Volume 43 [2008–09]

Cafe Mystique

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› paulr@sfbg.com

If you squint — hard, on a night of driving rain, and you earlier washed your contact lenses down the sink by accident, leaving yourself legally blind — you might just catch a hint of a glimpse of a shadow of the Castro Street that figures so prominently in the movie Milk. Today’s Castro Street, like its 1970s antecedent, is dominated by the Castro Theater’s gigantic sign (a colorful spectacle even to the grievously nearsighted), and it’s still just a few blocks long, a brief run from Market Street to 19th Street. In college, driven by stomach-churning curiosity, we navigated this little stretch one night and wondered what all the fuss was about. This was it? Yes, it was and still is.

Oscar Wilde is said to have said that anyone who disappeared would sooner or later be seen in San Francisco. He might have had a vision of Elvis, or perhaps a premonition about Castro Street, which remains a semi-mythical — and yet quite real — Main Street for gay America and maybe the world. Sitting in a window seat at Café Mystique recently (on an evening of no rain and with contact lenses securely in place), I noticed several familiar faces from epochs past, not seen by me for years but still quite recognizable, like a parade of Fezziwigs from my own private version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. In between these sightings, with the huge "Castro" sign glowing like a beacon across the street, we discussed Milk, a movie full of saintly intentions and virtually barren of actual characters except the tortured Dan White and the gently droll Scott Smith (Harvey Milk’s onetime lover), as played by James Franco.

Franco is tasty, with mystique: if he were a café, would he be Café Mystique? The food is tasty at Cafe Mystique, which until recently was a joint called Welcome Home. If Harvey Milk might have felt vaguely at home at Welcome Home, he would almost certainly be astonished by Café Mystique, which on the one hand is still a recognizably gay restaurant from the old school and on the other is dramatically good-looking and serves a Moroccan-inflected menu that would have seemed noteworthy anywhere in the city as recently as a decade ago.

First, the good looks: they’re neither North African nor Castro-homey but faintly central European, like a Vienna hotel or a Bavarian hunting lodge. The long north wall is clad in impressive wood wainscoting, punctuated by pillars topped with sconce lamps, for a street-light effect, while the paint scheme, of butter washed with caramel, enhances the sense of woodsy warmth.

As for the Moroccan touches, they’re all over the dinner menu (there are breakfast and lunch menus too), from the flatbread triangles accompanying a warm fava bean dip ($6) — like a slightly soupy hummus — to the mint in a cup of excellent, if under-seasoned, split green pea soup ($2). (Just add salt and voilà!) There are hints of influence from elsewhere around the Mediterranean as well; a bowl of cucumber sticks bathed in yogurt and boldly charged with lemon and garlic ($4) could easily pass for the Greek condiment tzatziki (itself an obvious relative of the Indian condiment raita).

None of these flourishes seems at all pretentious, since the cooking on the whole remains earthy and friendly. You can get a grilled cheese sandwich ($9), for instance, and it comes with really good fries, and if the cheese happens to be halumi wrapped in lavash, well … that just adds to the mystique. Halumi is a not-soft white cheese typically made from a blend of goat and sheep’s milk and is most closely associated with Cyprus; its firmness means that it resists melting under heat, retaining its shape and solid texture even while taking on a smokiness.

Grilling cubes of meat on skewers is common practice around the Mediterranean — and elsewhere — and at Café Mystique the mixed grill ($15) includes chicken and beef. Beef takes easily to the simplest preparations, such as grilling, while chicken typically needs some TLC to show at its best, so if I’d been asked to bet beforehand on which of these two contestants would command the plate, I would have chosen the beef. But the beef turned out to be rather tough, gray, and flavorless, while the chicken (boneless breast meat) was perfectly cooked, tender and juicy, with a nice dusting of spice. This uneven confederacy of flesh rested on a bed of couscous (which in its white coarseness resembled corn snow), and its chunks were interspersed with examples of grilled vegetables, among them onions, plum tomatoes, zucchini coins, and strips of red and green bell pepper. The bits of green and red on a carpet of white reminded me of Christmas trees and mistletoe wreaths left at snowy curbs in the Januaries of my youth.

Wilde might or might not have anticipated Elvis, but could he possibly have anticipated the Elvis crepe ($8), a gigantic dessert of bananas, vanilla ice cream, whipped cream, nuts, and melted Nutella sauce, all piled, ladled, and scattered atop an actual crepe? Plowing through this mass of sugary calories was a little like eating a banana split that had been neglected for an hour or so on the hottest day of summer. And a cautionary note on Nutella, the wondrous Italian spread of chocolate and hazelnut that appeared from the ashen privations of World War II: it used to consist largely of hydrogenated vegetable oil, i.e. trans fat, which, as we now know, is a no-no. I stopped buying it even when it was on sale. Have they changed the formula? Reading ingredient labels now involves considerable squinting.

CAFE MYSTIQUE

Daily, 8 a.m.–11 p.m.

464 Castro, SF

(415) 865-9810

www.cafemystiquesf.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Moderate noise

Wheelchair accessible

Fanning the flames

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› le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS When your rats grow bigger than your chickens and you can hear them at night in the chicken coop, laughing at your traps … them’s hard times.

I mean to pack it in, as a chicken farmer. But what am I going to farm? Rats?

What am I going to eat for lunch? What am I going to give to my friends for their birthdays?

What am I going to give to complete strangers when I love them for one reason or another? Besides eggs, eggs, and eggs, respectively?

Is it even possible for a chicken farmer not to be a chicken farmer? I have gone through brief periods of chickenlessness in my life, but I forget what they were like. Purgatory, probably. And in my theological opinion, purgatory is worse than hell. Hell, you can bring hot dogs and a stick, settle in. But purgatory is waiting by the phone, or running to the mailbox, or checking your e-mail 999 times an hour, wondering if you got the job.

I looked down and my slippers were on the wrong feet. Instead of switching them, I stood up and walked around like that for a while. I’m eating leftovers that are more than a week old now, and when repercussions happen, instead of throwing out the rest I go, hmm, better eat this for dinner too, to get rid of it.

Hey, maybe that’s why my chickens are smaller than my rats. The rats are eating their feed, and the farmer’s eating their scraps. That’s hard times.

I intentionally left Fanny’s off my little list of Hard Times Handbook cheap cheap chirpies because I wanted to give it a whole fat column of words to itself. Not that it’s the best, or the cheapest place out there, but it’s good and cheap, and it’s my new favorite restaurant simply for having duck soup, which is rare for Chinese restaurants, period. It’s even rarer for Chinese/American greasy-spoon dives.

Which is of course what Fanny’s is. South of Market, Bryant and Eighth streets, plain, spacious, and unspectacular. But the pa of the presumed "ma and pa" was talking passionately to their one sit-down customer about some recipe or cooking technique when I walked in, and I took this as a good omen.

An even better omen: how easy it is to eat for under $5. Two eggs with bacon or sausage, hash browns, and toast, omelets, French toast, pancakes, sandwiches, or two-item combos of Chinese food … all five and under. And then even if you’re going to splurge, say, on a big bowl of roast duck soup with wontons or noodles, you’re still talking sixes and sevens.

Not bad!

The catch is that I haven’t actually tried the duck soup, because I went there at eight in the morning on my pre-caffeinated way to work, ordered off the wall, to go, and grabbed a take-out menu (by way of reading material) on the way out.

I didn’t read my reading material until days later, the same way I read everything I read: rocking chair, toasty fire, cat on lap, hot tea … ah, literature!

Under the chapter heading, Soup (Wonton or Noodle), I read the words "roast duck" and followed the dots to the six and the fitty. My rocking chair squeaked to a stop, Weirdo the Cat woke up, the fire popped, I bookmarked my little fold-up take-out menu, and set it on the side table.

My eyes blurred with hot tears (I am easily moved), I scanned the bookshelves next to my wood stove: Jane Austen, Robert Benchley, Chekhov, Dickens … I didn’t have any E’s, so would file Fanny’s between Dostoyevsky and Fante.

I would go there again first chance I got — for lunch, because they’re not open for dinner. If anything is amiss or astounding, I will get word to you. Meanwhile, for me, it’s enough to know that it’s there, like Moby Dick.

And I can vouch for the breakfast: great hash browns, eggs done right, toast whatever. True, I ate these things in my car, driving over the Bay Bridge and listening to a recording of an old Booker T & the MGs LP played at 45 rpm … but that doesn’t mean I’m not a real restaurant reviewer.

Does it?

FANNY’S RESTAURANT

Mon.–Fri. 7 a.m.–4 p.m.; Sat.–Sun. 9 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

1010 Bryant, SF

(415) 626-1543

No alcohol

MC/V

L.E. Leone’s new book is Big Bend (Sparkle Street Books), a collection of short fiction.

A watched pot

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By Andrea Nemerson


› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I am gay and my boyfriend has trouble getting me off. I don’t like anal sex much because receiving or giving it usually doesn’t make me come. And my boyfriend usually can’t get me off orally, either, which means I have to resort to my own hand sometimes. I bought a Fleshlight, which my boyfriend uses on me. I can come with the Fleshlight, but now I feel disconnected from my boyfriend.

Love,

Not Feeling It

Dear It:

No doubt. That sounds a little grim and technical — plugging yourself (or getting plugged) into the sex socket a few minutes a night — and then rinsing it under the tap and going to sleep — sounds more like maintaining a set of false teeth or an ostomy than it does like having a sex life. What’s missing in your story, though, is how it has come to this. I get the feeling you’re young, but how did you operate before this particular boyfriend? And, um, what is he doing wrong?

We all have to resort to our own hands occasionally, and not only do I not think that’s a problem, I quite often consider it a solution. You shouldn’t be the only one who can do anything for you, though. I think you need to undertake a program like those followed by women trying to overcome anorgasmia. Of course, there are a lot of those women and relatively few men in the same boat, and while I know the girly experts and their work, um, inside and out, their male-oriented counterparts and clients are less familiar. Mostly, you hear about premature ejaculation and erectile dysfunction. Male lack of arousal and aroused-but-just-not-coming don’t get — rather, have not demanded — the same sort of respect, and don’t get discussed much except in the context of drug side effects, which…. Hey! You’re not taking any antidepressants or anything, are you? That would be great, actually, since if you were your doctor could probably fix this by jiggering your meds or dosages around.

Let’s assume there are no drugs involved. And you can’t have a purely physical problem, like scarring from an operation or diabetic neuropathy, or your Fleshlight (and may I say how much I hate the name of that masturbatory gizmo?) wouldn’t work either. So what you’ve got is something psychological holding you back, or causing you to hold back, however you want to frame it. You could be judging yourself unworthy of pleasure for any number of reasons, none of which really matter here.

If you are focusing on the sex you’re having as a performance instead of as an experience, you are doing what sex therapists call spectatoring — "Do I look hot when I’m doing this? Does he think I’m hot? Is he looking at my (putatively unattractive body part here)? Am I as good at this as his last boyfriend? Is he only with me because of (insert pathetic reason to be with you instead of someone better here)?" — which may sound ungrammatical but is certainly a useful concept. If you’re willing to put in the time with a therapist, or even with a bunch of self-help articles, you can probably figure out what you’re doing and learn to not do that. Since you’re gay, there’s a whole other avenue to wander down, too, the one with guilt and self-loathing and feelings of disappointing parents and angering assorted gods — all those things which have never done sexual minorities any good but can be pernicious and damned near impossible to shake if they happened to get their claws into you. Anyway, you’ll have to learn to stop watching and judging yourself, either by learning to focus on your sensations or on his — anywhere but on your own perceived suckitude, basically.

So, (1) it’s performance anxiety, and therapy, or self-help literature and then therapy if the former doesn’t work, will help. And let us not discount the possible — enormous — benefits of drugs. Say, anti-anxiety meds if it’s determined that you’ve got an anxiety thing going. Also, not that this is a common treatment protocol or anything, but I read one abstract where oxytocin, my favorite molecule and the hormone implicated not only in mother-infant bonding and human orgasm but mammalian pair-bonding and (this may be key here) our ability to trust each other, was successfully used to treat male anorgasmia. Yay, oxytocin!

Or then again, (2) it isn’t performance anxiety so much as it’s the result of initially practical but ultimately unhelpful masturbation habits — you trained yourself to respond to a very specific sort of stimulation. Since none of these other acts or orifices except the Fleshlight approximate what you’re used to, none of them are working. If it’s that, you have to retrain, and it will take a while, but women do it all the time and you can too.

My last suggestion, and please don’t quote me on this: Your boyfriend needs lessons.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is teaching Sex After Parenthood at Day One Center (www.dayonecenter.com), Recess (info@recessurbanrecreation.com), and privately. Contact her at andrea@altsexcolumn.com for more info.

The decimation of public health

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OPINION Crisis seems omnipresent these days.: it’s hard to find a newspaper that doesn’t carry the word in a headline at the top of the business section, or even on page 1. But a liquidity crisis seems a lot less solid when compared to the kind of crises faced by people in a society without health services.

San Francisco has developed a strong mental-health infrastructure, with respect for mental health consumers’ viewpoints and rights.

As an alternative to confinement — a coercive practice that can alienate patients — this city has acute diversion units: houses that serve as recovery centers for people in psychiatric crises. Psychiatrists manage medication, and nurse practitioners conduct health screenings, as you’d expect, but this is just the beginning of a broader approach to mental health. Residents work with professionals to develop their own treatment plans. They meet for discussion groups and trainings on topics that affect their ongoing mental health, like relapse prevention, symptom management, and medication education.

Participants help cook and clean to prepare themselves for independent living. Every year, 1,400 San Franciscans use these units.

We also have created culturally competent services. In immigrant neighborhoods and at San Francisco General Hospital, we have services in Spanish and Asian and Pacific Islander languages — services that help prevent the problems that can occur when native-language support is unavailable.

And the city has embarked on a grand experiment: Healthy San Francisco is designed to provide health care — before things get to crisis level — for any city resident who lacks insurance.

Unfortunately the crises have collided. These programs, along with dozens of others, are slated for closure next month as part of the city’s emergency rebudgeting response to our economic crisis. Half our acute diversion units will close. Hundreds of monolingual San Franciscans will lose services in Chinatown and the Richmond District, and General Hospital may lose half the Asian languages with which it can communicate with mental health consumers. New Leaf will cut therapy for 50 gay clients with combined mental health and addictive disorders. The sexual assault trauma recovery center will close.

Healthy San Francisco will be gutted. Staffing has not increased sufficiently to provide high quality care for all patients, and SF General will downgrade service by replacing skilled nursing jobs with less-skilled positions. Some RNs will be eliminated, LVNs will be replaced, certified staff will be replaced by noncertified staff, and clerks with medical training will be reduced to clerical work.

These are just examples. Cuts were made so hastily that nobody yet understands their full extent. But budgets — for all those digits and decimals that smack of hard economic truth — exist in the nebulous apparition of What May Be. And what may be, may yet be changed.

This month, the Board of Supervisors has the opportunity to change this future, and to protect the health and, in some cases, the lives of thousands of San Franciscans. Public health will receive cuts: that’s a sad truth of a faltering economy. But these cuts need be neither as numerous nor as deep as the current plan.

By reallocating funding from less essential programs to our most vital services, and by giving San Franciscans the option to vote on new revenue in June, the supervisors can respect the priorities of a city that cares about the well-being of its ill, its injured, and its uninsured.


Alysabeth Alexander works with La Voz Latina. Jennifer Friedenbach works with the Coalition, and SEIU Local 1021 activist Ed Kinchley is a member of the Coalition to Save Public Health.

The Hard Times Handbook

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We all have high hopes for the new administration. We’d all like to believe that the recession will end soon, that jobs will be plentiful, health care available to all, and affordable housing built in abundance.

But the grim reality is that hard times are probably around for a while longer, and it may get worse before it gets better.

Don’t despair: the city is full of fun things to do on the cheap. There are ways to save money and enjoy life at the same time. If you’re in trouble — out of work, out of food, facing eviction — there are resources around to help you. What follows is a collection of tips, techniques, and ideas for surviving the ongoing depression that’s the last bitter legacy of George W. Bush.

BELOW YOU’LL FIND OUR TIPS ON SCORING FREE, CHEAP, AND LOW-COST WONDERS. (Click here for the full page version with jumps, if you can’t see it.)

MUSIC AND MOVIES

CLOTHING

FOOD

CONCERTS

WHEELS

HEALTH CARE

SHELTER

MEALS

COCKTAILS

DATE NIGHTS

YOGA

PLUS:

HOW TO KEEP YOUR APARTMENT

HOW TO GET UNEMPLOYMENT

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FREE MUSIC AND MOVIES

For a little extra routine effort, I’ve managed to make San Francisco’s library system my Netflix/GreenCine, rotating CD turntable, and bookstore, all rolled into one. And it’s all free.

If you’re a books-music-film whore like me, you find your home maxed out with piles of the stuff … and not enough extra cash to feed your habits. So I’ve decided to only buy my favorites and to borrow the rest. We San Franciscans have quite a library system at our fingertips. You just have to learn how to use it.

Almost everyone thinks of a library as a place for books. And that’s not wrong: you can read the latest fiction and nonfiction bestsellers, and I’ve checked out a slew of great mixology/cocktail recipe books when I want to try new drinks at home. I’ve hit up bios on my favorite musicians, or brought home stacks of travel books before a trip (they usually have the current year’s edition of at least one travel series for a given place, whether it be Fodor’s, Lonely Planet, or Frommer’s).

But there’s much more. For DVDs, I regularly check Rotten Tomatoes’ New Releases page (www.rottentomatoes.com/dvd/new_releases.php) for new DVD releases. Anything I want to see, I keep on a list and search www.sfpl.org for those titles every week. About 90 percent of my list eventually comes to the library, and most within a few weeks of the release date.

And such a range! I recently checked out the Oscar-nominated animated foreign film, Persepolis, the entire first season of Mad Men, tons of documentaries, classics (like a Cyd Charisse musical or Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy’s catalog), even Baby Mama (sure, it sucked, but I can’t resist Tina Fey).

A music fanatic can find virtually every style, and even dig into the history of a genre. I’ve found CDs of jazz and blues greats, including Jelly Roll Morton, John Lee Hooker, Bessie Smith, Muddy Waters, kitschy lounge like Martin Denny and singer Julie London, and have satiated rap cravings with the latest Talib Kwali, Lyrics Born, Missy Elliott, T.I. or Kanye (I won’t tell if you won’t).

Warning: there can be a long "holds" list for popular new releases (e.g., Iron Man just came out and has about 175). When this happens, Just get in the queue — you can request as many as 15 items simultaneously online (you do have a library card, right?) You’ll get an e-mail when your item comes in and you can check the status of your list any time you log in. Keep DVDs a full seven days (three weeks for books and CDs) and return ’em to any branch you like.

I’ve deepened my music knowledge, read a broader range of books, and canceled GreenCine. Instead, I enjoy a steady flow of free shit coming my way each week. And if I get bored or the novelty of Baby Mama wears off, I return it and free up space in my mind (and on my shelf) for more. (Virginia Miller)

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STYLE FOR A SONG

Shhh. The first rule about thrifting, to paraphrase mobsters and hardcore thrift-store shoppers, is don’t talk about thrifting — and that means the sites of your finest thrift scores. Diehard thrifters guard their favorite shops with jealous zeal: they know exactly what it’s like to wade through scores of stained T-shirts, dress-for-success suits, and plastic purses and come up with zilcherooni. They also know what it’s like to ascend to thrifter nirvana, an increasingly rarified plane where vintage Chanel party shoes and cool dead-stock Western wear are sold for a song.

Friendships have been trashed and shopping carts upended in the revelation of these much-cherished thrift stores, where the quest for that ’50s lamb’s fur jacket or ’80s acid-washed zipper jeans — whatever floats your low-budg boat — has come to a rapturous conclusion. It’s a war zone, shopping on the cheap, out there — and though word has it that the thrifting is excellent in Vallejo and Fresno, our battle begins at home. When the sample sales, designer runoff outlets, resale dives, and consignment boutiques dry up, here’s where you’ll find just what you weren’t looking for — but love, love, love all the same.

Community Thrift, 623 Valencia, SF. (415) 861-4910, www.communitythrift.bravehost.com. Come for the writer’s own giveaways (you can bequeath the funds raised to any number of local nonprofits), and leave with the rattan couches, deco bureaus, records, books and magazines, and an eccentric assortment of clothing and housewares. I’m still amazed at the array of intriguing junk that zips through this spot, but act fast or you’ll miss snagging that Victorian armoire.

Goodwill As-Is Store, 86 11th St., SF. (415) 575-2197, www.sfgoodwill.org. This is the archetype and endgamer of grab-and-tumble thrifting. We’re talking bins, people — bins of dirt cheap and often downright dirty garb that the massive Goodwill around the corner has designated unsuitable, for whatever reason. Dive into said bins, rolled out by your, ahem, gracious Goodwill hosts throughout the day, along with your competition: professional pickers for vintage shops, grabby vintage people, and ironclad bargain hunters. They may not sell items by the pound anymore — now its $2.25 for a piece of adult clothing, 50 cents to $1 for babies’ and children’s garb, $4 for leather jackets, etc. — but the sense of triumph you’ll feel when you discover a tattered 1930s Atonement-style poison-ivy green gown, or a Dr. Pimp-enstein rabbit-fur patchwork coat, or cheery 1950s tablecloths with negligible stainage, is indescribable.

Goodwill Industries, 3801 Third St., SF. (415) 641-4470, www.sfgoodwill.org Alas, not all Goodwills are created equal: some eke out nothing but stale mom jeans and stretched-out polo shirts. But others, like this Hunter’s Point Goodwill, abound with on-trend goodies. At least until all of you thrift-hungry hordes grab my junk first. Tucked into the corner of a little strip mall, this Goodwill has all those extremely fashionable hipster goods that have been leached from more populated thrift pastures or plucked by your favorite street-savvy designer to "repurpose" as their latest collection: buffalo check shirts, wolf-embellished T-shirts, Gunne Sax fairy-princess gowns, basketball jerseys, and ’80s-era, multicolored zany-print tops that Paper Rad would give their beards for.

Salvation Army, 1500 Valencia, SF. (415) 643-8040, www.salvationarmyusa.org. The OG of Mission District thrifting, this Salv has been the site of many an awesome discovery. Find out when the Army puts out the new goods. The Salvation soldiers may have cordoned off the "vintage" — read: higher priced — items in the store within the store, but there are still plenty of old books, men’s clothing, and at times hep housewares and Formica kitchen tables to be had: I adore the rainbow Mork and Mindy parka vest I scored in the boys’ department, as well as my mid-century-mod mustard-colored rocker.

Savers, 875 Main, Redwood City. (650) 364-5545, www.savers.com When the ladies of Hillsborough, Burlingame, and the surrounding ‘burbs shed their oldest, most elegant offerings, the pickings can’t be beat at this Savers. You’ll find everything from I. Magnin cashmere toppers, vintage Gucci tweed, and high-camp ’80s feather-and-leather sweaters to collectible dishware, antique ribbons, and kitsch-cute Holly Hobbie plaques. Strangest, oddly covetable missed-score: a psychiatrist’s couch.

Thrift Town, 2101 Mission, SF. (415) 861-1132, www.thrifttown.com. When all else fails, fall back on this department store-sized megalith. Back in the day, thrift-oldsters tell me, they’d dig out collectible paintings and ’50s-era bikes. Now you’ll have to grind deeply to land those finds, though they’re here: cute, mismatched, mid-century chairs; the occasional designer handbag; and ’60s knit suits. Hint: venture into less picked-over departments like bedding. (Kimberly Chun)

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FREE FOOD

San Francisco will not let you starve. Even if you’re completely out of money, there are plenty of places and ways to fill your belly. Many soup kitchens operate out of churches and community centers, and lists can be downloaded and printed from freeprintshop.org and sfhomeless.net (which is also a great clearinghouse of information on social services in San Francisco.)Here’s a list of some of our favorites.

Free hot meals

Curry without Worry Healthy, soul pleasing Nepalese food to hungry people in San Francisco. Every Tues. 5:45–7 p.m. on the square at Hyde and Market streets.

Glide, 330 Ellis. Breakfast 8-9 a.m., lunch noon-1:30 p.m. everyday. Dinner 4-5:30 p.m., M-F.

St. Anthony Dining Room, 45 Jones, Lunch everyday 11:30 a.m.–1:30 p.m.

St Martin de Porres Hospitality House, 225 Potrero Ave. Best bowl of oatmeal in the city. Tues.-Sat. breakfast from 6:30-7:30 a.m., lunch from noon-2 pm.. Sun. brunch 9-10:30 a.m. Often vegetarian options.

Vegetarian

Food not Bombs Vegetarian soup and bread, but bring your own bowl. At the UN Plaza, Mon., 6 p.m.; Wed., 5:30 p.m. Also at 16th and Mission streets. Thurs. at 7:30 p.m.

Mother’s Kitchen, 7 Octavia, Fri., 2:30-3:30. Vegan options.

Iglesia Latina Americana de Las Adventistas Seventh Dia, 3024 24th St. Breakfast 9:30-11 a.m., third Sun. of the month.

Grab and go sandwiches

Glide, bag meals to go after breakfast ends at 9 a.m.

St. Peter and Paul Catholic Church, 666 Filbert. 4-5 p.m. every day.

Seniors

Curry Senior Center, 333 Turk. For the 60+ set. Breakfast 8-9 a.m., lunch 11:30 to noon every day.

Kimochi, 1840 Sutter St. Japanese-style hot lunch served 11:45 am (M-F). $1.50 donation per meal is requested. 60+ only with no one to assist with meals. Home deliveries available. 415-931-2287

St. Anthony Dining Room, 10:30-11:30 a.m., 59+, families, and people who can’t carry a tray.

Free groceries

San Francisco Food Bank A wealth of resources, from pantries with emergency food boxes to supplemental food programs. 415-282-1900. sffoodbank.org/programs

211 Dial this magic number and United Way will connect you with free food resources in your neighborhood — 24/7.

Low-cost groceries

Maybe you don’t qualify for food assistance programs or you just want to be a little thriftier — in which case the old adage that the early bird gets the metaphorical worm is apropos. When it comes to good food deals, timing can be everything. Here are a couple of handy tips for those of us who like to eat local, organic, and cheap. Go to Rainbow Grocery early and hit the farmers markets late. Rainbow has cheap and half-price bins in the bread and produce sections — but you wouldn’t know it if you’re a late-riser. Get there shortly after doors open at 9 a.m. for the best deals.

By the end of the day, many vendors at farmers markets are looking to unload produce rather than pack it up, so it’s possible to score great deals if you’re wandering around during the last half hour of the market. CAFF has a comprehensive list of Bay Area markets that you can download: guide.buylocalca.org/localguides.

Then there’s the Grocery Outlet (2001 Fourth St., Berkeley and 2900 Broadway, Oakland, www.groceryoutlets.com), which puts Wal-Mart to shame. This is truly the home of low-cost living. Grocery Outlet began in 1946 in San Francisco when Jim Read purchased surplus government goods and started selling them. Now Grocery Outlets are the West Coast’s version of those dented-can stores that sell discounted food that wasn’t ready for prime-time, or perhaps spent a little too long in the limelight.

Be prepared to eat what you find — options range from name brands with trashed labels to foodstuffs you’ve never seen before — but there are often good deals on local breads and cheeses, and their wine section will deeply expand you Two-Buck Chuck cellar. Don’t be afraid of an occasional corked bottle that you can turn into salad dressing, and be sure to check the dates on anything perishable. The Grocery Outlet Web site (which has the pimpest intro music ever) lists locations and ways to sign up for coupons and download a brochure on how to feed your family for $3 a day. (Amanda Witherell)

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LIVE MUSIC FOR NOTHING — AND KICKS FOR FREE

Music should be free. Everyone who has downloaded music they haven’t been given or paid for obviously believes this, though we haven’t quite made it to that ideal world where all professional musicians are subsidized — and given health care — by the government or other entities. But live, Clive? Where do can you catch fresh, live sounds during a hard-hitting, heavy-hanging economic downturn? Intrepid, impecunious sonic seekers know that with a sharp eye and zero dough, great sounds can be found in the oddest crannies of the city. You just need to know where to look, then lend an ear. Here are a few reliables — occasional BART station busks and impromptu Ocean Beach shows aside.

Some of the best deals — read: free — on world-class performers happen seasonally: in addition to freebie fests like Hardly Strictly Bluegrass every October and the street fairs that accompanying in fair weather, there’s each summer’s Stern Grove Festival. Beat back the Sunset fog with a picnic of bread, cheese, and cheap vino, though you gotta move fast to claim primo viewing turf to eyeball acts like Bettye Lavette, Seun Kuti and Egypt 80, and Allen Toussaint. Look for the 2009 schedule to be posted at www.sterngrove.org May 1.

Another great spot to catch particularly local luminaries is the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival, which runs from May to October. Rupa and the April Fishes, Brass Menazeri, Marcus Shelby Trio, Bayonics, and Omar Sosa’s Afreecanos Quintet all took their turn in the sun during the Thursday lunchtime concerts. Find out who’s slated for ’09 in early spring at www.ybgf.org.

All year around, shopkeeps support sounds further off the beaten path — music fans already know about the free, albeit usually shorter, shows, DJ sets, and acoustic performances at aural emporiums like Amoeba Music (www.amoeba.com) and Aquarius Records (www.aquariusrecords.org). Many a mind has been blown by a free blast of new sonics from MIA or Boris amid the stacks at Amoeba, the big daddy in this field, while Aquarius in-stores define coziness: witness last year’s intimate acoustic hootenanny by Deerhoof’s Satomi and Tenniscoats’ Saya as Oneone. Less regular but still an excellent time if you happen upon one: Adobe Books Backroom Gallery art openings (adobebooksbackroomgallery.blogspot.com), where you can get a nice, low-key dose of the Mission District’s art and music scenes converging. Recent exhibition unveilings have been topped off by performances by the Oh Sees, Boner Ha-chachacha, and the Quails.

Still further afield, check into the free-for-all, quality curatorial efforts at the Rite Spot (www.ritespotcafe.net), where most shows at this dimly lit, atmospheric slice of old-school cabaret bohemia are as free as the breeze and as fun as the collection of napkin art in back: Axton Kincaid, Brandy Shearer, Kitten on the Keys, Toshio Hirano, and Yard Sale have popped up in the past. Also worth a looky-loo are Thee Parkside‘s (www.theeparkside.com) free Twang Sunday and Happy Hour Shows: a rad time to check out bands you’ve never heard of but nonetheless pique your curiosity: Hukaholix, hell’s yeah! And don’t forget: every cover effort sounds better with a pint — all the better to check into the cover bands at Johnny Foley’s (www.johnnyfoleys.com), groove artists at Beckett’s Irish Pub in Berkeley (www.beckettsirishpub.com), and piano man Rod Dibble and his rousing sing-alongs at the Alley in Oakland (510-444-8505). All free of charge. Charge! (Kimberly Chun}

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THE CHEAPEST WAY TO GET AROUND TOWN

Our complex world often defies simple solutions. But there is one easy way to save money, get healthy, become more self-sufficient, free up public resources, and reduce your contribution to air pollution and global warming: get around town on a bicycle.

It’s no coincidence that the number of cyclists on San Francisco streets has increased dramatically over the last few years, a period of volatile gasoline prices, heightened awareness of climate change, poor Muni performance, and economic stagnation.

On Bike to Work Day last year, traffic counts during the morning commute tallied more bicycles than cars on Market Street for the first time. Surveys commissioned by the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition show that the number of regular bike commuters has more than doubled in recent years. And that increase came even as a court injunction barred new bike projects in the city (see "Stationary biking," 5/16/07), a ban that likely will be lifted later this year, triggering key improvements in the city’s bicycle network that will greatly improve safety.

Still not convinced? Then do the math.

Drive a car and you’ll probably spend a few hundred dollars every month on insurance, gas, tolls, parking, and fines, and that’s even if you already own your car outright. If you ride the bus, you’ll pay $45 per month for a Fast Pass while government will pay millions more to subsidize the difference. Riding a bike is basically free.

Free? Surely there are costs associated with bicycling, right? Yeah, sure, occasionally. But in a bike-friendly city like San Francisco, there are all kinds of opportunities to keep those costs very low, certainly lower than any other transportation alternative except walking (which is also a fine option for short trips).

There are lots of inexpensive used bicycles out there. I bought three of my four bicycles at the Bike Hut at Pier 40 (www.thebikehut.com) for an average of $100 each and they’ve worked great for several years (my fourth bike, a suspension mountain bike, I also bought used for a few hundred bucks).

Local shops that sell used bikes include Fresh Air Bicycles, (1943 Divisidero, www.fabsf.com) Refried Cycles (3804 17th St., www.refriedcycles,com/bicycles.htm), Karim Cycle (2800 Telegraph., Berkeley, www.teamkarim.com/bikes/used/) and Re-Cycles Bicycles (3120 Sacramento, Berkeley, www.recyclesbicycles.com). Blazing Saddles (1095 Columbus, www.blazingsaddles.com) sells used rental bikes for reasonable prices. Craigslist always has listings for dozens of used bikes of all styles and prices. And these days, you can even buy a new bike for a few hundred bucks. Sure, they’re often made in China with cheap parts, but they’ll work just fine.

Bikes are simple yet effective machines with a limited number of moving parts, so it’s easy to learn to fix them yourself and cut out even the minimal maintenance costs associated with cycling. I spent $100 for two four-hour classes at Freewheel Bike Shop (1920 Hayes and 914 Valencia, www.thefreewheel.com) that taught me everything I need to know about bike maintenance and includes a six-month membership that lets me use its facilities, tools, and the expertise of its mechanics. My bikes are all running smoother than ever on new ball bearings that cost me two bucks per wheel, but they were plenty functional even before.

There are also ways to get bike skills for free. Sports Basement (www.sportsbasement.com) offers free bicycle maintenance classes at both its San Francisco locations the first Tuesday of every month from 6:30-7:30 p.m. Or you can turn to the Internet, where YouTube has a variety of bike repair videos and Web sites such as www.howtofixbikes.com can lead you through repairs.

The nonprofit The Bike Kitchen (1256 Mission, www.thebikekitchen.org) on Mission Street offers great deals to people who spend $40 per year for a membership. Volunteer your time through the Earn-a-Bike program and they’ll give you the frame, parts, and skills to build your own bike for free.

But even in these hard economic times, there is one purchase I wouldn’t skimp on: spend the $30 — $45 for a good U-lock, preferably with a cable for securing the wheels. Then you’re all set, ready to sell your car, ditch the bus, and learn how easy, cheap, fast, efficient, and fun it is to bicycle in this 49-square-mile city. (Steven T. Jones)

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LOW-COST HEALTH CARE

When money’s tight, healthcare tends to be one of the first costs we cut. But that can be a bad idea, because skimping on preventive care and treatment for minor issues can lead to much more expensive and serious (and painful) health issues later. Here is our guide to Bay Area institutions, programs, and clinics that serve the under- and uninsured.

One of our favorite places is the Women’s Community Clinic (2166 Hayes, 415-379-7800, www.womenscommunityclinic.org), a women-operated provider open to anyone female, female-identified, or female-bodied transgender. This awesome 10-year-old clinic offers sexual and reproductive health services — from Pap smears and PMS treatment to menopause and infertility support — to any SF, San Mateo, Alameda, or Marin County resident, and all on a generous sliding scale based on income and insurance (or lack thereof). Call for an appointment, or drop in on Friday mornings (but show up at 9:30 a.m. because spots fill up fast).

A broader option (in terms of both gender and service) is Mission Neighborhood Center (main clinic at 240 Shotwell. 415-552-3870, www.mnhc.org, see Web site for specialty clinics). This one-stop health shop provides primary, HIV/AIDS, preventive, podiatry, women’s, children’s, and homeless care to all, though its primary focus is on the Latino/Hispanic Spanish-speaking community. Insurance and patient payment is accepted, including a sliding scale for the uninsured (no one is denied based on inability to pay). This clinic is also a designated Medical Home (or primary care facility) for those involved in the Healthy San Francisco program.

Contrary to popular belief, Healthy San Francisco (www.healthysanfrancisco.org) is not insurance. Rather, it’s a network of hospitals and clinics that provide free or nearly free healthcare to uninsured SF residents who earn at or below 300 percent of the federal poverty level (which, at about $2,600 per month, includes many of us). Participants choose a Medical Home, which serves as a first point-of-contact. The good news? HSF is blind to immigration status, employment status, and preexisting medical conditions. The catch? The program’s so new and there are so many eligible residents that the application process is backlogged — you may have a long wait before you reap the rewards. Plus, HSF only applies within San Francisco.

Some might consider mental health less important than that of the corporeal body, but anyone who’s suffered from depression, addiction, or PTSD knows otherwise. Problem is, psychotherapy tends to be expensive — and therefore considered superfluous. Not so at Golden Gate Integral Counseling Center (507 Polk. 415-561-0230, www.goldengatecounseling.org), where individuals, couples, families, and groups can get long- and short-term counseling for issues from stress and relationships to gender identity, all billed on a sliding scale.

Other good options

American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine (450 Connecticut, 415-282-9603, actcm.edu). This well-regarded school provides a range of treatments, including acupuncture, cupping, tui ma/shiatsu massage, and herbal therapy, at its on-site clinics — all priced according to a sliding scale and with discounts for students and seniors. The college also sends interns to specialty clinics around the Bay, including the Women’s Community Clinic, Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, and St. James Infirmary.

St. James Infirmary (1372 Mission. 415-554-8494, www.stjamesinfirmary.org). Created for sex-workers and their partners, this Mission District clinic offers a range of services from primary care to massage and self-defense classes, for free. Bad ass.

Free Print Shop (www.freeprintshop.org): This fantabulous Webs site has charts showing access to free healthcare across the city, as well as free food, shelter, and help with neighborhood problems. If we haven’t listed ’em, Free Print Shop has. Tell a friend.

Native American Health Center (160 Capp, 415-621-8051, www.nativehealth.org). Though geared towards Native Americans, this multifaceted clinic (dental! an Oakland locale, and an Alameda satellite!) turns no one away. Services are offered to the under-insured on a sliding scale as well as to those with insurance.

SF Free Clinic (4900 California, 415-750-9894, www.sffc.org). Those without any health insurance can get vaccinations, diabetes care, family planning assistance, STD diagnosis and treatment, well child care, and monitoring of acute and chronic medical problems.

Haight Ashbury Free Clinics (558 Clayton. 415-746-1950, www.hafci.org): Though available to all, these clinics are geared towards the uninsured, underinsured "working poor," the homeless, youth, and those with substance abuse and/or mental health issues. We love this organization not only for its day-to-day service, but for its low-income residential substance abuse recovery programs and its creation of RockMed, which provides free medical care at concerts and events. (Molly Freedenberg)

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THE BEST HOMELESS SHELTERS

There’s no reason to be ashamed to stay in the city’s homeless shelters — but proceed with awareness. Although most shelters take safety precautions and men and women sleep in separate areas, they’re high-traffic places that house a true cross-section of the city’s population.

The city shelters won’t take you if you just show up — you have to make a reservation. In any case, a reservation center should be your first stop anyway because they’ll likely have other services available for you. If you’re a first-timer, they’ll want to enter you into the system and take your photograph. (You can turn down the photo-op.) Reservations can be made for up to seven days, after which you’ll need to connect with a case manager to reserve a more permanent 30- or 60-day bed.

The best time to show up is first thing in the morning when beds are opening up, or late at night when beds have opened up because of no-show reservations. First thing in the morning means break of dawn — people often start lining up between 4 a.m. and 6 a.m. for the few open beds. Many people are turned away throughout the day, although your chances are better if you’re a woman.

You can reserve a bed at one of several reservation stations: 150 Otis, Mission Neighborhood Resource Center (165 Capp St.), Tenderloin Resource Center (187 Golden Gate), Glide (330 Ellis), United Council (2111 Jennings), and the shelters at MSC South (525 Fifth St.) and Hospitality House (146 Leavenworth). If it’s late at night, they may have a van available to give you a ride to the shelter. Otherwise, bus tokens are sometimes available if you ask for one — especially if you’re staying at Providence shelter in the Bayview-Hunters Point District.

They’ll ask if you have a shelter preference — they’re all a little different and come with good and bad recommendations depending on whom you talk to. By all accounts, Hospitality House is one of the best — it’s small, clean, and well run. But it’s for men only, as are the Dolores Street Community Services shelters (1050 S. Van Ness and 1200 Florida), which primarily cater to Spanish-speaking clients.

Women can try Oshun (211 13th St.) and A Woman’s Place (1049 Howard) if they want a men-free space. If kids are in tow, Compass Family Services will set you up with shelter and put you on a waiting list for housing. (A recent crush of families means a waiting list for shelters also exists.) People between 18 and 24 can go to Lark Inn (869 Ellis). The Asian Woman’s Shelter specializes in services for Asian-speaking women and domestic violence victims (call the crisis line 877-751-0880). (Amanda Witherell)

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MEALS FOR $5: TOP FIVE CHEAP EATS

Nothing fancy about these places — but the food is good, and the price is right, and they’re perfect for depression dining.

Betty’s Cafeteria Probably the easiest place in town to eat for under five bucks, breakfast or lunch, American or Chinese. 167 11th St., SF. (415) 431-2525

Susie’s Café You can get four pancakes or a bacon burger for under $5 at this truly grungy and divine dive, right next to Ed’s Auto — and you get the sense the grease intermingles. , 603 Seventh St., SF (415) 431-2177

Lawrence Bakery Café Burger and fries, $3.75, and a slice of pie for a buck. 2290 Mission., SF. (415) 864-3119

Wo’s Restaurant Plenty of under-$5 Cantonese and Vietnamese dishes, and, though the place itself is cold and unatmospheric, the food is actually great. 4005 Judah, SF. (415) 681-2433

Glenn’s Hot Dogs A cozy, friendly, cheap, delicious hole-in-the-wall and probably my favorite counter to sit at in the whole Bay Area. 3506 MacArthur Blvd., Oakl. (510) 530-5175 (L.E. Leone)

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CHEAP DRINKS

When it comes to free drinks I’m a liar, a whore, and a cheat, duh.

I’m a liar because of course I find your designer replica stink-cloud irresistible and your popped collar oh so intriguing — and no, you sexy lug, I’ve never tried one of those delicious-looking orange-juice-and-vodka concoctions you’re holding. Perhaps you could order me one so I could try it out while we spend some time?

I’m a whore because I’ll still do you anyway — after the fifth round, natch. That’s why they call me the liquor quicker picker-upper.

And I’m a cheat because here I am supposed to give you the scoop on where to score some highball on the lowdown, when in fact there’s a couple of awesome Web sites just aching to help you slurp down the freebies. Research gives me wrinkles, darling. So before I get into some of my fave inexpensive inebriation stations, take a designated-driver test drive of www.funcheapsf.com and www.sf.myopenbar.com.

FuncheapSF’s run by the loquacious Johnny Funcheap, and has the dirty deets on a fab array of free and cheap city events — with gallery openings, wine and spirits tastings, and excellent shindigs for the nightlife-inclined included. MyOpenBar.com is a national operation that’s geared toward the hard stuff, and its local branch offers way too much clarity about happy hours, concerts, drink specials, and service nights. Both have led me into inglorious perdition, with dignity, when my chips were down.

Beyond all that, and if you have a couple bucks in your shucks, here’s a few get-happies of note:

Godzuki Sushi Happy Hour at the Knockout. Super-yummy affordable fish rolls and $2 Kirin on tap in a rockin’ atmosphere. Wednesdays, 6–9:30 p.m. 3223 Mission, SF. (415) 550-6994, www.knockoutsf.com

All-Night Happy Hour at The Attic. Drown your recession tears — and the start of your work week — in $3 cosmos and martinis at this hipster hideaway. Sundays and Mondays, 5 p.m.–2 a.m. 3336 24th St., (415) 722-7986

The Stork Club. Enough live punk to bleed your earworm out and $2 Pabsts every night to boot? Fly me there toute suite. 2330 Telegraph, Oakl. (510) 444-6174, www.storkcluboakland.com

House of Shields. Dive into $2 PBR on tap and great music every night except Sundays at the beautiful winner of our 2008 Best of the Bay "Best Monumental Urinal" award. (We meant in the men’s room, not the place as a whole!) 39 New Montgomery, SF. (415) 975-8651, www.houseofshields.com

The Bitter End. $3 drafts Monday through Friday are just the beginning at this Richmond pub: the Thursday night Jager shot plus Pabst for five bucks (plus an ’80s dance party) is worth a look-see. 441 Clement, SF. (415) 221-9538

Thee Parkside Fast becoming the edge-seekers bar of choice, this Potrero Hill joint has some awesome live nights with cheap brews going for it, but the those in the know misplace their Saturday afternoons with $3 well drinks from 3 to 8 p.m.1600 17th St., SF. (415) 252-1330, www.theeparkside.com

Infatuation. One of the best free club nights in the city brings in stellar electro-oriented talent and also offers two-for-one well drinks, so what the hey. Wednesdays, 9 p.m.–2 a.m. Vessel, 85 Campton Place, SF. (415) 433-8585, www.vesselsf.com

Honey Sundays. Another free club night, this one on the gay tip, that offers more great local and international DJ names and some truly fetching specials at Paradise Lounge’s swank upstairs bar. Sundays, 8 p.m.–2 a.m. Paradise Lounge, 1501 Folsom, SF. (415) 252-5018, www.paradisesf.com (Marke B.)

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IMPRESS A DATE WITH DINNER UNDER $50

You’ve got a date this weekend, which you’re feeling pretty good about, but only $50 to spend, which feels … not so good. Where should you go?

You’ll appear in-the-know at the underrated Sheba Piano Lounge (1419 Fillmore, www.shebalounge.com) on lower Fillmore Street, right in the middle of the burgeoning jazz revival district. Sheba was around long before Yoshi’s, offering live jazz (usually piano, sometimes a vocalist) and some of the best Ethiopian food in the city in a refined, relaxed lounge setting. Sure, they’ve got Americanized dishes, but skip those for the traditional Ethiopian menu. Sample multiple items by ordering the vegetarian platter ($13) or ask for a mixed meat platter, which is not on the menu ($16 last time I ordered it). One platter is more than enough for two, and you can still afford a couple of cocktails, glasses of wine or beer, or even some Ethiopian honey wine (all well under $10). Like any authentic Ethiopian place I’ve eaten in, the staff operates on Africa time, so be prepared to linger and relax.

It’s a little hipster-ish with slick light fixtures, a narrow dining room/bar, and the increasingly common "communal table" up front, but the Mission District’s Bar Bambino (2931 16th St., www.barbambino.com) offers an Italian enoteca experience that says "I’ve got some sophistication, but I like to keep it casual." Reserve ahead for tables because there aren’t many, or come early and sit at the bar or in the enclosed back patio and enjoy an impressive selection of Italian wines by the glass ($8–$12.50). For added savings with a touch of glam, don’t forget their free sparkling water on tap. It’s another small plates/antipasti-style menu, so share a pasta ($10.50–$15.50), panini ($11.50–$12.50), and some of their great house-cured salumi or artisan cheese. Bar Bambino was just named one of the best wine bars in the country by Bon Apetit, but don’t let that deter you from one of the city’s real gems.

Nothing says romance (of the first date kind) like a classic French bistro, especially one with a charming (heated) back patio. Bistro Aix (3340 Steiner, www.bistroaix.com) is one of those rare places in the Marina District where you can skip the pretension and go for old school French comfort food (think duck confit, top sirloin steak and frites, and a goat cheese salad — although the menu does stray a little outside the French zone with some pasta and "cracker crust pizza." Bistro Aix has been around for years, offering one of the cheapest (and latest — most end by 6 or 7 p.m.) French prix fixe menus in town (Sunday through Thursday, 6–8 p.m.) at $18 for two courses. This pushes it to $40 for two, but still makes it possible to add a glass of wine, which is reasonably priced on the lower end of their Euro-focused wine list ($6.25–$15 a glass).

Who knew seduction could be so surprisingly affordable? (Virginia Miller)

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FREE YOGA

You may be broke, but you can still stay limber. San Francisco is home to scores of studios and karmically-blessed souls looking to do a good turn by making yoga affordable for everyone.

One of the more prolific teachers and donation-based yoga enthusiasts is Tony Eason, who trained in the Iyengar tradition. His classes, as well as links to other donation-based teachers, can be found at ynottony.com. Another great teacher in the Anusara tradition is Skeeter Barker, who teaches classes for all levels Mondays and Wednesdays from 7:45 to 9:15 p.m. at Yoga Kula, 3030a 16th St. (recommended $8–$10 donation).

Sports Basement also hosts free classes every Sunday at three stores: Bryant Street from 1 to 2 p.m., the Presidio from 11a.m. to noon, and Walnut Creek 11 a.m. to noon. Bring your own mat.

But remember: even yoga teachers need to make a living — so be fair and give what you can. (Amanda Witherell)

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HOW TO KEEP YOUR APARTMENT

So the building you live in was foreclosed. Or you missed a few rent payments. Suddenly there’s a three-day eviction notice in your mailbox. What now?

Don’t panic. That’s the advice from Ted Gullicksen, executive director of the San Francisco Tenants Union. Tenants have rights, and evictions can take a long time. And while you may have to deal with some complications and legal issues, you don’t need to pack your bags yet.

Instead, pick up the phone and call the Tenants Union (282-6622, www.sftu.org) or get some professional advice from a lawyer.

The three-day notice doesn’t mean you have to be out in three days. "But it does mean you will have to respond to and communicate with the landlord/lady within that time," Gullicksen told us.

It’s also important to keep paying your rent, Gullicksen warned, unless you can’t pay the full amount and have little hope of doing so any time soon.

"Nonpayment of rent is the easiest way for a landlord to evict a tenant," Gullicksen explained. "Don’t make life easier for the landlady who was perhaps trying to use the fact that your relatives have been staying with you for a month as grounds to evict you so she can convert your apartment into a pricey condominium."

There are, however, caveats to Gullicksen’s "always pay the rent" rule: if you don’t have the money or you don’t have all the money.

"Say you owe $1,000 but only have $750 when you get the eviction notice," Gullicksen explained. "In that case, you may want to not pay your landlord $750, in case he sits on it but still continues on with the eviction. Instead, you might want to put the money to finding another place or hiring an attorney."

A good lawyer can often delay an eviction — even if it’s over nonpayment or rent — and give you time to work out a deal. Many landlords, when faced with the prospect of a long legal fight, will come to the table. Gullicksen noted that the vast majority of eviction cases end in a settlement. "We encourage all tenants to fight evictions," he said. The Tenants Union can refer you to qualified tenant lawyers.

These days some tenants who live in buildings that have been foreclosed on are getting eviction notices. But in San Francisco, city officials are quick to point out, foreclosure is not a legal ground for eviction.

Another useful tip: if your landlord is cutting back on the services you get — whether it’s a loss of laundry facilities, parking, or storage space, or the owner has failed to do repairs or is preventing you from preventing you from "the quiet enjoyment of your apartment" — you may be able to get a rent reduction. With the passage of Proposition M in November 2008 tenants who have been subjected to harassment by their landlords are also eligible for rent reductions. That involves a petition to the San Francisco Rent Stabilization and Arbitration Board (www.sfgov.org/site/rentboard_index.asp).

Gullicksen also recommends that people who have lost their jobs check out the Eviction Defense Collaborative (www.evictiondefense.org).

"They are mostly limited to helping people who have temporary shortfalls," Gullicksen cautioned. But if you’ve lost your job and are about to start a new one and are a month short, they can help. (Sarah Phelan)

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OUT OF WORK? HERE’S STEP ONE

How do you get your unemployment check?

"Just apply for it."

That’s the advice of California’s Employment Development Department spokesperson Patrick Joyce.

You may think you aren’t eligible because you may have been fired or were only working part-time, but it’s still worth a try. "Sometimes people are ineligible, but sometimes they’re not," Joyce said, explaining that a lot of factors come into play, including your work history and how much you were making during the year before you became unemployed.

"So, simply apply for it — if you don’t qualify we’ll tell you," he said. "And if you think you are eligible and we don’t, you can appeal to the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board."

Don’t wait, either. "No one gets unemployment benefits insurance payments for the first week they are unemployed," Joyce explained, referring to the one-week waiting period the EDD imposes before qualified applicants can start collecting. "So you should apply immediately."

Folks can apply by filling out the unemployment insurance benefits form online or over the phone. But the phone number is frequently busy, so online is the best bet.

Even if you apply by phone, visit www.edd.ca.gov/unemployment beforehand to view the EDD’s extensive unemployment insurance instructions and explanations. To file an online claim, visit eapply4ui.edd.ca.gov. For a phone number for your local office, visit www.edd.ca.gov/unemployment/telephone_numbers.

(Sarah Phelan)

We’ll be doing regular updates and running tips for hard times in future issues. Send your ideas to tips@sfbg.com.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

I guess Mayor Gavin Newsom really wants to cut the budget. He wants to force city employees (and not just the cops) to accept pay cuts. He wants to lay people off and eliminate services. He wants to solve the budget crisis entirely on his terms — and honestly, it baffles me.

Anyone who runs a public or private enterprise has to make tough decisions and tough choices in tough times. I know that. I’ve had to cut spending and lay people off — and I can tell you, it sucked. It didn’t make me feel like a strong leader or a hard-nosed manager, it just made me sad.

In politics, I guess, there’s some advantage to looking like you can stand up to organized labor and the left. Maybe Newsom thinks he can run for governor as the mayor who refused to raise taxes during a budget crisis. Maybe he, like Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, thinks taxes are for girlie men.

But does he really want to preside over the decline of his own signature health care plan? Does he want to be mayor of a city that recovers more slowly from the recession? Does he want to be the environmental leader who cut public transportation funding?

He doesn’t have to do that. There’s another alternative. He can work with the supervisors — and labor, and business, and community activists — and look at ways to bring in some more money. It shouldn’t be that hard a sell, really. The budget gap is huge — Aaron Peskin, who served on the Board of Supervisors for eight years, said before he left office that he’s having a hard time even getting his mind around the monstrosity of the necessary cuts. I’ve been watching local politics for 25 years, and I’ve having a hard time too. We could be looking at eliminating half the discretionary spending in the general fund.

Do people who live and work in this city (including business owners) want to see public health cut by 25 percent? Do they want to see libraries closed, and neighborhood fire stations eliminated, and police stations shut down, and recreation programs that keep kids off the streets eliminated, and the Small Business Assistance Center defunded, and more mentally ill people wandering the streets, and longer waits for more crowded Muni buses? Is this the city we all want to live in?

Or are the wealthier residents and bigger businesses willing to pay just a little bit more each year to keep basic services in place?

If Mayor Newsom, who is still quite popular in town, asked that question, in that fashion, and presented budget cuts that everyone knows are necessary and better oversight and good government programs to let us all know that the money isn’t being wasted, and then promoted a couple of fair and progressive new revenue measures in a June special election, the worst of the bloodbath could be avoided.

I can’t understand why he wants this to be so hard.

The challenges for President Chiu

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EDITORIAL The ascension of Sup. David Chiu to the presidency of the Board of Supervisors gives a relative political newcomer considerable power. It also puts Chiu in position to carry on the legacy of Aaron Peskin and lead the opposition to Mayor Gavin Newsom’s pro-downtown, pro-Pacific Gas and Electric Co. agenda. Chiu, obviously, lacks the experience Peskin brought to the job, so he needs to move carefully at first. But he also needs to show that he’s more than a compromise candidate and that he has the ability to lead the board and promote the progressive agenda.

Let’s remember: Chiu was elected president entirely by the six progressive supervisors. The way the vote went down, five people, including Newsom’s closest allies, stuck together as a solid bloc and repeatedly voted for Sup. Sophie Maxwell. Maxwell had come down to the Guardian office a few days earlier to tell us that she was a solid progressive, but we saw the future of the board playing out when the votes were counted. Maxwell and Sup. Sean Elsbernd, who both have voiced concerns about the prospect of an inexperienced person taking the top job, could have broken with their bloc and voted for Sup. Ross Mirkarimi — that would have put him over the top. But through seven votes, as the progressives moved around trying to find a candidates all six could support, the Newsom Five stuck together. (Of course, if it hadn’t been for Sup. Chris Daly’s ill-conceived antics, Mirkarimi would have been able to get six votes, and we would have had an experienced leader in place).

Although Chiu talks (as he should) about bringing everyone together, he needs to keep in mind from day one that he is now the most visible member of a six-person board majority that can control the agenda and the set the tone for the city — if none of the six starts to drift toward the squishy center.

It’s going to be a rough, brutal year. The mayor has already made clear through his comments that he doesn’t even want to look at new revenue measures; he intends to solve the city’s half-billion-dollar budget crisis with cuts — deep, bloody cuts — alone. Chiu will have to stand up to him, publicly and privately, and make clear that a cuts-only budget isn’t going to fly in San Francisco.

And while Chiu will need some time to develop a leadership style and become familiar with the often-complex workings of the board, he should do a few things right away to show that he’s prepared to take on the difficult tasks ahead:

Support Peskin’s proposal for a special election in June. The proposal to allow the voters to consider raising taxes instead of just cutting is going to need a lot of help and support. The mayor opposes it, and some of his allies may oppose it too. But it’s absolutely crucial that San Francisco refuse to follow the lead of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. It’s crucial that the progressives, while acknowledging that cuts will have to happen, also insist on looking at fair revenue ideas. Chiu needs to take the point on this.

In fact, now that the mayor and his allies on the board have made this a central battleground — and in effect have made this a litmus test for Chiu’s new presidency — it’s even more important that every one of the six progressive supervisors stands up to this challenge.

We’re not sure which of the dozen-odd tax proposals floating around is the right one. But it would be the worst kind of foolishness to take the whole idea off the table.

Put good people on the key committees. The Budget Committee at this point looks good, with Mirkarimi, Sup. John Avalos, and Elsbernd. When that panel expands to five members (and it should, soon) Chiu should make sure that either David Campos or Eric Mar joins the committee, keeping a progressive majority. The Land Use committee will be crucial as the Eastern Neighborhoods plan is implemented; Chiu needs to appoint a progressive chair and majority.

Save LAFCO. The Local Agency Formation Commission is the only board committee that has public power and energy policy as its primary agenda. Budget-cutters (spurred by PG&E, which more than any other company is responsible for the budget crisis) have made LAFCO a target; Chiu needs to make it clear immediately that LAFCO will remain in place, with strong appointments and a chair committed to making community choice aggregation work and pursuing public power as the largest potential new revenue source for the city.

Chiu has promised to work with the mayor, which is fine. But first he needs to show the progressives who elected him that he’s also ready to do battle.

Six aren’t enough

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The historic Jan. 8 vote electing Sup. David Chiu as president of the Board of Supervisors — rare for its elevation of a freshman to the post and unprecedented for a Chinese American — clearly illustrates the ideological breakdown of the new board.

The six supervisors who claim membership in the progressive movement (Chris Daly, Ross Mirkarimi, David Campos, John Avalos, Eric Mar, and Chiu) gave Chiu the presidency after their efforts to give it to Mirkarimi or Avalos fell short, while the other five supervisors voted for Sup. Sophie Maxwell in each of the seven rounds, refusing to support any of the progressive picks.

But there are limits to what a bare majority of supervisors can do in San Francisco, particularly when the mayor is threatening vetoes and the city is wrestling with a budget deficit of gargantuan proportions. Overriding a mayoral veto or approving some emergency measures requires eight votes.

So the first question is whether Mirkarimi and Daly can come together after their split divided progressives and led to Chiu as a compromise candidate. But the second, more important, question for progressives is whether they can attract swing votes such as Maxwell and Bevan Dufty when the need arises.

The answers to those questions could start coming immediately as supervisors consider proposals to close a looming $575 million budget gap, including the proposal for a special election on revenue measures in June. Mayor Gavin Newsom opposes that election, so the board would have to muster eight votes in the next month to move forward with it.

They might even need more than that. A confidential memo to supervisors and the mayor by the City Attorney’s Office that was obtained by the Guardian sorts out the complex requirements needed to approve new taxes, including the requirement of unanimous board approval to place tax measures that can be passed with a simple majority vote on the ballot this year.

So President Chiu, who pledges to bring his colleagues together, certainly has his work cut out for him.

 

POLITICS AND POLICY

Achieving a unanimous vote on anything significant or controversial seems impossible right now. Mirkarimi is unhappy with Daly for thwarting his presidential ambitions; Maxwell and Dufty are unhappy with progressives for keeping her out of their club; and Chiu must quickly learn his new job during a time of unprecedented turmoil.

Chiu told his colleagues that he was “incredibly humbled” by an election that he didn’t think he’d win, and said that he is “acutely aware that I am new to the institution and the body.” But observers say Chiu’s temperament, intelligence, and connections to both the business community and the progressive movement could serve the city well right now.

“I think Chiu is a great choice. He has the humility that will help him,” outgoing Sup. Jake McGoldrick told the Guardian.

This compromise pick for president was praised by all sides, from the progressive coalition that feted him after the vote at a party at the SoMa club Temple. Rob Black, government affairs director for the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, told reporters that “David seems to be someone who is very willing to listen and willing to ask questions.”

“We have a progressive supervisor running the board,” Mirkarimi told the Guardian as he walked back to his office following the vote. Or, as Daly told us, “In the end, the progressive coalition stuck together and I’m happy about that.”

Walking back to Room 200 after the vote, Newsom told reporters that Chiu was “an outstanding choice” who represents “a fresh air of progress.” Asked whether he expects to have a better working relationship with Chiu than with outgoing president Aaron Peskin, Newsom replied, “That’s a gross understatement.”

“We’re looking forward to working with the new Board of Supervisors,” Newsom spokesperson Nathan Ballard told the Guardian after the vote. “The mayor has a long relationship with David Chiu. In fact, he was on our short list to be named assessor just a few years ago.”

Yet at the progressive party that night, Chiu sounded like a rock-solid member of that group, promising to help Mirkarimi with police reform, Campos with protecting undocumented city residents, Mar with strengthening city ties to the schools, and Avalos with safeguarding progressive budget priorities.

“I think this is the best outcome we could have,” Mirkarimi told the Guardian shortly after Chiu was elected. “I was the deciding vote that delivered Sup. David Chiu, the first Asian American president of the board. That doesn’t mean that the seasoned experience of Maxwell and myself wasn’t hard to pass by.”

In fact, both Dufty and Maxwell groused about the progressive bloc’s opposition to Maxwell, noting her positions on issues such as public power, affordable housing, and transportation issues. “The people that voted for me did so because they felt I would at least listen to them,” Maxwell told us, expressing frustration at not being accepted “by the board’s progressive clique” which, she noted, “are all males.”

“I think David will be great,” Dufty told the Guardian. “Obviously there was a desire to have someone strongly aligned with the progressive movement. I think it’s a mystery that Sophie isn’t considered part of the progressive movement.”

Progressives are going to have to work at resolving those differences if they are going to play a leadership role in the midyear budget cuts and prevent an expansion of the bloc of five supervisors who stuck with Maxwell and often align with the mayor.

“There has been tension between Ross and myself, but also between Sophie and Ross,” Daly told us. “Sophie is feeling that she might be a progressive, too. And some of the things we do on the board need eight votes. The rift between Ross and I is little. The real question is, when do we get Bevan and Sophie back?”

After fending off a progressive challenger in his reelection bid two years ago, Dufty seemed to move to the left, only to return to Newsom’s centrist faction — which mixes social liberalism with fiscal conservatism — in the last year. He prevented progressives from being able to override a mayoral veto of their decision to cancel $1 million in funding to Newsom’s Community Justice Center. And on Jan. 6, the old board delayed a vote on a mayoral veto of an ordinance that amends the Planning Code to require Conditional Use hearings and permits for any elimination of existing dwelling units through mergers, conversions, or demolitions of residential units, something sought by the tenant groups that are an important part of the progressive coalition.

Those issues, and the thicket that is the budget debate, illustrate what Daly admitted to us last week: “We can’t run this city with six votes.”

 

THE BUDGET MESS

The most pressing problem facing the new board is the budget, which requires $125 million in midyear cuts for the current fiscal year and will be an estimated $575 million out of balance for the fiscal year that begins in June. Chiu’s first move to deal with it — one lauded by progressives — was to name Avalos as budget chair.

“John Avalos has more experience on budget issues than me,” Daly, who chaired the Budget Committee for two years, said of his former board aide. But even Avalos was awestruck by the tsunami of bad budget news hitting the city, telling us, “I was visibly shaken.”

Mirkarimi and Elsbernd, the Budget Committee’s two other current members, also admit they face a daunting task.

“We can’t put a Band-Aid on the problem,” Elsbernd told the board last week. “This is not just about San Francisco now, but about San Francisco 20 years from now. We need to think about the next generation.”

Mirkarimi agrees with Elsbernd, at least in terms of the enormity of the problem.

“We cannot be incrementalist. We can’t dance around the edges,” Mirkarimi told his colleagues, shortly after making the surprise announcement that he’s expecting a child in April with Venezuelan soap opera star Eliana López, who he’s dated since meeting her last year at a Green Party conference in Brazil. Elsbernd and his wife are also expecting their first child.

Progressives strongly argue that such a large budget deficit can’t be closed with spending cuts alone, so one of Peskin’s final acts was to create legislation calling a special election for June 2 and having supervisors hold hearings over the next month to choose from a variety of revenue measures, but Newsom and the business community opposed the move.

“Basically, it’s not fully baked. It will take a citywide coalition (à la Prop. A) to win something like this and the coalition just hasn’t been built yet,” Ballard told the Guardian. Even Mirarimi echoed the sentiment, telling the Guardian, “I’m not opposed to a June election, but you can’t put something on the June ballot that’s half-baked because I doubt we could win in November if we put something half-baked on in June. My preference is that we work harder to create alliances to assure a healthy chance of getting something on the ballot and delivering a victory.”

Yet many progressives and labor leaders say it’s important to bring in new revenue as soon as possible, particularly because the cuts required by the current budget deficit would slash about half the city’s discretionary spending and devastate important initiatives like offering health coverage to all San Franciscans.

“For Healthy San Francisco to survive, the Department of Public Health has to have a minimum level of funding,” said Robert Haaland, a labor representative with the public employee union SEIU Local 1021. “Given the cuts that have been proposed, it’s not going to survive.”

While Peskin was criticized for acting prematurely, the City Attorney’s Office memo indicated that he couldn’t have waited and still allowed supervisors to play the lead role in determining what ended up on the June ballot. The memo was requested by Daly.

“In response to your specific inquiry about maximizing the amount of time a committee could deliberate the underlying measures and ensuring that the Board would have enough time to override a Mayoral veto, the emergency ordinance and the resolution calling for the special election should be introduced today,” the City Attorney’s Office wrote Jan. 6, the day Peskin introduced his revenue package.

Even then, supervisors would need to vote to waive certain election procedures, such as the 30-day hold for proposed ballot measures, and to move expeditiously forward with hearings, selection of the tax measures, and preparation of findings related to the special election and declaration of fiscal emergency.

The City Attorney’s Office wrote that the package needs final approval by Feb. 17. “We recommend that to meet this deadline, the Board adopt the resolution at its January 27 meeting and that the Mayor sign the resolution no earlier than February 2,” they wrote.

But Newsom has indicated that he would veto it, thus requiring eight supervisors to override. “Aaron had the right to do what he did, but in some ways he rushed the discussion, so it’s been a bit rockier than it otherwise might have been,” Dufty told us, noting that he’s still open to supporting a June ballot measure. “There is no way to avoid spending cuts, and we need more revenues and more givebacks from public employees … I think labor is spending a significant amount of time with the mayor, and he’s making a strong effort to work with the board. I’m trying to encourage us all to work together to the maximum extent possible.”

In fact, San Francisco Labor Council director Tim Paulson told the Guardian he couldn’t talk about the tax measures yet because of intense ongoing discussions. Ballard said Newsom might be open to tax measures in November, telling the Guardian, “Ideally we could do it all by streamlining government, reducing spending, etc. But the mayor lives in the real world and so he is open to the possibility of a revenue measure with a broad base of support.”

So, can the new board president help coalesce the broad base of support that he’ll need to avoid cuts that would especially hurt the progressive base of unions, tenants, social service providers, affordable housing activists, and others who believe that government plays an important role in addressing social problems and inequities?

“In light of the global meltdown, national slowdown, local crisis, and largest budget deficit in history, I believe this board understands the importance of unity and working together,” Chiu told his colleagues. “We don’t have time for the politics of personality when we have the highest murder rate in 10 years, when businesses are failing, and the budget deficit grows exponentially.”

Inauguration parties!

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TUESDAY, JAN. 20

The inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States is a historic event, with the rise of the first African American president coinciding with the end of perhaps the worst presidency in US history. So it’s time to celebrate, and here’s where you can do so on Jan. 20.

Sock it to me


NextArts has reserved the space outside City Hall for a simulcast of the inaugural proceedings and what it’s calling a Sock It To Me Concert. In the spirit of grassroots, progressive change, the price of admission is new socks and underwear with tags still attached for donation to the homeless.

7 a.m.–noon, free with donation

Civic Center Plaza

1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Plaza, SF

www.nextarts.org

The dream lives


The College of Alameda will broadcast Obama’s 9 a.m. swearing-in and offer open mike commentary during commercial breaks. The event also features several speakers on the civil rights movement and what Obama’s presidency means for Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy.

8 a.m. –1:30 p.m., free

F Building student lounge, College of Alameda

555 Ralph Appezzato Memorial Parkway, Alameda

(510) 748-2213

Quiet time is over


The African American Interest Committee is sponsoring a public viewing of the inauguration ceremony at the San Francisco Public Library. Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis and refreshments will be available in the Latino/Hispanic Community Meeting Room.

9 a.m.–noon, free

Koret Auditorium, SF Public Library

100 Larkin, SF

mjeffers@sfpl.org

Party for grid alternatives


Come try the signature Obama cocktail at the Swedish American Music Hall’s inauguration event. Watch a 9 p.m. rebroadcast of the inauguration on the big screen and dance and enjoy catering by Radio Africa and Kitchen. Proceeds benefit Grid Alternatives, an Oakland-based organization promoting renewable energy.

7 p.m., $22 advance, $25 at the door

2170 Market, SF

www.cafedunord.com

Obama mambo


Boogie down to support Amnesty International during its fundraising event, "Dance for Change." Music from hip-hop to house to rock will be spinning all night long, so prepare to shake it for Barack to the wee hours.

9:00 p.m.–2:00 a.m., $10

Le Colonial
20 Cosmo Place, SF

www.amnestyusa.org

Pray for change


After a week of shared prayer in mosques, temples, churches, and synagogues, the inauguration celebration will be the final stop for "Unity for the Sake of Change," a prayer event open to all religions.

7 a.m., $5

Oracle Arena

7000 Coliseum Way, Oakl.

(510) 272-6695

obamacelebration.org

Inaugural Ball


Electric Works gallery is hosting an Inaugural Ball featuring a rebroadcast of the inauguration followed by dancing. Formal dress is suggested but not required (changing rooms and borrowed finery will be available for those coming directly from work). Drinks and light hors d’oeuvres will be provided and proceeds benefit the San Francisco Food Bank.

6–10 p.m., $10 donation requested

130 Eighth St., SF

www.sfelectricworks.com

Women, Democrats, and democratic women


The San Francisco Democratic Party and local women’s political groups — including Emerge California, Good Ol’ Girls, and the San Francisco Women’s Political Caucus — are throwing an Inauguration Night party in the swanky Green Room of the War Memorial Opera House, featuring hors d’oeuvres, drinks, and entertainment.

5:30–8:30 p.m., $25

301 Van Ness, SF

www.actblue.com/page/inaugurationsf

(415) 626-1161

info@sfdemocrats.org

Inauguration Skaters’ Ball


The California Outdoor Rollersports Association hosts a political roller disco featuring Sarah Palins and Barack Obamas on wheels. There’s even a chance that a live feed from the party will be broadcast at the Presidential Gala in Washington. Dress up as your favorite politician and resist the urge to knock out your rivals.

7–11 p.m., $10 adults, kids free. $5 for skates

Funkytown SF

1720 19th St., SF

www.cora.org/ObamaParty.htm 2

Mail items for Alerts to the Guardian Building, 135 Mississippi St., SF, CA 94107; fax to (415) 255-8762; or e-mail alerts<\d>@sfbg.com. Please include a contact telephone number. Items must be received at least one week prior to the publication date.

The Funeral Party

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PREVIEW By the late 1990s, the better part of the country had reached a consensus. The whole East Coast vs. West Coast thing had officially run its course and was, decidedly, un-chill. A pimp-stick-wielding Snoop Dogg blowing a gasket at The Source Awards and doing his damndest to incite a riot was one thing. But, once the two most transcendent, brilliant musicians of the generation were murdered in cold blood, America and everyone else involved decided, enough was enough.

Ten years on from Biggie’s death, a new crew of whippersnappers has decided to boil up some East Coast/West Coast beef. Though they aren’t talking about engaging in sexual congress with anyone’s betrothed, Los Angeles dance-punk quartet the Funeral Party is sick of the Big Apple hoarding all the indie cred. On the raging "NYC Moves to the Sound of LA," from their jarring debut EP, Bootleg (Fearless, 2008), the precocious upstarts take aim at the "unoriginal," "contrived" New York City scene. Vocalist Chad Elliot venomously spits, "Stole all of your ideas from other cities<0x2009>/ Things are lookin’ stale<0x2009>/ It’s time to turn around<0x2009>/ New York City loves to mess around with the LA sound!" You hear that, Vampire Weekend? You’re fucking going down!

Only time will tell if this sick burn will plant the seeds of a feud that will dominate the back pages of publications nationwide. If I was a betting man, I’d give the "FP vs. NYC" feud between a 2 percent and .00231 percent chance of captivating America. But I would bet the ranch that the Funeral Party’s arresting brand of punk-based dance-rock — imagine Babyshambles on uppers, jamming with At the Drive-In-era Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Johnny Marr — landing them on the front pages of a few magazines in the coming years. Popscene has a knack for booking artists with solid buzzes before they blow up, so get ready to add the Funeral Party to the list of bands you saw before Carson Daly 2.0 informed America who they were.

THE FUNERAL PARTY Thurs/15, call for time, $8–$10. Popscene, 330 Ritch, SF. (415) 902-3125, www.popscene-sf.com

Inca Ore

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PREVIEW In the liner notes to his Automatic Writing (Lovely Music, 1996), Robert Ashley talks about how he tried to source text for his 1967 opera That Morning Thing by soliciting recordings from his friends narrating, without psychological or moral interpretation, scenes from their life that they’d chosen to keep secret. Describing the results of his survey as "very bad," Ashley decided to synthesize his own text, the result being the viscerally creepy "Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon."

The mercurial earth-mother drones of Inca Ore — the solo moniker of Oakland’s Eva Saelens — have, in their blown-out glory, a circuitous sonic relationship with the whining Moog ambience of Ashley’s strangest music, and the raw psychic effects of last year’s Birthday of Bless You (No Fun) are comparable to the composer’s work. Leaping from the absolutely banal to the densely metaphysical, Bless You‘s world is psychology- and morality-free, and when words replace bodiless moans, the effect is evocative, occult, and informed by a slight but potent sense of self-parody. As she declaims through a delay pedal at the conclusion to scrape-scape "Infant Ra": "to all jewels buried in the grass, awake, discovery, in oyster shells!" It’s not a hard world to get sucked into.

INCA ORE With Mangled Bohemians, and the Why Because. Wed/14, 9 p.m., $6.

Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. (415) 923-0923, www.hemlocktavern.com

“Tantalus”

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PREVIEW Last year’s audacious staged reading of the complete Tom Stoppard trilogy The Coast of Utopia saw the Shotgun Players expanding their already broad horizons to encompass a rarely performed heavyweight piece exploring the roots of Russian radicalism. This year, they’ve raised their own impossible bar even higher, with a staged reading of John Barton’s daunting 10-play cycle Tantalus.

Performed only once in its entirety — in Denver in 2000 — this marathon of myth was Barton’s attempt to fill in what he has termed the "gaps" in the Epic Cycle, which described the rise and fall of Troy in a series of epic poems, many of which have survived only in fragments. Sire of the doomed house of Atreus, Tantalus doesn’t actually appear in his own titular drama, having already been imprisoned by the gods for stealing their ambrosia — and offering up his son in a savory stew. But the rest of the squabbling pack — Agamemnon, Menelaus, Clytemnestra, et al. — play a role, along with a host of heroes, gods, and poets. Performing one-third of the great work on each of three successive Wednesdays, the Shotgun Players are poised, with this epic endeavor, to tantalize us.

TANTALUS Wed/14, Jan. 21 and 28, 7 p.m.; $150 for three performances. Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berkeley, (510) 841-6500, www.shotgunplayers.org

“Defiance”

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REVIEW A serious Holocaust movie like Edward Zwick’s Defiance has to start with archival footage. See, there’s Hitler, shouting in German. Say! Where did Zwick get shots of the Wehrmacht plundering the Bielski farm in Belarus? Oh, it’s fading into color — guess he filmed them himself. After the German invasion of Russia, the Bielski brothers took refuge in a nearby forest. They harassed Hitler’s supply line, provided shelter to fellow Jews, and generally defied things (Nazis, collaborators, Russians, each other). They led complicated but ultimately heroic lives, the kind that Hollywood distills into turgid cinematic pablum before slapping on a "based on a true story" title card. The times were rife with moral quandaries, difficult decisions, and summary execution. Zwick’s characters grapple with these thorny issues by shouting at each other, brow-furrowing, and brooding. If the Third Reich had declared war on central casting, the Bielskis would have been screwed: Daniel Craig is charismatic, but uncomfortable with leadership; Liev Schreiber is passionate, but too thirsty for revenge; Jamie Bell is meek and shy, but overcomes these defects. Harried by an acne-scarred traitor, they protect the socialist in Trotsky glasses, the avuncular rabbi who never thought they would amount to anything, and their three perfectly calibrated love interests. Take that, Nazis!

DEFIANCE opens Fri/16 in Bay Area theaters.

Martin Puryear

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REVIEW It’s exhilarating to see, upon entering the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s atrium, one of Martin Puryear’s most renowned works, Ladder for Booker T. Washington (1996), installed with such noiseless bravura: the 36-foot sapling grows slender and seems to disappear even faster into space as it floats above the elevators. Puryear’s eloquent exercise in perspective and comment on Washington — and his philosophy of slow progress and steady struggle in the fight for racial equality — gathers even more resonance today, thinking of 2008’s lengthy political campaigns and the calls for sacrifice in the recessionary year ahead.

After the conceptual games of SFMOMA’s "The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now" and the almost-fetishized objects of "246 and Counting: Recent Architecture and Design Acquisitions," there’s a lot to surprise — and refresh — the eye in this Puryear retrospective. If "246" startles with its museum recontextualization of almost mundane gadgets like the iPhone, this survey accomplishes the opposite: it quietly brings a primal sense of wonder to the act of walking 360 degrees around sculpture that seems both familiar and alien, bearing all the humble hallmarks of functionality but amplified to the level of fine art. Engineers and architects, woodworkers and basket-weavers, Sea Ranch aficionados and even Olafur Eliasson buffs will find much to ponder at Puryear’s elegant intersection of the raw and the handmade, the organic and the geometric. What comes across clearly in this gradually, gently elucidating exhibit — in which Puryear’s works are displayed thematically rather than chronologically, culminating with an effect akin to a camera aperture slowly swiveling its nautilus eye wide open — is the respect the artist so clearly has for those who study and perfect a craft or trade. It’s as if Puryear has writ large the notion of making: lionizing the utilitarian (Some Tales [1975-78], Lever #3 [1989]) and making it big and beautiful, even witty (Pride’s Cross [1988], Sharp and Flat [1987]), almost Dada-esque in its cerebral and political provocations (Le Prix [2005], C.F.A.O. [2006-07]), and as ovoidally opaque and as fascinated with the negative space within as the surrounding space it so handsomely cuts, without (Maroon [1987-88], The Charm of Subsistence [1989]).

MARTIN PURYEAR Through Jan. 25. Mon–Tues, Fri.–Sun., 11 a.m.–5:45 p.m.; Thurs., 10 a.m.–8:45 p.m. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., SF. $12.50, $8 seniors, $7 students, free for members and 12 and under (free first Tues.; half price Thurs., 6–8:45 p.m.). (415) 357-4000, www.sfmoma.org

Super Lit!

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Welcome to a super secret book issue, where you’ll find reviews, interviews, and some preview picks for events at the library, where books are relatively "free." I’ll kick things off with a rave for Blaine Dixon’s Polk Gulch (Blurb, 144 pages, $49.95), a semi-self-published collection of photos of life on one of San Francisco’s most storied streets. Blaine’s black-and-white eye is a West Coast counterpart to the Times Square views of Larry Clark and Gary Lee Boas, and the book’s final contemporary color section is packed with wise irony. Polk Gulch may not be what it once was, but Polk Gulch proves small publishing is still spirited, intelligent, and surprising. (Johnny Ray Huston)

www.blurb.com/user/Vercingtorix

>>The wayward west
America is not a freeway in Jon Raymond’s Livability
By Max Goldberg

>>This land was your land
The American West at Risk confronts mine-all-mine mentality
By Amanda Witherell

>>Speed Reading
83 Days of Radiation Sickness, The Photographs of Stanley Marcus and more
New Reviews

>>Herself redefined
The word is the thing in The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest
By Garrett Caples

>>Vive l’amour
Stephanie Young remakes icons and images in Picture Palace
By Brandon Bussolini

>>Blessed be
The Necronomicon has an expensive 31st birthday party
By Cheryl Eddy

>>Reel time travel
A book-length encounter with the criminally obscure Ulrike Ottinger
Matt Wolf

The wayward west

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The world falls away again and again in Jon Raymond’s short stories. The 10 pieces comprising Livability (Bloomsbury, 272 pages, $15), the Portland, Ore., author’s first such collection, are introspective ellipses enshrouded in the march of everyday life. We may hear about a job or spouse in passing, but Raymond submerges his characters into stunned states of contingency. Kelly Reichardt’s film adaptations of Raymond’s tales (2006’s Old Joy, 2008’s Wendy and Lucy) surely expand upon their source material, but his third person limited point of view skims existential drift with delicate precision. Whether it’s the dissipation of a Fight Club–inspired adolescent initiation ("The Wind"), a furtive after-hours blow job in the mall ("Young Bodies"), or a search for a missing friend amid the unfamiliar streets of a gentrifying city ("Benny"), Livability‘s plots are liminal hooks, awash in the overcast Oregon sky.

Though not an overwhelming prose stylist, Raymond sutures our reading with familiar ruminations. We have all known "almost lovers" and "might as well have been brothers." Most of us have friends who can "turn everything inside out in two breaths," too. Raymond’s characters have sharp eyes for sadness, spotting regret in everything from the diminishing opportunities for a bargain ("With the Internet, everyone knew exactly what everything was worth") to the misdirected vigor of young fathers ("Only after they’d been beaten up by the world for a good, long time were they ready").

The dearest passages in Livability linger over the unexpected amnesty of solitude. In "The Coast," a becalmed widow admits his guilty relish in being alone: "I enjoyed making the small decisions about which way to turn on the beach … I liked the slight puzzle a single man my age seemed to pose." In "Words and Things," a newly single woman observes the warmth of a cup of tea pressed to her hand, the light of passing headlights, and a silence that "crackled on her eardrums." These snatches pull up short of ecstasy, instead taking measure of the quiet remainder of perseverance.

The culminating story, "Train Choir," stands out for its inexorable chain of events, a heartbreaking progression with the unerring momentum of a ballad. In it, a young woman (Verna here, Wendy in Reichardt’s adaptation) breaks down in Oregon on her way to work the Alaskan canneries with her dog Lucy (who first appeared in the film version of Old Joy). Verna is literally at a loss, but it’s not so much what happens to the character as it is the steady undoing of options that makes "Train Choir" so moving. Even when a menacing turn is diffused, helplessness is still "only a few steps in either direction."

Raymond invokes the domestic dissolution of the George W. Bush era by giving Verna’s journey the telling backdrop of a flood. Given the current headlines, it’s hard to miss the story’s basic yet perspicacious point that the road from Bush’s America is not a freeway. Verna’s careful tally of expenses registers a different picture of money than the one lodged in discussions of "the economy." When a steep repair estimate pushes her over the edge of solubility, the sense of dispossession is sharp, like grief. Verna comes unyoked from society, but "Train Choir" is a frieze of vulnerability rather than disengagement. Verna’s condition illustrates the ease with which one can slip between the cracks in today’s United States — Bush’s rhetoric about the "ownership" society is meaningless to the individuals and entire communities who feel disowned by their country.

And yet, desolation offers its own illumination: "Overhead, the lights seemed to flutter, and for a moment she worried the whole world might disappear. But in fact nothing happened; the world remained as it was. There was no thunder. No lightning." We can read either hope or despair into these lines, but it would be folly to think the two are more than a few inches (or votes) apart.

This land was your land

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Anyone paying any kind of attention has a deep-gut feeling that things aren’t going well for Earth. No matter how fancy or technologically advanced we get, everything humans make and break is fashioned from the resources at hand — water, air, petroleum, minerals, soil and its nutrients, and plants and trees and their fruit. Your MacBook may look space age, but it didn’t fall from the sky. "Nearly everything you use every day is based on minerals mined somewhere, often leaving behind disfigured land and a toxic mess," Howard G. Wilshire, Jane E. Nielson, and Richard W. Hazlett write in The American West at Risk: Science, Myths, and Politics of Land Abuse and Recovery (Oxford University Press, 619 pages, $35)

"Mining is the prow of America’s consumer-propelled ship. Its whole purpose is to dig up resources for transformation to consumer goods," the authors go on to note, with the kicker that such resources are nonrenewable. "A three-bedroom, two-and-a-half bathroom house of about 2,000 square feet, with a two-car garage, central air conditioning, and a fireplace, contains more than a quarter-million pounds of mined metals and other minerals."

The American West at Risk explains the exact effects mining has on Western ecosystems — in other words, the other living things trying to survive alongside humans. Beginning with forests, the authors outline the history of logging and how the right to do it on public lands was weasled from a weak Environmental Protection Agency made even weaker over the last eight years. All professional geologists, the three authors draw upon science in their argument for preservation.

An EPA library in condensed form, The American West at Risk presents a coherent survey of forestry, agriculture, water use, outdoor recreation, road building, military operations, garbage disposal, and nuclear power. "Western US public lands, about 47 percent of the region, are this nation’s patrimony — the bulk of its remaining natural capital," the authors observe. In each of the book’s 13 chapters, they study a single major resource and its uses. The chapters are tidy and stand on their own, but read together, they reveal an abuse of public lands and resources for the benefit of a very few. They also reveal how government science has been warped to perpetuate myths — for example, the idea that grazing on rangelands doesn’t harm the soil, or that military testing shouldn’t have bothersome effects on downwind populations.

The conclusions reached by Wilshire, Nielson, and Hazlett aren’t all doom and gloom — solutions are included — but amid climate change, the authors deserve great credit for not mincing words. The American West at Risk is being marketed as a textbook, and although schools are one ideal realm for its ideas, they aren’t the only one. This book appeals to anyone with an interest in environmental issues, and is essential bedside reading for any environmentalist or activist. It should be read by all Westerners — and by anyone who cares about this great, vast, once bountiful planet, now on the brink of death.

HOWARD G. WILSHIRE, JANE E. NIELSON, AND RICHARD W. HAZLETT read from The American West at Risk. Thurs/8, 7 p.m. at Books Inc. Opera Plaza, 601 Van Ness, SF. (415) 776-1111, www.losingthewest.com

>>Read Amanda Witherell’s interview with the authors here

Speed Reading

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A SLOW DEATH: 83 DAYS OF RADIATION SICKNESS

By NHK-TV "Tokaimura Criticality Accident Crew"

Vertical

160 pages

$19.95

It’s tacky to begin a review of a book about death by radiation poisoning by praising the design of its jacket. But I’m afraid I have to — John Gall’s art for A Slow Death: 83 Days of Radiation Sickness is unique in a gaze-snatching fashion. It combines hues of yellow and green, block patterns, and a news photo backdrop into an attractive, enigmatic, and faintly disturbing image that makes a browser wonder, "What exactly is inside this book?"

The answer is an account of a nuclear plant worker’s gradual demise after he was accidentally exposed to 20,000 times the maximum tolerable amount of neutron beam radiation. As some alleged environmentalists (including figureheads such as Al Gore) have begun touting the benefits of "non-carbon sources" of energy — an evasive way of saying "atomic power" — Hisashi Ouchi’s death comes across as an extreme cautionary tale.

Built from a television documentary about the nuclear accident, A Slow Death bluntly but compassionately renders Ouchi’s physical symptoms — which included massive skin loss — and the emotional impact his plight had on the doctors and nurses who treated him. The last extraordinary aspect of Ouchi’s story involves his heart, which persevered and remained relatively healthy while the rest of him demonstrated the impact of radiation — as the book puts it, "it continued living amidst the destruction of virtually every other cell in his body." (Johnny Ray Huston)

REFLECTION OF A MAN: THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF STANLEY MARCUS

Photo selection by Allison V. Smith

Cairn Press

192 pages

$60

Sale signs at Macy’s and other businesses tend to suggest that the department store is a 20th-century phenomenon on its way down. But the department store had a great curator of sorts in Stanley Marcus, the Marcus in Neiman Marcus. An over-the-top extravagant collection of the businessman’s photography, Reflections of a Man might seem like a vanity project, but in fact it reveals a talented cameraman and, somewhat enticingly, the aesthetic point-of-view that might have gone into creating a popular chain of stores.

Dallas was Marcus’ home, and his version of the city wasn’t characterized by ugly American cowboy mentality so much as a love of beauty, parties, and profitable combinations thereof — he invented an annual Fortnight celebration as a way to boost sales during the slack period between back-to-school and the holidays. Oscar de la Renta’s brief forward to this monograph is a semi-flattering if fully affectionate account of Marcus’ unflagging success at making a sale. An old press pass reveals he wanted to be a photojournalist, but his public profession proved far more lucrative.

As for the photos, they are gorgeous, Popsicle-bright Kodachrome images of life in the South and abroad in Europe. Marcus had a terrific eye for patterns and repetitions, whether they came from cubic carpeting on the floor of a Paris fashion show or funny visual rhyming between Stetson hats and hanging lamps in a Houston restaurant. Christian Dior and Pucci pose with personality for Marcus, but his skill isn’t so much for portraiture as it is for the art of commerce, capturing the flair of couturiers as well as balloon and sponge vendors on the street. (Huston)

HOME: SOCIAL ESSAYS

By Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka)

Akashic Books

282 pages

$15.95

THE HUNGERED ONE

By Ed Bullins

Akashic Books

192 pages

$14.95

I didn’t ask, so don’t tell me why queers have come to be the fashionable sacrificial stooges for pandering new Democratic presidents. For some overstanding on the matter, read Amiri Baraka’s intro to the most recent edition of Home: Social Essays, a collection he wrote between 1961 and 1966 as Leroi Jones. Anyone familiar with reprints of Jones’s autobiographical works knows that they afford Baraka with a chance to engage in scathing (and sometimes funny) multileveled assessments of his past writings and views. Here, he leaps right into a critique of his past use of the word "fag" that insinuates tribute (without naming names) to some of the strong, influential queers he’s worked with over the years. It’s a prescient genuine act, but characteristic — Baraka was calling Obama "slick" years ago at a City Lights reading.

Baraka also writes a preface for a reprint of Ed Bullins’ story collection The Hungered One, but it’s Bullins’ introduction that makes an impression, because of its open-ended refusal of readings that interpret (and thus restrict) the title tale as an allegory. The Hungered One is filled with pieces that do exactly what they set out to do — "An Ancient One," for example, perfectly renders a city scene that happens in front of my building every day of the year. But it’s that title story — more horrifying than anything a genre writer like Stephen King has imagined — that lingers. It’s as uncanny as a nightmare, and as real as human nature. (Huston)

Herself redefined

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although I don’t enjoy real lakes

Barbara Guest, Biography

Barbara Guest (1920-2006) once told me she shared a taxi in Manhattan with Marianne Moore. Seeing Guest unsuccessfully hail a cab, Moore impulsively instructed the driver of the one she was in to pull over and pick up the young poet. Moore didn’t know Guest was a poet, and Guest was too intimidated to confess it, though they had a pleasant chat before Moore dropped her off at her destination.

There’s something fitting about this encounter. Although she most strongly identified with H.D. among modernist poets — even writing 1984’s still-standard H.D. biography Herself Defined — Guest is perhaps more like Moore in terms of her relative position within the New York School. Of the original members — including John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch — she is the most obviously difficult. Unlike her relatively postmodern colleagues, she primarily engaged with a high modernist aesthetic attuned to both the arch formalism of The Waste Land-era T.S. Eliot and the strident irrationality of surrealism. The result was a truly singular aesthetic, yielding, as The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest (Wesleyan University Press, $40) demonstrates, one of the most radical bodies of work in 20th century literature.

Difficulty is, of course, a vexed question; poetry’s perceived difficulty frightens off even readers of the most abstruse fiction. Some of Guest’s poetry is admittedly taxing — a book like Rocks on a Platter (1999) is nearly impenetrable to me, despite my appetite for such work. But the bulk of Guest’s writing is difficult only if you assume the goal of poetry is to make sense, which it isn’t. The greatest poetry exceeds meaning, suggesting more than it says, suspending language’s sense-making capacity in favor of the word as thing. If you forego the demand that poetry deliver a coherent picture or scenario, Guest becomes much less difficult. You simply follow, without worrying where you’re headed.

In Symbiosis (2000), for example, one of Guest’s increasingly abstract later works, we find these three lines: "In no climate whatsoever / noise traveling up the tower<0x2009>/ bronze green in the tournament … " Quotation out of context hardly distorts the passage because it’s never clear what the context is, the lines appearing apropos of nothing before or after. They remain stubbornly themselves, resisting meaning. You can propose a tower "in no climate," but the very definition of "climate" presupposes its ubiquity; everywhere has a climate. More pertinent to Guest’s concerns are the subtle musical echoes between "noise traveling" and "bronze green," or the disposition of the word "tower," scrambled throughout "whatsoever" and translated into French as the "tour" of "tournament." These are hardly Guest’s greatest lines, but they indicate some of her procedures. The poems are generated less by "the real" than by words themselves, their use as material objects, which is what I mean by "the word as thing."

To see early work like The Location of Things (1960-62) and The Blue Stairs (1968) back in print is thrilling, while the bird’s eye view of Guest’s career is revealing: nearly half the collection was written in the last 10 years of her life, indicating the mastery she attained. The array of forms is remarkable — just when she seems to embark permanently into a Mallarméan scattering of phrases across the page, she shifts to the microfictional prose poems of 1999’s The Confetti Trees. A short section of new work at the end suggests yet more possibilities. But as the Collected Poems shows, Guest had done enough.

Vive l’amour

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REVIEW Stephanie Young edited the anthology Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 432 pages, $29), which attempted to take a snapshot of the Bay Area’s poetry scene while acknowledging the failure built into such a task. Her second book of poetry, Picture Palace (in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, 120 pages, $15), is not particularly concerned with choosing between various poetic modes and traditions. Picture Palace draws as heavily on pop culture as it does on theory to find its form and to subsequently understand form’s impact on content. In the process, Young escapes the lyric poetry/language poetry binary. (Or, to use a less geography-bound but equally contemporary axis, the flarf/conceptual poetry binary.)

As its title suggests, Picture Palace is heavily invested in movies. Young makes and unmakes icons as well as the minutiae of daily life. On the theoretical tip, she applies Gaston Bachelard’s thought in books like 1994’s Poetics of Space and 1987’s The Psychoanalysis of Fire to the act of walking around Lake Merritt. In terms of ideas and visual imagination, Picture Palace is best described as dense. Images and their aftereffects are at play, but the reader has to dig for the gratifying thrill of recognition; even when a pop-culture reference is spotted, it has a strange murky glimmer. Young is both recovering a shared experience and implanting a new one when she writes lines like "Tim Robbins with Tupac<0x2009>/ the one where they stabbed each other<0x2009>/ for treatment," in "Betty Page We Love You Get Up."

There are other funny moments (the most intense flashes of Sylvia Plath’s "Lady Lazarus" are condensed into the formula "Rising, ash, eat, air, etc."), yet the real thrill of Picture Palace comes from the way it jumps between different levels of knowledge, in the kind of epistemological recreation that brings us back to Bachelard. Young’s ability to portray, in tandem, the way her speakers routinely perceive the world and the way they are able to break with those perceptions, and the ways of knowing the world that those perceptions embody, reminds me of the libretti of Robert Ashley’s operas more than it does the work of other contemporary poets. Much like the titular protagonist of Ashley’s Now Eleanor’s Idea (2007), her poetry is haunted by an "end of the world feeling," but where that feeling prodded Now Eleanor to pursue investigative journalism focusing on New Mexico’s lowrider culture, the same feeling pushes Young’s speakers to ponder and deform images projected onto, or from, screens: "There was a superimposed face on my face and I gradually came to see my own belief that it could never change. In this way my face functioned as an image on film."

The overall effect — and this seems like an inaccurate phrase, given how much Young’s poetics depends on micro-effects, small calibrations, and reversals of thought — is similar to Lynne Tillman’s 2006 novel American Genius. By this I mean that both writers’ driving concern is finding new forms to convey new experiences; they each establish a voice that, in its neurotic precision, contains multitudes.

Blessed be

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What the hell is the Necronomicon? A figment of H.P. Lovecraft’s imagination? A demon-awakening tool foolishly deployed in the Evil Dead movies? A manifestation of Aleister Crowley’s magical powers? Or simply a good old-fashioned hoax?

For purposes of this review, Necronomicon (Ibis, 220 pages, $125) is none of the above. Assume, if you will, that it’s a tome based on Sumerian mythology, filled with line drawings and incantations. It’s bound in ominous black with silver lettering and a built-in ribbon bookmark — all the better to keep important verses ("The Exorcism of the Crown of Anu," perhaps) at your fingertips. It’s edited by the single-named "Simon," who has been on the Necronomicon beat since 1977. According to Wikipedia, Simon’s interpretation has sold nearly 1 million copies. According to his author bio, his best-selling whereabouts "have been unknown since 1984" — until this 2008 re-release, anyway.

The Necronomicon is a fearsome-looking addition to any bookshelf. It’ll definitely enhance any library lacking in new age creepiness. But, uh, one more time: what is it exactly? Fortunately, Simon doesn’t leave you dangling. This edition comes complete with a new preface (helpfully explaining the significance of a deluxe 31st anniversary volume, lest you think someone dropped the ball during an even-numbered year), as well as earlier prefaces and an introduction that discusses Lovecraft, Crowley, and occult history. There’s also a pronunciation guide (since when uttering the incantations, "a mistake may prove fatal"); and a solemn page-and-a-half warning that dicking around with the Necronomicon can have serious consequences. There’s no mention of having to cut off one’s hand and strap on a chainsaw in its place, but readers who are also movie buffs will nod knowingly.

OK, then the good stuff (purportedly ancient curses, rituals, spells, etc.) begins, kicking off with "The Testimony of the Mad Arab" and continuing into chapters like "The Incantations of the Gates" and "The Conjuration of the Fire God." Names dropped include Pazuzu, of Exorcist fame. Not everything’s gloomy though; instructions on how to "win the love of a woman" and "restore potency" are included, along with poetry that could pass for death-metal lyrics: "I will cause the Dead to rise and devour the living!" Cookie Monster that!

All right. I’m pretty close to mocking the Ancient Ones here. If you happen to see me coming down the street (you’ll know it’s me — just listen for the "fearful howlings of a hundred wolves"), you might want to scrape together the dough for your own Necronomicon, just for protection purposes. The price tag on Simon’s brand-new version suggests to me that demons might really be pulling the strings somewhere along the way.

Reel time travel

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How often do you encounter a living artist whose radical and prolific body of work is criminally obscure? I can’t evangelize enough about the German filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger, whose work is the subject of Laurence A. Rickels’ Ulrike Ottinger: The Autobiography of Art Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 288 pages, $22).

Some glimpses into Ottinger’s dazzling and genre-defying oeuvre: baroque lesbian pirate adventure (1977’s Madame X: An Absolute Ruler); an aristocratic alcoholic tourist drinking herself to death in a post-apocalyptic West Berlin (1979’s Ticket of No Return); and a trans-Siberian train journey that makes an unexpected pit stop in Mongolia, where a two-hour ethnography of an all-female tribe unfolds (1989’s Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia).

There are hardly words to describe these striking and innovative films, but Rickels’ ambitious new book — drawing upon extensive interviews with the filmmaker — provides compelling interpretations. I recently interviewed him via e-mail.

SFBG It puzzles me how Derek Jarman’s queer-punk classic Jubilee (1978) is available as a Criterion DVD and Ulrike Ottinger’s contemporaneous and similarly groundbreaking Madame X is virtually inaccessible. Why do you think Ottinger isn’t better known in the states?

LAURENCE A. RICKELS Ottinger was very well known throughout the art cinema network in the 1980s. Though [her] fiction films were "long" in density and attention-surfeit, they in fact observed the time limits of features made for theatrical release. With the turn to documentary, she engaged in what I once referred to as "real time travel" — involving durations of viewing time up to nine hours in length. But once she began again to show her photography in acknowledged art venues, her current film work was rediscovered at least for that world.

Just as important, no doubt, is her refusal to release her films as readily available videos or DVDs. But this brings us back to the point that she operates, even when she identifies herself as filmmaker, as an artist who tries to oversee her reception.

SFBG Many of Ottinger’s films — both the documentaries and narrative films — deal with the exotic and otherness. She persistently crosses genres, cultures, and genders.

LAR What is so radical about her film art is an insistence on encountering the other, on meeting the other "halfway." For the other’s arrival, Ottinger constructs out of her own (formal) language a sort of terminal, which anticipates or fantasizes about what the other will bring to their "first" contact and exchange.

SFBG Which film from Ottinger’s oeuvre is essential viewing for those who haven’t seen her work? What about this film should a new viewer expect?

LAR If I had to choose one, it would be Ticket of No Return. It introduces the viewer to the distance Ottinger observes with regard to the very conditions of trauma. By drinking herself to death, the protagonist seeks, as Nietzsche counseled, to become who she is.

SFBG In your book you describe Ottinger’s next narrative work, Diamond Dance, about Jewish gangsters in Brighton Beach, the diamond business in New York, a gay psychoanalyst, and more. The film sounds incredible. What’s happening with the project?

LAR Diamond Dance was a new fictional film project at the start of the 1990s. There have been more near-miss attempts to find suitable conditions for its realization, even according to a more modest plan. However, Ottinger has not given up, and has been revising some of the pressure plot points in the original screenplay to reflect and invite another time period in which the film will be made and set. But the original film is in a sense lost — together with the era of art cinema to which it belonged.

Scary kids scaring kids

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PG TERROR The real magic kingdom is Disney Inc., which has managed to completely dominate family entertainment for at least 70 years, from Snow White (1938) to High School Musical 3: Senior Year (2007). Yet there was a period in the 1980s when the post-Walt studio appeared to have lost its way. The old formulas seemed tapped out, and attempts to find new directions floundered, at least commercially.

Thus there was a rush of incongruously un-Disneyesque titles venturing boldly into PG terrain: 1979 sci-fi thriller The Black Hole (featuring Anthony Perkins’ drilling death); 1980 musical flop Popeye from least-apt-Disney-director-ever Robert Altman; 1981 medieval horror Dragonslayer (which had a priest flambéed in closeup); 1982’s psychedelic Tron; 1985’s seriously depressed fantasy Return to Oz, and so forth. Many of these have since developed cult followings, but they were pretty unloved back then.

One such notable failure — though somehow every kid of the era seems to have experienced nightmares from seeing it — was 1980’s The Watcher in the Woods.

Based on Florence Engel Randall’s young-adult novel, it has the Curtis family — parents Carroll Baker and David McCallum, ex-pro ice skater Lynn-Holly Johnson’s oft-hysterical psychic teen Jan, and child horror-film regular (and eventual Paris Hilton auntie) Kyle Richards as demonically possessed tyke Ellie — renting the requisite spooky old English country mansion from spooky old Mrs. Aylwood (an imperiously restrained Bette Davis), whose own daughter mysteriously disappeared three decades earlier. Myriad inexplicable, near-fatal events targeting Jan point toward an explanation both supernatural and sci-fi.

Watcher‘s tortuous history exemplified a nervous studio’s conflicting impulses. Disney wanted to make something "darker" — or did it? Rewrites lightened up scary material. There were creative arguments and forced changes during filming. Yet the often beautifully atmospheric film’s woes had only begun.

The plug was pulled on completing elaborate F/X for a parallel-dimension climax, making for an abrupt, critically panned ending. This version was yanked from theaters after brief exposure in April 1980. A re-release in even softer form followed 18 months later. No less than three alternative endings were shot; Disney still refuses to release credited director John Hough’s preferred cut. Midnites for Maniacs programmer Jesse Hawthorne Ficks doesn’t even know which variant will open his "Broken Homes for the Holidays" triple bill. It’s followed by 1986 classic Stand by Me and 1973’s diabolically clever drive-in sleazefest The Candy Snatchers.

"BROKEN HOMES FOR THE HOLIDAYS"

Fri/9, Watcher in the Woods (7:30 p.m.), Stand by Me (9:45 p.m.), The Candy Snatchers (11:45 p.m.), $10

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com

Return to deform

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PREVIEW One of the most exciting and unusual theatrical events of 2008 came from a small San Francisco–spawned, now Brooklyn-based company: the curiously named Banana Bag and Bodice. It almost sounds unexpected, but in fact BBB, which retains close ties to the Bay Area, has been doing shrewd, highly imaginative, often startlingly designed songplays — their preferred term — with practically no budget for about a decade. Habitués of the San Francisco Fringe Festival, most of the company’s work has appeared there in one form or another — almost invariably garnering Best of Fringe honors — beginning with 1999’s debut outing, The Bastard Chronicles, and running through such memorable encounters as the dadaist delight and vegetarian horror show, Sandwich (2004), or the haunted viscera and satirical apocaly-poesis of The Sewers (2007).

Nonetheless, last spring’s world premiere of Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage — a slick, rousing performance-arty rock operetta-cum-English-lit-seminar that ran at the Ashby Stage in Berkeley — raised things to a new level for the company, especially in terms of production values. And thanks to the support of commissioning company Shotgun Players, BBB’s well-honed minimalist aesthetic, sardonic humor, enveloping musical designs, and performance rigor all proved more than capable of expanding to fill the bigger space and budget. It’s otherwise impossible — and still somewhat awesome — to imagine a BBB performance being mounted at a top-of-the-line venue like the Berkeley Rep. But that’s just where Beowulf will be reprised Jan. 8, expanding to fill the Rep’s cavernous Roda stage, in a single benefit performance ahead of the show’s New York City premiere in April at the Henry Street Settlement’s Abrons Arts Center. A sign of things to come.

Since co-founding Banana Bag and Bodice in 1999, writer-actor Jason Craig and actor Jessica Jelliffe have led the extremely resourceful, highly collaborative ensemble — which includes stalwarts composer-actor Dave Malloy and actor-director Rod Hipskind — in far-flung productions that regularly straddle NYC, SF, and Craig’s hometown of Dublin, Ireland. While dazzling audiences with works as conceptually unconventional as they are hilariously clever, behind the scenes they take a tough-minded and committed approach that serves them well in the lean and unforgiving environment of NYC’s alternative theater scene, and the group’s recent productions there have gained enthusiastic audiences and reviews as well as plenty of street cred with their peers.

Meanwhile, nurturing longstanding ties to the Bay Area has helped ensure a consistent output as well as momentum. When Shotgun’s artistic director Patrick Dooley held out the offer of a commission for an opera, Craig says they took the plunge without hesitation, telling him they’d like to do something with Beowulf. The idea apparently came more or less out of a hat. "I didn’t read it until Shotgun agreed to do it," he confesses alongside Jeliffe and Malloy at Craig and Jeliffe’s comfortable roost in a warehouse in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood. "It’s just really not my cup of tea. Honor and machismo." But Dooley immediately agreed, providing BBB with what was, for them, unprecedented support.

Malloy — as composer, musical director, and actor in the role of King Hrothgar — reveled in the creative possibilities: "To be able to have an eight-piece orchestra — I’ve never been able to have that before, and it’s so rich and rewarding." For the NYC production he’s even adding two more musicians. "I’ve been rewriting all the music, making it thicker and denser," he says. "It’s just a real treat, because I’m so used to doing black box theater where it’s like, ‘oh, this actor plays violin — great.’<0x2009>"

Craig’s script, meanwhile, ended up brilliantly channeling his reluctance and skepticism toward the epic poem itself, turning his own discovery and questioning of the text into a set of theatrical subjects and productive dichotomies: a panel of seemingly empty academic experts — two of whom, including Jelliffe, double as Beowulf’s monster adversaries — and the titular hero, played by Craig, as an unlikely he-man gone slightly to seed, in addition to a showdown with monsters who are also a mother and son, and the sly morphing of Beowulf’s medieval warrior mythos with its 21st-century rock-god counterpart. The latter concept was already honed in BBB’s 2007 show, The Fall and Rise of the Rising Fallen, which birthed a mock-legendary band with a life beyond the play. The results have shown BBB playing at the top of their game.

"It’s working with Shotgun that’s ramped up everything," confirms Jelliffe. "Not that we have to match that every time, but it has upped the ante, definitely. Usually we make whatever we can with whatever we can. With The Sewers, we made this incredible $20,000 set with no money because of the resources we are able to draw from in New York.

"We still do that, and will continue to do that," she continues. "But with Shotgun, I mean, having a budget?" It’s a modest one to be sure, but for now, without a doubt, as Craig says, "It’s cool."

BEOWULF: A THOUSAND YEARS OF BAGGAGE

Thurs/8, 8 p.m., $30

Roda Theatre

2025 Addison, Berk.

www.shotgunplayers.org

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