Coffee

Spooked

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› sarah@sfbg.com

Dressed to kill in a firehouse-red pantsuit and matching stilettos, drag queen Donna Sachet stood in the Eureka Valley Recreation Center on Sept. 22 and fondly recalled how four years ago she lauded Sup. Bevan Dufty when he announced that he wanted to make Halloween in the Castro a safer, more enjoyable event.

"Bevan said, ‘Come and celebrate, but no bad behavior,’" Sachet purred.

But things have changed — dramatically — and this year Sachet was helping moderate a heated meeting of a group called Citizens for Halloween, at which residents raised myriad concerns about Dufty and Mayor Gavin Newsom’s secretive plans for Halloween.

Dufty and Newsom’s plans have morphed from a failed and furtive attempt to move this fall’s event to the waterfront to an ongoing PR campaign that asks businesses to close early on what traditionally has been their busiest night of the year and implores the public to stay away from the famously flamboyant Castro on Halloween night.

There will be no city-sponsored porta-potties and no street closures.

But locals are haunted by a belief that it’s about as easy to kill Halloween in the Castro as it is to kill a bloodthirsty vampire on a rampage and a fear that the city’s current plan could leave the Castro less safe than ever.

Sachet, who has lived in the Castro for 13 years, recalled that since the city’s gay population migrated from Polk Street to the Castro, the numbers attending the annual Halloween in the Castro party have steadily swollen, to 100,000 in 2006.

"There have been many concerns over the size of it," Sachet said, recalling how, after four people were stabbed in 2002, increased community involvement and police presence and the creation of emergency lanes made Halloween 2005 one of the most peaceful in years.

"Then in 2006 we got word from the city to hem in the event and end it sooner," Sachet said, reminding the crowd that Newsom promised to convene a task force two days after nine people were shot and one woman was trampled on Halloween 2006 — an incident that was triggered by someone throwing a bottle into a crowd of young people, one of whom pulled out a gun and fired nine shots in retaliation.

The bottle incident occurred shortly after the city pulled the plug on the music and began chasing away the costumed crowds with water trucks in an effort to break up the party early.

But despite Newsom’s promise of a task force, no public presentation was ever made, and longtime Castro resident Gary Virginia, who applied to be on the panel, said he "never got any communication back."

Public records show that Newsom and Dufty held closed-door meetings with city department heads and members of the Entertainment Commission last winter in an effort to shift Halloween from the Castro into the backyard of Mission Bay residents. Those plans fell through, thanks to the objections of neighborhood associations that were left out of the planning loop and the financial concerns of event promoters who allegedly got spooked by all of the negative publicity that has been given to Halloween in the Castro.

Rich Dyer of the Sheriff’s Department confirmed to the audience at the meeting that city department heads have been holding secret sessions for months.

With Newsom recently admitting that the city can’t prevent people from showing up, Sachet said the members of Citizens for Halloween "aren’t placing blame but want accountability."

SF Party Party founder Ted Strawser said he’s worried that the only party happening on Halloween will take place at San Francisco General Hospital and the County Jails unless the city provides answers to the community’s questions about public safety and health, medical emergencies, and transportation.

CFH cofounder Alix Rosenthal, who challenged Dufty in last year’s District 8 supervisorial race, joined Virginia, Strawser, and LGBT community activist Hank Wilson in sending the city an extensive list of questions, which also includes concerns about the impact of the current plan on businesses, the lack of community partnership and involvement, and hopes for a post-Halloween evaluation.

"We think we deserve to know as stakeholders," Virginia said.

The Sheriff’s Department, at least, was willing to talk a bit about what’s going on. "The plans have changed radically over the last three or four months, as have the roles of the departments, but the police have finally settled on a response kind of plan," Dyer said. "And as far as I know, there are no plans for checkpoints this year."

Asked by mayoral candidate Chicken John Rinaldi whether he thought that frisking members of the crowd, as was done last year, helped contain the situation, Dyer nodded.

"A tremendous amount of alcohol was intercepted, along with knives and other weapons," Dyer said.

But this time around there won’t be the normal safety precautions; for example, cars will be able to drive along Castro between 18th Street and Market. If the mayor’s polite requests fail and large crowds show up anyway, the place could be a mess — and without toilets available, people may simply use the street.

Two Castro businesses, Ritual Coffee Roasters and one that asked to remain anonymous, will provide porta-potties to any residence or business that requests help. But with the witching hour just five weeks away, the prospects for peace and harmony aren’t looking good.

For more information, visit www.halloweeninthecastro.com or www.citizensforhalloween.com.

The Old-Fashioned Way at Hemlock Tavern

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LOCAL LIVE The first triumph of the night was simply that no one lost an eye. The Hemlock Tavern stage isn’t much more than a low corner deck, and the Old-Fashioned Way work a swooning fiddle into their akimbo art pop, which meant that whenever Marie MacBain launched an arpeggio, her bow looked like a weapon.

Such are the risks of bringing bits of a philharmonic onto the barroom circuit, an increasingly popular move — blame Montreal — that’s rarely handled with the charm of this six-piece. You won’t find bespectacled frontman Chris Wu miming Win Butler. Onstage he’s a picture of basso profundo calm, a seated yogi growling an indie rocker’s version of eightfold-path prescriptions: "Tea early morning, Earl Grey / And coffee all day / Tecate all night / Or just something with bite."

Crowded around their sage leader, the rest of the OFW, who formed in 2005 and will release their first 7-inch this fall, give off the ease of a family band, though no member remotely resembles another. They’re Dickensian orphans, then, who’ve gathered to put on a minstrel show — and who’ve had to find a sound to fit their strange batch of instruments. The two red-blooded guitars and the drum kit give the songs a sturdy rock core when the band wishes it. But there are also, at points, a Paul McCartney–style toy bass, an accordion, a triangle, a wailing keyboard, and a melodica, which pile into a haunted and seductive sort of antipop, mournful and klezmerish on a track like "Robot on Fire" but boppy, harmonic, and needing a restroom on "Take Your Fluids." The latter was a live highlight, thanks to bassist Heather Logsdon’s soft and shy la la las, while "Zeitgeist" was goofy and quotidian but sweeter for it: "I threw on my clothes clumsily / And I kissed you on the head at 1:30 / Out the door and crushed by night / My hoodie reeked of beer and your Lucky Strikes."

THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY Thurs/20, 9 p.m., $8. Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell, SF. (415) 861-2011, www.rickshawstop.com

My kingdom for a legume!

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› paulr@sfbg.com


Today’s homeland traveler must run a gauntlet of tribulation, beginning with the holy sacraments of shoe doffing and toothpaste Ziplocking and continuing to flight delays and $10 for an airborne box of chicken salad, but at the end of all the woe and insult is the comfort of knowing that there’s more where that came from, generally in the form of superfluous starch.

I noticed, in the course of several days spent recently in the heart of the heart of the country, that a broad no-legume policy seemed to be both unstated and strictly observed. Restaurants high and low didn’t offer so much as a lentil or chickpea, and as for breakfast at Denny’s or Perkins, where I went each morning with my squad of elders, you could have potatoes with your bread, or bread with your potatoes, you could have eggs a thousand different ways — in pastry! with cheese! — and cinnamon buns and oceans of weak coffee, and after all that you knew better than to think about glycemic indexes or your blood sugar level. Oatmeal? Consult the small print at the bottom of the laminated page.

At a nice Italian restaurant in St. Paul, Minn., I clicked my heels together three times and waited for Garrison Keillor to come through the door from his redoubt on nearby Summit Avenue. He did not; was this because he too is distressed at the lack of legumes in Lake Wobegon and its environs? Or was he at Perkins, chomping his way through mountainous platefuls of hash browns and bread?

Minnesota’s Twin Cities are hardly unsophisticated. St. Paul, in fact, has a Jewish deli, Cecil’s, that’s at least the match of any such place I knew in Chicago and far better than any deli here. But Jewish delis, no matter how wondrous their rye breads, aren’t known as hotbeds of legume culture, and if a good Italian restaurant doesn’t even have a white-bean soup or salad on the menu, what hope is there?

Does this matter? Yes. Legumes — whether white or black or cranberry beans, lentils, or chickpeas — are among nature’s near-perfect foods. They’re tasty, healthy, and flexible; they make good main dishes and side dishes, and they work in soup and as beds for other things. If you’re on your way to Lake Wobegon, don’t leave home without them.

Chicken and the pot

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› steve@sfbg.com

Chicken John Rinaldi — the fake-mustachioed showman and arts facilitator who is running for mayor — was late for our Sept. 7 interview, but his roommate let me into the candidate’s César Chávez Street home–office–performance space to wait for him.

Rinaldi was busy at the Ethics Commission office, trying to become the first and only mayoral candidate to qualify for public matching funds, a goal that requires raising at least $25,000 from among 250 city residents — and having the paperwork to prove it, which is proving the hard part for someone traditionally more focused on big ideas than small details. (See sidebar.)

He says he’s raised about $32,000 since getting into the race last month, including $26,700 from city residents, $12,000 of which came in on the deadline date, Aug. 28. It’s an impressive feat that could transform this marginalized, improbable candidate into one of the leading challengers, despite his enigmatic persona, maddeningly elusive platform, and admission that he can’t possibly win.

But Rinaldi, 39, who makes his living from his many performances and projects, isn’t your typical politician, as his history and home demonstrate. The high ceilings hold rigging and pulleys for the regular performances he hosts, although his bar and a pair of church pews were pushed back against one wall this day to make more space for campaign activities. Dammit the Wonder Dog, one of many characters Rinaldi has promoted over the years, slept on a deflated air mattress still dusty from Burning Man.

The red brick walls of his main room looked like an art gallery, with paintings by Ani Lucia Thompkins listing prices of at least $2,000 each and pieces by James McPhee going for less. On another wall hung the massive sign for the Odeon Bar — which Rinaldi owned from 2000 to 2005 — with Odeon spelled diagonally from right to left.

In the kitchen area, just inside the front door, the walls held framed posters from many of his projects — the Life-Sized Game of Mousetrap, Circus Ridickuless (the poster for which, at its center, has Rinaldi’s face and the label "Chicken John, Ringmonster"), the Church of the Subgenius (in which Rinaldi’s eponymous partner on The Ask Dr. Hal Show is some kind of high priest), and "The Cacophony Society Presents Klown Krucifixation" — as well as a framed poster of Pippi Longstocking.

Suddenly, Rinaldi blew in the front door, apologized for his tardiness, and declared, "The fucking Ethics Commission. I’m in so much trouble. I’ve probably already racked up $5,000 in fines."

Nonetheless, he may still qualify for at least $50,000 from the taxpayer-funded mayoral public financing program that debuted this election season, giving his campaign ample resources to promote his message of nurturing San Francisco as a "city of art and innovation."

My first significant interaction with Rinaldi happened about three years ago, when he and fellow Burning Man artist Jim Mason launched a lively rebellion against Black Rock City LLC’s control over the countercultural event (see "State of the Art," 12/1/04) and created a shadow organization, dubbed Borg2, to promote art.

Rinaldi’s focus and rhetoric then — arguing for a "radical democratization" of the art-grant selection process and the creation of a more inclusive discussion of the direction and future of both Black Rock City and San Francisco — are echoed in his current mayoral campaign.

"What I’m talking about now is the same thing I was talking about with Borg2. It’s the same thing," Rinaldi told the Guardian.

It’s about inspiration and participation, he said, about coming up with some kind of vehicle through which to facilitate a public discussion about what San Francisco is, what it ought to be, and the role that can be played by all the Chickens out there, all the people who help make this an interesting city but aren’t usually drawn into political campaigns or other conventional institutions.

"The number one qualification for mayor is you have to be passionate about the city you’re running," Rinaldi said. "The left of San Francisco can’t agree on anything except the idea of San Francisco."

And it is Rinaldi’s San Francisco that helped him transform his pickup truck into a "café racer" that runs on coffee grounds and walnut shells, an alt-fuel project inspired partly by the Green Man theme of this year’s Burning Man. It is the San Francisco that supports his myriad projects — from wacky trips aboard the bus he owns to offbeat performances at his place — and asks for his support with others’.

"This is part of the innovation thing," Rinaldi said of his candidacy. "Take a mayoral campaign and turn it into an artwork project that raises interesting questions and ideas."

But should that be funded by taxpayers? Mayor Gavin Newsom’s campaign manager Eric Jaye said he has concerns about Rinaldi getting money from that source. "It would be interesting to see public money go to someone’s art project," Jaye said. "This is not the intent. The intent was for this to go to a legitimate candidate."

Yet how did Rinaldi raise $12,000 in one day? "I sent out one e-mail," he said. "At one time there were 12 people outside my door, sliding checks through the slot."

Again: How? Why? Rinaldi responded by quoting Albert Einstein, "’There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.’" But when you try to pin down Rinaldi on what that idea is, why his candidacy seems to have resonated with the underground artists and anarchists and geeks of San Francisco, the answer isn’t entirely clear. And he disputes the idea that this is about him or his connections.

"These aren’t fans," Rinaldi said of his contributors. "They are equals in a city of art and innovation. It’s just my time…. I asked for something, and they gave it to me…. People don’t necessarily support me, my ideas, or my platform."

Among those drawn to Rinaldi’s campaign is Lev Osherovich, a 32-year-old postdoctoral researcher at UC San Francisco who helped with fundraising and administration and eventually became the de facto campaign manager.

"It must be quite a surprise for someone who appears to be a joke candidate to raise so much money and so much awareness," Osherovich told us. "But Chicken has a tremendous energy and a real gift for communication…. Outsider political movements are a great tradition in San Francisco — people using the political process as a vehicle for getting ideas out."

Yet even within his community, Rinaldi has his detractors, such as the anonymous individuals who formed the fake campaign Web sites www.chickenmayor.org and www.voteforchicken.org (Rinaldi’s actual campaign Web site is www.voteforchicken.com, and his personal one is www.chickenjohn.com).

The latter fake campaign site lists Rinaldi’s primary goal as "Chicken John needs attention."

Ask Rinaldi what he does need for this campaign, what his real goals are, and he sounds unlike any politicians I’ve ever heard.

"I don’t need a winning strategy. I don’t need any votes. We just want to raise the level of the conversation," said Rinaldi, who refuses to criticize Newsom on the record, insisting that the incumbent "should be treated with respect and admiration."

That conciliatory treatment has caused some to speculate that Rinaldi is aiming for a job within the Newsom administration, perhaps a staff position on the Arts Commission. But Rinaldi insists that slamming the mayor is an ineffective way to start a productive conversation and that his real goals are less tangible than that.

"The intention of my campaign is inspiration, to leave San Francisco politics better than I found it," Rinaldi said. "When I come out of this experience on the other side, I’ll be smarter…. It’s my intention to get an education and to have the people of San Francisco help give me that education."

As maddening and incomprehensible as that lack of political motivation and policy goals is to seasoned political professionals and journalists, many of his supporters find it refreshing.

"Politicians aren’t the only people who can navigate the world of politics," Rinaldi said, specuutf8g that some of his support comes from people who are disenchanted with conventional politics and drawn to his fresh, outsider approach to the race.

"It’s somewhat different than the usual political campaign," Osherovich said with obvious understatement, noting that the campaign has received so much support from people "because they know Chicken can do great things and great things are going to come out of this."

At the very least, interesting things are bound to come out of this campaign. Rinaldi is deliberately vague about exactly how his campaign will unfold or what his endgame might be, except to remind us that good stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. And he’s now at the beginning.

"More than half of what I do is a dismal failure," Rinaldi admitted. "But failure is now we learn."

Yet his successful fundraising over the past month is leading some to believe that this campaign won’t be a failure. Rinaldi said he’s been in daily contact with the Ethics Commission and is fairly confident he can satisfy its concerns and win public financing.

"I received a certain amount of funds, and I’m supposed to document where the funds came from by the 5 p.m. deadline. They said it wasn’t good enough, but I now have what’s good enough," Rinaldi said. "They are doing a lot of hand-holding. It’s like the DMV. It’s great."

So now he’s off and running.

"I just hired a staff. This is not a joke anymore. I’m serious," Rinaldi said, later adding an important caveat: "I could definitely go to jail if I do this wrong. I understand that."

PS Rinaldi said he has already booked 12 Galaxies — which has hosted his The Ask Dr. Hal Show and other projects — for his election night party, which he’s dubbed "The Loser’s Ball."

Sunrise at 90

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS They said we could stay and eat, but most of the band already had plans for dinner, and loved ones to eat it with, and East Bays to be in, etc. Me and Earl Butter, city dwellers, poor fucks, hungry, looked at each other. We looked at our hostess, and I popped the question: "What’s for dinner?"

By the book, beggars aren’t supposed to be choosers. But did I say we were beggars? No. I said we were poor fucks. We were invitees, and you have to be careful at these places. Sometimes they invite you to stay and eat, and what that means is institutional meatloaf, instant mashed potatoes, over-reheated canned green beans, sliced white bread with margarine, and other things that old people can chew. And that poor fucks like me and Earl Butter eat at home every single day. So what’s the point?

"Hold on. I’ll go ask," our hostess said.

And we finished setting up and played our songs. A sweet woman with black plastic glasses as big around as corn tortillas danced by herself, then with another woman. Then they both danced with a younger guy. Dude with a walker with a small paper plate full of snacks stopped in front of the stage and, oblivious, stood there eating. There were drinks too. A stooped, handsome man with eyes like William Burroughs and maybe Parkinson’s disease was sloshing a glass of red wine all over the white carpet and his white pants.

Rock ‘n’ roll, I thought. Right on! But I still didn’t know what was for dinner, so I got distracted and muffed my solo. It didn’t matter, of course, because nothing does.

When our hostess asked again, afterwards, if we wanted to stay and eat, I said, again, "Um, what’s for dinner?"

"Trout," she said. My eyes must have bugged. "We have a French chef," she explained. "It’s good food."

Goddamn it, now I have to get rich so I can afford to live in one of these places some day when my glasses are as big as tortillas. Just when you think you finally know your place in the world (with the meatloaf) … someone or something (such as trout) bonks you on the head and it’s right back to I-ain’t-good-enough.

I want to eat trout when I’m 90. Slivered almonds, twist of lemon. Side of real mashed potatoes, whipped to perfection, butter butter, and a salad bar. Actually decent coffee …

Forget it, kid. I can barely make my rent. In fact, I can’t. That’s why I had to sublet my place. How am I supposed to sock away savings into my late-life trout account? Forget it!

And Earl Butter’s worse off than I am. We treated this, therefore, like a special occasion. A taste of the good life. Dinner for two on top of Cathedral Hill. At a nursing home, yes — but still it felt almost like a date.

It wasn’t a nursing home. It was the Carlisle Sunrise, an independent-living facility. Meaning the people there can make some choices for themselves. The dining room is more like a restaurant than a cafeteria. Cloth tablecloths.

A man in a suit and tie served us wine. The tomato-basil soup was delicious. And they waited until we had finished our salads before they brought out our trout. Then they showed us a dessert menu.

"I’ll have the mouse," Earl Butter said.

The waitress looked horrified. "Did we misspell it?" she asked, looking over his shoulder at the menu. He’d been flirting with the waitresses all meal long, either ruining the illusion that we were a couple or strengthening it. I can’t decide.

"Kidding!" he said. She laughed. He laughed.

I was disturbed. It had nothing to do with his mice or my cattiness. I was sociologizing. I’d noticed something about the way the old folks were arranged around the room. There was a big, round table in the center, full and boisterous, another cluster of talking, laughing people at one long table, and then a lot of little satellite tables, some with pairs of people, and some with just one.

The woman eating alone at the table closest to ours reminded me of me in high school. And me at camp a couple weeks ago. And I thought that even if I live to be 90, and even if I get rich, and even if I change change change change change … some things just stay a certain way. Probably. And that can be sad. *

THE CARLISLE

Not really a restaurant

Taste teaser

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Dear San Francisco:

I never cook anymore, and it’s all your fault. Oh sure, you have all those fantastic grocery stores with organic pastas and locally grown tomatoes. But you’ve made it so hard to park near my house, I’d have to walk four blocks or more with my bags of polenta and pico de gallo to get my food home. Even worse — and this is where you’re really to blame — you make it so easy, and so rewarding, not to cook. Yes, I could stay home and make chicken soft tacos. But why not walk three blocks and buy better ones for a couple of bucks? Why would I stir-fry tofu and veggies alone in my kitchen when my best friend and I can meet for stellar sushi halfway between our railroad apartments? I know what you’re going to say: you give me Rainbow, and Faletti’s, and all sorts of places selling ingredients worthy of a home-cooked meal. But I know you’re teasing me. Because you also give me sag paneer at Dar Bar, and honey lavender ice cream at Bi-Rite Creamery, and super burritos at Pancho Villa. How could any girl with a regular amount of willpower and a serious lazy streak look you in the eye, San Francisco, with your spaghetti and meatballs down the street, and fresh unagi around the corner, and say, "Nahhh … I think I’ll eat in tonight"? It’s impossible, I tell you, and you know it. You taunt me with your whole-food minimarts on every corner, daring me to use my apartment’s vast counter space for something other than mixing cocktails. And then you tease me with your ceviche and your crab cakes and your sourdough-crust pizza. Damn you, San Francisco. Damn you for taking a girl who used to deep-fry her own goat-cheese croquettes and making her someone who can’t remember how to brew her own coffee. Damn. You. (And, uh, thank you.)

Love,

Molly Freedenberg

Feast 2007 editor

› molly@sfbg.com

PS Want to meet somewhere for dinner later?

Feast: 7 homey hearths

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Amber is my living room, and not just because I really like Pabst Blue Ribbon and smoking inside. It’s also because I live in a city where rents are high and living space is scarce, where community rooms are shared with multiple people (if there are community rooms at all), and backyards tend only to be big enough for the recycling bin. In suburban places, people share community and comfort around backyard barbecue pits and luxurious living-room couches. They have dinner parties and cocktail hours and invite friends over for tea. But here, we go to bars and restaurants and taverns and coffee shops. These are the places where we meet our neighbors, celebrate special occasions, while away idle hours, have intense conversations. And so, in many ways, these places — particularly those in our neighborhoods — become extensions of our homes and hearths. As the cold weather approaches (global warming willing), I’ve been thinking more about the literal interpretation of hearth; Amber serves me for late-night writing sessions and drunken postdate tell-alls, but where will I go when I want to curl up with a hot chocolate — or a hot toddy — and a long Russian novel? When I want to play Trivial Pursuit late into the cold night with a small group of good friends? When the weather outside is frightful and my date is so delightful? Where, by god, are the fireplaces? In this city of Edwardian apartments retrofitted with gas heaters (and roomies who have to get up early), here is a list of places with flickering flames and belly-warming booze.

BITTER END


I don’t think the Irish invented the fireplace, but they may have the patent on its best use. Wood paneling? A flaming heat source? Thick beer and hot soup? All Irish pubs seem to have ’em — and this Irish-style Richmond locale is no different. Stumbling into the Bitter End feels a bit like wandering into an O’Malley’s or a McSweeney’s in any country in the world — and with items like shepherd’s pie, Gaelic chicken with whiskey, and beer-battered appetizers on the menu, it’s almost like wandering into one in Ireland itself.

441 Clement, SF. (415) 221-9538

MCKENZIE’S


Sometimes you want cozy and kooky all in the same shot — and those are the times you end up at McKenzie’s. This small local favorite is half neighborhood bar in a mountain town (downstairs) and half cheap hostel (upstairs). Either way, it’s charming: small tables cluster around a fireplace over which a flat-screen television broadcasts sports, a jukebox blasts cheesy-but-lovable ’80s hits, and a live-feed video camera in the upstairs lounge, its images visible to every patron downstairs, lends itself to endless prank possibilities.

5320 Geary, SF. (415) 379-6814

ZEKI’S


Wanting no frills in Nob Hill? Try Zeki’s, which boasts two fireplaces — one by the pool table and one directly across from the leather-lined bar. With paraphernalia from old movies lining the walls and a good selection of European beers on tap, you’ll quickly see why this is a favorite spot for both old-school regulars and just-stumbled-in newbies.

1319 California, SF. (415) 928-0677, www.zekisbar.com

JOHN BARLEYCORN


If ever there were a place that personified hearth, it would be John Barleycorn, the little mountain lodge in the city that’s in danger of disappearing by November. This is the place to order strong whiskey from a salty but jovial bartender, to sip it while sitting on church pews in front of roaring flames, to break out a game of rummy or Scrabble (housed in a cozy room behind the chimney) long after you’d already planned to go home.

1415 Larkin, SF. (415) 771-1620

FIRESIDE


A cross between a dive bar and a swanky hipster joint, this Sunset watering hole embodies the schizophrenia of its up-and-coming neighborhood. Which seems to be fine with the down-to-earth drinkers who perch on leather couches around the neon-lit fireplace that anchors the room’s otherwise understated decor.

603 Irving, SF. (415) 731-6433

WILD SIDE WEST


A favorite of lesbians citywide and heteros in the know, this Bernal Heights beauty is most famous for its gorgeous garden patio. But a woodstove, a great jukebox, and strong, well-made drinks also make it perfect for those cold, foggy nights when all you want is a soft scarf, a smooth Scotch, and someone — boy, boi, or girl — to spoon with.

424 Cortland, SF. (415) 647-3099

HIDDEN VINE


OK. Including Hidden Vine may be cheating, as this secret hideaway doesn’t have a fireplace per se. But it’s sure got the atmosphere. Though this is a high-end drinkery, featuring a different wine region every month and offering an impressive selection of artisanal cheeses, the Vine is more comfy than chichi. And a display of white votive candles gives the impression — if not the heat — of a fireplace’s warmth.

620 Post, SF. (415) 674-3567, www.thehiddenvine.com*

Feast: 5 tables for one

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It’s such a cliché to say, "I hate to eat out alone." What’s to hate? True, it’s different from eating at home in your pajamas with a Scarface DVD for company, but when you’re on the go, you’re on the go, and there comes a point when grabbing another soggy sandwich at the corner market just won’t do. Sometimes you have to sit down, regroup, and eat something hot that doesn’t come out of a microwave or a cellophane packet. Peruse the latest Stop Smiling, or, god forbid, meet new people. Here’s a short list of a few places where eating alone doesn’t feel like an excerpt from No Exit — and the only hell involved is choosing just one entrée.

ESPERPENTO


While I was living in Madrid, solitude was hard to come by. Everyone went out in large groups, and day or night the streets were never empty. It was in the lively corner cafés of Lavapies that I honed the ability to be alone despite being constantly surrounded — gleaning respite within the chaos. Sometimes I like to relive those gloriously jumbled evenings of unfamiliar faces, clattering platters, and a graciously retiring waitstaff. At Esperpento, as in Lavapies, I can camp out in the corner with a dog-eared book, sipping a second fino, nibbling my boquerones, patatas, and olives (Spanish comfort food) as the Missionista jet-set ebbs and flows around me.

3295 22nd St., SF. (415) 282-8867

CAFÉ PRAGUE


OK, I admit it. I have something of a fetish for erratic Eurostyle dining. Much like Esperpento, Café Prague never lets me down in this regard. There’s ABBA on the radio. The cooks are frequently having uncomfortably loud discussions in the back that sound like they would be a lot of fun to eavesdrop on, if only I spoke Czech. The place is almost invariably out of the soup I want (though it does have more than 10 to choose from). What it boils down to for me, though, is that Café Prague serves my favorite spinach salad in town. Bigger than my head, it comes adorned with an entire hardboiled egg, chunks of addictive bacon, a slab of focaccia, veggies, and chunky blue cheese dressing. I wouldn’t call it an authentic central European spinach salad by any means, though Café Prague has the hookup on goulash and strudel too if you’re into it. But I am into spinach, and this is where I eat it.

584 Pacific, SF. (415) 433-3811

GOLDEN COFFEE


It takes a certain gumption to force your hungover self out of the homestead on a Sunday morning for a solo brekkie. But sometimes the cupboard is that bare, and it’s times like these when places like the Golden Coffee fulfill a need you might not even have known you had — for example, the need to eat a $6 steak, or the need to drink half a dozen coffee refills over a plate of crispy, golden hash browns (or chow mein!) cooked to greasy perfection by the middle-aged Asian grill master to the lilting strains of classical music. Seated elbow to elbow around a horseshoe-shaped countertop, the patrons of this landmark greasy spoon may not always agree on sports teams, career paths, or politics — but we can all agree that breakfast is a very important part of our day.

901 Sutter, SF. (415) 922-0537

RADIO HABANA SOCIAL CLUB


One reason to come here alone is because it’s so impossibly tiny that if you try to enter with more than one (short) friend, you might not make it beyond the front door. By yourself, you have half a chance of finding an empty bar stool — eventually. While you wait, nursing a juicy sangria, there is plenty to feast your eyes on, as every available surface of the place is decorated with a Dali-esque array of limbless misfit toys with mohawks, loteria cards, doctored lithographs, and dioramas containing giant rubber insects. Being social is more than just the name of the place: it’s the entire point. So leave your homework at home where it belongs and strike up a conversation with the Cuban expat beside you while plowing into a satisfying plate of black beans and rice or nibbling on a crispy chicken empanada.

1109 Valencia, SF. (415) 824-7659

CITRUS CLUB


After a long, hard afternoon shopping at Amoeba Records, you might find yourself in the awkward position of needing an immediate noodle transfusion (don’t scoff, it happens). Too cramped and clattery to be a good venue to bring anyone with whom you might want to have a conversation, the Citrus Club, a pan-Asian noodle house, is a great place to fly solo while you down some hot and sour soup from a bowl big enough to bathe in afterwards. A bit of a hipster magnet, it has vegan options and sake cocktails too. Best of all, the inevitable lines can be easily circumvented by sitting at the counter — an action that delivers its own smug reward.

1790 Haight, SF. (415) 387-6366*

Feast: 5 classic cafeterias

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When I was a wee lad in the sun-baked Los Angeles Basin, my maternal grandparents fostered what would become a lifetime obsession: the cafeteria. Products of World War II, they were people who appreciated the value of simple food and low prices. Add the fact that they were Roman Catholic and had eight mouths to feed, and their philosophy was pretty much a necessity. This is how I was introduced to carving boards of meat, steaming casseroles, and endless ice trays filled with shiny, multicolored geutf8 jewels. But where, oh where does one find these palaces of economic dining in San Francisco? The LA institution Clifton’s actually had an early genesis here, but it — along with Manning’s and Compton’s — didn’t survive the prosperity of the postwar years. It seems, however, that a strange cafeteria hybrid did: the hofbrau. Frankly, this comes as no surprise — as it really is just a cafeteria that serves booze, and, well, San Franciscans seem to never tire of the occasional nip. I set out to discover if the cafeteria is still thriving anywhere or if the hofbrau is really the answer, intent on experiencing these culinary relics and their gravy-laden wares.

TOMMY’S JOYNT


Little introduction is needed for this city icon, and it has no lack of fans, from the late Herb Caen to Metallica. It’s famous for its sandwiches and roast, as well as the décor: a mishmash of historical paraphernalia and signs screaming Where Turkey Is King! Tommy’s is equally fervent in the virtues of its buffalo stew and lists them accordingly. In addition to the myriad brews it has crammed behind the bar, it also serves liquor — and you can pretend you have the means for a three-martini lunch when they come priced at $3.75 each.

1101 Geary, SF. (415) 775-4126, www.tommysjoynt.com

LEFTY O’DOUL’S


Having been credited with discovering Joe DiMaggio and bringing baseball to Japan, O’Doul was that consummate old-school, bigger-than-life personality. So before the Bruce Willises, Sylvester Stalones, and others bestowed us with their culinary "treasures," O’Doul gave us this combination cafeteria–<\d>sports bar–tourist trap. The macaroni and cheese and the German potato salad are caloric bombs of goodness. And gnawing on a slice of American beef while staring at a giant statue of Marilyn Monroe is an experience vaguely reminiscent of listening to the Who’s Tommy.

333 Geary, SF. (415) 982-8900, www.leftyodouls.biz/index.html

CHICK-N-COOP


The closest to the sweet memories of my youth, Chick-N-Coop serves up all the goods while little old ladies prattle on about coupons over coffee and bowls of rice pudding. The Taraval location, with its early ’80s country atmosphere, boasts cheaper prices. But the best grub and experience is at the Excelsior location. Either way, the claim to fame here is the chicken, and the Chick-N-Coop does, indeed, know how to roast a bird. Sides are tasty, like the Greek-style spaghetti. And — be still, my beating heart — it has beautiful, beautiful Jell-O.

1055 Taraval, SF. (415) 664-5050; 4500 Mission, SF. (415) 586-1538

TOP’S CAFETERIA


One thing I learned during this search was that many of the old-timey joints — such as Manning’s, which used to be next door to the Emporium — were bought by Asian immigrants during the ’70s. Hence, today we have a proliferation of Chinese food to go and the ever-delicious Asian buffet, but that’s another tale. Top’s does, however, meld its former life with its current one, with interesting choices like lasagna and salad, Mongolian beef with shrimp, or Korean noodle soup. It wins big points for employing the linoleum-and-Formica aesthetic and for providing strange but lovely choices for low prices. Where else can you find a four-course meal for $23? Be ready when you approach the fair maiden at the counter, however, for the minute she claps her hands, you must know precisely what you want — and she waits for no one.

66 Dorman, SF. 415-285-2461

VA HOSPITAL CANTEEN


The word canteen in the name of this medical lunch room — the closest most of us get to a cafeteria these days — had me expecting the Andrews Sisters to greet me at the door, but alas, no one was rolling out any barrels. But the place wins, hands down, in the economy department: you can get a plate of fried chicken, pudding, and a Coke for three bucks. But this is a government institution, so leave your taste buds at the door. The dining room is an exercise in bright aqua and purple tones as only the late ’80s could have provided, but what keeps this establishment afloat above other like contenders is its magnificent view of the Pacific and the Marin Headlands. Though no destination, it’s still a cheap alternative to the Cliff House.

4150 Clement, Bldg 7, SF. 415-221-4810*

Feast: 6 top-notch tipples

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Vanguards of the gastronomic West, we San Franciscans no longer teeter through establishments that struggle over cooking a steak or making a dry martini. Now it’s heirloom this, house-made that. But yet, too often we find menu exoticism riding roughshod over care and competence. Go to a grill in Millbrae and you may sooner find mustard-encrusted salmon than a truly good burger; likewise, walk into a lounge in SoMa and you might see a bartender rolling up his sleeves to make a Thai-basil gimlet, only to then throw some Jameson into decaying java to pass off as an Irish coffee. Fortunately, though, there are still some bars that don’t get caught up in this culinary hullabaloo and can pull off even the easiest drinks. Following are some of our favorites.

AMERICANO RESTAURANT AND BAR


If the intended goal of making a cosmopolitan is a cocktail that is at once darlingly pretty and also scrumptious to the average palate, then a couple of monkeys with a couple of bottles of liquor could make a whole tasting menu. The cosmo at Americano, though, is made with the same care the staff gives a martini: real sugariness matches the tartness, the cranberry juice is nothing more than a soft touch, ice chips float atop it all, and an astonishing amount of alcohol is fitted into the space provided. Americano, replete in hotel swank, also provides the perfect place for kicking back and mingling with fellow business types.

8 Mission, SF. (415) 278-3777, www.americanorestaurant.com

ELIXIR


There is a growing movement to put rye instead of bourbon in manhattans. While some followers of this ethos hold office hours at Elixir, the manhattan made here with Elixir’s hand-selected barrels of Eagle Rare Bourbon is a treat. Too often a manhattan’s distinguished tones will come together all hunky. Here, though, those same flavors are coaxed into a cuddle puddle of dignity. The drink’s insane smoothness doesn’t come from sanding away the subtler notes either but from polishing the whole thing up.

3200 16th St., SF. (415) 552-1633, www.elixirsf.com

BOURBON AND BRANCH


According to Esquire, Bourbon and Branch is one of the top bars in the country. It feels, then, a little perverse to recommend getting a gin and tonic here (not to mention a waste of time even bringing it up). But in a world where so many gin and tonics are rendered impotent with second-class tonic, Bourbon and Branch is clearing a path by making its own. Even with its slight orange flavor, this mixer is the perfect way to sparkle out even the nicest gin. (Of course, no Bombay Sapphire here). One terrible caveat: get here on a lucky day — the homemade tonic goes quickly.

501 Jones, SF. (415) 346-1735, www.bourbonandbranch.com

ACE CAFE


It’s not hard to find bars in San Francisco that cater to beer aficionados. It’s a little more difficult finding one that appeals to refreshment devotees. Such a person may appreciate an obscure microbrew but will really yearn for a Tecate that’s ice cold. Sadly, bar refrigerators in San Francisco are rarely chilly enough to bring out all the refreshment qualities of beer — but not Ace Cafe’s. The refrigerator here pumps out beers that make your palm burn if you hold them too long. If that’s not enough, Ace Cafe chills its glasses as well. And wait — what’s this? Are these pretzels to munch on? This place knows how to serve a beer.

1799 Mission, SF

LAZSLO


You wouldn’t think Laszlo, with its blaring techno, European clientele, and postindustrial decor, would be the place to relax with a White Russian at the end of an evening. But as the bar apparent of Foreign Cinema, it can consistently make a creamy but still cutting nightcap. Plus, the sidewalk tables provide a charming space for enjoying the Mission Street show.

2534 Mission, SF. (415) 401-0810, laszlobar.com

LI PO


The overwhelming mai tai–ness of Li Po comes across in everything from its bizarre, saturated decor to its sometimes even more bizarre bands and mishmash clientele. In fact, being here is like swimming in a giant mai tai. This wouldn’t be so bad, except the bartenders here maintain that their mai tai has a secret ingredient — and that could be bad for the skin. Fortunately, this secret ingredient does wonders for the taste of the drink. More than just your typical fruity cocktail, Li Po’s version will have you rocking out alone in the basement, only to come drooling back to fork over $7 for another. Yes, the place can sometimes attract tourists. But since when is having the chance to buy a mind-blowing beverage for a sexually confused Minnesotan a bad thing?

916 Grant, SF. (415) 982-0072*

Feast: 5 sexy suppers

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Some dates are sweet. You go to a nice restaurant with lacy tablecloths, order food that won’t make your breath stink later, have polite conversation while shyly catching each other’s eye over the rim of your wine glass, and hold hands tentatively as you walk to the car, wondering if you’ll share a delicate kiss before you part ways for the night. But these aren’t usually the dates I want. More often, I like my dates down and dirty, boozy and bawdy, or, at the very least, out of the ordinary. I want to be either seduced by the cuisine or seduced by my company, but either way, I want my evening out to get me off. Here are some date destinations that are a guaranteed sure thing.

ASIASF


You can’t talk about food and sex and San Francisco without talking about this SoMa phenomenon. The food is good — the crab cakes are more crab than filler, and the beef in the steak salad was good quality — but the real reason you’re here is the drag show, though "drag show" is an anemic phrase for describing what you’ll see. This swanky spot features some of the hottest women this side of the Y chromosome (or Thailand) and some of the best dramatic performances this side of the Fringe Festival. My personal favorite? Red-haired Ginger, who downed a liter of Grey Goose and a bottle of "pills" while lip-syncing to "All by Myself." Pair her performance with the mint-heavy pomegranate mojito, and you’ll find yourself trying to take her home at the end of the night. (Note: She won’t go — she has a beau.)

201 Ninth St., SF. (415) 255-2742, www.asiasf.com

MAHARANI’S


You know those fantasies you have about being royalty in some foreign country while you seduce your polite, well-mannered, yet kinky lover-to-be over a plate of something steamy? This is the place you want to do it. The main dining room isn’t much to look at, but get a reservation for the Fantasy Room and you’ll find yourself in a private, beaded booth with cucumber-infused drinking water, warm towels scented with rose water, and Indian food served more elegantly than you ever imagined it could be (think geometric plates and California cuisine–<\d>style garnishes). The prix-fixe menu is a bit overpriced, but the Kama Sutra cocktail really is titilutf8g. And there’s something to be said for having control over your own lights and playing shoeless footsy under your private table.

1122 Post, SF. (415) 775-1988, www.maharanirestaurant.com

OVATION AT THE INN AT THE OPERA


San Francisco does dive bars, and does them well. But this city also does sexy elegance in a way that’s particularly ours, and Ovation is a perfect example. This hotel restaurant is opulent and classically romantic, with green velvet chairs and white tablecloths and entrées that cost more than most parking tickets. But in true Bay Area style, it’s also accessible, comfortable, and beautiful in an understated way — all of which make it sneakily sexy. The small, intimate bar grounds the dining room, and a fireplace warms the dignified décor, which might otherwise seem cold and baroque. Plus, is there anything hotter than illicit bathroom sex when you’re all dressed up?

333 Fulton, SF. (415) 553-8100

WOODHOUSE FISH CO.


I’m not sure I understand the appeal of oysters. I’ve trained myself to like them, especially with a bit of horseradish and ketchup. But are they really an aphrodisiac? Is it because of their obvious resemblance to female body parts? Or is it because you know that if your date can handle their mucusy texture and fishy flavor, they surely can handle, uh, yours? I can’t begin to guess. I prefer the sides of broccoli and fries (both well made) over the seafood at this joint in the Safeway district. But there’s one thing I find truly sexy about Woodhouse oysters: on Tuesday nights, they’re $1 apiece. Which means that after filling up, there’s still enough cash for a shot of tequila at the Transfer and coffee in the morning. And what’s sexier than shellfish? A date that doesn’t break the bank.

2073 Market, SF. (415) 473-CRAB, www.woodhousefish.com

SUPPERCLUB


Dinner in bed? It’s almost too obvious. But you can’t deny the appeal of overt sexuality, even if it’s delivered in a stylized, sometimes-too-LA package. The all-white dining room at this dinner-as-experience destination is striking, and I’ve rarely tasted food so delicious and subtle — particularly the vegetarian options — as it is here. And whether it was watching a tranny strip down, without fanfare or theatricality, to his bald, tattooed, masculine self, or whether it was the Late Night Sneaky I ordered (top-shelf tequila, a Corona, and an ExportA cigarette in a shot glass), or whether it was just settling into the couch cushions as my dirty martini settled into my bloodstream, it was hard to wait to jump my date until we got home.

657 Harrison, SF. (415) 348-0900, www.supperclub.com*

Where is the love?

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OPINION Distant dreams of flowing colored scarves, glowing tie-dyed shirts, and rainbow dashikis commingling with mounds of facial hair and peace signs filled my mind as I walked through a deep recess of quiet green on a hidden trail in Golden Gate Park. It was 7 a.m. I was there to meet Mary X, an OG Summer of Love attendee, as she hastily closed her camp before, as she put it, "the po arrested me and stole all my stuff."

Despite the romantic images of the 1967 events, Mary’s campmates — black, brown, and white houseless elders, several of whom are veterans of the Vietnam War — were barely clothed in soiled flak jackets and torn tie-dyed shirts.

Further shattering the mythos of peace, human love, and community caring, many of these elders sported overlong beards that, unlike those in so many white-ified Jesus pictures, were filled with crumbs and spittle. Their hands were crippled with arthritis and barely able to hold their coffee cups, much less make a peace sign. "I was there," Mary stated plainly, her black eyes searching nervously for the next Department of Public Works truck or park police officer. "I was at the original Summer of Love in 1967." She stopped talking, picked up her backpack, and left without looking back at me.

Mary is a diagnosed schizophrenic, she told me during our original phone call, and like many poor folks in the United States — like my poor mama, Dee, who passed away last year — she has no money for mental health services. Her indigent program allows her a biannual visit with a disaffected psychiatrist who hands her a medication prescription she can’t afford to fill. Her only income is earned from long hours spent collecting cans and redeeming them for small change, very hard work that we at Poor call microbusiness — and a line of work that our magazine, in a recent exposé ("The Corporate Trash Scandal," 8/15/07), discovered is more likely to erase our collective carbon footprint that any corporate recycling company.

While Mayor Gavin Newsom continues with his daily sweeps of homeless people in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius writes weekly hit pieces that demonize and lie about the poor folks surviving in public spaces, equating them with the wild coyotes that roam the park. Nevius’s hit campaign begs the question for all of us: where is the love?

As thousands celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love, how can we criminalize people for the sole act of living without a home and occupying public space? And who should really determine who belongs in open spaces like parks, beaches, streets, and sidewalks?

How have we in the United States come to equate cleanliness with a lack of poor human beings, and how are the people who have come to celebrate the Summer of Love — with their trash, picnic baskets, cars, belongings, and recreational drugs — any cleaner than the homeless folks who live and work in the park year-round and have nowhere else to go?

Tiny

Tiny, a.k.a. Lisa Gray-Garcia, is the cofounder of Poor magazine and the Poor News Network (www.poornewsnetwork.org) and the author of Criminal of Poverty: Growing Up Homeless in America.

Stone’s throw

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS While y’all were at Burning Man, I was in the bathtub. I was taking a bath. I was floating in a swimming pool with a mojito in one hand and a grilled hot sausage on a long fork in the other. I was walking in a fog.

I was eating a popsicle, running naked through sprinklers, stepping on worms.

I was listening to Elton John. In my room. Window open. I was eating salad and salad and salad. The greens were green and crisp, the tomatoes not quite ripe.

I was slicing white onions. I was eating white onions, raw, and hot peppers. I slept real hard and figured out how to open my window and walked around in the sun and the shade, looking people in the eye.

I took a bath and a shower at the same time, and drank ice water out of a glass, the outside of which frosted over, so I licked it. I dressed conservatively.

I hung out in coffeehouses. I am writing this in coffeehouses. Coffee. Iced coffee. Green tea. Italian sodas. This morning I went to a different coffeehouse, and I tried to see if I could eat Korean barbecue with rice for breakfast, in a coffeehouse.

I could! While y’all were at Burning Man, I was at the Pebbles Café in Glen Park, at 8:30 in the morning, eating bulgoki over rice, with a salad. Bulgoki, or bulgogi, means "fire meat" in Korean. In this case it’s beef, very thinly sliced and marinated in something salty and sweet, with onions and peppers and carrots and ohmigod! For having this on the menu, and for serving it to me at 8:30 a.m., Pebbles Café is my new favorite coffeehouse.

I think that people are vegetarians. I say this because I was sitting at a table full of dudes in a different coffeehouse, and they started talking about Burning Man this, Burning Man that. So I cleared my throat. I told them my idea for bringing Camp Chicken Farmer to Burning Man. They looked at me like I was crazy, and I looked at them like they were vegetarians.

The idea for Camp Chicken Farmer ’08 was hatched at Camp Trans, while I was interviewing someone about why didn’t they have eggs. And they said it was too hard to keep eggs without refrigeration, or even ice. Thing is: the freshest egg in the world is as warm as a mug of coffee, and the freshest meat is still moving.

To illustrate this natural fact, I am going to take Camp Chicken Farmer to Burning Man next year, if I can raise the funds and recruit farmers. So far I have one. Well, by myself then, if necessary, I’m going to haul a pick-up truck of live chickens to Black Rock Desert, and a sack of feed, and a hatchet. I’m going to dress conservatively, stay sober, and just fry fresh eggs and butcher and barbecue all week long, go to sleep early.

Now, my attentive readers are going to go: "Wait a minute, Chicken Farmer, you had a hard enough time killing Houdini."

Exactly. And what’s the cure for not hardly being able to kill a chicken? Killing hundreds of them. Anyone could tell you that. On the other hand, it takes a paid professional specialist like me to tell you about the intricacies of coffeehouse Korean barbecue in Glen Park. For breakfast.

Two drunk guys on a sidewalk in Chicago got in my face. They asked impolitely if I was a transvestite.

"I’m everything," I said. "I’m trans."

"You mean you used to be a man and now you’re a woman?" one guy asked while the other started going on about how God made you one way. "You don’t mess with that," he said.

"I did," I said.

The light changed while they were still in my face. "I’d love to stay and chat," I said, flashing them the peace sign and stepping in the street, as if I had somewhere to be.

In fact my bus didn’t leave until two a.m. I had time to kill. The sun was just setting. The tops of the tall buildings were lit, and we were in it, in one sense, like ants under a magnifying glass. I had time to kill, and time was killing me. So while you were at Burning Man, I was still in Chicago on the sidewalk between bums, drunk, hungry, discussing theology, not giving anyone any hand jobs, laughing, and on fire.<\!s>*

PEBBLES CAFE

Monday–<\d>Friday: 6:30 a.m.–<\d>3:30 p.m.; Saturday: 8:30 a.m.–<\d>3:30 p.m.; closed Sunday

2852 Diamond St. S.F.

(415) 333-2270

No alcohol

Credit cards not accepted

Wheelchair accessible

Elisa’s Cafe and L’s Caffe

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› paulr@sfbg.com

No matter how you prefer to spell café — or caffe, or even cafe — you probably have a favorite one. Haunting a particular café is a prerogative of city dwelling, and in a coffee-involved city like ours, the possible forums for such socially acceptable loitering are vast, even including places that don’t have espresso machines. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Cafés, you see, don’t have to be about coffee, really, though most serve it in some form and some serve it in many forms. Cafés can also be about food, and in this sense we use the word in more or less the same sense the Parisians do, to describe the most casual sort of restaurant, the sort of place that doesn’t necessarily have full table service but does have tables where you are welcome to linger and discuss and rap your knuckles for emphasis even after you’ve finished eating whatever it was you were eating.

And what were you eating? Nacatamales? Have my typing fingers gone into spasm? Did I mean to type tamales but succumbed to overenthusiasm? No: I meant to type nacatamales because the nacatamal is the tamale of Nicaragua (and Honduras), and you can get them at Elisa’s Café, along with other Central American delicacies. Along with coffee — but not espresso.

Elisa’s opened late in the spring in the Excelsior space occupied for a number of years by Bistro E Europe, a restaurant that served the foods of Hungary and the Roma (a.k.a. the gypsies). The rather Spartan-looking space has been given a nice freshening, with peach paint and black furniture, and you no longer have that forgotten-city feeling while sitting in the window, watching the world go by.

Nacatamales ($5.50), as prepared by Elisa’s kitchen, are bigger and squarer than ordinary tamales. They’re about the size of a watch box and are steamed in plantain leaves, which are peeled away before the plate is presented to you. Otherwise, the similarities are manifest; we are talking about a squarish molding of masa (a close, corn-meal relation of polenta) in which potatoes, rice, tomatoes, onions, raisins, mint leaves, and possibly beef, pork, or chicken, have been cooked, as in a clafoutis or berry muffin. The boundary between the filling and the enclosure is indistinct, in other words.

The nacatamales are big. One is plenty for a single person and might even be splittable if you open your repast with, say, some soup. Soups vary according to the day of the week, and some are pricier than others. The least costly appears on Friday and is meatless: a black-bean soup ($4.50), whose namesake legumes are reduced to a thin purée in which bob peeled boiled eggs and coiled ropes of red pepper. Since the soup is basically mild, enlivenment is provided on the side in the form of a white salsa, a mince of onions steeped in vinegar. The sauce emits almost unbreathable fumes, but once in the soup it settles down to the general benefit.

Other dishes seem more familiar — the sorts of things you might find at other restaurants serving the foods of Mesoamerica — including bistec encebollado ($8.75), several pieces of beef sliced minute-steak thin, then pan-fried and finished with a tousled cap of sautéed onions. There’s also a salad on the side, iceberg lettuce with cucumber coins and quartered tomatoes. Quite American, I thought, as if the shock of Nicaraguan cooking must be buffered somehow for yanqui sensibilities.

When you are sitting in L’s Caffe, on 24th Street between Bryant and Florida, you are sitting in what I think of as the deepest heart of the Mission. And because the Mission is changeable and ever-changing, a café at its heart would almost necessarily be polyglot. The principals of L’s are all named Lozano — which is a Spanish name but also turns up occasionally in Italy. Italy and Spain, of course, have taken turns ruling bits of each other over the centuries.

As if to honor this long entwinement, the café offers a casually international menu, with definite Italian flourishes along with Spanish touches spoken in a New World accent. You can get bagels smeared with lox and cream cheese, or with hummus; you can get a PB&J or a sandwich with pepperoni, mozzarella, and pesto. You can get Chilean-style empanadas ($3 each), half-moon shaped pastry pouches filled with shredded chicken or just vegetables — which might mean mostly spinach.

There’s a minestrone soup ($4.50) whose thick, spicy tomato sauce and flotsam of white beans and pasta would do credit to many an Italian restaurant. The soup goes nicely with, perhaps, a turkey and Swiss sandwich ($5.95), which would be totally all-American if not for the swoosh of hummus on the top slice of whole-wheat bread. Even a five-bean salad ($3.25), a staple of midsummer picnics, features a broad constituency of legumes: black, pinto, lima, and green beans, along with chickpeas.

Not all recent changes in the Mission are awful, if we factor into our judgment L’s Caffe’s commitment to organic agriculture — all the coffee beans are organic, as is much of the food — and to reducing its waste stream through a conscientious program of composting and recycling. As someone who recently had a burrito at a long-beloved taqueria (also in the Mission) and was horrified to see a reckless flow of aluminum foil, Styrofoam, and other manufactured leavings into the garbage, I can tell you that this matters.

ELISA’S CAFÉ

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

4901 Mission, SF

(415) 333-3177

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Not noisy

Wheelchair accessible

L’S CAFFE

Mon.–Thurs., 6 a.m.–9 p.m.; Fri., 6 a.m.–10 p.m.; Sat–Sun., 7 a.m.–9 p.m.

2871 24th St., SF

(415) 206-0274

www.lscaffe.net

Beer and wine

DC/DISC/MC/V

Not noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Fall Arts: Sing or swim

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

 

AUG. 28

Aesop Rock, None Shall Pass (Def Jux) We’ll see if ‘Sop has lost his edge livin’ in ol’ Frisky. Blockhead and Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle take a pass on the nervy rhymes.

Akon, Konvicted (Konvict/Upfront/SRC/Universal Motown) Konvinced? Or just plain a-korny?

Evelyn Champagne King, Open Book (RNB/Jaggo/Fontana) The disco queen who was discovered while cleaning the offices of Philly International brings “Shame” into the 21st century.

Ledisi, Lost and Found (Verve Forecast) The local singer’s debut for the true diva cathedral of all jazz labels has been three years in the making.

Liars, Liars (Mute) Work that skirt.

Noreaga, Noreality (Babygrande) Wake me up when Noreality TV has finished its broadcast day. Kanye West, Pharrell Williams, Jadakiss, Three 6 Mafia, David Banner, and a cast of thousands trade off on enabling duty.

Scorpions, Humanity — Hour 1 (New Door/UME) Oh, the inhumanity; Billy Corgan scorps out new turf.

Yung Joc, Hustlenomics (Block/Bad Boy South) Joc’ed up on java with the first single, “Coffee Shop,” off this Neptunes-, Fixxers-, and Gorilla Zoe–produced disc.

 

SEPT. 4

Calvin Harris, I Created Disco (Almost Gold) The brazen Scot is irreverent enough to lay claim to inventing the big D, the buzzword of this year and the year before.

 

SEPT. 11

Animal Collective, Strawberry Jam (Domino) Helmed by frequent Sun City Girls producer Scott Colburn, their eighth album’s nine songs include one dedicated to Al Green.

B5, Don’t Talk, Just Listen (Bad Boy) Diddy’s answer to the Backstreet Boys unknowingly use the favorite phone phrase of the Weepy-Voiced Killer as the title for their album.

Dirty Projectors, Rise Above (Dead Oceans) Another punk machismo-reclamation project? Queerific art rockers team with Grizzly Bear playas to rewrite Black Flag’s Damaged — from memory and with a hearty helping of cracked experifolk whimsy.

50 Cent, Curtis (Shady/Aftermath/Interscope) The artist also known as a form of VitaminWater that tastes like grape Kool-Aid continues his marketing onslaught.

Go! Team, Proof of Youth (Sub Pop) Will their first single, “Grip Like a Vice,” hook till it hurts?

Jenny Hoyston, Isle Of (Southern) The Erase Errata guitarist finds paradise far from the dashboard blight.

Modeselektor, Happy Birthday! (BPitch Control) Genre-hopping Berlin duo go the celebrity cameo route, enlisting the vox of Thom Yorke and others.

Pinback, Autumn of the Seraphs (Touch and Go) Will this top Pinback’s last album, Summer in Abbadon, which sold more than 80,000 copies? Indie music sellers wanna know!

Qui, Love’s Miracle (Ipecac) Jesus Lizard David Yow’s quid pro quo — with covers of Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” and Frank Zappa’s “Willie the Pimp.”

Simian Mobile Disco, Attack Decay Sustain Release (Interscope) I got my pulverizing bass in your acid keyboard scrunchies!

Kanye West, Graduation (Roc-A-Fella) West’s mom has been caught saying that this is his best album ever. Making or breaking the case: West has said that Lil’ Wayne will rap over a song titled “Barry Bonds.”

 

SEPT. 18

Babyface, Playlist (Mercury) The onetime close, personal friend of Bill just wants do covers, like “Fire and Rain,” “Time in a Bottle,” and — hoo boy — “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”

James Blunt, All the Lost Souls (Custard/Atlantic) U-g-l-y, this ain’t got no alibi.

Chamillionaire, Ultimate Victory (Chamillitary/Universal Motown) The H-town star’s long-delayed sophomore effort has a mammoth supporting cast even by commercial-rap standards; it kicks off with a single featuring Slick Rick.

The Donnas, Bitchin’ (Purple Feather/Redeye) Named after the fluffy puppies overrunning their studio?

Eve, Here I Am (Aftermath/Interscope) Had anyone been looking? Listening in are producers Dr. Dre, Timbaland, Swizz Beatz, and Pharrell Williams.

Rogue Wave, Asleep at Heaven’s Gate (Brushfire/Universal) Just don’t drift off around Marshall Applewhite while wearing black-and-white Nikes. A new bass player — Patrick Abernathy — and a new label for the locals.

Angie Stone, The Art of Love and War (Stax/Concord) The road back from VH1’s Celebrity Fit Club may yet be one to salvation, since it’s passing through the holy land of Stax.

 

SEPT. 25

Devendra Banhart, Smokey Rolls down Thunder Canyon (XL) Gael García Bernal sings on one track, and Vashti Bunyan sings on two; Noah Georgeson produces a collection that is supposed to flit from Gilberto Gil breezes to Jackson 5–style pop.

The Cave Singers, Invitation Songs (Matador) Pretty Girls Make Graves–Murder City Devils, Hint Hint, and Cobra High grads calcify in intriguing country-folk shapes.

Keyshia Cole, Just like You (A&M/Interscope) Two years on, it’s clear that Oakland girl Cole’s The Way It Is was the best R&B debut since What’s the 411? Through the sheer intense focus of her singing, she rescues overexposed Missy and Lil’ Kim on the first single here.

José González, In Our Nature (Mute) Yes way, José. The long wait for the follow-up to Veneer is over. González recorded this in his hometown over a three-week period after obsessing about today’s religion and (lack of) ethics.

PJ Harvey, White Chalk (Island) Peej draws in longtime collaborator Eric Drew Feldman and Jim White of the Dirty Three.

Iron and Wine, The Shepherd’s Dog (Sub Pop) Here’s hoping three’s the charm for Sam Beam.

Jagged Edge, Baby Makin’ Project (So So Def/Island) Yet another case for population control.

Mick Jagger, The Very Best of Mick Jagger (Rhino UK) It’s semiofficial: the best of Mick Jagger is worse than the worst of the Rolling Stones.

Bettye LaVette, The Scene of the Crime (Anti-) A singer who can bring out the black-and-blue tone of that title, especially because the scene of the crime is Muscle Shoals, Ala., where she returned to record this album. She’s backed by Drive-by Truckers.

Matt Pond PA, Last Light (Altitude) Neko Case and Kelly Hogan hold a candle.

Múm, Go Go Smear the Poison Ivy, Let Your Crooked Hands Be Holy (Fat Cat) Mum’s the word?

Meshell Ndegeocello, The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams (Decca) Connecting her MySpace page to the gender-bending edges of her cover of Bill Withers’s “Who Is He (and What Is He to You?),” you might say the man of her dreams is Miles Davis.

Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, Raising Sand (Rounder) Why does my mouth fill with sand when I think about this project?

Queen Latifah, Trav’lin’ Light (Verve) Latifah steps to a song that will always be owned by Billie Holiday — and sings some other songs as well — on her debut album for one of Lady Day’s main labels today.

Scott Walker, And Who Shall Go to the Ball? (4AD UK) The enigma returns more quickly than usual, albeit with a four-movement instrumental mini-LP composed for a dance piece.

Will.i.am, Songs about Girls (Interscope) The Black Eyed Pea with the lamest name loves the ladies, egged on by Snoop Dogg.

 

OCT. 2

Cassidy, B.A.R.S. (Full Surface/J) The Philly battle rapper rebounds from injury and lockup and leans on Bone Thugs, John Legend, and others for faith.

Annie Lennox, Songs of Mass Destruction (Arista) No doubt about it, “Why?” can be very irritating. But this title suggests she’s really amped up the damage inflicted by her tunes.

 

OCT. 9

Band of Horses, Cease to Begin (Sub Pop) Ben Bridwell expresses his love for YouTube video directors on this Phil Eks–produced second LP.

Dengue Fever, Untitled (M80 Music/NAIL/Allegro) On recordings, they’re sometimes glorious, sometimes not — will the third time be a charm for the group led by Chhom Nimol’s dynamic voice?

The Fiery Furnaces, Widow City (Thrill Jockey) The prolific sibs thrust forth their sixth full-length, emboldened by engineer John McEntire of Tortoise.

The Hives, The Black and White Album (Interscope) The ebullient Swedes will be donning black after a dozen or so shows opening for Maroon 5.

Jennifer Lopez, Brave (Epic) Are listeners courageous or is she?

Robert Pollard, Coast to Coast Carpet of Love and Standard Gargoyle Decisions (Merge) Two releases in one day — guided by bipolar voices?

She Wants Revenge, This Is Forever (Geffen) Let’s hope not.

Amy Winehouse, Frank (Island) Pre–US juggernaut album by the singer in rehab, for anyone who doesn’t think she’s overexposed or wouldn’t rather look at Ronnie Spector and listen to Ruth Brown.

 

OCT. 16

Nicole Scherzinger, Her Name Is Nicole …(Interscope) …and she’s the Pussycat Doll whom you can tell apart from the other Pussycat Dolls — I think. She falls in seconds-long love at first sight with prospective members of her group during auditions, if the trashiest TV show in recent memory is to be believed.

 

OCT. 23

Ashanti, The Declaration (The Inc.) I’ll flabbergast many by saying that Ashanti has served up more quality hit singles than the other R&B diva releasing an album this week.

Alicia Keys, As I Am (J) She can sing, she can play, she can sell Proactiv Solution like few others. But will she ever truly let that voice loose?

 

OCT. 30

Backstreet Boys, Unbreakable (Jive) Do we really want it that way again? Can they give it to us that way? One thing’s for sure — this should give Chelsea Handler months of comedy material.

Chris Brown, Exclusive (Jive) Yeah, he’s cuter than kitten posters. But his appearance in a tribute to the Godfather of Soul at last year’s Grammy Awards verged on sacrilege.

 

NOV. 13

Wu-Tang Clan, The 8 Diagrams (Street Recordings) Their first album in six years — thus their first post-ODB recording — takes its title from the Shaw brothers’ film Eight Diagram Pole Fighter; in tune with the George Harrison revival, it includes a cover of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”

 

NOV. 20

Six Organs of Admittance, Shelter from the Ash (Drag City) The Redwood Curtain’s guitar-wielding heir to John Fahey breaks out a new LP, said to be smokin’.<\!s>*

 

Mission Beach Cafe

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0

By Paul Reidinger


› paulr@sfbg.com

Pending the results of the next big earthquake, the Mission remains beachless, unless we count rooftops and the southwest corner of Dolores Park. No summertime water there, other than from the lawn sprinklers, but plenty of ephebes in Speedos for your voyeuristic pleasure. Maybe we shouldn’t fixate on water, anyway. The Mission, while landlocked, does offer lots of sun, a pleasantly hazy slacker ethos that would do credit to those surfer-dude haunts on the San Mateo County coast, and, since early in the year, Mission Beach Cafe, at the corner of 14th and Guerrero streets.

Decriers of Mission gentrification need only take a short roll down 14th, from Market to Folsom, more or less, to have their sense of the world restored. Grit has not yet been totally expunged from this city, and a less likely setting for an urban beach you would have trouble picturing. A few years ago, I wrote about another café, just a block or so away from Mission Beach on the 14th Street corridor, in which all the food was made in little ovens — convection, toaster, microwave — while nefarious types knocked about outside, on curbs and in alleys.

The little portable-oven place folded after a few years, but the advent of Mission Beach Cafe tells us that while 14th Street is still a realm of used-car lots, body shops, gas stations, kinky porn, and maybe even some lingering nefarious types, it is also sufficiently on its way up now to sustain a genuinely gorgeous little restaurant — latest in a long series of labor-of-love, neighborhood jewels that give this city of neighborhoods its distinctive restaurant character.

The gentlemen behind Mission Beach Cafe are Bill Clarke and Alan Carter. Carter is a baker, and this aptitude finds expression in the café’s morning persona — pastries to go with your Blue Bottle coffee — as well as on the evening shift, whose menu can include a rabbit pot pie ($17.50) with a homemade crust. We saw quite a few examples of this dish making appearances around the dining room. Part of its appeal doubtless has to do with the continuing exotic appeal of rabbit, and part of that probably has to do with the fact that cooking with rabbit is tricky. Like turkey, rabbit is lean and dries out quickly, and so sealing it in a pie, with peas, carrots, and thick gravy, is a good strategy. The pie isn’t a true pie, incidentally, an enclosure of pastry. The crust is just a disk fitted over the top of the bowl in which the dish is baked, and there is no edible bottom.

The general drift of the kitchen’s intentions is captured by a single entry on the dinner menu: ahi tuna tartare with ginger and soy sauce. I’ve never had a bad version of this dish, but I’ve had it so many times, and seen it so very many others, that sampling it no longer seems necessary. But it does tell us we’re in the heart of the heart of California cuisine, a reality of mixed and eclectic influences and local, sustainable, and often organic ingredients. And even if this is familiar territory, it can be made exciting by sharp execution and the occasional twist.

Let’s put some grated fresh ginger in the gazpacho ($4.50), for instance, and some sake too. I didn’t pick up the sake, but the brassy fruitiness of the ginger was unmistakable, while the soup’s appearance was unforgettable: a silken smooth purée of Pepto-Bismol pinky peach. A turkey sandwich ($6 for half) wasn’t quite so striking in either dimension, despite avocado, bacon, and aioli, but a vegetarian sandwich ($9.50) made clever use of sun-dried tomatoes’ meatiness as a supplement to grilled eggplant, avocado, and smoked mozzarella.

Succotash ($4.50), a classic dish of the American Indians, is so simple and tasty that its slender popularity nowadays is something of a mystery. It’s a good way to use some of high summer’s fresh corn, and if you run out of fava beans, use edamame instead! The result will be just as good. And if there’s any grumbling, the seasoned fries ($4.50) should snuff it out. They’re not curly like Jack in the Box’s, but they’re just as tasty.

The one dish I found a little wanting was tilapia ($13.50) crusted with flax seeds. These looked like blue-gray lentils and gave the filet the impression of having recovered its scaly skin, but the flavor charge tended toward the imperceptible. Tilapia has its attractions — it’s inexpensive, predictable, low profile — but as a rule it needs more help from the kitchen than a witty crusting and a heap of steamed spinach on the side.

Fortunately we had already semi-gorged on the day’s flatbread ($10), a squarish mat with the puffiness of fresh pita bread and topped with garlic, pine nuts, shredded chicken, fennel, and plenty of grated parmesan cheese. The look was slightly anemic — some green or red would have been nice — but the flavors were clear and powerful. And despite the flatbread’s satisfyingness, we still had enough space available, as we approached the finish line, to accommodate a last small masterpiece of baking: brownie points ($4.50), a pair of moist brownie triangles trimmed with caramel sauce and whipped cream.

To me these sorts of foods are homey in a San Francisco, early 21st-century way, but evidently they’re also hip too, to judge by the profusion of hipsters, in shiny pants and Technicolor Adidas, among the clientele. If we are to have such ironies in the Mission, what better place than at the Mission’s only beachfront café?<\!s>*

MISSION BEACH CAFE

Pastry and coffee bar: Mon.–<\d>Fri., from 7 a.m.; Sat.–<\d>Sun., from 8 a.m. Lunch: daily, 11 a.m.–<\d>3 p.m. Dinner: Tues.–<\d>Thurs. and Sun., 5:30–<\d>10 p.m.; Fri.–<\d>Sat., 5:30–<\d>11 p.m.

198 Guerrero, SF

(415) 861-0198

www.missionbeachcafesf.com

MC/V

Beer and wine

Pleasant noise level

Wheelchair accessible

Midnight Specialists: Midnight Mass

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0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

The funniest line in movie history didn’t pass from the lips of Addison DeWitt in All About Eve (1950), Nora Charles in The Thin Man (1934), or Alvy Singer in Annie Hall (1977). That honor belongs to Taffy Davenport (Mink Stole) of Female Trouble (1974), who responds to the advances of her dentally challenged stepfather thusly: "I wouldn’t suck your lousy dick if I was suffocating and there was oxygen in your balls!" Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, who will die for your sin of omission?

The savior of midnight movies in San Francisco, Peaches Christ, that’s who. If she can fit it into her busy schedule, of course.

Joshua Grannell, the surprisingly subdued and clean-cut gentleman behind the character of Midnight Mass’s holy hostess, says so during coffee talk about the author of that historical piece of dialogue, John Waters, and the massive undertaking that is the Mass’s special 10th-anniversary season at the Bridge Theatre. Mink Stole and Tura Satana will kick off the summer program on Friday, July 13, with Waters’s equally quotable Desperate Living (1977; "Tell your mother I hate her! Tell your mother I hate you!"), while Waters will introduce Female Trouble the following evening. Cassandra Peterson, a.k.a. Elvira, will be on stage for both nights of Midnight Mass’s closing weekend.

Grannell was particularly keen on landing Waters, the only one of the four cult deities appearing this summer who has never done Midnight Mass before, because the director unknowingly played a role in the genesis of the show.

Back when Grannell and his friend Michael Brenchley were film students at Penn State, they brought Waters to campus to do a monologue performance. "John told us about the Cockettes," Grannell remembers. "He encouraged us to move to San Francisco and told us how much fun Divine and Mink had here."

The pair took his advice, arriving in 1996 in the city, where they would eventually become infamous as Peaches Christ and her silent sidekick, Martiny. One decade later, when Amoeba Records asked Peaches to introduce Waters at a promotional appearance for his CD A Date with John Waters (New Line Records), Grannell seized the opportunity to remind the trash auteur who he had been in college and who he’d become. Waters was aware of Peaches through Stole, who has appeared at Midnight Mass four times. "He kind of screamed and went, ‘Oh, I know Peaches!’" Grannell says. The rest is scheduling history.

When Grannell moved to San Francisco, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) had just left the Kabuki, and there was no midnight show in town. Peaches Christ, a character originally known as Peaches Nevada in Grannell’s senior-thesis film project, Jizzmopper: A Love Story, had already been appearing at the Stud’s Trannyshack for a year when Grannell pitched the Midnight Mass idea to Landmark Theatres, owners of the Bridge. (Grannell used to be general manager of the Bridge and is now paid by Landmark just to be Peaches.) At the time, he was told that midnight movies didn’t work in San Francisco.

Though Midnight Mass’s focus has always been on movies, it serves up a unique form of live spectacle. "Peaches is literally 20 people," Grannell says to me more than once, as much to emphasize the scale of the productions as to give due credit to people such as the show’s amazing costume designer, Tria Connell. During the summer of 1998, the debut season of Midnight Mass offered such entertainment as audience makeovers (for the first of many Female Trouble screenings), a Sal Mineo–inspired wet Speedo contest (in conjunction with the incredible Who Killed Teddy Bear? [1965]), and a ladies-in-prison parody sketch (for Jack Hill’s The Big Doll House [1971]).

"Landmark said, ‘We’ll give you one season, one summer, and we’ll reevaluate,’" Grannell says. It didn’t take an abacus to see that the church of Christ was turning away as many people as were filling the seats. The first Midnight Mass humbly featured a Satana look-alike contest in celebration of the buxom spine snapper of Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965). Ten years later, Satana herself regularly appears at Midnight Mass. The still-star-struck Grannell recently attended her birthday barbecue in Los Angeles, where he was surrounded by enough Meyer actresses to leave the ground of a decent-size backyard completely untouched by the sun. On his way back to SF, he was invited to stop by Peterson’s house, where she cooked him a spooky vegetarian dinner. "Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would know these women," he says. "It’s just so surreal for me."

Peterson and Satana seem pretty jazzed about their relationship with Grannell and Peaches too. Both icons make a point of noting the intense — sometimes alarming — devotion of Midnight Mass audiences. "There was one little guy who just cried the whole time," Peterson says, recalling a meet and greet after her appearance last year. "He stood there in front of me and just cried and cried and cried. I don’t know if he was crying because he loved me or [because] I was making him miserable."

Peterson spins some funny tales, including one about almost running over a bicycling Waters in Provincetown, Mass. But when it comes to Midnight Mass, Satana might earn bragging rights. Between pleasantly digressive reminiscences about her days as "the numero uno tassel twirler" in gentlemen’s clubs around the country (including a four-month stint at North Beach’s Condor Club, where she worked with exotic-dancing foremother Carol Doda before "the problem with the guy caught in the piano"), she told me about a fan at her first Mass who refused to be inconvenienced by a heart attack. "He wouldn’t let the paramedics take him away until he got my autograph," she insists.

Grannell has his own ER anecdote, of course. It was the summer of 2004. Peaches was showing Mommie Dearest (1981) and offering mother-versus-daughter mud wrestling as an aperitif. "Martiny and I were Chastity versus Cher," Grannell remembers. "We did this whole ridiculous buildup where I was singing Cher songs and she was out there with an acoustic guitar doing, like, Tracy Chapman and 4 Non Blondes." While fighting in the mud — an improvised cocktail of soft drink syrup, water, and popcorn — Brenchley dislocated his shoulder. He left the stage and was taken to the closest hospital. After declaring himself the winner and quickly introducing the movie to a crowd that wasn’t any the wiser, Grannell went to visit his injured sidekick, looking like a streetwalker who’d just taken part in a hog-chasing contest. He braced himself for the treatment he would get at the admitting window. "I walked in, and two male nurses came up to me and said, ‘Ms. Christ, she’s going to be fine,’<\!s>" Grannell says. "They knew exactly who Peaches Christ was and even how she might come to be covered in slop. They treated me like royalty."

That type of reception is indicative of Peaches’s breakout popularity. Midnight Mass has traveled to Seattle three times since 2005 and went to New York in 2006. (Grannell says there’s even a nightclub in Ireland that bears Peaches’s name.) The de Young Museum is hosting "A Decade of Peaches Christ" in September. And a new television show, Peaches Christ’s Midnight Mass, produced by Landmark-owning Internet billionaire Mark Cuban, is also set to air in August on the HDNet Movie Channel. Peaches will introduce her favorite movies, which will be shown uninterrupted in high definition, with footage from the live shows.

As for Midnight Mass, the upcoming season includes a screening of Xanadu (1980) that will feature drag queen Roller Derby and a sing-along (as if that wouldn’t happen anyway), a 10th-anniversary presentation of Showgirls (the 1995 movie Peterson admits to loathing and walking out of with friend Ann Magnuson), and Coffy (1973, a soon-to-be personal favorite of anyone who sees it).

The last thing I ask Grannell is the despised but inevitable question put to all movie mavens. I actually wait until a couple of weeks after our initial interview before finally deciding to e-mail him about it. "Oh god! I really don’t think I have just one favorite movie," he responds. "But my favorite John Waters movie is Female Trouble. My favorite slasher is Freddy Krueger. My favorite ’80s comedy is Pee Wee’s Big Adventure [1985]. My favorite actress is Joan Crawford and my favorite movie of hers is Strait-Jacket [1964]. I could go on and on…. Do you want me to?"<\!s>*

MIDNIGHT MASS

Desperate Living (1977), with Mink Stole and Tura Satana in person

July 13, midnight, $12

Female Trouble (1974), with John Waters in person

July 14, midnight, sold out

Midnight Specialists: Midnight Mass

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

The funniest line in movie history didn’t pass from the lips of Addison DeWitt in All About Eve (1950), Nora Charles in The Thin Man (1934), or Alvy Singer in Annie Hall (1977). That honor belongs to Taffy Davenport (Mink Stole) of Female Trouble (1974), who responds to the advances of her dentally challenged stepfather thusly: "I wouldn’t suck your lousy dick if I was suffocating and there was oxygen in your balls!" Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, who will die for your sin of omission?

The savior of midnight movies in San Francisco, Peaches Christ, that’s who. If she can fit it into her busy schedule, of course.

Joshua Grannell, the surprisingly subdued and clean-cut gentleman behind the character of Midnight Mass’s holy hostess, says so during coffee talk about the author of that historical piece of dialogue, John Waters, and the massive undertaking that is the Mass’s special 10th-anniversary season at the Bridge Theatre. Mink Stole and Tura Satana will kick off the summer program on Friday, July 13, with Waters’s equally quotable Desperate Living (1977; "Tell your mother I hate her! Tell your mother I hate you!"), while Waters will introduce Female Trouble the following evening. Cassandra Peterson, a.k.a. Elvira, will be on stage for both nights of Midnight Mass’s closing weekend.

Grannell was particularly keen on landing Waters, the only one of the four cult deities appearing this summer who has never done Midnight Mass before, because the director unknowingly played a role in the genesis of the show.

Back when Grannell and his friend Michael Brenchley were film students at Penn State, they brought Waters to campus to do a monologue performance. "John told us about the Cockettes," Grannell remembers. "He encouraged us to move to San Francisco and told us how much fun Divine and Mink had here."

The pair took his advice, arriving in 1996 in the city, where they would eventually become infamous as Peaches Christ and her silent sidekick, Martiny. One decade later, when Amoeba Records asked Peaches to introduce Waters at a promotional appearance for his CD A Date with John Waters (New Line Records), Grannell seized the opportunity to remind the trash auteur who he had been in college and who he’d become. Waters was aware of Peaches through Stole, who has appeared at Midnight Mass four times. "He kind of screamed and went, ‘Oh, I know Peaches!’<\!s>" Grannell says. The rest is scheduling history.

When Grannell moved to San Francisco, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) had just left the Kabuki, and there was no midnight show in town. Peaches Christ, a character originally known as Peaches Nevada in Grannell’s senior-thesis film project, Jizzmopper: A Love Story, had already been appearing at the Stud’s Trannyshack for a year when Grannell pitched the Midnight Mass idea to Landmark Theatres, owners of the Bridge. (Grannell used to be general manager of the Bridge and is now paid by Landmark just to be Peaches.) At the time, he was told that midnight movies didn’t work in San Francisco.

Though Midnight Mass’s focus has always been on movies, it serves up a unique form of live spectacle. "Peaches is literally 20 people," Grannell says to me more than once, as much to emphasize the scale of the productions as to give due credit to people such as the show’s amazing costume designer, Tria Connell. During the summer of 1998, the debut season of Midnight Mass offered such entertainment as audience makeovers (for the first of many Female Trouble screenings), a Sal Mineo–<\d>inspired wet Speedo contest (in conjunction with the incredible Who Killed Teddy Bear? [1965]), and a ladies-in-prison parody sketch (for Jack Hill’s The Big Doll House [1971]).

"Landmark said, ‘We’ll give you one season, one summer, and we’ll reevaluate,’<\!s>" Grannell says. It didn’t take an abacus to see that the church of Christ was turning away as many people as were filling the seats. The first Midnight Mass humbly featured a Satana look-alike contest in celebration of the buxom spine snapper of Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965). Ten years later, Satana herself regularly appears at Midnight Mass. The still-star-struck Grannell recently attended her birthday barbecue in Los Angeles, where he was surrounded by enough Meyer actresses to leave the ground of a decent-size backyard completely untouched by the sun. On his way back to SF, he was invited to stop by Peterson’s house, where she cooked him a spooky vegetarian dinner. "Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would know these women," he says. "It’s just so surreal for me."

Peterson and Satana seem pretty jazzed about their relationship with Grannell and Peaches too. Both icons make a point of noting the intense — sometimes alarming — devotion of Midnight Mass audiences. "There was one little guy who just cried the whole time," Peterson says, recalling a meet and greet after her appearance last year. "He stood there in front of me and just cried and cried and cried. I don’t know if he was crying because he loved me or [because] I was making him miserable."

Peterson spins some funny tales, including one about almost running over a bicycling Waters in Provincetown, Mass. But when it comes to Midnight Mass, Satana might earn bragging rights. Between pleasantly digressive reminiscences about her days as "the numero uno tassel twirler" in gentlemen’s clubs around the country (including a four-month stint at North Beach’s Condor Club, where she worked with exotic-dancing foremother Carol Doda before "the problem with the guy caught in the piano"), she told me about a fan at her first Mass who refused to be inconvenienced by a heart attack. "He wouldn’t let the paramedics take him away until he got my autograph," she insists.

Grannell has his own ER anecdote, of course. It was the summer of 2004. Peaches was showing Mommie Dearest (1981) and offering mother-versus-daughter mud wrestling as an aperitif. "Martiny and I were Chastity versus Cher," Grannell remembers. "We did this whole ridiculous buildup where I was singing Cher songs and she was out there with an acoustic guitar doing, like, Tracy Chapman and 4 Non Blondes." While fighting in the mud — an improvised cocktail of soft drink syrup, water, and popcorn — Brenchley dislocated his shoulder. He left the stage and was taken to the closest hospital. After declaring himself the winner and quickly introducing the movie to a crowd that wasn’t any the wiser, Grannell went to visit his injured sidekick, looking like a streetwalker who’d just taken part in a hog-chasing contest. He braced himself for the treatment he would get at the admitting window. "I walked in, and two male nurses came up to me and said, ‘Ms. Christ, she’s going to be fine,’<\!s>" Grannell says. "They knew exactly who Peaches Christ was and even how she might come to be covered in slop. They treated me like royalty."

That type of reception is indicative of Peaches’s breakout popularity. Midnight Mass has traveled to Seattle three times since 2005 and went to New York in 2006. (Grannell says there’s even a nightclub in Ireland that bears Peaches’s name.) The de Young Museum is hosting "A Decade of Peaches Christ" in September. And a new television show, Peaches Christ’s Midnight Mass, produced by Landmark-owning Internet billionaire Mark Cuban, is also set to air in August on the HDNet Movie Channel. Peaches will introduce her favorite movies, which will be shown uninterrupted in high definition, with footage from the live shows.

As for Midnight Mass, the upcoming season includes a screening of Xanadu (1980) that will feature drag queen Roller Derby and a sing-along (as if that wouldn’t happen anyway), a 10th-anniversary presentation of Showgirls (the 1995 movie Peterson admits to loathing and walking out of with friend Ann Magnuson), and Coffy (1973, a soon-to-be personal favorite of anyone who sees it).

The last thing I ask Grannell is the despised but inevitable question put to all movie mavens. I actually wait until a couple of weeks after our initial interview before finally deciding to e-mail him about it. "Oh god! I really don’t think I have just one favorite movie," he responds. "But my favorite John Waters movie is Female Trouble. My favorite slasher is Freddy Krueger. My favorite ’80s comedy is Pee Wee’s Big Adventure [1985]. My favorite actress is Joan Crawford and my favorite movie of hers is Strait-Jacket [1964]. I could go on and on…. Do you want me to?"<\!s>*

MIDNIGHT MASS

Desperate Living (1977), with Mink Stole and Tura Satana in person

July 13, midnight, $12

Female Trouble (1974), with John Waters in person

July 14, midnight, sold out

Midnight Specialists: Midnight Mass

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

The funniest line in movie history didn’t pass from the lips of Addison DeWitt in All About Eve (1950), Nora Charles in The Thin Man (1934), or Alvy Singer in Annie Hall (1977). That honor belongs to Taffy Davenport (Mink Stole) of Female Trouble (1974), who responds to the advances of her dentally challenged stepfather thusly: "I wouldn’t suck your lousy dick if I was suffocating and there was oxygen in your balls!" Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, who will die for your sin of omission?

The savior of midnight movies in San Francisco, Peaches Christ, that’s who. If she can fit it into her busy schedule, of course.

Joshua Grannell, the surprisingly subdued and clean-cut gentleman behind the character of Midnight Mass’s holy hostess, says so during coffee talk about the author of that historical piece of dialogue, John Waters, and the massive undertaking that is the Mass’s special 10th-anniversary season at the Bridge Theatre. Mink Stole and Tura Satana will kick off the summer program on Friday, July 13, with Waters’s equally quotable Desperate Living (1977; "Tell your mother I hate her! Tell your mother I hate you!"), while Waters will introduce Female Trouble the following evening. Cassandra Peterson, a.k.a. Elvira, will be on stage for both nights of Midnight Mass’s closing weekend.

Grannell was particularly keen on landing Waters, the only one of the four cult deities appearing this summer who has never done Midnight Mass before, because the director unknowingly played a role in the genesis of the show.

Back when Grannell and his friend Michael Brenchley were film students at Penn State, they brought Waters to campus to do a monologue performance. "John told us about the Cockettes," Grannell remembers. "He encouraged us to move to San Francisco and told us how much fun Divine and Mink had here."

The pair took his advice, arriving in 1996 in the city, where they would eventually become infamous as Peaches Christ and her silent sidekick, Martiny. One decade later, when Amoeba Records asked Peaches to introduce Waters at a promotional appearance for his CD A Date with John Waters (New Line Records), Grannell seized the opportunity to remind the trash auteur who he had been in college and who he’d become. Waters was aware of Peaches through Stole, who has appeared at Midnight Mass four times. "He kind of screamed and went, ‘Oh, I know Peaches!’<\!s>" Grannell says. The rest is scheduling history.

When Grannell moved to San Francisco, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) had just left the Kabuki, and there was no midnight show in town. Peaches Christ, a character originally known as Peaches Nevada in Grannell’s senior-thesis film project, Jizzmopper: A Love Story, had already been appearing at the Stud’s Trannyshack for a year when Grannell pitched the Midnight Mass idea to Landmark Theatres, owners of the Bridge. (Grannell used to be general manager of the Bridge and is now paid by Landmark just to be Peaches.) At the time, he was told that midnight movies didn’t work in San Francisco.

Though Midnight Mass’s focus has always been on movies, it serves up a unique form of live spectacle. "Peaches is literally 20 people," Grannell says to me more than once, as much to emphasize the scale of the productions as to give due credit to people such as the show’s amazing costume designer, Tria Connell. During the summer of 1998, the debut season of Midnight Mass offered such entertainment as audience makeovers (for the first of many Female Trouble screenings), a Sal Mineo–<\d>inspired wet Speedo contest (in conjunction with the incredible Who Killed Teddy Bear? [1965]), and a ladies-in-prison parody sketch (for Jack Hill’s The Big Doll House [1971]).

"Landmark said, ‘We’ll give you one season, one summer, and we’ll reevaluate,’<\!s>" Grannell says. It didn’t take an abacus to see that the church of Christ was turning away as many people as were filling the seats. The first Midnight Mass humbly featured a Satana look-alike contest in celebration of the buxom spine snapper of Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965). Ten years later, Satana herself regularly appears at Midnight Mass. The still-star-struck Grannell recently attended her birthday barbecue in Los Angeles, where he was surrounded by enough Meyer actresses to leave the ground of a decent-size backyard completely untouched by the sun. On his way back to SF, he was invited to stop by Peterson’s house, where she cooked him a spooky vegetarian dinner. "Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would know these women," he says. "It’s just so surreal for me."

Peterson and Satana seem pretty jazzed about their relationship with Grannell and Peaches too. Both icons make a point of noting the intense — sometimes alarming — devotion of Midnight Mass audiences. "There was one little guy who just cried the whole time," Peterson says, recalling a meet and greet after her appearance last year. "He stood there in front of me and just cried and cried and cried. I don’t know if he was crying because he loved me or [because] I was making him miserable."

Peterson spins some funny tales, including one about almost running over a bicycling Waters in Provincetown, Mass. But when it comes to Midnight Mass, Satana might earn bragging rights. Between pleasantly digressive reminiscences about her days as "the numero uno tassel twirler" in gentlemen’s clubs around the country (including a four-month stint at North Beach’s Condor Club, where she worked with exotic-dancing foremother Carol Doda before "the problem with the guy caught in the piano"), she told me about a fan at her first Mass who refused to be inconvenienced by a heart attack. "He wouldn’t let the paramedics take him away until he got my autograph," she insists.

Grannell has his own ER anecdote, of course. It was the summer of 2004. Peaches was showing Mommie Dearest (1981) and offering mother-versus-daughter mud wrestling as an aperitif. "Martiny and I were Chastity versus Cher," Grannell remembers. "We did this whole ridiculous buildup where I was singing Cher songs and she was out there with an acoustic guitar doing, like, Tracy Chapman and 4 Non Blondes." While fighting in the mud — an improvised cocktail of soft drink syrup, water, and popcorn — Brenchley dislocated his shoulder. He left the stage and was taken to the closest hospital. After declaring himself the winner and quickly introducing the movie to a crowd that wasn’t any the wiser, Grannell went to visit his injured sidekick, looking like a streetwalker who’d just taken part in a hog-chasing contest. He braced himself for the treatment he would get at the admitting window. "I walked in, and two male nurses came up to me and said, ‘Ms. Christ, she’s going to be fine,’<\!s>" Grannell says. "They knew exactly who Peaches Christ was and even how she might come to be covered in slop. They treated me like royalty."

That type of reception is indicative of Peaches’s breakout popularity. Midnight Mass has traveled to Seattle three times since 2005 and went to New York in 2006. (Grannell says there’s even a nightclub in Ireland that bears Peaches’s name.) The de Young Museum is hosting "A Decade of Peaches Christ" in September. And a new television show, Peaches Christ’s Midnight Mass, produced by Landmark-owning Internet billionaire Mark Cuban, is also set to air in August on the HDNet Movie Channel. Peaches will introduce her favorite movies, which will be shown uninterrupted in high definition, with footage from the live shows.

As for Midnight Mass, the upcoming season includes a screening of Xanadu (1980) that will feature drag queen Roller Derby and a sing-along (as if that wouldn’t happen anyway), a 10th-anniversary presentation of Showgirls (the 1995 movie Peterson admits to loathing and walking out of with friend Ann Magnuson), and Coffy (1973, a soon-to-be personal favorite of anyone who sees it).

The last thing I ask Grannell is the despised but inevitable question put to all movie mavens. I actually wait until a couple of weeks after our initial interview before finally deciding to e-mail him about it. "Oh god! I really don’t think I have just one favorite movie," he responds. "But my favorite John Waters movie is Female Trouble. My favorite slasher is Freddy Krueger. My favorite ’80s comedy is Pee Wee’s Big Adventure [1985]. My favorite actress is Joan Crawford and my favorite movie of hers is Strait-Jacket [1964]. I could go on and on…. Do you want me to?"<\!s>*

MIDNIGHT MASS

Desperate Living (1977), with Mink Stole and Tura Satana in person

July 13, midnight, $12

Female Trouble (1974), with John Waters in person

July 14, midnight, sold out

A Hot Pocket by any other name

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By Gazelle Emami

It’s hard to define piroshki, though there’s no doubt they’re a Russian food. I say “food” because it’s a little ambiguous as to whether it’s a pastry, snack, or meal. Whichever group(s) it falls under, with its thick, deep-fried dough stuffed with an assortment of fillings ranging from meat to vegetarian-friendly options, You might call piroshki the Hot Pocket’s granddaddy.

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Owner Galina Galant and her father pose with racks of the piroshki they make fresh every morning.

You won’t find piroshki too easily in these parts—Paramount Piroshki, open since 1956, is one of the only places around to dedicate itself wholly to the traditional Russian treat. Owner Galina Galant and her family came to San Francisco from Russia in 1983 and bought the business from its previous owner. The building used to be in the style of a coffee shop, but given Potrero Hill’s industrial landscape, the Galants converted it into a factory and are mainly in the business of selling to other businesses.

Second nightlife

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It may sound cliché, but there’s no other way to put it: my nightlife sucks. With two shitty day jobs and a barely blossoming career as a freelance journalist, it’s nearly impossible for me to find enough time or money to enjoy this city after dark. It hasn’t always been this way: I used to spend my evenings gleefully cross-eyed, rubbing knees with random hedonists, pushers, and hell-raisers. I used to go skateboarding in night goggles and camp nude in the Tenderloin. Goddamn it, I used to have it all!

I’ve thus far managed to maintain sanity by telling myself that hard work produces success, but my self-imposed exile to the sunlit hours is rapidly taking its toll. Gray hair, bedroom alcoholism, and soul-crushing anxiety shouldn’t affect me for another 10 years or so. Yet here I barely stand at the ripe age of 28, a boring fucking wreck. In order to salvage some of my formerly wild personality — and rather than shoot myself or seek expensive therapy — I decided recently to take the plunge into the comprehensive virtual world of Second Life. Might as well throw down with some wart-nosed trolls and weirdo Wizards of Nardo, right? Pass the magick toad grog, Tinker Bell. Yep, I’m just that desperate.

A LITTLE HELP HERE?


With all the hype surrounding Second Life and its maker, Linden Labs, you’d think the game would be a fairly simple thing to pick up. Not so, my friend. The first obstacle I ran into was of the technical variety. After installing SL and choosing a sly code name (Justyn Jewell, natch), I thought I was good to go, but my poor old Dell crashed whenever I tried to wiggle my virtual buttocks. My friend Tony, a notorious group gamer at Stanford, hates it when I call him with computer questions but was surprisingly enthused about the opportunity to share his SL wisdom. He even agreed to come over that very night and lend me his vacationing roommate’s brand-new MacBook Pro until she got back. Score.

First lesson: customizing an avatar. Perversely, I chose the Boy Next Door body template and then altered its features to match my own. After some meticulous tweaking, Justyn Jewell was no longer your average joe. He was a tragically good-looking skinny white dude with slick brown hair and sleek black shoes. I also gave him a handlebar mustache, because I’m up-to-the-minute like that.

Tony spent the next few hours teaching me the basics. When he left that night, I was able to walk, fly, teleport, take a piss, and hold brief conversations. I was still having trouble picking things up, touching people, and not walking into corners, but it was too early to worry about socially acceptable advanced maneuvers. For a man who hadn’t touched a video game since Mario Bros. III, simply stumbling through SL’s intricate landscape felt like enough. Getting beyond that was going to be a bumpy road, but Tony promised to come back and teach me some more when the time was right.

AVATAR, AWAY!


My first few weeks with Second Life were just what I needed. Whenever my brain grew weary from writing another puff piece about the latest hair-removal technique ("Experience the smooth, toning pleasures of La Cage Aux Follicles"), I would log on and select one of the thousands of clubs from the Popular Place menu. Immediately, I’d shoot to an island dedicated to house, techno, hard rock, hip-hop, or what have you. Each venue was full of kitted-out avatars who acted as though they were at a real party. "Woo-hoo!" they would say. And "This party is sooo amazing!" I knew it was all fake, but I was getting a visceral thrill watching my doppelgänger mingle with squirrel people, virtual heshers, cocky shot-callers, and impossibly elfin ravers.

The possibilities kept me endlessly occupied. I started out mainly going to standard Ibiza-like situations but soon wound up frequenting a hip-hop club called Insatiable, where people ground to slightly less-than-cutting-edge tunes by Ludacris and Fat Joe. I tried to spice things up by talking to people wherever I went, but my standard greeting, "Whacha gonna do with all that ass, all that ass inside them virtual jeans?," was often met with a cold shoulder or yawn — even at Club Insatiable! The reason was obvious. While nearly everyone else had wild hairdos, tattoos, designer outfits, and sparkling electro-bling, I was still in stock attire, a boring newbie who didn’t know shit. It was time to get some gear.

Perusing boutiques in SL made me realize just how Vegas-like this virtual world can be. Everything is for sale. Shirts, pants, drinks, cars, body parts … Most items struck me as rather excessively priced or ephemeral, but a few choice pieces had me reaching for my Linden dollars, the coin of the realm.

One of my first stops was a store called Dicks and Pussies, where I somehow managed to score a free T — skintight, red and white, with the name of the store emblazoned across the chest. It was fine for walking around in an adult boutique, but I couldn’t figure out how to get the damn thing off. What would they say at Club Insatiable? In the hopes of finding a better free shirt, I teleported to a few other stores, but no luck. I was stuck looking like a freebie-grubbing douche bag until Tony could help me. Luckily, we had made a date for that night.

CLICK ON THE BLUE ONE


By 10 p.m., Tony and I were in an alcohol-fueled Second Life frenzy. After scoring some more Linden dollars, we flew around to goofy places like Hedonistic Isle, where you can gamble, listen to streaming audio, and lounge in lawn chairs. There were volleyball courts, bonfires, and beach toys all over the place, but I had other plans. Talking, dancing, and roasting electronic marshmallows were great and all, but what kind of nightlife would be complete without one-night stands?

I felt I had to act. "Hey Tony," I said. "How do you have sex in this place?" Tony stopped tapping at his keyboard and looked me dead in the eye. "I’m not exactly sure," he said. "Why don’t we find out?" I took a sip of my third real Jack and Coke and said, "Follow me."

Besides complimentary dorkwear, Dicks and Pussies has everything your perverted avatar could ever want. For less than a thousand Lindens (about $3) you can get a gigantic schlong with veins or a vagina with hyperrealistic stretch action. There were electric toys, erotic hairstyles, and even peekaboo lingerie. "All right, dude, I’ll buy you a vagina and myself a dick, but you have to show me how to put them on and work them," I said. "Fuck it, why not?" Tony said after a slight pause. That’s all I needed.

Within seconds Tony was wetting things with his brand-new vagina, and I was setting the flesh tones on my penis. "All right, man," I said. "How do you work these things?" I thought we would have to purchase some animation codes or something, but Tony knew a shortcut. Next to the showroom floor was a bedchamber with little balls hovering all over the place. Tony walked up to one and said, "Come on, dude, I’ll click on the pink ball. All you gotta do is click on the blue one, and we’ll be off."

Within seconds Justyn Jewell was balls deep in Tony’s avatar. Hilarious. Tony and I spent the rest of the night drinking and taking screen shots as our avatars explored each other’s software.

I passed out sometime around 2 a.m. and awoke the next morning to a pissed-off girlfriend. "What’s wrong, baby?" I asked. She refused to speak to me for an hour or so and then finally said, "I heard you last night. That was sort of weird that you fucked Tony."

I was immediately assaulted by a flurry of flashbacks: the sound of ice clinking in glasses, the sight of my avatar in the throes of passion, the giggles, the grunts … "Don’t say it like that," I said. "I didn’t fuck Tony. He was just, like, showing me how to have sex so I could buy some later." She stared at her coffee for a full minute and then said, "Well, I don’t know why you have to have sex at all. Is something wrong?"

The more I tried to explain that Second Life was just an entertaining outlet for when I was too busy to take her out, the worse it sounded. Why was I obsessed with that particular aspect of the game, anyway? And why, of all people, did I pick my friend Tony to experiment with? I waited until my girlfriend was in the shower before looking at the screen shots from the night before. Jesus Christ, what a pervert. Thanks a lot, Linden Labs! Now I have two shitty lives to deal with.

www.secondlife.com

Take another letter

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I just saw Secretary yesterday, and then read your column that mentions the same movie and similar sentiment ["Thwang," 5/30/07]. My situation is a bit different because I’ve known how I feel for a while but never seen or experienced it. Also, I’m a stripper and rarely have sex but am extremely sexual. I’ve got a serious lust affair with the eroscillator but think I’ve maybe given up on a love that will be feminist but dominating and aggressive, too. In the movie, Maggie is looking through classifieds for a partner, and that is way too dangerous for me. How do I quiet the arguments between feminism and being truly submissive? Also, having to be seriously up-front about wanting some serious kink might kill the whole deal for me. Do these relationships actually happen in real life? How?

Love,

Sub Grrrl

Dear Grrrl:

Right. There was a moment when every other conversation, magazine article, and academic conference was devoted to exploring the conflicts and connections between radical feminism and radical sexuality. It was called "the ’80s." You probably missed it owing to not being born yet, but that stuff is still in print, and whatever isn’t is gathering dust in the sorts of used bookstores heavily populated by overweight cats and should be easy to find. Most of the best-known pro-kink feminists of the time were very, very lesbian (see Gayle Rubin on the academic side and Pat Califia for "literotica"), but that doesn’t mean they didn’t have anything to say to straight women.

Obviously, of all the possible permutations, male dominant–female submissive is likely the most discomfiting to you. But, happily, the flip side of the "this weird sex thing goes against every political, ethical, or religious principle I consider right and true" coin is so often the Big Hot. Go to any upscale S-M party (yes, these really do exist) in San Francisco or Seattle, and at least half the women crawling around their master’s boots begging to be punished ’cause they’ve been very bad are in real life junior partners at onetime all-male law firms, or teach gender theory at small but prestigious liberal arts schools. In other words, they are quite fully "empowered," thanks, which doesn’t keep them from voluntarily surrendering said power come Saturday night, and may in fact add to the appeal. The classic, even clichéd, old-style S-M enthusiast, after all, is a member of Parliament who reports like clockwork to the bawdy house every Thursday afternoon for a brisk caning …

Um, yes. Where were we? I’m not sure where you, who perform naked for sexually aroused strangers for a living, got the idea that playing the personals is particularly dangerous. Perhaps from the same episodes of Law and Order in which a few pieces of S-M gear stashed under a suspect’s bed signal that a severed head in a shoe box cannot be far off? I would never suggest that you meet someone for coffee and immediately go home with him to check out his cool dungeon. Far from it. But the meeting-for-coffee part is perfectly safe. After that, you proceed as normal, which includes sharing your interests and aspirations … which is the next place we’re going to have some trouble, I see.

If being up-front about your weirditude is a potential deal-breaker for you, then I suspect you are a spontaneity freak. They are common, but many or most can have the need to proceed by whim or fancy beaten out of them by a stern application of reality. Spontaneity is fun and sexy, but it’s also responsible for most of your unwanted pregnancies, a vast number of STD transmissions, and who-all knows what other havoc. It’s also inconsistent with S-M at any level more technically advanced than the (admittedly often completely satisfactory) bend-over-and-spank variety. If you do go ahead with this, and you do find someone worthy of your submission, you are going to have to talk about it, whether you want to or not. Not only is it unsafe to do S-M with people you know nothing about, it isn’t even fun. What if you want to wear a neat little skirt and heels while bending prettily over nearby furniture, while he wants you to be a bad puppy and sleep in a kennel in the kitchen? What if your idea of submission is saying, "Yes, sir," a lot, while his idea of domination includes branding irons and cattle prods? Can you see how this could get ugly?

In romantic fantasy, the heroine meets the rough but passionate and shirtless master of the manor when she fetches up at his door as a penniless et cetera. In real life, I’m sorry to tell you, she meets him online or at an S-M "munch" or through kinky friends or at a party. And then they talk. I’m sure you’d rather toss your hair tempestuously while a dark and stormy stranger bends you over his knee and yanks down your pantaloons, but you’ll get over it.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question.

Dell’uva: my kind of wine bar

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By Molly Freedenberg
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I like wine bars. Not only for the obvious reason — good wine — but because they tend to be small, intimate, and a bit quiet – the perfect place for an intimate conversation or romantic rendezvous. The thing about them, though, is they also often tend to be pretentious. Or stark. Or cold. Or all of the above. And this is too bad for someone like me, who enjoys the occasional dress-up affair but is more of a Pabst and jeans and easy laughter kind of girl.

Enter Dell’uva, a brand spanking new (as in, less than a month old) wine bar in North Beach. This place has the ambience of a nice coffee shop, the soundtrack of a good neighborhood bar (you might hear hip hop, indie rock, or reggae on any given night), and the visual stimulation of a sports bar (yes, there are TVs showing basketball and football – though I’m trying to convince the owners to host a Lost night when the season starts up again).

Money for nothing and the booze for free

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By Molly Freedenberg

During the summer of 2000, as a a recent college grad with a lot of desire to drink and only a little money with which to do it, I made a chart of Portland bars’ happy hours, drink specials, and free food nights so I’d always have know where to drink affordably. The chart was divided by day. It was color coded. It also was a ridiculous waste of time – particularly since bar policies change so often that my chart was quickly rendered obsolete.

But I stand by the fact that the idea of such a resource was a good idea: for example, it’s Wednesday, it’s two o’clock, and I’m thirsty. Oh look! The chart says it’s half off beers at My Father’s Place right now! … or whatever.

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New York businesses already know that giving away alcohol is actually in their best interest. But Bay Area bars still need to catch on. “I never thought I’d say it, but SF needs to loosen up a bit,” said myopenbar staff writer Dave Schonenberg.

Well, the folks at sf.myopenbar have taken that idea (not from me, mind you) and improved upon it by about a thousand perfect. These wise folks compile a list of all the ways and places to drink for cheap or free in the SF area. And they’re actually places you’d want to go, like Amnesia for karaoke and $2 PBR, El Rio for free oysters and $2.50 drinks (today), or the Swap SF event for vodka, coffee, and clothes-sharing for $5 (Saturday). Plus, they include events like Critical Mass (Drinking on your bike is free, isn’t it?) and art gallery openings.

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