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Beauty, reappraised

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

First look by Matt Sussman:

The deYoung Museum’s retrospective of the late, great Yves Saint Laurent’s 40-year career designing haute couture comes at an awkward moment for fashion and its fans. With the country facing the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, “recessionista” is the buzzword du jour and Vogue and its ilk are trading their trend watches for old bromides such as “investment pieces” and “necessary luxuries.”

This strange timing is certainly no fault of the de Young, which had the foresight to begin planning this massive retrospective (and to ensure that SF was its only US stop) in 2002, well before the designer’s untimely passing last June. Amid the profligate bailouts, “Yves Saint Laurent: 40 Years of Fashion” not only offers up a snappy lesson in fashion history, it provides a necessary helping of that luxury so often promised, but debatably afforded, by public art institutions: beauty, reappraised.

Saint Laurent collected beautiful things — his homes in Paris and Marrakech were exquisitely appointed with Louis XVI furniture and paintings by Picasso and Goya — and he made the creation of beautiful things his life’s work. One can walk through the exhibit and simply appreciate this — the jackets that flawlessly capture Van Gogh’s brushwork through sequins; the evening cape that’s a cataract of autumnal feathers. But Saint Laurent is a master because he consistently made all the paillettes and feathers and evening gowns and safari suits telegraph what Tim Gunn likes to call “a point of view.”

Saint Laurent’s point of view was that beauty is a form of power and nothing is sexier than confidence. “The body of a woman is not an abstract idea,” he once said, “[A dress] is not made to be contemplated but to be lived in, and the woman who lives in it must feel herself beautiful and right in it.” Even on unobtrusive mannequins, you can see how Saint Laurent’s silhouettes were always conscious of — and gracious toward — a woman’s body. Many garments would be as flattering on a 20-something gamine as on a woman in the fullness of middle age. Perhaps this is why Catherine Deneuve has continuously worn YSL since 1967.

This is immediately apparent in the two rows of garments, backlit in soft blue, that form the entryway to the rest of the exhibit. Here are all the Saint Laurent hallmarks: transparency, androgynous tailoring, the perfected detail — all executed with a sly playfulness and flair for drama. A 1968 evening gown of sheer black silk chiffon, with a ring of ostrich feathers discreetly placed just below the navel, shocks first with all that it leaves exposed, and then with its elegance. A more modest 1991 two-piece evening ensemble dedicated to ballerina Zizi Jeanmaire (to whom Joseph Cornell also paid homage), evokes the casual ease of a dancer’s cool-down outfit — save for the exquisite bugle bead embellished hems. Several examples of Saint Laurent’s signature Le Smoking ensembles — his feminine remake of the tuxedo — are also on display, each one a master class in fit and proportion.

The “Yves Saint Laurent revolution” was not merely a matter of taking cues from street style and changing social mores and gender roles. Like Coco Chanel before him, Saint Laurent’s prerogative was to make clothes for women who wanted to dress for themselves, and not for the Social Registry circuit that still dictated the shopping habits of couture clients when he took over Dior, at the tender age of 21, in 1957.

Granted, many of Saint Laurent’s repeat customers — those names printed on the bottom of the exhibit’s explanatory cards like cartouches in an Egyptian temple — still went to charity luncheons, galas, and season openings. But clad in YSL, they could cause tongues to wag, cluck disapprovingly, or flutter with lust. Saint Laurent’s 1971 ’40s-inspired collection initially struck a sour note with fashion critics, who turned up their noses at what they saw as tasteless “Vichy chic.” But looking at that collection’s signature piece now — a sumptuous, acid green fox fur jacket with shoulder padding befitting a linebacker, or Joan Crawford — one sees a kind of social armor. It says, “don’t fuck with me,” in the classiest way possible. No wonder Naomi Campbell wore the jacket (with just a pair of tights and heels) in Saint Laurent’s farewell retrospective.

“I’m the last couturier,” Saint Laurent intones in a voiceover near the beginning of David Teboul’s intimate 2002 documentary Yves Saint Laurent 5 avenue Marceau 75116 Paris. It’s hard to scan how serious the gently self-deprecating Saint Laurent is being — although his visible physical frailty belies the sharpness of his instincts and his eye as he designs his final spring/summer collection.

Since Saint Laurent’s death, fashion has become yet more rapaciously capitalistic and pragmatically democratic: houses have become branches in multi-brand luxury conglomerates, designers sell to both Target and Barney’s, and haute couture has largely become an accessory to advertising. Saint Laurent’s “last couturier” statement comes off as a declaration of purity in the face of such seismic shifts. A palliative for these sour times, “Yves Saint Laurent: 40 Years of Fashion” grants us unprecedented access to the beautiful world he crafted, whose dignity he sought to protect until the end.

YVES SAINT LAURENT: 40 YEARS OF FASHION

Through April 5, 2009

De Young Museum

Golden Gate Park

50 Hagiwara Tea Garden, SF

www.famsf.org

———–

Second look by Kimberly Chun:

Menage A Trois: Looking And Longing And “Yves Saint Laurent”

TAKE ONE The flat, pop, almost banal brilliance of Luis Bunuel’s Belle de Jour (1967) hinges not on tragically trite dungeon-mistress corsets but on the critical tension between the silently exploding, sexually exploratory interior life of Severine (Catherine Denueve) and her frigid-to-frozen good-bourgeois exterior, impeccably framed by Yves Saint Laurent’s prim-chic uniform-esque daywear. These costumes continue to inspire imitators’ collections today — who can forget the jingle-all-the-way opening scene, where Severine rebuffs her handsome surgeon husband during a carriage ride? Her suave Prince Charming abruptly orders their coachman to roughly drag his resistant, now-struggling bride into the fairytale forest — the brass buttons on the men’s coats perfectly rhyme with those on Severine’s five-alarm scarlet wool suit — where they tie her up, tear off that perfectly tailored jacket, whip, and molest her. Bien sur, this is just Severine’s idle before-bed rape and violation fantasy, made all the more pungent by the perverse spoiling of Saint Laurent’s exquisite getups.

At this point in his career, the designer was fully occupied, dreaming up four full collections a year — two for ready-for-wear and two for haute couture — composed of as many as 100 ensembles. Yet he still loved to design for stage and screen. This job led to a lifelong friendship with Deneuve. One iconic frock from Belle de Jour — the sublimely austere, black wool barathea A-line with proper white satin collar and cuffs — is on display at “Yves Saint Laurent,” the exhaustive YSL retrospective at the de Young. An ever-so-slightly-hip-slung black patent belt nearly disappears beneath an invisible front placket closure: black on black. There may be more memorable outfits in the film — particularly the buttoned-up Severine’s protective-shell outerwear — but this piece, redolent of maids, nuns, schoolteachers, and other archetypal images of traditional female service — throws the distance between Severine’s desire for debasement and her icy, blue-eye-shadow-frosted hauteur into stark relief. It’s a study in contrasts: puritanical, yet in its girlish, unconstrained, almost innocent lines — also found in the gray trapeze dress Saint Laurent dreamed up for Christian Dior in 1958 — it eschews the predictable sexuality of the previous era’s “New Look,” with its nipped waists and full womanly skirts.

TAKE TWO Saint Laurent never shied from fantasy, and the Orientalist/colonialist dreams of the designer, who was born in Algiers and spent much of his later life in Morocco, are in full effect at the de Young — Jean Paul Gaultier dined out on the hyper-exaggerated cone breasts that Saint Laurent first conjured in his 1967 African collection. But equally fantastic, if pegged to more utilitarian, workday pursuits, are the examples of women’s wear influenced by salty Mediterranean seafarers, pin-striped swells, and animal-skin-clad hunters. Saint Laurent takes the functional and elevates it until it is almost painfully, acutely sensuous: witness 1968’s suede thigh-high boots accentuating an all-legs Amazon, accompanied by a figure-masking suede tunic and visor-ed hood. Nearby is his first safari jacket from 1968, laces descending from the neckline above a hip-riding ring belt, shorts, and tall boots. Tom Ford borrowed such insouciant lacing to revive moribund Gucci in the ’90s. Veruschka famously struck a pose in this outfit for the fashion press, but I can’t help but imagine longtime Saint Laurent muse and his femme counterpart Betty Catroux as its genuine inspiration.

Less lioness than angular blonde whippet, perpetually booted, putf8um blonde, and a permanent member of her and Yves’ imaginary band Les Saints (Catroux’s maiden name is Saint), the androgynous Catroux — who haunted the exhibition’s media preview at the de Young — was a mannequin for the house of Chanel when Saint Laurent spied her at a nightclub and insisted she work for him instead. A year after their meeting, Saint Laurent designed his first smoking jacket or tuxedo for women: “It was his first step in the exploration of masculine dress within a feminine framework,” writes Alicia Drake in The Beautiful Fall: Fashion, Genius, and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris (Back Bay, 2006). “The idea of girls dressing like boys and the tensions and attraction that could evoke was a daring new concept in fashion after a decade characterized by graphic, doll-like dresses, white tights, and bouncing hair.” This huntress is the flip of Belle de Jour‘s anti-heroine — aggressive, sexually liberated, and ready to loosen those lacings.

TAKE THREE Bridal gowns inevitably close couture shows, and while some fabulist fashionistas might prefer Saint Laurent’s opulent 1980 tribute to The Merchant of Venice-style Shakespeare or his outrageous but borderline gimmicky 1999 bridal Eve in a pink silk rose bikini, flower ankle bracelet, and train, I prefer the laugh-aloud audaciousness of his “queen baby” infanta/infantile 1965 bridal sock. Call it a divine bride-in-a-sack. Wittily foregrounding the untouchable yet phallic purity of bride-as-fantasy-virgin, Saint Laurent wraps his imaginary maiden in an intricately hand-knit, fisherman-style, ivory wool swaddling. The knobby knit encapsulates her head. Her arms disappear behind poncho-like slits. The designer’s beloved ribbons and bows punctuate her face, waist, and ankles, and pilgrim-buckled shoes poke out beneath. This is bride as a baby bottle cozy, ready to pop — evoking some creamy, dreamy, organic future, as well as some alien yet recognizable, marriage-as-Iron Maiden past.

Sensational trans-bashing at SF Weekly

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OPINION SF Weekly published an article Nov. 26 with the headline "Border Crossers." The subhead explained the thesis: "Long rap sheet? No problem. Transgender Latina hookers in SF are successfully fighting deportation by asking for asylum."

The title successfully encapsulates the Jerry Springer-like journalism masquerading as a feature article in an alternative weekly in San Francisco. While I would normally just dismiss this as another example of how SF Weekly is turning into the National Enquirer, the article is important in that it reveals the intense discrimination transgender immigrant women who do sex work face in San Francisco — and unfortunately, quite possibly jeopardizes an incredibly essential legal protection.

The writer, Lauren Smiley, apparently believes she has unearthed a shocking secret: that transgender women may receive asylum in the United States based on intense discrimination in their home countries. So trans immigrants can avoid deportation even when they have been arrested for prostitution and have rap sheets.

As Smiley notes, immigration judges and asylum officers have the discretion to grant asylum when a transgender woman presents a showing of a well-founded fear of persecution based on gender identity. Even Smiley admits that transgender women face violence and intense discrimination in their home countries; however, what Smiley finds the most egregious is that some small subset of the asylum-seeking women have been prosecuted for sex work.

What Smiley single-mindedly ignores is the astonishing statistics that show an unemployment rate of more than 50 percent for transgender women of color, and perhaps even higher statistics for undocumented women in San Francisco. Instead of pointing to the well-documented obstacles transgender women face in employment, Smiley interviews one transgender woman who was able to get a job as evidence that transgender women really do not have to be "hookers" to survive. (Yes, she really did use the word "hookers".)

Without any context or analysis, Smiley quoted Dan Stein, president of the "Federation for American Immigration Reform" (FAIR) as a credible critic of the practice of granting asylum to immigrant transgender women. The Southern Poverty Law Center recently officially designated FAIR as a hate group, but nowhere in her article does Smiley mention that the organization is considered one of the least trustworthy, if not laughable, sources for information on immigration.

What concerns me most is not the cheapness of the shot, but rather that — like so much sensationalist journalism — a piece like this gives fuel to right-wing activists like FAIR. Even Smiley notes that the Republican Party has included in its platform an end to the practice that has literally saved many lives.

What is even more astounding is that last year, Smiley received an award from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation for an article about how doctors were using a new treatment for transgender children so that they wouldn’t develop into their biological sex until after puberty — which would give those kids the choice to transition later.

Yet in the Nov. 26 piece, when describing the landmark case of Geovanni Hernandez-Montiel, who was the first to get asylum based on gender identity, this award-winning writer frequently refers to Giovanni using the male pronoun "he." While I would not expect most journalists to give a nuanced perspective on Giovanni’s gender identity, I do expect a journalist who has received an award from an LGBT media watchdog group to allow for a more fluid understanding of Giovanni’s gender. I called Smiley and she acknowledged that she should have better described FAIR. When I asked her about the other problems, she simply said I should write a letter to SF Weekly.

In San Francisco, can’t we expect and demand better?

Robert Haaland is co-chair of SF Pride at Work, a LGBT labor organization. Alexandra Byerly is program coordinator, EL-LA Program Para Trans-Latinas. Nikki Calma is a member of the Commission of the Status of Women. Cecilia Chung is chair of the San Francisco Human Rights Commission

Transforming traffic analysis

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› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY A court injunction against new bicycle projects in San Francisco (see "Stationary biking," 5/16/07) could get lifted next year, thanks to environmental studies released Nov. 26 and headed to the Board of Supervisors next month. But it’s a subtle, technical change in how city officials analyze traffic impacts that could have a more far-reaching implications.

It’s called Level of Service Reform and it would change the triggering mechanism for when projects need to conduct full-blown environmental impact reports, an expensive and time-consuming requirement that led to the three-year bike project injunction. And LOS reform has been rattling around the city bureaucracy long before the Guardian wrote about it two-and-a-half years ago ("The slow lane," 5/17/06).

"It’s either wonderful that I started working on this in 2002, or it’s embarrassing," Rachel Hiatt of the San Francisco Transportation Authority told a Nov. 19 meeting of TransForm (formerly the Transportation and Land Use Coalition) on the subject.

The California Environmental Quality Act of 1970 requires EIRs for projects with potentially significant environmental impacts, as is the case when the level of service (LOS) at an intersection could be changed. LOS is measured by the amount of time it takes a car to pass through a given area. The time consumed by the car is often referred to as control delay. Measured by grades A through F, control delay per motor vehicle times of up to 30 seconds (E grade) are acceptable in San Francisco.

Designating sections of certain busy streets to accommodate a bike lane would affect the control delay, thereby earning the area a lower LOS grade. Since cars now essentially have priority over alternative forms of transportation, many potential bike lanes have been stranded by the LOS standard.

City officials are working to replace the LOS measure with a new one based on auto trips generated (ATG), using 1 ATG as the threshold for an EIR. Projects that generate no car trips will not be seen as having any environmental impact, thereby moving through the approval process quicker and cheaper.

"LOS needs to be taken out of the picture," Hiatt said.

The argument for LOS replacement is not solely about the need to accommodate other transit modes, but about lowering costs and making government more efficient. Hiatt outlined other problems with the current measure as the failure to accurately gauge environmental impact, failure to reflect the city’s "transit-first" policy priorities, and an inefficient CEQA review process.

Development advisor Mike Yarne of the San Francisco Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development said that if the city wants to topple LOS, the Transit Authority has a case to make. "What the TA needs to show is that ATG is a more effective proxy to calculate environmental harm," Yarne said.

The city is also considering instituting a mitigation fee to be paid by project sponsors to compensate for environmental impact. Proceeds from the fee will be used to enhance all existing modes of transit, pedestrian safety, and could even include planting trees.

"The fee will go toward making people move faster," Yarne said.

Yarne admits that it could be a little difficult to make both changes at once. San Francisco will be the first city in California to create a mitigation fee, so other cities are taking notes.

"It would be quite an accomplishment if we could make it happen. It’s never been done," explained Yarne, noting that most cities have come to recognize that CEQA does not work well in urban areas. "The irony of ironies is the stopping of the bike plan."

Last week the TA released a Draft Environmental Impact Report for the San Francisco Bicycle Plan. With almost 900 days since the last new bike lane was constructed, the new bike plan will allow a roughly 75 percent increase to the current network..

San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Executive Director Leah Shahum expressed hope in the potential of the new EIR, slated to be approved this spring, after which the plan will be finalized and the city can go back to court to try to get the injunction lifted.

"The draft EIR is definitely a big step toward completion, but more needs to be done," she said. "The ridiculous exercise of slowing the bike plan down is a great case for why we need environmental review reform."

Stop PG&E’s corporate welfare

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EDITORIAL Just in time for the holiday season — and the colder weather — Pacific Gas and Electric Co. wants to shift millions of dollars in fees off big industrial customers and force residential consumers to pay more for natural gas.

The move would set a terrible precedent, and San Francisco officials should join the consumer groups that are calling on the California Public Utilities Commission to reject the plan.

At issue is California Alternative Rates for Energy (CARE), a state-mandated program that helps low-income consumers pay for basic gas service — enough to heat their homes and cook their food. CARE costs PG&E nothing; the entire subsidy system is paid for by modest surcharges on every utility bill in the state. But now the biggest gas users — giant corporations like Exxon Mobil and Chevron — want to stop paying the surcharge, and PG&E, along with San Diego Gas and Electric and Southern California Edison, is taking up their cause. The three giant utilities have asked the CPUC to reduce their subsidy contribution by $90 million. Residential customers would pick up the slack. Why? Jeff Smith, a PG&E spokesman, told Los Angeles Times columnist David Lazarus that "We’ve got to try to help make it more attractive for businesses to do business in California."

But Chevron and Exxon Mobil aren’t suffering from a hostile business climate in this state. Both have reported record profits in the past year. The CEO of Exxon Mobil, Rex Tillerson, was paid $16.7 million; Chevron’s CEO, David O’Reilly, made $15.74 million. The fee shift wouldn’t help small businesses much; it’s based on how much energy a customer uses, so the big energy-intensive industries pay the most.

The best way to boost the business climate in this recession era is to promote consumer spending — which means putting more money in the pockets of residents. Raising the gas bills of people who are already hurting will have the opposite effect.

"It’s an absolute outrage that the biggest companies would be given a discount on the backs of ratepayers," Mindy Spatt, media advocacy director at The Utility Reform Network (TURN), told us. "Everyone’s so worried about making the climate good for businesses, but what about the climate for people?"

A CPUC administrative law judge ruled against the utilities in November, but the case will go to the full commission, possibly as soon as Dec. 18. (Details are online at the Bruce Blog at sfbg.com.)

San Francisco has an interest in the outcome, since the city’s economy will take another hit if PG&E gets away with this. And, of course, it’s ironic that the utility would take this step just after it spent $10 million to defeat a local public-power measure (which would have lowered electric rates and helped both small and large businesses, as well as consumers).

The supervisors ought to pass a resolution opposing the plan and City Attorney Dennis Herrera should file a formal statement of opposition on behalf of the city.

In another front on another battleground, state assemblymember Tom Ammiano and state senator Mark Leno are introducing a joint resolution that would put the Legislature on record as supporting the legal challenge to the same-sex marriage ban, Proposition 8, and as raising concerns that the measure violates the equal protection and separation of powers safeguarded in the state constitution (see "Tyranny of the majority," 11/26/08).

Leno told us that the intent isn’t to put pressure on the California Supreme Court, which will begin considering the case in January, but to make clear the Legislature’s intent that substantial changes to the constitution such as this should go through the more cumbersome revision process.

Joining Leno and Ammiano in sponsoring the bill are Assembly Speaker Karen Bass and Assemblymember John Perez, and state senate president Darrell Steinberg and state senator Christine Kehoe. Leno said he expects others to sign on as well. It’s a solid idea, and the Legislature should approve it.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

I was out of town the day Tom Ammiano appeared at his final meeting as a San Francisco supervisor. Too bad; I would have gone, no matter how busy I was, just to be a part of history.

I know that sounds silly. The Barack Obama inauguration will be part of history. The election of Harvey Milk was part of history. Ammiano’s last day? Hey, the guy’s moving on to Sacramento. Take a bow, everyone says thanks, and another local politician takes another political job. History?

Well, yeah, actually. Because when the history of progressive politics is written in this town (and I hope some other poor sucker takes on that job so I don’t have to) Tom Ammiano will go down as a central figure in the movement that turned San Francisco around.

It’s worth noting that the movie Milk, celebrating the life of the gay pioneer, opened around the same time Ammiano was clearing out his City Hall office. The connection goes deeper than the fact that they were both queer men fighting for basic human rights and dignity at a time when that was a huge uphill struggle.

Milk was part of an urban movement that came out of the 1960s and came of age in the 1970s that sought to wrest control of San Francisco from a cadre of military and big business leaders who had been running it since World War II. The agenda of the crew that we collectively refer to as "downtown" was turning the sleepy port city of the 1930s into the financial headquarters for Pacific Rim trade. They wanted San Francisco to be another Manhattan; they laid plans, they put the machinery in place — and they never asked the people who lived here whether that was the future we wanted.

Because all that downtown development meant higher rents, more evictions, gentrification, budget deficits, too many cars, the death of small businesses … and by the mid-1970s, the activists had figured out how to fight back. It started with electing supervisors by district so that big money didn’t always carry the day.

Milk was elected supervisor as part of the progressive push that put George Moscone in the Mayor’s Office. And if Moscone and Milk had lived, it’s possible that the tide could have turned right then. But the assassinations derailed district elections, turned the city back over to downtown, and sentenced the San Francisco left to more than 20 years of tough political dark ages.

Ammiano got elected in that era, when the developers called all the shots, when tenants and environmentalists and neighborhood people were lucky to get two or three votes on the Board of Supervisors. His pro-tenant and anti-development proposals never even reached the desks of mayors who would have vetoed them anyway.

But he didn’t give up, and in 1999, in the bleak days of the dot-com boom, he took on a long-shot campaign for mayor that, in one six-week period, reenergized the San Francisco left. With his help, district elections came back; and with his leadership, a decidedly progressive board took office in 2001. Living wage, sick pay, universal health care, bike plans, real estate transfer taxes, tenant protections … these are all products of that change.

Ammiano was an odd sort of leader, someone with a sense of humor who didn’t take himself anywhere near seriously enough. He would be the first to credit the movement, not the man — and he’d be right. But when we needed him, he was there.

Decongest me

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› sarah@sfbg.com

San Francisco could raise $35 million to $65 million for public transit improvements annually by charging drivers $3 to cross specific downtown zones during peak travel hours, according to a San Francisco County Transportation Authority congestion pricing study.

The aim of those fees, SFCTA staffers say, is to reduce congestion, making trips faster and more reliable, neighborhoods cleaner, and vehicle emissions lower, all while raising money to improve local and regional public transit and make the city more livable and walkable — improvements they hope will get even more folks out of their cars.

London, Rome, and Stockholm already have congestion pricing schemes, but plans to charge congestion fees in New York got shelved this July, reportedly in large part because of New Jersey officials’ fears that low-income suburban commuters would end up carrying a disproportionate burden of these fees.

As a result of New York’s unanticipated pressing of the pause button, San Francisco now stands poised to become the first city in the United States to introduce congestion pricing. But the plan requires approval from both local officials as well and the state legislature.

As SFCTA executive director Jose Luis Moscovich told the Guardian last week, "The state has control over passage of goods and people. Therefore, if we want to restrict that in any way, e.g. charging a congestion fee, [we] have to get the state’s permission."

If a congestion pricing plan is to go forward, it will need the support of Mayor Gavin Newsom. Wade Crowfoot, the mayor’s climate change advisor, told us, "It’s obvious that the mayor embraces the concept, as he laid out in his 2008 inaugural address."

But Newsom isn’t signing the dotted line just yet. "The mayor wants to make sure that there are no negative impacts that would make people not want to come to San Francisco, or would harm low-income people who live in areas that are not served by public transit and have no other choice but to drive," Crowfoot said.

"We are encouraging the [Transportation Authority] to do vigorous public outreach so that no one feels blindsided," Crowfoot added.

But as SFCTA executive director Jose Luis Moscovich explained Nov. 25 to the supervisors, who also constitute the transportation authority board, even if San Francisco gets the legislative green light, it could take two to three years to implement a congestion pricing plan.

"We’re not making a proposal," Moscovich said. "We’re just showing the initial results of our analysis."

That said, it’s clear Moscovich believes congestion pricing is feasible and would contribute to local, regional, and statewide transit goals.

TOO MANY PEOPLE


With San Francisco planning to accommodate 150,000 new residents and 230,000 new jobs over the next 25 years, Moscovich’s principal transportation planner, Zabe Bent, outlined four scenarios last week that would mitigate impacts in already congested areas.

These scenarios involve a small downtown cordon, a gateway fee with increased parking pricing downtown, a double ring that combines gateway crossings with additional fees downtown, and a cordon that imposes fees on crossings into the city’s northeast corner. (See www.sfmobility.org for details, including maps of the four possible zone scenarios.)

It seems likely the SFCTA will pursue the double ring or northeast cordon option.

As Bent told the board, "If the zone is too small, people will drive around it. And drivers within the zone could end up driving more, thereby eroding anticipated congestion benefits."

But all four scenarios aim to alleviate an additional 382,000 daily trips and 30 percent extra time lost to traffic congestion that would otherwise occur by 2030, according to SFCTA studies.

"We won’t reach environmental goals through clean technology alone," Bent explained. "Even if everyone converted to a Prius, the roads would still be congested."

Observing that it already costs at least $4 to get into the city by car — on top of $2 per gallon for gas and high parking fees — Bent argued that congestion, which cost the city $2 billion in 2005, reduces San Francisco’s competitiveness and quality of life.

Stockholm raised $50 million a year and reduced congestion by 22 percent with congestion fees, while London raised $200 million a year and reduced congestion by 30 percent.

In San Francisco, the SFCTA used computer models to determine that by charging $3 per trip at peak hours, the region would get maximum benefits and minimum impacts.

Discounts would be available for commercial fleets, rentals, car shares, and zone residents, Bent said, with toll payers getting a $1 "fee-bate" and taxis completely exempt.

As Moscovich noted, "Taxis are viewed as an extension of the public transit system."

BIG BUSINESS GRUMBLES


With concerted public outreach scheduled for the next two months, and business groups already grumbling about even talking about any increases to the cost of shopping and commuting with the economy in meltdown, Moscovich warned the supervisors not to wait until after the next economic boom hits, before planning to deal with congestion.

"Now is the right time to study it, but not implement it yet," Moscovich said.

Kathryn Phillips of the Sacramento-based Environmental Defense Fund told the Board that in Stockholm, public support grew to 67 percent once a congestion fee was in place.

"People saw that it reduced congestion, provided more public transit services, and made the city more livable and walkable," Phillips said.

BART director and Livable City executive director Tom Radulovich believes that free downtown transit would make the fees more palatable. "Fares could be collected when you get off the train if you travel outside of the zone," Radulovich said.

Noting that BART is approaching its limits, Muni Metro needs investments, and parking fees are an effective tool for managing congestion, Radulovich added. "Congestion pricing’s main criteria should not be to make traffic move faster. I don’t want to create more dangerous streets, but generally speaking, I think that plan is on the right track."

As for fears that San Francisco’s plans could tank at the state level because of concerns about working-class drivers being unfairly burdened, Radulovich noted that SFCTA studies at Doyle Drive determined that only 6 percent of peak hour drivers are low-income.

"The vast majority are earning more than $50,000 a year," Radulovich said. "And since the number of low-income drivers is very small, they could be given discounts. The real environmental justice issue here is what current congestion levels are doing to people living downtown, who are mostly low-income. They put up with inhumane levels of traffic and congestion, which affects the health and livability of their neighborhoods."

Dave Synder, transportation policy director for SPUR (San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association), said he believes the regressive tax argument is a misleading attack.

"The truth is, that without the revenues this program will bring, the MTA will have to cut service for poor people, not increase service to meet increased demand for people who can no longer afford to drive," Synder told us.

But several local business groups are claiming that San Francisco doesn’t have a congestion problem compared to European cities.

Ken Cleveland of San Francisco’s Building Owners and Managers Association, said he believes that reports of congestion in San Francisco "are more hype than reality.

"We have no problem compared to London, Rome, and Stockholm," Cleveland said. "Congestion fees may work when you have a huge city with millions of people crammed in, like in London, Manhattan, Rome, but not in San Francisco."

Cleveland urged a hard look at what this increase means for people who drive now. " Fees of $160 a month would be "a real hit" on the middle and working classes, he said.

Jim Lazarus of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce said he opposed a local cordon, but supports a regional congestion pricing program. "Look out the window at 10.45 a.m., and you’ll see that there is no congestion on Montgomery and Pine," Lazarus told us, noting that unlike London, which covers 600 square miles, San Francisco only has a 49-square-mile footprint.

"If you decide not to go into downtown London, the odds are your taxes, jobs, and revenues will still go into London’s coffers," he said. "That’s not the case in San Francisco. So from a small business point of view, it doesn’t make sense."

Bent says the SFCTA’s study provides numbers that are irrefutable, in terms of showing how travel times are impacted by congestion, during peak hours. "We’re talking about modest improvements in speed, but significant improvements in travel time," Bent said.

The proposed fees won’t affect shoppers, museum-goers, or those going out at night, but would benefit all users of the public transit system, Moscovich said.

"We’re not designing for London, we’re designing for San Francisco," Moscovich told the Guardian. "And this is not an anti-automobile program. This is an effort to achieve a balanced transportation system."

With the congestion fee revenue reinvested in transportation infrastructure, Moscovich adds, public transit will be less crowded, and provide more frequent, faster service.

"It all makes perfect internal sense: folks with the least resources are likely to benefit the most," said Moscovich, who predicts that San Francisco will agree on some form of congestion pricing.

"The mayor wants to be seen as a leader in initiating climate change commitment, and transportation is one of the first ways to achieve this," he said. "Especially since 50 percent of San Francisco’s greenhouse emissions occur during peak hour travel."

"We’re trying to change behavior, not just engineering. We don’t want people in cars. … For every pollution-free Prius, you have diesel buses and older cars sitting in traffic idling, essentially eroding any benefits. The best way to optimize results is to get some cars out of the peak hour."

Sup. Jake McGoldrick, who is president of the SFCTA board and has supported the congestion fee-pricing system since it was implemented in London, said that "business will have to step up [and] make a willing suspension of disbelief to see that enhanced mobility will enhance business opportunities.

"There will be no need to get mauled at the mall," McGoldrick predicts. "San Francisco has wonderful things to offer, not just a sterile, homogenous, single-purpose environment. You can’t match museums and cultural amenities out at the malls. San Francisco is a cultural center, not just a strip mall."

McGoldrick, who is termed out in January, said that the new Board "will lean very positively toward doing this." He added that state representatives, including Sens. Leland Yee and Mark Leno and Assembly Members Fiona Ma and Tom Ammiano "will see the benefits.

"They should be willing to carry the banner because of the long term benefits for their grandchildren," McGoldrick said.

(The Board will consider the congestion pricing scenarios and impacts Dec. 16. See www.sfmobility.org for details of public workshops and meetings.)

Cue the clowns

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› steve@sfbg.com

The circus doesn’t come to San Francisco, but its performers do, sexy and talented dreamers who bring a creative energy that has transformed the city’s nightlife and counterculture. Spinning aerialists and dancing clowns now proliferate at clubs and parties, and their number has more than doubled in recent years.

They come from towns across the country — often via Burning Man, where they discover their inner performers, dying to burst out, and other kindred spirits — to a city with a rich circus tradition, which they tweak and twist into something new, a hybrid of the arts and punk sideshow weirdness. It’s the ever-evolving world of Indie Circus.

One of the biggest banners these performers now dance and play under is Bohemian Carnival, which draws together some of the city’s best indie circus acts, including Vau de Vire Society, the clown band Gooferman, and Fou Fou Ha, acts that fluidly mix with one another and the audience.

Last Saturday, as families across the country shopped and shared Thanksgiving leftovers, this extended family of performers rehearsed for that night’s Bohemian Carnival. Fou Fou Ha was in the Garage, a SoMa performance space, working on a new number celebrating beer with founder/choreographer Maya Culbertson, a.k.a. MamaFou, pushing for eight-count precision.

"Do it again," she tells her eight high-energy charges, who look alternatively sexy and zany even without the colorful and slightly grotesque clown costumes they don for shows. I watch from the wings as they drill through the number again and again, struck by how the improvised comedy at the song’s end changes every time, someone’s new shtick catching my eye and making me smile.

"That’s what we love the most, the improv element to it," Culbertson tells me. "We see how far you can take it and not break character."

As Fou Fou Ha wrapped up and headed home to get ready for the show, Gooferman and Vau de Vire were just starting to rehearse and set up over at the party venue, DNA Lounge. Reggie Ballard was up a tall ladder setting the rigging, the dancers stretched, Vau de Vire co-founder Mike Gaines attended to a multitude of details, and Gooferman frontmen Vegas and Boenobo the Klown played the fools.

"I feel like I’m on acid," Vegas said evenly, his long Mohawk standing tall.

"Are you?" Boenobo said, perhaps a little jealous.

"No, I wish," Vegas replied. "But that’s why it’s weird."

"Huh," Boenobo deadpanned. "Weird."

Fucking clowns. I decide to chat up a dancer, Rachel Strickland, the newest member of Vau de Vire, who stretched and unabashedly changed into her rehearsal clothes as she told me about why she moved here from North Carolina in July 2007.

"I waited a long time for this. I always knew I wanted to come to San Francisco and work on the stage, doing something in the line of Moulin Rouge, with the costumes and that kind of decadence and debauchery," Strickland said, oozing passion for her craft and the life she’s chosen, one she said has met her expectations. "I danced as much as I could my whole life and I have an overactive imagination, so it’s hard to shock me."

Not that Vau de Vire hasn’t tried. Shocking people out of their workaday selves is what the performers try to do, whether through vaudeville acts, dance routines, feats of skill, or just sheer sensual outlandishness. Vau de Vire choreographer Shannon Gaines (Mike’s wife of 19 years) also teaches at the local indie circus school Acrosports and, with beatboxer and performance artist Tim Barsky, directs its City Circus youth program, which combines hip hop and other urban art forms with circus.

Gaines has been a gymnast and dancer all her life, skills that she’s honed into circus performances she does through five different agencies, often doing corporate events "that involve wearing a few more clothes" and other more conventional performances.

"The other seems like work to me. But this," she said, a wry smile coming to her lips, "is like dessert. This is what excites me."

She’s not the only one. With their growing popularity, San Francisco’s indie circus freaks are juggling an increasingly busy schedule and developing even bigger plans for the new year, including a national tour and an extravaganza called Metropolus that would reinforce San Francisco’s reputation as the best Big Top in the country.

As Boenobo told me, "It’s a moment in time when there’s something big developing in San Francisco."

MIMES AND PICKLES


The circus arts are ancient, but San Francisco’s unique role in morphing and perpetuating them trace back to the 1970s when Make-a-Circus arrived here from Europe — where circus traditions are strong — and the local, organic Pickle Family Circus was born.

Wendy Parkman, now a board member at San Francisco Circus Center, the circus school she helped develop in conjunction with the Pickles and legendary performer Judy Finelli, worked for both circuses and described how they derived from San Francisco’s vibrant arts scene and its history of grassroots activism.

"It was just a wonderful, spontaneous bubble, a renaissance of circus activity," Parkman told the Guardian. "It was an outgrowth of the fabulous ’60s and the involvement of people with community and politics and art."

Parkman and many others trace the local lineage of a renaissance that came to be known as New Circus back to the San Francisco Mime Troupe, which in 1959 started doing political theater that incorporated comedy (or more specifically, Commedia dell’Arte), music, farce, melodrama, and other aspects of clowning.

"It really started with the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and it flourishes here because of the rich arts culture that we’ve always had here," Jeff Raz, a longtime performer with both original SF troupes who started the San Francisco Clown Conservatory and recently had the title role in Cirque du Soleil’s Corteo, told the Guardian.

"San Francisco felt like a place where things could happen that were socially and politically relevant," Parkman said. "Circus has always been a people’s art form. It’s a great way of getting a lot of people involved because it takes a lot of people to put on a show."

Perhaps even more relevant to the current indie circus resurgence, both Make-a-Circus and the Pickle Family Circus reached out to working class neighborhoods in San Francisco, where they would do parades and other events to entertain the people and generate interest in the circus.

"It was happy, healthy, and accessible to people of all ages, classes, and backgrounds," said Parkman said, who noted that things began to change in the 1980s as funding for the arts dried up and Pickle hit hard times.

"The Pickle Family Circus was a grassroots circus that was part of a real renaissance. Unfortunately, it didn’t go very far," Dominique Jando, a noted circus historian who has written five books on the circus and whose wife teaches trapeze at the Circus Center, told the Guardian.

Still, the Pickle legacy lives on in the Circus Center and Acrosports, making San Francisco and Montreal (birthplace of Cirque du Soleil, whose influence has also propelled the indie circus movement) the two major hubs of circus in North America. Unlike Europe, Russia, and China, where circus training is deeply rooted and often a family affair passed from generation to generation, Jando said, Americans don’t have a strong circus tradition.

"We are really the poor children of the circus world. There is not the same tradition of circus here that there is in Europe," said Jando, a native to France who now lives in San Francisco. "Learning circus is like ballet, and it’s not really in the American psyche to work and train for seven years for a job that offers modest pay."

Homegrown spectacles like Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus commercialized the circus and transformed it into the three-ring form that sacrificed intimacy and the emphasis on artistry and narrative flow. Traditionally in Europe, the clowns and music structured a circus performance, with the punctuation and interludes provided by the acrobats and other performers of the circus arts.

"It’s the superhuman and the supremely human, who are the clowns," is how Raz defines circus. "Clowns are becoming more central to the circus, the supremely human part, and that has a lot to do with our times."

Raz, Jando, and Parkman all pointed to the sterile excesses of the televised, digitized, Twittering, 24/7 world we live in as feeding the resurgence of circus. "It points to a demand by the audience to see something more down to earth and real," Jando said. "There is a need to go back to basics."

"It’s a response to the overly technological world we’re living in. People want to go back to what the human body can do and be in the same place as the performers," Parkman said. "One of the concepts of the Pickles was that it was drawing on the European model. I’d say what’s going on now in San Francisco is an offshoot of what the Pickles did."

Raz said the rise of Indie Circus and its influence on the local arts scene is consistent with his own experiences as an actor and clown. He used to keep two resumes, but performers today are often expected to be steeped in both disciplines, letting one inform the other and opening up new forms of creative expression.

"That melding that you’re looking at, from the club scene to Burning Man, is seeping into a lot of the world," Raz said. "Circus is very much a living art form."

Somehow," Jando said, "it has become a sort of counterculture on the West Coast."

INDIE, THE NEW NEW CIRCUS


Boenobo and Vegas haven’t done any real training to become clowns. They’re performers who use the clown shtick to build a fun and fantastical world off their solid musical base.

"There has to be whimsy. People take themselves so seriously," Boenobo said, noting that it was in response to the serious-minded Winter Music Conference in 2001 where he had the idea of having the members of his new band, Gooferman, dress as clowns. It was a lark, but it was fun and it stuck, and they’ve been clowns ever since.

"The clown thing floats my boat. It is a persona I really dig. And the band kicks ass. We’re all just super tight. The Bohemian Carnival is just a bunch of friends, like a family ejected out of different wombs," he said.

The band does kick ass. Setting aside the clown thing, their tunes are original and fun, evoking Oingo Boingo at its early best, particularly since the summer, when Boenobo and Vegas brought in a strong new rhythm section. But it’s the collaboration with Vau de Vire and the other groups that round out Bohemian Carnival and really bring it to life.

"People say it just blew my mind, and that is the immortality of it," Boenobo said. "It’s super-fucking gratifying, really. It’s just stupid."

They performed last month at the Hillbilly Hoedown inside a giant maze made of hay bales in Half Moon Bay, with the clowns and circus performers creating a fantastical new world for the partygoers. As Gooferman played, Shannon broke the rules and danced atop a hay bale wall behind the band, conveying pure danger and backwoods sex appeal.

"The Gooferman character is called Bruiser or Shenanigans," Shannon said of her performer alter egos. "She does the things that you’d get kicked out of a party for, but I can get away with it."

She considers herself more of a "fluffer" than a dancer, and while Gooferman plays, she gets the band and crowd charged up by pushing the limits of silliness and composure herself and seeing if they’ll follow. "So they’re thinking, wow, if she can do that, I can do all kinds of things."

Their world not only includes practitioners of circus arts (contortionists, aerialists, trapeze artists, clowns, and the like), but also the fashion scene (including outlandish local designers such as Anastasia), painters, sculptors, dancers, actors, fire artists, and DJs like Smoove who bring a certain zany flair to the dance parties.

"It’s hybridized. So it’s not just circus arts with some musical backing," Boenobo said. Instead, it creates a fun and whimsical scene that makes attendees feel like they’re part of something unusual, fun, and liberating. "Immersion is very important."

That’s why the Bohemian Carnival and its many offshoots try to break down the wall between the performers and the audience, who often show up in circus or Burning Man styles, further blurring the borders.

"When you break down that big third wall, there’s no pretense," Mike Gaines said. "It’s really about the party and the community."

Clowns circulate in the crowd, interacting with the audience while aerialists suddenly start performing on ropes or rings suspended over the dance floor. It draws the audience in, opens them up, makes them feel like they’re part of something.

"All of the sudden, people get to realize the dream of running away with the circus, but they get to leave it at the end of the night," Boenobo said with a wink, "which they generally like."

"The line of where circus starts and ends has been blurred," said kSea Flux (a.k.a. Kasey Porter), an indie circus performer who earlier this year started Big Top Magazine (www.bigtopmagazine.com) to chronicle the growing culture. "I love the old-school circus, but as with everything, it needs to be able to evolve to continue to grow."

When he joined the indie circus movement five years ago, performing with the Dresden Dolls, Flux said it transformed his life. He quit his corporate job and started developing his art and trying to make a living in the circus arts, including promoting the culture through the magazine.

"I found the circus and was completely filled with a new life," Flux said, noting that it was through his long involvement with Burning Man that he was exposed to the circus scene. "I think Burning Man gives a platform for it. People get stuck in their jobs and there’s this great week when you can let go and be what you want to be."

That’s also how the talented aerialist and hooper who calls herself Shredder got into this world, which she’s now explored in both the traditional circus and the indie variety, preferring the latter.

"I didn’t even know it was possible, but I just love it," said Shredder, who worked as a firefighter, EMT, and environmental educator before getting into performing through Burning Man, where Boenobo set up the Red Nose District in 2006 for all the many offshoots of the indie circus world that attend the event.

Shredder developed hula hoop and aerial routines, training hard to improve her skills and eventually was hired by the Cole Brothers Circus in 2006 to do aerial acrobatics and hooping. Founded in 1882, Cole is a full-blown circus in the Ringling Bros. tradition, with a ringleader, animals, and trained acrobats. Shredder toured 92 cities in 10 months until she felt the creativity and joy being snuffed out by the rote repetition of the performances.

"We did the exact same show everyday. It was like Groundhog Day but worse; same show, different parking lot," said Shredder, who later that Saturday night did a performance with more than a dozen hula hoops at once. "Then I heard about Vau de Vire through some fellow performers and I just heard they were doing really well and I wanted to be with a group like that … I was just so happy that they were willing to help me design my vision as an artist."

COMING TOGETHER


The Bohemian Carnival name and concept was actually an import from Fort Collins, Colo., where Mike and Shannon Gaines created the Vau de Vire Society as part of the performance and party space they operated there in a 100-year-old church that they purchased.

Mike’s background was in film; Shannon was a dancer; and the world they created for themselves was decidedly counterculture. So was their space, the Rose Window Experimental Theater and Art House, which they operated from 1997 to 2001 and lived in with 20 of their bohemian friends.

"It allowed us to really get to know ourselves. We had all day to just rig up any kind of performance we could imagine," she said. "If you had a crazy idea, you could just come on over at 3 a.m. and do it."

Their signature events were themed parties that would open with performances of about 30 minutes, usually combining music, dance, and performance art, followed by a dance party that was essentially an all-night rave. Initially the performances just drew off of the creativity of their friends, including those Shannon danced with. The themes were often risqué and sometimes included nudity.

The performances evolved over time, bringing in talent such as Angelo Moore of the band Fishbone, who is still a regular part of their crew. They were all attracted to the freaky side of performance art, which drew them toward sideshow, vaudeville, and circus themes and expanding what was technically possible. "We ended up getting a rigger in and just flying around the theater," Mike said.

In 2000, they did their first Bohemian Carnival event. "That’s when we started dabbling in the circus," Mike said.

While the events gained regional acclaim in newspapers and were supported by notables figures, including the town’s mayor, there was a backlash among local conservatives, including some who objected to how a traditional church was being used for raves by these bohemian freaks.

In 2001 they decided to search for a new home. "We looked around for the place that would be most accepting of what we were doing," Mike said.

San Francisco was known to be accepting of their kind, and there were groups here that were edging toward similar kinds of parties, including Infinite Kaos and Xeno (and its predecessor, Awd), as well as the band Idiot Flesh, not to mention the more serious circus being done at the Circus Center and Teatro Zinzanni.

"San Francisco, in this country, is a real hotbed for circus. So we were like, ‘Now we can bring in legitimate circus performers," Mike said. Shannon got a job teaching at Acrosports, allowing her to be immersed full-time in her art and to help grow her community.

Serendipitously, in August 2001, indie rocker Boenobo of the band Chub — a funky ska outfit whose members would wear different costumes to each of their performances — formed Gooferman, which wasn’t originally the clown band it is today: "The idea was you had to be in a costume and you had to be stoned." They morphed into a full-blown clown band, and began collaborating with circus performers.

"But it never coalesced until recently," Boenobo says.

That process probably began around Halloween 2004 at the Vegoose Festival in Las Vegas, when Vau de Vire Society was asked to fill eight hours’ worth of programming and turned to their San Francisco brethren for help, Mike said. They drove or flew about 100 people to the event.

It was also the year Boenobo staged the GoofBall in San Francisco, drawing together a variety of entertainment that helped change the nature of the traditional dance party. Perhaps not coincidentally, it was also the year that reviled President George W. Bush won a second term and when longtime Burning Man artists staged their ill-fated revolt against the event (see "State of the art," 12/10/04).

"When people get too serious, they need this shit even more," Boenobo said of the increasingly irreverent, naughty, and participatory parties he was throwing.

Meanwhile Fou Fou Ha was developing its act. Culbertson and Raymond Meyer were waiting tables at Rose Pistola in 2000 and decided to put their big personalities to work for them, bringing in other performers such as Slim Avocado and setting up routines to perform at CellSpace and other venues.

"We’re sort of like the children of Cirque du Soleil in a way, but we wanted to give it an edge," Culbertson said. "It’s sort of like the second wave vaudeville … now with more of a rock edge."

Fou Fou Ha’s shows play off the dark and surreal kind of performance that is more European than American, a style Culbertson was exposed to while studying choreography during her Fulbright scholarship in Holland in the late 1990s. When she returned to the United States in 2000, "I wanted to form a [dance] company." But she wanted it to be fun. "People really like the idea of serious dance combined with comedy, where you can fall out of your pirouette," she said.

"We’re kind of like guerilla circus," Slim, a trained ballerina, said. "It’s a whole new movement. It’s like ’30s cabaret, but edgier."

Boenobo started the Red Nose District on the playa at Burning Man in 2006, drawing together his Bohemian Carnival friends, a local group of stilt- walkers known as Enhightned Beings of Leisure, installation artist Michael Christian’s crew from the East Bay, the Cirque Berserk folks from Los Angeles, and others from the growing circus world.

"It’s a safe environment to be and do what you want," Gaines said of Burning Man, noting how those breakthroughs on the playa then come back home to the city. And that ethos carries into Vau de Vire, which is truly a collective of like-minded friends, one that eschews hiring outside performers for their shows. "They’re all just part of it," he said.

What they’re all part of — Vau de Vire, Gooferman, Fou Fou Ha, and the rest of the Indie Circus folk — has begun to make a strong imprint on San Francisco nightlife and counterculture. From a performer’s perspective, Boenobo said, it feels good. "Our local family is super comfortable with one another," he said, something he’s never felt before after 25 years as a indie rocker. "It’s rare to not have a lot of ego to deal with, and it’s super rare with this kind of high-quality performance."

But they want more. As Flux said, "We want to take over the world."

WHAT’S NEXT


Slowly, the circus collective members are moving toward becoming full-time freaks. Already, Mike Gaines said most of the 12 to 15 regular Vau de Vire performers practice their art full-time, subsidizing their performances by being instructors in dance or the circus arts.

That’s not to say the parties, with their large number of performers, are lucrative. "With circus, you get a million more people on your guest list, so circus is complicated from a promoter’s perspective," Joegh Bullock of Anon Salon, which incorporates circus acts into its parties, including the upcoming Sea of Dream party New Year’s Eve. "But we love it and wouldn’t do a show without it."

To pay the bills, "we also do a lot of corporate gigs," Gaines says, not proudly. Fou Fou Ha does as well, including performing at the Westfield San Francisco Centre this holiday season. They’re all dying to take their show on the road, but that, too, takes money. "Sponsorship is the key if we’re going to tour with 60 people," said Mike, who’s been working hard on a deal and said he feels close.

Boenobo’s latest plan is Metropolus, a circus-style extravaganza he’s planning (along with Bullogh and Gaines) for next Halloween, hoping to ferry guests (using buses or perhaps even art cars from Burning Man) among several venues in town (such as Mighty, 1015, Temple, and DNA Lounge) and a huge circus tent he wants to erect in Golden Gate Park.

In addition to circus-style entertainment drawn from across the country, he wants to precede the Saturday night finale with three days and nights of workshops and smaller-scale performances. His goal is for Metropolus to because a signature event for San Francisco and the indie circus scene, the equivalent of the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas; the Winter Music Festival in Miami; or the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

The time seems right, with the current financial meltdown creating opportunities even as it makes funding their world domination plans difficult. "Each time you have a crisis like we’re having now, it’s a ripe time for circus," Jando said, noting that circus boomed during the Great Depression and after each of the two World Wars.

And after going through years of pure absurdity in Washington, DC, and on Wall Street, Raz said the clowns of the world — from Stephen Colbert’s conservative television character (who Raz says employs clown techniques in his comedy) to a singer named Boenobo — now have a special resonance with people. As he said, "One of the things clowns do is they live the folly large."

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CLOWN’S EYE VIEW

I’ve been following Indie Circus for years, intending to add it to the profiles of various Burning Man subcultures (see www.steventjones.com/burningman.html) that I’ve written for the Guardian, but my reporting on this story began in May. And at the suggestion of Gooferman frontman Boenobo the Klown, I decided to start from the inside and let him turn me into a clown.

As makeup artist Sharon Rose transformed me into a happy clown backstage at DNA Lounge, I asked Boenobo what I should do (besides interview people). We just needed to clown around, keep the drunks from crowding the performers, help clear the stage between acts — whatever needed doing. "We’re the scrubs," he told me, clown-to-clown.

As we spoke, the acrobats stretched, a corpse bride goofed off as she prepared for her aria, members of the Extra Action Marching Band started to slink in, clowns applied their makeup, and female performers occasionally came back from the stage and whipped off their tops.

When Gooferman went on, I still didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing, so I stood next to the stage, watched, and awkwardly tried to be a little goofy in my dancing. A tall, beautiful blond woman stood next to me, catching my eye. She was apparently alone, so after a couple songs, during a lull, I asked her, "So, do you like clowns?"

"I am a clown," she said with a grin.

"Really?" I said. "You don’t look like a clown."

"But I am," she said. "I even do clown porn."

She turned out to be 27-year-old porn star Hollie Stevens, who told me she "grew up as a clown" in the Midwest before moving to California and getting into porn seven years ago. She even starred in the film Clown Porn and still sometimes dons the red nose and face paint for her public appearances, usually just for her own amusement. Stevens once appeared on the Jerry Springer Show as a clown, even getting into the requisite fight on stage with a friend.

"Clowns, you either love them or you hate them," she said, and she loves them.

I asked why she was there and she said that she’d come to see Boenobo. They had talked but never met, and shared a sort of mutual admiration. It was a clown thing. Clowns … they get all the hot chicks.

While we talked, an acrobat worked the pole on the stage, followed by an aerialist performing above the dance floor, one scene woven seamlessly into the other. The clowns of Gooferman puttered around the stage, removing equipment to get ready for the next act, flirting with the girls, trying to scam more drink tickets, or simply entertaining others and themselves.

The life of a clown is rarely dull.

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UPCOMING INDIE CIRCUS EVENTS

DEC. 5–6


Acrosports Winter Cabaret

639 Frederick, SF

8 p.m., $5–$15

www.citycircus.org

DEC. 12


Auditions for Acrosports’ City Circus

Call (415) 665-2276, ext. 103 for appointment

DEC. 12-14


Frolic: CircusDragBurlesque Festival

Featuring Fou Fou Ha, Anna Conda, and more

CounterPULSE

1310 Mission, SF

8 p.m., $100

www.counterpulse.org

1-800-838-3006

DEC. 20


Open House and Holiday Carnival

San Francisco Circus Center

755 Frederick, SF

10 a.m.–4 p.m., free

Pratfalls and Rising Stars

7 p.m., $12 adults, $8 children

San Francisco Circus Center

Tickets and info at www.circuscenter.org

DEC. 20


Storytime Festival, featuring Vau de Vire Society

4–7 p.m., "Tales of Enchantment," (G-rated show) 8–11 p.m., "Storytime for the Inner Child," (R-rated show)

$30–$50

Palace of Fine Arts

3301 Lyon, SF

www.storytimefestival.org

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>>More: Read Marke B.’s club review of Bohemian Carnival

The odd couple

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PREVIEW Do we have a new odd couple in town? At first glance Todd Eckert and Nol Simonse don’t seem to have much in common though both are tall, lanky dancers who allow themselves to disappear into other people’s choreography. Eckert’s steadying presence in Robert Moses’ Kin company contrasts strongly with Simonse’s febrile intensity in companies as diverse as Kunst-Stoff, Stephen Pelton Dance, and Janice Garrett and Dancers.

It turns out, not surprisingly, that the two have in common a desire to strike out on their own. Unlike ballet dancers, who are still mostly trained to interpret within a given language, modern dancers learn early on to create language and content from within themselves. So last year Eckert and Simonse hooked up for a performance of their own works. They liked what they saw. So did audiences.

For Shared Space 2, an evening of world premieres, each artist will create a solo and a group piece. Eckert’s Routines of Chaos investigates compulsive behavior: his yet unnamed quartet looks at self-sabotage in connection to relationship building. Simonse’s How Fortunate the Man with None mixes his own material with some "borrowed" from other dancers. For his group piece on grief, he examines the concept of the journey as developed by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book, On Death and Dying.

SHARED SPACE 2 Fri/5-Sat/6, 8 p.m., and Sun/7, 7 p.m.; $20. Dance Mission Theater, 3316 24th St., SF. (415) 273-4633, www.dancemission.com

Little Joy

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PREVIEW Few had a clue about Little Joy as we watched them gather on the outdoor stage at Big Sur’s Fernwood campground this fall. The Los Angeles band had slipping onto the Festival in the Forest bill the weekend before it was to perform at the Independent alongside Devendra Banhart side project Megapuss, and the ramshackle crew — which included vocalist-guitarist Binki Shapiro, multi-instrumentalist Rodrigo Amarante (Los Hermanos), and drummer-multi-instrumentalist Fabrizio Moretti (the Strokes) as well as Banhart and producer Noah Georgeson — took its time setting up. And why not? The sky was clear, the nightmarish Big Sur fire was behind us (though the Henry Miller Library was preparing to close for fear of mudslides), the green and gold mountains above the stage were a fantastic, organic distraction, and there was plenty of spectacular autumnal parkland to wander

As the group began to fiddle with its instruments in earnest, hipsters hailing from the Bay, Monterey, and LA suddenly materialized — like headbanded, bejeweled elves in designer sandals — from woods. Something special was going down. Yet little did we realize how sweet it would be: behind those scenester shades onstage came the most dulcet pop tunes, lightly scented with classic Brill Building songwriting and a whiff of Cali languor. Sounding for all the world like louche, beachbound Dion and the Belmonts, Little Joy sported an El Lay too-cool-for-you exterior that was simultaneously attractive and off-putting, but their songs — now collected on a self-titled Rough Trade debut — bid you to come closer, closer.

LITTLE JOY With the Dead Trees and Red Cortez. Tues/9, 8 p.m., $13. Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF. (415) 522-0333, www.slims-sf.com

Bad boys reformed … and together

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PREVIEW Superficially, Britpop arena monsters Oasis and alt-country whiz kid Ryan Adams appear to be strange bedfellows. But on further review, their careers bear a striking resemblance. Both Oasis and Adams burst onto the music scene from seemingly nowhere: Oasis with its Definitely Maybe (Creation, 1994) and Adams as the ringleader of critical darlings Whiskeytown. From there, both tasted their greatest successes. Oasis’ (What’s the Story) Morning Glory (Creation, 1995) sold more than 18 million copies worldwide, spawning their two best-known songs, "Wonderwall" and "Champagne Supernova." After Adams split from Whiskeytown in 1999, he released Heartbreaker (Bloodshot, 2000) and Gold (Lost Highway, 2001), which remain his most popular albums. Though Oasis and Adams have enjoyed solid sales and sold-out concerts through the middle part of their respective careers, they’ve endured commercial backlash, with fans becoming disillusioned with bad behavior, prickly relations with the media, and uneven albums. Gallagher brothers Noel and Liam, and Adams gained reputations as unstable, petulant artists, given to substance addiction, which often overshadowed their music.

Lucky for us, both Oasis and Adams seem to have grown weary of their bad-boy personas, and have recently focused on writing music reminiscent of older glories. Oasis’s new Dig out Your Soul (Big Brother/Warner Bros.) is a swaggering, triumphant return to form, that sees the likely lads from Manchester scaling back the power ballads and turning up the guitars to create their most engaging effort since Morning Glory. The ever-prolific Adams has kicked heroin, formed a new group called the Cardinals, and released Cardinology (Lost Highway), which is perhaps the strongest, most cohesive effort of his career. The two groups join forces Dec. 3, bringing their expansive, impressive catalogs to the Oracle Arena. Here’s hoping they’ll highlight past successes and bright futures.
OASIS AND RYAN ADAMS AND THE CARDINALS Wed/3, 7 p.m., $37.75–$66.25. Oracle Arena, 7000 Coliseum, Oakl. (415) 421-8497, www.livenation.com

The oldest story in the book

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REVIEW It’s the oldest story in the book — and no, I’m not talking about Adam and Eve. Eden is yet another addition to the familiar marriage-in-trouble genre, with no real twist to speak of: after 10 years together, Breda (Eileen Walsh) feels unloved by her husband Billy (Aidan Kelly). Meanwhile, Billy finds himself tempted by the forbidden fruit of infidelity. Rather than stunt the film, this well-trodden subject matter makes Eden’s success all the more impressive. Without reinventing the wheel, director Declan Recks has crafted one of the most captivating films of the year. It helps, of course, that he has two consummate performers. Kelly captures the subtle nuances of his character, who struggles to balance his selfish desires with his familiar obligations. And Walsh, winner of the Best Actress award at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, is nothing short of heartbreaking. Both actors look — for lack of a better word — real, and their presence enhances the film’s ability to produce a genuine empathetic response. Taken as a whole, there is a beauty in this quiet Irish drama rarely found in the glossiest of Hollywood blockbusters, with each frame thoughtfully composed. Despite the otherwise mundane story, Eden emerges as downright idyllic.

EDEN opens Fri/5 in Bay Area theaters.

“Lutz Bacher: ODO”

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PREVIEW A continuous line of images adheres to the spacious walls of Ratio 3. They all seem to be produced on the same roll of sticky-backed paper. Thanks to visual literacy conditioning, we follow them as a narrative. There’s a picture of a weird blue guy standing in a forest, dolls, hunky male mannequins, a bearded guy being nailed to a cross, a smiling woman holding a thrift-store sculpture, a Photoshop view of a bottomless Laura Bush standing with her hubby, and other random sights. Videos of banal superstore interiors, fluffy dogs, landscapes, and more are projected in odd corners above our heads.

Lutz Bacher’s current exhibition is as oddly engaging as it is opaque. Don’t look to the press release for answers — it’s a handy recipe for butterscotch pudding. The show’s title refers to a character, played by René Auberjonois, on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. And yet reason pulses beneath the surface of this puzzling installation. You don’t really need to fully get it to tap into its strange intimacy. The images have a stream of consciousness quality similar to contents of an e-mailbox, where personal notes commingle with abject spam — a hefty percentage of the material on view made its way to the artist through that electronic media stream, and if the look of the pictures sometimes seems too hi-res to betray that source, all the better.

Bacher, whose work has involved a dry, incisive use of appropriated and self-made material (Vargas paintings, political joke books, a hauntingly glitchy self-made video of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Stadium), offers another clue at the start of the exhibition: an old-school overhead projector enlarges a handwritten thank-you list marking all that follows with a sense of the artist’s community. "ODO" is engrossing for the images alone, some of which depict the artist and her previous works. But ultimately, it offers an intuitive view — one that may not make immediate sense, but that flares in your memory at the most unexpected moments.

LUTZ BACHER: ODO Through Dec. 13. Wed.–Sat., 11 a.m.–6 p.m. and by appointment. Ratio 3, 1447 Stevenson, SF. (415) 821-3371, www.ratio3.org

Cossu

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Having spent many months — too many months — watching presidential aspirants address television cameras from cavernous halls, I stepped into Cossu recently and found it oddly familiar. The restaurant is cavernous, and it even has a spotlit stage, although not for presidential candidates or other bloviating politicos but live musical acts. It also, until recently, was called Pasha.

The place has changed hands and changed chefs, according to one of our servers, and it’s even (we were reassured) been redecorated. It didn’t look much different to me, I must say: the lighting tends toward nightclub dimness; the walls, flooring, and tented ceiling are all a red-burgundy shade — like being inside a huge box of red wine — and, in a slight ergonomic crisis, the square tables are still awkwardly low, with awkwardly low ottomans and banquettes to sit on. The tables are also still set with brass inlays that say "Pasha." I didn’t particularly care for Pasha, so I wasn’t particularly thrilled to see a recurrence of the name. On the other hand, it’s hard to read table inlays in dim light. So, a wash there.

The big change has been in the kitchen, where executive chef Hijam Senhaji turns out a "Moroccan fusion" menu. As one of our servers told us, the idea is (if I might be allowed a moment of Emerilspeak) to kick it up a notch. The result is mostly impressive; if you’ve liked the food at Saha, Medjool, or the original Baraka, you’ll likely like the food here. Of course there are traditional tagine and couscous dishes, but the cooking can soar well beyond the old boundaries. It can also catch the occasional wing in power lines.

The best dishes have at least one foot firmly planted on the soil of tradition. The bastilla, for instance — a packet of phyllo pastry filled with something savory, like a giant flaky raviolo — is a staple in Moroccan cooking (and, under various other names, throughout the Mediterranean). Cossu’s Essaouira version ($14) is filled with a mix of shrimp and calamari in a chermoula paste — a fragrant blend of garlic, herbs, lemon juice, olive oil, cumin, coriander, and (guessing by the color) some saffron. The bastilla reaches the table looking like a big fat wallet and isn’t sprinkled with confectioner’s sugar. Some might account this omission a small mercy.

Another traditional Moroccan preparation is the salad of shredded spinach called bakoula ($8). It’s not exactly a beauty queen; in fact it looks like one of those clumps of wet grass you sometimes have to pull from the lawn mower, if you happen to have mowed a damp lawn. But it’s punctuated with slivers of green olive and imbued with the haunting, sour-salty flavor of preserved lemons. Even served cold, it casts a spell.

While you wait for the next treat to appear, you gnaw on your warm sesame-seed bun and nibble at your plate of green and black olives in their spicy marinade. (A word to the wise: most of the olives are pitted, but not all.) Maybe you’ve opted for the French fries ($6) as a kind of intermezzo; they’re wonderfully slender and tender-crisp, but they offer no discernable hint of Moroccan (or indeed any) fusion.

The kitchen saves the bulk of its innovative effects for the big dishes. Slices of Muscovy duck breast ($26) don’t, to me, suggest north Africa in the least, but the meat is expertly roasted to order (we asked for rare and got it rare — lovely reddish-pink flaps, with plenty of juice), and it’s sauced with a viscous, honey-like essence of apricot and cinnamon. As someone who is wary of the usual pairings made between fruit and flesh, sweet and savory (pork with apples or cherries comes instantly to mind), I found this combination to be winsome — and, in my experience, unique.

Well, semi-unique, since the sauce accompanying the black and white tuna ($24), also featured a cunning deployment of cinnamon, a supple and sublime spice we occidentals tend to underuse. Here the cinnamon was added to a tomato coulis, with the result being a distant relative of barbecue sauce. The fish itself, meanwhile, was sprinkled with black sesame seeds, seared to order, and presented on a bed of saffron rice.

So far, so good with these fusion dishes. The kitchen even served the duck with a pine-nut-and-parsley couscous, to distinguish it from the saffron rice. But both plates were piled high on one side with the same, not particularly interesting, medley of sautéed vegetables, mostly green and yellow summer squash, carrot tabs, and shreds of red cabbage. Of course these are all estimable — and colorful — foodstuffs; they are good for us and even, to a degree, seasonal. But they also suggest a kind of mass production that’s not quite consistent with the high ambition of turning out distinctive food, plate by plate. It’s especially jarring when the stars of each plate are so distinctive; it’s as if cheap tires have been fitted to a Lamborghini.

Is this disjunction a lingering ghost of Pasha? We attempted an exorcism by inquiring about dessert but were told our choices were limited to baklava and coffee. I like baklava well enough, but because it’s suffered overexposure on these hither shores — like tiramisù — and drifted in the direction of cliché, I almost never order it and didn’t here. Our knowledgeable and radiant server quietly supported us in this choice. She and her troupe, in fact, were altogether cosseting. *

COSSU RESTAURANT, BAR, AND LOUNGE

Tues.–Sun., 6 p.m. to closing

1516 Broadway, SF

(415) 885-4477

www.pasharestaurant.com

Full bar

MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Nubostubalgubiuba!

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FREE TO BE TV If you were a kid in the late 1960s and early ’70s, you were an integral part of the counterculture’s trickling-down influence. Hitherto square as a toddler’s puzzle peg, children’s TV programming radicalized not long after various sexual and social revolutions liberated their parents from larger strangulations.

Displacing innocuous slapstick pacifiers, shows were redesigned to educate and empower. Or simply be groovy, like the Sid and Marty Krofft Brit-popping Bugaloos or then-teen idol Rick Springfield’s Mission: Magic! Kid Power stressed multiculturalism. Schoolhouse Rock made homework fiendishly catchy. Fat Albert brought the inner-city ghetto to Saturday mornings.

But the most innovative stuff came from PBS, at its peak of funding, popularity, and adventure. Beyond Sesame Street, there was "Laugh-in for kids," The Electric Company, ingenious labors of grownup performers, puppeteers, child psychologists, and so forth.

ZOOM was something else — a show exclusively performed and largely created by kids themselves, with the adult staff credited as mere "helpers." From 1972 to ’78, the original ZOOM (excluding its 1999-2005 revival) was all about participation, on and off-screen. "Who are you? Whaddaya do? / How are you? / Let’s hear from you /We need you!" the cast sang before trilling the post office box that jokes, games, stories, poems, and whatnot could be sent to.

Producer WBGH Boston has just released two-disc ZOOM: Back to the 70s. This DVD flashback — encompassing a documentary overview as well as four complete episodes — remains very DayGlo Me Decade. But it dates surprisingly well.

The seven grade-school cast members were no Mickey Mouse Club lil’ pros but ethnically diverse, Boston-accented reg’lar kids who line-stumbled, improvised, sang, and danced without polish. They had unscripted "rap sessions" to discuss interpersonal dynamics. They quarreled over jacks. They performed viewers’ submitted mini-plays, recipes, and science experiments. "ZOOMguest" segments profiled other kids’ interesting lives — as a violin prodigy, expat Cubana, budding claymationist, girl hockey player, ham radio enthusiast, or developmentally-disabled student.

ZOOM imprinted popular culture in enjoyably silly ways, from Zoomer uniforms (loud striped soccer jerseys) to gibberish language Ubbi Dubbi. What still refreshes, however, is how the show treats pre-adolescents sans condescension, as people whose opinions and questions aren’t just cutely immature but worth respect and encouragement. Even the increasingly slick, disco-funky presentation by season six couldn’t render ZOOM showbiz-as-usual.

"Confidence in yaself … that’ll help you a lot" says a hereditarily reading-challenged teen in Back to the 70s‘ final 1976 full episode. ZOOM not only portrays him sympathetically, but as a role model — someone whose handicaps inspire him to excel wherever he can. Pity such positive-messaging rings so nostalgic.

www.shop.wgbh.org/product/show/48031

Let the rhythm hit ’em

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> a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW The exuberance bouncing off the walls of the Palace of Fine Arts at the Nov. 22 opening of the 10th annual San Francisco Hip Hop DanceFest probably kept the audience in a buoyant mood well beyond the theater. These young dancers — and hip-hop is still primarily a young person’s art — presented a show that was sassy, skilled, and a hoot to boot.

Artistic director Micaya has developed a dual approach to programming, and it works. She showcases local hip-hop schools that are worthy of exposure and that bring in audiences, and features them with professionals who, increasingly, may come from abroad. This year, in its infinite wisdom, the US Department of Homeland Security denied visas to dancers from Russia and the Netherlands.

Still, the DanceFest carried on. By their very nature, the school performances are ensemble-oriented. To watch these dancers is to be drawn into the sheer joy of what they are doing. Split-second timing and constantly shifting relationships within the group compensate for the relative simplicity of the individual steps. The whole, with its sense of interlocking gears, is held together by a sometimes almost militaristic discipline. Yet the format is flexible enough to showcase individual talent.

The DanceFest also gauges hip-hop’s ongoing evolution. Having started in the ’70s as a popular expression — urban folk dancing rooted in African and African American practices — hip-hop has been moving from the streets to the theater, from the community center to the concert hall. Whether that means that hip-hop will lose its grounding in pop culture remains to be seen. It probably has already. But there are gains.

Returning to this year’s festival with their mesmerizing HipHop/Beebop was the first-rate MopTop Music and Movement from Philadelphia. Two years ago they took on the founding fathers. Last year it was The Wizard of Oz. This time they brought a fabulously slinky vision of a hot night on the town. With Buddha Stretch and Mr. Valentine in zoot suits and rakishly tilted hats, and Uko Snowbunny and B-girl Bounce in flouncing minis, they were a marvel of strutting control, flashing showmanship, and barely contained heat. Flawless’ Manipulation was indeed flawless in the way its two ingenious dancers — dressed in metallic hats and jackets under black lights — sent currents of energy into each other’s bodies, both to support and to control. It’s no surprise that they were the UK’s World Hip Hop Dance Champions in 2006. Another champion was one-man wonder, veteran hip-hopper Popin Pete from Electric Boogaloos. With appropriate wigs on hand, he unfolded popping’s history in one smooth take — from a vibrating ’70s style, to raucous ’80s moves, to today’s elegant, dinner-jacket-clad incarnation.

Breaksk8 Dance Crew from Indiana, on rollerblades, disappointed. While somewhat impressive for their technical skills, they performed This Is How We Roll with a studied nonchalance that was off-putting. Also new to the festival was the all-male Formality group from San Diego. Their well-performed Players Club had the energy of a traffic jam and stood out in its fresh use of arm gestures. SoulSector turned out to be the only company interested in exploring hip-hop’s capacity to delve into deep issues: their Reinvention: Headhunters was a tough examination of militarism and war.

There was much to enjoy in the studio-based ensembles — the clean and swift U.F.O. Movement among them. Sunset’s smartly staged and hilarious Toonz dressed its dancers as Looney Tunes characters. Its smallest elementary-school-age dancers, of course, got the biggest applause. If this year’s DanceFest proves one thing, it’s that the artists have barely begun to scratch the surface of the genre’s potential for entertaining and thought-provoking dance. Now if we can just get Homeland Security off their backs …

Kickin’ ‘bot

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER A mashed-up stock market and credit-crunked fiscal outlook be damned — just what does the music industry have to do to make you part with your overly stretched entertainment dollar? Pay you to buy, Joe Deflation? Bookended by the double-B bombshells — Beyonce’s Nov. 18-released I Am … Sasha Fierce (Sony) and Britney Spears’ Dec. 2-scheduled Circus (Jive) — this week is likely major-label ground zero for pre-holiday CD releases — ready to tantalize us, peering through Pepto Bismol-smeared turkey goggles, with toothsome collaborations, tempt us with superstar potential, and dazzle with gleaming newness.

I’m taking a cue from a future-focused Kanye West and feeding a few Nov. 24 (Island Def Jam got a jump on the traditional Tuesday release date) and 25 releases to the trusty Micro-Reviewbot, our neutral yet far from neutered critical assessment generator, which will hold these discs up against infuriatingly fuzzy expectations and objectively critique said recordings. The exception: Guns N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy (Interscope) — because it’s hard to review an album when, at press time, the label allows Micro-Reviewbot to listen to only two tracks. But hey, why spoil the shock and awe? Careful now, Micro-Reviewbot can’t not tell the truth. Micro-Reviewbot only knows how to speak truth — to power and powerless alike. All systems go, Micro-Reviewbot!

KANYE WEST, 808S AND HEARTBREAK (ROC-A-FELLA/ISLAND DEF JAM)


Anticipation level: Smokin’ high, tempered with likely some ambivalence about Graduation‘s Daft Punk-Takashi Murakami-Chris Martin alliances. Has West hitched his wagon to one too many trendoids? Still, we are spared the faux drama of a 50 Cent feud with the advance of 808s’ release date.

Micro-Reviewbot’s pop-psych diagnosis: Frankly, Kanye sounds depressed. I know the self-proclaimed genius of rap is working through some deep shit: he broke up with his fiancée, and his mom died a year ago during cosmetic surgery.

Witness the way West has dug himself so deeply into his Afro-futurist themes and coolly digitized sonic landscape. This space-age ice-cold killer is taking the next spaceship from reality, pronto, while yodeling through a thicket of effects, "See you in my nightmares, suckers!" You wouldn’t know that the political/cultural change is breaking out all over this month — straight from the 808, a.k.a., native-born Barack Obama’s Hawaii, where West recorded this album using, a-ha, a Roland TR-808 drum machine. Instead, Kanye has taken refuge in something he can rely on: the love between a man and his Vocoder — or rather, a man and his Auto-Tune plug-in. Still, the songs on the dampened-down 808s and Heartbreak continue to grow on Micro-Reviewbot.

Alternative: Ludacris’ take-that, mob-inciting Theater of the Mind (Disturbing Tha Peace) — with a guest cast including TI, T-Pain, Lil Wayne, Jay-Z, Nas, the Game, Rick Ross, Chris Rock, Jamie Foxx, and Spike Lee — also out Nov. 24. It’s as if Ludi hadn’t ever abandoned the rap game for the cineplex — even if his references tend to ride a pop culture loop of I Hate Chris and Any Given Sunday more readily than anything resembling clichéd gangbanger reality.

THE KILLERS, DAY AND AGE (ISLAND)


Expectations: Fall Out Boy feuds and suits by ex-managers aside, it’s hard to gauge, considering their paean to Wal-Mart moms, Sam’s Town, surprised everyone by taking a left turn from the guilty-pleasure deca-dance-pop of "Somebody Told Me" toward Broooce-fearing Freedom Rock, a then-untapped ’80s retro vein — and shocked further by going Putf8um.

Micro-Reviewbot’s stays-in-Vegas assessment: are the Killers trying to tell us something by opening with a track titled "Losing Touch"? Somebody told the Sin City band they had to drop that Broooce crush that made them look like the girlfriends they had in February 1983. It’s not confidential. They’ve got potential, so they mixed touches of anthemic melody lines, glockenspiel, and sax appeal with more nods to the dance-pop crowd (the cringe-inducing "Joy Ride"). These new-new rock romantics want to have their epics (thundering "A Dustland Fairytale") and eat, too (U2-y pop hit "Human").

Alternative: Look for further throw-away kicks from English-New Zealand trash pleash Ladyhawke — not to be confused with stateside indie vets Ladyhawk — and her weird combo of DIY-rock trappings (the new self-titled Modular/Interscope CD sports rough sketches of a head-banded hipster chick and kittens) and slick electro-pop odes to lovers jetting over the Atlantic, whizzing synth details, and artificial hand claps.

DAVID BYRNE AND BRIAN ENO, EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS WILL HAPPEN TODAY (SELF-RELEASED)


Waxy critical buildup: a quiet storm has been building among graying ’80s-era fans and young ‘uns cognizant of the renewed relevance of the pair’s Talking Heads work and their last co-written full-length, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (Sire, 1981).

Micro-Reviewbot’s "I Am … Fierce" take: the ironic-naïf act is wearing thin. Micro-Reviewbot wants to like Everything, but finds its attention consistently drifting, mid-listen. Likely the best Byrne album in years, though the promise of bitingly ironic opener "Home" and the C&W-laced "My Big Nurse" soon degenerates with obvious Radiohead dig, "I Feel My Stuff," a jab at the crit darlings’ chilly electronic bricolage, which goes terribly wrong in a Midnite Vultures-style Pro-Tools-is-crack kind of way. Except Midnite Vultures is actually more listenable. Sonically songs like "Everything That Happens" are lovely — scattered with plangent piano tinkles and aquatic guitar lines — but perhaps it’s too much to ask elders like Byrne and Eno to eschew the non-Viagra-like sax and trudging tempos on tunes such as "Life Is Long" and find some genuine energy.

Alternative: Shhh, how about giving Micro-Reviewbot a little quiet digestion time for a change? *

Irresistible ODC

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PREVIEW Some traditions are just too good to give up. I can forgo most holiday customs, except for singing carols, The Nutcracker, and a Tom and Jerry with lots of nutmeg and rum, preferably drunk from properly labeled china cups. Another, a peculiar San Francisco tradition is ODC/Dance’s The Velveteen Rabbit. It has proved remarkably sturdy and remains quite irresistible.

You’d think at a time when kids are growing up with anime and Nintendo games, there would be little interest in a story about a sawdust-stuffed rabbit and 10-foot-tall nanny who brooks no nonsense in the nursery. Yet KT Nelson’s 22-year-old adaptation of Margery Williams’ 1922 classic,with its whiff of upper-class British propriety, has not lost one iota of its charm. Nelson choreographed it when her son was young. Maybe that helped with the inspiration.

Another reason is that right from the beginning, ODC went for top quality in its choice of its collaborators. They could barely afford children’s author Brian Arrowsmith’s costumes and design, but what an investment that turned to be. The combination of Geoff Hoyle’s narration, Benjamin Britten’s score, and Rinde Eckert’s voice was inspired. By now ODC’s dancers may be able to dance their roles in their sleep — but it doesn’t show. They don the parts like a second skin and seem to enjoy themselves. Daytime performances, at 90 minutes, in a relatively small theater, should make Rabbit accessible even to the younger crowd.

THE VELVETEEN RABBIT Fri/28-Dec. 14, call for times, $15–$45. Novellus Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard, SF. (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org, www.odcdance.org

Blitzen Trapper

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PREVIEW The pitter-pattering primal heartbeat of Blitzen Trapper’s whole-grain, acousti-organic stunner of an album, Furr, comes early in the recording, at track three with the title song, as songwriter-producer Eric Earley lightly rasps the tale of a boy turned wolf, turned human once more — haunted by dreams of running wild through the snow: "You can wear your fur like a river on fire<0x2009>/But you better be sure if you’re making god a liar<0x2009>/I’m like a rattlesnake, babe. I’m like fuel on a fire<0x2009>/So if you’re going to get made<0x2009>/Don’t be afraid of what you’ve learned."

"It’s metaphorical in a lot of ways," says Earley, 31, on the road with the band to Asheville, N.C. "But it’s an ancient story, in a way. It deals with the basic idea of the struggle between civilization and wilderness and the desire to return to a simpler state, which is impossible for us humans to do. But that battle is going on."

O what a lovely tussle it is, coupled with bravura organ-spiked, folk-rock opener "Sleepytime in the Western World," tooth-ache-sweet pop shot "God and Suicide," brash classic rocker "Gold for Bread," and glam nugget "Fire and Fast Bullets." With Wild Mountain Nation (Lidkercow Ltd., 2007) and now Furr, it’s as hard to pin down the Portland, Ore., beasties as ever before. At least there’s a pack for Blitzen Trapper to run with: one that includes current tourmates Iron and Wine, Fleet Foxes, and Bon Iver. "There has been more of a revival in natural music, using acoustic instruments and the human voice," offers Earley, whose first instrument was banjo, taught by his bluegrass musician father. "I’m not sure why that is, but I think it depends on whether there’s anyone around making that music well, twisting and turning it into something modern and unique."

BLITZEN TRAPPER With the Parson Red Heads and Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band. Tues/2, 8 p.m., $12–$14. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. (415) 771-1421, www.theindependentsf.com

Shwayze

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PREVIEW Shwayze would be impossible without reality TV, not only because Buzzin’, their own MTV vehicle, gives them the kind of exposure that YouTube, a place where music videos still circulate, couldn’t. Rather, the music on their self-titled Suretone/Geffen debut is about and of Los Angeles in a way that wasn’t thinkable before that form of programming legitimated some of the city’s embarrassingly tired clichés. Apply the sentiments of either of the Malibu duo’s charting singles — "Corona and Lime" and "Buzzin’" — to mainstream music during the early Bush administration, and you get Crazy Town’s "Butterfly" with an insanely pungent dash of LFO’s "Summer Girls." Not much new here, but the setting for these affectless feelings at least can finally be revealed.

What makes the duo feel current, if far from compelling, is that LA plays itself in their music, in a similar way the town stands for itself in, say, the Cobrasnake’s fake-real candids. From hook man Cisco Adler’s feather-weight, momentum-less production style — the template he figured out on Mickey Avalon’s "Jane Fonda" — to Shwayze’s max-relax loverman toasting, all their too-baked-for-love mellowship jams deliver some combination of the same three pieces of information: 1) girls in LA are probably the best ever; 2) there are a lot of parties in Malibu, and shit is laidback; 3) even if you’re broke, if you have weed, it’s chill — you can still hook up with girls.

Image-wise, Adler and Shwayze embody Urban Outfitters realness with a Pineapple Express sense of brofessionalism: both wear skinny jeans, slightly oversize tees, and high-tops, but Adler’s fedora and wayfarers tell us he’s the rock guy, while Shwayze’s cocked baseball hat tell us he’s the rapper dude. Lyrically, Schwayze’s concerned exclusively with girls — they talk about "girls" so much it’s hard not to imagine they’ve fallen in love with the word as a floating signifier. But watch a video and there they are, the word made flesh and Lycra.

SHWAYZE With Cisco Adler, DJ Skeet Skeet, and Krista. Sat/29, 8 p.m., $16.50. Grand Ballroom at the Regency Center, Van Ness and Sutter, SF. (415) 421-TIXS, www.goldenvoice.com

Czech it out

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REVIEW An attractive 30-something woman with a face hardened by rough times — most recently the 2002 Prague flood pretty much ruining her Prague home — Marcela (Anna Geislerova) is raising two children under precarious circumstances. Marriage to Jarda (Roman Luknar) is discordant, despite their volcanic sex, in large part because she objects to his paying the bills by running a chop shop. She’s already left the with the kids — albeit due to her son’s severe allergy to their digs’ post-flood moldiness — when Jarda steals the wrong guy’s car and gets his whole operation busted by police. With the breadwinner in jail, what’s Marcela to do? Move in with her crazy religious mother in-law (Emilia Vasaryova)? Nope. Stay with her own mother (Jana Brejchova) and the latter’s very creepy diabetic boyfriend (Jiri Schmitzer) in their cramped apartment? Yes, until something better comes along. Which, surprisingly, it does in the form of Czech-Italian vintner Benes (Josef Abrham), whose stolen car triggered Jarda’s arrest. He’s that staple of 1930s screwball comedies so seldom encountered since, in real or cinematic life: the suave older man who’s single, rich, lonely, and genuinely concerned over our underclass heroine’s welfare. This conceit might seem overly contrived in lesser hands than those of director Jan Hrebejk and scenarist Petr Jarchovsky (of prior foreign-language Oscar nominees 2000’s Divided We Fall and 2004’s Up and Down). But their excellently crafted and performed seriocomedy — with its frank yet funny sexual randiness — never feels less than credible. In a classically warm yet ironic, ambitious yet intimate, absurdist yet realistic Czech cinema fashion that Hrebejk and Jarchovsky will hopefully torch-carry well into the 21st century.

Beauty in Trouble opens Fri/28 in Bay Area theaters.

Take the red pill

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PREVIEW/REVIEW After a foray into the spirit-swindling zines and quilts of Olivia Plender that provide the other highlight of Berkeley Art Museum’s latest installment in the MATRIX series, it’s best to venture into the exhibition’s darkened back room, sink into a beanbag chair, and soak up the kinetic collage animation of Martha Colburn. Those beanbags, so different from the hard, backless blocks that art spaces and artists usually offer as places to sit, are an invitation to watch Colburn’s looping short film Myth Labs over and over — a worthwhile endeavor, since you could notice new things on your 20th dance with its blitz of religious, historical, commercial, and (oh yeah, before I forget) human imagery.

Rain clouds rain yet more rain clouds within just a single second-long burst of Myth Labs, which charts a tempestuous world where cops continually threaten to shoot whomever they encounter — cute kitties or Christ-like black men — in the face. Gunfire isn’t the only shooting going on, since the title of Colburn’s movie puns off of meth labs. The pairing of that literally explosive material with her animation is an apt one: as ever, her images erupt across the screen in rightward pans that no live action camera could capture. Beginning with battles between pilgrims and justifiably outraged and confused Indians, Colburn’s eight-minute version of American history is cinema as convulsive as its subject matter.

In an extension of the Berkeley Art Museum show, Pacific Film Archive is presenting a night with the artist and filmmaker. Though Colburn is most associated with Baltimore these days, it’s a homecoming of sorts, since she did time in the Bay Area in the 1990s, forging ties with fellow filmmakers at Other Cinema and collaborating since with Deerhoof. Spanning from 1995 to 2008, the hour-long program should be a decent representative look at the work of one of the best collage artists and animators in a post-Harry Smith world.

BENDING THE WORD/MATRIX 226 Through Feb. 8, 2009, free–$12. Wed.-Sun., 11 a.m.–5 p.m. Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft, Berk. (510) 642-0808, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

MARTHA COLBURN’S COLLAGE ANIMATIONS Tues/2, 7:30 p.m; $5.50–$9.50. Pacific Film Archive, 2575, Bancroft, Berk. (510) 642-0808, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Shaken, stirred

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Everyone has a tale to spin as part of the AC/DC piecemeal mythology/collective unconscious: the moment when the band’s music scored the cementing of a lifelong friendship, triggered a scarring bar brawl, or set off a particularly torrid tussle in the otherwise-antiseptic CD aisle of Wal-Mart. Mine occurred in Barstow, during a particularly soused night kicking off a college-ending road trip down Route 66, falling for my long-lashed, ringleted, metal guitar player boyfriend, tossing back Jack and Cokes, and dancing in cutoff hot pants in an almost-empty cow bar to "You Shook Me All Night Long." It’s basically impossible to mess up on the dance floor when it comes to that song: all you need to do is wiggle your pinky back and forth to the can’t-miss-it-with-a-sledgehammer beat — good times. American thighs and all.

But that was a lifetime ago: how relevant is AC/DC today — apart from providing the fodder for godawful cover versions of "You Shook Me All Night Long" by Celine Dion and Shania Twain? We won’t even go into Shakira’s wretched "Back in Black." When near-anonymous, rarely grandstanding band members emerge from the silence between albums, they purvey the image of a hard-working, headbanging, rigorously hard-rock constant in a world in the throes of change, an audience-friendly reliable in an unsettled music industry that gives the fans what they want, free of undermining irony and unfamiliar moves. The rock-solid conservative choice for rattled times.

True to its components’ working-class roots, the group is the blue-collar rock ‘n’ roll equivalent of Joe the Plumber: rockers who are pro-rock, hence the innumerable tunes with "rock" in the title and the banishment of power-ballad softness. Get thy Guns N’ Roses operatic self-indulgence away from these manly men, churning out the hard stuff as if from a devilishly well-oiled engine à la their current "Rock ‘n’ Roll Train" stage set. In AC/DC’s hands, all is reduced, or elevated, to rock and its all-too-evident properties: solidity, earthiness (hence those free-floating big balls and bombastic babes), and physicality (thus the band’s refusal to allow its songs to be sold as MP3s). On the new Black Ice, the juggernaut only slightly slows for the ironclad blues-rock figure of "Decibel." Rockism is almost beside the point — what isn’t rock, can’t be rocked, won’t be rocked doesn’t exist in the AC/DC universe. Post-modernist pastiche? Hip-hop? Electro? Psychedelia? Neu-rave? Huh?

That’s not to say that AC/DC is rocking in a void, a timeless Platonic plane completely divorced from encroaching reality. The group that appealed to punkers with its disciplined songcraft and streamlined riffs — and nodded to skinheads with the "oi!"s that decorate "T.N.T." — has at various times embraced a palpable sense of danger (witness Angus Young impaled bloodily on a guitar in the video for "If You Want Blood [You’ve Got It]") while also allowing its music to be licensed to the US Military for use in recruitment ads. Yet Black Ice‘s "War Machine" offers other ways to parse lyrics like, "Make a stand, show your hand / Call in the high command / Don’t think, just obey / I’m like a bird of prey / So better get your name, come on in / Gimme that thing and feed your war," apart from simply "Go Army."

This crack in the armor of certainty — from a combo that hails from ye olde days of rock-as-rebellion monoculture, when big, bad guitars were the only option for revolt in town — reads like a cap tug toward increasingly murky times. And the marketplace concession of giving Wal-Mart exclusive rights to sell the Black Ice CD — even in Wal-Mart-free towns like San Francisco — complicates matters because independent merchants like Amoeba Music are forced to purchase new copies from the big-box retailer, relinquishing their mark-up, in order to provide the disc as a service to their customers (the vinyl Black Ice is not exclusive to Wal-Mart). "It’s a slap in the face for indie record stores and AC/DC fans, especially for a band like AC/DC that has always had a reputation of delivering what the fans want," comments Amoeba Music product manager Tony Green. Note to AC/DC: Wal-Mart does not equal working class — or a passion for music. Give these dogs their bone.

She’s got balls

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> a&eletters@sfbg.com

IN THE BEGINNING Where I went to high school in the Midwest, you were either a boozer or a stoner. Boozers listened to AC/DC; stoners to Zeppelin. I was neither a boozer nor a stoner, but I knew which side of the coin I was on the minute my Dad turned the volume down on AC/DC’s epic "Big Balls." Instantly I was captivated by Bon Scott’s tongue-in-check lyrical genius, and asked my father to please, for the love of balls, turn it up again.

If there was a pinnacle moment where my heart subscribed to AC/DC for all eternity, it was there, in the back of our blue Volvo station wagon, while Bon Scott’s balls bounced from left to right, and I so wished to hold them every night.

Our bass player Riff Williams had a similar start. The first time she heard AC/DC was sitting in the back seat of a parked car watching her babysitter make out with her hot David Cassidy-esque boyfriend. The heavy petting lasted during most of High Voltage (Atlantic, 1976) and set the tone for Riff’s unruly adolescence.

Drummer Philomena Rudd’s introduction to AC/DC came with Highway to Hell (Atlantic, 1979), a birthday gift. She would stare at the back cover endlessly, both enchanted and horrified by the five rocker dudes. She was scared of all of them — except Bon who had a friendly smile — and had crushes on all of them — except Bon who was too old! This was long before she played drums, but she had the burning desire and would play along with AC/DC, pounding their songs out with drumsticks on her pillows.

As for vocalist Bonny Scott, she can’t remember a time not hearing AC/DC. "Thunderstruck" was the anthem in junior high. But what cemented the deal was Let There Be Rock (1980), which a friend copied for her on VHS. She watched it so many times, it wore out in one month. That was a turning point: years later Bonny and Riff created AC/DShe.

LET THERE BE SOUND No other band gets your blood pumping the way AC/DC does. That’s because they are a no-nonsense, hard-working rock band. You aren’t going to get frilly melodies — you get what you came for: hard, pounding riffs, sexed-up lyrics, and a solid kick in the ass. Not everyone can handle that, but everyone must admit that somewhere deep down inside, AC/DC has touched them — maybe even a touch too much.

Perhaps that’s why AC/DC has one of the largest fan bases in the world, and why people dedicate themselves to the group much like a religion, where Bon Scott is god and high voltage rock ‘n’ roll is forever synonymous with a good time. Two of the most dedicated AC/DC fans we know are these amazing brothers from Sacramento, dubbed the "Sac Bros." They came to one of our shows at a bar called the Roadhouse, and we were immediately drawn to them. Their ultimate adoration for AC/DC was apparent, and their love for ladies playing AC/DC inspired us to become the best tribute to AC/DC we could be.

Terry "Sac Bro" showed up at our next gig adorned in a new AC/DC and AC/DShe tattoo on the small of his back, securing our fate to "Ride on in the name of Bon" until the end of time. A recent tally disclosed that the Sac Bros have been to more than 85 AC/DShe shows.

LET THERE BE ROCK AC/DShe has definitely had the opportunity to see the world through Rosie-tinted glasses. We have had the joy of spreading the gospel of Bon around the Bay Area and in small doses around the world, celebrating the music of our favorite band with people who can’t see AC/DC on a regular basis.

When we recruited our drummer Philomena to play with us, she told us she never wanted to be in a tribute band and was working on original music. Riff pushed the envelope by asking her to at least play one show before making up her mind. She knew that was all it would take.

The crowd pulls the music out of you: there is nothing like watching a mob of rabid AC/DC fans rocking out and singing the lyrics over the sound of the drums. She was hooked by the bouncing, pulsing crowd; the head-banging front row; the beers flying; the couples making out in dark corners; the walls sweating; the Sac Bros screaming. This is what it’s like to play AC/DC’s music.

Change rejection

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AC/DC stormed onto the international stage with a song called "It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll). The song was an incendiary introduction to the Australian band’s brand of overdriven razor-boogie, and vocalist Bon Scott’s nasally shriek cataloged a life of hedonistic melancholy that ended with his death from alcohol poisoning in 1980.

It is rare for a group to write a song so prophetic of the challenges that lay ahead of them, even rarer for an outfit to suffer the loss of a charismatic frontperson and continue to exist. Less than six months after Scott’s tragic death, AC/DC got to the top. Recruiting singer Brian Johnson, the combo released Back in Black (Atlantic, 1980), a smash-hit record that went on to become the second-best-selling album of all time.

Towering pinnacles of success often have unintended consequences. Musicians accustomed to the travails of the industry suddenly find themselves with a seemingly inexhaustible reservoir of fan support, and enjoy the unquestioning indulgence of every creative whim. The desire to reinvent — to cast off cloying expectations of past success and established image — can be irresistible. This tendency has given us Kiss’ disco era, a Chris Cornell R&B album, and more iterations of Madonna than anyone cares to remember. Garth Brooks became Chris Gaines. The best-selling album of all time, the only one to beat out Back in Black, is Michael Jackson’s Thriller (Epic, 1982). I think you can see where I’m going with that one.

AC/DC, by contrast, has stayed so doggedly true to its original concept that it’s hard to imagine the band members even entertaining the idea of change if only to reject it. Their new album, Black Ice (Columbia), is the first in eight years, packed chock-full with the Young brothers’ stuttering, bluesy guitar riffs and Phil Rudd’s studiously unadorned drumming. The big surprise this time around, if you can call it that, is the inclusion of slide guitar on the track "Stormy May Day." The band’s been around for more than three decades, and a largely technical change in instrumentation on a single song qualifies as news. That’s sticking to your guns.

They’re still writing tunes with "rock ‘n’ roll" in the title, and Black Ice clocks in with four — quite an accomplishment in the field of writing rock songs about rock, which AC/DC more or less perfected. The quality of the tracks is neither here nor there, and it was fun reading the world’s Important Rock Critics write circles around themselves trying to think of something clever to say about the latest disc. In fact, if AC/DC has a talent besides writing infectiously simple rock mega-hits, it is confounding music writers.

They may not conjure the same arena-shaking adrenaline of the glory years, but no one’s really expecting that. The songs all sound the same, but that’s always been true. Their craft is so finely honed that they avoid any blunders or clunkers, and their stubborn enmity toward innovation makes them immune to any ill-advised tinkering with songwriting or sound.

They won’t even sell their stuff on iTunes, an anomaly that makes them a veritable dinosaur in the age of experimental "pay what you want" download ploys, when even the Napster-suing nofunskis in Metallica have been brought into the electronic fold. A lot of noise is made about AC/DC being an "album band," a commendable if quixotic adherence — the mind reels at the amount of money they could make off frat boys looking to round out the keg party playlist with a little "You Shook Me All Night Long." Then again, when you’ve already sold 200 million-odd albums, what’s left to buy? A plane for your plane? Maybe AC/DC could bailout the Big Three.

It’s not every band that proclaims a long road to the top, and then proceeds to walk it. AD/DC lamented that it "Ain’t No Fun (Waiting Round to Be a Millionaire)," but they waited and ended up millionaires. They argued that "Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution," and 42 million in sales proved them right. They saluted those who were about to rock, and got saluted right back. Their new album went No. 1 in 17 countries. If there’s one last self-referential song left to sing, it’s a cover of the Beatles’ "Don’t Ever Change."

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