Saket Vora

Last weekend I went up to the City with Terrell for the San Francisco Outside Lands music festival. This is the first time its been put on, and featured a 3-day lineup of good artists. Radiohead of course was a big draw, but there were a lot of other alternative music artists too. I was itching to leave work a bit early, and ultimately left at 4pm. Terrell and I caught the 5 o’ clock train up to the City then hopped on the Muni to Castro station. Tim Goodson, a Park c/o 2002 and now an intellectual property lawyer in SF, was generous to host us for the weekend at his week-old new place on the slopes of Twin Peaks. We chatted for a while then started the 2.5 mile walk to Golden Gate Park. On hindsight, we should have caught a cab. We got to the Radiohead show late, but a ticket snafu at the gates closest to the stage forced us to walk 1.5 miles in the opposite direction of the stage to get to the box office to figure out what was wrong. They admitted they screwed up and gave us complimentary VIP passes for the weekend.

The next day we had breakfast  at Zazie, a wonderful brunch place in Cole Valley. We ate in the flower-lined back porch, and Terrell spotted an “King Nerd” (Terrell’s words) as we were leaving – the guy who created LiveJournal, memcached, etc. Cool! We made it over to the festival later on and saw Kaki King (very cool guitar playing style), Regina Spektor, and then Cake. I got a call from Liz before the Spektor show telling me to turn to my right, then my left. And there she was waving! What a nice way of meeting up after so long.

The Cake show was pretty cool — towards the end the lead singer brought out a tree sapling in a pot and asked if someone could name it. A guy named Arturo correctly shouted out “live oak!” and Cake invited him to the front and gave him the tree, asking him to plant it and send them pictures of it as it grew older. How neat is that.

Terrell and I managed to grab a cab to Castro where we met up with Tim Mowrer. Using his shiny new iPhone, we found a nice hole-in-the-wall sushi place.

We woke up early Sunday morning and made it to the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. Tim Mowrer joined us too and sure enough Krupali, the girl that we ran into in the deli line at Yosemite, arrived too! She had told us about a special Chihuly exhibit that we just had to see. I had never heard of Chihuly the glassblower but was absolutely stunned at the collection.

What mastery of form and of the colors! (Ok, that last image is me having some fun with the new camera) Watch this slideshow for a taste of what the collection offered. Krupali had to go back to LA, so Terrell and Tim and I went and got some lunch at an Indian restaurant. Considering the high prices of the festival, it was well worth it. Tim picked up a ticket and we saw The Stars, Sharon Jones, Broken Social Scene, Andrew Bird, Rodrigo y Gabriela, then finished up with Jack Johnson (“Jack Johnson? I love Jack Johnson!”). Andrew Bird was also pretty neat — a multi-instrumentalist (including violin) he would use looping to build layers of sound. Rodrigo y Gabriela blew me away too, having never heard of them. They are a Mexican born but Dublin based acoustic guitar duo with astonishing skill and a unique percussive style. I finally got to meet up with Nick and Nick (my neuroscience friends and almost-roommates) and their friend Christina for many of these bands.

They were kind to give Terrell and I a ride back home to Palo Alto (the last train from SF leaves at 9pm…lame). Fun weekend!