food

Green Film Fest shorts: Just Do It

Andrew Lam
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Activist ire need a jump start? The Green Film Festival takes over Japantown’s San Francisco Film Society Cinema now through Wed/7. Go for tidings on the fight for our planet around the world — documentaries, expert panel presentations, and short films will be taking place. Check out Ali Lane’s previous reviews from the festival here.

Just Do It

In this intimate peek inside the world of “Environmental Direct Action,” viewers will marvel at the organization and cooperation displayed by the film’s English subjects. Occupy Oakland could really learn a thing or two from these self-proclaimed “domestic extremists,” champions against climate change, who the filmmakers followed for a year. The film starts off in the lead-up to “Climate Camp,” a literal camp-out of protesters in a secret location on a hill above London. From here, the protesters plan an “action.” Their actions seem pretty harmless and whimsical: gluing their hands together and invading the trade floor of RBS to sing songs; putting up posters at the entrance of a bank that says “Undergoing Ethical Renovation”; handcuffing themselves to the front gate of an MP’s home in order to publicly berate his policies. But these protests work. They get the news media to cover topics that were previously ignored.

The subjects of this film are mainly photogenic young people, with a few seasoned veterans as well, like . Some are Cambridge educated. All are uniformly anti-capitalist, as they believe capitalism inevitably leads to exploitation of the environment. They designate spokespeople, meticulously map out their “actions,” and memorize the legal consequences and potential charges faced, making sure to minimize any criminal property damage along the way. Before going out on an action, they write the phone number of their organization’s legal counsel on their forearms. What they’re doing is certainly risky, disobedient, and outside the margins of normal behavior, but the viewer gets the sense that these people have their act together and aren’t much of a threat to civil society.

This is a very sympathetic portrait of a movement, and it’s clear where director Emily James’s heart is. Her subjects’ enthusiasm for the cause, and for activism in general, is infectious. By the end it’s hard not to feel like a lazy bum as one subject intones, “Anyone out there thinking, ‘I wanna do more,’ just do it!” Indeed, this film doesn’t just give an impetus, but also a blueprint for how such things can be done.

The lingering question I had while watching the film, however, remained unanswered: where did these people get their money, for camp tents, and massive amounts of food, and buses, and superglue, and d-locks, and ladders: everything that it takes to protest, and live full-time as a protestor. Where do those funds come from? Perhaps this is a question to ask the filmmakers at the closing night party.

Green Film Festival closing night film and party

Wed/7 7:30 p.m., $12 for film, $15 for film and party

SF Film Society Cinema

1746 Post, SF

(415) 742-1394

www.sfgreenfilmfest.org

 

Green Film Fest shorts: The Global Catch

Andrew Lam
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Chins up, enviros — this week there’s a slew of movies showing that prove that you’re not alone in fighting the good fight. The Green Film Festival takes over Japantown’s San Francisco Film Society Cinema now through Wed/7, and includes looks at exciting new forms of activism, as well as the film work from intrepid whistleblowers the earth over. Drop through for tidings on the fight for our planet around the world — documentaries, expert panel presentations, and short films. And be sure to check out the rest of Ali Lane’s reviews of Green Fest flicks.

Sushi: The Global Catch

The opening of this film shows Tokyo chef Mamoru Sugiyama carefully placing gorgeous transparent and artistically sliced pieces of nigiri atop perfectly formed mounds of vinegar rice, in his Michelin-starred restaurant kitchen. If you’re the kind of person who loves sushi, this scene makes your mouth water. It’s such a cruel tease. The film proceeds to tell you all the reasons why your San Franciscan appetite for sushi, so geographically remote from the land of its creation, is actually a very destructive thing.

The construction of sushi, in classical Japanese style, is a precise and elegant process, that this film does a beautiful job of exploring. It takes aspiring chefs two years of apprenticeship just to learn how to properly prepare the rice. But sushi is now being mass-produced all over the world, to feed a growing international taste for this once esoteric Japanese delicacy. Elegance and precision have fallen by the wayside, in favor of quantity and expediency. As with most such trade-offs, the environment is suffering for it. Of course the story revolves around money – as the demand has exploded, Bluefin Tuna has become a piscine gold for fisherman.   At legendary Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo, tuna can be auctioned for as much as $1200 per pound. Tuna has been so overfished that at this point, some propose to put it on the endangered species list.

This is a story of global food trends, an intimate cultural portrait of a revered Japanese tradition, and a conservationist’s field guide to seafood. The message is clear: don’t eat more than the earth can comfortably provide. But if, after watching, you still can’t help but crave a bite of sushi, head over to Tataki, San Francisco’s first sustainable sushi bar, profiled in the film and located in Pacific Heights.

Screening followed by panel: “Sushi, Sustainability, and the Fate of Fish”

Sat/3 1:00 p.m., $12

SF Film Society Cinema

1746 Post, SF.

(415) 742-1394

www.sfgreenfilmfest.org

 

Maximum Consumption: Overlap at Public Works pairs the audio with the edible

Tony Robles
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So at Public Works this Thursday you can: watch veteran SF DJ Mophono and beat-driven gothsters Water Borders* live, learn about innovative advancements in music-making, peep some short films and new local art, and nibble tasty vegan treats. All in one event, from the safety of your own neighborhood club.

We all know there are overlapping circles between the arts – even the edible arts – and this is the belief that drives Overlap.org, a hyphen organization (music-arts-technology) that also has been hosting parties since 2006. In prep for the next installment of Overlap – which goes down Thursday – I spoke with Ghostly International’s Christopher Willits (Overlap.org’s founder, experimental SF-based musician) about music, food, and fostering local creativity:

SFBG: What will you be doing during the designing process workshop?

Christopher Willits: I’ll be covering a popular music-making and production tool called Ableton Live. I’ll be talking about the basics of this software system and how you can make expressive creative art with this digital tool.

SFBG: What are some other activities that will take place during this installment of Overlap?

CW: We have some great live music and a diverse lineup with Mophono, Water Borders, and Danny Paul Grody. Local films will be shown, we’ll have local vegan food from Freedom Kitchen, food by Rocky’s Fry Bread, and more local vendors announced the day of. We’ll have an info booth for our friends at Mission Creek Festival, and this time we also have very cool art vendors – Dave Marcoullier, The Heated, and more.

SFBG: Can you describe the vibe? What has been most surprising about previous Overlaps?

CW: I connected with Public Works after a SF Forage event I performed at, and we found that we shared a common vision of where the Overlap event could go. Our first event with [them] was last October, it proved the concept and set the tone – a relaxed evening of diverse art and some really awesome people hanging out and meeting. It’s cool to see people coming out of their usual scene and connecting with this idea of greater creative community overlapping, a community made from unique but interrelated groups.

SFBG: Why incorporate local food into a music event?

CW: We support the localization of food. Our last events have featured permaculture discussions about decentralizing our food sources. We can do this in SF.  Plus we just want people to be comfortable with some delicious clean food and feature these hard-working culinary artists. They are so much a part of the creativity of this city.

SFBG: Do you see any connections in the art of cuisine and the art of music? If so, what?

CW: Absolutely, the process, texture, flavor, color, history. Music, just like food, is woven in the very fabric of our culture. I don’t know of two other things that bring people together better than food and music.

SFBG: What are your personal favorite local places to eat?

CW: I’m really into Gracias Madre right now. Ask for the hot sauce, it’s this paste-like mixure of a couple different chiles. Yum. I think you need to ask for it.

SFBG: Future goals for Overlap.org and Overlap parties?

CW: Our goal is simple – to grow creative community in San Francisco. The rest will fall into place. We want to provide that place and time for people to come together and strengthen new bonds.

I have this feeling that we’re within a new creative wave in SF. We’re living in an amazing place and time, we’re all redefining how art and community interact and grow together. We have so much imagination and creativity. Together we are redesigning how our local communities can connect, come together and ultimately incite creative change.

Overlap
With Christopher Willits, Danny Grody, Mophono, Water Borders
Thurs/1, 7 p.m., $5-$10
Public Works
161 Eerie, SF
(415) 932-0955
www.publicsf.com

 

*An absolute aside: Water Borders’ Amitai Heller once casually told me he’d want to do a TED talk on the intersection of goth and baseball, and I think about this often, joke or not.

Nathaniel Blumberg: Open to change

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By Wilbur Wood

 (Wilbur Wood was a student of Nathaniel Blumberg in the early 1960s at the University of Montana in Missoula. And he was the leader  of a contingent of Blumberg students that turned up in San Francisco, many dispatched by the  Dean to work on the Guardian during the highly active and newsworthy 1960s.   Wilbur was a poet and a reporter,  with a master’s degree in creative wiriting at San Francisco State, so he fit in well at the Guardian. He had edited his campus paper,  so I made him city editor. He covered the 1967 mayor’s race and operated as if he were directed by Blumberg himself.  Wilbur followed Joe Alioto around, from place to place, and found that Alioto was changing his story depending on the audience.  Wilbur, as a Blumberg mentee, was not shocked. He nailed Alioto and  wrote one of the most amusing and  illuminating stories of the campaign. but it did not deter Alioto from becoming mayor. Wilbur ‘s big triumph as city editor was his work in positioning and editing an investigative story exposing how the members of the  local  San Francisco draft boards were anonymous, establishment types who worked in secrecy at secret meetings to draft a disproportionate number of minorities.  The expose  appeared in Deccember, 1967, in  the red hot middle of the Vietnam War. It was a bombshell, the first such story ever done in the nation, and led to extensive litigation on behalf of draftees in federal court, pioneering reforms in the draft, and inspired a national New York Times investigation.  It was written by Eugene Hunn, the husband of Nancy Engelbach Hunn from Kalispell, Montana, and a classmate of Wilbur’s and a student of Blumberg at the Montana School of Journalism.

(Alas, Wilbur  went back to Montana, as all Montana people seemed to do, and is now a poet, reporter, and philosopher living in his hometown of Roundup, Montana with his wife Elizabeth. She worked as an ad representative at the Guardian. Elizabeth and Wilbur run a a writing, editing, and consulting business called Stone House Productions. The stonehouse was built by Wilbur’s grandfather and is where the two live, work, and play.   Others in this Guardian era also went back to Montana:  Printer Bowler, Troy Holter, Larry Cripe, Nancy Engelbach Hunn, Karen King, Bruce DeRosier, Doug Giebel et al, a talented group of journalists, writers, and political activists bristling with Montana populism. The Blumberg/Montana contributions were enormously valuable in our early days when we had lots of ideas and ambitions but slender resources.   Why they left San Francisco to go back to Montana is still a mystery to me.)

I’m late for class, jogging, short-cutting across a mowed lawn in front of the School of Journalism. A window squeaks open and the unmistakable voice of the Dean, Nathan Blumberg, roars out a second story window: “BARBARIAN!”

Astonished, I plop down on the ground, speechless, chagrined, then leap up and disappear into class. It is the early 1960s. The Dean is, at that time, a man who believes that people should walk on the sidewalks, not upon the carefully tended lawns, at the University of Montana. He sees a reason for rules, even as he openly questions many of them

A scant six or seven years later, this same man is gliding over those same lawns, sailing Frisbees into the sky, chasing the return throws from students, the occasional faculty colleague, and former students back for a visit.

“When did Nathan start calling himself Nathaniel?” asks Bruce Brugmann, editor and publisher of the San Francisco Bay Guardian. We’re talking on the phone on the day of Nathaniel Blumberg’s death, February 14, 2012. Valentine’s Day. It is fifty-four days before his 90th birthday, on April 8. (April 8, Blumberg was delighted to learn, is Buddha’s birthday.)

“The name change happened in the 1970s or early ‘80s,” I tell Brugmann. Bruce, back in 1953, at the University of Nebraska, was a student of Nathan Blumberg. “We called him by his last name,” Brugmann said, “outside class. We never used his first name.”

Nor did we in the early ‘60s, I reply. He was The Dean, Dean Blumberg — until Printer Bowler (one of his students) began calling him “Coach.” Things were starting to loosen up by then.

“Blumberg is who inspired me,” Brugmann says. “He was highly critical of the mainstream press–and this was back in the ‘50s. He pointed out their faults in class. He advised me to go someplace – he mentioned San Francisco — and start an independent weekly newspaper. When I could do that, I did.”

But why change his name from Nathan? Both Brugmann and I know people who, through the years, met Blumberg and later named their sons Nathan. “It’s about affirming his full identity,” I say to Bruce. “He decided to accept his name as it appears on his birth certificate: Nathaniel Bernard Blumberg.”

NBB arrives at middle age in the 1960s — a man of high principles, acute intelligence, possessing an inquiring mind along with great reservoirs and pride and stubbornness, his career a success. He arrives at middle age but does not come to a stop. He opens up. Opens his heart to an expanding circle of friends. His property on Flathead Lake becomes a destination. Music, talk, good food and drink flow in the clearing under the tall trees.

Not long ago Nathaniel brought up an argument he and I engaged in, more than 40 years ago, driving up the Big Sur Coast on our way back to San Francisco. We’d made a day trip to San Simeon, and toured the hilltop castle of the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. Our argument was about Vietnam and the Civil Rights Movement. Blumberg thought the two issues were different, and that linking one with the other would damage the prospects for each cause, anti-war and anti-segregation. “You said the two were connected,” Blumberg reminded me, adding that about a year later, Martin Luther King, Jr., made that connection in public, in a speech at the Riverside Church in New York City. Nathaniel wanted to tell me that I had been right.

A veteran of World War II, NBB wrote the story of his weaponry unit going up against highly trained Nazi soldiers in the Battle of the Bulge. He honored that moment in history, but he approved of the next generation’s aversion and resistance to the war it had been handed: Vietnam. Although he was part of what Tom Brokaw called “the greatest generation,” Nathaniel rejected that label. He preferred the Sixties Generation, he told me, more than once, because “you did not accept the word of the government as truth.” Nor did we accept, he said, the word of the big corporations.

Nathaniel supported anyone trying to create a world based on love.

Les Gapay, a forrmer Blumberg student, writes a Blumberg remembrance and Blumberg writes his own obituary.

http://www.sfbg.com/bruce/2012/02/28/nathaniel-blumberg-everyone-needs-mentor

 

 

 

 

Noise Pop Roundup 3: Flaming Lips, Veronica Falls, Matthew Dear, Archers of Loaf

Tony Robles
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MVP for Noise Pop coverage this year goes to Ryan Prendiville. See below to find out why – Ed.

TUESDAY: The Flaming Lips at Bimbo’s

Time, for the Flaming Lips, is important. Because as a band — one that has been through all sorts of well documented shit — the Flaming Lips know the value of time (particularly borrowed) and have made it their work to not just create music but get into the complete manufacture of moments. Which is a tricky business, because moments are bastards.

Take all the pictures you want of the blinding lights, the beautiful costumed kids, the confetti cannons or all the other individual weapons that the Flaming Lips use to wage musical psychedelic war on time, and the moment still might not fit in a shutter, no matter how you slice a second. Full review here.

WEDNESDAY: Grimes, Born Gold, oOoOO, and Yalls at Rickshaw Stop

Cecil Frena described the lineup at Rickshaw Stop last night simply as “weird music.” He should know. Performing with his synth-fueled electronic dance trio, Born Gold (formerly Gobble Gobble,) Frena stood in front of a camera-slash-iPad pulpit, singing and conducting a third of the group’s sound via a motion-captured, clearly homemade, Janet Jackson Rhythm Nation era-esque military jacket. Full review here.

THURSDAY: Surf Club and FIDLAR at Cafe Du Nord, New Diplomat and Big Black Delta at Rickshaw Stop

“This song is called ‘Stoked and Broke,’” the band’s most talkative, spastic member introduced the first song, explaining, “because we’re stoked and broke.” What followed was a frenetic set of punk fueled, stripped down rock. With a rollicking tightness that reminded me of Thee Oh Sees, FIDLAR shot along, keeping the energy up by alternating singers. Full review here.

I left Cafe Du Nord after FIDLAR, hoping to catch at least some of Big Black Delta at the Rickshaw Stop. When I arrived another band was just starting. A local five piece, New Diplomat reminds me of the kind of groups that dominated the alternative rock airwaves in the late ’90s after grunge and pop-punk stopped being exciting. Since it was about the same time period when I stopped listening to the radio, and New Diplomat’s spiky haired singer had that emo/screamo edge that I have a hard time tolerating, it makes sense that the band put me off.

But then when Jonathan Bates, a.k.a. Big Black Delta started to perform, and I felt almost nothing, a more alarming possibility came to mind: maybe I’m burnt out. On record, I’ve liked what I’ve heard of Big Black Delta’s droned, vocally distorted hard electronic tracks. And performance-wise, Bates kept things appropriately dark, moody, and atmospheric, bumping up the sound with two drummers, each banging away on their side of the stage for some heavy hitting percussion. That whole stereo kit thing is usually the easy way to pull me in, but in this case all I could do was recognize it with cheap approval. Between New Diplomat and Big Black Delta the crowd thinned out a bit, and I leave early too, hoping to reset my baseline by the next day.

FRIDAY: Brilliant Colors, Bleached, and Veronica Falls at Rickshaw Stop, Matthew Dear at Public Works

My plan for the night was to see Veronica Falls at Brick and Mortar, and then hopefully run across the street to catch Matthew Dear at Public Works. But when I showed up at Brick and Mortar, the man at the door told me I had the wrong venue, their Noise Pop show was the night before. I apologized and, checking my schedule, saw that I was indeed an idiot. So much for that plan, at least I wore a coat.

The show was underway at Rickshaw. I didn’t know any of the bands opening for Veronica Falls. The androgynous singer onstage had a bowl cut and was wearing a collared button up that was the most over-sized fashion piece since Stop Making Sense. I couldn’t make out the words, but it was a nice voice – a little deep and dreamy – that mixed in with some catchy guitar riffs. The band was playing melodic pop, and having fun by all appearances. I found out later they are SF’s Brilliant Colors.

The next band, Bleached, had a sound that reminded of the Dum Dum Girls with a lo-fi punk edge. Two of the girls are blondes and the other two aren’t even girls. Bleached was more energetic on stage than Brilliant Colors, but I found their songs didn’t really hook me in. (It also didn’t help that there was a camera crew onstage with them.) The group harmonized a lot and decently, but too often spent a lot of time singing vowels (oohs, ahhs, and ohhs), which started to wear on me. They played a Ramones cover. I think it’s “When I Was Young.”

Still, it was good lineup leading into Veronica Falls, a UK band that has a retro pop sound as well. VF’s sound live was as clean and distinctive as it is on record, with nice guitar work over a signature drum sound that has an ever-present jangle that’s accomplished by little more than taping a tambourine to the floor tom. The band’s vocal style has some nice contrast, between Roxanne Clifford’s usual lead with backing from James Hoare and Patrick Doyle, but really I think it’s its structure and a Belle and Sebastian-like sense of lyrical imagery on songs like “Stephen” or “Bad Feeling” that sets the group apart.

So much so that on “Crimson and Clover”-referencing song, “Come on Over” VF can bust out some oohs and ohhs without it seeming like a shortcut. It was a good set, with a lot of new material as well, for the band that canceled its earlier SF debut due to visa issues. If anything, Veronica Falls was overly apologetic, drummer Patrick politely stated before the encore, “I know I keep saying it, and I feel like a bit of a dick saying it, but thanks.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bE6BFAwzwLU

It was before midnight when Veronica Falls finished, so I hurried to Public Works, where they were still setting the stage. While waiting for Matthew Dear to come on, however, I had the misfortune of standing in front of someone explaining to everyone within earshot how terrible the venue was, how it was a warehouse that they just put equipment in but never fixed up, how if she just got a warehouse for a weekend she could fix it up nicer, how there was a bare two-by-four nailed to the beam above the stage for no apparent reason, how they charged club prices but it was “not really a club.” (Sort of the reason I actually like it, that last part).

When Matthew Dear started performing, with a live band – his second night with the lineup – it all sounded more loud and abrasive than I had expected. I think my attitude, and my tired ears had been switched to bitch mode by the girl behind me. The show was sweaty and chaotic, it being a weekend late night at Noise Pop, but I called it a night while it was still going on.

SATURDAY: Noise Pop Culture Club at Public Works, Built Like Alaska, Hospitality, The Big Sleep, and Archers of Loaf at Great American Music Hall

This would be my last day of Noise Pop, I was convinced. As much as I would’ve liked to, I started the day knowing that I would not make it to Sunday’s Dodos show. Between my day job, covering Noise Pop, and pet-sitting three cats (who operate in a binary of meowing or vomiting) back in the East Bay, I may have taken on too much last week. That said, somehow, Saturday at noon I found myself back at Public Works, for the Noise Pop Culture Club, a six-hour-long block of workshops, screenings, interviews, performances, and something called the Seagate Remix Lounge that I didn’t really understand.

When I got to PW they were screening selections of Petites Planètes, another musical documentary series by the guy behind the Take-Away Shows on YouTube. The videos were cool, but the director, Vincent Moon, wasn’t there for the Q&A. Something about being a “nomad.” Dude bailed. Disappointing. Since I was sitting 20 feet from a bartender with nothing to do, I decided to get a drink, but the shaky feeling in my stomach reminded me that I hadn’t had the right ratio of solid food to alcohol in my diet last week. Some spicy noodles from the food truck outside created a buffer on which I began to add of few layers of bourbon, while watching the restored, color version of Méliès A Trip to the Moon, with soundtrack by AIR.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Nx8hVGzSO4

The main plan was to see Zigaboo Modeliste of the Meters play the drums. Modeliste was there as part of a Q&A with the makers of Re:Generation Music Project, a documentary-slash-Hyundai promotion in which he appeared. The clips made the recently released film (which apparently no one in the audience had seen) seem interesting, if only for scenes with whipper snapper EDM artists like Skrillex and Pretty Lights attempting to work with established musicians in other genres, awkwardly. At the end Modeliste played the drums for a bit, and the snare was so loud that each time he smacked it everyone in the audience blinked. A walk outside in the sun and a Bloody Mary later, I returned for a how-to session on using Ableton, and realized I am un-Able ton stay awake.

Clearly, when I made it to the Great American Music Hall, I was in bad shape. Nearly asleep on my feet, with quite a bit of time to go, and not thinking clearly, I made a bad strategic move that combines Red Bull and vodka, two things I don’t like anymore together than apart. When the first band, Built Like Alaska went onstage, I was in a fairly vile mood, my head hanging limp over the balcony while I wrote down petty things about the drummer that I didn’t like: his hat (a fedora indoors) his shirt (vintage Mickey Mouse) his facial hair (Tom Selleck meets Mario Brothers). All this, when his consistently irregular drumming was actually my favorite part of the band who I really had no problem with. Clearly, I was hating hard that night.

Until the next band, Hospitality played. I’d never heard Hospitality before – it was the band’s first time playing in San Francisco – but the sound pulled me in almost immediately, led by the charming, identifiable lilt in guitarist and lead singer Amber Papini’s voice. The songs were light and bouncy, and Papini performed with a slight disaffected edge, always looking up and off to something above the crowd, making strange faces and rolling her eyes at no one in particular. When I got home later, I went online almost immediately to listen to its album and find the song “Friends of Friends.”

Likewise, I tried to find music from the final opener, the Big Sleep, but that’s more of a band to see in concert form, as the trio’s main attraction is a Jack White-like guitarist, who has a lively style of playing and a way of alternating his sound between growling and loud to Jesus Christ, where did I put my ear plugs, I can feel my cochlear hair cells dying.

Now I’m not the biggest Archers of Loaf fan – the band’s actually only been on my radar since a number of high profile reissues last year – but other people at the Great American were clearly eager to see the reformed act live. When a few random notes came out of bassist Matt Gentling’s instrument during the band’s set-up a woman above stage in the balcony yelped, jumping to her feet and clapping her hands together excitedly.

Launching into “Harnessed in Slums,” the band played with an easy energy that gave no suggestion of their hiatus or age, and people in the crowd were shouting “I want waste! We want waste!” along with the chorus. Gentling in particular was electric. He leapt around stage and struck every hard rock guitar god stance imaginable but did it with a physicality that actually pulled them off. (Dude is ripped, FYI.)

At one point early on, struggling with some technical issues, Gentling looked at singer-guitarist Eric Bachmann and joked, “It’s just like the old days, everything is breaking.” Not quite getting the kink out of his bass, Gentling asked the crowd if it’d be ok if the band just kept playing through the difficulty, and Archers of Loaf continued on, powering through a long set. The place wasn’t full, but the crowd made up for it, and was still shaking the floorboards fifteen or so songs later when Archers play “Wrong” and shred a version of “Nostalgia”, making an encore completely obvious.

Ten minutes later – when I headed for BART to wait for a train alongside a couple of giggling guys laying on the platform surrounded by what must have been a dozen empty nitrous canisters – I was no longer tired and sent a text that read: “Okay. That was a good show. Worth it.”

Maven

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Maven

virginia@sfbg.com

APPETITE Enter through a corner door into a restaurant lined with high communal tables, upstairs seating area, and a redwood bar backed by a stone wall overflowing with plant life. Formerly RNM, Maven is a sleek new cocktail haven in Lower Haight. I knew the drinks would be good, but I was pleasantly surprised at how strong the food is. Maven opened as a “drink with food pairing” concept venue: the menu lists three pairing columns. In the middle are generously-sized “small” plates, a couple entrées and dessert. To the left is a “distilled” column of cocktails, to the right, “fermented” beer and wine offerings.

While co-owners Jay Bordeleau and David Kurtz (Kurtz is also executive chef) have worked in numerous fine dining and popular establishments like Michael Mina, Saison, Beretta, in keeping with the times, Maven is decidedly casual yet chic, focused on quality over pomp. Sous chef Matt Brimer, formerly of Maverick, works with Kurtz on dishes more interesting than they read on paper.

Wise they were to bring on Kate Bolton to oversee the cocktail menu. Elegant restraint is something she honed during her days at Michael Mina. Working my way through each of her balanced drinks, there was little down time.

Jamie Pait, who worked in pastry at Slanted Door, made the slew of house syrups, like ginger and five spice, which Bolton uses in her recipes. Pait’s hazelnut orgeat simply rocks. Orgeat is a creamy, nutty almond syrup. With hazelnuts instead of almonds it is equally silky — fantastic even on its own. In Nauti’ Mermaid ($10), it adds sexy layers of nuttiness to Jamaican rum, lime, orange and coconut juices. Thai spirit shines in the cocktail’s vacation-like smoothness as it cools a dish of Monterey Calamari ($9) laden with Thai chilies, ginger, coriander. The calamari cleverly comes two ways: fried and grilled.

Another happy match occurs in braised fennel and watercress ($9), again far more satisfying than it sounds. Grilled fennel works beautifully with creamy burrata cheese and charred cherry tomatoes — a twist on a Caprese — over grilled toast. Its cocktail match is International Mistress ($11), a soft but powerful mix of Nonino amaro and Sombra mezcal, luxurious with orgeat and grapefruit, with just a hint of mezcal smoke. Also more exciting than the overwrought sliders category would suggest are Chinatown duck sliders ($9), like a gourmet Chinatown sandwich with tender duck, shiitake mushrooms, bitter greens and a smack of bacon. Its cocktail pairing is the 5 Spot ($10), a bright blend of La Favorite rhum agricole, lime, maple, and house ginger and five spice syrups, crowned with a Thai basil leaf.

Lush and subtle co-exist on the menu — and Bolton generally keeps cocktails light enough on alcohol so as not to overwhelm the food. Global Warming ($11) is a unique aperitif. Not only do you get dry riesling, but sake, even a splash of Ransom’s Old Tom Gin. Tart with lemon, a little scoop of absinthe sorbet permeates the drink as it melts. Brilliant. Its food spouse is a superior scallop crudo ($12), silken paired with hazelnut, shiso, and tart apple.

Contrast raw scallop freshness with rich broccoli agnolotti ($11/$18), a pasta meaty with southern Tasso ham, savory with orange-hued mimolette cheese and cipollini onions. Its drink mate is a full-bodied, but not overwhelming, Hometown Vixen ($9). Bolton infused black pepper in Four Roses bourbon, mixing it with lemon and two house syrups: gomme and a luxurious roasted pistachio.

The only dish I wasn’t as taken with is still well-executed: seared arctic char ($23) swimming in smoked fume broth with carrots and turnips. There’s nothing wrong with the soft white fish — it just lacked the flavor punch found in its accompanying pickled PEI mussels. Its match was one of the best cocktails on the menu, Hibiki Highball ($12), showcasing Japanese whisky — Hibiki 12-year in this case — with a giant ice cube, house ginger syrup, bitters, and soda water. Wine and beer pairings are likewise thoughtful: Hennepin, Ommegang’s farmhouse saison beer, with a mushroom tart, or Poco a Poco’s funky, fun Chardonnay with the arctic char.

Dessert could easily be Beach & Hyde, an off-menu cocktail named after the cross streets of legendary bar Buena Vista. Inspired by Buena Vista’s famed Irish coffees, the drink is Evan Williams bourbon, coffee brewed with cocoa nibs and vanilla, plus egg white and orange zest. If you want to actually eat dessert, you won’t suffer with dark Mayan chocolate in brownie-reminiscent slices, accented by black cardamom ice cream.

In fact, you won’t suffer here at all.

MAVEN

598 Haight, SF.

415-829-7982

www.maven-sf.com

Subscribe to Virgina’s twice-monthly newsletter, The Perfect Spot, www.theperfectspotsf.com

 

Agrarian visions

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Agrarian visions

By Cynthia Salaysay

arts@sfbg.com

VISUAL ART Artists are makers, though rarely of history. But Fernando García-Dory and Amy Franceschini, two internationally recognized artists, seem to have a gift for it. “Perhaps,” García-Dory says, “when you start with a long perspective on history, you start to make history as well.”

At the David Brower Center’s Hazel Wolf Gallery, their joint show “Land, Use” presents work that is whimsical and futuristic, yet rooted in traditional agricultural values. It’s like Disney’s Tomorrowland — but on an urban farm, where wheelbarrows are pedal-powered. Or on the rolling green pastures of Spain, where sheep wear GPS transmitters around their necks.

Franceschini is one of San Francisco’s own. Her Victory Garden project in 2007 caught the fancy of SF City Hall, with pieces like Trike — a part-cycle, part-wheelbarrow, designed to contain all the supplies necessary to build a small garden. Soon the city began encouraging its residents to grow food, as it did in World War II. City Hall was decked out in raised garden beds, and residents throughout the city began their own vegetable patches.

García-Dory, from Madrid, has worked extensively with the dwindling Basque shepherds of the Pyrenees, where they have lived for centuries. His images and films portray white-haired men stacking golden cheese in ancient caves, or facing the wind, shearing one of their grim-faced flock.

The images come from the Shepherds School he created, and from his World Gathering of Nomadic Peoples (2005), in which shepherds and goatherds around the world came together to talk about their way of life, which has become so rarified in these modern times.

García-Dory’s work, in part, uses new technology to protect mobile pastoralism, as it’s called. His piece Bionic Sheep sits in the foyer of the gallery. The device emits ultrasound waves to repel wolves, as shepherds in Spain are no longer allowed to kill them to protect their flock. It also has a GPS so shepherds can keep track of their flock without being chained to the pasture. “They can stay at the bar, and have another beer,” Dory explains.

Adds Franceschini, “The role of art for us is, in part, utility. It has this negative connotation in the art world, but I think for us it’s important for the work we’re doing to be useful.”

Their first collaboration, Shepherd’s Wagon, a Blueprint, is “like the blueprint for a molecule that was sent on the Voyager shuttle to Jupiter,” says García-Dory. “It’s a way of saying, ‘Here, it’s a model, and it can be reproduced.'”

A canopy reaches out over the gallery, mimicking the awning of a shepherd’s wagon, where they sleep. Wooden chairs and a communal table fold down from the wall. As part of the installation, Franceschini and García-Dory invited young farmers, shepherds, and naturalists to sit together beneath their fragile roof. The forum’s purpose: to discuss how to balance the environmental concerns of naturalists with those of farmers and pastoralists, and forge a new network for social activism.

The gallery still holds some of the collective energy of the group. Remnants of their brainstorm litter the gallery like leaves blown over a sidewalk — a chaos of hopeful thoughts and ideas. Phrases like “We all need to come back to understanding the Farm Bill,” and “Let’s Shadow Each Other Voluntary Exchange Program” hang from the walls.

“Promoting a gathering as we did, it’s a way for us to be close to the people and have the direct communication that very often we lack in our lives,” says García-Dory.

“I haven’t been involved in food politics and land use in the last two years in the Bay Area,” Franceschini says. “For me, it’s a check in. Here’s all the people I’ve met from the Victory Gardens, here’s people I’d like Fernando to meet.”

Although the Bay Area is a hotbed of environmentalism and the slow food movement, awareness of pastoralism is low. “Dory’s reminding us of the history of the Basque sheepherders and the culture that brought shepherding to the American West,” says Brittany Cole Bush of Star Creek Ranch.

In the East Bay hills, Basque and Peruvian shepherds, along with young shepherds like Bush, use sheep and goats to reduce fire hazard, target invasive plants, and encourage native grasses to grow. “These animals are helping to revitalize the lands, and at the same time they’re producing a local grass-fed product that can be taken to market,” explains Bush.

Adds García-Dory, “Maybe sheep are the new celebrity, or should be.”

The Blueprint isn’t finished yet. “The people [at the gathering] said they would like to keep meeting and working, and that was really very encouraging for us,” says García-Dory. “We hope that the heritage of small farmers and shepherds can be a point of anchor for a new movement.”

Such a hope, though ambitious, seems realistic, given their past work. García-Dory’s World Gathering of Nomadic Peoples created an international, politically active community of shepherds that continues to work together. His Shepherds School has graduated 100 people. And Franceschini’s Victory Gardens live on — 10 of the gardens planted from the original 18 still exist. The city of San Francisco, which discovered through the project that people needed to learn how to grow food again, continues to fund educational programs like Hayes Valley Farm.

Although their pieces have created a lasting impact, Franceschini insists that much of that impact is due to the people around her. “An important part of what Fernando and I do is using the community around you to organize and activate ideas. That’s a message I’m always trying to tell my students. Your friends and your closest colleagues are your allies. I think sometimes you don’t see the potential in front of your nose.”

Other pieces on display include Franceschini’s This is Not a Trojan Horse, as well as short films and other artifacts documenting the Victory Garden, Shepherds School, and World Gathering.

LAND/USE

Through May 9

Hazel Wolf Gallery

David Brower Center

2150 Allston, Berk.

(510) 809-0900

www.browercenter.org

On the Cheap Listings

Andrew Lam
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On the Cheap listings are compiled by Soojin Chang. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

WEDNESDAY 29

Nutrition class for cyclists Sport Basement, 1881 Ygnacio Valley, Walnut Creek. (925) 941-6100, www.sportbasement.com. 7 p.m.-8 p.m., free with RSVP. It is the worst when you’re still 20 minutes away from your destination and your energy decides to crash on you. In this nutrition class, experts give perspectives on quality food choices, review specific bars and powders, and provide simple and delicious recipes for on and off the bike.

Radical Directing lecture series with Terry Zwigoff San Francisco Art Institute, 800 Chestnut, SF. (415) 771-7020, www.sfai.edu. 7:30 p.m., free. Long-time San Franciscan Terry Zwigoff makes feature films out of underground comic strips and turns down corporate project offers in favor of ‘tooning for smaller outfits. Join Zwigoff as he discusses his experience writing screenplays and making documentaries.

THURSDAY 1

“After Dark: Vinyl” interactive presentation Exploratorium, 3601 Lyon, SF. (415) 561-0360, www.exploratorium.edu. 6 p.m.-10 p.m., free with museum admission. In the heyday of vinyl, records were made of fragile materials such as wax and shellac. Experimental physicist Carl Haber recovers the sweet tunes that we once believed were gone forever.

The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers—and the Coming Cashless Society author discussion The Booksmith, 1644 Haight, SF. (415) 863-8688, www.booksmith.com. 7:30 p.m., free. These days, you can get far without the greenbacks — as long as you’ve got dough on your plastic. In his newest book, David Wolman embarks on a paper cash-less journey around the world, encountering people and technologies whose alternatively embrace and fear the end of tangible money.

“So You Think You Can Paint?” SoMa art party Club Six, 60 Sixth St., SF. (415) 863-1221, www.clubsix1.com. 7 p.m.-11 p.m., free. Your task is to complete as many eight-foot art pieces as you possibly can. If you have any doubts to your skills or just want to learn more, there will be a free art class from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. Huge walls, paint, brushes, and tunes will be provided.

Nightlife’s Darkroom photography event California Academy of Sciences, 55 Music Concourse, SF. (415) 379-8000, www.calacademy.org/nightlife. 6 p.m.-10 p.m., $12. Come meet the folks from Instagram for a night dedicated to the recent transmutations of photography. Enjoy live music and images of beautiful coral reef while checking out the innovations of Lytro’s light field camera, artist Genevieve Quick’s hand-made cameras, Lomography’s analog cameras, and aerial photographer Michael Layesfsky’s balloon camera.

FRIDAY 2

True Stories Lounge story telling performance The Make-out Room, 3225 22nd St., SF. (415) 647-2888, www.makeoutroom.com. 7:30 p.m., $10. Telling a good story is a particularly difficult art to master. Join seven professional storytellers who’ll be keeping this oral tradition alive by divulging their memoirs, essays, reportages, and narrative column writings.

SATURDAY 3

Origami club San Francisco Public Library, 500 Cortland, SF. (415) 355-2810, www.sfpl.org. 2 p.m.-4 p.m., free. Ah, the progressive addiction of origami. First you’re making a crane, and then you’re drinking out of an ornate paper teacup. Not surprising at all that there is a local club devoted to the art — now where’s the 12-step program?

“Zeke Greenwald, Potential Roommate” comedy show 222 Hyde, SF. (415) 345-8222, www.222hyde.com. 8 p.m.-10 p.m., free. Anyone who has ever searched Craigslist for housing in San Francisco know of the comedic horror that lies within each potential roommate. Five local comedians stand up to share their stories.

Dr. Seuss’s birthday celebration Playland-Not-at-the-Beach, 10979 San Pablo, El Cerrito. (510) 592-3002, www.playland-not-at-the-beach.org. Through Sunday. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., $10 children; $15 general admission. Celebrate the birthday of the guy who reminded us all that crazy is awesome and the imagination is limitless. There will be penny arcades, haunted houses, interactive exhibits, and magic sideshows. High-fives for everyone who dresses up.

Sperm Whale Soiree art and science reception Randall Museum, 199 Museum, SF. (415) 561-6622, www.randallmuseum.org. 7 p.m.-10 p.m., $15 advance tickets. Moby Dick gave sperm whales a bad rep. But the truth is they’re extremely interesting animals that nowadays, are sadly endangered (no thanks to you, Captain Ahab). Learn about their amazing diving skills and their even more intriguing sex lives.

SUNDAY 4

Actual Jazz Series with the John Schott Trio and special guests Actual Cafe, 6334 San Pablo, Oakl. (510) 653-8386, www.actualcafe.com. 5 p.m., free. Actual Cafe’s new house band plays twice a month on first and third Sundays. Its set list includes everything from standard jazz to obscure Ukrainian songs. First Sundays feature younger jazz musicians from the Bay Area, guest singers, and spoken word collaborators.

MONDAY 5

Mental Aerobics San Francisco Public Library, 100 Larkin, SF. (415) 355-2822, www.sfpl.org. 1 p.m.-3:30 p.m., free. Feeling a little brain-dead lately? You can do something about that, y’know. Come work out your cerebral organs and spark your cognitive vitality in this class designed to get your synapses firing.

TUESDAY 6

Andy Warhol: Polaroids/Matrix 240 Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft, Berk. (510) 642-0808, bampfa.berkeley.edu. Through May 20. Gallery hours Wed.-Sun. 11 a.m.-5 p.m., $7–$10. Long before Instagram, there was Polaroid. The Prince of Pop Andy Warhol took thousands of snapshots that were never shown to the public until now. Come check out photos of O.J. Simpson, Daryl Lillie, Diane von Furstenberg, and of course, bananas.

Occupy and Castlewood Workers to join up for “perhaps the biggest and most vibrant march Pleasanton has ever seen”

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Organizers hope for a big turnout Feb. 25 for the latest protest in a two-year saga to demand a better contract.

Food service workers at Castlewood Country Club were put on lockout on Feb. 25, 2010 when they refused the terms of a contract with the club. The contract stipulated that workers pay $849 per month for health care, a change from the free health care the contract had previously provided.

Lockouts, when employers refuse to let employees come back to work until they agree to contract terms, are a rare but powerful tool used against unions.

“A lockout is the opposite of a strike,” said Sarah Norr, organizer with UNITE HERE local 2850, which represents the Castlewood workers.

Since the lockout began, the club has hired non-union replacement workers and most of the union workers have taken other jobs. But, in order to end the lockout legally, the company must resolve the contract issues.

According to Norr, “It’s illegal to permanently replace locked out workers.”

Workers brought the case to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which filed a complaint against Castlewood August 30, 2010. The complaint states that the club “has been interfering with, restraining, and coercing employees in the exercise of the rights guaranteed in Section 7 of the [National Labor Relations] Act” and “has been failing and refusing to bargaining [sic] collectively and in good faith with the exclusive bargaining representative of its employees.”

An ongoing NLRB hearing on the case is expected to conclude on March 1.

Meanwhile, workers have been picketing daily since the lockout began two years ago. This has sometimes resulted in dramatic clashes with the club members.

One of the workers’ protests last June. Golfers’ reponses, complete with property desctruction, begin around 1:35

“Members of the club harass them on a daily basis. Hitting golf balls at them, throwing racial slurs at them. Some of them are really supportive but some are not so nice,” said Norr.

But workers persevere, and tomorrow they hope for a larch march on the club, joined by OccupySF and Occupy Oakland.

Said Norr, “It’s going to be a big, vibrant march, perhaps biggest and most vibrant march Pleasanton has ever seen. There will be a babies’ and children’s brigade.”

For Occupy organizers, joining up with the protest makes perfect sense.

“Many of Castlewood’s member-owners spent $25,000 for their memberships,” said Ann Worth, a longtime union member and participant in Occupy Oakland, in a press release. “They can justify spending that kind of money to play golf, but they still think it’s okay to squeeze more out of the people who work for them for $10 or $12 an hour. They expect workers to subsidize their expensive game by giving up affordable health care for their kids. It’s a perfect example of what’s been going wrong in this country: the rich are getting richer by denying everyone else their share in the American Dream.”

Have conservatives hijacked the Small Business Commission?

Sasha Cuttler
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Have conservatives hijacked the Small Business Commission?

Is the Small Business Commission really advocating for small businesses, or has the commission been hijacked by bankers and real estate developers aggressively pushing a right-wing agenda of unchecked growth and cuts to government regulation, programs, and fees? And why has the Mayor’s Office stacked the commission with these ideologues and worked behind-the-scenes to keep them in leadership roles?

Those are just a couple of the questions that have been raised by Mayor Ed Lee’s recent effort to amend the charter to give this commission broad authority over the city’s legislative agenda, which was dropped in the face of widespread opposition, and by his office’s alleged calls to their appointees urging them to vote for developer Luke O’Brien as vice president and banker Stephen Adams as president (simply reversing the roles they had played last year).

Traditionally, sources say the commission has sought to balance leadership between the mayor’s four appointees and the three appointed by the Board of Supervisors. But these days, the Mayor’s Office (mostly Chief of Staff Steve Kawa, we’re told) and its appointees (which include two bankers and one developer), at the urging of pro-development groups Coalition for Responsible Growth (CRG) and Plan C, seems to want to consolidate their control and push their agenda.

Neither Kawa nor Press Secretary Christine Falvey would address our direct question about the Mayor’s Office interfering with the internal working of supposedly independent commissions, but the Examiner today had a story about the Mayor’s Office doing the same thing on the Planning Commission with its leadership vote this week.

“If the Mayor’s Office feels the need to interfere in commission votes, it interferes with internal commission matters and the spirit of the commission,” Board President David Chiu, who has been following the Small Business Commission dynamics, told the Guardian.

Outgoing commission member Janet Clyde, who runs the legendary Vesuvio bar in North Beach, said she has long been bothered by the changing tone and dynamics on the commission: “There is definitely an agenda that is driven by the Mayor’s Office, a more conservative view…There is a big business agenda in small business clothes.”

And she said that change has been pushed by Plan C, CRG, and other fiscally conservative groups that backed Lee’s mayoral campaign. “They really saw an opportunity to use the Small Business Commission to push their agendas.”

The CRG board includes three members of Murphy O’Brien Real Estate Investments, including O’Brien and Mel Murphy, who is a mayoral appointee to the Building Inspection Commission, where he also regularly advocates for real estate interests. CRG, which did not return our calls for comment, testifies regularly at City Hall in favor of development and against regulation. Clyde and current commission member Kathleen Dooley say O’Brien has been especially aggressive in pushing his ideological agenda.

O’Brien ignored repeated Guardian requests for comment, and when we finally reached him by phone, he said, “I have no interest in talking to you.”

In December, in his role as president, O’Brien called a special hearing to discuss the Eastern Neighborhoods Plan, the massive land use plan passed a few years ago after dozens of public hearings to work out its myriad complicated details and balance the preservation of light industrial properties with housing development, providing city services, and other considerations.

“This thing really needs to be thought out a little bit more,” O’Brien said at the hearing in a video clip that is prominently displayed on the CRG website.

Commission Executive Director Regina Dick-Endrizzi defended that hearing and others that have ventured into planning, regulation, and land uses issues that seem to be the purview of other city commissions. “Every business we talk to that wants to be in a brick-and-mortar space, it’s all about land use,” she said, noting that at the commission’s last annual retreat, “they decided to take a look at impact fees and their implications.”

She also noted that the city defines small businesses as having fewer than 100 employees, and that both developers and bankers are legitimate small business advocates, noting how important loans and other capital sources are to small business survival. Mayoral spokesperson Christine Falvey also defended the appointments and their focus: “The Commission has a diverse group of individuals to represent small business. The agenda is not controlled by any one group. There is a diverse group of voices and all deserve to be heard.”

Falvey also said it’s important to have bankers like Adams, a branch manager of Sterling Bank & Trust, on the commission: “The Mayor understands the important link between conventional banks and micro lenders. While there are moderate improvements in the lending environment, understanding the current status of access to capital is critical information for the Commission in its role to advise and make recommendations to the Mayor and Board of Supervisors on policy matters and City regulations that affect either the ease or difficulty in doing business in San Francisco.”

But progressive members of the Board of Supervisors – including Sup. Christina Olague, a mayoral appointee, in her recent interview with the Guardian – have regularly derided the narrow focus and ideological agenda of the commission, particularly its mayoral appointees. Some privately call it the “Small-Minded Business Commission.”

“We need some diversity on this commission. It can’t be all white men with a particular point of view,” Dooley said.

That could begin to happen on Tuesday when the Board of Supervisors is slated to replace two of its outgoing appointees, Michael O’Connor and Janet Clyde, with two that have been recommended by the Rules Committee: Monette White, who runs Food for Soul, “an upscale restaurant and holding company,” and William Ortiz-Cartagena, CEO of Gentle Parking, which managing parking lots in the city.

But that won’t go very far in changing a commission that seems focused on using the “small business” fig leaf to push a more broad and ideological pro-business agenda. Even Chiu, who is strongly pro-business, told us, “The Small Business Commission needs to be focused on the plight and issues of small businesses.”

Ice Cream Bar’s soda fountain revives the ’30s jerk

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Ice Cream Bar’s soda fountain revives the ’30s jerk

In this week’s Appetite food and drink column in the paper, I relished the opportunity to return to a time of delicious handmade fountain drinks at Cole Valley’s new Ice Cream Bar (albeit with some innovative contemporary flavor twists). In between sips of wild cherry phosphate, I got to talk to Russell Davis, the bartender who developed the fantastic soda fountain program, about the soda jerk revival — and got him to share some of his sassafras secrets.

SFBG Why is Ice Cream Bar different from other soda fountain revival spots in the US?

Russell Davis There are a few spots in the country supporting the “revival” of the soda fountain and its lost drinks, but none take it to the extent and level that we do at Ice Cream Bar. From top to bottom, our menu is not just based on using quality ingredients and refined processes, but also on its inherent historical value. Our syrups are all fresh, cold agitated and our ice is all hand cut. Even our floats are built to the same specifications as they would have made them in 1894 Chicago. We are not playing around.

SFBG What connection do you see between classic and creative cocktails, the world you come from, and old fashioned soda fountain drinks?

RD Many bartenders who didn’t flee the country during Prohibition to practice their craft became soda jerks. There was a beautiful way of mixing that was refined during this period. Also, the techniques that we apply to soda fountain drinks can, and I believe will, be used in the crafting of a refined cocktail.  What I’ve noticed as the biggest difference between mixology and soda jerking is that whereas bartenders focus on using fresh fruits and other seasonal ingredients, soda jerks try to capture flavors (in a tincture or extract)….

SFBG Tell me about the sassafras root beer featured at ice Cream Bar. How is this different from other homemade root beers?

RD First, it’s made using fresh sassafras and a house built sassafras extract, something that you do not find in mass-produced root beer because, by USDA standards, it is illegal due to its slightly carcinogenic properties. But, there is nothing to be afraid of: it’s about as dangerous as cinnamon or nutmeg.  Most people use wintergreen, spearmint, and licorice or anise to replicate that sassafras flavor that was in the original old school recipes of root beer, but nothing compares to the flavor of the true stuff. Next, I use black and jasmine tea as a base combined with a variety of other herbs, then cold brew it with ground marshmallow root to create a thick creamy texture and give it head. Lastly, I add a little bit of St John’s Wort in so, hopefully, it will put you in a good mood as well.

SFBG Given more than 75 tincture options and house-made extracts, what crazy concoction would you order if you wanted something unusual?

RD [Laughs] You’ll just have to wait and see when the next menu comes out!

Subscribe to Virgina’s twice-monthly newsletter, The Perfect Spot, www.theperfectspotsf.com

On the Cheap

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On the Cheap listings are compiled by Soojin Chang. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

WEDNESDAY 22

“An Edward Gorey Birthday Party” Cartoon Art Museum, 655 Mission, SF; (415) 227-8666, www.cartoonart.org. 6 p.m.-8 p.m., free. Edward Gorey: a cool guy who not only made pop-up matchbox-sized books by hand, but also redefined the macabre nonsense that makes up children’s literature. Come celebrate the world-renowned author’s birthday with an evening of readings, interpretations, and cake.

BAY AREA

“Path to Prison Reform: Freeing Jails from Racism Berkeley-East Baby Gray Panthers” North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst, Berk; (510) 548-9696, berkeleygraypathers.mysite.com. 1:30 p.m., free. Plenty of things go down in jails that are neither documented nor resolved. Join ACLU members and former prisoners in a discussion of how racism may be the culprit behind prison brutality.

THURSDAY 23

“A Mnemosyne Slumber Party” Mechanic’s Institute, 57 Post, SF; (415) 393-0101, www.mililibrary.org. 6 p.m., $12. Mnemosyne is a free online journal that features art, fiction, and nonfiction work dedicated to the science of memory and the mind. Come to the premiere of their newest “Sleep and Dreams” issue, stay for a night of live readings and artist appearances.

FRIDAY 24

“Diversity and Evolution of Hummingbirds” City College of San Francisco Ocean Campus, 50 Phelan, SF; (415) 239-3475, ccsf.edu/upcomingevents. Noon-1 p.m., free. Hitchcock ruined birds for some of us, but for those who still find these flying feathered creatures non-terrifying, this is a chance to join ornithology instructor Joe Morlan as he discusses the many birds he saw in his adventures in California, Arizona, Belize, Costa Rica, Trinidad, and Ecuador.

BAY AREA

Oakland Food Not Bombs benefit show Revolution Cafe, 1612 Seventh St., Oakl; (510) 625-0149, www.revcafeoak.com. 7 p.m., $4-$13. Food Not Bombs is all about non-violence, consensus decision-making, and tasty vegetarian meals, distributed for free to the community. What’s not to love? Support the group’s efforts this weekend in a benefit show featuring local bands Nate Porter and Wagon Boat.

SATURDAY 25

“Noise Pop Culture Club” Public Works, 161 Erie, SF; (415) 932-0955, www.publicsf.com. 11:30 a.m.-6:30 p.m., $10. Noise Pop would not be possible without the visionary artists in the music, film, art, design, technology, and food communities. This event features a discussion by Johnny Jewel of Glass Candy, artwork by Grimes, an Ableton Live workshop with Thavius Beck, a talk on animation by Aaron Rose and Syd Garon – plus a bounce lesson taught by New Orleans bounce belle, Big Freedia.

Punk Swap Meet Speakeasy Ales and Lagers, 1195 Evans, SF; (415) 642-3371, www.goodbeer.com. 1

p.m.-6 p.m., free. If you thought flea markets were just for old knitting ladies, you have never been more wrong. Punk Swap Meet has tables selling records, zines, tapes, DIY crafts, clothing, and is open to all ages. There will be food by Eagle Dog, with vegetarian and vegan options available, and brew on tap for $3.

San Francisco Crystal Fair Fort Mason Center Building A, 99 Marina, SF; (415) 383-7837, www.crystalfair.com. 10 a.m.-6 p.m. (also Sun/26, 10 a.m.-4 p.m.), $6 for two-day admission. Is your chakra out of sync? Not to worry. Pacific Crystal Guild is coming with over 40 exhibitors carrying crystals from Nepal, Bali, Afghanistan, and China.

SF Flea Herbst Pavilion at Fort Mason Center, One Buchanan, SF; (415) 990-0600, www.sf-flea.com. Sat., 11 am.1-6 p.m. (also Sun/26, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.), $5. SF Flea is a modern public market that brings together local design, style, food, art, and entertainment.

BAY AREA

Miss and Mister Oakland Punk Rock Pageant East Bay Rats Club House, 3025 San Pablo, Oakl; (510) 830-6466, www.eastbayrats.com. 8:30 p.m., $5 (free for contestants). Who says you have to be a six-year-old from Georgia or proclaim world peace in a bikini to be in a pageant? Have your long-awaited tiara moment by showcasing how swiftly you can open a beer bottle with your teeth at Oakland’s very own punk rock pageant.

Stories of Old San Francisco Chinatown reading Eastwind Books of Berkeley, 2066 University, Berk; (510) 548-2350, www.asiabookcenter.com. 3 p.m., free. A long walk through Chinatown conjures ghosts – one can’t help cogitating on these streets’ secrets and history. Join Lyle Jan, a San Francisco native, for a journey through his youth spent growing up in Chinatown.

SUNDAY 26

San Francisco Bookstore and Chocolate Crawl Meet at Green Apple Books, 506 Clement, SF. (415) 387-2272, www.greenapplebooks.com. Noon-6 p.m., free. Go on a walking tour of some of San Francisco’s finest bookstores, buy some books, and eat a lot of chocolate.

The Fairy Dogfather signing Books Inc., 3515 California, SF; (415) 221-3666, booksinc.net/SFLaurel. 3 p.m., free. In Alexandra Day’s new book, a dyslexic boy asks for a fairy dogfather instead of a fairy godfather. And we’re so glad he did, because the combination of a fedora-wearing dog-friend and a confused child makes for one adorable picture book.

MONDAY 27

Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning reading Booksmith, 1644 Haight, SF; (415) 863-8688, www.booksmith.com. 7:30 p.m., free. Is it really true that an old dog can never learn a new trick? In his book Guitar Zero, NYU professor Gary Marcus chronicles his own experience learning to play the guitar at age 38, and finds that there isn’t necessarily a cut-off age for mastering a new skill.

TUESDAY 28

“Pritzker Family Lecture” with Claude Lanzmann and Regina Longo Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, 3200 California, SF. (415) 292-1200, www.jccsf.org. 7 p.m., free with reservation. Lanzmann not only lived through the German occupation of France and fought with the French Resistance, but helped document the whole thing as the editor of Les Temps Modernes, Jean Paul Sartre’s political-literary journal. Come pick his brain as he discusses his new memoir, The Patagonian Hare, and his film, Shoah.

Alerts

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WEDNESDAY, FEB. 22

 

Police graft

This event, part of the Shaping SF Public Talk series, will focus on the 1937 Atherton Report that blew the lid off San Francisco police corruption in that era. Speakers Hank Chapot and Chris Agee will address their research, on the report and on SF policing and crime in the 1950s, respectively.

7:30pm, free

CounterPULSE

1310 Mission, SF

www.counterpulse.org/?tribe_events=shaping-sf-public-talk-police-graft-in-san-francisco/

THURSDAY, FEB. 23

Eviction community forum

A panel discussion and chance to access resources for those affected by and interested in the epidemic of foreclosures and evictions in our neighborhoods. Hear from community organizers, foreclosure lawyers, and affected homeowners and tenants. This is organized by Occupy Bernal and will feature Spanish translation and childcare.

7pm, free

Bernal Heights Community Center

515 Cortland, SF

415-821-7617

 

Garden for the environment

Enjoy live music, food from Haight Street Market, a raffle, and a celebration of urban permaculture at the fundraiser. The Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Center celebrates the achievements of Garden for the Environment, a group that maintains a one-acre garden in the Sunset demonstrating the educational, environmental and food-security possibilities of permaculture.

6pm, $5

111 Minna, SF

www.hanc-sf.org/urban-farming-fundraiser-and-party.html

FRIDAY, FEB. 24

 

History of porn

Join author Sam Benjamin and golden age porn star Richard Pacheco for a lively presentation chronicling how porn emerged in its present form by looking back over past decades. The presentation will use non-explicit clips but promises to be funny and informative. Benjamin is the author of American Gangbang: A Love Story.

8pm, $10-30 suggested donation

Center for Sex and Culture

1349 Mission, SF

www.sexandculture.org/

SATURDAY, FEB. 25

Foreclose on Wells Fargo CEO

A demonstration, complete with street theater and education, as activists attempt to foreclose on and evict Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf. According to Occupy Bernal, this fun community event will feature “street theater to foreclose, auction home, and evict the CEO, music, Pride at Work dance mob, and special surprise bidders.”

1pm, free

1090 Chestnut, SF

www.occupybernal.org/wordpress

 

Deep Green Resistance

Have you ever felt that to continue to live on the planet, people must actively dismantle industrial systems which are destroying the earth, perhaps by any means necessary? If so, you should hear author Aric McBay speak about his book Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet. In the book, also by Derrick Jensen and Lierre Keith, the authors discuss the philosophies, tactics and implications of this brand of radical environmental activism.

7:30pm, free

Unite HERE Local 2

209 Golden Gate, SF

www.occupysf.org/calendar-2/

Dick Meister: Celebrating the Farmworkers’ Filipino American Champion

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By Dick Meister

Dick Meister, former Labor Editor of SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. He’s co-author of “A Long Time Coming: The Struggle To Unionize America’s Farm Workers.” Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

The birth date of Cesar Chavez, the late farm workers’ leader, will be celebrated next month, and rightly so.  But it’s well past time we also celebrated the life of probably the most important of the other leaders who played a major role in winning union rights for farm workers and otherwise helping them combat serious exploitation.

That’s Larry Itliong. He died 35 years ago this month at age 63. Itliong got involved in the farm workers’ struggle very early in life, not long after he arrived as a 15-year-old immigrant from the Philippine Islands. He was among some 31,000 Filipino men who came to California in the late 1920s.

They migrated throughout the state doing low-paying farm work, isolated from the rest of society and discriminated against because of their race.  They were prohibited from marrying Caucasians, from buying land and otherwise integrating into the community at large.

The Filipinos were perhaps the most isolated of the groups of penniless workers that growers imported from abroad. That, however, caused the Filipinos to band closely together. They formed extremely efficient work crews to travel the state under the direction of their own leaders, at times even forming their own unions.

They actually struck – a rarity for farm workers at the time – when grape growers in Southern California’s Coachella Valley rejected their pay demands in 1965. The strike was led by Itliong, who was then working for the AFL-CIO’s recently-formed Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee. The strikers got what they wanted in just ten days.

Elsewhere, however, the Filipinos were forced to accept growers’ terms, initially after brief strikes at several vineyards to the north.  But their fortunes changed after they struck grape growers in the Delano area of Kern County, where many Filipinos lived.

Again, they called on Itliong to lead them.  He clearly understood the deep anger and frustration that motivated his fellow Filipinos – an understanding based on his own long experience. Soon after he came to California from the Philippines, he turned to farm work and, while still in his teens, was involved in an unsuccessful tomato pickers strike in Washington State.

After that, Itliong traveled up and down California, trying, as he said,  “to get a job I could make money on . . . Whatever money I made from one job was not enough for me to live on until I got to the next job.” He barely made enough to pay for food and the cigars he seemed to be endlessly chomping. School was out of the question. But Itliong did learn plenty.

Like Chavez, he said he learned that farm workers could not improve their wretched working and living conditions, could not win any rights, if they did not band together to demand decent treatment.

Itliong did not have the intellectual and philosophical bent of Chavez. Nor did he share Chavez’ deep distrust of outside unions and their orthodox tactics. But Itliong was as convinced as Chavez of the need for unionization. And the depth of his conviction made Itliong a natural leader among the Filipinos.

He was readily hired as a full-time organizer by the AFL-CIO’s Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, eventually leading the strike against Delano grape growers that drew worldwide attention, much of it focused on Chavez.

The vineyard strikers were seeking no more than a pay raise of 15 to 20 cents an hour. But growers refused to negotiate with Itliong and meanwhile evicted strikers from the grower-owned camps where they lived.

Growers relied on animosity between Mexican-American and Filipino workers, caused in large part by the growers’ practice of setting up separate camps and work crews for various racial and ethnic groups.

But Chavez, who was then forming a union in Delano for Mexican American workers, did not hesitate when Itliong asked him for help.  Chavez felt that his group, then called the National Farm Workers Association, wasn’t ready to strike itself, but would honor the picket lines of the striking Filipinos.

Yet if they were to honor the picket lines of Itliong’s group, Chavez’ members asked, Why not strike themselves? Why not? And so they did.

That became the grape strike of 1965 that drew worldwide attention and support and ultimately led to the unionization, at long last, of California’s farm workers. It was Larry Itliong and his Filipino members who started it all, and who played an indispensable role throughout the struggle.

Without them there could not have been a strike. Without them, there could not have been the victory of unionization, without them no right for the incredibly oppressed farm workers to bargain with their employers

Within a year of the strike’s launching, Chavez and Itliong’s organizations merged to form what became the widely acclaimed United Farm Workers union – the UFW. Chavez was president, Itliong vice president. Chavez and the UFW’s far more numerous Mexican American members were in firm control.

Itliong never really accepted this situation. He finally resigned from the UFW’s executive board in 1971. He complained that the union’s outnumbered Filipinos “were getting the short end of the stick” from the Anglo lawyers, clergymen and other activists who were Chavez’ chief advisors.

Itliong preferred the more orthodox tactics of the AFL-CIO organizing committee, apparently not realizing it was the unorthodox tactics of Chavez’ group that finally led to unionization – boycotts, non-violence, use of religious and student groups and all manner of other help from outside the labor movement.

But this is not to detract from the extremely important role Itliong played in bringing farm workers a union of their own. He may not have clearly understood the need for new tactics, but he most certainly understood the paramount need of farm workers for unionization, and the great needs of Filipino Americans generally.

Larry Itliong devoted most of his life to seeing that they got much of what they badly needed.

After resigning from the UFW’s executive board, Itliong joined a project to develop desperately needed low-cost housing for the union’s retired Filipino members. Most of them were aging bachelors who had been unable to save much from the pittance growers had paid them for their years of sweating in the fields of California.

Few had families to shelter them now that they could no longer work and so were no longer welcome in the grower-owned labor camps that had been their only homes for decades. They faced living in squalid little rooms on Skid Row, lucky if they got enough to eat, far away from the fellow farm workers who had been their only family.

Itliong was determined that they would have decent housing and helped them get it by playing a key role in construction of a retirement village on union-owned land in Delano. Here they could live among their friends in clean, comfortable rooms, with plenty of food, recreational facilities and medical care.

Dick Meister, former Labor Editor of SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. He’s co-author of “A Long Time Coming: The Struggle To Unionize America’s Farm Workers.” Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

State Bird Provisions

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State Bird Provisions

virginia@sfbg.com

APPETITE I would venture to say Fillmore newcomer State Bird Provisions is the ideal companion to that district’s storied jazz tradition, even though there’s no direct musical connection. The spirit of jazz is present in playful, dim sum-style presentation — and in the improvisatory way that near-legendary husband-wife chef duo Stuart Brioza and Nicole Krasinski (formerly of Rubicon) change the menu almost daily. They adhere to the now-typical seasonal approach, yet are guided by a stronger creative prerogative than most. What sounds good? Where else could a dish be taken? What ingredients are new? Plates materialize on carts or trays like flashing jazz riffs, of the moment but never rootless.

The actual soundtrack is more Johnny Cash than John Coltrane: this fits the casual, toned-down setting, with pegboard walls and a front kitchen where cooks greet your arrival. After multiple visits since the restaurant opened two months ago, the staff remembers me, and Brioza is up front with a warm welcome.

A short, thoughtful selection of bottled beers, teas, wines by the glass, and rotating house lassis (fennel salted yogurt, coconut milk persimmon) helps orient visitors. And for those who fear the unknown, the menu lists a handful of “main” dishes. I’d recommend you go elsewhere if you want predictability. God knows there’s more than enough comfort food and traditional menus out there.

The joy of State Bird is that it’s unlike anywhere else. I find larger plates satisfying, even habit-forming, particularly the must-order CA State Bird (a quail, in case you were wondering). This is the one carryover from Brioza’s Rubicon days, the bird crusted in pumpkin seeds and cumin. But small plates offer the wider range of thrills. I am reluctant to even use the played-out term “small plates,” so keep that free-flowing, dim sum spirit in mind. Most dishes fall within the $5–$9 range, and everything on the menu is roughly $2–$18. When one adds up the final check, the variety is amazing given the per person price (on my visits, $30–$40 without drink).

In any case, a full printed list wouldn’t do the dishes justice. Take, for example, the basic-sounding seven pepper flatbread with oxtail (peppers used include long pepper and madras). I’ve seen a lot of oxtail and even more flatbread. This one is different. Upon first visit, the flaky, twisted bread, which forms a bit of bowl in which to pour braised, tender oxtail, transported me to Eastern Europe. It recalled crispy, fried langos bread from my travels in Hungary. (Chef Nick Balla at Bar Tartine does a top notch langos, by the way.). It speaks to the depth of Brioza’s influences and talent that a dish could evoke tradition while being one-of-a-kind. By my next visit, the dish shifted in shape, now topped with lentils and cream. This time its spice profile conjured Morocco and Spain, another time India. Whatever the incarnation, this may be my favorite.

There are countless delights: spanking fresh raw tuna is dashi-poached, coated in toasted quinoa with smoky bonito rosemary aioli, tossed with chrysanthemum leaves. Duck liver mousse is silky and ridiculously good (almost dessert-like) with almond financier cakes. Beef is served in three cuts — brisket, short ribs, chuck — on a bed of fried nettles with pomegranate.

Vegetarian dishes are just as captivating. Mushrooms arrive coated in hazelnut streusel with vanilla cream. Beets are crusted in rye grain, perked up with horseradish-ale cream. Char-grilled chicories are tossed with lemon, olive oil, dates, and almonds over spicy yogurt.

Bites (less than $6) are equally interesting. Celery root curd shows up in different ways: in a raw chicken ‘salad,’ bright with Buddha’s hand citrus, or in a jar of creamy smoked sturgeon and sea urchin.

Krasinski extends the inspiration to unusual desserts, sometimes with welcome savory notes. Two-dollar shots of peanut milk gently sweetened with muscovado (an unrefined brown sugar) are imperative. They call it “world peace” peanut milk because of the happy feelings it invokes. Milk chocolate and sesame mix with candied clementines and cocoa jam, the clincher being a crispy little wafer of chocolate, sesame, and tahini. Pear brandy and long pepper make winning companions in sabayon form — a finish on a high note.

STATE BIRD PROVISIONS

1529 Fillmore, SF.

(415) 795-1273

www.statebirdsf.com

Subscribe to Virgina’s twice-monthly newsletter The Perfect Spot, www.theperfectspotsf.com

 

On the Cheap Listings

Andrew Lam
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On the Cheap listings are compiled by Soojin Chang. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

WEDNESDAY 15

Radical Directing Lecture Series: Shari Frilot San Francisco Art Institute, 800 Chestnut, SF. (415) 771-7020, www.sfai.edu. 7:30 p.m., free. Shari Frilot is the curator of the Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier Program. In this lecture, she will discuss the cinematic works that are being created at the crossroads where art, film, and new media technology meet.

THURSDAY 16

“Coloring Outside the Lines: Black Cartoonists As Social Commentators” panel discussion City College of San Francisco John Adams Campus, 1835 Hayes, SF. (415) 239-3580, www.ccsf.edu. 1:30 p.m.-3:30 p.m., free. Cartoonists are like modern jesters — they poke fun and offer criticism, but we can’t help but love them. Nowhere is this more apparent than in funnies that deal with race in our society. Join curator Kheven LaGrone and guests in a discussion of how black cartoonists have brought in a wide range of perspectives to racial issues and social prejudices.

“Project Censored with Mickey Huff” book release event Modern Times Bookstore Collective, 2919 24th St, SF. (415) 282-9246, www.mtbs.com. 7 p.m., free. Mainstream media seems to air more stories about cats running onto soccer pitches and M.I.A.’s middle finger than relevant news. Author Mickey Huff presents the top 25 underreported news stories you may have missed, and delves in to censorship issues in the relentless fight against Big Media.

“Beyond Cage-Free” panel discussion Port Commission Hearing Room, Ferry Building, 1 Embarcadero, SF. (415) 291-3276, www.cuesa.org. 6:30 p.m.-8:30 p.m., $5 suggested donation. The cage-free label promises eggs from unpenned hens, but can belie farm environments that are much more tragic than the happy picture on cartons would lead us to believe. Join the Center for Urban Education and Sustainable Agriculture in a panel discussion with Lexicon of Sustainability founder Douglas Gayeton, Ferry Plaza farmers, and local ranch owners.

San Francisco Childhood: Memories of a Great City Seen Through the Eyes of Its Children author discussion Green Arcade, 1680 Market, SF. (415) 431-6800, www.thegreenarcade.com. 7 p.m., free. This city has always been a hoot. Editor and author John van der Zee has put together writings dedicated to the magic of San Francisco by figures like Joe DiMaggio, Jerry Garcia, Margaret Cho, and Carol Channing. Come hear about how the city felt to them, and reflect on whether it’s the same for you today.

FRIDAY 17

SF Beer Olympics Impala, 501 Broadway, SF. (415) 982-5299, www.impalasf.com. 8:30 p.m., $10. To start the night, compete in a game of flip cup, beer pong, and relays with strangers, friends, and soon-to-be friends. Afterwards, Olympic champions and losers are welcome to meander upstairs for free admission to the Impala night club.

A night with photographer Robert Altman Wix Lounge, 3169 22nd St, SF. (415) 329-4609, www.wixloungesf.com. 7-10 p.m., free. Robert Altman not only survived the 1960’s but photographed some of the best parts of it. He will be talking about his work for Rolling Stone and his experiences photographing icons like Mick Jagger and Bill Graham. Come hang out with this all-around cool dude.

SATURDAY 18

“A Love Supreme” Harlem Renaissance art celebration First Unitarian Church of Oakland, 685 14th St, Oakl. (510) 893-6129, www.uuoakland.org. 6 p.m.-9 p.m., donations accepted. The Harlem Renaissance brought on an explosion of culture and redefined music, art, and literature in American history. Join local queer poets of color in a delicious potluck dinner and music-poetry session to celebrate how cultural richness and literary splendor have not stopped growing.

The Dark Wave book release party Fecal Face Dot Gallery, 2277 Mission, SF. (415) 500-2166, www.ffdg.net. 6-9 p.m., free. You may know Jay Howell from his zine Punks Git Cut! where he sketched out an assortment of naked people, dogs, and boners. Howell is now bringing his majestic artwork as the backdrop of his new book — a literary tale of a black metal band’s disenchanted lead singer.

SUNDAY 19

Art Beat Bazaar music, poetry, and pop-up indie-mart Starry Plough, 3101 Shattuck, Berk. (519) 841-2082, www.starryploughpub.com. 3-7 p.m., free. This is the first of the monthly community event Art Beat Foundation will be hosting as a way to showcase local musicians, spoken word artists, comedians, and visual artists. Let folk-rock band Upstairs Downstairs be the musical soundtrack to your trip to the quirky pop-up store, where you will find handmade treasures by artists like Cori Crooks and Brownie 510

Yiddish sing-along with Sharon Bernstein Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, 3200 California, SF. (415) 292-1200, www.jccsf.org. 5-6:30 p.m., free. This musical event is one part of KlezCalifornia’s Yiddish Culture Festival, a three-day event for anyone who is interested in Yiddish literature, interactions between musical cultures, klezmer music, and/or Eastern European Jewish history. Lyric books will be provided.

MONDAY 20

Open mic night with Les Gottesman and Bill Crossman Bird and Beckett Books and Records, 653 Chenery, SF. (415) 586-3733, www.birdbeckett.com. 7 p.m., free. Les Gottesman and Bill Crossman are poets, activists, and professors who are coming to share their latest and favorite works in this literary night. Gottesman’s words are said to be goosebump-invoking and Crossman’s smooth piano skills are not to be missed.

TUESDAY 21

“Laissez les bons temps rouler” Mardis Gras party Jazz Heritage Center, 1320 Fillmore, SF. (415) 346-5299, www.thefillmoredistrict.com. 5 p.m., $5 for wristbands. Make it a merry Fat Tuesday this year by going out to the Fillmore District for a neighborhood party of stilt walkers, jugglers, and face painters. 10 Fillmore Street venues will have live music and Mardi Gras-themed drinks and treats for under 10 dollars.

“Youthquake: High Style in the Swinging Sixties” American Decorative Arts forum and exhibit Koret Auditorium at de Young Museum, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden, SF. (415) 750-3600, www.deyoung.famsf.org. 7 p.m., $15. Long hair and bellbottoms marked the fashion and music scene during the 1960’s, and a similarly defiant idiosyncrasy took over home décor. Join Mitchell Owens of Architectural Digest in a lecture on the bold and innovative interior style moves that were made during the exuberance of the youthquake.

“Feast of Words: A Literary Potluck” SOMArts Cultural Center, 934 Brannan, SF. (415) 552-1770, www.feastofwords.somarts.org. 7-9 p.m., $10 in advance; $5 with a potluck dish; $12 at door. Writers are often thought of as caffeine junkies who survive off of coffee and cigarettes. But hey, we eat just like any other Joe Schmo. At this literary event, foodies and writers unite to share (both food and literature) and learn about local cultures and flavors.

Localized Appreesh: Bhi Bhiman

Tony Robles
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Localized Appreesh is our weekly thank-you column to the musicians that make the Bay. To be considered, contact emilysavage@sfbg.com.

Bhi Bhiman manages a joke when he coolly plucks bluesy guitar while singing about kimchi on “Kimchee Line” off his new album Bhiman (“it’s cabbage time”). It’s just not the food you’d expect to hear name-checked in a folky 1920s blues-style standard. (Though on another track, “Ballerina,” he does mention beans.) Despite this wry wink, his songs have an inherent sadness to them, which only makes more intriguing that irreverent style of telling socially conscious stories with lyrics you just wouldn’t quite imagine there in another time period. It’s the contemporary take on the classic style.

He has been referred to as the “Sri Lankan Woody Guthrie,” but that sort of makes me cringe, for a number of reasons. Though it’s true they both sing stories of the downtrodden (check “Guttersnipe” below). But Bhiman is a musician who needn’t be reduced to borderline comparisons based partially on ancestry. He’s got a style his own, and was born in St. Louis. This week, the SF-based musician celebrates the release of Bhiman with a show Sat/18 at Bottom of the Hill.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALAYYMwQMWQ

Year and location of origin: Born 1982, St. Louis, USA, Earth.

Motto: Badabing Badaboom.

Description of sound in 10 words or less: Socially aware country blues and soul.

Instrumentation: Acoustic guitar, vocals.

Most recent release: BHIMAN (BooCoo) – released Jan. 24, 2012.

Best part about life as a Bay Area musician: Diversity of culture

Worst part about life as a Bay Area musician: Cost of living

First album ever purchased: Michael Jackson’s Dangerous.

Most recent album purchased/borrowed from the Web: Booker T Jones, The Road From Memphis.

Favorite local eatery and dish: There’s a new Korean place called Manna that is really good and reasonably priced (incredibly important). I get the soft tofu soup with pork.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUxknehMG6E

Bhi Bhiman
With Vandella and Misisipi Mike & Cree Rider opening
Sat/18, 8:30pm, $12
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
www.bottomofthehill.com

Bike-borne tacos are coming! But not without your help

Andrew Lam
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Now, Rose “Slam” Johnson’s Hot Bike would not be the first taco bike in the Bay Area. That honor, of course, is due to Alfonso Dominguez’s El Taco Bike. But Hot Bike does have something going for it, besides the adorableness of its creator (one of our Hot Pink List designees from last year’s Queer Issue). Where Dominguez’s ride was merely the storage receptacle for delicious steamed tacos de canasta, Johnson’s will serve as an actual portable kitchen on a Yuba Mundo utility bike. That’s right — vegan tacos made to order. 

She’s looking to raise $5,000 to make her dream a reality. Yes, that means a Kickstarter. But the video’s cute too! Look at it: 

Potential offerings for the Hot Bike include roasted veggies and sweet beans (!), each topped with Johnson’s signature beet coleslaw. The project is the culmination of many years of dreaming by the queer community activist, who has done work with the SF Bike Coalition’s Bike to School program, AIDS Life Cycle, the YMCA’s bike program, and the LGBT Center’s youth meal nights. She’s into the way that food has the power to bring people together. And she lives for biking — Johnson often spends the summer on the back of two wheels, having trekked up and down both coasts. 

Johnson plans to focus on catering events, or posting up alongside other food carts. I asked her during our recent interview on the bench outside of the 24th Street Philz Coffee why she wouldn’t be into doing the jingle-jangle ice cream truck thing (visions of door-to-door taco service pinging about my head) and she said it had to do with a concept she calls the “street food bubble.” See, people it seems are hesitant to buy tacos off the street from somebody whose kitchen hygiene skills are unproven. That’s why she likes to vend her wares in more established areas. 

“Once it’s popped, it’s popped,” Johnson continued. “But yeah, otherwise people are skeptical of selling food on the street.”

Overcome what skepticism remaining in your heart on Sun/26, when she takes her outfit (minus bike, that’s not built yet) over to Public Works for the club’s Stardust Sunday party featuring the First Church of the Sacred Silversexual, Mancub, and 8ball of the Space Cowboys. 

Stardust Sunday feat. tacos by Hot Bike

Sun/26 8 p.m.-12:30 a.m., $5 presale

Public Works

161 Erie, SF

www.publicsf.com

The Performant: Strangelove

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“City of Lost Souls” at ATA, and “Awkward Dinner Party” at the EXIT Theatre, subverted the Valentine spirit.

Talk about a hot mess. The florid, fluid, City of Lost Souls (1983), Rosa von Praunheim’s seldom-screened, “transgendered ex-pat food-fight sex-circus musical extravaganza” begins with a motley cast of unapologetic misfits sweeping up a trashed-out Berlin burger joint, the “Hamburger Königin” (Burger Queen). Shimmying on the counter, falling out of her lingerie, punk rock’s first transwoman cult darling, Jayne County, belts out “The Burger Queen Blues” while her fellow wage slaves, Loretta (Lorraine Muthke), Gary (Gary Miller), and Joaquin (Joaquin La Habana) gyrate suggestively across the linoleum until the boss-lady, Angie Stardust (as herself), a regal, “old school” transsexual wrapped in an enormous fur coat, curtails their goofy antics with a whistle and megaphone.

In stern German she orders them back to work—preparing for the next round of abusive food fights, which characterize the “service” at her uniquely unappetizing restaurant. A Theatre of the Ridiculous-style foray into the secret lives of gender outlaw ex-pats in flirty, dirty Berlin, “Lost Souls” isn’t your typical romance—but it’s a love story all the same.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOh0bn03xt4

Though much of the film adheres to just the merest suggestion of plot, the characters that emerge from its glitter-dusted frenzy are well worth getting to know. Angie Stardust in particular is given reign to share not just her conflicted opinions of Germans and Germany, but also her stories of childhood abuse, reminiscences of her career as a club singer in New York, and her longing for gender-reassignment surgery.

A model matriarch of the tough-love variety, she alternately flatters and bullies her employees and tenants of her Pension: the glamorous Southern trannie Tara O’Hara, the “sexual trapeze” artists Tron von Hollywood and Judith Flex (who also narrates much of the film in humorously-exaggeratedly, American-accented German), the frail, pouty Loretta, trashy, spotlight-seeking Lila (Jayne County), and downright spooky Gary—not just a burger-flipper with a smoking hot dancer’s body, but a quasi-cult leader and practitioner of erotic black magic.

Presented at ATA by New York’s Dirty Looks film series, the film manages to wear serious commentary on racism, homophobia and transphobia, ageism, politics, abortion, and sexual identity on its gold lamé sleeve, while shamelessly rocking shredded pantyhose and too much mascara, masturbating from the perch of a flying trapeze, serving dog turds as dinner, and billing writhing orgies with nubile bodies as “group therapy”. Recently restored, this historical, hysterical document of Berlin-dwelling sexual revolutionaries provides giddy enjoyment alongside its food (fight) for thought, from Jayne County’s signature grimaces, to Tron von Hollywood’s rippling abs.

While no dinner is so awkward as one in which dog turds serve as the meat, improv concept show “Awkward Dinner Party” rallied with a boorish dinner guest (John Kovacevich) who turned out to be a 4000 year-old deity with a crush on the hostess (Lisa Rowland), a gracious retiree saving up for a Winnebago with mild-mannered husband Frank (Dave Dennison). Conceptualized and performed by Rowland and Dennison, every “Awkward Dinner Party” features a different guest star, and as a completely improvised work, each night promises to be its own unique smorgasbord.

What remains a constant is the awkward — the dinner guest you can’t get rid of no matter how boring (or scary) they might be, the third wheel who reminds you why you became a coupled two-wheeler in the first place. A nomadic production, ADP will be serving its next tasty improv at Noh Space in April. No jacket required, but an RSVP is always a nice gesture.

Something to celebrate: 4 local standouts from SF Beer Week’s opening pours

Andrew Lam
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The first drinkers to make it into the SF Beer Week opening celebration on Friday, January 10 had the run of the taps, and with over 50 breweries pouring two to six beers apiece in this year’s more spacious Concourse Exhibition Center venue, that counted for a lot. Yet, for some reason, the two guys at the head of the line were still speed walking. Maybe it was a preemptive strike against beer gut. 

Sorry gents, but it’s a losing battle. Calorie counting was a loser’s game on Friday, but for anyone interested in the best and brightest of San Francisco suds, it was a can’t-miss situation. Here were some of the standouts — all local SF brews:

Almanac: SF’s fledgling Almanac brewery poured my first beers of the Week, and subsequently walked with my heart. The gypsy brewer (so named because it still doesn’t have its own facilities) makes small batch beers with fruit from featured Northern California farms — after the batch is made, it may never come back. It was pouring three of its fruit-based beers on Friday: the Belgian golden strong blackberry, farmhouse pale ale plum, and the winter wit orange and ginger. This week, the upstart is pairing with some of the city’s foodie flocking points to create some incredible limited edition products made with its beers: Dynamo Doughnuts,Humphrey Slocombe, and Wing Wings. Plus tonight (Mon/13), the brewery will be pairing up with Speakeasy and Pacific Brewing Laboratories to provide drinks during the hog butchering lesson and feast at the Beast and the Hare for all you carnivores. 

SF Beer Week at the Concourse Exhibition Center. It really was a sausage fest. 

Pacific Brewing Laboratories: “It’s been so amazing,” said Pacific Brewing Laboratories‘ Patrick Horn. Horn — who Guardian readers will remember from his local snack-beer pairings in last fall’s Beer Issue — was talking about his nanobrewery’s recent transition into non-nano — a.k.a, the SoMa outfit’s appearance in stores and bars around the city. Horn says the only trouble his outfit has been having is keeping up with the demand for its Squid Ink and Nautilus saison, which as it happens were the two brews he was pouring on Friday. 

Shmaltz: I was partial, as always, to the SF-born Shmaltz‘s Albino Python, with its notes of ginger, sweet orange peel, and crushed fennell. Another recent happening: the brewery’s developed a new recipe for its Genesis dry hopped session ale, which it hardly ever does. Once a cross between an amber and a pale ale, Shmaltz employee Leah Harmatz says the new recipe was created so that it would be “more crisp.” I had to agree. Shmaltz’s mega carny food beer dinner on Wed/15 is probably going to be the most decadently weird night of Beer Week — set at Elk Lodge No. 3, attendees will enjoy their comestibles with performances by sideshow wackos as a garnish. 

Southern Pacific Brewing: This brand-new brewery‘s recently opened brewery-pub-restaurant in the Mission has to be one of the neighborhood’s most exciting new spaces — vast and airy, the multilevel seating is going to be a place to beat in the Indian summer months when everyone wants to kick back with their favorite uber-local microbrew. On Friday, it was pouring its extra India pale ale and black ale, only two of a wide array of beers it makes on-site in their warehouse building. 

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