Kids

Accidental tranny

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› superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO Guilty! I’m totally real-time guilty. Yeps, frenz, I’m that spastic whore on the dance floor whooping like a neon cough, flinging my Mary Kate triceps up when a thump drops in the mix. If a club has one of those heinous black lights at the door, I sneak in the back so no one spots the glowing spunk on my skirt or my phosphorescent VCR. I always ask for extra antioxidant-rich lychees in my pomegranatini, to offset the American Spirits. OK, I’ve blown the DJ. And although I’ve never stuffed a tube sock down my sequined thong or Botoxed my rosy areolae, those are my fake digits you just beamed into your contacts, sweetness. Thanks for the pomegranatini. Call me!

Also, I take things for granted. Some parties in this town have been around since Y2K was ripped-knee-high to a troll doll (New Wave City, 1984, Popscene, Death Guild, Red Wine Social, Qoöl). I’ve surely enjoyed them all. But in my ravenous quest for novelty I’ve watched them gradually fade from my schedule, like tears of joy evaporating on a monitor. Thus I was shocked when word squirted down the pudding pipe that — after 12 years of lunatic antics at the Stud — weekly trash-drag frenzy Trannyshack was slamming its barn door shut in August. Just where the heck will club pervs get their weekly fix of "two trannies, one cup"?

"I never intended to become a professional drag queen, Marke B. It was almost an accident," Trannyshack hostess Heklina said, laughing groggily into the phone when I rang for dish. I’d woken her up: it was 2 p.m. "I was merely dabbling in drag when the Stud approached me a dozen years ago to fill the Tuesday night slot. It’s been wonderful, but I’m ready for a change — and I’m too much of a control freak to let Trannyshack go on without me."

The lady was feeling candid. "I’m done with punk-rock drag," she added. "I’m tired of feeling like I have to haul in my own amps, manage the entire bar, and clean up afterwards. At this point I simply want to walk onstage and have the light show ready and the sound board all cued up. And I want more challenges, to work more in theater, expand my horizons, travel, figure myself out. You get trapped in a persona. This great thing comes along, people love it, and then suddenly it’s your whole life. For 12 years. Time for a breather!"

Hold on to your panicked panties, though. "Trannyshack the brand isn’t going away," Heklina continued. "I’m working on making it a monthly party somewhere nice, and we’ll still do big events like the annual pageant, Trannyshack Reno, international gigs, and maybe bring back the cruise." The weekly Trannyshack’s planning to go out with a bang too: a countdown of greatest hits and command performances has begun, with Ana Matronic of Scissor Sisters hosting Feb. 12 and an explosive 12th-birthday blowout Feb. 19.

Heklina is one of the OG rave-era club kids who made San Francisco fabulously unsafe at any speed, and Trannyshack freed drag from its Judy Garland fetters, flooding punk spirit — and oodles of bodily fluids — into the stalls of gay nightlife. The ‘Shack’s now venerable enough to be thought mainstream by some young turks, but it still feels like the scene’s bloody wig’s been yanked off.

TRANSPORTING How’s this for a leap of global proportions? The papacito of the nightlife’s global grooves movement, DJ Cheb i Sabbah — himself a proprietor of one of SF’s longest-running parties, 1002 Nights (now at Nickie’s in the Lower Haight on Tuesdays) — has just released another stunningly internationalist CD, Devotion (Six Degrees), and he’ll be throwing down, celebration-wise, at the huge returning one-off Worldly at Temple. Boosting Cheb’s subcontinental turntable wizardry live will be Pakistani vocalist Riffat Sultana and percussionists Salar Nadar and Mitch Hyare. Also trading on the tables: electrotabla etherealist Karsh Kale and bhangra breakster Janaka Selekta. Fold dem paper planes and twirl.

TRANNYSHACK

Tuesdays, 9 p.m., $8

Stud

399 Ninth St., SF

(415) 866-6623

www.studsf.com

www.trannyshack.com

CHEB I SABBAH AT WORLDLY

Sat/9, 10 p.m., $8

Temple

540 Howard, SF

www.templesf.com

www.chebisabbah.com

Overdrawn at the sperm bank

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I had a beautiful child via donor sperm from a sperm bank. My partner (female) and I are very happy, but recently I have been having sexual fantasies about the donor. I have not told this to my SO (she would not understand, trust me). I feel an almost spiritual bond with this unknown man and am concerned I may be getting a little obsessed. Have any experience in this minefield?

Love,

A Matter of Sementics

Dear Matter:

Not directly, no, but as we used to say at San Francisco Sex Information when somebody would call looking for a bisexual transman into water sports to answer a question, "We all have the same training! OK if I give it a try?" Of course, we, whoever we are, do not necessarily all have the same training, but if my time in the trenches has earned me anything, it’s an impressive virtual Rolodex of people, many of them good friends, who have done or seen or charged for whatever the experience in question might be. I have produced for your edutainment a professional singer who gives great head without harming her throat, a Realtor who would throw you out on your ear for attempting that "house humping" business, any number of well-spoken hos, a dominatrix who can testify to the fact that men who want to be kicked in the balls never show up for their appointments, and another who can prove otherwise. In other words, here’s your expert, my friend who has worked as a teller at the sperm bank, if you will. Call her Polly. Polly Enmity. She says:

It’s not uncommon for women using sperm banks to get really attached to their donors. No, really attached. When I worked in the semen industry I spent countless hours on the phone with women who wanted to know how hot their donor was, if I would do him (they were asking only hypothetically, I’m sure), what celebrity he looked like, how nice he was, what he wore, if he smelled nice. So yes, it’s supercommon to feel attached. I was offered not insignificant sums of money to divulge donors’ identities (which I never did, and that’s why I’m still broke), and at least one woman asked if we did "live inseminations." In my experience, donor fantasies and attachment are very common, and yours seems to be on the less stalkerish end of the scale.

And even if you never met the guy, you did get some of his most intimate bodily fluids (albeit centrifuged and washed beyond all recognition) inserted into your most intimate parts, so your connection to this donor is, well, pretty understandable. Ever get attached to someone after a one-night stand? It can happen, sure. Now think about a woman who uses the same donor, cycle after cycle, hoping each time to get pregnant and finding out month after month that it hasn’t worked … again. It almost becomes like a relationship, albeit one that involves you picking your partner based on a short description and the kindness of the sperm bank workers who vouch for his character and looks. I’ve seen women feel upset, angry, even betrayed by this person they have never met.

Now, is this just fantasy, or would you want it to play out in reality? Think: Do you really want to know anything more about him? What if he turns out to be your neighbor who had your car towed last week? Or the jerk on his cell phone sitting next to you in a restaurant? If you met him, would you do anything about the sexual feelings, or would they remain in the realm of fantasy? I knew many of these donors, and, well, with a couple of exceptions, many of them were nice, average guys trying to earn a few bucks by selling their genetic material, but most of them weren’t really fertile fantasy fodder. Trust me on this: your fantasy of your donor is probably much better — and hotter — than the reality.

Listen to Polly! She has some hilarious and fairly scarifying stories from the deepest vaults of the sperm bank — tales from the crypt — and many of them involve people or their products not smelling so nice. This is not something you need to think about while cuddling your sweet baby, who I am sure smells lovely. While Polly and I both steadfastly stand by your right to fantasize about any damned thing that pleases you, some fantasies are just inconvenient and ultimately more trouble than they’re worth. You wouldn’t want to fantasize about your boss every morning in the shower, only to have to face him or her and be all professional and not at all sweaty as soon as you got to work, would you? This one isn’t that bad as long as you keep in mind that tracking down the donor would be like suicide, only messier — so that anonymity thing sure was a good idea in this case.

Love,

Andrea

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

G-Spot: Valentine’s Day events

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PARTIES, EVENTS, AND BENEFITS

Amor del Mar Aquarium of the Bay, Pier 39, Embarcadero at Bay; 623-5326, www.aquariumofthebay.com. Feb 14, 6pm, $100. Celebrate San Francisco’s love affair with the bay and support the nonprofit Aquarium of the Bay Foundation at this gala celebration featuring global cuisine, decadent drinks, live music, and exhibitions.

Erotic Playground One Taste, 1074 Folsom; www.tantriccircus.com. Sat/9, 8pm; $30 single women, $50 single men, $60 couples. The Tantric Circus presents a sexy evening of burlesque, striptease, male lap dance, fruit feeding, DJs, and more.

Eternal Spring SomArts Bay Gallery, 934 Brannan; 1-888-989-8748, eternalspring08.com. Sat/9, 2-10pm, $7. Celebrate life, love, arts, and creativity at this all-day event including a fashion show, performances, free classes (hoop, poi, yoga, and more!), DJs, and shopping.

Heroes and Hearts Luncheon Union Square; 206-4478, www.sfghf.net. Feb 14, 11:30am, $300. Celebrate those who have helped the community and support the San Francisco General Hospital Foundation by attending this luncheon and auction of artist-created tabletop heart sculptures.

My Sucky Valentine XIII ARTworkSF Gallery, 49 Geary; 673-3080, www.artworksf.com. Feb 14, 8pm, $15-25. Listen to tales of tainted love and bad sex by good writers including Thomas Roche, Carol Queen, Michelle Tea, and mi blue, all to benefit the Women’s Community Clinic and the St. James Infirmary.

One Night Stand X ARTworkSF Gallery, 49 Geary; 673-3080, www.artworksf.com. Sat/9, 6-11pm, $15-25. Support the Center for Sex and Culture and the SF Artists Resource Center at this sexy multimedia event including live nude models, paint wrestling, erotic food feeding, and performances.

PINK’s 2nd Annual Valentine’s Day Party Look Out Bar, 3600 16th St; 703-9751, www.mypartner.com. Sat/9, 8pm-2am, $25. MyPartner.com cohosts this year’s party and benefit for the GLBT Historical Society. About 300 single gay guys are expected to enjoy an open Svedka vodka bar and hobnobbing with guests like Assemblymember Mark Leno and Sup. Bevan Dufty.

Poetry Battle of (All) the Sexes Beat Museum, 540 Broadway; 863-6306, www.poormagazine.org. Feb 14, 7:30pm; $20 to fight, $15 to watch. Challenge your partner (or future partner) to a battle of spoken word, hip-hop, poetry, or flowetry in the ring at this benefit for Poor magazine.

Prom Pete’s Tavern, 128 King; 817-5040, www.petestavernsf. Feb 14, 9pm, $10. What’s more romantic than prom? Prom in the ’80s! Enjoy music, decorations, mock gambling, and dancing, all to benefit Voices, a nonprofit that works with emancipated foster youths. Admission includes one drink, gambling chips, and a photo.

Queen of Arts: A Profane Valentine Coronation Sssshh…!, 535 Florida; www.anonsalon.com/feb08. Feb 15, 10pm, $10-20. The production team that brought us Sea of Dreams presents a sexy night of DJs, dancing, art, and performance, including Kitty-D from Glitch Mob, Mancub from SpaceCowboys, Fou Fou Ha!, and Merkley.

Queen of Hearts Ball Mighty, 119 Utah; 974-8985, www.goodvibes.com. Feb 14, 8pm, $25. Good Vibrations and Dr. Carol Queen host this decadent fairy-tale-themed costume party featuring MC Peaches Christ, circus performances by Vau de Vire Society, a fetish fashion show, and dancers from the Lusty Lady.

Romancing the Reptiles: Wild Love! Tree Frog Treks, 2112 Hayes; 876-3764, www.treefrogtreks.com. Sat/9, noon-2pm; $40 adults, $25 kids. Join animal care director Ross Beswick as you learn about how animals pick their mates and where baby animals come from.

Sensualité 111 Minna, 111 Minna; www.celesteanddanielle.com/party.html. Feb 15, 9pm; $15 advance, $20 at the door. Wear something sexy to this multimedia Valentine’s Day event featuring aphrodisiac appetizers, exotic rhythms, tarot readings, performances, a raffle, and a no-host bar.

Sweet Valentine’s Cruise Pier 431/2; 673-2900, www.redandwhite.com. Feb 14, 5pm; $48 adult, $34 youth. Join the Red and White Fleet for a romantic, fun, two-hour cruise of the San Francisco Bay, including a lavish appetizer buffet by Boudin and a complimentary beverage.

Transported SF Valentine’s Singles Party Pickup at Rite Spot, 2099 Folsom; transportedsf.com. Feb 14, 7:30pm, $21.49. Join DJs Ana Sia and Felina aboard the biodiesel Transported SF bus for sultry sounds, schmoozing with other singles, and stops at gorgeous outdoor dancing locales.

Woo at the Zoo San Francisco Zoo; Sloat at 47th St; 753-7236, www.sfzoo.org. Sat/9, Feb 13-15, 6pm; Sun/10, Feb 17, noon; $75. This multimedia event, conducted by Jane Tollini of the now-defunct Sex Tours, explores the sexual and mating behaviors of animals. Also featuring champagne and romantic refreshments.

BAY AREA

Flamenco, Candlelight and Roses Café de la Paz, 1600 Shattuck, Berk; (510) 287-8700, www.cafedelapaz.net. Feb 14, 5:30, 6, 8, and 8:30pm; Feb 15-16, 6:30pm; $75-115. The nuevo Latino café celebrates the sweet side of love with three days of dinner plus a show, featuring the acclaimed Caminos Flamencos dance company.

Nest Firecracker Valentine Event Nest, 1019 Atlas Peak, Napa; (707) 255-7484. Sat/9-Sun/10, 10am-6pm, $5. Celebrate Chinese New Year and Valentine’s Day together while shopping for unique gifts and making art projects with scrapbook artist Janine Beard, all to benefit the "Nest Egg" fund through the Arts Council of Napa.

Sweetheart Tea Yerba Buena Nursery, 19500 Skyline, Woodside; (650) 851-1668, www.yerbabuenanursery.com. Sat/9, noon, $25. Enjoy a traditional tea service with a special Valentine’s Day menu, followed by a stroll through the nursery’s gorgeous gardens.

Week of Valentines at Habitot Children’s Museum Habitot Children’s Museum, 2065 Kittredge, Berk; (510) 647-1111, www.habitot.org. Fri/8-Sat/9, 9:30am-4:30pm; Feb 12-14, 9:30am-1pm; $6 per child, $5 for accompanying adult. Contribute to a large heart sculpture and create handmade cards from recycled materials. Bring valentine-making supplies to receive a free adult admission pass.

FILM, MUSIC, AND PERFORMANCE

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert California Palace of the Legion of Honor, 100 34th Ave; 1-866-912-6326, www.legionofhonor.org. Feb 14, 5:30pm, $10-20. The Cinema Supper Club at the Legion of Honor presents this film as part of "The Real Drama Queens" series, including a special exhibition opening at 5:30pm, dinner seating at 6pm (reservations made separately; call 750-7633), and film screening at 8pm.

BATS Improv Valentine’s Day Show Bayfront Theater, Fort Mason Center, bldg B, Marina at Laguna; 474-6776, www.improv.org. Feb 14, 8pm; $10 advance, $15 at the door. Whether you’re flying solo, with friends, or on a date, this audience-participation show is the perfect place to enjoy the funny side of romance.

The Best American Erotica Modern Times Bookstore, 888 Valencia; 282-9246, www.moderntimesbookstore.com. Feb 13, 7:30pm, free. Celebrate the 15th anniversary of the series with this showcase of standout stories, including a hot and edgy piece from Susie Bright.

Boston Marriage Theatre Rhinoceros, 2926 16th St; 861-5079, www.therhino.org. Feb 7-March 2, call or see Web site for schedule, $15-35. Join Anna and Claire and their crazy maid for Theatre Rhinoceros’s version of David Mamet’s same-sex romp.

Brainpeople Zeum, 221 Fourth St; 749-2228, Thurs-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2pm. Through Feb 16. $20. American Conservatory Theater presents the world-premiere production of this newest work by José Rivera, screenwriter of The Motorcycle Diaries, about two women who reckon with their pasts in an apocalyptic future.

The Eyes of Love Mechanics’ Institute, 57 Post; 393-0100, www.milibrary.com. Feb 14, 7:30pm; $15 members, $25 public. Back by popular demand, chanteuse Helene Attia will select from her vast repertoire of love songs, classic and contemporary. Admission includes hors d’oeuvres, libations, and dessert.

Hope Briggs and Friends: A Musical Valentine Herbst Theatre, War Memorial Veterans Bldg, 401 Van Ness; 392-4400, www.cityboxoffice.com. Feb 17, 3pm, $25-50. Celebrated soprano Hope Briggs shares favorite opera arias alongside 15-year-old singing sensation Holly Stell and virtuoso violinist Dawn Harms.

How We First Met Herbst Theatre, War Memorial Veterans Bldg, 401 Van Ness; 392-4400, www.howwefirstmet.com. Feb 14, 8pm, $22-35. Real audience stories are spun into a comedy masterpiece in this one-of-a-kind hit show.

In Search of the Heart of Chocolate Delancey Street Foundation, 600 Embarcadero; 310-0290, www.chocumentary.com. Tues/12, 6:30 and 7:30pm, $10. Bay Area filmmaker Sarah Feinbloom screens her new chocumentary, about Noe Valley’s Chocolate Covered and its customers. Screenings followed by a chocolate reception featuring art and live music.

I Used to Be So Hot Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia; 626-2787, www.theintersection.org. Feb 14, 7 and 9pm; Feb 15-16, 8pm; $20. InnerRising Productions presents comedian Mimi Gonzalez, a Detroit native who’ll take you on a journey through sexual politics and queer discovery.

Lovers and Other Monsters Hypnodrome, 575 10th St; 377-4202, thrillpeddlers.com. Feb 12-16, 8pm; Feb 17, 7pm; $20-34.50. With a diabolical nod to Valentine’s (and Presidents’) Day, Thrillpeddlers presents a weeklong rotating lineup of live music, exquisite torture, and expert testimony, including Jill Tracy, Jello Biafra, and Creepshow Camp horror theater.

Miss Ann Peterson’s Broken Heart Red Poppy Art House, 2698 Folsom; 1-800-838-3006, www.tangolamelodia.com. Feb 13-16, 8pm, $15. See the premiere of Tango la Melodia’s new multimedia production, a three-night concert featuring original music, poetry, and performance set in the romantic, sexy Roaring ’20s.

Mortified: Doomed Valentine’s Show Make-Out Room, 3225 22nd St; www.makeoutroom.com, www.getmortified.com. Fri/8, Mon/11, 8pm; $12 advance, $15 at the door. Share the pain, awkwardness, and bad poetry associated with love as performers read from their teen-angst artifacts. The creator of the nationwide and NPR phenomenon, David Nadleberg, will be in attendance in celebration of the release of Mortified: Love Is a Battlefield (Simon Spotlight).

Not Exactly Valentine’s Show Purple Onion, 140 Columbus; 567-7488, www.talkshowsf.com. Mon/11, 7pm, $18-20. Presented by Talk Show Live, Beth Lisick talks about her latest work and performs from her slam repertoire, chocolatier Chuck Siegel of Charles Chocolates gives an interview and tasting, Vicki Burns performs a program of "sort-of romantic standards," and Kurt Bodden reads a short story by James Thurber.

Philosophy/Art Salon: What is Erotic? Femina Potens Art Gallery, 2199 Market; 217-9340, www.feminapotens.com. Feb 16, 6:30-8:30pm, $10-25. Philosopher Rita Alfonso joins erotica writer Jennifer Cross and artist Dorian Katz for a brief show-and-tell followed by a Socratic dialogue on the question "What makes for erotic art?"

Romeo and Juliet: Gala 40th Anniversary Screening Castro Theatre, 429 Castro; 863-0611, www.thecastrotheatre.com. Feb 14, 7pm; $25 adult, $12.50 youth. Marc Huestis and the Istituto Italiano di Cultura present a 40th-anniversary screening of Franco Zeffirelli’s romantic classic, with star Olivia Hussey in attendance and a live musical performance.

Valentine’s Day Film Program: Labor of Love Exploratorium, 3601 Lyon, McBean Theater; www.exploratorium.edu. Sat/10, 2pm, free with museum admission ($9-14). In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, the Exploratorium presents a program of short, expressive films about people who love what they do.

BAY AREA

The Gin Game Pacheco Playhouse, 484 Ignacio Blvd, Novato; 883-4498, www.pachecoplayhouse.org. Feb 14, 8pm, $10 special Valentine’s Day price. Bay Area theater vets Norman A. Hall and Shirley Nilsen Hall star in D.L. Coburn’s production of the 1978 Pulitzer Prize-winning play in which two residents of an "aged home" find comfort and competition in the constant shuffling of cards and eventually unravel bits of their past they may rather fold than show.

Giselle Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley, Lower Sproul Plaza (near Bancroft at Telegraph), Berk; (510) 642-9988. Feb 14-16, 8pm; Feb 17, 3pm; $34-90. Cal Performances presents Nina Ananiashvili and the State Ballet of Georgia performing the beloved ballet, accompanied by the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra.

Love Fest La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck, Berk; (510) 849-2568, www.lapena.org. Feb 14, 7:30pm; $12 advance, $14 at the door. HBO Def Poet Aya de Leon hosts this alt-V Day evening of spoken word and music that focuses on love of self, spirit, community, family, peace, and democracy, including readings from her collection of "Grown-Ass-Woman" poems.

Songs of Love Two Bird Cafe, 625 Geronimo Valley, San Geronimo; 488-0105, mikelipskinjazz.com. Feb 14, 7-9pm, free. Jazz vocalist duo Mike and Dinah Lee present a Valentine’s Day concert at Two Bird, which will feature a special menu.

Viva la Musica! St. Mark’s Catholic Church, 325 Marine View, Belmont; (650) 281-9663, www.vivalamusica.org. Feb 14, 8-10pm, $15. Share a romantic musical evening with heart-melting chamber music, intimate solos, sassy choral numbers, and gifts of chocolate for audience members.

ART SHOWS

Flowers from a Nuclear Winter: A Live Art Installation by Rod Pujante Exploratorium, 3601 Lyon, Phyllis Wattis Webcast Studio; 561-0363, www.exploratorium.edu. Feb 16, 11am-4pm, free with museum admission ($9-14). Cosponsored by the Black Rock Arts Foundation and the Exploratorium, Burning Man artist Rod Pujante performs a live demonstration of transparent-flower making, converting waste into a dreamscape.

Modern Love Lost Art Salon, 245 S Van Ness; 861-1530, www.lostartsalon.com. Feb 14, 5:30-8:30pm, free. Celebrate Valentine’s Day at an opening reception for this show of work selected from Lost Art’s library of more than 3,000 pieces from the mid-20th century.

BAY AREA

Red Cake Gallery: February Open House Call for directions to private home; (510) 759-4516, www.redcakegallery.com. Feb 23, 6-10pm; Feb 24, March 1, 1-4pm; Feb 25-29, 6-8pm; free. Have your cake and eat it too at this post-Valentine showcase of work by Red Cake artists, to be held in a private San Francisco home.

CLASSES AND WORKSHOPS

Aphrodisiac Cooking Class Sur la Table, 77 Maiden; 732-7900, www.surlatable.com. Feb 15, 6:30pm, $170 per couple. Learn to make a delicious, sensual meal at this couples’ class hosted by chef Diane Brown, author of The Seduction Cookbook (Innova, 2005).

Chocolate, Strawberries and Lapdancing Center for Healing and Expression, 1749 O’Farrell; (510) 291-9779, www.slinkyproductions.com. Tues/12, 8pm; $110 per couple, $160 per threeple. Be the best seat in the house at the Slinky Productions lap dance class for couples, which includes chocolate, strawberries, and champagne.

Letterpress Valentines San Francisco Center for the Book, 300 De Haro; 565-0545, sfcb.org. Fri/8, 2-5pm, $65 (including materials). Experienced and novice printmakers alike can enjoy an afternoon making letterpress cards with Megan Adie.

Valentine Special: Xara Flower-Making Workshop Exploratorium, 3601 Lyon, Skylight Area. Feb 14 and 16, noon-2pm, free with museum admission ($9-14). Attorney and Burning Man artist Mark Hinkley teaches attendees how to make fake flowers from recycled bottles. All materials provided; ages 6 and up.

BAY AREA

Celebrating the Masculine and Feminine Odd Fellows Hall, 839 Main, Redwood City; (650) 780-0769. Feb 16, 10am-6pm, $150-175. Join Valerie Sher, Jackie Long, and Jim Benson on a journey toward wholeness as we explore who we are as men and women.

A Night of Bond, James Bond Bay Club of Marin, 330 Corte Madera, Corte Madera; 945-3000. Feb 14, 7pm, $35-45 (includes drinks and appetizers). Skip the prix fixe dinner and join certified matchmaker Joy Nordenstrom for a Bond-themed workshop about cultivating passionate relationships, including a contest for best male and female Bond-inspired costumes.

Slim’s slimed

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER There are eight jillion stories in the naked, nervous-Naughties city, and one of the increasingly common tales is that of the wannabe slicker who lays out that down payment for a little piece of gritty ‘n’ shitty, gorgeous ‘n’ porous, wild ‘n’ wooly San Francisco. And then supposed slick realizes, "Hey, I’m tired of stepping over panhandlers, looking for parking, and listening to car alarms, building fans, BART musicians, construction blare, and city hubbub in general." Translation: "I actually want to live in Concord, San Carlos, or Corte Madera." So the square spoiler in this happily unholy round hole of a town decides to wreck things for everyone.

That sort of inane, fish-outta-water resolve is, unfortunately, threatening Slim’s, the linchpin of the 11th Street–SoMa club scene since chart topper Boz Scaggs first opened the respected nightspot two decades ago, the site of many a memorable night of music and a venue that, legend has it, bands like Built to Spill have pledged their loyalty to because of its dedication to stellar sound. One of Slim’s neighbors tipped me off last month that the hall — which has consistently passed all sound tests conducted by the city’s Entertainment Commission — was being besieged weekly by a lone complainer living in Juniper Alley. All of this came to a head in December 2007 when the accuser ordered citizen’s arrests of two of Slim’s night managers on three occasions — after, Entertainment Commission industry representative Terrance Alan says, police refused to issue noise-violation citations of their own because they couldn’t hear any vioutf8g sound issuing from Slim’s. The arrests have led the Department of Alcohol Beverage Control to bring an enforcement action against Slim’s liquor license, which may close the club for 15 to 25 days after an April hearing.

"She has been threatening to do this for a while," Slim’s co-owner Dawn Holliday told me. The complaining neighbor and her partner have been registering noise complaints for the past two years, Holliday added, though no other neighbors have complained, and in 2000 all of the area’s condo and live-work residents signed a deed restriction making it clear that the district is a mixed-use neighborhood subject to noise, odors, and other industrial activities 24-7. Nonetheless, Holliday continued, "she calls the police on average four nights a week. The Entertainment Commission has gone into their house and done readings in the house, done readings out in front of house, and we do readings in front of their house every night with a decibel meter on the most sensitive reading you can get, and we are always compliant. It didn’t satisfy them."

One of the charges against a Slim’s manager was dismissed, but both staffers are still due to go to court for the two arrests in February and March. "I’m hoping they let these kids off," Holliday said. "I’ve gone to [San Francisco Police Department’s] Southern Station and asked them to wait for me to come over or Boz to come over and arrest us. It’s not fair that employees get arrested. We’re the two owners that live the closest, and both of us would take tickets before our employees."

Holliday is confident — after going into mediation, consulting with sound guru Charles Salter, and taking actions like installing a new insulated roof and a special four-tiered back door — that a resolution is possible. Still, the idea that one sour grape can pull down another great venue is troubling. "This is a situation where you can see how the system, which was designed to have respect for all the citizenry, can be used by this vexed complainer," Alan said. "They’ve created this history of complaints based only on their complaints. It’s going to cost Slim’s a lot of money and cost their managers a lot of sleepless nights, who want to go on and have a life. And they won’t be able to if they are found criminally liable for this. Imagine, you’re just doing your job …"

And hey, that’s another reason why so many of us come to this cow town in the first place: to work and to cozy up closer to that golden cow pumping pomegranatinis, the raucous crafters of musical ambrosia, et al. Fess up: you didn’t move to SF to feel good about driving a Prius or down Starbucks. What you can’t find regularly in Concord or Corte Madera — and what so many of us continue to crave — is that non-government-regulated minimum requirement of fun: loud, smelly, still safe, inconvenient, sprinkled with homeless parking valets, and still unlike anything you’ll get in the sticks.

For more, see Sonic Reducer Overage at www.sfbg.com/blogs/music.

HOWLIN RAIN MAKE THEIR MOVE

Howlin Rain and Comets on Fire’s Ethan Miller has plenty of news about: HR’s superfine new LP, Magnificent Fiend, will be released March 4 on SF’s Birdman label and HR’s new imprint, Columbia Records cohoncho Rick Rubin’s American Recordings. Why jump? Miller told me he was enticed by larger studio budgets and the opportunity to be produced by Rubin, whom the frontman praised as someone who "seems to chip away at all those extraneous things and just draw out the essential fluids onto the tape.

"Those are the reasons," Miller said. "This is not the type of record deal where you get a million-dollar check and drive away in a Rolls-Royce, and you’re, like, ‘Fuck, cool, man, they bought me a Corvette, and now everyone can just go get wasted on coke and it doesn’t matter now, man!’ And then, whoa, a year later you’re kicked off the label, and you’re, like, ‘Fuck, I blew my $2 million advance now. This sucks! Now I’m a fucking nobody!’ That’s not this."

HOWLIN RAIN

With Black Mountain

Mon/4, 8 p.m., $14

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

www.theindependentsf.com

Top o’ the world, ma

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› duncan@sfbg.com

My ex-girlfriend hipped me to TopR, short for Top Ramen, around 2003. We were driving in her car, and she cracked open the newly released Burning the Candle at Both Ends (Earthlings/DWA) and slid it into the dash. I’d like to say it changed my life, but to be honest, I can’t remember it. I do remember that she described TopR as this homeless, couch-surfing rapper who’d slept on her previous boyfriend’s couch. It was classic case of his reputation and lifestyle preceding his music.

Later I met TopR — or Topper Holiday, as he’s ceased using his first name — at 111 Minna Gallery, where I still work a side gig as a doorman. Throughout my years there he’s been a semiregular fixture, posted at the end of the bar, skeezing free drinks. He’s well loved but has this Dennis the Menace air surrounding him, like, "Oh, Topper’s here. Here comes trouble." One night in Minna alley, I remember him — a big, bescruffed white dude in a fitted New Era cap, somewhat rotund and more than a little faded — striking up a conversation with some bland, buttoned-down types, telling them he was a rapper and following up with a drunken freestyle. I came away feeling that it was a little sad, like he was busking in a BART station, trying to impress the squares.

"Fuck being glamorous — I’m cantankerous." So goes the first line on "Frankenstein’s Topster," the opener off his latest, fifth album, Marathon of Shame (Gurp City). It was playing when I walked into Dalva on 16th Street to say hello to my friend Toph One and reintroduce myself to TopR. And quite a reintroduction it was: even before Top starts rapping, the track is a fucking winner, anchored by a sample of Black Sabbath’s "A National Acrobat," the driving guitar riff married to an überfunky drumbeat by producer Dick Nasty.

A good hip-hop album is like a good comedy record: the shit’s got to be so sharp that you want to listen to it more than once, want to scan back on the CD and point out lines to your friends who are riding with you. In Top’s case it’s an apt comparison since he’s influenced by stand-up comedians as much as by other rappers and samples Sam Kinison and Bill Hicks on his previous disc, Cheap Laughs for Dead Comedians (Gurp City, 2006). Marathon is packed with lines that’ll make other rappers wish they’d written them, from favorite one-liners like "Puttin’ squares in their place like Tetris" to heartfelt couplets such as "I don’t want to fit into this banality factory / Where together we can all make profit from tragedy."

It stands to reason that TopR can come up with witty rhymes: he’s been rapping since he was 12. Now 30, he gained his rep as a battle rapper at parties and clubs. "From ’93 until 2000 all I did was battle," he says over a pint at the Richmond District’s 540 Club. "I didn’t record music. I didn’t put out anything. I just made a reputation for myself through battling. If I was putting out albums in ’95, ’96, I might’ve been an actual artist like Living Legends, Atmosphere, and Hieroglyphics. You can only be a battle rapper for so long. After a while there’s not very much creative outlet for it. You can only make fun of someone for so long before you actually want to express your real problems and your real feelings about life. And you do that through writing songs."

In a time when your average radio rap track has more advertisements for sneakers and pricey booze than a copy of GQ, TopR represents a more compelling side of the hip-hop spectrum: the storied tradition of rapper as traveling salesman, hawking CDs "out the trunk," or in his case, out the messenger bag, since, as he says on "Siren Song," "the Muni is my chariot." And while he often calls himself out as lazy in his songs, TopR’s tale is a cross between the 1984 runaway-punk movie Suburbia and the classic Horatio Alger story.

A self-described "troubled kid," TopR left his parents’ home in Santa Cruz at 15, living in squats and hitchhiking to San Francisco to hit open mics and do graffiti. He was arrested for vandalism, went back home, and left again, sleeping on couches if he was lucky and outside if he wasn’t. He attributes his notoriety in the bar scene to necessity: "The fact that I was homeless — I had to be in bars every goddamned night, looking for places to stay. I had nothing better to do."

Slumming, bumming, and battling eventually led to some Greyhound cross-country tours and a devoted following of party kids and misfits, unhappy with the status quo and, like him, struggling to get by. There’s no shortage of the usual hip-hop bravado on Marathon: "I’m a piss artist who spits darkness at bitch targets," TopR raps on "Siren Song," "<0x2009>’cause the music that’s honest is the music that hits hardest." True, but the track isn’t merely empty braggadocio: it’s nothing less than an existentialist crisis with a beat, one rapper’s The Sickness unto Death, asking the eternal questions of the artist and, ultimately, everyone who’s been "up against it."

And while it’s the struggle — and the willingness to cop to it — that makes Marathon so compelling, it seems TopR might finally be on the bus toward Figuring It All Out. On a tour in 2005 he met his fiancée, Kelly-Anne, perhaps the muse of "Siren’s Song," bartending at one of his shows in Asheville, NC. He stayed in the South for more than a year before getting an apartment, with a couch and a bed, in San Francisco’s Sunset District. "I came up as ‘the homeless kid who slept on couches,’<0x2009>" he explains. "But I was good at graffiti young, and I was a good rapper. I got away with a lot of stuff that some punk little kid wouldn’t because people respected me for my talents or whatever. But I’ve mellowed out." Here Top takes a contemplative pull on his pint. "I mean, I’m fuckin’ 30. I’ve got a dog now."

I’m going to do my part to go tell it on the mountain, to put this disc on when we’re cruising down the street, to make sure you hear the hilarious lines and crucial cuts. But on the other hand, one reason why it’s so good is because you ran into him in the bar and bought a disc so he could have beer money. TopR may have reached escape velocity from his day job, but he’s still orbiting the homelessness of his recent past. The line that sums up TopR for me is from "I’m on One" on Cheap Laughs: "It doesn’t take a genius to see that we’re livin’ stressful / The secret to my success is that I’m unsuccessful." It might be better for him if he got the juice to leave orbit altogether and rocket into the outer galaxies of hip-hop superstardom, but would it be better for his music if he weren’t "livin’ stressful?" Living hand to mouth myself, I’m heartened to see someone who keeps grindin’, who tries to live a creative life in the face of SF-size rent, the approaching years, and a music industry that may never give a shit. To quote TopR’s MySpace page, "Even when nothing goes right I still prevail."

TOPR CD RELEASE PARTY

With DJ Quest, Conceit, Delinquent Monastery, Thunderhut Project, Ras One, and DJ Delivery

Fri/1, 9 p.m., $10

12 Galaxies

2565 Mission, SF

(415) 970-9777

www.12galaxies.com

Bound for better

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

INTERVIEW You probably stumbled over it during your holiday shopping travails: a little 2008 pocket date book branded "Slingshot" with a hand-drawn cover of kids wearing engineer boots and "A is for anarchy" garb, picking flowers, vegetables, and fruit in an idyllic garden scene, a cityscape looming in the distance. Inside, each page is embellished with a quirky hand, oddball fonts, and quintessentially activist remembrances like "1979 Police machine-gun a mass rally on the steps of San Salvador cathedral, killing 25" (May 8) and "1925 Lenny Bruce b. ‘If you can’t say FUCK you can’t say FUCK THE GOVERNMENT!’" (Oct. 13), as well as faithful reminders for all of the Berkeley Critical Mass rides in ’08. The bold-faced coups de grâce: the international radical contact list, quasi phrasebook, and quick tips to "Resist Government Repression." Other anarchist groups throughout the world put out calendars, but this year Berkeley collective Slingshot published an organizer that allows you to literally organize more than just the crap that surrounds you.

This year is a banner one for the planner, and for the 20-year-old nonprofit as well. After several cryptic bouts of phone tag, I spoke to a group representative — who appropriately called himself Slingshot — earlier this month, and he said the group printed 30,000 pocket and spiral-bound 2008 editions, a jump from the wee 400 copies issued when the organization began printing them 14 years ago. Now with distribution in 50 states and a dozen countries, they’re almost sold out, though copies are still available at Bound Together Books at 1369 Haight.

What started out as a fundraiser — inspired by the radical organizers made by European collectives — for Slingshot’s free newspaper has taken on a somewhat anarchic life of its own. "Technically we’re trying to promote historical knowledge about liberation struggles and trying to disseminate contact info for those engaged in social justice work," Slingshot explained, though the handmade, cut-and-pasted, non-computer-generated paperback is also a pure product of a pre–digital age, DIY aesthetic.

Each collective member worked independently on four pages per organizer, drawing from a huge compendium of historical events for each date, so no one person controlled the overall style or process. "It’s contrary to the way the mainstream press looks, where everything [is] programmatic," Slingshot stressed. "Just like life, each page has a different look." The artists, whom Slingshot described as "the people who were filling the streets at the [World Trade Organization]," remain anonymous, except on the cover, which is signed Molly Crabapple.

"Anyone can make art. If we waited for professionals to start the calendar or the paper, we never would have gotten there," he continued. "I think that’s why people like our calendar. People want to feel engaged and not just spectators in their lives."

Next up in Slingshot’s own organizer: the collective hopes to create a zine-making space in its office at the Long Haul Infoshop in Berkeley, complete with typewriters and other materials. "We’re not really against computers per se," Slingshot confessed. "But it’s not a good thing to not question whether everything has to be computerized. We can make it accessible here: people don’t have to have skills other than using scissors."
slingshot.tao.ca

Hey, hey. hey

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I’m getting superfrustrated. I don’t have the highest sex drive, but it is there. However, I can’t understand why my brain and my body tell me I want to do something that inevitably makes me uncomfortable and unhappy. Even with lube, sex leaves me sore for hours. I try to just give my boyfriend blow jobs so I can avoid having to have sex. I’m 21 and have been sexually active for about three years, and I just always figured everything would get better.

And it’s not just intercourse. I can’t even get satisfaction from oral sex or masturbating. It feels good, but then, instead of feeling really good, like you’d expect an orgasm to feel, suddenly the pleasure just kind of floats away. If that’s an orgasm, it freaking sucks. It is unpleasant. What is wrong with me?

Love,

Can’t Get Me No

Dear No:

Well, you’re feeling unsatisfied because you are unsatisfied, but I don’t suppose that observation will be much use to you. I believe that your sex drive is still hanging in there because you’re a normal, healthy girl, albeit one who apparently has some issues (we call them issues when we don’t know what else to call them) about sex. In fact, I’m not even sure you have issues. I think maybe you’ve just had some pretty disappointing sex, and now you’re so expecting it to be disappointing that you’re just kind of jumping straight to the disappointment part and saving yourself some time.

I hate to punt this over to the usual suspects, but I think I have to: there are books — lots of them — on learning to masturbate and becoming orgasmic, and there are some spectacular toys out there now, toys so good that I am not altogether positive I can still promise that using them will not interfere with partnered sex, but that is obviously a topic and a worry (an issue) for another time. The old classics are Lonnie Barbach (reads like a therapist writing for Redbook) and Betty Dodson (reads like someone you’d meet at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival circa 1989, naked), but they have accumulated an Amazon wish list full of competition. Poke around in the reviews and see if you can find someone whose voice you can stand, buy their book or DVD and whatever basic toys they recommend, then buy yourself some time and use them. Oh, and if there’s a boyfriend in the picture, tell him to just hang on — you’ve got some stuff to do, after which he’s welcome to come back and try again. If this works, it should be worth the wait.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

I’m a 20-year-old girl, and I’ve only had one sex partner in my life (high school to the present). My problem seems pretty basic: sex doesn’t feel all that great. I mean, the desire’s there, but after a few minutes the pleasure part just kind of slips away, despite my best efforts to keep it there, and the rest either feels like smushing body parts or else is unpleasant and sort of painful. I don’t understand how it can start off feeling good and then just go away. Maybe I’m on the right track: When I first started having sex (three years ago), it always felt pretty neutral. Now at least it feels good for a little while. I can’t masturbate to orgasm either. It is incredibly frustrating to want to have sex even knowing I always go away from it unsatisfied. What is wrong with me? How do I fix it?’

Love,

No, No, No

Dear No:

I had to reread very carefully to make sure you and your doppelgänger are not the same person, but look — you’re slightly younger! And very, very faintly less hopeless, I think, but that is open to interpretation. I do find it slightly heartening that you are experiencing a bit of pleasure now, since I’d have to agree that it would be difficult to get motivated in the complete absence of anything more exciting than "neutral" sensation.

It’s neither fair nor just but is common for women to be out of touch with their sexual-response cycles in a way that simply doesn’t occur very often in males. I hesitate — nay, refuse! — to get into any historical-political reasons why this might be so. (It’s not that they’re not interesting, but they are unfruitful and dreadfully distracting, which is exactly what we don’t need when we’re already having trouble concentrating.) I’m afraid you too will have to buy media products and a vibrator that tickles at least your fancy, put the boyfriend on hold, and get practicing. I wish I could wave a magic wand for you, but I think the motor in mine is burning out. They don’t last forever.

Love,

Andrea

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

Editor’s Notes

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When the political consultants get their focus groups and test the slogans that will guide political policy in California, the one that comes out near the top all the time is "living within our means." That’s why Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger used the line (as many of his predecessors have done) to try to make his brutal, bloody budget cuts sound eminently reasonable. The hardworking taxpayers of this state have to live within their means, right? They can’t spend more money than they have. So when the state comes up short, the governor and the legislature just have to do what’s necessary to make payment due balance with accounts received.

But it’s a misleading metaphor.

Imagine you’re working at a full-time job, just barely managing to cover the bills, and all of a sudden, through no fault of your own, your boss decides to cut your pay by 15 percent. Life wasn’t exactly easy before; now it really sucks. Now the essentials are at risk — you can’t pay the rent and put food on the table and buy clothes for your kids without going into debt. And sure, you can borrow for a while and run up the credit cards, but it won’t work in the long term and will wind up costing you a lot more.

And your boss smiles and tells you to live within your means.

This is what’s happened to California. The people who operate the public services (schools, parks, hospitals, etc.) that we all depend on just saw their income cut radically. The state already tried borrowing, but the interest alone is going to cost $2 billion this year; California, like so many Californians, is having trouble with its debt load.

So what would your typical breadwinner try to do? Well, he or she would complain about the pay cut and fight to get that money back, look for another job, possibly moonlight…. In other words, those hardworking taxpayers would try hard to find a revenue-side solution. For the state, that means raising taxes. Focus-group that one, Mr. Governor.

Brownout! rolls through the rain

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Turn that umbrella upside down and smile to the warm Latin funk (with an edge of oh-so-nasty) of Austin’s Brownout!, who’ll be drizzling driving grooves, conga section included, through that undersung cumbia-and-get-’em hot spot, El Rincon this Saturday. They’ll be playing a live set with DJ Chicken George, guaranteed to shelter you from the storms.

brownout1.jpg

The eight-piece ensemble’s work can be found on Freestyle Records, and its sunny, tequila-soaked appearance here is brought to you by the kids from rad soulful weekly Afrolicious (Thursdays at Elbo Room), accompanied by funky drimmers LaMalaMaña and DJs Señor Oz and Pleasuremaker. Check it!

Brownout
Saturday Jan/26
10pm-2am
El Rincon
2700 16th Street
(between Folsom St & Harrison St)

Video Mutants: Reflections of Damon Packard

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Though Damon Packard considers himself a filmmaker, not a video artist, his wonderfully unique and often bizarre works are right at home in our Video Mutants issue.

Watch and learn, kids!

The trailer for The Untitled Star Wars Mockumentary.

Reflections of Evil trailer.

Video Mutants: Booby call

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Who can bring together cast-off crocheted critters and KISS? Early ’70s Ann Arbor, Mich., art noise and the Whitney Biennial? Vampires toiling in cubicles and Sonic Youth’s 1992 album Dirty (DGC)? Mike Kelley, man, can.

Ouch — the allusions get bumpy after almost three hours of mind-altering video candy. The medium may be the favored art material of the moment, but it’s only one weapon at the disposal of the cofounder of Destroy All Monsters — the Stooges’ weirder kissing cousins — and the Dirty cover artist. Kelley’s work can be found in major museum collections around the world, and he’s collaborated on video pieces with artists like Paul McCarthy in the past, but Day Is Done, which screens Jan. 31 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, is his first feature, revamped as a narrative-ish stream from the installation version shown in 2005 at Gagosian Gallery in New York City.

Religious icons, ’80s modern dancers, lousy Nazi rappers, bad comedians, and spacey witches and vampires dance, sing, and hold forth throughout the video musical’s 32 chapters, augmented by a Kelley-written soundtrack that encompasses gospel and techno, light pop and monkish drone. Say I’m lost in pop idolatry, but the most wonderfully bizarre moment in this lengthy bizarre wonder arrives during a painful singles mixer furnished with irksome chair-desks as the differences among the assembled women — two African Americans, a white lost Hee Haw extra, a rocker in full KISS makeup, and a gloomy witch — are highlighted by portraits of their respective all-American idols: Kobe Bryant, R. Kelly, Garth Brooks, Gene Simmons, and Brandon Lee, all painted with clunky, thrift store–style passion. After getting an, erm, tongue lashing from the KISS girl for nattering about the largeness of some big stuffed bananas, the hick chick is forced to defend her painting of Brooks staring at a bare breast (in reality painted by Kelley). "But it ain’t even my tit — it’s my momma’s," the backwoods boob protests as the KISS fan sneers with all of Detroit Rock City’s blood-spitting wrath. "Gosh, I hope Garth don’t go for my momma and not for me!"

The rejoinder "That bitch is nuts!" might be a punch line to a half-cocked sitcom, but it’s also the perfect response to the old biddy dressing down a would-be school pageant Madonna for her posture or the blood-drenched hawker of a putf8um MasterCard that supports the "educational complex" — or any other denizen of Kelley’s jet-black-humored, bleakly antic fun house.

Looking back at the video now, however, Kelley can still picture changes to Day Is Done — each chapter a live-action re-creation of an extracurricular activity photo culled from a high school yearbook. For instance, the many students and office workers dressed as depressed vampires and gleeful witches seem a bit too trendy today, even for a man with a taste for monsters. "If I thought about it more, I would have done something less … au courant, I guess," Kelley drawls over the phone from his Los Angeles home. Does he still glimpse kids in full goth regalia? A heavy sigh, then, "Yeah. Also, it’s kind of gone into the art world. A lot of gothy art is being made."

A self-described "maximalist" who has made noise for years as part of Destroy All Monsters — a forerunner of experimentalists here and abroad — and later on his own, the man once pegged as a major proponent of installation-oriented "clusterfuck aesthetics" is clearly driven to strike out in fresh directions all the time. Day Is Done, for example, emerged from his work with repressed memories and his Educational Complex sculpture, a model of every school the Detroit native ever attended, with, he says, "all the parts I couldn’t remember left blank." The original idea for the video — shot over a few weeks in 2005 at an LA park, Kelley’s studio, and his alma mater, California Institute of the Arts — was to "fill in the blanks with screen memory."

"Also because this show was in New York, I thought doing something with a Broadway overtone would be funny because that’s something cultured New Yorkers are embarrassed about!" Kelley says, laughing.

Kelley is obviously still eager to venture into unexamined office parks of discomfort, provoking his viewers by pushing them into the dead spaces that fill the back lots of corporate break rooms and school yards. The artist’s well-known stuffed-animal works similarly evolved from an unspoken exchange with his audience. "When I first starting using that stuff, I was only working with things that were handmade, and it didn’t matter to me what they were — I was more interested in the idea of love and labor," Kelley explains. "But people were really, really fixated on the dolls, and I realized there’s a great kind of empathy for them, and also I realized that much of that empathy had to do with this kind of rise and fixation on child abuse and that whole victim culture that was coming up in the ’80s."

Shortly after one of those discarded dolls popped up on the cover of Dirty, Kelley, bandmate Cary Loren, SY’s Thurston Moore, and critic Byron Coley put together the 1994 three-CD retrospective Destroy All Monsters: 1974–1976 for Moore’s Ecstatic Peace! label to document the original lineup’s work before the arrival of the Stooges’ Ron Asheton and the MC5’s Michael Davis in the band. The founding group re-formed, while Kelley has continued to work sound components into his artwork and make and release music on his Compound Annex imprint.

Has music video ever been part of Kelley’s Wagnerian compendium of interests? "I’ve never been asked!" he says. "I don’t think I would do one for myself — who would show it? It’ll just be another thing that sits in a box in storage, like all my records." Still, his freshly edited feature might work. "It generated a tremendous amount of music," the artist muses. "In a sense, Day Is Done is one giant music video." *

DAY IS DONE

Jan. 31, 7:30 p.m., $6–<\d>$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

www.ybca.org

www.mikekelley.com

Video Mutants: Rave damage

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>>Click here to read Marke B.’s interview with Ryan Trecartin

› superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO "Hey Skippy, PattyMay is here. In. This. Room."

"Oh god, it’s true! PattyMay is in this room."

"Yes! Tell him I am here. I am PattyMay, and I am in. This. Room."

"Did you say PattyMay is in the room?"

This is the Guardian‘s video art issue, and anyone who’s recently hung out with a certain brand of cued-in, mid-20s clubber knows that the neon-splattered, inverted Internet psycho-vids of Ryan Trecartin are the new now. Those who’ve not hung out with such can plug directly into any enervated crackles and eyeball quivers lingering from their tab-heavy rave days — a tweekend back in K-land, courtesy of capital A — with a quick scan of the Philadelphia-based 26-year-old’s YouTube channel, WianTreetin.

There — and in several big-time art exhibitions throughout the world — you’ll find one of the most mind-bending glosses on getting ready for a night out, and actually going out, that’s ever been burnt to digi, A Family Finds Entertainment (2004). This half-hourish doozy begins with a gothic drag specter clutching a bottle of generic hair spritz and trying to pull a little girl into a bathroom closet. It ends with a boy who’s been run over by a ghost car rising from the dead, kind of, as a gender-clown version of himself gets reborn in a kiddie pool after a house is destroyed by an underground indie rock dance orgy. (Cue fireworks.)

In between is what one character calls "nonlinear trash, with color!" and the wickedest toss-off line in the universe, "To the dark side — I party alone." Also: a chipmunk remix of Sophie Ellis Baxter’s awful "Murder on the Dance Floor," a spastic impersonation of infernal fiber-optic networks, liberal quantities of ingested toner, confused plans shouted through butcher-paper walls, and the partially imaginary dream girl PattyMay, made somehow realer by several incantations of her name. All this and more, plus an overload of kitten star wipes.

What? That’s not your typical night out? Honey, call me.

Mapping the plots of Trecartin’s hyperactive, live-action phantasmagorias is so beside the point it’s next to it. Part of the posted synopsis of his 2006 short Tommy Chat Just E-Mailed Me: "Takes place inside and outside of an Internet e-mail…. Tammy prints stuff and confronts Beth. Beth does a Google search for ‘fun’ and finds ‘ugly,’ so she phone calls her dark dream girlfriend Pam who has communication problems, a dead computer painting, Apple OSX, and their lesbian communal baby prop."

And although the look and feel of his episodes — Microsoft-blue papier-mâché interiors, vine-sprouting ceilings, fluorescent-dipped skin tones, looped asexual voices, ominous snippets of warped bubblegum pop — are definitely wiggy, drug analogies come up obvious and short. Trecartin’s created a hilarious and horrifying — hilarifying — open-source code for the nightmare side of contemporary life, with its inflatable technological chaos, zombified discount shopping, and endless idiotic yakking. Wild club nights and the ancient rituals of rebirth they tap into yield a central theme — actual physical activity among streaming virtual selves.

In 2007’s I-BE AREA — basically what the invisible thing that sneaks up behind you when you’ve been online too long looks like — the main gist is the soul’s fate in a world of obnoxious social networking, one that reduces individuals to quasi-emotional ADD outbursts and illogical catchphrases. It’s life aboard the MySpace Death Star, and everyone had better fill up their blogs, crop their pics, broadcast in a perfect urban patois, and be their own friends. "Look, I think I just saw a highly advanced, 3-D text message of my future self giving me the middle finger," main character I-BE, a.k.a. Trecartin, says snootily.

I-BE AREA zings off on a million paths in its quest for authenticity — names become other names, twins melt into clones, characters switch places with their avatars and turn clairvoyant. There’s a jaw-dropping tap dance sequence featuring orphaned kids recorded on Adoption Audition Tapes. At one point a woman who looks like she wandered off the set of Dynasty identifies herself as the Head-PArent and drops a hypothetical blow-dryer into a hot tub full of hippie ghouls. Later a noodle-eyed tranny ectomorph called Pasta kidnaps a baby.

Near the center of it all is the Wood Shop — a real wood shop, with band saws revving and lumber strewn precariously. It’s also the perfect joke on a mainstream gay dance club (or online hookup site). "Exotic" black go-go boys writhe frantically on tables, fractured machinery noises sub in for lame-ass techno, and an obnoxious, pig-tailed faggy avatar screams "What?" into her brick cell phone. Then everyone prances around lewdly and breaks windows. Just like real life!

www.elizabethdeegallery.com/artists/view/ryan-trecartin

www.youtube.com/WianTreetin

A glossary

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I’m a little confused. Could you please explain all the different genders? It seems there is so much more out there than just male and female: transsexuals, he-shes, shemales … And are hermaphrodites real? I’m most intrigued by them. Do they live as male or as female? Are they born that way? Who’s who?

Love,

Gender Confused

Dear GC:

OK, but you should know going in that you’re setting me up for abuse from a certain segment of the genderfolk, that overearnest subset that thrives on righteous indignation. I don’t know what it is about the Gender Weirdness Club that renders so many of its members both unnecessarily hostile and so shockingly humorless — you’d think living as a guy in a dress, for instance, would pretty much force you to develop a sense of humor — but if I talk about this, I will infuriate people, and this time I blame you. That’s OK, right?

Transgender is an umbrella term. It used to be pretty much interchangeable with transsexual, but the latter is on its way out (too identified with men who went to Sweden in the early ’60s and came back looking like very-large-footed stewardesses, I guess). Many people in the gender community now use the term transgender to describe anyone who does not fit readily into the "a boy is a boy and a girl is a girl, and that’s that" paradigm. When I say umbrella term, mind you, I mean a really big umbrella. There’s a crowd under there, from the girl in combat boots who would have been described as a tomboy in a previous generation (I was one, and it never would have occurred to me to call myself anything other than female, but fashions and perceptions change) to the aforementioned guy in a dress, with a large and oddly dressed crowd doing the Time Warp in between, including some who blur the line for kicks and others who are just trying to mess with you.

Transsexual used to be the common term, as I said, for someone described as trapped in the wrong body. Now you’re more likely to hear transman (a man assigned a female gender at birth, later corrected by some combination of introspection and self-acceptance, gender presentation, hormones, and/or surgery) or transwoman (the same but vice versa). Some transfolk make a distinction between the idea of transsexuality (literally "crossing sexes") and being a (trans)man or (trans)woman: they feel they never changed genders, just other people’s perception of their gender, so they don’t feel a term like transsexual accurately describes them. Many would probably prefer to be known as men and women, for obvious reasons, but accept or proudly bear the trans label.

He-she is a term from the carnival sideshow. You’d probably best just file that one away with the rest of the historical oddities if you want anyone to talk to you about this.

As for shemale … I recently pissed off an earnest transperson — let’s call her Ernestine — merely by answering a question about shemale porn; the writer’s boyfriend was nuts about the stuff, and she wanted to know how worried she should be. Not very, I said. "Lots of people enjoy blah blah blah shemale blah …" Blam! "No transsexual woman," Ernestine wrote, "would expose her genitals like that on the Internet." She meant to convey the fact that transwomen are not freaks and need not find work at the aforementioned sideshow, a noble sentiment and all, but the fact that they are not freaks does not preclude some of them from becoming whores. There is a huge market for transporn, and much of it does use the admittedly objectionable, if undeniably retro amusant, term shemale. Sorry, Ernestine.

And finally, you asked about hermaphrodites. Nobody uses this term anymore unless they’re describing worms. There are lots of people born with a condition referred to as pseudohermaphroditism, but really, these ought not to concern you. The important thing to know is that there are kids born with ambiguous genitalia and others born with outward and inward sex parts that don’t match. The default medical response was and mostly still is surgery, but the foundation on which that treatment was built — basically, that you can raise anybody as any gender by strictly enforcing "appropriate" pronouns, toys, outfits, and love objects — has crumbled in recent years. We hardly know anything, but we do know that most people are born with sense of their own gender; and while you can beat almost anyone into admitting anything, telling a little boy he’s a little girl, no matter how insistently, will not make him a girl — it will just make him angry and possibly crazy. We are learning, finally, to take people’s word for it: I’m a girl, even in combat boots, and you are whatever it is you say you are.

Hope this helps.

Love,

Andrea

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

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

There’s a January report from the San Francisco Controller’s Office that says the city’s transportation policy is failing.

It doesn’t say that in so many words — that might have gotten some media attention — but the implication is clear.

The report is on the taxicab industry, always a fascinating topic, and it’s filled with charts and graphs discussing how much money the cab companies make and how little the drivers make. But in the middle of all of that is a remarkable paragraph that says:

"The resident population in San Francisco appears to be increasing. Since 2000, the Department of Finance reports it has grown by 4.7 percent, or by approximately 0.6 percent per year. Although the Census Bureau believes San Francisco lost population from 2000 to 2005, it too has reported population increase since 2005. Muni trips have slightly declined over the same period — a cumulative negative change of 2.5 percent — while vehicle registrations in San Francisco have increased by 1.5 percent. This suggests that residents may be substituting away from mass transit and into private and personal transport modes."

That reads like, well, a Controller’s Office report, but here’s the translation: More San Franciscans are driving cars. Fewer are taking Muni. It’s not exactly shocking news to anyone who pays attention to traffic patterns in town, but it’s a serious indictment of city policy.

The statistics show a couple of things. One is that the city is, indeed, getting richer — generally speaking, wealthier people are more likely to use private cars. Another is that Muni hasn’t been performing: all of the national and local data show there’s a direct correlation between on-time transit service and ridership (and of course there’s a direct, or rather inverse, correlation between the number of people riding Muni and the number of cars on the streets.)

But what it says to me is that city hall doesn’t really consider the car glut a top priority.

There is no official city goal to reduce the number of cars in town or the number of car miles traveled or the number of vehicles on the streets. The city Planning Department continues to base its land-use decisions on projections of increased car traffic (which has to be accommodated with more garages). Nobody’s calling for a five-year plan to turn the trend around.

It’s going to be a big year for transit policy: the city’s Transit Effectiveness Study comes out in February, and the report on congestion management should be done in June. Perhaps the supervisors can use that information to create goals, timelines, and programs that will reduce — instead of accommodate — cars on the streets.

I’m part of the problem, and I know it: I drive a car, and I drive it too often. I do it because it’s difficult to get my kids to and from school on a bus.

That’s one of the tricky parts of this equation (school buses in a city where everyone has choice and kids from any neighborhood can go to any school), but I have to say, the parking lot at McKinley Elementary School is packed every single morning with people driving schoolkids. You’d think the city could work with the San Francisco Unified School District — maybe organize car pools. Maybe the mayor’s $130,000 per year global warming coordinator could get involved.

We could start with a citywide survey: Why do you drive? Where? What would get you out of your car? Aim for 5 percent per year. It’d be better than what we’re doing now.

Today’s Ammianoliner

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Today’s Ammiano liner:

Hillary and Barack discuss the issues. Britney should keep her kids. Not.

(From the answering machine of Sup. Tom Ammiano on Jan. 22, 2008.) B3

Pop op

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER "Omigod, I totally love that." A doll-faced, teenage dead ringer for Zooey Deschanel gawks dreamily at a dabbed dwarf cactus drifting off the edge of a cream-colored sheet of paper — jaw a-dangling, china blue eyes a-gobbling. It’s not often you catch a snatch of pure rock ‘n’ roll idol worship amid the pristine white walls of a museum space, yet here it was, flowering quietly in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art room that hosts the shifting collection of Paul Klee prints gathered and loaned by San Francisco’s father of the pill, Carl Djerassi. These days the Klee pieces are sharing space with the whimsy-washed ink, watercolor, and graphite works by San Francisco Art Institute graduate and international psych-folk rock emissary (and Guardian copydesk swear-jar star) Devendra Banhart, who performs at the museum Jan. 17 in celebration of "Abstract Rhythms: Paul Klee and Devendra Banhart."

The small show opened quietly, but judging from the cool kids reverently orbiting the pieces, word is slowly leaking out about this charming clutch of images, which displays both opera lover Klee’s most music-inspired, antic pieces — is that the musical fruit of a bean burrito or bassoon emerging from a posterior in Der Fagottist (The bassoonist)? — and Banhart’s sweetly humorous paper pieces depicting a fictitious fan called Smokey, who’s also the center of his recent, somewhat decentered LP, Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon (XL). Banhart is clearly a man of many gifts: here, Flowering Corn Maiden Smokey and Banded King Snake and Thunder Maiden show off a playful yet refined eye and an overflowing though focused imagination with a transfigurative bent that conjures Giuseppe "Fruit Face" Arcimboldo.

While the word show is increasingly, happily confused in both its musical and visual art contexts — and the term pop becomes more relevant in the art world than in the shiny plastic disc marketplace — the exhibit arrives as yet another instance of the healthy, ever-bubbling and brewing cross-pollination going on between the two types of media since the turn of the century. That highly consensual crossover fever dream is evident at art openings throughout the Bay every first Thursday, and it’s heartening to know that just as music becomes a harder proposition to tackle commercially and art has become a bigger business, musicians are finding their way toward new audiences and artists are coursing toward pop. And while spaces like 21 Grand and LoBot Gallery weather their share of hassles, newbs like the month-old Fort Gallery are throwing open their doors undeterred. The last, a Mission District space, is currently showing collage and sculpture by Ryan Coffey by appointment only — "Until we quit our day jobs," co-owner Jesi Khadivi says with a laugh — but Khadivi and cohort Vanessa Maida promise a mix of art, barbecue, live music, and special soirees like the Jan. 16 movie night that will juxtapose Ranu Mukherjee’s Sustenance short with Alejandro Jodorowsky’s tripindicular The Holy Mountain (1973).

The blend of high art and lowdown sounds isn’t new, ace genre bender Chris Duncan asserts: music-art hybridization "has always been around on different levels, but I think most people who make art also make music, or are very much influenced by music. As far as different mediums and different ways of doing things, the lines are so blurred at this point. For me, I like to keep busy, and I like getting a lot of people involved in stuff. I can get lost in my studio for a long time, and it gets kinda lonesome."

This may explain why Duncan — whose visual art career has been far from dormant, considering his fall solo show at Gregory Lind Gallery — has been dipping his toes into other creative wellsprings: on Jan. 18 he’ll celebrate the first release of SF twosome Pale Hoarse’s The Gospels on his new label, the Time Between the Beginning and the End. Call it a handmade labor of love: Duncan stitched and silk-screened about 100 multihued covers for the limited-edition record. Each one — available at Aquarius Records and via Duncan’s Hot and Cold Web site — promises to shimmer with different tones beneath the pink fluorescent-ink silk screen.

It’s the first record the Oakland artist has made, though he once designed a cover for a Jade Tree split with Songs: Ohia and My Morning Jacket, as well as for Battleship’s Presents Princess (Ononswitch, 2005). "There’s a total Sub Pop Singles Club influence, for sure. Music has always been part of my whole trip, and record collecting was such a big part of my growing up," says Duncan, whose also recently edited his first book, My First Time: A Collection of First Punk Show Stories (AK Press), a project that mushroomed from a slim zine, and he’s embarking on the next issue of the wonderful art zine he assembles with Griffin McPartland, Hot and Cold. (The next issue sounds like a doozy and will include contributions from Colter Jacobsen, Chris Corales, and Hisham Bharoocha and a CD by Golden Bears, a new project from the Quails’ Julianna Bright and Seth Lorinczi.) "Making a record fulfilled the need to hand-make stuff," Duncan continues. "A lot of projects I do outside painting are about gathering and collecting things, doing records, zine assembling. Now I’m inspired to put out a record every year." *

MOVIE NIGHT

With Sustenance and The Holy Mountain

Wed/16, 8:30 p.m., $5 donation

Fort Gallery

83B Wiese, SF

www.fortgallery.com

DEVENDRA BANHART

Thurs/17, 8 p.m., $15–<\d>$20

Phyllis Wattis Theater, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third St., SF

www.sfmoma.org

PALE HOARSE

With Raven and Hannah, visuals by Chris Duncan, and shorts

Fri/18, 8 p.m., $6

Artists’ Television Access

992 Valencia, SF

www.atasite.org

For more, see Sonic Reducer Overage at www.sfbg.com/blogs/music.

Messy Marv at large

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Even the short list of elite Bay Area rappers — say, Too Short, E-40, Keak Da Sneak, and Mistah FAB — must include the Fillmore’s own Marvin Watson Jr., a.k.a. Messy Marv. Since selling 15,000 units of his debut, Messy Situations (Ammo, 1996), at age 16, Mess has consistently earned impressive independent numbers: his solo discs Disobayish (Scalen/Sumday, 2004) and Bandannas, Tattoos, and Tongue Rings (Scalen/SMC, 2005) both sold 20,000, while his collaboration with San Quinn, Explosive Mode (Presidential, 1998), has moved more than 50,000.

Mess began 2007 with Da Bidness (Gateway/SMC), the creation of a supergroup formed with Keak and PSD, which, according to SMC’s Will Bronson, was last year’s best-selling local independent disc, at 19,000 and counting. Mess’s current project, Draped Up and Chipped Out 2 (Scalen/SMC), dropped at the year’s end. By mid-December, Draped was the number one independent and number 13 overall album on the Music Monitor Network, which tracks sales from major United States indie chains.

The soundtrack to an uncompleted film, Draped consists mostly of songs by Mess — spitting alongside national talent like Mike Jones, Juvenile, and Sean Paul — plus tracks from local heavyweights like G-Stack and B-Legit. Despite its various hands, the disc still has an album feel, containing some of Mess’s best work since Bandannas. Highlights include his singles "My Life Is a Movie," which showcases a hook by the late Mac Dre, and "Sei Luv," a rare foray into romantic R&B. With multiple business ventures in the works — including a clothing line and a reality TV show — and perpetual major-label interest, Mess is as likely as any Bay rapper to go nationwide.

Coming from the Fillmore’s projects, however, presents challenges most artists don’t face. When I spoke with Mess, he was fresh out of Santa Rita Jail, where he spent the past year on a weapons charge.

"I was charged with felony possession of a firearm, my second firearm case," he said. "The deal was three years’ state pen, but my legal defense got me a year. Now I’m back out, trying to turn my negative situation into a positive.

"Jail didn’t stagnate anything as far as my label Scalen," continued Mess, who even recorded a Draped intro behind bars. "They had a phone so I could do my business and my time. I have a strong team behind me."

Nonetheless, given California’s three-strikes law, another felony gun charge could land Mess serious prison time. When asked if he’s worried, however, he got a little heated.

"Now you sound like the SF police," he said — the last thing a rap reporter wants to hear. "Are we trying to make people think I don’t care about going to jail?" he asked, citing his displeasure with a May 15, 2007, San Francisco Chronicle article implying his gun toting had ruined his career opportunities.

"I felt real exploited by that article," Mess said. "I said I’d rather be caught with than without, any day. The way the murder rate is, it’s like that. I don’t regret any of it. I’d rather people read about me in jail than read about me dying or being shot."

He has a point. I absolutely hate guns, as do SF voters, who passed Proposition H — banning possession and sale of firearms within city limits — in 2005. But Prop. H was struck down Jan. 9 by the First District Court of Appeal, based on a challenge by the National Rifle Association, for conflicting with state law, and I think it’s hypocritical to condemn rappers for carrying guns in a society that refuses to ban them. Street rappers like Mess have to maintain a presence in the hood to preserve their credibility and fan base. But money and fame make them targets for violent crime.

"We need some kind of protection," insisted Bay legend Spice 1, who was shot in the chest during a Dec. 3, 2007, attempt to break into his Escalade while he slept inside. The bullet pierced his lung, leaving him in critical condition, though he’s now out of danger and recovering.

"Entertainers should get a break, but we can’t even wear [bulletproof] vests," added Spice, who has had six gun charges, including four in California that predate the three-strikes law. "Marv ain’t trying to jack nobody. He’s trying to protect himself."

In any case, despite the risks, Mess has no intention of abandoning his hood. Beyond the usual rapper’s neighborhood pride, he has taken on an active role in attempting to turn negatives into positives. Aside from using his label to employ youths whose criminal records and/or poor education make getting jobs nearly impossible, he’s put out two volumes of Fillmore Nation (Scalen/SMC, 2006) to help young rappers launch their careers. He intends to donate a portion of the profits to two Fillmore community centers.

"When I got my position in the music industry, I didn’t turn my back on the kids," Mess said. "I’m out here with these kids, these criminals, and they look at me as hope because I was the same way. When they look at me, they can say, ‘If Messy Marv can do it, I can do it.’<0x2009>"

All told, I think San Francisco — or at least the Fillmore — is better off with Mess on the street than in a cell.

Single cells, single cells

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I read your recent article about postpregnancy changes [12/19/07]; you didn’t mention one promising new treatment for stress incontinence, stem cells. Maybe you’re not interested because it’s not a standard treatment yet, but in case you simply didn’t know, here are some links: www.medscape.com/viewarticle/494967 (requires log-in), www.medpagetoday.com/Surgery/Urology/tb/6055.

Love,

Helpful Reader

Dear Helpful:

I’m interested! My interest in urinary stress incontinence goes way back to when I was first looking into the female ejaculation thing and telling people over and over that "this is not urinary stress incontinence! Nothing to do with that! Forget you ever heard the words urinary stress incontinence." Which I promptly did. And now I’m writing and teaching about what happens to sex after you have babies and barely have time to think about female ejaculation, but guess what’s back as an issue, big-time? Of course. People talk about baby weight and boobs and tiredness and getting "touched out" by having a baby stuck to you at all hours, but how often does anyone mention the fact that peeing when you laugh, sneeze, or do anything more interesting in the way of convulsive expulsions is (a) very common postpartum (in which postpartum can mean, say, 40 years postpartum) and (b) just mortifying and deeply antierotic? (Right, yes, except to that subset — you know who you are — who do find random uncontrollable peeing erotic; you can just sit down, since we’re not talking to you.)

From the Medscape article Helpful linked:

Preliminary research suggests that stem cell therapy is a viable and efficacious treatment for stress urinary incontinence, according to results presented … at the 90th scientific assembly and annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.

"We believe we have developed a long-lasting and effective treatment that is especially promising because it is generated from the patient’s own body," said Ferdinand Frauscher, MD, associate professor of radiology at the Medical University of Innsbruck, Austria. In the study, women who had autologous adult stem cells implanted into the rhabdosphincter were free of incontinence for a year or longer, he said.

You caught the part where these were the women’s own stem cells, right? These are not the stem cells of controversy, drawn from the blasto-Americans whose lives are supposed to be every bit as valuable as that of an adult with a life and a family and a case of Parkinson’s or MS and no good therapies, nope. They were pulled out of the patients’ arms and injected back into the women’s urethras, where they proceeded to thicken the walls and make the sphincter more elastic and contractile. Plus, they’re smart:

"These are very intelligent cells," Dr. Frauscher said. "When they connect with other cells they stop growing." He said it takes about two weeks for the cells to complete the process. However, some women in the study reported a benefit within 24 hours of treatment. Dr. Frauscher said that was probably due to a "bulking" effect of the cells, creating pressure on the urethra.

In another, similar study, the women were still continent a year later. This is really good news, if a little early and a little techy and not likely to be appearing at a doc-in-the-box clinic near you any time soon. We can keep our fingers (and, unfortunately, our legs) crossed, though.

While we’re crossing, here’s more good news for women who, like me, did their dancing to ’80s music while the ’80s were still happening and might be wondering where their smooth skin, bouncing curls, and vaginal lubrication went: gone with the estrogen, of course. You could get whiplash keeping up with the latest on hormone-replacement therapy for menopause — it’ll give you cancer; no, it’ll protect you from heart attacks; no, it’ll give you heart attacks but protect you from cancer — but (also from Medscape, at www.medscape.com/viewarticle/568354):

The American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists (AACE) has released a statement on hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and cardiovascular risk, emphasizing that HRT does not appear harmful in younger women in early menopause and may indeed be beneficial in this group.

Younger for these purposes means under 60 (phew!) or less than 10 years after menopause. HRT isn’t going to be for everyone, and these are the same numbers (the Nurses’ Health Study) that have been crunched and crunched again while women get the above-mentioned sore necks (and sometimes much, much worse) in attempting to keep up with the latest, but right now this seems good. I’ve tried to look forward to my cronehood as a time of wisdom and serenity, but … bleah. Just whisper the words vaginal atrophy to any woman past 35 and you’ll see how eager most of us are to give up our estrogen. Given the choice, I’d rather pee my pants.

Love,

Andrea

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

A no-new-cuts budget

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EDITORIAL It’s time for Democrats in Sacramento to show some political courage. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has thrown down the gauntlet, offering a budget plan that isn’t just brutal and wrong — it’s a train wreck, a catastrophe that would devastate public education, parks, and basic services in California for years to come. The Democrats need to publicly declare this dead on arrival and offer an alternative plan that closes most of the $14 billion deficit with new taxes.

The budget deficit is serious business: it represents more than 10 percent of the state budget, and, after a series of tough years that have left California in debt, it’s not going to be easy to eliminate. And we recognize that Schwarzenegger is serious about across-the-board cuts — he’s willing to eliminate 6,000 jobs from the bloated prison system and let 22,000 inmates out early. That’s long overdue, and those savings can be incorporated in any final plan.

But slicing the education budget by $4 billion is insane. We’re not just talking about government employees losing their jobs or reducing bureaucratic overhead — this is about threatening the future of a generation of California kids. Those kinds of cuts — which absolutely will translate into a loss of teachers, school closures, and the end of music, art, and science programs — aren’t just one-year measures that can be repaired later. These are deep reductions in the state’s commitment to educating children who can’t afford private schools — and those kids will suffer for years.

Closing parks, cutting social programs, and eviscerating aid to cities — which will mean another round of cuts at the local level — would do serious damage to California. And none of it is necessary.

The governor’s pledge not to raise taxes demonstrates that, for all his talk of bipartisanship, at heart he’s a George W. Bush Republican. Cutting state spending at this level as the nation heads into a recession is insane; all the governor’s plan would do is drive the economy further into the tank, destroy more jobs, and reduce tax revenue, making next year’s problem even worse.

Think about it for a second: just restoring the vehicle license fee, which is a modest tax on car ownership, would bring in more than $4 billion, enough to save public education.

The richest Californians have done very well under the Bush tax cuts. And the deficits that those tax cuts created are part of California’s budget problem. Even increasing state income taxes slightly on those very-high-wage earners would bring in as much as $3 billion, according to the California Tax Reform Association — and since the rich can deduct state taxes from their federal payments, this would ultimately be a way to transfer money from Washington DC back to California.

That state’s sales tax code is still stuck in another era, and all sorts of things defined as services don’t get taxed at all — even though, according to the CTRA, "many ‘services’ are actually the temporary use of tangible commodities, such as admission to sporting events, ski resorts, golf courses, amusement parks, gyms and concerts, and should be in the tax base." Fixing that problem would bring in another $4 billion.

In other words, a few modest changes in the tax laws that would affect only the rich and those with excess disposable income would solve the budget deficit without cutting any services at all (except prisons, which need to be cut anyway). And that’s without even addressing the regressive mess that is Proposition 13.

A revenue-based solution would also prevent a deep hit to the economy, because shifting money from the very rich (who don’t tend to spend their marginal dollars) to the poor (who tend to put every new dollar right into the economy) is always a source of economic stimulus.

The Democratic leadership knows this. Most of the rank-and-file Democrats in the State Legislature know this. It’s not rocket science. But politicians in California are terrified of raising taxes — but in 2008 they have to get over it. It’s the responsibility of the Democratic leadership to educate the public about the real choices here, the real economics, the real stakes — and the only humane, credible solutions. If they cower in fear and cave in to the governor now, it’s hard to imagine when they will ever be able to take a stand.

A perfect marriage …

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By Andrea Nemerson

…of presenter and material, anyway. I can’t promise you the other kind, although I’m working on it.

Since I had my kids, I’m forever wishing I could write more about kid-having issues in Alt Sex Column, but of course, ASC readers want to hear about fisting and polyamory, — not so much with the kiddie stuff. My other regular readers, at a much more mainstream (www.firstwivesworld.com) site than www.sfbg.com will ever aspire to be, want to hear about nicely dating nice men after a maybe not-so-nice divorce.

I think I’ve got it now, though — Good Vibrations wants me to come in and talk about sex after kids, starting Thursday the 24th at the Berkeley store. I’ll be spinning it more toward the “save your sanity and your relationship” side, and less toward “this is the exact position you should use for this-and-such,” partly because there is no perfect position for thus-and-such, and partly because I believe very firmly that sex is better when your life isn’t falling apart around you. It’s all about still being nice to each other even though everything’s different and there’s a small squalling person demanding all your emotional resources and you’re just…so… tired.

So come see me!

Here’s the information:

East Bay Mother’s Group “Birth Ways” presents – Good Vibes for Mama’s Own Good!
An evening on Motherhood and Sexuality, a special evening of frank and lively discussion, information, and shopping! Featuring key speakers Andrea Nemerson, Samantha Matalone Cook, and Gina Hassan, Ph.D. Free admission, information and goodies!
Explore and shop during this after hours event for mothers only and get 10% off your total purchase!
For more information or to RSVP contact Birthways or Good Vibrations or email donations@Birthways.org.

Thursday, January 24
7:30 p.m. – 10 p.m.
Good Vibrations Berkeley Store
2504 San Pablo Avenue (at Dwight Way)
Berkeley, CA 94702
(510) 841-8987

Newsom’s gambit

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Newfamily08.jpg
Gavin Newsom, flanked by his sister, Hillary Newsom Callan, her two young daughters and his fiancee, Jennifer Siebel, prepares to be sworn in for a second term as Mayor of San Francisco by his father, retired Judge William Newsom.

Newfather08.jpg
Promises, promises. Newsom takes the oath, using an old family Bible, held by Siebel.

Mayor Gavin Newsom’s 2008 inaugural address under City Hall’s caverous domed rotunda looked like a rehearsal for his upcoming wedding to actress Jennifer Siebel, what with the choir trilling, the reverend pronouncing his blessings, the family Bible, the bucket loads of roses, and Newsom’s sister’s cute little kids running all around.

Newchild08.jpg
Siebel clutches Newsom’s niece, Talitha Callan, while the Mayor listens to event emcee Carlos Garcia, before launching into his hour-long inaugural address

Less adorable was the fact that Newsom’s speech contained a not so thinly veiled attack on the November 2008 charter amendment, which seeks to set aside $2.7 billion in city funds for affordable housing over 15 years.

The amendment would give affordable housing the same baseline of funding that the city already allocates to the Recreation and Park Department Fund and the Library Preservation Fund—and less than it already sets aside for the Children, Youth and Families Fund.

Sounds reasonable to those of us who have no hope of owing a home in San Francisco and are either having difficulty cobbling together the rent each month for our lowly studio/room/apartment/shack in the City, or are already displaced to the East Bay.

It’s a point that a super majority of the Board of Supervisors, along with State Senators Carole Migden and Leland Yee, and Assemblymembers Mark Leno and Fiona Ma, all seem to get, given their support for the affordable housing set aside.
But not, apparently, Newsom, who smeared this amendment as “a political gambit,” while pushing a Lennar-backed measure that promises to build 10,000 housing units at Candlestick Point, but does not specify what percentage of these units would be below market rate, for rent, or affordable, to people who currently live in the Bayview.

“In the next four years we are going to keep offering real solutions on affordable housing, not fall prey to political gambits that offer attractive promises but not sound policy,” Newsom said, during his address.

But is the newly resworn-in Mayor’s resistance to the Board’s affordable housing charter amendment rooted in the fact that it would require the Mayor’s Office of Housing to prepare an affordable housing plan every three years, present an annual affordable housing budget and do so before the rest of the Mayor’s annual budget proposals are finalized?

All these steps are crucial, in terms of transparency, accountability–and ensuring that the affordable housing needs of low-income and working class folks get top priority, instead of becoming an annual political football. They are also logical steps, for those seeking sustainable solutions to homelessness and climate change, as Newsom claims to be doing.

But instead, Newsom continues to lend his support to the Lennar-backed measure on the June 2008 ballot, even though Lennar broke its promise to build rentals at its Hunters Point Shipyard Parcel A site, where it is constructing 1,500 condominiums, and failed to live up to its promise to proactively protect local residents from asbestos dust.

Let’s Newsom sees the light, uses his political capital to support the affordable housing charter amendment, and thus lives up to his promise to protect all of the City’s residents, for the next four years.

Rebel women

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LA GARRUCHA CHIAPAS (Jan. 8th) – Dozens of Zapatista companeras, many of them Tzeltal Maya from the Chiapas lowlands decked out in rainbow-hued ribbons and ruffles, their dark eyes framed by pasamontanas and paliacates that masked their personas, emerged from the rustic auditorium to the applause of hundreds of international feminists gathered outside at the conclusion of the opening session of an all-women’s Encuentro hosted by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) here at year’s end.

The Tzeltaleras’ line of march, which resembled a colorful if bizarre fashion parade, seemed an auspicious start to the rebels’ third “encounter” this year between “the peoples of the world” and the Zapatista communities and comandantes – an anti-globalization conclave last December and an Encuentro in defense of indigenous land this summer preceded the womens’ gathering.

Although the call for the event was issued under the pen of the EZLN’s quixotic spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos, the author of a recently published erotic coffee table book in which his penis plays the role of a masked guerrillero, the impetus for the women’s Encuentro sprung from the loins of the Zapatista companeras.

Last July, at the conclusion of a meeting with farmers from a dozen counties in the hamlet with the haunting name of La Realidad (“The Reality”), a young rebel from that community, “Evarilda,” apparently without clearing the invitation with the EZLN’s General Command, called for the all-womens’ encounter, explaining that men were invited to help with the logistics but would be asked to stay home and mind the children and the farm animals while the women plotted against capitalism.

True to Evarilda’s word, at the December 29th-31st gathering, which drew 300-500 non-Mexican mostly women activists to this village, officially the autonomous municipality of Francisco Gomez, and which honored the memory of the late Comandanta Ramona (d. January 2006), men took a decidedly secondary role. Signs posted around the Caracol called “Resistance Until the New Dawn,” a sort of Zapatista cultural/political center, advised the companeros that they could not act as “spokespersons, translators, or representatives in the plenary sessions.” Instead, their activities should be confined “to preparing and serving food, washing dishes, sweeping, cleaning out the latrines, fetching firewood, and minding the children.”

Indeed, some young Zapatista men donned aprons imprinted with legends like “tomato” and “EZLN” to work in the kitchens. Meanwhile, older men sat quietly on wooden benches outside of the auditorium, sometimes signaling amongst themselves when a companera made a strong point or smiling in pride after a daughter or wife or sister or mother spoke their histories to the assembly.

The role of women within the Zapatista structure has been crucial since the rebellion’s gestation. When the founders of the EZLN, radicals from northern Mexican cities, first arrived in the Tzeltal-Tojolabal lowlands or Canadas of southeastern Chiapas, women were still being sold by their families as chattel in marriage. Often, they were kept monolingual by the husbands as a means of control, turned into baby factories, and had little standing in the community. Those from the outside offered independence and invited the young women to the training camps in the mountain where they would learn to wield a weapon and use a smattering of Spanish and become a part of the EZLN’s fighting force. Fourteen years ago, on January 1st 1994, when the Zapatistas seized the cities of San Cristobal and Ocosingo and five other county seats, women comprised a third of the rebel army. Women fighters were martyred in the bloody battle for Ocosingo.

Key to bringing the companeras to the rebel cause was “The Revolutionary Law of Women,” officially promulgated that first January 1st from the balcony of the San Cristobal city hall, which decreed that women should have control over their own lives and their bodies. The law, which had been carried into the Indian communities by Comandantas Susana and Ramona, often meeting with hostility from the companeros, was “our toughest battle” Marcos would later note.

Integrating women into the military structure, which was not tied to local community, proved easier than cultivating participation in the civil structure, which was rooted in the life of the villages. Although women occupied five seats on the 19-member Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee (CCRI), the EZLN’s General Command, their numbers fell far shorter in 29 autonomous municipal councils and the five Juntas de Buen Gobierno (“Good Government Committees”) which administrate Zapatista regional autonomy.

But as the Zapatista social infrastructure grew, women became health and education promoters and leaders in the commissions that planned these campaigns and their profile has improved in the JBGs and autonomias.

Women’s Lib a la Zapatista has been boosted by the rebels’ prohibitions against the consumption of alcohol in their communities. Whereas many inland Maya towns like San Juan Chamula are saturated in alcohol, with soaring rates of spousal and child abuse, the Zapatista zone has the lowest abuse indicators in the state, according to numbers offered by the womens’ commission of the Chiapas state congress. As a state, Chiapas has one of the highest numbers of feminicides in the Mexican union – 1456 women were murdered here between 1993 and 2004, more than doubling Chihuahua (604) in which the notorious muertas of Ciudad Juarez are recorded. The low incidence of violence against women in the zone of Zapatista influence is more remarkable because much of the lowland rebel territory straddles the Guatemalan border, a country where 500 women are murdered each year.

With the men tending the kids and cleaning latrines, the women told their stories in the plenaries. Many of the younger companeras like Evarilda had grown up in the rebellion – which is now in its 24th year (14 on public display) – and spoke of learning to read and write in rebel schools and of their work as social promoters or as teachers or as farmers and mothers. Zapatista grandmothers told of the first years of the rebellion and veteran comandantas like Susana, who spoke movingly of her longtime companera Ramona, “the smallest of the small,” recalled how in the war, the men and the women learned to share housekeeping tasks like cooking and washing clothes.

“Many of the companeros still do not want to understand our demands,” Comandanta Sandra admonished, “but we cannot struggle against the mal gobierno without them.”

The Zapatista companeras’ struggle for inclusion and parity with their male counterparts grates against separatist politics that some militant first-world feminists who journeyed to the jungle espouse. Lesbian couples and collectives seemed a substantial faction in the first-world feminist delegations. Although no Zapatista women has publicly come out, the EZLN has been zealous in its inclusion of lesbians and gays and incorporate their struggles in the rainbow of marginalized constitutuencies with whose cause they align themselves.

Sadly, the Encuentro of the Women of the World with the Zapatista Women did not provoke much formal interchange between the rebel companeras and first-world feminists – who were limited to five-minute presentations on the final day of the event. Nonetheless, a surprise Zapatista womens’ theater piece did imply a critique: in the skit, a planeload of first-world feminists with funny hair (played by the companeras) lands in the jungle to deliver the poor Indian women from oppression.

Among international delegations in attendance were women representatives from agrarian movements as far removed from Chiapas as Brazil and Senegal, organized by Via Campesina, an alliance that represents millions of poor farmers in the third world, and a group of militant women from Venice, Italy who have been battling expansion of a U.S. military base in that historic city. Political prisoners were represented by Trinidad Ramirez, partner of imprisoned Ignacio del Valle (who is serving a 67-year sentence), leader of the farmers of Atenco. A message from “Colonel Aurora” (Gloria Arenas), a jailed leader of the Popular Army of the Insurgent People (ERPI), who now supports the EZLN, was read. Although he reputedly lives only a few villages away, Subcomandante Marcos (or his penis) did not put in an appearance at the women’s gathering.

Ladling out chicken soup at her makeshift food stand, Dona Laura told La Jornada chronicler Hermann Bellinghausen that once the womens Encuentro had concluded, everything would return to normal – “only normal would be different now.”

Although the Encounter amply demonstrated the increasing empowerment of the Zapatista companeras, how much of what was said actually rubbed off on those who came from the outside is open to question. “I didn’t really get a lot of it,” confided one young non-Spanish-speaking activist on her way home to northern California to report back on the women’s gathering to her Zapatista solidarity group.

Be that as it may, the EZLN is going to need all the women – and men – it can muster in the months to come. 2008 looms as a difficult year for the rebels with the mal gobierno threatening to distribute lands the Zapatistas recovered in 1994 to rival Indian farmer organizations and paramilitary activity on the uptick.

As has always been the case since this unique rebellion germinated, the Zapatistas turn the corner into another year in struggle.

Careers & Ed: Get schooled

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With the holidays over, it’s back-to-school time — and not just for kids and college students. Adult education classes also are starting up after their winter hiatus, so take that money you’d promised to spend on a gym membership (like you’d use it anyway) and put it toward learning that skill you’ve always wished you had. Here’s a list of some of our favorite upcoming courses, all perfect for beginners.

DUCT TAPE DRESS FORMS


The idea of this course is to teach you to make customized dress forms so you can mend and create outfits that exactly fit your body. And even if you aren’t a budding designer … what room’s decor wouldn’t benefit from the addition of a duct tape mannequin?

Jan. 19, 11 a.m.–3:30 p.m. $75

Stitch Lounge, 182 Gough, SF. (415) 431-3739, www.stitchlounge.com

URBAN COMPOSTING


This hands-on workshop teaches the basic methods of both backyard and worm composting.

Jan. 19, 10 a.m.–noon. Free

Garden for the Environment, Seventh Ave., SF. (415) 731-5627, www.gardenfortheenvironment.org

YOGA 101


A good place to start for the would-be yogi who doesn’t want to jump in blind, this Sunday workshop explores basic postures, breathing, and meditation for the beginner.

Jan. 27, 1:30–3:30 p.m. $35 (includes one free week of yoga)

Yoga Tree, 519 Hayes, SF. (415) 626-9707, www.yogatreesf.com

CURIOUS SOUL: THE VISUAL JOURNAL


Instructor Suzanne Merritt helps you discover eight universal patterns of beauty and translate your experience into visual form. Includes collage, tearing, layering, image transfers, and mixed media.

Jan. 28–29, 10 a.m.–5 p.m. $190 plus $20 materials fee

San Francisco Center for the Book, 300 De Haro, SF. (415) 565-0545, sfcb.org

PAPER LANTERNS


Learn to construct a wooden reed skeleton frame before covering it with handmade paper — and leave with a finished paper lantern, complete with bulb and 12-foot wire with on-off switch.

Jan. 31, 6:30–9:30 p.m. $65 (includes $15 materials fee)

Craft Gym, 1452 Bush, SF. (415) 441-6223, www.craftgym.com

WOMEN’S BLACKSMITHING


A special workshop for women offered by women who teach the fundamental skills needed to forge steel, including tapering, upsetting, flattening, and twisting.

Feb. 2–3, 10 a.m.–6 p.m. $345

Crucible, 1260 Seventh St., Oakl. (510) 444-0919, www.thecrucible.org

MOROCCAN FLAVORS


A relaxed, comfortable cooking class that shows how to use seasonal, organic, unrefined, and local ingredients to make Moroccan delights beyond the standard couscous.

Feb. 4, 6:30–9:30 p.m. $60

Sage Table, Oakl. Call for address. (510) 914-1142, www.thesagetable.com

IMAGE AND THE BOOK


Explore contemporary art-making practices in this six-session series covering alternative approaches to painting, drawing, collage, sewing, image transfer, binding, narrative development, and subject investigation.

Feb. 13–March 13, Wednesdays, 7:15–10 p.m. $180 plus $10 materials fee

California College of the Arts, 5212 Broadway, Oakl. (510) 594-3771, www.cca.edu/academics/extended

2-DAY FILM SCHOOL


Why waste money on an expensive film school when you can learn all you need to know over one weekend? This crash course is taught by Dov S-S Simens of the Hollywood Film Institute.

March 15–16, 9 a.m.–6 p.m. $389

Call for location. (310) 659-5668, www.mediabistro.com

WINE TASTING: BASICS FOR BEGINNERS


Learn to taste the way the pros do, then apply your new knowledge to 20 wines in this continuing education class provided by City College of San Francisco.

April 26, 1–3 p.m. $50

Fort Mason, bldg. B, room 106, Marina at Laguna, SF. (415) 561-1860, www.ccsf.edu

Careers & Ed: The Roots of teaching

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› culture@sfbg.com

The last day of class before Christmas break presents a challenge for any educator, in any class, at any school. It’s usually considered completely devoid of teachable moments, a phenomenon that’s chalked up (pun intended) to prevacation excitement: PlayStation daydreams, visions of sugarplum romance, and the promise of two and a half weeks of sleeping in don’t exactly encourage industrious behavior.

So the popular course of action among teachers remains the party approach — some snacks, some games, a dose of holiday frivolity. Why swim against the prevailing yuletide, hopelessly and in vain, when you can just float home on a mess of soggy pizza boxes lashed to some two-liter pontoons?

When I visited Claire Keefer’s class Dec. 14, she seemed to be taking this approach. Sure enough, she’d brought a bag of her favorite Christmas candies, a little soda, and some healthier-looking crackers. And she informed her students they’d be playing a game for the better part of the period. But before giving in to the swell of a winter recess so near at hand, during the second-to-last period of the calendar year Kiefer gave her students an honest-to-goodness assignment. She asked them to pull out their journals and respond to a writing prompt she’d posted on the board. And they did, after a collective, semipolite grumble.

And before they knew it — before I knew it — Kiefer’s prompt became a complex sociopolitical discourse on the visual representation of traditional Christmas characters like your boys Jesus, Santa, those creepy little white-guy elves (hee-hee), et al.

Being the literate, postfeminist, righteously liberal San Franciscan that I am, it wasn’t difficult for me to see the purpose of Kiefer’s holiday exercise: to allow her students to problematize the whiteness that so often masquerades as normalcy by paying special attention to holiday symbols.

Looking back on my high school experience, I can say for certain that they, those nefarious they, never stretched my cultural IQ like that. Kiefer’s kids have access to these kinds of ideas. I listened as her students commented on race, power, religion, and misnormalized iconography with intelligence, all quite comfortable in the task. Dare I say, what an important challenge? (I’ll admit I didn’t know Jesus was brown skinned until well into my second year of college.) And what a show of teaching chops it was, to take the least teachable moment of the least teachable day of 2007 and pull some learning out of it.

Quite unlike the stereotype of the emergency-credentialed twentysomething pushover left to rattle all alone in an urban trial by fire, at 26, Kiefer cuts a most confident, no doubt pedagogic figure. Her intelligence, craft, and experience have made her transition from jail to prison to Balboa High School a seamless one.

Jail? Let me explain. Kiefer teaches Roots, a classroom-based initiative that serves children affected by incarceration, which falls under the umbrella of a California nonprofit called Community Works. To clarify: Kiefer works for Community Works at Balboa High School, where she teaches the Roots elective. At a glance, one might conjecture a circumstance of triangulated, bureaucratic-type tension, considering she basically has two bosses, Principal Patricia Gray at Balboa and Ruth Morgan of Community Works. Yet both not only hold Kiefer in the highest regard but also seem equally keen on giving her all the support she needs. And as to the question of distance between Kiefer and the rest of the faculty at Balboa, there is none, plain and simple. Everybody knows her, and everybody knows she puts her students first.

One of the great advantages of teaching Roots is that Kiefer gets to develop and implement the curriculum as she sees fit, in a manageable, supportive classroom environment. Small class size really helps, as does the freedom to design a program that encourages students to respond to their feelings by communicating creatively.

"We always go back to incarceration, sharing personal stories, learning empathy, meeting it head-on." Some of her kids have been incarcerated themselves; most attend her Roots class because their parents have recently been or are currently incarcerated. Control of her curriculum means Kiefer can account for the academic and emotional complexities of her classroom and adjust, midstream if necessary, to the needs of a group of 9th to 12th graders of varied ages, from diverse backgrounds, and with different personalities. Kiefer tailors her lessons to make room for all types of learners.

Curriculum design, creative writing, learning and teaching empathy — these happen to be Kiefer’s experiential strengths. "I’ve never not designed my own curriculum," she says. How many teachers, at 26, can claim such autonomy? How many teachers, at 26, have already worked for years inside correctional facilities? The public school system has placed Kiefer perfectly, in exactly the right circumstances, with kids who respond to her sense of responsibility, her gift of honesty, and her desire to challenge them.

In fact, there is something of a university feel to her classroom dynamic, and she is well aware that her MFA qualifies her to be a college-level instructor. However, neither tweedy aspirations nor hubris figure into Kiefer’s seeming raison d’être. Instead, it has everything to with finding those places where "the need is so transparent," she said. Kiefer’s life path seems so clearly marked as to appear predestined.

At the age of 20, during summer break from Tulane University and entirely of her own volition, Kiefer contacted the Cobb County Jail in Marietta, Ga., asking to be let inside to teach. When someone at the jail returned her call, offering her an administrative position at the facility, she politely insisted, "I already have a job. I just want to teach creative writing." She took the $8 per hour position then offered to her and started showing up about eight hours per week, as much as she could.

She spent her senior year of college editing the school’s literary magazine, the Tulane Review, while volunteering with adult literacy programs in New Orleans. She graduated with a double major in religious studies and English in 2003 and immediately afterward embarked on a yearlong Josephine Louise Newcomb Fellowship.

With the acceptance of her proposal, a plan involving a three-month stint teaching inside three institutions, Kiefer found herself first at San Quentin, then at Noriega, a federal institution in Miami, and finally at the Dale Women’s Facility in Vermont, implementing her curricula, sharing her love of the written word, and saddling her students with rigorously academic assignments. She always stresses the importance of word economy and limitation and is notorious for teaching entire sections around somewhat esoteric poetic forms — e.g., the villanelle and the sestina. "Society doesn’t expect much from [prisoners]. I sure as hell was going to," she said.

The same uncompromising, formal approach has helped Kiefer earn a reputation at Balboa for sticking to her guns, but her firmness comes with the deepest, most genuine regard for those around her. Thinking back on her first semester-long class at San Quentin, which she titled Art in Response to Gang Violence, Kiefer recalled, "A lot of these guys needed this creative outlet, or channel, and I needed to find a community."

Her attachment to the place was so profound that she returned to San Quentin in 2005, a year after her fellowship had ended, to teach one night per week while running down an MFA at San Francisco State University — all while holding a full-time position at Saint Vincent’s in Marin, where, she said, she learned how to handle emotional turbulence in young people after being threatened, groped, and cussed at, seeing desks and chairs fly, and watching a BBQ grill crash to the ground from a second-story window. Trying times at St. Vincent’s taught her how to be available at an authoritative distance.

Kiefer took the Roots job at Balboa High School just last year, the final one of her MFA program at SF State. Some attribute her teaching skill to her lifelong study of the written word, as students do make the best teachers. However, while acknowledging her diligence, she noted that fate, more than any other factor, has landed her right where she needs to be. Ask her if educating kids who’ve been affected by incarceration is something of a calling, and without hesitation she’ll tell you, "Totally."

"Prison education has been proven to prevent recidivism, and it injects humanity into the reality of being incarcerated…. Our society has it so wrong: we’re doing nothing to rehabilitate," Kiefer said with obvious sincerity. Her urgency is born of six years’ hands-on experience, and it still has her visiting prisoners and their families on her own time and acting as an advocate.

Notwithstanding her clarity of vision, though, she says she can be very wrong now and again. For example, I asked if she’d ever failed at anything. "I have a terrible sense of direction," she said. Well, Ms. Kiefer, I beg to differ. Your inner compass seems perfectly calibrated.

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