Amnesia. If that is the name of a music venue, wouldn’t you think that the music would be death metal or some dark trance sounding music? Or maybe there would be women dancing in cages and the walls would be lined with very scary or disturbing art. None of those thoughts or the thoughts I might have put into your heads applies to this location. Amnesia is like entering a bar from the Old West. Once you enter the bar, if you immediately turn around and look up you’ll see a line of beer barrels above the front door. The music stage looks like it might have gotten transported from a real Old Western bar and by that I also mean the stage looks very old. The guitarist from one of the bands (Indianna Hale) would tap his foot and after each tap I worried that he might crash three feet down as a floorboard would bounce an inch or two upon each tap. As for the audience, there was no pretense. No one was dressed in a “hey, look at how cool I am” fashion. It was a show up in what makes you most comfortable look – minus the possibility of the pajamas look.
First band up at Amnesia was led by singer Indianna Hale. She definitely doesn’t have that death metal look. The music was Americana. Indianna Hale and her band appeared to be having more fun than the audience, which for some reason felt that standing 10 yards back from the stage was an appropriate distance. Indianna Hale couldn’t help but laugh throughout her set. There was some kind of inside joke going on between the three band members throughout their set. When their set ended, a demand was made for an encore. There was some hesitancy on their part. Finally, one of the band members called out, “Would you like to see Indianna on the drums and singing like Karen Carpenter?”
Next up was TV Mike and the Scarecrows. Now for those of us from a certain Los Angeles music scene, this might cause us to think about Mike TV and Get Set Go. TV Mike and the Scarecrows on this night continued the Americana sound with a six member band though it was mentioned from the stage that they are at times a seven member band. Their set went on for about 45 minutes. Though I enjoyed their set, I was a little upset about the length of their set as I was hoping to catch a little of the last band of the night. Unfortunately for me, I needed to head off towards the BART.
Amnesia unique touch: steps to the stage are pulled out from under the stage during switchovers.
Conversation of the night outside Amnesia: You’ve got to come and check out my band one of these days, also.
San Francisco: is San Francisco that rare city where one feels safer walking around at midnight versus walking around at 7 p.m.? I’ve been finding myself going to a number of venues around Mission Street. I find myself more concerned about my safety exiting the BART system in broad daylight versus when I’m heading back to the BART system at midnight. I’ll need to talk to my San Francisco friends about this someday.
Southwest. So I hit A List membership. After my Thursday night out at Amnesia, I checked in online and got assigned number A17. Now for those of you who don’t know anything about Southwest that is a very good number to have. Off to the airport I went on Friday evening in a very good state of mind. Not only was I heading back to Los Angeles, but I was basically going to get to sit wherever I wanted on the plane.
I got to the airport and come around 9:30 p.m. I got this strange feeling that the previous Southwest flight to Los Angeles hadn’t left yet along with a number of other flights. The terminal was just way too crowded. The Southwest plane at the gate my flight was supposed to depart from had the lights off inside and generally just had the appearance of being unoccupied. I kept looking up at the departure board and it kept saying that my flight was on schedule; however, it also kept saying that the flight before mine was delayed until 9:20 p.m. Now why would it keep saying that? Soon a Southwest employee made an announcement, “As you all know our computers are down . . . “ What are you taking about, we all know?!? A long story short, there went my awesome number as Southwest had suffered a massive computer failure and everyone who hadn’t given up after waiting around for 4 hours plus were packed onto the first available flight to Los Angeles once the computer system came back online.
I didn’t get to my home until 3 a.m. I could have gotten home by 2:30 a.m., but I was delayed by another 30 minutes when our flight landed at LAX and we couldn’t get to our gate. Why? A China Air jet was getting towed out of an area we needed to get towed into and during this process the tow caught on fire (not the plane, the tow).
Comment of the Southwest flight: If you’re in the technology field and you’re interested in a job with Southwest, check Southwest.com tomorrow morning because there will be job openings posted.
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