Watch out for flying spoons, at Humphry Slocombe

When I was younger, I didn't like cake. Yeah: a kid that didn't like cake! Whaa?

Even at my elementary school birthday parties -- wow: I can still remember the feel, the snap, of the cheap stretchy string that held cone birthday hats on our heads, the same cheap stretchy string that could also be used to launch various projectiles at a younger brother or sister -- yeah, my mom would get me an ice cream cake from the local Carvel, black cookie crumbs sometimes pressed into the sides. The spread also included sickly-sweet sherbert from Pathmark, served directly out of their clear plastic containers.

No cake.

While I've grown, over the years, to like a selected variety of cakey things -- give me ginger or carrot or lemon anything -- I've never lost that love affair with ice cream. In high school, I used to eat it by the half-gallon (rocky road, natch). Whew! But cut to 2009; and while I'm still into the stuff, I indulge in MUCH smaller quantities, refined quantities.

I got my latest fix just last week at Humphry Slocombe, a new, innovative ice cream shop in the Mission. Folks on yelp, on chowhound, on dailycandy -- not to mention in the local print -- are writing up a storm about it. Have you been? Have you been? Have you been?

Humphry Slocombe is the buzz of the town, it seems.

And, I think, with good reason.

First, you gotta check out the list of flavors that they have made or will make. At any given time, they will be selling maybe 12 or so of them (which seems to be the limit of the freezer in the front), with some favorites always on-the-ready and a rotating cast of, um, creamy-dreaminess(-and-sometimes-whimsiness).

I'm looking at you, foie gras, and, you, Andante chevre + strawberry jam.

On my particular visit, I got to sample quite a few of the offerings (the scooper seems to be patient enough to allow you to sample pretty much as many as you want -- on a quiet night, anyway): the Guiness gingerbread, the Valrhona fudgesicle, the Blue Bottle Vietnamese coffee, the balsamic caramel, the olive oil, and the Secret Breakfast.

Without getting into individual reviews, my lasting impression is that the ice cream of Jake Godby -- owner/chef of Humphry Slocombe -- really embodied the ingredients. And given their high quality, this makes for a wonderful experience for the palate. Tummy too.

Now, I'm not saying that you'll like all the flavors -- for example, the balsamic caramel wasn't for me (I'm not a fan of vinegar tang in general) -- but you're going to really like something. Even for the ones that aren't totally up your alley, you're going to appreciate the flavors on an academic level (well, maybe if you're like me and occasionally dabble in foodie-dom); you'll say, "I've never had this flavor of icecream before"; or, "this flavor has never been captured in icecream so well". Word.

Well, like I said, I ain't the first one to say it, but here goes: check this place out! Humphry Slocombe, on the west side of Harrison St., a tad north of 24th Street (map).

You'll see a few tables outside.

You might even see me there, Secret Breakfast in hand.. er, dish. One warning though: if I'm wearing a cone birthday hat with one of those elastic string things, watch out for flying spoons. Whap!

I'm 60.4% pure.. or 60.4% not pure?

Wow. Not sure how I, um, came across it again, but it seems the The Purity Test will never die. There are several places on the web with multitude versions of it, but the "500 Question Unisex, Omnisexual Purity Test" at www.puritytest.net is pretty much the standard.

In fact, my curiosity overrode my better judgment and I went ahead and took it other day (for shits and giggles).. and was a little disappointed. Yeah, I remember it being cooler back when I was in high school. haha. Some of the questions are repeated, and some just don't seem to be relevant or, at least, interesting to me now. But I guess one's perspective on life changes ten years on.. like, duh.

That said, just seeing the test again sparked memories of some formidable times growing up in Rhode Island (for high school). Endurance sports and girls and "possibility for adventure" (of any sort) were all just starting to enter into my worldview; definitely a pivotal era for me. If you were around then, let's get together and talk about Code Purple, horsenoises, and/or The Baker, ok? Oh man, totally silly and totally goodtimes. hahahaha..

In any case, for the record, I'm 60.4% pure (or is that 60.4% not pure?). Regardless, yeah - I admit - I need to get out more. haha. So, what's *your* score?

GY!BE is a tonic

You know, there are some bands that can change your life.. or, at least, will it in ways subconscious; their music is something - somehow - that stirs emotion; your reality changes for a given time and place (and space: we live in three dimensions, you know!). Wake up to the reality of an insightful riot of alternate brain activity! For this, their ability, I love them all the more; drugs don't have any affect on me. ha!

C'est la vie!

In any case, the aforementioned sonic phenomenon is most real for me now, as the expansive and cinematic sounds of Godspeed You! Black Emperor [sic, punctuation] warmly wrap around me as I be, sitting here in the prosaic, and slightly messy, scene of my San Francisco bedroom; a quiet Saturday is my fate. And I flash back to the first time I picked up - and I mean pick up in a most physical sense; I picked up the cardboard containing "Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven" (GY!BE's forth studio album) and I remember not knowing what to make of it. That is, their *reputation* preceded them, but only slightly - as I was only just beginning to blossom into the world of (good) music at the time - and a record of seemingly-random sound bites (from a somewhat-familiar, if ghostly, singularity) overlaid with 30-plus minute instrumentals is not for the faint of heart. The year was 2002 and I was at Waterloo Records in Austin on a work trip; it was nighttime for god's sake, but, yet, I wasn't ready to let GY!BE into my life.

But now, I actually own a few GY!BE CDs (and have for a few years), and I play them on occasion. In fact, it seems that they have made a comeback-into-fashion for me, at least in between Kitsune-this and neo-soul-electro-that, of course; yes, GY!BE and my biological rhythms happen to be aligned in this late 2007. In this way, again tonight, I find myself more-than-on-the-edge-of-tears; I am crying. Hmm.. yeah, so this is fine (sorta); I'm not fully comfortable with this sort of thing, but I *am* trying to be, given that I acknowledge the need for emotional release (as a general theory of human existence); I also acknowledge a personal backlog of emotion that may or may not have other outlets. Here, the music is the trigger; yes - the tears also made an appearance a few weeks ago in similar circumstances, GY!BE and all, so something more than coincidence is at work.

In such a situation it's hard to keep typing with a flow unbroken. And further, it's hard to *not* want to fall towards the floor - to *not* be reaching for the teasingly-horizontal floor (gravity, you are a seductress always).. the subconscious goal is that you just want to be (in a way, mathematically-speaking, chaotic). It sounds nice - right? - to just be listening to, to be surrounded by, the mystery language intrinsic in such deep-seeded music, and to let this set of temporally-extended melodies encompass the whole fabrinific realm of your most-immediate and hypotonic existence? Right? Well, ultimately, it's ok (it's ok for me, for me, for me now); the lights are low (they will only get lower); and my eyelids are vaguely transparent.

Tonight, while GY!BE delicately thumps from a set of lovely speakers (so far, so good), the butt of my right hand rubs a short and shallow - so shallow, it's imperceivable! - track, slowly, center-to-right, across my forehead, just above the space between my eyes; the action inadvertently adjusts the angle of my head upon my shoulders; my head is no longer upright (but, thankfully, still connected). And, as I mentioned before, a few tears roll down a man's cheek (mine!) while he sits as a twisted frame of flesh. It seems that this sort of music exposes me to the true workings of the world, and for that, I am grateful.

Godspeed, Godspeed.

Lyrics lost, and nostalgia discovered

Song lyrics are 95% lost on me.

That's not to say I'm illiterate or a beat junkie; that's not to say I don't care or don't appreciate powerful words crafted and applied to a framework of beautiful music (or visa versa). It really just comes down to the fact that I have problems with lexical disambiguation. Who knew? That is, I *hear* the lyrics and I, I *hear* the way they are sung, in terms of tone and melody and overall character, but I really only end up with "the feeling" of how they play with the rest of the musical mix; I could never repeat for you a line-intelligible from any given song. And it's always been this way.

What this means is that I listen to so much music and I know so little lyrics. So, for example, when I sing in the shower - it's been known to happen - I basically have a catalog of 3.5 proto-songs, made up of pieces of maybe 11 real songs. Who cares? A common affliction, yes - I know.. and there are worse ones out there, I, umm, hear, but I did get thinking about all this Wednesday night as I experienced the exception that proves the rule..

Performing some of the few songs - in the world! - that I know the lyrics to, Dinosaur Jr drew forth from me a sing-along (or at least muddle-along) during their show at Slims in San Francisco; I could half-articulate about a quarter of their set, spread out throughout the night. Again, who knew, and who cares? But thank god no one can actually hear me mangling each song - each to a different degree, of course, but each mangled nonetheless; the speakers are large, turned up loud, and sonicly all-encompassing.

Yes, I did say Dinosaur Jr; and, yes, I mean *that* Dinosaur Jr, underground indie-rock icons of the 80's and therefore ripe for being-Dinosaur jokes in the 00's, another band arguably back together to make a buck off nostalgia-fueled ticket sales. But I have seen them on both their contemporary tours (2005 and 2007) and while I know it is in a different way than they would have rocked in, say, 1989, they still rock. The music is spot on (if not a little too-polished and controlled sometimes) and, most notably for me, my main man J Mascis still conjures up these phenomenally epic and melodically noisy guitar solos I can't get enough of. When I'm really in the mood - as I was at the show - I could have kept my eyes closed and let the notes, sometimes fighting their way through feedback, go on forever. And so it goes..

Part of the appeal is that their music does somehow evoke a feeling of "nostalgia" in me; Dinosaur Jr songs always do, but seeing them live pumps up that feeling much more; it's quicker to come on and boldly-vibrating in its intensity. And I remember - via beer-dipped brain - that I recognized these feelings coming on during the show and this got me wondering further if I knew what the idea of "nostalgia" really meant! I mean, I ask because I think I get wistful way too often. haha.

It's not a bad thing, per se, and maybe not such an odd thing, I know, but I attribute it to the fact that I've had a series of such different lives - or at least approaches to life - since, say, high school, and, while they are continuous in time, they are carved into definite periods, accessible neatly, in general, for internal recall (but only occasionally for discussion). And since some of these packaged scenescapes would actually overlap on a real timeline, it's probably more appropriate to call them quanta - quanta of nostalgia? - insofar that each is a collection of times and places and people and feelings (real or not) associated with some state of being from my past. There is a definite trend for collusion with and adherence to the lock-step flow of time, for sure, but that is not always the case as, with reflection, certain threads of mindset could have their origin, or at least a later-assigned origin, with times farther removed from the locus of real activity; the same reasoning also applies to threads reaching somewhere into the future (ex. where the locus is the origin and provides the spiritual underpinnings for something later on).

The current definition on Wiktionary for nostalgia is:

"A bittersweet yearning for the things of the past."

And so with this definition and the contemplation above in mind, I can ask myself again if I know what nostalgia means. And I would say "yes".. although I would admit I might be applying it a bit too liberally. That is, I do understand that the term, in general parlance, is applied to looking back towards the past as if it was better than what you have now. But that's not exactly how I feel when I'm applying it to myself..

The quanta that I mentioned are all constituent parts my psyche; they are stepping stones - upwards, I think - in the path of my personal growth and development; they could even be construed as a series of adolescences or subtle psychological evolutions. And I look back fondly..

But I know, I know for sure - FOR SURE! - I'll be adding these years now to the nostalgia reel soon enough (i.e. as in, the last 1 or 2, because I've already added everything up until then). Oh man, but haha!, and oh-man-oh-man-oh-man (in a good way). These are the times of our lives and it's nice to be able to recognize that now; it helps me to breathe in the sunshine of San Francisco and beyond; and I'm always looking to breathe better in general.

In short, the good times haven't stopped yet; I'm excited for the present and know there are many opportunities for me and mine in the future. And how can't I be preemptively nostalgic for that? haha. That said, I can be temperamental, privately at least, so know there will be ups and downs in my outlook on life; I say this if only to let you know my exuberance isn't irrational and without bound - but, still, I'll leave that discussion for another time. For now, let me say that there were and are and will be some very good people in my life, past and present and future, respectively, as well as combinatorially. And even though I know it doesn't always come through in real time, I do appreciate how everything has come together; you, collectively, have made me a better person. haha. And so, it seems, regardless of my steely exterior, I can lay on the cheese with the best of them..

In any case - and back to the glorious present - the only thing I would have asked of Dinosaur Jr to do differently on Wednesday night would be to have played their "Just Like Heaven" cover from The Cure. If you haven't heard me sing in the shower, it is, basically, my number one ditty (always battling with R Kelly and David Bowie); it's a cover of a cover of a cover; read into that what you will. ;)