Bars

Bike safety chic

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› biztips@sfbg.com

Lately, I’ve been feeling too spooked to ride my bike. Chalk it up to too many near misses, some of which occurred when I was just walking my bike home in the rain. I often think of the shoulder injury my friend has yet to fully recover from or be compensated for (damn those uninsured motorists who skip town) after being doored two years ago. It doesn’t help matters that I spent the weekend at an East Bay music festival held annually in memory of Matthew Sperry, a bassist, composer, husband, and dad, whose very special life ended while he was cycling to work at LeapFrog in Emeryville on June 5, 2003. And let’s not forget Sarah Tucker (hit and run accident, 1/12/06) and Spider Davila (deliberate hit and run, 12/17/05).

Looks like I’m not alone in my fretting. According to a "report card" issued by the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, 13 percent of us are reluctant to pedal around town because we’re too scared. Overall, our city got a C-minus in bike friendliness from the 1,151 respondents who filled out the SFBC’s online and hand-distributed survey, mostly owing to scary motorists, bumpy streets, and not enough bike lanes (all issues the bicycle coalition works very hard on to make for a better biking city).

Even though I’m afraid of eating pavement while riding, I don’t wear a helmet. I used to, but those things never look good with my outfit. Besides, if two tons of car slams into me while I’m rolling down Gough, a little piece of plastic and foam wrapped around my Gulliver won’t save my life. Some of you fixies reading this article might be nodding in agreement. Well, that’s because your heads are still attached to your bodies.

Fixed-gear bikes do look beautiful, unfettered as they are by brakes, cheap plastic reflectors, and clunky beam lights, but I’m here to say that you don’t always have to sacrifice aesthetics in favor of living to a ripe old age.

Here’s a handful of ways for you, whether you’re a fixie, a chopper rider, a hybrid commuter, a BMX daredevil, or just really vain (like me), to avoid wearing a neck brace as a fashion accessory. Trust me, you and your bike will still look cool.

1. Get a light How many times has a passing motorist screamed that at you? You bitch about it, because every time you buy one, someone steals it, so finally you got one that slides on and off. But it was too big to fit in your pocket, and then some moron decided to strip the light’s pedestal still screwed to your handlebars. I solved this problem by getting a Topeak front beam light ($20). It’s small enough to fit in your mouth, and it straps on kind of like a wristwatch. No screwdriver necessary, no tacky plastic pedestal marring the sleek looks of your untaped handlebars. I got mine at San Francisco Cyclery on Stanyan across from Golden Gate Park.

2. Don’t be a sucker Jerks are also always stealing back lights and reflectors off bikes. Valencia Cyclery sells lots of "lollipop" lights, which are made by Cat Eye and attach with elastic cords — to your backpack, seat, helmet, belt loop. They cost $13 for a red and $17 for a more-expensive-to-make white LED light.

3. Cop skater style It’s hard to say how these things get decided, but among the tragically hip, lightweight and aerodynamic helmets specifically made for biking are as out as fanny packs. Case in point: Only hybrid riders wear them. But for some reason, wearing a skateboarding helmet while biking is dope. Whatever, they protect equally well. Giro and Bell make bicycle helmets that look like skater (or BMX) helmets, which are more rounded and human head–shaped than the amphibious-looking bike helmets of the ’90s. They come in an array of colors in matte and sparkling finishes. Freewheel and American Cyclery sell them for between 20 and 40 bucks. Skates on Haight sells actual skate helmets online for $20.

4. Just don’t commit suicide Road bikes are more the rage these days, but it’s hard to look out for wayward traffic while leaning over those drop handlebars. Cyclocross interrupter break levers ($20–$40) install at the top of the bars, near the stem, allowing road bike riders to sit upright. Since these levers connect to the housing instead of to your lower brakes, they are a much better alternative to the old-school versions often referred to as suicide brakes. Valencia Cyclery will retrofit your vintage road bike with these for $30. SFBG

Freewheel Bike Shop

1920 Hayes and 914 Valencia, SF

(415) 752-9195, (415) 643-9213

San Francisco Bike Coalition’s Report Card

www.sfbike.org

San Francisco Cyclery

672 Stanyan, SF

(415) 379-3870

Valencia Cyclery

1065 Valencia, SF

(415) 550-6601

Passion plays

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Campo Santo is currently celebrating its 10th anniversary, a significant milestone for any small theater company. But this one really does have something to celebrate. The past decade has been an intense, vibrant, unconventionally structured experiment in multicultural communal theater that’s not your typical "community theater," but an ambitious undertaking that takes seriously both its own immediate community and the various communities making up society at large. Along the way, it’s consistently produced by far some of the most exciting and risk-taking productions around. And with more than 30 world premieres to its credit as the resident company at Intersection for the Arts (San Francisco’s premier multidisciplinary alternative arts organization), it’s fair to say Campo Santo’s output has been nothing short of awesome.

But Campo Santo + Intersection is more than the sum of its production history, as anyone who goes to a performance knows. Not just situated in the Mission District but very much a part of it — it’s a place, a space, an environment, a neighborhood, and to many, precisely the hallowed ground the company’s name implies. With a loose and flexible network of individuals and groups capable of supporting and elaborating on each other’s artistic and social work — as well as an atypically astute and diverse audience — Campo Santo and Intersection’s personnel, setting, and semipublic work process all contribute to making it a conspicuously unique site on the theatrical landscape.

There’s probably no more ready proof of that, or the success of its formula, than the willingness of so many nationally prominent playwrights to repeatedly collaborate with Campo Santo on new work — a list that includes Naomi Iizuka, John Steppling, Greg Sarris, Jessica Hagedorn, Erin Cressida Wilson, Philip Kan Gotanda, and Octavio Sol??s. It’s even famously coaxed the first stage works out of well-established writers and poets like Jimmy Santiago Baca, Dave Eggers, and Denis Johnson.

The series of events marking Campo Santo’s 10th anniversary — from workshops, open discussions, and staged rereadings of past productions with the playwrights to a major blowout planned for June 3 — comes as a rare opportunity for company and audience to reflect on a decade of feverish, often brilliant work that has always looked restlessly ahead, as if to the next fix.

The retrospective has been something of a revelation to the company’s members and associates, judging by the rapt discussion that followed a rehearsal last week for the Denis Johnson program.

Words like simple, basic, naked — these recur repeatedly in any discussion of the theater with company member and Intersection program director Sean San Jose, who founded Campo Santo in 1996 with fellow actors Margo Hall, Luis Saguar, and Michael Torres. The occasion was a production of Octavio Sol??s’s Santos y Santos, a major dramatic success when Thick Description premiered it at Theater Artaud in 1993. San Jose, with Saguar and Torres (who had both been in the original production), staged a new version. Sol??s, who has since worked repeatedly with the company — most recently on 2005’s world premiere of The Ballad of Pancho and Lucy, a modern folkloric joyride set in the bars of the Mission District — remembers that first production as a portent of things to come.

"I found the production totally different but equally exciting to the one Tony Kelly had directed at Theater Artaud," he told me. "It was such a pressure cooker situation — I didn’t think it would ever work in a small space like New Langton Arts. But it was stirring. I knew this company had a future. I saw it as very hungry and focused — intense, brooding, and always on. Never a second wasted."

The decision to stage Santos at New Langton came out of another experience with bare bones performance. "These guys read the play in a youth correctional facility," explains Deborah Cullinan, who at the time had just been hired as Intersection’s new executive director — financial straits having temporarily shuttered the arts organization — and was tasked with reviving it. (The rise of Campo Santo and the resurgence of Intersection are intimately tied together, as it turns out.) "They were just reading it for these youth and the water pipe broke in the auditorium, so they got stuck in one of the living quarters, this tiny space. But Luis, Sean, and Michael will all tell you that’s when they understood that the words could drive something forward, because the boys were riveted."

The full production impressed Cullinan, and after their next one — an equally successful staging of a very different play, Erin Cressida Wilson’s Hurricane — she was convinced this was the sort of broad-ranging company Intersection wanted on board. In turn, Intersection gave Campo Santo crucial support, not least the Valencia Street space, to continue doing the kind of theater it had been groping toward.

The key to the company, Sol??s explains, is that "each actor is a dramaturge. They know what the play needs. They start to intuit it. It’s just part of their aesthetic now."

"It’s very much a playwright’s theater," notes Philip Kan Gotanda, whose A Fist of Roses was a thorough surprise last year, an exploration of male domestic violence whose highly original and unusually collaborative nature did as much credit to the veteran playwright as to the small company. "You just don’t find it that often — especially if you’re interested, as I’m interested, in writing pieces that are a little off the beaten path, both in form and content."

"They’re a writer’s theater in that they do exclusively new work, and find the playwrights that appeal to them," Sol??s agrees. At the same time, however, he believes Campo Santo is a strong actor’s theater. "There’s a reason why they’re drawn to Erin Cressida Wilson or Naomi Iizuka. There’s a real reason why they’re drawn to Denis [Johnson]. And Denis now, as I do and I’m sure the other writers are doing — we’re writing to suit the company. They have a great core of talent. They really know how to stretch and take chances. They do very dangerous acting."

Remarkably, 10 years along, Campo Santo continues to convey that sense of immediacy, a sense of raw intensity, risk, and daring, while always matching it with exceptional skill and a youthful, street-smart confidence.

Sol??s puts the formula succinctly: "They like passion. They like works about passion. And passion also in that religious sense." SFBG

Campo Santo 10th anniversary

Gala, Sat/3, 7 p.m.

Brava Theater Center, 2781 24th St, SF. $25

Real Women, Rock ’n’ Roll, and Karaoke:

The Work of Campo Santo and Jessica Hagedorn, June 9, 7:30 p.m.

Finale: Finding the Future, June 10, 7:30 p.m.

Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia, SF. $9–$20

(415) 626-3311

www.theintersection.org

Umlaut with that?

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› paulr@sfbg.com

A friend from LA said, upon stepping into Lettüs Café Organic, "I feel like I’m back in LA. On Rodeo Drive somewhere." Ah, Rodeo Drive, home of the Polo Store, haunt of Nancy Reagan. Lettüs isn’t quite the kind of place where you’d expect to see Mrs. R. — she seems more like the Spago Beverly Hills type — but the Rodeo vibe was palpable and even I caught it, though Lettüs’s Marina environs, its urban density of souls, have always seemed more Chicago than LA to me, more Lincoln Park. Of course, I once lived in Chicago; I have never lived in LA but have been to Rodeo Drive.

"Everything is good for you, and expensive," my LA friend continued, apropos the LA-ish menu at Lettüs. Ah, I thought, we could be talking about the Newsroom Café, that West Hollywood haunt (on Robertson, near Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, nowhere near Rodeo Drive but just across the street from the Ivy) of alfalfa sprouts, fat-free yogurt smoothies, and youthful pretenders to movie stardom, everybody wearing their fancy sunglasses inside — which of course is not necessary at Lettüs.

The good-for-you part I could accept, for Lettüs, as its full name suggests, deals almost exclusively in organic food and relies as much as possible on local produce. The pricey part, on the other hand, I balked at; Lettüs isn’t exactly cheap, but it isn’t expensive, either, for what you get, with only a handful of items costing more than $10. Plus, you are afforded an opportunity to ponder the umlaut, a flourish that puts one in mind of, perhaps, a Swedish delicacy like pancakes with lingonberry sauce, though the menu is devoid of Scandinavian influence (except for smoked salmon); most of the culinary cues are either Medi-Cal or East Asian, which leaves one with a general impression that an outpost of Chow has collided with one of the ZAO noodle bars.

The most Scandinavian element of Lettüs (other than the umlaut) is probably the interior design, walls and ceiling of slatted, pale wood, with interstitial bars of fluorescent lighting and sleek, spare furniture. There is a certain saunalike feel to the look, or perhaps it is vaguely Japanese. Either way, it manages to be both rustic and urban, cool and warm, an appealing casual-sophisticated setting for the casually sophisticated food of executive chef Sascha Weiss. (His partners in the endeavor are Matthew Guelke and Mark Lewis; the restaurant opened near the end of last year.)

If Weiss’s food has a theme, it might be "when worlds collide": chipotle-scented black bean soup ($4) with avocado salsa on the one hand and, on the other, mango chicken or tofu lettuce cups ($8) — shredded napa cabbage, a Thai-ish blend of ginger, cilantro, basil, and sweet-hot chili-tamarind sauce, and either baked tofu or grilled chicken bundled in swaddlings of Bibb lettuce for easy finger feeding. And if you have a third hand, how about some bruschetta ($5), points of grilled levain topped with white butter beans, roast garlic, cherry tomatoes, and basil?

Bigger dishes are available, of course, from various sorts of panini and open-faced sandwiches — including an entrant of grilled chicken breast ($9.50) with marinated peppers and pesto quite as potent as anything you’d get at Chow — to noodlier choices. Here we have a pasta ($8), fusilli sauced with arugula, sun-dried tomatoes, broccoli, and chickpeas, with a layer of olive slivers and gratings of parmesan cheese on top, a concoction surprisingly hearty despite the absence of animal flesh. There is also a plate of brightly acidic soba noodles ($7) — warm or cold, your call — tossed with julienne zucchini, carrot, and red bell pepper and a lime-sesame vinaigrette dotted with sesame seeds.

But in the main, the happiest course is probably to nosh. Most of the food lends itself to splitting and sharing, in particular the spring rolls ($6), rice-paper wraps stuffed with rice noodles, carrots, and lettuce, sliced into bite-size cylinders, and presented with dipping sauces of spicy peanut and sweet chili. Only slightly more cumbersome to divvy up is a salad of avocado and grapefruit ($7.50) nested in a carpet of peppery-nutty arugula and dressed with a grapefruit-juice vinaigrette; this is about as simple as it gets, and about as good, with butteriness, fruit, bite, and nose brought into a powerful harmony.

Given the confident eclecticism of the savory dishes, the desserts are surprisingly flat-footed. A pair of hazelnut shortbreads ($1) dipped in dark chocolate were not dipped in dark chocolate but presented to us naked. They were fine, crisp yet tender of crumb, but I felt obliged to ask after the missing chocolate. "We don’t have those today," our hapless server reported. Coffee cake ($4), meanwhile, was on the dry side despite an interspersion of blackberries and a streusel topping. Only the chocolate mousse cake ($5), served on a plate piped with raspberry sauce, was "dense" and "rich" as promised by the menu card — moist, too, they could honorably have added.

A word on the table service, which is of the semi variety: You order at the counter, are issued a placard with a number, seat yourself (displaying numbered placard), and wait for the food to start arriving. The system is fairly efficient, though cafeteria-esque, and the placards aren’t the usual cheap plastic numbers but cast steel, with numbers handsomely embossed in gold. Nancy Reagan might not buy them if she saw them in a window on Rodeo Drive, but she would at least look. SFBG

Lettüs Café Organic

Mon.–Fri., 7:30 a.m.–10:30 p.m.; Sat.–Sun., 8 a.m.–10:30 p.m.

3352 Steiner, SF

(415) 931-2777

www.lettusorganic.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Attack of the NIMBYs!

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› marke@sfbg.com

A fairy tale: Once upon a time there was a stone-hearted ogre named Capt. Dennis Martel of the San Francisco Police Department’s Southern Station. The Ogre Martel — either through manic moodiness, misguided morality, or perpetual constipation owing to the enchanted stick up his ass — was determined not to let people party like it was 1999. Thus he began terrorizing the nearby Clubbers of SoMa, a benign race of ravers, burners, and freaks who desired nothing more than peace, unity, respect, and free bottled water near the dance floor.

The ogre was relentless. Soon, after-hours party permits were being pulled, club owners fined for "attracting loiterers," and gentle electronica fans in bunny suits hauled downtown for daring to reek of reefer. SF’s premillennial party scene was in grave danger of becoming extinct, until a brave group of party people banded together and formed the San Francisco Late Night Coalition. These fair Knights of the Twirl-Around Table dedicated themselves to political action, local petitioning, and raising community awareness about the harmlessness of all-night dancing. Slowly but surely, they won over the hearts and votes of the townspeople, making clubbing safe again for all and banishing the evil Ogre Martel to parking lot duty at the airport. The end.

Well, not quite. Once again, good-natured fun in the Bay seems to be under attack. Only this time the threat comes not from one rogue cop and his wonky "cleanup" attempts, but from several nervous Nellies among the citizenry. As Amanda Witherell details in this issue, many of the city’s most revered street fairs, festivals, and outdoor events are now threatened by, among other things, higher fees, lack of alcohol sales permits, and sudden, oddball "concerns." And the story doesn’t stop there. The Pac Heights ski jump, amplified music in public spaces, and car-free Saturdays in Golden Gate Park have all recently been nixed by our supposedly green-minded go-go-boy mayor and his minions, under pressure from crotchety party poopers. Well-established clubs like the DNA Lounge, the Eagle Tavern, and — irony of ironies — the Hush Hush Lounge have had to dance madly and expensively around sound complaints. A popular wet-jockstrap contest in the Tenderloin was raided last month by cops, not because of the (whoops) accidental nudity and simulated sex, but because it was … too loud. Huzzacuzzawha?

While money and politics are certainly involved, the one common denominator in all this anti-fun is the squeaky wheel, the neighborhood killjoy who screams "not in my backyard!" These irksome drudges, the NIMBYs, are strangling San Francisco’s native spirit of communal cheer and outrageousness. Big business and corrupt political interests hinge their arguments for more money and less mirth on the whining of one or two finger waggers, despite overwhelming community support for the events being targeted. As often occurs in life, a single complaint carries far more weight than a hundred commendations. A few whack cranks bust the bash.

At this point one wants to shriek, "Move back to Mountain View, spoilsports!" And that’s exactly the message of the San Francisco Party Party, the latest grassroots effort to combat what Party Party leader Ted Strawser calls "the rampant suburbanization of the most gloriously hedonistic city on earth." NIMBYs are hard to spot; they come in every class and color and don’t always sport the telltale Hummers and French manicures of the previous generation of wet blankets (although they do often smell like diapers). The changing demographics of the city suggest that many new residents, mostly condo owners, commute to out-of-town jobs — in San Jose, say — and may be trying to transform San Francisco into a bedroom community.

"I don’t know who these quasi prohibitionists think they are, but they don’t belong here, that’s for sure," Strawser says. "Street culture and community gatherings are the reason San Francisco exists. We live our happy lives on the sidewalks and in the bars. And it’s bad enough we have to quit drinking at 2 a.m. Now we have to be quiet, too?"

The San Francisco Bike Coalition, the newly formed Outdoor Events Coalition, and the still-active Late Night Coalition are out in fabulous force to combat the NIMBYs. But, realizing the diffuseness of the problem, the Party Party is taking a less directly political, more Web-savvy approach to fighting San Francisco’s gradual laming, using its site as a viral locus for disgruntled partyers, a portal linking directly to organizations combating NIMBYs, and a guide to local fun stuff happening each week. "We’re a bunch of partyers, what can I say?" Strawser says. "We’re doing our best to shed light on all this insane NIMBY stuff, but we also love to go out drinking. And that’s a commitment many folks can relate to."

Let’s hope we can win the fight again this time (tipsy or no). San Francisco is a progressive city, dedicated to the power of microgovernment and the ability to have your voice heard in your community. If you don’t like what’s happening next door, you should be able to do something about it. But it’s also a city of constant reinvention and liveliness, exploration and celebration. That’s the reason we all struggle so much to stay here. That’s what shapes our soul.

If some people can’t handle it — well, the less the merrier, maybe. SFBG

www.sfpartyparty.com

www.sflnc.org

www.sfbike.org

Oh, behave!

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SUPER EGO  

Where’s my babymama! I want my babymama!
 
That’s what I planned to shriek at the Be Nice Party. I was gonna strut myself right up to the bar at Catalyst, the party’s venue, and politely order a babymama cocktail (strawberry vodka, banana liqueur, and pineapple juice, spiked with a flash of grenadine claw, strained and served on the rocks. Britney Spears in a short glass, darling). Then, without warning, I would flip a total schizo switch and attempt a full-on, foaming Whitney-Houston-out-of-butane meltdown, exclaiming the above, appalling every pleasantry-spewing goody-two-socks within earshot. I even intended to strew a few glass pipe shards and fling stray weaves about during my one-queen crackhead kabuki act (visuals). And maybe toss around a couple stained toddler jumpers or a threadbare bib with a faded Little Mermaid on it (poignancy). Britney, Whitney, and Disney — that’ll teach ’em to try to “be nice” at me.

But intentionally getting 86’d from something called Be Nice was far too obvious a reaction, like snarking Madonna at Coachella or shooting Phish in an alley. Me? I’m all about subtlety. I try to keep my scars behind my ears, thank you. So I hit up Be Nice with an openish mind and, instead of babymamas, got soused on redheaded sluts (Jägermeister, peach schnapps, and an ample screech of cran, shaken and quickly poured out — Kathy Griffin in a shot glass, darling). If there’s one thing I’ve learned on life’s Naugahyde stool, it’s that liquor’s the best revenge. And sluts are fun. And Tyra Banks is an alien pterodactyl.

Wow, I sound super gay this week.

So what’s Be Nice about? Once a month, a diverse group of randoms meet in a space “where you can make eye contact without it being ‘cruisy,’” with “music just loud enough to hear, but quiet enough to easily talk over,” to “say hello to someone new (or old)” but not to “impress people with how cool you may want them to think you are.” (“And … it’s early!”) Somewhat contradictorily, this “low-key public event” aims to bring the spirit of Burning Man’s Black Rock City to the heart of San Francisco. But the promoters mean in the sense of BRC’s ethic of PLUR and kindness (BRC PLURK?) not in the sense of “Oh god, it sounds like Burning Man on a stalled elevator — why not just throw in Whoopi Goldberg and call it German expressionist mime kill me now?”

But yes, I expected a cult. What I found was about 40 hip-but-nonhuggy characters sprawled across Catalyst’s booths, nary a silver Nike among them. The first thing that hits you when you enter a club whose music is pitched to pin drop is the odd, nostalgic staccato of conversation. I’m usually surrounded by jibber-jabberers aplenty — hello, mirror — and music can make a great escape pod. Hell, half the time I’m not even sure what I’m saying myself at the club, but that could just be my thick Vicodinian accent. Seriously, though, when was the last time you walked into a roomful of people talking and could hear both sides? It was fuckin’ spooky, Scooby. Waves of mutual exchanges washed over me as I leapt in, latching on to a couple groovy goth chicks and a freelance programmer in golf pants. Soon I was gabbing away, natch. I must have had fun because here are my notes: “Internetz … herpes scarf … deep-fried diet pill.” Oh yes, and Ramsa Murtha Begwagewan is the Anointed One, all praise him.

That there can be a successful club whose hook is friendly conversation may say more about technology’s limits than it does about a possible resurgence of Moose Lodges or canasta parties — although bingo is definitely in. Nightlife, this business we call tipsy, took a sucker punch from its former friend the Interweb, of course. (Why go out when you can get drunk online?) And we’re pretty much used to thinking of clubs at this point as either struggling to imitate the ethernet with hyper-adverbial interactive “concepts” or fetishizing things that computers cannot touch yet. Face-to-face give-and-take now joins classic cruising, live performance, art exhibits, sculptural environments, oxygen bars, professional mixology, vinyl archaeology, sweaty bodies, and chocolate syrup wrestling (www.chocolatesyrupwrestling.com) in clubland’s Museum of the Mostly Mouse-Free.

Clubs. Is there no index they can’t gloss?

One other nightlife experience that can never be truly virtualized: that predawn abandoned bus ride home, muffled sounds of the club still ringing in your ears. I like to think of Muni in those moments as my personal stretch Hummer; the driver is my handsome Israeli chauffeur/bodyguard/secret paramour who will someday betray me, and I’m a (kind of smelly) target of salivating paparazzi. Then I start to feel a tad snobbish and base and also possibly paranoid. But then I have a Snickers and I’m OK.   — Marke B. (superego@sfbg.com)

Be Nice Party

Second Wednesdays, 6–11 p.m.

Catalyst Cocktails

312 Harrison, SF

Free

(415) 621-1722

www.catalystcocktails.com

www.beniceparty.com

Porn 2.0

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› pornomovies@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION In downtown San Francisco, if you wander off Fifth Street down a small, twisting alley nestled among the sky-high monuments to money, you’ll find a freshly installed steel door, the glowing numbers affixed to it bearing little relationship to the other addresses on the street. If you’re lucky enough to get past the security cameras and locks, you’ll find yourself at the edge of a huge warehouse space full of stages and sets.

Climb up the stairs that lead away from the "medieval castle" set, and you’re in a huge office space full of computers. People are on the phones, or swapping stories as they return from a trip to the Starbucks around the corner, or gathered in tight huddles around large, flat-screen monitors full of partial layouts. Only the bathrooms offer a hint about what’s really going on here. No ordinary office would stock its toilets with an enormous rack of baby wipes, paper towels, and every feminine hygiene product known to woman. This is Kink.com, home to half a dozen of the Web’s hottest porn sites.

Everyone always asks what porn has done for the Web, but they never ask what the Web has done for porn. A place like this, full of queer hipsters, geeks, and models, would never have existed before 1995. It certainly wouldn’t have looked quite so Ikea.

I’ve come here to visit the set of Fuckingmachines.com, a Web site devoted to images and movies of women having sex with machines. Usually the machine involves some sort of piston and at least one moving part to which a dildo can be attached. The sensibility is perfectly San Francisco: a cross between high-tech fetishism and sexual fetishism. Tomcat, the site’s understated Web master, wears a tie and jeans to the set. With a degree in film and digital media from a large public university, the self-consciously androgynous Tomcat is precisely the sort of hip young professional who is attracted to second-generation Web porn operations like Kink.

Tomcat makes sure the first machine (called "the chopper") is ready to go and picks out a pale blue dildo from a huge, tidy cart that contains — laid out with surgical precision — an array of silicone cocks in various sizes, a fanned display of condoms, towels, baby wipes, and several lube bottles. Next to it is a pine cabinet full of carefully labeled drawers containing "large dildos" and "small dildos." A tiny table holds some soft drinks packed in ice, as well as a handful of lemon Luna bars.

"Last week we did an alien abduction scene," Tomcat says. "It was great — I got to be the alien." Today’s model, a tall brunet with a lascivious smile, named Sateen Phoenix, arrives in a little dress and fuck-me shoes. Like Tomcat, she’s the sort of person who has the education and resources to choose from many careers and has chosen this one because she likes it. "I’m moving to LA to get more work," she says, sipping water. "But I just got into this about six months ago — I like having sex in public, so I thought, why not do it here?"

Settling onto the chopper, Sateen poses and reposes, replaying her naughty grin as many times as Tomcat asks. The scene behind the scenes here is all business. PAs discuss the merits of various lubes and dildos; everyone tries to figure out the ideal position for Sateen’s pussy so that everything fits together when the machine starts pumping. Tomcat manages to issue directions in the tone of a nice but task-masterish boss.

"I know it’s awkward with your knees and the handlebars, but go ahead and insert it so that it’s comfortable," the Web master says. "Now just wank a little until you get off."

"I don’t know if I can get off like this," Sateen suggests. "I’m too lubey."

"Get some baby wipes for her to take care of that lube," Tomcat directs the PA.

Eventually, using another machine called "the predator," Sateen starts screaming in a way that marks this whole scene, again, as something that could only happen in the world of Porn 2.0. She’s had a genuine orgasm, the kind of thing you’d almost never see a woman do in porn before the Web took over.

Ten minutes later, still shaking and sweaty, Sateen pulls on a robe and stumbles over to the snack table. She falls into a chair and lets out her breath in a whoosh.

"Hard work, eh?" she sighs, grinning at me. "Having orgasms all day?" SFBG

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who’s never met a machine she didn’t like.

Last call?

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› news@sfbg.com

Concerns about public drinking in North Beach and stifled public debate are conspiring to cripple a pair of popular outdoor festivals, possibly creating a troubling precedent for other events at the start of San Francisco’s festival and street fair season.

"We’ll have to cancel this year’s festival," Robbie Kowal, who runs the North Beach Jazz Festival, said of the possibility of not getting his alcohol permit. "Seventy-five percent of our funding comes from the sale of alcohol."

The Recreation and Park Commission’s Operations Committee is set to review the jazz festival’s permit May 3, and if sentiments among the three mayor-appointed commissioners haven’t changed, they might not allow Kowal and his partners, John Miles and Alistair Monroe, to set up bars and serve drinks to local jazz fans in Washington Square Park, as they’ve been doing without challenge for the past 12 years.

"We’ve never even had a hearing to get a permit before," Kowal said. "We’ve had no arrests and no [California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control] violations. We’re being punished when we haven’t done anything wrong. We’re caught up in this whole North Beach Festival situation."

Kowal was referring to a dispute involving the neighborhood’s other popular street fair, the North Beach Festival, a 52-year street fair that had its permission to sell alcohol in the park yanked this year. The festival is hosted by the North Beach Chamber of Commerce, whose director, Marsha Garland, is a political adversary of the area’s supervisor, Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin.

The problem started when parks general manager Yomi Agunbiade determined that a long-standing ban on alcohol in city parks should also apply during festivals. Two out of three members of the Rec and Park Commission’s Operations Committee agreed with that ruling during an April 5 meeting, and it became official policy.

Then, as the North Beach Festival permit went to the full commission for approval April 20, the words "permission to serve beer and wine" disappeared from the agenda item. Those words had appeared on an earlier version of the agenda, allowing the commission to grant what Garland had received with every permit for the last 20 years. The agenda change meant the commission couldn’t even discuss the alcohol issue, let allow issue a permit that allowed it.

Commissioner Jim Lazarus questioned a representative of the City Attorney’s Office about it and was told that the full commission couldn’t hear the policy if the general manager and Operations Committee were in agreement.

"I was taken aback by the fact that the full request of the applicant to serve beer and wine was not on the calendar," Lazarus told us. "I’ve been on the commission for three and a half years, and I’ve never seen that happen before for this kind of issue."

This story is still unfolding, but observers are openly wondering whether this is an isolated case of political sabotage or whether this battle over beer could hurt the summer festival season.

Wine and beer sales have always played a critical role in the financial viability of many of the city’s summer festivals. In a city that’s never been afraid of a liberal pour, many are beginning to wonder if the good times are over, and if so, why?

"The Rec and Park meeting was so disheartening, and if it’s used as a precedent in any way, it will harm other events. If the oldest street fair in this city can be chipped away at like that, who’s next?" said Lindsey Jones, executive director of SF Pride, the largest LGBT festival in the country.

Some North Beach residents think this Rec and Park procedural shell game is punishment for Garland and her organization’s opposition to Peskin, whom they blame for the change.

"Aaron Peskin would like to take Marsha Garland’s livelihood away," said Richard Hanlin, a landlord and 30-year resident of North Beach who filed a complaint over the incident with the Ethics Commission.

"They want to railroad Marsha," said Lynn Jefferson, president of the civic group North Beach Neighbors. "They want to see her out of business. If she doesn’t have those alcohol sales, she’ll personally go bankrupt."

At the heart of the Garland-Peskin beef is a 2003 battle over a lot at 701 Lombard St. known as "the Triangle," which the owner wanted to develop but which the Telegraph Hill Dwellers wanted for a park after they found a deed restriction indicating it should be considered for open space. Peskin agreed with the group he once led and had the city seize the land by eminent domain, drawing the wrath of Garland and others who saw it as an abuse of government power.

Peskin told the Guardian that it’s true he doesn’t care for Garland, but that he did nothing improper to influence the commission’s decision or agenda. However, he added that he’s made no secret of his opposition to fencing off much of the park to create a beer garden and that he’s made that point to Rec and Park every year since the festival’s beer garden started taking over the park in 2003.

“Just let the people use Washington Square Park. It’s the commons of North Beach,” Peskin said. “The park should be open to people of all ages 365 days a year. That’s just how I feel.”

Yet Peskin said that neither the North Beach Jazz Festival, which doesn’t segregate people by age, nor festivals that use less neighborhood-centered parks, like the Civic Center and Golden Gate Park, should be held to the same standard. In fact, he plans to speak out in favor of the jazz festival’s right to sell alcohol during the May 3 meeting.

Access became the buzzword this year, in response to last year’s decision by the San Francisco Police Department to gate two-thirds of the park off as a beer garden, effectively prohibiting many underage festivalgoers from actually entering a large part of the park. The section near the playground remained ungated, but many families were disillusioned by the penning of the party.

Enter the North Beach Merchants Association, a two-year-old rival of the Chamber of Commerce with stated concerns about booze. President Anthony Gantner learned that the park code banned alcohol from being served in any of the parks listed in Section 4.10, which includes Washington Square as well as nearly every other greenway in the city, unless by permission of the Recreation and Park Commission, which should only be granted as long as it "does not interfere with the public’s use and enjoyment of the park."

Gantner and Peskin both argue that the beer garden does interfere with the right of those under 21 to use the park. "The Chamber is basically doing a fair, and that’s it," Gantner said. "A lot of its members are bars, and they run a very large fair with beer gardens that result in incidents on the streets for merchants."

Though Garland contends that the festival is an economic stimulator, resulting in an 80 percent increase in sales for local businesses, Gantner claims that a number of businesses don’t benefit from the increased foot traffic. He associates alcohol with the congruent crime issues that crop up when the clubs let out on Broadway, and thinks that selling beer and wine in the park only accelerates problems in the streets after the festival ends at 6 p.m.

Gantner has the ear of local police, who are understaffed by 20 percent and looking for any way to lower costs by deploying fewer cops. "It used to be we could police these events with full staff and overtime, but now we’re trying to police them with less resources, and the events themselves are growing," Central Station Capt. James Dudley said.

He’s also concerned about the party after the party. The police average five alcohol-related arrests on a typical Friday night in North Beach, most after the bars close. But those numbers don’t change much during festival weekend, leading many to question the logic behind banning sales of alcohol in the park. Besides, if sales were banned, many festivalgoers would simply sneak it in. Even one police officer, who didn’t want to be named, told us, "If I went to sit in that park to listen to music and couldn’t buy beer, I’d probably try pretty hard to sneak some in."

At the April 20 Rec and Park meeting, Garland presented alternative solutions and site plans for selling beer and wine, which represents $66,000 worth of income the festival can’t afford to lose. Beyond her openness to negotiations, Rec and Park heard overwhelming support for the festival in the form of petitions and comments from 30 neighbors and business owners who spoke during the general public comment portion of the meeting.

Father John Malloy of the Saints Peter and Paul Church, which is adjacent to the park, spoke in support of Garland’s request. "I think I have the most weddings and the most funerals in the city," he said. "I’m praying that we don’t have a funeral for the North Beach Festival. If anyone should be against alcohol, it should be the priest of a church."

So who are the teetotalers? Testimony included 10 complaints from members of the Telegraph Hill Dwellers, Friends of Washington Square, and the North Beach Merchants Association, as well as Gantner and neighborhood activist Mark Bruno, who came down from Peskin’s office, where he was watching the hearing, to testify.

Commissioner Megan Levitan said, "If anyone knows me, they know I like my wine," before going on to explain that she was born in North Beach and even used to serve beer at O’Reilly’s Beer and Oyster Festival. However, she said, she’s a mother now, and parks are important to her.

"It does change a park when alcohol is there," she said. "I do not believe we should serve alcohol in the park."

Will that still be her stance May 3 when the North Beach Jazz Festival requests its permit? The jazz fest has never had beer gardens, and the organizers don’t want them. Instead, they set up minibars throughout the park, which remains ungated, allowing complete access for all ages.

Although there is hired security and local police on hand, by and large people are responsible for themselves. The organizers say it’s just like going to a restaurant for a meal and a drink, except in this case it’s outside, with a stage and free live music.

Though Kowal remains optimistic, he’s rallying as much support as possible, even turning the May 3 meeting into an event itself on his Web site (www.sunsettickets.com). His partners, Monroe and Miles, were concerned enough to swing by City Hall to see Peskin, who agreed to testify and help the Jazz Festival retain the right to sell booze.

"The first person to write a check to start this festival was Mayor Willie Brown," Kowal said. "Peskin has always been a big supporter of the festival, which is why we think it will all work out."

The festival is a labor of love for the three organizers, who barely break even to put the event on; after expenses are covered, any additional profit from the sale of alcohol is donated to Conservation Value, a nonprofit organization that aids consumers in making smart purchases.

"We were the first fair to use Washington Square Park," Monroe, the founding father of the jazz festival, said. "We’re standing up for the right to access the park. It’s not about ‘he said, she said’ or who did what to whom. It’s about hearing free live music."

So now comes the moment when we find out whether this is about alcohol, parks, or simply politics, and whether future street fairs could feel the pinch of renewed temperance. If the jazz festival gets to sell booze, Garland’s supporters argue, that will represent a bias against the North Beach Festival.

The commission will hear Garland’s appeal at the end of May, just two weeks before the festival begins. With contracts already signed and schedules set, the stakes are high. Owing to lack of funds, Garland has already canceled the poetry, street chalk art, and family circus components of the fair. She did receive an e-mail from Levitan promising a personal donation to put toward the street chalk art competition. Even so, she’s preparing for a funeral.

And if alcohol is prohibited at the jazz festival, it could send out a ripple of concern among street fair promoters and lovers around the city. To be a part of the decision, stop by the meeting and have a say. SFBG

PS This weekend’s How Weird Street Faire, on May 7, centered at Howard and 12th Streets, will have beer gardens in addition to seven stages of music and performances. But organizers warn that it could be the last festival because the SFPD is now demanding $14,000, a 275 percent increase from the police fees organizers paid last year.

operations committee hearing

May 3, 2 p.m.

City Hall, Room 416

1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place, SF

(415) 831-2750

www.sfgov.org

Ruling party

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J-Stalin knows how to make an entrance.

The first time we meet, in November 2004 at the Mekanix’s recording studio in East Oakland, he enters nonchalantly, sporting an embroidered eye mask as though it were everyday wear. He walks up to me and shakes my hand. "I’m J-Stalin. I write and record two songs a day," he says with boyish pride.

I had a hard time retaining the notion the rapper wasn’t a boy, for though he’d recently turned 21, his five-foot frame and preternatural baby face gave the impression of a raspy-voiced, blunt-puffing, Henny-swilling 14-year-old.

Yet he already had a storied past. A teen crack dealer, or "d-boy," from West Oakland’s Cypress Village, Stalin was busted at age 17, spending the next 11 months on parole with weekends in juvenile hall. During this period, to both stave off boredom and possibly escape the multigenerational cycle of dope-dealing in his family, the young Jovan Smith began writing raps, finding out about the other Stalin in 11th-grade history class, and soaking up game at the Grill in Emeryville, where family friend DJ Daryl had a recording studio.

After letting him watch for a year, Daryl put Stalin on a track — the result so impressed Daryl’s frequent collaborator, Bay Area legend Richie Rich, he immediately commissioned a hook. Stalin would end up on three cuts on Rich’s Nixon Pryor Roundtree (Ten-Six, 2002) and on two as a member of the Replacement Killers, a group that included Rich and Crestside Vallejo’s PSD. Several more songs from this period had just surfaced on Rich’s 2004 compilation, Snatches, Grabs, and Takes (Ten-Six), though Stalin had since defected to the Mekanix’s production company, Zoo Entertainment. By the time we met, the highly productive crew had recorded most of Stalin’s upcoming debut, On Behalf of Tha Streets.

He’s next

During the next 18 months, J-Stalin would generate no small amount of buzz, thanks in part to high-profile guest shots on projects like the Jacka’s The Jack Artist (Artist, 2005) and the Delinquents’ Have Money Have Heart (Dank or Die, 2005). Three advance tracks from On Behalf — "Party Jumpin’," featuring Jacka; a clean version of "Fuck You"; and an homage to the classic drum machine, "My 808" — have accumulated spins on KMEL, while the video for "My 808" has more than 20,000 plays on Youtube.com. Too $hort says he’s "next," E-40’s dubbed him "the future," and major labels like Capitol and Universal are checking him hard.

To crown these achievements, Stalin’s copped a coveted spot hosting an upcoming project for the Bay Area’s mix-tape kings, DJ Devro and Impereal, alias the Demolition Men (see sidebar). Named after Stalin’s penchant for calling the DJs at 7 a.m., ready to lay verses, The Early Morning Shift is a potent fusion of mix tape beats and Mekanix originals, laced with Stalin’s melodic raps and distinctively raw, R&B–style vocals. Taking advantage of the industry’s current structure, whereby you can drop a mix tape or two without compromising your "debut" album marketability, The Early Morning Shift will be most listeners’ first chance to hear the prolific J-Stalin at length, in the company of stars like Keak, F.A.B., and the Team, as well as Stalin’s Cypress Village crew, Livewire. Having generated some 60 tracks in the scant two weeks devoted to recording the disc, Stalin has literally given the Demolition Men more than they can handle: Talk of a "part two" is already in the air, though the DJs are still rushing to finish the first for an early-May release.

The Early Morning Shift comes at a pivotal time in J-Stalin’s career. At the very least, the mix tape will warm up the Bay for On Behalf, which Zoo Entertainment plans to release independently in the next few months. With everywhere from Rolling Stone to USA Today catching on to the Bay’s hyphy/thizz culture, and major labels lurking in the wings, it’s probably only a matter of time before Stalin gets a deal. But the rapper is adamant on signing only as part of the Mekanix’s Zoo.

"We don’t want an artist deal," he says. "If they give us a label deal, it’ll work, because I ain’t fittin’ to sign no artist deal."

If this sounds a tad dictatorial in the mouth of so young a playa, consider that Stalin left a famous rapper’s camp to work with a then-unknown production duo, a decision fraught with risk. But Stalin’s instincts regarding his own artistic strengths are sound. He thrives on quantity, and the Mekanix’s intense productivity suits Stalin’s seemingly endless supply of rhymes and hooks. The duo’s ominous, minor-key soundscapes provide perfect vehicles for the rapper’s exuberant tales of West Oakland street hustle and melancholy, often poignant reflections on d-boy life.

"I used to listen to their beats," Stalin recalls, "and be like, ‘Damn, them niggas got heat!’ Plus they ain’t no haters. I mean, I’m a leader; I ain’t no follower. They allow me to still be me and fuck with them at the same time."

A few months ago I had a chance to watch this process in action, dropping by the studio as Dot and Tweed were putting the finishing touches on a hot new beat, one in tune with current hyphy trends yet retaining the dark urgency characteristic of the Mekanix sound.

"Let me get on it," Stalin says, as he usually does when he hears something he likes.

Sometimes Dot says yes, sometimes no, depending on their plans for a particular session. With a beat this fresh and radio-ready, one they could easily sell, Dot is noncommittal: "What you got for it?"

Without a pause Stalin breaks into a melody, accompanied by an impromptu dance: "That’s my name / Don’t wear it out, wear it out, wear it out …" Simple, catchy, the phrase totally works, and in less time than it takes to tell, he’s in the booth laying down what promises to be the main single from On Behalf: "That’s My Name."

Sitting behind the mixing board, Dot shoots me a smile, as if to say, "See why we work with this guy?"

On the Go Movement

With The Early Morning Shift about to drop, and On Behalf on the way, the only thing Stalin needs is his own catchword, à la hyphy or thizz. Enter the Go movement. Among recent innovations in Bay Area hip-hop slang is a certain use of the word go to indicate a kind of dynamic state of being, widely attributed to Stalin.

"I ain’t sayin’ I made it up, but somebody from West Oakland did," Stalin says. "Even before there was hella songs talkin’ about Go and shit, that shit came from ecstasy pills. We used to say, ‘Goddamn, you motherfuckers go.’ And then you refer to a female like, ‘She go.’ I swear it used to just be me and my niggas in the hood. I started fuckin’ with the Mekanix and sayin’ it at they place. Then, before I knew it, everybody was talking about Go."

Like thizz, Go quickly expanded beyond its drug-related origins, partly because it epitomizes so well the fast-paced environment of rappers’ lifestyles. Among the early cosigners of the Go movement is the Team, whose album World Premiere (Moedoe) dropped at the beginning of April. Not only did the group release a between-album mix tape and DVD called Go Music (Siccness.net, 2005), but Team member Kaz Kyzah has hooked up with Stalin and the Mekanix for a side project called the Go Boyz. First previewed on Go Music, on a track also featuring Mistah F.A.B., the Go Boyz have already recorded their self-titled debut, and Zoo is in talks with Moedoe about an eventual corelease.

"Where I’m from, we don’t say, ‘Go stupid.’ ‘Go dumb.’ We just go," Kaz Kyzah says, explaining the term’s appeal.

"Really, it’s a way of life for us," he continues. "Me, Stalin, Dot, and Tweed, we’d be up all night just goin’. Every song was recorded at like four in the morning. Listening to some of the stuff now, you can feel it in the music."

Getting in early

Since I began this piece, Stalin, it seems, has gotten even bigger, as word of The Early Morning Shift and the Go Boyz has spread through the scene. People are suddenly lining up to work with him, and he’s already committed to new projects with DJ Fresh, Beeda Weeda, the Gorilla Pits, and J-Nash, an R&B singer featured on Mistah F.A.B.’s upcoming Yellow Bus Driver. In a late-breaking development, E-40 confirms he intends to sign the Stalin/Beeda Weeda duo project to Sick Wid It Records.

During our interview, Stalin and I run by DJ Fresh’s studio so J can lay a rhyme for an upcoming installment of Fresh’s mix tape series, The Tonite Show. Another rapper, watching Stalin pull a verse out of thin air four bars at a time, is clearly awed: "He’s amazing. I mean, he’s on the records I buy."

Stalin takes it all in stride, though; aside from when I’ve watched him perform live, this is the first time I’ve ever seen someone react to him like he was a star. I get the feeling, however, it’s far from the last. SFBG

J-Stalin

Fri/28, 10 p.m. doors

Club Rawhide

280 Seventh St., SF

$20

(415) 621-1197

myspace.com/jstalinofficialpage

Bring on the Demolition Men

The Demolition Men, Impereal and DJ Devro, definitely didn’t earn their reputation as the Bay Area’s mix-tape kings by staying at home. As DJs the duo has performed together and separately at clubs all over the world, from China and Japan to South America and Europe. Native Spanish speakers — Impereal hails from the Colombian community in Queens, NY, while Devro is Southern California Creole — the pair also hosts Demolition Men Radio, broadcast Thursdays from 6 to 7 p.m. on Azul 1063, a hip-hop station in Colombia’s Medell??n. Yet if you live in the Bay, you’re most liable to see them on the street, selling mix tapes out of their backpacks.

"We’re like a walking promotional retail machine," Impereal jokes. "If you don’t buy a mix tape, you going home with a flyer."

Such determination, coupled with the DJs’ high output (more than 30 releases since late 2003, including three volumes each of R&B and reggaeton) and elaborate graphics, has finally kick-started the Bay’s once lackadaisical mix tape scene.

An integral component of hip-hop in New York and the South, enabling new talents to be heard alongside vets and vets to issue bulletins with an immediacy unavailable to corporate labels, DJ-assembled mix tapes at their best are the ultimate in no-holds-barred hip-hop. Considered "promotional material" and usually printed in limited quantities, the discs are generally unencumbered by legal requirements like sample clearance.

Until recently, however, mix tapes weren’t much of a factor here. While the Demolition Men are quick to pay homage to their local predecessors — like Mad Idiot, DJ Natural, and DJ Supreme — Natural acknowledges the mix tape scene was a bit dead before the Demolition Men began shaking it up.

"Out here DJs were concentrating on clubs," Natural says. "Then they started putting stuff out constantly." Now there’s sufficient trade in mix tapes for Natural to move his formerly virtual business, Urban Era, to brick-and-mortar digs at 5088 Mission, making it the Bay’s only all–mix tape music store. Yet even with increased competition, he notes, the Demolition Men still routinely sell out.

In addition to their up-tempo release schedule, the success of the Demolition Men’s mixes might be attributed to the conceptual coherence they bring to their projects. While they do put together general mixes featuring more mainstream fare — such as the Out the Trunk series, which boasts exclusives from Ludacris — the duo’s hottest projects tend to tap into the Bay’s reservoir of talent. Aside from their multifaceted Best of the Bay series, the Demolition Men have released mix tapes hosted by Bay Area artists like Balance, Cellski, El Dorado Red, and the Team.

Currently the Demolition Men’s most successful disc has been their most ambitious: Animal Planet, not so much a mix tape as music cinema, starring the Mob Figaz’ Husalah and Jacka. A mighty 34 tracks — featuring production by Rob Lo, Traxamillion, and the Mekanix, and appearances by F.A.B., Keak, and Pretty Black — Animal Planet is an incredible collection of almost entirely exclusive, original material, seriously blurring the boundary between mix tape and album. Its success has encouraged bold undertakings, like The Early Morning Shift with J-Stalin and Block Tested, Hood Approved, a mix tape/DVD starring Fillmore rapper Big Rich. "I guess we’re taking the mix tape to the next level," Devro says. (Caples)

Demolition Men DJ

Thurs/27 and the last Thursday of every month, 9 p.m. doors

Vault

81 W. Santa Clara, San Jose

$10

(408) 298-1112

myspace.com/demolitionmenmusic

Come in from the cold

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These days, folks make records faster than nervous singer-songwriters forget the words to their own tunes.

Jenny Lewis forged the delectable, bite-size Rabbit Fur Coat in the time between hairdos — I mean, between Rilo Kiley’s increasing obligations — finishing lyrics on the plane. Will Oldham churns out projects faster than I can spot them. And that’s all well and good. These people have their voices and they’re sticking with them. But, luckily, San Francisco’s Michael Talbott and the Wolfkings took their sweet time constructing Freeze–Die–Come to Life (Antenna Farm), a panoramic realization of earthy songs that have been floating around in the gentle, gifted Talbott’s head for years.

The resulting depth is fantastic. Underneath sonic icebergs freezing and melting and taking form again, there are oceans upon oceans, dark worlds within illuminate worlds. The many life-forms on this record swirl around us like the icy but essential winds in the opener, "Winter Streets."

"I’d been kicking these songs around for a while," Talbott says, speaking in a Mission District café on a break from his work in film restoration. The record would probably not have manifested but for the encouragement of Court and Spark’s M.C. Taylor and Scott Hirsch, good friends of Talbott’s. They’d heard his tunes over the years and believed in his vision. "They offered to be my backing band, and we started playing. Then they offered to make a record for me," he says with gratitude.

Taylor and Hirsch are the producers and a definitive part of the extensive backup band. "We didn’t have any financial constraints. I had as much time as they were willing to put in," Talbott acknowledges. They tweaked different parts over time, recording much of the album at Alabama Street Station, in San Francisco, throughout a one-year period. Oakland’s Antenna Farm Records is becoming a major indie folk club for the young and clear. It makes an excellent, publike home for this project.

There is certainly a lack of constraint here, recalling the egoless, mystic lake and hilltop murder ballads passed from singer to singer in the British folk tradition. None of the stories feel forced. Like many old tales, Freeze–Die–Come to Life flirts with darkness, caresses it, and then looks it considerately in the face. The record is modern in its focus on the fate of our hearts in often chilling, contemporary urban life, but ancient and, dare I say, traditional in its spaciousness. Keep it on for a day or two, and you’re bound to think you just saw wispy wolves scurrying around the edges of Dolores Park.

The wolfking was a mythical creature said to roam the hills of Southern California, transforming painful realities into glowing amber stones, which it then spit onto the hillside. Hard work, but easy and effective when these particular Wolfkings pace it so well. In the making of the album, one song, "The Passenger," naturally split into two, which, Talbott says, act as interludes. In "Passenger II," which comes first and is enlivened by unexpected chordal resolutions, Talbott sounds like a more grounded Leonard Cohen: "I will watch you start a revolution / But I will not take a side … I am the passenger / Leaving something behind." Tender harmonies abound throughout the disc, whether painting a picture of angelic abduction, on "Angel of Light," or brewing a potent cup of twilight tea, on "Goodnight." I shudder with delight every time "Angel of Light" reaches the trembling vocal climax: "Will you regret / Each pirouette / That you’ve turned?"

"The record is hushed and acoustic," Talbott confesses when I ask about the upcoming record-release show. "It’s good to listen to by yourself. But that doesn’t always translate when you play bars." Gathering from the talented local flock that plays on the album, Talbott formed an electric six-piece. The live shows are "louder and more aggressive," he declares, adding that no one in the audience will "get bored." And neither will the musicians, the tricksters, or the wolf-eyed shape-shifters, because each song has been specially reworked to thrive in the live environment.

In a nation where every viewpoint is clearly marked and where Mark Twain’s early take on the budding tourist industry, Innocents Abroad, is quickly losing its humor because we’re all like that these days, it’s refreshing to see Talbott and his brethren inhabiting the musical landscape so fully, not content to be tourists. It’s like, well, freezing, dying, and, while doing nothing but listening, coming to life. SFBG

Michael Talbott and the Wolfkings CD release party

With Last of the Blacksmiths, Citay, Broker/Dealer, Jeffrodisiac,
and artwork by Isota Records’ Nathaniel Russell

Thurs/27, 8 p.m.

Mighty

119 Utah, SF

$5

(415) 626-7001

The burger hopper

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The hamburger has a certain Zelig quality in America: It turns up all over the place, in guises high and low, at fancy metropolitan restaurants and greasy truck stops on the outskirts of every Podunk and Palookaville from coast to coast. Some, like the famous Zuni burger, are made from carefully ground high-end beef; many others — many, many others — are made from meat whose provenance we probably don’t care to think about.

The hamburger, then, is democratic in the best American sense. It looks as good in coat and tails as it does in a pair of sweatpants. It uncomplainingly accepts the companionship of cheese, yes, all kinds of cheese, but also of bacon, avocado, mushrooms, and grilled onions — not to mention lettuce, tomato, onion, and pickles. It can be made in a flash — cooked in a pan, under a broiler, on a griddle, over hot coals — and eaten with ease, being a variant of that incomparable finger food, the sandwich. It is suitable for practically any occasion; it is our national food. Presidents and paupers alike eat hamburgers.

Yet as democracy in America wanes, one cannot help wondering about the fate of the burger. Of course, San Francisco is not the ideal location for these kinds of ruminations, for this has never been much of a hamburger town. The city’s culinary roots are, instead, Franco-Italian, Chinese, Mexican, and maritime — none of them huge on ground-beef patties — and in later years we have witnessed a bloom of vegetarian regimes in which the trusty burger is anathema or worse. Add to all this a raft of concerns about mad cow disease and E. coli contamination, LDL and the ethical treatment of animals, and you have a recipe for … linguine with broccoli, or something.

Yet the burger is a hardy little fellow, and places that honor its tenacity persist and even, modestly, proliferate. One new such spot is Toad’s, which opened toward the end of January in the old Café Arguello space at Valencia and 26th Streets. You would not think, walking into Toad’s, that here is a restaurant dealing mainly in hamburgers and hot dogs, nor for that matter that you were entering a restaurant named Toad’s; the cream-and-dark-wood look is one of understated elegance and makes the tall, straight, boxy space look like a small Town Hall. The flat-panel television mounted above the bar toward the rear and tuned to ESPN does give a slight sports-bar air and does, perhaps, whet the appetite for such all-Americana as buffalo wings, potatoes, nachos, and curly fries, all of which the menu offers.

Not too many years ago, curly fries were a Jack in the Box exclusive, but now you can get them at one-off places like Toad’s, and they’re every bit as good — crisp and slightly spicy coils — as the fast-food version. You can get a full order of them, complete with buttermilk ranch dressing, for $3.95, but a better option might be to upgrade the fries included in the cost of your burger. This slight surcharge bumps the price of the well-seasoned and juicy avocado cheeseburger, say (with a half avocado’s worth of buttery, ripe slices and choice of cheese), from $8.95 to $9.95 and provides more than enough curly fries, unless you are really fixated.

In keeping with the restaurant’s handsome look, the Joe Six-Pack menu is full of sly upscaleness. The beef burgers are made from Black Angus, and there are several meatless choices available (including the amazingly lifelike Boca burger), along with homemade chili and soup of the day ($4.95 a bowl), which, even when it sounds drab — zucchini and mushrooms, maybe, classic bottom-of-the-bin, end-of-the-week stuff — is likely to be spiffed up with some cumin and chili pepper. You can get Stella Artois and Big Daddy IPA on tap. The one thing Toad’s doesn’t have is the alfresco option. For that you’ll have to traipse over to Barney’s Gourmet Burgers in Noe Valley.

Like Toad’s, Barney’s is a burger joint with a fair amount of discreet spit and polish. The space used to belong to a bistro, and the beer garden–worthy garden out front, set with umbrella-shaded tables and potted plants, was an important draw for diners who might otherwise be tempted to step into Little Italy (now Lupa) across the street. When Barney’s took over, there was quiet mourning in some quarters at fate’s lack of imagination, but the place has had a long run and — to judge from the crowds in the garden day and night — a successful one.

As it happens, Barney’s, too, offers curly fries, and they are as good as Toad’s (and Jack’s), right down to the ranch dressing. Although I made the mistake of ordering the curlies separately, I thought I was exercising moderation by getting only a half basket of them ($3.50) and was dismayed to find, when I weighed myself the morning after, that I’d gained five pounds. Moral of story: no morning-after weigh-ins, and curly fries should probably be eaten with tweezers, or handled with some of the same ceremony and officiousness that Seinfeld‘s übertoff Mr. Pitt brought to the enjoyment of his Snickers bars. (Knife! Fork! White linen napkin!)

The burgers, they are fine and conform nicely to the local standard. (Assuming you know what I mean, I shall say no more.) Lighter eaters and beefphobes will be relieved to learn that Barney’s offers turkey burgers outfitted in various ways — dusted with Cajun spices ($6.95), maybe, then blackened like Gulf red snapper. Such a burger might not play in Palookaville, but here in the big city, it’s the people’s choice, or one of them. SFBG

Toad’s

Dinner: nightly, 5:30–9:30 p.m.

Lunch: Sun., noon–3 p.m.

1499 Valencia, SF

(415) 648-TOAD

Beer and wine

MC/V

Potentially noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Barney’s Gourmet Hamburgers

Mon.–Thurs., 11 a.m.–9:30 p.m.

Fri.–Sat., 11 a.m.–10 p.m.

Sun., 11 a.m.–9 p.m.

4138 24th St., SF

(415) 282-7770

Beer and wine

MC/V

Pleasant noise level

Wheelchair accessible

SUPERLIST NO. 813: Bling it on

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Grills, plates, slugs, pullouts — whatever you want to call them — the gold tooth phenomenon, once a staple of hip-hop culture, has now become fashionable among indie rockers, parents, and high schoolers of all ages and races. Though the American Dental Association has strongly advised against bringing the bling to your gum line, as long as Oscar-winning rappers are dropping $30K on their choppers, the golden craze will surely blaze on. Caps are removable, can be made of yellow or white gold, silver, or putf8um, and usually come in two settings: solid, which covers the entire tooth, or open-faced, which has a square cutout to expose the normal tooth. Most grill shops specialize in custom designs and will cater to whatever your fancy might be — whether it’s grilling your teeth into white gold vampire fangs with diamond tips or etching your dog’s name into your caps with emeralds, rubies, or sapphires. Though we can’t vouch for the quality of a gold tooth, and prices may vary depending on the griller at each of these jewelry stores, we can certainly point you in the right direction for getting your pearly whites to shine through all that Bay Area fog.

Bling Master Jewelry (3746 San Pablo Dam Rd., El Sobrante. 510-669-0457, www.blinggoldteeth.com) has just the thing for your bling. On the Web site you can check out various designs of four-cap and six-cap grills in 14-karat yellow or white gold with diamond-cut settings. Service prices range from $80 for two 14k caps to $900 for six 22k caps.

For more than seven years, EJ Jewelry (2605 International, Oakl. 510-434-0700) has set polished grills into the smiles of folks all over the Bay Area. The glass cases within this bustling shop display a selection of open-faced and diamond fronts. One yellow gold tooth will cost you $20; a white gold tooth goes for $25.

Located on a gritty SoMa corner, Gold Teeth (986 Mission, SF. 415-357-9790) offers a twinkling assortment of gold caps and bars, adding luster to the dingy posters plastering its walls. Inside, you can get your grills cast in putf8um or 14k, 16k, or 18k gold and get your favorite stone inlay for $40 and up.

Gold Tooth Master (10623 International, Oakl. 510-636-4008), in East Oakland, has posters of rappers flashing their glistening fronts covering the peach-colored walls. Two display cases flaunt an impressive collection of fangs etched with various letters and designs. A 14k gold cap starts at $20, and dental gold costs $50.

A giant set of golden incisors grafed to the storefront of JC Jewelry (1940 Broadway, Oakl. 510-763-5556) welcomes visitors as they set foot in this boutique, located just off the 19th Street BART station in the heart of downtown Oakland. Here you can buy or trade gold teeth and even get repairs done for $25. Your options for grills include a solid or open-faced cut with diamond initials or gemstones ranging from rubies to sapphires.

Koko Gold Teeth (4838 International, Oakl. 510-533-2345, www.kokogoldteeth.com) gives you the most bling for your buck. Choose from an astounding array of beautiful designs and features. If the heart-shaped caps with rubies don’t have you salivating, then the jagged 3-D bars with diamonds will have you forking over your rent money in no time.

The original Mr. Bling Bling (1836 Geary, SF. 415-928-5789, www.mrblinggoldteeth.com), which is also the sister shop of Koko Gold Teeth, is crammed into a row of shops across the street from the Fillmore. Like Koko, this pocket-size store offers customers gold and silver fronts in a variety of diamond-fanged cuts and designs. Get there early because business tends to boom once the local high school lets out for the day.

Mr. Bling Bling Jewelry (13501 San Pablo, San Pablo. 510-215-0727) specializes in making repairs to damaged caps in need of a "bling-tastic" makeover. The store will also brighten your choppers with a tooth cast in yellow or white gold for $25.

Grilling at Nomad Body Piercing (1745 Market, SF. 415-563-7771) has gotten off to a slow start, due in part to its employees still trying to perfect the gold cap craft, but you can have your mouth cut in yellow or white gold for $25. Or you can just get your tongue pierced.

Tom’s Jewelry (693 E. 14th St., San Leandro. 510-430-8087) is a hop and a skip from the San Leandro BART station. Here you can get your plates filled with 14k and 18k gold, dental gold, and putf8um, as well as with different cuts and engravings with shimmering diamonds and colored gems. *

Heart of glass

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One way to temper the shock of the new is to leaven it with bits of the old. The Europeans are expert at this, though they are more likely to do it the other way around: fluffing the old with bits of the new. On a long-ago visit to Oxford, England, in the first gray days of 1989, I was startled to find a Benetton, slick with plate glass and multicolored neon, installed along the high street in a sooty medieval building. We did not go in — for what would be the point? — but continued on to Christ Church College after a brief pause for fish and chips in a hotel pub.

If Bushi-tei is the most beautiful restaurant to open in San Francisco for a long while — if it is, in fact, arrestingly beautiful — it is because its designers understood that the present and the past are having a long conversation about the future. Bushi-tei (the name is said to mean "samurai with a big heart") is ultramodern and at the same time rustic; it is plate glass, frosted glass, a table for 16 topped with glass, and it is aged lumber salvaged from a mid-19th-century building in Nagano, Japan, and strategically placed around the dining room so that one moment you think you are south of Market, the next in the dining hall of a medieval monastery, and the moment after that in a ski lodge, with winter whistling beyond the log-cabin walls.

The main floor of the dining room is dominated by the huge glass-top table, laid with a long row of flickering votive candles as if it were part of the set for a Brother Cadfael mystery on PBS, or in the sanctuary of some Anglican church at Advent. Was the restaurant expecting some huge party? I asked our server. I was full of apprehension, for huge parties tend to grow festive and then raucous, which can have a swamping effect on parties of two.

She shook her head. No, no big party, she said. I asked what the big table was for, then, and she explained it was sometimes used to accommodate lone, stray diners, as was done at inns in the days of Chaucer. Town Hall, in SoMa, has used a similar communal table to great effect while at the same time smoothly accommodating walk-ins and other slipshod planners.

Town Hall does not have food like Bushi-tei’s, however. The executive chef, Seiji "Waka" Wakabayashi (one of his recent gigs: Ondine, in Sausalito), is fluent in the high culinary idiom of France as well as the varying dialects of the Orient, and the result is an extraordinary and stylish melding of East and West, presented on gorgeous white ceramic tableware (from Tak and Wak) that perfects the interior design.

As at the fancier sorts of French places, the sequence of courses is punctuated by little grace notes that don’t appear on the menu, starting with an amuse-bouche of, say, tuna paté in a little pastry buttercup and scattered with minced chives, and ending with petits fours, about which more anon. In between are dishes of greater substance in which disparate elements are often artfully mingled, as in a carpaccio of golden beets ($12), sliced into thin coins and overlaid with bolts of fluke (a remarkably tasty white-fleshed fish), some mizuna for shrubbery, and red dots of raspberry-ume sauce. (Ume is a Japanese plum variety noted for its tartness.)

When the food is not a mingling of East and West, it tends to be Western. A quiver of grilled asparagus spears ($6), for instance, is simply dressed Mediterranean style with some verjuice and sea salt and topped with shavings of parmesan cheese, while pan-seared Sonoma duck breast ($22), finely carved into carpaccio-like slices, each with a heart of rose, is accompanied by braised spinach, a crème-fraîchey whip of mascarpone and mustard, and dried chutney.

Not all the fusing, meantime, is flawless. It should be back to the drawing board for the seared blue-fin tuna belly ($28), a slim filet of doubtless pricey fish — in sushi bars, tuna belly is prized for its fattiness and commands a high price — that does not respond well to heat. Fish fat might be highly desirable when uncooked, but when cooked, it develops a strong, acrid scent and flavor I found dislikable despite the camouflage of celery-root puree, bean sprouts, and lime-herb sea salt. Since it takes all kinds to make a world, it did not entirely surprise me that my companion liked the tuna belly as much as I deplored it; he is, after all, a tireless eater of crackly, crinkly, aromatic bronze skin, whether of chicken or salmon. There was something deeply atavistic going on here, some ghost conjured from the hunter-gatherer past whose presence I could sense but not see, something about smoky, fatty flesh. I traded for the remains of the duck, gamy but still civilized.

The petits fours — an intense chocolate tart the size of a half-dollar and an orange financier of about the same size, glazed with Cointreau or some other orange liqueur — make a nice postprandial nibble. Sweet tooths of a harder core will want something more substantial, though, and among the more interesting of the larger choices is a black-sesame blancmange ($6.50), essentially a kind of pudding served in a nifty little capped pot and topped with pineapple dice: sweet but not too sweet, and interesting, though not shocking. *

BUSHI-TEI

Tues.–Sun., 5:30–10:30 p.m. (Fri. until 11:30 p.m.)

1638 Post, SF

(415) 440-4959

www.bushi-tei.com

Beer, wine, sake

AE/MC/V

Not noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Behind and beyond bars

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Perhaps the best book written about a wrongly convicted man is Jack Olsen’s Last Man Standing, a chronicle of the 27 years Geronimo Ji-Jaga Pratt spent caged in a California prison thanks to crooked FBI agents and Los Angeles cops. The narrative starts with Pratt’s childhood in Louisiana, tracks his involvement in the Black Panther party and the decades he spent dwelling in the American gulag, and concludes with his triumphant release from prison thanks to the tireless lawyering of Stuart Hanlon and the late Johnnie Cochran. It’s a fucking amazing read – meticulously researched yet hyper-engrossing, torturous and ultimately uplifting.

But I’ve always had the nagging sensation that Olsen terminated his book at the perfect moment: before the homecoming euphoria wore off and the challenges and mundanity of day-to-day life set in. Can a person truly get on with his or her life when the authorities have stolen the vast bulk of it?

It’s the sort of question the makers of the documentary After Innocence put to eight men who were wrongfully sent to prison. The answers are, as a whole, tear-inducing – most of the men are grappling only semi-successfully with a callous world that’s done little to make them whole. Prison, as one man says, "breaks down your soul. It breaks down everything about you. It takes your manhood. It takes your pride. It takes your decency."

They find themselves struggling with the basics. They have trouble building lasting relationships with lovers. They have trouble finding jobs – how do you explain a 10- or 20-year blank spot on your résumé?

And at times they have trouble simply experiencing emotions. In what you’d expect to be an emotional highpoint, the film documents the release of Wilton Dedge, who is freed from a Florida prison after wrongly serving 22 years for sexual battery and burglary. But on his big day, Dedge looks uneasy and half-zombiefied, as if his decades in the joint have simply siphoned the life from him. It’s perhaps the most telling scene in a film filled with potent vignettes.

While tremendously powerful, After Innocence isn’t flawless. At times the movie is a little talking head-ish, telling viewers what they should think rather than letting them witness the stumblings and successes of the exonerated men. Overall, though, it’s a remarkable work – and one that deserves the widest audience possible. (A.C. Thompson)

AFTER INNOCENCE  Opens Fri/20  Lumiere Theatre  (415) 267-4893  Act 1 & 2  (510) 464-5980  Showtimes at www.sfbg.com  www.landmarktheatres.com  www.afterinnocence.com

Cruisin’ for a bruisin’

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EVER SINCE THAT fateful day on the family farm when our stud calf Beauregard threw me from his back and rammed me several times against a large oak, giving me one heck of a concussion, I knew I was destined to become a leather queen. I was only 11 at the time, and the options were few for actual experience, but dammit — if I couldn’t have the sex, then at least I’d have the outfits. “And what are you?” my innocent neighbors would ask when they opened their doors at Halloween. “I’m Freddie Mercury!” I’d reply with a wiggle of my little homemade chaps (Hefty bags and duct tape) for emphasis. And then they’d give me candy.

Nowadays everyone’s got to have at least one kinky fetish on their sexual resume — thanks, Madonna — yet often the men, women, and “other” of that twisted tribe known as the Leather Community still get a bad rap, especially among young gay club patrons. Part of this is fear, of course: Doesn’t all that pain hurt a little? And part of it is shame: The leather generation that came of age in the ’70s and ’80s has had to shoulder not just the burdens of age and rejection, but also a ridiculous cross between jealousy for living through the hedonistic homo heyday and blame for AIDS. And then, of course, there’s the primal terror of turning into one of those old men with cottage-cheese buttocks and a basketball belly who strut around the Eagle wearing nothing but rainbow flip-flops and a leash.

Oh sure, we’ll let them take us home and spank us on weeknights, but when we see them at the disco, we just shudder and throw shade.

In response, it seems, the leather queens closed ranks. No longer feeling welcome, they became a kind of secret society in the ’90s. Once-omnipresent social institutions like the Imperial Court of San Francisco and the Rainbow Motorcycle Club went underground ��� and, sadly, saw their profiles dwindle. Tight-knit contingents like Mama’s Family and the Men of Discipline sprang up, with their unique rituals and dress codes, shunning the clubs in favor of charity Golden Gate potlucks, cabaret fundraisers, and converted-garage play parties promoting safe-sex awareness. (Leatherfolk are all about the benefits, these days.) The sash circuit moved to the suburbs. Half the community morphed into bears. Even the dawn of the Internet connection only increased the generation gap.

But as the first Arab American leather hip-hop disco clubkid muppet queer San Francisco Drummer Boy 2001 (runner-up), I feel it’s my deep responsibility and honorable duty to reprazent my peeps in the hide. If there’s one thing my leather dad (love you, Ray) taught me, it’s respect, and if there’s another, it’s how to keep from passing out after hanging upside-down for 40 minutes. It’s time for all this nonsense to stop. This year may have seen three more local leather haunts — Loading Dock, My Place, and Club Rendez-Vous — close to become upscale, straight-type martini lounges; the baths are still outlawed; and creepy tweekers have invaded the sex clubs; but the leather lifestyle is still brilliant and vital, bouncing back up through the queer underground and swelling its ranks with curious alternaqueers and radical faeries, who fetishize being open-minded.

Today, the only places the whole queer community can come together regularly are our precious few leather bars. Daddy’s, Aunt Charlie’s, Marlena’s, and The Eagle have all undergone recent renaissances, fueled by a combo of renegade young promoters, indulgent owners, and a healthy new lust for the underground. Where else can beef and chicken meet? Not to mention old punks, baby dykes, hustlers, drag queens, bull daggers, grandpas, gymbots, ex-clones, Aberzombies, club kids, A-gays, bikers, circuit boiz, transgendered hotties, Log Cabin Republicans, and the odd closeted TV anchorman. It seems the more the mainstream media bleaches out our filthy abominations, the more we return to our fruitful past, when lust was the glue that held us together, and abomination was a kind of gang handshake. We may be more diverse than ever, but leather’s still our common ground.

Daddy’s. Daily, 9 a.m.-2 a.m., 440 Castro, SF. (415) 621-8732, www.daddysbar.com.

Marlena’s. Mon.-Fri., 3 p.m.-2 a.m.; Sat.-Sun., noon-2 a.m., 488 Hayes, SF. (415) 864-6672.

Aunt Charlie’s. Mon.-Fri., noon-2 a.m.; Sat.-Sun., 10 a.m.-2 a.m., 133 Turk, SF. (415) 441-2922, www.auntcharlieslounge.com.

The Eagle Tavern. Daily, noon-2 a.m., 398 12th St., SF. (415) 626-0880, www.sfeagle.com.

E-mail Marke B. at superego@sfbg.com.

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