Literature

A lost San Francisco saga

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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A lost San Francisco saga

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC “There are great artists and musicians who will never be discovered,” says Herman Eberitzsch Jr. III “That’s the way it is,” he reasons. “There’s only so much room at the top.”

That’s why you’ve most likely never heard of Eberitzsch (pronounced “eh-bur-itch”) despite his remarkable music talent. He has a name straight out of a gothic fairy tale — far from the iconic, slick-sounding syllables associated with San Francisco’s psychedelic soul renaissance during the late 1960s and ’70s. Yet his recordings hold up to the best of them. “We had a strong conviction that we were the next big thing,” Eberitzsch says. “But we weren’t.”

Each generation harbors a certain aesthetic mood that mutates and evolves under the prescient vision of a limited number of innovators. Their fresh styles, resonant at first, then become formulated and stagnant, disseminated in the norm. We then await the next genius, or at least a movement of collective creativity, to shake things up. But what attunes us to one artistic strand, pregnant with a world of open-ended meaning and feeling, rather than another with just as much potential richness? How do we come to discern between the vanguard and the wayward? And what if we miss something in the process?

Eberitzsch’s unlikely story might just read like a rediscovery of what we overlooked. He recorded hours of bluesy soul fueled by free-form jazz throughout the ’70s that never saw commercial release. He arranged, wrote, sang, and funkified the keys on dozens of songs with mainstays of Santana’s circuit (Coke Escovedo, Linda Tillery), Lee Oskar of War, and Sly Stone’s drummer, Greg Errico, among many others. Most of the musicians who recorded on Eberitzsch’s own arrangements were, by and large, no-namers, yet it’s their music which now stands out.

Eberitzsch’s songs leap and wander. They gracefully move the spirit while grounding the body in rich, earthy grooves. They are a naive and inspiringly audacious attempt at channeling the sort of raw expression that challenges, mesmerizes, fights, and loves. In the midst of so much experimental and groundbreaking sound, Eberitzsch’s music either missed the ears of the right A&R rep or was just not the right kind of different.

 

A CHANCE REDISCOVERY

Now Eberitzsch is sitting across from me in a café near his former Potrero district home, excited to tell his story. He greets me as Allen Ginsberg (my look-alike visage intact, masked in dark beard and glasses), and I feign appreciation for the well-meaning reference, knowing that although Ginsberg had quite a poetic sharpness, he wasn’t the best-looking fellow. But Eberitzsch’s generous charm and earnest happiness with the course his life has taken, despite the disappointments, quickly win me over. Waves of amiable energy overtake the slightly weathered rasp in his voice. A youthful, idealistic Eberitzsch naturally emerges in the course of minutes. In a way, he’s been waiting for this interview for 40 years.

“Atlantic told me, ‘We don’t hear it at this time,'<0x2009>” Eberitzsch says, highlighting the elusive way a record company executive might elongate time, stretching the curt word like a worn rubber band. “But when you invest your life and your heart and soul into a project of your own creation, your own little children of songs, you don’t throw them away. You don’t send them down the River Styx,” he says, laughing. “So I put ’em in the basement.”

That’s where record collector Daniel Borine mistakenly found the two-inch apex tapes, 35 years later, while doing photo research for a reissue project on lost Bay Area modern soul. What those tapes hid — a dusty time capsule of relentless insight and vigor — amazed Borine. In a move away from the prideful hoarding that typically characterizes collectors, Borine wanted to share the tapes with a larger audience and finally do justice to Eberitzsch’s music. He pursued the new and quickly growing business of recorded music archaeology and preservation, an endeavor that mirrors what so many archivists have done already for literature, film, and visual art. Borine had the tapes mastered and organized the tracks into coherent volumes. He plans to put out four full-length records of Eberitzsch’s brilliant efforts, titled the HE3 Project, over the coming years on his own upstart Family Groove Records.

The first chapter of the compilation is set for release on March 30. It focuses on Eberitzsch’s trailblazing efforts from three distinct recording sessions between 1971 and 1974. These recordings capture Eberitzsch’s far-reaching artistry — a grounded and soulful angle on space-jazz psychedelia, informed as much by Weather Report as by Robert Johnson. This is the story of the man behind the HE3 Project.

 

ORIGINS OF A WOULD-BE TRAILBLAZER

Herman Eberitzsch Jr. III was born in San Francisco’s colorful Portola neighborhood in 1947. He grew up in a German household, where he learned to play the classical composers — Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms — at a young age. But somewhere along the way Eberitzsch caught the funk and couldn’t let go. “In my room I listened to James Brown,” he recalls. “When I grooved and played the boogie, I had a powerful left foot that shook the ground. My left foot took down the house, so I eventually had to move out.”

Eberitzsch conjured doo-wop on the corner with the young funky drummer Greg Errico, who lived down the street. He was enraptured by the blues in Oakland, danced to jazzy R&B grooves in San Francisco, and witnessed the emergence of a new psychedelic sound at the Fillmore and in the streets. Immersed in the Bay Area’s magnetic music community, he naturally gravitated to the keys again. “I figured out how to play funky style clavinet and piano,” Eberitzsch says. “They called me Funky Knuckles for short.”

At 21, the freshly-dubbed Funky Knuckles joined a band with Boots Hughston called Sword and the Stone, and was booked by Bill Graham to perform at the Fillmore. The outfit transitioned into a quartet, Shane, with Santana’s David Brown on bass. They hustled around the city making $10 an hour and all the beer they could drink. The city bubbled over with an unparalleled creative force. The time was electric.

That same year — 1968 — Eberitzsch attended UC Berkeley to study psychiatry. But he quit after one semester to pursue music as a career, preferring the organic therapeutic powers of rhythm and melody to the structured treatment of question and answer. “Music is a much more pure form of psychiatry. It has two potentials: it either incites you to create, or it soothes the savage beast,” he says. “I became a knowledgeable person of people through music.” And cyclically, Eberitzsch’s improvisational music erupted from kinetic relationships with people.

Read part two of “A lost San Francisco saga” here.

From Beijing to Oakland

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From Beijing to Oakland

arts@sfbg.com

LIT In 2005, after dropping out of a PhD program in immunology, Chinese writer Yiyun Li debuted her first book of fiction, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. A collection of stories exploring the aftershock of the Cultural Revolution on mainland and overseas Chinese, it won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, Guardian First Book Award, and California Book Award. Li’s story “Immorality” won the Paris Review Plimpton Prize.

Afterward, Li’s green card application was rejected by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services — twice. Her “extraordinary ability” as an artist (Title 8, Code of Federal Regulations, Part 204.5) could not be proven until she won, on top of those accolades, a Pulitzer Prize.

Fortunately for the status of fiction in America, Li’s extraordinary ability was finally recognized in 2007, 11 years after her arrival to the United States. In a journey that has taken her from Beijing to Iowa, Li now resides in Oakland with her family. Li left China in 1996 to pursue a doctorate in immunology at the University of Iowa. Living in China, she had no interest in writing fiction, and her natural affinity and aptitude for telling stories in English took her by surprise. Her second language in speaking, she discovered, was really a “first language in creating and thinking.”

Li has a scientist’s eye toward precision and a gifted storyteller’s ability to extract meaning from the mad fracas of human circumstance. Last year, she published a well-received first novel called The Vagrants. Set in China during 1979, in a fictional provincial city called Muddy River, the novel provides an unflinching view into the era’s brutality and violence. The novel also reveals, carefully and without sentiment, the unexpected moments of transcendence that result when love, empathy, and human emotions bloom in the harshest of environments.

Li spoke with the SFBG about The Vagrants, released in paperback by Random House a few weeks ago.

SFBG You write in English, which you learned as an adult. Does this have to do with any innate differences linguistic between English and Chinese? Does it have anything to do with your associations with China?

YIYUN LI I wasn’t trained as a writer in China, and even though I widely read Chinese literature when I was in China, I never had the urge to write in Chinese until I came to America, picked up English, and felt it a natural way to express myself. I think it is a more personal decision than I may have indicated, though honestly I myself sometimes feel mystified by this switch of languages too. I feel much more like myself when I write in English, which is to say English is really my first language in creating and thinking. In a way I do censor myself less when I write in English — again, that censoring is not from others, but from myself.

SFBG Do you think in Chinese?

YL I no longer think in Chinese. Of course as my mother tongue, Chinese is still used in my everyday life — I still count and do my math in Chinese, but when I think about literature, art and philosophy I think in English.

SFBG As an international student, your decision to forgo a promising medical career and become a writer was extremely brave. During the process of writing your first book, did you experience great anxiety or doubt? Were you ever tempted to give up and go back to medicine?

YL I didn’t feel self-doubt — I think by the time I gave up my immunology career, I was certain I wouldn’t go back. There was a certain level of anxiety but I would say at the time it was minimal. I probably just lived with a tunnel vision and all I thought about was to write, and write well. I was certain that I needed some time to improve myself, so it did not occur to me to give up.

SFBG When you write, do you find you draw any lessons from your experiences studying medicine?

YL Medical knowledge, like any kind of knowledge, is helpful and useful for a fiction writer. I think my training perhaps helps me look at the world and its many violences without being sentimental.

SFBG In The Vagrants, even small children in Muddy River are completely unmoved by public executions. This strikes me as devastating and true. My mother told me that when she was growing up in China during the early 1970s, she saw a man bleed to death on the side of the road. The real horror of the experience didn’t dawn on her until decades later. You were seven years old in 1979, the year in which The Vagrants takes place. Writing about violence from the perspective of children, do you recall events from your own childhood in China?

YL Your mother’s experience was quite close to my own experience, and indeed for most children, empathy and sympathy come not naturally, but with some help from grownups and education. When violence is prevalent, as one sometimes finds in life, not only children but adults too stop questioning the injustice. I did draw from my own memories of the time, but like your mother, I had to look back as a different person to understand the tie.

SFBG Have you gone back to China since you’ve left? How are you received?

YL Yes, I have been back visiting. I keep a very low profile when I visit China. so there is not much trouble for me.

SFBG You’ve mentioned that your biggest literary influence is William Trevor. You’ve named Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Greene as influences, too. Do you draw any influences from Chinese literature?

YL My favorite Chinese author — Shen Congwen — influenced me a lot, not in the way of how he wrote stories and how he used language but how he looked at the world as a storyteller.

SFBG Speaking of Chinese novels, some of your characters in The Vagrants, like Teacher Gu, are quite literary. I enjoyed that Kai and Kialin hold their clandestine meetings in the library. I also liked that Jialin’s mother steals books for him from the shelves she’s supposed to guard. What books are these characters reading? If you could pick a book for each Gu, Kai, and Jialin, what might be a book that affected the way each viewed the world at that time?

YL This is a great question. For Jialin and Kai, I imagine they would be reading Gadfly, a little-known novel in the West but a hugely popular novel in China (and Soviet Union) written by the Irish author Ethel Voynich. I also thought Jialin might be interested in reading French authors. For Teacher Gu, I would imagine he would read Tolstoy.

Live Shots: Literary Death Match, Elbo Room, 02/12/2010

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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In honor of the upcoming installment of the Bay’s wondrous Literary Death Match — Fri/12, 6:30, $10 at Elbo Room, 647 Valencia, SF. — here are some pics from last month’s raucous Valentine’s Day edition. It was a fight for love … to the death! 

Steampunk convention tinkers mightily

Andrew Lam
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Steampunk has been described as a “step sideways in time.” It’s certainly not a regressive subculture- one peek at the kinds of clockwork corsetry and hydraulics operated moving machines that steampunk tinkerers fashion will convince you of that- but rather, a rethinking of where technology could have led us. It’s a topic that’s figuring prominently in the minds of many these days, which means this year’s New Albion Steampunk Exhibition (begins Fri/12) promises to be more whiz-bang than ever.

Picture, if you will, a mass of punks and nonconventional individuals in Victorian garb and laboriously created wings, monocles, wrist weaponry and whatnot, all milling about to waltz music in a very conventional hotel convention space. Surely, unsuspecting squares of Emeryville will be freaked.

Three tracks will guide tinkerers through the exhibition; one for DIY-ers, one for those with an ear for scholarly discussions of steampunk and another that focuses on the give-and-take of expert panel discussions on the culture. Participants can also pick and choose among the bounty- after all, who could miss discussions on steampunk philosophy featuring the movement’s great literati, James Blaylock? Or a rundown of the history of man powered submarines, classes on leather working, the regal history of steampunk, a panel who will dissect and illuminate “steampunk garb for life on a budget,” a look at the observatory as “science temple”, a museum of curiousities? Impossible, you must go to all.

After the learning, ballrooms galas and drink and meets will keep participants busy, just like at any other convention. Well, except for the fact that this gala will include prizes for the “most workable wearable invention” and meet and greets will center around self propelled three story Victorian houses and feature drinks served by robots.

Just a simple step sideways, really. 

Now Albion Steampunk Exhibition

Fri/12 (through Sun/14), $20-50

Hilton Garden Inn

1800 Powell, Emeryville

www.steampunkexhibition.com

alt.sex: Big oops

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alt.sex: Big oops

andrea@mail.altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

The question of pre-cum and sperm content seems to be in a debate. One article says there is no sperm in pre-cum, another says that the previous research’s fluid collection methods were faulty. So is there sperm in pre-cum, or is that just another sex-negative scare tactic?

Love,

Which Is It?

Dear It:

The question of whether, or rather the assertion that pre-cum does contain sperm, certainly has been used as a sex-negative scare tactic, specifically as a weapon in the chastity wars. I wouldn’t go so far as to write off the question itself as pure propaganda tool, though — it’s a legitimate subject for scientific inquiry, and we are all about those.

While the interwebs present a boundless sea of sex information, sex “information,” and purest balderdash, we have to watch where we’re going. I’ve taken on this one at intervals for years, but needing a fresh fact-infusion I headed to PubMed, as one should. There I found that an andrology lab at Ben Gurion University in Israel seems to be doing all the interesting work. The lab collected pre-ejaculatory fluid from its premature ejaculation patients, another group referred to the lab for “excessive fluid secretion during foreplay” (this paper was nicely titled “Copious pre-ejaculation: small glands-major headaches”), and a control group of regular guys. All were sampled several times during foreplay, whatever that is, and after masturbation, and none had any sperm at all in the pre-ejaculatory samples. None. And no matter how many times those scare-tacticters warn credulous teens about it only taking one (true, but that One’s chances of making it through the vaginal gauntlet and the Chamber Of Cervical Horrors to emerge victorious are almost as small as the sperm itself), even they can’t make a claim that “it only takes none.” None is none. None is good.

So … we do have some science. We do have samples studied and found utterly devoid of sperm. We also have, of course, innumerable pregnancies blamed on those sneaky gland-lurking sperm. What are we to make of those? Some claimants are lying. Some failed to flush out the urethra with a nice healthy pee after the first ejaculation, which could certainly result in some loiterers being carried along by the next stream of pre-cum that happens by. And some are the result of “oopsies!” of various sorts, including undetected or unstoppable mini-ejaculations before the main event. None of this has ever succeeded in convincing me that withdrawal is unsafe or stupid or worse than nothing, as some of that scare-based literature would have it. It is, in fact, the precise opposite of “worse than nothing”: it is in every way better than nothing. Kids who are taught that condoms leak and pills fail and withdrawal is worse than nothing end up using … nothing. And that, my friend, is worse than anything.

Love,

Andrea

 

Expanding movement

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Expanding movement

rebeccab@sfbg.com

When University of California Berkeley students staged building occupations last fall, their furious, brazen response to startling tuition hikes and staff cutbacks captured the attention of the world, recalling the radical actions of earlier generations.

Yet the thrust behind the March 4 Strike and Day of Action, a mass mobilization for public education and services that is reaching into all corners of the state and spreading nationwide, appears to stem from widespread agitation that extends well beyond the flare-ups on college campuses.

"What’s historic about this is that pre-K through PhD has never walked together," said Lillian Taiz, president of the California Faculty Association, which represents faculty in the California State University system. "We have often been pitted against one another, and I think everyone feels finally, in the end, there is no difference in importance between pre-K and PhD. We need it all."

The historic new alliance faces an uphill climb in an environment characterized by a devastating budget crisis at the state level. California — the world’s eighth-largest economy — hovers around 47th in the nation in terms of per-pupil spending, and the most recent wave of budget rollbacks has cut to the bone.

Students and teachers across the Bay Area argue that with dramatic slashes in funding, the educational system is failing youth. Class sizes are ballooning to claustrophobic levels, students are unable to take their desired courses, fees are going up, bathrooms are getting cleaned less frequently, and staffers are getting stressed by overwhelming workloads. "Classes are jam-packed," Taiz says. "You have kids sitting on the floor. You have students just begging to be allowed in a class."

As University of California students decry a 32 percent hike in fees, the California State University system is suffering from damage inflicted by 2,000 faculty layoffs over the past year. The San Francisco Unified School District, meanwhile, is staring down an estimated $113 million budget deficit over the next two years, and 900 layoff notices recently were issued to teachers, librarians, secretaries, and other school employees to warn them that their jobs could be slashed by the end of the school year.

When San Francisco’s school district faced a gaping budget shortfall during the last budget cycle, it was propped up by a combination of Rainy Day Fund reserve dollars and stimulus funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. With no such safety nets in place this time around, anxiety levels are higher and the outlook is uncertain.

March 4 is shaping up to be more than an opportunity to vent frustrations to elected leaders. Instead, organizers describe it as a rallying point for a movement to defend public education that has caught on like wildfire, uniting people from different worlds. Pickets and rallies will be staged throughout the region. Thousands are expected to swarm Civic Center Plaza in San Francisco. Students from a handful of East Bay campuses are organizing marches to Frank Ogawa Plaza in downtown Oakland. Students and faculty from Berkeley will be boarding buses to take the message to Sacramento. The Oakland Unified School district will host a districtwide mock "disaster drill" to call attention to the disastrous budget. Even public transit activists opposed to the latest round of Muni service cuts and fare hikes are joining the protests, hoping to expand the discussion to support vital public services (for details on these and other events, see "Alerts" opposite this page).

"We’ve never gotten this level of activism over anything in SF since I’ve been here," says Matthew Hardy, communications director for United Educators of San Francisco. "There’s a growing movement for progressive taxation and budget reform instead of draconian cuts."

Taiz, who teaches history at Cal State Los Angeles, described March 4 as an opportunity to fill a void in leadership. "Historically, in these moments where ordinary people step up to the plate, you end up leading the leaders," she said. "We are kind of shocked, but in truth, we do know what has to be done." Quality education isn’t just important for young people, but for society as a whole, she argued. "I am a baby boomer, and if the folks coming up behind me don’t have really, really good jobs, I’m going to be eating dog food. Because those are the people who pay Social Security and pay the taxes."

In the week preceding March 4, teachers and students throughout the Bay Area were in a frenzy of preparation.

Carlos Baron, a theater professor at SF State, was wondering whether the grand procession of papier-mâché puppets his theater students will unveil on the March 4 Day of Action should take a V-shape or some other form. "The main puppet is the Draculator," explained Baron, a Chilean who directed plays in the Salvador Allende era before he began teaching at SF State in 1978. "It’s a cross between the Terminator-Governor and Dracula. But also it doubles as a banker and a general."

When asked how funding cutbacks affect students, Baron didn’t hesitate. "It impedes the creation of a positive vision for themselves and this society," he said. It stunts "the development of the imagination," he added. "We are trained as individuals to accept our failure and our smallness because we’re familiar with it. They don’t want an educated population, a sensitive population, a dreaming population. Would we select Schwarzenegger?"

Nicole Abreu Shepard, a first-grade teacher at Buena Vista Elementary in San Francisco’s Mission District, was collecting permission slips from parents to take her students to a rally and march down 24th Street. "The entire school is walking out," Abreu Shepherd said. Buena Vista’s art program exists solely because parents volunteer their time, she explained. More than half the students qualify for free or reduced lunch, and many incoming kindergarteners or preschoolers are new to the English language. Now there are proposals on the table to increase kindergarten class sizes to 25 or possibly even 30 students. "It’s sort of tying their hands behind their back and asking them to teach on one foot," she noted, and worried about the eventual result. "It’s going to be harder and harder to keep parents who could afford private school in a public school system."

Meanwhile, at the UC Berkeley campus, Krystof Cantor was sitting behind a table heaped with piles of radical literature bearing titles such as "After the Fall: Communiques from an Occupied California." Cantor, who earned his PhD in vision science in 2005, was joining student organizers in making one last push to drum up student interest in March 4 events at a multi-faceted event called "Rolling University." Late on the evening of Feb. 26, a dance party on the Berkeley campus morphed into a street riot — replete with ignited Dumpsters — in downtown Berkeley. The incident attracted media attention and drew public criticism from administrative officials.

The radicalized student movement that has erupted on the UC Berkeley campus is "very much about seizing power," Cantor told the Guardian several days before. "It’s been disruptive, it’s been militant, and it’s been creative. That’s very scary," to the administrators the movement is targeting, he added.

That focused pressure on UC administrators sets these students apart from the coalition of UC Berkeley faculty members and student government members and allies who are coordinating bus trips to protest in Sacramento March 4, he explained. "Sacramento’s not innocent, but it’s not like the administrators are just doing what they have to do," he charged, pointing to new construction projects on campus even as workers are hit with layoffs and furloughs, plus an increasing trend of privatizing on-campus jobs and services. "You can save the public sector by pouring money into it. But it won’t work if the people in charge … want to privatize everything."

Jasper Bernes, a graduate student in English who was seated next to Cantor, noted that the occupation tactic is catching on at other campuses. "I have no doubt that March 4 will greet us with news of many occupations," he said.

Baron, the Chilean theater professor, noted that some SF State students had occupied a business school building in protest of budget cuts. "They were pissed," he said. "They wanted to do something radical. They really inconvenienced a lot of people — but they took chances nonetheless. I went there, and I locked arms with them for awhile." At the same time, he wondered about how effective it was, he said.

And for all the months of preparation and visioning, Baron said he also wonders what will ultimately be borne out of the marches, rallies, pickets, and procession of lovingly crafted street puppets he helped breathe life into. For all the hard work and planning, he says, "My problem is not so much March 4. It’s March 5."

e.e.’s coming

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e.e.’s coming

When I was a young reader first discovering poetry — and still very much under the thumb of my strict Asian parents — I blushed (for obvious reasons) whenever I encountered e. e. cummings’ name. In those prudish days, were I to know that cummings penned some of the most deliciously sensual poems of the last century, I might have been frightened off literature for good. This hypothetical is redundant, as I wasn’t scared off poetry and eventually outgrew those jejune ideas of virtue. This hypothetical is further redundant because his erotic poems were never published together in the same volume until now, in Erotic Poems, a new collection of cummings’ amatory verses and sketches.

Readers will delight in these works, which are as naughty as they are tender, bemused as they are earnest. Consider the below, from “16”:

(may i touch said he
how much said she
a lot said he)
why not said she

The poem winks at its author’s salaciousness while joyously proclaiming it. Other poems in the book replace cheekiness with bodice-ripping romance:

you said Is
there anything which
is dead or alive more beautiful
than my body,tohave in your fingers
(trembling every so little)?

Reading through these lovely pieces, I was reminded by how beautifully Michael Cain recites cummings’ “somewhere i have never traveled,gladly beyond” in the film Hannah and Her Sisters (by Woody Allen). I hadn’t seen that movie in years, yet as I read along I could hear Cain’s clement voice reading in my ear.

nothing we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility; whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain has such small hands

In the movie, as Cain recites the above excerpt to the sister (played by Barbara Hershey) of his wife (played by Mia Farrow), Hershey is seduced by the poem’s slow cadences and the sensuality of cummings’ beautiful words. The viewer, watching, can’t help but sympathize with her, even as she steals her sister’s husband. You can’t blame someone for engaging in a torrid affair with a man who read e. e. cummings from memory: it’s not the man she wants, but the poetry. The works in this newest collection, which was released earlier last month in time for Valentine’s Day, remind us again and again how thrilling it feels to be seduced by language.

Let’s all read Sand Paper

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Let’s all read Sand Paper

Charmingly disheveled Adobe Books, strung as it is on the alcoholic’s crucifix known as the cross-section of 16th and Valencia, has become a beloved sanctuary for readers, drunkards, and occasionally homeless individuals alike. I always look forward to Adobe Books’ events because you can never predict who among the circus just outside will enter and join the fun. Not many bookstores on this dry earth permit customers to imbibe openly from brown bags of Colt 45 during poetry readings. Adobe Books’ Dickensian squalor places it fondly in my heart even as its floorboards sink beneath the weight of dusty overladen bookshelves — and when the smell of stale beer and, somehow, cats, forces me to breathe through my mouth while I peruse.

On Monday, March 1, Adobe Books will host the San Francisco launch party of three new books from Sand Paper Press. It’ll be worth holding my nose to dive in.

Known for featuring and promoting the works of writers associated with Key West Florida, Sand Paper is not as provincial as it may seem. Key West is like Iowa City in that both localities are marked by a disproportionately high writers-to-population ratio. Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, Tennessee Williams, and Earnest Hemingway have all served as pro tem Floridians. This upcoming Monday, books by Stuart Krimko, Shawn Vendor, and Arlo Haskell will be presented and read at Adobe.

Stuart Krimko, currently based in Los Angeles, is the author of The Sweetness of Herbert, a collection of poems loosely inspired by the works of Welsh poet George Herbert (1593-1633). Herbert was remembered for his fancifully monastic poems about the existence of God, and his influence is most evident in lines by Krimko like “(As God in the form of a nauseous wave cast Jonah out.)/ That’s what aggressive living is about.” Readers should note that the collection’s title is intentionally misleading; Herbert’s allusion is tangentially related to a work that is richly imbued with Krimko’s own personality.

Key West poet Arlo Haskell’s collection Joker is lovely. John Ashbery once commented that Haskell’s poems “conjure an ambiance as temperate and welcoming as ocean air.” Ashbery was correct in the sense that Haskell’s poems have a flowing and pellucid quality to them, best seen in phrases like “Imagination is our hard respite/ and the birds in the trees are one of a kind: loneliness./ Our law, like love and lust, is liquid”. However, Haskell’s work is not always temperate nor welcoming; they are frequently political and incisive. Despite Haskell’s aptitude for a pretty turn of phrase, he is not afraid to stir the water. Nor is he apprehensive in revealing what lies beneath.

Along with Haskell and Krimko, young writer Shawn Vandor will also be at Adobe, reading from his collection of stories Fire at the End of the Rainbow.

Sand Paper Press launch party
Mon/1, 7pm, free
Adobe Books
3166 16th Street, SF.
www.myspace.com/adobebooks

The battle for the forgotten district

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The battle for the forgotten district

sarah@sfbg.com

This November, when voters in District 10 — the largest, sunniest, and most diverse of the city’s 11 supervisorial districts — replace termed out Sup. Sophie Maxwell, they’ll be making a selection that could have pivotal implications for the entire city.

That’s because the next supervisor from southeast San Francisco inherits a district that is home to some of the city’s biggest environmental and public health challenges, as well as the most potential for development that will determine what kind of city San Francisco becomes.

District 10 is where you’ll find the most polluted and most underdeveloped lands in San Francisco, areas that could either be transformed into models of a sustainability or, in the words of Tony Kelly, the president of Potrero Boosters Neighborhood Association, “be turned into a toxic Foster City.”

District 10 is where the slaughterhouses, tanneries, and glue factories set up shop and used the bay as a dumping ground. It’s where the smokestacks of coal and oil fired power plants polluted the air. It’s where the Navy filled the Bay, built a shipyard at Hunters Point and loaded parts of the first atomic bomb onto the USS Indianapolis in 1945.

District 10 is where the bottom fell out of this industrial economy in 1974, when the Navy left, taking with it people’s jobs, pay, and hopes for a home of their own and a better future, particularly for what was then a predominantly African American population.

And District 10 is ground zero for plans that will triple the population and double the number of homes — homes that likely will only be “affordable” to Google executives and retirees from Marin, forever changing the face of San Francisco’s southeast sector. Critics fear that will accelerate what has been a steady exodus of black residents, replaced by megadeveloper Lennar’s vision for a new D10.

It’s against this dark history and difficult present that a wide open field of more than a dozen candidates are vying to replace Maxwell, who came to power in 2000 and has had a mixed voting record in her decade on the board. Sometimes, Maxwell was the eighth vote that let the progressive majority on the Board override Mayor Gavin Newsom’s veto and pass trailblazing legislation. Other times, she was the swing vote that allowed the moderate minority to carry Newsom’s water.

So, in addition to D10’s many internal challenges, this seat could determine the political balance of power on the Board of Supervisors, placing all the more importance on voters in this long-marginalized part of town.

 

DISTRICT OF DISCONTENT

Eric Smith, a biodiesel activist who has thrown his hat in the D10 ring, says that there is a lot of frustration in the air, and looking at the problems the district is facing, it’s hardly surprising that it has what nearly every candidate agrees is a fractured political culture.

“The Bayview, the Hunters Point Shipyard’s toxic Superfund site, the homicide rate, unemployment, poor public transportation, dwindling services and community resources have made D10 one of the city’s largest melting pots of discontent,” Smith said.

Smith’s words were spoken while the Elections Department was verifying signatures earlier this month on a second failed effort to qualify a petition to recall Maxwell.

Bayview resident and D10 candidate Marie Franklin didn’t support the attempt to recall Maxwell, but she understood it as “a frustration movement.”

“People are sinking in the sand, we’ve already lost so many of them, and they felt Sophie wasn’t doing anything for them,” said Franklin, who praised Maxwell for helping get Franklin’s apartment building complex renovated — a job that was completed 18 months ago, at a cost of $65 million, creating 500 local jobs.

“There are 654 units here, and they were uninhabitable,” Franklin said. “There was black mold, rain falling inside. We had people living worse than Haiti.”

Franklin, who said she is running because she “knows the history,” came here in 1978, when she and her son were living in a car after a fire left them homeless. She said the Bayview was a totally isolated area, barely part of mainstream San Francisco.

“There were no taxis, no services,” she recalled. “Nobody would come here, it was the stigmatized area where no one was accountable to provide services.”

The Bayview — which in some ways is the heart of D-!0 — wasn’t always a black community. But African Americans have been living here for 70 years, dealing with all the racism, denial of services, poverty, and pollution. And it bothers Franklin that 85 percent of the 10,500 homes that Lennar plans to develop won’t be affordable to the elderly, disabled, unemployed and low-income people who currently live in the Bayview.

“We need to preserve the diversity of the community and make sure their issues and information will flow to City Hall,” she said. “You must give the people a handle. If you don’t reach out, they’ll slip. That’s why folks out migrated.

Whoever succeeds Maxwell will be a central player in addressing some very big and dirty issues: the future of the Navy’s radiologically impacted shipyard at Hunters Point, Lennar’s massive redevelopment plan for the Shipyard and Candlestick Point, the polluting power plants, replacement of stinky digesters at the sewage plant, and the SF Hope public lousing rebuild.

There’s also the chance to address violence and crime. James Calloway, a candidate who has long worked in Bay Area schools, told us he believes that education and jobs are part of the keys to rejuvenating the district.

“Job opportunities are not as plentiful in the district,” Calloway said. “When I was a kid, you could walk down Third Street at 2 a.m. Now I wouldn’t walk down it at 9 p.m., and I know the area.”

Calloway is hopeful that the massive redevelopment plan, if done correctly, could start the district’s comeback. “Not a lot of black folks stay here when they have extensive education,” he said. “But it’s not only them. Many were displaced by redevelopment and had no way to go back.”

 

ELECTION UP FOR GRABS

The largest of the city’s 11 electoral districts, D10 is a huge triangular piece of land in the city’s southeast sector that was used as an industrial dumping zone for decades. Today, the district runs from the Giants stadium at AT&T Park to the 49ers stadium at Candlestick Point and encompasses Mission Bay, Potrero Hill, Dogpatch, India Basin, Portola, Little Hollywood, and Visitacion Valley. It’s also crossed by two freeways that isolate it from the rest of the city, and is home to a large number of crumbling housing projects that are in the process of being rebuilt.

Candidate Ed Donaldson grew up in the projects until he was 10 years old, when the Redevelopment Agency kicked his family out in the 1970s. “We landed on our feet, but others weren’t so lucky,” said Donaldson, who works as a housing counseling director at the San Francisco Housing Development Corporation.

“There is a sense that the Bayview and Visitacion Valley have not been included within the San Francisco family,” Donaldson said. “There is a sense of being forgotten.”

In 2007, Donaldson co-founded the Osiris Coalition to tackle the city’s dormant Certificate of Preference program, in which the Redevelopment Agency issued a document to displaced residents and businesses in the 1960s promising that they could return.

He also tried to rescue some 700 foreclosed properties and recycle them as affordable housing stock. And now he is trying to prevent the city from bulldozing seven SF Hope projects without guaranteeing residents that they have right to remain.

In 2007, Mayor Gavin Newsom and Maxwell convened an African American Outmigration Task Force that didn’t get a public hearing about its findings until August 2008. The timing angered some, who questioned why the report’s findings and implications for urban planning weren’t released before June 2008, when the residents of San Francisco voted for the Lennar-led Proposition G, a proposal to build 10,000 market rate homes at one of San Francisco’s last remaining black communities, which Newsom and Maxwell endorsed.

The taskforce didn’t publish its recommendations until the end of 2009, allegedly because of insider squabbling. Meanwhile, gentrification was going on actively, and many blamed Newsom, and by extension Maxwell, for failing to do anything with the group’s findings as D10 residents continued to suffer from high rates of asthma, cancer, unemployment and an ongoing black exodus.

It wasn’t always this way. In the 1940s, the district’s black population exploded when migrants from the south and World War II veterans came to work at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. Some moved to Alice Griffith Public Housing complex, or Double Rock, which was built as military housing in 1962. Others relocated to the Bayview when the Redevelopment Agency took over the Fillmore/Western Addition in the ’60s and ’70s as part of a controversial urban renewal effort.

But when the Navy abandoned the shipyard in 1974, unemployment hit the black community hard. Today, hundreds of the city’s lowest income residents live in Alice Griffith’s crumbling units and endure sewage backups, no heat, cloudy drinking water and leaking ceilings, as they wait for the projects to be rebuilt.

“Generations have been trapped in the silo of public housing and cannot get out, because of lack of opportunity and education, so when we legislate, we need to take that into consideration,” said candidate Malia Cohen, whose grandfather came from Texas to work at the shipyard where he met her grandmother, whose family came from New Orleans.

“My grandfather’s father was a longshoreman. He worked with the infamous Leroy King [a commissioner at the city’s Redevelopment Agency] and he has fantastically vivid stories of racism,” said Cohen, who works for the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, previously served on the executive staff of Mayor Gavin Newsom, and has already raised over $18,000 in the D10 race and qualified for public matching funds.

“My family came here to work hard, they lived on Navy road in the projects, and then they bought a house here. My parents were born here, and we were all public schooled,” Cohen recalled as she took me on a tour of D10 that ended up in Visitacion Valley, an increasingly Chinese-American neighborhood that reflects a district-wide trend.

Census data show that by 2000, Asians were the largest racial group in the district (30 percent), followed by blacks (29 percent), whites (26 percent), and Latinos (19 percent). By 2003, according to the California Urban Issues project, the trend continued. Asians were the largest racial group (32 percent), followed by blacks (27 percent), whites (21 percent) and Latinos (17 percent) of the population.

This means that D10 candidates will have to garner support from more than one ethnic group to win. Over a dozen candidates have already filed papers in the race, but so far there is no clear front-runner.

Also frustrating the prognosticators is that fact that D10 has had the lowest voter turnout in the city, so the winner will also depend on who goes to the polls.

D10 candidate Geoffrea Morris, who is the grand daughter of longtime Bayview activist Charlie Walker, has been knocking on doors and participating in voter registration drives.

“We need new blood,” Morris said

Getting elected will be a complicated equation. Although Bayview’s population was 50 percent African American at the time of the 2000 census, it didn’t turn out the vote. In the 2006 election, only 14,000 of the district’s 37,000 registered voters went to the ballot, and 50 percent were from whiter, richer, and more Asian neighborhoods.

“It’s very important to the future of the city that the ethnicity diversity of the board be maintained and that the African American community have representation,” former Board President and current Democratic Party chair Aaron Peskin told the Guardian.

Maxwell recently told the Guardian that she’s not ready to endorse any D10 candidates yet. “I’m waiting for people to have a better understanding of what this community is, what the common thread running through it is, and how to use rank choice voting,” she told us.

The only candidate who currently holds elected office is BART director Lynette Sweet, who had her answers down pat when we reached her by phone, and even used wording that was eerily similar to Maxwell’s words.

“D10 is a pretty diverse district, but there is only one common thread: the need for economic development,” Sweet told me. “That’s true in Potrero Hill, Portola, Dog Patch and the Bayview. It’s the same mantra: a lot of small businesses need help, and the only way to help them is through economic development. In Potrero Hill it’s about land use. In the Bayview, it’s about the shipyard and better transportation and truancies.”

 

THE COMMON THREAD

District 10 is ground zero for the Lennar’s $2.2 billion plan to develop 10,500 market rate condos at the Shipyard and Candlestick Point. The plan will allegedly create thousands of jobs and new parks, deliver on an historic community benefits agreement that labor groups claim is so “lawyered up” that the developer can’t renege on its promises.

The package is framed as the one and only way to revitalize the southeast’s formerly vibrant economic engine. Indeed, any time anyone tries to slow down the process—to take time to thoroughly read the draft EIR and see if it adequately addresses the impacts of this massive urban reengineering project — a chorus of “no delays” starts up, either from residents of the housing projects desperate to see their homes rebuilt, or the labor contractors who hope to get jobs.

“It’s as if the city is playing checkers, while Lennar is playing three-dimensional chess,” Eric Smith observed.

Lennar has stated that it will contribute $711 million to finance this massive project. The remainder will be leveraged by Mello-Roos bonds, state taxes based on the use and size of a property and intended to raise money for needed services, and tax increment financing, which creates funding for projects by borrowing against future property tax revenues.

The conceptual plan won Maxwell’s backing but environmental groups are critical of the draft EIR.

During DEIR hearing, environmentalists questioned the wisdom and the cost of filling the Bay to build a bridge over Yosemite Slough, and building condos on Candlestick Point state recreation area, the only open major open space in the district.

But the city’s Planning Department also has 20,000-30,000 units of housing in its pipeline. This means that if all these plans get approved in the next decade, they’d account for 80 percent of residential development citywide. And D10’s population could triple, further skewing the district’s already shifting demographics.

In other words, D10 as we know it could become nothing more than a historic relic in a few years, and the next supervisor will play a key role in deciding whether that happens. SFHDC’s Ed Donaldson warns that any supervisor who does not understand the complexity of the city’s largest district can expect a similar recall backlash in future.

“There is no one homogenous voice in the community,” Donaldson said. “The grass-roots organizing that brought about the recall effort was a result of a changing political structure in the area, but is not yet on par with other districts in town. We still allow our politics to be controlled from downtown.”

Fellow candidate Eric Smith warns that the issues—and politics—are complex.

“People were emotional, angry, and desperate because they feel no one listens to them,” Smith said. “That’s part of the problem here; they would rather have a supervisor go down swinging for them, rather than watch one seemingly side with Lennar, PG&E and the mayor on issues contrary to their interests. That’s the terrible irony and one of the biggest problems in District 10. Folks are so mad, they’re willing to do whatever it takes to make them feel they have a voice in the outcome, even if it’s potentially worse.”

Smith cited the sequence of events that culminated last year in the Navy dissolving the community-based shipyard Restoration Advisory Board (RAB), which for years has reviewed technical documents and commented on the Navy’s clean-up proposals. But in December, the Navy made its official decision to disband the RAB, citing dysfunctional behavior and off-topic discussions that got in the way.

“Some of the same folks who were frustrated by the process, tried to send a signal to the Navy that they weren’t being heard and for all their well-intentioned efforts got the RAB dissolved,” Smith said. “I truly feel for them, it’s absolutely heartbreaking, but at times, they can be their own worst enemy.”

One of the looming issues about the shipyard is that the land has been polluted and needs to be cleaned. The shipyard contains radioactive debris from ships towed to the shipyard, after a 90-foot wave washed over them during an atomic test gone awry. The Navy burned 610,000 gallons of radioactively contaminated ship fuel at the shipyard, and workers showered on the shipyard, raising concerns that radioactive materials got into the drains and sewers. And questions have been raised about radiological tests on animals at the yard.

 

LEAKS AND FLOODS

It’s not just the shipyard that’s toxic. Even the buildings that were constructed to house workers 50 years ago are a serious mess.

Realtor Diane Wesley Smith, who grew up in public housing projects, took me on a walking tour of Alice Griffith last week to see conditions that tenants will likely have to endure until at least 2014, if the city sticks to its plan to relocate people into a new replacement unit in the same geographical area, if not the exact same site.

What we found was pretty messed up.

“The water sometimes comes out brown and feels like sand. It’s been like that for a year,” one resident said.

“The water is cloudy, the bath tub isn’t working and the sink keeps stopping up,” said another.

A woman named Silvia showed us how the water from the tap in her elderly mother’s kitchen flows out cloudy and then doesn’t settle properly, like foamy beer.

“The roof’s been leaking for years, the sewage backs up, but they just fixed the lights,” Silvia said. A neighbor named Linda was using her oven as a heater.

“The toilet backs up a lot, and my grandson’s been coughing a lot from asthma,” Linda said.

“Roaches is always a problem,” said a woman named Stormi, dressed in black sweats and a black T-shirt that read, “Can’t knock the hustle.”

“They’re trying,” said Stormi, a member of the Alice Griffith Residents Association, as a couple of Housing Authority trucks pulled up to do repairs.

“They promise that you will not have to leave your unit, but if they try to move us down to the waterfront, well, there’s a reason there’s no housing there, and it’s because the land will flood,” Stormi said.

“If we don’t end up at the table, we’ll end up on the menu,” Wesley Smith warned, as she stopped to chat with a group of young men, who were worried they would pushed out of the Alice Griffith rebuild through the criteria being established.

“Fred Blackwell, the executive director of the Redevelopment Agency, assures me that’s not the case, but Alice Griffith is a Housing Authority property, and empty promises have the potential to be great promises provided they are made in writing,” Wesley Smith said as we walked out of the projects and onto the road where a yellow and black sign announced “flooded” next to Candlestick Point park, where Lennar wants to build.

Malia Cohen expressed concern about Hope SF residents, as we drove through the Sunnydale housing project.

“We have to be diligent and mindful that people are not pushed out,” Cohen said, noting the sweeping views at Gleneagles golf course above Sunnydale, and the value of housing for a golf course community. “When public housing gets taken offline, we must work with Redevelopment and the Housing Authority to make sure no one is changing the rules halfway. We have to make sure the talks and walks line up. We need to be equal partners. We cannot be bulldozed by City Hall.”

Geoffrea Morris is a Calworks employee, at the Southeast Community College facility on Oakdale, which was built to mitigate the city’s expansion of the sewage plant in 1987. She cited concerns about the literacy levels of people who live in the 2200 public housing units that cluster D10. “A lot of people in Alice Griffith don’t even know the dates or when it’s going to be reconstructed,” Morris said. “Folks like to be told stuff like that, but the city gives you a stack of papers. Some will read them, but others rely on folks they think are trustworthy. They need stuff in layman’s terms written on one sheet of paper.”

Morris is a fan of the Internet who posted a community survey online, and made sure every housing project got some literature telling people to get informed. She worries about the digital divide in D10:

“A lot of folks don’t have computers and access to important information,” Morris said. “And let’s talk about the way ‘affordable’ is used to trick people.”

Michael Cohen, Newsom’s top economic adviser, recently stated in a memo that over the expected 15-20 year phased build out, Lennar’s Candlestick-Shipyard development would include, “up to 10,500 residential units, about 32 percent of which (3,345) will be offered at below market rates.”

“But 892 units of this ‘affordable category’ will be sold to folks earning $100,000,” Morris said. “So if you subtract 892 units from affordable unit category, you’re back to 25 percent affordable.”

Candidate Kristine Enea, an attorney and a former RAB member, chairs the India Basin Neighborhood Association, which administers a US EPA grant to hire experts to translate the Navy’s cleanup documents into plain English and comment on them She was frustrated by the Navy’s decision to dissolve the RAB.

“The lack of a forum does nothing to bolster the community’s trust in the cleanup or the redevelopment process,” Enea said.

Enea generally supports the Lennar project, but has concerns about whether it will adequately mitigate increased car traffic, or result in commercial development that benefits her neighborhood.

“India basin is a pocket of Hunters Point right along the shoreline,” Enea said. “Right now, we have no shops or restaurants, no ATM, no groceries, nothing beyond one liquor store and a few industrial businesses.

Potrero Boosters president Tony Kelly told us that District 10 residents can think for themselves. “D10 residents don’t need to rely on corporations to solve their problems,” he said.

“Folks in the eastern neighborhoods came up with a better revitalization plan than what the city proposed and community activists managed to close the power plant, after the city said it was impossible,” Kelly recalled.

And there’s no shortage of good ideas.

Kelly suggested that an urban agriculture center could immediately put low-skilled folks to work by erecting greenhouses on unused land. Smith said the industrial zone could be “incredible eco-park made from sustainable sources.

‘D 10 is the dumping ground for everything, including all the city’s waste,” he said. “We could be a shining example, not just for D 10, but the rest of the state.”

The D 10 candidate line up includes Calloway, Cohen, Donaldson, Smith, Enea: civil rights attorney Dewitt Lacy, Morris, Potrero View publisher Steve Moss; District 7 BART director Lynette Sweet, Wesley-Smith. Bill Barnes, who works for Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier, and Linda Richardson, who was appointed to the Human Rights Commission in 2007 by Mayor Newsom, have also expressed interest in the race.

In such a huge field, name identification will play a major role. Sweet is in office, but BART Board is not a high-profile job and won’t give her a huge advantage.

Cohen has a slight edge right now in that she’s raised $18,505, including $500 from former Newsom flak Peter Ragone, making her the first D. 10 candidate to qualify for campaign financing. The oldest of five girls, Cohen recalls how her mother got laid off from her city job as a school-based mental health worker and then rehired, as part of the city’s budget cuts.

“We felt that pinch and the frustrating games that are played out between the leadership and the rank and file,” she said.

Cohen who worked for Newsom in his first term as mayor, but has since left his administration , said she is uncomfortable at being framed as Newsom’s candidate.

“Because I’m not, but I am one of the few candidates who has seen how the mayor and the Board work—and don’t work—together,” she said.

Moss sees the city’s southeast as a “district in transition.” Over coffee at Farley’s in Potrero Hill, he told me that the southeastern neighborhoods could be “launching pads for environmentally sustainable growth.”

“The district’s been in a frozen period for 30 years, But despite the problems, people are deeply committed to and in love with their community.

“This district is the future of San Francisco and its social fabric—the diversity, income –and its problems are leftovers from the city’s industrial age.”

 

 

 

DISTRICT 10, BY THE NUMBERS

Total Acres: 5,650

Average household income: $85,000

Population: 73,000

Registered voters: 37,700

Average housing price: $335,000

Ethnicity (2003 figures): Asian 32%, African American, 27%, white 21%, Hispanic 17%

Development status of land: 18% residential, 38% is commercial, 38% undevelopable

All figures the latest available. Sources: SFGIS, Association of Bay Area Governments, U.S. Census, California Urban Issues Project. Ethnicity and income data is from 2003 and almost certainly has changed.

Philosophy, get hip: “The Examined Life” comes to the Herbst

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Philosophy, get hip: “The Examined Life” comes to the Herbst

In new documentary The Examined Life, eight of the most famous minds in contemporary philosophy — Cornel West, Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Judith Butler, and Slavoj Zizek — seem almost unintimidating. Detached from the props of intellectual life and presented in public setting away from rapt crowds, miked podiums, and the protective custody of academia, these philosophers appear comfortingly average, for entire milliseconds. For instance, on a sunny afternoon, post-structuralist scholar Judith Butler could almost be any other leather-jacketed San Francisco Missionite with a cool haircut ambling down Clarion Alley, perhaps en route to Thrift Town for some more leather jackets. That is, until she begins to discuss, in a slow and deliberate manner with eyes fixed intently into the middle distance, the body’s morphologies as experienced by the subject. Cover blown.

Examined Life director Astra Taylor will be appearing — along with philosopher Judith Butler and activist-artist Sunaura Taylor (who appears with Butler during the segment filmed in Clarion Alley) — at a screening of her film at the Herbst Theater on Thu/25, at 7:30 PM. The three women will participate in a discussion and Q&A session following the screening.


In the last few years, Astra Taylor has become known for her documentaries about philosophy. Previously, she directed the film Zizek!. I hold Zizek! partly responsible for introducing American hipsters to the Slovenian Lacanian-Marxist with saliva glands as hyperactive as his intellect who so rapidly became for youngish creativeish urbanites a sort of Mitteleuropean Moses to Marx’s Abraham.

As a documentary filmmaker, Taylor is no neutral observer; she openly reveres her subjects. Though it has been criticized (A. O. Scott of the New York Times said the film was “too glamorized by its brainy stars to engage them critically”), Taylor’s reverence is fine by me. These eight philosophers are inspiring people who make it their business to think their way through some of life’s most difficult questions. Furthermore, I prefer to keep my philosophers on a pedestal, even when they’re rambling about jazz in the back of someone’s Volvo (ahem, Cornel West).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zwmum5_ofU

To be fair, Cornel West could talk about his favorite lunch foods and I would find it interesting. ‘Cerebrities’ opining about anything, literally anything, makes for entertainment. In this film, the entertainment value is heightened by some particularly bathetic physical settings. Taylor aims to represent her philosophers outside of the stereotypical realm of academe, and she attempts this by filming them in public places that are both neutral to the philosophers’ private lives and exist outside outside the structured environment of the workplace. In The Examined Life, Appiah is interviewed while waiting around at the Toronto airport. Hardt is filmed rowing a wooden boat, with some difficultly, on a lake in Central Park that is congested with loud, unseemly geese. And, not to be outdone, Zizek requested his segment be filmed at the dump.

But, funny public settings notwithstanding, there is a discernible soapbox in each section of The Examined Life, one all eight philosophers in the film are given time to use carte blanche. Each thinker is provided an open forum to deliver decontextualized soliloquies as if at an imaginary podium in front of some metaphysical audience, and the camera eyes this dotingly. Pretentious? Yes, but forgivably so. With their contributions to their disciplines, these eight thinkers have the right to believe they have important things to say. Watching them, I am inspired to think more critically and rigorously, perhaps from a contact high off the glaring epistemological glow.

In the middle of all this talking, the philosophers do experience occasional challenges in presenting their ideas in a way that make sense to listeners. This is to be expected; even if you limit the scope of the discussion, it is impossible to unpack an ‘examined life’ in the time it takes to watch a movie. I commend these philosophers for trying at all. I also commend them for managing to not be dull, even when in their labyrinthine monologues they’ve lost me completely.

For those interested, I encourage you to attend the screening at the Herbst Theater. If philosophy is the enormous pharmacy we raid to cure ourselves of an unexamined existence, and if an actual philosophy class would be akin to the smallpox vaccine, then The Examined Life is the equivalent a mild herbal supplement. While this film won’t heal anyone of a painfully unexamined existence, a dose of it has its benefits. Think of it as a gateway drug. A documentary may proffer only a minute, highly mediated glimpse into how a philosopher thinks, but it does have the power to ask an non-philosophizing audience to think more philosophically.

Herbst Theater
Thu/25, 7:30PM, $25
401 Van Ness, SF.
(415) 621-6600
www.cityboxoffice.com

Snap your fingers for our new poet laureate

Andrew Lam
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“The only war that matters is the war against the imagination.” Diane di Prima, San Francisco’s new poet laureate as of last year, should be an expert on imagination’s primacy. Her work in such volumes as The Revolutionary Letters (1971) helped to shine a light on the role women played in Bohemia- not always the most well-lit arena. On Fri/19, the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts holds a reception to laud the most well known female voice of the Beat movement, and celebrate her turn as our city’s bard.

Here’s the bio-in-a-nutshell; born Italian-American in Brooklyn, Di Prima was a precocious writer, corresponding with Ezra Pound by the age of 19. After attending Swarthmore she starting gettin’ wierd with in with the Beats in Manhattan, in 1966 spending time on Timothy Leary’s Millbrook psychedelic community. She’s worked closely with Amiri Baraka, and the two co-founded the New York Poet’s Theatre. She became a connective figure between the Beats and hippies, moving to California permanently in the ’60s where got in with the radical improv group, the Diggers, and started studying world religions. She’s written over 48 books. 48 books! Would that we all could have a paragraph like that written on our lives.

And the poetry? The words often often personal, serving to widen Di Prima’s scope beyond an individual life to constancies in the human condition. But rather than stretch my capacity as a poetry critic, let us just revel in the glory of the words themselves. Below, “Revolutionary Letter #1” from Revolutionary Letters.

 

I have just realized the stakes are myself

I have no other

ransom money, nothing to break or barter but my life

my spirit measured out, in bits, spread over

the roulette table, I recoup what I can

nothing else to shove under the nose of the maȋtre de jeu

nothing to thrust out the window, no white flag

this flesh all I have to offer, to make the play with

this immediate head, what it comes up with, my move

as we slither over this go board, stepping always

(we hope) between the lines

 

The poet laureate honor was first bestowed on Lawrence Ferlinghetti by Willie Brown in 1998. MCCLA’s event will also feature past honorees Devorah Major, Jack Hirschman and Janice Mirikitani, amongst other members of the rhymey profession.

Celebrate Diana di Prima

Fri/19 7:30 p.m., free

Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts

2868 Mission, SF

(415) 821-1155

www.missionculturalcenter.org

Blow your mind on this lecture, man

Andrew Lam
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5

It was a convergence that may have been responsible for the rise of psychedelic drugs, yoga, vegetarianism, and the new age spiritual movement in the western world. And it happened at Harvard University? Don Lattin’s talk on his book The Harvard Psychedelic Club (Harper Collins) next week (Thur/18) narrates one of history’s most momentous groups of college buddies and how their scientific studies on the effects of tripping balls changed American culture in the 1960s.



Sure, we all expanded horizons in college — but these guys set the gold standard. LSD and psilocybin had yet to be codified by the man in 1960, when Timothy O’Leary and Richard Alpert began the Harvard Psilocybin Project, in between trips to Mexico where they dabbled in the indigenous folks’ teonanácatl. The project tested, among other things, the effects of psilocybin on the anti-social behavior of prisoners and facilitation of religious ecstasy in divinity students. They also administered LSD to over 300 students and faculty members. It was during these studies that Leary and Alpert fell in with Andrew Weil and Huston Smith. A quartet of intellects was formed and the rest, as the hippies would say, is history.


Basically, they all got fired from traditional academia, the drugs got banned for use by law abiding citizens, and each “club” member became a leader in a different aspect of counter culture- Smith in world religions, Alpert in guruism, Weil in promoting integrative medicine within traditional psychology and Leary to… well we all know what Leary got up to.


But first they kicked it at Harvard, and their ensuing escapades are also the subject of Lattin’s lecture- which apparently included some total buzzkill “backstabbing, jealousy, and outright betrayal,” according to the event’s press release. E tu, Ram Dass? The lecture is but one mind expanding night brought to us by the California Institute of Integral Studies, who is also sponsoring a talk on “The Way of the Shaman (Fri/12 through Sat/13) and a performance by the Soweto Gospel Choir (March 27) this spring.


 


“The Harvard Psychedelic Club” with Don Lattin


Thur/18 7 p.m., $15


CIIS Main Building


1453 Mission, SF


(415) 575-6100


www.ciis.edu

Stage Listings

David Talbot
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Stage listings are compiled by Molly Freedenberg. Performance times may change; call venues to confirm. Reviewers are Robert Avila, Rita Felciano, and Nicole Gluckstern. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com.

THEATER

OPENING

The Greatest Bubble Show on Earth Marsh, 1062 Valencia. (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $7-$50. Opens Sun/14. Runs Sun, 11am. Through April 3. The Amazing Bubble Man returns with his extraordinary family-friendly show.

Ramona Quimby Zeum: San Francisco Children’s Museum, 221 Fourth St; (510) 296-4433, aciveartstheatre.org. $14-$18. Opens Sat/13. Runs Sat-Sun, 2 and 4:30pm. Through Feb 21. Active Arts Theatre for Young Audiences presents a theatrical production based on the novels of Beverly Cleary.

Tick, Tick&ldots;Boom! Eureka Theatre, 215 Jackson. (800) 838-3006, www.therhino.org. $15-$30. Previews Wed/10-Fri/1Opens Wed/10. Runs Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Through Feb 28.Theatre Rhinoceros presents Jonathan Larson’s rock musical.


ONGOING

Animals Out of Paper SF Playhouse, 533 Sutter; 677-9596, www.sfplayhouse.org. $30-$40. Tues, 7pm; Wed-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 3 and 8pm. Through Feb 27. SF Playhouse presents Rajiv Joseph’s quirky comedy.

Beauty of the Father Phoenix Theatre, 414 Mason; (800) 838-3006, www.offbroadwaywest.org. $30. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through March 13. Off Broadway West Theatre Company presents Nilo Cruz’s Pulitzer Prize-winner.

Bright River Brava Theater Center, 2781 24th St; (800) 838-3006, thebrightriver.com. Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 7pm. Through Feb 20. From the imagination of Tim Barsky comes a journey through a dystopian uderworld.

Eat, Pray, Laugh! Off-Market Theaters, 965 Mission; www.brownpapertickets.com. $20. Wed, 8pm. Through Feb 24. Off-Market Theaters presents stand up comic and solo artist Alicia Dattner in her award-winning solo show.

Eccentrics of San Francisco’s Barbary Coast: A Magical Escapade San Francisco Magic Parlor, Chancellor Hotel Union Square, 433 Powell; 1-800-838-3006. $30. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Ongoing. This show celebrates real-life characters from San Francisco’s colorful and notorious past.

Fabrik: The Legend of M. Rabinowitz Jewish Theatre, 470 Florida; 292-1233, www.tjt-sf.org. $20-$45. Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through Feb 28. The Jewish Theatre San Francisco presents a Wakka Wakka Productions presentation of this story of a Polish Jew who immigrated to Norway, told with hand-and-rod puppets, masks, and original music.

Fiddler on the Roof Golden Gate Theatre, 1 Taylor; 512-7770, www.shnsf.com. $30-$99. Tues-Sat, 8pm; Wed, Sat, and Sun, 2pm. Through Feb 21. Harvey Fierstein, who played Tevye in the recent critically acclaimed Broadway production, reprises the role as part of the Best of Broadway series.

Fiorello! Eureka Theatre, 215 Jackson; 392-4400, www.cityboxoffice.com. $10-$30. Sat-Sun, 2pm. Through Feb 20. The San Francisco Arts Education Project celebrates the ninth year of its musical theater company with three weekend performances of Broadway’s Pulitzer Prize winning play.

Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune Royce Gallery, 2901 Mariposa; (866) 811-4111, www.frankieandjohnnysf.com. $28. Thurs/11-Sat/13, 8pm. Royce Gallery presents Terrence McNally’s award-winning play.

Hearts on Fire Teatro ZinZanni, Pier 29; 438-2668, www.zinzanni.org. $117-$145. Wed-Sat, 6pm; Sun, 5pm. Through May 16. Teatro ZinZanni celebrates its 10th anniversary with this special presentation featuring Thelma Houston, El Vez, and Christine Deaver.

Oedipus el Rey Magic Theatre, Building D, Fort Mason Center; 441-8822, www.magictheatre.org. $20-$55. Days and times vary. Through Feb 28. Luis Alfaro transforms Sophocles’ ancient tale into an electrifying myth, directed by Loretta Greco.

Pearls Over Shanghai Hypnodrome, 575 Tenth St.; 1-800-838-3006, www.thrillpeddlers.com. $30-69. Sat, 8pm; Sun, 7pm. Through April 24. Thrillpeddlers presents this revival of the legendary Cockettes’ 1970 musical extravaganza.

The Real Americans The Marsh, 1062 Valencia; 826-5750, www.themarsh.org. $15-$50. Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Through March 6. The Marsh presents the world premiere of Dan Hoyle’s new solo show.

Red Light Winter Next Stage, 1620 Gough; (800) 838-3006, custommade.org. $18-$28. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through Feb 20. There’s a moment in the second act of Red Light Winter that eerily recalls the plotline of Fugard’s Coming Home, currently playing the Berkeley Rep, but unlike Fugard, playwright Adam Rapp can’t help but to ratchet up the despair without tempering it with a shred of hope, and the resultant script comes off more like misery porn than an authentic exploration of the human spirit. You can’t fault the fearless cast of Custom Made Theatre’s production of it for the script’s overall flaws though; they inhabit their characters wholly, firing off volleys of "dude-speak" "nerd-speak" and "unrequited love-lament" without a hitch, imbuing each scene with subtle quirk and nervous tension. Steve Budd, as Davis, channels the restless energies of a hedonistic jackass (whose brash exterior sadly does not hide a heart of gold), and the neurotic, OCD sorrows of the hopelessly heartbroken Matt are brought to acutely uncomfortable life by Daveed Diggs. But it is the shape-shifting, name-changing, unreliable Christina (powerfully rendered by Britanny K. McGregor) who remains the play’s greatest enigma and bears the brunt of Rapp’s punishing pen, like the weary subject of a Tom Waits ballad, minus the comfort of a redemptive moment, or even just a bottle of whiskey. (Gluckstern)

Rent Southside Theatre, Fort Mason Center; www.jericaproductions.com. $25-$35. Fri, 8pm; Sat-Sun, 2 and 8pm. Through Feb 21. The Royal Underground presents A Jerica Productions Company rendition of Jonathan Larson’s Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning rock opera.

*The Wave The Marsh, 1062 Valencia; 826-5750, www.themarsh.org. $7-$50. Sat/13-Sun/14, 2pm. The Marsh Youth Theater’s teen troupe propels a wholly worthwhile, surprisingly sophisticated world premiere musical, directed with loving attention by Cliff Mayotte, and written by Marsh stage veteran Ron Jones ("Say Ray"), after his own infamous experience as a young history teacher at Palo Alto’s Cubberley High School in 1967. In a year marked by the Summer of Love, an annihilating war in Vietnam, and a Civil Rights Movement that saw, among much else, Cubberley’s first "integrated" student body, Jones (played by Mark Kenward) crafted a lesson plan on the Holocaust that called for the creation of his own authoritarian movement, dubbed the Third Wave. Students—and teacher—soon found their susceptibility to a sense of belonging and the acquisition of power altogether intoxicating, enough to forgo some basic human decencies, and the experiment went infamously out of control, ending Jones’s career as a history teacher where it began. But the lesson—that fascism is a modern social danger present to all and not confined to some aberrant past—has never subsided. Indeed, the real wave proved to be the story’s powerful resonance worldwide for over four decades—inspiring multilingual treatments in articles, literature, teleplays, and films, including a 2008 German drama and a forthcoming English-language doc. There’s palpable heart and a knowing freshness to the staging of this adept musical, however, which features a rewarding score (from David Denny, Kathy Peck and MYT creative director Emily Klion, under the sharp direction of Frederick Harris), bright choreography (by Patricia Lam), and memorably spirited performances by a diverse, versatile cast. It won’t be surprising to see a version of "The Wave" reach Broadway in the near future, but it’s real power lies in the kind of community project beautifully realized right here at the Marsh. (Avila)

What Mama Said About ‘Down There Our Little Theater, 287 Ellis; 820-3250, www.theatrebayarea.org. $15-$25. Thurs-Sun, 8pm. Through July 30. Writer/performer/activist Sia Amma presents this largely political, a bit clinical, inherently sexual, and utterly unforgettable performance piece.

Wicked Orpheum Theatre, 1182 Market; 512-7770, www.shnsf.com. $30-$99. Tues, 8pm; Wed, 2pm; Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 2 and 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Ongoing. Assuming you don’t mind the music, which is too TV-theme–sounding in general for me, or the rather gaudy décor, spectacle rules the stage as ever, supported by sharp performances from a winning cast. (Avila)


BAY AREA

Antigone Live Oak Theatre, 1301 Shattuck, Berk; (510) 649-5999, www.aeofberkeley.org. $12-$15. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through Feb 20. Actors Ensemble of Berkeley presents Jean Anouilh’s adaptation of the ancient Greek tragedy.

Coming Home Thrust Stage, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, 2025 Addison; (510) 647-2917, www.berkeleyrep.org. Tues, 8pm; Wed, 7pm; Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through Feb 28. $33-$71. The rags to riches fantasy of the small town girl who hits the big time after abandoning her hometown for the brighter lights of a big city is one of the most well-worn yet perennially beloved plotlines. Less popular are the tales of the girls who return to their hometowns years later still in rags, their big city dreams crumbled and spent. Such a tale is Athol Fugard’s Coming Home, a cautious sequel to Valley Song, which follows Veronica Jonkers (a versatile Roslyn Ruff) to her childhood home in the Karoo, her own small child in tow and little else. The tragedy of her ignominious return is further compounded by her secret knowledge that she is HIV-positive, and her young son’s future therefore precarious. The slow-moving yet tenacious script stretches over a period of four years, following both the progression of Veronica’s dread decline in health, and the flowering intellectual development of her son, Mannetjie (played by Kohle T. Bolton and Jaden Malik Wiggins), who keeps his "big words" in his deceased Oupa’s pumpkin seed tin. Almost superfluous appearances by the ghost of Oupa (Lou Ferguson) are made enjoyable by Ferguson’s quiet mastery of the role, and Thomas Silcott parlays great empathy and range in his performance as Veronica’s irrepressible childhood companion and circumstantial caretaker Alfred Witbooi. (Gluckstern)

The First Grade Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk; (510) 843-4822, auroratheatre.org. $15-$55. Tues, 7pm; Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through Feb 28. Aurora Theatre Company presents the world premiere of Joel Drake Johnson’s new play.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead Marion E. Green Black Box Theatre, 531 19th St, Oakl; www.theatrefirst.com. $10-$30. Thurs/11-Sat/13, 7:30pm; Sun/14, 2pm. Tom Stoppard’s sensational first play will probably never have the impact it had in 1966—partly because it proved so influential—but TheatreFIRST’s generally sturdy production wades in enthusiastically and the results remain ultimately, if more quietly, contagious. In a cheeky, knowing meld of Beckett and Shakespeare, Stoppard crafts a heady as well as deeply silly existential comedy, told from the perspective of two hapless minor characters in Hamlet—the somewhat interchangeable and finally expendable Rosencrantz (Kalli Jonsson) and Guildenstern (Michael Storm)—whose sealed fate is signaled by a changeless sky (manifest in Rick Ortenblad’s scenic design), coins that only come up heads, and their inexplicable inability to leave the stage. Nevertheless, our bemused protagonists—preoccupied with nameless anxiety, word games, and endless summarizing—are the last ones to figure it all out. Leave it to a roving thespian (the excellent Andrew Hurteau) and his amusing caravan of out-of-work players, strutting and fretting along, to gradually drop some knowledge on our heroes. If the first act runs slow and rough, Mary Cavanaugh’s firm direction, graceful choreography, and shrewd use of live and recorded music contribute to a general warming by acts two and three. Meanwhile, the play’s bandying of philosophical ideas and fertile metaphors ensures the monkey business does not escape some poignancy by the end. (Avila)

DANCE

"The Butterfly Lovers" Palace of Fine Arts Theatre; 392-4400, www.cityboxoffice.com. Tues-Wed, 7:30pm. $35-$70. Chinus Cultural Productions and China Arts and Entertainment Group present the U.S. premiere of China’s Romeo and Juliet, performed by the Beijing

"It Never Gets Old" The Garage, 975 Howard; (510) 684-4294, dancetheatershannon.org. Fri-Sun, 8pm. $15-$20. Dance/Theater Shannon presents an evening length performance exploring how different relationships provide context to intentions of touch.

"Love Everywhere" Various locations; www.dancersgroup.org. Fri, 12pm; Sun, 9 and 11am. Erika Chong Shuch Performance Project presents this new, large-scale work as part of Dancers’ Group’s ONSITE series.


BAY AREA

"Ecstatic Dance" Sweets Historic Ballroom, 1933 Broadway, Oakl; 505-1112, info.ecstaticdance@gmail.com. Sun, 9:30am; Wed, 7pm. Ongoing. Move however you feel inspired with this freeform journey of movement.


PERFORMANCE

"All Star Magic & More" SF Playhouse, Stage 2, 533 Sutter; 646-0776, www.comedyonthesquare.com. Sun, 7pm. Ongoing. Magician RJ Owens hosts the longest running magic show in San Francisco.

30th Anniversary Celebration of New Works African American Art and Culture complex, 762 Fulton; 292-1850, www.culturalodyssey.org/tickets. Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Through March 14. $20. In celebration of Black History Month and National Women’s Month, Cultural Odyssey presents a festival featuring The Love Project, The Breach, and Dancing with the Clown of Love.

"Assuming the Ecosexual Position" The Lab, 2948 16th St. 864-8855, www.thelab.org. Sat, 8pm. $7-$10 Acclaimed performance artist and sex educator Annie Sprinkle and her partner Elizabeth Stephens explore, generate, and celebrate love through art during this special event that includes an erotic cake contest. Bring your own!

BATS Improv Theatre Bayfront Theater, Fort Mason Center, B350 Fort Mason; 474-6776, www.improv.org. Fri-Sat, 8pm. $17-$20. The Theatresports show format treats audiences to an entertaining and engaging night of theater and comedy presented as a competition.

Bijou Martuni’s, 4 Valencia; 241-0205, www.dragatmartunis.com. Sun, 7pm. $5. The eclectic live cabaret showcase features a night of love songs in honor of Valentine’s Day.

"Bee’s Knees" Bollyhood Café, 3372 19th St. Thurs, 7pm. $3. This night of poetry, storytelling, and music celebrates performers who are post-democratic, humanist, sensual, and dedicated artists in the tradition of Walt Whitman.

"Best Feeding" EXIT Theatre, 156 Eddy; 673-3847, StageWerx Theatre, 533 Sutter. www.brownpapertickets.com. Fri, 8pm. $15. W. Kamau Bell presents this comedy written and performed by Martha Rynberg.

"Cora’s Recipe for Love" EXIT Theatre, 156 Eddy; 673-3847, www.theexit.org. Fri-Sat, 8pm, through Feb 20. $15-$25. Sean Owens’ wacky alter ego returns to address love and longing through the eyes of Gas and Gulp regulars.

"Emergency Cabaret Relief: Haiti" Community Music Center, 544 Capp. Sfcmc.org. Mon, 7pm. $15-$20. Accidentally Double Booked Presents Jessica Coker, Soila Hughes, and Leanne Borghesi in a benefit for Partners in Health.

"How We First Met" Herbst Theatre, 401 Van Ness; 392-4400, www.howwefirstmet.com. Sat-Sun, 8pm. $25-$40. Real audience stories are spun into a comedy masterpiece in this one-of-a-kind show, now in its 10th year.

"I Heart Hamas: And Other Things I’m Afraid to Tell You" Off Market Theaters, 965 Mission; www.ihearthamas.com. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. $20. An American woman of Palestinian descent, San Francisco actor Jennifer Jajeh grew up with a kind of double consciousness familiar to many minorities. But hers—conflated and charged with the history and politics of the Middle East—arguably carried a particular burden. Addressing her largely non–Middle Eastern audience in a good-natured tone of knowing tolerance, the first half of her autobiographical comedy-drama, set in the U.S., evokes an American teen badgered by unwelcome difference but canny about coping with it. The second, set in her ancestral home of Ramallah, is a journey of self-discovery and a political awakening at once. The fairly familiar dramatic arc comes peppered with some unexpected asides—and director W. Kamau Bell nicely exploits the show’s potential for enlightening irreverence (one of the cleverer conceits involves a "telepathic Q&A" with the audience, premised on the predictable questions lobbed at anyone identifying with "the other"). The play is decidedly not a history lesson on the colonial project known as "the Israeli-Palestinian conflict" or, for that matter, Hamas. But as the laudably mischievous title suggests, Jajeh is out to upset some staid opinions, stereotypes and confusions that carry increasingly significant moral and political consequences for us all. (Avila)

"Justin Bond: Close to You" Castro Theatre, 429 Castro; 863-0611, www.thecastrotheatre.com. Sun, 8:15pm. $35-75. Accompanied by a lush 10-piece orchestra, the Tony nominee recreates sweet sounds from your favorite Carpenters hits. The evening also features the Thrillpeddlers as special guests.

"The Lieutenant Governor from the State of Confusion" Rrazz Room, Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason; 781-0306, www.therrazzroom.com. Mon, 8pm. Through Feb 22. $25. Will Durst is back with his quiver chock full of fresh topical barbs.

"Life Unfolding" NOHspace, 2840 Mariposa; www.brownpapertickets.com/event/95864. Fri-Sat, 8pm. $20-$100. This benefit performance for the Tamalpa Institute features the works of Dohee Lee, G Hoffman Soto, Iu-Hui Chua, and special guest artists.

"Love Bites: All That Jazz" Women’s Building, 3543 18th St; womensbuilding.org. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through Sat. $15-$30. The Lesbian/Gay Chorus of San Francisco presents its seventh annual Anti-Valentine’s Day cabaret and musical extravaganza.

"Marga’s Laugh Party" Café Du Nord, 2170 Market; 861-5016, www.cafedunord.com. Wed, 8pm. $10. DJ Chelsea Starr spins and host Marga Gomez presents some of the hottest acts in comedy.

"MediaARTS 2010: Algo-rhythms of heart/break/beats" Ninth Street Independent Film Center, 145 Ninth St; www.mediaarts2010.com. Fri, 7pm. $10-$20. Ninth Street Independent Film Center presents an exhibition of the intersection of emerging technology, performance, and the moving image attempting to compute what it means to love and lose.

"Mortified: Doomed Valentine’s Show" Make-Out Room, 3225 22nd St.; www.makeoutroom.com. Thurs-Fri, 8pm. $12-$15. Share the pain, awkwardness, and bad poetry associated with love as performers read from their teen angst artifacts.

"On the Periphery of Love: A Solo Performance Festival with Valentine’s Day Implications" StageWerx Theatre, 533 Sutter. www.stagewerx.com. Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 7pm, $15-$30. StageWerx presents five new visions of romance, featuring work by Martha Rynberg, Thao P. Nguyen, Zahra Noorbaksh, Bruce Pachtman, and Paolo Sambrano.

PianoFight Studio 250 at Off-Market, 965 Mission; www.painofight.com. Mon, 8pm. Through March 29. $20. The female-driven variety show Monday Night ForePlays returns with brand new sketches, dance numbers, and musical performances.

"Salute to the World Soccer Cup" Cocomo Café Club, 650 Indiana. 334-0106, www.friendsofbrazil.org. Sat, 9pm. $30. The Bay Area Brazilian Club cast their mystic and joyous spell for the 43rd Carnaval Ball.

"Strange Love" Actors Theatre, 855 Bush; 345-1287, www.natashamuse.com. Sun, 6:30pm. $10. The Valentine’s Day edition of "A Funny Night for Comedy" features Will Franken, Wegent and Page, and host Natasha Muse.

"Things We Made" Off-Market Theater, 965 Mission; www.thingswemade.com. Sat, 10:30pm. Ongoing. $20. The longest-running alternative comedy show premieres an all-new weekly show in its new home.

"Wegent and Page Draw the Line" The Dark Room, 2263 Mission; 401-7987, www.darkroomsf.com. Fri-Sat, 8pm, $10. Sammy Wegent and Allison Page present new comedic material about breaking up, breaking down, and breaking barriers.

Gas and Gulp regulars.


BAY AREA

Upright Citizens Brigade Pan Theater, 2135 Broadway, Oakl; www.pantheater.com. Fri, 8 and 9:10pm. Ongoing. $14-$18. Upright Citizens Brigade Touring Co. brings the NYC funny to Oakland with this improve comedy show with guest performing troupes.

"The Vagina Monologues" La Pena Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Ave, Berk; (510) 849-2568, www.lapena.org. Thurs, 8pm. Also Sun at The Warehouse. V-Day East Bay presents a two-night benefit reading of Eve Enselr’s award-winning play.

"Whipped" La Pena Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Ave, Berk; (510) 849-2568, www.lapena.org. Fri. $8-$12. Mango w/ Chile presents true life stories of love through music, spoken word, theater, dance, burlesque, drag, and video.


COMEDY

Annie’s Social Club 917 Folsom, SF; www.sfstandup.com. Tues, 6:30pm, ongoing. Free. Comedy Speakeasy is a weekly stand-up comedy show with Jeff Cleary and Chad Lehrman.

"All Star Comedy and More with Tony Sparks" SF Playhouse, 533 Sutter; 646-0776, www.comedyonthesquare.com. Sun, 8:30pm. Ongoing. SF’s favorite comedy host brings a showcase of the Bay’s best stand-up comedy and variety.

"Big City Improv" Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter; (510) 595-5597, www.bigcityimprov.com. Fri, 10pm, ongoing. $15-$20. Big City Improv performs comedy in the style of "Whose Line Is It Anyway?"

Brainwash 1122 Folsom; 861-3663. Thurs, 7pm, ongoing. Free. Tony Sparks hosts San Francisco’s longest running comedy open mike.

Club Deluxe 1511 Haight; 552-6949, www.clubdeluxesf.com. Mon, 9pm, ongoing. Free. Various local favorites perform at this weekly show.

Clubhouse 414 Mason; www.clubhousecomedy.com. Prices vary. Scantily Clad Comedy Fri, 9pm. Stand-up Project’s Pro Workout Sat, 7pm. Naked Comedy Sat, 9pm. Frisco Improv Show and Jam Sun, 7pm. Ongoing. Valentine’s Day special features Reggie Steele and JJ Johnson.

Cobbs 915 Columbus; 928-4320. Thurs, 8pm; Fri, 8 and 10:15pm. $20. Featuring "Arabs Gone Wild," including Dean Obeidallah, Aron Kader, and Maysoon Zayid. Also Robert Schimmel with Mark Pitta on Sat and Sun.

"Comedy Master Series" Blue Macaw, 2565 Mission; www.comedymasterseries.com. Mon, 6pm. Ongoing. $20. The new improv comedy workshop includes training by Debi Durst, Michael Bossier, and John Elk.

"Danny Dechi and Friends" Rockit Room, 406 Clement; 387-6343. Tues, 8pm. Free. Danny Dechi hosts this weekly comedy showcase through October.

"Frisco Fred’s Comedy Hour" Chancellor Hotel in the Luques Restaurant, 433 Powell; 646-0776, www.comedyonthesquare.com. Sat, 7 and 8:30pm. Through March 27. $25. Frisco Fred presents this fun-filled hour of comedy, magic, crazy stunts and special guests.

"Improv Society" Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter; www.improvsociety.com. Sat, 10pm, ongoing, $15. Improv Society presents comic and musical theater.

"Legwork!" Mama Calizo’s Voice Factory, 1519 Mission; www.brownpapertickets.com/event/96616. Fri, 8pm. New comedic work from Beth Lisick and Tara Jepsen, Kirk Read, and Erin Markey.

Punch Line San Francisco 444 Battery; www.punchlinecomedyclub.com. Featuring Grant Lyon on Wed and Dana Gould Fri-Sat.

Purple Onion 140 Columbus; (800) 838-3006, www.purpleonionlive.com.

Rrazz Room Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason; 781-0306, www.therrazzroom.com.

"Raw Stand-up Project SFCC, 414 Mason, Fifth Flr; www.sfcomedycollege.com. Sat, 7pm, ongoing. $12-15. SFCC presents its premier stand-up comedy troupe in a series of weekly showcases.

BAY AREA

"Comedy Off Broadway Oakland" Ms. Pearl’s Jam House, 1 Broadway, Oakl; (510) 452-1776, www.comedyoffbroadwayoakland.com. Thurs-Fri, 9pm. Ongoing. $8-$10. Comedians featured on Comedy Central, HBO, BET, and more perform every week.

"Identity Crisis Tour" Oracle Arena, 7000 Coliseum Way, Oakl; (510) 569-2121, www.coliseum.com. Sun, 5pm. $45.50. Celebrate Valentine’s Day with Jeff Dunham.

SPOKEN WORD
"Grateful Tuesday" Ireland’s 32, 3920 Geary; 386-6173, www.myspace.com/thegrasshoppersongs. Tues, 8pm. Ongoing. Grasshopper hosts this weekly open mic featuring folk, world, and country music.
"Literary Death Match" Elbo Room, 647 Valencia. Fri, 6:30pm. $5-$10. A lineup of all-star judges pit writers against each other.
"Writers with Drinks" Make-Oput Room, 3225 22nd St; www.writerswithdrinks.com. Sat, 7:30pm. $5-$10. Charlie Jane Anders hosts this spoken word variety show, this time featuring Vikram Chandra, Cherie Priest, James Rollins, Andrew Porter, and Derek Powazek.

The Sexy Professor speaks at City Lights

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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The Sexy Professor speaks at City Lights

Literary critic, Stanford professor, and sexy-brainy scholar Terry Castle will be speaking at City Lights Books on Tuesday, Feb. 9, about The Professor and Other Writings, a series of meditations on topics ranging from Art Pepper to the Polermo catacombs to Susan Sontag. When read together, the essays coalesce into a singular, fearless new memoir.

Castle has produced an incredible body of literary criticism and, in her work, she often explores the complicated relationship between literature and sex. Books like The Apparitional Lesbian and The Literature of Lesbianism examine depictions of love between women in the Western literatary canon. Boss Ladies, Watch Out: Essays on Women, Sex, and Writing investigates female sexuality in works by famous women writers.

But don’t let the lit theory put you off. Even those allegedly allergic to theory will enjoy the candid, intelligent essays in Castle’s latest work. Her intellectual gifts are obvious — even her informal pieces have the pleasing effect of making their reader feel smarter — but Castle remains accessible to a wide audience. In fact, her writing seems targeted at those who exist on the outskirts, or even outside, of the literary cognoscenti. Castle makes no secret of her distaste for the “preening and plumage display” of current day literary criticism, or what she calls “jargon-ridden pseudo-writing,” and her informal pepperings of middle- and low-brow references throughout The Professor add to Castle’s likableness. None of my college professors would ever (admittedly) discuss the “hotitude” of famous Hollywood stars; neither would they (admittedly) jam out to bass-bomping hip hop on their iPods.

The Professor is marketed as a memoir, but it reads more like a collection of prose pieces, each distinguished by their own specific ideas and themes. Though a touch gossipy, “Desperately Seeking Susan,” about Castle’s prickly friendship with Susan Sontag, is a delightful read. Near the essay’s end, the two women attend a dinner party at Marina Abromovic’s apartment also attended by (if this tells you anything) Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, and the “freaking-looking” singer from Fischerspooner. The disaster that ensues is a finely-rendered comedy of manners, equal parts hilarious and grim.

Castle’s “Que Modo Deum,” a collage posted on her blog

Castle touches on the work of jazz saxophonist Art Pepper, whose underrated genius is vaunted by jazz enthusiasts, in “My Heroin Christmas”. In “Travels With My Mom“, a short travelogue which can be read online, the author’s relationship with her mother is illuminated in a series of seemingly innocuous glimpses. The title-essay, “The Professor,” which was my favorite, is a searing reflection on sexual discovery, and details the romantic entanglements of Castle’s own college days, the most significant one being her relationship with a troubled female professor that arrives full circle, many years later, in a chance meeting that I refuse to spoil for you here.

The essays in this fine collection are personal to their author, but their focus is outwardly directed. They observe and describe, in rich personal detail, other things and other people. They are not a periscope view into Castle’s human psyche, lesbian psyche, or any psyche for that matter. Castle is far too tasteful to go there. In The Professor there is no hint of the solipsistic introspection or blubbering confessionalism that has gives bad name to the memoir form. Castle is generous with personal anecdotes, opinions, and history, but her subjective experiences are used to shed light on ideas that remain, while important to the author, wholly independent of any one person’s life. I enjoyed this collection immensely. 

Terry Castle
Tue/9, 7:30pm, free

City Lights Book Store

261 Columbus Ave. (at Broadway)

(415) 362-8193

www.citylights.com

The Professor and Other Writings
By Terry Castle
352 pages. HarperCollins.
$25.95

Trash Lit: Things are weird around ‘Mariposa’

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Editor’s note: Guardian Executive Editor Tim Redmond has a bad 30-year addiction to mystery/crime/thriller books. He’s decided that he may as well put this terrible habit to productive use by writing about these sometimes awful, sometimes entertaining and — on rare occasion — significant works of mass-market literature. Read his last installment here. 

mariposa.jpg

Mariposa
By Greg Bear
(Vanguard Press, 340 pages, $25.95)

By Tim Redmond

Good science fiction has a moral, of sorts. Frank Herbert wrote about the scary power of a charismatic leader. Robert Heinlein gave us the fun of free love and the lie of religion. William Gibson outlined the weird dangers of a digital society. My favorite sci-fi movie ever, RoboCop (1987), was all about the perils of privatizing public services.

Mariposa is part science fiction and part action thriller, and the mix works. I liked this book a lot – it’s got creepy tech advances — digital storage devices that dissolve in your blood; tattoos that allow you to exchange information by skin-to-skin contact; monitoring chips that follow your every move; roller bots; a new drug that makes you a near-legendary fighter and totally fucks up your brain – as well as a message that’s eerily relevant.

Mariposa‘s opening is bizarre. The first chapter seduces you in a way that reminds me of Neuromancer. It’s the second decade of the 21st century. Oil prices have collapsed, destabilizing much of the Middle East. The United States is $30 trillion in debt and the president has had to accept IMF-style international receivership. “And it’s all our fault,” one character notes. “We do hate paying taxes, and we do love our government services.”

And the news media? “The dwindling national press – those journalists who still worked for networks or newspapers or the five prime news sites and could afford to travel rather than just sit in front of a screen and suck coffee and pontificate on what others saw and wrote – was as worn out and discouraged as the rest of the nation.”

Most of Texas is no longer under effective federal control. The FBI is in the process of being dismantled.The real, emerging power in the nation, and perhaps soon the world, is the head of a giant private security company that got rich off military contracts. In fact, he’s trying to prove how powerful he is by orchestrating the death sentence of a 15-year-old kid who has the misfortune to be the son of a federal agent.

Into this nightmare step a handful of still-loyal FBI operatives working directly for the dying president, who has been shot with a bullet laced with deadly engineered proteins. They’re trying to rescue a deep cover agent planted in the Talos Corporation — someone who is trying to sneak the explosive data in the company’s files out of a tightly controlled compound. They’re also out to save the 15-year-old’s life before the Texas corrections system, which pretty much reports to Talos, gets to stick him with a lethal injection.

Syntobe proteins that turn Coca Cola syrup into bombs. Desert car chase with hellfire missiles in drone planes. Robot snakes retrieving blood laced with digital downloads. Slightly lame FBI sex. Wicked drug-addled martial arts fighting. A hero who fights off powerful sedatives to take out six guys with a pole ax. I have to say: This one goes down as one of the best action books of the last year.

This Week’s Picks

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WEDNESDAY (3rd)

 

FILM

SF Ocean Film Festival

The City by the Bay has a long history of film festivals. But it wasn’t until 2004 that one concentrated on this area’s oceanographic connections. Hosting more than 50 films, the San Francisco Ocean Film Festival has documentaries on marine life and environmental science, surfing videos, experimental and animated productions, and more. Crowd favorites include a program dedicated to sharks and a chance to meet the filmmakers who work among the denizens of the deep at an Aquarium of the Bay fundraiser. (Sean McCourt)

Various times (Sun/7), $8–$12

(filmmakers reception, $60; festival and VIP passes, $85–$175)

Theatre 39 and Aquarium of the Bay

Embarcadero and Beach, SF.

(415) 561-6251

www.oceanfilmfest.org

DANCE

Shantala Shivalingappa

Rarely seen in the Bay Area, Kuchipudi is one of the great classical Indian dance forms. Taking its name from the village in which it was “born” in the 15th century, it’s related to Bharatanatyam but is more theatrical, using fast and often airborne footwork. Shantala Shivalingappa is a Madras-born, Paris-raised dancer who has worked with Maurice Bejart, Peter Brook, and Pina Bausch. Her piece Gamaka — one definition of which refers to Indian music’s shimmering quality — is a solo that Shivalingappa developed with her four musicians. One hopes it includes a part in which the Kuchipudi dancer performs on the rims of a brass plate. (Rita Felciano)

8 p.m, $27–$39

Herbst Theatre

401 Van Ness, SF

(415) 392-2545

www.performances.org

MUSIC

Doug Carn and Black Jazz Reunion

In the early 1970s, pianist Gene Russell founded Black Jazz Records in Oakland. Branching away from traditional jazz, the label was inspired by African-American political and spiritual movements taking place at the time. One of its most successful acts was pianist and composer Doug Carn. Better known as half of the duo Doug and Jeane Carn, he has sold more records than Dave Brubeck and Ramsey Lewis. Introduced to music at a young age by his mother and an uncle, Carn has studied piano, alto sax, and also oboe. His adaptations of Coltrane’s classic “A Love Supreme” and Horace Silver’s “Peace” are creative and lyrical. (Lilan Kane)

8 and 10 p.m, $10–$18

Yoshi’s

510 Embarcadero West, Oakl.

(510) 238-9200

www.yoshis.com

THURSDAY (4th)

 

DANCE/PERFORMANCE

Luxury Items

Monique Jenkinson, a.k.a. Fauxnique, is a master of lipsync. But I’m excited to hear what she has to say in her new show. In between the bravura dynamic dance moments of Faux Real, Jenkinson made her past into present-time conversation with the audience, and did so with offhand ease. This time, she’s digging into cultural obsessions. I’ve heard that Luxury Items includes a eulogy for newspapers — from the perspective of a hoarder. (Johnny Ray Huston)

8 p.m. (through Feb 21), $10–$20

CounterPULSE

1310 Mission, SF

(415) 863-9834

www.odcdance.org

TALK/LECTURE

“After Dark: Sexplorations — Exploring Nature’s Reproductive Strategies “

Throw the word sex in front of any event title and folks will flock. So maybe the people at the Exploratorium are on to something with the latest installment of its “After Dark” lecture series. For one night, anyone old enough to legally down a good old glass of hooch can learn why Viagra only works for men, whether it’s possible to orgasm with just your thoughts, and how sex toys do their magic. Think of it as the sex ed class you always wanted to take but never did. Mary Roach, author of Bonk, will be on hand to pass on some expertise. (Elise-Marie Brown)

6 p.m., $15 (free for members)

McBean Theater

Exploratorium

3601 Lyon, SF

(415) 561-0363

www.exploratorium.edu

FILM

Sacred Places

Let those critics who would universalize their disillusionment (however well-founded) into “death of cinema” bromides see Jean-Marie Téno’s marvelous essay-film Sacred Places. A few minutes observing Nanema Boubacar’s neighborhood cine-club, located in a poor district of Ouagadougou, and they might let up. Like Agnès Varda, Téno prefers pondering large questions on the move. Here, he reexamines the founding principles of African cinema in a split-portrait of Boubacar, a struggling entrepreneur (in Burkina Faso, too, it’s more difficult to procure African titles than the latest Hollywood blockbuster), and Jules Cesar Bamouni, a djembe maker who draws the same links between filmmaking and the griot tradition that were so important to Ousmane Sembène. (Max Goldberg)

7 p.m., $9.50

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-1412

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

FILM

Movie Night at SFO

Like most people in the Bay Area, I’ve only gone to San Francisco International Airport to pick someone up or fly away (usually to a warmer destination). Basically I go there to handle business, maybe grab a bite, and leave. But now this aviation destination is giving a reason to visit sans luggage — free movie nights.Tonight SFO screens The Legend of Pancho Barnes and the Happy Bottom Riding Club. The 2009 documentary delves into the work of Florence “Pancho” Barnes, Hollywood’s first female stunt pilot. Writer-producer Nick Spark and director Amanda Pope will be on hand. (Brown)

6 p.m., free

SFO Aviation Museum

SFO, International Terminal, Level 3

(650) 821-9911

www.flysfo.com/web/page/orphan/movie

DANCE

Ronald K. Brown/Evidence

Nick Cave is back. Sort of. If you missed Ronald K. Brown’s response to Cave’s mysterious masked figures last year, here is another opportunity. The work, now called Journey, opens this remarkable dancer’s return engagement. Brown’s work thrives on an underground stream of spirituality. He started his Evidence company at 19, and his voice and his polyglot dance vocabulary have only become more personal and burnished. Brown is very much a 21st century artist. New on this program will be the all-male 2008 Two-Year Old Gentlemen, which explores the relationships that men develop with each other. The gorgeous 1999 piece Grace has a good chance to become Evidence’s Revelations. (Felciano)

8 p.m. (through Sat/6), $30

Novellus Theater

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 392-2545

www.ybca.org

THEATER

Fabrik: The Legend of M. Rabinowitz

Jim Henson made a mark with his lighthearted use of puppets, or should I say Muppets. But Wakka Wakka Productions, a visual theater company from New York City, is a far cry from Kermit the Frog. Instead of presenting mirthful sketches, this nonprofit uses hand-and-rod puppets to unfold dark tales of valor and resilience. Inspired by Yiddish and Nordic folktales, Fabrik tells the story of Moritz Rabinowitz, a Polish Jew who publicly voiced his opposition to anti-Semitism during the rise of Nazi Germany. (Brown)

8 p.m. (through Sun/28), $20–$34 (pay-what-you-can Thurs/4)

The Jewish Theatre San Francisco

470 Florida, SF

(415) 292-1233

www.tjt-sf.org

FRIDAY (5th)

 

EVENT

San Francisco Beer Week

The Bay Area is a treasure trove of microbreweries and their thirsty followers — a perfect combination for San Francisco Beer Week, which, despite its city-centric name, hosts events throughout the greater Bay Area, including a variety of tastings, food pairings, meet-and-greets with brewers, and live entertainment. The festival kicks off with an opening gala at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Over the next 10 days, breweries including 21st Amendment, Beach Chalet, Speakeasy, Seabright, Santa Cruz Mountain, Anchor, and Thirsty Bear share their best suds. (McCourt)

5–9 p.m. opening gala, $55–$65

Various locations (through Feb. 14), prices vary

www.sfbeerweek.org

EVENT

Wonderland: A Tim Burton Ball

If only I could live in Tim Burton’s world, with misfit heroes and a Danny Elfman soundtrack. I’d cast Winona Ryder as my best friend, Helena Bonham-Carter as my kooky artistic mentor, and Johnny Depp as … well, you know. I’d be darkly beautiful and I’d dance beneath ice sculpture snow. Too bad movies aren’t reality. Nonetheless, Brian Gardner — founder of Swing Goth and lover of all things modern and macabre — is doing his best to close that gap. This week he hosts an ambitious event dedicated to Burton, just in time for the media blitz that’s about to have everyone saying Alice rather than Avatar. (Molly Freedenberg)

9:30 p.m. $15–$20 ($5 extra for pre-event dance class at 7:30 p.m.)

DNA Lounge

375 11th St, SF.

(415) 626-1409

www.dnalounge.com

MUSIC

Irma Thomas and the Professionals

Do you know what it means to be the Soul Queen of New Orleans? Big Easy native Irma Thomas has been pouring her heart into the soul circuit for the past five decades. She celebrates this half-century anniversary with the Rounder Records release The Soul Queen of New Orleans: 50th Anniversary Celebration. People love and know Thomas for tunes, but she also opened her own club, Lion’s Den, in the 1980s. She headlined frequently there until Hurricane Katrina brought disaster. In 2007, Thomas’s After The Rain (Rounder/UMGD) brought her first Grammy. (Kane)

8 and 10 p.m. (also Sat 2/6), $30

Yoshi’s

1330 Fillmore, SF

(415) 655-5600

www.yoshis.com

VISUAL ART

“Article X”

The starting point for the artworks in this show is not the X, but the X’s center: that crucial yet vapid intersection where form meets function. It is here that photographer David Trautrimas and sculptural artist Kristina Lewis originate with the ordinary: household kitchen appliances and high heels, respectively. Lewis’ reassembled high heel sculptures, which hint at sculptural artist Brian Jungen’s series of Nike Air Jordans-turned-aboriginal masks, tease and fray the ends of X. (Spencer Young)

5–8 p.m. (continues through March 20), free

Johansson Projects

2300 Telegraph, Oakl.

(510) 444-9140

www.johanssonprojects.net

SATURDAY (6th)

 

MUSIC

Dawes

In recording his group Dawes’ debut album North Hills (Ato Records/Red), Taylor Goldsmith said that he wanted the inherent quality of the instruments to come across. Perhaps the greatest instrument Dawes has is Goldsmith’s voice, which is infused with a soulful timbre. Influenced by Otis Redding and James Brown, Dawes produces a warm country rock that incorporates tight drumming from Goldsmith’s younger brother Griffin. The sound feels initially familiar, and carries a hint of early 1970s Creedence. But with personal lyrics and a lush mix of instrumentation, Dawes manages to pull in the listener. Which is good for everyone. (Adam Lesser)

With Cory Chisel and Wandering Sons, Jason Boesel

9 p.m., $12

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com

MUSIC

Broun Fellinis play Zeppelin

Broun Fellinis has been bending genres, defying categorization, and blazing artistic trails since their foundation in 1991. Deeply embedded within the creative landscape of our fair city, this righteous jazz trio is known for conjuring acoustic spaces that transcend genre. My question is, what will it do with Led Zeppelin? When you match Zeppelin’s brand of distinctive debauchery in the musical realm with the imaginative hands of Professor Boris Karnaz, Black Edgar Kenyatta, and Kirk the Redeemer, the result can only be good, maybe great, if not historic. What? You don’t like cool stuff? Sure you do. You should go. (D. Scot Miller)

10 p.m., $10

Coda Jazz Supper Club

1710 Mission St, SF

(415) 551-CODA

www.codalive.com

MONDAY (8th)

 

MUSIC/EVENT

Marcus Books’ 50th Anniversary Fundraiser

Literacy is a gift most take for granted. It allows you read about this event right now. You can help other people learn how to read by attending this fundraiser, a music and literature showcase that benefits Marcus Books’ Scholar Book Club nonprofit literacy program. The evening’s host, spoken word artist Scorpio Blues, has been featured on BET, on HBO’s Def Poetry, and is also the CEO of Hot Water Cornbread, a spoken word and entertainment management company in Oakland. Her group the Hot Water Cornbread All Star Poets performs as well. (Kane)

With Blayze, Pop Lyfe, HWCB Poets

8 p.m., $15–$20

Yoshi’s

1330 Fillmore at Eddy, SF

(415) 655-5600

www.marcusbookstores.com

www.yoshis.com

MUSIC

St. Vincent

St. Vincent’s Jane-of-all-trades Annie Clark cut her teeth playing with the Polyphonic Spree and Sufjan Stevens, so there is no doubt she has the experience to deliver a live show worthy of her sophomore album Actor (4AD). Tender and tough, Clark may appear to draw from the singer-songwriter well, but dashes of menace and complexity separate her intricate pop songs from run-of-the-mill balladry. Considering Actor was written and recorded by Clark using GarageBand, here’s your chance to enjoy the lush tunes with a full ensemble. (Peter Galvin)

With Wildbirds and Peacedrums

8 p.m., (doors: 7 p.m.), $20

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

www.gamh.com

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

Robert B. Parker: The king is dead

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By Tim Redmond

Damn, I haven’t been this bummed since the death of John D. MacDonald.. SFGate reports today that Robert B. Parker collapsed at his desk; the king of trash-lit detective novels is dead at 77.

The obits will talk about Parker in the same breath as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, and that’s true, as far as it goes. But in terms of period writing and a continuing-series character who was attractive as much for his faults at for his good deeds, Parker and MacDonald had a lot more in common. Like Travis McGee, MacDonald’s knight in slightly tarnished armor, Parker’s Spenser was a tough guy with a sense of humor about himself, someone who cared (almost despite his best instincts) about humanity and wasn’t bitter, angry, lonely or needlessly violent.

McGee was a creature of Florida in the Sixties, a tanned and restless womanizer who lived on a houseboat and practically existed for casual sex. His attitude toward women was often described as patronizing, and in the early works, the girls are mostly there for McGee’s amusement, but that changes toward the end; McGee falls deeply in love in the Green Ripper, has a daughter who changes his life — and turns out to be not such a sexist pig after all. The McGee books are also packed with environmental wisdom and a sharp description of the ugly side of development-crazy Florida.

And it may not seem such a big deal now, but when MacDonald started writing in the 1950s, the idea the a main character in a tough-guy American novel would have a best friend who was Jewish was something unusual.

And then there’s Spenser. He came along in the 1980s, but from the start was a creature of the modern world, a Boston private detective who — as much as anyone in that genre could ever be — was a liberal. His best buddy was a black guy who drank fine champagne (and, of course, totally kicked ass). His life partner was a Harvard-trained psychologist, and he never fooled around on her; in fact, in many of the books, he rejects the advances of other women, noting that he is, and for all his life will be, “the main squeeze of Susan Silverman.” He has gay characters who are as tough as he is and get the same respect as anyone who can swing a mean fist and shoot a gun.

And nobody wrote like John D. MacDonald — except possibly Robert B. Parker.

So Spenser is gone. Boston, and American literature, will never be the same.

Shopping

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Shopping

BEST INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORE; BEST USED BOOKSTORE

Green Apple

With thousands of dirt-cheap books, CDs, and DVDs, Green Apple is worth visiting for the witty staff picks alone.

506 Clement, SF. (415) 387-2272, www.greenapplebooks.com

Best Independent Bookstore runners up: Books, Inc., City Lights

Best Used Bookstore runners up: Dog-Eared Books, Aardvark

BEST COMIC BOOK STORE

Isotope

Mainstream comics are represented at Isotope, but its raison d’être is small-press, independent, and self-published varieties.

326 Fell, SF. (415) 621-6543, www.isotopecomics.com

Runners up: Whatever, Al’s Comics

BEST MAGAZINE SELECTION

Fog City News

Nibble designer chocolates while you sift through a staggering selection of magazines, including more than 700 foreign titles.

455 Market, SF. (415) 543-7400, www.fogcitynews.com

Runners up: Issues, Farley’s

BEST SPECIALTY BOOKSELLER

Borderlands

This Mission District shop, specializing in fantasy, horror, and science fiction, hosts an author nearly every week.

866 Valencia, SF. (415) 824-8203, www.borderlands-books.com

Runners up: Babylon Falling, Get Lost

BEST PLACE TO BUY VINYL; BEST PLACE TO BUY CDS

Amoeba Music

A Bay Area institution, Amoeba features a formidable vinyl collection and bargain bins overflowing with cheap used CDs.

1855 Haight, SF. (415) 831-1200; 2455 Telegraph, Berk. (510) 549-1125; www.amoeba.com

Best Place to Buy Vinyl runners up: Grooves, Open Mind

Best Place to Buy CDs runners up: Rasputin, Streetlight Records

BEST PLACE TO RENT MOVIES

Le Video

Conceived when the Parisian owner couldn’t find the cult and foreign films she craved, Le Video is known for its large, eclectic inventory.

1231 Ninth Ave., SF. (415) 566-3606, www.levideo.com

Runners up: Lost Weekend, Faye’s

BEST CLOTHING STORE (WOMEN)

Ambiance

Ambiance junkies love the store’s dedicated staff and massive selection, stretching across several budget octaves and featuring brands like Free People, BCBG, and Betsey Johnson.

1458 Haight, SF. (415) 552-5095; 3985 24th St., SF. (415) 647-7144; 1864 Union, SF. (415) 923-9797;

Runners up: Crossroads Trading Co., Brownies Vintage

www.ambiancesf.com

BEST CLOTHING STORE (MEN)

Indie Industries

The pared-down Berkeley storefront features prints, graphic tees, hoodies, and dresses by in-house artisans, plus anime-inspired kitsch.

2003 Milvia, Berk. (510) 549-3285, www.indieindustries.com

Runners up: Cable Car Clothiers, Five and Diamond

BEST CLOTHING STORE (KIDS)

Chloe’s Closet

Visit Chloe’s for the big selection, sweet Bernal Heights location, and homey atmosphere that’s earned it accolades four years running.

451 Cortland, SF. (415) 642-3300, www.chloescloset.com

Runners up: Little Fish, Pumpkin

BEST LOCAL DESIGNER


Nicacelly: Best Local Designer
GUARDIAN PHOTO BY MATTHEW REAMER

Nicacelly

Nicacelly’s designs are as colorful and eclectic as San Francisco itself — imagine a schizophrenic geisha sightseeing in Thailand while moonlighting as a hip-hop DJ. You can find her styles at True, Upper Playground, and Density, among other locations.

www.nicacelly.com

Runners up: Linda Pham, Sunhee Moon

BEST VINTAGE CLOTHING STORE

Brownies Vintage

Brownies has an unusual specialty: deadstock vintage that’s never been washed or worn. The unassuming shop also carries new styles by local and independent designers.

2001 Milvia, Berk. (510) 548-5955, www.brownies-vintage.com

Runners up: La Rosa, Painted Bird

BEST THRIFT STORE

Thrift Town

Thrift Town’s not your tame little vintage boutique — it’s a massive beast of a thrift store, with a huge selection and dizzyingly low prices.

2101 Mission, SF. (415) 861-1132, www.thrifttown.com

Runners up: Community Thrift, Out of the Closet

BEST SHOE STORE

Shoe Biz

If Kelly of YouTube fame were to shop at any of these footwear outlets, he/she could have only one response: these shoes rule.

1446 Haight, SF. (415) 864-0990; 877 Valencia, SF. (415) 550-8655; 3810 24th St., SF. (415) 821-2528,

www.shoebizsf.com

Runners up: Gimme Shoes, Rabat

BEST FURNITURE STORE

Propeller

Propeller mixes whimsy, beauty, and function in its showroom, featuring items like ceramic deer-head wall hangings, a chair made to look duct-taped, and dishes that look like they’re in motion.

555 Hayes, SF. (415) 701-7767, www.propellermodern.com

Runners up: Zonal, Monument

BEST VINTAGE FURNITURE STORE

Monument

Perfect for buying your home’s centerpiece item or simply getting inspiration, Monument has an impressive selection of modern and deco furniture.

572 Valencia, SF. (415) 861-9800, www.monument.1stdibs.com

Runners up: The Apartment, X-21

BEST FLEA MARKET

Alemany Flea Market

Smaller than Alameda’s but more charming, the Sunday Alemany market is a haven for hipsters seeking ironic art, vintage housewares, old tools, and antique art-projects-to-be.

100 Alemany, SF. (415) 647-2043

Runners up: Alameda, Ashby

BEST HARDWARE STORE

Cole Hardware

Friendly staff, an impressive selection, and convenient locations have made this independently owned shop a Bay Area favorite since 1920.

956 Cole, SF. (415) 753-2653; 3312 Mission, SF. (415) 647-8700; 70 Fourth St., SF. (415) 777-4400

2254 Polk, SF. (415) 674-8913; www.colehardware.com

Runners up: Brownie’s, Cliff’s

BEST INDEPENDENT TOY STORE

Ambassador Toys

A wonderland of toys, puzzles, coloring books, vintage race cars, collectible dolls, and other unique gifts for kids, Ambassador further charms shoppers with free gift wrapping.

186 West Portal, SF. (415) 759-8697; 2 Embarcadero Center, lobby level, SF.

(415) 345-8697, www.ambassadortoys.com

Runners up: The Ark, Mr. Mopps

BEST SHOP FOR PARENTS-TO-BE

Natural Resources

Encouraging mindfulness in pregnancy and child rearing, Natural Resources is an eco-boutique as well as an educational resource.

1367 Valencia, SF. (415) 550-2611, www.naturalresourcesonline.com

Runners up: Day One, Chloe’s Closet

BEST PET SHOP

Bernal Beast

Locals love Bernal Beast’s courteous staff, merchandise selection, unique treats (antlers as a chew toy!), and fantastic raw food section.

509 Cortland, SF. (415) 643-7800, www.bernalbeast.com

Runners up: Best in Show, Noe Valley Pet Co.

BEST QUIRKY SPECIALTY STORE

Paxton Gate

A more eclectic selection of bones, stones, taxidermy, rare plants, and oddball collectibles than Paxton’s could only exist in a gothic novel.

824 Valencia, SF. (415) 824-1872, www.paxtongate.com

Runners up: Heartfelt, Wishbone

BEST SPORTING GOODS STORE

Sports Basement

Whether it’s yoga mats, running shorts, tennis rackets, or basketballs you need, this is the place to get them — and often at warehouse prices.

1590 Bryant, SF. (415) 575-3000; 610 Mason, SF. (415) 437-0100; www.sportsbasement.com

Runners up: See Jane Run, Lombardi’s

BEST PLACE TO BUY CAMPING GEAR

REI

It’s difficult to find a retailer with a better selection of outdoor gear, from trek shoes to white-water rafting oars — and the return policy for members is unmatched.

840 Brannan, SF. (415) 934-1938, www.rei.com

Runners up: Sports Basement, Wilderness Exchange

BEST PLACE TO BUY BIKES AND GEAR

Mike’s Bikes

Mike’s does sell bikes and gear, but it’s best known and loved for its knowledgeable, reliable, and friendly service staff.

1233 Howard, SF. (415) 241-2453, www.mikesbikes.com Valencia Cyclery, American Cyclery

BEST ECO-FRIENDLY RETAILER

Rainbow Grocery

Featuring organic produce at good prices, natural bath and body products, and a selection of vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, and other specialty items, Rainbow pleases a full spectrum of shoppers.

1745 Folsom, SF. (415) 863-0620, www.rainbowgrocery.org

Runners up: Elephant Pharmacy, Spring

Shopping — Editors Picks

BEST SUI, SHARP AND SWEET


Sui Generis: Best Sui, Sharp and Sweet
GUARDIAN PHOTO BY SAMANTHA BERG

Despite the vast numbers of stylish males who haunt our fair burg, shopping for menswear in San Francisco can be a real downer. You’re either pummeled with dopey high-end “designer” street labels à la G-Star or forced to piece together a credible look from scattershot resale sources — not a bad option in itself, except that every other subculturally fashion-conscious Y-chromosomer is usually elbowing you out of the way to get to the good stuff. Enter Sui Generis, a boutique of impeccably vetted men’s vintage wear on Church Street (another location, featuring dressier consignment duds, recently opened on Market Street). The Generis gentlemen hand-select a dossier of ultrasharp hand-me-down duds that poke the up-on-it eye with longing — rare and perfect tees, plaids of fondest dreams, jeans that scream “do me,” fedoras, scarves, footwear, more — and force us to re-evaluate our look every time we glance up at its display windows. A good thing, then, that Sui’s also manageably affordable. And one-of-a-kind cache is part of the value: no chance of running into your twin from Rolo or Nomads, here.

218 Church, SF. (415) 436-9661; 2265 Market, SF. (415) 437-2265, www.myspace.com/suigeneris_sfo

BEST PLACE TO FIND RARE NUTS

Sure, Valencia Cyclery has a whole store full of bikes, locks, tools, lubricants, and clothes at their 1077 Valencia showroom, but what makes them so magical is the 1065 Valencia repair shop. They opened in 1985, which means if you need a roller cam on an early Suntour mountain bike brake, a rebuild kit for a Sturmey Archer 3 speed hub, or just a hard-to-find nut with an odd thread pitch, you’re stoked. The back rooms have shelves and drawers full of every imaginable wingding and doohickey for your two-wheeled best friend — and if what you need isn’t there, the manager will order it. The mechanics are actually people you’d trust to work on your bike, not ham-handed hacks with their thumbs on backwards. And best of all, they explain things in plain English, not cooler-than-thou biker-ese.

1065 and 1077 Valencia, SF. (415) 550-6600, www.valenciacyclery.com


Sara Brownell and Nici Williams of
Brew Holster Cult: Best Beer Helmet
GUARDIAN PHOTO BY SAMANTHA BERG

BEST BEER HELMET UPGRADE

You’d think hipsters would’ve come up with an answer to beer helmets ages ago. But it wasn’t until saucy AC/DShe rock ‘n’ roll vixens Nici and Sarah began to face technical tippling difficulties at their shows — including drenched T-shirts and wet amps — that the Brew Holster was born. The studded leather gun sling, created by the girls in their backyard chop shop, kept the rockers’ drinks close and off their clothes while still looking badass. So how to join the Brew Holster Cult? Simply buy one off the Web site and wear it to backyard BBQs, outdoor concerts, all-night barhops, or wherever you need to rock out with your cock out or jam out with your clam out — without losing your booze. Brew it to it!

www.brewholstercult.com

BEST FARM-FRESH FASHION

Quaint, antique- and decor-store-lined Jackson Square got a little chicer — and a little more fashionista-friendly — when Carrots moved into the gracious hood. Sisters Melissa and Catie Grimm named their sublime boutique, tongue firmly placed in cheek, after the petite veggies that built their family’s business, Grimmway. Yet we couldn’t be further from the farm amid Carrots’ lofty yet elegant, European-inspired mix of antiques and industrial decor touches. Visitors are welcome to sip an espresso beneath the zinc 19th-century chandelier while browsing the wares of such covetable young designers as Thakoon, Stella McCartney, Narcisco Rodriguez, Vanessa Bruno, and Peter Som. Men can also find fashion respite courtesy of such desirables as Band of Outsiders, Obedient Sons, and Rag & Bone. The free mini carrot-cake cupcake isn’t your only reward for stopping by and discovering the ideal piece.

843 Montgomery, SF. (415) 834-9040, www.sfcarrots.com

BEST ONE-STOP MAELSTROM OF METAL

Chances are, if you’re at all familiar with the Bay Area metal scene, you’ve crossed paths with Shaxul, proprietor of Shaxul Records. In addition to distributing and releasing local and rare metal albums, Shaxul hosts a monthly radio show on KUSF (all-metal, natch) and runs a snug storefront on Haight Street, boldly perched opposite the megasize Amoeba Records. The walls are black and decorated with all manner of posters and T-shirts (including a particularly rad High on Fire tee that is sold out on every Internet vendor you might think of). The shelves are packed with vinyl (them things you put on a record player, kids!), CDs, DVDs, and more. And you ain’t gonna find no wimpy selections here: Shaxul almost exclusively stocks bands with names that’d scare your grandma, with brutal sounds to match. Both current (Saros, Hammers of Misfortune, Asunder) and classic (Death, Exodus, Testament) acts are well represented. Emo kids stay home! Everyone else, horns up.

1816 Haight, SF. (415) 831-5334, www.shaxulrecords.com

BEST VOODOO NOSE CANDY

Helen Keller once said, “Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived.” Which may be true, but she forgot to add that it can also be used to accumulate money, secure a long life, and get back at your ex for blowing your housemate. The aromatic candles, incense, and powders at Yoruba Botanica, a Santeria store in the Mission District, have been imbued with a potent form of South American sorcery, so choose your scents wisely. You don’t want to mistakenly buy a death candle for your arthritic grandmother, or some romance dust for your creepy bi-curious roommate. A consultation with one of the women who run Yoruba Botanica will ensure you get the correct smell for your purposes. And for a small fee, they’ll take you in back, read your fortune, and maybe even tell you how to score more ass.

998 Valencia, SF. (415) 826-4967

BEST NOMADIC HIPSTER BOUTIQUE

The Mission Indie Mart, a roaming thrift store, local design showcase, and barbecue that takes place monthly in backyards and at dive bars throughout the Mission District was dreamt up by Kelly Malone, a tattooed hipster chick with three lifelong obsessions: DIY fashion, hard drinking, and good times. Sadly, while her hobbies did wonders for her social life, they caused quite a stir at the Gap, where Malone had been working for more than 10 years. So she set up her own business. Her brainchild has become a staple of Mission dwelling: a monthly opportunity to mingle with artists, musicians, fashion designers, misfits, and fall-down drunks like the founder herself, whose hourly announcements at MIM evolve throughout the day from straightforward information to inebriated performance art. Her best line to date: “The bathrooms are in the back, the T-shirts are in the corner, and the vodka is in my belly. Now come on stage and let’s get naked, bitches. Wooo!”

www.indie-mart.com

BEST BONBON BAR

Charlie’s chocolate factory may be pure fiction, but Miette Confisserie is pure magic. This Hayes Valley confectioner, sister to the Ferry Building’s Miette Patisserie, brings European decadence and childlike devotion to the candy-shop concept. Walls are lined floor-to-ceiling with apothecary jars filled with imported boiled sweets, Dutch licorice, saltwater taffy, fine chocolates, and buttery caramels — all of which can be packaged in custom boxes tied with satin ribbons. But you don’t have to take your treats home. Miette hosts children’s birthday parties, complete with ballerinas, storytelling, and pony rides. Not a breeder? Adults can play too, with private evening fetes featuring champagne and cotton candy. Either option is ideal, considering Miette’s decor is as winsome as its sweets: if the perfectly salted walnut shortbread doesn’t charm you, the black-and-white checkerboard floor surely will.

449 Octavia, SF. (415) 626-6221

BEST WAY TO LEAVE A PARTY WITHOUT YOUR CLOTHES

Alternative economies sound nice in political lectures at the University of California, Santa Cruz, but they rarely thrive in real life. Sure, there are little free markets that crop up in cities across the world, but they’re usually full of questionable scavengers, dirty hippies, and slumming rich kids temporarily rebelling against “the Man.” And then there’s the stuff they trade — the idea that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure just doesn’t hold water when you see the usual pile of broken plates, outdated VCRs, and defunct Web site promo T-shirts. But thanks to the hipsters behind SwapSF, one experimental trade economy seems to be working. Their secret? Alcohol and music, of course. SwapSF is a seasonal warehouse party that charges $5 and a bag of clothes for entry. It’s a small price to pay for access to dope beats, an open bar, and all the cool togs your friends bought and never wore.

www.swapsf.com.

BEST FRENCH WINE WAREHOUSE

Many people are frightened of French wine, particularly the indecipherable and austere-looking labels — but not you. When your friend goes to a Halloween costume party as an uncorked bottle of Château d’Yqem, you are savvy enough to be amused. You are also savvy enough to know where to find deals on French (and other European) wines — which can still be found despite the dollar’s collapse against the euro: The Wine House. The warehousey setting on the northern foot of Potrero Hill assures you that it’s not ambience or fancy shelving you’re paying for. The staff is knowledgeable, helpful, and friendly. And there are plenty of offerings from Burgundy, Bordeaux, and lesser-known winegrowing regions, especially those in the south of France. Many wines are priced near $5 a bottle, making them competitive with Trader Joe’s plonk. Best of all are regular case discounts, from 10 percent on up, along with occasional case specials (often on fine Côtes du Rhône) even more drastically discounted.

129 Carolina, SF. (415) 355-9463, www.winesf.com

BEST ECO-SPOT FOR NOE TOTS

Ensure the longevity of both your children and the world they’ll grow up in at Mabuhay Kids, an eco-friendly baby boutique in Noe Valley named for the Filipino phrase for “long life.” Sporting eco-friendly, safe, and stylish attire from global and local designers, Mabuhay (pronounced “ma-boo-hi”) is a must for JAKC’s organic baby blankets, Stubby Pencil Studio’s soy crayons, and much more. Why trick out your toddlers with gun-toting G.I. Joes or sweatshop OshKosh B’Gosh overalls when you can provide them with sustainably harvested rubber tree tricycles or duds from Ses Petites Mains, who make organic French fashions for little ladies? In light of massive baby product recalls, this is a shop whose wares you can trust — whether your moppet’s got ’em on her bod or in his mouth. Plus, for Noe dwellers, it’s just one biodiesel stroller ride away.

195 Church, SF. (415) 970-0369, www.mabuhaykids.com

BEST MASTERS OF MYSTERY

A bookstore that sells mysteries shouldn’t be clean and well-lighted. It should look and smell and feel like it came out of the dark streets of Victorian London. And although the San Francisco Mystery Bookstore isn’t by any means dingy or dank, it’s got that wonderful cluttered feel of a place owned by someone who loves books and tolerates a bit of chaos. There are paperback mysteries everywhere — in the shelves, on the windowsill, stacked up by the cash register, tucked away in the back. They’re brand-new, used, or very old and valuable. There are selections by famous authors and some by writers you’ve never heard of. And best of all, the people who work there are as obsessed with whodunits as we are — they seem to have read everything by everybody and are happy to talk, recommend, critique, or chat. Or are they?

4175 24th St., SF. (415) 282-7444, www.sfmysterybooks.com

BEST BARGAIN BEATER MOTORCYCLES


Bike Yard: Best Bargain Beater Motorcycles
GUARDIAN PHOTO BY SAMANTHA BERG

The Bike Yard is every would-be sick boy’s dream come true: a used bike dealership, run by Francisca Feribert, a petite German mechanic who repairs totaled motorcycles and sells ’em cheap. Surrounded by ivy-covered brick warehouses and highway overpasses, the Yard feels like a piece of the country plopped down on the east side of Potrero Hill. Motorcycles and scooters in various states of repair look like they’ve been poured into the cyclone-fenced lot, where they’ve washed up against the sides of a gypsy caravan-style wagon, a small, corrugated metal workshop, racks of tires, and a tattered, sun-bleached Winnebago — all protected by Feribert’s guard goose, Helga. This licensed dealership even handles registration and sells helmets, so you can get riding as soon as you’ve got the scrill. Plus, beaters are especially good for first-timers, who need not wreck a $1,000 ride the first time they drop it.

851 Tennessee, SF. (415) 821-3941, www.bikeyardsf.com

BEST BANANA REPUBLIC REPLACEMENT

If you like Banana Republic’s simple, well-fitting, flattering clothes but not its reputation for using child labor and cutting down old-growth forests, you’ll love Sunhee Moon. This independent local designer with a “less is more” attitude uses such high quality fabrics and tailored, classic designs that you’ll hardly bat an eyelash at the price tags (tops run between $48 and $118). Women of all body types can find basics in simple, solid colors that somehow manage to maintain a hip, San Francisco-style sensibility. These are cute, modern clothes for home-based creative types who want to feel a bit dressed up, or for professionals working in the Financial District — who are probably the people who can afford to shop here regularly. But if you’re sick of ill-fitting T-shirts and corporate-shopping guilt, an occasional splurge at Moon is well worth the sacrifice.

2059 Union; 3167 16th St.; 1833 Fillmore, SF. (415) 922-1800, www.sunheemoon.com

BEST ORGANIC GUYLINER

Whether you’re headed to Club Meat at DNA Lounge, a Fall Out Boy concert, or simply a party full of squares where you’ll be the token “edgy” guy, there’s nothing to make a man feel sexy like a smudge of black kohl around the eyes. But who wants to defile his delicate emo lids with chemical-laden mainstream makeup? Not you. That’s where Pharmaca Integrative Pharmacy comes in. This Cole Valley cosmetic emporium features shelf after shelf and wall after wall of beauty products that won’t take a toll on either the planet or your face. There’s even a male makeup artist to give you tips, as well as a dizzying array of browsing-friendly herbal remedies, magazines, and health-related tchotchkes to occupy your friends who refuse to wear guyliner. Oh, and ladies can shop here too.

925 Cole, SF. (415) 661-1216, www.pharmaca.com

BEST MID-SHOPPING RESPITE

Any savvy shopper knows you have to refuel midday if you want to hit all the sales before closing. But there’s no need to resort to food courts and burger stands. Tucked away down Claude Lane, just blocks from Union Square, is Café Claude. Dining at the clandestine café is like spending an afternoon in Paris — arguably the best shopping city in the world — and has similarly replenishing effects (without the price or carbon footprint of a flight to France). Sit inside to enjoy a daily special amid the zinc bar, period travel posters, and vintage tables all rescued from an actual Parisian café. Or refuel with soupe l’oignon, salade Niçoise, and charcuterie et fromage on the petite heated patio. Weary shoppers can also enjoy a full bar and daily happy hours from 4 to 6 p.m. After all, you might need a glass of Sancerre — or a shot of St. Germain — before you take a second glance at your receipt from Neiman Marcus.

7 Claude Lane, SF. (415) 392-3505

BEST BAGPIPE EMPORIUM

It’s likely you’ve never stepped inside Lark in the Morning, unless you’re a musician with highly specialized needs. (Bagpipe reeds? Musical saws? Chinese opera gongs? It’s got ’em.) Time to change that! Though it does most of its business via mail order and its Web site, Lark recently moved from tourist-choked Fisherman’s Wharf to cozier digs in the Mission District, where the diverse inventory of ethnic instruments covers the walls, fills floor space, and hangs from every available ceiling hook. Adventurous beginners (including kids) and pros alike can find what they need here. And unlike certain big-chain instrument stores, Lark is staffed by musicians who are excited to share their knowledge with fellow artists, budding and otherwise. Just don’t test-drive anything by playing “Smoke on the Water” or “Dueling Banjos” — the staff might have to pull a Wayne’s World on you and request a song they aren’t subjected to on a daily basis.

1453 Valencia, SF. (415) 922-4277, www.larkinthemorning.com

BEST HOUSEWARMERS FOR POETS

Like Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” vision of a sunny pleasure dome filled with caves of ice, Rare Device, that bright little Hayes Valley shop on Market Street, exhibits gorgeous and amazing things. Things, (as the poem says, of course), of rare device. This San Francisco find is actually the sister of a Brooklyn establishment running under the same moniker, and both focus on designer objets d’art from around the world. Stop by once and your list of must-gets could go something like this: Japanese tea cups carved from single blocks of wood, a mouth-blown wine glass with an inverted stem, and a linen silk-screened pillow for your dreamy head. Things you must give as gifts range from the perplexing knitted bowl with a porcelain center to the mind-blowingly obvious bottle opener that says “open.” Well, how else are you going to pop the lid of that milk of paradise at the next housewarming party?

1845 Market, SF. (415) 863-3969, www.raredevice.net

BEST “SECRET” GARDEN

In Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, it is the magic of nature, experienced privately, that transforms Mary and Colin into blossoming children. Though Vines Café is not officially a secret, the quaint coffee house and gallery’s proximity to the typically quiet Thomson’s Nursery next door seems to have a similar effect on patrons. Sitting on the patio of the converted Victorian, one might find time standing still: hummingbirds hover midair to drink nectar from red-flowered pineapple sage while bees and butterflies flit from the lavender to the lemon geraniums to the foxglove plants below. ‘Tis a place that seems built for writing in a diary, reading a fanciful novel, or sketching a whimsical landscape. And if contemplation isn’t your thing, you can occupy yourself by browsing Vine’s antique jewelry gallery upstairs or choosing which petunias you’ll take home with you. Just don’t tell Mr. Craven where you got ’em.

1113 Lincoln, Alameda. (510) 522-8489

BEST BOOKSTORE FOR ASPIRING ACTIVISTS


Babylon Falling: Best Bookstore for Aspiring Activists
GUARDIAN PHOTO BY SAMANTHA BERG

Mark Twain said, “The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read,” which means that if you ever want to actually learn anything from books, you’re gonna have to get some decent lit. But you don’t need to waste your time surfing on Amazon or searching through library stacks (gasp!) — the rebel academics at Babylon Falling have already done all the work for you. If you really want to learn how to be as subversive as Che Guevara or Chuck D, pop into Babylon and check out its selection of revolutionary literature, graphic novels, art, and music. Babylon also carries a huge assortment of toys, artwork, clothing, and DVDs to complement its collection of more than 3,000 book titles. Plus, it hosts readings, art shows, and signings by literate revolutionaries from the Bay Area and beyond. Babylon will never fall if its citizens learn to read good. You can quote us on that.

1017 Bush, SF. (415) 345-1017, www.babylonfalling.com

BEST DIRT CHEAP DESIGNER DUDS

Jeremy’s is what all fashion discounters should aspire to be — fluorescent lights, foul dressing rooms, and lack of mirrors be damned. Brick-lined, filled with well-weathered wood and retro fixtures, built like an aging beauty of a department store, and chock-full of full-tilt high fashion and fun bargains, Jeremy’s is catnip to the clothes fiend who has all the desires of an haute couture client but few of the funds. It’s all here, kids: Prada, Dolce & Gabbana, Missoni, McQueen, Chanel, Marc Jacobs, Marc Jacobs, Marc Jacobs — all well-edited and last season or older. You wouldn’t guess it, of course. The men’s collections are similarly high style, though often much more pecked over. Pity the poor manly fashionisto in search of a deal elsewhere — you’ll find them here. Also worth perusing are the always delightful collections of unique shoes and boots, junior lines (often culled from Anthropologie and its ultracute, vintage-inspired brand), and accessories, jewelry, bags, and housewares. Items come and go, but, man, do they speed out of the store when Jeremy’s all-store sales are in full effect.

2 South Park, SF. (415) 882-4929; 2967 College, Berk. (510) 849-0701, ww.jeremys.com

BEST DANDY NANCIES

Toss the tacky Axe body spray, lose that horrid Aveda sheen, forget dropping oodles of dough on some designer-brand swill that looks better in its fancy bottle then on your handsome man-skin — Nancy Boy products are the real deal when it comes to male image enhancement. Manufactured locally and distributed from a lovely shop in Hayes Valley that also functions as a gallery of rare and covetable glassware, the all-natural line for men features several enormously popular products for local luxury lovers, including an inimitable signature replenishing shave cream infused with natural steam-distilled extract of fresh cucumbers (“not some ‘idea of cucumber’ concocted in some chemistry lab,” the makers assure us), a wildly fab lavender laundry detergent, and myriad other beauty products — not just for metrosexuals and A-gays! They work on scruffy hipsters and women too! — that we never thought we’d come to depend on so much. An extra treat: co-founder Eric Roos’ occasional hilarious, politically satirical newsletter that keeps us in stitches. Who knew beauty could be so spot-on?

347 Hayes, SF. (415) 552-3802, www.nancyboy.com

BEST BOUTIQUE FOR HEP CATS (AND DOGS)

Jeannine Giordan believes that pet stores are places humans should want to shop in, and that pet food should be made of ingredients animals actually want to eat. So radical! So revolutionary! And, in the case of Giordan’s brand new pet boutique Hazel and Gertie’s, so cute! Housed on the bottom floor of a Victorian on 22nd Street, the shop is clean, airy, and punctuated by tastefully, carefully collected displays of products for four-legged friends, from beds for your beagle to collars for your chartreux. Most impressive, though, is the selection of pet foods, including healthy, organic items by California Natural, Innova, Newman’s Own, and Wysong and raw food by San Francisco–based smallbatch. But Hazel and Gertie’s — named for Giordan’s dogs — is more than just a store. It’s also the outpost for Giordan’s dog-walking business, Gooddog, as well as a self-serve washing station (tub, water, towel, apron, and all-natural soap provided for $15). Giordan even gives referrals for other pet-related services.

3385 22nd St., SF. (415) 401-9663, www.hazelandgerties.com

BEST CUSTOM BOOKBINDERY

You refuse to get your wedding dress off the rack, so why buy your guestbook at Target? Especially when Kozo Arts can make you a custom book as special as your ceremony? This small bindery in Cow Hollow specializes in Japanese-style journals, invitations, scrapbooks, photo albums, and guest books, all handmade by one of Kozo’s five artisans. You choose from a wall of gorgeous screen-printed Chiyogami papers, pick a matching imported silk binding fabric, and order the size and page count you want — and you soon have a one-of-a-kind volume for documenting your once-in-a-lifetime event. The small, charming shop on Union Street also has a selection of premade books in its most popular styles, including journals decorated with pink and white flowers and bunnies, a basic red cherry blossom print, and various colored backgrounds embossed with Japanese parasols that are great as gifts. And don’t miss the scrap bin, full of beautiful leftover papers and fabrics perfect for DIY projects.

1969A Union, SF. (415) 351-2114, www.kozoarts.com

BEST GARDEN OF FASHION


Porto: Best Garden of Fashion
GUARDIAN PHOTO BY SAMANTHA BERG

We can’t decide which we like better: the imported Italian fashions Porto sells or the building it houses them in. It’s undeniable that the clothes for women are chic, distinctive, and well made. We love the asymmetrical details on Sathia tees and dresses, the fun and flirty sportswear by Deha, the innovative skirts and tops from MC Planet, and the unique detailing on everything by Vasalli. But we especially love how the shop is tucked away from the bustle of Union Street down a long corridor, and how natural light floods the airy, two-story building. Add the adjacent rooftop garden, where Porto’s friendly, helpful owner might let you sip bubbly between purchases, and you might forget about the clothes altogether. That is, until you check out the fabulous sale racks. One visit here and you’ll never need Urban Outfitters again.

1770 Union, SF. (415) 440-5040, www.portoboutique.com

BEST MODERN MOROCCAN STYLE

If you like the bold colors, interesting shapes, and exotic romance of Moroccan design, but don’t want your home to look like a college dorm or a swingers’ lounge, you’ll love Tazi. This Hayes Valley showroom is stocked full of Moroccan furniture, textiles, clothing, and accessories — all with a sleek, modern edge. Think mosaic patio tables, bright sofas, metalsmithed lanterns, leather poufs (ottomans), and antiqued doors — most handmade, and all of unmatched quality. Though the Linden Street studio specializes in working with retailers, bars, and restaurants, the staff will also happily help individuals supplement their wardrobe with a gorgeous leather purse, or solve complicated spatial issues with mix-and-match furniture pieces. Plus, Blue Bottle’s just down the street. You can’t get that in Morocco.

333 Linden, SF. (415) 503-0013, www.tazidesigns.com

BEST BIKE CLOTHES FOR BABES

When Sheila Moon started racing bicycles in 1993, very few companies made cycling clothes designed to fit women. “I started asking friends in bike shops if women’s clothing would be a good idea, and they all looked at me like I was crazy,” she said. Moon went for it anyway. Now, after six years in business, she’s distributed in 32 states, plus Canada, and her extensive line includes caps, jerseys, shorts, and knickers for women and men, with separate styles for professional cyclists and regular ol’ riders. She’s moved her SoMa design studio to a live/work loft in Oakland, but everything is still stitched and shipped from San Francisco. Locals can find styles like her women’s riding britches on her Web site and at shops like Sports Basement, City Cycle, and Mojo Bike Café. And daily commuters should keep an eye out: Moon’s got even more bike-to-boardroom threads in her fall line. (Hint: skirts!)

www.sheilamoon.com

Nightlife and Entertainment

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BEST REP FILM HOUSE

Red Vic

From rock docs to cult classics, this Upper Haight co-op’s schedule has kept its cozy couches filled with popcorn-munching film buffs since 1980.

1727 Haight, SF. (415) 668-3994, www.redvicmoviehouse.com

Runners up: Castro, Roxie

BEST MOVIE THEATER

Balboa Theater

Packing the house with film festivals, second-run faves, indie darlings, and carefully chosen new releases, this Richmond gem offers old-school charm with a cozy neighborhood vibe.

3630 Balboa, SF. (415) 221-8184, www.balboamovies.com

Runners up: Castro, Kabuki Sundance

BEST THEATER COMPANY

Un-Scripted Theater Company

The Un-Scripted improv troupe elevates comedy from one-liners and shtick to full-fledged theatrical productions with a talented cast and eccentric sensibilities.

533 Sutter, SF. (415) 869-5384, www.un-scripted.com

Runners up: ACT, Shotgun Players

BEST DANCE COMPANY

Hot Pink Feathers

Blurring the line between cabaret and Carnaval, this burlesque troupe drips with samba flavor (and feathers, of course).

www.hotpinkfeathers.com

Runners up: DholRhythms, Fou Fou Ha!

BEST ART GALLERY

Creativity Explored

The cherished nonprofit provides a safe haven for artists of all ages, abilities, and skill levels while making sure that great works remain accessible to art lovers without trust funds.

3245 16th St., SF. (415) 863-2108, www.creativityexplored.org

Runners up: 111 Minna, Hang

BEST MUSEUM

De Young

Golden Gate Park’s copper jewel boasts stunning architecture, one hell of a permanent collection, and an impressive schedule of rotating exhibitions.

50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, SF. (415) 750-3600, www.famsf.org/deyoung

Runners up: Asian Art Museum, SF MOMA

BEST MIXED-USE ARTS SPACE

CellSPACE

From aerial circus arts to metalsmithing, fire dancing to roller-skating parties, CellSPACE has had its fingers all over San Francisco’s alternative art scene.

2050 Bryant, SF. (415) 648-7562, www.cellspace.org

Runners up: SomArts, 111 Minna

BEST DANCE CLUB

DNA Lounge

DNA scratches just about every strange dance floor itch imaginable — from ’80s new wave and glam-goth to transvestite mashups and humongous lesbian dance parties.

375 11th St., SF. (415) 626-1409, www.dnalounge.com

Runners up: Temple, 1015 Folsom

BEST ROCK CLUB

Bottom of the Hill

San Francisco’s quintessential “I saw ’em here first” dive, Bottom of the Hill consistently delivers stellar booking, cheap drinks, and great sound.

1233 17th St., SF. (415) 621-4455, www.bottomofthehill.com

Runners up: Slim’s, The Independent

BEST HIP-HOP CLUB

Club Six

Six blurs the line between high and low, offering an upstairs lounge in which to see and be seen and a basement dance floor for those who want to show off their b-boy prowess.

60 Sixth St., SF. (415) 531-6593, www.clubsix1.com

Runners up: Poleng, Milk

BEST JAZZ CLUB

Yoshi’s

Nothing says “Bay Area” quite like Yoshi’s masterful combo of classic cocktails, inventive maki rolls, and world-class jazz acts.

510 Embarcadero West, Jack London Square, Oakl. (510) 238-9200; 1330 Fillmore, SF. (415) 655-5600; www.yoshis.com

Runners up: Jazz at Pearl’s, Biscuits and Blues

BEST SALSA CLUB

Cafe Cocomo

Smartly dressed regulars, smoking-hot entertainment, and plenty of classes keep the Cocomo’s floor packed with sweaty salsa enthusiasts year-round.

650 Indiana, SF. (415) 824-6910, www.cafecocomo.com

Runners up: El Rio, Roccapulco

BEST PUNK CLUB

Annie’s Social Club

The club maintains its cred by presciently booking on-the-rise punk and hardcore bands and adding a sprinkle of punk rock karaoke, photo-booth antics, and ’80s dance parties.

917 Folsom, SF. (415) 974-1585, www.anniessocialclub.com

Runners up: Thee Parkside, 924 Gilman

BEST AFTER-HOURS CLUB

Endup

Where the drunken masses head after last call, the aptly named Endup is probably the only club left where you can rub up against a fishnetted transvestite until the sun comes up. And after.

401 Sixth St., SF. (415) 646-0999, www.theendup.com

Runners up: Mighty, DNA Lounge

BEST HAPPY HOUR

El Rio

“Cash is queen” at this Mission haunt, but you won’t need much of it. El Rio’s infamous happy hour — which lasts five hours and begins at 4 p.m. — consists of dirt cheap drinks and yummy freebies.

3158 Mission, SF. (415) 282-3325, www.elriosf.com

Runners up: Midnight Sun, Olive

BEST DIVE BAR

500 Club

A mean manhattan might not be the hallmark of a typical dive, but just add in ridiculously low prices, well-worn booths, and legions of scruffy hipsters.

500 Guerrero, SF. (415) 861-2500

Runners up: Broken Record, Phone Booth

BEST SWANKY BAR

Bourbon and Branch

Mirrored tables, exclusive entry, fancy specialty cocktails, and a well-appointed library root this speakeasy firmly in “upscale” territory.

501 Jones, SF. (415) 346-1735, www.bourbonandbranch.com

Runners up: Red Room, Bubble Lounge

BEST TRIVIA NIGHT

Brain Farts at the Lookout

“Are you smarter than a drag queen?” Brain Fart hostesses BeBe Sweetbriar and Pollo del Mar ask every Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. at this gay hot spot. Maybe.

3600 16th St., SF. (415) 431-0306

Runners up: Castle Quiz (Edinburgh Castle), Trivia Night (Board Room)

BEST JUKEBOX

Lucky 13

Bargain drinks, a popcorn machine, and Thin Lizzy, Hank 3, Motörhead, and Iggy on heavy rotation: Lucky 13 never disappoints.

2140 Market, SF. (415) 487-1313

Runners up: Phone Booth, Lexington Club

BEST KARAOKE BAR

The Mint

It may be nigh impossible to get mic time at this mid-Market mainstay, but once you do, there are hordes of adoring (read: delightfully catty) patrons to applaud you.

942 Market, SF. (415) 626-4726, www.themint.net

Runners up: Encore, Annie’s Social Club

BEST CLUB FOR QUEER MEN

Bearracuda at Deco

Bears at the free buffet, bears on the massage table — bears, bears everywhere, but mostly on the dance floor at this big gay biweekly hair affair in the Tenderloin.

510 Larkin, SF. (415) 346-2025, www.bearracuda.com

Runners up: The Cinch, The Stud

BEST CLUB FOR QUEER WOMEN

Lexington Club

With a pool table, a rotating gallery of kick-ass art, and regular rock DJ nights, this beer-and-shot Mission dive has been proving that dykes drink harder for more than a decade.

3464 19th St., SF. (415) 863-2052, www.lexingtonclub.com

Runners up: Cockblock, Wild Side West

BEST CLUB FOR TRANNIES

Trannyshack

Say hello, wave good-bye: Heklina’s legendary trash drag mecca hangs up its bloody boa in August, but it’s still the best bang for your tranny buck right now.

Stud, 399 Ninth St., SF. (415) 252-7883, www.trannyshack.com

Runners up: AsiaSF, Diva’s

BEST SINGER-SONGWRITER

Curt Yagi

Multi-instrumentalist Curt Yagi has been making the rounds at local venues, strumming with the swagger of Lenny Kravitz and the lyrical prowess of Jack Johnson.

www.curtyagi.com

Runners up: Jill Tracy, Kitten on the Keys

BEST METAL BAND

A Band Called Pain

If you didn’t get the hint from their name, the Oakland-based A Band Called Pain bring it hard and heavy and have lent their distinct brooding metal sound to the Saw II soundtrack and Austin’s SXSW.

www.abandcalledpain.com

Runners up: Thumper, Death Angel

BEST ELECTRONIC MUSIC ACT

Lazer Sword

Rooted in hip-hop but pulling influences from every genre under the sun, the laptop composers seamlessly meld grime and glitch sensibilities with ever-pervasive bass.

www.myspace.com/lazersword

Runners up: Kush Arora, Gooferman

BEST HIP-HOP ACT

Beeda Weeda

Murder Dubs producer and rapper Beeda Weeda may make stuntin’ look easy, but he makes it sound even better: case in point, his upcoming album Da Thizzness.

www.myspace.com/beedaweeda

Runners up: Deep Dickollective, Zion I

BEST INDIE BAND

Ex-Boyfriends

San Francisco outfit and Absolutely Kosher artists the Ex-Boyfriends dole out catchy power pop with a shiny Brit veneer and a dab of emo for good measure.

www.myspace.com/exboyfriends

Runners up: Gooferman, Making Dinner

BEST COVER BAND

ZooStation

A mainstay at festivals, parties, and Slim’s cover-band nights, ZooStation storm through the U2 catalog (they take on more than 140 of the band’s tunes).

www.zoostation-online.com

Runners up: AC/DShe, Interchords

BEST BAND NAME

The Fucking Ocean

Fuck Buttons, Holy Fuck, Fucked Up, Fuck, indeed: the time is ripe for band names that can’t be uttered on the airwaves, and the Fucking Ocean leads the pack. George Carlin would be so proud.

www.myspace.com/thefuckingocean

Runners up: Stung, Gooferman

BEST DJ

Smoove

Ian Chang, aka DJ Smoove, keeps late hours at the Endup, DNA Lounge, 111 Minna, Mighty, and underground parties all over, pumping out power-funk breaks.

www.myspace.com/smoovethedirtypunk

Runners up: Jimmy Love, Maneesh the Twister

BEST PARTY PRODUCERS

Adrian and the Mysterious D, Bootie

Five years in, the Bay’s groundbreaking original mashup party, Bootie, has expanded coast-to-coast and to three continents. This duo displays the power of tight promotion and superb party skills.

DNA Lounge, 375 11th St., SF. (415) 626-1409, www.bootiesf.com

Runners up: NonStop Bhangra crew, Mike Gaines (Bohemian Carnival)

BEST BURLESQUE ACT

Twilight Vixen Revue

Finally, someone thinks to combine pirates, wenches, classic burlesque, and foxy lesbians. This all-queer burlesque troupe has been waving its fans (and fannies) since 2003.

www.twilightvixen.com

Runners up: Sparkly Devil, Hot Pink Feathers

BEST DRAG ACT

Katya Ludmilla Smirnoff-Skyy

Gorgeous costumes, a glamorous backstory, and a jam-packed social calendar are reasons enough to catch this opera diva, but it’s her flawless mezzo that keeps fans hurling roses.

www.russianoperadiva.com

Runners up: Charlie Horse, Cookie Dough

BEST COMEDIAN

Marga Gomez

One of America’s first openly gay comics, San Francisco’s Marga Gomez is a Latina firebrand who’s equally at home performing at Yankee Stadium or Theatre Rhinoceros.

www.margagomez.com

Runners up: Robert Strong, Paco Romane

BEST CIRCUS TROUPE

Vau de Vire Society

Offering a full-on circus assault, the wildly talented and freakishly flexible troupe’s live show delivers plenty of fire performances, aerial stunts, and contortionism.

www.vaudeviresociety.com

Runners up: Teatro Zinzani, Pickle Family Circus

BEST OPEN MIC NIGHT

Hotel Utah

One of the city’s strongest breeding grounds for new musical talent, Hotel Utah’s open mic series opens the floor for all genres (and abilities).

500 Fourth St., SF. (415) 546-6300, www.hotelutah.com

Runners up: Queer Open Mic (3 Dollar Bill), Brain Wash

BEST CABARET/VARIETY SHOW


Hubba Hubba Review: Best Cabaret/Variety Show
PHOTO BY PATRICK MCCARTHY

Hubba Hubba Revue

Vaudeville comedy, tassled titties, and over-the-top burlesque teasing make the Hubba Hubba Revue the scene’s bawdiest purveyor of impropriety.

www.hubbahubbarevue.com

Runners up: Bohemian Carnival, Bijou (Martuni’s)

BEST LITERARY NIGHT

Writers with Drinks

This roving monthly literary night takes it on faith that writers like to drink. Sex workers, children’s book authors, and bar-stool prophets all mingle seamlessly, with social lubrication.

www.writerswithdrinks.com

Runners up: Porchlight Reading Series, Litquake

BEST CRUSHWORTHY BARTENDER

Laura at Hotel Utah

Whether you just bombed onstage at open mic night or are bellied up to the Hotel Utah bar to drink your sorrows away, the ever-so-crushworthy Laura is there with a heavy-handed pour and a smile. She’s even nice to tourists — imagine!

500 Fourth St., SF. (415) 546-6300, www.hotelutah.com

Runners up: Chupa at DNA Lounge, Vegas at Cha Cha Cha

Nightlife and Entertainment — Editors Picks

BEST CREEP-SHOW CHANTEUSE

There’s just something about the inimitable Jill Tracy that makes us swoon like a passel of naive gothic horror heroines in too-tight corsets. Is it her husky midnight lover’s croon, her deceptively delicate visage, her vintage sensibilities? Who else could have written the definitive elegy on the “fine art of poisoning,” composed a hauntingly lush live score for F.W. Murnau’s classic silent film Nosferatu, joined forces with that merry band of bloodthirsty malcontents, Thrillpeddlers, and still somehow remain a shining beacon of almost beatific grace? Part tough-as-nails film fatale, part funeral parlor pianist, Tracy manages to adopt many facades yet remain ever and only herself — a precarious and delicious balancing act. Her newest CD, The Bittersweet Constrain, glides the gamut from gloom to glamour, encapsulating her haunted highness at her beguiling best.

www.jilltracy.com

BEST CINEMATIC REFUGE FOR GERMANIACS

Can’t wait for the annual Berlin and Beyond film fest to get your Teuton on? The San Francisco Goethe-Institut screens a select handful of German-language films throughout the year at its Bush Street language-school location. For a $5 suggested donation, you can treat yourself to a klassische F.W. Murnau movie or something slightly more contemporary from Margarethe von Trotta. Flicks are subtitled, so there’s no need to brush up on verb conjugations ahead of time. And the Bush Street location is within respectable stumbling distance of many Tendernob bars, not to mention the Euro-chic Café de la Presse, should your cinematic adventure turn into an unexpected Liebesabenteuer. Unlike SF filmic events offering free popcorn, free-for-all heckling, or staged reenactments of the action, Goethe-Institut screenings need no gimmickry to attract their audiences — a respectable singularity perhaps alone worth the price of admission.

530 Bush, SF. (415) 263-8760, www.goethe.de

BEST UNFORCED BAY AREA BALKANIZATION

Despite all the countless reasons to give in to despair — the weight of the world, the headline news, those endless measured teaspoons — sometimes you just have to say fuck it and get your freak on. No party in town exemplifies this reckless surrender to the muse of moving on better than the frenetic, freewheeling proslava that is Kafana Balkan. No hideaway this for the too-cool-for-school, hands-slung-deep-in-pockets, head-bobber crowd. The brass-and-beer-fueled mayhem that generally ensues at Kafana Balkan, often held at 12 Galaxies, is a much more primitive and fundamental form of bacchanal. Clowns! Accordions! Brass bands! Romany rarities! Unfurled hankies! The unlikely combination of high-stepping grannies and high-spirited hipsters is joined together by the thread that truly binds: a raucous good time. Plus, all proceeds support the Bread and Cheese Circus’s attempts to bring succor and good cheer to orphans in Kosovo. Your attendance will help alleviate angst in more ways than one.

www.myspace.com/kafanabalkan

BEST GOREY BALL

There’s no doubt about it — we San Franciscans love to play dress-up. From the towering Beach Blanket Babylon–esque bonnets at the annual Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence Easter Sunday to the costumed free-for-all of All Hallows Eve, the more elaborate the excuse to throw on some gay apparel, the more elaborate the apparel. This makes the annual Edwardian Ball tailor-made for San Francisco’s tailored maids and madcap chaps. An eager homage to the off-kilter imaginings of Edward Gorey, whose oft-pseudonymous picture books delved into the exotic, the erotic, and the diabolic within prim and proper, vaguely British settings, the Edwardian Ball is a midwinter ode to woe. From the haunting disharmonies of Rosin Coven to the voluptuous vigor of the Vau de Vire Society’s reenactment of Gorey tales, the ball — which now encompasses an entire three-day weekend — is a veritable bastion of dark-hued revelry and unfettered fetish.

www.myspace.com/edwardianball

BEST PROGRESSIVE LOUD ‘N’ PROUD

We love Stephen Elliott. The fearless writer, merciless poker opponent, and unrepentant romantic’s well-documented fall from political innocence — recounted in Looking Forward to It (Picador, 2004) and Politically Inspired (MacAdam/Cage, 2003) — has kept him plunged into the fray ever since. Like most other ongoing literary salons, Elliott’s monthly Progressive Reading Series offers a thrilling showcase of local and luminary talent, highlighting up-and-comers along with seasoned pros — shaken, stirred, and poured over ice by the unflappable bar staff at host venue the Make-Out Room. All of the proceeds from the door benefit selected progressive causes — such as, most recently, fighting the good fight against California state proposition 98. Books, booze, and ballot boxing — a good deed never went down more smoothly or with such earnest verbiage and charm.

www.progressivereadingseries.org

BEST UNDERAGE SANDWICH

When it comes to opportunities to see live independent music, most Bay Area venues hang kids under 21 out to dry. Outside of 924 Gilman in Berkeley and the occasional all-ages show at Bottom of the Hill, the opportunities are painfully sparse. But thanks to members of Bay Area show promotion collective Club Sandwich, the underground music scene is becoming more accessible. Committed to hosting exclusively all-ages shows featuring under-the-radar local and national touring bands, Club Sandwich has booked more than a hundred of them since 2006, ranging from better-known groups like No Age, Marnie Stern, and Lightning Bolt to more obscure acts like South Seas Queen and Sexy Prison. Club Sandwich shows tend to cross traditional genre boundary lines (noise, punk, folk, etc.), bringing together different subcultures within the Bay Area’s underground music scene that don’t usually overlap. And the collective organizes shows at wildly diverse venues: from legitimate art spaces like ATA in San Francisco and Lobot in Oakland to warehouse spaces and swimming pools.

www.clubsandwichbayarea.com

BEST BEER PONG PALACE

Pabst Blue Ribbon, American Spirits, track bikes, tattoos, stretchy jeans, slip-ons, facial hair, Wayfarers. Blah, blah, blah. If you live in the Mission — and happen to be between 22 and 33 years old — you see it all, every night, at every bar in the hood. Boooring. If you’re sick of all the hipster shit, but not quite ready to abandon the scene entirely, take a baby step over to the Broken Record, a roomy dive bar in the Excelsior that serves gourmet game sausage, gives away free beer every Friday(!), rents out Scrabble boards, and isn’t afraid to drop the attitude and get down with a goofy night of beer pong or a bar-wide foosball match. The cheap swill, loud music, and street art will make you feel right at home, but the Broken Record’s decidedly Outer Mission vibe will give you a much-needed respite from the glam rockers, bike messengers, “artists,” and cokeheads you have to hang out with back in cool country.

1166 Geneva, SF. (415) 255-3100

BEST VOLUPTUOUS VISIBILITY

Every June, the Brava Theater quietly morphs into the center of the known universe for queer women of color. And what a delectable center it is. Over the course of three days, the Queer Women of Color Film Festival, produced by the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project, screens more than 30 works by emerging filmmakers for a raucously supportive audience — an audience that happens to be cute as all hell. In fact, some would call the festival the cruising event of the year for queer women of color. Of course, the films are worth scoping too. Students of QWOCMAP’s no-cost Filmmaker Training Program create most of the festival’s incredible array of humorous and sensitive films, which explore topics such as romance and family ties. For festivalgoers, this heady mixture of authentic representation, massive visibility, and community pride (all screenings are copresented with social justice groups) is breathtakingly potent. It’s no wonder a few love connections are made each fest. Want just a little more icing on that cake? All screenings are free.

(415) 752-0868, www.qwocmap.org

BEST DANCE-FLOOR FLICKS FIX

The San Francisco Film Society is best known for putting on America’s oldest film fest, the San Francisco Film Festival. But the organization also hosts a TV show, publishes an amazingly vibrant online magazine, and throws a slew of events throughout the year under its SF360 umbrella, a collection of organizations dedicated to covering film in San Francisco from all angles. There’s SF360 movie nights held in homes across the city, Live at the Apple Store film discussions, and special screenings of hard-to-see films held at theaters throughout the Bay Area. But our favorite SF360 shindig is its monthly SF360 Film+Club Night at Mezzanine, which screens underground films to a room of intoxicated cinephiles who are encouraged to hoot, holler, and at times — like during the annual R. Kelly Trapped in tha Closet Singalong — flex their vocal cords. Past Film+Club screenings have included a B-movie skate-film retrospective, prescreenings of Dave Eggers’s Wholphin compilations, and an Icelandic music documentary night, at which, we’ll admit, we dressed up like Björk.

www.sf360.org

BEST HORIZONTAL MAMBO ON HIGH


Project Bandaloop: Best Horizontal Mambo on High
PHOTO BY TODD LABY

Normally when one mentions doing the horizontal mambo, nudges and winks ensue. But when Project Bandaloop gets together to actually do it, the group isn’t getting freaky, it’s getting wildly artistic — hundreds of feet up in the air. The aerial dance company creates an exhilarating blend of kinetics, sport, and environmental awareness, hanging from bungee cords perpendicular to tall building walls. The troupe is composed of climbers and dancers, who rappel, jump, pas de deux, and generally do incredibly graceful things while hoisted hundreds of feet up in the air. Founded in 1991 and currently under the artistic direction of Amelia Rudolph, Project Bandaloop’s company of dancer-athletes explores the cultural possibilities of simulated weightlessness, drawing on a complete circumferential vocabulary of movement to craft site-specific dances, including pieces for Seattle’s Space Needle and Yosemite’s El Capitan. (Once it even performed for the sheikh of Oman.) Now, if there were only a way to watch the rapturous results without getting a stiff neck.

(415) 421-5667, www.projectbandaloop.org

BEST YODELALCOHOL

From the sidewalk, Bacchus Kirk looks like so many other dimly lit San Francisco bars. Yet to walk inside is to step into a little bit of Lake Tahoe or the Haute-Savoie on the unlikely slopes of lower Nob Hill. With its raftered A-frame ceiling, warm wood-paneled walls, and inviting fireplace, the alpine Bacchus Kirk only needs a pack of bellowing snowboarders to pass as a ski lodge — albeit one that provides chocolate martinis, raspberry drops, and mellow mango cocktails rather than hot cocoa, vertiginous funicular rides, and views of alpenhorn-wielding shepherds. This San Francisco simulation of the après-ski scene is populated by a friendly, low-key crowd of art students, Euro hostelers, and diverse locals — no frosty snow bunnies here — drawn by the congenial atmosphere, the pool table, and that current nightlife rarity, a smoking room. Tasty drinks and lofty conversation flow freely: if you leave feeling light-headed, you won’t be able to blame it on the altitude.

925 Bush, SF. (415) 474-4056, www.bacchuskirk.org

BEST COCKTAILS WITH CANINES

Plenty of bars around town call themselves pooch-friendly — as if a pampered shih tzu housed in a Paris Hilton wannabe’s purse, its exquisitely painted paw-nails barely deigning to rest atop the bar, represents the be-all and end-all of canine cocktail companionship. The Homestead, however, goes the extra mile to make four-legged patrons of all shapes and sizes at home with its “open dog” policy. Permanently stationed below the piano is a water dish, and the bar is stocked with an ample supply of doggie treats. At slack times, the bartenders will even come out from behind the bar to dispense said treats directly to their panting customers. Talk about service! As for the bipeds, they will undoubtedly appreciate the Homestead’s well-worn 19th-century working-class-bar decor (complete with a potbellied stove!) and relaxed modern-day atmosphere. It’s the perfect spot to catch up with old friends — either furry or slightly slurry — and make a few new ones.

2301 Folsom, SF. (415) 282-4663

BEST VISA TO MARTINI VICTORY


Bartender Visa Victor: Best Visa to Martini Victory
PHOTO BY NEIL MOTTERAM

When überfancy personalized cocktails started popping up all over town, it was only a matter of time before we of the plebeian class started demanding our fair share. Looking to be poured something special, but can’t afford a drink at Absinthe? Want to sample a few stupendously constructed tipples in the Bourbon and Branch vein with limited ducats? Score: Visa Victor the bartender has what you want. Once a journeyman slinger, Visa has started filling regular shifts — typically Wednesdays and Sundays — at Argus Lounge on Mission Street. What he offers: his own DJ, a well-populated e-mail list of fans, and an array of unique ingredients including rare berries, savory herbs, and meat. Yes, meat — his recent bacon martini turned out to be not just an attempt to tap into the city’s growing “meat consciousness” but damn good to boot. And hey, we didn’t have to take out a phony second mortgage to down it.

BEST JAZZ JUKE

Pesky Internet jukeboxes are everywhere: any decent night out can be ruined by some freshly 21-year-old princess bumping her “birthday jam” incessantly. The old-school jukebox, on the other hand, has the oft-undervalued ability to maintain a mood, or at least ensure that you won’t be “bringing sexy back” 27 times in one evening. Aub Zam Zam in the Upper Haight maintains an exceptional jukebox chock-full of timeless blues, jazz, and R&B slices. Selections include Robert Johnson, Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Taj Mahal … the list of smooth crooners and delicate instrumentalists goes on and on. This is in perfect keeping with Aub Zam Zam’s rep as a mighty fine cocktail lounge, established in the 1940s. New owner Bob Clarke has made the place a lot more welcoming than it was in the days of notoriously tyrannical founder Bruno, who proudly boasted of 86ing 80 percent of the Zam Zam’s would-be customers. But Clarke’s kept at least one thing from Bruno’s days besides mouthwatering drinks: his favorite juke jams.

1633 Haight, SF. (415) 861-2545

BEST FUNNY UH-OH

It’s hard to tell if the entity known as Something with Genitals is a comedy act or a cultural experiment designed to monitor human behavior under unusual circumstances. Take, for example, the night one member of this duo, sometimes trio, of dudes made his way through the crowded Hemlock Tavern on cross-country skis. When he finally maneuvered himself onto the stage, the lights went out and the show was over. Sometimes no one gets onstage at all. Instead the audience gets treated to one of the group’s ingeniously simple short films, which are way better at summing up every one-night stand you’ve had than a regular joke with a punch line. Check out their video on MySpace of a guy who strikes up a conversation with a shrub on some Mission District street, invites it to a party, offers it a beer, asks it to dance, shares some personal secrets and heartfelt dreams, then proceeds to drunkenly fuck it, and you’ll wonder if they’ve been reading your diary. Funny uh-oh, not funny ha-ha.

www.myspace.com/somethingwithgenitals

BEST WEIRD EYE FOR WEIRD TIMES

Even if you’re not in the market for stock footage — the chief focus of Oddball Film + Video, which maintains an archive crammed with everything from World War II clips to glamour shots of TV dinners circa 1960 to images of vintage San Francisco street scenes — you can still take advantage of this incredible resource. Director and founder Stephen Parr loves film, and he loves the unusual; lucky for us, he also loves sharing his collection with the public. RSVPs are essential to attend screenings at the small space, which in recent months has hosted such programs as “Shock! Cinema,” a collection of hygiene and safety films (Narcotics: Pit of Despair) from bygone but no less hysterical eras, and “Strange Sinema,” featuring yet-to-be-cataloged finds from Oddball’s ever-growing library (a 1950s dude ranch promo, an extended trailer for 1972 porn classic Behind the Green Door). Other past highlights have included programs on sex, monkeys, India, and avant-gardists and nights with guest curators like Los Angeles “media ecologist” Gerry Fialka.

275 Capp, SF. (415) 558-8117, www.oddballfilm.com

BEST SWEET ISLE OF ROCK

It doesn’t get much sweeter, in terms of massive multistage music gatherings soaked with mucho cerveza and plenty of sunshine: looking out over the bay at our sparkling city from the top of a Ferris wheel as Spoon gets out the jittery indie rock on the main stage below. That was the scene at last year’s inaugural two-day Treasure Island Music Festival, a smooth-sailing dream of a musical event presented by the Noise Pop crew and Another Planet Entertainment. The locale was special — how often do music fans who don’t live or work on the isle ever get out to that human-made spot, a relic from the utopian era of “We can do it!” engineering and World’s Fairs. The shuttles were plentiful and zero emission. The food was reasonably priced, varied, and at times vegetarian. About 72 percent of the waste generated by the fest was diverted to recycling and composting. Most important, the music was stellar: primo critical picks all the way. This year’s gathering, featuring Justice, Hot Chip, and the Raconteurs, looks to do even better.

www.treasureislandfestival.com

BEST WHITE-HOT WALLS

Pristine walls couldn’t get much more white-hot than at Ratio 3 gallery. Chris Perez has a nose for talent — and an eye for cool — when it comes to programming the new space on Stevenson near SoMa. The curator has been on a particular roll of late with exhibitions by such varied artists as psychedelia-drenched video installationist Takeshi Murata, resurgent abstractionist Ruth Laskey, and utopian beautiful-people photog Ryan McGinley, while drawing attendees such as Mayor Gavin Newsom and sundry celebs to openings. Perez also has a worthy stable of gallery artists on hand, including local legend Barry McGee (whose works slip surprisingly well among recent abstract shows at the space), rough-and-ready sculptor Mitzi Pederson, op-art woodworker Ara Peterson, and hallucinatory dreamscape creator Jose Alvarez. Catch ’em while the ratio is in your favor.

1447 Stevenson, SF. (415) 821-3371, www.ratio3.org

BEST ON-SCREEN MIND WARP

When edgy director of programming Bruce Fletcher left the San Francisco Independent Film Festival (IndieFest), fans who’d relied on his horror and sci-fi picks were understandably a little worried. Fortunately, Fletcher’s Dead Channels: The San Francisco Festival of Fantastic Film proved there’s room enough in this town for multiple fests with an eye for sleazy, gory, gruesome, unsettling, and offbeat films, indie and otherwise. There’s more: this summer Dead Channels teamed up with Thrillpeddlers to host weekly screenings at the Grand Guignol theater company’s space, the Hypnodrome. “White Hot ‘N’ Warped Wednesdays” are exactly that — showcasing all manner of psychotronica, from Pakistani gore flick Hell’s Ground to culty grind house classics like She-Freak (1967). Come this October, will the Dead Channels fest be able to top its utterly warped Hump Day series? Fear not for the programming, dark-dwelling weirdos — fear only what’s on the screen.

www.deadchannels.com

BEST BACKROOM SHENANIGANS

Everyone knows when Adobe Books’ backroom art openings are in full swing: the bookstore is brightly lit and buzzing at an hour when most other literature peddlers are safely tucked in bed, the crowd is spilling onto the 16th Street sidewalk, and music might be wafting into the night. Deep within, in the microscopic backroom gallery, you might discover future art stars like Colter Jacobsen, Barbra Garber, and Matt Furie, as well as their works. Call the space and its soirees the last living relic of Mission District bohemia or dub it a San Francisco institution — just don’t try to clean it up or bring order to its stacks. Wanderers, seekers, artists, and musicians have found a home of sorts here, checking out art, bickering over the accuracy and comprehensiveness of the time line of Mission hipster connections that runs along the upper walls, sinking into the old chairs to hang, and maybe even picking up a book and paging through.

3166 16th St., SF. (415) 864-3936, adobebooksbackroomgallery.blogspot.com

BEST HELLO MUMBAI


DJ Cheb i Sabbah at Bollyhood Café: Best Hello Mumbai
PHOTO BY NEIL MOTTERAM

India produces more movies than any other place on the planet, although you’d scarcely know it from the few that make it stateside. But the American Bollywood cult is growing, and Indian pop culture is dancing its eye-popping way into San Francisco’s heart with invigorating bhangra club nights and piquant variations on traditional cuisine. Bollywood-themed Bollyhood Café, a colorful dance lounge, restaurant, and bar on 19th Street, serves beloved Indian street food–style favorites, with tweaked names like Something to Chaat About, Bhel “Hood” Puri, and Daal-Icious. The joint also delights fans of the subcontinent with nonstop Bollywood screenings and parties featuring DJs Cheb i Sabbah and Jimmy Love of NonStop Bhangra. The crowd’s cute, too: knock back a few mango changos or a lychee martini and prepare to kick up your heels with some of the warmest daals and smoothest lassis (har, har) this side of Mumbai.

3372 19th St., SF. (415) 970-0362, www.bollyhoodcafe.com

BEST POP ‘N’ CHILL


Sheila Marie Ang at Bubble Lounge: Best Pop ‘N’ Chill
PHOTO BY NEIL MOTTERAM

When people get older and perhaps wiser, they begin to feel out of place in hipstery dive bars and tend to lose the desire to rage all night in sweaty dance clubs. But that doesn’t mean they don’t want to party; it just means they’d rather do it in a more sophisticated setting. Thank goddess, then, for Bubble Lounge, the Financial District’s premier purveyor of sparkling social lubricant. For a decade, this superswanky champagne parlor has dazzled with its 10 candlelit salons, each decked out with satin couches, overstuffed chairs, and mahogany tables. BL specializes in tasters, flights, and full-size flutes of light and full-bodied sparkling wines and champagnes. But if poppin’ bub ain’t your style, you can always go the martini route and order a specialty cocktail like the Rasmatini or the French tickler — whatever it takes to make you forget about the office and just chill.

714 Montgomery, SF. (415) 434-4204, www.bubblelounge.com

BEST REGGAE ON BOTH SIDES

Reggae may not be the hippest or newest music in town, but there are few other genres that can inspire revolutionary political thought, erase color lines, and make you shake your ass all at the same time. Grind away your daily worries and appreciate the unity of humanity all night long on both sides of the bay — second Saturdays of the month at the Endup and fourth Saturdays at Oakland’s Karibbean City — at Reggae Gold, the Bay Area’s smoothest-packed party for irie folk and dance machines. Resident DJs Polo Moquuz, Daddy Rolo, and Mendoja spin riddim, dancehall, soca, and hip-hop mashup faves as a unified nation of dub heads rocks steady on the dance floor. Special dress-up nights include Flag Party, Army Fatigue Night, and the Black Ball, but otherwise Reggae Gold keeps things on the classy side with a strict dress policy: no sneakers, no baseball caps, no sports attire, and for Jah’s sake, no white T-shirts. This isn’t the Dirty South, you know.

www.reggaegoldsf.com

BEST MEGACLUB REINCARNATION

Its a wonder no one thought of it before. Why not combine green business practices with a keen sense of after-hours dance floor mayhem, inject the whole enchilada with shots of mystical spirituality (giant antique Buddha statues, a holistic healing center) and social justice activism (political speaker engagements, issue awareness campaigns), attach a yummy Thai restaurant, serve some fancy drinks, and call it a groundbreaking megaclub? That’s a serviceably bare-bones description of Temple in SoMa, but this multilevel, generously laid out mecca for dance music lovers is so much more. Cynical clubgoers like ourselves, burnt out on the steroidal ultralounge excesses of the Internet boom, cast a wary eye when it was announced that Temple would set up shop in defunct-but-still-beloved club DV8’s old space, and feared a mainstream supastar DJ onslaught to cover the costs. Temple brings in the big names, all right, but it also shows much love for the local scene, giving faves like DJ David Harness and the Compression crew room to do their thing. The sound is impeccable, the staff exceedingly friendly, and even if we have to wade politely but firmly through some bridge and tunnel crowd to get to the dance floor, we can use the extra karma points.

540 Howard, SF. www.templesf.com

BEST BANGERS AND FLASH


Blow Up: Best Bangers and Flash
PHOTO BY MELEKSAH DAVID

Disco, house, techno, rave, hip-hop, electroclash … all well and good for us old-timers who like to stash our pimped-out aluminum walkers in the coat check and “get wild” on the dance floor. But what about the youth? With what new genre are they to leave their neon mark upon nightlife? Which party style will mark their generation for endless send-ups and retro nights 30 years hence? The banger scene, of course, fronting a hardcore electro sound tinged with sweet silvery linings and stuttery vocals that’s captured the earbuds and bass bins of a new crop of clubbers. Nowhere are the bangers hotter (or younger) than at the sort-of weekly 18-and-over party Blow Up at the Rickshaw Stop, now entering its third year of booming rapaciousness. Blow Up, with resident DJs Jeffrey Paradise and Richie Panic and a mindblowing slew of globe-trotting guests, doesn’t just stop with killer tunes — almost all of its fabulously sweat-drenched, half-dressed attendees seem to come equipped with a digital camera and a camera-ready look, as befits the ever-online youth of today. Yet Blow Up somehow leaves hipper-than-thou attitude behind. Hangovers, however, often lie ahead.

www.myspace.com/blow_up_415

BEST SCRIBBLER SMACKDOWN

It may not be the Saudi tradition of dueling poets, in which two men swap lines until one can’t think of any more couplets (and is severely punished), but the Literary Death Match series, put on by Opium magazine, is San Francisco’s excellent equivalent, though perhaps less civilized. Try to remember the last poetry reading you attended. Tweedy professors and be-sweatered Mary Oliver acolytes, right? Literary Death Match is not this mind-numbing affair. It’s competitive. It’s freaking edge-of-your-seat. And everyone’s drunk. Readers from four featured publications, either online or in print, do their thing for less than 10 minutes, and guest “celebrity” judges rip participants apart based on three categories: literary merit, performance, and “intangibles” (everything in between). Two finalists duke it out to the literary death until one hero is left standing, unless she or he’s been hitting up the bar between sets. Who needs reality television when we’ve got San Francisco’s version — one in which literary aspirations breed public humiliation, with the possibility of geeky bragging rights afterward?

Various locations. www.literarydeathmatch.com

BEST MISTRESS OF MOTOWN

Drag queens — is there nothing they can’t make a little brighter with their glittering presence? Squeeze a piece of coal hard enough between a perma-smiley tranny’s clenched cheeks and out pops cubic zirconium, dripping with sparkling bon mots. Yet not all gender illusionists go straight for ditzy comic gold or its silver-tongued twin, cattiness. Some “perform.” Others perform. And here we must pause to tip our feathery fedora to she who reps the platinum standard of awe-inspiring cross-dressing performance: Miss Juanita More. No mere Streisand-syncher, class-act Juanita dusts off overlooked musical nuggets of the past and gives them their shiny due. Despite punk-rock tribute trends and goth night explosions, Juanita’s focus stays primarily, perfectly, on that sublime subcultural slice of sonic history known formerly as “race music” and currently as R&B. Her dazzling production numbers utilize large casts of extras, several acts, and impeccable costumery that pays tribute to everything from Scott Joplin’s ragtime to Motown’s spangled sizzle, dirty underground ’70s funk to Patti LaBelle’s roof-raising histrionics. When she’s on spliff-passing point, as she so often is, her numbers open up a pulse-pounding window into other, more bootyful, worlds.

www.juanitamore.com

BEST AMBASSADORS OF DREAD BASS

That cracked and funky dubstep sound surged through Clubland’s speakers last year, an irresistible combination of breakbeats energy, dub wooziness, sly grime, intel glitch, and ragga relaxation. Many parties took the sound into uncharted waters, infusing it with hip-hop hooks, Bollywood extravaganza, roots rock swing, or “world music” folksiness. But only one included all those variations simultaneously, while pumping local and international live acts, fierce visuals, multimedia blowouts, and an ever-smiling crowd of rainbow-flavored fans: Surya Dub, a monthly lowdown hoedown at Club Six. The Surya crew, including perennial Bay favorites DJ Maneesh the Twister and Jimmy Love, and wondrous up-and-comers like Kush Arora, Kid Kameleon, DJ Amar, Ripley, and MC Daddy Frank on the mic, describes its ass-thumping sound as “dread bass,” which moves beyond wordy genre description into a cosmic territory the rumble in your eardrums can surely attest to. Surya Dub keeps it in the community, too, helping to promote a growing network of citywide dubstep events and spreading their dread bass gospel with parties in India.

www.suryadub.com

BEST HELLA GAY BEST OF THE BAY

Very few things in this world are gay enough to warrant the Nor Cal Barney modifier “hella,” but for tattooed karaoke-master Porkchop’s sort-of-monthly series at Thee Parkside, Porkchop Presents, the term seems an understatement. At least three times a season, the mysterious Porkchop gathers her posse of scruffy boozehounds and butt-rockin’ hipsters to the best little dive bar in Potrero for a daylong celebration of the gayest shit on earth. Past events have included Hella Gay Karaoke, Hella Gay Jell-O Wrestling, a Hella Gay Beer Bust, and the all-encompassing nod to gaydom, Something Hella Gay, an ongoing event during which gay folks go drink-for-drink to see who’s the gayest of them all. Join Porkchop and her crew of lowbrow beer snobs at Thee Parkside for arm wrestling competitions, tattoo-offs, and hella gay sing-along battles. You probably won’t win anything because the competition is so stiff and the rules are so lax, but you can rest assured that the smell of stale cigarettes, cheap beer, and sweaty ass will stay in your clothes for at least a week after the show. And that’s all that really matters, isn’t it?

Art, work, and artwork

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Art, work, and artwork

VISUAL ART The global financial crisis continues to impoverish and displace those within reach of its residual tremors. Yet in the art realm, there have been signs of hope. Recent fairs — Frieze Art Fair in October and Art Basel Miami Beach earlier this month — brought reports of strong sales and optimism within the distressed economy. So why are artists everywhere worried about their futures, and more critically, panicking about their present tenses? The squeeze has to do with the work in artwork. More often than not, artists aren’t getting paid for their work.

The general prosperity of the current art market does not reflect the financial success of most artists — it just means that artworks are selling, and many of those works are by artists who are already established or dead. The other artists, the worried ones, the ones scraping by on paint chips and uncreative, menial part-time jobs and unpaid internship after unpaid internship, are starting to organize. And talk. Worried as well, I recently attended two events, one in New York and the other in Oakland, that call for a shift of terrain in art/work.

The New York event, titled, “What Is the Good of Work?” — the second in a four-part series organized by Goethe-Institut New York — was more abstract in its approach, seeking to redefine work through film and literature. For instance, when British novelist Tom McCarthy roused Herman Melville’s character Bartleby in order to express the potentials of “recess” in a “recession” and promote a politics of pause as escapist rather than reactionary, an audience member inquired: “But how can this be implemented in real life?” Here, McCarthy went quiet. The rest of the panel, too, including the nihilist philosopher Simon Critchley, only seemed capable of speculating on a new function of work, as opposed to how this new work would, well, work.

Comparatively, the Oakland event was more concerned with brass tacks. Organized by Sight School, an artist-run storefront newly opened in November, its aim “to create dialogue around new modes of living and being in the world in order to reveal connections between art and life” was actually visualized.

The evening began with local artists and writers reading primarily from a newspaper compiled by the Chicago-based collective Temporary Services. In it, more than 40 artists and writers pinpoint problematic issues and propose a way out. The front page introduction succinctly outlines its motivations:

We can see how the collapse of the economy is affecting everyone. Something must be done. Let’s talk. No, it can’t wait. Things are bad. We have to work things out. We can only do it together. What do we know? What have others tried? What is possible? How do we talk about it? What are the wildest possibilities? What are the pragmatic steps? What can you do? What can we do?

FREE / TAKE A COPY. MAKE AN EXHIBITION.

HOST A DISCUSSION IN YOUR TOWN.

The urgency of this situation was emphasized most strongly by Julian Myers, an assistant professor of curatorial practice at California College of the Arts. He fervently read the group Research and Destroy’s “Communiqué from an Absent Future: On the Terminus of Student Life,” which was drafted in response to the current University of California crises. Myers conveyed the text’s uncomfortably accurate detail of a bankrupt future not just for students, but anyone not already financially secure. The text incensed everyone in the room, as they realized the gravity of student debts and of academia as a new factory — a neverending rabbit hole of false security.

The last reader, Natasha Wheat, decided not to read at all; rather, she turned to the audience and asked, “What does a just art economy looks like?” Immediately, people chimed in. The space turned into a sauna of conjectures, arguments, personal anecdotes, and pleas. A variety of ideas and subjects — everything from emphasizing the importance of guilds and collectives to providing braces for children — were bandied about. These rants often lacked direction. Many were fueled by emotion and gave way to incomprehensible babble about new economies without realizing the previous paths paved by Marx, Adam Smith, and Keynes. But the passion, heretofore dormant, was inspiring.

Interestingly, the only thing missing from all the cries of desperation was a focus on artwork itself. In this small storefront room, everyone — artists, writers, curators, historians, and spectators — was hyper-aware about the lack of funding. But ironically, art had gone missing as well. Not many will disagree with the assertion that workers deserve payment for their labor, but what if their work blows? If I actively paint a canvas for eight hours a day, and no one finds it of value, why should I get paid? If money were a given, we’d all be doodling for dollars.

Zachary Royer Scholz, one of the readers and most intelligent contributors to the discussions, ended the event with a similar concern. He shifted the blame away from the economy and back toward the art. “Canada has strong government and institutional funding for its artists, but look at its art … it sucks!” Just then, a man on the opposite side of the room descended on Scholz, barking in protest. His ass-length dreads swung in tandem with his raised fists. It looked like a fight might break out, but the affront turned out to be performative — the room was filled with artists, after all.

I don’t find it coincidental that Dave Hickey’s The Invisible Dragon: Essays On Beauty (University of Chicago Press, 152 pages, $22) stirred from its coma this year. Its polemics could not be revived at a better time. First released in 1993, the book has been out of print for several years. Hickey originally pulled the plug because the “intensity and icy aggression” of The Invisible Dragon’s provocation was too great. In other words, people were pissed because Hickey insisted on the importance of art’s beauty.

In the collection’s first essay, “Enter The Dragon: On the Vernacular of Beauty,” Hickey argues that beauty has been replaced by meaning, and laments the art market baton swap from art dealers to institutions. “The institution’s curators hold a public trust,” Hickey writes. “They must look attentively and genuinely care about what artists mean, and what this meaning means in a public context — and, therefore, almost of necessity, they must distrust appearances.”

The problem, according to Hickey, parallels the one in Michel Foucault’s 1975’s Discipline and Punish, wherein punishment shifts from the external, via physical torture as public spectacle, to the internal — torture of the soul and mind via incarceration and criminal psychiatry. In effect, it’s a shift of gaze and surveillance: we now internalize this gaze and monitor ourselves.

But what does this have to do with art? Art limited to meaning loses its subversive potential; it gets too worried and existential. By contrast, allowing art to express itself through appearances also allows it to find new folds within an otherwise predetermined economy of signs — an economy controlled exclusively by arts institutions.

I imagine if Hickey had been in that room that evening, he would have stood up early on to demand that everyone stop acting like economists: You’re artists, dammit. You’re not here to fix the economy, you’re here to create things. Now go out and make shit — but for Christ’s sake, make it beautiful. *

www.sightschool.wordpress.com; www.temporaryservices.org

Dark mirrors

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Dark mirrors

arts@sfbg.com

LIT Recently I was at a meeting with an unnamed arts organization, planning for an AfroSurreal art exhibit. As we were hashing out the details of display, the concept of the black dandy become a bone of contention among my learned colleagues. What was, and is, a black dandy? How does the black dandy differ from the white dandy? What’s the difference between a dandy and fop? Aren’t those terms interchangeable? Why bother looking at or for a black dandy at all? I’m seldom at a loss for words — it just takes me a minute to arrange them properly sometimes. (Ask my editor.) But this time, I had nothing to say. I just directed all queries to Slaves To Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (Duke University Press, 408 pages, $24.95).

Monica L. Miller’s book is the first of its kind: a lengthy written study of the history of black dandyism and the role that style has played in the politics and aesthetics of African and African American identity. She draws from literature, film, photography, print ads, and music to reveal the black dandy’s underground cultural history and generate possibilities for the future.

Slaves to Fashion looks at black dandies of the past, beginning with Mungo Macaroni, a freed slave and well-known force within the London social scene in the 18th century. Miller also studies contemporary manifestations, in the vestments of Andre 3000 and Puff Daddy, showing how black dandies have historically used the signature tools of clothing, gesture, and wit to break down limiting definitions and introduce new, fluid concepts of social and political possibility. Though Slaves to Fashion is über-academic and at times weighed down by post-structrualist jargon, Miller more than makes up for it with uncanny feats of scholarship that illustrate ways in which the figure of the black dandy has been an elephant-in-the-room — albeit a particualrly well-dressed one.

A great example is Miller’s citing of the character of Adolph in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Almost immediately after the publication of this "great abolitionist work," its characters became some of the first American archetypes: Simon Legree and Uncle Tom are two notable examples. In comparison, Adolph — a black dandy pivotal to the story — was excised from the public imagination. Miller sees this as a reaction to what she calls "crimes of fashion," which take place when Africans and African Americans don the clothing of the oppressed to both emulate and satirize the oppressor. Adolph served as a "dark mirror" to both American materialism and the deep fear of the impending gender and race-mixing that would take place after abolition.

This fear, according to Miller, is the difference between the black dandy and the white dandy or the fop. Unlike a Caucasian counterpart, exemplified by the likes of Oscar Wilde, the black dandy comes from a position of underprivilege and uses flair and style as a way to redefine masculinity to include him. In other words, as opposed to a feminine front, it is the black dandy’s fluid masculinity — his "queering" of the term — that threatens to undermine the social order. Adolph is the exact opposite of the static, predictable docility and animalism of "the Big Black Buck" Uncle Tom. When he’s in town, you have to lock up your sons, daughters, wives, mother, father, and yourself because his power of seduction is so great. Think Prince during his Dirty Mind (Warner Bros., 1980) phase and you get the general idea.

Fear, according to Miller, continues to generate a serious backlash in reaction to the idea — let alone reality — of true equality for black people in the west. Images of black cork minstelry that lampoon the black dandy’s aspirations have been around as long as the black dandy. From Zip Coon and Jim Dandy in the early 19th century to present-day manifestations in popular culture, ambivalence — a tool of the black dandy — has served as a double-edged sword. Exactly when and where does "stylin’ out" become "coonin’"? If W.E.B. Du Bois, the quintessential black dandy, couldn’t figure it out, I’m not sure that I can find a definitive answer.

Slaves to Fashion rediscovers its footing in exploring the nature of "otherness." Returning from investigations of the black dandy’s lineage to note his role in contemporary art and culture, Miller shines a light on filmmaker Isaac Julien, editor and photographer Iké Udé, visual artist Yinka Shonibare, and beyond. In the process, she answers a variety of questions regarding what a black dandy is and does. Ultimately, the black dandy’s problem is an AfroSurreal one: by perpetrating these "crimes of fashion," by avoiding and exploding pat definitions of blackness, masculinity, and sexuality, he occupies a realm outside convention, and all too often, recognition. It is from these murky waters of post-postmodernity, I believe, that the black dandy brings a message for us all.

Trash Lit: ‘Nine Dragons’ is trustworthy

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Editors note: Bay Guardian Executive Editor Tim Redmond has a bad 30-year addiction to mystery/crime/thriller books. He’s decided that he might as well put this terrible habit to productive use by writing about these sometimes awful, sometimes entertaining and — on rare occasion — significant works of mass-market literature. Read his last installment here.

nindragons.jpg

Nine Dragons
Michael Connelly
Little, Brow;, 374 pages, $27.99)

By Tim Redmond

Harry Bosch, Michael Connelly‘s fictional detective, is the best continuing-series character in the genre (well, there’s Spenser, but he’s a special case). Bosch lives in L.A., where he’s a cop. He’s a little bit tortured — what can you say about a guy named Bosch whose dad thought it would be funny to name him Hieronymous? — but not so bent that it takes over the storyline.

And there’s always a good storyline. Connelly, a former newspaper reporter, knows how to work the real world into top-fight fiction, and his books give you a great feel both for the seedy side of Los Angeles and the world of a police detective. He doesn’t glorify cops — they come with plenty of warts, and some of them are sleazebags and some are thugs and some are crooks. And he doesn’t make violence seem anything but ugly, pathetic and painful.

Nine Dragons takes on a scene that Connelly doesn’t know that well — Chinese gangs and the Hong Kong underworld — but instead of pretending to be an expert, he works his learning curve into his hero’s head. Bosch, after all these years, has never quite recovered from his time as a tunnel rat in Vietnam, and is painfully nervous that his attitude toward Asians remains colored by that experience. From the first chapter, he’s having trouble with his partner, Detective Chu, someone he desperately needs but can’t entirely trust.

Trash Lit: Wild times in ‘Rough Country’

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Editors note: Guardian Executive Editor Tim Redmond has a bad 30-year addiction to mystery/crime/thriller books. He’s decided that he might as well put this terrible habit to productive use by writing about these sometimes awful, sometimes entertaining and — on rare occasion — significant works of mass-market literature. Read his last installment here.

roughcountry.jpg

Rough Country
John Sandford
(Putnam, 388 pages $26.95)

By Tim Redmond

Let us stipulate: It’s difficult for a male writer who specializes in straight male lead characters (and in this case, in a straight male lead character who spends a significant portion of his waking hours trying to get women into bed) to write a credible novel that centers around a lesbian resort. James Patterson, a white guy, has a wonderful black lead character named Alex Cross who works, perfectly, but that’s the exception; most people screw up when they try to reach like that.

And at the beginning of Rough Country, I had to wonder. I love John Sandford, but after the first chapter…well, you’ve got a straight girl getting hot watching lesbian lip-lock, you’ve got sordid lesbian drama that turns into a lesbian bar fight, you’ve got a weird business going on with really young men working at the women-only resort who may be on-the-side fuck-candy for bisexual girls (or may be underage hotties fucking older women for money)…and a little too much talk about “rug munchers.”

But by the middle of the book, it’s pretty clear that this is not just a great Sandford novel, but a wonderful portrayal of a fictional Northern Minnesota town where nobody gives a shit who fucks who. The owner of the resort is a respected local businessperson. The old straight guys who run bars and work as fishing guides treat the women just like any other (money-carrying) tourists. An old lady who’s part of a horticultural preservation group wonders aloud why anyone would care about another person’s sexuality, save for “a bunch of stuffy old men.”

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