Lit

Higher ground

-
0

arts@sfbg.com

LIT What Susan Sontag wrote about illness in 1978’s Illness as Metaphor and 1989’s AIDS and Its Metaphors holds for disaster as well: all too often, widespread devastation is made to serve moralistic meanings. Perhaps the primary virtue of Rebecca Solnit’s clear-headed new book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (Viking, 353 pages, $27.95), is that it does not simply swap one interpretation of disaster — as anticonsumerist reckoning, for instance — for another, such as Jerry Falwell-style damnation. Solnit is interested in how people act in the aftermath, for better and for worse.

By tallying stories from a century’s worth of disasters, Solnit mounts a passionate argument that altruism and solidarity are the norm, no matter what the media or authorities might report. Early in A Paradise Built in Hell, she reflects on the unexpected joy found in the wake of the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989: "We don’t even have a language for this emotion in which the wonderful comes wrapped in the terrible, joy in sorrow, courage in fear. We cannot welcome disaster, but we can value the responses, both practical and psychological."

Solnit collects evidence of commonplace resilience from bottom-up accounts of earthquakes in San Francisco and Mexico City, the London Blitz, 9/11, Katrina, and the Halifax Explosion of 1917. She marshals these anecdotes against the Hobbesian view, often taken by those in power, that ordinary people will backslide into chaotic violence without strict social controls. A ruling class’s authority is disrupted in disaster, and this tends to put them in a preemptive, paranoid mood. The helpful term for this displacement is "elite panic." The predictability of warrantless crackdowns is depressing. In Solnit’s history, we see Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco ("These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so if necessary, and I expect they will") echoing the brutal edict issued by San Francisco’s mayor, Eugene Schmitz, in 1906 ("The Federal Troops, the members of the Regular Police Force, and all Special Police Officers have been authorized by me to KILL any and all persons engaged in looting"). People matter more than property, except when they don’t.

It’s to Solnit’s credit as a journalist that she departs from her script in New Orleans for a harrowing account (with an assist from former Guardian reporter A.C. Thompson) of the murder of several black men by heavily armed white vigilante groups. One wonders, however, if these ragtag brigades—which certainly cannot be called "elite" — aren’t filling a similar vacuum, in their way, as the informal groups that set to feeding the hungry. How does Solnit’s goodness match up with the mass-complicity required of genocide? It’s telling, after all, that Jan T. Gross’ 2001 book about a massacre of Jews in World War II was titled Neighbors.

A Paradise Built in Hell is a little didactic and a lot repetitious in the typical nonfiction style, and for someone obviously concerned with the impact of words, Solnit never really explains the Christian tuning of her title. But these are only chinks in the book’s broad spirit of inquiry. Solnit’s sources include Carnival, Russian anarchist thinker Peter Kropotkin, the reactionary politics of disaster movies like Dante’s Peak (1997), and William James, who was visiting Stanford during the ’06 quake. Her most intriguing proposition is that the civic temper — James’ phrase — loosed by disaster represents a kind of desire. We’re so used to thinking of desires, both as they’re expressed and repressed, as a private matter of sexuality and identity that it’s almost shocking to hear the word in this social context.

One can easily think of Solnit’s look at hope regained as a kind of parable of the Bush-Obama transition, but if A Paradise Built in Hell is a product of its time, it’s not because it channels our new president’s good tidings. Instead, Solnit’s work is best read as a sustained critique of the degraded view of ordinary citizens taken by the Bush administration: in its eyes we were craven, greedy, vindictive, and worse. Solnit says no, not when it counts. It takes real imagination to answer the intellectual crisis provoked by the reign of W with a study in altruism. What’s even more surprising, she succeeds.

Flourescence

-
0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS It looked like a good place to sit and so we sat there, basking in the relative fluorescentlessness. Compared to Joshua Tree National Park, there are a lot of restaurants to choose from on San Bruno Avenue in San Francisco. Dive after dive after dive, it’s a Cheap Eats mecca. Whereas Joshua Tree has lizards. Stones. A bee that won’t leave me alone.

My sweetie and me are under a rock, or rather, under a complex formation of rocks, sharing an apple and writing on our laptops. We are sitting side by side on a blanket, leaning against one wall of our cave. I just had me my favorite siesta ever. Hold on a second … Her too. You wouldn’t believe how in love I am. Hold on a second … Her too.

You wouldn’t believe how hot it is just a few feet away from us, and how pleasant the weather is in our cave. Tomorrow with the air conditioning on we will drive through Mojave to Death Valley Junction, home of the Amargosa Opera House.

A woman named Marta rented then bought it 40-some years ago, but no one would come, so she painted an audience on the walls of the place, and now she’s 90 and still performs there even though sometimes she has to sing sitting down.

Anyway, it seems like a monument to what I love about life: kooky people making limeade out of lemons. That’s one thing. So we’re going to go see it, maybe catch a show, if we’re lucky. If we’re really lucky, a standing-up one. And if not, we’ll drive on. There are hot springs that side of the mountains.

I haven’t camped in Joshua Tree for a few years. Ever since I first moved to my witchy shack in the woods, I have not felt the need to camp, go figure. But the desert is something else. And this one is my favorite place on the planet. The surreal rock formations, the moony landscape, the irrepressible joy of headlight-lit ocotillos, and the cartoonishly contortionistic joshua trees reaching every which way at once.

What we don’t have here is beef with tender greens, or pork and preserved cabbage noodle soup, or chicken with bitter melon. In fact, there are many ways in which Joshua Tree National Park is not a Chinese restaurant.

It’s so quiet you can hear the air, sometimes.

At night there are a lot of airplanes. Blinking beelines to Palm Springs, or Los Angeles, or back, their silent exclamations are almost welcome in a sky dotted with periods and comets.

I don’t think I ever brought a laptop before to Joshua Tree. But I’m with a writer now, and she’s got a reading tour on the East Coast next month, a slow-going story to finish, and a new one to start. Whereas I have a restaurant to tell you about.

It’s a little less fluorescent than most San Bruno Avenue joints, yes, but it’s still cheap. San Bruno Café. Or 2546 Café. Or 2546 San Bruno Café. They have $5.25 rice plates from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., even on weekends. Gotta like that.

What you don’t gotta like (and won’t) is that every meal starts — no matter what you order — with a bowl of bean water soup. That was our name for it. I mean, you can’t argue with free, but … come on! A bowl of murky brown water with nothing in it? Maybe a half of a bean, or two, lurking somewhere beneath the cloudy, greaseless surface.

If you look around the restaurant, you’ll notice that people are leaving unfinished bowls of bean water all over — on ledges, on chairs, on other people’s dirty tables, on clean ones … Eventually the management will notice too.

Bean water aside (very very literally), nothing else was especially great either. Although: everything was good and cheap. You’d be hard-pressed to find any 10s on San Bruno’s menu. There are even some things under five, like instant noodles and porridges.

But it’s so weird to be writing about Chinese food in Joshua Tree. I’m going to stop doing so, abruptly, kiss my hard-working sweetie, and walk until I find an Internet café.

2546 SAN BRUNO CAFE

Daily: 7:30 a.m.–9 p.m.

2546 San Bruno, SF

(415) 468-8008

No alcohol

MC/V

L.E. Leone’s new book is Big Bend (Sparkle Street Books), a collection of short fiction.

Take warning

-
0

a&eletters@sfbg.com

The forests are in flames, the desert is advancing, the glaciers have vanished, and in a solar-powered facility towering above the ice-free waters of the Arctic, some 800 miles north of Norway, a solitary older man (Pete Postlethwaite) roams the hallways of the Global Archive, a warehouse sheltering banks of data-storage servers, a civilization’s worth of art and invention, and a Noah’s ark of extinguished species. From this lonely outpost, he gravely explores a stomach-churning inquiry: "We could have saved ourselves. But we didn’t. It’s amazing. What state of mind were we in to face extinction and simply shrug it off?"

Good question, and one that Franny Armstrong’s The Age of Stupid, a hybrid merging documentary material and a fictional frame tale, forcefully suggests we start addressing like we mean it — immediately. That is to say, before runaway climate change makes its debut and some or all of its widely forecasted ecological consequences begin to manifest, along with resource shortages, food and water riots, and massive societal collapse.

Delineating the complex global network of climate-change causes and effects, The Age of Stupid interweaves real-life documentary footage from the lives of six present-day subjects in New Orleans, the French Alps, Jordan, southwest England, a small Nigerian fishing village, and Mumbai, India. Interspersed is real and faux (future) archival footage depicting and predicting the environmental consequences of humanity’s bad habits. And all of it is presented as the digital artifacts of a dying-off civilization, preserved for uncertain posterity in the Global Archive. While covering similar terrain to that of An Inconvenient Truth (2006), the film serves as a kind of "No, but really, folks …" in the face of frighteningly incremental gestures toward sustainability — and continued shortsighted resistance — at the levels of national, state, and local government as well as citizenry.

The film’s opening sequence begins with the big bang and hurtles via countdown clock through billions of years, flying past the earliest stages of evolution, past dinosaurs, past the industrial revolution, and past the present day, the titular Age of Stupid, so fast that we barely have time to notice ourselves on the screen before it’s 2055, the Age of Too Late. The message: in the grand scheme of things, we have about a nanosecond left to kid ourselves as we refill our metal water bottle and press the start button on our Energy Star-qualified washer-dryer or Prius — or to find a way, at the level of populace, not green-minded individual, to radically swerve from our current path. According to Armstrong and her cohorts in the Not Stupid Campaign, the film’s companion activist effort, our fate will pretty much be decided by December’s climate talks in Copenhagen. (The film, which premiered in the U.K. in March, has its 50-country "global premiere" Sept. 21-22.)

So then, do the canvas bags, travel mugs, energy-saving appliances, clotheslines, CSA memberships, cycling, recycling, composting, and other ecologically minded efforts of a smattering of well-intentioned individuals matter at all? Or matter enough — in the face of factories, factory farming, methane-emitting landfills, canyons of office towers lit up 24/7, a continent-sized constellation of plastic detritus in the Pacific, and millions of trips cross-country at an average elevation of 30,000 feet?

Colin Beavan, the subject of Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein’s No Impact Man, is banking on yes, being of the "be the change you wish to see in the world" school of thought (admittedly in good company, with Mahatma Gandhi). Taking its name from Beavan’s book project and blog, No Impact Man shadows the NYC-based writer; his wife, Michelle Conlin, a senior writer at BusinessWeek admitting to "an intense relationship with retail" and a high-fructose corn syrup addiction; and their toddler daughter, Isabella, during a year in which they try to achieve a net-neutral environmental impact.

This entails giving up, in successive stages, with varying degrees of exactitude, packaged food (hard on a family whose caloric mainstay is take-out), nonlocal food (hard on a woman who drinks multiple quadruple-shot espressos a day; impossible, as it turns out), paper products (magazine subscriptions, TP), fossil-fuel-dependent transit (airplanes, elevators, and even the subway), electricity (i.e., the refrigerator), and, to a large extent, trash. The idea is to learn empirically — and demonstrate — which behaviors might be permanently ditched and which are virtually hardwired.

There are, predictably, certain criticisms –- from irritated environmentalists, from semianonymous blog commenters, from the New York Times Home and Garden section. There is the matter of giving up public transportation rather than championing it, and the issue (raised by a community gardener who takes Beavan under his wing) of Conlin’s laboring for a high-circulation publication that trumpets capitalist virtues antithetical to the project of tapering off consumption and waste. And Beavan sometimes comes across, particularly in the book, as well-meaning but stubbornly myopic in his focus on self-improvement.

Then again, the guy and his family gave up toilet paper, electric light, motor vehicles, spontaneous slices of pizza, and many deeply ingrained habits of wastefulness for a year while most of the rest of the country got up each morning and brushed their teeth with the water running. What impact the No Impact project might have on, for instance, the mounds of trash-filled Heftys that line Manhattan’s sidewalks each week remains to be seen. But as the Age of Stupid winds down, it’s probably a waste of time to fault anyone’s attempts to forestall the Age of Too Late.

NO IMPACT MAN opens Fri/18 in Bay Area theaters.

THE AGE OF STUPID plays Mon/21, 8 p.m., SF Center. Visit www.ageofstupid.net for additional Bay Area screenings.

Fall fairs and festivals

-
0

AUG 28-30

Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival Golden Gate Park, SF; www.sfoutsidelands.com. 12-10pm, $89.50-$225.50. SF’s best alternative to That Thing in the Desert is back for its second year, with headliners Pearl Jam, Dave Matthews Band, and Tenacious D playing for you and two thousand of your closest friends.

BAY AREA

Eat Real Festival Jack London Square, Oakl; eatrealfest.com. Fri, 4-9pm; Sat, 10am-9pm; Sun, 10am-5pm. Free. Buy from your favorite street food vendors, sample microbrews at the Beer Shed, or shop in the market for local produce at this sister event to La Cocina’s Street Food Festival.

AUG 29-SEPT 20

SF Shakespeare Festival Presidio’s Main Post Parade Ground Lawn, between Graham and Keyes; www.sfshakes.org. Sat, 7:30pm; Sun, 2:30pm, free. The genius of Shakespeare in SF’s most relaxed setting.

SEPT 1-30

Architecture and the City Times, locations, and prices vary. www.aiasf.org/archandcity. The American Institute of Architects San Francisco chapter and the Center for Architecture + Design host the sixth annual fest, featuring home tours, films, exhibitions, dining by design, and more.


SEPT 5-6

BAY AREA

Millbrae Art and Wine Festival Broadway Avenue between Victoria and Meadow Glen, Millbrae; (650) 697-7324, www.antiquesbythebay.net. 10am-5pm, free. The Big Easy comes to Millbrae for this huge Labor Day weekend event.

SEPT 6

BAY AREA

Antiques and Collectibles Faire Alameda Point, Alameda; www.antiquesbythebay.net. 9am-3pm, $5. California’s biggest and best antiques and collectibles extravaganza is back with 800 outdoor booths, with something for everyone.

SEPT 9-20

Fringe Festival Exit Theatre, 156 Eddy; 931-1094, www.sffringe.org. Times and prices vary. An ever-changing collection of unusual and lively experimental theater pieces will be showcased over the course of 18 days.

SEPT 12-13

Chocolate Festival Ghirardelli Square; www.ghirardellisq.com. 1pm, free. Indulge in chocolate delicacies, sip wine, and enjoy chocolate-inspired family activities at this annual event benefiting Project Open Hand.

Power to the Peaceful Festival Speedway Meadow, Golden Gate Park; www.powertothepeaceful.org. 9am, prices vary. Michael Franti and Guerrilla Management present the 11th annual festival dedicated to music, arts, action, and yoga. With Alanis Morrisette, Sly & Robbie, a special after party at the Fillmore, and workshops all day Sunday.

BAY AREA

Mountain View Art and Wine Festival Castro Street between El Camino Real and Evelyn Ave, Mountain View; (650) 968-8378, www.miramarevents.com. 10am-6pm, free. More than 200,000 art lovers will gather for the 38th installment of one of America’s top art festivals, featuring crafts, live music, food, and drink.


SEPT 13

Brews on the Bay Jeremiah O’Brien at Pier 45; 929-8374. Times, locations, and prices vary. www.aiasf.org/archandcity. The American Institute of Architects San Francisco chapter and the Center for Architecture + Design host the sixth annual fest, featuring home tours, films, exhibitions, dining by design, and more.


SEPT 17-21

BAY AREA

Symbiosis Gathering Camp Mather, Yosemite; www.symbiosisgathering.com. $180, includes camping. This synesthesia of art, music, transformational learning, and sustainable learning is quickly becoming one of NorCal’s favorite fall festivals. This year’s headliners include Les Claypool, Yard Dogs Road Show, Bassnectar, and the Glitch Mob.


SEPT 19-20

Autumn Moon Festival 667 Grant; 982-6306, www.moonfestival.org. 11am-6pm, free. Chinatown’s annual street fair features continuous Asian entertainment, lion dances, costumed artisans, cultural demonstrations, arts and crafts, and food vendors.


SEPT 27

Folsom Street Fair Folsom Street between Seventh and 12 St; www.folsomstreetfair.org. 11am-6pm, free. The world’s largest leather event covers 13 city blocks with entertainment, vendors, and plenty of spectacle.


OCT 2-5

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Speedway Meadow, Golden Gate Park; www.strictlybluegrass.com. Check website for times. Free. Natalie MacMaster, Emmylou Harris, Aimee Mann, Neko Case, and many more perform for free in Golden Gate Park.

OCT 3

LovEvolution Civic Center Plaza; www.sflovevolution.org. 12pm, free. The event formerly known as Love Parade may have a new name, but the music, color, and fun remains.

OCT 3-4

World Veg Festival San Francisco County Fair Bldg, Lincoln and Ninth Ave; 273-5481, www.sfvs.org/wvd. 10am-6pm, $6. The San Francisco Vegetarian Society and In Defense of Animals present the 10th annual award-winning festival featuring lectures, cooking demos, vegan merchandise, and entertainment.

OCT 4

Castro Street Fair Castro at Market; www.castrostreetfair.org. 11am-6pm, free. The festival founded by Harvey Milk returns with the theme "Come Get Hitched in the Center of the Gay Universe," in an effort to keep the embers burning in the fight for equal rights.

OCT 9-17

Litquake Locations vary; Times vary, most events free. To commemorate its 10-year anniversary, the storytelling festival kicks off with the "Black, White, and Read" ball and continues with nine days of lit-themed programming.

OCT 11

San Francisco Decompression Indiana Street; www.burningman.com. Break our your still-dusty Burning Man costumes and welcome hard-working BMORG staff back to "Real Life" with this BRC-themed street fair and festival.

OCT 15

West Fest Speedway Meadows, Golden Gate Park; www.2b1records.com. 9am-6pm, free. 2b1 Multimedia Inc., the Council of Light, and the original producer of Woodstock 1969 team up to celebrate Woodstock’s 40th anniversary with a free show featuring Country Joe, Denny Laine, Alameda All Stars, Michael McClure, and tons more.

OCT 16

WhiskyFest San Francisco Marriott, 55 Fourth St; 896-1600, www.maltadvocate.com. 6:30-9:30pm, $95. America’s largest whisky celebration returns to SF for the third year with more than 200 of the world’s rarest and most expensive whiskies.


OCT 17

Potrero Hill Festival Potrero Hill Neighborhood House, 953 De Haro. 9am-5pm. This benefit for the Potrero Hill Neighborhood House features a jazz brunch catered by students of The California Culinary Academy and continues with a street fair along 20th Street between Missouri and Arkansas.


OCT 17-18

Treasure Island Music Festival Treasure Island; www.treasureislandfestival.com. Fri-Sat, 11am. $65-$249. The Bay Area’s answer to Coachella (minus the camping, heat, and Orange County douchebags) is back, this year featuring The Flaming Lips, The Decemberists, Yo La Tengo, The Streets, and about 100 other indie favorites and up-and-comers.

BAY AREA

Half Moon Bay Art and Pumpkin Festival Main Street at Highways 1 and 92, Half Moon Bay. 9am-5pm, free. Jim Stevens and Friends will return to the world famous festival featuring music, crafts, parade, and children’s events.

OCT 23-24
Exotic Erotic Expo Cow Palace, 2600 Geneva; www.exoticeroticball.com. Fri, 2-10pm; Sat, 12-6pm; $20. Part Mardi Gras, part burlesque, and part rock concert, this two-day fest is a celebration of human sexuality and freedom of expression, with its crowning event the Exotic Erotic Ball on Saturday night.
NOV 2
Day of the Dead Starts at 24th and Bryant, ends at Garfield Park; www.dayofthedeadsf.org. 7pm, free. Celebrate this traditional Latin holiday – and SF institution — with a procession and Festival of Altars.
NOV 13-15
SF Green Festival San Francisco Concourse Exhibition Center, 635 Eighth St; www.greenfestivals.org Fri, 12-7pm; Sat, 10am-7pm; Sun, 11am-6pm. $15-$25. A joint project of Global Exchange and Green America, this three-day event features the best in green speakers and special events.
NOV 27-DEC 20
Great Dickens Christmas Fair Cow Palace Exhibition Halls, 2600 Geneva; www.dickensfair.com. Fri-Sun, 11am-7pm. Check website for ticket prices. Channel Charles Dickens’ Victorian London with this 90,000 square-foot theatrical extravaganza.

The Guardian Drug Issue: a baggie full of links

-
0

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

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

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

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

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

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

479-chronic.long.jpg

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

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

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

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

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

479-bo.long.jpg

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

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

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

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

479-burner.long.jpg

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

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

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

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

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

479-film.long.jpg

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

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

>> Intoxicated rhythms: Recordings by musicians under the influence

Made in USA

-
0

a&eletters@sfbg.com

DRUG LIT You can go to these places. Reading Righteous Dopefiend (University of California, 392 pages, $24.95), I kept trying to pinpoint, via clues in the text, where on "Edgewater Blvd." — Bayshore — the homeless heroin addicts whose lives the book chronicles were encamped. You want to know if you’ve walked by them. Because what pulls you through this often dense ethnography are finely drawn portraits of the brutal lives of individuals.

Philippe Bourgois, a professor of anthropology and medicine who taught for a while at UCSF (he’s now at the University of Pennsylvania) and Jeff Schonberg, a photographer, spent nearly 12 years with a core group of 10 homeless drug addicts in and around the Bayshore area. In Righteous Dopefiend they’ve created a devastating, blow-by-blow indictment of the countervailing forces that conspire to keep these people — Hank, Petey, Tina, Carter, Felix — on the margins.

Of course, the authors recognize that the members of the group they’re following bear some responsibility for the day-to-day atrocity their lives have become. But they track these lines back carefully, conducting extensive interviews with family members, former employers, and ex-spouses who live more (or at least much less precariously) in the "mainstream." Part of what’s revealed in these back stories reminded me of William T. Vollmann’s argument, in his book Poor People (Ecco, 2007), about "accident prone-ness": that the cultures of poverty, addiction and marginalization have a snowball effect within individual lives. Meeting medical — or court — appointments becomes impossible without transportation; sores and open-container tickets turn into abscesses and bench warrants.

The book is divided into nine parts, each detailing an aspect of the everyday lives of the homeless addicts. In "Falling in Love," over the course of interviews, monologues, and Schonberg’s overwhelming black and white photographs, we watch the trajectory of Tina and Carter’s on-again, off-again romance. The chapter is bracketed by "Intimate Apartheid" and "A Community of Addicted Bodies," which illustrate the particulars of the group’s estrangements (from within and without) and its focal, primary romance — with heroin, crack, and alcohol.

In "Making Money," the few legal, and many more illegal, means of getting enough cash to fix are catalogued and considered. Bourgois considers the obsolescence of blue-collar manufacturing jobs, nationally and particularly in rapidly gentrifying cities like San Francisco. What interests the authors here, as elsewhere, are the ambiguously symbiotic, even parasitic relationships employers have with the homeless. One boss who relies on a member of the group pays him exactly enough for a bag of heroin, ensuring that he’ll be at work again first thing the next day.

Throughout the first-person narratives, Bourgois threads his argument: that the institutions, ostensibly set up to serve this body of addicts (from the police-state to community clinics) are, like the employers, both dependent on them (for government funding, menial labor, etc.) and ultimately at cross-purposes with them. The services senselessly undercut one another, forming a no-place for the homeless to barely survive in, characterized by the either/or of living purely by chance, in extreme squalor, or in a permanent maze of bureaucracy. So the Edgewater homeless carve out a life in between, under the freeways but with methadone treatment or an SRO perpetually on the horizon. It’s a shell game where the addict always loses.

There are plenty of good reasons to get this book and read it. If you’re interested in homelessness, addiction, or in the public health issues surrounding IV drug use, this is an excellent source of information. The authors treat their subject brilliantly and with great compassion. It is also a hell of a story, and it’s local. These people walk by you every day and should not remain invisible.

This land is ‘Methland’

-
0

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The elephant in the shroom

-
0

a&eletters@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drunk on words

-
0

12 HALLUCINOGENIC NOVELS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EIGHT GREAT INEBRIATED MEMORY PIECES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Editor’s Notes

-
0

steve@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

Are you ready to fly?

-
1

By D. Scot Miller

milehigh0709.jpg

Unless Greyhound grows wings, I’ll never be a member of the mile-high club. For those that don’t know, the mile-high club sports members who have gotten a little somethin’-somethin’ 30,000 feet in air. Membership is just one trip to that chemical-smelling cubicle that most airlines call bathrooms. Cleis Press editor Rachel Kramer Bussel puts a much better spin on the prospect in her anthology The Mile High Club: Plane Sex Stories. One-flight stands, kinky passengers, fantasy stewards, and cozy couples commingle when free to move about the cabin.

The standout piece for me is Thomas S. Roche’s, “When Your Girlfriend Wears A Very Short Skirt.” I’ve been seeing Roche’s name in anthologies for years and often found his work not daring enough for my taste. Imagine my surprise when the word “cunt” was just sitting there! I never use that word. Not much of a fan of it either – I prefer pussy – but Roche dropping it in the middle of his piece was like a wolf showing off his teeth for the first time. Maybe he’d used it before, but this time I was shocked, appalled, and impressed.

Alison Tyler flexes her prodigious erotic muscle in “Planes, Trains, and Banana Seat Bicycles.” “I could tell he was groaning, but I couldn’t hear a sound besides the roar of the plane” Her title character says, “And I realized I don’t ever want total quiet. I don’t need darkness. Lights at the end of the runway are among my favorite sights.” Talk about jazzy analogies! I can dig it.

Now for the bumpy landing: Erotic writing, second only to sports writing, can easily turn into a cliche-ridden morass. “His manly arms,” “her dripping pussy” — in many ways erotic lit hasn’t made it past Victorian tumescence and tribadism. This is not to say that many of the passages in this fun book avoid this hazard, just that the ones that don’t fizzle the sizzle for shizzle. Mix it up more next time.

Appetite: Drink on the cheap…with class

-
0

Every week, Virginia Miller of personalized itinerary service and monthly food, drink, and travel newsletter, www.theperfectspotsf.com, shares foodie news, events, and deals. View the last installment here.

redwoodroom_0709.jpg
Redwood Room.

EVENTS

RN74’s $1-3 offerings
Didn’t think it was possible? Michael Mina’s newest wine bar/restaurant mecca offers a real deal. Every day after 10 pm, late-nighters are rewarded with $1 shots of Fernet and $3 Kronenbourgs. No, it’s not fabulous wines from the 3000+ list, though you can still order any of those. But Burgundy can wait when Fernet and Kronenbourgs are this cheap.
Daily, 10 pm-close
301 Mission, SF
415-543-7474
www.michaelmina.net/rn74/

5A5’s Steak Lounge happy hour… and once a week $1 champagnes
5A5, downtown’s chic/hip steak lounge, has a 5 at 5 deal going six days a week. Enter the dimly lit bar area, gaze at the striking dome, and fill up on a $2 daily-changing bar bite and $5 appetizers, like truffle fries, beef carpaccio (this is a steak lounge, after all), or 2 for $5 popular hamachi, poke, or oyster shooters. Wash it all down with $5 wines, beers, and cocktails. Bonus "secret": hit 5A5 on Thursday nights between 9-10pm and you can sip as many $1 glasses of champagne as you like.
Monday-Saturday, 5-7:30 pm
244 Jackson, SF
5a5stk.com/promotions.php

Redwood Room’s weekly $8 cocktail
Duck into the Clift Hotel, housing the historic Redwood Room. Though we love those redwood walls and retro-meets-modern ambiance, I know the bar can get touristy — even snooty. That’s why I prefer it on a weeknight for a chance to soak up the gorgeous surroundings while those creepy-cool "live portraits" follow me with their eyes. Redwood is now introducing a different specialty cocktail each week for $8 (their drinks are usually $12 or more). Recent creations include a Clementine Blossom, made with St. Germain and prosecco, or a Blackberry Margarita with Tres Generaciones Plata Tequila, fresh blackberries and lime juice and simple syrup.
Sunday-Thursday, 5pm-2am
Friday-Saturday, 4pm-2am
495 Geary Street
www.clifthotel.com

Appetite: Drink on the cheap…with class

-
0

Every week, Virginia Miller of personalized itinerary service and monthly food, drink, and travel newsletter, www.theperfectspotsf.com, shares foodie news, events, and deals. View the last installment here.

redwoodroom_0709.jpg
Redwood Room.

EVENTS

RN74’s $1-3 offerings
Didn’t think it was possible? Michael Mina’s newest wine bar/restaurant mecca offers a real deal. Every day after 10 pm, late-nighters are rewarded with $1 shots of Fernet and $3 Kronenbourgs. No, it’s not fabulous wines from the 3000+ list, though you can still order any of those. But Burgundy can wait when Fernet and Kronenbourgs are this cheap.
Daily, 10 pm-close
301 Mission, SF
415-543-7474
www.michaelmina.net/rn74/

5A5’s Steak Lounge happy hour… and once a week $1 champagnes
5A5, downtown’s chic/hip steak lounge, has a 5 at 5 deal going six days a week. Enter the dimly lit bar area, gaze at the striking dome, and fill up on a $2 daily-changing bar bite and $5 appetizers, like truffle fries, beef carpaccio (this is a steak lounge, after all), or 2 for $5 popular hamachi, poke, or oyster shooters. Wash it all down with $5 wines, beers, and cocktails. Bonus "secret": hit 5A5 on Thursday nights between 9-10pm and you can sip as many $1 glasses of champagne as you like.
Monday-Saturday, 5-7:30 pm
244 Jackson, SF
5a5stk.com/promotions.php

Redwood Room’s weekly $8 cocktail
Duck into the Clift Hotel, housing the historic Redwood Room. Though we love those redwood walls and retro-meets-modern ambiance, I know the bar can get touristy — even snooty. That’s why I prefer it on a weeknight for a chance to soak up the gorgeous surroundings while those creepy-cool "live portraits" follow me with their eyes. Redwood is now introducing a different specialty cocktail each week for $8 (their drinks are usually $12 or more). Recent creations include a Clementine Blossom, made with St. Germain and prosecco, or a Blackberry Margarita with Tres Generaciones Plata Tequila, fresh blackberries and lime juice and simple syrup.
Sunday-Thursday, 5pm-2am
Friday-Saturday, 4pm-2am
495 Geary Street
www.clifthotel.com

The Bush era

-
0

a&eletters@sfbg.com

SAT IN YOUR LAP: THE LATEST DAUGHTERS OF KATE BUSH FLESH OUT THIS WOMAN’S WORK

By Marke B.

Kate Bush was gifted with a fierce female originality at a time when the rock world was starved of it: her golden run of eccentric achievement in the late 1970s and early 1980s placed her next to Joni Mitchell in terms of adventurous — if not always intellectual — influence in the minds of aspiring young women singer-songwriters. (And there’s some extremely perverse pleasure to be taken in the little factoid that her stunning 1985 EMI comeback album Hounds of Love snatched the top U.K. album slot from Madonna’s Like A Virgin.)

But that gift was also a curse: Bush was so original in so many ways that it’s easy to forget the myriad musical pathways she forged. This “artist in a female body” — as she famously protested when her panicked record company started pimping her rack on sleeves to shift units — has mostly been boiled down to spiritual oracle, swooping-voiced Sybil, and, ever since concept albums by women were banished to exile in Guyville, keeper of the idiosyncratic prog-rock flame. In other words, Stevie Nicks with a Fairlight synthesizer and a degree in Celtic mythology. Or else just plain weird.

Fortunately, musical weirdness is so much with us today that other Bush qualities are starting to be glimpsed through the babushka, including her production abilities, precocity, sincerity, humor, and unabashed gender-fucking. For the past three decades, it’s never been rare for artists to be compared to Bush — mostly for childlike vocalizations or way with a silver space suit and Circe metaphor. But in our post-neo-neo-soul moment (sorry Wino), a new crop of female British singers has arisen that takes its cues, mostly acknowledged, from Bush’s kaleidoscopic talent.

FLORENCE AND THE MACHINE

Without Kate Bush, flouncy freak-folker Florence Welch and her ever-changing backup band could be heard as a product of the unholy union of Devendra Banhart and Tori Amos — except those two probably wouldn’t exist without Bush either. Florence grounds her lyrics in the sexually frantic Bush. “I must be the lion-hearted girl,” she sings in the vid for “Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up)” just before her wedding banquet table folds up into her coffin.

www.myspace.com/florenceandthemachinemusic

MARINA AND THE DIAMONDS

Marina and the Diamonds, a.k.a. the singular singer Marina Diamandis has been gaining huge traction with her excellent “I Am Not A Robot” track, calling up the more vulnerably affirmative, “Don’t Give Up” Bush. But it’s her screwy, cuckooing “Mowgli’s Road” that effectively conjures up woozy Kate at a post-rave bonfire.

www.myspace.com/marinaandthediamonds

BAT FOR LASHES

Half-Pakistani lovely Natasha Khan works the gleaming edge of Bush’s dark underworld glamour, and grounds her post-goth balladry and soft electro sparks in the sensual world. Her single “Daniel” de-Eltons the title character and places him among Bush’s slightly menacing, jig-footed cosmic effigies.

www.myspace.com/batforlashes

MICACHU AND THE SHAPES

Mika Levi calls herself Micachu and spits out shiv-sharp blasts of dissonant micro-punk — seemingly the opposite of Bush’s epic dramas. But Levi echoes Bush both in the sheer Englishness of her lyrics, the knockout oddity of her instrumentation and starry-eyed gender-bending. Micachu’s rambunctious, exhilarating new album Jewelry (Rough Trade) could easily have been shaken out of Bush’s backing track outtake archives.

www.myspace.com/micayomusic

MICACHU AND THE SHAPES

With tune-yards, Tempo No Tempo

July 22, 8 pm., $10

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com ————

MOTHER STANDS FOR COMFORT: KATE BUSH IN THE SOUNDS OF NOW

By Irwin Swirnoff

It’s always exciting when you sense universal consciousness in motion. Like so many around me lately, I can’t stop listening to Kate Bush. I play Hounds Of Love (EMI, 1985) from start to finish again and again, allowing a different song from the album to become my theme or guiding light for weeks at a time. I play The Dreaming (EMI, 1982) and let it spin in and out of my head. These songs are as dramatic as they are sincere. They conjure magic while maintaining an emotional core. Bush’s undeniable integrity travels through her songs like a force of nature, from soft-lit soap opera to primal realms.

Many great records by other artists in the last few years have been stamped with undeniable Kate Bush moments. A new generation of musicians is learning that avant and pop sensibilities can coexist in exciting ways and that it is possible to blend the organic and the mechanical to create songs that soar with a mission. Here are some of today’s cloudbusters.

GANG GANG DANCE

“House Jams” (from Saint Dymphna)

(from Saint Dymphna, Social Registry, 2008)

On its latest album, Gang Gang Dance not only embraces its love of the dance floor — it invites the spirit of Kate Bush to a psychedelic midnight rave.

M83

“Skin Of The Night”

(from Saturdays =Youth, Mute, 2008)

No strangers to teenage mellow drama and melodrama, M83 makes music with a cinematic quality, much in the same way that Kate Bush’s records sound like movies unto themselves.

PAAVOHARJU

“Kevatrumpu”

(from Laulu Laakson Kukista, Fonal, 2008)

This Finnish group roams through a landscape that varies from dusty fairytale to psychedelic future. This track is by far the most dancepop — and Bush-like — moment on a record that also channels Kurt Weill, Edith Piaf, and Robert Wyatt.

JOANNA NEWSOM

Ys

(Drag City, 2006)

Many eccentric female artists are compared to either Kate Bush or Björk by lazy critics, but few actually reach that kind of ecstatic individuality. Joanna Newsom is one. Her complete belief in her vision is apparent in these commanding, flawlessly executed songs.

TELEPATHE

“Drugged”

(from Dance Mother, IAMSOUND)

Much like their New York City neighbors Gang Gang Dance, Telepathe calls Bush to mind when it branches out from its experimental roots into a slow burning state that’s ready for the dancefloor.

CHROMATICS

“Running Up That Hill”

(from Night Drive, Italians Do it Better, 2007))

It takes major guts to cover this Bush composition, a contender for one of the most poignant songs of the last quarter century. The air of magic and mystery here is very Kate.

FEVER RAY

Fever Ray

(Mute)

The debut solo record from Karin Dreijer Andersson of the Knife is more internal and intense than the dance floor stylings of her well-known group. Andersson plays with different voices and personas while creating sounds that are creepy and comforting. The result feels like a perfect contemporary response to Bush’s explorations of 20 years ago.

Bare life

-
0

a&eletters@sfbg.com

In one of the many oblique exchanges between potential suicide Nancy Stockwell (Maria Bello) and her killer-cum-suitor Louis Farley (Jason Patric), the sadist asks his victim how she imagines death. Staring at a nearby aquarium teeming with wandering fish, Stockwell gleefully responds that death is a release — like one of them, you can breathe underwater. Swedish music video director Johan Renck’s first feature, Downloading Nancy is largely a meditation on such metaphysical atmospheres — the suffocating air of tract homes, the cold showers of sexual dysfunction, the liquid plasma of the sickly blue computer screen — and one woman’s compulsion for escape.

After a childhood of cruel sexual abuse and 15 years of pitiless marriage to game developer Albert (Rufus Sewell), Nancy retreats from her life of desperation and sets upon a pernicious odyssey. Determined to slough off her physical body and all of its mundane accoutrements, she enlists Internet pal Louis, an S&M fetishist and videographer, to pleasure and then kill her in a cyber-sacrifice. As the unnerving danse macabre gets underway, Nancy and Louis tease death with self-mutilation and torture, using razor blades, mousetraps, and lit cigarettes to chilling, depraved effect. Nancy’s bare arms and legs contain an archive of scars and burn marks, as do other hidden cavities she will puncture before reaching orgasm. Louis, stoic and increasingly conflicted about their atrocious pact, often trades away the pleasure of his own sexual fantasy in order to question Nancy’s real motivations or persuade her back toward life. Trading roles of executioner and executed, these lost souls teeter on a threshold where the sovereignty of sacrifice fades imperceptibly into the debasement of living death. Does Nancy’s ultimatum to her new beau constitute the ultimate instance of a woman’s seduction — or the complete penetration of the digital world into a simulacrum of unsacrificable flesh?

Equally as unnerving are the scenes of Nancy’s former life with Albert, a vampirous clone of the business world. When Nancy vanishes — her depraved goal unbeknownst to Albert — he wanders through the sickly mauve interior of the house, putter in hand, desperately trying to understand where their life went astray, all the while sneaking glances at the computer that had consumed Nancy’s life.

Despite some scenes of lugubrious pretension (particularly the "therapy" sessions between Bello and Amy Brenneman as her savior-psychologist), Downloading Nancy achieves a dubious distinction: it presents a model of posthuman mortality that oscillates between the bare life of the mutilated body and the de-corporeal skin of the digital screen. Renck employed cinematographer extraordinaire Christopher Doyle to enhance the feeling of mise en abyme by coloring everything in etiolated blues and grays. The result is a dystopic recreation of the present (here there are obvious comparisons to Cronenberg’s 1996 Crash) where boredom has supplanted the titillation of apocalypse. When Louis finally agrees to participate in the penultimate encounter, what ensues is a numbing anticlimax beyond (or beneath) the meaningfulness of sacrifice.

DOWNLOADING NANCY opens July 10 in Bay Area theaters.

Daydream city

-
0

a&eletters@sfbg.com

In the Bay Area’s labyrinth of low-lit warehouses, cramped house parties, and grimed-out dive bars, it’s a cacophonous tug-of-war for the three-chord crown.

This latter-day resurrection of traits from the late 1960s — the Sears Roebuck guitars; the off-key, offbeat attack; the onstage fearlessness — has brought many unpretentious all-for-one-and-one-for-all shows to the scene. Poised to snag a bit of the shiny rock ‘n’ roll royal headdress is Oakland’s Snakeflower 2, a trio whose blistering, bare-bones repertoire seems to spring newly alive from a dusty, attic-dwelling bin of decades-old abandoned vinyl.

Vocalist and bassist Matthew Melton’s lo-fi roots stretch — like the world’s longest amp cord — all the way back to his hometown in Memphis. There, he grew up playing in garage bands and jamming with prolific punk hero Jay Reatard.

Discontented with the Memphis scene’s lack of fire, Melton eventually put together a ramshackle, road-ready outfit that became Snakeflower’s first incarnation. The group played what Melton, a lover of subgenres, describes as "art punk non-songs." Moving his musical dreams and new band to California instigated a gift-and-curse scenario. "We decided almost overnight to go on tour," he says. "It was really ill-conceived. We did a full U.S. tour literally calling venues from the road, jumping on these bills and having pretty crazy shows along the way."

Snakeflower mark one had wilted by the time the group made it to San Francisco, and Melton’s bandmates stranded him in the city and left for Los Angeles. Nonetheless, he decided to stick things out and reform the band with two new members, drummer Billy Badlands and guitarist Tim Tinderholt.

"Where I grew up in Memphis, you can be guaranteed that no one’s gonna pay any attention to you," Melton says. "Here, there’s much more energy in the scene. Plus, being surrounded by so many great bands is a motivation to keep making great music."

It’s easy to hear what the California scene has done for Snakeflower 2’s live shows and recordings — the group’s aggression is undeniable. The late 2008 release Renegade Daydream (Tic Tac Totally) is steeped in the dire urgency of a fragile heart under pressure. It grooves hard, thanks to dagger-sharp hooks and vicious chord progressions, all registering at shit-hot speed to keep up with Melton’s nervy vocal swagger. "Memory Castle," the album’s single, pairs psychedelic tunnel-vision reverb with a rumination on lost dreams and the courage it takes to get them back.

Melton’s already looking in a new direction for the group’s next album. When his other brainchild, the smooth-punk outfit Bare Wires, gained popularity, Snakeflower 2’s gigs took a hiatus. But during that time, he devoted himself to writing fresh, epic material.

"I’ve actually been working in secret to write and record a 14-minute long cantata called ‘Forbidden Melody,’" he explains. "I had to set time aside to isolate myself [and] work with really pure ideas. [The new music] is something totally different, almost like a rock opera. I’m trying to go a little bit further, really trying to come up with something new."

While much of the local garage scene sticks to the ordinary and familiar. leave it to Melton and his mates to shoot the moon and score an album in the process.

SNAKEFLOWER 2

With the Vows, In the Dust

July 13, 9 p.m., $5 (day of show only)

Elbo Room

642 Valencia, SF

(415) 552-7788

www.elbo.com

The nativists are restless

-
0

news@sfbg.com

The comments sections of the Guardian‘s Politics blog and the San Francisco Chronicle‘s SFGate Web site have been lit up over the past week with angry (and sometimes overtly racist) denunciations of Latino immigrants, triggered by the latest Chronicle stories challenging San Francisco’s Sanctuary City policies and by Guardian revelations that Chronicle writer Jaxon Van Derkeken accepted an award and substantial cash payment from a controversial nativist group.

While Van Derbeken, two Chronicle editors interviewed by the Guardian, and other critics of San Francisco’s longstanding policy of not notifying federal authorities about the arrests of undocumented immigrants have denied trying to stir up nativist furor, the tone and content of many of these comments seems to indicate they’ve done exactly that.

The saga began June 19 when we published “Chronicle accepts award and cash from anti-immigrant group” on our Politics blog. The story began: “San Francisco Chronicle reporter Jaxon Van Derbeken recently accepted an award and cash prize (he refuses to say how much) from the Center for Immigration Studies — which a Southern Poverty Law Center report in February 2009 criticized for its overtly racist roots and extreme anti-immigrant agenda — for his controversial articles on San Francisco’s Sanctuary City policies.

“CIS paid for Van Derbeken to accept the award at the National Press Club and conservative Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders to introduce him earlier this month, an appearance they used to make derogatory comments about San Francisco, its values, and local immigrant rights activists, while saying little to rebuke the group for stirring up hateful nativist furor around what has become perhaps the country’s most divisive issue.”

Van Derbeken would only address the issue by e-mail, sending us two terse replies to our inquiry and refusing to answer most of our questions, including much how cash he received for a prize that we discovered paid $1,000 in 2001 (the complete e-mail exchange is include in our post).

“No one should mistake their decision to endorse my work for my endorsement of theirs,” was Van Derbeken’s most substantive comment, although he refused to offer an opinion on CIS or the SPLC report, which he didn’t read until after accepting the award. “I haven’t drawn any conclusions about it.”

CIS executive director Mark Krikorian, author of The New Case Against Immigration, Both Legal and Illegal (2008, Sentinel), responded to our inquires with an e-mail blaming the “jihad against dissent from the elite consensus for open borders” and referring to a column he wrote for National Review Online criticizing SPLC’s fundraising.

But in the past, Krikorian has called for the federal government to cut off funding to San Francisco and even prosecute local elected officials, writing in his CIS blog, “Local neutrality on immigration is no longer possible. Every jurisdiction in the country has a choice to make: Either buttress federal efforts at immigration control or subvert them. San Francisco has chosen the second option. It should now learn the consequences.”

We did phone interviews with Van Derbeken’s editors, Managing Editor Steve Proctor and Assistant Managing Editor Ken Conner, who both defended the stories and the decision to accept the award. Neither would reveal how much cash was involved, and neither would admit that it represented validating a group that recently has been vying for mainstream legitimacy.

“All issues have proponents and opponents,” Proctor told us, equating the award to those given for education and legal affairs reporting and denying that the immigration issue is more divisive and controversial. “At the end of the day, it isn’t about this group but about Jaxon’s stories,” Conner told us.

Those stories continued in high-profile fashion a few days later as Van Derbeken essentially rewrote a June 21 Los Angeles Times scoop about how San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris allowed a half-dozen undocumented immigrants to enroll in a rehabilitation program rather than turning them over to the feds. The details became front-page lead news stories in the Chronicle on June 22 and 23.

Local immigrant rights activists criticized the Chronicle stories and the paper’s decision to accept the CIS award and money.

“When I read these kind of stories that lead us down a dark path and play on people’s fears and paint immigrants with a broad brush — as a threat, as criminals, as dangerous to the community — I do think that there are anti-immigrant nativist centers egging on reporters like Jaxon down this dark path by giving him cash awards,” Phil Hwang, a staff attorney for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, told us. “It’s part of the strategy these anti-immigrant groups are employing. It’s why they created this award. And if you look at who founded CIS and their vision, it’s clear that they believe America is under threat from non-white immigrants,”

Angela Chan of the Asian Law Caucus, whom Van Derbeken mentioned by name in his CIS award speech, said she is worried this latest round would weaken Harris’ support for Sanctuary City policies. That’s what happened to Mayor Gavin Newsom last fall, when Van Derbeken wrote the stories CIS honored.

“I’d hate to see another series of anti-immigrant scapegoating being used to make hasty policy decisions that violate the rights of immigrants, tear apart families, and increase the state of terror in immigrant communities,” Chan told us.

Harris, who is running for state attorney general, defended her decision to let undocumented immigrants complete the Back on Track program after their presence was brought to her attention, but has since changed the policy to bar them from enrolling. “No innovative initiative will ever be created without some unanticipated flaws to be fixed along the way, but this must not stop us from tackling tough problems with smart solutions,” she said in a prepared statement.

“These are tough economic times,” Hwang added. “People are very nervous about their jobs. And that is often when the [anti-immigrant] rhetoric ramps up.”

The Chronicle writer and editors and Krikorian stopped responding to Guardian inquiries. But the blogs were lit up with comments — hundreds of them from around the country at the bottom of Van Derbeken’s latest stories — that had some disturbing themes, accusations, and suggestions. They indicate that the radical nativists are using this issue — and the Chron‘s spin on it — to promote a dangerous agenda.

Here’s a small sampling:

•<\!s> “Illegal aliens are like a plague.”

•<\!s> “Kick out all Illegals, return the city to its rightful owners”

•<\!s> “For God’s sake, STOP pandering to the ILLEGAL ALIENS and get rid of them!”

•<\!s> “Anyone caught crossing the border illegally should be shot as a spy.”

•<\!s> “The border ought to be land mined.”

•<\!s> “What is this sham that diversity is great? It is tearing this country apart.”

Such sentiments — which we usually counter on the Guardian Politics blog — were met with silence by Van Derbeken.

Appetite: Burmese delights flower in a SoMa alley

-
0

By Virginia Miller

burmchick0609.jpg
Yellow Pa Taut’s Burmese chicken curry with lemongrass

After a little jaunt to nearby Hall of Justice (wait, let’s hope that’s not the case), you might want to take notice of the unusual: Burmese food in an alley across the street. Though it’s been around awhile, it’s remained quietly under the radar. And it’s good, too. Yellow Pa Taut, named after a Burmese flower, is a small, welcoming SoMa restaurant lit with twinkling lights, serving curries, salads, noodles and a range of vegetarian dishes. Standard Burmese salads like the tea leaf or ginger ones ($9.95 each) are fresh and bright, curries are mild (some a little oily) and chicken tenderly falls apart. There’s also eggs with okra ($7.25), rice-based biryani dishes, samosa salad ($8.50 – with shredded cabbage and mint leaves) and Burmese curry pork belly ($9.95). Next time your friends want to try something new and cheap, win points by suggesting a Burmese spot they haven’t tried yet.

15 Boardman Place (between Bryant Street & Fargo Place)
San Francisco, CA 94103
415-701-8188
www.yellowpataut.com

When we grow up

-
0

a&eletters@sfbg.com

In the 1960s and early ’70s there was great enthusiasm behind the idea of loosening up the public school system. You know, making things more participatory, sparking kids’ imaginations, encouraging those who might have be bored or neglected in traditional classroom models.

Suddenly grade-school veteran Mrs. McGregor was prodded — not that some sterner specimens didn’t resist — to read the hidden signs of each child’s psychological well-being as well as drill ye olde reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic. If the freshly arrived 20-something teacher (or teacher’s assistant) seemed more cool, accessible, and just plain interested, that’s because she or he was; universities had started moulding them that way.

Anyone who grew up in that era remembers the incongruity of old playground games alternating with teacher-led, noncompetitive new ones. Old instructional and filmstrips that seemed prehistoric because they came from the Eisenhower era, offering laughably corny behavioral (not to mention grooming) advice, were shown alongside hip new edutainments urging tolerance, getting in touch with one’s feelings, and treading gently on Mother Earth. (Most of the latter were produced by questionable corporate friends of the planet like Exxon and DuPont.) Where minority students had always had to accept their absence from textbooks and other media, now kids in the whitest small-town or suburb saw rainbow-coalition peers depicted in revised or brand-new materials.

This happened fastest on TV, where much children’s programming seemed to grow sophisticated and viewer-improving overnight. On the commercial networks, there were the likes of Schoolhouse Rock and Fat Albert. The bounty on PBS, then fatly funded and as yet undiminished by cable competition, included Sesame Street, The Electric Company, and ZOOM. All knocked themselves out painting learning as fun, group inclusion and individual differences as neat. The messages were subversive by prior standards: girls could grow up to be astronauts too; boys were encouraged to cry if they felt like it. (And we all know they sometimes do.)

Perhaps the era’s zenith was Free to Be … You and Me, a multimedia phenomenon that hasn’t died yet. (The original album is still in print.) Chosen this year for the annual Sunday kids’ matinee slot at Frameline, it has a special place in the memories of umpteen lesbian, gay, and trans adults — because while it didn’t directly address sexual identity, the emphasis on upending stereotypical gender roles echoed deep for kids who mostly didn’t know yet just how "different" they might turn out to be.

The story goes that Free first grew from liberated That Girl star Marlo Thomas’ desire to create something for her young niece. Something that didn’t reinforce traditional "See Dick! He’s building a mud fort! See Jane! She’s happy just watching him, keeping her dress clean!" sentiments in kid lit.

That idea became a half-million selling 1972 LP by Thomas and starry "friends" including one 6’5 NFL legend (and author of Rosey Grier’s Needlepoint for Men) singing sensitive boy anthem "It’s All Right to Cry." There were also tracks like "Parents Are People," "William’s Doll," and "Helping," performed by everyone from Dionne Warwick and Diana Ross to Tommy Smothers, Carol Channing, and Dick Cavett.

Many of them were back for the prime-time, hour-long special on ABC two years later, joined by Alan Alda, Cicely Tyson, Harry Belafonte, some Muppets, Kris Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge, Roberta Flack and Michael Jackson (still cosmetically intact), and the choral Voices of East Harlem.

A broadcast staple for some years, the show is still pretty great, reflecting the contributions of such brains as Carl Reiner, Shel Silverstein, Sheldon Harnick (Fiddler on the Roof), and Thomas’ major collaborator Christopher Cerf. Mixing sketches and songs, live action and cartoons, it humorously soft-pedals myriad corrective lessons: revising the Greek legend of suitor-outrunning Princess Atalanta so that the happy ending is feminist, not marital; clucking at the selfishness of a superfemme, pink-clad girl who brattily insists "Ladies First" (and gets eaten by tigers as a consequence).

The term "politically correct" hadn’t been invented yet, but it could certainly be levied against Free. As it duly was/is, in some quarters. "Make no mistake, this is propaganda aimed at children. The message is that girls will find happiness only if they mimic boys," harrumphs one current Amazon customer. (He also considers the running skits with wisecracking Muppet infants "disturbing" and "revolting.") Alert Rush Limbaugh, quick!

This dangerous brainwashing tool generated picture books, a belated TV sequel (1988’s Free to Be … A Family), and a 35th anniversary revised-form original print reissue for which Thomas made the publicity rounds last year. These days she may be lesser known in gay circles for public philanthropic expressions than her alleged private despotic ones (see scurrilous unauthorized biography That Girl and Phil: An Insider Tells What Life is Really Like in the Marlo Thomas-Phil Donahue Household, a camp tell-all classic right up there with Call Her Miss Ross.) All gossip aside, however, innumerable grown-up queers are still in Thomas’ debt. A self-Acceptance 101 dose as easy to swallow as Flintstone multivitamins, Free to Be … You and Me remains good for you, and baby too.

FREE TO BE … YOU AND ME

Sun/21, 11 a.m., Castro

Disorderly

-
0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS A lime green flip-flop on the shower floor of a gym I don’t go to … Somebody stole my compost pile. The old woman I am not was rehearsing what to say to her doctor. "I have an eating disorder," she rehearsed, in the waiting room. Her husband was sitting, she was standing. Both were 80. "Anything else?" she said.

The husband mumbled something I couldn’t hear.

"I can’t wait to see him!" she said, and kept saying, to the receptionist, to me, to her husband. "After all this time! I can’t believe I’m going to see him." She actually said that. She was way too excited to sit down. There were pictures on the wall of all the doctors who shared this office, and she excused herself for climbing on my lap to get a better look.

But I don’t think he was up there. I know my doctor wasn’t.

Her doctor, I gathered from something else overheard, had retired and recently unretired. "I hope he notices that I lost some weight," she said.

I sneaked long looks at the husband, who was playing his part perfectly, part trooper, part crank. What could he say?

What can I say?

"There are restaurants around here," she said, apropos of very little. Her husband nodded.

I smiled and felt very healthy, and very confident in the health of the old woman I am not. To be honest, I might have under-overheard her, initially. She might have said "reading disorder." That was what it sounded like, but my brain must have substituted "eating disorder" because it didn’t know what to make of a reading disorder.

But really I should leave these matters to the medics.

For example, I was fully prepared to describe to my doctor not only the symptoms of my ailment but the diagnosis, the prognosis, and the cure.

It’s too easy.

The old woman’s time came and her husband, for better or worse, followed her in. I opened my book.

Me? My pulse, temperature, and blood pressure were, as always, pathologically normal. My cholesterol? Low.

For my birthday everyone made me bacon cupcakes, and pulled pork, and mac and cheese, oh, and a Rice Krispies cookie cake shaped like a roasted chicken. But even before any of the above indulgences indulged my palate, I had a stomachache.

Stomachache is not the right word. I had nausea, no appetite (or a lot less than usual), mild dyslexia, pins and needles in my legs, a slight spin to my head, sleeplessness, and the giggles. I was way too happy for my own good.

When my doctor walked in I broke it to her: "I have a writing disorder."

She lit up. Young, unjaded, unhurried, and beautiful, she seems to actually like it that I come see her once or twice a year for no good reason. "Tell me about it," she said.

"A lime green flip-flop," I said, "on the shower floor of a gym I don’t go to."

"Mmm-hmm. Mmm-hmm." She nodded, wide-eyed. Mind you, this is a general practitioner, not my therapist.

"That wasn’t a dream," I said. "This was: somebody stole my compost pile. I went outside and it was gone. Who would steal compost?"

"I wonder," she said, wondering with me. And the rest was academic, easy questions with obvious answers.

I’m a bad Italian. I can have too much garlic. It gives me anxiety attacks, whereas raw white onions calm me down. I had a cousin visiting from Ohio, and she and my nephew wanted to go to the stinking the Stinking Rose, so I went, to be sociable, but held back on the eats.

After Vesuvio, I hugged them goodbye and walked toward my car. They went the other way, toward more beer. Once they were out of sight, I ducked into a cute little downstairs-upstairs Thai restaurant I’d never noticed before, probably because it wasn’t there. Ton Yong. I’d much rather eat duck soup than over-garlicky overrated Italian food. As you know, it’s medicine to me, and Ton Yong had it, $8.25.

It was good, a little salty maybe, but a lot of ducky, and good noodles. Still, it was not exactly what the doctor ordered. I said this already, before I knew what it meant, but not even duck soup can save me now. I’m in love. Pass the Ativan.

TON YONG THAI CAFE

Daily 11 a.m.–11 p.m.

901 Kearny, SF

(415) 986-6218

No alcohol

MC/V

L.E. Leone’s new book is Big Bend (Sparkle Street Books), a collection of short fiction.

Highbrow smut: local literary porno for book lovers

-
0

By Juliette Tang

hotnnaughtya.jpg
Why Kindle when you can burn?

Sometimes, it really is sexier to close your legs and open a book. Especially in the case of good erotic fiction. While porn gives you a balls-in-the-face visual overload, the pleasures of erotica are subtler, more cerebral. A book of erotica is something you can take with you into the bathtub with a glass of wine, candles lit, and jazz on the radio. Or, put the dust jacket of Ulysses on your copy of Hot-N-Naughty: Extreme Erotica and you’re totally safe to read while MUNI-ing to work in the morning.

Always known as a bookish city, San Francisco does not disappoint bibliophiles whose tastes lean toward the more sensational. Who knew there were so many different words for “penis”? Like “bald-headed butler”? This Friday (May 8, 6:30PM) at the Good Vibrations on Polk (1620 Polk Street), treat yourself to a free session of “Erotica and Wine” with a special reading by writer John Thursday. More of an “erotic philosopher,” Thursday has introduced some truly necessary terms to our sexual lexicon, like zen penis, dong perch, and shirt cocking.

booksmut0509.jpg
Not an example of “shirt cocking”

If you’ve got the urge for some sizzling stories but can’t make it out to Good Vibes on Friday, check out some of these progressive San Francisco bookstores for some literary hardcore!

Gay marriage? In Iowa?

-
0

What happens when Iowans discover that gay marriage is legal? Jess Brownell provides some clues in the classic Iowa movie “State Fair”

By Jess Brownell

Iowa is in the news just now, and for a reason I must confess I would never have anticipated: Gay marriage turns out to be legal there. Who’d have thought it.? Not many Iowans, I’d venture.

I know a little about the state. I was born in Iowa, and grew up a few miles to the west in Nebraska. I had cousins living on Iowa farms whom I visited. (My host on this blog was born and raised in Iowa, and I imagine has his opinions on what’s happening in the Hawkeye State.) Frankly, I have no idea what to expect now.

Generally, Iowa hits the public eye only when the caucuses gather every fourth year, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t weird all the time. Iowans seem to be of two minds about almost everything, this tension being best represented by the two senators they have chosen to send to Washington. One, Tom Harkin, the Democrat, is a stalwart liberal (except where agricultural subsidies to factory farmers are concerned); the other, Charles Grassley, the Republican, is a fierce fiscal conservative (except of course where agricultural subsidies are concerned) who is still remembered for his objection to an eternal flame at JFK’s grave because of the unfair burden keeping it lit would place on the American taxpayer. I suppose you could say that like all of us Iowans have a lively sense of self-interest, but they do seem to have a hard time making up their minds about anything else.

Thee Oh Sees, Mayyors, Nodzzz

-
0

PREVIEW "Less is more" sucks; "more is more" rules. Maybe that’s just the indulgent kid in me talking, but it hasn’t stopped me from incessantly barking my musical wet dream over a bullhorn to anyone with ears: more fuzz, grit, and grime; more sweat; more eyeballs rolling back into heads; more microphones in mouths. Then one day, Christmas came early. Hark! The herald angels sing. Someone heard these ardent desires and delivered to me a glittering layer cake of wondrous noise — a megabill starring garage kingpins Thee Oh Sees, incognito feedback wizards Mayyors, and lo-fi clamor popsters Nodzzz.

This Bay Area-baked rock ‘n’ roll show might reduce any holier-than-thou longhair into a hapless fanboy or girl — while still maintaining that hip exterior, of course. But that’s okay. You’ll get over pretending you’re cool, because you’ll soon be quoting the wise words of Britney Spears, yelling "Gimme gimme more" in reflex to the spectacle of visceral, adrenochrome-addled power. Like when Mayyors’ caged-animal vocalist John Pritchard lets loose his devilish yawps; or when ax-wielder Chris Woodhouse’s dirty, torrential licks get ghoulish; or when Oh Sees’ guitarist Petey Dammit hones in on a laser-cut groove and won’t let go; or when the Nodzzz boys brazenly wail "Is she there? Is she there?" over swooning, sun-lit strums; or when, or when, or when….

More is more: when it rains it pours.

THEE OH SEES, MAYYORS, NODZZZ With Sunny and the Sunsets. Wed/29, 8 p.m., $5. El Rincon, 2700 16th Street, SF. (415) 437-9240. www.elrinconsf.com>.

1...212223...29Page 22 of 29

48hills.org is the official publication of the non-profit San Francisco Progressive Media Center.
Contact us: info@48hills.org