Art

It’s tops

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For more top 10s, see our Year in Music 2008 issue.

JONAS REINHARDT’S TOP 10


1. Droids, Star Peace (Repressed)

2. Steve Moore, Vaalbara (Noiseville)

3. La Düsseldorf, La Düsseldorf (Nova, Water)

4. Cluster US tour

5. Lovefingers.org

6. White Rainbow, "Snake Snacks Brain Tazer Pt2"

7. Richard Pinhas, Singles Collection 1972–1980 (Captain Trip)

8. 88 Boadrum, Aug. 8, ’08

9. Methusalem, Journey into the Unknown (Ariola)

10. B.O.D.Y.H.E.A.T. light show, Nov. 7

MI AMI’S DANIEL MARTIN-MCCORMICK AND DAMON PALERMO’S COMBINED TOP 10


*Grouper, Dragging a Dead Deer up a Hill (Type)

*US Girls, Introducing (Siltbreeze)

*Sugar Minott, Dancehall Showcase Vol. II (Black Roots/Wackies)

*Fripp and Eno, No Pussyfooting (EG)

*Steel an’ Skin, Reggae Is Here Once Again (Em)

*Dam-Funk, "Burgundy City" (Stones Throw)

*Pyha, The Haunted House (Tumult)

*Orchestre Régional De Kayes, The Best of the First Biennale of Arts
and Culture for the Young (Mississippi)

*Various artists, Blackdisco (Blackdisco)

BOMB HIP-HOP’S DAVID PAUL’S TOP 10


1. Grip Grand, Brokelore (Look)

2. Sweatshop Union show at Rickshaw Stop, Sept. 25

3. DJ Zeph and Azeem, On the Rocks mix CD

4. Planet B-Boy DVD (Arts Alliance America)

5. Prince vs. Michael show, Madrone Lounge, Nov. 15

6. Large Professor, Main Source (Gold Dust Media)

7. DJ Agent 86, "The Ultimate" 7-inch (Bomb Hip-Hop)

8. EMC, The Show (M3)

9. DJ Design with Party Arty, "Get on the Floor" single (Look)

10. History of Rap poster

TARTUFI’S TOP 10 OF ’08


*Paper Airplanes, Scandal Scandal Scandal Down in the Wheat Field (self-released)

One of the best albums we have heard in years. Wins Most Mind-Twisting Listen award from Tartufi, which just so happens to be a hairless alpaca.

*Department of Eagles, In Ear Park (4AD)

A lush and weighty release. Wins Best Overall Production award, which just so happens to be a medium-sized bologna.

*Low Red Land, Dog’s Hymns (self-released)

Man, this album is just so freaking good. It is like a chocolate river of dreams wrapped in bacon and covered in Tony Alva. They win Album Most Likely to be Sung at Top of Lungs No Matter Who Is Around award, which just so happens to be Tony Alva wrapped in bacon.

*Deerhoof, Offend Maggie (Kill Rock Stars)

Awesomely awesome and both classically deery and innovatively hoofy. Wins the award for Longevity, Perseverance, Persistence, Reliability, and Most Rockin’-est, which just so happens to be a completely un-offended Maggie, fresh and new!

*Fleet Foxes, Fleet Foxes (Sub Pop)

Didn’t want to like this after seeing it more times that we have ever seen anything before, at every Starbucks in the whole universe. Then we took a listen, and it is actually quite good. Wins the Your Albums Will Forever Be in Starbucks (a Blessing and a Curse) award, which just so happens to be a Slip ‘N Slide.

*Musee Mecanique, Hold This Ghost (Frog Stand)

These guys rule live. Wins the Classiest Band in All the Land award, which just so happens to be the option to plate a member of the band in gold.

*Russian Circles, Station (Suicide Squeeze)

A rad album with just the right amount of chunk, noise, pretty, psych, and space. Wins the Most Dreamiest Drummer Ever award, which just so happens to be a date with Lynne!? Weird.

*Beach House, Devotion (Carpark)

Admittedly, this album was purchased based upon the cover art alone, but imagine the surprise and blissed-out happiness upon hearing the actual music! Wins the Smoothest Vocals and Best Use of a Drum Machine award, which just so happens to be a tall ship towing a peanut.

*Radiohead, In Rainbows (ATO)

We listened to this a lot while on tour. Like, a lot. Wins the Smarty Pants award and the Duhhhh award, which just so happens to be invisibility cloaks for the whole band. You guys are welcome. We know what it’s like. We are pretty famous, too.

*Vetiver, Thing of the Past (Gnomonsong)

Andy’s voice makes me so happy and his musical choices make me even happier. Wins Best Use of Hats, Beards, and Boots award, which just so happens to be the lemon tree from the back patio at El Rio! You guys sing a cover, and I will sneaky sneak it out the front.

SORCERER’S DANIEL JUDD’S TOP 10


1. Raphael Saadiq, The Way I See It (Sony BMG/Columbia)

Heard this while I was record shopping in Chicago. Thought it was a Motown record I had never heard before. Great songs, production, and the singing is excellent.

2. Menahan Street Band, Make the Road by Walking (Daptone)

On Election Day we grabbed fish tacos on Ritch Street and there was a DJ wearing a George Bush mask who was spinning this record on the turntables set up on the sidewalk. The sun was shining, and Obama was about to win — a dawning of a new day.

3. Various artists, Pop Ambient 2008 (Kompakt)

This year’s collection might be my overall favorite.

4. Zo! and Tigallo, Love the 80’s! (Chapter 3hree)

Nice modern R&B versions of the most random ’80s jams. Good for throwing in a mix with the catchy Usher, T-Pain, and R. Kelly jams I also dug on this year.

5. Woolfy at the Elbo Room

A great show from Woolfy at B.O.D.Y.H.E.A.T.’s monthly night. A full band rocking great, slow-burning dance jams.

6. Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell (Matt Wolf, US) at the Roxy.

Loved the unreleased music and the glimpses of his creative process.

7. Boom Clap Bachelors, Kort Før Dine Læber (Music for Dreams)

Crazy futuristic electro-soul. One of the dudes is from Owusu and Hannibal, another cool group in this realm.

8. Various artists, Watch How the People Dancing: Unity Sounds from the London Dancehall, 1986–1989 (Honest Jon’s)

Been loving the Casio-fueled insanity, the craziest voices from the singers.

9. Various artists, Funky Nassau: The Compass Point Story 1980–1986 (Strut)

The tropical boogie/reggae vibes flow so nicely from this cast of jammers.

10. Hatchback, Colors of the Sun (Lo)

Arpeggios and creamy chord changes.

THE HARBOURS’ MIGUEL ZELAYA’S TOP 10 2008 RELEASES


1. Two Sheds, untitled EP (iTunes)

2. Kelley Stoltz, Circular Sounds (Sub Pop)

3. Uni and the Dig! String Trio, As Gold (self-released)

4. Pillars of Silence, Pillars of Silence (self-released)

5. Michael Zapruder, Dragon Chinese Cocktail Horoscope (SideCho)

6. Land of Talk, Some Are Lakes (Saddle Creek)

7. Radiohead, In Rainbows (ATO)

8. Hayden, In Field and Town (Fat Possum)

9. +/-, Xs on Your Eyes (Absolutely Kosher)

10. The Beach Boys, U.S. Singles: Capitol Years ’62–65 (EMI)

KELLEY STOLTZ’S TOP 10 AND MORE


*Borts Minorts on earth and in concert

A white body suit, a musical instrument made of a ski and bass string, and beautiful dancing gals. Fun SF weirdness without the Burning Man remorse.

*Thee Oh Sees live and The Master’s Bedroom Is Worth Spending a Night In (Tomlab)

Really, how many awesome tunes can a human being write?

*The Fresh and Onlys

What a fine group — so fine I started a label, Chuffed, to put out their first single. Where the embers of the Red Crayola and the Elevators’ hash pipe merge with Born to Run muscle.

*The Dirtbombs

Since I toured with them this year I got to see them 53 times, and they were awesome every night — except that first night in Bloomington, Ind., but that was a bummer gig all around. "I Can’t Stop Thinking About It" is the best tune I heard this year.

*Margo Guryan, Take a Picture (Sundazed)

Thanks to Chris at Groove Merchant for hipping me to this. Soft chanteuse-y vocals, booming drums, sitars, and fuzz = awesome pop.

*Beck, "Chemtrails" from Modern Guilt (Interscope)

I just really dig this tune. I like the homemade video for it on YouTube and the conspiracy theories the song alludes to.

*Randy Newman at SFJAZZ fest, playing a solo piano gig, for nearly two hours

Again, how many good songs can one person write — it’s ridiculous!

*Sunday night shows at the Rite Spot

Annie Southworth does a good job booking the place: Colossal Yes, Adam Stephens, Prairie Dog, occasional jazz cats, and the Ramshackle Romeos were my year’s highlights.

*Local bands at SFO

It’s mostly soft ‘n’ gentle pop, classical, or jazz — no Caroliner concerts are planned yet. But wouldn’t a Bart Davenport tune help the Xanax really take the edge off the preflight panic?

*Mon Cousin Belge at Café Du Nord

Somehow MCB unites Antony and Jello Biafra song skills, vocal chords, political proclivities, humor, and pathos into a horrifically scarred Belgian-in-exile crooner to make SF laugh and cry. Jobriath of the now!

*Jeffrey Lewis at Hotel Utah

The best concert I saw all year. The supergenius from your eighth-grade math class returns 20 years later with tunes that mix the Femmes, Jonathan Richman, and James Joyce.

CITAY’S EZRA FEINBERG’S MUSIC OF 2008


*M83, "Kim & Jessie" (Mute)

’80s melancholia with good drum fills.

*The Dry Spells’ "Rhiannon" to be released on Antenna Farm in spring 2009

Much better than the Fleetwood Mac original. No, I am not fucking with you.

*Realizing the Grateful Dead’s "Touch of Grey" (Arista, 1987) is the best aging hippie anthem ever, and feeling like I relate to it, especially because I’m rapidly going gray.

*Tune-yards’ "News" (Marriage)

This is the best unknown band I’ve ever heard, no joke, hands down — you’d be insane not to check it out at tuneyards.com.

*3 Leafs, Space Rock Tulip (self-released)

Amazing SF all-star mostly improv band featuring members of Gong, Tussle, Citay, and others. Epic, spacious, physical, colorful, and powerful, with catchy and fun moments throughout. www.myspace.com/3leafs

*The Botticellis, "The Reviewer" (Antenna Farm)

Total power pop, like the best upbeat Big Star meets the best Cheap Trick. One of my favorite songs of recent memory.

*Tune-yards live in SF and Portland, Maine

Citay played on a bill with Tune-yards in Portland, Maine, and then we set up a show for her here in SF. We promoted the heck out of it, the people came out, and Tune-yards killed. Truly inspiring.

*Vetiver’s cover of "The Swimming Song" (Gnomonsong)

*Half Japanese at the WFMU showcase at SXSW

*Discovering Mastodon, way, way late.

VICE COOLER’S TOP 10 MUSIC RECORDING THINGS


1. Toxic Lipstick, "Thunderdome" (Dual Plover)

This is one of the most fucked-up songs from one of the most fucked-up records in the past 20 years.

2. Deerhoof, current tour clips on YouTube

Since I got their first two records at age 15, Deerhoof has remained one of my favorite bands, and the addition of Ed Rodriguez has pushed them into a new terrain of amazingness.

3. E-40 featuring Lil John, "Turf Drop" (BME/Reprise) and Urxed, Car Clutch, and Soft Circle live at Triple Base

Fucking incredible! And the Triple Base show pretty much made everyone’s "show of the year."

4. Lil Wayne, "A Millie" (Cash Money/Young Money/Universal)

This song completely saves the rest of this half-assed, boring, and otherwise overhyped record.

5. Matmos, Supreme Balloon (Matador)

Dude, they always deliver!

6. Bleachy Bleachy Bleach

It’s sort of like Cobra Killer being thrown into a fryer, but made by super young Bay Area suburban girls whose first "big band" that they got into, at age 14, was Wolf Eyes.

7. Disaster’s LP and Barr’s new songs live

I was lucky enough to see the few performances that he made it to, after he cancelled most of his shows for this year. As far as his alter ego, Disaster, goes — I like it because people think the record player is broken when you listen to the album.

8. The Younger Lovers, Newest Romantic (Retard Disco)

Full disclosure: I recorded four songs on it. This is a band started by a friend I grew up with named Brontez. Highly recommended.

9. Fatal Bazooka, "Parle a Ma" (Warner)

While on tour in France we were tortured by mainstream French radio. Fortunately, this song was a big hit at the time. Thank God we don’t speak much French, because I am 100 percent positive that the lyrics fucking suck.

10. Quintron, Too Thirsty 4 Love (Goner)

The best album cover and best opening song. It’s tragic that bands like My Chemical Romance are so huge and have pushed such genius artists as Quintron and Miss Pussycat into such obscurity.

Don’t look back

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Twelve months ago, as I sat down to write a year-end appraisal of 2007, I was still in awe of "© Murakami," the Takashi Murakami show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. It brilliantly captured the crass apex of global capitalism, mostly through celebrity-studded receptions and the appropriated — call it sculptural — form of a Louis Vuitton boutique. What a difference a year makes. At the close of 2008, the whole art world is watching as the highly regarded MOCA teeters precariously on a financial abyss, while Vuitton maven Marc Jacobs recently canceled his extravagantly performance-arty holiday party in the name of "recessionista" austerity.

Suddenly, commentaries on luxury goods seem so ’07, as evidenced by the critical response to a Chanel-sponsored, Zaha Hadid-designed quilted handbag exhibition that landed in Central Park this fall. "If devoting so much intellectual effort to such a dubious undertaking might have seemed indulgent a year ago, today it looks delusional," architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff opined in The New York Times. At this particular moment, it’s as difficult to summon up the flush feeling of the recent past as it is to contemplate a belt-tightening future.

To look forward is to confront anxious uncertainty. Optimists, however, anticipate a period in which art is tempered by a sense of hopefulness and focus rather than being driven by auction reports. Contemporary art will become more thoughtful, they predict. A good percentage of San Francisco art dealers jetted off to Miami for the recent spate of fairs, fingers crossed, expectations lowered. Word on the street said the outcome wasn’t as bad as expected, though sales were slow. Collectors actually had time to look and think about the art they were interested in, in contrast to automatically joining the grab-and-go sellers’ market of years past. Like everything else in our culture, the art world appears poised to embrace a more manageable scale. I wonder if this also means that art activities will become more homegrown.

This fall, the Bay Area saw a whole lot of contemporary art from China, with big shows at the Berkeley Art Museum ("Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art From the Sigg Collection") and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art ("Half Life of a Dream: Contemporary Chinese Art") providing a welcome crash course in Far East art production. It seems unlikely, though, that either will have a lasting impact on community consciousness. Interest in Chinese art mirrors an American preoccupation with economic miracles. Numerous Western galleries opened Beijing outposts this year, positioning for anticipated new markets, but fantasies of financial success have been exposed as illusion — much like the sounds and images from Zhang Yimou’s over-the-top opening of Beijing Olympics.

The Bay Area museum scene was robust in the summer. Unsurprisingly, "Frida" gave SFMOMA a summer blockbuster, albeit one outsold by "Chihuly at the de Young." The latter presented a problematic expression of the tensions between art, craft, and design — Kenneth Baker’s slam review in the San Francisco Chronicle incited a welcome, if contentious, flurry of public online dialogue. The Contemporary Jewish Museum opened its new building in June with solid shows and events, making that institution a more prominent cultural resource (albeit one that still needs to prove itself through upcoming programming). There were lower budget alternative visions to be found. A plethora of apartment and hallway galleries popped up around town. "Kiki: The Proof is in the Pudding," Ratio 3’s summer show honoring a now-legendary mid-1990s gallery in the Mission, , generated a surprisingly broad buzz, thanks to its range of notable artists with SF roots.

And then there was "Bay Area Now 5," a show that people, unfortunately, weren’t really talking about. Ambitious in intent, this edition of the regional survey hoped to offer a spin on international biennials. It included artists who recently moved to the area from distant countries, some guest-curated shows-within-the-show, and off-site events. But the result felt unfocused. Its off-kilter array of bizarre inclusions — such as Edmundo de Marchena’s jaw-dropper of a sculpture, a jiggling prosthetic genital homage to SF’s history of sexual compulsion — failed to please artists (both in and out of the show), appease local galleries whose artists were not represented, or register with a public looking for the current pulse of San Francisco art. Challenges to the market-based art world and programs that avoid the usual suspects are welcome strategies. But in this case, the quality of individual projects was subsumed by the muddled institutional vision of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. What is the point of "Bay Area Now" again?

Perhaps the misfired attempt would be forgivable if it hadn’t been bracketed by equally undercooked exhibitions ("The Way That We Rhyme," "The Gatherers: Greening Our Urban Spheres," and the cryptic "transPop: Korea Vietnam Remix" — a show in dire need of contextualizing wall labels). YBCA has a new visual arts director, former San Diego Museum of Art curator Betti-Sue Hertz, who will take the helm in early 2009. She has her work cut out for her.

As resources become more precious, frugal ingenuity is likely to take precedence in local art offerings. To cut costs, museums will be having fewer exhibitions with longer runs (some extending beyond six months). These time frames offer opportunities for deeper scrutiny — or heavier bouts of boredom. Something like SFMOMA’s current "The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now," even if it doesn’t live up to its promised scope, reflects an interest in collaborative involvement and the appeal of low-rent materials — rubber bands, anyone? Audiences are enjoying themselves, maybe even making repeat visits.

Perhaps homespun critical fantasy is the order of the day. The Wattis Institute’s "The Wizard of Oz," for example, fused a ragtag collection of contemporary art and historical artifacts into an amber-hued vision of the crumbling American dream. I wish I’d been able to see the Jeff Koons sculpture installed in the Château de Versailles, a more extravagant example of a visually and conceptually pointed spectacle — Koons’ mash-up of European and American relics forms another kind of dreamy Oz. Click your heels three times and repeat after me: there’s no place like home.

GLEN HELFAND’S 2008 TOP 10

1. "Oranges and Sardines," Hammer Museum

Returning SFMOMA curator Gary Garrels’ current "conversations on abstract painting" exhibition in Los Angeles is one of the most satisfying, artist-friendly shows ever.

2. Philippe Vergne, lecture at San Francisco Art Institute

The recently-appointed director of the Dia Art Foundation offered incisive, inspirational, and witty takes on the melancholic state of the arts.

3. Speed Racer: The IMAX Experience (Andy and Larry Wachowski, USA, 2008)

This color-drenched amusement park ride of a movie lacks coherence and features the world’s most irritating child actor, but two-plus hours of nonstop electric rainbow CGI at IMAX scale turns eye-tickling into an endurance sport.

4. Seven Days in the Art World, by Sarah Thornton (Norton, 256 pages, $24.95)

As economies tank everywhere, there is no better time to get Thornton’s insider view of art fairs, auctions, art schools, and the like — it already seems like glam art history. Plus it’s great fodder for art opening chitchat.

5. Brendan Lott, at SF Art Commission Gallery and San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art

Lott’s paintings — farmed out to painting towns in China and based on appropriated culturally revealing Flickr images of American teens — provided a remarkably concise picture of globalization.

6. Fritz Haeg, lecture at SFMOMA

Though the notion of garden-as-participatory-eco-artwork is beginning to seem rote, Haeg, a key figure in this movement, convinced skeptics with his self-aware and pleasurable take on social sculpture.

7. You Don’t Mess with the Zohan (Dennis Dugan, USA, 2008)

Adam Sandler’s crude, sure, but in this under-appreciated lark he joyfully takes on Arab-Palestinian conflict, the joys of intergenerational sex, the mall-ization of Manhattan, and vintage Paul Mitchell unisex cuts.

8. Park Life and Electric Works

These two relatively new gallery-bookstore entities, Park Life in the Richmond District and Electric Works in SoMa, have made good art seem accessible — in the collector sense — to everyone. If you can’t afford the originals or prints (Electric Works makes ’em), then you can buy into the highly selective inventory of art books at either place.

9. Love Songs (Christophe Honoré, France 2007)

This down-tempo spin on Jean-Luc Godard’s 1961’s A Woman Is a Woman and Jacques Demy’s 1964 The Umbrellas of Cherbourg restored my faith in French cinema, not to mention musical melancholy.

10. "Josephine Taylor: Bomb Landscape," Catherine Clark Gallery

Taylor first made a splash with delicately rendered, almost wispy epics of extreme family dysfunction and abuse. Her latest show is startling in its visual darkness and more dreamlike but still frightening surrealistic imagery.

Picks, pans, and a top 10

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CHUCK MOBLEY, CURATOR AT SF CAMERAWORK


Pan: SF Art Institute’s furlough

A humble proposal to those laid off for a month: exchange your individual voice for a collective one and begin intervening by employing the crafty tools of activism as an artful device of communication in order to effect positive change for your institution. As culture workers you are bound to succeed.
Pick: The Size Queens, Magic Dollar Shoppe (Bitter Stag)

A lineup of Bay Area all-stars have produced a multi-layered disc of anti-globalization, anti-pop culture anthems filled with pathos and wit. By turns literary, cheeky, melancholic, and celebratory, this music is the perfect accompaniment to a protest or a Naomi Klein lecture.

XYLOR JANE, ARTIST


Pick: P&H 2 (Behemoth), 2007, oil on canvas, 84" x 92", from "Amy Sillman: Third Person Singular,"

at Tang Museum, Saratoga, NY

This painting stares you down and sizes you up. I lock a gaze. I’m a little scared. I can hear and smell every single thing near me. IT makes you bristle, puff, straighten and square the challenge, feet planted for a tussle. The hot center smokes and glows blood fire, breathes through clamped jaws, "What the fuck are you?". Turns a thick neck and swings an armored tail. THWACK. Hit, jolted, burnt? Part of me melts away, Oh, just my outers, clothes and skin. Hair.

LAWRENCE RINDER, DIRECTOR OF BERKELEY ART MUSEUM AND PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE


1. Odetta at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival
2. Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri’s documentary film October Country
3. Conspiracy of Venus at Adobe Books
4. "Ajit Chahuan: Milky Way of Breeding Stallions That Roll, Ejacuutf8g By Themselves," at Adobe Books Backroom Gallery
5. "Paul Schiek: the thing about you is that you will end up like me," at Stephen Wirtz Gallery
6. Leah Marks’ senior show at California College of the Arts
7. Jennifer Blowdryer
8. Andy Goldsworthy’s The Spire in the Presidio
9. Brontez at Dog Eared Books
10. Frederic Rzewsky, solo piano at Mills College

WILLIAM E. JONES, FILMMAKER


Pick: Odires Mlászho

At São Paulo’s Galeria Vermelho this fall, I saw the sexy and cerebral, disciplined and dissipated work of Mlászho for the first time. He juxtaposes ordinary mortal faces and Roman portrait sculptures with geometric rigor in his collage series "A Fossil Dig Full of Hooks." He cunningly cements pages of reference books together in his sculpture Enciclopédia Britânica. His most powerful works (from a series called "Butchers and Master Apprentices") involve elaborate collage rearrangements of male nudes that manage to look at once disemboweled and bloodless. Diaphanous yet strong, a body becomes a deconstruction of a flesh-colored Herman Miller lamp.

AVA JANCAR, CO-OWNER OF JANCAR JONES GALLERY


Pick: The current Berkeley Art Museum

A few months ago I found a pamphlet-like publication at an antique shop in Alameda, its cover austere, reading simply University Arts Center. Detailed within were the elevation plans of the elegantly modern yet utilitarian Mario Ciampi design for the Berkeley Art Museum’s current site. Opened in 1970 and constructed in a brutalist manner, with fanning interior cantilevers around an airy core, the concrete building is to be replaced soon with a design by international architect Toyo Ito. My past year of visits to the museum has been colored by this knowledge, and I’ve begun to mourn its impending loss. In spite of the current structure’s seismic instability, it remains baffling to me that a community is so quick to dispose of this local icon, not yet 50 years old. "The richness of this building will arise from the sculptural beauty of its rugged major forms," an awards jury wrote in 1966 regarding Ciampi’s plan. "We believe [it] can become one of the outstanding contributions to museum design in our time."

HENRY URBACH, CURATOR OF ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN AT SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART


Pick: "Lautrec in Leather: Chuck Arnett and the Birth of the San Francisco Scene," at the GLBT Historical Society

If you missed the show, you can still see Arnett’s rendition of Michelangelo’s David in full leather gear (on view in the Historical Society’s exhibition on 18th and Castro), or you can make an appointment to visit the organization’s extensive queer archive.

Pick: The Federal Office Building by Morphosis, Renzo Piano’s Academy of Sciences Building, and Toyo Ito’s design for the Berkeley Art Museum

These buildings point the way to a new civic architecture.

Pick: The Hunky Jesus contest in Dolores Park on Easter Sunday

Street theater at its finest.

Pick: Nice Collective’s "Voix de Ville" Collection

How fortunate we are to have these brilliant designers among us.

Pan: Proposition 8

MATT FURIE, ARTIST


Pick: "One-Thousand Twenty-Six Eyes," at Hamburger Eyes Photo Epicenter

One thousand twenty-six eyes is a lot of eyes and it’s also the name of an awesome group show I saw this year at Hamburger Eyes. I like eyes. The show featured a ton of cool photos from the kids at Space 1026 in Philly. The best thing there was a large glowing geodesic dome with tie-dyed pillows all around it. I sat on a pillow and discovered a little peephole with a tiny photo inside. Turned out this structure was lined with tons of little viewfinders and each hole had a different pic! They also had a great merch booth in the back with a bunch of handmade prints, zines, t-shirts and stuff. I bought an awesome hamburger-with-eyes t-shirt there by artist Chris Kline. He rules.

DARIN KLEIN, PROGRAMS COORDINATOR AT THE HAMMER MUSEUM AND CURATOR


Pick: Fag School #3

Naked men (Jewish Jason, Bob the Handyman, and My Best Friend’s Weiner), hilarious cruising reviews, mortifying blackout reviews, advice columns by Telfar and Allison Wolfe, interviews with New Bloods and Billy Cheer. All of this and more, created with scissors, markers, glue, and a manual typewriter. Nothing fancy, experimental or tricky about this project. Just rants, raves, and snapshots, served up hottt by San Francisco’s very own Brontez in glorious black and white photocopy. The price is right at just $3.50. Warning: Playing the weird Lovewarz DVD that comes with this zine could ruin a preppy gay birthday party!

Hardly art, hardly garbage: Fall Out Boy at Great American Music Hall

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Fall Out Boy sml 3.jpg

By Michael Harkin

“Why’d they have to do the concert on this day, when they knew it’d be rainin’?” You posed a good question, Mr. Passerby. I arrived at Great American Music Hall at 11:45 a.m. on this damp, overcast Sunday morning, Dec. 22, and 150 people were already lined up around the corner from the club. Mostly teenage girls around, but lots of parents toted umbrellas and blankets – what good sports! – knowing full well that they’d be out there another seven hours with their kids before doors.

My neighbors in line had variously traveled from Stockton, Mountain View, and San Jose, willing to pay far more than the $20 door price to see Fall Out Boy that night. Their health ‘neath those Decaydance hoodies wasn’t quite as important as the close proximity the venue would afford them.

Fall Out Boy sml 1.jpg

I can’t readily provide a sufficient rationale for standing out in the rain this long, especially when the band in question is the embodiment of commercial rock’s absurdity – they headlined the Honda Civic Tour last year, for heaven’s sake – and regularly employ such overwrought, cumbersome song titles as “I’m Like a Lawyer with the Way I’m Always Trying to Get You Off (Me and You).” That said, I like ’em anyway – hard to say why. And this beats paying 60 bucks to see them with some terrible bands at the HP Pavilion next summer, right?

Tops in 2008

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TOMAS PALERMO’S TOP DANCEHALL AND REGGAE ARTISTS 2008


This year saw American pop (Rhianna, Kardinal Offishall, and Sean Kingston) broadly embracing Jamaican music. Likewise, Jamaican artists emulated, covered, and incorporated American pop and R&B motifs more than ever. The trend in JA was toward hot singles over hot albums, while dozens of new artists broke out. Women in particular had a massive resurgence in reggae (Queen Ifrica, Etana, Cherine Anderson) and dancehall (Tifa, Timberly, D’Angel, Tami Chynn). Money — having it, making it, spending it — was the most prevalent song topic. Here are six categories of reggae artists who made as big an impact on music as Jamaican athletes did on the track in Beijing.

TOP DAWGS Dancehall chart-toppers included Mavado, Vybz Kartel, Beenie Man, Elephant Man, and Busy Signal.

ROOTS REFRESHERS Taj Weekes, Dwayne Stephenson, Morgan Heritage, Pressure, and Tarrus Riley enlivened one-drop traditional reggae.

LADIES IN CHARGE Women charged the charts, including Spice, Tifa, Natalie Storm, Timberlee, Pompatay, D’Angel, Etana, and Queen Ifrica.

CATCHING FIRE Newcomers galore emerged, like Bugle, Serani, Demarco, Erup, Black Ryno, and Konshens.

SOLID AS A ROCK Veterans who didn’t let us down included Beres Hammond, Tony Rebel, Jah Cure, Mr. Vegas, and Junior Reid, as well as Damien and Steven Marley.

POP GOES REGGAE These reggae/pop/R&B combinations and remixes made us smile: Estelle/Sean Paul, Jazmine Sullivan, John Legend/Buju Banton, plus French roots-boots remixes of Mary J. Blige, Lil Wayne, Nas, and Motown.

WOODEN SHJIPS’ TOP 10 (IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER)


•Art Lessing, Sleeping Ghost (An Electric Eggplant)

•Der TPK (Teenage Panzerkorps), Games for Slaves (Siltbreeze)

•Endless Boogie, Focus Level (No Quarter)

•Expo 70 and Rahdunes’s split-LP (Kill Shaman)

•Fabulous Diamonds, Fabulous Diamonds (Siltbreeze)

•Los Llamarada, Take the Sky (S-S)

•Nothing People, Anonymous (S-S)

•Sic Alps, US EZ (Siltbreeze)

•Suicide, Live 1977–1978 (Blast First)

•Times New Viking, Rip It Off (Matador)

GEORGE CHEN’S DISORDERLY 10


•Grouper, Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill (Type)

•Krallice, Krallice (Profound Lore)

•Mount Eerie, Lost Wisdom and Black Wooden Ceiling Opening (P.W. Elverum & Sun)

•Ecstatic Sunshine live

•Prurient live

•Bulbs, Light Ships (Freedom to Spend)

•Mincemeat or Tenspeed in a cave

•Thee Silver Mt Zion Memorial Orchestra and Tra-La-La Band, 13 Blues for Thirteen Moons (Constellation)

•Pukers cassette

BEN RICHARDSON’S "BEVY OF HEAVY" TOP 10 METAL ALBUMS


•Testament, The Formation of Damnation (Nuclear Blast)

•Gama Bomb, Citizen Brain (Earache)

•Bloodbath, The Fathomless Mastery (Peaceville)

•Cannabis Corpse, Tube of the Resinated (Forcefield/Robotic Empire)

•Hail of Bullets, …of Frost and War (Metal Blade)

•Bison B.C., Quiet Earth (Metal Blade)

•Grand Magus, Iron Will (Rise Above/Candlelight)

•Jucifer, L’Autrichienne (Relapse)

•Gojira, The Way of All Flesh (Prosthetic)

•Enslaved, Vertebrae (Indie)

DJ AMPLIVE’S TOP 10


1. MGMT, Oracular Spectacular (Sony)

2. Zion-I, "Juicy Juice" (Gold Dust)

3. Grouch, Show You the World (Legendary Music)

4. Weezer, "Pork and Beans" (Geffen)

5. Santogold, Santogold (Downtown/Atlantic)

6. The Foals, Antidotes (Sub Pop)

7. T-Pain, "Chopped ‘N Skrewed" (Jive)

8. Tapes ‘N Tapes "The Dirty Dirty (Recession Remixes)"

9. Jamie Lidell, Jim (Warp)

10. Hottub, "Man Bitch" (LeHeat)

THEO SCHELL-LAMBERT’S TOP 10 OF ’08


10. The Kills, Midnight Boom (Domino)

Hince and Mosshart’s latest was forceful and impressively consistent, which, yes, meant it was professional, and which, no, didn’t mean it was soulless. The pair spotted the rhythmic snap and hypnotism in ’60s playground sing-alongs. Working with these features instead of nostalgia or camp, they had the basis for a percussion-driven ’00s rock.

9. Steinski, What Does It All Mean? 1983–2006 Retrospective (Illegal Art)

Steve Stein’s influential ’80s tracks were extreme hip-hop: not only any song, but any sound that society had made could be sampled and woven into his boom-box fabrics. Of course, this made for legal nightmares. In 2008, we got the gift of a straightforward packaging.

8. Benga, Diary of an Afro Warrior (Tempa)

The Croydon dubstep man shoved the movement forward with Warrior, but he played it as a nudge. An eclectic, graceful, and terrifically undogmatic outing, it seemed to stroll along the Thames, picking up a new rhythm in each neighborhood. Through that, it remained fierce.

7. Bon Iver, For Emma, Forever Ago (Jagjaguwar)

When you head off to the cabin in the woods to record your masterpiece, it doesn’t tend to work out well. You realize the woods are cold and boring, and that you are missing some helpful equipment. Justin Vernon’s excursion into the Wisconsin snow should inspire a new crop of such failures, because it polishes the myth. In its austerity and bone-cooling effect, Emma recalls a more focused Bonnie "Prince" Billy.

6. The Magnetic Fields, Distortion (Nonesuch)

In 2008, soaking an indie album in Jesus and Mary Chain noise was about as original as what Bon Iver did (see above). Yet it too worked. Critically, Stephin Merritt never let his latest become a disc about texture: he knew that the key to noise pop is the pop. And Distortion delights in the girl-group drums and pert melodies while dramatically cringing at the feedback it pretends is just part of every record. "Drive on, Driver" is more indebted to Fleetwood Mac than anyone else.

5. Lucinda Williams, Little Honey (Lost Highway)

We extend the same sort of charity to Lucinda Williams as we do Chan Marshall — we just really want those gals to be in a happy place. For the first time in a while, Lucinda cut a studio set with optimistic poetry, and Honey not only warmed anyone who got close to Essence or West (both Lost Highway; 2001, 2007), it even matched the elegance of those discs — and with a way juicier palette.

4. Vampire Weekend, Vampire Weekend (XL)

The culture-jamming ("Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa") wasn’t as deeply meaningful as some held, but the light touch with which it arrived made the record a bit of a marvel. It was sweet, it was for parties, and it had nothing to do with Paul Simon. And the lyrics cribbed from freshman classes at Columbia were remarkably workable and unsophomoric.

3. Lil Wayne, Tha Carter III (Cash Money)

Wayne has a monopoly on ink. What doesn’t make it onto his neck goes into his paeans. Both outlets — the tats, the praise — can seem excessive, but the latter just keeps on being reasonable. Wayne is the rapper as post-rapper, deliciously self-aware. Rapping is a funny thing to do, and rap albums are increasingly funny things to make. He’s getting inside it: looking with awe at that thing he just said, then riffing off it, then riffing off that, wheezing and grunting until his syllables morph, and enjoying himself.

2. Beach House, Devotion (Carpark)

The Baltimore pair found a sound on their debut. On their second record, they improved it and grew into it. Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally seemed to be operating in some last outpost of melody, where tart country-pop hooks could be heard in a final, furry form before they collapsed. That made Devotion both comforting and lonely.

1. Drive-By Truckers, Brighter Than Creation’s Dark (New West)

For starters, DBT are shaping up as their generation’s premier bards of booze. When not singing mid-bender, they’re suffering through the aftermath or plotting the next go-round. What that really means is that their songs teeter powerfully between the concomitant bitterness and shame. The 19-song Creation was built to have room for all the less proud emotions.

Honorable mentions: Lykke Li, Youth Novels (LL); White Hinterland, Phylactery Factory (Dead Oceans); Kathleen Edwards, Asking for Flowers (Rounder); James Pants, Welcome (Stones Throw); Fleet Foxes, Fleet Foxes (Sub Pop)

THE FUCKING CHAMPS’ TIM SOETE’S TOP 10 2008 RELEASES


1. Various artists, Obsession (Bully)

2. Kurt Vile, Constant Hitmaker (Gulcher)

3. Jonas Reinhardt, Jonas Reinhardt (Kranky)

4. Ariel Pink, Oddities Sodomies Vol. 1 (Vinyl International)

5. Lindstrom, Where You Go, I Go Too (Smalltown Supersound)

6. Bum Kon, Drunken Sex Sucks (Smooch/Maximum Rocknroll)

7. La Dusseldorf, Viva (Water)

8. John Maus, Love Is Real (Upset the Rhythm)

9. RTX, JJ Got Live RaTX (Drag City)

10. Sic Alps, US EZ (Siltbreeze)

CHRIS SABBATH’S TOP 10


1. Godwaffle Noise Pancakes

A cluster of floor-crouching noiseniks + a heaping helping of syrupy waffles hot off the griddle = a great way to kill two hours on a Saturday afternoon.

2. Beth from Times New Viking tells me outside the Great American Music Hall that she likes my cat sweatshirt: And according to her, she only gives out one sweatshirt compliment per year — oh, snap!

3. Spire Live, Fundamentalis (Autofact/Touch)

Dynamite double LP compilation of live recordings dubbed in various European cathedrals from the likes of Philip Jeck, Christian Fennesz, BJNilsen, and more.

4. Eat Skull, Sick to Death (Siltbreeze)

Hurrah to the Philadelphia noise imprint for releasing this gem of a debut.

5. Kevin Drumm, Imperial Distortion (Hospital)

The Chicago native once again falls head over heels for the drone.

6. Wavves, Wavves (Woodsist)

I love this kid! Bedroom-spun beach punk in the vain of Beat Happening and the Embarrassment.

7. Common Eider, King Eider, Figs, Wasps, and Monotremes (Root Strata)

If I could fork a Goldie over to Rob Fisk for every time this album made its way through my stereo speakers, he would have a lot of Goldies.

8. Excepter, Debt Dept (Paw Tracks)

The Brooklyn electronic performance troupe sings about burgers, sunrises, and killing people on its new disc.

9. Blank Dogs, On Two Sides (Troubleman Unlimited)

New-wave synths soiled in grime, decayed vocals, and tape hiss galore from this prolific newbie.

10. John Wiese at the Lipo Lounge

Sounded like chunks of metal swelling to the size of balloons and then bursting into my chest for 10 awesome minutes.

PETER NICHOLSON’S TOP 10 TUNES TO DANCE AWAY THE HEARTACHE


1. Yellowtail featuring Alison Crockett, "You Feel Me" (Bagpak)

2. Dave Aju, "Crazy Place" (Circus Company)

3. Jazzanova featuring Randolph, "Let Me Show Ya (Henrik Schwarz Remix)" (Sonar Kollektiv)

4. Grace Jones, "La Vie en Rose (Casinoboy Version)" (Trackybottoms)

5. Mike Monday, "The 11 11" (Om)

6. Recloose, "Catch a Leaf" (Loop Sounds)

7. La Vida Buena, "Humanidad" (Amalgama)

8. Sebo K, "Too Hot" (Mobilee)

9. Art Bleek, "Modern Spaces" (Connaisseur)

10. Jimpster, "Dangly Panther" (Freerange)

IRWIN SWIRNOFF’S FAVORITE RECORDS AND MUSICAL MOMENTS OF 2008


•John Maus, Love Is Real (Upset the Rhythm)

•Hercules and Love Affair (DFA) and at Mezzanine

•Erykah Badu, New Amerykah, Pt.1: 4th World War (Motown)

•Magnetic Fields, Distortion (Nonesuch)

•Stereolab, Chemical Chords (4AD)

•White Magic, New Egypt (Latitudes)

•Cluster at Aquarius Records and the Boredoms at the Fillmore

•My Bloody Valentine at the Concourse

•Flying Lotus, Los Angeles (Warp)

•Grouper, Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill (Type)

I can’t not mention: Sparks, Exotic Creatures of the Deep (Lil Beethoven); Beach House, Devotion (Carpark); Cut Copy, In Ghost Colors (Modular Interscope); Nagisa Ni Te, Yosuga (Jagjaguwar); the Alps, III (Type); Paavoharju, Laulu Laakson Kukista (Fonal); Antony and the Johnsons, Another World (Secretly Canadian).

ERIK MORSE’S TOP RECORDS OF 2008


•Gas, Nah und Fern (Kompakt)

•Fennesz, Black Sea (Touch)

•Mavis Staple, Live: Hope at the Hideout (Anti-)

•Various artists, Thank You Friends: The Ardent Records’ Story (Big Beat)

•Abdel Hadi Halo and the El Gusto Orchestra of Algiers, Abdel Hadi Halo and the El Gusto Orchestra of Algiers (Honest Jon’s)

•Skyphone, Avellaneda (Rune Grammofon)

•Autechre, Quaristice (Warp)

•Susanna, Flowers of Evil (Rune Grammofon)

•Raymond Scott Quintette, Ectoplasm (Basta)

•The Last Shadow Puppets, The Age of the Understatement (Domino)

•Tape, Luminarium (Hapna)

•Al Green, Lay It Down (Blue Note)

•Beach House, Devotion (Carpark)

TWO GALLANTS’ TOP 10 OF 2008


•Fleet Foxes, Fleet Foxes (Sub Pop)

•Various artists, Victrola Favorites: Artifacts from Bygone Days (Dust to Digital)

•Moondog: The Viking of 6th Avenue: The Authorized Biography by Robert Scotto (Process, 2007)

•Barack Obama

•Blitzen Trapper, Furr (Sub Pop)

•What It Is: What It Is by Paul G. Maziar and Matt Maust (Write Bloody)

•Various artists, Eccentric Soul: Trager and Note Labels (Numero)

•Immortal Technique, The 3rd World (Viper)

•Grayceon, The Grand Show (Vendlus)

Two Gallants perform Dec. 26, 8 p.m., at the Fillmore. www.twogallants.com

DEERHOOF’S ED RODRIGUEZ’S TOP 10 THINGS OF A MUSICAL NATURE 2008


• I Got the Feelin’, James Brown in the ’60s DVD (Shout! Factory)

It will remind you why you decided to play music in the first place. If you don’t play music then it will make you want to start.

• Silentist, Silentist (Celestial Gang)

Mark Burden always keeps me interested. Nancarrow or Reich with blast beats.

• Over the course of more than two months of touring I saw and got to know several bands that were new to me. Coconut, Experimental Dental School, Parenthetical Girls, Flying, and so many more. I can’t remember ever getting to see so much inspiring music made by so many creative, energetic, and completely fun people.

• Weasel Walter, solo, duos, trios, and on and on

No matter what the setting, he pushes the situation further with his drive, talent, and humor (all of which are refreshing and needed in the improvised music scene).

• Bronze

Nominated for the best act of commitment that didn’t involve self-mutilation. All in unison, shaving their heads onstage and then revealing perfect Marine dress uniforms under their smocks. They looked so good it inadvertently might have been the best recruiting campaign since Kid Rock and NASCAR teamed up to con kids across the US.

• Death Sentence: Panda! and …

• Burmese

I went to every show of both these bands over the year whenever I was in town. Without fail I would be deaf, destroyed, and smiling, or dancing, laughing, and smiling. Check them out to match those descriptions to the correct band!

• Earth, Wind and Fire: In Concert DVD (Geneon, 2000)

I work at Lost Weekend Video, so I watch more new music DVDs more often than I get new CDs. But maybe you’ll do the same after watching this bass player do high kicks for an hour and not miss a note.

• Touring with old friends KIT and Hawnay Troof. Watching Vice Cooler get a bunch of crossed-armed kids dancing, cause bartenders to leave their posts to run to the stage and move, and VC almost break his neck jumping off monitors all in single-digit minutes. With KIT, add in the insane attack of Steve, the bouncing energy of Kristy, and the apologetic guitar soloing of George Chen, and try not to beam.

• Joining Deerhoof! Getting to spend so much time of 2008 with John, Greg, and Satomi has made this year feel like no other.

>>MORE YEAR IN MUSIC 2008

You heard it here first

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

The first time I noticed that my city of art and innovation was getting short shrift was when The New York Times started going on about "freak folk," Joanna Newsom, and Devendra Banhart and really, you know, getting rhapsodic about these baroquely retro space-folk flavors.

And somehow it never quite came up that these people are San Francisco people, and that their music is San Francisco music. I mean, yes, Banhart has a rep as being a bit of a drifter. Yes, Newsom is really from, you know, Nevada City … and yet, where else could they have first truly taken root, where else could they have first broken through the topsoil, drunk of the dew, and soaked up the dappled sunlight, except in the rich, loamy cultural compost heap that is San Francisco, the Bay Area, and its wooly NorCal surround?

This germination of culture, color, sound, and flavor is, in the most organic sense of it, completely cyclical. Ken Kesey’s garden parties put out roots and rhizomes and threw up spores that took hold almost immediately among music lovers in the region. The result was a distinctly American growth medium for the archetypes of Dionysus, Pan, and Astarte; for the mystic and mythic yearnings of the Victorians; and for the willful, self-starting proto-anarchism of the English Diggers. Cross-pollinate that with the intellectual and aesthetic rebellion of situationism and free jazz, borne in with the gusting, blowsy Beat generation, and you have yourself a rather fecund and folkloric little bramble — one that got even more biodiverse with all the punk rock springing up like weeds in the 1970s.

This polyglot epoch of musical discovery gave us so much. Not just the Dead’s first three records, the Airplane, or even David Crosby’s If I Could Only Remember My Name (Atlantic, 1971) — what about Blue Cheer, Moby Grape, Fifty Foot Hose, the Flamin’ Groovies, the Avengers, and the DKs? Rather a multifaceted mix, but relevant, because Bay Area bands like these set the pattern for divergent waves of underground music-making during the next three or four decades.

The last 15 years in particular have seen these retro sounds made new in the Bay Area and then breaking into the critical, and sometimes commercial, mainstream somewhere else. Usually New York is quickest to take all the credit. Like with that whole garage rock revival. Yeah, yeah, the Strokes, blah, blah, the latest in NYC retro-cool. It’s not that we were first, here in SF. It’s just that we’ve been playing that stuff on KUSF-FM for years, and fabulous local bands have been cranking out that sound for years, and suddenly the Big Apple is basking in the hipniz.

Or in the glorification of Williamsburg, which totally followed the Mission District in terms of exuberantly youthful, excruciatingly hip, oft-naïve, and fearlessly spasmodic creative gusto. Dang, before there was a TV on the Radio, Kyp Malone was working at the One World Cafe on McAllister and Baker streets, making music with Rocket Science and the Nigger-Loving Faggots and handing out fresh-pressed records to the community-radio DJ down the street. OK, so that’s not the Mission, but it sort of was a suburb of the Mission.

Or with the whole freak-folk thing. Back in 2004 or thereabouts The New York Times started noticing there were hairy kids playing spacey and folkoric acoustic sounds. They quickly championed the term "freak folk," and in 2006 even ran a big, lushly illustrated, front-page article in the "Sunday Arts & Leisure" section, Will Hermes’ "Summer of Love Redux," that curiously never once mentions San Francisco, despite bolting the whole thesis down with repeated references to Banhart, Newsom, Vetiver, Comets of Fire, the Six Organs of Admittance, and Jolie Holland.

Now we see, from the foggy depths, a new rising of fuzz and hair, the shambling and very organic children of Blue Cheer. Parchman Farm was an early bloomer, as was Comets on Fire, and now the Bay Area is throbbing with shaggy combos exploring the idiom. Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound, Sleepy Sun, and so many of those Frisco Freakout acts — how will these vibrations resonate across the nation over the next five years? And will New York City somehow take credit for that, too? I think not. They’re just too damn cool to grow out their bangs past the uncomfortable midlength stage.

Philly, though, which gave us Bardo Pond, Brother JT, Siltbreeze Records — there’s a hairy, done-it-all scene stealer I can live with.

JOSH WILSON’S TOP FIVE

1. Godwaffle Noise Pancakes closing show at the former ArtSF, Nov. 8

2. William Hooker, Hemlock Tavern, July 24

3. Heavy Metal (1981) and Conan the Barbarian (1982, with James Earl Jones and some other guy) at the Castro Theater’s "Analog Adventures" showcase

4. All Tomorrow’s Parties, Monticello, NY, Sept. 19-21

5. Expo for Independent Arts moves to Dolores Park and triples in size, Sept.

>>MORE YEAR IN MUSIC 2008

Moving forward

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Gathering my thoughts about how I listened to music in 2008, I think not only of Luc Sante’s piece on Manny Farber in this month’s Artforum, but also Ariana Reines’ Action, Yes piece explaining why she hates the "cleanness and elegance of tight and perfect writing." In different ways, both pieces deal with the importance of smallness, incompleteness, and, to steal the title of Reines’ piece, "sucking."

Because it’s easy not to suck, and this may or may not be the Internet’s fault. Music itself did not suck in 2008, despite the crumbling of an always-already imaginary consensus, and that’s maybe what’s so unsatisfying about trying to hang 12 months on something as well-executed yet under-inspiring as, say, Dear Science (Interscope). I’m not sure that people won’t start rallying around a single release or clutch of releases to narrate what made this year worth listening to deeply, but the albums that spring to mind now as forecasting what will sound good in the future are ones that pursued a small, near-inarticulate muse and ended up with something almost monomaniacal. It’s not a coincidence then that so many of these records were made during time apart from the artists’ main gig. The economy, man. We all gotta grind.

BRANDON BUSSOLINI’S TOP 10


1. Inca Ore, Birthday of Bless You (Not Not Fun)

Former PDXer and current Oaklander Eva Saelens is Inca Ore. Her most recent solo LP is an incantatory, patient ritual, a literally awesome tapestry of magnetic tape smears, disembodied wails, and dark, roiling resonance.

2. Arms, Kids Aflame (Melodic)

Harlem Shakes guitarist Todd Goldstein strikes out on his own here, and the results can be insanely satisfying: the indie triumvirate made up of "Whirring," the title track, and "Tiger Tamer" is a welcome reminder that pop music is supposed to make your heart race. The album’s second half is less distinctive, but it’s not like it hasn’t earned the right to be.

3. Bohren and der Club of Gore, Dolores (Ipecac)

There’s nothing organic about this full-length’s inert pace: slow enough to make Swans sound like a thrash band, its floating vibraphone riffs eerily familiar/defamiliarizing like only the Twin Peaks soundtrack before it, Dolores at times seems like a morbid joke. If the characters in Samuel Beckett’s trilogy listened to music, I have a hunch it would sound much like this.

4. Zomes, Zomes (Holy Mountain)

In addition to playing guitar in Lungfish, Asa Osborne constructs sturdy little habitations out of drum machine, guitar, and organ under the Zomes moniker. While it may sound too controlled at first, the recording’s insistence on small, unvarying patterns reveals itself as an autonomous language over time, its photocopy mystery emerging from the stuff of repetition and reproduction itself.

5. Ssion, Fool’s Gold (Sleazetone)

This disc’s two release dates might as well stand in for its own ability to navigate, rather than drown in, Internet-era self-reflexivity — it seems less like a one-off collection of jams than a collection of techniques for fucking with identity. Tracks like "Street Jizz" and "Clown" don’t have to decide between earnestly camp and campily earnest because they realize a third way.

6. School of Language, Sea from Shore (Thrill Jockey)

The punched-out vowel sounds that open this album recall, like Sébastien Tellier’s "Divine," old Art of Noise productions. Field Music’s David Brewis uses them as a bed not for uptight Euro-funk, but for generously rendered bedroom prog. At moments surprisingly muscular ("Disappointment ’99") but always rhythmically ambitious, Sea may seem like Manny Farber’s "white elephant art" from the outside, but is unmistakably "termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art" within.

7. Indian Jewelry, "Free Gold!" (We Are Free)

Thematically, the idea of establishing your own currency as a subversion of government and the totalizing power of capitalism both has a precedent, at least, in the B-52’s Whammy (Warner Bros., 1983). The record’s appeal has little to do with good timing, however: there are too many honest-to-goodness songs here for it to be "out" rock, too much Rev/Vega worship for it to be simply psychedelic. Gold’s appeal, instead, is its beefy epileptic punch. Listen close and feel the retina burn.

8. Portishead, Third (Mercury/Island)

It would be a lie if I said I didn’t care about this band before this album, but what’s remarkable here is that for all the group’s touted perfectionism, the two preceding LPs consistently opted for the warmth of loneliness, something the listener could, y’know, identify with. In contrast, Third is a hard, long, steely drag on modernism’s cold monumentality: "Machine Gun" is dubstep packed tight into a tarry espresso shot. Even the escape imagined in "The Rip" is hounded by a spidery Casio riff — the stuff of uneasy sleep.

9. RA.085, Tobias Freund Podcast (residentadvisor.net)

Stepping away from dance-oriented mixes for a minute, Resident Advisor commissions the best mix they’ve ever hosted. Freund’s work is hard to find, but this mix makes clear that he’s got a privileged understanding of both minimal techno and ambient’s DNA — and some killer crate-digging luck. I mean, come on, that Savant track? (Discogs it!)

10. Gang Gang Dance, Saint Dymphna (Social Registry)

The cliché about bands like GGD — nominally "noise," but whose music actually deals in another kind of abstraction, like Animal Collective or Excepter — is that they get more pop and more weird as they grow into their career. Saint Dymphna can be swallowed whole — parts of God’s Money (Social Registry, 2005) tended to stick in the throat — and the group makes no bones that this comes at the expense of extraneous oddness. But a certain strange eclecticism takes its stead. Occasionally Lizzie Bougastos’ voice sounds like a Wiccan falsetto incarnation of M.I.A. The band openly goes for dubstep in "Princes," and "House Jam" is the song folks will go apeshit over at their reunion concerts 20 years in the future.

>>MORE YEAR IN MUSIC 2008

Amber India

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Whatever you think a tony Indian restaurant might look like, you’re probably not picturing Amber India. On the other hand, if you’re wondering what a tony Indian restaurant smells like, you probably already know: it smells like the regular kind, which is to say, it smells of curry. Amber India smells bewitchingly of curry while looking like, in its elegant stackedness, Postrio.

You step inside from street level — or lane level, since the restaurant lies along a pedestrian plaza, Yerba Buena Lane — and find yourself at the host’s podium, on a small platform, while the restaurant opens out below you like an enchanted, hidden valley. Amber India doesn’t quite have Postrio’s Gone with the Wind staircase or exhibition kitchen, but it does have gorgeous flooring (large tiles of what looks like polished sandstone); impressive columns; a partly coffered ceiling; square leaves of gilded, pressed tin tethered to some of the light fixtures; and atmospheric golden lighting in general. Given the hardness of the flooring material and the scale of the restaurant (which can accommodate nearly 200 people), noise is notably under control.

Amber India opened in the city just this past June, in a neighborhood that has seen drastic changes in recent years. (The restaurant’s siblings, scattered across the Peninsula and South Bay, have been a presence in the Bay Area for nearly 15 years.) For one thing, there is now an actual neighborhood, with people living just steps away — mostly overhead, in the condominiums above the Four Seasons Hotel, and in the many other residential buildings that have sprung up in SoMa. The restaurant is also convenient to shoppers, museum-goers (the new Jewish Museum is just across the walkway, while the Yerba Buena Center and Museum of Modern Art are barely more than one block distant), and out-of-towners.

Why would they come to Amber India, apart from its convenience and style? One reason might be that the food emerging from the kitchen is gratifyingly spicy. We were particularly exhilarated by the dal Amber ($12.95), a shallow dish of black lentils swimming in a thick, rust-colored sauce the menu described as consisting of "cream, tomatoes, and spices." "Spices," in the world of Indian restaurants, is a come-hither word that tells you practically nothing; it doesn’t have to mean "spicy" — i.e. hot — but it does here. Dal is often soupy and can be indifferently prepared in other restaurants, but Amber India’s version had a velvet smoothness that left an erotic tingle on the lips.

If you want the standards, many of them are here. But the menu offers a wide array of imaginative cooking, including the use of unorthodox ingredients. Duck? How about duck tikka kebab ($10.95), chunks of boneless breast meat marinated in spicy yogurt, pan-seared on skewers, and served with an eerily addictive dill-caper sauce the color and consistency of homemade mayonnaise? The meat was beautifully tender and didn’t even need the sauce, but once the meat was gone, we kept dipping out spoons into it as if it were a separate dish.

Thanks to saganaki and The Simpsons, many of us are familiar with fried cheese, but grilled cheese — as in actual chunks of cheese, not packaged in a sandwich — is another matter. Amber offers it as paneer tikka lal mirch ($15.95), elongated cubes of mild white cheese, marinated and grilled. If you’ve eaten grilled tofu, you’ll have a good sense of the look and feel of this dish, although the cheese has more tang.

As a boy, I was unimpressed by the cans of spinach devoured by Popeye the Sailor Man: I liked Popeye, but spinach was repulsive, period, new paragraph. Then, in early adulthood, I discovered saag paneer, an exotic version of creamed spinach punctuated with chunks of white cheese. Every Indian restaurant I’ve been to — except, now, Amber — offers an interpretation of this standard. Amber’s spinach dish is called teen saag ($14.95); it consists of spinach (plus some dill and mustard greens) wilted with cumin and garlic and, for counterpoint, mushroom caps and spears of baby corn instead of cheese chunks.

I would count that dish as vegan, despite a small suspicion that cream was involved. Indian cooking is expansively vegan- and vegetarian-friendly, but if you are a sometime or intermittent vegetarian, or a pesco-vegetarian — or even just some kind of poser — Amber doesn’t disappoint. Our tongues were left pleasurably smoldering by the "thecha" shrimp salad ($9.95), a clutch of small shrimp marinated with garlic and chilis, sautéed, and nested in mixed baby field greens. The masterstroke: a vinaigrette scented with lemon verbena, an herb that, like lemongrass, is lemony in a way distinct from plain lemons.

It’s possible that people eat in Indian restaurants without having naan, but I have never seen such a display. Amber isn’t the place to experiment with the naanless life, either; its flatbreads are wonderful exercises in blistered tenderness, and the signature Amber rounds ($3.95) come with a variety of toppings, including a fragrant and nippy blend of chili and thyme.

On the other hand … $3.95 for a disk of bread sprinkled with a few herbs isn’t exactly the steal of the century. Amber’s prices are, I would guess, about 50 percent higher than the Indian-restaurant average in the farther reaches of the city. So you pay a city-center premium that reflects convenience and the affluence of the surroundings. But you won’t find better Indian food, and in that sense the premium, although steep as a percentage, is modest as a fact.

AMBER

Dinner: Sun.–Thurs., 5–10 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 5–10:30 p.m.

Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.; Sat.–Sun., noon–3 p.m.

25 Yerba Buena Lane, SF

(415) 777-0500

www.amber-india.com

Full bar

AE/DC/DISC/MC/V

Not noisy

Wheelchair accessible

“Dream On!”

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PREVIEW ‘Tis the season for Bay Area art to slow to a near standstill. Many galleries are closed through 2008. Those still open tend to favor group shows that double as holiday sales — a tough proposition this year. Mission 17 is bucking the trend with "Dream On!," a juried exhibition put together by director-curator Clark Buckner and three others. The show’s dream theme is a mighty wide one. It allows for photographic work by Jessica Rosen (showcased in the Guardian‘s annual August photo issue) and Jason Hanasik, whose verdant Steven in a bed of flowers displays a light touch while grazing up against potentially unsubtle topics such as homoeroticism, militarism, and Andrew Wyeth–like Americana combinations of human and landscape portraiture. (Hanasik is fond of depicting figures in repose.) Mission 17 sneaks some playful and thoughtful art into the city — Ryan Alexiev’s summer solo effort, "The Land of a Million Cereals," was one of 2008’s most enjoyable shows. This group collection, 20 artists strong, holds promise.

DREAM ON! Through Jan. 31, 2009. Wed.–Sat., 1–6 p.m., or by appointment. Mission 17, 2111 Mission, SF. (415) 861-3144, www.mission17.org>.

Mwa ha ha!: Chip Kidd on Batman’s adventures in Japan

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By Louis Peitzman

There’s a good chance you own a piece of Chip Kidd’s artwork, whether or not you’re aware of it. The New York-based graphic designer is a prolific producer of book cover art, drafting an average of 75 jacket designs a year. He’s also a huge comic book fan, and has written and edited works including 2004’s The Golden Age of DC Comics and this year’s Watching the Watchmen. His latest book is Bat-Manga!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan (Pantheon, 384 pages, $29.95 paperback and $60 hardcover), which collects a series of previously unseen manga starring the caped crusader. In a phone interview, I spoke to Kidd about Batman’s culture shock, the bitchin’ Batmobile, and how to pronounce “manga” without sounding ignorant.

batmanga2.jpg

SFBG: The first question should be an easy one. Is it “mayn-gah” or “mahn-ga”?
Chip Kidd: [laughs] It’s “mahn-ga.” That’s the Japanese pronunciation.

SFBG: All right, I’ll do my best to say it that way from now on. So rather than being just Batman or just manga, how does Bat-Manga! represent a fusion of styles?
CK: The artist Jiro Kuwata was very much drawing on what was going on in the American comics, but taking that as a visual cue, and then doing his own riff on it.

SFBG: In the interview with Kuwata included in the book, he talks about trying to make Batman more mature for Japanese audiences. Do you think he succeeded in doing that?
CK: That interview was translated. I don’t know if I’d call it “maturity.” It’s just a different kind of sensibility. I think maybe what he means [is] these stories have a sort of whimsical tone, but then when you look at what’s really going on, the villains are really trying to kill Batman and Robin. It’s not like a game. It’s fun, but there’s this actual sense of menace that the Batman comics at the time, in the U.S., did not have.

Shopping: Where to get the goods tonight

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By Chloe Schildhause

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Bubble baubles from CC Rider

Everyone should be extremely stressed at the moment. You only have 14 more shopping days until Christmas, a mere 10 until Chanukah, and 20 more until my birthday. You’re running out of time! San Francisco merchants and local designers understand this and are here to help you.

TONIGHT: The Divisadero Art Walk starts at 6:00 and technically goes until 9:00, with select businesses open a bit on the later side. Walk between Geary and Haight and check out stores for the thrift lover in your life. CC Rider features vintage goods as well as local designers. I went there the other day and picked up some used books- Stardust: The David Bowie Story as a gift to myself, and The Lani People’s The Daring Science-Fiction Novel of a Race of Beautiful Females That Were Called Non-Human for my science fiction-loving sister (good thing she doesn’t read my blogs.)

Then there’s Still Life, a fabulous treasure chest of a store. The Divisadero boutique, which opened within the year, is a place where one can ogle over the vintage threads and hand made jewelry made from various local designers. I ended up buying a high-waisted brown leather skirt on my last visit, and a gorgeous rose ring for my friend Rosie, but it’s the badass switchblade gun necklace that’s on my wish list.

Demon Days without end

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Like science fiction, techno can elicit automatic cringes when dropped as a descriptor in mixed company. Haters give explanations that aren’t really explanations — much like vocabulary that doesn’t add up to an argument: it’s repetitive, boring, either icy and alienating or overblown and dramatic, frequently both at once. It’s a weird scene. They seem to use drugs in a way that’s both corny-sensual and ego-destroying. Ironically — though, in our irony-saturated discourse, the word may be redundant — with the arrival of digital ubiquity, techno is remarkable not for its insistence on a placeless, distanceless future, but on space, duration, history, and a certain quality of experience and memory that seems purged from the hyper-compressed torrent of pre-nostalgized bloghouse jams.

You can’t say Carl Craig’s name without the word "techno" slipping out of your mouth. As part of Detroit’s second wave of techno producers, he refined and extended the future-shock innovation of Juan Atkins’ and Richard Davis’ work as Cybotron under a number of monikers. Now an expat living in Berlin, Craig most recently released — under his own name and excluding this year’s remix compilation, Sessions (Studio !K7) — 1997’s More Songs About Food and Revolutionary Art on his own Planet E label. Demon Days, a roving club night that Craig has been hosting since 2005 with New York’s DJ Gamall — better known as the guy who runs PR agency Backspin and a former member of Genesis P-Orridge’s postindustrial pranksters Psychic TV — offers a partial explanation of what else he’s been up to in the interim.

Even if Craig had remained silent after the release of More Songs instead of cranking out remixes and collaborations, his reputation would be secure: neither dance music nor trad techno, its tracks build and decay with patience and attention to nuance that’s still unlike anything this side of Berlin’s Basic Channel. And like that group’s work, More Songs‘ futurism hasn’t curdled into camp, and its moods are still penetrable, if odd at first. Despite the abundance of paramilitary imagery in 1990s techno — a tradition that traces back to Throbbing Gristle’s marriage of brutality and abject satire, an early influence on both Craig and Gamall — the album’s cover art literally explicates Craig’s vision of revolution as a basically a mental one. It’s unmistakably a home-listening record, much like this year’s Deutsche Grammophon-approved Recomposed, which appropriately finds Craig collaborating with Basic Channel’s Moritz Von Oswald, reworking orchestral pieces by Ravel and Mussorgsky into tentative, if fleetingly brilliant, new configurations that exist somewhere between minimal techno and the classical minimalism of Steve Reich, Terry Riley, et al.

Little if any of this material is likely to make it into Craig’s or Gamall’s set, which will probably highlight electro-historical bangers, their own remixes, and forthcoming releases from Planet E. But considering the general availability of the means of electronic music production — your cracked Ableton Live setup or the Roland TR-303 bass synth you downloaded to your iPhone — the fact that these guys know how pacing, thoughtfulness, and lineage inform, rather than detract, from body-rocking, their sets should act as a reminder. That is to say, you can come to engage with the tradition within techno that remains autonomous from the auto-nostalgic, meta-authentic economy of bloghouse/indie — or you can come to just dance.

This is electro music without hipster runoff’s signature, meaning-void stamp, "///miss u//." The omissions in their sets, not to mention an utter lack of MP3s, should be enough to make you think twice before unloading another mash-up on the world or listening to Justice’s wack Fabric mix. There is another world, people, and while it doesn’t escape being flawed, stupid, and fatally self-conscious like the indie-bred one that seems to control the Internet, you can at least pour your enthusiasms into this one without worrying about backlash. (Brandon Bussolini)

DEMON DAYS

With Carl Craig, Space Time Continuum, and Gamall

Thurs/11, 10 p.m., $14 advance

Mezzanine

444 Jessie, SF

(415) 625-8880

www.mezzaninesf.com

Souther-fried nocturne

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A drunkard’s lament. A bluesman’s wail. The mischievous grin of children. A carnival geek’s chicken act. Seething with images of the mundane and transmundane, photographer William Eggleston’s lost film Stranded in Canton is an extraordinary exegesis on the ordinary. After 35 years on the museum and midnight movie circuits, Stranded has finally been given a proper DVD release by art publisher Twin Palms. This version, distilled to a reasonable 76 minutes, originates from more than 30 hours of film shot by Eggleston between 1973 and 1974 on a hand-held Sony Porta-pak as he traveled within the Southern golden triangle of Memphis, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Delta.

In his quest to turn the home movie into an art form, Eggleston inventoried the people and places (both beautiful and ugly) that surrounded him. While the placid daylight moments are glorious, it is the sinister images that have guaranteed Stranded its nefarious legend. Armed with a newly developed infrared tube, the videographer was able to submerge into the half-lit netherworlds of juke joints, road houses, and pool halls — which grew like polyps on the plains of Dixie — and record impromptu epic flagellations of the poets and paupers therein.

Watching Stranded in Canton, it becomes apparent there is a common thread binding it to its predecessors: Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey’s 1966 Chelsea Girls, and Joseph Cornell’s 1936 Rose Hobart. Whether in the speed-addled monologues of a New York "superstar" or the re-splicing of B-movie exotica, each shares with Stranded an emphasis on a vernacular of the ordinary. Under the focus of the "democratic camera," the colloquial — prattle, refuse, apocrypha — is recontextualized and transformed as fantasy. Critic Richard Woodward characterizes Eggleston’s vision as "a belief that by looking patiently at what others ignore or look away from, interesting things can be seen." Far from boring, everydayness in this sense gains the arch importance of situationism. Or as Henri Lefebvre defined it, "It is everyday life which measures and embodies the change which takes place ‘somewhere else,’ in the ‘higher realism.’"

Might we venture to say, then, that Stranded in Canton is the home-movie equivalent of Gone with the Wind? Probably not. But it is remarkable nonetheless.

www.twinpalms.com

Extra! Extra! Heterosexuality in peril!

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Dear Readers:

I’m kind of pretty

and pretty damned smart

I like romantic things like music and art

and as you know I have a gigantic heart

so why … don’t I have a boyfriend?

— Kate Monster, "Sucks to be me" from Avenue Q

Sucks to be Kate Monster, and it sucks just as much to be my many friends of similar description — not monsters but smart, pretty, funny, adventurous, and moderately level-headed young women of great heart, who are caught in an endless cycle of dating to no (desirable) purpose and no end in sight, at least out here on the coasts. One friend actually moved to the Midwest to get away from the evil scene and was promptly rewarded with an actual boyfriend, the type who proudly introduces you as his girlfriend and can discuss a future together without smirking. I’ve developed a kind of semi-vicarious hate-on for the coastal guys — what gives them the right to treat my friends like instantly replaceable consumer objects of dubious value? — so I’ve been reading with interest some of the recent glut of articles and books on the state of young manhood, First World Problem version.

Most of these come down to "men are just big boys/no they aren’t," the argument currently raging, or at least smoldering, pretty much anywhere you find people discussing the current social climate and where we seem to be heading, love-and-marriagewise.

On the "no wonder you can’t find a boyfriend" side, you find innumerable lifestyle articles, most notably and recently Gary Cross’s Men To Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity, in which the historian blames the immaturity he sees in modern Western males on three decade’s worth of cultural shift, starting with a rejection of the old, unquestionably masculine and often admirable but also frequently rigid and authoritarian paternalism of the "Greatest Generation," which left men wandering, lost and fatherless, for lack of a better role-model to replace the castoff, too-dadly Dad. This is nothing startling — we’ve heard it before — but he does present a decent argument and does so without too much blame, some hope for the future of heterosexuality, and none of the (admittedly rather entertaining) snottiness of our next example, the recent articles by Kay S. Hymowitz in City Journal.

City Journal is the organ of conservative think tank the Manhattan Institute, but so what? It has lively cultural commentary and even if you don’t want to be a conservative yourself, it isn’t (I think) contagious, so why shouldn’t readers of leftish news weeklies read out of their comfort zones occasionally? And its authors, apparently, aren’t afraid to say they were wrong, which is always cheering. The first of the two articles, "Child-man in the Promised Land" was another of the "men suck" pieces. The man-child (whom the writer contrasts with the man, who has or wants a wife and kids and actually seeks out responsibilities and then discharges them rather than avoiding ever acquiring any) has tastes both formed and reflected by Maxim and [adult swim]. He likes video games and junk food and sex but not women, really, and he doesn’t call when he says he will because he never intended to — why should he when there’s always another girl who, not having met him yet, expects even less from him than you do?

That was the first article. The current piece has Hymowitz exploring the (really rather startling) not-so-underground Man Web and finding that a lot of these guys are treating women like trash because the women (they feel) are trashing them right back. Nobody’s acting very mature here, so she could just as well have titled her piece (actually called "Love in the Time of Darwinism") "She Started It!"

Women, say the young men, want it all and switch the rules on you without warning. They want equality except when they don’t, and then you’re in trouble for not bringing roses. Plus, they’re attracted to jerks, they sneer at nice guys, and then they blame you for acting like a prick.

This state of affairs, the shifting rules and roles, may have brought us to this point, writes Hymowitz (and others), where the gulf between male and female mores and modes of expression is wider than it has been since before World War I, and a certain amount of aggression, contempt, and rude gamesmanship (see both The Rules and Rules of the Game ) is both expected and to some extent accepted. I leave it to Hymowitz to troll the gamier recesses of the Web for sites like AlphaSeduction and Eternal Bachelor ("Give modern women the husband they deserve. None."), but you shouldn’t be too surprised to hear that this stuff is out there.

Are these dispatches from the new war correspondents accurate? Somewhat. As much as can be expected from lifestyle journalism, anyway, which by definition requires a phenomenon, the more disturbing the better (would you read weekly articles in The New York Times titled "All Well in Pleasantville?"). Is this state of affairs universal? Certainly not. Is it inevitable? I think not. What’s that everyone’s been saying about hope and change?

Love,

Andrea

Got a salacious subject you want Andrea to discuss? Ask her a question!

Superblastered

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› superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO Blue! Red! Yellow! Green! Indigo Girls! (Ew.) This column is on a serious ’90s flashback trip lately — as is the city’s nightlife: witness delightfully grungeful monthly Debaser’s climb to the top of the club charts (www.myspace.com/debaser90s) — dipping its toes into the perilous VH-1 waves of Clintonia. But hardly that icky! My last installment caught up with primal ravers Tribal Funk, and this time around I’m jumping with joy in my silk-tasseled plaid bolero jacket for the 13th anniversary celebration of protean party promoters Blasthaus at Mighty, with techno heartthrob headliners Matthew Dear and Ryan Elliot, a supporting cast of stellar local talent including my DJ crush of the mo’ Nikola Baytala (call me!) a bouncy castle, a sushi bar, and a foot-washer.

Yep, foot-washer.

"His name’s Shrine, and he likes to wash feet. So why not?" breathy Blasthaus Supreme Commander — actual title — Monika Bernstein told me over the phone. That’s a little burner for Blasthaus, whose parties tend to focus more on a dedicated dance vibes than sideshow shenanigans, but no one said they ain’t got dirty sole.

When I think of Blasthaus, I feel the swirly suck of 1998 and its raucous PoP all-nighter at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, inaugurating the neon-sprawling Keith Haring retrospective there. I popped three shitty e’s too many and somehow got locked upstairs in the darkened galleries while thousands raged in the atrium below. I don’t remember much beyond that, but Keith says "hi." Also the Watchmen are real.

Blasthaus is anything but stuck in the era of dial-up modems, though, staying true to founder William Linn’s forward-thinking production intent when he named the nascent collective after Weimar-era German fine-art factory Bauhaus, with a hands-in-the-air wink. The company now employs 30 staffers — "We’re like a buzzing virtual hive of little party elves," Bernstein said, laughing — and not a week’s gone by this past year without a Blasthaus shindig bringing in big underground and not-so-underground names. Glitch Mob, Modeselektor, Ellen Allien, Sascha Funke, and Richie Hawtin have all brought sparkly star-fire to its gigs, as well as longtime party partners — break out the Internet boom bubbly — Thievery Corporation, who’ll be headlining the Haus’ New Year’s Eve blast at the Concourse.

"We bring in who we listen to," Bernstein said, "so we’re just as excited about our parties as the people attending them. And a big part of our aesthetic is the art aspect" — Blasthaus has run several galleries, from Joypad to Rx to BoCA, and there’s something arty on the horizon for 2k9 — "so we think of our parties as forms of expression, not just bottom lines. Otherwise, why bother?" They could just bring in DJ Tiësto and retire.

BLASTHAUS 13TH ANNIVERSARY BLOWOUT

Fri/12, 9 p.m., $15 advance

Mighty

119 Utah, SF

(415) 762-0151

www.partyeffects.biz

************

CLASH AND CARRY ON

Holy crap, dubstep’s still happening. In fact, it’s getting bigger, like a blimp on laughing gas, but with polka-dotted clown feet. Which is surely how anyone who’s heard Coki’s 2007 low-frequency smash "Spongebob" has felt, me included. Coki and Mala, a.k.a. Digital Mystikz, will be melting the woofers at Dubclash Volume II, the excellent all-star dubstep clusterfuck (in a very good way) with "US Ambassador of Dubstep" Joe Nice, Sgt. Pokes, and other up-to-the-nanosecond bass purveyors. This is a heart-pounding chance to get a West Coast taste of Brixton, UK’s much-buzzed positivity-centric DMZ party by way of our very own Surefire dubstep crew. Volume II at Mezzanine is an upgrade on this year’s capacity Dubclash parties at Jelly’s, with much more bounce to the ounce.

Sat/13, 9 p.m., $15–$25. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. (415) 625-8880, www.mezzaninesf.com, www.sfdubstep.com

***********

POKE ‘EM IF YOU GOT ‘EM

I write so much about gay stuff that you’d think my keyboard’s made of fuschia Spandex, and yet the big queer story of 2008 was all the vibrant lesbian nightlife. In particular, the Diamond Daggers, an all-queer-women troupe of vaudevillians, has been putting on spectacularly entertaining offbeat affairs. Grab your golden lasso and get ho-ho happy at their Holiday Roundup, which invites all "Calamity Janes, ranch hands, bronco busters, and rodeo queens" to a Wild West-themed hoedown, with DJ Fairy Butch, live ruckus from the Whoreshoes, and more kooky cowpoke drag and cabaret performers than you can spur on without messing your spangles.

Sat/20, 9 p.m., $12–$20 sliding scale. Fat City, 314 11th St., SF. (415) 525-4676, www.diamonddaggers.com

Gift List #4: Where to shop for the holidays

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To help with the holiday hullaballoo, the SFBG staff is revealing — at last! — its secret shopping secrets, to perhaps give you some gift inspiration. In this installment: Staff Writer Amanda Witherell‘s little giving pleasures. Previously, Kimberly Chun, Dulcinea Gonzalez and Marke B. shared their faves.

Check out more suggestions in our ginormous 2008 Holiday Guide — and enter our contest to win $500 in gift certificates if you spend $100 locally. Wowza.

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Treats from Little Otsu

Little Otsu
It’s a new year. Everyone needs a new calendar. Little Otsu carries original calendars, datebooks, and cards designed by artists who deserve your money more than Hallmark. Blessedly free of puppies, kittens, and pastoral scenes.
849 Valencia, SF. (415) 255-7900, www.littleotsu.com

Arch
My little art nerd sister always needs something for her endless art school career. Arch, which services the nearby California College of Art, has the typical pen and paper supplies, notebooks and art books, and lots of other trinkets like bags, jewelry — plus toyish things that can lessen the blow of giving the kid something she needs for school.
99 Missouri, (415) 433-2724, www.archsupplies.com

Stumasa
For people who are geeking out on domesticity and having babies and all that, Stumasa mostly carries a lot of unfinished furniture and cool paints, but also some random home accessories that seem to suggest of the owners’ tastes: we saw this, we liked it, we’re gonna sell it in our store. Pinhole camera kits, old-school children’s toys, and cool natural fiber rugs, baskets, and linens.
515 Frederick, SF. (415) 759-1234, www.stumasa.com

Gift List #3: Where to shop for the holidays

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To help with the holiday hullaballoo, the SFBG staff is revealing — at last! — its secret shopping secrets, to perhaps give you some gift inspiration. In this installment: Senior Arts and Entertainment Editor Kimberly Chun‘s adorable-minded giving pleasures. Previously, Dulcinea Gonzalez and Marke B. shared their faves.

Check out more suggestions in our ginormous 2008 Holiday Guide — and enter our contest to win $500 in gift certificates if you spend $100 locally. Wowza.

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Too-cute Mummy Boy figurine from Super7

Rare Device
Wow: adorable, beautifully designed gifties for your design-junkie chums — books, tchotchkes, jewelry, stationary — and is there a nicer, quirkier selection of covetable handbags around? I also dig the precious metal objets a la the human tooth.
1845 Market, SF. (415) 863-3969, www.raredevice.net

Park Life
Can’t resist the inhouse T-shirt designs, awesome ’80s-old-school watches, art and design tomes, and of course the always-intriguing art shows in back.
220 Clement, SF. (415) 386-7275, www.parklifestore.com

Curiosity Shoppe
Adore the faux moustachio – and the cute necklaces and DIY kits – all so winsomely displayed.
855 Valencia, SF. (415) 671-6384, www.curiosityshoppeonline.com

Hear ye: Global Headphone Fest happens Saturday

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A very-last-minute dispatch from the deletist, “deleting elitists since 2003”:

San Francisco’s Fourth Annual Global Headphone Festival
Sat/6, 4 p.m.- 4 a.m., free and all ages and BYOH (bring your own headphones) and 1/4-inch headphone adapters will be available for a small returnable deposit
5lowershop
992 Peralta, SF
(415) 762-3616
More info and live stream at www.deletist.info/plug4.html

Performances by
MICHAEL MANTRA [dronecore]
STRANGELET [noise/improv/buffonery]
MOSB [square recovery]
SONDERKOMMANDO [glitchy industrial noise]
ROGER MILLS [trumpet drones : streaming from AUSTRALIA]
FILTHMILK [cavernous electronics]
SABRETEETH [tesla death ray]
CORVETTE SUMMER [antidoom]
MNEMOTH [deconstructivism]
SKULLCASTER [blackened folk]
MR. CLUCK [circuit bent toys]
SHARKIFACE [hex breaker]
CATSYNTH [ambient]
RUIDOBELLO [processed field recordings]
VSLS [antisonique]
CONFIGURATION AND FUNDAMENTAL GROWTH [experimental]
OZMADAWN [noise and drones]
DANCIN BABY [soundtrack from hell]
MIXILE [ambient/field recordings : streaming from IRELAND]
MOISTURE [electronics]
DESPICABLE ALIEN [electroacoustic duo]
DUBTAIL [electronics]
WELTSCHMERZ [cellos of doom]
JOHN M. BENNETT [sound poetry : streaming from FRANCE]
FOREST ZOMBIE [textured computer noise]
PEREID [electro carnage]
NICOLAS CARRAS [sound art/concret music : streaming from FRANCE]
DELETIST [cover songs gone wrong]
CEREBRAL ROIL [industrial grindcore]
DARPH/NADER [villainy]
A FASHIONABLE DISEASE [noise ass jazz glitch fuck metal]
MOISTURE FARMER [sitar fx]
HORAFLORA [psychoacoustics]
DJ CRACKHOUSE [noisehop]
HEARTWORM [mechanically separated]

Gift List #2: Where to shop for the holidays

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To help with the holiday hullaballoo, the SFBG staff is revealing — at last! — its secret shopping secrets, to perhaps give you some gift inspiration. In this installment: Entertainment and Sponsorship Manager Dulcinea Gonzalez‘s retro-flavored giving pleasures. Previously, Marke B. shared his faves.

Check out more suggestions in our ginormous 2008 Holiday Guide — and enter our contest to win $500 in gift certificates if you spend $100 locally. Wowza.

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Suds for Santa: City Beer Store

The Other Shop
This is a great go-to store for quirky, vintage, fun stuff whether you are looking for a kitschy painting, funky ’60s vase, mid-century lamp or used vinyl.
327 Divisadero, SF. (415) 621-5424

Mickey’s Monkey
Here’s a the perfect place to hunt down ’60s and ’70s style dressers, tables, and chairs for non-collector prices. Plus, they have fun little gifty odds and ends like deer antlers, owl art, and more all sure to impress your friends.
218 Pierce, SF. (415) 864-0693

Rooky’s Records
If your guy or gal is into old 45’s this place is the vinyl holy land! Tell the owner Dick what you’re into …. the Madison, the Monkey, the Twist — it’s all there. Ask Dick about his own CD compilations of the oldies too — they’re packaged super cute and make for great parent gifts.
448 Haight, SF. (415) 864-7526, www.rookyricardosrecords.com

‘Barf Manifesto’

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Maybe it’s the urge to purge months of presidential campaign propaganda or eight years of George W. Bush. Maybe it’s the holiday season. All I know is this: barf is in. The evidence is all around us. On TV, you’ll find Hurl, "an eating competition with an extreme sports chaser" that couples tunnel rides in steel balls with mac ‘n’ cheese gorge-fests in an attempt to make contestants vomit. On the magazine racks, no less a trend bible than Vice recently devoted an illustrated feature to a guy whose raison d’être is puking upon select stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Based on the photographic evidence, he chooses his targets well ("Wesley Snipes is my least favorite person on Earth. Have you heard about his ear hair?"). But I do have to quarrel with his belief that Elizabeth Taylor deserves a Technicolor yawn.

Without a doubt, the best addition to the thriving contemporary vomitorium is Dodie Bellamy’s Barf Manifesto (Ugly Ducking Presse, 32 pages, $7). The fact that Bellamy’s text is a sort of celebratory puke in response to Eileen Myles’ 2004 essay "Everyday Barf" only fortifies vomit’s role in contemporary consciousness. The publisher’s promo text for Barf Manifesto cheekily likens it to The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas as "an intimate account of a long, sometimes tortured but enduring friendship between two female writers." Taking that cue, I’ll risk sacrilege and say I prefer Bellamy’s book to Gertrude Stein’s.

It’s a mistake to assume, as I initially did, that Barf Manifesto might ideally be placed next to Valerie Solanas’ similarly slim yet convulsive 1968 SCUM Manifesto, which was recently republished by BüK America at the street tract value of $1.49. Not a rant so much as a pair of roiling bursts of text, Bellamy’s book has feminist intent, but ultimately it presents an artistic credo, in the manner of Andre Breton’s paeans to Surrealism. She sister-spews a trail of artistic connections that leads from Myles’ essay to the nauseating beauty and power of Op Art figurehead Bridget Riley’s imagery.

Bellamy weaves through the intestinal curves of a complex anecdotal maze — we accompany her and Myles through the violent smashing of a piñata, a vivid confrontation over a toilet, and a hilarious exchange about Lynndie England. Along the way, she works out the mother issues so often connected to stomach sickness. She declares that she’s out to "attack the essay" and (carrying on from her 2006 book Academonia) to "shit on academic pretension," but really, she pukes on the doctrinaire BS of insidious Professor X’s across the land. In the process, she transcends the occasionally overbearing libidinal influence of Kathy Acker on some of her other work. A bravura lindy hop through the possibilities of English, Barf Manifesto is too good for a porcelain god.

In the American tree

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REVIEW I’ll remain calm while reviewing Bernadette Mayer’s new collection of poems, Poetry State Forest (New Directions, 128 pages, $17.95). It’s sort of a B-sides-and-rarities collection. I first heard "Easy Puddings" through a recording of a reading-interview Mayer gave with Susan Howe on KPFA-FM in the 1970s. While not all of the poems are new, all of them might be new to you.

This dense forest is, first and foremost, public property. Although Mayer’s poetry looks and often is intimidating, it also offers warm welcome: it comes straight out of the ground ("mud’s an introduction to thinking," she writes), and its loaded with good humor ("mother give me five I know not what I do"). Add to this the fact that Mayer has always been fiercely and unapologetically political:

I only have faith in writers

One painted on a barn "FUCK BUSH!"

This gives a bad name to fucking

Like Catullus, whose work she’s translated, local news and the people and places of her life (in upstate New York) flash in and out of the poems, creating a choppy river of narrative. These flashes of local news suffuse their subjects with a mythical quality. They come with creation myths: "& when phil first met max, born in henniker, new hampshire, he was jumping on the top of our yellow couch, saying, ‘i’m high!’." Mayer’s neighbor Helen Green ("i buy brown / beige & white eggs / from the greens"), who grew up in the upstate New York town of Troy, becomes "Helen of Troy."

Poetry State Forest is packed with weird trees and you may need snowshoes. But the experimental nature of the writing is born of necessity, not art: it charts a mind too complex, too humanly thoughtful and restless to be encapsulated into neat syntax. Line by line, ideas bump into one another in explosions of beautifully torqued grammar: a series of sonnets gives way to a long section of notebook fragments, or a dialogue between Mayer and her house.

Over the course of her long and awesome career, Mayer’s reverently studied and mastered one poetic form after another (the sonnet, epigram, and sestina, among others), and then gleefully watched each implode. She’s really the direct heir to Gertrude Stein. And if William Burroughs was right that "intellectuals are deviants in the U.S.," Mayer is living proof by the sheer force of her intellect, and the capable way it undoes syntax, form, and orthodoxy at every turn.

The first poem in Poetry State Forest, "Chocolate Poetry Sonnet," ends with the couplet "poetry is as good as chocolate / chocolate’s as good as poetry." I want to know where Bernadette Mayer gets her chocolate.

For a new cinema

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Commenting on the relationship between his identity as a filmmaker and his identity as a novelist, the late Alain Robbe-Grillet told the New York Times, "We are friends, but never collaborators." Like many of Robbe-Grillet’s pronouncements concerning his own work, the statement is pithy and guarded, and cannot be taken entirely at face value.

Robbe-Grillet is primarily known as one of the chief proponents and practitioners of the nouveau roman ("new novel"), which sought to extricate literature from its formal, stylistic, and historical precedents. But he was also a prolific filmmaker, and film frequently creeps into the discussions in his essay collection, For a New Novel (1963), as both a frame of reference and as a kind of practical model. Viewers will get a chance to decide for themselves how in cahoots Robbe-Grillet the filmmaker was with Robbe-Grillet the novelist during "Enigmas and Eternity: The Films of Alain Robbe-Grillet," a series curated by Joel Shepard of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts which includes several films directed by Robbe-Grillet that have long been unavailable in the United States.

Ironically, Robbe-Grillet’s first foray into film was his much-lauded collaboration with director Alain Resnais, as the screenwriter for his landmark 1961 film Last Year at Marienbad (which is part of the series). Marienbad received plenty of acclaim upon its release, netting a Golden Lion in Venice and an Oscar nomination for Robbe-Grillet’s screenplay. It also generated nearly as much controversy. Claiming to have sat through the entire thing — let alone, that one "got it" — became a kind of shibboleth for the ’60s intelligentsia.

Two years later, Robbe-Grillet would step behind the camera to direct his first film, L’Immortale, in which Marienbad‘s influence is still fresh. Like Marienbad, Robbe-Grillet’s directorial debut is a gorgeous, obtuse math proof that doesn’t necessarily prove anything. Its characters are merely new variables being plugged into a familiar equation — a man ("N") tries to track down an enigmatic woman ("L") and convince her of their previous meeting against an exotic backdrop — that is designed to shuffle them through time and space. The palaces of Nymphenburg and Schleissheim have been swapped out for the souks and mosques of Istanbul. As the femme fatale, Françoise Brion in Nina Ricci replaces Delphine Seyrig in Chanel, doing her best catalog poses as she insists to her pursuer that the ancient capital around them is, "not a real city, but a musical set for a romantic comedy."

L’Immortale is in some ways Robbe-Grillet’s screen test. Cribbing a few moves from Resnais while trying out a few new tricks, Robbe-Grillet seems to be playing around with, as he describes in a 1956 essay in For A New Novel, the cinematic image’s ability to "suddenly (and unintentionally)" restore the reality of "gestures, objects, movements, and outlines." When watching any film, our field of vision is always bounded by the camera’s frame. But Robbe-Grillet exploits this technological feature, forcing us to focus on the objects and people on screen to the extent that what they signify becomes secondary to their presence.

This makes for lots of shots of empty chairs (Robbe-Grillet has a thing for empty chairs), frozen crowds out of Marienbad‘s manicured gardens, and several "impossible" continuous pans in which the same people keep remarkably reappear in front of the slowly sweeping camera. Despite however many times Brion asserts that "everything is fake," Istanbul is the most obstinately present thing about L’Immortale. The Turkish merchants, maids, souvenir hawkers, and child guides who appear on the sidelines are largely oblivious to the inchoate memories and stifled desires of the film’s European ciphers. In a possible proto-swipe at Orientalism, Robbe-Grillet seems to be saying that Istanbul itself — that survivor of multiple Crusades, invasions, and reconstructions — will continue to endure, outliving the Istanbul of European fantasy.

True to the spirit of Robbe-Grillet, I can only tentatively state to what extent L’Immortale is representative of the rest of his filmography (as of press time, only one other film, 1966’s surprisingly funny meta-noir Tran-Europe Express, was screened). No doubt, he’d be self-conscious about the air of canonicity necessarily implied by a retrospective. "The writer must proudly consent to bear his own date," he writes in one essay, "knowing that there are no masterpieces in eternity, but only works in history." Undoubtedly, there are times when Robbe-Grillet’s work shows its age — Marienbad in particular has become fodder for countless perfume commercials and parodies of pretentious art cinema. Robbe-Grillet also recognized that prescience could be a double-edged sword. As if writing a self-fulfilling prophecy, he observes,"[Novels] survive only to the degree that they have left the past behind them and heralded the future." This idea equally applies to his films.

ENIGMAS AND ETERNITY: THE FILMS OF ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET

Through Dec. 18

$6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

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