› publicwriter@techsploitation.com
TECHSPLOITATION In a recent New York Times Book Review screed, the proverbial old-white-male author John Updike offers a reader’s digest version of the argument against online publishing. For those of us who are genuinely puzzled by the animosity directed against efforts to digitize books (like Google Print or the Internet Archive’s Open Library Project), Updike’s short essay is quite instructive.
Updike offers the usual salvos against the “unedited, unattributed” nature of most online writing, but the true source of his wrath is a profound distaste for the idea of reading as a “community activity.” He’s disgusted by the idea of texts being intermingled and passed around “promiscuously” in electronic libraries. More than that, he’s weirded out by the way readers intermingle online. Back in the 1950s and ’60s, Updike was never called on to make appearances or have his photo on book jackets, and he still longs for the silences and authorial anonymity of that experience. Ultimately, he predicts that the demand for an intimate back-and-forth between author and audience on the Web will lead us back to “the pre-literate societies, where only the present, live person can make an impression and offer, as it were, value.”
Most writers who, like myself, spend their days jabbering online have a tendency to read essays like Updike’s as the rantings of an obsolete Luddite who can’t tell the difference between a wiki and an RSS feed. It’s easy to make fun of the guy for not knowing a whole lot about the technologies he’s criticizing. But let’s take him seriously for a minute and consider what he’s actually getting at beneath his profound misunderstandings of Google Print and bookshelf mash-ups.
The essay begins with a wistful evocation of the bookstores he visited when young: Mandrake’s in Cambridge, where Updike found New Directions paperbacks; the old Doubleday’s in New York on Fifth Avenue, “with an ascending spiral staircase visible through plate glass.” He worries about losing the understated beauty of books and the quiet dignity of the stores that trade in them. In short, he feels like he’s losing the public spaces devoted to buying and selling books. And yet what he scorns most in his essay is the idea of a “universal library,” democratically accessible to all and long the dream of techie futurists like Wired cofounder Kevin Kelley and digital archivist Rick Prelinger. Why wouldn’t Updike welcome a new, bigger public space devoted to books?
To answer, let me return for a moment to the complaint made by pretty much every blogger who has argued with an old-school print journalist about the legitimacy of online writing. Typically bloggers upbraid these print writers for fearing new technologies in a sentence that goes something like this: “If you simply replace the word ‘blog’ with the word ‘printing press’ in this argument, you see how the argument against blogs is like arguing against the progress of civilization.”
But there is no evidence that anyone protested the invention of the printing press for destroying writing. Sure, there may have been some angry monks here and there who could no longer make a living writing books out by hand. But in general, writers welcomed the invention of the printing press. It led to a flowering of the writing industry and literacy. Meanwhile, governments liked the printing press because it made propaganda a whole lot simpler. It also made writing easier to censor. Unlike handwritten books, which were labor intensive but hard to regulate, every book made with a printing press could be tracked. In England, shortly after the printing press gained ascendancy, all printers had to register with the state for exactly this reason.
The invention of the printing press is nothing like the invention of the Web, which liberates writers from their dependence on publishers regulated by the caprices of states and markets. And so, for now at least, Updike is right that the Internet takes us back to a pre-Gutenberg era. Until we start seeing major censorship crackdowns on Web publishing — rather than the threat of pervasive surveillance, which is certainly chilling — online publishing will never behave like the printing press. The printing press led to the privatization of reading, but the Web leads to its socialization.
So perhaps what Updike is getting at when he bemoans the rise of digital books is really the rise of an uncensored public space. He’s not afraid of technology, but of the public itself. SFBG
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who loves libraries and old bookstores.
Media
Is Updike obsolete?
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› tredmond@sfbg.com
Just about everybody in the “respectable” news media is going to call Sup. Chris Daly’s latest charter amendment a crackpot idea, so I might as well join the crackpots right now. I think it’s wonderful.
Daly wants to require the mayor of San Francisco to appear once a month at a Board of Supervisors meeting and answer questions. That’s it — no decisions get made, no policies change. The mayor just has to stand up in public, in front of the district-elected legislators, and explain himself.
It’s a longstanding tradition in England, where the prime minister has to show up at Parliament for “question time.” It makes for outstanding politics and great TV. It’s often pretty rough: The PM gets interrogated by the opposition and fires back. When the smoke clears, the public knows a little more about the government’s policies, and the nation’s chief executive is a little more accountable.
Imagine if G.W. Bush, who doesn’t like press conferences, embodies the imperial presidency, and hates having to answer in public to anything, had to endure question time before the House of Representatives. Imagine Maxine Waters or Barbara Lee or John Murtha asking him about the war. (For that matter, imagine Bill Clinton avoiding impeachment by hashing the questions out in front of a Republican Congress long before it ever got to that.)
There’s a lot to like about parliamentary democracies, and one of the best things is the relatively weak executive branch. Question time in England helps keep the prime minister under control.
And of course in San Francisco mayors are pretty powerful and tend to be pretty aloof. Willie Brown just ignored critics. Gavin Newsom talks to the press but doesn’t get into active debates that much. So it wouldn’t hurt the mayor — any mayor — to have to spend an hour a month in a public session responding to the supervisors’ questions; it wouldn’t hurt the city either. It would do wonders for fighting the inclination toward secrecy in the executive branch. And you know you’d want to watch.
Yeah, Chris Daly is not a fan of Gavin Newsom, and the political consultants working for the mayor will have all sorts of reasons to call this a personal attack and an assault on separation of powers (if not on the very nature of American democracy). But come on — if the prime minister of England can find time to handle this while leading one of the world’s great powers, the mayor of San Francisco can fit it into his tight schedule.
Onward: The deal that gives Dean Singleton’s MediaNews Group control over most of the Bay Area dailies is now complete — and already there’s word that Singleton and the Hearst Corp., which owns the ostensibly competing San Francisco Chronicle, will be doing a joint web venture together.
From the June 29 Contra Costa Times:
“MediaNews executives revealed the company is discussing with Hearst Corp. a joint venture to begin a new Web site involving the Bay Area online products of the Times and Mercury News; of the MediaNews publications in the Bay Area; and of the Hearst-owned Chronicle.”
Monopoly marches on.
Funny: I didn’t see anything about this in the Chron. SFBG
FOURTH OF JULY
The Fourth of July listings were compiled by Joseph DeFranceschi and Duncan Scott Davidson. All events take place on July 4 unless otherwise noted.
Fireworks Dinner with Jazz Piano Top of the Mark, 999 California, SF; 392-3434, www.topofthemark.com. 7:30pm, $189 per couple. The music of jazz pianist Ricardo Scales and breathtaking views of the city’s fireworks display accompany this elegant dinner of a four-course fixed menu served with a complementary bottle of champagne.
Fourth of July Waterfront Festival Pier 39, Fisherman’s Wharf, Ghirardelli Square, The Cannery, SF; 705-5500, www.pier39.com. 1:30-10pm, free. This all-day fair featuring entertainment, arts and crafts, food, and American flags ends with the famed Municipal Pier Fireworks Extravaganza starting at about 9:30pm.
Hornblower Yacht Forth of July Cruises Pier 33, Embarcadero, SF; 1-800-467-6256, www.hornblower.com. Noon, $49; 6:30pm, $119–$219. Spend the afternoon out on the bay with Hornblower’s lunch cruise; or why not watch fireworks and enjoy a buffet dinner ($119), or an all-inclusive, four-course extravaganza ($219) on your evening voyage.
Kayak Trip to 4th of July Fireworks City Kayak, Pier 39, SF; 357-1010, www.citykayak.com. 6pm, $68. Paddle around with sea lions, enjoy the fireworks and sip champagne (included) from the best seat in the house on this unique aquatic experience.
Red and White Fleet Forth of July Fireworks Cruises Pier 43 1/2 at Fisherman’s Wharf, SF; 673-2900, www.redandwhite.com. 7:45pm, $45 ($25 for kids age 1-11). Red and White Fleet will send out four ships to cover this popular event so get your tickets early and don’t forget your Dramamine.
El Rio BBQ and Bandfest El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF; 282-3325, www.elriosf.com. 3-8pm, free admission. Come listen to rock music from the Birds and Batteries, Low Red Land, Mr. Divisadero, and Solar Powered People. Drink beer all day — it’s the American way.
BAY AREA
4th of July at the Berkeley Marina Berkeley Marina, 201 University, Berk; (510) 548-5335, www.ci.berkeley.ca.us. noon-9:30pm, free. Berkeley’s all day, alcohol-free, fair with entertainment, food, games, face painting, and giant waterslide is a great place for families and ends with, you guessed it, fireworks.
4th of July Celebration at Jack London Square Broadway at Embarcadero, Oakl; 1-866-295-9853, www.jacklondonsquare.com. 1-9:30pm, free. With international food, children’s activities, arts and crafts, and fireworks the real highlight of this event is a free two hour pops concert by the Oakland East Bay Symphony.
Fuck the 4th Sale AK Press, 674-A 23rd St., Oakl; (510) 208-1700, www.akpress.org. July 3, 4:10pm, free. In addition to 25 percent off everything in the warehouse (books, CDs, DVDs, clothing), and sale books for as low as $1, there will be entertainment, food, and an atmosphere of summer glee.
Oakland A’s Beer Festival McAfee Coliseum (East Side Club), 7000 Coliseum Way, Oakl; (510) 638-4627, oakland.athletics.mlb.com. Noon-2pm, ticket to the game needed for entry. Sample beers from over 30 breweries before enjoying America’s game on America’s day. Play ball!
Redwood City 67th Annual Independence Day Parade Brewster and Winslow, Redwood City; (650) 365-1825, www.parade.org. 10am, free. Redwood City hosts the country’s largest July 4th parade and their all-day festival features food, entertainment, vendors of all sorts, marching bands, and ends in traditional fashion with a fireworks display at around 9:30pm.
San Francisco Symphony Shoreline Amphitheatre, One Amphitheatre Pkwy, Mountain View; (650) 967-3000, www.livenation.com. 8pm, $15-28.50. You’ll soon forget that Mountain View’s beautiful outdoor amphitheater is built atop a garbage dump when guest conductor Randal Fleisher leads the San Francisco Symphony in a concert complete with fireworks. The program features music and clips from Disney film favorites.
USS Hornet 4th of July Party USS Hornet Museum, 707 W. Hornet, Pier 3, Alameda; (510) 521-8448, www.hornetevents.com. 10am-9:50pm, $20 ($5 for kids). View a F-14 Tomcat and Apollo space capsule among other items on a tour of this aircraft carrier which will have music, games, children’s activities, and a great view of the Bay Area fireworks.
The Guardian listings deadline is two weeks prior to our Wednesday publication date. To submit an item for consideration, please include the title of the event, a brief description of the event, date and time, venue name, street address (listing cross streets only isn’t sufficient), city, telephone number readers can call for more information, telephone number for media, and admission costs. Send information to Listings, the Guardian Building, 135 Mississippi St., SF, CA 94107; fax to (415) 487-2506; or e-mail (paste press release into e-mail body — no text attachments, please) to listings@sfbg.com. We cannot guarantee the return of photos, but enclosing an SASE helps. Digital photos may be submitted in jpeg format; the image must be at least 240 dpi and four inches by six inches in size. We regret we cannot accept listings over the phone. SFBG
Never mind Brookers . . .
› numa@techsploitation.com
TECHSPLOITATION In the world of weird cultural appropriation that is the Web, nothing can compare to the strange tale of a Moldavian pop song called “Dragostea din Tei.” It began in 2003 as a catchy disco tune by boy band the O-Zone, who sing in Romanian and look like a queer version of Duran Duran (or perhaps a queerer version). The video for the song started circuutf8g on the Web a couple years ago and is full of silly shots in which the band dances on an airplane, its members hugging one another and randomly morphing into cartoon characters.
The infectious song became a hit in Europe and immediately inspired several parody/homage fan videos online. One, by a Finnish artist, depicted an androgynous anime character dancing to the tune, and so many people accessed her little movie that no server would host it. Soon a Japanese cartoon version appeared, in which two cats dance while subtitles supply words in Japanese that sound like the Romanian lyrics, thus producing a running commentary of Japanese nonsense.
The obvious and exuberant queerness of the video inspired many other versions, including one in which three Polish guys dance around with giant dildos and another that aired on Spanish television with the lyrics changed to include the phrase marica tu, which means “you’re queer.” Earlier this year a group of students at the University of British Columbia gave the Web possibly the last (or at least the best) word in gay appropriations of the video: Four nubile Canadian men jump around, take off their shirts, chase airplanes, and frolic by the seashore while mouthing the lyrics to the song. Although this elaborate creation was linked from Collegehumor.com, it’s hard to see the parody in it — it’s a straight homage to the goofy Moldavian original.
While these queer appropriations (or approbations) warmed up the Net, a very different group also played telephone with “Dragostea din Tei,” creating parodies of parodies inspired by a 19-year-old American named Gary Brolsma. Brolsma had recorded himself lip-synching, making faces, and chair-dancing to the song with a Web cam and posted it on his Web site. Within days, copies of the video had made it all over the Net, inspiring people to re-create Brolsma’s hand-waving and nutty facial expressions in their own videos. Over many iterations, this meme was dubbed the “Numa Numa Dance,” in reference to the chorus of “Dragostea din Tei,” which goes “numa numa iei, numa numa iei.” Although Brolsma was embarrassed by the phenomenon and stopped talking to the press about it, his happy, geeky imitators posted Numa Numa Dances from all over the world — including Thailand, Hong Kong, the UK, and, of course, Canada. My favorite was made by a couple of kids in the United States studying for a calculus exam, who dance around to the song and wave printouts of formulas and binary numbers in front of the screen.
Even the US Navy got in on the action with a video that sort of straddles the line between gay and dorky.
Despite its global popularity, few in the media paid any attention to this queer geek meme until a straight white girl named Brookers appropriated it on YouTube.com. Her version, called “Crazed Numa Fan,” shows her doing the exact same thing you see in every other Numa Numa Dance flick: She waves her arms and makes faces in front of her bedroom Web cam. But her video, which is no more or less creatively cute than the hundreds of others out there, was downloaded 1.5 million times. And a couple weeks ago it earned the skinny blond 20-year-old a development deal with former MTV star Carson Daly’s production company.
I know, I know. Predictable as hell, right?
But while Brookers’s fame will flare out, the Numa Numa Dance will continue on its merry digital way. When I watch all those happy imitators bouncing to “Dragostea din Tei” on their Web cams, I feel viscerally the utopian promise of global pop culture. I’m nodding along to a joyful tune in a language I rarely hear, and it’s been mashed up, appropriated, and reappropriated, our pleasure in it shared and reshared until it feels like everybody everywhere is doing the Numa Numa Dance along with me. SFBG
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who loves any Romance language that retains the neuter, along with several Latin declensions.
For a short compendium of the best in “Dragostea din Tei,” see the online version of this column at www.sfbg.com.]
Original video: video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2294961099056745991
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› tredmond@sfbg.com
The local daily newspapers haven’t paid much attention to it, but there’s a ferocious fuss going on in the blog world over political power and journalistic ethics, and it’s all swirling around a 34-year-old who runs the world’s most popular political blog out of his home in Berkeley.
It’s a fascinating story because of what it says about the revolution that’s taking place in media and politics today.
Markos Moulitsas Zuniga runs the blog DailyKos, which started off as just another liberal political blog by a liberal political activist (who used to be a political consultant and worked at one point for Howard Dean). But in the past three years it’s become phenomenally successful: DailyKos.com gets about a half million page views a day, which puts it in the league not with most of the other blogs but with major mainstream news operations. Moulitsas has no staff — no reporters, no editors, no reviewers, no nothing. His readers — or, more accurately, the members of the huge and growing DailyKos community of 92,000 registered users — provide almost all of the content. They write their own personal blogs called diaries, they comment on each other’s stuff, they promote (and dis) candidates, and they have formed the best known place in the country for the Dean wing of the Democratic Party to meet and confer.
The politicians have noticed, big time: Leading Democrats (like Rep. Nancy Pelosi) post on the site. A couple of months ago, a former president (Jimmy Carter) stopped by to blog. When the Kossacks organized an annual convention this summer, Sen. Harry Reid and presidential hopeful Mark Warner showed up.
So now DailyKos is in the big leagues — and not surprisingly, critics are starting to snipe.
The latest: Moulitsas and Jerome Armstrong, who runs MyDD.com, have written a book together, and are longtime pals. (Moulitsas calls Armstrong his “blogfather.”) Armstrong is an active political consultant, and the candidates he works for sometimes get nice mentions on DailyKos. There’s been a lot of mumbling about how there might be some kind of sordid conspiracy here (hire Armstrong, get plugged on DailyKos), and it all became louder when the New Republic got word that Armstrong had been accused of illegally hyping stocks on the Web several years ago — and that Moulitsas had sent an e-mail around to a private mailing list urging other bloggers to keep it quiet.
The right-wingers (including David Brooks of the New York Times) have had a field day with this, acting as if they’ve finally unmasked the Great Left-Wing Conspiracy. Actually, the fact that it all came out in the open pretty quickly shows what a lousy secret cabal the bloggers make. Mostly, Moulitsas’s e-mail was just pretty stupid. But the whole episode raises the question: At what point do bloggers have a responsibility to be accountable, to have ethics and disclosure standards the way “mainstream” journalists are supposed to?
I e-mailed Moulitsas about it, and he’s pretty clear: “People like you keep trying to pound a round peg into a square hole,” he said. “This is citizen media. It is what it is … Old media might want the media landscape to resemble their old world, but it doesn’t, not anymore.”
Which is absolutely true. And I love DailyKos. And the blog explosion is perhaps the most democratic thing that’s happened to media in the history of civilization.
But at some point, citizen journalism isn’t enough — you need reporters and editors and a real staff to give the public real information about the world. And when that happens in the blog world (and it will soon) a lot of the rules are going to change. SFBG
Mr. Big Stuff
> a&eletters@sfbg.com
America is unquestionably the land of the large. We well realize that gigantic things generate a sense of awe — along with danger — as it currently applies to presidential hubris and supersized snacks. It’s no accident that the artists who work biggest are United States residents — not to mention men: Think of James Turrell, who transformed a crater in the Arizona desert into a massive temple to natural light; Richard Serra, whose hefty steel sculptures have blocked public plazas and famously crashed through a gallery floor; Christo, whose canvases are world landmarks and entire states; and even Jeff Koons, who effectively inflated a topiary puppy to the size of a mountain. They may have international reputations (and a few peers in other countries), but there is something undeniably American in the desire to realize dreams that large. The trick is to translate that sense of awe into something more than size envy.
Matthew Barney is perhaps the first contemporary artist to translate the idea of that monumental impulse to the media age. His latest venture, “Matthew Barney: Drawing Restraint,” which opens at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art this week (look for a review in these pages soon), is a sizable, career-spanning project. Like most of his work, it involves a feature-length film, and objects and images that relate to a self-invented universe, one filled with references to the human body, landscapes, and landmarks. Perhaps, as some critics have suggested, Barney’s work extends the enveloping nature of film into three-dimensional space, or synthesizes various art forms into a Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk — that total, epic extravaganza of a term that’s frequently attached to Barney. Whatever it’s called, it feels like something major.
A HIGH PRICE TO PAY?
Barney’s Drawing Restraint series — which comprises performances, videos, a feature film, and drawings — is rooted in the idea of struggle, transformation, and creation. The pieces in the ongoing series reflect the artist’s changing means — the earliest of them were done with Barney attempting to make drawings on the wall while shackled with rubber tethers or jumping on a trampoline and inscribing a self-portrait on the ceiling. Drawing Restraint 14, which was recently executed at SFMOMA, involved the artist scaling the building’s tubular skylight and drawing on the curved wall. Drawing Restraint 9, as has been widely reported, costars Barney’s real-life partner Björk, was filmed on a large Japanese whaling ship and employed the full crew as extras (a primary theme of the film is Barney’s identity as an occidental — read: American — in an inscrutable Japanese culture), and was realized on a budget of nearly $5 million.
That seems an attractive sum for an artist to be working with, but not when you compare it to the costs of this country’s greatest cultural exports — Hollywood movies — or even the price of an impressionist painting at auction. It definitely pales before Damien Hirst’s recently publicized bid to make the priciest work of art ever: a diamond-encrusted skull costing some $18.8 million. If Barney could raise those kinds of funds, most likely he’d have little trouble taking his vision to a next level, be it with CGI effects or with greater amounts of his signature material, petroleum jelly.
EXCESS AND RESTRAINT
The SFMOMA exhibition involved casting 1,600 gallons of the stuff, a relatively small amount in Barney terms, in a rectangular mold — a process that was slowed by clogged hoses and a minor rupture on the museum steps. As he did at the Guggenheim with his 2003 Cremaster Cycle exhibition, Barney easily occupies a good chunk of the museum. The show covers the whole of the fourth floor, which has, for the first time, most of its walls removed. The now-vast galleries house a few whale-sized sculptures, all illuminated with hundreds of industrial-looking lightbulbs installed by Barney’s crew. Clusters of sleek flat-screen monitors hang from the ceiling throughout. While it’s not the most expensive show that SFMOMA has mounted — recent ones involving less exotic materials have had much bigger price tags — Drawing Restraint feels deluxe, even if its most used material is cool, white plastic instead of precious stones.
Is Barney’s work gracious or self-absorbed? Is his work fueled by ego, the art market, or artistic drive? These are difficult questions, and although the Cremaster exhibition was accompanied by a telephone book–sized catalog with reams of explanatory text, it’s still difficult to know. Critic Jerry Saltz, in a review of Drawing Restraint 9, described Barney as “a mystic exploring his own inner cathedral.” It seems apt, as that religious edifice is a cavernous container in which to contemplate mystical phenomena, not to mention a form to which museums are often compared. We’re meant to enter them and be quietly wowed, whether we believe the dogma or not.
Those who have tickets to the already sold-out Barney lecture on June 23 — an example of his rock star status — will most likely come away with a sense that the artist possesses a genuine humbleness and an unerring drive to realize his vision. He thinks big, and manages to live up to his ambitions with dignity. Whatever you think of his work, you gotta admire his supersized pluck. SFBG
MATTHEW BARNEY: DRAWING RESTRAINT
June 23–Sept. 17
Fri.–Tues., 11 a.m.–5:45 p.m.;
Thurs., 11 a.m.–>8:45 p.m.
SFMOMA
151 Third St., SF
$7–$12.50, free for 12 and under and members (free first Tues.; half price Thurs., 6–8:45 p.m.)
(415) 357-4000
For Drawing Restraint events, go to www.sfmoma.org
Personal surveillance etiquette
> trace@techsploitation.com
TECHSPLOITATION In an alternate universe, the National Security Agency’s database of every telephone call made over the past five years in the United States is being used in couples counseling sessions to prove that some guy really did say that mean thing his boyfriend says he said. But in this universe, where the government spies on you rather than keeping couples from breaking up over stupid shit, we must rely on our personal phone surveillance logs to preserve social connectedness.
That’s why I’ve been having an etiquette crisis about my smart phone. It’s a Treo 650, the kind that holds a zillion numbers in memory and can therefore identify anybody calling me who has called before. It’s like a just-in-time call-tracing system. Even when people try to block their numbers, I can often tell who they are based on how the block looks. One colleague’s blocked caller ID always pops up as “4321” and another as “9999999.” My phone also maintains a fairly extensive log of who has called me, so I can browse through my own personal phone records for the past year and a half to figure out names, numbers, and times called.
As more people acquire similar phones, I become increasingly alarmed by all this record keeping — not so much because of the mini-NSA feelings engendered, but because I’m not sure what the social rules around it are. For example, I can now be fairly certain that if I call a friend or colleague’s cell phone, they’ll know it’s me before they answer. Even creepier, they’ll know I called, and when, even if I don’t choose to leave a message. And they know that I know the same things about them when they call. Thence comes my etiquette crisis.
You see, the whole practice of calling and hanging up without leaving a message has taken on a new meaning. Calling and hanging up is no longer really an option — even if you do hang up, a record of your actions lingers on. And there’s no benefit in terms of stopping cranks or fraudsters here because caller ID is easy to fake or block. There are at least a dozen services that help you spoof the number on your phone so it looks as if you’re calling from 6969696 or whatever. So this is really only an issue for the casual phone caller who isn’t energetically paranoid enough to go through the trouble of altering her phone number.
All this is an elaborate explanation for why I stood in the street the other day, staring at a missed-call notice on my phone and wondering if the person who called intended for me to call him back. He hadn’t left a message, but then again, he didn’t need to — he’s a pretty tech-savvy person and would certainly have anticipated that I would know he called and precisely when. Was it like a “call me but not urgently”? Was it just a transient sort of request, like an invite to lunch that would time out by the time I got a message, so he didn’t bother leaving one? (In that case, I thought to myself, I really didn’t need to call him back.) Or was it some new form of passive-aggressiveness, in which my decision whether or not to call him back based on the call trace became the measure of my loyalty to our friendship?
Charlie, who watched me staring at my phone, opined that I didn’t have to call the person back. But then I reminded her of a spat we’d had where she cited my cell phone log, saying she could prove that she’d called 10 times before I called back. She conceded, “Well, you should always call me back if I don’t leave a message, but nobody else.”
This seemed to me an awfully arbitrary rule. Miss Manners would be indignant.
Caller ID is causing a politeness aporia in my life. I suspect this is because surveillance and etiquette are both tools that help us monitor and control what everybody around us is doing. Of course, no matter how stringent the etiquette enforcers are, we still have a choice about how and when we choose to adhere to their little rules. With surveillance, there is no choice.
And, in case you’re wondering: No, I didn’t return the phone call. SFBG
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who has a record of every time you called her since late 2004.
Shoot for the contents
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
"Who is going to tell our stories if we don’t?" asks Madeleine Lim, founder and director of the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project. She has a point. After wracking my brain to recall queer women or trans people of color who have graced a movie screen this year outside of a film festival, all I could come up with was Alice Wu’s Saving Face — which certainly didn’t play at the multiplex. Lim firmly believes that "as long as we’re not in the studio systems writing, directing, and producing these films, we’re never going to see ourselves on the big screen." Her "little stab" at putting such stories front and center was creating the QWOCMAP program, which offers free digital filmmaking workshops to queer women and trans folks of color.
This weekend brings the Queer Women of Color Film Festival, an official event of the National Queer Arts Festival that Lim organizes and curates along with M??nica Enr??quez and Darshan Elena Campos. "Tender Justice," the first evening’s program (Thurs/8, 7 p.m.), showcases shorts by young women aged 18 to 25. Many deal with issues of violence and assault, some obliquely: In the experimental piece Messages, by Alyssa Contreras, a girl wanders through a surreal red-and-black nightmare listening to hateful cell phone messages left by various family members.
On the second evening, queer Latina filmmakers come together for "En Mi Piel: Borders Redrawn" (Fri/9, 7 p.m.). The event, which includes a panel discussion, is entirely bilingual: "It is political to reclaim spaces that are bilingual, in light of the immigration debate and the backlash and racism that it has generated," says cocurator Enr??quez. There are shorts by Bay Area and Los Angeles filmmakers, as well as a group of Mexican filmmakers who traveled here on a grant from the Global Fund for Women. One highlight is filmmaking collective Mujeres y Cultura Subterranea’s La Dimensi??n del Olvido, a gritty documentary that chronicles the lives of women and startlingly young girls who live on the streets in Mexico. Others include Liliana Hueso’s Las Mujeres de Mi Vida; Aurora Guerrero’s Pura Lengua, which skillfully handles a narrative about a Los Angeles Latina queer woman who deals with a horrific police assault; and Amy André’s En Mi Piel, in which an FTM half-white, half-Chicano trans man named Logan recalls his journey back to Mexico, the search for his roots becoming part of his new identity.
The third evening, "Heart of the Flame" (Sat/10, 7 p.m.), features works by students of Lim’s over the age of 25. One such is Kenya Brigg’s Forgiven, an autobiographical narrative about recognizing her grandmother’s strength of forgiveness, which she observes when the elderly African American woman uses a cake to bury the hatchet with a white neighbor who once signed a petition to keep her from buying a house in their Castro neighborhood. SFBG
QUEER WOMEN OF COLOR
FILM FESTIVAL
Thurs/8–Sat/10
SF LBGT Community Center,
Rainbow Room
1800 Market, SF
(415) 752-0868
Free
Feminists prefer genetic engineering
› procloning@techsploitation.com
TECHSPLOITATION I’ve been sorely disappointed by feminists’ responses to genetic engineering. Like many life sciences, genetic engineering has its dark side — but that’s no excuse for groups like Gene Watch to claim that the feminist position on genetic engineering should be "just say no." Why the hell shouldn’t feminists seize the means of reproduction and turn them to our own best interests? Why shouldn’t we be at the table when policy makers determine the best ways to regulate cloning, genetic engineering, and new reproductive technologies?
If we turn our backs on the debate, it will just go on without us. And we know how that turns out already. Just look at what happened with birth control pills. The pill was developed and tested in the 1950s entirely by male researchers — one of whom, Harvard’s John Rock, was a devout Catholic. Rock pushed for a dose cycle of the pill that would replicate women’s monthly menstrual cycle, essentially so that it could be, like the rhythm method, a God-approved form of birth control. The Pope disagreed, but the monthly pill cycle stuck, despite the fact that the pill could completely eliminate menstruation for as long as a woman wished and there was no evidence that this was any less healthy than a monthly menstrual cycle.
Let’s think here, people — if women and feminists had been involved in the process of developing the pill, there is no goddamn way we would have let them take away the possibility of a pill to eliminate our "little visitor." No woman likes to bleed once a month. It’s messy; it’s crampy; occasionally there are embarrassingly stained clothes and sheets. Only men would deem it "better" for us to keep on putting up with this biological annoyance even after finding a cure for it. Luckily, there are now a handful of birth control products on the market, such as Seasonale and Lybrel, that do eliminate periods as well as prevent pregnancy. It only took 50 years.
That’s why any feminist worth her sodium chloride should be charging into the debate on genetic engineering with a list of demands. Hell, yes, we want to change the biology of reproduction — and we want to change it now.
The primary goal of a feminist genetic engineering project is to cut the reproductive process loose from patriarchy and male domination. One simple way to do that is to make sure feminist politics are front and center in any discussion about how we will use genetic engineering to eliminate harmful birth defects. I think we can all agree that it would be great to make sure babies aren’t born with holes in their hearts, but what about girl babies born with small breasts? Can’t you just see some clueless researcher claiming that women with small breasts are "harmed" psychologically, and that therefore we should engineer all women to have big ones? Feminists need to shut that shit down right away.
But what do we want? First of all, we want genetic engineering to transform the way families work, perhaps by making it possible for two women to create a baby without male intervention — or for more than two parents to create a baby. (Researchers in Japan have already bred a healthy baby mouse out of genetic material from two females, and researchers in England are working on a human baby that will have genetic material from two women and one man.) Either way, you’ve got new parental formations, and hopefully this biological change will lead to childcare being meted out more equally — or at least challenge our preconceptions about what it means to be a "mommy" or a "daddy."
We also want artificial wombs, so that women don’t have to stay home from work while gestating their fetuses. We need technologies that will at last close the "baby gap" in workplaces where women fall behind their male colleagues during pregnancies and their children’s early development. Plus, we want men to be able to participate as fully in the reproductive process as possible. That’s why male pregnancy and lactation should be a goal of feminist genetic engineers. We don’t want merely to liberate ourselves from the reproductive process; we want to bring men into it as our equal partners.
New family structures, artificial wombs, and pregnant men are just the very beginnings of what feminists should be demanding when it comes to the genetic transformation of our species. Let’s get out of the streets and into the lab! SFBG
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who thinks mpreg stories are the wave of the future.
“Fabulous Fiona”
By Tina Rodia
At Fiona Ma party, Irish Cultural Center
At 9:09 p.m., with 17 percent of the precincts reporting, Fiona Ma already had 59 percent of the votes. Supporters at the party, which is about 300 people large, include the Arab Antidiscrimination Association, the organizers for the North Beach Festival, and members of the Outer Sunset community, where Ma is the district supervisor.
The organizers of the North Beach Festival refer to the State Assembly District 12 candidate as “Fabulous Fiona.” With drinks in hand, they are celebrating an early victory.
Approached by members of the media as she entered the room, Ma made statements regurgitating the standard “home ownership and business revenue are what’s good for San Francisco” talking points from her campaign Web site, her political mentor, former state senator John Burton, at her side.
Cave in
› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Pop styles of the oh-so-rich and silly!
Britney Spears nearly drops her infant son, baby in one hand, drink in the other, while angling through an NYC crowd! And so soon after being bitch-slapped by the paparazzi for misusing her infant car seat! Oops, she can’t do anything right!
Blaming "media intrusion" for his marital breakup, prenup-less Beatle Paul McCartney promises to hit the charts with the most costly divorce in Brit(pop) history — at an estimated $188 to $376 million. Most referenced Beatles lyric: "Can’t buy me love"!
Gossip — so slight it’s surreal — comes and goes. What remains are the exclamation point–free, consistently sinister talents of Nick Cave — now back in form as the screenwriter of John Hillcoat’s bloody, lyrical Australian western, The Proposition. His red right hand extends to yet another film opening this week in the Bay Area, Olivier Assayas’s Clean, which features sometime Bad Seed James Johnston playing a simian-mugged ’80s rock star — you rang? — whose death by overdose leaves the addict mother of his child, Emily (Maggie Cheung), high and struggling to dry out.
Bathing in bloodshed and unflinchingly embracing the visceral, The Proposition immediately brought to mind the other recent movie by another rocker with punk, metal, and underground roots who hit a commercial peak in the early ’90s and found a temporary home in the arms of an Alternative Nation: The Devil’s Rejects, by Rob Zombie. The two movies might be seen as spiritual kin — if not responses to each other — and might even be read as thinly disguised metaphors for life on the road in a rock band: Cave’s bespattered, greasy, tangled-haired outback outlaws would blend in fine at Lollapalooza, while the do-you-want-to-stop-for-ice-cream-or-to-disbowel-passing-strangers repartee between Zombie’s killer hillbillies on the lam smells like a kind of sociopathic teen spirit, circa ’92. The fact that the Rejects — the very title of the film sounds like a band name — torture a C&W band reads as uncensored rock ’n’ roll ribaldry to me.
Cave, on the other hand, takes hellfire, carnage, and, once again, torture scenes seriously: His is a morality play, with a fatalistic acknowledgment of the way race and class operate in an Australian frontier injustice system. Likewise, rather than relying on crowd-pleasing rock akin to that in Rejects, Cave and Dirty Three violinist Warren Ellis unveil a shockingly restrained, elegiac, occasionally screeching score for The Proposition, now available on Mute.
Clean wasn’t written by Cave, but his dark yet redemptive residue is all over it. The main flaw in this otherwise graceful tale of a jet-set junk-bird’s descent, flight, then ascent is the fact that the finale falls flat: This movie is all about the hangers-on, the incidental characters orbiting an absent, dark hole of a star, so when Cheung finally takes the mic and dares to fill the void left by her dead lover, her performance should have hit some Marianne Faithfull–esque lowlife high. Still, amid Assayas’s detailed, obvious pleasure depicting ex-wife Cheung floundering after her man’s passing, Cave look-alike Johnston gets in a few of the most memorable, candid lines in Clean when he tells Cheung that his latest album is simply mediocre, and while he may make better once again, he’ll settle for whatever he can get to put it out now.
Why Cave now? Perhaps the culture is finally ready for his plain, unpleasant truths; his horror stories; and his scary, survivor’s revisioning of reality. Dubbing him goth is too easy; calling him Johnny Cash’s black-suited successor, facile. He’s proof that one can go to hell and back.
Stealin’ and Gilman Is anyone beginning to feel like Jack White’s voice is a little like squeaky tires doing donuts on chalkboard? No? Excellent, because the Raconteurs, his current band with other mad Midwestern too-cool-for-schoolies, have put out a pretty swell rock record, digging into late-’70s to late-’80s sounds, be they Romantics-style new wave or AOR hair-band histrionics. And by gum, don’t they look like the Replacements in the above promo pic — miming a much reproduced Let It Be–era ’Mats photo? A tribute to off-the-cuff randomness? … The rock never quite stops — Bay Area party starters Rock ’n’ Roll Adventure Kids are back, recording a new album and playing shows once again. This week’s is a doozy: 924 Gilman’s annual Punk Prom — for students who can’t afford the high price of dull high school–approved entertainment. Costumes, dancing, and like-minded souls — sounds like a rock ’n’ roll adventure worth crashing. SFBG
Raconteurs
July 23, 8 p.m.
Warfield, 982 Market, SF.
$27.50–$37.50
(415) 775-7722
Punk Prom
Fri/26, 8 p.m.
924 Gilman, Berk.
$5
www.924gilman.org
Quit moping
Kultur Shock
Gypsy-inspired punk mixes it up with bilingual thrashers La Plebe. Wed/24, 9 p.m., Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. $10. (415) 621-4455.
Tough and Lovely
Garage rock, ’60s soul, and girl group are all within groping distance. Thurs/25, 9:30 p.m., Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. $6. (415) 923-0923. Sat/27, Stork Club, 2330 Telegraph, Oakl. Call for time and price. (415) 444-6174.
Grind and Glory hip-hop conference
15- to 25-year-olds are invited to get down and throw their hands in the air at this DJ Project music conference with Dead Prez, Amp Live, and Jurassic 5’s Chali 2Na. Sat/27, 10 a.m.–5 p.m., 425 Market, SF. Free. www.grindandglory.com.
Mogwai
That’s Mr. Beast to you. Turge-rockers Earth open. Sat/27, 9 p.m., Fillmore, 1805 Geary, SF. $22.50. (415) 346-6000.
Shoplifting
The band takes punk to the jagged cliffs where politics and art meet and dance a jig. Tues/30, 9 p.m., Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. $8. (415) 621-4455. SFBG
Endorsements: The Greens
EDITORIAL We’ve long encouraged the California Green Party to focus its energy on local races, and in San Francisco, the Greens have had considerable success: Matt Gonzalez and then Ross Mirkarimi were elected supervisor as Greens (and Gonzalez made a hell of a run for mayor). Sarah Lipson and Mark Sanchez won school board seats. The idea of someone from the Green Party running citywide is no longer all that unusual, and if the party can continue to generate energy and enthusiasm over the next few years, it will become even more of a source of progressive leaders and provide competition to the Democrats who have controlled city politics for decades.
We focused in last week’s endorsements issue on a few contested Democratic primaries for state assembly and senate, but there are several Greens worthy of note who are challenging entrenched incumbents. Our Green primary endorsements:
For US Senate: Todd Chretien
Chretien is one of the most exciting Green Party candidates in the country. He’s trying to turn a nonrace into a referendum on war and abuse of power. This East Bay resident has spent years fighting for social justice, first as a socialist and then as a Green. He’s smart, passionate, eloquent, and right on the issues. He’s clearly not going to beat Dianne Feinstein, but if he gets any media attention, he’ll be able to raise some important issues.
For US Congress, District 8: Krissy Keefer
Keefer, a dancer and Guardian Goldie winner, has long been an active part of the city’s arts community. She’s always been political, and became an antigentrification activist during the dot-com boom. She has virtually no hope of beating incumbent Nancy Pelosi, and her platform is a little, well, abstract. But we’ve always liked Keefer and we appreciate her spirit in trying to hold Pelosi accountable.
For State Assembly, District 12: Barry Hermanson
Hermanson spent 25 years putting his ideals into action as the owner of a small employment agency, where he sought to raise pay rates for temporary workers. His strategy: reduce his own commission, and pay the temps more. He put a bunch of his own money into a successful citywide campaign to raise the minimum wage. If Janet Reilly wins the Democratic primary for this seat, most progressives in town will probably stick with her — but if Sup. Fiona Ma comes out on top June 6, Hermanson could emerge as the only alternative. SFBG
Doing the Cannes-Cannes
Gary Meyer of the Balboa is at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Here is the first of his reports from the Croisette and the theater trenches:
Getting there — No snakes on the plane
The trip to Cannes always starts when I board the plane in San Francisco, looking to see if anyone I know is aboard. The 747 was huge but full exploration didn’t reveal any obvious candidates for the Festival.
Once in Paris things change. On the transfer to Nice I always run into several friends making the final leg of our journey to the south of France and 10 days of movies, morning till dawn. We compare stories about how much sleep we did or didn’t get before leaving and on the plane. And the inevitable jokes about being jet-lagged and surely taking naps in films.
Each year I also spot someone famous getting on my plane. One year I chatted with French superstar Jeanne Moreau. I had been involved in distributing a movie she directed, L’Adolescente. Another time Michael Richards (Kramer on “Seinfeld”) was nervous about the trip. It was his first time in France and he was appearing at the premiere of the movie Unstrung Heroes. He was a nervous wreck. He couldn’t figure out how to use the pay phones, scared of the security and certain he would never find his way to the airport gate at DeGaulle (a reasonable worry). I befriended him and showed the way.
This year as the long line waited to board our flight, Snakes on a Plane‘s Samuel L. Jackson was escorted to the front of the line. A member of the Cannes Jury, he had a hat pulled down so he’d only be half recognized. Someone in the line called out, “I’ll see you in Cannes,” to make sure we all knew where they were both headed.
Opening night
Arriving a day early has it benefits. The crowds haven’t assembled. One can take care of accreditation, press orientation and study the various program books. A press screening of The Da Vinci Code was the only scheduled event. I had already seen it and chose to have dinner with friends.
Film festivals like to open with a high profile movie that is sure to attract big stars, tons of media attention and a major post-screening party that will last all-night. Allowing a film to open a festival, especially Cannes, is taking a big chance. The movie will come under extra heavy scrutiny from critics. The Da Vinci Code is a logical choice to open the 59th Cannes International Film Festival. It is based on a huge best-selling book and largely set in France. Starring a major American movie star, Tom Hanks, and one of France’s most popular actresses, Audrey Tautou, it also features numerous important European actors. As I write this, over my left shoulder I can see them walking up the red carpet for the opening night ceremonies. Thousands of people jam the streets in front of the Palais. TV cameras and photographers catch the face of every person who ascends the steps to make certain they don’t miss anyone of importance.
The press has now seen The Da Vinci Code. The response isn’t too good. But despite the criticism you will read, Columbia Pictures made the correct choice. Director Ron Howard’s last film, Cinderella Man, was invited in 2005 but the producers passed. And the film failed at the box office. This time they aren’t about to miss out on the glitzy stamp of approval that comes with opening the world’s most famous film festival.
Day one
I’ve seen three films the first day of the Festival — all official selections caught at press screenings. I’ll catch a few more tonight.
A good way to start off the morning is with something not too demanding. Paris je t’aime is a collection of 20 five-minute films by an eclectic group of international directors including Gus Van Sant, the Coen Brothers, Walter Salles, Alfonso Cuaron, Alexander Payne, Gurinda Chadha, Tom Twyker, Wes Craven and many more guiding a superstar cast from Natalie Portman to Gena Rowlands, Gerard Depardieu to Fanny Ardant. (Ben Gazzara, Juliette Binoche, Steve Buscemi, and Bob Hoskins also are featured.) Anthology films inevitably are a mixed bag. Each piece is about love in Paris. They are like simple short stories; the best ones aren’t overly ambitious. Paris looks lovely of course and I enjoyed most of it.
Next came a film from Paraguay, Hamaca Paraguaya. At only 78 minutes, this is the kind of movie not to see when still jet lagged. It is all voice-over dialogue (subtitled) with stagnant camera shots. When the lights went up, I asked my neighbor, author Phillip Lopate, if I snored. He said I was a very considerate napper and wanted to know how he did. Just fine, I guess, as he didn’t wake me up. I have no doubt it will be hailed as a work of art by someone.
Much better was Summer Palace, the first competition film. Director Lou Ye (Suzhou River, Purple Butterfly) has constructed a complex film of relationships starting in 1989 China. A student leaves her small town and boyfriend to attend university in Beijing. She discovers both friendship and sex, with the pleasures and confusion they can bring. We journey through the political changes in China and Germany (where some of the characters go) over the next 15 years as the group of friends separate and rejoin. The film is often powerful, vibrant and involving, if a bit difficult to follow at times. It overstays its welcome at 140 minutes; some careful editing would help it become even better.
Summer Palace is the only Asian film in the Competition. It arrives amidst controversy. The Chinese government has complained that the producers didn’t get censorship approval and have broken the law by submitting it to Cannes. But the filmmakers claimed they didn’t submit it to Cannes. (Must have been the sales agent in France.) The Chinese censors turned the film down. Some suspect it is for the highly erotic nature and political reasons. There have been reports that the film has been withdrawn and the director has returned to China. This won’t be the first time claims of censorship by China have garnered attention here. The highest profile case was Zhang Yimou’s To Live.
Overheard
Sitting in front of a sandwich stand a young British woman told her companion that film sales have been tough and that the DVD market has slowed to practically nothing: “We are looking for Video In Demand, computer downloading — anything where people don’t have to leave their homes.”
Free kitten?
SONIC REDUCER Mother’s Day: the primo time to think about reasons why mom rules. So why did I spend it listening to Grandaddy’s new, possibly last album, Just Like the Fambly Cat (V2)? I also lost about four solid hours watching Amon Duul, MC5, and Scott Walker videos on YouTube and thinking back to my adolescent years, when my household chores fell by the wayside and dear ole mum would threaten to spirit away a sackful of our 20 or so semiferal "fambly" cats and kittens and abandon them by some desolate roadside pineapple cannery. Thanks, ma!
Really, Hallmark and the assorted commercial pressures that guilt you into shuffling to the post office with an annual tribute to motherhood bring out the absolute worst — namely, inappropriate memories — in me. Though that certain special someone never carried out those acts of probable feline-cide, it’s clear not all of us come psychologically, emotionally, and financially equipped to be parents — just as many of us were not well kitted out to be pet owners. We try: Glance through the approximately 17,000 cat videos on YouTube — John Lennon’s scant 415 refs are no match against the cuddly-wuddly, flea-bitten hordes. The majority are amateurish, dull, full of "aw-isn’t-she/he/it-cute — quick get it on the cameraphone" tumescent adoration.
Still, between the anticlimactic "Puppy vs. Cat" snippets, music fans can kill an entire Mother’s Day watching Magma serenade Catholic padres in some strange French B-movie or study a drowsy Velvet Underground supposedly writing "Sunday Morning" ("They all look so fucked up. Heroin is bad for you," comments one viewer) or check out the most viewed music-related vid that day (perhaps related to the new service that started last week allowing users to upload footage directly from a phone or PDA): a blurry, too-loud, obviously cellie-derived clip of Guns n’ Roses blasting out "Welcome to the Jungle" at NYC’s Hammerstein Ballroom on May 12.
How perfect then that I stumble across a few Grandaddy videos on my YouTube travels, including a slightly oogy bit showcasing, as its maker puts it, "a slug on a cucumber listening to Grandaddy." A comment on the lysergic lethargy embedded in the Modesto band’s tunes? Animals, or rather people in animal suits, operate as stand-ins for nature in the group’s shared videos, representing a star-crossed love for the junky delights of an infinitely disposable, shareable information culture, as well as the earthly attractions of the Central Cali natural world. I can totally relate, dudes.
Sluggish Grandaddy fans who can’t break away from waxing their own cucumbers will be pleased to know that Just Like the Fambly Cat is a suitably great, elegiac outro for the disbanding band (so says songwriter Jason Lytle). A pop symphony to that final solution to dissolution and aimlessness: death. If Grandaddy always seem to teeter betwixt stoner listlessness and slacker lack of focus, the threat of imminent nonexistence and looming loss has brought a sense of purpose, opening with a child’s repeated, lisping, "What happened to the fambly cat?" and closing with Lytle’s grandiose finale, "I’ll never return!" The act of recording melts into biography, as Lytle angrily mourns his broken engagement with all the infectious pop trappings ("Jeez Louise") and then gets lost in dusty, hermetic yet elegant reveries reminiscent of such peers as Air ("Oxygen/Auxsend"). There are, as Lytle sings, about "fifty percent less words" here, breaking from pop formulae, but the writing is more than up to providing the mental visuals for Fambly Cat‘s aural invocation of the last, sad days of summer.
Nonetheless, YouTube comes through with some Fambly Cat imagery, as Lytle has come out from behind the animal costume on a lo-fi video for the "single" "Where I’m Anymore." He bicycles down orchard and suburban lanes, bridging Modesto’s agri and aggro environs, as a papier-mâché cat head jumps into the frame for the slow-jamz chorus of lost-pussy meows. This shy number may have emerged after Margot and the Nuclear So and So’s similar catcentric number, but Grandaddy’s easy, sensuous paw tracks promise to stick with you longer, even after Lytle supposedly says good-bye to Modesto, a place tied tightly to another dubbed Grandaddy. After all, Magnet magazine recently reported that Lytle has sold his Modesto house and is moving to Montana, with no plans to perform Fambly Cat songs live ("If we go on tour, somebody’s gonna fucking die"). But perhaps this media-lavished long good-bye isn’t what it seems — and Grandaddy fans can dry their tears — because it appears Lytle will play those tunes after all, at Amoeba Saturday. Like a cat that always comes back, all may not be lost. SFBG
JASON LYTLE OF GRANDADDY
Sat/20, 6 p.m.
Amoeba Music, 1855 Haight, SF
Free
(415) 831-1200