Books Archives — Page 48 of 68 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Events listings

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September 15, 2009

Events listings are compiled by Paula Connelly. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com.

THURSDAY 17

Crafty Hour Element Lounge, 1028 Geary, SF; (415) 440-0111. 5pm, free. Check out new work from 16 emerging local artists, working in varying mediums at this Lightbox happy hour Lightbox is a support system for emerging artists and proceeds from the event will go toward creating a permanent workspace and gallery.

Curry Contest a.Muse Art Gallery, 614 Alabama, SF; www.yourmusegallery.com. 6pm, $10 suggested donation. Sample vegetarian curry made by both professional and non-professional chefs and vote for your favorite by putting a tip in their jar. The chef with the most tips wins! All tips go to the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal (ICJB).

"Darkness is Your Candle" First Unitarian Universalist Church, 1187 Franklin, SF; 1-800-233-6984. 7pm, $15. Enjoy an evening of poetry and music with mythologist and storyteller Michael Meade, mystical poets Rumi and Hafiz, and devotional music by the Qadim Ensemble to benefit at risk youth and intercultural projects.

Fetish Photography Blue Sky Studios, 2325 3rd St., SF; www.blueskysf.com. 6pm, $10. Join renowned fetish photographer Eric Kroll for a presentation and discussion of his Fetish Photography Art from his early days to the present.

Internet Bookburning Books Inc., 601 Van Ness, SF; (415) 776-1111. 7pm, free. Learn more about the problems that the internet poses for the book business with a panel of outlaw thinkers including, Peter Maraveilis, Peter Plate, Herbert Gold, Ethan Watters, and Brenda Knight.

FRIDAY 18

Round 2 111 Minna Gallery, 111 Minna, SF; (415) 974-1719. 5pm. Help raise funds and awareness for The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society at his benefit and art auction featuring artists Brett Amory, Kevin E. Taylor, Regino Gonzales, Ferris Plock, and more, and live painting, drawing, and music.

SATURDAY 19

West Coast Live Ferry Building, Port Commission Room, 2nd floor, 1 Ferry Plaza, SF; (415) 433-9500. 10am, $18. Attend a live broadcast of the West Coast Live radio show moderated by Sedge Thomson featuring music by Sarah Lee Guthrie and Johnnie Irion, and authors Gennifer Choldenko, Sue Monk Kidd, and Ann Kidd Taylor.

Roadworks Steamroller Prints SF Center for the Book, Rhode Island between 16th and 17th St., SF; (415) 565-0545. Noon – 5pm, free. Check out this street fair where featured artists and community members can have their work printed by a steamroller. Also featuring vendors, music, food, and activities.

SUNDAY 20

Rock For MS Boom Boom Room, 1601 Fillmore, SF; (415) 673-8000. 7:30pm, $25. Enjoy a smokin’ hot show with Roy Rogers at this benefit for the MS Friends foundation, featuring author Deborah Grabien signing copies of her new JP Kinkaid mystery series books.

TUESDAY 22

Digital Publishing Revolution Mechanics Institute Library, 57 Post, SF; (415) 393-0101. 7pm, $10. Hear more about how digital publishing is changing the lives of writers at this American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) meeting, featuring a panel of local experts with Bob Cauthorn, Mark Coker, and Ivory Madison.

‘We Did Porn’: Zak Smith gets sticky

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September 15, 2009

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By D. Scot Miller

WE DID PORN: MEMOIRS AND DRAWINGS
(Tin House Books)
by Zak Smith

I admit it. I was fully expecting to hate Zak Smith‘s book about his alt-porn experiences. Yes I was. Trendoid motherfucker gonna tell me about porno? What’s this artsty-fartsy, probably spoiled, uber-talented white boy artist got to say to me about fucking somebody?

Turns out, quite a bit.

I have to say that after the first chapter of this engrossing tome, Zak Smith had changed my life forever. He made me overcome my fear and predjudice of hipsters – something that Miranda July and Dave Eggers could not do – and listen to his tale of making alt-porn and living gonzo in alt-porn world. Not the best writer in the world, Smith makes up for his Hunter Thompson parroting with honesty and constant lucidity.

Zak at work as “Zak Sabbath,” alt-porn star

“The most hideous thing about pornography,” he says early on, “is that it works. On you.”

Enter our LIT123 contest!

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September 12, 2009

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An oldie but goody from the the Early Office Museum

Hey SF scribes! Tell us a story — fiction, nonfiction, or poetry — that reflects life in the Bay IN EXACTLY 123 WORDS. Our 10 favorites will be printed in our 10/7 issue and the writers will win a gift certificate to Books, Inc.!

(Send your entries to culture@sfbg.com by Tuesday, September 22. Put “Lit123” in the subject line, and please include your name or nom de plume and city. See more details here.)

You’ve only got a little over a week left, so get to scribblin’! Here’s an example, written by our Executive Editor Tim Redmond, to get your gears lubricated:

Moon and I are walking through McLaren Park, looking for the dog run with the pond so she can chase ducks. But I have no sense of direction, so we wind up wandering toward where the park turns into a neighborhood where old white hippie-type men tend to be way out of place. And along come two young guys out of gangster central casting — tough, big, tats, baggy plants and puffy coats, and I’m maybe just a little bit nervous, until I notice that they’re … holding hands. So then I smile nice, and they smile back and we go on walking as I wonder: Is it homophobic of me to just assume that gay men are unlikely to be violent thugs?

Introducing our LIT123 contest!

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September 9, 2009

1

Camus can do, can you?

Hey, y’all — grab your peacock-plumed keyboards, polish up your virtual inkwells, and unleash your mini-Kerouac because we’ve got a little competition for you to take part in. Wanna win a nifty gift certificate to Books, Inc?

All you have to do is submit a little story — fiction, nonfiction, or poetry — that somehow reflects living in the Bay Area to culture@sfbg.com by Tuesday, September 22. (Put “Lit123” in the subject line, and please include your name or nom de plume and city.)

The catch? All entries must be exactly 123 words. Easy as 123, right?

We’ll publish our 10 favorites in our special Writers Issue on 10/7, and give those authors gift certificates to Books, Inc. To help get you started, here’s a horrific little story by our always zombie-fightin’ arts and entertainment editor. Submit yours today!

Alone in his dilapidated Victorian, the hulking cannibal mutant arranged his weapons collection with pride. There was the chainsaw he’d refurbished after finding it abandoned on the 22; the hatchet and axes he’d inherited from his hulking cannibal mutant father; and the set of steak knives he’d ordered from QVC. He also had, strewn about his SoMa property, various bear traps, pits concealed with leaves, trip wires, and so forth. Earlier that day, he’d waddled out to the nearest road — pothole-strewn, dirt, the kind of route only a traveler lost mid-shortcut would take — and felled a large tree that blocked both lanes. It would only be a matter of time, he figured. He was ready. And man, was he ever hungry.

Film review: “A Woman in Berlin”

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September 9, 2009

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By Louis Peitzman

As titles go, A Woman in Berlin is rather vague. A clearer option, to borrow from a popular children’s books series, would be A Series of Unfortunate Events. Based on a true story published anonymously by, well, a woman in Berlin, the film recounts the tribulations faced by German women at the end of World War II. As the Russian army occupies Berlin, these ladies must defend themselves against rape and domination while they await their husbands’ return. It’s a dark chapter in history — and a frequently forgotten one at that. But though A Woman in Berlin may be an important film, it’s not a good one. Without the cinematic flair required to handle a story of this magnitude, writer-director Max Färberböck turns the movie into something monotonous and draining. The characters are morally ambiguous but not interesting; the plot is depressing but tedious. I’m reminded of a quote from The History Boys (2006), another film that touches on (albeit briefly) the atrocities of the second world war: “How do I define history? It’s just one fuckin’ thing after another.”

A Woman in Berlin opens Fri/11 in Bay Area theaters.

No gag

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September 8, 2009

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andrea@mail.altsexcolumn.com

Andrea is currently on vacation. This column originally ran in June 2006.

Dear Andrea:

About getting past my gag reflex while giving blow jobs: I have no idea of what’s the best way to practice this. I’ve tried bananas, but honestly that was just weird. I never bothered trying to deep-throat my ex because he was happy with a hand job. The new boyfriend has expressed much interest in it, and I think trying to deep-throat without practice first would be really awful. Any books on this? Recommended dildos? Anything?

Love,

Willing but Worried

Dear Will:

Indeed, but first let’s get our terms straight: Are you confutf8g the standard-issue blow job with the X-treme sport called "deep-throating" (taking the penis all the way into the throat), or has the boyfriend specifically requested the latter? "Deep-throating" has long had its place in the lexicon, but it has not replaced and ought not to replace "blow job," "giving head," or "going down on." They are not at all the same thing.

If all you two are interested in is mouth-penis contact, you shouldn’t need a textbook or a night of, you should pardon the expression, "cramming." You can practice a bit with nothing fancier or more banana-flavored than your own finger or a Popsicle stick, just to determine how far back you can tolerate an oral foreign body before you need to expel it. It does get easier with practice. Once you graduate to the real thing, you will find that the more control you take over the process (you do the moving, he just lies there being happy he has a penis), the less gaggy you will feel. If it still feels overly intrusive or out of control, wrap your hand (spit into it generously first, as though sealing a bargain) around the base and move this in concert with your mouth. Some men can easily detect the difference but many don’t care — friction is friction, after all, and warm, wet, and deep are usually good enough without having to get all picky about it. Most men enjoy a blow job, period, and few — I cannot say "none," but let’s not get distracted by the corner cases — get off on making girls gag or produce involuntary Roman showers.

If you can imagine yourself practicing on a dildo and not immediately collapse in giggles, you’re ahead of the game and I give you my blessing. Buy something realistically sized and inexpensive (jelly rubber, probably), pretend it’s attached to your boyfriend (the sillier the color the harder this is to carry off, I imagine) and see how deep, fast, et cetera, you can go without gagging. Keeping your neck straight and head slightly back are supposed to help, although the often recommended lie-on-your-back-with-your-head-off-the-edge-of-the-bed position strikes me as ill advised at best, since we are trying to avoid panic here, and what could be more panic inducing than having your airway and vocal capability cut off while somebody straddles your chest? Try lying prone or crouching, with the dildo upright as though projecting jauntily from your boyfriend’s pelvis as he lies on his back, and practice opening your throat as though chugging a beer or saying "Ah."

You may find, in time, that you really can control your gag reflex. The feedback provided by a real live boyfriend, though, in the form of appreciative gasps and groans, is a motivator the likes of which mere plastic, no matter how colorful, will never achieve. Not, at any rate, with today’s technology. Androids and replicants haven’t yet started rolling off the assembly lines and into our toy boxes.

Faking it with inanimate objects will only get you so far; if you really want to learn, you’re going to have to try it on the real thing. I don’t know your boyfriend, but I bet he’d be game for a little experimentation. Just make sure that the session is approached as an experiment, and that neither of you brings to it unrealistic expectations of immediate, spectacular success. Nobody’s born knowing how to do this sort of thing, at least not until those replicants get here.

If you two get this far and wish to — oh heck, there’s no better way to put this — go a little deeper, there’s good information to be found in instructional videos and DVDs, like the ones Nina Hartley puts out, and in books such as Violet Blue’s The Ultimate Guide to Fellatio, which contains nifty tips like how to keep your lipstick perfect throughout, as well as, yes, bona fide deep-throating techniques. I think deep-throating is overrated, myself, but then, I only borrow a penis and ought to defer here to those who possess them full time.

One last word of warning: Yes, there can be a somewhat unpleasant surprise at the end of a successful blow job. Inform him that he is responsible for early warning and withdrawal, no "whoopsies" allowed. This probably ought to be considered nonnegotiable at the beginning, subject to later review.

Love,

Andrea

See Andrea’s other column at carnalnation.com

The weird attacks on Van Jones

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September 4, 2009

24

By Tim Redmond

It’s no surprise that the right-wing nuts are going after Van Jones, the Bay Area activist who is now Obama’s green-jobs advisor. The loonies have picked up on the fact that Jones was one of 100 people (along with Daniel Ellsberg and Paul Hawken) who signed a letter raising questions about the government response to the 9/11 attacks. It’s actually not that radical a letter; Indybay has posted it here.

But what amazes me is how quickly people who aren’t typically considered wackos have bought into this — take, for example, the former wife of the mayor of San Francisco, who appeared on Sean Hannity’s show to denounce Jones with some bizarre claims:

GUILFOYLE: Well, that’ s a problem. When you say, is there a problem with the vetting process? Clearly he wasn’t vetted. All they had to do was go and ask a couple of questions in San Francisco about this individual. You know there’s a problem when he’s not even wanted in the city of San Francisco where I come from. OK?

HANNITY: That’s a good point.

GUILFOYLE: That’s a huge red flag right there. What is this man’s qualification besides his anti-American theory? He’s far left, radical.

HANNITY: No, he’s a communist. I mean avowed.

GUILFOYLE: Yes.

CUPP: Self-avowed. Yes.

GUILFOYLE: Self-avowed communist. Why is he even in the White House? Is that the reward?

He’s “not even wanted in San Francisco?” What? Van Jones is an icon in this town. Some people think he gets too much fawning press; nobody I know thinks he’s unwanted.

And, um, self-avowed communist? Kimberly, that’s so 50s. I know Van Jones, and I know some communists, and I can tell you that Van Jones — for better or for worse — is not a communist. Guilfoyle must know that, too — in fact, there really aren’t a whole lot of communists left, even in the Bay Area. In the 1980s, I used to see the Revolutionary Communist Party types at political events, but you hardly ever hear from them any more. Calling someone a communist these days doesn’t even qualify as red-baiting; it’s just nutty-mouth.

More:

HANNITY: All right. This is back in March of 2008. We examined this. He called on participants to take a pledge of resistance and — “Not in our name will we invade countries, bomb civilians, kill children, letting history take its course over the graves of the nameless.”

Now, I mean, we can keep going, look at the comment that he made about white polluters steering poison into black communities.

CUPP: Right.

GUILFOYLE: Well, this is an individual that doesn’t have the qualifications to be in the bizarre job that he’s in. And it just raises the issue here about these czars gone wild. This is someone who actually just doesn’t even like the United States of America, wants to reshape it, remake it into something that we would not even recognize, and what’s so wrong with this country that we have an individual like this coming in, meddling in our affairs that has no idea what he is doing, who really is traitorous in his comments against this country.

Actually, I spent several years of my life researching a book on the American environmental movement, which is now available in the remainder bins of finer used books stores here and there, and I can tell you that the question of environmental racism — in this case, of white-owned companies dumping toxic waste in black communities — is well settled. In fact, I was surprised to learn that chemical pollution wasn’t entirely a class issue — poor white communities got less poison than middle-class black communities. That’s 20-year-old news.

I know these guys need ways to attack Obama, but come on, Kimberly: You know better.

At least, I guess, Newsom can always distance himself; isn’t that what ex-wives are for?

Sonic Reducer Overage: AC/DC, Japanther, Invisible Ocean Gathering, White Buffalo, and more

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September 2, 2009

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By Kimberly Chun

Relaxing too hard this Labor Day weekend? Get the blood moving at these musical happenings – so much more than we could fit in print.

AC/DC
The Aussies are slipping on Black Ice and into the record books as the fifth best-selling band in US history. With Answer. Wed/2, 8 p.m., $92.50. HP Pavilion, 525 W. Santa Clara, San Jose. www.livenation.com

Corn on the curb

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September 1, 2009

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le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS I pick up my brother at the airport. It might not always be the Oakland airport, but I will always pick up my brother at the airport. Besides love, there’s corn in it for me. Ohio corn. I didn’t know about this angle when I tried to lift his suitcase, while he was busy with a big ragged box with duct tape all over it, situating this in the back of my little car — just so, because that’s the way he is.

Me, I’ve been struggling with the Meaning of Life a little lately, and you never know where you will find a sense of purpose. Why not at the curb outside of baggage claim? I didn’t know, I just thought I would make myself useful.

I got the suitcase about an eighth of an inch off of the ground, then decided to just wait quietly for my hug, and let it back down.

"I’ll get that," he said. After he got it, after the hug, we were driving away and he said, "Do you know what’s in that suitcase?"

"Something really very heavy," I said.

And that was when he said, "Corn."

"Ah," I said, as if corn, all things considered, made perfect sense.

"Ohio corn," he said. "Picked this morning. Four dozen ears of Ohio corn."

"OK then," I said.

He had me go through his old neighborhood, which is West Oakland, because he wanted to leave some on his ex’s steps, and his buddy Ron’s steps, and for all I knew some other people’s steps.

But it was 10:30 at night and I wondered about raccoons and other terrorists. I wondered this out loud.

"You’re right," he said. "I’ll deliver it in the morning." And we got back on the freeway.

We went to my house and started eating the corn in my kitchen, standing up. We didn’t bother to boil it or anything, and it was pretty good, but I still didn’t know about bringing four dozen ears of fresh corn on an airplane to California. It seemed a little illegal, if not — I don’t know — pointless.

"The fact is," I said to my brother, halfway through my first ear, "we do have corn here." To illustrate my point, I opened the refrigerator and showed him an ear. I’d just bought it at the grocery store. It seemed pretty fresh too. This is California.

"Ohio corn," he said. There was a piece of it on his chin, and his eyes looked glazed, maybe because of the time difference.

I’m supposed to be a food writer, and I wasn’t sure I could tell the difference. It was good, yes. I ate another piece, steamed, at my cousin Choo-Choo’s house the next day. It was great.

But sometimes I get a great ear of corn at the farmers market, too. I guess the meaning of life is that corn means different things to different people, and while a lot of people have little brothers, few if any of them arrive at the Oakland airport with a suitcase full of corn. So there’s that.

Grateful, charmed, and educated, I offered him my life. My cabin, the kids, this column. He said he’d take my records, and my car. "It’s all or nothing," I said. And for the next couple days I went around buying ears of corn at all the local markets.

I’d pay 99 cents (in some cases) for one ear of locally grown organic corn, and eat it raw, or in some cases cooked, and of course in other cases barbecued. And you know what? It never tasted as good as my brother’s suitcase-smuggled Ohio corn.

Which is gone. My brother’s still here, for a couple more weeks. I called him and said, "OK, you can have my records."

He deserves them, but mostly I just love to think of one of my sisters picking him up at the airport in Ohio, trying to lift his suitcase, or his big taped-up box, and not getting it more than an eighth of an inch off the ground.

"Do you know what’s in there?" he’ll say. And she’ll never guess. I wrote this while eating a Vietnamese sandwich at:

TAY TAH CAFE

Mon.–Fri.: 8 a.m.–6:30 p.m.;

Sat. 9 a.m.–6:30 p.m.; Sun. 10 a.m.–5:30 p.m.

1182 Solano, Albany

(510) 527-8104

No alcohol

MC/V

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

Davila 666, Mannequin Men, NoBunny, Bridez

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September 1, 2009

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PREVIEW Working its way through the ranks of punk rock’s prestigious pantheon, Puerto Rico’s Davila 666 is held in the same regard as King Khan and Black Lips, even sounding kinda Ramones-ish at times. Its debut self-titled release is on the label that can do no wrong, In the Red. Expect an onslaught of guitar fuzz, jangle, and theatrics, sung entirely en Español!

Co-headlining for the night is the Midwest’s own Mannequin Men. With a fresh summer release under their belt, Lose Your Illusion (Flameshovel), the boys take time out from "professionally" DJ-ing various Chicago bars and clubs to join the tour. According to the guy who books them, they like to spin in their downtime. Notorious for having an appetite for destruction all their own, the quartet should be in rare form on stage. They have a song called "WTF LOL" dedicated to the kids and their computer lingo. At first I wasn’t sure if I should be annoyed or amused. I’ll let you be the judge.

Not to be outdone, Oakland’s nomadic NoBunny is East Bay garage rock’s answer to the Jim Henson-esque perverse puppets from the 1989 film Meet the Feebles. The sleaze rocker’s mangy Muppet-like mask probably smells as rotten as it looks. But it’s his sound that’s oh so sweet. He’s got a soft spot for oldies and does campy, quirky lo-fi homages. Check out his filthiness, cuz he’ll (probably) sing in his undies. In contrast, SF’s Bridez will add a "lady’s" touch to the evening. It’s hard to imagine the walls of Thee (tiny) Parkside containing all this rawk. Somehow I think it’ll manage.

DAVILA 666, MANNEQUIN MEN, NOBUNNY, BRIDEZ Copresented by Thee Parkisde and KUSF. Wed/2, 8 p.m., $10, 21 and over. Thee Parkside, 1600 17th St., SF. (415) 252-1330. www.theeparkside.com

Events listings

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September 1, 2009

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Events listings are compiled by Paula Connelly. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com.

WEDNESDAY 2

Rebecca Solnit Green Arcade, 1680 Market, SF; (415) 431-6800. 7pm, free. A release party for Solnit’s new book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, where the award winning author explores themes of altruism and hope through several histories of the shaken commons in the aftermath of calamity.

THURSDAY 3

Divisadero Art Walk Divisadero from Haight to Geary, SF; www.divisaderoartwalk.blogspot.com. 6pm, free. Get in touch with the burgeoning art scene on Divisadero street, with 35 participating merchants offering specials, art, music, and community.

Oy Vey! Contemporary Jewish Museum, 736 Mission, SF; (415) 655-7800. 5pm; free, $5 admission to exhibits and programs. Kvetch with friends over drinks after work while enjoying some art and architecture. Featuring Susan G. Solomon giving a talk titled, The Art of Listening: Oral Histories from Voice of Witness and StoryCorps.

Art and Wine for PACT San Francisco PACT office, 635 Divisadero, SF; (415) 922-2550 to RSVP. Enjoy wine tasting, food, and student made art at this fundraiser for PACT, Inc., an non-profit that provides low income and first generation students guidance through the college, financial aid, and scholarship application processes.

FRIDAY 4

Art.tech The Lab, 2948 16th St., SF; (415) 864-8855. Fri. 8pm, Sat. 1-8pm, Sun. 1-7pm; $12-20 sliding scale per day, $36 for a three day pass, $8 for single evening performance. A festival of art, performance, sound, workshops, demos, and lectures featuring cutting-edge artistic experiments created with and related to technology.

SATURDAY 5

Food For Thought Toby’s Feed Barn, 11250 State Route One, Point Reyes Station; (415) 663-1542. 7pm, free. Hear author David Mas Masumoto read from his books and talk about his experience as a third generation organic peach and grape farmer, whose organic farming techniques have been widely adopted.

SUNDAY 6

Penguins to Penguins Great Highway, connecting Golden Gate Park to the San Francisco Zoo, SF; sundaystreetssf.com. 10am, free. Take advantage of this month’s Sunday Streets, a safe, fun, car-free area for people to get out and get active in San Francisco neighborhoods.

TUESDAY 8

Lang Lang Zellerbach Auditorium, UC Berkeley Campus, 2430 Bancroft Way, Berk; (510) 642-9988. 7:30pm, $20. Hear this highly influential Chinese pianist interview with Sarah Cahill, also a pianist, from KALW’s Sunday evening show Then and Now, about his new book, Journey of a Thousand Miles in this program and book signing.

Man in the mirror

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August 26, 2009

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le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS I love the fog. I love a street lamp. I love my log pile. I had just driven down from the shack so I needed to pee, plus lunch.

"Lamb burrito with chile lime sauce," I said, because I had to know.

"You like spicy?" he said.

"Yes."

"Then you should get the tropical lamb."

"Tropical lamb burrito," I said. "Do you have a bathroom?"

He motioned over his shoulder, through the kitchen, and I went there. But it was unclear. There was a guy sitting in a chair, an unmarked door behind him. I wondered if he was waiting.

"Bathroom?" he said.

When I nodded, he motioned over his shoulder, and as I walked past he said, and I quote, "Flush the toilet."

I closed the bathroom door behind me and took a deep breath, which I don’t normally like to do in unfamiliar bathrooms. But this particular breath seemed called for. I thought I might be maybe going to have a nervous breakdown.

Instead, I peed. I felt good about this decision.

There was no lock on the door. No toilet paper. No paper towels. I washed my hands, wiped them on my skirt, and carefully considered what to do next. Besides go sit down and eat my burrito, I mean. The thing is, I was pretty sure this guy outside the bathroom worked for me. He’d started out as a character in one of my old stories, sitting on a bucket at a gas station in Nevada, I believe, with a rotten spot in his forehead and maybe a worm in it. Uncle Somebody.

I’d made up the worm, of course, but I’m not making this other stuff up. Maybe he wanted a promotion. Tired of being a wormy character in an obscure old literary magazine, he waited for me in restaurants. Or maybe just this one. Who knows how long he’d been sitting there, saying to people, "Flush the toilet."

This rarely happens in movies, let alone restaurant reviews — that a fictional character (within the fiction of the movie, of course) charms, heel-clicks, or brute forces their way into "real life," or, for our purposes, Cheap Eats.

I tried to remember if I’d based my character on someone real, maybe someone I’d seen on the street in, oh, Albany, California, say. San Pablo Ave. I tried to remember what he’d said, in the story. It seemed important — the kind of detail that could make or break me. To give you an idea of my frame of mind, at the time.

I looked in the mirror and did not look good.

And now I was going to have to walk past him again. The way I saw it, not saying anything wasn’t an option. The question was what to say. I decided I would inform him they were out of toilet paper and paper towels. That way I would find out if he worked for the restaurant, and, if so, know that I was off the hook.

But when I went out there, finally, and walked past him and stopped and looked at him, sitting there with his legs spread and his elbows on his knees, leaning forward, I froze. He looked at me looking at him, and I said, in a flash of inspiration, "I flushed the toilet."

Sometimes you have to meet these people on their terms. It’s the last thing they expect, to be embraced by a parrot or a mirror. In fact it’s hard for even me to imagine, when I put it like that.

"What?" he said.

"I flushed the toilet," I said, and I turned and left him there, staring at the floor between his feet, either lost in thought, or defeated.

Either way, I enjoyed my weirdo burrito to the best of my ability, and its. Lamb in a spicy honey curry sauce, with black beans and rice in a tortilla. Chips on the side.

You don’t believe me, do you.

THE HOT SHOP

Mon.–Sat.: 11 a.m.–8 p.m.

909 San Pablo Ave, Albany

(510) 528-9011

No alcohol

Cash only

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

Electric truth

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August 26, 2009

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johnny@sfbg.com

1. New wave of California painting My thoughts on the topic are still percoutf8g, but it will soon be time to take on the inspiring subject of new California painters. Amanda Kirkhuff’s superb oil portrait of Lorena Bobbitt, currently up at [2nd Floor Projects], is one touchstone. Neil Ledoux’s brown invocations at Silverman Gallery earlier this year is another. The next few months bring a blitz of lively, original paintings. Brendan Lott serves up ugly-beautiful America. (Oct.-17-Nov. 14, Baer Ridgway Exhibitions, www.baerridgway.com) Alika Cooper continues her film femme fatale fascination with some Farrah. (Sept. 3-Oct. 17, Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art, www.wolfecontemporary.com) Kim Cogan pictures San Francisco. (September, Hespe Gallery, www.hespe.com) Nancy Chan sets friends floating in space and Matt Momchilov confronts weird normality head on. (Sept. 11-Oct. 17, Eleanor Harwood, www.eleanorharwood.com) But most of all, I’m looking forward to Conrad Ruiz’s sure-to-be-orgasmic debut SF solo show. (Dec. 11-Jan. 23, 2010; Silverman Gallery, www.silverman-gallery.com)

2. "When Lives Become Form: Contemporary Brazilian Art, 1960s to the Present" Tropicália can’t be revived often enough, even if Os Mutantes have — shame, shame — soundtracked a McDonald’s commercial. This survey, which includes fashion and architecture in addition to visual art and music, has been traveling the globe. Finally, SF gets a chance to see the movement Hlio Oiticica built. Nov. 5-Jan. 31, 2010; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, www.ybca.org

3. "Moby Dick" After last fall’s show devoted to L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, CCA Wattis Institute’s trilogy of shows inspired by novels goes fishing for Herman Melville’s biggest catch. The range of artists taking part is impressive, with the likes of Tacita Dean placed next to local talents such as Colter Jacobsen. A number of works by filmmakers — including Buster Keaton, Jean Painlevé, Peter Hutton, and Kenneth Anger — are on deck. Sept. 22-Dec. 12, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, www.wattis.org

4. "On View: Candice Breitz" A working class hero is something to be. Breitz’s video portrait of 25 John Lennon fans singing along to John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (Apple/EMI, 1970) sounds derivative of Phil Collins’ karaoke vids of Smiths fans, but in pop, no ideas are original, and all ideas are meant to be stolen and transformed. Plus the musical source is so damn good. A side video, 2005’s Mother — the title of one of John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band‘s best songs — mines cinema. Oct. 1-Dec. 20, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, www.sfmoma.org

5. "Wonderland" Lance Fung’s curatorial idea to bring together 52 artists (43 from San Francisco and nine from other countries) for 10 site-specific projects in the Tenderloin has greater potential than any standard museum or gallery show. Oct. 17-Nov. 14, various sites, www.wonderlandshow.org

6. Photography Decades of work by an autodidact who learned from Warhol, studied under Irving Penn and at least briefly influenced Larry Clark comes together in "Ari Marcopoulos: Within Arm’s Reach," Marcopoulos’s first midcareer survey (Sept. 23-Feb. 7, 2010; Berkeley Art Museum, www.bampfa.org) Charles Gatewood’s raw and candid portraits of celebrities — no, he doesn’t only aim his camera at naked bodies with piercings — are gathered to form a countercultural scrapbook. (Sept. 3-Oct. 31, Robert Tat Gallery, www.roberttat.com) Johan Hagemeyer turns now-endangered California nature into a subject of eternal awe. (Sept. 9-Nov. 3, Scott Nichols Gallery, www.scottnicholsgallery.com) Hiroshi Sugimoto captures the surreal beauty of lightning in a manner Jean Painlevé might admire. (Sept. 10-Oct. 31, Fraenkel Gallery, www.fraenkelgallery.com) And San Francisco itself is the subject of the first entry in the vast retrospective "An Autobiography of the San Francisco Bay Area." Sept. 10-Oct. 31, SF Camerawork, www.sfcamerawork.org

7. "There’s a Mystery There: Sendak on Sendak" Where are the wild things this fall? On the movie screen — thanks to Spike Jonze’s adaptation of a children’s classic by Maurice Sendak — and in the museum, where this show presents watercolors, sketches, drawings and dummy books. Sept. 8-Jan. 19, 2010; Contemporary Jewish Museum, www.thecjm.org

8. "Bellwether" As New Langton Arts goes down amid dissent and criticism, the vibrant but at times diffuse Southern Exposure introduces a new Mission District home space with a 10-artist show that includes contributions by Renee Gertler and Lordy Rodriguez. Oct. 17-Dec. 12, Southern Exposure, www.soex.org

9. "The Art of Richard Mayhew" The Museum of the African Diaspora plays host to one-third of a three-part retrospective of the artist and activist’s career. The show includes work from the late 1950s through the 1970s, a time span that includes his beginnings as an artist and his work with Spiral, a group of black artists including Romare Bearden. Oct. 9-Jan. 10, 2010; Museum of the African Diaspora, www.moadsf.org.

10. Solo and duo shows a go go Ara Peterson proves once again that few people chart — and bring dimension to — color with such power. (Nov. 6-Dec. 18, Ratio 3, www.ratio3.org) David Hevel gathers hideously pretty sculptures of Bernie Madoff, Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, and Brangelina. (Sept. 10-Oct. 17, Marx & Zavattero, ww.marxzav.com) The late illustrator Charley Harper — beloved by Todd Oldham — gets a tribute. (Sept. 24-Oct. 31, Altman Siegel Gallery, www.altmansiegel.com) Local minimalist Todd Bura presents another open puzzle. (Sept. 18-Oct. 25, Triple Base, www.basebasebase.com) Pop goes berserk in the works of John De Fazio, and Daniel Minnick reinvents the American photo booth (fall, [2nd floor projects], www.projects2ndfloor.blogspot.com) Katya Bonnenfont proves — with a light and lovely touch, and against most evidence in galleries — that design can be art. (Oct. 22-Dec. 24, Haines Gallery, www.hainesgallery.com) And last, Luke Butler brings hotness and comedy together through razor-sharp collage. Sept. 11-Oct. 17, Silverman Gallery, www.silverman-gallery.com.

Excitement! Dread! Blatant Oscar baiting!

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August 26, 2009

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cheryl@sfbg.com

Let’s be honest, film fans: summer 2009 hasn’t exactly been an exercise in awesome. Early entries like X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Terminator Salvation were disappointing; hyped projects like Public Enemies and Brüno offered some entertainments, but overall felt kinda meh. The Hangover, Up, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and Star Trek may have been mostly deserving of their $250 million-plus hauls, but think how many poor suckers emptied their wallets at the sublimely awful Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which has raked in a bone-rattling $400 million so far. (That’s a lotta robot balls.)

But in Hollywood, there’s always hope. District 9 kicked ass, and Inglourious Basterds — while not Quentin Tarantino’s masterpiece, not by a forehead-carving longshot — at least provoked spirited debate among filmgoers who’ve been chomping on flaccid fare like GI Joe for months. What follows is a selective list of upcoming releases (dates are subject to change), including some surefire Oscar contenders, though I’m still holding out hope for a dark horse Drag Me to Hell nomination or two.

Sept. 11: In behind-the-scenes Vogue doc The September Issue, the devil wears Prada and busts fashionista chops while getting her magazine’s most important issue to press. Anna Wintour takes off her sunglasses! She cooly dismisses headlines, underlings, feathers, and an ugly pink-and-black ensemble! Director RJ Cutler (producer of 1993’s The War Room) gets the ever-so-glamorous dirt. Also out today: The Hills fembot Audrina Patridge brings her ceiling eyes to the big screen in horror flick Sorority Row; and mumblecore master Andrew Bujalski rolls out his third feature, after 2002’s Funny Ha Ha and 2005’s Mutual Appreciation.

Sept. 18: In a clash of the zeitgeists, Transformers thespian Megan Fox stars as a demonic high schooler in the Diablo Cody-scripted Jennifer’s Body. Irony is, like, so hot, y’know? For The Informant!, Steven Soderbergh returns from indieland to "from the director of Ocean’s Eleven, Twelve, and Thirteen" mode. His newest is the tale of a goofy, whistleblowing agribusinessman played by a fat-and-mustachioed Matt Damon.

Sept. 25: Proud, profiteering misogynist Tucker Max — a figurehead in the "fratire" literary movement — cowrote the script for I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, based on his book (in turn, based on his blog), which kinda looks like a crasser spin on The Hangover. Fame updates the 1980 high school song-and-dance classic, a remake that actually makes sense given the popularity of the High School Musical series and all those bajillions of televised talent contests.

Oct. 2: Judging by its trailer, Zombieland could be the greatest movie ever made. Also: British footy drama The Damned United, with a script adapted by Frost/Nixon (2008) screenwriter Peter Morgan; and the latest from Michael Moore (the self-explanatory Capitalism: A Love Story) and the Coen brothers (A Serious Man, a ’60s-set black comedy that features no major movie stars).

Oct. 16: At long-friggin’-last, the Cormac McCarthy adaptation The Road — starring Viggo Mortensen and directed by John Hillcoat (2005’s The Proposition )— comes shuffling down the postapocalyptic highway. Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are squares off for its twee-off with Wed Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox (out Nov. 13).

Oct. 23: Lars von Trier’s Antichrist shocked Cannes — will it make a splash here, opposite Saw VI (oh yeah, they made a sixth one)? Meanwhile, cult cinema fans won’t want to miss the return of Thai martial arts wizard Tony Jaa in Ong Bak 2. Hold on to your Buddha heads! Finally, when Michael Jackson died, he left behind enough rehearsal footage to fill a backstage doc, named This Is It after his never-launched tour. Celebration or cash-in?

Nov. 6: Jon Ronson’s The Men Who Stare at Goats is one of my favorite books. If George Clooney and co. mess this one up, I might have to lock them in a small room and blast the Barney theme until they crack.

Nov. 13: Precious: Based on the Novel Push By Sapphire was raved-about at Sundance, with stars like Mo’Nique and Mariah Carey de-glamming for art. On the complete other end of the spectrum, disaster expert Roland Emmerich masterminds the end of the world (again) with 2012.

Nov. 20: The Twilight Saga: New Moon opens. Look, enough people care about this that I don’t have to.

Dec. 11: Three heavyweights, three very different target audiences. Disney unveils its first-ever African American animated heroine in The Princess and the Frog (about time, Mouse House); Clint Eastwood directs Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela in the rugby-themed Invictus; and Peter Jackson takes on Alice Sebold’s bestseller The Lovely Bones, starring Atonement (2007) fabulist Saoirse Ronan as the doomed Susie Salmon.

Dec. 18: I was stoked about James Cameron’s Avatar. Then I saw the trailer. Hmm.

Dec. 25: Now that Guy Ritchie’s no longer married to Madonna, will his filmmaking talent return? With hot property Robert Downey Jr. starring, Sherlock Holmes could be revisionist-tastic. And, strictly for Christmas Day masochists, there’s Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel.

Cockburns expose the “American Casino” economy

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August 20, 2009

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A Q and A audio interview with co-producers Leslie and Andrew Cockburn on their remarkable new documentary, “American Casino,” opening Friday (Aug. 21) at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco for a two week run.

Interview with Andrew and Leslie Cockburn by SFBG

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Leslie Cockburn, the widely respected investigative reporter and filmmaker, began work on “American Casino” in January 2008 when she and her husband Andrew recognized the signs of an emerging financial collapse from the subprime meltdown.

They spent the next 12 months filming the terrible effect of the accelerating disaster and have produced in my view one of the very best accounts of how and why $12 million trillion dollars vanished in the American Casino.

The reason the film is so good is because the Cockburn team were working with great freedom as independent filmmakers and they are both superb reporters who know how to put an investigative story together clearly and with impact and authority. You really don’t feel you understand the collapse until you’ve seen this documentary.

Leslie, who was born and raised in San Francisco, was among the first women to graduate from Yale. She went on to produce many award-winning stories for PBS, CBS and ABC news, including “From the Killing Fields” for the ABC News documentary show Peter Jennings Reports. She conceived and co-produced “The Peacemaker,” a thriller starring George Clooney and Nicole Kidman about a planned terrorist attack on New York City.

Andrew is a member of the famous Cockburn journalism family that count father Claud, two brothers Patrick and Alex, two nieces and Leslie. He has produced journalism in many forms including books, newspaper and magazine articles and “The Red Army,” a 198l film on the Russian military that debunked the widely held opinion at that time that the Russian military machine was equal to the U.S. military. In l998, he and brother Patrick published the book, “Out of the Ashes, the Resurrection of Saddam Hussein.” When Hussein found out about the book, he decreed that anyone caught selling it would be hanged. In l987, Andrew and Leslie began their collaboration by producing documentaries for PBS Frontline.

Andrew claims he is not shocked by the financial disasters he researched in “American Casino.” His father covered the l929 Crash as a correspondent for the London Times and Andrew grew up listening to the stories.

“American Casino” opens Friday night with a showing at 7:30 and 9:30 p.m. at the Roxie Theater, 3117 16th st., followed by Q and A sessions by Leslie and Claud. The show plays Saturday night at 7:30 and 9:30 p.m. with Q and A sessions. The move runs for the next two weeks. The Q and A sessions will be a special treat, as the audio interview above demonstrates.

Furverts: the book

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August 19, 2009

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By D. Scot Miller

FURVERTS
By Michael Cogliantry
(Chronicle Books, $12.95)

Yeah. OK. I was one of those people who thought that Bugs Bunny looked hot in drag. There was something about the way his bucked teeth looked with lipstick, the way his large, mascara eyes gave a come hither look that gave me a tingle. And when his disguise would inevitably come off, often exposing his cotton-tail to Elmer Fudd, my pre-adolescent self would get a goose.

Like so many of my generation, we had no idea what we were feeling or how it would translate in adulthood. For me, large eyes and buck-teeth grab my attention. Others became Furverts.

A Furvert is turned on by furry costumes – Bugs Bunny’s tail – and Michael Cogliantry has created a board book, originally titled The Furry Kama Sutra, that captures these furry lovers in flagrante delicto in various mundane settings: A bear blows a bunny in the living room, a lion boffs a rooster in the garage.

“Birds do it, bees do it, but no one does it like furries do it.”

Chronicle Books took a chance on this one. Formatting it as a board book, looking so much like the kind babies chew on, and filling it with woodland creatures in compromising positions touches on a disquieting element, though it’s difficult to explain just why. My copy came with a plastic cover sporting a sticker saying, “Paws off! Not suitable for kids,” and yet it, like the fur-play chronicled, appeals to the kid in you. Ick.

All-in-all, this is harmless and quirky little curio with no explicit photos. The poses themselves range from silly to sappy and the settings, from the depressing no-tel motels to the press-board basement, make the furry rutters all the more hilarious.

This land is ‘Methland’

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August 19, 2009

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DRUG LIT Books claiming to be about drugs in some way — whether nominally fiction or nonfiction — all run up against the same problem: pharmacodependency is already culture. Or, as the literary theorist and academic Avital Ronell puts it in her brilliant, uncategorizable tract, Crack Wars (University of Illinois Press, 1993), drugs articulate "a quiver between history and ontology."

Put another way, drugs aren’t everything, but rituals of self-maintenance and care, from vitamins to exercise and so on, are built on addictive structures. Isoutf8g a drug as a singularity — as Nick Reding only apparently does in Methland (Bloomsbury USA, 272 pages, $24.95), a sort of informal case study of the effects and causes of the meth epidemic in the Iowa town of Oelwein — is a dicey proposition. It calls for a kind of Puritan monomania that might capture some of the lucidity of being on drugs but does so at the price of insight, a deductive rather than inductive logic.

It’s easy to claim that drugs are culture if we limit ourselves to the black-light poster canon of drug lit from Baudelaire’s Les Paradis Artificiels (1860) to Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1959) and Bret Easton Ellis’ coke-benumbed Less Than Zero (1985). In their time, those books appeared as threatening as their subject matter because they revealed associations between addiction and literature — a notion that seems rather quaint now. Nobody’s launching hysterical campaigns against toxic literature. Today, video games are the new objects of moral panic. Perhaps as books quietly got subsumed into the category of self-improvement, video games took on the cast of a potentially ruinous pursuit of unproductive labor.

In this context, meth is an oddly positioned drug: since its first large-scale use among soldiers on both sides during World War II, speed has been associated with hard work, endurance, and elevated mood over more abstract qualities. Whether prescribed for slimming down or perking up during its brief tenure as a licit drug, amphetamines have always tended to banal, everyday worry. As Reding writes in his book’s introduction, the U.S. meth epidemic is set apart not only because meth can be synthesized cheaply and discreetly at home, but because the drug’s main constituency is working-class, rural whites. Reding’s take on his subjects is compassionate but not treacly: a significant portion of the book links increased meth use with the effects of globalization upon the blue-collar job markets in small towns.

One of the Oelwein residents Reding profiles, a notorious crank addict named Roland Jarvis, went from earning $18 an hour with full union membership and benefits to $6.20 an hour without benefits or union membership after Gillette and later Tyson took over the company where he worked, Iowa Ham. Jarvis used meth to help pick up extra shifts even in the halcyon days of a livable wage, but it’s difficult to imagine how one could make do on $6.20 an hour without tweeking — Reding claims local meth production increased by 400 percent around the same time. Jarvis’ narrative arc culminates when his home explodes as he attempting to dismantle his basement meth lab. The descriptions that Reding shares — of how Jarvis’ skin proceeded to slough off in sheets, revealing the muscle below, for example — make for a kind of rural Grand Guignol, otherwise held in check by structural explanations.

The author gives the sense of a slightly distracted but pleasant dinner party host — wary of lingering on any subject too long, he returns cyclically to the nonaddicts who form the moral core of the story. Clay Hallberg, Oelwein’s high-strung general practitioner, and Nathan Lein, the assistant Fayette County prosecutor, are the book’s through-lines: their tentative redemption is the town’s, and the book’s conclusion plays out with a Midwestern brand of reticence. But Reding’s attempts to connect Oelwein’s story with his own family history cause the book to lose focus, particularly as it concludes. To his credit, this feels like the result of keeping an over-cautious distance from mom-baiting newsmagazine templates. Ironically, though, some of Methland‘s descriptions of meth-fueled psychosis — an elaborate fetish for enemas; frozen pigs in a blanket used as butt plugs — are far-out enough to be at home in the "Drugs" episode of Channel 4’s satirical documentary program Brass Eye.

Methland also tracks the paths of the meth trade, illustrating how early routes were established by out-migration from the corn belt to labor markets in Southern California, then were consolidated into an empire by Lori Arnold, and finally transformed into a decentralized system in which Mexican traffickers use illegal immigrants employed in the meatpacking industry as mules. By following both federal meth legislation and news coverage of the epidemic, Reding emphasizes meth’s functions and reputation within society. He links the drug to an incredible depression of wages and standard of living by corporations threatening to move operations offshore should they be forced to enact worker protections.

Meth is a drug with no celebrities, and Reding treats his subjects with respect, despite close calls with former addicts who play disc golf with him one minute and threaten his life the next. But even beyond a standard litany of reservations about nonfiction — that the author’s voice is too intrusive or not intrusive enough, that there are chunks of undigested research — Methland’s attempt to combine personal reflections on identity and place with an examination of the drug’s role in a small town’s economic struggles seems formally stale.

Perhaps this approach is more truthful, though: meth in Oelwein offers little in the way of rausch, which Ronell defines as the "ecstasy of intoxication," but can be everything when it comes to making do as agribusiness exerts its downward pressure on communities that had previously survived on small-scale farming and small business. Though he might not be able to keep his readers fully invested in his book’s characters, Reding illuminates how meth flows along the same lopsided trajectory of so-called development for which globalization is a handy catch-all. Meth lit is a distant prospect, and as Ronell reminds us with respect to crack, it’s because these drugs don’t have the veneer of moral defensibility. A writing more appropriate to the subject might put forth a louder call for justice for the future. Methland does an able job for now.

The elephant in the shroom

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August 19, 2009

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

DRUG LIT The psychedelic experience is perfectly, if unintentionally, expressed in a poetry collection: Too long I took clockwork as a model instead of following the angle my inclinations make with the ground. So writes Rosmarie Waldrop in A Key into the Language of America (New Directions, 1994), a book based on Rhode Island founder Roger Williams’s 1643 guide of the same name. The most "meditative" poets, from Milton and Blake to James Merrill and Denise Levertov, are often those who have reworked historical texts. The same could be said about scholars of psychedelics. Forget about Aldous Huxley’s exaggerated diatribes and everything by Carlos Castenada. The "doors of perception" aren’t opened by self-indulgent rambles of the "I’m a spiritual person" variety.

In 2007, sick of the ingrained pop mythologies surrounding psychedelics (and realizing, it seems, that such pseudoscience isn’t helping make the case for legalization), British scholar Andy Letcher published Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom (Harper Perennial, 384 pages, $14.99). Though he spends quite a bit of time debunking myco-myths that I’d imagine are only actually believed by people while tripping — Santa Claus is a giant, speckled variety of the Amanita genus; Stonehenge was like a Dead show without the music — the double-PHD Letcher gives a solid sense of magic mushrooms as they moved through history, and we moved with or tripped over them. Letcher uncovers how little we can possibly know.

Because mushrooms can "simply be picked and eaten," Letcher explains, there is "not a single instance of a magic mushroom being preserved in the archaeological record anywhere." Drugs and apparent representations of magic mushrooms that have been found have had other, nonintoxicating uses, from food to insulation, or have been doctored up to appear trippy, as with one example of Neolithic rock art widely distributed through self-declared visionary Terence McKenna’s books — McKenna’s then-wife, Kat Harrison, actually made the drawing from a photo, adding her own interpretation.

I once heard prankster Paul Krassner relate the tale of his first psychedelic escapade. After his mind returned, he said, it seemed like a good idea to call his mother and express his elation (the rational part of his mind must have still been distracted). Her hilarious response was perhaps culled from the jumbled logic of the war on drugs: "Watch out," she pined into the phone. "I’ve heard that LSD can be a gateway drug to … marijuana!"

Letcher shares this realistic sense of humor about the life of drugs. Before picking apart proponents of the otherworldly "ancient mushrooming thesis," he offers them room to breathe. He is ultimately interested in the cultural evolution of the West’s "yearning for enchantment" in response to changes that have occurred since the industrial revolution. "That we in the West have found value in those remarkable mushroom experiences, where almost all others before us have regarded them as worthless," he notes, "means that in a very real sense we could claim to be living in the Mushroom Age." He explores how McKenna’s death in 2000 left the psychedelic movement without an "obvious figurehead" and how the need to paste our modern sensibilities onto "a pre-historic religion or tabu" (as shroom-popularizer Gordon Wasson wrote in a letter to Robert Graves in 1950), is just an urge.

Post-McKenna, what is the destination of the psychedelic movement’s next trip? A new book, Mushroom Magick (Abrams, 144 pages, $19.95), is respectable for its clear motivations and gorgeous, thorough design. It’s a little too much fun, consisting of over 100 lush, full-page watercolors by Arik Roper, whose shrooms "grow from the tip of my pen without much effort." Incomplete but clear field notes by Gary H. Lincoff and an essay by Erik Davis offer tasty morsels, and the short bibliography points to useful resources such as Paul Stamets’ field guides. But Daniel Pinchbeck’s foreword follows the same trajectory that Letcher so carefully deconstructs. I’m afraid that Mushroom Magick ultimately presents as recreational something that, with or without New Age revisionism, clearly has a deeper, revelatory role to play in human affairs. And that’s not furthering the discussion, that’s a little irresponsible.

Drunk on words

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August 19, 2009

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12 HALLUCINOGENIC NOVELS

1. Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon, 1973. When jazz singer Anita O’Day found herself stuck with an odd group of musicians who weren’t drinking alcohol or smoking anything between sets — they were reading books — she considered such behavior the other side of life. A very Pynchonian phrase. I know more people (two) who claim to have read this novel on acid than any other — the writer Kevin Killian and the poet Joshua Clover.

2. The Soft Machine, William Burroughs, 1962. A whole cosmology, and an antidote to the hideous language virus from outer space.

3. Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, Philip K. Dick, 1974. In a future where manufactured drugs bend the parameters of space and time, our characters are still also dropping mescaline.

4. How I Became a Nun, César Aira, 1993. Poisonous ice cream is the agent that instigates a trip coextensive with the mysteriously-gendered childhood of poor little César Aira. Part Alice in Wonderland, part Genet.

5. Any book by Wilson Harris. Really. They all blur together. Staring at most any page of Harris is like staring at a painting by Rufino Tamayo, Anselm Kiefer, Charles Burchfield, or Wilfredo Lam.

6. The Book of Lazarus, Richard Grossman, 1978. Dropped into the middle of this collage-novel, with its sophomoric poetry, cartoons of crossing guards, and plot about kidnapping a mobster’s daughter, is a fragment from an eternal sentence. Seventy single-spaced pages of psychedelic cartoon as cosmically weird as Tamala 2010.

7. Guide, Dennis Cooper, 1998. Once, when I was 19 and tripping, I wandered into a room full of cadavers. Whoa, I said. Later that night, I glimpsed the secret structure of the universe. Guide is kind of like that. "Dennis" struggles to convey the unpleasant insights from a bad trip.

8. Ice, Anna Kavan, 1967. Born Helen Ferguson, Kavan named herself after one of her own fictional characters. In and out of mental institutions. On and off heroin. Devoted to gay men. Found dead with lots of heroin and lipstick in her room. In this novel the world is freezing over and a poor thin girl is always getting tormented. Or is she?

9. Gone Tomorrow, Gary Indiana, 1993. For just one scene — a gay sex acid trip at Dachau. Burroughsian flesh-melds, fairy tales bubbling into reality, and the discovery that the Holocaust has been reduced to kitsch.

10. Dream Jungle, Jessica Hagedorn, 2003. Another one-scene wonder — an acid trip on a Manila-bound airplane. Yikes.

11. Already Dead, Denis Johnson, 1998. Starring a toad whose secretions contain DMT.

12. On Heroes and Tombs, Ernesto Sabato, 1961. Three-quarters of this is just okay, but "The Report on the Blind" makes it worth the price of admission. A paranoid misanthrope explores the sect of the blind which he believes secretly rules the world. Does for the visually impaired what The Orphan does for foreign adoptees.

EIGHT GREAT INEBRIATED MEMORY PIECES

1. Cool For You, Eileen Myles, 2000. Introducing his latest, prescription drug-addicted memoir The Adderall Diaries, Stephen Elliott writes that "… only a fool mistakes memory for fact." Chris Kraus, as quoted by Myles: "Because capitalism’s insincere, it demands sincerity from its art."

2. Mama Black Widow, Iceberg Slim, 1969. "Under the crazy hypnosis of pills and alcohol I had the strange feeling I was in a fantastic flower garden, hearing the hum and buzz of insects …" Sounds like a sentence from —

3. Discovery of the World, Clarice Lispector, 1984. Except Clarice wouldn’t mention the pills and alcohol. It’s all subtext. Who’d have guessed she was addicted to sleeping pills the whole time?

4. Good Times: Bad Trips, Cliff Hengst and Scott Hewicker, 2007. Lit and art world luminaries describe their experiences, with illustrations.

5. A Voice Through a Cloud, Denton Welch, 1950. Excruciating pain is hallucinatory, and painkillers, too. "I was exquisitely conscious of the texture of things. There was torture in the smooth sheets, in the hair of the mattress and the weight of the blankets …"

6. Valencia, Michelle Tea, 2000. You can call it fiction, but I’ve been involved in illicit transactions with one of the characters.

7. The Peyote Dance, Antonin Artaud, 1976. A French Nobel Prize winner thinks Artaud didn’t even take that trip in the 1930s. Maybe not, but this book still gives me mescaline flashbacks — like the peyote trip in Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (1996).

8. Go Ask Alice, Anonymous, 1971. I haven’t read it, but my partner Jonathan says our teen heroine’s (to quote the cover text) "harrowing descent into the nightmarish world of drugs" — acid trips and gay sex — convinced him to follow her path.

Hard-headed

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August 19, 2009

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le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS The wheel came off the shopping cart and the whole thing went over. Cans clanged and rolled. Plastic milk jugs bounced, and the toddler in the kid seat crashed down with them, helpless, tangling with cereal boxes and plastic bags of produce.

Her mom, who was also holding a baby, had the look of a mom who was watching her two-year-old fall on her head. In between the bonk and the scream, there was that split second where question mark and exclamation mark meet. And stare at each other. While tumbleweeds roll silently by like a lone little wheel down Aisle 7. The sun moves a little. There’s so much space in that flat, hard moment that you could land an airplane on it.

Then: the long, loud, first breathless wail, like being born all over again. In automatic sympathy, everyone else holds their breath too, thinking: Breathe, kid! Breathe! But I know how hard kids’ heads are, compared to their mothers’ hearts. I’m more worried about the mom. In the time it took her to drop to the grocery store floor, still cradling her baby in one arm, and gathering up her now bawling toddler in the other, a crowd had formed.

Two store managers, displaying athleticism rarely seen outside track meets, were first on the scene. Before all the cans had even stopped rolling, they were offering the hurt and/or scared shitless child Popsicles and juice boxes. But the kid was inconsolable. "I’m not feeling well," she said, between wails.

For the next 15 minutes, nothing changed. The kid cried. The baby, heroically, stayed calm. While the mother, squeezing and rocking and there-there-ing, checked her older child’s head for bumps, or worse.

While the two store managers divided their labor, one serenading the mom with an endless stream of apology, the other scrambling for still brighter colors of Popsicles. While a couple of the bystanders, in a desperate attempt to be byuseful, bytapped the scattered groceries into a pile with their feet. While the woman in the business suit said, "You need to take her to see a doctor, right now."

To her credit, at least she said this just once. Whereas the woman who wasn’t in a business suit, speaking on behalf of all the rest of Berkeley, Calif., where this happened, would not stop repeating one word, "Arnica."

So, then, the song goes like this:

"Oh sweetie, I’m so sorry. There, there, sweetie. Show mommy where it hurts."

Crying crying. "I’m not feeling well." Crying.

"How about purple?" Crying.

"Arnica."

"Ma’am, do you want me to hold the little one for you? We’re so sorry. Does she need ice, ma’am?"

"How about green? Do you like green?"

"Arnica." Crying.

"Sweetie, sweetie, it’s OK sweetie." Crying. "Mommy’s here, sweetie. It’s all right."

"Arnica."

"Ma’am." Crying. "If there’s anything at all." Crying. "We can do, Ma’am."

"Arnica."

And on and on and onica, until finally the mother, briefly wondering why she lives where she lives, pried her attention away from her crying child to look this woman in the eye and say, "Will you please go away?"

Which is where I, in the spirit of Lou Reed singing, "I’m just the waterboy<0x2009>/the real game’s not over here," admit that I wasn’t there. I’d hear all about it … how they escaped to the parking lot, to their car, only to find the store managers, through the miracle of pole vaults and sheer speed, had collected, bagged, and long-jumped their groceries to the parking lot, to their car, ahead of them. And free! I’d help put those groceries away. But I wasn’t there. I was in San Francisco, in a swirl of pain and fear all my own, eating duck soup by myself at my new favorite restaurant.

THE OLD SIAM

Daily: 11 a.m.–11 p.m.

201 Ellis, SF

(415) 885-5144

No alcohol

MC,V

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

Worth it

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August 12, 2009

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le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS He signs his e-mails Romeo. I sign mine Juliet. It’s cute, but you try not to think about how that one ends.

You know … well, you probably don’t know, so I’ll tell ya: if you’re a trans woman dating men, you can spend years and years and years trying to find one who doesn’t either cream his pants or throw up as soon as you take your clothes off. And then, by some miracle of shifting continents and a spectacularly rare alignment of stars, planets, and good hair days, you do! You find, in fact, the one. Now, like everybody else in love, you have to kinda wait. And see. What happens.

There are questions. There is distance. There are Capulets and Montagues, jobs, exes, currents. There are riptides and undertows, sharks, lions and tigers and bears … and there are days when you feel like you are on Cloud 10. I like those days. They’re way better than the other ones, where you feel like you are hacking your way through a jungle of impossibility with a plastic butter knife and without mosquito repellent.

Yo, Shakey, is this what love is supposed to feel like? A million mosquito bites? Probably not, but I’ll take it. I’ll take it because it’s perfect. It’s perfect! It really is — give or take 5,822 miles and a logistical conundrum that would make Alfred North Whitehead reach for his binkie — perfect.

My head hurts. Again. (And again and again.) The last time I remember feeling really physically good, let’s see, I was sitting in my new favorite restaurant with my soccery girlfriends, eating grilled meatball and green apple spring rolls dipped in this insanely delicious orange pork sauce.

And if you think that sounds slightly odd, the next item on the menu is a grilled shrimp Popsicle on sugar cane.

No, it’s not some kind of funky fusion foofoo place, it’s Pot de Pho, Geary and Parker streets, and I love it. Yeah, it’s a little pricier than most Vietnamese restaurants, but worth it because it’s worth it, and fun. They don’t overly worry about authenticity. I like that. It’s like, let’s do Vietnamese food with all the best ingredients possible, well-researched recipes, and a sense of fun.

Our waiterguyperson, like the menu, was full of enthusiasm. He told us he was starting a new happy hour thing, making cocktails and punch and stuff using just wine and sake by way of alcohol.

The pho was good, I didn’t order it, of course, because I’d eaten noodle soup for lunch and dinner the day before, and still had a big pot of it at home in my fridge. But I did taste.

It’s $10 for a large bowl, $8.75 for a medium, and $5 child size. And, although they do offer a chicken pho, a vegan pho, and even (for a couple bucks more) an ahi tuna pho, they don’t offer tendon and tripe as options for their beef pho.

That’s the kind of thing I might have made fun of them for a few years ago — even though I would have been snickering over a bowl with just rare steak, every time.

Oy.

Bean sprouts are in the soup, not on the side. Wide rice noodles instead of vermicelli. They have a Vietnamese sandwich, but in a green onion crepe instead of a crusty French roll … The authenticity snobs will complain. But you know what? The older I get, the more I couldn’t care less about words like authentic and traditional, and grammar in general.

If it wasn’t for inauthenticity and maltradition somewhere down the line, we’d all be having bananas and bugs for lunch. Thank you, I’ll try the green apple spring rolls and green onion crepes.

Speaking of crepes, I’m pretty sure the French gave pho to the Vietnamese, not to mention French bread.

That’s why Pot de Pho is my new favorite restaurant, for giving us grilled shrimp Popsicles. And because the teacups are a pretty shade of green, and the chairs there are cushy and comfortable. I need that right now. Pretty shades of green and a soft, comfy chair.

POT DE PHO

Tues.-Thurs., Sun.: 11 a.m.-10 p.m.

Fri.-Sat.: 11 a.m.-11 p.m.; closed Mon.

3300 Geary, SF

(415) 668-0826

Wine, beer

MC,V

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

A story goes with it

-

August 5, 2009

0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS There’s something reassuring about this, that, blink, 15 years later there’s still a line outside Kate’s Kitchen on Sunday morning. And they still haven’t figured out how to make home fries taste like anything. And their homemade sausage patties are still only slightly more flavorful than hockey pucks — but not nearly as succulent. And I will still wait in line for half an hour to eat there.

The good news is I won’t have to do so again until 2024, at my current rate of amnesia.

There’s more good news. I’d scored a goal in a soccer game that same Sunday morning, so while the Maze and me were waiting, he in his bicycle sweat and me in my soccer stink, I got to describe this great goal in great detail, the ins and outs, overs and unders, the intricacies, the outricacies … there was all the time in the world.

Having seen me play soccer before, the lucky fuck, my Maze’s amazement was palpable. His forehead wrinkling into a labyrinth of wonder, he asked, "You didn’t get lonely?"

Now, to appreciate the excellence of this question, one would have to be an avid Cheap Eats reader, which I’m not. So he had to explain it to me, but I don’t have the time to explain it to you because, contrary to all appearances to the contrary, this is not a review of Kate’s Kitchen, and we haven’t even sat down yet. Suffice to say, it was a good question, and the answer was, no, I didn’t get lonely.

"Were you nervous you would miss?"

"I wasn’t nervous," I said. "I was sure I would miss." Have I explained this already, to you nonathletes? There’s the zone, see, and then there’s the no-zone, and the cool thing is that in either of them anything at all is possible.

"Your table’s ready" … for example.

It was so loud inside Kate’s that a little kid was holding his ears. It was so loud that, once seated, I kind of wished we were still standing outside on the sidewalk. And that was before our food was served.

Another thing about this day was that it was the San Francisco Marathon. So the Maze and me were not the only sweaty smelly people in town. We’d watched some of them staggering along Haight Street, way after the fact, looking like death and saying, "Thank you. Thank you." Because everyone was congratuutf8g them. Marathoners inspire me, too. Big time. I wanted to pat them on the back, but was afraid they might fall over.

The Maze tried to explain bike racing to me. The last stage of the Tour de France was that day, too, and he’d been watching and following it. These ‘uns ride 100-plus miles a day for weeks and there are mountains and sprints and teams and packs and stages, and all I kept thinking about, the whole time he was talking, was their butts.

But that night we watched a little bit of it on his computer, and I thought I understood. Bike racing, like any other sport, has stories in it. And that’s what makes it, and life, interesting. I think it was a Damon Runyon character who used to say this, about horses: "There’s a story goes with it."

I say that sometimes about a restaurant. Maybe it’s what used to be there before this place. Maybe it’s something important that happened to you, like divorce. Or a particularly transcendent chili.

Looney’s in Berkeley just opened a second Looney’s in Oakland, on MLK Blvd., making it the closest barbecue to my house. I go by it many times a week. I’ve eaten their pulled pork sandwich, and french fries, and I’ve studied their menu, which is extensive for a barbecue joint — and expensive, for a barbecue joint. I’ve sampled a few of their many sauces, but I still don’t know their story. Sign says they were voted Alameda County’s best barbecue. Really??? I might eat there four more times this week, in the company of 12 more question marks. They have a lunch buffet, beef stroganoff, and clam chowder in sourdough bread bowls.

Something tells me they ain’t going to make it until 2024. Help me understand.

LOONEY’S SOUTHERN BBQ

Daily: 11 a.m.–10 p.m.

5319 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., Oakl.

(510) 652-1238

Full bar

AE/MC/V

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

Whoop Click!

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August 4, 2009

0

PREVIEW Like most superhero tales, actor-comedian James Judd’s story begins with a spider bite. He hopes the incident will give him superpowers (specifically the ability to manipulate ATM machines with his eyes), but it never comes. Instead, the nasty bite gives him an excuse to, well, sit on his butt. And it is in his treacherously hot Palm Springs home that our hero gains a lot of weight.

In his newest show, Judd tells the story of how a poisonous spider bite on his butt leads to a two-week holiday at a decrepit fat camp in Florida. Tricked by his parents, Judd accepts a birthday gift at a luxury spa ("You’ll really love it — it’s like rehab!" says "Judd’s mom) only to arrive at a weight-loss camp in the middle of a swamp in July. To make matters worse, Judd is accompanied by his four Mormon aunts, who were all made famous in his previous show 7 Sins. In his 45-minute set, the San Francisco resident takes on 10 hilarious personalities, from the doctor who is convinced Judd’s spider bite is a brain tumor to an aunt who can’t seem to part with her Bible trivia books. Laugh along at Judd’s pain as he relives how he survives the fat camp while trying to uncover the truth behind a dark family secret. Oh, and he reenacts a scene from a porno called Ass Artist 3 — intrigued yet?

WHOOP CLICK! Through Aug 22. Sat, 8 p.m., $20, Dark Room, 2263 Mission, SF; (415) 401-7987, www.darkroomsf.com

Best of the Bay 2009: Sex and Romance

-

July 28, 2009

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