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Canton Seafood and Dim Sum Restaurant

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› paulr@sfbg.com

If children should be seen but not heard, and writers should be read but neither seen nor heard, what does this tell us about restaurant signage? Certainly that it should be seen and, ideally, read. Signage isn’t everything, but it tells us a lot about a place even before we step inside. If signage is going to be conspicuous, it ought to be stylish, as at Dosa and Ziryab, and if it’s going to be inconspicuous, as at many of the highest-end places around town, then the place had better be so good that we’ll find it despite the lack of a beckoning beacon. The splendor inside had better balance the lack or near lack of street presence.

What, then, are we to make of conspicuous but unstylish signs, such as the one that hangs above Canton, a Cantonese seafood and dim sum restaurant on Folsom I’ve zoomed past a million times over the years without pausing to consider because the cheap, blaring, generic yellow sign above the door all but dared me to stop in for some mediocre, greasy food, and who needs that? Bad Chinese food isn’t hard to find in San Francisco, alas, and one of the easier ways to find it is to look for those turmeric yellow signs that are the Asian equivalents of all-American roadside-diner signs, complete with a Coke (or Pepsi) blurb and logo.

Canton, moreover, has hung its jaundiced shingle in a part of town that’s moved notably upmarket in the more than 20 years the restaurant has dwelled in the neighborhood. The old warehouses and industrial plants are gone or transformed now, and the area’s restaurants are tuned into the tourist and convention frequencies being broadcast from the nearby Moscone Center and its coterie of hotels and museums. Canton looks like a throwback, a piece of old furniture abandoned by the curb with a hand-lettered "free" sign taped to it — but it is not.

For one thing, the restaurant is one of a handful in town to offer the Cantonese specialty nor mai gai ($20), the skin of a whole chicken, stuffed with sausage-dotted sticky rice and deep-fried. The dish is more interesting for its presentational value and as a textural adventure than as one of taste, since in the mouth it’s basically rice with a hint of salty sweetness (from the Chinese sausage) and a bit of poultry crunch (from the skin). Much of the flavor comes from the accompanying mystery sauce, a kind of sweet-sour vinaigrette laced with rounds of scallion.

We could not say where the rest of the chicken went, though some of the meat might have found its way into the chicken chow mein ($7), fat noodles tossed with chopped scallions and a soy-based sauce. And the remainder of it, cut into strips and sautéed to a golden crispness, might have ended up in the excellent chicken salad ($7.50), with a thick honey-soy vinaigrette served on the side. The kitchen, in fact, does a nice job all the way around in the crispy department, from salt and pepper spare ribs ($8.50) to the similar but even better salt and pepper sea bass ($18), slightly curly flaps of creamy flesh within a delicate golden envelope.

Cantonese cooking is known for its seafood variations and for its mild subtleties. These themes intersect in the seafood combo ($12), a large clay pot filled with prawns, squid, and scallops atop a medley of vegetables, among them snow peas, water chestnuts, and shreds of carrot and napa cabbage. The broth that hydrates this little world tends toward reticence, but you will find that the vegetables, when you reach them, have been tarted up nicely with ginger, whose clear, strong flavor shines like a light in a dim room.

But not all Cantonese subtlety has to do with seafood. Snow peas beef ($8.50) proves that meat too can show well with gentle handling, although it must be said that beef is among the most forgiving of ingredients and is often excellent with little or no help at all. Here the supporting cast includes a shower of snow peas, bright green as spring, and a slightly sweet sauce with flecks of crushed peppercorn.

Practically every Chinese restaurant of note in town offers some version of duck buns, and Canton ($13) is no exception, although there is a twist. The half duck is brought tableside and first stripped of its reddish gold skin, which is then served in steamed buns, along with plum sauce and scallion tips shredded to look like pieces of frisée. While these are eaten, the skinless bird is carved up and the meat passed around the table. I liked this little drama in two acts, but I did find the skinless, bunless meat to be a bit naked.

Although Chinese artistry in soup making cannot be doubted, and although I have had some excellent dessert soups over the years — fruit soups, mainly — I just don’t warm to the sweet red-bean soups that bring many a Chinese dinner to a close. Canton’s entry ($3) looked quite familiar, like muddy river water with bobbing unmentionables, and it tasted like what it was: cooked beans with some sugar added. I would recoil less, I think, if it weren’t served hot. Heat, on the other hand, became the shredded pork soup ($3.50), an early-on course made memorable by the ghostly intensity of dried scallops.

Canton is modestly if neatly fitted out, but the space is magisterial: as enormous as a ballroom, with a coffered glass ceiling and a far wall lined with aquariums in which the more alert members of the day’s catch await some sign that their turn is imminent. *

CANTON SEAFOOD AND DIM SUM RESTAURANT

Daily, 10:30 a.m.–9:30 p.m.

655 Folsom, SF

(415) 495-3064

www.cantonsf.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Comfortable noise level

Wheelchair accessible

Green City: A wiser Earth movement

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› amanda@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Have you ever wondered how many environmental and social justice nonprofits are really out there?

Noted local environmentalist Paul Hawken estimates there are at least one million and as many as 10 million do-gooder alliances throughout the world, toiling away at their local niche problems or tackling the grander crises of the day, staffed by volunteers sacrificing time and desperately trying to raise enough money and political will to rebuild from the ruins.

And while environmentalists often are derided — and even criticize themselves and their allies — for being too fractured, lacking focus and an overarching leadership, Hawken thinks that’s actually a good thing.

Hawken is the founder of the gardening and tool company Smith and Hawken and author of several books, including The Ecology of Commerce and Natural Capitalism (the latter with energy efficiency guru Amory Lovins). He runs the Sausalito research group Natural Capital Institute, and that is where the research began for his new book, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming.

Hawken attempted to quantify the entire environmental and social justice movement. He quickly realized its ever-shifting nature would make that impossible, and instead he’s qualified the movement into 414 taxonomies, from prison reform to chemical pollution, from ecopsychology to worker health and safety.

Blessed Unrest is both a history of environmental and social justice activism and an account of its modern efforts. Hawken traces the roots of the movement back to a meeting of a dozen abolitionists in 1787, identifying them as the first group of people who fought to better the lives of others they didn’t know. He lays bare the chilling truth that business owners then made the same economic arguments in support of slavery that corporations now make to justify the continued extraction of natural resources at the cost of human and planetary health.

Hawken contends that the environmental and social justice communities, despite their different objectives, actually function with the same core values. He thinks this plethora of small groups is a good thing and likens the overall movement to an immune system for the earth. The immunology of the human body became an even apter metaphor when he learned that the ability to heal doesn’t follow any top-down management but instead depends on cellular growth and change.

Now, rather than trying to count all the organizations, he’s invited them to account for themselves through WiserEarth (www.wiserearth.org), a Wikipedia-like database in which groups can post information and outreach.

"WiserEarth is a tool," Hawken told the Guardian. The "Wiser" part of the name is actually an acronym for World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility, and Hawken hopes activists use the site to pool scant resources and spread their rich loam of knowledge. It’s a place where philanthropists can find organizations of a similar ilk, and perhaps most important, the Web site reflects the real identity of a group that could never find a room big enough to host all its members.

"It brings more awareness of the scope and diversity of the movement," Hawken said. "You can see yourselves as part of a larger whole. That’s very assuring and helpful."

The Web site is only a couple of months old, but there are already 106,000 organizations listed, and it’s growing daily. At his public appearances, Hawken now stands in front of a large screen scrolling a list of all the names. "People cry when they see it," he said. "Repeatedly, everywhere I show it. And I don’t try to make it emotional. The reason, I think, is it’s a relief. The relief has to do with scale."

Fighting the good fight can feel like an exhausting, frustrating, and lonely battle, an overextended run of a play called David and Goliath that should have left the stage long ago. Hawken said he never imagines an audience for his books, and though this isn’t exactly a rallying cry, there is an affirmation coming across that flagging activists, freedom fighters, and friends of the earth need to hear: keep it up. And add your org to WiserEarth.*

Cemetery gates

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Perhaps the only nonzombie movie in recent memory in which the dead outnumber the living, Colma: The Musical did not appear to be a hot prospect when it premiered at last year’s San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. A musical suburban-youth angstfest made locally on a shoestring, starring and produced by no one you’ve heard of? A movie originally intended to be an indie concept album and a stage show? It is the nature of such things to be cute in theory and adorable in execution — but only if one is friends with the cast and crew. If not, it might prompt the type of frozen smile reserved for requests such as "Will you go with me to see my old college roomie play Evita?"

The high energy at the packed Kabuki Cinema for Colma‘s first big screening didn’t necessarily raise my expectations. So the cast and crew have a lot of friends, I thought. Add a decent percentage of the burg of Colma’s approximately 2,000 current residents — hey, I’d go see anything named after my hometown too — and indulgence could be counted on, no matter how lame or amateurish the movie turned out to be.

It’s normal to go a little nuts when something you expected to be so-so at best emerges as totally ingratiating instead. The worthy underdog is usually a little overrated; one current case in point is another movie musical, Once. But in the case of Colma: The Musical, over the past 15 months a number of newspaper writers and people at subsequent festivals have been as surprised and delighted as I was at that first screening. Now Richard Wong’s movie is at a theater near you — at least in San Francisco, with New York City and Los Angeles showings soon to come — and it’s possible it could become a feel-good sleeper around the nation. Like, well, Once.

Almost everywhere anyone grows up seems like Deadsville at the time, boredom being the glue that holds adolescence together. But of course in Colma, the Bay Area’s ruling burial site (breathing-to-decomposing ratio: 1 to 1,500), that notion is redundant. The protagonists of Colma: The Musical are three best friends who’ve just finished high school and have no idea what they’ll do with the rest of the week, let alone the rest of their lives. Equal parts awkward and deadpan, they love and torture one another as if going through naturally spazzy growth spurts.

Jug-eared Billy (Jake Moreno) is a wannabe actor and serial monogamist with the attention span of a gnat, so his head-over-heels crushes come as fast as reprises of the ironically titled lovesick song "Mature." His parents are weird, but at least they’re trying hard to relate to him, unlike the militarily stern widower dad of Rodel (scenarist, composer, and lyricist H.P. Mendoza), who does not react well when his son’s crackhead secret ex-boyfriend reveals Junior is a ‘mo. Much like Rodel, Maribel (L.A. Renigen) is privately crushing on Billy. Even though she’s an aspiring slut, she’s probably the most grounded of the three.

Crises happen, feelings are hurt, and production numbers are born. Two particularly resourceful, near-spectacular highlights of this $15,000 production are the drunken barroom kiss-off "Goodbye Stupid" and "Deadwalking," a wistful lament sung by Maribel and Rodel while innumerable white-gowned ladies and black-tied men waltz through one of Colma’s oldest cemeteries. The sassy humor at play is perhaps best defined by Mendoza piping the tune "One Day" to a car-alarm accompaniment. But nothing is quite so exhilarating as the opener, "Colma Stays" ("like rigor mortis"), a snarky anthem that introduces the Bay Area, the movie’s lead characters, and Colma‘s droll tenor in a sugar rush of split-screen, lip-synching joy.

Colma: The Musical was shot on mini-DV in a widescreen format, and in his first directorial feature, cinematographer-editor Wong already knows how to fill the screen and cut images to music with a genius simplicity that shames most Hollywood (even MTV) veterans. The filmic energy ideally complements performances that are deadpanned to perfect al dente density.

Irresistible at first listen, Colma: The Musical‘s songs haven’t held up quite as well as I’d hoped over the last year’s repeat listens on CD. But as someone who still treasures the ’80s college rock likes of Game Theory, Let’s Active, They Might Be Giants, and subsequent torch carriers, I’ll happily note that a musical that sounds like those groups rather than the usual bad MOR (a description applicable even to the pseudosoulful Dreamgirls and the garish top 40 pastiche Moulin Rouge) is a step in the right direction.

On the other hand, the movie has improved. Clocking in at a generous 113 minutes during its festival travels, Colma: The Musical has since been tightened to a lean 95 without losing poignancy, hilarity, or nuance. "Listen, things got outta hand, things were said, basically everybody’s at fault here," Rodel quasi-apologizes at a late point after an instance of much interpersonal ado about basically nada. The makers of Colma, by contrast, have made something remarkable from almost nothing. Their film is as sweet, funny, and dweeb-pop catchy as anything you’re going to see this year.*

COLMA: THE MUSICAL

Opens Fri/22

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

www.colmafilm.com“>

Editor’s Notes

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It’s Pride, and I’m going to shamelessly plug something. ‘Tis the season for shameless plugging! Whatever your orientation, take a break from strutting your sizzling stuff soon and visit the GLBT Historical Society on Mission Street (www.glbthistory.org). The archives are a treasure trove, and "Out Ranks," the current exhibition displaying the effects of queer soldiers from World War II through Iraq, is a must-see.

To my mind, the only place gays in the military belong is on a porn DVD — definitely not on an aircraft carrier deployed to Kuwait. But there are incredible personal stories in "Out Ranks," scattered among the crisp dress uniforms and bright blue dishonorable discharge papers, many faded to a trendy shade of robin’s egg.

Stories like that of Sylvia Rivera, a transgender woman drafted in 1967 who fought police at Stonewall. Or Helen Harder, a Women’s Army Air Corps member who signed up during WWII with her girlfriend (how hot is that?). The show also contains relics of queer antiwar protests, including a poster of a hunky, half-naked Jesus screaming, "Thou Shalt Not Kill!" Yummy.

Recently, board member Gerard Koskovich gave me a tour of the society’s archives, the largest collection of queer historiana in existence. He showed me underground newsletters for queeny World War I GIs and photo albums of ’70s lesbian weddings. There were boxes of flyers for ancient gay bars like the Anxious Asp and Fickle Pickle, Super 8 reels of street riots and disco dance floors — and a container holding Harvey Milk’s bullet-riddled clothing.

"Here’s a gown the first Gay Empress, José Sarria, wore," Gerard said, unfurling a brittle re-creation of Audrey Hepburn’s Ascot ensemble from My Fair Lady. Tears sprang to my eyes. "And that," he said, pointing to a nondescript sewing machine, "is what Gilbert Baker sewed the first Pride flag on."

I lost it. All that fabulousness up close was just too much. I bent down quickly, pretending to tie my shoelaces to hide my exploding sobs.

It was then that I realized I was wearing pumps.

Sequined pumps. Purple sequined pumps. I stared down in astonishment. A pair of leopard-print hose raced up my legs, blooming at my upper thighs into a dazzling Lycra minidress. Enormous pads sprouted from my shoulders, and my hair kinked out into a frizzy bleached mullet. Good lord, I was becoming Sylvester. I was riding a giant mirror ball through space. "Yooou make me feel!<\!s>/ Mii-ighty real!"

It was all a hallucination, of course. Family can make you do that, hallucinate. Love is a drug indeed. And the glittery fabric of history, despite its many bullet holes, still connects us all.*

Remove Jew now

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EDITORIAL Sup. Ed Jew should have resigned from the Board of Supervisors immediately after admitting to reporters that a May 18 FBI raid of his homes and offices recovered $40,000 in cash that he demanded from a constituent with regulatory issues.

Even if one believes his implausible story about intending to give the money to a playground project, Jew’s actions are still unethical, unseemly, and illegal. Politicians must never, under any circumstances, accept cash payments in exchange for services, and those who do belong in prison.

But he didn’t resign, choosing instead to put his personal ambition and stubborn refusal to take responsibility for his actions ahead of what’s best for the city and his constituents. Then, when public records and testimony from neighbors made it clear that Jew didn’t really live in District 4, as the law requires and as he declared in sworn statements under penalty of perjury, Jew should have been honest with the public instead of spinning still more elaborate and unbelievable lies. Again, he should have done the honorable thing and resigned.

But if the surreal rally his supporters staged June 15 at City Hall is any indication, Jew intends to keep fighting this until someone drags him from the building.

That’s what needs to happen now. It’s no longer about Jew but about whether a system designed to prevent these kinds of abuses works. People need to have their confidence in city government restored, and that requires immediate action by Mayor Gavin Newsom, Attorney General Jerry Brown, and the courts.

District Attorney Kamala Harris did her job when she investigated the residency issue and filed nine felony charges against Jew on June 12. City Attorney Dennis Herrera did his job when he set reasonable deadlines for Jew to prove his residency, then announced June 18 that he was pursuing action to remove Jew from office.

Now it’s Newsom’s turn. The time has come for him to do his job, and that means doing everything in his power to ensure that Jew is ejected from City Hall as soon as possible.

Same thing for Brown, who should immediately certify Herrera’s request to file a quo warranto lawsuit that would deem Jew unqualified for the office he holds and remove him. Whatever Superior Court judge gets the case should put this on the fast track and help give District 4 residents a qualified, reputable representative.

They don’t have that now. And until they do, there is a dark cloud hanging over City Hall that affects everyone inside. It’s time for Jew or the system to remove that cloud. *

Suburban stasis

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Colma is not Daly City. Apparently I’m the only San Franciscan who’s failed to comprehend the pronounced distinctions between these neighboring municipalities, outside the selection of merch at their respective Target stores. Daly City has Serramonte Center and the rows of houses made famous by Malvina Reynolds’s anthem to architectural sameness, "Little Boxes" (the song that opens Showtime’s fabulous stoned-in-suburbia sitcom, Weeds). Colma’s got car lots and a few square blocks of single-family dwellings, enough for the approximately 2,000 residents who live surrounded by a whopping 17 graveyards, most catering to specific ethnicities, if not deceased pets. According to the Colma civic Web site, the price of an average home here is a grounding $280,000. Necropolis is too harsh a word — there’s something truly adorable about a town whose official motto is "It’s great to be alive in Colma."

I learned this on a drive through the town with Richard Wong, the director of the wonderfully assured Colma: The Musical, a film that uses this unlikely and oddly ordinary community as a font of artistic inspiration. For Wong, who grew up in San Francisco, the burg recalls childhood trips to Toys "R" Us after visiting family tombstones at the Chinese cemetery. He brings me to the surprisingly expansive Colma Historical Association, a museum charting the town’s lore with binders on each of the memorial parks. Then we coast through the self-contained pocket of homes and the location where Rodel, one of the three restless, fresh high school grad protagonists of the film, fictionally resided. Wong notices a bit of improvement to the place — new brick-patterned siding spruces up the garage — and a couple of houses under construction at the end of the block. Other than that, nothing’s changed, he says.

"One of the inspirations for the film came from the idea of a small town — one that doesn’t really change much — next to one of the most progressive cities in the world," Wong remarks. "Colma is almost exactly the same as it was when the houses were first built."

Colma is a character in the movie — a collaboration with Wong’s college pal H.P. Mendoza, who wrote the script and songs and capably plays Rodel — whose opening musical number, "Colma Stays," is a peppy celebration of suburban stasis. It takes Wong’s expert use of split screen to enliven the carless boulevards and the encroaching sense of teenage ennui. (Befitting its location, Colma: The Musical does wonders with its garage-sale budget and rumpus-room laptop audio- and video-editing marathons.) Billy, another of the main characters, points to a rare new feature on the landscape: a just-built police station. It’s difficult to imagine the crimes the cops must contend with.

The film, however, vividly illustrates how three Colma youths occupy themselves: crashing generic college parties, working at the mall, and hitting the bars with fake IDs. (Wong had to excise a drug-use reference — another stereotypical suburban teen activity — in order to gain permission to shoot a moody musical number in the Italian cemetery.) The fog that envelopes Colma serves as an almost too-perfect metaphor for the insularity of dead-end streets, which engender the claustrophobia of neighborhood inertia in the characters. "There’s no conflict in their lives, and that’s the problem," Wong explains. "They just don’t have that much going on." With nothing to do, people can get bitter — or they get out. The two guys manage that — Rodel, shunned by his family because he’s queer, heads to New York to pursue his dream of being in the musical theater, while Billy, an aspiring actor, packs his car to move to San Francisco. Their female cohort Maribel, the tart character who holds them together, plans to stay — though her motivations are self-deprecatingly ambiguous.

There is a genre of suburban films that usually involves teen suicide, superdepressed moms, or scary skeletons in the linen closet. If this were a Larry Clark film, the kids would be shooting up or shooting themselves. If it were a John Hughes picture, there’d be prom-related antics in the McMansion. In Colma, they sing their suburban sorrows. Wong suggests his film might be a regional music-theater production of a suburban drama, and it’s a wacky idea that’s far more satisfying than you might expect.

Mendoza, in a phone conversation, admits that he prefers films that have some empathy for tract-house dwellers. He feels that Napoleon Dynamite sneers at its characters. "I did not want that for this. I find Colma endearing," he says. "This is not an indictment — it is a locale. We’re just portraying these kids saying it’s boring." Mendoza lived in Colma during his high school years, moving there after growing up in the Mission. "At that time, all the Filipino families moved to Daly City so their kids could go to Westmoor High."

While it finds comedy in the notion of living in a generically small locale, the film exudes an affably focused sense of place. Mendoza tells me that his best friend in high school cited a particular Colma cul-de-sac as his favorite place because it had a great view of the mall. He reveals his own beloved spot, an underpass at the intersection of an up-and-coming Filipino street and a dicey neighborhood. On the sloped, stagelike hill, Mendoza and his pals would have water-balloon fights and — "This is so gay," he warns — reenact scenes from Little Shop of Horrors. Given his movie, that makes wonderful sense.

The image also fits the satisfying, hometown-boys-make-good narrative of the film’s critical success. Since Colma: The Musical scored on the festival circuit, Wong has hooked up with the more seasoned director Wayne Wang, with whom he’s currently working. Future collaborations with Mendoza are imminent, including a Colma sequel: Serramonte: The Musical. That narrative will follow, in song, Maribel’s future in retail. As a career path, that may seem like a dead end, but for Wong and Mendoza, creating a movie about it affirms that their little town of graveyards is ripe with artistic joie de vivre.

The Muppets take San Francisco

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Be warned: the following is in no way a professional, measured critique of the career and oeuvre of one Jim Henson, master puppeteer, kiddie empire creator, and upcoming Yerba Buena Center for the Arts retrospective honoree. Oh, no. Below are the semicoherent ravings of a Muppet-philiac Henson fangirl. One whose first experience of the legitimate thea-tah was not The Pirates of Penzance but "Pigs in Space." One whose initial exposure to the ways of l’amour involved a pig and a frog getting it on after extensive rounds of bike riding and loaded sexual repartee. One who breaks into Muppet palsy — spastic flailings of staccato, head-wagging ecstasy — whenever she hears The Muppet Show siren song of "It’s time to play the music / It’s time to light the lights." One who, in her aggressively weird late teens, sported a sassy shag haircut dyed a deep shade of Grover blue because, perhaps, she secretly wished she were a Muppet.

And who could blame me, uh, her? After all, Muppets can do anything, and they usually have a good time doing it. These anarchic, orgiastic amalgams of felt, foam, and fun fur are investigative reporters, musicians, demolition experts, hack comics, boomerang-fish throwers, mad scientists, misunderstood performance artists, masters of the ancient art of ka-rah-tay, and so much more. Above all, they are vaudevillians with the incessant desire to entertain — just like their ingenious creator. Part Walt Disney (minus the Nazi sympathizing), part Groucho Marx — and looking like the cloned offspring of Lyle Lovett and Jesus Christ — the late Henson was nevertheless about as unassuming as they come. He is universally remembered as the nicest guy you’ve ever met (or, in my case, wish you had). But while his Muppets may have gained superstardom on Sesame Street, it may surprise some to know that cooperation didn’t always "make it happen" in Henson’s working relationships.

"We were very competitive with each other," director and longtime Henson collaborator Frank Oz (the voice of the inimitable Miss Piggy) admitted when I used a recent promotional tour for an Oz project as a chance to quiz him, quickly, about his Muppet past. "We put each other in lousy situations and tried to screw each other over." Of course, that’s not to say Henson was the Eve Harrington (as in All About Eve) of the puppet world. He valued collaboration with his fellow artists above all else; competition was a creative catalyst. "He appreciated everybody else’s work too," Oz, who calls Henson a "genius," clarifies. "There was a camaraderie, a great affection amongst all of us."

Henson’s creative fervor and Puritan work ethic helped make the Muppets a success, but so did his business acumen, something he leavened with that patented nice-guy attitude. "He really wanted everyone to be happy in a business deal," says Muppet performer (the Great Gonzo) and Marin resident Dave Goelz, who worked with Henson from the early ’70s until Henson’s sudden death from pneumonia in 1990. "The reason Jim was such a good businessman was very simple: people loved to work with him." Goelz, who will make appearances at the YBCA on June 21 and 22 to introduce "Muppets 101," fondly remembers the sense of community Henson fostered, having never experienced the tug-of-war that characterized Henson’s relationship with Oz.

The YBCA retrospective is thrillingly comprehensive, although it could be more cohesive. The three Muppet features being screened comprise what I like to call "the real original trilogy": 1979’s The Muppet Movie, 1981’s The Great Muppet Caper (viva Charles Grodin!), and 1984’s The Muppets Take Manhattan. Also included are assorted Muppet marginalia (Mike Douglas appearances, the infamous "Sex and Violence" Muppet Show pilot, some fantastic behind-the-scenes footage), forays into less kid-friendly puppetry (a betighted David Bowie in the Terry Jones–penned Labyrinth, the gloriously strange Dark Crystal), early commercial and experimental work, and later TV work like Fraggle Rock, the corny yet inspired (the Muppet modus operandi) ’30s gangster-movie send-up Dog City, and episodes of the gothic fairy-tale theater The Storyteller.

The Muppets aren’t lowering the stage curtain anytime soon. In addition to a planned Dark Crystal sequel, a Fraggle Rock movie is in the works. Disney bought the rights to the Muppets in 2004 (something, believe it or not, Henson was trying to make happen shortly before his death, recognizing that the juggernaut could give his franchise the protection it deserves). And the Jim Henson Co. continues to produce work in part inspired by Henson, like the film adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s MirrorMask. Still, no one has the gall to suggest it’s like it used to be. "Sammy Davis Jr. died on the same day," Oz notes. "There’s no other Sammy Davis Jr., and there’s no other Jim Henson."

Why exactly have the Muppets managed to endure? The answer, according to Goelz, is simple. "They are us," he says. "They describe a world that’s filled with conflict, but nonetheless they’re motivated by charity. It all came out of Jim’s philosophy. He believed that people are basically good, and he operated that way."

So it turns out I am a Muppet after all. The really good news, it seems, is that we all are. Corny? Maybe. But also pretty damn inspired.*

MUPPETS, MUSIC, AND MAGIC

June 21–July 1; $6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Screening Room

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

More cops are not enough

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EDITORIAL There was a telling trio of events June 13 that illustrated what’s wrong with the current debate over public safety issues in San Francisco and why real police reform is needed before we spend $33 million to bolster the ranks of the San Francisco Police Department, as Mayor Gavin Newsom is proposing.

Newsom and his supporters gathered on the steps of City Hall to blast a proposal by Sup. Chris Daly to remove from the budget an extra class of police cadets (which the SFPD will have a hard time even filling, given its recruiting problems) and make other changes, denouncing the supervisor for supposedly endangering city residents.

It was shrewd yet shortsighted politics for Newsom to grandstand on public safety. But it was also demagoguery. Newsom is playing to people’s fears, pandering to the Police Officers Association, and hoping that people won’t notice how little he’s done to actually make San Franciscans safer, something that simply dumping more cops into a dysfunctional system won’t help.

The murder rate has soared under Newsom, who never followed through on his promise to "change the culture at the SFPD," content to let this deeply troubled agency manage itself. Newsom opposed the requirement of police foot patrols, helped kill violence-prevention programs, watered down an early-intervention system for abusive officers, and sabotaged an innovative community policing plan. Instead, he simply throws money at the department, tells us how deeply he cares, and calls that a commitment to public safety.

On the evening of June 13, San Francisco once again experienced the price of this lack of leadership when four young men were shot in the Friendship Village public housing complex in the Western Addition, which the SFPD had promised to regularly patrol. To bring the tragic point home, there was another shooting at the same spot the next morning.

"Today I’m all over the mayor and all over the police chief and all over city agencies to give me a detailed plan," Sup. Ross Mirkarimi told Bay City News. As well he should be. For all its resources, the SFPD has yet to work with the community on a comprehensive plan for keeping it safe.

The SFPD’s wasteful overkill by cadres of do-nothing officers gets displayed for all time and again: at peace marches, street fairs (particularly last year’s Halloween in the Castro, where hordes of cops standing around doing nothing failed to catch the guy who shot nine people), and now Critical Mass, where the 40 cops who accompany it seem to have no plan for managing the event and refuse to even take reports when cars hit bikes.

How are more cops going to help this problem? What we need is real reform, but unfortunately, Newsom and his allies keep trying to give this department more authority and resources without asking for anything in exchange.

Case in point: a charter amendment by Sup. Sean Elsbernd that was heard June 13 at the Police Commission meeting. In the name of reducing the commission’s disciplinary backlog and improving officer morale, Elsbernd proposed gutting civilian police oversight by handing the police chief much of the power now held by the commission and the Office of Citizen Complaints. The proposal was blasted by the OCC and the American Civil Liberties Union as a giant step backward.

Elsbernd tells us he’s working with those groups to maintain civilian oversight while accomplishing his goal of allowing the commission to focus on big policy issues rather than individual disciplinary actions. We’re not sure that’s possible without the establishment of a new body or substantially more resources going to the underfunded OCC.

But we do share his goal of creating an open, public dialogue about the SFPD within an agency that has the authority to implement reforms. Newsom has been unwilling to facilitate a frank public discussion of the SFPD’s practices, where they can be improved, and how much money the department really needs to do the job we want it to do.

Maybe the Police Commission, under progressive new chair Theresa Sparks, is just the place to talk about real police reform. *

Newsom cuts poverty programs

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Mayor Gavin Newsom is publicly claiming to support the city’s poor and homeless, but his budget would quietly cut 4 percent from the Department of Public Health’s annual funding, eliminating key support services to the city’s most vulnerable residents.

What the mayor calls his "back-to-basics budget" would double the number of outreach workers for his signature Homeless Connect program and establish a community court to punish "quality-of-life crimes" as they occur, but it also would cut substance-abuse and mental-health services, close homeless shelters, and eliminate funding to various services for the poor.

"It’s probably the most hypocritical and damaging budget for the city’s homeless and poor that we’ve seen in years," Juan Prada, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, told the Guardian. "We have all this new money going to a community court system to force people into treatment programs that he’s defunding."

Now the budget is in the hands of the Board of Supervisors, which is hearing appeals from health care advocates and people who depend on such services to survive. Some say this is a familiar game. Debbi Lerman, administrator for the San Francisco Human Services Network, says that every year the mayor recommends such cuts and the supervisors restore the funding.

"It’s a dance. Everyone has to go to the Health Commission, everyone has to go to the board. It’s a dance we have to go through every year," Lerman told us. "It’s frustrating. It’s exhausting. It’s a bad process and we shouldn’t have to do it…. What the city needs is a long-term planning process."

Even Sup. Bevan Dufty, a Budget and Finance Committee member likely to be a swing vote between the mayor’s budget and the demands of board progressives, calls the process of cutting and restoring funding a "fire drill" in which people who depend on city services are forced to come out and comment in front of the board.

"It’s difficult and disheartening to see people in fragile health being forced to come to the board to petition us to restore funding to services that are a lifeline for them," Dufty told us. "This board has not accepted cuts to health programs even in difficult years, and I don’t anticipate that we are going to accept any this year."

But if the board cannot find additional funding, many programs that were at risk in past years could be eliminated or weakened. One new cut would eliminate $1.1 million in funding for Buster’s Place, a drop-in homeless center on 13th Street. James Stillwell, Alcohol and Drug Program administrator for the DPH, told us the department provided the seed money to open that shelter in March. Now the shelter is scheduled to close at the end of June.

The mayor’s budget also would cut 150 outpatient and residential treatment slots for substance abusers and replace them with a methadone van for recovering heroin addicts, with a $1.3 million net reduction in services. Larry Nelson, managing director of Walden House, which likely would lose some funding if those cuts go through, told us that more methadone treatment is needed but it should not come at the cost of other services.

"I personally was on methadone for nine years. I’m an advocate. It’s a great tool in this war on drugs, but it’s not a great idea to cut one service to fund another," Nelson said. "Methadone treatment is long-term. Way more clients will be served with standard outpatient programs."

Newsom press secretary Nathan Ballard didn’t directly address the Guardian‘s questions on the mayor’s proposed cuts, focusing only on new initiatives: "In the area of substance abuse, the budget proposes $525,000 to expand existing partnerships and foster new alliances to provide an additional 50 emergency and stabilization beds for the city’s homeless."

Prada said Newsom’s budget is vague on how it intends to meet such goals with reduced funding. One thing poverty advocates and the budget numbers make clear is that the mayor is proposing significantly reduced resources for the poor, homeless, and drug addicted — money that he wants to divert to police, street cleaning, and other "back-to-basics" proposals. (Chris Albon)

The budget’s opening battle

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› sarah@sfbg.com

Mayor Gavin Newsom and Sup. Chris Daly have been engaged in a high-profile clash over city budget priorities in recent weeks. Newsom appeared to win the latest battle when he galvanized an unlikely coalition and Daly clashed with some of his progressive allies, prompting Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin to remove Daly on June 15 as chair of the Budget and Finance Committee.

"This is not about personality, and it shouldn’t be about the mayor’s race. It should be about making sure we have a good budget," Peskin told the Guardian shortly before announcing that he would be taking over as Budget and Finance chair just as the committee was beginning work on approving a budget by July 1.

Yet this latest budget battle was more about personalities and tactical errors than it was about the larger war over the city’s values and spending, areas in which it’s far too early for the Newsom camp to declare victory. The reality is that Newsom’s "back-to-basics budget" — which would increase spending for police and cityscape improvements and cut health services and affordable-housing programs — is still likely to be significantly altered by the progressives-dominated Board of Supervisors.

In fact, while the recent showdown between Newsom and Daly may have been diffused by Daly’s removal as Budget and Finance chair, it’s conceivable that a clash between Newsom and the supervisors is still on the horizon. After all, eight supervisors voted for a $28 million affordable-housing supplemental that Newsom refused to sign, and the mayor could yet be forced to decide whether to sign a budget that lies somewhere between his vision and Daly’s.

Stepping back from recent events and the supercharged rhetoric behind them, a Guardian analysis of the coming budget fight shows that there are difficult and highly political choices to be made that could have profound effects on what kind of city San Francisco becomes.

If Daly wanted to spark a productive dialogue on whether the mayor’s budget priorities are in the best interests of the city, he probably didn’t go about it in the right way. But the approach seemed to be born of frustration that the mayor was refusing to implement a duly approved program for an important public need.

Daly has argued that when he introduced his $28 million affordable-housing supplemental in March, he thought it would be "noncontroversial." Last year the board approved and Newsom signed a $54 million supplemental budget, including $20 million in affordable-housing funds. Daly wrote on his blog that he hoped his latest $28 million request would help "stem the tide of families leaving San Francisco, decrease the number of people forced to live on the streets, and help elders live out their days with some dignity."

But Newsom objected, first criticizing Daly in the media for submitting it too late, then refusing to spend money that had been approved by a veto-proof majority, with only his supervisorial allies Sean Elsbernd, Michela Alioto-Pier, and Ed Jew opposed. Daly pushed back against what he loudly labeled the mayor’s "backdoor veto," which he considered illegal.

"You may not believe the question of affordable housing and affordability is more important than redesigning the city’s Web site or perhaps installing cameras in police cars or fixing a pothole, but to say that the money does not exist is a lie," Daly said at a board meeting.

So when Newsom submitted his final budget June 1, Daly proposed restoring the funding and taking away $37 million from what he called the mayor’s "pet projects." His suggestion triggered a political firestorm, since his targets included a wide array of programs, including $700,000 for a Community Justice Center, $3 million for one police academy class, $10.6 million for street repairs and street trees, $2.1 million to expand the Corridors street cleaning program, and $500,000 for a small-business-assistance center. In their place, Daly argued, the city would be able to restore funds cut from affordable housing, inpatient psychiatric beds, and services for people with AIDS.

In addition to uniting against him those constituencies whose funding he targeted, Daly’s proposed cuts in law enforcement — and his brash, unilateral approach to the issue — threatened to cost him the support of Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, a progressive with public safety credentials who represents the crime-plagued Western Addition. So it was a precarious situation that became a full-blown meltdown once the Newsom reelection campaign started phone banks and e-mail blasts accusing Daly of endangering public safety and subverting the normal budget process.

Pretty soon, with Daly’s enemies smelling blood in the water, it became a sort of feeding frenzy, and various groups urged their members to mobilize for a noon rally before the June 13 Budget and Finance Committee meeting. "We are a sleeping giant that has awakened," small-business advocate Scott Hauge claimed as he e-mailed other concerned stakeholders, who happened to include Friends of the Urban Forest and public housing activists, thanks to Daly’s call for a $5 million cut in Newsom’s Hope SF plan, which would rebuild public housing projects by allowing developers to also build market-rate condos at the sites.

"Mirkarimi seems to feel strongly about having cops and infrastructure, which are typically the priorities of conservatives," Daly told the Guardian as he announced plans to cancel the June 13 budget hearing, which he did after accusing Newsom of engaging in illegal electioneering.

Daly also accused Newsom of abusing his power by securing the City Hall steps for a budget rally at the same time, date, and place that Daly believed his team had secured — a mess-up city administrator Rohan Lane explained to us as "an unfortunate procedural thing."

But while Daly told us he "needed to hear from progressives who enjoy diversity, because if we don’t get more affordable housing dollars, San Francisco is going to become increasingly white, wealthy, and more conservative," all anyone could hear the next day was a pro-Newsom crowd chanting, "No, Supervisor Daly, no!" outside City Hall.

Newsom spoke at the rally and claimed that Daly’s proposal to cut $5 million from Hope SF would eliminate "$95 million in local money to help rebuild San Francisco’s most distressed public housing," a figure that includes the bond issue Newsom is proposing. With the 700 to 900 market-rate units included in the program, Newsom claims the cuts will cost the city $700 million in housing.

"Stop the balkanization of San Francisco!" Rev. Al Townsend roared, while Housing Authority Commissioner Millard Larkin said, "People are living in housing not fit for animals. Protect policies that give people a decent place to live."

"This is about your priorities," Newsom said as he made the case that fixing potholes, sweeping streets, and putting more cops on the beat are now San Francisco’s top concerns.

"I’ve never seen this type of disrespect to the public process," Newsom said, addressing a crowd that included a couple of Daly supporters holding "Homelessness is not a crime" signs alongside people dressed as trees, a dozen people in orange "Newsom ’07" shirts, Newsom campaign operative Peter Ragone, and former Newsom-backed supervisor candidates Doug Chan and Rob Black (the latter of whom who lost to Daly and now works for the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce).

"Gavin Newsom’s budget reflects that he has been listening to you. It’s not something he has dreamed up is his ivory tower," Townsend said, while Kelly Quirke, executive director of Friends of the Urban Forest, pointed out that Daly’s proposal would mean the 1,500 trees that the Department of Public Works planted this year "would not be watered," and Police Commissioner Yvonne Lee said the proposal would "eliminate 50 new officers that could be on streets, plus a $400,000 system to identify the source of gunfire."

What Newsom’s supporters didn’t mention was that his proposed budget, which would add $33 million for the Police Department to help get more officers on the streets and pay existing officers more, also would drastically shift the city’s housing policies by transferring about $50 million from existing affordable-housing and rental-support programs into spending on home ownership and development of market-rate units. And that comes as the city is losing ground on meeting a goal in the General Plan’s Housing Element of making more than 60 percent of new housing affordable for low-income residents.

Daly doesn’t think people fully understand the implications of Hope SF and said public hearings are needed so they "can understand it better." Yet the Newsom rally still touted the mayor’s concern for those in public housing projects.

"We’re not interested in rebuilding unless the tenants are supportive," Doug Shoemaker of the Mayor’s Office of Housing told the Guardian, promising that existing public housing units will be replaced "on a one-to-one basis" and noting that 85 affordable rentals, along with 40 to 50 units for first-time home buyers at a below-market rate (for a household of two with an income of about $58,000 annually) and hundreds of market-rate condos, will be built.

"The market-rate condos will cross-subsidize the rebuilding of public housing," said Shoemaker, who claims that the "lumpiness of the mayor’s budget" — in which home-ownership funding increases by $51 million, while programs benefiting the homeless and senior and families renters appear to have been cut by $48 million — "is best understood over the long term" and is related to the redevelopment projects in Bayview–Hunters Point and Mission Bay.

"The hardest thing about explaining these figures is that it sounds like a game of three-card rummy, but we need to fuel whatever is coming down the pipeline," he said.

The confusing fight over affordable housing has even split its advocates. Coleman Advocates for Children and Their Families publicly urged Daly not to hold Hope SF funds hostage to his housing supplemental, while the Family Budget Coalition urged Newsom and the supervisors to "work together to find at least $60 million during the add-back process to prioritize affordable housing."

But with Daly gone from the Budget and Finance Committee, how will his proposals and priorities fare? Sources say Peskin was irritated with Daly’s budget fight and his recent Progressive Convention — both actions not made in consultation with colleagues — as well as his increasingly public spat with Mirkarimi. Yet Peskin publicly has nothing but praise for Daly and supports many of his priorities.

"We are working with the same schedule that Daly’s office laid out," Peskin said, noting that a lot of the decisions about funding will depend on "what ends up coming from the state." San Francisco could still lose money from the state or federal budget. During a June 18 budget hearing, Sup. Bevan Dufty introduced a motion to amend the mayor’s interim budget by appropriating $4 million for HIV/AIDS services, to be funded by General Fund reserves, for use by the Department of Public Health.

This was one of Daly’s top priorities, and as the hearing proceeded, it became clear that there was a method in the former chair’s apparent budget-dance madness. Newsom’s budget would restore $3.8 million of the $9 million in AIDS grants lost from federal sources, with Newsom asking Congress to backfill the remaining reductions to the Ryan White Care grant. Sup. Sean Elsbernd questioned the wisdom of appropriating $4 million now, when the feds may yet cough up, and Mirkarimi questioned whether doing so would send Washington the message that it doesn’t need to help us.

"It’s a discussion we have every year," Controller Ed Harrington said. He recommended appropriating $4 million now and sending the following message: "Yes, we think this is important, we’ll try and figure out how to fix it, but this shows it isn’t easy. It’s a political call rather than a technical one."

In the end, the Budget and Finance Committee voted 3–1, with Sup. Tom Ammiano (the only supervisor to publicly support Daly’s alternative budget) absent and Elsbernd dissenting, to appropriate $4 million, on the condition that if additional federal and state funds are granted to backfill the Ryan White Care grant, the controller will transfer the $4 million augmentation back to the General Fund.

The same kind of balancing act is expected on Daly’s other suggestions to restore funding for affordable housing and public health departments, so it’s still too early to tell whether his priorities might ultimately win the war after losing the battle.*

Steven T. Jones contributed to this report.

For more details on the city budget process and a schedule of Budget and Finance Committee meetings, visit www.tiny.cc/BJRSN.

Flipping for Pride

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› culture@sfbg.com

It isn’t easy being a male cheerleader. Never mind that any cheerleading above the junior high school level requires not only coordination, commitment, skill, and athleticism but also just plain balls. Cheerleading carries a stigma of being fluffy, froofy, and effeminate: if sports were food, many people would consider cheerleading cotton candy. And that’s just for women. God forbid you should have a Y chromosome and think it might be fun to do back tucks, throw people into the air, or dance in sync with 20 other people. If you’re a spirit-squad hetero, you probably spend all your time proving it. And if you’re gay? Better bone up on those self-defense classes — and then get ready for your career as a wisecracking, flamboyant sitcom roommate.

That is, unless you’re a member of CHEER SF, the world’s first and longest-running LGBT-identified cheerleading squad. Yes, you’ve seen them at practically every major queer-oriented event, but what do you really know about them? Though the all-volunteer squad is officially coed, its makeup of more than 30 members now tends to be 75 percent male, and most of them are gay — CHEER SF started in 1980, in fact, as an all-gay male squad of five members. Even more important, they’re serious cheerleaders, performing gravity-defying stunts, remarkably syncopated dance moves, awe-inspiring gymnastics, and all. Volunteers are asked to make a one-year commitment, show up for three-hour rehearsals every Tuesday, and promise to perform 10 times a year (with another 20 events optional). Not to mention the financial investment: polyester performance uniforms, plus T-shirts, shorts, and shoes, which can add up to $400 before cheer camp and travel costs.

No, this is no swishy, ironic version of Will Ferrell’s famous SNL skits. This is the kind of squad that, if you saw them compete on CNN, would make you go, "Holy crap, they’re amazing."

I BELIEVE I CAN FLY


Look closely and you’ll see something else that sets CHEER SF apart, aside from its dude-to-dudette ratio: inclusiveness of ethnicities, sizes, ages, and gender identifications. And if you have any familiarity with cheerleading, you’d notice something else unusual: men in the air.

In traditional cheerleading, men and women have traditional roles. Men are bases and tumblers, valued for strength and stability. Women are fliers and dancers, valued for lightness and cuteness in a short skirt. Not so with CHEER SF, which has been sending men into the air for 20 years. The result is not only revolutionary — something that, like sideways haircuts and oversize sunglasses, the mainstream has finally picked up on way after the gay community discovered it — but also spectacular.

"Guys that fly, they’re awesome," said main choreographer and creative director Morgan Craig, a former dancer and gymnast who joined the squad after he was handed a flyer in the Castro 16 years ago. "Right now, one of our male fliers does a double full basket."

I’m not touching that comment with a 10-inch pole.

Of course, not all guys can, or want to, fly. That’s why women were invited to join the squad eight years ago: there just weren’t enough small men who wanted to be thrown into the air to execute collegiate-level stunts. Now, with a coed squad, CHEER SF gets the best of both worlds: female fliers with their natural lightness, as well as male fliers, who tend to be stronger and also carry their weight in different places — making for different and often more daring stunts.

WE’RE HERE, WE CHEER


So who are these people? Former cheerleaders, dancers, and athletes. Those with experience and those with the desire to get some. People who make cheer their life, like Craig, who coaches high school and all-star teams, teaches tumbling for cheerleaders, and mixes cheer music (!) for a living. And people who hold down noncheer day jobs, like 49-year-old Steve Burke, who works as a vocational rehabilitation counselor.

"My life is doing good things and getting paid for it and doing good things and not getting paid for it," he said.

Oh yeah. Did I mention one tiny detail? CHEER SF saves lives. Its mission is to raise money to help those with HIV, AIDS, cancer, and other life-challenging diseases. Some proceeds come from performance fees (CHEER SF has performed everywhere from Singapore to San Diego), but most are donations dropped in the "spirit bucket" passed around at every performance. In its 27-year history, the group has raised nearly $100,000, Burke said, "mostly one dollar at a time." This year, it expects to make its largest donation ever — more than $30,000.

Burke said the do-gooding is the primary reason CHEER SF is just as fun, if not more, as the cheering he did at Sacramento State in 1980. Back then "you were out there supporting your teams and your school, and that was really rewarding," he said. "But with CHEER SF, everybody’s our team."

SPIRIT FINGERS!


As for the current state of men in cheerleading, Burke and Craig say it isn’t as bad as it used to be, thanks in large part to Bring It On (a.k.a. the Best Movie Ever) and regular CNN coverage of cheerleading competitions, which bring to light just how cool — and difficult and dangerous — cheerleading can be.

But with charity cheer squads modeled off CHEER SF popping up all over the country, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say our local LGBT-identified team has had something to do with heating up the cheerleading climate too.

As Burke said, "Cheerleading can change the world."<\!s>*

www.cheersf.org

www.myspace.com/CHEERSF

The Queer Issue: Pride event listings

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› culture@sfbg.com

PERFORMANCES AND EVENTS

WEDNESDAY 20

“Out with ACT” American Conservatory Theatre, 415 Geary; 749-2228, www.act-sf.or. 8pm, $17.50-$73.50. ACT presents this new series for gay and lesbian theater lovers, including a performance of Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid and a reception with complimentary wine and a meet and greet with the actors. Mention “Out with ACT” when purchasing your tickets.

“Queer Wedding Sweet” Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, 3200 California; 438-9933, www.jccsf.org/arts. 8pm, $36. The JCCSF presents the West Coast premiere of Queer Wedding Sweet, an “exploration of queer weddings and commitment ceremonies through stories, song, juggling, and comedy.” Featured performers include Adrienne Cooper, Sara Felder, Marilyn Lerner, Frank London, and Lorin Sklamberg.

BAY AREA

“Queer Cabaret” Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; (510) 841-6500, www.shotgunplayers.org. 8pm, $15-20. Big City Improv, Jessica Fisher, and burlesque dancers Shaunna Bella and Claire Elizabeth team up for an evening of queer performance celebrating Pride. Proceeds will go to the Shotgun Players’ Solar Campaign.

“Tea N’ Crisp” Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; (510) 841-6500, www.shotgunplayers.org. 8pm, $25. Richard Louis James stars as gay icon Quentin Crisp in the Shotgun Players’ production of this Pride Week tribute.

THURSDAY 21

“Here’s Where I Stand” First Unitarian Church and Center, 1187 Franklin, SF; (415) 865-2787, www.sfgmc.org. 8pm, $15-45. The world’s first openly LGBT music ensemble will be kicking off Pride Week with a range of music from Broadway to light classical. Includes performances by the Lesbian/Gay Chorus of San Francisco, San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, and the San Francisco Lesbian/Gay Freedom Band. Concert also takes place same time on Sat/22.

“Thursday Night Live” Eagle, 398 12th St, SF; (415) 625-0880, www.sfeagle.com. 1pm, $10. Support Dykes on Bikes at their 30th anniversary Beer/Soda Bust and catch these glitzy vixens as they share the stage with Slapback.

Veronica Klaus and Her All-Star Band Jazz at Pearl’s, 256 Columbus, SF; (415) 291-8255, www.jazzatpearls.com. 8 and 10pm, $15. The all-star lineup features Daniel Fabricant, Tom Greisser, Tammy L. Hall, and Randy Odell.

FRIDAY 22

“Glam Gender” Michael Finn Gallery, 814 Grove; 573-7328. 7-10pm. This collaboration between photographer Marianne Larochelle and art director Jose Guzman-Colon, a.k.a. Putanesca, kicks off Pride Weekend by celebrating San Francisco’s queer art underground.

Pride Concert Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission. SF; 7 and 9pm, Copresented by the Lesbian/Gay Chorus of San Francisco and the San Francisco Lesbian/Gay Freedom Band, this 29th annual Pride concert promises to be a gay time for all.

San Francisco Trans March Dolores Park, 18th St and Dolores; 447-2774, www.transmarch.org. 3pm stage, 7pm march; free. Join the transgender community of San Francisco and beyond for a day of live performances, speeches, and not-so-military marching.

BAY AREA

Queer Stuff Pride Talent Showcase Home of Truth Spiritual Center, 1300 Grand, Alameda; 1-888-569-2064, www.queerstuffenterprises.com. 7:30pm, $8. This showcase features the music of Judea Eden and Friends, Amy Meyers, and True Magrit, plus the comedy of Karen Ripley.

SATURDAY 23

Dykes on Bikes Fundraiser Eagle, 398 12th St, SF; (510) 712-7739, www.twilightvixen.com. 1pm. Twilight Vixen Revue will perform at the beer bust at the Eagle. Stop by before heading to the march.

LGBT Pride Celebration Civic Center, Carlton B. Goodlett Place and McCallister, SF; (415) 864-3733, www.sfpride.org. Noon-6pm, free. Celebrate LGBT pride at this free outdoor event featuring DJs, speakers, and live music. This is the first half of the weekend-long celebration sponsored by SF Pride. Also Sun/24.

Mission Walk 18th St and Dolores, SF; (503) 758-9313, www.ebissuassociates.com. 11am, free. Join in on this queer women’s five-mile walk through the Mission.

Pink Triangle Installation Twin Peaks Vista, Twin Peaks Blvd parking area, SF; (415) 247-1100, ext 142, www.thepinktriangle.com. 7-11am, free. Bring a hammer and your work boots and help install the giant pink triangle atop Twin Peaks for everyone to see this Pride Weekend. Stay for the commemoration ceremony at 10:30am.

“Remembering Lou Sullivan: Celebrating 20 Years of FTM Voices” San Francisco LGBT Center, Ceremonial Room, 1800 Market, SF; (415) 865-5555, www.sfcenter.org. 6-8pm, free. This presentation celebrates the life of Louis Graydon Sullivan, founder of FTM International and an early leader in the transgender community.

“Qcomedy Showcase” Jon Sims Center, 1519 Mission, SF; (415) 541-5610, www.qcomedy.com. 8pm, $8-15. A stellar cast of San Francisco’s funniest queer and queer-friendly comedians performs.

San Francisco Dyke March Dolores Park, Dolores at 18th St, SF; www.dykemarch.org. 7pm, free. Featuring Music from Binky, Nedra Johnson, Las Krudas, and more, plus a whole lot of wacky sapphic high jinks.

SUNDAY 24

LGBT Pride Celebration Civic Center, Carlton B. Goodlett Place and McCallister, SF; (415) 864-3733, www.sfpride.org. Noon-7pm, free. The celebration hits full stride, with musical performances and more.

LGBT Pride Parade Market at Davis to Market at Eighth St, SF; (415) 864-3733, www.sfpride.org. 10:30am-noon, free. With 200-plus dykes on bikes in the lead, this 36th annual parade, with an expected draw of 500,000, is the highlight of the Pride Weekend in the city that defines LGBT culture.

CLUBS AND PARTIES

WEDNESDAY 20

“Gay Pride in the Mix” Eureka Lounge, 4063 18th St, SF; (415) 431-6000, e.stanfordalumni.org/clubs/stanfordpride/events.asp. 7-9pm, no cover. An intercollegiate LGBT mixer in an upscale environment, with drink and appetizer specials available. Alumni from Ivy League and Seven Sisters schools, Stanford, MIT, and UC Berkeley welcome.

Hellraiser Happy Hour: “Pullin’ Pork for Pride” Pilsner Inn, 225 Church, SF; (415) 621-7058. 5:30-8pm, free. The Guardian‘s own Marke B. will be pullin’ pork and sticking it between hot buns with the help of the crew from Funk N Chunk. You might win tickets to the National Queer Arts Festival, but really, isn’t having your pork pulled prize enough?

THURSDAY 21

“A Celebration of Diversity” Box, 628 Divisadero, SF. 9pm-2am, $20. Join Page Hodel for the return of San Francisco’s legendary Thursday night dance club the Box for one night only, sucka!

Crack-a-Lackin’ Gay Pride Mega Party Crib, 715 Harrison, SF; (415) 749-2228. 9:30pm-3am, $10. Features live stage performances and, according to the press release, “tons of surprises.” I’m not sure how much a surprise weighs, so I don’t know how many surprises it takes to add up to a ton. It’s one of those “how many angels fit on the head of a pin?” things.

“Gay Disco Fever” Lexington Club, 3464 19th St, SF; (415) 863-2052, www.lexingtonclub.com. 9pm-2am. I can’t figure out who does what at this event. Courtney Trouble and Jenna Riot are listed as hosts, and Campbell and Chelsea Starr are the DJs, which I guess makes drag king Rusty Hips “Mr. Disco” and Claire and Shaunna the “Disco Queens.” It takes a village to raise a nightclub. That’s a whole lotta fabulousness under one roof.

“Girlezque SF” Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell, SF; www.myspace.com/girlezquesf. 9pm, $10-15. This supposedly sophisticated burlesque party for women features the erotic stylings of AfroDisiac, Sparkly Devil, Rose Pistola, and Alma, with after-party grooves by DJ Staxx. Hopefully, it’s not too sophisticated &ldots;

Pride Party Lexington Club, 3464 19th St, SF; (415) 863-2052, www.lexingtonclub.com. 9pm-2am, free. Make this no-cover throwdown your first stop as you keep the march going between the numerous after-parties.

FRIDAY 22

Bustin’ Out II Trans March Afterparty El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF; (415) 510-677-5500. 9pm-2am, $5-50, sliding scale. Strut your stuff at the Transgender Pride March’s official after-party, featuring sets from DJs Durt, Lil Manila, and Mel Campagna and giveaways from Good Vibes, AK Press, and more. Proceeds benefit the Trans/Gender Variant in Prison Committee.

Cockblock SF Pride Party Fat City, 314 11th St, SF; (415) 568-8811. 9pm, $6. DJs Nuxx and Zax spin homolicious tunes and put the haters on notice: no cock-blockin’ at this sweaty soiree.

“GIRLPRIDE” Sound Factory, 525 Harrison, SF; (415) 647-8258. 9pm-4am, $20. About 2,500 women are expected to join host Page Hodel to celebrate this year’s Pride Weekend, and that’s a whole lotta love.

Mr. Muscle Bear Cub Contest and Website Launch Party Lone Star Saloon, 1354 Harrison, SF; (415) 978-9986. 11pm, $19.95. Join contestants vying for the title of spokesmodel of Muscle Bear Cub. The winner receives $500 cash and a lifetime supply of Bic razors. Don’t shave, Bear Cub! Don’t you ever shave!

Uniform and Leather Ball SF Veterans War Memorial, 401 Van Ness, Green Room, SF; www.sfphx.org. 8pm-midnight, $60-70. The men’s men of the Phoenix Uniform Club want you to dress to the fetish nines for this 16th annual huge gathering, featuring Joyce Grant and the City Swing Band and more shiny boots than you can lick all year. Yes, sirs!

SATURDAY 23

“Old School Dance” Cafè Flore, 2298 Market at Noe, SF; (415) 867-8579. 8pm-2am, free. Get down old-school style at the Castro’s annual Pink Saturday street party, with sets from DJs Ken Vulsion and Strano, plus singer Moon Trent headlining with a midnight CD release party for Quilt (Timmi-Kat Records).

Pride Brunch Hotel Whitcomb, 1231 Market, SF; (415) 777-0333, www.positiveresource.org. 11am-2pm, $75-100. Honor this year’s Pride Parade grand marshals: four hunky cast members from the TV series Noah’s Arc; Marine staff sergeant Eric Alva, the first American wounded in Iraq; and Jan Wahl, Emmy winner and owner of many funky hats.

“Puttin’ on the Ritz” San Francisco Design Center Galleria, 101 Henry Adams, SF; (650) 343-0543, www.puttinontheritzsf.com. 8pm-2am, $85. Bump your moneymaker at this all-lady event. Incidentally, the performer who brought “Puttin’ on the Ritz” back to popularity on early ’80s MTV was none other than Taco.

“Queen” Pier 27, SF; www.energy927fm.com. 9pm, $45. Energy 92.7 brings back the dynamism of the old-school San Francisco clubs for this Pride dance-off. Peaches and Princess Superstar headline. Wear your best tear-away sweats and get ready to get down, Party Boy style.

“Rebel Girl” Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell, SF; wwww.rebelgirlsf.com. 9pm-2am, $10. Rebel Girl brings the noise for this one, with go-go dancers, Vixen Creations giveaways, drink specials, and, you know, rebel girls.

“Sweat Special Pride Edition” Lexington Club, 3464 19th St, SF; (415) 863-205, www.lexingtonclub.com. 9pm-2am, free. DJ Rapid Fire spins you right round round with a sweaty night of dancing and grinding.

SUNDAY 24

Dykes on Bikes Afterparty Lexington Club, 3464 19th St, SF; (415) 863-2052, www.lexingtonclub.com. Noon, free. How do they find time to ride with all these parties?

“Gay Pride” Bambuddha Lounge, 601 Eddy, SF; (415) 864-3733, www.juanitamore.com. 3pm, $25. Juanita More! hosts this benefit for the Harvey Milk City Hall Memorial, with a DJs Derek B, James Glass, and fancy-pants New York City import Kim Ann Foxman. It also includes an appearance from silicone wonder Miss Gina LaDivina. Fill ‘er up, baby!

“Pleasuredome Returns” Porn Palace, 942 Mission, SF; (415) 820-1616, www.pleasuredomesf.com. 9pm, $20. You have to get tickets in advance for the onetime reopening of the dome in the Porn Palace’s main dungeon room. When you’re done dancing, visit the jail, bondage, or barn fantasy rooms and make that special someone scream “Sooo-eeeee!”

The Queer Issue: Back to the future?

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I’m supposed to meet my editor, Marke B., to talk about this piece at noon at some cheap Mission restaurant that won’t bankrupt my lousy checking account. I arrive 15 minutes late; he’s running at least 30 behind. As I sit and wait for him, I can’t help but laugh — queers are always late. As a queer with a drag-queen alter ego, Felicia Fellatio, I know this is especially true — that hoary old chestnut about "running on drag time" has the ring of solid validity. Trannies are like Muni: we’re never on time.

But a growing body of scholarly queer literature suggests that the underlying cause of our tardiness may be more than simply wanting to be fashionably late. In fact, our predictable lack of punctuality might be a symptom of what many psychologists see as the gay community’s prolonged adolescence; there may be a sense of time unique to homos that exists outside heterosexual norms.

WIND IT UP


Put simply, queer temporality theory says that because our lives can’t be completely legally or socially mapped out according to the heterosexual model (getting married, having kids, sharing retirement benefits, expecting inheritance), we feel less pressure to conform to other aspirations (completing a degree, saving for a house, planning retirement) in the stereotypical Game of Hetero Life. Basically, tardiness is a form of subconscious queer rebellion. This can manifest itself as a rejection of all schedules, however quotidian. It can also lead to a profoundly different view of what the future means to queer people, especially in terms of freedom of choice. Well-known queer theorist Judith Halberstam elaborates on this theory, from a transgender point of view, in her book In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York University Press, 2005).

Some studies also posit that, because many of us grappled with the whole coming-out thing at the same time we were going through puberty, our adolescent maturation period was extended, thus stretching out our psychological development — and effectively slowing down our mental clocks. We just need more time to process things and act on them. Other queer temporality theories focus on the psychological effects of AIDS, which instilled in our community a sense of imminent mortality that negated the future and focused our attention on the present. Rather than making decisions based on what may be, we began to concentrate on what is, creating art and culture that offered immediate transcendence through humor and rage, rather than any abstract hope for the future. "AIDS quickens that sense of needing to and actually being able to draw forth from one’s spirit that work which will have resonance for other people," the late, great filmmaker Marlon Riggs said, and the recent work of performance studies scholar José Esteban Muñoz tries to show how queers have incorporated that sense of "quickening" into their lives and actions.

SPRUNG FORWARD


Of course, we may just run late for things because we’re busy, either at work (most of us rely only on ourselves for financial stability) or at play (our culture is still pretty party-centric, so we have a lot of hangovers to deal with). Plus, putting on all that makeup is practically a full-time job for us queens. Cut us a little slack so we can look fabulous. And all of the theories above seem awfully generalized — some may bristle at the suggestion that we be cast as supposed victims of a pathology that prolongs our adolescences and screws with our mental clocks. It’s not as if there aren’t queer people living as much as they can according to the hetero model, especially now that legal restrictions against same-sex marriage and adoption are relaxing in some areas.

In fact, the pendulum seems to be swinging the other way in terms of the queer rebellion against the straight timeline. As noted by broadcast journalist Tovia Smith last month on National Public Radio, in her piece "Marriage Causes Shift in Gay Culture," it seems that queers have gone "from a radical movement bent on challenging societal norms to a community now eagerly embracing those conventions as their own."

Smith drew her conclusion based on an interview with an upper-middle-class white gay couple from Cambridge, Mass. — the type of control group against which queers have traditionally defined themselves. Whatever negative connotations the phrase "prolonged adolescence" may conjure up, a case could be made that this is precisely what allows queer culture to thrive. Adolescence is when a personality is at its most fluid, and queer identity is the essence of fluidity. Halberstam sees queer temporality as a positive, radical reaction to heterosexual society’s mores, pitting it against the "time of inheritance," whose purpose is merely to shore up "the historical past of the nation" and protect "national stability." In the ’90s, a vibrant queer culture of artistic expression, political activism, and social and sexual interaction embraced the notion of prolonged adolescence.

FALLING BACK


Queercore bands like Pansy Division and Tribe 8 co-opted the in-your-face, live-fast-die-young aesthetic of punk, inviting listeners to throw off the shackles of heterosexual society’s expectations and, in the words of Pansy Division, "join the cocksuckers club." Homocore fanzines reveled in childlike graphics and gleefully reinterpreted teen fan magazines like Tiger Beat, giving them a decidedly homosexual spin. The hallmarks of puberty — geeky awkwardness, swoony crushiness, questionable outfits, wanton partying, sexual exploration — became queer fashion statements. Prolonged adolescence was also a means of connection in a time of grief and frustration, a flashpoint where queer history met the present. The AIDS Quilt used a common symbol of childhood comfort to unite and console mourners, and activist organizations like ACT UP and Queer Nation energized their members with the élan of belonging to a rebel schoolyard gang.

But that was the past, and there’s no denying that, with more access to the heterosexual lifestyle opening up for queers, the future is upon us. HIV is no longer a death sentence (for people who can afford the meds), and any evidence of necessary rebellion is awfully hard to find in young gay people these days, at least on the face of it. Prada and Beyoncé have replaced vintage clothing and queercore as coins of the young gay realm, and the psychological and social effects of the current lust for consumerism and mainstream pop culture on queers today will be for future theorists to puzzle out. To me, it represents a sad trend that aspires more toward societal acceptance than political subversion, an adjustment of our internal clocks to tick to the tired straight beat. Call me nostalgic, call me behind the times — just don’t call me late for cocktails.

The Queer Issue: Commitment slut

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I’m going to miss Pride this year. I’ll be on the East Coast at a wedding while queer sex parties and dungeons throw open their incredibly inviting doors to a host of the proud play-minded. Outlaws versus in-laws, polyamorous queers versus monogamous marrieds. Does it all come down to such fixed oppositions? For me, a bi girl with a boyfriend (who for the purposes of this article has asked to be identified by the curvaceous and inviting letter O), this question had reached the pitch of a psychic emergency.

It might seem obvious to you, dear reader, that like all nasty dichotomies this one was bound to wobble, to yield, to come undone. But some days it felt as though a bright line was running down my center and I had to choose a side. As Pride Month approached, I decided to resist and reinvent these oppositions with a little research of my own. What I found were queer activists fighting for same-sex-marriage equality while swinger parties thrived for horny partnered types of every ilk.

CRUISING THE GAME


And there I was in the middle: happy with O, really love-struck, but wondering where to go with my queer desires and identity. Crushes flickered. Girls floated around in my dreams like alluring phantoms. I vented, haltingly, to O. It’s the price a guy pays for dating a bi dyke. He was a sympathetic listener. And it wasn’t just a one-way conversation: O is erotically adventurous in his own right, and he’d revealed hints of unplumbed inclinations in the areas of pain play and submission. We’re pretty good at working through hard stuff with a minimal amount of drama, so it seemed both safe and exciting to experiment.

The quest for random sex presents a logistical conundrum for a shy person such as myself: I have a tendency to run in the opposite direction from anyone I find attractive, whether that obscure object of desire is a girl, a boy, or someone in between. And now that I’m done with my days of ecstasy and blackout drinking, I knew I’d have to be forthright in my quest for a bawdy experience.

My first stop was Fantasy Makers, a house of bondage and fetish nestled in an East Bay suburb. Lorrett, the house coordinator, gave me a tour of the facilities one late-spring afternoon. "This culture penalizes alternative sexualities," she said, her bright blue eyes flashing with intelligence and curiosity. "Normal!" She shuddered. "I hate that word."

Fantasy Makers offers toy shows, BDSM, and more (no actual sex between workers and clients, though — it’s illegal). Its hourly rate is the same for singles and couples, in order to encourage shared kinky experiences. Lorrett showed me the well-outfitted dungeon, replete with custom-built throne; the medical room, which featured a beautiful antique examination table and a complete array of surgical instruments; and the all-purpose room, which could be quickly cleared for any kind of wrestling one desired.

"Now I’ll turn you over to the girls," Lorrett promised, leading me down to the kitchen–<\d>employee lounge, where she introduced me to a swirl of workers. It was a hot day, and Mistress Tatiana looked up from her laptop wearing nothing but panties and an appraising grin. Priscilla and Elizabeth lounged on a long black couch and waited for calls to come in while watching a movie about strippers unionizing.

I was filled with hope on learning that one is not born a pro dom but rather becomes one: the Fantasy Maker folks filled me in on play parties and classes that are open to newbies and lifestylers alike. This crew favored the DIY style of Screw Up, a monthly BDSM instructional organized via Tribe.net by and for "freaky queers who don’t identify as male or female," as Priscilla put it. Topics range from flogging to mummification.

Tatiana talked about classes she teaches at Quality S-M, then neatly turned the tables to ask, "What about you?"

"Big dykey streak, boyfriend, open to playing with others together," I replied. That was the setup O and I had agreed on, and I discovered an abundance of creative commitment styles among the Fantasy Makers crew. One of the women was in a long-term open relationship and had just registered as a domestic partner with her genderqueer lover. Another had a primary submissive male friend and a panoply of mostly female playmates. And Lorrett had not one but two husbands.

TAKING IT OUTSIDE


I left Fantasy Makers feeling inspired and a tad electrified. It was time to move theory into practice. O and I did our makeup, squeezed hands, and set out for the queer-friendly Club Kiss, a monthly Mission District play party, along with our adventurous companion X. I would like to report that the stiletto-shaped love seat, the stripper pole, and the back room with its tiki theme and lurid row of mattresses all enabled me to happily re-create the careless, drunken foursomes of my college years, but in truth, I freaked out. I found myself on the sidewalk, orally fixating on cigarettes while hot jealousy spurted through my veins. O coaxed me back inside, where he soothed my wakened jealousy demon in the manner of a horse whisperer braving flying hooves. X, meanwhile, worked the room happily, as if arriving at a long-awaited home.

Finally, X, O, and I reunited, and as my head cooled, I tasted a little morsel of what these parties promise besides the obvious — the opportunity to witness a side of your partner you may never have seen before. For example, I learned that O likes to be tied up and spanked until he sees a white light while assembled parties look on in shock and pleasure. Who knew? I felt proud of O: raw, turned on, weird, excited, wounded, and open to a world of possibility.

That world of possibility is infinitely expanding, especially here in the Bay Area. There is, for example, the Queer Playground, a play party held on Pride Weekend at the bastion of worldly sex play in the Bay, the Citadel. The infamous Kinky Salon is also hosting something giant for its members of all genders. And Pride private play parties are multiplying by the dozen.

But I’ll miss it all, because of a wedding.

BI IN THE MIDDLE


It’s a weird thing, marriage. It makes me bitter that through the contingencies of gender, chance, and choice, I can chose whether or not to gain legal rights and social legitimacy with my current honey but couldn’t do so with past partners.

It wasn’t that I’d yearned for nuptials in my past decade of dating girls; in no way did I dream of the ostentatious engagements and rehashed nuclear-family model. I balked at those things, and if I ever thought of myself as married to my ex, I had married her in subtle and various ways that seemed more meaningful to me than public social contracts ever did — in road trips and alter egos, in getting to know each other’s families and then running away from holiday gatherings to smoke pot together in my little sister’s car. It seemed that our vows were forged of a shared, unspoken resistance to such conventions and institutions as marriage, and I took a roguish pride in sticking it out longer than the friends’ marriages that had come into being and died while she and I stayed together.

And now, happy as I am to destabilize gender binaries, to watch Bend Over, Boyfriend on repeat, to hold on to my queer family, to try sex parties on for size, I can simply marry O if I want to. Legally, civilly, so that we receive the roughly 1,000 rights granted by the federal government and the additional 500 given by the state. And on some days marriage seems like an adventure, a love riot, something we can define ourselves without accepting grody ceremonials or monogamy mandates. We can elope! Our honeymoon can be a class on flogging!

But here it is: straight privilege — mine. Bam. And bitterness doesn’t do much in the way of gaining those rights for my dyke-partnered buddies or my genderqueer friends whose identities don’t match up with the "man" and "woman" boxes on the marriage forms. So I checked in with Shannon Minter, legal director at the National Center for Lesbian Rights, to find out more about the fight for same-sex marriage equality.

Minter is the lead counsel in the marriage cases that are currently being tried before the Supreme Court of California. The lawsuits argue that California’s statutory definition of marriage violates equal-protection clauses in the state constitution by sanctioning discrimination on the grounds of sex and sexual orientation. Minter expects the cases to be settled within the year. While the outcome looks hopeful, the issue still needs plenty of support from queers and straight allies. According to Minter, four ballot initiatives seeking to amend the state constitution to define marriage as heterosexual have been submitted with the attorney general. "It’s pretty likely that Californians will be voting on this in 2008," he informed me.

Which gave me an idea for a present for the happy couple whose wedding will keep me from getting my queer on: a donation on behalf of the bride and groom to Equality California, an organization dedicated to outreach, education, and coalition building for same-sex-marriage equality. It ain’t no toaster, but the historical impact may be a lot greater.<\!s>*

www.fantasymakers.com

screwup.tribe.net

www.clubkiss.us

www.sfcitadel.org

www.kinkysalon.com

www.nclrights.org

www.eqca.org

The Queer Issue: Rainbow retirement

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Lionel Mayrand spent more than a decade working with the elderly. He helped train staff for the National Meals for the Elderly Project and wrote the first grant application for Elderhostel, an international senior travel network. Along the way, Mayrand found and lost one of the great loves of his life. "I am an AIDS widower," he says. "My financial life was wiped out by the illness of my partner in life and business. I lost so many friends to AIDS, I’m starting to forget their names." Recently, the sixtysomething tax specialist noticed the Senior Services meal program located near his house and suddenly found himself wrestling with the idea of attending. It was not so much a matter of pride or of realizing his age, but of community. With his unique life experiences, would he feel welcome?

QUEER PIONEERS


Getting older is a challenge for many people. But retired LGBTs often face unique difficulties. They feel a sense of isolation and discrimination — more hurdles for a group that weathered straight hatred and the AIDS pandemic. There’s also a lack of established infrastructure particular to their needs: many LGBT people of the baby boom generation, which is just now hitting retirement age, had to leave their families behind in order to live openly, so they may not have an inheritance or traditional family support to turn to. And because AIDS left so few survivors of earlier queer generations, the health care system is woefully unprepared to meet current senior queer physical and psychological needs. In a way, today’s senior queers are pioneers.

"Queer seniors often lack the family support systems that older straights take for granted," says Michael Adams, executive director of New York–<\d>based Services and Advocacy for GLBT Elders, or SAGE. Now 29 years old, SAGE is the oldest and largest organization in the country focusing on the needs of LGBT seniors. "Many queers may have been disconnected from their birth families for many years, and they’re less likely to have had children of their own. Older queers are also likelier to live alone and less likely to be in relationships," Adams says.

Meanwhile, older queers also face more discrimination from senior organizations, nursing homes, and health care providers, he adds. Some groups, such as the Red Cross, are committed to discrimination for religious or philosophical reasons. In other organizations, individual staffers may just have an issue. Worst of all, "a lack of support in the LGBT community itself" exacerbates this problem, Adams says. "There’s ageism in every community, but when you’re talking about a population of seniors that faces such difficulty in the senior world," the indifference of the LGBT community compounds the problem.

Local organizations, however, are stepping up to provide the kind of help non-LGBT seniors might not get from their nuclear families or the gay community at large. The queer-oriented New Leaf Outreach to Elders in San Francisco offers 24 senior activities and 50 meetings per week at different sites around the city, as well as health and counseling services at its clinic on Hayes Street. And New Leaf isn’t afraid to use the past to help the future.

"The way in which the gay and lesbian communities mobilized to take care of the HIV pandemic has become a model for organizations taking care of straight people," says Bill Kirkpatrick, a New Leaf social services worker. Even mainstream organizations taking care of the elderly are learning from the queer response to HIV, he says. "As the epidemic created models for us to take care of ourselves, the same thing is happening in the aging community."

TAKING IT STRAIGHT


Accommodating the needs of queer seniors doesn’t mean reinventing the wheel, Kirkpatrick adds. A big part of his work at New Leaf involves helping LGBT people connect with traditionally straight, more established programs. "We want to make sure these services have been culturally trained," Kirkpatrick says. New Leaf takes LGBT seniors to staff meetings at organizations like Meals on Wheels and other home health care agencies so the seniors can tell their stories and educate workers.

But what about the seniors themselves? Kirkpatrick says a big part of his job is working to gain the trust of "someone who has survived by hiding from the mainstream services and is distrustful." New Leaf organizes volunteers to visit the homes of isolated seniors and check on them. The organization takes great care to avoid pathologizing problems like depression, isolation, and low self-esteem as if they’re strictly mental health issues, Kirkpatrick says.

SAGE provides many of the same services as New Leaf, but it also lobbies for public policies that are designed to advance the rights of LGBT seniors. "Too often, LGBT seniors have not been on the radar screen when it comes to the policies and programs that get developed for seniors at the state and national level," Adams says. In 2005, SAGE sent the first openly gay delegate to the White House Conference on Aging, an event that happens once every 10 years. "Those are the kinds of places where policy gets made, [and] funding streams and priorities get influenced."

SAGE also provides counseling on sexuality. The rate of HIV infection among older people is increasing, according to the National Institutes of Health. And recent studies have shown that HIV and other STDs are more likely to go undiagnosed in seniors because doctors assume older people don’t have sex or engage in other risky behavior.

Some seniors with HIV have been living with it for years, but others have acquired it recently. Many are taking advantage of the increased opportunities for sex thanks to Viagra — often without protection, Adams says.

A HOME OF THEIR OWN?


Another challenge facing LGBT seniors: when a same-sex partner dies, the surviving partner may not be able to inherit a pension or Social Security benefits. Transferring the title on a house can be more difficult for couples who aren’t legally married, notes Moli Steinert, executive director of Open House, a San Francisco nonprofit dedicated to building LGBT senior residences. Steinert is trying to get approval from the city for Open House’s first housing project, at 55 Laguna Street, part of a larger redevelopment project on that site. She says Open House is also in the process of identifying a low-income housing site. "Our mandate is really to develop mixed-income housing. You just can’t get housing all in one location for all populations, so we’re working on trying to find land that will lend itself to filling out the spectrum of needs in our community," she says.

Open House educates health service organizations about LGBT senior issues and reaches out to isolated queer seniors, similar to what New Leaf is doing. And Open House advocates for LGBT seniors at the citywide level, trying to make sure housing and other services are open to queers.

What exactly makes housing LGBT-friendly? According to Steinert, it’s a matter of making sure queer culture is represented and the staff is trained to recognize the needs of the population. For example, a transgender resident of a nursing home may need help with bathing and wouldn’t want an attendant who’s insensitive or transphobic.

"It would not be easy for an LGBT senior to feel at home in a traditional senior housing facility," Steinert says. "They would basically need to go back in the closet. They would not feel able to disclose their partner or their history and feel like it would be accepted." Even if you succeeded in training the staff to be sensitive, you might not change the culture among the people who’ve been living in the facility for years, she points out.

The first LGBT-focused housing facility for seniors in the Bay Area will probably be the Barbary Lane Senior Communities at Lake Merritt in Oakland. Preleasing began March 1, and people will start moving in this fall. The Barbary Lane team is transforming the classic art deco Lake Merritt Hotel into a safe space for seniors, doing everything from doubling the size of the elevators to using universal design to get rid of knobs and handles. The kitchens and bathrooms in the apartment units are designed to be easy to use for disabled people and people with arthritis or other mobility issues.

With the Parlor Suite starting at $3,295 and the Merritt Grand at $4,295, you couldn’t accuse Barbary Lane of being low-income housing. But these prices are typical for retirement communities, and they include meals and other amenities seniors would otherwise have to pay for separately, says David Latina, Barbary Lane’s president. "A schoolteacher could afford to live here," he adds. Hard-up residents could share a studio apartment, he suggests. Programming and activities will be queer focused, and Barbary Lane will try to involve the local queer community as much as possible, opening its lavish dining area to outside events such as queer weddings and fundraisers.

Barbary Lane will only house people who are mostly able to take care of themselves. Once they need more than an assisted-living level of care, they’ll have to move to a nursing facility or nursing home. When that happens, Barbary Lane will make sure they go to facilities that are LGBT-friendly and have well-trained staff, according to Latina.

Latina says his organization aims to open five more facilities in California and is partnering with another organization to open a facility in New York. There are 17,000 queer seniors in the Bay Area alone, Latina claims, and even if only a quarter of them are looking to move into retirement homes, that could mean more than 4,000 residents for places like Barbary Lane. Rainbow flags flying over retirement communities could become a common sight in the near future.<\!s>*

www.sageusa.org

www.newleafservices.org

www.openhouse-sf.com

www.barbarylanesenior.com

Wayfaring stranger

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"I never imagined doing this." It’s a sentiment that Mariee Sioux, a singer-songwriter from Nevada City, returns to many times in our phone conversation: specifically, her genuine surprise that adapting her poetry to music has resulted in a life as a touring musician. "I was terrified playing at that show," she says mirthfully, describing her first big out-of-town gig at Brightblack Morning Light’s Quiet Quiet Ocean Spell Festival in Big Sur. "The whole tour that followed helped me get used to performing…. It sucks being scared all the time."

Sioux did seem a little shy — or quiet, anyhow — the first time I saw her play, but it only served to underline the concentrated energy of her music. Spiritual poems attuned to animals and ancestors, songs like "Wizard Flurry Home" and "Buried in Teeth" burrow deep inside you, with reams of words propelled by intuitive, circular guitar patterns. The circumstances of the show — organized by friends in a eucalyptus grove overlooking Berkeley — certainly helped, though I imagine Sioux’s diamond-in-the-rough talent would have been just as readily apparent in a club.

The compositions Sioux performed that night — most from her self-released EP, A Bundled Bundle of Bundles — seemed pointedly unhurried, more akin to the folk sprawl penned by Michael Hurley and Joni Mitchell than your typical verse-chorus-verse songwriting. Her guitar melodies are often a step behind her alliterative narrations, so it makes sense that the words came first. "I always wrote, since I was little … weird writing," she explains. "And I was just surrounded by music, so I guess this all started when me and a couple of friends wanted to start learning guitar. We formed this little girl band." She laughs. "And on my own time I started making these songs."

As is so often the case, the turning point came on a journey. "I left for Patagonia for three months, and I took my guitar with me because that was my new thing I had found. So I took it with me, and I had lots of solitary time in Patagonia," she recalls. "So I just wrote more songs and practiced and basically taught myself guitar." It was only through the prodding of friends that Sioux entertained the idea of recording these new songs: "I wouldn’t have even thought that people would want to hear it."

If word hadn’t gotten out of Grass Valley, it’s easy to imagine Sioux’s music being rediscovered some years down the line. Unshaped, personal to the point of being hermetic, this is the stuff record collectors live for. As it happened, though, Brightblack Morning Light has employed the singer-songwriter in a steady opening gig following that Quiet Quiet appearance, and now Nevada City’s Grassroots Records is readying her first full-length album, Faces in the Rocks, for a September release.

When talk turns to the album, Sioux gushes about collaborating with Gentle Thunder, an American Indian flute player who "felt this immediate connection to the project," and her bluegrass musician father (the two duetted at the Great American Music Hall a few months ago). And it sounds like she’s found a good partner in Grassroots, a homespun label with plenty of singer-songwriters on the roster. Label founder Marc Snegg writes, "Mariee’s songs, poetry, singing and performance dig deep in time, soar high in spirit, and possess a breadth of natural wisdom beyond her years or any years."

Still, while it might just be the jet lag following a European tour with Brightblack talking, Sioux sounds a little tentative about the musician’s life on the phone. She’s stoned on the album but wondering when things might settle down. "I’ve just been going for over a year. I haven’t really lived anywhere. I need a fixed point…. I want to decorate a room," she says. When focusing on the music, though, her view on itinerancy takes on a different, more redemptive cast. "It’s hard to pour your heart out so many times," she muses, "but it’s also refreshing, or even renewing in a way."*

MARIEE SIOUX

With Alela Diane, Aaron Ross, and Lee Bob Watson

Tues/26, 9 p.m., $7

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

Revenge of the nerds

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"Hey, everybody, we’re all gonna get laid!" Rodney Dangerfield’s character, Al Czervik, says in one of the classic lines from Caddyshack. Oakland’s Replicator sample the line as the tag end of "Delicious Fornicake," the opening track of their new album, Machines Will Always Let You Down (Radio Is Down). The inclusion is telling: Caddyshack celebrates the redemption — nay, triumph — of the little guy, the lowly, the nobody, the nerd, the caddy, for chrissakes, despite the oppression of greedy, classist boors. Machines is, in its way, a tight, terse, aggro, nerd-rock opera, with tweed cubicles replacing expansive set pieces, and hard, noisy post-punk reminiscent of geek-rock kingpins Big Black, in an alternate universe where Steve Albini doesn’t take himself so seriously. "It’s kind of, for lack of a better term, big rock," vocalist-guitarist Conan Neutron says over the phone from his apartment. In the opening track, the narrator, with the help of "a few beers, some Scotch, and a pack of cigarettes," builds "a robot with which to have sex." In "Payment www.yzzz.rd" (pronounced "wizard"), Neutron, an IT guy for a "major financial institution" when not living the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, sings, "I just got paid / So come get my cash / Come take my money / Come get it fast," the refrain of wage slaves everywhere.

The next track, "Assloads of Unrespect," is in the voice of a degenerate dot-com millionaire, the kind who crawled the Bay Area like a new species of roach in the mid- to late ’90s: "Let me begin / By saying I’m rich / I’m well-dressed / Good-looking / Hey — ain’t that a bitch? / Because I own you / That’s right, I own you." In an example of Neutron’s biting, often hilarious lyrics, the boss we love to hate goes on: "I heard it said the meek shall inherit the earth /Well, just make damn sure to shine my shoes first." The album goes on to tackle such subjects as time travel, the Enigma machine, and the spy-versus-spy uses of nanotechnology, before ending with the Office Space–like "Login with My Fist" — the battle cry of cubicle commandos everywhere — which winds down in a cacophony of screams and guitar squall, an implacable Commodore VIC-20–style voice repeating, "It does not compute," in the background.

It’s worth noting that the disc isn’t a celebration of all things techie, often a nerd stereotype. Rather, it’s a scathing denunciation of technology, or, more accurately, the devious and inhumane uses that technology has been put to in the hands of the powerful and ethically impaired. When the nerd class stops letting itself be pimped out for the glory of so-called pure science, then maybe it’ll inherit the earth. And when people stop being enamored of machines making life easier, maybe they’ll realize they’re being enslaved by technology — that, indeed, machines will always let you down.

"We make music for very pissed-off smart people," Neutron says. He goes on to acknowledge that this target demo is a small slice of the music-listening public: "Our music isn’t very popular." Formed in 1999, Replicator — Neutron, Ben Adrian on bass and keyboard, Chris Bolig on drums, and "junior partner" Todd Grant on guitar — have seen trends come and go. "First everyone was really into indie pop," Neutron says. "Then everyone was into sounding like Radiohead and then garage rock and then everyone wanted to, like, wear a mask and not really play music."

Through it all, Replicator have released three pissed-off, smart records, toured heavily, and brought to mind a time "when it was not an insult to be considered brilliant," as the lyric on "Login with My Fist" goes. I’m not saying they’re brilliant — nor am I saying they’re not — but what they’re attempting doesn’t accept mediocrity. This uncompromising approach often seems to have relegated them to the middle slot of shows while the underground flavor du jour headlines above them. Like Dangerfield, they get no respect.

One of the titles kicked around for the new album was Fuck You, Still Here. "I see bands that are more careerist," Neutron says. "They have this idea: ‘Oh, we’re going to get signed and then we’re going to make this video and go on tour with this band.’ That seems to be their end goal.

"Our end goal is to return the ass-kicking that music has given us."

REPLICATOR

With Moggs and Colony of Watts

June 30, 9:30 p.m., $6

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

The slow fade of Sly Stone

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

FULL CIRCLE This spring Epic/Legacy finally started releasing Sly and the Family Stone: The Collection, the band’s seven albums complete with previously unreleased music, new liner notes, and great sound, with the final installment, Greatest Hits, to come July 24. The event had been on the horizon for some time, but like everything connected with Sly Stone, a fan was never sure when — or if, for that matter — the music would be available.

If you aren’t familiar with Stone’s music, get this collection and enjoy. These days it’s popular to credit the Beatles, Brian Wilson, Jimi Hendrix, and a few others as the essential pioneers from that era — with no mention of Stone, who was as important as any. If you’re wondering why that is, find the title track from his hugely popular 1971 album, There’s a Riot Goin’ On. It’s on the brief side — as in zero seconds, which was Stone’s idea of a joke or something. As San Francisco Chronicle writer Joel Selvin points out in the notes, the riot was going on in Stone’s life.

There was a moment in the late 1970s when music fans were asking, "What happened to Sly Stone?" Time passed, and the question evolved into "Whatever happened to Sly Stone?" The answer — "I don’t know" — didn’t change, until one day, sadly and inevitably, the question generated only another question — "Who?" — an answer all by itself.

In the early 1980s — somewhere between "what" and "whatever" — the band booked a show at the now-defunct Keystone Berkeley. Stone had gone phantom, which made the performance an event. Accordingly, the place was packed. The band was introduced and began to vamp, and after way too long — it was clear the Family didn’t know what to expect — Stone emerged and took his place behind a keyboard and, without acknowledging anyone, began to play. The band was thrown at first, but after a few halting bars and some nervous glances, they seemed to recognize the groove. Never mind the key or tempo, or where they should jump in. It didn’t matter, because suddenly Stone lurched into something else, with the same result. A moment later he did it again. And again. And again.

The set didn’t last more than a few minutes. That was the upside. The downside? Everything else.

Yet forgotten or not, Stone was once arguably the most important figure in pop. During the late 1960s and early ’70s, the Vallejo native wrote and recorded one hit after another: "Dance to the Music," "Everyday People," "Stand!" "I Want to Take You Higher," "Hot Fun in the Summertime," "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again)," "Family Affair." He brought black music to San Francisco’s tumultuous hippie scene and created rich, innovative, rock-flavored R&B, played by a deliberately integrated band. Rock fans — most of them white — welcomed the bridge to black music and, by inference, black people. If the door didn’t swing as wide or as often the other way, a glimpse of the band’s appearances on YouTube, which has great Family Stone material, shows a genuinely mixed audience responding to the group’s appeal for peace and understanding.

Stone was a founding father of modern funk, a wildly creative force who added innovations to the sound as it flourished. His music reshaped the tastes of black and white listeners, and one miserable Sunday morning in August 1969, his band took the Woodstock stage — it was 3:30 a.m. — and absolutely stole the show.

You can only hope The Collection will have a similar impact. The band’s four pre-Riot albums offer a treasure chest of rich, increasingly funky soul. No matter how cynical Stone became — the black superstar playing to a largely white audience, the musical genius forced to pander to the tastes of a pop audience, the master manipulator turning every scene to his own advantage — the music was charming and irresistible. As was the man who created it.

Although some of his most important work was still before him, Stone ushered in the 1970s in paranoia and retreat — a perfect fit with the moment. He flipped off superstardom with an arrogance only a superstar could muster. Once outgoing and engaging, Stone burned promoters, his band, and fans. The once-steady supply of new material slowed to a trickle, and Stone became a no-show at dozens of concerts. He slid into an increasingly opaque and eventually impenetrable world. Riot and 1973’s Fresh — forget 1974’s Small Talk — were as adventurous and self-involved as music could be. Most of the original Family was gone, and the losses of drummer Greg Errico and bassist Larry Graham — who reportedly slept with one eye open after falling out with Stone — were particularly felt. This music was dreamy and solipsistic. Stone’s huge smile and the Family vibe were gone, replaced by a menacing undercurrent. Credits on both albums are, apparently, haphazard, which means that the contributions of Miles Davis, George Clinton, and Bobby Womack, for instance, aren’t acknowledged.

That Stone could attract such talent was a testimony to his gifts, and to the legendary partying that went on at his Los Angeles mansion. Still, if James Brown invented funk, Stone got in where he fit in: the ground floor. Riot may clock a man losing his grip on reality, but it also captured a musical innovator exploring the possibilities of a crucial movement. *

Singin’ and shillin’ with the Muppets

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I had a revelation while watching Muppets Music Moments: Statler and Waldorf are the reasons I became a film critic. As a li’l Muppet-freaked kid in the late ’70s and early ’80s, I lived for their curmudgeonly peanut-gallery zingers. But there’s plenty of stuff I didn’t remember from The Muppet Show, or that I couldn’t pick out as examples of Jim Henson’s wonderfully offbeat sense of humor — like, say, a brigade of pigs in full leather-daddy garb singing "Macho Man." And surreal numbers, like that same brigade of pigs dressed as Eskimos, belting out "The Lullaby of Broadway," or a sequence in which Kermit’s hospital-room tableau morphs into a full-on jungle scene (complete with witch doctors) as the ensemble rips into Harry Nilsson’s "Coconut." Also, there’s plenty of just plain weirdness — like, did you ever notice that the Swedish Chef is the only Muppet with actual human hands? I don’t have to say any more, except that this program is essential viewing for anyone who worshipped The Muppet Show cast albums ("Menah Menah," anyone?) — or for folks with kids who are too young to have otherwise developed outrageous Muppet nostalgia.

More for grown-ups but no less entertaining is the foray into Henson’s Commercials and Experiments. An early Kermit prototype shills for pork sausage and bacon (wherefore art thou, Miss Piggy?); another spot highlights singing gas-pump nozzles; an RC Cola ad features a bird puppet muttering, "I hate folk singers with messages!"; and a spot for Muppet toys offers a group of mini-Kermits sweetly intoning, "If you don’t buy us, we’ll bite you in the leg!" There are also snippets of Henson appearing on talk shows and demonstrating his puppetry techniques, as well as short films that are entirely puppet free — including some psychedelia, such as a delightful sound-and-image collage starring the impish Henson himself. (Cheryl Eddy)

COMMERCIALS AND EXPERIMENTS Sun/24, 7:30 p.m.

MUPPETS MUSIC MOMENTS Sat/23, 2 p.m.; June 28, 7:30 p.m.; $6-$8. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Screening Room, 701 Mission, SF. (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org

The fix

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› paulr@sfbg.com


For a longtime pastry chef, Emily Luchetti holds notably clear-eyed views about dessert. The sweet course, she writes in the introduction to her new cookbook, Classic Stars Desserts (Chronicle, $29.95), "is important for our emotional well-being and tastes better when we don’t feel guilty about eating it." To assuage this guilt, we must accept that "we cannot eat desserts all the time" (let alone start meals with them, and yes, you got the memo). We must also keep ourselves in some kind of shape and eat what she calls "healthful" foods — the usual suspects here: fruits, vegetables, low-fat protein, and so forth. With life in the proper balance, we can reward ourselves for our restraint and moderation with the occasional fix of blueberry pie, knowing that, as Luchetti says of herself, "I am more apt to stick to a healthful diet if I know I can have a treat now and then." (Blueberries, incidentally, are not without nutritional value; even in pies, they offer a rich palette of phytonutrients, including anthocyanins and anthocyanidins, which tend to protect human tissues.)

In Luchetti’s enlightened world, intensity, not scale, is the measure of all desserts, since when a dessert "is made with great ingredients and has maximum flavor, you don’t need a huge portion to feel satiated." It also helps to have first-rate recipes, and Luchetti (who has enjoyed long runs as a pastry chef at Stars and, for the past 10 years, Farallon) has a lot of these to offer. I was particularly pleased to find in this new volume the secrets of Stareos, the star-shaped cookies that were a favorite and icon at Stars. (One secret: the filling is made with mascarpone.)

Just as delightful is her cranberry twist on linzer torte, an old Austrian favorite typically made with raspberry jam. Although Thanksgiving is months off, it’s never too early to start worrying about cranberries, which despite their many virtues (including effectiveness as a home remedy for urinary-tract infections) always seem to end up being orphaned at the end of the big meal, valued for their reddish magenta color and not much else.

Luchetti’s greatest-hits book left me with a pang too for Stars, a sensational and imposing place built for the ages yet gone before the turn of the millennium. An ashen fate, yet memories of the restaurant remain surprisingly sweet.

Pay, pal

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER "Fuck Lars Ulrich — he can play drums on my balls with his teeth!" Them’s fighting words from the beefy bruiser in a tinsel page-boy wig, perhaps provoked only by four wannabe skids’ burning need to cover Metallica’s "For Whom the Bell Tolls" at last week’s first but — fortunately for your inner and outer sketched-out Priest hooligan with a nonironic mullet, prematurely weather-beaten mien, and herbally truncated short-term memory — not last "Hesher" night at the Parkside, where it’s now semiofficially installed after starting its smokin’ life at Annie’s Social Club. Still headbang or nod out to "Sweet Child o’ Mine"? All is forgiven and even drunkenly applauded at "Hesher," a metal karaoke and air guitar contest. Yet as delightful as it is to rock out with your crock out to such unrepentant cock-rock versions of "Eye of the Tiger" and "Round and Round," I couldn’t help but think that all of us ruddy walleyes were just cruising upstream against a current zeitgeist hell-bent on nailing culpables caught with their greasy paws in the cookie jar. How else to explain the crowds crowing to punish Paris or throw the book at I. Lewis "Lemme Scoot" Libby? Why else were latently Catholic viewers so outraged that Tony Soprano didn’t go down in a hail of bullets rather than simply cutting to black? After years of the Bush and Cheney show, the hordes have become less hesher than harsher.

Maybe we’re waiting for justice, answers, something to believe in — and perhaps the once-wronged and now recognized and fully redeemed Spoon’s Britt Daniel is ready to give it to us, just as he and other indie savants like Feist turn in their subtlest, slowest-growing recordings to date. In fact, the opening track of Spoon’s Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (Merge), "Don’t Make Me a Target," could serve as the theme song for a rockin’ version of Chicago starring the most hated Hilton in America: it soft-shoes the bristly snarl of "Waiting for the Kid to Come Out," off last year’s reissued Soft Effects EP. In spite or perhaps because of the troubles he saw when he was pushed off Elektra, griping loudly all the way, Daniel has always sounded like one of the angriest dogs on the lot, barely leashed to those leathery pop hooks.

With Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, Daniel ventures into other textures and tempos, moduutf8g his bark and bite with plangent pings and drastic pressure drops, floating in an echoey "The Ghost of You Lingers" and snapping suavely to the hand-clapping "Don’t You Evah." Though the infectious brass, Daniel’s streetwise taunts, and the band’s pugilistic punch conjure up memories of a certain cheesy piano man, as Sasha Frere-Jones of the New Yorker has pointed out, aligning "The Underdog" with Billy Joel’s "Only the Good Die Young," I’d venture that Daniel is less conjuring stereotypically cornball urban bluster pop straight out of some tourist fantasy of a Little Italy than continuing the same cranky conversation that began back around the hard-assed, grunge-era Soft Effects, now aged artfully into a modern-day Bobby Darrin–y hep cat. Much like the album’s cover girl, sculptor Lee Bontecou, Daniel’s finding new mettle — and much softer metals — with which to channel his rage.

FOLKLORE LURE Court and Spark and Hiss Golden Messenger honcho and teacher MC Taylor is answering the siren call of higher education and leaving the Mission digs he shares with his wife, Abby, to move to Chapel Hill, NC. "We both wanted a change of scenery, wanted to live in the country and have a garden. I got accepted to the grad program in folklore at UNC, so everything worked out perfectly," he e-mailed on the eve of a moving sale that promised "the craziest set of Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game books that you’ve probably ever seen — seriously." Taylor will continue the more improvisational HGM in his sweet home North Carolina, though sadly C&S will probably call it a day — but not before a finale July 6 at Cafe du Nord.

MICKI ON THE MEND? Many know Stork Club owner Micki Chittock as the Oaktown stalwart who moved the Stork from its cubby near the Tribune tower to its current Telegraph Avenue clubhouse. But how many, booker Joel Harmon wonders, have come through for Chittock since her serious van accident in April? Suffering from a broken femur, pelvis, back, and ribs, Chittock has three weeks left in intensive care before she’s transferred to a recovery room, Harmon e-mailed me, after doctors gave the club owner a 50 percent chance of recovery. Harmon has put together two benefit shows to ease the medical expenses, and he’s working on more because, he writes, "I’m thinking that in order for the Stork to survive, Micki has to survive." *

HEAR, YOU GO

SEX VID AND FUNEROT


Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll sweethearts sweat it out with kindred Northwestern miscreants. Wed/20, 9:30 p.m., $5. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. (415) 923-0923, www.hemlocktavern.com

SEAN HAYES


The SF singer-songwriter whoops it up in honor of Flowering Spade, which found him in a groove with Etienne de Rocher. Thurs/21, 9 p.m., $18. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. (415) 885-0750, www.musichallsf.com

THE JOINT


Crown City Rocker Headnodic breaks out hip-hop, soul, and dancehall alongside Raashan Ahmad. Thursdays, 10 p.m., $5. Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck, Berk. (510) 548-1159, www.shattuckdownlow.com

WHITE MICE


Load Records rodents bite headliner Skinny Puppy’s butt; don’t be surprised if they also gnaw their way onto a bill at the Bakery in Oakland. Thurs/21, 9 p.m., $27.50. Fillmore, 1805 Geary, SF. (415) 346-6000, www.thefillmore.com

SEA WOLF


Turn-of-the-century wolf moniker and contemplative songcraft. Fri/22, 9 p.m., $10–$12. Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. (415) 861-5016, www.cafedunord.com

DEAD SCIENCE AND IMPLIED VIOLENCE


A Wu-Tang dance party ensues after the twisted pop eccentrics couple with the experimental-theater ensemble fixated on dance, politics, and illness. Fri/22, 9 p.m., sliding scale. 21 Grand, 416 25th St., Oakl. (510) 444-7263, www.21grand.org

NOMO


Elliot Bergman’s free-funk, Afrobeat, and noise eight-piece fires up the mbira, gamelan, and glockenspiel. Tues/26, 9 p.m., $10. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. (415) 621-4455, www.bottomofthehill.com

FEIST


The ex-Peaches sidekick issues a subdued, ambitious, and multitextured Reminder (Cherrytree/Interscope). June 26–27, 8 p.m., $25. Fillmore, 1805 Geary, SF. (415) 346-6000, www.thefillmore.com

“Heart” attack

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FILM Angelina Jolie in blackface and a decent film? Both seem remarkable when one considers the cinematic caca generated by the Tomb Raider franchise star since her Oscar win for Girl, Interrupted (1999).

Decidedly weightier and more ambitious than the screwball Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005), A Mighty Heart finds Jolie coated with a deep tan and kitted out in a faux pregnant belly as Marianne Pearl in an adaptation of the journalist’s 2003 best-selling account of the kidnapping and demise of her husband, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

The part-French Jolie may be a more suitable choice than the last Marianne rumored to be slated for the project, coproducer Brad Pitt’s previous main squeeze, Jennifer Aniston, but surely there was a more apropos physical fit for the pixieish, caramel-skinned Pearl than the opulently Sophia Loren–like Jolie?

"I think that’s rubbish. It’s so superficial," A Mighty Heart director Michael Winterbottom says, talking a mile a minute in a blurry, nasal Lancashire accent and alternately basking in and ducking the uncharacteristically bright San Francisco summer sun in the Ritz-Carlton courtyard. "The first time I met Angelina was with Marianne, and in fact they knew each other already and they trusted each other already. They’re kind of similar in lots of ways and talked about the story in similar ways. And that’s what’s important, really — to have someone actually know the person they’re playing, especially with a story that’s as sensitive as this."

In many ways Winterbottom was perfectly cast as the director for A Mighty Heart. He’s an ex-documentarian noted for striking a balance between intimate love stories (2004’s 9 Songs, 2003’s Code 46); tales like his Manchester music scene snapshot, 24 Hour Party People (2002), that revolve around the pleasure principle; politicized narratives firmly embedded in a labyrinthine geopolitical landscape (2006’s The Road to Guantánamo, 2002’s In This World, 1997’s Welcome to Sarajevo); and literary adaptations (2006’s Tristam Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, 1996’s Jude).

"They’re also films about individuals as well," Winterbottom counters. And at times A Mighty Heart boils down uneasily as a Möbius strip of a meta–murder mystery — about the media, as documented by the media, intercut with shots of entangled Karachi phone and cable lines even as Brangelina paparazzi attempted to capture the couple’s every move and at least one scandal spun off the 2006 shoot (Mumbai residents charged the couple’s bodyguards with racism during filming at a school).

A Mighty Heart also reads somewhat like the flip side of Winterbottom’s previous release, The Road to Guantánamo, which blended dramatizations and documentarylike interviews with three British Muslims, a.k.a. the Tipton Three, who were held at Guantánamo Bay for two years before they were released without having been charged.

"In a way I think both stories are about people who are kind of victims of the extreme violence on both sides," the filmmaker says, describing both as post–Sept. 11 stories. "I think there are groups on both sides who want the violence to escalate."

Which gives Winterbottom impetus to carry on with his political-as-personal narratives, turning to the next in a series of Steve Coogan films, an adaptation of former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray’s memoir Murder in Samarkand. "We’re trying to do a comedy about the British ambassador in Uzbekistan being sacked because he didn’t agree about the use of information gained under torture."

A MIGHTY HEART

Opens Fri/22 in Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

Tastes like chicken

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FILM Always be suspicious of any documentary that starts off with this snippet of dialogue: "Is it real, is it not real?" In fact, for the first 10 minutes of American Cannibal, directed by Perry Grebin and Michael Nigro, I suspected I might be watching a mock doc. But nope, it’s real — more authentic than reality TV, anyway, which is the subject it chronicles via both insider insights (from showbiz types like Fox Reality Channel honcho David Lyle) and the tension-fraught journey of Gil S. Ripley and Dave Roberts, writing partners who turn to reality TV as their last make-a-buck resort. That chance comes in the form of skeezy Kevin Blatt, proud promoter of jailbird Paris Hilton’s sex tape, who bypasses their pitch Virgin Territory ("When you win it, you lose it!") in favor of American Cannibal, an extreme twist on Survivor that Ripley tosses out as more of a joke than anything else. Before he and Roberts can believe what’s happening, an American Cannibal pilot — presented to potential cast members as Ultimate, Ultimate Challenge, part of the show’s bait-and-switch tack — is in motion. Morals and friendships are soon tested, as is the idea that reality TV spells instant money and success for whoever can bring the last great idea to some new, more sensational level.

Seriously, though, would you actually eat someone’s finger for prize money, even if you were really, really hungry? Would anyone? American Cannibal the documentary proves far more fascinating than American Cannibal the failed reality show ever could have been. It does feel like America’s rabid urge to devour prepackaged reality has settled down a bit, but you and I both know it’s never going away. Representing the craze’s high end, American Idol vet Jennifer Hudson has an Oscar. At the low end, take your pick (wherefore art thou, The Littlest Groom?). But if Ripley and Robert’s American Cannibal — a show that was to strand constants on a desert island and starve them, then tell them they had to eat human flesh to survive — sounds so ridiculous that you feel kind of sorry it never made it to the airwaves so you could watch, you’re not alone. As doc interviewee and The Daily Show cocreator Lizz Winstead points out, "If the lowest common denominator was a muscle, it could kick the shit out of anything else."

AMERICAN CANNIBAL

June 22–28, $4-8

See Rep Clock for showtimes

Red Vic

1727 Haight, SF

(415) 668-3994

The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (6/18/07)

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The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (6/18/07): At least 36 Iraqis were killed today.

Compiled by Paula Connelly

Casualties in Iraq

Iraqi civilians:

At least 36 Iraqis were killed today in a battle between Shiite militiamen and British forces, according to the Associated Press. Reports of the dead were unable to tell how many were militiamen and how many civilians.

98,000: Killed since 3/03

Source: www.thelancet.com

65,411 – 71,665: Killed since 1/03

Source: http://www.iraqbodycount.net

For a week by week assessment of significant incidents and trends in Iraqi civilian casualties, go to A Week in Iraq by Lily Hamourtziadou. She is a member of the Iraq Body Count project, which maintains and updates the world’s only independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq.

A Week in Iraq: Week ending 3 June 2007:
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/editorial/weekiniraq/47/

For first hand accounts of the grave situation in Iraq, visit some of these blogs:
www.ejectiraqikkk.blogspot.com
www.healingiraq.blogspot.com
www.afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com

U.S. military:

3,773: Killed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq 3/20/03

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

111 : Died of self-inflicted wounds, according to http://www.icasualties.org/.

For the Department of Defense statistics go to: http://www.defenselink.mil/

For a more detailed list of U.S. Military killed in the War in Iraq go to: www.cnn.com

Iraq Military:

30,000: Killed since 2003

Source: http://www.infoshout.com

Journalists:

177 journalists have been killed in Iraq since the start of the war four years ago, making Iraq the world’s most dangerous country for the press, according to Reporters without borders.

164: Killed since 3/03

Source: http://www.infoshout.com/

Refugees:

The Bush administration plans to increase quota of Iraqi refugees allowed into the U.S. from 500 to 7,000 next year in response to the growing refugee crisis, according to the Guardian Unlimited.

Border policies are tightening because one million Iraqi refugees have already fled to Jordan and another one million to Syria. Iraqi refugees who manage to make it out of Iraq still can’t work, have difficulty attending school and are not eligible for health care. Many still need to return to Iraq to escape poverty, according to BBC news.

1.6 million: Iraqis displaced internally

1.8 million: Iraqis displaced to neighboring states

Many refugees were displaced prior to 2003, but an increasing number are fleeing now, according to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ estimates.

U.S. Military Wounded:

50,502: Wounded since 3/19/03 to 1/6/07

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

The Guardian cost of Iraq war report (6/18/07): So far, $435 billion for the U.S., $55 billion for California and $1 billion for San Francisco.

Compiled by Paula Connelly

Here is a running total of the cost of the Iraq War to the U.S. taxpayer, provided by the National Priorities Project located in Northampton, Massachusetts. The number is based on Congressional appropriations. Niko Matsakis of Boston, MA and Elias Vlanton of Takoma Park, MD originally created the count in 2003 on costofwar.com. After maintaining it on their own for the first year, they gave it to the National Priorities Project to contribute to their ongoing educational efforts.

To bring the cost of the war home, please note that California has already lost $46 billion and San Francisco has lost $1 billion to the Bush war and his mistakes. In San Francisco alone, the funds used for the war in Iraq could have hired 21,264 additional public school teachers for one year, we could have built 11,048 additional housing units or we could have provided 59,482 students four-year scholarships at public universities. For a further breakdown of the cost of the war to your community, see the NPP website aptly titled “turning data into action.”

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