The 24th San Francisco Silent Film Festival (SFSFF) runs May 1st – May 5th at the historic Castro Theatre! This year's festival features 25 programs (including an illustrated lecture presentation at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley), all with live musical accompaniment! There are films from ten different countries — Bali (Goona Goona), Czechoslovakia (Tonka of the Gallows), France (L’Homme Du Large), Germany (The Oyster Princess, Opium, The Love of Jeanne Ney), India (Shiraz: A Romance of India), Italy (Rapsodia Satanica, L'Inferno), Japan (Japanese Girls at the Harbor), Sweden (Sir Arne's Treasure), U.S. (Wolf Song, Husbands and Lovers, Lights of Old Broadway, Hell Bent, The Wedding March, and more), and the USSR (Earth) — and more than 40 brilliant musicians from around the world to accompany the films. Bookended by Buster Keaton classics The Cameraman (1928) and Our Hospitality (1923), the film selection has something for everyone, including melodrama, horror, adventure, westerns, and even Nordic noir.

All films at SFSFF are accompanied with live music by extraordinary musicians including Club Foot Gamelan, Frank Bockius, Guenter Buchwald, Stephen Horne, Sascha Jacobsen, Matti Bye Ensemble, Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, Philip Carli, Wayne Barker, Utsav Lal, and Donald Sosin.

Photos by Kelly Sweeney-Osato. Words by Audra Wolfmann.

On Saturday, April 13th, Amoeba SF, along with hundreds of independently owned music stores around the world, celebrated Record Store Day. We opened at 8am for the first time in our 12-year history of RSD-ing. This may sound crazy early, but we opened the doors to a line that went down Haight Street, around the corner onto Stanyan, and down to Waller! RSD limited edition releases is what this crowd of early risers was after. If you missed the boat on this holy day, fear not as we still have a few titles online HERE.

In addition to the RSD limited edition releases, Amoeba SF had DJs from 8am to 3pm, setting the tone for the shopping extravaganza. Massive kudos to all of our DJs (Maria Victoria & Dizzy Miss Lizzy of Black Rhythm Happening, Mario Muse, Carolyn Keddy, Smash Hunter, B-Side Brujas, Digital KitKat), but most of all to DJ Bearzbub who played a bitchin' 8am set that has us all dancing in the aisles.

Yes, another glorious Record Store Day has come and gone, but that doesn't mean you need to wait another year the celebrate the virtues of vinyl. All three Amoeba Music locations are open year-round, fighting the good fight and listening to the righteous tunes.

Here's some photos from Saturday. Please see the complete set HERE.
 

Amoeba Music is proud to co-sponsor Oaklash, the Bay Area drag and queer performance festival. This year's festival will feature a full weekend of nonstop DRAG including live performance, music, local vendors, DJs, art, and more! Queens, Kings, and friends from all over the Bay Area and beyond will come together in Oakland for this celebration of local queer culture.

The fun starts on Friday, April 26th at 8pm at Eli's Mile High Club (3629 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Oakland) with BACKLASH: The Oaklash Kick-off Party. Spend the evening with Punk bands The Gooch Palms (Australia), Muñecas (SF), and Bitch Please (LA), plus a killer drag show featuring La Vanidad, The One And Only Rexy, and Kochina Rude.

The festivities continue into the weekend with the two-day festival on Saturday, April 27th and Sunday, April 28th at Classic Cars West (411 26th St, Oakland) with shows from 2pm-10pm (doors at noon). Live music with bands Saturn Rising (LA) and Yayah (SAC) on Saturday, and Zedgar Infiniti (OAK) and Dollii (SF) on Sunday. Drag performances on Saturday feature Meatball (LA), Horrorchata (NYC), Cucci Binaca (SEA), Ti To (LA), Violet Hex (PDX), and local luminaries Juanita More, Jillian Gnarling, Nicki Jizz, Glamamore, and many more! Sunday's performances feature Lucy Stoole (CHI), Queef Latina (MIA), Andro Gin (MIA), HAIRY BRADSHAW (DEN), and local legends Mama Celeste, Peaches Christ, Fauxnique, Dulce De Leche, and more!

By Shona

I love New Orleans, and if you’ve been there, you do too. (If you’ve never been, get yourself down there!) New Orleans is the birthplace and repository of so much important music and, more importantly, so much music is alive and swaggering there. It’s Jazz, it’s R&B, it’s Cajun and Zydeco, it’s Funk, it’s Mardi Gras Indians, it’s Rock & Roll, it’s brass bands, it’s Bounce and Hip-Hop, and we could go on. Let’s just say it’s all that and a bag of Zapp’s potato chips! It’s our past and present, but how do we keep it going for our future? We add Musician Lover to our identity as Music Lover. We support the music and culture by supporting the health and well-being of the people who create it.

Amoeba Music has a long history with the New Orleans Musicians’ Assistance Foundation (NOMAF) and the clinic they support, New Orleans Musician’s Clinic (NOMC). Their mission is to save New Orleans Music and one of the ways they do that is “preventing death by lifestyle.” If you’ve seen an episode of the David Simon HBO drama Treme, then you saw their work depicted. We are a business run by music lovers that caters to music lovers and, let’s be real, we gotta be Musician Lovers.

Every year, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival happens the last weekend of April. It’s an epic music festival, mixing big name, internationally known acts and hyper local artists. Last year they had almost 450,000 attendees over seven days. This year is their big 50th Anniversary, and the line-up is insane. Dave Matthews Band, Diana Ross, Katy Perry, Herbie Hancock, Leon Bridges, Logic, Big Freedia, Santana, Trombone Shorty, and more. NOMAF is holding a raffle and tickets are only $10 each! The grand prize is two Brass Passes (7 day access, VIP perks) to Jazz Fest. Trust, you want that prize. (They don’t take any federal funds, so they rely on year-round donations and special events to fund their programs.)

By Kai Wada Roath
Ambassador of Confusion Hill and host of the Super Shangri-La Show

When I was a young lad of 18, I went to see Dick Dale on his Tribal Thunder tour. He was amazing, yet he was also the most boastful "showboat" I had ever seen on a stage. After the show, like many others, I went to get his autograph on the back of an old Esmeralda Fortune Teller’s card. When it was my turn in line, he stopped his autographing routine, put his hands firmly on both my shoulders, looked me straight in my eyes, and started telling me intensely about how one of his pet tigers recently died, and that when he was holding his beloved giant cat during its passing he too ventured to where the animal's spirit was heading.

It was only darkness he saw, there was no vision of the tunnel of light that he had been told about time and again, and from that moment on he was now scared of death and had doubts about the afterlife. Eventually he took his hands off me, signed my card, and went back to handing out his signed picks to the waiting bewildered line of fans behind me, who questioned me after about what he was talking to me about. I wondered recently, where did his spirit go when it left this Earthly plane? I like to think he is now riding on his tiger with his guitar swung around his back, like He-Man atop Battle Cat, similar to a Frank Frazetta painting. A ghost tiger rider in the sky.