Lit

Behind the Bey empire

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Editor’s Note: The Chauncey Bailey Project, a collaboration of local media outlets including the Guardian, is investigating the circumstances surrounding the Aug. 2 murder of Bailey, an Oakland journalist who was reporting on the financial dealings of the Bey family’s Your Black Muslim Bakery at the time he was killed. For more information, including audio, video, and updates on the case, click here.

Since 2003, Esperanza Johnson, a former key figure within Oakland’s Bey organization, and her husband, Antron Thurman, have acquired nearly $2 million worth of East Bay real estate through a string of controversial deals tainted with allegations of deceit.

In five cases those deals led to litigation. Johnson, of Antioch, who also goes by the name Noor Jehan Bey, has twice been accused of fraud. Court records indicate that one of those transactions involved falsified documents.

One sale involving Johnson, a licensed real estate broker, led to criminal charges: Alameda County prosecutors in 2006 convicted a Johnson associate on fraud charges stemming from a deal that cost an East Oakland couple their home.

A broad array of characters have tangled with Johnson and Thurman in court, including a disabled Berkeley bus porter forced from his family home, an Antioch couple now facing foreclosure, and East Bay Habitat for Humanity, a nonprofit organization that builds homes for the poor and struggling. Combined, they claim to have lost at least $1.77 million in property, cash and equity in the deals.

The revelations about Johnson and Thurman come as authorities scrutinize the extensive real estate dealings of the Bey family and their bankrupt business, Your Black Muslim Bakery, including Johnson’s role as the broker for an Oakland woman named Paulette Arbuckle who is attempting to buy the bakery’s San Pablo Avenue headquarters. Johnson bore four of the Bey family patriarch’s dozens of children.

Bakery CEO Yusuf Ali Bey IV, 21, jailed without bail on kidnapping and torture charges, also is charged with real estate fraud: prosecutors say he bought an Oakland property under a false identity.

And bankruptcy trustee Tevis Thompson, who is overseeing the liquidation of Your Black Muslim Bakery’s assets, has claimed in court papers that Bey IV transferred $2.28 million in bakery properties to his mother, Daulet Bey, in a bid to “defraud creditors.” The trustee has sued for those properties’ return.

Devaughndre Broussard, a 20-year-old bakery associate, is charged with the Aug. 2 shotgun slaying of Oakland Post Editor Chauncey Bailey as he walked to work in downtown Oakland. Police say Broussard made a confession – later recanted – that he killed Bailey because the journalist was working on a story about the bakery’s finances and bankruptcy case.

Johnson, whose state business registration was suspended more than a year ago for failure to pay taxes and who with Thurman has more than $1 million in state and federal tax liens recorded against them, didn’t return numerous telephone calls and emails, and didn’t answer the gate at her Antioch home on two recent occasions.

Thurman refused to speak to reporters who approached him recently in Oakland.

A Los Angeles real estate consultant who reviewed Johnson’s transactions for the Chauncey Bailey Project said the trustee and judge handling the bakery’s bankruptcy should examine Johnson’s record.

They “should be made aware that a realtor on a transaction which requires the trustee’s approval has a murky… background,” said Eric Forster.

The attorney for the court appointed bankruptcy trustee charged with liquidating the bakery said Johnson’s transaction history would be probed.

“Obviously it is of some concern to us and we’re looking into it,” Eric Nyberg, attorney for trustee Tevis Thompson, said when informed of the cases.

He also noted that Arbuckle may not, in the end, be the highest bidder for the bakery. A hearing on her offer is scheduled for Nov. 29. If the $899,999 bid of Johnson’s client, Arbuckle, is successful and Johnson is “entitled to receive the commission, then we really don’t have an issue with it,” Nyberg said.

A spokesperson for the state Department of Real Estate, Tom Pool, wouldn’t discuss the Johnson and Thurman transactions.

Machado

Markus Machado and Gail Mateo said that when they wanted to buy a newer and bigger home in 2005, they went to a real estate broker they thought they could trust: Esperanza Johnson.

A Compton native, Johnson became involved with the Bey organization, a spin-off of the Nation of Islam, at the age of 12, taking the name Noor Jehan Bey.

She’s returned to using the name Esperanza Johnson, though she’s been listed in judgments against her by banks and credit-card companies as Nellie Bey, Nuri Bey, Noojean Bey and Noor Jehan Esperanza, a review of records by the Chauncey Bailey Project shows. And, in 2005 testimony, she said she still occasionally uses the name Noor Jehan Bey.

Johnson had hired Machado, a graphic artist, to create flyers for her Signature One Mortgage and Real Estate.

In a recent interview at his lawyer’s office, Machado described her as warm and gregarious – at first, anyway. Machado said Johnson arranged what seemed like an incredible deal: the couple could sell their 50-year-old Pittsburg house and move into a spacious four-bedroom home in a verdant Antioch subdivision, an ideal place to raise their three children and grow old together.

Johnson promised they’d pay about $1,600 a month for the new home, only a little more than their mortgage at the time. Machado said Johnson even agreed to forgo her usual commissions “because we were like family.”

They said Johnson had told them their credit was poor, and talked them into selling their Pittsburg house to one of her employees, Araceli Moreno, for $350,000 while putting the new home and mortgage in Moreno’s name as well. They expected to refinance the loan in about a year, when Moreno would sign the house over to them.

It seemed perfect – until the bills arrived.

The payments were $2,700 a month and soon ballooned higher, they now say in court records. And then Johnson – who in sealing the deal had diverted almost $58,000 of equity from their old home to others, and had won large commissions for herself by getting them an unfavorable mortgage – stopped taking their calls, Machado said as his wife sat next to him weeping.

The couple had trouble making the payments almost immediately and Moreno began receiving calls from the mortgage company. She sued Machado and Mateo last year.

“The point of (Moreno’s) lawsuit was to get them to refinance to get my client’s name off the loan and for her to go ahead and salvage what of her credit picture she could,” said Moreno’s attorney, Richard G. Hyppa of Tracy.

The couple counter-sued in November 2006, naming Moreno and Johnson as defendants, claiming that Johnson defrauded them. They are now months behind on the payments and stressed to exhaustion.

“I don’t sleep. Gail doesn’t sleep,” Machado said. “I was very naive. We were led down this primrose path because I trusted (Johnson) implicitly.”

After paying off what they owed on the Pittsburg house, about $190,000 was left over that should have been used for the down payment on the Antioch house. But the suit alleges that Moreno used only $77,973 toward the down payment.

Meanwhile, court records say Johnson arranged for another $10,000 to be paid out to Moreno, and for someone named Harry Hawkins to get $45,830 as “repayment of loans.” Machado’s lawyer, Ken Koenen, said attempts to locate Hawkins have been fruitless.

The suit also claims Johnson structured the Antioch mortgage so monthly payments would increase dramatically after a year, and so Machado and Mateo would have to pay an $18,000 penalty in order to refinance – thereby earning her a much larger commission.

Machado and Mateo now are several months in arrears on the mortgage in Moreno’s name. Default notices have arrived at the house.

“It’s an extremely painful thing,” Machado said. “We have been robbed of our peace of mind. We have to make decisions about whether to put food in the refrigerator or gas in the car. We’ve not even sure we’re going to have a place to live.”

Johnson hasn’t responded to the couple’s lawsuit and will likely be subject to a default judgment, Koenen said.

Chicago D&P
Johnson and Thurman in 2004 acquired a Hercules home after a federal judge had ordered it frozen as an asset of an investment company, Chicago D&P, that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission had accused of fraud.
The property was supposed to be sold to help pay back investors – reportedly including at least 30 active-duty Marines and several churches – which had been cheated out of millions through Chicago D&P’s pyramid schemes.
The daughter of the company’s president had bought the property years earlier using a straw purchaser – a friend with better credit – as a front, according to court records.
That friend had been trying to get her name off the title for some time, and the daughter’s attorney – Githaiga Ramsey, who also worked for Thurman and Johnson on another case – persuaded her to sign the house over to them. Records shows Ramsey offered the friend $20,500 to complete the transaction but that the payment was never made.
The transfer of the house occurred after U.S. District Court Judge Charles Breyer ordered the property frozen. Thurman then turned around and sold it a month later to one of the employees of his bail bond business, Jamie Bonilla, for $460,000. Johnson filed Bonilla’s loan application.
Most of that money appears to have eventually gone to pay mortgages against the property when Thurman and Johnson acquired it for free. But first, Thurman received $60,213 from the deal’s escrow; and Ramsey got $31,000.
It remains unclear who lived in the house after Bonilla bought it.
Stephen Anderson, the receiver representing Chicago D&P’s bilked investors, wrote in April 2005 that he believed Johnson’s daughter, Nisa Bey, had lived there.
Other documents show Madeeah Bey – another mother to several of patriarch Yusuf Bey’s children – used it as her mailing address in two December 2004 real estate deals.
It’s also unclear whether Thurman and Johnson knew of the court order freezing the house when they took possession of it. But in February 2005 Breyer held Ramsey in contempt of court for defying his order.
Ramsey and Thurman both repaid the money they received from the escrow when Thurman sold the house to Bonilla.
Bonilla, within a few months, then sold the house for $625,000 – a profit of $211,690 from a property that the receiver had originally wanted to sell to help repay the defrauded investors.
Anderson said a long legal battle to regain title to the house would’ve been too costly.
“We made an economic decision,” he said. “The objective of the receiver is to return as much money as possible back to the investors, and it was not difficult to determine we were going to get more money” by taking the $91,000 from Thurman and Ramsey than by “trying to unscramble that whole mess.”
Ramsey, who surrendered his law license while facing disciplinary charges from an unrelated case, wouldn’t discuss this case or others in which he was involved with Johnson and Thurman.
“My God, am I never going to get away from this?” he said. “I’m not involved and I don’t want to be. I’m not in contact with these people anymore.”
Bonilla could not be located.
Habitat for Humanity house
Antron Thurman married a woman named Sharon Clements in December 1987. Records show they separated seven months later and eventually filed for a divorce that was never made final.

In early 2000, Clements, as a single mother, moved into a home on 105th Avenue in Oakland built by the low-income housing nonprofit East Bay Habitat for Humanity. It gave Clements a no-interest $112,000 loan with no down payment.

Clements died in April 2003, leaving no will. Usually either there’s a clear legal inheritance, or else the nonprofit passes the deed to someone qualified for low-income aid, executive director Janice Jensen said. But Clements’ son was still a minor.

Clements’ home stood vacant for three years while her estate was sorted out in Alameda County Probate Court.

Then, in mid-2006, Thurman argued he was entitled to the low-income property as Clements’ surviving spouse, records show – even as he listed his address as Johnson’s Antioch home, and other records showed that in the previous few years he had bought and sold in excess of $1 million in East Bay real estate.

“Frankly, I didn’t even know about Mr. Thurman,” Habitat’s Jensen said. “I had no idea who he was or that he even existed until the attorneys got involved. When we looked at the deed, she was the only signature, so she bought that home herself.”

Still, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Marshall L. Whitley awarded Thurman the house, which had restrictions in place to preserve its affordability for low income people.

Thurman then sold it back to Habitat for Humanity for the $13,500 in equity that had accrued during the three years Clements owned it.

Alana Conner, an attorney for Thurman at the time, said she couldn’t independently recall details of the case and declined to discuss it.

Stewart

Mitzie Peters befriended Brandy Stewart in 2001, studying the Bible with her eventual victim, court records say.

Peters persuaded the cash-strapped AC Transit bus driver to deed the home at 1565 77th Ave. – which Stewart had inherited from her mother, and in which she, her husband and her three children lived – into Peters name and use Peters’ credit to get an equity loan. Peters promised to return the deed after a few days, keeping $12,000 from the loan as a fee.

“She said that because she loved me so much, she would never, ever think about doing this for anyone else, but she would help me to get the house refinanced,” Stewart would later testify.

Stewart deeded the house to Peters on March 11, 2003. But rather than sticking to the deal, Peters drained the property of all equity and gave nothing to Stewart, court records show.

Peters couldn’t have conducted the transaction without Johnson and her family.

As Peters’ broker, Johnson submitted a series of loan applications reporting Peters’ income as increasingly higher until the bank accepted the deal; she also allegedly coached Stewart in writing to the title company and falsely claiming Peters was her cousin.

Johnson’s sister, Ruquayya Jasmine Pennix, prepared Peters’ tax returns to send to the loan company, showing self-employment income that Peters later admitted was bogus; it’s unclear if Pennix knew that at the time.

Another of Johnson’s sisters – Fatima Ismail, who worked in Johnson’s office – drew up a phony lease showing Peters had derived rental income from Stewart’s house, according to court records.

Three months after she took title to Stewart’s house, Peters sold it to one of Johnson’s sons, Amir Bey. Under oath, Amir Bey later admitted he was just a straw buyer for his mother.

When arrested and charged with unrelated public benefits fraud, perjury and grand theft in July 2004, Peters made bail with Thurman’s Sinbad’s Bail Bonds.

As investigators also began probing her real estate activities, Peters gifted her Hayward condo to Johnson’s daughter, Nisa Bey, who sold it a month later for about $400,000.

Peters then lived with Nisa Bey in Pittsburg until going to prison. Because her bail had been secured with the condo, Thurman later asked a judge to exonerate the bail and return more than $50,000 – to Nisa Bey.

The Alameda County District Attorney’s office interviewed Johnson, Thurman, and their attorney, Githaiga Ramsey – who had represented Peters until just two months earlier, and who had just arranged the Chicago D&P deal for them – in September 2004.

“Johnson seemed evasive when questioned about irregularities in the loan and application process,” inspector Paul Wallace wrote in court papers.

But Johnson wasn’t charged.

“We didn’t think we could prove the case against her beyond a reasonable doubt,” Deputy District Attorney Alyce Sandbach said. “We didn’t have enough to make her on a case of fraud… of having made knowing misrepresentations.”

Among additional charges filed against Peters in November 2004 was a felony grand-theft count for equity and title to the Stewarts’ home; she pleaded no contest to that and 15 other, unrelated counts a year later, and was sentenced in February 2006.

The Stewarts got the $50,374.10 bail money Thurman had tried to direct to Nisa Bey. A judge in January ordered Peters to pay $486,083.90 in the Stewarts’ civil lawsuit, but they haven’t seen a dime, their lawyers say.

Amir Bey and Johnson tried to evict the Stewarts, court documents show, but backed off when the couple obtained free legal help.

The Stewarts then sued Johnson, Peters and Amir Bey; Johnson eventually offered to deed the house back to Stewart, but with the equity drained, the Stewarts couldn’t afford the higher mortgage payments.

A judge in September 2006 ordered Johnson and Amir Bey to pay the Stewarts $100,000 – $20,000 up front and $1,667 per month for 48 months.

Rebecca Saelao, the Stewarts’ attorney, said this civil judgment became a lien on the house, and was subordinated to massive mortgages Johnson and Amir Bey had taken on the property and eventually defaulted on. The house was sold at auction last year for $80,900, public records show.

The Stewarts got only about $5,000 from the sale of the home they’d lost. They no longer live in the Bay Area, and couldn’t be reached for comment.

Taylor

Wrapped in a thin, sea-green blanket, Donald Taylor lay in a narrow bed at a Stockton nursing home recently, his frail 61-year-old body ravaged by diabetes and hypertension. His wheelchair was parked at his bedside, a walker he wants to learn to use, a few feet away.

Taylor is broke and relies on Medi-Cal, the state insurance program for the indigent, to bankroll his care and board at the Elm Haven Care Center.

His room is dingy and, fluorescent-lit with peeling blue wallpaper and a television, foil wrapped around its rabbit-ear antennae, issuing forth static-filled sound. He spends his days “just doing nothing.”

He said he wonders what his life might be like now if he never encountered Antron Thurman. “I think about it quite often, but there’s nothing I can do… I think about how they took the house from me,” Taylor said haltingly in a soft, gravelly voice that contained little emotion.

In the 1950s Taylor’s parents bought a cozy two-bedroom home on a tree-shaded street in north Berkeley. He grew up there and lived there still as an adult, while working as a bus-station porter. When his parents died, he and his sister, Loretta Alexander, inherited the house; the mortgage was paid off.

In early 2001, according to interviews and court documents, stepbrother Frederick Myers Jr., approached the siblings with a plan: He would help them form a company to manage the house and another property they had inherited, an undeveloped Lake County parcel.

Myers asked them to transfer the two deeds to the new corporation, which he would helm for them. Taylor said he agreed at his sister’s urging, believing the three of them could profit from development of the Lake County parcel.

But Myers suddenly sold the Berkeley house to Thurman, pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars and disappeared, court documents say, catching Taylor and Alexander completely off guard.

“I felt I had been cheated,” Taylor said, adding that he believes Thurman and Myers worked in concert. “Fred Jr. took the house and sold it to (Thurman) and it’s been downhill ever since. He sold it out from underneath us.”

Myers could not be located. Thurman, asked if he remembered Taylor, refused to answer as he climbed into a Cadillac Escalade outside a home in the Oakland hills.

Alexander’s son, Tony Cole, expressed disgust at the way his mother and uncle were played. “That property slipped right out from underneath them,” he said in a phone interview. “They didn’t have the business sense to know what was going on.”

Taylor and Alexander in 2004 sued to reclaim the house. Myers never appeared in court, but Thurman – represented by Githaiga Ramsey – responded by filing his own suit, claiming he had legitimately bought the property for $374,388 and demanding that Taylor pay $1,500 in monthly rent or get out.

Taylor and Alexander eventually settled the case for $55,000; it took Thurman 10 months to pay them, court records indicate. Taylor’s attorney, Frederic Harvey, refused to discuss the case.

The two-story, beige stucco house with a large garage has steadily appreciated in value. Public records show Thurman sold it in 2004 to Madeeah Bey – the same relative who used the Chicago D&P house in Hercules as her address – for $520,000; she sold it for $850,000 less than a year later. The house is now assessed at $867,000.

Alexander died last year. Taylor lost most of his possessions including photos of his mother when he left the property.

“I’d like to tell him to go (screw) himself,” Taylor said of Thurman, his legs twitching quietly under the blanket.

University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism students Lisa Pickoff-White, Robert Lewis, Nick Kusnetz, Vianna Risa Davila, Marnette Federis and Lucie Schwartz contributed to this story.

Thomas Peele and Josh Richman are staff writers for the Bay Area News Group; A.C. Thompson is a free-lance reporter working for New America Media and Bay Area News Group-East Bay; Bob Butler is a freelance reporter and president of the Bay Area Black Journalists Association.

The art world

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REVIEW Somewhere along a Los Angeles freeway, a couple have a tense conversation about hamburgers. In Southwick, Mass., three women allow their hair to be braided together, and a Houston resident writes the eventful story of her life in a day. In a bedroom in Sydney, Australia, the dress a young woman wore the day she lost her virginity is laid out on the floor, along with the shoes that, she notes, stayed on for the duration. A sign goes up in a patch of parkland near Penn State detailing the markings and habits that distinguish the common raven from the American crow.

The pages of Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July’s Learning to Love You More are filled with such earnest explanations, recorded interactions, humble creative feats, and scraps from memory or fantasy or some complicated combination — all of them compiled from the thousands of audio, visual, and textual contributions to Fletcher and July’s Web site of the same name. Begun in 2002, the project was launched with the goal of offering concrete creative inspiration to any and all comers in the form of detailed assignments: to make an encouraging banner or an educational public plaque, to start a lecture series or compose the saddest song, to write down a recent argument or make a neighborhood field recording, to spend time with a dying person or heal oneself.

"Assignments" suggests a classroom exercise, and as the title implies, education in various guises is one aspect of the project; another is the goal of simply freeing participants to be artful. As Fletcher and July note in the introduction, "Sometimes it seems like the moment we let go of trying to be original, we actually feel something new — which was the whole point of being artists in the first place."

As word of the project has spread in unpredictable patterns via clusters of participants and viewers drawn in over time, LTLYM has put art-making inspiration, instruction, and encouragement in the hands of a sizable, indeterminate, dominolike scattering of humans across the globe. The result here is a succession of works that provoke the viewer to unpredictable reactions as the pages turn. A sound might begin somewhere between a snicker and a giggle, as when one flips to the back to see a re-created poster of Jack Nicholson baring his teeth in The Shining from the teenage years of Jack McCalla of Farmville, Va., but it’s likely to resolve into a capitulatory sigh over a press release written by Toronto resident Emily Holton that announces to selected media outlets her late-night gastric troubles and uncertainties about love’s power to last.

Some of the tasks result in the merely adorable or the gently nostalgic, like the high quotient of bright-eyed household pets found amid the dust bunnies during "Assignment 50: Take a flash photo under your bed," or the series of old book covers from "Assignment 45: Reread your favorite book from fifth grade," which turns up A Wrinkle in Time, Pet Sematary, and Amazing Secrets of the Psychic World and does offer the quiet pleasure of noting experiential connections with formerly young and faraway strangers. Similarly, the encouraging banners of Assignment 63 run the risk of slogans everywhere — but who knows what would happen if, on one of those demoralizing, head-in-gas-oven sort of days, one rounded a corner and came face-to-face with "You Have a Spine!" or "Death Is Not the End."

The past is a minefield and thus ripe for artistic endeavor, and here the weight of memory brings a charge to mundane objects like those clothes laid flat on the floor. So does the weight of regret, as in "Assignment 53: Give advice to yourself in the past," which provokes Wendy in North Carolina to tell her 15- and 16-year-old iterations, "Please eat. You are not ‘fat.’"

This and other conversations produce some of the most poignant and painful and pleasurable moments — such as Assignment 52’s "phone call you wish you could have," which produces two siblings catching up across the mortal coil barrier and a mutual coming-out and profession of love between friends, punctuated by phrases that progress from "Hey, wuddup fool?" to "Fine! I’m gay!" to "I love you too much to hate you." The insubstantial nature of the person on the other end of the line is affecting, whether they’re beyond the grave or simply unlikely to answer.

As was Fletcher and July’s hope, their project offers the humbling, heart-expanding experience of recognizing that the globe is dotted with original and inventive humans, busy thinking and suffering and wondering about love — and making work that turns the world into a more recognizable and yet more startling place when it’s seen. *

LEARNING TO LOVE YOU MORE

By Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July

Prestel Publishing

160 pages, $19.95 paper

www.learningtoloveyoumore.com

The big guns

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REVIEW Over the past 15 years, a steady stream of good, bad, and indifferent anthologies has promised to deliver the thrills of pulp fiction. But for all the retro cover art, melodramatic blurb copy, and Quentin Tarantino allusions, their contents have been shockingly deficient in what aficionados consider to be the real pulp fiction: stories that originally appeared in the luridly covered popular fiction magazines — printed on incredibly cheap pulp paper — that were the medium for popular and genre fiction during the period between the two world wars.

Even the staunchest purist, however, will be pleased with The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps. No false advertising here. The Big Book is big, roughly the size of the San Francisco yellow pages. And it offers up nothing but the purest in pulp mystery fiction. Save for one story by the iconic James M. Cain, every one of the 45-odd full-length novels, novelettes, and short stories here originally appeared in the pages of long-gone pulps such as Black Mask, Clues, Detective Story, Gun Molls, and Detective Fiction Weekly.

The Big Book is packed with appearances by what is arguably the pulps’ greatest contribution to posterity: the hard-boiled private eye. Excellent, seldom-reprinted stories by Raymond Chandler ("Red Wind," "Fingerman") and Dashiell Hammett ("The Creeping Siamese," "Faith") are joined by clipped-prose gems such as Paul Cain’s ultra-hard-boiled exercise in blackmail, "One, Two, Three," and Frederick Nebel’s tough tale of nightclub murder, "Wise Guy," along with a bevy of unsentimental gumshoe stories by unfortunately lesser-known writers, among them Roger Torrey, Stewart Sterling, and Leslie White.

The pulps weren’t all about tough-talking dicks, though. In a section titled "The Villains," the Big Book focuses on the "bad" guys who often weren’t that bad. In one typical story, Raoul Whitfield’s "About Kid Deth," a sympathetic racketeer beats a bum murder rap with a few of his less-savory fellows. And rounding out the volume is "The Dames," a selection of stories featuring strong female characters. While there were no women PIs in the pulps, there were plenty of broads like the chorine protagonist of Cornell Woolrich’s "Angel Face," who could out-wisecrack the sharpest-tongued gumshoe.

Of course, picture-perfect prose is in short supply. The bulk of the material in the Big Book was written by poor bastards trying to make a living pounding out stories at a penny a word. At that rate, experimentation was idiotic and rewriting a rare luxury. But these strictures guaranteed that the stories would be relentlessly paced and action packed. Someone’s getting knocked over the head, if not shot or stabbed, on every other page.

And even in these bullet-riddled sagas, there is no shortage of rough-hewn beauty. In Steve Fisher’s "You’ll Always Remember Me," the psychopathic protagonist concludes that "one person more or less isn’t so important in the world anyway, no matter how good a guy he is." In Frank Gruber’s "The Sad Serbian," a skip tracer notes, "The noise she makes when she hits the floor reminds me of the time I got drunk at a dance and fell into the bass drum." And the opening line of Woolrich’s "Angel Face"? "I had on my best hat and warpaint when I dug into her bell." Well, who can resist?

After a thousand pages of this, you’ll never want to go back to the fake stuff. The Black Lizard Big Book puts the pulp back into pulp fiction. *

THE BLACK LIZARD BIG BOOK OF PULPS

Edited by Otto Penzler

Vintage Books

1,168 pages

$25

Cemetery days

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REVIEW A smaller selection of the poems in A Wall of Two would have been easier to take. Presented here in more than 50 bone-shaking adaptations by poet Fanny Howe, the devastating early works by sisters Henia and Ilona Karmel, survivors of the German concentration camp Buchenwald, are so harrowing I could read only a few at a time. But a lighter load would have detracted from their representation of a horrific captivity and possibly kept us from looking at suffering as the Karmel sisters do: directly in its dirty, doomed face.

When they were sent from Kraków, Poland, to forced labor camps in 1943, Ilona was 17 years old, Henia 20. Amid brutal work shifts behind barbed wire in Germany and Poland, the determined women, bordering on starvation but inspired by an education rich in literature and verse, scribbled poems on stolen work sheets. They sewed them into the hems of their dresses, and Henia, believing that her death was imminent, managed to hand them off, during a forced march near the end of the war, to a cousin, who in turn got them to Henia’s husband, Leon Wolfe. By the time the sisters were reunited with Wolfe, they had suffered mutiutf8g injuries by German tanks and, oddly, had each had one leg amputated.

Smuggled away from such darkness, the poems in A Wall of Two are intimate, physical, sometimes clumsy observations of a dire reality. They home in on a sense of looming threat, evoking the state of captivity as relentlessly as Jacobo Timerman did in sections of Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, his 1981 masterpiece of human rights literature. In "A Child’s Vision of Peace," Ilona, who would later win acclaim for her 1986 novel An Estate of Memory (set in the concentration camps), envisions two boys cautiously standing face-to-face. They "grasp hands and hang on / As if they held a hammer and sickle," then suddenly lash out at each other: "Take that, and that." In "The Land of Germany," Henia is surrounded by wires "Barbed and bright / Like mad-dog teeth."

In many of her bleak little songlike poems, Henia scratches lines as stark as etchings on a prison wall: "Cemetery days / One after the other"; "You don’t believe what’s happening here, / Do you, my poor horrified brothers?"; "Sometimes a dream stupidly hangs on" — her verse rendered in Howe’s minimalist adaptations of literal translations from the Polish. Howe writes that she often chose to prune back "dangling clauses" or "excess adjectives" in order to bring forth the essential images in the poems, and such scaled-back lines cast a light on Henia’s brutal irony in "Snapshots":

And do you want to know

what I do for a living?

I’m not joking.

I sort shell casings

It’s the best job

because killing is good

and time passes fast

when the work has a purpose.

Cunning and immediate, poems such as this are sandwiched between remarkable letters and essays, stories and acknowledgements, reminders that if any of the little twists of fate hadn’t occurred, everything could have quickly disappeared — not just the wall of words, but the women fighting behind it. *

A WALL OF TWO: POEMS OF RESISTANCE AND SUFFERING FROM KRAKÓW TO BUCHENWALD AND BEYOND

By Henia Karmel and Ilona Karmel

Adaptations by Fanny Howe

Translated by Arie A. Galles and Warren Niesluchowski

University of California Press

158 pages; $45 hardcover, $16.95 paper

Alex Ross brings the noise

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New Yorker critic Alex Ross surveys the many faces of 20th-century classical music
By Max Goldberg
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“In the classical field it has long been fashionable to fence music off from society, to declare it a self-sufficient language,” Alex Ross writes in the preface to his new opus, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. “In the hyper-political twentieth century, that barrier crumbles time and again…. My subtitle is meant literally; this is the twentieth century heard through its music.” This is a bit of a misrepresentation, since The Rest Is Noise is first and foremost a review of composers’ lives, but Ross is indeed working on a grand canvas, stitching together innumerable discrete innovations in a seesawing account of modern classical music’s volatile politics of style.

ross.jpg
Smart and cute? Hubba hubba …

Which is to say that while The Rest Is Noise may be telescopic as a political history — the 20th century here belongs to Central Europe, Russia, and America, with only minor walk-ons for whole continents — it’s entirely effective as a history of ideas. Ross, the classical music critic for the New Yorker, guides us with a generalist’s passion for connections and large-scale developments. He revels in the coincidences and overcrowding of the 20th century: in the way Richard Strauss’s life bridged Wagner to “American soldiers whistling ‘Some Enchanted Evening’” in Germany’s decimated cities; in the fact that two diametrically opposed titans of European composition (Schoenberg and Stravinsky) came to live miles apart in a Los Angeles teeming with émigrés (their neighbors included Thomas Mann, Theodor Adorno, Alma Mahler, and Aldous Huxley).

Running through these overlapping microhistories are the categorizations that define 20th-century music as a realm of ideas: dissonance and tonality, zeitgeist and heartland, modernism and pastiche.

Lit: Lucy Corin’s boundary issues

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In her story collection The Entire Predicament, author Lucy Corin investigates the unstable line between public and private life
By Amanda Davidson
lit@sfbg.com

corincut2.jpg

Dangling by one ankle in the front doorway of her house, the narrator of “The Entire Predicament,” the titular story in Lucy Corin’s new collection, regards the world from an upside-down vantage point. “My country’s at war,” she states, as if, tilted over, she can simply spill out this oft-suppressed information. As she twirls, slowly, suspended by a “network of ropes,” the unnamed protagonist observes the inside of her house and the outside world in alternating rotations. Inside, consumer totems of the good life — “the desirable open floor plan” and “shining kitchen” — turn out to lack substance. Doors are hollow; walls crumble at a touch. Outside, children, soldiers, and, mysteriously, a small giraffe collect on the lawn. “How did I get here?” the suspended narrator wonders.

Rat with wings

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SEVENTIES FLASHBACK The ’60s were all about changing society. When that didn’t pan out, the ’70s went all inwardly focused, pursuing pleasure and spirituality. Both goals frequently commingled as fads, cults, and pop religio-psych fixes. The Age of Aquarius dawned no more: Planet Self-Help was rising, and exotic waves washed across the shore of American consciousness.

Perhaps nothing in that era’s landscape of seekerdom spread its populist wings farther — or became a more dated Me Decade punch line — than Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Richard Bach’s precious wee tome (of fewer than 10,000 words, stretched to book length by Russell Munson’s black-and-white aviary photos) was first issued in 1970 by Macmillan after numerous other publishers passed. This little-being-that-could tale is about a "one-in-a-million bird" who yearns to transcend his garbage-eating tribe by flying for the pure joy and challenge of it. Expelled from this group, he’s taken in by gull teachers operating on a "higher plane" and ultimately graduates to "working on love" with his original, dumbly materialist flock, which needs schooling the most. It’s kinda Zen, albeit with Western appeal in that the seeker is granted special FasTrak-to-enlightenment status: "You, Jon, learned so much at one time that you didn’t have to go through a thousand lives to reach this one," one teacher tells our protagonist. So Anakin Skywalker!

With collegians steeped in Herman Hesse and Carlos Castaneda fanning the flame, Seagull became a phenomenon, surpassing Gone with the Wind‘s hardcover-sales record. It topped the New York Times‘ best-seller list for 38 weeks and was translated into umpteen languages (my thrift-shop edition is English-Korean). It inspired a ballet, a spoken word record by "MacArthur Park" crooner Richard Harris, myriad parodies, and a cameo appearance on Brady Bunch daddy Mike’s bedside table. Could a movie version possibly miss?

Oh yes, it could: thanks to Paramount Home Video, the single most ridiculed flop of 1973 is newly out on DVD. Like most such whipping posts (Heaven’s Gate, Inchon, etc.), it’s not nearly as bad as its reputation suggests. Still, some cringing is appropriate. Much is Bach’s fault, even though he sued Paramount over minor textual deviations. The pompous parable and sentiments behind lines like "There’s got to be more to life than fighting for fish heads!" remained all his. Lit crits carped well before film reviews dug a deeper hole. One called the book "a mishmash of Boy Scout–Khalil Gibran–Horatio Alger doing Antoine de Saint-Exupéry spouting the Qur’an as translated by Bob Dylan." But full shit-storm blame rested on the decision by the producers and director Hall Bartlett to visualize a live-action narrative starring actual gulls (controlled on set by radar signals) with dubbed Hollywood actors’ voices.

Painfully whisper-intense James Franciscus "beaked" Jonathan. Richard Crenna, Hal Holbrook, Dorothy McGuire, and Nanny and the Professor‘s Juliet Mills were other seagull ventriloquists. Perhaps evocative, simple animation à la 1971 AMC Movie of the Week classic The Point (which had music by Harry Nilsson) would have been a better path. Bartlett (his career a casualty) went on a promotional tour with "star" birds, creating a truly shitty situation in hotel rooms nationwide. That didn’t help to choke back reviewers’ laughter or massive public indifference. Nobody denied Jack Couffer’s stunning, Oscar-nominated cinematography. And Neil Diamond’s original song score — soaring or insipid, choose yer side — took on a commercial life of its own.

But the film was doomed. A second version, replacing dialogue with Sir Lawrence Olivier’s narration, was released. But when a movie’s already branded a dud, such salvage tactics never work. This screen Seagull lives on as a fabled crapsterpiece, designated "Golden Turkey" by the likes of future conservative art warden Michael Medved. Aviator turned novelist turned sage Bach found his audience shrinking, though a faithful core remains, which now forgives and even appreciates the movie he disowned. These days Love Story, Erich von Däniken (of Chariots of the Gods?), and pet rocks have little noncamp residual value. But Jonathan Livingston Seagull is still in print.

Golden Rice Bowl and San Tung

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› paulr@sfbg.com

If you think chicken is restaurant food for losers, you haven’t been getting out to enough Chinese restaurants lately. And who could blame you? Going out for Chinese food these days is a little like voting in a presidential primary: there are far too many choices that seem far too much alike, and most of them turn out to be disappointing. But we mustn’t let ourselves become discouraged by mediocrity, which after all is the usual state of human affairs and the human beings who conduct them. There are always jewels to be found, glittering in the muck of the mundane, and the task at hand is the pleasant one of discovery.

The chicken-is-for-losers argument was put forth explicitly by Anthony Bourdain in his book Kitchen Confidential. When you don’t know what you want, you order chicken. Probably you will forget about the chicken as soon as it’s gone, like an episode of bad sex. But maybe you won’t forget, if you were lucky or wise enough to have the dry-fried chicken, and to have had it at either of a pair of places on Irving in the Inner Sunset: San Tung or Golden Rice Bowl. As Chinese restaurants in the city go, these places look like strictly neighborhood joints, with not much in the way of décor or other atmospherics, and service that’s not exactly coddling, though friendly and competent. But the chicken!

And what is dry-fried chicken, exactly? It could begin with either wings or thigh meat — but thigh meat, which is boneless, gives a higher edible yield. The pieces of flesh are dipped in batter or otherwise given some kind of coating, then fried in oil until lightly crisped. The result is a heap of golden chunks and shards, juicy within envelopes of delicate crunch. There might be a discreet flow of spicy sauce. For those who like a certain muscularity in their Chinese cooking, dry-fried chicken could be just the ticket, and the variations between the approaches taken by the respective kitchens at San Tung and Golden Rice Bowl will be a prod to ongoing interest.

We found San Tung’s version ($5.50 at lunch, $8 at dinner) to consist of large, flattish chunks of meat, like rocks you could skip across a pond on a summer afternoon. The chunks had been battered and fried to a sturdy gold, with ginger, garlic, and red chile peppers lending an appealingly blunt heat to the proceedings. Across the street, meanwhile, Golden Rice Bowl’s edition ($5.50 at lunch, $8.25 at dinner) gave its slightly more cylindrical bits of meat a coating that was less batter looking than some kind of dredging (in cornmeal and pepper); after the hot-oil treatment, the textural effect was similar to that of pepper-fried calamari. The dish also included a slightly sweet sauce, as glossy and dark as molasses and dotted with chunks of red chili pepper for a bit of heat. And the winner is … a draw.

I don’t mean to imply that the two restaurants are identical, or even fraternal, twins. San Tung seems to be, overall, more of a spice-heat palace, as suggested by the little complimentary plate of kimchee that’s brought to your table after you’re seated. (At Golden Rice Bowl, the nibble consists of daikon and carrot sticks, on the sweet side of pickled.) Perhaps the fire accounts for San Tung’s throngs of the young and the trendy; Golden Rice Bowl’s demographic appears to be a little older, less noisy, and distinctly Asian — this last detail always reassuring, at least to this occidental person.

More San Tung zing can be found in the three deluxe spicy sauce noodles ($7), a quite large bowl filled with linguinelike homemade noodles, shrimp, calamari, and scallops in a reddish, sweet-heat sauce under a rough green cap of cucumber splinters. Across the street at GRB you can get something similar and just as tasty but milder: seafood Hong Kong–<\d>style crispy noodles ($7.25), a stir-fry of shellfish, calamari, snow peas, carrot sticks, whole baby shiitake mushrooms, and leaves of nappa cabbage laid atop a broad nest of crisped vermicelli-style noodles. The well-modulated tone here seems rather Cantonese.

Soups track a similar divide. San Tung’s hot and sour soup ($4.95), chockablock with strips of tofu, peas, bamboo shoots, and willow-tree mushrooms, arrives on the tongue with a nice sourness but later releases a pepper heat that vents up through one’s nostrils. Golden Rice Bowl’s seaweed egg flower soup ($4.50), on the other hand, is almost like liquid sushi, with its black webbings of kelp giving off their subtle but distinctive odor; ballast (and some color) is provided by diced root vegetables and peas.

We pause briefly to acknowledge San Tung’s fabulous shrimp and leek dumplings ($6.50 for 12 — a deal). The menu describes them as "little," but really they’re about the size and shape of potstickers, though steamed instead of pan-fried. What is most remarkable is their richly juicy filling, a fragrant blend of ground shrimp mixed with ginger, garlic, and Chinese chives. You could make a meal out of a plate of these.

Golden Rice Bowl has an aquarium — a nice touch, especially since it’s purely decorative and not a holding tank full of creatures waiting to be plucked out and turned into somebody’s dinner. The place is also more gently lit than its neighbor across the way, where overhead lights glare and the atmosphere is not for the faint of heart — or who are, as we used to say in grade school, chicken.

GOLDEN RICE BOWL

Daily, 11 a.m.–9:30 p.m.

1030 Irving, SF

(415) 731-8110

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Not noisy

Wheelchair accessible

SAN TUNG

Mon.–Tues. and Thurs.–Sun., 11 a.m.–9:30 p.m.

1031 Irving, SF

(415) 242-0828

Beer and wine

MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Just do it

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

That nursing column wasn’t real, right? I’m all for attachment parenting — in fact, my three-year-old is still co-sleeping, and we’re just grateful that he sleeps at all. But we have a spare bedroom. We have a couch. Hell, we have a kitchen table and the living room floor. They must be able to find a place to have sex that isn’t directly next to their sleeping child?

I’m glad the column is going to venture into the realities of sex after parenthood, even if I’m going to be squicked out all day now.

Love,

Gentle Reader

Dear Gen:

Sorry for the squickage (although it does tend to come with the Alt.Sex territory, doesn’t it?) and I’m glad somebody likes the parenting stuff! It’s not always easy for me to reconcile my print life as a (one hopes) sexily knowing know-it-all with my current real-life life as a slightly befuddled toddler wrangler in a faintly besnotted T-shirt.

The letter was, as I admitted, a work of fiction by an online friend who was squicked herself by the tendency in some quarters of the Interweb to turn enlightened parenting into a competitive sport. "Attachment parenting," for those not playing along at home, is supposed to foster in your children such a secure sense of loving support at home that they feel safe exploring the world independently. Those people happily boasting online that they obviously have to homeschool because their six-year-olds simply aren’t ready to wean yet are missing the point, probably on purpose.

And what, besides breasts, does this have to do with sex? Enough, I figured, since even those of us sensible enough to avoid getting into ridiculous babes-in-arms races feel the pressure to privilege baby above all. While wearing my sex advisor hat (and what does that look like? one wonders somewhat nervously), it’s my job to worry about the grown-ups.

So what of noncrazy parents struggling to maintain a sex life in the face of a sudden incursion of tiny, extremely demanding people into their lives and beds? Even people who started out absolutely determined that crib is crib and bed is bed often end up with a small person occupying essential real estate. What does one do? I’m glad, for instance, that you have a spare room and a coffee table and a large macramé plant holder to hang from, or whatever you listed there, but do you really use them? Do you leave the baby sleeping quietly in your queen-size and sneak off to disport yourself in the garage? Good for you if so (and no, I’m not being facetious — I mean it: good for you), but I think many people mean to and hope for the best, but end up sighing and kissing goodnight and sinking gratefully into Morpheus’s arms instead of each other’s. It’s understandable. We’re tired!

The other conventional wisdom beloved of (presumably baby-free) sex advisors is to take a weekend away just for the two of you (or, in the interest of inclusivity, the three or more of you, if that’s what you’re into). This is nice on paper, but if you have a baby, let’s face it: you’re not leaving him or her for an entire weekend to go golfing on the Lost Coast. You’re just not. If your children are old enough to understand that Mommy and Daddy, or Mommy and Mommy, or Mommy and Daddy and Mommy (enough — inclusivity makes me tired) are coming back, then maybe. But the price tag on a weekend away plus 24-7 nanny time is scarifying enough to kill Mommy and Daddy’s buzz three counties away. So mostly a "no."

If I didn’t believe so strongly that a decent sex life really is key to a decent home life, and that happy people make better parents, and that better parents make healthier babies, I’d be tempted to say, "Aw, screw it, just give up and hope you’ll get your mutual mojo back in a few years when the kid’s over needing Mommy and Daddy all night." I do, though, so I’m going to suggest sneaking him back into his own bed in the sleep-like-the-dead early dawn instead. And getting a relative (or hiring a teenager) to take the kids out on a weekend morning twice a month. And getting TiVo to record The Daily Show instead of wasting precious baby sleep time staring at the tube.

Again, more later. In the meantime, my bedside table may have held more exotic objects in its time, but it currently boasts a copy of And Baby Makes Three, by John M. Gottman and Julie Schwarz Gottman. I don’t ordinarily waste my time on self-help lit, but Gottman is the man who made a science of saving marriages, or at least accurately predicting which ones are capable of saving themselves. He’s the one who determined that rolling your eyes with contempt when your partner speaks means you might as well start dividing up the CDs. So don’t do that, people, and I’ll be back with a book report.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question.

Yoko Ono: Imagine Peace

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Sometimes, in these heady days of what passes for online journalism, the press release is better than the story.
This one just in, from Yoko Ono of John Lennon fame, is an example:

Dear Bruce,

Make sure you visit www.IMAGINEPEACE.com on October 9th, John Lennon’s birthday,
for the unveiling of the incredible IMAGINE PEACE TOWER on the isle of Videy, Reykjavik, Iceland.

Please visit the site, have a look around, IMAGINE PEACE and send your wishes to join
over 495,000 others buried in capsules around the IMAGINE PEACE TOWER, dedicated
to my late husband: musician, poet, artist and peace activist, John Lennon.

Please join us on October 9th at www.IMAGINEPEACE.com
Wherever you are, we will all be together that day.

With the deepest love,

yoko ono

———————————————————————————————————————-

Visit www.IMAGINEPEACE.com to send your wishes to the IMAGINE PEACE TOWER and join the biggest online peace demonstration on October 9th.

The website contains over 160 pages, loads of easter eggs, and is being augmented every day. Explore, have fun, participate, IMAGINE PEACE and join Yoko Ono and thousands of others at www.IMAGINEPEACE.com on October 9th for the unveiling of the IMAGINE PEACE TOWER, when we will be uploading photos and videos of the
days events as they happen.

———————————————————————————————————————-

A dream you dream alone is only a dream
A dream you dream together is reality
Yoko Ono

Imagine all the people living life in peace
John Lennon

———————————————————————————————————————-

The IMAGINE PEACE TOWER is an artwork conceived by Yoko Ono in memory of John Lennon.

It is dedicated to peace and bears the inscription IMAGINE PEACE in 24 languages.

Its construction and installation is a collaboration between Yoko Ono, the City of Reykjavik, Reykjavik Art Museum and Reykjavik Energy.

The work is in the form of a wishing well from which a very strong and tall tower of light emerges. The strength, intensity and brilliance of the light tower continually changes as the particles in the air fluctuate with the prevailing weather and atmospheric conditions unique to Iceland.

Every year it will light up between October 9th (Lennon’s birthday) and December 8th (the day of his death).

In addition the IMAGINE PEACE TOWER will be lit on New Year’s Eve, during the first week of spring and on some rare special occasions agreed between the City and Yoko Ono.

———————————————————————————————————————-

Banners, posters and desktops are available at the website.

Please forward this letter to everyone on your mailing list. thankyou. IMAGINE PEACE!

———————————————————————————————————————-

Join the biggest online peace demonstration – www.IMAGINEPEACE.com

Chicago’s Estrojam hits us where we secrete

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chomic sml.bmp
Margaret Cho rocked the mic – and her burleque bone – at Estrojam in Chicago.

By K. Tighe

An estimated 15,000 attendees flocked to venues around Chicago last week, Sept. 18-23, for the fifth annual Estrojam Music and Culture Festival to see women doing what they do best. E-Jam is no touchy-feely Lilith affair: the events ran the gamut from burlesque to boozing, hip-hop to rock, photography to film.

Margaret Cho lit up the festival with a raucous array of ta-tas, tattoos, and tassels. Many eyebrows were raised when the San Francisco-born comedienne took up belly dancing a few years ago, but this week’s stint at the Lakeshore Theatre proved that Cho has taken the cabaret world firmly by the fans and put together a stellar revue. Featuring seasoned pros like New York’s Dirty Martini and LA’s Princess Farhana, up-and-coming transgender comic Ian Harvie, and members of West Hollywood’s Gay Mafia Comedy Troupe, The Sensuous Woman is an edgier take on a burlesque variety show.

The opening fan dance was not your standard pink and frilly affair, but an irreverent pulsing precursor to the sexual themes of the show set to Peaches’ “Boys Wanna be Her.” Here’s the thing – everyone in the cast was flapping a fan, not just the pretty girls – it was clear that Cho intended to blur some lines. As she emerged from the feathered curtains, the audience went ape and Cho began a well-received stand-up routine with “I’m Margaret, Bitch.” Keeping on the current event tip, the comic called out the critics of Britney’s VMA performance, ascribing the commentary on the pop star’s weight to “a symptom of a diseased mind.” Going on to vividly and hysterically describe that fateful day in an airport bathroom for Sen. Larry Craig, Cho introduced her show as “Like Donny and Marie – but with an all-tranny chorus line.”

The afterworld

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› lit@sfbg.com

REVIEW "Stress eternal life." Irène Némirovsky inscribed these words in her diary on July 1, 1942, less than two weeks before she was arrested under Vichy race laws, a month and a half before her death at Auschwitz. She wrote concerning a cycle of novels conceived to reflect the everyday qualities of life during wartime — a portrait emphasizing pettiness and pity, fear and loathing. The manuscripts for the two she finished were published as Suite Française in 2004, a discovery that seemed the improbable product of luck and literary heroism. A Russian-French Jew who converted her family to Catholicism in 1939, Némirovsky held no illusions regarding her bleak fate but maintained a Herculean work ethic during the occupation, drawing on a strong conviction — palpable in both the fiction and the journals — regarding the immemorial qualities of inner life and writing.

It would be dishonest to ignore the extratextual aura of such works, how they arrived in our hands, the time and lives bridged. And yet, Suite Française‘s literary flaws — chief among them a tendency toward simplistic moralizing and characterizations freighted with cliché — are unmistakable. What a welcome relief, then, to hold in one’s hands a slim volume of few wasted words called Fire in the Blood — another, earlier novel rescued from Némirovsky’s notebooks.

Whereas Suite‘s indirect narration delivers Némirovsky’s closely observed social realism with a brittle, didactic tone, the first-person narration of Fire in the Blood‘s Monsieur Sylvestre, a solitary, middle-aged landowner hoping only to be left alone to his gardens and journal, offers this same sensibility in fuller bloom. When Sylvestre’s reticent voice invokes the thick, guilty-by-association social atmosphere in the provinces, where the book is set, it is with the shadow of self-implication.

It being the provinces, everyone in Fire in the Blood is related, if not by blood than by deeply intertwined personal experiences, unspoken proprieties, and the land itself. Sylvestre is a cousin of Hélène, the matriarch of a proud family of landowners, and the book first takes up the narrative of the younger generation, specifically Hélène’s daughter Colette and her drowned husband, Jean.

Far from resting in peace, Jean in death reveals a web of infidelity and foul play, and the specter of an older story emerges via the youthful indiscretions at hand. Unfolding with slow mystery at first (Némirovsky occasionally overplays her hand in this regard, interjecting foreboding drumrolls), it picks up speed and urgency, until the past fully overtakes the present in the final thundering pages of the book: an enfolding, transmuting structure designed to convey the "roaring, all-consuming tidal wave of love."

Reliving his former passions, Sylvestre muses, "I felt as if I’d been asleep for twenty years and had woken to pick up my book at the very page I’d left off." Back, then, to that tonic of literary heroism and luck. We are, in the end, moved by this writing not just because the books did endure but because one senses Némirovsky willing it to be so. With 20 pages left, we finally get "But wait. Let’s start from the beginning …" As Sylvestre the narrator ends his story suspended in timeless reverie, so too does Némirovsky the writer end her book singing out to us: "What I could not foresee was the flame that would be locked inside me, whose cinders would continue to glow for years to come." What he could not foresee, she knew beyond doubt.*

FIRE IN THE BLOOD

By Irène Némirovsky

Translated by Sandra Smith

Alfred A. Knopf

160 pages

$22

True crime

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› lit@sfbg.com

REVIEW In a July 31, 2007, editorial, the New York Times decried the "more than 5,000 murders … reported each year" in Guatemala, noting that "many are committed by the same groups — both left and right — that terrorized the country" during its 36-year civil war. Yet as author Francisco Goldman writes in The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?, the Catholic Church–<\d>initiated report that precipitated the murder of human rights leader Bishop Juan Gerardi "concluded that the Guatemalan Army and associated paramilitary units … were responsible for 80 percent of the killings of civilians, and that the guerillas had committed a little less than 5 percent of those crimes."

The Times‘ "plague on both their houses" take is a splendid illustration of how poorly served we are by our media’s reporting on Guatemala — and Latin America in general. When Goldman states that the Guatemalan war "was a consequence of a coup engineered by the CIA against Jacobo Arbenz, only the second democratically elected president in Guatemala’s history," he may shock an American audience largely oblivious to events widely known outside the United States.

On April 22, 1998, Gerardi briefed the Guatemala City media on an Archdiocesan Office of Human Rights investigation so thorough that it named more than 50,000 of the war’s estimated 200,000 casualties. At the time, "no Guatemalan military officer had ever been convicted or imprisoned for a crime related to human rights," Goldman writes. And the military planned to keep it that way. Four days later, Gerardi was bludgeoned to death in his garage.

It was a killing so bold as to suggest that military assassination specialists could not have been involved. But, as one Guatemalan journalist wrote, "crimes planned in the [Presidential Military Staff] are executed to look like common violence," and a disinformation campaign immediately sprang into action, one in which, Goldman notes, famed novelist and former Peruvian presidential candidate Mario Vargas Llosa played a particularly despicable role.

The Guatemalan-born, US-based Goldman has written three novels, a background that serves him well in his first nonfiction book, a complicated story of high-level government and military obfuscation eventually penetrated — to a degree — through dogged work by low-level government investigators and prosecutors working at great personal risk. At least two special prosecutors, four witnesses, and one judge involved in the case have gone into exile, and one witness was murdered. But three members of the army and the priest who shared Gerardi’s house were convicted for participating in his "extra judicial execution." Their sentences were finally upheld this year, although by that time one of them had been decapitated in a prison riot.

Goldman observes that Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, whose militaries the United States backed in similar conflicts, all became societies with "some of the highest murder rates in the world," where "the powerful and well connected acted with impunity." The story pauses on a positive note, though, with one prosecutor declaring the beginning of "the second stage of prosecution," aimed at higher-ups involved in the crime, possibly including Otto Perez Molina, the right-wing candidate in Guatemala’s current presidential campaign.<\!s>*

THE ART OF POLITICAL MURDER: WHO KILLED THE BISHOP?

By Francisco Goldman

Grove Press

416 pages

$25

READING

Oct. 21, 5 p.m., free

City Lights Bookstore

261 Columbus, SF

(415) 362-8193, www.citylights.com

A theocratic democracy?

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lit@sfbg.com
My old friend Reese Erlich is remarkably optimistic about Iran, which is a pleasant perspective. I’m glad somebody is.
In his insightful, if sometimes choppy, new book, The Iran Agenda: The Real Story of U.S. Policy and the Middle East Crisis, he offers an alternative view of a nation and a culture that has been either ignored or demonized by the mainstream press for more than 30 years. His basic thesis — that US policy toward Tehran is moronic, driven by foolish politics, bad information, and greedy geopolitical aims — is hard to dispute. His subtext — that there’s real hope for democracy in Iran — is a bit of a tougher sell.
Erlich has done what few US journalists ever do: he’s visited Iran, repeatedly, and taken the time to meet not just with government officials and activists but with ordinary Iranians. Almost across the board, they condemn the United States and support the Islamic state.
We’re presented with “liberal” politicians — which might be a bit of a stretch — and radical activists, including Marxists, who offer a vision of a democratic Iran. Me, I’m dubious about any hope for theocratic democracy; as a proud atheist, I think that separation of church and state — strict, inviolable separation — is essential for any functioning democracy.
But Erlich’s willing to give other cultures and ways of thinking a break, which is one of the main reasons he’s such a good reporter. And in The Iran Agenda he presents a picture of a nation far more complex than the caricatures we’ve seen depicted by the administration and the evening news.
That’s the real value of this book: you get a sense from a veteran journalist of what you’ve been missing all these years. Erlich tries to sort out the ethnic geopolitics of Iran and explain which groups are aligned with whom (and why the United States supports some of them). It’s all somewhat dizzying, but that’s part of the point. This situation is more complicated than most American opinion makers are willing to admit.
And for all that, it’s a good read.
THE IRAN AGENDA: THE REAL STORY OF U.S. POLICY AND THE MIDDLE EAST CRISIS
By Reese Erlich
PoliPoint Press
192 pages, paper
$14.95
READINGS
Sat/22, 2:30 p.m., free
City College of San Francisco, Mission Campus, Auditorium (Room 109)
1125 Valencia, SF
Sat/29, 7 p.m., free
Book Passage
51 Tamal Vista Blvd., Corte Madera
(415) 927-0960
www.bookpassage.com
For information on more Bay Area events, go to www.p3books.com.

Joining the party

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lit@sfbg.com
In 1946, after three and a half years spent fighting in the segregated US Army on the Pacific front of World War II, Nelson Peery returned to a home front marked by joblessness, mob violence, lynchings, police tyranny, and red-baiting hysteria. Discussing the homecoming of black veterans such as himself in his new memoir, Black Radical, he says, “We had become conscious defending other people’s freedom.”
Black Radical is the sequel to Peery’s first memoir, Black Fire, which takes us from Peery’s childhood during the Great Depression to the wartime experiences that lead to his expanding racial consciousness. Black Radical focuses on Peery’s time in the Communist Party, which he joins soon after his return to Minnesota. Shortly thereafter, Peery’s father, an American Legion stalwart, chooses patriotism over paternity and declares to the state legislature, “I have seen my seven sons swallowed in the bloody maw of Communism.” This “good Negro” pose is exactly what Peery has vowed to struggle against, although he is equally skeptical of black nationalism, embracing instead a Marxist analysis that sees the overarching system as the problem, not just white racists and their deluded allies.
Peery’s dedication to the Communist Party, which he likens to his commitment to his army division during the war, is sometimes stunning when juxtaposed to the organization’s systemic racism. And while he is forthright about his ethical struggles and political development, there is a staginess to much of the dialogue that transforms plot turns into vehicles for Peery’s soul-searching. But the book is also filled with anecdotes that lend emotional depth to Peery’s revolutionary rhetoric, such as when a white librarian hands him a copy of Karl Marx’s The German Ideology, though such a gesture could lead to her immediate dismissal. Or when Peery hosts legendary blues singer Leadbelly at his Minneapolis home and the singer ends up entertaining a crowd of 200 revelers that includes the visiting Dean of Canterbury.
Black Radical concludes in the LA neighborhood of Watts, where Peery attempts to do organizing work as relentless police harassment of poor black residents leads to the Watts uprising of 1965. Peery visits a supermarket where customers are piling their shopping carts high and then wheeling everything past smiling clerks. One woman tells Peery, “You can take whatever you want. They ain’t chargin’ today.” While the riots are eventually suppressed by 24,000 law enforcement thugs, this moment still illuminates the possibilities for the self-determination Peery invokes.
BLACK RADICAL: THE EDUCATION OF AN AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY
By Nelson Peery
New Press
272 pages
$24.95
READING
Sept. 20, 7 p.m., free
City Lights Bookstore
261 Columbus, SF
(415) 362-8193, www.citylights.com

Feast: 7 homey hearths

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Amber is my living room, and not just because I really like Pabst Blue Ribbon and smoking inside. It’s also because I live in a city where rents are high and living space is scarce, where community rooms are shared with multiple people (if there are community rooms at all), and backyards tend only to be big enough for the recycling bin. In suburban places, people share community and comfort around backyard barbecue pits and luxurious living-room couches. They have dinner parties and cocktail hours and invite friends over for tea. But here, we go to bars and restaurants and taverns and coffee shops. These are the places where we meet our neighbors, celebrate special occasions, while away idle hours, have intense conversations. And so, in many ways, these places — particularly those in our neighborhoods — become extensions of our homes and hearths. As the cold weather approaches (global warming willing), I’ve been thinking more about the literal interpretation of hearth; Amber serves me for late-night writing sessions and drunken postdate tell-alls, but where will I go when I want to curl up with a hot chocolate — or a hot toddy — and a long Russian novel? When I want to play Trivial Pursuit late into the cold night with a small group of good friends? When the weather outside is frightful and my date is so delightful? Where, by god, are the fireplaces? In this city of Edwardian apartments retrofitted with gas heaters (and roomies who have to get up early), here is a list of places with flickering flames and belly-warming booze.

BITTER END


I don’t think the Irish invented the fireplace, but they may have the patent on its best use. Wood paneling? A flaming heat source? Thick beer and hot soup? All Irish pubs seem to have ’em — and this Irish-style Richmond locale is no different. Stumbling into the Bitter End feels a bit like wandering into an O’Malley’s or a McSweeney’s in any country in the world — and with items like shepherd’s pie, Gaelic chicken with whiskey, and beer-battered appetizers on the menu, it’s almost like wandering into one in Ireland itself.

441 Clement, SF. (415) 221-9538

MCKENZIE’S


Sometimes you want cozy and kooky all in the same shot — and those are the times you end up at McKenzie’s. This small local favorite is half neighborhood bar in a mountain town (downstairs) and half cheap hostel (upstairs). Either way, it’s charming: small tables cluster around a fireplace over which a flat-screen television broadcasts sports, a jukebox blasts cheesy-but-lovable ’80s hits, and a live-feed video camera in the upstairs lounge, its images visible to every patron downstairs, lends itself to endless prank possibilities.

5320 Geary, SF. (415) 379-6814

ZEKI’S


Wanting no frills in Nob Hill? Try Zeki’s, which boasts two fireplaces — one by the pool table and one directly across from the leather-lined bar. With paraphernalia from old movies lining the walls and a good selection of European beers on tap, you’ll quickly see why this is a favorite spot for both old-school regulars and just-stumbled-in newbies.

1319 California, SF. (415) 928-0677, www.zekisbar.com

JOHN BARLEYCORN


If ever there were a place that personified hearth, it would be John Barleycorn, the little mountain lodge in the city that’s in danger of disappearing by November. This is the place to order strong whiskey from a salty but jovial bartender, to sip it while sitting on church pews in front of roaring flames, to break out a game of rummy or Scrabble (housed in a cozy room behind the chimney) long after you’d already planned to go home.

1415 Larkin, SF. (415) 771-1620

FIRESIDE


A cross between a dive bar and a swanky hipster joint, this Sunset watering hole embodies the schizophrenia of its up-and-coming neighborhood. Which seems to be fine with the down-to-earth drinkers who perch on leather couches around the neon-lit fireplace that anchors the room’s otherwise understated decor.

603 Irving, SF. (415) 731-6433

WILD SIDE WEST


A favorite of lesbians citywide and heteros in the know, this Bernal Heights beauty is most famous for its gorgeous garden patio. But a woodstove, a great jukebox, and strong, well-made drinks also make it perfect for those cold, foggy nights when all you want is a soft scarf, a smooth Scotch, and someone — boy, boi, or girl — to spoon with.

424 Cortland, SF. (415) 647-3099

HIDDEN VINE


OK. Including Hidden Vine may be cheating, as this secret hideaway doesn’t have a fireplace per se. But it’s sure got the atmosphere. Though this is a high-end drinkery, featuring a different wine region every month and offering an impressive selection of artisanal cheeses, the Vine is more comfy than chichi. And a display of white votive candles gives the impression — if not the heat — of a fireplace’s warmth.

620 Post, SF. (415) 674-3567, www.thehiddenvine.com*

Stone’s throw

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS While y’all were at Burning Man, I was in the bathtub. I was taking a bath. I was floating in a swimming pool with a mojito in one hand and a grilled hot sausage on a long fork in the other. I was walking in a fog.

I was eating a popsicle, running naked through sprinklers, stepping on worms.

I was listening to Elton John. In my room. Window open. I was eating salad and salad and salad. The greens were green and crisp, the tomatoes not quite ripe.

I was slicing white onions. I was eating white onions, raw, and hot peppers. I slept real hard and figured out how to open my window and walked around in the sun and the shade, looking people in the eye.

I took a bath and a shower at the same time, and drank ice water out of a glass, the outside of which frosted over, so I licked it. I dressed conservatively.

I hung out in coffeehouses. I am writing this in coffeehouses. Coffee. Iced coffee. Green tea. Italian sodas. This morning I went to a different coffeehouse, and I tried to see if I could eat Korean barbecue with rice for breakfast, in a coffeehouse.

I could! While y’all were at Burning Man, I was at the Pebbles Café in Glen Park, at 8:30 in the morning, eating bulgoki over rice, with a salad. Bulgoki, or bulgogi, means "fire meat" in Korean. In this case it’s beef, very thinly sliced and marinated in something salty and sweet, with onions and peppers and carrots and ohmigod! For having this on the menu, and for serving it to me at 8:30 a.m., Pebbles Café is my new favorite coffeehouse.

I think that people are vegetarians. I say this because I was sitting at a table full of dudes in a different coffeehouse, and they started talking about Burning Man this, Burning Man that. So I cleared my throat. I told them my idea for bringing Camp Chicken Farmer to Burning Man. They looked at me like I was crazy, and I looked at them like they were vegetarians.

The idea for Camp Chicken Farmer ’08 was hatched at Camp Trans, while I was interviewing someone about why didn’t they have eggs. And they said it was too hard to keep eggs without refrigeration, or even ice. Thing is: the freshest egg in the world is as warm as a mug of coffee, and the freshest meat is still moving.

To illustrate this natural fact, I am going to take Camp Chicken Farmer to Burning Man next year, if I can raise the funds and recruit farmers. So far I have one. Well, by myself then, if necessary, I’m going to haul a pick-up truck of live chickens to Black Rock Desert, and a sack of feed, and a hatchet. I’m going to dress conservatively, stay sober, and just fry fresh eggs and butcher and barbecue all week long, go to sleep early.

Now, my attentive readers are going to go: "Wait a minute, Chicken Farmer, you had a hard enough time killing Houdini."

Exactly. And what’s the cure for not hardly being able to kill a chicken? Killing hundreds of them. Anyone could tell you that. On the other hand, it takes a paid professional specialist like me to tell you about the intricacies of coffeehouse Korean barbecue in Glen Park. For breakfast.

Two drunk guys on a sidewalk in Chicago got in my face. They asked impolitely if I was a transvestite.

"I’m everything," I said. "I’m trans."

"You mean you used to be a man and now you’re a woman?" one guy asked while the other started going on about how God made you one way. "You don’t mess with that," he said.

"I did," I said.

The light changed while they were still in my face. "I’d love to stay and chat," I said, flashing them the peace sign and stepping in the street, as if I had somewhere to be.

In fact my bus didn’t leave until two a.m. I had time to kill. The sun was just setting. The tops of the tall buildings were lit, and we were in it, in one sense, like ants under a magnifying glass. I had time to kill, and time was killing me. So while you were at Burning Man, I was still in Chicago on the sidewalk between bums, drunk, hungry, discussing theology, not giving anyone any hand jobs, laughing, and on fire.<\!s>*

PEBBLES CAFE

Monday–<\d>Friday: 6:30 a.m.–<\d>3:30 p.m.; Saturday: 8:30 a.m.–<\d>3:30 p.m.; closed Sunday

2852 Diamond St. S.F.

(415) 333-2270

No alcohol

Credit cards not accepted

Wheelchair accessible

Palmetto Restaurant and Lounge

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Let us now parse famous streets — in particular, Chestnut and Union streets, those parallel avenues and venues of Marina culture, so near to yet far from each other. As someone who cannot be said to be a habitué of either promenade, I speak with the authority of the outworlder, the sporadic visitor whose perceptions are freshened by infrequency. Therefore: Chestnut Street seems to me to be peopled by post-collegiate sorts in their 20s, while Union Street, a few blocks up the hill, strikes me as more thirtysomething country. There the upland air, while still smelling strongly of youth, acquires a crisp note of adultness. One notices better shoes, and certainly fewer chain and fast-food restaurants, than in the nearby bottomlands. Union Street, in fact, is a pretty good place to eat; Betelnut is still there and well into its second decade of life, while just a block or so away we now find Palmetto Restaurant and Lounge, which opened over the summer in a unique space long occupied by Café de Paris L’Entrecote. (And, for Tales of the City nostalgists, the lights of Perry’s are still a-twinkle.)

Palmetto’s street persona is that of a glassy cottage that’s begun to sink decorously into the pavement. You make your entrance by taking a few counterintuitive steps downward, and you find yourself at the edge of an airy, open, well-lit solarium with, behind the host’s station, a bar that could easily be a sports bar. The clientele is fearsomely athletic-looking, as if everyone is a model awaiting an imminent photo shoot for Power Bars. But the restaurant’s ruling muse turns out to be elegance, not brawn. The interior was redesigned by the noted architect Cass Calder Smith, and the idea, as in a certain sort of cooking, is to let the space speak in its own voice. The overall effect is one of warm minimalism — an apparent paradox, yet one is bewitched by the scale of the rear dining room (which is far larger than the glassy little house on the street implies) and the easy fluidity of human movement. There is even, in a throwback, an exhibition kitchen at the restaurant’s very rear — a discreet nod to the culinary voyeurs who still lurk among us.

Chef Andy Kitko (a Gary Danko alumnus) has picked up the script left behind by the departure, some years ago, of 42 Degrees — as in 42 degrees of latitude, as in, more or less, a line running near the coasts of southern Europe and northern Africa, through Italy and the Balkans and on to the Black Sea, whose south shore consists mostly of Turkey. The word the restaurant uses to describe Kitko’s panoramic menu is "contemporary Mediterranean," and although "Mediterranean" has lately become a squishy term, here its big-tent roominess seems right. "Contemporary," of course, is code for "California," meaning, more or less, we’ll try anything once.

The food tilts toward small plates, along with soups, salads, and pastas available by the half-size. These last are not inconsiderable. Maccaronis amatriciana ($8) featured the classic Roman sauce of pancetta, onion, chili, and tomato — pleasantly spicy, with a hint of smoke — spooned over a healthy portion of house-made pasta, like stubby straws that had been slit open.

The bigger plates, interestingly, are on the not-huge side. The burger ($12) was just right, about a third of a pound of Meyers Ranch beef — and it was also fabulously juicy and full of flavor, a best-in-show contender. It would have been satisfying even if it hadn’t come with a cone of crisp, well-salted frites and their sidekick trio of sauces: ketchup, tomato, and cumin aioli, with its breath of the Maghreb. King salmon ($24), meanwhile, was given a yogurt marinade and served atop a tabbouleh paste with peas and cumin carrots; it felt vaguely Turkish to us.

But, as is so often the case, the kitchen saves its best work for the smaller jewels. A trio of arancini ($8), basically risotto fritters that look like batter-fried golf balls, were scented with Meyer lemon and carried a secret cargo of tarragon crème fraîche. House-made lamb sausage ($10) arrived, still sizzling from the grill, on a ragout of navy and fava beans, while flaps of grilled Monterey Bay sardines ($8) were mounted on rounds of toast, with rich, dark caponata on hand to help balance the fish’s oiliness.

Some of the stuff drifted toward the ordinary: an heirloom tomato salad ($12), with burrata di bufala and balsamic drizzle was good, but practically every restaurant in town is offering something similar; and a wild mushroom soup ($8) with garlic chives and a crouton, was also good and only slightly less familiar. Some of the so-called accompaniments, on the other hand, were unexpected and tasty. A Castilian-style pisto ($6) resembled its summer-bounty relatives, ratatouille and caponata, but put more emphasis on diced eggplant and added haricots verts for color, while grilled corn with lime butter ($5) fitted the butter, in melting pats, atop disks of cob that looked like yellow nigiri.

There is at least one extraordinary dessert awaiting your attention. It bears the nearly unmanageable name of galaktoboureko ($8). If you can make it understood that this is what you want, you will soon be feasting on a pair of crisped phyllo tubes filled with lemon-infused semolina custard and plated with lavender honey and grilled fig halves that look like pieces of candy. I like figs about as much as I like chestnuts, which is not very, but here we have a dessert that’s greater than the sum of its parts — or, an artful union.<\!s>*

PALMETTO RESTAURANT AND LOUNGE

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 9:30 a.m.–3:30 p.m. Dinner: Sun.–Thurs., 5:30–10 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 5:30–11 p.m.

2032 Union, SF

(415) 931-5006

www.palmetto-sf.com

Full bar

AE/DISC/MC/V

Well-managed noise

Wheelchair accessible

I talked with a Zombie

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The busiest guy with an undead name in showbiz? Rob Zombie. Like a certain mask-wearing maniac, the man can’t be stopped – at least when it comes to doing press for Halloween, his latest film, which opens Friday, August 31 (giving you a full two months to prepare for the actual holiday). I zoomed into the office after an ill-advised night out for my 8:45 a.m. interview. My phone was lit up like Vegas – Mr. Zombie was running a bit late, could I hold on for a few minutes? Yeah, I could hold on to talk about Halloween – John Carpenter’s 1978 original is my go-to favorite film citation, and I’m anticipating the remake with every bloody bone in my horror-geek body. I don’t like doing interviews before I’ve seen the film, but again – it’s Halloween, dude. A movie that – let’s be honest – needs no enhancement to be scary, even in 2007. But I’m willing to see what Zombie has to offer. Which leads me to my first question …

San Francisco Bay Guardian: What do you think makes you different from other directors who’ve remade horror films (see: The Hills Have Eyes, Dawn of the Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Fog, etc. etc.)? I know you’re a huge horror fan…

Rob Zombie: It’s hard to say. All directors are different. And for me to assume I know who they are and what they do and what their motivations are would be presumptuous on my part. But the only thing that I know is that what makes this remake possibly different from others is that it’s not just a job. If you’re gonna take on something, you have to take it on because you have some passion for the project. Because I’ve been offered other things in the past and I’ve turned them all down because I was just kind of like, “Why would you remake that? Who give a shit?” So I mean, maybe that’s different. Sometimes people just take on jobs that they really don’t have a passion for, and it shows.

Bay Area fall fairs and festivals

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Summer may technically be on the outs, but don’t put away your baggies, huarache sandals, and that bushy, bushy blond hairdo just yet, all you Gidgets and Big Kahunas out there: it’s still Surfin’ USA in the Bay. Hell, summer doesn’t even start in San Francisco until September at the earliest. You can wax up the board and get busy, stuff the kidlets into the Woody, and hit one of the bevy of cool fiestas listed below, or maybe just lay out on a towel in Dolores Park, waiting for a wayward Lothario or Lothariette to rub cocoa butter on your fleshy hind regions. Ah, how good do we have it in the Sucka Free City?

AUG. 25

Jazzy Tomatoes Berkeley Farmers’ Market, Center at MLK Jr. Way, Berkeley; (510) 548-3333, www.ecologycenter.org. 10:30am-3pm. Free. This collaboration between the Downtown Berkeley Jazz Festival series and the Berkeley Farmers’ Market features the sounds of local mandolinist Mike Marshall and Brazilian pianist Jovino Santos Neto, plus the flavors of Venus Restaurant’s Ann Murray.

AUG. 25-26

Bodega Seafood Art and Wine Festival Watts Ranch, 16855 Bodega Ave, Bodega; (707) 824-8717, www.winecountryfestivals.com. Sat, 10am-6pm; Sun, 10am-5pm. $8-12. The sleepy village where Alfred Hitchcock filmed The Birds hosts this celebration of the best beer, wine, and seafood California has to offer. Sip on a Cline Cellars pinot noir and enjoy albacore wrapped in bacon while taking in the sounds of Marcia Ball’s Texas-style roadhouse blues.

Golden Gate Renaissance Festival Speedway Meadow, Golden Gate Park, SF; (415) 354-1773, www.sffaire.com. Sat, 10am-6pm; Sun, 10am-5pm. $5-15. Stilt walkers, fire-eaters, jesters, jousters, knights, peasant wenches, and Shakespeare fetishists abound in the fourth installment of this medieval fair. Amid the feasting and storytelling, you’ll get a chance to practice your chivalry and maybe ride a horse.

AUG. 26

Arab Cultural Festival County Fair Building, Ninth Ave and Lincoln, Golden Gate Park, SF; www.arabculturalcenter.org. 10am-7pm. $2-5. Hikayatna (Our stories) is the theme for this year’s Arab Cultural Festival, featuring a bazaar with jewelry, henna, and Arab cuisine, as well as assorted folk and contemporary musical performances.

Taste of Marin St. Vincent’s School for Boys, 1 St. Vincent Dr., San Rafael; (415) 663-9667, www.marinorganic.org. 4-10pm. $150. Dedicated to supporting and promoting the exquisite food that is grown and produced in Marin, this event features a silent auction, chances to meet the farmers and chefs, and an elaborate sit-down dinner. Soulstress Maria Muldaur provides the musical entertainment.

AUG. 31-SEPT. 2

Monterey Bay Reggae Fest Monterey County Fairgrounds, 2004 Fairground Road, Monterey; (831) 394-6534, www.mbayreggaefest.net. The sprawling Monterey County Fairgrounds plays host to this annual festival featuring the liveliest of modern reggae acts. Eek-a-Mouse, Mighty Diamonds, and you-know-who’s brother, Richard Marley Booker, are just a sample of this year’s lineup.

SEPT. 1-3

Art and Soul Oakland Frank Ogawa Plaza and City Center, 14th St. and Clay, Oakl; (510) 444-CITY, www.artandsouloakland.com. 11am-6pm. $5. The seventh incarnation of this annual downtown Oakland festival includes dance performances, lots of art to view and purchase, an expanded Family Fun Zone, and a notably eclectic musical lineup: big-name performers include Lucinda Williams, Against Me!, the Legendary Fillmore Slim, Johnny Rawls, and Ted Leo and the Pharmacists.

Sausalito Art Festival Army Corps of Engineers-Bay Model Visitor Center and Marinship Park, Sausalito; (415) 331-3757, www.sausalitoartfestival.org. Check Web site for times. $5-20. The Sausalito waterfront will play host to hundreds of artists’ exhibits as well as family entertainment and top-notch live music from the likes of Jefferson Starship and the Marshall Tucker Band.

SEPT. 1-23

Free Shakespeare in the Park Presidio parade ground, SF; (415) 558-0888, www.sfshakes.org. Sat, 7:30pm; Sun and Labor Day, 2:30pm. Free. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream gets a brilliant rendition under the direction of Kenneth Kelleher on the outdoor stage. Families fostering budding lit and theater geeks should take note.

SEPT. 3

Cowgirlpalooza El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF; (415) 282-3325, www.elriosf.com. 3-9pm. $10. This sure-to-be-twangy evening on El Rio’s patio features music by the most compellingly country-fried female musicians around, including Kitty Rose, Starlene, Axton Kincaid, Burning Embers, 77 El Deora, and Four Year Bender.

SEPT. 5-9

San Francisco Electronic Music Festival Project Artaud Theater, 450 Florida, SF; www.sfemf.org. 8:30pm. $12-16. The seventh in an annual series of weeklong electronica parties. Fred Frith, Annea Lockwood, Univac, and David Behrman round out this year’s lineup.

SEPT. 8

911 Power to the Peaceful Festival Speedway Meadows, Golden Gate Park, SF; (415) 865-2170, www.powertothepeaceful.org. 11am-5pm. Free. This event calling for international human rights and an end to bombing features art and cultural exhibits and a talk with Amy Goodman, as well as performances by Michael Franti, the Indigo Girls, and DJ Spooky.

SEPT. 8-9

Bay Area Pet Fair Marin Center, 10 Ave of the Flags, San Rafael; (415) 229-3174, www.bayareapetfair.com. Sat, 10am-6pm; Sun, 10am-5pm. $5-7. This event does double duty as a celebration of companion animals and a venue for a massive pet adopt-athon, so bring the kids and the dog.

Brews on the Bay Jeremiah O’Brien, Pier 45, SF; www.sanfranciscobrewersguild.org. 12-4:30pm. $8-40. Beer tasting, live music, and food abound at the San Francisco Brewers Guild’s annual on-deck showcase.

Chocolate Festival Ghirardelli Square, 900 N Point, SF; www.ghirardellisq.com. 12-5pm. Free. An indisputably fun weekend at the square includes chocolate goodness from more than 30 restaurant and bakery booths, various activities for kids and families, and a hands-free Earthquake Sundae Eating Contest.

SEPT. 9

Solano Avenue Stroll Solano between San Pablo and the Alameda in Berkeley and Albany; (510) 527-5358, www.solanoavenueassn.org. 10am-6pm. Free. The long-running East Bay block party features a clown-themed parade, art cars, dunk tanks, and assorted artsy offerings of family fun, along with the requisite delicious food and musical entertainment.

SEPT. 15-16

Mill Valley Fall Arts Festival Old Mill Park, Mill Valley; (415) 381-8090, www.mvfaf.org. Sat, 10am-6pm; Sun, 10am-5pm. $7. Dig this juried show featuring original fine art, including jewelry, woodwork, painting, ceramics, and clothing.

Wisdom Festival Fort Mason Center, SF. (415) 452-0369, www.wisdomfestival.com. Sat, 10am-8pm; Sun, 10am-7pm. $8-$55. This fest features interactive panels, workshops, symposiums, and lectures, all geared toward your inner Shirley MacLaine.

SEPT. 22-23

Autumn Moon Festival Grant between California and Broadway and Pacific between Stockton and Kearney, SF; (415) 982-6306, www.moonfestival.org. 11am-6pm. Free. At one of Chinatown’s biggest annual gatherings you can see an acrobatic troupe, martial artists, street vendors, and, of course, lots of moon cakes. I like the pineapple the best.

SEPT. 28-30

A Taste of Greece Annunciation Cathedral, 245 Valencia, SF; (415) 864-8000, www.sfgreekfoodfestival.org. Call or check Web site for time. $5. Annunciation Cathedral’s annual fundraising event is an all-out food festival where you can steep yourself in Greek dishes, wine tasting, and the sounds of Greek Compania.

SEPT. 29-30

World Veg Festival San Francisco County Fair Building, Ninth Avenue and Lincoln, Golden Gate Park, SF; (415) 273-5481. www.sfvs.org. 10am-6pm. $5. For those afraid of hamburgers, this event features speakers, live entertainment, and local cuisine of the meatless variety.

SEPT. 30

Folsom Street Fair Folsom between Seventh and 12th streets, SF; www.folsomstreetfair.com. 11am-6pm. Free. The world’s largest leather gathering, coinciding with Leather Pride Week, features a new Leather Women’s Area along with myriad fetish and rubber booths. Musical performers include Ladytron and Imperial Teen, and comedian Julie Brown also will appear.

OCT. 3

Shuck and Swallow Oyster Challenge Ghirardelli Square, West Plaza, 900 North Point, SF; (415) 929-1730. 5pm. Free to watch, $25 per duo to enter. How many oysters can two people scarf down in 10 minutes? Find out as pairs compete at this most joyous of spectacles, then head to the oyster and wine pairing afterward at McCormick and Kuleto’s Seafood Restaurant, also in Ghirardelli Square.

OCT. 4-9

Fleet Week Various locations, SF; (650) 599-5057, www.fleetweek.us. Cries of “It’s a plane!” and “Now there’s a boat!” shall abound at San Francisco’s impressive annual gathering. Along with ship visits, there’ll be a big air show by the Blue Angels and the Viper West Coast Demonstration Team. And for the lonely among us, North Beach will be assholes and elbows with horny sailors and jarheads.

OCT. 4-14

Mill Valley Film Festival CinéArts at Sequoia, 25 Throckmorton, Mill Valley; 142 Throckmorton Theatre, 142 Throckmorton Ave, Mill Valley; Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center, 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; (925) 866-9559, www.mvff.com. Check Web site for times and prices. Documentaries and features of both the independent and international persuasion get screen time at this festival, the goal of which is insight into the various cultures of filmmaking.

OCT. 5-6

San Francisco Zinefest CELLspace, 2050 Bryant, SF; (415) 750-0991, www.sfzinefest.com. Fri, 2-8pm; Sat, 11am-7pm. Free. Appreciate the continuing vitality of the DIY approach at this two-day event featuring workshops and more than 40 exhibitors.

OCT. 5-7

Berkeley Juggling and Unicycling Festival King Middle School, 1781 Rose, Berkeley; www.berkeleyjuggling.org. Fri, 5-10pm; Sat, 9am-10pm; Sun, 9am-5pm. Check Web site for prices. More balls than hands. More feet than wheels.

Pacific Pinball Exposition Marin County Civic Center Exhibition Hall, San Rafael; www.nbam.org/ppexpo. Fri 2-10pm; Sat-Sun, 10am-12am. $20-35. Focusing on vintage machines, this inaugural festival promises to extol all things pinball. I think you get in free if you’re a deaf, dumb, and blind kid who can play a mean pinball.

OCT. 6-13

Litquake Various locations, SF; www.litquake.org. San Francisco’s annual literary maelstrom naturally features Q&As and readings by a gazillion local authors, including Daniel Handler, Jane Smiley, Dave Eggers, and Ann Patchett. The gang is honoring local writer Armistead Maupin with a lifetime achievement award.

OCT. 11-14

Oktoberfest by the Bay Fort Mason Center, Marina at Laguna, SF; www.oktoberfestbythebay.com. Check Web site for times. $25. One of the few places your lederhosen won’t look silly is the biggest Oktoberfest left of Berlin, where the Chico Bavarian Band will accompany German food and a whole lotta beer.<\!s>*

 

Two great cult movies

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Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (John Newland, US, 1973). As Grindhouse viewers or true grindhouse aficionados know, starting a title with Don’t was once a popular way to strike fear in sleazoids. The fact that Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark was made for TV would suggest it’s tame — that is, if the Don’t era didn’t coincide with the glory, rather than gory, days of frightening TV movies. In fact, this little number is at least as great as Dan Curtis’s 1975 Trilogy of Terror, with which it shares some knee-high shocks while being much less campy. Don’t Open the Fireplace might be a more accurate if less catchy title, especially since the dark — not to mention a soundtrack that layers sinister, gnomish voices into a chorus — is definitely something to be afraid of here. As lead character Sally, Kim Darby realizes this only after her incessant urge to remodel a mansion has taken on Pandora’s box connotations. In every dream home lies a heartache, and in every possessed old mansion lurks the doom of a nuclear family (as in Curtis’s 1976 Burnt Offerings) — or in this case, a frigid, childless couple. This movie is at least as creepy as any manifestation of Takeshi Shimizu’s Ju-on (Grudge) series, which updates its conceit. For an extra kick, imagine a remake with Martha Stewart in the lead role! (Johnny Ray Huston)

Fri/10, 11:30 p.m., Roxie Film Center. See Rep Clock

Welcome Home Brother Charles (Jamaa Fanaka, US, 1975). I once thought Jamaa Fanaka’s most outrageous movie was 1987’s Penitentiary 3. What could be wilder than Leon Isaac Kennedy’s character Too Sweet and übercutie Steve Antin as a sax-playing John Coltrane disciple in a prison overseen by Tony Geary, his receding mullet frazzled by peroxide, with drag queens and a crack-smoking, back-breaking sex dwarf named the Midnight Thud at his beck and call? Well, Penitentiary 3‘s psycho-racial-sexual parade marked only the baroque era of a one-of-a-kind directorial career that began with efforts such as this flick, a.k.a. Soul Vengeance, which has attained notoriety because it features a certain part of the male anatomy gone extra large and homicidal. There’s something crazily brilliant about the way Fanaka literally takes racist stereotypes to their illogical and logical ends. Though his material has been pure pulp, his career deserves to be viewed close to, if not alongside, those of UCLA peers such as Charles Burnett, Billy Woodberry, and Haile Gerima, none of whom has courted or been understood by white Hollywood. Look past the trouser snake, and you’ll see a moodily lit credit sequence with a score not dissimilar to Mick Jagger’s for Kenneth Anger’s Invocation of My Demon Brother and a politicized, funny, angry, and loving use of the color red. Admittedly, most people won’t be seeking out this movie for a performance by an actress in a supporting role, but it must be said that Reatha Grey is a natural. (Huston)

Fri/10, 7 p.m., Roxie; Sat/11, 2:30 p.m., Roxie

Chin music, pin hits

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Drifting into a coma at last week’s lethargic Oakland A’s–<\d>Los Angeles Angels game, I suddenly woke with a snort, dropped my bag of peanuts, and realized what was missing. No, not some bargain-price rookie flamethrower, though that wouldn’t hurt. It was too quiet. I needed some screeching Queen songs to drown out the deranged A’s fans screaming behind me.

But it wasn’t just me — the A’s and their fans were suffering from a dearth of head-bobbing, fist-punching at-bat music, in addition to a real game. One lousy Nirvana snippet does not inspire high confidence or achievement, making it hard for the team to compete with the sleek multimedia machine of, say, the Giants, the Seattle Mariners, or heck, any other ball team out there blasting tunes at top volume to work up the crowd into a bubbling froth whenever a hometown hitter saunters to the plate or whenever the action lags. Of course, the selections have fallen into predictable patterns: Barry Bonds has tended to favor Dr. Dre minimalist power hooks to usher in his home-run hits. There are the inevitable Linkin Park, Metallica, and T.I. tunes as well as "Crazy Train," "Yeah!" and, naturally, DJ Unk’s "Walk It Out," beloved of so many athletes and audio staffers — although sometimes musicians have their say, as when Twisted Sister asked John Rocker and the Atlanta Braves to stop playing "I Wanna Rock" after the player’s racist, homophobic, and sexist mouth-offs back in 2000.

Maybe we’re just damaged, in need of a perpetual soundtrack to go with our every activity and our shrinking attention spans — though some might argue that baseball, like so many sports, needs an infusion of new but not necessarily performance-enhanced energy. We can all use some style to go with our substance, which might explain why presidential candidate John Edwards was said to be pressing flesh at the still-unfolding, long-awaited Temple Nightclub in SoMa last week. And why it wasn’t too surprising to get an invite on a bisected bowling pin to Strike Cupertino, a new bowling alley–<\d>cum–<\d>nightclub down south in Cupertino Square, a withering mall off 280 where the venue has planted itself on the basement level. Its neighbors: a JC Penney, a Macy’s, a Frederick’s of Hollywood, an ice-skating rink, an AMC 16-plex, and lots of darkened store spaces. I stopped to admire the wizard-embellished pewter goblets and marked-down Kill Bill Elle Driver action figures at the sword-, knife-, and gun-filled Armour Geddon — still open for all your raging goth armament needs.

Strike, however, was raging all on its own, without the skull-handled dagger it never knew it needed. In a wink toward the Silicon Valley work-hard-play-hard crowd Strike’s owners hope to attract, Angela Kinsey from The Office threw out the first ball in the black-lit, modish alley. A luxe bar dreamed up by Chris Smith, one of the team that designed Nobu, was swarming with guests clamoring for free Striketinis.

Apparently Strike Cupertino isn’t original: the first one sprung, after a full makeover, from Bowlmor Lanes in Greenwich Village, New York City, in 1997, and went on, according to the press literature, to become the highest-grossing bowling alley in the world. Others are located in Bethesda, Md., Long Island, and Miami. But what, no Vegas? Strike seems perfectly suited for Sin City, with its bright, flash, well-upholstered decor — equal parts retro ’50s and ’60s, both American Graffiti and Goldfinger — and multiple massive plasma screens distractingly flickering the Giants game, ESPN, any game, above the lanes, the lounge, and every surface. Peppy, poppy ’80s rock and R&B — "Hey Mickey" and "Little Red Corvette" — coursed from the DJ booth next to the raft of pool and air hockey tables and the game arcade as upscale clubbish figurines, blue-collar bowling diehards, and Asian and Latino kids tried out the lanes and tables and some fair American and Asian finger food.

I stuck a kiwi into a chocolate fountain and spurted sticky brown stuff all over my white shoes and shirt and wondered, could this be the future of clubbing — or sports? Amusement parks for adults, lubricated with fruity but muscley cocktails? Or maybe this is as hellacious as it gets in drowsy Cupertino.

Still, I thought Strike was worth swinging by, if only to play on a sparkling, well-waxed, seemingly nick-free lane for the first time, in fresh, BO-free shoes, with immaculate, grimeless balls. Also, knowing how many miles per hour your ball is traveling is a trip, if somewhat discouraging for featherweights like yours truly. Yes, I know the $5 cover after 9 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays seems excessive for, well, a bowling alley, but Monday evening seems a deal with all-night unlimited play for a flat $14. Word has it that the nightspot also enforces a dress code — and that even Bonds would have to leave his cap at home — but I say perhaps just cut back on the supershort bowling-shirt dresses and fishnet stockings on the teenagey waitresses. We’re not in Vegas yet, Toto.

STRIKE CUPERTINO

Cupertino Square

10123 Wolf Road, Cupertino

(408) 252-BOWL

www.bowlatstrike.com

YOU SCORED

OLIVER FUTURE


The Los Angeles buzz band generates scratchy, acidic melodic rock with plenty of post-punk seasoning. With Boy in the Bubble and 8 Bit Idiot. Wed/8, 9 p.m., $7. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com

ROBBERS ON HIGH STREET


Veering from tree cities to familial familiars, the NYC combo come with Grand Animals (New Line). With the Wildbirds and the Old-Fashioned Way. Thurs/9, 9:30 p.m., $8. Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. www.cafedunord.com

GREAT NORTHERN


Melodic pop for modern-rock romantics. With Comas and Twilight Sleep. Sat/11, 9 p.m., $13–<\d>$15. Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF. www.slims-sf.com

MIKAELA’S FIEND AND SEXY PRISON


Driving punk tumult meets salacious death disco. With Mika Miko and Twin. Sun/12, 8:30 p.m., call for price. 21 Grand, 416 25th St., Oakl. www.21grand.org

PELICAN


The Windy City instrumentalists skew shorter — seven minutes at most — and focus on songs on their new City of Echoes (Hydra Head). With Clouds and Garagantula. Sun/12, 8:30 p.m., $13–<\d>$15. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. www.musichallsf.com

Daft Punk makes it harder, better, faster, stronger…

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By Sean Manning

dpunk.jpg

The palpable current of body heat and the nervous tension of thudding beats caused some of those packed in front of the stage to lose inhibition and go into freak-out mode, while others busted a move with their glow sticks, or simply resorted to ecstatic screaming. Berkeley’s Greek Theatre was throbbing with life – and Daft Punk hadn’t even started playing yet.

Call it a show that was nothing if not a tribute to the undeniable musical power of anticipation and release. Case in point: the adrenaline-baiting dance mix that filled the venue as a mysterious black curtain draped the stage that was being prepared for the French house legends. A gust of wind occasionally gave a glimpse of a blasting strobe light or a bit of metallic rigging. The effect worked: not only was the crowd visibly anxious, leading to general shenanigans and throwing things, but some concert-goers were actually tugging at the curtain to get a glimpse of the stage setup that took well over a half hour to set up.

When the curtain peeled away, the sheer buildup had already amped the audience to a level of intensity that most bands would be lucky to get during their encore. And that was the thing: Daft Punk’s entire set felt like an encore, going to absurd lengths to top itself. What could be cooler than hearing “Around the World”? Well, how about “Around the World” blasting out of Daft Punk’s obsidian pyramid set, with a webbed lighting rig, a jumbo big screen, and – oh yeah, throw in the vocals from “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger,” too, while you’re at it.

And for the actual encore? Well, they lit everything else up onstage, why not light up Daft Punk themselves? Yeah, that was it. And when they turned around, Guy-Manuel de Homem Christo and Thomas Bangalter’s jackets lit up with the Daft Punk logo to the delight of an entire hillside of apeshit-happy fans. Epic.

Dirty truth bombs

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Been around da block as Jenny and I have? Then you’re all way too familiar with that cad Hoochie Coochie Man, that bogus Boogie (Chillen) Man, and — natch, Nick — that Loverman. But hey, who’s this new game, Grinderman? This grind has little to do with a full-bodied Arabica, the daily whatever, or the choppers that go "Clink!" in the night. It’s all about that which is toppermost of the poppermost on young men’s minds, always skirting young men’s fancies. Namely, sex, sex, and more sex. Oh yeah, and sex.

No pretense, prenups, or prenatal care here. "An overriding theme of mine is, I guess, a man and a woman against the world," Grinderman’s primo romantic, Nick Cave, murmurs. "But for this record, the woman seems to be down in the street, engaged in life, and the man is kind of left on his own, with, um, y’know, a tube of complimentary shampoo and a sock."

It’s the rough, sordid, inelegant, dirty-old-man truth, youth — and judging from Grinderman’s self-titled debut (Mute/Anti-), it sounds awfully good to me. Consider the configuration of Cave on vocals and guitar along with three Bad Seeds (violinist and electric bouzoukist Warren Ellis, bassist Martyn Casey, and drummer Jim Sclavunos), his solo band set free to create music collaboratively, loosely tethered to Cave’s mad songwriting skills. There’s sex, yes, but Grinderman is also about finding fresh, new positions and approaches to the old rump roast of rock ‘n’ roll, copping new moves to old blues, and finding new grooves for honest old dogs. After all, Cave will have been on this blighted speck for half a century this year. "Look, I’ve been turning 50 for years, so it’s kind of academic at this stage," says the polymath who won over critics with his screenplay for the 2005 Aussie western The Proposition. "I think there’s an old man’s anger behind this record and a sense of humor about it as well, I guess, that you only get with age, really. Where all you can do is kinda laugh. But I do think there’s a sort of rage that’s 50 years old."

It’s there in "Go Tell the Women": "All we want is a little consensual rape in the afternoon<\!s>/ And maybe a bit more in the evening," Cave coos. Scenes abound of balding devils treating themselves to lonely hand jobs in the shower or restlessly flipping channels, fondling the changer, on universal remote; on "Love Bomb," Cave grumbles, "I be watching the MTV<\!s>/ I be watching the BBC<\!s>/ I be searching the Internet." He’s aware of the "mad mullahs and dirty bombs" out there ("Honey Bee [Let’s Fly to Mars]"), but instead of succumbing to death and devastation, Grinderman gets lost in the life force, a many-monikered lady, the old in-and-out, monkey magik — real Caveman stuff.

The band wisely avoided choosing the latter label. But amid testosterone, no one lit on the charm. Congenialman doesn’t have quite the same ring, though the Cave I speak to from his home in Brighton, England, is definitely a lighter, brighter, wittier, and much more charming creature than I ever imagined. Searching for a lighter midinterview, Cave is in fine spirits — Grinderman had only done three shows and an in-store, but he and Sclavunos were pleased with the reception to their collective nocturnal emission.

At the larger Bad Seeds shows, Cave explains, "the audience is a long way away. It’s just been really good to kind of … see what an audience looks like again."

The four first came upon the idea of starting a new group when, while performing as the Bad Seeds, Sclavunos says, "we’d catch glimmers of it in rehearsals or sound checks. Someone would make some awful noise, and we’d all get excited and start playing along with it."

The sole American member of Grinderman and the Bad Seeds — and a onetime member of the Cramps and Sonic Youth — laughs abruptly when I ask him to describe his dynamic with Cave: "Hah! Complicated!" They talk a lot, about matters beyond music. "There’s such a tendency, such an anti-intellectual streak in rock ‘n’ roll music," Sclavunos continues. "Such a fear of seeming to know things and such a tendency to dumb things down for the sake of trying to make it seem more real or give it more integrity. Don’t let it get too complicated or it starts smacking of prog rock or something! But Nick’s not afraid of ideas, and he’s not afraid to try out ideas, and in that sense we’re all of the same mind."

Grinderman is likewise as collective minded as possible. "We do it in very much the traditional democratic manner of bands," Sclavunos offers. "Whoever can be bossier in expressing an opinion about something has the opportunity to speak up, and if there’s anything really objectionable going on, you can certainly count on people raising a fuss!"

The idea was to try something different, Cave confirms. "I asked Warren Ellis what I should sing about lyrically because we had a pretty clear understanding what the music was going to be like, and he said he didn’t know but just don’t sing about God and don’t sing about love," Cave details. "A piece of information like that initially throws me for a six, but it’s actually enormously helpful for me as a writer because it kind of cuts down your options and pushes you into another place." Contrary to belief, the idea was not to re-create Cave’s cacophonous early combo, the Birthday Party. "The Birthday Party were actually way too complicated," Cave says mirthfully. "We don’t have enough brain cells left to be able to cope with that kind of thing."

Sooo … what with all the "No Pussy Blues" and the odes to "Depth Charge Ethel" shoved down Grinderman’s trou, one wonders what Cave’s wife, Susie Bick, must think of the lyrics? She likes the band and the shows, he says, then sighs, "Um, yeah. You know, I think there may have been a certain confusion to begin with, but I cleared that up." As in, who exactly you were writing about? "Yeah. Exactly. Yeah."<\!s>*

GRINDERMAN

Thurs/26, 9 p.m., $26 (sold out)

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

www.gamh.com

Also Fri/27, 9 p.m., $26 (sold out)

Slim’s

333 11th St., SF

www.slims-sf.com

ROAMING, CHARGED

CRIBS


UK punk pop with enough energy — and provocation, thanks to the Femlin-perpetuated sex and violence in the video for "Men’s Needs," off their new Men’s Needs, Women’s Needs, Whatever (Warner Bros.) — to shiver your baby bunker’s timbers. With Sean Na-Na and the Hugs. Wed/25, 8 p.m., $11–<\d>$13. Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF. www.slims-sf.com

BAT FOR LASHES


Another kick inside for Kate Bush lovers? Vocalist Natasha Khan is an ethereal ringer for the lady. I dug the all-girl folk-and-art-song combo when they played South by Southwest — and the affection is catching: Bat for Lashes’ Fur and Gold (Caroline) was recently short-listed for UK’s Mercury Prize. Mon/30, 8:30 p.m., $10–<\d>$12. Café du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. www.cafedunord.com

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