Bay Guardian Archives Archives — Page 1034 of 1098 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Comedy Tonite!

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December 22, 2006

Intern Aaron Sankin’s take on the recent live SF appearance of Michael Ian Black and Michael Showalter, two of the creators of the show Stella

The first time I saw Stella I was instantly enraptured. It was clever, it was funny, and, most of all, it was zany. Zany like the old Marx brothers movies (which, for my money, are the funniest things to have ever been committed to celluloid); zany like the Animaniacs cartoons that entertained me for many a Cheerio-filled Saturday morning. Zany in a way that modern comedy no longer is. Hip comedy now days is frantic and schizophrenic but zany it is not. Family Guy, the show that is currently pushing the televised comedic envelope these days, has all the elements of zaniness—the non-stop barrage of jokes, the relative minimum of importance put things like plot and character development, pratfalls—but lacks the childlike innocence that true zaniness requires.

SFBG/Media Alliance

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December 22, 2006

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Media groups want documents unsealed – SF Chronicle

Group asks federal judge to shed light on media dealings

ChainLINKS

Get Crafty!

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December 21, 2006

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› culture@sfbg.com
Each holiday the populace drones out to the local malls in search of appropriate gifts. Not that there’s anything wrong with the holiday institutions of bad parking, blasphemy, and Black Friday — they are, after all, our modern manifestations of the holiday spirit — but in the event you like the idea of giving charming gifts handmade with affection and idiosyncrasy, you have an array of clever and affordable online options at your fingertips. Largely conceived and produced by local artisans, these handicrafts play well to most audiences, offering irony for the siblings, sincerity for the grandparents, and neutrality to the ne’er-do-wells.
Before we hit the gifts, it’s worth noting that the holiday season is a time to acknowledge all the people in our lives. As nice as that is, few of these folks will actually receive gifts. Happily, the right card can take the place of a casual gift and still produce warm fuzzies the way the best wrapped packages do.
Take, for example, Motormouth Press’s ornament cards (www.motormouthpress.com). These paper fetishes are fitting mementos for those in small living spaces as they store easily, weigh nothing, and are as cute to receive as they are to hang on your space-saving tree. Motormouth’s penguin flexagon card tells a little story and ends with a seasonal greeting. In a more mixed-media vein, Notesink (www.notesink.com) builds cards using remnants of fabric, buttons, and paper and also features screen-printed, kid-themed, and, of course, holiday cards. These cards are so cute you’ll rub your eyes in disbelief — they may even inspire you with their crafty prowess. If that happens, you should look into Sideshow Stamps (www.sideshowstamps.com). A purveyor of funky stampedelica, Sideshow features pithy images such as its Leg Lamp stamp, and if you’ve seen A Christmas Story, you know that’s Xmas imagery plain and true.
The Bay Area has much to offer in the way of bath and beauty product lines. Though using soap is a personal matter, bath products make peculiarly neutral gifts. To spice up the body politic, the following kitchen chemists have put some weight into product design. Take Lizzie Sweet (www.lizziesweet.com), for example. The tangy-looking packaging is intended to make you feel as sexy about buying the bath line as using it. Presentation also matters to Aqua Energy Design Studio (www.aquaenergydesignstudio.com), whose island-inspired products include supersexy bath salts that resemble uncut diamonds. The Aromatic Way Apothecary (www.aromaticway.com) uses potent olfactory triggers to make its pragmatic products. The cold salve clears your pathways better than Vicks and without the chemical blur, while the scented shea butter sticks, packaged in deodorant twist-up tubes, are practical for the pocketbook.
Though all bath products can be hedonistic experiences, not all are. Mandrake Apothecary puts the sense into sensual. Perfect for the solstice, Mandrake’s line of sexy scents (www.mandrakeapothecary.com) is rife with plant extracts and mystical purpose. It’s genuinely magic stuff. And not like Jesus magic — like magic magic. For a more arcane approach to the sacred ritual of bathing, look to Oakland’s Pomegranate Body (www.pomegranatebody.com). Skin-nourishing shea butter abounds, and the Citrus Sun line smells like sunshine.
The Curiosity Shoppe (www.curiosityshoppeonline.com) could be San Francisco’s one-stop craft shopping mecca. With themed products for the home and the office, it has layers of quippy objets d’art that can offer petite grandeur to all the people on your shopping list. The brass bird nest (with stone eggs) is precious, and rumor has it that using the owl paperweights will make you smarter. For the “kitschen” (get it?) it’s all about Lorena Barrezueta’s ceramic takeout containers. For more gender-specific items, think about getting Conphorm’s Um Felt wool tote and carry bags, which have a durable design for the modern maiden, and Deadly Squire’s shrewd neckties — ideal for the alternadad. For other whip-smart items, look to Poketo’s intoxicating array of clever wallets (www.poketo.com) or the jocular skull patches from Krooked Stitches (gaytha.net/krooked).
Fabric always warms up the coldest of transactions, and fabric checkbook covers from Blissen (www.blissen.com) make bill paying that much sweeter. If you know someone who could use more comfort while managing their finances, throw in Sprout Studios’ cozy tea-inspired ceramics kit (homepage.mac.com/bob.jen/sprout/index.htm): it’s ideal for making your hot beverage merry and bright.
When it comes to the eenie ones, let’s be honest: you’re buying more for the parents than the kids, so why not consider adorable attire? Tiddly Toggs (408-371-7919) offers hand-knit sweaters, dresses, and hats for babies and toddlers in colors and shapes that vary with the seasons. Crafted by a British ex-nanny and seamstress (imagine Mary Poppins with knitting needles), the work features patterns both unpredictable and sedate. The three-owl pullover with buttons for eyes is a real heart warmer. The baby attire available at One Hot Tomatoe (www.onehottomatoe.com) is pretty adorable too. Tomatoe’s cheeky lobster bib could help train your favorite one-and-a-half-year-old in the ancient art of snobbery — that is, if the training isn’t already over.
If said one-and-a-half-year-old is a smart-alecky lass, you might want to drop her right into a RicRac pirate party dress from Tartlette (www.tartlette.com). Festooned with a skull and crossbones (the skull is dotted with a tiny pink bow), this dress could get your toddler into the VIP room at a SoMa club. If your fav one-and-a-half-year-old is a lad, perhaps a Mary tee from Oh Baby Apparel (www.ohbabyapparel.com) is more fitting. With a Virgin of Guadalupe patch adorning the shirt’s pocket, believers could well consider it a layer of protection (from on high!) for their bouncing boy. Complete that ensemble with high-top- or Mary Jane–<\d>style felted boots from the Clever Kitty (thecleverkitty.com) and then round out the look with a grouchy stuffed doll. The Little Gorgeouses from Little and the Girl (www.littleandthegirl.com) are sweet felt stuffed toys with an air of mystery. Lucille the French poodle carries a comforting expression, while kitten Clive is a masked avenger complete with cape. For the more acidulous, consider Scared Girl’s cunning felt Pretend Friends (www.scaredgirl.net), who live squarely on the intersection of adorable and wonky. Rectangulo’s name may give you an idea of his shape, but it says little about his demeanor. Equally emotive is poor little Grubbly, who cries perpetually, perhaps because he’s got seven appendages. He just needs a little love! (FYI, these creatures are great gifts for everyone — even the grouches who say they don’t care about local businesses or craftspeople and would rather scarf down food court junk while being crushed half to death at a mall. Maybe they too just need a little love.)

My, how the rumors swirl

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December 21, 2006

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By Tim Redmond

Well, now I’m not the only one speculating about the possibility of Carole Migden deciding to run for mayor. Sasha at LeftinSF floated it out Tuesday, and SFist weighed in on it today.

All of this, of course, goes back to the story that Mark Leno may challenge Migden for her state Senate seat, a prospect that has political reporters and insider-politics junkies (including me) buzzing around madly.

But when you actually think about if for a second, there are a few good reasons for everyone (including Leno) to take a deep breath and consider what this could mean. For starters, Midgen and Leno don’t really disagree on a lot of major issues. So the campaign would be all about things like “effectiveness” and personality — and that kind of race has the prospect of turning very negative and very ugly very fast. The battle would split the progressive community, and, as one observer put it to me, “there would be blood everywere, and it could take years to heal the wounds.”

I’m not syaing Leno shoudn’t do it — I like to see incumbents face a challenge, and this is a democracy and he has every right to run for any office he wants. But this is about more than Leno and Migden; there’s a progressive movement in this town, and we’ve got a lot of battles to fight.

I know Leno and Migden aren’t on the best of terms right now, but I think Sup. Tom Ammiano has the right idea. “Before this goes any further,” he told me, “Mark and Carole really need to sit down and talk.”

And I’d love to evesdrop on THAT conversation.

PS: Lest I sound too negative about a Leno challenge, let me quote a local activist who knows both politicians well: “Leno fights for his issues. He’s a real hard worker. Carole pushes the right button on the issues, but a lot of us think she’s missing in action. She shouldn’t be talking to Leno — she should be back here talking to us.”

And if the prospect of a challenge gets Migden to pay more attention to her constituents, that’s only a good thing.

Making their lists

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December 20, 2006

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PAUL COSTUROS
Total Shutdown, Death Sentence: Panda!, Murder Murder
(10) Bay Area representing and dominating at the End Times Fest in St. Paul, Minn., June 22–<\d>24.
(9) T.I.T.S., Throughout the Ages split double 12-inch with Leopard Leg (Upset the Rhythm) and live. Forest-witch psych never sounded so good.
(8) Fuckwolf CD on Kimosciotic and live. Dub done via destruction by way of swallowing glass and delay …
(7) Burmese, White (Planaria) and live. Every time I see them I feel like I’ve been transported to a Beijing opera in 1790 and forced to watch it while strapped to a chair at gunpoint.
(6) Devin the Dude, live at the Red Devil Lounge, Nov. 6. Songs about fucking, drinking, and smoking weed sung so beautifully, like an angel.
(5) “Black Panther Rank and File” at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, March 18–<\d>July 2, and getting snubbed by Bobby Seale when I asked him about when he did stand-up comedy.
(4) Tracy Morgan doing stand-up live at Cobb’s, March 3.
(3) Sergio Iglesias and the Latin Love Machine at Thee Parkside, Nov. 18, and the soccer circle that followed.
(2) 16 Bitch Pile-Up, Doomsday 1999, Ettrick with Weasel Walter live, March 15.
(1) (tie) Nate Denver’s Neck at the Elbo Room, Oct. 14. I laughed, I cried, and I wanted to destroy someone for the first time since sixth grade; Skip Donahue’s new wave extravo-bonanza at Casanova, April 20; Kurtis Blow at Mighty, Aug. 12; DJ Funk at the Rickshaw Stop, July 21; and ESG at Mezzanine, Oct. 27.

ARI MESSER
Contributor
• Mountain Goats, Get Lonely (4AD).
• Beth Orton, Comfort of Strangers (Astralwerks). Shimmers with a modern kind of grace.
• Nic Jones, Game Set Match (Topic). My favorite wild-as-the-firth Brit-folk revivalist, live in the ’70s, resurrecting ballads and slapping the guitar like a preacher on a healing mission.
• Crooked Jades, World’s on Fire (Jade Note Music). Old-timey troubadours sing with fire, then stomp it out so that there’s nothing left to repent for.
• Various artists, Chrome Children (Stones Throw).
• Margot and the Nuclear So and So’s, The Dust of Retreat (Standard Recording Co.).
• Sara Tavares, Balance (Times Square).
• Meneguar, I Was Born at Night (Magic Bullet).
• Mirah, Joyride: Remixes (K). The double album explores the songwriter’s expansive journal-like stories.
• Joanna Newsom, Ys (Drag City). Surpasses Cat Power in my book of 2006 for the year’s most sweetly sacrificial feline croon.

CLIPD BEAKS
Tigerbeat6 band
(1) E-40, “Tell Me When To Go” (Sick Wid It/Jive). Duh.
(2) Indian Jewelry and Celebration at South by Southwest.
(3) Lil Wayne, everything but especially “Shooter,” Tha Carter Vol. 2 (Cash Money).
(4) No Doctors — just in general.
(5) Mute Era and In Corridors. The mystic protégés of the Minnesota-Japan rock ’n’ roll exchange program.
(6) Gentleman’s Techno at the Cave — especially OonceOonce DJ sets and Black William and the Gondolier live.
(7) White Williams, “Headlines,” Let’s Lazertag Sometime (Tigerbeat6).
(8) Watching Dusty Sparkles from Glass Candy and Danava do anything.
(9) Shawn Porter, a.k.a. Bloody Snowman.
(10) Erase Errata, Nightlife (Kill Rock Stars).

SAKE ONE
Levende Lounge resident DJ
(1) A lotta ancestors: from the great J-Dilla to LA DJ and community organizer DJ Dusk to SF native and NYC staple Adam Goldstone to rebel radio pioneer Michael “Mixxin” Moore to SF DJ and youth activist DJ Domino, the sky gained a lotta bring-ass stars.
(2) The Trackademics phenomenon. Comin’ straight outta Alameda High, young Trackademics took the underground dance music world by storm, using broken beat, dance punk, and new soul sounds and smashing them into a hyphy hybrid that had kids going stewey from SF to NYC.
(3) Pacific Standard Time anniversary party. When Kool Herc stepped to the DJ booth at Levende Lounge in March, time sorta stood still for a few hours. He gave Frisco a taste of the magic that sparked a global prairie fire.
(4) Bilal, Something to Hold Onto. Probably the best major-label release of 2006 that never came out. His label blamed online leaks but probably just lacked the creative vision to market such a strange product — namely, inventive modern soul music.
(5) Tiombe Lockhart, “O Bloody Day, O Starry Night on the Bowery” (Bling47). Evil genius Waajeed and the brilliant Ms. Lockhart released the first of what should be many classic joints.
(6) GQ, “Better Must Come” (Calibud). Something about an eight-year-old having a number one hit with a conscious anthem just kinda makes me feel good about the future.
(7) Alice Smith, For Lovers, Dreamers and Me (BBE Music). Though the incredible Maurice Fulton remix of “Love Endeavor” isn’t here, this album reflected a new direction for urban music.
(8) The hyphy movement. Kinda obvious, but its impact is hard to overstate. Bay Area club music took the world by storm in 2006, leading taste-making rags and bloggers from here to Denmark scouring the Web for the latest Bay Area slang, style, and sounds.
(9) Journey into Paradise: The Larry Levan Story (Rhino). After a couple attempts, 2006 saw a definitive two-disc collection of some of the songs that trademarked perhaps the most influential DJ of all time, besides Herc.
(10) TV on the Radio, Return to Cookie Mountain (Interscope). I prefer the leaked version because “Wolf Like Me” is the shit, but it’s still pretty damn good for a major-label debut, nyuk, nyuk.

GENE “BEAN” BAE
Battleship
(1) Punk section at Amoeba, SF and Berkeley. I know I work there, and this comes dangerously close to an advertisement, but isn’t it about time?
(2) Domino Records’ Sound of Young Scotland series. Lovely reissues of Orange Juice, Fire Engines, and my current fave, Josef K. Courtesy of Franz Ferdinand’s severance check.
(3) Boy, I sure picked a bad year to swear off box sets: This Heat’s Out of Cold Storage (ReR) finally makes available all the in- and out-of-print recordings.
(4) Boy, I sure picked a bad year to swear off metal: Boris, Pink and live, and collaborating with Sunn O))) on Altar (both Southern Lord).
(5) The Bay Area represents: running into fellow local bands such as the Fucking Ocean in NYC and T.I.T.S. in Leeds, England, while on a too-long tour was the salve for the weary, homesick, itinerant musician. And by the way, the Fucking Ocean’s new CD, Le Main Rouge, harks back to the heady times at the turn of the century when it seemed like every day a new band that didn’t suck crawled out of a new crack in the sidewalk.
(6) It would be irresponsible of me to not mention the midterm elections.
(7) Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man was the best music-related film of the year. And it gave me more reasons to hate U2.
(8) Coming to a curbside near you: the Bay Area’s best new venue, John Benson’s decommissioned AC Transit bus converted into a biodiesel RV and mobile venue.
(9) Billy Childish’s unplugged show, Mama Buzz Café, May.
(10) And one thing that sucked this year: Lance Hill quit booking and working the Stork Club. The man who brought you the club’s happy hour and free admission during the Oakland Art Murmur — and who let Battleship record an album at his venue — has left the building. May the East Bay rise to the occasion and continue nurturing good local music.

MATT BAUER
Singer-songwriter
(1) Mariee Sioux, A Bundled Bundle Of Bundles (self-released). So. Ridiculously. Good.
(2) Death Vessel, Stay Close (North East Indie). I’ve listened to this five billion times since I got it in October.
(3) Laura Gibson, If You Come to Greet Me (Hush).
(4) CMJ Music Marathon, accompanying Alela Diane and Tom Brosseau on banjo. When Brosseau breaks into the highest part of his range, it makes me almost believe in ghosts.
(5) El Capitan live at the Rite Spot, Oct 15. They did a medley covering and reworking other Bay Area artists’ music — one of the most creative and heartfelt things I heard all year.
(6) Last of the Blacksmiths, “And Then Some”/”You Think I’m. O.K.” 7-inch.
(7) Deerhoof, McCarren Park Pool, Brooklyn, NY.
(8) Standing onstage at Carnegie Hall. OK, I was only delivering a bass amp for Smokey Robinson. But it gave me chills!
(9) Jolie Holland’s “Mexican Blue.” Maybe my favorite song of 2006.
(10) Jeffrey Luck Lucas, Bottom of the Hill, Feb. 8.

DAVE BROEKEMA
Numbers
• T.I.T.S. and Leopard Leg, Throughout the Ages/Leopard Leg split double 12-inch (Upset the Rhythm)
• Mon Cousin Belge, the Knockout, a couple weeks ago
• Bootleg of Black Sabbath Live in Paris 20 Dec. 1970
• Trin Tran (a.k.a. Trinng Tranng)
• Erase Errata, Nightlife (Kill Rock Stars)
Weasel Walter performing with Sergio Iglesias, Thee Parkside, Nov. 18
• Gay Beast, El Rio, Dec. 7
• Fuckwolf, anywhere, anytime
• K.I.T. dressed as mummies (or the Mummies)
• Halloween at 3rd Ward in Brooklyn
• Seeing The Sweet Smell of Success with Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster on PBS twice (I don’t have cable). Totally awesome creepy nastiness.

BROLIN WINNING
422 Records and MP3.com; Top 10 Hip-Hop
• Mekalek, Live and Learn (Glow-in-the-Dark). Time Machine’s DJ-producer connects with various rappers for a supremely banging compilation-style album. Rhode Island, stand up!
• Motion Man, Pablito’s Way (Threshold). Bay Area superlyricist knocks it out of the park on his second solo effort, produced by KutMasta Kurt, featuring Too $hort, Mistah FAB, and Q*bert.
• Snoop Dogg, Tha Blue Carpet Treatment (Geffen). Though a bit bloated, Snoop’s eighth album is still great, featuring bass-heavy beats and collabos with Nate Dogg, Dre, Cube, E-40, and others.
• Melina Jones, Swearing Off Busters (sampler). An immensely talented MC-vocalist from the SFC, Jones is the future. Check her out on MySpace and cop the album in early ’07.
• Dudley Perkins, Expressions (Stones Throw). Charmingly blunted soul-funk meanderings from underground icon Madlib and the artist formerly known as Declaime.
•<\!s><\i>Ghostface, Fishscale (Def Jam). The Wu’s most consistent swordsman continues to impress, with help from Dilla, Doom, and Pete Rock.
• Rakim, Slims, Sept. 10. The R may be pushing 40, but he still knows how to move the crowd, running through timeless jams with Kid Capri backing him up.
• A Tribe Called Quest, Berkeley Community Theatre, Sept. 9. Rhymefest and the Procussions were cool too, but the reunited Tribe killed it.
• Ice Cube, Fillmore, April 25. Despite cred-killing family films and uneven recent material, Cube ripped it live, drawing from a thick catalog of Westside classics.
• Kool Keith, Mezzanine, June 17. At his first local appearance in years, notorious rap weirdo Kool Keith did an amazing set with lots of Ultramag and Octagon material, plus a random topless chick.

WILL SCHWARTZ
Hey Willpower
(10) Amy Winehouse, “Rehab” (Universal/Island).
(9) Cassie, “Me and U” (Bad Boy).
(8) Brick Lane, London, on a Sunday.
(7) Hot Chip, “Over and Over” (Astralwerks).
(6) Fingered Club at Little Pedro’s in downtown LA.
(5) Final Fantasy, Bottom of the Hill, Aug. 11.
(4) Planning to Rock at Club Motherfucker, Bardens Boudoir, London, Dec. 9.
(3) Grizzly Bear, Yellow House (Warp).
(2) Lena Wolff, Needles and Pens, March 11–<\d>April 9.
(1) Field Mob with Ciara, “So What” (Universal).

LEE HILDEBRAND
Contributor
• Brett Dennen, So Much More (Dualtone). The Central Valley singer-songwriter addresses political and romantic concerns in a craggy, tear-stained tenor.
• Kelis, Kelis Was Here (Jive). Although in-your-face sexuality is the Manhattan siren’s calling card, it’s hard not to also adore the way she blurs the lines between R&B, rock, hip-hop, and pop.
• Charles Lloyd, Sangam (ECM).
• Ann Nesby, In the Spirit (Shanachie). Nesby’s glorious alto pipes often leap octaves in breathtaking bounds on this masterpiece of traditional African American gospel music.
• Joan Osborne, Pretty Little Stranger (Vanguard).
• Catherine Russell, Cat (World Village). Veteran background vocalist Russell steps to the forefront with a wonderfully eclectic set of tunes including “Back o’ Town Blues,” which her dad, Luis Russell, wrote with Louis Armstrong back in 1945.
• Candi Staton, His Hands (Honest Jons/Astralwerks).
• Irma Thomas, After the Rain (Rounder).
• Hank Williams III, Straight to Hell (Bruc). This intense honky-tonk country music is filled with visions so demented that the label’s owner, former California lieutenant governor Mike Curb, spells his own name backward.
• Mitch Woods, Big Easy Boogie (Club 88). Marin County vocalist-pianist Woods creates the hottest set of 1950s-style New Orleans R&B since, well, the ’50s.

TOM CARTER
Charalambides; Top 10 Things That Didn’t Happen in San Francisco
(1) Getting dosed at Terrastock, Providence, RI, and watching Lightning Bolt from high in the light rigging, April 23.
(2) On tour with Marcia, watching thousands of chimney swifts flocking into a smokestack during a light rainstorm in Portland, Ore., with a double rainbow to the east and a sunset to the west.
(3) Me and Natacha witnessing Comets on Fire’s chalet get destroyed at All Tomorrow’s Parties with a BBC film crew documenting the whole scene. Minehead, Devonshire, UK.
(4) Ben Chasny destroying with solo electric guitar at Arthur Nights, LA, Oct. 21.
(5) Jamming Buffy St. Marie’s “Cod’Ine” for over an hour at 4 a.m. with Matt Valentine and Erika Elder in Guilford, Vt.; also Mvee and the Bummer Road’s form-destroying set at ATP, Minehead, Devonshire, UK.
(6) Hearing the most killer noise CD-R ever in Nashville, recorded by Chris Cherry Blossoms’ Boston Terrier.
(7) Gigging with Badgerlore at the Wire festival, Chicago, and eating pizza slices the size of surfboards with Glen Donaldson, Sept. 21.
(8) Laying down thick sounds with Shawn McMillen and the Starving Weirdos in Eureka and later watching McMillen toss tennis balls to a terrier on the beach in Samoa while hearing Steve Weirdo’s roommate’s tales of Sasquatch hunting and dodging bullets in the Yuroc reservation.
(9) Ashtray Navigation’s Syd Barrett tribute at the beginning of their set, biker bar downstairs playing “Astronomy Domine” the same night in Leeds, UK.
(10) Gray-orange dust storm over the gash of the Rio Grande. Later that night, me and my girlfriend, Natacha, listen to Of’s wedding CD-R and watch dozens of shooting stars and a distant thunderstorm over the mountains, Taos, NM.
RIP Syd Barrett, Arthur Lee, and whoever else I’m forgetting.

Hallelujah, more lists!

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December 20, 2006

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MATTHEW EDWARDS
MUSIC LOVERS
(1) <\i>The Fall live at the Independent, May. Mark E. Smith, wife, and a band he put together the day before — classic Fall. Peerless.
(2) <\i>John Legend, Get Lifted (Sony). More ideas per song than most indie bands have in a lifetime. Stellar soul.
(3) <\i>Margaret Cho singing “Old Man’s Cock and Balls” to the tune of “Old Time Rock and Roll,” Provincetown, July
(4) <\i>D’autres nouvelles des etoiles — Serge Gainsbourg DVD. 4 hours of sin and sauce, wit and wiles.
(5) <\i>Poppy and the Jezebels, “Nazi Girls”/”Painting New York on my Shoes* (Kiss of Death/Reveal). Best young group out of UK in an age — four 14-year-old girls from Birmingham. Massive in 2007.
(6) <\i>Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, directed by Michel Gondry.
(7.) <\i>Drive-By Truckers at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. The American Smiths with Lynyrd Skynyrd’s shirts and guitars.
(8) <\i>Joanna Newsom, Ys (Drag City). So far ahead of the “new folk” pack it’s not true. A goldrush-town Kate Bush.
(9) <\i>One Kiss Can Lead to Another: Girl Group Sounds Lost and Found (Rhino)
(10) <\i>Borts Minorts opening for us at Amnesia.
Music Lovers play Slim’s Dec. 23.

KELLEY STOLTZ
SUB POP SONGWRITER
(1) <\i>Detroit producer-musician-good fellow Matthew Smith’s Outrageous Cherry released their umpteenth album Stay Happy (Rainbow Quartz), and it’s a fab collection of big beat Jesus and Mary Chain meets the Chills type of pet sounds.
(2) <\i>I got to play a show with Dan Sartain in Amsterdam this fall. He describes himself to the common man as Chris Isaak on acid — or was that quaaludes ? No weepy romantic, the 24-year-old hails from Birmingham, Ala., and does surf-rockabilly besame-mucho murder ballads really well. He’s a real character, too. After staying up all night he was spotted eating falafel wearing his hotel towels for socks. His new album, Join … Dan Sartain, is on Bjork’s One Little Indian label.
(3) <\i>The Muldoons are a family band composed of Hunter and Shane, about age 9 and 12, respectively, and their dad, drummer Brian, who play high energy Stoogey rock. Their first single was recorded by Jack White, no less. There were a lot of kids playing rock songs this year, but these guys are future and now, for real. Listen to their live session on www.wfmu.org for proof.
(4) <\i>As 2006 comes to a close, it is getting closer to April 2007, when Sonny Smith’s new album will finally appear. After some rewrites and a touch of hemming and hawing, my favorite SF Pro Tools hobo will release Fruitvale on a new label run by local vocalist Chuck Prophet.
(5) <\i>The Oh Sees recorded a fine new album, Sucks Blood, and that too will be coming along early next year, but since I heard it this year I can safely say it was one of the sonic highlights of the recent past.
(6) <\i>Vetiver, To Find Me Gone (Dicristina Stair). A great collection of ’70s AM radio pop magic and smart lyrical turns.
(7) <\i>Black Fiction were a force of rumbling floor toms, Casio blips, and cool tunes. The most interesting SF band playing in 4/4 time.
(8) <\i>Australia’s Eddy Current Suppression Ring channeled AC/DC, the Buzzcocks, and early Joy Division/Warsaw on their fantastic “Get Up Morning” single.
(9) <\i>How could Arthur Lee and Syd Barrett pass away within a couple weeks of each other? Similar souls departed.
(10) <\i>Sub Pop goes green and offsets their offices’ electricity usage with clean windpower churned up in the Pacific Northwest. I hope more corporate structures within and outside of the music world will take note and do a simple thing that helps a lot.

DEVIN HOFF
DEVIN HOFF PLATFORM
(1) <\i>Marisa Monte, Palace of Fine Arts, Nov. 5
(2) <\i>Deerhoof, Great American Music Hall, Sept. 5
(3) <\i>Jamie Stewart of Xiu Xiu, solo at Prison Literature Project benefit, AK Press Warehouse, April 11
(4) <\i>Ornette Coleman, Sound Grammar (Sound Grammar)
(5) <\i>Marisa Monte, Universo au Meu Redor (Blue Note)
(6) <\i>Marisa Monte, Infinito Particular (Blue Note)
(7) <\i>Caetano Veloso, Ce (Umvd)
(8) <\i>Ches Smith, Congs for Brums (Free Porcupine Society)
(9) <\i>Mary Halvorson and Jessica Pavone duo
(10) <\i>Iron Maiden, A Matter of Life and Death (Sanctuary)

JORDAN KURLAND
NOISE POP
(1) <\i>The Who, Endless Wire (Republic)
(2) <\i>Jose Gonzalez, Veneer (Mute)
(3) <\i>Thom Yorke, The Eraser (XL)
(4) <\i>Jenny Lewis with the Watson Twins, Rabbit Fur Coat (Team Love)
(5) <\i>Cat Power, The Greatest (Matador)
(6) <\i>Kieran Hebden and Steve Reid, The Exchange Session, Volume 1 (Domino)
(7) <\i>Cursive, Happy Hollow (Saddle Creek)
(8) <\i>Long Winters, Putting the Days to Bed (Barsuk)
(9) <\i>Boards of Canada, Trans Canada Highway (Warp)
(10) <\i>Beirut, The Gulag Orkestar (Ba Da Bing)

CHRISTOPHER APPELGREN
NOISE POP, LOOKOUT RECORDS
•<\!s><\i>Colossal Yes, Acapulco Roughs (Ba Da Bing)
•<\!s><\i>Voxtrot’s cover of Comet Gain’s “You Can Hide Your Love Forever” from the band’s Web site
•<\!s><\i>Still Flyin’, Time Wrinkle (Antenna Farm)
•<\!s><\i>Peter Bjorn and John, Young Folks (Wichita)
•<\!s><\i>Primal Scream, Riot City Blues (Sony)
•<\!s><\i>Trainwreck Riders, Lonely Road Revival (Alive)
•<\!s><\i>The Tyde, Three’s Co. (Rough Trade)
•<\!s><\i>French Kicks, Two Thousand (Vagrant)
•<\!s><\i>Chow Nasty live
•<\!s><\i>Love Is All, Nine Times That Same Song (What’s Your Rupture)

VICE COOLER
XBXRX, HAWNAY TROOF, K.I.T.
•<\!s><\i>Matt And Kim, Cafe Du Nord, Aug. 19. They have been described as the “happy Japanther.” It’s true that both bands are duos and use minimal drums for their sing-along anthems. But Matt throws his hands in the air while he plays.
•<\!s><\i>My own birthday party, 21 Grand, July 15. Performances by Quintron and Miss Pussycat, Mirror Dash, Harry Marry, Dinky Bits, Always, Sharon Cheslow and Elise from Magic Markers. I felt like I had my own MTV Sweet Sixteen episode.
•<\!s><\i>Sonic Youth, Bill Graham Civic Center. Not only was I tripped beyond because they even played “Mote,” but I also got to drone on it! Thurston looked over when their never- ending outro started, smiled, and threw his guitar to me. They even gave me all of their leftover catering.
•<\!s><\i>7 Year Rabbit Cycle, Ache Horns (Free Porcupine). This is one of the best records that I have ever heard. It’s a shame that they never get to play live because it is one of the most powerful things that you will ever see.
•<\!s><\i>Xiu Xiu, The Air Force (5 Rue Christine). Does anyone else think the cover looks like Jamie Stewart as Jesus Christ?
•<\!s><\i>Macromantix at 12 Galaxies, November
This MC came straight from the Oz and killed the small crowd.
•<\!s><\i>Deerhoof live. Their free, download-only EP of covers and live tracks made it to the top of my iTunes for 2006. But seeing them go completely nuts under a public microscope has been so rad. Next time you see them look for the John Dieterich strut during “Flower.”
•<\!s><\i>Matmos, The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of the Beast (Matador). One of the best electronic -based records to come out in years.
•<\!s><\i>High Places. It’s like the Beach Boys on more drugs. But High Places don’t do drugs. Mindfuck, right?
•<\!s><\i>Quintron and Miss Pussycat at 12 Galaxies, July 14
•<\!s><\i>Barr, “The Song Is the Single” 7-inch (PPM).
Brendan Fowler plows through an enormous amount of subjects like touring, loneliness, breaking up, pop music, and his song sucking — in a mere four minutes! The crowd left with their jaws on the floor when he premiered this at the Hemlock in July.
•<\!s><\i>Peaches live and Impeach My Bush (XL)
Peaches’ live show is on fire. She is now backed by JD (Le Tigre), Sam Mahoney (Hole) and Radio Sloan (The Need), who make up the Herms, the best backing band in rock history.

SONNY SMITH
SINGER-SONGWRITER
•<\!s><\i>Edith Frost. A Chicago transplant to the Bay Area — her solo opening set for Bert Jansch was casual, personal, and real. Great American Music Hall, Oct. 25.
•<\!s><\i>Jesse Hawthorne Ficks. The guy that puts all the midnight triple-bills together at the Castro. He’ll make you realize that seeing Who Made Who when you were 12 is more important than seeing Citizen Kane in college or Cassavetes in film school.
•<\!s><\i>Alice Shaw. Few artists turn the camera on themselves so consistently and keep it lighthearted and meaningful at the same time.
•<\!s><\i>Omer. The guy that plays on Valencia. Year after year he remains this city’s most dedicated, unique, sincere, bizarre, angry, chipper, crazy, and prolific performer. If you’re intertwined with music so much that you play in the rain on the street every night then you’re operating on a whole other level.
•<\!s><\i>Bert Jansch. One nice thing about the neo-folk trend is that he’s out touring and making records. At the Music Hall, he dressed like a regular old, unassuming guy and launched immediately into a song about a friend murdered by Pinochet. True folk music.
•<\!s><\i>24th Street Mini Park. The most beautiful, selfless, and innocent piece of art this city has created that I know of.
•<\!s><\i>Packard Jennings. He exposes greed, reveals hypocrisy, uncovers lies. A rebellious social commentator, this artist is totally anti-authoritarian, so we like him.
•<\!s><\i>AM Radio. Neverending home of complete insanity. Fascists, paranoid conspiracy theorists, hate mongers, xenophobes, racists, psych-babble freaks, radical religious zealots, and right-wing patriot sociopaths. Truly the theater of the absurd.
•<\!s><\i> Dark Hand Lamp Light. One of the first times I’ve seen music and visual art melting so perfectly together to tell good old-fashioned stories.
•<\!s><\i>Sister Madalene. There is no problem she cannot solve. One visit will convince you and lift you out of sorrow and darkness.

MISSION CREEK MUSIC AND ARTS FESTIVAL STAFF
TOP NINE PLUS FAVORITE MISSION CREEK SHOW
(1) <\i>Jeff Ray (founder/producer): Best show — The Knife at the Mezzanine. Best record — Dwayne Sodahberk, Cut Open (Tigerbeat 6).
(2) <\i>Jon Fellman (co-producer): Best show — Slits, T.I.T.S., and Tussle at Uptown. Best CD — Kelley Stoltz, Below the Branches (Sub Pop).
(3) <\i>Lianne Mueller (graphic designer): Best show — Beirut at Great American Music Hall. Best CD — Lambchop, Damaged (Merge).
(4) <\i>Moira Bartel (sponsorship): Best show — Cat Power at the Palace of Fine Arts.
(5) <\i>Ashley Sarver (programmer): Favorite show — Sprite Macon at Amnesia. Favorite album — Joanna Newsom, Ys (Drag City).
(6) <\i>Molly Merson (sponsorship): Best show — Alejandro Escovedo and Jeffrey Luck Lucas at 12 Galaxies. Favorite album — Bob Frank and John Murry, World Without End (Bowstring).
(7) <\i>Brianna Toth (publicity, programmer): Favorite show — Dead Science with Casiotone for the Painfully Alone and Sholi. Favorite album — Paris Hilton, Paris (WEA).
(8) <\i>Katie Vida (arts curator): Best show — Anselm Kiefer at SFMOMA. Best album: Beirut, Gulag Orkestar (Ba Da Bing). Best man: Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006), Poet Laureate of the United States in 2000.
(9) <\i>Neil Martinson (programmer): Show — Os Mutantes at the Fillmore. Record — Winter Flowers, Winter Flowers (Attack Nine). Musical trend — Master Moth.
(10) <\i>Favorite Mission Creek show of 2006 — Silver Sunshine, Citay, Willow Willow, and Persephone’s Bees at Rickshaw Stop, May 20.
The Mission Creek Music and Arts Festival will be happening from May 10–<\d>20; go to www.mcmf.org for more information.

NOISE: Coup keeps on keepin’ on…

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December 20, 2006

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FOR THE COUP

THE SHOW GOES ON

New Orleans Musicians Fund to Assist band recover from devastating bus crash

The Coup will play Claypool’s Mad Hatter’s Ball New Year’s Eve

Grace Pavilion, Santa Rosa

Santa Rosa — December 120, 2006 — The Harmony Festival has received many queries about whether or not The Coup, having recently survived a devastating tour bus accident in which they lost all of their belongings and were forced to cancel their tour, would be able to play as scheduled on New Year’s Eve at the Mad Hatter’s Ball (Grace Pavilion, Santa Rosa) with Les Claypool and the New Orleans Social Club.
The Harmony Festival is proud to confirm that The Coup will indeed play New Year’s Eve, broken bones and all.
We’d also like to note that the New Orleans Musician’s Hurricane Relief Fund – a non profit beneficiary of the show – has volunteered to donate 50% of the funds they raise at the show to The Coup, which lost their instruments, recording equipment, clothes, phones – even their I.D.s and the keys to their cars and homes. Boots Riley, leader of The Coup has made several trips to New Orleans in support of local musicians and now its their turn to return the favor.
So while the main reason to go the New Years Eve Celebration is to have a fabulous time -you will also be able to party with a purpose and directly support two worthy causes.

Les Claypool will be joined by The New Orleans Social Club featuring members of the Neville Brothers and The Meters including George Porter, Jr., Leo Nocentelli, Ivan Neville, Henry Butler, Raymond Weber, and The Coup’s Boots Riley and Pam the Funkstress–the funkateers Billboard just dubbed “the best hip hop act of the past decade.” A portion of the event’s proceeds will benefit the New Orleans Musicians Hurricane Relief Fund.

EVENT

The North Bay debut of Les Claypool’s New Year’s Eve Hatter’s Ball

DATE

Sunday, 31 December 2006

HOURS

Doors open at 7pm. Show starts @ 8pm and goes till late!

VENUE

Grace Pavilion

Sonoma County Fairgrounds

1350 Bennett Valley Road

Santa Rosa, California

RV and van camping is allowed at the fairgrounds. To make reservations, email camping@harmonywinterfestival.com.

TICKETS

Advance: $50, Door: $60, VIP Magic Pass: $100 (limited availability)

Available online at HarmonyFestival.com and InTicketing.com

This is an all ages event.

“Expect the usual high grade midnight antics,” said Colonel Claypool. “And of course there will be plenty of special treats, surprises and New Year’s mayhem for all!”

“We are very excited to offer the North Bay a world class New Year’s Eve event to call its own,” said Sean Ahearn, program director for the Harmony Festival. “Harmony’s 2006 Hatter’s Ball with Les Claypool marks the first time that his band will perform locally. We are thrilled that legendary artists like the New Orleans Social Club and The Coup accepted our invitation to join the party, and we invite the local community to help us make the event an annual North Bay New Year’s Eve tradition.”

In addition to the all-star line up, this year’s Hatter’s Ball will once again feature the Most Original Hat Contest and a diverse array of mad hatters. Attendees are encouraged to costume accordingly! VIP tickets include green room and side-stage viewing access, preferred parking, and complimentary champagne, beer and hors d’oeuvres. RV and van camping will be allowed for all general ticket holders. To make reservations, email camping@harmonywinterfestival.com.

A party with a purpose

Known for being a party with a purpose, the Harmony Festival will honor the legendary New Orleans Social Club’s performance at this year’s New Year’s Eve Hatter’s Ball by raising funds throughout the evening for New Orleans Musicians Hurricane Relief Fund.

Les Claypool

Les Claypool is one of the most unlikely success stories in music history. His trademark voice, thumping bass and unique worldview have become the calling cards for a number of wildly successful and influential albums, books and films. Musical outfits he’s been involved with include the seminal alt-rock band Primus, Oysterhead featuring Trey Anastasio (Phish) with Stewart Copeland (The Police), and Colonel Claypool’s Bucket of Bernie Brains, just to name a few. Les has been performing his New Year’s Eve shows for the last decade in San Francisco, and will be performing his first ever hometown show in the North Bay.

New Orleans Social Club

Six weeks after Hurricane Katrina, a parade of Crescent City legends united to celebrate the indomitable spirit and culture of their native city. Scattered around the country, they gathered in Austin as a loose-knit collective dubbed The New Orleans Social Club. Over the course of seven magical days and nights, they recorded Sing Me Back Home. Grammy nominated producer Leo Sacks and multiple Grammy-winning Ray Bardani assembled a dream team: Ivan Neville on organ, Henry Butler on piano, and two founding members of The Meters – Leo Nocentelli on guitar and George Porter, Jr. on bass. Rounding out the quintet was the wickedly funky Raymond Weber on drums. George assumed the mantle of musical director and the group was called The New Orleans Social Club. Joining the core band were guests including Irma Thomas, Marcia Ball, Dr. John, Willie Tee, Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews, John Boutte and more.

The Coup

The Coup is one of the most overtly political bands in rap history. Wicked funk and smooth soul grooves fuel their revolutionary music. Formed in the early ’90s, The Coup were influenced by conscious rappers like Public Enemy and KRS-One. Raised in East Oakland’s Funktown neighborhood, lead rapper/producer Boots Riley was involved in political activism long before he was a musician. His fervent dedication to social change was the overriding influence on every Coup album. Pam the Funkstress, the first female DJ star in the famously competitive Bay Area turntablist scene, later joined the group. The Coup’s uniquely bent grooves point to “Dirty Mind”-era Prince, late-80s Too Short, and the trunk-rattling hyphy sonics of the New Bay movement.

New Orleans Musicians Hurricane Relief Fund

The New Orleans Musicians Hurricane Relief Fund is a non-profit, 501(c)(3) organization founded by Ben and Sarah Jaffe of Preservation Hall immediately after Hurricane Katrina. The NOMHRF mission is twofold: to provide humanitarian outreach to New Orleans musicians affected by the storm and to revive New Orleans’ unique musical culture. NOMHRF brings musicians home with rent subsidies and grants for home repairs, creates and underwrites gigs, supports the second line tradition by helping to offset the cost of bands for parades, and replaces flood-damaged instruments. We empower musicians to earn a living and heal the city with their music. Since the levee failure, more than 1000 New Orleans musicians have received these services from NOMHRF, as well as referrals to health care clinics, social services, and other relief organizations. For more information, please email info@nomhrf.org or call (800) 957-4026.

Harmony Productions

For four decades, Harmony has served the communities of the Greater Bay Area with events that promote positive social change and celebrate life. For more information, visit us at HarmonyFestival.com.

Press contacts

:

Michael Coats (Michael@coatspr.com, 707 935 6203)

Dennis McNally (DMcScribe@aol.com, 415 896 2198)

Paisly A. Marechal
Coats Public Relations
paisly@coatspr.com
707-935-6203

Hawk eyed

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December 20, 2006

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Urban wildlife sightings are always joyous things – but not if you’re a rat. We spied this gorg bird from our offices on Potrero Hill and watched it tear the entrails from a humongoid rodent. Missed our deadlines, but it was much better than the Discovery Channel.

Photos by Joe Pennant.

NOISE: As the Toph turns ??

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December 20, 2006

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Hey everyone loves Red Wine, eh? Well, show the love when Toph One celebrates his birthday with a little veeno and a heaping side of beats. This very special Red Wine Social happens tonight, Dec. 20, 10 p.m.-2 a.m., Dalva, 3121 16th at Valencia, SF. Other wheels of steelers include Doc Fu and Pause. And it’s all free. So feel free.

Courtesy of True Skool’s Web site.

Eureka! More on how monopoly papers cover monopoly news

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December 20, 2006

3

By Bruce B. Brugmann

And so there it was, buried today in the business pages of the Chronicle/Hearst, the Contra Costa Times/Singleton, and the San Jose Mercury News/Singleton, the latest major development in one of the great buried stories of our time in the local daily press.

Editor and Publisher, the trade magazine for newspapers, got this major story right: Its online head read, “S.F. Judge Blocks Hearst/MediaNews Collaboration,” and its strong lead made the key point: “In a victory for a local businessman seeking to overturn a complex San Francisco Bay Area newspaper deal between Hearst Corp. and MediaNews Group Inc., a federal judge Tuesday issued a preliminary injunction blocking the chains from collaborating on joint distribution or advertising sales of their papers.”

This was an important ruling in the Clint Reilly/Joe Alioto antitrust case, which stands as the only real impediment to the Hearst/Singleton deal that would destroy daily competition and impose regional monopoly in the Bay Area.
(See Guardian stories and previous blogs.)

But the ruling and the coverage by burial by the Hearst/Singleton press illustrates a major problem with the case: the publishers, who are normally hollering about the government suppression of documents and government manipulation of the news, this time got the documents sealed and so only their side of the story is getting out. Hearst/Singleton got a stringent protective order that gives them essentially unreviewable discretion to control the documents in the case. (Alioto presumably agreed to the order to get an early trial date).

Here’s how this works: Hearst/Singleton designate any document they are producing in discovery as “secret.”Alioto cannot contest that under the order, nor is there any dispute mechanism by which he can challenge it. If Alioto wants the document, he has to accept it under the protective order. Then, if he wants to file it with the court, he has to do so under seal. And, under the protective order, the judge has no discretion and must appeal the seal order. Alioto’s brief is also sealed, if it references the sealed document. This was the case with the critical April 26, 2006 letter from Hearst to Singleton that outlined an agreement to explore joint national and internet adversiting sales as well as joint distribution.

The judge has referenced and quoted the letter and stated in her preliminary injunction order that the letter “is in the form of a potentially binding agremeent” and indicates the two companies have “expressed the desire, if not the intent,” to collaborate in the Bay Area. Yet the letter is under seal, as is another letter the judge has quoted and a whole batch of obviously explosive discovery documents which Alioto got under discovery.

The letter is a publisher document and is not under seal and they can talk about it if they want to. After all, if they want to disclose their own secrets, it is up to them. Thus: the publishers have crafted a protective order that gives them control of the documents, gives the court no power to control its own filings, and no way for anyone to challenge any secret designations. The effect is that the Riley/Alioto filings are secret, the publishers filings are public, the public gets only one side of the story. And then the Hearst/Singleton papers put its side out in wimpy little stories buried in their business sections with wimpy little heads. (Example: today’s Chronicle head, “Hearst-MediaNews ruling extended.” Now there’s a rouser.) And there is no explanation of how the publishers rigged the protective order to promote their side of the story and muzzle Alioto.

All of this amounts to a terrible precedent for Hearst and Singleton and their chain allies (McClatchy, Gannett, Stephens) to be setting in federal court against the free press, the First Amendment, and open government.

Repeating: Thank the Lord for Reilly and Alioto. And where the hell are the federal antitrust attorneys (they are still mucking about, pledging folks to secrecy and then asking softball questions)? And where the hell are outgoing Attorney General Bill Lockyer (who seems cowed by the case and is busy chasing those dread pre-texters in the Hewlett-Packard board room)? And where the hell is incoming Attorney General Jerry Brown (who has announced he is going to continue to live in Oakland under the heavy thumb of Singleton’s Oakland Tribune and his galaxy of East Bay papers, without making a peep to date)? B3

P.S. l: I am not blaming the reporters nor their editors for their patriotic Hearst First and Singleton First coverage. They have the unenviable assignment of covering the monopoly moves of their publishers in New York and Denver that are aimed at savaging their own papers and their own staffs and their own communities. It is not, let us stipulate, a fun job. I hope they are keeping detailed diaries. B3

NOISE: Chime power

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December 20, 2006

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Drifting aimlessly amid the holiday chaos? Tell me all about it. There’s nothing like seasonal activity disarray (SAD) when it comes feeling sorry for yourself, grumpy, and liable to purchase the first bright shiny object to obliterate the pain.

So if you’re feeling listless and confused, there’s a few shows to check in lieu of pouting in front of the boob toob: The Powerful PWRFL (a.k.a., Kazu Nomura, who has been compared to Syd Barrett) will be here, riding a wave of cold air from Japan via Seattle. I dug the eclectic noise-maker’s CD – but don’t ask me to cough up the title of it. A big kid in a crazy red and white costume swiped it. But you can hear the sounds tonight, Dec. 20, at 21 Grand (with Liz Albee and George Cremaschi, the Norman Conquest, and darwinsbitch) and tomorrow, Dec. 21, at Stork Club, both in O-city. Word – well, if you consider PWRFL a word. Txt cltre scks.

Also up: the Winter Solstice Celebration at the lovely and creepy Chapel of the Chimes Mausoleum in Oakland.
“From the Darkness, Solace” is the theme for the event, tomorrow, Dec. 21, 7-11 p.m. More than 30 artists will kick out the original music throughout the columbarium in honor of the darkest day of the year. Dress warmly. Flashlights encouraged. $10-$20.

The lineup goes a little like this:

STAGE 1
SoRiah (throat singer)
Garth Powell (percussion)
Sarah Wilson (piano)
LX Rudis (synth)
Eric Glick Rieman (piano)

STAGE 2
Jeff Stott (oud)
Kanoko Nishi (koto)
Ernesto Diaz Infante (guitar)
Devin Hoff (Bass)

STAGE 3
Bob Marsh (cello)
Tako Oda (countertenor)
John Raskin (saxaphone)
Jen Baker (trombone)

STAGE 4
Tim Perkins (elec)
Johnathon Segal (multi)
Danielle Degruttola (cello)
Jess Roland (multi)
Lance Grabmiller (elec)

STAGE 5
Mike Perlmutter (reeds)
Stephen Kent (didgeridoo)
Sameer Gupta (tabla)
Shoko Hikage (koto)

Preparing for nuclear attack

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December 20, 2006

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By Tim Redmond

I grew up in the 1960s, the era of elementary school bomb drills and “duck and cover.” I thought we’d gone beyond all of that, but apparently not: i just received from the federal Department of Health and Human Services a “Wallet guide for the media” called “Preparing for terrorism and other public health emergencies.” It folds out into a nice handy tip sheet on what to do if we’re attacked by mustard gas, nerve gas, antrax or a number of other awful things. In most cases, of course, there’s absolutely nothing anyone can do except “immediately seek medical care.”

My favorite item, though:

“Nuclear device — powerful bomb involving splitting of atoms. Comes in various sizes and types, producing various levels of destruction.

“First actions: Do not look toward the explosion …. Lie on the ground and cover your head.”

Then bend over and kiss your ass goodbye.

William Brand’s Beer Column

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December 20, 2006

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William Brand’s Blog Craft Beer
Inside Bay Area

Those Nasty Elves: Where to Buy Them
By William Brand on Wednesday

I wrote about an English beer with a catchy name – Seriously Bad Elf – in my Beer of the Week Column today.

Here’s a list of bottle shops in the Bay Area that are carrying the gift packs, according to the distributor, Manzo Beer & Ale, Mountain View.

East Bay

Berkeley:

Ledger’s Liquor, 1399 University Ave., (510) 54
Star Market, 3068 Claremont Ave., Berkeley, 94705, (510) 652-2490.
Whole Foods Market, 3000 Telegraph Ave., Berkeley, (510) 649-1333.

Concord:
Monument Wine and Spirits, 2250 Monument Blvd. (Just north of Oak Grove Road in the Safeway shopping center. (925) 682-1514

San Leandro:
Plaza Bottle Shop and Market, 15292 Liberty St., (on the bay side of the 580 fwy at 150th St., (510) 357-1810

San Ramon:
Jay Vee Liquors, 12191 Alcosta Blvd. (925) 828-1400.0-9243.J

South Bay

Campbell:
Whole Foods on Bascom Road and Hamilton

Cupertino:
Whole Foods Market, 20830 Stevens Creek Blvd., (408) 257-7000

Mountain View/Los Altos
Whole Foods Market, 4800 El Camino Real, (650) 559-0300.

San Francisco

City Beer Store, 1168 Folsom St.,#101. (415) 503-1033. Hours: Noon-10 p.m.The City Beer Store on Folsom between 8th & 7th St. Will also be selling individual bottles from the pack.

Unholy spirit

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December 20, 2006

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› cheryl@sfbg.com
It was dark and stormy the night I journeyed to Oakland to meet the Saviours — a perfect weather match for their music, which I’ve had on constant ear blast since picking up their Tim Green–<\d>produced debut, Crucifire (Level Plane, 2006). These guys are fucking serious. They proffer fierce, hard-driving metal so metal you could pronounce it me-tal, spreading their gospel with lyrics such as “All crosses burn into the sky, and their ashes fall to serve as hell’s floor.” Live — forget it: heads involuntarily bang when the Saviours unleash their thunder.
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I knocked on the door of the Saviours’ lair (the Telegraph Avenue digs of singer-guitarist Austin Barber, guitarist Dean Tyler Morris, and drummer Scott Batiste). A giant, fiery pentagram? A life-size diorama of Slayer’s Reign in Blood album cover?
Actually, it was a pretty normal apartment, all things considered. Barber, Batiste, and Morris were chilling around a coffee table that displayed evidence of a post-Thanksgiving weekend winding to a boozy end. (Bassist Cyrus Comiskey, the only member who doesn’t live there and who also plays with Drunk Horse, was stuck at work.) We settled in to chat about the band and expand on the latest update posted on their Web site, www.killforsaviours.com: “We’re writing new songs and partying.”
The members all have pre-Saviours history: Barber and Batiste played in screamo outfit Yaphet Kotto, while Batiste and Morris have known each other since junior high.
“Me and Scott had the idea to start the band a couple of years ago. We got together, started jamming, and we were on tour a month later,” said Barber, who at 24 is the youngest Saviour and the only one who isn’t from Santa Cruz. (He hails from Fort Smith, Ark.) “We just wanted to start a killer heavy band. Now we’re trying to chill out and write a new record — and not play very many shows until spring.”
Their music may visit dark places, but the guys share an easygoing chemistry that extends to their songwriting technique.
“Pretty much everything starts with something that Scott writes, and then everybody adds to it until we decide it’s done,” Morris said. “A lot of times he’ll do stuff musically that I would never do, so of course it makes me think about something new and forces me to figure out a way to work myself into it. Everybody does that — Austin does that with his parts, and Cyrus does that with all his bass parts, and Scott does that with the drums too. It’s very collaborative.”
Batiste added, “This band’s pretty amicable. Like, at the end of 42 days of tour, we were all hanging out and drinking and not sick of each other.”
The Saviours have also found support in the Bay Area metal scene, where peers include High on Fire and Green’s band, the Fucking Champs. Of course, they’re also fans of the genre gods: Slayer, Black Sabbath, and Metallica. The anti-Christian imagery that appears in their lyrics and album artwork is owed to Barber, who grew up surrounded by conservative types. In other words, he’s not a Satan worshipper.
Christianity, he explained, “has always been such a bummer in my life. I just always identified with the dark — partying, do whatever the fuck you want, just living your life. And they’re trying to not live life. All that shit’s representative of doing your own thing, and fuck everybody else.”
Doing their own thing is important for the Saviours, who said they’ll never hook into Ozzfest-style bullshit. They’ve just settled into a new practice space and have plans for a live album (possibly to be recorded at their upcoming Hemlock Tavern show) as well as their next studio full-length, which will be “an extension of the first album,” Barber said.
“It’s gonna sound different, though, ’cause we only have two guitar players now and we used to have three,” Morris noted. (Fifth member Mag Delana, a Yaphet Kotto vet, left the band after Crucifire was recorded.) “I think the songs are getting more intricate.”
“They’ll also stay kinda raw, though,” Batiste added. “Consciously, we try to stay simple.”
Though they joke that they only do “extreme tours,” owing to past jaunts that saw them navigating icy highways in the Midwest and sweltering in East Coast summer heat, the Saviours are eager to hit the road next year. This year they traveled across America playing songs from Crucifire and their 2005 EP, Warship (Level Plane), recorded soon after the band formed, and they’ve picked up fans everywhere.
In New Orleans, Barber recalled, “We were partying all night after the show. I’m out front eating some food, and I hear our band blasting out of some car. And it’s the sheriff — literally the sheriff of New Orleans. He’s all, ‘Fuckin’ Saviours! Aaaah!’ Just screaming at me. He was blasting our CD from the cop car. It was fucking awesome.”<\!s>SFBG
SAVIOURS
With California Love
Dec. 29, 9:30 p.m.
Hemlock Tavern
1131 Polk, SF
$6
www.hemlocktavern.com

Step lively

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December 20, 2006

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com
The year in dance began as a bummer, but it’s ending on a note of hope. In January, Oakland Ballet closed its doors. This week they’re back — sort of — with former artistic director Ronn Guidi’s Nutcracker. What happened? Guidi wouldn’t face reality, that’s what. He never has. He didn’t program George Balanchine when everyone else was jumping on that bandwagon. He commissioned female choreographers when few others would. Throughout his career he swam against the stream, pursuing what he loved most, in particular almost-forgotten ballets from the ’20s and ’30s. Guidi’s successor, Karen Brown, valiantly tried to take the company — already in deep disarray when she started her tenure — in a new direction. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. Now there is at least a glimmer of hope that Oakland Ballet will resurrect itself.
On a broader level, the year has been great for Asian dance — even if the label no longer fits (if it ever did). Remarkably diverse first-rate artists have emerged from that huge continent for some time, but this year has been a particularly rich one for them. The Nrityagram Dance Ensemble brought slightly updated, spectacularly expressive Odissi dance from eastern India. Japanese-born Eiko and Koma worked with exquisitely trained young artists from Cambodia. Sankai Juku may be based in Paris these days, but the company’s lush version of Butoh is both its own and distinctly Japanese. From Taiwan, Cloud Gate Dance Theatre’s physicalization of calligraphy was an extraordinary example of how dance can shape time and space. The Bayanihan Philippine National Dance Company’s lovely celebration of the richness of its country’s culture even acknowledged its colonizer, Spain. Locally, Gamelan Sekar Jaya continued its collaboration with Balinese artists in a simple new work dance intended as a response to the 2002 bombings of that island’s night clubs. If these artists have anything in common, it is that their work’s visual appeal sometimes supersedes choreographic values.
The following “12 of 2006” are not to be construed as the best but simply as events and artists for whose work I am particularly grateful. They are listed alphabetically.
1. At its local premiere, Paul Taylor’s antiwar Banquet of Vultures seemed over the top. I have since changed my mind. Taylor has made many dark pieces; I now think Banquet can stand with the best of them. The trajectory of this trip into hell, set to an unlikely Morton Feldman score, was masterfully realized. When Taylor is good, he still is tops.
2. Counter Phrases was a lush, breathtaking dance film from Belgium, presented as part of San Francisco Performances’ Dance/Screen series. Created by Anna Teresa de Keersmaeker and Thierry de Mey, it featured commissioned scores (created after the visuals) and used the medium with great skill and extraordinary imagination.
3. Doug Varone and Dancers made a rare appearance in the Bay Area, courtesy of San Francisco Performances. Varone shapes generous and humane impulses into highly athletic and musically astute choreography that brings out his dancers’ individuality. He is a much underrated artist.
4. Brazilian Paco Gomes, an experienced choreographer but a relative newcomer to the Bay Area, presented meticulously detailed, smartly timed minidramas that were fun to watch and told us something about ourselves. Gomes is also uncommonly skilled at integrating modern elements into an Afro-Brazilian dance vocabulary for evocations of Candomblé rituals. His dancers — eight women and one man — can do it all.
5. Liss Fain has been making unspectacular but carefully structured, ballet-inspired modern dance for many years. She chooses excellent but demanding music and works with good designers and fine dancers. This year she moved her season to Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. That’s where she belongs.
6. Hell’s Kitchen Dance featured a group of talented, barely post-college-age dancers from New York who work out of Mikhail Baryshnikov’s Art Center. Traveling with the still great dancer, they presented works by Benjamin Millepied and the promising Canadian Azure Barton. Barton’s skippy goofiness, as cleanly realized as if it had been planned on graph paper, was a major discovery.
7. Margaret Jenkins has been thinking about and making dance for many years. For A Slipping Glimpse, she and her dancers traveled to India to work with the modern dance Tanusree Shankar Dance Company. The collaboration resulted in a beautifully planned, exquisitely realized meditation — one of Jenkins’s best.
8. If I had to choose my favorite event of 2006, it would have to be “Kathak at the Crossroads,” the conference Pandit Chitresh Das organized to consider Kathak’s future in light of its past. Each of the 21 solo dancers who performed during those three days put new twists on a noble art.
9. Lyon Opera Ballet’s triple bill at Cal Performances featured neither toe shoes nor tutus. Instead it brought an inspiring triple bill by musically literate, kinetically gifted female choreographers who could not be more different from each other: Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Sasha Waltz, and Maguy Marin.
10. San Francisco Ballet: what can I say? It’s a great company. Helgi Tomasson’s wide-ranging repertoire allows dancers from around the globe to be who they are and yet work with a common purpose. Of the two local premieres, William Forsythe’s Artifact Suite challenged the massive corps like nothing has before; Jerome Robbins’s Afternoon of a Faun showed what magic two self-absorbed dancers can create.
11. In an area that produces dance festivals quite regularly, the San Francisco Hip Hop DanceFest has a future. To be able to watch hip-hop artists — who hail from all over these days — take what used to be a street form and reshape it into increasingly sophisticated theatrical dance is just a delight.
12. At both the WestWave Dance Festival and in her own concert, Erin Mei-Ling Stuart proved how much she has grown as a choreographer. With imagination and a flair for humor, she takes a skeptical look at the world and turns her perceptions into deftly choreographed characters and narratives.<\!s>SFBG

The territory of The Forest War

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December 20, 2006

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Three years ago playwright-director Mark Jackson and the Shotgun Players teamed up to present The Death of Meyerhold, Jackson’s devilishly imaginative and ambitious distillation of the revolutionary life, work, and world of Russian theater innovator Vsevolod Meyerhold. A remarkable success, Meyerhold was easily among the top three world premieres of the season and flagged Jackson, artistic director of Art Street Theatre (1995–<\d>2004), as an up-and-coming innovator in his own right.
Since then, Art Street Theatre has, according to its Web site, “put its producing activities on hiatus,” but Jackson (like his AST colleagues, with whom he continues to collaborate) has kept busy on a freelance basis, recently with his roundly lauded version of Oscar Wilde’s Salome for Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre and currently with his own play, The Forest War. The latter marks his second collaboration with Shotgun, and its powerful, graceful debut suggests Meyerhold’s chemistry was no fluke.
The play opens on the court of an ancient Asiatic kingdom at the cessation of a long war for control of a precious natural resource, namely, the economically indispensable forest. Having led his clan to a hard-won victory, the aging Lord Karug (Drew Anderson) takes the precaution of passing the mantle of state power over the head of his own bellicose and power-hungry son, Lord Kain (Kevin Clarke), and onto the irenic shoulders of Kulan (Cassidy Brown), popular with the populace as a just lord with humble roots in tilled soil. This sets Kain scheming — with the aid of his ally General Mau Tant (Reid Davis) — to take by stealth what he feels should be his by right. Kain’s machinations temporarily trade martial ferocity for the opportunities offered by marital infidelity, as a palace intrigue — devoted family man Kulan’s secret liaison with Karug’s courtesan (Tonya Glanz) — becomes the basis of a public campaign to topple his rival.
This Shakespearean plotline comes refracted startlingly, Akira Kurosawa–<\d>style, through a highly stylized lens — a fairly stunning mise-en-scène that astutely combines elements of Kabuki and Noh theater into a visual banquet with a palpitating dramatic energy behind it, all operating with a precise economy of movement, gesture, and sign. The story features other familiar-sounding details of war and peace — from the health care reform instigated under Kulan to Kain’s manipulation of intelligence and ill-considered war preparations. No matter how stylized or abstract the setting, there’s no missing the contemporary forest for these ancient trees. A whole set of secondary characters, moreover, as well as a parallel affair between Kulan’s daughter (Caroline Hewitt) and a poor artist (Ryan Tasker), flesh out the link between the common people and their turbulent leaders. Jackson directs his actors beautifully, extracting performances from Brown, Tasker, Hewitt, and Clarke, in particular, that breathe individually and expansively inside the productively strict choreography and caricature demanded.
If its vaguely two-party politics strike one as ultimately less sophisticated than its aesthetic vision, The Forest War still potently registers the anxiety of the times. And maybe, specifically, anxiety around our sense of time, in a world whose constantly increasing pace seems to both flatten time into an ever-uprooted, disconnected present and reinforce a by-now-inescapable fear of time running itself out completely. But in the realm of theater, the world that engulfs the characters onstage is also the ground of hope, where the audience, at least, remains to imagine new possibilities emerging from the charred landscape of runaway greed and war. (Robert Avila)
THE FOREST WAR
Through Jan. 14, 2007
Thurs.–<\d>Sun., 8 p.m.
Ashby Stage

Purple tamed?

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December 20, 2006

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Ho, ho, hum. I may have to take it up with a certain chunky fellah in the red clown suit, because just between you and me, I can’t take the pressure. I’m sure you understand — the stress to plonk down the bones for the most lavish holiday booty. To have the raddest New Year’s Eve. To return or regift those less-than-apt presents in the weeks to follow. To end the year with a big bang, sinking your teeth deeply into the ass of life and emerging with stories to tell and most limbs intact.
Right up there with all of the above is the pressure to have fun in Las Vegas. I mean, you have to be a complete loser to not enjoy yourself, not eke out some happening in Vegas that had to stay in Vegas, right? After all, America’s sin city is busy recasting itself as the country’s entertainment capital, building casinos and ripping up the strip late into the night — surely they have some poison that tempts a princely palette?
Alas, Vegas can be such a tease. Exhibit one: Prince, supposedly deep into an indefinite residency at his new club, 3121 (the branding of this year’s album continues), at the Rio hotel but instead taking every weekend off till New Year’s from his Friday and Saturday gig. Caveat: don’t jingle-jangle into town expecting to see his purple highness shake it dutifully, night in and out, à la Frankie, Elvis, Wayne Newton, Barry Manilow, all the big cheeses. Admittedly, even at $125–<\d>$312 a pop, it would have been worth it — to see the larger-than-life mercurial Minneapolis mini at his relatively intimate 900-seat venue, which is said to be under the Purple 1’s sole artistic control, while the adjoining 3121 Jazz Cuisine is overseen by his personal chef. It’s the latest sign of the times: the 48-year-old was following his inclusion in an obligatory animated feature, Happy Feet, and his now-you-see-him-now-you-don’t Net presence (this year he shut down his longtime site shortly after fielding a Webby Lifetime Achievement Award for being the first major artist to release an entire album online exclusively) with a distinct signifier of a rapidly settling-down showbiz icon: a stint in Vegas. Isn’t this American entertainment’s Valhalla, where major stars come to die? “Now if he gets fat like Elvis …,” opined alexnevermind319 on fan site www.prince.org. I pictured the man socking back in a beige McMansion, crusting elegantly in a La-Z-Boy, heavily partaking of TiVo, inhaling fistfuls of Corn Nuts, and wondering if he’s in danger of becoming a corn nut himself, burned out on the bright lights that mask the sun-baked void after only a mere month.
I was clearly conflicted, so I sought solace in a kicky, clean-fun but self-aggrandizing Pussycat Dolls revue at Cesar’s Pure nightclub (drinking game: take a swig every time the half-nekkid hotties urge “Sing along, ladies”) and a geriatrically inclined ’n’ reclined show by Neil Diamond impersonator Jay White, a genuine sing-alike (Diamond himself is quoted in White’s ad: “Jay, keep singing so I can stay home and relax”) who too often shatters the illusion (“Everyone got their Christmas shopping done?” the would-be solitary man queried amid his re-creation of Diamond’s July 4, 1976, Vegas show).
But what am I complaining about? History, musical or otherwise, is often reworked here, toward new, profitable, and vanity-fluffing ends. I dug the Liberace Museum — including its cranky caretakers, who forbade us from cruising through its two buildings in a mere half hour — but you don’t have to look far beyond Liberace’s chinchilla-trimmed capes and mirror-tiled roadster to glimpse the sadness beneath the flash: my partner in Vegas grime read the fine print in the trophy room and noted that many are for simply giving talks and such. Did even the highest-paid entertainer in Vegas history (Liberace took home $50,000 a week in 1955 for turning it out regularly at the Riviera) and the man who enlightened Elvis himself about the power of glitter really need to pad his brag board?
Perhaps size does matter — Las Vegas is as much about industrial-scale entertainment as it is about taking your money in a wholesale sorta way. Judging from the recent low-key array of musical offerings — Toni Braxton was Prince’s only real rival last week — the Purple Pachyderm looms large here, the one truly musically innovative performer currently ensconced in Vegas. But can we say any Vegas-level dues are getting paid at all when Prince keeps the length of his engagement foggily indefinite, the time he goes onstage set vaguely after 10 p.m. — can’t he take the heat, sweat, and slog like a regularly gigging musician? It made you respect those crack, hard-working players behind small fries like White even more. In announcing Prince’s Vegas lounge act, a rep claimed Prince “wants to bring raw, live music back to Las Vegas.” So bring it already.<\!s>SFBG
PRINCE
Fri. and Sat. (after Dec. 28, but don’t count on it), 10 p.m.
3121 at the Rio
3700 W. Flamingo, Las Vegas, Nev.
www.ticketmaster.com

Viva Falletti!

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December 20, 2006

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>paulr@sfbg.com

The age of the independent grocer might be deep in its twilight season, but that doesn’t mean a fresh gleam or two can’t occasionally appear in the gathering Wal-Mart-Target-chain darkness. One such gleam is Falletti Foods, resurrected in a handsome new complex next to the DMV just east of Golden Gate Park’s Panhandle. Falletti had operated for years in the old Petrini’s space at Masonic and Fulton. But that building was demolished in 1999 to make way for housing. Well, I thought at the time, so much for Falletti, RIP. Even in San Francisco, the tendency toward chain grocers in barnlike buildings seemed to be irresistible.
The reborn Falletti (still owned and run by Tick Falletti and his sons, Dominic and Jamie) is almost defiantly small, just 6,000 square feet of full-service market. Yet the space breathes nicely; the flow is natural, the aisles wide and well lit, the produce section a roomy square set about two central islands, one of them devoted to organic foodstuffs. Wines are displayed on elegant wood shelves just past the main entrance, while on the other side of the store is a long, L-shaped butcher’s counter — “40 feet of meat” — from whose shining glass cases can be had Diestel turkey parts and Dungeness crab, among many other delicacies.
I had supposed, before visiting, that the store’s compaction meant it would emphasize prepared foods and deli items, but this isn’t so. You could easily do your weekly shopping here, and prices, while not low, are competitive with those at similar stores. As for prepared foods: a Delessio Market and Bakery occupies a large corner of the floor space and is separated from Falletti mostly by signage of the you-are-now-entering sort. And for seekers after coffee, there is a Peet’s in its own cozy alcove just off the main entrance. The presence of the latter probably helps explain why Falletti doesn’t sell any bulk whole-bean coffee (such as Jeremiah’s Pick or Sark’s), just imported Italian stuff like Illy.
The realities of our strange times say that even the little guy has to have free parking and take credit cards, and Falletti does both. The place doesn’t have Whole Foods’ array of cheeses, but that doesn’t seem like a terribly high price to pay for buy-local types, which I hope most of us are.

Keeping up with John Waters

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December 20, 2006

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CULT MOVIES Cobbled and crumbling streets with a homegrown musk of fish, piss, and National Bohemian Beer wind through Charm City — a place where ragged and palsied vagrants stroke crack pipes atop benches reading “The Greatest City in America.” The dainty, dapper man serving me coffee from an antique tray couldn’t be further away from Baltimore.
His recent San Francisco appearance has been moved from the Fillmore to the Swedish American Hall. Cross-legged in a perfectly tailored black suit, John Waters chalks it up to the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle but adds, “Don’t worry — I don’t feel like Kevin Federline or anything.” It turns out the cult director is a fervent member of Team K-Fed. “I hope he gets the kids. I love a bad boy, and he is so clueless about how to deal with the press — but at least he wasn’t out this week showing his crotch.” Instead of dwelling on the deeper cultural nuances of Britney Spears, I’m just trying to figure out how this guy has time to keep up with the tabloids.
You see, John Waters — sultan of sleaze, underbelly fetishist, iconic if ironic impresario — has been very, very busy.
First, there’s the remake of the remake of Hairspray. The original 1988 film featured Debbie Harry, Sonny Bono, Divine, and Jerry Stiller — and launched the career of Ricki Lake. After easily reaching cult status, its Broadway musical version swept the Tonys — and now Waters is back with a third cast and a fresh eye: “Each time it has to be reinvented to work — otherwise why go there?” The new movie, which stars Michelle Pfeiffer, Queen Latifah, and Christopher Walken, comes out next summer and features John Travolta in the roll of Edna Turnblad. “Sitting there in the trailer with John Travolta getting into drag, it’s not so much different than Divine getting into drag — it’s a looong process.”
Though this latest version of Hairspray is directed by Adam Shankman, it has the full support of its creator. Some might say full frontal support — Waters shows his unwavering approval in the film’s first 30 seconds through a cameo as a flasher.
Meanwhile, stage director Mark Brokaw, Daily Show writer David Javerbaum, and Fountains of Wayne member Adam Schlesinger have teamed up with the Hairspray the Musical team to turn Cry-Baby, Waters’s 1990 movie musical, into another Broadway show. The film — starring Johnny Depp and Amy Locane — is the story of two ’50s teenagers tangled up in a star-crossed-lovers cliché. The menagerie of raunch and camp is fleshed out with some vulgar rockabilly (parts of the soundtrack are produced by Dave Alvin), tight clothes, and quite possibly the most unbelievable supporting cast of all time. “I cast it like I was having an insane dinner party with people from very different worlds,” Waters says. You can bet that Iggy Pop, Patricia Hearst, Willem Dafoe, Traci Lords, and even Polly Bergen had some wild times on set.
Waters recently collaborated with Jeff Garlin to adapt his infamously inflammatory monologue, This Filthy World, for the screen. The lewdly eccentric music compilation A John Waters Christmas (New Line) is in stores now, and A Date with John Waters (New Line), a smutty Valentine’s Day comp, will hit the shelves in early February. And just in case you still suspect the man of slacking off, he has also finished writing the screenplay for his next film — a children’s movie. Yeah, as in for children.

JOHN WATERS DOUBLE FEATURE
Fri/22, 7 p.m. Hairspray;
8:50 p.m. Cry-Baby
See Rep Clock

Judge blocks newspaper monopoly

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December 20, 2006

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@@http://www.sfbg.com/blogs/politics/@@

They rule — and drool

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December 20, 2006

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com
REVIEW It may sound like a toast at a wedding reception, but in order to have some measure of success in a collaborative project, there has to be an agreement between the parties involving respect, patience, and a dose of humor. The opposite would be when a couple filing for divorce cites “irreconcilable differences.” For the collaborative art team leonardogillesfleur (Leonardo Giacomuzzo and Gilles-fleur Boutry), this phrase is also the clever title of their recent body of work currently on exhibit at Catharine Clark Gallery. The title plays on the struggle to create collaboratively and points to the sometimes fruitless results in pushing idealistic — or just plain romantic — notions. Paired with this work is “Action Series,” a grouping of videotaped performances that touch on a similar vein.
The team graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2004 with MFAs from the New Genres Department. And it shows. Upon entering the gallery, you are confronted with a candy-apple red contraption: a push-me-pull-you Fiat, a car with two front ends seamlessly melded together to create a vehicle that can drive in two directions. It has two steering wheels, two front windows, no back seat, and a propensity for going in circles. The car isn’t real, but the photos and schematic layouts are convincing enough. On close investigation, you can see that the car is actually an altered toy and leonardogillesfleur altered its photograph. This is something children would happily invent with crayons.
The pair have also included a recording of their own childlike car sounds, which emits vrrrroommms from a corner in the gallery, near the large-scale photo of the car, One Way or Another Puzzle. The vehicle sits waiting, parked on cobblestones, with the pair walking toward it, dressed in matching exercise gear — ready for action. But the action they get, as shown in one photo of the car after it’s made donuts (“Going in Circles”), is likely to prove frustrating. A real object the team made prior to this two-way Fiat is a bicycle with two handlebars and two seats. Unlike on a tandem cycle, a third wheel in the center has the riders facing away from each other and forever pedaling hard to try and go their direction instead of their partner’s. These objects are visual puns and teeter on the edge of dadaism but fall more directly in the realm of conceptualism, the kind taught at a clown college — smart but also smart-ass.
In the next room video monitors on the walls and a large projection in a small theater loop the staged photolike performances of “Action Series.” Leonardogillesfleur are playing with the idea of holding a moment, markedly a special occasion, for as long as they can. Akin to a freeze-frame kiss at the end of a sappy movie, Myself as a Fountain highlights the team seconds before they go into a passionate lip-lock. They stand outside in some city park, amid the sound of cars and dogs barking — with heavy strings of drool pouring from their mouths. In all these videos — including one with the painfully cold setting of a blizzard, in which the couple hold a waving-at-the-camera pose — the title includes the length of time the subjects endured these attempts to hold on to the moment. In the loop in which a birthday cake’s candles melt down while awaiting a puff of air from Boutry’s mouth, friends wobble and work to hold their poses in the background. The time reads “8:42.” Family and friends actually suffered it out as we do when enduring each other’s company for too long. In these video pieces leonardogillesfleur capture the clear sense of futility in preserving a moment that didn’t happen the way it was imagined. The duo are fortunate in their pairing: they have figured out how to mix their multimedia works with just enough humor to hold viewers’ attention, yet leaving them open to the works’ harder messages.<\!s>SFBG

LEONARDOGILLESFLEUR 2006
Through Fri/22
Wed.–<\d>Fri., 10:30 a.m.–<\d>5:30 p.m.
Catharine Clark Gallery
49 Geary, second floor, SF
(415) 399-1439
www.cclarkgallery.com

Girls and monsters

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December 20, 2006

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› johnny@sfbg.com

Impish skittering insect fairies, horned Jean Cocteau–<\d>spawned romantic beasts, lascivious frogs that make Jabba the Hutt seem schooled by Jenny Craig, and murderous monsters with hands on their eyes — no doubt about it, the baroque and neo-Raphaelite splendor (or Splenda, since it’s largely CGI-based) of Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth leaves the majority of 2006’s unimpressive prestige movies looking drab and mechanical. But as Del Toro’s rich pageant attempts to shove what feels like 12 dozen solemn manifestations of Cate Blanchett aside in order to make a valid, exciting run for the Academy Awards, it’s important to realize that the director’s vision, while creative, has a definite antecedent: one of the least-known greatest movies of all time, Víctor Erice’s sublime 1973 The Spirit of the Beehive. Like Erice’s movie, Pan’s Labyrinth is an allegorical look back at Francisco Franco–<\d>era Spain, as seen through the eyes of a little girl.
Del Toro has admitted that The Spirit of the Beehive has seeped into his soul — though not, to some detriment, into his filmmaking style. Its influence is evident even in the architectural emphasis of his movie’s title, which trades Erice’s honeycombs for a maze. Within the movie itself, however, this labyrinth overtly evokes Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, as young Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) races through corner-laden leafy and stony passages away from the murderous clutches of her stepfather, Franco minion Captain Vidal (Sergi López). Her fight for life traverses the film’s narrative — a much larger labyrinth that ultimately connects her imagination to the lives of others.
The bittersweet outcome of that struggle won’t surprise anyone familiar with Shakespeare, not to mention Del Toro’s past movies or his enlightened, enthusiastic love of John Carpenter — a rare Hollywood director who doesn’t think a pigtailed child with an ice cream cone is above the ruthlessness of the streets. In Del Toro’s 1997 mutant cockroach thriller, Mimic, an orphan in the sewers meets a fate similar to that of a sewer orphan in Bong Joon-ho’s upcoming The Host, the only movie to outdo Pan’s Labyrinth as a politicized genre entry at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. Both Bong and Del Toro measure the sins of the world against a girl’s heroism, and while they’ve learned about the power of spectacle from Steven Spielberg, they haven’t swallowed his saccharine formulas — or pursued his nationalist and reactionary political tendencies.
In Del Toro’s case, this means the Mexican-born director repeatedly returns to Spain under the Fascist reign of Franco to construct fantastic but critical parables in which children represent resistance. In this regard, Pan’s Labyrinth is a sister film to 2001’s The Devil’s Backbone, with Ofelia serving as a solitary counterpart to the boys of that film’s haunted school. It’s a mistake — made by at least one pan of Pan — to attribute the film’s fairy-tale quality to sexism on the part of its director; without question, Del Toro is paying homage to Erice’s Spirit, perhaps the greatest movie ever made about a child’s — not just girl’s — consciousness.<\!s>SFBG

PAN’S LABYRINTH
Open Fri/27 in Bay Area theaters
See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com
www.panslabyrinth.com

Ringing it backwards

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December 20, 2006

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SUPER EGO Hustlers are like trees — you can usually tell how long they’ve been around by the number of rings around their eyes. Or how many teeth they have left, if trees had teeth, which they don’t, but hey, I’m never one to not stretch a simile to Andromeda and back. They pay me to do it! It’s my elastic destiny.
I was counting the rings on a hot tattooed man-product at the bar closest to my heart, Mr. Lee-ona’s in the Tenderloin, when a thought attacked me: maybe, Miss Marke B., you should do one of those year-in-clubs retrospectives and try to relive, in a Swiss-cheese-brain way, 12 hard months’ worth of gadabouting. The highs, hangovers, hilarity, hurling, what have you.
Suddenly, I was attracted both ways. Retrospectives can be lame, but no one really does them about clubs here. So there’s originality. Plus: I had a coherent thought! I should run with it. Maybe I’ll even earn another ring.

BREAKOUTS
There were oh-so-very many success stories in 2006, not all of them pretty. Here are some. Bootie (www.bootiesf.com), the horrendously wonderful mashup monthly, moved to DNA Lounge and became a secret guilty favorite. Tipsy zombie Santas dancing to Kanye West and Beethoven — ’nuff said. Also: Hard Eight at Crash (www.crashnightclub.com) with DJ Tommy Lee blew the roof off retro and introduced a whole new generation of Marina chicks to porn and torn rock T’s. A sight to ponder heartily. The Transfer (415-861-7499) attempted to transform a beloved biker-dyke bar into the most forward-thinking semiunderground party stop on every cool clubber’s night train and ended up being a little of both, which — who knew? — proved to be an addictive combination.

FLAMEOUTS
Megaclubs, no doubt. San Francisco had already moved away from cavernous supastar showcase spots by the start of ’06. Even that infamous security-wracked techno black hole, 1015 (www.1015.com), was making good on its intentions to remodel itself into a more intimate, lounge-type joint. Mezzanine (www.mezzaninesf.com) found it drew more crowds as an edgy concert space than as a circuit host. And while the ever-delayed opening of “super club” Temple (www.templesf.com) teased me with inklings of controlled experiments (would the ability to plug your own headphones into a DJ booth be enough to tempt folks to pay $20 door fees and find their way through 10 rooms?), the nightspot’s had too many permit problems to get off the ground. We’re edging toward a time when a “DJ” walks into a bar and plugs a cell phone into the speakers — we’re obviously in need of some intimacy.

TRENDS
In a weird reversal of the ’70s, mushrooms have tied cocaine as the bad-girl head party, but neither of them can beat prescription drugs yet. The bathroom stalls are like freakin’ Canadian pharmacies. The whole ’70s rare-groove gay bathhouse trend is still our most exportable original trend — breakbeats, who? — thanks to Bus Station John and a host of new gay musicologists. Circuit is dead, house keeps taking a beating, and no one’s too snobby about music anymore (too much of a good thing? I’m so puke over the easy ’80s). Club Neon (www.neonsf.com) and Brigitte Bardot (www.myspace.com/brigittesf) are doing wonders with bringing back the ’90s, with original remixes and a glam-grunge aesthetic. Trash drag and its backlash, trashier drag, are merging at an alarming pace. And seedy dives — complete with the occasional hustler — are back for their trademark naughty luxury. No more lava lamps and pod chairs, people! SFBG

MR. LEE-ONA’S
301 Turk, SF
7 a.m.–2 a.m.
(415) 292-9803

The art of the cart

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December 20, 2006

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› paulr@sfbg.com

The romance of street-cart food might not be high romance, but it is romance and does cast its spell, particularly in big, rich cities — like ours — with elaborate infrastructures of fancy restaurants and a concomitant epidemic of some as-yet unnamed cultural autoimmune disorder that attaches inordinate worth to the prosaic.
Street-cart chic reflects, I would say, a recognition among the high rollers that immaculate table linens and Limoges china aren’t all there is to the gastronomic life, that occasionally a little mayonnaise running down the sleeve is in order, though maybe not mayonnaise from an actual street cart, because the cart-keeper probably hasn’t washed his hands and you might get salmonella. I tilt toward this view largely because several recent street-cart-food undertakings of note have connections to glossy, big-name places, and these connections do carry a certain brand-name reassurance. Two examples: the Ferry Building’s Mijita, which serves Mexican street food with regional accents, is related to swank Jardinière by way of a shared owner-chef, Traci des Jardins, while Charles Pham’s hugely upscale the Slanted Door has given birth to a pair of Out the Doors (the latest in the Westfield San Francisco Centre, the great mall of tomorrow), which bundle up take-out packages of Vietnamese street-cart food for those on the run or on deadline.
Yet not all street-food emporiums are modest little places with richer, grander siblings that can sluice their rich patrons downstream every now and then for some edible absolution of wealth-guilt. Bodega Bistro, for instance, has a kind of dual identity; it’s a quite elegant Tenderloin restaurant that gives a section of its menu over to the street-cart food of Hanoi. And now we have the seductive Regalito Rosticeria, which combines a gleaming Pizzeria Delfina look, of warm wood, glass, and stainless steel, with a menu (by chef and owner Thomas Peña) largely given over to versions of Mexico City’s street-cart food.
The extreme makeover of what was once a pupusería is stunning in practically every respect, but its most striking feature is the long bar, or counter, which runs most of the length of the restaurant, can seat at least a dozen, and is backed by the busy kitchen, with its gas-fired ovens, mortars and pestles, and busy chefs filling stainless-steel bowls with fresh salsas and guacamoles. It’s like the Mexican version of a sushi bar. The dark side of the moon, of course, is that table seating is a little sparse.
As the glistening treasures in the chefs’ stainless-steel bowls suggest, las salsas are not only excellent but makers of dishes. Guacamole ($6) can and does stand alone, of course; it’s creamy-chunky, made with perfectly ripe avocados sliced up by hand rather than processed or pounded, and it’s served with whole tortillas (of wheat) fried to a bronze crispness. You break off a piece, as if it’s pappadam, and dip. If you want the same thing with tomatoes instead of avocados, you will opt for the tostadas with salsa fresca ($3), the crispy disks presented this time with a classic salsa made with voluptuously ripe tomatoes, finely diced, whose sweetness balances the sourness of the lime and the bite of the garlic and chiles.
But to say that other sauces play supporting roles is not to diminish them. The torta ($7.50) — a Mexican sandwich featuring roasted pork or chicken on wondrously puffy bread swabbed with refrijoles and Mexican crema (a close relation of crème fraîche) — benefits from the presence of a sharp pico de gallo, while the quesadillas ($7.50), deep-fried half moons, like empanadas depend on a red salsa, waterier and hotter than its fresca cousin. Even the sauces you can’t see, such as the vinaigrette that dresses the chopped lettuce accompanying the taquitos ($7.50), add a charge. There is nothing quite like undressed lettuce, sitting there like a pile of hay in a barnyard, to let the air out of the balloon of anticipation, and yet this seemingly minor oversight is common practice in many Mexican restaurants. If nothing else, the kitchen crew at Regalito sweats the details.
The only sauce I didn’t respond to was the roping of red-pepper coulis across the enchiladas rojas ($7.50), flaps of corn tortillas also topped with white pipings of crema, like decorations on a birthday cake. The sauce’s rich rust red color belied its undersalting. On the other hand, the tortillas weren’t deep-fried — a small mercy.
Many of the small dishes, of bar and side food, are remarkably tasty: brilliant little pirouettes of flavor and texture you could easily choreograph into a light, leisurely meal or an extended cocktail hour. If you’ve ever saved the seeds from your Halloween pumpkin and later tried to roast them, only to meet with disappointment, you will find the pepitas ($2) — pumpkin seeds toasted with chili, salt, and lime — to be revelatory. Mostly they are tender and melt in the mouth without leaving behind that terrible cud of fiber.
Beans, of course, are available in a variety of guises. Among the possibilities are stewed pinto beans ($2.50), mild and meaty, and ejotes ($3.50) — green beans — sautéed with delicate ribbons of white onion and finished with a squeeze of lime. And while we are on the subject of limes: the house-made limeade ($1.95) is a phenomenon of dense sweet-sourness. If you’re tired of lemonade and you want a bit more excitement than the usual aguas frescas can provide — or you seek the grease-cutting power of citric acid — you will be happy with it. Think of it as a little gift to yourself — a regalito, as Spanish speakers say.<\!s>SFBG

REGALITO ROSTICERIA
Tues.–<\d>Fri., 11 a.m.–<\d>10 p.m.; Sat., 9 a.m.–<\d>10 p.m.; Sun., 9 a.m.–<\d>8 p.m.
3481 18th St., SF
(415) 503-0650
www.regalitosf.com
Beer and wine
AE/DISC/MC/V
Pleasantly noisy
Wheelchair accessible