High drama with Dresden Dolls’ Amanda Palmer at the Fillmore on May 18. All photos by Neil Motteram.
Contributing photographer Neil Motteram checked out the Dresden Dolls show at the Fillmore on May 18. Here’s what he shot.
East Bay Ray gives the Dolls a hand with a cover of “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!).”
Give Ladytron a little sugar.
As usual, SF, you’re far too much for one music fan or one paper to handle. Here are more worthy picks that didn’t quite make it to print. Knock yourselves out.
Cave Singers
There is life after post-punk. Pretty Girls Make Graves, Hint Hint, and Cobra High seem far away for the Matador art-folkies. With Botticellis and Triumph of Lethargy Skinned Alive to Death. Thurs/22, 8 p.m., $12. Independent, 628 Divisadero, S.F. (415) 771-1422.
Last of the Blacksmiths
The SF ensemble may be last, but they’re not to be forgotten, as they whoop it up moodily on the occasion of their spanking fresh album, **Young Family Song** (Vanguard Squad), alongside Black Fiction writer Tim Cohen’s the Fresh and Only’s. With El Capitan. Sat/24, 9 p.m., $10. Café du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. (415) 861-5016.
Rats
The misunderstood NYC critters promise to rip you a new one. With Some Days. Sat/24, 6 p.m., $5. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. (415) 923-0923.
Ladytron
They only want you when you’re 17 — when you’re 21 you’re no fun. But if you’re the UK combo you have considerably longer shelf life: fans are chomping at the bit for Ladytron’s forthcoming fourth album, **Velocifero,** for their new imprint, Nettwerk. Tues/27, 8 p.m., $27.50. Fillmore, 1805 Geary, SF. (415) 346-6000.
Good to know Joey Ramone Day marches on – just as it was fun to hear, at last night’s Eric Lyle reading/event at CounterPULSE for his new book, On the Lower Frequencies: A Secret History of the City, the Guardian contributor talk about his own personal observance of Joey Ramone Day – playing Ramones songs on a boombox through the streets, meditating on the frontman.
Well, it happens on every coast. This just in – the details for this year’s Joey Ramone Birthday Bash on May 19 in NYC:
“Celebrating what would have been the 57th birthday of punk-icon Joey Ramone, the annual Joey Ramone Birthday Bash will take place Monday, May 19, at the Fillmore New York at Irving Plaza. Mickey Leigh, event organizer and brother of Joey Ramone, has announced that, as part of the eighth annual Bash, fans will be treated to a special reunion appearance from Manitoba’s Wild Kingdom featuring Handsome Dick Manitoba, Andy Shernoff, Ross the Boss, and JP Thunderbolt.
As I predicted, Friday’s campaign kickoff event for Sup. Ross Mirkarimi wasn’t simply about whether he’ll be reelected to the Board of Supervisors. It was the launch of a movement to reshape San Francisco’s political landscape in a way that could maintain progressive control of the Board of Supervisors and propel Mirkarimi into the mayor’s office a few years from now.
Yet rather than relying strictly on a reenergized progressive movement, the event seemed to signal that Mirkarimi is aiming to create a bigger tent that capitalizes on his strength on criminal justice issues, among other domains of the moderates. Notably, those in attendance included two former mayors: Art Agnos (no surprise) and Willie Brown (big surprise, and a strong indicator that Mayor Gavin Newsom’s coalition is fraying).
As Sup. Aaron Peskin told the capacity crowd at Yoshi’s on Fillmore Street, “There may come a day when Ross is the chief executive of this city.”
Image from sfgreenparty.org
Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi kicks off his campaign for reelection this evening at Yoshi’s Jazz Club in the heart of the Fillmore. The Board of Supervisors’ only Green Party member is popular in his District 5 — made up of the super lefty Haight and crime-plagued Western Addition, where Mirkarimi has shown real leadership in pushing police foot patrols and other reforms — and is expected to cruise to a relatively easy victory.
But today’s event carries a far larger symbolic significance: it is the beginning of a long campaign to create a progressive narrative for San Francisco that counters the centrist and fairly superficial approach of Mayor Gavin Newsom. And that’s a struggle that will carry through this fall’s high-stakes supervisorial elections, into the vote for a new board president in January, and on into the next mayor’s race — all of which could feature Mirkarimi in a starring role.
› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Cover albums — critics stuck on music-maker-as-auteur theories, singer-songwriter elitists, and band-as-prime-mover rockists have long believed them the easy way out. Cat Power has succumbed twice, Dirty Projectors once, Scarlett Johansson completely surrendered to the mix of her forthcoming Tom Waits covers long-player — only to be upstaged by the production of TV on the Radio’s David Sitek. Still, despite the presence of so many tuneless, karaoke-jacked wannabes ready to grab their 15 minutes, even the talented are tempted to linger in the shadows of giants, bringing their own ideas and sound to a few of the many great, perhaps forgotten, songs and stories swirling in the ether. Why look down on the cover disc?
San Francisco songsmith Andy Cabic, who plays Great American Music Hall with his band Vetiver on May 6 for the first time since August, dusts his shoulders of such snobbery. "I don’t know why there would be a critical bias against cover records," he opines outside Sacramento at the Hanger studio where he’s three days into the next Vetiver album of original numbers. "Maybe a critic should try to do a covers record and see how good it comes out before they say there’s something wrong with it."
Cabic’s not ashamed to point out that "throwback is all over" Vetiver’s new collection of offbeat covers, Thing of the Past (Gnomonsong). The retro album art depicting a pretty girl studying old vinyl was shot at Cabic’s Inner Richmond flat, highlighting just a fraction of his impressive stash of records — and the music was made by the band a group of old friends from North Carolina that Cabic assembled to tour Vetiver’s To Find Me Gone (Dicristina Stair, 2006).
Wasn’t it Bob Dylan and the Beatles who triggered so many critics to privilege songwriters over interpreters? "I was just having a conversation with someone about what caused it," Cabic says. "I think you’d have to attribute it to Bob Dylan. The Beatles’ first two records had covers. I still love those records that were put together by the whole machinery of an A&R person, a singer, and songs by the great writers of that moment. But I chose songs that weren’t of the moment — songs that were timeless or not easily heard today, songs I thought we could do well." Well is an understatement: Thing is a lovely, tenderly rendered amalgam of the band’s distinctive sound, Cabic’s hushed voice, unusual covers — which run the gamut from Biff Rose’s "To Baby" to David Brock and Hawkwind’s "Hurry on Sundown" to San Jose mystery songwriter Dia Joyce’s "Sleep a Million Years" — and guest turns by underground folk luminaries like Michael Hurley and Vashti Bunyan. "The interesting aspect of doing covers is that there’s a mixture of restraint and freedom in doing them," Cabic muses.
Another recent notable cover project is Shelby Lynne’s sensuous dust-up with Dusty Springfield’s catalog, Just a Little Lovin’ (Lost Highway). Lynne, who plays the Fillmore on May 1, has caught her share of acclaim for this spare collection — sans the plush arrangements of Springfield’s versions and teeming with Lynne’s tremulous, haunted soul. So why covers, apart from the fact that Lynne’s chum Barry Manilow suggested it? "I think people want to hear good stuff," she says from her Houston tour stop, with sharpshooter directness and the twangs of a tempestuous girlhood spent in Alabama. "Not a lot of good out there. I’m talking about if you wanna listen to classic music, you always reach back."
What Lynne loved about Springfield was "the song selection — and she was a great honest singer. The production I love — it was Jerry Wexler and the Memphis sound," though she quickly adds, "I was trying to stay away from that. That’s why I left it bare."
The woman who played Johnny Cash’s mother in Walk the Line isn’t a vocalist to be trifled with. A survivor to the core (her father shot her mother and then killed himself when she and sister Allison Moorer were teenagers), she may have been, in her words, "too young to understand the heaviness" of duetting with George Jones on the same mic when barely 19 with producer Billy Sherrill behind the board, but she does know "it doesn’t hurt to have a Grammy," as Lynne says of her 2001 Best New Artist award.
And she knows she doesn’t want to collaborate with her sister — yet. "We have two very different kinds of things — I tell her maybe when she’s an old lady," Lynne drawls firmly. So listen closely to her turn on Springfield because next, Lynne says, "I’m gonna be writing songs. I’m not going to be doing covers again for a long time — if ever. This is it. I think you should be allowed one cover record per career." *
SHELBY LYNNE Thurs/1, 8 p.m., $25. Fillmore, 1805 Geary, SF. www.ticketmaster.com
VETIVER Tues/6, 9 p.m., $16. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. www.gamh.com
PETER BJORN AND JOHN’S PETER MORÉN BREAKS FROM THE PACK
The Last Tycoon, the title of the new solo full-length by Peter Morén, one leg of Peter Bjorn and John, is only that — not a way of life, despite the omnipresent whistle of the group’s "Young Folks" last year. Morén swears that he’s no mogul — he just wants to gently mock the solo project conceit while referencing the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. "I thought it would be funny to have a grandiose, pretentious title for a homey album," he tells me from Montreal. Tycoon, which Morén describes as "low-key and folky," came about when he brought a song, "Le Petit Guerre," to the rest of his longtime band. "The other guys wanted to take it in a more German kraut-rock direction, but obviously with the French refrain I thought it should be more melancholy, chanson-like, dreamy, like it is on the record now. That’s what started the project." And the rest of the band approved. "I needed another outlet," says Morén, "because I’ve been playing with the boys since I was 15. So it’s nice when you have to make all the decisions yourself, even though it can be a little bit scary."
PETER MORÉN With Tobias Frobert and Big Search. Thurs/1, 7 p.m., $15. Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. www.cafedunord.com
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Clip this article. Put it on your refrigerator to remind yourself, your roommates, your friends and family to see Medicine For Melancholy.
The story seems simple. In the aftermath of a party, two 20-something San Franciscans wake up in bed together with no recollection of how they got there. They exchange names at a Noe Valley coffee shop and share a cab in cold silence with no attempt to reconnect. She leaves her wallet behind. He hunts her down online to return it. From there, they begin a convincing dance of seduction infused with excitement, disclosure, and tenderness. Micah (Wyatt Cinach) is immature, self-effacing, and strong, while Jo (Tracey Heggins) is confident, grown-up, and intense. What they learn about each other — and what the film reveals — is on par with any postmodern romance. Writer-director Barry Jenkins has created complex characters trying to negotiate simple feelings in a difficult world.
It’s always enriching to see talented artists at work. In mixing black and white with color to explore the relationship between setting and dialogue, director of photography James Laxton captures the sublime and gritty sides of San Francisco. The city he sees is the city we know. From the grassy lands of Noe Valley to the quiet hush of the Tenderloin at dawn, Laxton’s eye makes the nearly deserted SF that the two main characters inhabit lush, promising, and sinister.
Medicine for Melancholy is important because it spotlights the most overlooked aspect of SF’s changing face: black people, and the lack thereof. Micah and Jo are black and their race plays into the affair in surprising and subtle ways.
Jenkins has said that Medicine for Melancholy is "a simple, straightforward film that illuminates the modern complexities of living as a declining minority in America’s major cities." At the time Medicine for Melancholy was filmed, SF’s black population was 7 percent and dropping. As one of the remaining black people in SF, I know that black flight is a reality here. The self-evident gentrification and anti-black sentiment of the city play heavily into the dynamic of this movie’s couple: Micah doesn’t do SFMOMA; Jo hadn’t known that MoAD existed. Micah sees himself as black first and a man second. Jo refuses to define herself.
At Micah’s apartment, a poster with a 1962 quote from the Redevelopment Agency sparks a conversation. Jo wants to let go of the past. Micah, the native, sees the poster as relevant to Mission Bay.
"Why is everything that is ‘indie’ mean ‘not black?’" Micah asks at one point. Conversations like these have been going on among my dwindling number in San Francisco for too long. Until now, only we have heard them.
Tell people about Medicine for Melancholy. In the face of an impending cultural extinction and the potential loss of SF’s soul, this excellent movie is part of a necessary discussion.
MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY
Wed/30, 9:15 p.m., Kabuki; Sun/4, 8:15 p.m., PFA; May 7, 3:30 p.m., Kabuki
The 51st San Francisco International Film Festival runs through May 8. Venues are the Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Clay, 2261 Fillmore, SF; Kabuki, 1881 Post, SF; and Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk. For tickets (most shows $12.50) and information call (925) 866-9559 or visit www.sffs.org.
I agree with my cohort Dennis Harvey — it is always cheering to see 1962’s The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. There’s something so special about the bodiless head trapped under a glass jar in that movie. As Jan Compton, a.k.a. "Jan in the Pan," actress Virginia Leith seethes and cackles, bringing across pure existential pain more forcefully than any French philosopher with a perma-creased brow. The fact that The Brain That Wouldn’t Die figures in local mad magician Craig Baldwin’s new antic investigation Mock Up on Mu is just one of at least 51 reasons why I’m excited to see it premiere at the 51st SF International Film Festival.
The Guardian‘s deluxe coverage of SFIFF 51 kicks off with a portrait of Baldwin. Elsewhere, Cheryl Eddy discusses blood ties with the sickest father-daughter team around, Dario and Asia Argento. Our stories this week also scope out a pair of life-and-death documentaries; a mod, mod, mod war movie; some new Mexican filmic journeys; the merits of festival awardees; and, last but not least, the eternally fatal allure of the late Gene Tierney. So, before you drown in the dark, before hours of unmapped SFIFF excursions have you feeling like the son or daughter of the brain that wouldn’t die, read all about it here. In the words of José-Luis Guerín, director of In the City of Sylvia, "we should see cinema as a separate continent" — and we should be cheered by what we see. (Johnny Ray Huston)
The 51st San Francisco International Film Festival runs April 24-May 8. Venues are the Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Clay, 2261 Fillmore, SF; Kabuki, 1881 Post, SF; and Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk. For tickets (most shows $12.50) and information call (925) 866-9559 or visit www.sffs.org.
>>For more reviews, previews, news, and daily coverage of SFIFF 51, check out SFBG’s Pixel Vision blog.
>>Highway 51
A road map to SFIFF 51 — films to ride with (and some speed bumps)
>>Explosive stuff!
Craig Baldwin turns space junk into magickal treasure with Mock Up on Mu
By Dennis Harvey
>>Blood ties
Asia and Dario Argento go go for a SFIFF trifecta
By Cheryl Eddy
>>Ashes to ashes
A dance between Dust and Profit motive and the whispering wind
By Matt Sussman
>>On tour
Mod auteur Serge Bozon makes the war go pop in La France
By Kimberly Chun
>>Critic’s choice
In praise of J. Hoberman and In the City of Sylvia
By Max Goldberg
>>Apolitical animal
Mexico’s SFIFF thrillers aren’t thrilling, but Cochochi turns loss into victory
By Jason Shamai
>>Fierce perm
Robert Towne still knows how to give an award-winning Shampoo
By Maria Komodore
>>Color her deadly
Leave Her to Heaven‘s strange allure will pull you under
By Johnny Ray Huston
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
It isn’t easy being a Chosen One. Rootsy singer-songwriter Jackie Greene — formerly a big fish in the relatively small pond of Sacramento who now lives in San Francisco — has had great things expected of him since he was a solo troubadour fresh out of high school in Placerville. Rolling Stone critics named Gone Wanderin’, his first album for the indie Dig Music label, one of the best of 2002 and the follow-up, Sweet Somewhere Bound (Dig Music, 2004), was another critical favorite. The excitement led to Greene being signed by Verve/Forecast, and his first disc for that company, 2006’s extraordinary American Myth, seemed to confirm this guy was going places. Produced by Los Lobos’ Steve Berlin, the album was a diverse and confident showcase of Americana styles, from blues to driving rock to Dylanesque rambles. But a not-so-funny thing happened to Greene on the way to certain stardom: his label started to fall apart in the middle of promoting his album, tours were cancelled, and the blush of early success faded.
Yet Greene’s upward trajectory continued. A spellbinding and charismatic performer, he kept playing wherever he could, with his band or acoustic with a partner. It wasn’t long before he had a new label in place, this time with 429, a subsidiary of the Savoy jazz imprint. In the meantime, out of the blue, former Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh, who leads the popular Deadish jam band Phil Lesh and Friends, fell in love with American Myth and invited Greene to join the group as lead vocalist and co-lead guitarist alongside the great Larry Campbell. Though Greene hadn’t listened to much Dead beyond the records his parents owned — and frankly he preferred his folks’ Ray Charles and Big Bill Broonzy discs — he quite naturally fell into the mix. The songwriter was quickly accepted by Dead Heads for his passionate renditions of the band’s tunes, as well as cover songs and a sprinkling of his originals.
"I love playing in Phil and Friends," he says as he sits in the control room of Mission Bells, the Bernal Heights recording studio he shares with Tim Bluhm of the Mother Hips. "Playing those Jerry [Garcia] songs, I kind of feel like I love a lot of them like they’re my own songs."
In the midst of touring with Lesh last fall, Greene and Steve Berlin somehow managed to find time to record the superb, just-released Giving up the Ghost (429). Using both his regular touring band and the same group of hip Los Angeles session cats who sparked American Myth — collectively they’re known as Jackshit, with Elvis Costello drummer Pete Thomas as their best-known member — Greene and Berlin painstakingly put together the album from sessions in Sacramento, Los Angeles, SF, Chicago, and Brooklyn. Greene rightly calls the recording "darker" than its predecessor. That said, it is still filled with sharp lyrics, bright melodies, memorable riffs and hooks, and typically soulful vocals. In keeping with Greene’s and Berlin’s affection for off-the-wall sonics, there are literally dozens of different guitar and keyboard textures, unusual treatments on vocals, and a zillion little touches that give the disc a wonderful variety and depth. It’s easy to picture several songs being embraced by rock radio, but this music is still not exactly at the forefront of the current mainstream.
"Certainly I want to have some successful records — who doesn’t?" Greene confesses. "But I’m not willing to make anything other than what I want to make it sound like. If this is not considered commercially viable, then so be it."
JACKIE GREENE
Thurs/10, 8 p.m., $22.50
Fillmore
1805 Geary, SF
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
ESSAY In a journal entry dated Dec. 27, 1835, from his 1840 book Two Years before the Mast, student-turned-seafarer Richard Henry Dana recorded his first impressions of the area we know as the City, while his ship, The Alert, traveled through the Golden Gate:
We passed directly under the high cliff on which the presidio is built … from whence we could see large and beautifully wooded islands and the mouths of several small rivers … hundreds of red deer, and [a] stag, with his high branching antlers, were bounding about, looking at us for a moment and then starting off …
Dana arrived in the Bay Area after one era had ended and before another began. Until the coming of the Spaniards a generation earlier, some 10,000 people, members of around 40 separate tribes, lived between Big Sur and San Francisco, in the densest Native American population north of Mexico. Despite the existence among them of as many as 12 different languages, the people collectively referred to now as the Ohlone lived in relative peace for some 4,500 years.
On his first visit, Dana predicted that the Bay Area would be at the center of California’s prosperity. When he returned more than 30 years later in 1868, he discovered that his hotel was built on landfill that had been dumped where The Alert first landed.
Then in middle age, Dana wrote, "The past was real. The present all about me was unreal." Making his way through the crowded streets where the new city he’d predicted was being built, he remarked, "[I] seemed to myself like one who moved in ‘worlds not realized.’" Thus Dana became one of the first to articulate the peculiar San Franciscan combination of nostalgia for a lost past and despair over an unrealized future.
The past and future are always alive here. On his first visit, Dana wrote in his notebook about the great city to come. But like many residents of SF today, he slept on the cold, hard ground.
In George Stewart’s 1949 science fiction classic Earth Abides, a mysterious disease has killed 99 percent of the Earth’s population; the main character, Ish, roams the City and East Bay until he finds a wife. Stewart’s book ends in a Twilight Zone scenario, as an old, feeble Ish — now the last living pre-plague American — watches in dismay while his illiterate offspring hunt and frolic like the Ohlone, wearing animal skins and fashioning arrowheads from bottle caps.
After a wildfire, Ish notices that a library has been spared. All the information is still in there, he thinks. "But available to whom?"
Perhaps the knowledge Ish once begged his children to learn can be found in 1970’s The Last Whole Earth Catalog. Its 450-plus yellowing Road Atlas–size pages contain terse recommendations of publications about plant identification, organic gardens, windmills, vegetable dyes, edible mushrooms, goat husbandry, and childbirth, while also sharing the fundamentals of yoga, rock climbing, making music with computers, space colonization, and — of course! — the teachings of Buckminster Fuller.
The initial Whole Earth Catalog sought to reconcile Americans’ love of nature and technology. In Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism (University Press of Kansas, 303 pages, $34.95), author Andrew Kirk credits its creator, Stewart Brand, with bringing a sense of optimism to environmentalism. A character in Tom Wolfe’s 1968 Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Brand embodied the cultural intersection of acid and Apple at mid-1960s Stanford University. Kirk examines Brand’s 1965 "America Needs Indians" festival, his three-day Trips Festival in 1966, and his time riding the bus as one of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters.
Counterculture Green correctly suggests that Brand’s utopian lifestyle has a hold on our imagination. But Brand was a leader of the counterculture, not a revolutionary. He believed that the market economy, not political change, would usher in a better world. While today’s market — at the behest of individuals — has started to demand renewable energy or sustainable growth, it also has brought us the SUV, suburban sprawl, and the highest fuel prices in history. Apple may empower the individual — or want consumers to believe it does — but at 29, Silicon Valley has the highest concentration of Superfund sites in the country.
Brand deserves credit for intuiting the peculiar "machine in the garden" Bay Area we live in today, a place perhaps more "California Über Alles" than utopian. It’s far from the postmarket SF envisioned in Ernest Callenbach’s 1975 novel Ecotopia, which is set in 1999, nearly 20 years after Northern California, Oregon, and Washington have seceded from the United States to form the titular nation. A colleague of Brand’s, Callenbach bases his society on ideas from the Whole Earth Catalog, but for one major difference — Ecotopia comes into being not through the free market but through an environmental revolution. (I won’t spoil it, but here’s a hint: it starts in Bolinas!)
While Callenbach’s future sometimes resembles a mixture of the Haight Street Fair and Critical Mass, there are twists. Ancient creeks have been unearthed, and on Market Street there is a "charming series of little falls, with water gurgling and splashing, and channels lined with rocks, trees, bamboos and ferns." Ecotopians have instituted a 20-hour work week that involves dismantling dystopian relics such as gas stations. There is a surplus of food produced close to home. Materials that do not decompose are no longer used. This new world is no wilderness — it reconciles civilization and nature. Yet perhaps its most radical idea is that humans can create a utopia without help from a plague, apocalyptic war, or earthquake.
The 1906 San Francisco earthquake leveled 4.7 square miles — or 508 city blocks. It destroyed 28,188 structures, including City Hall, the Hall of Justice, the Hall of Records, the County Jail, the Main Library, five police stations, and more than 40 schools. Yet strangely, many apocalyptic tomes — including recent ones such as the speculative nonfiction best-seller The World Without Us and the born-again Christian Left Behind series — are reluctant to imagine a totally destroyed San Francisco.
In contrast, Chris Carlsson’s 2004 utopian novel, After the Deluge (Full Enjoyment Books, 288 page, $13.95), suggests the City is at its most charming when at least partially in ruins, like the old cities of Europe. In Carlsson’s post-economic SF of 2157, rising sea levels from global warming submerge much of the Financial District, yet the City adapts by serving old skyscrapers — now converted into housing — with a network of canals.
After the Deluge‘s vision of reduced work, free bikes, and creeks unearthed from beneath streets borrows from Callenbach’s Ecotopia. Yet Carlsson seems to have his most fun imagining a city transformed by ruins: take a subtle comment on the Federal Building at Seventh and Market streets. In Carlsson’s map of SF circa 2157, the monstrosity that some call the Death Star is simply labeled "The Ruins."
Similarly, the photographs in After the Ruins 1906 and 2006: Rephotographing the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire (University of California Press, 134 pages, $24.95) appear to delight in the City’s impermanence. Mark Klett presents famous images of the smoldering city in 1906 alongside carefully shot contemporary photographs from the same vantage points. Cleverly, these images are arranged in a manner that suggests the ruins aren’t just the past but also an inevitable future.
The aftermaths of SF’s earthquakes are often described in utopian terms, as if cracks in the landscape revealed the possibility of a better world. In After the Ruins, a 1906 quake survivor remembers cooperation not seen since the days of the Ohlone:
A spirit of good nature and helpfulness prevailed and cheerfulness was common. The old and feeble were tenderly aided. Food was voluntarily divided. No one richer, none poorer than his fellow man.
In an essay accompanying After the Ruins, Rebecca Solnit recollects the 1989 earthquake similarly:
The night of the quake, the liquor store across the street held a small barbecue … I talked to the neighbors. I walked around and visited people. That night the powerless city lay for the first time in many years under a sky whose stars weren’t drowned out by electric lights.
Greta Snider’s classic early ’90s punk and bike zine Mudflap tells of a utopia for bicyclists created by the 1989 Loma Prieta quake. Until torn down, a closed-off section of damaged Interstate 280 became a bike superhighway where one could ride above the City without fear of cars. Earthquakes are seen to have utopian potential in SF, because, like protests or Critical Mass, they stop traffic. In 1991, Gulf War protestors stormed the Bay Bridge, shutting down traffic on the span for the first time since the 1989 quake. Perhaps in tribute to the utopian possibilities of both events, William Gibson’s 1993 book Virtual Light imagines a postquake-damaged Bay Bridge as a home for squatter shanties and black market stalls.
Carlsson’s new nonfiction book, Nowtopia (AK Press, 288 pages, $18.95), explores new communities springing up in the margins of capitalist society. Subtitled How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclists, and Vacant-Lot Gardeners Are Inventing the Future Today, it looks for seeds of post-economic utopia in places such as the SF Bike Kitchen and the Open Source software movement. According to Carlsson, these communities "manifest the efforts of humans to transcend their lives as wage-slaves. They embrace a culture that rejects the market, money, and business. Engaging in technology in creative and experimental ways, the Nowtopians are involved in a guerilla war over the direction of society."
A founder of Critical Mass, Carlsson praises the biofuels movement and bicycle culture for promoting self-sufficiency through tools. With its optimism and endorsement of technology, Nowtopia occasionally evokes the Whole Earth Catalog. Yet unlike Brand’s tome, it focuses on class and how people perform work in today’s society. Carlsson finds that in their yearning for community, people will gladly perform hours of unpaid labor on behalf of something they love that they believe betters the world.
Within today’s SF, Carlsson cites Alemany Farm as an example of nowtopia. Volunteers took over an abandoned SF League of Urban Gardeners (SLUG) farm next to the Alemany Projects, farming it for several years before the City gave them official permission. "Instead of traditional political forms like unions or parties, people are coming together in practical projects," Carlsson writes. "They aren’t waiting for an institutional change from on-high, but are getting on with building the new world in the shell of the old."
Ironically, the only literature that truly envisions the complete destruction of large areas of the City are the postwar plans of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency. In 1956, it began the first of two projects in the Fillmore, slashing the neighborhood in two with a widened Geary Boulevard and demolishing over 60 square blocks of housing. Some 17,500 African American and Japanese American people saw their homes bulldozed.
With their dreams of "urban renewal," the heads of SF-based corporate giants such as Standard Oil, Bechtel, Del Monte, Southern Pacific, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America reimagined the City as a utopia for big business. The language of a Wells Fargo report from the ’60s evokes the notebooks of Dana: "Geographically, San Francisco is a natural gateway for this country’s ocean-going and airborne commerce with the Pacific area nations." Likewise, Prologue for Action, a 1966 report from the San Francisco Planning and Urban Renewal Association, might have been written by dystopian visionary Philip K. Dick:
If SF decides to compete effectively with other cities for new "clean" industries and new corporate power, its population will move closer to "standard White Anglo-Saxon Protestant" characteristics. As automation increases the need for unskilled labor will decrease…. The population will tend to range from lower middle-class through upper-class…. Selection of a population’s composition might be undemocratic. Influence on it, however, is legal and desirable.
This dream of turning San Francisco into a perfect world for business required that much of the existing city be destroyed. First, the colorful Produce District along the waterfront was removed in 1959, its warmth and human buzz replaced by the four identical modern hulks of the Embarcadero Center. Beginning in 1966, some 87 acres of land south of Market — including 4,000 housing units — were bulldozed to make way for office blocks, luxury hotels, and the Moscone Center.
The dark logic of the Redevelopment Agency’s plans are projected into the future in the profoundly bleak science fiction of Richard Paul Russo’s Carlucci series from the ’90s. Russo’s books are set in a 21st-century SF entirely segregated by class and health. The Tenderloin is walled off into an area where drug-addicted and diseased residents kill each other or await death from AIDS or worse. Access to all neighborhoods is restricted and even the series’ hero, stereotypical good cop Frank Carlucci, submits to a full body search in order to enter the Financial District because he lacks the necessary chip implant to be waved through checkpoints.
Russo’s nightmares have their real side today, and many dreams found in Ecotopia and the Whole Earth Catalog — composting, recycling, widespread bicycling, urban gardening, free access to information via the Internet, Green building design — have also come to pass. (There is even a growing movement to unearth creeks like the Hayes River, which runs under City Hall.) Pat Murphy’s 1989 novel, The City Not Long After, imagines these opposing visions of the city will continue even after a plague wipes out all but one-thousandth of SF’s population. In Murphy’s book, those still alive turn the City into a backdrop for elaborate art projects, weaving ribbon and lace from Macy’s across downtown streets and painting the Golden Gate Bridge blue. This artists’ utopia is threatened when an army of survivors from Sacramento marches into SF. But the last forces of America, unlike the dot-com invaders of the ’90s, prove no match for the artists, who use direct action tactics and magic to rout Sacramento in an epic showdown at Civic Center Plaza.
In Carlsson’s After the Deluge, several people enter a bar called New Spec’s on Fulton Street. The walls are covered with old SF ephemera. One character explains to Eric, a newcomer, "Its all about nostalgia, a false nostalgia." Was the City a better place before the war, before the earthquakes, or before it was even the City? So many utopian visions of the future evoke a simpler past that one wonders if believing in one is the same as longing for the other. It’s a question that would make sense, once again, to Philip K. Dick.
Perhaps no fiction about a future SF captures utopian yearning as well as Dick’s decidedly dystopian works, because his stories, though full of futuristic gadgets, are really about the ways human characters relate to them. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) is set in a radically depopulated postwar SF of 2021. The air is filled with radioactive dust and the streets are hauntingly empty as humans race to colonize Mars. Main character Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter assigned to "retire" humanlike androids, yet he’s mostly concerned about his electric sheep. Because there are almost no animals left on Earth, owning a fake one helps a striver like Deckard keep up appearances.
In 1962’s The Man in the High Castle, Dick imagines life in SF after the Nazis and Japanese have won World War II. Nostalgia haunts this story, too. Protagonist R. Childan makes his living selling rare prewar Americana to rich Japanese collectors. Not much has changed in this alternate SF, though. Market Street is still a place of "shooting galleries [and] cheap nightclubs with photos of middle-aged blondes holding their nipples between their wrinkled fingers and leering." While most utopian futures look to the past, Dick’s dystopian futures are all eerily about the present.
So how does Mr. Childan deal with the pain of living in a world where Nazis have won the war? How else? "To inspire himself, he lit up a marijuana cigarette," Dick writes, "excellent Land-O-Smiles brand."
Erick Lyle is the editor of Scam magazine. His book, On the Lower Frequencies: A Secret History of the City, is out now on Soft Skull Press.
NOWTOPIA BOOK RELEASE PARTY
Wed/9, 7:30 p.m.; $20 suggested donation (includes book, reading/discussion, and contribution to site)
CounterPULSE
1310 Mission, SF
(415) 626-2060
By Vanessa Carr Independent music and DIY culture can come like flashes of hope through the dark days of teenage dorkdom. For me, it was Bikini Kill’s first album on tape. The revelation: something better is out there. And better yet, one can actually have a role in creating it. Once a small-town kid growing up in Neenah, Wisconsin, graphic designer and poster artist Jason Munn tapped into a similar sense of inspired possibility. As a skateboarder with a crew of like-minded friends, he was influenced early on by skateboard graphics and the album art of bands like the Promise Ring and Boys Life. Munn, 32, now lives in Oakland, where he has been running The Small Stakes design studio since 2003. He continues to draw stylistic and psychic inspiration from punk’s handmade aesthetic and DIY ethos. Munn’s stunningly precise silkscreen show posters for artists, ranging from Battles and LCD Soundsystem to Sufjan Stevens and Modest Mouse, have made him a minor celebrity among design nerds and indie rockers alike. Not that you’d ever know it: in person he is soft-spoken and humble, certainly not the kind of guy who goes around telling people, for instance, that his work is part of the San Francisco MoMA’s permanent collection, or that it’s regularly featured in PRINT Magazine and Communication Arts. This Friday night (4/4), Munn will be selling limited edition art prints and gig posters at Bloom Screen Printing in Oakland. Munn’s prints will be on sale for $5-$25. Bloom Screen Printing posters will also be for sale. SFBG: When did you start making music-related posters? Jason Munn: I started in [art] school. A lot of my projects were music-related even when they weren’t supposed to be, because that was what I was interested in. I was working in another design studio at the time – after school – and at night a lot I was doing these kind of things just to do what I wanted to do and also to build up a portfolio of the kind of work that I really wanted to show people, which was not necessarily the stuff I was doing at my day job. I moved out here in 2002, again with no plans at all. About a month after I moved out here, two people I met were booking shows in Berkeley at a place they called the Ramp. It was in the basement of this church in Berkeley, and they were doing one show a month – really great shows, a lot of local bands, and a lot of bands that will play the Fillmore when they come through now: Animal Collective, Deerhoof, Why? – a lot of local things, but also touring acts. But again, it was only one show a month, and it was only open for a year. It was essentially when I started doing posters. They asked me to do a poster for each show. I wanted to silkscreen, but I didn’t know how. I had done a little bit of silkscreening in school, so I had a real basic knowledge of it. The first job I had out here I was actually temping at a silkscreen shop – I printed the t-shirts. So basically they would burn the screens for me and I would print from home. I made a huge mess and it was a huge learning process. I probably did six or seven posters, and then I met a guy in Oakland who was printing another job for me that I did the design work for. His name is Nat and he runs a screenprinting shop in Oakland called Bloom Screen Printing. It’s a small shop, and he basically taught me a ton about printing. I started printing my stuff there, and he was showing me lots of tricks, random things that I was having trouble with. He was looking at the stuff I was doing at home and was like, “This is what you’re doing wrong.” It was really cool. I still print there – he also prints larger jobs for me, although he is a pretty in-demand printer. SFBG: How do you make it work financially?
Indie silkscreen revelations
› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Carla Bozulich is a force of nature. And nature in all its sweetest Central Texas manifestations — crisply twittering songbirds, spring sun glinting off the tin-sided porch, a slight breeze blowing in from the Colorado River — responds gently in kind, encircling the half-renovated cottage where she’ll be playing a small house show on the outskirts of South by Southwest. The former Geraldine Fibbers leader piles out of the van along with the rest of her virtuosic, dusty, somewhat road-dazed ensemble Evangelista. We’re a long way — more than a decade — from the time Bozulich’s disintegrating ’90s alt-rock combo opened for Iggy Pop at Austin, Texas’s largest intersection for thousands of SXSW onlookers.
"I have a potential with my voice of — I don’t know how to say this without sounding really ridiculous — but I’ve frightened bears away from attacking," Bozulich says, laughing slightly, tucked into a porch a few weeks back and tackling each question with the driving eloquence of a woman who’s spent plenty of time behind the wheel of her passions. "Wild dogs at another time when I was with Tara." She imitates the hounds barking meekly then crawling away, whining. "I just consider it something that I was born with, and a lot of times when I sing, I’m kind of holding it back because it’s sort of too much. So I just kind of decided when I started doing Evangelista that I was going to sort of work on a project where I didn’t hold back and I would try to use it to really inspire people to blow off the kind of trendy, lethargic, like, boundaries — you know, the boundaries you don’t cross in terms of not embarrassing yourself!"
We’ve ducked onto the porch as Scary Mansion plays in back to talk about Evangelista’s new album, Hello, Voyager, Bozulich’s second on the great Constellation imprint — her first, titled Evangelista (2006), was the indie’s first non-Canadian release — and the stunning show she gave the other night. It was likely one of the best of the fest, with Bozulich howling into her mic, pacing the stage during the new LP’s title opus, uncoiling sharp, eloquent shards of noise, and hopping in place with a contented smile as her band — a relatively new incarnation that includes longtime bassist-collaborator Tara Barnes, cellist Andrea Serrapiglio, and guitarist Jeremy Drake — generated a moving, glorious din. "The west is the best and the wind knows my name," Bozulich told the heavens — and you believed her.
Unfortunately the heavens opened up and poured down misfortune last November while Evangelista toured Europe. "I got hurt really bad in Paris. I was hit by a random madman on the street, who broke my cheek," Bozulich recalls of the incident, which occurred while she was singing and being interviewed on the street. Her face still feels shattered. "It was completely random. In a nutshell, he hit everybody, but he broke my cheek." But instead of crawling home to a friend’s couch and recuperating, she decided to stay on the road. "It was a weird decision, but looking back I’m really glad I did," she says. She saw Pompeii, Rome, and Tuscany, though her face was purple and swollen, and it was, she allows, "hard to sing." Yet, she adds, "I was having the adventure of my life."
Bozulich’s tactic in the face of disaster perfectly parallels her desire to venture out on a limb in every way. "I don’t take drugs or drink and haven’t for many years," she confesses. "So for me the ultimate high I’ve discovered after all these years is really — I have to say — embarrassment, doing something that might not be supercool. It separates a room, and there will be some people who will be like, ‘Yeah, fuck it! I’m sick of this, too. I really want to express who I really am.’" And in a sense Evangelista’s music is a very specific response to wartime disenfranchisement, written by an artist who describes herself as a "really, really far-left progressive, politically, and I feel like music is one of our only ways that we can organize. Fundamentalists still have that leg up on us. They aren’t afraid to join together."
Bozulich has done it before: fronting her old group Ethyl Meatplow — during which the shy girl who once sang behind drum kits "really learned to be a badass" — she changed lives: "People still come up to me saying really great things like, ‘We conceived our child in the bathroom at an Ethyl Meatplow show.’ And there’s several people who have said, ‘I came out of the closet just from listening to Ethyl Meatplow’ — and that’s political. That’s great!" She stares out at the fast-food drive-throughs that surround even this tiny show, and the sweet recording deals, massive crowds, and Iggy Pop opening slots don’t seem like much after all. "I’ve just been very lucky, you know."
CARLA BOZULICH’S EVANGELISTA
Thurs/27, 7 p.m., free
Amoeba Music
2455 Telegraph, Berk.
Also Fri/28, 9 p.m., $10
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
FILL ‘ER UP
Channeling Joni Mitchell and even dreamier Laurel Canyon lasses alongside hand-drummer Andres Renteria and bassist Joshua Abrams (Prefuse 73), Todd has bewitched the Arthur mag crowd with her seventh full-length, Gea (City Zen). With Jose Gonzalez. Thurs/27, 8 p.m., $25. Fillmore, 1805 Geary, SF. www.ticketmaster.com
The SXSW smoke clears as the Texas hip-hop odd mob mess around in San Fran town. With Vital, Ryan Greene, Chris Lee, DJ D, and Jamie Way. Sat/29, 9 p.m., $15. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. www.mezzaninesf.com
The SF singer-songwriter serves up "tea metal" backed by Erase Errata drummer Bianca Sparta. With Ora Corgan, and Gabriel Saloman and Aja Rose. Mon/31, 6 p.m., $5. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Meshuggah’s obZen (Nuclear Blast) is not the first example of a quality album with dismal cover art. On the other hand, it’s not that easy to think of really, er, great examples. Mott the Hoople’s Brain Capers (Atlantic, 1971), Humble Pie’s Smokin’ (A&M, 1972), and the Rolling Stones’ Black and Blue (Rolling Stones/Virgin, 1976) come to mind, but I’m not sure if these are actually good albums or just guilty pleasures. There’s also Blue Öyster Cult’s Agents of Fortune (Columbia, 1976) and Steely Dan’s Can’t Buy a Thrill (MCA, 1972) — slightly more reputable records, but like the others above, they’re subject to the "Hey, it was the ’70s" defense.
Sweden’s Meshuggah occupy a whole ‘nother realm of music — modern extreme metal, generally speaking — which means I should be comparing them to their peers, not a bunch of musty classic rock acts. However, over my years of following this genre, I’ve become so desensitized to foul cover art that it seldom fazes me anymore. Skeletons being crucified on inverted crosses? Helpless, bloody victims with various orifices sewn shut? You try not to pay too much attention to it.
ObZen takes the good album–bad cover discrepancy to a new level, though. On their cover, a computer-generated image of a naked, three-armed, blood-covered mandroid sits in the lotus position, engaged in a solemn act of meditation. Apparently, it’s tied in with the title’s "obscene zen" pun. Whatever the case, it’s not good. Not good at all. The only reason I bother poking fun is because the music itself is pretty amazing.
Granted, the members of Meshuggah have been churning out this sort of sandblasting tech-metal for more than a decade, but obZen includes some of their most creative, demented riffing in years. They’re the rare extreme metal band whose sound is immediately recognizable: pick a song, any song, and you can tell it’s them within a few seconds — though it’s much harder to figure out exactly which song you’re hearing. This is partly because their music never changes all that much — externally, at least — but also because it’s so distinctive and idiosyncratic.
Meshuggah established their sound on 1995’s Destroy Erase Improve and 1998’s Chaosphere (both Nuclear Blast), and it’s essentially an industrial-tinged mutation of the tight, mechanical thrash metal of early ’90s Sepultura or pre-Black Album Metallica. While most of the far-out happenings in ’90s metal came from the seedier realms of black metal, death metal, and grindcore, Meshuggah continued as one of the few bands doing anything groundbreaking with this sort of weightlifter-metal template. In other words, they didn’t have any close peers when they emerged as a noteworthy group, and despite influencing a wide variety of metal, prog, and experimental acts in the years since, there’s no one who sounds quite like them.
They’re not without their metal-band trappings, although these don’t involve Satanism or bad horror-flick imagery. Instead, there is a sort of dystopian sci-fi thread running through much of their work, something they share with predecessors like Voivod and Fear Factory. I don’t know anyone who is specifically attracted to Meshuggah based on that aspect of their aesthetic, just as I don’t know anyone who listens to the band because of vocalist Jens Kidman, whose monochromatic bark is certainly an acquired taste.
Rather, Meshuggah’s appeal is all about "that thing" they do with their guitars and drums. It’s very specific: jackhammer drums and hiccuping guitar riffs wind around one another in an intricate fashion, with the drums and guitars usually playing in different time signatures and constantly turning around on one another. Their tracks are often more like études, which deal with complex polyrhythms, than a song with anything resembling a verse-chorus-verse form.
It would all be hopelessly nerdy if it wasn’t so darn heavy and impossibly well-executed. Perhaps, like the unfortunate dude on the cover, some of the members of Meshuggah have three arms. Listeners might find the band’s music tedious and one-dimensional, and indeed, sometimes it is. Then again, there’s often a fine line between hypnotic and monotonous. With obZen, Meshuggah are mostly on the right side of that line, even if their visual sensibilities leave much to be desired.
MESHUGGAH
With Ministry and Hemlock
Tue/1–April 2, 8 p.m., $38.50
Fillmore
1805 Geary, SF
(415) 346-6000
› paulr@sfbg.com
If all roads lead to Rome — or once did — what does this tell us about the Eternal City? That it has terrible traffic? Yes, eternally — since ancient times. That the city was and is an international city? Yes, again, though more so in yesteryear, when the imperial Romans called the Mediterranean Sea mare nostrum and grain grown in Egypt was shipped more than a thousand miles by boat to feed the capital’s million or so citizens. In our locavore times, it is startling to think that a metropolis two millennia ago depended on such a sprawling foodshed.
At SPQR, a restaurant that opened late last year in the old Chez Nous space on Fillmore, the Roman feeling is more intimate — and maybe that means more modern, since today’s Italy no longer has its fingers in a host of imperial pies and Rome itself owes its international stature largely to its position as seat of the Catholic Church. Otherwise, the city is an Italian city, and its food is Italian food, with bits and influences taken from here and there across the peninsula. (The letters of the restaurant’s name, incidentally, stand for "Senatus Populusque Romanus," meaning "the Senate and people of Rome.")
SPQR’s powers that be, including executive chef Nate Appleman, have applied to the new restaurant the ethic they successfully introduced at their first one, A16 in the Marina. The ethic involves, in true European fashion, elements of preservation and innovation; A16 brought the flavors of Naples and Campania, including first-rate pizza, into the space once occupied by Zinzino, a creditable ristorante-pizzeria in its own right, and now SPQR succeeds Chez Nous, a pioneer in global tapas (with a slant toward Provence and the Maghrib), with a Roman-inflected menu that’s very heavy on fabulous small plates. They’re not called tapas, and since tapas fatigue set in some time ago around here, this is probably a wise choice.
These small courses are the heart of the menu and are arrayed under three rubrics: cold, hot, and fried. If ordered separately, they’re $7 each, but you get three for $18 and five for $28, and because they’re uniformly excellent, these bulk deals are good ones. (By small, by the way, I mean to imply "shareable," not "tiny.") The only small dish I found even slightly submemorable was a plate of crostini served with ricotta cheese and a pooling of peppery olio nuovo; the overall effect was gentle, with some crunch from the bread rounds and a hint of bite from the olive oil, like a teething puppy working a pinkie finger, and those little stimuli probably would have been enough if the other dishes hadn’t been so impressive.
Fried means, in several cases, "deep-fried," and this can be among the guiltier of pleasures if it gets out of hand. Deep-frying didn’t hurt bocconcini, gumball-sized blobs of mozzarella cheese, but it didn’t add much, either, beyond producing a likeness to the risotto fritters known as arancini; the spicy tomato sauce for dipping was more tomato than spicy, but it carried a sufficient voltage of tartness to help cut the fat.
Chicken livers, on the other hand, benefited from the same treatment. Deep-frying helped moderate their blood-iron gaminess. (The Romans are said to be organ-meat aficionados, but I would say this is true throughout Italy and the rest of Europe, where for centuries meat has been expensive and hard to come by, and all parts of a food animal were and are appreciated, honored, and used.)
While beans are most closely associated with Tuscany, they turn up throughout Italian cooking, and if it turns up somewhere in Italian cooking, sooner or later it will turn up in Roman cooking. SPQR offers cellini beans — a broad, white variety, similar to cannellini — topped with a reddish soffrito of ground pork that resembles a cross between (Mexican) chorizo and Bolognese sauce. The kitchen also handles a pair of problem children with considerable skill: black kale is sautéed to tenderness — but not mushiness — with broccolini, golden garlic slivers, and enough red chili flakes to make a real entrance, while Brussels sprouts are split like baby artichoke hearts and flash-fried with garlic, capers, parsley, and plenty of lemon to tame the cabbage beast.
The signature Roman pasta sauce is amatriciana, which is typically a combination of onions, tomatoes, smoked pancetta, and a suggestion of chile heat, and it is usually tossed with fat, hollow string pasta, either bucatini or perciatelli. SPQR’s version ($12) uses red instead of yellow or white onion, substitutes guanciale (cured pork cheek) for the pancetta, and leaves you to choose either spaghetti or rigatoni (both housemade) as your pasta. Choose either: you will be happy. The sauce is intense but civilized. If you like your pasta sauces creamy, you’re also likely to be happy with the carbonara sauce ($12), made with guanciale, crushed black peppercorns, and pecorino cheese. Like gelato, it draws its richness from egg yolks.
Since Italian food isn’t known for its spiciness, I was struck by the heat of the kale and amatriciana dishes. But, duly struck, I was less surprised by the "spicy chocolate" dessert ($7.50), chocolate mousse studded with Calabrian chiles and presented in a hot-chocolate cup under a dapper cap of whipped cream. The chile effect was mild, not much more than a tingle, but it did enhance the chocolate — maybe just through simple stimulation.
A similar enhancement: the spooning of sugared bitter-orange zest over a thick slice of ricotta torte ($7.50) with crema fresca. The torte and its cream shawl were rich but a little shy, while the zest on its own would have been too sharp. But together, they are a simple symphony.
The restaurant doesn’t take reservations. So: expect big crowds, of friends and countrymen, if not Romans.
SPQR
Dinner: Sun.–Thurs., 5:30–10 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 5:30–11 p.m.
Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.
Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 10:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.
1911 Fillmore, SF
(415) 771-7779
Beer and wine
AE/MC/V
Noisy
Wheelchair accessible
Get an earful of what everyone at SXSW was yapping ’bout: longtime Oaklander Darondo performs, backed by Nino Moschella, at Shattuck Down Low tonight, March 21. Low-ridah soul – with vanity plates, sho – and R&B comes to town once more in the form of the Ubiquity artist who once opened for James Brown and hung with Fillmore Slim.
DARONDO
With Nino Moschella
Friday/21, 9:30 p.m., $12
Shattuck Down Low
2284 Shattuck, Berk.
The Boredoms‘ Eye Yamantaka is ordinarily a man of few words, but the Japanese experimental music veteran let the flood gates fly open via my e-mail interview. No snores here – just expect to whet your appetite for the Boredoms‘ Tuesday, March 18, show at the Fillmore. Ex-Black Dice drummer and current Soft Circle impressario Hashim Kotaro Bharoocha provided the translation.
SFBG: The new album is amazing — it sounds like positively symphonic! What was the idea, goal, or focus?
Eye Yamantaka: Recently I have been getting into symphonic progressive rock. I
want to buy music like that, but I don’t know who’s making it. I’m also a fan of progressive heavy metal from Scandinavia. On the album, I am taking a minimalist approach by manipulating sounds on the turntable (I am using church pipe organ music by Jon Gibson).
The sub-patterns from the church organ sounded like human voices to me, so we had that scored, and had an actual choir sing it. We weren’t doing anything on Christmas Eve, so we decided to do a show that day, and the choir fit the night perfectly.
SFBG: I remember interviewing Eye and Yoshimi years ago in the late ’80s in San Francisco. How would you say the band has evolved since then? What has your muse been telling you? Where have your
interests led you?
EY: The band went through significant changes on SPR and GO!!!!!! We started to take a minimalist approach from SPR, but after this album we took that approach to the extreme. I think that those records were a rebirth point for us. After those records, we got rid of the guitar and bass in the ensemble, and I started to DJ a lot more (I was DJing a lot more than performing with the band). We started to think in terms of performing as if we were a record player, rather than playing as a normal band.
› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Spring has sprung, warmth has won, and winter has crept away, wondering how many more glacier-melting heat spells it must weirdly weather. And what better time for nuance to take a hike, for subtlety to go on holiday — as daylight savings time ends, morning doves coo, fixies flood the now bone-dry streets, and sunlight beams down on the joints and jowls like an all-natural, wholly organic tanning salon lamp rather than just some ironic jab at Al Gore and the 2000 presidential election. Soaking up rays in Dolores Park or gazing upon the workers tearing up Valencia, I have to ponder: what is life but a big, fat in-and-out/hot-and-not list? That’s all the cerebral cortex is good for as it gently simmers in its own gray broth in the soft, slightly gooey heat. Turn it around, make ’em outs and ins, and the fun never ends.
Out: out in April, the Boredoms’ Super Roots 9 (Thrill Jockey), the first new Super Roots installment in eight years and the noise poobahs’ first live recording to boot, a document of a Christmas Eve 2004 Japan show with a 20-strong choir. In: experiencing the raw power and glory of the long-haired, avant-psych-punk Nipponese elders live. After catching the combo pulverizing the sold-out mass at the Independent with their triple-drummer ferocity and Eye Yamantaka’s crazed musical-orb twirling, I can guarantee it’ll be ecstasy for all at the Fillmore this week, sans the chemical cuddly-wuddlies, when the Boredoms perform "in the round" for the first time stateside, while promising to brandish "Sevena," their seven-necked guitar.
Out: Dungeons and Dragons creator Gary Gygax, RIP. In: pretending every music show is a dungeon. The question is who’s the dragon: the cranky bartender who has no patience for your Screaming Orgasm shit, the doorperson who can’t find your name on the guest list, the dragon-size, 7-foot-plus dude blocking your view, or the organism with the dragon-breath yoo-hooing his buds? Minutes, if not seconds, of enjoyment.
Not: lame jokes about lame white guys singing lame sexed-up R&B ballads — not to be confused with simply dorky jabs masquerading as actual humor concerning those same sexed-up R&B ballads. No wonder Semi-Pro sucked all the air — compressed or no — from the theaters. Even OutKast’s André Benjamin couldn’t save that play. Hot: working online mundanities into your next pop hit. Witness Teyana Taylor’s "Google Me" on her MySpace (and then admire the way she smooshes her big hair beneath a single hoodie and marvel at the textlike clicks that sound like she’s clipping her toenails). Not to be mistaken for the ringtones I was planning to pen myself: "Facebook Snowballin’," "Just Wanna Be Friendsters," and "Kicking You Outta MySpace."
Naughty: not using coasters, stage diving when the sign explicitly orders you not to, and stepping on the soft, sweet skulls of all the folkie kids sitting on the floor at the next Cat Power show. Haughty: the mendicant monkish hoodie, otherwise known as the new trucker cap. I know balls-out volume dealers like Holy Fuck look cool as Franciscans pulling the hoodie hood over ye olde pate, but you’re going to risk getting stereotyped as a druid in my rock-show/D&D game.
Not: pleasantly perfumed men’s restrooms in clubland. You know which way the wind blows when Mr. P’s door flings ajar. Do non-urine-scented men’s rooms exist? Does the unrefined sense of smell most men possess actually help rather than hinder in this case? Discuss. Snot: asking the audience not to clap till the end of the set — and then thanking them sarcastically when they do applaud between songs.
Not: … realistic. I’m talking about the recent "nightclub reform legislation" proposed by Mayor Gavin Newsom, which "makes it illegal to loiter within 10 feet of a club for more than three minutes." Does taking a breather from a hot club or loading your van with gear fall under the exempt "other activity"? Does this mean that nightclubbing smokers will be forced to purchase automobiles in order to have somewhere to sit and suck their cancer sticks in peace? Snot: do the words "ultralounge bottle service" ring a bell? 2
BOREDOMS
Tues/18, 8 p.m., $26.50
The Fillmore
1805 Geary, SF
TIM SAYS MAKE IT WORK
Sparkles magic! Totting the new UnononU (Kemado), the combo is less ’80s wavo, more hard-cider ’70s psych. Wed/12, 9:30 p.m., $7. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com
Powerful juju is always in the works when the Boss duo comes together again. Thurs/13, 8:30 p.m., pay what you can. 21 Grand, 416 25th St., Oakl. www.21grand.org. Fri/14, 9:30 p.m., $7. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF.
Remixing everyone from Ghostface Killa to Architecture in Helsinki, this Parisian is somebody! Fri/14, 9 p.m., $10. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. www.mezzaninesf.com
The Brooklyn soul savant’s For Lovers, Dreamers and Me (2006) got a rerelease thumbs-up from Epic. With DJ Saka. Mon/17, 8 p.m., $14. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com
Living Legends
March 7, Fillmore
By Chris DeMento
Not much to say about Friday night’s hip-hop variety show at the Fillmore except that the Legends flat-out rocked it on some Altered Beast shit – that is, once again rising from the underground to save your 18-year-old daughter and all her tank-topped friends.
Grouch met with a warm reception, second only, of course, to Murs, who couldn’t get enough of the energy the crowd was giving him. Dude was bouncing around like a male cheerleader on an upskirt high at homecoming, but who could blame him? A Fillmore stuffed with youngsters was clearly about it, throwing up their double L’s and rhyming right along to Living Legends songs that have become new underground classics.
It was a grip of MCs sharing the stage together and having at posse cuts and shouting out Hieroglyphics Crew the way they’re wont to do. They themselves admitted that the audience’s youth made them feel a bit old.
