Art

Shelf help

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› lit@sfbg.com

WISH LIST My family of origin is so nuclear that on smoggy days a mushroom cloud can be seen above the suburb where my parents still reside. During the holidays we gather there to rehearse and stage the roles we will alternately perform and resist in the ensuing year. While Dad tracks holiday cards sent and received on an Excel spreadsheet, Mom dons a pair of felt antlers and holes up in the kitchen. As for me, I revert to fatigued, endless reading, as if by some cruel law of repetition I have returned to that sullen moment in junior high when my only friend suddenly became popular, leaving me with nobody but books as my companions. Without intervention, I might remain in this half-hypnotized state, rereading Flowers for Algernon until the world outside grows dim, like a dream I can barely remember. This year, however, I’m readying myself with an eclectic batch of new books, books that make me want to participate instead of turning into a listless blotch of angst. These titles provide critical frameworks for dissent, suggest avenues for engagement, and probe cultural blind spots — generating new aesthetic possibilities along the way.

I, for one, like to kick off the holiday season with a powerful dose of well-researched feminist analysis, supplied this year by Susan Faludi in The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America (Metropolitan Books, 368 pages, $26). It’s akin to taking vitamins to ward off the winter cold that’s going around the office. I read some Faludi, I ask my brother to help out in the kitchen. Faludi argues that a highly gendered mythology reasserted its virulent hold over the national psyche (as writ large by the national media) in the wake of Sept. 11. Drawing from an abundance of sources, she parses out the myth: strong male heroes rescue helpless girls, feminism is dismissed as a frivolous and dangerous mistake, and cowboys and manly men rise again to keep the home soil safe. In debunking this overblown narrative, Faludi demonstrates that it doesn’t actually help those it valorizes, nor does its rehearsal expedite an increase in national security or political accountability.

Investigating the symbolic construction of identity and myth from the angle of art, Tisa Bryant’s Unexplained Presence (Leon Works Press, 167 pages, $15.95 paper) takes up "black presences in European literature, visual art, and film." Fusing criticism, film theory, and fiction with a keenly poetic ear, Bryant reenters cultural artifacts to open up these symbolically loaded but structurally silenced or backgrounded characters and motifs. Her stories trace the ways in which black subjectivity is distributed or denied within pictures and plots, between viewers and artworks and artists, and in acts of conversation and debate, of queer identification or refusal to see. What is most remarkable is how Bryant transforms these elisions into acts of imagination, restoring or reconfiguring partially glimpsed subjects via fleet and surprising sentences that traverse the distance between representation and meaning.

Renovating symbolic systems can be hard work, and nothing restores a fatigued body and mind like making changes to the physical infrastructure — such as sawing through your drainpipes to divert "barely used" household water from sewers to gray-water systems for gardening and washing clothes. Sexily linking the macro to the micro, the locally grown junta known as the Greywater Guerrillas has expanded its how-to know-how into Dam Nation: Dispatches from the Water Underground (Soft Skull Press, 416 pages, $19.95 paper), a collection of essays that examine the global plight of water misuse and attendant broad-scale ecological impacts. I don’t think it undermines the gravitas of the issue to mention that portions of the book are a sheer pleasure to read, especially when editors Cleo Woelfle-Erskine, July Oskar Cole, and Laura Allen (illustrations were supplied by Annie Danger) detail their efforts to "disengage from the water grid" by taking plumbing into their own hands.

What James Kochalka takes into his hands in American Elf Book Two: The Collected Sketch Book Diaries of James Kochalka (Top Shelf Comics, 192 pages, $19.95) is his life, tidbits of which he transforms into daily diary comics. Visually and verbally, Kochalka risks a silly, reckless sweetness — a sampling of titles includes "Romance of Life" and "Everything was fine until the old wakey wake." The strips are also a little bit perverted and weirdly honest, as Kochalka’s elf-eared stand-in catalogs a receding hairline, farty dairy hangovers, and arguments with his beloved and salty-mouthed wife. As the pages and days pile up, the effect is infectious, such that, while under the diaries’ spell, I began to sense secret fissures of creative potential and magic in the mundane flow of everyday life.

Isa Chandra Moskowitz, Terry Hope Romero, and the army of flavor lovers they run with have changed the landscape of vegan cooking. In Veganomicon: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook (Marlowe and Co., 336 pages, $27.50), Moskowitz and Romero draw inspiration from a variety of international cuisines, without making any claims to authenticity. The resulting recipes (mole, saag, and lasagna, to name a few) are adventures in surprising flavor combinations. A helpful foreword details how to stock a vegan pantry, and tips offered alongside the easy-to-follow recipes instruct on where to find specialty items or how to organize your cooking tasks — advice that, as an unskilled, distractible cook, I found particularly useful. An appendix of menus ranges from rich party foods to low-fat and easy-to-prepare options.

Printed in large type, so it’s easy to read when splayed open next to a bicycle, the repair-manual portion of the illustrated Chainbreaker Bike Book: A Rough Guide to Bicycle Maintenance, by Shelley Lynn Jackson and Ethan Clark (Microcosm Publishing, 256 pages, $12), builds from the ground up. Starting with the ethics and rewards of skill sharing, it moves on to detail parts, tools, and instructions for system-by-system checkups and repairs. The book’s second half comprises reprinted issues of the Chainbreaker zine, originals of which were lost when zinester Jackson’s New Orleans home flooded after Katrina. The zines complement the how-to portions with a wider view of the bicycle’s cultural impact — e.g., the role of bikes in the women’s clothing revolution, the democratizing potential of this low-cost form of transportation. Note: the book hits shelves in February, but aspiring bike enthusiasts can order it now at www.microcosmpublishing.com.

And to come full circle … Sherman Alexie’s first young adult (and graphic) novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Little, Brown Young Readers, 240 pages, $16.99), reminds me that a return to YA reading can be the opposite of mind-numbing — when undertaken with a book that’s emotionally spring-loaded, linguistically gymnastic, and devastatingly funny in turns. Drawing from his experiences growing up, Alexie tells the story of Junior (a.k.a. Arnold True-Spirit Jr.), a comic-drawing Indian kid who leaves his reservation to attend an all-white high school. Between racism at school and conflict with friends on the reservation, Alexie nails the ups and downs of a young artist learning to navigate by his own radar, amid competing claims from family and a sometimes encouraging but often deviously indifferent world. Ellen Forney’s inspired illustrations channel Junior’s manic, tell-it-like-it-is sensibility and provide a visual anchor for Alexie’s loquacious narrator.

Ask Dr. Rock

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Question: What’s the biggest annoyance at rock shows?

Guardian calendar editor Duncan Scott Davidson answers: Loudmouths. Hecklers are usually silenced quickly enough, but it’s the person who thinks his or her banal conversation is more important than the band that drives me apeshit. A few months ago at 12 Galaxies, some guy behind me talked through 16 Horsepower’s set. I guess he thought he’d score underground cultural cred by asking his date to see a random band she’d never heard of. He got a little lubricated and soliloquized at a volume greater than that of the group, while positioned only a few feet from the stage. Simple etiquette, folks: would you go to a movie and shout through the whole thing? And that film may screen five times a day at five different theaters, whereas an out-of-town band may not play here for another year, if ever.

I bonded with the guy beside me over lover boy’s boorishness. "Let’s rush him," he said. Instead, I turned to the happy couple and said, "Excuse me, I don’t mean to be rude, but would it be OK if I asked you two to talk by the bar? I’m having a hard time hearing the band." At which point the dude started to tell me it wasn’t OK and I was being rude. Fortunately, the loudmouth’s date, being more attuned to social mores and imminent bodily harm, spoke up, saying it was a perfectly acceptable request.

Remember, at a show it’s never a bad idea to assume that people have come to see — and hear — the band. This type of cultural absolutism makes snooty Yale professors weep, but I say rock ‘n’ roll is high art, and people should be allowed to appreciate it without interference. For my money, a quiet café or restaurant is a better place for a date conversation. Maybe a bar or a dance club, if you enjoy shouting at your love interest.

Are you a musical artist with pressing career questions? Or a puzzled fan looking for answers to pop culture’s little unmentionables? E-mail askdrrock@sfbg.com.

Graf legend

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On Aug. 15, on what would have been the late Mike "DREAM" Francisco’s 38th birthday, his old-school graffiti pal SPIE ONE honored his slain partner in the best way he knew how: by creating new street art, on 24th Street between Capp and Lilac in the Mission.

But it’s not just on anniversaries when SPIE thinks about DREAM, the widely respected Bay Area graffiti artist who was gunned down in the East Bay in 2000. "I think about DREAM every day. A lot of us do. It keeps me going sometimes. He was a positive spirit," SPIE said in mid-November. "And it’s pretty amazing how DREAM’s legacy just keeps growing. He has become this really important figure to a lot of youths out here who may never have even met him." That influence will inevitably grow with the publication of a comprehensive book on DREAM that SPIE and others are working on meticulously.

Like DREAM, SPIE is an integral figure in the history of Bay Area graffiti. Born and raised in San Francisco’s Excelsior–Outer Mission District, SPIE remembers the birth of graf in the city. "The graffiti really took off around ’84 in San Francisco," he recalled. That same year he started bombing, first as a solo artist and later with the crews KKW and ACT, which he joined while attending McAteer High School. "McAteer was very unique because a lot of different kids from different neighborhoods all seemed to gravitate there … from the avenues, Hunters Point," he said of the Diamond District school whose courtyard was used as a "writer’s bench." "Some kids would cut school from Lincoln or Washington and cut up there, meeting in the afternoon. We didn’t have a big fence around the school, so it was very loose to come on and off the campus." Others unexpectedly showed up too. "We knew a lot of folks that would find easy ways to escape Juvenile Hall across the street, and they’d be chilling too at the writer’s bench in their county orange, their sandals ready to run through Glen Park Canyon," SPIE said, laughing.

In 1987, when writers from all over the Bay Area converged on the Powell Street BART station for an informal graffiti meeting, SPIE first met Alameda artist DREAM, who’d already been tagging under various names for a few years. "In the book will be one of the first DREAM sketches that he ever did. It was on his court papers," SPIE said. "He just got caught when he was like 16 years old, and he was sitting in court and did a DREAM piece on the court paper!" In the two decades since that meeting, the laws against graffiti have gotten much tougher, and many youths have been tried as adults. "With just over $400 worth of damage, a kid could be arrested and prosecuted as a felon," SPIE said.

Consequently, for writers like SPIE, who requested anonymity for this story, the stakes are high when they do illegal street art. It’s a lot less stressful for him to do legit pieces like the recent city of San Francisco–sponsored mural on 24th Street between Capp and Lilac, which he did with Homies Organizing the Mission to Empower Youth. The bright, block-long collaborative painting — which includes art by Nancy Pili, Marina Prez-Wong, and Mike Trigger — is, like much of SPIE’s work, politically charged. "Overall, it is about solidarity between communities of color and oppressed people … and a commentary on fences and borders around the world, including the Mexican-American border," SPIE explained. "The fence that goes around the parking lot gave us the basis for this theme about fences, walls, and prisons…. It’s like the gating and jailing of a community."

It’s a timely work, appearing at a moment when San Francisco and its developers seem intent on erasing its underground-art past. "They buffed everything out at China Basin and a lot of other places in the city," SPIE said, concerned about the forces that are "pushing the public artists into the far reaches of the city."

For more information on SPIE, DREAM, and the forthcoming book, go to www.dreamtdk.com.

Up against the wall

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

There’s a new mural at 24th and Capp streets that does a stellar job of capturing the urban, cultural vibe of the Mission’s residents. No, not the skinny jeans–wearing, Burning Man bohemians who’ve colonized the area in recent years. I’m talking the baggy jeans–wearing Latino youths who are the inheritors of a proud local tradition of Chicano mural art. Craftily melding urban motifs, the mural celebrates their bicultural realities: lowriders cruise alongside hyphy "scrapers," pachucos and Mac Dre mingle, and graffiti lettering makes the same statement as silk-screened Brown Pride posters of the ’70s.

The work was created from July to September by members of Homies Organizing the Mission to Empower Youth, a neighborhood-based youth leadership nonprofit serving at-risk Latino teens and young adults. The primary goal of HOMEY is violence prevention. Through art, education, and skill-building activities, the organization offers alternatives to young people growing up in a rough environment where gangbanging, drug dealing, gun violence, and incarceration are the norm.

The mural is a shining example of the numerous creative projects initiated by HOMEY to bring together young folks who might otherwise have beef or get caught up in the neighborhood’s dangerous Sureño-Norteño turf rivalry. According to HOMEY project coordinator Nancy Hernandez, the mural bolstered the organization’s other violence-prevention efforts because "young people who didn’t know each other got to know each other. People in the community who didn’t know each other got to know each other. And people were educated on a lot of things to be proud of about their culture, their history, and their neighborhood." Although a core group of teen and adult artists executed the initial planning and design for the mural, in the end more than 200 community members contributed to the painting.

The title of the piece is Solidarity: Breaking Down Barriers. Taking unity as a starting point, the artists began by brainstorming about the influences that divide people, communities, and cultures: everything from national boundaries to gang-affiliated colors. No national flags appear in the 100-foot-long painting. The United States–Mexico border wall figures prominently, snaking through the background of the mural’s central panels, but it’s juxtaposed with portrayals of intra- and interethnic alliance in the foreground. Mexican Revolucionarios, members of the United Farm Workers, and Brown Berets, all painted in sepia tones, float beneficently behind modern-day Raza activists wearing white tees and white bandanas — a purposefully neutral color worn nationwide by Latino youths during the immigrant rights rallies of May 1. In the Bay Area, many of those activists were HOMEY members.

As celebratory as the painting is, one controversial panel on its far right-hand side threatened to overshadow the entire project. It’s a portrayal of Palestinians garbed in traditional Arab kaffiyeh head scarves breaking through a concrete wall — ostensibly the Israeli West Bank security barrier. The image fits into a third-world rights vignette expressing solidarity with indigenous groups and colonized peoples.

Some members of San Francisco’s Jewish community took issue with the image, which originally included a hole in the wall in the shape of the state of Israel. Two Jewish advocacy groups, the Jewish Community Relations Council and the Anti-Defamation League, brought these concerns to the San Francisco Arts Commission, the board charged with approving all public art. "We thought this one panel was disjointed from the rest of the mural," JCRC associate director Abby Michelson Porth recalls telling HOMEY and the Arts Commission at a public forum this August. "It didn’t demonstrate peaceful coexistence, which is, frankly, contrary to the theme of the work."

Rather than battle it out and fling loaded accusations of censorship and anti-Zionism at each other — which would indeed completely contradict the intent of the community-building project — the two factions engaged in a civil dialogue that turned out to be a learning experience for all. HOMEY agreed to make some changes to the imagery: the kaffiyeh shrouding one figure’s face, which the JCRC and the ADL claimed connoted terrorism, is now pulled back and worn as a simple Muslim head scarf; the wall opening now breaks into an expansive blue sky; and the branches of an olive tree now weave around the wall — a symbol of peace and a near-literal olive branch. Still, according to Porth, "It’s not the imagery that we would choose, but we recognize the muralists made significant changes and that they came far from the original design."

Hernandez is quick to point out that many Jewish San Franciscans supported the original design and that several of the artists are in fact Jewish. But she acknowledges that "when we’re painting somebody else’s culture, we have to be humble. We have to say, ‘You know what? We don’t know everything about everybody, but we do know about ourselves, and we’re trying to draw parallels between ourselves and other peoples.’<0x2009>"

To many, it may come as a surprise that the mural’s Palestinian imagery was so controversial. After all, claiming solidarity with Palestine is a common stance among San Francisco’s radical left. Nonetheless, by giving their input, the mural’s detractors wound up being collaborators on a project authored by, as it turned out, truly disparate voices in the community.

www.homeysf.org

Defying the injunction

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› news@sfbg.com

While City Attorney Dennis Herrera can claim victory in winning court approval for his controversial gang injunctions, at least one targeted group is openly defying the terms of the preliminary order, trying to make a statement that they should be given a chance to heal the wounds they helped create.

Alleged members of the Eddy Rock gang in the Western Addition, from the Yerba Buena Plaza East housing complex at Eddy and Buchanan streets, have continued to hold small film festivals and other gatherings in an attempt to show the public that despite being labeled violent criminals, they are making a positive contribution to the community.

As the San Francisco Police Department and City Attorney’s Office say they are preparing to enforce the injunction, many of the named parties in the Western Addition say they will continue to congregate within the four-block "safety zone," an area where they are forbidden to loiter, be in the company of other gang members, or engage in other banned activities. In defying the injunction, they risk being jailed for up to five days.

"They’re trying to force us out of our community, but we’re [going to] fight it," Maurice Carter, a 32-year-old alleged gang member, told the Guardian.

The decision by targeted members to forge ahead with their community-building efforts is an attempt to sway city officials into easing the restrictions of the injunction, a prospect that seems unlikely at this stage.

"We’ve got the most influence of anybody," said Paris Moffet, whom the city attorney has identified as the leader of Eddy Rock, a label the 27-year-old disclaims. "But they don’t think so. Instead of putting us down, if they want to stop the violence, why aren’t they helping us?"

Superior Court Judge Peter Busch granted three injunctions sought by Herrera on Oct. 18 against two other gangs in the Western Addition and the Norteños in the Mission. The date for enforcing the injunction remains tentative, and city attorney spokesperson Matt Dorsey said, "Out of an abundance of caution, we will not begin to enforce the injunction against an enjoined gang member until after the proof of service for that individual has been filed with the court."

The city attorney is also holding sessions, with the help of the Gang Task Force, to properly train local police to enforce the measure. However, Lt. Ernie Ferrando of the task force said his unit can and likely will apply the restrictions to those who have already been served.

As of Nov. 26, 33 individuals have been served with injunctions, Dorsey said. Twenty people from the Western Addition — five from Chopper City, 10 from Eddy Rock, and five from the Knock Out Posse — have been given notice, along with 13 Norteños from the Mission.

Despite the measures being taken by police and the city attorney, which involve careful efforts to make sure only people named on the injunctions are prosecuted, critics of the approach say the injunctions may no longer be necessary in the Western Addition, where many of the targeted individuals seem to have made great strides over the past few months.

"I’ve been coming down here for four years, and this is the first summer that I haven’t had to drive over caution tape," said Sheryl Davis, program director of Mo’ Magic, which is based in the nearby African American Art and Culture Complex on Fulton Street. "So something is working."

The last gang-related homicide occurred in May, Northern Police Station captain Croce Casciato said. Police say the reasons for the decrease in violence are varied, but few can argue against its scope. The alleged gang members who have been targeted maintain that they — not outside forces or the injunction — are most responsible for the turnaround.

"There’s been a lot of bloodshed here. We’re trying to clean that bloodshed," Moffet said. About the looming threat of the injunction, he added, "We’re [going to] stand tall no matter what they say. Everybody makes mistakes. The main thing is trying to better yourself. That’s my leadership — stopping the violence."

Davis, who helped the film fest at Plaza East secure a digital projector, agreed that the respite in killings is directly attributable to the alleged perpetrators. While she didn’t criticize outright the efforts of the city attorney, she did say the recent positive actions by alleged gang members should be noted and that the injunction will likely act as a deterrent to such activities.

Of community-based efforts in the Western Addition, Davis said, they "should be duplicated, not shut down."

But proponents of the injunctions say they won’t hinder positive efforts. Nor will it be impossible for targeted gang members to be removed from the list. Public Defender Jeff Adachi is currently pushing for an opt-out provision that would permit injunction targets to petition for their removal by proving they are not involved with gangs. It’s an idea that has been supported in concept by the city attorney, though the details have yet to be worked out.

Lt. Ferrando pointed out that the injunctions might help gang members to escape the lifestyle without fear of retribution.

"This gives some guys the chance to leave the area for good," he said, noting that after the first injunction was approved, against the Oakdale Mob in Bayview–Hunters Point, several members simply never came back to the area and were never served.

Still, those named as members of Eddy Rock expressed concern that their recent positive efforts may go to waste.

"Some of the guys doing the good work are on the injunction. I find that very unique," said Marquez Shaw, a 26-year-old who is described in court papers as a member of the gang, though he is not on the list of targeted individuals.

In a video made by the group during a recent gathering, 20-year-old alleged member Hannibal Thompson says, "We got a lot of good stuff going on right now. Don’t take it away from us."

Flop it out, Oaktown

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Intrepid reporter Justin Juul hits the streets each week for our Meet Your Neighbors series, interviewing the Bay Area folks you’d like to know most.

Mr. Floppy’s Flophouse is a cluster of buildings in East Oakland that has been used throughout the years as a saloon, a venue for underground raves, a brothel, and most recently as a movie set. It also used to be Jack London’s favorite place to get drunk. I wanted to interview George, the crazy guy who owns the place, but he repeatedly denied my request, stating with obvious disgust that he has no desire to “get his name out there.”

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Welcome to Mr. Floppy’s!

Luckily, one his tenants, Sarah Doppler, had no qualms.

Sarah is one of those free-spirited traveler types who pops into a city for a few months, makes a bunch of friends, and then disappears before she gets sucked into their drama. Very smart. The following interview took place in front of a bonfire in Sarah’s backyard.

SFBG: So where are you from, and how did you find yourself living in this weird floppy-house complex thing?

Sarah Doppler: I’m from Seattle, Washington and I moved to the Bay Area about 4 months ago. I needed to find a room so I just answered an ad on Craigslist. It said “Female Artists Wanted: $400.” So I came and checked it out one night. It was really creepy because there are all these pianos and statues and about 50 dark rooms throughout the place. It’s like a maze with weird art and raccoons and this huge backyard by the freeway where I can chill with all my homies.

SFBG: Yeah, dude, I just spent twenty minutes looking for the bathroom and finally had to leave when I accidentally barged in on a film crew and a bunch of vampires eating fried chicken. What’s up with that?

Doppler: Oh man, this place is amazing! There’s that saloon right behind my room; that’s where you were. It’s fully decked out with mahogany and stained glass and it’s been there since the 1880’s. There are pictures of Jack London all over the place and my landlord rents it out to movie studios. They do a lot of horror flicks back there. The vampires have been chillin’ for weeks. I got drunk with them last night.

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Sarah Doppler, flopper.

Lick it legal

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By Justin Juul

Being an American sucks in a lot of different ways — it’s basically impossible to live here and not be fat, you can’t drink in the streets, etc — but perhaps worst of all is the fact that absinthe is illegal. It doesn’t sound so bad on its own, but think about the repercussions of such a pointless ban: we have to drink waaaaay more than most Europeans in order to get drunk, we have to do mushrooms or acid if we want to hallucinate, and to top it all off our art is suffering. Look around you. Where are our Picassos and Van Goghs? Where are our Oscar Wildes and modern-day Hemingways? The answer is as sad as it is obvious. Our creative geniuses are either too strung out to work or rotting in rehab centers because they had to turn to heroin instead of absinthe.

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Picasso’s “Absinthe Drinker”

Thank god for loopholes. The people over at Lit have discovered that, although straight-up absinthe may be illegal, there’s nothing in the books that says you can’t make candy out of the stuff.

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Suck and spin

Save an artist this Christmas. Order some Absinthe Lollies now.

Absinthe Lollies are available at Miette Confiserie and through Lit’s Web site.

Miette Confiserie
449 Octavia Boulevard, SF
(415) 626-6221
www.miettecackes.com

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

Sup. Aaron Peskin hates billboards, and mostly I agree with him — the whole damn world feels like a commercial these days, and it’s nice to be able to walk around a few parts of the city and not be surrounded by giant illuminated ads. But as Election Day approached this fall, I felt like something was missing from San Francisco.

October in this city used to mean brightly colored campaign festoonery on lampposts, utility poles … anywhere anyone could legally stick a sign promoting or attacking a candidate or ballot measure. Yeah, it got a bit ugly, and yeah, it was one more way that people with money were able to get their message out and get a leg up on the people who weren’t well funded. And it was always a mess in late November, when the campaigns conveniently forgot to take their posters down. But it also, I think, served to remind everyone that an election was coming up.

That doesn’t matter so much when the office of the president of the United States is on the ballot, because most people at least know that’s going on. But this year only about 30 percent of voters bothered to go to the polls — and since San Francisco has elections at least twice per year and not all of them feature a high-profile race, it’s not a bad idea to do something festive to get everybody thinking about them.

So while I didn’t oppose Peskin’s ordinance banning campaign signs on public property, I’m thinking maybe we should modify it a bit. I’m not sure exactly how; maybe we set aside a small amount of money from the public campaign fund and give local artists modest grants to come up with wild and colorful posters announcing the election and encouraging people to vote. We let churches and nonprofits hang signs celebrating anniversaries and special events — why not public art celebrating our semiannual bout of obsessive democracy?

Just a thought.

And here’s another:

I have friends who are employed in the world of philanthropy (that is, they either administer grants or seek them), and we were all complaining the other day about how people like Bill Gates get to set international health policy. When Gates decides something’s a problem, it suddenly has vast resources — and his opinion about world health isn’t always shared by experts in the field.

In a better world we would tax Gates and Microsoft at a level that would provide adequate resources for our elected representatives to make choices about global problems, but these days the rich don’t pay taxes — yet they can set policy. So I had a suggestion:

What if Gates decided to give, say, a billion dollars to some needy urban public school district? I don’t know — Detroit or Jackson, Miss., … or San Francisco. My friends, who understand how these things work, said I was nuts; much of that money would immediately be lost to corruption.

Maybe — but what if it weren’t a lump sum? What if the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation just doubled the annual budget of the San Francisco Unified School District for the next 10 years? What if the "project," so to speak, was to demonstrate how effective the public sector can be at educating kids if the resources are available?

And maybe after 10 years the Gates folks could do a massive public relations campaign and people would realize that higher taxes for public schools might make for a better society.

Happy Thanksgiving. *

Fetus frenzy

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› culture@sfbg.com

If you live in San Francisco and are in possession of a conventional vagina, you are most likely pregnant. And if you’re not pregnant, you’re either anxious to become so or have just pinched out a baby and are looking toward closing the deal on numbers two and three before you hit 40. If none of the above applies, I, a new mother myself, give you permission to ignore that self-righteous pregnant bitch eyeing your Muni seat and openly admit the following: SF was edgier when it was just a bunch of wayward freaks in crotchless ass pants.

Now, thanks to a surge in results-oriented fucking among the white, heterosexual ruling class, this city has become overrun with decaf-latte-sipping, thousand-dollar-stroller-pushing, CFO–Noe Valley–ish, overly together supermoms who will tear you multiple assholes if you even think about stepping near their two-legged petri dish specimens. One might be tempted to label this phenomenon a baby boom. That assumption, however, is incorrect. What we are witnessing in San Francisco — and everywhere else inhabited by Gen Xers with money — is a parent boom.

In the past, parents were simply identified as people who raised children. That era, which lasted roughly 200,000 years, has ended. Parents now practice the rarified art of parenting. Parents who parent must adopt a specific parenting style — one that’s far more complex than a hairstyle and infinitely more expensive. Parenting requires ongoing investment in sleep and breast-feeding consultants, childproofing contractors, European-designed gear, six-week courses, endless manuals and magazines, and, depending on one’s sacred style, couture bedding and nursery decor that can run well over five grand. This is quite a change of direction for Generation X, to which I belong, whose members were blacking out in Cow Hollow bars and smoking out of two-foot Mission District bongs throughout the ’90s. But my generation’s escapist persona — equal parts political indifference, obsessive consumerism, hedonistic self-absorption, and Diff’rent Strokes references — did not abate or even truly evolve when we threw the birth control in the trash. It only found new life, literally.

We, the latchkey slackers who postponed being parents until our ovaries wept, are acutely aware that whatever decisions we make regarding our children are direct reflections of ourselves. It is therefore imperative to properly accessorize one’s child; only by doing so can one ensure the child is a better accessory. The right stroller, carrier, preschool waiting list, parenting philosophy, and even diaper — all denote much more than any sensible person would care to know.

THE BABY GAP


Oh, wait. I forgot to mention the babies: it appears there are many of them. Commercial sidewalks in Noe Valley, Cole Valley, Hayes Valley, and beyond buzz with kitten-eyed freshies sucking the rubberized life out of pacifiers, frazzled mommies in yoga pants and camel toes pushing behemoth, double-wide prams, nannies chatting on cell phones while small barbarians stick organic Cheerios up their noses. Top preschools are waitlisted for several years. Babysitters are harder to find than a pimple on a newborn’s butt. Is it good for San Francisco’s soul that kiddie boutiques outnumber bondage shops and Polk Street glory holes? It’s an epidemic, cry my nonparent friends, some of whom have been accosted by pompous moms and dads for accidentally bumping into strollers or smoking on the street. Ever think of denying an All-Important Holy Mother with Child your seat on the 1 California? Want to be knifed by a stay-at-home mom from precious Laurel Heights?

Funny thing is, the evidence of a baby boom is largely anecdotal. Statistics paint a very different picture. A disturbing March 2006 report by Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth, "Families Struggle to Stay: Why Families Are Leaving San Francisco and What Can Be Done," reveals that we have the lowest child population of any American city. And of San Francisco’s 100,000 children, most reside in the city’s poorest districts — including traditionally working-class neighborhoods that are becoming increasingly chic. Coleman Advocates also estimates that 39,000 families with children are in need of affordable housing.

"The issue is not if there is a baby boom trend in San Francisco," Coleman Advocates’ Ingrid Gonzales e-mailed me. "The real issue is whether these [lower-income] families stay or are eventually pushed out of San Francisco because of a lack of affordable family housing or access to a quality public school education. Stats show that families leave when their children reach kindergarten age. Coleman Advocates and our families say that this is not OK — families should have a right to stay in the city they call home."

Somehow I doubt the parents buying the $1,890 Cabine infant dresser at Giggle on Chestnut Street are too worried about making rent. In fact, a May article in the New York Times reports that San Francisco is second only to Manhattan in toddlers born to wealthy white families, defined as those that pull in an average of $150,763 per year. And consider this Coleman Advocates finding: there was a 45 percent drop in the number of black families with children in San Francisco from 1990 to 2000, while around the same time 90 percent of the people moving into the city did not have children and — surprise, surprise — were mostly rich and white. This development pretty much paralleled the period of the dot-com boom. At the risk of making light of an alarming situation, is it safe to posit that the dot-com bust inspired semiemployed white professionals to buy a lot of lube?

CLASH OF THE CODDLERS


So what creates this illusion of a baby boom? Probably an uptick in showy, hyperactive parenting. Weekends at Children’s Playground in Golden Gate Park provide insight into the phenomenon. There parents can be found earnestly — one might even say aggressively — parenting. They really put their all into it ("it" being what our parents haphazardly did with us) as they push their bewildered offspring in swings, making sure to "Wheee!" with more enthusiasm than a redneck at a NASCAR rally — an apt metaphor, because this brand of parenting is a competitive sport. "How old is she? Is she standing on her own? Can she walk yet? Does she speak French, and can she crap in the can?" someone always wants to know, hungrily eyeing your baby as if she were a delicious wild Alaskan king salmon fillet.

But blessed be, developmental superiority is not the only way to make other parents feel like shit. Fleets of luxury Dutch strollers are parked around the playground’s grassy knolls, each exceeding my share of rent by $300. I’ve seen nannies pull toys from Coach and Louis Vuitton diaper bags, kids scale the jungle gym dressed in Little Marc coats, white babies in $40 organic cotton T-shirts emblazoned with a grossly ironic image of a black woman’s face.

This excess of money breeds paranoia. Even on the warmest days, Caitlin-Courtney-Penelope-Emily-Aurelia-Shiloh-Mackenzie can be observed crawling in the playground’s cool sand, fully dressed in the very best of Zutano’s and Petit Bateau’s wide-brim hats, thick socks and booties, long-sleeve shirts, and pants in order to prevent the wretched elements, formerly known as blue sky and sunshine, from attacking the child’s not-so-invisible bubble. And rest assured, many of the playground’s nannies — almost entirely middle-aged mothers and grandmothers of color — have been fingerprinted and subjected to invasive criminal background checks. Long gone are the days when parents hired any ol’ teenage stoner to watch their kids.

LAVISH AND LACK


I feel embarrassed to be here, I often think. Because I know I’m part of the problem. I didn’t come to San Francisco for the money — I was born here and spent most of my childhood in that new epicenter of ultraparenting, Noe Valley — and I don’t have a nursery, a full-size kitchen, or even a hallway in my shared one-bedroom Sunset apartment. (This is not a "poor me" moment; my lifestyle is a choice.) But I did spend $300 on a labor and newborn preparation course, during which I suffered video after video of goopy babies cannonballing forth from untamed bush. I paid a woman $200 to teach me how to breast-feed and another $50 to join a local e-mail list through which upper-crust women seek help in finding dinner party entertainment for hire and live-in au pairs. I can cite Halle Berry’s prenatal test results but no statistics from the war in Iraq. I have secretly chuckled at ugly babies. I have wanted to know if your baby can stand alone yet and why she’s so much smaller than mine. I’ve purchased nearly 20 books on pregnancy, breast-feeding, natural birth, cosleeping, infant health, starting solids, potty training, how to stay hot, and how to fix my gut.

Pediatric records indicate I was not reared by wild dogs, yet I can’t figure out how to assume the most primal of all roles — motherhood — without hitting the ATM.

In her 2007 manifesto against the $20 billion baby-to-toddler industry and the disastrous effects it has on our children, Buy, Buy Baby (Houghton Mifflin) author Susan Gregory Thomas credits Gen X’s overspending and unhealthy micromanaging to the way in which we, the products of broken homes and TVs as babysitters, were raised: "The commercialization and neglect of young people results not only in fears of abandonment and bank-breaking shopping habits in adulthood to fill the void but also in a deep, neurotic sense of attachment to, and protection of, one’s own children and home."

Gregory Thomas’s assessment strikes me as painfully true and spurs the question: what kind of people will our babies become? Will they, as older children and adults, invariably expect and demand the best, no matter the appropriateness of the circumstance? Will they be terrified of public schools and public transportation and — worse — people with a different color skin? How will they ever travel abroad, and will they condescend to people who have less? Surely the parents who buy their baby the $1,700 Moderne crib intend only to give their child the finest they can offer. Every child is worthy of that grand intention. Yet, as my friend and mother-mentor Billee Sharp pointed out, the more extravagant the gifts, the harder the parents must work to provide them, resulting in less time spent with their kids. Lavishness, in this sense, becomes empty compensation for a shortage of available love.

IT TAKES AN INTERNET?


Being a new parent is much harder than it seems. If we’re overcompensating, it’s largely because we don’t know what else to do. If it takes a village to raise a child, what happens when all you have is DSL? During my pregnancy and the first three months of my daughter’s life, my husband and I lived in relative isolation in Brooklyn, away from family and a network of close friends that could offer knowledge and day-to-day help. The books, the classes, and the breast-feeding consultant filled the gaps that real support would have provided. (I certainly had two boobs but no idea where to put them: In the baby’s mouth? Are you serious?) In the absence of genuine community, we follow the only guidelines available to us and do the best we can manage. While nothing is less appealing to me than having to be someone’s friend simply because we both piss our pants when we sneeze, artificially constructed social networks like mommy groups, daddy groups, play groups, and Yahoo e-mail groups fulfill a real need for disconnected urbanites whose families typically reside thousands of miles away.

Learning to be a parent without geographic and strong emotional links to our families, then, becomes a complicated process of untangling the skein of too much information. From the moment a woman discovers she is pregnant, she and her partner are encouraged to believe they are totally, utterly retarded when it comes to being parents. The reality-TV experts, the how-to books, the product-driven Web sites and magazines cater to a deep, unrelenting distrust of ourselves, and they have the tragic effect of obliterating whatever parenting intuition and knowledge that we, as living creatures, already have in our DNA.

My path to reclaiming motherhood began with an injured wrist. Everything I had read warned that I would roll over my child and kill her if we slept together in one bed. To prevent this tragedy, my husband and I bought a sleigh bed attachment for our bed that kept me at least a foot away from my child. Each night that I listened to her breathe without being able hold her brought an agony so intense that I became profoundly depressed. I was desperate to pull her close to my body, like every mammal mother does, like our ancestors did long before they stopped growing pubic hair on their backs. In my longing to be nearer to my child, I contorted my left wrist under my head as I slept, perhaps to stop my murderous hands from accidentally touching the person I love most. With my wrist in a splint and steroid shots in my hand, I sobbed to my mother over the phone, "I can sleep with my cats, but why not with my own child?"

The night I brought my daughter into bed marked the beginning of my departure from the fear-and-product-based mommy mainstream. Within weeks a friend turned me on to the instinctive-parenting ideas put forth in Jean Liedloff’s The Continuum Concept (Addison Wesley, 1986), a fascinating book that details the author’s travels to Venezuela, where she studied the parenting methods of the indigenous Yequana Indians, who, remarkably, have never considered shopping for child-rearing clues on Babycenter.com. Admittedly, my and my husband’s current touchy-feely, indigenous-inspired style is a little fringe lunatic, and, as Gregory Thomas might suggest, it’s probably no coincidence that we both come from broken homes. But life-changing insights that require no investment in stylish baby gear are available to us. We only have to be willing to look.

BEYOND THE BUBBLE


One of the most affecting messages I have received about the depth of real parental love came to me in the form of a damp newspaper abandoned on the subway in New York City. Elizabeth Fitzsimons’s essay "My First Lesson in Motherhood," published in the New York Times Modern Love section this Mother’s Day, chronicles the journalist’s trip to China, where she and her husband picked up their adopted infant daughter, who, it turned out, had debilitating health defects. Fitzsimons was warned that her daughter might have Down’s syndrome, might never walk, and will likely be tethered to a colostomy bag for the rest of her life. "I knew this was my test," Fitzsimons writes, "my life’s worth distilled into a moment. I was shaking my head ‘No’ before [the doctors] finished explaining. We didn’t want another baby, I told them. We wanted our baby, the one sleeping right over there. ‘She’s our daughter,’ I said. ‘We love her.’ "

Fitzsimons’s fierce, truly unconditional love for a child she did not create becomes even more striking when contextualized in these fertility and pregnancy-obsessed times. We all want our children to be healthy, to outlive us, to be content, and to exist in a safe, peaceful world. These desires are pretty basic. Clearly, though, there’s a worrisome glitch in the parent boom trend: it has nothing to do with the well-being of children who are biologically not ours. This newfound love for babies is entirely insular, concerned only with one’s genetic family, one’s own perfect, beautiful, well-fed, well-dressed child. Look inside a pregnancy or parenting magazine and you will find that most lack any semblance of social perspective as they offer tired takes on recycled, useless information: "How to lose the baby weight in three days!" "Ten tips for getting back the magic in the bed!"

But the truth is that while middle-class women squabble about whether to breast-feed or bottle-feed, 39,000 families with children in this city are in dire need of affordable homes. For every day we bicker over stay-at-home moms versus mothers who work full-time, four children in this country will die from abuse or neglect, and eight more will be killed at the hand of someone operating a gun, according to Children’s Defense Fund statistics.

The self-centeredness of Gen X parents manifests as blindness to these sad realities, and here I indict myself again. Why do I only act on behalf of my child when I have the means to do something that could help other, less fortunate children? Maybe the answer is too painful to consider. Maybe I’d rather shop for a new sling instead. *

Pyramental

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› superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO Books are cool, and they can make you taller. Often they even tell you things, things you never thought you’d want to know. They’re like platform heels that talk! But they speak in a flippant whisper, and what they say is delicious.

Sure, books may not be able to dish on how Tyra got rid of her "vag arms" this season (hello, Scotch tape in her hairy pits) or why that one annoying girl on the 22 Fillmore’s still pumping that goddamn "Hot Pocket, drop it" song on her tinny-ass cell phone over and over, a mound of discarded sunflower seed shells scattered around her pastel Superfecta IIs. (Please go download some Lupe Fiasco "Superstar" to your knockoff Chocolate already, sweetie. Seriously. It’s November.)

What books can tell you sometimes is that you’re right. I love that! Take The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art, and Music Drive New York City, by Elizabeth Currid, a new spine that fingerless-gloved intellectuals are cracking all over the Muni. It basically argues that — fuck Wall Street — the arts are the real forces that drive Manhattan’s hopping money market. (Too bad the best new artists can only afford to live in Queens now.) And guess where the linchpins are? Where art, fashion, and music intersect and all the brainy hotties trade lucrative ideas? That’s right: night clubs. All the fabbest deals are made on the dance floor, Ms. Elizabeth says, and nightlife, in which "creative minds set the future trends," should be boosted to top priority by any wannabe successful city, extralegal activities be damned. Of course she’s talking about New York, so her tome’s a tad inapt for our little blow jobs–for–tourists trade show here. But still, nightlife rules! One day it’ll make us all rich and famous! In your face, space coyote.

Speaking of books: I once dated a tech bear. It was the mid-’90s, the Interweb was still shiny, and bears hadn’t morphed into hedge-trimmed candy ravers yet. Don’t hate! Tech bears were hot — I’m still an all-day sucker for them — and this one, like so many others of his ilk, not only could build a Unix server out of two Cherry Coke cans and a pizza box but also spent his nights tripping on krunk and composing ambient electronic odes to his heroes Brian Eno and Arthur Russell. I couldn’t drag his ass onto a dance floor to save my life, but his windowless bedroom in the Tenderloin was a glittery cornucopia of strobe effects and rapid-fire bleeps. Go figure.

If only there had been some kind of school for him to attend, some place that would have guided him toward a career in digital-audio arts before he blew his mind on meth and moved back to the Midwest to become a gay trucker for Montgomery Ward!

Better late than never, maybe; now there is. Pyramind, a full-on media music and production school, is taking over SoMa and providing some of San Francisco’s brightest club-music makers with the skills to conquer the digital world. I recently found myself being chaperoned, somewhat bewildered, through Pyramind’s labyrinthine main campus by director and president Greg Gordon, in the company of old-school dance floor mover and shaker Paul dB. As they led me from one cavernous, soundproofed room to the next, each full of top-flight equipment, giant projection screens, a plethora of enormous monitors, and some mighty fine-looking students, I realized: maybe I should just give up writing and start composing the soundtrack for Halo 4. I could help launch a puke-colored Mountain Dew energy drink in 2009!

My temporary flight of fancy — how could I ever give up getting kind of paid to down well-vodka cosmos and introduce you to several psycho drag queens almost every week? — wasn’t such a pie in the sky. Pyramind’s hooked up with major prestidigitalators like Apple, Ableton, Digidesign, M-Audio, and Propellerhead. Students get possible career leads and exposure to some of the biggest biggies — Pyramind calls these companies "strategic partners," but to me a strategic partner is someone you sleep with to get back at your ex.

But the school is just part of a grand master plan. Pyramind is octopoid, with recording studios, a distribution service, international programs, a music label called Epiphyte headed by industry legend Steffan Franz, a well-established musical showcase–club night called TestPress that’s expanding to other cities (and has spawned an Epiphyte-released CD of bouncy tunes), and, with the recent acquisition of another huge campus a few doors down from the main one, an independent party venue. Pyramind’s stacked. And hey, in case any terrorists were thinking of hijacking any future Pixar productions (although wasn’t Cars terrifying enough?), Pyramind’s got the seal of approval, I shit you not, from Homeland Security. Calling all tech bears: drop that Cheeto and get in the digi-know now.

www.pyramind.com


www.epiphyterecords.com/

All about Bob

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

It’s not that I’m anti–Bob Dylan. I’ve just never been a fan in particular. I’m too young or too fond of metal or too shallow or some combination of the three. But I found I’m Not There — Todd Haynes’s sorta biopic of the icon — entirely fascinating. By now you’ve heard the pitch: six actors (Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, and Ben Whishaw) play facets of Dylan without actually playing Dylan, though Bale and Blanchett come dangerously close. The movie begins with the death of this nebulous character, identifiable only by his distinctive mop of dark curls, and a somber narrator informing us, "Even the ghost was more than one person." And I’m Not There is nearly more than one movie, with different film stocks, casts, tones, and styles deftly stitched together by Dylan’s music (performed, appropriately enough, by an array of artists).

Perhaps you didn’t realize that one of Dylan’s personae is an African American boy (Franklin) obsessed with boxcars, guitars, and Woody Guthrie. Strangers are drawn to this nostalgic little soul, including a kindly woman who feeds him before sternly advising him to "live your own time." This sweet tale, filmed in warm hues with touches of magical realism, is a more abstract reading of Dylan — unlike the story of Jack Rollins (Bale), which is told documentary-style and features Julianne Moore as a Joan Baez clone reminiscing about Jack’s impact on the 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene. He was a visionary, using traditional folk stylings to comment on contemporary concerns. His life becomes intertwined with the showbiz fate of Robbie Clark (Ledger), a James Dean–ish young actor whose starring role in a Jack Rollins biopic catapults him to stardom.

After a freewheeling courtship — with montage-spun happiness undermined by televisions constantly broadcasting the Vietnam War — Robbie marries Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who later leaves him when fame and ego turn him into something of an asshole. But aside from big-head syndrome, Robbie’s worst offense is saying that women can’t be poets. The sins of Jude (Cate Blanchett) are far dirtier, and it’s no coincidence that Jude’s saga — a black-and-white British tour from hell, with snooty reporters and drug-enhanced moments of surreality — is I’m Not There‘s most magnetic segment.

Sexy androgyne Blanchett’s probably got her next Supporting Actress win sewn up with this one, or she should. Her performance is the heart of the movie — snarling, weary, uncanny, and able to make David Cross’s hairy cameo as Allen Ginsberg seem totally logical. Don’t Look Back would be the most obvious frame of reference here, but Haynes is less interested in Dylan’s performances or fans than his inner conflicts. It’s hard to sing about the oppressed when you are rich, famous, and beloved. It’s hard to keep your head on your shoulders when everyone views you as the voice of a generation. It’s hard to be patient when the Man (Bruce Greenwood — OK, his character has a name, but he’s the Man nonetheless) digs into your past, unable to beat you in a war of words but smugly proud of finding dirt that cracks your cooler-than-thou armor. Whoa, you mean his name isn’t really Bob Dylan?

Less compelling are a pair of shorter segments — Whishaw as Arthur (as in Rimbaud), who pops up occasionally to drop science via actual Dylan quotes, and Gere as Billy the Kid, a retired outlaw in hiding whose Halloween-obsessed hometown appears art-directed by Tim Burton. As in other chapters, there are surely nuances that sailed past me but that Dylan obsessives will seize on. Thankfully not represented are Dylan’s less-interesting years — the Victoria’s Secret pitchman era, for example.

As a rock doc–slash–biopic, I’m Not There is proof that the best rendering of a legend isn’t necessarily done with straight, tidy lines. I may not have been a huge Dylan fan before I’m Not There, but I was a Haynes fan. With this, his most ambitious work to date, the director’s affection for re-creating the past finds its match in his innovative dissection of a complex artist’s soul. *

I’M NOT THERE

Opens Wed/21 in Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

www.imnotthere-movie.com“>www.imnotthere-movie.com”>www.sfbg.com

www.imnotthere-movie.com

Gobblin’ Cobain

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER For too many, Thanksgiving is all about high-priced, high-stress flights home for the holidays, foul fowl, sad slipcovers, and relatives who rove the spectrum from irksome to inspirational. Why the last? I have to say that one miserable Turkey Day spent on the outskirts of Des Moines, Iowa, meeting a squeeze’s enraged and estranged parents while his jock brother dented my Geo Metro during a show-off game of tag football brought me closer to thoughts of suicide than ever before. Thanksgiving: the most annoying event before and since Oracle OpenWorld (only with a tad fewer leering conventioneers)? Discuss.

So it’s fitting, then, that soon-to-be uncomfortably bloated thoughts once again turn to the late Kurt Cobain with the Nov. 30 theatrical release of Kurt Cobain about a Son and the Nov. 30 droppage of Unplugged in New York, the DVD release of Nirvana’s 1993 MTV Unplugged appearance. I watched both 14 years to the day after the band’s Unplugged taping, on Nov. 18. If I weren’t already terrified of tying on the turducken, I’d be totally spooked by the synchronicity: are you sure Halloween is over?

AJ Schnack’s doc About a Son reads like a ghostly document: Cobain’s disembodied voice floats over its entirety, drawn from tapes of 1992–93 interviews conducted by coproducer Michael Azerrad for his book Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana (Main Street, 1993). Beneath the songwriter’s thoughts, Schnack chooses to float images of everyday romance and poetry captured in Cobain’s northwestern haunts: power lines shoot across the sky, dead birds rot beneath burnished sunsets, kids play music in alleyways. Relying on an evocative score by Steve Fisk and Ben Gibbard and songs by Queen, David Bowie, and others that are related to the interviews, Schnack eschews Nirvana’s music and even their photographic image until the very end. He prefers to immerse the viewer in the edited, intimate thoughts of Cobain, who can genuinely touch and surprise a listener with stories of how he felt abandoned by his father and his honesty about his misanthropy (coworkers "get on my nerves so bad I either have to confront them and tell them I hate their guts or ignore them"), heroin use (of his $400 per day self-medicating efforts to stem his chronic stomach pain, he says, "I was healthier and fatter than I am now"), and hatred of the media ("the most ruthless life form on Earth"). By turns moving and excruciating, About a Son raises as many questions as it answers.

Eerily dovetailing with About a Son by way of a cover of Bowie’s "The Man Who Sold the World" and a Queen joke regarding ex–Germs guitarist Pat Smear, the Unplugged performance has long been loaded with the stuff of quintuple-putf8um legend and fan speculation regarding Cobain’s death, which occurred just four months after the program aired on Dec. 14, 1993 on MTV. How else to parse the lyrical references to guns, the white lily set decorations (Cobain’s idea), and the set list’s intermittent aura of doom? In any case, Nirvana completists will want to snag this for the unedited 66-minute concert, which includes two numbers excised from the original 44-minute broadcast: Nirvana’s "Something in the Way" and the Meat Puppets’ "Oh Me." The mistakes and occasional sour notes remain. I was surprised by the general lack of energy in the band; the ordinarily forceful Dave Grohl sounds painfully unsure on brushes. But the conviction, seriousness, and soulfulness of Cobain’s vocal performance make this entire endeavor worthwhile — despite the gritted-teeth grin and protruding tongue that follow the first few songs.

You strain to hear the dialogue between the band members and betwixt Cobain and the audience. When the band seems to dither over the last song, one female audience member yells, "<0x2009>‘Rape Me’!" "Is that Kennedy?" someone asks, referring to the noxious alterna-VJ of the day. "I don’t think MTV will let us play that," Cobain replies with an insouciant, knowing air. If you’re still looking for that classic Gen X cynicism, look no further than MTV, which seems to have ditched music programming in general.

So why did Cobain sing for his TV dinner in the first place? Was it simply because In Utero (DGC, 1993) wasn’t selling well? Just months before his passing, Cobain already looked like another pop idol prepping to die young and leave a gorgeous corpse. Or not. Nonetheless, here, bird-boned with downcast eyes, he edges closer to that beautiful boy outlined in Elizabeth Peyton’s paintings, ready to assume his place in a pantheon of perpetually doodled, iconographic heartthrobs, right after Jim Morrison and James Dean. Nirvana was a great band — but as so many know who were there, cognizant, and occasionally coherent when Nevermind (Geffen, 1991) hit, there were lots of great bands. Ever the authentic article, Cobain knew this as much as any other, which is why he always gave a hand to forebears, bringing on the Meat Puppets (much to the disappointment of MTV, according to an accompanying DVD short) and sporting a T-shirt of the SF all-female art-punk combo Frightwig for this performance. Did it simply take Cobain’s dramatic death to, as an MTV executive dork opines in the short, turn an "interesting, eclectic performance" into "a masterpiece"? Neither of these spooked offerings really fits that descriptor, but for the faithful they might do till another comes along. *

KURT COBAIN ABOUT A SON

Opens Nov. 30

See film listings

www.landmarktheatres.com

For live music picks, see www.sfbg.com/blogs/music.

Disaster preparedness

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Above a semicircle of wooden crates arranged on a weathered wooden stage, two tattered flags of New Orleans and the United States are projected on a back screen. The flags appear to flutter in the rotating series of overlapping still images. This shifting perspective implicitly signals the living and composite nature of the history (recent and long-term, local and national) we are about to hear, as the 11 members of the ensemble representing survivors of Hurricane Katrina’s inundation of New Orleans in 2005 slowly assemble onstage and introduce themselves.

As they tell their individual stories — with charming, informal demeanors — and relate the story of their city, the flags give way to a steady stream of projected images (designed by Daniel Gamberg), including old snapshots, local landscapes, memorabilia, bits of relevant text, a pregnant cloudscape, and, finally, images of an unprecedented natural and human disaster. The social breakdown, government malfeasance, and open racism attendant on the Katrina disaster are balanced by stories of courage, compassion, camaraderie, and resolve — human capacities grounded in individual character and familial and communal solidarity, as well as the resources of a specific cultural life and history made manifest in the play’s wise and winning emphasis on New Orleans’s African American musical heritage.

While not uniformly strong, the cast includes some formidable talents (including Mujahid Abdul-Rashid, Velina Brown, L. Peter Callender, and Elizabeth Carter) and has another actor playing herself: Federal Emergency Management Agency inspector Linda Rose McCoy (whose unique and surprisingly sympathetic perspective makes up for some awkward and rather abrupt entrances and exits). Although the unevenness brings unintended lulls to the show’s pith and pacing, in general these down-to-earth stories and alternately quiet and harrowing disaster testimonials — together with a solid mix of a cappella song, recorded music (from the irresistibly joyful Hot 8 Brass Band), and the occasional burst of movement — bring much life to a relatively spare stage. Amid a growing cult of catastrophe, Stardust reminds us poignantly of the culture of survival.

ARGOS, OR NOT


On dramatically turbulent waters of its own, the latest Mary Zimmerman extravaganza, a retelling of Jason and the Argonauts’ search for the Golden Fleece, sails smoothly into a West Coast premiere at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, the Bay Area berth for the director’s previous work, including the Tony Award–winning Metamorphoses. Zimmerman runs a tight ship and knows how to rig a stage — first of all, with cleverly intricate mise-en-scènes, including a dynamic, even acrobatic ensemble of actors (led by Jake Suffian as an average-dude Jason), beautiful sets (Daniel Ostling’s enormous and pristine wood plank walls and ceiling, with a matching wooden catwalk and a mast rising like a firehouse pole through an aperture, look like the environs of a high-priced New York art gallery), and the playful use of stage properties (including Michael Montenegro’s buoyantly rough-and-ready puppets).

But the play also feels rigged. With humor pitched low (from an occasionally clever angle) and a forced sense of wonder, the spectacle has a vaguely didactic, children’s-theater aspect, as if some assigned learning were being dressed up and played down as "fun." Some episodes work well dramatically, the story of Hercules and Hylas in particular. But in the end, the long (two and a half hours) journey, which scrawls a timely (if wishful) moral about mad missions abroad "to put an end to evil" ending miserably for their instigators, is a short hop, emotionally and intellectually.

STARDUST AND EMPTY WAGONS: STORIES FROM THE KATRINA DIASPORA

Wed/21 and Fri/23–Sat/24, 8 p.m.; Sun/25, 3 p.m.; $18–$50

Brava Theater Center

2789 24th St., SF

(415) 647-2822

www.brava.org

ARGONAUTIKA

Through Dec. 16, $27–$69

See Web site for schedule

Berkeley Repertory Theatre

2015 Addison, Roda Theatre, Berk.

(510) 647-2949

www.berkeleyrep.org

No censure for DiFi

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Well, the move to censure Dianne Feinstein was shot down by the Democratic Party, but not before party Chair Art Torres was forced to give a painful, embarassing speech about it.

Robert Wyatt – love, sadness, love!

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robertwyatt.jpg

By Todd Lavoie

The saddest music in the world? I still haven’t finished watching the 2003 Guy Maddin film of the same name – wherein legless beer-company baroness Lady Helen Port-Huntley (Isabella Rossellini) hosts a contest to find the single most sob-inducing melody in the world – but if such a match were to be held, I’d reckon Robert Wyatt would leave his competition sweating. He’s been practicing quite a bit: the recently released Comicopera (Domino) carries enough emotional heft to even send the bitter, joyless Lady Helen herself whimpering underneath her platinum wig.

Lest I give the wrong idea, Comicopera – as sweeping and ambitious as it is in its depictions of the human experience in the era of the so-called War on Terror (copyright 2001, Bush/Cheney Mafia) – offers much more than just sadness and loss. Any such meaningful analysis of life in the 21st century would be seriously limiting itself by failing to consider the rest of the emotional spectrum, and so Wyatt has injected the album with a considerable amount of whimsy and wide-eyed wonder at how heart-stoppingly beautiful the world can be. It’s a quality he’s brought to his recordings ever since his 1971 solo debut, The End of an Ear (Sony Import) – and even before then as the drummer and occasional vocalist for jazz-art-prog fusionists Soft Machine and Matching Mole – but it’s perhaps on his latest that these juxtapositions are best-articulated. Comicopera is a laugh, a cry, a wince, a raised fist, and awestruck sigh all at once. I’m not sure how many other albums this year can say the same about themselves.

But back to that “saddest music in the world” tag: the first thing you’re bound to be hit by on a Robert Wyatt record is his voice. It’s the sound of a disappointed angel, perhaps – still capable of shining a bright light upon all that is worthy of wonderment, but tempered by a sense of world-weariness and frustration with how we mortals never seem to get it right for too long before messing it up all over again. His frail tenor frequently cracks and wavers around the notes, and can be quite devastating. And the falsetto? Even the most jaded of hearts would have a rough time fighting off the ache induced by a Wyatt falsetto. Exhibit A: “Shipbuilding,” a moving Elvis Costello-penned lament. As much as I adore Elvis – and his version which came out afterwards was mighty fine as well – I’ve always been partial to Wyatt’s interpretation, which became a small hit in Britain. Here’s a performance from BBC’s The Old Grey Whistle Test:

Pick up the beat

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Bop City. The Blackhawk. The Jazz Workshop. The Both/And. Keystone Korner. Kimball’s.

San Francisco’s world-renowned jazz club heritage has always been a part of the city’s matchless cultural identity. But the je ne sais quoi’s been missing for decades, because there hasn’t been a jazz club regularly booking national and international touring musicians into the city for more than 20 years.

That all changes this month with the Nov. 28 opening of Yoshi’s San Francisco. There’s been a Yoshi’s in Jack London Square for 10 years, the descendant of a North Berkeley sushi bar that morphed into a restaurant and music venue on Claremont Avenue in Oakland. Down by the waterfront, Yoshi’s became synonymous with jazz and was revered as both an artist- and an audience-friendly venue.

The brand-new club and restaurant at 1330 Fillmore holds down the ground floor of the freshly minted Fillmore Heritage Center, a 13-story mixed-use development that hopes to jump-start a renaissance in the scuffling Western Addition historic area. "Truthfully, I really don’t know why there hasn’t been another jazz club in San Francisco," says Yoshi’s artistic director, Peter Williams, the man charged with making sure the music part of the business stays in business. He’s been booking the artists at Yoshi’s for the past eight years. "Jazz is very risky," he continues, "and maybe people were feeling like they didn’t want to take the chance. These owners felt there was an opportunity."

The owners are Kaz Kajimura, one of Yoshi’s founders, and developer Michael Johnson. Their opportunity is costing $10 million, with the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency kicking in a $4.4 million loan as part of the total $75 million redevelopment project helmed by Em Johnson Interest, Johnson’s company.

Their idea of a new jazz club in the Fillmore District took shape four years ago, after a series of false starts with other developers and other discussed flagship venues, such as the Blue Note. Johnson sent out requests for proposals to jazz clubs around the country; Kajimura received one, and when he met with Johnson, the two hit it off. "Michael could see Kaz’s vision, and vice versa. That made it happen," Williams says. The building, designed by Morimoto, Matano, and Kang Architects, has a performance venue of 417 seats, 317 on the ground level and 100 more on a mezzanine. The restaurant, serving a modern Japanese cuisine created by executive chef Shotaro "Sho" Kamio, seats 370 in its combined dining and lounge areas. Success on the food side is a likely slam dunk — it’s in jazz presenting, much like three-point shooting, that percentages decline.

Williams is counting on Yoshi’s reputation among jazz professionals — musicians, managers, and agents — as a starting point. "We’ve put a lot of care into presenting the music in as respectful a setting as possible," he says. "I think that’s paid off for us."

CLUB DECLINE?


But jazz club culture has receded in the past 20 years, with the music finding support from institutions like SFJAZZ, which stepped into the developing void in the city 25 years ago. SFJAZZ executive director Randall Kline has always looked to organizational models like the San Francisco Symphony in terms of sustaining and growing the jazz art form. "What has happened is jazz has moved more into the concert hall and into more of a special-events format than a club format," Kline says. "There hasn’t been a great growth of jazz clubs in the country. But there’s a proliferation of festivals."

There are jazz clubs — Jazz at Pearl’s, under the strong stewardship of Kim Nalley and Steve Sheraton, is certainly a necessary element of North Beach, and farther north on Fillmore is Rasselas — but Kline believes there just aren’t as many live music clubs as there once were.

Still, despite the fierce competition for eyes, ears, and dollars, the fact remains that musicians need to play. Performance has always been one of the most effective ways for jazz artists to sustain themselves and build their audience. Not only is there no substitute for hearing the music live, but venue sales have also become a larger part of the overall sales picture, observes Cem Kurosman, director of publicity for Blue Note Records.

"Now, with fewer and fewer TV, radio, and mainstream press outlets covering new jazz artists, touring has become more important than ever," Kurosman says, "although there are fewer jazz clubs on the national circuit than ever before."

The Bay Area is one of the top four jazz markets in the country, and it behooves artists to gain exposure here. That wasn’t really a problem while the region was consistently supporting the music, when the music was here in the clubs and jazz seemed to swing up from the streets.

But times have changed, and no one recognizes that better than Todd Barkan, who ran Keystone Korner in North Beach. When Keystone closed in 1983, it was one of the last San Francisco clubs to regularly book national and international touring jazz groups. Barkan is now the artistic director of Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, the jazz club operated by Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York, and he’s also a highly regarded producer who works with numerous domestic and European jazz labels.

"The reason there hasn’t been anything in San Francisco proper for some 20 years is that it’s a new era," Barkan says. "San Francisco is not the bohemian place that it was when I started the Keystone in the early ’70s, which itself was a holdover from the psychedelic era."

While Barkan’s place could not rightly be called a dive, it was a funky little crowded club. From the stage to the bar, the setup at Keystone was significantly removed from the state-of-the-art amenities at Yoshi’s. In some ways, Yoshi’s splits the difference between the club and the concert experience, the hope being that the artists and the audience get the best of both worlds.

Barkan says the primary jazz audience now has different expectations than it used to. "It took a number of years to get the business set up to have the right kind of a club that could really be competitive and cater to a much more upscale audience, which is where the real jazz audience is now overall," he says. "For better or worse that’s where it’s at."

That audience is also spread throughout the Bay Area, which is important for a San Francisco–situated club to keep in mind. "San Francisco’s a little town," Barkan says. "With all due respect, ‘the city’ is only about 800,000. The Bay Area is 4.5 to 5 million people, but it’s very spread out." His North Beach club got a tremendous benefit from the freeway off-ramp at Broadway, which made getting into that part of the city from the Bay Bridge simpler.

But Yoshi’s San Francisco won’t survive on jazz alone, as Barkan and Williams acknowledge. "To do the kind of numbers and volume Yoshi’s needs, you have to have a diversified musical program," Barkan says.

Williams spins the challenge of putting butts in the seats as an opportunity to be creative. "I’ll have to branch out a little bit in what we do," he agrees. "I don’t think we’ll be able to do just jazz all the time." At Yoshi’s Oakland, Williams has added salsa dance nights on Mondays, and he consistently books fusion and smooth jazz performers like Keiko Matsui and neosoul acts like Rashaan Patterson.

The San Francisco spot will likely see a similar mix, though the inaugural performers are a mainstream ensemble called the Yoshi’s Birds of a Feather Super Band, which includes vibraphonist Gary Burton, saxophonists Ravi Coltrane and Kenny Garrett, trumpeter Nicholas Payton, and bassist John Patitucci. Veteran drummer Roy Haynes leads the band, which Williams created specially for the club’s opening.

Taj Mahal and the Phantom Blues Band follow, and later in December, Chick Corea, Charlie Hunter, and Rebeca Mauleón will perform. Next year will see guitarist Pat Metheny, pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba, vocalist Cassandra Wilson, and guitarist Bill Frisell in multinight runs at the club. Williams will try various things, particularly in the early months. "December is mostly artists coming to San Francisco with one band and then going to Oakland with another," he says. Corea, Hunter, and Taj Mahal will all pull double Yoshi’s duty.

"It’s gonna be a learning experience to find out what works and what doesn’t and how the two clubs can work together," Williams says. He will also have bands play the first part of the week in San Francisco and then Thursday through Sunday in Oakland, reasoning that San Franciscans are looking for more things to do early in the week. And he wants the club to be a platform for local artists — probably early in the week as well — but says Yoshi’s will have to focus on national touring acts simply to get people into the club.

Local saxophonist Howard Wiley is bullish on the new club, hoping that, if nothing else, it brings some notice to jazz instead of more exploitative forms of expression. "I’m so tired of hearing about Britney [Spears] and strippers and all that stuff," he says. "I’m hoping and praying the pendulum will swing back and people will cherish things of value again. I always love it when more attention can be brought to the music."

Currently Intersection for the Arts’ composer in residence, Wiley put out the self-released Angola Project earlier this year. The music is based on African American prison spirituals with roots primarily in songs and stories from the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, La. While Wiley hopes Yoshi’s can bring in artists like Billy Harper and David Murray, not necessarily household names even in mainstream jazz homes, he recognizes the reality of booking the club. "I’m not so into Rick Braun, but I understand," he says with a laugh, referencing the smooth jazz trumpet icon. "I just hope the club represents the music to its fullest, because it’s the only American contribution to global art."

ACCESSIBLE AVENUES


Former club owner Barkan hopes the new Yoshi’s anchors a reinvigorated jazz scene in San Francisco, one that can support another, smaller club as well, something with around 150 seats and less of an overhead, which a savvy veteran promoter like, say, himself might book. A smaller room certainly would make music more accessible to audiences. It might also underscore the notion that there just aren’t the headliners in jazz that there once were — the names needed to fill a room the size of the new Yoshi’s. "When the Keystone was up and running, we had Dexter Gordon, Elvin Jones, Gene Ammons, Art Blakey, Cannonball Adderly, Rashaan Roland Kirk, Freddie Hubbard," Barkan says. "The list was pretty inexhaustible.

"More than anything, jazz needs committed, dedicated presenters," he continues. "Yoshi’s is to be commended for what it does. They’re unsung heroes of this whole scenario."

The long-ago memories from San Francisco’s jazz club past sound like misty urban legends. Bop City, for instance, was the spot where Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker played. Saxophonist John Handy was just 18 when he joined John Coltrane onstage. Across town in North Beach, Miles Davis recorded his first live album at the Blackhawk. Charles Mingus recorded one of his best live LPs at the Jazz Workshop, and Adderly got famous from the one he recorded there. Do you remember Sun Ra’s expansive band flowing off the tiny stage at Keystone Korner? Jazz fans may have to resign themselves to the fact that it may never be like that again.

But there’s a San Francisco jazz continuum that includes those clubs, writers like the late Phil Elwood, producers such as Orrin Keepnews, and musicians including Joe Henderson, to name just a few. There have been many other forgotten heroes and great moments. And even though CD sales have slumped in recent years, reflecting the faltering music industry as a whole, there are as many good musicians around as ever, and most observers think an audience is there as well. For any live music scene to work, there have to be the players, the audience, and the venue to bring them together, and Yoshi’s hopes to do that for the Fillmore. "I just hope the Bay Area jazz community will band together, check this out, and make it work," Williams says. "It’s a huge undertaking. It’s going to be a beautiful room, there’ll be beautiful music, and if people come, it’ll be a success."

ROY HAYNES AND YOSHI’S BIRDS OF A FEATHER SUPER BAND

Nov. 28, 8 and 10 p.m., $100

Yoshi’s

1330 Fillmore, SF

(415) 655-5600

www.yoshis.com

Zombie Warhol rises: Glam!

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There’s been a rash of Warholia on the club scene of late: A number of art-party installations, an attack of Joe Dallesandro clone-looks among the gay, and, of course, big sunglasses and drugged-out looking stares everywhere. Thank goddess the whole screw-on fright wig thing has yet to take off, but I bet someone’s tryin’! Could it be our continued spiral into decadence caused by political powerlessness? Maybe. Or maybe it’s just another generation discovering the silver-clouded joys (although hopefully not the overdoses) that fueled the Factory.

heat_11_07.jpg

Whatevs, it’s a joy. And the funnest manifestation is Club Heat, a tribute to the giant influence — and even gianter “personalities” — that Warhol’s superstar system effected on modern club life (and art, and politics, and means of production … ). Heat’s a new monthly at the Stud — last month’s was off the hook, and this Friday is electro-stud DJ Donimo’s b-day, which will most likely be scandalous — that combines all the arty with the party to bring back the golden early years of Clublandinalia. Plus — this one’s got an ’80s/kind of post-Studio 54 theme going on, which is a little mixed up, timeline-wise, but hey — post-postmodern!. Pour one out for poor Edie, darling.

PS. I WANT MY MONEY! JUST GIVE ME MY MONEY! (Sorry, you can’t call something Heat without me quoting the movie!)


Oh, Little Joe

The Fillmore mess around

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San Francisco’s Fillmore District, Willie Brown once said, "had to be the closest thing to Harlem outside of New York." The Fillmore was in its golden era when the future mayor, then a teenager, arrived in 1951 from segregated Mineola, Texas. The 20 blocks that constitute the heart of the Fillmore then bustled with commerce and culture. It was a vibrant African American community, renowned for its nightlife.

People from throughout the Bay Area and around the world came to clubs such as Bop City (1690 Post), Jack’s Tavern (1931 Sutter), Elsie’s Breakfast Nook (1739 Fillmore), the Blue Mirror (935 Fillmore), and the Booker T. Washington Hotel’s cocktail lounge (1540 Fillmore) to see local attractions like Saunders King and Vernon Alley, as well as such national stars as Louis Armstrong, Louis Jordan, Slim Gaillard, Art Tatum, T-Bone Walker, Roy Milton, and Ruth Brown. It was not uncommon for audience members to bump shoulders with Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Robert Mitchum, Sammy Davis Jr., Dorothy Dandridge, and other visiting celebrities. Saxophonist John Handy remembers jamming with John Coltrane at Bop City, then going around the corner to Jackson’s Nook (1638 Buchanan) to share tea and conversation with the then-little-known musician, who was in town with Johnny Hodges’s band.

"Coltrane was quiet," onetime Bop City house pianist Frank Jackson recalls over a plate of short ribs at 1300 on Fillmore, a new upscale soul food restaurant two doors down from the new Yoshi’s San Francisco club. Willie Brown is dining a few tables away.

By the time Brown became mayor of San Francisco in 1996, the Fillmore was pretty much a ghost town and had been for some two and a half decades, the victim of a botched redevelopment plan. Small groups of aging African American men gathered on corners and in vacant lots that stretched for blocks, bringing folding chairs and tables to play dominos or poker.

In a letter to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle about 20 years ago, an African American minister from the Fillmore who was opposing plans to revitalize the area’s nightlife claimed there had never been much of a jazz scene in the area. But those old men, as well as many musicians from the Fillmore’s heyday, knew better. Visual proof can be found in page after page of historic photographs collected by Elizabeth Pepin and Lewis Watts in Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era (Chronicle, 2006). Many also fill several walls in 1300 on Fillmore’s lounge. Some can be viewed in rotation on a screen above the bar and outside, on the Eddy Street side of the building, which also houses Yoshi’s, the Jazz Heritage Center, and 80 condominiums.

THE HOOD HEATS UP


"The Fillmore was hot," says trumpeter Allen Smith, who moved there from Stockton in the late ’40s. "You could hit two or three clubs in one block, each with a band. Racial prejudice was practically nonexistent. You gotta remember that blacks weren’t even welcome on the east side of Van Ness Avenue — but all the races could mix in the Fillmore. You could be out all hours of the night, partying with whomever you cared to, and you didn’t have to worry about anybody mugging you or bothering you. It was just very cool." The 82-year-old musician — who has played in the Benny Carter, Benny Goodman, and Gil Evans orchestras — will perform as a member of the Frank Jackson Quintet on Dec. 3 at the new Yoshi’s.

"There were a lot of after-hours clubs," says Jackson, also 82, a Texan who settled in the Fillmore with his family in 1942. "Bop City was about the most popular thing in this area. I was one of the house pianists. I would play different nights. We would all fill in for each other. If you got a better gig, you’d go and take it. There was always somebody that could take your place."

Bop City was owned by promoter Charles Sullivan, who in the 1950s and early ’60s was presenting such attractions as B.B. King, Bobby Bland, and Ike and Tina Turner at the Fillmore Auditorium before Bill Graham ever set eyes on the building. The after-hours club opened in 1949 and was originally called Vout City, with Slim Gaillard as host and attraction.

Famous for such songs as "Flat Foot Floogie," "Vout Oreenee," and "Popity Pop," Gaillard was a vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, and purveyor of jive talk. "He spoke several different languages and invented some of his own," says Jackson, who was a member of Gaillard’s band at Vout City. The eccentric Gaillard was as likely to bake a cake in the club’s kitchen and serve it to customers as he was to perform. After several months Sullivan let Gaillard go and hired Jimbo Edwards to run the room.

"Jimbo was a used-car salesman downtown or somewhere," Jackson says. "He knew absolutely nothing about jazz, but he got his jazz lessons right there with Bop City as his workshop. He got to know exactly what was going on and who was doing what and whether they were good at it."

Besides such then–resident musicians as Handy, Pony Poindexter, Dexter Gordon, and Teddy Edwards, Jackson remembers playing during his seven years at Bop City with many out-of-town talents, including Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Ben Webster, Frank Foster, Stuff Smith, Art Blakey, Chico Hamilton, and Philly Joe Jones. And he especially remembers the night his idol, pianist extraordinaire Art Tatum, came in to listen but not to play. "They gave him a seat right by the piano," Jackson says. "I did not wanna play. The place was packed. There were seven or eight piano players in the house, but nobody wanted to come up and play."

Edwards relocated the club to Fillmore Street in the mid-’60s, but it closed shortly thereafter. The action had shifted to Soulville at McAllister and Webster streets, where younger players like Dewey Redman and Pharoah Sanders jammed, and to the Half Note on Haight Street, where George Duke led a trio with vocalist Al Jarreau. And just down the street Handy’s explosive quintet with violinist Michael White appeared regularly at the Both/And, which also presented such touring artists as Betty Carter, Milt Jackson, Roland Kirk, and Archie Shepp.

"THEY TOOK AWAY THE MUSIC"


By the end of the ’60s, however, jazz was all but dead in the Western Addition. Only Jack’s, which had moved from Sutter Street to the corner of Fillmore and Geary in the building that is now the Boom Boom Room, survived into the ’70s. Some, like Handy, blame the decline of jazz on the popularity of rock, others on rising crime and the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency.

"To me, they just destroyed the area," Jackson says of the city agency. "They took away the music. They took away homes from people. They were in a hurry to get people out of their homes."

Allen Smith’s son Peter Fitzsimmons has long been active in efforts to bring jazz back to the Fillmore and currently runs the Jazz Heritage Center, which includes an art gallery, a screening room, and a gift shop. "There were a lot of variables in place that kinda brought down the jazz scene," he says. "The music trends went away from jazz into the big stadium-rock concerts. There were some black families moving out of the Fillmore, so there wasn’t as much nightlife. And it got a little more dangerous. Like in major cities everywhere else, destitute people, drugs, and other things came into the sociological picture.

"In the ’50s and early ’60s, Jimbo was there," Fitzsimmons adds. "He marshaled his club. It wasn’t a dangerous place. People were coming from all over the world to go to Jimbo’s." Fitzsimmons and a lot of other people are confident that jazz in the Fillmore will again rise to such heights. *

FRANK JACKSON

Dec. 3, 8 and 10 p.m., $16–$20

Yoshi’s

1330 Fillmore, SF

(415) 655-5600

www.yoshis.com

Remain in light

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"The body, and its pleasures and powers, is rarely far from the spirit in California," Erik Davis writes in his introduction to Isis Aquarian’s firsthand account The Source: The Untold Story of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wa 13, and the Source Family (Process). Many generations of Californians have enjoyed a mix of healthy eating, nature appreciation, and magical thinking, but few have done so with as much colorful exuberance as the Source Family, a group of angelic longhairs that thrived in the Hollywood hills in the late ’60s and early ’70s under the guidance of Father Yod (a.k.a. YaHoWa, Shin Wha, and Jim Baker), a fast-talking rascal with the hair, beard, and robes of a latter-day Zeus.

What began as a small commune of hippie restaurateurs (the group ran the Source, the veggie restaurant where Woody Allen has his Los Angeles lunch with Diane Keaton in Annie Hall) soon swelled into the hundred-plus-member Source Family. As Baker grew more assured in his Father role, so too did his leadership become more outlandish, both in terms of teachings (which dabbled in many incoherent mystical strands) and practices (which infamously incorporated tantric sex rituals and polygamy). The family’s experiment in living had stops in Hawaii and San Francisco (the Guardian‘s classified section is mentioned twice in The Source) before Father Yod died in a hang-gliding accident in 1975, a notably quiet way to go in a decade that also saw the Manson Family’s carnage and Jonestown’s horror.

Three events this week — an audiovisual-enhanced discussion at Artists’ Television Access, a signing at Aquarius Records, and a live performance at Cafe du Nord — commemorate the publication of Isis "Keeper of the Record" Aquarian’s Source Family primer, a stitching together of testimonies and primary documents. As is often the case with informal accounts, the book is wracked with cliché, most frustratingly in the form of new age truisms used to elide meaningful experiences. There are, though, more than enough weird and wonderful details to make it an enjoyable read (for example, the rainbow diet of avocado, eggplant, red onion, banana, filberts, tomatoes, and alfalfa sprouts), and something like pathos emerges when family members reflect on their experiences ("Probably 60 percent of my memories come from one single year of my life").

Still, it’s their glamour that holds our attention. There were dozens of similar-minded spiritual groups at the time, but nothing quite like the Source. Comparing the group with the earthier Love Israel Family, Aquarian writes, "[We] had a house in Hollywood and served organic cuisine to rock stars; our women wore custom-designed jewelry…. They had trucks, and Father had a Rolls Royce." The Source Family cut a path defined more by aestheticism than asceticism, and one of the chief pleasures of Aquarian’s book lies in the ephemera — commandments, names, menus, costumes — that, even in their most disposable forms, explode forth with the group’s high hippie style. Davis makes the crucial point that for the Source Family, "spirituality was a creative act of avant-garde exploration. In this regard, cults can be like art collectives."

This is certainly the case with the music, most of which came under the aegis of Ya Ho Wa 13, a core group capable of the thundering Dionysian grooves necessary to underwrite Father Yod’s commanding vocal presence. Besides being incorporated into Source Family meditations, the band played in town (a supplementary CD to Aquarian’s book includes a surreal performance at Beverly Hills High School) and cut numerous one-take albums (she estimates 65 in a two-year period, though many have been lost). The band’s changing permutations and relentless output anticipated the working methods of collective groups such as Acid Mothers Temple and Sunburned Hand of Man.

Can one enjoy the art without being a kind of spiritual tourist? It’s a difficult question, but one worth asking in light of the Source Family’s reemergence amid major excavations of the Age of Aquarius (see: freak folk, hippie chic). It goes without saying, but the various sponsors of this week’s Source events are impeccably hip: Other Cinema, Aquarius Records, and the locus of much of the current Aquarian fever, Arthur magazine.

What distinguishes today’s backtracking from the brief vogue for peace signs and psychedelic guitar washes in the early ’90s is the depth of the fascination. Seekers aren’t contenting themselves with the usual icons; they’re hungrier than that. How else to explain reissues of everything from Terry Riley to Karen Dalton, the popularity of Arthur, and the crowds when Alejandro Jodorowsky’s fantasias (El Topo, The Holy Mountain) played at the Castro Theatre some months ago? A week before the Source Family gathering at ATA, the same venue hosted another convergence of ’60s esoterica: Ira Cohen (the publisher and filmmaker behind the mirror- and mind-warping Invasion of the Thunderbolt Pagoda) introducing Julian Beck’s documentary Paradise Now: The Living Theatre in Amerika.

As the cultivation of influences matures, younger artists and musicians begin to reshape the past in more interesting, nuanced ways. One such avatar is the LA-by-way-of-Baltimore blues banshee Entrance (né Guy Blakeslee). Booking him as the opener for the Ya Ho Wa 13 reunion is a brilliant stroke, since it properly asserts the bill as a cross-generational dialogue. Did Devendra Banhart consult the Source Family group shots before convening his own family portrait for the cover of Cripple Crow (XL Recordings)? Might there be something of Father Yod’s TEN (the eternal now) teachings locked in White Rainbow’s recent bliss-minimalism opus, The Prism of the Eternal Now (Kranky/Marriage)? I’m inclined to think so, especially after having learned that certain taste-making record producers love to gab about the Source Family. It would seem that the sons of Father Yod have become elders in their own right.

Elements of Aquarian culture will always be at best ridiculous and at worst morally vacuous. As Father Yod could pass megalomania off as free-spiritedness, so too is the current crop of (mostly white) aficionados sometimes guilty of confusing creativity with fetish: for surface, ornament, texture, and, inevitably, Native American signifiers. And yet, now as it was then, much of the work being produced is vividly realized and buoyantly energetic. Flipping through The Source, one does indeed experience a kind of timelessness quite apart from the star gates, comets, and prophecies. Forty years later, the book’s disarming photographs do not seem to represent individuals so much as an ideal, a vision of beauty that endures. *

ERIK DAVIS AND ISIS AQUARIAN ON FATHER YOD AND THE SOURCE FAMILY

Sat/17, 8:30 p.m., $7.77

Artists’ Television Access

992 Valencia, SF

(415) 824-3890

www.othercinema.com

BOOK SIGNING AND LISTENING PARTY

Sun/18, 1 p.m., free

Aquarius Records

1055 Valencia, SF

(415) 647-2272

www.aquariusrecords.org

YA HO WA 13

With Sky Saxon and the Seeds, Entrance, and Ascended Master

Sun/18, 8 p.m., $12

Cafe du Nord

2174 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

www.cafedunord.com

Praise the lard

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By L.E. Leone


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CHEAP EATS The problem is, I don’t like applesauce. The solution is to start liking applesauce. There is no other way, given the ridiculous bounty of Sonoma County’s apple harvest this year, plus the clanking, cavernous, empty chill I feel every time I open my checkbook.

I have two apple trees in my chicken yard. Since I wandered and roamed all summer and most of the fall, missing blackberries, missing peaches, missing the pears I poach from a tree down the street and the grapes I borrow from all of the vineyards around here, I am especially determined to use my millions and millions of apples — even the ones that have already fallen and have worms swizzle-sticking out of them since there ain’t no chickens yet to see to this.

I don’t like apple cider. I don’t like apple juice. Apple pie is not my favorite kind of pie. I mean, I eat applesauce, but it’s not a thing to get all excited about, like beet greens or getting to ride up front.

What I do like is apples — crunchy, juicy, crisp, ripe apples. In my hand, while I’m sitting in the tree, under it, or on a ladder. So I eat what I can, and I hand apples to people, like on the train. Or at Sockywonk’s art opening, when I went around the room and handed everyone an apple from my tree.

There’s something sexy about handing someone an apple.

I’m not religious, but sometimes a crazy-ass Bible story can point to something worth something in real life too, like how Jesus turned water into wine, and the next thing you know the French are making French toast out of stale bread. I myself have turned cream into butter, and my brother hammered spigots into trees and turned goo into maple syrup.

Voilà: breakfast!

To hand someone an apple is to say, Take a walk on the wild side!

Whereas there’s nothing at all sexy about applesauce. It’s baby food. It’s windfall, it’s "drop," it’s old. It’s easy to make. Just cut ’em up and cook ’em. Last year I made and canned a load of applesauce, and, so I wouldn’t have to eat it, I gave it all away. And no one made love to me. Well, that’s not true, but it was meat related. It had nothing to do with applesauce.

The year before that it was apple chutney, which didn’t go over so well with the Thanksgiving turkey. I’ve made and canned apple barbecue sauce too. It’s okay.

This year I am determined to learn to like applesauce.

Now, the number one tried-and-true all-time best way to start liking a thing that you didn’t like before, everybody knows, is to put bacon in it. I looked online, but none of the applesauce recipes had bacon in them. Cinnamon. Sugar. One said honey, but the closest any of them came to bacon was butter. I didn’t look real close. Anyway, the lesson of Jesus is to not use recipes. I shut down my computer and galloped into town to buy me some bacon.

My mother wonders if the serpent that spoke to Eve in the Bible story was perhaps actually honey, oozing out of a hive and slithering down the tree of life. Never mind that honey is even less likely to learn a language than snakes are — my mother has been wondering this now, she admitted to me recently, for at least 30 years.

I think she’s brilliant. And persistent. Yet flexible. Thirty years ago, for example, she was keeping bees and eating honey instead of sugar. Honey was good for you. Now it’s the root of all evil.

I never liked honey, and I found out recently that neither does Ruth Reichl, and neither did M.F.K. Fisher. So that’s my literary mom and grandma (they shudder and turn over, respectively, at the thought) and now my mom-mom too. My grandma-grandma couldn’t care less, being dead, but I come from a tradition of honey hating, apparently, and not even bacon is going to change that.

As for applesauce …

If there is in fact a root of all evil, I would like to find out what exactly it is and learn to cultivate and cook with it, like carrots, potatoes, beets.

If there is a root of all good, it’s bacon fat. I cooked the apples in it, slow and long, over the wood stove. Sprinkle of water. Speck of cinnamon. When finally I had what seemed like applesauce, I crumbled the bacon back into it, and now, praise the lard, guess who just loves applesauce?

Why I voted for Josh Wolf

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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION Last week’s mayoral election in my hometown of San Francisco was one of those weird moments that make you think you’re living in a Philip K. Dick novel, looking at hundreds of alternate futures peeling away from the present like little slivers of psychosis. It was a dismal election, in which the incumbent, conservative–for–San Francisco Gavin Newsom, was the only candidate who had any hope of winning. He was practically unopposed, but there was, technically, a cornucopia of candidates, spanning the gamut from qualified but unpopular to completely unqualified and silly, who were on the ballot running against him.

Things being what they are, the silly candidates got the most attention (albeit not most of the votes). Some guy named Chicken, known mostly for his participation in the art festival Burning Man, ran on a campaign pushing people to vote for him as their second choice, since San Francisco has ranked-choice voting. He definitely had great posters, given his connection to the arts community, but not much of a platform. Then there was the sex club owner Michael Powers, who ran on a platform I never quite understood. Powers does have one of the nicest sex clubs I’ve ever seen, called (appropriately enough) the Power Exchange, and I wondered briefly if that might qualify him to run the city. But in the end, he got the fewest votes. And Chicken did not come in anywhere near second.

As I said, there were a few candidates, like Quintin Mecke, with relevant experience, but none had big enough constituencies to pull off a win. So when it came time to fill in my ballot, I voted for a guy who isn’t a joke and has the kinds of political experience that might get him elected in 2035: Josh Wolf.

Media geeks may remember Wolf as the blogger who was sent to prison for refusing to identify for the police some protesters in video he posted of a political demonstration that turned violent. After he got out of prison he went on the Colbert Report, where he came across as well intentioned and with a burning passion for free speech. In the mayoral race, he ran on a platform that emphasized open democratic processes and a good wi-fi plan for the city. Nobody in his campaign thought he would win, and indeed he only garnered about 1,500 votes. But that’s saying something in an election with only 17 percent turnout.

So why didn’t I vote for somebody like Mecke, who had a good position on dealing with homelessness and had already done some work in city politics? Because, as I said, I felt like I was in this Dick novel looking into a zillion possible futures right there in the polling place. There were the sure-to-fail futures represented by good candidates with no hope of winning, and then there was the dark future of creepy joke candidates like Chicken, whose mockery of the voting process was probably part of why so few people turned out for the election. Why vote when running for mayor had been turned into a joke?

So I voted for the best possible future I could find, the future in which, eventually, smart young people who care about freedom of expression online become mature politicians who understand new technologies and the socioeconomic conditions associated with them. Maybe Wolf won’t grow into that politician, but somebody like him will. And that person will probably understand things like how to organize Internet access for low-income city residents and why entertainment companies shouldn’t be allowed to sue people for hundreds of thousands of dollars because they’ve been file-sharing. That person will also understand how easy it is to violate people’s privacy online and will push for regulations that prevent companies and governments from dipping into private digital data supplies.

Of course, the future in which we have politicians like Wolf may never happen. We can’t predict what will become of him, and we can’t know if digital natives will mature into progressives who care about access and privacy reforms. There’s always room for wired neocons and digital Puritans, whose intimate history with the Internet will make them particularly good at legisutf8g censorship purges and invasive data mining. That’s not the future I voted for, but I am always having to remind myself that’s the future I may get. *

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who is living in an alternate future right now.

True grace

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By Rita Felciano

Bay Area Odissi dancer Asako Takami died on November 3, 2007 in San Francisco after a four-year battle with ovarian cancer. She was 47 seven years old. Founder and artistic director of the East Bay-based Pallavi Dance Group, Takami was an exquisite dancer and much-revered teacher of who had lived in the Bay Area for fifteen years. As a sign of their love and affection for this remarkable woman and artist, the Bay Area dance community honored her in a benefit at the Cultural Integration Fellowship in San Francisco on October 27, 2007.

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Born in Nigata, Japan, Takami became interested in Odissi, the Indian classical dance style from the state of Orissa, at the age of 20. In 2000, in an interview with Hinduism Today she explained her fascination with the art. “I’d never seen women who were really beautiful and really powerful. That energy I’d never felt in anything — that was my first impression. I could not forget it.” For the next 15 years she studied with Smt. Kumkum Lal and Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra in India and Japan. She gained international attention through her participation in Ralph Lemon’s Tree, part two of “The Geography Trilogy.” The work was performed at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in October 2000.

Mythili Kumar, Artistic Director of Abhinaya Dance Company in San Jose, remembers Takami for her “exquisite grace and perfect technique.” Her death, she said, “is a tremendous loss to the dance world but I feel so fortunate that we got to know such a wonderful, humble and sweet person. We will miss her so much.” Takami is survived by friends and her partner Ralph Lemon. A memorial service will take place Sun/18 at 2 p.m. in the Bolinas Community Center, 14 Wharf Road, Bolinas.

Seeing Stars

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By Todd Lavoie

Breaking up, breaking down, pulling yourself together, and plunging back into the dating scene to start all over again – sound familiar? Most of us have trod down that road before – the avenue leading us through the entire tumultuous cycle of doomed romance. Oh, the drama! While there certainly are stops along the journey that can be a real hoot – the thrill of discovery, the razzle-dazzle of courtship – later on, many of the landscapes can turn rather damn ugly for a while before things start looking up again.

Eventually, with a bit of persistence, the road will loop right back to the beginning, up with the pretty scenery which lured you within in the first place. Canadian popsters Stars are the audio-tour equivalent of this trek, but here’s the thing: these guides tend to skip right on through the picture-postcard stuff in favor of focusing on what lay farther down the road. The tussles, the tugs-of-war, the tongue-lashings, and then ultimately the breaking up and breaking down and moving on – that’s their turf, their area of authority. So how the hell do they make all of that strain and strife so appealing, so breathtakingly rip-roaring? How do they convince so many hopeful romantics to hop on such a bumpy ride? Get your answers this Tuesday and Wednesday, Nov. 13 and 14, when Stars storm the Bimbo’s stage and explain it all.

As a longtime member of one of those oh-so-sickening “happy loving couples” Joe Jackson sneered about all those years ago from his new wave bachelor pad, maybe I’m no longer an expert on the peaks and troughs of the dating scene – if I ever possessed that sort of wisdom, I gave it up long ago when I met my match. It’s been quite a while since I’ve been single in the city, and yet a spin of a Stars album can send me back to those days quicker than anything, and – here’s a bonus – without resorting to banal chick-flick-isms and the like. Honestly, why does so much so-called “sensitive” art (and maybe I’m being generous here by calling it “art” in the first place) sacrifice intelligence in the process? Me, I’d much rather dip my ears into something a bit more substantial. And that’s the draw of these Montrealers: we’re talking about clever, heartfelt, literate indie-pop here, hurtling from their five fiery souls with such urgency and conviction that even little old domestics like yours truly can pump their fists along to the “love is war” manifestos without feeling the slightest bit out of place. If you’ve ever loved – or, hell, tried to love, even – than any of their four albums will surely speak to some wounded corner of your heart, given the chance. Best of all, you’ll feel better afterwards – a good ‘n deep scrubbing of the insides ain’t ever a bad thing. Whose heart couldn’t benefit from a metaphorical enema now and again?

Collage Party at Creative Growth

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If you’re wondering what to do today, there is surely nothing better than joining The Collage Party at Creative Growth, winners of this year’s Lifetime Achievement Goldie award.
I’ll be there in spirit, because there are few things I love more than collage (I’ve got a dozen unfinished projects at home, so I’ll cut jewels from Sotheby’s catalogues when I get there tonight).

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photo of a Collage Party in Berlin

The Collage Party is one part of Creative Growth’s Public Art Making Day, which connects Winnipeg artist Paul Butler’s nomadic collage project (on view at the space’s gallery) with an audio-visual program curated by Jennifer Maerz and the premiere of A Mixed Bag of Trippy Shorts, a new film (or film collection) by the Prince of Calgary, Guy Maddin, whose new feature-length movie gives Detour’s Ann Savage her best film role in over a half-century.
Ladies and gentleman, take out your scissors and start cutting.

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Ann Savage in Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg

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