Mission Mission

Our pal Mike got fed up with all the gentrification in San Francisco and moved to Indonesia for some good old-fashioned slumming it. Unfortunately, he’s sent back word that our worst fears have been realized: Jakarta is the new Marina! Street carts! Obscure ice cream flavors! Is no one safe?

World’s biggest indie band Death Cab for Cutie tapped local talent for their current U.S. tour, which wraps up next week. We had a chance to talk with Death Cab’s Jason McGerr about their upcoming swing through town and working with the Magik*Magik Orchestra, a local group of classical musicians led by conductor Minna Choi that have been collaborating with acts like John Vanderslice and The Walkmen since 2008.

To win a pair of tickets to the Thursday, May 10, show, give us your best reason you deserve to go in the comments section. Winner will be chosen based on merit. Contest ends at 4 P.M. on Tuesday.

MM: You guys are playing the Fox Theater. Have you played there before? We’re very proud of it.

JM: No, I’ve heard nothing but amazing things about the Fox and the way it sounds. We really lucked out on this tour. Because we’re playing with Magik*Magik Orchestra we haven’t done as many general admission rock venues as we have big beautiful classic theaters that are designed with acoustics in mind. It’s been a real treat to be out here and hear music differently. It’s a whole new experience.

MM: How did you get introduced to the Magik*Magik Orchestra?

JM: Minna Choi did the arrangements for a few of the songs on our new record. Before that, I think in the history of the band we’ve had maybe one cellist on one song, but having more full string arrangements sounded so much more full and beautiful. Afterwards we invited Minna and four string players down to an event we were playing and had them perform, not only the two songs on our new record that they played on but also some back catalog songs that hadn’t had strings before and it was such and amazing experience that it was like, alright, make a note of that, this is what it feels like to play with strings. So that planted the seed.

MM: Tell us about the tour. How has the collaboration changed the dynamic on stage?

JM: Before the tour, Minna worked on arrangements and just kind of emailed back and forth with Chris [Walla]. They [Magik*Magik] were super professional – they had their charts and were all ready to go.  Honestly the first time we played with them was like two days before the tour, and already it’s been incredible. They bring a ton to the table. They make me use my ears more. Playing in your standard four piece rock band, I know where everyone is, but sometimes I don’t really hear it, you know? So it’s a heightened sense of awareness to have these people on stage with really incredible dynamics. I feel like I just got accepted into Julliard.

Death Cab plays the Fox Theater on May 8, 9, and 10. They plan to hit up Cancun and drop by Tiny Telephone to hang out when they don’t have to work. After the tour wraps up, they head to Europe and Japan. Sounds pretty fun.

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Hickey was a band from the Mission in the 90’s that was the primary inspiration for the whole Mission punk scene of the late 90’s and early 00’s. I pretty much missed them entirely – I was still getting into music and probably at a Suicide Machines show at Slim’s around the time they were playing their last show. I did get ahold of their album at some point as well as a burned copy of Various States of Disrepair that I ripped from the KALX library on my first generation iBook. At some point I saw Matty Luv and possibly another member of Hickey play at Mission Records in an acoustic band called Me, You, and the Boys. All I distinctly remember was the closing refrain of the best song they played, “I’m higher than youuuuu are, I’m higher than youuuuu are.” Sadly, Matty Luv died a year or two later.

I pre-ordered this album a few months ago when Corbett posted about it on Facebook. 1-2-3-4-Go records in Oakland put the reissue together, and they did a great job. It’s two LPs, Gatefold jacket, a larger than cd-sized stapled booklet that’s around 20 pages, free download, optional red vinyl, and an adorbs punk rock patch (people still make those?)

I’m surprised by how many songs I remember, since I probably haven’t listened to it in about 8 years. My teenage punk nostalgia has already been kicked into high gear since I discovered an awesome blog called Remote Outposts that is posting a bunch of old demos and DIY cds/tapes that came out around that time.

Anywayz, for those of you who are fans, I hope you are enjoying this reissue as much as I am. Is this the first time it’s ever been pressed as an LP? And for those of you who haven’t heard Hickey, they’re worth looking into if you like inspiring, passionate, weird, catchy, edgy rock music.

Over the last month, an unusual amount of the food reporting in the Wall Street Journal has centered around the Mission’s most loved/hyped restaurants.

Today it was a feature on Wo Hing General Store, the new Charles Phan restaurant opened in the original Slanted Door space on Valencia. A couple weeks ago Bi-Rite and Humphry Slocombe were somewhat awkwardly portrayed as rivals in a cookbook review in the national lifestyle section.

The previous week, Mission Chinese Food’s ribs were one of four dishes featured in an article about lamb. A few days before that, the front page of the lifestyle section was devoted to an article on these newfangled “pop-ups” that led with a lengthy profile of Wise Sons, the brand new Jewish deli on 24^th.

Maybe 2012 is the year of the WSJ discovering the Mission, like how the NYT discovered Brooklyn in 2010:

[photo by Sexpigeon]

Look at that bottle! I don’t know about you, but I’d definitely pay $8 for a 10 ounce pour of PBR if they advertised it like this in the U.S.

[Angus Winchester]

Turns out The Mission ain’t what it used to be:

San Francisco is a place that offers at least a semblance of social life in the streets and has a mass-transit system that, being at least semi-functional, can get you home even after chasing large doses of MDMA with multiple Irish carbombs, resulting in an uncontrollable throwing up of copious amounts of last nights frozen pizza onto strangers who you had drunkenly mistook for childhood friends. Who doesn’t want to live in a place where you can simply exit your apartment, walk a few blocks, and end up at a bar filled to the brim with a battalion of apparently creative, interesting patrons? Or, at least, so went my daydreams.

As it stands, the reality is much different. Upon exiting BART and walking down the streets of the Mission, it becomes apparent that San Francisco has transformed in ways that I cannot appreciate. Newly Ipe-planked luxury condominiums with fancy, all glass, automatic underground garage doors, and heated post-industrial concrete polished floors, sit adjacent to coffee shops whose patrons sip on $6-7 dollar coffee while they guiltily donate some small, insignificant pittance towards “saving the third world” on their new high-end Mac gadgets.

Read on at Oakland Local. Also here’s what ipe is.

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Turns out last night’s buckets of rain did more than just make people feel scared/cozy. Humphry Slocombe laments via Twitter that the store has been flooded, which not only is surely causing lots of headaches but also has damaged copies of their newly-printed recipe book. Luckily they’ve probably got some bourbon on hand. We’re sorry, guys! Chin up!

Famed local booze blogger Camper English recently called out San Francisco bar owners and bartenders for their increasingly generic cocktail bars and menus:

As bartenders have figured out what works here (drinks with bitter flavors and fresh ingredients, but not too many) and what doesn’t (molecular mixology), they’ve played it increasingly safe with each new venue that opens. The new cocktail programs are great but they invoke fewer original ideas. Bartenders in up-and-coming cities have no such pre-fixed notions of what works in their market yet, and often take more creative risks both in the bar design and in the drinks. Now our local bartenders need to look outside the city for good ideas to incorporate and build upon.

I’ve noticed this trend as well, but I don’t think it’s specific to San Francisco. Now that there’s a fancy cocktail bar on every corner the hipper areas of major cities, you’d expect an increase in variety and creativity. Instead, bars seem content to ride the wave of cocktail obsession by offering unadorned classic cocktails at high and rising prices. Subbing out an ingredient for it’s schmancier equivalent (like using Cocchi Americano instead of dry vermouth) seems to qualify as an innovative variation. The design and styling of each new bar consists of as much hardwood as can fit in the budget while hopefully leaving room for funny outfits.

The issue is that while customers get more educated, the offerings are getting less impressive and more generic. Adding to the problem, there is so much demand for skilled bartenders that the people making these cocktails, at least in my experience, don’t always know what they’re doing. (Tip: if your bar is designed to look like a speakeasy, don’t muddle an orange into your Old-Fashioned.) In short, there’s often not a lot going on that I can’t do at least as well at home.  It’s sad because in most cases there are a lot of creative people and not enough venues, whereas in this case there are plenty of venues but not enough creativity.

Sometimes I wonder what we are going to do with all these neighborhood bars that have been overly remodeled to look like libraries when the bubble bursts and two thirds of them go out of business. Maybe we can turn them into libraries.

[Illustration by Joan Horne]

Now called Dante’s Weird Fish, the beloved vegan-friendly eatery reopens today, right on schedule. The menu still has all the classics, like the Little B. Stack and the fried pickles. Read all about it here.

[Grub Street SF]

This comment just popped up on the lengthy thread of gripes about the $15 burger situation at Mission Bowling Club:

Regarding the $15 burger, well, you know, that’s just like, uh, you’re opinion man…

It’s kind of a glass half-full/half-empty thing right? Of course it makes me sad to be the perpetrator of a $15 burger.

But keep in mind, at Duc Loi it was $8, then $9 towards the end. It was available from 12-3pm standing or sitting on a milk crate in a super market. That’s about as low overhead as you can get and it turned out that it was not a viable business model–I think for one two week stretch, I put in 50 hours and made $100.

Mission Bowling Club is an attempt at a viable business model for the owners and investors. If my food program isn’t profitable enough for them, someone else will be taking over the reins. And on the bright side, the Mission Burger IS available for $10 from 3-6pm in a restaurant with a full bar. So thrifty foodies can take heart.

Besides, the whole menu is cheap for fine dining and expensive for junk food, so if you’re one to judge based on labels, it’s a free country. You can rent movies, or go the movie theater. Some of these new fangled beers are kind of pricey too.

Of course our initial inclination is to side with Anthony, since he’s helping bring a unique entertainment option to the neighborhood and you’re, well, writing mean stuff on the internet. But the concern is understandable – I don’t see myself on an average afternoon spending $75 on a burger, a few beers and an hour of bowling.

Let me point one thing out: I grew up watching bowling alleys close. Whatever Amoeba was was gone for as long as I can remember, and the demise of Japantown Bowl just about ruined my dreams of a career in professional between-the-legs bowling. All we had left was Presidio and Serra bowl, so most of the city was without viable options. And the food at Presidio is inedible, so it really doesn’t matter how cheap it is. I can’t speak to Serra Bowl because I’ve never had a car, but that’s gone anyway so whatever.

So maybe we’re just not willing to pay for however much it is a bowling alley costs. But some people are giving it a shot, so should we just see how it goes?

But Anthony, we gotta know: does it come with fries?