Danielle Steele, Vanessa & Bill Getty, Trevor & Alexis Traina, and Serge & Tatiana Sorokko are wealthier than you, punk. "A San Francisco family is looking for a personal assistant / household manager to join our team on a long term basis." Are you that someone? But wait, there's more: in addition to joining a family that refers to themselves as a "team," you--a "highly poised, polished, professional, and articulate" cad--will also conduct interviewing,......

-- Unsilent Night: New York-based composer Phil Kline’s holiday concert creates "an outdoor ambient music piece for an infinite number of boomboxes. It’s like a Christmas caroling party except that [you] don’t sing, but rather carry the music, each [member] playing a separate track that is a "voice" in the piece. In effect, we become a city-block-long sound system" So ... there you have it. Tapes and CDs will be handed out to participants.......

New York Times, in their weekly Critic's Choice: New CDs column, introduced us to four different musicians we have never heard of: Lupe Fiasco, Jaheim, Birdman and Steve Lehman. We think that it has nothing to do with the "critic's choice", but rather there is nothing significant to write about this week - seems like a repeat of last week. We're patiently waiting for the January releases of: Radiohead (the actual CD), Kate Nash, Sia,......

A sad week for LAist as they lose their trusted and amazing editor Tony Pierce to the LA Times, but what a blast his last week was. He shared his 25 Favorite CDs of 2007 and wrote a great review of just a good movie, No Country For Old Men. At UCLA, thousands of students celebrated the end of their quarter by running around campus in their undies (lots of photos in a two-part......

Each Tuesday we will feature new music that should (or whatever) be on your radar. Standouts: This week is worst than last week. Really though, there's nothing (except the Original Cast Recording of Lovemusik). Even on the Amoeba Records website, they only have two, we repeat, two records on their list. With the holidays approaching, one would think that there would be an avalanche of CDs being released but again, there's only a few. Please......

Tonight, for one night only, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts will be featuring two sneak previews of Dirty Country, a highly entertaining documentary about the underground world of raunchy music, directed by Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher, founders and hosts of the Found Footage Festival, which sold out four shows at the Red Vic last month. Dirty Country, which won the Audience Award at this year's South By Southwest, is part of Yerba......

We'll admit, with a bit of shame, that the first time we became aware of Nick Drake, it was during a lame commercial for the VW Cabrio. Except, the commercial wasn't lame because the song in it was so awesome. We didn't buy a Cabrio, but we did buy some Nick Drake CDs, and that's pretty much the only thing we've ever been thankful to Volkswagen for. Nick Drake is the subject of Jeroen......

The Bay Area is home to many intriguing small businesses. Still, color us surprised that we've found in Juno Baby a local purveyor of high-quality children's educational products that manages to encapsulate what we like best in a company. ...

Last week's winner, the Bay Guardian. What do Carter and Bush have in common? Problems with Schwarzenegger's health insurance plan. Someone missed the sarcasm in Tim Redmond's column about wifi. Steven T. Jones is working hard this week, covering not only Fake Question Time on the blog but also the trademark fight over Burning Man. Cover article: There's only six quail in the Presidio now, and they're all male. Is the Presidio like the Castro......

Happy Holidays! Chances are, you're reading this the day after Christmas, back at your day job after all-too-short a holiday, and the last thing you want from us is stuff about the holidays. But that's just too bad. Because, see, here in the Ist-A-Verse, we do things ahead of time. It might be December 26 for you, but that's what you get for not checking your Favorite Local Blog on Christmas Eve. ...

Tonight at Biscuits and Blues (401 Mason St.), legendary New Orleans pianist, Henry Butler performs solo piano, combining the classical and jazz elements he absorbed at Louisiana School for the Blind and Southern University with the gospel, blues and R&B sounds he heard growing up in New Orleans. (8pm & 10pm shows) Saturday Grab a boombox and head on over to Mission Dolores Park (18th and Dolores) for Unsilent Night 2006, composer Phil Kline’s annual......

How do you feel about holiday music? We thought that KOIT started playing their 24/7 holiday programming a little early this year, but we do love randomly hearing Jose Feliciano's "Feliz Navidad" in our car. There are two holiday albums out this year that we've been enjoying. If you're a fan of Sarah McLachlan, you should buy her holiday album Wintersong. The CD has several traditional holiday tunes, but we were pleasantly surprised by......

Last week's winner, the East Bay Express: The Spare The Air advocates don't take BART. Book section: Their book reviewer thinks that Special Topics in Calamity Physics is pretentious. Cover article: the new hip downtown Oakland scene, and backlash. Korean food in Oakland. Amoeba's plans to counteract the downloading revolution -- among other things, they let you "rent" CDs by buying them at full price and then returning them for 75% back after you've ripped......

This past Monday we headed down to The Fillmore to see Cold War Kids open for Editors. Cold War Kids had all the right ingredients to stand out from the pack, especially with singer Nathan Willett’s piercing voice. None of what they played sounded derived or expected, which is an impressive feat these days. Judging by the resonance of crowd favorite "Hospital Beds", we’re witnessing another dazzling San Francisco export. Editors played their catchy and......

LAist has so much fun this week! They go to E3, where they overhear the timeless remark "Man, this is where nerdy girls get laid." Is that a promise? They also give us this week's best CDs and make us realize that LA is the best place to use Zillow. Ah, Houstonist. They're biking to work, that is, if they can figure out how to get there. That's right, Mapquest says "Houston had the......

This is how it works: newspaper or news show, you know the evil MSM, does a story riddled with factual inaccuracies. The story then out there, bloggers go wild, give cries of (depending on one's political affiliation) "liberal bias"/"corporate cave in", and demand scalp. Retraction is given, mistakes acknowledged, scalp proffered, and bloggers do victory dance. So it's time for bloggers' powers to activate. On the way into work, we were reading the Chron's Peter Hartlaub's otherwise highly enjoyable piece on used CDs and how they can reclaim one's cheesy musical past, something we could definitely relate to, when we looked at the accompanying photos of the cheesy musical past he is reclaiming. Shown are cds of Billy Idol's "Rebel Yell", Bon Jovi's "Slippery When Wet," and Guns N' Roses mighty "Use Your Illusion II." But it's not what he listed that got our goat, it's the captions. Because he has "Rebel Yell" coming out in 1990, "Slippery" in 1999 (!), and "Use Your Illusion II" as coming out in 1997. Great googly moogly! ...

We're a little new to this whole iPod thing as we finally broke down and got one a few weeks ago (the 30GB video iPod if you must ask). And yes, we LOVE IT, so much so we're a little amazed how civilization has managed to progress without them. But we are also finding out that we are becoming a little too obsessed with it. Which we're sure you all know about because we're totally behind the curve on all this. But what we seem to obsess with most isn't the actual iPod but the iPod playlist. We just can't stop thinking about our playlist. ...

In addition to our show reviews, artist interviews, and weekly concert listings, we added a new dimension to our music coverage this year: giveaways! We know you just love to read us talking about music (see: dancing about architecture), but we did our best to put CDs and concert tickets in your hands as well. We hope you enjoyed it. These giveaways would not be possible without the cooperation of friendly music publicists, band reps......

Never let it be said that SFist doesn't think ahead. Yes, it's only just past Thanksgiving but we're already looking forward to the next holiday. No, not Christmas (Santa, baby Jesus, whatever) - we're talking New Year's. The blank slate that represents the chance to really change our lives for the good, for good. Sheya, right! We suck at resolutions. Did you know dental floss can go bad? Yeah, that's how good we are......

Our concert picks for the week of 9/22-9/28. We've got not one, but three CDs to give away to a lucky winner this week, in honor of three upcoming concerts: Bloc Party tonight at the Warfield and Popscene, John Wilkes Booze on Saturday at Thee Parkside, and Jeff Hanson at Cafe Du Nord on Monday. Enter to win Silent Alarm Remixed, Telescopic Eyes Glance The Future Sick and Jeff Hanson. (Contest ends 9/28). This week......

So it looks as though there's a little less competition in the Valley, and therefore the world, for portable MP3 player technology. D&M Holdings went and sold the rights to Rio's IP assets to SigmaTel. You may remember Rio as the folks who brought one of the very first MP3 players to market (we bought a 32mb Rio as a Christmas gift for our mom back when we were flush with dot-com boom cash,......

"What? This isn't the Beck show?" we heard a guy ahead of us in line cry out in the Great American ticket line last night. Nope, the sold-out show was for quirky folkster Sufjan Stevens, who's touring on the second of his albums dedicated to the American states, Illinois. (Beck was about five blocks down the street, at the Bill Graham.) According to Asthmatic Kitty, the label that's putting out Illinois, they got an angry letter from DC Comics complaining about a picture of Illinois resident Superman on the cover art for Sufjan's album. They managed to work out a deal where they can sell the CDs they have but future albums won't have Clark Kent on them. So naturally, we ran to the merch table as soon as we got in, and, to our delight, they were selling off the CDs with the pictures of the Man of Steel. No, we didn't buy two (one to listen to, one to sell) -- but we thought about it! Making the pre-concert settling-in process complete, we looked up from lovingly caressing our new purchase to see -- not only SFist Krissy, but also -- Jason Schwartzman! Well, it was either Jason Schwartzman or a guy with Jason's distinctive nose and bad posture, wearing an aqua tank top and swimming upstream with his posse to get closer to the stage. uneven metered time, the Fighting Illini, a loud guy in the back, and a song about John Wayne Gacy, after the jump....

You probably remember that brief brouhaha about the CD price-fixing antitrust case, where that judge was going to give everyone who'd ever bought a CD from 1995 to 2002 $14.99 if they sent in their name and address, right? Well, as part and parcel of that settlement, all the CD companies agreed to send free CDs to public libraries across the land. Well, hey -- our beloved San Francisco public library just got its Columbia Record Club shipment, and received: 91 copies of Ricky Martin's Sound Loaded, 81 copies of Jessica Simpson's Irresistible, and 68 copies of Celine Dion's greatest hits. We're going to reserve ours online right now! Jaundiced athenaea-nauts are grumbling that the record companies appear to be dumping poorly-selling records on libraries (Irresistible, for instance, is the second Jessica Simpson album, the one that came out before Newlyweds), but cheerier librarians are storing, say, their 106 copies of Lenny to give away as prizes for summer reading contests. Check out what everyone else in California is getting. (For instance, San Francisco Unified (.pdf) is getting 51 copies of Whitney Houston's "Star Spangled Banner," 7 copies of "Carmen: A Hip Hop-era," 5 copies (clean) of The Wu Tang, and a smattering of Kronos Quartet and John Adams CDs, among many, many others)....

SFist Rain makes a good point today when she reminds us that our friends at the San Francisco Public Library have more to offer us than just the printed word. You can also check out or reserve CDs, DVDs, audiobooks, and VHS tapes (for the unfrozen cavemen lawyers among us) for those times when reading isn't your first choice. Needless to say, you can also find these types of items at our fine local......

Valentine's Day is upon us, which means it's time to separate the lovers from the haters. Are those tiny red hearts shooting from your eyes, or little sharpened daggers? It's no matter, SFist promises to love you either way. Here are our picks for the this week's bay area music offerings. If you're aware that umlauts are the universal symbol for rock, you might already have your tickets for Thursday night's Queensrÿche show at......

and wish you a happy ChrisMaHanuKwanziKah! As last week's winner, the East Bay Express goes up first. A lot of letters criticizing a number of factual errors in Cecil Brown's piece about African-American graduate students at Cal. (i.e., Brown said there were only eight African-American grad students at Cal; there are actually 316. How do you miss 308 people?) Sigh. In happier news, Bottom Feeder proposes to his girlfriend! We hope she says yes. A......