Nightlife

Second nightlife

-
0

It may sound cliché, but there’s no other way to put it: my nightlife sucks. With two shitty day jobs and a barely blossoming career as a freelance journalist, it’s nearly impossible for me to find enough time or money to enjoy this city after dark. It hasn’t always been this way: I used to spend my evenings gleefully cross-eyed, rubbing knees with random hedonists, pushers, and hell-raisers. I used to go skateboarding in night goggles and camp nude in the Tenderloin. Goddamn it, I used to have it all!

I’ve thus far managed to maintain sanity by telling myself that hard work produces success, but my self-imposed exile to the sunlit hours is rapidly taking its toll. Gray hair, bedroom alcoholism, and soul-crushing anxiety shouldn’t affect me for another 10 years or so. Yet here I barely stand at the ripe age of 28, a boring fucking wreck. In order to salvage some of my formerly wild personality — and rather than shoot myself or seek expensive therapy — I decided recently to take the plunge into the comprehensive virtual world of Second Life. Might as well throw down with some wart-nosed trolls and weirdo Wizards of Nardo, right? Pass the magick toad grog, Tinker Bell. Yep, I’m just that desperate.

A LITTLE HELP HERE?


With all the hype surrounding Second Life and its maker, Linden Labs, you’d think the game would be a fairly simple thing to pick up. Not so, my friend. The first obstacle I ran into was of the technical variety. After installing SL and choosing a sly code name (Justyn Jewell, natch), I thought I was good to go, but my poor old Dell crashed whenever I tried to wiggle my virtual buttocks. My friend Tony, a notorious group gamer at Stanford, hates it when I call him with computer questions but was surprisingly enthused about the opportunity to share his SL wisdom. He even agreed to come over that very night and lend me his vacationing roommate’s brand-new MacBook Pro until she got back. Score.

First lesson: customizing an avatar. Perversely, I chose the Boy Next Door body template and then altered its features to match my own. After some meticulous tweaking, Justyn Jewell was no longer your average joe. He was a tragically good-looking skinny white dude with slick brown hair and sleek black shoes. I also gave him a handlebar mustache, because I’m up-to-the-minute like that.

Tony spent the next few hours teaching me the basics. When he left that night, I was able to walk, fly, teleport, take a piss, and hold brief conversations. I was still having trouble picking things up, touching people, and not walking into corners, but it was too early to worry about socially acceptable advanced maneuvers. For a man who hadn’t touched a video game since Mario Bros. III, simply stumbling through SL’s intricate landscape felt like enough. Getting beyond that was going to be a bumpy road, but Tony promised to come back and teach me some more when the time was right.

AVATAR, AWAY!


My first few weeks with Second Life were just what I needed. Whenever my brain grew weary from writing another puff piece about the latest hair-removal technique ("Experience the smooth, toning pleasures of La Cage Aux Follicles"), I would log on and select one of the thousands of clubs from the Popular Place menu. Immediately, I’d shoot to an island dedicated to house, techno, hard rock, hip-hop, or what have you. Each venue was full of kitted-out avatars who acted as though they were at a real party. "Woo-hoo!" they would say. And "This party is sooo amazing!" I knew it was all fake, but I was getting a visceral thrill watching my doppelgänger mingle with squirrel people, virtual heshers, cocky shot-callers, and impossibly elfin ravers.

The possibilities kept me endlessly occupied. I started out mainly going to standard Ibiza-like situations but soon wound up frequenting a hip-hop club called Insatiable, where people ground to slightly less-than-cutting-edge tunes by Ludacris and Fat Joe. I tried to spice things up by talking to people wherever I went, but my standard greeting, "Whacha gonna do with all that ass, all that ass inside them virtual jeans?," was often met with a cold shoulder or yawn — even at Club Insatiable! The reason was obvious. While nearly everyone else had wild hairdos, tattoos, designer outfits, and sparkling electro-bling, I was still in stock attire, a boring newbie who didn’t know shit. It was time to get some gear.

Perusing boutiques in SL made me realize just how Vegas-like this virtual world can be. Everything is for sale. Shirts, pants, drinks, cars, body parts … Most items struck me as rather excessively priced or ephemeral, but a few choice pieces had me reaching for my Linden dollars, the coin of the realm.

One of my first stops was a store called Dicks and Pussies, where I somehow managed to score a free T — skintight, red and white, with the name of the store emblazoned across the chest. It was fine for walking around in an adult boutique, but I couldn’t figure out how to get the damn thing off. What would they say at Club Insatiable? In the hopes of finding a better free shirt, I teleported to a few other stores, but no luck. I was stuck looking like a freebie-grubbing douche bag until Tony could help me. Luckily, we had made a date for that night.

CLICK ON THE BLUE ONE


By 10 p.m., Tony and I were in an alcohol-fueled Second Life frenzy. After scoring some more Linden dollars, we flew around to goofy places like Hedonistic Isle, where you can gamble, listen to streaming audio, and lounge in lawn chairs. There were volleyball courts, bonfires, and beach toys all over the place, but I had other plans. Talking, dancing, and roasting electronic marshmallows were great and all, but what kind of nightlife would be complete without one-night stands?

I felt I had to act. "Hey Tony," I said. "How do you have sex in this place?" Tony stopped tapping at his keyboard and looked me dead in the eye. "I’m not exactly sure," he said. "Why don’t we find out?" I took a sip of my third real Jack and Coke and said, "Follow me."

Besides complimentary dorkwear, Dicks and Pussies has everything your perverted avatar could ever want. For less than a thousand Lindens (about $3) you can get a gigantic schlong with veins or a vagina with hyperrealistic stretch action. There were electric toys, erotic hairstyles, and even peekaboo lingerie. "All right, dude, I’ll buy you a vagina and myself a dick, but you have to show me how to put them on and work them," I said. "Fuck it, why not?" Tony said after a slight pause. That’s all I needed.

Within seconds Tony was wetting things with his brand-new vagina, and I was setting the flesh tones on my penis. "All right, man," I said. "How do you work these things?" I thought we would have to purchase some animation codes or something, but Tony knew a shortcut. Next to the showroom floor was a bedchamber with little balls hovering all over the place. Tony walked up to one and said, "Come on, dude, I’ll click on the pink ball. All you gotta do is click on the blue one, and we’ll be off."

Within seconds Justyn Jewell was balls deep in Tony’s avatar. Hilarious. Tony and I spent the rest of the night drinking and taking screen shots as our avatars explored each other’s software.

I passed out sometime around 2 a.m. and awoke the next morning to a pissed-off girlfriend. "What’s wrong, baby?" I asked. She refused to speak to me for an hour or so and then finally said, "I heard you last night. That was sort of weird that you fucked Tony."

I was immediately assaulted by a flurry of flashbacks: the sound of ice clinking in glasses, the sight of my avatar in the throes of passion, the giggles, the grunts … "Don’t say it like that," I said. "I didn’t fuck Tony. He was just, like, showing me how to have sex so I could buy some later." She stared at her coffee for a full minute and then said, "Well, I don’t know why you have to have sex at all. Is something wrong?"

The more I tried to explain that Second Life was just an entertaining outlet for when I was too busy to take her out, the worse it sounded. Why was I obsessed with that particular aspect of the game, anyway? And why, of all people, did I pick my friend Tony to experiment with? I waited until my girlfriend was in the shower before looking at the screen shots from the night before. Jesus Christ, what a pervert. Thanks a lot, Linden Labs! Now I have two shitty lives to deal with.

www.secondlife.com

Welcome to Summer Scene 2007

-
0

Click here to go to Summer SCENE 2007: Our Guide to Nightlife and Glamour

It’s almost summer, and I feel shamelessly trendy. Not Bobby or big sunglasses trendy — or even Lindsay gray hoodie or Paris orange jumpsuit trendy (well, maybe a little). No, I wanna know. What’s going on in the wide and wicked world of fashionable nightlife? Make me care, dammit.

In New York, the wild, proudly heterosexual rich kids who run the überpopular Box are talking about opening an after-hours bathhouse. We can’t do that in San Francisco (it’s still illegal), but I love that the little downtown brats are hauling wet-het sleaze from their gilded water closets. In Syria, according to the New York Times, gentlemen’s clubs — and there really isn’t any other kind of club in Syria — have started Iraqi refugee–themed stripper nights. No, thank you. And in Europe, there are so many seven-foot-tall Danish, Turkish, and Ukrainian drag queens ruling the dance charts right now, it’s like some flamboyant aural Amazon gypsy carnival exploded. Stevie Nicks was right!

But what about here in the Bay? It seems like dance music is still going through what hip-hop went through 15 years ago — digging up the past, mixing it up with the future, dropping golden nuggets on the playlist. Pairing that turquoise off-the-shoulder cable knit with a fuzzy pink mini, tucking our leopard-print stockings into our pixie boots. Only now, at last, we’re edging our way slowly into the ’90s, with brassy neu rave air horns, sly acid bass lines, and e-fueled hyphy goofiness sidling up to the frosty early ’80s and offering to buy her a double Manhattan. My edge-of-’90s deep-dish DJ wish list for summer 2007: Leila K, "Got to Get"; Mory Kante, "Yeke Yeke"; Nicolette, "O Si Nene." And anyone who can find a way to slip on Guru Josh’s "Infinity (1990s: Time for the Guru)" with a straight face wins my vote for Queen of the Rave-iverse.

Yet things aren’t totally bass-ackward in clubland, although I fondly hope that the recent giant Vivienne Westwood fashion retrospective at the de Young fills the dance floors with gorgeous beaded corsets, golden safety pins, padded asses, ostrich feathers, crazy harlequin prints, and deconstructed plaids for years to come. (Did anyone else shed a tear when they came upon the famous sparkly platforms that made Naomi Campbell tumble to the runway? Tragic. I nearly threw my cell phone in sympathy. But that would be expensive.)

Techno’s making a huge and forward-looking comeback, ripping an electronic page from the mashup scene’s playbook and going live, helped by mind-boggling new software. It’s complicated, but it’s lovely. Indie rock DJs, like techno DJs before them, are discovering contemporary classical ("new music") and throwing rough street sounds and angular, alien textures into their sets. The dub scene is also booming, mixing high-tech breaks and ragga beats with Southeast Asian instrumentation and more than a little African flavor. And the queer kids? We’ve ceased embracing our inner Beyoncé so much and are turning to live bands and smoky cabaret to get our kicks. Rawk.

All of which just means anything goes. And lover, it’s going well. So make this summer work for you — however, whyever, whenever. It’s almost like democracy!

Poach the crowd,

Marke B.

marke@sfbg.com

Red with blue

-
8

Hit it or quit it: short takes on films at Frameline 31

For Christ’s sake: LGBT folk vs. Christians

Club sprockets: nightlife hits the screen at Frameline

Night of 1,000 sexploits: a Q&A with lezsploitation maven Michelle Johnson

From the ashes: Lizzie Borden’s radical Born in Flames is reborn

One-on-one-on-one: add it up for the sensual appeal of Glue

› johnny@sfbg.com

In its characteristically brisk and rich opening passages, André Téchiné’s The Witnesses (Les Témoines) will have you seeing red. Lively, fiery, appetizing, yet ominous reds bleed or burn from the credits and from background spaces within the film’s alternately urban and waterside mise-en-scènes. Téchiné’s cunning and unsettling use of the color could be a subtle nod to the Eastmancolor era of his Cahiers du Cinema forefather Jean-Luc Godard. It’s certainly a foreboding hint of what’s to come in the film. Creatively speaking, it’s also a sign of a renewed creative vigor — marks of a master.

Choosing Téchiné’s intimate Paris-set look at love under siege at the beginning of the AIDS crisis as its opening-night film, the Frameline fest, now in its 31st year, acknowledges its maturity. While LGBT identity might be thriving in the marketplace, The Witnesses does the hard work of looking back. Did gay culture almost die in the ’80s? If so, that era’s talented survivors — such as Téchiné, a Roland Barthes acolyte casually mentioned by Barthes in diary entries leading up to the years in which Witnesses is set — are guides. As his job description attests, Téchiné is a director, using a lively eye to uncover a past era’s soul and intelligence so that it might be regained. *

THE WITNESSES (Andre Téchiné, France, 2007). Thurs/14, 7 p.m., Castro ($75–$90 with opening gala)


SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL LGBT FILM FESTIVAL
The 31st San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival, Frameline 31, runs June 14–24 at the Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF; Parkway Theater, 1834 Park Blvd., Oakl.; Roxie Film Center, 3117 16th St., SF; and Victoria Theatre, 2961 Capp, SF. Tickets (most films $8–$10) are available at www.frameline.org

Club sprockets

-
0

This year’s Frameline is bursting with documentaries about legendary nightlife personalities. Call it the Party Monster effect. Following the release of two films about the tragedy of Michael Alig’s breakneck rise and murderous fall, filmmakers have become more attuned to the significance of clubs in gay life — or else they’ve realized that featuring outrageous club kids in their movies is a shortcut to notoriety.

Only available via online clips, the blaxploitation homage Starrbooty features an over-the-top RuPaul as a supermodel-spy who must go undercover as a New York City street hooker to rescue her kidnapped niece from an evil arch-nemesis. Pavlovian scenester stimuli Lady Bunny, Lahoma van Zandt, and Candis Cayne are on hand to spice up the (admittedly, a tad tired) proceedings. A cameo by heavily accented porn god Michael Lucas is priceless for its awkwardness.

From the other side of the country, and the comedy spectrum, comes Alexis Arquette: She’s My Brother, which documents the transgender transformation of Los Angeles scene star (and actor!) Alexis Arquette. We follow Alexis exhaustively — as she shops, clubs, and dishes on her future vagina — until she throws a bitch fit at the end about the intrusiveness of the cinematic project (how postmodern). La-la Land drag luminaries Jackie Beat and Candy Ass (what, no Chi Chi Larue?) offer comments throughout.

The Godfather of Disco purports to tell the story of Mel Cheren, the storied gay West End Records founder who presided over such dance music innovations as the 12-inch single, the instrumental B-side, and the DJ dance mix and the release of groundbreaking disco nuggets like "Sesso Matto" and "Is It All Over My Face." Three decades’ worth of superstar DJs and club promoters enthuse over their favorite West End releases of yore, but director Gene Graham gives us only snatches of the songs and little information about the commentators. Still, those in the know will find it hard to resist glimpses of old Paradise Garage flyers and photos and quick chats with nightlife doyens like Johnny Dynell of Jackie 60, DJs Louie Vega and Nicky Sano, and producer John "Jellybean" Benitez. Plus, there’s a galloping stream of zingers delivered by the Village People’s cowboy, Randy Jones.

Dynell also pays tribute to one of NYC’s hottest clubs of the past decade in Motherfucker: A Movie, which follows six months in the lives of Motherfucker’s four touchingly self-important promoters. Director David Casey works hard to import something other than sublebrity worship into his pic, giving us some beautiful camerawork, lessons about the inner workings of club promotion and operation, and a wealth of cameos by partiers both weathered and nubile, from Sylvain Sylvain and Bob Gruen to Willie Ninja and Moby to the Juan Maclean and Peppermint Gummybear.

It’s all cool, but also a little pointless — a slew of tipsy polysexual hopefuls grinding to the latest slick club music, hardly an ounce of genuine artistic inspiration or dangerous cultural exploration in sight. (To his credit, Casey allows some of the older commentators to make this point explicitly.) "We’re all just doing our thing, waiting for the next revolution," one of the participants says. Hmm. (Marke B.)

ALEXIS ARQUETTE: SHE’S MY BROTHER (Matthew Barbato and Nikki Parrott, US, 2007). Fri/15, 7 p.m., Victoria

THE GODFATHER OF DISCO (Gene Graham, US, 2007). Sat/16, 3:30 p.m., Victoria; Tues/19, 4:30 p.m., Castro

MOTHERFUCKER: A MOVIE (David Casey, US, 2007). Tues/19, 7 p.m., Victoria

STARRBOOTY (Mike Ruiz, US, 2007). June 23, 8:30 p.m., Castro

Club Six survives

-
0

› news@sfbg.com

A two-year battle over noise may have finally come to a relatively peaceful close June 5 when both sides made concessions about the presence of Club Six on historically blighted Sixth Street.

In one corner were a few discontented residents of the Lawrence Hotel atop the club and their champion, Paul Hogarth of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic and managing editor of www.BeyondChron.org, who say the noisy club disrupts their lives. On the other side of the ring was Angel Cruz, Club Six’s owner and operator, and dozens of supporters who assert that Cruz and his club have revitalized Sixth Street and enriched their lives.

The two sides faced off in front of the Entertainment Commission, which was charged with mediating the dispute and was considering a 30-day suspension of the club’s entertainment and after-hours permits. The commission decided to forgo the suspension for now and place the club on a 120-day probationary period, during which any sound violations could trigger an expedited return to the commission and possible shutdown.

Cruz pledged to use the time to finish soundproofing Club Six. He has already poured about a quarter-million dollars into buffering the club’s noise, and he just hired an esteemed acoustic consultant to finish the process.

The movement to shut down Club Six was spearheaded by Jim Ayers, a long-term, low-income tenant of the hotel who claims that the noise generated by the club keeps him up all night and that the vibrations are strong enough to knock items off shelves (see "Fury over Sound," 5/23/07).

"The funny thing about this whole process is the better [the soundproofing] gets, the more complaints we get," Cruz told the Guardian. "As long as we are open, Jim Ayers is going to complain."

But not all residents of the Lawrence Hotel are against Club Six. Julius Countryman, another long-term resident, told the commission — to rounds of applause from supporters — "Club Six keeps me rockin’. It keeps me movin’."

In fact, only a few of the 41 residents of the Lawrence showed up at the hearing to voice displeasure. One tenant claimed "intimidation" kept them away.

Club Six supporters turned out in such large numbers that the hearing had to be moved to a bigger room. Dozens filed before the commission to give impassioned, one-minute pleas as to why the club needs to stay. A few even said Club Six saved their lives. One man who was beaten unconscious down the street from the club said he may not have been alive if Club Six security hadn’t stepped in. Another recovering drug addict thanked Cruz for giving him a job when no one else would hire him.

So for now, there’s a break in what had been an animated and polarizing conflict pitting low-income residents against those with concerns about growing threats to nightlife and urban culture. (The Guardian‘s last story on the conflict generated more readers comments than any recent story on our Web site, most of them critical of our perspective.)

Yet the overwhelming response at the hearing brought a perspective to the issue different from what Hogarth and his clients have pushed. And that is, if Club Six closed, more than 50 people employed by the club would face financial hardship, and a unique venue supportive of music, art, and cultural diversity would be sorely missed.

But it remains to be seen whether Cruz can mollify his neighbors and the city officials who are now watching — and listening to — Club Six.

Czech, please!

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

A faltering economy is the biggest threat to most national film industries, but Czechoslovakia’s had a more distinct misfortune: it was shut down by occupation forces not once but twice. Most famously, the 1960s Czech new wave, in which talents like Jirí Menzel, Ivan Passer, Vera Chytilová, and Milos Forman first flourished, was abruptly dammed by the 1968 Soviet invasion. The type of widespread film-buff culture that brought attention to those directors scarcely existed when — before the Nazis commandeered local studios and permitted only a handful of strictly escapist films to be made for the home market — the country’s cinema had its first golden age.

Before World War II, Czechoslovakia boasted one of the most adventurous and lively — if not widely exported — movie industries in the world. Of course, this meant there was room for a lot of populist fluff. But the 12 features in the Pacific Film Archive’s new series "Czech Modernism, 1926–1949" show why Nazi invaders sensed a celluloid threat: these films are full of playful social critique as well as imaginative stylistic leaps. They assume that an audience is intelligent and that it will enjoy the subversion of authority. These films don’t provide pacification, let alone propaganda.

As playwright and Velvet Underground fan turned president Václav Havel would suggest some decades later, Czech life — at least the urban variety — has long appreciated the intersection of the avant-garde and leftist politics. The region’s geographic location, between the sophisticated capitalist West and the stylistically impoverished Communist USSR, at times seems directly reflected in these films’ colliding influences, from German expressionism to Soviet formalism to an Erich von Stroheim–esque attitude decadence.

The series’ two movies by director Vladislav Vancura apply a mad stylistic energy to subjects that might easily have been played for simple melodrama or pathos. In 1933’s On the Sunny Side, a pair of city children whose friendship bridges the class divide end up dumped in an orphanage when their parents are deemed unfit: first it’s fatherless, accordion-playing Honza, then pigtailed Babula, whose womanizing dad has just bankrupted the family. Frenetic montages contrast the adult worlds of poor and rich, cutting between breadlines and champagne-guzzling flappers. At the progressive home for foundlings, by contrast, equality is ensured by self-government — as a collective, the kids are better able to look after their own welfare than the grown-ups who’ve failed them.

Vancura’s Faithless Marijka, from the next year, is set in the Carpathian Mountains, with local nonprofessional actors as the leads. But it’s no sylvan idyll. The supposedly central tale of a lumberjack’s cheating spouse is nearly lost amid the struggles of laborers to triumph over their greedy oppressors (whose ranks include a disturbing anti-Semitic caricature).

A similar mix of poetic naturalism and Eisensteinian montage marks Karl Junghans’s 1929 silent Such Is Life. Its titular shrug downplays a vigorous look at some ordinary Prague residents, notably a put-upon laundry worker (Vera Baranovskaya, who played the title character of Vsevolod Pudovkin’s 1926 Mother), her loutish husband, and a manicurist daughter pretty enough to attract major trouble. Similar perils await two office girls lured into a lecherous nightlife in 1931’s From Saturday to Sunday, by Gustav Machatý, who would create an international sensation with Hedy Lamarr’s nude swim in Ecstasy two years later. This time romance rather than lust prevails as the more innocent secretary flees a grabby grandpa and winds up meeting her pure-hearted lower-class match.

Mistrust toward the rich and powerful was also a frequent theme in the era’s Hollywood films, in an attempt to please American audiences suffering though the Great Depression, which in turn triggered Czechoslovakia’s economic hardship. But the criticism in such films was usually glib, the solutions fanciful. Not so here. It’s eye-opening to watch a popular hit like Martin Fric’s 1934 Heave Ho!, widely regarded as the best effort from local comedy team Jirí Voskovec and Jan Werich.

Werich plays a dissolute multimillionaire informed one day that his stocks are worthless and he’s broke. Teaming with an unemployed laborer (Voskovec) who’d ranted against factory-shutting fat cats on the radio (before being dragged off), he discovers — after making a mess of various odd jobs — that he’s inherited a huge building. Unfortunately, it’s just a bunch of steel girders, so the penniless duo hit on the scheme of collectivizing construction with other indigent workers, who’ll have a home when it’s finished. Naturally, corporate types try to thwart this truly free enterprise, but they are treated to the ol’ titular gesture. A socialist semimusical with sight gags and assorted silliness, this sure ain’t Gold Diggers of 1933. *

CZECH MODERNISM, 1926–1949

Through June 24; see Rep Clock for schedule; $4–$8

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-1124

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Fury over sound

-
0

› steve@sfbg.com

Club Six is a popular nightclub that has invigorated the seedy Sixth Street corridor, attracted new businesses nearby, and generally made it safer to walk that area at night. Yet along the way, the expanding club has become a magnet for noise complaints from adjacent residents of single-room-occupancy hotels who are pushing the city to yank the club’s permits and perhaps put it out of business.

The San Francisco Entertainment Commission will hear the case June 5 and decide how to balance a campaign started by a few irritated neighbors and then organized by the Tenderloin Housing Clinic (THC) against concerns that the city is fast becoming less tolerant of nightlife and a vibrant urban culture (see "Death of Fun, the Sequel," 4/25/07).

"The concept of mixed use is going to be put to the ultimate test," Robert Davis, executive director of the commission, told the Guardian. "With the influx of housing in every neighborhood, it takes a careful hand to balance those uses, and that’s what the commission is trying to do."

Club Six is located in an old brick building underneath the Lawrence Hotel, where some residents complain that music rumbles their rooms and keeps them up at night. They blame club owner Angel Cruz. "His music kept getting louder and louder until it was vibrating the rooms up here," said Jim Ayers, the Lawrence Hotel resident who has filed the most noise complaints. "He ignores the law and doesn’t care about this area whatsoever."

Yet Cruz said he’s put more than $1 million into the club since he bought it in 2001, back when the neighborhood was mostly vacant storefronts and junkies ruled the streets. Those improvements include more than $229,000 in sound-accentuation work, mostly focused on the Lawrence Hotel.

"I thought it was a great space that could be developed into something special, which it has become. And this was a turnaround neighborhood," Cruz told us, noting that the space has been a bar since the 1930s and that several new clubs followed him into the neighborhood. "I think we’ve been a good neighbor. Do we make noise? Every club in town makes noise. And if you’re going to shut us down, you should shut down every club in town."

Cruz said the problems began two years ago when Ayers complained about noise from the club and sued him in small claims court, asking for $7,500. Before the case went to trial, Ayers offered to settle the case and stop complaining (Ayers told us he wanted $3,500; Cruz said it was $5,000), but Cruz refused, and the judge eventually awarded Ayers $500.

"He was trying to extort money from me so he wouldn’t keep complaining," Cruz said of Ayers. "He was upset that he only got $500 and told me he would make my life a living hell, which he has."

Ayers maintains that it’s about noise and not money, but he admits that the unsatisfying end to the case prompted him to keep complaining and seek regulatory relief. "He said to me that I can’t do a damn thing to him," Ayers told us. "Well, I say, ‘Mr. Cruz, look what I’ve done now.’"

Since January of last year, Ayers and a few other persistent complainers have triggered regular police visits to the club, organizational and political help from the THC (publisher of www.beyondchron.org, which has written critically of Club Six), and intervention by an Entertainment Commission sound engineer and the City Attorney’s Office.

"We’re concerned that the owner of Club Six is not being a good neighbor," the THC’s Paul Hogarth told us. "We have encouraged tenants to call the police when things are too loud." As a result, Club Six had to do more soundproofing and keep the music set at 88 decibels in the club, a level it has violated a few times, each by less than 10 decibels. Cruz said he’s made a good-faith effort to follow the rules and has worked with various speaker configurations and other experiments.

The complaint by the City Attorney’s Office seeks a 30-day suspension of the club’s entertainment and after-hours permits and charges that "the operation of Club Six has caused harm, and continues to harm, the public health, safety and welfare and has been a strain on police services. Angel Cruz has demonstrated that mere verbal warnings by enforcement officers are insufficient to stop the nuisance caused by the nightclub and has forced the Entertainment Commission to intervene."

But Davis said it will be a difficult decision for the appointed body, which he noted is increasingly being called on to mediate disputes like this all over town.

"One of the mandates of the commission is we want to promote entertainment. Angel is an asset to the community, and we don’t want to drive him out, but we have to act [on the complaints]," Davis said. "It’s based primarily on noise complaints, not whether Angel is popular. He is, and he’s tried to work with the community." *

The public may attend and testify at the Entertainment Commission hearing June 5 at 4 p.m. in room 406 of San Francisco City Hall, 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place.

NIMBYs wanna 86 Club Six (updated)

-
0

UPDATE: I ADORE all the controversy this post is causing (thanks BeyondChron!). Admittedly I wrote this almost a month ago, then hightailed it to the jungles of Peru — just as the facts of the case were becoming clearer. Steve Jones elaborated on the case later in the game here. It’s encouraging that Sixth Street residents are organizing to protect their living conditions, but the reality is that Club Six is zoned properly and obeying the rules, as far as I know. And I stand by my opinion that Six is one of the liveliest clubs in the city. Also admittedly, I jumped to some distasteful conclusions right away (although I was acting at the time on the info available — like any good hothead blogger). But that’s the fun of being a drama queen.

So now some whiny “Not In My Backyard” folks are after one of the best big hip-hop/dubwize/ragga/house spots in the Bay — the six-and-a-half year-old Club Six.

darkroom.jpg

I love Six — the subterranean downtown-ness of it — definitely a little rough around the edges, but nice and soft inside. The irony of this whole sad affair is that the complaining neighbors are saying that Six is too loud — ON SIXTH STREET! Bwahahaha! Are they kidding? Not only has Six’s owner, Angel Cruz, invested a ton o’ duckets into soundproofing the place, but — C’MON! –it’s Sixth Street. The rowdies on the street fart louder than Club Six.

Still, Six faces its license getting pulled for a month, which would break the place. Click here to read an open letter from Angel to the nightlife community, and see how you can help (PDF). Folks like us helped save Hole in the Wall last week — let’s pitch in and keep nightlife diverse in the Bay!

Score one for fun

-
0

By Steven T. Jones
For the last year, the Guardian has been trying to get mainstream San Francisco to pay attention to the mounting threats to this city’s nightlife and outdoor events. Last night, the issue finally started getting some traction when the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee overwhelmingly approved a resolution calling on the city to value fun and enact policy changes to protect it (to read the resolution, click here and select “Nightlife and Festivals Resolution”). Kudos to all the representatives who supported it and to the Outdoor Events Coalition and Nightlife Coalition for their advocacy on the issue. There are signs that Mayor Gavin Newsom is coming around on the issue, but the real test will be whether he can rein in the bureaucracy’s hunger for bigger fees and make fun a priority in his next budget update. BTW, it would also be nice if the Chronicle, Examiner, and local TV stations would start paying attention to an issue that goes to the heart of whether San Francisco maintains its lively culture. We really can’t be the only ones that love a good party, can we?
uh-1.jpg
Photo from How Weird Street Faire, courtesy of Mv.gals.net

Death of fun, the sequel

-
0

> news@sfbg.com

Fun – in the form of fairs, festivals, bars, art in the parks, and the freedom to occasionally drink alcohol in public places – is under attack in San Francisco.

The multipronged assault is coming primarily from two sources: city agencies with budget shortfalls and NIMBYs who don’t like to hear people partying. The crackdown has only intensified since the Guardian sounded the alarm last year (see “The Death of Fun,” 5/24/06), but the fun seekers are now organizing, finding some allies, and starting to push back.

Mayor Gavin Newsom and other city hall leaders have been meeting with the Outdoor Events Coalition, which formed last year in response to the threat, about valuing the city’s beloved social gatherings and staving off steep fee hikes that have been sought by the Recreation and Park, Fire, Public Works, and Police departments.

Those conversations have already yielded at least a temporary reprieve from a substantial increase in use fees for all the city’s parks. It’s also led to a rollback of the How Weird Street Faire’s particularly outrageous police fees (its $7,700 sum last year jumped to $23,833 this year – despite the event being forced by the city to end two hours earlier – before pressure from the Guardian and city hall forced it back down to $4,734).

The San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee will also wade into the issue April 25 when it considers a resolution warning that “San Francisco has become noticeably less tolerant of nightlife and outdoor events.” It is sponsored by Scott Wiener, Robert Haaland, Michael Goldstein, and David Campos.

The measure expresses this premier political organization’s “strong disagreement with the City agencies and commissions that have undermined San Francisco’s nightlife and tradition of street festivals and encourages efforts to remove obstacles to the permitting of such venues and events up to and including structural reform of government permitting processes to accomplish that goal.”

The resolution specifically cites the restrictions and fee increases that have hit the How Weird Street Faire, the Haight Ashbury Street Fair (where alcohol is banned this year for the first time), and the North Beach Jazz Festival, but it also notes that a wide variety of events “provide major fundraising opportunities for community-serving nonprofits such as HIV/AIDS, breast cancer, and violence-prevention organizations that are dependent upon the revenue generated at these events.”

Yet the wet blanket crowd still seems ascendant. Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier now wants to ban alcohol in all city parks that contain playgrounds, which is most of them. Hole in the Wall has hit unexpected opposition to its relocation (see “Bar Wars,” 4/18/07), while Club Six is being threatened by its neighbors and the Entertainment Commission about noise issues. And one group is trying to kill a band shell made of recycled car hoods that is proposed for temporary summer placement on the Panhandle.

That project, as well as the proposal for drastically increased fees for using public spaces, is expected to be considered May 3 by the Rec and Park Commission, which is likely to be a prime battleground in the ongoing fight over fun.

 

FEE FIGHT

Rec and Park, like many other city departments, is facing a big budget shortfall and neglected facilities overdue for attention. A budget analyst audit last year also recommended that the department create a more coherent system for its 400 different permits and increase fees by 2 percent.

Yet the department responded by proposing to roughly double its special event fees, even though they make up just $560,000 of the $4.5 million that the department collects from all fees. Making things even worse was the proposal to charge events based on a park’s maximum capacity rather than the actual number of attendees.

The proposal caused an uproar when it was introduced last year, as promoters say it would kill many beloved events, so it was tabled. Then an almost identical proposal was quietly introduced this year, drawing the same concerns.

“These are just preliminary numbers, and they may change,” department spokesperson Rose Dennis told us, although she wouldn’t elaborate on why the same unpopular proposal was revived.

Event organizers, who were told last year that they would be consulted on the new fee schedule, were dumbfounded. They say the new policy forces them to come up with a lot of cash if attendance lags or the weather is bad.

Mitigating such a risk means charging admission, corralling corporate sponsorship, or pushing more commerce on attendees. This may not be a hindrance for some of the well-known and sponsored events such as Bay to Breakers and SF Pride, but consider how the low-budget Movie Night in Dolores Park might come up with $6,000 instead of $250, or how additional permit fees could strangle the potential of nascent groups such as Movement for Unconditional Amnesty.

The group is sponsoring a march in honor of the Great American Boycott of 2006. On May 1 it will walk from Dolores Park to the Civic Center in recognition of immigrants’ rights. The group wanted to offer concessions, because food vendors donate a percentage of their sales to the organization, but the permit fee for propane use from the Fire Department was too high.

“They couldn’t guarantee they’d make more than $1,200 in food to cover the costs of permits,” said Forrest Schmidt, of the ANSWER Coalition, who is assisting the organizers. “So they lost an opportunity to raise funds to support their work. It’s more than $1,000 taken off the top of the movement.”

ANSWER faced a similar problem after the antiwar rally in March, when the rule regarding propane permits was reinterpreted so that a base charge, once applied to an entire event, was now charged of each concessionaire – quadrupling the overall cost. ANSWER pleaded its case against this new reading of the law and was granted a one-time reprieve. But Schmidt says none of the SFFD’s paperwork backs up a need to charge so much money.

“They kept on saying over and over again, ‘You guys are making money on this,’ ” Schmidt said. “But it’s an administrative fee to make sure we’re not setting anything on fire. It’s essentially a tax. It’s a deceitful form of politics and part of what’s changing the demographic of the city.”

The Outdoor Events Coalition, which represents more than 25 events in the city, agrees and has been meeting with city officials to hash out another interim solution for this year, as well as a long-term plan for financial sustainability for all parties.

“We’re cautiously optimistic,” said Robbie Kowal, a coalition leader and organizer of the North Beach Jazz Festival. But he’s still concerned about what he and the coalition see as a continuing trend.

“The city is changing in some way. It’s becoming a culture of complaint. There’s this whole idea you can elect yourself into a neighborhood organization, you can invent your own constituency, and the bureaucracy has to take you seriously. Neighborhood power can be so effective in fighting against a Starbucks, but when it’s turned around and used to kill an indigenous part of that neighborhood, like its local street fair, that’s an abuse of that neighborhood power.”

 

NIMBY POWER

Black Rock Arts Foundation, the San Francisco public art nonprofit that grew out of Burning Man, has enjoyed a successful and symbiotic partnership with the Newsom administration, placing well-received temporary artwork in Hayes Green, Civic Center Plaza, and the Embarcadero.

So when BRAF, the Neighborhood Parks Council, the city’s Department of the Environment, and several community groups decided several months ago to collaborate on a trio of new temporary art pieces, most people involved thought they were headed for another kumbaya moment. Then one of the projects hit a small but vocal pocket of resistance.

A group of artists from the Finch Mob and Rebar collectives are now at work on the Panhandle band shell, a performance space for nonamplified acoustic music and other performances that is made from the hoods of 75 midsize sedans. The idea is to promote the recycling and reuse of materials while creating a community gathering spot for arts appreciation.

Most neighborhood groups in the area like the project, and 147 individuals have written letters of support, versus the 17 letters that have taken issue with the project’s potential to draw crowds and create noise, litter, graffiti, congestion, and a hangout for homeless people.

But the opposition has been amplified by members of the Panhandle Residents Organization Stanyan Fulton (PROSF), which runs one of the most active listservs in the city, championing causes ranging from government sunshine to neighborhood concerns. The group, with support from Sup. Ross Mirkarimi’s staff, has delayed the project’s approval and thus placed its future in jeopardy (installation was scheduled to begin next month).

“My main concern would be that this is a very narrow strip of land that is bordered by homes on both sides,” said neighbor Maureen Murphy, who has complained about the project to the city and online through the PROSF. “My fear is that there is going to be amplification and more people and litter.”

The debate was scheduled to be heard by the Rec and Park Commission on April 19 but was postponed to May 3 because of the controversy. Nonetheless, Newsom showed up at the last hearing to offer his support.

“Rare do I come in front of committee, but I wanted to underscore … the partnership we’ve had with Black Rock Arts Foundation. It’s been a very successful one and one I want to encourage this commission to reinforce,” Newsom told the commission. “I think the opportunity exists for us … to take advantage of these partnerships and really bring to the forefront in people’s minds more temporary public art.”

Rachel Weidinger, who is handling the project for BRAF, said the organizers have been very sensitive to public input, neighborhood concerns, environmental issues, and the impacts of the project, at one point changing sites to one with better drainage. And she’s been actively telling opponents that the project won’t allow amplified music or large gatherings (those of 25 or more will require a special permit). But she said that there’s little they can do about those who simply don’t want people to gather in the park.

“We are trying to activate park space with temporary artwork,” she said. “Guilty as charged.”

Yet any activated public space – whether a street closed for a fair or a march, a park turned into a concert space, or a vacant storefront turned into a nightclub – is bound to generate a few critics. The question for San Francisco now is how to balance NIMBY desires and bureaucratic needs with a broader concern for facilitating fun in the big city.

“Some people have the idea that events and nightlife are an evil to be restricted,” Wiener said. But his resolution is intended as “a cultural statement about what kind of city we want to live in.” *

 

Bar wars

-
0

› news@sfbg.com

For the owners of the Hole in the Wall Saloon, the plan was simple: move their popular South of Market gay bar out of its dingy and dilapidated quarters to a much better spot around the corner. With numerous bars and nightclubs already along the stretch once known as the gay miracle mile, they assumed their place would fit right in.

But SoMa is changing — and the bar’s new neighbors in the increasingly residential district are using every regulatory trick in the book to block the move. Another bar, they say, is one too many.

The Hole in the Wall’s current location on Eighth Street frequently lives up to the place’s modest-sounding name. The plumbing stops up. The patched floor sags in places. And the bar tilts at an unnatural angle. Co-owners Joe Banks and John Gardiner, who are life as well as business partners, spent years seeking a new space for their eclectic, art-filled taproom. Last year they thought they had found an ideal spot a block and a half away on Folsom, between Dore and 10th streets.

At today’s prices, the building was a bargain — only $1.2 million. After making sure that the space, a former dance studio, was zoned to allow for a bar, Banks and Gardiner hired a local design-build firm to renovate the building. They hoped to open the new location by April 15, the bar’s 13th anniversary.

Now they just hope to open.

In early December project manager Jeff Matt was working on the build-out of the new space when a man named Jim Meko stopped by and asked him to give a letter to the owners. The letter, obtained by the Guardian, is on letterhead for the Western SoMa Citizens Planning Task Force. The task force, which Meko chairs, is advising the Planning Department on a new zoning plan for South of Market.

The letter was a copy of a five-month-old missive Meko had addressed to the real estate agent representing the building’s sellers. It warns that if the property were sold to someone who wanted to open a bar, the buyers could face "obstacles" such as protests to the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control and petitions to the Planning Commission.

Silvana Messing, the agent to whom the letter is addressed, told us she never received it. The agent representing Gardiner and Banks as buyers, who asked not to be identified by name, claims he didn’t see the letter either. But if he had gotten it before the sale, he said, "I probably would have advised [Gardiner and Banks] not to buy the place."

Meko, who lives around the corner from the Hole in the Wall’s new location, told us Banks and Gardiner "tend to live right on the edge of the law" as bar owners. He charged that the place used DJs without the proper entertainment permits and that there have been reports of drug dealing and nudity on the bar’s premises.

Gardiner admitted that he and Banks have employed DJs in the past but says they did not know that a DJ requires a special permit: "We thought an entertainment license was for places with live bands…. When we found out, we stopped it." Banks and Gardiner denied that drug dealing takes place at the bar. As for nudity, several Hole in the Wall regulars recalled a time in the mid-’90s when patrons occasionally drank in the buff, but they told us such behavior died down long ago.

Officer Rose Meyer, the San Francisco Police Department’s permit officer at Southern Station, gave the bar and its owners glowing reviews. Referring to Gardiner in particular, Meyer told us, "Southern Station would have no objection to him operating [at the new location]. I don’t foresee there being any problems."

"He has always been responsible" in the past, she said.

Meko claims the letter wasn’t meant to stir up opposition to the bar’s move. Instead, he said, he was simply trying to warn Gardiner and Banks about the simmering antinightlife attitude among SoMa residents. "It’s real precarious," Meko said. "Neighbors just rise up. They become real irrational…. They can go crazy."

When 10th Street resident Damien Ochoa received notice from the Planning Department about the new bar in early January, he didn’t rise up — at least at first. But given that his bedroom window is less than 50 feet from the bar’s back smoking area, he was concerned. As a result, he said by phone, he "started to do a little bit of research about the owners." In the course of his research, he got in touch with Meko.

Ochoa said Meko informed him that "they’re potentially not good neighbors." After a neighborhood meeting, Ochoa, Meko, and several other residents pitched in money to file a petition in Ochoa’s name asking the Planning Commission to look at the project under its power of discretionary review. Other neighbors lodged protests with the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control. Within weeks all of Meko’s warnings to the real estate agent had come true.

As a result, work on the new bar is at a standstill. It cannot begin again until the protests work their way through hearings and appeals. It could be many months until the outcome is decided. Banks and Gardiner say they have staked their financial future on the new bar, with tens of thousands of dollars in construction loans set to come due before the end of the year. Without any income from the new location, they might not be able to stay afloat.

Banks told us the opposition to the bar’s move came as a complete surprise. The Hole in the Wall, he said, is "a place where everybody’s welcome. It’s a gay bar, but everybody’s welcome." To try to resolve the dispute, Banks and Gardiner hired Jeremy Paul, an experienced permit expediter, to shepherd the project through the regulatory process and to negotiate with Meko and the neighbors. The two sides are currently in talks about enclosing the back smoking area, a change that could cost more than $100,000. Paul expressed guarded optimism that the project will eventually go forward, but he told us the rancor over the new saloon is an example of "the identity crisis" San Francisco is going through.

"The Hole in the Wall relocation is a case study in how dysfunctional this system is," Paul said. Zoning in the area allows for a bar, he said, "and if these people don’t want to live in a bar district, they should check the zoning where they’re buying a house or renting an apartment" before moving there.

Paul added that if the residents are dead set against any new bars on their block, they should work to change the zoning.

The task force Meko chairs is at work on a new zoning plan for the area, which it will eventually present to the Planning Department. Some nightlife supporters worry that the goal may be a more residential neighborhood with no room for more bars.

Meko and Ochoa strongly deny that Meko is behind the residents’ actions. "I’m a neighbor," Meko told us, claiming that he is simply working with other neighbors to prevent the noise, smoke, and litter that could accompany the bar. As for the task force’s work, Meko said he is actually trying to bring more nightlife into SoMa, but only in appropriate areas with adequate "buffers" for the residents.

"I’ve spent the last 10 years of my life trying to broker peace between" bar owners and neighbors, he asserted. He noted that the Entertainment Commission, on which he also sits, is working to clarify permit rules for clubs and bars.

John Wood, a member of the San Francisco Late Night Coalition, said the neighbors "have reasonable concerns" about the new bar but those concerns "are being overblown." Wood noted that the bar is only rated for 49 patrons at a time and that by agreeing to soundproof the building and possibly enclose the back patio, the owners have been very accommodating. "Even nightclubs don’t go through those kinds of measures," he said.

Banks told us he and Gardiner desperately want to resolve the situation. "We’re willing to do anything within our financial means," he said. "We want to save it. The Hole in the Wall is our baby." *

FEAST: the Guardian Guide to spring food and drink

-
0

Click here to check out out FEAST picks!

Taking it in

It’s no secret that we are what we eat. But it’s as true on a collective level as it is on a personal one. I’ve been struck by this fact as I’ve toured my new hometown with an eye for Bloody Marys and bloody steaks, learning about the life, vibrancy, art, and activism of San Francisco through its tamales and tajines. Having come most recently from Los Angeles, with the strip-mall predictability of its restaurants, I find myself falling more in love with this bayside city with every PBR I polish off. Not that there aren’t good places to eat in LA — there are. But a city’s culinary landscape is indicative of its culture, values, and politics — and while LA’s sweet spots are few and far between, hidden, often elitist, usually too expensive, and always hard to get to (hello, traffic), San Francisco’s are plentiful, varied, egalitarian, ecofriendly, and accessible. They have personality and heart. They provide nourishment and pleasure. Most of all, they serve damned good food. This is a guide to this city’s characteristic places for dining and drinking, the places that express our great diversity and our activist nature, the places that cater to our exciting nightlife and to the many ways we recover from it. From green restaurants to places to get cocktails, from high-end to lowbrow, from ethnic treasures to all-American classics, these are some of our favorites. This list is by no means comprehensive, as we are blessed to live in a city with so much to offer that a full list of places worth visiting would read like a phone book. For even more, check out our weekly restaurant reviews, in the paper and online at www.sfbg.com, and keep an eye out for our Best of the Bay issue in July. And in the meantime, raise your glass — or your fork — to the fact that we live in one of the most exciting, eclectic, good-eatin’ cities in the world. I for one am happy to drink to that.

Molly Freedenberg

Feast 2007 editor

molly@sfbg.com

Emergency exits

-
0

› marke@sfbg.com

I’ve got one copy of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace strapped under my right foot, one strapped under my left. The new 1,400-page Penguin Classics translation by Anthony Briggs makes for a great pair of platforms. My fantasy party posse’s at my side: Felicia Fellatio rocking a hot red bandito bandanna, a full white tutu, and a number 5 Tim Hardaway jersey; Baby Char Char in an oversize pajama-print homeboy hoodie and a pair of random, paint-spattered Levi’s; Nova all angles on her retro-future ’80s Nagel dangling neon banana earrings, turquoise ruffled skirt, and shoulder-padded acid-washed cropped jacket trip; and Hunky Beau in Juicy Couture pipe pants and war paint.

Somebody else is in the corner, wearing pink panties on his head and a giant chain, but no one knows his name.

I feel great. I just finished six weeks of Third Street Gym boxing boot camp, and you could bounce a full congressional subpoena off my abs, darling. (OK, that’s a lie — but I think about going to the gym every time I light up a smoke. That should count for something, no?) We’re out the door to my drag idol Juanita More’s weekly Saturday all-nighter, Playboy, at the Stud (www.juanitamore.com), when suddenly it hits me: today is Saturday, right? I better check the Internet.

I put down my flask of Cuervo and log on, and this little box of "gay news" pops up. (How does the Internet know? Oh, that’s right: all my online porn accounts.) "UN Confirms Anti-Gay Death Squads in Iraq" the top headline reads. Kidnappings, mutilation, charred bodies found by the road. Hmm. A few clicks later: "Iraqi Leaders OK Gay Pogroms." According to activists, Shiite militias are engaging in one of the "most organized and systematic sexual cleansings in history" with the government’s two-cheeked kiss of approval, and the US is refusing asylum to gay Iraqis.

Oh dear. Suddenly the thought of whooping it up while my gay Iraqi rainbow family burns seems kind of, you know, gross.

I’m so fucking sick of feeling powerless against this stupid war. Of always tucking the grief of it somewhere in the back of my mind as I down another shot and hit the dance floor. Not only is it a major buzzkill among other omnipresent buzzkills — global warming, fundamentalist terror, constant surveillance, government-sanctioned queer discrimination, bad hair days — but, as a citizen of the allegedly participatory democracy that started the whole thing, I feel somehow responsible, no matter whom I voted for however many times. And just admitting that, I feel like a spoiled American. It sucks.

On top of that, I have to watch myself and many of those around me struggle to keep the flame of resistance sparkling. It seems exhaustion has seeped into our consciousness and may actually be taking root. I fondly recall the first exhilarating flush of protest — of taking back the streets until my pumps wore through on the first night of "shock and awe," of lying down and blocking traffic in an orange jumpsuit (on purpose for once) as the bombs continued to rain down on civilians half a world away, of wildly dancing with Code Pink and cute Puerto Rican socialists in the NYC streets during the 2004 Republican Convention, hoping the nets the cops threw over us wouldn’t snag my weave. Sure, I still bang my pan with a stick at the occasional ANSWER weekend protest, despite my massive hangover. But after four years of war, it often seems I’m banging fruitlessly. If a club freak chants in a vacuum, will the killing please stop now?

Thank goddess I’ve got the beautiful souls I’ve met at the clubs around me. The kind of nightlife I love is inherently subversive: when one kind of music, location, or style becomes dominant, a host of alternatives immediately springs up. That energy refuels my rebellious spirit and keeps my fight up during the day. Yes, yes, partying is an escape from reality — but it’s also a play space, a way to work out the anxieties of the world by fooling with your identity, a place to push the boundaries of society into a personal utopia.

To me, underground nightlife can also be a fascinatingly warped mirror of the problems facing the world, its trends the raw expression of deep-seated angst. As W. consolidated his political power in the early ’00s, nightlife fashions and music (and drugs) returned to the tastes of the Reagan and Thatcher ’80s, when angular pop and cold synths were a loud rebuke to false sincerity and hubris. The recent explosion of pre-AIDS-era disco and imagery in many gay clubs may be an unconscious wish to transport ourselves to the time before the Republicans’ disastrous "morning in America." And the vibrant local hyphy scene is based on auto sideshows: literally wasting gas (use it while you got it!). Now, well into W.’s second term, we’re reliving the rococo styles of Bush the Elder without irony. Dance floors are looking like a punk rock Cosby Show, and I’m into it.

But that’s all theoretical musing. The most important thing about nightlife is community, whether you’re a full-time club kid or just going out for a drink after work with your friends. You want to be around other people, to not feel so alone in this crazy world, to make a connection. You walk into a bar, and suddenly you’re in a minisociety, one you hope you can handle better than society at large.

Can this community make a difference? Sure. The nightlife community, gay and straight, was instrumental in the fight against AIDS (and still is). It banded together to defeat the antirave legislation of the early ’00s. Tons of parties raise money for good causes. Currently, party-oriented groups such as the League of Pissed Off Voters (sf.indyvoter.org), which reaches out to young people through DJ events, and the SF Party Party (www.sfpartyparty.com), which influences local politics by combining education with clubbing, are doing their best to change the world.

"People on the left these days seem to think that denying themselves pleasure is the only way to take back the government. The early energy of protest against Bush has turned into a kind of self-punishment. That’s so dry and boring — and ultimately useless," says Dr. Stephen Duncombe, editor of the Cultural Resistance Reader and author of the new book Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy. I called him because I wanted to talk about the guilt some of us feel about partying when the world’s going to shit. He’s been a prime mover in theatrical resistance groups such as Reclaim the Streets, the Lower East Side Collective, and the utterly fabulous Billionaires for Bush. (He’s also kind of cute in a young-professor-at-NYU way.)

"We should be using the positive energy of nightlife to show people that politics can be both entertaining and transformational," he continues. "Politics should be a fun, interactive spectacle, like the kind nightlife provides. No one wants to get involved with something if it seems like more work."

Yet still I worry. What would life be like if the war were here? What if I were a gay Iraqi? I trolled the Internet gay hookup sites to find a gay Iraqi to talk to about it. All I could find at first were half-naked American soldiers stationed in the Middle East (we are everywhere!). I eventually came upon a Western-educated gay Iraqi refugee living in Jordan who identified himself as Arje. He said I was being foolish. "Go out and have fun," he replied when I wrote that I didn’t feel like partying off the weight of the world. "Have a dance for me."

SCENE: Nightlife during wartime

-
0

SCENECover.jpg

SCENE: Nightlife During Wartime

-
0

Last Wednesday we unleashed the first issue of our new quarterly glossy supplement SCENE: The Guardian Guide to Nightlife and Glamour to thunderous approval and only a few (disappointing) howls of protest. I want more protest dammit! Where’s freakin’ Fox News when you want ’em! My nails are too long to dial the right-wing media up. Lord, I need a special dialing wand .

SCENECover.jpg

With fashion and photography contributed by House of Herrera and art direction by Mirissa Neff, SCENE took on Nightlife During Wartime. Go ahead and read my intro essay Emergence exits: Getting crazy in a time of crisis — if you dare.

More pics and articles after the jump!

Scene: Nightlife during wartime

-
0

SCENECover.jpg

Super Modelo

-
0

› superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO The sun-bleached suede pump lay abandoned in a tattered jumble of grasses, beneath a grove of swaying palms, next to a ruined hacienda. Vermillion nasturtiums burst through the hacienda’s broken crimson bricks. Embossed on the pump’s inner sole, one word: predictions. Suddenly, a pair of untethered horses flashed into view — one black, the other sweet caramel, weaving their way to a freshwater lagoon at the tip of the white sand beach just beyond us. The grove lit up like a David Lynch interior. Both horses froze to inspect me and Hunky Beau, their glittering eyes four obsidian orbs, the clang-clanging cowbells roped to their well-muscled necks all echoing ancient disco and shit.

Ah, Mexico. Pass the lip balm.

Fearful of my sustained pallor — nightclub, laptop, nightclub, laptop, head shave, rehab — Hunky Beau had whisked me away for a week on the beaches of sunny Baja, to the tiny Pacific outpost of Pescadero, brimming with surfers who’d congregated for wave season. (Two words: Mexican surfers. Delicioso.) "But you’ll miss the season premiere of America’s Next Top Model! Church of Tyra! Church of Tyra!" a tiny voice in the back of my head had protested, the one I call Tiki La Shot. "Big whup, lady," said another, the one I call Mann Coulter. "You’re also missing the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. Wanna cry about it?"

Turns out I had the dates wrong for both. Then Anna Nicole collapsed. Predictions!

Despite my extended geography of lovers, I still can’t speak a lick of española — which of course only adds to my mysterious attractiveness. The language of sexy is silence. So the only information I could glean from the gorgeous local populace for you is this: if you ever find yourself in an old-fashioned paleteria in the dusty, delightful village of Todos Santos, don’t ask them to scoop your purplicious uva ice cream into a sugar conio.

Also, horrid faggot fashions have truly gone global. While the nuevo dinero flowing in from all the unfortunate American second-home development has triggered a growth market in mid-’90s gangsta baggies among the more macho Baja-anians, abruptly blooming on the street corners are packs of mincing teen Mexican queens with tie-dyed mullets, pink cell phones, and embroidered denim flares. Flacas, please.

Toward the end of our sojourn, we avoided the awful, gringo-polluted Disneyland of Cabo San Lucas and took off to the raucous Carnaval parade and festival in the state capital, La Paz. (Will someone please, please solve the riddle of Middle American female hair? Why are white ladies in Cabo still working the frizzy bob thing, squished into yellow Dress Barn stretchiness, and screaming for "peena coladas"? Tufted bangs, even! I almost had to love it.)

There we swooned over the hundreds of handsome caballeros who’d descended from their mountainside ranchos in impeccably spotless Stetsons, Wranglers, and mustaches to hoof it to banda sinaloense, the breathtaking polka-style Mexican dance music. There were so many tuba, trombone, and accordion ensembles oompa-pahing away mere inches from one another I thought I was being squeezed through an awesome Lawrence Welk mashup tube.

As the gangs of muy guapo musicians waltzed the night away and the blanket sellers hawked their tiger-striped and Virgin of Guadalupe–decorated wares, the pink sliver of the moon dipped below La Paz Bay. I turned to Hunky Beau and sighed. Fuck the fruitless Carnaval cruising, I thought. I’m the real princess here.

Funny how sometimes the hardest nightlife things to find are the ones right under the mirror beneath your nose. So I get back and want to hear some banda on the home team dance floor, right? But … where? Seems any night of the week I can get freaky to Southeast Asian, Brazilian, Moroccan, and Afro-Caribbean beats, but, despite the recent explosion of norteño music (the "gangsta rap of banda"), an early ’00s club interest in electronic-tinged banda by groups such as Nortec Collective, and our own estimable population of Mexican folk, the only reliable finds on my banda radar are occasional events at clubs such as El Rincon, Cancun, the Make-Out Room, and, of course, that reina wonderland, Esta Noche.

In this way, banda is like hyphy: everywhere in the media and streets but rarely on the dance floor. I’m the first to admit that I’m a mite too white sometimes. Just because I don’t know about it doesn’t mean it’s not banging. Therefore, I vow to go immediately to the Discolandia and Ritmo Latino record stores in the Mission and follow the plethora of flyers for live banda to Latinate bliss. Meanwhile, hey, all you worldly and alternative DJs: how about slipping some slices from Banda el Recodo de Cruz Lizarrága in your mix? Huh? *

The sushi house rules

-
0

› paulr@sfbg.com

An old rule of prudence teaches that you should never eat raw oysters in a month whose name doesn’t have an "r" in it — from May to August, more or less — the warm-weather months elevating the danger of spoilage. Rain and cold do present their inconveniences and discomforts, but they are also balm in the matter of seafood, most of which is delicate and turns bad easily if the temperature starts to rise. One does not like to think of oysters being hauled along I-5 on some infernal July afternoon.

The rule has never been extended to sushi, so far as I know, but it wouldn’t be the worst idea. Although my best sushi experiences have been in balmy Hawaii, and while I have eaten raw seafood here in every season, even our autumnal summer, I am most at ease doing so in winter, when the world itself seems well refrigerated and the albacore tuna, plucked from cold seas, is rushed to the chilly city, where we eagerly await it in a restaurant that, perhaps — with any luck — is well heated.

Barracuda Sushi, which opened last year on a glam stretch of Market Street that includes Café Flore, Bagdad Café, and Lime, is well heated. It is also quite nice looking, with a rust and jade paint scheme, banquettes upholstered in fabrics with fine geometric patterns, and bars fore and aft (the latter a sushi bar). The place is less clubby-looking than Lime (which is a door or two away), but there’s a powerful nightlife pulse nonetheless. If you knew this space as the onetime home of such restaurants as Tin Pan and Repastoria Satyricon, you might not recognize it.

It is one of my pet theories that oft-flipped restaurant spaces at last achieve stability when they become Japanese restaurants. Après le déluge, sushi. Houses of Japanese cuisine must fail occasionally, but the attrition rate is low. So Barracuda (which has a pair of sibling restaurants down the Peninsula) opens with at least one structural advantage.

Another plus, more sensual or aesthetic in nature, is the swirling of Peruvian and Brazilian touches into the food, a reflection not of the kitchen’s whimsy (or not just of its whimsy) but of the large Japanese migrations to South America in the first half of the 20th century. Who could forget that a recent president of Peru bore the unlikely name Alberto Fujimori? Of course, he was forced out in disgrace, but still.

A nice introduction to this pan-Pacific sensibility is the sushi napoleon ($11.95), a disk of rice about the size of a single-serve cheesecake topped with chunks of tuna and avocado — a pair of roll regulars — along with blueberries, slices of mango, and a slathering of mayonnaise. It sounds awful, like something a latchkey kid might throw together as an after-school snack, but it turned out to be both beautiful (with the colors of some elaborate ice cream confection) and tasty-rich in a way Japanese food seldom is.

Most of the food isn’t so aggressively inventive. Gyoza ($5.95), the Japanese pot stickers, are familiar and friendly, though we found the skins to be thinner than usual, and the ponzu sauce on the side was spiked with some minced jalapeño pepper for added excitement. Seaweed salad ($6.95) was presented as an upmarket trio, with three varieties of seaweed (wakame, goma wakame, and hijiki) given three saucings of aji amarillo (mayonnaise-like and made from the mild yellow Peruvian chile), orange tobiko, and lemon. A sushi set ($11.95) consisted of California roll (crab and avocado) and a selection of nigiri, including tuna, salmon, and shrimp; it was good, but you could get it anywhere, even at the supermarket.

But even the fanciest supermarket probably wouldn’t offer anything to compare with the hamachi ceviche ($11.95), the thin bricks of flesh doused with a basil-yuzu-wasabi sauce — truly a New World combination, which produced a memorable sweet pepper-fire effect — and topped with tiny cubes of purplish bronze geutf8 — like jewels — we could not identify. Also distinctive are many of the rolls, including the Barracuda crunchy roll ($12): broiled tuna and avocado wrapped in a long tube of rice, which is then dipped in a light batter and flash-fried. The result is something like a Japanese chimichanga, tasty but quite rich.

We tend to associate Japanese cuisine so strongly with uncooked seafood that we are at risk of forgetting that the Japanese cook a lot of their food too and with their own sort of élan. The lunch menu offers us a series of vivid reminders of this, from udon (the pho-like noodle soup) to various types of panko-crusted cutlets, or katsu. There is even a breaded calamari steak (the poor man’s abalone), which turned up for me in a bento box ($9.50) in the company of a California roll, a pat of white rice, a mixed salad with creamy dressing, and (most welcome on a leaden, tule-fog day) a bowl of miso soup on the side. Across the table, miso soup was neither necessary nor missed, for there came a great bowl of udon ($9.95), steaming like a caldera on some volcanic plain. In the concentrated chicken broth lurked a Medusa’s wig of fat noodles, with flecks of shiso and scallion and slivers of shiitake mushrooms. The tempura shrimp were presented on the side, and we briefly considered the likelihood that we were expected to dump them into the bowl. We didn’t, and they turned out to do nicely when eaten on the side … but had we broken a rule? *

BARRACUDA SUSHI

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

2251 Market, SF

(415) 558-8567

www.barracudasushi.com

Full bar

AE/DC/DISC/MC/V

Noisy if busy

Wheelchair accessible

>

Transfer: Over?

-
0

Well, flip-and-skip realtor Greg Bronstein’s done it again — but this time he’s fucked with the wrong peeps. I got word on Sunday that he’d sold the Transfer — out from under the noses of the staff. Nightlife mogul wannabe Bronstein and his horridly named organization, Flavors You Crave (gag), also owns Lime, Bar on Castro, Crave, Jet and probably a million other places as well — and he’s known for selling things at a moments notice. Sell those! Close those! He sold Castro restaurant Blue, Sneaky Tiki shut down within moments of opening, and Bronstein came really close to pissing me off when he bought and sold Hush Hush in turnaround fashion, effectively closing it down for good. But the Transfer, under fab and canny manager Shawn Vergara, has become ground zero for nonpretentious party people in just one year — and was going strong. Most of the party promoters working with the Transfer have said they’ll jump ship with out Vergara at the helm. No word what the new owners intend yet, but we’ll be following the story closely, marke my words …

transfera.jpg
Better days?

Rutting madly

-
0

› superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO Oh! Yes! It hurts! Oh yes! It hurts!

My virtual buttocks are on fire.

After my last little column about stuff I’d enjoyed in Clubland over the past year, I got spanked online for downplaying some of the Bay’s ongoing nightlife trends. Namely: breakbeats and house revivals, dubstep and kiddie rave, Burning Man, Burning Man, Burning Man. (Isn’t he burnt yet? Sheesh. It’s like a spiritual tire fire already.) That’s fine, baby: hit me one more time. Getting spanked online was my former profession. If my drag name weren’t already Pantaysia, I’d be known as Rudolpha the Red-Assed Tranny for sure. And luckily, it’s the new year — I can simply wad up my 2006 wall calendar and stuff it down my cut-off liquor store panty hose for some rough-year-behind-me relief. I’m just. That. Crafty. See?

My, but how the sting lingers, the echoing smack of keen reprimands. Whether or not the genres of clubalalia mentioned above — and I’m pretty sure one or more of my personalities has dished them all here in the past — are curvaceous and bearded enough to attract my one good eye is one thing. Whether or not my mouth is so big it can swallow all the wonders of what happens after dark and spit them whole back in your face is another. I’m just one slightly skinny leather hip-hop disco Muppet queer after all. My day job’s at a Wendy’s! I leave being everywhere to other gay peeps.

Yet the familiar finds its way into one’s regular carousing, no? What if I’m in a hot, wet rut? All those back room encounters, bathhouse sounds, bhangra parties, electro flashes, wet jockstraps, mad drag queens, hip-hop karaoke nights, bedroom DJs, shots of Cuervo … could they be of a party piece? Didn’t I once declare krumping the future? Where’s the damn risk?

Yes, I have my broad themes: 2005 was all about the democratization of Clubland via technology — and trying to get laid by a woman for the first time; 2006 was about how clubs reflected our culture’s apocalyptic visions and the return of the outlaw gay underground. Lord knows what the predawn rubble of 2007 will shape itself into. But here are some nifty things I’d like to stick my nosy pumps in.

NEOMINIMAL TECHNO


DJ Jason Kendig, Claude VonStroke, and a giant swath of relocated Detroiters are injecting tiny bleeps and beats in the strangest of places: dive bars and back rooms. What’s the deal?

GEAR CULTURE


Bars like Gestalt in the Mission District are serving brewskis to Critical Massers. Clubs like LoGear at the Transfer are making frantic pedalers dance. Will the fixed-gear explosion spawn a raucous rocker renaissance?

TABLE GODDESSES


Where are the ladies? The fierce rulers of the US club scene at the moment are women from New York City and Los Angeles. For years my money’s been on SF femmes like Jenny Fake, Forest Green, and Claire-Ahl to join them. Why are we still ruled by men?

BEAT FREAKS


Fine. For the 13th time I’m calling a house revival. House club mainstays like Fag and Taboo are still going strong. Legendary DJ Ruben Mancias is coming back from New York City for a while to restart his influential club Devotion, and DJ TeeJay Walton is launching a new club called Freak the Beat (www.freakthebeat.com), specifically aimed at attracting younger househeds. Fingers crossed.

POST-POST-IRONY


Last year all the quotes were dropped from retro. People took the sounds and styles of the past seriously, no joke. It paid off in a lot of ways (notably, people stopped laughing and erroneously screaming, "Oh my god, I used to love this song!" when a record had claps or a guitar solo in it). But post-irony was, well, not much fun. Are people on the dance floor smiling yet? That’s better. *

It’s happening, and it’s happening now. Sign up at www.sfbg.com and you can flame my frickin’ column at will (I know you’ve got scandalous New Year’s Eve tales … better share ’em it before I do). Also: hit up the Pixel Vision blog (www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision) for more club news, reviews, and how-do-you-dos. It’s all about raving in the cubicles, baby.

Making their lists

-
0

PAUL COSTUROS
Total Shutdown, Death Sentence: Panda!, Murder Murder
(10) Bay Area representing and dominating at the End Times Fest in St. Paul, Minn., June 22–<\d>24.
(9) T.I.T.S., Throughout the Ages split double 12-inch with Leopard Leg (Upset the Rhythm) and live. Forest-witch psych never sounded so good.
(8) Fuckwolf CD on Kimosciotic and live. Dub done via destruction by way of swallowing glass and delay …
(7) Burmese, White (Planaria) and live. Every time I see them I feel like I’ve been transported to a Beijing opera in 1790 and forced to watch it while strapped to a chair at gunpoint.
(6) Devin the Dude, live at the Red Devil Lounge, Nov. 6. Songs about fucking, drinking, and smoking weed sung so beautifully, like an angel.
(5) “Black Panther Rank and File” at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, March 18–<\d>July 2, and getting snubbed by Bobby Seale when I asked him about when he did stand-up comedy.
(4) Tracy Morgan doing stand-up live at Cobb’s, March 3.
(3) Sergio Iglesias and the Latin Love Machine at Thee Parkside, Nov. 18, and the soccer circle that followed.
(2) 16 Bitch Pile-Up, Doomsday 1999, Ettrick with Weasel Walter live, March 15.
(1) (tie) Nate Denver’s Neck at the Elbo Room, Oct. 14. I laughed, I cried, and I wanted to destroy someone for the first time since sixth grade; Skip Donahue’s new wave extravo-bonanza at Casanova, April 20; Kurtis Blow at Mighty, Aug. 12; DJ Funk at the Rickshaw Stop, July 21; and ESG at Mezzanine, Oct. 27.

ARI MESSER
Contributor
• Mountain Goats, Get Lonely (4AD).
• Beth Orton, Comfort of Strangers (Astralwerks). Shimmers with a modern kind of grace.
• Nic Jones, Game Set Match (Topic). My favorite wild-as-the-firth Brit-folk revivalist, live in the ’70s, resurrecting ballads and slapping the guitar like a preacher on a healing mission.
• Crooked Jades, World’s on Fire (Jade Note Music). Old-timey troubadours sing with fire, then stomp it out so that there’s nothing left to repent for.
• Various artists, Chrome Children (Stones Throw).
• Margot and the Nuclear So and So’s, The Dust of Retreat (Standard Recording Co.).
• Sara Tavares, Balance (Times Square).
• Meneguar, I Was Born at Night (Magic Bullet).
• Mirah, Joyride: Remixes (K). The double album explores the songwriter’s expansive journal-like stories.
• Joanna Newsom, Ys (Drag City). Surpasses Cat Power in my book of 2006 for the year’s most sweetly sacrificial feline croon.

CLIPD BEAKS
Tigerbeat6 band
(1) E-40, “Tell Me When To Go” (Sick Wid It/Jive). Duh.
(2) Indian Jewelry and Celebration at South by Southwest.
(3) Lil Wayne, everything but especially “Shooter,” Tha Carter Vol. 2 (Cash Money).
(4) No Doctors — just in general.
(5) Mute Era and In Corridors. The mystic protégés of the Minnesota-Japan rock ’n’ roll exchange program.
(6) Gentleman’s Techno at the Cave — especially OonceOonce DJ sets and Black William and the Gondolier live.
(7) White Williams, “Headlines,” Let’s Lazertag Sometime (Tigerbeat6).
(8) Watching Dusty Sparkles from Glass Candy and Danava do anything.
(9) Shawn Porter, a.k.a. Bloody Snowman.
(10) Erase Errata, Nightlife (Kill Rock Stars).

SAKE ONE
Levende Lounge resident DJ
(1) A lotta ancestors: from the great J-Dilla to LA DJ and community organizer DJ Dusk to SF native and NYC staple Adam Goldstone to rebel radio pioneer Michael “Mixxin” Moore to SF DJ and youth activist DJ Domino, the sky gained a lotta bring-ass stars.
(2) The Trackademics phenomenon. Comin’ straight outta Alameda High, young Trackademics took the underground dance music world by storm, using broken beat, dance punk, and new soul sounds and smashing them into a hyphy hybrid that had kids going stewey from SF to NYC.
(3) Pacific Standard Time anniversary party. When Kool Herc stepped to the DJ booth at Levende Lounge in March, time sorta stood still for a few hours. He gave Frisco a taste of the magic that sparked a global prairie fire.
(4) Bilal, Something to Hold Onto. Probably the best major-label release of 2006 that never came out. His label blamed online leaks but probably just lacked the creative vision to market such a strange product — namely, inventive modern soul music.
(5) Tiombe Lockhart, “O Bloody Day, O Starry Night on the Bowery” (Bling47). Evil genius Waajeed and the brilliant Ms. Lockhart released the first of what should be many classic joints.
(6) GQ, “Better Must Come” (Calibud). Something about an eight-year-old having a number one hit with a conscious anthem just kinda makes me feel good about the future.
(7) Alice Smith, For Lovers, Dreamers and Me (BBE Music). Though the incredible Maurice Fulton remix of “Love Endeavor” isn’t here, this album reflected a new direction for urban music.
(8) The hyphy movement. Kinda obvious, but its impact is hard to overstate. Bay Area club music took the world by storm in 2006, leading taste-making rags and bloggers from here to Denmark scouring the Web for the latest Bay Area slang, style, and sounds.
(9) Journey into Paradise: The Larry Levan Story (Rhino). After a couple attempts, 2006 saw a definitive two-disc collection of some of the songs that trademarked perhaps the most influential DJ of all time, besides Herc.
(10) TV on the Radio, Return to Cookie Mountain (Interscope). I prefer the leaked version because “Wolf Like Me” is the shit, but it’s still pretty damn good for a major-label debut, nyuk, nyuk.

GENE “BEAN” BAE
Battleship
(1) Punk section at Amoeba, SF and Berkeley. I know I work there, and this comes dangerously close to an advertisement, but isn’t it about time?
(2) Domino Records’ Sound of Young Scotland series. Lovely reissues of Orange Juice, Fire Engines, and my current fave, Josef K. Courtesy of Franz Ferdinand’s severance check.
(3) Boy, I sure picked a bad year to swear off box sets: This Heat’s Out of Cold Storage (ReR) finally makes available all the in- and out-of-print recordings.
(4) Boy, I sure picked a bad year to swear off metal: Boris, Pink and live, and collaborating with Sunn O))) on Altar (both Southern Lord).
(5) The Bay Area represents: running into fellow local bands such as the Fucking Ocean in NYC and T.I.T.S. in Leeds, England, while on a too-long tour was the salve for the weary, homesick, itinerant musician. And by the way, the Fucking Ocean’s new CD, Le Main Rouge, harks back to the heady times at the turn of the century when it seemed like every day a new band that didn’t suck crawled out of a new crack in the sidewalk.
(6) It would be irresponsible of me to not mention the midterm elections.
(7) Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man was the best music-related film of the year. And it gave me more reasons to hate U2.
(8) Coming to a curbside near you: the Bay Area’s best new venue, John Benson’s decommissioned AC Transit bus converted into a biodiesel RV and mobile venue.
(9) Billy Childish’s unplugged show, Mama Buzz Café, May.
(10) And one thing that sucked this year: Lance Hill quit booking and working the Stork Club. The man who brought you the club’s happy hour and free admission during the Oakland Art Murmur — and who let Battleship record an album at his venue — has left the building. May the East Bay rise to the occasion and continue nurturing good local music.

MATT BAUER
Singer-songwriter
(1) Mariee Sioux, A Bundled Bundle Of Bundles (self-released). So. Ridiculously. Good.
(2) Death Vessel, Stay Close (North East Indie). I’ve listened to this five billion times since I got it in October.
(3) Laura Gibson, If You Come to Greet Me (Hush).
(4) CMJ Music Marathon, accompanying Alela Diane and Tom Brosseau on banjo. When Brosseau breaks into the highest part of his range, it makes me almost believe in ghosts.
(5) El Capitan live at the Rite Spot, Oct 15. They did a medley covering and reworking other Bay Area artists’ music — one of the most creative and heartfelt things I heard all year.
(6) Last of the Blacksmiths, “And Then Some”/”You Think I’m. O.K.” 7-inch.
(7) Deerhoof, McCarren Park Pool, Brooklyn, NY.
(8) Standing onstage at Carnegie Hall. OK, I was only delivering a bass amp for Smokey Robinson. But it gave me chills!
(9) Jolie Holland’s “Mexican Blue.” Maybe my favorite song of 2006.
(10) Jeffrey Luck Lucas, Bottom of the Hill, Feb. 8.

DAVE BROEKEMA
Numbers
• T.I.T.S. and Leopard Leg, Throughout the Ages/Leopard Leg split double 12-inch (Upset the Rhythm)
• Mon Cousin Belge, the Knockout, a couple weeks ago
• Bootleg of Black Sabbath Live in Paris 20 Dec. 1970
• Trin Tran (a.k.a. Trinng Tranng)
• Erase Errata, Nightlife (Kill Rock Stars)
Weasel Walter performing with Sergio Iglesias, Thee Parkside, Nov. 18
• Gay Beast, El Rio, Dec. 7
• Fuckwolf, anywhere, anytime
• K.I.T. dressed as mummies (or the Mummies)
• Halloween at 3rd Ward in Brooklyn
• Seeing The Sweet Smell of Success with Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster on PBS twice (I don’t have cable). Totally awesome creepy nastiness.

BROLIN WINNING
422 Records and MP3.com; Top 10 Hip-Hop
• Mekalek, Live and Learn (Glow-in-the-Dark). Time Machine’s DJ-producer connects with various rappers for a supremely banging compilation-style album. Rhode Island, stand up!
• Motion Man, Pablito’s Way (Threshold). Bay Area superlyricist knocks it out of the park on his second solo effort, produced by KutMasta Kurt, featuring Too $hort, Mistah FAB, and Q*bert.
• Snoop Dogg, Tha Blue Carpet Treatment (Geffen). Though a bit bloated, Snoop’s eighth album is still great, featuring bass-heavy beats and collabos with Nate Dogg, Dre, Cube, E-40, and others.
• Melina Jones, Swearing Off Busters (sampler). An immensely talented MC-vocalist from the SFC, Jones is the future. Check her out on MySpace and cop the album in early ’07.
• Dudley Perkins, Expressions (Stones Throw). Charmingly blunted soul-funk meanderings from underground icon Madlib and the artist formerly known as Declaime.
•<\!s><\i>Ghostface, Fishscale (Def Jam). The Wu’s most consistent swordsman continues to impress, with help from Dilla, Doom, and Pete Rock.
• Rakim, Slims, Sept. 10. The R may be pushing 40, but he still knows how to move the crowd, running through timeless jams with Kid Capri backing him up.
• A Tribe Called Quest, Berkeley Community Theatre, Sept. 9. Rhymefest and the Procussions were cool too, but the reunited Tribe killed it.
• Ice Cube, Fillmore, April 25. Despite cred-killing family films and uneven recent material, Cube ripped it live, drawing from a thick catalog of Westside classics.
• Kool Keith, Mezzanine, June 17. At his first local appearance in years, notorious rap weirdo Kool Keith did an amazing set with lots of Ultramag and Octagon material, plus a random topless chick.

WILL SCHWARTZ
Hey Willpower
(10) Amy Winehouse, “Rehab” (Universal/Island).
(9) Cassie, “Me and U” (Bad Boy).
(8) Brick Lane, London, on a Sunday.
(7) Hot Chip, “Over and Over” (Astralwerks).
(6) Fingered Club at Little Pedro’s in downtown LA.
(5) Final Fantasy, Bottom of the Hill, Aug. 11.
(4) Planning to Rock at Club Motherfucker, Bardens Boudoir, London, Dec. 9.
(3) Grizzly Bear, Yellow House (Warp).
(2) Lena Wolff, Needles and Pens, March 11–<\d>April 9.
(1) Field Mob with Ciara, “So What” (Universal).

LEE HILDEBRAND
Contributor
• Brett Dennen, So Much More (Dualtone). The Central Valley singer-songwriter addresses political and romantic concerns in a craggy, tear-stained tenor.
• Kelis, Kelis Was Here (Jive). Although in-your-face sexuality is the Manhattan siren’s calling card, it’s hard not to also adore the way she blurs the lines between R&B, rock, hip-hop, and pop.
• Charles Lloyd, Sangam (ECM).
• Ann Nesby, In the Spirit (Shanachie). Nesby’s glorious alto pipes often leap octaves in breathtaking bounds on this masterpiece of traditional African American gospel music.
• Joan Osborne, Pretty Little Stranger (Vanguard).
• Catherine Russell, Cat (World Village). Veteran background vocalist Russell steps to the forefront with a wonderfully eclectic set of tunes including “Back o’ Town Blues,” which her dad, Luis Russell, wrote with Louis Armstrong back in 1945.
• Candi Staton, His Hands (Honest Jons/Astralwerks).
• Irma Thomas, After the Rain (Rounder).
• Hank Williams III, Straight to Hell (Bruc). This intense honky-tonk country music is filled with visions so demented that the label’s owner, former California lieutenant governor Mike Curb, spells his own name backward.
• Mitch Woods, Big Easy Boogie (Club 88). Marin County vocalist-pianist Woods creates the hottest set of 1950s-style New Orleans R&B since, well, the ’50s.

TOM CARTER
Charalambides; Top 10 Things That Didn’t Happen in San Francisco
(1) Getting dosed at Terrastock, Providence, RI, and watching Lightning Bolt from high in the light rigging, April 23.
(2) On tour with Marcia, watching thousands of chimney swifts flocking into a smokestack during a light rainstorm in Portland, Ore., with a double rainbow to the east and a sunset to the west.
(3) Me and Natacha witnessing Comets on Fire’s chalet get destroyed at All Tomorrow’s Parties with a BBC film crew documenting the whole scene. Minehead, Devonshire, UK.
(4) Ben Chasny destroying with solo electric guitar at Arthur Nights, LA, Oct. 21.
(5) Jamming Buffy St. Marie’s “Cod’Ine” for over an hour at 4 a.m. with Matt Valentine and Erika Elder in Guilford, Vt.; also Mvee and the Bummer Road’s form-destroying set at ATP, Minehead, Devonshire, UK.
(6) Hearing the most killer noise CD-R ever in Nashville, recorded by Chris Cherry Blossoms’ Boston Terrier.
(7) Gigging with Badgerlore at the Wire festival, Chicago, and eating pizza slices the size of surfboards with Glen Donaldson, Sept. 21.
(8) Laying down thick sounds with Shawn McMillen and the Starving Weirdos in Eureka and later watching McMillen toss tennis balls to a terrier on the beach in Samoa while hearing Steve Weirdo’s roommate’s tales of Sasquatch hunting and dodging bullets in the Yuroc reservation.
(9) Ashtray Navigation’s Syd Barrett tribute at the beginning of their set, biker bar downstairs playing “Astronomy Domine” the same night in Leeds, UK.
(10) Gray-orange dust storm over the gash of the Rio Grande. Later that night, me and my girlfriend, Natacha, listen to Of’s wedding CD-R and watch dozens of shooting stars and a distant thunderstorm over the mountains, Taos, NM.
RIP Syd Barrett, Arthur Lee, and whoever else I’m forgetting.

Girl talk

-
0

› kimberly@sfbg.com
The Gossip’s first show of 2006 in San Francisco wasn’t as likely to get tongues clacking as one I saw several years previously, the night mod, bobbed fireball Beth Ditto pulled a cute, bare-skulled baby dyke from the audience to twist and grind to the tune of “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” But on Jan. 27 the mixed queer-straight crowd was yelling just as loud anyway, singing along like budding blues shouters and bopping up and down atop broken glass as a long-haired Ditto wailed through the sweat streaming down her face, swayed us and slayed us. Her best friend during her Alabama school days, Nathan Howdeshell, tugged as many sharp, shocked punk-blues lines out of his guitar as he could while drummer Hannah Blilie pounded home Ditto’s words: you’re standing in the way of control.
Control … undergarments? In women’s circles, control can be such a dirty word, but self-described fat activist Ditto would probably differ and describe it instead as a cry for seizing power, calling for a new team after half a decade of Republican-dominated government.
According to the US Senate Web site, 1992 was the year of the woman — the first time four women (Barbara Boxer, Carol Moseley Braun, Dianne Feinstein, and Patty Murray) were elected to the Senate in a single election year, following the highly combustible Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. The sight of an all-white male committee laying into law professor Anita Hill apparently led many to question the dearth of female senators. I’m sure some powers-that-be would rather that be the sole “year of the woman,” officially mandated by the federal government. But for me, 2006 could have just as easily have fit that descriptor. Even if we didn’t spend its closing month fussing over celeb thunderwear.
This year began with the typically fire-starting “say, ah-women, somebody” salutations of Ditto at Bottom of the Hill and continued through the strong musical showings of local all-female combos Erase Errata and T.I.T.S., the splashy emergence of girl bands such as Mika Miko and Cansei de Ser Sexy, and the newly revived ESG and Slits, which proved to be some of the most exciting musical reunions of 2006. In the fourth quarter, life seemed to rhyme with art, as Nancy Pelosi assumed her role as the first female House speaker and leaders such as Liberian president Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the first elected female head of state in Africa, entered the picture. As 2006 ends with five Grammy nominations for the Dixie Chicks and the girl-group-loving gloss of Dreamgirls, the pendulum of public favor seems to be swinging toward the double–X chromosome side of the block. We’re not even counting the onslaught of Latin pop princesses à la Shakira and Nelly Furtado, reading into Beyoncé’s strident awakening on B’Day (Dreamgirls probably hit a little too close to home for destiny’s chosen child), and paying heed to the escapist serenade of Gwen Stefani. Could feminism be in again?
Perhaps — because you can smell the stirrings of discontent and brewing backlash in the winter wind. The demise of fem-firebrand groups like Sleater-Kinney and Le Tigre foregrounded the question “Is the all-girl band dead?” — as the latter’s Kathleen Hanna complained about not getting radio and MTV play on the basis of gender. How else to explain complaints of pretension surrounding the release of Joanna Newsom’s Ys and the fact that the biggest gossip of the year — talked up louder than the Gossip’s Ditto — came in the form of the pantyless pop-tart triad of Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, and Lindsay Lohan? Even TV’s would-be feminists tut-tutted about the trio’s shaved, bared crotch shots, proliferating online like so many revamped, vamped-up NC-17 Hollywood Babylons and Celebrity Sleuths. Is the image of pop stars flashing cameras news? No, but then most of us never actually saw Jim Morrison’s lizard king or GG Allin’s scabs. Spears’s career was built on the promise of pubescent sex — how does that change when her paycheck is splashed all over workplace monitors? What is celebrity when the highly controlled PR mechanism breaks down and the most intimate component of fame, tabloid poonanny, is served up, C-section and all, in a bucket seat?
So as pop’s eternal girls go wild and skip the thong song and we muse over whether Pelosi and company’s new roles could be the best thing to ever happen to Dubya, especially if he aims to avoid impeachment (mainstream media hand-wringing over frosh Demo centrists possibly going wild is disingenuous — does anyone really expect Pelosi to be as much a partisan pit bull as Newt Gingrich?), we have to wonder how we might transform this turning point, the second (or third or fourth, etc.) coming of the Woman, into something greater than the sum of its disparate, far-flung, all-girl band parts. It’s tempting — and perhaps nutty — to draw rough, symbolic comparisons between the national discussion around Hillary Clinton’s and Barak Obama’s possible presidential runs and the Bay Area’s most arresting musical developments in 2006: the insurgent interest surrounding all-female bands and the buzzy rise of Bay hip-hop and hyphy. Is it time to lay siege to the turf of the Man. Even the oldest schoolee in rock’s girls academy, Joan Jett, can point to Broadcast Data Systems statistics on how more than 90 percent of the songs played on rock or alternative radio are still by men. “It’s institutional, and I’m not quite sure where to attack it,” Jett told me this fall. “Except with the audiences. The audiences forced stations to play ‘I Love Rock ’n’ Roll.’ So we got to get to that place.”
That place — my space or yours — is wherever women (and men) put together bands to make their own “user-generated content,” as a social networking site might dub it, or “art,” as I prefer to call it, and find the will to take control. Of how they sound and how they get their music out. For a sample overview of that cutting edge, see Chicks on Speed’s recent sprawling triple-CD comp, Girl Monster, Volume 1, with tracks by artists ranging from Kevin Blechdom, the Raincoats, Tina Weymouth, and Boyskout to Pulsallama, Cobra Killer, LiliPUT, and Throbbing Gristle’s Cosey Fanni Tutti. Rewrite musical history and promise you’ll be on volume two. SFBG
KIMBERLY CHUN’S CRAMMED TOP NINE
•Folk talk: Bonnie “Prince” Billy, The Letting Go (Drag City); Beirut, The Gulag Orkestar (Ba Da Bing); Joanna Newsom, Ys (Drag City)
•Hot rock: Awesome Color, Awesome Color (Ecstatic Peace); Erase Errata, Nightlife (Kill Rock Stars); Snowglobe, Doing the Distance (Makeshift); Om, Conference of the Birds (Holy Mountain)
•Interstellar explorers: Akron/Family, Meek Warrior (Young God); OOIOO, Taiga (Thrill Jockey); Grouper, Wide (Free Porcupine); White Magic, Dat Rosa Mel Apibus (Drag City)
•Live, with love: 7 Year Rabbit Cycle, Coughs, Citay, Gossip, Sonic Youth and Mirror Dash, Neil Hagerty, Flaming Lips, Liars, Radiohead, Grizzly Bear
•Odds and ends: Tom Waits, Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards (Anti-); Marisa Monte, Universo ao Meu Redor (Blue Note); Girl Monster, Volume 1 (Chicks on Speed); Art of Field Recording: 50 Years of Traditional Music Documented by Art Rosenbaum (Dust-to-Digital)
•Party jams: Clipse, Hell Hath No Fury (Re-Up Gang/Arista); Girl Talk, Night Ripper (Illegal Art); Beck, The Information (Interscope); the Knife, Silent Shout (Rabid)
•Pop nostalgists: Camera Obscura, Let’s Get Out of This Country (Merge); Pelle Carlberg, Everything Now! (Twentyseven); Essex Green, Cannibal Sea (Merge); Pascal, Dear Sir (Le Grand Magistery)
•Solo mio: Neko Case, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood (Anti-); Jolie Holland, Springtime Can Kill You (Anti-); Thom Yorke, The Eraser (XL)
•Reissue korner: Cluster; Karen Dalton; Delta 5; ESG; Ruthann Friedman; Jesus and Mary Chain; Milton Nascimento; Ike Yard; What It Is!: Funky Soul and Rare Grooves (1967–1977) (Rhino)

Bears in jell-o! Female bears!

-
0

OK OK I know we’re giving the bears a lot of play lately in the clubs section, but the whole bear nightlife thing is truly a phenomenon. There’s all these bear clubs now! Too bad the music lames, in my book — all kinda hi-nrg circuity, but I guess that’s kind of run-off from the whole “we’re fat but macho!” thing. (Fact: bears are big girls. That’s what I love about them. They’re so cute! I’ve slept with ever so many… )

So yes, the big (hahahaha) bear club is Bearracuda and now the extra-machowannabes of the universe — and wonderful, at that. these are hot athletes— SF FOG RUGBY is hosting this weekend. BUT THAT’S NOT ALL!

bearr2.jpg
The Fog invades Bearracuda on Saturday, December 16th @ The Deco Lounge, 510 Larkin at Turk. DJs Underdog and Polar Bear will be spinning tunes. $6 gets you in, with part of the proceeds from the door going to the SF Fog. $2.75 drafts, free massages, rugby players and bears! Festivities run from 10pm to 3am.

The people’s party

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Sake 1 isn’t your typical DJ. Holding a graduate degree in social work from UC Berkeley, he volunteers for Caduceus Outreach Services, providing aid to mentally ill homeless adults. He is in the middle of a year initiating as a priest of Elegua in the Lucumi faith (more commonly known as Santeria) and, among other restrictions, must wear white from head to toe, refrain from sex, alcohol, and drugs, and avoid physical contact with others. His weekly party Pacific Standard Time regularly donates a portion of its proceeds to community organizations such as DiverCity Works and the Center for Young Women’s Development. And he has continued to be an in-demand hip-hop and soul DJ, playing parties like Little Ricky’s Rib Shack in NYC and mixing compilations for outfits like Fader magazine, while relentlessly maintaining an optimistic outlook — even though 2006 saw the deaths of his brother; his best friend, DJ Dusk; and his protégé, DJ Domino.
“It has been hard to lose my best friend, my brother, and a student-friend all in the span of four months,” Sake said from his home in the Mission the week before he was to play a memorial party in New York for his brother, house producer and DJ Adam Goldstone. “But it reminds me where I come from and why I do what I do as a DJ. And I have angels all around me …”
ANGELS FROM THE AVENUES
Sake 1 (the name is his tag from his graffiti days) grew up Stefan Goldstone in the Fillmore and the avenues and graduated from Washington High School before attending UC Santa Cruz and finally UC Berkeley. He learned to mix by using records like Public Enemy’s “Night of the Living Baseheads” and Ultramagnetic MC’s “Ego Tripping” on one turntable while listening to KPOO on Sunday afternoons. His older brother in New York expanded his world with Red Alert, Pete Rock, and Marley Marl tapes, and Sake 1 soon began visiting the North Beach Tower Records, which at the time had an extensive selection of 12-inch singles. House parties in Santa Cruz followed when he went to college, and to this day the mood of those early parties is something he treasures. “I always feel like that’s something I’m trying to recapture, that house party vibe where you know everybody, where you feel safe even though it’s kinda out of control.”
Following a long list of steadily higher profile events that included Church, Soulville, and Luscious, Sake’s latest attempt to have a club that feels like a house party is Pacific Standard Time, where he is the resident DJ. The PST started in the spring of 2005 at Bambuddha Lounge, eventually moving to Levende Lounge in search of a bigger dance floor. Reflecting Sake’s diverse selections, which range from hip-hop to disco to broken beat, guests have included Daz-I-Kue from Bugz in the Attic, house producer Osunlade, and local favorites such as Mind Motion.
“Pretty much from June of 2005 until [now], it’s been packed every week, so it’s been a blessing,” Sake said. “The struggle part has been trying to keep the music progressive, keep the ideas and the organizations that we support at the forefront, and not fall back on ‘Well, we’re successful, we’re making money, and people like it, so let’s wild out and just have this bacchanal thing.’ When things become successful, it’s almost like a gift and a curse, because then people expect it to be a certain way every week, and it makes it hard to keep it changing. When it’s not successful, you can change, and nobody’s really trippin’, because nobody’s coming!” he laughed.
REACHING OUT
Saying that the party’s crowd has evolved with its success, Sake acknowledged that at times he finds it hard to strike a balance between playing the more obscure tracks he may personally favor and keeping the party rocking. At the same time, he is well aware that being successful allows him not only to reach a broader audience but to make a bigger impact when he does use his party for benefits. And keeping that success rolling may mean tempering his philosophy of selecting tracks by artists from other countries, female artists, and those that represent genres not easily slotted into the Clear Channel and MTV pigeonholes.
“At PST we struggle with trying to be this sexy, cool, tastemaker thing and then doing these community organization parties,” he reflected. “And the community organizations come and bring their bases, and their bases don’t want to hear SA-RA Creative Partners necessarily. They want to hear commercial rap, because that’s what a lot of our folks listen to.”
Nevertheless, at 11:20 on a recent Thursday night, Levende was rapidly filling up, and the already packed dance floor had no problem getting down to SA-RA’s “Hollywood.” But half an hour later there was a markedly bigger response when Sake dropped “Keep Bouncing,” a track by Too $hort featuring Snoop Dog and will.i.am that the majority of DJs digging SA-RA joints wouldn’t let near their crates.
“DJs should break records, and nightclubs should be places for not just new music but new ideas,” Sake explained. “People should be open to new sounds … and people should be open to having a nightlife experience that isn’t [divorced] from thinking about what is going on in the world outside — that [doesn’t just accept] that you have to step over homeless people to get into the nightclub, you have to disrespect the bar staff to get your drink quicker, you have to touch a girl’s ass if she won’t dance with you.” Walking the line between educating and entertaining, Sake 1 is making San Francisco a better place with a party that might just have it both ways. SFBG
SAKE 1 AT PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
Thursdays, 10 p.m.
Levende Lounge
1710 Mission, SF
$10
(415) 864-5585

1...272829Page 28 of 29

48hills.org is the official publication of the non-profit San Francisco Progressive Media Center.
Contact us: info@48hills.org