Beer

Kim Gale, the world’s nicest guy, 1941-2008

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Kim Gale

1941-2008

By Bruce B. Brugmann

A celebration of the life of Jeremy Kimball (Kim) Gale, a colorful Guardian graphic artist who died on Friday, Nov. 28th, in Marin General Hospital of diabetes and renal disease, will be held at 5 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 11th, at the Paper Mill Creek Saloon in Forest Knolls in Marin County. He was 67.

It is most fitting that Kim’s memorial service will be held in a saloon. He loved the Paper Mill and he loved saloons and he loved to attend and put on parties.

Kim was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and graduated from the New England School of Arts in Boston, then headed west and ended up in San Francisco in the mid-1960s. He soon made his way to the Bay Guardian newspaper and our cramped little office at 1070 Bryant Street. There he found a home, fast friends, a cast of characters, his kind of muckraking left politics, a rollicking good time, and a perfect place for his free-spirited lifestyle.

He was also a talented graphic artist who could do everything from whipping out illustrations on deadline, to designing front pages, to laying out and pasting up pages quickly, to keeping things flowing with professional casualness. Best of all, he could make sense out of and fit nicely into our often chaotic production department.

He was a big guy, with the build of a high school football tackle on a winning team, and he had enormous stamina and energy. I remember him standing at his drawing board, hour after hour, grinding through the piles of ad and editorial copy, and getting the page flats to the printer on time. Then he would head out to the old Ribeltad Vorden bar near Precita Park for his second job of the day as a bartender. Some of us would follow him to the Ribeltad, where Kim would again be standing, this time behind the bar pouring us drinks until closing time.

Through all the pressures of production and bartending, Kim was always the essence of affability and good humor. I never saw him angry or raise his voice. He was, as we often remarked at the Guardian, “the world’s nicest guy.”

Kim loved our Guardian parties and could outlast anybody at the bar or on the dance floor. “He could organize a party like few others,” according to his brother Jon. “He put together a full day of fun for nearly 200 people for his 40th birthday. There were two nationally known bands and other musicians who performed. Children of all ages, their parents and grandparents danced, ate grilled ribs, and barbecued oysters and the wine flowed freely.

“When he was 17, he put together an ice-skating party that included half of Portsmouth High School and college students home on Christmas break. That party was talked about for years. When I attended my 40th high school reunion, it seemed my classmates asked about my brother before they asked me what I’d been doing over the years. Everybody loved Kim. He was a load of fun.”

His favorite job, after leaving the Guardian, was working as a public relations man for the Golden Gate Fisherman’s Association. Executive Editor Tim Redmond remembers Kim calling him one day and asking if he wanted to go fishing. “Sure,” Tim said, quite startled, “but why do you want me to go fishing?” Kim replied, “Because that’s my job, to take reporters out fishing.”

It was the perfect job for Kim – beer, fishing, and a chance to talk with interesting people. He loved every minute and often seemed to marvel at the fact that he was actually getting paid to do it.
Tim and then Reporter Martin Espinoza spent a day with Kim drinking beer and fishing out on the Farallone Islands. With Kim’s guidance, they caught lots of fish and Kim would give the name and nature of each fish.

Kim transformed his fishing expertise into a fishing report and website. Kim had a host of sources out on the lakes and rivers and he would call them and find out where the fish were biting and how to catch them. He put the information up on his website and fisherman would pay to visit the site.

Kim lived for many years in Forest Knolls where, according to daughter Natasha Pemberton, “he enjoyed visiting and dancing with friends at the Pepper Mill. He also loved fishing, telling stories, and being surrounded by family and food. We will remember him for his sense of humor, love of life, and his gentle, good heartedness.”

Kim was preceded in death by his parents Arline and Edwin and son Christopher. He is survived by his brother Jon Gale of Waterboro, Maine, daughters Justine Huntsman of Twist, Montana, and Natasha Pemberton, of Lagunitas, and partner Zoila Berardi, of Grass Valley, and the entire “Berardi” clan, as Natasha puts it. Condolences may be sent to Tashapemberton@hotmail.com.

A new kind of Belgium: Hipster beer, bikes, and bookstores

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Nicole Gluckstern reports from her recent trip to the New Belgium Brewery in Colorado

It’s standing room only in the tasting room of the New Belgium Brewery in Fort Collins, Colorado, and the post-Turkey Day hordes are sampling schooners of brews not yet readily available in California: a kicky espresso ale called Giddy Up, a small-batch cranberry brew, and Mighty Arrow pale ale. There are two tours available — a self-guided walk down NBB memory lane (from hobbyists’ basement to craft-brewing behemoth, the eighth largest brewery in the US), and a tour of the brewery itself. Recently named by the Wall Street Journal as one of the top fifteen small companies to work for in the United States, the front-of-house vibe at NBB is palpably cheery—from the receptionists to the bussers — and our tour guide, Miller is extravagantly even more so.

“I photograph best from the right,” Miller informs the camera-toters, and ushers us into the brewhouse, also known as “The Mothership.”

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The New Belgium crew

Starting off in the smallest section of the brewhouse, we are introduced to the mechanics of a 100-barrel brew system from Germany, a section, Miller admits, that doesn’t get used very often. A dizzying array of Brazil-style “ducts” and pipes criss-crosses the ceiling, and strategically-placed fat-tire cruisers lean rakishly against the walls, with a full array of same parked outside in the employee bike racks. The brewing equipment might be German in origin, but the beers are decidedly not. The Reinheotsgebot or German beer purity law allow for only three ingredients to be used: water, hops, and barley, while the Belgians, as well as the New Belgians “throw in everything including the kitchen sink.” Coriander, Montmorency cherries, wormwood—it’s all fair game.

It’s not touched upon in the tour, but something I notice immediately is how clean the joint is, almost freakishly so. You could lap beer up off the floor in case of an accidental flood, though as we pass by the hulking, in-use 200-barrel system, I sincerely hope it won’t ever come to that. Away from the hustle and bustle of the public tasting room we sample some not-for-sale special brews: a 9% variation of Abbey and a limited-edition sour peach ale. My underage “totally awesome sister” (she made me write that) sniffs my glass and pronounces the fruity/spicy aroma “interesting”. I inform her it is sublime as we head to the bottling plant: The Thunderdome.

Tartufi signs to Southern, closes out 2008 at the Eagle

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This in from the good folks of Bay Area band Tartufi:

“Tartufi signs to Southern Records!!!!

“After months of searching for just the right home for their new album, Lynne and Brian a saw a light on in the far off cabin at Southern Records. A kind maiden at Southern welcomed them in, sat them beside the hearth, and fed them delicious English soup and beer. Well worn from their travels the two musicians listened intently as the label maiden told them tales of battles fought, won, and lost in the kingdom of Indierocklandia. Her eyes were true and her words sure. Their amulet – the one the wizard of the glenn gave them to reveil trickery – confirmed that she was pure of heart. She invited them to stay. They accepted, and and together Lynne and Brian placed the only copy of Nests of Waves and Wire on the great oak table. This is where our story begins…

Waxing fried

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› le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS I got a Brazilian. I play on a Brazilian soccer team. I pass for Brazilian. I pass to Brazilians. I figured, what the fuck, I’ll get a Brazilian.

My Canadian likes it like that. I happened to know this, and did it for him. That way, in case we become a couple and have a fight some day and he says, "What did you ever do for me?" I’ll say, "I got my ass waxed in the middle of winter," and, argument over, we’ll live happily ever after.

Why I don’t write restaurant reviews is illustrated by the following little story:

I ate at my always favorite restaurant, Just For You, three times in 10 days, and two of those times I ordered the hangtown fry. If you don’t know what a hangtown fry is … I feel so sorry for you that my eyes are watering.

My mouth is watering too, because what it is, see, is eggs with onions, oysters, and bacon. Or: everything that makes life lovable, give or take butter. And there’s always plenty of that on the table at my always favorite restaurant.

Just to be clear: this is not a review of Just For You. I already reviewed it eight or nine times. It’s my last-standing always favorite restaurant. This is just a story (true) that has a moral (iffy), and happens to be set at a particular place. In Dogpatch. San Francisco. California.

The hangtown fry’s creation myths center around Placerville, which used to be called Hangtown, and/or San Francisco, which used to be called San Francisco, during the gold rush. Miner walks into a bar, says, no joke, he struck it rich, what’s the most expensive meal they can make him? Cook invents the hangtown fry ($6) on the spot.

Six dollars!!! In the middle of the 19th century!! Do you see my point? Inflation be damned, 160 years later you can get the same damn thing for breakfast at Just For You for just four dollars more!

But that’s not my point. My point is that, if you ask me, the oysters should be breaded and fried — not because that’s the more authentic way to make the dish (although it might be, for all I know), but because it tastes better this way. Trust me. That’s how they made it on Friday. And if I were a restaurant reviewer I would have written, Ohmigod! Ohmigod! Ohmigod! I mean what else can you say about fried oysters and bacon on the same plate? With eggs and onions.

Cornbread …

And then when I went back on Wednesday, with Earl Butter, and ordered the hangtown fry again, the oysters were not at all breaded or fried and the dish was, like, yeah, whatever.

Don’t get me wrong, I love raw oysters. There is no oyster better than a raw oyster. But these wasn’t raw oysters. They were knocked out of a jar (I’m guessing) and cooked into some eggs. And there’s a world of difference between a not-raw jar-knocked oyster breaded and fried, and a not-raw jar-knocked oyster just knocked and notted and cooked into eggs, bacon notwithstanding.

Tell you what, I have never been madder at my always favorite restaurant than I was that Wednesday morning, Earl Butter as my witness. I was madder at them than they used to be at me 10 years ago for trying to keep the place a secret.

Which goes to show you that, in the words of Shakespeare, you never can tell, and therefore shouldn’t write restaurant reviews. You should get a Brazilian.

And a Canadian who appreciates Brazilians.

On exotic-bodied chicken farmers.

If you’re me.

My new favorite restaurant is Bombay. Indian. Only I’m madder at them than at Just For You. It was classic: small white girl orders something hot hot hot, and a knows-better waiterperson goes, "Oh, no no no, that’s already the spiciest dish on our menu." He talks her into medium, and the spiciest dish on their menu turns out to be as spicy as a bowl of corn flakes. Been in a bad mood ever since.

BOMBAY INDIAN RESTAURANT

Daily: Lunch, 11:30 a.m.–3 p.m.; Dinner, 5 p.m.–10:30 p.m.

2217 Market, SF

(415) 861-6655

Beer & wine

AE/DISC/MC/V

L.E. Leone’s new book is Big Bend (Sparkle Street Books), a collection of short fiction.

Gift List #2: Where to shop for the holidays

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

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

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Suds for Santa: City Beer Store

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

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

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

Good Pizza

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Are hotel restaurants second-class citizens? Do they fly coach? Not all of them, certainly, in this city: several of our grandest restaurants, including Masa’s, Campton Place, and the Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton, are in (grand) hotels. Still, the hotel restaurant, as a general proposition, gives a brief shiver. One has the abiding suspicion that these enterprises serve a captive audience consisting of out-of-towners — people here for conventions or conferences, or maybe just plain old tourists. In a tourist town like ours, tourists are the objects of considerable ambivalence. They spend money, yes, which is a particularly attractive gesture during times of economic apocalypse, but they’re also suckers for cable-car rides and dishes like cioppino served in hollowed-out rounds of sourdough bread.

They’re also not too likely to be found at such places as the intersection of Seventh and Mission streets, where, after nightfall, the look and a good deal of the feel of gloomy Gotham City in Tim Burton’s first Batman movie set in. Scraps of stained newspaper rustle in the gutters, and passersby mutter to themselves. You wouldn’t expect to find a hotel here, and yet there is one: it’s called Good Hotel, it’s part of the Joie de Vivre chain (which has made something of an art of bringing alternative style to sketchy or otherwise unlikely sites), and its restaurant is called Good Pizza. Yes, a hotel restaurant that’s a pizzeria! This could be a first.

Tony pizzerias have been blooming in the city in the past few years, and Good Pizza is one of them. It emphasizes high quality ingredients — how about some fromage blanc from Cowgirl Creamery, or bacon from Nueske? — and it’s also bright and good-looking in a way that reminded me of IKEA. The main color is an orange-peach, but there’s plenty of warm wood trim, glass, and shiny stainless-steel for the Stockholm look. The bright and generous lighting, in addition to making the interior glow, also flows out to the street. The pizzeria is a lantern on its otherwise ill-lit corner.

The menu is quite limited, with a twist. On the non-twisty side, you can choose from among nine pies with predetermined toppings; the possibilities here range from a simple, classic margherita pizza (tomato sauce, mozzarella, basil) to a more oddball pie featuring the aforementioned fromage blanc in the company of seasonal organic apples, toasted walnuts, and scallions. The twist is that you can put together your own pizza, which, so far as I know, isn’t permitted at such places as Delfina, Pizzetta 211, Piccino, or Gialina.

Perhaps there is wisdom in not permitting people the freedom to command their own pies. Seinfeld‘s Kramer tried to put cucumbers on a pizza, until Poppie smacked him down. Let this be a lesson to us all.

Cukes aren’t an option at Good Pizza, but one evening we did order a pie that we supposed would be a splendid, if brief, monument to vegetarian possibility but didn’t turn out quite right. The culprit, we decided, was the sun-dried tomatoes, which in certain contexts can add a sausage-y weight but in others can be noisy and uncooperative. Our pizza, a 12-incher ($13), began with the included tomato sauce and a proprietary cheese blend, and we added (besides the sun-dried tomatoes), roasted mushrooms, artichoke hearts, and fresh tomatoes (an extra $1 each). We couldn’t quite put a finger on the exact nature of the clash, although artichoke hearts can be as recalcitrant as sun-dried tomatoes, and the fresh tomatoes had been added after the pizza had been lifted from the oven, leaving them raw and untethered to everything else.

Much simpler and therefore more coherent was the pepperoni pizza ($14 for the 12-incher). Has there ever been a bad pepperoni pizza? This one was made with Hobbs pepperoni, which made it sound a little hoity-toity. But the sausage was not only garlicky and peppery but greasy; it left little pools of orange everywhere, like chorizo in a queso fundido, which made me feel that it was half-time at a college football game somewhere.

No pizza is complete without a salad, and Good Pizza offers one, and only one: the good salad ($8 for the large version, with an herbed flatbread). The salad is basically a Greek salad without feta cheese; its players include tomato and red bell pepper slices, chunks of cucumber, kalamata olives, and artichoke hearts, all bathed in a memorable lemon-oregano vinaigrette.

No pizzeria experience is complete without some beer or wine. You could enjoy a Moretti ($4.50) with your pie — Italian beer is underrated — but a livelier choice might be a glass of red or white wine ($5.75) from Más Wine Company in Cloverdale. In a small irony, the beers (there’s also Coors Light) come in bottles, while the wines by the glass are on tap. The Más 2006-vintage vino was an impressive proprietary blend of syrah and cabernet (with a dash of petite sirah) that tasted strongly of cherries and was indeed, as the winery’s Web site promises, "food friendly" and "approachable."

Given the ovens that must be the center of any pizzeria’s kitchen, it isn’t surprising that Good Pizza’s shiny display cases are full of baked goods, including scones, muffins, and cookies — wonderfully intense lemon-sugar cookies for just 90 cents. Not bad. (The baked goods aren’t actually baked onsite but come from Pacific Baking Company.) The scones and muffins also clue us in that Good Pizza, like many another hotel restaurant, does a smart morning business. Who wouldn’t love the smell of breakfast calzones in the morning, with the sun breaking over the corner of Seventh and Mission and a fresh newspaper to read?

GOOD PIZZA

Mon.–Fri., 7 a.m.–3 p.m., 5–10 p.m.; Sat.–Sun., 8 a.m.–10 p.m.

112 Seventh St., SF

(415) 626-8381

www.jdvhotels.com/dining/good_pizza

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Not quiet

Wheelchair accessible

Cue the clowns

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› steve@sfbg.com

The circus doesn’t come to San Francisco, but its performers do, sexy and talented dreamers who bring a creative energy that has transformed the city’s nightlife and counterculture. Spinning aerialists and dancing clowns now proliferate at clubs and parties, and their number has more than doubled in recent years.

They come from towns across the country — often via Burning Man, where they discover their inner performers, dying to burst out, and other kindred spirits — to a city with a rich circus tradition, which they tweak and twist into something new, a hybrid of the arts and punk sideshow weirdness. It’s the ever-evolving world of Indie Circus.

One of the biggest banners these performers now dance and play under is Bohemian Carnival, which draws together some of the city’s best indie circus acts, including Vau de Vire Society, the clown band Gooferman, and Fou Fou Ha, acts that fluidly mix with one another and the audience.

Last Saturday, as families across the country shopped and shared Thanksgiving leftovers, this extended family of performers rehearsed for that night’s Bohemian Carnival. Fou Fou Ha was in the Garage, a SoMa performance space, working on a new number celebrating beer with founder/choreographer Maya Culbertson, a.k.a. MamaFou, pushing for eight-count precision.

"Do it again," she tells her eight high-energy charges, who look alternatively sexy and zany even without the colorful and slightly grotesque clown costumes they don for shows. I watch from the wings as they drill through the number again and again, struck by how the improvised comedy at the song’s end changes every time, someone’s new shtick catching my eye and making me smile.

"That’s what we love the most, the improv element to it," Culbertson tells me. "We see how far you can take it and not break character."

As Fou Fou Ha wrapped up and headed home to get ready for the show, Gooferman and Vau de Vire were just starting to rehearse and set up over at the party venue, DNA Lounge. Reggie Ballard was up a tall ladder setting the rigging, the dancers stretched, Vau de Vire co-founder Mike Gaines attended to a multitude of details, and Gooferman frontmen Vegas and Boenobo the Klown played the fools.

"I feel like I’m on acid," Vegas said evenly, his long Mohawk standing tall.

"Are you?" Boenobo said, perhaps a little jealous.

"No, I wish," Vegas replied. "But that’s why it’s weird."

"Huh," Boenobo deadpanned. "Weird."

Fucking clowns. I decide to chat up a dancer, Rachel Strickland, the newest member of Vau de Vire, who stretched and unabashedly changed into her rehearsal clothes as she told me about why she moved here from North Carolina in July 2007.

"I waited a long time for this. I always knew I wanted to come to San Francisco and work on the stage, doing something in the line of Moulin Rouge, with the costumes and that kind of decadence and debauchery," Strickland said, oozing passion for her craft and the life she’s chosen, one she said has met her expectations. "I danced as much as I could my whole life and I have an overactive imagination, so it’s hard to shock me."

Not that Vau de Vire hasn’t tried. Shocking people out of their workaday selves is what the performers try to do, whether through vaudeville acts, dance routines, feats of skill, or just sheer sensual outlandishness. Vau de Vire choreographer Shannon Gaines (Mike’s wife of 19 years) also teaches at the local indie circus school Acrosports and, with beatboxer and performance artist Tim Barsky, directs its City Circus youth program, which combines hip hop and other urban art forms with circus.

Gaines has been a gymnast and dancer all her life, skills that she’s honed into circus performances she does through five different agencies, often doing corporate events "that involve wearing a few more clothes" and other more conventional performances.

"The other seems like work to me. But this," she said, a wry smile coming to her lips, "is like dessert. This is what excites me."

She’s not the only one. With their growing popularity, San Francisco’s indie circus freaks are juggling an increasingly busy schedule and developing even bigger plans for the new year, including a national tour and an extravaganza called Metropolus that would reinforce San Francisco’s reputation as the best Big Top in the country.

As Boenobo told me, "It’s a moment in time when there’s something big developing in San Francisco."

MIMES AND PICKLES


The circus arts are ancient, but San Francisco’s unique role in morphing and perpetuating them trace back to the 1970s when Make-a-Circus arrived here from Europe — where circus traditions are strong — and the local, organic Pickle Family Circus was born.

Wendy Parkman, now a board member at San Francisco Circus Center, the circus school she helped develop in conjunction with the Pickles and legendary performer Judy Finelli, worked for both circuses and described how they derived from San Francisco’s vibrant arts scene and its history of grassroots activism.

"It was just a wonderful, spontaneous bubble, a renaissance of circus activity," Parkman told the Guardian. "It was an outgrowth of the fabulous ’60s and the involvement of people with community and politics and art."

Parkman and many others trace the local lineage of a renaissance that came to be known as New Circus back to the San Francisco Mime Troupe, which in 1959 started doing political theater that incorporated comedy (or more specifically, Commedia dell’Arte), music, farce, melodrama, and other aspects of clowning.

"It really started with the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and it flourishes here because of the rich arts culture that we’ve always had here," Jeff Raz, a longtime performer with both original SF troupes who started the San Francisco Clown Conservatory and recently had the title role in Cirque du Soleil’s Corteo, told the Guardian.

"San Francisco felt like a place where things could happen that were socially and politically relevant," Parkman said. "Circus has always been a people’s art form. It’s a great way of getting a lot of people involved because it takes a lot of people to put on a show."

Perhaps even more relevant to the current indie circus resurgence, both Make-a-Circus and the Pickle Family Circus reached out to working class neighborhoods in San Francisco, where they would do parades and other events to entertain the people and generate interest in the circus.

"It was happy, healthy, and accessible to people of all ages, classes, and backgrounds," said Parkman said, who noted that things began to change in the 1980s as funding for the arts dried up and Pickle hit hard times.

"The Pickle Family Circus was a grassroots circus that was part of a real renaissance. Unfortunately, it didn’t go very far," Dominique Jando, a noted circus historian who has written five books on the circus and whose wife teaches trapeze at the Circus Center, told the Guardian.

Still, the Pickle legacy lives on in the Circus Center and Acrosports, making San Francisco and Montreal (birthplace of Cirque du Soleil, whose influence has also propelled the indie circus movement) the two major hubs of circus in North America. Unlike Europe, Russia, and China, where circus training is deeply rooted and often a family affair passed from generation to generation, Jando said, Americans don’t have a strong circus tradition.

"We are really the poor children of the circus world. There is not the same tradition of circus here that there is in Europe," said Jando, a native to France who now lives in San Francisco. "Learning circus is like ballet, and it’s not really in the American psyche to work and train for seven years for a job that offers modest pay."

Homegrown spectacles like Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus commercialized the circus and transformed it into the three-ring form that sacrificed intimacy and the emphasis on artistry and narrative flow. Traditionally in Europe, the clowns and music structured a circus performance, with the punctuation and interludes provided by the acrobats and other performers of the circus arts.

"It’s the superhuman and the supremely human, who are the clowns," is how Raz defines circus. "Clowns are becoming more central to the circus, the supremely human part, and that has a lot to do with our times."

Raz, Jando, and Parkman all pointed to the sterile excesses of the televised, digitized, Twittering, 24/7 world we live in as feeding the resurgence of circus. "It points to a demand by the audience to see something more down to earth and real," Jando said. "There is a need to go back to basics."

"It’s a response to the overly technological world we’re living in. People want to go back to what the human body can do and be in the same place as the performers," Parkman said. "One of the concepts of the Pickles was that it was drawing on the European model. I’d say what’s going on now in San Francisco is an offshoot of what the Pickles did."

Raz said the rise of Indie Circus and its influence on the local arts scene is consistent with his own experiences as an actor and clown. He used to keep two resumes, but performers today are often expected to be steeped in both disciplines, letting one inform the other and opening up new forms of creative expression.

"That melding that you’re looking at, from the club scene to Burning Man, is seeping into a lot of the world," Raz said. "Circus is very much a living art form."

Somehow," Jando said, "it has become a sort of counterculture on the West Coast."

INDIE, THE NEW NEW CIRCUS


Boenobo and Vegas haven’t done any real training to become clowns. They’re performers who use the clown shtick to build a fun and fantastical world off their solid musical base.

"There has to be whimsy. People take themselves so seriously," Boenobo said, noting that it was in response to the serious-minded Winter Music Conference in 2001 where he had the idea of having the members of his new band, Gooferman, dress as clowns. It was a lark, but it was fun and it stuck, and they’ve been clowns ever since.

"The clown thing floats my boat. It is a persona I really dig. And the band kicks ass. We’re all just super tight. The Bohemian Carnival is just a bunch of friends, like a family ejected out of different wombs," he said.

The band does kick ass. Setting aside the clown thing, their tunes are original and fun, evoking Oingo Boingo at its early best, particularly since the summer, when Boenobo and Vegas brought in a strong new rhythm section. But it’s the collaboration with Vau de Vire and the other groups that round out Bohemian Carnival and really bring it to life.

"People say it just blew my mind, and that is the immortality of it," Boenobo said. "It’s super-fucking gratifying, really. It’s just stupid."

They performed last month at the Hillbilly Hoedown inside a giant maze made of hay bales in Half Moon Bay, with the clowns and circus performers creating a fantastical new world for the partygoers. As Gooferman played, Shannon broke the rules and danced atop a hay bale wall behind the band, conveying pure danger and backwoods sex appeal.

"The Gooferman character is called Bruiser or Shenanigans," Shannon said of her performer alter egos. "She does the things that you’d get kicked out of a party for, but I can get away with it."

She considers herself more of a "fluffer" than a dancer, and while Gooferman plays, she gets the band and crowd charged up by pushing the limits of silliness and composure herself and seeing if they’ll follow. "So they’re thinking, wow, if she can do that, I can do all kinds of things."

Their world not only includes practitioners of circus arts (contortionists, aerialists, trapeze artists, clowns, and the like), but also the fashion scene (including outlandish local designers such as Anastasia), painters, sculptors, dancers, actors, fire artists, and DJs like Smoove who bring a certain zany flair to the dance parties.

"It’s hybridized. So it’s not just circus arts with some musical backing," Boenobo said. Instead, it creates a fun and whimsical scene that makes attendees feel like they’re part of something unusual, fun, and liberating. "Immersion is very important."

That’s why the Bohemian Carnival and its many offshoots try to break down the wall between the performers and the audience, who often show up in circus or Burning Man styles, further blurring the borders.

"When you break down that big third wall, there’s no pretense," Mike Gaines said. "It’s really about the party and the community."

Clowns circulate in the crowd, interacting with the audience while aerialists suddenly start performing on ropes or rings suspended over the dance floor. It draws the audience in, opens them up, makes them feel like they’re part of something.

"All of the sudden, people get to realize the dream of running away with the circus, but they get to leave it at the end of the night," Boenobo said with a wink, "which they generally like."

"The line of where circus starts and ends has been blurred," said kSea Flux (a.k.a. Kasey Porter), an indie circus performer who earlier this year started Big Top Magazine (www.bigtopmagazine.com) to chronicle the growing culture. "I love the old-school circus, but as with everything, it needs to be able to evolve to continue to grow."

When he joined the indie circus movement five years ago, performing with the Dresden Dolls, Flux said it transformed his life. He quit his corporate job and started developing his art and trying to make a living in the circus arts, including promoting the culture through the magazine.

"I found the circus and was completely filled with a new life," Flux said, noting that it was through his long involvement with Burning Man that he was exposed to the circus scene. "I think Burning Man gives a platform for it. People get stuck in their jobs and there’s this great week when you can let go and be what you want to be."

That’s also how the talented aerialist and hooper who calls herself Shredder got into this world, which she’s now explored in both the traditional circus and the indie variety, preferring the latter.

"I didn’t even know it was possible, but I just love it," said Shredder, who worked as a firefighter, EMT, and environmental educator before getting into performing through Burning Man, where Boenobo set up the Red Nose District in 2006 for all the many offshoots of the indie circus world that attend the event.

Shredder developed hula hoop and aerial routines, training hard to improve her skills and eventually was hired by the Cole Brothers Circus in 2006 to do aerial acrobatics and hooping. Founded in 1882, Cole is a full-blown circus in the Ringling Bros. tradition, with a ringleader, animals, and trained acrobats. Shredder toured 92 cities in 10 months until she felt the creativity and joy being snuffed out by the rote repetition of the performances.

"We did the exact same show everyday. It was like Groundhog Day but worse; same show, different parking lot," said Shredder, who later that Saturday night did a performance with more than a dozen hula hoops at once. "Then I heard about Vau de Vire through some fellow performers and I just heard they were doing really well and I wanted to be with a group like that … I was just so happy that they were willing to help me design my vision as an artist."

COMING TOGETHER


The Bohemian Carnival name and concept was actually an import from Fort Collins, Colo., where Mike and Shannon Gaines created the Vau de Vire Society as part of the performance and party space they operated there in a 100-year-old church that they purchased.

Mike’s background was in film; Shannon was a dancer; and the world they created for themselves was decidedly counterculture. So was their space, the Rose Window Experimental Theater and Art House, which they operated from 1997 to 2001 and lived in with 20 of their bohemian friends.

"It allowed us to really get to know ourselves. We had all day to just rig up any kind of performance we could imagine," she said. "If you had a crazy idea, you could just come on over at 3 a.m. and do it."

Their signature events were themed parties that would open with performances of about 30 minutes, usually combining music, dance, and performance art, followed by a dance party that was essentially an all-night rave. Initially the performances just drew off of the creativity of their friends, including those Shannon danced with. The themes were often risqué and sometimes included nudity.

The performances evolved over time, bringing in talent such as Angelo Moore of the band Fishbone, who is still a regular part of their crew. They were all attracted to the freaky side of performance art, which drew them toward sideshow, vaudeville, and circus themes and expanding what was technically possible. "We ended up getting a rigger in and just flying around the theater," Mike said.

In 2000, they did their first Bohemian Carnival event. "That’s when we started dabbling in the circus," Mike said.

While the events gained regional acclaim in newspapers and were supported by notables figures, including the town’s mayor, there was a backlash among local conservatives, including some who objected to how a traditional church was being used for raves by these bohemian freaks.

In 2001 they decided to search for a new home. "We looked around for the place that would be most accepting of what we were doing," Mike said.

San Francisco was known to be accepting of their kind, and there were groups here that were edging toward similar kinds of parties, including Infinite Kaos and Xeno (and its predecessor, Awd), as well as the band Idiot Flesh, not to mention the more serious circus being done at the Circus Center and Teatro Zinzanni.

"San Francisco, in this country, is a real hotbed for circus. So we were like, ‘Now we can bring in legitimate circus performers," Mike said. Shannon got a job teaching at Acrosports, allowing her to be immersed full-time in her art and to help grow her community.

Serendipitously, in August 2001, indie rocker Boenobo of the band Chub — a funky ska outfit whose members would wear different costumes to each of their performances — formed Gooferman, which wasn’t originally the clown band it is today: "The idea was you had to be in a costume and you had to be stoned." They morphed into a full-blown clown band, and began collaborating with circus performers.

"But it never coalesced until recently," Boenobo says.

That process probably began around Halloween 2004 at the Vegoose Festival in Las Vegas, when Vau de Vire Society was asked to fill eight hours’ worth of programming and turned to their San Francisco brethren for help, Mike said. They drove or flew about 100 people to the event.

It was also the year Boenobo staged the GoofBall in San Francisco, drawing together a variety of entertainment that helped change the nature of the traditional dance party. Perhaps not coincidentally, it was also the year that reviled President George W. Bush won a second term and when longtime Burning Man artists staged their ill-fated revolt against the event (see "State of the art," 12/10/04).

"When people get too serious, they need this shit even more," Boenobo said of the increasingly irreverent, naughty, and participatory parties he was throwing.

Meanwhile Fou Fou Ha was developing its act. Culbertson and Raymond Meyer were waiting tables at Rose Pistola in 2000 and decided to put their big personalities to work for them, bringing in other performers such as Slim Avocado and setting up routines to perform at CellSpace and other venues.

"We’re sort of like the children of Cirque du Soleil in a way, but we wanted to give it an edge," Culbertson said. "It’s sort of like the second wave vaudeville … now with more of a rock edge."

Fou Fou Ha’s shows play off the dark and surreal kind of performance that is more European than American, a style Culbertson was exposed to while studying choreography during her Fulbright scholarship in Holland in the late 1990s. When she returned to the United States in 2000, "I wanted to form a [dance] company." But she wanted it to be fun. "People really like the idea of serious dance combined with comedy, where you can fall out of your pirouette," she said.

"We’re kind of like guerilla circus," Slim, a trained ballerina, said. "It’s a whole new movement. It’s like ’30s cabaret, but edgier."

Boenobo started the Red Nose District on the playa at Burning Man in 2006, drawing together his Bohemian Carnival friends, a local group of stilt- walkers known as Enhightned Beings of Leisure, installation artist Michael Christian’s crew from the East Bay, the Cirque Berserk folks from Los Angeles, and others from the growing circus world.

"It’s a safe environment to be and do what you want," Gaines said of Burning Man, noting how those breakthroughs on the playa then come back home to the city. And that ethos carries into Vau de Vire, which is truly a collective of like-minded friends, one that eschews hiring outside performers for their shows. "They’re all just part of it," he said.

What they’re all part of — Vau de Vire, Gooferman, Fou Fou Ha, and the rest of the Indie Circus folk — has begun to make a strong imprint on San Francisco nightlife and counterculture. From a performer’s perspective, Boenobo said, it feels good. "Our local family is super comfortable with one another," he said, something he’s never felt before after 25 years as a indie rocker. "It’s rare to not have a lot of ego to deal with, and it’s super rare with this kind of high-quality performance."

But they want more. As Flux said, "We want to take over the world."

WHAT’S NEXT


Slowly, the circus collective members are moving toward becoming full-time freaks. Already, Mike Gaines said most of the 12 to 15 regular Vau de Vire performers practice their art full-time, subsidizing their performances by being instructors in dance or the circus arts.

That’s not to say the parties, with their large number of performers, are lucrative. "With circus, you get a million more people on your guest list, so circus is complicated from a promoter’s perspective," Joegh Bullock of Anon Salon, which incorporates circus acts into its parties, including the upcoming Sea of Dream party New Year’s Eve. "But we love it and wouldn’t do a show without it."

To pay the bills, "we also do a lot of corporate gigs," Gaines says, not proudly. Fou Fou Ha does as well, including performing at the Westfield San Francisco Centre this holiday season. They’re all dying to take their show on the road, but that, too, takes money. "Sponsorship is the key if we’re going to tour with 60 people," said Mike, who’s been working hard on a deal and said he feels close.

Boenobo’s latest plan is Metropolus, a circus-style extravaganza he’s planning (along with Bullogh and Gaines) for next Halloween, hoping to ferry guests (using buses or perhaps even art cars from Burning Man) among several venues in town (such as Mighty, 1015, Temple, and DNA Lounge) and a huge circus tent he wants to erect in Golden Gate Park.

In addition to circus-style entertainment drawn from across the country, he wants to precede the Saturday night finale with three days and nights of workshops and smaller-scale performances. His goal is for Metropolus to because a signature event for San Francisco and the indie circus scene, the equivalent of the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas; the Winter Music Festival in Miami; or the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

The time seems right, with the current financial meltdown creating opportunities even as it makes funding their world domination plans difficult. "Each time you have a crisis like we’re having now, it’s a ripe time for circus," Jando said, noting that circus boomed during the Great Depression and after each of the two World Wars.

And after going through years of pure absurdity in Washington, DC, and on Wall Street, Raz said the clowns of the world — from Stephen Colbert’s conservative television character (who Raz says employs clown techniques in his comedy) to a singer named Boenobo — now have a special resonance with people. As he said, "One of the things clowns do is they live the folly large."

———–

CLOWN’S EYE VIEW

I’ve been following Indie Circus for years, intending to add it to the profiles of various Burning Man subcultures (see www.steventjones.com/burningman.html) that I’ve written for the Guardian, but my reporting on this story began in May. And at the suggestion of Gooferman frontman Boenobo the Klown, I decided to start from the inside and let him turn me into a clown.

As makeup artist Sharon Rose transformed me into a happy clown backstage at DNA Lounge, I asked Boenobo what I should do (besides interview people). We just needed to clown around, keep the drunks from crowding the performers, help clear the stage between acts — whatever needed doing. "We’re the scrubs," he told me, clown-to-clown.

As we spoke, the acrobats stretched, a corpse bride goofed off as she prepared for her aria, members of the Extra Action Marching Band started to slink in, clowns applied their makeup, and female performers occasionally came back from the stage and whipped off their tops.

When Gooferman went on, I still didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing, so I stood next to the stage, watched, and awkwardly tried to be a little goofy in my dancing. A tall, beautiful blond woman stood next to me, catching my eye. She was apparently alone, so after a couple songs, during a lull, I asked her, "So, do you like clowns?"

"I am a clown," she said with a grin.

"Really?" I said. "You don’t look like a clown."

"But I am," she said. "I even do clown porn."

She turned out to be 27-year-old porn star Hollie Stevens, who told me she "grew up as a clown" in the Midwest before moving to California and getting into porn seven years ago. She even starred in the film Clown Porn and still sometimes dons the red nose and face paint for her public appearances, usually just for her own amusement. Stevens once appeared on the Jerry Springer Show as a clown, even getting into the requisite fight on stage with a friend.

"Clowns, you either love them or you hate them," she said, and she loves them.

I asked why she was there and she said that she’d come to see Boenobo. They had talked but never met, and shared a sort of mutual admiration. It was a clown thing. Clowns … they get all the hot chicks.

While we talked, an acrobat worked the pole on the stage, followed by an aerialist performing above the dance floor, one scene woven seamlessly into the other. The clowns of Gooferman puttered around the stage, removing equipment to get ready for the next act, flirting with the girls, trying to scam more drink tickets, or simply entertaining others and themselves.

The life of a clown is rarely dull.

————

UPCOMING INDIE CIRCUS EVENTS

DEC. 5–6


Acrosports Winter Cabaret

639 Frederick, SF

8 p.m., $5–$15

www.citycircus.org

DEC. 12


Auditions for Acrosports’ City Circus

Call (415) 665-2276, ext. 103 for appointment

DEC. 12-14


Frolic: CircusDragBurlesque Festival

Featuring Fou Fou Ha, Anna Conda, and more

CounterPULSE

1310 Mission, SF

8 p.m., $100

www.counterpulse.org

1-800-838-3006

DEC. 20


Open House and Holiday Carnival

San Francisco Circus Center

755 Frederick, SF

10 a.m.–4 p.m., free

Pratfalls and Rising Stars

7 p.m., $12 adults, $8 children

San Francisco Circus Center

Tickets and info at www.circuscenter.org

DEC. 20


Storytime Festival, featuring Vau de Vire Society

4–7 p.m., "Tales of Enchantment," (G-rated show) 8–11 p.m., "Storytime for the Inner Child," (R-rated show)

$30–$50

Palace of Fine Arts

3301 Lyon, SF

www.storytimefestival.org

————

>>More: Read Marke B.’s club review of Bohemian Carnival

Sleigh bells ring, are you drinking?

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By Molly Freedenberg

Oh, it sure is party season. How do I know? The costumes and formalwear strewn across my floor, the open bottle of hangover-fighting Vitamin B on my nightstand, and the sense of anticipation I get just looking at the calendar. Now, I know San Francisco is a party town, and there’s really no season that isn’t chock full of events worth attending. So what makes this one special? Its my favorite party season. I love the rain and the cold. I love Christmas in all of the ways it’s taken seriously (Dickens Fair) and not so seriously (Santacon).

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All Santa wants for Christmas is a mashup party! Bootie SF on Dec. 13 is the official post-Santacon event again this year.

Now, I have friends who would argue that party season officially started with Burning Man. But as far as I’m concerned, it started last Friday night with a fete at the Ambassador hosted by Hendrick’s gin (open bar! ouch.) and Nerve.com. Not only was this schizophrenically-themed 20s/30s/Edwardian/Victorian party was hosted in the perfect venue, and not only did almost every guest actually dress up (bonus points for the fact that I knew only a handful of the fedora-ed attendees), and not only were the cocktails so tasty that they pleased even this gin-skeptic, but the performances were fantastic.

Miss Kitten on the Keys, a regular at Hubba Hubba Revue, was the right combination of bubbly and bawdy. Trixie Little and the Evil Hate Monkey took Acrobalancing and burlesque to a place that was both funny and sexy. The two stripping chanteuses dazzled with voices, costumes, and choreography. And I’m not sure what to say about the blonde bombshell who lost her clothes and gained a giant martini glass chair except that I’ve never seen such a professional burlesque dancer up close.

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The lovely Trixxie Carr, pretty in purple (with some guy) at Bootie SF on Nov. 22, will make an apperance at the Lusty Lady Holidy Party on Dec.9. Photo by Tim Farris.

I barely sobered up in time to stop by the next night’s Bootie SF, an always fabulous party (which my dance troupe, the Cheese Puffs, happened to perform at) that featured an all-request set by live mashup band Smashup Derby. I’d be hard pressed to find a more generous, fun-loving crowd than Bootie, or more impressive and lovable hosts than Adrian, Mysterious D, and Trixxie Carr. Next up was the Black Rock Arts Foundation fundraiser at the Bentley Reserve, where we managed to miss all the entertainment but not the gorgeous setting and even more gorgeous crowd (plus, beds? how can you go wrong?). And Sunday saw the burner beourgeoisie headed to Supperclub (beds again! The weekend’s theme?) for the Five & Diamond anniversary party, a beautiful and celebratory affair featuring pretty clothes and even prettier people.

It took nearly ’til Thanksgiving to recover from all that beauty (OK, and booze), but I think I’m ready for what’s coming up in the next few weeks. If my health and hangover remedies cooperate, I’ll be attending a good portion of the following:

THURSDAY, DEC. 4

Visual Vaudeville & Built Burlesque
6pm, free
Brava Theater
2789 24th St., SF
pandorastrunk.com

Brava Theater and Pandora’s Trunk (the art/fashion collective on Lower Haight co-founded by designer Miranda Caroligne) take over the enormous and gorgeous vaudeville theater to fill it with music, burlesque, a narrative fashion presentation, and an indie craft and design show. Featured designers include Bad Unkl Sista, Miss Velvet Cream, Medium Reality, and Ghetto Goldilocks. Sure to be a good time, helped along by Patz & Hall wine and Lagunitas beer.

Pirate Cat Radio Benefit Debacle!
9pm, $7 donation to Pirate Cat Radio
Fat City
314 11th St., SF

I don’t know much about Pirate Cat Radio, but I do know about Hubba Hubba Revue – and if those crazy burlesqueteers are involved (which they are!), you know you’re in for a good time. The evening features live burlesque and performances by The Yes Go’s, Stigma 13, and October Allied.

Sticky buns

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› le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS This Thanksgiving I am thankful for sushi, pre-cum, the hangtown fry, clam chowder, big green salads, soft-boiled eggs, carnitas tacos, biscotti, roasted chickens, cum, day-old sticky buns, and Canada. However, I have no plans for Thanksgiving dinner.

How can this happen? My favorite holiday! My only holiday!

Deevee and Gilley are going camping. I’m invited, but don’t like to be cold. The Maze invited me to San Diego for dinner with his parents. I like to be warm, but the train ticket costs $150 and you have to spend half the time on a bus. What kind of train ticket is that?

My new favorite country is Canada. Truth be told, Canada was my old favorite country too, only for different reasons. I used to like Canada because it seemed less like a country than other countries, the mouse sleeping next to the elephant. Its people, peaceful and funny.

Second City Television was my favorite TV show. "O Canada" stirred me more than "The Star-Spangled Banner." I almost died in Canada, in the late 1990s, and have only been back once since, to play cowboy songs for elderly shut-ins in Ottawa.

That was five years ago, and I was in a van. You don’t need a passport to get into Canada, just to come back. I learned. The hard way. I’m afraid to fly and can’t afford to and have no plans to visit my new favorite country, but that’s OK. Apparently, it will come to me.

In Canada all the animals are moose. If you have mice, and you trap one, you will find on closer inspection that your mouse is a little tiny moose. If you have a cat and a dog, you have a moose and a moose. Small ones. If you go to the zoo, or the circus, and they feature an elephant, it will be played by a humongous moose. And if you see an actual-size moose — say, on the side of a small road in the mountains — then that’s a moose too.

Thanksgiving in Canada happens in October and is not a big deal, according to my Canadian. After work I picked him up at the airport, and I took him out for sushi and then to a downtown hotel with clawfoot bathtubs.

We hardly slept that night, or the next, or the next. The groundwork had been laid online, which doesn’t sound right, I realize. But besides sex, we drove around and talked about food, and movies, and food. Fuck history, Canadians know as much about American barbecue as most Americans do. We’d eaten at a lot of the same places in the South. He knew where to get fried chicken in Missouri, and Buffalo wings in Buffalo. I showed him where to go for breakfast in San Francisco, lunch on the Sonoma Coast, and dinner in the wine country.

He bought me a bottle of great whiskey and a big book about road food. All weekend that weekend I didn’t check my e-mail or answer my cell phone, and my friends worried about me. They needn’t have. I was visiting Canada, in the comfort of my own county and country. And I found it infinitely sweet, hospitable, romantic, and, best of all, game.

The boys around here, you know, the too-cool-for-drool outside-the-box ones who describe themselves on the dating sites as open-minded, adventurous, looking for new experiences, blah blah barf … I hate to say this, my rad hipster sexually-liberated countrymen, but you were just schooled in all of the above by a middle-aged Canadian tweed with daughters and a favorite toothpaste.

He didn’t know I was trans when he first wrote to me, just liked my pics and words and food-itude. I told him right away. I told him and showed him: look, man, an outtie. And unlike you, he shrugged. Never been with a body like mine, he said, never even thought about it. But … he couldn’t wait to find out.

And did.

And loved it. And loves me. He said so.

"I love you too," I said. And I took him back to the airport and then went to play soccer as usual.

My new favorite restaurant is Sushi Man. Just for the name. That’s all. The sushi was … well, nobody got hurt or anything. I got sashimi hamachi and some saba, and the steamed spinach thing with sesame seeds, which was great. Better than the sushi. Nice atmosphere, surreal service, nobody there … *

SUSHI MAN

Daily: 5 p.m.–10:30 p.m.

731 Bush, SF

(415) 981-1313

Beer & wine

MC/V

Politics behind the picture

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› news@sfbg.com

The new Harvey Milk movie, which opens later this month, begins as a love story, a sweet love story about two guys who meet in a subway station and wind up fleeing New York for San Francisco. But after that, the movie gets political — in fact, by Hollywood standards, it’s remarkably political.

The movie raises a lot of issues that are alive and part of San Francisco politics today. The history isn’t perfect (see sidebar), but it is compelling. And while we mourn Milk and watch Milk, we shouldn’t forget what the queer hero stood for.

Milk started out as something of a pot-smoking hippie. “The ’70s were a hotbed of everything,” Sup. Tom Ammiano remembered. “Feminism, civil rights, antiwar.” Milk’s early campaigns grew out of that foment. “Sure, he wanted to be elected,” Ammiano told us. “But the main ingredient was courage. He was fighting with the cops when they raided the bars … what he did was dangerous.”

Milk never would have been elected supervisor without district elections — and the story of district elections, and community power, ran parallel to Milk’s own story, for better and for worse.

Milk tried twice to win a seat on the at-large Board of Supervisors and never made the final cut. But in the mid-1970s, a coalition of community leaders, frustrated that big money controlled city policy, began organizing to change the way supervisors were elected. The shift from an at-large system to a district one in 1976 was a transformational moment for the city.

“I think that San Francisco doesn’t always appreciate the sea change that district elections brought,” Cleve Jones, a queer activist and friend of Milk who helped Dustin Black write the script for Milk, told us. “It wasn’t just important to the various communities that had been locked out of power at City Hall — it was the glue that began to grow the coalitions.”

Milk was elected as part of what became the most diverse board in the city’s history, with Asian, black, and gay representatives who came out of community organizations. The board, of course, also included Dan White, a conservative Irish Catholic and former cop. And it was the assassination of Milk and Mayor George Moscone by Sup. White — and the civic heartbreak, chaos, and confusion that followed — that allowed downtown forces to repeal district elections in 1980. That gave big money and big business control of the board for another 20 years, a reign that ended only when district elections returned in 2000.

Milk was a gay leader, but he was also a tenant activist, public power supporter, advocate for police reform, supporter of commuter taxes on downtown workers, and coalition-builder who helped bring together the labor movement and the queer community. It started, ironically, with the Teamsters.

“Those of us who came out of the antiwar movement remembered that the Teamsters supported Richard Nixon until the very last moment,” Jones said. “And they were seen as one of the most homophobic of all the unions.”

But in the 1970s, the Teamsters were at war with the Coors Brewing Company, and trying to get San Francisco bars to stop serving Coors beer. Allan Baird, a Teamsters leader who lived in the Castro District, saw an opportunity and contacted Milk, who agreed to help — if the Teamsters would start hiring gay truck drivers.

“It wasn’t just San Francisco and California,” Jones recalled. “We got Coors beer out of every gay bar in North America.” And gays started driving beer trucks.

Today, the queer-labor alliance is one of the most powerful, effective, and lasting political forces in San Francisco.

Milk was never popular among the wealthier and more established sectors of the gay community; he believed in a populist brand of politics that wasn’t afraid to take the fight to the streets — and beyond San Francisco. A central theme of the film is the fight against Proposition 6, a 1978 measure by conservative state Sen. John Briggs that would have barred homosexuals from teaching the public schools.

Milk, defying the mainstream political strategists, insisted on debating Briggs in some of the most right-wing parts of the state. He refused to downplay the gay-rights issues. And when Prop. 6 went down, it was the end of that particular homophobic crusade.

Milk was always an outsider, and he ran for office as a foe of the Democratic Party machine. “His campaign for state Assembly was all about Harvey vs. the machine,” former Sup. Harry Britt told us. “His main supporter was [Sup.] Quentin Kopp. He didn’t run as the liberal in the race; he ran against the machine.” And for much of the next 20 years, progressives in San Francisco found themselves fighting what became the Brown-Burton machine, controlled by Willie Brown and John Burton.

It’s too bad the movie wasn’t released early enough to have had an impact on Prop. 8, the anti same-sex marriage measure that just passed in California. Some critics of the No on 8 campaign say the message was far too soft, and that a little Harvey-Milk-style campaigning might have helped.

But for us, one of the most striking things about the movie is the fact that Milk and his lover, Scott Smith, were able to leave New York with very little money, arrive in San Francisco, rent an apartment on their unemployment checks, and open a camera store. That wouldn’t be possible today; the Harvey Milks of 2008 can’t live in the Castro — and many can’t live anywhere in San Francisco. The city is too expensive.

In fact, for all the victories Milk won, for all the successes of the movement he helped to build, much of his agenda is still unfulfilled, even in his hometown.

The first time Harvey Milk gives a public speech in the film, he’s standing on a soapbox … literally. He brings out a box with “soap” written on the side; a funny gag, but a serious and telling moment for him and San Francisco.

The issues that Milk spoke so passionately about in that speech included police reform, ending the war on drugs, protecting tenants and controlling rents, and improving parks and protecting people’s rights to use them liberally — all issues with as much resonance today as they had back then.

The movie leaves us with a painful question. For all the celebration of Milk’s legacy by San Franciscans of various political stripes, why have we made so little progress on some of his signature issues? We celebrate the martyr — but often forget what the man really advocated.

Support for gay rights is de rigueur for anyone who aspires to public office in San Francisco. But a quarter of city residents still voted to take away same-sex marriage rights in this election. Many older gay men today are barely able afford their AIDS medication and rent. And transgender people and other nontraditional types are still ostracized, unable to get good jobs, and sometimes treated contemptuously when they seek help from their government.

Sure, marijuana is supposedly legal for medical uses in California and pot clubs proliferate around San Francisco. But even these sick patients are still targeted by the federal government and its long arms in San Francisco, including former US Attorney Kevin Ryan, whom Mayor Gavin Newsom named his top crime advisor and who is now seeking to crackdown on the pot clubs. Why, 30 years after Milk was shot, does one have to claim an ailment or illness to smoke a joint in this town?

Two-thirds of city residents are renters, a group Milk championed with gusto, but we barely beat a state initiative in June that would have abolished rent control. Housing is getting steadily more expensive. And in this election, Newsom and his downtown allies opposed Proposition B, an affordable housing measure, and Proposition M, a common sense measure to prohibit landlords from harassing their tenants. Such harassment is a common tactic to force tenants from rent-controlled units, even though the City Attorney’s Office is currently suing the city’s biggest landlord, Skyline Realty, for its well-documented history of harassment. Newsom may be the champion of same-sex marriage, but when it comes to issues like tenants’ rights, we suspect that Milk would be appalled at Newsom’s gall.

Ted Gullicksen of the San Francisco Tenants Union noted that in the wake of Milk’s death and before the repeal of district elections, San Francisco established rent control and limits on condo conversions. The tenant movement has grown steadily stronger and more sophisticated, he said, as it had to in order to counter increasing economic and political pressures and creative gambits by landlords.

“The city has gentrified phenomenally since that time, and that’s put tremendous pressure on tenants and on condo conversions,” Gullicksen told us. “It continues to be a real struggle.”

Police reform was also a huge issue for Milk and his gay contemporaries, who suffered more than most groups from the behavior of thuggish cops protected by weak oversight rules and a powerful union. And today, the Police Officers Association is stronger and meaner than ever, but the oversight has improved little, as both the Guardian and San Francisco Chronicle have explored with investigations in recent years.

And in our public parks, San Francisco officials in recent years have banned smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, playing amplified music, and even gathering in large numbers without expensive, restrictive permits. Even in the Castro, where Milk and his allies took it as a basic right to gather in the streets, Newsom and the NIMBYs unilaterally cancelled Halloween celebrations and used police to chase away citizens with water trucks.

Is this really the city Harvey Milk was trying to create? In the film, he talks about transforming San Francisco into a vibrant, tolerant beacon that would set an example for the rest of the country, telling his compatriots, “We have got to give them hope.”

Well, with hope now making a comeback, perhaps San Francisco can finally follow Milk’s lead on the issues he cared about most.

>>Back to the Milk Issue

Meatballs

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Earl Butter made the sauce and I put meatballs in it. You could smell this on the stairs. Between the first and second floors it was something, and between the second and third it was something else. The meatballs had beef and pork and cheese, garlic, parsley, an egg, some old bread crumbs … basically, whatever I could find in Earl Butter’s kitchen. I browned them in bacon fat; then, while they were bobbing in the saucy gurgle, I washed the soccer off of me in Earl Butter’s shower.

Five zip we’d lost. I tossed a salad, boiled spaghetti, Wayway brought the bread, and it was Sunday afternoon all over again. My hair air dries. I do not use hair dryers.

I use a towel.

The occasion: a visit from our own private Idahoan, Johnny "Jack" Blogger, né Johnny "Jack" Journalism, né Johnny "Jack" Poetry, the master of doing what he does, and being what he does, and words and I guess horses.

There were eight people total gathered around a couple of makeshift tables, spinning mismatched forks and raising glasses and bottles and eyebrows to bad jokes, good food, and questionable politics. We laughed until it hurt, ate until it hurt, and then one of us had to go give a massage, another was late for load-in and sound check, a couple needed a nap, and dirty dishes beckoned.

Somehow Johnny "Jack," our guest of honor, wound up doing most of them. I helped. When I go to Idaho, Johnny "Jack" and his wife, Mrs. "Jack," always have a big pot of something or other waiting for me. Mac and cheese. Red beans and rice. It’s a long drive.

When he showed up here, a couple nights before spaghetti, I had jambalaya, which is my new favorite thing to make. And eat. I am eating the leftovers as we speak, and I gotta say: yum. Every time I make jambalaya I have to call Crawdad de la Cooter five times to ask about this or that or rice, and I suppose that’s partly what I love about jambalaya. That tech support comes with it.

You can toast the rice first, or not, or sauté it a little with the "holy trinity" of onions, celery, peppers, and garlic, and, oh, you can imagine how a chicken farmer loves four-thing trinities!

But this time Crawdad called me. "What are you cooking?" she asked.

"Jambalaya," I said. "Here. Talk to John." And I handed him the phone. My two favorite laughs, his and hers, but I could only hear one of them and wished I had a speaker phone.

At the show that night three of our spaghetti friends were playing in two different bands. Everyone was there and I talked to a lot of people I hadn’t seen in some time and lost my voice. That’s just one reason why this column isn’t exactly saying anything.

On the way back to the woods we stopped at a late-night Chinese joint for something to eat. Up high near the ceiling in a corner was a medium-size fish tank with medium-size fishes swimming back and forth, winding around like letters, trying real hard to spell P-O-R-K and B-E-E-F and even C-H-I-C-K-E-N, and really only looking like fish in a fish tank. And tasty ones at that. Which reminded me of this article even before I started to write it.

Johnny "Jack" Blogger has been blogging and talking a lot about nostalgia. This ain’t that. My own happy happy sizzly sadness is set some time in the future. I don’t want to be fried, or cooked in a clay pot either, but there is something delicious in my medium-size heart, flop and roll and apropos of none of the above. I twist, I turn, I sink and spin, and can’t even begin to spell it.

My new favorite restaurant is Lee Hou, which claims to be "the very first Chinese restaurant on Clement." So … OK, so they’ve had a long time to perfect their salt and pepper chicken wings. We also got lamb sticks, because that seemed like good road food, but the wings were 10 times better and soared us, and we got crumbs and bones all over Johnny "Jack"<0x2009>‘s car, not mine. Damn it! Some things we didn’t eat: snails, duck tongue, and goose intestines. Oh, and fish. *

LEE HOU

Sun.–Thurs., 8 a.m.–1 a.m.; Fri.–Sat., 8 a.m.–2 a.m.

332 Clement, SF

(415) 668-8070

Beer and wine

MC/V

I remember Harvey

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Toward the end of the supervisorial campaign in 1973, I got an intercom call from Nancy Destefanis, our advertising representative handling political ads. Hey, she said, I got a guy here by the name of Harvey Milk who is running for supervisor and I think you ought to talk to him.

Milk? I replied. How can anybody run for supervisor with the name of Milk?

Nancy laughed and said that wasn’t his big problem, it was that he was running as an openly gay candidate, but he had strong progressive positions and potential. Nancy, a former organizer for Cesar Chavez’ farm workers, was tough and savvy, and I always took her advice seriously. "Send him in," I said.

And so Harvey Milk came into my office, at the start of his political career, looking like a well-meaning amateur. He had a ponytail and mustache, wore Levi’s and a T-shirt, and talked breathlessly about his issues without a word about how he intended to win. His arguments were impressive, but he clearly was not ready for prime time. We gave him our "romantic" endorsement. He got 17,000 votes.

I also advised him, as diplomatically as I could, that if he wanted to be a serious candidate, he needed to clean up his act.

Two years later, Milk strode into the Guardian in a suit and tie as a serious candidate ready to win and lead. As our strong endorsement put it, "Now he’s playing politics for real: he’s shaved his mustache, is running hard in the voting areas of the Sunset, and has picked up a flock of seemingly disparate endorsements from SF Tomorrow, the Building and Trades Council, Teamsters (for his work on the Coors beer boycott) and the National Women’s Caucus." On policy, we said he "would put his business acumen to work dissecting the budget" and "would fight for higher parking taxes, no new downtown garages, a graduated real estate transfer tax, an end to tax exemptions for banks and insurance companies, dropping the vice squad from the police budget, and improved mental health care facilities." He couldn’t get enough votes citywide to win, but he came closer.

In 1976, Milk decided to run for a state Assembly seat against Art Agnos. We decided to go with Agnos, largely because he was familiar with Sacramento as an aide to former assemblyman Leo McCarthy and also because our political reporter covering the race, Jerry Roberts, said that Agnos was much better on Sacramento issues during the campaign. We decided that Agnos was right for Sacramento and that we needed Milk in San Francisco. I have often wondered if we had endorsed Milk, and he had won, if he would still be alive.

The next year, when the city shifted to district supervisorial elections, Milk won and became the first openly gay elected official in the country. He would always say, "I am not a gay supervisor, I am a supervisor who happens to be gay."

On the afternoon of Friday, Nov. 24, 1978, Milk dropped by to see me at the Guardian. He was a bit dejected. Things were getting tougher for him on the board. He was getting hassled by his friends and allies who were telling him, as he put it, "if you don’t vote for me on this one, I’m going to stop supporting you." He said he was going to press on, but from then on he was going to work more closely with the Guardian on legislation and on giving us information.

Then he smiled the famous Harvey Milk smile and said as he left my room, "I want to be your Deep Throat at City Hall."

Those were the last words I ever heard from Harvey Milk. He was assassinated three days later.

Meet the lovely ladies of Carrots

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SFBG’s Justin Juul continues his fashionable Meet Your Neighbors series with an somewhat-organic boutique makeover

carrots0801a.jpg

Carrots is one of those fancy boutiques you pass on your way to work and think Jesus, who the hell can afford this stuff? At least, that’s what I was thinking as I peered into the store’s window and saw a mannequin wearing a wool sweater and a button-up shirt with a $280 price tag. Beyond that was a palace filled with bearskin rugs, rusted machinery, and high-end apparel. On a normal shopping day I would have scoffed and taken my business elsewhere. But today was not a normal day. I had been sent to Carrots by the editor of a culture-and-nightlife magazine to check out the boutique’s new promotion: styling appointments for men who love beer. That’s how I met the first heiresses I will probably ever know, the proud owners of Carrots, Catie and Melissa Grimm of Grimmway Farms. They bought me beer, dressed me up in some swanky stuff, and even consented to this no-holds-barred interview about what its like to run a fashion emporium and live on karat juice.

carrots0802a.jpg
Ooh la la!

SFBG: How did you guys get into the fashion thing?
Melissa Grimm: We’re sisters and when we were growing up we always talked about owning a business together. When we moved here three years ago we just fell in love with the city, but after about six months we realized that something like this was missing; you know, a store that combines men’s and women’s fashion. We wanted to create an environment you could just walk into and not feel intimidated, just a really comfortable space with a nice selection of hard to find things. We have handmade belts from Geoffrey Young, for example. Almost no one else has those.

SFBG: Yeah, you have a lot of stuff I’ve never seen, that’s for sure. Cool stuff. Did you go to fashion or design school or anything?
Melissa: No, but we know a lot about fashion and we try to pride ourselves on things that are hard to find. It comes from living a life of travel, growing up with a mother who’s very elegant and stylish. She sort of instilled that in both of us.

carrots0803a.jpg
The sisters, anything but Grimm

SFBG: Yeah, my dad was a Marine so…

Catie Grimm: Um, yeah. Also, we both love to travel. It’s our favorite thing to do. And we love fashion. So we try to incorporate those two passions in everything we do.

SFBG: So you carry designers from all over the world then?

Chinafornia

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› paulr@sfbg.com

The specter of linoleum haunts the neighborhood Chinese restaurant. Many of us have paid visits to these purgatories, where the food is tasty and cheap but the lighting is harsh and fluorescent and the flooring looks as if it had been laid down, without much love, during the Eisenhower administration. One ponders this trade-off, wondering, in particular, whether it’s inevitable. Then one goes to Kathy’s California Chinese Cuisine and finds an answer.

Rumors of Kathy’s’ culinary excellence had been reaching me for some time. I had seen the place often enough, certainly, in its snug little commercial strip at the dizzying confluence of Dewey and Laguna Honda boulevards and Woodside Avenue, just steps from Muni’s Forest Hill metro station. But I only recently stepped inside for the first time and felt myself transported to … Vienna! Of course, I had only just been to the real Vienna — for the first time — over the summer, so that wedding-cake city in the heart of Mitteleuropa was on my mind.

Kathy’s isn’t about wedding cakes or Mitteleuropa, but it does offer surprisingly gracious old world atmospherics, if one discounts the burbling aquarium just inside the front door, the scattering of gourds on the floor (in honor of Halloween and the autumn harvest), and the general storefront-spaciness of things. (There is no host’s podium, just the fish tank, while the server’s station is all the way at the rear of the dining room, like the check-in counter for an obscure airline in an obscure country.)

The floor is laid with handsome tiles that look as though they were quarried from a stormy sea, the walls are a discreetly sensuous peach color, and soft light flows from a pair of rather resplendent glass chandeliers, as well as from sconce lamps on the wall. From an unseen sound system I heard playing one evening — for our final Viennese touch — the final movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 22 in E flat major. Also some Bach. The music was present but not obtrusive, which these days seems to be very much the exception to the rule. Considering that Kathy’s does a lively takeout business, the restaurant’s dining room is a startlingly attractive place to sit and have dinner, at least if your idea of having dinner includes conversation.

When "California" is used as a modifier with respect to some traditional cuisine, I immediately think of zucchini. Zucchini grow like weeds in our part of the world, and they turn up in highly unlikely spots, such as hor mak talay, the Thai dish of coconut milk and red curry. And they turn up at Kathy’s, along with eggplant, tomatoes, and peppers. Somewhere in the kitchen is a ratatouille crying out to be made.

Kathy’s isn’t that Californianized, or Californicated, but there is a nice plate of stir-fried vegetables, the vegetable deluxe ($7.95), that features plenty of shredded napa cabbage, carrot coins, broccoli florets, and chunks of Japanese eggplant, with plenty of garlic and ginger and — the special touch — a ring of tissue-thin tomato slices arranged around the edge of a platter, like a link fence. The fence is both visually attractive and the source of a subtle acid zip.

Most of the food has a familiar north-China look, although there is the occasional wrinkle, such as red dumplings ($6.95), an octet of Chiclet-shaped, half-dollar-sized dough packets filled tight with minced, gingery pork and bathed in a thick, glossy reddish-orange sauce that’s both sweet and hot.

Similar dumplings recur in the wonton soup ($6.95 for two), although the real stars here are the chicken stock (intensified through reduction and not too salty) and the wealth of vegetables bobbing alongside the wontons. The roll call here includes more shredded cabbage and broccoli florets, along with quarters of button mushroom and (a non-vegetable) peeled shrimp.

Our intel source, a local, suggested that we would find the walnut prawns ($10.95) exceptional. Since I have never found walnut prawns exceptional, I was prepared to be disappointed. But … Kathy’s walnut prawns are exceptional! The large, plump shrimp are shelled, then stir-fried in a creamy sauce spiked with some sort of liquor (brandy or rum?), and scattered with candied walnuts and raisins. It is very tricky business to introduce this much sweetness into a savory dish; a balance must be struck, lest you end up with some kind of shrimp dessert. Kathy’s version strikes that balance.

Tangerine beef ($10.95), meanwhile, left me secretly chagrined, since the flaps of beef, while tasty, were not coated and deep-fried to heart-stopping crispness before being tossed in a thick and glossy orange sauce. The drill here was more of a conventional stir-fry (with a medley of vegetables) in a soy-based sauce, with the tangerine figuring as an occasional burst of zest. More interesting, or at least unexpected, or unadvertised, were the lithe slices of green apple ringing the platter; their sweet-tartness helped balance both the saltiness of the soy sauce and the richness of the meat.

Other pluses: service is practiced and friendly. You can get brown rice instead of white. Transport logistics are, apart from the terrifying intersection, rather painless, with Muni just steps away and street parking quite easy. The relaxed, well-mannered crowd is easy to take. And, on that happy note, I’m done with Chinese food for a bit. Probably.


Kathy’s California Chinese Cuisine

Dinner: nightly, 5–10 p.m.

Lunch: Mon.-Fri., 11 a.m.–3 p.m.

408 Dewey, SF

(415) 665-6888

Beer and wine

MC/V

Not noisy

Wheelchair accessible

My kingdom for a dumpling

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› paulr@sfbg.com

As kingdoms go, Kingdom of Dumpling is a rather Lilliputian affair — a runt, actually, if that word can be used in conjunction with "kingdom." Dumplings are small objects, of course, even the Bavarian ones made from potatoes, also known as knödel, and they seem even smaller when described in the singular. Kingdom of Dumpling? Is there only one kind of dumpling, or only one permitted per customer, or (our worst-case scenario) only one of one kind permitted per customer? The answers are No, No, and No — but I leap ahead.

The Kingdom (an adjunct of Kingdom of Chinese Dumpling, on Noriega) opened last spring, in the snug Sunset space once occupied by the excellent David’s Kitchen. That restaurant was a culinary multilinguist, fluent in the major idioms of east and southeast Asian cuisines; it was like a miniature Straits Cafe. The new place has retained much of that spirit, right down to the Magic Marker board that hangs above one corner of the dining room proclaiming the day’s specials, such as duck curry. David’s Kitchen offered a similar dish, if I remember rightly.

What is different is the massive infusion of dumplings, steamed buns, and general dim-summery. If you’re a haunter of noodle bars, this is an alternate universe. It’s as if some restaurant geneticist created a hybrid by mixing the DNA of a pan-Asian place and a dim sum house — and did so in a space that would feel crowded with a dozen people inside. But the space is still an attractive shade of creamy yellow, the tables and chairs are comfortable, and the food is excellent.

The truly fresh, handmade Chinese dumpling is a revelation, when you actually find one and bite into it. KoD’s are warm and juicy inside their soft pouches of dough; eating one is like biting into a piece of perfectly fresh fruit that’s been warmed by the sun, except the flavors aren’t fruity but (in the main) meaty, with generous tweakings of ginger and garlic. I liked the pork dumpling with napa cabbage ($5.95) slightly better than the chicken dumpling with corn ($6.45), mainly because the chicken didn’t assert itself with quite the same quiet sensuousness as the pork, and the peak-of-the-season corn was a little too sweet. But either way, you get a dozen for about six bucks, and the individual dumplings aren’t small.

The appeal of warm food is primal — does the heat sound an ancient echo of fresh kill? — but cold dishes have their own charms, especially when they’re as tasty as KoD’s. Marinated seaweed salad ($3.95) is a treat I associate with Japanese restaurants, but KoD’s is just as good, if in a quite different way. The seaweed itself, for starters, isn’t a mass of green, crinkled threads but a bowlful of what look like julienne poblano peppers, or perhaps tiny eels that have only just stopped writhing. And while Japanese seaweed salads are typically dressed with some form of ponzu sauce, KoD’s carries another charge, more savory and with less citrus-tart balance.

A salad of bean stick ($4.95) consisted of flaps of bean curd — corrugated, like Ruffles potato chips — and tossed with plenty of chopped cilantro. With some minced garlic and grated ginger, this simple ensemble became addictive, and the fact that was served cold — not cold, really, more on the low end of room temperature — faded from one’s consciousness, bite by bite.

More minced garlic was assigned to enliven crispy lotus root ($5.95), an enormous platter of cream-colored disks punctuated by vacuole-like interior spaces. I had the brief sense of examining a cross-section of bacteria under a microscope. The root sections themselves were indeed tender-crispy, as if they’d been briefly stir-fried, steamed, or otherwise tenderly handled; lotus root is really a starchy rhizome, and while some authorities compare it to potato, it reminded me of a cross between jicama and daikon. The root is rich in various vitamins and minerals as well as dietary fiber and is widely enjoyed throughout east Asia.

XO sauce, as browsers at Asian markets may know, is an irresistible, if pricey, confection — a lumpy paste — of dried seafood (including shrimp and scallop) along with various seasonings and degrees of chili heat. It’s quite good right out of the jar, as I am embarrassed to say I know from personal (though not recent) experience. How much better, though, to use the precious XO to flavor a dish like beef chow fun ($6.95), a Cantonese festival of wide noodles, strips of tender meat, and bean sprouts. The color palette here was a little too thoroughly earthen to be ideal, but the glistening of the noodles and beef did bring a bit of joy to the eye.

It’s not surprising that a restaurant serving food this tasty, interesting, and carefully prepared at such modest prices should attract young people, nor that — given the restaurant’s location deep in the Sunset District — so many of those young people should appear to be of Asian ancestry. Their presence suggests that some kind of college or university campus must lie nearby, but we couldn’t think of one. City College? Not too close. San Francisco State? Closer, though hardly at hand. The Sunset might be a neighborhood not a kingdom, but it’s a pretty good-sized neighborhood that shows signs of reinvention and renewal — and now it has a place where you can eat like a king, for a lot less than the king’s ransom.


KINGDOM OF DUMPLING

Daily, 10 a.m.–9:30 p.m.

1713 Taraval, SF

(415) 566-6143

www.kingofchinesedumpling.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Bearable noise

Wheelchair accessible

Yes on K waits …

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Saadia Malik reports:

Yes on K campaign workers were still waiting at Zeitgeist bar to hear if their measure had passed at 10:30pm. At this time, just a handful of people remained at the middle bar where the party was located, drinking beer and watching the news on TV.

As the others left, tired of waiting for the slow-coming results, campaign organizer Sadie Lune remained optimistic about results either way.

“Right now I’m so full of hope and joy” she said, after a day of last minute campaigning. She said she was unfamilar with the political campaign process prior to the yes on prop K ballot measure, but was pleased with the response from voters.

“Any result seems like a gateway for opportunity.”

The party’s on at Joey and Eddy’s

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by Meghan McCloskey

At this hip restaurant in North Beach, many people gather to support Joe Alioto, who is running for District 3 Board of Supervisors. But most attendees just want a cool place to hang out and watch Obama on the big screen. Someone even dropped and shattered a beer bottle in the midst of the excitement.

Big-time Alioto supporter Peter Bails says Alioto would be great for the job. “He’s left but not off the edge,” he says. Along with other issues, Bails likes Alioto’s stance on increasing policemen on our streets, along with the fact that he’s not about drama. But Bails thinks Alioto won’t do so great in the polls. “His sister’s already there. People are afraid of that.”

Alioto’s cousin, Joe Alioto II, is in an outstanding mood. “I watched history tonight,” he says. Despite the Guardian’s skepticism on Alioto’s leadership abilities, Joe says, “I think Joe is easily the most qualified person I know–as a gentleman, as an attorney, as a family man, and as a student of history and of life.”

Tears, cheers, and bubbly for Obama … and Sheehan?

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By Molly Freedenberg

There’s no sign at Inner Mission Tavern that this is a Cindy Sheehan party, but it’s most certainly one for Obama. When Virginia was announced for the Democratic nominee, the bar erupted in cheers – a sound dwarfed only by the joyous explosion when CNN predicted him the winner of the 2008 presidential election several minutes later. The night’s two bartenders (also the owners), both in Obama T-shirts, popped bottles of champagne for those lucky enough to be seated at the bar in the packed-beyond-belief room. The cheers, congratulations, and happy hugs stopped for Senator McCain’s speech, which was met first with a combination of boos and cheers, and then with appreciation for his surprisingly gracious concession speech. “This is my favorite McCain speech,” said one party attendee. As everyone waited for President-elect Obama to appear on CNN, the bar had to ask for patrons to pass their empty glasses to the front, as they’d run out of everything. “Obama’s so awesome he sold the bar out of beer!” someone exclaimed. And then Obama took the (TV) stage. Everyone in the room listened attentively. Some shed tears. Some of the biggest responses were to Obama’s acknowledgement of the millenial generation’s refusal to accept their reputation for apathy, and Obama’s mention that this is also a victory for those who are gay. Then, just like the live audience in Chicago, bar patrons chanted “Yes We Can” along with Obama’s pulpit-style closig. With the speech over and the bar starting to empty, there’s still no mention of Sheehan (nor any results available). But somehow, I imagine no matter the results of local elections tonight, most of these people will go home happy.

Election-night bashes off the grid

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OK, we all know about the free election-daze bevvies at Starbuck’s and gratis donuts at Krispy Kreme (if you’re so hot for free caff, why not get your fix at a local kawfee-seller like Farley’s on Potrero Hill instead?) – but what about all those other parties out there for you freedom-lovin’ America-for-Americans? Tonight it’s time to celebrate (and toast the outgoing, seemingly never-ending campaign cycle). Say “s’long” to those perpetually looping, loopy infomercials… here, there, everywhere:

PARTY LIKE AN ART STAR
Free pizza when the polls close! And an opportunity to write on the walls, think historical thoughts, and live it up at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. YBCA put a call out to makers to help them dream up a got-out-the-vote getdown. And boy did they respond: participants include Hella Hella Acapella with Lara Maykovich, Maya Dorm, Nichole Rodriguez, Marissa Greene and Madeleina Bolduc; Sri Satya Ritual Movement with Micah Allison, Isis, Indriya and Nikilah Badua; Anahata Sound; Derick Ion and the Satya Yuga Collective; Dancing the Dead Dharma (Sara Shelton Mann and Dance Brigade); Alleluia Panis and Dwayne Calizo; Anna Halprin; DJ Wey South; DJ Aztec Parrot with YBCA Young Artists at Work; rigzen; Maji; Sara Shelton Mann; Dance Brigade; Bruce Ghent; Rajendra Serber; Sonya Smith; Kira Maria Kirsch; Folawole Oyinlola; Lena Gatchalian; Sarah Bush; Hana Erdman; Karen Elliot; Richelle Donigan; Kimberly Valmore; Krissy Keefer, and Guardna contributor D. Scot Miller. Whew. Pass the Joe Six-Pack. 6–11 p.m., free with cash bar. YBCA, 701 Mission, SF.

CHICK-CHICK-CHICK THAT BOX
For finger-licking good times after licking the GOP? Free chicken if Obama wins from 9-10 p.m. at Farmer Brown, 25 Mason, SF. (415) 409-FARM.

SAN FRANCISCO’S OBAMA VICTORY PARTY
Oh, why not just call it now. Drink specials, guest speakers, and live election coverage. First 100 attendees get a free Shephard Fairy “Hope” poster. Doors 6 p.m., free. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. (415) 625-8880.

DON’T DODGE THE DRAFTS
Drafts – that’s our cue to drink up! The Guardian bash boasts a free beer special (while it lasts) when you present a voter receipt or sticker. Win prizes like Beach Blanket Babylon tickets at an election trivia challenge. 7-9 p.m., free. Kilowatt, 3160 16th St., SF. (415) 861-2595.

Axton Kincaid gets close to the source with their new release

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axtonkincaid silver dollars smal.jpg

AXTON KINCAID
Silver Dollars
(Free Dirt/ Trade Root Music Group)
By Todd Lavoie

Bay Area three-part-harmony whizzes Axton Kincaid might no longer remain as geographically close to each other – three-fifths of the band recently relocated to Portland, Ore. – but their musical kinship appears as mighty as ever with their latest release, Silver Dollars.

Dishing out 11 barnburners, honky-tonk stompers, and beer-sobbers over the course of 35 minutes, these folks are the real deal: genuine, heartfelt, and pleasantly irony-free. While some of the younger, urban exponents of rootsy sounds tend to approach country, folk, and bluegrass idioms with a bit of emotional distance, Axton Kincaid feel closer to the source – not to mention more reverential to the material which inspired them in the first place.

Many months ago, I’d described the band as an updated Carter Family. The assessment still rings true, but I’d also stick them in the same class as the Be Good Tanyas, Freakwater, or the Walkabouts, all of whom display an obvious love for classic twang while still bringing a little contemporary attitude along the way.

Flaming in the Castro

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› paulr@sfbg.com

At Brandy Ho’s newish outpost in the Castro District, the fuchsia-colored paper place settings are embossed with the image of a chili pepper. For spice freaks, this is the equivalent of the famous blinking boob in North Beach — the neighborhood that is the home of the original Brandy Ho’s, which turns 30 next year. Let us meditate on the complex irony of all this.

People in the vicinity of their 30th birthdays often find themselves with procreation on the brain, so perhaps it isn’t so surprising that restaurants sometimes develop a similar fever. It probably isn’t too shocking, either, that Brandy Ho’s should have chosen to spawn in the heart of the Castro, a heavily foot-trafficked neighborhood with something less than a cornucopia of Chinese restaurants. For years I was a quiet fan of China Court, a block away at the corner of Castro and 19th streets, but that place folded and became something else a few years ago, leaving the field pretty lightly uncontested. It might be more shocking that Brandy Ho’s offspring bears so little physical resemblance to its parent.

Brandy Ho’s in the Castro isn’t just a Chinese restaurant: it’s a good Chinese restaurant, and it’s a Hunan Chinese restaurant. It’s also rather sensationally good-looking: a rosewood-lined cave — or mining tunnel, or (since this is the Castro) sauna — fronted with enormous, ground-to-ceiling panes of plate glass, which makes it easy to observe those who are observing you as they drift by. You are either inside or outside the human aquarium, and it doesn’t matter which. The Castro is a kingdom of darting eyes. If you struggle with chopsticks, you might draw a crowd of gawkers here. Brandy Ho’s chopsticks are plastic, and that’s not the best news for beginners and the inept. Wood has more grip and is much more forgiving.

Why does Hunan matter? Because Hunan food is spicy food, and while I have high regard for steamed Cantonese or Hakka delicacies for their fineness and subtleties, I prefer some fire on the plate. I love Szechuan food, but there isn’t a lot of it to be found in San Francisco. Hunan is just about as appealing and, perhaps, just a wee bit more refined, at least as it’s turned out by the kitchen at Brandy Ho’s.

And — to invert an old saw — where there is fire, there must be smoke. At Brandy Ho’s, the smoke comes not from tea leaves but from hardwood, and it results in a set of dishes that are exceptionally flavorful and quite unlike any other Chinese food I’ve eaten. Our server cautioned us that there were those who found the smokiness of smoked duck Hunanese ($12.95) "too strong," but the meat, when it finally floated in as a set of osso buco-like pieces on a carpet of carrot coins and bamboo shoot tabs, was reminiscent of Canadian bacon or some other kind of pork that had been roasted over a campfire. The smoke was smooth, hearty, and gently dominant in the manner of a good dark beer. Modest inconveniences: remnants of bone and dried skin. There was some chili heat too, but it deferred to the smoke.

Many of the dishes aren’t spicy at all. Steamed dumplings ($5.50) turned out to be potstickers, a half-dozen of them chubby as well-fed goldfish and filled with a tasty but well-behaved mince of pork, ginger, garlic, and scallion. Hot and sour soup ($3.50) was hot mostly in the hot-weather sense, but mostly it was bitter. The roster of ingredients seemed unremarkable — eggs, bean curd, bamboo shoots, and carrots — but had some unannounced greens been stirred into the mix, sharpening the soup’s edge?

And mo si vegetables ($8.95) — mu shu is the more familiar English spelling — rely mainly on garlic and ginger, not hot peppers, for their effect. Nonetheless, their effect is quietly potent, abetted by the hoisin sauce you swab on your pancakes before filling them with the actual stir-fry, whose main players are shredded napa cabbage and tree-ear mushrooms, bound together with egg. As much as I’ve loved mu shu pork over the years, I found this porkless version of the dish to be quite as convincing as its fleshier siblings and did not miss the meat.

Seinfeld‘s George liked his chicken spicy — and in the third person — and he would have liked Brandy Ho’s gon-pou chicken Hunan ($8.95), a fabulous mélange of boneless chicken cubes, onion slivers, chunks of red bell pepper, garlic, water chestnuts, and — most fabulous of all — wok-fried peanuts. There was plenty of chili-pepper heat in here somewhere. We mentioned to our server that we wanted the food to be spicy but didn’t want to burst into flames, and he’d nodded sagely, as if he heard this sort of thing every day and took it as a precise instruction. We ended up tingling yet unflaming, so the message must have gotten through somehow.

What was more remarkable was the dish’s uncanny resemblance to that old Szechuan favorite, kung pao chicken. What could distinguish the two, besides the spelling? The wok-frying of the peanuts? Is that some expression of Hunanese character, or just a flourish from this particular kitchen? Hunan and Szechuan provinces do adjoin each other, so maybe neighborliness accounts for some of the apparent cross-pollination.

Considering the quality and noteworthiness of the food and the restrained high style of the setting, Brandy Ho’s is notably inexpensive. Although portions are generous, many of the dishes cost less than $10, and even the pricier ones struggle to reach into the low teens. If you’re tired of fretting about the stock-market burn-off but aren’t yet ready for the depths of Carl’s Jr. or microwaveable burritos, Brandy Ho’s could very well be the place.

BRANDY HO’S

Continuous service: Sun.-Thurs., 11:30 a.m.–11 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 11:30 a.m.–midnight

4068 18th St., SF

(415) 252-8000

www.brandyhos.com

Full bar

AE/DC/DS/MC/V

Moderate noise

Wheelchair accessible

Budgin’

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Why so glum, Chun? Well, for starters, the economy is sucking about as hard as an insecure groupie attacking her/his fave-rave rocker head-case, and the stock market is making me more nauseated than the time I mixed deep-fried Twinkies and the Giant Dipper roller-coaster ride at Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. Oh, sure, we’re all gonna die giggling with sheer, unrepentant delight when the Barack Star pulls it off come Nov. 4. But in the very lean meantime, we gotta scrimp ‘n’ scrape to find the joy.

So why not mix good times and sound — arf! — financial advice from those adventurers in fabulously gritty lo-fi sonics and rock ‘n’ roll derring-do at Budget Rock Seven music fest?

Yes, I may be high. Ask rockers — oft dismissed as guitar-collecting, ramen-chawing spendthrifts lacking in fiscal acumen — for budget suggestions? Don’t you know that the sweaty, loud ‘n’ danceable rawk gathering has little or nada to do with tightened (white, skinny) belts during tough times — having plucked its name from a Mummies long-player, not its accountants? Sho’ ’nuff, impecunious stuff. Nevertheless, if a truly depressing nu-depression-style bottoming-out occurs — B-Rock or no — it can’t hurt to look to grassroots rabble-rousers for tangibles on living it up on little scrill.

"I have nothing to offer but bad tips," Darin Raffaelli — ex-Supercharger member and now in Budget Rock bands the Baci Galoopis and supa-group Mersey Wifebeaters — apologizes in a recent e-mail. "Go to the taco truck and don’t be afraid to get face meat if they run out of the standard meats. Don’t be a deadbeat weefie and carry your own load. Doesn’t matter how big your carriage is — just fill it to the tarp with whatever you can and the goodhearted folk will make sure you get by. Don’t get tattoos, and take care of your feet.

"Hope that helps."

It’s like pouring loose change, slugs, and paper clips into those supermarket counters: every little bit helps. Brian Girgus, who drums for rising Mantles-spinoff proj Personal and the Pizzas, has more low-dough advice: "Sneak a flask of whiskey in. Drink during Happy Hour. Make your pizzas at home. Roll out the dough really thin to make the pizza seem bigger. Buy used vinyl at the thrift stores."

"Budget? I’m not an expert on that. I’m up to my ears," opines festival co-founder and co-organizer Chris Owen by phone. He’s got more important things on his mind, like convincing Budget Rock performer Roy Head — renowned as "the white James Brown" for his crazy-agile dance moves, and his 1965 hit, "Treat Her Right" — to record "Just Head" by the Nervous Eaters and "Teenage Head" by the Flamin’ Groovies for his Hook or Crook Records. The dynamic Head — who Owen says is still amazing (The 67-year-old "is like Iggy Pop in the way he puts himself out there") — just might play those tunes live, if we’re lucky, when he performs here for the first time since the ’60s.

Owen says there was an attempt to move Budget Rock back to San Francisco — where it first laid down a beachhead at Thee Parkside — but, as we laugh, "the city wasn’t having it!" With assists from Bobbyteen Tina Lucchesi, Guardian staffer Dulcinea Gonzalez, and others, Owen threw the bash together again at the Stork Club. "Sometimes it’s worth it to just have a blowout in a smaller place," he explains. "At a smaller place, they’re happy to have you. I can’t imagine anyone drinking more than the people who go to these things!"

Budget planning? I got my BR grandma-panties in a bunch to catch In the Red combo the Lamps, Bare Wires, Nodzzz, Thee Makeout Party, the Pets, Hunx and his Punx, Ray Loney and the Phantom Movers, Sir Lord Von Raven, Hypsterz, Christmas Island, and Russell Quan’s 50th Birthday Party. As for Owen, he’s especially psyched about Human Eye (a Clone Defects variant that rarely plays Bayside), Haunted George, Seattle band Head (I see a theme emerging), and Personal and the Pizzas ("A MySpace band that suddenly became a real band — basically they wrote two of the catchiest songs I’ve ever heard"), as well as the Top Dog-sponsored hot-dog-eating contest and the pancake breakfast aided and abetted by ex-Parkside honcho Sean O’Connor’s Batter Blaster invention.

"When I first announced the lineup people were, like, ‘Who the fuck are these bands?’" Owens says of the eclectic nature of this year’s festival. "There are a whole lot more bands that are more difficult — more influenced by New Zealand pop music and not necessary garage rock and punk."

But seriously, back to budgets? "I would say, don’t take any advice I’d give you — that’s the best advice," Owen says. "But with this thing: $5 beer and cheap food, 34 bands in four days. That’s pretty good. If you’re trying to maximize your dollar, that’s less than a dollar a band." *

BUDGET ROCK SEVEN

Preview with Lover! and Nobunny

Wed/22, 5:30–8 p.m., free

Eagle Tavern

398 12th St., SF

Festival runs Thurs/23-Sun/26, various times, $10–<\d>$30

Stork Club

2330 Telegraph, Oakl.

www.myspace.com/budgetrock

SIDEBAR

HEAD OUT

THE USAISAMONSTER

Maybe after Barack Obama wins, the Load combo can change its name to THE USAISINRECOVERY. Fri/24, 9:30 p.m., $8. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk St., SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

BRIDGE SCHOOL BENEFIT

Whoa, Nellie: Band of Horses is the latest add to the benefit helmed by Neil Young and family. Sat/25, 5p.m., and Sun/26, 2 p.m., $39.50–$150. Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View. www.livenation.com

AGAINST ME!

Do the Florida punks have a persecution complex? Mon/27, 8 p.m., $22.50. Grand Ballroom, Regency Center, Van Ness and Sutter, SF. www.goldenvoice.com *

Nostalgia

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Now that I am once again all chipper and cheerful and shit, albeit without wheels or money or, you know, prospects, I reckon I can return to writing about food. Anyway, I’m going to try.

My happiness is speculative. I figure, in a world with Alice Shaw and her biscuits in it, all things are not only possible, but likely. Right now, for example, I am lying outside in my tiny patch of woodsy sunshine, dreaming about becoming Canadian, if for no other reason because their Thanksgiving comes earlier than ours, and who wouldn’t want that?

What I love about sunbathing in the woods in October is that you don’t need to wear sunscreen. Or anything.

What I love about Canada …

What I love about fall is sitting in a pile of dead leaves on a sidewalk in Berkeley with Clara de la Cooter, wiggling our legs.

A couple weeks ago, when I was still engaging in defeatist activities such as dating, I was asked, over coffee, what my favorite restaurant was. I don’t believe the asker even knew I was a chicken farmer, let alone the chicken farmer, and that, therefore, my favorite restaurant was wherever I happened to be eating.

So it surprised me more than him when, instead of saying "all of them!" I waxed nostalgic over a particular one, Gravy’s, which has been boarded up for at least five years. If anything I should have said Penny’s Caribbean Café, which has been boarded up for less than one, and which I drive by once a week in the wild hope that she will have resurrected out of the flour and chickpea dust in her cluttered back-room kitchen on Sacramento Street.

Nostalgia happens. Fall’s a good time for it. It’s not a good or a bad thing. It’s nostalgia. It means that at one point in time, at least, you enjoyed life, and that your memory function is functioning. Unfortunately, it also implies that right now things aren’t so bacon for you. For example, you have no idea, say, where to get a good curry goat roti.

There’s a very plastic dollar-fitty-a-thing Chinese joint where Ann’s Café was. I went in there a couple months ago, and got it to go. What was Ann’s Café, in its entirety, is now just the kitchen. The grease on the walls back there looked familiar. I’ve been meaning to write about it.

Maybe next week.

Anything can happen. I have a recurring dream about Ann’s reopening in a food court kind of setting, a small, square, open-air restaurant with Her, Fran, in the middle, holding court and slinging omelets. It’s the same feeling as the one I have when I dream about my closest comrade ever, who died 20 years ago: that this is just wonderful, and not at all, not-even-the-slightest-bit real, like heaven.

While I dream of food courts, by way of conceptualizing a nonexistent afterlife, or bullshit reincarnation, some people get to have children!

Take my other old favorite restaurant, Yamo Thai Kitchen, or Mean-Lady Thai as its ardent fans affectionately called it. Of course, Yamo still stands, in name, reincarnated as Yamo, a Burmese joint.

What you may not know is that Yamo’s son and daughter-in-law (who used to cook at Yamo, near the end) have opened a Thai restaurant in the Excelsior District, hooray! My last first-date ever, the guy who asked me what my favorite restaurant was, launching this nostalgic fit … he not only knew this but had eaten there, turns out. I excused myself.

Outside I called Earl Butter on my cell phone and said, "Let’s go."

We went. My new favorite restaurant is Zabb. Familiarly great Thai food for familiarly cheap prices. Diehard fans of Yamo might miss the tight quarters and sweet tension of watching your meal happen from a front-row counter seat, but I liked Zabb’s atmosphere too. Spacious, unpretentious, and very friendly. They definitely put more effort into presentation. The spring rolls were, if anything, better than Mom’s. The choo-chee curry was fantastic. And they also serve my old Yamo favorites, red curry duck, and chef noodles. All this … this is good news, for me. *

ZABB

Wed.–Mon., 11 a.m.–9:30 p.m.

4440 Mission, SF

(415) 586-2455

Beer & wine

Little Delhi

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Manhattan joke: a part of Murray Hill, along Lexington Avenue in the ’20s, is known as Curry Hill because of its profusion of Indian and Pakistani restaurants. Even if you hadn’t heard the joke, you would probably recognize the neighborhood’s scent: no cuisine I’m aware of has a stronger or clearer olfactory signature. (Backyard barbecuing might deserve an honorable mention.)

We have our own Curry Hill, but it’s on Nob Hill, which pretty well mutes the word play, if not the scent. A major curry locus can be found on Jones Street south of Geary Boulevard, where the perfumed air is reminiscent of a spice market. But there is another node not far away, although perhaps — to vitiate the pun utterly — not on Nob Hill at all. I speak of the corner of Mason and Eddy streets, just a few steps from Union Square, the theater district, and the glamorous Westfield San Francisco Centre, and even fewer steps from the Tenderloin. If you’ve ever wondered what economic stratification, third world-style, might look like in a big American city, a brief reconnoiter of this largely flat area would give you a pretty good idea.

As for the corner itself: the air is redolent of curry, and for some of us, that means seduction. On one side of the street stands Punjab, wonderfully fragrant but with no table service, while on the other we find Little Delhi, an Indian restaurant that’s as comfortable as a pair of well-worn shoes, with table service.

As someone who bears witness to a great many restaurants that seem to have entered the world fully-formed under the godlike guidance of some designer, I warm to a place whose interior isn’t designed so much as accreted. Little Delhi has a well-lived-in look; its creamy walls are hung with portraits, tapestries, a map, and a flat-panel screen showing sports. The crowd is equally ad hoc: we noticed several tables full of what appeared to be (non-English-speaking) tourists, several more of possible neighborhood dwellers, including students (CCSF and Academy of Art College have campuses nearby), and a generous smattering of people who could have been of south Asian descent. This last convergence suggests, to me, a degree of authenticity. If people who grow up eating a cuisine later turn up in a restaurant serving the cuisine, there’s a reasonable chance the restaurant is turning out creditable versions of the food.

And Little Delhi is doing that — at moderate prices. Most of the menu consists of dishes that cost less than $10, and portions are generous. There are plenty of familiar faces in the crowd, including a notably good saag paneer ($7.99) — spiced spinach with cubes of white cheese — whose mild seasoning let through more spinach flavor than is usual. We were vaguely reminded of the creamed spinach that is a fixture of many a holiday repast in our part of the world.

A preparation I hadn’t seen before was badami chicken ($9.99), boneless chunks of tandoori-roasted meat in a curry (and yogurt-thickened?) sauce laced with slivers of pistachio and cashew nuts. It was a near, and crunchy, relation to that lovable stalwart, chicken tikka masala, but what most impressed me was a smokiness in the meat that managed to be heard through the assertive saucing.

Quite similar was lamb tikka masala ($9.99), cubes of tandoori-roasted lamb in another sensuous sauce, this one a bit redder, sweeter, and more tomatoey than its badami cousin, due perhaps to the presence of ketchup. (Ketchup — English ketchup in particular — plays a central role in the evolution of tikka masala.) Lamb’s gaminess stands up to strong saucing, though I caught no hint of smoke here as I had with the chicken.

As is typical at south Asian restaurants, the list of meatless possibilities is extensive, and this is good news for vegetarians, even us flexos. We were particularly impressed with chana masala ($6.99), a classic dish of chickpeas, enlivened here with slices of tomato and whole cardamom pods. These softened some from being braised and, when chewed on, gave off their refreshing woody flavor, with its hints of cinnamon and ginger. Cardamom is rich in a substance called cineole, a natural antiseptic that can fight bad breath. FYI.

From the oven: perfectly good naan ($1.50), cut into triangles for ease of use in sopping up all those irresistible sauces. For whole wheat aficionados, there’s roti (also $1.50) — virtually the same thing, except made from whole grain. Also useful for sauce-soppers is rice pillau ($2), a sizable dish of basmati rice. "Pillau" looks suspiciously like "pilaf," which would mean rice cooked in some kind of stock. This rice appeared to have been cooked in plain water, which didn’t do much for its color — it looked like a gritty heap of corn snow — but did show its wonderful nutty flavor to clearest effect.

Basmati is so tasty, in fact, that demand for it has been surging in India and throughout the Middle East. According to a story published in July in The Wall Street Journal, its price has risen between 100 and 200 percent in the past two years. So let’s count ourselves lucky to be able to enjoy this modest luxury for so little — a treat that won’t break the bank, not that there are all that many banks left to be broken. May the Fed be with you. *

LITTLE DELHI

Daily, 11:30 a.m.–11 p.m.

83 Eddy, SF

(415) 398-3173

Beer and wine

AE/DC/DS/MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible

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