Art

Our Weekly Picks: November 10-16, 2010

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0

WEDNESDAY 10

EVENT

“Goldies After Party”

You dog-eared the pages of last week’s Guardian, reading about the Guardian Outstanding Local Discovery award winners. Tonight, head to 111 Minna to congratulate the artists in person — and to rock out at the free, open-to-the-public after party. Taking the stage: Oakland “slop-pop” rockers Bare Wires, SF popsters Brilliant Colors, dark post-punker Soft Moon (a.k.a. Luis Vasquez), pop sensation Myles Cooper (of “Gonna Find Boyfriends Today” fame) with club sensation Alexis Penney, and DJs Naoki Onodera and Primo Pitino. Don’t miss what’s sure to be a mother lode (yep, shameless gold joke) of a party! (Cheryl Eddy)

9 p.m., free

111 Minna Gallery

111 Minna, SF

www.sfbg.com/2010/11/03/goldies-2010

 

THEATER

Or,

Aphra Behn was a woman ahead of her time. A 17th century spy and the first professional female playwright, Aphra Behn is the topic of Liz Duffy Adams’ new play Or, at Magic Theatre. Full of sensationalism, sex, art, politics, and laughs, this comedy hosts a variety of eccentric characters including double agent William Scot, actress Nell Gwynne, and even King Charles II himself. Adams received the fifth Lillian Hellman Award for Playwrighting for Or, at the 2010 Lilly Awards; the play promises a dose of English history and a chance to chuckle the night away. (Emmaly Wiederholt)

Through Dec. 5

Wed.–Sat., 8 p.m. (also Sat, 2:30 p.m.);

Sun, 2:30 p.m.; Tues, 7 p.m., $45–$60

Magic Theatre

Fort Mason Center, Building D, Third Floor, SF

(415) 441-8822

www.magictheatre.org

 

THURSDAY 11

DANCE

Ampey!

In 2008, Adia Tamar Whitaker took a trip to Africa, where she encountered ampey, a Ghanian children’s dance for which you need to be on your toes in more ways than one. It became the inspiration for Ampey!, in which she explores complexities surrounding identity, family, and home. For Whitaker, that “return” trip had been become a voyage of discovery — though not in the way she anticipated. Presented as a work in progress last year, one could sense Ampey!’s artistic potential; it already included a powerful percussive “sitting dance.” Perhaps the best aspect of the two-year Performing Diaspora Project is its offer to artists like Whitaker to keep working on what needs to be done. (Rita Felciano)

Through Nov. 21

Thurs/11–Sun/14 and Nov. 18–20, 8 p.m.;

Nov. 21, 3 p.m., $19–$24

Counterpulse

1310 Mission, SF

1-800-838-3006

www.counterpulse.org

 

MUSIC

Ghostface Killah

No one has your back like Iron Man. Pretty Toney was the original link that brought the whole Wu-Tang together. Always willing to lend a devastatingly together verse to just about anybody’s single (MSTRKRFT, Prefuse 73, DANGERDOOM, etc), Starky still has found time to release classic after classic album. On his latest, Ghostdini: Wizard of Poetry in Emerald City, the Wallabee Kingpin went the extra mile, dispensing priceless relationship advice via a series of YouTube videos. Isn’t it about time you gave Ghostface Killah a little something back in return? (Ryan Prendiville)

With Sheek Louch and Music by Frank Dukes

9 p.m. $22

Slim’s

333 11th St., SF

(415) 255-0333

www.slims-sf.com

 

MUSIC

Masaki Batoh

Incorporating elements of Krautrock, folk, free jazz, and all manner of indigenous instrumentation, enigmatic Japanese psych collective Ghost are the heirs to such earlier cosmic emissaries as fellow countrymen the Taj Mahal Travelers. Founder and core player Masaki Batoh takes a similarly eclectic approach in his non-Ghost releases, whether turning out a chugging acoustic cover of Can’s “Yoo Doo Right” or mournful dirges, as on his recent collaborative albums with Espers’ Helena Espvall. Tonight’s rare solo set, with Batoh alternating between guitar and banjo and a table full of electronics, should prove no different. (Matt Sussman)

With Young Elders

10 p.m., $10

Vortex Room

1082 Howard, SF

www.myspace.com/thevortexroom

Also Fri/12

With Sic Alps

10 p.m., $5

Ghost Town Gallery

2519 San Pablo, Oakl.

www.myspace.com/ghosttowngallery

 

DANCE

Sankai Juku

Butoh is perhaps one of the most enigmatic dance forms. Emerging in the late 1950s in opposition to the Westernization of Japan, butoh often explores the more grotesque side of human nature. Unlike other dance forms with a syllabus of movements, butoh may be completely conceptual, hyper-slow, playful, scary, or none of the above. It defies definition. Audiences can begin to wrap their minds around butoh as Sankai Juku, the legendary Japanese butoh company, tours to San Francisco to present Hibiki: Resonance from Far Away, a piece said to plumb poetic beauty. Meditative and hypnotic in its simplicity, this award-winning work is a signature of butoh. (Wiederholt)

Thurs/11–Sat/13, 8 p.m.;

Sun/14, 2 p.m., $35–$60

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Novellus Theater

700 Howard, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

 

FRIDAY 12

MUSIC

Lindstrøm

Known to much prefer holing up in the studio in his home base of Oslo, Norway, than performing live, this is a rare opportunity to catch a set from one of the more interesting electronic music producers around. Lindstrøm first made a name for himself as a remix artist, reworking tracks from the likes of LCD Soundsystem, Roxy Music, Franz Ferdinand, and the Boredoms. His solo albums are full of frosty disco beats, heavy synthesizers, classic funk influences and enough of an adventurous streak to appeal to more than just the dance floor crowd. (Landon Moblad)

With Marbeya and Publicist

9 p.m., $15

Mezzanine

444 Jessie, SF

(415) 625-8880

www.mezzaninesf.com

 

DANCE

“Manifestival: Like Oil and Water: From Gaza to the Gulf”

Lots of Bay Area artists know that the world is a village, all politics are local, and that it’s probably not a good idea to ignore an problem until it burns your face. Socially committed dance is a large part of what we see on our stages. Artists are the antennas of the race and following them is fun as well as instructive. This year’s Manifestival theme of “Like Oil and Water: From Gaza to the Gulf” should provide more than enough inspiration for the two different programs. Onstage the first weekend are Jessica Damon, Jose Navarrete, Michael Velez, Nicole Klaymoon, Sri Susilowati, Naked Empire Buffoon, Stella Adelman, and Youth Speaks. (Felciano)

Through Nov. 20

Fri.–Sat., 8 p.m., $22

Dance Mission Theater

3316 24th St. SF

(415) 273-4633

www.brownpapertickets.com

 

VISUAL ART

“A Journeyman’s Papers”

Rare is the gallery show at which the owner of said gallery steps out from the wings and shows his or her own work. Risks! No one wants to be seen as the next megalomaniac Thomas Kincaid, drunkenly careening into the heavily curtained schlock-nests of Midwestern housewives, right? No fear of that kind of showboating here. Rob Delamater, co-owner of dapper cognoscenti-magnet Lost Art Salon, creates voluptuously genteel, generous-spirited pieces that fit right in with his gallery’s excellent collection of rare vintage modern works. Block-printed portraits of the wanton Bloomsbury group, evocative and crepuscular figure studies, and, perhaps most intriguing, softly primitive compositions evoking the California coastline painted on vintage book covers are the gorgeous, midcentury-type whistle stops on Delamater’s artistic journey. Doff your fedora, shed your silk shift, and have a lovely look. (Marke B.)

Through Jan. 31, 2011

5:30–8:30 p.m., free

Lost Art Salon

245 S. Van Ness, Suite 203, SF

(415) 861-1530

www.lostartsalon.com

 

SATURDAY 13

MUSIC

Dãm-Funk

George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic are going to be at Yoshi’s next week. That’s cool. But instead of waiting to enjoy what’s sure to be a great reminiscing on where funk’s been, why not check where it’s going? Dãm-Funk (pronounced “Dame Funk”) lays down a DJ set at Som Bar. A DIY DJ, producer, and recording artist, Dãm-Funk uses the same playbook as Ariel Pink, digging deep into genres and musical styles that were left by the wayside to create distinct sounds. While I can’t guarantee that he’ll break out the Animal Collective (so many records to choose from), word is that he’ll bust out the keytar. (Prendiville)

With King Most, Jacob Pena, and Freddy Anzures

9 p.m., $10

Som.

2925 16th St., SF

www.som-bar.com

 

EVENT

“Frogs in the Fog”

Wow, I just found the frikkin’ treasure trove! Not even my ecology-expert friends knew that the San Francisco Naturalist Society has the most kickass events calendar (www.sfns.org/events) — one that’s updated daily, to (hiking) boot. Probably the coolest-sounding upcoming event is led by “Mr. Science,” a.k.a. Chris Giorni, founder of Tree Frog Treks, and starts with checking out his extensive stash of amphibians and reptiles. After bonding with uncharacteristic mini-fauna, grab a slice of pizza to sustain your explorer spirit onward toward the hidden ponds, sacred groves, and endless discoveries of western Golden Gate Park. While the Treks’ mission is to make science fun for the kiddos, this adventure is open to all. (Kat Renz)

4 p.m.–6:15 p.m., $15–$50 (sliding scale)

Tree Frog Treks’ Frog Hall

2114 Hayes, SF

(415) 564-4107

www.baynature.org

 

SUNDAY 14

MUSIC

Nile

Specializing in impossibly fast blast beats and meticulously researched Egyptological lyrics, Nile has carved out a niche as one of the scene’s most revered death metal acts. The South Carolina quartet hews closely to the genre’s traditions, playing intricate, epic compositions that lean heavily on tremolo picking and sheer speed. Replicating such extreme chops live is no mean feat, but previous appearances by the band have been flawless and incendiary, particularly when they launch into epic closer “Unas Slayer of the Gods.” Whether you’re there for the tales of bloodthirsty pharaohs or just excited to bask in the copious beats-per-minute, Nile will take no prisoners. (Ben Richardson)

With Ex Deo, Psycroptic, Keep of Kalessin

7:30 p.m., $30

Slim’s

333 11th St., SF

(415) 255-0333

www.slims-sf.com

 

MONDAY 15

MUSIC

Thermals

For punk-tinged indie rockers Thermals, consistency is the name of the game. Never straying too far from its bare-bones, guitar, bass, and drums format, the Portland, Ore.-based band has now released five albums of punchy Buzzcocks-esque rock ‘n’ roll. Its newest, Personal Life, was produced by Death Cab for Cutie’s Chris Walla and includes a nice mix of slower, more drawn-out tracks and infectious, pound-on-your-steering-wheel bursts of adrenaline, such as lead single “I Don’t Believe You.” (Moblad)

With Night Marchers and White Fang

8 p.m., $16

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1421

www.theindependentsf.com 


The Guardian listings deadline is two weeks prior to our Wednesday publication date. To submit an item for consideration, please include the title of the event, a brief description of the event, date and time, venue name, street address (listing cross streets only isn’t sufficient), city, telephone number readers can call for more information, telephone number for media, and admission costs. Send information to Listings, the Guardian Building, 135 Mississippi St., SF, CA 94107; fax to (415) 487-2506; or e-mail (paste press release into e-mail body — no text attachments, please) to listings@sfbg.com. We cannot guarantee the return of photos, but enclosing an SASE helps. Digital photos may be submitted in jpeg format; the image must be at least 240 dpi and four inches by six inches in size. We regret we cannot accept listings over the phone.

On the Cheap Listings

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0

Events listings are compiled by Caitlin Donohue. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Weekly Picks.

WEDNESDAY 10

Holiday Ice Rink in Union Square Union Square, SF. Sun-Thu 10am-10pm. Fri and Sat 10am-11:30pm. Runs through January 17. $4.50 for kids and $9 for adults before 6pm; $5 for kids, $9.50 for adults after. It’s time to glide into the holidays (or bruise your bottom) as this annual tradition opens for all comers on two blades. E may not have snow, but we’ll sure as heck have Celine Dion belting through the speakers at young couples.

How to Do Physics Experiments at Home Bazaar Café, 5927 California, SF. (415) 831-5620, www.julianagallin.com/howto. 7pm, free. Learn how to melt glass in your microwave, make your own speaker, speed up time (or at least your watch) – Maker Faire favorite Zeke Crossover of Physics Circus teaches you some snazzy physics tricks at the invaluable monthly How To series at Bazaar cafe.

 

THURSDAY 11

SF Etsy Team Show Shawna Stoney, 390 Kansas, SF. (415) 863-9700, www.shawnastoney.com. Noon-6pm, free. Kickstart your holiday shopping (or just pick up some ideas for the future) as Esty.com’s San Franciscan craftspeople band together to present an “Everything Handmade Show.” Cute and ingenious goodies galore – all locally made and often one-of-a-kind.

BAY AREA

Censored 2011 Revolution Books, 2425 Channing Way, Berk. (510) 848-1196, www.revolutionbooks.org. 7pm, free. From “Capitalist Forces Reaking Havoc in Africa” and “Internet Privacy and Personal Access at Risk” to “Global Plans to Replace the Dollar” and “US Funds and Supports the Taliban,” Project Censored has exposed the major stories reported about least in the mainstream media – in one handy annual compendium. Censored 2011 coauthors Mickey Huff and Peter Phillips discuss 20 of the big stories you might have missed, and how they affect us all.

 

FRIDAY 12

Big Things Grand Opening Kitsch gallery, 3265 17th St., SF; www.bigbigbigthings.com. 6pm, free. Big Things, a new local website dedicated to art, fashion, design, travel, people, “and other inspirational things” is launching, officially, with this giant shindig. Featuring drawings, paintings, video, sculpture and installations by a bevy of artists, music by kids from the the SF Rock Project and DJs April Knows Best and Ben Bracken. Plus, colorful objects to take home!

 

SATURDAY 13

“A Community Writing Itself” Book Launch Meridian Gallery, 535 Powell, SF. (415) 398-7229, www.acommunitywritingitself.com. 7:30pm, $10 (no one turned away for lack of funds). Local author and poet Sarah Rosenthal has compiled a book of her many fruitful and titillating conversations with Bay Area vanguard writers and experimentalists. This launch party will include poetry readings and Q&As with Truong Tranm Juliana Spahr, Stephen Ratcliffe, and Elizabeth Robinson.

“The Nutrition Perscription” Institute on Aging, 3600 Geary, SF; (415) 273-5481, www.sfvs.org. 8pm, free. The San Francisco Vegetarian Society invites Dr. Donald Forrester to speak about diet and its relationship to the major degenerative diseases plaguing Americans today. (Hint: drop that French fry!) Dr. Forrester has a background in both family practice medicine and chemical engineering, and has more than 30 years experience in the field.

Writers with Drinks Make-Out Room, 3225 22nd St., SF. www.makeoutroom.com; www.writerswithdrinks.com. 7:30pm-9:30pm, $5-$10 sliding scale. This monthly literary hoot continues to augment the heady with the fizzy. This time around, Richard Kadrey, Debbie Stoller, Deb Campo, Larry-Bob Roberts, and Indigo Moor take the stage and freshen your wordy cocktail.

 

MONDAY 15

Long Now: Rachel Sussman presents “The World’s Oldest Living Organisms” Cowell Theater, Fort Mason Center, Pier 2, SF; www.longnow.org; www.fortmason.org. 7 p.m., $10. long Now, the organizazion dedicated to slower living, presents a lecture and showing of Rachel Sussman’s photographs of some of the world’s longest-living beings, including 400,000-year-old Siberian bacteria.

TUESDAY 16

Mommy’s Playdate Good Vibrations Polk Gallery, 1620 Polk, SF; (415) 345-0400, www.goodvibessexymama.com. 7pm-9pm, free. Attend this afterhours mixer with like-minded moms who want to learn how to put some spice back into their sex lives. Enjoy a “Mommi-tini,” learn tips from Good Vibes sexologist Dr. Carol Queen, meet mommy writer Billee Sharp, quick-witted author of Fix It, Make It, Grow It, Bake It: The D.I.Y. Guide to the Good Life.

The designer as performer

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
The designer as performer

MUSIC/VISUAL ART It’s late at night, and I’m sitting at my laptop transcribing an interview with visual designer Adam Guzman, when I notice the graphics on my screen, twitching along dully to the sound of our recorded conversation. A fuchsia tube made out of small crosses rises up against a black background, something between a digitized sand worm and a Slinky, and opens its yellow maw in a pointless sort of way that’s familiar to anyone who uses Windows Media Player. All I can think of is how much Guzman must hate these visualizations.

Guzman, you see, is one-half of Fair Enough, a design partnership with Julia Tsao. In the last year they’ve been working in creating concert visuals for musicians. But these aren’t your typical, canned images projected near the stage; stock footage and trippy clip art looped or automated to roughly coincide with the beat. “We wanted to do the opposite,” Guzman says during our phone interview. “We both hated that. You go to a concert and someone is playing, and the visuals have nothing to do with what [the sound] on stage. They’re just found clips of stuff. This doesn’t make sense, and I was sort of tired of that. We wanted to make simple things that were synced to [the music] and do it in a different way.”

The Fair Enough project started when Guzman was studying at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Through Tsao, Guzman was introduced to Jason Chung, who records and performs under the name Nosaj Thing. “I actually lived with him for a little bit,” Guzman says. “He got to talking, and he was really into doing a synchronized show inspired by [shows by the Japanese rock innovator] Cornelius. At the same time, I was starting my thesis and I was really into doing projects with music and sound experiments. It just made sense to do a project with him, and it turned into this thing that consumed me for a year.”

A great deal of Guzman’s process for the project is documented on his thesis blog, aleome.tumblr.com. But it began the way it does usually for him, with exploration. “When I started, I didn’t really know what direction it was going to go in,” he says. “I started drawing and shooting video, trying to edit it together, playing with MIDI controllers and stuff like that. I tried programming too, but wasn’t really into that. Julie had been gone, and when she came back, everything just sort of clicked and we decided to do something really simple. You know, embrace our constraints. Because I’m not a pro at animation or programming or anything. Neither is she. We just wanted to use that as a design tool.”

The final product is a stunning presentation, blanketing Nosaj Thing, his DJ booth, and the music under a series of graphic banners. Whereas typical concert visuals bombard your corneas with collages of disparate elements, each image of Fair Enough’s presentation is simplified down to an aesthetic essence. The displays range from organic suggestions with flowing blobs and swarming fireflies to geometric patterns shuttering crosses and a succession of colors. But each stands out on its own.

“We modeled the show after Jason’s set,” Guzman explains. “It made sense, because for his songs there’s pieces, and he calls them up when he’s performing. A bassline, or a synth, the drums, parts of the song. We thought it would be cool to do the same thing with the visuals and have parts of songs that we could call up as well. I was into the idea of the designer as performer, and what that [might] mean. I developed what the show is today from that. It’s the same. We have two MIDI controllers, and for each song there will be anything from three to seven clips that go with different parts, and we’re mixing and calling them up live.”

Guzman goes back repeatedly to the idea of the designer as performer. It was the subject of his thesis, Sound and Vision. Interested in musical artists who have pushed visual performances to the forefront — Daft Punk, Kanye West, U2, and especially the Talking Heads and Jonathan Demme’s 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense — he initiated the project as a way of exploring how sound influences visuals and how visuals create music. As David Byrne puts it: “Music is physical. The body understands it before the mind.” What Guzman and Tsao have created is a musical appeal to the sense of sight.

For Nosaj Thing’s November tour, they’re essentially members of the band, rehearsing, traveling on the bus with the other acts — Toro y Moi (who they also designed visuals for) and Jogger — and performing live at the shows.

Did Guzman see this happening when he was studying design? “I always knew I wanted to do something like this,” he says. “I didn’t envision this, though. I’m really excited about what’s happening.”

If Guzman wanted to explore the relationship between design as performance, he has done so — by becoming a performer. *

NOSAJ THING

With Toro Y Moi and Jogger

Fri/12, 9 p.m., $15–$18

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

www.rickshawstop.com

www.fair–enough.com

Music Listings

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0

Music listings are compiled by Cheryl Eddy. Since club life is unpredictable, it’s a good idea to call ahead to confirm bookings and hours. Prices are listed when provided to us. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Weekly Picks.

WEDNESDAY 10

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Bobs Café Du Nord. 8pm, $24.

Chicago Afrobeat Band Boom Boom Room. 9:45pm, $8.

Delorean, Lemonade, Butterfly Bones Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $16.

Grinn and Barrett, Coyotes, Red Light Circuit El Rio. 8pm, $5.

Have Special Power, Poison Control Center, Guitar vs. Gravity Elbo Room. 9pm, $7.

Derick Hughes Biscuits and Blues. 8pm, $16.

Gregg Laswell, Harper Blynn Independent. 8pm, $15.

Mae, Terrible Things, Windsor Drive Bottom of the Hill. 8pm, $14.

Terry Malts, Devon Williams, Lilac Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $6.

Personal and the Pizzas, Natural Child, Wrong Words Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $10.

Slick Rick Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8pm, $25.

Stars, Delays Fillmore. 8pm, $27.50.

DANCE CLUBS

Booty Call Qbar, 456 Castro, SF; www.bootycallwednesdays.com. 9pm, $3. Jualina More!, Joshua J, and guests spin booming, booty-shaking beats.

Fixup 222 Hyde; www.fixupsf.com. 9:30pm, $5. Bass music monthly with special guest Submerse.

Hands Down! Bar on Church. 9pm, free. With DJs Claksaarb, Mykill, and guests spinning indie, electro, house, and bangers.

Jam Fresh Wednesdays Vessel, 85 Campton, SF; (415) 433-8585. 9:30pm, free. With DJs Slick D, Chris Clouse, Rich Era, Don Lynch, and more spinning top40, mashups, hip hop, and remixes.

Mary-Go-Round Lookout, 3600 16th St, SF; (415) 431-0306. 10pm, $5. A weekly drag show with hosts Cookie Dough, Pollo Del Mar, and Suppositori Spelling.

Mods vs. Rockers Make-Out Room. 9pm. With Nectarine Pie and mod, garage, punk, and new wave DJs.

RedWine Social Dalva. 9pm-2am, free. DJ TophOne and guests spin outernational funk and get drunk.

Respect Wednesdays End Up. 10pm, $5. Rotating DJs Daddy Rolo, Young Fyah, Irie Dole, I-Vier, Sake One, Serg, and more spinning reggae, dancehall, roots, lovers rock, and mash ups.

Synchronize Il Pirata, 2007 16th St, SF; (415) 626-2626. 10pm, free. Psychedelic dance music with DJs Helios, Gatto Matto, Psy Lotus, Intergalactoid, and guests.

THURSDAY 11

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Leila Broussard, Bess Rogers, Allison Weiss Hotel Utah. 8pm, $10.

Marc Broussard Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8pm, $30.

Collie Buddz and New Kingston, Los Rakas Independent. 9pm, $30.

Candy Claws, Chain Gang of 1974, Blackbird Blackbird Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $12.

Ghostface Killah, Sheek Louch, Music by Frank Dukes Slim’s. 9pm, $22.

Jack Grisham and the West Coast Dudes, Stagger and Fall Thee Parkside. 9pm, $10-12.

Mayer Hawthorne and the County, Gordon Voidwell Bimbo’s 365 Club. 8pm, $16.

Mental 99 El Rio. 7pm, free.

RJ Mischo Biscuits and Blues. 8pm, $16.

Nitzer Ebb, //Tense//, Soft Metals, Terminal Twilight Mezzanine. 8:30pm, $20.

Taxes, Fake Your Own Death, Kill Moi, DJ Ted Bagel Radio Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

Tyrone Wells, Andrew Belle, Crown Point Café Du Nord. 8pm, $18.

Yo Mama’s Big Fat Booty Band Boom Boom Room. 9:30pm, $8.

Zoobombs, Uzi Rash, Cruddy Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $6.

DANCE CLUBS

Afrolicious Elbo Room. 9:30pm, $10. DJs Pleasuremaker and Señor Oz with special guest Black Pearl 504 spin Afrobeat, tropicália, electro, samba, and funk.

CakeMIX SF Wish, 1539 Folsom, SF; www.wishsf.com. 10pm, free. DJ Carey Kopp spinning funk, soul, and hip hop.

Caribbean Connection Little Baobab, 3388 19th St, SF; (415) 643-3558. 10pm, $3. DJ Stevie B and guests spin reggae, soca, zouk, reggaetón, and more.

Drop the Pressure Underground SF. 6-10pm, free. Electro, house, and datafunk highlight this weekly happy hour.

Good Foot Som., 2925 16th St, SF; (415) 558-8521. 10pm, free. With DJs spinning R&B, Hip hop, classics, and soul.

Jivin’ Dirty Disco Butter, 354 11th St., SF; (415) 863-5964. 8pm, free. With DJs spinning disco, funk, and classics.

Kissing Booth Make-Out Room. 9pm, free. DJs Jory, Commodore 69, and more spinning indie dance, disco, 80’s, and electro.

Koko Puffs Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 10pm, free. Dubby roots reggae and Jamaican funk from rotating DJs.

Mestiza Bollywood Café, 3376 19th St, SF; (415) 970-0362. 10pm, free. Showcasing progressive Latin and global beats with DJ Juan Data.

Motion Sickness Vertigo, 1160 Polk, SF; (415) 674-1278. 10pm, free. Genre-bending dance party with DJs Sneaky P, Public Frenemy, and D_Ro Cyclist.

Peaches Skylark, 10pm, free. With an all female DJ line up featuring Deeandroid, Lady Fingaz, That Girl, and Umami spinning hip hop.

Roger Sanchez Vessel. 9:30pm, $10-20. “The Return of House Tour” with Sidney Samson.

Wax Candy Ambassador, 673 Geary, SF; www.ambassador415.com. 9pm, free. Disco-licious party jams with Andre Lucero, Worker, Travis Dalton, and Sergio.

FRIDAY 12

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

“Bohemian Carnival” DNA Lounge. 9pm, $20. With Vau de Vire Society, Gooferman, Bambi Killers, and DJ Smoove.

Doomtree, POS, Dessa, Sims, Cecil Otter, Mike Mictlan, Lazerbeak, Paper Tiger, Rec-League Slim’s. 9pm, $15.

Emmitt-Nershi Band, Hot Buttered Rum Special String Band Independent. 9pm, $25.

Holy Shit, Bitter Honeys Knockout. 9pm, $7.

Talib Kweli Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8 and 10pm, $26.

Mayday Parade, Breathe Carolina, Every Avenue, Artist vs. Poet, Go Radio Regency Ballroom. 6pm, $20.

Narrows, Skinwalker, New Trust Bottom of the Hill. 10pm, $12.

Charles Neville, Youssoupha Sidibe and the Mystic Rhythms Coda. 9pm, $17.

Nosaj Thing, Toro Y Moi, Jogger Rickshaw Stop. 9pm, $18.

Number Prophets, Pebble Theory, Heart Touch Hotel Utah. 9pm, $8.

Rod Piazza and Mighty Flyers Biscuits and Blues. 8pm, $22.

Rocket Summer: Bruce Avary, his instruments and your voices, He Is We, Travis Hayes and An-Nhein Le Thee Parkside. 9pm, $15.

Le Serpent Rouge, Mardi Love and Zoe Jakes, Brass Menazeri Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $21.

Sista Sekunden, Roller, Lecherous Gaze, Fast Asleep Submission, 2183 Mission, SF; www.sf-submission.com. 9pm, $8.

This Charming Band, For The Masses Café Du Nord. 9:30pm, $12.

Young Offenders, Northern Towns, Sydney Ducks Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $7.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Paul Dresher Ensemble ODC Theater, 3153 17th St, SF; www.odctheater.org. 8pm, $18.

SF Jazz High School All-Stars Concert Jewish Community Center, 3200 California, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 8pm, $5-15.

3 Leg Torso Red Poppy Art House. 8pm, $15.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Hobbyhorse Red Vic, 1665 Haight, SF; www.myspace.com/redvicsessions. 7:45pm, $2.

Marco Periera and Brasil Guitar Duo Herbst Theatre, 401 Van Ness, SF; www.omniconcerts.com. 8pm, $24-38.

DANCE CLUBS

Exhale, Fridays Project One Gallery, 251 Rhode Island, SF; (415) 465-2129. 5pm, $5. Happy hour with art, fine food, and music with Vin Sol, King Most, DJ Centipede, and Shane King.

Fat Stack Fridays Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 10pm, free. With rotating DJs B-Cause, Vinnie Esparza, Mr. Robinson, Toph One, and Slopoke.

Fo’ Sho! Fridays Madrone Art Bar. 10pm, $5. DJs Kung Fu Chris and Makossa spin rare grooves, soul, funk, and hip-hop classics.

Fubar Fridays Butter, 354 11th St., SF; (415) 863-5964. 6pm, $5. With DJs spinning retro mashup remixes.

Good Life Fridays Apartment 24, 440 Broadway, SF; (415) 989-3434. 10pm, $10. With DJ Brian spinning hip hop, mashups, and top 40.

Heartical Roots Bollywood Café. 9pm, $5. Recession-friendly reggae.

Hot Chocolate Milk. 9pm, $5. With DJs Big Fat Frog, Chardmo, DuseRock, and more spinning old and new school funk.

Rockabilly Fridays Jay N Bee Club, 2736 20th St, SF; (415) 824-4190. 9pm, free. With DJs Rockin’ Raul, Oakie Oran, Sergio Iglesias, and Tanoa “Samoa Boy” spinning 50s and 60s Doo Wop, Rockabilly, Bop, Jive, and more.

Some Thing The Stud. 10pm, $7. VivvyAnne Forevermore, Glamamore, and DJ Down-E give you fierce drag shows and afterhours dancing.

Strictly Video 111 Minna. 9pm, $10. With VDJs Shortkut, Swift Rock, GoldenChyld, and Satva spinning rap, 80s, R&B, and Dancehall.

Treat Em Right Elbo Room. 10pm, $5. Hip-hop, funk, and more with DJs Vinnie Esparza and B. Cause, plus guest Primo.

SATURDAY 13

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Blisses B, Tyler Matthew Smith, Vandella Café Du Nord. 9:30pm, $10.

Cat Party, Pins of Light Bender’s, 800 S. Van Ness, SF; www.bendersbar.com. 10pm, $5.

Dead to Me, Cobra Skulls, Thousand Watt Stare, Invalids Thee Parkside. 9pm, $10.

Full On Flyhead, Stomacher, Swoon, Nosebleed Academy Slim’s. 9pm, $14.

Hank IV, Carlton Melton, Circle Pit, Outlaw Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

Hot Lunch, Spider Fever, Harderships El Rio. 9pm, $7.

Junip, Sharon Van Etten Independent. 9pm, $20.

Talib Kweli Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8 and 10pm, $26.

Charles Neville, Youssoupha Sidibe and the Mystic Rhythms Coda. 10pm, $17.

Over the Rhine, Lucy Wainwright Roche Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $25.

Sista Monica Biscuits and Blues. 8pm, $22.

Trophy Fire, Ash Reiter, Foolproof Four Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $7.

Two Headed Spy, Deeper, Thumper, Cold Steel Renegade Hotel Utah. 9pm, $8.

Dean Wareham Fillmore. 9pm, $25.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Jazz Mafia, Realistic Orchestra, Latryx Mezzanine. 9pm, $20.

Jazz Sawyer 3rio Coda. 7-9pm, $5.

Paul Dresher Ensemble ODC Theater, 3153 17th St, SF; www.odctheater.org. 8pm, $18.

3 Leg Torso San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St, SF; www.ticketweb.com. 10am, $5-18.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Banda de Turistas, Pacha Massive Elbo Room. 4pm, $5.

Broceliande Seventh Avenue Performances, 1329 Seventh Ave, SF; www.sevenperforms.org. 7:30pm, $15-20.

Go Van Gogh Café International, 508 Haight, SF; www.cafeinternational.com. 7pm.

Slavic Soul Party! Swedish American Hall (above Café Du Nord). 8pm, $30.

DANCE CLUBS

Bar on Church 9pm. Rotating DJs Foxxee, Joseph Lee, Zhaldee, Mark Andrus, and Nuxx.

Bootie DNA Lounge. 9pm, $6-12. Mash-ups with guest DJ Axel.

Frolic Stud. 9pm, $3-7. DJs Dragn’Fly, NeonBunny, and Ikkuma spin at this celebration of anthropomorphic costume and dance. Animal outfits encouraged.

Prom Milk. 9pm, $8. Wave not Wave DJs Jacob Fury and Mario Muse spin rock ‘n’ roll at this prom-themed dance party.

Rock City Butter, 354 11th St., SF; (415) 863-5964. 6pm, $5 after 10pm. With DJs spinning party rock.

Same Sex Salsa and Swing Magnet, 4122 18th St, SF; (415) 305-8242. 7pm, free.

Spirit Fingers Sessions 330 Ritch. 9pm, free. With DJ Morse Code and live guest performances.

Spotlight Siberia, 314 11th St, SF; (415) 552-2100. 10pm. With DJs Slowpoke, Double Impact, and Moe1.

Tormenta Tropical Elbo Room. 10pm. Electro cumbia with DJs Spoke Mathambo and Mshini Wam, Zuzuka Poderosa, Disco Shawn and Oro 11, and Panamami.

SUNDAY 14

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Macy Blackman and the Mighty Fines Biscuits and Blues. 8pm, $15.

Cornershop, Tyde, Mar Carroll Independent. 8pm, $25.

High Places, Soft Circle, Sun Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

Erin Mckeown Café Du Nord. 8pm, $15.

Nile, Ex Deo, Psycroptic, Keep of Kalessin Slim’s. 7:30pm, $30.

Tennis, Eulogies Hotel Utah. 9pm, $8.

Thralls, Reverse Dotty, Spiro Agnew Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $6.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Sepia Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8pm, $22.

Vijay Iyer Trio Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 7pm, $30-50.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Rosanne Cash Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, 3301 Lyon, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 7pm, $25-65.

Hammerlock, K-9 Thee Parkside. 4pm, free.

DANCE CLUBS

DiscoFunk Mashups Cat Club. 10pm, free. House and 70’s music.

Dub Mission Elbo Room. 9pm, $6. Dub, dubstep, roots, and dancehall with DJ Sep, J Boogie, and guest Spliff Skankin’.

Gloss Sundays Trigger, 2344 Market, SF; (415) 551-CLUB. 7pm. With DJ Hawthorne spinning house, funk, soul, retro, and disco.

Hacienda Deco Lounge, 510 Larkin, SF; www.decosf.com. 10pm, $3. Classic electronic tracks with DJs Inquilab, Robots in Heat, Tristes Tropiques, and guest Chris Orr.

Honey Soundsystem Paradise Lounge. 8pm-2am. “Dance floor for dancers – sound system for lovers.” Got that?

Pachanga Coda. 5pm, $10. Salsa with DJs Fab Fred and Antonio, plus Orquesta La Moderna Tradición.

Play T-Dance DNA Lounge. 5pm-midnight, $25. House with DJ Rich Russ and DJ John LePage.

Swing Out Sundays Rock-It Room. 7pm, free (dance lessons $15). DJ BeBop Burnie spins 20s through 50s swing, jive, and more.

Tensnake Public Works, 161 Erie, SF; www.publicsf.com. 9pm, $10. Cosmic disco.

MONDAY 15

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Alejandro Chavez, Korelenko, Upwords Movement El Rio. 7pm, $7.

Pomegranates, Oh No Oh My, Big Tree Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $10.

Rattlesnakes, Silent Comedy, Scrote with Stripminers, Pink Snowflakes Elbo Room. 9pm, $7.

Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, Lonely Forest, Alright Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

Thermals, Night Marchers, White Fang Independent. 8pm, $16.

Nico Vega, Imagine Dragons, Saint Motel Café Du Nord. 8pm, $10.

DANCE CLUBS

Black Gold Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 10pm-2am, free. Senator Soul spins Detroit soul, Motown, New Orleans R&B, and more — all on 45!

Krazy Mondays Beauty Bar. 10pm, free. With DJs Ant-1, $ir-Tipp, Ruby Red I, Lo, and Gelo spinning hip hop.

M.O.M. Madrone Art Bar. 6pm, free. With DJ Gordo Cabeza and guests playing all Motown every Monday.

Death Guild DNA Lounge. 9:30pm, $3-5. Gothic, industrial, and synthpop with Decay, Joe Radio, and Melting Girl.

Manic Mondays Bar on Church. 9pm. Drink 80-cent cosmos with Djs Mark Andrus and Dangerous Dan.

Musik for Your Teeth Revolution Café, 3248 22nd St., SF; (415) 642-0474. 5pm, free. Soul cookin’ happy hour tunes with DJ Antonino Musco.

Network Mondays Azul Lounge, One Tillman Pl, SF; www.inhousetalent.com. 9pm, $5. Hip-hop, R&B, and spoken word open mic, plus featured performers.

Skylarking Skylark. 10pm, free. With resident DJs I & I Vibration, Beatnok, and Mr. Lucky and weekly guest DJs.

TUESDAY 16

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Bright Blues, Drums and Color, Moonshine and the Drugs Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $6.

Cermak, Califia El Rio. 7pm, free.

Curse of Panties, Red Light Mind, Stowaways Hotel Utah. 9pm, $6.

Fat Tuesday Band Biscuits and Blues. 8pm, $15.

Generalissimo, Pegataur, Nero Order Café Du Nord. 8:30pm, $10.

Margot and the Nuclear So and Sos, Jookabox, Burnt Ones Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $16.

Bruno Mars, Donnis Slim’s. 8pm, $19.

Perfect Circle Fillmore. 8pm, $40.

Sole and the Skyrider Band, Egadz and Edison, Epcot, DJ Bomarr Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

Twiztid, Blade, Mclordz and Sauce Funky, Kung Fu Vampire Regency Ballroom. 7:30pm, $23.

Vaccuum, Unlearn, Kruel, Neo Cons Knockout. 9:30pm, $5.

DANCE CLUBS

Alcoholocaust Presents Argus Lounge. 9pm, free. With DJ Ken Prank and DJ Grenadine.

Brazilian Wax Elbo Room. 9pm, $7. With Samba de Raiz featuring Jorge Alabe, plus DJs Carioca and P-Shot.

Eclectic Company Skylark, 9pm, free. DJs Tones and Jaybee spin old school hip hop, bass, dub, glitch, and electro.

Share the Love Trigger, 2344 Market, SF; (415) 551-CLUB. 5pm, free. With DJ Pam Hubbuck spinning house.

Womanizer Bar on Church. 9pm. With DJ Nuxx.

An Iggy Pop Woody Allen

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
An Iggy Pop Woody Allen

COMEDY Marc Maron is old school. He’s the kind of comic who will talk your ear off about the pitfalls of modern technology and the lost art of conversation while actually making a point. He doesn’t do characters or hide behind awkward self-consciousness. He criticizes YouTube and the oversaturation of stand-up comedy, hankering for a return to the “emotional thought” of comics he grew up admiring. And in what seems to be a symbolic “fuck you” to the modern world, the guy is still rocking his America Online e-mail account. “No numbers or any of that shit — nice and clean,” he says. “I’m trying to make it sound really cool and retro.”

Maron specializes in a type of stand-up comedy that seems to reject any kind of self-censoring, perhaps best comparable to the like-minded Louis C.K. He is brutally honest when discussing his own thoughts and opinions, and vehemently flustered while ranting about personal relationships, the state of the country’s mental health, or why the hell he felt the need to buy a Blackberry (he compares his text messaging ability to pounding out letters on a stone tablet). His success has led to the creation of “WTF with Marc Maron” (www.wtfpod.com), a podcast full of comedy bits, interviews with comics like David Cross, Sarah Silverman, Bob Saget, and Maria Bamford, and most recently, even a bit of Maron’s newfound love for performing music live.

SFBG I was at a comedy show last week and on the way out I heard this woman ranting to her friend about how offended she was by some of the comic’s material. I was kind of baffled that someone could take it so seriously. Do you deal with this very often at your shows?

MARC MARON Part of the tradition of stand-up comedy, and of the comics who I’ve enjoyed personally throughout my life, is challenging people and making them a bit uncomfortable. You want to make people think rather than just sit there passively. If you’re doing your job well, you should have two or three of those people a show.

SFBG You talk a lot about technology’s impact on communication and your struggles to constantly try to adapt to it. If you could go back in time and freeze technological advancement at a certain point, when would that be?

MM (Laughing) Shortly after the invention of the automobile.

SFBG Do you mean that personally or in the grand scheme of things?

MM I guess in the grand scheme of things.

SFBG It’s interesting listening to your comedy about technology, because you walk a line between hating having to constantly keep up and knowing you have to in order to survive and benefit from it. Like the podcast, for example — has that turned a lot of people onto your comedy who hadn’t heard you previously?

MM It’s a whole other world, man. I can be doing a show and get an e-mail from a guy in Chile who’s listening to the podcast while climbing a mountain, and that’s really cool. But too often, I think technology encourages cowardice. You can hide behind a computer, you can hide behind a screen name. Or if you have to talk to someone, you just think, “I’ll just text this guy.” It can be draining to deal with certain things, and that can make it easier. But at some point you need to just man up.

SFBG The podcast is a nice compliment to your stand-up in that you don’t always have to play things strictly for laughs and can often just pick the brains of your guests in a really open, honest way.

MM Yeah. The podcast is unique in that it’s often just two people sitting down, having a conversation. And it seems like sitting down with another person for an hour-and-a-half of interpersonal conversation is too rare or hard for some people these days.

SFBG You’ve talked before about your love for music and playing guitar, and you’ve recently started to perform live a bit. What do you find different about performing music on stage compared to comedy?

MM In terms of baring your soul, I think music is the ultimate form for that. It’s amazing how much you can lose yourself playing music. As for stand-up, I would say it’s definitely a more vulnerable and high-risk art form in that people might not laugh and it’s just you up there. You don’t have your bandmates to fall back on.

SFBG Do you find that it becomes more difficult to stay angry the older you get?

MM Sure. I’ve recently started to come to a place where I’ve learned to accept a lot of things for how they are. I haven’t been doing very much topical or political comedy over the past few years, which is something I used to do a lot of. To do that type of comedy, you really need to be up to date. I used to read everything and get pissed off, and at some point I think I got a little disillusioned with it all. So I don’t do that very often these days. But don’t worry, ’cause I’m just waiting for the shit to hit the fan. And it definitely will.

MARC MARON

With Ryan Singer and Janine Brito

Thu/11, Fri/12 and Sat/13

Punch Line Comedy Club

444 Battery, SF

(415) 397-PLSF

www.marcmaron.com

www.wtfpod.com

Prison for killer cop

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
Prison for killer cop

rebeccab@sfbg.com

On Nov. 5, former BART Police officer Johannes Mehserle was sentenced to two years in state prison for fatally shooting Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old African American rider, on the Fruitvale train platform on New Year’s Day 2009.

Mehserle, who is white, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in July in an incident that has become charged with racial undertones. He received credit for 292 days served in jail so far, which will considerably reduce his time in prison. It was the lightest prison sentence he could have received for the crime.

Grant supporters gathered in Frank Ogawa Plaza in downtown Oakland to express anger and sorrow upon hearing news of the sentence. “I’m not shocked,” said Cat Brooks, who helped organize an afternoon rally for the Coalition for Justice for Oscar Grant. “But I’m disgusted and distraught. It seems like the justice system didn’t work.”

After the rally came to a close and night fell, protesters spilled into the streets and marched toward the Fruitvale BART Station, the scene of the crime. But after a dozen car windows were smashed along the way, police officers in riot gear corralled the group into a residential neighborhood. Police then placed 152 protesters under mass arrest, mostly on charges of unlawful assembly. Roughly two-thirds of those arrested were Oakland residents, according to the Oakland Police Department, while others were from Berkeley, San Francisco, Hayward, and other local cities.

 

COMMUNITY RESPONDS

A stage outside Oakland City Hall was transformed into a venue for personal expression in the wake of the sentencing. Community members lined up to air their frustrations and resolve to keep fighting. They piled flowers onto a shrine that had been created with a picture of Grant’s face. Some painted pictures, while others gave spoken word or hip-hop performances. Several told stories of loved ones who’d died in police shootings.

Cephus Johnson, Grant’s uncle, was at the Los Angeles courtroom where Mehserle was sentenced, but shared some thoughts with the Guardian beforehand. Asked what he’d thought when the verdict had been announced, Johnson said, “My first thought was that we’re witnessing the criminal justice system failing to work as it should have worked.” If the sentence fell short of the 14-year maximum, he said, “it will be another slap in the face, signifying that black and brown men are worthless.”

East Bay labor organizer Charles Dubois was among those attending the Nov. 5 rally. “Every black parent, every brown parent, lives with this nightmare of their children being killed by some cops because they thought they had a gun,” Dubois said in an interview with the Guardian. “It’s been happening since I was a kid. It’s been happening then and it’s happening now, and it’s going to keep happening until we do something.”

California Assemblymember Tom Ammiano (D-SF) also weighed in during a phone call with the Guardian. “This verdict is outrageous,” he said. “It’s Dan White all over again.”

 

JUDGE DROPS GUN ENHANCEMENT

Judge Robert Perry sided with arguments presented by Mehserle’s defense attorney, Michael Rains, when he levied a reduced punishment. Mehserle could have served up to 14 years prison for involuntary manslaughter committed while wielding a gun, but Perry tossed out the firearm enhancement.

“No reasonable trier of fact could have concluded that Mehserle intentionally fired his gun,” the judge was quoted in media reports as saying. But that appears to be what the jury found, as the prosecution argued in a presentencing memorandum.

“The evidence was presented regarding the use of the gun, and in discussing the use of the gun in the jury room, somehow or another the jury decided he had used the gun illegally,” criminal defense attorney and National Lawyers Guild observer Walter Riley told the Guardian. “One has to believe the jury expected him to have exposure to a greater amount of jail time because of that.”

Perry said he believed Mehserle suffered a “muscle memory accident” that led him to draw and fire his service weapon instead of his Taser, a cornerstone of the defense’s case.

Rains wrote to the court prior to sentencing that jurors should never have been allowed to apply the firearm enhancement to an involuntary manslaughter conviction “because in this case, there is no logical way to square a verdict of involuntary manslaughter and a finding that Mehserle intended to use his gun.”

Prosecutor David Stein of the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office countered that the jury’s conviction showed they believed Mehserle intended to shoot, but not to kill, Grant. Yet Perry agreed with the defense, conceding he had mistakenly permitted the jury to enhance Mehserle’s sentence.

Riley said he sympathized with frustrations over the gun enhancement getting dismissed. “The use of guns is too prevalent in circumstances where law enforcement comes in contact with young black people,” he said. “Our society — our civil society, our judicial authority, and our communities — have to hold government and law enforcement officers to a higher level of accountability in their interactions with citizens. When people with guns shoot an inordinate number of people of one group, it’s worth tremendous scrutiny.”

 

ANOTHER NIGHT IN JAIL

Twice before, activists took to the streets in furious protest over this case. In January 2009, things escalated to the point where cars were set ablaze. In July 2010, a street rally gave way to rioting and looting. So on Nov. 5, many downtown Oakland storeowners boarded up and closed business early in anticipation of a third wave of vandalism.

Yet the turnout was smaller than the previous events. And while there were reports of smashed car windshields and other instances of vandalism along the circuitous path of the march, there was far less property destruction.

The community affair outside Oakland City Hall ended around 6 p.m., when the permit expired. Soon after, activists spilled into the intersection of 14th and Broadway streets, then began advancing down 14th Street chanting “No Justice! No Peace!” and “The whole system is guilty!” The march turned right onto Madison Street, then left onto 10th Street.

A police helicopter with a spotlight kept pace overhead while it progressed, and when protesters reached Laney College, police officers in riot gear blocked them in. So protesters cut through a park and wandered in a pack until they reached the intersection of East 18th Street and Sixth Avenue in a residential neighborhood. Once again, police surrounded the protesters. This time, the crowd was trapped.

Rachel Jackson, an activist who was barricaded in, began sounding off. “We were going to Fruitvale,” she explained. “We wanted to go to the scene of the crime. All night the police have been trying to suppress our free speech.” When a nearby TV news reporter asked her about windows that had been busted along the march, she was incensed. “We will not equate glass with Oscar Grant’s life!” she responded. “If we have to come out ourselves and board up windows, we’ll do that. But what we are concerned with right now is murder.”

Reporters were allowed to exit the confined area, but if anyone else had been inclined to leave peacefully, they were unable to. Police issued a call on a megaphone telling activists, “You are all under arrest. Do not resist arrest.” By the time the mass arrest was underway, public information officer Jeff Thomason told a group of reporters that there were more police officers on the scene than protesters.

“When the rocks were being thrown, it was declared an unlawful assembly,” Thomason explained. He said a dispersal order had been issued simultaneously. Yet it would have been impossible for the trapped crowd to comply with such an order.

Meanwhile, a resident of the Oakland neighborhood who had come outside when the commotion began told the Guardian that she sympathized with the protesters. “The only thing I don’t condone is the vandalism,” said Dyshia Harvey, who surveyed the scene from behind a fence with her six-year-old son.

Harvey had been anticipating word of Mehserle’s sentencing. “I was upset. I was frustrated, angry, and hurt” by the outcome, she said. But she wasn’t surprised. “I already knew we weren’t going to get no justice,” she said. “For taking a life, 14 years isn’t enough. It makes you feel like there’s no justice in the justice system.”

 

NOT OVER YET

Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley has not stated whether her office will appeal Perry’s ruling. Rains told reporters in L.A. that he would appeal Mehserle’s involuntary manslaughter conviction.

Meanwhile, the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice released a statement indicating that a federal investigation is in the works. “The Justice Department and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California have been closely monitoring the local prosecution of this case,” a USDOJ prepared statement notes. “Now that the state prosecution has concluded and consistent with department policy, we will thoroughly review the prosecution and its underlying investigation to determine whether further action is appropriate.”

BART settled a civil lawsuit filed on behalf of Grant’s daughter in January that is likely to total $5.1 million, according to civil rights attorney John Burris’ website. Two other lawsuits, one on behalf of Grant’s mother and one on behalf of five other men on the Fruitvale station platform that night, have been consolidated into a single trial that will begin in May 2011, Burris told the Guardian.

Meanwhile, Grant’s death marked just one of three police shootings that occurred Jan. 1, 2009 — the other two cases also sparked allegations of civil-rights violations, since both victims were African American men. Adolph Grimes, 22, was fatally shot 14 times, including 12 times in the back, by a group of New Orleans police officers, who erroneously believed he was a suspect who’d fled the scene of a shooting.

The same night, Robert Tolan, 23 — the son of a Major League Baseball player — was shot and seriously injured outside his home in an upscale Houston suburb by a police officer who mistakenly believed Tolan had stolen the vehicle he was driving. Sgt. Jeffrey Cotton, the white officer who shot him, was ultimately acquitted.

 

CREATIVE OUTLET

Not everyone in Oakland reacted to Mehserle’s sentence by charging through the streets. The Oscar Grant Foundation, which facilitated live art performances at Frank Ogawa Plaza Nov. 5, is calling for youth groups, Bay Area schools, and adults to participate in an art and poetry showcase inspired by Grant. Information can be found online at IamOscarGrant.org. The foundation is advertising a $1,000 grand prize. Three artists from the Trust Your Struggle Collective didn’t wait to join a contest, however, and spent the afternoon of Nov. 5 adorning plywood covering the Youth Radio building windows at 17th Street and Telegraph Avenue, a few blocks from Frank Ogawa Plaza.

The mural displayed a prominent image of Grant holding his daughter, Tatiana, who was four years old when Grant was killed. The pair are flanked by the names and figures of more than 20 people killed by police.

“We asked the youth inside what they wanted to see,” Miguel Perez, an artist with the Trust Your Struggle Collective, told the Guardian as he looked over the mural. “They said they wanted to see the names of people killed by police nationwide, not just in the Bay Area. The list is so huge, it’s hard to pick out specific names.”

Perez said Trust Your Struggle is a group of artists and educators with social-justice backgrounds who create art as activism. “Being a person of color, I’ve had racist stuff said to me by the police,” Perez said. “It seems like it’s slowly been changing for the past hundreds of years, but it’s still not enough — enough being fairness.” *

Editor’s Notes

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
Editor’s Notes

tredmond@sfbg.com

Way back in 1986, Tom Hsieh Sr., an architect and one of the most conservative members of the Board of Supervisors, called his colleague Harry Britt — by all accounts the most liberal supervisor — and asked for a meeting. The way both men described it to me at the time, Britt was a little mystified; why would someone who was on the opposite end of the political spectrum want to be pals?

Well, it turned out that Hsieh had a message for his colleague. "Someday," Hsieh told Britt, "the gays and the Asians will be running this town, and we might as well get along."

It’s taken a while, but Hsieh (whose son is a moderate-to-conservative political consultant and activist) was prophetic. One of the little-noticed facts about this supervisorial election is that the majority of the members of the next Board of Supervisors will be either Asian or gay. And the odds are pretty good that the person in the Mayor’s Office in 2012 will be Asian (David Chiu, Leland Yee, Phil Ting) or gay (Tom Ammiano, David Campos, Mark Leno).

I mention that bit of interesting history as a sort of a prelude to the fascinating historic challenge facing progressives in San Francisco today. At a time when the rest of the country seems to be drifting (at least for the moment) to the right, San Francisco has a chance to go to the left. There hasn’t been a mayor the progressives supported in this town in at least 20 years (and that’s if you count Art Agnos, which is a bit of a stretch). With Gavin Newsom (will he be San Francisco’s last straight white mayor?) leaving early in his term, the supervisors could profoundly change the direction of the city.

And they could also duck, punt, or make a terrible mistake.

If the board wants to appoint someone who’s going to promote a progressive agenda, that person not only needs to be able to get six votes in January, but hold on to the seat until November — when the competition will be intense. And any progressive mayor will be vilified by the local daily papers, mocked by the national media, and held to an almost impossible standard by his or her constituents.

You wonder why anyone would want the job.

But taking on that insane challenge is also about history, and about proving that this city is (still) different. And the person in the job is going to need a whole lot of help and support. I have to believe that we’re up to it.

Scenes from the Nov. 5 Oscar Grant rally

Sasha Cuttler
-
0

By Rebecca Bowe and Alex Emslie

Photos by Ramsey El-Qare

This week’s Guardian features an in-depth account of the Nov. 5 rally and march held in response to the news that former BART cop Johannes Mehserle, who fatally shot unarmed BART passenger Oscar Grant on Jan. 1, 2009, was sentenced to two years in prison for involuntary manslaughter. With credit for time served and good behavior, Mehserle could be out in less than a year.

The rally lasted from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. at Frank Ogawa Plaza in downtown Oakland, where community members expressed outrage at the lenient sentence. All afternoon, people told stories about loved ones who’d been victims of police brutality, made art and gave potery readings and hip-hop performances, and chanted with fists in the air. Soon after the rally ended, about 200 protesters began marching down 14th Street toward the Fruitvale BART station, where Grant was shot. Some car windshields and the windows of an AC transit bus were smashed along the way. Police followed, and by the time the crowd made it to Sixth Avenue and East 18th Street, 152 protesters were barricaded in by police in riot gear and placed under arrest. The photos, taken by Ramsey El-Qare, tell the story of that afternoon and evening.

 

 

Our Weekly Picks: November 3-9, 2010

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0

WEDNESDAY 3

EVENT

“The Neighborhood”

Audyssey, an L.A.-based audio laboratory, must have a thing for San Francisco. First it marketed its iPhone docking station as the South of Market, and now it’s calibrating the music scene by launching a monthly music showcase at 111 Minna: “Multiple genres. Local talent. The Neighborhood.” With live performances by Maus Haus, My First Earthquake, Shortkut, Trackademicks, Ghosts On Tape, DLRN, and Electric Sunset, and DJs King Most, Prince Aries, and A-Ron, the lineup is enough to make you forget the whole synergistic marketing thing (it’s free, yo). That many diverse acts and the promise of local food carts to keep you fed? (Food not free.) Half the fun should be seeing if it all come together under one roof. (Ryan Prendiville)
9 p.m., free
111 Minna Gallery
111 Minna, SF
(415) 974-1719
www.audyssey.com/theneighborhood

THURSDAY 4

COMEDY

Michael Ian Black

First gaining widespread fame for his work on Stella, The State, Viva Variety and other TV shows, comedian Michael Ian Black has honed his sarcastic commentary on pop culture to a fine, surgical-quality blade, quite literally stealing the show on every appearance he has made on VH1’s I Love The … series. For those who just can’t get enough of his wit and witticisms from the short, seconds-long snippets that make it on the air, here’s the chance to experience a full-on onslaught of hilarious, side-splitting observations from one of the best funnymen on the circuit today. (Sean McCourt)
Thurs.–Sun., 8 p.m. (also Fri.–Sat., 10:15 p.m.), $22.50–$23.50.
Cobb’s Comedy Club
915 Columbus, SF
(415) 928-4320
www.cobbscomedyclub.com

MUSIC

Marnie Stern

Kill Rock Stars artist Marnie Stern brings her whirlwind brand of finger-tap guitar shredding to Oakland. With influences ranging from math-rock godfathers Don Cabellero to punk and classic-rock staples, Stern and her band create quite the interesting racket. Equally impressive as Stern herself is her drummer, Zach Hill (of Hella), who matches her yelping vocal style and hyperactive arena rock solos with a frenetic creativity all his own. Stern’s new self-titled album brings the “noise for the sake of noise” level down just a tad and offers a more melodic and direct approach to her songwriting. (Landon Moblad)
8 p.m., $12
New Parish
579 18th St., Oakl.
www.thenewparish.com

FRIDAY 5

VISUAL ART

“I Live Here: SF”

It goes without saying that we live in a pretty diverse city, but since February 2009 photographer Julie Michelle has been capturing the people and stories that make SF great in her “I Live Here: SF” portrait series. The end result includes more than 170 images of SF residents, complete with their personal stories and accounts of their connection to this lovely, crazy, and exciting city of ours. Her subjects cut across races, classes, ages, and neighborhoods; you might just be surprised by the SF microcelebrities who pop up in them. I guarantee you’ll recognize someone photographed for the exhibit — or at least have seen one walking by you on the street. (Ben Hopfer)
6-9 p.m., free
SOMArts
934 Brannan, SF
(415) 552-1770
www.iliveheresf.com

DANCE

“Shared Space 4”

This is the fourth “Shared Space” season for Todd Eckert and Nol Simonse, two dancers who couldn’t be more different from each other. Yet as choreographers they find common ground. At least for this season, they are both diving into the past for their world premieres. The intricate meters of a medieval poetic form and the music of J.S. Bach inspired Eckert’s new Sinfonia. Continuing his interest in Greek mythology, Simonse is reaching even farther back. Demeter, the goddess of harvest and generosity, became the springboard for Greater Than. With Dancer for Hire, however, he hits a painful, up-to-date note: how to keep dancing in these parlous times. (Rita Felciano)
Fri/5-Sat/6, 8 p.m.; Sun/7, 7 p.m., $20
Dance Mission Theater
3316 24th St., SF
(415) 273-4633
www.sharedspacesf.org

MUSIC

Ray Manzarek and Roy Rogers

A recent project bringing together two luminaries of the 1960s and ’70s California rock ’n’ roll scene, the collaboration between legendary Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek and blues guitarist par excellence Roy Rogers has produced an eclectic exploration of musical styles, including reimaginings of Doors classics, along with other blues and jazz tracks. Tonight’s show is being billed as “An Evening of Rock ’n’ Roll Tales and Music” since the duo promise to share stories about their long and fruitful careers between songs — fans won’t want to miss this rare opportunity to hear them straight from the still-rocking source. (McCourt)
8 and 10 p.m., $18–$25
Yoshi’s San Francisco
1330 Fillmore St., SF
(415) 655-5600
www.yoshis.com

DANCE

AXIS Dance Company and inkBoat

Known for its mix of disabled and able-bodied dancers, AXIS Dance Company has joined forces with Shinichi Iova-Koga and his company inkBoat to create ODD, a piece inspired by the work of Norwegian painter Odd Nerdrum. With cellist Joan Jeanrenaud performing a live original composition, ODD delves into themes found in Nerdrum’s paintings, including loneliness, fear, sexuality, and degradation. Iova-Koga’s choreography is mesmerizing to say the least and exactly how he will fuse two companies, a musician, and an artist’s work into an evening show is the source of much anticipation. (Emmaly Wiederholt)
Fri/5–Sat/6, 8 p.m., Sun/7, 3 p.m., $15–$18
ODC Theater
3153 17th St, SF
Also Nov. 12–14, $10–$22
Malonga Theater
1428 Alice, Oakl.
www.axisdance.org

SATURDAY 6

MUSIC

San Francisco Symphony Día de los Muertos family concert

One hundred years ago as the Mexican Revolution kicked into high gear, could Emiliano Zapatista or Pancho Villa have anticipated the havoc that has their country in a stranglehold today? We hear so much about the Mexican drug wars (and bankroll them on the weekend) that it’s easy to forget our southerly neighbor’s beauty and culture. This makes it a particularly salient year for the symphony’s annual celebration of Chicano heritage, underwritten by an homage to the centennial celebration of the Revolution. Papel picado, sugar skulls, and steaming cups of Mexican chocolate precede the musical program, which itself features kid-friendly works from accomplished Latino composers. (Caitlin Donohue)
2 p.m., $15–$68
Davies Symphony Hall
201 Van Ness, SF
(415) 864-6000
www.sfsymphony.org

PERFORMANCE

Burning Libraries: Stories from the New Ellis Island
Arts and Literacy in Children’s Education (ALICE) is a grassroots organization composed of artists from multiple genres committed to bringing arts education to economically disadvantaged schools. Born out of a project encouraging children to learn their oral histories is Burning Libraries: Stories from the New Ellis Island, a new piece by ALICE Presents, the professional performing arm of ALICE. Encapsulating 30 stories from people in minority and immigrant communities, this theatrical piece fuses dance, music, video, puppetry, and aerial arts to explore what it truly means to be American. (Wiederholt)
Through Nov. 14
Thurs/4 and Fri.–Sat., 8 p.m.;
Sun, 3 p.m., $15–$30
ZSpace at Theater Artaud
450 Florida, SF
Also Dec. 3–-5,
$15–$25
Laney College Theater
900 Fallon, Oakl.
www.alicepresents.com

MONDAY 8

DANCE

WestWave Dance Festival

If you are counting live performances, this is program three of this year’s WestWave Dance Festival. If you like your dance on screen as well as on stage, this is program four, since officially Nov. 7’s “Dance on Film Nite” is program three. Enough bean counting. It’s good to see that Monday night dance has caught on. Audiences apparently appreciate not having to squeeze all their dance fixes into the weekend. Of course, it helps to program stuff people want to see; tonight’s event is a good mix of well-, fairly-well, and little-known choreographers: Lisa Townsend, Brittany Brown Ceres, Erika Tsimbrovsky, Robert Dekkers, and Andrew Skeels. (Felciano)
8 p.m., $25
Cowell Theater
Fort Mason Center, Marina at Laguna, SF
(415) 345-7575
www.westwavedancefestival.org

TUESDAY 9

MUSIC

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart

With a name like the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, you’d be justified in taking these guys for some sappy, Bright Eyes wannabes. Luckily, this isn’t the case. Based out of New York City (who isn’t these days?), the band makes lovely little indie-pop tunes that couple boy-girl harmonies with Jesus and Mary Chain-style distortion. Check out the absolutely infectious track “Young Adult Friction” from the 2009 self-titled album for a taste. (Moblad)
With Weekend and Grave Babies
8 p.m., $15
Independent
628 Divisadero, SF
(415) 771-1421
www.theindependentsf.com

MUSIC

Kurt Vile and the Violators and Soft Pack

If sneering “I hope I die before I get old” epitomized a generation, what’s the significance of Matt Lamkin singing “I know I’m gonna die before I see my prime” on Letterman? Rock ’n’ roll is now collecting Social Security and emerging acts are hoping for a YouTube apotheosis. Musical appreciation amounts to identifying a band’s influences and then immediately writing them off. With the driving beat of Lamkin’s L.A.-based Soft Pack or the writing-from-the-bottom-of-a-well style of Philadelphia’s Kurt Vile and the Violators, this would be a disservice. The sounds familiar, but moves forward, and as Vile reminds, “I’ve got a freeway mind, let go of my head.” (Prendiville)
With Purling Hiss
8 p.m., $14
Rickshaw Stop
155 Fell, SF
(415) 861-2011
www.rickshawstop.com

Appetite: 3 escaped-from-New York egg creams

Andrew Lam
-
0

Sipping an egg cream soda is an all-American, very New York pastime, but nowadays the nostalgic sodas are popping up in increasing numbers in our fair city. I rounded up a trifecta of perfect SF spots to get your cream on, but first a historical rundown.

Though the identity of the creator of the original egg cream is somewhat debated, many credit Louis Auster, a Brooklyn candy store owner in the late 1800s. In his well-researched tome on the history of soda fountains, Fix the Pumps, Art of the Drink‘s Darcy S. O’Neil says the New York egg cream evolved as a variation on the original milkshakes served at soda fountains in the late 19th century.

The classic recipe, which contains no egg whatsoever, traditionally consists of milk (or cream, for added richness), chocolate syrup, and soda water, making for a gently effervescent imbibement. It has a creamy, chocolate-y tinge, and a pleasurable hint of sour from the soda. The best creations have a foamy, seltzer “head” and are reminiscent of an ice cream soda sans ice cream. Some claim the original recipe included actual egg, which was replaced when they became expensive and harder to procure during World War II.

Speculations aside, I find egg creams a delightful reminder of my high school years on the East Coast, when I sipped at diners in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Jersey. To this day, I can’t be in proximity of Katz Deli in the Lower East Side without ordering one to go. 

The recent proliferation of egg creams in San Francisco is a welcome trend. Though I can never seem to track down the Egg Cream Cart, which was launched earlier this year by a mysterious “Madame Bubbles” (and serves egg creams and Jewish treats like rugelach), there are a few more easy-to-find places to wash down a soda, whether you go for the original Brooklyn recipe with chocolate syrup, New York style with vanilla, or even a San Francisco egg cream made with both chocolate and hazelnut syrups. 

 

Grand Coffee

Months back, I wrote about the new Grand Coffee on Mission Street, a humble little counter-window service  that pumped out expertly prepared Four Barrel coffee, creative jam sodas, layered iced coffees, and yes, egg creams. Owner Nabeel Silmi makes a Brooklyn egg cream ($2.75), for which he first drizzles the glass with Brooklyn-made Fox’s U-bet chocolate syrup, then douses it with milk and seltzer water, ultimately handing you a freshly frothy drink.

2663 Mission, SF

(415) 206-1238


Tony’s Coal-Fired Pizza & Slice House

The new take-out shop next to Tony’s Pizza Napoletana is just what North Beach needed: addictive Neapolitan and East Coast pizzas, ordered by the pie or the slice (cheese, pepperoni and daily specials). Eat in at one of the couple of tables in the joint or trot across the street to Washington Square Park with pizza or giant Italian beef sandwich in hand. The deal is sweetened with three egg cream options: New York, Brooklyn, and SF versions. The downside? They’re a whopping five dollars each. But the balance is right and kudos to Tony for offering all the classic egg creams. 

1556 Stockton Street, SF

(415) 835-9888


Cowgirl Creamery’s Sidekick

Cowgirl Creamery‘s brand new Ferry Building cafe, Sidekick, is a take-out venue for all things cheese, from challah rolls filled with the stuff to a fresh mozzarella bar where you can choose which mozza type you’d like to heap over salad. Sidekick starts with a San Francisco egg cream (chocolate and hazelnut syrups for four dollars), then offers three non-traditional versions: raspberry, coffee cream, and caramel cream ($3.75). The SF soda enhances that light, chocolate-drenched froth with a whisper of nuttiness. Consider it egg cream with a California twist. 

1 Ferry Building, SF

(415) 362-9354

www.cowgirlcreamery.com

 

Subscribe to Virgina’s twice monthly newsletter, The Perfect Spot

 

GOLDIES 2010

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
GOLDIES 2010

GOLDIES 2010 Welcome to the 22nd annual Goldies issue. The Goldies stand for Guardian Outstanding Local Discovery awards, and rather than isolating one particular art form as a promotional endeavor, they aim to bring the Bay Area arts community together to celebrate actors, choreographers, filmmakers, musicians, and performance and visual artists who have added something special to the creative landscape.

It’s always tempting for me to imagine a grand Goldies production codirected by all of a year’s awardees. As they come together, the Goldies have a tendency to take on a life or identity of their own, and this year it’s fair to say that through chance or happenstance, the awards are sporting a little more gay glitter than usual. Another theme that has revealed itself is how true fandom or intense appreciation for a form of expression can, through the type of education that blooms from extreme dedication, metamorphose into art. A number of this year’s winners began as fans or enthusiasts, and over time, converted that enthusiasm into unique sites, sights, and sounds.

The 14 2010 Goldie winners were selected by myself along with fellow Guardian editors Cheryl Eddy and Marke B., and regular critics and contributors Robert Avila, Rita Felciano, and Matt Sussman. The initial nominations came from contributors to the Bay Area arts scenes and a number of Guardian writers. You can join the awardees and some surprise special guests Nov. 10 for a free celebration at 111 Minna Gallery. If you’re wondering what to wear, go for the gold. (Click below to learn more about this year’s winners, and check out last year’s winners here.)

GOLDIES 2010:

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT: RICK AND MEGAN PRELINGER

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT: MARC HUESTIS

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT: SLUMBERLAND RECORDS

VISUAL ART: JENNIFER LOCKE

MUSIC: SAID ADELEKAN

THEATER: CHRISTOPHER KUCKENBAKER

DANCE: AMY SEIWERT

MUSIC: HUNX AND HIS PUNX

VISUAL ART: AMANDA CURRERI

DANCE: RAMÓN RAMOS ALAYO

FILM: JOSHUA GRANNELL

MUSIC: DJ BUS STATION JOHN

VISUAL ART: RUTH LASKEY

STAGE: JESSE HEWIT/STRONG BEHAVIOR

 

All Goldies portraits by Saul Bromberger and Sandra Hoover

 

GOLDIES PARTY

With Myles Cooper, Alexis Penney, and surprise guests TBA

DJing by Primo Pitino and Naoki Onodera

Wed/10, 9 p.m., free

111 Minna Gallery

(415) 974-1719

www.111minnagallery.com

Music Listings

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0

Music listings are compiled by Cheryl Eddy. Since club life is unpredictable, it’s a good idea to call ahead to confirm bookings and hours. Prices are listed when provided to us. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

WEDNESDAY 3

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Hudson Bell, Winechuggers Café Du Nord. 9:30pm, $10.

Aloe Blacc with the Grand Scheme, Maya Jupiter, DJ Matthew Africa Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $14.

Caldecott, Spooky Flowers, Guns for San Sebastian, Ansel Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $8.

Paula Cole Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8pm, $26.

Dr. Dog Fillmore. 8pm, $25.

Lila Downs Herbst Theatre, 401 Van Ness, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 7:30pm, $25-65.

Elsinore, Dot Punto, Elissa P, Ash Reiter Elbo Room. 9pm, free.

Sean Hayes, Arann Harris and the Farm Band Independent. 8pm, $17.

Hypnotist Collectors, Sweet Bones, Starfish in the Clouds Milk Bar, 1840 Haight, SF; www.milksf.com. 9pm.

Candye Kane Biscuits and Blues. 8pm, $18.

No Joy, La Sera, Wax Idols Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $7.

Eliza Rickman, Chris Trapper, Jason Adamo Hotel Utah. 8pm, $10.

Ryuichi Sakamoto Regency Ballroom. 8pm, $30-37.50.

DANCE CLUBS

Booty Call Q-Bar, 456 Castro, SF; www.bootycallwednesdays.com. 9pm. Juanita Moore hosts this dance party, featuring DJ Robot Hustle.

Hands Down! Bar on Church. 9pm, free. With DJs Claksaarb, Mykill, and guests spinning indie, electro, house, and bangers.

Jam Fresh Wednesdays Vessel, 85 Campton, SF; (415) 433-8585. 9:30pm, free. With DJs Slick D, Chris Clouse, Rich Era, Don Lynch, and more spinning top40, mashups, hip hop, and remixes.

Mary-Go-Round Lookout, 3600 16th St, SF; (415) 431-0306. 10pm, $5. A weekly drag show with hosts Cookie Dough, Pollo Del Mar, and Suppositori Spelling.

RedWine Social Dalva. 9pm-2am, free. DJ TophOne and guests spin outernational funk and get drunk.

Respect Wednesdays End Up. 10pm, $5. Rotating DJs Daddy Rolo, Young Fyah, Irie Dole, I-Vier, Sake One, Serg, and more spinning reggae, dancehall, roots, lovers rock, and mash ups.

Synchronize Il Pirata, 2007 16th St, SF; (415) 626-2626. 10pm, free. Psychedelic dance music with DJs Helios, Gatto Matto, Psy Lotus, Intergalactoid, and guests.

THURSDAY 4

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Natacha Atlas Herbst Theatre, 401 Van Ness, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 7:30pm, $25-65.

Bayside, Senses Fail, Title Fight, Balance and Composure Regency Ballroom. 7:30pm, $18.

Avi Buffalo, AB and the Sea, Colleen Green Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $14.

Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers, High Five Revival Café Du Nord. 8:30pm, $16.

Djavan Warfield. 8pm, $37.50-62.50.

Dr. Dog Fillmore. 8pm, $25.

Foxtail Somersault, Tomihira, Vir, Tracing Figures Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $10.

Grand Nationals, Good Luck Jimmy, Uncle Frank and the Co-Defendants, Ash Gray Hotel Utah. 8pm, $8.

Mean Jeans, Shannon and the Clams, Margaret Doll Rod, Therapists, Skumby Thee Parkside. 9pm, $8.

Monarch, Trees, Al Qaeda Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $7.

Two Door Cinema Club, Generationals, Funeral Party Slim’s. 8pm, $17.

Joe Louis Walker Biscuits and Blues. 8pm, $20.

Wild Thing, SF Blows Knockout. 9:30pm, $5.

DANCE CLUBS

Afrolicious Elbo Room. 9:30pm, $10. DJs Pleasuremaker and Señor Oz spin Afrobeat, tropicália, electro, samba, and funk.

Caribbean Connection Little Baobab, 3388 19th St, SF; (415) 643-3558. 10pm, $3. DJ Stevie B and guests spin reggae, soca, zouk, reggaetón, and more.

Club Jammies Edinburgh Castle. 10pm, free. DJs EBERrad and White Mice spinning reggae, punk, dub, and post punk.

Drop the Pressure Underground SF. 6-10pm, free. Electro, house, and datafunk highlight this weekly happy hour.

Electric Feel Lookout, 3600 16th St, SF; (415) 431-0306. 9pm, free. With DJs subOctave and Blondie K spinning indie music videos.

Good Foot Som., 2925 16th St, SF; (415) 558-8521. 10pm, free. With DJs spinning R&B, Hip hop, classics, and soul.

Holy Thursday Underground SF. 10pm, $5. Bay Area electronic hip hop producers showcase their cutting edge styles monthly.

Jivin’ Dirty Disco Butter, 354 11th St., SF; (415) 863-5964. 8pm, free. With DJs spinning disco, funk, and classics.

Koko Puffs Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 10pm, free. Dubby roots reggae and Jamaican funk from rotating DJs.

Lacquer Beauty Bar. 10pm-2am, free. DJs Mario Muse and Miss Margo bring the electro.

Mestiza Bollywood Café, 3376 19th St, SF; (415) 970-0362. 10pm, free. Showcasing progressive Latin and global beats with DJ Juan Data.

Peaches Skylark, 10pm, free. With an all female DJ line up featuring Deeandroid, Lady Fingaz, That Girl, and Umami spinning hip hop.

FRIDAY 5

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Bear in Heaven, Lower Dens, Sun Airway Independent. 9pm, $14.

Darondo Café Du Nord. 9pm, $15.

Rick Estrin and the Night Cats Biscuits and Blues. 8pm, $20.

Funk Revival Orchestra, Karyn Page Boom Boom Room. 9:30pm, $10.

Mark Growden a.Muse Gallery, 614 Alabama, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. 7:30pm, $20-90.

Hillstomp, McDougall Thee Parkside. 9pm, $8.

I The Mighty, Of Shape and Sound, 5606, Hometown Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $12.

Ray Manzarek and Roy Rogers Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8 and 10pm, $18-25.

Moanin’ Dove, Goldenhearts with Kaboom String Band, Linda Perry, Soft White Sixties Cellspace, 2050 Bryant, SF; www.tiny.cc/3uvwz. 8pm, $12.

Patsychords, Coyote Grace, Alessi’s Ark, Kelli Scarr Hotel Utah. 8pm, $8.

La Plebe, Lenny Lashley’s Gang of MDC, Classics of Love, Nino Zombi Slim’s. 8:30pm, $15.

Roche, Sex Worker, Bookworms Li Po Lounge. 8pm.

Walken, Lesbian, Grayceon Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $8.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Francis Wong Old First Church, 1751 Sacramento, SF; (415) 474-1608. 8pm.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Afrofunk Experience Coda. 10pm, $10.

Heather Ambler and Jim Goodkind Mercury Café, 201 Octavia, SF; (415) 753-7855. 7:30pm, free.

Brass Tax Amnesia. 10pm, $5.

SambaDa Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $16.

DANCE CLUBS

Bearracuda DNA Lounge. 9pm, $10. House music dance party for bears and other wildlife, with live performances by Christeene, Smash-Up Derby, and more.

Braza! Som.10pm, $10. One-year anniversary celebration with DJ Spinna, plus residents Kento, Vanka, and Elan and live batucada with Fogo Na Ropa.

Club Dragon Club Eight, 1151 Folsom, SF; www.eightsf.com. 9pm, $8. A gay Asian paradise. Featuring two dance floors playing dance and hip hop, smoking patio, and 2 for 1 drinks before 10pm.

Deeper 222 Hyde, 222 Hyde, SF; (415) 345-8222. 9pm, $10. With rotating DJs spinning dubstep and techno.

Dirty Rotten Dance Party Madrone Art Bar. 9pm, $5. With DJs Morale, Kap10 Harris, and Shane King spinning electro, bootybass, crunk, swampy breaks, hyphy, rap, and party classics. Exhale, Fridays Project One Gallery, 251 Rhode Island, SF; (415) 465-2129. 5pm, $5. Happy hour with art, fine food, and music with Vin Sol, King Most, DJ Centipede, and Shane King.

Family Vibes Elbo Room. 10pm, $8-10. Dub, bhangra, and Latin with Non Stop Bhangra, Locura, and Surya Dub,

Fat Stack Fridays Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 10pm, free. With rotating DJs B-Cause, Vinnie Esparza, Mr. Robinson, Toph One, and Slopoke.

Fubar Fridays Butter, 354 11th St., SF; (415) 863-5964. 6pm, $5. With DJs spinning retro mashup remixes.

Good Life Fridays Apartment 24, 440 Broadway, SF; (415) 989-3434. 10pm, $10. With DJ Brian spinning hip hop, mashups, and top 40.

Hot Chocolate Milk. 9pm, $5. With DJs Big Fat Frog, Chardmo, DuseRock, and more spinning old and new school funk.

Oldies Night Knockout. 9pm, $2-4. Doo-wop, one-hit wonders, and more with DJs Primo, Daniel, and Lost Cat.

Rick Preston, Michelle Sanz, Christian Intrigue Triple Crown. 9pm. Spinning house to raise money for the American Red Cross to help victims of the San Bruno disaster.

Popscene vs. Loaded Rickshaw Stop. 10pm, $10. With Young the Giant, Geographer, DJ Aaron Axelson, and DJ Omar.

Rockabilly Fridays Jay N Bee Club, 2736 20th St, SF; (415) 824-4190. 9pm, free. With DJs Rockin’ Raul, Oakie Oran, Sergio Iglesias, and Tanoa “Samoa Boy” spinning 50s and 60s Doo Wop, Rockabilly, Bop, Jive, and more.

Some Thing The Stud. 10pm, $7. VivvyAnne Forevermore, Glamamore, and DJ Down-E give you fierce drag shows and afterhours dancing.

Strangelove Cat Club, 1190 Folsom, SF; (415) 703-8965. 9:30pm, $6. With DJs Tomas Diablo, Joe Radio, Fact 50, and Prince Charming spinning goth and industrial.

SATURDAY 6

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Big Light, Big Universe, Scraping for Change, Distorted Harmony, Lost Cosmonauts, Body or Brain Great American Music Hall. 7pm, $15.

Browntown West, Okie Rosette, Starr King Pops Bottom of the Hill. 2:15-5:15pm, $15. Starr King Elementary School benefit.

Colour Revolt, Cast of Thousands, Polaris at Noon Bottom of the Hill. 9:30pm, $10.

David J with Jill Tracy, Oddbird, Five Beats One Café Du Nord. 9:30pm, $15.

Evolution: The Ultimate Tribute to Journey, La Ventana Slim’s. 9pm, $16.

Ruth Gerson Hotel Utah. 8pm, $10.

Mark Growden a.Muse Gallery, 614 Alabama, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. 7:30pm, $20-90.

Laurie Morvan Band Biscuits and Blues. 8pm, $20.

Ledisi Palace of Fine Arts, 3301 Lyon, SF; www.sfjazz.org. $30-75.

Left Alone, Rocketz, Howlers, Bum City Saints Thee Parkside. 9pm, $8-10.

Magic Leaves, Moccretro, Spurm Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $6.

Mondo Drag, Your Cannons, Rachel Fannan Fivepoints Arthouse, 72 Tehama, SF; (415) 989-1166. 8pm, $5.

Pepper, Fishbone, Pour Habit Warfield. 8pm, $28.

Small Black, Class Actress, Young Prisms Independent. 9pm, $14.

Mavis Staples and Billy Bragg Fillmore. 8pm, $36.50.

Chelsea TK and the Tzigane Society, Love Dimension, Moon Balloons Hotel Utah. 9:30pm, $6.

Trans Am, Nice Nice, Jonas Reinhardt, Beat Broker Rickshaw Stop. 8:30pm, $15.

Jody Watley Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8 and 10pm, $28-36.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Roy Haynes and the Fountain of Youth Band Herbst Theatre, 401 Van Ness, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 8pm, $25-65.

“Switchboard Music Festival Preview” Porto Franco Records Art Parlor, 953 Valencia, SF; (650) 678-8020. 8pm, $15. With Telepathy and Happy Hour Jazz Quintet.

Zachary James Watkins, Kenneth Atchley Li Po Lounge. 9pm, $5. With films by John Reily with soundtracks by Lars Hidde and Charles Kremenak.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Africa Rising feat. DJ Jerimiah Coda. 10pm, $10.

Magic System, Les Twins Mezzanine. 8pm, $30.

Tango No. 9 Noe Valley Ministry, 1021 Sanchez, SF; www.noevalleymusicseries.com. 8:15pm, $17.

DANCE CLUBS

Bar on Church 9pm. Rotating DJs Foxxee, Joseph Lee, Zhaldee, Mark Andrus, and Nuxx.

Debaser Knockout. 9pm, $5. Nineties alternative with DJ Jamie Jams and Emdee.

Everlasting Bass 330 Ritch. 10pm, $5-10. Bay Area Sistah Sound presents this party, with DJs Zita and Pam the Funkstress spinning hip-hop, soul, funk, reggae, dancehall, and club classics. Fire Corner Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 9:30pm, free. Rare and outrageous ska, rocksteady, and reggae vinyl with Revival Sound System and guests.

Foundation Som., 2925 16th St., SF; (415) 558-8521. 10pm.

Gemini Disco Underground SF. 10pm, $5. Disco with DJ Derrick Love and Nicky B. spinning deep disco.

HYP Club Eight, 1151 Folsom, SF; www.eightsf.com. 10pm, free. Gay and lesbian hip hop party, featuring DJs spinning the newest in the top 40s hip hop and hyphy.

Kontrol Endup. 10pm, $20. With resident DJs Alland Byallo, Craig Kuna, Sammy D, and Nikola Baytala spinning minimal techno and avant house.

Leisure Paradise Lounge. 10pm, $7. DJs Omar, Aaron, and Jet Set James spinning classic britpop, mod, 60s soul, and 90s indie.

New Wave City: Duran Duran Tribute DNA Lounge. 9pm, $7-12. With DJs Skip and Shindog.

Rock City Butter, 354 11th St., SF; (415) 863-5964. 6pm, $5 after 10pm. With DJs spinning party rock.

Saturday Night Soul Party Elbo Room. 10pm, $10. Sixties soul with DJs Lucky, Phengren Oswald, and Paul Paul.

Souf Club Six. 9pm, $7. With DJs Jeanine Da Feen, Motive, and Bozak spinning southern crunk, bounce, hip hop, and reggaeton.

Soundscape Vortex Room, 1082 Howard, SF; www.myspace.com/thevortexroom. With DJs C3PLOS, Brighton Russ, and Nick Waterhouse spinning Soul jazz, boogaloo, hammond grooves, and more.

Spirit Fingers Sessions 330 Ritch. 9pm, free. With DJ Morse Code and live guest performances.

SUNDAY 7

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Terry Adams Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8pm, $25.

Azalea Snail, Werewolves, Art of Shooting, Technicolor Yawn Hemlock Tavern. 5pm, $7.

Circa Survive, Dredg, Codeseven, Animals As Leaders Regency Ballroom. 7pm, $20.

A Decent Animal, Manatee, Graham Patzner Hotel Utah. 8pm, $7.

George Glass, Grimoon, Silent Pictures Knockout. 9pm, $7.

Johnny Flynn, Cheyenne Marie Mize, Goh Nakamura Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $12.

Kegels, Penny Dreadfuls, Dead Panic Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

Rubbersidedown, Burn River Burn, Dead Neck Café Du Nord. 8pm, $10.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Kally Price with Old Blues and Jazz Band, Emperor Norton’s Jazz Band Amnesia. 9pm, $7-10.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

José James and Jef Neve Florence Gould Theatre, Legion of Honor, 100 Legion of Honor Dr, SF; www.sjfazz.org. 2pm, $30.

Yellowjackets: The Jeff Lorber Fusion feat. Randy Brecker and Eric Marienthal Palace of Fine Arts, 3301 Lyon, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 7pm, $25-65.

DANCE CLUBS

Afterglow Nickies, 466 Haight, SF; (415) 255-0300. An evening of mellow electronics with resident DJs Matt Wilder, Mike Perry, Greg Bird, and guests.

Call In Sick Skylark. 9pm, free. DJs Animal and I Will spin danceable hip-hop.

Dance Social Knockout. 5pm, free. Northern soul, Motown, rocksteady, and more with DJs Dr. Scott and Revival Sound System.

DiscoFunk Mashups Cat Club. 10pm, free. House and 70’s music.

DJ Anthony Atlas Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, free.

Dub Mission Elbo Room. 9pm, $6. Dub, dubstep, roots, and dancehall with DJ Sep, Vinnie Esparza, and guest Antiserum.

Gloss Sundays Trigger, 2344 Market, SF; (415) 551-CLUB. 7pm. With DJ Hawthorne spinning house, funk, soul, retro, and disco.

Honey Soundsystem Paradise Lounge. 8pm-2am. “Dance floor for dancers – sound system for lovers.” Got that?

Kick It Bar on Church. 9pm. Hip-hop with DJ Zax.

Pachanga Coda. 5pm, $10. Salsa with DJs Fab Fred and Antonio with Jesus Diaz y su QBA.

Swing Out Sundays Rock-It Room. 7pm, free (dance lessons $15). DJ BeBop Burnie spins 20s through 50s swing, jive, and more.

MONDAY 8

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Average White Band Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8pm, $25.

Marc Cohn, Sahara Smith Palace of Fine Arts, 3301 Lyon, SF; www.ticketmaster.com. 8pm, $38.50.

Combichrist, Aesthetic Perfection, (iVardensphere), God Module, DJ Decay Slim’s. 7:30pm, $24.

Heavy Independent. 8pm, $14.

Lucabrazzi, Vatos Locos, Spawn Atomic, Bckup Razor Elbo Room. 9pm, $5.

Supervillains, Ballyhoo!, Agent Deadlies Bottom of the Hill. 8:30pm, $10.

KT Tunstall, Hurricane Bells Warfield. 8pm, $30-40.

DANCE CLUBS

Black Gold Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 10pm-2am, free. Senator Soul spins Detroit soul, Motown, New Orleans R&B, and more — all on 45!

Death Guild DNA Lounge. 9:30pm, $3-5. Gothic, industrial, and synthpop with DJs Decay, Joe Radio, and Melting Girl.

Krazy Mondays Beauty Bar. 10pm, free. With DJs Ant-1, $ir-Tipp, Ruby Red I, Lo, and Gelo spinning hip hop.

M.O.M. Madrone Art Bar. 6pm, free. With DJ Gordo Cabeza and guests playing all Motown every Monday.

Manic Mondays Bar on Church. 9pm. Drink 80-cent cosmos with Djs Mark Andrus and Dangerous Dan.

Musik for Your Teeth Revolution Café, 3248 22nd St., SF; (415) 642-0474. 5pm, free. Soul cookin’ happy hour tunes with DJ Antonino Musco.

Network Mondays Azul Lounge, One Tillman Pl, SF; www.inhousetalent.com. 9pm, $5. Hip-hop, R&B, and spoken word open mic, plus featured performers.

Skylarking Skylark. 10pm, free. With resident DJs I & I Vibration, Beatnok, and Mr. Lucky and weekly guest DJs.

TUESDAY 9

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Average White Band Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8 and 10pm, $16-25.

Brookhaven Amnesia. 9pm.

Nectarine Pie, TRMRS, Apache Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $6.

OK Sweetheart, Parlor Hawk, Desert Noises, Sean Barnett Hotel Utah. 8pm, $10.

Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Weekend, Grave Babies Independent. 8pm, $15.

Kurt Vile and the Violators, Soft Pack, Purling Hiss Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $12.

DANCE CLUBS

Eclectic Company Skylark, 9pm, free. DJs Tones and Jaybee spin old school hip hop, bass, dub, glitch, and electro.

Share the Love Trigger, 2344 Market, SF; (415) 551-CLUB. 5pm, free. With DJ Pam Hubbuck spinning house.

Womanizer Bar on Church. 9pm. With DJ Nuxx.

GOLDIES 2010: Jennifer Locke

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
GOLDIES 2010: Jennifer Locke

In her pieces, Jennifer Locke has, variously, jumped rope for 30 minutes in a full-body latex suit (cutting out a hole in the bottom afterward to drain out her accumulated sweat and urine); wrestled with a partner at the Berkeley Art Museum smeared in stage blood; covered herself in Elmer’s glue, let it dry into a second skin, and then peeled it off; received a lap dance from a male stripper; and branded a fellow participant.

Granted, reducing Locke’s art to such a titillating laundry list is a superficial move. But the immediate visceral spectacle her work repeatedly presents is undeniably seductive — albeit in a punk rock kind of way. It’s hard not to be pulled in by the grappling, athletic bodies, the donning and shedding of second skins, all frequently soundtracked by the amplified breath of the participants themselves, even if it sometimes causes one to flinch.

Locke, who has spent considerable time working as a pro dom and is herself a champion submission wrestler, is keenly aware of her art’s initial draws. “Yeah,” she laughs over the phone, “athletic bodies are inherently sexy. It’s in our nature as human beings to want to look. But I want there to be a barrier between the audience and the image of the body.”

In Locke’s work, which she describes as a sculptural hybrid of live studio actions and video, the camera often provides that layer (or more often, layers) of mediation. Locke strategically uses video within her pieces to alter the on-site audience’s expectations and perceptions of what’s occurring in front of them, as well as those of viewers encountering the pieces as video documents after the fact.

Whatever erotic or transgressive charge a viewer may have invested in the actions being performed becomes rewired through the camera set-up, or is short-circuited entirely. As critic Daniel Coffeen has noted of Locke’s work: “She does not dabble in human affect but in human mechanics.”

In the aforementioned BAM piece, Red/White (Fake Blood), Locke and her wrestling partner sparred in the museum’s loading bay, their actions relayed to the audience via a live video feed that, due to technical difficulties, wound up being projected in black and white. The door to the dock, however, was left slightly ajar so anyone who wanted to see the “real event,” and the piece’s “true colors,” could — although no one was ever specifically directed to.

In Black/White, a three-day piece done as part of the opening of the San Francisco offices of the Marina Abramovic Institute of Performance Art, Locke placed the camera filming a live feed of her actions so that it encompassed those viewing her as well, then projected that image on a rear wall so the audience could observe either Locke’s action or the projection of themselves watching Locke’s action, but not see both simultaneously.

“I used to talk a lot in my artist statement about power dynamics, but then I realized over time that I’m more interested in how meaning gets produced,” she says. “Power is a means to talk about that, but I want to know how those hierarchies actually shift around in reality: Who’s in control? Am I? Is the camera? Is the audience? My work is like a three-card monte.”

www.jenniferlocke.net

>>MORE GOLDIES 2010

GOLDIES 2010: Ruth Laskey

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
1
GOLDIES 2010: Ruth Laskey

One thing that Bay Area art has no shortage of is color. Whether it be Albers-informed theory, Op-influenced repetitious patterns, Mission muralismo, or mural-like Mission School paintings, in general, local color has been primary, if not outright garish. Ruth Laskey’s palette stands apart — confident enough to be low-key or even muted in comparison. “Color is kind of it for me,” Laskey says, in the middle of a sleepy afternoon at a Mission cafe. “It’s where a piece gets its emotion.”

You could say that there’s a quality of quiet intensity to Laskey’s work, and the artist herself is soft-spoken. She’s also strong, clear, and candid in terms of viewpoint. “My relationship to color is not very systematic,” she says, when the topic of Albers references in relation to her work is broached. “It’s more intuitive. I already see things from a painter’s perspective. When you’re a painter making color, there’s an evolution that happens.”

In Laskey’s case, this evolution is ongoing — and it isn’t taking place within traditional painting. Both “7 Weavings,” her first solo exhibition at Ratio 3 in 2008, and a self-titled show at the same space this year are taken from her larger “Twill Series,” a growing group of “investigations” that she began in 2005, years after taking a weaving class in between undergraduate and graduate studies at California College of the Arts. “Twilling is basic, the first pattern weave you learn,” she says. “The loom I’ve been using from the beginning is basic. I was thinking about my understanding of weaving, and I was interested in how twill creates shape on its own. It kind of clicked one day that I could use twill, but insert the thread in the same way I would with tapestry.”

That moment kick started Laskey’s unique use of dye and weft and warp to create color forms in which minimalism and materiality intersect. Her “Twill Series” has generated a cover story critical appraisal in Artforum and many responses locally — in some ways, the discourse about her growing body of work (including my own 2008 piece for this publication, which focused on geometric elements) reveals as much about the writers as it does about the art itself, which invites contemplation and allows open interpretation. It’s a mistake to assume this openness is cool detachment, though. “It’s fabric,” she says. “It’s inherently warm.”

At the moment, Laskey’s studio is in the garage of her apartment in Glen Park, a neighborhood that has housed some artists of renowned dedication, like Bruce Conner. Her day job at California College of the Arts’ Oakland library is one source of inspiration and perspective. Music could be another. When I ask her what sounds might make apt accompaniment for an audiovisual presentation of her art, her choice is Sun Ra. Thinking of her work as what Ra would call an “art form of dimensions tomorrow” adds another a playful element to its fabric. She uses blankness around an image as he uses the silence that surrounds sound. Space is the place.

As for Laskey’s “Twill Series,” at the moment it’s hard to gauge how large it will grow, but there is no doubt her deployment of dye and geometric shape is subtly shifting. “It’s an issue that artists have to deal with all the time,” she reflects. “I might still be interested in what the work is doing, but is it still engaging for everyone else? There’s always that tiny figure on your shoulder saying, ‘Maybe you need to move on.’ But I feel like it’s taking me on this journey. It might be a really slow journey. It might have small steps. But I’m enjoying that. For me, it’s fruitful.” 

www.ratio3.org; www.ruthlaskey.com

>>MORE GOLDIES 2010

GOLDIES 2010: Christopher Kuckenbaker

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
GOLDIES 2010: Christopher Kuckenbaker

In September, the San Francisco Fringe Festival offered patrons an off-Beat gem, The Burroughs and Kookie Show. A deftly performed blend of homage and intimate psychic excavation, the play imagines William S. Burroughs (actor-playwright Christopher Kuckenbaker) as talk show host, opposite a deadpan, laconic musician named Loubis the Pubis (Louis Libert), and a missing cohost, “Kookie,” symbolized in absentia by a small, empty chair. Tonight’s guest? An unsuspecting actor named Chris Baker (Christopher Kuckenbaker again). At once mood-alteringly dreamy and piquant, shrewdly funny and unexpectedly poignant, the show deservedly scampered off with “Best of Fringe” honors.

Kuckenbaker is a sharp, versatile actor who’s plied the more vibrant fringes of Bay Area theater since the 1990s. He and his now ex-wife moved away in 2001 to pursue professional careers as actors in Chicago and Boulder, but Kuckenbaker returned in 2007. The timing was auspicious. A month later, he was memorably cast as real mama’s monster Grendel in Banana Bag & Bodice’s bicoastal hit, Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage. Next up, Kuckenbaker appears at Z Space opposite 2009 Goldie winner Beth Wilmurt in The Companion Piece, directed by Mark Jackson.

Kuckenbacker came to acting while at Santa Barbara City College. This followed a scattered upbringing in California towns like Hollister and Salinas, and far-flung lands like Australia. He credits all the moving around with seeding his actor’s outgoing personality. “It maybe forced me to be a little more gregarious than other people,” he suggests.

Arriving in San Francisco in 1993, Kuckenbaker received a degree from San Francisco State’s prolific theater department in 1997. Since then, his graceful work and alternately intense and quirky looks have made him a unique presence onstage. He’s also an astute and generous ensemble player who’s worked repeatedly with leading smaller companies like Art Street and the Shotgun Players; been part of a now defunct sketch comedy troupe called Old Man McGinty; and appeared repeatedly in Playground’s popular stagings of contest-generated short plays.

His own shift to playwriting, meanwhile, is more than a lark. He and Burroughs go way back. They first met in the Interzone of the imagination around the time Kuckenbaker left Santa Barbara with some Beat-obsessed cohorts for Bellingham, Wash., in the early 1990s. He stayed only a year in the Pacific Northwest rain, but something had happened to him up there, some inter-era nod, some afflatus. A mind-meld with old Bill.

“When I first moved to Bellingham, I’d go to the grocery store and pick up CDs of him reading his own works. That turned me on. There was something about his voice that triggered something in my brain, released some kind of new chemical in my head, and it just made sense.”

After gestating for nearly two decades, that initial inspiration has become a Möbius strip seamlessly joining in one actor two complex identities: Burroughs and the actor alter ego called on to process the painful end of a marriage. In giving a compelling dramatic shape to the voices in his head, Kuckenbaker says he’s found new definition in a still-unfolding career.

“When I look back, it seems to me I was just going from one show to the next, never really seeing myself any further along than the next show. Now, after giving birth to something in a very personal way, I want with all my power for it to grow and be seen, to spread itself out across the world. I have some big ideas about where I want to take the next iteration of The Burroughs and Kookie Show, making it a much larger and richer piece.” 

www.kuckenbakery.com

>>MORE GOLDIES 2010

GOLDIES 2010: Hunx and his Punx

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
GOLDIES 2010: Hunx and his Punx

It should come as no surprise that a gay 30-year-old male living in the Bay Area who borrows elements of his fashion-forward look from Freddie Mercury is putting out the “gayest music ever.” He’s a Pisces who rocks a switchblade comb and blends leather daddy duds with a 1950s-meets-1980s juvenile delinquent touch.

Seth Bogart, a.k.a. Hunx, has been devoted to rock and trash pop culture for years. He made zines as a teen in Arizona when riot grrrl was happening, and has essentially created a life from his variety of enthusiasms.

“I do it for myself, to have fun. It makes me feel better being constantly creative. As cheesy as it sounds, happiness is doing what you want to do,” says the rather butch-looking Bogart over tortas at a 24th Street restaurant. His eyes are piercing, he’s wearing a torn biker jacket, and he’s sporting a few days more than a five o’clock shadow.

Probably tired from having just gotten back from New York City, where he spent eight days recording the next Hunx and His Punx album for Sub Pop’s subsidiary label Hardly Art, Bogart appears happy to be home. After years living in Oakland, he currently resides in the Bayview District.

Thematically, Bogart describes the first proper Hunx and His Punx album as being similar to this year’s compilation Gay Singles (True Panther) in that it deals with love and teenage heartbreak. “It sounds like a dream,” he exclaims. But the upcoming album delves deeper into a sadness he said he’s never really written about before. His father committed suicide when he was just a teen, and with his mom left “out of it and depressed” in the immediate aftermath, it’s no wonder he grew up fast and was on his own by 17.

Bogart found catharsis in freedom of expression. As the tale goes, after his previous group Gravy Train!!! disbanded, friends such as Nobunny and Christopher McVicker helped pen some of the early Hunx and His Punx songs. On the new album, Bogart more fully takes the reins, writing half the album’s tracks himself, with his bold bassist and bandmate Shannon Shaw also contributing a few numbers. As for Hunx’s flirty and quick-witted onstage candor, Bogart attributes some of his brazen confidence to old pal and former roadie Nobunny, who instilled in him that you only have one chance in life. This attitude has led to a colorful album insert of Hunx in the buff, as well as an awkward moment when his Internet-browsing mom unexpectedly saw his boner in a Girls music video.

If you think Bogart’s skills to pay the bills begin and end with music, guess again. He happens to co-own Down at Lulu’s, a popular Oakland vintage boutique and salon, with Tina Lucchesi (of Trashwomen, Bobbyteens, and now Midnite SnaXXX). The shop has been open four years, and Bogart, a licensed cosmetologist, cuts hair there three days a week. He and his friend Brande Baugh are also developing a TV talk show.

Although owning his own shop and contributing to the local music scene are two obvious ways Bogart serves the Bay Area community, it’s what he stands for on a larger scale as a unique gay personality in the still hetero male-dominated genre of punk — and broader realm of rock — that makes him bold and noteworthy. You can call him bubblegum and outrageous, but the fact remains that Hunx exudes an image of strength and confidence. He fills a void in garage rock that isn’t quite clean enough for the Castro and maybe too queer for some fans of harder sounds. He blurs the lines, breaks down boring boundaries, and stays true to himself all the while. 

www.myspace.com/hunxsolo; www.myspace.com/gayestmusicever

>>MORE GOLDIES 2010

GOLDIES 2010: Jesse Hewit/Strong Behavior

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
2
GOLDIES 2010: Jesse Hewit/Strong Behavior

Most shows start with a request to turn off your cell phones. Tell Them That You Saw Me begins with an implicit request to leave your virtual mind outside. As the lights come up in this latest work from Jesse Hewit/Strong Behavior (which premiered after a residency at CounterPULSE in August), five utterly gobsmacked women, sprawled in enervated postures on floor and furniture, stare back at the audience for a very long time. The audience is still, but maybe still not seeing everything in front of them, as a micro-choreography of breath and saliva and eyelash unfolds amid a glacial volley of questions and answers. The real seeing takes time and patience and something like courage, things that feel in short supply these days — unless you attend this piece, which requires as well as rewards “attending.”

“It’s a study in focus,” says Hewit, “and it’s a study in what we’re looking at and why, and how we deal with each other for long periods of time.” The piece, he says, made him conscious of a concern he’s had with duration as a condition of social life and a strategy for art. Like an aikido master, Hewit uses the sheer weight of time to unsettle our usual, predictable, and tyrannical rhythms. In doing so he advances an invigorating and revelatory body of work exploring our myriad personal and social identities.

For his part, the 30-year-old choreographer and theater maker is both a unique artist and part of a tight-knit milieu making serious waves across the Bay Area’s performance scene. Much of this network of young, bold, savvy, and mostly queer artists gathers under the banner of The Off Center, an ongoing artist-run performance initiative originally formed around recently-shuttered queer performance incubator Mama Calizo’s Voice Factory. (The group includes close colleague Laura Arrington, the other CounterPULSE summer residency artist, whose Hot Wings shared the bill with Tell Them.)

From ages 8 to 13, Hewit studied ballet in Montreal. But dance went by the wayside as his family kept pulling up stakes and moving, since in most places “it wasn’t cool to be a boy who was a dancer.” He got back into dance while at New York University in Tisch’s Experimental Theater Wing. Then, unexpectedly, he headed to a psychology program in central Florida: “I don’t know what the deal was, but something didn’t agree with me in New York anymore.” After a year-and-a-half, Hewit found San Francisco State’s graduate program in sexuality studies. “I thought I was going to be a sociologist,” he admits. “[But] my mode of expression while in graduate school kept coming back to mounting performances or looking at bodies and posturings, so I realized, ‘Oh, okay, I have to go back and do dance stuff.'”

The theoretical rigor explicitly informs Hewit’s work, but he’s also inspired by an international discourse among dance/theater makers. He recently trained with choreographer Meg Stuart and names among other significant influences New York–based choreographer Miguel Gutierrez, Bulgarian-born physical theater artist Ivo Dimchev, North Carolina–raised feminist choreographer-provocateur Ann Liv Young, and New York’s Big Art Group. Locally Hewit cites people like Erika Chong Shuch, Jess Curtis/Gravity, and Sara Kraft.

Hewit particularly credits Keith Hennessy, a friend and mentor, with drawing his work into an international context. He brings up Hennessy’s balancing of two boards on his head in his Bessie Award–winning show Crotch. “It’s really relentless and impossible and it takes way too long,” he recounts with satisfaction. “It’s nice. It’s always these little sites of resistance — just how quickly do we think things are supposed to happen?” 

www.jessehewit.com

>>MORE GOLDIES 2010

GOLDIES 2010: Joshua Grannell

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
1
GOLDIES 2010: Joshua Grannell

Whether he’s all dolled up as Peaches Christ or wearing his everyday attire, Joshua Grannell is a cinematic force to be reckoned with. He turned a love of cult film into a modest empire, with a memorable drag character, a popular midnight movie series, and All About Evil, his first full-length feature film.

But back in 1998 when Grannell was working for Landmark Theatres, Midnight Mass was a tough sell. “Midnight movies had really died in San Francisco,” he recalls. “It was sort of a thing that was considered passé and relegated to the suburbs.”

To Landmark’s credit, Grannell did get the go-ahead to create Midnight Mass, which he hosted as his alter ego Peaches Christ. He screened camp classics like Showgirls (1995), Female Trouble (1974), and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970). The stage show was led by Peaches, who Grannell describes as “a character born out of the world of cult movies.”

“I’m not just programming a movie,” he explains. “I’m also creating an entire environment and a whole show to go along with it.”

While Grannell still produces Midnight Mass sporadically, he no longer maintains it as a regular series. And who can blame him? He has plenty on his plate as a filmmaker, the role he’s wanted to play since childhood.

“I went through a period where I started to freak out and think, oh my God, what have I done?” he admits. “I’m best known for being a clown named after Jesus. And I was proud of that … but I really did start to think that no one was ever going to invest any money in me or my filmmaking.”

But it was his Peaches Christ fame and the popularity of Midnight Mass that gave Grannell an audience who understood and appreciated his vision. He was able to use that when he wrote and directed All About Evil, in which he also cameos — as Peaches, natch.

The film is Grannell’s ode to his idols, an homage to the schlocky gore of Herschell Gordon Lewis and the charming perversity of John Waters. It’s also an impressive achievement, the work of a filmmaker who is accomplished in his own right.

But he hasn’t let the success go to his head. As Peaches, Grannell remains a snarky fan, noting that part of her appeal is her unwavering silliness.

“Peaches is a bit of a goofball, and I certainly don’t take Peaches too seriously,” he notes. “The minute I do, go ahead and put a bullet in my head, because that would ruin everything.”

To Grannell, the fannish aspect is essential to the Peaches Christ brand. In a way, it mirrors his own passion — he’s just as excited to share the stage with his cult heroes as we are to see them.

“I’ve built a whole career centered around worshiping my idols,” Grannell says. “I’ve gotten to meet them and I’ve gotten to work with them. But even though I would say that I consider John Waters to be a friend, I don’t know that he’s a friend to me without my obsession still being there and being a fan.”

Grannell’s humility isn’t an affectation. Despite his considerable successes, he’s still driven by simple goals.

“I make crowd-pleasers,” he says. “I’m an entertainer. There’s a sort of art to what we do, certainly, and an aesthetic, but first and foremost, I get off on making people laugh or puke or scream. That’s always been the thing I’m most interested in.”

www.allaboutevilthemovie.com; www.peacheschrist.com

>>MORE GOLDIES 2010

GOLDIES 2010: Amanda Curreri

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
GOLDIES 2010: Amanda Curreri

Five minutes into talking with Amanda Curreri over a slice and coffee at Mission Pie, I’ve agreed to take part in a piece she’s working on as part of Shadowshop, the in-gallery artists’ marketplace Stephanie Syjuco is organizing for SFMOMA’s upcoming survey of work made in the past decade.

“It’s called Afghanistan Insert,” Curreri explains, speaking in the measured fashion of someone who carefully considers her words. “I’m trying to insert Afghanistan into SFMOMA and into San Francisco’s art community.”

Curreri’s commitment to getting the local arts scene to engage with what has become commonly dubbed by the mainstream news media as “the forgotten war” is not just politically motivated. It’s also personal. Her husband has been working in Afghanistan for the past five months as a security contractor, during which he has sent her snapshots of local graffiti. They are documents of his ground truth.

Curreri plans on physically inserting herself and her husband’s images into Shadowshop, much in the same way she holds one of his pictures in the portrait accompanying this feature. Indeed, the photo, this profile, Curreri’s new status within the local arts community as a Goldie winner, and the conversations this increased attention might encourage will all become part of the discourse surrounding Insert Afghanistan and contributing to its impact.

All this is consonant with Curreri’s view of herself as more of an instigator than an artist. “I’m trying to make art that crosses out of the art world,” she says, echoing Joseph Beuys’ notion of social sculpture. Her projects thrive on participation, using the exhibition space as a kind of social laboratory in which she arranges shared cultural touchstones and institutions — campfire songs, the judicial process, family recipes — as prompts for personal reflection and shared conversation on the “big subjects” that undergird them: history, politics, memory, and in the case of Afghanistan Insert, their intersection within a seemingly endless and fruitless foreign occupation thousands of miles away.

Engaging with Curreri’s art often entails an extended encounter with the artist herself (given how unexpectedly my interview at Mission Pie has turned out, the reverse seems true as well). The last conversation I had with Curreri was this past July, when she videotaped my extemporaneous responses to her off-camera questioning about the topic of last words. My interview was to be incorporated into her concurrent exhibit “Occupy the Empty,” for which she transformed Ping Pong Gallery via hand-sculpted “props” into a courtroom in which various associates, friends, and strangers, such as myself, volunteered their time and testimony.

As with Insert Afghanistan, the inspiration for “Occupy the Empty” was also personal: after participating in a court hearing concerning her late father, Curreri found out it had been held in the same Massachusetts courthouse in which Italian-American anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti were sentenced to death in the early 20th century. Curreri, also of Italian-American descent, saw the coincidence as a chance to connect to that history and, in the process, build a community around a larger discussion of remembrance. Curreri recalls one participant for whom the show served an almost therapeutic function.

“I want to create art that has an interpersonal function, in real-time,” she says. “I want my work to set a specific frame around our inherent connectivity.” 

www.amandacurreri.com

>>MORE GOLDIES 2010

A Celtic violinist Jimi Hendrix?

Andrew Lam
-
0
A Celtic violinist Jimi Hendrix?

“Can you tell me why they call you the Jimi Hendrix of the violin?” I’m chatting with Eileen Ivers, Bronx-born one-time house blue electric violinist for Riverdance. One must admit, it seems like a curious moniker. Over the phone, Ivers dissolves in laughter. 

“I wish I could,” she finally continues. “One wonderful gentleman from some paper put that. I’d love to think that in some way — he had such a love of blues and roots — I don’t know, I won’t even go there, but I feel so connected to the instrument.” Oh, plus she integrates into her concerts (one of which will be rocking Freight and Salvage Thu/4) liberal doses of jams, electric violin, wah-wah pedal, and, dare we say, soul? “I love to put that to an audience to open their minds — this instrument can rock out as well.” The pieces are beginning to come together…

Perhaps I’m fixating on the comparison because at first glance, there is very little to tie together the lives of Hendrix and Ivers, who was born to immigrant parents used to the hardship and poverty in their birthland of County Mayo, Ireland. “There’s no Gaelic word for immigration — just for exit,” Ivers tells me. “It shows culturally they never wanted to leave, but they had to in the mass exodus.” She talks like an Irish person, falling into discussions of my Gaelic name as those of her (our) ethnic persuasion are wont to do and converses with a hint of that sing-song lilt that is the mark of the Emerald Isle. 

Eileen Ivers and Immigrant Soul, sans Photoshop butchering. Photo by Luke Ratray

Ivers learned her craft through a man in the New York neighborhood she grew up who delighted in teaching the young people in the area how to play the tunes of their cultural legacy. Love of the instrument buoyed her through years at Iona College spent studying mathematics and into a career that’s seen her play with Celtic legends The Chieftains, the international touring company of Riverdance, over 40 symphonic orchestras, and on soundtracks for films like Gangs of New York (2002).

It was through the multitudinous nature of the city’s music scene that the influences audible in her new tracks like “Paddy in Zululand” came to the fore. That tune in particular features an Irish melody plucked out by Iver’s violin which emerges from a background of upbeat African percussion – testament to the connections that Ivers sees between the divergent cultures’ musical forms. 

Which isn’t a particularly unique thing in and of itself – the Bay Area’s Markus James performs similar transmutations with African string music and Americana blues (vocalist Tommy McDonnell of Ivers’ touring band, Immigrant Soul, was a member of the original Blues Brothers band with Dan Akroyd and John Goodman). What may be unique is the bubbling sense of happiness that is exuded from Ivers when she imparts her art upon a listening crowd – or jaded local journalist, who she gracefully includes in her comments regarding the musical resonance she finds in these cross-continent musical similarities. “It’s in our heart — you hear these grooves and it feels right,” she says.

Lost in the music, you might say. Just like Jimi, right?

Eileen Ivers and Immigrant Soul

Thu/4 8 p.m., $23.50-$22.50

Freight & Salvage

2020 Addison, SF

(510) 644-2020

www.thefreight.org

 

FEAST: 6 hot C-cups

Andrew Lam
-
0
FEAST: 6 hot C-cups

A funny thing happened on the way to adulthood: hot chocolate became interesting. Remembered by most Americans as the insipid, lukewarm, desiccated powder-based drink of ice rinks (often dispensed from a machine that simultaneously squirts water and dark matter into your cup), 21st century big-kid hot chocolate has heat, depth, spice, richness, variety. It is, in short, both hot and chocolate. And let’s not forget innovations in topping technology. Today’s hot chocolatiers don’t open a bag of petroleum-based white things or spray on the ReddiWip — they make their own marshmallows and whipped cream.

Hot chocolate is also one drink you never find yourself saying, “If only I hadn’t had that last (fill in cocktail) … ” Indeed, researchers at Cornell found that hot chocolate has more antioxidants per cup than red wine or tea. So as we enter hot chocolate season — our summer, which they call “autumn” on the rest of the continent — raise a cup to your health. 

BOULETTE’S LARDER

In the third season of Dexter, top cop Maria has a pair of bonding experiences with women that are consummated with two words “ganache frosting.” Ganache — that rich, delicious, thick, delicious, dense, delicious mix of chocolate and cream — is the base element of Boulette’s singular cup of Eastern European-style hot chocolate. All day long, Boulette’s chefs keep a pan of molten ganache simmering in anticipation of its HC fans. The result is hot chocolate so thick you almost need a spoon, and so satisfying you can omit that dollop of cream.

One Ferry Building # 48, SF (415) 399-1155. www.boulette’slarder.com


COCO LUXE

This pretty-in-pink Haight Street anomaly makes eight kinds of hot chocolate (including a green tea version for serious antioxidant-counters) plus a milk-free drink for all those people who can’t, won’t, or don’t swing bovine. Billed as warm chocolate pudding, the molten concoction blends dark chocolate and hot water until it’s only navigable by spoon. Like our beloved Earth, it also retains its molten core, so it can be toyed with for some time without losing any of its hot, thick mojo. Coco Luxe also has solid chocolates, gorgeous ones that look like mini wall art. And let’s face it, we all need a little solid food occasionally to add weight and depth to our c-cups.

1673 Haight SF. (415) 367-4012. www.coco-luxe.com


CHRISTOPHER ELBOW CHOCOLATES

When the abundant novelty of SF’s innovative hot chocolate scene has worn off, head to this sleek corner store for even more innovation. The boutique chocolatier, which originated in Kansas City, Mo., has all the customary spicy, dark, and milky brews you’ll find at many of our other HC providers — along with some never-before-seen variations spiked with ginger, curry, and coconut milk. Christopher Elbow also makes powdered versions of some of its best-selling drinking chocolates, which make a lovely nyah-nyah-nyah gift for friends still living in Hershey’s just-add-water-powdered-packet land.

401 Hayes, SF. (415) 355-1105. www.elbowchocolates.com


FIVE STAR TRUFFLES

You gotta love this under appreciated one-man operation, where the one man makes your cup by shaving generous helpings of his superlative block chocolate into every liquid cup. The price is right — $2.75 for 16 ounces — and the one man always offers one of his handmade truffles on the house. The one man also exhibits a sincere liberalism about how much milkfat is really necessary for hot chocolate. If you want nonfat hot chocolate (no judgments!), so be it. With base chocolate this good, you won’t miss the milkfat.

411 Divisadero, SF. (415) 552-5128, www.fivestartruffles.com

BI-RITE CREAMERY

Although most people waiting in line at Bi-Rite see only the ice cream and soft-serve, hot chocolate heads can’t help but notice, tucked as it is on the counter behind the cookies, la machine. A combination hot plate-whirligig, Bi-Rite’s single-purpose hot chocolate machine (rumored to have been developed by SF’s own Recchiuti) keeps its brew in a perpetual state of warmth and agitation. What does this mean, besides one terrific cup? No waiting! Traditionalists all the way, Bi-Rite uses only ground chocolate, cocoa, sugar, and milk. A word of warning, though: Bi-Rite only makes HC during the winter (other people’s winter) and on unusually cold or rainy days. Pray for rain.

3692 18th St., SF. (415) 626-5600. www.biritecreamery.com


CHILANGO

Most people come to this Mexican restaurant — and rightly so — for the food. But if you’re here and have postpriandial room, you’ll notice hot chocolate on Chilango’s dessert menu, right up there with flan and churros. But like any good dessert, Chilango’s hot chocolate takes time — the chefs stir each cup over the stove. Let’s face facts, all the delicious Mexican and spicy hot chocolate around town originated from … Mexican hot chocolate. Get the real deal here. And never forget that nothing brings out the flavor of churros like dipping them in hot chocolate.

5 Church, SF. (415) 552-5700. www.chilangococina.com 

 

 

FEAST: 7 burrito-free late nights

Andrew Lam
-
0
FEAST: 7 burrito-free late nights

We’re spoiled rotten living in the city where if you fling an ankle boot, it’s bound to hit a taqueria open past last call. Its like a burrito vortex — go out in San Francisco and at some point you will get wrapped up in flour tortilla and snuggle in with your old buddies, carnitas and shredded cheese. But gooey and warm as it is in there, you must resist the pull to turn into a burrito. I know, I know, we’re gonna hold your hand through this one. We’ve assembled the meeting places for Burritos Anonymous: purveyors of snacks so fine — and open at least until 1 a.m. on weekends — that your frijoles negros withdrawal-twitches will subside and your post-bar, pre-bed caloric intake will rejoin your regularly programmed San Francisco culinary adventuring. We’re talking calamari bulgogi, vegan smoked duck sandwiches, chilaquiles, pambazos, and beef brisket with a side of cucumber salad. We’re talking late night. Clip this page and store it near your bus fare.

TOYOSE

There’s a converted garage in the heart of the Sunset District stuffed with carousing young’uns into the wee hours. Its charmingly narrow dining area has enough foliage and hanging screens between tables to hide 1 a.m. sloppiness — and enough Korean delicacies to entertain the most rabble-rousing group for hours. Try their noodle dishes, which can feed four with their toss-it-yourself mounds of veggies, cold rice noodles, and chile sauce. House favorites include the seafood pancake, kimchee fried rice, bulgogi, soju smoothies, and the damn largest bottles of Korean lager seen this side of the Pacific.

Open until 2 a.m. daily.

3814 Noriega, SF, (415) 731-0232


NOMBE

A hip izakaya whose name roughly translates to “he who doesn’t remember the walk over.” Nombe’s menu can be boggling, but that doesn’t detract a smidge from the table of pickled daikon, stewed onion pork belly, steaming bowls of ramen, and sake flights that is apt to materialize after speaking with the friendly serving staff. Motor skills eschewing spoons and forks for the moment? Play swords with something off the tasty skewer menu.

Open until 2 a.m. weekends

2491 Mission, SF. (415) 681-7150. www.nombesf.com

REACTION RESTAURANT

When the owners of all-ages art-punk venue Sub-mission decided to open up a dining room next door, they kept it accessible. Reaction’s got a menu full of little-seen Mexico City specialties that won’t break the bank of their underage clientele, but still don’t relapse into the boring realm that sub–$5 food often falls. Our favorite is the pambazo, a roll that’s been dipped in red sauce, grilled, then stuffed with your choice of meats or beans. You’ll also find huaraches, gorditas, and burgers — all in a sleek, red and black ambience that won’t harsh your buzz.

Open until 3 a.m. weekends

2183 Mission, SF. (415) 552-8200

J & V CAFE

There’s late night, and there’s late night. If the sun’s coming up and you’re not ready to mix and mingle with the morning suits, head to Bayview. Not that J & V will be filled with drunken sops like you — a well-turned, few-frills cafe located in the middle of SF’s wholesale produce market, the work day here begins in the dark of the night. Standard diner fare, decent espresso, a few quality Mexican specials — no b-words, but plenty of heaping chilaquiles plates to palliate that come-down.

1 a.m.-2 p.m. Mon.-Fri.

2095 Jerrold, SF. (415) 821-7786. www.jandvcatering.com

THE LIBERTIES

A place that takes no liberties with the notion of good pub food available when you need it most. The Liberties offers stomach-liners like mashed potato-topped cottage pie, bangers, and Anglo-happy chicken curry for those who’d rather have their biggest meal of the day post their biggest pints of the day.

Open until 2 a.m. weekends

998 Guerrero, SF. (415) 282-6789. www.theliberties.com

TOMMY’S JOYNT

With an exterior decorated in shades of circus tent, the 63-year old legend is a great place for Mom’s cooking at hours Momma woulda freaked had you started rustling around in the kitchen. Hofbrau service has you line up with a tray and point to which braised meat and starch you’d like heaped on your plate. Beef brisket? Buffalo stew (their specialty)? Veggiesaurus? No worries. Scoops of pasta salad, greens, and potatoes await.

Open until 1:40 a.m. daily.

1101 Geary, SF. (415) 775-4216. www.tommysjoynt.com

LOVE N HAIGHT DELI & CAFE

Stating the obvious: vegans get short shrift when it comes to late night. Seriously, how often can you order the same thing Carnivorous Carl is having … minus the protein and sauce? Unfair. Pay it no mind — with Love N Haight’s head-whirlingly large menu of vegan (and some meat) sandwiches, you’ve got the upper hand. Sure, the fake roast duck may taste similar to the fish and the chicken — but its a chewy, satisfying kind of same.

Open until 2 a.m. weekends.

553 Haight, SF. (415) 252-8190 

 

 

French Cinema Now! Two to see — and one to avoid

Sue Vaughan
-
0
French Cinema Now! Two to see — and one to avoid

The San Francisco Film Society’s “French Cinema Now” kicks off Thurs/28 with a week of spankin’ new Gallic films. Not sure which flick to choose, budding Cahiers du Cinéma contributor? Read on for a batch of brief reviews.

Copacabana (dir. Marc Fitoussi) It feels strange to call Copacabana subtle, especially when the film’s main character Babou (Isabelle Huppert) is consistently over-the-top. But this is a slight comedy, a character study to showcase Huppert’s considerable talent. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Copacabana depends on its strong lead, and there are few stronger than Huppert, one of the most dynamic and adaptive French actors working today. Babou is aloof and frustrating but also warm and well-intentioned. The film follows her struggle to start a new career and prove herself to her daughter Esmeralda, played by Huppert’s real-life offspring Lolita Chammah. The plot is a bit unfocused, as Babou ventures off to Belgium to sell timeshares for a suspect company. But Huppert keeps Copacabana grounded, creating an experience that’s richly rewarding albeit unconventional. While the film doesn’t delve deeply into her fraught relationship with Esmeralda, we know enough to care. Babou may be one of Huppert’s lighter characters, but that doesn’t make her any less captivating. Thurs/28, 6:45 p.m.; Fri/29, 9:30 p.m.

Rapt (dir. Lucas Belvaux) At first glance, Rapt is your traditional kidnapping drama, with wealthy industrialist Stanislas Graff (Yvan Attal) held captive for a hefty ransom — 50 million euro, to be precise. The relationship between Stan and his brutal kidnappers is interesting, but Rapt’s most engaging scenes focus on the way Stan’s family and business partners respond to his plight. This isn’t the average high-stakes crime thriller, in which the loyal wife will go to any means necessary to get her husband back. Instead, the family argues over how much to pay — they haggle for Stan’s life. And in his absence, he’s revealed to be a philanderer, a gambler, and kind of a jerk. Attal is well cast as Stan — at times, he is both sympathetic and reprehensible. But those left behind command more attention: his all-too-understanding wife Francoise (Anne Consigny) and his ambitious assistant Andre (Andre Marcon). Rapt is an impressive addition to the genre, using kidnapping to tell a story more original than what one might expect. Thurs/28, 9:30 p.m.; Mon/1, 9:15 p.m.

Irene (dir. Alain Cavalier) Irene is the definition of passion project, an incredibly personal film about director Alain Cavalier’s deceased wife. It’s a tough movie to criticize, in that Cavalier clearly poured his heart and soul into it. But Irene is, frankly, a self-indulgent mess, the kind of movie no filmmaker should be allowed to make. Cavalier talks incessantly, adopting a throaty whisper that might be intended to give him gravitas but mostly ends up grating. His love for his subject is apparent throughout, but the navel-gazing is completely unbearable. For over 80 minutes, Cavalier reads through excerpts from his diary, relives the day his wife died (nearly 40 years in the past), and obsesses over peculiar minutiae. In one of Irene’s strangest scenes, Cavalier reenacts his birth using an egg and a watermelon. The whole enterprise plays out like a French art film cliché. It’s masturbatory, yes, but far worse than that — it’s boring. Fri/29, 5 p.m.; Sat/30, 1:45 p.m.

“French Cinema Now”

Oct 28-Nov. 3, $12.50

Embarcadero Center Cinema

One Embarcadero Center, Promenade Level, SF

www.sffs.org

1...110111112...206Page 111 of 206

48hills.org is the official publication of the non-profit San Francisco Progressive Media Center.
Contact us: info@48hills.org