Nov. 28
Music
Zodiac Death Valley
Concentrating on the lure of the Western desert – as well as the rovers who are drawn to such merciless terrain – the aptly named Zodiac Death Valley have achieved a gothic blues version of Gram Parsons’s Flying Burrito Brothers. Singer Niccolo Abodeely and his bandmates toss in a few moments of cactus flower romanticism among the rattlesnakes and cattle skulls, and the result is equal parts enticement and capture. (Todd Lavoie)
With the Moanin’ Dove, Matthew Hansen, and Jake Mattison
8:30 p.m.
Hotel Utah Saloon
500 Fourth St., SF
$6
(415) 546-6300
www.thehotelutahsaloon.com
Visual Art
“Capp Street Project: Michael Stevenson”
“How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later”
“Radical Software: Art, Technology, and the Bay Area Underground”
The latest chapter in CCA Wattis’s ongoing “Capp Street Project” comes from Michael Stevenson, who will allow his painstaking recreation of a MONIAC – a bygone hydraulic contraption known as the Monetary National Income Automatic Computer – to gradually fall into ruin. “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later” has roots in ’70s-era Cali ideas about the future. The same might be said of another group show: “Radical Software” ventures into different passages of the seemingly limitless Stewart Brand-related Bay Area underground hacker mazes explored in Lutz Dammbeck’s doc The Net. (Johnny Ray Huston)
7:30-9 p.m. opening reception (through Feb. 24, 2007)
CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, Logan Galleries
1111 Eighth St., SF
Free
(415) 551-9210
www.wattis.org