Celebrating its tenth year in existence, the Annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival is a weekend long music festival held in Golden Gate Park that is free to the public thanks to the sponsorship of Warren Hellman. Attracting a crowd of more than 600,000 for the weekend, visitors came in droves, many of which parked and locked their bicycles to every tree along the path to Speedway Meadows. Visitors came to see over 60 acts on six stages over the three day event, with high profile musicians like Elvis Costello, Joan Baez, Indigo Girls, Patti Smith, Rosanne Cash, Randy Newman and Emmylou Harris performing. Along with plenty of music, the festival featured local vendors selling food, non-alcoholic drinks, and merchandise. Alcohol is allowed, but is not for sale on the premises. Plenty of people came prepared with ice chests, blankets, picnic gear, and their dogs to enjoy the festivities, if only it was a little bit warmer. |Hardly Strictly Bluegrass|

Celebrating 40 years in the city, this annual weekend long event draws an estimated crowd of over one million people, all there to show support for tolerance and pride. The festivities include a parade down Market Street, culminating with a massive festival in Civic Center Plaza. The event features live music, food and beverage concessions, a diverse crowd, and plenty of colorful costumes. Admission is free and is open to all ages. |SF Pride|

For over forty years, San Francisco has celebrated the arrival of flowering cherry blossoms with a two weekend long celebration in the middle of |Japantown|. Originally a tradition in Japan called |Hanami| (flower viewing), celebrations there consist of outdoor parties and feasts amongst the blooming trees that can go on until the wee hours. Since the flowers typically only last a week or two on the tree, the cherry blossom is said to symbolize the fleeting beauty of life.

The parade on the last day of the festival begins at the Civic Center, travels down Post Street and ends at Fillmore Street. This year’s parade had its share of taiko drummers, Japanese Animation costume contest winners, and beauty pageant winners, not to mention some impressive |Matoi| twirling. At the tail of the parade, scores of people carrying large barrels of sake make offers of rice wine in anticipation of the staple crop planting season. The festival also features local merchants selling their wares and numerous food venders serving everything from BBQ to ramen noodles. |Nor Cal Cherry Blossom Festival|

Live at |The Fillmore

With lyrics like “I saw the future, the geeks were right” and song names like the backwardly titled “Machine in the Ghost” you might think Todd Fink was holed-up underground somewhere awaiting our machine overlords from the future. After a four-year break that involved building their own recording studio and setting up their own label (blank.wav), Omaha’s The Faint return with their newest album Fasciination: ten tracks that will give the listener a variety of lyrics to sit back and think about. The subject matter ranges from profoundly transcendental with “Davey knows we all create the world from in our skulls…” and “what was there before the bang/let’s ask the atheists…” to the sarcastically apologetic with “forget the words I said, I was not myself. I never thought you were psycho…,” yet still manage to stay ironically pop-ish, and fresh.

In finding new electronic sub-niches for Fink to attach his sublime “watch what the humans ruin with machines…” and often bizarre “My mother was filled with popcorn…” lyrics to, the band has come a long way sonically from “Glass Danse,” likely from the newfound freedom of having their own label and studio, as well as personal maturation. The squeaky, distorted bass sounds of “Fulcrum and Lever” and the electro-angelic weeping and digital pops of “A Battle Hymn for Children” represent new and eclectic sonic landscapes for the band, but won’t completely surprise, as the sound is still definitively The Faint. The seemingly endless and lethargically rhythmic dance-groove of “Forever Growing Centipedes” and tweaked-out disco-funk anthem “Get Seduced” are sure to get your body moving and are likely to become welcome additions to the band’s already great live shows.

The Faint’s ability to seamlessly fuse their sometimes electronic-dance-pop sound with conceptually ambitious and dystopian lyrics still remains the key to their dysfunctional charm. However, it’s not clear the band knows which to highlight more, the undeniable dance-ability of their music or the introspective and un-arguably thought provoking lyrics of their lead singer. Fink’s lyrics this time out show more awareness and sensitivity and seem more heartfelt than previous albums (there is a noticeable down-tick in juvenile sexual references), but there are times when the music’s intensity is overwhelming, making the lyrics seem more subtle than they are. The band faces an obvious problem, become more irresistibly dance-able or lyrically compelling and you inherently diminish the effect of the other. For now, however, it seems The Faint are balancing the two just fine. |The Faint|