food

FEAST: 6 hot C-cups

Andrew Lam
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FEAST: 6 hot C-cups

A funny thing happened on the way to adulthood: hot chocolate became interesting. Remembered by most Americans as the insipid, lukewarm, desiccated powder-based drink of ice rinks (often dispensed from a machine that simultaneously squirts water and dark matter into your cup), 21st century big-kid hot chocolate has heat, depth, spice, richness, variety. It is, in short, both hot and chocolate. And let’s not forget innovations in topping technology. Today’s hot chocolatiers don’t open a bag of petroleum-based white things or spray on the ReddiWip — they make their own marshmallows and whipped cream.

Hot chocolate is also one drink you never find yourself saying, “If only I hadn’t had that last (fill in cocktail) … ” Indeed, researchers at Cornell found that hot chocolate has more antioxidants per cup than red wine or tea. So as we enter hot chocolate season — our summer, which they call “autumn” on the rest of the continent — raise a cup to your health. 

BOULETTE’S LARDER

In the third season of Dexter, top cop Maria has a pair of bonding experiences with women that are consummated with two words “ganache frosting.” Ganache — that rich, delicious, thick, delicious, dense, delicious mix of chocolate and cream — is the base element of Boulette’s singular cup of Eastern European-style hot chocolate. All day long, Boulette’s chefs keep a pan of molten ganache simmering in anticipation of its HC fans. The result is hot chocolate so thick you almost need a spoon, and so satisfying you can omit that dollop of cream.

One Ferry Building # 48, SF (415) 399-1155. www.boulette’slarder.com


COCO LUXE

This pretty-in-pink Haight Street anomaly makes eight kinds of hot chocolate (including a green tea version for serious antioxidant-counters) plus a milk-free drink for all those people who can’t, won’t, or don’t swing bovine. Billed as warm chocolate pudding, the molten concoction blends dark chocolate and hot water until it’s only navigable by spoon. Like our beloved Earth, it also retains its molten core, so it can be toyed with for some time without losing any of its hot, thick mojo. Coco Luxe also has solid chocolates, gorgeous ones that look like mini wall art. And let’s face it, we all need a little solid food occasionally to add weight and depth to our c-cups.

1673 Haight SF. (415) 367-4012. www.coco-luxe.com


CHRISTOPHER ELBOW CHOCOLATES

When the abundant novelty of SF’s innovative hot chocolate scene has worn off, head to this sleek corner store for even more innovation. The boutique chocolatier, which originated in Kansas City, Mo., has all the customary spicy, dark, and milky brews you’ll find at many of our other HC providers — along with some never-before-seen variations spiked with ginger, curry, and coconut milk. Christopher Elbow also makes powdered versions of some of its best-selling drinking chocolates, which make a lovely nyah-nyah-nyah gift for friends still living in Hershey’s just-add-water-powdered-packet land.

401 Hayes, SF. (415) 355-1105. www.elbowchocolates.com


FIVE STAR TRUFFLES

You gotta love this under appreciated one-man operation, where the one man makes your cup by shaving generous helpings of his superlative block chocolate into every liquid cup. The price is right — $2.75 for 16 ounces — and the one man always offers one of his handmade truffles on the house. The one man also exhibits a sincere liberalism about how much milkfat is really necessary for hot chocolate. If you want nonfat hot chocolate (no judgments!), so be it. With base chocolate this good, you won’t miss the milkfat.

411 Divisadero, SF. (415) 552-5128, www.fivestartruffles.com

BI-RITE CREAMERY

Although most people waiting in line at Bi-Rite see only the ice cream and soft-serve, hot chocolate heads can’t help but notice, tucked as it is on the counter behind the cookies, la machine. A combination hot plate-whirligig, Bi-Rite’s single-purpose hot chocolate machine (rumored to have been developed by SF’s own Recchiuti) keeps its brew in a perpetual state of warmth and agitation. What does this mean, besides one terrific cup? No waiting! Traditionalists all the way, Bi-Rite uses only ground chocolate, cocoa, sugar, and milk. A word of warning, though: Bi-Rite only makes HC during the winter (other people’s winter) and on unusually cold or rainy days. Pray for rain.

3692 18th St., SF. (415) 626-5600. www.biritecreamery.com


CHILANGO

Most people come to this Mexican restaurant — and rightly so — for the food. But if you’re here and have postpriandial room, you’ll notice hot chocolate on Chilango’s dessert menu, right up there with flan and churros. But like any good dessert, Chilango’s hot chocolate takes time — the chefs stir each cup over the stove. Let’s face facts, all the delicious Mexican and spicy hot chocolate around town originated from … Mexican hot chocolate. Get the real deal here. And never forget that nothing brings out the flavor of churros like dipping them in hot chocolate.

5 Church, SF. (415) 552-5700. www.chilangococina.com 

 

 

FEAST: 5 sardinerias

Andrew Lam
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FEAST: 5 sardinerias

When it comes to sardines, you have to think outside the earthquake shelter. On the flavor-o-meter, the tinned food of last resort (served on tarps with Saltines and stale water) bears no resemblance to its wild, fresh self. Even a humble sardine doesn’t deserve to be jammed in like a sardine, oil slicked, and left to age in the farthest reaches of the cupboard.

As several San Francisco eateries are ably proving, sardines, when treated with respect, are a tasty addition to the dining table. And healthy. And sustainable (they’re on the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Super Green list!) Everyone from Andrew Weil to the Italian grandmother we all wish we had proclaim the virtues of the pungent silver herring. And with good reason: its tiny, 25-calorie body is packed with essential fatty acids, iron, protein, and calcium.

Let’s face it, the good people of Sardinia didn’t get their beautiful skin and convivial personalities from eating schweinebraten on spätzle. They’re all high on EFAs. Sardine EFAs.

PESCE

Pesce was one of the first and finest restaurants to introduce San Franciscans to the joys of sardine cuisine. The casual Russian Hill restaurant offers small plates of fish, pasta, and vegetables (and please, can we call it cicchetti, as they do, instead of “Italian tapas”?) patterned on the cooking of Venice. Pesce serves its sardines (all from Monterey Bay) simply — grilled, on a bed of mixed greens and pickled vegetables with a wedge of lemon. The result is tart, briny, and clean. If you’re still on the fence about sardines, Pesce is the place that will convert you to a bona fide a-fishyanado.

2227 Polk, SF. (415) 928-8025. www.pescesf.com

RAGAZZA

In Provence, shmear means aoli. They put it on meat; they put it on vegetables; they put it on fries; they put it on fish. Heck, they probably put it on ice cream. At Ragazza, the new relative of Glen Park’s Gialina Pizzeria on Divis, the chefs splat a huge dollop of it on its sardines. Apart from the aoli, Ragazza takes an Italianesque approach, stuffing them with an earthy mixture of breadcrumbs, olive oil, garlic, oregano, and onion and baking them in the restaurant’s gas-fired Wood Stone oven. The result is a crispy exterior over sardines that almost melt away on the fork. Add some mixed greens and a robust Italian red and you can practically feel your arteries unclogging. Oh, Ragazza also has pizza.

311 Divisadero, SF. (415) 255-1133. www.ragazzasf.com

NOPA

There’s locavore, 100-mile radius locavore, and there’s ultra-loca, five-mile radius locavore. While most of the city’s sardine-serving restaurants get their sardines from Monterey Bay, Nopa gets its from our very own San Francisco Bay. This is great news because our local sardines nearly went extinct in the 1950s. And — sardine cognoscenti consider the Pacific sardine as flavorful as those on the Sardinian coast (take that, overpriced cans from Norway). Speaking of flavorful, Nopa serves the little San Franciscans baked in its wood-fire oven with fingerling potatoes and frisee. The only thing missing is an order of flatbread, a gems salad, wine, and the burnt honey crème brulee.

560 Divisadero, SF. (415) 864-8643. www.nopasf.com

BARBACCO ENO TRATTORIA

You have to give Barbacco credit. Unlike most of the restaurants that have rediscovered the sardine, Barbacco doesn’t seem to be operating on the principle that sardines are an after-5 p.m.-only food. Although not exactly in the let’s-have-herrings-for-breakfast! camp, Barbacco at least believes that noon is a perfectly reasonable time to start the jonesing. The bustling, suits-heavy Financial District eatery is the creator of what may be the city’s only sardine sandwich (if this isn’t true, we’d like to know). Barbacco also breaks the don’t-get-too-weird-with-sardines taboo, pairing its sardines with a hefty piece of seared calamari. Not most people’s first choicem perhaps, but the two get along swimmingly, especially when served on an Acme torpedo roll and slathered with arugula and Barbacco’s housemade “roasted tomatoe condimento.”

220 California, SF. (415) 955-1919. www.barbaccosf.com

FERRY PLAZA SEAFOOD

When you don’t want others dictating what you can and can’t have on your sardines, duck into Ferry Plaza Seafood. This celebrated purveyor of all things aquatic sells wild, locally caught sardines (and by this we mean our our SF as well as Monterey bay) when available. “We love sardines,” said one salty staffer. “Especially the local ones. They just glisten.” They recommend bringing out the glisten by brushing with olive oil, salt, and pepper; grilling a few minutes on each side; and dressing with lemon. Call first for availability, these guys swim in and out of supply.

One Ferry Building, #11B, SF. (415) 274-2561. www.ferryplazaseafood.com 

 

FEAST: 7 burrito-free late nights

Andrew Lam
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FEAST: 7 burrito-free late nights

We’re spoiled rotten living in the city where if you fling an ankle boot, it’s bound to hit a taqueria open past last call. Its like a burrito vortex — go out in San Francisco and at some point you will get wrapped up in flour tortilla and snuggle in with your old buddies, carnitas and shredded cheese. But gooey and warm as it is in there, you must resist the pull to turn into a burrito. I know, I know, we’re gonna hold your hand through this one. We’ve assembled the meeting places for Burritos Anonymous: purveyors of snacks so fine — and open at least until 1 a.m. on weekends — that your frijoles negros withdrawal-twitches will subside and your post-bar, pre-bed caloric intake will rejoin your regularly programmed San Francisco culinary adventuring. We’re talking calamari bulgogi, vegan smoked duck sandwiches, chilaquiles, pambazos, and beef brisket with a side of cucumber salad. We’re talking late night. Clip this page and store it near your bus fare.

TOYOSE

There’s a converted garage in the heart of the Sunset District stuffed with carousing young’uns into the wee hours. Its charmingly narrow dining area has enough foliage and hanging screens between tables to hide 1 a.m. sloppiness — and enough Korean delicacies to entertain the most rabble-rousing group for hours. Try their noodle dishes, which can feed four with their toss-it-yourself mounds of veggies, cold rice noodles, and chile sauce. House favorites include the seafood pancake, kimchee fried rice, bulgogi, soju smoothies, and the damn largest bottles of Korean lager seen this side of the Pacific.

Open until 2 a.m. daily.

3814 Noriega, SF, (415) 731-0232


NOMBE

A hip izakaya whose name roughly translates to “he who doesn’t remember the walk over.” Nombe’s menu can be boggling, but that doesn’t detract a smidge from the table of pickled daikon, stewed onion pork belly, steaming bowls of ramen, and sake flights that is apt to materialize after speaking with the friendly serving staff. Motor skills eschewing spoons and forks for the moment? Play swords with something off the tasty skewer menu.

Open until 2 a.m. weekends

2491 Mission, SF. (415) 681-7150. www.nombesf.com

REACTION RESTAURANT

When the owners of all-ages art-punk venue Sub-mission decided to open up a dining room next door, they kept it accessible. Reaction’s got a menu full of little-seen Mexico City specialties that won’t break the bank of their underage clientele, but still don’t relapse into the boring realm that sub–$5 food often falls. Our favorite is the pambazo, a roll that’s been dipped in red sauce, grilled, then stuffed with your choice of meats or beans. You’ll also find huaraches, gorditas, and burgers — all in a sleek, red and black ambience that won’t harsh your buzz.

Open until 3 a.m. weekends

2183 Mission, SF. (415) 552-8200

J & V CAFE

There’s late night, and there’s late night. If the sun’s coming up and you’re not ready to mix and mingle with the morning suits, head to Bayview. Not that J & V will be filled with drunken sops like you — a well-turned, few-frills cafe located in the middle of SF’s wholesale produce market, the work day here begins in the dark of the night. Standard diner fare, decent espresso, a few quality Mexican specials — no b-words, but plenty of heaping chilaquiles plates to palliate that come-down.

1 a.m.-2 p.m. Mon.-Fri.

2095 Jerrold, SF. (415) 821-7786. www.jandvcatering.com

THE LIBERTIES

A place that takes no liberties with the notion of good pub food available when you need it most. The Liberties offers stomach-liners like mashed potato-topped cottage pie, bangers, and Anglo-happy chicken curry for those who’d rather have their biggest meal of the day post their biggest pints of the day.

Open until 2 a.m. weekends

998 Guerrero, SF. (415) 282-6789. www.theliberties.com

TOMMY’S JOYNT

With an exterior decorated in shades of circus tent, the 63-year old legend is a great place for Mom’s cooking at hours Momma woulda freaked had you started rustling around in the kitchen. Hofbrau service has you line up with a tray and point to which braised meat and starch you’d like heaped on your plate. Beef brisket? Buffalo stew (their specialty)? Veggiesaurus? No worries. Scoops of pasta salad, greens, and potatoes await.

Open until 1:40 a.m. daily.

1101 Geary, SF. (415) 775-4216. www.tommysjoynt.com

LOVE N HAIGHT DELI & CAFE

Stating the obvious: vegans get short shrift when it comes to late night. Seriously, how often can you order the same thing Carnivorous Carl is having … minus the protein and sauce? Unfair. Pay it no mind — with Love N Haight’s head-whirlingly large menu of vegan (and some meat) sandwiches, you’ve got the upper hand. Sure, the fake roast duck may taste similar to the fish and the chicken — but its a chewy, satisfying kind of same.

Open until 2 a.m. weekends.

553 Haight, SF. (415) 252-8190 

 

 

Appetite: Director Jean-Luc Naret dishes on SF Michelin Guide 2011

Andrew Lam
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Appetite: Director Jean-Luc Naret dishes on SF Michelin Guide 2011

Hubbub‘s the word in the food world this week surrounding the release of the 2011 Michelin Guide San Francisco, the restaurant ranking organization’s fifth Bay Area edition. The venerable food institution is entering into its 111th year, having gained a strong following in New York and San Francisco and anticipating an upcoming launch in Chicago (next time, LA).

Hot topics around the champagne cooler? Chez Panisse losing its star and The Restaurant at Meadowood achieving the rare feat of gaining three stars (making it and French Laundry the only Bay Area ‘straunts to make the grade). Read on for Michelin Jean Luc Naret’s reflections and a list of the Bay’s Michelin-honored restaurants for 2011.

I chatted with Naret — a charming Frenchman based in Paris who generally spends three weeks out of every month traveling around the globe — over espresso at the Slanted Door yesterday. On an idyllic October day, the nostalgic glow on the Bay was befitting — Naret is departing Michelin in January after seven years with the company, though he’ll stay tied to its future in a consulting role.

Naret describes San Francisco as “one of the finest culinary regions in the world… I love this place. It’s a region where I spend a lot of time”. He hints that he’s considering getting a place in Marin, maybe Tiburon, laughingly adding, “So, if anyone is listening?” 

What does the arbiter of taste see as our unique contribution in the food realm? Naret names categories where the Bay Area excels: technique (“You don’t burn anything anymore” he jokes, I think) and produce. He claims the general culinary mindset changed here in large part due to the “willingness of chefs” to grow or source every kind of produce locally, not to mention the development of talent that was necessary “to make it perfect”. 

“Fifteen years ago in France we never heard the word ‘organic'”, Naret says. “That came from here. [The Bay Area] has a big influence — similar to Japan — where seasonality is also very important”. 

Successfully launching Michelin in America was one of Naret’s key accomplishment during his years as director, so what does he see as the US’ greatest culinary strength? In one word: “Diversity”. He mentions the myriad of cuisines available. “You can get anything in New York,” he says, adding that the breadth of food culture in our great cities enriches the dining world.  

Looking back on the last seven years, Naret shared that his biggest surprise came when he joined Michelin from the outside, one of only six directors to do so since 1900. He pushed boundaries in the company by asking questions like: “Why not go to the States? To Asia?” 

He’s delighted to see that seven years later — he planned on acting in the post for no longer than five — he’s managed to leave a legacy that feels complete. “Everything we said we’d do, we’ve done. We’ve reached new territories.” He says the future of Michelin includes the ranking system’s continued expansion to other cities — along with growth in technology output like the global spread of Michelin iPhone apps already common in Europe. 

All signs show that the world is ready. Heads of state and people from Michelin-less countries — Singapore among them — have contacted Naret him to ask when their cities will be getting their own guides. In Tokyo (which now stands as the city with the most three star restaurants in the world) the area’s first Michelin guide sold 150,000 copies in a shocking 24 hours. It would appear that the massive influence Michelin has long held in Europe has a firm grasp on epicures around the world. 

Naret keeps mum about the mysterious business venture he’ll launch promptly after leaving Michelin after a mere two weeks vacation. On this October day, he’s in reflection mode: “I’m very happy to leave a beautiful legacy”. 

The 2011 SF Michelin Guide officially releases today. Michelin Guide New York 2011 debuted Oct. 6 and the very first Chicago guide will be released November 17. Subscribe to Virgina’s twice monthly newsletter, The Perfect Spot.

*****

Bay Area restaurants awarded coveted Michelin stars in its 2011 edition

(N = new to this year’s guide)

 

THREE STARS: Exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey

The French Laundry

The Restaurant at Meadowood (N)

 

TWO STARS: Excellent cuisine, worth a detour

Coi

Cyrus

Manresa

 

ONE STAR: A very good restaurant in its category

Acquerello

Alexander’s Steakhouse (N)

Ame

Applewood (N)

Auberge de Soleil

Aziza

Baumé (N)

Bouchon

Boulevard

Campton Place (N)

Chez TJ

Commis

The Dining Room at the Ritz Carlton

Dio Deka (N)

étoile

Farmhouse Inn & Restaurant

Fleur de Lys

Frances (N)

Gary Danko

La Folie

La Toque

Luce

Madera (N)

Madrona Manor

Masa’s

Mirepoix (N)

Murray Circle

One Market

Plumed Horse

Quince

Redd

Saison (N)

Santé

Solbar

Spruce (N)

Terra

Ubuntu

The Village Pub

Wakuriya (N)

 

Don’t stop this crazy thing

Andrew Lam
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Don’t stop this crazy thing

arts@sfbg.com 

Coldcut used to brag that it was “Ahead of Our Time.” In the late 1980s, they slapped the phrase onto a host of groundbreaking forays into cut-and-past sound mathematics like “Beats + Pieces,” “Doctorin’ the House,” and “Stop This Crazy Thing,” freewheeling tunes that treated the history of sound as an enormous candy shop, copyright laws be damned.

And now? Coldcut’s long-running company Ninja Tune reflects the musical times in all its heterogeneous subgenres and variations on familiar themes. When Matt Black and Jonathan More launched Ninja Tune in 1990, it was to create an outlet for the group’s abiding passion in instrumental beats (which the British press would soon garnish with colorful nicknames like “trip-hop” and “sampledelia”). It was built on Coldcut-related productions like DJ Food’s Jazz Brakes series and Bogus Order’s Zen Brakes. Over time, the label flowered into a major indie with two sublabels (Counter and Big Dada) and dozens of artists passing through its doors, from Amon Tobin and Roots Manuva to Antibalas and Mr. Scruff. Today, it releases iconoclastic statements from the L.A. beat scene (Daedelus), the Baltimore indie/electro scene (Spank Rock and the Death Set), and London’s grime and bass worlds (the Bug).

During a phone interview from London, Coldcut’s Black says, “All the artists on the label have their own character. It’s like a collection of audibles, really. There’s a consistency in the fact that we’re all quite out there.” He adds that Ninja Tune is more “advanced” than it was in its first decade, when most of the roster — including production units like the Herbaliser and Funki Porcini — fit under the “trip-hop” rubric. “I felt that some of the early releases interpreted the Coldcut blueprint too literally, just getting some funky loops and sounds and stringing it out for a bit.” Part of this is due to maturity. The Herbaliser, for example, began making beat “loops” for discerning headz but has since grown into a full-fledged band. Even DJ Food, which now solely consists of producer Strictly Kev, has become a purveyor of soundtrack music inspired as much by David Axelrod as Marley Marl.

The mutating Ninja Tune amoeba is being chronicled through a series of 20th anniversary promotions. The deluxe box set Ninja Tune XX includes a hardcover book, six CDs, and six 7-inch vinyl records. The book, Ninja Tune: 20 Years of Beats & Pieces (Black Dog Publishing, 1992 pages, $29.95), is also available separately as a paperback. “If you look at the arrangements and the musicality on the music on the XX set, it’s a lot more advanced than it was a few years ago,” says Black, pointing to San Francisco’s Brendan “Eskmo” Angelides as an example.

Eskmo isn’t the first Bay Area artist to record for Ninja Tune; that honor belongs to rap experimentalist cLOUDDEAD, which released the U.K. edition of its 2001 self-titled album through Big Dada. However, he gives Ninja Tune a foothold in the thriving bass and organic electronic music scene through the symphonic boom of tracks like “Hypercolor.” Eskmo says that signing with Ninja Tune, which just released his self-titled debut, has been “really inspirational,” adding, “It’s a unique thing in this day and age for an independent to be flourishing and still put out creative stuff.”

According to Stevie Chick’s book 20 Years of Beats & Pieces, Ninja Tune emerged in the wake of the music industry’s brief yet disillusioning courtship of Coldcut, who dazzled with a game-changing remix of Eric B. & Rakim’s “Paid In Full” (the classic “Seven Minutes of Madness” mix) and U.K. pop hits like Yazz’ “The Only Way Is Up” and Queen Latifah’s “Find a Way.” The label began as Coldcut’s middle finger to demands that they become another group of pop-dance hacks like Stock Aitken Waterman. “We really liked making instrumental hip-hop, fucking around, not having to make another ‘pop’ track,” Black tells author Chick. On albums such as 1997’s Let Us Play, Coldcut found an equilibrium between advocating the wonders of cutting-edge technology and vinyl consumption and promoting anticapitalist themes.

An inevitable byproduct of Ninja Tune’s success (as well as that of its great rival, Warp Records) is that its fashion-forward yet radical communal lifestyle seems more myth than reality. In 2005, the label released Amon Tobin’s soundtrack for the Ubisoft video game Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. Last year, Speech Debelle won the U.K. Mercury Prize for her Speech Therapy debut. A few months later, the British rapper announced that she wanted off the Big Dada label because it didn’t promote her work enough. Meanwhile, several roster artists have scored popular car commercials, from Mr. Scruff’s “Get a Move On” for the Lincoln Navigator to the Heavy’s “How You Like Me Now?” for KIA Sorento minivans.

“We’ve adapted our game,” Black explains. “We’ve got a company called Sync, Inc. and they specialize in getting sync licenses or getting our music placed in films, TV, video games, and adverts. That’s become an important part of our business.” When asked if that contradicts Coldcut’s earlier independent philosophy, he answers, “We give our artists a lot of freedom. If an artist wants to license a track to Coca-Cola, we wouldn’t necessarily block them. Coldcut has turned down a lot of syncs, particularly car ads, ever since we did one for Ford and realized that was a terrible idea.” Ironically, the song used was “Timber,” an instrumental decrying the eradication of rain forests. Even though Coldcut gave half of the licensing money to Greenpeace, says Black, “We didn’t feel comfortable with it.”

Two decades on, Ninja Tune continues to weather the rapid changes of the music industry while sustaining Coldcut’s dream of an independent haven for progressive artists. But the future ain’t free. “I believe the corporations are the Nazis of our age,” Black says. “But you sometimes have to talk to the Nazis because they’re a reality.”

NINJATUNE XX

With Amon Tobin, Kid Koala, DJ Food and DK, Toddla T and Serocee, Dj Kentaro, Eskmo, Ghostbeard, An-Ten-Nae, Motion Potion

Fri/29, 9 p.m.-4 a.m.; free with rsvp

1015 Folsom

103 Harriet, SF

www.ninjatunexx.xlr8r.com

 

 

Music

Andrew Lam
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Music listings are compiled by Cheryl Eddy. Since club life is unpredictable, it’s a good idea to call ahead to confirm bookings and hours. Prices are listed when provided to us. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

WEDNESDAY 27

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Boom Boom Satellites Independent. 8pm, $15.

Bring Me the Horizon, August Burns Red, Emarosa, Polar Bear Club, This is Hell Regency Ballroom. 6:30pm, $20.

Castles in Spain, Sea of Sorrow, Gun and Doll Show, Pollux, Ol’ Cheeky Bastards, Katie Garibaldi Bottom of the Hill. 8:30pm, $8.

Decry, Snake Mountain, Ruleta Rusa Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $7.

Fun., Steel Train, Jarrod Gorbel Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $16.

Future Night, Blackbird Blackbird Knockout. 9pm, $6.

Get Offs, Blowie! Hemlock Tavern. 6pm, $5-7.

Hawksley Workman, Ian Fays, Red Verse Hotel Utah. 8pm, $10.

Insomniacs Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $15.

Midnight Strangers, Red Yellow Blue, Nectarine Pie Red Devil Lounge. 8pm, $6.

Misisipi Mike’s Honky Tonk Night Time Band, Grand Nationals, Jeanie and Chuck’s Country Roundup El Rio, 8pm, $5.

Poor Bailey, Foxtails Brigade, Il Gato Café Du Nord. 8:30pm, $12.

Star Fucking Hipsters, Monster Squad, Static Thought Thee Parkside. 8pm, $8.

DANCE CLUBS

Booty Call Q-Bar, 456 Castro, SF; www.bootycallwednesdays.com. 9pm. Juanita Moore hosts this dance party, featuring DJ Robot Hustle.

Club Shutter Elbo Room. 10pm, $5. Goth with DJs Nako, Omar, and Justin.

Hands Down! Bar on Church. 9pm, free. With DJs Claksaarb, Mykill, and guests spinning indie, electro, house, and bangers.

Jam Fresh Wednesdays Vessel, 85 Campton, SF; (415) 433-8585. 9:30pm, free. With DJs Slick D, Chris Clouse, Rich Era, Don Lynch, and more spinning top40, mashups, hip hop, and remixes.

Mary-Go-Round Lookout, 3600 16th St, SF; (415) 431-0306. 10pm, $5. A weekly drag show with hosts Cookie Dough, Pollo Del Mar, and Suppositori Spelling.

RedWine Social Dalva. 9pm-2am, free. DJ TophOne and guests spin outernational funk and get drunk.

Respect Wednesdays End Up. 10pm, $5. Rotating DJs Daddy Rolo, Young Fyah, Irie Dole, I-Vier, Sake One, Serg, and more spinning reggae, dancehall, roots, lovers rock, and mash ups.

Synchronize Il Pirata, 2007 16th St, SF; (415) 626-2626. 10pm, free. Psychedelic dance music with DJs Helios, Gatto Matto, Psy Lotus, Intergalactoid, and guests.

THURSDAY 28

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Big Eagle, Caleb Coy, D. Lee Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $6.

“Blues at the Grammys” Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $15.

Isobel Campbell Ameoba, 1855 Haight, SF; www.amoeba.com. 7pm, free.

Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan, Willy Mason Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $19.

Dirty Filthy Mugs, Death Valley High, FlexXBronco, Box Squad, Rock Fight Thee Parkside. 9pm, $8.

Henry Clay People, Dig, Hundred Days Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

Jeffrey Jerusalem, Brainstorm, Safe Milk. 8pm, $5.

K’Naan, Paper Tongues Fillmore. 8pm, $25.

Liberation Institute, Annie Bacon and Her O-Shen, Terese Taylor, Seedy Naturalists El Rio. 9pm, $8.

UNKLE, Sleepy Sun Regency Ballroom. 8pm, $28.

VersaEmerge, Anarbor, Dangerous Summer, Conditions Café Du Nord. 7pm, $12.

Zinc Finger, Bigelows Treehouse, Emily Zisman Hotel Utah. 8pm, $7.

DANCE CLUBS

Afrolicious Elbo Room. 9:30pm, $10. DJs Pleasuremaker and Señor Oz spin Afrobeat, tropicália, electro, samba, and funk.

Caribbean Connection Little Baobab, 3388 19th St, SF; (415) 643-3558. 10pm, $3. DJ Stevie B and guests spin reggae, soca, zouk, reggaetón, and more.

Dirty Dishes 009 Lookout, 3600 16th St, SF; www.dirtydishesdjs.com. 9pm, $3. With Gordon Gartress, DJ Diagnosis, and Jive.

Drop the Pressure Underground SF. 6-10pm, free. Electro, house, and datafunk highlight this weekly happy hour.

Gigantic Beauty Bar. 9pm, free. With DJs Eli Glad, Greg J, and White Mike spinning indie, rock, disco, and soul.

Good Foot Som., 2925 16th St, SF; (415) 558-8521. 10pm, free. With DJs spinning R&B, Hip hop, classics, and soul.

Jivin’ Dirty Disco Butter, 354 11th St., SF; (415) 863-5964. 8pm, free. With DJs spinning disco, funk, and classics.

Koko Puffs Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 10pm, free. Dubby roots reggae and Jamaican funk from rotating DJs.

Mestiza Bollywood Café, 3376 19th St, SF; (415) 970-0362. 10pm, free. Showcasing progressive Latin and global beats with DJ Juan Data.

Peaches Skylark, 10pm, free. With an all female DJ line up featuring Deeandroid, Lady Fingaz, That Girl, and Umami spinning hip hop.

SFSU International Halloween Party DNA Lounge. 7:30pm, $20. With Fans of Jimmy Century, Glass Feather, and Nervous Factor.

FRIDAY 29

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Boy in the Bubble, Ready! Ricochet, Poor Sweet Creatures Hotel Utah. 9pm, $8.

Built to Spill, Revolt Revolt, Finn Riggins Fillmore. 8pm, $25.

Grady Champion Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $20.

Death Hymn #9, Midnite Snaxx Hemlock Tavern. 6pm, $5.

Deerhunter, Real Estate, Casino vs. Japan Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $17.

Elle Nino, Hold Me Luke Allen, Club Crashers El Rio, 9pm, $3-5.

Foreverland Yoshi’s San Francisco. 10:30pm, $35.

Free Energy, Foxy Shazam, Hollerado Slim’s. 9pm, $15.

Grass Widow, Bar Feeders, Lou Lou and the Guitarfish Thee Parkside. 9:30pm, $8. Book release party for Heart Transplant by Andrew Vachss.

Kindness and Lies, Leathers, Monbon, Mic Danja Rock-It Room. 9pm, $10. Also with Craft, DJ Madd Hatter with Rey Resurreccion, Paulie Rhyme, and Nero.

Lotus, Mux Mool Independent. 9pm, $20.

Of Montreal, Janelle Monae Warfield. 9pm, $32.

Joe Pug, Nik Freitas, Two Sheds Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

“SF Zombie Prom” Verdi Club, 2424 Mariposa, SF; www.zombiepromsf.com. 8pm, $15. With Stompy Jones and the Hi-Rhythm Hustlers.

Super Diamond, Pop Rocks Bimbo’s 365 Club. 9pm, $22.

*Thrones, Acid King, Christian Mistress Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $10.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Bitches Brew Revisited Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, 3301 Lyon, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 8pm, $25-65.

Dave Mihaly’s Shimmering Leaves Ensemble, Cylinder Community Music Center, 544 Capp, SF; www.davemihaly.com. 8pm, $10.

8 Legged Monster Coda. 10pm, $10.

Leo Kottke Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8pm, $32.

Kronos Quartet Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard, SF; www.ybca.org. 8pm, $30.

Savanna Jazz Trio Savanna Jazz. 7:30pm, $5.

DANCE CLUBS

All Hallow’s Eve DNA Lounge. 9pm, $13. Halloween party with Decay, BaconMonkey, Joe Radio, and more.

Club Dragon Club Eight, 1151 Folsom, SF; www.eightsf.com. 9pm, $8. A gay Asian paradise. Featuring two dance floors playing dance and hip hop, smoking patio, and 2 for 1 drinks before 10pm.

Exhale, Fridays Project One Gallery, 251 Rhode Island, SF; (415) 465-2129. 5pm, $5. Happy hour with art, fine food, and music with Vin Sol, King Most, DJ Centipede, and Shane King.

Fake Blood, Huoratron Mezzanine. 9pm.

Fat Stack Fridays Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 10pm, free. With rotating DJs B-Cause, Vinnie Esparza, Mr. Robinson, Toph One, and Slopoke.

Fubar Fridays Butter, 354 11th St., SF; (415) 863-5964. 6pm, $5. With DJs spinning retro mashup remixes.

Good Life Fridays Apartment 24, 440 Broadway, SF; (415) 989-3434. 10pm, $10. With DJ Brian spinning hip hop, mashups, and top 40.

Hot Chocolate Milk. 9pm, $5. With DJs Big Fat Frog, Chardmo, DuseRock, and more spinning old and new school funk.

Icee Hot featuring L-Vis 1990, Low Limit, Ghosts on Tape, Disco Shawn, Rollie Fingers Elbo Room. 10pm. Electro.

Live 105’s Subsonic Spookfest Cow Palace, 2600 Geneva, SF; www.livenation.com. 6pm, $50. With Underworld, Moby, MSTRKRFT, DJ Shadow, Booka Shade, and more.

Rockabilly Fridays Jay N Bee Club, 2736 20th St, SF; (415) 824-4190. 9pm, free. With DJs Rockin’ Raul, Oakie Oran, Sergio Iglesias, and Tanoa “Samoa Boy” spinning 50s and 60s Doo Wop, Rockabilly, Bop, Jive, and more.

Some Thing The Stud. 10pm, $7. VivvyAnne Forevermore, Glamamore, and DJ Down-E give you fierce drag shows and afterhours dancing.

Teenage Dance Craze Halloween Monster Party Knockout. 10pm, $4. Twist, surf, and garage with DJ Sergio Iglesias, Russell Quann, and dX the Funky Gran Paw, plus a live performance by Girlfriends.

SATURDAY 30

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Apples in Stereo, Fol Chen Independent. 9pm, $15.

*Cattle Decapitation, Devourment, Knights of the Abyss, Burning the Masses, Son of Aurelius, Slaughterbox Thee Parkside. 8:15pm, $12-15.

Dead Souls, Spellbound, Lisa Dewey and the Lotus Life Elbo Room. 10pm, $8-10.

Deerhunter, Real Estate, Casino vs. Japan Slim’s. 9pm, $17.

Fucking Buckaroos, Jesse Morris and the Man Cougars, Thee Heartbeats El Rio. 10pm, $7.

Love is Chemicals, HIJK, Donts, Jake Mann and the Upper Hand, ’86 Mets Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $8.

Nellie McKay Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 8pm, $30.

Kate Nash, Peggy Sue Warfield. 9pm, $25.

Super Diamond, Erasure-esque Bimbo’s 365 Club. 9pm, $22.

Earl Thomas and the Blues Ambassadors Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $22.

Tiny Television, Ferocious Few, Steve Pile Band Bottom of the Hill. 10pm, $12.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Justin Hellman Coda. 7pm, $7.

Omara Portuondo Herbst Theatre, 401 Van Ness, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 8pm, $30-75.

Primavera Latin Jazz Band Savanna Jazz. 7:30pm, $8.

Arturo Sandoval Herbst Theatre, 401 Van Ness, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 8pm, $30-75.

DANCE CLUBS

Bar on Church 9pm. Rotating DJs Foxxee, Joseph Lee, Zhaldee, Mark Andrus, and Nuxx.

Big Top Hallo-Weenie Party Club Eight, 1151 Folsom, SF; www.joshuajpresents.com. 9pm, $5-10. With Kidd Sysko and DJ Jinks.

Blow Up SF: Halloween Special Edition Kelly’s Mission Rock, 817 Terry Francois, SF; www.blowupsf.com. 9pm, $10-20. Jeffrey Paradise and Ava Berlin host a Haunted Mansion party.

Bootie DNA Lounge. 9pm, $10-20. Halloween mash-ups with Adrian and Mysterious D.

Cramps Night Knockout. 9pm, $3. Halloween jams with Djs Sergio Iglesias, Okie Oren, and Lisa.

Go Bang! Deco Lounge, 510 Larkin, SF; www.sanfrancisco.going.com/gobang. 9pm, $5. Atomic dancefloor disco costume party with Andre Lucero, Glenn Rivera, and more.

Hov-O-Ween Medici Lounge, 299 Ninth St, SF; www.medicisf.com. 10pm, $5. Gloom, doom, and boom with DJs Voodoo, Purgatory, and Unit77.

HYP Club Eight, 1151 Folsom, SF; www.eightsf.com. 10pm, free. Gay and lesbian hip hop party, featuring DJs spinning the newest in the top 40s hip hop and hyphy.

Rock City Butter, 354 11th St., SF; (415) 863-5964. 6pm, $5 after 10pm. With DJs spinning party rock.

Spirit Fingers Sessions 330 Ritch. 9pm, free. With DJ Morse Code and live guest performances.

SUNDAY 31

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Burned Out Basements, Trainwreck Riders, Velveteen Habit, Dead Westerns, Beet the Meatles, Human Condition Bottom of the Hill. 6:30pm, $10.

Lucha VaVoom Fillmore. 8pm, $32.50.

Mig 21 with Jiri Machacek, DJ Che Café Du Nord. 8pm, $25.

Nobunny, Uzi Rash, Apache, Monster Maus, Tumor Boys Thee Parkside. 8pm, $12.

Parties, Lotus Moons Hemlock Tavern. 8pm, $6.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

“Ghosts and Jazz” Yoshi’s San Francisco. 7pm, $5-20. With Brenda Wong Aoki and Mark Izu.

Valeriana Quevado, Larry Vuckovich, Buca Necak, Sanna Craig Bliss Bar, 4026 24th St, SF; (415) 826-6200. 4:30pm, $10.

Trumpetsupergroup Koret Auditorium, de Young Museum, Golden Gate Park, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Dr, SF; www.theintersection.org. 2pm, free.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Albino!, Rito Reinoso y su Ritmo y Armonia, DJ Specific Independent. 8pm, $17.

Back 40, Carburetors Thee Parkside. 4pm, free.

Danilo El Rio. 4pm, $8.

La Mission Band Roccapulco, 3140 Mission, SF; www.roccapulco.com. 3pm, $20.

DANCE CLUBS

DiscoFunk Mashups Cat Club. 10pm, free. House and 70’s music.

Dub Mission Halloween Elbo Room. 9pm, $6. Dub, dubstep, roots, and dancehall with DJ Sep, Maneesh the Twister, and guests Spit Brothers with Bakir and Dubsworth.

45 Club Halloween Party Knockout. 10pm, free. Funky soul with dX the Funky Gran Paw, Dirty Dishes, and English Steve.

Gloss Sundays Trigger, 2344 Market, SF; (415) 551-CLUB. 7pm. With DJ Hawthorne spinning house, funk, soul, retro, and disco.

Honey Soundsystem Paradise Lounge. 8pm-2am. “Dance floor for dancers – sound system for lovers.” Got that?

Kick It Bar on Church. 9pm. Hip-hop with DJ Zax.

Pachanga Coda. 5pm, $10. Salsa with DJs Fab Fred and Antonio with Los Compas.

Religion Bar on Church. 3pm. With DJ Nikita.

Swing Out Sundays Rock-It Room. 7pm, free (dance lessons $15). DJ BeBop Burnie spins 20s through 50s swing, jive, and more.

Trannyshack: Halloween DNA Lounge. 9:30pm, $20. With special guest Julie Brown and hosts Peaches Christ and Heklina.

MONDAY 1

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Asteroid 4, Lovetones, Fauna Valetta, Spyrals Elbo Room. 9pm, $7.

Enter Shikari, Haste the Day, Sleeping With Sirens, Ms. White Slim’s. 7pm, $16.

Ingrid Michaelson, Guggenheim Grotto Fillmore. 8pm, $22.50.

Stone Temple Pilots Warfield. 8pm, $52.50-65.

White Denim, Zodiac Death Valley Independent. 8pm, $15.

DANCE CLUBS

Black Gold Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 10pm-2am, free. Senator Soul spins Detroit soul, Motown, New Orleans R&B, and more — all on 45!

Death Guild: Day of the Dead Guild DNA Lounge. 9:30pm, $3-5. Gothic, industrial, and synthpop with DJs Decay, Joe Radio, and Melting Girl.

Krazy Mondays Beauty Bar. 10pm, free. With DJs Ant-1, $ir-Tipp, Ruby Red I, Lo, and Gelo spinning hip hop.

M.O.M. Madrone Art Bar. 6pm, free. With DJ Gordo Cabeza and guests playing all Motown every Monday.

Manic Mondays Bar on Church. 9pm. Drink 80-cent cosmos with Djs Mark Andrus and Dangerous Dan.

Musik for Your Teeth Revolution Café, 3248 22nd St., SF; (415) 642-0474. 5pm, free. Soul cookin’ happy hour tunes with DJ Antonino Musco.

Network Mondays Azul Lounge, One Tillman Pl, SF; www.inhousetalent.com. 9pm, $5. Hip-hop, R&B, and spoken word open mic, plus featured performers.

Skylarking Skylark. 10pm, free. With resident DJs I & I Vibration, Beatnok, and Mr. Lucky and weekly guest DJs.

TUESDAY 2

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Aural Logic Sound System/Back Beat Coda. 9pm, $5.

Bloody Beetroots DeathCrew 77 Mezzanine. 8pm, $25.

Robbie Fitzsimmons, Emily Greene Hotel Utah. 9pm, $10.

Ian Fays, Calorifer is Very Hot Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $6.

Gary Numan Fillmore. 8pm, $27.50.

Tokeson, Candelaria Elbo Room. 9pm, $7-10. Dia de los Muertos celebration.

Laura Veir and the Hall of Flames, Leslie Stevens and the Badgers Independent. 8pm, $15.

DANCE CLUBS

Eclectic Company Skylark, 9pm, free. DJs Tones and Jaybee spin old school hip hop, bass, dub, glitch, and electro.

Rock Out Karaoke! Amnesia. 7:30pm. With Glenny Kravitz.

Share the Love Trigger, 2344 Market, SF; (415) 551-CLUB. 5pm, free. With DJ Pam Hubbuck spinning house.

Womanizer Bar on Church. 9pm. With DJ Nuxx.

 

 

Hey boo

Andrew Lam
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Hey boo

marke@sfbg.com

Time to slice some holes in a bedbugged sheet and hack through this year’s Phantasmatorium of Flabberghastly Fantastic Halloween Parties. Our chilling soundtrack is provided by terror-iffic local post-electro haunter oOoOO, who’s being broomed into the contentious new witch house subgenre, but who sends his own unique shiver down the spines of my stiletto eyeballs. You go, ghoul. (That joke kills me every time.)

Find oOoOO’s ghoulish tunes at www.myspace.com/wkwkwkwkwkwkwkw

POPSCREAM

Long-running 18+ mainstay Popscene unleashes the horror, the horror of Brit pop bliss on a suspecting crowd of young fabs. DJs Omar and Aaron Axelsen bloody the decks — and this is the official warm-up party for the huge Spookfest at Cow Palace (www.cowpalace.com), so you know there’ll be special guests. Thu/28, 9 p.m., $10. 330 Ritch, SF. www.popscene-sf.com

DEBASER HALLOWEEN

The city’s best alternative retro-’90s club is reaching into the mothballs and pulling out the flannel and the neon — look out it’s gonna be a warehouse party theme! That’s right, rave meets grunge for all you young freaks. DJ Chris Orr makes sure it’s all quality. OMG free Glo-Stiks while they last. Dress up, peeps. Fri/29, 9 p.m., $5. 111 Minna, www.111minnagallery.com

DEATH BY DISCO

Calling all pink furry freaks and majik man-moths — inimitably beastly Burner crew Pink Mammoth hosts a night of chunky techno with an arsenic lace of dubstep. Phantasmic DJs Gravity and Jdub Ya whip your wool into a frenzy. Fri/29, 9 p.m., $5. Shine, 1337 Mission, SF. www.pinkmammoth.org

ICEE HOT HALLOWEEN

The scariest thing about this party is how good the music’s gonna be: Ghosts on Tape, L-Vis 1990, SBTRKT, Rollie Fingers, and Disco Shawn bring the down-low future funky for a cute crowd that creeps. Fri/29, 10 p.m., $10. Elbo Room, 647 Valencia, SF. www.elbo.com

NINJA TUNE XX

Everybody freak out! The 20th anniversary party for headtrip-tastic label Ninja Tune comes equipped with massive heavy hitters Amon Tobin, Kid Koala, DJ Food, Eskmo, and tons more — this isn’t necessarily a Halloween party, but it’ll tear you up nonetheless. Fri/29, 9 p.m.–4a.m., free with RSVP at website. 103 Harriet, SF. www.1015.com/onezerothree

ONRA

French future funkster who Frankensteins J Dilla slickness, Dam Funk sizzle, and Flying Lotus sass performs live with Buddy Sativa on synths. Boo-gielicious all-vinyl Sweater Funk crew warms up the operating tables. Fri/29, 10 p.m.–late, $10. SOM, 2925 16th St., SF. www.som-bar.com

GO BOO!

It’s a disco bloodbath, hawney. Legendary old-school disco and hi-NRG DJs Glenn Riviera, Andre Lucero, and Steve Fabus join Sergio Fedasz for an amped up version of monthly mirrorball extravaganza Go Bang! Sat/30, 9 p.m.–late, $5 (free until 10) Deco Lounge, 510 Larkin, SF. www.decosf.com

BIG TOP HALLOWEENIE

It’s a major electro-pop sausagefest (with a fab crowd redeeming the buzzsaw tunes), as this monthly circus-themed queer hoo-haw stuffs it up your Motel Hellhole. Highlights: Drag rapper Kalisto and witchy mama Mutha Chuka perform, and Tweeka Turner hosts a haunted crackhouse upstairs. Sat/30, 9 p.m.–late, $5. Club Eight, 1151 Folsom, SF. www.joshuajpresents.com

BLOW UP HAUNTED MANSION

Arise, ye amped-up ghosts of electro bangers, throw on your uber-stylish dancing togs, and make the scene, as the raucous Blow Up crew conjures its annual Halloween bash. Plus: full blown costume contest. Sexytime, sexytime. Sat/30, 9 p.m.–3 a.m., $10–$20. Kelly’s Mission Rock, 917 Terry Francois Blvd., SF.www.blowupsf.com

DAS KLUB

Um, how could we argue with a “20,000 Homos Under the Sea” theme (insert seamen crack here). Bathhouse disco captain DJ Bus Station John joins forces with queer punk Hey Sailor crew to swab your alternaqueer poop deck. Sat/30, 10 p.m., $5 in costume, $7 without. Das boo! Club 93, 93 Ninth, SF.

HAUNTED TEMPLE

Local dance-rock fixture Jaswho? celebrates the release of his electrofied new album Nudroid Musik by performing live at this hair-raising affair, with backup from DJs Paul Hemming, Brian Salazar, and many more as Temple becomes a haunted graveyard. Sat/30, 10 p.m., $30. Temple, 540 Howard, SF.www.templesf.com

LESBO BLOODBATH IV

Sapphic spooks and gore-geous lesboos haunt the girlicious Lexington Club, with rockin’ DJs Jenna Riot and LA’s Miss Pop. Killin ’em Kelsey hosts the costume contest for amazing prizes, and I’m totally going as Vagina Den-Tatas, grrrl. Sat/30, 9 p.m., free. Lexington Club, 3161 19th St., SF.www.lexingtonclub.com

TABOO HALLOWEEN EXTRAVAGANZA

Soulful house godfather David Harness wowed the pants off ’em at the Fag Fridays reunion a couple weeks ago, follow him deeper at this installment of his lovely mixed Taboo monthly. Now with more spooky! Sat/30, 9 p.m., $10. Eve Lounge, 575 Howard, SF. www.eveloungesf.com

HALLOWEEN: A PARTY!

The name may be laughable generic (irony kills!) but the shindig’s anything but/butt: Peaches Christ and Trannyshack’s Heklina bring you a nightmarish night of outsized drag gutsiness, with tons of psycho performers and special guest Julie Brown. “Homecoming Queen’s Got A Gun” — and she gonna pop yo ass. Sun/31, 9:30 p.m.–3 a.m., $20 advance. DNA Lounge, 375 11th St., SF. www.dnalounge.com

I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST COCKTAILGATE

Suppositori “Skeletor” Spelling and her kooky coven of trash-drag underlings happily horrify you with a scary movie-themed night of pustulent performances and Satan-knows-what-else. Bring a towel and scream in it. Sun/31, 9 p.m., $4. Truck, 1900 Folsom, SF. www.trucksf.com

 

 

Citizen’s Band

Andrew Lam
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Citizen’s Band

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE One of the revelations in Peter Mayles’ cycle of enchanting memoirs about life in Provence (A Year in Provence, Toujours Provence, Encore Provence) is that some of the best food in France is to be found at truck stops. This stands to reason, since truckers are a migratory species whose survival depends on knowing where to eat — and French truckers spend their days zooming around France, a land where food and wine are as much a part of the national identity as the language itself.

Citizen’s Band (which opened in August on a semi-sketchy stretch of Folsom St. in SoMa) isn’t quite a truck stop and it certainly isn’t in France, but it does have, stashed above the door, a collection of vintage CB radios, the kind whose tinny crackle helped drive C.W. McCall’s 1975 truckers’ anthem, “Convoy.” And it is, in its hipster-city way, a convincing contemporary version of a roadside diner: it has a long counter, zinc-topped tables, harsh lighting, and plenty of din, all at the edge of an insanely busy street.

But the place doesn’t serve Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, despite a plethora of hipsters, and the staff all seem to be relations of Flo, the cheeky woman from the Progressive Insurance TV ads. Indeed, beer places a distant second as a libation to wine, which is offered in a variety of interesting pours listed on the huge chalkboard that backs the counter. So maybe we’re not so far from France after all. Or somewhere in Europe. Lately I’ve noticed a small but definite bloom on wine lists of reds produced in German-speaking lands, and Citizen’s Band offers a glass of Blaufränkisch, an Austrian red, for $7.50. Our (female) server described it as “feminine,” not a customary description for wine. To me, the wine was light and spicy, like a nero d’avola after some heavy core training. Could this be what she meant?

If a convoy of hungry, discerning French truckers came rolling up to Citizen’s Band, what would they find, apart from trouble in parking? American food, subtly reimagined and cooked to the highest standard. Chef Chris Beerman’s menu includes elements of what we might call comfort cuisine, including macaroni and cheese and a burger with fries, but it also soars into the higher airs of the gastronomic ether — and even the homey stuff is enriched by a close attention to detail.

The mac ‘n’cheese ($8) was made with fontina and a Sonoma dry-jack fonduta, which helped permeate the pasta tubes. I didn’t like the fried onion rings on top; they were crunchy but discordant. A plate of humble franks and beans ($8) was stylishly reinvented with grilled sweet Italian sausage from Paul Bertolli’s Fra’ Mani in Berkeley, surrounded by butter beans (from Iacopi Farms) in a rich sauce of oregano, pecorino romano, and (to judge from the glossiness) butter. And how many diners, or truck stops, would toss a salad of baby arugula leaves ($8) with diced peaches (for deep sweetness), almond brittle (for sweet crunch), Point Reyes blue cheese (for rich bite), and a huckleberry vinaigrette for a final fillip of piquancy and (deep purple) color?

The burger ($13, plus $2 for cheese) was quite a production. The beef was kobe, from Snake River Farms; the bun, challah (which is pretty much brioche, for purposes of richness). Also aioli and house-made burger pickles and — better than either of those items, good as they were — no raw onion. Best of all, the kitchen actually grilled the meat as ordered, to medium rare, as recommended by Flo. A medium-rare burger means a juicy burger, and juiciness makes all the difference. A dry burger is a dead burger. The stack of fries on the side was excellent, still warm and crisp from the deep fryer.

The roasted red trout ($20) looked like a pair of cantaloupe slices slipped atop an heirloom-tomato panzanella, with a scattering of garlicky Monterey Bay calamari and some uncredited braised greens. The fish was lovely, but it was the panzanella that commanded our attention: it was colored by several shades of cherry tomatoes and made crunchy by croutons toasted gold. Panzanella is summer on a plate, but it’s also, at least traditionally, frugality on a plate, a way of rejuvenating bread that’s past its prime. To find it deployed with such elegant discipline here was a delight. Encore!

CITIZEN’S BAND

Dinner: Tues.–-Sat., 5:30–11 p.m.

Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–2 p.m.

Brunch: Sat., 10 a.m.–2 p.m.

1198 Folsom, SF

(415) 556-4901

www.citizensbandsf.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

 

Ignoring Cheney’s real victims

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Dick Meister. former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeistersf.com, which includes more than 250 of his columns.

 

So, as the Washington Post ‘s Paul Farhi reported recently, hunter Harry Whittington is still suffering from the effects of  being shot accidentally by hunting partner Dick Cheney in Texas four years ago.

I’m sure we’re all sorry about that, about how Whittington still has the lead pellet that pierced his larynx when the then-vice president swung around abruptly and fired away at a flight of quail. We’re of course sorry, too, about the 30 or so other pieces of shot still inside Whittington out of some 200 that slammed him, and the scars he bears.

 “I was lucky,” Whittington told Farhi, “I just feel every day ‘s a gift. Sometimes I wonder why I got those extra years.”

But what of the real victims? What of the defenseless quail that Cheney, Washington and two friends were stalking with a clear and undisguised intent to kill?

At least one quail was saved when Dead Eye Dick hit Whittington while aiming for a bird, and there was a bit of poetic justice since Whittington was struck as he was returning from retrieving a quail he had killed.

But no one bothered reporting how many other birds had been killed. After all, they were inferior beings raised for the amusement of Cheney and others who get their kicks stalking and killing fellow creatures.

Cheney’s been at it a long time, targeting ducks, pheasants and other birds as well as quail, in company with such other conservative favorites as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and former President George W. Bush.

Although apparently not as skilled and frequent a hunter as Cheney, Bush has managed to bring down a few winged creatures himself, most notably during his New Year’s holiday in Texas a few years back., Bush, who modestly declared that “I’m not that good a shot,” managed to down five quail. He said that “was a lot of fun.”
 
Bush praised the owner of the area in which the hunt took place for maintaining the land as a good habitat, not because it benefited the birds, of course, but because  – like the Texas farm where Cheney was hunting – it provided easy targets for hunters who wished to kill birds.

There are more than 20 million “sportsmen” like Bush and Cheney who find it fun to prey on innocent birds and animals.

The number of “sportsmen” has declined in recent years, thanks to anti-gun sentiment, urbanization, the animal rights movement, availability of a broad range of other leisure activities, heightened environmental awareness and the increasing cost of hunting equipment,

But there are still far too many people searching the countryside for winged and four-legged victims. What’s more, manufacturers of guns and other hunting gear have greatly intensified efforts to increase their number. So have state fish and game departments, which rely on hunters’ license fees to cover much of their operational costs.

Hunters and their defenders argue that, although the hunters’ targets are too dumb to realize it, hunting actually benefits them by “thinning the herds” and thus keeping them from starvation. But though there’s no doubt that reducing or at least relocating some animal populations may be necessary for their survival, there are civilized ways to do it.

Once, long ago, we had to hunt and kill in order to survive. But this is the 21st century. It’s outrageous that leaders and citizens of the world’s most powerful and influential nation, one that presumes to be the role model for all others, find it amusing to engage in the barbarity of killing for sport.

Invariably, when I address this subject, people come back at me complaining that I just don’t understand that some people need to hunt animals to help feed their families.

I understand. But that’s another matter entirely. I’m writing about the vast majority of hunters who hunt and kill their fellow animals, not for food, but for the fun of it. To me, that seems a sick thing to do.

 Let me repeat: It’s killing for the sport of it that should disturb us all. It’s not just the bird and animal targets that need protecting. Think of the message that’s being delivered to the rest of us. It’s a message, as animal rights activist Jamie Kemsey noted, “that it is acceptable to commit an act of violence and take innocent life simply for the fun of it. In these violent times we cannot afford, under any circumstances, to condone such morally bankrupt actions.”

Dick Meister. former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeistersf.com, which includes more than 250 of his columns.

Kim chichi

Andrew Lam
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0
Kim chichi

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS It was the weekend and my kitten and me were dancing to the Ramones in our pajamas. Coffee sloshing all over the place. Kibble clattering. The phone rang and we let it ring. I already had lunch plans and dinner plans. Why answer the phone?

I answered the phone. Knowing me, it was either my lunch plan or my dinner plan, calling to cancel. So I stopped the music.

Stoplight kept dancing.

On the phone was one of my three-year-old pals. She was upset and wanted to talk, so we talked. Once she had collected herself and was breathing normally I asked, “How’s your mommy?”

“Good,” she said, in her normal little voice. “How’s Stoplight?”

“Good. We were dancing,” I said.

“Oh.”

“Ramones.”

If she had an opinion about them, she didn’t say. For the moment, her favorite bands are ABBA and Harry Belafonte — who isn’t, strictly speaking, a band. We made plans to get a burrito between lunch and dinner, and then she put her mom on. Coincidentally, we too made plans to get a burrito between lunch and dinner.

For lunch, I had a burrito. You will be relieved to learn that it was not the conventional kind. It was another one of those Korean-style kimchi burritos, such as had bewitched, bothered, and bewildered me a few months back at John’s Snack & Deli, downtown.

I haven’t slept well ever since. And I wanted to repay the kind then-stranger who ruined my circadian rhythm, if not life, by introducing me to the kimchi burrito. Interestingly, he’s never had one himself. Just saw the sign at John’s and thought I should know, bless him.

John’s is not in my opinion open on weekends. Nor is it open past six on weekdays, meaning most working stiffs who aren’t lucky enough to work in the Financial District will never know. A moment of silence, for them.

The good news is that the HRD Coffee House, South of Market, also has a kimchi burrito, and is open Saturdays. The bad news is it’s pork, not beef, and it ain’t even a third as juicy as John’s sleep disorder was, as I recall. By comparison, HRD’s kimchi burrito is underspicy and over-ricy. But, come to think of it, underpricey too. It’s only $5.50, and that’s good news all over again. Plus you don’t have to eat it on your bike (or at your desk, I guess) because HRD is an actual place. You know, with tables, chairs, counters, a very fluorescent back room, and college football on TV.

We sat at the window counter, me and my new friend Mr. Wong — not to be confused with Mr. Wrong (my old friend). And we talked about movies, food, and movies about food. He’s a film writer and, I gather, a collector. But he’s in over his head. He’s attended and collected so many movies that he hasn’t had time, in 51 years, to learn how to cook, not even pasta. Check it out, this cat owns copies of my two favorite movies — which are both very, very obscure, and, Jesus, pretty old — but he hasn’t seen either one!

Yet.

In exchange for teaching Mr. Wong how to cook, I think he’s going to share his collection with me. First thing I’m going to show him how to make: popcorn.

We will work our way up to kimchi, and then bulgogi, and then kimchi burritos because, sad to say, my Mr. Wong still hasn’t exactly had an exactly brilliant and/or life-altering one. As much as we both liked HRD, the place.

And the people.

He finished his. I gave the second half of mine to a homeless person on Market Street.

“It’s a burrito,” I said, “but, get this: it’s Korean!”

The dude, apparently not a foodie, was underplussed.

“So you know,” I said. “A Korean burrito.”

“I’ll think about that,” he said, “while I’m eating it.”

HRD COFFEE SHOP

Mon.–Fri. 7 a.m.–3 p.m.; Sat. 9 a.m.–3 a.m.

521 Third St.

(415) 543-2355

Cash only

No alcohol

Hold onto yer Wiggs, change comin’ to Western Addy

Andrew Lam
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0
Hold onto yer Wiggs, change comin’ to Western Addy

Morgan Fitzgibbons isn’t thinking small when it comes to goals for his Western Addition sustainability group, the Wigg Party. “We want to make our community a leader in the transformation in resilience,” he tells me during our coffee date to discuss the group’s upcoming anti-boycott “carrotmob” at Matching Half Cafe (Sat/23). 

It’s no coincidence that his language sounds a little new age-y. The basis for Fitzgibbons’ vision for the Wigglers seems grounded in the PhD of Philosopy, Cosmology, and Consciousness he received at California Institute for Integral Studies. “We’re these sacred beings,” he tells me earnestly of his San Francisco community. “This is a sacred movement – I want people to look back in a hundred years and see that.”

Woo-woo? Well yeah, but hold your jaded mutterings until you hear what the guy’s done with his convictions in “cosmological evolution,” as he puts it. Fitzgibbons has assembled a core group of Western Addition residents who operate in four different arenas of turning the area around SF’s “Wiggle” (the well-trafficked bike route through the Panhandle and between the hills in Lower Haight and Duboce Triangle) into a leader in scaled-back, neighborhood-focused living.

Bicycling barristers: Morgan Fitzgibbons and Wigger Dave Bryson on a city-wide urban farms bike tour. Photo by Jenny Sherman

Their areas of attack, you ask? There’s a sustainable business group, who works on incentives for local outfits that find ways of greening their ways. For example, this Saturday’s carrotmob (you can read more about the nationally recognized concept here) is a concentrated effort to storm Matching Half’s doors with business in support of their pledge to buy a bike trailer to transport farmer’s market-purchased goods, switch to organic milk, and chuck the plastic wrap for reusable food containers. 

There’s also a local food group who works with local markets to freecycle unpurchased produce at the neighborhood’s Hayes Valley Farm, a “rescaling” group focusing on ways to limit commercial consumption, and the Wiggle Transformers, who are collaborating with the SF Bike Coalition on the Wiggle portion of their Connecting the City Initiative, a comprehensive plan to improve bike passage throughout San Francisco.

Like I said, comprehensive. And most of the core group – which Fitzgibbons pegs at around 20 party members – are under 30 years old. Which is neat-o, and most likely made possible by the group’s party ethos when it comes to fighting for what they believe. I mean, I say fighting but I think I really mean loving, or something equally hippie. A bunch of them live in a place called the Sunshine Castle, for god’s sakes, where they throw “shenanigans” (according to Fitzgibbons) after-parties for their events, like the recent 10/10/10 day of action that saw the Wigglers conduct a 50-60 person bike tour of the city’s urban farms and a coordinated garden plant in collaboration with Kitchen Garden SF. 

In the works are plans for a Bernal Bucks-esque local currency, which the group hopes will inspire Western Addition residents to patronize more heavily the wealth of small businesses along the Divisadero Corridor and surrounding areas (holler, happy hour at Bean Bag). 

Fitzgibbons says the hyper-localism of the Wigg Party is perfectly suited for the history and relative youth of the Western Addition neighborhood.

The Wiggle itself provides a apt symbol for the group. The Wiggle Transformers’ work is making bike traffic better for everybody, but also a physical passage that Fitzgibbons hopes will say “you’re stepping into a different place now” to bikers entering the Western Addition.

“San Francisco has always been a seed of revolution,” he reflects. “Of the younger neighborhoods – the Mission and Western Addition – Western Addition is a lot less nihilistic. With University of San Francisco near the area, there’s always going to be a lot of young people living out here, and that’s who our message resonates with. It’s such a new community.”

This last comment raises a red flag in my mind. The parties, the bike tours, it all sounds grand, but given that all this is coming from a twenty-something guy with a complicated mullet and a hoody, how much does the Wigg Party truly represent the Western Addition, an area that’s been wracked by recurring waves of gentrification and is subject, like everywhere else in the city these days, to ever-increasing rent prices and displacement of long time residents? Despite the free food at Hayes Valley, are we being sustainable, or are we being hipster-sustainable? 

“To be a truly successful movement, we’ll have to organize everybody,” Fitzgibbons says, who himself has lived in the neighborhood for three years. Among those that regularly attend Wigg meetings, there is but one long-time resident, he tells me, who plays an active role advising on how to better integrate with the neighborhood’s ongoing goals and activities. Past that, “there’s tacit support among the long-term residents, and we get a lot of family participation in our Wiggle events,” Fitzgibbons tells me.

But I trust that he’s learning as he goes. After all, in explaining his philosophy on activism to me, Fitzgibbons appropriates that sustainability champion himself: Socrates. “The only thing I know is I don’t know everything,” he smiles. “We don’t have to have all the t’s crossed and i’s dotted, but we can whip up excitement and hopefully inspire people to do this in their communities. Create that showcase.” And if figuring it all out looks like a party in the streets, sayeth the Wigglers, so be it. 

Wigg Party Carrotmob

Matching Half Cafe

Sat/23 3-6 p.m., free

1799 McAllister, SF

www.wiggparty.org

 

Epic Bush crawl, part one

Andrew Lam
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5
Epic Bush crawl, part one

ruggy@yelp.com

SUPER EGO Marke B.’s off getting hitched to Hunky Beau, so we asked the raffishly cute Ruggy, senior community manager at Yelp.com, to fill in as nightlife correspondent. Part two comes out Nov. 3.

What does your average Friday night look like? Does it involve catching up with old college friends over a 2007 Chateau Montelena Bordeaux blend? Maybe you’d rather snuggle up next to your boo on an EQ3 chaise longue with the remote in one hand and a Shake Weight in the other.

If you’re anything like me and my ragtag group of degenerate colleagues, nothing quite spells F-U-N like a bar crawl spanning seven different locations in less than five hours, complete with gratuitous heavy petting, nacho cheese Doritos, and warm Miller High Life. Now, what if I told you there was an unheralded bar route in the city that’s chock-full of sticky floors, intoxicated curmudgeons, and more bottom shelf liquor than you can shake a Polaroid at?

The stretch of self-reproach I reference is Bush Street between Stockton and Taylor. But beware — this challenge isn’t for the faint of heart. Being the altruist I am, I decided to document this fantastic, drunken journey on your behalf, to ensure you avoid a colossal case of bottle flu the following morning. You can thank me later.

Tunnel Top (601 Bush): From Union Square, take the stairs north at the entrance to the Stockton Tunnel (after a salacious afternoon romp at the Green Door if you want to up the ante), turn about face, and gallop roughly 10 paces west. Perfect for guest registration on a Bush Street crawl, since the T-Top offers a nifty happy hour with $3 drafts and $2.75 bottled beers as well as a slew of aging hipsters and law school dropouts (a.k.a. real estate brokers) enjoying glasses of Chimay and a hip playlist. Plenty of complicated haircuts at 6:30 p.m., but not a single raccoon tail in sight.

Chelsea Place (641 Bush): If you’re expecting skyline views of Manhattan and metrosexuals out the wazoo, you most certainly have the wrong Chelsea in mind. This is a cozy nook for true alcoholics, where one drink is too many, and 1,000 is never enough. A tiny push through the saloon-style wooden doors grants you access to the Emerald City of unglamorous horizons. One of the few bars in San Francisco that will still let you smoke inside (but the first of many we encountered this Friday night), the immediate rush of second-hand smoke is enough to give you flashbacks to the first time you choked on a Marlboro Red in your junior high bathroom stall. If you’re sensitive to environmental tobacco, you’ll just have to suck it up and enjoy those delightful, toxic fumes.

As is usually the case with these sorts of establishments, the bar was packed with nothing but men over 50 (plus us) cooing over the female Asian staff, who all looked like they were auditioning for a Britney Spears music video. Laissez-faire seems to be in full effect: cigars, graffiti, dice games, whiskey shots out of plastic bottles that just say “whiskey” on the label, cheap beer, snuff pipes, and free bags of Orville Redenbacher. ‘Nuff said.

RJ’s Sports Bar (701 Geary): Korean women behind the bar (it seems to be Bush corridor de rigueur) who speak excellent Spanish and have incredible dance moves (don’t ask me how I know, but this was the biggest surprise of all). Another bar that allows indoor smoking, despite a sticker, in plain sight, that contradicts such actions. A man came in and requested that the bartender fill up his empty Gatorade bottle with Anchor Steam for $5, and without a second thought, that call was answered.

High Tide Lounge (600 Geary): Free food ranging from kimchi, chicken wings, and sushi rolls to stuffed peppers, pad Thai, chow mein, and something that resembled an egg roll but looked more like a snuffed out cigar. I didn’t ask questions. In the midst of our revels, we happened upon a petite woman taking a little catnap in the corner of the bar. Despite sleeping on a cold linoleum floor, she looked quite peaceful. Definitely not dead, though … we checked her pulse.

Marcus; or the Secret of Sweet

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Marcus; or the Secret of Sweet

Days before Hurricane Katrina strikes the Louisiana projects, a young gay black man launches his search for his sexual and personal identity in this acclaimed provocative, poignant, and fiercely humorous coming-of-age story.

Live it up with 10UP ! $10 tickets for all A.C.T. productions – a dramatically affordable experience.
November 2nd’s evening will begin with a pre-show reception in the Sky Lounge with complimentary wine by Bear Flag and delectable bites from Fifth Floor Restaurant at 7PM. Purchase tickets at www.act-sf.org/10UP
November 2nd, 2010 at  7PM @ ACT, 415 Geary Street San Francisco, CA 94102


ENTER TO WIN a pair of tickets to the Novemeber 2nd reception and show by sending your full name to promos@sfbg.com (subject line: Marcus) no later than October 31st.  Winners will be contacted via email. Tickets will be held under the winners name at will call; you must provide a valid photo ID for entry.

About Fifth Floor
A food, wine and cocktail experience like no other await at the Michelin-starred Fifth Floor restaurant. In the lounge, the finest boutique liquors are mixed and muddled into handcrafted cocktails.  In the dining room, an award winning wine list complements the daily menu, which features only the best ingredients sourced from farmers and vendors.

For dinner reservations, please call 415.348.1555 or visit www.fifthfloorrestaurant.com. 

Uptown Joe’s

Andrew Lam
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0
Uptown Joe’s

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE Use of the word “downtown” in the American vernacular has always faintly troubled me. It’s a term that should be used only with respect to Manhattan, which really does have a downtown, along with a midtown and an uptown. The better phrase for the rest of us is “city center,” which is what you tend to see in European cities — signs reading “centrum” or (in German-speaking lands) “zentrum,” with a big arrow pointing you in the right direction.

Of course, in a city as hilly as San Francisco, “up” and “down” have meanings independent of any two-dimensional map. Uptown Joe’s, the successor to Café Majestic, might not be in any actual uptown anyone here would actually refer to, but the restaurant is pretty far up the southern face of Pacific Heights. So it can claim some real elevation, if not a view. It’s the “Joe” part of the name, interestingly, that’s been the occasion for some legal tussling in the past year between Uptown Joe’s and Original Joe’s, which burned down three years ago.

What’s most striking to me about the restaurant’s name is how inapposite it is. It sounds a diner-ish, Seinfeldian note — you can almost see Uncle Leo carping and gesturing in a booth over a bowl of chicken noodle soup — but the restaurant is in fact an elegant, high-ceilinged, cream-colored vault, almost fin de siècle Viennese in its quiet dignity. If you thought that the quiet restaurant was a thing of the past here, where the dominant trend in restaurant design is a noisy urban minimalism with concrete accents and patrons texting away because they can’t hear one another, you’ll find Uptown Joe’s to be a welcome surprise. It’s the sort of place that encourages that most retro of human practices, conversation.

In keeping with the vast dining room’s old world graciousness, the kitchen turns out a menu that might have been described as “continental” a generation ago. Many dishes have Italian roots — there are a number of pastas and several veal possibilities, including piccata and parmagiana — but many others seem generically occidental, such as charbroiled filet mignon or pork chops.

A nice touch on the antipasto platter ($14.95 for two) was the red-wine vinaigrette drizzled over everything. It lent a glamorous and inviting sheen. “Everything” meant ham, salami, and pepperoni, slices of white cheese, tomato quarters, black olives (pitted — thank you!), and red-onion rings atop chopped spears of romaine lettuce.

Minestrone ($5) was served in a tureen whose shape probably helped hold in heat but made access tricky. The soup itself had a sickly, gray-green color, perhaps because of a bounty of cabbage, and was dotted with kidney beans and macaroni tubes. Its flavor was dominated by the earthy bite of the stock (roasted vegetable?) and the heap of grated Parmesan our server spooned over the top, to give it a cap almost like that of French onion soup.

Fried chicken ($18.95 for a half-bird) had a crisp, brownish-bronze crust that was lovely to look at but, being gravely underseasoned, not much to taste. Some CPR administered via salt shaker did restore a faint heartbeat, and the meat itself was juicy. The real redeemer of the plate was the slew of vegetables — broccoli and cauliflower florets, zucchini, sheets of Swiss chard, chunks of baby carrot — apparently braised in stock, to judge by their flavorfulness. Steamed mixed vegetables so often taste like hospital food, but not these.

Calamari steak ($18.95) is sometimes said to be the poor man’s abalone, but it can be splendid in its own right if not overcooked to toughness. Uptown Joe’s batter-fried version was tender with just a hint of chewiness (can we say al dente in this context?) and doused with lemon butter for a fillip of decadence. On the side: a mound of rigatoni tossed with marinara sauce.

Uptown Joe’s prices strike me on the whole as not bargain-basement despite the restaurant’s folksy name. Neither are they through the roof, especially considering the ambiance, although the desserts did leaving me wondering. The chocolate mousse cake ($7.75) was light as whipped cream and not much else, while the apple pie ($7.50, with a pat of vanilla ice cream) was almost too hot to eat in spots despite a creditable crust. In a word: middling. 

UPTOWN JOE’S

Dinner: Tues.–Sun., 5–10:30 p.m.

Brunch: 9 a.m.–2 p.m.

1500 Sutter, SF

(415) 441-1280

Full bar

AE/DS/MC/V

Not noisy

Wheelchair accessible

The soul of the city

Andrew Lam
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23
The soul of the city

tredmond@sfbg.com

44th ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL We all arrived in San Francisco broke: Paulo and me in the ’73 Capri, crawling over Donner Pass with a blown valve and three cylinders firing; Tracy and Craig in the back of a VW van, behind in the payments and on the run from the repo men; Tom and Sharon hitching across the Southwest after Tom, who could bullshit with the best, talked himself out a jail cell in New Orleans. Moak showed up in a rusty Datsun with the wheels falling off. Jane and Danny came on the old hippie bus, the Green Tortoise, $69 across the country.

But we all had a friend who knew a friend where you could crash for a little while. And in the early 1980s you got food stamps the first day and it only took a couple of weeks to get a job waiting tables or canvassing or selling trinkets on the Wharf. And once you’d scraped together a couple hundred dollars — maybe two weeks’ work — you could get a place to live. My first room in a flat in the Western Addition was $120 a month.

We did art and politics and writing and music. After a while, some of us went to law school, some of us became journalists, some of us went into government and education. A few of us fled, and Paulo died in the plague (dammit). But in the end, a lot of us were — and are — San Franciscans, part of a city that welcomed us and gave us a chance.

It was a very different time to be young in San Francisco.

I’m not here to get all nostalgic, really I’m not. There were serious problems in 1982 — raging gentrification was creating clashes in the Mission and the Haight and south of Market that were more violent than anything going on today. And frankly, broke as we were, most of my friends were from middle class homes and were college educated and had a leg up. We weren’t going to starve; we didn’t have to make really ugly choices to eat.

Most of the stories in this special anniversary issue are about marginalized youth — young people trying to survive and make their way against all odds in an increasingly hostile city and a bitter, harsh economy.

But there’s an important difference about San Francisco today, something earlier generations of immigrants didn’t face. The cost of housing, always high, has so outstripped the entry-level and nonprofit wage scale that it’s almost impossible for young people to survive in this town — much less have the time to add to its artistic and creative culture.

I met the 21-year-old daughter of a college friend the other day. She’s as idealistic as we all were. She wants to move to San Francisco for the same reasons we did and you did — except maybe she won’t. Because she felt as if she had to come visit first, to use her dad’s network, see if she could line up a job and figure out if her likely earnings would cover the cost of living. When I mentioned that I’d just up and left the East Coast and headed west, planning to figure it out when I got here, she gave me a look that was part amazement and part sadness. You just can’t do that anymore.

The odds are pretty good that San Francisco won’t get her — her talent and energy will go somewhere else, somewhere that’s not so harsh on young people. I wondered, as I do every once in a while when I’m feeling halfway between an angry political writer and an old curmudgeon: would I come to San Francisco today?

Would Harvey Milk? Would Jello Biafra? Would Dave Eggers? Would you?

If you were born here, would you stay?

Are we squandering this city’s greatest resource — its ability to attract and retain creative people?

The two people who started the Bay Guardian 44 years ago were young arrivals from the Midwest. Bruce Brugmann looked around the city room at the Milwaukee Journal, where he worked as a reporter, and realized there wasn’t any job he wanted there in 10 years. With two young kids and a dream of starting a weekly newspaper in one of the world’s most exciting cities, Bruce and his wife, Jean Dibble, settled in a $130-a-month flat. The Guardian’s first office was a desk in the printers shop. When they paper could finally afford its own space, Bruce and Jean moved the staff into a $60-a-month four-room place on Ninth and Bryant streets.

From the start, the paper was a “preservationist” publication — both in terms of environmental issues like saving the bay and in the larger political sense. The San Francisco Bay Guardian was out to save San Francisco.

The city was under assault — by the developers who were making fast money tossing high-rises into downtown; the speculators making fast money flipping property, ducking taxes, and driving up rents; the unscrupulous landlords who were letting their buildings fall apart while they charged ever higher rent. For the Guardian, fighting this urbicide meant protecting San Francisco values, preserving the best of the city from what Bruce liked to call “the radicals at the Chamber of Commerce.”

For the Guardian, progress wasn’t measured in the number of new buildings constructed, but in the ability of the city to remain a place where artists and writers and community organizers and hell-raisers — and the young people who were always bringing new life to the city — could survive. We supported rent control, and growth limits, and affordable housing policies, and limits on condo conversions, and minimum-wage and sanctuary city laws — and a long list of other things that together amounted to a progressive agenda.

And in 2010, the assault on the young, the poor, the nonconformists, the immigrants, is still on, at full force. The mayor and his allies are pushing a ballot measure that would make it illegal just to sit on the sidewalk. He’s also turning the local juvenile authorities into immigration cops, breaking up families in the process. He’s cut funding for youth services, and wants to make it easier for speculators to evict tenants, take affordable rental housing (especially the flats that young people share to save money) off the market, and create high-priced condos. Virtually all of the new housing he’s pushing is for rich people. He’s shutting down parties and arresting DJs and, in effect, declaring a War on Fun.

What he’s doing — and what the downtown forces want — is the transformation of San Francisco from a welcoming city where the weird is the normal, where the young and the crazy and the brilliant and the broke can be part of (or even drivers of) the culture, to one where profit and property values are all that matter. And that’s a recipe for urban doom.

Richard Florida’s 2004 bestseller The Rise of the Creative Class shook up political thinking by pointing out that cities thrive with iconoclasts, not organization people. Everyone likes to talk about that now, even Mayor Gavin Newsom. But the missing piece, from a policy perspective, is that the creative class — particularly the young people who are going to be the next generation of the creative class — needs space to grow. And that means the most important thing a creative city can do is nurture the very people Newsom and his allies want to drive away.

If Prop. L, the “sit-lie” law, passes, if the rental flats in the Mission that have been home to several generations of young artists, writers, musicians and future civic leaders vanish in the name of condo conversions, if 85 percent of all the new housing in San Francisco is affordable only to millionaires, if the money that helps foster kids and runaways and at-risk youth dries up because this rich city won’t raise taxes, if nightlife becomes an annoyance to be stifled…then we’re in danger of losing San Francisco.

Our 44th Anniversary Issue also includes stories by Sarah Phelan on SF’s disadvantaged youth, Caitlin Donohue’s account of the Haight street kids, and Rebecca Bowe’s look at ageing out of the foster care system

Music listings

David Talbot
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0

Music listings are compiled by Paula Connelly and Cheryl Eddy. Since club life is unpredictable, it’s a good idea to call ahead to confirm bookings and hours. Prices are listed when provided to us. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com.

WEDNESDAY 20

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Aerosols, Montra, Skystone Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $6.

Pryor Baird and the Deacons Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $15.

Blood and Sunshine, Callow, Shauna Regan Red Devil Lounge. 8pm, $6.

Deer Tick, J. Roddy Walston and the Business Regency Ballroom. 8pm, $17.

Ennen Enne, Winebirds, Zoo Elbo Room. 9pm, $7.

Four Year Strong, Wonder Years, American Fangs Slim’s. 8pm, $17.

Hedley, Gold Motel, Chairman Wow Café Du Nord. 8pm, $12.

Hesta Prynn, Kenan Bell, 40Love Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $12.

Scout Niblett, Esben and the Witch, Excuses for Skipping Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $12.

Suicidal Tendences, (hed)p.e. Fillmore. 8pm, $26.50.

UK Subs, Total Chaos, Sore Thumbs, Final Summation Thee Parkside. 8pm, $10-12.

Vaselines, Dum Dum Girls Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $23.

Hawksley Workman, Joe Firstman, Aimee Francis, Trey Lockerbie Hotel Utah. 7:30pm, $10.

DANCE CLUBS

Booty Call Q-Bar, 456 Castro, SF; www.bootycallwednesdays.com. 9pm. Juanita Moore hosts this dance party, featuring DJ Robot Hustle.

Breezin Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 9:30pm, free. With DJs Amy A and Brynnie Mac spinning yacht rock od smooth 70s.

Hands Down! Bar on Church. 9pm, free. With DJs Claksaarb, Mykill, and guests spinning indie, electro, house, and bangers.

Jam Fresh Wednesdays Vessel, 85 Campton, SF; (415) 433-8585. 9:30pm, free. With DJs Slick D, Chris Clouse, Rich Era, Don Lynch, and more spinning top40, mashups, hip hop, and remixes.

Mary-Go-Round Lookout, 3600 16th St, SF; (415) 431-0306. 10pm, $5. A weekly drag show with hosts Cookie Dough, Pollo Del Mar, and Suppositori Spelling.

RedWine Social Dalva. 9pm-2am, free. DJ TophOne and guests spin outernational funk and get drunk.

Respect Wednesdays End Up. 10pm, $5. Rotating DJs Daddy Rolo, Young Fyah, Irie Dole, I-Vier, Sake One, Serg, and more spinning reggae, dancehall, roots, lovers rock, and mash ups.

Synchronize Il Pirata, 2007 16th St, SF; (415) 626-2626. 10pm, free. Psychedelic dance music with DJs Helios, Gatto Matto, Psy Lotus, Intergalactoid, and guests.

THURSDAY 21

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Ancestors, Pins of Light, Fucking Wrath Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $7.

Atreyu, Bless the Fall, Chiodos, Architects, Endless Hallway Regency Ballroom. 6:30pm, $23.

Bell X1 Swedish American Hall (upstairs from Café Du Nord). 8pm, $18.

Company Car, Pebble Theory, Farewell Typewriter El Rio. 9pm, $6.

Stan Erhart with Garth Webber Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $15.

Harry and the Hitmen, Hypnotist Collectors, Jugtown Pirates Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $10.

Dave Mason Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8pm, $36.

Joey McIntyre, Emanuel Kiriakou Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $34.

Mischka, White Buffalo, Chris Velan Independent. 8pm, $15.

Old Man Markley, Whisky Richards, West Nile Ramblers Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

Recoil: A Strange Hour, Alan Wilder and Paul Kendall, Architect, Conjure One Mezzanine. 8pm, $25.

*Saviours, Kowloon Walled City Thee Parkside. 9pm, free.

Scrams, Airfix Kits, Dirty Cupcakes, Bad Backs Knockout. 9:30pm.

DANCE CLUBS

Afrolicious Elbo Room. 9:30pm, $10. DJs Pleasuremaker and Señor Oz and guest Choco Mann spin Afrobeat, tropicália, electro, samba, and funk.

Caribbean Connection Little Baobab, 3388 19th St, SF; (415) 643-3558. 10pm, $3. DJ Stevie B and guests spin reggae, soca, zouk, reggaetón, and more.

Club Jammies Edinburgh Castle. 10pm, free. DJs EBERrad and White Mice spinning reggae, punk, dub, and post punk.

John Digweed Ruby Skye. 9pm, $30.

Drop the Pressure Underground SF. 6-10pm, free. Electro, house, and datafunk highlight this weekly happy hour.

Electric Feel Lookout, 3600 16th St, SF; (415) 431-0306. 9pm, $2. With DJs subOctave and Blondie K spinning indie music videos.

Good Foot Som., 2925 16th St, SF; (415) 558-8521. 10pm, free. With DJs spinning R&B, Hip hop, classics, and soul.

Jivin’ Dirty Disco Butter, 354 11th St., SF; (415) 863-5964. 8pm, free. With DJs spinning disco, funk, and classics.

Koko Puffs Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 10pm, free. Dubby roots reggae and Jamaican funk from rotating DJs.

Mestiza Bollywood Café, 3376 19th St, SF; (415) 970-0362. 10pm, free. Showcasing progressive Latin and global beats with DJ Juan Data.

Nightvision Harlot, 46 Minna, SF; (415) 777-1077. 9:30pm, $10. DJs Danny Daze, Franky Boissy, and more spinning house, electro, hip hop, funk, and more.

Peaches Skylark, 10pm, free. With an all female DJ line up featuring Deeandroid, Lady Fingaz, That Girl, and Umami spinning hip hop.

Popscene 330 Rich. 10pm, $10. Rotating DJs spinning indie, Britpop, electro, new wave, and post-punk.

FRIDAY 22

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Born Ruffians, Meligrove Band Slim’s. 9pm, $16.

Fleeting Trance, Wish Inflicted, Jeremy Serwer Hotel Utah. 9pm, $8.

Jon B. Yoshi’s San Francisco. 10:30pm, $25.

Lyrics Born, Chali 2na, Rakaa Independent. 9pm, $25.

Never Shout Never, Maine, I Can Make a Mess Like Nobody’s Business, Carter Hulsey Warfield. 6:30pm, $20.

Jack O and the Tearjerkers, Roy Loney, East Bay Grease, Wrong Words, Scrams Thee Parkside. 8:30pm, $10. Part of Budget Rock 9.

Mississippi Man, Silent Comedy, Michael Beach Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $8.

Pierced Arrows, Bare Wires, Burnt Ones Rickshaw Stop. 8:30pm, $12.

Lavay Smith and Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $20.

Starfucker, Octopus Project, Strength Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $14.

Stone Foxes, Soft White Sixties, Real Nasty Bottom of the Hill. 10pm, $12.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

*Yusef Lateef Grace Cathedral, 1100 California, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 8pm, $30-50.

Gretchen Parlato Swedish American Hall (upstairs from Café Du Nord). 8pm, $30.

Marlena Teich Savanna Jazz. 7:30pm, $8.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Boca do Rio Coda. 10pm, $10.

Marina Lavalle Brava Theater, 2781 24th St., SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. 8pm, $22.

DANCE CLUBS

Afrobeat Lab Elbo Room. 10pm, $10. Featuring a live performance by ALBINO! with DJs Señor Oz and guests.

Alcoholocaust Presents Riptide Tavern. 9pm, free. DJ What’s His Fuck spins old-school punk rock and other gems.

Club Dragon Club Eight, 1151 Folsom, SF; www.eightsf.com. 9pm, $8. A gay Asian paradise. Featuring two dance floors playing dance and hip hop, smoking patio, and 2 for 1 drinks before 10pm.

Duniya Dancehall Blue Macaw, 2565 Mission, SF; (415) 920-0577. 10pm, $10. With live performances by Duniya Drum and Dance Co. and DJs dub Snakr and Juan Data spinning bhangra, bollywood, dancehall, African, and more.

Exhale, Fridays Project One Gallery, 251 Rhode Island, SF; (415) 465-2129. 5pm, $5. Happy hour with art, fine food, and music with Vin Sol, King Most, DJ Centipede, and Shane King.

Fat Stack Fridays Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 10pm, free. With rotating DJs B-Cause, Vinnie Esparza, Mr. Robinson, Toph One, and Slopoke.

Fubar Fridays Butter, 354 11th St., SF; (415) 863-5964. 6pm, $5. With DJs spinning retro mashup remixes.

Good Life Fridays Apartment 24, 440 Broadway, SF; (415) 989-3434. 10pm, $10. With DJ Brian spinning hip hop, mashups, and top 40.

Hot Chocolate Milk. 9pm, $5. With DJs Big Fat Frog, Chardmo, DuseRock, and more spinning old and new school funk.

House of Voodoo Medici Lounge, 299 9th St., SF; (415) 501-9162. 9pm, $5. With DJ Purgatory and Stiletto spinning goth, industrial, deathrock, glam, darkwave, and eighties.

Psychedelic Radio Club Six. 9pm, $7. With DJs Kial, Tom No Thing, Megalodon, and Zapruderpedro spinning dubstep, reggae, and electro.

Queens are Wild Mezzanine. 8pm, $25-$500. A benefit casino night costume party with host Juanita More and DJs Gemini Disco.

Rockabilly Fridays Jay N Bee Club, 2736 20th St, SF; (415) 824-4190. 9pm, free. With DJs Rockin’ Raul, Oakie Oran, Sergio Iglesias, and Tanoa "Samoa Boy" spinning 50s and 60s Doo Wop, Rockabilly, Bop, Jive, and more.

Scientist with Roots Radics Rock-it Room. 9pm, $17.

Some Thing The Stud. 10pm, $7. VivvyAnne Forevermore, Glamamore, and DJ Down-E give you fierce drag shows and afterhours dancing.

Soul in the Machine DNA Lounge. 8pm, $20. Techno and industrial with Dyloot, Taj, and more.

$3 Dance Party Knockout. 10pm, $3. Eclectic tunes with DJs Paul Paul, dX the Funky Gran Paw, and Deadbeat.

SATURDAY 23

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Laurie Anderson Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8pm, $55.

Bilal Ameoba, 1855 Haight, SF; www.amoeba.com. 2pm, free. 2pm, free.

Chuck Alvarez Band Biscuits and Blues. 8:30pm, $15.

Crosstops, Sassy Bender’s, 800 S. Van Ness, SF; www.bendersbar.com. 10pm, $5.

Electric Six, Constellations, Ghost Robot Independent. 9pm, $16.

Frail, Savage Resurrection El Rio. 9pm, donations to Rocket Dog Rescue accepted.

Giovenco Project Coda. 10pm, $10.

JP, Chrissie and the Fairground Boys, Amy Correia Bimbo’s 365 Club. 9pm, $33.

Oblivians, Icky Boyfriends, Wounded Lion, Wild Thing Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $20.

Rubinoos Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $18. Part of Budget Rock 9.

*Skipper, Shannon and the Clams, C’Mon Everybody, Tropical Sleep, Larry and the Angriest Generation, Midnite Snaxx Thee Parkside. 2pm, $7. Part of Budget Rock 9.

Trashcan Sinatras Swedish American Hall (upstairs from Café Du Nord). 8pm, $20.

Triptykon, 1349, Yakuza Slim’s. 9pm, $23.

Women, French Miami, Manchild Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $10.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Bill Frisell and the 858 Quartet Noe Valley Ministry, 1021 Sanchez, SF; www.noevalleymusicseries.com. 7:30 and 9:30pm, $25.

JFJO, Con Brio, Evarusnik Café Du Nord. 9:30pm, $15.

Will Sellenraad Coda. 7pm, $7.

Suzanna Smith Savanna Jazz. 7:30pm, $8.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Ashwin Batish and friends of Sitar Power Red Poppy Art House. 7pm, $25. With dance artist Rasa Vitalia.

Greensky Bluegrass Boom Boom Room. 8pm, $15.

Ten Sorrowful Songs and a Crane San Francisco Community Music Center, 544 Capp, SF; (415) 647-6015. 8pm, free.

Craig Ventresco and Meredith Axelrod Atlas Café. 4pm, free.

DANCE CLUBS

Bar on Church 9pm. Rotating DJs Foxxee, Joseph Lee, Zhaldee, Mark Andrus, and Nuxx.

Barracuda 111 Minna. 9pm, $10. Eclectic 80s music with DJs Damon and Phillie Ocean plus 80s cult video projections, a laser light show, prom balloons, and 80s inspired fashion.

Bootie DNA Lounge. 9pm, $6-12. Mash-ups with guest VJ Faroff and more.

Derrick Carter Ruby Skye. 9pm, $15.

Cockblock Rickshaw Stop. 10pm. Queer dance party with DJ Nuxx and friends.

David J. Cat Club. 9:30pm, $10-12. Music from the dark side.

Debaser Knockout. 9pm, $5. Hip-hop hits of the 90s with DJs Jamie Jams, EmDee, and Stab Master Arson.

4OneFunktion Elbo Room. 10pm, $5-10.

Go Bang! Deco Lounge, 510 Larkin, SF; (415) 346 – 2025. 9pm, $5. Recreating the diversity and freedom of the 70’s/ 80’s disco nightlife with DJs Steve Fabus, Tres Lingerie, Sergio, and more.

HYP Club Eight, 1151 Folsom, SF; www.eightsf.com. 10pm, free. Gay and lesbian hip hop party, featuring DJs spinning the newest in the top 40s hip hop and hyphy.

Icee Hot 222 Hyde, SF; www.iceehotmartyn.eventbrite.com. 10pm. With Dutch drum and bass veteran and producer Martyn.

Reggae Gold Club Six. 9pm, $15. With DJs Daddy Rolo, Polo Mo’qz, Tesfa, Serg, and Fuze spinning dancehall and reggae.

Rock City Butter, 354 11th St., SF; (415) 863-5964. 6pm, $5 after 10pm. With DJs spinning party rock.

Spirit Fingers Sessions 330 Ritch. 9pm, free. With DJ Morse Code and live guest performances.

SUNDAY 24

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Laurie Anderson Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8pm, $55.

Azure Ray, Whispertown, Tim Fite Independent. 8pm, $15.

"Battle of the Bands" DNA Lounge. 5:30pm, $12. With House of Clouds, Twisted Blues, and more.

Happy Body Slow Brain, Please Do Not Fight, Bird by Bird, Girlfriend Season Rickshaw Stop. 7pm, $10.

Making Dinner Café Du Nord. 8pm, $10.

Muskrats, Tee’n’Dee Explosion, Outdoorsmen, Spencey Dude and the Doodles, Angora Debs, Skkkumby Thee Parkside. 1pm, $7. Part of Budget Rock 9.

Lucky Peterson Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $20.

Reigning Sound, Flakes, Ty Segall, Touch-Me-Nots Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $15. Part of Budget Rock 9.

Safes, Cellar Doors, Dead Westerns Hemlock Tavern. 8pm, $7.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Anthony Brown and friends Koret Auditorium, de Young Museum, Golden Gate Park, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Dr, SF; www.theintersection.org. 2pm, free.

Bill Frisell Ameoba, 1855 Haight, SF; www.amoeba.com. 2pm, free.

Bill Frisell and the 858 Quartet Noe Valley Ministry, 1021 Sanchez, SF; www.noevalleymusicseries.com. 7:30pm, $25.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Kenny Barron Trio with David Sanchez Herbst Theatre, 401 Van Ness, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 7pm, $25-65.

Big Tings Gravity, 3251 Scott, SF; (415) 776-1928. 5pm, free.

Jon Jang SF Conservatory of Music, 50 Oak, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 3pm, $30-50.

Barrington Levy Slim’s. 9pm, $30.

Orquesta America El Rio. 4pm, $8.

Josh Workman, Bryan Bowman, Ravi Abcarian Bliss Bar, 4026 24th St, SF; (415) 826-6200. 4:30pm, $10.

DANCE CLUBS

DiscoFunk Mashups Cat Club. 10pm, free. House and 70’s music.

Dub Mission Elbo Room. 9pm, $6. Dub, dubstep, roots, and dancehall with DJ Sep, Ludachris, and DJ Tomas.

Gloss Sundays Trigger, 2344 Market, SF; (415) 551-CLUB. 7pm. With DJ Hawthorne spinning house, funk, soul, retro, and disco.

Honey Soundsystem Paradise Lounge. 8pm-2am. "Dance floor for dancers – sound system for lovers." Got that?

Jock! Lookout, 3600 16th St, SF; (415) 431-0306. 3pm, $2. This high-energy party raises money for LGBT sports teams.

Kick It Bar on Church. 9pm. Hip-hop with DJ Zax.

Lowbrow Sunday Delirium. 1pm, free. DJ Roost Uno and guests spinning club hip hop, indie, and top 40s.

Pachanga Coda. 5pm, $10. Salsa with DJs Fab Fred, DJ Antonio, and Montuno Swing.

Religion Bar on Church. 3pm. With DJ Nikita.

Stag AsiaSF. 6pm, $5. Gay bachelor parties are the target demo of this weekly erotic tea dance.

Swing Out Sundays Rock-It Room. 7pm, free (dance lessons $15). DJ BeBop Burnie spins 20s through 50s swing, jive, and more.

MONDAY 25

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Lights, Jeremy Fisher Slim’s. 8pm, $15.

Lucky Peterson Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $20.

Russian Circles, Keelhaul, Call Me Lightning Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $13.

Seabear, Grandchildren Independent. 8pm, $15.

Amanda Shires, Jesse Brewster, Heather Combs Elbo Room. 9pm, $7.

DANCE CLUBS

Black Gold Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 10pm-2am, free. Senator Soul spins Detroit soul, Motown, New Orleans R&B, and more — all on 45!

Death Guild DNA Lounge. 9:30pm, $3-5. Gothic, industrial, and synthpop with DJs Decay, Joe Radio, and Melting Girl.

Krazy Mondays Beauty Bar. 10pm, free. With DJs Ant-1, $ir-Tipp, Ruby Red I, Lo, and Gelo spinning hip hop.

M.O.M. Madrone Art Bar. 6pm, free. With DJ Gordo Cabeza and guests playing all Motown every Monday.

Manic Mondays Bar on Church. 9pm. Drink 80-cent cosmos with Djs Mark Andrus and Dangerous Dan.

Musik for Your Teeth Revolution Café, 3248 22nd St., SF; (415) 642-0474. 5pm, free. Soul cookin’ happy hour tunes with DJ Antonino Musco.

Network Mondays Azul Lounge, One Tillman Pl, SF; www.inhousetalent.com. 9pm, $5. Hip-hop, R&B, and spoken word open mic, plus featured performers.

Skylarking Skylark. 10pm, free. With resident DJs I & I Vibration, Beatnok, and Mr. Lucky and weekly guest DJs.

TUESDAY 26

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Best Coast, Sonny and the Sunsets Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $15.

Billy Nayer Show, Lee Vilensky Trio Café Du Nord. 8:30pm, $12.

Breathe Owl Breathe, Little Wings, Kacey Johansing Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

Ego Likeness, Chant, Slave Unit Elbo Room. 9pm, $10.

Mariah Larkin El Rio. 7pm, free.

DANCE CLUBS

Alcoholocaust Presents Argus Lounge. 9pm, free. "Stump the Wizard" with DJs What’s His Fuck and DJ Wizard.

Eclectic Company Skylark, 9pm, free. DJs Tones and Jaybee spin old school hip hop, bass, dub, glitch, and electro.

Rock Out Karaoke! Amnesia. 7:30pm. With Glenny Kravitz.

Share the Love Trigger, 2344 Market, SF; (415) 551-CLUB. 5pm, free. With DJ Pam Hubbuck spinning house.

Womanizer Bar on Church. 9pm. With DJ Nuxx.

Markus James’ West African happiness surplus

Andrew Lam
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In an age of endless crossover between most conceivable forms of music, it’s but small surprise that a Caucasian man from Virginia is making blues with West African witch doctors. What rarely gets discussed in these cross-ocean collaborations is the social aspect of the fusion. What did the artists eat for lunch the day they recorded that track? In what language was the “and-a-one” that started off the first take? 

We had the opportunity to chat over the phone with Bay Area artist Markus James, who has parlayed his time with Malian string musicians into elemental blues tracks. You can hear them on both his new album, Snakeskin Violin, and at his live show (at the Ashkenaz, Fri/22) with The Wassonrai, who are West African musicians that rep for jam band track longevity – strains of which James says is indigenous everywhere from Mali to Jackson, Mississippi — into their already formidable blend of blues past and present. James said (and we’re paraphrasing here) that the secret to fusion collaborations all lies in your location-resonation, but that’s just his perspective.

 

San Francisco Bay Guardian: When did you first hear African music? Did you know right at the start the depths you would dive into it?

Markus James: I don’t know if anyone really knows what is going to take them. The lights really went on for me when I heard Ali Farka Toure. He played traditional West African music on the electric guitar and it came out sounding like John Lee Hooker. That was where I really felt the powerful connection between all the music I grew up loving: rock, and soul music, and of course blues music, and the connection between that and its ancient roots in West Africa.

 

SFBG: What did African music pick up in the United States to become blues?

MJ: The roots of blues music go way back, specifically to pentatonic [five note as opposed to our eight note system] music traditions there. Pentatonic music really resonates with what we think of as blues music. There is a direct correlation between what I call country blues, or old school blues music, and some of these music traditions that I’m talking about in West Africa. Not just the notes and the musical scale, but the groove, the rhythm. For example, in West Africa women are often pounding the millet for that evening’s food. The have this six-foot tall piece of wood – it’s like a mortar and pestle. Another woman, or a girl, is scooping it back underneath so that the wood hits the grain. They get these rhythms going that are like goom-chack-goom-chack. Then people start playing on calabashes with this rhythm, and the rhythm is virtually identical to what we call the shuffle rhythm that you hear in a lot of old blues music, Chicago blues music, and rock music. If you go over to West Africa and you start playing what we call country blues, people will just start playing along with it and they’ll say oh, that’s our music.

 

SFBG: On “I Won’t Let It” you perform spoken word over the music. Is there a legacy in African music of that spoken word tradition?

MJ: Absolutely. There’s a whole caste of artists called griots. Their specialty is preserving history through story-songs, but also singing praise songs to whoever’s in power at the time. They will break into long passages of rhythmically chanted tone-poem language. That’s all there. 

 

SFBG: You do a lot of cross-culture collaboration. Does the dynamic get tricky when you come from one of the wealthiest nations in the world?

MJ: Not really. I’ll give you an example. I was introduced to a 75-year old man who is the spiritual leader of the Holehoire religion in Timbuktu, Mali. He is what we would call a healer, or in older parlance, a witch doctor. He is like a medium, and his whole role in the community is to communicate with the jinn, their spirits. His instrument is a gourd with the skin of a river snake stretched across it, the string is horse hair. He has a whole repertoire of melodies and rhythms that he plays, the purpose of which are to call certain spirits for certain purposes, to ask for rain, or to ask for good luck, a million things.

He came over to our adobe-walled house where I had my little set-up going and we started playing music together. I was playing guitar and he was shifting back and forth between his two instruments, and he would sing a little line and I would sing something. I told him, I’m making a recording in blues, which is an African-American tradition, if this thing turns out pretty good I might put it on a CD – and I’m paying him, which he’s happy about. And I said before I do anything I want to bring it back to you because I know this is really – I don’t know how I said it to him but I’d say it to you, this is really deep waters. This is considered the pre-voodoo religion. He said sure, fine, great, I hope somebody enjoys it.

The next year I came back and I played him what I had made out of it, it’s this song on Snakeskin Violin, it’s called “Sundown Pearl” I played it for him and he started beaming and smiling and saying this is very good, this is going to be very successful. When I see him I give him something which anticipates the day when I might get some royalties from it. My friends that I’ve made there, it’s hard for them to understand that I’m not really selling a lot of CDs here but they’re very happy that there’s a revenue stream.

 

SFBG: You’re a vegetarian. I’m curious — I’m a vegetarian too – how is it to travel in Africa without eating meat?

MJ: They assumed at first that I must be deranged. It was absolutely inconceivable that someone could live without eating meat. Even the West African artists I perform with here in the US, it’s taken them awhile to accept it, even though they know other people here. I’m trying to think what it would be like to tell someone here. It’d be like saying I went down to the Bay and I just skipped across it to Berkeley. 

 

SFBG: You can’t even do it with food — our society has such an individualized view of eating. 

MJ: You know, I’m eating rice down there without the meat sauce, but I’m still in this communal meal zone. My friends will explain, he’s a vegetarian, and that means he doesn’t believe in eating meat, and he appears to be healthy. Something that I could not have foreseen was that I’d become a emissary for vegetarianism in West Africa.

People say, you come from a rich country, and they come from a poor country, so what is politically correct? I think when some people go to West Africa they resonate with it, they connect with it. You come to realize that what we think of as wealth and poverty is very relative to our perspective. Here you might say that we’re wealthy because we have a car, or a house, or roads that allow you to go 60 miles per hour. What we have may not necessarily translate into what they would consider to be joy, happiness, abundance, peacefulness. They’re certainly not stuck in traffic jams and trying to make mortgage payments. We might be looking at a little of a joy deficit and over there they have a happiness surplus. I know that’s simplistic, but that’s my perception. 

 

Markus James and the Wassonrai

Fri/22 9:30pm, $10-12

Ashkenaz

1317 San Pablo, Berk.

(510) 525-5054

www.ashkenaz.com

 

The 20th annual Potero Hill Festival

Andrew Lam
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It’s the little festival with a big view. Potrero Hill, the home of the Guardian, is hosting the 20th annual festival with of a “New Orleans” Style Brunch created by the California Culinary Academy and an exciting street fair on 20th Street between Missouri & Wisconson Streets. Enjoy music, food, crafts and activities for the young and old alike.

Potrero Hill Festival
Date: October 16, 2010, 11am-4pm
Location: 20th Street Between Missouri & Wisconson Streets

New Orleans Jazz Brunch
Location: Potrero Hill Neighborhood House, 953 De Haro Street
Date: October 16, 2010, 9:00am-1:00pm

Before the Festival, join the Festival Committee and the Potrero Hill Neighborhood House for an annual tradition – a lavish and delicious brunch catered by the California Culinary Academy featuring Dixieland music and superb bay views.

Festival Performances & Activities

  • Main and Side Stage including performances by some of the area’s most exciting performers.
  • Kids Area including bouncy house, petting zoo, pony rides, performer stage and more
  • Snack the Hill: A variety of food from Potrero Hill restaurateurs and more
  • Over 40 Potrero Hill and local artists, merchants & nonprofit organizations

Marketing

  • Collectible Posters will be posted on Potrero Hill and beyond
  • Advertising in Potrero View & the San Francisco Bay Guardian
  • Online campaign including a website, social marketing and email campaign

Attendance

  • Festival has an expected attendance of over 7,500 Potrero Hill & San Francisco Residents
  • New Orleans Jazz Brunch will be attended by as many as 500 Potrero Hill and San Francisco Residents

Benefits the Potrero Hill Neighborhood House

The Potrero Hill Festival will support the programs of the Potrero Hill Neighborhood House (NABE). The NABE is an invaluable community resource that provides important programs for the community, including youth and senior nutrition, employment and supplemental education programs and programs for developmentally disabled adults.

Whiskeyfest 2010 highlights, part two

Andrew Lam
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Whiskeyfest 2010 highlights, part two

Earlier on sfbg.com, Virginia Miller turned WhiskyFest into Whisky Week, meeting with seven different distillers who’d come to attend the Fest from such far-flung booze berths as Kentucky and Scotland. Here’s part one of her scotch-heavy Whisky Week highlights. Read on for part two: conversations with bourbon and rye distillers.

10/8 COFFEE WITH JIMMY RUSSELL OF WILD TURKEY – The morning before WhiskyFest I learned about a company that’s been a Kentucky mainstay since 1855, and met with its master-distiller since 1954. Jimmy Russell comes from a family of distillers: grandad, dad — who worked for him at Wild Turkey in the early years — and now Russell is distilling with his son, Eddie. Jimmy could not be more charming. An older Southern gentleman, he’s soft-spoken, with an adorable sense of humor that I discovered as we chatted over coffee.

Russell makes Wild Turkey bourbons and ryes “the old-fashioned way” and says he doesn’t even tell his son all of his distilling secrets. They use barrels charred four times and made of white oak mainly from Missouri, Kentucky and the Ozarks of Arkansas. Their basic bourbons are a blend of six, eight and ten year-aged, with a lower proof than some bourbons, generally 108-110 proof. He explains lower proof is actually more costly as there is more water added to dilute higher proof bourbons. 

The distiller’s yarns about his town of Lawrenceburg, KY are fascinating, particularly because it’s in a mostly dry county where no drinks are allowed in restaurants and bars do not exist. “We’re not dry, we’re moist”, he says, as there are a few limited options to purchase drink in the area. It was only a couple years ago they secured a souvenir liquor license, one of many complicated hoops to jump through to in order to allow tastings in their actual distillery. Russell says he adheres to the Southern Baptist tradition that one only drinks hard liquor for medicinal purposes. He qualifies in a gentle, Southern drawl, “I keep a cough pretty much most of the time”.

10/7 SIPPIN’ WHEATED BOURBON WITH PARKER BEAM – Amidst the annoying happy hour din at Bloodhound last Thursday night, distilling legend Parker Beam was hanging out with the Heaven Hill crew and a few of their whiskeys. They pulled out a bottle of brand new Parker’s Heritage Wheated Bourbon, an earthy, wood-laced wheat beauty whose mix blends in corn and malted barley.

Parker raised a glass as we attempted to chat above the din. Hearing took some effort as the delightful Parker speaks in a slow, Southern drawl that lulls one into a real enjoyment of the moment. His passion for distilling shines in his calm demeanor. He’s distilled for decades, both with father, Earl and son, Craig. And yes, he’s related to “that” Beam. His grandfather and namesake, Park Beam’s, brother was the storied Jim Beam (aka James Beauregard Beam). Parker is part of a royal distilling heritage. I asked if his son had any children who might next enter the fray. “My son has five daughters, so no,” he surmised. “But who knows? Maybe we’ll have the first female bourbon distiller someday.” It wouldn’t be the first noteworthy accomplishment in the Beam family’s rich history.

10/10 BACON BRUNCH WITH KEITH KERKHOFF OF TEMPLETON RYE – Setting: Reza Esmaili’s Long Bar. Food: delectable spread from chef Erik Hopfinger. Heaping bacon piles of Eden Farms Berkshire Pork — And don’t forget the rye. Templeton Rye from Templeton, Iowa, to be exact. The brunch was in celebration of this delightful rye — previously restricted for sale to Illinois and Iowa — finally becoming available in San Francisco.

Templeton is so small batch that you won’t find it in any Bay Area shops outside of SF, where our usual suspects, like Cask, Jug Shop, and K&L all stock the brand. Assistant master-distiller Keith Kerkhoff (I wrote about a Whiskies of the World seminar with their president, Scott Bush earlier this year) and brand manager Michael Killmer hosted us for a relaxed, festive brunch where the coffees were spiked with the rye and topped with Fernet whipped cream. Welcome to SF, Templeton.

Waxing poetic with Maker’s Mark at The Alembic

10/10 DIPPING WAX WITH KEVIN SMITH OF MAKER’S MARK — At The Alembic, Kevin Smith, the master distiller of Maker’s Mark, spent a couple hours with a small group, tasting through various ages of the bourbon from white dog to pours that were years older than the finished Maker’s product, so that we could get an idea of when a spirit is ready. From a somewhat neutral base cut down to 90 proof, the bourbon gained most of its flavor from barrel aging, and we sampled a woody 12-year version that came off astringent and tannic, though not unpleasant. Smith used the two to highlight their choice of the smoother, rounder balance of the fully matured final product which is aged roughly years.

We finished with Maker’s 46, their first new product in 50 years. I’ve had it a few times and it makes sense Kevin said the inspiration was rye whiskey with advanced spicing, toasty oak and that “cinnamon bite.” It’s certainly my preferred Makers. Thanks to The Alembic for serving us a gorgeous, bright Maker’s 46 cocktail: sweet vermouth, absinthe, maraschino and a mint garnish. But the session wasn’t over until we had hand-dipped glasses in Maker’s signature red wax, a tradition established from the chemist wife of Bill Samuels, Sr. (Maker’s original owner). She loved brandy and wanted the bottle shape and wax to imbue Maker’s with a brandy elegance.

Interestingly, California just surpassed Kentucky as Maker’s number one-selling US market. Raise a glass, shall we, to the pioneers and tastemakers who brought love of spirits to share during this past whirlwind week of whisky.

—Subscribe to Virgina’s twice monthly newsletter, The Perfect Spot

Appetite: WhiskyFest 2010 highlights, part one

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Appetite: WhiskyFest 2010 highlights, part one

“[Whisky] feels appropriately intellectual: a drink you can wrestle with, linger over, and appreciate with all its nooks and crannies.” – Victoria Moore, How to Drink

WhiskyFest turns into Whisky Week with many of the world’s great master distillers and brand ambassadors in town from the reaches of Scotland and Kentucky for a tasting event of nearly 300 whiskies. I had the privilege of meeting with seven different distillers – some met with me over coffee or lunch, others at intimate gatherings. Impressed by the wide range of approaches, styles and personalities, I could easily write an article about each one and their respective distilleries. I will share highlights, this time with Scotch master, Richard Paterson, from a Charbay whiskey dinner, and tastes from the event. Part two will be conversations with bourbon and rye distillers.

10/8 LUNCH WITH RICHARD PATERSON – Richard Paterson, known as “the nose” for his impeccable nose and taste, has been Whyte & Mackay’s master blender for decades. He’s one of the world’s leading scotch experts, author of the book Goodness Nose (which I savored as “homework” all through Whisky Week). To be part of one his seminars (such as at WhiskyFest Friday night), is to be bombarded with dates, history, uproarious expertise, irreverence, drama, laughter. When one lucky member of the class samples Dalmore Sirius (which has sold at up to $60,000 a bottle!), Paterson sets off a mini-rocket filled with confetti. Fireworks. Revelation. Kind of like tasting it myself…

I had the privilege of an intimate three hour lunch over food and the Dalmore line with Paterson at Wayfare Tavern. We covered the range from 12 year to King Alexander III scotches (which I first had at Whiskies of the World). The chocolate, marzipan, tropical fruit of King Alexander III remains a Dalmore highlight for me. It’s the only single malt in the world finished in six different woods (Port, Bordeaux Cabernet Sauvignon, Marsala, Madeira, Matusalem sherry, small batch Knob Creek bourbon barrels). Dalmore’s Gran Reserva stood out more the second and third time I sampled it with spiced marmalade, crushed almonds, and sherry notes from the 60% Oloroso sherry casks it’s aged in.

Get Richard started on wood and he says, “The wood is, as far as I’m concerned, the be all, end all.” With a devotion to fine sherry casks (like Gonzales Byass), a key source of Dalmore’s elegant taste profile, they also use a generous amount of American white oak, bourbon casks from Heaven Hill and Jim Beam, which enriches the profile further.

A favorite, which I would happily sip on its own, isn’t bottled: the unaged distillate or, whisky base. It’s amazing how much you can tell of a spirit’s quality by its foundation. I was pleasantly assaulted with an array of tastes from spice and earth to lemongrass in the clear, strong distillate. I finished every drop.

Certainly a pinnacle is reached with the Sirius. The rare opportunity to sample highly aged spirits just a handful times (like two 1800s cognacs in New Orleans or Highland Park’s 40 and 42 year scotches) has opened doors of flavor I could not dream up – this scotch transported me to regions beyond. There are only 12 bottles of Sirius in existence, a ’51 vintage with a blend of Dalmore scotches from 1868, 1878, 1926, 1939. History courses through each drop, while Paterson’s expert blending skills are illuminated here. Rich chocolate earth gives way to licorice and a bonfire smokiness. I count myself lucky.

To drink with Paterson is to learn how to properly nose a glass, how to hold whisky in your mouth for maximum taste (from many seconds, up to 2-3 minutes). One learns how the dreaded phylloxera aphid (which wreaks havoc on vines) inadvertently aided whisky’s growth by making dominant cognac in short supply, creating demand for other drink (read chapter seven in Paterson’s book). But he doesn’t just talk aphids, he brings visuals: big, plastic bugs to illustrate whisky’s unexpected “friend”.

Quirky and colorful, whisky comes to life through Paterson’s interpretation. Intelligent and challenging though the whisky world can be, Paterson retains the intellect but makes it approachable, fun. A Paterson course in whisky education should be mandatory for all would-be and already-avid drinkers.

TASTES – As usual, VIP hour is the time for the rare, the old, the latest, though it was more packed than ever with a mad rush waiting at the door at opening time.  This meant less opportunity to chat with distillers and hear about what you were tasting. A lot can happen in a year and the number of whiskies I’ve had since the last WhiskyFest meant this year was a lot of re-tasting and confirming favorites. Of the whiskies I had not tried, there weren’t a slew of stand-outs.

One that jumped out was a special unlisted, under-the-table pour of George T. Stagg bourbon. Toasty, charred oak warms, rounded out by a raisin-vanilla sweetness. Out of many over-hyped whiskies in the 20-40 year range during VIP hour, Bowmore’s 25 year stood out with a robust profile of salty brine and baked pear sweetness. Glenfarclas 40 year made a statement with tobacco, elegant tannins, orange. But it was many of my usual favorites that remained at the top, including Highland Park’s 30 year, Pappy Van Winkle’s 20 and 23 year bourbons, Parker’s Heritage 27 year bourbon, and Charbay’s incomparable Release II 1999 Pilsner whiskey. It was good to see Wes and Lincoln Henderson (of Woodford Reserve fame) with their new, port barrel-finished Angel’s Envy bourbon – I sampled an early version from Wes way back in December. Also on the non-whisky tip, I was happy as ever to sip a couple Germain-Robin beauties, including their complex Varietal Grappa, and oaky Coast Road Reserve brandy.

10/6 CHARBAY SPIRITED DINNER – With a magnificent sunset from atop the Marriott’s View Lounge as our backdrop, Marko and Jenni Karakasevic of Charbay hold an intimate spirited dinner annually. With plenty of time to hang out with the Karakasevics and meet fervent food and drink lovers at the two tables, the highlight was, of course, drinking Charbay’s incomparable spirits. Starting off with refreshing Green Tea Aperitif paired with Kumamoto oysters on the half shell, we then moved to one of the stand-out white whiskeys in existence: Doubled & Twisted Light Whiskey.

We moved on to what qualifies as one of the best things I ever tasted in my life (now, and every time I taste it): Release II of Charbay Whiskey. This was the best food match of the night, paired with slow-smoked Berkshire Farms Pork Belly and a mini-tamale in Lagunitas chili mole. Surprise whiskey barrel tastings followed: the Release II, but aged 12 years instead of the 6 years of the current release. At a higher proof, it’s superb, complex, rich.

A Meyer Lemon Vodka  ice intermezzo was a refreshing palate cleanser over basil ice, imbuing tart lemon with almost absinthe-like notes. Dessert was paired with their Black Walnut liqueur. As with most Charbay spirits, it’s a stunning standard-setter in its genre.

–-Subscribe to Virgina’s twice monthly newsletter, The Perfect Spot

Our Weekly Picks: October 13-19

Andrew Lam
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WEDNESDAY 13

MUSIC

Vader

Vader’s history stretches back almost 30 years. Borrowing Darth’s moniker might not have been the world’s most original idea, but they were likely among the first to have done it. The Polish death metal stalwarts formed in 1983 in Olstzyn, deep behind the Iron Curtain. Successful demo recordings got them hooked with Earache Records, and the band has been pillaging the world’s stages ever since. Guitarist-singer Piotr Wiwczarek is the only original member left in the fold, but the band’s anthemic music is as potent as ever, mixing impossibly thick blast beats with heavy slabs of neoclassical melody. Their upcoming album Return to the Morbid Reich is a nod to the 1990 demo that made their name; this tour, they’re inviting you along for the ride. (Ben Richardson)

With Immolation, Abigail Williams, Lecherous Nocturne, and Pathology

6:30 p.m., $22

DNA Lounge

375 11th St., SF

(415) 626-1409

www.dnalounge.com

 

THURSDAY 14

DANCE

Lines Ballet

The story of Scheherazade and her 1,001 nights of tales to postpone her beheading by the Persian king has intrigued and captivated audiences for ages. Choreographer Alonzo King’s dance adaptation Scheherazade delves beyond the story to explore themes ranging from the symbolism of abused women to the transformative power imbued in the tales. The company of chiseled titans dance alongside tabla master Zakir Hussain’s score, which incorporates traditional Persian instrumentation into the original classical composition by Rimsky-Korsakov. The piece premiered in Monaco last December; San Franciscans can now experience King’s artistic rendering of Scheherazade’s classic tale for themselves. (Emmaly Wiederholt)

Through Oct. 24

Thurs/14, 7 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 8 p.m.;

Sun., 5 p.m.; Oct. 20–21, 7:30 p.m., $25–$75

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Novellus Theater

700 Howard, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.linesballet.org

 

FILM

“Jim Henson and Friends: Inside the Sesame Street Vault”

Consider the Muppet. Made of foam and googly eyes, set atop spindly legs under a mop of primary-color hair, these brave figures have become our children’s teachers on a level unparalleled in the world of infotainment. We’re talking street, of course — Sesame Street, which since its 1969 debut has won 97 Emmy awards, more than any other show. Yerba Buena Center for the Art is running a series of Sesame clip collections, and today’s viewing pays homage to the contributions of the show’s early creative team, with a special furry hug to creator Jim Henson, and little-seen guest appearances from the show’s early days. (Caitlin Donohue)

7:30 p.m. (also Sat/16, 2 p.m.), $6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

 

DANCE

“CounterPULSE’s Performing Diaspora: Sri Susilowati”

Stripping world dance of its trappings is quite the rage these days. But few have done it so radically as Indonesian classical dancer did Sri Susilowati at last year’s Performing Diaspora festival. Yet this was the same artist who, only a few months before at the Ethnic Dance Festival, had performed an exquisite, contemporary Javanese mourning dance. Now she is back, having been invited to expand on her 2009 piece. Susilowati may look one of those ethereal dance creatures whose bodies are so stylized that it’s difficult to think of them having earthly passions. Yet they do. Hint on Susilowati: food. Another Indonesian dancer, Prumsodun Ok, opens the show for her. (Rita Felciano)

Thurs/14–Sat/16, 8 p.m.; Sun/17, 3 p.m., $24

CounterPULSE

1310 Mission St./SF

(415) 626-2060

www.brownpapertickets.com

 

MUSIC

Fresh and Onlys and Kelley Stoltz

San Francisco-based artists the Fresh and Onlys and Kelley Stoltz will both have new albums on hand at this double CD release blowout. The new Fresh and Onlys disc, Play It Strange, showcases the band’s garage-rocky spin on 1960s pop, and was recorded for the first time outside of a DIY studio setup with Comets on Fire producer Tim Green. Stoltz releases his newest batch of throwbacks to the Beatles’ and Beach Boys’ style of sunny pop with To Dreamers. This is a perfect night to come out and support local music. (Landon Moblad)

With Carletta Sue Kay

9:30 p.m., $12

Café Du Nord

2170 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

www.cafedunord.com

 

FRIDAY 15

DANCE

Dandelion Dancetheater

Known for its loud, provocative works merging dance, drama, and music, Dandelion Dancetheater turns its attention to motherhood in MamaLOVE: Seeds of Winter. The seven-women cast explores mom-related themes by diffusing fairy tales, myths, and lullabies to discover the context and relevance of the cultural archetypes and stereotypes surrounding motherhood. Each evening brings a rotating roster of guest mama-choreographers: Mary Carbonara, Tammy Cheney, Laura Elaine Ellis, Suzanne Gallo, Dana Lawton, Laura Renaud-Wilson, and Chingchi Yu. Directed by Kimiko Guthrie, the show promises to be haunting, hilarious, and not to be missed as the mom-artists address the complexities of love, loss, connection, and independence. (Wiederholt)

Though Oct. 24

Fri-Sat, 8 p.m.; Sun, 7 p.m. (also Oct. 24, 3 p.m.), $12-15

Shawl Anderson Dance Center

2704 Alcatraz, Berk.

(510) 654-5921

www.dandeliondancetheater.org

 

SATURDAY 16

MUSIC

“Longplayer San Francisco: 1,000 Years in Three Simultaneous Acts”

As a founding member of legendary rabble-rousers the Pogues, Jem Finer helped the band deconstruct traditional Irish music and create a new musical creature out of its varied influences. Taking this willingness to experiment with different sounds and ideas and bringing it to another level, Finer composed Longplayer, a piece designed to last 1,000 years and played on instruments such as Tibetan bowl gongs. Today’s special performance will be a 1,000-minute excerpt performed by 18 musicians on a custom-built, 60-foot-wide circular “instrument” — so slow down and take some time to absorb some art that goes against today’s faster-is-better mentality. (Sean McCourt)

7 a.m.–11:40 p.m., $25–$28

Yerba Buena Center For The Arts Forum

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

 

EVENT

“ODC Theater’s JumpstART”

Several years and millions of bucks in the making, ODC is at last ready to unveil its new state-of-the-art “cultural campus” in the Mission in a celebratory free day of “dance, theater, performance, and community.” With more than 20 performers and organizations participating, there will be something for everybody — yes, even clogging — at this one-of-a-kind public offering. A glance at the roster includes such names as Scott Wells and Dancers, Robert Moses’ Kin, Killing My Lobster, Youth Speaks, and of course ODC/Dance, all curated by ODC Theater director Rob Bailis in collaboration with the likes of choreographer Joe Goode, world music expert Lilly Kharrazi, and playwright-director Mark Jackson. (Robert Avila)

Noon–11 p.m., free (tickets available one hour prior to each performance)

ODC Theater

3153 17th St, SF

(415) 863-9834

www.odcdance.org

 

DANCE

Trolley Dances

I still wish they’d call them Street Car Dances instead of Trolley Dances, because that’s what they are, but the name is a registered trademark and has its origins in San Diego (where they actually have trolleys). However, there is nothing else I would change on these annual easy-rider events. They are pure fun, and curator Kim Epifano always comes up with an intriguing lineup of entertainers. This year you’ll see, among others, dancers from Joe Goode Performance Group, Sara Shelton Mann, Ensohza Minyoshu (traditional Japanese folk music and dance), and Sunset Chinese Folk Dance Group. And do look out for a special treat on Ninth Ave for our animal friends, courtesy of brilliant maskmaker Mike Stasiuk. Boarding takes place at Duboce Park. (Felciano)

Through Sun/17

11 a.m. (runs every 45 minutes until 2:45 p.m.), free with Muni fare ($2)

Duboce at Scott, SF

(415) 226-1139

www.epiphanydance.org

 

EVENT

ArtSpan Open Studios

Do you ever want to stroll into other people’s homes simply from sweet curiosity? Perhaps you covet thy neighbor’s art, or maybe just appreciate light and shadow and like talking with the peeps who represent it? Do all three at the largest and oldest open studios event in the country. The self-guided art tour is ongoing through October, but this weekend doors will open in the artsy northern and eastern neighborhoods. From the nude drawings of Derriere Guard (ahem, Beavis) to the ultraviolet photos of South African succulents, it’s the best opportunity to get to know your local artists. And maybe take home a derriere or two. (Kat Renz)

Through Oct. 31

Sat.–Sun., 11 a.m.–-6 p.m., free

Bayview, Excelsior, Financial District, North Beach, Potrero, Russian Hill, SoMa,Tenderloin

(415) 861-9838

www.artspan.org

 

SUNDAY 17

MUSIC

BATUSIS

Featuring two of the founding architects of punk rock — guitarists Sylvain Sylvain from the New York Dolls and Cheetah Chrome from the Dead Boys — Batusis already has its street cred and headliner status firmly in place. Taking its name from the groovy dance that Adam West performed in the campy 1960s Batman TV show, the band came together and released a new self-titled EP earlier this year that’s steeped in the sounds that earned these six string slingers their place in the punk pantheon in the first place. This dynamic duo may not be so young anymore, but they’re sure as hell just as loud and snotty. (McCourt)

With Re-Volts

8 p.m., $12–$15

Thee Parkside

1600 17th St., SF

(415) 252-1330

www.theeparkside.com


MONDAY 18

MUSIC

David Bazan

Previously known for fronting the popular indie-rock project Pedro the Lion, David Bazan has returned to working under his own name. His most recent solo album, Curse Your Branches, covers some religious-themed lyrical ground that fans should be familiar with by now, like the tales of sinners losing their way and Bazan grappling with his own faith. But it also presents itself in a much more upbeat, poppier setting than we’re used to, often at odds with the reflective and sometimes dark themes of the songs. Moody, country-tinged Baltimore duo Wye Oak opens. (Moblad)

8 p.m., $15

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1421

www.theindependentsf.com 


The Guardian listings deadline is two weeks prior to our Wednesday publication date. To submit an item for consideration, please include the title of the event, a brief description of the event, date and time, venue name, street address (listing cross streets only isn’t sufficient), city, telephone number readers can call for more information, telephone number for media, and admission costs. Send information to Listings, the Guardian Building, 135 Mississippi St., SF, CA 94107; fax to (415) 487-2506; or e-mail (paste press release into e-mail body — no text attachments, please) to listings@sfbg.com. We cannot guarantee the return of photos, but enclosing an SASE helps. Digital photos may be submitted in jpeg format; the image must be at least 240 dpi and four inches by six inches in size. We regret we cannot accept listings over the phone.

 

Bar Agricole

Andrew Lam
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Bar Agricole

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE At the risk of sounding like a grossly premature exit poll, I am willing to say that Bar Agricole, which opened mid-August on a rather grimy block of 11th Street, is already, and easily, the best restaurant on that block. Not that the bar (pardon my punnery) is set all that high. You might very well think that Butter, across the street, doesn’t represent serious competition. You might, if you have a long memory, remember Undici (later Eleven), a lofty, 1990s place across the street that might have been worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as Bar Agricole — but was also deafening. Bar Agricole is supremely worthy and not deafening.

The sonic detail deserves mention for several reasons, one of which is that the restaurant looks like it should be deafening. Once you gain the dining room (after a trek up a woody incline, past a semi-secluded open-air terrace), you find yourself in a onetime plumbing-supply shop remade in the sleek Euro-modern style that you might find in one of the more happening neighborhoods of Stockholm. Interior vistas consist of wood, plate glass, and seating that doesn’t look ergonomic. Noise is almost always the companion of these chic design elements.

But Bar Agricole’s tables are spaced widely enough to let the restaurant breathe, and, for a rustic-enviro touch, the long bar is made from wood recycled from an Ohio farm, if my eavesdropping ears heard the story right. The madding crowd is never far away, yet the sound is muted just enough not to become the center of attention. It’s like watching a big pot of simmering stock coming to a boil it never quite reaches. This kind of ambience management is a subtle but real triumph.

Agricole — as Francophiles might know — refers not only to agriculture but to a type of rum favored by the French. The chief impresario of the place, Thad Vogler, is a cocktail man, and the cocktail list is impressive. But you’d have a hard time finding any mixed drink to top the white, or unaged (“blanche”) armagnac, which, like my beloved grappa, is as clear as water but fruitier, more melodious, less openly fiery. Like agricole rum, it finds its way into a number of cocktails, but it’s splendid when taken straight.

Chef Brandon Jew’s cooking is also melodious and goes down easy. The theme is California eclectic, with, like a corniche, a fair number of tight twists and turns. The chopped liver on toast ($8), for instance, was warmed all the way through, which lent the dish an appealing melted-fused quality. Tomatoes with bottarga ($14) revealed itself to be a colorful salad of heirloom fruit with a heavy (and unannounced) scattering of shell beans. For seasoning, there were flecks of bottarga (salt-cured fish ovaries, a Mediterranean delicacy).

The kitchen’s eye for color is sharp. A plate of picalilli ($6), or pickled vegetables, was dominated by luminous yellow cauliflower florets and nearly as luminous quarters of red beet. Other players: halved baby carrots, long beans, skinny green peppers flushed with red as if by dawn, and whole okra pods. Altogether it looked like something Cézanne might like to paint, if he didn’t gobble it down first, which was what we did.

No menu is truly complete without at least one flop. At Bar Agricole, this would be the beguilingly named sardine roll mops ($6), which consisted of a large piece of fish wrapped pig-in-a-blanket-style around a pickle spear the color of radiator fluid, then laid on a board of flatbread and doused with crème fraîche. The overall effect was supposed to be, I guess, a variation on a Sunday-morning shmear, but the flatbread was uncooperative and difficult to eat and the fish-pickle pairing wasn’t much better, despite the cream’s attempts at reconciliation. If a dysfunctional family were turned into food, it might seem something like this.

On the other hand, we loved the tanginess of the olive-oil poached tuna ($14) mingled with fennel-root shavings and cilantro. And the corn pudding ($16) — like an eggy polenta, topped with corn kernels, okra halves, whole padrón peppers, and served in an earthenware crock — was original and sublime, while being at least plausibly vegetarian-friendly.

If you like lemon verbena cream, you’ll want dessert. A puffy cloud of it semi-salved the dryness of the blueberry shortcake ($8) — tons of blueberries, though — while another puff appeared, uncredited, with the wondrously glazed peach-pluot upside-down cake. If you had to bet the farm on one of these, you’d be wise to choose the latter. 

BAR AGRICOLE

Dinner: nightly, 6 p.m.–1 a.m.

355 11th St., SF

(415) 355-9400

www.baragricole.com

Full bar

AE/DS/MC/V

Tolerable noise

Wheelchair accessible

 

Lost city

Andrew Lam
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2
Lost city

arts@sfbg.com

WRITERS ISSUE With its vast divide between the rich and poor, its lusty appetite for sex, and its backroom real estate deals, it would seem that even the boutique and completely gentrified San Francisco of today offers to writers of crime fiction a rich vein of noir opportunity. Yet the lone novelist today determinedly probing the dark side of San Francisco’s endless battle to clean up the streets is Peter Plate. His latest novel, Elegy Written on a Crowded Street (Seven Stories Press, 176 pages, $13.95), is Plate’s ninth in a hardboiled writing career that spans the era of out of control gentrification in San Francisco. With little fanfare or support, against the real life backdrop of police sweeps of the homeless and the start of the dot com boom, Plate has produced a shelf of books that represent a lonely, yet noble and deeply radical literary effort to write noir crime fiction in which not the cops but the criminals are the protagonists.

Plate’s novels are full of delicious hooks. They reliably begin with some of the best premises in noir fiction today. Fogtown (Seven Stories Press, 2004) opens as a crowd of Market Street homeless and down and outers witness the crash of an armored Brinks truck at dawn that temporarily fills the desolate street with crisp, new hundred dollar bills. In Police and Thieves (Seven Stories Press, 1999), Doojie, a small-time Capp Street weed dealer, accidently witnesses the murder of a homeless man by a police officer and spends the rest of the book on the run from the murderous cop who seeks to silence him.

Like Doojie, Plate’s characters are always in the wrong place at the wrong time, unwilling spectators as the city changes around them. The free money in Fogtown offers the Market Street dwellers a tantalizing glimpse of the kind of new carefree life being lived all around them by the rich who have newly arrived to the city. Yet, like the upscale new eateries and clubs popping up everywhere, the money is off limits to them, and those who take the money instantly become, like Doojie, hunted by police. Plate’s strength is in conveying the hopelessness and despair of lone characters pitted in Doestoyevskian battle with societal forces far greater than they are. As they are slowly ground down by this struggle, we feel their terror, incomprehension and paranoia. As the drug dealer and SRO hotel manager, Jeeter, says in Fogtown, “Rights? You don’t have any rights. You have choices. That’s all you have. And you made the wrong one.”

In this context, noir fiction for Plate is protest fiction. A longtime street activist, Plate writes with the gut instincts of a protester, taking his novels right to the barricades where different visions of San Francisco violently clash. One Foot Off The Gutter (Incommunicado, 1995), is a mordant postcard from a Mission District just about to enter its gentrification era in which a homeless cop, a Latino gang member, and a yuppie doctor all covet the same Victorian houses at 21st Street and Folsom. Soon The Rest Will Fall (Seven Stories, 2006) is set in the Trinity Plaza Apartments on Market Street at the height of housing activists’ struggle to save the low income housing from demolition. Plate has so reliably found the pulse of change in the city that at times his work has blurred tragically with reality. Police and Thieves ends with a fire at the Crown Hotel on Valencia Street. Just months after the book’s publication, the real life Crown Hotel burned to the ground.

Since Plate finished his Mission Quartet at the close of the dot-com era, he has turned his attention to San Francisco’s Main Street, Market Street. Recently, in its inaugural issue, the incipient local newspaper San Francisco Public Press reported that one lone real estate speculator owns 62% of the vacant real estate between 5th and 6th on Market Street and that he is willfully leaving those properties vacant until he can make the money he thinks he deserves off of the property. Those uselessly abandoned and boarded up buildings at the very heart of the city are the recurring backdrop for much of Elegy Written On a Crowded Street, perhaps Plate’s darkest and most emotional work to date.

Elegy is not so much a traditional crime fiction thriller, but a lyrical roman noir in which police and thieves battle not each other but the stifling conditions of the city. Plate’s latest evokes Don Carpenter’s 1966 classic Hard Rain Falling (reissued this year by New York Review of Books), an unrelenting work that also took place largely on Market Street. Carpenter’s novel brings to life the old dive 24-hour pool halls and dirty hotel rooms of a 1950s San Francisco where the promise of the Gold Rush American West has faded. The novels’ restless young pool hustlers and small time thieves can only shuttle aimlessly back and forth in the new remote control city, like the 8 Ball, waiting to fall. Elegy’s characters are their descendents, still on Market Street and still waiting.

Down this mean street walks May Jones a tough, hard-drinking bail bondswoman, who is nearing forty with no prospects. Like everyone around her, Jones dreams of escape from the city. Even Jones’ clients are leaving for Portland. “It’s got trees. Good people. Cheap housing,” an erstwhile, young crusty-punk bank robber earnestly tells Jones as she prepares to skip bail. But Jones is condemned to remain, while all around her are the undead ghosts of those already disappeared and the soon to be departed. The cleaned up San Francisco is haunted. The living are exhausted. Jones says to herself, “I have pipelines to the lands of the dead.’

Jones echoes the food stamp caseworker, Charlene Hassler from Plate’s welfare reform novel, Snitch Factory (Incommunicado, 1996). Like Hassler, Jones is being worn down between the insatiable needs of her clients and the treacherous intrigues that surround her job. Jones’ client is Mary Anderson, a pregnant twenty-year-old African-American who has killed her boyfriend, the SFPD’s star snitch on Fillmore Street. By keeping her client out of jail, Jones finds herself on the cops’ shitlist and in fear for her life. As in other Plate novels, a police hunt for Jones ensues. As in other recent Plate novels, after the initial hook, the plot soon becomes murky and this hunt becomes elliptical and hard to follow, perhaps even a bit ridiculous. A plot sideline in which Jones has a brief fling with a dyke she meets at the End Up goes nowhere. The ghosts of Lenin and punk rock legend, Will Shatter make surprise cameos that stretch the reader’s credulity. Yet, Plate’s spot on descriptions of Market Street today and the universe of dread his characters inhabit there remains compelling throughout and one never doubts that the unraveling narrative is what life feels like for his characters. Plate writes with a tightly wound urgency throughout and Elegy makes a persuasive case that what is happening at 5th and Market today is happening to the city as a whole.

Fantastical plot aside, it is the weight of the dead that is the true subject of Elegy. The book opens with a dreamy scene, shrouded in fog, in which Jones watches the dead body of one of her former clients as it bobs up and down in the surf, unable to either reach the shore or go under for good. Some policemen have waded into the water to grapple with the dead man and bring him in, but the body proves too difficult to apprehend and the cops are pulled down with the it into the crashing waves. Throughout Elegy, Plate’s characters similarly bob along, paralyzed and unable to take decisive action, only pulling each other down, and as the novel ends, May Jones is more or less back where she started. Sadly, like many of Plate’s recent books, the novel fails to fully satisfy because there is no resolution to the plot. Plate’s characters do not seem changed by their ordeal; they only become more numb. Yet perhaps that is the point. Plate seems to be saying that as long as the city fails to grapple with its own dead, nothing can change, and the city is condemned to go around and around in a sort-of netherworld, reliving its past traumas in new conflicts. “It’s a moment in hell that should be taking place beneath the ground,” Plate writes of a brutal police assault on a drunken derelict in Elegy, and it sums up the whole book. The dead won’t stay buried.

While an elegy is a funeral song, a lamentation for the dead, it also suggests a last word. With Elegy has Plate said all he has to say about San Francisco? One hopes not. Perhaps no writer working today has left such a record of what it feels like to live in the American city in the era of gentrification. Yet, in life as in Plate’s fiction, knowing the truth can take its toll, as Doojie finds out when he is hunted by the police for the truth he alone knows. By the end of Elegy, May Jones has spent so much time wallowing in the murky depths where her clients dwell, that her identification with them is complete and her fate has become inseparable from theirs.

The exhausted tone of Elegy suggests that like Jones, Plate, the lifelong activist and engaged writer, has perhaps stared into the abyss too long. Nonetheless, his nine novels are a significant achievement, the life’s work of a doggedly engaged writer. In each book, I have found scenes that remain unforgettable in my own mind and that have permanently altered my own perceptions of San Francisco and its streets. While Plate’s novels are each flawed in their own way, I love them with the Algren-like compassion he clearly has for his memorable characters, like the homeless cop who lives in his squad car in Gutter, and the ex-con who robs a pot club while dressed like Santa Claus in Soon the Rest Will Fall. Taken as a whole, Plate’s novels offer a compelling and defiant portrait of the psychic toll the disappearance of loved people, places, and opportunity from the city has taken on those left behind.

 

 

 

On the cheap listings

David Talbot
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On the Cheap listings are compiled by Paula Connelly. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com.

WEDNESDAY 13

“How to Cook Like a Scientist” Bazaar Café, 5927 California, SF; (415) 831-5620. 7pm, free. Meet Jeff Potter, author of Cooking for Geeks, who combines cooking with Mythbusters to create a food-as-science, cooking experience for those who like to know how things work.

THURSDAY 14

Sparring with Beatnik Ghosts Beat Museum, 540 Broadway, SF; (415) 399-9626. 7pm, free. This ongoing multimedia poetry series returns to the Beat Museum with host Daniel Yaryan and featuring readings by David Meltzer, San Francisco Poet & Beat Icon, Ellyn Maybe & Her Band, Steve Arntson, Jerry Ferraz, Martin Hickle, Richard Loranger, Whitman McGowan, Ginger Murray, Julie Rogers, Margery Snyder, and Chris Vannoy.

FRIDAY 15

Mark I. Chester Benefit Mark I. Chester Studio, 1229 Folsom, SF; (415) 621-6294. 7pm; free, donations encouraged. Celebrate Mark I. Chester’s 60th birthday while helping to raise funds for a new book. View Chester’s current exhibit, “Doing Time on Folsom St: a 30 year retrospective of fine art gay radical sex photography” and enjoy readings and performances by Carol Queen, Tom Orr, Seth Eisen and Jesse Hewitt and more. Sponsored by the Center for Sex and Culture.

“Writing Our Word, Speaking Our Minds, Telling Out Stories” San Francisco Main Library, Latino/Hispanic Community Meeting Room, 100 Larkin, SF; (415) 557-4400. 6pm, free. Featuring readings by and about lesbians with disabilities with Elana Dykewomon, Barbara Ruth, Teya Schaffer, Dominika Bednarska, and the Mothertongue Feminist Theater Collective.

SATURDAY 16

“The Classics” 1:AM Gallery, 1000 Howard, SF; (415) 861-5089. 5:30pm, free. Attend the closing reception for this exhibit, curated by Nate1, that brings together original vintage work from the artists that put San Francisco on the graffiti map and defined Bay Area graffiti style. Guest speaker Spie will give an informative tour of the exhibit on Bay Area graffiti.

Halloween Bazaar Modern Eden Gallery, 403 Francisco, SF; (415) 420-2898. 7pm, free. End your day of touring open studios in North Beach, as part of SF Open Studios’ weekend two, at this spooky-themed trunk show featuring wares by local artists JuJu by Sarah, Marya Zoya Taxidermy Courture, Blackbird Bazaar, Squid Rose designs, and more plus pumpkin carving and painting, music, drinks, and treats. Costumes encouraged.

Potrero Hill Festival 20th street between Missouri and Wisconsin, SF; www.potrerofestival.com. 11am-4pm, free. Soak up the best of Potrero Hill at this street fair with a view featuring local merchants and residents selling their wares, arts, and crafts, two stages with live music, food from Potrero Hill restaurateurs, information booths, and kids activities including a bouncy house, petting zoo, pony rides, and performances.

Taste of Fillmore Fillmore between Post and Jackson, SF; www.tasteoffillmore.com. 1pm-6pm; free admission, $20 for wrist band. Buy a wrist band and enjoy food and wine tastings at boutiques and restaurants, or just walk around and check out some live jazz, walk through home décor scenes installed on the sidewalks, watch cooking demonstrations, fashion shows, and more.

Trolley Dances Meet at the Harvey Milk Center for Recreational Arts at Duboce Park, Scott at Duboce, SF; www.epiphanydance.org. 11am-2:45pm, tours leave every 45 min.; free with MUNI fare. Get out of the theater and into the streets with traveling performances by Epiphany Productions SDT, Joe Goode Performance Group, Sara Shelton Mann, and more as they take you from Duboce Park to the SF Botanical Garden in Golden Gate Park for several unique performance locations.

“The Wild Kitchen” Omnivore Books on Food, 3885a Cesar Chavez, SF; (415) 282-4712. 3pm, free. Hear authors Connie Green and Sara P. Scott discuss their book, The Wild Kitchen: Seasonal Foraged Foods and Recipes, and the increasing popularity of wild delicacies. Green sells her gathered goods across the country to Napa Valley’s finest chefs, so before you buy that expensive meal, consider the free buffet that is California.

Writers with Drinks Make Out Room, 3225 22nd St., SF; (415) 647-2888. 7:30pm, $5-$10 sliding scale. This installment of the monthly spoken word variety show features Marcia Clark, Ken Scholes, Jamie Freveletti, Stephen O’Connor, Kirya Traber and Daniel Allen Cox. Proceeds to benefit the Center for Sex and Culture.

Yerba Buena Fair Yerba Buena Gardens, Mission between 3rd and 4th St., SF; (415) 644-0728. 11am-3pm, free. Celebrate the Yerba Buena neighborhood at the fair featuring live music, dancing, acrobats, neighborhood food vendors, street food vendors, art and history walks, prizes and giveaways, kids activities, and more.

SUNDAY 17

Capsule Hayes Valley Park, Octavia at Hayes, SF; www.capsulesf.com. 11am-6pm, free. Enjoy this fashion design open air market and community party where you can browse locally made clothing, upcycled jewelry and accessories, steampunk-inspired wear, graphic tees, kids clothes, and designer housewares while listening to live music by members of the Jazz Mafia, Brent Bishop and the Part Poopers, and more.

Fiesta on the Hill Cortland between Bocana and Folsom, SF; (415) 206-2140. 10am-6pm, free. Join your friends and neighbors for the 22nd annual Fiesta to benefit the Bernal Heights Neighborhood center, an organization that works to maintain the ethnic, cultural, and economic diversity of Bernal Heights. This alcohol free family event to feature a petting zoo, pony rides, a pumpkin patch, non-profit booths, live music, food vendors and more.

 

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