Drugs Archives — Page 21 of 30 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

The Guardian Drug Issue: a baggie full of links

August 19, 2009

The Jah Warrior Shelter Hi-Fi crew — Rocker T, Irie Dole, I-vier, and Jah Yzer — photographed for our cover by Jeffery Cross.

Editor’s Note: People like getting high. Whether to just shake off the busy day with a joint or cocktail, or to break free of normal sensory reality and explore the wild beyond, drugs have always been part of the human experience, shaping our societies for good, ill, or a complex and fascinating mixture of both.

Media portrayals of drug use tend toward the extremes, telling either dark tales of dysfunction or else celebrating some counterculture. But we at the Guardian take a more nuanced view, recognizing the often-subtle role that narcotics and their related hysteria play in a wide variety of human endeavors.

That’s why the Guardian‘s Drug Issue isn’t contained in a single section, but laced throughout the paper, from Paul Krassner’s op-ed on the early acid pioneers all the way back to Dennis Harvey’s list of the top freakouts on film.

In the news section, we explore the growing movement to decriminalize marijuana, rising meth-related emergencies among women, and drug use at Burning Man. Super Ego takes a muddled journey to the bathroom stall, flashing back to the alphabet soup of yesterday’s dance floors, while in Lit, we hunt for shrooms and hallucinatory reading, and take a hard look at addiction in Bayshore. And in music, Shady Nate shares the purple you can drink.

Enjoy the trip, and we’ll see you on the other side. (Steve Jones)

>> Chronic debate: Marijuana decriminalization moves forward on several fronts

>> Fewer young people using drugs: When it comes to illicit substances, SF’s kids are alright.

>> Cranked up: Are party girls starting to catch up with the boys?

>> Packing for the trip: The art of taking drugs to — and at — Burning Man

>> LSD as gateway drug: Paul Krassner reflects on acid pioneers

>> Confessions of a Bo-Fessional: Leanin’ on codeine and promethazine with Shady Nate and Livewire

>> Alphabet soup: A brief meditation on the recent history of club drugs

>> The elephant in the shroom: It’s time to start being realistic about magic mushrooms

>> This land is Methland: A new book tracks a drug through America’s cracks and faultlines

>> Drunk on words: 12 hallucinogenic novels and 8 inebriated memory pieces

>> Made in USA: Under the overpass, Righteous Dopefiend finds a different kind of San Francisco drug story

>> Mothership connections: George Clinton has used, not abused, drugs

>> Letts dance: Tracy Letts’ play August: Osage County makes family dysfunction fun again

>> Time passages: Taking a listen to Coil’s music to take drugs to

>> This is your film on drugs: One film critic’s top movie freakout scenes

>> Hittin’ the tube: A&E’s Intervention — do junkies ever watch it?

>> Intoxicated rhythms: Recordings by musicians under the influence

‘Time’ passages

August 19, 2009

DRUG MUSIC "We attempted to dissolve time." That’s how the late John Balance, half of the now disbanded British experimental musical duo Coil, described the aim of their 1998 release Time Machines (Eskaton). Balance said this with such matter-of-factness that you hardly notice the ludicrousness of his claim. No mere sensation-hungry dabblers when it came to tearing down the doors of perception, Coil certainly had reason to stand behind their assertion. Having logged countless hours drifting in the lapping tides of Time Machine’s slowly unraveling synthesizer drones, I can tell you that Balance and musical partner Peter Christopherson definitely succeeded in their attempt.

Coil’s m.o. with Time Machines can be best summed up by the title of Spacemen 3’s 1990 demos compilation Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs To (Bomp). Starting from the premise that hallucinogens can remove oneself from one’s temporal reality, Balance and former Throbbing Gristle member Christopherson (with assistance from William Breeze and Drew MacDowell), set out to synthesize music that would catalyze and tease out the temporally-disruptive effects of specific chemical compounds.

If that sounds a bit dry, there is indeed an aura of scientific self-seriousness to the release. Each composition is titled with the chemical name of the substance it has been designed for — track one, "Telepathine" (an earlier term for the compound found in Ayahuasca or yage, popularized by Burroughs and Ginsberg); track two, "DOET/hecate"; track three, "5-Me0-DMT"; and track four, "Psilocybin." But for Coil, science was another form of magic, something driven home by the album’s cover design: a black, glossy oval that alludes to the obsidian "scrying mirror" of Renaissance magician and astronomer John Dee, who supposedly used the stone to conjure spirits. (A limited number of albums also came with a set of stickers that when placed on top of each other depicted Dee’s sigil, the Hieroglyphic Monad).

I should confess, with much embarrassment, that for the many times and many different contexts in which I have listened to Time Machines, I have yet to experience any of the tracks while on the substances for which they were specifically engineered. That said, the album’s transportive effects are noticeable even while listening sober (and are certainly heightened by strong doses of THC). My experience has largely been subtractive: it is hard to do anything or to think about anything with much success, or even "actively listen," while Time Machines is playing. It is the aural equivalent of an isolation tank, in that you don’t even notice the vessel falling away, you’re so immersed. Turn it on, tune in, and dissolve.

Mothership connections

August 19, 2009

a&eletters@sfbg.com

DRUGS If, while flipping through TV channels, you happened upon the episode of VH1’s Celebrity Rehab in which George Clinton appears, you might be forgiven for assuming that the Godfather of Funk, whose drug use reputation precedes him, was under Dr. Drew’s rehab care. In actuality, Clinton was not seeking any guidance from the good TV doctor. Rather, he was working alongside him in helping Rehab subject Seth "Shifty" Binzer get back on the straight and narrow road to sobriety by producing new music for the fallen Crazy Town singer.

According to those familiar with the 68-year-old funk ambassador and his lifelong body of work — which includes the catch phrase and Funkadelic album title Free Your Mind … And Your Ass Will Follow (Westbound, 1970) — George Clinton doesn’t lie or hide the fact that he has dabbled in mind-altering substances, using them to enhance the experience of the funk. "When you think of drug abuse, you immediately think of something you can’t handle, something that takes you over. So he [Clinton] is into drug overuse, but that is not the same as drug abuse. In one interview he [says he] never got religious until he took acid," explains Ricky Vincent, the Berkeley journalist, college professor, KPFA DJ, and author of the acclaimed music history book Funk: The Music, the People, and the Rhythm of The One (St. Martin’s Press), which includes a forward penned by Clinton.

"He indulges, but he manages it," says Vincent, who has interviewed Clinton numerous times. "Yes, he got arrested [once] for cocaine. But you don’t hear of him going in and out of the hospital because he overdosed and couldn’t control it. He is one of these people that has turned recreational drug use into a part of his lifestyle, and he doesn’t try to pretend that he doesn’t do drugs. George just says, ‘Hey, I get high all the time!’."

Clinton’s party ways are legendary. In Ice Cube’s early 1990s video for "Bop Gun (One Nation)" which heavily features the Godfather of Funk and reworks the title track of Funkadelic’s 1978 One Nation Under A Groove with the refrain "So high you can’t get over it," Cube at first shuns an invite to a party Clinton is throwing, saying, "I don’t know man. Your get-togethers are kind of wild." As anyone who has ever attended a Parliament-Funkadelic or P-Funk All Stars concert can attest, things tend to get crazy onstage as an ensemble numbering a dozen or more players wanders on and off stage. Most of the musicians are in costumes, including the diaper-clad guitarist/musical director Garry Marshall Shider. Donning his trademark fluorescent rainbow wig, lead funkateer Clinton is happy to be at the center of this organized chaos.

From the get-go in 1970 when the group released its first two albums, Funkadelic’s lysergic-drenched psychedelic funk noise was influenced by the rock music happening around it in Detroit and beyond. Clinton admits to taking acid to fuel his and his band’s early recordings at a time when LSD was still primarily a white person’s drug, not one widely accepted by the black community. Without it, Clinton’s pioneering psychedelic funk pioneered might never have happened. "I can’t think of any other way that you could conceive making music about going to the furthest edge of the universe and then turn around and take it to the bottom of the ocean and actually make it a musical party journey … I mean, you got to be a little altered to do that," says Too $hort, who has long drawn influence from Clinton’s music, and whose collaborations with Clinton include the title track of his 1996 album Gettin’ It (Jive).

George Clinton has been around long enough to witness this country’s changing public attitudes toward drug use and abuse. He’s smart enough to see through the hypocrisy of America’s so-called "war on drugs," and is never too shy to loudly address it. A couple of years ago, he wowed a young Def Poetry audience when he read the "poem" "Dope Dog." In actuality, its words are the lyrics to the song "U.S. Custom Coast Guard Dope Dog," from the Parliament-Funkadelic/P-Funk All Stars album Dope Dogs (P-Vine/Hot Hands/Dogone, 1994), which also features songs titled "Help, Scottie, Help (I’m Tweaking and I Can’t Beam Up)" and "Pepe (The Pill Popper)." Clinton left the audience at that HBO studio reading with an observant final line about "the deal on dope": "There’s more profit in pretending that we’re stopping it than selling it."

GEORGE CLINTON AND PARLIAMENT-FUNKADELIC

Aug. 30, 9 p.m., $38

Regency Ballroom

1300 Van Ness, SF

(415) 673-5716

www.georgeclinton.com

Intoxicated rhythms

August 19, 2009

An almost mythological speculation inundates many so-assumed drug-inspired recordings, especially those of the psychedelic ’60s. Despite my late nights of fuzzy research, I thus advise the reader to measure these drugged-out recordings with the highest dose of skepticism. (Michael Krimper)

Ash Ra Tempel and Timothy Leary — Seven Up (Kosmiche Kuriere, 1973)
While recording, members drink a 7-Up can laced with LSD.
Dr. Dre — The Chronic (Priority, 1992)
The much-imitated and never duplicated source of blunted funk rap.
David Bowie — Station to Station (RCA, 1976)
On a cocaine trip to new-wave space.
Sly and the Family Stone — There’s A Riot Goin’ On (Epic, 1971)
Famously recorded in Sly’s Bel Air drug mansion.
Leak Bro’s — Waterworlds (Eastern Conference, 2004)
Get wet with these rhymers on a PCP holiday.
Quasimoto — The Unseen (Stones Throw, 2000)
Madlib gets wicked with psilocybin mushrooms and a voice modulator.
DJ Screw — 3 N’ The Mornin’ Pt. 1 (Bigtyme, 1995)
The originator of purple drank (codeine, promethazine, alcohol).
The Cure — Pornography (A&M, 1982)
A dark journey into LSD, cocaine, and alcohol.
Pink Floyd — The Piper at The Gates of Dawn (EMI Columbia, 1967)
This Syd Barrett acid trip will keep you away from drugs forever. Bonus: songs about love interests that are really about drugs.

Rick James — "Mary Jane" (Motown, 1985)
Marijuana’s classic cut just to get your feet wet.
The Beatles — "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" (Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Capitol, 1967)
Heavily debated, but really, is this not about LSD?
Laid Back — "White Horse" (Sire, 1967)
Don’t ride heroin, but get up on that white pony!
E-40 — "White Gurl" (My Ghetto Report Card, Reprise, 2006)
Another Yay Area cocaine anthem.
Paper Route Gangstaz — "Keyshia Cole" (Fear and Loathing in Hunts Vegas, Mad Decent, 2008)
Tribute to the Oakland-based singer — and potent brand of herb.
Don Cherry — "Brown Rice" (Don Cherry, Horizon, 1975)
Oh, seductive golden brown of heroin!
Cab Calloway — "Minnie The Moocher" (Brunswick, 1931)
Save your wallet and stay away from Minnie, that drug fiend inside you!
Steely Dan — "Doctor Wu" (Katy Lied, ABC, 1975)
A tad colonial, but still an insightful meditation on the opiate trade.

Alphabet soup

August 19, 2009

markeb@sfbg.com

SUPEREGO ADDICT "That techno shit ain’t nothing but a bunch of clowns tripping their balls off to car alarms," the old saying goes. And it’s almost exactly right! If we’re still in the 1990s — which, by the way, also saw over-tattooed punk and swing revivalists nodding off to black tar and a swarm of bronze-bleached gays mething out to Bryan Adams circuit remixes when they could pry away from AOL chat. (You thought it took forever to download a naked JPEG in 1997? Try doing it on crystal.) Plus: candy-flipping Burners, K-holed zombie househeds, and reams of GHB newbies shitting their pants and dropping half-dead at the unfortunately ambulance-ridden EndUp.

Glancing back with a delicious shiver, the ’90s were a shadow-peopled heyday of designer nightlife drugs, an alphabet soup raining down in clubbers’ peripheries. But, really, from opiate-stoned flappers and Benzedrined mods to the Factory’s orange Obetrols and MDA at the Paradise Garage — when haven’t drugs driven the wee-hours subcultural?

Yes, the music plays into the drug of each scene’s choice, a Pan flute solo wafting over the Valley of the Dolls. You do need to drop E on a crowded dance floor to "get" most strains of techno, or smoke out bigtime for reggae to wobble you to Jah. And drugs drive the music: I’m currently rereading one of my fave tomes, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk (Penguin, 1997), and it blows my Swiss cheese brain the sheer piles of drugs everyone was on in the ’70s rock scene. I guess that’s why they got so bloated in the ’80s.

Which leads us, squinting in dawn’s foggy light, to the present. It’s odd that the same prescription drugs kids use to stay well-behaved in math class are the ones most clubbers pop while getting dressed, with a key-snort of terror-funding coke to keep the edge off. But if ’00s electro and fidget house were the sound of Adderall and Ritalin, dubstep derived from hydroponic stank, the disco revival uncorking fresh poppers (see www.homochic.com for your designer bottle), and minimal techno just OCD writ large (a self-consciously undrugged movement?) then the illicit substance center, though cut with baby laxative, at least still holds. And always the liquor flows and flows….

STEVE BUG

Brain-teasing techno label Pokerflat presents a rare showcase of its stable, including deep mentalist Bug and smooth criminal John Tejada.

Fri/21, 10 p.m., $20, Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. www.mezzaninesf.com

DERRICK CARTER

Do-the-doo house is making a shining comeback, thanks in part to the Chicago master’s tireless touring. Shimmy and shake, boogie child.

Fri/21, 10 p.m.- 4 a.m., $10. Temple, 540 Howard, SF. www.templesf.com

KRADDY

"Cybernetic breaks with asymmetrical dub delays" from the former Glitch Mobber, with "global slut psy-hop" queen Ana Sia opening up.

Fri/21, 10 p.m., $10. Mighty, 119 Utah, SF. www.mighty119.com

RONSKI SPEED

Your progressive-trance Burner warmup begins with the Euphonic Sounds tunes of this dapper space octopus.

Sat 22, 10 p.m.- 4 a.m., $15 advance. 1015 Folsom, SF. www.1015.com

JEGA

Wherefore art thou, Ambient Romeo? All around us, of course, as pioneer Jega drops his excellent double-disc Variance (Planet Mu) after nine long years.

Sun/22, 10 p.m., $10. Li Po Lounge, 916 Grant, SF. www.nastysonix.com

This land is ‘Methland’

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August 19, 2009
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DRUG LIT Books claiming to be about drugs in some way — whether nominally fiction or nonfiction — all run up against the same problem: pharmacodependency is already culture. Or, as the literary theorist and academic Avital Ronell puts it in her brilliant, uncategorizable tract, Crack Wars (University of Illinois Press, 1993), drugs articulate "a quiver between history and ontology."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The elephant in the shroom

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August 19, 2009
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a&eletters@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drunk on words

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August 19, 2009
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12 HALLUCINOGENIC NOVELS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EIGHT GREAT INEBRIATED MEMORY PIECES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cranked up

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August 19, 2009
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news@sfbg.com

In the early 2000s, crystal meth abuse became so rampant in San Francisco that city officials formed the Crystal Methamphetamine Task Force in 2005. A correlated increase in HIV transmission led the task force to focus on the gay men’s party circuit, targeting that community with education campaigns on the drug’s effects, safer usage, and safe sex tips.

But while the party boys got the attention, the drug appears to now be taking an increased toll on women. Has focusing on men meant that women users aren’t getting enough information on reducing harm?

Jennifer Lorvick is part of a team at the Research Triangle Institute, a nonprofit based in North Carolina that has an office in San Francisco, that is now studying women meth users in the Tenderloin. She agrees that the majority of users in the city are gay men, pointing to the alarming results of studies done between 2002 and 2005 showing a related increase in syphilis transmission as well as HIV among male meth users. Meth use still seems to be on the rise, increasing faster among women than men.

Lorvick’s group is researching meth use, sexual risk, HIV, and other sexually transmitted infections in about 300 people in one of the poorest cross-sections, women at "street level" in the Tenderloin. The study "isn’t representative of clubbers, students or middle-class users," she cautions. With more than half of the project completed, she’s finding "lots of unprotected sex, trading sex for drugs or money. A lot of sex risk and a fair bit of STD infection."
One red flag is the city’s most recent monthly STD report, available at the Department of Public Health’s Web site. Meth is the only drug included in the statistics. Comparing the first half of 2009 with the first half of 2008, meth-related visits to the SF General Hospital’s emergency department jumped 11 percent for men, and spiked a whopping 38 percent for women.

While that’s a staggering jump, activists note that it’s just one isolated indicator, albeit one that should warrant a closer look at the problem. Gay rights advocate Michael Petrelis found that the stats lump together all kinds of visits, whether an accidental overdose, a user seeking to start detox, or a physical or mental injury. Michael Siever, currently a co-chair on the meth task force and a director of the Stonewall Project, said the physicians’ reporting methods need to be standardized. "These numbers ebb and flow," he said. "We need a long term view for trends."

Dr. Dawn Harbatkin, medical director of Lyon-Martin Health Services, a San Francisco clinic started in 1979 specifically to serve lesbians, says that in a bad economy societies experience "an overall increase in substance use, not just meth specifically." Siever concurs: "In bad times, the use of alcohol and all other drugs goes up. If you’re out of work, you have more time for meth. It’s a kind of common wisdom."
It’s not terribly surprising then, that there would be some increase in ER visits this year. But 38 percent is a huge jump for women. "Incarceration, hospitalization, and treatment is the same for women and men around the state," Hilary McQuie, regional director of the Oakland-based Harm Reduction Coalition, said of meth-related statistics across California. "In San Francisco, it was a party drug. Now it’s starting to even out" between men’s and women’s usage.
Lorvick said that nationwide, women make up about a third of the users of other substances like alcohol and heroin — but half of meth users. "There are a lot of women users — 50 percent. I don’t think people know that." She says that it was prescribed to women in the 1950s to help them remain slender, supposedly happier, and to get more done.
The study also found that African American women had higher rates of HIV and other STDs, even when not engaging in riskier behaviors. The researchers urged that free, voluntary, accessible, STD screening and treatment be provided to all meth-using women.
It may be time for the city’s meth task force to focus on HIV prevention and safer use for women as well as men. The Stonewall Project runs the information-packed Web site tweaker.org, which is oriented to gay and bi men.

But gay and bi men aren’t the only ones reading: "Meth use by women has been an issue for quite a while. I wasn’t expecting so many e-mails and responses from women," Siever said. "It doesn’t get as much attention, with less HIV transmission."
When Siever and his task force co-chair, Sup. Bevan Dufty, were asked about resources for women meth users, they mentioned treatment and counseling centers like the Iris Center, New Leaf, and Walden House. But as far as outreach and HIV prevention, there doesn’t seem to be an equivalent to tweaker.org for women who need information.

Furthermore, resources shouldn’t be solely for those who are ready to quit. Harbatkin of Lyon-Martin points out that it’s challenging to get women and transgender individuals into treatment.
For starters, Siever recommends having the city’s health departments track use more extensively. But he concedes, "Obviously, that’s not enough."

Fewer young people using drugs

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August 19, 2009
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Opposition to drug use is often couched in concern about children, but today’s kids are using fewer drugs than in the past. And, according to a survey of risky behavior, San Francisco’s young people are using fewer drugs than those nationally.

The San Francisco Unified School District, in conjunction with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, surveys its high school students biannually to asses drug use, eating and exercise habits, and other possibly risky behavior.

Over the last 12 years, alcohol has been the most frequently abused substance among San Francisco high school students and usage rates have held fairly steady, dropping from 59.2 percent to 53.2 percent for one-time use, and from 27.5 percent to 22.3 percent for habitual use. The corresponding national rates have dropped from 79.1 percent to 75 percent and from 50.8 percent to 44.7.

Yet more people are seeking help for marijuana use than alcoholism. According to the Community Behavioral Health Services division of the city’s Department of Public Health, 36 percent of young people receiving substance abuse treatment are marijuana users and only 21 percent are treated for alcohol abuse.

The higher rates of treatment could explain the large decline in marijuana use since 1997.

The number of students who have tried marijuana dropped from 33 percent to 22.8 percent, and habitual use has dropped from 17.1 percent to 11.4 percent. This mirrors the national trend in which rates dropped from 47.1 percent to 38.1 percent and from 26.2 to 19.7 percent for lifetime and habitual use, respectively.

The decline in marijuana use is only surpassed by that of cigarette abuse, which has dropped by almost half from 60 percent to 36.5 percent for lifetime use and from 19.1 percent to 8 percent for habitual use.

A current year study, which does not include trend data, shows that rates of cocaine, methamphetamines, and steroid use are below the national average, all hovering around 5 percent.

The surveys only collect data on illicit drug use and do not include the abuse of prescription drugs, which Jim Stillwell, manager of substance abuse service for the San Francisco Department of Health, said is on the rise.

They get pills from their parents, he said, and because they see adults take them, they don’t seem as risky.

Packing for the trip

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August 19, 2009
0

news@sfbg.com

San Francisco has always been a big recreational drug town, from its opium dens of yore to the pill-popping beats and acid-eating hippies to business elites doing bumps in bathrooms to ravers on E and cranked-out clubbers, not to mention the tattered street souls scoring fixes of crack or smack.

But in terms of sheer numbers of Bay Area partiers stocking up on the full illegal pharmacopoeia all at once, it’s hard to top right now, the month of August, the run-up to Burning Man.

Now I know what they say. This event — which started in San Francisco 23 years ago and now occurs in the Nevada boondocks — isn’t simply a big drug fest. Many burners don’t even do drugs anymore. It’s about "radical self-expression" and "radical self-reliance" and all kinds of other radical stuff, like a gift economy, public nudity, and massive fire cannons. Radical, dude.

But let’s get real, m’kay? Burning Man may be many things, but among those things is that it may be the best time and place on the planet to ingest mind-altering substances, something recognized even by attendees who don’t regularly do drugs — although most burners also do them here.

Why? Because DRUGS ARE FUN!!!

OK, so you’re getting ready to head to the playa. You’re part of a mid-sized Burning Man camp that’s giving away peach schnapps Sno-Cones from a big peach-shaped art car and you’re all calling yourself James. Or whatever. Not important.

You got your goggles and combat boots. Your bike is covered entirely in fake pink fur and wrapped in blue electro-luminescent wire. You’ve packed enough costumes for a month, from the fire-crotch thong to an elaborate Ming the Merciless getup, complete with death ray. Again, whatever, not important.

What is important are the drugs. You’re going to spend a week frolicking through the planet’s preeminent adult playground, past all manner of tripper traps and the weirdest, most mind-blowing shit you’ve ever seen, mixing with a multitude of beautiful souls with Cheshire Cat grins. You’ll want one too.

I suppose you could do it sober, and I’ve heard stories about people who do. But why? This particular party environment is a lifeless desert that sucks the moisture out of you and everything around you, so booze just isn’t the best choice of intoxicant. I’ve known many people who have ended up in the medical tent from drinking, but none from using drugs.

In fact, it’s safe to say that drug cocktails are the cocktails of Burning Man.

Everyone has his or her drug combo of choice, but mine is flipping out. Candy-flipping (LSD and ecstasy) or hippie-flipping (shrooms and ecstasy), depending on my mood and agenda. It’s the perfect combo: E for the euphoria and psychedelics to amp up the weirdness. It’s like a wild, joyful ride into a parallel universe.

On a big night, I’ll often re-up several times, taking another dose of one or the other every few hours, balancing my buzz like the pro I am. And then, as dawn approaches after a long night of flipping around the playa, that’s the best time to get into the Ketamine. Believe me, Special K is just the right dessert for a meal like that, bringing all the night’s adventures into a sort of twisted focus.

Of course, you’re going to want to vary your experiences night to night, and for that you’re going to need to be well stocked. One year, I took K, MDA, MDMA, acid, shrooms, pot, Foxy, nitrous oxide (maybe that doesn’t count), cocaine, 2CB, 2CT7, mescaline, and, well, I’m sure there were others. I think I counted 15 in all, all consumed over the course of nine days. At that level, you begin count sobriety as its own drug.

By the end of the week, once the tolerance has been ratcheted up by daily drug use, some burners start to really pile on the chemicals, trying to regain the high highs from the early part of the week. Burn night, the week’s penultimate party, can get downright ugly, walking zombies with glazed expressions and wan, serotonin-depleted smiles.

It can take weeks to fully recover your senses after a run like that. But we do come back. Humans are remarkably resilient creatures.

Serious week-long benders aren’t for everyone, but almost everyone dabbles in the desert. Newbies want to maximize their experience and veterans just know, including the fact that (no matter what they’re intentions going in) they’ll want drugs, which can be tough to score out there.

Cops with night-vision goggles and plain-clothed narcs prowl the playa and we’ve all heard outrageous stories of vile, sneaky busts. As a result, we’re so guarded around people we don’t know that uninitiated newbies sometimes sadly conclude that nobody does drugs at Burning Man, despite all the giddy grins and oversized pupils. Remember: you aren’t paranoid if they really are out to get you.

So we down our drugs carefully and stock up here. But most of us are professionals — more so in the working than party worlds — who don’t have dealers on speed dial. So right now, we’re all banding together to place ridiculously large orders — hundreds of pills, pounds of fungus, all just for personal use — with the handful of multidrug dealers who can make more money in August than the other 11 months put together.

But drugs busts don’t spike in August, and busts at or en route to Burning Man have also been flat in recent years, despite eager law enforcement. That’s because we’re smart, creative professionals who really don’t want to get caught. And we’ve devised crazy, inventive ways of hiding them — systems I won’t reveal. We all have drugs, but bring your dogs and all your cop knowledge, and you still won’t find them.

We are determined and we love our drugs.
For great advice on dosage and warnings about various drug combinations, consult www.erowid.org.

Confessions of a Bo-Fessional

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August 19, 2009
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a&eletters@sfbg.com

That Bo & Sprite, I mix it up and tip it every day and night

— Shady Nate, "Bo & Sprite," The Bo-Fessional

DRUGS I’m in the backyard of Shady Nate’s aunty’s house on 28th and "Zipper" (Chestnut Street) in West Oakland, watching Lil Rue of Livewire pour four ounces of purple syrup into a liter of Sprite, which turns the hue of pink champagne. With the residue, he coats a cigarette, Shady coats a Black&Mild, and Jay Jonah coats a blunt, which sputters and foams as it burns. When Rue licks the syrup cap, however, Jonah protests this breach of etiquette, though the dispute dissipates as the bottle goes around.

The syrup in question is promethazine-codeine cough syrup, known variously as "lean," "sizzurp," even simply "purple" (wreaking linguistic havoc since "purple" also means weed). "Lean" derives from its characteristic side-effect: if you drink enough, you need to lean against something to stand. West Oakland’s term of choice is "Bo," as in "Robitussin." Bo first oozed into rap in the late ’90s via the South, associated with the slowed-down chopped and screwed sound invented by Houston’s DJ Screw. One of Shady’s OGs, Big Mayne, assures us Bo’s been in Oakland forever, though formerly cheap liquor was its vehicle. (Drinking it straight is called "raw.") Soda is a comparatively recent innovation, indicating Bo’s increasingly youthful demographic, which extends to middle school.

"In ’95, I ain’t seen no one sippin’ syrup but OGs," Shady recalls. "We didn’t know what it was. Around 2000, it started to pop — couple motherfuckers knew about it but not everybody. But now, it’s like a fad. Like Mac Dre came with the thizz, it’s syrup now."

As Shady notes, Bo has supplanted Ecstasy as the hood’s must-do drug. But Bo is more likley to kill you; promethazine causes extreme drowsiness and potentially, in large enough doses, heart attacks or respiratory failure. DJ Screw himself died of respiratory failure at age 29 in 2000. In December 2007, six months after his post-prison triumph with UGK’s No. 1-debuting Underground Kings (Jive, 2007), Pimp C, 33, succumbed to a lethal combination of syrup and his preexisting sleep apnea.

The possibility of death has, of course, never deterred drug use except in individual cases; even so, as a trend, Bo is a risky high. Addictiveness aside, the best part of the high, I’m told, occurs on the brink of nodding off. (Jonah claims that nodding off at the wheel, not overdose, is the leading cause of Bo-related death in West Oakland.) But the target — "catching your nod" — seems easy for the inexperienced to overshoot, particularly when the delivery method is a beverage that tastes like it was designed for kids.

Tastes? Well, yes, I took a few pulls from the bottle, purely for journalistic purposes. Four ounces among four people isn’t enough to make you lean or nod, but it’s enough to get the idea. I was pretty lifted for three hours, then mildly so the rest of the day. The promethazine considerably enhances the codeine: my head felt pleasant, like a halo extended a few inches between me and the world, yet the sensation was crisp, not foggy, at least at this dosage, peaceful rather than giddy. This was a one-time trial for me, but I could easily see wanting to extend the high.

Indeed, extension is the point; Shady’s ideal is to nurse four or more ounces over the course of the day. In terms of rap hedonism, Bo has ushered in a new vibe. You don’t guzzle, you "tip" or "kiss" it. Instead of ballin’, you brag on stinginess, "I ain’t sippin’ with you" being a common refrain. Generally I’ve found people in the ghetto generous with weed — the blunt’s a preeminently social event — so Bo’s antisocial element is striking. "I done seen fights over the lacers," Shady laughs, referring to the use of the residue. "It almost just went down — Jonah almost took off Lil Rue!"

On this day in July, Shady has a pair of projects in Rasputin’s rap Top 20: an album, Gasman Unleashed (PTB/Clear Label/SMC); and a mixtape, The Bo-Fessional (DJ Racks), on which every song is devoted to Bo. As we drink, I ask about its effect on his creative process.

"I can rap all fast," he says (an understatement), "but when I’m on syrup — I’m singin’, I’m harmonizin’. It slows me down."

The difference is palpable on "Bo & Sprite," his mixtape take on Kid Cudi’s "Day and Night." The choice itself is uncharacteristic, as is the weird thickness of his Bo-soaked delivery, discovering melodic filigrees only implied in the original as he spins an amusingly mundane tale of scoring — classic drug music. Most of Shady’s vocals on Gasman are lean-free by necessity, in order to achieve full speed, but Bo-Fessional serves as an inspired b-side, documenting what, in Oakland, may be the Summer of Bo.

But Bo’s already grown scarce; the members of Livewire say the police have cracked down and doctors aren’t prescribing it due to the widespread abuse. Already expensive — roughly $15 an ounce — Bo’s street price is ever increasing due to the drought, which limits Shady’s indulgence to roughly once a week. This might be frequent enough, given Bo’s potential dangers. I very much understand the attraction, but at the same time, Shady and Livewire are talented dudes with a lot to live for.

This is your film on drugs

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August 18, 2009
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a&eletters@sfbg.com

Movies and drugs were made for each other — depiction-wise that is, beyond experience-enhancing audience and creativity-enhancing (or canceling) maker usage. Too bad legality and morality so frequently messed with that perfect union. Herewith a highly selective, hardly definitive list of the medium’s

resulting greatest freakouts. It excludes the following: really obvious stuff, like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Reefer Madness (1936); most horrific withdrawal sequences (that’s another article); and scenes in which performers really do appear very high (inevitably, Dennis Hopper).

Case Study: LSD (1969) Your friends at Lockheed Aircraft Corp. crafted this cautionary educational short in which our heroine, already "pretty jacked up on marijuana," drops you-know-what. She then goes downtown for a hot dog. But when she’s about to consume that tasty snack it turns into a troll doll on a bun, begging for mercy because "He had a wife and seven kids at home to support." Then the screaming starts.

The Big Cube (1969) A spoiled stepdaughter and predator playboy attempt to drive wealthy widow Lana Turner insane by serially dosing her. What’s perhaps most amazing about this awesomely awful potboiler is that Turner’s acting is even worse when her character is straight.

The Trial of Billy Jack (1974) Before he’s ready to shelve pacifism once again to kick fascist butt, Tom Laughlin’s counterculture vigilante must go deep into his New Age White Dude’s identification with Native American spirituality by doing peyote in the desert. This attempt to separate ego from self is in fact the most egomaniacal drug trip in the history of cinema, equating Tom/BJ with the soaring national bird and Jesus Christ.

Go Ask Alice (1975) There may be no wrong-trip scene freakier than this TV movie’s one in which our teen runaway protagonist and a temporary traveling companion are made to bark like dogs for an older couple — the "winner" getting a new boost, the loser getting "punishment" horribly left to our imaginations.

Blue Sunshine (1976) Never grab the wig off a secret U.S. government LSD experiment veteran whose secret baldness "covers" homicidal psychosis. And if you do, this cult horror classic teaches, stay the hell away from the fireplace.

Desperate Teenage Lovedolls (1984) This DIY punk parody’s all-female band members avenge themselves on their greedy manager by mega-dosing him, resulting in horrific hallucinations of Taco Bell ads and Barbra Streisand Yentl (1983) posters inspire unfortunate delusions of flight.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) On everything, Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro’s Duke and Dr. Gonzo visit Circus Circus — an environment that could induce anxiety attacks in the soberest tourist.

Cookers (2001) This vastly underrated quasi-horror is a one long paranoid wigout. Its three characters are meth cookers holed up in an abandoned rural house until their batch is done. Unfortunately, madness, sexual competitiveness, and the questionably supernatural intervene. The other great meth horror movie so far is Pop Skull (2007), which doesn’t even specify the substance being abused.

Knocked Up (2007) Paul Rudd. Shrooms. Five different types of hotel chairs. Plus "Love, the most beautiful shiny warm thing in the world!"

Kurt Vile

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August 18, 2009
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PREVIEW Walking around the streets of his hometown Philly, Kurt Vile is on the other end of the phone talking about his various fixations and some of his musical dopplegangers.

"I was obsessed with Springsteen," he says, after pausing to ask for a pack of Camel Lights at a corner store. "I still love Springsteen. I love all the greats. I don’t love everything, but usually I get obsessed with everything. And Neil Young! I’ve always liked Neil Young, but a few years ago I read his biography Shakey [by Jimmy McDonough; Random House, 2002] and I was a psycho fan afterwards."

The first rumblings most of us heard from Vile, apart from his work with throwback psych-rockers the War On Drugs, were earlier this year, when he released God Is Saying This To You? (Mexican Summer) as well as a reissue of his 2008 debut Constant Hitmaker (Gulcher/Woodsist).

These lo-fi albums were compiled from home-recorded songs dating back to 2005. They are rife with woozy sound effects, gossamer instrumentals, and electronic drum beats. Vile’s voice resonates through vignettes about operating forklifts, conversations about red apples, and a scene devoted to riding on a yellow Schwinn while "blasting classic rock in spring." He evokes the isolated melancholy of Nick Drake, and Young’s dulcet-toned, raconteur-esque acoustic numbers.

But Vile isn’t fingerpicking himself into any niche. Constant Hitmaker‘s ecstatic opener, "Freeway," is a beacon of light, shimmering in ’70s pop glory but dosed with Vile’s wizened lyricism. On the March 2009 release The Hunchback EP (Richie Records/Testoster Tunes), Vile and his band the Violators hold nothing back. All amps are cranked to 11, resulting in reverb-laden songs so epic, it’s clear Vile is ready to walk far away from his lo-fi roots, at least for a while.

"On stage, Kurt Vile and the Violators are a serious force," says Richie Charles, the EP’s producer. "I suppose they take their cues from Kurt, but they operate as four dudes whose blood is being pumped by a single heart. The Violators should not be underestimated."

Vile’s facility for writing winsome, bare-bones fingerpickers and wailing Crazy Horse jams is a testament to the intensity of his ideas. "My mind’s always wandering," he says. "Theres so much on my mind about my music right now that it’s taking up all my brain."

These obsessive tendencies are finally paying off. In late May, Matador Records signed Vile, calling him one of the more important figures in modern-day American music. "Signing Kurt was the easiest decision we’ve made since we sponsored a seniors’ Jai Alai league in the early ’90’s," says Matador co-owner Gerard Cosloy. "The liability risks are much lower this time around, and the music’s far better, so everyone’s a winner."

Vile’s next album, the cunningly-titled Childish Prodigy, is due out in autumn. "It’s the closest thing I have so far to my masterpiece," he says. "It’s not super-clean or anything, but it’s most definitely not lo-fi. You can keep uncovering stuff in there. It’s my first album album."

KURT VILE With Dungen and Woods. Aug. 30, 8 p.m., $14. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. (415) 621-1615, www.bottomofthehill.com

Editor’s Notes

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August 18, 2009
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steve@sfbg.com

People like getting high. Whether to just shake off the busy day with a joint or cocktail, or to break free of normal sensory reality and explore the wild beyond, drugs have always been part of the human experience, shaping our societies for good, ill, or a complex and fascinating mixture of both.

Media portrayals of drug use tend toward the extremes, telling either dark tales of dysfunction or else celebrating some counterculture. But we at the Guardian take a more nuanced view, recognizing the often-subtle role that narcotics and their related hysteria play in a wide variety of human endeavors.

That’s why the Guardian‘s Drug Issue isn’t contained in a single section, but laced throughout the paper, from Paul Krassner’s op-ed on the early acid pioneers all the way back to Dennis Harvey’s list of the top freakouts on film.

In the news section, we explore the growing movement to decriminalize marijuana, rising meth-related emergencies among women, and drug use at Burning Man. Super Ego takes a muddled journey to the bathroom stall, flashing back to the alphabet soup of yesterday’s dance floors, while in Lit, we hunt for shrooms and hallucinatory reading, and take a hard look at addiction in Bayshore. And in music, Shady Nate shares the purple you can drink.

Enjoy the trip, and we’ll see you on the other side.

Mexico report: Science and Indian genocide

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August 7, 2009
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By John Ross

MEXICO CITY — When President Felipe Calderon strode to the flag-bedecked podium in southern Mexico City last May 11th, at the nadir of the spring swine flu panic, and, under the strictest health protocols, lowered his “tapaboca” (surgical mask) to punch the button that would load “The Mexican Genome” onto the world’s computers, the only thing that seemed to be missing was a military band to strike up the National Anthem.

The human genome is the ordering of genes in a determined set of chromosomes that contain all the genetic and hereditary memory of the human organism, i.e. the history of our DNA. Although distinct genomes have been decoded for racial groupings — European Caucasians, Asians, and Africans — science has never before been assigned to decipher the genome of a national state or nation which is, by definition, a political entity, and many here questioned the existence of a “Mexican Genome.”

Despite the nay sayers, Dr. Gerardo Jimenez, director of the National Institute of Genomic Medicine (INMEGEN), whose scientists did the gene mapping, insists that the 89 deviations from genetic patterns found in other races justifies the national character of the “Mexican Genome.”

Other scientists scoffed at the INMEGEN project. Science writer Julio Munoz Rubio wondered if Calderon’s genome would prompt a genetic explanation for such peculiarly Mexican propensities as “mariachis, tequila, wife-beating, gay-bashing, and racist attitudes towards indigenous peoples.” Would a gene be discovered for electoral fraud and the corruption of public officials, asked one letter-writer to La Jornada, the left daily, pointing out that, according to a government audit, half a million Yanqui dollars appears to have gone missing during the construction of the INMEGEN headquarters in the south of the city.

Calderon’s political opponents also questioned the timing of the announcement of the discovery of the Mexican Genome during a health crisis that had been tainted by his administration’s overreaction to the swine flu pandemic after a six-week delay in alerting the public to the contagion.

The president countered his critics by lauding the cost benefits that the decoding of the Mexican Genome would mean for public health care. Cost effective preventative medicines and treatments could now be delivered to confront the nation’s Number One killers, diabetes and obesity. So-called “personalized” drugs would now be designed to deal with the health problems of the Mexican people. “Super Positive News!” read the crawl on the Univision report about the “Mexican Genome.”

But which Mexicans will be the beneficiaries of this cutting edge science? Mexico is, indeed, many nations. The vast bulk of the population — 80 million out of 103 million people — is of mixed European and indigenous stock (65% of the genetic material identified in the Mexican Genome is listed as “Amerindian”.) On the other hand, Mexico is home to 57 distinct ethnic groups or “peoples” (15 to 20 million, a fifth of all Mexicans) whose genetic make-up is distinct from the Mestizo population.

Rocked and rolled

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August 5, 2009
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a&eletters@sfbg.com

Musical theater separates the men from the boys, and the gritty urban musical is especially tough to pull off. Hardcore violence, seedy city underbellies, bare midriffs, and a sprinkling of angel dust might make me or you want to burst into song, but it’s still pretty jarring to witness. Nonetheless, the GUM as a subgenre is well established. Many would call Rent its quintessential expression. Others might go for Urinetown, if only to take the piss out of the Rent faction. But these are the ones that help sell the form, and they can make it look misleadingly easy.

Boxcar Theatre’s new urban rock musical, Rent Boy Ave.: A "Fairy’s" Tale, has some of the genre’s virtues and many of its faults, with a title already evoking at least two of the aforementioned Broadway precedents (though how intentionally I can’t say; thematically the play’s emphasis falls more on the subtitle, with snaking references to Pinocchio et al.). You have to hand it to Boxcar; as other companies scale back and tighten belts, it steps forward and belts out scales. It’s an ambitious capstone to the company’s current season. It’s also bursting with neighborhood spirit: Rent Boy Ave. is about sleazy back-alley prostitution and drug dealing among underage hustlers in the feral alleyways of SoMa, conveniently located right outside the door.

While there are actually relatively few people to be sighted, let alone tricks turned, in the street immediately adjacent to the theater, director Wolfgang Lancelot Wachalovsky does his best to play up any symmetry, having actors panhandle and proposition the audience as they take their seats, arrayed around chain-link and vibrant graffiti (courtesy of Lily Black and Mr. Fingers) in Don Cate’s enveloping urban jungle décor. The cheekiness simultaneously erases the distinction between theater and street and calls knowing attention to it.

But ambition and local flavor notwithstanding, the musical is rather shaky. The story begins with the arrival of fresh-meat street urchin David (a nicely bold and comically dry, if musically uneven, Bobby Bryce), exiled from his Midwestern home (yes, he’s from Kansas) for being gay. Accomplished hustler Mark (Bradly Mena), already long in the tooth at 17, takes him in hand, while insisting he’s straight despite his male clientele. David is not prepared to prostitute himself, but likes Mark, who introduces him to the Pimp (a dramatically flat but resonantly voiced Anthony Rollins-Mullens), who gets him dealing drugs in the meantime. David befriends another of the Pimp’s properties, junkie thrasher Jackie, whose opening number, "Punk Rock Slut," establishes actor Danelle Medeiros’ conviction and vocal control in the role despite some less than compelling choreography. The streets are haunted, meanwhile, by a psychopathic Dirty Old Man (a bright, enjoyably nasty Donald Currie, with some of the better lyrics) and patrolled by a foul-mouthed soup-kitchen saint, Sister Mercy (an able Michelle Ianiro).

Performances here are mixed, the staging only fitfully compelling. More crucially, book and lyrics (by artistic director Nick A. Olivero) deliver a patchy plot and characters of thin or questionable merit. There’s humor and punch in some songs, but too many lines are poetically strained to the point of hemorrhaging — especially in the generally egregious "rhyme"-busting of the Pimp: "I’ve got apples to pick /And fingers to lick /And money to kick." The rock score (by Michael Mohammed), at times effectively driving or wistful, can also be dully formulaic or ponderously proggy. Rent Boy Ave.‘s moral has an unfortunate double edge to it: among this world’s fleshy but spiritually empty transactions — "Life don’t mean a thing /Living in a prostitution ring" — it’s the soul that counts.

RENT BOY AVE.: A "FAIRY’S" TALE

Through Aug. 9

Wed–Sat, 8 p.m.; Sun, 2 p.m., $18–$34

Boxcar Playhouse, 505 Natoma, SF

(415) 776-1747

www.boxcartheatre.org

Summer of ’69

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August 5, 2009
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When Dylan wrote "Forever Young," he surely didn’t reckon on something that would make even the most yoga-limbered original hippie feel old: Easy Rider turning 40. But it just did, an occasion commemorated by the restored print playing the Red Vic this week. Disregarding the tragic social-commentary ending, one can ponder "Where would Captain America and Billy be now?" — then watch 2007’s Wild Hogs for one depressing possible answer.

Easy Rider has been lionized and analyzed as the single film that most changed — or eroded — old-school Hollywood. It was made well under the radar for a pittance, by the blind leading the naked — Peter Fonda had never produced a film, and Dennis Hopper had never directed one. Real rednecks hired as bit players really did want to beat up the longhaired crew, who really were frequently on the drugs ingested on-screen. Hopper dithered for a year before delivering a three-hour edit. (Surprisingly, he approved of the 95-minute final version others hastily cut.)

By the time Rider finally came out, some thought the biker genre was already finished. Despite all that, it became a phenomenon, "defining the sixties" and inducing the studios to chase that elusive magic by green-lighting innumerable other first-time filmmakers’ equally loose, indulgent features.

Looking at Easy Rider now is like rereading Hermann Hesse or Carlos Castaneda 40 years later — do it at your own peril, because what seemed so profound then might be revealed as pretentious, vague, and awfully dated. The mystique transcended the movie long ago. But this tale of two hippie dudes smuggling coke (scored from Phil Spector as "the Connection"!) cross-country only to discover they "blew it," has innumerable parts greater than its sum: it gave us Jack Nicholson (who was about to quit acting before being asked to replace Rip Torn), cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs, all-rock soundtracks, the inimitable Karen Black, and many more. As phrase and symbol, Easy Rider still evokes a dream.

EASY RIDER

Wed/5–Sat/8, check Web site for times, $6–$9

Red Vic Movie House

1727 Haight, SF

www.redvicmoviehouse.com

Best of the Bay 2009: Arts and Nightlife

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July 28, 2009
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>>CLICK HERE TO SEE THIS LIST ON ONE PAGE
>>BEST OF THE BAY HOME

Editors Picks: Arts and Nightlife

BEST BLOODY QUEEN

A gut-spewing zombie drag queen roller derby in honor of Evil Dead 2. An interview with The Exorcist‘s Linda Blair preceded by a rap number that includes the line, "I don’t care if they suck their mother’s cock, as long as they line up around the block!" A virtual wig-pulling catfight with Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. All this and more have graced the proscenium of the Bridge Theater as part of the jaw-dropping (literally) Midnight Mass summertime B-movie fun series, brought to us by the always perfectly horrific Peaches Christ. Her wigs alone are usually enough to scare the jellybean-bejeezus out of us, but Peaches combines live craziness with wince-worthy flicks to take everything over the top. After this, her 12th season of disembowelled joy, Peaches is moving on from Midnight Mass to become a director in her own right — she just wrapped up filming All About Evil with Natasha Lyonne and a cast of local fleshbots. Look for it in your googleplex soon, and know that Peaches still stumbles among us.

www.peacheschrist.com

BEST FLAMIN’ FUN

Kids, really, don’t try this at home. Don’t hook up your two-player Dance Dance Revolution game to a row of flamethrowers. Don’t rig said game to blast your dance competitior with a faceful of fire in front of an adoring crowd if they miss a step. Don’t invest in enough propane to fuel a small jet, a flaming movie screen for projecting all those awkward dance moves onto, and a booming sound system to play all the Japanese bubblegum techno you could ever hope to hear. Leave the setup to Interpretive Arson, whose Dance Dance Immolation game has wowed participants and spectators alike from Black Rock City to Oaktown — and will scorch Denmark’s footsies this fall. Do, however, seek out these intrepid firestarters, and don a giant silver fireproof suit with a Robby the Robot hood. Do the hippie shake to the mellifluous tones of Fatboy Slim and Smile.dk, and prepare yourself to get flamed, both figuratively and literally.

www.interpretivearson.com

BEST PENGUIN PARTY, PLANETARIUM INCLUDED

Penguins are damn funny when you’re drunk. They’re pretty entertaining animals to begin with, but after a couple martinis those little bastards bring better slapstick than Will Ferrell or Jack Black. But tipsily peeping innocent flightless birds — plus bats, butterflies, sea turtles, and manta rays — is just one of many reasons to attend Nightlife, the stunningly rebuilt California Academy of Sciences’ weekly Thursday evening affair. This outrageously popular (get there early) and ingenious party pairs gonzo lineups of internationally renowned DJs and live bands with intellectual talks by some of the world’s best-known natural scientists. Cocktails are served, the floor is packed, intellects are high — and where else can you order cosmos before visiting the planetarium? Another perk: the cost of admission, which includes most of the academy’s exhibits, is less than half the regular price, although you must be 21 or older to attend. Come for the inebriated entertainment, stay for the personal enrichment.

Thursdays, 6 p.m., $8-<\d>$10. California Academy of Sciences, 55 Music Concourse Dr., Golden Gate Park, SF. (415) 379-8000, www.calacademy.org/events/nightlife

BEST LINDY HOP TO LIL’ WAYNE

Retain a fond nostalgia for the 1990s swing revival scene? Swing Goth is the event you’ve been waiting for. Not quite swing and not even remotely goth, Swing Goth gives swing enthusiasts the go-ahead to boogie-woogie to modern tunes at El Rio. This isn’t your grandmother’s fox trot: rock, rap, ’80s, alternative, Madchester, Gypsy punk, and almost anything else gets swung. Held on the first and third Tuesday of each month and tailored for beginners, this event draws an eclectic crowd that includes dudes who call themselves "hep cats," Mission hipsters, and folks who rock unironic mom jeans and Reebok trainers. If you’re new to swing, arrive at 7:30 and take a one-hour group lesson with ringleader Brian Gardner, who orchestrates the event, to get a quick introduction to swing basics before the free dance. Lessons are $5, but no extra charge for ogling the cute dykes who call El Rio their local watering hole. Swing? Schwing!

First and third Tuesdays, 7 p.m., free. El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF. (415) 282-3325, www.swinggoth.com

BEST CELESTIAL TRAJECTORISTS

Who can take a sunburst of boomer rock inspirations — like The Notorious Byrd Brothers–<\d>era Byrds and Meddle-some Pink Floyd — sprinkle it with dew, and cover it with chocolaty nouveau-hippie-hipster blues-rock and a miracle or two? The fresh-eyed, positive-minded folks of Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound can, ’cause they mix it with love and make a world many believed had grown hack and stale taste good. Riding a wave of local ensembles with a hankering for classic rock, hard-edged Cali psych, Japanese noise, and wild-eyed film scores, the San Francisco band is the latest to make the city safe once more for musical adventurers with open minds and big ears. What’s more, the Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound’s inspired new third album, When Sweet Sleep Returned (Tee Pee) — recorded with help from Tim Green at Louder Studios — has fielded much press praise for space-traveling fuzzbox boogie blowouts like "Drunken Leaves" and blissed-out, sitar-touched jangle rambles such as "Kolob Canyon." Consider your mind burst.

www.myspace.com/theassembleheadinsunburstsound

BEST DANCE DYNAMO

You can’t miss him. He has legs like tree trunks and arm muscles that ripple like lava. When he leaps you think he’ll never come down, and his turns suggest the power of a hurricane. He is dancer Ramón Ramos Alayo, Six years ago he founded the CubaCaribe Festival that now packs in dance aficionados of all stripes, and he’s one of the shaping forces behind the wild San Francisco Carnaval celebration. He runs Alayo Dance Company, for which he choreographs contemporary works with Afro-Cuban roots, and he teaches all over the Bay Area — as many as 60 people show up for his Friday salsa classes at Dance Mission Theater. But Ramos is most strikingly unique as a performer. Ramos is as comfortable embodying Oshoshi, the forest hunter in the Yoruba mythology, as he is taking on "Grace Notes," a jazz improvisation with bassist Jeff Chambers. No wonder Bay Area choreographers as radically different as Joanna Haigood, Sara Shelton Mann, and Robert Moses have wanted to work with him.

www.cubacaribe.org

BEST BLUEGRASS AMNESIAC

Toshio Hirano packs a mean sucker punch. At first glance he’s a wonderfully eccentric Bay Area novelty, a yodeling Japanese cowboy playing native songs of the American heartland. Yet upon further inspection, it becomes as clear as the skies of Kentucky that Toshio is the real deal when it comes to getting deep into the Mississippi muck of Jimmie Rodgers-<\d>style bluegrass. Enchanted by the sound of American folk music as a Japanese college student, Toshio soon ventured stateside to spend years traveling and playing from Georgia to Nashville to Austin before finally settling in the Bay Area. Today, Toshio plays once a month at Amnesia’s free Bluegrass Mondays to standing-room-only crowds. Stay awhile to hear him play Hank Williams’s "Ramblin’ Man" or Rodgers’s "Blue Yodel No. 1(T for Texas)." It’ll clear that Toshio’s novelty is merely a hook — his true appeal lies in his ability to show that there’s a cowboy lurking inside all of us.

www.toshiohirano.com

BEST COMMUNITY CHOREOGRAPHERS

A collective howl went up in 1995 when it was announced that the annual festival Black Choreographers: Moving into the 21st Century at Theater Artaud was ending due in part to lack of funding. But two East Bay dancers, Laura Elaine Ellis and Kendra Kimbrough Barnes, actually did something about it, working to ensure that African-American dancers and dance-makers received attention for the range and spirit of their work. It took 10 years, but in 2005, Ellis and Kimbrough Barnes helped launch Black Choreographers Festival: Here and Now, which takes place every February in San Francisco and Oakland. The three-week event is a fabulous way for a community to celebrate itself and to invite everyone to the party. While the choreographers’ range of talent and imagination has been impressive — and getting better every year — the performances are merely the icing on the cake. Master classes, mentoring opportunites for emerging artists, and a technical theater-training program for local high school and college students are building a dance infrastructure the next generation can plug into.

www.bcfhereandnow.com

BEST MADCAP POP MAIDENS

San Francisco can always use another all-female band — and Grass Widow satisfies that need beautifully, cackling with brisk, madcap rhythms and rolling out a happy, crazy quilt of dissonant wails. Drummer-vocalist Lillian Maring, guitarist-vocalist Raven Mahon, and bassist-vocalist Hannah Lew are punk as fuck, of course — in the classic, pre-pre-packaged noncodified mode — though many will instead compare the trio’s inspired, decentered pop to dyed-in-the-bluestockings lo-fi riot grrrl. Still, there’s a highly conscious intensity to Grass Widow’s questioning of the digital givens that dominate life in the late ’00s, as they sing wistfully then rage raggedly amid accelerating rhythms and a roughly tumbling guitar line on "Green Screen," from their self-titled debut on Make a Mess: "Flying low into trees. We exist on the screen. Computer can you hear me? Understand more than 1s and 0s?" Grass Widow may sweetly entreat the listener, "Don’t make a scene," but if we’re lucky, these ladies will kick off a new generation of estrogen-enhanced music-making.

www.myspace.com/grasswidowmusic

BEST PURPLE SING-ALONG

Karaoke is one of those silly-but-fun nightlife activities that always has the potential to be awesome but usually isn’t. The song lists at most karaoke bars suck, the sound systems are underwhelming, and no matter where you go there’s always some asshole bumming everyone out with painful renditions of Neil Diamond tearjerkers. Well, not anymore! Steve Hays, a.k.a. DJ Purple, is a karaoke DJ — or KJ — who has single-handedly turned the Bay Area’s once tired sing-along scene into a mother funkin’ party y’all. DJ Purple’s Karaoke Dance Party happens every Thursday night at Jack’s Club. Forget the sloppy drunks half-assing their way through Aerosmith and Beyoncé songs. DJ Purple’s Karaoke Dance Party is all about Iron Maiden, Snoop Dogg, Led Zeppelin, and Riskay. No slow songs allowed. An actual experienced DJ, Hays keeps the beats running smooth, fading and blending as each person stumbles onstage, and even stepping in for saxophone solos and backup vocals when a song calls for it. And sometimes even when it doesn’t.

Thursdays, 9 p.m., free. Jack’s Club, 2545 24th St., SF. (415) 641-5371, www.djpurple.com

BEST FLANNEL REVIVAL

In this age of continual retro, it comes as a surprise that listening to mainstream ’90s alternative rock can give you, under the right inebriated circumstances, the kind of pleasure not experienced since heroin went out of vogue. Debaser at the Knockout has become one of the best monthly parties in San Francisco, largely because it gives ’80s babies, who were stuck playing Oregon Trail in computer class while Courtney Love and Kat Bjelland were rocking it out in Portland, the chance to live out their Nirvana-era dreams. Debaser promoter Jamie Jams is the only DJ in San Francisco who will spin the Cranberries after a Pavement song, and his inspired mixology is empirically proven to induce moshing en masse until last call, an enticingly dangerous sport now that lead-footed Doc Martens are back in style. Sporting flannel gets you comped, so for those still hung up over Jordan Catalano and the way he leans, Debaser is rife with contemporary, albeit less angsty, equivalents.

First Saturdays, 9 p.m., Knockout, 3223 Mission, SF. (415) 550-6994, www.myspace.com/debaser90s

BEST CRANIUM MONOPOLY SCRABBLE RISK

The shaky economy’s probably put your $60 concert plans on hold and relegated those high-rolling VIP nights to the back burner. So it’s a great time to return to the simpler forms of social interaction, such as shaking some dice and screaming, "Yahtzee, bitches!" or guffawing maniacally every time some poor fool attempts to pass your two hotels on Boardwalk. Fortunately, game night at On the Corner café on Divisadero fills your staid Wednesday evenings with enough card-shuffling, Pop-o-matic popping, I-want-to-be-the-thimble classics to sink your battleship blues. Plus, there’s coffee and beer. Working in collusion with the colossal collection of neighboring Gamescape, On the Corner provides a plethora of gaming options to fit its large tables and vibrant atmosphere. Stratego, Scattergories, and other trivial pursuits are all available, and the 7 p.m.-<\d>to-<\d>closing happy hour includes $2.50 draft beers and sangria specials. The tables fill up quickly, though — arrive early so you won’t be sorry.

Wednesdays, 7–10 p.m., free. 359 Divisadero, SF. (415) 522-1101, www.sfcorner.com

BEST PARTY OF ONE

Perfect moments are never the ones you work hard to create. Too much effort kills the magic. Instead, the moments we treasure are those that steal up on us, slipping past our defenses to reveal, for just an instant, the sublime wonder of the universe. This is precisely what happens during one’s first encounter with the Lexington Street disco ball, innocuously spinning its multifaceted heart out on a quiet neighborly block in the heart of the Mission District. One moment you’re just walking down the street minding your own business — perhaps rehashing the "should have saids" or the "could have beens" in the muddled disquiet of your mind — when suddenly you spot it, the incongruously located disco ball suspended from a low-hanging branch, throwing a carpet of stars across the sidewalk for anyone to enjoy. All is still, but the music in your heart will lead you. Hold your hands in the air, walk into the light, and dance.

Lexington between 20th and 21st streets, SF

BEST BLOCK-ROCKIN’ BIKE

Amandeep Jawa’s bright blue, sound-rigged party-cycle — Trikeasaurus — is our bestest Critical Mass compadre and bike lane buddy, and an essential component of his impromptu FlashDance parties. This three-wheelin’, free-wheelin’, pedal-and-battery-powered funk machine has been bringing the party to the people — and leading spontaneous Michael Jackson tributes — from the Embarcadero to the Broadway tunnel for the past two years. Even if you’re just out for a stroll or a bit of that ephemeral San Francisco "sun"-bathing, when Trikeasaurus comes rolling along you just have to boogie on down the road, bust a move, get your groove thing on, let your freak flag fly, and insert ecstatic cliché here. We can pretend all we want in the privacy of our own hip sancta sanctorum that Destiny’s Child or OutKast will never move us, but somehow when Trikeasaurus comes bumping by, we just can’t help but bump right back. Don’t fight the feeling! Join the 500-watt, 150-decibel velolution today.

www.deeptrouble.com

BEST HOLES FOR YOUR KRAUTROCK SOUL

If you’ve done ketamine, you know what it’s like to get lost in the cosmic K-hole. To those who have entered the mystical D-hole, however, your ketamine story is child’s play. The Donuts dance party, thrown at various times and locations throughout the year by DJ Pickpocket and visual artist AC, provides adventurous club-goers with that most delicious of drugs: donuts, given away free. First timers, be careful: these potent little sugar bombs are highly addictive and can often lead to an all-night binge of ecstatic power-boogie, which can result in terrible withdrawal symptoms. Like many other popular club drugs, donuts are offered in powdered form, though they can also be glazed, which leaves no tell-tale residue around the mouth. But as long as you indulge responsibly, entering the Hole of the Donut is perfectly safe. Amp up your experience to fever-pitch perfection with Donuts’ pulse-pumping Krautrock, new wave, retro disco, and dance punk live acts and beats.

www.myspace.com/donutparty

BEST PLACE TO PARTY LIKE A SLOVENIAN

If there’s one thing all Slovenians have in common, it’s that they know how to deck a muthafunkin’ hall, y’all. It stands to reason then that Slovenians run one of the biggest and best halls in town. The Slovenian Hall in Potrero Hill is available for all your partying needs — birthdays, anniversary bashes, coming-out fests, etc. The rooms inside the hall are spacious and clean, the kitchen and bar spaces are outfitted to serve an entire army, and there are plenty of tables and chairs. But it’s the decor that makes this place unique: Soviet-era and vintage tourism advertisements are sprinkled throughout the place and banners promoting Slovenian pride hang from the ceiling. The hall also hosts live music events — recently an Argentine tango troupe took up residence there, making things border-fuzzingly interesting, to say the least.

2101 Mariposa, SF. (415) 864-9629

BEST FUTURE RAP CEO

Odds are you’ve not yet heard of East Bay teen hip-hop talent Yung Nittlz — but one day soon you will. The ambitious, gifted Berkeley High student has already amassed five albums worth of smooth and funky material that he wrote, produced, and rapped and sang on. In August 2007, when he was just 13, the rapper born Nyles Roberson scored media attention when Showtime at the Apollo auditions came to town and he was spotted very first in line, having camped out the night before. And while Yung Nittlz wasn’t among the lucky final few to be picked, he did make a lasting impression on the judges with his strong performance of the song "Money in the Air" and choreography that included him strategically tossing custom-made promo dollars that he designed and made. The gifted artist also designed the professional-looking cover for his latest demo CD, which suggests fans should request the hit-sounding "Feelin’ U" on KMEL 106 FM. Stay tuned. You’ll likely be hearing it soon.

www.myspace.com/yungnittlz

BEST B-MOVIE SURVIVOR

The crappy economy has ruined many things. It’s the reason both the Parkway and the Cerrito Speakeasy theaters — where you could openly drink a beer you’d actually purchased at the concession stand, not smuggled in under your sweatshirt — closed their doors this year. But even a bummer cash crunch can’t dampen a true cult movie fan’s love of all things B. Deprived of a permanent venue for his long-running "Thrillville," programmer and host Will "The Thrill" Viharo adjusted his fez, brushed off his velvet lapels, and started booking his popular film ‘n’ cabaret extravaganzas at other Bay Area movie houses, including the 4-Star and the Balboa in San Francisco, and San Jose’s Camera 3. Fear not, devotees of film noir, tiki culture, the swingin’ ’60s, big-haired babes, Aztec mummies, William Shatner, the Rat Pack, Elvis, creature features, Japanese monsters, and zombies — the Thrill ain’t never gonna be gone.

www.thrillville.net

BEST GAY FLIPPER ACTION

Much like travel agents, beepers, and modesty, pinball machines are slowly becoming relics of the past. But it’s difficult to understand why these quarter-fed games would fall by the wayside, since they’re especially fun in a bar atmosphere. What else is there to do besides stare at your drink, hopelessly chat up the bartender, constantly check your phone, and try to catch that one cute patron’s eye. At the Castro’s Moby Dick, pinball saves you from such doldrums. Sure, the place has the requisite video screens blaring Snap! and Cathy Dennis chestnuts, and plenty of hunky drunkies to serve as distractions. But its quarter-action collection — unfortunately whittled down to three machines, ever since Theater of Magic was retired due to the difficulty of finding replacement parts — is a delightful retro rarity in this gay day and age. So tilt not, World Cup Soccer, Addams Family, and Attack from Mars fans. There’s still a queer home for your lightning-quick flipping.

4049 18th St., SF. www.mobydicksf.com

BEST BLAST OF JUSTICE

Founded in 2002, the many-membered Brass Liberation Orchestra has been blowing their horns for social justice all over the Bay Area — from the San Francisco May Day March and Oakland rallies for Oscar Grant, to protests against city budget cuts and jam sessions at the 16th Street BART station. Trombones out and bass drums at the ready, this tight-knit organization of funky folk recently returned from New Orleans, where they played to support community rebuilding projects in the Lower Ninth Ward. With a membership as diverse as they come, the BLO toots their horns specifically to "support political causes with particular emphasis on peace, and racial and social justice" — especially concerning immigrants’ rights and anti-gentrification issues. But the most joyful part of their practice is the spontaneous street parties they engender wherever they pop up, and their seemingly impromptu romps through neighborhoods and street festivals. Viva la tuba-lution!

www.brassliberation.org

BEST WITTY WONG

Is your idea of hell being trapped in a room with a white, collegiate, spoken-word "artist" — or worse yet, being forced to wear an Ed Hardy t-shirt? Are you a veteran of the 30 Stockton and the 38 Geary, with the wounds and the stories to prove it? Can you just not help but stare at someone who somehow can’t resist an act of street corner masturbation? Then you’re ready to lend an ear to Ali Wong, the funniest comedian to stomp onto a San Francisco stage in a long time. Some people get offended by Wong, which is one reason she’s funny — comedy isn’t about making friends, and she’s not sentimental. She draws on her family history and writing and performing experience in implicit rather than overt ways while remaining as blunt as your funniest friend on a bender.

www.aliwong.com

BEST SITE FOR SHUTTERBUGS

Take a picture, it’ll last longer. Especially if you take it to — or even at — RayKo Photo Center, a large SoMA space that boasts a studio, a shop stocked with new and used cameras, a variety of black-and-white and color darkrooms, a digital imaging lab (with discount last-Friday-of-the-month nighttime hours), and classes where one can learn the latest digital skills as well as older and arcane processes such as Ambrotype (glass plate) and Tintype (metal plate) image-making. Devoted in part to local photographers, RayKo’s gallery has showcased Bill Daniel’s panoramic yet raw shots of a post-Katrina Louisiana and has likely influenced a new generation of shutterbugs affiliated with groups and sites like Cutter Photozine and Photo Epicenter. One of its coolest and truly one-of-a-kind features is the Art*O*Mat Vending Machine, an old ciggie vendor converted into a $5-a-piece art dispenser. And of course RayKo has an old photo booth, so you can take some quick candid snapshots with or without a honey.

428 Third St., SF. (415) 495-3773, www.raykophoto.com

BEST RAPPING CABBIE

The great myth about cab drivers is that they’re a bunch of underappreciated geniuses who write poetry and paint masterpieces when they’re not busy shuttling drunks around. Most cabbies, however, aren’t Picassos with pine-scent air fresheners. They clock in and out just like we all do, and then they go home and watch reality TV. There are, however, a few exceptions to the rule: true artists who have deliberately chosen the cabbie lifestyle because it allows them the freedom to pursue their passions on the side. MC Mars is such a cabbie. A 20-year veteran on the taxi scene, Mars is also a hip-hop performer, a published author, and an HIV activist. You can check his flow every Wednesday night at the Royale’s open-mic sessions. Or, if you’re lucky enough to hail his DeSoto, you can get a free backseat show on weekends. And don’t forget to pick up his latest CD, "Letz Cabalaborate," available on Mars’ Web site.

www.mcmars.net

BEST FRESH POETICS

The Bay Area knows poetry. And people in the Bay Area who know poetry today realize that the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beats, the Language poets, and even the New Brutalists might inspire contemporary writers, but they don’t own them. You can encounter proof in places like Books and Bookshelves, and read it in publications like Try. As the Bay Area Poetics anthology edited by Stephanie Young made clear in 2006, Bay Area verse is enormous and ever-changing. One year earlier, David Larsen established a space for it in Oakland with his New Yipes Reading Series, which frequently paired poets with filmmakers. He’s since moved to the East Coast, but Ali Warren and Brandon Brown re-energized the concept, simplifying its name to The New Reading Series and refining its content to readings with musical interludes. It’s the best place around to hear Tan Lin and Ariana Reines and confront notions of the self through Heath Ledger. It’s also hosted a kissing booth, for all you wordsmiths who aren’t above romantic trappings.

416 25th St., Oakl. www.newyipes.blogspot.com

BEST HOUSE OUTSIDE

For 15 years, the much-loved and lovable warm weather Sunset parties have shaken various hills, isles, parks, patios, and boats with funky, techy house sounds. Launched by underground hero DJ Galen in 1994, the outdoor Sunset gigs have amassed a huge following of excited party newbies and familiar old-school ravers — and now even their kids. Early on in the game, Galen was soon joined by fellow Bay favorite DJs Solar and J-Bird, and the three — collectively known as Pacific Sound — have kept the vibe strong ever since. This year saw a remarkable expansion on the Sunset fan base: attendance at the season opener at Stafford Lake reached almost 4,000, and Pacific Sound just launched an annual — and truly moving — party on Treasure Island that had multiple generations putting their hands in the air. The recent Sunset Campout in Belden drew hundreds for an all-weekend romp with some of the biggest names in electronic music — true fresh air freshness.

www.pacificsound.net

BEST SECRET OF ETERNAL RAVE
According to murky local legend, sometime in the early ’90s a Finnish archaeologist named Mr. Floppy passed through Oakland on a quest to find an inverted pyramid rumored to hold the secret to eternal life. He didn’t find anything like that, of course, but he did discover a really cool apartment complex run by an obsessive builder named George Rowan. The sprawling place, which housed multiple dwelling units as well as an outdoor dance area and an out-of-use bordello and saloon famously frequented by Jack London in the 1800s, was an interconnected maze of rooms decorated with found objects and outsider art. It was a perfect spot to throw underground raves, which is exactly what Floppy and Rowan did until the day they got slapped with a fire-hazard citation. Nobody really knows what happened to the psychedelic archaeologist after that, although his spirit lives on: Mr. Floppy’s Flophouse has recently re-opened as a venue for noise shows, freaky circuses, and all-night moonlit orgies.
1247 E. 12th St., Oakl

———–

BEST OF THE BAY 2009:
>>BEST OF THE BAY HOME
>>READERS POLL WINNERS
>>EDITORS PICKS: CLASSICS
>>EDITORS PICKS: CITY LIVING
>>EDITORS PICKS: FOOD AND DRINK
>>EDITORS PICKS: ARTS AND NIGHTLIFE
>>EDITORS PICKS: SHOPPING
>>EDITORS PICKS: SEX AND ROMANCE
>>EDITORS PICKS: OUTDOORS AND SPORTS
>>LOCAL HEROES

Editor’s Notes

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July 21, 2009
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Tredmond@sfbg.com

All the great sci-fi and comic book movies have some sort of larger social metaphor. Robocop, one of my all-time favorites, was really about the privatization of public resources. Our hero gets mangled in a firefight because Detroit turned its police department over to Omni Consumer Products Corp., which cut staffing to boost the bottom line and there’s no backup available.

So when I was editing this week’s cover package on the battle over health insurance, I couldn’t help thinking about The Incredibles. See, Mr. Incredible is this great superhero, but liability lawsuits force him to retire and he winds up as a claims clerk in an insurance company, where he sits around all day stamping "denied" on health insurance claims. Then he gets in trouble for quietly telling customers how they can appeal.

I’ve always imagined that real health insurance offices look exactly like that. People sit around all day and get paid to make sure that other people don’t get health care. And if they deny enough claims, they get a nice bonus. If they approve too many claims or help the poor customers appeal, they get fired.

The thing is, the bonus part is true. Many insurance companies pay their staff based on how much they have done to keep costs down — that is, to make sure expensive medical treatments are denied. I’ve been through this. The medical insurance won’t pay for the anesthesia my son needs for complicated oral surgery because the procedure happens in a dental office. The dental insurance won’t pay because the drugs are administered by an anesthesiologist, who is a doctor, not a dentist. Someone is smiling in both the medical and dental insurance offices; they just saved $1,000. Bonus on the way.

Sound familiar? I bet you’ve been through it too.

This is why the only way health insurance is going to get better is if the profit is taken out of it. And why it’s absolutely nuts that the insurance industry is still considered part of the solution.

The city budget didn’t come out well. The cops, the mayor’s press office, the mayor’s 311 call center, the places where there is still a lot of bloat, saw no real cuts. Public health and human services, which have already been cut to the bone, got hacked even more. And there is no concrete plan to even try to raise new revenue this fall.

There are some lessons here, and let me start with an obvious one. The final deal went down with two people — Sups. John Avalos and David Chiu, both new to the board — in the room with the mayor’s staff. Same thing in Sacramento — five people cut the deal. There’s got to be a better way. *

Editor’s Notes

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July 14, 2009
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tredmond@sfbg.com

An angry reader called me years ago to complain about one of my columns, and before she hung up she informed me that "all you radical hippies want is free drugs, free love, and free lunch."

I couldn’t possibly have put it better. Especially the free lunch.

But it’s funny: As a society, Americans these days are almost afraid of things that are free. If it doesn’t cost money, it must be a scam. Or crappy. Or illegal. Nobody just gives anything away any more.

In fact, Douglas Rushkoff has written an entire book about the problem, called Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How We Can Take it Back (2009, Random House). In an interview with Cecile Lepage in this special issue (which provides dozens of great tips on things you can do and get for free), Rushkoff describes the problem:

"People prefer hiring a person to babysit for their child rather than accepting a favor from the old lady down the street — because if you accept, what social obligation have you incurred? What if she wants to join you at your next barbecue? What if she now wants to be your friend? So now we all have to work more to get money to buy things that we used to just exchange freely with each other."

Of course, if we all gave more away free, we wouldn’t need anywhere near as much money, which would change the whole way our consumer-driven society functions. People could work less and have more free time (say, to volunteer, or help babysit the neighbor’s kid). The financial institutions that so dominate our society (and that so seriously fucked up the world economy) would have less of a role in how people live their lives.

I know, I know: Ain’t no free lunch. Not in America, not in 2009. But it’s a thought.

So everyone in town was talking last week about the City College indictments. As one local wag put it to me, only partly in jest: "These folks must be guilty as sin if Kamala Harris actually indicted them." We don’t know much about their guilt or innocence before trial, but we do know that (a) our district attorney is mighty careful about filing charges in political corruption cases, so this isn’t just a set of allegations that will quickly disappear, and (b) there has been an awful lot of corruption in the local community college for a long time, and this is probably just the tip of the iceberg.

I wouldn’t be surprised, when all is said and done, if the reign of former chancellor Phil Day starts to look like that of former school superintendent Bill Rojas — a cesspool of sleaze that could take years to clean up.

And yet, college trustee Lawrence Wong was quoted in the Chronicle praising Day and calling him "probably the best chancellor we’ve had." Amazing, but not surprising. In fact, Wong and two of his colleagues — Trustee Natalie Berg and former trustee Rodel Rodis — backed up Day over and over again when he played funny with money, pissed off community groups, and acted disdainful of any criticism.

Rodis lost his re-election bid last fall, although Berg somehow survived. Wong is up in 2010. The reformers are slowly gaining control of the board, and the indictments show just how badly that was needed. *

Harris, Newsom duck on immigration

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June 30, 2009
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EDITORIAL So let’s get this straight.

Kamala Harris, the San Francisco district attorney, has set up a laudable program called Back on Track that offers counseling and job training for first-time drug offenders who otherwise would be clogging up the local jail.

A handful of the people who went into the program were undocumented immigrants. Some completed the program successfully and were allowed to graduate.

This is a problem?

Apparently so — because between them the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco Examiner have devoted at least five major stories, one horrible column and at least one editorial to exposing the fact that some people who otherwise would have been jailed and deported for minor nonviolent crimes have been allowed to stay in the country, with new skills that might help them find jobs that don’t involve selling drugs on the street.

And Harris, who is running for state attorney general, is scrambling to cover herself, announcing that undocumented immigrants will no longer be allowed to go through the program. In other words, to get rehabilitation instead of jail time in San Francisco, you now have to submit proof of citizenship.

There’s a whole lot wrong with this picture. The critics attacking Harris claim that undocumented immigrants don’t deserve job training since they can’t work in this country legally anyway. That’s just silly — tens of thousands of immigrants who lack legal documentation are working in San Francisco right now, and tens of thousands will continue to work in San Francisco. And they’re generally a productive part of the economy and community. These immigrants already face barriers to attending college. The only thing that denying first-offenders job training does is increase the chance they will return to crime.

Yes, the L.A. Times was able to find one person enrolled in the program who went out and committed robbery and assault. He was the only one of seven undocumented people in the program who had legal problems while attending. The others were allowed to graduate, had their criminal records erased, and, given the overall results of the program, were far less likely than people who had served jail time to re-offend.

Unfortunately, the daily newspaper stories are just the latest attack on San Francisco’s Sanctuary City policy, which is supposed to bar local law enforcement from turning people over to federal immigration authorities. Mayor Gavin Newsom has backed away from the sanctuary policy — and now Harris is backing away, too.

The district attorney says that allowing undocumented immigrants into her program was a mistake, and that it’s been "fixed." That’s the wrong approach. Prisons and county jails in California are jammed beyond capacity. The cost of incarcerating all those people is staggering and helping to bankrupt the state. And the threat of deportation has created a climate of terror and desperation in immigrant communities, where families are being ripped apart and lives shattered by overzealous federal agents.

And the weak responses by San Francisco city officials are just empowering the radical nativists, who want to blame all of society’s problems on immigrants.

Harris did nothing wrong and has no need to apologize or change her program. Job training as an alternative to jail is good public policy — for citizens and noncitizens. She and Mayor Newsom ought to be defending the Sanctuary City laws instead of running away from them. If this is what it takes to seek statewide office, the mayor and district attorney would better serve their constituents by staying at home. *

Designer drugs: HomoChic unleashes piggy poppers

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June 26, 2009
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By Juliette Tang

Just in time for your big gay Pride weekend, the talented artists at the HomoChic collective have launched their and improved site, now complete with an online store where you can get your very own designer poppers top. Created by SF’s Leo Herrera and NYC artisan Blue Bayer, these simultaneously classy and slutty swine-themed poppers tops are available in 14K gold plate or sterling silver, and come with a little chain so that you can conveniently wear your poppers around your neck (the coke necklace from Cruel Intentions is so ten years ago). Says Leo Herrera, co-founder of HomoChic, “”This piece of gay history is the best thing to happen to messy sex and sweaty dance floors since the pump lube bottle & the hanky code.” Herrera sat down with the SFBG to talk about the history of HomoChic, the innocent fun of poppers, and what it’s like to be a “chubby chasing feeder twink”.

SFBG: Can you describe, in your words, what HomoChic is? (And it’s absolutely gorgeous gorgeous, by the way). From my perspective, HomoChic is a little bit of everything, from photography to video to design to music to writing to fashion. From a creator’s viewpoint, what are you going for with the site?

LH: HomoChic.com is an artist collective, production house, and as of June 09, an online store for prints and gay artifacts. We produce events, films, costumes and images with a focus on gay anthropology and history. We are also planning on representing artists and performers through online promotion and commerce.

SFBG: How did HomoChic take off?

LH: HomoChic has taken off because of our focus on gay history and repackaging it in a way that isn’t too focused on looking toward the past (i.e. AIDS activism, “traditional” Pride) to shape ways of taking the Gay Movement to the future. At the same time, we are finding the resources and opportunities to create more of our own projects, so it’s something gay men of all ages can identify with. HomoChic started with myself, Jacob Sperber (co-founder of HoneySoundSystem) and my gay brother Allan producing art pieces that revolved around events and vice versa. Whether it is an after-party for an art show, or a film piece produced specifically to be a trailer for a nightlife event. The notion of Chic has always been associated with being a homo. As a lot of us, especially the younger generation, assimilate, we become too focused on being part of mainstream culture and forget that for a long time, the industries have looked to us to show them what’s cool and sellable, not the other way around. Think Madonna’s Vogue, or disco for example.

SFBG: How were you inspired to make your lovely pig-topped poppers bottles?

The price of normal

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June 23, 2009
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news@sfbg.com

With a 2010 state proposition on gay marriage in the works and a national gay rally on the Washington Mall being planned for October 10-11 of that year, it’s obvious that more and more of the LGBT community’s resources are being funneled into the battle for marriage equality, while other causes go begging.

Already gay marriage has become a black hole that is sucking untold amounts of money, time, and energy out of our community. In the 2008 election alone, gay marriage supporters raised $43.3 million to defeat Proposition 8, the anti-gay marriage initiative that California voters passed by 52 percent. It may be the biggest chunk of change the community has ever spent for a single fight.

A QUESTION OF PRIORITIES

I’m not against gay marriage. If queer couples want to be as miserable as straight ones, that’s their choice. Marriage is a failed institution. With a 54.8 percent divorce rate nationally and a 60 percent rate here in California, there’s no doubt in my mind that heterosexual "wedded bliss" is more of an oxymoron than a reality.

What’s troubling to me as a queer activist of almost 40 years (much of that time spent on economic justice work) is that, with the tremendous amount of homelessness, poverty, and unemployment in our community, we are spending so much dough on the fight to give a minority of folks — those who opt for tying the knot — rights and privileges that straight married folks have.

Sure, it’s unfair that married straights get tax breaks, not to mention the status of next-of-kin for hospital visits and medical decisions when one partner is ill, and queers don’t. Altogether, married couples have 1,400 benefits, both state and federal, that domestic partners and single people don’t enjoy. It’s a matter of simple justice that the playing field be leveled. Only a right-wing idiot could disagree with that. Now, if only we could fight to give everyone (including singles) those 1,400 benefits.

For me it’s a question of priorities. We are living in scary times. Unemployment is sky-high; millions are without healthcare, including children; foreclosures are robbing homeowners and tenants alike of their housing; and business collapses are leaving a lot of people out in the cold and unable to pay the rent or the mortgage.

DINKS NO MORE

The queer community is no better off.

It’s a popular misconception that queers have a lot of disposable income. The "double income, no kids" (DINK) myth was promoted in the 1980s by gay publishers who wanted to expand their advertising base and their profits. These days, to read many gay publications, you’d think that all queers are going on fabulous vacations and buying expensive clothes, jewelry, and electronic gizmos.

That myth was easily dispelled by a recent study, "Poverty in the Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Community," published this March by the Williams Institute at UCLA. Like "Income Inflation: the myth of affluence among gay, lesbian, and bisexual Americans," the groundbreaking 1998 study by M.V. Lee Badgett of the Department of Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the Williams report found that many members of our community aren’t shopping ’til they drop. They can barely afford to put food on the table.

Nationally, 24 percent of lesbians and bisexual women are poor compared to 19 percent of heterosexual women; 15 percent of gay and bisexual men are poor compared to 13 percent of heterosexual men.

Queers aren’t just low on cash — we’re homeless, too. A 2006 report, "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Youth: An Epidemic of Homelessness" from the National Lesbian and Gay Task Force and the National Coalition on Homelessness, showed that 20 percent to 40 percent of the 1.6 million homeless youth in America identify as LGBT. In San Francisco, the number of queers in the homeless youth population (estimated at 4,000 by the Mayor’s Office) is "roughly 44 percent," according to Dr. Mike Toohey of the Homeless Youth Alliance in the Haight.

Brian Basinger of the AIDS Housing Alliance says that 40 percent of people with HIV/AIDS, in the city once acclaimed for its care of those with the disease, are either "unstably housed or are homeless." In the Castro, Basinger said, there are only "12 dedicated HOPWA beds" for people with the disease. HOPWA (Housing Opportunities for People with AIDS) is a federal voucher program for low-income people with AIDS that is similar to federal housing assistance program Section 8.

Certain members of our community don’t fare much better in the area of employment. A 2006 survey by the Guardian and the Transgender Law Center reported that 75 percent of transgender people are not employed full-time, and 59 percent make less than $15,299 a year. A mere 4 percent of respondents earned more than $61,200, the then-median income average for San Francisco.

Fifty-seven percent of trangendered people said they suffered employment discrimination, demonstrating the need for the inclusion of "gender identity" in the federal Employment Non-discrimination Act. Human Rights Campaign, a national gay organization, and out Congress member Barney Frank (D-Mass.) cut transgenders out of that legislation the last time it was up before Congress.

It could all get a whole lot worse.

AXING THE FUTURE

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to lop at least $81 million from California’s AIDS budget, including money for AIDS drugs, leaving low-income people stranded without their medication. Senior services are also on his cutting block, including $230.8 million from in-home services and $117 million from adult health-care programs. (As we go to press, the state Legislature is working to restore the AIDS money to the budget.)

Mayor Gavin Newsom, in his proposed city budget cuts, is axing $128.4 million from public health and $15.9 million from human services. There’s no doubt these cuts in health and human services will severely affect people with AIDS, seniors, youth, the homeless, and others in our community who can least afford to pay for the city’s budget shortfall.

The millions spent on gay marriage in the past few years could have gone a long way in these lean times. It could have helped make the proposed queer senior housing project, Open House, a reality. With 88 units in the works at 55 Laguna St., the site of the old UC extension, it will be the only such housing for LGBT seniors in San Francisco.

The money also could have funded housing in the Castro for homeless queer youth or people with AIDS. It could have been used as seed money for a much-needed war against poverty in the LGBT community.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF LIBERATION

The queer movement hasn’t always been this obsessed about getting hitched. Forty years ago this week, drag queens and others fought back against the cops who were raiding a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn in New York City’s West Village. Three days of protests led to the creation of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), a revolutionary group dedicated to the sexual liberation of all people. GLFers weren’t looking to walk down the aisle or form binary couples. In a desire to "abolish existing social institutions," as the NYC branch of GLF said in its statement of purpose, some GLFers explored polyamory (more than one relationship at a time).

That’s why I edited Smash the Church, Smash the State! The Early Years of Gay Liberation, just published by City Lights Books, a collection of writings by former GLF members and other gay liberationists. I wanted to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Stonewall and the birth of GLF with a reminder of who we were and what we did. After all these years, I still don’t want to head to the chapel to get married.

When it really comes down to it, gay marriage is a conservative issue. It’s about wanting to fit in, to be like everyone else. Beyond the important issues of tax breaks and next-of-kin status — and the fact that if any institution exists, it shouldn’t discriminate against queers — marriage is ultimately a means of normalizing binary queer relationships, especially for gay men who have always enjoyed the freedom to be promiscuous. It’s a way to try and rein in our libidos, though the prevalence of extramarital sex among straight couples — 50 percent for women, 60 percent for men, according to a recent issue of Journal of Couple and Relationship Therapy — shows that marriage doesn’t come with a chastity belt.

It also doesn’t come with any guarantees, as researchers discovered in Sweden, where queers were able to contract for same-sex partnerships from 1995 until recently, when full same-sex marriage was instituted. According to a study by the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, Swedish queers have been divorcing in high numbers, like their straight counterparts, who have a divorce rate that’s just a little higher than the United States.

For queers in Sweden, that’s the price of being normal.

Tommi Avicolli Mecca, who has been a queer activist since he was involved with the Gay Liberation Front at Temple University in Philadelphia in the early 1970s, is editor of Smash the Church, Smash the State! The Early Years of Gay Liberation (City Lights Books).

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