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The Fourth of July in Rock Rapids, Iowa, 1940-53

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The good old days in Rock Rapids, Iowa,
the Fourth of July, l940-53

By Bruce B. Brugmann

(Note: In July of l972, when the Guardian was short a Fourth of July story, I sat down and cranked out this one for the front page on my trusty Royal Typewriter. I now reprint it each year on the Bruce blog, with some San Francisco updates and postscripts.)

Back where I come from, a small town beneath a tall standpipe in northwestern Iowa, the Fourth of July was the best day of a long, hot summer.

The Fourth came after YMCA camp and Scout camp and church camp, but before the older boys had to worry about getting into shape for football. It was welcome relief from the scalding, 100-degree heat in a town without a swimming pool and whose swimming holes at Scout Island were usually dried up by early July. But best of all, it had the kind of excitement that began building weeks in advance.

The calm of the summer dawn and the cooing of the mourning doves on the telephone wires would be broken early on July Fourth: The Creglow boys would be up by 7 a.m. and out on the lawn shooting off their arsenal of firecrackers. They were older and had somehow sent their agents by car across the state line and into South Dakota where, not far above the highway curves of Larchwood, you could legally buy fireworks at roadside stands.

Ted Fisch, Jim Ramsey, Wiener Winters, the Cook boys, Hermie Casjens, Jerry Prahl, and the rest of the neighborhood would race of their houses to catch the action. Some of them had cajoled firecrackers from their parents or bartered from the older boys in the neighborhood: some torpedoes (the kind you smashed against the sidewalk); lots of 2 and 3-inchers, occasionally the granddaddy of them all, the cherry bomb (the really explosive firecracker, stubby, cherry red, with a wick sticking up menacingly from its middle; the kind of firecracker you’d gladly trade away your best set of Submariner comics for).

Ah, the cherry bomb. It was a microcosm of excitement and mischief and good fun. Bob Creglow, the most resourceful of the Creglow boys, would take a cherry bomb, set it beneath a tin can on a porch, light the fuse, then head for the lilac bushes behind the barn.

“The trick,” he would say, imparting wisdom of the highest order, “is to place the can on a wood porch with a wood roof. Then it will hit the top of the porch, bang, then the bottom of the porch, bang. That’s how you get the biggest clatter.”

So I trudged off to the Linkenheil house, the nearest front porch suitable for cherry bombing, to try my hand at small-town demolition. Bang went the firecracker. Bang went the can on the roof. Bang went the can on the floor. Bang went the screen door as Karl Linkenheil roared out in a sweat, and I lit out for the lilacs behind the barn with my dog, Oscar.

It was glorious stuff – not to be outdone for years, I found out later, until the Halloween eve in high school when Dave Dietz, Ted Fisch, Ken Roach, Bob Babl, and rest of the Hermie Casjens gang and I made the big time and twice pushed a boxcar loaded with lumber across Main Street and blocked it for hours. But that’s another story in my Halloween blog of last year.

Shooting off fireworks was, of course, illegal in Rock Rapids, but Chief of Police Del Woodburn and later Elmer “Shinny” Sheneberger used to lay low on the Fourth. I don’t recall ever seeing them about in our neighborhood and I don’t think they ever arrested anybody, although each year the Rock Rapids Reporter would carry vague warnings about everybody cooperating to have “a safe and sane Fourth of July.”

Perhaps it was just too dangerous for them to start making firecracker arrests on the Fourth – on the same principle, I guess, that it was dangerous to do too much about the swashbuckling on Halloween or start running down dogs without leashes (Mayor Earl Fisher used to run on the platform that, as long as he was in office, no dog in town would have to be leashed. The neighborhood consensus was that Fisher’s dog, a big, boisterous boxer, was one of the few that ought to be leashed).

We handled the cherry bombs and other fireworks in our possession with extreme care and cultivation; I can’t remember a single mishap. Yet, even then, the handwriting was on the wall. There was talk of cutting off the fireworks supply in South Dakota because it was dangerous for young boys. Pretty soon, they did cut off the cherry bomb traffic and about all that was left, when I came back from college and the Roger boys had replaced the Creglow boys next door, was little stuff appropriately called ladyfingers.

Fireworks are dangerous, our parents would say, and each year they would dust off the old chestnut about the drugstore in Spencer that had a big stock of fireworks and they caught fire one night and much of the downtown went up in a spectacular shower of roman candles and sparkling fountains.

The story was hard to pin down, and seemed to get more gruesome every year – but, we were told, this was why Iowa banned fireworks years before, why they were so dangerous and why little boys shouldn’t be setting them off. The story, of course, never made quite the intended impression; we just wished we’d been on the scene.
My grandfather was the town druggist (Brugmann’s Drugstore, “where drugs and gold are fairly sold,” since 1902) and he said he knew the Spencer druggist personally. Fireworks put him out of business and into the poorhouse, he’d say, and walk away shaking his head.

In any event, firecrackers weren’t much of an issue past noon – the Fourth celebration at the fairgrounds was getting underway and there was too much else to do. Appropriately, the celebration was sponsored by the Rex Strait post of the American Legion (Strait, so the story went, was the first boy from Rock Rapids to die on foreign soil during World War I); the legionnaires were a bunch of good guys from the cleaners and the feed store and the bank who sponsored the American Legion baseball team each summer.

There was always a big carnival, with a ferris wheel somewhere in the center for the kids, a bingo stand for the elders, a booth where the ladies from the Methodist Church sold homemade baked goods, sometimes a hootchy dancer or two, and a couple of dank watering holes beneath the grandstand where the VFW and the Legion sold Grainbelt and Hamms at 30¢ a bottle to anybody who looked of age.

Later on, when the farmboys came in from George and Alvord, there was lots of pushing and shoving, and a fist fight or two.

In front of the grandstand, out in the dust and the sun, would come a succession of shows that made the summer rounds of the little towns. One year it would be Joey Chitwood and his daredevil drivers. (The announcer always fascinated me: “Here he comes, folks, rounding the far turn…he is doing a great job out there tonight…let’s give him a big, big hand as he pulls up in front on the grandstand…”)

Another year it would be harness racing and Mr. Hardy, our local trainer from Doon, would be in his moment of glory. Another year it was tag team wrestling and a couple of barrel-chested goons from Omaha, playing the mean heavies and rabbit-punching their opponents from the back, would provoke roars of disgust from the grandstand. ( The biggest barrel-chest would lean back on the ropes, looking menacingly at the crowd and yell, “ Aw, you dumb farmers. What the hell do you know anyway?” And the grandstand would roar back in glee.)

One year, Cedric Adams, the Herb Caen of Minneapolis and the Star-Tribune, would tour the provinces as the emcee of a variety show. “It’s great to be in Rock Rapids,” he would say expansively, “because it’s always been known as the ‘Gateway to Magnolia.” (Magnolia, he didn’t need to say, was a little town just over the state line in Minnesota which was known throughout the territory for its liquor-by-the-drink roadhouses. It was also Cedric Adams’ hometown: his “Sackamenna.”) Adams kissed each girl (soundly) who came on the platform to perform and, at the end, hushed the crowd for his radio broadcast to the big city “direct from the stage of the Lyon County Fairgrounds in Rock Rapids, Iowa.”

For a couple of years, when Rock Rapids had a “town team,” and a couple of imported left-handed pitchers named Peewee Wenger and Karl Kletschke, we would have some rousing baseball games with the best semi-pro team around, Larchwood and its gang of Snyder brothers: Barney the eldest at shortstop, Jimmy the youngest at third base, John in center field, Paul in left field, another Snyder behind the plate and a couple on the bench. They were as tough as they came in Iowa baseball.

I can remember it as if it were yesterday at Candlestick, the 1948 game with the Snyders of Larchwood. Peewee Wenger, a gawky, 17-year-old kid right off a high school team, was pitching for Rock Rapids and holding down the Snyder artillery in splendid fashion. Inning after inning he went on, nursing a small lead, mastering one tough Larchwood batter after another, with a blistering fastball and a curve that sliced wickedly into the bat handles of the right-handed Larchwood line-up.

Then the cagey Barney Snyder laid a slow bunt down the third base line. Wenger stumbled, lurched, almost fell getting to the ball, then toppled off balance again, stood helplessly holding the ball. He couldn’t make the throw to first. Barney was safe, cocky and firing insults like machine gun bullets at Peewee from first base.

Peewee, visibly shaken, went back to the mound. He pitched, the next Larchwood batter bunted, this time down the first base line. Peewee lurched for the ball, but couldn’t come up with it. A couple more bunts, a shot through the pitcher’s mound, more bunts and Peewee was out. He could pitch, but, alas, he was too clumsy to field. In came Bill Jammer, now in his late 30’s, but in his day the man who beat the University of Iowa while pitching at a small college called Simpson.

Now he was pitching on guts and beer, a combination good enough for many teams and on good days even to take on the Snyders. Jammer did well for a couple of innings, then he let two men on base, then came a close call at the plate. Jammer got mad. Both teams were off the bench and onto the field and, as Fred Roach wrote in the Rock Rapids Reporter, “fisticuffs erupted at home plate.” When the dust cleared, Jammer has a broken jaw, and for the next two weeks had to drink his soup through a straw at the Joy Lunch. John Snyder, it was said later, came all the way in from center field to throw the punch, but nobody knew for sure and he stayed in the game. I can’t remember the score or who won the game, but I remember it as the best Fourth ever.

At dusk, the people moved out on their porches or put up folding chairs on the lawn. Those who didn’t have a good view drove out to the New Addition or parked out near Mark Curtis’ place or along the river roads that snaked out to the five-mile bridge and Virgil Hasche’s place.

A hush came over the town. Fireflies started flickering in the river bottom and, along about 8:30, the first puff of smoke rose above the fairgrounds and an aerial bomb whistled into the heavens. BOOM! And the town shook as if hit by a clap of thunder.

Then the three-tiered sky bombs – pink, yellow, white, puff, puff, puff. The Niagara Falls and a gush of white sparks.

Then, in sudden fury, a dazzling display of sizzling comets and aerial bombs and star clusters that arched high, hung for a full breath and descended in a cascade of sparks that floated harmlessly over the meadows and cornfields. At the end, the flag – red, white and blue – would burst forth on the ground as the All-American finale in the darkest of the dark summer nights. On cue, the cheers rolled out from the grandstand and the cars honked from the high ground and the people trundled up their lawn chairs and everybody headed for home.

Well, I live in San Francisco now, and I drive to Daly City with my son, Danny, to buy some anemic stuff in gaudy yellow and blue wrapping and I try unsuccessfully each year to get through the fog or the traffic to see the fireworks at Candlestick. But I feel better knowing that, back where I come from, everybody in town will be on their porches and on the backroads on the evening of the Fourth to watch the fireworks and that, somewhere in town, a little boy will put a big firecracker under a tin can on a wood porch, then light out for the lilacs behind the barn.

P.S. Our family moved in l965 from Daly City to a house in the West Portal area of San Francisco. There are, I assure you, few visible fireworks in that neighborhood. However, down where we work at the Guardian building at the bottom of Potrero Hill, the professional and amateur action is spectacular.

From the roof of our building at 135 Mississippi, and from any Potrero Hill height, you can see the fireworks in several directions: the waterfront fireworks in the city, fireworks on the Marin side of the Golden Gate bridge, fireworks at several points in the East Bay, fireworks along the Peninsula coast line.

And for the amateur action, parents with kids, kids of all ages, spectators in cars and on foot, congregate after dusk along Terry Francois Boulevard in San Francisco along the shoreline between the Giants ballpark and Kellys Mission Rock restaurant.
The action is informal but fiery and furious: cherry bombs, clusters, spinning wheels, high flying arcs, whizzers of all shapes and sizes. The cops are quite civilized and patrol the perimeter but don’t bother anybody. I go every year. I think it’s the best show in town. B3.

Domestic unrest

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Survival often depends on one’s ability to scurry around. Dancers and smaller-scale presenters must use their wits if they want to show their audiences more than homegrown fare. For the most part, the process at SCUBA — a presenters’ network that shares companies out of Seattle, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and San Francisco — works. Sometimes, however, there is a glitch. Such was the case June 26–28 with one of the two dance installations presented as part of "ODC Theater Festival 2: Local Heroes/Big Picture," Kate Watson-Wallace’s House and Karen Sherman’s Tiny Town.

Watson-Wallace has made something of a reputation for herself in her home city of Philadelphia, where she takes over physical locations and transforms them through performance. Since these are acutely site-specific works, traveling with them is difficult. At Theater Artaud, she was confronted with a huge space that has a strong personality of its own. It proved particularly problematic during the first of two performances on opening night when the soft light of dusk streamed through the huge, history-crusted windows of Artaud’s loading dock. She also had to deal with memories (at least this audience member’s) of Lizz Roman, Joanna Haigood, and other artists who have presented their own — and stronger — interpretations of Artaud. Watson-Wallace works best with intimacy, and her production simply needed more confinement than the space or the budget allowed.

House consisted of what probably were three excerpts from the original piece, performed in the theater’s loading dock and lobby. To create the dining room, she placed a long table and six chairs in a corner, which afforded some sense of enclosure. This first part was choreographically the richest, and well performed by Watson-Wallace, Megan Mazarick, and John Luna with local dancers Sebastian Grubb, Jocelyn Lee, and Marisa Mariscotti. Shifting relationships — on, over, and under the table, as well as up the wall — flowed with the inevitability of clock time, yet they were filled with nuanced little fits and starts. An emotional climate redolent with suggestions of love, rebellion, and fatigue recalled tense moments around anyone’s family dinner table. People came and went, hands tentatively touched, looks were exchanged, support was given and withdrawn.

In the living room — suggested by a sofa, rug, and coffee table nailed halfway up a wall — Mazarick’s slow-paced solo had to deal with gravity as she slithered, climbed, and hung over the furniture. This was bland. Two pillows attached to Artaud’s lobby served as Watson-Wallace and Luna’s bedroom. A live video projected their movement onto a lumpy mattress. The duo’s well-danced intimacy — tender, playful, troubled — suggested two people used to each other in bed and out. I kept wondering whether an element of voyeurism was supposed to be at play between the real and the virtual performance. If there was, I didn’t see it.

Sherman resides in Minneapolis but was born in St. Louis. The person sitting next to me at the show was familiar with the choreographer’s birthplace and caught local references that escaped me. Tiny Town was a sardonic but curiously affectionate portrait that peeled away the layers of what the program described as a "Midwestern landscape," yet this could be any small town. It’s a place where everyone minds everyone else’s business, where residents frantically try to keep up and fit in — and woe to those who can’t.

Tiny was meticulously crafted with rich production values. It ran a little flat toward the end, but showcased fine performances from dancers Sherman, Joanna Furnans, Megan Mayer, Morgan Thorson, and Kristin Van Loon. You knew that not everything was right behind the set’s picket fences when a rising cloud revealed two atomic reactors and a woman with her legs tied literally turned herself upside down to "walk." She ended headfirst in a stack of pancakes, and that was just for starters. In this world of superficial prettiness — flowers stuffed in mailboxes, glittery party dresses — tomboys get beaten up and toothy housewives are indeed desperate.

The dancing was appropriately stiff-legged and fractured, full of moments infused with a dogged persistence. It spoke volumes about discomfort within one’s skin, if not outright self-hatred. And all of it was presented with pasted-on smiles.

Centiclubs

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER "It’s like an old ship. Things break, things fall apart, and you just keep bailing water and hope you hit land someday!"

That’s Guy Carson, Café Du Nord owner and ex-Hotel Utah booker, on owning a 100-year-old club. Yes, there are the inevitable aches and pains attendant with a structure erected just two years after the great ‘quake, as well as eerie little trap doors and escape hatches from the Prohibition era. But, oh, the stories the Du Nord, House of Shields, and Hotel Utah — a troika of oases overflowing with libation and live music that have all hit the century mark in the past year — could tell. ‘Member the time PJ Harvey played a not-so-secret show at the Utah, triggering round-the-block queues? Or the first San Francisco show by rock legends the Zombies at the Du Nord? Or the rumored gunfight played out by Comstock Lode robber baron William Sharon in front of his then-men’s social club, now known as the House of Shields?

‘Course you don’t. So much has been lost in the mists of Bay Area mythology and Barbary Coast conjecture. But there’s always word of mouth — in full effect at the shambling, loving June 19 celebration of the Utah’s centennial, as Birdman Records’ David Katznelson presented witnesses like owner Damian Samuel, a ukulele sing-along by music writer Sylvie Simmons and Bart Davenport, and tributes by artists who have stomped Utah’s boards, including Paula Frazer and Greg Ashley.

Since its days as Al’s Transbay Tavern (name-checked in 1971’s Dirty Harry) through the years owned by screenwriter Paul Gaer (who brought in Robin Williams and puppet shows), the venue has not only been instrumental in establishing a beachhead for local bands — Cake was considered a resident outfit in the 1990s and Counting Crows, Jewel, and Tarnation were onetime regulars ("For a while I used to say that the Hotel Utah was Geffen’s A&R department," recalls Carson). Its communities include "open mic–ers, the regulars, and the people who live in the building," Samuel offers. "It’s a live amoeba of sorts that has its own direction." He says the UK’s Noisettes now call the Utah its home base, and past staffers include ex-booker Mike Taylor (Court and Spark), Cory McAbee (Billy Nayer Show), and Shannon Walter (16 Bitch Pile-Up). One of Samuel’s fave tell-alls: in 1997 he had to walk future Guns N’ Roses guitarist Buckethead around the block so he could make a dramatic entrance onstage. "Here I am walking him around in SoMa, a chicken bucket on his head," Samuel recalls. "He kept saying, ‘I didn’t realize this block was so long.’<0x2009>"

Uptown, a century ago, the House of Shields also threw open its doors — in a much more hush-hush way: the venue began life as a men’s social club, and the only women permitted in until the ’70s were, says owner Alexis Filipello, "working girls." These days, the venue that got its name from its ’30s owner Eddie Shields is more likely to see indie artists like Sean Smith and Beam than highly establishment swells sneaking a stiff drink, but the crowd remains raucous, gathered around the elegant bar originally meant for the Pied Piper watering hole in the Palace Hotel across New Montgomery. When artist Maxfield Parrish made his Pied Piper of Hamelin mural (1909) far too long for the piece, the bar was sent over to Palace cobuilder William Sharon’s other nightspot. After Filipello bought the watering hole in 2003, she restored the natural wood, refurbished the moldings, reupholstered the booths, and jettisoned the "funky" taxidermy. "It was just such a beautiful old location, a piece of San Francisco’s history," she recalls. "We did a lot of work to get it back up to its beauty." No plans, however, for the firmly closed underground passage that links House of Shields to the Palace. Persistent rumors have it that in 1923, President Warren Harding died, not in the Palace as officially reported, but in the Shields’ speakeasy, and was transported through the tunnel back to his suite to avoid Prohibition-period scandal.

The ground is still shaking, happily, around Café Du Nord, which hit its 100th in October. In the next year Carson hopes to create a coffeehouse/art space upstairs next to the club, where performers can show their work, then play a show upstairs at the Swedish American Hall — which has hosted performers ranging from Cat Power to Michael Hurley — or downstairs at the Du Nord. He also plans to install an elevator where the Du Nord women’s room now sits, renovating the space so he can do the unique, one-off shows he prefers.

Carson is striving to continue nurturing the creative spirit of the Utah. "The difference between then and now is that everything costs so much. Our overhead here is so high, you can’t fail," he says. Back in ’90 when Gaer hired him at the Utah, he adds, "it wasn’t a big financial nut to crack, and we ran it like a living art experiment. I really miss those days. It was fun!"

QUESTION AUTHORITY?

MEGAFAUN


Backwoods Table of the Elements crustastic jams? The Durham, N.C., trio also joins Akron/Family at the High Sierra fest for a Mega-Akron set. Wed/2, 8:30 p.m., pay what you can. 21 Grand, 416 25th St., Oakl. www.21grand.org. Also Thurs/3, 9 p.m., $8. 12 Galaxies, 2565 Mission, SF. www.12galaxies.com. Fri/4–Sat/5, check Web site for times, $30–<\d>$168. High Sierra, Quincy; www.highsierramusic.com

BATTLEHOOCH


Kooky, crunchy spazz-tastic moves for kids? The SF band dons Baagersox guise for the first anniversary Lazerdance dance-off Thursday, then goes into seven-piece mode Saturday. Thurs/3, 10 p.m., $5. Knockout, 3223 Mission, SF. www.theknockoutsf.com. Also Sat/5, 9:30 p.m., $7. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

RETRIBUTION GOSPEL CHOIR


All-boy rock testimonials from Low’s Alan Sparhawk? Tues/8, 9 p.m., $10. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com

No wallflowers

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… And you shall know Tilly and the Wall by their tap-dancing rather than their drumming, their girl-gang vocals, their dazzling finery, the virtual — and at times, I swear, literal — confetti in the air. So is it any shock that the Omaha, Neb., five-piece, once better known as a Bright Eyes spin-off, has become one of the most beloved live indie acts to still hop in a van and hit the road? Nonetheless, the ensemble, which more often resembles a hyperpositive winsome art project than your average stony-faced indie rock unit, has weathered its share of audience adversity.

"We once played a coffeehouse, opening for Pedro the Lion, and there was one guy sitting in front, sawing logs," muses vocalist Neely Jenkins from Omaha, thinking back on the band’s oddest performances. "We were like, ‘Really? We’re that boring? We gotta do something.’<0x2009>"

Hence the Tilly and the Wall approach: no snores, no folded-arms bores, and this time out, a crew member devoted to lights. "Having gone to shows since I was in junior high, I know what shows excite me," says Jenkins, 34, who once performed with tap-dancing bandmate Jamie Pressnall in Conor Oberst’s poppy Park Ave. "It is nice to have something to look at, to make it more fun and more visually stimuutf8g. Especially now because tickets are so expensive — you better put on a good show."

The wild children of the Midwest are attempting to hold their fans’ attention offstage as well with their latest, third full-length, a multitextured affair enigmatically titled O (Team Love), after the oval frame that will surround the various, limited-edition, handmade prints created by friends. The covers’ collages, watercolors, and cartoonish imagery visually parallels the collaborative approach of Tilly and the Wall, touching on O‘s new moods and musical turns, which capture both feisty girl-group pop ("Blood Flowers") and sample-propelled Of Montreal–like psych-bounce ("Chandelier Lake").

"Our sounds have been sort of lighter, but our subject matter has always been a little bit darker," Jenkins explains. "I feel like there were some more truthful feelings in this one. It wasn’t just the happier side of life. It wasn’t a cover. There was some real stuff going on."

TILLY AND THE WALL

Tues/8, 9 p.m., $17

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

www.gamh.com

Speed Reading

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FASHION: A PHILOSOPHY

By Lars Svendsen

Reaktion Books

188 pages

$24.95

As a once and future dandy, I’ve noted the growing field of fashion philosophy. In the realm of the academy, the idea of a unified theory of style has become something of a holy grail. The latest knight-errant, Lars Svendsen, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Bergen in Norway, starts his quest by seeking the meaning of fashion.

Relying heavily on Immanuel Kant and Walter Benjamin, Svendsen (as translated by John Irons) creates a concise and comprehensive primer on fashion and clothing as it relates to identity. He then stitches on a virtual CliffsNotes of philosophy on fashion, citing Roland Barthes, Charles Baudelaire, and Michel Foucault, and then appliqués some hep quotes from Bret Easton Ellis, AbFab, and the Pet Shop Boys.

In the end, Svendsen finds that we cultivate surfaces, that we live in an increasingly fictionalized reality, and that our identities are in steady decline. He concludes that fashion is a highly diverse phenomenon that pretends to have meaning, but in reality "has meaning to only a limited extent." That’s it? Fashion has no meaning, but some meaning? How weak is that?

If philosophy wishes to find meaning in fashion, it must make room for the power of talisman, totem, and fetish — elements that pure reason cannot abide. Svendsen errs in a manner many fashion philosophers have, by refusing to look away from the runways of Europe toward the magical elements of dress in Africa, Asia, and South America. The eggheads just don’t get it.

Flight or write

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

"The moment one learns English, complications set in," wrote Spanish ex-pat Felipe Alfau, in English, beginning his 1948 novel Chromos (first published in 1990). Learning English, he wrote, "far from increasing [one’s] understanding of life, if this were possible, only renders it hopelessly muddled and obscure." While this might be true of learning any new language — one starts to see how words simply refer to other words — we might say the same about literature. Are those of us who look to books for salvation making the simple needlessly complex? Orhan Pamuk claims that writing novels is just an "excuse to wrap myself up in new personas." Gregory Corso wrote of our relationship to books: "I, as though tipping a pitcher of milk / pour secrecy upon the dying page." Though not especially positive, both descriptions are sensual and alluring.

Katherine Silver’s thrilling translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness (New Directions, 142 pages, $15.95), the first English appearance of any of the Salvadoran exile’s eight novels, brings out the physical effects of a different type of reading: the translation of human tragedy into words, and then back into life. It begins with the incantatory phrase, "I am not complete in the mind." The sentence comes from a report of transcribed Indian testimonies of survivors of a massacre in an unnamed country that resembles Guatemala. The alcoholic, sardonic, surprisingly compassionate narrator is editing this report as a freelance gig for the Catholic Church.

On the phone from her home in Berkeley, Silver admitted that when an editor first showed her 2004’s Insentatez (Tusquets Editores) at the Guadalajara International Book Fair, she was put off by the subject matter: "I looked at it very quickly and said, I don’t like violence. Then I read it on the airplane and said, ‘I want to do this.’ It’s not really about violence. It’s all ultimately about the intimacy of language and writing."

Despite being plagued by increasingly violent fantasies ("For I am not a total stranger to magical realism," the narrator says to explain a particularly brutal one in which a brain is split in half), he is finally brought back to earth not by the truths of the report but by a paranoid (and in the end, realistic) attention to the relationship of the report to the outside world. One sexual fantasy’s effect is simply to "stabilize" his mood. Later, overwhelmed with isolation, he goes outside to "howl like a sick animal under the star-studded sky." After this release, he is able to see the real danger approaching in the shadows.

Senselessness builds so seamlessly to an arresting finale that you will immediately read it again, attentive to how the language of the report infests the narrator’s language. Silver was lucky, she said, to be working with such a "careful" writer. "A translator is a very close reader," she said. "It’s kind of like looking at a book through a magnifying glass. But I never had to second-guess him. He wears well." As a result, the moment one starts reading Senselessness, complications set in — complications we cannot live without.

Hunter, haunted

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend," says the reporter in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), a film about the importance of living up to one’s image, even when that image is predicated more on fiction than fact. It’s a burden either way, and the dilemma is echoed in Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, a lively new documentary by Alex Gibney, who directed 2005’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and picked up an Oscar this year for Taxi to the Dark Side.

Gonzo focuses on Thompson’s most fruitful professional period — 1965 to 1975, a decade that saw the New Journalism proponent (who committed suicide in 2005) write Hell’s Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. During that time, he also launched an ill-fated campaign for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colo., and shaped his public persona into that of a gun-toting, drug-crazed, booze-soaked, authority-bashing champion of outsiders, capable of churning out pages of brilliant and utterly unique prose, always written in first person and most often written while under the influence.

Speaking over the phone from New York City, Gibney reflected that he was drawn to his latest subject largely because of that persona. "He was a guy who didn’t play by the rules, and it seems like we need a guy like that around now, when the rules are being used against us by people in power," the director said. "Also, he seemed like a fun character to do, this larger-than-life character that — for at least for a brief period of time — became this outlaw that we all wanted to live by."

Gonzo taps quite a bit of home-movie footage, photos, and audiotapes to flesh out Thompson beyond his words (read by Johnny Depp, who bonded with the author while prepping for the 1998 Fear and Loathing movie). A diverse array of contemporary interviews (Rolling Stone‘s Jann Wenner, Hell’s Angel Sonny Barger, both of Thompson’s wives, Pat Buchanan, illustrator Ralph Steadman, George McGovern, and Jimmys Buffet and Carter) bears out the wide range of Thompson’s influence. According to Gibney, the only interview he would have liked to have gotten but didn’t was with Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau, who would only speak off the record.

"My first day on the job was to go out to [Thompson’s funeral] — the one Johnny Depp paid for — and hang out, try to get a bunch of people to talk, and then shoot the funeral itself. I shot the funeral, but nobody much wanted to talk to me," Gibney recalled. "But once I let everyone know I was doing this film and that it was really gonna focus on his work, that opened people up, and inevitably they started talking about Hunter the character as well."

The funeral, briefly shown in Gonzo, is a surprisingly tasteful spectacle involving taiko drums, a giant cannon, and glimpses of famous friends (John Kerry, Bill Murray). The film doesn’t spend much time on Thompson’s suicide, though in its first scene it speculates how the writer might have lost his trademark edge. In Gibney’s eyes, Thompson’s Dr. Gonzo alter ego was the reason for both his success and his ultimate downfall.

"Initially [his persona] just grew out of a natural journalistic instinct to supply your own perceptions, to put yourself in the story, to be the lens through which viewers would see whatever you were covering," Gibney said. "But over time it became [less of a] lens [and more of a] bubble in which he got trapped. So I think that was the trick. Sometimes this mythical character he created just kind of took over. As he remarks in the film, ‘Sometimes I don’t know who to be, whether to be Duke or Hunter.’<0x2009>"

Duality also manifested itself in Thompson’s private personality, which Gibney was surprised to discover as being "almost bipolar."

"Hunter’s mood swings kind of represented his ability to see the kind of schisms or splits in the American character," he said. "I knew he was always a very perceptive writer about the American character, but I think maybe he was so perceptive because he — more than a lot of people — is like America. Sort of the best and the worst. I didn’t really understand till I started the film just how many-sided he was."

Visually dynamic and entertaining for Thompson devotees as well as those who only know him from Depp’s portrayal in Fear and Loathing, Gonzo is nonetheless tinged with the melancholy that eventually tempered Thompson’s considerable lust for life. Blame health problems, professional frustrations, the re-election of George W. Bush, or more existential concerns — Thompson’s quest for the American Dream, documented in Fear and Loathing and elsewhere, was never really satisfied. Instead, Gibney speculated, "I think he ended up finding how elusive it is, and how much-desired it is — but how rare it is to ever find it. And that’s what he found in Vegas, I think: what a perfect vehicle for the death of the American dream, this place where you go hoping to fulfill that rags to riches dream, yet in some fundamental way knowing that the house always wins."

GONZO: THE LIFE AND WORK OF DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON

Opens Fri/4 in Bay Area theaters

www.magpictures.com

Catlady

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Every year the feral cat no one can catch has a litter of kittens and one of them winds up knocking on my door, so to speak, saying, "Well? Am I cute, or what?" And before I can answer — answering rhetorical questions being one of my favorite pastimes — the little outcast (who is of course the very definition of cuteness), falls into a feigned faint on account of starvation, obliging me to go get milk.

Now, I’ve listened to plenty of bluegrass music in my day. Between mandolin and fiddle solos I have absorbed the important lessons of the frozen girl, the paperboy, and others like them. Orphaned outcasts require bowls of milk, a crust of bread, and/or blankets, or else they will be dead on your doorstep come morning.

And nobody wants that, except maybe music publishers. I myself am not a moral, nor even an ethical, person. If I live by a code, it’s my own, and it’s odd, idiosyncratic, and inconsistent. Nevertheless, mercy for those less fortunate than myself, provided they show up on my doorstep no later than the second verse, starving or freezing, and preferably with a slight wobble, the back of their hand to the forehead … this is programmed into my cells as surely as one, four, five.

Plus: kittens are cute. They just are. Case closed. And I say this at the risk of offending a large portion of my readership, Rube Roy Perrotta, a.k.a. Shortribs Mosel, my old-time barbecue and buffet podner back in Ohio. He hates when I write about children and bunnies and shit. Speaking of which, there will also be fallout from the four or five people who have written, over the years, in support of Poo Poo Pride Month.

Which this is.

I’m sorry. I still listen to punk rock. I still like to look at, talk about, and journalistically record my scatological masterpieces. It’s just that I have also come to be an unabashed appreciator of cuteness. Sensing that, kittens come to my door.

I can tell that this will be the defining challenge of the second half of my life: how to die without first becoming a cat lady. All the elements are in place: aloneness, eccentricity, poverty, slanty one-room shack in the woods, disorderliness of mind, unrefined tastes, shortness of grace, pretty big bluegrass collection, and a weird, open heart.

Against that mountain of impending insurmountability, there stands one ally in my corner, and it is, ironically, a cat. My cat. Weirdo the Cat, whose legendary disdain for all carbon-based life forms, even orphans, is most vehemently expressed when the life form looks a little like her. As long as I have Weirdo the Cat, I reckon, I am absolutely protected from catladyhood.

Weirdo is 14 or 15. That means she likely will only live, I realize, for another 15, 20 years tops. Yes, I know that’s twice as long as cats generally live, but I’m factoring in her supernatural capacity for cantankerousness and tenacity. Some people are just too frickin’ pissed off all the time to die, and Weirdo the Cat, believe me, is one of those people.

How lucky is that? Without any question of me taking in one or 10 of these adorable outcasts my big-hearted self, I can get on the phone and start making calls. I know a lot of people with kids. I know a lot of musicians who know a lot of bluegrass songs. I know a lot of bighearted people without Weirdo the Cat in their corner.

Ate a lot of salad last night, as always, with my chicken soup, which had even more vegetables in it. Peas, celery, carrots. I ate a mango. Popcorn goes good with books, too, then a midnight bowl of Flakes & Flax cereal. For breakfast: oatmeal with sunflower seeds, strawberries, and blueberries.

Coffee.

Do you, like me, like balance? Don’t you wish this cute column came with a picture? Do you? Close your eyes.

———————————————————————–

My new favorite restaurant is Pho Hoa Lao #2. You know how I know? Because I ate there! Big, bright, empty place. The service is terrible, especially considering that there was no one else to serve. But the imperial rolls were pretty good, and both bowls of soup — the rare beef and beefball pho and the chicken soup — were very good. And it’s cheap, so …

PHO HOA LAO #2

333 10th St., Oakl.

(510) 763-8296

Daily, 8 a.m.–8 p.m.

No alcohol

Credit cards not accepted

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

Look, I get the gun thing. I started shooting a .22 rifle in third grade, and by the time I was 11 I had a gold National Rifle Association Sharpshooter medal on my wall. Even in my advanced, protogeriatric condition, I can still pop the logo on a Budweiser can at 50 feet; I did it two months ago, in upstate New York, with my nephew and namesake, who is a proud teenage redneck. Tim lives in a small town, wears camo, smokes the adults at paintball, and loves his firearms.

My brother, his dad, goes along with this reluctantly — in his household, there are very strict rules about gun use. The .22 and the .177 have trigger locks, and my brother keeps the only key in his pocket. The ammunition is locked up separately. And he has informed his son that anything you kill, you eat — which discourages any potshots at squirrels and birds. I can live with that.

I also have a friend in San Francisco who hunts, and I’m more than happy to go to his annual pig roast and consume the sweet, juicy, wonderful wild boar he pegged in Sonoma County.

So I get it. There are people who love target shooting, and since I was one of them many years ago, I understand. There are people who think it’s cool to go shoot a pig or a turkey or a duck and take it home for supper: since I think it’s one of the world’s great experiences to catch a bass or a trout and do the same thing, it’s hard to be critical.

But the United State Supreme Court decision last week wasn’t about my nephew’s .22 or my friend Rich’s hunting rifle. It was about whether cities can do anything remotely at all meaningful to keep 14-year-olds from shooting each other on the streets.

It’s about whether kids in Hunters Point and the Western Addition will live to graduate from high school. It’s about whether the desperate young people who are doing robberies in the Mission District and Bernal Heights will wind up shooting someone and spending the rest of their lives in prison over a bag of groceries and a hundred bucks. It’s about whether someone the age of my kindergarten daughter will take a bullet in the head one night and die from the crossfire while she’s asleep in bed.

Let’s face it: this is about handguns and assault rifles, about weapons that have very little use in hunting, that are rarely part of any sporting tradition, and that exist almost entirely for the purpose of killing other human beings.

The unnamed man who is suing — with the NRA’s money — to win the right to own a handgun in San Francisco public housing claims he needs a weapon to defend himself. I’ve been studying self-defense for 17 years now, and let me tell you a not-so-secret fact: guns are a terrible method of protection. If you own a gun in a city, the odds are far better that it will kill you or a loved one than that it will save your life. Guns don’t deter crime; they encourage crime.

And for my dear friends on the left who say that the Second Amendment protects us all from government repression, let me politely suggest that if the Marines invade San Francisco, the pistol in your attic won’t be much help.

City Attorney Dennis Herrera is fighting back on the NRA lawsuit, aggressively. He has to keep it up; this is madness.

Lennar’s bombing range in Orlando

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Explosive news from Orlando: unexploded bombs found on Lennar housing site

How did Lennar build homes on a former military base without the live ordnance first being cleared? That’s the subject of a CNN report about a neighborhood in Orlando that was built on the former Pinecastle Jeep Range.

And as questions swirl about who knew what and when, a bigger question is coming into focus: who will the homeowners be able to hold accountable, now that their homes have been built? Is it the Army Corps of Engineers, the developer?

The report notes that “multiple lawsuits have been filed, accusing builders of gross negligence and seeking unspecified monetary damage.”

ornance.jpg
NIMBY nightmare: top ten things you don’t want to find in your backyard.

So, is this “real estate fraud” as one commentator on the CNN online edition claims?

And is it true that the government would have to step in and help the banks if all these property owners refused to pay their mortgages, claiming that the contract to buy the property was fraudulent, due to non-disclosure?

Either way, here is an interesting comment that should give prospective home owners pause:
” The twisted thing about real estate is you owe the bank not the developer. The bank pays the developer, and the home-owner is left with 30 years of house payments on a piece of property not safe to live on and lower in value than they paid for it. “

No need for earplugs at SFTV Unplugged

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Stefan Grant and bassist Martin Morales rock the Devil at SFTV Unplugged.

By Kat Renz

A year ago, local guitarist Stefan Grant wasn’t sure how he’d continue playing live shows. The drummer of his alternative/metal band, Kinetic Chain, moved to Chicago, and the tribe was further split after he and the lead guitarist suffered a falling out.

And then, as so often happens in those bummer times, epiphany struck: what if they took a different direction from the guitar riff-driven, crashing drum sound they were so used to and went acoustic instead? “Let’s strip it down to what it is,” Grant said, adding that he wanted to create an opportunity to play and see live music that’s easy on the ears but still rock, as opposed to jazz or pop – a sweet space he considers relatively rare in the city. Thus was born SFTV Unplugged.

It’s not a novel approach – remember how killer those episodes of MTV Unplugged were back in the ’90s? “I think there are a lot of 30-plus people who liked Unplugged a lot,” Grant said, as we proceeded to rail off a list of our favorite performances. Alice in Chains. The Cure. That legendary Nirvana performance with Kurt Cobain sarcastically commenting on everything from harp-tuning to Leadbelly’s for-sale guitar amid a stage buried in star-gazer lilies.

The new privacy

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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION It’s shocking how quickly we’ve all gotten used to the idea that the government can and will listen in on everything we say on our telephones, as well as everything we do on the Internet. Case in point: the FISA Amendments Act passed in the House last week, and is predicted to pass the Senate this week. This is a bill that grants telecoms retroactive immunity for illegally giving the National Security Agency access to the phone calls and Internet activities of millions of US citizens. What this bill ultimately does, aside from not holding companies accountable to the Constitution, is open the door for future mass infractions.

We’re looking down a fiber-optic cable that leads to a future where US spies can snarf up everybody’s data without warrants, combing through it for potential suspects in an ongoing digital witch hunt for terrorists or other "bad guys." I’m not saying anything new here. This is just a quick recap of every progressive futurist’s nightmare: it’s an Orwellian world where nothing you do goes unseen.

My hope is that this absurd bill won’t pass the Senate. But if it does, at least we can hope it will be somehow held in check by other laws to come, and by constitutional challenges. But I still think it’s time that we kiss our old-fashioned notions of privacy goodbye.

And not because we will all reveal our secrets and therefore be equally naked, as "transparent society" shill David Brin has argued. We never will be equally naked. There will always be governments and wealthy entities that have the means to cover their tracks and hide their transgressions. I think we must shed the idea that somehow we can protect the rights of ordinary people by protecting what we in the United States once called privacy.

The notion that we should each be granted a special sphere where everything we do goes unseen, unremarked, and unrecorded is a relatively new notion in itself, something that could hardly have existed in a small-town society where everybody knew everybody else’s business. And it still hardly exists in many high-density countries like Japan and China, where privacy is not as prized as other rights are.

What we ask for when we ask for privacy in the United States is a simply a space (physical or digital) to do legal things without fear of reprisals. Even when we had a more tightly-wrapped notion of privacy, say, 50 years ago, it was hardly perfect. Secrets leaked; spies spied. But there were no 24-hour videocam logs and detailed records of your every correspondence available and searchable online. You could write love letters to your secret admirer, ask her to burn them, and be sure nobody would ever know about your forbidden love.

If those letters were intercepted in a small community, your infamy would live forever. Not so in the digital age, when there’s so much readily available infamy that nobody could be bothered to remember your indiscretions for more than a few seconds. What I’m trying to say is that we will never have the old privacy of the burned letter again.

Instead we will have the new privacy, where what we do can be seen by anyone, but will mostly be hidden by crowds. The problem is that we still lose the old privacy forever. My secret transgressions may be drowned out by multitudes, but anyone who is determined to spy on my most private life will probably be able to do so — without a warrant.

So what do we do? Develop new standards of propriety, becoming as formal and controlled behind closed doors as we are in public? I think that will have happen in some cases. And in most cases, people will rely on crowds to hide them, hoping they never fall under sustained scrutiny. The more noise all of us make, the more we can help to hide the innocent. There will be a kind of privacy in the crowd.

But there will also be a private class of people who never have to rely on crowds. To return to my earlier point, I don’t buy for a minute the idea that at some point everyone — including the rich and politically connected — will be subjected to the same scrutiny as those people whose phone records were illegally handed over the to NSA by AT&T. The powerful will continue to have old-fashioned privacy, while the rest of us must get used to living without it.

Annalee Newitz (annalee@techsploitation.com) is a surly media nerd who tried to hide behind a crowd once but they dispersed.

Rock Candy

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REVIEW May 15 was one of those few cheery days in San Francisco when a sunny morning transitioned into a "warm wind blowing, stars are out" night. Oh yeah, and that whole State Supreme Court lifting the ban on gay marriage thing probably raised overall spirits a bit. But no, that wasn’t the reason the evening mood was so upbeat. In fact, the joyous news that day was that a straight couple, refusing to be disenfranchised any longer, announced their engagement at the Stud’s mixed, bimonthly, electro-punk-pop night Rock Candy. I know, it’s all so unclear, but it wouldn’t be the city by the Bay if the fog didn’t continuously roll in, right? And as I rolled into the club, ready to rock, I too refused to be left out in the cold any longer and searched the venue for my next ex.

Sure, I came up in the age of rock star divorces like those of Tommy Lee and Heather Locklear or Locklear again and Richie Sambora. So I vow that if I were a rock, I’d be jade — because I no longer have faith in the so-called sacrament of marriage. Still, I say if straight people want to live in acrimony, they should be able to. But ear candy beat eye candy for the night-creatures in attendance amid the polyamorous union of DJed new rave, goth, indie, and Brit-pop, and club hosts Marc Blinder and Virginia Suicide’s rousing gay marriage-themed sing-along, which culminated with the inspiring "We Are the Champions." Truth be told, I think it’s great that the happy couple delayed their announcement until everyone achieved the freedom to marry. Nonetheless, my more disillusioned half wondered what all the commitment-phobic gay partners, who previously shooed off marriage with "Darling, I’d marry you if I could," will do now.

ROCK CANDY First and Third Thursdays, 9 p.m.–2 a.m., $5. Stud, 399 Ninth St., SF. www.elasticfuture.com

Down with legitimacy

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OPINION We all remember Gavin Newsom’s stunt four years ago, when he emerged from a tight election race against Matt Gonzalez and promptly "legalized" gay marriage, sending his approval ratings soaring and guaranteeing him a second term. Back then 80-somethings Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon became the first smiling gay couple to marry in honor of La Newsom, before then a politician known mostly for cynical, anti-poor rhetoric (remember "Care Not Cash"?).

Now that the California Supreme Court has struck down the ban on same-sex marriage, everywhere we hear of couples who’ve been together 10, 20, or 30 years (or six months) rushing to tie the knot and proclaim: "finally … it’s … legitimate!" It’s hard to imagine a more wholehearted rejection of queer struggles to create defiant ways of living and loving, lusting for and caring for one another — methods not dependent on inclusion in the dominant institutions of straight privilege.

Gay marriage proponents now declare that finally gays and lesbians are "full citizens" — as opposed to half-citizens, one imagines, or — gasp — non-citizens! As Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducts the biggest raids in history, the gay establishment celebrates its newfound legitimacy. Sure, for a few of the most privileged, the right to get gay married might be the last thing standing in the way of full citizenship. But there are certainly a legion of impediments for the rest of us.

Let’s step back for a moment and imagine what it means to be a full citizen of the foremost colonial power, bent on bombing rogue states to smithereens, exploiting the world’s resources, and ensuring the downfall of the planet. As same-sex marriage fetishists rush to stake their claim to straight privilege, who gets left behind? Oh, right — anyone who doesn’t want to follow an outdated, tacky, oppressive model of long-term monogamy sanctioned by a state seal.

Want health care? Get married (to someone with a good health plan). Need a place to live? Better get working on a spouse with a house. Need to visit your friend in the hospital? Forget it (unless you’re ready and able to tie the knot). Need to stay in this country, but you’re about to get deported? Should’ve gotten married while you had the chance!

Want to define love, commitment, family, and sexual merrymaking on your own terms? Honey, that’s so last century — this year it’s all about matching putf8um Tiffany wedding bands, the Macy’s bridal registry, and a prime spot on the Bechtel float in the Pride parade — now that’s progress!

While San Francisco has a long history of sheltering dissident queer cultures of incendiary splendor, the rush for status within the status quo threatens to delegitimize everyone who isn’t ready for the Leave It to Beaver lifestyle.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (mattildabernsteinsycamore.com) is most recently the editor of an expanded second edition of That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation (Soft Skull Press, 2007). Her new novel, So Many Ways to Sleep Badly, will tantalize you this fall.

Free solar power?

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› sarah@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY San Francisco’s new solar incentive program just might make the conversion to green power almost free to city residents when combined with other state and federal programs, some of which expire at the end of this year.

This is an unlikely city for such a dynamic, as we reported a couple months ago (see "Dark days," 04/16/08), given our small lot sizes, high costs, and the fact that we have about twice as many renters as homeowners. The solar program also hit some political snags.

Promoted since December 2007 by Mayor Gavin Newsom and Assessor/Recorder Phil Ting, the Solar Energy Incentive program has been struggling to get Board of Supervisors approval since January when Sups. Chris Daly, Jake McGoldrick, Ross Mirkarimi, and Aaron Peskin objected to the use of public money to fund the program, which will subsidize solar installations on private homes and businesses.

These San Francisco Public Utilities Commission funds were intended to expand publicly owned power projects such as solar panel installation on city property. But as the SFPUC’s Barbara Hale explained to the Guardian, new laws prevent cities from qualifying for state rebates if they convert municipally owned buildings to solar, making those conversions a comparatively losing financial equation.

So on June 10, the board approved Newsom’s program in an 8-3 vote, with Mirkarimi lending his support after he secured funding for a complementary $1.5 million, one-year solar pilot program targeted at nonprofits and low-income families. The San Francisco Solar Energy Incentive program will provide $3 million in solar rebates annually for 10 years.

As Mirkarimi aide Rick Galbreath told the Guardian, "Nonprofits can’t always move as fast as the private sector, and solar advocates, who have been pushing other programs since December, have already got things in the pipeline."

Some of those other programs combine with the new city one in interesting ways. "What if solar were free? Then everyone would install it, right?" was the question posed by Tom Price, whom we profiled in January (see "Solar man," 01/02/08) for founding Black Rock Solar, which does large public interest solar projects using volunteer labor.

Now Price thinks the free solar power that he’s been able to leverage for schools and hospitals just might be available to the average San Franciscan. "This program inadvertently could make solar in San Francisco the cheapest it’s ever been," Price told us. "At least for a short window of time."

Under the city’s program, solar rebates begin at $3,000 for homeowners — and rise in $1,000 increments to a maximum of $6,000 if residents use local installers, hire city-trained workers, and live in city-designated environmental justice districts. For private businesses, the rebate cap is set at $10,000. But that amount can rise if combined with the state and federal incentives that expire at the end of the year.

"I’m one of three tenants. Each of us has an electrical meter, each of us is eligible for a $5,000 rebate under the city’s program," said Price, who rents on Potrero Hill and hopes to pull off an almost no-cost conversion with his landlord.

Price estimates the solar conversation will cost about $15,000 per tenant. So, if two conversions are done (there’s only space for two conversions on most of the city’s Edwardian and Victorian homes), Price’s landlord can subtract two $5,000 cash rebates, plus the Pacific Gas and Electric Co.–administered California solar incentive, plus a $2,000 federal tax credit.

Price said landlords can also take advantage of a 30 percent investment tax credit on top of a 60 percent tax deduction that Dave Llorens of Next Energy found buried deep within the economic stimulus package signed by President George W. Bush earlier this year. Landlords can then arrange to sell cheap, renewable power to their tenants.

"What if I sign an agreement with my landlord to pay $50 per month for the right to have access to his solar system?" Price said. "So now the money that would have been going to PG&E goes to the landlord."

And it’s clean, free power, rather than PG&E’s expensive power generated largely from nuclear and fossil fuel sources.

"This makes San Francisco the first place a tenant and a landlord can really work together to make solar power affordable," Price said. "And that in turn will help drive adoption of renewable energy."

The commissioner’s conflicts

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

Before the June 5 special meeting of the San Francisco Planning Commission got underway, Michael Antonini had an announcement.

Dressed in a charcoal suit and red-checked tie, with his white hair combed back over his skull, the longtime commissioner disclosed that he was a part owner of a condominium in the eastern neighborhoods, where a years-long rezoning effort is nearly complete. That means Antonini is among the people who could benefit from increased land values due to zoning upgrades.

As a result, Antonini begrudgingly declared that he would have to recuse himself from hearings involving the eastern neighborhoods until the potential conflict is dealt with.

"Hopefully this can be resolved in the next few weeks and I’ll be able to participate at later hearings," Antonini said at the meeting.

But it was a bit late to be complying with the state’s conflict-of-interest laws: Antonini had already actively taken part in meetings in which the plan was discussed. And Antonini also neglected to mention that after he and his son purchased the condo, he voted on two other projects that appear to be within steps of it.

Public records show that Antonini bought the $515,000 condo at 200 Townsend Street in 2003 with his real estate agent son, John. Commissioner Antonini and his wife own a 25 percent stake in the property through a family trust the couple created in 1997. His son holds the majority interest.

Antonini worked hard to play down his stake in the condo at the June 5 meeting. It’s not an investment property, he made clear to the commissioners. There’s no rent generated from it. He’s a mere minority holder in a family trust that controls the condo, and it was purchased as a residence for his son and his wife.

"Because I did not believe our fractional interest in John’s condo represented a conflict, I did not consider reclusing [sic] myself from projects near the condo," Antonini wrote to the Guardian.

But the laws on this are pretty clear. The state’s Political Reform Act of 1974 prohibits public officials from participating in decisions that will have a "foreseeable material financial effect on one or more of his/her economic interests." It also states that any "direct or indirect interest" worth more than $2,000 poses a potential conflict, for which a 25 percent stake in a half-million dollar condo would seem to qualify.

RECUSE ME


Other public officials in similar situations have recused themselves long before the issue became a potential political liability.

Sup. Bevan Dufty bought into a three-unit residential property on Waller Street with two co-tenants in December 2006. He immediately sought advice from the city attorney, who told him he no longer could vote on the Market-Octavia Plan, a series of land-use changes in Hayes Valley, Duboce Triangle, and elsewhere that was similar in scope to the current rezoning efforts in the eastern neighborhoods. The supervisor also couldn’t vote on a major Laguna Street redevelopment project or on legislation making it easier for seniors to convert rental units to condos.

Antonini told us that "only in the last month" did the city attorney warn some officials involved with plans for the eastern neighborhoods that if they held property in the area, there could be a conflict of interest.

"We’ve been working on [the eastern neighborhoods] for the whole six years I’ve been on the planning commission," he said at the meeting. "It’s a little troubling that this issue of conflict is raised now rather than at the very beginning."

The law does make an exception when the economic interests of the "public generally" could also be enhanced by a government decision such as those that have an impact on a large section of the city like the eastern neighborhoods. But the city attorney’s office concluded for now that the condo indeed may pose a conflict. And in the meantime, Antonini told us that the Fair Political Practices Commission in Sacramento, which helps enforce the state’s Political Reform Act, is being consulted to determine "whether our fractional interest in the condo truly represents a conflict of interest."

The eastern neighborhoods planning process isn’t the only legislation that created a potential conflict for Antonini. The commissioner voted in January 2007 to approve construction of 26 new single-room occupancy units at 25 Lusk Alley, not far from his property at 200 Townsend. The project’s sponsor, Michael Yarne, is a land-use attorney who today works for the mayor’s economic development office. The project was approved, according to meeting minutes.

The project itself relied on a contentious legal loophole in which developers claim their units are "single-room occupancy," a necessity because the area permits residential efficiency hotels where the poor and working-class used to live. Allowing such SRO hotels in areas zoned for light industrial uses enabled the city to preserve some forms of affordable housing. But builders can turn around and lease the opulently large units such as the ones at 25 Lusk, which bear little resemblance to genuine SRO rooms, to well-heeled clients.

"They are allowed where normal residential units are not allowed, because historically SROs were always extremely affordable housing," community organizer Calvin Welch said. "The whole notion of market-rate SROs is a new invention, and that’s why they’re controversial. They’re basically the new version of live-work lofts."

In November 2006, Antonini also voted to approve a liquor license for a new full-service restaurant and wine bar at 216 Townsend, even closer to his son’s condo.

TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT


State ethics laws say that a public official has a conflict if his or her property comes within 500 feet of a project the official will be scrutinizing and voting on.

Conservatively measuring from the furthest corners of each property, Google Earth puts both the proposed restaurant and SRO within 500 feet.

Bob Stern, president of the Los Angeles–based Center for Governmental Studies and co-author of the state’s Political Reform Act, said a public official could face $5,000 in civil penalties for each conflict-of-interest violation. But it’s not common for the chronically under-resourced FPPC to go after local officials, he said.

Mayoral spokesperson Nathan Ballard wrote in an e-mail that "we take any allegations of conflicts of interest seriously" but added there is a disagreement over whether the "public generally" exception applied to the eastern neighborhoods and that the City Attorney’s Office was seeking additional input from the FPPC.

As for the two projects he voted on near the condo, Antonini apparently told the mayor’s office he had looked into whether 25 Lusk fell inside 500 feet. "Based on his understanding at the time," Ballard wrote, "they didn’t."

That’s a stretch, at best. The projects are in the same block. We walked them off and found that Antonini would have to be splitting hairs to argue that they are outside the boundary — and even in that case, it would be only by a few feet. The rusty red paint job, black trim, and stylish, outsize windows of 200 Townsend are easily viewable from the backside of 25 Lusk.

"If there is a legitimate argument that they did fall within the 500-foot radius, this should be clarified," Ballard stated. "However, given the relative insignificance of the two projects cited in your e-mail and Antonini’s long-standing reputation as an ethical and hard-working commissioner, we don’t have any reason to believe that he would have knowingly and/or willingly violated the state’s Fair Political Practices Act."

But the Lusk Street project was by no means insignificant. "They are highly regulated," Welch said of SROs. "You cannot convert them to tourist hotels without going through a very long and cumbersome process. They are valued for affordable housing so highly that the city regulates their conversion to tourist uses." So instead, the "corporate suites," as Welch calls them, masquerade as SROs. The project was approved in the end, but two commissioners — Christina Olague and Sugaya Hisashi — voted against it.

Antonini told us that he believes 25 Lusk is more than 500 feet away, and as for the restaurant, planning staff recommended approval.

The commissioner told us, "I was the one who brought public attention to the issue of my possible conflict. I believe it is a small issue when compared to my body of work on behalf of San Francisco over the last six years."

The June 5 meeting where Antonini made the disclosure about his son’s condo was part of a long and detailed process that will determine the fate of vast sections of Potrero Hill, SoMa, the Mission District, and Dogpatch. The official planning process for the targeted 2,200-acre area began back in 2001, and the commissioners could approve new zoning plans next month before sending the proposal to the Board of Supervisors.

For much of San Francisco’s history, the city sections poised for rezoning have been home to light industry and blue-collar jobs. But housing has encroached over the last 15 years, and the planning commission is prepared to allow between 8,000 and 10,000 new units over the next 20 years. That will almost certainly increase the value of land in the area.

Residential developers built thousands of pricey condos in the SoMa District during the 1990s, exploiting another divisive zoning loophole that created waves of animosity across the city and aided in a takeover of the Board of Supervisors by a progressive bloc of candidates.

Live/work lofts, as developers called them, were built in areas zoned for light industrial commercial purposes. Wealthy buyers would ostensibly operate businesses out of their homes or live in them as working artists as the zoning required, but few have complied with the letter or — having found ways to narrowly abide by it — the spirit of the law.

"The city turned its head," housing attorney Sue Hestor said. "We have 3,000 units that are supposed to be occupied by artists and probably 90 percent of them are not occupied by artists at all. It’s blatantly illegal."

Antonini has managed to maintain friendships with local moderate Democrats over the years despite being an elected member of San Francisco’s Republican Party County Central Committee. Willie Brown first appointed him to the powerful planning commission in 2002, and he’s been a reliable vote for developers and other large business interests. Mayor Gavin Newsom reappointed him in 2004 and earlier this year tried to engineer Antonini’s election as president of the commission.

Beretta

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Restaurant archaeologists might not have much occasion to use carbon dating, but we do have the space at 1199 Valencia Street as a window into the past, and therein hangs a tale of the city. A decade ago, the occupant was Radio Valencia, a cheerful boho cafe that served art displays, live music, and ecologically sensitive sandwiches. It was, in its faintly grubby coolness, the epitome of the 1990s Mission District. But it closed around the turn of the millennium, first giving way to a Thai restaurant (J.J. Thai Bistro) and then to the Last Supper Club — a nice place and cool in its way, but not at all grubby, just as Valencia Street itself lost much of its jagged urban edge on the way to being the flâneur-friendly promenade we know today.

The Last Supper Club changed hands in 2005, when the original owners, Joe Jack and A.J. Gilbert, bowed out to Ruggero Gadaldi, whose other concerns include Antica Trattoria and Pesce. There is some evidence Gadaldi didn’t like his new restaurant’s name, since earlier this spring he gave the place a makeover and a re-christening. It’s now called Beretta — a name perhaps too redolent of weaponry for some tastes, but less overripe than the other one — and its interior has been given a slick minimalist treatment. The Last Supper Club’s baroque cherubs and fountain are gone, replaced by SoMa-esque black-topped tables, including a large and rather Chaucerian community table in the middle of the dining room, where you might find yourself sitting next to complete strangers with whom you can build some spontaneous social capital.

The menu, meanwhile, is like the love child of SPQR and Pizzeria Delfina. In other words, it hosts a wealth of exquisite small plates — known here by their traditional name, antipasti, since traditionally they’re served before the pasta course — along with salads, risotti, and an impressive list of pizzas. There’s also (in an echo of Gialina) a main course that changes nightly. But for many — if not most — of the tables (not to mention the community table), a pizza is the main event, to judge by the pizzas that seem to come sailing out of the kitchen like Frisbees.

The antipasti divide into vegetable, fish, and meat sections, the last consisting of such usual cured-flesh suspects as prosciutto, mortadella, and soppressata. The vegetable choices are more varied and seasonal. We practically inhaled a plate of bruschetta ($6) — the correct pronunciation, by the way, is "bru-SKATE-ah," not "bru-SHETT-ah" — slathered with a spring-green puree of fresh fava beans and sprinkled with salty-sharp pecorino cheese. And while quarters of artichoke heart ($6), roasted alla romana, are commonly filled with seasoned bread crumbs, they are less commonly spiked, as they are here, with that dynamic duo of spicy Italian-style sausage, hot pepper and fennel seed.

And a tip of the locavore cap to the Monterey Bay sardines ($7), a set of luxuriously plump and oily fish, grilled and plated "en saör," a Venetian technique that combines slivers of white onion and red bell pepper, a generous splash of extra-virgin olive oil, and an equally generous blast of white vinegar.

If white rice strikes you as a little boring, you’ll probably approve of the squid-ink risotto with calamari rings ($13). The briny-sweet flavor is direct, in the best Italian tradition, and the rice grains themselves are cooked nicely al dente — as are the tentacles, for that matter. But it’s the color that commands attention: a purplish-black with a sheen of green, like summer thunderheads billowing over the Mississippi. The color is so profound and unusual as to become tastable.

While the pizzas aren’t precious, they do reflect a thoughtfulness about ingredients. Even more, they remind us that pizza-baking has its subtleties. I was especially pleased to find, when a prosciutto-arugula pie ($14) reached us on its little wire stand, that those two delicate ingredients had been added after the pizza had emerged from the oven, crust abubble with tomato and mozzarella. It would have been simpler to throw everything on at once, but that would have cost the prosciutto and arugula something of their distinctive characters.

Desserts tend heavily toward gelato, and, surprisingly for an Italian restaurant, there is no tiramisù. For those who can’t do without that deathless warhorse, the baba al rum ($8) might do; it consists of spongecake leaves soaked with rum and topped with a cap of simple cream gelato (not even vanilla added as a flavoring, just cream) and a pinch of orange zest looking like bright orange sawdust. Tasty, but plenty of fumes; you would not want to light a match until the bowl had been emptied and cleared and several minutes had passed.

For those who can’t do without chocolate, there’s a dish of chocolate gelato ($7), given textural interest by crumblings of amaretti (the famous almond biscuits) and few squirts of caramel sauce. The sauce cools and becomes chewy on the slopes of the gelato blob, like lava turning to rock on the side of a volcano.

The crowd: familiar-looking. It seemed to me that I’d seen the same group in recent visits to Spork, Dosa, and Range — all of which are within two or three blocks, as the flâneur strolls. Median age I would guess to be in the early 30s; median income, considerably higher. If, like me, you’ve noticed that traffic across the Mission has hugely thickened in the past 10 years and wondered who’s living in all those loft-style buildings that have sprung up as if by magic, the Beretta clientele suggests some answers. Now where did I put my Beretta?

BERETTA

Dinner: nightly, 5:30 p.m.–1 a.m.

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 10 a.m.–3 p.m.

1199 Valencia, SF

(415) 695-1199

www.berettasf.com

Full bar

AE/DISC/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Charo gives a pluck

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My first exposure to Charo was in a high school–era Christmas gift from my parents, The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste. There she was: strawberry blonde Pebbles hair framing a face that defined pert, a guitar poised scepter-like, and an impressive décolleté shrink-wrapped in enough sequins to cover all of Carnaval.

I think Charo would laugh at being included in such a Who’s Who, which also included Liberace and Chesty Morgan. The singing, dancing, and "cuchi-cuchi!" spouting Castilian sex kitten that pratfalled with the best of 1970s television, the Vegas institution who wound up in that sub-A list purgatory The Surreal Life, is the Charo America knows and loves. But according to this 40-year show biz veteran, the other Charo — a classically trained musician with serious Spanish guitar chops — is just getting warmed up. A Pride celebrity grand marshal, she’ll be riding on a parade float full of Charo look-alike drag queens, followed by a show at the Herbst Theatre.

SFBG How does it feel to be coming back to San Francisco after three years?

CHARO I call it Planet San Francisco because it’s different from everything else in this country. And I am honored and very glad [to be a Pride grand marshal], due to the fact that all my life I have detested oppression, dictatorship, and discrimination. ‘Cuz, you know, my early learning years were under the fear and dictatorship of [Gen. Francisco] Franco. I was surprised when I came to America that people used such titles as black, fag, skinny, Catholic, yellow. None of this exist in my education.

[Being a grand marshal] is also perfect timing because I am introducing my new single, "España Cani," as remixed for the dance clubs! It’s the best thing I have done in my career, and it’s just destined to make people live for 10 minutes and feel the passion of flamenco. That will be playing on the float with my flamenco dancers dancing around, and I will be with several look-alikes.

SFBG Are they going to be the same drag queens you judged at the Trannyshack Charo night back in 2005?

CHARO That was a hot-hot-hot evening! But I think this time they will be different. I think that one is better-looking than I am, and I am pissed off because that means I have to have to put a lot of push-up to have bigger tits. And he’s a 30-year-old boy!

SFBG Your publicist told me that you lost a Charo look-alike contest in Puerto Rico.

CHARO That was the lowest point in my career [laughs]. I made a big mistake since I dressed like a look-alike. I had a big, big wig instead of my natural hairdo, and instead of dancing like me I tried to copy them. The idiot judge said, "Number 3" — which was me — "needs more practice!"

SFBG What can we expect from your new show at the Herbst?

Charo: The show is faaabulous. I am going to play as much [guitar] as the audience can take of the new me. I will do it until they ask me to stop. I am a musician in high heels [laughs]. I even sleep with high heels, in case I have to run and the fire department guys can’t find me. I am 5 feet 3 inches, and I wear heels all the time. But the bottom line is that I am a musician. I am an entertainer number second.

SFBG When you started making TV appearances it was all "cuchi-cuchi!" all the time.

CHARO Yes. When I was on Johnny Carson and he starts talking to me in English, I just kept saying "cuchi-cuchi" to survive. And the rating was so big that I keep coming back. But the TV producer said if you want to play guitar, do it in your own time.

SFBG On a few of the episodes of The Love Boat your character April Lopez plays guitar for the passengers, no?

CHARO I went to producer Mr. [Aaron] Spelling and said, "OK, in this episode can I play a little of the guitar?" And he said, "OK, but don’t be too good. Don’t destroy the character of April, because April is a wetback and she’s not supposed to know so much music."

SFBG It’s just so funny because here’s Madonna trying to play guitar on tour and she’s pretty terrible, but right of out the gate you were a classically trained guitarist who could also write hit dance singles.

CHARO [Laughs]. Yes, Madonna used to be my neighbor. But then she moved to England. I would be very happy — and this is not bragging, because I like Madonna — to say to her how to play the guitar. I think I could help her with "La Ilsa Bonita."

THE RETURN OF CHARO AND HER LAS VEGAS SHOW

Sun/29, 8 p.m., $40–$100

Herbst Theatre

401 Van Ness, SF.

(415) 392-4400, www.koshercomedy.com/charo

The Hot Pink List 2008

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>>ALLAN AND LEO HERRERA



Yes, they’re gay brothers, which is, like, totally hot. But even if they weren’t related, their individual artistic creations would have us on the hook. Heads of HomoChic (www.homochic.com), the new gay mafia collective that combines gallery shows, fashion design, and nightlife craziness into mind boggling events, they’re inspiring the latest generation to revel in its scandalous past. Leo’s photography mixes porn with historical reference to dizzying, stimuutf8g effect. Allan’s costuming and styling brings bathhouse and backroom gay culture to light. Currently the Chihuahua, Mexico-born siblings have pieces in the queer Latino "Maria" show at Galería De La Raza. Leo features pants-raising boy-pics and a video installation centered on Harvey Milk. Allan, whose Money Shots underwear line graces many an alternaqueer’s backside, displays a chandelier made of 2,000 pink condoms.

MARIA

Through July 4

Galería De La Raza

2857 24th St., SF

(415) 827-8009

www.galeriadelaraza.org


>>ANNIE DANGER



Who’s the superbusy M-to-F artist and activist stirring up trouble with the mighty force of a Dirt Devil — the one they call Annie Danger? She’s sketched flora and fauna for environmental manifesto Dam Nation (Soft Skull Press, 2007), appeared as a blackjack-playing nymph in a shit-stirring Greywater Guerillas performance, dressed like a wizard at a recent Gender Pirates party, and just played Pony Boy in a queered-up "Outsiders." Right now at Femina Potens gallery (www.feminapotens.org), you can see her as Sister Wendy, the wimpled PBS art nun, in her video for "Untold Stories: Visual and Performative Expressions of Transwomen." In a rare occurrence, you can meet Annie Danger as herself at the National Queer Arts Festival’s edgy "TransForming Community" spoken word event. Who she’ll be when she MCs Friday’s thrilling Trans March (www.transmarch.org) is anyone’s delightful guess.

TRANSFORMING COMMUNITY

Thurs/26, 7:30 p.m., $8–$15

LGBT Community Center

1800 Market, SF

(415) 865-5555

www.queerculturalcenter.org


>>DEXTER SIMMONS



"I worry not just for fashion, but for the future of television," this multitalented fashion designer, stylist, hair and makeup artist, model, and Oakland native told us with a laugh backstage at the Vans Warped Tour, where he was frantically preparing bands for the stage. "There’s a cheesy aspect creeping in right now because of fashion reality TV that scares me. It looks too easy, and creates too many followers. Wise people want one-of-a-kind, personalized looks. That’s why I love San Francisco," he adds. "It’s small but big — global even — and it likes to take risks." Dexter’s company, FLOC (www.teamflocouture), formed with his best amigo Lauren Rassel, has been taking local runways and nightclubs by fierce, feathery storm since it was formed two years ago, and local rockers like Von Iva and Svelt Street swear by FLOC’s Warriors-inspired designs. Now working as a stylist for SF-based online retail giant Tobi.com, Dexter seems destined for the big time — his designs are penetrating the world and making heads turn a wee bit sharper.


>>CHELSEA STARR



She’s too-too much, this Miss Starr. A genre-straddling DJ and ubiquitous promoter celebrated for her many regular parties (including new weekly Buffet at Pink, a fabulously popular all-female DJ weekly shindig, and Hot Pants, a queer biweekly that draws out the crème de la crème of the city’s thigh-baring night owls), as well as a groundbreaking writer who just toured the country as part of the Sister Spit all-girl spoken word road show, and a fashion designer with her very own eponymous line of eminently wearables — there are just so many ways to love her. This week she’ll find time to spin at umpteen Pride parties, as well as at her very own special Pride edition of Hot Pants. "I’m also a twin, a Gemini, and a cookie monster," Chelsea tells us with a wink.

HOT PANTS

Fri/27, 10 p.m., $5

Cat Club

1190 Folsom, SF

(415) 703-8964

www.myspace.com/hotpantsclub


>>JOSH CHEON



We can’t fib — smarties turn us on. So when we heard that cutie DJ Josh Cheon, host of West ADD Radio’s thuper-queerific "Slave to the Rhythm" program (www.westaddradio.com/slavetotherhythm) held advanced degrees in cell biology, neuroscience, and psychology, we suddenly had to hide our pointiness. An integral member of San Francisco’s gay vinyl-fetishist collective Honey Soundsystem (www.honeysoundsystem.com), Cheon just got back from rocking London’s premiere alternaqueer club, Horsemeat Disco. While his radio show’s name pays homage to Grace Jones, his eclectic sets encompass Candi Staton classics and Detroit Rock City jams. As a featured disc-meister at Bibi, San Francisco’s glorious, charitable party for Middle Eastern and North African queers, he taps his Lebanese roots with Arabian and Persian pop and disco favorites like Fairuz, Googoosh, and Dalida — and some surprise grin-givers from the likes of Boney M.

BIBI

Fri/27, 9 p.m., $20

Pork Store Café

3122 16th St., SF

(415) 626-5523

www.myspace.com/BibiSF


>>MONISTAT



She’s everywhere, lately, this feisty mistress of the night. Trash drag fanatics, glamorous electro freaks, after-hours hipster hot tub revelers — she’s a muse to many, with a sharp tongue and handmade Technicolor outfit for all. Plus, just in general: hot Asian tranny fierceness. "I’m thoroughly inspired by the pigeons in the Civic Center," she tells us. "Also, parties full of beautiful people worshipping me." She’ll be hosting the Asian and Pacific Islander stage at this year’s Pride festivities. But first this plus-size supermodel, trainwrecking DJ, oft-blacklisted performer, and dangerous skateboarder will be throwing a sleazoid party called Body Rock on gay-historic Polk Street "for the musically impaired and fans of a man in a dress, which would be me. I’ve walked through the fire and come out blazing!"

BODY ROCK

Thu/26, 10 p.m., free

Vertigo

1160 Polk, SF

(415) 674-1278

www.myspace.com/monistat7


>>CHRIS PEREZ



Which highly influential SF gallery owner brought John Waters, Todd Oldham, the mayor, and hundreds of sweaty kids together (with a couple kegs) under one roof this spring for photographer Ryan McGinley’s West Coast solo debut? Chris Perez of Ratio 3, whose shows also helped artists score Artforum covers and big time awards. Perez pairs an intuitive talent for identifying a popular hit with innovative curatorial decisions. But his space is no mere white box in the gourmet ghetto: "You’re never just walking down Stevenson," explains this escapee from Catholic school and former San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts volunteer. "Unless you’re hooking up or getting cracked out." Or peeping great art. On Friday, Ratio 3 dresses up as ’90s queer-radical gallery Kiki, for "Kiki: The Proof is in the Pudding," a group tribute to late curator-activist Rick Jacobsen.

KIKI: THE PROOF IS IN THE PUDDING

Fri/27, reception 6–8 p.m., free

Ratio 3

1447 Stevenson, SF

(415) 821-3371

www.ratio3.org


>>HUNTER HARGRAVES



If you think constant AIDS activism is exhausting, try doing it in drag. Stanford grad Hunter heads up StopAIDS (www.stopaids.org) community initiatives by day, and is a board member of diversity-seeking And Castro For All (www.andcastroforall.org), through which fellowships in his name are awarded to young queer activists every year. By night and early morning he becomes Felicia Fellatio, a precariously-heeled tranny who’s single-handedly hauling grunge back onto drag stages — a recent flannel-drenched lipsync of Pearl Jam’s "Jeremy" teared up many a jaded eye — and he DJs queer punk parties like Trans Am (www.myspace.com/transamtheclub) and Revolution, the hot monthly tea dance for HIV-positive men at Club Eight (www.positiveforce-sf.com). Felicia also auditioned for America’s Next Top Model (seriously) but was eliminated when her man hands slapped someone prettier. You can catch Hunter and Felicia, although probably only half of each, at the StopAIDS booth at this year’s Pride celebration.


>>ALICIA MCCARTHY



Hipsters sporting $80 faux-penciled rainbow patterns and glossy-mag ads with jagged color intersections are fronting a style artist Alicia McCarthy helped originate — but she does it a hundred times better. Her current show at Jack Hanley takes off in a dozen different directions from her signature shapes and spectrums in a manner that reflects an honestly fractured identity. Coiled thought forms, a wooden chair facing the backside of a scruffy penguin flying toward a wall of mirrors, and a show-within-the-show by friend Stormy Knight that includes sketches by a parrot named The National Anthem and sculpture by Redbone the dog. McCarthy’s latest exhibition also displays more than a few small works subtly placed where a wall meets the floor, which goes to show that she’s still making some art that only people who pay attention will discover.

ALICIA MCCARTHY

Through Sat/28, free

Jack Hanley Gallery

395 Valencia, SF

(415) 522-1623

www.jackhanley.com


>>MON COUSIN BELGE



Half-naked, goo-spitting art rock in a sling never got so deliciously tawdry. When this San Francisco quartet of self-professed "bunch of fags with vision and bacon cheeseburgers" takes the stage and launches into "Tweaker Bitch" or "Pigdog" off their new album Quelle Horreur (World Famous in SF Records), anything involving titilutf8g revulsion can happen and usually does. Fronted by enigmatic singer Emile, a Belgian addicted to plastic surgery — 39 procedures to date — and leather thongs, Mon Cousin Belge (www.moncousinbelge.com) updates queercore for the ambivalent masses with "deep faggotry jams" and knickers-wetting live performances. Bring a towel to their launch party at Thee Parkside bar in Potrero Hill. You’ll definitely need it — the crowd of cute intel-queers they draw is over-the-top steamy.

QUELLE HORREUR LAUNCH PARTY

Sat/28, 10pm, $6

Parkside

1600 17th St., SF

(415) 503-0393

www.theeparkside.com

The Guardian Queer Issue 2008

Pride 2008 events

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› culture@sfbg.com

ONGOING

Frameline Film Festival Various locations; see Web site for dates and times, www.frameline.org. The humongous citywide queer flick fest is still in full eye-popping effect.

Golden Girls Mama Calizo’s Voice Factory, 1519 Mission, SF; (415) 690-9410, www.voicefactorysf.org. 7 and 9pm, $20. Through Sat/28. Revisit all the "gay" episodes of this classic and tragic sitcom, as performed with panache and pratfalls by gender clowns Heklina, Pollo Del Mar, Cookie Dough, and Matthew Martin.

National Queer Arts Festival Various locations; see Web site for details, www.queerculturalcenter.org. Experience scandalously good spoken word, cabaret, art installations, and so much more as this powerhouse monthlong celebration of queer revelations continues.

THURSDAY 26

PERFORMANCES AND EVENTS

Marriage Is Not Enough: Radical Queers Take Back the Movement New Valencia Hall, 625 Larkin, SF; (415) 864-1278. 7pm, $7 donation. Spread-eagled with one foot in the past and the other in the future, Radical Women host a forum to honor the efforts of drag queens and queers of color in 1969’s Stonewall rebellion and to discuss the docile nature of LGBT leadership in the face of poor and working-class queer issues today.

"Our Message Is Music" First Unitarian Church and Center, 1187 Franklin, SF; (415) 865-2787, www.sfgmc.org. 8pm, $15-$35. The world’s first openly LGBT music ensemble will kick off Pride Week with a range of music from Broadway to light classical. Includes performances by the Lesbian/Gay Chorus of San Francisco, San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, and the San Francisco Lesbian/Gay Freedom Band.

Pansy Division Eagle Tavern, 398 12th St., SF; (415) 626-0880, www.pansydivision.com. 9pm, $7. Homoerockit band Pansy Division plays a live set with the handsome help of Glen Meadmore and Winsome Griffles following a screening of the film Pansy Division: Life in a Gay Rock Band.

CLUBS AND PARTIES

Body Rock Vertigo, 1160 Polk, SF; (415) 674-1278. 10pm, free. Incredibly energetic tranny-about-town Monistat hosts a bangin’ electro night for queers and friends featuring San Francisco’s favorite crazy DJ Richie Panic. Expect wet panties.

Cockblock SF Pride Party Minna, 111 Minna, SF; www.cockblocksf.com. 9pm-2am, $5. DJs Nuxx and Zax spin homolicious tunes and put the haters on notice: no cock-blockin’ at this sweaty soiree.

Crib Gay Pride Party Crib, 715 Harrison, SF; (415) 749-2228, www.thecribsf.com. 9:30pm-3am, $10. The hopefully soothing Ms. Monistat (again!) and the irritating — in a fun way — Bobby Trendy set it off at this homolicious megaparty popular among the 18+ set, complete with a Naked Truth body-art fashion show and a T-shirt toss, in case you lose the one you came with in the melee.

The Cruise Pride Party Lexington Club, 3464 19th St, SF; (415) 863-2052, www.lexingtonclub.com. 9pm-2am, free. Hey, dyke sailor! Hike up your naughty nauticals and wade into this ship of dreams (yes, it’s a theme party) with DJs Rapid Fire and Melissa at the lovely lesbian Lex. Land, ho.

The Tubesteak Connection Aunt Charlie’s, 133 Turk, SF; (415) 441-2922, www.auntcharlieslounge.com. A warm and bubbly tribute to early Italo house, wonderfully obscure disco tunes, and outfits Grace Jones would die for. With DJ Bus Station John.

FRIDAY 27

PERFORMANCES AND EVENTS

Same-Sex Salsa and Latin Ballroom Dance Festival and Competition Magnet, 4122 18th St., SF; (415) 581-1600. www.queerballroom.com. 7pm-12am, free. With $100 awarded to the winner of this fancy-footwork competition, the stakes for this event’s salsa-hot dancing surpass the single bills slipping into thong strings this week.

San Francisco Trans March Dolores Park, Dolores and 18th Sts; (415) 447-2774, www.transmarch.org. 3pm stage, 7pm march; free. Join the transgender community of San Francisco and beyond for a day of live performances, speeches, and not-so-military marching.

CLUBS AND PARTIES

Bibi: We Exist and We Thrive Pork Store Café, 3122 16th St., SF; (415) 626-5523, www.myspace.com/BibiSF. 9pm, $20. The Middle Eastern and North African LGBT community hosts a charitable happy hookah party to native tunes spun by DJs Masood, Josh Cheon, and more.

Bustin’ Out III Trans March Afterparty El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF; 282-3325. 9pm-2am, $5-$50, sliding scale. Strut your stuff at the Transgender Pride March’s official afterparty, featuring sets from DJs Durt, Lil Manila, and giveaways from Good Vibes, AK Press, and more. Proceeds benefit the Trans/Gender Variant in Prison Committee.

Charlie Horse: No Pride No Shame The Cinch, 1723 Polk, SF; (415) 776-4162, www.myspace.com/charliehorsecinch. 10pm, free. Drag disaster Anna Conda presents a bonkers night of rock ‘n’ roll trash drag numbers, plus Juanita Fajita’s iffy "gay food cart" and Portland, Ore.’s Gender Fluids performance troupe.

Cream DNA Lounge, 375 11th St., SF; (415) 626-1409, www.creamsf.com. Two levels of sexy girl energy and a catwalk to scratch your lipstick claws on, plus a Latin lounge with hip-grinding tunes from DJs Carlitos and Chili D.

GIRLPRIDE Faith, 715 Harrison, SF; (415) 647-8258. 8pm-4am, $20. About 2,500 women are expected to join host DJ Page Hodel to celebrate this year’s Pride Weekend, and that’s a whole lotta love.

Hot Pants Cat Club, 1190 Folsom, SF; (415) 703-8964, www.myspace.com/hotpantsclub. 10pm, $5. DJ Chelsea Starr and many others make this alternaqueer dance party a major destination for hot persons of all genders and little trousers.

Mr. Mighty, 119 Utah, SF; (415) 762-0151, wwww.mighty119.com. 10pm-6am, $20. Darling promoters Big Booty, FSLD, Beatboxevents, and Big Top join forces to produce the party premiere of Pride week with DJ Kidd Sysko and Lord Kook spinning alternative techno sounds, and a special deep and dirty set from soulful house god David Harness.

Sweet Beast Transfer, 198 Church, SF; www.myspace.com/beastparty. 10pm-2am, $10. Reanimate your fetish for leather and fur by dressing up as fiercely feral fauna for the petting-zoo of a party. This week, after all, is mating season.

Tranny Fierce Supperclub, 657 Harrison, SF; (415) 348-0900, www.supperclub.com. 8pm dinner, 10pm afterparty. $85 dinner, $15-$25 afterparty. Total ferosh! Project Runway winner Christian Siriano hosts a four-course meal of trash-talking and looking fierce. The afterparty serves up drag nasty from Holy MsGrail, Cassandra Cass, and more.

Uniform and Leather Ball Hotel Whitcomb, 1231 Market, SF; (415) 777-0333, www.frantix.net. 8pm-midnight, $25 & $40. The men’s men of San Francisco’s Mr. Leather Committee want you to dress to the fetish nines for this huge gathering, featuring men, music, and more shiny boots than you can lick all year. Yes, sirs!

SATURDAY 28

PERFORMANCES AND EVENTS

Dykes on Bikes Fundraiser Eagle Tavern, 398 12th St., SF; (415) 626-0880, www.dykesonbikes.org. Noon. Dykes on Bikes can’t drink and drive: they need your help. A pint for you means a gallon of gas for them. Stop by before heading to the march.

LGBT Pride Celebration Civic Center, Carlton B. Goodlett Place and McCallister, SF; (415) 864-3733, www.sfpride.org. Noon-6pm, free. Celebrate LGBT pride at this free outdoor event featuring DJs, speakers, and live music. This is the first half of the weekend-long celebration sponsored by SF Pride. Also Sun/29.

Pink Triangle Installation Twin Peaks Vista, Twin Peaks Blvd parking area, SF; (415) 247-1100, ext 142, www.thepinktriangle.com. 7-11am, free. Bring a hammer and your work boots and help install the giant pink triangle atop Twin Peaks for everyone to see this Pride Weekend. Stay for the commemoration ceremony at 10:30am to hear Mayor Gavin Newsom and Assemblymember Mark Leno speak.

Pride Brunch Hotel Whitcomb, 1231 Market, SF; (415) 777-0333, www.positiveresource.org. 11am-2pm, $75-$100. Raise a mimosa toast to this year’s Pride Parade grand marshals with many of the community’s leading activists.

Same-Sex Country, Swing, and Standard Ballroom Dance Festival and Competition Hotel Whitcomb, 1231 Market, SF; (415) 626-8000, www.queerballroom.com. 6:30-8pm, free. The Queer Jitterbugs get reeling at this one-of-a-kind contest that’ll shine your spurs and get you swingin’ out of your seat.

San Francisco Dyke March Dolores Park, Dolores and 18th Sts, SF; www.dykemarch.org. 7pm, free. Featuring music from the Trykes, Papa Dino, Las Krudas, and more, plus a whole lot of wacky sapphic high jinks.

CLUBS AND PARTIES

Bearracuda Pride Deco, 510 Larkin, SF; (415) 346-2025, www.bearracuda.com/pride. 9pm-3am, $8 before 10pm, $10 after. Hot hairy homos generate serious body static on the dance floor at this big bear get-down.

Bootie Presents The Monster Show DNA Lounge, 375 11th St, SF; (415) 626-1409, www.bootiesf.com. The city’s giant mashup club hosts a drag queen bootleg mix extravaganza, as Cookie Dough and her wild Monster Show crash the Bootie stage.

Colossus 1015 Folsom, SF; (415) 431-1200, www.guspresents.com. 10pm-8am, $40. The beats of mainstream club favorite DJ Manny Lehman throb through the largest and longest, uh &ldots; dance party of Pride week.

Deaf Lesbian Festival Dyke Ball San Francisco LGBT Center, Rainbow Room, 1800 Market, SF; (415) 865-5555, www.dcara.org. 8pm, 440. Feel the music, close your eyes, and dance to the rhythm of your smokin’ partner at the Deaf Lesbian Festival’s first ever Dyke Ball.

Devotion EndUp, 401 Sixth St, SF; (415) 357-0827, www.theendup.com. 9pm, $15. This storied dance party is back with "A Classic Pride." DJs Ruben Mancias and Pete Avila spin all-classic soulful and stripped-down house anthems for a sweaty roomful of those who were there back when.

Dyke March After Affair Minna, 111 Minna, SF; www.diamonddaggers.com. 8pm-11pm, $12-$20 sliding scale. An early-ending party featuring drag queens, burlesque stars, and belly dancers ensures that beauty sleep comes to the next day’s easy riders whose love of bikes and beer rivals that of any Hell’s Angel or fratboy. Or, stick around for Minna’s ’80s night, Barracuda.

Manquake The Gangway, 841 Larkin, SF; (415) 776-6828. 10pm, $5. Disco rareties and bathhouse classics in a perfectly cruisy old-school dive environment with DJ Bus Station John.

PlayBoyz Club Eight, 1151 Folsom, SF; www.clubrimshot.com. 10pm-3am, $10. The stars of legalized gay marriage, Obama’s candidacy, Pride week, and Black Music Month all align for this hip-hop heavy celebration.

Queen Pier 27, SF; www.energy927fm.com. 8pm, $45. Energy 92.7 FM brings back the dynamism of the old-school San Francisco clubs for this Pride dance-off. Chris Cox and Chris Willis headline. Wear your best tear-away sweats and get ready to get down, Party Boy style.

Rebel Girl Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell, SF; wwww.rebelgirlsf.com. 9pm-2am, $12. Rebel Girl brings the noise for this one with go-go dancers, Vixen Creations giveaways, drink specials, and, you know, rebel girls.

SUNDAY 29

PERFORMANCES AND EVENTS

LGBT Pride Celebration Civic Center, Carlton B. Goodlett Place and McCallister, SF; (415) 864-3733, www.sfpride.org. Noon-7pm, free. The celebration hits full stride, with musical performances and more.

LGBT Pride Parade Market at Davis to Market and Eighth Sts, SF; (415) 864-3733, www.sfpride.org. 10:30am-noon, free. With 200-plus dykes on bikes in the lead, this 38th annual parade, with an expected draw of 500,000, is the highlight of the Pride Weekend in the city that defines LGBT culture.

True Colors Tour Greek Theatre, UC Berkeley Campus, Hearst and Gayley Streets, Berk; (510) 809-0100, www.apeconcerts.com. 5pm, $42.50-$125 Cyndi Lauper, The B-52s, Wanda Sykes, The Puppini Sisters, and queer-eyed host Carson Kressley bring it on for human rights and limp wrists.

CLUBS AND PARTIES

Big Top The Transfer, 198 Church, SF; (415) 861-7499, www.myspace.com/joshuajcook. A circus-themed hot mess, with DJs Ladymeat, Saratonin, and Chelsea Starr, plus Heklina’s "best butt munch" contest. Will she find the third ring?

Dykes on Bikes Afterparty Lexington Club, 3464 19th St, SF; (415) 863-2052, www.lexingtonclub.com. 1pm, free. How do they find time to ride with all these parties?

Juanita More! Gay Pride ’08 Bambuddha Lounge, 601 Eddy, SF; (415) 864-3733, www.juanitamore.com. 3pm, $30. Juanita More! hosts this benefit for the Harvey Milk City Hall Memorial, with DJs Robot Hustle and James Glass, and performances by fancy-pants Harlem Shake Burlesque and the Diamond Daggers. Fill ‘er up, baby!

Starbox Harry Denton’s, 450 Powell, SF; (415) 395-8595, www.harrydenton.com. 6pm-midnight, $7 High atop the Sir Francisc Drake Hotel, the swank Harry Denton’s presents DJ Page Hodel’s patented brand of diverse and soulful bacchanalia.

Sundance Saloon Country Pride Hotel Whitcomb, 1231 Market, SF; (415) 626-8000, www.sundancesaloon.org. 6pm-11pm, $5. Hot hot bear husbands on the hoof, line-dancing for the pickin’ at this overalls-and-snakeskin-boots roundup.

Unity Temple, 540 Howard, SF; www.templesf.com. Legendary kiki-hurrah club Fag Fridays rises again with a sure-to-be-smokin’ DJ set from the one and only Frankie Knuckles, the goddess’s gift to deep house freaks and friends.

Pics: Juneteenth ’08 celebrates slavery’s end at City Hall

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By Ariel Soto

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Juneteenth, also known as Freedom Day or Emancipation Day, is a celebration of the abolition of slavery in Texas and is recognized as a state holiday in 29 states. On June 20th, a Juneteenth celebration was held in front of City Hall in San Francisco. The event included live music, from gospel to hip-hop and salsa. Vendors displayed traditional African wares such as mud cloths and big woven hats. Artists sold their creations, some with the images of famous African American activists on them and visitors at the fair relaxed in lawn chairs, soaking up the sun and sipping on free coffee samples. Later in the afternoon there was a lively procession, with a marching band, horseback riding and Assemblyman Mark Leno tossing candy to on-lookers. As always, it was a classic, fun-for-all San Francisco cultural event.

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‘Tokyo Gore Police,’ ‘Machine Girl’ splash down at Hole in the Head’s finale

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One-armed bandit: Machine Girl‘s Asami lost an arm in her battle against a shady ninja family, but that doesn’t mean you should stand in the way of her quest for vengeance (witness the poor slob in the rear).

Ho boy, are you ready for the nightmares? That’s practically guaranteed this weekend as the Another Hole in the Head fest closes out with its final mow-down. Fans of arterial spray, extreme Japanese filmmaking, random acts of unkind dismemberment, and fatal flying guillotines will be able to get their geek on one last, but hella amazing time with this last-minute double feature of Japanese shock-and-argh at Brava, showcasing the late add Tokyo Gore Police and crowd fave Machine Girl. The quickie downlow:

MACHINE GIRL

Possibly the most exuberantly bloody and cartoonish offering in the fest, which bites off/pays homage to Grindhouse AND Kill Bill. This archetypal Japanese revenge story – passionate and cruel by turns – hinges on the trials and tribulations of Ami Hyuga (Asami), a high-school basketball nut, fresh-faced daughter of an accused killer, and loyal big sister. Her younger brother becomes snared by spiralling gambling (!?) debts and ends up in hock to the local budding young hoods, including the son of a yakuza/ninja kingpin (whose devil ‘do bears a remarkable resemblance to that of Prodigy’s lead vocalist) – it doesn’t end prettily. Something snaps in Ami, and she goes after the kids responsible for her bro’s death, only to come up against a formidable array of monstrous parents driven to protect their equally rotten offspring. Losing her arm – slowly – in a nasty torture scene just sends her over the edge. Don’t even ask yourself how she can possibly operate a attachable machine gun with a stump – Rose MacGowan figured out how in Planet Terror, so can she.

You won’t soon forget the memorably ’60s-ish comicbook-like action sequence opener, evocative of both Seijun Suzuki and Sin City, or the finale, less a balletic bloodbath than a completely over-the-top showdown between the “Super Mourner Gang” of grieving parents (just because your son chose to become a ninja doesn’t mean you don’t hurt), giant holes blasted in bodies, a driller bra donned by the meanest mama ever, and a scalping scene that combines disco strobing and an almost Looney Tunes-esque dark comedy.

TOKYO GORE POLICE

Also produced by the venerable exploitation house Nikkatsu (well, they made all kinds of films, though their “roman porno” and “pink” softcore films brought them infamy) with a few of the same actors popping up, Tokyo Gore Police is the eagerly awaited, latest turn by the cruelly beauteous Audition S&M star Eihi Shiina. Here, she’s a girl cop – part of a sinister Philip K. Dick-ish privatized police squad commissioned with ridding the world of monstrous psychopaths who grow weapons out of whatever body part they lose. Sound familiar? Yes, these are the same good – or bad, depending on how you feel about this level of gore – people at Nikkatsu who gave you Machine Girl.

Directed by first-time auteur Yoshihiro Nishimura (who crafted special effects makeup for Machine GIrl, the also memorable Hole in the Head features Exte and Meatball Machine), Tokyo Gore Police is chock-full of disturbing scenes: point-blank exploding heads (recurring like a child’s bad dreams), exposed brains, intimations of limbless sexual servitude, and natch the Snail Girl, above. But the movie’s blend of Ultraman live-action monster brouhahas and a Burner-y, nouveau goth-steampunk aesthetic that, personally, pulls me out of the narrative. I felt a little less invested in Tokyo Gore Police than the more, ahem, classically B-minded Machine Girl. But, hey, this isn’t a competition – unless you want to see how far I can throw a severed hand – so stick around for both flicks. Shock fiends won’t be disappointed.

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Creepy crawlies: Snail Girl

MACHINE GIRL AND TOKYO GORE POLICE
June 22, 6 and 8 p.m., call for price
Brava Theater
2781 24th St., SF
For tickets or more information, call (415) 820-3907
www.sfindie.com

Get Reatarded

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By Michael Harkin

Memphis’ Jay Reatard is only in his twenties, but he’s already a garage-punk legend: in the last two years following stints in bands like the Lost Sounds and the Angry Angles, he’s released a future classic LP in 2006’s Blood Visions, as well as a metric tonne of terrific single cuts.

As a well-documented onstage punch-out in Canada recently showed, the nose-breaking intensity of his melodic chops have been bowling over tastemakers everywhere, especially the folks at the Matador label. Following some especially wonderful wax last year (the “I Know A Place” 7-inch, the “Night of Broken Glass” 12-inch), Mr. Reatard and Matador arranged this year to release a new 7-inch single every month for six months in gradually decreasing quantities, which would eventually be compiled onto a full-length disc.

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“See/Saw,” the A-side from single no. 1, is still the biggest scorcher of the series thus far: his double-tracked nasal yelp and ticker tape enunciation turn lines like “And that is all that I know!” into something shout-alongable and triumphant. “Screaming Hand” is delightful, too. It’s got a Sparks-y, theatrical chorus (“You want a hero? No no no no no…”) and a simple, infectious keyboard lick that make for an all-too-fast rave up, kinda like his notoriously short, fiery live gigs.

Three, Two, One, Boom!

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It’s too brilliant a day to be inside working. You feel like blowing up something up. But don’t want to go postal.
So, live vicariously and watch yesterday’s implosion of half of the boiler building at the former PG&E power plant in Hunters Point, brought to us courtesy of Kristine Enea. Boom!

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