Volumes

A certain way

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Georgie Bundle came creaking into my shack in the middle of the night. Weirdo the Cat wigged a little and went under the bed. I rolled over. The refrigerator snored. Georgie Bundle stood his stand-up bass in the doorway and wound down on the floor without any lights on.

In the morning I stepped over him and put the coffee on. I started a fire. There was an apple pie, and there were leftover ribs I’d slow-smoked for dinner the night before. Oh, and there was applesauce, of course, with bacon in it. Starting to sound like breakfast?

Wake up, Georgie Bundle. Wake up and smell the barbecue.

I never lock my door. It’s the woods! I’m a chicken farmer! Visitors are rare, but always welcome. It was Bundle’s idea to put the ribs on the pie, like ice cream.

"Georgie Boy," I said half a bite later, my mouth full, my eyes bugging, "you are a genius."

He hemmed and chawed, blushed a little, and said, "No, no, no," but I tell you, world, this was a chicken-and-waffle moment. The smoky sauce (borrowed from Big Nate), the juicy meat, the flaky, buttery crust, the sweet, gooey apples … it was a taste sensation that will likely color — or flavor, I should say — the rest of my apple pie–eating life.

Yours too, if you let it. Don’t be afraid. Look, open your eyes. It’s walking distance to pork chops and apple sauce, with pastry crust for biscuits. It’s almost classic. I, for one, will not be able to eat apple pie now without smothering it in barbecue, or at least wanting to. Just like I crave fried chicken instead of blueberries on my waffle and buttered, syrupy waffles under my fried chicken.

End of story. Bing. I take back everything I ever said about anything. I love applesauce, I love apple pie, and Mitsuhiro is wild about burritos.

He’s the Japanese tourist whom I met on the train and then helped find his way around Chicago. I made a phone call, drew a map, walked him to the El, and pointed him north. It was nothing, really — I had a five-hour layover there. But to him this was tantamount to saving his life. Come to think of it, he might be right.

Anyway, we’d already agreed that when he came back West we’d go eat. I’m a slow thinker and a patient listener, and this makes me popular with non-English-speaking people in general. I’m also a one-track conversationalist. After hours and hours of broken sentences, backyard sign language, and bee dances, I had gleaned that Mitsuhiro, in one week in San Francisco, had only eaten Chinese food.

I gave him my phone number and e-mail address and tried to think how to say he was "in good hands" without potentially transutf8g that into Japanese as "I want to blow you." Even though, of course, I did.

"Mexican food," I said, starting safe. "Vietnamese food. Caribbean food. Indian food. I love to eat. I will show you."

His mind stopped working at Mexican, I guess, because a couple of weeks later he e-mailed on his way back across the country and said, "Next Sunday date 11 I am free. I would try Mexican food."

We ate burritos, then drank at the only Mission District bar that was open at 5:55 p.m. on Sunday, date 11: the Make-Out Room. I didn’t know there was going to be music. At first we were the only ones there. Three pints later I started to realize that I, your chicken farmer truly, to whom every single thing is "a date," was on a date … a date date. I know because he kept saying sweet things and, more to the point, wouldn’t let me pay for anything. And right around that time, all of my friends in the world started moseying into the bar. There was Kid Coyote with a guitar, the Old Sack on drums. Here come the Mountains, Gator-Gator, Jolly Boy, Earl Butter. And nobody’s seen me for weeks, so there’s considerable hugging and hooting, and I tried to introduce Mitsuhiro in a certain way. But.

I can only imagine his confusion. I think he thought I was one of those kinds of women, or else maybe he realized finally that I was exactly the kind that I am.

In any case, the mood changed. He started looking at his watch a lot, then had to go. Back to Okinawa, and there is a song in that, yes, but it’s already been written. *

Fetus frenzy

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› culture@sfbg.com

If you live in San Francisco and are in possession of a conventional vagina, you are most likely pregnant. And if you’re not pregnant, you’re either anxious to become so or have just pinched out a baby and are looking toward closing the deal on numbers two and three before you hit 40. If none of the above applies, I, a new mother myself, give you permission to ignore that self-righteous pregnant bitch eyeing your Muni seat and openly admit the following: SF was edgier when it was just a bunch of wayward freaks in crotchless ass pants.

Now, thanks to a surge in results-oriented fucking among the white, heterosexual ruling class, this city has become overrun with decaf-latte-sipping, thousand-dollar-stroller-pushing, CFO–Noe Valley–ish, overly together supermoms who will tear you multiple assholes if you even think about stepping near their two-legged petri dish specimens. One might be tempted to label this phenomenon a baby boom. That assumption, however, is incorrect. What we are witnessing in San Francisco — and everywhere else inhabited by Gen Xers with money — is a parent boom.

In the past, parents were simply identified as people who raised children. That era, which lasted roughly 200,000 years, has ended. Parents now practice the rarified art of parenting. Parents who parent must adopt a specific parenting style — one that’s far more complex than a hairstyle and infinitely more expensive. Parenting requires ongoing investment in sleep and breast-feeding consultants, childproofing contractors, European-designed gear, six-week courses, endless manuals and magazines, and, depending on one’s sacred style, couture bedding and nursery decor that can run well over five grand. This is quite a change of direction for Generation X, to which I belong, whose members were blacking out in Cow Hollow bars and smoking out of two-foot Mission District bongs throughout the ’90s. But my generation’s escapist persona — equal parts political indifference, obsessive consumerism, hedonistic self-absorption, and Diff’rent Strokes references — did not abate or even truly evolve when we threw the birth control in the trash. It only found new life, literally.

We, the latchkey slackers who postponed being parents until our ovaries wept, are acutely aware that whatever decisions we make regarding our children are direct reflections of ourselves. It is therefore imperative to properly accessorize one’s child; only by doing so can one ensure the child is a better accessory. The right stroller, carrier, preschool waiting list, parenting philosophy, and even diaper — all denote much more than any sensible person would care to know.

THE BABY GAP


Oh, wait. I forgot to mention the babies: it appears there are many of them. Commercial sidewalks in Noe Valley, Cole Valley, Hayes Valley, and beyond buzz with kitten-eyed freshies sucking the rubberized life out of pacifiers, frazzled mommies in yoga pants and camel toes pushing behemoth, double-wide prams, nannies chatting on cell phones while small barbarians stick organic Cheerios up their noses. Top preschools are waitlisted for several years. Babysitters are harder to find than a pimple on a newborn’s butt. Is it good for San Francisco’s soul that kiddie boutiques outnumber bondage shops and Polk Street glory holes? It’s an epidemic, cry my nonparent friends, some of whom have been accosted by pompous moms and dads for accidentally bumping into strollers or smoking on the street. Ever think of denying an All-Important Holy Mother with Child your seat on the 1 California? Want to be knifed by a stay-at-home mom from precious Laurel Heights?

Funny thing is, the evidence of a baby boom is largely anecdotal. Statistics paint a very different picture. A disturbing March 2006 report by Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth, "Families Struggle to Stay: Why Families Are Leaving San Francisco and What Can Be Done," reveals that we have the lowest child population of any American city. And of San Francisco’s 100,000 children, most reside in the city’s poorest districts — including traditionally working-class neighborhoods that are becoming increasingly chic. Coleman Advocates also estimates that 39,000 families with children are in need of affordable housing.

"The issue is not if there is a baby boom trend in San Francisco," Coleman Advocates’ Ingrid Gonzales e-mailed me. "The real issue is whether these [lower-income] families stay or are eventually pushed out of San Francisco because of a lack of affordable family housing or access to a quality public school education. Stats show that families leave when their children reach kindergarten age. Coleman Advocates and our families say that this is not OK — families should have a right to stay in the city they call home."

Somehow I doubt the parents buying the $1,890 Cabine infant dresser at Giggle on Chestnut Street are too worried about making rent. In fact, a May article in the New York Times reports that San Francisco is second only to Manhattan in toddlers born to wealthy white families, defined as those that pull in an average of $150,763 per year. And consider this Coleman Advocates finding: there was a 45 percent drop in the number of black families with children in San Francisco from 1990 to 2000, while around the same time 90 percent of the people moving into the city did not have children and — surprise, surprise — were mostly rich and white. This development pretty much paralleled the period of the dot-com boom. At the risk of making light of an alarming situation, is it safe to posit that the dot-com bust inspired semiemployed white professionals to buy a lot of lube?

CLASH OF THE CODDLERS


So what creates this illusion of a baby boom? Probably an uptick in showy, hyperactive parenting. Weekends at Children’s Playground in Golden Gate Park provide insight into the phenomenon. There parents can be found earnestly — one might even say aggressively — parenting. They really put their all into it ("it" being what our parents haphazardly did with us) as they push their bewildered offspring in swings, making sure to "Wheee!" with more enthusiasm than a redneck at a NASCAR rally — an apt metaphor, because this brand of parenting is a competitive sport. "How old is she? Is she standing on her own? Can she walk yet? Does she speak French, and can she crap in the can?" someone always wants to know, hungrily eyeing your baby as if she were a delicious wild Alaskan king salmon fillet.

But blessed be, developmental superiority is not the only way to make other parents feel like shit. Fleets of luxury Dutch strollers are parked around the playground’s grassy knolls, each exceeding my share of rent by $300. I’ve seen nannies pull toys from Coach and Louis Vuitton diaper bags, kids scale the jungle gym dressed in Little Marc coats, white babies in $40 organic cotton T-shirts emblazoned with a grossly ironic image of a black woman’s face.

This excess of money breeds paranoia. Even on the warmest days, Caitlin-Courtney-Penelope-Emily-Aurelia-Shiloh-Mackenzie can be observed crawling in the playground’s cool sand, fully dressed in the very best of Zutano’s and Petit Bateau’s wide-brim hats, thick socks and booties, long-sleeve shirts, and pants in order to prevent the wretched elements, formerly known as blue sky and sunshine, from attacking the child’s not-so-invisible bubble. And rest assured, many of the playground’s nannies — almost entirely middle-aged mothers and grandmothers of color — have been fingerprinted and subjected to invasive criminal background checks. Long gone are the days when parents hired any ol’ teenage stoner to watch their kids.

LAVISH AND LACK


I feel embarrassed to be here, I often think. Because I know I’m part of the problem. I didn’t come to San Francisco for the money — I was born here and spent most of my childhood in that new epicenter of ultraparenting, Noe Valley — and I don’t have a nursery, a full-size kitchen, or even a hallway in my shared one-bedroom Sunset apartment. (This is not a "poor me" moment; my lifestyle is a choice.) But I did spend $300 on a labor and newborn preparation course, during which I suffered video after video of goopy babies cannonballing forth from untamed bush. I paid a woman $200 to teach me how to breast-feed and another $50 to join a local e-mail list through which upper-crust women seek help in finding dinner party entertainment for hire and live-in au pairs. I can cite Halle Berry’s prenatal test results but no statistics from the war in Iraq. I have secretly chuckled at ugly babies. I have wanted to know if your baby can stand alone yet and why she’s so much smaller than mine. I’ve purchased nearly 20 books on pregnancy, breast-feeding, natural birth, cosleeping, infant health, starting solids, potty training, how to stay hot, and how to fix my gut.

Pediatric records indicate I was not reared by wild dogs, yet I can’t figure out how to assume the most primal of all roles — motherhood — without hitting the ATM.

In her 2007 manifesto against the $20 billion baby-to-toddler industry and the disastrous effects it has on our children, Buy, Buy Baby (Houghton Mifflin) author Susan Gregory Thomas credits Gen X’s overspending and unhealthy micromanaging to the way in which we, the products of broken homes and TVs as babysitters, were raised: "The commercialization and neglect of young people results not only in fears of abandonment and bank-breaking shopping habits in adulthood to fill the void but also in a deep, neurotic sense of attachment to, and protection of, one’s own children and home."

Gregory Thomas’s assessment strikes me as painfully true and spurs the question: what kind of people will our babies become? Will they, as older children and adults, invariably expect and demand the best, no matter the appropriateness of the circumstance? Will they be terrified of public schools and public transportation and — worse — people with a different color skin? How will they ever travel abroad, and will they condescend to people who have less? Surely the parents who buy their baby the $1,700 Moderne crib intend only to give their child the finest they can offer. Every child is worthy of that grand intention. Yet, as my friend and mother-mentor Billee Sharp pointed out, the more extravagant the gifts, the harder the parents must work to provide them, resulting in less time spent with their kids. Lavishness, in this sense, becomes empty compensation for a shortage of available love.

IT TAKES AN INTERNET?


Being a new parent is much harder than it seems. If we’re overcompensating, it’s largely because we don’t know what else to do. If it takes a village to raise a child, what happens when all you have is DSL? During my pregnancy and the first three months of my daughter’s life, my husband and I lived in relative isolation in Brooklyn, away from family and a network of close friends that could offer knowledge and day-to-day help. The books, the classes, and the breast-feeding consultant filled the gaps that real support would have provided. (I certainly had two boobs but no idea where to put them: In the baby’s mouth? Are you serious?) In the absence of genuine community, we follow the only guidelines available to us and do the best we can manage. While nothing is less appealing to me than having to be someone’s friend simply because we both piss our pants when we sneeze, artificially constructed social networks like mommy groups, daddy groups, play groups, and Yahoo e-mail groups fulfill a real need for disconnected urbanites whose families typically reside thousands of miles away.

Learning to be a parent without geographic and strong emotional links to our families, then, becomes a complicated process of untangling the skein of too much information. From the moment a woman discovers she is pregnant, she and her partner are encouraged to believe they are totally, utterly retarded when it comes to being parents. The reality-TV experts, the how-to books, the product-driven Web sites and magazines cater to a deep, unrelenting distrust of ourselves, and they have the tragic effect of obliterating whatever parenting intuition and knowledge that we, as living creatures, already have in our DNA.

My path to reclaiming motherhood began with an injured wrist. Everything I had read warned that I would roll over my child and kill her if we slept together in one bed. To prevent this tragedy, my husband and I bought a sleigh bed attachment for our bed that kept me at least a foot away from my child. Each night that I listened to her breathe without being able hold her brought an agony so intense that I became profoundly depressed. I was desperate to pull her close to my body, like every mammal mother does, like our ancestors did long before they stopped growing pubic hair on their backs. In my longing to be nearer to my child, I contorted my left wrist under my head as I slept, perhaps to stop my murderous hands from accidentally touching the person I love most. With my wrist in a splint and steroid shots in my hand, I sobbed to my mother over the phone, "I can sleep with my cats, but why not with my own child?"

The night I brought my daughter into bed marked the beginning of my departure from the fear-and-product-based mommy mainstream. Within weeks a friend turned me on to the instinctive-parenting ideas put forth in Jean Liedloff’s The Continuum Concept (Addison Wesley, 1986), a fascinating book that details the author’s travels to Venezuela, where she studied the parenting methods of the indigenous Yequana Indians, who, remarkably, have never considered shopping for child-rearing clues on Babycenter.com. Admittedly, my and my husband’s current touchy-feely, indigenous-inspired style is a little fringe lunatic, and, as Gregory Thomas might suggest, it’s probably no coincidence that we both come from broken homes. But life-changing insights that require no investment in stylish baby gear are available to us. We only have to be willing to look.

BEYOND THE BUBBLE


One of the most affecting messages I have received about the depth of real parental love came to me in the form of a damp newspaper abandoned on the subway in New York City. Elizabeth Fitzsimons’s essay "My First Lesson in Motherhood," published in the New York Times Modern Love section this Mother’s Day, chronicles the journalist’s trip to China, where she and her husband picked up their adopted infant daughter, who, it turned out, had debilitating health defects. Fitzsimons was warned that her daughter might have Down’s syndrome, might never walk, and will likely be tethered to a colostomy bag for the rest of her life. "I knew this was my test," Fitzsimons writes, "my life’s worth distilled into a moment. I was shaking my head ‘No’ before [the doctors] finished explaining. We didn’t want another baby, I told them. We wanted our baby, the one sleeping right over there. ‘She’s our daughter,’ I said. ‘We love her.’ "

Fitzsimons’s fierce, truly unconditional love for a child she did not create becomes even more striking when contextualized in these fertility and pregnancy-obsessed times. We all want our children to be healthy, to outlive us, to be content, and to exist in a safe, peaceful world. These desires are pretty basic. Clearly, though, there’s a worrisome glitch in the parent boom trend: it has nothing to do with the well-being of children who are biologically not ours. This newfound love for babies is entirely insular, concerned only with one’s genetic family, one’s own perfect, beautiful, well-fed, well-dressed child. Look inside a pregnancy or parenting magazine and you will find that most lack any semblance of social perspective as they offer tired takes on recycled, useless information: "How to lose the baby weight in three days!" "Ten tips for getting back the magic in the bed!"

But the truth is that while middle-class women squabble about whether to breast-feed or bottle-feed, 39,000 families with children in this city are in dire need of affordable homes. For every day we bicker over stay-at-home moms versus mothers who work full-time, four children in this country will die from abuse or neglect, and eight more will be killed at the hand of someone operating a gun, according to Children’s Defense Fund statistics.

The self-centeredness of Gen X parents manifests as blindness to these sad realities, and here I indict myself again. Why do I only act on behalf of my child when I have the means to do something that could help other, less fortunate children? Maybe the answer is too painful to consider. Maybe I’d rather shop for a new sling instead. *

Chez Maman

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Chez Maman might not be spreading her arms just for you, but it sure feels that way. You step inside, and you are snuggled. There is no one else in her world but you — except, of course, those other inconveniently needy people who are lined up at the long bar and packed into the windowside tables, hungry for a taste of Mom’s cooking and competing for her attention, damn them. Mom in this instance is French, a stoveside exponent of la France profonde, a disher-up of various Gallic comfort food, though plainly Mom has been hoofing it around the world lately too, since, to judge by the menu card, she seems to have discovered the quesadilla, among other New World wonders.

Mom’s place used to be Just for You, a celebrated daytime, mostly breakfast-and-lunch venue that also served dinner but decamped a few years ago to Dogpatch. Space was presumably an issue in that move; the vacated premises were tight even by the standards of tight premises, and the advent of Chez Maman (an offshoot of Plouf offshoot Chez Papa, at the corner; now there are several Chezs Mamans) did not cause those premises to expand. The restaurant’s minimal dimensions seem to be exactly those of yesteryear. We were shown to a window-display table one noontime, and I felt as if I were being stuffed into a coach seat on United Airlines. The chairs were handsome enough — some kind of brushed steel or aluminum, very au courant — but I would have been happier with less metallic chic and more space in which to draw breath.

Yet the closeness of the quarters is what it is: an inherited condition. And there is something to be said for knee-knocking proximity, at least if you’re with somebody you like. If you’re not, there’s always the long counter (which affords an excellent view of the conversation-piece kitchen) and, in clement weather, the sidewalk tables. It has long been my sense that the concept of clement weather is generously understood in France; the French will sit at outdoor tables in the Place de la Bastille, sipping espressos or Kronenbourgs from tall glasses, even as February snowflakes twirl gently down around them. If they need further warming, they light cigarettes and denounce the government.

No snowflakes on Potrero Hill, of course, at least not of the meteorological sort — and not many cigarettes now either — but at Chez Maman there are excellent panini, including those classic French versions, croques monsieur et madame. You can’t go wrong with these, but how about a panino of merguez ($9.50), the spicy North African lamb sausage, presented (with sautéed onions and Gruyère) on immaculately fresh bread in the form of a boomerang? I never tire of merguez, but I particularly liked Chez Maman’s version, which had the coarse, chewy texture of the house-made kind.

The merguez panino plate, like that of the tuna panino plate ($9.50), was prettied up with balsamic-dressed mesclun — beautiful and tasty if rather austere. To balance this small touch of abstemious greenery, we sprang for the herbed frites ($5), which arrived in a hefty stack with a ramekin of aioli on the side and lasted beyond the end of the panini despite our enthusiastic plunderings: forkfuls, fingerfuls. The tuna sandwich was good, just not quite as memorable as its merguez sibling: the fish was mashed with aioli into a kind of salad dotted by bits of roasted red pepper and given a gentle edge by some parmesan gratings, though no capers.

If you accept the quesadilla as legitimate in a French (or French-plus) bistro, then you will also welcome, beforehand, guacamole and chips ($7). The guac is nicely chunky and lightly kissed by lime juice, but the fresh-from-the-fryer chips are a revelation — almost like pastry. No one can eat just one, and I should know. I could easily have eaten the whole stack, like a bag of Ruffles, without any guacamole at all. Fortunately or unfortunately, I had to share.

The quesadillas are wittier than the run-of-the-mill sort. I was especially taken by a vegetarian version ($10.50) filled with a sauté of red and yellow bell peppers and zucchini, and smears of goat cheese. The quesadilla, duly grilled, was cut into quarters and stacked like a club sandwich, which made it easier to share, sharing being a recurrent motif at Chez Maman, perhaps because of the close quarters or the sense of maternal vigilance.

Across the way, my friend took a deep whiff of his niçoise salad ($13.50), as if he were warming his face over a steamy bowl of soup.

"It smells fishy," he said with satisfaction, "like the real thing." The salad included fresh grilled tuna, naturally, to contribute to this authenticating perfume, but also anchovy fillets, whose aroma is indispensable in certain preparations. I have had niçoise salads, even good niçoise salads, without anchovies, but anchovies are, without doubt, an improvement. (The rest of the salad was satisfyingly standard-issue: quarters of hard-boiled eggs and tomato, green beans, potatoes, and black olives.)

Perhaps the most genuinely French aspect of the Chez Maman experience is the service. As those who’ve visited France know, the French tend not to fawn over restaurant customers. Service is generally crisp and correct, and servers are pleasant while avoiding the noisome American tic of pretending to be your friend. Chez Maman’s service offers a version of this brisk continental experience, which is intensified by the crowding smallness of the place into a blend of efficiency and urgency. Plates clatter, people come and go, and Maman reminds us, gently but firmly, not to talk with our mouths full. *

CHEZ MAMAN POTRERO HILL

Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–11 p.m.; Sat.–Sun., 10:30 a.m.–11 p.m.

1453 18th St., SF

(415) 824-7166

www.chezmamansf.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Pyramental

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› superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO Books are cool, and they can make you taller. Often they even tell you things, things you never thought you’d want to know. They’re like platform heels that talk! But they speak in a flippant whisper, and what they say is delicious.

Sure, books may not be able to dish on how Tyra got rid of her "vag arms" this season (hello, Scotch tape in her hairy pits) or why that one annoying girl on the 22 Fillmore’s still pumping that goddamn "Hot Pocket, drop it" song on her tinny-ass cell phone over and over, a mound of discarded sunflower seed shells scattered around her pastel Superfecta IIs. (Please go download some Lupe Fiasco "Superstar" to your knockoff Chocolate already, sweetie. Seriously. It’s November.)

What books can tell you sometimes is that you’re right. I love that! Take The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art, and Music Drive New York City, by Elizabeth Currid, a new spine that fingerless-gloved intellectuals are cracking all over the Muni. It basically argues that — fuck Wall Street — the arts are the real forces that drive Manhattan’s hopping money market. (Too bad the best new artists can only afford to live in Queens now.) And guess where the linchpins are? Where art, fashion, and music intersect and all the brainy hotties trade lucrative ideas? That’s right: night clubs. All the fabbest deals are made on the dance floor, Ms. Elizabeth says, and nightlife, in which "creative minds set the future trends," should be boosted to top priority by any wannabe successful city, extralegal activities be damned. Of course she’s talking about New York, so her tome’s a tad inapt for our little blow jobs–for–tourists trade show here. But still, nightlife rules! One day it’ll make us all rich and famous! In your face, space coyote.

Speaking of books: I once dated a tech bear. It was the mid-’90s, the Interweb was still shiny, and bears hadn’t morphed into hedge-trimmed candy ravers yet. Don’t hate! Tech bears were hot — I’m still an all-day sucker for them — and this one, like so many others of his ilk, not only could build a Unix server out of two Cherry Coke cans and a pizza box but also spent his nights tripping on krunk and composing ambient electronic odes to his heroes Brian Eno and Arthur Russell. I couldn’t drag his ass onto a dance floor to save my life, but his windowless bedroom in the Tenderloin was a glittery cornucopia of strobe effects and rapid-fire bleeps. Go figure.

If only there had been some kind of school for him to attend, some place that would have guided him toward a career in digital-audio arts before he blew his mind on meth and moved back to the Midwest to become a gay trucker for Montgomery Ward!

Better late than never, maybe; now there is. Pyramind, a full-on media music and production school, is taking over SoMa and providing some of San Francisco’s brightest club-music makers with the skills to conquer the digital world. I recently found myself being chaperoned, somewhat bewildered, through Pyramind’s labyrinthine main campus by director and president Greg Gordon, in the company of old-school dance floor mover and shaker Paul dB. As they led me from one cavernous, soundproofed room to the next, each full of top-flight equipment, giant projection screens, a plethora of enormous monitors, and some mighty fine-looking students, I realized: maybe I should just give up writing and start composing the soundtrack for Halo 4. I could help launch a puke-colored Mountain Dew energy drink in 2009!

My temporary flight of fancy — how could I ever give up getting kind of paid to down well-vodka cosmos and introduce you to several psycho drag queens almost every week? — wasn’t such a pie in the sky. Pyramind’s hooked up with major prestidigitalators like Apple, Ableton, Digidesign, M-Audio, and Propellerhead. Students get possible career leads and exposure to some of the biggest biggies — Pyramind calls these companies "strategic partners," but to me a strategic partner is someone you sleep with to get back at your ex.

But the school is just part of a grand master plan. Pyramind is octopoid, with recording studios, a distribution service, international programs, a music label called Epiphyte headed by industry legend Steffan Franz, a well-established musical showcase–club night called TestPress that’s expanding to other cities (and has spawned an Epiphyte-released CD of bouncy tunes), and, with the recent acquisition of another huge campus a few doors down from the main one, an independent party venue. Pyramind’s stacked. And hey, in case any terrorists were thinking of hijacking any future Pixar productions (although wasn’t Cars terrifying enough?), Pyramind’s got the seal of approval, I shit you not, from Homeland Security. Calling all tech bears: drop that Cheeto and get in the digi-know now.

www.pyramind.com


www.epiphyterecords.com/

Uncuddly Leigh

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Jennifer Jason Leigh is nearly 50 years old. She looks about 15 years younger, yet without that plastic appearance redolent of cosmetic surgery. For a while she was a real movie star, if not quite a popular one, sustaining widely seen films through performances such as her homicidal nut in Single White Female (1992) and tightly wound abuse victim in Dolores Clairborne (1995). Equally memorable, if less seen, were her turns as dirt-dumb yet sympathetic prostitutes in Miami Blues (1990) and Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989), a working-class housewife and mother blasé about her phone-sex day job in Short Cuts (1993), an undercover cop turned junkie in Rush, and the brilliant but dysfunctional Dorothy Parker in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994).

Leigh blazed through ultrastylized retro hard-boiled patter as the female reporter in the Coen brothers’ underrated 1994 flop The Hudsucker Proxy. Who saw her extraordinary performance in Georgia, a painfully astute sibling drama she produced (and her mother wrote) the next year? Hardly anyone. As time passed she could be glimpsed guest-starring on TV’s Hercules and Spawn and retreating into supporting roles (like the wife who gets killed 10 minutes into 2002’s Road to Perdition) when she wasn’t turning to animation voice gigs.

It’s true that mainstream audiences never really embraced Leigh, who enacted real disappointment and displeasure instead of fake romantic bliss while losing her virginity in her first lead role, in 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High. She hadn’t made it easy, unlike the drastically less complicated Julia Roberts. Leigh resisted being ingratiating or easy to understand and consistently played gawky characters in difficult moral circumstances. She was a nervous talk show guest, and she didn’t seem obviously sexy, despite her frequently naked screen roles.

"I’ve never been a careerist," Leigh remarked during an awkward recent onstage conversation with Ben Fong-Torres (who seemed strangely fixated on a lascivious line of questions she wasn’t buying), part of a tribute at the Mill Valley Film Festival. That remains true. She’s as gifted as any actress of her generation but hasn’t quite scaled the high-profile heights of variably contemporary thespians such as Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett, or Nicole Kidman.

The last is her costar in Margot at the Wedding, written by Leigh’s husband, Noah Baumbach. Baumbach is best known for writing and directing 2003’s The Squid and the Whale, though his 1995 debut, Kicking and Screaming, has a cult following, and 1997’s Mr. Jealousy ought to as well. Margot pursues Squid‘s major themes: sibling and parental relationships, comings-of-age, familial wounds inflicted unintentionally and otherwise, and the emotional chaos physical intimacy wreaks. But Margot takes them out of the city, all the way to … the Hamptons. Still, that’s country enough for the neurotic, erudite urbanites who are Baumbach’s specialty. Close proximity to the outdoors can’t get them to relax their grips on historical baggage and personal grudges, even toward kin. In fact, a backyard tree turns out to be the symbolic — and physical — catalyst in the movie’s application of a lit match to blood relations long primed for explosion.

Kidman’s Margot is a type familiar in real life yet seldom so well detailed onscreen: the cunning malcontent who gnaws like a termite at other people’s happiness, convincing everyone that it’s for their own good. And Margot at the Wedding is concise, hilarious and cathartic, portraying cruel behavior sans authorial malice or even basic moral judgment. These people can’t help what they do. The quirky dysfunction feels utterly credible. There’s a moment when Kidman’s and Leigh’s characters reference a relative’s youthful sexual abuse — then erupt in inappropriate laughter. It’s shocking, yet it seems just right, because that kind of gallows humor is typically a survivor’s closely held secret weapon.

Kidman’s chilly, defensive sexpot owns the title, but Leigh’s Pauline is the movie’s emotional ballast. Playing closer to her offscreen personality (or so Baumbach says), Leigh is a one-generation-late hippie chick who gives everyone the benefit of the doubt — no matter how many times they’ve failed to return that favor. The story line and dialogue’s excoriating peak occurs when Pauline is finally driven past endurance, howling well-earned abuse at the monster sister who’s undercut her entire life. Leigh wails on 2007’s most satisfying screen rant. If Baumbach wrote it for her, the favor is returned threefold. Who else could pull off its full, verbose fury — and make sense of the story’s refusal to fade out afterwards?

Leigh’s major performances have always been the kind that people deem difficult: they’re knotty, uncuddly, indelible. This is the rare movie whose scripted complexities are equal to those she brings to it.

MARGOT AT THE WEDDING

Opens Wed/21 in Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

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www.margotatthewedding.com

All about Bob

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

It’s not that I’m anti–Bob Dylan. I’ve just never been a fan in particular. I’m too young or too fond of metal or too shallow or some combination of the three. But I found I’m Not There — Todd Haynes’s sorta biopic of the icon — entirely fascinating. By now you’ve heard the pitch: six actors (Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, and Ben Whishaw) play facets of Dylan without actually playing Dylan, though Bale and Blanchett come dangerously close. The movie begins with the death of this nebulous character, identifiable only by his distinctive mop of dark curls, and a somber narrator informing us, "Even the ghost was more than one person." And I’m Not There is nearly more than one movie, with different film stocks, casts, tones, and styles deftly stitched together by Dylan’s music (performed, appropriately enough, by an array of artists).

Perhaps you didn’t realize that one of Dylan’s personae is an African American boy (Franklin) obsessed with boxcars, guitars, and Woody Guthrie. Strangers are drawn to this nostalgic little soul, including a kindly woman who feeds him before sternly advising him to "live your own time." This sweet tale, filmed in warm hues with touches of magical realism, is a more abstract reading of Dylan — unlike the story of Jack Rollins (Bale), which is told documentary-style and features Julianne Moore as a Joan Baez clone reminiscing about Jack’s impact on the 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene. He was a visionary, using traditional folk stylings to comment on contemporary concerns. His life becomes intertwined with the showbiz fate of Robbie Clark (Ledger), a James Dean–ish young actor whose starring role in a Jack Rollins biopic catapults him to stardom.

After a freewheeling courtship — with montage-spun happiness undermined by televisions constantly broadcasting the Vietnam War — Robbie marries Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who later leaves him when fame and ego turn him into something of an asshole. But aside from big-head syndrome, Robbie’s worst offense is saying that women can’t be poets. The sins of Jude (Cate Blanchett) are far dirtier, and it’s no coincidence that Jude’s saga — a black-and-white British tour from hell, with snooty reporters and drug-enhanced moments of surreality — is I’m Not There‘s most magnetic segment.

Sexy androgyne Blanchett’s probably got her next Supporting Actress win sewn up with this one, or she should. Her performance is the heart of the movie — snarling, weary, uncanny, and able to make David Cross’s hairy cameo as Allen Ginsberg seem totally logical. Don’t Look Back would be the most obvious frame of reference here, but Haynes is less interested in Dylan’s performances or fans than his inner conflicts. It’s hard to sing about the oppressed when you are rich, famous, and beloved. It’s hard to keep your head on your shoulders when everyone views you as the voice of a generation. It’s hard to be patient when the Man (Bruce Greenwood — OK, his character has a name, but he’s the Man nonetheless) digs into your past, unable to beat you in a war of words but smugly proud of finding dirt that cracks your cooler-than-thou armor. Whoa, you mean his name isn’t really Bob Dylan?

Less compelling are a pair of shorter segments — Whishaw as Arthur (as in Rimbaud), who pops up occasionally to drop science via actual Dylan quotes, and Gere as Billy the Kid, a retired outlaw in hiding whose Halloween-obsessed hometown appears art-directed by Tim Burton. As in other chapters, there are surely nuances that sailed past me but that Dylan obsessives will seize on. Thankfully not represented are Dylan’s less-interesting years — the Victoria’s Secret pitchman era, for example.

As a rock doc–slash–biopic, I’m Not There is proof that the best rendering of a legend isn’t necessarily done with straight, tidy lines. I may not have been a huge Dylan fan before I’m Not There, but I was a Haynes fan. With this, his most ambitious work to date, the director’s affection for re-creating the past finds its match in his innovative dissection of a complex artist’s soul. *

I’M NOT THERE

Opens Wed/21 in Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

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www.imnotthere-movie.com

Do you believe in White Magic?

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

The folkish side of indie rock has been blessed with several female songwriters who have unique, affecting voices — Chan Marshall, Joanna Newsom, Becky Stark — but White Magic’s Mira Billotte is in a different league altogether. Her vocal tracks thunder and shiver all over the register, fearlessly chasing down radical intonations and bold tonal colors. Where the others can all sound a little fey and princessy, Billotte’s full-spectrum blasts hark back to the possessed passion of ’60s stunners like Grace Slick, Karen Dalton, and — why not? — Janis Joplin.

Billotte’s voice hinges on form and freedom, a balance that’s been remarkably well preserved on White Magic’s recordings. Speaking from her New York home about the band’s new EP, Dark Stars (Drag City), Billotte notes, "It’s the first digital recording White Magic recording has done, and we figured that would be cool because we could record in a spontaneous way."

But while the music feels fresh and explorative, it’s clear from my conversation with Billotte that a lot of thought goes into White Magic’s release schedule, a not-insignificant point given indie rock’s de facto buzz-bin setting. To be sure, the hype machine is familiar to the duo: Billotte’s regular partner is Doug Shaw, though they’re frequently joined by other musicians like Gang Gang Dance’s Tim Dewitt and the Dirty Three’s Jim White. Back in 2004, White Magic were frequently cited as leading lights of the burgeoning freak folk movement and were invited by Sonic Youth and Stephen Malkmus to play the hip All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in London.

Perhaps it was Billotte’s previous experience with Quix*o*tic — a band she played in with her sister Christine — that kept White Magic so even-keeled through these early waves. White Magic released an EP (2004’s Through the Sun Door), then took their time with an expansive full-length, Dat Rosa Mel Apibus (both Drag City). Since putting out the album, they’ve mostly shied away from touring. If anything, the band continues to be underrated, especially Billotte’s obvious star-power talent. One wonders if it isn’t the liberties she takes with her tracks — the very things that make them so special — that’s kept mainstream acceptance at bay. Vocalists such as Marshall and Stark may lack Billotte’s range, but their voices are more consistent and pleasant and therefore more likely to nab attention through in iTunes downloads or soundtrack one-offs.

Far from being a stopgap, Dark Stars sounds like a further staking out of White Magic’s idiosyncratic musical terrain: piano-driven ballads that swallow up a field guide’s worth of sounds and textures, everything from Tin Pan Alley jazz to dub chants, West African guitar music to Old Weird America folk. Bookends "Shine on Heaven" and "Winds" spiral out with repetitive, glistening chants — Billotte tells me the first song began as an improvisation at a party with friends — while "Very Late" boasts baroque blues and "Poor Harold" a loose-limbed folk ballad–reggae stomp combination. If this all sounds a little unwieldy, that’s because it is. The EP format is a perfect fit for the duo, since it allows them a full range of exploration in individual songs while still maintaining a succinct arc. Billotte confirms my suspicion that Dat Rosa was composed of four distinct parts, or EPs: "It’s a good format for my songs … and I tend to segment things in fours … so I like that the EP is four songs."

Besides Billotte’s voice, White Magic’s intensity has a lot to do with how they draw so many splintering sounds out of a relatively limited musical palate of mostly piano, guitar, and White’s seasick drums. Their songs sometimes seem to be all incantation, yawping calls without resolution. It’s a musical formula that is intoxicating and dizzying and certainly has something to do with the way the group has retained the sense of excitement and mystery that attended its first transmissions. As freak folk’s star fades, White Magic still seem on the brink.

"Hopefully [the music] can take you to that other place when you’re really listening to it," Billotte says, "because that’s what it does for me when I’m playing it…. That’s kind of what I feel like the trance element is." She sings for the sake of the songs, in other words, making it seem all the more likely that those songs are built to last. *

WHITE MAGIC

With Cryptacize and the Dry Spells

Fri/23, 9:30 p.m., $12

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

Out of the shadows

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

So if you see me, I be where they don’t battle rhyme

28 and zipper or Eighth Street and Adeline

— Shady Nate, "Banga Dance (Remix)" (Zoo Ent.)

I meet up with Shady Nate at Eighth Street and Adeline, in the Acorn neighborhood of West Oakland, where he spent his youth. As we scout locations for photos, a man walks by peeling a tangerine. "I survive in West Oakland," he mutters, more to himself than to us. The statement fits the hard surroundings, though Shady’s presence lifts the general mood.

"Shady Nate?" an older drunk wearing gold chains and riding a kid’s bike enthuses. "You doin’ it big!"

A woman approaches, claiming she knows Shady. He punches her number into his phone. "I don’t know her," he says afterward, laughing. Another dude tells me he loves Livewire, the crew whose members include Shady and pint-size phenom J-Stalin from the adjacent Cypress Village hood. "They make music for us," the dude says with pride.

This appreciation is worth underscoring. The usual criticisms of ghetto rap’s violent, dope-slinging content always overlook the fact that it’s a product of its environment. Glorification or not, the grimy depictions of street life by rappers like Shady mean the world to people who would otherwise have no voice articuutf8g their struggles. As Mistah FAB put North Oakland on the rap map, so Shady has done for the Acorn, appearing alongside heavyweights Keak Da Sneak and San Quinn on J-Stalin’s hit "Banga Dance" remix.

Now Shady has his whole hood behind him, giving him the necessary buzz to launch his solo career. Recently signed to Hieroglyphics member Tajai’s Clear Label Records, which plans to drop his debut, Son of the Hood, in March 2008, Shady is currently warming up the streets with two projects: the Demolition Men mixtape Early Morning Shift 2, cohosted by Stalin, and a DJ Fresh album, Based on a True Story (FreshInTheFlesh). Combined with the recent successful Livewire West Coast tour, the discs confirm Shady’s taking his game to the next level.

BASED ON A TRUE STORY


"I got away with hella bad shit as a teen," the tall, wiry 26-year-old born Nate Findley confesses. "I always went to school, but after I’d be in the street with my partnas. I never got caught until I was 18, an adult. That’s how the corner is."

"My first case was a 211, a robbery," he says ruefully. "That fucked me up. Every time I get jacked [stopped by cops "on suspicion"], they punch my name in, first thing they see: ‘Oh, yeah, 211.’ I ain’t on probation. I don’t do nothing no more. But something you did as a kid haunts you even when you got a new life. So I’m motivating my people to do something else."

Yet even in his young d-boy days, Shady was already honing his MC skills. "The block would get hot, so we’d go to the studio," he explains. "But we wasn’t no real rappers. I started taking it seriously around ’03, when I hooked up with Stalin, seeing all the people he was meeting. I ain’t never really met nobody that really rapped before.

"Stalin helped me record my first solo mixtape, Shady Acres [2004]," Shady continues. "Then I got on his album On Behalf of the Streets [Livewire, 2006]."

GARAGE DAYS RE-REVISITED


That was around the time I met Shady at the Garage, the now-legendary East Oakland studio where On Behalf was produced by the Mekanix. At the time, Shady was hanging back, soaking up game, and the game was thick: everyone from the Mob Figaz to Kaz Kyzah, Keak, and FAB routinely came through. When the Mekanix teamed with Stalin and Kaz as the Go Boyz, Shady hopped on the project, laying down his first major tracks like "What I Seen," which appears on Early Morning Shift 2.

"Meeting these cats on the radio motivated me to work harder," Shady says. "I was kinda timid at first. I knew I could rap, but these niggas been doing this shit for a minute. I just got more confidence now."

It was impossible not to notice. In the months following the Go Boyz sessions and the closure of the Garage due to near-constant police surveillance, Shady’s raps took on a new intensity, documented in appearances on Beeda Weeda’s Homework (PTB, 2006) and Stalin’s original Early Morning Shift (2006). His flow has gone from sick to lethal: it’s an elastic, melodic delivery that accelerates to double time as it plows its way to the end of the verse. Though the slang isn’t as dense, the combination of speed and rhythm treads on E-40 terrain, repeatedly forcing you to rewind to figure out just what Shady is saying.

With his name ringing bells throughout Oakland, it’s easy to see why Clear Label — responsible for Beeda Weeda’s Turfology 101 (2006) — picked Shady as its next artist. Showcasing beats by Droop-E, the Mekanix, Beeda’s PTB camp, DJ Fresh’s Whole Shabang, and Traxademix, the upcoming Son of the Hood promises to be one of the hot releases of 2008.

"That’s my debut right there," Shady says with pride. "It’s sick. This is my first time having unlimited studio time. I can leave the club at 3:30 in the morning and go to the Hiero lab, and I ain’t never been like that before. I got my mojo back, so it’s good." *

Sens Restaurant

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REVIEW My hot date and I spent about as enjoyable an hour and a half as can be spent in a brown bat cave (without doing it in a corner). I don’t know what restaurant occupied this slot on the promenade level of 4 Embarcadero before Sens took it over, but whatever beast it was left Sens with a nightmare dilemma on its hands: how to exorcise California gothic spirits of stone and brown and big buck hunting and death? Sens’s answer? You don’t. You just try to work around the problem, apparently, starting with strong gin and tonics and continuing with great food.

The Caprese here was a complete success, and when interrogated as to the type of cheese on which it hinged, our waiter Anthony was quick to get back to us with an answer: "Manouri — wonderful texture." The lamb meatballs were plated atop some kind of berry reduction, an attempt at underlying sweetness that did little to contrast an overgarlicky finish.

As for the entrées, there’s better halibut out there, but the lamb shank that Anthony brought us was gorgeous and easy off the bone — NC-17 all the way. And dessert? Caramel ice cream sitting on a little cake, all on some wafers. It was gone before we could identify its parts.

The service was politely concerned, not pushy. The Mediterranean spices were authentic, if slightly overpowering. But the hand lamps that adorn every stone pillar seemed straight-up evil. Picture this: put an electric torch in a lamp in the hand of a dead person. Multiply by 25. No joke.

When there’s little an owner can do to overcome such a gnarly aesthetic hex, I guess the only thing left to do is simply to embrace it. Or maybe the interior’s not such a lugubrious affair at lunchtime. Here’s hoping, for the food’s sake.

SENS RESTAURANT Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m. and 5:30–10 p.m.; Sat., 5–11 p.m. 4 Embarcadero, promenade level, SF. (415) 362-0646, www.sens-sf.com

Land of milk and money

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› paulr@sfbg.com


At Gourmet magazine’s recent Wine Cellar extravaganza in the Galleria, I chatted with a Kerrygold functionary about currency exchanges, having first fortified myself with a few glasses of wine and an empanada. One would not want to drift into discussions of the dollar and the euro on an empty stomach, nor in a condition of total and stony sobriety. How about renaming the dollar the bungee, incidentally? Maybe it would help bring the great plunge to a stop.

Kerrygold is an Irish dairy concern with a huge export business in butter and boutique cheeses, much of it on this side of the Atlantic, so the diverging fortunes of the dollar and the euro are of intense interest to its corporate strategists. But an even more pressing issue, I was told, is the rising global demand for milk, as people in China, a onetime land of tea now rapidly becoming citified, start developing the Western taste for coffee and piling into their local Starbucks for morning lattes. It is one of life’s larger ironies at the moment that even as our drive-through way of life shows signs of collapsing, much of the rest of the world seeks to adopt it. Happiness is getting into your car and driving somewhere for a $4 cup of milky coffee. O blessed marketers!

Irony did not seem to be the evening’s theme, but then, irony is seldom to the taste of swells. Groups of the well-dressed and well-off swirled about the huge hall as if at a waltz, nibbling and sipping and nibbling some more. Quite a few of the city’s grandest restaurants — including Aqua, La Folie, Scott Howard, and Limón — were represented among the food stations, while off in a corner a group from Louisiana was barbecuing large prawns in spicy sauce, and a crew on the stage was dishing out low-calorie Indian food. The queues for these treats were formidable. Even swells, apparently, can stand only so much monkfish liver, or spot-prawn sashimi in apple-fennel broth with coconut marshmallow.

Back in the land of Kerrygold, I grazed musingly across a small prairie of cheeses and used toothpicks. For a moment I was alone, the herd of swells having galloped across the floor in pursuit of some new delight. I felt the crinkly dollars in my pocket and murmured reassuringly to them.

Gobblin’ Cobain

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER For too many, Thanksgiving is all about high-priced, high-stress flights home for the holidays, foul fowl, sad slipcovers, and relatives who rove the spectrum from irksome to inspirational. Why the last? I have to say that one miserable Turkey Day spent on the outskirts of Des Moines, Iowa, meeting a squeeze’s enraged and estranged parents while his jock brother dented my Geo Metro during a show-off game of tag football brought me closer to thoughts of suicide than ever before. Thanksgiving: the most annoying event before and since Oracle OpenWorld (only with a tad fewer leering conventioneers)? Discuss.

So it’s fitting, then, that soon-to-be uncomfortably bloated thoughts once again turn to the late Kurt Cobain with the Nov. 30 theatrical release of Kurt Cobain about a Son and the Nov. 30 droppage of Unplugged in New York, the DVD release of Nirvana’s 1993 MTV Unplugged appearance. I watched both 14 years to the day after the band’s Unplugged taping, on Nov. 18. If I weren’t already terrified of tying on the turducken, I’d be totally spooked by the synchronicity: are you sure Halloween is over?

AJ Schnack’s doc About a Son reads like a ghostly document: Cobain’s disembodied voice floats over its entirety, drawn from tapes of 1992–93 interviews conducted by coproducer Michael Azerrad for his book Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana (Main Street, 1993). Beneath the songwriter’s thoughts, Schnack chooses to float images of everyday romance and poetry captured in Cobain’s northwestern haunts: power lines shoot across the sky, dead birds rot beneath burnished sunsets, kids play music in alleyways. Relying on an evocative score by Steve Fisk and Ben Gibbard and songs by Queen, David Bowie, and others that are related to the interviews, Schnack eschews Nirvana’s music and even their photographic image until the very end. He prefers to immerse the viewer in the edited, intimate thoughts of Cobain, who can genuinely touch and surprise a listener with stories of how he felt abandoned by his father and his honesty about his misanthropy (coworkers "get on my nerves so bad I either have to confront them and tell them I hate their guts or ignore them"), heroin use (of his $400 per day self-medicating efforts to stem his chronic stomach pain, he says, "I was healthier and fatter than I am now"), and hatred of the media ("the most ruthless life form on Earth"). By turns moving and excruciating, About a Son raises as many questions as it answers.

Eerily dovetailing with About a Son by way of a cover of Bowie’s "The Man Who Sold the World" and a Queen joke regarding ex–Germs guitarist Pat Smear, the Unplugged performance has long been loaded with the stuff of quintuple-putf8um legend and fan speculation regarding Cobain’s death, which occurred just four months after the program aired on Dec. 14, 1993 on MTV. How else to parse the lyrical references to guns, the white lily set decorations (Cobain’s idea), and the set list’s intermittent aura of doom? In any case, Nirvana completists will want to snag this for the unedited 66-minute concert, which includes two numbers excised from the original 44-minute broadcast: Nirvana’s "Something in the Way" and the Meat Puppets’ "Oh Me." The mistakes and occasional sour notes remain. I was surprised by the general lack of energy in the band; the ordinarily forceful Dave Grohl sounds painfully unsure on brushes. But the conviction, seriousness, and soulfulness of Cobain’s vocal performance make this entire endeavor worthwhile — despite the gritted-teeth grin and protruding tongue that follow the first few songs.

You strain to hear the dialogue between the band members and betwixt Cobain and the audience. When the band seems to dither over the last song, one female audience member yells, "<0x2009>‘Rape Me’!" "Is that Kennedy?" someone asks, referring to the noxious alterna-VJ of the day. "I don’t think MTV will let us play that," Cobain replies with an insouciant, knowing air. If you’re still looking for that classic Gen X cynicism, look no further than MTV, which seems to have ditched music programming in general.

So why did Cobain sing for his TV dinner in the first place? Was it simply because In Utero (DGC, 1993) wasn’t selling well? Just months before his passing, Cobain already looked like another pop idol prepping to die young and leave a gorgeous corpse. Or not. Nonetheless, here, bird-boned with downcast eyes, he edges closer to that beautiful boy outlined in Elizabeth Peyton’s paintings, ready to assume his place in a pantheon of perpetually doodled, iconographic heartthrobs, right after Jim Morrison and James Dean. Nirvana was a great band — but as so many know who were there, cognizant, and occasionally coherent when Nevermind (Geffen, 1991) hit, there were lots of great bands. Ever the authentic article, Cobain knew this as much as any other, which is why he always gave a hand to forebears, bringing on the Meat Puppets (much to the disappointment of MTV, according to an accompanying DVD short) and sporting a T-shirt of the SF all-female art-punk combo Frightwig for this performance. Did it simply take Cobain’s dramatic death to, as an MTV executive dork opines in the short, turn an "interesting, eclectic performance" into "a masterpiece"? Neither of these spooked offerings really fits that descriptor, but for the faithful they might do till another comes along. *

KURT COBAIN ABOUT A SON

Opens Nov. 30

See film listings

www.landmarktheatres.com

For live music picks, see www.sfbg.com/blogs/music.

Disaster preparedness

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Above a semicircle of wooden crates arranged on a weathered wooden stage, two tattered flags of New Orleans and the United States are projected on a back screen. The flags appear to flutter in the rotating series of overlapping still images. This shifting perspective implicitly signals the living and composite nature of the history (recent and long-term, local and national) we are about to hear, as the 11 members of the ensemble representing survivors of Hurricane Katrina’s inundation of New Orleans in 2005 slowly assemble onstage and introduce themselves.

As they tell their individual stories — with charming, informal demeanors — and relate the story of their city, the flags give way to a steady stream of projected images (designed by Daniel Gamberg), including old snapshots, local landscapes, memorabilia, bits of relevant text, a pregnant cloudscape, and, finally, images of an unprecedented natural and human disaster. The social breakdown, government malfeasance, and open racism attendant on the Katrina disaster are balanced by stories of courage, compassion, camaraderie, and resolve — human capacities grounded in individual character and familial and communal solidarity, as well as the resources of a specific cultural life and history made manifest in the play’s wise and winning emphasis on New Orleans’s African American musical heritage.

While not uniformly strong, the cast includes some formidable talents (including Mujahid Abdul-Rashid, Velina Brown, L. Peter Callender, and Elizabeth Carter) and has another actor playing herself: Federal Emergency Management Agency inspector Linda Rose McCoy (whose unique and surprisingly sympathetic perspective makes up for some awkward and rather abrupt entrances and exits). Although the unevenness brings unintended lulls to the show’s pith and pacing, in general these down-to-earth stories and alternately quiet and harrowing disaster testimonials — together with a solid mix of a cappella song, recorded music (from the irresistibly joyful Hot 8 Brass Band), and the occasional burst of movement — bring much life to a relatively spare stage. Amid a growing cult of catastrophe, Stardust reminds us poignantly of the culture of survival.

ARGOS, OR NOT


On dramatically turbulent waters of its own, the latest Mary Zimmerman extravaganza, a retelling of Jason and the Argonauts’ search for the Golden Fleece, sails smoothly into a West Coast premiere at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, the Bay Area berth for the director’s previous work, including the Tony Award–winning Metamorphoses. Zimmerman runs a tight ship and knows how to rig a stage — first of all, with cleverly intricate mise-en-scènes, including a dynamic, even acrobatic ensemble of actors (led by Jake Suffian as an average-dude Jason), beautiful sets (Daniel Ostling’s enormous and pristine wood plank walls and ceiling, with a matching wooden catwalk and a mast rising like a firehouse pole through an aperture, look like the environs of a high-priced New York art gallery), and the playful use of stage properties (including Michael Montenegro’s buoyantly rough-and-ready puppets).

But the play also feels rigged. With humor pitched low (from an occasionally clever angle) and a forced sense of wonder, the spectacle has a vaguely didactic, children’s-theater aspect, as if some assigned learning were being dressed up and played down as "fun." Some episodes work well dramatically, the story of Hercules and Hylas in particular. But in the end, the long (two and a half hours) journey, which scrawls a timely (if wishful) moral about mad missions abroad "to put an end to evil" ending miserably for their instigators, is a short hop, emotionally and intellectually.

STARDUST AND EMPTY WAGONS: STORIES FROM THE KATRINA DIASPORA

Wed/21 and Fri/23–Sat/24, 8 p.m.; Sun/25, 3 p.m.; $18–$50

Brava Theater Center

2789 24th St., SF

(415) 647-2822

www.brava.org

ARGONAUTIKA

Through Dec. 16, $27–$69

See Web site for schedule

Berkeley Repertory Theatre

2015 Addison, Roda Theatre, Berk.

(510) 647-2949

www.berkeleyrep.org

Well-heeled

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Ask a dancer under 30 in Europe about Pina Bausch, and most likely you’ll get a blank stare or a shrug. You might as well mention Isadora Duncan or Martha Graham. Important, yes; relevant, no. For them, Bausch, the most radical innovator of European dance in the past three decades, is passé. But stateside that’s not the case, judging by the many dancers who mingled with the older crowd during Cal Performances’ recent Bausch engagement, her first since a 1997 appearance showcasing the California-inspired Nur Du (Only You).

Part of the reserved reception Bausch receives overseas may be due to prophet-in-her-own-land syndrome. And another part may relate to the revolutionary aspect of her work; once a revolution is institutionalized, it loses its punch. And some of it may simply be a function of aging. Not all artists produce major works in their seventh decade. Bausch is 67.

Although people have complained for years that "there is no dancing" in Bausch’s productions, there was plenty in her 2004 Ten Chi, and it was heroic. These dancers had the physical and emotional training to be ferocious and lyrical, plangent and athletic, sometimes all within the same couple of phrases. They lived off momentum, introspection, and one another. And every one of them was an individual, though they all had that Bauschian stare.

Even longtime company members Helena Pikon, Julie Shanahan, and
Julie Anne Stanzak danced better than ever. As for Dominique Mercy, who has been with Bausch since 1973, his sad-sack clown is getting more ethereal every year, yet he’ll whip himself around the stage with the best of them. He has also given the company something else: his daughter, Thusnelda Mercy, who — along with the rest of the women — dances on heels that are a lot higher than Ginger Rogers’s. High heels are Bausch’s pointe shoes, icons of femininity that radically shift the body’s center of gravity.

Ten Chi is one of Bausch’s better travel pieces, for which she visits a country or a city to gather information, which she and her dancers then incorporate into one of her meandering colossal collages, integrating culture-specific material into a much larger whole. In the impressive Ten Chi, Azusa Seyama, who is Japanese, gave head-bobbing lessons in proper behavior to Ditta Miranda. She also turned herself into a grinning paparazza, snapping pictures of a nonplussed Pascal Merighi. These scenes started out as high comedy, but Bausch pushed them to the point where they turned into something much darker.

It was this underbelly that redeemed much of Ten Chi‘s surface frivolity. Beneath the distinct and sometimes very funny episodes, Bausch and her exceptional set designer Peter Pabst infused a slowly growing sense of dread. Initially, the innocuously falling "cherry blossoms" looked pretty, but as they accumulated, the scene transformed into something akin to an eternal winter. Concurrently, in a brilliant stroke of optical illusion, the tail of a huge whale suggested that an animal was about to rise from the deep. Think Moby-Dick, think wars, think the unconscious. In the prolonged finale the dancers returned individually. They threw themselves into hair-raising contortions, whipping turns, and slithery slides. And they did it again and again and again, until I wanted to scream, "Stop it! Enough!" — which is exactly what Bausch intended. *

Rip, role-play, and burn

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Jeanne D’Arc

(Sony, PSP)

GAMER I had the fortune of winning a PSP in a contest a few weeks ago, and in my hunt for an inaugural game for the system, I spotted Jeanne D’Arc on a shelf in a local toy store. Because the cover sports an awesome girl with a sword and because no one does medieval European history like the Japanese, I picked it up.

Jeanne D’Arc is historical fantasy with a plot that seems a little too familiar. The Level-5-developed title has a lot of the elements of your average Japanese role-playing game: a heroine whose home is put to the torch by agents of a diabolical figure (in this case Henry VI of England) under the influence of a demon summoned by the real villain, who is a sorcerer. Jeanne and her childhood friends set off to fight back, spurred by Jeanne’s discovery of a magical, demon-vanquishing armlet. They are accompanied by a cute animal companion, required in all Japanese RPGs: a giant purple toad. The rough placement of the story within the framework of a well-known legend is what rescues the plot from being completely pedestrian.

The game, a tactical strategy RPG in the style of Final Fantasy Tactics with few deviations from the formula, has a map of locations through which the player travels. Most of them have battles, though some also have shops and plot-revealing cut scenes. On entering a battle, the player chooses various characters with different abilities and arranges them on a large grid. The player and the computer take turns moving all of their characters and making them attack or use an item in their inventory. Think of a chess game in which all of the pieces have big swords and bigger hair. Jeanne D’Arc adds a few little power-ups — such as squares where your attacks have a greater impact — but these don’t affect game play much.

One thing I really liked about the game is that each character has a backstory. You aren’t controlling a bunch of nameless soldiers. Your characters are also fairly customizable. Usually each character in an RPG is locked into a career path for the benefit of the story, and usually the healer is a demure woman. This irks me. Jeanne D’Arc let me create a butch male healer who swoops to the rescue whenever one of my little chess pieces is hurting.

Jeanne D’Arc is nothing new, but it’s fun, and the development of the minor characters involves the player in a way that’s refreshing for a tactical RPG. The quality of the graphics and sound are exceptional for a handheld game; I found myself humming the fight tune in the shower, so I guess the music’s more memorable than most. That said, if the narrative keeps following history, it’s going to be a bummer to see a character I’ve developed for 40 hours get burned at the stake at the end. Oh well.

Pick up the beat

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Bop City. The Blackhawk. The Jazz Workshop. The Both/And. Keystone Korner. Kimball’s.

San Francisco’s world-renowned jazz club heritage has always been a part of the city’s matchless cultural identity. But the je ne sais quoi’s been missing for decades, because there hasn’t been a jazz club regularly booking national and international touring musicians into the city for more than 20 years.

That all changes this month with the Nov. 28 opening of Yoshi’s San Francisco. There’s been a Yoshi’s in Jack London Square for 10 years, the descendant of a North Berkeley sushi bar that morphed into a restaurant and music venue on Claremont Avenue in Oakland. Down by the waterfront, Yoshi’s became synonymous with jazz and was revered as both an artist- and an audience-friendly venue.

The brand-new club and restaurant at 1330 Fillmore holds down the ground floor of the freshly minted Fillmore Heritage Center, a 13-story mixed-use development that hopes to jump-start a renaissance in the scuffling Western Addition historic area. "Truthfully, I really don’t know why there hasn’t been another jazz club in San Francisco," says Yoshi’s artistic director, Peter Williams, the man charged with making sure the music part of the business stays in business. He’s been booking the artists at Yoshi’s for the past eight years. "Jazz is very risky," he continues, "and maybe people were feeling like they didn’t want to take the chance. These owners felt there was an opportunity."

The owners are Kaz Kajimura, one of Yoshi’s founders, and developer Michael Johnson. Their opportunity is costing $10 million, with the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency kicking in a $4.4 million loan as part of the total $75 million redevelopment project helmed by Em Johnson Interest, Johnson’s company.

Their idea of a new jazz club in the Fillmore District took shape four years ago, after a series of false starts with other developers and other discussed flagship venues, such as the Blue Note. Johnson sent out requests for proposals to jazz clubs around the country; Kajimura received one, and when he met with Johnson, the two hit it off. "Michael could see Kaz’s vision, and vice versa. That made it happen," Williams says. The building, designed by Morimoto, Matano, and Kang Architects, has a performance venue of 417 seats, 317 on the ground level and 100 more on a mezzanine. The restaurant, serving a modern Japanese cuisine created by executive chef Shotaro "Sho" Kamio, seats 370 in its combined dining and lounge areas. Success on the food side is a likely slam dunk — it’s in jazz presenting, much like three-point shooting, that percentages decline.

Williams is counting on Yoshi’s reputation among jazz professionals — musicians, managers, and agents — as a starting point. "We’ve put a lot of care into presenting the music in as respectful a setting as possible," he says. "I think that’s paid off for us."

CLUB DECLINE?


But jazz club culture has receded in the past 20 years, with the music finding support from institutions like SFJAZZ, which stepped into the developing void in the city 25 years ago. SFJAZZ executive director Randall Kline has always looked to organizational models like the San Francisco Symphony in terms of sustaining and growing the jazz art form. "What has happened is jazz has moved more into the concert hall and into more of a special-events format than a club format," Kline says. "There hasn’t been a great growth of jazz clubs in the country. But there’s a proliferation of festivals."

There are jazz clubs — Jazz at Pearl’s, under the strong stewardship of Kim Nalley and Steve Sheraton, is certainly a necessary element of North Beach, and farther north on Fillmore is Rasselas — but Kline believes there just aren’t as many live music clubs as there once were.

Still, despite the fierce competition for eyes, ears, and dollars, the fact remains that musicians need to play. Performance has always been one of the most effective ways for jazz artists to sustain themselves and build their audience. Not only is there no substitute for hearing the music live, but venue sales have also become a larger part of the overall sales picture, observes Cem Kurosman, director of publicity for Blue Note Records.

"Now, with fewer and fewer TV, radio, and mainstream press outlets covering new jazz artists, touring has become more important than ever," Kurosman says, "although there are fewer jazz clubs on the national circuit than ever before."

The Bay Area is one of the top four jazz markets in the country, and it behooves artists to gain exposure here. That wasn’t really a problem while the region was consistently supporting the music, when the music was here in the clubs and jazz seemed to swing up from the streets.

But times have changed, and no one recognizes that better than Todd Barkan, who ran Keystone Korner in North Beach. When Keystone closed in 1983, it was one of the last San Francisco clubs to regularly book national and international touring jazz groups. Barkan is now the artistic director of Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, the jazz club operated by Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York, and he’s also a highly regarded producer who works with numerous domestic and European jazz labels.

"The reason there hasn’t been anything in San Francisco proper for some 20 years is that it’s a new era," Barkan says. "San Francisco is not the bohemian place that it was when I started the Keystone in the early ’70s, which itself was a holdover from the psychedelic era."

While Barkan’s place could not rightly be called a dive, it was a funky little crowded club. From the stage to the bar, the setup at Keystone was significantly removed from the state-of-the-art amenities at Yoshi’s. In some ways, Yoshi’s splits the difference between the club and the concert experience, the hope being that the artists and the audience get the best of both worlds.

Barkan says the primary jazz audience now has different expectations than it used to. "It took a number of years to get the business set up to have the right kind of a club that could really be competitive and cater to a much more upscale audience, which is where the real jazz audience is now overall," he says. "For better or worse that’s where it’s at."

That audience is also spread throughout the Bay Area, which is important for a San Francisco–situated club to keep in mind. "San Francisco’s a little town," Barkan says. "With all due respect, ‘the city’ is only about 800,000. The Bay Area is 4.5 to 5 million people, but it’s very spread out." His North Beach club got a tremendous benefit from the freeway off-ramp at Broadway, which made getting into that part of the city from the Bay Bridge simpler.

But Yoshi’s San Francisco won’t survive on jazz alone, as Barkan and Williams acknowledge. "To do the kind of numbers and volume Yoshi’s needs, you have to have a diversified musical program," Barkan says.

Williams spins the challenge of putting butts in the seats as an opportunity to be creative. "I’ll have to branch out a little bit in what we do," he agrees. "I don’t think we’ll be able to do just jazz all the time." At Yoshi’s Oakland, Williams has added salsa dance nights on Mondays, and he consistently books fusion and smooth jazz performers like Keiko Matsui and neosoul acts like Rashaan Patterson.

The San Francisco spot will likely see a similar mix, though the inaugural performers are a mainstream ensemble called the Yoshi’s Birds of a Feather Super Band, which includes vibraphonist Gary Burton, saxophonists Ravi Coltrane and Kenny Garrett, trumpeter Nicholas Payton, and bassist John Patitucci. Veteran drummer Roy Haynes leads the band, which Williams created specially for the club’s opening.

Taj Mahal and the Phantom Blues Band follow, and later in December, Chick Corea, Charlie Hunter, and Rebeca Mauleón will perform. Next year will see guitarist Pat Metheny, pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba, vocalist Cassandra Wilson, and guitarist Bill Frisell in multinight runs at the club. Williams will try various things, particularly in the early months. "December is mostly artists coming to San Francisco with one band and then going to Oakland with another," he says. Corea, Hunter, and Taj Mahal will all pull double Yoshi’s duty.

"It’s gonna be a learning experience to find out what works and what doesn’t and how the two clubs can work together," Williams says. He will also have bands play the first part of the week in San Francisco and then Thursday through Sunday in Oakland, reasoning that San Franciscans are looking for more things to do early in the week. And he wants the club to be a platform for local artists — probably early in the week as well — but says Yoshi’s will have to focus on national touring acts simply to get people into the club.

Local saxophonist Howard Wiley is bullish on the new club, hoping that, if nothing else, it brings some notice to jazz instead of more exploitative forms of expression. "I’m so tired of hearing about Britney [Spears] and strippers and all that stuff," he says. "I’m hoping and praying the pendulum will swing back and people will cherish things of value again. I always love it when more attention can be brought to the music."

Currently Intersection for the Arts’ composer in residence, Wiley put out the self-released Angola Project earlier this year. The music is based on African American prison spirituals with roots primarily in songs and stories from the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, La. While Wiley hopes Yoshi’s can bring in artists like Billy Harper and David Murray, not necessarily household names even in mainstream jazz homes, he recognizes the reality of booking the club. "I’m not so into Rick Braun, but I understand," he says with a laugh, referencing the smooth jazz trumpet icon. "I just hope the club represents the music to its fullest, because it’s the only American contribution to global art."

ACCESSIBLE AVENUES


Former club owner Barkan hopes the new Yoshi’s anchors a reinvigorated jazz scene in San Francisco, one that can support another, smaller club as well, something with around 150 seats and less of an overhead, which a savvy veteran promoter like, say, himself might book. A smaller room certainly would make music more accessible to audiences. It might also underscore the notion that there just aren’t the headliners in jazz that there once were — the names needed to fill a room the size of the new Yoshi’s. "When the Keystone was up and running, we had Dexter Gordon, Elvin Jones, Gene Ammons, Art Blakey, Cannonball Adderly, Rashaan Roland Kirk, Freddie Hubbard," Barkan says. "The list was pretty inexhaustible.

"More than anything, jazz needs committed, dedicated presenters," he continues. "Yoshi’s is to be commended for what it does. They’re unsung heroes of this whole scenario."

The long-ago memories from San Francisco’s jazz club past sound like misty urban legends. Bop City, for instance, was the spot where Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker played. Saxophonist John Handy was just 18 when he joined John Coltrane onstage. Across town in North Beach, Miles Davis recorded his first live album at the Blackhawk. Charles Mingus recorded one of his best live LPs at the Jazz Workshop, and Adderly got famous from the one he recorded there. Do you remember Sun Ra’s expansive band flowing off the tiny stage at Keystone Korner? Jazz fans may have to resign themselves to the fact that it may never be like that again.

But there’s a San Francisco jazz continuum that includes those clubs, writers like the late Phil Elwood, producers such as Orrin Keepnews, and musicians including Joe Henderson, to name just a few. There have been many other forgotten heroes and great moments. And even though CD sales have slumped in recent years, reflecting the faltering music industry as a whole, there are as many good musicians around as ever, and most observers think an audience is there as well. For any live music scene to work, there have to be the players, the audience, and the venue to bring them together, and Yoshi’s hopes to do that for the Fillmore. "I just hope the Bay Area jazz community will band together, check this out, and make it work," Williams says. "It’s a huge undertaking. It’s going to be a beautiful room, there’ll be beautiful music, and if people come, it’ll be a success."

ROY HAYNES AND YOSHI’S BIRDS OF A FEATHER SUPER BAND

Nov. 28, 8 and 10 p.m., $100

Yoshi’s

1330 Fillmore, SF

(415) 655-5600

www.yoshis.com

Behind the Bey empire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Machado

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It seemed perfect – until the bills arrived.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stewart

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Johnson wasn’t charged.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taylor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How you hate me now?

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Hated (Special Edition)

(Music Video Distributors)

Our Favorite Things

(Other Cinema)

DVDS I must have passed the G.G. Allin documentary Hated (1994) a dozen times in the video store over the years without ever mustering the nerve to rent it. Having finally watched it, I can only ask myself, "What took me so long?" Not because it’s a pleasant viewing experience, but because it’s such a massive train wreck: the (il)logical end point of years of self-destructive punk shock tactics and performance antics.

Hated was filmed by Todd Phillips — who went on to direct Old School and Starsky and Hutch — while he was a film student at New York University. It depicts what ended up being the final few years in the life of a genuinely disturbing and disturbed dude.

The film is built around — but not limited to — in-the-trenches footage of the tattooed, scarred, and frequently naked and/or bloody Allin onstage with his band, the Murder Junkies. This footage is not meant to showcase his vocal range — he had none — or the band’s sterling musicianship. Instead, it finds Allin assaulting audience members, getting wrestled down by cops, and genuinely scaring the crap out of everyone in the room. We also see footage from a surreal appearance on Geraldo and an appalling "spoken word" performance at NYU that ends with Allin sticking a banana up his tailpipe, the cops coming — a recurring theme — and Phillips nearly being expelled for booking the whole atrocity.

The rest of the video shows that, for better or worse, Allin’s live act really wasn’t an act. He was a genuinely angry, sociopathic fellow who lived his life as recklessly as he performed, in constant squalor and literally on the run from the police. This DVD reissue adds a recent interview with his poor mother, whose reclusive, mentally ill husband insisted on naming the boy "Jesus Christ," whence the nickname "G.G." originated. There’s also two full audio commentaries from Phillips as well as the Beavis and Butthead–like duo of Murder Junkies Merl Allin, G.G.’s brother, and Dino Sex, the band’s sicko naked drummer. I absorbed every second of it.

Next to Allin, Bay Area cutups Negativland might look like Goody Two-shoes, but don’t be fooled. Granted, you won’t find them cutting themselves or shitting onstage. In fact, you won’t find the group’s members at all in most of the videos on their recent anthology Our Favorite Things (Other Cinema). Make no mistake, though: there’s something to offend just about everyone on this DVD.

Pushing people’s buttons is nothing new for Negativland, but what’s striking about this release is how well the video format suits the group’s meticulous cut-and-paste approach. The editing sleight of hand is simply amazing at points. These are some of the most involved, detail-oriented music videos I’ve ever seen, which may sound like faint praise given the laziness that’s typical of the medium, but stay with me here.

Drawing on music from throughout their career, Negativland go after such familiar targets as firearms (the found-footage extravaganza of "Guns"), advertising ("Truth in Advertising" and perhaps one too many videos from the Dispepsi CD), and religion ("Christianity Is Stupid," in which a series of Hollywood Pontius Pilates are seen driving nails into Jesus’ hands in sync with the song’s thumping industrial beat).

That said, some of the best moments are much less pointed, including the eerie "Time Zones" — an oddly entertaining bit about the number of time zones in the Soviet Union — and the short and surreal "Over the Hiccups," a bunnies-in-outer-space Claymation piece that is black comedy at its most brutal.

Yes, Negativland are as relentless — and self-referential — as ever on this DVD, and if you watch it for long enough, you’re bound to get annoyed at something. But when has that not been the case with this group? Even so, Our Favorite Things is one of the best things they’ve done in any format, with moments that are as jaw-dropping in their way as anything on the grisly Hated. 

I feel pretty

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

"Make my world beautiful," commands the (drag) queen (Flynn Witmeyer) of her corseted courtiers. The incantation naturally has something defiant and (given our location in a loft on Capp near 16th Street) maybe even a little urgent about it, summoning the new Eden as an unruly if royal realm of gender-blurring sexual role play and uninhibited frolic. Naturally too there’s bound to be trouble in paradise, the intruder in this instance being no snake but rather a pair of slithering fish-head waiters. But in theater group elastic future’s Beautiful it’s a party all the same.

A "gender-bending theater party," to be exact, which the company first staged in a more limited run in 2005. Set in the round among a haremlike arrangement of sheer curtains and floor pillows — on which audience members are encouraged to sprawl with a complimentary bottle of wine — the play presents a campy battle between the forces of good sex and evil prudery, or liberation and conformity if you like, with the aforementioned fish-topped waiters (the impeccably over-the-top Meghan Kane and Christopher P. Kelley) meting out a snooty version of Old Testament–style chastisement with a lot of modern-style prying, voter pandering, and enhanced interrogation.

While the piece was reportedly revamped somewhat from the original, it’s not entirely clear why the restive young company has chosen to revisit this early effort. (It has since brought out another cushion-and-two-buck-Chuck affair called The Greek Play, coproduced with Root Division in tandem with a like-themed gallery show, as well as a wonderfully original play–cum–rock show at the bar Amnesia about a famous real-life pair of sibling rock goddesses, The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Deal.) As a troupe bent on appropriating and reinventing the classics (whether of the past couple of millennia or couple of decades) in site-specific performances that eagerly engage audiences in the conceit, elastic future cultivates a certain brash fervor that excuses some retracing of its theatrical trajectory. That said, the production comes across as highly uneven in conception and execution. The script by company member and cofounder Sue Butler (who also penned Kim Deal and Greek) is fairly freewheeling but thin, surviving on animated one-liners (played for all their worth by the expressive Witmeyer) amid somewhat stilted dialogue and on other eccentric touches here and there. It lacks a satisfying degree of character and plot development, and for all of the heated foreplay, which at one point bursts forth into a riot of spanking, the play remains surprisingly tension free.

Beautiful bills itself as "The Rocky Horror Picture Show of the experimental theater world," and if that self-description seems to pull in opposite directions (having the paradoxical ring of something quaintly cutting-edge), it kind of fits nonetheless. The plot’s mock battle between good and evil and decidedly unshocking transvestism and BDSM pantomimes, accompanied by a rock soundtrack only slightly more up-to-date than Rocky Horror‘s, amount to a harmless debauch akin to dress-up at the midnight screening. The "experimental" part of the outing, meanwhile, rests largely with the show’s enthusiastic mesh of performance and party.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MAIDS


In American Conservatory Theater’s production of N. Richard Nash’s The Rainmaker, budding spinster Lizzie (René Augesen) may not be a great beauty, but she will gladly settle for being called pretty, a designation made to seem suddenly possible only by a barnyard brush with traveling salesman, charlatan, and stud Starbuck (Geordie Johnson). You’ll know the story thanks to the cringingly saccharine yet admittedly fixating movie starring Katherine Hepburn and a wholly outsize Burt Lancaster. The surprise is in director Mark Rucker’s wonderfully cast and perfectly pitched staging, which is a real beauty to behold. Augesen’s assured and generous performance leads an ensemble effort that is melodramatic manna for three acts. *

BEAUTIFUL

Through Dec. 1

Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m. (no show Nov. 22–24), $15 ($10 if dressed in drag)

Space 180

180 Capp, SF

www.elasticfuture.com

THE RAINMAKER

Through Nov. 25

Tues.–Sat., 8 p.m. (also Nov. 21 and Sat., 2 p.m.); Sun., 2 p.m., $14–$82

American Conservatory Theater

415 Geary, SF

(415) 749-2228

www.act-sf.org

Man with a mission

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER J Church’s Lance Hahn was possibly the only vocalist-guitarist ever to front a punk band wearing slippers (translation for mainlanders: flip-flops). A longtime presence in the Mission District anarchist punk scene until his move to Austin, Texas, in 1999, Hahn died down south Oct. 21 at 40 from complications after a lengthy battle with kidney disease. Although we were both from Honolulu, and the same small but spunky punk scene at that, I never really knew him, though throughout the ’90s I saw him around town and behind the counter at scruffy, sunny Epicenter, the punk zine HQ and hangout high above 16th Street and Valencia.

He really found a home here, on the other side of the Muni tracks that inspired his band name. That much was evident Nov. 11 at Hahn’s packed memorial, organized by friends like ex–J Church drummer and current Aquarius co-owner Andee Conners. Watching the Super 8 films of Hahn as a child and surrounded by copies of old J Church posters, I was struck by the realization that an era — not just a man — had truly passed. He’d had an impact on punk scenes here and elsewhere. Never mind that he played guitar for Beck from 1994 to ’95 — Hahn was more than that. He was an unassuming everyguy who happened to front a fine punk unit named after the streetcar line that carted him to work and provided a space for his songwriting — and an artist who touched a lot of people with his music, the words he wrote in zines like Maximumrocknroll, and his presence in the ’90s SF anarchopunk scene.

At a time when punk so often comes off as yet another stale, mall-purchased arena pose, Hahn is a reminder of how politicized the music was in the ’80s and even the ’90s — and what an act of will it was to be hardcore in those prewired days. You had to make the effort to scour Factsheet Five to find the zines to connect with other voices in the wilderness or to get your grubby meat hooks on the 7-inches that you could never find in your small-town record store. When I first encountered Hahn, he was playing with a few of the smarter, more committed local misfits in Cringer, a Honolulu punk combo known for its superior songwriting. Other like-minded, passionate souls were few and far between, which may have been why Hahn garnered a reputation as a warm, approachable figure, even as J Church found punk renown.

I heard he had moved to Los Angeles to work for nuclear disarmament group SANE/FREEZE and then finally relocated to San Francisco, where he worked for the activists as well as Revolver and recorded with J Church for such imprints as Lookout! and Honest Don’s. The year he moved to Austin, Hahn was diagnosed with congestive heart failure, and in 2006 with kidney failure and — once again — congestive heart failure. In the months before his death, he went through numerous outpatient surgeries, struggled through dialysis, and stressed out about his lack of insurance, although he continued to plug onward, running Honey Bear Records, publishing his zine, Some Hope and Some Despair, and working on a tome of anarchopunk history.

He’ll doubtless be a part of that history, thanks to fans and friends like Gits drummer Steve Moriarty, who e-mails, "Lance’s purpose was more than to be a musician in a punk band. He was an inspiration and center of a very positive and progressive music scene during the ’90s" — and Adam Pfahler, who drummed for J Church as well as Jawbreaker and Whysall Lane. "Aside from being one of the smartest, funniest people I’ve known, he was a Mission District fixture and the glue that held the San Francisco punk rock community together through J Church, setting up shows, his writing, volunteer work, and most importantly, his friendships," Pfahler writes in an e-mail. "Even though he moved to Austin years ago, he was somehow magically just around the corner ready to pick up right where he left off. I wouldn’t be surprised if he showed up to his own memorial, going, ‘Oh holy shit! What’s going on?’<0x2009>"

XIU XIU SHIMMIES FOR AIDS ORPHANS


Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart has a lot going on: a new book, Xiu Xiu: The Polaroid Project (Mark Batty), of postshow Polaroids tirelessly snapped by tour manager David Horvitz and culled from three tours’ worth of film sent by fans, and an album, Women as Lovers (Kill Rock Stars), due Jan. 29, 2008. Now the Oakland dynamo’s helping to put together "Give In," a Nov. 16 dance party benefiting the Nyumbani AIDS orphanage in Kenya, with Kill Rock Stars matching all donations. Deerhoof’s Satomi Matsuzaki and Why?’s Yoni Wolf will DJ along with Stewart, who dreamed up the idea with friend and orphanage volunteer Angela Seo. Like gloom with your get-down? Stewart will satisfy: he told me he plans to play only Joy Division, Smiths, and Cure songs during his 40-minute set. "People are either going to love this or hate this!" he says gleefully. "It’s my idea of heaven on earth. Hopefully, it will be other people’s as well." 2

"GIVE IN" BENEFIT

Fri/16, 9 p.m., $7–$20, sliding scale

LoBot Gallery

1800 Campbell, Oakl.

www.lobotgallery.com

Beer, sweet beer

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In beer’s ongoing search for a place at the table set with a white linen tablecloth, dessert presents itself as an unlikely but promising niche. Reputable brewers seem convinced that their offerings match up at least as well as wine with many savory dishes, in part because beer tastes less strongly of alcohol and is therefore the food’s servant rather than its competitor, but during a recent beer-and-high-cuisine dinner at Rubicon, I found myself yearning for some nicely acidic wine — red, white, champers, I would gladly have taken a glass of any of it, though the menu had been chosen to flatter and be flattered by the accompanying beers.

The dishes certainly sounded beerworthy: crispy buttermilk-marinated quail (a tony relative of fried chicken) on a bed of tart onions and preserved lemon, followed by a slab of beer-braised beef short ribs, with carrot puree and roasted wild mushrooms. The fact that all of this was basically glorified pub food didn’t diminish its tastiness, nor its compatibility with beer — but it was also cripplingly rich. Just one of these dishes would have filled my richness quota for a month. But there was dessert too.

The sweet course was remarkable not so much in itself — an oat crunch cake, spiced like a carrot cake and served with a pat of chocolate ice cream fortified with stout — as for what it managed to do for a pair of libations. Under its penumbra of sugariness, a dark cream stout tasted almost like black coffee, while a beer-derived postprandial liqueur — rather cloying on its own — acquired a steadying deepness on the tongue to accompany its deep, slightly cloudy caramel color.

The beer cordial (Utopias from Samuel Adams, if you’re curious) is being marketed as a cognac and port alternative and is priced accordingly. On its own it was shapelessly sweet; it lacked cognac’s clarifying fire and port’s engulfing grapy richness. But this is America, and in America, apparently, there is no such thing as too sweet. While cognac and port have their grown-up stringencies, Utopias is soft and lovable, even when served in a sophisticated-looking brandy snifter. It is, however, 27 percent alcohol, which means that, like a chocolate martini, it’s stronger than it looks. Be careful or you’ll get tipsy, knock over your snifter, and stain the white linen tablecloth.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Divining truth

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› mirissa@sfbg.com

"Basically, it’s a mystery as to why someone who is brought up in Western Europe and is primarily the product of French and English culture should hear Ali Farka Touré at the age of 19 and feel like a thunderbolt just bashed them on the head," Piers Faccini says.

It was the late ’80s, and after spending much of his childhood in rural France, Faccini was back in his native London, playing in a band that covered the Smiths. While digging through record bins he stumbled across the sounds that swiftly changed his musical path: Touré’s Sahara-swept grooves, as well as the down-home Delta blues of Skip James. "Many musicians had no interest in that kind of music," he recalls by phone from Italy. "But to me it was like being in Ali Baba’s cave."

Faccini was smitten, although, he explains, "you can’t fall in love unless you recognize something. That’s why when you fall in love it always feels like you’ve known each other before." Faccini immediately wanted to sell his electric guitar.

"It sounded like everyone else was beating around the bush and this guy went straight to the bull’s-eye, straight to truth," the singer-songwriter says of James. "I wanted to make music like that. Of course, I realized it doesn’t come that easy." He laughs. "You’ve got to work at it."

After toiling on his music for many years — in the late ’90s in a band called Charley Marlowe — something clicked in about 2002, when Faccini found his voice, one that resonates from the nexus of his Italian, English, and Gypsy bloodlines and the music of the Mississippi Delta and the North African desert. What’s so striking about his sound is its ability to pay homage to musical traditions near and far without falling prey to exoticism or sonic carpetbagging.

Faccini’s solo debut, Leave No Trace (Label Bleu, 2004), was heard by storied producer JP Plunier, who came to see Faccini during his tour with the Malian duo Amadou et Mariam. Faccini soon joined the posse of earnest songwriters fostered by Plunier, including Ben Harper and Jack Johnson, an opportunity he describes as nothing short of serendipitous. "I played him my new songs, and two months later we were in the studio," he says. "He was a great guy to hook up with and an incredible foil to have in the studio…. JP has an incredibly instinctive mind and heart."

The resulting album, Tearing Sky (Everloving, 2006), was recorded over 12 days in Los Feliz in Los Angeles. It’s a hauntingly timeless work that showcases Faccini’s ability to divine essential truths of human experience. Unafraid to jump into the heavy stuff, Faccini writes lyrics that touch on universal themes: being born, dying, loving, hating — sans platitudes or overly personal narratives.

Faccini has been on the road opening for Harper on and off for the past year, and the experience has exposed his music to a broad swath of new fans. The reception has been overwhelmingly positive, and many listeners have approached him with their interpretations of his music and stories of how it’s affected their lives. Nothing could please him more. "When I’m playing music and people take it to mean a certain thing, I’m really happy, because to me a song belongs to whomever hears it," Faccini says. "To me that’s what music is, something that should be used in a personal way." *

PIERS FACCINI

With Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals

Sat/17, 7 p.m., $37.50–$47.50

Paramount Theatre

2025 Broadway, Oakland

(510) 465-6400

www.paramounttheatre.com

Sail away

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Jason Lakis is proving to be his own best bandmate. The former frontperson of Bay Area country-slowcore outfit the Red Thread, which split this summer after three stellar LPs, has lately reemerged as Mist and Mast — a solo act, though you wouldn’t guess it. Mist’s eponymous debut, which Lakis released on his Oakland Petting Zoo label, finds the artist playing every part — and sounding sneakily like some well-rehearsed group. On "Green Eyes," say, a sweet spell of country-tinged and harmony-heavy college rock, the so-called group might be the young REM with the vocalist seeming to shy away from the mic. How like the young Michael Stipe.

Being your own full band is becoming ever easier, thanks to increasingly sophisticated home-recording options, but that doesn’t make it any less weird. So when I met recently with the bespectacled, enthusiastic songwriter over Kronenbourgs at Whiskey Thieves in the Tenderloin, these were some of the first things I asked: Is it strange making music by yourself after all that time in bands? Do you even know how to play all the instruments?

"I’m not great…. I could just barely get by," Lakis said, speaking of his virtuosity, not his emotions, and reminding me that he used to drum with the late-’90s Bay Area brooders Half Film. "And I’m a big fan of the lo-fi stuff and, like, old Kinks stuff. They were great. I hate when I hear bands that just play so perfectly." He admitted that it may be a "cop-out" to prefer imperfection as an aesthetic when your skill level doesn’t allow much else. But Lakis seems to come by that taste honestly, and he’s put it to valid use on the record. The Kinks comment struck me because on Mist and Mast I’d heard occasional wisps of an even more affably imprecise ’60s British pop act: Syd Barrett–era Pink Floyd. Though the album has little of Barrett’s essential psychedelia, Mist‘s acoustic chords tend toward early Britpop’s shambling, lullabylike quality. Certainly, Lakis was excited by the notion. "I’m a huge Floyd fan!" he exulted.

On Mist that ’60s brand of slight sloppiness, whether by necessity or intent, makes an intriguing match with the more modern fumbling of Lakis’s native slowcore. Textured, plunky guitars were a Red Thread centerpiece, and they remain prominent in the solo work. The album shows its devotion to the theme by opening with a casually dueling pair. And yet, absent the band, the guitars don’t fix on any standard indie arrangement. They’re as likely to be married to ELO-style organ ("Campfire Went Out") as rollicking folk-rock rhythms ("Eyes Adjust to the Dark").

All of this interdependence stems from a new songwriting style, which Lakis described as a gathering of discrete pieces. "It was the first group of songs where I kind of felt when I was writing like I could hear all the parts," he told me. These arrangements were originally intended for a band, but given that Lakis was conceiving all tracks in advance, the collaborative process that fueled earlier Red Thread work seemed doomed. "I’m not [someone] who can easily tell people, ‘Hey, can you play this?’" the songwriter confessed. The seemingly casual recording he’d been doing in his Oakland home — "I would have my door shut, and my dog would be going grink, grink, grink at the door, and I’d have to put foamcore and a blanket up against the door, and it would get superhot in there" — suddenly became the main event.

Writing and recording piecemeal over an extended period of time and without the keel of a band and a studio can make for a messy album. And Mist and Mast is, at minimum, eclectic. The obvious outlier, "New Water," would surely have seen its programmed beats cut by another label. Lakis was fully aware of this. Rather conveniently, another thing he decided to dismiss — along with being good at everything he played — was having it all make sense together. The Red Thread albums, in contrast, were "really samey-samey," he explained. He chose to be content with Mist and Mast being, as he put it, "far from a concept album."

Was that another friendly cop-out, like calling shoddy playing charming because you "like the first Sebadoh albums"? A little, sure. But Lakis seems to be risking more by distancing himself from any single scene. How much simpler would it have been to play up the latent twang and latch onto an alt-country tag or trim a few bad moods and dub the music psych-pop? Instead, Mist and Mast feels more like a recent history of the man who made it, a trade we should be glad to make. *

MIST AND MAST

With the Dying Californian and the Winks

Sat/17, 9:30 p.m., $7

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

Redevelopment blues

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James Baldwin said it most eloquently and publicly: "Urban renewal … means Negro removal" — during a 1963 TV interview on meeting a boy displaced by the Fillmore-area redevelopment projects of the ’50s and ’60s. Wondering what happened to the Fillmore’s vibrant jazz, blues, and R&B clubs — which once drew musical giants like Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington and fostered local neophytes like Etta James and Chet Baker? Look to the two phases of the Western Addition Project, which swept over at least 30 blocks and affected more than 17,000 residents from 1953 to 1967.

Long before the bulldozers arrived, the Fillmore was renowned as one of the most diverse neighborhoods in San Francisco, a magnet for Japanese and Filipino immigrants. A few African American families had been living in the neighborhood prior to the 1906 earthquake, and when World War II brought the removal and internment of the Fillmore’s Japanese and Japanese American residents, the African American population exploded as workers moved from the South to the West Coast to work in the shipyards. Their arrival led to the blossoming of black-owned businesses and the Fillmore music scene. Hollywood stars could be spotted in back rooms, experimental filmmaker Harry Smith painted murals on the walls of Bop City, and marquee names such as Lionel Hampton would jam with local talents like Jerome Richardson and Vernon Alley and take them on the road.

Yet after the war, despite the early protests of community leaders, the Fillmore was slated for redevelopment — one of many "modernization" projects spurred by US redevelopment agencies created in the late ’40s that inevitably pinpointed neighborhoods populated by the poor and people of color. The two-lane Geary Avenue was transformed into a six-lane thoroughfare to speed commuters toward the Financial District, thousands were forced to move, and by 1967, when the Western Addition Community Organization managed to win a lawsuit against the city to stop demolition, only two venues had survived: the third incarnation of Jack’s Tavern, currently the Boom Boom Room, and the Majestic Ballroom, now the Fillmore.

More than 5,000 displaced people were left with "certificates of preference" promising dislocated residents and business owners spots when they returned, which few did. Instead, many moved away and lost contact with the Redevelopment Agency, chalking up their losses to false promises; still others have fought to have their certificates honored, such as Leola King, the owner of jazz-era nightspot the Blue Mirror (see "A Half-Century of Lies," 3/21/07).

King lives just down the street from the Fillmore Heritage Center, which houses Yoshi’s, the Jazz Heritage Center, and 1300 on Fillmore. It’s the final piece of the puzzle and fills the last remaining lot left by the redevelopment begun in 1953 — more than 50 years after the fact.

As the devastated dirt lots have remained barren for decades, the Fillmore has become more associated with crime and shattered dreams than the hot sounds and wild times of the 1940s and ’50s. When the Fillmore Center, with its Safeway, was finally built in the late ’80s, the community hoped for an economic renaissance which never quite arrived, old-timer Reggie Pettus of the New Chicago Barber Shop recalls. Jazz — in all its permutations — continues. And the oft-cited villain of the piece, the Redevelopment Agency, has attempted to redress its wrongs, producing booklets about the Fillmore’s musical heritage to spur developers to build in the neighborhood renamed the Fillmore Jazz Preservation District.

"The signs here always cracked me down because there’s nothing left to preserve!" says Elizabeth Pepin, coauthor of Harlem of the West (Chronicle, 2006), who initially learned about the neighborhood at the behest of Bill Graham as the Fillmore theater’s day manager in the late ’80s. "It’s all been bulldozed down. It shouldn’t be called ‘preservation district.’ It should be called ‘resurrection district.’<0x2009>"

All that’s left are memories and photos, which she and coauthor Lewis Watts gathered for their book and curated for 1300 on Fillmore’s walls. Pepin has done her share of work for the agency and the neighborhood, helping to fill the empty storefronts with posters of the area’s musical history, and is all too familiar with its fumbles. "The Redevelopment Agency just can’t get out of its own way — a disaster over and over again. Even the best intentions — for example, they hired me to do these names." She points to the monikers of local musicians like John Handy on the bricks of the sidewalk, running perpendicular to pedestrian traffic. "Why did they turn them this way? You put them the other way so people can read them as they’re walking, and then they’re so small nobody notices them!"

Still, she has her hopes, like everyone else who loves the Fillmore: "I want it so badly to succeed." The arrivals of Yoshi’s and 1300 on Fillmore are exciting, she agrees, though she wonders whether the old scene can truly be re-created. "One, when jazz was here in the ’40s and ’50s, it was superaffordable. Two, it was the music of the day, the rap music of the day, and all the people went out and danced," she explains. "It does worry me that everyone is pinning their hopes on this one corner to bring back everything else."

"Oddly enough, the Fillmore jazz district is probably more well-known in Europe among jazz collectors than in our own backyard," says Guardian contributor and cohost of KUSF’s Friday Night Session Tomas Palermo. He believes the area’s jazz history should be included as part of the core curriculum at SF public high schools, and he urges Yoshi’s San Francisco and other "jacket-and-tie" jazz outlets to "open up to new sounds," citing London’s Jazz Cafe, which books everyone from Roy Ayers to 4hero. He agrees with other watchers: the last parcel of land razed by the redevelopment wrecking crews shouldn’t become yet another exclusive club for the moneyed elite who roll down Fillmore from Pacific Heights and across the bridges. It has to be accessible to the community and the creatives who once made it what it was and what it could be, taking it even further from what Pettus once described as "Fillmo — no mo’." "Now," Pettus says, taking a break from cutting heads, "it’s ‘Fillmore — maybe!’"

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