EDITORIAL The rate of violent crime in San Francisco, including murder, is climbing, and it’s way past unacceptable. Progressives aren’t generally known for their crime-fighting plans, but in this case the left flank of the Board of Supervisors, led by Ross Mirkarimi and Chris Daly, has offered a real, functional plan: an increase in community policing and additional funding for violence-prevention programs. However, Mayor Gavin Newsom and the cops are against that, and they helped knock it down on the June 6 ballot.
So what does the mayor want to do? He wants to put surveillance cameras — perhaps as many as 100 new surveillance cameras — all over the city, recording everything that happens in big swaths of public space, 24 hours a day.
The American Civil Liberties Union is urging the mayor to drop the plan. We agree.
For starters, there’s no evidence that cameras deter crime. Studies in England, where crime cameras are ubiquitous, show no decrease in criminal activity that can be linked to the cameras, and even studies in the United States suggest that criminals aren’t deterred by them. It’s possible cameras will help identify killers, particularly in neighborhoods where it’s almost impossible to find witnesses willing to talk — but it’s also possible (even likely) the bad guys will know exactly where the cameras are and either move somewhere else or wear masks.
And in exchange for this dubious benefit, San Franciscans will give up an immense amount of privacy.
We already live in a society where surveillance is an ugly fact of life. Credit card customers, grocery shoppers, cell phone and FasTrak users — almost all of us have our names and other details of our lives in electronic files, controlled by private firms and (as we’ve seen in the post–Sept. 11 era) easily accessible by government agencies.
The cameras offer such a huge potential for abuse. Will local or federal authorities use them to monitor political protests? Will they become a tracking device for people the feds consider a “threat”? Will they be used to monitor and suppress perfectly legal political activities and private associations?
No matter what the mayor and the San Francisco Police Department say, those cameras will be recording in public spaces, and those video files will exist somewhere, and even if they’re regularly erased (and given the SFPD’s record on following its own rules in other areas, we don’t trust that for a second), all it takes is a visit from the Department of Homeland Security to overrule all the safeguards. And anybody who thinks that won’t happen has been utterly out of touch with the state of the body politic in the past six years.
Another possibility the ACLU raises: Those videos could be considered public record in California — meaning stalkers, angry ex-spouses, and people planning violent crimes will have access to the daily movements of their potential victims.
The supervisors have, to their credit, tried to come up with rules to limit the potential abuses. But these sorts of technologies have a way of expanding, and law enforcement agencies have a way of avoiding oversight and scrutiny. There are much, much better ways to deter and fight violent crime. The best solution here is to simply cut the funding for the mayor’s cameras from next year’s budget. SFBG
Volumes
Put away the cameras
Taking spills
> kimberly@sfbg.com
It takes a lot to knock an obsession out of Built to Spill singer-songwriter-guitarist Doug Martsch. Behind the beard, the down-low home life with wife and child, and the phone conversation padded with softly undercutting “Oh, I dunno’s,” once lay the heart of a raging pickup basketball junkie.
“I kinda got sucked into the NBA play-offs seven or eight years ago,” explains Martsch, 37, from his home in Boise, Idaho. “Then I quit smoking cigarettes five or six years ago, and when I quit smoking, I decided to go shoot hoops, and then I just got really addicted to it, totally loved it. That was kind of my main passion.
“Yeah, I played music somewhat, but basketball was what I lived for and did every day.”
A seemingly harmless hobby, except that Martsch threw himself so vigorously into the game that he was starting to do some real damage — to himself. Most recently, Built to Spill — one of Northwestern rock’s most respected representatives and one of ’90s indie/alternative/modern rock/whatev’s most influential bands — had to push back the tour dates for their new album, You in Reverse (Warner Bros.), because of a detached retina Martsch suffered while banging around the court. And then there was the last time Built to Spill played in San Francisco, two years ago …
The band was staying at the Phoenix, and as usual while on tour, Martsch ventured out, looking for a local pickup game. He found one at the Tenderloin Golden Gate YMCA. “I was playing noon ball with the people there, and I got smacked in the ear and popped my eardrum, and I was deaf in my right ear for a couple months,” he recalls. “I kept waiting for my hearing to come back. We had to finish the tour, and I could only hear out of one ear, and it was driving me crazy!” After he returned home Martsch finally, reluctantly broke the news to his wife, who had been worried about basketball injuries for some time. One can imagine the I told you sos ringing out all over Boise.
“Yeah, I had my right ear destroyed, and my right eye destroyed so far, and my right knee also,” continues Martsch, who, at one point, also suspected he had a torn ACL. “So, I dunno — I’m about done. I also started taking it a little too seriously. I started not having very much fun unless I was playing well. If I missed a few shots, I’d just become really frustrated, and I wasn’t really enjoying myself.” After his eye injury Martsch followed his doctor’s orders to stop playing for a few months, and in the process, some of the fixation dissipated (though plucky challengers can get a taste of it by playing Martsch via a game on the band’s Built to Spill Web site).
Luckily for patient Built to Spill fans, Martsch reimmersed himself in music. Those listeners had been waiting for five years for a studio follow-up to Ancient Melodies of the Future (Warner Bros.). Touched by Martsch’s passion for the Delta blues — which resulted in his 2002 solo album, Now You Know (Warner Bros.) — You in Reverse finds the band shaping less characteristic jams and experimenting in the studio, sans their longtime producer Phil Ek and accompanied by only engineer Steven Wray Lobdell (who ended up getting the producer credit). Pitting himself against longtime contributing guitarist–turned–permanent member Brett Netson of Caustic Resin, Martsch unfurls guitar solos that are both economical and impassioned, beginning with the lengthy, multitextured suite “Goin’ Against Your Mind.” He buries his vocals as guitars chime brightly in the foreground on “Liar,” then throws indie listeners for a loop with souped-up ska and flamenco tempos (“Mess With Time”). In all, Martsch sounds more like a ’burb-bound Neil Young than ever before, harnessing a semi-tamed Crazy Horse for his garage jams with his Seattle- and Boise-based bandmates while sidestepping the dangers of repeating himself and working in almost undetectable jabs at the current political environment.
Looking back at the gap between Ancient Melodies and You in Reverse, Martsch is quick to point out that the band actually took only a yearlong breather between tours and recording. But the reason they took the break, he confesses, was that “I just really burned out. I was just kind of tired of Built to Spill and wasn’t very interested in alternative rock in general.” He discovered Delta blues around the time he recorded Keep It Like a Secret and, he explains, “that’s all that sounded very good to me.”
That changed when the group got together to jam for You in Reverse, which Martsch describes as Built to Spill’s most collaborative album yet. He hopes with the official addition of Netson that he can write songs with the rest of the band while Built to Spill is on tour and recording songs at studios across the country. “I’m just kind of excited,” says Martsch. And that’s a major score for someone who claims he doesn’t think he has a “real lust for life.”
“I think the best things Built to Spill ever does are yet to come on some sort of level.” SFBG
BUILT TO SPILL
Wed/21-Sat/24, 9 p.m.
Slim’s
333 11th St., SF
$18
(415) 522-0333
www.builttospill.com
THE LATE, GREAT JOBRIATH
Before Hedwig was a glimmer in John Cameron Mitchell’s eye, before some Bowie-imitation bathhouse spillage bloomed into Velvet Goldmine’s Brian Slade, before Freddie Mercury was frightened mid-rhapsody by thunderbolts and lightning, there was Jobriath, the first (and the lost) truly out, gay glam rock star. “He’s one of my favorite artists,” the Ark’s Ola Salo enthuses when the stage name of Bruce Wayne Campbell, the man behind epics like “Space Clown,” is mentioned.
The recent compilation Lonely Planet Boy (Sanctuary) takes its title from a New York Dolls tune, but the songs are by the one and only Jobriath, and for every hilarious Ziggy Stardust–inspired misfire there is an odd moment of spine-tingling magic, such as agoraphobe ballad “Inside,” which could give Rufus Wainwright a lesson or two about how to rein in the braying while racing up and down the scales. A street hustler and classically trained pianist, Jobriath was also a self-described schizophrenic, just one of many reasons why his valiant attempt to kick down the closet door and race to the top of 1973’s charts was doomed.
Lonely Planet Boy songs such as “Be Still” and “Ecubyan” prove just how eerily beautiful — if not exactly commercial — Jobriath’s page from the book of glam could be, but he also was no slouch at giving a good quote. The gatefold sleeve of his first album featured a nude Jobriath with a truncated lower torso. “They used a mannequin’s ass and it wasn’t as round as Jobriath’s,” the artist himself told one interviewer. “That’s probably why Jobriath didn’t make it.” It is odd how closely the manic Oz-like titters of Jobriath’s “What a Pretty” resemble some Klaus Nomi songs, because Nomi and Jobriath were two of the earliest casualties of AIDS. A Chelsea Hotel resident who appeared in a BBC documentary about it, Jobriath died there in 1981.
Lonely Planet Boy was reissued thanks to one of Jobriath’s longtime fans, Morrissey. “I’d told the reps from Elektra in Sweden that they should reissue the Jobriath albums or put them out on CD,” says the Ark’s Salo. “So when that comp appeared, I thought that was very nice.” The author of Lonely Planet Boy’s liner notes, Manchester-based Robert Cochrane is working on a Jobriath biography titled Gone Tomorrow, and it’s fair to say that Jobriath, however obscurely, is here today. His follies are now successfully realized in the celebratory sound of the Ark. (Huston)
Calleth he, calleth I
> johnny@sfbg.com
When I reach the Ark’s rock idol Ola Salo on the phone at his apartment in Malmö, Sweden, he’s getting ready to meet friends to watch his country’s team take on Paraguay in the World Cup. Sheer lack of time calls for forward gestures, so I ask him to describe his boudoir, a CD- and book-strewn “one and a half” room apartment. “It looks like a pretty storage room,” he says, amusedly. “I have a plastic chandelier. I’ve got my big black piano and my black angel wings. I have art and furniture that friends of mine have made, such as a big purple lamp made out of ladies’ stockings. The apartment is a color explosion of chlorophyll green and bright yellow and pink and black and white. That’s the scheme — and purple. It’s harmonic but playful and energetic.”
Sort of like the Ark’s music, as showcased on State of the Ark (Virgin), the band’s first US album and third to date. In the recent glam sweepstakes, Salo and his four bandmates trump the Darkness with greater songcraft and less falsetto gimmickry — they also have more chops than any prefab pseudo-punk American loogie hocked up by the MTV machine in the last decade. Basically, the Ark prove a 21st-century band can honor the likes of the New York Dolls, Bowie, Queen, and company while still being relevant. On songs like the fabulous handclap stomper “Calleth You, Calleth I” (from the 2002 Virgin import In Lust We Trust) they are capable of turning a banal gesture — in this case, the fleeting impulse to reach out to phone an ex — into an act of ludicrously glorious, wide-screen, Bic-waving grandeur.
Perhaps it’s fate that gave Salo a last name that echoes the subtitle of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s filmic revision of the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom. Because he’s the son of a priest, it’s tempting to think of him as a real-life rock version of bishop’s stepson Alexander from Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander, rebelling against punishing strictures. But it’s a bit more complicated — Salo taps into and adds a twist to his religious roots, embracing the Bible’s (and rock’s) messianic outcast aspects and imagining his own miracles. One example is In Lust We Trust’s “Father of a Son,” which hit big in Sweden at the precise moment that a law preventing homosexuals from adopting children was banished. The song doesn’t just refer to queer parenthood, it drapes an ascendant Salo in choral hallelujahs.
“The Book of Revelations was the coolest part of the Bible to me because of all the parts about smoke and fire and demons,” Salo says. “It’s very heavy metal. Growing up in a Christian family gives you this kind of stigma of being a pussy. People think that Christians are … forget pussy, they’re Ned Flanders–like. I wanted to do something of Biblical proportions, something magical or sensational, something with power and joy, something that if people thought it was silly or uncool or ludicrous I wouldn’t mind.”
The Ark’s new State of the Ark might not contain anything quite as spine-tingling and sublime as “It Takes a Fool to Remain Sane,” the gauntlet-throwing leadoff hit from their 2000 debut We are the Ark. (That track has the “Hand in Glove” urgency of someone who has waited years to sing their life, and in pledging allegiance to the queer kids, the weird kids, and the fat kids, Salo’s probably saved some lives.) But it has some great moments, such as the single “One of Us Is Gonna Die Young,” an anthem to the joy of life rather than the allure of death. On State of the Ark, as on the Ark’s previous album, Salo called upon Velvet Goldmine soundtracker and ex–Shudder to Think member Nathan Larson (whose girlfriend Nina Persson fronts Malmö’s other top group, the underrated Cardigans) to help him recognize the difference between “stupid strange” and “creative strange” English lyrics.
Nonetheless, Salo agrees that one billion ABBA fans can’t be wrong in noting that a Swedish band’s approach to the English language as an “artifact” yields special interpretive appeal. He’s also more than willing to discuss the country’s past and current role in the musical landscape, lauding Göteburg-based Sarah Assbring’s el Perro del Mar project for making “probably last year’s best debut album” and playfully admonishing me for ignoring ’60s garage instrumentalists the Sputniks when I race through a shorthand version of the country’s pop history. “Sweden has a very good social welfare system and people have good living standards and we haven’t had any wars,” he pointedly observes. “We have had a lot of time to do luxurious peacetime things like making pop music.”
Perhaps because Salo is “too egocentric” to be a fan of the past rock stars he admires, the Ark’s brand of performance is exactly the type designed to incite maniacal worship. Such fan-demonium hasn’t kicked in all over the United States, but it has in other countries. “Fans are crazy in Italy, which you know if you’ve ever watched Italian television,” says Salo. “And the paparazzi — there’s a reason why that’s an Italian word.” He goes on to tell the story of a girl who was paid by an Italian tabloid to sleep with him. “I was not interested at all,” he concludes, with a dry laugh. “She got drunk and failed at her goal — miserably.”
As opposed to Salo, who is more than ready to seduce at any time. All those who saw or read about the Ark’s springtime South by Southwest shows know that he has no qualms about treating an industry barbecue like a stadium gig — he’ll bump and grind in his boots and tighty whities right on past the most jaded zombie. Something tells me that sort of attitude and behavior mean this city will love him even more frenziedly than he might love it. What might he wear, or not wear, for his first visit to San Francisco? “Some flowers in my hair, I guess,” he deadpans. “I’ve heard that’s obligatory. Actually I’m getting a new suit, or dress, for the SF shows. I hope it’s a smash.”
That said, it’s World Cup time, and who is Salo’s favorite player on the Swedish team? “Zlatan Ibrahimovic,” he answers, in a tone suggesting that looks might have something or everything to do with it. “Now I’m going to go watch him do his thing.” SFBG
THE ARK
With Mon Cousin Belge
Fri/23, 9 p.m.
Cafe du Nord
2170 Market, SF
$13
(415) 861-5016
www.cafedunord
SF Pride Festival
Sun/25, 3:30 p.m. (Shadowplay stage) and 5:15 p.m. (main stage)
Civic Center, SF
Free
(415) 864-3733
www.sfpride.org
www.thearkworld.com
Foreign cures
> barsandclubs@sfbg.com
It’s Saturday morning, 10 a.m., and the sun streaming into your bedroom is driving a wedge into your brain. Someone put little socks on your teeth while you were sleeping. You smell like a distillery. You failed to follow any of the drunken rules when you stumbled home, pantsless, the night before: You didn’t drink a big jug of water and take two ibuprofen, and you didn’t make yourself a fried egg sandwich. (You know about that one, right? Grilled cheese sandwich with a fried egg and mayo inside — works every time.) You promise yourself you’re never going to mix mai tais, margaritas, and merlot again. With a Mary Jane finale.
But if you’re up for some real chow (instead of crackers, club soda, and Emergen-C), fortunately you’ll find salvation in a number of our city’s dining outposts. Since there are cultures that have been dealing with hangovers for many moons longer than our little post–Barbary Coast enclave has, I went on a citywide tour to unearth the best international food cures to help counteract the deleterious effects of knowing a bartender, blacking out at bachelor parties, or just drinking to forget.
A hot bowl of the Vietnamese noodle soup pho (pronounced fuh) comes highly recommended as a restorative by a couple restaurant owners I know, and some bona fide boozehounds. Turtle Tower (631 Larkin, SF. 415-409-3333) in Little Saigon has the best pho in the city, and number nine, the Pho Ga/chicken noodle soup — a steaming bowl of silky, hand-cut rice noodles and some darned good white chicken meat — is your rescue. Since Turtle Tower’s pho is considered to be northern, or Hanoi, style, it comes in a light broth with cilantro and a side of lemon and sliced peppers. Order the small size — it’s plenty big enough, trust. Back it up with a tangy lemon soda and you are seriously set. Lucky you, they’re open early, so you can get your slurp on.
Some other folks wise to the soup-as-hangover-antidote method are those wild ones of the mountains, the Basque. Sheepherders really know how to party. (What else can you do there? Wait, don’t answer that — just leave the sheep out of this.) Their classic day-after elixir is garlic soup. Visit Piperade (1015 Battery, SF. 415-391-2555, www.piperade.com) and order a bowl of hearty soup made with rock shrimp, bacon, bread, garlic, and egg. It covers all the bases. You can eat at the cozy bar, so don’t let the white tablecloths scare you.
OK, everyone has heard of the infamous Mexican hangover cure, menudo. (No jokes about the band, please, that’s tired.) Menudo is a soup made with beef tripe (yes, it comes from three of a cow’s four stomachs), hominy, onion, and spices. Sometimes you’ll find some pork knuckles or calf’s foot. The Greeks have a version of it; same goes for a number of South American countries, and you’ll even find a variant in the Philippines. Menudo is traditionally only available on the weekends, so I made sure I was good and hungover the Sunday I stumbled into Chava’s (2839 Mission, SF. 415-282-0283) to try it. How hungover? How about a wedding rehearsal dinner the night prior, with a cavalcade of flutes of sparkling wine, red wine, and a couple French 75s followed by two old-fashioneds? Yeah, I was feeling it.
But, um, here’s what I’ve decided about menudo: On the days when you’re so nauseated you need to get sick, come to Chava’s, get a bowl of menudo to go, bring it home, and open the lid. Just one whiff, partnered with the sight of the rubbery tripe and animal parts, will inspire a great big Technicolor yawn. No offense to Chava’s, but you simply had to grow up with the stuff to be able to eat it, let alone eat it when you’re hungover.
Speaking of fatty food: It’s supposedly tough on your liver the day after, since it’s already working double time to flush out all those nasty toxins, but I say whatever — if the fat makes you feel good, eat up. This is where el Farolito (2951 24th St., SF. 415-641-0758) lives up to its “little lighthouse” name, especially for those who can’t see through their morning-after daze. The doctor is ready to see you now: The super quesadilla suiza is a flour tortilla exploding with a mass of carne asada, cheese, meat, avocado, salsa, and sour cream that you can pick up and hold in your quivering DTs-afflicted hands. It’s so huge you can bring the rest of it home for when you’re hungry again. (What is it about hangovers that turns everyone into Count Snackula?)
A runner-up in the “Mexican food–bad for you” category are the nachos (and a Pacifico, if you can manage it) at Taqueria Can-Cun (2288 Mission, SF. 415-252-9560). The nachos saved me one afternoon after a bleary night in North Beach with some Italians (don’t ask). You’ll get a pile of meat, refried beans, avocado, cheese, sour cream, jalapeños, and their lousy grainy chips that actually come to life in the nachos. Spicy too. Feeling more arriba now?
The Irish know a thing or two about hangovers, and you can find a hearty Irish breakfast — sausage, bacon, black-and-white pudding (you might not want to eat it — it’s made with blood), baked beans, potatoes, mushrooms, and eggs any style — at the Phoenix Bar and Irish Gathering House (811 Valencia, SF. 415-695-1811, www.phoenixirishbar.com). The place is nice and dark, even during the day, so you don’t have to dine in your sunglasses (unless someone punched you in the eye because you were mouthing off). There are all kinds of brunch dishes and other greasy foods served until late in the day, and you have plenty of options for some hair of the dog at the bar. I’d say they know their clientele.
A partyer pal was kind enough to let his secret out of the (barf) bag for me: the Korean dish bi bim bap from Hahn’s Hibachi (1305 Castro, SF. 415-642-8151), a magic combo of chicken, pork, or marinated beef and vegetables on a bed of rice, with a raw egg on top. Throw some hot sauce on and mix it all up in its hot stone bowl so the bits of rice on the edge get crispy and the egg cooks. The name literally means “thrown-together rice,” and while there are definitely more authentic places around town, hangover day is never good for serious exploration — you need a sure thing.
The hungover French (well, those from the region of Brittany, anyway) would surely cosign a crepe from Ti Couz (3108 16th St., SF. 415-252-7373). These aren’t the finest crepes in the world, but I would say an order of the complete crepe (ham, cheese, and a sunny-side up egg inside) with the Ti Couz mimosa (made with peach schnapps — I know, you thought you were done with schnapps) while sitting out in the sun will get you feeling très bon again.
Lastly, our tour of the culinary landscape of San Francisco wouldn’t be complete without a couple classic American burger options. I am not alone in vouching for the wonders of a Whiz Burger (700 S. Van Ness, SF. 415-824-5888) cheeseburger and a root beer freeze. There’s even a decent veggie burger, and tasty seasoned waffle fries. But it’s hard to beat a giant juicy burger hot off the grill while hanging out on the patio of Zeitgeist (199 Valencia, SF. 415-255-7505) on a Sunday, with an ice-cold beer or one of their Bloody Marys. My badass bartender friend Kenny Meade from Vertigo Bar recommends either a shot of Fernet or, post-Zeitgeist, a Mexican chocolate milkshake from Mitchell’s Ice Cream (688 San Jose, SF. 415-648-2300, www.mitchellsicecream.com). He’s gotten me drunk enough times for me to totally trust him on this little piece of advice. SFBG
In between potential Betty Ford benders, Marcia Gagliardi somehow publishes a delicious weekly column about the SF restaurant scene, the Tablehopper, at www.tablehopper.com. Got a favorite foreign hangover cure? Let us know: barsandclubs@sfbg.com.
DJ without borders
> barsandclubs@sfbg.com
If you were born in Algeria, of Jewish and Berber descent, and had a penchant for classical Indian raga, you might be as disinclined to align yourself with any one school of thought or music as genre-blending DJ Cheb i Sabbah is. Equally at home in Morocco, France, India, and San Francisco, he has been skillfully infusing traditional South Asian, Arabic, and North African melodies with modern electronic beats in the Lower Haight since 1990, first at Nickie’s BBQ and now every Wednesday night at Underground SF. On June 16, Cheb i Sabbah celebrates the release of his sixth album with Six Degrees Records, La Ghriba, with 1002 Nights, his performance group of vocalists, percussionists, and dancers, and superstar Senegalese singer Baaba Maal.
SFBG You started DJing in Paris, how many years ago now?
DJ CiS It makes me look ancient, but 1963, 1964 is when I started. I was 17.
SFBG And have you DJed continuously for 40 years?
DJ CiS I’ve had three professional DJ incarnations. In 1963 that was the first one. Second one was 1980, also in Paris, and then the next one was about 16 years ago, here. In between I performed with the Living Theatre, then raised a family. Working at Rainbow Grocery, working at Amoeba Records …
SFBG You worked at Rainbow?
DJ CiS Actually it’s a funny story, because that’s how I started spinning again. I worked at the one on 15th, before the big new one opened on Folsom. I would make tapes, and then whenever I went to work, if somebody liked my tape, they would play it. One day this guy comes up to me, his name is Bradley, and he says, “Man, this music is cool.” I say, “Yeah, that’s raï music from Algeria,” and he says, “You know what, I have a little club in the Lower Haight called Nickie’s, and if you want to come on a Tuesday Night and spin some music, I’ll give you $40.” At first I was, like, “I don’t know about this, it’s not like Paris,” although within two weeks there was a line outside the door. Then [legendary jazz musician and sometime Sabbah collaborator] Don Cherry would come to Nickie’s, and I would say to him, “I don’t know if I’m going to stick with it,” and he actually forced me to. He said, “No, you should stick with it. It’s important.”
SFBG So we have Don Cherry to thank.
DJ CiS From there I spent 10 years spinning at KPFA. Later on I became the world music buyer in Berkeley for Amoeba, and in those 14 years I put on close to 40 shows which I produced.
SFBG The 1002 Nights shows?
DJ CiS Yes, with Khaled. With Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. It was a period where I did quite a few shows.
SFBG And you’re going to be doing that again, the 1002 Nights?
DJ CiS Yeah, but this time I’m being hired more than actually putting on the show. The last show I did produce, which was actually a huge one, and very successful, was one I recently did with Khaled at the Berkeley Community Theatre, and there were 3,300 people there.
SFBG Do you decide in the club what kind of beats you’re going to add, or do you decide in the studio?
DJ CiS I think the producing aspect is different than the dance floor one. However, the great thing about being a DJ is if you do a mix, you can try it out right away. You don’t have to wait to find out if people like it or not. But it’s really two different approaches, because also it’s very subjective. Is Shri Durga [his first record on Six Degrees] a danceable album or not? Well, I don’t know. I think it is. Maybe not every track, but not every minute of the day is there to dance. And it does have a focus on the tradition, you know. I’m not trying to do such a modern thing with just a little bit of the tradition. I’m doing the opposite. The tradition is first; second is bringing in what we call these days “global electronica,” which is better than “world music.”
SFBG You’ve referred to it as “outernational” music. How is that different from “international”?
DJ CiS It just goes … out [gestures, hands apart]. It seems like “outer” opens it up to the idea that we don’t need national boundaries and restrictions and all of that, but maybe that’s a whole other discussion. I think the challenge for a DJ is to never refuse any kind of audience. If you were to spin a heavy metal set, you would find the heavy metal that appeals to you, because there’s good music in every area. It’s a gift, Don Cherry would say. You have to give it. SFBG
DJ CHEB I SABBAH AND 1002 NIGHTS WITH BAABA MAAL
Fri/16, 8 p.m.
Masonic Auditorium
1111 California, SF
(415) 776-4702
www.masonicauditorium.com
www.sixdegreesrecords.com
Great head here
> barsandclubs@sfbg.com
“Half of Americans haven’t tried decent beer,” says William Brand, the Oakland Tribune’s resident beer columnist and local brew expert. Back in the sixth grade, Nebraska native Brand was himself weaned on the likes of Budweiser, Hamm’s, and Coors, wan beverages he now refers to as mere “alcohol vehicles” — brewed with rice and corn, cheaply made, and lacking any real taste. “That’s not beer,” he says, “that’s just crap.”
Brand encountered his first crap-free beer during a stint in the Navy, when he was stationed near Washington, DC. Friends took him out to a posh German restaurant and there, he recalls, he ordered a Wurzburger amber “in a very nice pilsner glass.”
“I took one taste,” he says, “and it was amazing. I never tasted anything like it. Until then, everything I ever tasted was awful.”
He soon mail ordered a home-brewing kit from England and began his long journey to respected beer connoisseurship. Since 1989, his Oakland Tribune column, “What’s on Tap,” has been steering beer fanatics toward the finest local suds. We asked him to share some Bay Area brewery history and talk about some of his local favorites.
SFBG You used to brew your own beer. Why did you stop?
BRAND I moved to California in 1970. I had one glass of Anchor Steam and realized I didn’t have to brew any beer. And of course then the whole beer-making revolution happened. It really all started in the Bay Area, with the Portland area right behind it. In the United States, home brewing was made legal in ’78. Brewpubs became legal in California in ’81.
SFBG How has the American microbrew movement evolved since then?
BRAND For a while it was all Northern California and the Pacific Northwest. But that’s all ancient history. Young Americans traveled to Europe, discovered good beer, and started brewing it. Now there’s about 1,300, 1,600 breweries in America. There’s more beer — and more styles of beer — in America than in any other country in the world.
SFBG What distinguishes the Bay Area microbrew scene?
BRAND Well, you can’t really say “the Bay Area.” You have to say “Northern California.” And it’s a toss-up between Northern California and the Pacific Northwest for beer nirvana. In the US it’s becoming like Germany or Belgium, where different people from different regions have their own styles. In the Pacific Northwest they go for dark and strong beers. In Northern California we’re famous for extremely hoppy beers.
Beers are measured in international bitterness units — it’s a scale that beers use. For comparison purposes, Budweiser is 13 IBUs; Stella is 30 IBUs. We have lots of beers that are 100 IBUs or more. It’s a style that’s becoming known as double IPA [India Pale Ale].
SFBG With an eye toward both quality and adventurous weirdness, what are some of your favorite Bay Area beers?
BRAND There’s one called Watermelon Wheat from 21st Amendment Brewery in San Francisco. It’s a blend of wheat and barley, and they actually put watermelon in it, which really comes through. You’d think it would be ghastly beer, but it’s quite good. Another of my favorites comes from Drake’s Brewing in San Leandro, and it’s called Papa Denogginizer. It’s hugely hops — and somewhere around 11 percent alcohol. Then go to Marin Brewing Company in Larkspur, and the guy there is making barrel-aged beers. With barrel-aged beers, you brew your beer, you ferment your beer, then you put it in a whiskey barrel or a wine barrel. Going over to Magnolia Brewery on Haight Street, the brewer makes a mild beer in a high hop area. And he brews cask ales — real ale — in the English style.
SFBG If you really want to impress, say, a Belgian — which local beers would you introduce them to?
BRAND Actually, the ones that are really interested in what we’re doing in the US are the Belgians. They’re really smart, and they’re watching us, and there are a few Belgian breweries that are making American-style beer. Most of the Belgians that come over here are looking for something strong and hoppy. So I’d try and find them something like Old Yeltsin — brewed by HopTown Brewing Company in Pleasanton — or a barley wine. There’s a bar and grill called Schooner’s in Antioch that makes a barley wine. It’s quite strong — around 10 or 11 percent — and they age it for a year or two or three, and it’s astounding. So I’d go with our own styles. There are also some American breweries that are doing a Belgian style. In the Bay Area one place for that is Russian River Brewing Company in Santa Rosa — they do stunning stuff.
SFBG So you might say that Europeans understand American beer.
BRAND There’s a lot of respect in Europe for American beer makers today. And there’s no animosity at all. The thing about beer is that people are never snobby. People only become beer snobs when they don’t know what they’re talking about — or when they’re talking about crappy beer. SFBG
Want more brew-haha? Contact William Brand at whatsontap@sbcglobal.net.
THE BREWERIES
21st Amendment Brewery www.21st-amendment.com
Drake’s Brewing www.drinkdrakes.com
Marin Brewing Company www.marinbrewing.com
Magnolia Brewery www.magnoliapub.com
HopTown Brewing Company www.hoptownbrewing.com
Schooner’s www.schoonersbrewery.com
Russian River Brewing Company www.russianriverbrewing.com
CLUB REPORT: BANGKOK
Clubs in Bangkok are always packed with a mixture of Thais and farang, which means honky or honkies, depending on the number of honkies being talked about. Dressed in perfect designer knockoffs, the local people in Thailand almost never look tacky. The tourists, however, almost always do. Pastel polo shirts, sunglasses at night, and hair that only David Hasselhoff can be blamed for is the standard look for Bangkok’s “cool dudes.” Do not go out on the town wearing a Blue Öyster Cult T-shirt — people will actually be afraid of you.
Probably the hippest club in Bangkok right now is Bed (www.bedsupperclub.com), a massive, hangarlike space divided into two rooms. One room is an enormous dance floor with either thumping techno or prancing house played at a deafening volume. The other half of Bed is where it gets its name. Along the walls of this huge room are big fluffy mattresses with big fluffy pillows on top. Everything is spotless white, so please bathe before climbing up on one.
Santika is the other big mainstream spot. Malls are very popular in Bangkok, and Santika is like a huge mall for clubgoers. The ceilings are about 1,000 feet high, and everything’s very well lit. One room has a stage with live bands playing anything from reggae to metal and a throng of local Thais in front, guzzling whiskey and soda and generally going nuts. Another room has a punishing array of strobe lights and specializes in hip-hop, which in Thailand often means Black Eyed Peas, House of Pain, and Gwen Stefani. Fun.
The best underground “all-Thai” club I’ve been to didn’t have a sign, or a name. My friend led me through a darkened hair salon that was closed for the night (the front door was unlocked), into the next room, up some dimly lit stairs, and then into a darkened room. I half expected to find a game of Russian roulette in progress, but instead the room was packed wall-to-wall with people. Seemingly run by teenagers, the place had, like, two whole lights flashing and was playing authentic hip-hop — every single person was dancing. As the night went on, more and more of the kids came up and wanted to shake my hand and welcome me (the conspicuous farang) to Thailand. It was a really entertaining place but, like many of the best things in Bangkok, totally illegal and transitory. It probably closed down the next night and opened up somewhere else. It’s crazy here. (Mike McGuirk)
CLUB REPORT: REYKJAVIK
Vikings party, hard. That famous take-no-prisoners vigor applies, big time, when it comes to getting down and conquering pints of good ole bjor (beer by local breweries Viking, natch, Egils, Thule, Spegils, and Litli Jon), the low-alckie malt (brown ale), and lagerol (pale ale). Ducking into Reykjavik’s three-floor dance palace NASA (slogan: “EXPECT HANGOVERS!”), I didn’t glimpse too many elfin Icelanders sucking down the native caraway schnapps, brennivin, also known locally as svartidauoi (“black death” — sch-weet). I was served that on the jet over, along with yummy business-class reindeer sashimi. (Svartidauoi is a very necessary chaser when it comes to tourist palate-tester skyrhakari — putrid shark).
Drinks, schminks, the locals were out on the dance floor, booty dancing to Ali “Dubfire” Shirazinia of Deep Dish live on the tables. Got to love the native boogie that evening: a condensed, pixieish finger-and-shoulder wiggle that was a smidge early Steve Martin and more than a little high-nerd. High, for reals — my sturdy male traveling companions later reported back from the men’s room, which they described as a “total scene.” A woman apparently waltzed in at one point and set up a pharmacy, surrounded by a crowd that proved Viking blood courses through their veins — according to one fellow traveler, they elbow something fierce.
Though the packed club was bustling, I met with no outta-hand shoving, just friendly offers to dance with groups of fresh-faced men, handsome, slender, and high-cheekboned. This evening, the internationally renowned Icelandic ladies paled in comparison — many appeared a wee bit wenchy. You know what I’m talking about — too much maquillage, too little too-tight clothing, too many servings of rotten shark. Meow! Where’s my kitten tartare? Time to repair to a quieter watering hole, like Asian fusion temple Apotek, mod lounge Oliver, or the chandeliered Rex, where Quentin Tarantino is said to have matched shots with Björk and the Iceland cultural minister.
Forget about live music tonight, although Iceland is chock-an-ice-block with creative musical originals. I followed Tarantino’s lead once again — as well as Bill Clinton’s — and ended the morning at the Baejarins Beztu hot dog stand by the wharf, right next to my deco lodging, Hotel 1919, circa 1919. Mind-cleansing, chill sea air. Warm light emanating from the oldest fast-food joint in Reykjavik (established 1935). The finest dog in town (homemade lamb wieners topped with delish dried onion and rémoulade). No better way to watch the dawn melt into day. (Kimberly Chun)
Meth-y behavior
Perhaps a good indicator of a social problem’s gravity is the number of documentaries it inspires. This year crystal meth addiction, specifically in gay urban communities, brings us two, Meth (Todd Ahlberg, 2005; Fri/16, 3 p.m., Castro) and Rock Bottom: Gay Men and Meth (Jay Corcoran, 2006; Sat/17, 1:15 p.m., Victoria). Watching two treatments certainly seems like a good way to get to the truth — what might be downplayed in one can achieve its rightful resonance with reiteration in the other. And the irony of cautionary tales is that because they admonish by example, they’re inherently fun.
Still, the two films, while stylistically dissimilar, are enough in accordance with one another detail-wise that only one ticket need be purchased. Even the ambivalence in the two, where it shows up, is similar. Another commonality is high quality. When the interviewees in either film aren’t perceptive and articulate about their own predicaments, which is rarely, their evasions and delusions are just as revealing.
The one you decide to see may come down to a packaging preference. Meth is a sleek number whose visuals and soundtrack slyly evoke the circuit parties that took meth abuse under their wing and add the appropriate energy to rapturous accounts of nine-hour sex marathons and wholesale exterminations of self-doubts before serving as an effectively creepy counterpoint to descriptions of the drug’s eventual toll. The film relies solely on interviews with users, however, and though they’re surely an important source for information on the subject, it can feel a little claustrophobic with regard to perspective. Rock Bottom: Gay Men and Meth’s editing will appeal to those who like fewer hospital corners; it also offers more voices, from health care professionals, family, and friends, without skimping on first-hand accounts and without ever sliding into brochure-speak. Either choice is quite an education. (Jason Shamai)
Tea – totaled
› superego@sfbg.com
SUPER EGO Gurl, I woke up on the wrong side of Tuesday afternoon. I don’t know if it was that pint of Cuervo I ordered for appetizers the night before or that quart of quinine I downed soon after for the tetanus I got from sitting on someone’s iPod, but I was hella hungover. My jaw was swiveling, my heart was pounding, and my languid extremities felt so hot that the unicorns on my nails nearly melted. One minute I was hosting the World Cup in my fantasy bra and panties, the next I was hosting it in my actual head.
“This is it,” I thought through the shuddering echo of tiny cleats. “Mama’s gettin’ middle-aged.” I’d finally hit one of midlife’s big Hs: hot flash, hair loss, hangover. And I’m only 19! Good thing I carry some Remifemin and an extra wig in my beaded Whole Foods evening bag.
Fitfully I scanned the Dumpster for any half-smoked butts and chased my scattered thoughts to their grim conclusions. Folks think I’m frickin’ Carrie Bradshaw, being a columnist, lolling around in my Blahniks, whimsically riffing on the romantic wiles of my telegenic brunchmates, leaping with a shy giggle into the magical dilemmas of contemporary life. But this is clubland, Samantha: Dive too deep down in it and — hey, presto! — abracadrinkingproblem. Ain’t nothing wrong with a little party-party, y’all, but us clubbers gotta watch for that border cross over the Rio Messy: Shit’s about as tasteful as soyr cream on a tofurkey burritofu, but with almost twice the calories.
So, maybe it was time for a tiny hooch holiday. Me, I’m an uncurbed child of the streets, where “time-out” is code for “free clinic” (and “free clinic” means “trick’s bathroom”), but in my new semi–fully employed state I’m always running into vibrant-looking Guardian people taking “a personal time-out” — from drinking, from smoking, from imported prickle-backed Peruvian shellfish, whatever. You’d think my health insurance here would cover hangovers, what with the professional risk involved in my line of work, but alas, “no dice.”
“You can do this,” I assured myself. “Just for a week. It’s not like when the government made you give up Wal-Trim diet pills. That was forever.“
But just because I wasn’t drinking didn’t mean I wasn’t going out altogether. She’s still gotta earn a living, and her living’s spilling tea. Luckily, along with the current wine bar burst, San Francisco’s having a tearoom explosion as well. (No, not that kind of tearoom, perverts. Leaves first, then you pay — not the other way around.) And the goddess of cups provides several venues for bar-hour tea-totaling glee. The slightly hoity-toity yet still chill Samovar Tea Lounge (www.samovartea.com) in the Castro is a bookish, cruisey mecca and just opened a Yerba Buena Gardens outpost to boot. Modern Tea (www.moderntea.com) has taken hold in Hayes Valley, with its stylish presentation and unequaled view of all the tipsy drag queens stumbling from Marlena’s down the street. Hang on to your saucers, ladies.
But the real news on the late-night tea front is the hip-hop-oriented Poleng Lounge. Yep, you read right, it’s a hip-hop tearoom. The kids from Massive Selector have transformed the former 1751 Social Club space into a Bali-inspired wonderland that also hosts performances by some of the top names in roots and electro (Ohmega Watts, Vikter Duplaix, Triple Threat). Poleng’s restaurant and tearoom opens to the public June 9, with a huge kickoff bash featuring Faust and Shortee, Amp Live, host Lateef, and probably more than a few chipped handles. Food and tipple are also available, but the focus, of course, is on the leaf — green and otherwise.
Whew! After all that tea I need to take a leak. But before I saunter off, look at me — I’m fantastic, I’m radiant, I’m slightly hypercaffeinated. I feel like I could do yoga in the street. Maybe I should do this personal time-out thing more often. As they say, the liver the better (just kidney!). Now somebody order me a damn mai tai already. SFBG
“LET THE RHYTHM HIT ’EM”
With Faust and Shortee and Amp Live
Fri/9, 9 p.m.–2 a.m.
Poleng Lounge
1751 Fulton, SF
(415) 441-1751
Tonight is what it means to be young
TEEN FLICKS In the late ’70s and early ’80s a funny thing happened at the movies: Suddenly aware of a whole pocket-moneyed demographic betwixt Disney and the R rating, major studios began targeting a median audience, aged 15. (Ultimately they’d even get their very own designation, PG-13.) An explosion of post-Meatballs teen comedies soon replaced sex farce fucking and wanking with peeping and pranking. Even "nicer" films like Fast Times at Ridgemont High and the John Hughes–Molly Ringwald trilogy viewed adolescence as a self-contained world, not the way station to adulthood American Graffiti proposed just a few years earlier.
With the anthemic whining of Pink Floyd’s The Wall as personal soundtrack, kids who’d missed the big party of the ’60s grasped rebellion as attitude, sans social consciousness. Jonathan Kaplan’s Over the Edge (1979) and Adrian Lyne’s Foxes (1980) were fairly realistic portraits of aimless teenage escape from broken institutions (family, school). Exploring the same themes but leaving realism behind, the movies in Jesse Ficks’s Midnites for Maniacs’ "Latch-Key Kids Quadruple Feature" offer archetypal youth-persecution scenarios gone baroque via pop-fantasy tropes and bottomless (if depthless) directorial extravagance. To a generation just learning to want its MTV, albeit with a vengeance, such edgy glamour felt all the more "real" for being surreal.
Following his prior S.E. Hinton adaptation, The Outsiders, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 Rumble Fish replaced saturated-color swoon with a B&W faux-beatnik poesy derived equally from American International Pictures, Maya Deren, and Dal??. Its mannerisms are too indulgent to defend, too dazzling to deny — what other movie could stockpile so many desperate debtors to James Dean (Matt Dillon, Mickey Rourke, Dennis Hopper, Tom Waits, Nicolas Cage) and get away with it?
But Rumble Fish is acoustic haiku compared to the florid power balladry of director Walter Hill’s two most delirious action comix. Discarded by Paramount as an exploitation movie and belatedly acclaimed by critics, 1979’s gang warfare phantasmagoria The Warriors was so flagrantly exciting — Bic-waving 60-year-old Pauline Kael called it "visual rock" — that actual gang fights broke out in theaters, causing at least one death and much moral outrage. Its titular protagonists (derived, by way of a 1965 novel, from ancient Greek military history!) are scrappy underdogs fighting through rival gang turfs across a hallucinatory NYC. KISS Army–meets–Marvel Comics pillow hump? Blood-churning metaphor for life itself? Whatever: The Warriors remains trash-treasure gold.
Hill went even more nuts with "rock & roll fable" Streets of Fire, a neon-hued rainbow of ’50s juvenile delinquent nostalgia, new wave futurism, and pure 1983 mainstream cheese. Note the Pat Benatar postures struck by music superstar Ellen Aim (Diane Lane, in her bad "bad girl" period) before she’s abducted by freakazoid fan/rapist Willem Dafoe, necessitating rescue by laconic ex Michael Pare. "It’s so much better going nowhere fast," she wails in the quintessentially flamboyant opening set piece. Exactly! Streets of Fire is a stupid, gorgeous, guilty pleasure.
Simple guilt motivates the evening’s opening anomaly. Cipher in the Snow is a somber 21-minute lesson produced in 1973 by Brigham Young University in which a teenage boy exits a school bus to enigmatically expire in the wintry drifts. Why? As various authorities puzzle out later, nobody bothered to love him. Shown even in non-Mormon classrooms for several years, Cipher left a lasting impression on many because it explicitly amplified what many 15-year-olds think: No one cares about me, but if I just died, they’d be soooo sorry. (Dennis Harvey)
LATCH-KEY KIDS QUADRUPLE FEATURE
Cypher in the Snow, 7 p.m.; Rumble Fish, 7:45 p.m.; The Warriors, 9:45 p.m.; Streets of Fire, 11:59 p.m.
$10
Castro Theatre
429 Castro, SF
(415) 621-6120
Goode is great …
Before his dancers had even taken a single step, a huge round of applause greeted Joe Goode at his group’s 20th-anniversary concert at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Goode is probably the best-loved choreographer in town. For two decades he has chronicled his generation’s unease about living in its own skin. When AIDS began to devastate this town in the early ’80s, Goode was there to speak out with pieces that were blunt, poignant, and theatrically savvy.
Goode is the poet of anxiety, pain, and uncertainty. He’s able to see a major catastrophe on its own terms but also as a metaphor for what ails us. His heroes — and they are heroes — are the outsiders, the watchers, and the misfits whose values and existence society would like to deny. He has a self-deprecatory wit that makes us wince and laugh at the same time. And he has developed a genre of dance theater that’s exceptionally successful at blending speech and movement. Very few choreographers have Goode’s ability to use language so acutely.
The anniversary concert offered the standing-room-only audience two pieces, the new Stay Together, to a score by San Francisco Symphony music director Michael Tilson Thomas, and the haunting 1998 Deeply There (stories of a neighborhood).
In Stay Together, Goode tackles what is glibly summarized as the midlife crisis: when long-term relationships unravel, careers begin to meander, and time ahead is shortening. A secondary strand explores the process of creating a piece, of finding a direction in which to take it. The ever-efficient Liz Burritt, clipboard in hand and glasses on her nose, was there to give the largely silent Goode plenty of advice of the “listen deeply” and “be in the moment” type.
The challenge here for Goode was to make a work about being clueless without coming up with a piece that goes nowhere. It’s a challenge he doesn’t quite meet. To achieve “a perfect little euphoria” is, no matter what Burritt says, no easier in art than it is in life. Despite good collaborators and several splendid episodes, there’s something wan about Stay Together that makes for a disconcerting theatrical experience.
Tilson Thomas’s score is perfectly serviceable, with monochromatic sections punctuated by percussive elements. Several times it hilariously called up sci-fi and Movietone music associations.
Goode and Melecio Estrella, as his maybe young lover, maybe younger self, had some telling shadowing duets together. During their first meeting, silhouetted against separate screens, heads longingly turning toward each other, they almost trembled with excitement and fragility. Throughout, Austin Forbord’s live videos contributed excellent tonal nuances and a sense of sometimes almost painful intimacy.
Stay Together‘s most theatrically cutting moment came with Marit Brook-Kothlow’s sex-starved Norma Desmond figure. The intensity of the character’s obsession split her screen image and spilled over into some vigorous dancing.
Deeply There remains one of Goode’s finest works. Robin Holcomb’s on-tape score, with its echoes of Shaker and Americana folk tunes, is inspired; the a cappella singing by Goode’s dancer-actors, haunting. With this quasi–musical theater work, Goode hones in on and pays tribute to a community that pulled together and learned to take care of and bury its own. Goode’s piece just barely avoids sentimentality by calling up equal measures of laughter and tears.
On many levels the piece remains disjointed. The outrageous Imelda figure (Ruben Graciani) and a voguing Jackie O sequence have little to do with the work’s subject except to point to the excesses of the times. These are the segments that today seem the most dated, perhaps because they look so innocent.
Yet the work rode an emotionally convincing trajectory from the opening prologue between Frank (Goode) and little Willis (Joshua Rauchwerger), who wants to know where Goode’s lover Ben is, to the last monologue about carrying on, however uncertainly. The scenes seamlessly flowed one to the next; the characters looked all too plausible. Estrella as the well-meaning goody-goody neighbor was positively nauseating, while Brook-Kothlow has grown in stature as D.D. the dog and Felipe Barrueto Cabello’s silent Mauricio has more backbone. The only false note remains Joyce (Burritt), Ben’s virago of a sister. She is still too much of a caricature. SFBG
joe goode performance group
Fri/9–Sat/10, 8 p.m.; Sun/11, 7 p.m.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater
700 Howard, SF
$16–$40
Shoot for the contents
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
"Who is going to tell our stories if we don’t?" asks Madeleine Lim, founder and director of the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project. She has a point. After wracking my brain to recall queer women or trans people of color who have graced a movie screen this year outside of a film festival, all I could come up with was Alice Wu’s Saving Face — which certainly didn’t play at the multiplex. Lim firmly believes that "as long as we’re not in the studio systems writing, directing, and producing these films, we’re never going to see ourselves on the big screen." Her "little stab" at putting such stories front and center was creating the QWOCMAP program, which offers free digital filmmaking workshops to queer women and trans folks of color.
This weekend brings the Queer Women of Color Film Festival, an official event of the National Queer Arts Festival that Lim organizes and curates along with M??nica Enr??quez and Darshan Elena Campos. "Tender Justice," the first evening’s program (Thurs/8, 7 p.m.), showcases shorts by young women aged 18 to 25. Many deal with issues of violence and assault, some obliquely: In the experimental piece Messages, by Alyssa Contreras, a girl wanders through a surreal red-and-black nightmare listening to hateful cell phone messages left by various family members.
On the second evening, queer Latina filmmakers come together for "En Mi Piel: Borders Redrawn" (Fri/9, 7 p.m.). The event, which includes a panel discussion, is entirely bilingual: "It is political to reclaim spaces that are bilingual, in light of the immigration debate and the backlash and racism that it has generated," says cocurator Enr??quez. There are shorts by Bay Area and Los Angeles filmmakers, as well as a group of Mexican filmmakers who traveled here on a grant from the Global Fund for Women. One highlight is filmmaking collective Mujeres y Cultura Subterranea’s La Dimensi??n del Olvido, a gritty documentary that chronicles the lives of women and startlingly young girls who live on the streets in Mexico. Others include Liliana Hueso’s Las Mujeres de Mi Vida; Aurora Guerrero’s Pura Lengua, which skillfully handles a narrative about a Los Angeles Latina queer woman who deals with a horrific police assault; and Amy André’s En Mi Piel, in which an FTM half-white, half-Chicano trans man named Logan recalls his journey back to Mexico, the search for his roots becoming part of his new identity.
The third evening, "Heart of the Flame" (Sat/10, 7 p.m.), features works by students of Lim’s over the age of 25. One such is Kenya Brigg’s Forgiven, an autobiographical narrative about recognizing her grandmother’s strength of forgiveness, which she observes when the elderly African American woman uses a cake to bury the hatchet with a white neighbor who once signed a petition to keep her from buying a house in their Castro neighborhood. SFBG
QUEER WOMEN OF COLOR
FILM FESTIVAL
Thurs/8–Sat/10
SF LBGT Community Center,
Rainbow Room
1800 Market, SF
(415) 752-0868
Free
Gnaw on this
› cheryl@sfbg.com
There’s always room for another film festival in this town, especially when said fest is drowning in blood, guts, and supernatural shenanigans. The San Francisco Independent Film Festival’s festering youngest child, Another Hole in the Head, returns this week for its third year of ghouls gone wild.
Standouts include The Hamiltons (think Party of Five meets Martin), directed by a local duo whose enticing nom de screen is "the Butcher Brothers,” and, from Greece, Yorgos Noussias’s excellent To Kako (Evil), which cribs from Romero and 28 Days Later in its tale of a ragtag band of urban survivors scrambling to evade the marauding undead. And yes, it does incorporate the dreaded fast-moving breed of zombies, but even genre purists turned off by that factoid will forgive the film once things start going apeshit; I’m thinking in particular of a scene in a deserted restaurant that unleashes 2006’s most satisfying head-squashing to date. The film also has enough of a sense of humor to include the line "If you don’t trust me, trust this!" (cut to: a giant rifle) and a last shot of near-genius proportions.
Per usual, HoleHead brings in several Asian horror flicks, including Shinya Tsukamoto’s enduringly creepy Haze and Yudai Yamaguchi (Battlefield Baseball) and Junichi Yamamoto’s disappointing Meatball Machine. There are also a handful of classics, like Bruce Kessler’s 1971 psych-out Simon: King of the Witches and — in perhaps the festival’s most inspired move — John Boorman’s 1973 Zardoz. Sean Connery’s spectacular loincloth is but the first of many, many reasons to view this neglected masterpiece on the big screen.
Also well worth catching (either at the fest or during their June 29–July 2 run at CELLspace): splat-happy theater troupe the Primitive Screwheads (Evil Dead: Live!, Re-Animator of the Dead), who return with their latest, The Chainsaw Massacres, which boasts a rumored 60 gallons of stage blood poised to rain down on the audience. Plus: disco!
ANOTHER HOLE IN THE HEAD
June 8–15
See Film listings for venue and ticket information
Mini mini CinemaScope!
The term CinemaScope might conjure a 2.66-to-1 vision of an extra-bodacious Marilyn Monroe in How to Marry a Millionaire, or, if you’re a certain breed of movie maniac, it might inspire a recitation of Fritz Lang’s famous Contempt-uous remark that the format is fine for filming snakes and coffins, but not for capturing people. Bizarre, then, that Liu Jiayin has taken an outmoded approach known for gargantuan celluloid spectacle and revived it — brilliantly — for small-scale digital family portraiture. Winner of numerous festival prizes, including the competitive Dragons and Tigers award bestowed in Vancouver last fall, Liu’s BetaSP debut feature, Ox Hide, has more than once been deemed the most important first feature to emerge from China since Jia Zhangke’s 2000 Platform. That’s a fest obsessive’s way of saying that Liu is the real deal — in addition to possessing a charismatically baby-butch camera presence, she knows how to write, stage, and shoot a funny, unsettling, and pointed scene.
Twenty-three scenes, to be exact, a number reflecting Liu’s age when she made the movie. Ox Hide consists of just that many immobile but rarely "static" shots, each used to depict a moment from the cramped and quarrelsome domestic life she shares with her mother and her father, the latter a stubborn and slowly failing leather goods merchant. (Thus the title.) Making "reality" TV look about as stupid as it is, Liu shares a unique use of format and a sharp focus on the family with ’90s teen PixelVision pioneer — and former Le Tigre member — Sadie Benning, and like Benning, she’s got terrific timing both on-screen (bickering about noodles at the dinner table) and off (using a close-up of a printer to reveal her kin’s economic struggles). Local curator Joel Shepard deserves thanks for bringing this movie to the Bay Area, kicking off a "Beijing Underground" series that will span a few more Fridays this month. (Johnny Ray Huston)
OX HIDE
Thurs/8, 7 and 9 p.m.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission, SF
$5–$8
(415) 978-2787
Honeycomb hideout
› johnny@sfbg.com
Cast a spell — that is what movies (at least nondocumentary ones) are or were supposed to do, and yet how often do they achieve that aim today? V??ctor Erice’s original feature, 1973’s The Spirit of the Beehive, is partly about the spell a masterful movie can cast, and also is a many-shaded masterpiece that casts an unforgettable spell, a waking dream that disperses in a way that seems to infect the world outside the darkened rooms in which it breathes and lives.
At first glance the story seems so simple, and after all, it is set "Once upon a time …," as an intertitle announces, just after a credit sequence featuring objects relevant to the story — a beekeeper’s mask, a train, a well, a mushroom, and that surrealist standby, a clock — drawn by the film’s lead actors. But more specifically, it takes place somewhere on the Castilian plateau of Spain around 1940, as Frankenstein comes to town. Ana (Ana Torrent) and older sister Isabel (Isabel Teller??a) are among the children who race through the barren rural landscape to a movie barn to see James Whale’s classic chiller, but it is only Ana who cranes like a lunar flower under the projected light, ignoring a prelude from the film’s producers that warns viewers not to take what they see too seriously. Before Ana and her sister emerge playfully shrieking from the darkened building, Erice has already allowed Frankenstein‘s influence to seep outside, into the seemingly oblivious existences of the girls’ mutually alienated parents, a beekeeper (Fernando Fern?
Blinded by Scientists?
› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER It may be yet another sign of a time-space-buckling rock apocalypse. Or a chilling harbinger of imminent, sonic-subtlety-be-damned deafness. Or simply a case of sudden, acute perceptiveness. But you had to wonder, watching We Are Scientists and Arctic Monkeys at the Warfield on May 31, how two such different bands (at least on record) could blur together into one indistinctive, loudly guitar-oriented mass. And I like that fetchingly raucous and hook-slung Arctic Monkeys album. I enjoy the forceful post-punk rock of We Are Scientists, live — wisecracks about dead dads, babes up front, and all.
Both bands work hard for their money — though I can’t speak for the second half of Arctic Monkeys’ set. I had to flee because of my lumbago, left charring in the oven. But as I was racing to my vehicle, I did wonder about the so-called ’00s rock revolution: Could it have gotten stalled somewhere around the time the Arctic Monkeys decided to jettison their straight-forward approach at Great American Music Hall earlier this year and reach for the shadows, smoke machines, and drum-triggered, classically trite rock light show?
Perhaps they’re trying too hard, and if the bands aren’t, then someone is, be it their stylists or marketing departments. What they and other nouveau rock heads should realize is that some arts are beyond science. It’s too easy to slag We Are Scientists, as so many have, starting with a tone set by wink-wink song titles like “This Scene Is Dead” and “Cash Cow” and gamboling forth to the canny exploitation of cute kittens on the cover of With Love and Squalor (Virgin). The cellular building blocks of a fun, poppy, and even harder rock band are there, once you start hacking away at the thick, waxy snark buildup. It’s not that I don’t want to hear about the bad new good times of bands like We Are Scientists and the Killers — but whether they dig deeper and darker into the not-so-secret life of hotties or step back (rather than up, to a privileged perch) and develop a sense of songcraft, they need to make me wanna walk on their wild side.
Killers and bad dudes Speaking of Killers, word has it the Hundred Days show at Bottom of the Hill June 3 was buzzing with A&R types because the SF band’s demo was mixed by Mark Needham, who also worked with the Killers. Colin Crosskill e-mailed me to confirm that Killers producer Jeff Saltzman has expressed interest in working with Hundred Days on their next album, based on the recordings…. Shoplifting’s name, unfortunately, proved too prescient: The Seattle band’s gear was lifted from their van parked on Guerrero Street before their May 29 SF show. They’ve posted a list of stolen gear at www.myspace.com/shoplifting for sharp eyes at Bay Area shops and swap meets…. In other thieving matters, Annie of Annie’s Social Club had a green-and-white guitar autographed by X stolen from her premises; if you have info, contact anniesbooking@gmail.com.
Running in the streets Paranoia, punch-ups, temper tantrums, spread-betting losing sprees, and banging cracked-out, nameless pop stars — nope, that wasn’t the scene at Sonic Reducer’s recent birthday splashdown. Instead that’s all on the new album from the Streets (a.k.a. Mike Skinner), The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living (Vice/Atlantic), a riff on the trials and tribulations of fame that has divided many who have heard it.
“Honesty has always been what I’ve been good at,” says a subdued Skinner, calling from his London home. Making Machiavelli look like a po-faced naïf, one crack at a time, he adds, “People have definitely not liked it as much. But on the whole I think it’s gone down really well.”
I spoke to Skinner when his first CD, Original Pirate Material, came out stateside, when neither of us was completely sure his brand of hip-hop would go over well in the United States. Even now, Skinner says, “I didn’t expect anyone outside the UK to give a shit about it,” so sidestepping the gangster game seems easy. These days, he believes, “it’s a competition to be the hardest. Who’s the most credibly tough. I do think it’s very difficult to stand out against that.”
Why get rich and die trying? Worse, you can stiff like 50 Cent in his own biopic. Instead, Skinner sounds like he’s going the Jay and Em route and concentrating on running his own label, the Beats. “I just want to stay busy and hopefully never work at Burger King again.” SFBG
The Streets with Lady Sovereign
Fri/9, 9 p.m.
Fillmore
1805 Geary, SF
$21.50
(415) 346-6000
OH, THE PLACES YOU’LL GO!
Cat Empire
Putf8um-selling Aussie Latin-jazz-ska-hip-hop fusion purveyors make the Latin-jazz-ska-hip-hop kittens purr. Fri/9, 9 p.m., Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. $15. (415) 771-1421.
Oakley Hall
Back-to-the-garden refusniks? Cali-fucked-up dreamers? Brooklyn’s mega ensemble can’t stop putting out music this year; their latest is the bejeweled Gypsum Strings (Brah). Fri/9, 9 p.m. Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. $12. (415) 861-5016.
Soundwave Series
Its first Live Play show at ATA will be documented by KQED’s Spark. Myrmyr, Luz Alibi/Mr Maurader, and Moe! Staiano’s Quintet with guest curator Matt Davignon improvise to previously unseen videos culled by 21 Grand’s Sarah Lockhart. Fri/9, 8 p.m., Artists’ Television Access, 992 Valencia, SF. $6–$10. www.projectsoundwave.com.
James Blackshaw
The young UK guitarist grabbed Wire and Fakejazz’s attention with last year’s O True Believers (Important) — and now has ours. Sat/10, 9:30 p.m., Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. $10. (415) 923-0923.