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Black-and-white beatitude
Given all the media hype and hand-wringing that’s attended the 50th anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and the upcoming posthumous appearance of Allen Ginsberg in Todd Haynes’s Bob Dylan bio-fantasia I’m Not Here — in which the goaty poet, played by David Cross, pays awkward tribute to a limo-driven Dylan (Cate Blanchett) from a speeding golf cart – you’d think the rainbow spectrum of Beats had finally been winnowed down to the twin poles of James Dean-ish sexpotism and portly Zen-molestation.
Sure, there’s Grandpappy William Burroughs in there somewhere, and Neal Cassady, popping up like a scarecrow in a field of blurry mental imagery, but ask kids today who the Beats were and they’ll skip straight past the tilted berets and beaten tablas, the smoke-wreathed faculties of Naropa, and various Coney Islands of the mind, pausing only when they meet their own reflections in whatever Gap-like ad campaign features Jack and Al at the moment.
Which is precisely why photographer Christopher Felver’s handsome picture book Beat comes as a revelation. In the tradition of the Beats’ artistic intentions and pretensions, Felver’s collection of historical black-and-white photographs expands our mental perceptions, including among the pantheonic Beat coterie a plethora of artists and writers who were influenced by, accompanied, or descended stylistically from the well-packaged icons of the era. Scribbled haiku, scrawled excerpts from heartfelt letters, and other typographically authentic ephemera accentuate 187 pages of gorgeously immediate photographs of rapidly fading fellow travelers such as Gary Snyder, Ken Kesey, Richard Brautigan, Ed Sanders, Anne Waldman, and Tom Clark — as well as more liberally categorized Beat types such as Kathy Acker, Lou Reed, Kurt Vonnegut, and composer Lou Harrison.
Sometimes this methodology of including every personality possessed of “creative spirit and joyous antics” (as the book’s dust jacket has it) who happened to cross Felver’s lens leads to a little stretching. I have a feeling Denise Levertov, Tatum O’Neal, and Hunter S. Thompson would raise half an eyebrow at their inclusion here. But the pictures are frank and fabulous, so it’s best just to go with the flow.
San Franciscans may be forever hovering at the edge of Beat burnout, but whatever the lasting cultural merits of these pranksters, posers, protesters, tireless Orientalists, and gangly graphomaniacs (Beat’s press materials suggest that these folks all shared “themes of spirituality, environmental awareness, and political dissidence”; one is tempted to add “unbridled onanism” to the list), they sure lived fast and left great-looking corpuses.
BEAT
By Christopher Felver
Last Gasp
240 pages
$29.95
Editor’s Notes
› tredmond@sfbg.com
I was talking the other day to the mayor’s chief political advisor, Eric Jaye, who thinks we should endorse his client for reelection. "Gavin Newsom," he told me, "is the most progressive mayor in San Francisco history."
Well, I haven’t been here for all of them, but in my 25 years or so, the competition hasn’t been terribly stiff. Newsom vs. Dianne Feinstein? That’s a no-brainer. Newsom vs. Frank Jordan? Uh, what was the question again? Newsom vs. Willie Brown? Things are pretty bad now, but I never want to go through another era like the Brown years again.
Newsom vs. Art Agnos? Well, Agnos had a lot of potential and did some good stuff, but he also sold the city out to Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and became such an arrogant jerk that he alienated a lot of his allies and nobody could work with him anymore.
So on one level, Jaye has a point: we’ve had some pretty rotten characters in room 200 at City Hall, and his guy isn’t by any means the worst.
But I keep coming back to my basic complaint: what has Newsom actually done about the crucial issues facing the city? Where is the leadership?
A few days earlier, I’d had lunch with Jack Davis, the gleefully notorious political consultant, and we got to talking about housing and rent control, which I’ve always strongly promoted and Davis’s landlord clients have always bitterly opposed. And we realized, two old opponents, that on one level that battle is over: it was lost years ago, when San Francisco failed (and then the state preempted our ability) to regulate rents on vacant apartments. The wave of Ellis Act evictions has damaged the situation even more. The limited rent control in San Francisco today can’t possibly keep housing even remotely affordable. The only way to fix the problem would be to roll back all rents to their levels of about 15 years ago; anyone (besides me) want to take on that campaign?
So what, Davis asked, would I do about it?
Since Newsom is going to be reelected this fall anyway, let me suggest how he could live up to Jaye’s billing.
Imagine if the mayor of San Francisco called a meeting of all the key players in the local housing market — the residential builders, the big developers, the nonprofits, the tenant activists, the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition folks, the Board of Supervisors president, the neighborhood groups — and said something like this:
"San Francisco needs about 15,000 new affordable-housing units in the next five years. That’s housing for low-income people, housing for people who work in San Francisco … family housing, rental housing, land-trust housing, supportive housing, a mix of units at a mix of prices, but none of it out of the reach of blue-collar and service-industry workers.
"So here’s the deal: you people sit here and figure out a way to make it happen, including how to pay for it — and until you do, not one new market-rate project will get approved by my Planning Commission."
You suppose we might get a little action here? You think the developers who see a gold rush in the San Francisco housing market might be willing to play ball? You think that the mayor might show leadership on the most pressing problem facing residents and businesses in this town, the most serious drain on the local economy? It sure wouldn’t hurt to try.
The rate hike hurts the economy
EDITORIAL Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s latest rate increase simply ratifies what’s been going on for many years: the private electric utility screws residential users and small businesses. If the California Public Utilities Commission goes along with the new rate plan, renters and homeowners will see their power bills go up more than 4 percent; small merchants will face a hike of nearly 7 percent. Meanwhile, rates for some of the biggest users will actually fall, by as much as 3.7 percent.
That’s pretty shoddy environmental policy. For years activists have argued that the biggest users should pay higher rates, since that would give them the strongest incentive to conserve. Cutting rates for, say, big companies that leave their lights on all night or manufacturers that refuse to invest in the latest conservation technology will only lead to more waste — and thus to more energy use and more global warming.
But it’s also bad economic policy. High utility rates hit hardest among those least able to afford them — and just as tax increases on the poor and small businesses disproportionately harm the economy, this rate hike will have lasting damage that goes beyond individual users.
Since San Francisco has a mild climate and a lot of residents and small businesses already work hard to conserve power, the rate hike may not seem catastrophic: if your monthly electric bill is $50, the additional charge will be just $2. But when that’s multiplied by more than 300,000 San Francisco households (and close to one million in Northern California), we’re talking significant money.
As we’ve demonstrated (see "The $620 Million Shakedown," 9/4/02), high PG&E rates suck hundreds of millions of dollars a year out of San Francisco and many times that out of Northern California. This rate hike will bounce that number even higher. And remember: San Francisco is the only city in the United States with a legal mandate, through the Raker Act, to establish a public power system.
And that ought to spark a new organized effort to bring public power to the city.
The city is already moving forward on Community Choice Aggregation, which will translate into lower rates — but will leave PG&E controlling the local grid. It’s a good first step, but the second step — a full takeover of the grid and a city-run power agency — needs to be on the agenda as an action item. It’s not clear how best to proceed, but there are great ideas out there. Sups. Tom Ammiano and Chris Daly, for example, have talked about requiring contractors to allow the city to lay electric cables whenever the streets are torn up, which would allow public power to proceed one neighborhood at a time.
But the economic impact of this rate hike ought to be enough evidence of the need to get rid of PG&E that organizers can start putting together concrete plans for the future.
PS If city hall proposed a 7 percent tax hike for small businesses, most would be screaming bloody murder and complaining about the larger economic impact. But the small-business community has never been actively involved in public power efforts. The rate hike is in effect a tax on those least able to pay, and small-business leaders ought to join the public power fight.
PPS The city, especially the Small Business Commission, needs to be fighting this late hike. And the commission should designate an ombudsperson to compile complaints about PG&E.
Petraeus’s War
EDITORIAL Nine Americans soldiers died in Iraq on Sept. 10, a few more than average, but overall it was just another typical day in a war that has cost a fortune, claimed the lives of 3,774 US troops and perhaps 600,000 Iraqis — and accomplished nothing.
While those (mostly) young people died in the desert, Gen. David Petraeus was in Washington, D.C., wearing a starched uniform shirt with four stars and seven rows of medals, telling members of Congress that the mission in Iraq is coming along just fine.
The surge, he insisted, is working, and there are signs of progress. He held up chart after chart showing that casualties and sectarian killings are down, that parts of Baghdad are becoming more secure — and that he expects to be able to end the surge and bring back the additional 30,000 troops by next summer.
What that means, in essence, is that the top general in Iraq thinks the United States will still need 130,000 troops in that country a year from now. That’s unacceptable — and it’s up to the Democratic leadership, which has been all too deferential to the military brass, to stand up and say so.
For months now, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–San Francisco), who prematurely took impeachment off the table, has been telling her antiwar constituents that she wanted to wait until she heard from Petraeus before taking any action on the war. Now she’s heard. He’s said he doesn’t see any end to the occupation. He’s mouthing platitudes that clearly aren’t true (the violence now is still far worse than it was four years ago) and presenting an image of Iraq that is on its face false (a remarkable new poll by ABC News, the BBC, and Japanese broadcaster NHK concludes that 70 percent of Iraqis think the situation has gotten worse in the past six months and the surge is a failure). And he’s talking about al Qaeda and Iran in tones that suggest that the administration is looking for excuses to expand the conflict even further.
Pelosi should not be allowed any more excuses. She needs to begin moving for an immediate and dramatic troop reduction with an aggressive schedule for complete withdrawal. And if she has to, she should publicly state that the Democrats in Congress are prepared to cut off funding for the war.
This latest report should be a call to arms for the antiwar movement, which needs to be visible and active on every front — including reminding the Democratic presidential candidates that moderate, cautious statements about ending the war simply aren’t good enough. Anyone who wants the nomination for George W. Bush’s job ought to be willing to stand up and say what the clear majority of Americans think: it’s time to bring the troops home, now.
Green City: Gray-water guerillas
› sarah@sfbg.com
GREEN CITY The task sounded simple: help our friend Kristal set up a bathtub in her backyard over the Labor Day weekend so she could soak under the stars and her plants could drink the gray water.
Gray water is water from the sink, shower, bathtub, and washing machine, but not the toilet. And I’ve been inspired by its use since reading gray-water guerrillas Laura Allen, July Oskar Cole, and Cleo Woelfle-Erskine’s book Dam Nation: Dispatches from the Water Underground (Soft Skull, 2007).
Allen, Cole, and Woelfle-Erskine describe how to install fairly radical gray-water systems, including dry and composting toilets and rainwater capture zones, as well as ways to recharge groundwater with rain gardens and treat gray water using homemade wetlands.
Installing gray-water systems usually requires government permits, and public health officials caution that flawed systems can spread disease and contamination. But our system was a simple one meant to dispose of clean hot water that cascades from the tub into a lava rock–filled drainage ditch that will hopefully, in time, support a small wetland.
Like many Californians, Kristal can only afford a tiny place, but she has hit the rental jackpot with her latest abode. It’s a barn red, vine-covered cottage behind a bigger house, but it comes with a private yard, thanks to artfully placed trellises and interwoven tree branches.
The only downside of her cottage is the absence of an indoor bathtub, so Kristal decided to set up a cast-iron bath outdoors and fill it with water piped by a hose from her sink. We tried it out July 4, and it was magical looking at the fireworks while sitting in steaming water that wasn’t steeped with hot-tub chemicals.
But when Kristal let out the plug, the gray water splattered out noisily and created an unsightly, muddy hole in the yard. This growing mess got Kristal worried that she would attract mosquitoes, kill her plants, and rot her cottage foundations. So I decided to help, relying on the gray-water guerrillas’ manual and my husband’s years of experience in restoring wetlands. Together, the three of us talked through the science, economics, and aesthetics of the proposed project to come up with a viable plan.
The science was simple but critically important, given that we were contemputf8g creating a homemade wetland near other dwellings and gardens. Water flows downhill and follows the path of least resistance, while wetlands, which are nature’s water purification system, create breeding grounds for native plants, insects, and animals. As such, they are fragile ecosystems that are easily harmed by bleach, bath salts, and any boron-containing products. So it’s critical to use all-natural, biodegradable soaps in a tub whose gray water will flow into homemade wetlands.
We reconciled these principles with Kristal’s need for inexpensive materials, her love of simple designs, and her desire to camouflage unsightly plumbing. In the end, we settled on a cascading system that uses cinder blocks to elevate Kristal’s tub and a wine barrel to hold the gray water, which flows by gravity into the barrel and then into the wetlands.
To control and direct water flow, we linked the barrel by way of a garden hose to a piece of slotted, corrugated drainage pipe. We buried the pipe in a lava rock–filled trench that was dug in a serpentine shape so that the gray water flows away from homes and into the lowest part of the garden, which is filled with sandy, drainage-friendly soil.
After a hard weekend of work, Labor Day found us basking in a freshly painted and elevated aquamarine bathtub, imagining how great Kristal’s wetlands will look once she adds water-loving plants like native cattails, which will attract a host of dragonflies, frogs, and beetles. Then we pulled the plug and waited anxiously for the tub to drain. To our delight, the water swirled smoothly into the barrel, then gurgled quietly underground.
Eureka! We were now bona fide gray-water guerrillas and had experienced, in microcosm, the challenges people grapple with, yard by yard, block by block, as they try to green the concrete jungle, one low-impact development at a time. It was exhilarating, empowering, and addictive. But before we had a chance to fully recover, Kristal was on her feet, talking about installing a solar-powered water heater this Thanksgiving. *
Comments, ideas, and submissions for Green City, the Guardian‘s weekly environmental column, can be sent to news@sfbg.com.
Do wi-fi right — ourselves
OPINION Although it’s only a "declaration of policy," Proposition J (the mayor’s wi-fi initiative) is garnering a lot of opposition. Taken at face value, the initiative seems like a no-brainer: of course we should have free, high-speed wi-fi for everyone, with adequate privacy and no public money, right now. The initiative makes it sound like all we have to do is bend over and pick up the golden wi-fi network lying in the street. Like other stories about precious paving, though, the reality is considerably less shiny.
Since Mayor Gavin Newsom filed Prop. J to whip up support for his proposed EarthLink network, that company pulled out of the San Francisco deal. EarthLink also pulled out of its agreement with Houston (paying $5 million in penalties) and laid off almost all of its municipal network division staff.
Prop. J was created to rally support for a deal that doesn’t exist anymore. Should we pass it anyway? Well, the problems that Prop. J points out are real. At least a fifth of San Franciscans have no home Internet access, and many more residents have only dial-up access.
Unfortunately, Prop. J is written to make a political point, not to ensure universal Internet access. In order to make that point, it insists on two features that were part of the EarthLink deal but don’t make sense if we’re actually trying to achieve access for everyone.
First, wi-fi is almost certainly not the technology on which to base a citywide network. It’s suited to quick-and-dirty outdoor networks or to extending indoor networks to multiple rooms, but as a network that’s supposed to cover large outdoor areas and reach into buildings, it’s got serious limitations.
A smarter approach would likely use wi-fi only where it makes the most sense as part of a larger network. A truly universal network would likely utilize a combination of wi-fi, the fiber-optic line that San Francisco already owns, and possibly other technologies, like copper wires or fixed-point wireless.
Second, Prop. J specifies that the network be built as a public-private partnership. The fall of the EarthLink deal proves that the fantasy of a company coming into San Francisco and giving everyone free Internet is just that: a fantasy. Simply declaring that we want a public-private partnership is not going to conjure some unknown company out of thin air to build a universal network in San Francisco.
Although the measure is not legally binding, many of its opponents, including several unions and a number of community groups, understandably fear that it’ll be used as an excuse to rush into a bad deal. If we’ve committed to a public-private partnership and "implementing … agreements as quickly as possible," we’re not exactly staking out a great bargaining position.
The mayor seems dead set on finding a private company to build this network, whether or not that makes sense. He’s likely to use Prop. J, if it passes, as a way to ignore the likelihood that we’re better off pursuing a city-run network. If ensuring that every San Franciscan has access to the Internet is something we really feel is important, it’s something that’s worth doing right, and if we want to make sure it’s done right, we should do it ourselves.
Sasha Magee
Sasha Magee is an activist who blogs at leftinsf.com.
NASA hippies
› annalee@techsploitation.com
TECHSPLOITATION As annoying as hippies can be, it’s strangely comforting to think that the one bit of junk we shot into deep space is emblazoned with a hippie symbol. I’m talking about the golden records screwed onto the shells of Voyagers I and II, two space probes that completely changed our understanding of the solar system and then shot out into deep space bearing record albums intended for alien consumption.
Last week marked the 30th anniversary of the Voyager II launch. While most people recall the Voyager probes for creating close-up photographs and atmospheric readings from Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, these probes were always intended to do more than send messages back home for human consumption. In the mid-1970s, when the Voyager spacecraft were being completed, pop cosmologist Carl Sagan convinced NASA to include a message from Earth on the probes. They were to bring news of us to alien beings in the unknowable reaches of the galaxy and beyond.
In consultation with a bunch of other geeks (including Timothy Ferris, who produced the album), Sagan decided that the delivery mechanism for this message should be a golden record, packaged with a cartridge and needle, as well as abstract mathematical instructions for how fast to spin the disc and at what frequencies it would emit sound. You can listen to the entire recording at goldenrecord.org, and the experience is bittersweet, an auditory glimpse of a very different time in human history.
The tracks include greetings in dozens of languages, including ancient Sumerian, which of course nobody knows how to pronounce anymore. And Gaia help us, there is also a "whale greeting." There is a track devoted to "Earth sounds," all which sound totally cool while remaining unrecognizable as particularly Earthly. There are over a dozen music recordings from around the world, all of which are written (and mostly performed) by men. Most are from the West, with a few Russian numbers thrown in — probably for "diversity." Bach is presented alongside Chuck Berry, Navaho chants beside Beethoven. It’s a Sesame Street notion of pluralism, with an emphasis on music and greetings rather than political speeches or academic treatises on economics.
Also included on these records are directions to Earth, using nearby stars as navigation points.
The golden records imply that music, math and images are universal symbolic systems, the best kind for communicating with beings radically different from ourselves. This is an idea that was popular in the 1970s — Steven Spielberg immortalized it in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in which humans meeting aliens establish communication via electronic sounds. But as American historian Karen Ordahl Kupperman has pointed out, the idea that music (and the math underlying it) is a universal form of communication also comes from centuries-old encounters between Europeans and natives in the Americas. Early European explorers recount communicating with natives via music upon first meeting and reaching an understanding on that basis.
Music may be a near-universal form of communication among humans, and there is something glorious and touching about trying to share that with other creatures in space. Of course, the notion that aliens might share the idea of "hearing" with us profoundly silly. What if these are creatures who communicate via molecular manipulation, or chemical signatures? What if they live in vacuum, and therefore cannot "hear" at all?
So yeah, the golden record is species-centric. It’s also naively specific to one culture, for who can think of a golden record full of Western music as anything but the work of hippie liberal white dudes? Still, I’d rather be represented by its naive utopianism than by most of the signals shooting off this planet.
No doubt the golden record will bemuse any alien life that actually bothers to examine the goo on a piece of space junk. But a bemused alien may in fact be the one who comes closest to guessing the true meaning of the golden record, and perhaps the true meaning of human life itself. And so it seems fitting that our one letter to the universe reads something like this: Wish you were here. We have no idea what we’re doing, but we sound good!
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who thinks that perhaps the golden record is really a message to ourselves.
How soon is now?
› johnny@sfbg.com
REVIEW Sixteen minutes with Lars Laumann? Well, I didn’t say no, and discovered that his video Morrissey Foretelling the Death of Diana is as uncanny as its title is ludicrous. This present-day conspiratorial artifact makes a Smiths devotee feel like Jim Garrison during a virgin viewing of the Zapruder film. Laumann weds a looped melody from the Smiths’ instrumental "Oscillate Wildly" to TV news footage, music-video clips, and visions from the ’60s kitchen sink cinema that have inspired (and provided) Morrissey lyrics, using all of the above as a backdrop to a voice-over lecture that links the 1986 album The Queen Is Dead to the Aug. 31, 1997, death of Princess Diana. Even if you have no interest in (or an aversion toward) the title’s pair of late 20th-century British cult figures, the result casts a comic yet eerie spell.
At this point, it’s fair to say that Smiths-inspired art has become a subgenre, a phenomenon flourishing to the degree that it deserves a book-length essay — ironic, since most of the video and visual art projects responding to Morrissey and company are far superior to the shelf of books that have been written off of his name.
Laumann’s video doesn’t pack the emotional wallop of the Istanbul-set karaoke in Phil Collins’s installation dünya dinlemiyor (The world won’t listen), which did time at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art last fall. But the Oslo, Norway, artist is exploring something different than is Collins, whose update of Andy Warhol’s screen tests allows for compassionate views and expressions of fandom. Drawing heavily from David Alice’s site www.dianamystery.com, Laumann’s short work reaches for the extraterrestrial stars in presenting the organic quality of conspiracy theory during the Internet era. As in Lutz Dammbeck’s Unabomber documentary The Net, the final conclusion (if there is such a thing) matters less than the numerous revelatory or ludicrous destinations that are part of the narrative’s crazy maze.
Morrissey Foretelling the Death of Diana helps kick off a staggered series of videos showcased over the next two months in "There Is Always a Machine Between Us," at SF Camerawork. Curated by Kate Fowle, Karla Milosevich, Chuck Mobley, and Chuck Orendorff, the overall exhibition toys with Skype, mouse-triggered wall projections, and an orange-hued approximation of living-room DVD viewing. Some viewers might find it inherently problematic for lo-res video to receive bigger-screen treatment. Regardless, the varied combos of form and context here aren’t as provocative as the material gleaned by the select group of Web trolls whose research is on display.
Web trolling as gallery fodder — is this just one more ploy to destruct ye olde sacred art space so it can be mistaken for YouTube or an amusement park? If so, I’m happy that the likes of Cliff Hengst, Matthew Hughes Boyko, and Matt Wolf are doing the handiwork. More than one contributor to the exhibition’s DVD library includes the YouTube mainstay CPDRC Inmates Practice Thriller, yet Hengst’s, Boyko’s, and Wolf’s compilation DVDs also showcase distinctively deranged aesthetics. Hengst gives us Anna Nicole Smith outtakes, Barbra Streisand swearing at a heckler, and an industrial clip he aptly titles Clowns vs. Old People: The Final Battle. Beginning with another YouTube hit, Cobra vs. Baby, Boyko’s DVD moves on to revealing moments when onlookers seize control of imagery from stars, such as an unedited version of Tom Cruise getting sprayed in the face at a War of the Worlds premiere and the aftermath of Tara Reid inadvertently flashing a post-op nipple during her zillionth red carpet stroll.
Wolf’s DVD, featuring moments such as Kerri Strug Olympic Vault (singled out for its revealing masochism) and a clip of Ryan Phillippe playing the first gay teen in daytime soap history, offers only a taste of the imitations of Imitation of Life found on his site, mattwolf.info. More than the research DVDs provided by some of the show’s other videomakers, it adds to the richness of his work on display. In Smalltown Boy, Wolf — who is currently working on a documentary about the late musician Arthur Russell — picks up the baton left by Todd Haynes sometime at the cusp of the ’90s, combining TV-documentary motifs such as voice-over and interview to tease out a link between the late David Wojnarowicz and a teenage girl obsessed with My So-Called Life. The conspiratorial thread that runs through "There Is Always a Machine Between Us" resides within Smalltown Boy as well, in a manner that is all the more effective for being muted.
Fifteen minutes with Markus Linnenbrink? Well, I didn’t say no — and didn’t regret spending that amount of time and a bit more with his wall painting, epoxy resin paintings, and sculpture at Patricia Sweetow Gallery. Though slick on the surface, with a lively sense of color that exposes the rote and drab quality of some Bay Area work, on closer examination the German Linnenbrink’s paintings possess candy cane sickliness. The queasy factor is only magnified by the suspended drops of paint that hang from the bottom of some works, or, in the case of ALLESWIRDWEITERGEHNINEEINPAARSEKUNDEN, by hundreds of pockmarks. (Twisting things inside out once again, these pocks are gorgeous on closer examination, resembling the interiors of porcelain saucers or cups.) The muscularity of Linnenbrink’s process — Clement Greenberg and Jackson Pollock would approve — is counterbalanced by his fondness for bits of glitter and his droll flair. Though he’s understated in comparison with Douglas Gordon when it comes to temporal commentary, his titles sometimes question whether it is the paintings or their viewers who are loitering.
THERE IS ALWAYS A MACHINE BETWEEN US
Through Nov. 17
Tues.–Sat., noon–5 p.m., free
SF Camerawork
657 Mission, second floor, SF
(415) 512-2020
FIFTEEN MINUTES WITH YOU
Through Oct. 20
Tues.–Sat., 10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m., free
Patricia Sweetow Gallery
77 Geary, mezzanine, SF
(415) 788-5126
Going topless
› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea: My girlfriend is really into BDSM. At first I tried and played a convincing (I think) top-dom, but it just wasn’t hot for me, so I looked some stuff up to get inspired. As I was reading-watching, I would really get off on it, but the sex with my girlfriend still wasn’t hot. Then I realized that when I was masturbating to all this I was fantasizing about subbing. Oops. I am way in love with my girlfriend, but she is a bottom. Period. She might switch it around if it meant a lot to me, but I would know that it wasn’t really making her happy. I don’t know what to do. Can I become a top? Can I teach myself to like it? I’m going to do it either way but I really want to get into it, so please help! I want us to be good in bed together but two bottoms don’t make a top. Help! Love, Topless
PS We’re lesbians, if that matters.
Dear Tops: It sure doesn’t, but thanks for the info!
I was just thinking about this last night when a friend was catching me up on her latest dating adventures. She was lamenting that some potential dates seem to come equipped with a set of kinks perfectly matching her own, and though that sounds good, it is of course no use at all. As you have discovered to your frustration, one wants a date with a complementary set of kinks, not a matching one. It’s not an uncommon problem, and its most common manifestation is exactly the one that’s driving you nuts: there are too many bottoms in this world and nowhere near enough tops to keep them satisfied. Why this is (beyond the fact that topping is hard work) I couldn’t tell you for sure, but I bet any number of eager grad students are currently proposing theses on the subject to bored advisors who have read enough similar stuff already.
Here’s my theory: There are people for whom BDSM is a core part of their identity, running as deep as, say, homosexuality or monogamy. Some may always have recognized this element in themselves, even before they had the language to express it (these are the kids who always want to play pirates or whatever game involves somebody getting tied to something or intentional infliction-receiving of pain, even when the other kids are long since ready to move on). Others don’t realize it until they’re exposed to S-M in some more adult context, but then it just clicks in, key into lock, and they know. Your girlfriend sounds like one of these BDSM lifers, who tend, in my experience, to be pretty set on their preferred role even if they do switch experimentally on occasion (a good idea, if only to find out how painful-exhausting it is to experience-produce any particular sensation).
Then there are the anything-goes people, who are happy to pick up a flogger or don a dog collar, what the heck, as long as it’s fun. This type of player may not identify as an S-M person per se but may just enjoy a little power exchange on the occasional Friday night, no biggie. You may fall more on this end of the spectrum, but even what-the-heckers will usually discover some sort of preference, as you have. Most people do have a preference: Rare or well-done? Black or with milk? The perfect 50-50 switch is almost certainly as rare as the perfect 50-50 bisexual, but plenty of people find something to like in either role. I do think you can develop an appreciation for topping and get some satisfaction out of a job well done (there are resources like The New Topping Book by Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy to help you with this), but you can enjoy and get good at it without every really becoming a top the way both of you are currently bottoms. Be careful about taking on a role that isn’t really you, though. Nobody loves a martyr, and you’re still going to want to bottom sometimes. I worry about you starting to resent your girlfriend for getting to have all the fun.
I have a suggestion that might save your relationship or might strike you as all sort of wrong and make you hate me, but here goes: you guys find a willing top, maybe somewhere in your extant social circle, maybe online or by joining a BDSM social organization, and bottom together sometimes. This kind of shared adventure can be hot, hot, hot and very bonding, sort of like getting lost in the woods together and surviving through mutual trust and interreliance, but a lot more fun. I think if you do that sometimes, and play top sometimes, and stick with the vanilla sometimes, you’ll probably be OK, provided you both take care of getting your itches scratched. Love conquers … much. Love, Andrea
Andrea’s on vacation this week; this column ran previously (7/05/06). But she’s still checking e-mail and eagerly awaiting your questions about love and lust!
Parea Wine Bar and Cafe
› paulr@sfbg.com
Just when you thought that Valencia Street couldn’t possibly support another restaurant, you blinked, or sneezed, or took a cell phone call from someone who’d dialed the wrong number, and kazaam! — you looked up to see another restaurant. Let’s say you’re standing at the corner of 19th Street, so it’s probably Paréa Wine Bar and Café, which was opened a little over a year ago by Nicole and Telly Topakas in the space held most recently by Oxygen Bar and Sushi.
One plus for Paréa is that it’s Greek, or semi-Greek, or nominally Greek — Greekish, at least — on a seething restaurant row that’s otherwise devoid of Hellenistic flavors. The wine list includes a large number of bottlings from Greece, and many of them are available by the glass and half-glass. (Three cheers for the half-glass, by the way — or, as it’s known at Paréa, the "taste" — for encouraging experiment without fomenting undue drunkenness.) I have a certain fondness for Greek whites, which manage to be both stony and floral — flowers cut from stone — much like Greece itself. But there are plenty of wines from elsewhere around the Mediterranean, the New World, and for that matter the whole world.
The food reflects a similar Grecocentric globalism. At the core of the menu are the mezes plates, arrays of traditional Greek delicacies. But one wall of the restaurant consists of a huge chalkboard that lists the day’s specials, many of which nod to Greece only slightly or not at all. Whatever the ethnic or cultural slant of the food, it’s likely to be made with organic ingredients obtained locally, and to go well with wine.
Paréa is the Greek term for a gathering of intimates: friends in the truest sense. The group that assembles in Plato’s Symposium would probably qualify. Plato’s paréa might well feel at home at Paréa, clustering around the restaurant’s low tables, sitting on backless stools, making elegantly bawdy remarks about the rest of the clientele (youngish, good-looking, often ambiguous as to team played for) and the service staff (same).
The space isn’t that different from its Oxygen Bar edition — the long bar still runs along one wall at the rear of the dining room — except that the colors have changed from an ethereal combination of blue and white to a sunset-on-Mykonos blend of red and yellow. Also, the strange plastic oxygen tubes that protruded from the walls, as if the restaurant catered to people suffering from emphysema, have vanished. The uncluttered walls now invite leaning, as you sip your wine, nibble your mezes, and exchange deep thoughts with the other members of your paréa.
The mezes platters available from the regular menu are fine, though not remarkable. The vegetarian version ($12) includes — besides triangles of toasted pita bread — hummus, yogurt, black and green marinated olives, carrot and celery sticks, and coils of roasted red bell pepper. The meat and cheese version ($13) consists of salami coins, tissues of prosciutto layered like oriental rugs on a dealer’s floor, and slices of brie and ibérico cheeses. Olives, too.
The small, shareable plates available from the big board offer more alluring possibilities. We were particularly taken by a set of crispy lentil cakes ($5), which looked like molasses cookies and had some of the character of falafel while being distinct from it. The cumin yogurt dabbed on top helped soothe any dryness and seemed slightly Greek in the bargain.
Dryness was of course not an issue with the tomato bisque ($6), a bowl of cream-infused soup with a hint of smoke — for the tomatoes had been roasted — and just a bit chunky. (The puréeing had been done with a food mill, perhaps, and not a mercilessly efficient electric device.) And an excellent pizzetta ($5) was tomatoless if not quite bianco; roasted red bell peppers provided a smear of color, while rounds of pepperoni floated on a small sea of melted mozzarella cheese.
The kitchen offers a nightly entrée for those who need a more sustained experience of nourishment. It might well be some sort of baked pasta — bucatini ($13), maybe, tossed with corn niblets, mushrooms, and fennel in a cream sauce, with gratings of ibérico cheese on top.
"Too much cheese," one of my companions said. Clearly he had not grown up where I did, in the land where there is no such thing as too much cheese.
Panini make a nice alternative to the nightly entrée. A vegetarian version ($9) might include tomatoes, English cheddar cheese, and a pesto made of several varieties of basil, at least one of which had a definitely minty character. Or it might be meatier ($11): bits of smoked duck with a sweetish ensemble of red onion slivers, fig jam, and some dandelion greens.
The dessert menu suggests that a panna cotta nexus is forming in the neighborhood. Excellent versions can be had at nearby Delfina and Farina, and Paréa’s ($6) is comparable, if different. It’s scented with vanilla, barely sweet, roughly the consistency of mascarpone, and served in a shallow dish with raspberry coulis. It’s also incomparably better than a polenta cake ($6), a dried arrangement that even a studding with cherries and lavish scoops of whipped cream could not redeem. It should be banished from the paréa of desserts.
PARÉA WINE BAR AND CAFÉ
Mon. and Wed.–Sun., 5 p.m.–midnight
795 Valencia, SF
(415) 255-2102
Beer and wine
AE/MC/V
Noisy
Wheelchair accessible
Written on the skin
› kimberly@sfbg.com
Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich, Federico Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni, Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune — legendary screen team-ups betwixt a vision-questing director and his or her alter ego star filter are the stuff of cinematic legend. Wet dreams for reviewers intent on imbuing criticism with the sticky glaze of biography, they’re also seemingly part of a mythical auteur-driven cinematic past that was untouched by the hard-line realities of big-budget, gun-for-hire studio economics.
So it’s remarkable to find a filmmaker like David Cronenberg reteaming with his A History of Violence (2005) star Viggo Mortensen for Eastern Promises — it’s only the second time that Cronenberg has repeated such a collaboration since his work with Jeremy Irons in M. Butterfly (1993) and the director’s masterwork, Dead Ringers (1988). Sure, the feature also revolves around the mob (this time the Russian Vory v Zakone rather than the Irish mafia) and family, of both the biological and the bloodily nonbiological sorts. But there must be something deeper going on here. Talking to an energetic, black-clad Cronenberg, temporarily sprawled on a damask couch at the Ritz-Carlton a few weeks back and preparing to head back to his hometown film festival in Toronto, I wondered what exactly was the nature of his and Mortensen’s obviously tight relationship.
"Oh, we’re in love," the 64-year-old director quipped dryly. Shall we alert the tabloids about forthcoming nuptials, in the scandalous style of Ingrid Bergman running off with Roberto Rossellini?
"Yeah, it’s kind of a brotherly love as well. I feel like he’s the brother I never had. We’re very close. No, we’re very close."
Cronenberg kids you — not a stance expected from the man once associated with a grotesque yet cerebral breed of filmic Grand Guignol. But perhaps it isn’t entirely unprecedented: he famously splattered the prepubescent screens of pop-cult consciousness with his literally mind-blowing Scanners (1981). Punctuating his points with sharp hand gestures and following every flicker of your glance, the man thinks and jests both on and off his feet — and spars and parries just as effortlessly.
For Cronenberg, Eastern Promises‘ attraction lay not in its focus on mafia or family but in the well-crafted, textural script by Dirty Pretty Things‘ Steven Knight. "I was particularly interested in the multicultural aspect, because London, like Toronto, prides itself on being multicultural, which is to say immigrants can come and maintain their national identity and still live within the English context," the filmmaker mused. "That’s a nice concept. Does it really work? There are a lot of frictions, hostilities, and enmities that are brought from the old country."
The multilingual, half-Danish Mortensen has proved the ideal specimen, or Cronenbergian vessel, through which to play out these ideas. In contrast to A History of Violence‘s Tom Stall, whose assimilative veneer of wholesome middle-American respectability is torn away by a sudden, almost sensually shocking outburst of violence to reveal a noirish mafia past, Mortensen’s mysterious Eastern Promises character, Nikolai Luzhin, is all cold and mechanistic as he moves carefully through the alienating turf of a Russian immigrant neighborhood in London. Behind his slick, sexually contained, rockabillyesque shades, suit, and pompadour, Nikolai keeps his past firmly hidden, showing only bodily badges of allegiance, a vividly baroque comic book constellation of Siberian prison tattoos. The mafia narrative has become a way of venturing into the shadow zones of biological and chosen families. In Eastern Promises, Cronenberg juxtaposes the quest of Anna (Naomi Watts) to find the relatives of a dead Russian girl’s infant with Nikolai’s search for acceptance within the family of crime boss Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl).
On its slick gray and black noirish surface, Eastern Promises doesn’t resemble offerings like 1979’s The Brood, 1983’s Videodrome, 1986’s The Fly, or 1996’s Crash, films that bound Cronenberg’s name to that of the phrase body horror. But one can’t help but glimpse the filmmaker’s themes in the starry ciphers on Mortensen’s form.
So what does Cronenberg think of so-called body horror today? "I think nothing!" he exclaims with a comic snort. "It does seem kind of ridiculous. When you think of it, horror is about mortality, and it’s about mortality seen as a very physical event. That’s what, to me, horror films are about. To me, the genre is about the body, really."
EASTERN PROMISES
Opens Fri/14 in Bay Area theaters
You go, I go, we all go for Viggo
A painter, poet, jazz musician, and political activist, Viggo Mortensen is a mass of complicated, sometimes conflicting energies and interests. He’s as macho and swarthy as they come, but with a contemplative thirst for truth. He’s shy, but a bit of a motormouth (and can run on in at least six different languages). Mortensen is a matinee idol with a philosopher’s soul — Jean-Jacques Rousseau trapped in the body of Rudolph Valentino.
When I interviewed him last month during his stop in San Francisco to promote the David Cronenberg–directed thriller Eastern Promises, it became clear that the strong-yet-delicate thing isn’t just a clever shtick. Looking tan and lean and sporting an impressive ‘stache, he was soft-spoken and friendly. It didn’t hurt that he came bearing gifts — before I even sat down, he placed a shrink-wrapped copy of Exene Cervenka’s book of collage, 666, on the table in front of me. (Mortensen’s boutique company, Perceval Press, publishes the book by the artist and X frontwoman, who is not so coincidentally his ex-wife and the mother of his teenage son, Henry.)
What sometimes gets lost in the Viggo-induced swoon is that the man is a fine actor. Mortensen is often the best thing in his movies, though in the past that sometimes wasn’t saying much. After delivering what should have been a star-making performance in Sean Penn’s 1991 directorial debut, The Indian Runner, he languished in B-movie hell (American Yakuza) and dud big-budget productions (Boiling Point, Daylight). Peter Jackson might have given him the exposure he was due in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but it took a weirdo genre director eager to flex more commercial muscles to give him the roles he was born to play: sensitive, soul-searching, primordial beasts.
In Eastern Promises, his latest collaboration with said weirdo director, Mortensen plays Nikolai Luzhin, a driver and all-around henchman for the notorious Russian organized crime syndicate Vory v Zakone. During its making, Mortensen helped literally and figuratively to flesh out the idea for what became a major thematic refrain — the detailed prison tattoo work found all over Nikolai’s body. "[Tattoos were] mentioned in the original script in passing," he noted. "But like everything else, I wanted to know what that meant. A friend of mine, Alix Lambert, made a great documentary called The Mark of Cain, where she went into maximum-security prisons in Russia and learned about Russians and Ukrainians and Georgians — men and women — who have identified themselves with these symbols. I learned, among other things, that symbols and text — religious or other — that seem to mean one thing on the surface actually mean something quite different. It’s a CV, a résumé, that they have on their bodies."
Mortensen studied Russian for the role and traveled to the country for research. "I checked with people who had backgrounds not dissimilar to the character I was playing. Once they realized I wasn’t trying to mock them or wasn’t going to do yet another clichéd Russian or be critical of them — I was just trying to get it right — then they were very helpful. So the tattoos were correct."
Mortensen acknowledges that his comfort level with Cronenberg has freed him to do things he might normally be hesitant to do — for instance, fend off an attack from two mobsters in a bathhouse while wearing nothing but the aforementioned tattoos. He has done full-frontal nudity before, in The Indian Runner, but never in such a physically demanding, exposed fashion. In an intricately choreographed scene destined to be one of the most talked about of the year, Mortensen brutally yet balletically propels his body through the frame in mostly long shots. Like the climactic (ahem) sex scene in A History of Violence, this is Eastern Promises‘ defining physical act, a turning point that irrevocably alters the emotional predicament of its central character. And it’s a doozy.
"We talked about it long before shooting and as we were working out the choreography," Mortensen said. "And I said, you should just shoot it like you do the rest of the movie — for real. It shouldn’t be limited. You shouldn’t have to try to make the body look glamorous or avoid seeing the whole body as much as possible. Forget about the fact that people are going to do screen grabs. It’s just the way it is." (Michelle Devereaux)
Hispanics go hyphy
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Latinos rarely receive credit for all they’ve brought to the rap game. After all, it was primarily Puerto Ricans who authored those boogaloo break-dance moves in the Bronx. And what would Cali hip-hop be without the laid-back style of Chicano cholos and their "low lows"?
Currently, a contingent of local Latino rap artists is pushing hard for recognition. Its members are on the Thizz Latin label, an imprint of Mac Dre’s Thizz Entertainment group. Only a year old, Thizz Latin is the brainchild of Julio "Gold Toes" Sanchez, a Chicano MC and hip-hop impresario hell-bent on highlighting the diversity of the hyphy movement.
To the Mission District native, San Francisco is practically synonymous with diversity. "I’m a San Franciscan to the heart," Sanchez says. "I’m a melting pot within my mind and in my soul."
On this hot Mission afternoon, he rolls up in his cream-colored Cadillac to tell me the Peruvian joint where we planned to meet is closed. Instead, he takes me to a Chinese restaurant where the Asian immigrant owners greet him by first name. To some, Sanchez could be imposing, with his brawny build, shaved head, and fiery demeanor. To the restaurant’s proprietors, he’s just a neighborhood kid.
Sanchez is using his community-bridging skills and street hustle to build a wide audience for his label’s pan-Latin roster of rappers, including Mr. Kee, Tito B, Freddy Chingaz, and Louie Loc, who are of Cuban, Mexican, Salvadoran, and Nicaraguan descent, respectively. "We can go to Hunters Point and have it rocking. We can go to the Mission and have it rocking. We can go to Union Street, and we can have it crackin’ off the hook. We could go to Chinatown, and they’re gonna love us."
One of Thizz Latin’s premier artists, Chicano MC Jimmy Roses, opened the "Super Hyphy 18" concert recently in Santa Rosa. Minutes into his set, he made the remarkably mixed crowd of more than a thousand move with his feel-good anthem "Who Rock the Party," an ebullient track that received some airplay on local radio and galvanized what Sanchez calls the Latin hyphy movement.
Movement building, however, has been impeded by the peculiar racial politics of local commercial radio. Although Thizz Latin artists have garnered a few spins, radio play in the Bay largely eludes them, despite the fact that several of the imprint’s releases have sold more than 20,000 units. The explanation given by DJs and programmers? They’re not black enough for hip-hop and R&B stations, and they’re not Latin enough for the Hispanic format. In Sanchez’s words, "We’re everywhere but the motherfucking radio!"
The situation mirrors the marginal, neither-here-nor-there position of US Latinos, who comprise the nation’s largest minority yet rarely receive recognition in the mainstream media. The music industry in particular can’t seem to wrap its brain around the biculturalism of urban Latino youth, many of whom grew up listening to traditional Latin sounds yet are utterly immersed in hip-hop.
Thizz Latin beatmaker Ivan "Baby Boss" Martinez, a rising star at 18, is a perfect example of this. The Mexican American college freshman explains, "Whenever we’re with our families, we’re bumpin’ banda. We’re playing mariachi in the car. But when I’m with my clique, it’s just hip-hop and reggaetón."
Martinez’s dexterity in mixing multiple genres impressed "ShoBoy" Edgar, a popular DJ on fledgling KWZ, 100.7 FM ("La Kalle"). The reggaetón-heavy station, which specifically targets urban Latino youths, hired Martinez to produce a few commercials but seldom plays Thizz Latin tracks — ostensibly because they’re in English.
Even more galling to Sanchez is the lack of local hip-hop and R&B radio support, considering that both KMEL, 106.1 FM, and KYLD, 94.9 FM (Wild), regularly sponsor events such as Carnaval in the Mexican American community and even farm their DJs out for private quinceañera parties. Still, they refuse to put Latin rap on regular rotation. At press time, KMEL and KYLD representatives had not responded to requests for comment.
Interestingly, Thizz Latin MCs get more love in other regions, including central California and the Southwest, where they play to crowds as large as 5,000. The hip-hop hotbed of Houston is especially amenable to Latin rap — so much so that local players have begun to migrate there. Vallejo rapper Baby Bash moved to H-Town years ago and subsequently struck gold in record sales. San Jose’s Upstairs Records, home of SoCal Chicano-rap phenom Lil Rob, recently set up shop there.
Even Sanchez, a die-hard San Franciscan, feels the pull southward. He lived in Houston for a time and built strong connections there with top Chicano talent Chingo Bling and South Park Mexican, who both appear on Thizz Latin releases. So does Baby Bash, who recently paired up with Sanchez on "Thick ”N Juicy," a seductive track on Sanchez’s solo debut, Gold Toes Presents: The Gold Rush, set for a Sept. 18 release.
Something of a slow jam, "Thick ‘N Juicy" differs from Thizz Latin’s more hardcore hyphy output. The imprint’s vaguely thuggish brand of rap is offered as another excuse by radio programmers for why it doesn’t get played. But that argument doesn’t hold water considering both KMEL and La Kalle play classic gangsta rap by the likes of Snoop Dogg and 2Pac.
There are obviously racialized assumptions being made about what a real Latino is and what true hip-hop is. This rigid logic pushes Latino rappers into a broadcast border zone as migrant wanderers looking for a place to settle on the radio dial. Hopefully, they’ll find a home once Latinos gain a stronger foothold in the media.
Los Angeles two-piece No Age — ex of Wives — ply a grimy, low-tech hybrid of fuzz-prone guitar loops, surfy psych-noise, and ear-shattering skate rock that’s been hell-raising the SoCal music scene since the band’s April 2006 debut. When they’re not generating a shoegazey yet Ramones-channeled noise punk, vocalist-drummer Dean Spunt and guitarist Randy Randall use the band name as an umbrella under which to display their talents as visual artists. Firmly ingrained within their city’s underground art community alongside punk diehards like I’m a Fucking Gymnast, Abe Vigoda, and Silver Daggers, NA frequently perform at and curate art exhibits for the Smell, the all-ages downtown LA performance space dedicated to promoting DIY art and music. The pair also like to sport their own rainbow-colored T-shirts, and over the phone from LA, Randall recently revealed that they were hard at work silk-screening bandannas for their fall US tour. "I’ll let you know that Dean just printed an amazing pink bandanna with gold ink on it. It’s metallic gold that’s sparkly," he exclaimed. "It looks fucking awesome." Sharing their band name with a 1987 SST compilation of instrumentals, NA recently embarked on a similar path — sort of. In March the two dropped five limited, vinyl-only EPs on five different record labels on the same day. NA’s first full-length, Weirdo Rippers (Fat Cat), compiles cuts from those releases — it’s a remarkable documentation of Randall and Spunt’s progress as musicians since Wives went their separate ways in late 2005. Interchanging drumstick-splintering hysteria and seedy feedbacked blasts ("Boy Void") with ambient garage ("Neck Escaper") and Christian Fennesz–styled guitar squalls ("Escarpment"), NA (who recently signed to Sub Pop) sound aggro-driven without coming off as bombastic — something Randall admitted the group has avoided since its birth. "I think Wives had a bit of a macho-guy complex, and that’s certainly something we didn’t want to work with in No Age. Hence maybe the rainbow T-shirts," he said with a laugh. (Chris Sabbath) NO AGE With KIT, Mi Ami, and Party Fowl Tues/18, 9 p.m., $8 Bottom of the Hill 1233 17th St., SF (415) 621-4455 www.bottomofthehill.com
All the rage
Somewhere over the White Rainbow
Adam Forkner’s creativity is now almost entirely unfettered. Performing and recording as White Rainbow, the onetime Yume Bitsu member today experiences few blockages between said creativity and the musical end product, and as a result he’s "finally understanding how to make music that [he’s] proud of." It’s a rather surprising sentiment considering his bang-up musical pedigree: ((((VVRSSNN)))), Dirty Projectors, Jackie-O Motherfucker — none of which are even slightly inhibited in the invention department.
This newfound creative clarity, which Forkner describes over the phone from his home in Portland, Ore., is thankfully not confined to the depths of the White Rainbow DAT machine. His music — a droney assemblage of syncopated rhythms and looped, tripped, and delayed instrumental layers — humbly offers the vibes of its healing ambience to all listeners.
Inspired chiefly by Terry Riley’s delayed keyboard pieces, White Rainbow’s music is mostly flat-out improvised. Live, Forkner employs a guitar, a microphone, a hand drum, and various looping devices and effects pedals to shape wispy, winding riffs and layered rhythmic patterns into wholly organic, psychedelic drone grooves. Earlier recordings, most of which are collected on 2006’s five-CD, single DVD Box (Marriage), reflect this purely improvisatory approach. His upcoming album for Kranky, Prism of Eternal Now, was constructed in a different fashion than before, as Forkner found himself using computers, with which he "deeply went in, sculpted, and added parts" to provide a more precise shape for his pieces.
This week’s beneficiaries of White Rainbow’s sonic balm will unfortunately not be treated to Forkner’s White Rainbow Full Spectrum Vibrational Healing Center, an occasional long-form live format that he cherishes: beneath a canopy, lights and video accompany his live instrumentation over several hours, during which listeners are free to come and go. "The motivation is to create a calming environment for me to be able to explore sound with people," he explains.
Yet isn’t this "healing center" business a bit hippieish for someone so indie rock? Forkner admits to "exploring his place in the New Age continuum," but his affinity for playing in odd outdoor or tented spaces shouldn’t be misconstrued as the sign of an impending Yanni career move à la Live at the Acropolis — dude just feeds off environments other than rock clubs, dig? With its music so deftly constructed and brilliantly serene, White Rainbow’s space is a place many might want to drop in on. (Michael Harkin)
WHITE RAINBOW
With Dirty Projectors, Yacht, and Sholi
Wed/12, 8 p.m., $10
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
(415) 621-4455
Let bison be bison
Arguments for choosing bison over beef include the likelihood that bison is, on balance, better for you and is a meat from a once nearly extinct North American species whose prospects for survival are, perhaps ironically, enhanced by its homecoming as a food animal. Arguments against include cost (I paid about $29 per pound recently for some bison strip steaks) and, perhaps ironically, leanness, which complicates cooking. Still, when the numbers were crunched for the Labor Day weekend, the ayes had it.
Lean can mean tough and juiceless, especially if you’re using a dry-heat cooking implement, like a charcoal grill. And on Labor Day weekend, would you be using anything else? As a precaution, I asked the butcher to leave a strip of fat on each steak; as an additional precaution, I pounded each piece lightly with a tenderizing mallet. And I used a marinade — for Florentine-style grilled beef, from Bruce Aidells’s invaluable The Complete Meat Cookbook (Houghton Mifflin, 2001). The marinade consists of a few tablespoons of extra-virgin olive oil, a teaspoon of kosher salt, some cracked black pepper, and some minced garlic, if you like. (I like.) You mix all that together in a broad dish, turn the pieces of meat in it until they’re nicely slicked, and let the ensemble stand, covered, in the refrigerator for several hours or (better) overnight.
Holiday grillers, overcome by enthusiasm and beer, often lay fires that are much too hot. For boneless steaks — and, for that matter, burgers — a moderately hot fire is plenty. You are cooking food, not competing in an inferno Olympics. You know your fire is too hot if the food burns on the outside while remaining rawish inside. By this time, of course, it’s too late.
My modest fire cooked the steaks in about five or six minutes per side and left nice grill marks too. The meat turned out to be a lovely medium rare, with each strip having a band of pink inside, deepening to rose toward the core. The texture was different from beef’s: not the velvet butteriness of filet mignon but not tough either. More like a tri-tip. As for the flavor: superbeefy, I thought, without a hint of gaminess. Others at the table thought the meat had a flavor distinct from beef’s but just as good. A veritable stampede of approval.
Paul Reidinger
› paulr@sfbg.com
Looks that kill
› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER When does music news boil down to a form of disaster reporting? Behold the universal slagging that accompanied the tepid Sept. 9 Video Music Awards performance by a sluggish, underwear-clad Britney Spears, postpreggers bulgy and freshly toasted from a supposed turn at Burning Man (yet another sign of the event’s apocalyptic death throes, scuttling my long-dreamed-of plans for a Playa Hater’s Camp at Black Rock?). OK, Brit is a mess — the nonstop media slam dance is starting to nauseate me, despite Spears’s unconvincing pleas to give her more.
But maybe in a microfragmented, nano-niched pop universe, we’re all just looking for a few things to agree on, like: Rihanna embodies class (is it the Posh Spice asymmetrical bob?), Justin Timberlake looks good next to his Mickey Mouse Club ex and his Sept. 12 Shark Tank opener Good Charlotte, and Spears needs a handler she can trust so we can cease critically burning her. There is such a thing as too much freedom — as several Mötley Crüe-dites have proved of late. San Jose native Nikki Sixx’s collection of ’80s journal entries The Heroin Diaries — out Sept. 18 — shows that it’s never too late to exploit one’s excesses, while Bret Michaels from Poison’s VH1 series Rock of Love takes The Bachelor‘s formula to a skanksome low, as his prospective mates — coldly self-promoting, sharky rock chicks all — manage to outshine the shameless star with their backbiting, bitchery, and oh so many looks that kill.
Yet it doesn’t have to be this way. Witness, a galaxy away, the communal, mammalian planet Animal Collective. Much has been made in the past five years or so of the collectivist spirit infusing art groups like Hamburger Eyes, Royal Art Lodge, and Space 1026. Music collectives have been overshadowed, although San Francisco’s Thread Productions collective seems to be finding its rhythm via Tartufi, Silian Rail, Low Red Land, Birds and Batteries, and Sky Pilots, and a few art ensembles like Forcefield persist via recordings.
Through it all, though, Animal Collective have continued to fly their fellow-feeling flag high, despite multiple solo outings, loudly thumping the drum for the notion of continual artistic exploration and Strawberry Jam (Domino), their latest, almost poppily upbeat album. All the members possess the freedom to leave anytime they want to — and to combust messily all over blogosphere gossip sites if they care to — but they choose to stay and play with their happily bent song structures.
Panda Bear, né Noah Lennox, has seen his share of success with this year’s solo Person Pitch (Paw Tracks) and has had to struggle with the tug of his Lisbon, Portugal, home, where he’s lived for more than three years with his wife and daughter, and touring with the loose collection of onetime Baltimore schoolmates now scattered between New York City and Washington, D.C. Stuck in traffic with Avey Tare (David Portner), Geologist (Brian Weitz), and Deakin (Josh Dibb) outside Toronto, where they have a show, the 29-year-old Lennox says earnestly, "I hope people show up. I get nervous about performing — it takes over from the worry about whether people are going to be there."
Strawberry Jam‘s title came to him during a dreamy airline encounter. "On the little tray of food was a packet of strawberry jam. I opened it up and looked at that stuff," he explains. "It was futuristic looking, gooey, but it also looked sharp in a way. I thought it would be cool if it we could get the music to sound like that."
The final recording, produced by longtime Sun City Girls producer Scott Colbourn, who also oversaw Feels (FatCat, 2005), drones and shimmers with fewer overdubs than they’ve used in the past, surging with the band’s trademark bell-shaking, ethereal gloss ("#1"), an almost Madchester bounce ("Peacebone"), and infectious, nearly melodic manifestos ("Winter Wonderland"). "I guess we wanted to do something different than anything we’d done before and hopefully different from anything we’d ever heard before," Lennox says. "That’s what we get psyched about overall."
Having only to dread the retread, Lennox even embraces that three-letter word — jam — in reference to the band. "Maybe there’s a bit of a crossover," he says sweetly. "That’s cool. There’s a lot of Grateful Dead fans in our band."
ANIMAL COLLECTIVE
Mon/17, 8 p.m., $25
Fillmore
1805 Geary, SF
WHAT GOES AROUND
AD HAWK
Coalition of Aging Rockers just keeps on noisily aging: Charalambides’s Tom Carter and other acolytes pay tribute to the fab space rock fossils of Hawkwind. Wed/12, 6 p.m. $5. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com
MASERATI
The Kindercore survivors play alongside Thread Records collectivists Silian Rail and Sky Pilots. Wed/12, 9 p.m., $8. 12 Galaxies, 2565 Mission, SF. www.12galaxies.com
YO MAJESTY
Sunshine State crunk-punkers promise to pick up where ESG left off. Wed/12, 9 p.m., free with RSVP at going.com. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. www.mezzaninesf.com
BONFIRE MADIGAN
Ex–<\d>SF riot grrrl cellist Madigan Shive joins the local Best Wishes. Thurs/13, 9 p.m., $8. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com
TOMUTONTUU AND VODKA SOAP
Finland band generates eerie cryptonoise alongside Skaters spin-off project. Fri/14, 9 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com
VHS OR BETA
The Southern dance rockers bring their comets. Fri/14, 9 p.m., $15. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. www.mezzaninesf.com
SPECTRUM
Spaceman 3 alum Sonic Boom helms one of the finest free street-fair experimento lineups ever at the Polk Street Fair. With Triclops!, TITS, Los Llamarada, and Lou Lou and the Guitarfish. Sat/15, noon–7 p.m., free. Polk and Post, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com
HANDSOME FURS
Wolf Parader Dan Boeckner breaks out his silky Sub Pop side project. Mon/17, 8 p.m., $10–$12. Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell, SF. www.rickshawstop.com
HIGH ON FIRE
Death be not proud, the Oakland metallists claim, waving a fierce new Relapse disc, Death Is This Communion. Tues/18, 7 p.m., free. Amoeba Music, 1855 Haight, SF. 1...410411412...493Page 411 of 493