Arts & Culture

Arts & Culture

Northen high (and low) lights

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>>Check out Jesse Hawthorne Ficks’ TIFF takes here.

FILM FESTIVAL REPORT There weren’t exactly tumbleweeds rolling through Park City, but this January’s Sundance Film Festival did have a becalmed feeling reflecting the economic panic — money, corporate sponsors, and industry personnel weren’t falling from the sky quite so thickly as usual, which naturally made the experience that much more pleasant for those simply there to see movies. There was no such diminished frenzy apparent at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival (Sept. 10-19), even if one of the local papers lamented "parties are smaller and over early." (Cue the Bee Gees’ "Tragedy.")

There’d been more serious lamentation in recent years that TIFF has gone too Hollywood, too average-viewer-unfriendly, its programming now driven by (rather than simply attracting) celebrity and media attention. That’s clearly not true of the program’s bulk. Still, you’ve got to wonder just how the "art" of cinema is being celebrated when one big-noise 2009 premiere was no less (what could be less?) than Jennifer’s Body, which put Diablo Cody’s Oscar in perspective.

Not much more defensible were a slew of hollow costume flicks, from opening night’s kinda-’bout-Darwin Creation to the closing Young Victoria, with Oliver Parker’s latest Wildean crapfest Dorian Gray, Carlos Saura’s frivolous I, Don Giovanni, and Stephen Poliakoff’s silly Glorious 39 among the plush time-killers unveiled like papier-mâché statuary between.

Those are movies likely to underwhelm soon at a theatre near you — though not so soon as the enthusiastically received latest efforts by the Coen brothers, Terry Gilliam, Michael Haneke, Jason Reitman, Michael Moore, Steven Soderbergh, Jane Campion, Pedro Almodóvar, Todd Solondz, and others no doubt already ramping up their Oscar campaigns. Those were easy to put off. But there was a great deal I was very sorry to miss, like Cornieliu Porumboiu’s Romanian Police, Adjective, Raoul Peck’s Haitian Moloch Tropical, and Shirin Neshat’s Tehran period piece Women Without Men, films whose chances of U.S. distribution are variably remote.

Among titles caught, low expectations were more often met with high rewards than vice versa. Das Boot (1981) in a tank, Venice Film Festival Golden Lion winner Lebanon proved an effective but unremarkable war-is-hell statement. There was controversy over Tel Aviv’s spotlight in the inaugural "City to City" sidebar. But if government propagandist efforts secured that slot as charged, other Israeli features here, like Danny Lerner’s lurid Kirot, were hardly goodwill ambassadors.

On the other hand, Lars von Trier’s Cannes scandal Antichrist turned out neither brilliantly here nor appallingly there — though one viewer did upchuck at a press screening, and a publicist called mine the first neutral reaction she’d heard of.

Elsewhere, the flowers of evil bloomed in myriad hothouse forms, some rather wilted on arrival. Perhaps most intriguing was a portrait of a movie that will never fully exist: L’Enfer de Henri-Georges Clouzot reconstructs footage from an aborted early ’60s thriller by the French genre master. Experimenting with psychedelic imagery to evoke pathological jealousy, he abandoned ship midway, but the remains still fascinate. Another mental health vacation, Werner Herzog’s improbable Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, won numerous fans. Yet it’s much less fraught with danger than Abel Ferrera’s 1992 original, and for all its gratuitous goofing too often looks/sounds like direct-to-cable product.

Plumbing sillier darknesses were the lamentable latests by George Romero (Survival of the Dead) and Joe Dante (The Hole), not to mention yet more not-different-enough vampire stuff (Suck, Daybreakers), a middling Manson recap (Leslie, My Name is Evil), and one dullish Robert E. Howard adventure (Solomon Kane). Midnight Madness’ one shining light was a nasty little Australian number, The Loved Ones, after which you will never hear Kasey Chambers’ "Not Pretty Enough" without cringing. I mean, even more than previously.

Elsewhere, pleasures were scattered and unpredictable, with some uneven films elevated by performances — Woody Harrelson’s delusional superhero in Defendor, Edward Norton as twins in Leaves of Grass, and just about everybody in Rebecca Miller’s The Private Lives of Pippa Lee. Major attention went to Drew Barrymore’s directorial bow Whip It, but Samantha Morton’s own, comparatively overlooked debut The Unloved ranks almost up there with the medium’s greatest horrible-childhood portraits. For originality, nothing quite trumped Corey Adams and Alex Craig’s surreal skateboarder fantasia Machotaildrop, even if its charms eventually wore a bit thin. Which was not an issue for French stop-motion animation A Town Called Panic, 75 minutes of perfect silliness that provided a Gallic heaven to complement Clouzot’s hell.

Mark of quality

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

DANCE REVIEW The Mark Morris Dance Group’s regular visits to the Bay Area have assured it a faithful and knowledgeable audience. Yet rarely has it received the kind of enthusiastic applause that greeted its West Coast premieres of Visitation and Empire Garden, and the magisterial V (2001), at Cal Performances. Morris is that rarest of contemporary artists — a great entertainer and a great humanist.

In the history of Western art, the Visitation refers to paintings that depict the pregnant virgin meeting her cousin, Elizabeth, who is pregnant with John the Baptist. They illustrate a tender relationship between two mothers-to-be. It’s doubtful Morris had this kind of religious iconography in mind when he set his lovely Visitation to Beethoven’s Cello Sonata No. 4 in C, although the work did suggest the intimacy of old friends. The outstretched hand became the central gesture for convivial meetings and partings that were as public and private as the ongoing "conversation" between the piano and the cello. You found yourself looking in on an elegant salon that — after all, this is Mark Morris — was also a playground of rabbits hopping and toy soldiers stomping. Maile Okamura was the butterfly looking for a place to light.

The other new work, Empire Garden, supposedly took its name from a Chinese restaurant; it’s a much darker affair. I can’t pretend to have penetrated Charles Ives’ gnarly Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano, best known for threading Americana music into its central scherzo section. Morris responded by densely layering kaleidoscopically-changing images that tumbled on top of each other. He packed a pulsating stage space with prayer meetings, hunting scenes, ballroom couples in rigor mortis, robotic escorts, human pyramids, and pontificating leaders. But he also gave his dancers tiny wistful gestures for the hands or a foot. The whole Brueghelian canvas had a slightly deranged energy from which emerged a rather foreboding dance of death finale. Julie Worden, magnificent in the grandeur with which she enlivened her singular role, stood out from an ensemble that has never looked better.

V, to Schumann’s Quintet for Piano and Strings, resonated with particular poignancy at its local premier in October 2001, three weeks after 9/11. That reference — which Morris always resisted — has faded. What remains is a dance that is powered by the rigors of formal design. The dancers were divided into two groups of seven, dressed in either off-white pants or blue skirts (by Martin Pakledinaz). The choreography stuck closely to the music — sometimes almost mockingly so — and much of it had a swingy pliancy to it. Large arm gestures also suggested a ceremonial quality. Somewhat mysteriously, a duet called up an unsustained echo from the wings.

But V‘s most remarkable section starts in the central Largo, for which Morris uses the simplest of human movements. One group walks, the other crawls, out of the wings. The drama happens when the vertical and horizontal lines intersect — basic geometry. The piece has two endings: an orgy of embracing, and a V-shaped military phalanx moving downstage. Take your pick.

Godsend

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER God Is Good, the name of Om’s new long-player on Drag City, may run the risk of landing the heavy, heavy drone dealers in the gospel section of your clueless big-box retailer, but founder-bassist Al Cisneros couldn’t help the tug of title: "To me, at this point, in the journey of my life, that’s really all I can say."

The soft-spoken, spectacled musician, all in black with his instrument tucked beside him, laughs a little — and who can blame him? The longtime Bay Area fixture has been tackling some major changes in the past year. I almost don’t recognize him, now shorn of his long, black tresses, amid the bustling throng and espresso-machine groan of Muddy Waters at 16th and Valencia streets. He waves goodbye to his wife, whom he followed last year to San Luis Obispo, close to where she’s attending graduate school. In ’08 he also said farewell to the drummer he’s played with since high school, Chris Haikus, who quit in the middle of the last Om tour and retired from music. And after our chat, Cisneros will drive up to Portland, Ore., a commute he now makes regularly in order to practice with Om’s new drummer Emil Amos. Cisneros, who, with Hakius, once made up two-thirds of the legendary doom/stoner metal trio Sleep, is fully awake and in motion — and everything appears to be falling effortlessly into place.

"I have to keep playing," he explains. "I have music all the time, and it has to come out." To that end, Amos, who’s also in Grails, slipped into the drummer’s seat perfectly. "His playing style spoke my language directly when I first saw him playing drums," Cisneros murmurs. "The specific lyricism that he puts into his drumming, aside from the flow itself — which is beautiful. It was absolutely what I’d hear inside in many riffs and many parts I have, the complement of what I hear. There are certain fills, the way he’ll sit in a beat, the way he’ll be with a beat — it felt so familiar."

So he called up Amos on the chance that he would be able to work on a scheduled Sub Pop single. The two had already bonded during late-night rock-philosophy jam sessions while Om and the Grails were on tour a few years ago. After each show, Cisneros, Amos, and Hakius would hang out and analyze everything from dub to Billy Cobham — "the extremely nerdy academic aspects of the records we grew up with," the amicable Amos recalls by phone, taking a break from his day job at a Portland homeless shelter. "We’d get into philosophical debates, almost Platonic dissections of, when a verse ends and you go into chorus, what do you do on drums in this specific situation, in 1971? It was just this weird way of talking about music as a metaphor for spiritual education. We’re obsessed to that level. I think Al’s brain just thought, who can I trust?"

Remarkably, Cisneros — a man who has a Sanskrit passage from the Bhagavad-Gita tattooed on the left hand he uses for fingering — was right on, and though the two had never played together, a three-day rehearsal in Amos’ basement yielded the 7-inch. The Steve Albini-recorded God bears out the partnership, picking up the tempo, folding in tamboura and flute, and coming close to realizing the sounds in Cisneros’ head — the only other instance, he says, occurred with Sleep’s Holy Mountain (Earache, 1993), and "in the best way, we didn’t know what we were doing. It happened to us." Still, he offers, chuckling, "I don’t want to be in Sleep for the rest of my life."

For metal monks, as well as spiritual disciples of any order, the key is to focus on the practice — not fixate on whether or not Amos has a beard, a discussion the drummer says he’s found on some online forums. "I’ve never seen another band that gets so much attention about changing one bass guitar pedal or overdubbing one extra tambourine," Amos observes. "Nobody would say anything if Men at Work switched out a bass, but in this band, there’s the sense of trust between an artist and audience. It’s a delicate thing."

And it sounds like Cisneros has found an understanding new foil in his ever-evolving dialogue. "It’s a joy to work with Emil," he says softly. "The interplay between the instruments — the very premise of having a duo is to have a conversation between the instruments, and it literally happens nonstop when we play."

OM

With Lichens

Thurs/24, 8 p.m., $15

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

www.theindependentsf.com

Easy as one 23

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

MUSIC Brought together by the 23 enigma (and, more than likely, straight-up friendship), the two folks behind Rainbow Bridge get a bit elusively new age in discussing their musical partnership. After several minutes of semi-coded phone conversation from their Olympia, Wash., home base, touching on author and teacher José Arg?elles, the Mayan calendar, and the idea of "cultivating obscurity," it becomes increasingly clear that the band’s raison d’être is actually pretty simple: maximizing the two-piece drum and electric guitar format — "trying to see how much spirit we can cultivate with super-basic things" as drummer/co-vocalist (and sometimes keyboardist) Bridget O’Brien Smith puts it — for a shuffling, mesmerizing twang that really ought to reach ears well beyond the Pacific Northwest.

Guitarist-vocalist Adam Croce and O’Brien-Smith are in the process of intensive rehearsals and days spent recording a prospective LP. "Each time we’ve recorded, we’ve had a different set-up — getting a different ambience, the breath of the day," explains Croce, relieved to "exhale finally" after one such session.

Rainbow Bridge began playing together early last year in Olympia, where both members attended Evergreen College, and each thought up the name individually before — simultaneously, I guess — suggesting it to the other. This was a fortuitous early sign of what they describe as their "harmonic convergence," not unlike the Arg?elles-initiated 1987 event of the same name. While their band’s name might seem to allude to Jimi Hendrix’s 1970 Rainbow Bridge concert in Hawaii ("a different kind of harmonic convergence," Croce assures), it has more to do with Arg?elles, whose 2012 Circumpolar Rainbow Bridge meditation is said to be able to spiritually unify the planet.

There’s a definite spiritual connection between Rainbow Bridge and the Bay Area, where Croce grew up and played in a ton of bands, including the SPAM Records-affiliated Tommy Lasorda and Los Rabbis. I first heard his music on a self-titled album by Broken Strings, a solo work that circulated extensively on CD-R before its vinyl release on True Panther Sounds last year. It’s a weird, home-recorded rock revelation, peppered with Carl Sagan soundbites and crackling with a feverish energy reminiscent of Robert Pollard’s mid-1990s brilliant streak.

Broken Strings is over now, but Croce and O’Brien-Smith already appear set to considerably improve on that work, judging from both sides of Rainbow Bridge’s killer debut seven-inch, "Big Wave Rider/Birdcage" (True Panther Sounds), out this month. "Rider" is a knockout, small-scale anthem, a summery song of measured meter ("Hangin’ 10 /Gnarly session /Shootin’ the curl /Shootin’ the curl for the world! /For a surfer girl /Waves they unfurl!") and ecstatic delivery. The flip is a chugging, jilted blues, likewise remarkable.

Rainbow Bridge plays its first show outside Olympia in Seattle later this month, and hopes to tour the West Coast soon. Just be sure to understand their reasons for being: "We are connected by the 23 enigma," says O’Brien-Smith, while Croce adds, "And we don’t wanna be stigmatized for that."

www.myspace.com/rainbowbridge23

www.truepanther.com

Seattle slew

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Montreal-based turntablist and producer Kid Koala (born Eric San) is the type of artist you can expect to take some formidably playful risks. Known for his virtuoso skills scratching and mixing on the wheels of steel, back in 1996 he was the first musician in North America signed to the U.K.’s boundary-busting label Ninja Tunes. Arriving in the wake of a fantastic mixtape, San’s debut hip-hop-jazz-funk crossover Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (Ninja Tunes, 2000), featured a video game and a surreal comic book he designed himself. For him, the creative impulse is dedicated to telling a compelling and unlikely story. Free for download at www.nufonia.com, The Slew’s 100% — San’s self-released fourth effort in collaboration with long time friend Dynomite D — continues this tradition.

San and Dynomite (born Dylan Frombach) had discussed collaborating on a full-length project ever since vibing together on a couple spacey jazz singles about a decade ago (peep their "Third World Lover"). Thus, when Frombach was enlisted by his cousin Jay Rowlands to produce the score for a feature documentary on elusive Seattle psych-rock recluse Jack Slew, he brought San along. That was four and a half years ago. The documentary has since fallen through, but the score evolved independently into a masterfully abrasive and chest-rumbling soundscape. "We wanted to do some Black Sabbath meets the Bomb Squad," San tells me, laughing.

Initially the loosely-defined "Black Squad" duo gathered concrete inspiration from Jack Slew’s unreleased material — an ample body of work, thick with ferocious dusty breaks, bluesy vocals, and fuzzed-out riffs. Slew has a gravelly yet piercing voice that cuts right through the drums. He sings knowingly of freedom lost and the fragile sentiments of an ape trying to become a man. It’s rich material that just begs for sampling. San and Frombach reassemble the parts to produce a fresh perspective on the dangerously free spirit of the outlaw. "We needed a car chase scene, and a jail break scene, and then we ran with it," says San. Indeed, the album roves widely and digs deep, concluding with the epic moral struggle of "A Battle of Heaven & Hell."

Despite a cinematic narrative akin to a rogue spaghetti western, The Slew nearly succumbs to the usual pitfalls faced by turntablist albums. In the aesthetic sphere of turntablism, the scratching and abrupt pattern changes can sound gluttonous and overtly technical, warping the sonic landscape into a show of narcissism. "On the one hand [100%] is super-psychedelic, loud, and banging," San explains. "On the other hand" — he laughs — "it’s the most masochistic, purist turntable record I’ve ever made."

However, what saves the effort from sadism as well is that the Slew’s hip-hop inspired pastiche takes cues from authentic recording techniques of early ’70s rock. San and Frombach dove into their history books to study the methods for producing the screeching drums and sandblasted guitar riffs of that era. To really polish the coarsely hypnotic sound, they asked Mario Caldato Jr. — the engineering innovator behind the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique (Capitol, 1989) among others — to master the effort. The result is an interweaving of pummeling breaks and wa-wa guitar nastiness fractured by effects modulations and the emboldened seams of mixing and scratching. And it hits loud.

Koala and Dynomite originally entertained the idea of performing 100% live with 14 turntables. Fortunately, they scrapped that idea in favor of working with Chris Ross and Myles Heskett, the former rhythm section of Australia’s the Wolfmothers. Ross and Heskett play bass guitars, drums, and organ while Kid Koala and mad scientist partner P-Love (Paolo Kapunan) handle six turntables. San had to build "bass-proof, shock-proof turntables" to face the monster loudness that will ensue on the Slew’s two-and-a-half-week North American tour. "We bought spring-loaded tone arms and made custom vinyl to cue faster, so we can just drop the needle and go," he says. "We are going to just cut loose."

KID KOALA PRESENTS: THE SLEW

With Adira Amran

Fri/25, 9 p.m. (doors 8:30 p.m.), $15

The Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1421

www.independentsf.com

Come of age

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

FILM A bittersweet tone in movies is an easy thing to flub. The most common culprits are asinine sentimentalism and mock-solemnity, neither of which figures into the graceful cinema of Ermanno Olmi. His early films, Il Posto (1961) and I Fidanzati (1963), still exhibit an impossibly light touch, with a warm humanist core of glances, material texture, and yearning wrapped in a dispassionate view of industrialized alienation.

In Il Posto, a boy’s coming-of-age is rendered a split decision: his entrance into the Milanese workplace is a gloomy premonition of adulthood, but there’s a taste of love for succor. Olmi’s breakthrough would have seemed small even if it hadn’t come on the heels of L’Avventura (1960) and La Dolce Vita (1960). It’s easy to imagine that Il Posto‘s quotidian pleasures might have seemed retrogressive in this context—but with contests for neorealism’s soul laid to rest, it’s easy to appreciate Olmi’s remarkable skill directing amateur actors, his elegant sequencing, and his aching cinematography, as ravishingly revealing as Robert Frank’s contemporaneous photographs. Insofar as the world-weariness of The Exiles (1961) and Killer of Sheep (1977) relate to the Italian style, they travel the Olmi path.

The director has been drawn to simple characters and stories throughout his career, but his own formal means can be surprisingly experimental. In the prolonged opening of I Fidanzati, for instance, Olmi fragments two estranged lovers’ circumnavigation of a dance, stitching together the story of a relationship with a series of elusive encounters plucked from time. The jag echoes Alain Resnais’ early films, but a bookending montage of the lovers reading each other’s letters uses the same technique against the modernist grain, for emotional warmth.

While Olmi’s more highly esteemed cousin in pictorial ennui, Michelangelo Antonioni, absconded with neorealism to the metaphysical realm, Olmi plunged back to earth. To wit: his new film, Terra Madre, is the official documentary of the 2006 Slow Food conference in Turin. A strange hybrid of educational film and poetic reverie, Terra Madre leaves polemics to the conference participants. Olmi’s presence is felt in the digressive close-ups of soil, plants, faces and hands. In a beguiling sequence midway through the film, his camera studies the ramshackle space left behind by a self-sufficient hermit. Does the director see himself in the story of this man who found the world in a small plot of life and tended his own garden for decades? Regardless, the "Life’s Work" retrospective at the PFA is an abundant harvest.

LIFE’S WORK: THE CINEMA OF ERMANNO OLMI

Sept. 25–Oct. 30, $5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-5249, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Welcome weirdness

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DNA science has taught us everyone is unique. Art teaches that everyone — even wildly derivative sons-of-bitches — are kinda sorta likewise (at least technically). Still, there’s ordinary "individuality," actual distinctiveness, and then there’s whoa. Belonging to this last category is Swedish writer-director Roy Andersson, who’s made four features in four decades and surely won’t be hurrying up anytime soon.

Does it really take him that long? (Yes: he’s directed hundreds of commercials over the same period, yet took the perceived failure of 1975’s Giliap hard enough to pause a quarter-century before making another movie.) Or is it simply that the unclassifiable gimcracks he now records on film take years to create, not unlike someone’s backyard Lego-built Disneyland or Popsicle-stick Florentine Duomo?

No matter. Andersson’s films are like nothing else in the medium, if anything landing closer to multimedia maxi-minimalist stage avant-gardism like Robert Wilson’s vintage stage spectaculars. Albeit with considerably more humor and warmth, like Meredith Monk’s work both live and cinematic (1988’s Book of Days). But funnier still — like Buster Keaton without the character focus — and cinematically master-diagrammed à la Jacques Tati. Plus droll yet existentially dour in a particularly Scandinavian way.

Which is a long way of explaining You, the Living — finally here for a short theatrical run two years after its Cannes debut — as a bewildering whatsit of immeasurable invention and delight. (Arguably more-awesome Songs from the Second Floor, from 2000, took even longer before it got one week at the Roxie.)

How can one describe You, the Living? Fifty stationary-camera scenes, preceded by a Goethe quote, arrange mostly nonprofessional actors in tableaux of increasing musicality heavy on Dixieland tuba. Characters and settings do occasionally recur, but there’s very little "plot" per se. The highly worked production design (almost entirely studio-bound) is all queasy pastels, with a particular fondness for ’70s grandma-sweater-yarn lime.

There is, however, a slyly escautf8g absurdity in which Nordic miserabilism and fantasy apocalypticism somehow jigger a perfect cocktail. The taste is odd, at first — then it knocks you pleasurably sideways. There’s no easy convincing till you’ve seen it. Then there’s no easy convincing anyone else until you’ve made them see it. That’s worth the effort, though, because they will be so glad, and astonished by your rarefied good taste. (Dennis Harvey)

YOU, THE LIVING opens Fri/25 at the Sundance Kabuki.

Flesh tones

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markeb@sfbg.com

Like a cold, wet pinky, porn has truly inserted itself into every facet of our lives — even our nightlife. Gay porn, especially, is big business in the Bay, and besides the endless stream of between-flicks go-go boys this provides many mainstream gay clubs and a host of porn-themed parties, most featuring DJ Pornstar, it also draws a lot of international hopefuls to our fair shores, maintaining some diversity on the homoclub scene. You wouldn’t believe the amount of Swiss buttboys I’ve met at the disco, child.

But what about the music of gay porn? Has it moved beyond the stereotypical boom-chaka-wahow-wahow to reflect our hip-hop-infused, electronic reality? I recently talked via hot pink iPhone with The minor9 (www.theminor9.com), a young production duo who’ve been working with Raging Stallion for the past few months, helping to infuse that megastudio’s soundtracks with a little contemporary flavor, from the neo-tango trappings of the forthcoming Hombre to the trip-hop trimmings of shoe-and-weed fetish flick High Tops, which features a sampled recipe for marmalade(!).

Minor9 members Marcus and Chris stepped into the giant shoes of legend JD Slater, a cofounder of Raging Stallion whose soundtrack work helped bring rock, ambient, and industrial sounds into the porn mainstream, and who recently retired to concentrate on his own music. "It’s amazing the amount of opportunity composing for porn provides," says Marcus. "Obviously we’re not out to make a big artistic statement — the director tells us his vision and we do our best to match it in the background. So no grand chord changes or cymbal crescendos at the climax. But in terms of creative outlets, you couldn’t ask for more."

"My greatest triumph was slipping some bassoon into a scene," adds Chris. The local duo share a past as independent musicians and combine live instrumentation with software hijinks to set the right backseat blow-job mood. Chris and Marcus asked me not to use their last names to avoid future employment kafuffles. So, is there still a porn stigma?

"Porn’s such a fact of life now, and my mom said, ‘That’s great!" when I told her about my new job," says Marcus. "But you never know." Chris chimes in, "Let’s put it this way. I used to be a graduate student in math. Talk about stopping a conversation dead. Now I tell people what I do and suddenly I’m the life of the party."

—————

BEARRACUDA MAGNUM

Sweaty gay leather bears packed in hairy shoulder-to-shoulder, grunting to live sets by dark duo Ejector and drag tragedy Christeene, plus electro-pop DJ Francisco Guerra. Fri/25, $10. DNA Lounge, 375 11th St., SF. www.bearracuda.com

BLOWOFF

Another hairy bear woof attack, this time on the rock remix tip, with indie hero DJs Bob Mould and Rich Morel at the first anniversary of this too-popular party. Sat/26, 10 p.m., $15. Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF. www.slims-sf.com

SISSY FIT

"Rock ‘n roll, cheap bear, and sloppy dick" brought to us by the queer punk Trans Am boys. DJs Dirty Knees and Pickle Surprise help usher in the mosh madness. Sat/26, 10 p.m., $6. Sub Mission, 2183 Mission, SF. www.myspace.com/transamtheclub

SS TRANNYSHACK

What’s better than nutso drag? Nutso drag on a boat. Try to stay seaworthy at this swingin’ who’s-who with Heklina, Dirty Sanchez, DJ Juanita More! and more. Sat/29, 8:30 p.m., $45 advance. Pier 41, SF. www.trannyshack.com

Creamin’ for comics

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culture@sfbg.com

Erotic comics are a special breed of porn. Unlike prose, they can show as well as describe. Unlike photos, they’re narrative. Unlike film, they have a limitless special effects budget. Comics are capable of everything from gritty, realistic detail to "yowza!" flights of fancy — perfect for the demands of erotica.

And yet good erotic comics seem in short supply. Despite a venerable history that stretches from the Tijuana Bibles of the 1920s to the wild antics of the underground comix movement in the ’60s and ’70s, porn comics have languished of late. Alternative and independent comics have been trending more toward asexuality. And gay male erotic cartoonists are only now struggling out of the shadow of Tom of Finland, whose comics of square-jawed, fascist-reminiscent leathermen and bikers have dominated gay erotic art in the same way that Tolkien’s imagination bound and gagged fantasy writers for generations.

Once you start digging, however, it’s remarkable the gems you can find. The fact that comics are so marginalized creates a kind of purity to the art form. Cartoonists aren’t motivated by fame and fortune, but rather by their passion for their stories and their art. The same is doubly true for erotic cartoonists, whose work is often an evolution of the naughty pictures they drew compulsively while growing up.

Here are a few of the most unusual, hot, and fun recent erotic comics collections to get your juices flowing.

BEST EROTIC COMICS 2009

Greta Christina, Editor

(Last Gasp)

www.lastgasp.com

A man stimulates the orifice of a bound mermaid with a twig, an infertile professor convinces a student to impregnate his wife, a dominatrix hires a gay masseur to fuck her boyfriend, a sadistic dom pisses all over her girlfriend, King Kong and Godzilla have hot sex in the ruins of Tokyo.

Best Erotic Comics, an annual collection of the best and brightest of kinky comics, is yet another reason to be proud of our sexy Bay Area, published as it is by legendary, local institution Last Gasp. Editor Greta Christina has assembled an impressive collection of literary smut comics that run the full gamut of sexual interests, from octopus sex to airplane sex. It’s especially refreshing to see straight porn side by side with gay and lesbian imagery — it allows the reader to understand sexuality as a spectrum of possibilities, and to see how hot the fantasies of others can be.

PRIDE

Gengoroh Tagame

(G-Project, 2007)

www.tagame.org

Odd as it may seem, the best bear comics porn in the world is coming out of Japan, a country with a noticeable lack of big, hairy men. Clearly the exotic has its erotic charms. Unlike yaoi — the popular manga genre in which female cartoonists create stories of gay male romance and sex for an audience of girls and women — bara is gay manga created by actual gay male creators and usually does not feature the yaoi breed of androgynous boys with big eyes and floppy hairdos, but rather burly, hypermasculine men.

No one is better at portraying these than Gengoroh Tagame, arguably the world’s greatest, living erotic cartoonist. His universe is populated with the hottest muscle bears outside of the Lone Star’s patio during Folsom Street Fair weekend, and they have a tendency to be tied up, humiliated, and fucked senseless. Pride is a recent trilogy of books from the master, detailing the gradual transformation of a cocky, hirsute hunk into an obedient slave by a buff, bearded professor. The books are full of all sorts of S-M shenanigans, with our hero being put through the paces, from extreme bondage and piercings to fistings and scat play. Tagame has yet to be translated into English, but he’s such an accomplished cartoonist that his work can still be thoroughly enjoyed.

SMALL FAVORS

Colleen Coover

(Eros Comix, 2002)

www.eroscomix.com

While lesbian imagery exists in various straight publications, there is an unfortunate dearth of true lesbian erotic comics. Colleen Coover’s Small Favors is a notable exception. Coover is an excellent cartoonist and clearly has a great time illustrating her two heroines, Annie and Nibbil, having wild, fun, and juicy sex.

Annie is accused of masturbating too much by her own conscience and is assigned a finger-tall guardian to stop her from getting jiggy with it too often. Fortunately, this tiny watcher winds up being a nympho herself, and jumps Annie at her first opportunity, leading to comics’ best introduction line ever: "Ummm … Hi, Annie! My name’s Nibbil! Gosh, I hope you don’t mind me fucking myself on your nipple!"

WANKY COMICS

BiL Sherman

(Self-published)

www.wankycomics.com

Occasionally you’ll stumble across some underground, barely-distributed mini-comic, put together by the creator with a photocopier and a stapler, that will take your breath away. BiL Sherman’s Wanky Comics is bizarrely brilliant, completely original, and about as underground as you can get.

While the subject matter of the stories in WC ranges wildly from horny unicorns and space-age sex clones to an inexplicably naked superhero and his quest for love, Sherman has a distinctive style that unifies the series. He draws like a thirteen-year-old with OCD and a hard-on, filling his pages with burly, hairy men. Each chest hair is lovingly and obsessively drawn, and the faces are rugged and expressive.

Sherman is unafraid to get both funny and surreal, a refreshing trait in porn comics. The "Mike Thorn and the Nine Satanic Statements," episode, for example, is a blow-by-blow illustration of a scene on a porn set, while the text underneath the images is taken directly from Anton Levey’s Satanic Bible, creating a strangely disconnected, campy, yet beautiful juxtaposition.

BIRDLAND

Gilbert Hernandez

(Eros Comix, 1992)

www.eroscomix.com

Hernandez is one of the creators, along with brothers Jaime and Mario, of Love and Rockets, arguably the single greatest American comic book. Rarely does such a world-class, literary cartoonist turn his talents to porn. Luckily, however, the highly prolific Hernandez created Birdland, a voyeuristic foray into the lives of strippers, bodybuilders, and horny aliens — and one of the classics of erotic comics.

Birdland introduces characters such as Fritz, the large-breasted, brainy psychiatrist with a lisp and a passion for guns, which Hernandez later incorporated into L&R. But while L&R certainly never shies away from sexual material, Birdland is unabashedly erotica, with copious cum shots filling the pages.

Though Hernandez identifies as straight, Birdland is in many ways pansexual erotica, with every type of coupling depicted. The final scene, in which the characters have a giant orgy in a spaceship, is one of the most oddly liberating and transcendent sex sequences ever conceived. After reading it, anything seems possible.

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A GUIDE TO PORN CARTOONISTS AT THIS YEAR’S FOLSOM STREET FAIR

The Folsom Street Fair on Sun/27 is all about community, and one of the ways it demonstrates this is by donating a block of booth space to queer erotic artists, many cartoonists. This year’s little section of the Fair, at 11th Street and Folsom, is very exciting. Here’s some highlights.

Chuck Connor and Sean Platter: the duo’s Demonic Sex series pulls no punches with its depictions of satanic transformations and sexual hells. www.triplesixcomics.com

Dave Davenport and Justin Hall: An accomplished tattoo artist, Davenport uses his illustration chops to create horny werewolves, skate punk ghosts, and other wholesome characters in Hard To Swallow, co-created with Justin Hall (that’s me!). www.hardtoswallowcomics.com

Steve MacIsaac: As the co-creator (along with Dale Lazarov) of Sticky, MacIsaac offers sex-positive stories instead of the rape fantasies that often dominate gay porn. www.stevemacisaac.com

Bradley Rader: Harry and Dickless Tom is the story of two homophobic truckers who screw and then beat up fags. It turns surreal when one wakes up with a vagina. www.flamingartist.com

Sean Z: Sean’s Myth is a superb fantasy comic with complex plots, gorgeous color work, and big-dicked vampires. www.sean-z.com

See www.folsomstreetfair.org/art for more kinky artists.

Too clever by half

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“>THEATER REVIEW With a notable streak of successful New York–bound liftoffs and landings — for everything from solo shows (Bridge & Tunnel) to unconventional musicals (Passing Strange) — it’s fair to call Berkeley Rep the regional NASA to Broadway’s firmament. It therefore seemed more savvy than surprising that the Rep took on staging Green Day’s humongous hit concept album, American Idiot, as a musical. Given the attention-grabbing concept-squared, the built-in youth market, the local angle, and the precedent (and writer-director Michael Mayer) borrowed from Spring Awakening — the faux-punk teen-angst Tony-winner of 2007 — American Idiot the musical must have been something of a no-brainer.

And sure enough, there are no brains in this show, just lots of songs and outfits and group dancing and mild thrashing and writhing around amid high-grade eye candy. It lasts 85 minutes, or an eternity, I’m not sure which came first. I wasn’t expecting much, having not cared for the hollow gestures in Spring Awakening, but I got even less. Shot out of the circus canon of commercial instinct, the stage version of Green Day’s album is as tarted up and vapid as they come. It will do the band and the Rep no harm, but anyone who actually takes their theater seriously or, yeah, even rebellion against a body-and-soul–smashing capitalist machine will be, uh, let’s say, disappointed. The gestures of rebellion here — thoroughly watered down and washed away by a flood of sentimentality, admittedly derived largely from the album itself — are worthy of any of the more slick corporate advertising campaigns. Meanwhile, a vague storyline of redemptive dissolution and lost love preens around a loser-hero and two distant and less central buddies, but it’s all faded imprints of a million things you’ve seen before.

AMERICAN IDIOT

Through Nov. 1

Check Web site for schedule, $16-$95

Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison, Berk

1-888-4-BRT-Tix, www.berkeleyrep.org

Events listings

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Events listings are compiled by Paula Connelly. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

WEDNESDAY 23

Barback Olympics Ruby Skye, 420 Mason, SF; (415) 693-0777. 8:30pm, free with RSVP at going.com. Twenty San Francisco bars send their best barback gladiators to compete for prizes in a bottle relay, beer restocking race, keg changing competition and many more rigorous activities. Also featuring DJs, performances, and libations.

Queer Mommy/Boy Femina Potens, 2911 Market, SF; (415) 385-5814. 8pm, $8-12 sliding scale. Join in on a community discussion on the often invisible, misunderstood dynamic of Mommy/Boy in the leather, kink, LGBT, and BDSM communities.

BAY AREA

LGBTTIQ in the U.S. Free Speech Movement Café, Moffitt Library, UC Berkeley, 2200 University, Berk; (510) 642-3773. 6pm, free. Hear panelists, who are contributing writers from the recently published book Smash the Church, Smash the State: The Early Years of Gay Liberation , discuss the history of this movement while linking it to current social and legal battles for equality.

THURSDAY 24

Big Book Sale Festival Pavilion, Fort Mason, SF; (415) 626-7500. Thursday – Saturday 10am-8pm, Sunday 10am-6pm; free. Hundreds of thousands of books, DVDs, CDs, and other forms of media are being sold for $5 or less to benefit the San Francisco Public Library.

Women’s Building Celebration Women’s Building, 3543 18th St., SF; (415) 431-1180. 4pm, free. Celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Women’s Building at the open house featuring tours of the historic building, food, entertainment, and storytelling.

BAY AREA

Life of Ramparts Magazine First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing, Berk.; (510) 848-3696. 7:30pm, free. Hear Robert Scheer and Peter Richardson discuss the short and remarkable life of Ramparts magazine (1962-1975), one of the most influential leftist publications of its era.

FRIDAY 25

Ghetto to Gaza POOR Magazine, 2nd floor, Redstone Building, 2940 16th St., SF; (415) 671-0789. 7pm, free. Hear Mutulu Olugbala, also known as M1 from the rap group Dead Prez, share his recent experiences in Gaza, Cairo, and Europe and compare them with ghetto life in Black communities in the U.S.

Ride Too! CELLspace, 2050 Bryant, SF; (415) 648-7562. 8pm, $10-20 sliding scale. Enjoy bikes, beer, and bands at this benefit for CELLspace and the Florida St. Mural Project and neighbor welcome back party for the Bike Kitchen.

Taste of Greece Annunciation Cathedral, 245 Valencia, SF; (415) 864-8000. Fri.-Sat. 11am-10pm, Sun. Noon-9pm; $10, print out a free ticket at www.annunciation.org. Enjoy some authentic fresh Greek food at San Francisco’s only Greek food festival.

SATURDAY 26

Asian American Women Artists SOMArts Cultural Center, Bay Gallery, 934 Brannan, SF; (415) 722-4296. 6:30pm, $15-50 sliding scale. Celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Asian American Women Artists Association at this event featuring three exhibitions with art from Bay Area women, live music, activities, and more.

iB Crafty Workspace Limited, 2150 Folsom, SF; www.market-sf.com. Noon, free. Shop local at this handmade craftmasters and artists showcase. Featuring fashion, jewelry, paintings, cards, housewares, and more.

Tour de Fat Speedway Meadows, Golden Gate Park, SF; www.sfbike.org. 11am-5pm, free. Don’t miss this years bicycle festival featuring a bicycle parade, live music, food, bicycle performances, and more. Proceeds to benefit the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition and the Bay Area Ridge Trails Council.

Trannyshack Boat Cruise Pier 41, Fisherman’s Wharf, SF; visit www.trannyshack.com for info and tickets. 9pm; $45, tickets not available at the dock. Get on board the S.S. Trannyshack 2009 as it sails around the San Francisco Bay with cruise director Heklina presenting a show featuring Dirty Sanchez and the gorgeous ladies of Trannyshack.

BAY AREA

Watershed Environmental Poetry Fest Civic Center Park, downtown Berkeley; (510) 526-9105. Noon, free. Join poets Robert Haas, David Mas Masumoto, Arthur Sze, Carol Moldaw, and many more at this day of poetry, music, and activism.

SUNDAY 27

Folsom Street Fair Folsom between 7th and 12th St., SF; www.folsomstreetfair.org. 11am-6pm, donations appreciated. The 26th Folsom Street Fair offers over 250 exciting, sexy exhibitors and vendors, food, drinks, and artistic and cultural entertainment.

BAY AREA

Last Sundays Fest Telegraph between Dwight and Bancroft, Berk.; www.lastsundaysfest.com. 11am-7pm, free. Take in the culture of the East Bay at the last Last Sundays Fest of the year. Featuring entertainment, culture, recreation, shopping, and dining.

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Music listings

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Music listings are compiled by Paula Connelly and Cheryl Eddy. Since club life is unpredictable, it’s a good idea to call ahead to confirm bookings and hours. Prices are listed when provided to us. Submit items at listings@sfbg.com.

WEDNESDAY 23

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

"Blue Bear School of Music Band Showcase" Café du Nord. 7:30pm, $12-20.

Dance Gavin Dance, Emarosa, Of Mice and Men, Tides of Man Slim’s. 9pm, $14.

Dillinger Four, Riverboat Gamblers, Arrivals, Young Offenders Bottom of the Hill. 7pm, $12.

Do, Hollywood Mon Amour Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $10.

David Dondero, Christopher Lockett, Shaun Paul Gordon Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $10.

Pete McGill and His Cottonfield Blues Band Rasselas Jazz. 8pm, free.

Goh Nakamura, Doug Paisley, Lesser Lights Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $10.

Pet Shop Boys Warfield. 9pm, $55-89.50.

Pitbull, David Rush Regency Ballroom. 8pm, $32.50.

Portugal. The Man, Drug Rug, Robert Francis Independent. 9pm, $15.

Shari Puorto and Alastair Greene Biscuits and Blues. 8pm, $15.

Revolting Cocks, Jim Rose Circus Fillmore. 8pm, $25.

Sinner, Sinners, Unko Atama, Horror X Annie’s Social Club. 8pm, $7.

BAY AREA

Rodrigo y Gabriela Fox Theater. 8pm, $35.50.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Anthony Brown’s Asian American Orchestra Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8pm, $20.

"B3 Wednesdays" Coda. 9pm, $7. With Adam Shulman.

Cat’s Corner Savanna Jazz. 7pm, $5-10.

Michael Chase Rite Spot, 2099 Folsom, SF; www.ritespotcafe.net. 8:30pm, free.

Ben Marcato and the Mondo Combo Top of the Mark. 7:30pm, $10.

Tin Cup Serenade Le Colonial, 20 Cosmo Place, SF; (415) 931-3600. 7pm, free.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

49 Special Climate Theater, 285 9th St., SF; (415) 704-3260. 8pm.

Freddy Clarke and Wobbly World Peña Pachamama, 1630 Powell, SF; (415) 751-6090. 8:30pm, $10.

Liz Rogers Plough and Stars. 8pm, free.

Tippy Canoe SoCha Café, 3235 Mission, SF; (415) 643-6848. 8:30pm, free.

DANCE CLUBS

Booty Call Q-Bar, 456 Castro; www.bootycallwednesdays.com. 9pm. Juanita Moore hosts this dance party, featuring DJ Robot Hustle.

Club Shutter Elbo Room. 10pm, $5. Goth with DJs Nako, Omar, and Justin.

Hands Down! Bar on Church. 9pm, free. With DJs Claksaarb, Mykill, and guests spinning indie, electro, house, and bangers.

Indulgence Wednesdays Harry Denton’s Starlight Room, top floor, Sir Francis Drake Hotel, 450 Powell, SF; (415) 395-8595. 9pm, $15. With DJs Sam Isaac, Bruce, Live Models, and more helping you to relax, dance and indulge in good food and good company.

Jam Wednesday Infusion Lounge. 10pm, free. DJ Slick Dee.

Qoöl 111 Minna Gallery. 5-10pm, $5. Pan-techno lounge with DJs Spesh, Gil, Hyper D, and Jondi.

RedWine Social Dalva. 9pm-2am, free. DJ TophOne and guests spin outernational funk and get drunk.

Respect Wednesdays End Up. 10pm, $5. Rotating DJs Lonestar Sound, Young Fyah, Sake One, Serg, and more spinning reggae, dancehall, roots, lovers rock, and mash ups.

Synchronize Il Pirata, 2007 16th St.; (415) 626-2626. 10pm, free. Psychedelic dance music with DJs Helios, Gatto Matto, Psy Lotus, Intergalactoid, and guests.

THURSDAY 24

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

B-52s, Venus Infers Regency Ballroom. 8pm, $55.50-67.50.

Back40 Simple Pleasures, 3434 Balboa, SF; (415) 387-4022. 8pm, free.

"Blue Bear School of Music Band Showcase" Café du Nord. 7:30pm, $12-20.

Cormorant, Velinas, Fell Voices, Elm, Servile Sect, DJ Rob Metal Thee Parkside. 9pm, $8.

Cotton Jones, Frontier Ruckus, Garrett Pierce Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

Shane Dwight Biscuits and Blues. 8pm, $15.

Mark Eitzel, Victor Krummenacher Red Devil Lounge. 8pm, $15.

Hundred Days, Mata Leon, Black Mercies Knockout. 9:30pm, $5.

John Brown’s Body, Black Seeds Rickshaw Stop. 8:30pm, $17.

Manic Street Preachers Fillmore. 8pm, $22.50.

*Om, Lichens Independent. 9pm, $15.

On the Spot Trio, Audible Mainframe Boom Boom Room. 9:30pm, $7.

La Plebe, King City, Jesse Morris and the Man Cougars Eagle Tavern. 9:30pm, $7.

Jerry Jeff Walker, Django Walker Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $35.

"World Record Appreciation Society" Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $8.

BAY AREA

Bon Iver, Megafaun Fox Theater. 8pm, $22.50.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Al Coster Trio and jam Savanna Jazz. 8pm, $5.

Andrew Elmer Shanghai 1930. 7pm, free.

Eric Kurtzrock Trio Ana Mandara, Ghirardelli Square, 891 Beach, SF; (415) 771-6800. 7:30pm, free.

Kitten on the Keys Rite Spot, 2099 Folsom, SF; www.ritespotcafe.net. 9pm, free.

Marlina Teich Trio Brickhouse, 426 Brannan, SF; (415) 820-1595. 7-10pm, free.

"Music for People and Thingamajigs Festival" Meridian Gallery, 535 Powell, SF; (510) 418-3447. 8pm, $10-15. Experimental music incorporating found and made instruments and alternate tuning systems.

Soulive Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8 and 10pm, $22-26.

Stompy Jones Top of the Mark. 7:30pm, $10.

Walter Earl Group Coda. 9pm, $7.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Bluegrass and Old Time Jam Atlas Café. 8pm, free.

Flamenco Thursday Peña Pachamama, 1630 Powell, SF; (415) 751-6090. 8:15pm, $10-12. With Carola Zertuche.

Denise Funari, Misisipi Mike Wolf, Gayle Lynn, Maurice Tani Café Royal, 800 Post, SF; (415) 441-4409. 8pm, free.

Phil Johnson Castagnola’s, 286 Jefferson, SF; (415) 776-5015. 8pm, $10.

Old Blind Dogs Plough and Stars. 8pm, free.

Sarah Stiles, Rachel Wood-Rome Luggage Store Gallery, 1007 Market, SF; (415) 255-5971. 8pm, $6-10.

DANCE CLUBS

Afrolicious Elbo Room. 9:30pm, $5-6. DJs Pleasuremaker, Señor Oz, J Elrod, and B Lee spin Afrobeat, Tropicália, electro, samba, and funk.

Bingotopia Knockout. 7:30-9:30pm, free. Play from drinks, dignity, and dorky prizes with Lady Stacy Pants.

Caribbean Connection Little Baobab, 3388 19th St; 643-3558. 10pm, $3. DJ Stevie B and guests spin reggae, soca, zouk, reggaetón, and more.

DJ Jah Yzer Icon Lounge. 10pm, $5. Hosted by ArtNowSF.

DJ JayCeeOh Ambassador Lounge, 673 Geary, SF; (415) 563-8192. 10pm. RSVP to guestlist@justoneent.com with subject "jco".

Drop the Pressure Underground SF. 6-10pm, free. Electro, house, and datafunk highlight this weekly happy hour.

Funky Rewind Skylark. 9pm, free. DJ Kung Fu Chris, MAKossa, and rotating guest DJs spin heavy funk breaks, early hip-hop, boogie, and classic Jamaican riddims.

Heat Icon Ultra Lounge. 10pm, free. Hip-hop, R&B, reggae, and soul.

Kick It Bar on Church. 9pm. Hip-hop with DJ Jorge Terez.

Koko Puffs Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary; 885-4788. 10pm, free. Dubby roots reggae and Jamaican funk from rotating DJs.

Mestiza Bollywood Café, 3376 19th St., SF; (415) 970-0362. 10pm, free. Showcasing progressive Latin and global beats with DJ Juan Data.

Mirza Party and Soul Movers Infusion Lounge. 9pm, free. Featuring Designer DJs.

Popscene 330 Rich. 10pm, $10. Rotating DJs spinning indie, Britpop, electro, new wave, and post-punk.

Represent Icon Lounge. 10pm, $5. With Resident DJ Ren the Vinyl Archaeologist and guest.

Toppa Top Thursdays Club Six. 9pm, $5. Jah Warrior, Jah Yzer, I-Vier, and Irie Dole spin the reggae jams for your maximum irie-ness.

FRIDAY 25

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Addison, Started-Its, Semiconductors Hotel Utah. 9pm, $8.

Dave and Confused, Funky Beulah, Spacelord, Ghosts on the Radio Rock-It Room. 9pm, $5.

Dead to Me, Nothington, Re-Volts, Semi Evolved Simians Thee Parkside. 9pm, $10.

Felonious Coda. 10pm, $10.

Foolproof, Cuban Cigar Crisis, Dum Sprio Spero House of Shields. 9pm, $5.

Galactic Fillmore. 9pm, $29.50.

Gov’t Mule, Carney Warfield. 8pm, $37.

"Kid Koala presents the Slew: Live" Independent. 9pm, $17. Adira Amram opens.

Living Colour, Fishbone Regency Ballroom. 9pm, $27.

One in the Chamber, Sabertooth Zombie, Hell Hath No Fury, Waylin Jenocide Annie’s Social Club. 9:30pm, $7.

Proclaimers, Pants Pants Pants Bottom of the Hill. 9:30pm, $15.

Radiators Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $25.

Slavic Soul Party, Brass Menazeri Elbo Room. 8:30 and 11:30pm, $15 (two-show pass, $25).

Tainted Love, Mustache Harbor Bimbo’s 365 Club. 9pm, $23.

Billy Talent, Poison the Well, AM Taxi Slim’s. 8:30pm, $15.

This Charming Band, Erasure-Esque, Love Vigilantes Café du Nord. 9:30pm, $12.

3 Leafs, Carletta Sue Kay, Si Claro Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $6.

Whip Boom Boom Room. 1am, $20.

Wonder Bread 5 Red Devil Lounge. 8pm, $10.

BAY AREA

Chickenfoot, Queensryche, Davy Knowles and Back Door Slam Greek Theater, UC Berkeley, Berk; www.ticketmaster.com. 7pm, $39.50-65.

Hammer, Whodini Fox Theater. 8pm, $45.75-65.75.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Audium 9 1616 Bush, SF; (415) 771-1616. 8:30pm, $15.

Black Market Jazz Orchestra Top of the Mark. 9pm, $10.

"Cultural Encounters: Friday Nights at the deYoung presents Jazz at Intersection" Wilsey Court, de Young Museum, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Dr, SF; www.deyoungmuseum.org. 6:30pm, free. With Sarah Wilson’s Trapeze Project.

Eric Kurtzrock Trio Ana Mandara, Ghirardelli Square, 891 Beach, SF; 771-6800. 8pm, free.

Jim Butler Quartet Savanna Jazz. 8pm, $5.

Kitten on the Keys Rite Spot, 2099 Folsom, SF; www.ritespotcafe.net. 9pm, free.

Lucid Lovers Rex Hotel, 562 Sutter, SF; (415) 433-4434. 6-8pm.

Soulive Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8 and 10pm, $22-26.

Terry Disley Experience Shanghai 1930. 7:30pm, free.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Cuban Nights Peña Pachamama, 1630 Powell, SF; (415) 751-6090. 8:30pm, $19.95. With singer Fito Reinoso.

Makana Biscuits and Blues. 8pm, $20.

Quijerema, Rafael Manriquez Red Poppy Art House. 8pm, $12-15. Developing the Chilean new song movement.

Social Sunday, Goodbye Gadget Dolores Park Café. 7:30pm, free.

Brandon Stanley Plough and Stars. 8pm, $6.

BAY AREA

Brad Paisley, Dierks Bentley, Jimmy Wayne Shoreline Amphitheater, One Amphitheater Pkwy, Mtn View; www.livenation.com. 7:30pm, $29.25-58.75.

DANCE CLUBS

Activate! Lookout, 3600 16th St; (415) 431-0306. 9pm, $3. Face your demigods and demons at this Red Bull-fueled party.

Bar on Church 9pm. Rotating DJs Zax, Zhaldee, and Nuxx.

Blow Up Rickshaw Stop. 10pm, $10-15. DJ Jefrodisiac and Ava Berlin present this electro-disco-noir nightclub.

Bombastik 103 Harriet, 103 Harriet, SF; (415) 431-7444. 10pm, $15. With DJs Benga, PantyRaid, Martyn, and more.

Boom Boom Room 9pm, $10. With Pleasuremaker, DJ Señor Oz, and Afrolicious.

Drop the Lime Mighty. 10pm, $12. With DJs Tim Exile, Warp and Sleazemore.

End of Summer Party Jelly’s, 295 Terry Francois, SF; (510) 692-7069. 10pm, $15. With DJs Rick Lee, Kel’s, Gator Boots, and more. September babies free until Midnight.

Exhale, Fridays Project One Gallery, 251 Rhode Island; (415) 465-2129. 5pm, $5. Happy hour with art, fine food, and music with Vin Sol, King Most, DJ Centipede, and Shane King.

Fat Stack Fridays Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 10pm, free. With rotating DJs Romanowski, B-Love, Tomas, Toph One, and Vinnie Esparza.

Gay Asian Paradise Club Eight, 1151 Folsom, SF; www.eightsf.com. 9pm, $8. Featuring two dance floors playing dance and hip hop, smoking patio, and 2 for 1 drinks before 10pm. Gymnasium Stud. 10pm, $5. With DJs Violent Vickie and guests spinning electro, disco, rap, and 90s dance and featuring performers, gymnastics, jump rope, drink specials, and more.

Look Out Weekend Bambuddha Lounge. 4pm, free. Drink specials, food menu and resident DJs White Girl Lust, Swayzee, Philie Ocean, and more.

M4M Fridays Underground SF. 10pm-2am. Joshua J and Frankie Sharp host this man-tastic party.

Miles Medina, Slick D Infusion Lounge. 9pm, $20.

Punk Rock and Shlock Karaoke Annie’s Social Club. 9pm-2am, $5. Eileen and Jody bring you songs from multiple genres to butcher: punk, new wave, alternative, classic rock, and more.

Stupid Fresh Club Six. 9pm, free. With DJs Delivery, Bling Crosby, Frank Footer, and more spinning hip hop, reggae, and club hits.

Suite Jesus 111 Minna. 9pm, $20. Beats, dancehall, reggae and local art.

Teenage Dance Craze Party Knockout. 10pm, $3. Teen beat and twisters with DJs Sergio Igledias, Russell Quann, and dX the Funky Gran Paw.

SATURDAY 26

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

!!!, Indian Jewelry Independent. 9pm, $20.

Birdmonster, A B and the Sea Bottom of the Hill. 2:15pm, $5-20. Benefit for the Potrero Hill Public Library.

Bridge to Hope Great Meadow, Fort Mason, SF; 1-800-595-4849. 11am, $38-78. A benefit for the Lazarex Cancer Foundation featuring Brian McKnight, Gerald Albright, Kirk Whalum, Zakiya Hooker, and more.

Epiphanette, Great Girls Blouse, Polyphonic Monk Brainwash Café, 1122 Folsom, SF; (415) 861-3663. 8pm, free.

Eric McFadden Trio Boom Boom Room. 9:30pm, $12.

Five Fingers of Death, Holy Remodel, Kumbulus Thee Parkside. 3pm, free.

Grannies, Meat Sluts, Maklak, Psychology of Genocide Annie’s Social Club. 9pm, $7.

Notorious, Glorified HJ Red Devil Lounge. 8pm, $10.

Ovipositor, Generalissimo, Cartographer Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $6.

Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions Fillmore. 9pm, $26.50.

Tainted Love, Barely Manilow Bimbo’s 365 Club. 9pm, $23.

Telefon Tel Aviv, Race, Cloud Archive Bottom of the Hill. 10pm, $10.

Earl Thomas Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $22.

Wallpaper Rickshaw Stop. 9pm, $10-15.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Audium 9 1616 Bush, SF; (415) 771-1616. 8:30pm, $15.

Eric Kurtzrock Trio Ana Mandara, Ghirardelli Square, 891 Beach, SF; (415) 771-6800. 8pm, free.

"Jazz Mafia Presents: Remix Live" Coda. 10pm, $10.

Proteges of Hyler Jones Shanghai 1930. 7:30pm, free.

Roberta Gambarini Quartet Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8 and 10pm, $18-22.

Ricardo Scales Top of the Mark. 9pm, $10.

Susannah Smith and band Savanna Jazz. 8pm, $5. With jazz harpist Motoshi Kosako.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Hank Cramer San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park, west end of Fisherman’s Wharf, SF; (415) 561-6662, ext. 33. 8pm, $14. Part of the Sea Music Concert Series.

Toshio Hirano Rite Spot, 2099 Folsom, SF; www.ritespotcafe.net. 9pm, free.

Paddy Keenan Plough and Stars. 8pm, $6.

Peruvian Night Peña Pachamama, 1630 Powell, SF; (415) 751-6090. 7:30pm, $19.95. With Luis Valverde and Jose Monteverde.

Sila, DJ Santero, DJ Jeremiah and the Afrobeat Nation Café du Nord. 9:30pm, $15.

BAY AREA

Paulina Rubio Fox Theater. 8pm, $39.50-69.50.

DANCE CLUBS

Baby Loves Disco Ruby Skye. 2pm, $18. A child proof disco party for toddlers, preschoolers, and parents looking for a break from the routine playground circuit.

Bar on Church 9pm. Rotating DJs Foxxee, Joseph Lee, Zhaldee, Mark Andrus, and Niuxx.

Barracuda 111 Minna. 9pm, $5-10. Eclectic 80s music with Djs Damon, Phillie Ocean, and Mod Dave, plus free 80s hair and make-up by professional stylists.

Blowoff Slim’s. 10pm, $15. Hosted and DJ’d by Bob Mould and Rich Morel.

DJ Solarz Infusion Lounge. 9pm, $20.

4OneFunktion Elbo Room. 10pm, $5. Hip-hop with Computer Jay, F.A.M.E., and DJs A-Ron, B. Cause, and Mista B.

Funkentanzen Paradise Lounge. 10pm, $15. Featuring Poker Flat and DJs Burnski, Adnan Sharif, Limaçon and Zenith.

Go Bang! Deco SF, 510 Larkin St; (415) 346-2025. 9pm, $5. Experience the Atomic Dancefloor Disco Action with DJs Eddy Bauer, Flight, Nicky B., Sergio and more.

HYP Club Eight, 1151 Folsom, SF; www.eightsf.com. 10pm, free. Gay and lesbian hip hop party, featuring DJs spinning the newest in the top 40s hip hop and hyphy.

Spirit Fingers Sessions 330 Ritch. 9pm, free. With DJ Morse Code and live guest performances.

Summer Saturdays Bar On Church. 9pm, free. With DJ Mark Andrus spinning top 40, mashups, hip hop, and electro.

SUNDAY 27

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Blitzen Trapper Independent. 8pm, $16.

Bonfire Madigan, Kelli Rudick, Odessa Chen Café du Nord. 8pm, $12.

Brothers Goldman Boom Boom Room. 9:30pm, free.

Didimao, Swahili Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $5.

Edguy, Epicurean, Luna Mortis, Epidemia Slim’s. 8pm, $22.

Honor Society Fillmore. 8pm, $7.11.

*"Leonard Cohen Tribute" Make-Out Room. 8pm, $7. Musicians Jeffrey Luck Lucas and Justin Frahm celebrate their birthdays with a Cohen tribute, featuring performances of Cohen songs by Kelley Stoltz, Sean Smith, Nathan Wanta, Kira Lynn Cain, and more.

Sondre Lerche, JBM Gret American Music Hall. 8pm, $21.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Don Alberts and Michael Jones Savanna Jazz. 7:30pm, $5.

Cecilio and Kapono Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8pm, $40.

Terry Disley Washington Square Bar and Grill, 1707 Powell, SF; (415) 433-1188. 7pm, free.

Grupo Falso Baiano with Eva Scow Coda. 8pm, $7.

Rob Modica and friends Simple Pleasures, 3434 Balboa, SF; (415) 387-4022. 3pm, free.

Roberta Gambarini Quartet Yoshi’s San Francisco. 2pm, $5-22.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Jack Gilder, Kevin Bemhagen, Richard Mandel and friends Plough and Stars. 8pm, free.

Grupo Falso Baiano Coda. 8pm, $7.

Kami Nixon and the Skiddy Knickers Thee Parkside. 4pm, free.

DANCE CLUBS

DiscoFunk Mashups Cat Club. 10pm, free. House and 70’s music.

Dub Mission Elbo Room. 9pm, $6. Dub, roots, and classic dancehall with DJ Sep and guests International Observer and Jacob Cino aka DJ Chinbambino.

Gloss Sundays Trigger, 2344 Market, SF; (415) 551-CLUB. 7pm. With DJ Hawthorne spinning house, funk, soul, retro, and disco.

Honey Soundsystem Paradise Lounge. 8pm-2am. "Dance floor for dancers – sound system for lovers." Got that?

Jock! Lookout, 3600 16th; 431-0306. 3pm, $2. This high-energy party raises money for LGBT sports teams.

Kick It Bar on Church. 9pm. Hip-hop with DJ Zax.

Last Sunday Bollyhood Café. 9:30pm, $2. With DJs Noble and Duroja spinning dance hall, soul, and R&B.

Religion Bar on Church. 3pm. With DJ Nikita.

Stag AsiaSF. 6pm, $5. Gay bachelor parties are the target demo of this weekly erotic tea dance.

5 O’Clock Jive Inside Live Art Gallery, 151 Potrero, SF; (415) 305-8242. 5pm, $5. A weekly swing dance party.

MONDAY 28

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Alabama Mike and Third Degree Rasselas Jazz. 9pm, free.

Alice in Chains Fillmore. 8pm, $25.

Dead Meadow, Spindrift, Howlin Rain, Kymberli’s Music Box DJs Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $15.

Jeffertitti’s Nile, B and Not B, Boyfriend Search, Love Dimension Knockout. 9pm, $7.

MV and EE, Expo ’70, Bronze, Inner Beauty, DJ Andy Cabie Café du Nord. 9:30pm, $12.

Metalkpretty Elbo Room. 9pm, $5.

Rain Machine Independent. 8pm, $15.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Cecilio and Kapono Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8pm, $40.

Lavay Smith Trio Enrico’s, 504 Broadway, SF; www.enricossf.com. 7pm, free.

Richard Rite Spot, 2099 Folsom, SF; www.ritespotcafe.net. 8pm, free.

DANCE CLUBS

Black Gold Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary; 885-4788. 10pm-2am, free. Senator Soul spins Detroit soul, Motown, New Orleans R&B, and more — all on 45!

Going Steady Dalva. 10pm, free. DJs Amy and Troy spinning 60’s girl groups, soul, garage, and more.

King of Beats Tunnel Top. 10pm. DJs J-Roca and Kool Karlo spinning reggae, electro, boogie, funk, 90’s hip hop, and more.

Krazy for Karaoke Happy Hour Knockout. 5pm, free. Belt it out with host Deadbeat.

Manic Mondays Bar on Church. 9pm. Drink 80-cent cosmos with Djs Mark Andrus and Dangerous Dan.

Monster Show Underground SF. 10pm, $5. Cookie Dough and DJ MC2 make Mondays worth dancing about, with a killer drag show at 11pm.

Network Mondays Azul Lounge, One Tillman Pl; www.inhousetalent.com. 9pm, $5. Hip-hop, R&B, and spoken word open mic, plus featured performers.

Spliff Sessions Tunnel Top. 10pm, free. DJs MAKossa, Kung Fu Chris, and C. Moore spin funk, soul, reggae, hip-hop, and psychedelia on vinyl.

TUESDAY 29

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Crown City Rockers hosted by Lyrics Born, Spaceheater’s Blast Furnace, DJ D-Sharp,

Mason Jennings, Crash Kings Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $20.

Smokin’ Joe Kubek and Bnois King Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 11:30pm, $15.

Lahar Boom Boom Room. 9:30pm, $5.

Samvega, Shimmies, Maere Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $8.

Sian Alice Group, Leopold and His Fiction, Enablers Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $10.

Destani Wolf Independent. 8pm, $10.99.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Dave Parker Quintet Rasselas Jazz. 8pm.

David Binney Band Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8 and 10pm, $12-16.

"Jazz Mafia Tuesdays" Coda. 9pm, $7. With Shayna Steele and Jazz Mafia.

Michael Browne Trio Rite Spot, 2099 Folsom, SF; www.ritespotcafe.net. 8pm, free.

Ricardo Scales Top of the Mark. 6:30pm, $5.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Kailash Kher, Cheb I Sabbah Fillmore. 8pm, $25.

Gino Napoli Simple Pleasures, 3434 Balboa, SF; (415) 387-4022. 8pm, free.

Song Session Plough and Stars. 8pm, free. With Vince Keehan and friends.

DANCE CLUBS

Bitches Get Stitches 222 Hyde, 222 Hyde, SF; (415) 812-6143. 8pm, $15. With DJ Holger Zilske.

Drunken Monkey Annie’s Social Club. 9pm-2am, free. Rock ‘n’ roll for inebriated primates like you.

Eclectic Company Skylark, 9pm, free. DJs Tones and Jaybee spin old school hip hop, bass, dub, glitch, and electro.

Rock Out Karaoke! Amnesia. 7:30pm. With Glenny Kravitz.

Share the Love Trigger, 2344 Market, SF; (415) 551-CLUB. 5pm, free. With DJ Pam Hubbuck spinning house.

Stump the Wizard Argus Lounge. 9pm, free. Music and interactive DJ games with DJs What’s His Fuck and the Wizard.

Womanizer Bar on Church. 9pm. With DJ Nuxx.

Psychic Dream Astrology

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Mercury will stop its retrograde nonsense on the 29th.

ARIES

March 21-April 19

Athletes will tell you that they never feel better than when they’re sweaty and short of breath. The reason for this is that the more seriously you engage your body, the easier it is to get a handle on yourself. Gather your energy and get grounded so that you can make smart choices. Strive towards sure footedness.

TAURUS

April 20-May 20

Sadly, not everything that you want is good for you, Taurus. Desire is just as often motivated by self-sabotaging impulses as by actual wanting. Make sure you are not engaged in bad self-fulfilling prophesies. Be willing to look underneath why you feel like you’ve gotta have those shoes, that hottie, or those wheels. Motive is everything this week.

GEMINI

May 21-June 21

Being capable of great things is awesome, and you are more than capable — you are downright brimming with potential. The problem is, you’re having a rough time figuring out how to put all your sparkle to good use. Cultivate perspective and a good sense of timing.

CANCER

June 22-July 22

You can’t blame folks for not meeting your needs if you were never direct about them in the first place. If you do, you’re not likely to get very far. Don’t externalize the anger you feel towards your self at the people closest to you. Adopt a sense of humor about your situation instead.

LEO

July 23-Aug. 22

Your anxious head is like a runaway car on a hill of black ice. It’s bad news, out of control, and not going in a good direction. Slow your thinking and figure out what you feel instead. Forget about the how/who/whys of it all, and just get in touch with your emotions. That way you can figure out what you’re really scared of.

VIRGO

Aug. 23-Sept. 22

It’s time to lay down some serious roots. You are ready to settle into things right now, and all you need is a plan. Get out a pen and pad (if you’re old school) and write a list of all the small parts that need to happen. Then you can partake in the cherished Virgonian pastime of executing your goals with precision.

LIBRA

Sept. 23-Oct. 22

Sometimes we’re not supposed to know the answers, and that lack of assurance can be a breeding ground for anxiety. This week, you may gain intimate knowledge about the concepts of chaos and upheaval. Allow things to pass that are no longer serving you and let the future present itself when it’s good and ready.

SCORPIO

Oct. 23-Nov. 21

Don’t throw in the towel or break things. There are plenty of frustrations plaguing you, and you’ll only make things worse if you’re reactive. Things are changing, and the only control you have is over your own damn self. Act with compassion, insight, and patience this week.

SAGITTARIUS

Nov. 22-Dec. 21

There is too much going on for you to both process emotionally and keep up your hectic lifestyle. The candle you’re burning at both ends is bound to singe your fingers if you don’t slow down and figure out some sort of strategy. More work and less play may make you a dull boy, but at least it won’t give you a meltdown.

CAPRICORN

Dec. 22-Jan. 19

If anyone likes a challenge, its you, Cappy mon Capitan. The stars suggest a duel between your heart of hearts and your large-and-in-charge mind. In one corner, we have your struggle to be happy and enjoy your life, and in the other, we have the demanding voice of reason and everything that’s likely to go wrong. Who’s your money on?

AQUARIUS

Jan. 20-Feb. 18

If you insist on running yourself ragged, no one can stop you. It’s a free(ish) country. But, seriously, what’s your rush? You need some down time before you make a mess. This week, you will save time if you do it once and do it right.

PISCES

Feb. 19-March 20

Loss is such a pain in the butt because there are so many stages to grieving. Even if you are mourning the loss of a shitty apartment or an old and hated job, being without something or someone that you once identified with is emotionally consuming work. Find a creative outlet to redirect your energies into helping your changes along. *

Jessica Lanyadoo has been a psychic dreamer for 15 years. Check out her Website at www.lovelanyadoo.com or contact her for an astrology or intuitive reading at (415) 336-8354 or dreamyastrology@gmail.com.

Running with the night

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FILM NOIR FEST The Columbia trademark: a literal goddess swathed in virginal white robes, she serenely holds aloft a torch à la the Statue of Liberty. What say we gussy her up in black satin and replace that blazing torch with a hot little .45? It seems apropos, considering the Roxie Theater is hosting a "Best of Columbia Noir" retrospective. But does the program manage to eclipse all that angelic light? Yes and no. While there is plenty of nefarious activity on display, a weirdly frequent moralizing often fails to capture the noir spirit.

Take Knock on Any Door (1949). A social justice–courtroom drama steeped in moral outrage, it has the gall to cast Humphrey Bogart not as rogue private dick but as upstanding defense attorney. As directed by Nicholas Ray, Door is a prestige picture flirting with humanity’s underbelly, eventually offering a mea culpa to wash itself clean.

Even "B" movie bona fides like The Whistler (1944) can’t help suffer a little moral affront. Its titular character operates in Rod Serling mode: part superego, part harbinger of doom. Robert Rossen’s Johnny O’Clock (1947) offers all the traditional noir elements, but dang if its criminal antihero (Dick Powell) doesn’t get redeemed by true love. When the SF-set The Lineup (1958) focuses on a pair of drug henchmen, it’s a fascinating character study; when it follows forthright SFPD detectives, it’s Dragnet.

Speaking of lineups, there’s a curious dearth of femmes fatales in this one. Even Sam Fuller, the king of exploitation with a social conscience, fails to deliver one in his otherwise crackerjack Crimson Kimono (1959), a gritty exploration of race relations in midcentury Los Angeles. Anita Ekberg camps it up in the uproarious, Freudian cheesecake-fest Screaming Mimi (1958), but her femme fatale status is seriously undermined by a lack of personal responsibility — she’s like a buxom Barbara Stanwyck with a frontal lobotomy.

Thank the dark lord for the grotesquely atmospheric and oddball Soul of a Monster (1944). It won’t be giving much away to reveal that the movie takes the femme fatale concept to its logical end. Never mind the film’s coda about faith and redemption, the sight of the devil marching resolutely through dark streets, downing power lines in her wake, obliterates all that corn. We can finally chalk one up for the bad girls.

THE BEST OF COLUMBIA NOIR

Sept. 17–30, $5–$9.75

Roxie Theater, 3117 16th St., SF

(415) 863-1087, www.roxie.com

Fringe follies

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

The San Francisco Fringe Festival is, like, 18 or something this year. That used to mean you were middle-aged in, like, the Middle Ages. But this is 2000-and-something. The multi-venue Exit Theatre–centered Fringe, lottery-based democratic mayhem at its most unsound and intriguing, appears as youthful as ever. Witness the healthy emphasis on clowns, derelicts, and deviants, the longstanding stalwarts of its revolving stage.

One of the kickoff shows Wednesday eve was LandEscape, Rowena Richie’s decidedly quirky but adept, factually hefty, and not unamusing theater-dance piece based on the work of real-food advocate Michael Pollan. It’s about the disastrous perversity of industrial farming and the hope in old-fashioned alternatives. But top of the 2009 crop (or at least what was glimpsed from among roughly 40 scheduled shows in the two days before print deadline) is The Godling, which marks the creepy-sexy and dependably weird return of New York’s Endtimes Productions, purveyors of last year’s homerun, Knuckleball. This time it’s a whole new cast and crew, with writing credit for this nicely rendered — and that’s a nice word for it — dark carnival descent going to Mark Borkowski, with a firm hand on the helm from artistic director Russell Dobular.

A sideshow sandwich-board advert for "The Godling" and small, scattered piles of clutter litter the stage at the outset of this horror-charmer, where soon a memorable set of disreputables take shape in the dim light. At the demented head of things is a randy carny showman and seething psychopath (a volcanic Leal Vona) sporting an altered hockey mask and straight razor. Nearby stands, sometimes on hands, his shapely assistant (Leah Dashe). On a chain is their little incubator: a thin naked waif (Candace Janee) hunched over and cupping her protruding stomach, her mess of long hair obscuring angelic features. The couple discusses the keeping of time, nervously, while taking time to mock their prize — the girl with the growing freak in her belly — and awaiting the arrival of a certain "him" who, when he does appear, turns out to be a dapper, gentlemanly torturer.

As Fringe shows go this is a veritable bear on a trike. Nicely acted too. But there’s a line running from The Godling to the other playlets I happened to catch immediately prior, including Cockroach and Hell, the Musical. SF’s Dark Porch Theatre offers a little fevered dream of its own, centered on the eternal return of one wandering brutalized madman-cum–shopping cart (played to a kind of operatic perfection by the ever able Nathan Tucker). Tucker, eyes wild and as prominent as two eight-balls, stirs the stage like a demon chef, as his tormentor (Alison Sacha Ross) rasps accusations and slights his way, all pointing back to a psychosexually fraught night 10 years earlier and its lingering scars mental and otherwise. Director Margery Fairchild also choreographs a trio of Cockroach dancers, three men in beige unitards moving frenetically and continually reconfiguring like blobs of mercury in solution. The nature of the incident is weird enough, and Tucker’s a treat, though not always served by playwright Martin Schwartz’ elevated language and furtive storyline, and a dramatic arc that doesn’t quite come off despite some strong moments amid the faltering momentum.

Darkness descends again in a philosophical and even more comical key with 2006 Best of Fringe winner K.S. Haddock’s Hell, the Musical, which astutely realizes that while Jean Paul Sartre cooked up the perfect image of hell in other people, he completely left out the power chords. The charismatic cast of this revamped No Exit can sing and act, and the live musical accompaniment by the Crooked Family provides the Pat Benatar-esque punch you’d expect to be leveled by and against the damned.

SAN FRANCISCO FRINGE FESTIVAL

Through Sept. 20, $10 or less
Various venues, SF
(415) 673-3847, www.sffringe.org

Rock me, Amadeus

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kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER How do you fluff up sagging ole demon rock in the 21st century? Break it down to just one dude with a laptop and free-floating mix of hip-hop and hesher, ho’-pulling and hoary? Take it up a couple jillion notches and set it free of verse, chorus, and bridge to nowhere, heading into noise’s bristling, gristly outerzone? Or just turn it around and send it through the filter of another country, another tongue, another cult-cha — and back. The latter is the case for French combo Phoenix and Israeli outfit Monotonix (see sidebar), two travelers in the rutted, wrecked roads of rock — both playing this week in this bobo bastion by the Bay.

"When we were young," says Phoenix guitarist Laurent "Branco" Brancowitz, 35, "we tried to sound like the Velvet Underground and tried to erase the Frenchness." He chuckles under his breath. He’s on the phone from Versailles, where Phoenix first rose up from old Europe’s antiquities. "But now that we’ve grown up, we don’t try to hide our accent. We love the fact that we had to admit we come from a different country than most rock musicians. We can’t talk about Cadillacs, but we talk about our own things: we talk about the Eiffel Tower, Versailles, the things that are our Mississippi and cotton fields."

Tough to reenvision the Eiffel as a small-town Midwestern water tower — but Phoenix manages its own reinvention on the Parisian landmark on "1901," off Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix (Loyaute/Glassnote) — as well as, Brancowitz explains, "all these things that were so modern at the time, that are now so obvious and cliché. There was a moment when [the Eiffel was] scary, offering a new vision for the future. It was an idea we were fascinated by, the idea of modernity in the past and how you relate to that."

Phoenix has flown far since the days when it served as early Air’s live band and had a sleeper hit of sorts with "Too Young" via the Lost in Translation soundtrack. Vocalist Thomas Mars might have graduated to the gossip columns as director Sofia Coppola’s baby daddy, but Wolfgang can stand proudly on its own (with help from producer Philippe Zdar of Cassius), straddling the kingdom of Killers-ish dancefloor-friendly rock-pop with ethereal numbers like "Fences" and the more austere, ambitious ambient outskirts, as embodied by the lovely "Love Like a Sunset Part I."

Thanks to its old Versailles nest, the outfit is accustomed to both staring inward at the past and out. There, says Brancowitz, "the buildings were perfectly symmetrical. There’s the boredom — that’s important. We had all these dreams of escaping. The combination of boredom and beauty shaped us." The band members hid out in their basements listening to the Velvets and the Beatles and retreating to another kind of inspiring yet imposing past, while Mozart, Liszt, and the like blared in the background. As kids, Brancowitz recalls, "We had a lot of soccer matches with a soundtrack of classical music — very loud classical music."

That breed of bonding has led to the fact, as the guitarist puts it, "for some very strange reason, all the good French artists are friends." Brancowitz himself started out in a band called Darlin’ with Daft Punk’s Guy Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter, the pair who changed the world’s perception of French pop. The punk Beach Boys-inspired band crumbled when the other two "decided to go to a lot of rave parties, and I didn’t because I didn’t like the nightclub life. I’m a bit of a snob about it — I find it very vulgar." He laughs. "But we are friends. No issues." *

PHOENIX

Thurs/17, 8 p.m., $30–$32

Warfield

982 Market, SF

www.goldenboice.com


MONOTONIX IN STEREO

"Sit the fuck down! Sit the fuck down!" yelled Monotonix vocalist Levi "Ha Haziz" Elvis, né Ami Shalev, at this year’s Mess with Texas getdown during South by Southwest. An impressive display of crowd control, honed by somewhat unexpected circumstances. "I was trained in the Israeli Army," says Shalev. "They want you to be able to control people — just kidding!" But seriously, kids: "I must say every time the crowd does whatever I tell them to do, it’s kind of surprising." He’s on the phone in Jaffa, outside Tel Aviv, where the rock-out rage machine known as Monotonix is still based, despite the city’s (and country’s) small rock scene: "The only way for us to get bigger, develop, was to go outside Israel," he says. "There are a lot of good things in Israel, but not in rock music. Rock music is not in our culture." Nevertheless Monotonix’s first full-length, Where Were You When It Happened (Drag City), which the group recorded with Tim Green in SF, sounds like it’s running spectacularly well on the filthy fumes of stateside guitar-army conscripts like MC5. And word keeps spreading about Monotonix’s fiery shows. "I don’t want to sound arrogant," says Shalev, "but it keeps snowballing."

Thurs/17, 9 p.m., $15. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

Playlist

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CROCODILES

Summer of Hate

(Fat Possum)

If it’s 1988 all over again, Crocodiles are our Spacemen 3, ready to deliver the perfect prescription: drum machines. vintage organs, drugs = god lyrics. They’ve got the best Jesus and Mary Chain death anthems too, and the occasional burst of energy, trading ‘ludes for upper-spiked punk on "Soft Skull (In My Room)." The poise and epic production here are surprising for a debut.

GRASS WIDOW

Grass Widow EP

(Make a Mess)

Bullseye. Times four.

BARBARA LYNN

Here is Barbara Lynn

(Water)

A lost gem of Atlantic, saved by the boys of Water in Oakland. The clarity and purity of Lynn’s voice are rare — and don’t let those adjectives fool you into thinking she’s a frail flower. Here, the left-handed guitarist makes wise ballads she wrote as a teen burn as strong and steady as anything by Irma Thomas. It’s all in the voice.

EMITT RHODES

The Emitt Rhodes Recordings [1969-1973]

(Hip-O-Select)

Oh, Emitt. At your peak you were picture-perfect: thick brown hair parted down the middle, angelic face with a doll’s complexion. The music business’ merry-go-round was cruel to you, but what glorious pop songs you’ve given us: "Live Till You Die" has been holding me together the last week or two, and it’s just one of many beauties from your self-titled 1970 LP.

SALLY SHAPIRO

My Guilty Pleasure

(Paper Bag)

The mystery girl who goes by the name of Sally and her partner in song Johan Agebjörn trade the melancholic depths of their first synth pop collection for lighter, sunnier fare. But the Expose-like "Save Your Love" has its charms, as does the song that pits love versus people dying in Africa.

SORCERER

Neon Leon

(Tirk)

On his second album, SF’s Daniel Judd veers away from the Hawaiian and beach themes and takes inspiration from novelist Elmore Leonard while adding some funk touches. But the tracks here still bloom and glisten like a tropical flower seen through time-lapse photography. "Dayglow" is gorgeous and many-faceted. "Raydio (Play It)" is the loveliest tribute to Ray Parker Jr. in the history of recorded sound.

The revolution will not be regionalized

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

It’s safe to say that Achim Bergmann of Trikont, Germany’s oldest independent record label, has an affinity for the underdog. From his favorite soccer team (Munich’s best-loved losers, the 1860 Löwen) to his favorite musicians, it is outsiders who attract Bergmann’s attentions, personal and professional, rather than the heroes of the mainstream. Of course, outsider music comes in many variations, and somehow Trikont manages to embrace them all. From Finnish Tango to American yodeling, German-language reggae to Turkish techno, British punk to Black Panther soul, the label’s eclectic catalog has been transcending language boundaries and international borders long before "world music" became a Billboard buzzword.

First founded in 1967 as a radical publishing arm of the SDS, Trikont started publishing books of political and philosophical ideology collected mainly from the so-called "third world" (Trikont, short for trikontinentale, is a colloquial expression for same), including the Bolivian diaries of Che Guevera, the incendiary Revolution in the Revolution by Régis Debray, and the ubiquitous Little Red Book or Quotations from Chairman Mao. In 1971, Trikont released its first record album — a compilation of neoprimitive folk and radical "self-made music" titled Wir Befreien Uns Selbst or We Free Ourselves, a phrase that could stand as the label’s unofficial motto even today.

"It was very simple, very rough, not polished at all," Bergmann tells me as we sit at a wobbly kitchen table in Trikont’s Munich-Obergiesing headquarters. His youthful exuberance belies his bushy, white Ernest Hemingway beard. When Wir Befreien Uns Selbst sold 20,000 copies, for Bergmann it sparked the realization that "music was the non-dogmatic part of left-radicalism, a way to connect with the working class." It also provided the radicals with music — beyond the endlessly circuutf8g MC5 and Rolling Stones albums — they could call their own. Trikont’s official motto, "our own voice," reflects this ideal to this day.

And what a range of voices call the label home. After splitting from the book publishing side of the business in 1980, Trikont’s focus shifted from being a mouthpiece for the radical German left to being a conduit for what Bergmann terms "popular music" from all over the world. Not popular in the MTV hit-parade sense, but popular as in sphere-of-influence: from the emblematic zydeco of the Louisiana Bayou to the dramatic excesses of Mexican bolero, the label excels at tapping into that particular cultural zeitgeist expressible only through music. It does so through exactingly executed compilations curated by DJs, music journalists, and fellow aficionados of the slightly askew. Their ranks include a veritable who’s who of luminaries from the European music scene — John Peel, Jon Savage, Jonathan Fischer, Thomas Meineke, Bernadette La Hengst — while from our side of the pond, Greil Marcus provided the liner notes for Christoph Wagner’s harrowing 2002 compilation Prayers from Hell: White Gospel and Sinner’s Blues

Like the best mixed tapes, Trikont’s compilations are elegantly cohesive while still retaining the essential element of surprise. My first Trikont album, 1997’s Dead and Gone #2: Songs of Death — which I scored from a department store bargain bin while living in Munich — is an unlikely amalgamation of Serbian requiems, chilling soul tracks, avant-garde moaning provided by Lydia Lunch, Lou Reed, Nico, and Diamanda Galás, a suicidal lament by Bushwick Bill and the Geto Boyz, and an astonishingly moving funeral hymn from South Africa. Not exactly the stock-in-trade set list of goth clubs and vampire movies, yet as suitable a soundtrack for reflection on mortality as any Rosetta Stone album could aspire to be.

A current favorite, last year’s Roll Your Moneymaker: Early Black Rock ‘n’ Roll 1948-1958, plumbs the earliest incarnations of rock music. It includes the first recording of the Preston Foster song "Got My Mojo Working" (sung by the enigmatic Ann Cole), two classic Ike Turner tracks, the powerhouse Etta James anthem "W-O-M-A-N," and the hilariously snarky "Pneumonia" by Joe Tex. Trikont’s acclaimed swamp music series — nine albums’ worth of forgotten zydeco and Cajun gems — evolved from a crash course in music appreciation. Bergmann reminisces: "We came to Floyd Soileau of Flat Town Music … and told him to go to the cellar where the music that he couldn’t sell anymore was stored … [afterward] we were sitting here for weeks, reading things, listening to big boxes of it without any knowledge [of the genre] and ended up with the first three compilations, which were an incredible success."

One of the most outré of Trikont’s compilations is also perhaps one of its most universal: the "La Paloma" series — an audacious collection of 141 versions of one song. Originally penned around 1863 by a Basque national called Sebastian Iraider, the stately habanera spread from continent to continent, insinuating itself into the collective musical consciousness. In Mexico, it’s a call to arms (or to amor). In Romania, it’s a funeral march. In Tanzania, it’s chanted at weddings. In Germany, it’s a seafarer’s anthem. In Hawaii, it’s plucked out on the slack key guitar first introduced to the island by Spanish-speaking vaqueros. In fact, series curator Kalle Laar estimates that "La Paloma" has been recorded well over 2,000 times, in every possible language and style.

Even though his label is open to experimentation and quirk, Bergmann admits that when the "La Paloma" project was first pitched by Laar — a prominent sound artist and "a collector of very strange music" — Trikont’s first reaction was unequivocal: "We said, hey, Kalle Laar, we are crazy, but not that crazy." But Laar persisted, bringing mixed tapes of the song, presenting the history of the tune, and expounding on its worldwide popularity. "It was very interesting to hear," Bergmann recalls. "It was the same song each time, but it wasn’t. You could listen to all these versions at one time and it wasn’t boring or repetitive."

In 1995, the first volume of La Paloma: One Song for All Worlds was released. With versions recorded by Amon Duul II, Hans Albers, Carla Bley, Jelly Roll Morton, and Szedo Miklos, it documents a full 100 years’ worth of "La Palomania," and has since led to the eventual release of five more volumes. In turn Laar’s project inspired Sigrid Faltin’s 2008 documentary La Paloma. Sehnsucht. Weltwide (a.k.a. La Paloma. Longing, Worldwide) which screened at San Francisco’s Berlin and Beyond festival last January.

In addition to genre-crossing compilations, Trikont’s lineup of German-language folk, jazz, and avant-garde pop musicians keeps the label connected to its original mission. Collectively, the label’s single-artist albums are as varied as its compilations: they include recordings by Bayrische Rastafarian Hans Söllner, Berlin-based jazzman Coco Schumann, and Bavaria’s contribution to the anarchist brass band genre, La Brass Banda.

Though Trikont’s desire to free music from the narrow confines of regionalism applies to its German-language artists, the label is best recognized for its compilations of obscure Americana. American music, Bergmann points out, has long been the preferred music of German youth in regions occupied by the U.S. Armed Forces. Alien yet electrifying, the music broadcast on the AFN (Armed Forces Network) during the occupation and through the 1960s inspired a whole generation of young Germans searching for individuality and self-determination. It did so with more success than German volksmusik. "In Germany, we had never really had a revolution, so we didn’t have the music for it," Bergmann muses. "It’s hard for an old leftist like me to say it, but it was the American soldiers who brought freedom. But in the cultural sense, it was true."

On its unexamined surface, Munich seems like an unlikely place for a revolutionary underground music scene. Unlike its edgier northern counterparts, the city has enviably low unemployment and a relatively stable middle-class. It manages — somewhat tenuously — to strike a balance between being the capital of traditionally conservative Bavaria and the southernmost stronghold of the left-leaning Social Democrats. But scrape beneath and you’ll find that the same stubborn spirit that compels Bavaria to retain its status as a "Freistaat" within the German Bundesrepublik, and which has also fueled a streak of hard-left radicalism since the 1960s. Observe Trikont: with limited resources and anticapital ideologies considered counterintuitive by the so-called big players in a slumping music industry, the label nonetheless has created a stable home and well-deserved audience for the previously unheard music from every continent and classification.

What, then, is the key to Trikont’s longevity? "We never really had an agenda," Bergmann reflects. "We just wanted to say, ‘We will tell you a story in music, so you can see how good and how strong music can be.’ People have got an innate sense for it. If they listen to good music, they want good music." No matter what your definition of good music is, chances are, Trikont has it.

www.trikont.com

What they do matters

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johnny@sfbg.com

Something is happening. San Francisco and the greater Bay Area is, even more than usual, home to some bands that hardwire the heart: Grass Widow, Nodzzz, Rank/Xerox, Mayyors, Ty Segall. But more than that, the place we call home is a nexus for a bunch of great new rock albums — ones that just might be classics. Girls’ Album (True Panther/Matador) is the popular one with the media blitz behind it, but the Mantles’ debut is the come-from-behind outsider, the secret star, the crushworthy keeper. You’ll know it when you hear it, from the one-two-three punch of the first trio of tracks: the Byrds-y jangle of "Disappearing Act"; the churning propulsive energy of "What We Do Matters"; and maybe most of all, the brooding balladry of "Look Away," a now-I-see-you-now-I-don’t relationship ode which possesses a kind of offhand melodic and vocal strength that sounds easy to achieve, but obviously isn’t, because so few ever manage to do it.

Those are some of the things that go into The Mantles (Siltbreeze), along with guitar blazes (the climactic "Thin Reminder") and the overall feel of a band as a thriving living thing. What went on outside the album is an entirely different story. The group recorded with Greg Ashley in Oakland, where the adventures often began before they entered the studio. "One day this cracked-out lady walked up and punched this other lady in the face right in front of our car," says drummer Virginia Weatherby. "There’s a giant pile of trash right in front of his [Ashley’s] door," chimes in bassist Matt Roberts. "This one afternoon I showed up and there was a guy by it wearing no shirt and a Yoda mask — it was totally absurd."

Fueled by friendship and romance, the Mantles are relaxed enough to enjoy absurdity, whether it arrives in the form of a shirtless dude in a Yoda mask or entails playing the role of "psychedelic band" and "mid-tempo downer" at a sweltering garage rock party where people are doing cannonballs into a pool. If anything, the group was too relaxed for Ashley’s spontaneous and live-sounding recording process, an achievement of sorts. "You think you have the situation figured out on the third day of recording," says vocalist-guitarist Mike Oliveras, as the group discusses the different facets of Ashley’s home studio and warehouse setup, where graffiti and ciggies floating in glasses of beer are one norm. "Then he [Ashley] comes down with a bounty of nice-looking tomatoes and says, Do you guys want any tomatoes? These are from my garden on the roof."

The Mantles is being released by Siltbreeze, a pairing that should yield interesting results. The pop immediacy of the group’s songs might make them seem a good fit for Berkeley’s Slumberland, even if they tend to rock a bit more vigorously and wildly than many groups on Mike Shulman’s rightfully vaunted label. A standout track like the easygoing, assured "Don’t Lie" — understated yet almost anthemic at the close — is more melodic than most music released by Siltbreeze owner Tom Lax, whose enthusiasm came from hearing the first of the group’s two 7-inch singles to date. "There’s a certain amount of people who will buy it [the album] because it’s on Siltbreeze," Roberts says. "And there’s a certain amount of people who will specifically not buy it because it’s on Siltbreeze."

Fortunately, The Mantles is the kind of album that defies expectations. Its shades of New Zealand-ry (an organ sound and laconic vocal delivery not far from Flying Nun groups such as the Chills and the Verlaines), its Paisley Underground touches (some reviewers have mentioned Steve Wynn and Dream Syndicate), and its better-than-NME‘s-C86-cassette pop appeal seem very au courant, but come across as natural as breathing. Oliveras’ vocal presence is both a weapon and a major reason for this — he’s got more confidence and presence than your average rocker, yet he never falls into cringeworthy or over-the-top rock star gestures. There’s no T.T.H. (tries-too-hard) to his or the band’s approach. This forthright pleasure and assurance might have grown from the group’s recording experiences to date, which range from the experimentation and live takes of Ashley to the precision and attention to detail of Papercuts’ Jason Quever, who produced one of their singles.

Along with friendship and romance, family plays a role in the Mantles’ music — not corny Christian family values, but a bond with family members that’s taken a variety of funny forms during the group’s existence. "At [a show at] Café Du Nord, my mom said she wanted a drink, and when I told her to go to the bar, she said, It’s not my milieu," says Roberts to much laughter. He lists his favorite show to date as one the group did for Oliveras’ family: "There was an audience of six people on patio chairs sitting 20 yards away from us," he says.

"The Mantles: Being Earnest," Oliveras jokes.

The Mantles has the arresting look required of a vinyl-only release, thanks to a stark and handsome design by local musician Nathan Berlinguette, art by Colter Jacobsen, and another family touch: the photo on the album’s cover. As evocative in a nostalgic way as the cover of Night Control’s Death Control (Kill Shaman) is in a 2009 manner, it’s a picture of a man holding a picture — a photo of Jimi Hendrix. The man, standing in front of a gorgeous mountain-lined horizon, is Weatherby’s father. "My dad is beside himself," she says with a smile. "He went to one of our shows recently and was walking around saying, Album Cover Guy’s here. Want to meet the album cover?"

THE MANTLES

Album release party

Oct. 1

Eagle Tavern

398 12th St, SF

(415) 626-0880

www.myspace.com/mantles

The Mix

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(1) For Alexis (2009), Apichatpong Weerasethakul

(2) Dancin’ at Lil’ Baobab

(3) Aiyana Udesen’s art in "Future Colors of America" at Giant Robot

(4) Steamy disco rarities and hot queers, Le Perle degli Squalor

(5) Dexter season two

Come a cropper

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superego@sfbg.com


SUPEREGO I had absolutely no idea that there was a hysterical ’90s gay dance hits mashup scene!

This was just one of the many, many worlds that opened up for me as Hunky Beau and I girded our burgeoning loins and embarked one recent Saturday on a whirlwind Castro bar crawl. Despite the nutso economics of late, a large new crop of attractively unpretentious San Francisco nightspots has bloomed, from the odd-but-pleasant hunter-themed Bloodhound in SoMa (1145 Folsom, www.bloodhoundsf.com) and multi-chandeliered DJ paradise Triple Crown in Mid-Market (1760 Market, www.triplecrownsf.com) to Potrero Hill’s underground-minded Project One Gallery (251 Rhode Island, www.p1sf.com), the Mission’s jazz-inflected supperclub Coda (1710 Mission, www.codasf.com), and — hurray? — our first "dessert lounge" CandyBar in the Western Addition (1335 Fulton, www.candybarsf.com). Even a few mainstays have had fresh alt-cred life breathed into them, like absinthe-happy Buckshot Tavern (3848 Geary, SF. www.buckshot-sf.com), classy dive the Hearth (4701 Geary), and reinvigorated Madrone Lounge (500 Divisadero, www.madronelounge.com).

It’s a regular autumn harvest of buzz-heavy embarrassment opportunities — a barvest, if you will. But it’s the Castro that’s seen the most openings in the past few months, so that seemed the logical destination for a night of guzzling look-see.

For the sake of my flawless skin, I try to stay positive. Complaining about the Castro is like crapping on a pigeon: you feel a little vindication, but then you realize, "Wow, I just crapped on a pigeon." So you have to just take our increasingly generic, Kylie-nauseating gay Mecca on its own terms, acknowledging that among the upscale influx there’s at least some crazy drag and heartfelt effort at the Lookout (3600 16th St., www.lookoutsf.com), a very nice overdue remodel of the hip-pop Café (2369 Market, www.cafesf.com), with a lot fewer tiny backpacks in line to get in, even a cozy laidback alcoholic outpost called Last Call (3988 18th St., www.thelastcallbar.com), which slid right into the old Men’s Room space. And Q Bar (456 Castro, www.qbarsf.com) hosts some some damn cute weekly parties.

That hoo-hoo gay mashup scene I mentioned — think Armand Van Helden’s rejigger of "Professional Widow" by Tori Amos overlaid with Deee-Lite’s "Groove is in the Heart" and Stardust’s "Music Sounds Better with You" — was rocking a dance floor of five at the distractingly bright Toad Hall (4146 18th St., www.toadhallbar.com) but the nifty back patio was packed, mostly with amply proportioned women who’d probably wandered over from the Castro Theater’s Erotic Film Festival. I suppose apoplectic owner Les Natali is trying to somehow channel the spirit of the original clone-era Toad Hall bar through a blaze of big-screens and several hot pink waterfalls?

The cover at Trigger (2348 Market, www.clubtrigger.com) was $8.

By far the best new arrival to the cologne zone is Blackbird (2124 Market, www.blackbirdbar.com), a relaxed, narrow, and hiply appointed joint around the corner from the former Transfer, now known creatively as Bar on Church (198 Church, www.thebarsf.com). Blackbird has been in the news a lot lately due to the sad death of droll co-owner Doug Murphy from swine flu, eclipsing the happier news that the bar has quickly become one of the city’s more celebrated hotspots. Blackbird’s other co-owner, Shawn Vergara, knows that a few rough edges, a risk-taking cocktail menu — try the sparkling, tequila-based "grape drink" — and a freak-welcoming vibe stick in the mind more than wannabe polish.

As for the rest of the Castro: Is trying to do something different too much to ask? Did I just crap on a pigeon?

Events listings

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Events listings are compiled by Paula Connelly. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com.

THURSDAY 17

Crafty Hour Element Lounge, 1028 Geary, SF; (415) 440-0111. 5pm, free. Check out new work from 16 emerging local artists, working in varying mediums at this Lightbox happy hour Lightbox is a support system for emerging artists and proceeds from the event will go toward creating a permanent workspace and gallery.

Curry Contest a.Muse Art Gallery, 614 Alabama, SF; www.yourmusegallery.com. 6pm, $10 suggested donation. Sample vegetarian curry made by both professional and non-professional chefs and vote for your favorite by putting a tip in their jar. The chef with the most tips wins! All tips go to the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal (ICJB).

"Darkness is Your Candle" First Unitarian Universalist Church, 1187 Franklin, SF; 1-800-233-6984. 7pm, $15. Enjoy an evening of poetry and music with mythologist and storyteller Michael Meade, mystical poets Rumi and Hafiz, and devotional music by the Qadim Ensemble to benefit at risk youth and intercultural projects.

Fetish Photography Blue Sky Studios, 2325 3rd St., SF; www.blueskysf.com. 6pm, $10. Join renowned fetish photographer Eric Kroll for a presentation and discussion of his Fetish Photography Art from his early days to the present.

Internet Bookburning Books Inc., 601 Van Ness, SF; (415) 776-1111. 7pm, free. Learn more about the problems that the internet poses for the book business with a panel of outlaw thinkers including, Peter Maraveilis, Peter Plate, Herbert Gold, Ethan Watters, and Brenda Knight.

FRIDAY 18

Round 2 111 Minna Gallery, 111 Minna, SF; (415) 974-1719. 5pm. Help raise funds and awareness for The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society at his benefit and art auction featuring artists Brett Amory, Kevin E. Taylor, Regino Gonzales, Ferris Plock, and more, and live painting, drawing, and music.

SATURDAY 19

West Coast Live Ferry Building, Port Commission Room, 2nd floor, 1 Ferry Plaza, SF; (415) 433-9500. 10am, $18. Attend a live broadcast of the West Coast Live radio show moderated by Sedge Thomson featuring music by Sarah Lee Guthrie and Johnnie Irion, and authors Gennifer Choldenko, Sue Monk Kidd, and Ann Kidd Taylor.

Roadworks Steamroller Prints SF Center for the Book, Rhode Island between 16th and 17th St., SF; (415) 565-0545. Noon – 5pm, free. Check out this street fair where featured artists and community members can have their work printed by a steamroller. Also featuring vendors, music, food, and activities.

SUNDAY 20

Rock For MS Boom Boom Room, 1601 Fillmore, SF; (415) 673-8000. 7:30pm, $25. Enjoy a smokin’ hot show with Roy Rogers at this benefit for the MS Friends foundation, featuring author Deborah Grabien signing copies of her new JP Kinkaid mystery series books.

TUESDAY 22

Digital Publishing Revolution Mechanics Institute Library, 57 Post, SF; (415) 393-0101. 7pm, $10. Hear more about how digital publishing is changing the lives of writers at this American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) meeting, featuring a panel of local experts with Bob Cauthorn, Mark Coker, and Ivory Madison.


Music listings

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Music listings are compiled by Paula Connelly and Cheryl Eddy. Since club life is unpredictable, it’s a good idea to call ahead to confirm bookings and hours. Prices are listed when provided to us. Submit items at listings@sfbg.com.

WEDNESDAY 16

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Altarboys, Midnight Bombers, Inferno of Joy Annie’s Social Club. 9pm, $7.

*Bad Brains, P.O.S., Trouble Andrew Slim’s. 8pm, $26.

Pete Bernhard, Leopold and His Fiction, Erin Brazil Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $8.

Dave the Pastor Dalton, Mike and Ruthy, Meri St. Mary, Virgil Shaw Hotel Utah. 8pm, $6.

Disastroid, Solid, Sticks and Stones Elbo Room. 9pm, $6.

Every Time I Die, Bring Me the Horizon, Oh Sleeper, Architects Regency Ballroom. 8pm, $20.

Global Noize Boom Boom Room. 9:30pm, $15.

Joshua James and Cory Chisel Independent. 9pm, $12.

Jinx and Jezzebelle Simple Pleasures, 3434 Balboa, SF; (415) 387-4022. 8pm, free.

Light Machine, Charlie Gone Mad, Black Eagle Trust Red Devil Lounge. 8pm, $5.

Love Language, All Smiles Café du Nord. 8:30pm, $10.

Oh My God, Highway Patrol, Wave Array Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $7.

Okmoniks, Magnetix, Wau y Los Arrgghs, Rantouls Knockout. 9pm, $9.

Tip of the Top Rasselas Jazz. 8pm, free.

Todd Wolfe Biscuits and Blues. 8pm, $15.

Yourself and the Air, Excuses for Skipping, Mister Loveless Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

BAY AREA

Bonnie Raitt and Taj Mahal Paramount Theatre. 8pm, $39.75-59.75.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

"B3 Wednesdays" Coda. 9pm, $7. With Sylvia Cuenca Organ Trio.

Cat’s Corner Savanna Jazz. 7pm, $5-10.

Dr. Lonnie Smith Trio Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8 and 10pm, $22.

Leigh Gregory Plough and Stars. 9pm, free.

Ben Marcato and the Mondo Combo Top of the Mark. 7:30pm, $10.

"San Francisco Electronic Music Festival" Brava Theater, 2781 24th St, SF; www.sfemf.org. 7pm, $10-17. With Miya Masaoka, Lukas Ligeti, and Amy X Neuburg.

Tin Cup Serenade Le Colonial, 20 Cosmo Place, SF; (415) 931-3600. 7pm, free.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Freddy Clarke Peña Pachamama, 1630 Powell, SF; (415) 646-0018. 8pm, $12. Latin, Middle Eastern funk.

DANCE CLUBS

Booty Call Q-Bar, 456 Castro; www.bootycallwednesdays.com. 9pm. Juanita Moore hosts this dance party, featuring DJ Robot Hustle.

Fringe Madrone Lounge. 9pm, free. With DJs subOctave and Blondie K spinning the best of indie rock and classic new wave.

Hands Down! Bar on Church. 9pm, free. With DJs Claksaarb, Mykill, and guests spinning indie, electro, house, and bangers.

Jam Wednesday Infusion Lounge. 9pm, free. With DJ Slick D.

Qoöl 111 Minna Gallery. 5-10pm, $5. Pan-techno lounge with DJs Spesh, Gil, Hyper D, and Jondi.

RedWine Social Dalva. 9pm-2am, free. DJ TophOne and guests spin outernational funk and get drunk.

Respect Wednesdays End Up. 10pm, $5. Rotating DJs Lonestar Sound, Young Fyah, Sake One, Serg, and more spinning reggae, dancehall, roots, lovers rock, and mash ups.

Synchronize Il Pirata, 2007 16th St.; (415) 626-2626. 10pm, free. Psychedelic dance music with DJs Helios, Gatto Matto, Psy Lotus, Intergalactoid, and guests.

THURSDAY 17

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Blank Slates, Jank, Warren Teagarden Hotel Utah. 9pm, $8.

Blues Traveler Fillmore. 8pm, $27.50.

Buxter Hoot’n, David and Joanna, Nathan Hughes El Rio. 10pm, $5.

Chairlift, Magic Bullets, El Ten Eleven Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $15.

Terry Hanck Biscuits and Blues. 8pm, $15.

Happy Mondays, Psychedelic Furs, Amusement Parks on Fire Regency Ballroom. 8pm, $35.

Hundred Days, Trophy Fire, Atlantic Line Knockout. 9:30pm, $5.

Jahlectrik, Big Lion, Erica Sunshine Lee Red Devil Lounge. 8pm, $8.

Monotonix, Triclops, Anavan Independent. 8pm, $15.

Phoenix, Soft Pack Warfield. 8pm, $32.

Rademacher, Young Hunting, Gold Medalists Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $6.

*Tarrakian, Christian Mistress, Meow Annie’s Social Club. 9pm, $7.

Telepath and Big Gigantic Boom Boom Room. 9:30pm, $10.

Throw Me the Statue, Brunettes, My First Earthquake Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $12.

Turbonegra, Switchblade Riot, My Parade, DJ Squid Thee Parkside. 9pm, $6.

World/Inferno Friendship Society Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $15.

BAY AREA

*Avengers, Pansy Division, Paul Collins Beat Uptown. 9pm, $12.

Ben Harper and Relentless7 Fox Theater. 8pm, $35.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Al Coster Trio Savanna Jazz. 8pm, $5.

Duuy Quintet Coda. 9pm, $7.

Eric Kurtzrock Trio Ana Mandara, Ghirardelli Square, 891 Beach, SF; (415) 771-6800. 7:30pm, free.

Mads Tolling Trio Shanghai 1930. 7pm, free.

Marlina Teich Trio Brickhouse, 426 Brannan, SF; (415) 820-1595. 7-10pm, free.

Stephen Merriman Simple Pleasures, 3434 Balboa, SF; (415) 387-4022. 8pm, free.

Sakai Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8pm, $14.

"San Francisco Electronic Music Festival" Brava Theater, 2781 24th St, SF; www.sfemf.org. 7pm, $10-17. With Mark Trayle, Donald Swearington, Maria Chavez, and Mason Bates.

Scott Amendola Trio with Jeff Parker and John Shifflet Café du Nord. 8pm, $15.

Stompy Jones Top of the Mark. 7:30pm, $10.

Bernie Worrell, Broun Fellinis Yoshi’s San Francisco. 10:30pm, $15.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Rebecca Cross and the Saints, Stella Royale, New Map of the West Bollyhood Café. 9pm, free.

Flamenco Thursdays Peña Pachamama, 1630 Powell, SF; (415) 646-0018. 8pm, 9:30pm; $12.

Robyn Harris, Chris Trapper Dolores Park Café. 7:30pm, free.

Belle Monroe and Her Brewglass Boys Atlas Café. 8pm, free.

Tipsy House Plough and Stars. 9pm, free.

DANCE CLUBS

Afrolicious Elbo Room. 9:30pm, $5-6. DJs Pleasuremaker, Señor Oz, J Elrod, and B Lee spin Afrobeat, Tropicália, electro, samba, and funk.

Bingotopia Knockout. 7:30-9:30pm, free. Play for drinks and dignity with Lady Stacy Pants.

Caribbean Connection Little Baobab, 3388 19th St; 643-3558. 10pm, $3. DJ Stevie B and guests spin reggae, soca, zouk, reggaetón, and more.

Club Jammies Edinburgh Castle. 10pm, free. DJs EBERrad and White Mice spinning reggae, punk, dub, and post punk.

Drop the Pressure Underground SF. 6-10pm, free. Electro, house, and datafunk highlight this weekly happy hour.

Funky Rewind Skylark. 9pm, free. DJ Kung Fu Chris, MAKossa, and rotating guest DJs spin heavy funk breaks, early hip-hop, boogie, and classic Jamaican riddims.

Heat Icon Ultra Lounge. 10pm, free. Hip-hop, R&B, reggae, and soul.

Kick It Bar on Church. 9pm. Hip-hop with DJ Jorge Terez.

Koko Puffs Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary; 885-4788. 10pm, free. Dubby roots reggae and Jamaican funk from rotating DJs.

Mestiza Bollywood Café, 3376 19th St., SF; (415) 970-0362. 10pm, free. Showcasing progressive Latin and global beats with DJ Juan Data.

Mirza Party and Soul Movers Infusion Lounge. 9pm, free. With DJ E Rock.

Popscene 330 Rich. 10pm, $10. Rotating DJs spinning indie, Britpop, electro, new wave, and post-punk.

Represent Icon Lounge. 10pm, $5. With Resident DJ Ren the Vinyl Archaeologist and DJs Green B, Daneekah, and Smoke 1.

Rock Candy Stud. 9pm-2am, $5. Luscious Lucy Lipps hosts this electro-punk-pop party with music by ReXick.

Toppa Top Thursdays Club Six. 9pm, $5. Jah Warrior, Jah Yzer, I-Vier, and Irie Dole spin the reggae jams for your maximum irie-ness.

FRIDAY 18

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

*Avengers, Pansy Division, Paul Collins Beat Bottom of the Hill. 10pm, $12.

Blue Rabbit, Marcus Very Ordinary, Gregg Tillery, Hoof and the Heel Hotel Utah. 9pm, $8.

Citizen Cope Fillmore. 9pm, $27.50.

Dead Guise Connecticut Yankee, 100 Connecticut, SF; www.theyankee.com. 9pm.

Drones, Model/Actress, Spyrals, DJ Duke of Windsor Café du Nord. 9:30pm, $10.

Grand Lake, White Cloud, Rad Cloud Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $6.

Ice Cream Socialites Thee Parkside. 9pm, $6.

Illness, Sideshow Fiasco, Groundskeeper Kimo’s. 9pm, $6.

Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Depreciation Guild, Cymbals Eat Guitars Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $15.

Porcupine Tree, That 1 Guy Warfield. 9pm, $27.50-32.50.

Sea Wolf, Old-Fashioned Way, Sara Lov Bimbo’s 365 Club. 9pm, $15.

Shotty, Lipstick Conspiracy, Richie and the Curious Proclivities El Rio. 10pm, $5.

Timber Timbre, Harbours Rickshaw Stop. 6pm, $10.

"Your Music Magazine Band Olympicks" Red Devil Lounge. 9pm, $10.

BAY AREA

Miley Cyrus, Metro Station Oracle Arena, 7000 Coliseum Wy, Oakl; www.ticketmaster.com. 7pm, $39.50-79.50.

Furthur Fox Theater. 7:30pm, $49.50.

White Witch Canyon, 3rd Rail, 667 Uptown. 9pm, $10.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Audium 9 1616 Bush, SF; (415) 771-1616. 8:30pm, $15.

Black Market Jazz Orchestra Top of the Mark. 9pm, $10.

"Cultural Encounters: Friday Nights at the deYoung presents Jazz at Intersection" Wilsey Court, de Young Museum, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Dr, SF; www.deyoungmuseum.org. 6:30pm, free. With Crushing Spiral Ensemble.

Eric Kurtzrock Trio Ana Mandara, Ghirardelli Square, 891 Beach, SF; 771-6800. 8pm, free.

Barry Finnerty and trio Savanna Jazz. 8pm, $5.

"Idle Warship: Talib Kweli, Res, and Graph Nobel" Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8 and 10pm, $16.

Jessica Johnson Shanghai 1930. 7:30pm, free.

Lucid Lovers Rex Hotel, 562 Sutter, SF; (415) 433-4434. 6-8pm.

"San Francisco Electronic Music Festival" Brava Theater, 2781 24th St, SF; www.sfemf.org. 7pm, $10-17. With Ed Osborn, Preshish Moments, Frank Bretschneider, and Joan La Barbara.

Lavay Smith and Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $20.

David Tranchina Simple Pleasures, 3434 Balboa, SF; (415) 387-4022. 8pm, free.

Will Bernard Band, Skerik Boom Boom Room. 9:30pm, $15.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Bluegrass Bonanza Plough and Stars. 9pm. Presented by Shelby Ash.

Boca Do Rio Coda. 10pm, $10.

Brownout, Manicato, DJs Pleasuremaker and Señor Oz Elbo Room. 10pm, $10.

Crushing Spiral Ensemble deYoung Museum, Golden Gate Park, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, SF; (415) 750-3600. 6:30pm, free.

Cuban Nights Peña Pachamama, 1630 Powell, SF; (415) 646-0018. 8:30pm, $15.

Shayle Matuda Dolores Park Café. 7:30pm, free.

Mestizo, Caravanserai: The Santana Tribute, Vortex Tribe feat. Mingo Lewis Slim’s. 8pm, $13.

"Methods of Defiance" Regency Ballroom. 9pm, $25-37.50. With Dr. Israel, Bernie Worrell, Toshinori Kondo, Hawkman, Guy Licata, and Bill Laswell.

Julia Nunes Swedish American Hall (upstairs from Café du Nord). 7:30pm, $15.

DANCE CLUBS

Activate! Lookout, 3600 16th St; (415) 431-0306. 9pm, $3. Face your demigods and demons at this Red Bull-fueled party.

Bar on Church 9pm. Rotating DJs Zax, Zhaldee, and Nuxx.

Blow Up Rickshaw Stop. 10pm, $10-15. With DJ Jefrodisiac and Ava Berlin.

Boombox Saints Club Six. 9pm, $10. With DJs Pep Love, Amp Live, Xein How, and more spinning hip hop.

Deep Fried Butter, 354 11th St., SF; (415) 863-5964. DJs jaybee, David Justin, and Dean Manning spinning indie, dance rock, electronica, funk, hip hop, and more.

Exhale, Fridays Project One Gallery, 251 Rhode Island; (415) 465-2129. 5pm, $5. Happy hour with art, fine food, and music with Vin Sol, King Most, DJ Centipede, and Shane King.

Fat Stack Fridays Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 10pm, free. With rotating DJs Romanowski, B-Love, Tomas, Toph One, and Vinnie Esparza.

Gay Asian Paradise Club Eight, 1151 Folsom, SF; www.eightsf.com. 9pm, $8. Featuring two dance floors playing dance and hip hop, smoking patio, and 2 for 1 drinks before 10pm.

Jump Off Club Six. 9pm, $10. With DJs Eddie Leader, Hector Moralez, and Oscar Miranda spinning house.

Look Out Weekend Bambuddha Lounge. 4pm, free. Drink specials, food menu and resident DJs White Girl Lust, Swayzee, Philie Ocean, and more.

Loose Stud. 10pm-3am, $5. DJs Domino and Six spin electro and indie, with vintage porn visual projections to get you in the mood.

M4M Fridays Underground SF. 10pm-2am. Joshua J and Frankie Sharp host this man-tastic party.

Oldies Night Knockout. 9pm, $2-4. DJs Primo, Daniel, and Lost Cat spin doo-wop, one-hit wonders, and soul.

Punk Rock and Shlock Karaoke Annie’s Social Club. 9pm-2am, $5. Eileen and Jody bring you songs from multiple genres to butcher: punk, new wave, alternative, classic rock, and more.

David Savior and Don Lynch Infusion Lounge. 9pm, $20.

SATURDAY 19

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Agent Ribbons, Splinters, Sarees Thee Parkside. 9pm, $6.

Amazing Baby, Entrance Band, Total Hound Bottom of the Hill. 10pm, $12.

Citizen Cope Fillmore. 9pm, $27.50.

*Dirty Three, Faun Fables Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $19.

Dragonforce, Sonata Arctica, Taking Dawn Regency Ballroom. 8pm, $28.

Fleeting Trance, Foreign Cinema, Boatclub Li Po Lounge. 8:30pm, $7.

Mark Hummel and Rusty Zinn Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $20.

Little Boots, Music Go Music, Yes Giantess, DJ Aaron Axelsen Independent. 9pm, $17.

Loretta Lynch, Hollyhocks, Yard Sale Hotel Utah. 9pm, $7.

Lou Dog Trio, Audiodub, Search Party Red Devil Lounge. 9pm, $15.

*Meat Puppets, Dead Confederate, Ume Slim’s. 8pm, $13.

Middle Class Murder, Tomorrowmen, Hi-Watters Thee Parkside. 3pm, free.

No Alternative, Druglords of the Avenues, Downtown Struts El Rio. 9pm, $8.

Sex Vid, Corpus, Milk Music Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $7.

Starving Weirdos, William Fowler Collins, Metal Rouge, Darwinsbitch, Jim Haynes, John Davis, Danny Paul Grody Swedish American Hall (upstairs from Café du Nord). 2pm, $10.

Tarentel, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Alps, Ducktails, Pete Swanson, Joe Grimm, Operative Café du Nord. 8pm, $15.

Will Bernard Band with Skerik Boom Boom Room. 10pm, $15.

BAY AREA

Dave Rude Band Uptown. 9pm, $10.

Furthur, Vice Fox Theater. 6:15pm, $49.50.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Audium 9 1616 Bush, SF; (415) 771-1616. 8:30pm, $15.

Bop City Coda. 10pm, $10.

Terrence Brewer Shanghai 1930. 7:30pm, free.

Eric Kurtzrock Trio Ana Mandara, Ghirardelli Square, 891 Beach, SF; (415) 771-6800. 8pm, free.

Groove Rebellion Simple Pleasures, 3434 Balboa, SF; (415) 387-4022. 8pm, free.

"Idle Warship: Talib Kweli, Res, and Graph Nobel" Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8 and 10pm, $16.

"San Francisco Electronic Music Festival" Brava Theater, 2781 24th St, SF; www.sfemf.org. 7pm, $10-17. With Jorge Bachmann, Gino Robair, and Pamela Z.

Savanna Jazz Trio Savanna Jazz. 8pm, $5. With jazz harpist Motoshi Kosako.

Ricardo Scales Top of the Mark. 9pm, $10.

"Sounds of Unity Jazz Concert" Unity Church of San Francisco, 2222 Bush, SF; www.unitysf.com. 7:30pm, free.

Will Bernard Band, Skerik Boom Boom Room. 9:30pm, $15.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Rahim AlHaj and Alam Khan Herbst Theater, 401 Van Ness, SF; (415) 621-6600. Music from Iraq and India.

Bajofondo Bimbo’s 365 Club. 9pm, $25.

Carnaval Del Sur Peña Pachamama, 1630 Powell, SF; (415) 646-0018. 8pm, $15.

Plucked Seventh Avenue Performances, 1329 7th Ave., SF; (415) 664-2543. 7:30pm, $18. With Diane Rowan, Celtic harp and Dominic Schaner, lute and vihuela.

Whiskey Richards, Amanda Duncan Plough and Stars. 9pm.

DANCE CLUBS

Bar on Church 9pm. Rotating DJs Foxxee, Joseph Lee, Zhaldee, Mark Andrus, and Niuxx.

Booty Bassment Knockout. 10pm, $5. Hip-hop with DJs Ryan Poulsen and Dimitri Dickenson.

Cock Fight Underground SF. 9pm, $6. Locker room antics galore with electro-spinning DJ Earworm and hostess Felicia Fellatio.

Doherty’s Birthday Bash EndUp. Late Show 10pm-5am, Early Show 5am-Noon; $15. With Late Show DJs spinning breakbeats, electro, hip hop hybrids, and more and Early Show DJs spinning house, tech house, and progressive house.

Fire Corner Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary; 885-4788. 9:30pm, free. Rare and outrageous ska, rocksteady, and reggae vinyl with Revival Sound System and guests.

HYP Club Eight, 1151 Folsom, SF; www.eightsf.com. 10pm, free. Gay and lesbian hip hop party, featuring DJs spinning the newest in the top 40s hip hop and hyphy.

Juakali Triple Crown. 10pm, $7.

Knocked Up Knockout. 6-9pm, free. With DJ Touchy Feely.

Let’s Blaze Club Six. 9pm, $10. With live performances by C U Next Weekend, Jeanine Da Feen, and more.

Life S.F. Infusion Lounge. 9pm, $20. With DJ J Espinosa and Designer DJs.

NonStop Bhangra Rickshaw Stop. 9pm, $15. Dholrhythms and DJ Jimmy Love present the latest Bhangra grooves.

Saturday Night Live Fat City, 314 11th St; selfmade2c@yahoo.com. 10:30pm.Saturday Night Soul Party Elbo Room. 10pm, $10. DJs Lucky, Phengren Oswald, and Paul Paul spin 60s soul 45s.

Soul Slam IV: Prince and Michael Jackson Mezzanine. 9pm, $25.

Spirit Fingers Sessions 330 Ritch. 9pm, free. With DJ Morse Code and live guest performances.

Summer Saturdays Bar On Church. 9pm, free. With DJ Mark Andrus spinning top 40, mashups, hip hop, and electro.

SUNDAY 20

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Daikaiju, Pollo Del Mar, Secret Samurai, TomorrowMen Hotel Utah. 2pm, $10.

*Flood, Emeralds, Early Graves Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $6.

Gaslight Anthem, Murder By Death, Loved Ones, Frank Turner Fillmore. 8pm, $20.

Grouper, Christina Carter, Ilayas Ahmed, Barn Owl, Sun Circle, Common Eider King Eider,

Austin Lucas, Two Cow Garage, Mike Hale Thee Parkside. 8pm, $8.

Ming and Ping, Miss Derringer, Wooden Ponies Slim’s. 8pm, $15.

Brendon Murray Swedish American Hall (upstairs from Café du Nord). 6:30pm, $20.

Pink Mountaintops, Pack AD Independent. 8pm, $12.

"Rock for MS presents Roy Rogers" Boom Boom Room. 8:30pm, $25-100.

"Sunset Youth Services presents: Top Performers from Upstar Records" Bottom of the Hill. 1:30pm, $10.

These United States Café du Nord. 8pm, $10.

Tigercity, Royal Bangs, Actors Bottom of the Hill. 8pm, $10.

BAY AREA

Furthur Fox Theater. 7:30pm, $49.50.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Rob Modica and friends Simple Pleasures, 3434 Balboa, SF; (415) 387-4022. 3pm, free.

Moped Mojito, 1337 Grant; www.mojitosf.com. 8pm.

Savanna Jazz Trio Savanna Jazz. 7:30pm, $5.

Tony Lindsay Band Yoshi’s San Francisco. 7pm, $18.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Bajofondo Bimbo’s 365 Club. 8pm, $25.

Marla Fibish and friends Plough and Stars. 9pm, free.

Fiesta Adina! Peña Pachamama, 1630 Powell, SF; (415) 646-0018. 7pm, $12. With Eddy Navia and Sukay.

King Cab Thee Parkside. 4pm, free.

Maria Volonte: Tango Dance Party Coda. 8pm, $10.

Hank Williams Birthday Tribute Amnesia. 10pm, $5. Live-band country karaoke.

DANCE CLUBS

DiscoFunk Mashups Cat Club. 10pm, free. House and 70’s music.

Dub Mission Elbo Room. 9pm, $6. Dub, roots, and classic dancehall with DJs Sep, Maneesh the Twister, and Ludichris.

Gloss Sundays Trigger, 2344 Market, SF; (415) 551-CLUB. 7pm. With DJ Hawthorne spinning house, funk, soul, retro, and disco.

Honey Soundsystem Paradise Lounge. 8pm-2am. "Dance floor for dancers – sound system for lovers." Got that?

Jock! Lookout, 3600 16th; 431-0306. 3pm, $2. This high-energy party raises money for LGBT sports teams.

Kick It Bar on Church. 9pm. Hip-hop with DJ Zax.

Religion Bar on Church. 3pm. With DJ Nikita.

Stag AsiaSF. 6pm, $5. Gay bachelor parties are the target demo of this weekly erotic tea dance.

T-Dance Deco Lounge, 510 Larkin, SF; (415) 346-2025. 4pm, $5 suggested donation. Positive guys and their friends are welcome at this benefit for Positive Force featuring DJ Robbie Martin.

MONDAY 21

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Buffalo Collision Independent. 8pm, $20.

Get Up Kids, Youth Group, Pretty and Nice Fillmore. 8pm, $23.50.

In Flames, Between the Buried and Me, 3 Inches of Blood, Faceless Regency Ballroom. 7:30pm, $26.

Qwel and Maker, Denizen Kane, Rock Bottom, Influence and Ro Knew, Bwan Elbo Room. 9pm, $5.

Titus Andronicus, So So Glos, Relatives Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $8.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

"Jazz at the Rrazz" Rrazz Room, Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason, SF; www.therrazzroom.com. 8pm, $25. With Jeremy Cohen.

John Patitucci Trio Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8 and 10pm, $14-18.

Lavay Smith Trio Enrico’s, 504 Broadway, SF; www.enricossf.com. 7pm, free.

DANCE CLUBS

Black Gold Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary; 885-4788. 10pm-2am, free. Senator Soul spins Detroit soul, Motown, New Orleans R&B, and more — all on 45!

Ceremony Knockout. 10m, free. Dark pop, goth, industrial, and new wave with DJs Deadbeat and Yule Be Sorry.

Going Steady Dalva. 10pm, free. DJs Amy and Troy spinning 60’s girl groups, soul, garage, and more.

King of Beats Tunnel Top. 10pm. DJs J-Roca and Kool Karlo spinning reggae, electro, boogie, funk, 90’s hip hop, and more.

Krazy for Karaoke Happy Hour Knockout. 5-10pm, free. Belt it out with host Deadbeat.

Mainroom Mondays Annie’s Social Club. 9pm, free. Live the dream: karaoke on Annie’s stage and pretend you’re Jello Biafra.

Manic Mondays Bar on Church. 9pm. Drink 80-cent cosmos with Djs Mark Andrus and Dangerous Dan.

Monster Show Underground SF. 10pm, $5. Cookie Dough and DJ MC2 make Mondays worth dancing about, with a killer drag show at 11pm.

Network Mondays Azul Lounge, One Tillman Pl; www.inhousetalent.com. 9pm, $5. Hip-hop, R&B, and spoken word open mic, plus featured performers.

Spliff Sessions Tunnel Top. 10pm, free. DJs MAKossa, Kung Fu Chris, and C. Moore spin funk, soul, reggae, hip-hop, and psychedelia on vinyl.

TUESDAY 22

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Bon Iver Fillmore. 8pm, $25.

Complaints, Sharp Objects, High and Tight Knockout. 10pm, free.

Fat Tuesday Band Biscuits and Blues. 8pm, $15.

Five Finger Death Punch, Shadows Fall, Otep, 2Cents Regency Ballroom. 7:30pm, $22.

Erin McCarley, Landon Pigg Independent. 8pm, $15.

Moneybrother, Farewell Typewriter Red Devil Lounge. 8pm, $8.

Most Serene Republic, Grand Archives, Lonely Forest Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $12.

One Eskimo, Haley Bonar Hotel Utah. 9pm, $10.

Pet Shop Boys Warfield. 9pm, $55-89.50.

Prizehog, Rabbits, Iron Witch Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $6.

Jill Tracy, Eli August, Vernian Process Elbo Room. 9pm, $5.

BAY AREA

Australian Pink Floyd Show Fox Theater. 8pm, $32.50-39.50.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Toshiko Akiyoshi, Lew Tabakin Quartet Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8 and 19pm, $16-20.

Dave Parker Quintet Rasselas Jazz. 8pm.

"Jazz Mafia Tuesdays" Coda. 9pm, $7. With the Park and special guests.

Dame Cleo Laine and Sir John Dankworth Rrazz Room, Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason, SF; www.therrazzroom.com. 8pm, $50-65.

MO Jazz Simple Pleasures, 3434 Balboa, SF; (415) 387-4022. 8pm, free.

Ricardo Scales Top of the Mark. 6:30pm, $5.

DANCE CLUBS

Alcoholocaust Presents Argus Lounge. 9pm, free. With DJs What’s His Fuck, Deadbeat, and Big Nate.

Drunken Monkey Annie’s Social Club. 9pm, free. Weekly guest DJs and shot specials.

Eclectic Company Skylark, 9pm, free. DJs Tones and Jaybee spin old school hip hop, bass, dub, glitch, and electro.

POSH Infusion Lounge. 5pm, $20. Featuring a live band.

Rock Out Karaoke! Amnesia. 7:30pm. With Glenny Kravitz.

Share the Love Trigger, 2344 Market, SF; (415) 551-CLUB. 5pm, free. With DJ Pam Hubbuck spinning house.

Womanizer Bar on Church. 9pm. With DJ Nuxx.


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