Arts & Culture

Arts & Culture

“Seventh” heaven

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

If you loose your tethers to terra firma and let yourself drift with the hallucinatory swirl of fireside Anglo folk, violin-swept electronic beats, and the dulcet sighs on Goldfrapp’s fourth album, Seventh Tree (Mute), you won’t be surprised to learn that vocalist Alison Goldfrapp plucked the disc’s name from a dream. "I can’t argue with that, I thought when I woke up," Goldfrapp says from London during a brief break from the group’s current tour. And the dream itself? "It was a beautiful tree," she recalls. "It all felt amazing and wonderful, and it had a ‘seven’ on it, and then I was in a women’s spa, a Roman bath, and it was very steamy. I was asking people about the title and giving them all the titles I had, and they were going, ‘No, no, that’s wrong. You’ve got to call it Seventh Tree.’<0x2009>"

Sounds like the kind of certainty that you should never buck, and you can practically hear Goldfrapp nodding over the line "You know, when they come and advise … " before she breaks the oracular mood with a dose of levity. "I had too much curry that evening — that’s what I put that down to."

Picturing the ethereal blond in the throes of Indian grub-powered inspiration puts an entirely new wrinkle in Goldfrapp’s intense, synthetic dreamscapes. "Folktronica" isn’t quite the term for what the startlingly grounded singer and collaborator Will Gregory conjure with Seventh Tree: a recording that elegantly marries the groovy Serge Gainsbourg–ian Euro-funk ("Little Bird") with sometimes stonily spare ("Eat Yourself") and occasionally majestic John Barry–imbued orchestrations ("Road to Somewhere") — the latter a combination that might occur within a single song ("Clowns"). The album marked a dramatic shift from the duo’s last full-length, Supernature (Mute, 2005), but then, Goldfrapp never promised you the certainty of a glittering disco ball spinning round. For this record, the pair began to write songs for the first time solely on guitar, and Goldfrapp found inspiration in the quality of light and lyrical fatalism of 1970s road-trip films like Badlands, in addition to popular reference point Wickerman. "I thought about American films — the hazy sunshine, kind of Californian," she muses. "The road trip is significant as a kind of rite of passage, and it feels opportunistic, but there’s always a sense of doom as well."

Writing music for film is one opportunity Goldfrapp would love to grasp, but she also wants to compose for a choir. "Making music is an endless world of possibility," she says. "The future is unknown." But for now, all too soon, it’ll be back to that eternal road, which Goldfrapp will undertake without Gregory. "Will doesn’t tour — he can’t fit in the bunk beds, and I’m not crazy about it either!" she exclaims while simultaneously bemoaning the current drizzly gray of London. "I love playing, but touring is exhausting. I wish I could transport myself from place to place." At least she’ll be trailing that California sunlight soon.

Goldfrapp performs at 5:50 p.m., Sat/20, on the Bridge Stage at Treasure Island Music Festival.

Seasonal cool

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Brian Blade will say he’s just the drummer in the band. But Blade isn’t just any player, having credits ranging from Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell along with Joshua Redman and Wayne Shorter. His understatement neatly fits the carefully nuanced improvisation on his new record with the Fellowship Band, Season of Changes (Verve). Group founders-leaders Blade and pianist Jon Cowherd wrote all the material on the new record, which they’ll feature in performance at the Monterey Jazz Festival Sept. 21 and at Yoshi’s SF Sept. 22.

Season stresses the cool, cerebral resonance the ensemble has forged throughout their decade of playing together. "The core of the sound comes from Jon’s writing and his expression at the piano," Blade says by phone from Portland, Ore. Blade and Cowherd have been friends since meeting at Loyola University in New Orleans. "Somehow our songs fit together," Blade explains. "I think that has to do with our relationship and a bond we have that gives the music a cohesiveness as a listening experience."

Humility becomes Blade — and once again, he stresses that he’s simply the drummer with the Wayne Shorter Quartet. But that notion would minimize the amazing collective musicianship of the band led by the saxophonist-composer: It’s been together for eight years now with Danilo Pérez on piano and John Patitucci on bass. Shorter and the outfit make a series of rare club dates at Yoshi’s in Oakland beginning Sept. 30.

Blade seems to have struck the perfect balance between working with Shorter and finding his own voice within the composer’s music. "We want to be true to Wayne’s vision obviously," he observes, "and we try to submit to that. But he wants us to take our own way."

"’Take a chance’ is what he would say," Blade concludes. "It’s challenging to suddenly be thrown out there to walk the wire, so to speak, but we’ve grown into being each other’s safety net." 2

BRIAN BLADE AND THE FELLOWSHIP BAND

Mon/22, 8 and 10 p.m., $10–$16

Yoshi’s

1330 Fillmore, SF

(415) 655-5600

www.yoshis.com

WAYNE SHORTER QUARTET

Sept. 30–Oct. 4, 8 and 10 p.m.; Oct. 5, 7 and 9 p.m., $40–$70

Yoshi’s

510 Embarcadero West, Oakl

(510) 238-9200

www.yoshis.com

A Bay pas de deux

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW Coming right off the top of the new season, two local choreographers, Liss Fain and Erika Chong Shuch, have thrown a spotlight on the marvelous richness of Bay Area dance. These women couldn’t be more different from each other. One creates cool, intricately flowing balletic dances; the other, spunky and quixotic dance theater.

Fain is something of an outsider if for no other reason than that she choreographs to a different tune. No easy beats or slapped-together sound collages for her. Her most recent Liss Fain Dance performance included Bach, Reich, Messiaen, and Bartók. Fain’s is a refined though restricted sensibility, which manifests itself in carefully structured work that floats through time and stage space without establishing linear trajectories. Often the music gives the pieces something akin to a backbone. Her longtime collaborator, Matthew Antaky, envelopes her filigreed choreography with masterful light and scenic designs. Rarely has Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ Novellum stage looked as good.

A world and a local premiere shared the evening with reprises of the courtly couple-dancing Crossing (2004) and the haunting The Line Between Night and Day (2005). Ejmaj Design’s punk leather and lace costumes for the new At the Time suggested theatrically pungent subject matter. But Fain’s slow romp of entangled limbs for Dexandro Montalvo and Bethany Mitchell remained pretty tame.

For the US debut of 2007’s elegant Looking, Looking, inspired by trips to Eastern Europe and Cambodia, Fain responded to Bartók’s folkloric echoes with couple dances and a sense of searching — in the air and on the ground. Full of lively arm gestures, some possibly inspired from Asian mudras, Looking‘s high point came with Montalvo’s partnering two of Fain’s most expressive dancers, fiery Kai Davis and lyrical Daphne Zneimer. Line, performed to parts of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, is a more angular work that, thankfully, avoided literal references to the music’s place of origin: a concentration camp. Somehow it managed to be both elegiac and hopeful.

Also at YBCA, in its Forum space, Erika Shuch Performance Project’s existential musing, After All, Part I, engaged with its excellent performers. The stage oozed with talent and energy, thanks to the eminent, wistful dancer Joe Goode, singer-composer Dwayne Calizo, charming teenage vocalist Gracie Solis, percussionist-actor Matthias Bossi, and actor Beth Wilmurt, not to mention a quartet of dancers and a motley movement chorus of 23.

Drawing from a number of writers, Chong Shuch fashioned dances, monologues, and songs into a circular structure about, well, the meaning of life — as seen mainly from the perspective of a goldfish. Shuch has gathered — and created — marvelous material but it needs to be more organically shaped.

Individual segments work well. Wilmurt inhabited Michelle Carter’s sparkling text as naturally as her pisca-sartorial accoutrements of sunglasses and form-hugging sequins. Though plagued with what appeared to be vocal difficulties, Calizo’s character of a hobo Santa Claus who carries everything with him was a fanciful creation. Bossi roared through Octavio Solis’ "Last Psalm" (an inversion of "The Lord Is My Shepherd") with a mixture of bravado and cynicism. Given the current political climate, he was as hilarious as he was chilling.

Still, what After needs is somebody — just as in the initial fable — to hold it up. As it was, it didn’t leave enough footprints in the sand.

Live through this

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REVIEW Hey, kids! Wake up and smell the freedom! Outside the RNC, for instance, where a phalanx of Taser-wielding storm troopers recently did their dirty work on citizens practicing what civics classes used to call free speech. One 19-year-old there was beaten unconscious, hooded, hauled away, and beaten some more — subjected to what any dropout in years past would have rightly called torture. "Freedom" is Francophobe for fries, or else it’s merely the liberty of the ruling class to plunder with impunity, slurping up every last drop of blood from the rest of us like it was Heinz 57.

Am I exaggerating? My diction may have a salty 19th-century flavor, but it’s only appropriate, given this nation’s inglorious march backward to the future. It’s also appropriate, in its own way, that Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening (written in the 1890s) should be making a raucous but compromised comeback courtesy of Broadway. Deemed pornographic when it premiered in New York City in 1917, the German proto-expressionist work’s categorical attack on the deathly sexual repression and moral hypocrisy of the age becomes — after a lag time of roughly a century — a financially sound formula of faux teen empowerment and positive messaging. In its big show biz incarnation, the teeth of Wedekind’s restlessly outraged, poetical, funny, and morbid little play are filed down to dust, even as Steven Sater (book and lyrics) and Duncan Sheik (music) channel VH1 rebellion into some kinetic, tuneful, and exciting moments (heightened significantly by Bill T. Jones’ choreography). The talented young cast rocks unabashedly to the end. But that’s also where the schmaltz lies heaviest — all things wicked and corrupt being made tolerable again as characters dead and alive reunite for a throaty anthem to hope and purple summer and god knows what. Roll over, Wedekind. And tell Bertolt Brecht the news.


Through Oct. 12. Tues.–Sat., 8 p.m. (also Sat., 2 p.m.); Sun., 1 and 6 p.m., $30–$99. Curran Theatre, 445 Geary, SF. www.shnsf.com

No peace, so Justice

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>>Justice for all? Read club snob Marke B.’s response to this essay here.

› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Is it wrong to like Justice as much as you like your iPhone? Can a rocker adore Justice as much as they love AC/DC? What’s wrong with the fist-pumping, head-banging reaction the French duo inevitably pull when their pop bombast hits your brainwaves?

There’s no denying that the duo of Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay go for the drama, even while piling on the classical melodicism, teasing with sonic textural interest and gently provoking with image and concept. In play are the detached yet still loaded signs and symbols of a de-centered, post-nationalist, millennial Europe — where the virtual village square, an imagined common ground, is littered with logos and branding detritus like corporate trademarks (à la their sparkling ’80s font-anime fete of a vid for “DNVO”) and crosses (a.k.a., the title of Justice’s 2007 Ed Banger/Vice/Downtown debut), the latter of which might be read at various points as a crucifix, a space-galleon, or a coffin with wings.

But perhaps that common ground is also the beat — a constant that shifts intriguingly. The beat doesn’t possess the primacy one would imagine from an outfit so associated with disco, the so-called nouveau French touch scene, or anything resembling dance music culture, if there was ever such an animal. Instead, Augé and de Rosnay are ciphers: the friendly, unobtrusive absence at the center of Justice, as identifier-free and countenanceless as they are in their Grammy-nominated “D.A.N.C.E” video. These children of Jean Baudrillard dare you to deny their ball-busting bounce, ear-bleed volume, and bloodless hooks, sans even the cartoon/anime-cool, featureless, anti-human “faces” of Daft Punk, or the too-cool-for-school ‘tude of, say, Death From Above 1979. As with their recently banned video for “Stress,” Justice are tinkering with pop violence, devoid of true gore, a.k.a. passion.

So is it wrong to think of Justice as a user-friendly lil’ post-modern contemporary performing unit (CPU), right there along with my favorite multi-tool and time-wasting-toy iPhone — generating content that doesn’t burden me with biography, calculated ways of winning my dollar, or even, despite the iconography, religion, politics, or deep thoughts designed to program or convert me. “Justice is music without a message and without politics,” de Rosnay told Pitchfork this year. “We don’t want to tell people what to think.” Regardless of whether I buy †‘s Christian allusions — “Genesis,” “Let There Be Light,” “Waters of Nazareth,” and even divinity or “DVNO,” I believe de Rosnay’s, ahem, sincere. Like any tool, the Net, or any number of platforms available online, Justice provides a blank for me to fill in like the animation-bedecked T-shirts of the “D.A.N.C.E.” video. “T,” here, stands for tabula rasa, ready to be doodled on, graffitied or defaced — even while cheekily offering, for one millisecond, “Internet Killed the Video Stars,” this gen’s knowing rejoinder to the first video aired on MTV.

And despite the adoring masses, Augé and de Rosnay came off as far from superstar DJs in their shadowy absence-presence at Coachella in April 2007, where I first, er, saw Justice deliver what they’ve described as their first live music performance, non-reliant on turntables or CD mixers. Chalk it up to the cool relief of the evening after the blistering heat of the day, the locale of the relatively chill dance tent at the far end of the festival grounds, the gorgeously retina-searing, candy-colored hot neon and cross-flashing light show, or the duo’s own excitement, but their set — epic, melodious, and full of those big, fat, dumb beats that detractors love to slam — turned out to be the sweet spot of the entire event. By comparison, the duo’s MySpace-sponsored turn at the SF Design Center this spring tapped a slightly menacing Nuremberg rally–style vibe with its impenetrable black wall of Marshall stacks centered on a crucifix, above which the duo worked like two hipster Ozs cloaked in darkness. Even without the pastel flash, the kids punched the air with joyful anguish up front as latecomers skipped toward the stage. Justicemania.

But as Chinua Achebe promised and Justice referenced in their party’s-over “We Are Your Friends” video, things fall apart. All five-alarm strings and raver-y emergency broadcast system wail, “Stress” was the least likely track Justice could have chosen. The vérité smash-up of La Haine (1995), Costa-Gavras dynamism (The clip’s director, Romain-Gavras, is his son), and the media-savvy Medium Cool revolves around a multiracial gang of Justice cross-jacketed toughs committing senseless acts of violence in a collision between the two Parises: an alienating, multicultural and cosmopolitan urban milieu, and the quintessentially old-world City of Light. Was this rough Justice? Mais non, considering the injection of irreverent wit when one gangbanger kicks out a car radio bleating “D.A.N.C.E.” Concluding with a fourth-wall-busting scene as the boom operator’s arm catches fire and the gang descends on the camera-wielder, the video appears to be literally turning the easy thrills of the soundtrack-sourcing music on its head.

“Stress” segues with this year’s DJ Mix Leur Selection (Tron) from Justice, which shows off the pair’s puckish humor by aligning Dario Argento collaborators Goblin along with their heroes Sparks, supposed rivals Daft Punk, SF metal abstractionists Fucking Champs, and — who said the French lack wit? — Frank Stallone. The DJ Mix‘s finale — Todd Rundgren’s “International Feel” — gives you a taste of what the twosome might have in mind to follow †‘s tonally varied orchestration of older tracks, dance pop, and more stately instrumentals — as Rundgren wails to his time-traveling synths, “And there is more / International feel … interplanetary deals … interstellar appeal … universal ideal.” After the tantalizing whirl of signs and symbols — hinting at everything and nothing — is there more to Justice than what dazzles the ear and eye?

Justice performs at 9:15 p.m., Sat/20, at the Bridge Stage.

Dot Dash

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ISBN REAL Exciting news for the tangibility fetishists among us (digital space-children, just hum some binary code for a minute while we grasp at one more straw): Dash Shaw’s serial Web comic BodyWorld (dashshaw.com) will be gracing the third dimension in (earth-) bound form some time next year, as a graphic novel published by Pantheon.

BodyWorld, now up to chapter eight of 12, concerns Paulie Panther, a botanist in the not-too-distant future whose job is to update an encyclopedia of hallucinogenic plant life. This assignment has brought him to the insular forest community of Boney Borough, where an unknown specimen has been discovered on the grounds of the local high school. Panther, the romantically hopeless type (in other words, charmless, unkempt, occasionally suicidal, and still somehow attractive to women), makes a scummy motel room the base of his operation, which consists primarily of nursing and widening the scope of his addictions. Stuck in town waiting for the demurring plant to reveal its effects, he passively falls in with the goings-on of the school.

BodyWorld is most affecting and formally adventurous in its drug sequences, which sneak up on the reader as the plant’s effect — the opening of a conduit to any neighboring consciousness — sneaks up on Panther. Mind-melding and substance abuse (especially the romantically hopeless kind) aren’t the freshest of raw materials, but plot twists that could have been boring are elevated by the effectiveness of their representation. The laconic panel layout (three equally-dimensioned squares across and as many squares as necessary down) is subtly subverted here and there to convey the altered state. Most notably, the confusion of amateur telepathy is rendered with overlapping panels.

A digital space-child out of financial necessity, I read what’s available of BodyWorld before checking out any of Shaw’s earlier, off-line work. I wish I’d read it all in order. BodyWorld is a little disorienting without some wider frame of reference. Its noirish coyness seemed possibly rushed and incommunicative, and the sudden spikes of concentrated empathy came off as conciliatory attempts at cohesion. But it’s easier to trust that the comic’s erratic emotional register isn’t just a broken valve when considered alongside such tonally assured creations as 2006’s The Mother’s Mouth (Alternative Comics, 128 pages, $12.95) and Bottomless Belly Button (Fantagraphics Books, 720 pages, $29.99).

Shaw’s engagement with human frailty hasn’t fully shaken that tannic flavor of a detached exercise. I’m not sure what was preoccupying Dan Kois when he read Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, but Shaw has a way to go yet before his output’s "emotional jolt" — as Kois puts it in a recent New York magazine profile of Shaw — out-zaps that of Corrigan creator Chris Ware. Still, we’re talking about a 25-year-old who renders intimate character dramas that aren’t obviously autobiographical. That endeavor in itself deserves applause. Viewed as part of an impressive and varied body of work (Shaw created thousands of pages before he could even rent a car), BodyWorld feels genuinely experimental instead of rhythmically wayward. It’s an experiment moored by stimuutf8g visual syntax: shards of solid candy hues, evocative lapses in the coloring, those dreamy wandering panels. Plus, shopworn or not, drugs and ESP are just neat.

Speed Reading

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KEEP THE FAITH

By Faith Evans with Aliyah S. King

Grand Central Publishing

353 pages

$24.99

She was Biggie’s wife. She’s still the mother of his son. She was in the middle — stuck on the very fault line — of the Biggie and Tupac saga. She’s put up with Sean Combs through all his nicknames. She wrote and sang gorgeous backup for Mary J. Blige on choice tracks from Mary’s classic 1994 album My Life (MCA) — that is, before she and Mary got quite contrary. She’s had more than a lil’ issue with Lil’ Kim. She was friends with Missy Elliott before Missy became famous. In Etta James’ wild and unfiltered 1995 autobiography Rage to Survive (Da Capo Press, 304 pages, $18), she’s the one James singles out as a daughter figure. You best believe Faith Evans has a story to tell.

A page-turner with nary a false note, Keep the Faith is a tale beyond any groupie’s intelligence or contemporary pulp fiction hood novelist’s imagination. While Faith never made a flat-out classic album like My Life, her recordings (especially 2001’s Faithfully, on Bad Boy) are underrated, and she didn’t Oprah-size herself like Mary. She’s kept it understated, so her memoir isn’t a tell-all. It presents some well-known stories from her perspective, adding the occasional new twist — for example, it turns out she beat up Kim not once, but on two different occasions. We learn Missy can be a bit two-faced. We wonder how sensible, Clark Sisters–loving Faith could be so foolish as to get caught up with Death Row Records and a buck wild Tupac, and so strong as to not go insane with paranoia once people started talking and shit started going down. Faith’s Biggie stories — including vivid memories of days on the stoop before his first album dropped — are funny and endearing. They’re also far from sugar-coated, building up to a cathartic account of his funeral that’s not flattering to Mary or Kim — but isn’t vindictive or judgmental either. She speaks her truth.

Mead notebook

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› johnny@sfbg.com

"Yeah, whatever, I’m just watching Oprah," Taylor Mead lolls over the phone line when I ask if he has time to talk. "Anyway, what do you want to know, because I’m so bored with being interviewed."

Actually, around a half-minute separates Mead’s initial "whatever" from his profession of boredom — 30 seconds that he laconically fills with more wit than other interview subjects might manage in 30 hours. "One day Oprah will be at a petting zoo, loving little animals, and the next she’ll have a banquet, serving 100 people veal," he says. "As a vegetarian, I object. I object to this new vice president, too. She hunts wolves from an airplane. Give me a break."

Such objections are a taste of what’s in store for anyone wise enough to see the 83-year-old Mead crack wise during a brief visit to San Francisco. "Do I dare call it Frisco?" asks the star of Ron Rice’s 1960 North Beach–set cinematic Beat classic The Flower Thief. Though Mead hasn’t been to SF in years, he knows the city today well enough now to liken it to "the richest suburb in the world," so he’s querying himself as much as me. "They called it Frisco when there were tough dockworkers there, when it was a tougher town. Now it’s just Frisky."

The Flower Thief kicks off "Taylor Mead: A Clown Underground," a three- evening Joel Shepard–curated affair at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts that moves on to the 1967-68 Andy Warhol mock western Lonesome Cowboys and concludes with William A. Kirkley’s 2005 documentary portrait Excavating Taylor Mead. The first and last films are bookend — sort of — visions of a self-described "National Treasure / If there were such a thing." Mead is a great American movie star and poet whose stardom is a byproduct of his poetry and vice versa. Just as 2000’s Pie in the Sky: The Brigid Berlin Story reveals that Mead’s rich-rebel-gone-Warhol-superstar peer Brigid Berlin is a master of monologue, Kirkley’s documentary — and more directly, Mead’s books — present a wilder-than-Wilde master of the aphorism.

Mead can also make a lengthy poem sing, as illustrated by a YouTube clip of a serenade to Jake Gyllenhaal, gleaned from one of his regular Monday night appearances at Bowery Poetry Club. If Gyllenhaal’s 2005 Brokeback Mountain character is the gay son of Montgomery Clift in 1948’s Red River and 1961’s The Misfits, then both Mead’s song to Gyllenhaal and Mead’s older poem "Autobiography" prove lonesome cowboys can be lassoed by a rodeo clown.

"For everything that is original, spontaneous, alive, and creative and beautiful, there is some old lady who will complain about it," writes Mead in 1986’s Son of Andy Warhol (Hanuman Books). In the 2005 collection A Simple Country Girl (YBK Publishers, $14.95) his wit and wisdom is even shorter and sharper. "Everything / Has a right to life / except mosquitoes / and religious people."

Airplane willing and anti-anxiety medication in hand, Taylor Mead is returning to the town where Jack Spicer once seethed as he sat on Jack Kerouac’s lap. Shower him with Dewar’s. He’ll be bringing a couple hundred pages of quips in his carry-on bag, but they might not be necessary.

As the man himself says, "I don’t need a script."

TAYLOR MEAD: A CLOWN UNDERGROUND

Thurs/18–Fri/19 and Sun/21, 7:30 p.m., $8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

—————————–

Autobiography

(after a poem by Ferlinghetti)

By Taylor Mead

I have blown

And been blown

I have never had a woman

I have been in great jails and terrible jails

The great jails were the tanks and the terrible jails were the model prisons.

I have seen my mother a few hours before she died.

I have seen my father pinching pennies and felt it.

I have heard and felt my father in his worship of

money worshipping money and the U.S.A. of money

madness, fuck it!

I have been beaten nearly to death before an

"enlightened" Greenwich Village crowd.

I have been beaten in my hospital bed by sadistic

doctors.

I have been arrested by a jealous policewoman and

I should have hit her and killed her.

I have played all the pianos that all the famous

pianists have played in Carnegie Hall in the basement

of Steinway Hall and I still play them

after making it with the elevator boys on a quiet

religious Sunday afternoon.

I have made goo goo eyes at Marlon Brando with no

luck

but not too much discouragement either.

I have made it with Montgomery Clift in Central Park

against a little pagoda

or at least he said it was Montgomery Clift and

it was Montgomery Clift too.

Elizabeth Taylor has really looked at me from under

a veil on Fifth Avenue and Susan Strasberg and

Judith Anderson all on Fifth Avenue and can’t

remember her name on Sixth Avenue now the

Avenue of the Americas and then too

And that year’s winner of the Antoinette Perry

award followed me from the St. Regis where he lived

and I’ve never been in for four blocks until

I regretfully lost him because I’m shy.

And my first day alone in New York almost this famous

cowboy star made goo goo eyes at me on the steps

of the New York Public Library, main branch

And I went into the Times Square Duffy Square

subterranean toilet with one of the movies’ Tarzans

and he showed me his big peter

and I showed him my small one

because it was cold and

I didn’t want to get it excited unless I was sure

something great was about to take place

And it didn’t.

Originally printed in Excerpts from the Anonymous Diary of a New York Youth (self-published, 1961) and Angels of the Lyre: A Gay Poetry Anthology (Gay Sunshine Press, 1975)

New blood

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What possesses Towelhead director and Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball to explore those gray areas where sexuality converges with morality? "It’s fascinating," Ball says, sequestered in San Francisco’s Ritz-Carlton for a series of interviews. "I feel like I’m at a point where really well-adjusted people are the kind of people I like to have in my life. But as characters in fiction — shoot me! I would be so bored."

Ball unleashes a magnificently chortle, more Henry VIII than writerly introvert: "I’m interested in the mistakes people make [and] in the dilemmas where people’s true characters are called into question. I’m interested in those mythic moments in everybody’s life."

Towelhead, which Ball adapted from Alicia Erian’s 2005 novel, is unflinching in its depiction of the culture shock and flowering sexuality of 13-year-old Jasira (Summer Bishil), an Arab American girl relocated to Houston to live with her strict Lebanese father (Peter Macdissi). The film is also courageously unjudgmental concerning the choices the young girl makes — which include her relationship with Army reservist Mr. Vuoso (Aaron Eckhart), who lives next door. Ball sets the disarmingly realistic mood of Towelhead perfectly with his opening scene of Jasira about be given a "mercy" shave by her mother’s boyfriend, though few would suspect that he would so adeptly grapple with the narrative’s complex perspective on race — not to mention the parallels one might draw between the film’s mis-en-scene, set during the Gulf War, and today’s conflict in Iraq.

In contrast, Ball’s latest TV foray, True Blood, which recently premiered on HBO, casts its nets far from reality into a pulpy, supernatural future where vampires can openly live among humans following the invention of synthetic blood. Can a telepathic young woman find true blood — or rather, love — with a guy who sucks? It sounds like Ball is happy to stem the angst flowing through so many of his projects. "I thought, enough with the existential naval-gazing," he says, laughing. "Been there done that."

TOWELHEAD opens Fri/19 in Bay Area theaters.

Jabbing at Justice?

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>>Justice among us? Read rocker Kimberly Chun’s response to this essay here.

› superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO Pack up your travel-size Palin Porker-Pink™ CoverGirl Lipslick, kids, ‘cuz we’re about to time-travel through the recent dance floor past, with a brief stop at Negative Nellyland. All aboard the Wayback: toot, toot.

In the past couple of years, five new genres have taken over US underground clubs — all with wriggly roots in Europe and Canada. (If you’re looking to read any entrails about America’s loss of influence in the world, check out our lube-slip grip on global dance floors.) These genres are the following: minimal techno, a brainy but often stunning strip-down of the much-maligned techno beast; dubstep, with its post-postcolonial fusion of reggae, two-step, bhangra, and more; retro disco, summoning the shimmering ghosts of gay bathhouse, italo disco, and other pre-digital ’70s and ’80s micro-movements; lazer bass — or “bastard bass,” or “psychedelic robo-crunk remix action” — the blippy, bowel-shaking deconstruction of chart-prevalent hip-hop.

And then, of course, there’s hardcore electro.

Honestly, hardcore electro — and the glam-slam banger scene that grew up around it — can sometimes bug the bejesus out of me. The genre has mind-blowing aspects: thumping energy, quick-witted mixing, exhilarating stuttered vocals, old-school breakdowns, and key-skipping basslines. I was raised rave, so its primo combo of mannered anarchy and DJ worship — along with its genre-bending conflagration of metal, crunk, acid, and techno — is right up my tender alley. Bring the noise.

Yet there’s something a little too “party like a rockstar” about it. With its accompanying over-the-top neon-hipster look (attack of the sunglass tees!), sex-obsessed provocations, and fist-pumping non-dance moves, hardcore electro is the new hair metal. The banger kids I’ve met are all lovely and motivated, and in the right DJ hands — Richie Panic, Vin Sol — the mix can achieve perfection, cheekily blasting stadium-size sounds to an up-to-the-minute crowd. But there’s sometimes a shallow, for-the-cameras sheen to the scene — mirroring the often robotic, often black-faced “let’s get fucked up and fuck” lyrics spat from the speakers. Sad face.

Plus, no one ever STFUs about goddamned Justice.

OK, look, I’m no hater — do you see any frown lines on this immaculate face? Thought not. If 10,000 people wanna throw on electric-blue shutter shades and American Apparel tube socks and lose their shit to two smirking French dudes, I’m all for it. I may even join ’em. But if I get one more MySpace friend request from a DJ tag team in Spiderman masks who fall on their knees before Justice, I’m gonna hurl coconuts. Can we get a little originality on the runway, s’il vous plaît?

Justice — superstars of the Ed Banger label, for which the banger scene’s named — are OK. Any politically savvy decks duo that flawlessly drops “Master of Puppets” and “Standing in the Way of Control” into ear-splitting, ADD sets gets my vote. They’re wicked smart, too: the hilariously grandiose symbol-title of their first album, † is the ascii symbol for dagger — an Internet-based irony perfect for our religiously warring times, and one surely expected from the two sharp former graphic designers. They don’t wear masks, whew, and I can’t totally blame them for the look and feel of their scene.

So why do Justice make my snobby shit list? First, they overreach, in that tired rock-star DJ way: their stadium tour of this country was partly downscaled in the face of poor ticket sales. Plus, their poker-faced religious bombast act is too one-note to enjoy, and their first major US TV appearance, on Jimmy Kimmel Live, was a lip-synch of their welcome-worn-out-quickly hit “D.A.N.C.E.” performed by Michael Jackson and Prince look-alikes — a cynical joke that turned the song’s utopian lyrics (“Under the spotlight / Neither black nor white”) into a racial minefield and completely underestimated the audience. I realize Justice gets a wry giggle from such overblown deflation — that’s so French — but I can’t afford enough flip-flops to go with all their tacky punch lines. Mean ol’ rock stars.

Then, where is the love? Surely you’ve heard of “the love”? It’s enshrined in the House Nation constitution, the underlying sentiment of dance music from the dawns of disco and house through the second Summer of Love exactly 20 years ago — and still running under the floors of many clubs today. I’m not a metaphysical person. One body’s enough for me, thank you. Well, maybe three on the weekend. But even I can feel the spiritual dimension of dance, the slightly corn-tinted, otherworldly glow of souls united in motion. Love is the message.

Sure, Justice promised that “We are your friends / You’ll never be alone again” with their friends Simian in the undisputed juggernaut mix of ’06. But it came off as more snide than divine. Their shows get too hyper for full transcendence: more cool than heat, more status than soul. And Justice’s horrifying misstep of a video for “Stress,” which follows a group of youths as they rob and beat random Parisians (yes, I get that it boldly activated European fears of “the other,” but, bleh), sets the banger aesthetic up as the nihilistic opposite of love, while desperately lunging for punk-rock street cred. Boring!

But maybe unblinking devotion to “the love” is an outdated, pre-Internet means of global dance floor connection and validation — and something those of us glowsticking it with Big Bird in the pre-Dubya years had the fortunate leisure to indulge in and mystify. Maybe now thrashing out with like minds to an aggro blizzard of metal samples and jittery synths — and looking good doing it — is the perfect escape pod: dance-floor justice, for these apocalyptic times. Maybe.

Mao and Coca-Cola

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› johnny@sfbg.com

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is in the grip of full-on Fridamania when I first pay a visit to "Half-Life of a Dream: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Logan Collection." Nonetheless, Yue Minjun’s terracotta warriors attract photo-ops: a little girl poses next to a solitary Yue sculpture with his hands behind his neck, while five other Yue statues (each a life-size body — barefoot in white T-shirt and blue jeans — with an enormous head: eyes closed, mouth frozen in anxious "smile") stand in formation near the exhibition’s threshold.

A single Yue also welcomes visitors to the quieter, more expansive "Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection" at the Berkeley Art Museum, where 25 more Yue statues (from the 2000 installation 2000 A.D.) and numerous oil-on-canvas renderings of Yue — including a chain of 13-or-so Yues looking down on everyone — await inside. A decision to use this icon of cynical realism as a host of sorts unites the SFMOMA and BAM shows, which also feature a number of the same artists: Bird’s Nest Stadium designer and provocateur Ai Weiwei; satirical painter Yu Youhan; gay gazer Zeng Fanzhi; repetitious self-portrait specialist (like Yue) Fang Lijun; disturbing dreamer Yang Shaobin; chilly portraitist Zhang Xiaogang; candid snapper Liu Xiaodong; mordant physical observer and landscape artist Liu Wei; Tiananmen Square lookout Yin Zhaoyang; and Li Songsong, who coats memory in cake icing.

A collection of work dating from 1988 to 2008 by 25 artists, "Half-Life of a Dream" is less expansive than "Mahjong," which draws from Uli Sigg’s world’s-largest collection of contemporary Chinese art and dates back to the late stages of the Cultural Revolution. Its conceit is also more specific and restrictive: digging beneath the Beijing Olympics slogan "One World, One Dream," the SFMOMA exhibition taps into the myriad dream facets or "masks, shadows, ghosts, reveries" (to quote from Jeff Kelley’s titular essay) that drift through pre- and especially post-Mao China.

This dream theme is clear and to the forefront in paintings such as Liu Xiaodong’s 2007 Xiaomei and Zhang Xiaogang’s 2005-6 Untitled, but it grows strained when applied to, say, Liu Dafang’s urban photorealism. At times, it obfuscates the layers of a work, as when the complex mother-daughter vision of Yu Hong’s 2006 She — White Collar Worker is summarized with the quasifeminist remark that "women remain trapped in dreams of themselves." Regardless, "Half-Life" presents more than a few standout works: Gu Wenda’s hair-raising united nations — babel of the millennium (1999) and Sheng Qi’s autobiographical political memorial My Left Hand (2001) are especially formidable. Its dream analysis fits most snugly and dramatically around one of the most recent pieces — and the exhibition’s climax of sorts — Sui Jianguo’s The Sleep of Reason. There, an eternally resting Mao is surrounded by multicolored masses of toy dinosaurs.

Here’s a Mao, there’s a Mao, everywhere’s a papa-oom-Mao-Mao in the relatively playful "Mahjong," where Sun Guoqi’s 1973 Chairman Mao with the New National Emblems greets viewers with false cheer at the first of five floors (leaving aside the lower levels and snaky hallways, where some of the most provocative work resides). This traditional view of Mao is quickly punctured by Yu Youhan’s hilarious 2005 Warhol pun Untitled (Mao/Marilyn), the young androgyne Mao of Li Shan’s 1995 Rouge–Flower, the Nintendo Mao of Feng Mengbo’s 1994 Taxi Taxi, the decaying Mao of the Gao brothers’ acerbically watchful 2000 An Installation on Tiananmen, the art connoisseur Mao of Shi Xinning’s 2000-01 Duchamp Retrospective Exhibition in China, and the flirtatious Mao of the same artist’s 2001 Dialogue, to name but a handful.

Strong currents of irreverence surge throughout "Mahjong," thanks to children of Mao and Coca-Cola such as the Luo brothers, whose vulgar, comedic keepsakes of fast-food capitalism enliven "Dialogue China Part II," a group show at Elins/Eagles-Smith Gallery. (Also at Elins/Eagles-Smith, Xing Danwen’s urban fiction dioramas bring the post-human romance of Tsai Ming-liang’s 1994 Vive L’<0x2009>Amour to mind.) The exhibition’s sub-strands of subject matter include militarization and the "little emperors" and troubled girls of China’s one-child policy.

While mahjong might not be the deepest or most revelatory thematic motif for an exhibition devoted to a nation, it more than suits both BAM’s multitiered or tiled space and the rich varieties of the Sigg collection. "Mahjong" doesn’t have to beg for repeat viewings — the magnitude of the show and quirks of its arrangement demand it. In general, contemporary Chinese painters tend toward large-scale representation, perhaps most successfully when — as with Zhou Tiehai’s looks at Joe Camel — one gets the sense that the grand gesture itself is being mocked. But one of the exhibition’s best works is also its tiniest: Lu Hao’s A Grain of Sand (2003) is a 1/4-by-1/4-inch memorial to the individual, a figure perpetually under assault — whether by communism or hypercapitalism.

DIALOGUE CHINA PART II

Through Sept. 30

Elins/Eagles-Smith Gallery

49 Geary, Suite 520, SF

(415) 981-1080

www.eesgallery.com

HALF-LIFE OF A DREAM: CONTEMPORARY CHINESE ART FROM THE LOGAN COLLECTION

Through Oct. 5

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third St., SF

(415) 357-4000

www.sfmoma.org

MAHJONG: CONTEMPORARY CHINESE ART FROM THE SIGG COLLECTION

Through Jan. 4, 2009

Berkeley Art Museum

2626 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-0808

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Love and death

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I’m in my mid-to-late 30s. Most of my life, my sex drive has been pretty low. Fairly quickly (within a year) after beginning a relationship, it tapers off to almost nothing. I believe this significantly negatively affects my LTRs (my last one ended due to not enough sex; we’re trying to work on it in my current one).

I suspect this is pretty common (I’ve heard of "lesbian bed death," and some of my straight friends also admit to having a very low sex drive). What are the typical causes of low libido in women? I don’t really believe in aphrodisiacs, but are there any proven treatments, meds, or herbs for this?

Love,

No Mojo

Dear Mo:

If any of those worked, they would be aphrodisiacs, and you’d be stuck not believing in them. Not at all helpful. Luckily, they don’t, so you don’t have to worry about it.

Actually that’s not precisely true. There are things that work for some women, just not all, or even most. And since female sexuality seems to delight in confounding even the most dedicated researchers, there’s no telling what might turn out to be efficacious — some combination of hormones, set and setting, history and expectation, and circulation. But in which combinations and what order, nobody knows.

I’d be interested to know what "trying to work on it" means, and whether it’s working. If you really want to delve in, you could see if you can get a referral to an endocrinologist who knows what she’s doing; maybe a little testosterone boost would give you a, uh, leg up. Second, or first if that isn’t happening, you could get yourself assessed for depression or anxiety disorders and maybe do some cognitive-behavioral therapy and/or try Wellbutrin. And last (or first), I’d take a look at the sex you are having and determine whether maybe it’s just not what you want, and try to add in or subtract the elements that would improve things or are killing your buzz, respectively.

The bummer part is that some people really do just have a low libido and that makes them normal for them. Unfortunately, a clear declaration on the order of "that’s just the way I roll" is not going to satisfy a frustrated partner, and many people suffering from low desire really are suffering — they want to have high desire. Some combination of the suggestions above may get you somewhere, and I sincerely hope they do. Otherwise, well, I just listened to a fascinating program on the placebo effect on a BBC podcast, but I’m afraid none of the researchers on there could reasonably claim that taking a pill that you know has no physioactive ingredients would work. Otherwise I’d be all, "Here, take this."

Love,

Andrea

P.S. Oh — there’s an interesting entry on the neurochemistry of lesbian bed death at "Scientific Blogging," here: www.tinyurl.com/4vaxq9. She blames it on oxytocin and pheromones and — surprise! — too much cuddling.

Dear Andrea:

My husband has ED and likes sex in the morning after I give him oral sex, which seems to help. The problem is that he won’t give me oral back! He’s gotten oral millions of times — and me? Twice at the most. Years ago, he was giving oral and I came, which kinda flooded him, and he didn’t do it again for 20 years. Now I’m menopausal and kinda dry, so rubbing gets annoying and doesn’t do much for me. And now I don’t even want to give him oral because he won’t do it for me. He touches me and I pull away because I know he won’t return what he gets. This stinks for me, and I’m totally turned off!

Love,

Rubbed Wrong Way

Dear Way:

Oh, not good. You don’t want to go without forever, nor do you want to get into this sort of (I wish there were a better phrase for this) tit-for-tat system with your beloved. You’re going to have to tell him how you feel, then he’s going to have to, well, reciprocate. If the problem really is the once-upon-a time "flooding" incident, you can do what I urge men to do: warn your partner before flooding ensues, allowing her/him the chance to pull back if wanted. Then you have to tell him that you’re dry and don’t want to be rubbed so much, but here is some helpful, handy lube. Then you have to stop being so mad at him. It’s not that you don’t have cause — of course you do! — but the grouchy, aggrieved tone that comes across in your letter is not the sort that invites compromise and the "we must all hang together or most assuredly we shall all hang separately" approach which is, frankly, your only hope. You really should not have let 20 years go by without saying anything. He really should not have let 20 years go by, period. So, OK, what now?

Love,

Andrea

Got a salacious subject you want Andrea to discuss? Ask her a question!

Also, Andrea is teaching! Contact her if you’re interested in (sex)life after baby classes. Her new blog is at www.gogetyourjacket.com, but don’t look there for the butt sex. There isn’t any.

Treasure Island Music Festival 2008

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It’s a Treasure Island Music Festival free-for-all, and we’re ready to rock and/or dance overboard with the all-star line-up at the gonzo weekend-long sonic blast. In the name of rockers, Sonic Reducer faces off against the dance-floor repping Super Ego over French electro-pop juggernaut Justice, headlining Saturday. What has the stylish duo wrought? Plus: we also look at TV on the Radio, Goldfrapp, Hot Chip, Vampire Weekend, prep school rock, and other artists appearing Sat/20-Sun/21. For the complete fest schedule and details, go to www.treasureislandfestival.com and dig for gold.


>>Sonic Reducer: No peace, so Justice!
Stressing on semiotics and skipping to the bomb-blast beat
By Kimberly Chun


>>Super Ego: Jabbing at Justice?
“Help! I’m drowning in shutter shades,” yells club kid
By Marke B.


>>No castaways here
Treasure Island jewels to drool over
Our Picks


>>Channel surfers
Flip the switch and begin anew with TV on the Radio
By Mosi Reeves


>>“Seventh” heaven
Goldfrapp ascends to the astral, while throwing roots down in the real
By Kimberly Chun


>>Does Vampire Weekend suck?
A critical mass of critical stabs at the afro-pop punks
By Brandon Bussolini


>>Class revolting
Chester French fronts the new school of college-rockers
By Brandon Bussolini


>>Hot Chip, ahoy
Fancy dress, hearing loss, pop highs
By Kimberly Chun

Waving the black flag

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PREVIEW First the bad news, straight from the wise-ass, too-literate, poetry-writing punk rocker who once muscled his way through Los Angeles hardcore byways and back: "I think McCain will win," Henry Rollins tells me over the phone in Los Angeles after humping a shipment of his new book, Fanatic! Vol. Three (21361), off the truck and into his offices.

"He’s just an awful person." Rollins pauses. "I’m one to talk, but I’m not as awful. I just think America will make the wrong choice again. After all, Democrats never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity — and Republicans cheat."

Ah, Rollins — a heady gust of hardcore wit ‘n’ wisdom, the punk progenitor driving the original, alternate-universe straight-talk express. On the eve of a so-called change election, leave it to the ex–Black Flag frontman and IFC regular to take a talking tour titled "Recountdown" to gauge the state of the nation. Rollins, no doubt, will hold forth on subjects ranging from Sarah Palin ("Who needs five kids? What are you, working in the fields? Are you selling them for meat?") to his recent documentary-making and travels in Thailand, South Africa, New Orleans, Pakistan, and Burma (of the latter he says, "it was five wacky white guys with expensive cameras trying to pass themselves off as tourists").

So in a world that seems to witness even the most obscure underground combo bellying up to the reunion trough, can we ever expect the still-influential Black Flag to reassemble? The good news: Rollins amiably notes that he wouldn’t have much say in the matter since "Black Flag basically belongs to Greg Ginn. But as a hypothetical, I’d pass."

HENRY ROLLINS Fri/19, 8 p.m., $25. Zellerbach Auditorium, UC Berkeley Campus, Bancroft and Telegraph, Berk. (415) 421-8497, www.livenation.com

Bart Davenport

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PREVIEW "I’ve never been into rowdy shit, you know. I’ve always been a softie."

Secure is the man who will own up to his inner — and aural — gentleness. But Bart Davenport is like that: a lover not a fighter, even as he talks about Egbert Souse’s, the W.C. Fields–themed bar in Oakland that he lives above. That "semi-rowdy" nightspot poses no danger to the East Bay–born-and-bred singer-songwriter: he prefers the sweet stuff to the hardcore — or to sour grapes. Lend an ear to the refreshing-as-iced-tea, silky delights of his new, fourth solo CD, Palaces (Antenna Farm), Davenport’s bid to give his ravenous listeners what they want. "Now you have MySpace, and you have a way for people from all over the world to ask you, ‘Where’s the new record?’<0x2009>" says Davenport, who of late rarely played solo and mainly focused on singing with Honeycut. "I thought I better make another one for these people or they’ll go away!"

Palaces will provide fans of the ex-Kinetics and Loved Ones frontman with the pure hit of pristine pop pleasure they’ve been hankering for. In pursuit of the earnest, 1960s- and ’70s-era AM-radio soft-rock pleasures of "Jon Jon" and "A Young One," Davenport enlisted the help of friends like Honeycut’s Tony Sevener and Hervé Salters, Persephone’s Bees’ Angelina Moysov, and Kelley Stoltz and Kevin Ink. The latter two worked on Ink’s 24-track, 2-inch tape machine, which Herbie Hancock’s "Rockit" was said to have been recorded on, and brought in a glockenspiel, which Stoltz purchased for the project. "Stoltzisms crept their way onto the songs," Davenport says, "and it was a welcome thing." The resulting Palaces finds the self-described "acoustic guitar–slinging troubadour" sounding perfectly comfy in his own skin, so hurl as many softie or soft-rock accusations as you wish. "I’ve never had a personal agenda to bring back soft rock," Davenport muses. "If it’s vilified by people who don’t like it, that just makes it cooler for me and the people who do. Really, who wants to be hip?"

BART DAVENPORT With Sugar and Gold, Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson, and Oakland Soft Rock Choir. Fri/19, 9:30 p.m., $12. Café Du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. (415) 861-5016, www.cafedunord.com

Carcass

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PREVIEW Besides creating one of the most ungainly acronyms in the English language, NWOBHM, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, galvanized a global infatuation with metal that lasted more than a decade. As the music pioneered by Motörhead, Iron Maiden, and Judas Priest touched off an international powder keg, it lost its UK focus, along with nods to Tennyson and the kind of goofy patriotism exemplified by bands like Saxon.

Left behind by the mid-1980s was a younger generation of English musicians, roiling in the Margaret Thatcher–stirred urban cauldrons that produced metal’s earliest heroes, and disaffected by the commoditization of Maiden and Priest. By exhibiting an inexhaustible appetite for extreme music’s nascent movements and a talent for combining and improving on them, Liverpool’s Carcass began a second, newer wave of equally influential British heavy metal.

Along with their co-conspirators in Napalm Death, Carcass drew on thrash, hardcore, early death and black metal, and the abrasive sound of NYC post-punk band Swans to create a genre called "grindcore." Pushing the compositional potential of metal to its absolute limit, the band inspired countless followers to attempt similar feats of complicated, abstruse, yet relentlessly heavy songwriting.

The daunting power of their musical imaginations was perversely mirrored in their lyrics. Weaving stomach-turning tales of autopsy and disembowelment, Carcass’ anatomical knowledge was so thorough it led some to believe that they were doctors, or at least medical school dropouts. Despite a 13-year hiatus, the band has returned to its practice, supported by death and black metal luminaries that would not exist without them.

CARCASS With Rotten Sound, Suffocation, 1349, and Aborted. Fri/19, 8 p.m., $32.50. Grand Ballroom, Regency Center, 1290 Sutter, SF. (415) 673-5716, www.regencycentersf.com

Black and white

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REVIEW When Lisa (Kerry Washington) and Chris Mattson (Patrick Wilson) move into their "starter house" — since it has a three-car garage, sizable pool, sweeping hillside view, and god knows how many bedrooms, perhaps they ultimately plan to buy a castle — it seems a plus that their next-door neighbor is a policeman. Unfortunately, LAPD officer Abel Turner (Samuel L. Jackson) has a rather heavy-handed sense of justice both on and off-duty. A widower who keeps his two children on a tight disciplinary leash, he has very specific ideas about what’s right and wrong. Soon, it becomes clear that for Turner, interracial couples like the Mattsons fall into the latter camp. It doesn’t take long before his barbed civility and leading comments turn to outright hostility, with the couple helpless to prove he’s behind acts of vandalism and other escautf8g problems. Nor can his police buddies be expected to help. Directed (but not written) by Neil LaBute, this drama builds up a fair amount of discomfiting tension, with Jackson wisely underplaying a role that could have turned into a villainous caricature. The movie deserves credit for provoking discussion rather than simply inflaming racial paranoia à la Crash (2004), even if in the end it falters by reverting to the usual thriller clichés.

LAKEVIEW TERRACE opens Fri/19 in Bay Area theaters.

Perspectives on metal

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REVIEW San Francisco photographer David Maisel is best known for vast, expansive images. Critic Vince Aletti deemed his aerial views of Los Angeles freeways "absolutely post-apocalyptic." With "Library of Dust," Maisel shifts from the macrocosmic to the nearly microscopic. But his trademark clarity and intensity turns the viewer’s mind into an infinite focus-puller regarding notions of existence and human relationships to the universe. The titular library is a room in the Oregon State Hospital — the site of Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest — where copper canisters in various stages of corrosion contain the ashes (or in hospital parlance, "cremains") of forsaken mental patients.

The many-layered morbidity of Maisel’s subject matter is counterbalanced by the shocking beauty of the decaying canisters, which, in his words — and in his large-scale images, illuminated by filtered window light — spill forth "cadmium, cobalt, cerulean, azurite, oxblood, chrome yellow, ocher, sage, and emerald." Though one essay in the new Maisel monograph Library of Dust (Chronicle Books, $80) begins with Roland Barthes proclaiming that a photographic image "produces Death while trying to preserve life," these photos are an inverse of that popular theorem. (In fact, since Maisel took the photos in 2005, the canisters have been placed inside black plastic boxes and clear plastic bags, generating condensation he’s compared to "breath on a window.") "Library of Dust" intersects potently and poetically with historical studies of madness and death, not to mention a recent mini-wave of books and films on the subject of dust.

In a far corner of Haines Gallery, Zhan Wang’s "Gold Mountain" presents a different heavy perspective on metal, arranging stainless steel rocks next to "real" ones. While Zhan invokes the California Gold Rush, it’s hard not to think of this quiet, near-hidden installation’s relationship to the current onslaught of Chinese art in the Bay Area — or to think of the people and landscapes around Three Gorges Dam.

DAVID MAISEL: LIBRARY OF DUST and ZHAN WANG: GOLD MOUNTAIN Through Oct. 4. Tues.–Fri., 10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.; Sat., 10:30 a.m.–5 p.m. Haines Gallery, 49 Geary, suite 540, SF. (415) 397-8114. www.hainesgallery.com

Up in smoke?

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SPOILER-LADEN TV RANT What’s wrong with Weeds? The Showtime dramedy about a pot-dealing MILF is in its fourth season, and was recently renewed for two more — but who’s gonna keep watching? A few choice moments aside, the once-mighty Weeds has pretty much sucked this season. To recap: at the show’s start circa 2005, recently widowed suburbanite Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker) "put the herb in suburb," per Showtime’s cheeky coinage, by dealing greenage to well-off clients, including her sleazy accountant, Doug (Kevin Nealon). With her ever-present iced coffee in hand, Prius-driving Nancy slurped her way into a new routine: keeping her two growing sons in line, butting heads with neighbor nemesis Celia (Elizabeth Perkins) and troublemaking brother-in-law Andy (Justin Kirk), doing business with local suppliers like no-nonsense Heylia (Tonye Patano), opening a bakery as a pot-shop front, and dating a single dad (Martin Donovan) who turned out to be a DEA agent.

Season two followed a similar shenanigans-amid-McMansions plot, throwing in a Snoop Dogg cameo and thickening tension surrounding Nancy’s DEA dude and her ever-growing (ha!) business. Season three teetered ever-more on the edge of believability, and Nancy’s cushy community was eventually consumed by a wildfire that could only have been the result of arson and a desperate push to give the show new life.

Weeds creator Jenji Kohan and company aimed for change by moving the Botwin clan south, from Los Angeles suburbia to a beachy town near the Mexican border. Fresh scenery has allowed the show to introduce new characters like Esteban (Demian Bichir) — the suave mayor of Tijuana who happens to be a drug kingpin running pot, weapons, heroin, and god knows what else through a hidden tunnel beneath Nancy’s strip-mall maternity store. (Naturally, Nancy begins sleeping with him almost instantly.) Some of Weeds‘ familiar touchstones remain, like Celia’s destructive presence and Doug’s sleaziness, but there’s a sadness to coke-sniffing Celia and a creepiness to Doug (now obsessed with a beautiful illegal immigrant) that’s become increasingly less fun to watch. The show’s quirkier moments — like the priceless season two episode when Andy explained to Nancy’s youngest son about the wonders of jerking off into a banana peel — have all but vanished. What’s it gonna take to bring Weeds back? Did the magic flame out when "Little Boxes" ceased to be the theme song and suburbia faded from view? And how does a show called Weeds get away with showing so little actual pot smoking? Parker’s oft-awarded performance is still the best thing about the show. Pretty soon, though, it’ll be the only good thing.

WEEDS airs Mondays at 10 p.m. on Showtime.

Knuckleballin’

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW I don’t know if it helps to have a strategy at the San Francisco Fringe Festival. The nature of this annual animal — the 17th installment opened Sept. 3 — resists forethought. You study the program, listen to the buzz while getting yours on in the Exit Theatre Café, read the audience reviews online, but in the end you never know what you’ll get. This year I led with my gut and — it being that kind of year — decided to go for all the dark stuff: the ugly, the brutal, the profane. So I started with clowns.

In truth, the choice to see physical comedy troupe Pi’s After-Party on opening night had less to do with anything inherently transgressive about clowns than with the juggling, which I’d glimpsed at the Fest’s Sneak Peak show last month, and which was great enough to merit a second viewing. I could watch those jugglers for hours: the courage, the concentration, the ingenuity, the balls. Also the bowling pins and knives. A glow-in-the-dark routine was nearly balletic; a bloody mishap with the blades, almost operatic — if in a jocular, low-key sort of way.

As it turned out, the rest of the troupe’s routines, while uneven — a few bits felt either too familiar or underdeveloped — offered fresh and fine moments, with antics delivered expertly by a youthful, progressively endearing ensemble. Themes touching my heart included varied use of a casket and several walk-on appearances by the Grim Reaper. The grand finale — an all-out bone-crushing melee done in slow-mo — could have gone all night judging by audience guffaws and my own joyful tears. These are serious clowns, and their work is extremely silly.

The evening only got better and darker as I headed into Knuckleball, a drama whose sophisticated, thematic blend of love and baseball begins, naturally enough, with a star-spangled blowjob. This excellent two-hander, produced by New York’s EndTimes in association with Mortals Theater, is the best dramatic work I’ve seen at any Fringe. It’s one uninterrupted, dynamic, wildly unpredictable conversation between Ross (Shawn Parsons) — a Midwestern welder whose former glory days of high school baseball are overshadowed by the loss of his teammate and best friend — and his high-class girlfriend Trish (Judy Merrick) — whose polyglot, jet-set life masks a sordid past Ross must unexpectedly confront. Sounding distant echoes of Tennessee Williams and maybe Richard Greenberg, William Whitehurst’s hard, unsparing, humorous, and humane play, sharply directed by Jeremy Pape, is lit up by two fine, gutsy, focused performances that grip from the first and don’t let go.

Next came My Friend Hitler, rounding out the evening with swastikas and a wicked little footnote to the history of the Third Reich. Yes, with friends like these, Ernst Röhm — the head of the Nazi Party’s paramilitary brownshirts, executed by Hitler’s minions in 1934 in the "Night of the Long Knives" purge — needed no enemies. But are we meant to feel sorry for Röhm? Hardly. Are we meant to sympathize with longtime friend Adolph’s tough choices? Nah. In this solo performance, inspired by Yukio Mishima’s play and delivered by Washington, DC performer Zehra Fazal in Hitler drag, there’s not much to latch onto beyond the (unconvincingly personalized) political machinations of a waxing tyrant. Larger themes remain indistinct in this set of one-sided conversations, which Fazal delivers with animated but histrionic conviction. Hard to believe Nazis could be so dull, but maybe there’s a political lesson in that somewhere.

The following night’s fare included two back-to-back solo shows by women travelers. With the sparest of stage properties and a cheery but overly static stage presence, Katherine Glover details adventures in Central America, Europe, and Africa in No Stranger Than Home. These rarely rose above what you might expect to hear from a 20-something, white, middle-class American woman, but to her credit Glover is not entirely unconscious of this, using it to advantage on occasion. My Camino, by Canadian Sue Kenney at least takes a stab at mise-en-scène by reutf8g the story of her 780-km trek across a medieval Spanish pilgrimage route while walking on a treadmill. Perhaps the most affecting aspect of Kenney’s natural delivery is her understated treatment of her private sorrows.

A trip to the Center for Sex and Culture ended night two with the lighthearted yet evangelical infomercial/tutorial/educational variety act, Peg-Ass-Us, a duet by a real-life couple exploring the joys of pegging (which Webster’s declines to define, but involves a woman with a strap-on and a receptive partner). Sporting Barney-esque songs, a little audience participation, and lots of lube, it actually lasts longer than sex, which may be a drawback.

SAN FRANCISCO FRINGE FESTIVAL

Through Sun/14

For the schedule and details, go to www.sffringe.org

Too hot

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Turn down the grill, puleeze — last week felt like a little time-traveling trip to Nellyville (Universal), a throwback to ’02, as in "I’m getting too hot / I wanna take my clothes off." That snatch of "Hot in Herre," Country Grammar king Nelly’s collabo with the Neptunes, could have been the recurring refrain throughout the 80-degree-plus Indian summer sizzle engulfing San Francisky. And frankly I prefer Nelly’s get-nekkid vision of toasty times to the heat that seems to be driving the kids on my street to shoot each other up. Nightlife shouldn’t mean a fight for your life, and who can blame the Mission District teens who want to get out of their suffocating family apartments? Still, you wonder drowsily, when roused at 4:45 a.m. to the sound of five gunshots and some murder-minded creep speeding off: why do the shooters have such ready access to firearms?

I say, let’s cut the vengeance-minded, pistol-packing heat and up the glammed-up, sexy swelter instead. We can use a little more ye olde "Hot in Herre" and less hot-under-the-collar shoot-’em-ups. So the timing was perfect to check in with Nelly, a.k.a. Cornell Haynes Jr., about his latest album, Brass Knuckles (Derrty/Universal), on the verge of an intimate national tour alongside his chums St. Lunatics.

The finished product took a great deal of tweaking — hence the multiple delays, says the soft-spoken rapper, fashion impresario, and collaborator with everyone from T.I. (Creatively, "he’s a beast," swears Nelly) to Tim McGraw. Though Nelly’s intent on trying out new sounds, fans seem to prefer the rapper’s smoother R&B side, as exhibited by the popularity of his Suit disc over his hip-hoppier Sweat full-length (both Derrty/Universal, 2004). And the third single off Brass Knuckles, "Body on Me," which brings the St. Louis rapper together with Akon and rumored squeeze Ashanti, has done considerably better than his fun-loving, shout-along foray betwixt crunk and hyphy, "Stepped on My J’z" ("My ode to the joy of the sneaker," he says).

But all that doesn’t mean the Charlotte Bobcats co-owner wants to skew toward safe choices amid industry uncertainty and his own tussles with Universal ("Definitely I was unhappy with the situation," Nelly says of the negotiations that led him to make the 2007 throwaway "Wadsyaname" single. "Sometimes I think the only leverage that entertainers have is the music."): after all, he did try to assemble a vocal threesome with Mariah Carey and Janet Jackson for Brass Knuckles as well as a bro-down with Bruce Springsteen.

"Don’t be afraid of change," he tells me over the phone. "I think that’s the thing that scares people the most. You can’t tell fans what they should buy. You can’t tell fans what they should like. It looks funny! ‘Yo, don’t buy that — buy this. You’re wrong!’<0x2009>" The still-budding thespian within — Nelly will appear in the CSI: NY season opener — rears its head as the rapper imagines a bullied fan. "’But, but, it’s my money!’

"That’s something you don’t want to get into," he continues, reassuming his proper role. "You’re always a student."

This time around, Nelly says, "I wanted to do things a little differently — bring an energy to the album that I maybe haven’t in a while as far as tempos and selection of people that I used." To support that he wants to spend this tour "just explaining the songs and explaining what went into the album."

Apparently there’s more than a little of the down-home Midwesterner in the rapper, who continues to reside in his hometown of St. Louis. There, keeping it real — and cool — means knowing when to lay low. Having finally finished the album a week and a half ago, he’s now in the middle of promotions, marketing, and tour preparations, and his typical day can mean doing interviews at four New York City radio stations in one fell swoop, or "a good nap all day because I’m exhausted," he sighs. "Because I’ve probably been up for four or five days in a row. No exaggeration. It’s something that stays on you." *

NELLY

With St. Lunatics and Avery Storm

Sat/13, 9 p.m. doors, $40–$55

Mezzanine

444 Jessie, SF

(415) 820-9669

www.mezzaninesf.com

COME OUT SWINGING

BEATEN BY THEM

The native Australians — and onetime San Franciscans — hammered out a fascinating Signs of Life (Logicpole/Thrill Jockey, 2007) at Tiny Telephone studio. With one f and the Healing Curse. Wed/10, 9 p.m., $6. Hotel Utah, 500 Fourth St., SF. www.hotelutah.com

FLOATING CORPSES, HUNX AND HIS PUNX, AND YOUNGER LOVERS

Wreak havoc with Roxy Monoxide alongside Gravy Train!!!!’s punk poobah and Brontez’s ever-lovin’ latest. With No Gos and Bridez. Sat/13, 8 p.m., $5–$7. 924 Gilman Street Project, Berk. www.924gilman.org

MARY HALVORSON AND JESSICA PAVONE

The Brooklyn chamber-folk experimentalists are on critics’ short lists for On and Off (Skirl). With Xiu Xiu, Evangelista, and Prurient. Sat/13, 9 p.m., $12–$14. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com

JANET JACKSON

Jacko may have snubbed his sis at her BMI lifetime achievement ceremony, but she continues to "Rock Witchu" despite turmoil with Island Def Jam. Sat/13, 7:30 p.m., $37.50–$123.25. Oracle Arena, 7000 Coliseum, Oakl. www.livenation.com

TRICKY

The trip-hoppin’ hip-hopper delves into his tough council estate upbringing with Knowle West Boy. (Domino). With Sonny. Sun/14, 9 p.m., $30. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

Jam econo

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› duncan@sfbg.com

Look, I can’t tell you, OK? It’s not that I don’t want to, but when I tell someone it’s "off the record," it’s off the record. It’s not like divulging the day job of Nicole Laurenne, super-saucy singer and Farfisa player for the Love Me Nots, would be some kind of huge, Valerie Plame–style leak, but I refuse to be the Scooter Libby here. Let’s just say she wants to keep her professional and garage-rock lives separate. Brain surgeon? Test pilot? Miniskirted, go-go-booted commando, doing the swim behind enemy lines? "Just tell them I’m a spy. I work for the CIA," Laurenne says during a phone interview from her office in stifling Phoenix, Ariz., or, perhaps, from her secret lair in the caldera of an extinct volcano.

Whatever it is she does, let’s just say Laurenne and the rest of her black-and-white-garbed, pin-sharp quartet aren’t quitting their day jobs any time soon. Not because the band doesn’t pack enough full-throated, ’60s soul, Mosrite fuzz, and hip-shaking, back-alley R&B stomp to rock the door off the proverbial garage — because they do, in spades. This is clearly evidenced by their 2007 debut, In Black & White, and their newly dropped Detroit, both produced in a chicken slaughterhouse-turned-recording studio in the Motor City by Jim Diamond (the White Stripes, the Romantics, the Charms) and both on Love Me Nots’ Atomic a Go Go imprint. "Our day jobs pay for everything," Laurenne tells me. "We’re very careful to work around them. We decided a long time ago we didn’t want to live in a van for a month and play on Tuesdays in Wichita." This allows them to practice an approach that more seasoned touring bands like Les Savy Fav have turned to after decades of midweek dates in nowhere towns: the tour as surgical strike. "We’ll go out to the East Coast and do New Jersey on Thursday and New York on Friday and Boston on Saturday and fly home on Sunday," she says.

I can hear it already: "Man, that’s not punk rock. Where’s the DIY? I’m revoking their indie street cred." Sell out? Hardly. The Love Me Nots are an example of a new paradigm, or at least a rare one: they actually put the horse before the cart. While grinding away in various Phoenix garage outfits over the years — with the exception of their new bass player, Kyle Rose Stokes, a 26-year-old grad student, they’re all in their 30s — the Love Me Nots realized they had to make money so they could do it right from the get-go: they release their own music on their own label, do the distribution, copyrighting, publishing, artwork — not to mention writing songs, rehearsing, and playing gigs. They may not be gluing together 7-inch sleeves, but they’ve got more in common with the DIY ethos of bands like Minor Threat and Black Flag and the labels they created, Dischord and SST, than trustafarians trying to scam street cred by sprinkling a steady diet of ramen with cocaine binges, hoping to float to hipster heaven on the sparkly fart of the first A&R douchebag who recognizes their Casiotone genius.

"You’ve got to give ’em what they want," Laurenne advises an unnamed "little girl" as Detroit nears its crescendo, before adding, "without losing what you’ve got." And while it’s delivered as romantic advice, it sums up the band’s outlook: deliver the goods, on your own terms, in your own time. You can have the career, and the band, and the love life — Laurenne and guitarist Michael Johnny Walker recently got engaged — and not have to slack off on any element of being alive. It is, however, somewhat of a balancing act. "We try to avoid doing stuff that’s too connected," the vocalist says when I asked her if the band’s been asked to play Christmas parties. "We definitely don’t mind people who enjoy that style of music coming out and enjoying it. They certainly need their own release. And, honestly, a lot of people in this type of suit world have other, non-suit interests too, and I think they feel validated, like, ‘Oh, I guess it’s OK to be a sort of renaissance person. You can pursue your own interests, and it’s not shameful anymore.’<0x2009>"

Perhaps it’s my brief stint in the dirty, amoral trenches of mind control, er … "advertising," that immediately leads me to a tag line: "The Love Me Nots: Making It Safe for the Squares to Dance," I tell Laurenne. "That’s your next T-shirt."

THE LOVE ME NOTS

With the Hi-Nobles and the Laundronauts

Fri/12, 9 p.m., $8

Annie’s Social Club

917 Folsom, SF

www.anniessocialclub.com

Lose yourself

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Every big city hosts its fair share of great bands that attract crowds with centrifugal force. While other performers flyer mercilessly only to play to the opening act and bartenders, some draw a crowd only money can buy. But money seems to have little to do with it — some acts are just really fucking good.

I sat down with Ty Segall in the Lower Haight last month to find out what he was putting in the water. "If I put out a hundred records in my life, I’ll die happy," Segall said after a good, hearty spiel praising Billy Childish.

Segall sets the scene physically. Onstage, the 21-year-old can be sighted in tight jeans and a striped T-shirt, crouched over a guitar in front of a bass drum with a tambourine duct-taped haphazardly to the front. The reverb is turned up so high you can hardly tell where the lyrics end and guitar begins. Then imagine it sounding great — almost like you’re listening to an old record. Every pause between songs is heavy with echo and the hiss of amplifiers. Suddenly you realize that punk’s not dead — we just weren’t doing it right.

"It’s all about the sound … the old, live rock thing," he explained. "Childish is famous for saying you don’t need more than a day to record something. That’s how I feel recording should be done. Quick, on the fly, fast — real."

The new sound is the old sound. In a media-saturated culture where you can listen to anything from GG Allin to the Shangri-las without having to have a cool older brother, the only place to turn is your roots.

"For me, there’s nothing better than oldies stations," Segall said. "All the girl groups and Buddy Holly — it’s real rock ‘n’ roll. It’s not even the song. It’s how it sounds. It’s got soul. The style of recording, the real, live sound, and the real feeling it portrays. You can feel the live, on-the-fly mentality."

Ask Segall about his influences, however, and you’ll get a lot more than Childish. You’ll get an array of genres and styles: surf music, glam, the Stooges, and local bands. Segall has basically jumped into a dream.

"I’m the luckiest person in the world," he said, referring to his upcoming US tour with indie greats Thee Oh Sees and the Sic Alps. "I’m touring with two of my favorite bands in the city. This is as far as I ever wanted to take this project, and I’m already there." And the man has gone even further: Thee Oh Sees’ John Dwyer is releasing Segall’s new self-titled album on his Castle Face imprint, though at this point he has released only one other recording — by his own band — on the label.

But then everyone gets carried away and forgets him or herself when they see Segall live. In fact, you almost forget to dance. His songs are so spot-on and inspired that you lose your focus on the surroundings. Instead you glue your eyes to his performance the same way you fix on a TV set when you’re hungover. People already consider Segall’s SoCal-ish lo-fi ballad "The Drag" a classic, and I have the hypnotic, Syd Barrett–inspired "Who Are You?" on every playlist on my iPod.

I mean, I don’t want to get all afterschool-special about it, but if you want to see something new and don’t want to waste an entire night, catch Segall the next chance you get. And you know what? If Segall puts out a hundred records in his life, I’ll die happy too.

TY SEGALL

With Thee Oh Sees and Sic Alps

Thurs/11, call for time and price

Eagle Tavern

398 12th St., SF

(415) 626-0880

Also with Master/Slave and Girls

Fri/12, 9:30 p.m., $7

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

www.hemlocktavern.com

Girls, Girls, Girls

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

On Feb. 15, the auspicious day after Valentine’s, Café Du Nord hosted Girls’ debut — a perfect night to showcase their music, which is full of heartache and romantic longing. I witnessed the birth of a pop sensation that night. I’ve never seen San Francisco rock kids so unhinged for a band that had never previously played out — they sang, in a state of unrestrained fervor, along with songs only available online.

Those of us giddy in the crowd that night haven’t been alone in feeling it. In three months, the SF outfit sold out all 500 copies of their recently released single on True Panther. In fact, 200 of those records were sold on pre-order, and the group has received notice on Pitchfork and various blogs and in Spin magazine.

The rapid and rapturous reception would turn anyone’s head. But the boys of Girls — JR White on bass, Christopher Owens on guitar and vocals, and an otherwise rotating lineup — are wary of overly speedy success. When I sat down with White and Owens at the Ferry Building last week, I asked White why he thinks listeners respond so keenly to their songs. "I think they’re honest," he replied. "It’s the first thing I noticed, and it’s the first thing a lot of people say." Girls’ music, he added, "lacks the pretension in a lot of pop music."

Girls emerged from a living-room recording project that Owens brought White, a recording engineer. Excited by Owens’ music, White suggested they form a band. A musician since age 15, the bassist confesses that this is the first time he feels no ambivalence about playing in a group. According to White, the project evolved as if by "divine intervention — a gift from everything that’s happened in your life."

I possess a reflexive Gen X cynicism and would normally respond to such an avowal with skepticism. However, there’s nothing contrived about Girls’ sincerity. In fact, the similarly charming Owens owned that descriptor, claiming, "Essentially I am just really an earnest, sincere person.

"I came to the realization at the last show that we would probably be the easiest band to make fun of," he continued. "You could read the lyrics and just mock it. So I feel super-vulnerable. I don’t think we get up there and right away, people are saying, ‘Yeah, this is the best thing ever.’ We kind of have to win them over, but it’s kind of a cool thing to go through from the beginning of the show to the end of the show. Every show has kind of been excruciating to play. The end is great."

In any case, Girls’ lyrical earnestness was treated to a skilled studio work-over on their recordings — a full-length is due this fall on True Panther. The songs shine with brilliant arrangements that layer echoed vocals and reverbed guitars. The touchstones for such massive sound swirls are Spiritualized and various shoegazer outfits, but Girls can’t be pigeonholed as a strictly genre band. For one thing, White rarely buries the vocals at the back of the mix, so we hear Owens’ supple voice upfront, albeit through the pleasant gauze of lo-fi tape hiss. They also have written several dazzling three-minute-or-so pop songs, brightly realized with major chords and handclaps.

According to a commenter on Girls’ MySpace page, the band’s music smells like summer. Laugh or no, it’s true. Their sound resembles all the parts of the season: the bright happy mornings, the long gorgeous days, the nostalgic end-of. "Morning Light" evokes that perfect buzz after a great night out and the walk home on a summer dawn. "Hellhole Rat Race" resembles the summer waxing in September, dusty and wistful. "Lust for Life" gives off the whiff of a perfect pop song: you’re cruising in a car maybe to the beach, in search of beers for breakfast, and your friends are all around.

I don’t know why this music triggers synesthesia in me. I suspect it’s because these gorgeous numbers make my skin literally tingle. The tunes are so classic and pure, yet churn so massively, and the language is so full of want. It’s an imperfect world, and boys and girls do each other harm. But, hey, sometimes a song can be your salvation.

GIRLS

With Master/Slave and Ty Segall

Fri/12, 9:30 p.m., $7

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

www.hemlocktavern.com

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