Live Archives — Page 23 of 254 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Goldies 2014 Music: DJ NEBAKANEZA

Michael Redmond

February 18, 2014

marke@sfbg.com

GOLDIES “I don’t care how much equipment you have, how many laptops you’ve got hooked together — if you’re just making a bunch of trendy electronic sounds, if you don’t know melody or dynamics or how to really play an instrument… you aren’t making any music.”

The masked man known as DJ Nebakaneza is notorious for his dazzling and unsettling outfits, gonzo energy, brain-scrambling bass, and rollicking social media presence. He isn’t afraid to court controversy or speak his mind about what’s going on in dance music, either. But dig a little beneath the flash and bombast and a portrait of an artist as a young bass maven emerges, one brimming with deep musical knowledge, canny intellectual vision, disarming charm, and inspiring faith in his hometown scene.

It’s almost impossible to talk about Neb without including the rest of his Irie Cartel DJ crew — JohnnyFive, Mr. Kitt, Miss Haze, and Danny Weird. Irie Cartel has had a profound effect on the San Francisco dance music scene. But to understand just how much of an effect, we’ll need to run down a little history of what didn’t happen in the San Francisco clubs.

In the early 2000s a deep and throbbing apocalyptic sound from the grimier neighborhoods of London called dubstep started shaking the bass bins of the underground. By 2007, it was seeping into club nights here like Grime City, Brap Dem, and Full Melt, drawing critical interest and providing a nice complement to the minimal techno and disco revivalism that was also happening at the time.

But then a funny thing happened: mainstream America, apparently looking for a new arena-style rockout, hijacked dubstep, gutting it of all but its deep bass and catchy name. Pop artists adopted the sound, twisting it into a series of bowel-rumbling bass drops (nothing wrong with those, really), and it became known more for its fist-pumping frat party reputation than a reflection of the more angsty corners of urbanity. A wave of bro-step began washing over US clubs, threatening to wash out more subtle party expressions with its macho aggression.

Guardian photo by Saul Bromberger and Sandra Hoover

That onslaught was stopped at our borders, thanks to Irie Cartel, whose weekly Ritual dubstep nights kept the fun factor high (and the bass extremely low), but also made room for classic bass music sounds, experimental electronic showcases, and flights of melodic beauty. It still melted your face, but poetically. Irie also emphasized old school rave community spirit: At its height, in the basement of club Temple, the Ritual party included a community marketplace for people to sell their handmade wares and food. It was like a cosmic bass bazaar full of beautiful bass faces. “We’re all musically nerdy,” Neb says of his crew. “But we strip out all the ‘look at me’ ego that came with the mainstream dubstep scene.”

DJ Neb got into dubstep, in fact, as a fresh-faced youth who wandered into Grime City one night. “I spotted this flyer pasted to a wall and decided to check it out — it was at the old Anu club on Sixth Street at the time. And when I walked in, I was blown away by this wave of bass, these awesome sounds that seemed to be pulling me apart. I never looked back from there,” he told me over the phone, as he prepared to leave for a gig in Uruguay. “It seemed to pull together something that had been brewing in me somewhere. I’d always been into music. I started working at Rasputin Records as soon as I could, and would spend all my free time in there, too — just digging through bins and listening to music. My paycheck would go right back into those records. They used to pay me in music, essentially.

“As a kid, I played percussion. I went through a Janet Jackson and New Jack Swing phase, got really into hip-hop. I was deep into downtempo, trip hop, and rare groove when I started DJing. It was the whole ‘lounge era’ of nightlife, so I started getting a lot of gigs as a cocktail hour DJ. I even had a chillout show on KKSF, the smooth jazz radio station,” he laughed.

“But when the dubstep thing started blowing up for me, I realized it was time to create a new persona, and that’s when DJ Nebakaneza was born. I had to delete my previous existence. I made a ceremonial sacrifice of that guy.” Neb went on to host the Wobble Wednesdays show on Live 105 and rise to the forefront of forward-thinking yet accessible bass purveyors.

But now it’s 2014, dubstep has almost completely played itself out — bro-step wiz Skrillex’s latest shows have been billed as “playing the classics” — and Ritual is on hold. (“When dubstep became popular, Ritual suddenly had this massive influx of people who were drawn to the sound but had never been in a club before, didn’t know how to act,” Neb said. “They were spurned by a lot of our regulars, who closed ranks. But I was like, ‘We were all new at the party at one point, wouldn’t it be better to connect with these people?’ It was sad that our scene got so defensive. I wish we could have embraced the fear a little more. But we’re just giving everything a time out. Ritual will be back.”)

If dubstep is no longer an option, what’s a dubstep DJ to do?

Go back to the drawing board, of course. Last year, DJ Nebakaneza started releasing a series of exquisite mixes tapping into his vast knowledge banks. Each month he would take on a new, unexpected genre — yacht rock, rare disco, Dirty South hip-hop, instrumental funk, even emerging ones like half-time — and weave something magical from his roots. The Expansion Series is one of the most ambitious things I’ve heard a Bay Area DJ attempt, and it comes off pretty flawless.

“I was having an identity crisis,” Neb said. “Dubstep had kind of moved on, and I missed my crate-digging days. Playing those lounge sets — some of them were four or more hours long. That’s a lot of music. I missed being able to sneak all kinds of colors into it. I also missed playing the music that’s closest to my heart: Isley Brothers, James Brown, all that beautiful old funk and soul. I needed to break myself down a little to see how to move ahead.”

Currently, Neb is throwing a bass-oriented monthly party called Paradigm with fellow head Lud Dub. But he’s still planning his next sonic move. “I want something sexy, still with the bass, but a more ‘purple’ feel. Not the trap sound that’s been happening, but something deep and hot.”

Heavens, does that mean the edgy Nebakaneza persona will be tossed to the wind? “Don’t worry, Nebakaneza’s not going anywhere. And I’m still keeping the mask.”

Goldies 2014 Dance/Film: San Francisco Dance Film Festival

Michael Redmond

February 18, 2014

Goldies 2014 Dance/Film: San Francisco Dance Film Festival

GOLDIES Greta Schoenberg founded the San Francisco Dance Film Festival in 2008, but she didn’t realize it at the time. It began as “Motion Pictures,” a gallery show combining dance photography with screenings of Schoenberg’s “screen dance” films — short works she’d made specifically for the camera.

It was a success, so the next year, she asked other artists who were making dance films to contribute. (The dance-film genre also includes staged performances filmed for archival purposes and dance-themed documentaries, in addition to more experimental works.) The 2009 event was also a hit; it attracted the interest of the Ninth Street Independent Film Center, which was searching for a way to celebrate Bay Area National Dance Week. Schoenberg’s shorts program was a perfect fit.

“Skye Christensen — who was the director [at Ninth Street], and is now on our board — suggested that we make it into a real festival,” remembers Schoenberg. “It was her idea to call it the San Francisco Dance Film Festival, which was a little daunting. But I’m so glad I did, because I think that leap forward was just the risk somebody needed to take, and it happened to be me.”

With help from Christensen and other community arts organizations, Schoenberg assembled a volunteer staff and launched the first official San Francisco Dance Film Festival in 2010. The DIY effort worked. “We had people sitting on the floor in the lobby in our rush ticket line. We had already outgrown the [Ninth Street] space.”

An evolution into something even bigger seemed inevitable. Enter Judy Flannery, who was looking for a way to bring Dance Screen — the prestigious dance film and video competition presented by the Vienna-based International Music + Media Centre, or IMZ — to San Francisco.

“When I was first asked by this European organization if I could help them collaborate with a US dance film festival, I said the only two I knew of were in LA and New York,” recalls Flannery — until she learned about Schoenberg’s fledgling enterprise.

*Guardian photo by Saul Bromberger and Sandra Hoover*

“I made this proposition to Greta that it would be great to get the San Francisco festival better-known. I felt she’d done this amazing thing, which was to identify a need. There wasn’t anything in Northern California that allowed filmmakers to show dance films,” Flannery says. “Plus, this is one of the most vibrant dance communities in the country, and we’re also renowned for having a super independent film community. So why hadn’t they gotten together to make dance films? This was a golden opportunity to make this a more established festival.”

She adds with a laugh, “I basically said I’d like to put it on steroids.”

Initially, Schoenberg hesitated — but Flannery won her over.

“I made this Faustian deal with Greta that I would do a big chunk of the work, alongside Greta and a lot of volunteers, to help establish the fourth festival, in 2013, as a collaboration between the San Francisco Dance Film Festival and the European Dance Screen,” she says. “I was also able to get some other artistic organizations involved, like the San Francisco Ballet and the San Francisco Film Society.”

The SFDFF’s newly heightened profile allowed for an expanded program beyond screenings, with panel presentations (on topics like digital distribution and music-rights issues) and the “Co-Laboratory” program, which paired local choreographers with local filmmakers and gave them a compressed window of time (one week!) to create a short dance film together.

“We wanted to encourage local dancers and filmmakers — who are very busy doing their own things — to go, ‘Look what happens if we work together!’,” Flannery says. “It was a wonderful way to engage the very communities we want to celebrate. This year, we want to build on what we were able to pull off last year.”

And the SFDFF’s upward trajectory shows no sign of leveling off. Plans for the future include, of course, the 2014 festival (calling all filmmakers: submissions are open through May 1), which takes place in November and will include a tribute to veteran documentarian Frederick Wiseman. Eventually, the SFDFF hopes to become a year-round organization. Expanding its audience is a key goal.

“This genre is not new — it’s been around since the early days of cinema,” Schoenberg says, citing the works of Muybridge and Maya Deren as examples. “What is new is the technology that’s available for the average dancer. Now, you can make a film on your iPhone. That’s exciting! And through these works, you can expose somebody to dance in a way that they’re comfortable with. They might not inclined to go to a live performance of an unknown contemporary dance company, but if they’ve seen a shorts program of contemporary dance works, maybe they would. As a dancer, I don’t feel like dance films can ever replace live performance. That would never be the goal. But using these films as ambassadors, and getting people to understand dance a little bit more — I think they’re an amazing tool for outreach.”

Goldies 2014 Performance/Music: Brontez Purnell

Michael Redmond

February 18, 2014

Goldies 2014 Performance/Music: Brontez Purnell

GOLDIES After being informed that Bay Guardian editors and a theater critic vetted his Goldie nomination, Brontez Purnell reacts. “I think it’s fuckin’ rad. I’m pretty into it. A theater critic? Was I criticized?”

Sitting in the backyard of his Mission District apartment, braced leg extended with crutches at his side, Purnell reflects on roughly 12 years of living in the Bay Area (his Mission digs are temporary; he’s about to move back to Oakland). A storyteller of many mediums, his injury prevents him from dancing until mid-March, which is no good since he’s the founder of the Brontez Purnell Dance Company. If you’ve lived here a minute, you might recognize him as a former Sparky’s Diner waiter, working the “drunk tank” every Saturday night.

“When I was 24, my entire dating pool had seen me dance naked or in my underwear — literally get fingered at a Gravy Train!!!! show. They’d see [me] there and think they could be mean to me like, ‘Gimmie my fries!'” He recalls this, along with other illicit memories from his time in the Oakland-based, exclamation point-loving electro clash band.

But like fans of that fad, he’s moved on. He’s 31 now and for the past 10 years the music he writes, records, and performs live is for his band Younger Lovers. Its newest record, Sugar In My Pocket, recently came out on Southpaw Records.

“I don’t think anyone knew I had this background of a punk that had been playing in bands since I was a teenager,” he says, explaining there was overlap between the two music projects with distinctly different flavors, though Younger Lovers’ first album initially received a “hateful response from a lot of the gay boys around.

Everyone thought it was this flash-in-the-pan thing, but it’s something I was actually working on for a long time. It was cool to smash a lot of assumptions with Younger Lovers. People would say, ‘Wow, we didn’t know you played an instrument. We thought you were just kind of drunk and danced around.'”

*Guardian photo by Saul Bromberger and Sandra Hoover*

People still ask him about those old shows, but he admits to not

remembering a lot of it and that some of that life bleeds over to now. “I would call myself an alcoholic.

I would never call myself a drug addict. I feel like the next set of Younger Lovers’ songs will probably be about addiction.”

Purnell is nothing if not self-aware; he points out his own patterns of over-consumption, whether it be food, men, drugs, or alcohol. But his ability to turn weakness into strength is artistry in itself. In his dance company’s The Episodes, universal themes of struggling with identity and finding oneself are apparent, but being black and gay only makes the search for acceptance that much harder.

“I romanticize the outsider. There’s always going to be this running theme of me versus the world, but it’s never so personal to me because I feel like I’m embodying the story of 100 of my friends in one voice.”

In one sequence, “Tub,” Purnell soaks a new pair of jeans while talking on the phone to a friend. The veil of humor is used to deal with heavier topics, as he segues from commentary on butch gays (or “bearded ladies,” as he likes to call them) with their trendy “Hitler Youth haircuts” and how he’s disappointed when they think he’s too effeminate for them, to his own T-cell count, to some suspiciously descriptive-drug scenarios that involve snorting heroin. Another segment recalls a “redneck teacher bitch” from his home state of Alabama, giving the class scientifically incorrect and insensitive, to say the least, explanations of where AIDS comes from.

“I never let humor interfere with what is definitely a message,” Purnell says. “Underneath it all, there is going to be that point where somebody is like, ‘Oh shit. He’s not joking. He’s joking, but he’s totally not joking.’ Humor is actually a really dangerous tool.”

His truth, he says doesn’t always set him free, but as the saying goes — sometimes it hurts. And that’s the beauty of what Purnell does: He looks at his reality, his disappointments, and his personal achievements, and he’s able to persist. He remains one of the more resilient creative forces on the scene he helped make, despite oftentimes receiving second-tier ranking to some of his contemporaries.

Does he play the victim? Well, he gets accused of it a lot, but that’s because of “people’s fucked-up views on what a victim is.” He recites a James Baldwin quote he loves: “The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.”

In short: Purnell is not a victim — he’s a fighter. And as a singer, songwriter, musician, choreographer, dancer, and performer, he proves himself by doing all these things … and then some.

The Goldies: What we’re fighting for

Michael Redmond

February 18, 2014

EDITORIAL If you want to understand what we at the Bay Guardian and activists from the broader progressive movement mean when we say that we’re fighting for the soul of San Francisco, just peruse this issue’s 25th annual Goldies awards. The artists that we profile and celebrate are the very people that this city in now in danger of losing.

It’s never been easy for the idealists, those artists and activists whose passionate pursuits create our unique, world-renowned culture. San Francisco has always been an expensive city and creative types often have to struggle to remain here, pouring cocktails for tourists, delivering packages by bike, or helping corporations throw their parties in order to make ends meet.

But in the hyper-gentrification now underway, the city is at a tipping point. Every rent-controlled apartment that a real estate speculator takes off the housing market represents the loss of someone from the working or creative classes, each lost unit a lost opportunity to create a space for a young person with something important to say.

City Hall has gone to great lengths to keep big tech companies like Twitter and Zynga from leaving the city, offering tens of millions of dollars in tax breaks that have helped drive up both residential and commercial rents, squeezing out the individuals and institutions that aren’t motivated primarily by money. But the people who really need the help aren’t getting it.

If we simply allow the logic of the market shape San Francisco, it will lose everything that makes it great, becoming a sterile landscape of chain stores, expensive boutique restaurants, and disengaged citizens who work too hard and play too little. The Elbo Room and other great music venues will become condos, something the owners of that building are studying (but the club is strenuously resisting), something that might make economic sense even though it tears at the soul of the city.

Read our profile of Sara Shelton Mann, to whom we’ve awarded a lifetime achievement award for encouraging generations of local artists to express their creativity, thus helping the rest of us better understand and appreciate the human condition, in all its wondrous and challenging complexity.

That’s what it means to live in a major metropolis, rather than some suburban bedroom community. Cities are where we come together to engage with one another and with the struggles of our times, embracing messy urban realities rather than trying to scrub them away. This is where we figure it out, with the help of the artists and activists who are here to keep us honest and aware.

We need to find ways to preserve and expand the opportunities for creative, passionate people of all kinds to live in San Francisco. We need to make that our chief political task for 2014, as if our very soul depended on it.

Locals Only: Shareef Ali

Steven T. Jones

February 18, 2014

Is there anything more punk-rock, truly, than baring your soul in the form of a song? That’s what came to mind the first time I heard Shareef Ali, an Oakland-based singer-songwriter whose debut album, A Place To Remember the Dead, will most likely land in the “folk” section of the record store (er, the iTunes store?) after it drops tomorrow, Feb. 19.

Yes, there’s acoustic guitar; there are poetic and earnest turns of phrase about melancholy, joyful, and romantic feelings. But the underlying current is pure punk defiance — a melodic middle finger of sorts to anyone who might suggest that confessional songwriting means you have to be soft, to anyone made uncomfortable by rough-hewn, sacrificial-sounding love ballads, to an indie music landscape that offers little room for artists who don’t buy into ironic or detached as the road to cool.

Ahead of Ali’s record release show at Bottom of the Hill tomorrow night, I asked him how that sound came about.

SF Bay Guardian: Where are you from originally, and what brought you to SF?

Shareef Ali: I spent my formative years in the Midwest; born and bred in St. Louis, Missouri, schooled in Oberlin, Ohio. In 2006 I moved to LA to start a band that existed long enough to play exactly one show. Then I did a few years toiling away in the non-profit world, which brought me up to the Bay. Eventually, I realized that not only would I not be happy unless I was making music, but that I also believed it was the most valuable contribution I could make. I’ve been focused on music for the past five years, and have never been happier or more sure of my path.

SFBG: How and when did you first start playing music? Who are some of your biggest influences?

SA: I got my first guitar in the 7th grade when my mom accidentally ran over my foot with the car and felt hell of bad about it. I played in a kinda all-over-the-map rock band through high school, messed around with jazz and experimental composition in college, but it wasn’t until I got to the Bay that I really discovered my best assets as a songwriter. As far as influences go, there are the obvious ones that you can detect — Oberst, Cohen, Waits, to name a few — but really, my biggest inspiration these days comes from the musicians in the rich local folk scene here, some of whom can write a fucking song as well as anyone. There are a lot of talents, Brian Belknap and Mr. Andrew being two of my favorites (who both also played as sidemen on my record).

SFBG: How do you describe your sound or genre, when forced to do such a thing?

SA: There’s only one thing more obnoxious than trying to describe one’s music in brief, and that’s listening to a fucking musician hem and haw about how they “don’t want to be pigeonholed.” My roots are in folk, but I feel like a punk aesthetic informs my delivery a lot, even if it’s not a punk-style song. And then stylistically I also draw on country, jazz, pop music, old-time blues, whatever. What ties it all together is that it’s all lyrical music. The song, the story, the poetry of it, is the centerpiece; other musical elements are all supportive of that.

SFBG: Some of your songs are obviously very autobiographical/confessional. How do you decide how much of yourself to put into a song, and what to leave kind of vague?

SA: Some of my songs are definitely deeply personal, especially in a tune like “For the Rest of my Life,” wherein I address, by their real names, both my partner and my ex-lover-still-close-friend. I like to put in little Easter eggs of meaning, inside jokes that only the subjects of the songs will get. There’s one song on the record written about another local songwriter, and I quote half a dozen of her songs back to her. Who knows what other listeners take away from these lines, but there are plenty of lyrics in songs I love that I can only guess at their meaning; that’s part of the fun. On the other hand: My buddy S.A. Bach put it well when he sang, “Writing songs ain’t for telling the truth.” Or as someone else somewhere said, “A story doesn’t have to be real to be true.”

SFBG: How do you survive financially in the Bay Area as a musician? If you have a day job, I’m always curious to hear about ’em…

SA: I’m fortunate to have a partner with a stable teaching gig who’s very supportive of my music; we’re currently expecting our first kiddo, and I’m probably gonna get to be the stay-at-home papa, which I’m pretty stoked for. I have a few other odd gigs that I do, and I have also spent some time on the dole, for which I make no apologies.

SFBG: What neighborhood do you live in? And what’s the one Bay Area food you couldn’t live without? I love the It’s-It reference in “Tucson.”

SA: I live in the Lower Bottoms of West Oakland. Bay Area cuisine I couldn’t do without? I’m gonna have to go with the handmade noodles at Shan Dong in downtown Oakland. [Ed. note: Fuck yeah.]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaPENY3uIHA

Shareef Ali
With Sparkbox (Kelly McFarling + Megan Keely) and Whiskerman
2/19, 8:30pm, $8
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
www.bottomofthehill.com

Locals Only is our shout-out to the musicians who call the Bay Area home — a chance to spotlight an artist/band/music-maker with an upcoming show, album release, or general good news to share. To be considered, drop me a line at esilvers@sfbg.com.

BARF-y, in a good way: Bay Area record labels draw a cattle drive of local music lovers

Steven T. Jones

February 17, 2014

On Saturday, the first annual Bay Area Record Label Fair (BARF) was born. As a labor of love between Father/Daughter Records and local promoters, Professional Fans, the event set out to be an ode to the ingenuity and entrepreneurial efforts of record labels in the Bay. Some 17 labels, including Slumberland Records, Loglady Records, Polyvinyl Record Co., Alternative Tentacles, and many more, displayed and sold their music at Thee Parkside.

It was a given that BARF would be successful — after all, it was free, and boasted a live show with uber-talented Bay Area acts — but it was truly staggering to see how packed the place was. At times, wandering through the vendor section was nothing short of a cattle drive. The layout of vendors was superb, however; I was pleasantly surprised to see how the folks behind BARF turned the patio at Thee Parkside into a marketplace for music wares.

al lover

Al Lover

Of course, one big thing that initially attracted me to the event (other than the possibility of spending too much money) were the performances by Al Lover, Cocktails, Twin Steps and Dog Party. All bands were from various record labels tabling at BARF. Al Lover kicked off the more musical aspect of the event. As a San Francisco-based music producer, he combines various beats from ‘60s psych-rock and heavy-sounding drum tracks much like those of Wu-Tang Clan alum RZA. Al Lover has also been known to make remixes of tracks from fellow Bay Area artists, such as Fuzz and Burnt Ones.

More people started to filter in when Cocktails, self-dubbed “slop-pop” from San Francisco off Father/Daughter Records, started to play. At times, vocalist and guitarist Patrick Clos’ vocals were reminiscent of Elvis Costello. Often fuzzed out and with a tendency to combine sneering and saccharine-sweet vocals, the band cranked out its set in record time.

Cocktails

Twin Steps, off 1-2-3-4 Go! Records, is a sample-based quartet from Oakland that blends elements of ‘60s soul, weirdo rock, and pop. Known for surf riffs punctuated with yelping vocals, the band is flying off the handle exemplified. Vocalist Drew Pearson tried to engage the audience by routinely darting off the stage and using the crowd as a crutch (literally), but they weren’t quite as receptive as he’d maybe hoped. This was a little disheartening, given the band’s track record of rowdy (or raucous, if you will) shows.

Twin Steps

It should be noted here that the audience for the show portion of the event was ultimately meek. Since the event occurred between the hours of noon and 5 pm, maybe there just weren’t enough fierce advocates for day-drinking in the crowd? Pearson was caught saying “I didn’t know we were in a library” during the band’s set. So yes, it was very quiet.

Despite that one shortcoming, Dog Party, a Sacramento-based sister duo (ages 17 and 14) brought an air of Ramones worship to the house. Known cronies of Kepi Ghoulie, their fellow Asian Man Records labelmate and the former frontman for ‘90s pop-punk mainstays Groovie Ghoulies, it’s easy to see where the band draws influence from. The high point of the Dog Party set was its cover of “Los Angeles” by seminal ‘80s punk band X.

Dog Party

After that, the audience dispersed. Some mingled, others ventured out to vendor area saddled with questions to the tune of “Should I buy this cassette for $5, though I have never heard of this band before?” or perhaps “How did I spend so much money at an event that’s supposed to be free?”

Long story short: BARF was pretty much everything a fan of independent Bay Area music could hope for. So when does this all happen again?

— @erindage

“Monologos de la Vagina” An artistic and cultural triumph at the Brava theater in the Mission

February 17, 2014

I had just settled into my seat Friday night at the Brava Theater in the Mission to see the opening night production of “Monologos de la Vagina” and the San Francisco debut of Eliana Lopez as a performer and producer.

This would be an interesting evening, I mused, because the play is being performed in Spanish and I speak only a word or two of Spanish. The play, known in English as the “Tne Vagina Monologs,” was written by Eve Ensler. It opened in 1994 for a five year run off Broadway and has been produced internationally in many variations. It became, as the New York Times put it, “probably the most important piece of political theater of the last decade.” .

Art Agnos, the ex-mayor who is leading the battle to stop the Manhattanization of the waterfront, was attending the performance with his wife Sherry. He tapped me on the shoulder and said quietly, Bruce, they filed a lawsuit this afternoon to block our waterfront initiative. They, he explained, were the developers, the Building Trades and Construction Union, and the San Francisco Giants. We chatted for a few moments about the impact of the suit and what must be done quickly to stop it in court.

This was, I thought, a quintessential San Francisco moment.

Here were Sherry and Art, coming to the Brava Theater, deep in the heart of the Mission at 2781 24^th St., on the very day that the waterfront gang were bringing up their big guns to knock out a people’s initiative aimed at saving the waterfront on the other end of town. The timing was exquisite and the political and community points became eminently clear as the evening wore on.

The Warriors’ arena proposal, as Art and his allies have argued, is merely a loss leader for a monstrous condos-for-millionaires project by a Los Angeles developer that would do serious short and long term damage to one of the most valuable pieces of property in the world. And it’s on public property on the waterfront and would involve enormous public subsidies for the duration. The Giants, quiet till now, have their own highrise agenda.

By contrast, here were Eliana, the Brava Theater, and her merry band of monologists working to do good, lots of good, by producing the first professional Spanish-speaking production of the Monologs in San Francisco—and its message that illuminated women’s sensuality and the social stigma of rape and abuse. In the process they were helping to save a lovely old Mission theater building and institution and helping the Mission District, which needs all the help it can get these days.

Neighborhood theaters like Brava are an endangered species in San Francisco and its home base in the Mission is under relentless eviction and gentrification pressure. San Francisco is the only major urban municipality in California that is not seeing an increase in its Latin population..

Eliana became famous in her native Venezuela as a star in television soap operas, but her real passion is live theater. Her father is a theater director in Caracas and live theater is in her bones. She feels strongly that San Francisco needs more and better access to Spanish-speaking theater and Brava is a wonderful venue for her to indulge her passion. She and her husband, Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi, live with their son Theo, 4, on the edge of the Mission, only three blocks from the theater.

I found that the good thing about seeing the Monologos without knowing the language was that I could still get a lot out of the play and the production The lady from Venezuela can act—and did so beautifully and with charm, gusto, and style. And she can perform in both English and Spanish, as she has done in other Monolog productions. .

She can also produce, mounting a professional production that could play on any stage in San Francisco or Caracas or points in between. And she is also a splendid promoter and public face of the play and the theater, appearing regularly on Spanish programs on radio and television and in public appearances. Her six person ensemble included two actors who have performed the Monologs in Spanish in Miami and New York: Alba Roversi and Marisol Correra. Eliana performed with Alba in Caracas.

The actors worked together nicely, obviously enjoyed each other and the dialog, played to each other’s strengths, and got their points across with expressive gestures and voice inflections and humor and poignancy. They loved the play and got a big kick out of performing at the Brava Theater. The audience loved the ladies and their performance and gave them a standing ovation. Alas, the play was only for the three day Valentine’s Day weekend.

Bravo, Eliana. Bravo. Keep on rolling, as we say in English. B3

A newspaper is not just for reporting the news as is, but to make people mad enough to do something about it. Mark Twain (The motto of Random Lengths, an alternative newspaper published by James Allen in San Pedro, Calif.)

(The Bruce blog is written and edited by Bruce B. Brugmann, editor at large of the Bay Guardian. He was the editor and co-founder and co-publisher with his wife Jean Dibble of the Guardian, 1966-2012)

Guardian honored for investigation of buying influence at City Hall

Sasha Cuttler

February 13, 2014

Guardian honored for investigation of buying influence at City Hall

Bay Guardian News Editor Rebecca Bowe and Staff Writer Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez are being honored by the Society of Professional Journalists with a James Madison Freedom of Information Award for “Friends in the Shadows,” our investigation of the shady ways that developers and other powerful players buy influence at City Hall.

The package of articles, prepared for the Guardian’s 47th anniversary issue of Oct. 6, used extensive public records to show how contributions to the city’s various “Friends Of…” organizations create cozy relationships between regulators and the regulated, donations that are often designed to skirt public disclosure requirements.

“Their detailed and thorough account explored a trail of money through myriad city agencies and departments,” the awards committee wrote, noting how the paper “used public records, interviews and independent research to probe how developers, corporations and city contractors use indirect gifts to city agencies to buy influence.”

The Guardian will profile the other winners in our annual Freedom of Information Issue on March 12, and all the winners will be honored at SPJ’s James Madison Awards banquet on March 20. The full press release follows:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

JAMES MADISON AWARD WINNERS FOR SUNSHINE AND FIRST AMENDMENT WORK ANNOUNCED BY NORCAL SPJ CHAPTER

SAN FRANCISCO – Retired San Francisco Chronicle editor Peter Sussman, known for histireless pursuit of an end to restrictions on media access to prisoners, his support of the inmate journalists’ rights, and for his many other contributions to journalism, has been named winner of the Norwin S. Yoffie Award for Career Achievement Award by the Society of Professional Journalists Northern California chapter.

Sussman will be honored along with other winners of the chapters’ James Madison Freedom of Information Awards on Thursday, March 20 in San Francisco. Other winners include three high school journalists who honored confidential agreements with sources by beating back a subpoena for their notes, an online newspaper that successfully sued for its right to basic law enforcement information after being blacklisted by a county sheriff it had angered by reporting on his past, and an investigative journalist who used more than 100,000 pages of documents to report on potential structural problems on the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge.

The 29^th Annual James Madison Awards will be presented to champions of the First Amendment and freedom of information on Thursday, March 20, 2014, at a banquet at the San Francisco City Club.

Besides Sussman, whose award is named for the late editor of the San Rafael Independent Journal and co-founder of the SPJ NorCal’s Freedom of Information Committee who was a staunch advocate for transparency, the honorees are:

Rob Gunnison, a former instructor and Director of School Affairs at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism will be honored with the Beverly Kees Educator Award for his years of mentoring aspiring journalists and for the re-establishment of required course work on access to public records. The award is named for a former SPJ NorCal president who was an educator and nationally recognized journalist.

In a year when whistleblowers have been both applauded and excoriated, Peter Buxton will be honored with the FOI Whistleblower/Source Awardfor his historic 1972 role in exposing to a reporter the evils of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments. From 1932 to 1972 African-American sharecroppers who thought they were getting medical care went untreated for syphilis so the government could study the disease’s progression.

State Senator Leland Yee of San Francisco will receive the Public Official recognition award for his courage to oppose his own Democratic Party leaders and the governor in 2013 with public criticism of efforts to weaken the California Public Records Act by loosening disclosure requirements for local governments.

The Lake County News and its co-foundersElizabeth Larson and John Jensen will receive theNews Media Award, for their successful legal fight to force the county sheriff to end a news blacklist of the paper after a series of hard-hitting, critical articles about his conduct in office.

Attorney Terry Gross of Gross Belsky Alonso, will receive the FOI Legal Counsel Award in recognition of his years of work to expand the rights of online journalists and to protect reporters who were victims of corporate email snooping and to redress the illegal police detention of reporters during protests in Oakland and Berkeley, among many causes.

Freelance journalist Richard Knee will receive a Distinguished Service Award for 12 years of service on San Francisco’s Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, an 11-member body that monitors City Hall’s compliance with open-government laws. He has served two decades on the SPJ NorCal FOI Committee and he helped in a successful ballot-measure campaign to strengthen the Sunshine law in 1998-99.

Reporter Tom Vacar of KTVU Channel 2 will receive a Journalist Award for his story exposing false claims by BART and BART unions that the California Public Utilities Commission certifies BART train operators. Using the California Public Records Act, Vacar forced the CPUC to disclose it does not certify, review, test or train operators, but is no more than a rubber stamp for BART operator certification.

The San Quentin News will be honored with aNews Media Award for accomplishing extraordinary journalism under extraordinary circumstances. In the only inmate-produced paper in California, and under the scrutiny of prison authorities, the inmate journalists and volunteers covered a prison hunger strike, overcrowding and denial of compassionate release for a dying inmate.

Samuel Liu, Sabrina Chen and Cristina Curcelli, reporters at The Saratoga Falcon, at Saratoga High School, will receive the Student Journalist—High School Award for their resistance to subpoenas for their notes and for protecting their sources by invoking California’s reporter shield law as they covered cyberbullying claims and the suicide of a classmate.

Judith Liteky, a former nun, and Theresa Cameranesi, will receive the Citizen Award, for pressing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Department of Defense to win a precedent-setting ruling that the government may not withhold on national security grounds the names and military unit information of graduates and instructors at the former School of the Americas, now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.

News Editor Rebecca Bowe and staff writerJoe Fitzgerald Rodriguez of the San Francisco Bay Guardian will receive Journalist Awards for extensive use of public records, independent research and interviews to produce a detailed account of financial “gifts” given to some city agencies that are used to curry favor out of the limelight.

Aaron Swartz, a computer programmer who launched a method of secure communication between journalists and their sources, will be honored posthumously with the Public Service Award. Swartz died in January 2013 at the age of 26, but his work on the journalist-source software ‘Strongbox’ has flourished.

Senior investigative reporter Charles Piller ofThe Sacramento Bee will be honored with theJournalist Award for breaking the story that the tendons connecting the skyway portion of the new eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge were corroded and could potentially fail. His digging led to the revelation that engineers had warned for two years of the danger.

Columnist and editorial writer Daniel Borenstein of the Bay Area News Group will receive the Editorial & Commentary Award for his strong editorials that helped beat back a legislative attack on California’s Public Records Act. He also produced a string of columns critical of school districts that failed to report suspicious behavior and he challenged the lack of disclosure during BART labor negotiations.

The awards banquet will be held at the City Club of San Francisco, 155 Sansome Street, 9^th floor, 1½ blocks from the Montgomery St. BART station. A no-host reception at 5:30 pm will be followed at 6:30pmby the dinner and awards ceremony. Tickets are $50 for SPJ members and students, and $70 for other attendees. Full table hosting opportunities and program sponsorships are also available.

To purchase tickets please go tohttps://www.eventbrite.com/e/29th-annual-james-madison-freedom-of-information-awards-banquet-tickets-10528851077

The James Madison Freedom of Information Award is named for the creative force behind the First Amendment and honors local journalists, organizations, public officials, educators and private citizens who have fought for public access to government meetings and records and promoted the public’s right to know and freedom of expression. The awards dinner is held annually during the week of Madison’s birthday, which was March 16, 1751.

Award winners are selected by SPJ NorCal’s Freedom of Information Committee.

Background information, including a complete list and description of winners is attached. Additional information is available from FOI Committee co-chairs Thomas Peele or Geoffrey King at the email addresses listed above.

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2014 JAMES MADISON HONOREES

NORWIN S. YOFFIE CAREER ACHIEVEMENT AWARD

Peter Sussman has spent most of his career as a vocal advocate for journalistic ethics and freedom of information, and as an editor for the San Francisco Chronicle. But he is perhaps best known for his dogged advocacy for news media access to prisoners and as an advocate for prisoners’ right to practice journalism. He began pushing for media access to inmates when federal prison officials punished convicted bank robber Dannie “Red Hog” Martin for writing to Sussman in the 1980s. It began an epic fight for freedom of speech, and from 1986 to 1992 the Chronicle, with Sussman as his editor, published Martin’s articles about prison life. Sussman co-authored a book with Martin, “Committing Journalism: The Prison Writings of Red Hog.” During his stint as SPJ chapter president from 1995-1997, state prison officials issued “emergency” restrictions on media interviews with prisoners. During the ensuing national media attention, Sussman became the natural spokesman on the issue. For years after that he helped write and sponsor bills in Sacramento that would overturn the media access limits. He also helped to write the SPJ Code of Ethics. And in his spare time he edited “Decca,” a collection of letters by Jessica Mitford, muckraking journalist and memoirist.

BEVERLY KEES EDUCATOR AWARD

Rob Gunnison spent two decades as a journalist for United Press International and the San Francisco Chronicle, giving him the kind of hands-on experience journalism students covet. Gunnison taught at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism from 1999 to 2013, mentoring dozens of students in the realities of news gathering. In the years before he left, Gunnison also served as the Director of School Affairs. He guided the school through trying periods of transition and pushed to reinstate requirements that students understand and are able to use public records laws. He has been an outstanding influence to aspiring journalists with his passion for reporting, his humility and approachability. He instilled optimism in the face of a rapidly shifting and often hostile media climate.

WHISTLEBLOWER AWARD

Peter Buxton played a historic role as a whistleblower in 1972 by exposing the decades-long experimentation on the effects of untreated syphilis on hundreds of African-American sharecroppers. Although penicillin was a proven cure for syphilis, for 40 years, the government allowed the men to suffer and die, and to expose their wives and children to the disease, and left it untreated to monitor its course. As a young venereal disease researcher for the U.S. Public Health Service in Alabama, Buxton met with doctors and tried to force the issue of treatment, only to be mocked and refused. He left the service for the UC Hastings School of Law but, haunted by the plight of the men, he reached out to a journalist about the government’s experiment. As a result of his action, Congress reformed laws on human research, Medical Ethics Committees were required to have non-physician members and the victims were given $10 million in reparations. In 1997 President Bill Clinton apologized to the victims and their survivors: “The United States Government did something that was profoundly, morally wrong… clearly racist.”

JOURNALIST AWARD

Reporter Tom Vacar of KTVU Channel 2 pursued a critical safety story at the height of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) strike in 2013: Were substitute drivers, drawn from supervisor ranks, qualified to operate the trains? BART and the union told him the California Public Utilities Commission certified the train operators. But he was stonewalled when he asked the CPUC to explain how it certified operators. It was not until Vacar pressed for documentation, using the state Public Records Act, that he learned BART provided no more than a rubber stamp for drivers. He exposed the false claims of certification, showing the CPUC did not certify, review, test or train operators. In fact, after two BART workers were killed on the tracks by a passing train, he discovered the CPUC did not even have copies of training materials.

PUBLIC OFFICIAL AWARD

Despite the risk of infuriating his own Democratic party leadership and Governor Jerry Brown, Senator Leland Yee of San Francisco spoke out early against the governor’s plan to weaken the California Public Records Act. A proposal, slipped into the 2013-2014 state budget would have allowed the open records law to be essentially optional for cities and other local agencies. Yee became the lone Democrat in the state Legislature to cry foul early. With public sentiment on his side, Yee ultimately prevailed. The governor and the legislature backed away from the plan when faced with a flood of opposition from newspaper editorials, environmentalists and conservatives.

DISTINGUISHED SERVICE AWARD

Freelance journalist Richard Knee has been a fixture on the SPJ NorCal’s FOI Committee for more than two decades. He played a major role in the successful effort to strengthen San Francisco’s Sunshine Ordinance in 1998-99. And since 2002 he has served on the city’s Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, an 11-member body that monitors how well (or poorly) City Hall complies with local and state open-government laws. He has not been afraid to lock horns with powerful politicians suspected of sunshine-law violations, including former Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin and current Supervisor Scott Wiener.

NEWS MEDIA AWARD

Lake County News co-founder Elizabeth Larson first confronted a candidate for sheriff, Frank Rivero, in 2010, with evidence of his arrest record in Florida. When Rivero won the election, Larson learned he was under investigation for changing a story about shooting a man in 2008 while working as a deputy. His credibility was so undermined from the shooting statements that Rivero could not testify in court, without defendants being informed of his history under a legal precedent called the Brady rule. When Larson used the open-records law to expose Rivero’s status as a Brady violation risk, he retaliated by blacklisting the Lake County News from routine media information. Larson and her husband, John Jensen, took Rivero to court and in March 2013, with the help of attorney Paul Boylan of Davis, they won restoration of access to public media information and the county had to pay $110,000 to cover the pair’s legal fees.

STUDENT JOURNALISTS—HIGH SCHOOL AWARD

Samuel Liu, Sabrina Chen and Cristina Curcelli, reporters for Saratoga High School’s The Saratoga Falcon, questioned the accuracy of news accounts that attributed the tragic suicide of a schoolmate to virulent cyberbullying by fellow students. National headlines said students passed around photos of an alleged sexual assault on the girl during a party. Liu, Chen and Curcelli wanted to discover what was accurate. They interviewed more than 50 people, some on condition of anonymity. In sharp contrast to the national headlines, they reported “roughly 10 people” saw the illicit photos and they “never went on Facebook.” But on the first day back to school in 2013 the three were handed subpoenas demanding their emails, notes and names of sources from a lawyer for the girl’s family, which was suing the school. All three successfully resisted the subpoenas by invoking California’s reporter Shield Law. In so doing, they highlighted that the Shield Law is for all journalists, not just those working for pay. Guylyn Cummins, lawyer for the students, pointed out the Shield Law applies to student journalists, who do not lose their constitutional rights when they step onto campus.

JOURNALIST AWARD

Rebecca Bowe, San Francisco Bay Guardian news editor, and staff writer Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez used public records, interviews and independent research to probe how developers, corporations and city contractors use indirect gifts to city agencies to buy influence. Their investigation found that donations are not made directly to regulators where disclosure laws would leave them easily tracked. Instead, millions of dollars are funneled through private nonprofits, sometimes dubbed “Friends of” committees, such as Friends of City Planning or Friends of Animal Care and Control. Bowe and Rodriguez found that a mechanism allows large amounts of cash to flow in shadowy donations that make it difficult to see who is behind the money. Their detailed and thorough account explored a trail of money through myriad city agencies and departments.

NEWS MEDIA AWARD

The San Quentin News has accomplished extraordinary journalism under extraordinary circumstances. It is the only inmate-produced newspaper in California, begun in 1940 by warden Clinton Duffy. These prison reporters, along with volunteers from the outside, raise the curtain of secrecy that shrouds those who live behind the walls. Although under the scrutiny of prison authorities, they reported on last year’s prisoners’ hunger strike, prison overcrowding, the controversial handling of a deadly Valley Fever outbreak in the prisons and a feature on the refusal of a Superior Court judge to grant compassionate release to an 81-year-old inmate dying of cancer. They handle reporting with tenacity, sensitivity and thoroughness.

CITIZEN AWARD

Judith Liteky, a former nun, and Theresa Cameranesi, sued in federal court in San Francisco to gain public release of the names of students and instructors at the U.S. military school known for its role in training military officers later linked to human rights abuses. Liteky was a founding member of the non-profit School of Americas Watch, formed after the 1990 murder of six priests and their housekeeper and her daughter in San Salvador. The massacre was linked to 19 Salvadoran military officers trained at the former U.S. Army School of the Americas. The two women sued the Department of Defense to force resumption of what had been routine release of student names. In 2013 they won a significant victory. An Oakland federal judge, in a precedent-setting decision, ruled the government could not withhold the names on a national security basis. Although the legal fight is not over, this ruling alone curbs the government’s ability to restrict access to internationally sensitive information.

LEGAL COUNSEL AWARD

Attorney Terry Gross of Gross Belsky Alonso, in San Francisco, has spent years working to expand the rights of online journalists, to vindicate reporters wrongly arrested during protests and to protect reporters whose phone records were subject to corporate snooping. Last year, Gross secured a $99,000 settlement for photojournalist Jane Tyska after former Oakland Unified School District Police Chief Art Michel detained her while she covered a protest. In 2012, he won a $162,500 settlement and restraining order against the UC Berkeley Police Department for the illegal arrest and search of a camera belonging to Indybay journalist David Morse during a 2009 protest. Gross successfully represented Think Secret in a landmark state appeal court decision that extended California’s journalist Shield Law to online-only publications. In 2008, he sought damages on behalf of The New York Times and several Business Week journalists from Hewlett-Packard, after it was discovered HP obtained the private telephone records of reporters in an attempt to discover a news source from unpublished material.

PUBLIC SERVICE CITATION

Aaron Swartz was, by all accounts, a brilliant and sophisticated young man. Although he died in January 2013 at the age of 26, his work on the journalist-source software “Strongbox” flourished. “Strongbox” — now renamed “SecureDrop” — promises to be a crucial tool for journalists and their sources in the wake of revelations about mass surveillance by the National Security Agency. “Strongbox/SecureDrop” provides a secure system for sources and journalists to receive documents and communicate with each other confidentially in the digital age. Swartz initially conceived of “Strongbox” in San Francisco, where he lived at the time. The New Yorker adopted the secure document submission system in May and it has now been adopted by such publications as Forbes, The Global Mail and ProPublica. At the time of his death, Swartz was under federal indictment for downloading a large number of academic papers via MIT’s network, which he reportedly intended to distribute. He could have been sentenced to as many as 50 years in prison if convicted and many have attributed to his tragic taking of his own life to the government pressure he faced.

JOURNALIST AWARD

Senior investigative reporter Charles Piller of The Sacramento Bee pored over more than 100,000 pages of construction and inspection records to make a troubling discovery: Tendons on the new eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge were subject to water-induced corrosion. He broke the story that a comparison of inspection records and a rosy report by the California Department of Transportation showed CalTrans found few significant problems and that its report was littered with misstatements and wrong information. His relentless digging uncovered the failure of CalTrans to protect the “post-tension” tendons on the new spans skyway from water and that the bridge construction violated universally accepted techniques meant to prevent corrosion. He was also able to report that inspectors had warned for at least two years about water leaks and potential corrosion.

EDITORIAL & COMMENTARY AWARD

Columnist and editorial writer Daniel Borenstein of the Bay Area News Group helped beat back a 2013 attack by Governor Jerry Brown and the California Legislature on the California Public Records Act. Borenstein sounded the first alarm in his columns and kept up the attack. He also directly challenged a stonewalling school district attorney over access to documents, including the lawyer’s withholding of his own job contract renewal. This led the district to release them and fire the attorney. His tenacity in seeking out and monitoring of Bay Area Rapid Transit District paperwork during the BART administration’s months-long duel with unions over contract terms prompted him to call for more transparency and disclosure in a series of editorials. Lastly, he pushed for, and obtained, release of documents related to teacher abuse of students in local school districts, which enabled his colleagues to put together stories about the failure of local districts to report suspicious behavior to authorities as required by law.

Live Shots: Augustines get anthemic at The Independent

Steven T. Jones

February 12, 2014

Live Shots: Augustines get anthemic at The Independent

by Stephen Sparks

When my girlfriend and I got into the cab for the ride to The Independent on Monday night, the Slavic driver was rocking out to “The Summer of ’69.”

“Do you like Bryan Adams,” he asked us immediately, making it feel like our answer determined whether he’d give us a ride. So, yeah, we like Bryan Adams alright. “Not everyone likes Bryan Adams,” he continued. “I don’t understand.”

It felt like a fitting prelude to seeing Augustines, a band too sincere to be cool, too earnest to give a damn about being praised by, say, Pitchfork. There’s something refreshing about a band who pin their hearts to their sleeves, who perform every song as if it were their swan song, and who seem genuinely enthusiastic about performing music.

Augustines are a trio of singer/guitarist Billy McCarthy, multi-instrumentalist Eric Sanderson, and drummer Rob Allen. Sanderson and Allen are solid musicians who seem to have fun performing, but it’s McCarthy, who was born in Santa Cruz and grew up in Placer County, who stole the show. He’s a theatrical performer who was really stoked to be playing in “fucking San Francisco,” a place that he said “handed me my ass so many times.” Now, living in New York, his affection for California was obvious: “Fucking California! Our coastlines are long,” he began in a sort of call-and-response with the audience, “Cigarettes are $5. Burritos are $7. We hug people when we see them even if we don’t know them very well.” His banter during the show was pitch perfect; it was obvious he was enjoying himself. He even seemed excited to do the obligatory crowd-pleasing clap-your-hands-for-living-in-San-Francisco thing.

I get the sense that McCarthy’s this pumped to play anywhere — “Houston, you have such great museums!” “Phoenix, this dry is heat amazing!” — so this tempered my disappointment in the crowd’s initial lukewarm reception to Augustines’ fantastic new songs off their self-titled album. (“Cruel City,” a fuck-you to New York City, is like the bastard son of “Graceland” and “Born to Run”). But then again, I doubt anyone could match McCarthy’s enthusiasm, and soon the crowd warmed up. I don’t think it would’ve mattered much to the band if we didn’t. They were in fucking San Francisco and were going to give their best effort, dammit.

The best moment in a show full of great ones came during the encore, when McCarthy and Sanderson performed an unplugged version of “East Los Angeles,” a bittersweet love song for the ghosts of LA, off 2011’s Rise Ye Sunken Ships. McCarthy, bottle of whiskey in hand, moved away from the microphone to the right of the stage, asked for our cooperation, and performed for the hushed audience an amazing rendition. For a singer who relies on a lot of bombast, McCarthy is capable of making a room full of 300 people feel intimate. Especially when, at the end of the show, he thanked us for coming, implored us (this guy doesn’t ask, he implores) to get home safe, and then hugged his fellow band members.

We didn’t take a cab home, we walked. And, because we were so high on the experience of seeing someone do something they love, with passion and energy and conviction, we got home in record time. I can’t think of any better way to praise a show than to say that its energy carried us a mile and a half.

Music Listings: Feb 12-19, 2014

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

February 12, 2014

WEDNESDAY 12

ROCK

Boom Boom Room: 1601 Fillmore, San Francisco. The Coffis Brothers & The Mountain Men, Evan & The Eccentrics, 9:30 p.m., $5.

Bottom of the Hill: 1233 17th St., San Francisco. Desert Noises, Buckeye Knoll, City of Women, 9 p.m., $10.

Elbo Room: 647 Valencia, San Francisco. Bonnie & The Bang Bang, Owl Paws, Popgang DJs, 9 p.m., free.

Hemlock Tavern: 1131 Polk, San Francisco. Annie Girl & The Flight, Balms, Everyone Is Dirty, 8:30 p.m., $7.

The Knockout: 3223 Mission, San Francisco. “Disorder,” w/ Bestial Mouths, All Your Sisters, Cry, DJs Russell Butler & Nako Hszm, 10 p.m., $7.

Slim’s: 333 11th St., San Francisco. Touche Amore, MewithoutYou, Seahaven, Drug Church, 7:30 p.m., $16.

DANCE

111 Minna Gallery: 111 Minna, San Francisco. “Qoöl,” w/ DJs Zach DeVincent, The Ride, Marc Fong, Will Spencer, Dan Sherman, and Spesh, 5-10 p.m., $5.

Beaux: 2344 Market, San Francisco. “BroMance: A Night Out for the Fellas,” 9 p.m., free.

The Cafe: 2369 Market, San Francisco. “Sticky Wednesdays,” w/ DJ Mark Andrus, 8 p.m., free.

Cat Club: 1190 Folsom, San Francisco. “Bondage A Go Go,” w/ DJs Damon, Tomas Diablo, & guests, 9:30 p.m., $5-$10.

Club X: 715 Harrison, San Francisco. “Electro Pop Rocks,” 18+ dance night, 9 p.m., $15-$20.

Edinburgh Castle: 950 Geary, San Francisco. “1964,” w/ DJ Matt B & guests, Second and Fourth Wednesday of every month, 10 p.m., $2.

F8: 1192 Folsom, San Francisco. “Housepitality,” w/ Corey Black, Mike Bee, Joel Conway, Sharon Buck, Fil Latorre, more, 9 p.m., $5-$10.

The Independent: 628 Divisadero, San Francisco. BoomBox, 9 p.m., $16-$18.

Infusion Lounge: 124 Ellis, San Francisco. “Indulgence,” 10 p.m.

Lookout: 3600 16th St., San Francisco. “What?,” w/ resident DJ Tisdale and guests, 7 p.m., free.

Madrone Art Bar: 500 Divisadero, San Francisco. “Rock the Spot,” 9 p.m., free.

MatrixFillmore: 3138 Fillmore, San Francisco. “Reload,” w/ DJ Big Bad Bruce, 10 p.m., free.

Q Bar: 456 Castro, San Francisco. “Booty Call,” w/ Juanita More, Joshua J, guests, 9 p.m., $3.

HIP-HOP

Skylark Bar: 3089 16th St., San Francisco. “Mixtape Wednesday,” w/ resident DJs Strategy, Junot, Herb Digs, & guests, 9 p.m., $5.

Slate Bar: 2925 16th St., San Francisco. “Special Blend,” w/ resident DJs LazyBoy & Mr. Murdock, 9 p.m., free.

ACOUSTIC

50 Mason Social House: 50 Mason, San Francisco. Tyler Weiss, Brandon Eardley, Sweet Water, 8 p.m., free.

Brick & Mortar Music Hall: 1710 Mission, San Francisco. Gangstagrass, Shovelman, 9 p.m., $10-$13.

Cafe Divine: 1600 Stockton, San Francisco. Craig Ventresco & Meredith Axelrod, 7 p.m., free.

Club Deluxe: 1511 Haight, San Francisco. Happy Hour Bluegrass, 6:30 p.m., free.

Fiddler’s Green: 1333 Columbus, San Francisco. Terry Savastano, Every other Wednesday, 9:30 p.m., free/donation.

Plough & Stars: 116 Clement, San Francisco. Actual Wolf, 9 p.m.

JAZZ

Amnesia: 853 Valencia, San Francisco. Gaucho, Eric Garland’s Jazz Session, The Amnesiacs, 7 p.m., free.

Burritt Room: 417 Stockton St., San Francisco. Terry Disley’s Rocking Jazz Trio, 6 p.m., free.

Cigar Bar & Grill: 850 Montgomery, San Francisco. DU UY Quintet, 8 p.m.

Jazz Bistro at Les Joulins: 44 Ellis, San Francisco. Charles Unger Experience, 7:30 p.m., free.

Le Colonial: 20 Cosmo, San Francisco. The Cosmo Alleycats featuring Ms. Emily Wade Adams, 7 p.m., free.

Meridian Gallery: 535 Powell, San Francisco. Meridian Composers in Performance: Joshua Allen, 7:30 p.m., $10.

Pier 23 Cafe: Pier 23, San Francisco. Mike Lipskin Group, 6 p.m., free.

Revolution Cafe: 3248 22nd St., San Francisco. Michael Parsons Trio, Every other Wednesday, 8:30 p.m., free/donation.

Top of the Mark: One Nob Hill, 999 California, San Francisco. Ricardo Scales, Wednesdays, 6:30-11:30 p.m., $5.

Zingari: 501 Post, San Francisco. Sherri Roberts, 7:30 p.m., free.

INTERNATIONAL

Bissap Baobab: 3372 19th St., San Francisco. “Baobab!,” timba dance party with DJ WaltDigz, 10 p.m., $5.

Cafe Cocomo: 650 Indiana, San Francisco. “Bachatalicious,” w/ DJs Good Sho & Rodney, 7 p.m., $5-$10.

Pachamama Restaurant: 1630 Powell, San Francisco. Cafe Latino Americano, 8 p.m., $12.

SFJAZZ Center: 205 Franklin, San Francisco. Bassekou Kouyaté & Ngoni Ba, 7:30 p.m., $25-$45.

BLUES

Biscuits and Blues: 401 Mason, San Francisco. HowellDevine, 7:30 & 9:30 p.m., $15.

The Royal Cuckoo: 3202 Mission, San Francisco. Big Bones & Chris Siebert, 7:30 p.m., free.

The Saloon: 1232 Grant, San Francisco. Leah Tysse, 9:30 p.m.

COUNTRY

The Lucky Horseshoe: 453 Cortland, San Francisco. The Lucky Horseshoe House Band, 8:30 p.m.

Yoshi’s San Francisco: 1330 Fillmore, San Francisco. Junior Brown, 8 p.m., $26-$30.

FUNK

Vertigo: 1160 Polk, San Francisco. “Full Tilt Boogie,” w/ KUSF-in-Exile DJs, Second Wednesday of every month, 8 p.m.-1:30 a.m., free.

THURSDAY 13

ROCK

Amnesia: 853 Valencia, San Francisco. “Spaceship Chaos,” w/ Rafa’s One Man Band, Not Robots, Borrowed Trouble, 8 p.m., $5-$10.

Bottom of the Hill: 1233 17th St., San Francisco. Sylvan Esso, Pixel Memory, Kitten Grenade, 9 p.m., $12.

The Chapel: 777 Valencia, San Francisco. Royal Teeth, Chappo, Blondfire, 8 p.m., $13-$15.

Hemlock Tavern: 1131 Polk, San Francisco. Sandy’s, Elle Bell, Rustangs, 8:30 p.m., $6.

The Knockout: 3223 Mission, San Francisco. Li Xi, The Pen Test, Brian Tester, DJ Mashi Mashi, 9:30 p.m., $6.

Make-Out Room: 3225 22nd St., San Francisco. Golden Void, Pontiak, Cy Dune, 7:30 p.m., $8-$10.

Milk Bar: 1840 Haight, San Francisco. Turtle Rising, Eyes on the Shore, KnightressM1, 8:30 p.m., $8.

S.F. Eagle: 398 12th St., San Francisco. Bronze, Sam Flax, Screature, Woman, 9 p.m., $8.

SFSU Campus, Cesar Chavez Student Center: 1650 Holloway, San Francisco. Hundred Acre Good, Stoics, Balms, Dark Satellite, 6 p.m., free.

Slim’s: 333 11th St., San Francisco. Breathe Carolina, Mod Sun, Ghost Town, Lionfight, 8 p.m., $15.

Thee Parkside: 1600 17th St., San Francisco. Hazzard’s Cure, Lord Dying, Hornss, 9 p.m., $10.

DANCE

Abbey Tavern: 4100 Geary, San Francisco. DJ Schrobi-Girl, 10 p.m., free.

Audio Discotech: 316 11th St., San Francisco. Mark Knight, Pheeko Dubfunk, Festiva, 9:30 p.m., $20 advance.

Aunt Charlie’s Lounge: 133 Turk, San Francisco. “Tubesteak Connection,” w/ DJ Bus Station John, 9 p.m., $5-$7.

Beaux: 2344 Market, San Francisco. “Men at Twerk,” 9 p.m., free.

The Cafe: 2369 Market, San Francisco. “¡Pan Dulce!,” 9 p.m., $5.

Cat Club: 1190 Folsom, San Francisco. “Throwback Thursdays,” ‘80s night with DJs Damon, Steve Washington, Dangerous Dan, and guests, 9 p.m., $6 (free before 9:30 p.m.).

The Cellar: 685 Sutter, San Francisco. “XO,” w/ DJs Astro & Rose, 10 p.m., $5.

Club X: 715 Harrison, San Francisco. “The Crib,” 9:30 p.m., $10, 18+.

Danzhaus: 1275 Connecticut, San Francisco. “Alt.Dance,” Second Thursday of every month, 7 p.m., $7, 18+.

Elbo Room: 647 Valencia, San Francisco. “Afrolicious,” w/ DJs Pleasuremaker, Señor Oz, and guests, 9:30 p.m., $5-$8.

Harlot: 46 Minna, San Francisco. “You’re Welcome,” w/ Mr. C, Matrixxman, Benjamin K, 9 p.m., free.

Infusion Lounge: 124 Ellis, San Francisco. “I Love Thursdays,” 10 p.m., $10.

Madrone Art Bar: 500 Divisadero, San Francisco. “Night Fever,” 9 p.m., $5 after 10 p.m.

Q Bar: 456 Castro, San Francisco. “Throwback Thursday,” w/ DJ Jay-R, 9 p.m., free.

Raven: 1151 Folsom, San Francisco. “1999,” w/ VJ Mark Andrus, 8 p.m., free.

Ruby Skye: 420 Mason, San Francisco. “Awakening,” w/ Congorock, 9 p.m., $15-$20 advance.

Temple: 540 Howard, San Francisco. “Decibel,” w/ Joe Nice, Sam Supa, Max Ohm, Octopod, Groucho, 10 p.m., $15.

The Tunnel Top: 601 Bush, San Francisco. “Tunneltop,” DJs Avalon and Derek ease you into the weekend with a cool and relaxed selection of tunes spun on vinyl, 10 p.m., free.

Underground SF: 424 Haight, San Francisco. “Bubble,” 10 p.m., free.

Vessel: 85 Campton, San Francisco. “Base,” w/ Chris Liebing, Alessandro, 10 p.m., $5-$10.

HIP-HOP

Eastside West: 3154 Fillmore, San Francisco. “Throwback Thursdays,” w/ DJ Madison, 9 p.m., free.

John Colins: 138 Minna, San Francisco. DJ Sticky Ricardo, 10 p.m.

Mezzanine: 444 Jessie, San Francisco. DJ Qbert, Del the Funky Homosapien, Dan the Automator, Peace, Bambu, 9 p.m., $10-$20.

Skylark Bar: 3089 16th St., San Francisco. “Peaches,” w/ lady DJs DeeAndroid, Lady Fingaz, That Girl, Umami, Inkfat, and Andre, 10 p.m., free.

ACOUSTIC

Bazaar Cafe: 5927 California, San Francisco. Acoustic Open Mic, 7 p.m.

The Lucky Horseshoe: 453 Cortland, San Francisco. Windy Hill, The Oly Mountain Boys, 8:30 p.m.

Plough & Stars: 116 Clement, San Francisco. Tipsy House, 9 p.m.

Yoshi’s San Francisco: 1330 Fillmore, San Francisco. Lee DeWyze, 8 p.m., $22-$26.

JAZZ

Blush! Wine Bar: 476 Castro, San Francisco. Doug Martin’s Avatar Ensemble, 7:30 p.m., free.

Boom Boom Room: 1601 Fillmore, San Francisco. Victor Little’s Big Hit, 9:30 p.m., $8.

Brickhouse Cafe: 426 Brannan, San Francisco. Marlina Teich Trio, 7 p.m., free.

Cafe Claude: 7 Claude, San Francisco. Dick Fregulia’s Good Vibes Trio, 7:30 p.m., free.

Feinstein’s at the Nikko: 222 Mason, San Francisco. Paula West, 8 p.m., $35-$50.

Jazz Bistro at Les Joulins: 44 Ellis, San Francisco. Clifford Lamb, Mel Butts, and Friends, Second Thursday of every month, 7:30 p.m., free.

Le Colonial: 20 Cosmo, San Francisco. Steve Lucky & The Rhumba Bums, 7:30 p.m.

Pier 23 Cafe: Pier 23, San Francisco. Primavera, 7 p.m., free.

The Royal Cuckoo: 3202 Mission, San Francisco. Charlie Siebert & Chris Siebert, 7:30 p.m., free.

Top of the Mark: One Nob Hill, 999 California, San Francisco. Stompy Jones, 7:30 p.m., $10.

Zingari: 501 Post, San Francisco. Barbara Ochoa, 7:30 p.m., free.

INTERNATIONAL

Bissap Baobab: 3372 19th St., San Francisco. “Pa’Lante!,” w/ Juan G, El Kool Kyle, Mr. Lucky, 10 p.m., $5.

Cafe Cocomo: 650 Indiana, San Francisco. N’Rumba, DJ Good Sho, 8 p.m., $12.

Pachamama Restaurant: 1630 Powell, San Francisco. “Jueves Flamencos,” 8 p.m., free.

Red Poppy Art House: 2698 Folsom, San Francisco. Makrú, Sol Tevél, benefit concert for the Red Poppy Art House, 7 p.m., $10-$100 sliding scale.

Sheba Piano Lounge: 1419 Fillmore, San Francisco. Gary Flores & Descarga Caliente, 8 p.m.

Verdi Club: 2424 Mariposa, San Francisco. The Verdi Club Milonga, w/ Christy Coté, DJ Emilio Flores, guests, 9 p.m., $10-$15.

REGGAE

1015 Folsom: 1015 Folsom, San Francisco. Tarrus Riley & Dean Fraser with the Black Soil Band, DJ Smoky, Polo Mo’Quuz, Green B, 8 p.m., $20-$40.

Make-Out Room: 3225 22nd St., San Francisco. “Festival ‘68,” w/ Revival Sound System, Second Thursday of every month, 10 p.m., free.

Pissed Off Pete’s: 4528 Mission St., San Francisco. Reggae Thursdays, w/ resident DJ Jah Yzer, 9 p.m., free.

BLUES

50 Mason Social House: 50 Mason, San Francisco. Bill Phillippe, 5:30 p.m., free.

Biscuits and Blues: 401 Mason, San Francisco. Brad Wilson Blues Band, 7:30 & 9:30 p.m., $15.

The Saloon: 1232 Grant, San Francisco. Jose Simioni, 4 p.m.; Chris Cobb, 9:30 p.m.

COUNTRY

Atlas Cafe: 3049 20th St., San Francisco. Jinx Jones & Jessica Rose, 8 p.m., free.

The Parlor: 2801 Leavenworth, San Francisco. “Twang Honky Tonk & Country Jamboree,” w/ DJ Little Red Rodeo, 7 p.m., free.

EXPERIMENTAL

Exploratorium: Pier 15, San Francisco. Resonance: Unheard Sounds, Undiscovered Music, w/ The Freddy McGuire Show (Anne McGuire & Wobbly), 7 p.m., $15.

The Luggage Store: 1007 Market, San Francisco. Reconnaissance Fly, WhatUke, 8 p.m., $6-$10.

SOUL

Cigar Bar & Grill: 850 Montgomery, San Francisco. Big Blu Soul Revue, Second Thursday of every month, 7:30 p.m., free.

The Independent: 628 Divisadero, San Francisco. Alice Smith, Destani Wolf, 8 p.m., $22.

FRIDAY 14

ROCK

Bottom of the Hill: 1233 17th St., San Francisco. Quilt, The Spyrals, Wymond Miles, 9:30 p.m., $10.

DNA Lounge: 375 11th St., San Francisco. The Warlocks, The Shivas, Cellar Doors, Denney Yoints, 8:30 p.m., $10-$13.

El Rio: 3158 Mission, San Francisco. Friday Live: Thith, DJ Emotions, 10 p.m., free.

Hemlock Tavern: 1131 Polk, San Francisco. CCR Headcleaner, Quaaludes, Mane, 9 p.m., $5.

Make-Out Room: 3225 22nd St., San Francisco. Bermuda Triangle Service, A Carnival of Hours, 7:30 p.m., $8.

Milk Bar: 1840 Haight, San Francisco. I Haight Valentine’s Day, With music by The Fire Department, The Go Ahead, and SolGanix., 8:30 p.m., $7-$10.

Rickshaw Stop: 155 Fell, San Francisco. Valentine’s Day with The Lovemakers, Manics, Everyone Is Dirty, DJ Aaron Axelsen, 9 p.m., $12.

Yoshi’s San Francisco: 1330 Fillmore, San Francisco. T.E.N.: Thomas Pridgen, Eric McFadden, and Norwood Fisher (performing the Jimi Hendrix album Axis: Bold as Love), in Yoshi’s lounge, 10:30 p.m., $16-$19.

DANCE

1015 Folsom: 1015 Folsom, San Francisco. Lonely Hearts Club, With music by Kaytranada, Sango, Falcons, Starship Connection, Iman Omari, Shift K3y, Insightful, Running in the Fog, and more., 10 p.m., $17.50 advance.

Amnesia: 853 Valencia, San Francisco. “Indie Slash,” w/ DJs Danny White & Rance, 10 p.m., $5.

Audio Discotech: 316 11th St., San Francisco. “Summertime, All the Time,” w/ Viceroy, Penguin Prison (DJ set), Surf Ambassador Hendo, 9 p.m., $15-$20 advance.

BeatBox: 314 11th St., San Francisco. As You Like It: A Special Valentine’s Love Affair, With music by Slow Hands, Worst Friends, Bells & Whistles, and Dao & Pwny., 9 p.m., $10-$20.

Beaux: 2344 Market, San Francisco. “Manimal,” 9 p.m.

Cafe Flore: 2298 Market, San Francisco. “Kinky Beats,” w/ DJ Sergio, 10 p.m., free.

The Cafe: 2369 Market, San Francisco. “Boy Bar,” w/ DJ Matt Consola, 9 p.m., $5.

Cat Club: 1190 Folsom, San Francisco. Dark Shadows: Vampire Valentine, With DJs Daniel Skellington, Melting Girl, Unit 77, and Starr., 9:30 p.m., $7 ($3 before 10 p.m.).

The Cellar: 685 Sutter, San Francisco. “F.T.S.: For the Story,” 10 p.m.

The EndUp: 401 Sixth St., San Francisco. “Trade,” 10 p.m., free before midnight.

The Grand Nightclub: 520 Fourth St., San Francisco. “We Rock Fridays,” 9:30 p.m.

Harlot: 46 Minna, San Francisco. “Love Bitten x Love Smitten: A DJ Fueled Dance Affair,” w/ DJ Don Lynch, M.O.M. DJs, 9 p.m.

Infusion Lounge: 124 Ellis, San Francisco. “Bitter Ball,” w/ Bebe Rexha, DJ Cobra, 99.7 NOW’s Fernando & Greg, 10 p.m.

Lone Star Saloon: 1354 Harrison, San Francisco. “Cubcake,” w/ DJ Medic, Second Friday of every month, 9 p.m.

Lookout: 3600 16th St., San Francisco. “HYSL: Handle Your Shit Lady,” 9 p.m., $3.

Manor West: 750 Harrison, San Francisco. “Fortune Fridays,” 10 p.m., free before 11 p.m. with RSVP.

MatrixFillmore: 3138 Fillmore, San Francisco. “F-Style Fridays,” w/ DJ Jared-F, 9 p.m.

Mezzanine: 444 Jessie, San Francisco. “Dirtybird Players,” w/ Justin Martin, Christian Martin, J.Phlip, Worthy, 9 p.m., $10-$20.

Mighty: 119 Utah, San Francisco. “Vinyl Affair,” w/ Mark Farina, Pezzner, Lurob, 10 p.m., $15-$20 advance.

Monarch: 101 Sixth St., San Francisco. Green Gorilla Lounge: Valentine’s Day Discotech, With music by Tim Sweeney, Anthony Mansfield, and DJ M3., 9:30 p.m., $8-$15.

Project One: 251 Rhode Island, San Francisco. “Eightfold,” w/ DJs Augustine, Dave Mak, Dano, and Tuhin Roy, 9 p.m., $8 (free before 10 p.m.).

Public Works: 161 Erie, San Francisco. “Garage Mahal: Caravan of Love,” w/ Dusty, Laura McGourty, Deckard, Tamo, ViaJay, Mancub, Shooey, DingDong, Mace, more, 9:30 p.m., $10-$15.

Q Bar: 456 Castro, San Francisco. “Pump: Worq It Out Fridays,” w/ resident DJ Christopher B, 9 p.m., $3.

Ruby Skye: 420 Mason, San Francisco. Bad Boy Bill, Tommie Sunshine, 9 p.m., $20 advance.

S.F. Eagle: 398 12th St., San Francisco. “Pound Puppy: Puppy Love,” w/ DJs Taco Tuesday, Chip Mint, and CarrieOnDisco, 9 p.m.

Slide: 430 Mason, San Francisco. “E2F,” Second Friday of every month, 9 p.m.

Supperclub San Francisco: 657 Harrison, San Francisco. Love Me: A Second Base Valentine’s Event, With music by Phutureprimitive, Jocelyn, Dulce Vita, Dutch, Neptune, Baron Von Spirit, and more., 9 p.m., $15-$30.

Temple: 540 Howard, San Francisco. “Red, White, and Sexy,” w/ Rainbow Party, Reflkta, Sebastian Concha, Mikey Tan, Hardy, 10 p.m., $15.

Underground SF: 424 Haight, San Francisco. “Bionic,” 10 p.m., $5.

Vessel: 85 Campton, San Francisco. “Sound Addiction,” w/ Techminds, Felnlove, DJ Nile, Sam F, 10 p.m., $10-$30.

W San Francisco: 181 Third St., San Francisco. Valentine’s Day Dance Party with DJ Aykut & Dr. T, 9 p.m., $10-$20.

Wish: 1539 Folsom, San Francisco. “Bridge the Gap,” w/ resident DJ Don Kainoa, Fridays, 6-10 p.m., free.

HIP-HOP

Elbo Room: 647 Valencia, San Francisco. Hellfyre Club Night, w/ Busdriver, Milo, Open Mike Eagle, Nocando, 9 p.m., $15.

EZ5: 682 Commercial, San Francisco. “Decompression,” Fridays, 5-9 p.m.

John Colins: 138 Minna, San Francisco. “Heartbeat,” w/ resident DJ Strategy, Second Friday of every month, 9 p.m., $5 (free before 11 p.m).

Slate Bar: 2925 16th St., San Francisco. “The Hustle,” w/ DJs Sake One & Sean G, Second Friday of every month, 9 p.m.

Slim’s: 333 11th St., San Francisco. Blackalicious, Jahi & The Life, Antique Naked Soul, 9 p.m., $25.

ACOUSTIC

Bazaar Cafe: 5927 California, San Francisco. Valentine’s Day Special: Bad Relationships & Breakup Songs, Hosted by Tommy P., 7 p.m.

Plough & Stars: 116 Clement, San Francisco. “Hillbilly Robot: An Urban Americana Music Event,” w/ The James King Band, Windy Hill, 9 p.m., $10-$15.

The Sports Basement: 610 Old Mason, San Francisco. “Breakfast with Enzo,” w/ Enzo Garcia, 10 a.m., $5.

JAZZ

Atlas Cafe: 3049 20th St., San Francisco. Jazz at the Atlas, 7:30 p.m., free.

Beach Chalet Brewery & Restaurant: 1000 Great Highway, San Francisco. Johnny Smith, 8 p.m., free.

Bird & Beckett: 653 Chenery, San Francisco. Jimmy Ryan Quintet, Second Friday of every month, 5:30 p.m., free.

Biscuits and Blues: 401 Mason, San Francisco. Lavay Smith & Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers, 7:30 & 10 p.m., $24.

Cafe Claude: 7 Claude, San Francisco. Lori Carsillo, 7:30 p.m., free.

Cafe Royale: 800 Post, San Francisco. Tristan Norton Quartet, 9 p.m.

Center for New Music: 55 Taylor, San Francisco. Best Coast Jazz Composers Series #4: Ben Goldberg, 7:30 p.m., $12-$15.

Feinstein’s at the Nikko: 222 Mason, San Francisco. Paula West, 7 & 9:30 p.m., $35-$50.

Jazz Bistro at Les Joulins: 44 Ellis, San Francisco. Charles Unger Experience, 7:30 p.m., free.

The Palace Hotel: 2 New Montgomery, San Francisco. The Klipptones, 8 p.m., free.

The Royal Cuckoo: 3202 Mission, San Francisco. Steve Lucky & Carmen Getit, 7:30 p.m., free.

Savanna Jazz Club: 2937 Mission, San Francisco. Valentine’s Day Party with Jeri Brown & Woody Woods, 7:30 p.m., $10.

Top of the Mark: One Nob Hill, 999 California, San Francisco. Black Market Jazz Orchestra, 9 p.m., $10.

Zingari: 501 Post, San Francisco. Joyce Grant, 8 p.m., free.

INTERNATIONAL

Amnesia: 853 Valencia, San Francisco. The Petrojvic Blasting Co., 7 p.m., $7-$10.

Bissap Baobab: 3372 19th St., San Francisco. “Paris-Dakar African Mix Coupe Decale,” 10 p.m., $5.

Cafe Cocomo: 650 Indiana, San Francisco. Taste Fridays, featuring local cuisine tastings, salsa bands, dance lessons, and more, 7:30 p.m., $15 (free entry to patio).

Cigar Bar & Grill: 850 Montgomery, San Francisco. Mazacote, 10 p.m.

Cliff House: 1090 Point Lobos, San Francisco. Orquesta Conquistador Quartet, 7 p.m.

Pachamama Restaurant: 1630 Powell, San Francisco. Cuban Night with Fito Reinoso, 7:30 & 9:15 p.m., $15-$18.

Red Poppy Art House: 2698 Folsom, San Francisco. Janam, 7:30 p.m., $15-$20.

REGGAE

Gestalt Haus: 3159 16th St., San Francisco. “Music Like Dirt,” 7:30 p.m., free.

BLUES

Lou’s Fish Shack: 300 Jefferson St., San Francisco. Little Wolf & The HellCats, 6 p.m.

The Saloon: 1232 Grant, San Francisco. Jinx Jones & The KingTones, Second Friday of every month, 4 p.m.; Delta Wires, 9:30 p.m.

Tupelo: 1337 Green, San Francisco. Marshall Law Band, 9 p.m.

FUNK

Boom Boom Room: 1601 Fillmore, San Francisco. RonKat Spearman’s Valentine Luv Fest with Katdelic, Pamela Parker, DJ Be Smiley, 9:30 p.m., $12-$15.

The Independent: 628 Divisadero, San Francisco. The Pimps of Joytime, Solwave, 9 p.m., $20-$22.

Make-Out Room: 3225 22nd St., San Francisco. “Loose Joints,” w/ DJs Centipede, Damon Bell, and Tom Thump, 10 p.m., $5-$10.

SOUL

Brick & Mortar Music Hall: 1710 Mission, San Francisco. The Seshen, Zakiya Harris, Okapi Sun, 9 p.m., $12-$15.

Edinburgh Castle: 950 Geary, San Francisco. “Soul Crush,” w/ DJ Serious Leisure, 10 p.m., free.

The Knockout: 3223 Mission, San Francisco. “Nightbeat,” w/ DJs Primo, Lucky, and Dr. Scott, Second Friday of every month, 10 p.m., $4.

Madrone Art Bar: 500 Divisadero, San Francisco. “Yo Momma: M.O.M. Weekend Edition,” w/ DJ Gordo Cabeza, Second Friday of every month, 9 p.m., $5 (free before 10 p.m.).

Yoshi’s San Francisco: 1330 Fillmore, San Francisco. Valentine’s Weekend with Irma Thomas, Feb. 14-15, 8 & 10 p.m., $24-$49.

SATURDAY 15

ROCK

Bender’s: 806 S. Van Ness, San Francisco. Mondo Generator, White Barons, Turbonegra, 10 p.m., $5.

Bottom of the Hill: 1233 17th St., San Francisco. The Summer Set, acoustic performance of Legendary, 8 p.m., $20.

The Chapel: 777 Valencia, San Francisco. Secret Chiefs 3, Mirthkon, 9 p.m., $20-$22.

Hemlock Tavern: 1131 Polk, San Francisco. Aa, Alan Watts, Wand, Violent Vickie, 9 p.m., $8.

Neck of the Woods: 406 Clement, San Francisco. Charmless, The Skinny Guns, The Tenderloins, on the downstairs stage, 9 p.m., $5.

Slim’s: 333 11th St., San Francisco. Zepparella, Skip the Needle, 9 p.m., $18.

Thee Parkside: 1600 17th St., San Francisco. First Annual Bay Area Record Label Fair (B.A.R.F.), featuring live music by Dog Party, Cocktails, Twin Steps, and Al Lover, plus record label merch from Fat Wreck Chords, Castle Face, Polyvinyl, Slumberland Records, Alternative Tentacles, 1-2-3-4 Go!, Tricycle, Loglady, Empty Cellar, Father/Daughter, Moon Glyph, Antenna Farm, and more, 12-5 p.m., free.

DANCE

Amnesia: 853 Valencia, San Francisco. “Pance Darty,” w/ Jjaaxxnn & Duke, Third Saturday of every month, 9 p.m., $7.

Audio Discotech: 316 11th St., San Francisco. Treasure Fingers, Dr. Fresch, Sunwoo, 9 p.m., $10 advance.

BeatBox: 314 11th St., San Francisco. “Sandstorm: The Official Afterparty of Oasis,” w/ DJ Tristan Jaxx (starts 4 a.m. Sunday morning), $15-$20; “Bearracuda Goes Pop,” w/ DJs Rotten Robbie & MC2, 9 p.m., $6-$10.

Cafe Flore: 2298 Market, San Francisco. “Bistrotheque,” w/ DJ Ken Vulsion, 8 p.m., free.

Cat Club: 1190 Folsom, San Francisco. “New Wave City: New Romantic Night,” w/ DJs Skip, Shindog, Low-Life, and Danny White, 9 p.m., $7-$12.

DNA Lounge: 375 11th St., San Francisco. “Bootie S.F.,” w/ A+D, DJ Dcnstrct, Becky Knox, DJ MC2, Guy Ruben, Myster C, Mr. Washington, drag performances by The Monster Show, more, 9 p.m., $10-$15.

The EndUp: 401 Sixth St., San Francisco. “The Show: Superfreq,” w/ David Scuba, Ben Seagren, Dean Samaras, Alex Windsor, Lick the DJ, 10 p.m., $10-$20.

F8: 1192 Folsom, San Francisco. Saint Pepsi, Glenn Jackson, Hawtline, Cool Greg, Pyramids, Bobby Peru, Neto, Witowmaker, 9 p.m., $10-$15 advance.

Infusion Lounge: 124 Ellis, San Francisco. “Social Addiction,” Third Saturday of every month, 10 p.m., $20.

Lexington Club: 3464 19th St., San Francisco. “S.O.S. Saturday,” w/ DJ Footy, 9 p.m., free.

Lookout: 3600 16th St., San Francisco. “Bounce!,” 9 p.m., $3.

Madrone Art Bar: 500 Divisadero, San Francisco. “Fringe,” w/ DJs Blondie K & subOctave, Third Saturday of every month, 9 p.m., $5 (free before 10 p.m.).

Mezzanine: 444 Jessie, San Francisco. “Oasis,” w/ Mickey Friedmann, Misha Skye, Maya Simantov, 9 p.m., $45.

Mighty: 119 Utah, San Francisco. Bass Cabaret: Bonnie & Clyde’s Valentine, With music by Lafa Taylor, VibeSquaD, Jocelyn, and more., 10 p.m., $22 advance.

Milk Bar: 1840 Haight, San Francisco. “The Queen Is Dead: Second Annual ‘I Know You’re Unloveable’ Ball,” w/ DJs Jacob Fury, Mario Muse, and Maren Christensen, 9 p.m., $5.

Monarch: 101 Sixth St., San Francisco. “No Way Back,” w/ Legowelt, Xosar, Conor, Solar, 10 p.m., $15.

Powerhouse: 1347 Folsom, San Francisco. “Beatpig,” Third Saturday of every month, 9 p.m.

Public Works: 161 Erie, San Francisco. “Electric Nostalgia,” w/ DJ Dials (LCD Soundsystem DJ set) and Motion Potion (Talking Heads DJ set), 9 p.m., $6-$10; “Icee Hot,” w/ John Talabot, Galcher Lustwerk, Ghosts on Tape, Shawn Reynaldo, DJ Will (in the main room), 10 p.m., $5-$15 advance.

Ruby Skye: 420 Mason, San Francisco. Dannic, Trevor Simpson, 9 p.m., $20-$30 advance.

S.F. Eagle: 398 12th St., San Francisco. “UnderBear: The Cubhouse,” 9 p.m., free.

Slate Bar: 2925 16th St., San Francisco. “Electric WKND,” w/ The Certain People Crew, 10 p.m., $5.

Slide: 430 Mason, San Francisco. “Luminous,” w/ DJ Zhaldee, Third Saturday of every month, 9 p.m.

Temple: 540 Howard, San Francisco. “The Fourth Annual Carnaval Circus,” w/ The Funk Phenomenon (Lucas Med & Bryan Boogie), Reggie Soares, Fausto Sousa, Roberto Martins, DJ Bizkit, 10 p.m., free.

Vessel: 85 Campton, San Francisco. Tall Sasha, 10 p.m., $10-$30.

HIP-HOP

111 Minna Gallery: 111 Minna, San Francisco. “Shine,” Third Saturday of every month, 10 p.m.

Beaux: 2344 Market, San Francisco. “Swagger Like Us,” 9 p.m., $3.

Brick & Mortar Music Hall: 1710 Mission, San Francisco. Craig G, Scarub, Eddie K, Gigio, Telli Prego, AgentStrik9, Spank Pops, DJ T.D. Camp, 9 p.m., $8-$12.

John Colins: 138 Minna, San Francisco. “The Bump,” w/ The Whooligan, Third Saturday of every month, 10 p.m., free.

The Knockout: 3223 Mission, San Francisco. “The Booty Bassment,” w/ DJs Dimitri Dickinson & Ryan Poulsen, Third Saturday of every month, 10 p.m., $5.

Showdown: 10 Sixth St., San Francisco. “Purple,” w/ resident DJs ChaunceyCC & Party Pablo, Third Saturday of every month, 10 p.m.

Skylark Bar: 3089 16th St., San Francisco. “Night Swim,” w/ resident DJ Mackswell, Third Saturday of every month, 10 p.m.

ACOUSTIC

Atlas Cafe: 3049 20th St., San Francisco. Craig Ventresco and/or Meredith Axelrod, Saturdays, 4-6 p.m., free.

Bazaar Cafe: 5927 California, San Francisco. Jordan Singh VanderBeek, 7 p.m.

The Lucky Horseshoe: 453 Cortland, San Francisco. High Country, The Lucky Horseshoe Bluegrass Band, 8:30 p.m.

Plough & Stars: 116 Clement, San Francisco. The Bombadils, 9 p.m.

Thee Parkside: 1600 17th St., San Francisco. “Hillbilly Robot: An Urban Americana Music Event,” w/ Big Jugs, Wolf Hamlin & The Front Porch Drifters, Kemo Sabe, Three Times Bad, 9 p.m., $13.

Tupelo: 1337 Green, San Francisco. Shantytown, 9:30 p.m.

JAZZ

Cafe Claude: 7 Claude, San Francisco. The Monroe Trio, 7:30 p.m., free.

Feinstein’s at the Nikko: 222 Mason, San Francisco. Paula West, 7 p.m., $35-$50.

Jazz Bistro at Les Joulins: 44 Ellis, San Francisco. Bill “Doc” Webster & Jazz Nostalgia, 7:30 p.m., free.

Red Poppy Art House: 2698 Folsom, San Francisco. Sophisticated Ladies, 7:30 p.m., $15-$20.

Savanna Jazz Club: 2937 Mission, San Francisco. Byrds of a Feather, 7:30 p.m., $8.

SFJAZZ Center: 205 Franklin, San Francisco. Kate McGarry & Keith Ganz, in the Joe Henderson Lab, 7 & 8:30 p.m., $30.

Sheba Piano Lounge: 1419 Fillmore, San Francisco. The Robert Stewart Experience, 9 p.m.

Zingari: 501 Post, San Francisco. Chris Duggan, 8 p.m., free.

INTERNATIONAL

1015 Folsom: 1015 Folsom, San Francisco. “Pura,” 9 p.m., $20.

Bissap Baobab: 3372 19th St., San Francisco. “Paris-Dakar African Mix Coupe Decale,” 10 p.m., $5.

Cafe Cocomo: 650 Indiana, San Francisco. Pepe y Su Orquesta, DJ EMV, 8 p.m., $15.

Cigar Bar & Grill: 850 Montgomery, San Francisco. Orquesta La Clave, 10 p.m.

Make-Out Room: 3225 22nd St., San Francisco. “El SuperRitmo,” w/ DJs Roger Mas & El Kool Kyle, 10 p.m., $5 before 11 p.m.

Pachamama Restaurant: 1630 Powell, San Francisco. Eddy Navia & Pachamama Band, 8 p.m., free.

Revolution Cafe: 3248 22nd St., San Francisco. Go Van Gogh, Third Saturday of every month, 9 p.m., free/donation.

The Riptide: 3639 Taraval, San Francisco. The Mano Cherga Band, 9:30 p.m., free.

Space 550: 550 Barneveld, San Francisco. “Club Fuego,” 9:30 p.m.

REGGAE

Make-Out Room: 3225 22nd St., San Francisco. Titan Ups, Burnt, 7:30 p.m., $8.

BLUES

Biscuits and Blues: 401 Mason, San Francisco. Rick Estrin & The Nightcats, 7:30 & 10 p.m., $22.

Lou’s Fish Shack: 300 Jefferson St., San Francisco. Robert “Hollywood” Jenkins, 6 p.m.

The Saloon: 1232 Grant, San Francisco. Tony Perez & Second Hand Smoke, Third Saturday of every month, 4 p.m.; Curtis Lawson, 9:30 p.m.

FUNK

Boom Boom Room: 1601 Fillmore, San Francisco. Wicked Mercies, Eliquate, DJs Lydia & Mike, 9:30 p.m., $10-$15.

The Independent: 628 Divisadero, San Francisco. The Pimps of Joytime, Myron & E, 9 p.m., $20-$22.

SOUL

Elbo Room: 647 Valencia, San Francisco. “Saturday Night Soul Party,” w/ DJs Lucky, Phengren Oswald, and Paul Paul, Third Saturday of every month, 10 p.m., $10 ($5 in formal attire).

The Royal Cuckoo: 3202 Mission, San Francisco. Freddie Hughes & Chris Burns, 7:30 p.m., free.

Yoshi’s San Francisco: 1330 Fillmore, San Francisco. Valentine’s Weekend with Irma Thomas, Feb. 14-15, 8 & 10 p.m., $24-$49.

SUNDAY 16

ROCK

Brick & Mortar Music Hall: 1710 Mission, San Francisco. Jesus Sons, Down & Outlaws, Psychic Jiu-Jitsu, 9 p.m., $5-$7.

DNA Lounge: 375 11th St., San Francisco. Gorilla Music Battle of the Bands: Finals, w/ Mythra, The Only Ocean, Nightrail, They Went Ghost, As Small As Giants, Flip & The European Mutts, Pyrite Sidewalk, Wonderland Syndrome, The Guverment, Vulturegeist, Maxwell Powers, 5:30 p.m., $10-$12.

El Rio: 3158 Mission, San Francisco. Violent Change; Turner; The Reds, Pinks, and Purples, 9 p.m., $3.

The Independent: 628 Divisadero, San Francisco. New Politics, Magic Man, Sleeper Agent, 8 p.m., sold out.

Milk Bar: 1840 Haight, San Francisco. Surf Music Extravaganza with The Deadlies & The Reefriders, 3 p.m., free.

DANCE

Audio Discotech: 316 11th St., San Francisco. “Fools in the Night,” w/ Bag Raiders, The Schmidt, 9 p.m., $20-$25 advance.

BeatBox: 314 11th St., San Francisco. “Discothèque,” w/ DJs Razor & Guido and David Harness (starts 3 a.m. Monday morning), $15-$20; “Union,” w/ DJs Steve Sherwood & Craig Gaibler, 5-10 p.m., $5; “Honey Soundsystem: President’s Day,” 10 p.m., $10-$20.

Beaux: 2344 Market, San Francisco. “Full of Grace: A Weekly House Music Playground,” 9 p.m., free.

The Cellar: 685 Sutter, San Francisco. “Replay Sundays,” 9 p.m., free.

The Edge: 4149 18th St., San Francisco. “’80s at 8,” w/ DJ MC2, 8 p.m.

Elbo Room: 647 Valencia, San Francisco. “Dub Mission,” w/ Roommate, DJ Sep, DJ Beset, 9 p.m., $6-$9.

The EndUp: 401 Sixth St., San Francisco. “T.Dance,” 6 a.m.-6 p.m.

F8: 1192 Folsom, San Francisco. “Stamina,” w/ Yutaka, Joanna O, Kimba, Jamal, Lukeino, 10 p.m., free.

The Knockout: 3223 Mission, San Francisco. “Sweater Funk,” 10 p.m., free.

Lookout: 3600 16th St., San Francisco. “Jock,” Sundays, 3-8 p.m., $2.

MatrixFillmore: 3138 Fillmore, San Francisco. “Bounce,” w/ DJ Just, 10 p.m.

Otis: 25 Maiden, San Francisco. “What’s the Werd?,” w/ resident DJs Nick Williams, Kevin Knapp, Maxwell Dub, and guests, 9 p.m., $5 (free before 11 p.m.).

The Parlor: 2801 Leavenworth, San Francisco. “Sunday Sessions,” w/ DJ Marc deVasconcelos, 9 p.m., free.

Q Bar: 456 Castro, San Francisco. “Gigante,” 8 p.m., free.

S.F. Eagle: 398 12th St., San Francisco. “Disco Daddy,” w/ DJ Bus Station John, 7 p.m.

The Stud: 399 Ninth St., San Francisco. “Massive: S.F. Bear Weekend 2014,” w/ DJs Mike Biggz & LoonETech, 6 p.m., $5.

Temple: 540 Howard, San Francisco. “Sunset Arcade,” 18+ dance party & game night, 9 p.m., $10.

HIP-HOP

Boom Boom Room: 1601 Fillmore, San Francisco. “Return of the Cypher,” 9:30 p.m., free.

ACOUSTIC

Amnesia: 853 Valencia, San Francisco. Frank Fairfield, Devine’s Jug Band, Meredith Axelrod, 8 p.m., $10.

Bazaar Cafe: 5927 California, San Francisco. Olivia Clayton, Jeremy Hatch, Travis Barnes, 6 p.m.

Bottom of the Hill: 1233 17th St., San Francisco. Peter Bradley Adams, Ghost & Gale, 7 p.m., $12.

The Lucky Horseshoe: 453 Cortland, San Francisco. Bernal Mountain Bluegrass Jam, 4 p.m., free.

Madrone Art Bar: 500 Divisadero, San Francisco. “Spike’s Mic Night,” Sundays, 4-8 p.m., free.

Pier 23 Cafe: Pier 23, San Francisco. The Barren Vines, 5 p.m., free.

Plough & Stars: 116 Clement, San Francisco. Seisiún with Jack Gilder, Kevin Bernhagen, and Richard Mandel, 9 p.m.

The Rite Spot Cafe: 2099 Folsom, San Francisco. Snow Angel, 8 p.m., free.

St. Luke’s Episcopal Church: 1755 Clay, San Francisco. “Sunday Night Mic,” w/ Roem Baur, 5 p.m., free.

Yoshi’s San Francisco: 1330 Fillmore, San Francisco. Piers Faccini, Dom La Nena, 7 p.m., $20-$24.

JAZZ

Feinstein’s at the Nikko: 222 Mason, San Francisco. Paula West, 7 p.m., $35-$50.

Jazz Bistro at Les Joulins: 44 Ellis, San Francisco. Bill “Doc” Webster & Jazz Nostalgia, 7:30 p.m., free.

Madrone Art Bar: 500 Divisadero, San Francisco. “Sunday Sessions,” 10 p.m., free.

Revolution Cafe: 3248 22nd St., San Francisco. Jazz Revolution, 4 p.m., free/donation.

The Riptide: 3639 Taraval, San Francisco. The Cottontails, Third Sunday of every month, 7:30 p.m., free.

The Royal Cuckoo: 3202 Mission, San Francisco. Lavay Smith & Chris Siebert, 7:30 p.m., free.

SFJAZZ Center: 205 Franklin, San Francisco. Kate McGarry & Keith Ganz, in the Joe Henderson Lab, 5:30 & 7 p.m., $25.

Zingari: 501 Post, San Francisco. Barbara Ochoa, 7:30 p.m., free.

INTERNATIONAL

Atmosphere: 447 Broadway, San Francisco. “Hot Bachata Nights,” w/ DJ El Guapo, 5:30 p.m., $10 ($18-$25 with dance lessons).

Bissap Baobab: 3372 19th St., San Francisco. “Brazil & Beyond,” 6:30 p.m., free.

Thirsty Bear Brewing Company: 661 Howard, San Francisco. “The Flamenco Room,” 7:30 & 8:30 p.m.

BLUES

Biscuits and Blues: 401 Mason, San Francisco. Jason King Band, 7:30 & 9:30 p.m., $15.

Lou’s Fish Shack: 300 Jefferson St., San Francisco. Sam Johnson, 4 p.m.

The Saloon: 1232 Grant, San Francisco. King Perkoff, 4 p.m.; Silvia C, Third Sunday of every month, 9:30 p.m.

Sheba Piano Lounge: 1419 Fillmore, San Francisco. Bohemian Knuckleboogie, 8 p.m., free.

Swig: 571 Geary, San Francisco. Sunday Blues Jam with Ed Ivey, 9 p.m.

SOUL

Delirium Cocktails: 3139 16th St., San Francisco. “Heart & Soul,” w/ DJ Lovely Lesage, 10 p.m., free.

MONDAY 17

ROCK

Bottom of the Hill: 1233 17th St., San Francisco. The Lawrence Arms, Nothington, Great Apes, 8 p.m., $20.

Brick & Mortar Music Hall: 1710 Mission, San Francisco. Waters, Farallons, Mornings, 9 p.m., $6.

DANCE

DNA Lounge: 375 11th St., San Francisco. “Death Guild,” 18+ dance party with DJs Decay, Joe Radio, Melting Girl, & guests, 9:30 p.m., $3-$5.

Q Bar: 456 Castro, San Francisco. “Wanted,” w/ DJs Key&Kite and Richie Panic, 9 p.m., free.

Underground SF: 424 Haight, San Francisco. “Vienetta Discotheque,” w/ DJs Stanley Frank and Robert Jeffrey, 10 p.m., free.

ACOUSTIC

Amnesia: 853 Valencia, San Francisco. Windy Hill, Third Monday of every month, 9 p.m., free.

The Chieftain: 198 Fifth St., San Francisco. The Wrenboys, 7 p.m., free.

Fiddler’s Green: 1333 Columbus, San Francisco. Terry Savastano, 9:30 p.m., free/donation.

Hotel Utah: 500 Fourth St., San Francisco. Open Mic with Brendan Getzell, 8 p.m., free.

Make-Out Room: 3225 22nd St., San Francisco. “Sad Bastard Club,” Third Monday of every month, 7:30 p.m., free.

Osteria: 3277 Sacramento, San Francisco. “Acoustic Bistro,” 7 p.m., free.

The Saloon: 1232 Grant, San Francisco. Peter Lindman, 4 p.m.

JAZZ

Cafe Divine: 1600 Stockton, San Francisco. Rob Reich, First and Third Monday of every month, 7 p.m.

Jazz Bistro at Les Joulins: 44 Ellis, San Francisco. Eugene Pliner Quartet with Tod Dickow, 7:30 p.m., free.

Le Colonial: 20 Cosmo, San Francisco. Le Jazz Hot, 7 p.m., free.

Sheba Piano Lounge: 1419 Fillmore, San Francisco. City Jazz Instrumental Jam Session, 8 p.m.

Zingari: 501 Post, San Francisco. Marilyn Cooney, 7:30 p.m., free.

INTERNATIONAL

Elbo Room: 647 Valencia, San Francisco. Zili Misik, 9 p.m., $8.

REGGAE

Skylark Bar: 3089 16th St., San Francisco. “Skylarking,” w/ I&I Vibration, 10 p.m., free.

BLUES

The Chapel: 777 Valencia, San Francisco. Jeremy Spencer & Band, 8 p.m., $22-$25.

The Saloon: 1232 Grant, San Francisco. The Bachelors, 9:30 p.m.

COUNTRY

Make-Out Room: 3225 22nd St., San Francisco. “Whiskey River,” w/ DJ Handlebars & Pretty Ricky, Third Monday of every month, 10 p.m., free.

SOUL

Madrone Art Bar: 500 Divisadero, San Francisco. “M.O.M. (Motown on Mondays),” w/ DJ Gordo Cabeza & Timoteo Gigante, 8 p.m., free.

TUESDAY 18

ROCK

Amnesia: 853 Valencia, San Francisco. Bill Baird, Brova, The Dirty Snacks Ensemble, Beast Nest, 9 p.m.

Boom Boom Room: 1601 Fillmore, San Francisco. Island of Black & White, Mosshead, Mondo Deco, 9:30 p.m., $5.

Bottom of the Hill: 1233 17th St., San Francisco. The Lawrence Arms, Nothington, Great Apes, 8 p.m., $20.

The Chapel: 777 Valencia, San Francisco. Converse Rubber Tracks Live: Bl’ast!, Lecherous Gaze, Hot Lunch, 8 p.m., free with RSVP.

DNA Lounge: 375 11th St., San Francisco. American Head Charge, Righteous Vendetta, Catharsis, 7 p.m., $12-$15.

El Rio: 3158 Mission, San Francisco. Foli, Animal Eyes, We Are the Men, 7 p.m., $5.

Hemlock Tavern: 1131 Polk, San Francisco. Couches, Fish Breath, Command Control, 8:30 p.m., $6.

The Knockout: 3223 Mission, San Francisco. A Million Billion Dying Suns, The Tropics, Buzzmutt, 9:30 p.m., $6.

DANCE

Aunt Charlie’s Lounge: 133 Turk, San Francisco. “High Fantasy,” w/ DJ Viv, Myles Cooper, & guests, 10 p.m., $2.

Monarch: 101 Sixth St., San Francisco. “Deep, Dark, and Dangerous,” w/ Youngsta, Truth, Vilify, 10 p.m., $15.

Otis: 25 Maiden, San Francisco. “Vibe,” w/ Binkadink, Third Tuesday of every month, 6 p.m., free.

Q Bar: 456 Castro, San Francisco. “Switch,” w/ DJs Jenna Riot & Andre, 9 p.m., $3.

Underground SF: 424 Haight, San Francisco. “Shelter,” 10 p.m., free.

Wish: 1539 Folsom, San Francisco. “Tight,” w/ resident DJs Michael May & Lito, 8 p.m., free.

ACOUSTIC

Bazaar Cafe: 5927 California, San Francisco. Songwriter in Residence: Paige Clem, continues through Feb. 25.

Brick & Mortar Music Hall: 1710 Mission, San Francisco. Noah Gunderson, Carly Ritter, 8 p.m., $10-$12.

Plough & Stars: 116 Clement, San Francisco. Seisiún with Autumn Rhodes & Pat O’Donnell, 9 p.m.

The Rite Spot Cafe: 2099 Folsom, San Francisco. Drizzoletto, 8 p.m., free.

JAZZ

Beach Chalet Brewery & Restaurant: 1000 Great Highway, San Francisco. Gerry Grosz Jazz Jam, 7 p.m.

Biscuits and Blues: 401 Mason, San Francisco. The Robert Stewart Experience, 7:30 & 9:30 p.m., $15.

Blush! Wine Bar: 476 Castro, San Francisco. Kally Price & Rob Reich, 7 p.m., free.

Burritt Room: 417 Stockton St., San Francisco. Terry Disley’s Rocking Jazz Trio, 6 p.m., free.

Cafe Divine: 1600 Stockton, San Francisco. Chris Amberger, 7 p.m.

Jazz Bistro at Les Joulins: 44 Ellis, San Francisco. Clifford Lamb, Mel Butts, and Friends, 7:30 p.m., free.

Le Colonial: 20 Cosmo, San Francisco. Lavay Smith & Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers, 7 p.m.

Revolution Cafe: 3248 22nd St., San Francisco. West Side Jazz Club, 5 p.m., free; Panique, Third Tuesday of every month, 8:30 p.m., free/donation.

Sheba Piano Lounge: 1419 Fillmore, San Francisco. Sharman Duran, 8 p.m.

Tupelo: 1337 Green, San Francisco. Mal Sharpe’s Big Money in Jazz Band, 6 p.m.

Verdi Club: 2424 Mariposa, San Francisco. “Tuesday Night Jump,” w/ Stompy Jones, 9 p.m., $10-$12.

Wine Kitchen: 507 Divisadero St., San Francisco. Hot Club Pacific, 7:30 p.m.

Yoshi’s San Francisco: 1330 Fillmore, San Francisco. Tommy Igoe Big Band, 8 p.m., $22.

Zingari: 501 Post, San Francisco. Emily Hayes, 7:30 p.m., free.

INTERNATIONAL

Cafe Cocomo: 650 Indiana, San Francisco. Salsa Tuesday, w/ DJs Good Sho & El de la Clave, 8:30 p.m., $10.

The Cosmo Bar & Lounge: 440 Broadway, San Francisco. Conga Tuesdays, 8 p.m., $7-$10.

Elbo Room: 647 Valencia, San Francisco. “Porreta!,” all night forro party with DJs Carioca & Lucio K, Third Tuesday of every month, 9 p.m., $7.

F8: 1192 Folsom, San Francisco. “Underground Nomads,” w/ rotating resident DJs Amar, Sep, and Dulce Vita, plus guests, 9 p.m., $5 (free before 9:30 p.m.).

REGGAE

Milk Bar: 1840 Haight, San Francisco. “Bless Up,” w/ Jah Warrior Shelter Hi-Fi, 10 p.m.

BLUES

The Saloon: 1232 Grant, San Francisco. Lisa Kindred, Third Tuesday of every month, 9:30 p.m.

EXPERIMENTAL

Center for New Music: 55 Taylor, San Francisco. sfSoundSalonSeries, w/ Natural Artefacts, Tim Perkis, Lucie Vitkova, 7:49 p.m., $10-$15.

SOUL

Make-Out Room: 3225 22nd St., San Francisco. “Lost & Found,” w/ DJs Primo, Lucky, and guests, 9:30 p.m., free. 2

This Week’s Picks: February 12 – 18, 2014

Michael Redmond

February 11, 2014

WEDNESDAY 12

When The Landscape Is Quiet Again: North Dakota’s Oil Boom

In a land far, far away, the greedy hands of oilmongers are ripping apart Sarah Christianson’s home state. “Almost every local person I spoke with out there expressed some version of this sentiment: ‘I’m so glad so-and-so is dead, so they don’t have to see what’s happened to this place,'” says the photographer. Over the past year, Christianson documented the consequences of North Dakota’s newest oil boom: oil wells built on her parent’s mineral acres, drilling rigs planted on desolate horizons, natural gas flare pits disrupting untouched valleys. Her latest project, “When the Landscape is Quiet Again” hosted by SF Camerawork through April 19, examines the lasting repercussions of North Dakota’s 1973 oil boom, the new damages being inflicted today and the dichotomous effects on this economically depressed region. Opening reception will be held the following day at 6pm. (Laura B. Childs)

Free

SFCamerawork

1011 Market, 2nd floor, SF

www.sfcamerawork.org

Octopalooza

Are you a two-fisted drinker? Think you can keep up with an eight-armed party animal? Tonight’s your chance to do exactly that, and drink like a fish — literally! Head down to the waterfront tonight for “Octopalooza,” an SF Beer Week event celebrating cephalopods that will allow people to eat, drink and dance, all under the water. Featuring beers from San Francisco’s Pacific Brewing Laboratory (with labels such as “Squid Ink” and “Nautilus”) the fete will also include food from Pier 39 restaurants, octopus talks, squid dissections, squid ink block printing and a silent disco. Price of admission includes four drink tickets. (Sean McCourt)

6:30-9:30pm, $35

Aquarium of the Bay

Pier 39, SF.

www.aquariumofthebay.com

(415) 623-5300

THURSDAY 13

Breakfast: A History

Many modern Americans might have struggled with breakfast in the mid-1800’s, according to author Heather Arndt Anderson: “Bacon and eggs, pancake with syrup, and hot coffee were now considered as ‘injurious’ to one’s health as masturbation.” Anderson explains in her book Breakfast: A History how Americans’ healthy living attitudes at that time spurred the development of granola as a popular food. Anderson’s origin stories and accessible anthropological analysis showcase how the early day cuisine from different eras shape what we eat today. “Breakfast” also explores how culture, linguistics, religion and mass media elevated the morning meal’s status to the most important meal of the day. (Kevin Lee)

6:30pm-7:30pm

Omnivore Books

3885 Cesar Chavez, SF

(415)282-4712

www.omnivorebooks.com

Free

Valentine’s Day Gay Romance from Cleis Press

Don’t mind the fogged-up windows at Books Inc. in the Castro on Wednesday night. Cleis Press has a steamy evening in store for you! This pre-Valentine’s Day book reading will celebrate the best parts of gay romance with tales of first times, young love, and longtime commitments. The independent queer publishing company has lined up three celebrated gay erotica authors for a night of hot-and-heavy prose followed by a book signing. Rob Rosen will share a titillating excerpt from one of his recent erotic novels, while Felice Picano and Lewis DeSimone will read from Best Gay Romance 2014, a sexy and lustful anthology that tackles all matters of the heart, soul, and bedroom. (Laura B. Childs)

7:30pm, free

Books Inc. The Castro

2275 Market, SF

www.booksinc.net

FRIDAY 14

Thao and The Get Down Stay Down

Hometown hero Thao Nguyen has been very busy of late, touring her band’s newest album We the Common, writing and recording short films with the likes of Ira Glass for Funny or Die, shooting music videos (and getting shut down by the SFPD) on the new Bay Bridge, and volunteering frequently for the California Coalition for Women Prisoners. Thao and the Get Down Stay Down’s music, a folk-rock blend, is simultaneously intimate and socially conscious, with her most recent work featuring themes of community and gratitude. Nguyen has been playing San Francisco shows semi-frequently for years, but this night will see her headlining the beloved and historied Fillmore for the first time, so this gig is sure to be electric. (Haley Zaremba)

With Sonny and the Sunsets

9pm, $20

The Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

(415) 346-3000

www.thefillmore.com

CCR Headcleaner

Does your ideal Valentine’s Day date entail seeing a mixture of psych-infused sludge rock and girl-dominated punk bands, all for thecost of $5? If yes, then consider your plans made. CCR Headcleaner, Quaaludes and Mane are throwing a bash during everybody’s favorite Hallmark holiday at Hemlock Tavern. Local raucous rockers CCR Headcleaner recently made waves with its split EP alongside Ty Segall’s stoner garage rock band, Fuzz, for the “Less Artists More Condos” 7″ series. Playing with CCR Headcleaner is Quaaludes, a San Francisco punk girl band that draws influences from the likes of grunge and riot grrrl. Opening is ’80s goth-tinged post-punk girl band, Mane. Though each band draws from different influences, each band brings an unfiltered, raw quality to its performance. So grab your partner, sweetie, S.O. – or whatever you call them – and march on over to the Hemlock for a grimy punk show. (Erin Dage)

With Quaaludes, Mane

9pm, $5

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

Hubba Hubba Revue

Looking for a Valentine’s event that’s sure to blow all the others away? Slip into the world of scandalous speakeasies, flirtatious flappers and gun-toting gangsters tonight when Bay Area burlesque group Hubba Hubba Revue presents a special “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre” themed show. Enjoy bootlegged beverages while watching a bevy of beauties from around the world perform on stage, including Lilly Tiger from Berlin and Fever Blister from LA — expect spats to be stripped, and fedoras to be flung — all giving a racy take on romance from the roaring twenties. (Sean McCourt)

9pm, $15-$30

DNA Lounge

375 11th St., SF

(415) 626-1409

www.dnalounge.com

www.hubbarevue.com

Company C Contemporary Ballet

Some 12 years ago, Company C Contemporary Ballet started modestly with student performers; it now has a fine group of professional dancers and an infrastructure that supports it. After this season they’ll change to a “project-based” format that is less financially demanding and artistically more flexible. Artistic Director Charles Anderson has always had a knack for programming his own pieces in conjunction with intriguing works by other. That’s not likely to change. His is and will remain a ballet company featuring choreography that showcases 21st century dance. Among two of Anderson’s works, this program features Charles Moulton’s ingenious Nine Person Precision Ball Passing; Susan Jaffe’s Weather — who knew that the great ABT Ballerina choreographed? — and Yuri Zhukov’s expanded Railroad Joint. (Rita Felciano)

Feb. 13 and 14, 8pm. $25-48

Feb. 15, 6pm Gala. Feb. 16, 3pm

YBCA, LAM Research Center Theater, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

SATURDAY 15

Myron & E

The Stones Throw record label is sort of the indie Motown of the 21st century, and their latest output, Myron and E, has instantly become some of the coolest cats on the LA-based cadre of vinyl evangelists. The deliciously soulful duo will be bringing its spunky horns, soothing rhythms, and hypnotic vocals to the Independent in support of their debut LP Broadway. The lead single “If I Gave You My Love” showcases the duo’s one-two punch of Barry White-esque vocals on the chorus, surrounded by peppy falsetto. Myron and E got together in the Bay after Myron escaped from LA, where he was working on the sketch comedy show “In Living Color.” If there ever was an occasion to bust out your special bowtie and fancy dancing shoes, it’s this show. (George McIntire)

9pm, $20 adv, $22 door

The Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1421

www.theindependentsf.com

B.A.R.F.

February 15 is the date that many people will join in one area for their common love of BARF (Bay Area Record Label Fair). Vomit word-play aside, here are the details: local organizations Father/Daughter Records and Professional Fans have come together to spearhead the first annual event honoring record labels across the Bay Area. Labels such as Polyvinyl, Castle Face, 1-2-3-4 Go! Records, Slumberland, and many more will be selling their music all under one roof for such an occasion. To sweeten the deal, uber-talented bands representing local labels such as “difficult” punks Twin Steps, pop-punk sister duo Dog Party, power-pop sensations Cocktails, and psych-rocker Al Lover will be performing at the gig! And the best part about this event? There’s no need to cough up cash to get in. (Erin Dage)

With Twin Steps, Dog Party, Cocktails, Al Lover

12pm, Free

Thee Parkside

1600 17th St, SF

(415) 252-1330

www.theeparkside.com

John Talabot at Icee Hot

After slow simmering yet heavy hitting releases like ‘Sunshine,’ John Talabot released his debut ƒIN in 2012 to crossover attention. Add in a single live performance with collaborator Pional leading to touring with The xx, the only question would be what 2013 bring. The answer: an equally lauded entry into DJ-Kicks mix series, with Talabot taking his ability to sustain an emotional moment in time — dark, melancholic, tender, whatever — and extended it into a career-up to-here defining set. It’s perhaps the best entry yet into his sound, as much forward looking (including new songs “Without You” and “Siderall”) as tied to the past, with obscurities like Jurgen Paape’s remix of “Kron” by Sillikron reaching back to nights spent as a windowlicking trainspotter in Barcelona clubs, notebook in hand. (Ryan Prendiville)

With Galcher Lustwerk, Ghosts on Tape, Shawn Reynaldo, DJ Will

10pm-4am, $5-15 presale

Public Works

161 Erie, SF

(415) 932-0955

www.publicsf.com

SUNDAY 16

East Bay Comic Con

You don’t have to go all the way down to San Diego this year to get your comic book and pop culture fix — just check out East Bay Comic Con, a brand new event that will feature a host of comic book vendors along with several special guests including Richard Kiel (who played “Jaws,” the towering villain with metal teeth in two James Bond films) and John Stanley (author and host of KTVU’s classic TV show “Creature Features”). James O’Barr, the creator of The Crow, will also be on hand, and will kick off the party with a screening of the film based on his comic the night before. (Sean McCourt)

Movie screening and Q&A

7pm Sat/15, Free for first 350 fans

Brenden Theater

1985 Willow Pass Rd., Concord

East Bay Comic Con

10am-4:30pm, $5 (children 8 and under free)

Concord Hilton 1970 Diamond Blvd., Concord

www.eastbaycomiccon.com

TUESDAY 18

“Committed Cinema: Tony Buba” Braddock, Penn., got its big-screen moment last year with the release of Out of the Furnace, Scott Cooper’s occasionally overwrought tale of two brothers battling grim destinies in the crumbling steel town. As it turns out, documentarian Tony Buba has been lensing his blue-collar hometown for decades, and the filmmaker dubbed “a national treasure” by the Anthology Film Archives is coming to Berkeley to share his work and converse with USF education professor Rick Ayers. Tonight, “The Braddock Chronicles” compiles shorts from 1972-85. More shorts precede screenings of narrative Lightning Over Braddock: A Rustbowl Fantasy (1988), and his most recent doc, 2013’s We Are Alive! The Fight to Save Braddock Hospital, on consecutive nights. (Cheryl Eddy)

Feb 18-20, 7pm, $5.50-$9.50

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

bampfa.berkeley.edu

Rep Clock: February 12 – 18, 2014

Michael Redmond

February 11, 2014

Schedules are for Wed/12-Tue/18 except where noted. Director and year are given when available. Double and triple features marked with a •. All times pm unless otherwise specified.

ARTISTS’ TELEVISION ACCESS 992 Valencia, SF; www.atasite.org. $7-12. “Sistah Sinema: A Queer Women of Color Valentine,” short films, Fri, 8. “Small Press Traffic: Douglas Kearney, Claudia Rankine, Normal Cole,” reading, Sun, 5.

BALBOA THEATRE 3630 Balboa, SF; cinemasf.com/balboa. $7.50-10. “Popcorn Palace:” The Muppet Movie (Frawley, 1979), Sat, 10am. Matinee for kids.

BERKELEY FELLOWSHIP OF UNITARIAN UNIVERSALISTS 1924 Cedar, Berk; www.bfuu.org. $5-10. Rosa Luxemburg (von Trotta, 1986), Thu, 7.

CASTRO 429 Castro, SF; (415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com. $8.50-11. •Fargo (Coen and Coen, 1996), Wed, 7, and The Man Who Wasn’t There (Coen and Coen, 2001), Wed, 8:55. •Age of Consent (Powell, 1969), Thu, 6:30, and Lolita (Kubrick, 1962), Thu, 8:30. “Marc Huestis presents:” The Color Purple (Spielberg, 1985), Valentine’s Day Celebration with Oscar nominee Margaret Avery (“Shug”) in person, Fri, 7:30 (gala), 8:45 (film only). This event, $11-35; advance tickets at www.ticketfly.com. Annie (Huston, 1982), presented sing-along style, Sat-Sun, 1. This event, $10-16; advance tickets at www.ticketweb.com. •Miami Blues (Armitage, 1989), Sat, 6, and Scarface (De Palma, 1983), Sat, 8. •Baraka (Fricke, 1992), Sun, 5:05, 9, and Samsara (Fricke and Magidson, 2011), Sun, 7. •The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (Lawrence, 2013), Mon, 2:30, 8, and The Hunger Games (Ross, 2012), Mon, 5:20.

CHRISTOPHER B. SMITH RAFAEL FILM CENTER 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; (415) 454-1222, www.cafilm.org. $6.50-$10.75. times. “Oscar Nominated Short Films 2014,” call for dates and times. Gloria (Lelio, 2013), call for dates and times. The Past (Farhadi, 2013), call for dates and times. The New Public (Gunther, 2013), Wed, 7. Merrily We Roll Along, recorded live at West End London’s Harold Pinter Theatre, Sun, 7; Feb 23, 1; Feb 28, 7. “Mostly British Film Festival,” Feb 18-20. Visit www.mostlybritish.org for schedule.

CLAY 2261 Fillmore, SF; www.landmarktheatres.com. $10. “Midnight Movies:” Harold and Maude (Ashby, 1971), Fri-Sun, midnight.

DAVIES SYMPHONY HALL 201 Van Ness, SF; www.sfsymphony.org. $25-80. “A Symphonic Night at the Movies:” “A Night at the Oscars,” famous clips and movie music with the SF Symphony, Sat. 8.

EXPLORATORIUM Pier 15, SF; www.exploratorium.edu. Free with museum admission ($19-25). “Resonance: The Freddy McGuire Show,” with video artist Anne McGuire and collagist Wobbly, Thu, 7. “Saturday Cinema:” “Lovesick Cinema,” short films, Sat, 1, 2, 3.

MECHANICS’ INSTITUTE 57 Post, SF; milibrary.org/events. $10. “CinemaLit Film Series: Villains We Love:” No Way to Treat a Lady (Smight, 1968), Fri, 6.

NEW PARKWAY 474 24th St, Oakl; www.thenewparkway.com. $10. The Motherhood Archives (Lusztig, 2013), Tue, 7. With filmmaker Irene Lusztig in person.

PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE 2575 Bancroft, Berk; (510) 642-5249, bampfa.berkeley.edu. $5.50-9.50. “Film 50: History of Cinema:” Singin’ in the Rain (Donen and Kelly, 1952), with lecture by Emily Carpenter, Wed, 3:10. “African Film Festival 2014:” “Between Cultures: Recent African Shorts,” Wed, 7. “Against the Law: The Crime Films of Anthony Mann:” T-Men (1948), Thu, 7; Raw Deal (1948), Fri, 8:50. “Funny Ha-Ha: The Genius of American Comedy, 1930-1959:” Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Hawks, 1953), Fri, 7. “The Brilliance of Satyajit Ray:” The Big City (1963), Sat, 5:45. “Jean-Luc Godard: Expect Everything from Cinema:” Contempt (1963), Sat, 8:20. “Committed Cinema: Tony Buba:” “The Braddock Chronicles” (1972-85), Tue, 7.

ROXIE 3117 and 3125 16th St, SF; (415) 863-1087, www.roxie.com. $6.50-11. SF IndieFest, through Feb 20. For program info, visit www.sfindie.com.

TANNERY 708 Gilman, Berk; berkeleyundergroundfilms.blogspot.com. Donations accepted. “Berkeley Underground Film Society:” “LOOP Presents:” “Soundies!”, cinematic jukebox of rare musical films, Sat, 7:30; Take the Money and Run (Allen, 1969), Sun, 7:30.

VOGUE 3290 Sacramento, SF; www.mostlybritish.org. $12.50. “Mostly British Film Festival,” 25 classic and new films from the UK, Ireland, Australia, and India, Feb 13-20.

YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS 701 Mission, SF; www.ybca.org. $8-10. “2013 British Arrow Awards,” award-winning commercials, Thu-Sat, 4, 6, 8; Sun, 2, 4, 6. *

Theater Listings: February 12 – 18, 2014

Michael Redmond

February 11, 2014

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

THEATER

OPENING

Children Are Forever (All Sales are Final!) Stage Werx Theatre, 446 Valencia, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $15. Previews Fri/14, 8pm. Opens Sat/15, 8pm. Runs Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through March 22. W. Kamau Bell directs Julia Jackson in her solo show about adoption.

Napoli! ACT’s Geary Theater, 415 Geary, SF; www.act-sf.org. $10-120. Previews Wed/12-Sat/15 and Tue/18, 8pm (also Sat/15, 2pm); Sun/16, 7pm. Opens Feb 19, 8pm. Runs Wed-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2pm; Tue, 7pm (March 4, show at 8pm). Through March 9. American Conservatory Theater performs a new translation of Eduardo de Filippo’s poignant Italian comedy.

BAY AREA

A Maze Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; www.justtheater.org. $20-25. Previews Fri/14-Sat/15, 8pm. Opens Sun/16, 5pm. Runs Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through March 9. Shotgun Players present Just Theater’s production of Rob Handel’s kaleidoscopic comedy.

The Music Man Julia Morgan Theater, 2640 College, Berk; www.berkeleyplayhouse.org. $17-60. Previews Thu/13, 7pm and Sat/15, 1pm. Opens Sat/15, 6pm. Runs Fri and March 20, 7pm; Sat, 1 and 6pm; Sun, noon and 5pm. Through March 23. There’s trouble in River City! See it unfold amid all those trombones at Berkeley Playhouse.

ONGOING

Feisty Old Jew Marsh San Francisco Main Stage, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $25-100. Sat, 8pm; Sun, 7pm (March 2, performance at 2pm; March 9, performance will be a reading of Charlie Varon’s Fish Sisters). Through March 16. Charlie Varon performs his latest solo show, a fictional comedy about “a 20th century man living in a 21st century city.”

Foodies! The Musical Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter, SF; www.foodiesthemusical.com. $32-34. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Open-ended. AWAT Productions presents Morris Bobrow’s musical comedy revue all about food.

Hir Magic Theatre, Fort Mason Center, Bldg D, Third Flr, SF; www.magictheatre.org. $20-60. Wed-Sat, 8pm (additional show Feb 19, 2:30pm); Sun, 2:30pm. Through Feb 23. Taylor Mac, creator of 2011’s five-hour six-director extravaganza The Lily’s Revenge, returns to the Magic Theater with a much more straightforward, if not exactly straight, family comedy-drama in two acts. An Iraq vet named Isaac (Ben Euphrat) returns to his childhood home from the war, where his job was picking up body parts. His now touchy stomach is set off right away by the disturbing changes that have taken place while he was away. For one thing, the place is a dump. His father (a toddling, half-vacant, half-wily Mark Anderson Philips) has had a stroke that has left him an overgrown infant in thrall to his mother, Paige (a honeyed but brassy Nancy Opel), now come into her own as a liberated woman whose badge of honor is a derelict household out of all usual (patriarchal) order and discipline — and whose manner is just a little like that of an open-minded, half-savvy drag queen. Still more troubling to Isaac is his sister Maxine, now Max (an animated and winning Jax Jackson), in the midst of transitioning via regular internet-purchased doses of testosterone. (Max insists on being addressed with gender-neutral, third-person pronouns ze, in place of she/he, and hir for him/her). Soon Isaac shores up his father’s position and mounts a counteroffensive to reclaim lost ground. An ideological turf war commences for control of the hearth and, by extension, the future of the family as an institution. Directed by Niegel Smith, the cast is competent but only intermittently effective at selling the high-octane comic premise. Jackson and Opel are the most consistent and persuasive. The play, meanwhile, has some good one-liners in addition to its intriguing premise, but gets mired in a broad and emotionally detached sitcom-like style, which can make the playwright’s more theme-oriented, expositional dialogue sound all the more jarring. Nevertheless, the play tackles a serious question: whether it is better to build on the flawed institutions one inherits and try to do better or scrap it all for something supposedly new. It has the good sense to refrain from an easy resolution of the socially and politically freighted dynamic it sets up, pointing a little vaguely to some third-way forward, outside the traditional family, in Max’s forestalled but anticipated flying of the coop. (Avila)

An Indian Summer Exit Theatre, 156 Eddy, SF; www.wehavemet.org. $20-40. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through March 1. Multi Ethnic Theater presents local playwright Charles Johnson’s parable of race relations in the Deep South of the 1980s. On a small stage split into two alternating scenes by a moveable wall in director-designer Lewis Campbell’s set, two sets of working-class residents of rural Alabama, one white and one black, have their discrete worlds unexpectedly collide. Musician Charlie Ray (a less than convincing Kevin Wisney) is fresh from the pen and living with girlfriend Pearle (AJ Davenport). Plucking at his guitar, he dreams of getting some money to afford time in a recording studio. But his brother Bobby (Paul Rodriguez) has a way of talking him into sketchy schemes, which has Pearle worried, especially after a visit from the Sheriff (Richard Wenzel). For his part, Bobby is hoping to make some money to appease his pregnant wife, Sarah (Bree Swartwood), who wants Bobby to move her and their baby to Maine. Meanwhile, Junior (a forceful Bennie Lewis, alternating nights with Stuart Hall) is a feisty wheel-chair bound African American man living in a small trailer. Junior’s friend Emmitt (Fabian Herd, alternating with Vernon Medearis) tries to convince him he should put his money in a bank rather than keeping it in his trailer — especially now that Junior is selling his land for a tidy sum — but Junior doesn’t trust banks. Next, Junior gets a letter from a lawyer claiming half the profit from the land sale on behalf of a long lost, half-white relative — the offspring of an illicit romance between Junior’s father and a white woman, related to Pearle. The situation, of course, spells trouble. But while we see it coming, there’s meant to be pathos in the tangled connections among these parallel stories. Unfortunately, the artificial nature of the plot makes it hard to credit, while the desultory pace and uneven acting make the going harder still. (Avila)

Jerusalem San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post, SF; www.sfplayhouse.org. $20-100. Tue-Thu, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 3pm); Sun/16, 2pm. Through March 8. SF Playhouse presents the West Coast premiere of English playwright Jez Butterworth’s West End and Broadway hit, a three-act revel led by a larger-than-life rebel, a stout boozed-up drug-dealer, habitual fabulist, and latter-day Digger of sorts named Johnny “Rooster” Byron (Brian Dykstra). The dominion of this Falstaffian giant is the English countryside outside his squalid trailer door, not far from Stonehenge, where he seems to incarnate a rather dissipated version of an ancient English independence, like one of the great mythical beings of rural lore. Aptly enough, it’s Saint George’s Day, the feast day of England’s national saint, but it’s not all a party this time around. Authorities have issued a final 24-hour eviction notice on Rooster’s tin door; there are luxury apartments in the works; and there’s concern in town about the underage teens who flock to Rooster like so many fledglings — one, in particular, has gone missing: Phaedra (Julia Belanoff), who we see at the very outset of the play donning a fairy costume and singing the title song, based on the Blake poem and England’s unofficial national anthem. The next 24 hours will be either the breaking point or the apotheosis for all Rooster has made himself out to be. In Butterworth’s big-eyed comedy, we are meant to feel a stake in this outcome whether we actually like Rooster or not — his independence, the scope of his life and vision, suggests the outer limit of possibility in an ever more disciplined and circumscribed world. Director Bill English (who also designed the impressive bucolic-trailer-park set) and his large cast (which includes a strong Ian Scott McGregor as longtime Rooster sidekick, Ginger) dive into the comedy with gusto. But somehow the drama, the larger stakes in the storyline, falls short. A certain requisite intensity and momentum are only fitfully achieved. Dykstra, as the expansive antihero, has the biggest burden here. And while he has an appealing swagger throughout, his wayward brogue and unconvincing bellicosity undercut the culmination of the play’s (admittedly somewhat overwrought) mythopoeic proportions. (Avila)

“The Love Edition: Love Bytes” Bindlestiff Studio, 185 Sixth St, SF; facebook.com/TheLoveEdition. $10-20. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through Feb 22. Bindlestiff performs six different tales about online dating, loneliness in the cyber age, Google stalking, and other modern-day matters of the heart.

Lovebirds Marsh San Francisco Studio, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Thu-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 8:30pm. Through March 15. Theater artist and comedian Marga Gomez presents the world premiere of her 10th solo show, described as “a rollicking tale of incurable romantics.”

The Oy of Sex Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $20-100. Sat, 5pm. Extended through Feb 22. Comedian Alicia Dattner performs her solo show, based on her stories from her own life and love addiction.

The Paris Letter New Conservatory Theater Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; www.nctcsf.org. $25-45. Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through Feb 23. New Conservatory Theatre Center performs Jon Robin Baitz’s tale of a Wall Street powerhouse desperately trying to keep his sexual identity a secret.

The Pornographer’s Daughter Z Below, 470 Florida, SF; www.zspace.org. $32. Thu/13-Sat/15, 8pm (also Sat/15, 10:30pm); Sun/16, 5pm. Liberty Bradford Mitchell was a good kid growing up, and a pretty innocent one — probably more than you would expect given her proximity to the family business, the veritable empire of porn founded and run by her father and uncle, San Francisco legends Artie and Jim Mitchell. Now in her 40s and a mother of her own, Mitchell proves a likeably earthy presence if a less-then-compelling actor-playwright in her new one-woman show, directed by Michael T. Weiss, a firsthand account of growing up in San Francisco’s first family of raunch. Inseparable brothers Artie and Jim were the 1970s porn pioneers who founded the O’Farrell Theatre and road high in the industry, weathering court battles and substance abuse and divorce, but succumbing ultimately to their own lethal fallout — Jim Mitchell shot and killed Liberty’s father Artie in 1991. The material here is rich to say the least, and together with generous and explicit excerpts from archival footage and classic porn (including the Mitchells’ own era-defining Behind the Green Door, from 1972), it makes a fascinating bed for Liberty Mitchell’s reminiscences. Musical accompaniment by three-person SF band the Fluffers, meanwhile, punctuates the chronology with blasts of period rock, though often just a few bars worth, and backs up Liberty on the a single, rather awkward musical number. Moreover, despite the keen interest the basic historical facts and family anecdotes can generate, Mitchell’s filial narrative lens is only intermittently effective, being finally too pat, poorly drawn, and predictably sentimentalized to fully reverberate with the larger, almost archetypical or classical themes hovering nearby. (Avila)

The Scion Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-60. Thu-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Through March 1. Brian Copeland’s fourth solo show takes on “privilege, murder, and sausage.”

Shit & Champagne Rebel, 1772 Market, SF; shitandchampagne.eventbrite.com. $25. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Extended through March 1. D’Arcy Drollinger is Champagne White, bodacious blonde innocent with a wicked left hook in this cross-dressing ’70s-style white-sploitation flick, played out live on Rebel’s intimate but action-packed barroom stage. Written by Drollinger and co-directed with Laurie Bushman (with high-flying choreography by John Paolillo, Drollinger, and Matthew Martin), this high-octane camp send-up of a favored formula comes dependably stocked with stock characters and delightfully protracted by a convoluted plot (involving, among other things, a certain street drug that’s triggered an epidemic of poopy pants) — all of it played to the hilt by an excellent cast that includes Martin as Dixie Stampede, an evil corporate dominatrix at the head of some sinister front for world domination called Mal*Wart; Alex Brown as Detective Jack Hammer, rough-hewn cop on the case and ambivalent love interest; Rotimi Agbabiaka as Sergio, gay Puerto Rican impresario and confidante; Steven Lemay as Brandy, high-end calf model and Champagne’s (much) beloved roommate; and Nancy French as Rod, Champagne’s doomed fiancé. Sprawling often literally across two buxom acts, the show maintains admirable consistency: the energy never flags and the brow stays decidedly low. (Avila)

The Speakeasy Undisclosed location (ticket buyers receive a text with directions), SF; www.thespeakeasysf.com. $60-90 (add-ons: casino chips, $5; dance lessons, $10). Thu-Sat, 7:40, 7:50, and 8pm admittance times. Through March 15. Boxcar Theatre presents Nick A. Olivero’s re-creation of a Prohibition-era saloon, resulting in an “immersive theatrical experience involving more than 35 actors, singers, and musicians.”

Ubu Roi Exit on Taylor, 277 Taylor, SF; www.cuttingball.com. $10-50. Thu, 7:30pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 5pm. Through March 9. Cutting Ball Theater performs Alfred Jarry’s avant-garde parody of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, presented in a new translation by Cutting Ball artistic director Rob Melrose.

The World’s Funniest Bubble Show Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $8-11. Sun, 11am. Through March 9. The popular, kid-friendly show by Louis Pearl (aka “The Amazing Bubble Man”) returns to the Marsh.

BAY AREA

Escanabe in da Moonlight Live Oak Theatre, 1301 Shattuck, Berk; www.theatrefirst.com. $10-30. Thu-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through March 8. TheatreFIRST performs Jeff Daniels’ raucous comedy.

Geezer Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. $25-50. Thu, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Through March 1. Geoff Hoyle moves his hit comedy about aging to the East Bay.

Gideon’s Knot Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk; www.auroratheatre.org. $32-60. Tue, 7pm; Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through March 2. Aurora Theatre Company performs Johnna Adams’ drama set within the tense atmosphere of a parent-teacher conference.

The House That Will Not Stand Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison, Berk; www.berkeleyrep.org. $29-59. Tue and Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, Thu/13, and March 13, 2pm; no matinee Sat/15); Wed, 7pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through March 16. Berkeley Rep performs the world premiere of Marcus Gardley’s tale of free women of color in 1936 New Orleans.

An Ideal Husband Douglas Morrison Theatre, 22311 N. Third St, Hayward; www.dmtonline.org. $10-29. Fri-Sat and Feb 27, 8pm (also Feb 22, 2pm); Sun, 2pm. Through March 2. Douglas Morrison Theatre performs Scott Munson’s adaptation of the Oscar Wilde classic, reset in 1959 Washington, DC.

The Laramie Project Masquers Playhouse, 105 Park Place, Point Richmond; www.masquers.org. $22. Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through Feb 22. Masquers Playhouse performs the theatrical collage about the real-life hate-crime murder of Matthew Shepard.

Man in a Case Berkeley Repertory Theatre, 2015 Addison, Berk; www.berkeleyrep.org. $45-125. Wed/12, 7pm; Thu/13-Sat/15, 8pm; Sun/16, 2pm. It’s a desultory country evening among friends — Belikov (Mikhail Baryshnikov), Barbara (Tymberly Canale), Ivan (Chris Giarmo), Burkin (Paul Lazar), and Kovalenko (Aaron Mattocks) — who chatter and quibble among themselves, just dying for a good story. Two tales eventually unfold, becoming the basis for an effervescent and emotive theatrical outing in this canny, elegant adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s “Man in a Case” and “About Love” by co-directors Paul Lazar and Annie-B Parson of Big Dance Theater. In a style that revels in what it reveals, the action centers around a long table to the left of the stage, at the far end of which sound designer Tei Blow manages sound effects and Jeff Larson triggers video projections from his laptop. (Peter Ksander’s attractive, non-naturalist scenic design comes animated throughout by a discerning array of choice foley work and atmospheric video projections.) With each humorous and wistful story, the stage expands in unexpected ways, thanks to Parson’s vibrant choreography, the shape-shifting mise-en-scene, golden-throated musical director Giarmo’s exquisite score (much of it delivered live), and the superbly unaffected acting and supple movement of the cast. Acting the leads in both stories, Baryshnikov etches his respective characters with a masterful hand and a light step, making for a vivid presence at every turn. Opposite him each time, Canale’s luminous vitality proves a perfect match. But this is truly an ensemble effort, and the fine result produces a poignant, moody combination of the earthy and sublime. (Avila)

Quality of Life Pear Avenue Theatre, 1220 Pear, Mtn View; www.thepear.org. $10-35. Thu-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through Feb 23. Pear Avenue Theatre performs Jane Anderson’s play about two couples coming to grips with losses in their lives.

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

Aguas Dance Company ODC Theater, 3153 17th St, SF; www.odcdance.org. Fri/14-Sat/15, 8pm; Sun/16, 7pm. $27. The company performs Movendo com Capoeira, featuring Afro-Brazilian dance and live music.

“Best of the Bay Comedy Show” Pa’ina Lounge, 1865 Post, SF; www.painasf.com. Sun/16, 7pm. $10. Hella Gay Comedy presents its annual “best of” show featuring LBGT and LGBT-friendly comedians: Casey Ley, Justin Lucas, Kimberly Rose Wendt, and Rajeev Dhar. Charlie Ballard hosts.

“The Big Buttery Sketch Show” Exit Theater, 156 Eddy, SF; www.pianofight.com. Fri/14-Sat/15, 8pm. $20-30. PianoFight Productions’ female-driven sketch comedy group Chardonnay (formerly ForePlays) performs.

“Black Choreographers Festival: Here & Now” This week: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF; www.bcfhereandnow.com. Thu/13-Sat/15, 8pm. $25-35. The festival continues its 10th anniversary with Nora Chipaumire’s Miriam.

Caroline Lugo and Carolé Acuña’s Ballet Flamenco Peña Pachamama, 1630 Powell, SF; www.carolinalugo.com. Fri/14 (see note below), Sun/16, Feb 22, March 1, 8, 16, 22, and 30, 6:15pm. $15-19. Flamenco performance by the mother-daughter dance company, featuring live musicians. Fri/14 Valentine’s Day show, 5:30pm, $59.95 (includes dinner).

Company C Contemporary Ballet Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Lam Research Theater, 701 Mission, SF; www.companycballet.org. Thu/13-Fri/14, 8pm; Sat/15, 6pm (benefit gala); Sun/16, 3pm. $25-48. The company’s winter program includes premieres by Susan Jaffe and Charles Anderson.

“Dream Queens Revue” Aunt Charlie’s Lounge, 133 Turk, SF; www.dreamqueensrevue.com. Wed/12, 9:30pm. Free. Drag with Collette LeGrande, Ruby Slippers, Sophilya Leggz, Bobby Ashton, and more.

“Get Your Heart On with the Klipptones” Palace Hotel’s Pied Piper, 2 New Montgomery, SF; (415) 512-1111. Fri/14, 8pm-midnight. Free ($10 food or beverage minimum). The six-piece ensemble plays swinging romantic songs for Valentine’s Day.

“Live Law: Love and the Law” Verdi Club, 2424 Mariposa, SF; www.lifeofthelaw.com. Thu/13, 7pm. $20. Live storytelling with Senator Mark Leno, attorneys, a private investigator, and other legal-minded folks.

Feinstein’s at the Nikko Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason, SF; www.feinsteinssf.com. This week: Paula West, Thu/13, 8pm; Fri/14, 7 and 9:30pm; Sat/15-Sun/16, 7pm, $35-50.

“Full Spectrum Improvisation” Stage Werx, 446 Valencia, SF; www.joyacory.com. Sun/16 and April 27, 3pm. $12-25. Also March 9, 3pm, Western Sky Studio, 2525 Eighth St, Berk. Improvisational theatre with Joya Cory, Craig Landry, Olivia Corson, Martin Robinson, and guests.

“How We First Met” Marines’ Memorial Theatre, 609 Sutter, SF; www.howwefirstmet.com. Fri/14, 8pm. $40-55. Back for its 14th year, this show created and hosted by Jill Bourque shares real-life love stories (from couples in the audience!) via improvised sketches and songs.

“Magic at the Rex” Hotel Rex, 562 Sutter, SF; www.magicattherex.com. Sat, 8pm. Ongoing. $25. Magic and mystery with Adam Sachs and mentalist Sebastian Boswell III.

“Mortified: Doomed Valentines” DNA Lounge, 375 11th St, SF; www.getmortified.com. Thu/13, 7:30pm. $15-21. Also Fri/14, 8pm, $15-20, Uptown, 1928 Telegraph, Oakl. Fearless storytellers share their most adorably embarrassing childhood writings — and since the theme is love blunders, expect tales of unrequited crushes, school-dance disasters, and teen-angst drama galore.

“Naked Dudes Reading Lovecraft” Stage Werx Theatre, 446 Valencia, SF; www.hampantsproductions.com. Wed/12, 8pm. $20. “100 percent visible wing-wangs and hoo-hoos” are promised, plus maybe a tentacle or 12 too.

“Point Break Live!” DNA Lounge, 373 11th St, SF; www.dnalounge.com. March 7 and April 4, 7:30 and 11pm. $25-50. Dude, Point Break Live! is like dropping into a monster wave, or holding up a bank, like, just a pure adrenaline rush, man. Ahem. Sorry, but I really can’t help but channel Keanu Reeves and his Johnny Utah character when thinking about the awesomely bad 1991 movie Point Break or its equally yummily cheesy stage adaptation. And if you do an even better Keanu impression than me — the trick is in the vacant stare and stoner drawl — then you can play his starring role amid a cast of solid actors, reading from cue cards from a hilarious production assistant in order to more closely approximate Keanu’s acting ability. This play is just so much fun, even better now at DNA Lounge than it was a couple years ago at CELLspace. But definitely buy the poncho pack and wear it, because the blood, spit, and surf spray really do make this a fully immersive experience. (Steven T. Jones)

“Romantic Comedy Farce” Bayfront Theater, B350 Fort Mason Center, SF; www.improv.org. Fri/14, 8pm. $20. BATS Improv takes on Valentine’s Day.

“The Vagina Monologues/Monólogos de la Vagina” Brava Theater Center, 2781 24th St, SF; www.brava.org. Fri/14-Sat/15, 8pm (also Sat/15, 5pm); Sun/16, 2pm. $35-45. Eliana Lopez, Marisol Correa, and Alba Roversi star in this Spanish-language production of Eve Ensler’s feminist classic.

BAY AREA

“Die Fledermaus” Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro, Mtn View; www.mvcpa.com. Sat/15, 8pm; Sun/16, 2pm. $20-53. Lamplighters Music Theatre (noted for its Gilbert and Sullivan productions) performs Johann Strauss’ “bubbly tale of revenge and temptation.” Continues at Bay Area theaters through Feb 23; visit www.lamplighters.org for future dates.

“Last Word Reading Series” Nefeli Caffe, 1854 Euclid, Berk; (510) 841-6374. Fri/14, 7pm. Free. With poets Tom Odegard and Paradise, plus an open reading.

“MarshJam Improv Comedy Show” Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. Fri, 8pm. Ongoing. $10. Improv comedy with local legends and drop-in guests.

“Something Sweet” Piedmont Center for the Arts, 801 Magnolia, Piedmont; www.westedgeopera.org. Fri/14, 7:30pm. $15-25. Romantic operatic repertoire sung by three real-life couples. *

Film Listings: February 12 -18, 2014

Michael Redmond

February 11, 2014

Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Dennis Harvey, Lynn Rapoport, Sam Stander, and Sara Maria Vizcarrondo. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock.

OPENING

About Last Night First remake of the week: a do-over of the 1986 ensemble rom-com, based (like the earlier film) on a David Mamet play. This version stars Kevin Hart, Regina Hall, Michael Ealy, and Joy Bryant. (1:40)

Beijing Love Story Writer-director-star Chen Sicheng adapts his 2012 Chinese TV series, adding movie stars Carina Lau and Tony Leung Ka-fai to the cast to up the big-screen wattage. The film follows an array of couples, starting with Chen and real-life wife Shen Yan as a young couple forced to make some hard choices after an unplanned pregnancy. “What’s love? It’s like a ghost. Everyone’s heard of it, nobody’s seen it,” the reluctant father-to-be’s cynical friend tells him. Said friend has been hitched for years; the film’s next storyline follows what happens when his wife finds out he’s been cheating (as it turns out, she has some secrets of her own). At one point, the action shifts from Beijing to Greece (for the Lau-Leung segment), before returning to the city for a teenage love story involving a cello prodigy who wants to compete on TV, and a boy who can “see auras,” among other fanciful talents. Finally, an elderly man embarks on a series of blind dates, looking for a second chance at love, with a twist that’s obvious to anyone who’s ever seen a rom-com before. By the time this flowery Valentine’s card of a movie reaches its melodramatic conclusion, it’s abundantly clear that Chen knows his target audience — see: the film’s multiple Titanic (1997) references — and that he’s a huge fan of the romance genre himself. Well, ’tis the season. (2:02) Metreon. (Eddy)

Endless Love Second remake of the week: a do-over of Franco Zeffirelli’s adaptation of Scott Spencer’s young-adult-love-gone-awry novel. (1:44) Shattuck.

Like Father, Like Son A yuppie Tokyo couple are raising their only child in workaholic dad’s image, applying the pressure to excel at an early age. Imagine their distress when the hospital phones with some unpleasant news: It has only just been learned that a nurse mixed up their baby with another, with the result that both families have been raising the “wrong” children these six years. Polite, forced interaction with the other clan — a larger nuclear unit as warm, disorganized, and financially hapless as the first is formal, regimented and upwardly mobile — reveals that both sides have something to learn about parenting. This latest from Japanese master Hirokazu Koreeda (1998’s After Life, 2004’s Nobody Knows, 2008’s Still Walking) is, as usual, low-key, beautifully observed, and in the end deeply moving. (2:01) Shattuck, Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

Lovers of Eternity Other Cinema’s latest season opens with something truly special: a new Kuchar Brothers movie. Well, not exactly “new” — that would be difficult, as SF’s own beloved George is with us no more — but one that, incredibly, has never been seen on the West Coast before. Lovers of Eternity (1964) is a half hour color “camp treasure” recently transferred to 16mm from a sole surviving 8mm print. No clue what the cast or content is, but having been made when the Bronx bros were 22 years old, just before they stopped directing as a team, how could it not be genius? The bill will also include Mike Kuchar in person presenting his 1966 The Secret of Wendel Samson, starring Pop artist Red Grooms, George, and Kuchar staples including Donna Kerness and Bob Cowan; plus his brand-new Soulmates. There will also be miscellany including “an orgy of erotic romps” and “psychedelic smut.” Valentine’s Day was for lovers; at this Sat/15 event, get retro-sleazy. More info at www.othercinema.com. Artists’ Television Access. (Harvey)

RoboCop Truly, there was no need to remake 1987’s RoboCop, Paul Verhoeven’s smart, biting sci-fi classic that deploys heaps of stealth satire beneath its ultraviolent imagery. But the inevitable do-over is here, and while it doesn’t improve on what came before, it’s not a total lost cause, either. Thank Brazilian filmmaker José Padilha, whose thrilling Elite Squad films touch on similar themes of corruption (within police, political, and media realms), and some inspired casting, including Samuel L. Jackson as the uber-conservative host of a futuristic talk show. Though the suit that restores life to fallen Detroit cop Alex Murphy is, naturally, a CG wonder, the guy inside the armor — played by The Killing‘s Joel Kinnaman — is less dynamic. In fact, none of the characters, even those portrayed by actors far more lively than Kinnaman (Michael Keaton, Gary Oldman, Jackie Earle Haley), are developed beyond the bare minimum required to serve RoboCop’s plot, a mixed-message glob of dirty cops, money-grubbing corporations, the military-industrial complex, and a few too many “Is he a man…or a machine?” moments. But in its favor: Though it’s PG-13 (boo), it’s also shot in 2D (yay). (1:50) Presidio. (Eddy)

Tim’s Vermeer See “Masterpiece Theater.” (1:20) Embarcadero.

Winter’s Tale Akiva Goldsman (Oscar-winning screenwriter of 2001’s A Beautiful Mind) directs Colin Farrell, Jessica Brown Findlay, Russell Crowe, and Jennifer Connelly in this adaptation of Mark Halprin’s supernatural romance. (1:58) Four Star, Presidio.

ONGOING

American Hustle David O. Russell’s American Hustle is like a lot of things you’ve seen before — put in a blender, so the results are too smooth to feel blatantly derivative, though here and there you taste a little Boogie Nights (1997), Goodfellas (1990), or whatever. Loosely based on the Abscam FBI sting-scandal of the late 1970s and early ’80s (an opening title snarks “Some of this actually happened”), Hustle is a screwball crime caper almost entirely populated by petty schemers with big ideas almost certain to blow up in their faces. It’s love, or something, at first sight for Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) and Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams), who meet at a Long Island party circa 1977 and instantly fall for each other — or rather for the idealized selves they’ve both strained to concoct. He’s a none-too-classy but savvy operator who’s built up a mini-empire of variably legal businesses; she’s a nobody from nowhere who crawled upward and gave herself a bombshell makeover. The hiccup in this slightly tacky yet perfect match is Irving’s neglected, crazy wife Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence), who’s not about to let him go. She’s their main problem until they meet Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper), an ambitious FBI agent who entraps the two while posing as a client. Their only way out of a long prison haul, he says, is to cooperate in an elaborate Atlantic City redevelopment scheme he’s concocted to bring down a slew of Mafioso and presumably corrupt politicians, hustling a beloved Jersey mayor (Jeremy Renner) in the process. Russell’s filmmaking is at a peak of populist confidence it would have been hard to imagine before 2010’s The Fighter, and the casting here is perfect down to the smallest roles. But beyond all clever plotting, amusing period trappings, and general high energy, the film’s ace is its four leads, who ingeniously juggle the caricatured surfaces and pathetic depths of self-identified “winners” primarily driven by profound insecurity. (2:17) Four Star, Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

August: Osage County Considering the relative infrequency of theater-to-film translations today, it’s a bit of a surprise that Tracy Letts had two movies made from his plays before he even got to Broadway. Bug and Killer Joe proved a snug fit for director William Friedkin (in 2006 and 2011, respectively), but both plays were too outré for the kind of mainstream success accorded 2007’s August: Osage County, which won the Pulitzer, ran 18 months on Broadway, and toured the nation. As a result, August was destined — perhaps doomed — to be a big movie, the kind that shoehorns a distracting array of stars into an ensemble piece, playing jes’ plain folk. But what seemed bracingly rude as well as somewhat traditional under the proscenium lights just looks like a lot of reheated Country Gothic hash, and the possibility of profundity you might’ve been willing to consider before is now completely off the menu. If you haven’t seen August before (or even if you have), there may be sufficient fun watching stellar actors chew the scenery with varying degrees of panache — Meryl Streep (who else) as gorgon matriarch Violet Weston; Sam Shepard as her long-suffering spouse; Julia Roberts as pissed-off prodigal daughter Barbara (Julia Roberts), etc. You know the beats: Late-night confessions, drunken hijinks, disastrous dinners, secrets (infidelity, etc.) spilling out everywhere like loose change from moth-eaten trousers. The film’s success story, I suppose, is Roberts: She seems very comfortable with her character’s bitter anger, and the four-letter words tumble past those jumbo lips like familiar friends. On the downside, there’s Streep, who’s a wizard and a wonder as usual yet also in that mode supporting the naysayers’ view that such conspicuous technique prevents our getting lost in her characters. If Streep can do anything, then logic decrees that includes being miscast. (2:10) Metreon, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Dallas Buyers Club Dallas Buyers Club is the first all-US feature from Jean-Marc Vallée. He first made a splash in 2005 with C.R.A.Z.Y., which seemed an archetype of the flashy, coming-of-age themed debut feature. Vallée has evolved beyond flashiness, or maybe since C.R.A.Z.Y. he just hasn’t had a subject that seemed to call for it. Which is not to say Dallas is entirely sober — its characters partake from the gamut of altering substances, over-the-counter and otherwise. But this is a movie about AIDS, so the purely recreational good times must eventually crash to an end. Which they do pretty quickly. We first meet Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey) in 1986, a Texas good ol’ boy endlessly chasing skirts and partying nonstop. Not feeling quite right, he visits a doctor, who informs him that he is HIV-positive. His response is “I ain’t no faggot, motherfucker” — and increased partying that he barely survives. Afterward, he pulls himself together enough to research his options, and bribes a hospital attendant into raiding its trial supply of AZT for him. But Ron also discovers the hard way what many first-generation AIDS patients did — that AZT is itself toxic. He ends up in a Mexican clinic run by a disgraced American physician (Griffin Dunne) who recommends a regime consisting mostly of vitamins and herbal treatments. Ron realizes a commercial opportunity, and finds a business partner in willowy cross-dresser Rayon (Jared Leto). When the authorities keep cracking down on their trade, savvy Ron takes a cue from gay activists in Manhattan and creates a law evading “buyers club” in which members pay monthly dues rather than paying directly for pharmaceutical goods. It’s a tale that the scenarists (Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack) and director steep in deep Texan atmospherics, and while it takes itself seriously when and where it ought, Dallas Buyers Club is a movie whose frequent, entertaining jauntiness is based in that most American value: get-rich-quick entrepreneurship. (1:58) Embarcadero, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio. (Harvey)

Devil’s Due (1:29) Metreon.

Frozen (1:48) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness.

Gloria The titular figure in Sebastian Lelio’s film is a Santiago divorcee and white collar worker (Paulina Garcia) pushing 60, living alone in a condo apartment — well, almost alone, since like Inside Llewyn Davis, this movie involves the frequent, unwanted company of somebody else’s cat. (That somebody is an upstairs neighbor whose solo wailings against cruel fate disturb her sleep.) Her two children are grown up and preoccupied with their adult lives. Not quite ready for the glue factory yet, Gloria often goes to a disco for the “older crowd,” dancing by herself if she has to, but still hoping for some romantic prospects. She gets them in the form of Rodolfo (Sergio Hernandez), who’s more recently divorced but gratifyingly infatuated with her. Unfortunately, he’s also let his daughters and ex-wife remain ominously dependent on him, not just financially but in every emotional crisis that affects their apparently crisis-filled lives. The extent to which Gloria lets him into her life is not reciprocated, and she becomes increasingly aware how distant her second-place priority status is whenever Rodolfo’s other loved ones snap their fingers. There’s not a lot of plot but plenty of incident and insight to this character study, a portrait of a “spinster” that neither slathers on the sentimental uplift or piles on melodramatic victimizations. Instead, Gloria is memorably, satisfyingly just right. (1:50) Embarcadero, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

Gravity “Life in space is impossible,” begins Gravity, the latest from Alfonso Cuarón (2006’s Children of Men). Egghead Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) is well aware of her precarious situation after a mangled satellite slams into her ship, then proceeds to demolition-derby everything (including the International Space Station) in its path. It’s not long before she’s utterly, terrifyingly alone, and forced to unearth near-superhuman reserves of physical and mental strength to survive. Bullock’s performance would be enough to recommend Gravity, but there’s more to praise, like the film’s tense pacing, spare-yet-layered script (Cuarón co-wrote with his son, Jonás), and spectacular 3D photography — not to mention George Clooney’s warm supporting turn as a career astronaut who loves country music almost as much as he loves telling stories about his misadventures. (1:31) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

The Great Beauty The latest from Paolo Sorrentino (2008’s Il Divo) arrives as a high-profile contender for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, already annointed a masterpiece in some quarters, and duly announcing itself as such in nearly every grandiose, aesthetically engorged moment. Yes, it seems to say, you are in the presence of this auteur’s masterpiece. But it’s somebody else’s, too. The problem isn’t just that Fellini got there first, but that there’s room for doubt whether Sorrentino’s homage actually builds on or simply imitates its model. La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8 1/2 (1963) are themselves swaying, jerry-built monuments, exhileratingly messy and debatably profound. But nothing quite like them had been seen before, and they did define a time of cultural upheaval — when traditional ways of life were being plowed under by a loud, moneyed, heedless modernity that for a while chose Rome as its global capital. Sorrentino announces his intention to out-Fellini Fellini in an opening sequence so strenuously flamboyant it’s like a never-ending pirouette performed by a prima dancer with a hernia. There’s statuary, a women’s choral ensemble, an on-screen audience applauding the director’s baffled muse Toni Servillo, standing in for Marcello Mastroianni — all this and more in manic tracking shots and frantic intercutting, as if sheer speed alone could supply contemporary relevancy. Eventually The Great Beauty calms down a bit, but still its reason for being remains vague behind the heavy curtain of “style.” (2:22) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

Her Morose and lonely after a failed marriage, Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) drifts through an appealingly futuristic Los Angeles (more skyscrapers, less smog) to his job at a place so hipster-twee it probably will exist someday: beautifulhandwrittenletters.com, where he dictates flowery missives to a computer program that scrawls them onto paper for paying customers. Theodore’s scripting of dialogue between happy couples, as most of his clients seem to be, only enhances his sadness, though he’s got friends who care about him (in particular, Amy Adams as Amy, a frumpy college chum) and he appears to have zero money woes, since his letter-writing gig funds a fancy apartment equipped with a sweet video-game system. Anyway, women are what gives Theodore trouble — and maybe by extension, writer-director Spike Jonze? — so he seeks out the ultimate gal pal: Samantha, an operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson in the year’s best disembodied performance. Thus begins a most unusual relationship, but not so unusual; Theodore’s friends don’t take any issue with the fact that his new love is a machine. Hey, in Her‘s world, everyone’s deeply involved with their chatty, helpful, caring, always-available OS — why wouldn’t Theo take it to the next level? Inevitably, of course, complications arise. If Her‘s romantic arc feels rather predictable, the film acquits itself in other ways, including boundlessly clever production-design touches that imagine a world with technology that’s (mostly) believably evolved from what exists today. Also, the pants they wear in the future? Must be seen to be believed. (2:00) Four Star, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug Just when you’d managed to wipe 2012’s unwieldy The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey from your mind, here comes its sequel — and it’s actually good! Yes, it’s too long (Peter Jackson wouldn’t have it any other way); arachnophobes (and maybe small children) will have trouble with the creepy, giant-spider battle; and Orlando Bloom, reprising his Lord of the Rings role as Legolas the elf, has been CG’d to the point of looking like he’s carved out of plastic. But there’s much more to enjoy this time around, with a quicker pace (no long, drawn-out dinner parties); winning performances by Martin Freeman (Bilbo), Ian McKellan (Gandalf); and Benedict Cumberbatch (as the petulent voice of Smaug the dragon); and more shape to the quest, as the crew of dwarves seeks to reclaim their homeland, and Gandalf pokes into a deeper evil that’s starting to overtake Middle-earth. (We all know how that ends.) In addition to Cumberbatch, the cast now includes Lost‘s Evangeline Lilly as elf Tauriel, who doesn’t appear in J.R.R. Tolkien’s original story, but whose lady-warrior presence is a welcome one; and Luke Evans as Bard, a human poised to play a key role in defeating Smaug in next year’s trilogy-ender, There and Back Again. (2:36) Metreon. (Eddy)

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire Before succumbing to the hot and heavy action inside the arena (intensely directed by Francis Lawrence) The Hunger Games: Catching Fire force-feeds you a world of heinous concept fashions that’d make Lady Gaga laugh. But that’s ok, because the second film about one girl’s epic struggle to change the world of Panem may be even more exciting than the first. Suzanne Collins’ YA novel The Hunger Games was an over-literal metaphor for junior high social survival and the glory of Catching Fire is that it depicts what comes after you reach the cool kids’ table. Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) inspired so much hope among the 12 districts she now faces pressures from President Snow (a portentous Donald Sutherland) and the fanatical press of Capital City (Stanley Tucci with big teeth and Toby Jones with big hair). After she’s forced to fake a romance with Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), the two watch with horror as they’re faced with a new Hunger Game: for returning victors, many of whom are too old to run. Amanda Plummer and Jeffrey Wright are fun as brainy wackjobs and Jena Malone is hilariously Amazonian as a serial axe grinder still screaming like an eighth grader. Inside the arena, alliances and rivalries shift but the winner’s circle could survive to see another revolution; to save this city, they may have to burn it down. (2:26) Metreon. (Vizcarrondo)

I, Frankenstein (1:33) Metreon.

Inside Llewyn Davis In the Coen Brothers’ latest, Oscar Isaac as the titular character is well on his way to becoming persona non grata in 1961 NYC — particularly in the Greenwich Village folk music scene he’s an ornery part of. He’s broke, running out of couches to crash on, has recorded a couple records that have gone nowhere, and now finds out he’s impregnated the wife (Carey Mulligan) and musical partner of one among the few friends (Justin Timberlake) he has left. She’s furious with herself over this predicament, but even more furious at him. This ambling, anecdotal tale finds Llewyn running into one exasperating hurdle after another as he burns his last remaining bridges, not just in Manhattan but on a road trip to Chicago undertaken with an overbearing jazz musician (John Goodman) and his enigmatic driver (Garrett Hedlund) to see a club impresario (F. Murray Abraham). This small, muted, droll Coens exercise is perfectly handled in terms of performance and atmosphere, with pleasures aplenty in its small plot surprises, myriad humorous idiosyncrasies, and T. Bone Burnett’s sweetened folk arrangements. But whether it actually has anything to say about its milieu (a hugely important Petri dish for later ’60s political and musical developments), or adds up to anything more profound than an beautifully executed shaggy-dog story, will be a matter of personal taste — or perhaps of multiple viewings. (1:45) Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit Throwback Terror Thursday, anyone? If the early Bourne entries leapt ahead of then-current surveillance technology in their paranoia-inducing ability to Find-Replace-Eliminate international villains wherever they were in the world, then Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit flails in the opposite direction — toward a nonsensical, flag-waving mixture of Cold War and War on Terror phobias. So when covert mucky-muck Thomas Harper (Kevin Costner) solemnly warns that if mild-mannered former Marine and secret CIA analyst Jack Ryan stumbles, the US is in danger of … another Great Depression, you just have to blink, Malcolm Gladwell-style. Um, didn’t we just do that? And is this movie that out of touch? It doesn’t help that director Kenneth Branagh casts himself as the sleek, camp, and illin’ Russian baddie Viktor Cherevin, who’s styled like a ’90s club tsar in formfitting black clothing with a sheen that screams “Can this dance-floor sadist buy you another cosmo?” He’s intended to pass for something resembling sex — and soul — in Shadow Recruit‘s odd, determinedly clueless universe. That leaves a colorless, blank Chris Pine with the thankless task of rescuing whiney physician love Cathy (Keira Knightley) from baddie clutches. Pine’s no Alec Baldwin, lacking the latter’s wit and anger management issues, or even Ben Affleck, who has also succumbed to blank, beefcake posturing on occasion. Let’s return this franchise to its box, firmly relegated to the shadows. (1:45) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

Labor Day Sweet little home repairs, quickie car tune-ups, sensual pie-making, and sexed-up chili cookery — Labor Day seems to be taking its chick-flick cues from Porn For Women, Cambridge Women’s Pornography Cooperative’s puckish gift-booklet that strives to capture women’s real desires: namely, for vacuuming, folded laundry, and patient listening from their chosen hunks of beefcake. Let’s call it domestic close encounters of the most pragmatic, and maybe most realistic, kind. But that seems to sail over the heads of all concerned with Labor Day. Working with Joyce Maynard’s novel, director-screenwriter Jason Reitman largely dispenses with the wit that washes through Juno (2007) and Up in the Air (2009) and instead chooses to peer at his actors through the seriously overheated, poetically impressionistic prism of Terrence Malick … if Malick were tricked into making a Nicholas Sparks movie. Single mom Adele (Kate Winslet) is down in the dumps over multiple miscarriages and her husband’s (Clark Gregg) departure. Son Henry (Gattlin Griffith) becomes her caretaker of sorts — thus, when escaped convict Frank (Josh Brolin) forces the mother-and-son team to give him a ride and a hideout, it’s both a blessing and a curse, especially because the hardened tough guy turns out to be a compulsively domestic, hardworking ubermensch of a Marlboro Man, able to bake up a peach pie and teach Henry to throw a baseball, all within the course of a long Labor Day weekend. Hapless Adele is helpless to resist him, particularly after some light bondage and plenty of manly nurturing. Ultimately this masochistic fantasy about the ultimate, if forbidden, family man — and the delights of the Stockholm Syndrome — is much harder to swallow than a spoonful of homemade chili, despite its strong cast. (1:51) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

The Lego Movie (1:41) Balboa, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center.

Lone Survivor Peter Berg (2012’s Battleship, 2007’s The Kingdom) may officially be structuring his directing career around muscular tails of bad-assery. This true story follows a team of Navy SEALs on a mission to find a Taliban group leader in an Afghani mountain village. Before we meet the actors playing our real-life action heroes we see training footage of actual SEALs being put through their paces; it’s physical hardship structured to separate the tourists from the lifers. The only proven action star in the group is Mark Wahlberg — as Marcus Luttrell, who wrote the film’s source-material book. His funky bunch is made of heartthrobs and sensitive types: Taylor Kitsch (TV’s Friday Night Lights); Ben Foster, who last portrayed William S. Burroughs in 2013’s Kill Your Darlings but made his name as an officer breaking bad news gently to war widows in 2009’s The Messenger; and Emile Hirsch, who wandered into the wilderness in 2007’s Into the Wild. We know from the outset who the lone survivors won’t be, but the film still manages to convey tension and suspense, and its relentlessness is stunning. Foster throws himself off a cliff, bounces off rocks, and gets caught in a tree — then runs to his also-bloody brothers to report, “That sucked.” (Yesterday I got a paper cut and tweeted about it.) But the takeaway from this brutal battle between the Taliban and America’s Real Heroes is that the man who lived to tell the tale also offers an olive branch to the other side — this survivor had help from the non-Taliban locals, a last-act detail that makes Lone Survivor this Oscar season’s nugget of political kumbaya. (2:01) Metreon. (Vizcarrondo)

The Monuments Men The phrase “never judge a book by its cover” goes both ways. On paper, The Monuments Men — inspired by the men who recovered art stolen by the Nazis during World War II, and directed by George Clooney, who co-wrote and stars alongside a sparkling ensemble cast (Cate Blanchett, Matt Damon, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Bob Balaban, Hugh “Earl of Grantham” Bonneville, and Bill Fucking Murray) — rules. Onscreen, not so much. After they’re recruited to join the cause, the characters fan out across France and Germany following various leads, a structural choice that results in the film’s number one problem: it can’t settle on a tone. Men can’t decide if it wants to be a sentimental war movie (as in an overlong sequence in which Murray’s character weeps at the sound of his daughter’s recorded voice singing “White Christmas”); a tragic war movie (some of those marquee names die, y’all); a suspenseful war movie (as the men sneak into dangerous territory with Michelangelo on their minds); or a slapstick war comedy (look out for that land mine!) The only consistent element is that the villains are all one-note — and didn’t Inglourious Basterds (2009) teach us that nothing elevates a 21st century-made World War II flick like an eccentric bad guy? There’s one perfectly executed scene, when reluctant partners Balaban and Murray discover a trove of priceless paintings hidden in plain sight. One scene, out of a two-hour movie, that really works. The rest is a stitched-together pile of earnest intentions that suggests a complete lack of coherent vision. Still love you, Clooney, but you can do better — and this incredible true story deserved way better. (1:58) Balboa, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Nebraska Alexander Payne may be unique at this point in that he’s in a position of being able to make nothing but small, human, and humorous films with major-studio money on his own terms. It’s hazardous to make too much of a movie like Nebraska, because it is small — despite the wide Great Plains landscapes shot in a wide screen format — and shouldn’t be entered into with overinflated or otherwise wrong-headed expectations. Still, a certain gratitude is called for. Nebraska marks the first time Payne and his writing partner Jim Taylor weren’t involved in the script, and the first one since their 1996 Citizen Ruth that isn’t based on someone else’s novel. (Hitherto little-known Bob Nelson’s original screenplay apparently first came to Payne’s notice a decade ago, but getting put off in favor of other projects.) It could easily have been a novel, though, as the things it does very well (internal thought, sense of place, character nuance) and the things it doesn’t much bother with (plot, action, dialogue) are more in line with literary fiction than commercial cinema. Elderly Woody T. Grant (Bruce Dern) keeps being found grimly trudging through snow and whatnot on the outskirts of Billings, Mont., bound for Lincoln, Neb. Brain fuzzed by age and booze, he’s convinced he’s won a million dollars and needs to collect it him there, though eventually it’s clear that something bigger than reality — or senility, even — is compelling him to make this trek. Long-suffering younger son David (Will Forte) agrees to drive him in order to simply put the matter to rest. This fool’s mission acquires a whole extended family-full of other fools when father and son detour to the former’s podunk farming hometown. Nebraska has no moments so funny or dramatic they’d look outstanding in excerpt; low-key as they were, 2009’s Sideways and 2011’s The Descendants had bigger set pieces and narrative stakes. But like those movies, this one just ambles along until you realize you’re completely hooked, all positive emotional responses on full alert. (1:55) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

The Nut Job (1:26) Metreon.

“Oscar Nominated Short Films 2014: Animated” Five nominees — plus a trio of “highly commended” additional selections — fill this program. If you saw Frozen in the theater, you’ve seen Get a Horse!, starring old-timey Mickey Mouse and some very modern moviemaking techniques. There’s also Room on the Broom, based on a children’s book about a kindly witch who’s a little too generous when it comes to befriending outcast animals (much to the annoyance of her original companion, a persnickety cat). Simon Pegg narrates, and Gillian Anderson voices the red-headed witch; listen also for Mike Leigh regulars Sally Hawkins and Timothy Spall. Japanese Possessions is based on even older source material: a spooky legend that discarded household objects can gain the power to cause mischief. A good-natured fix-it man ducks into an abandoned house during a rainstorm, only to be confronted with playful parasols, cackling kimono fabric, and a dragon constructed out of kitchen junk. The most artistically striking nominee is Feral, a dialogue-free, impressionistic tale of a foundling who resists attempts to civilize him. But my top pick is another dialogue-free entry: Mr. Hublot, the steampunky tale of an inventor whose regimented life is thrown into disarray when he adopts a stray robot dog, which soon grows into a comically enormous companion. It’s cute without being cloying, and the universe it creates around its characters is cleverly detailed, right down to the pictures on Hublot’s walls. Embarcadero. (Eddy)

“Oscar Nominated Short Films 2014: Live Action” With the exception of one entry — wryly comedic The Voorman Problem, starring Sherlock‘s Martin Freeman as a prison doctor who has a most unsettling encounter with an inmate who believes he’s a god — children are a unifying theme among this year’s live-action nominees. Finnish Do I Have to Take Care of Everything?, the shortest in the bunch, follows a cheerfully sloppy family’s frantic morning as they scramble to get themselves to a wedding. Danish Helium skews a little sentimental in its tale of a hospital janitor who makes up stories about a fanciful afterlife (way more fun than heaven) for the benefit of a sickly young patient. Spanish That Wasn’t Me focuses on a different kind of youth entirely: a child soldier in an unnamed African nation, whose brutal encounter with a pair of European doctors leads him down an unexpected path. Though it feels more like a sequence lifted from a longer film rather than a self-contained short, French Just Before Losing Everything is the probably the strongest contender here. The tale of a woman (Léa Drucker) who decides to take her two children and leave her dangerously abusive husband, it unfolds with real-time suspense as she visits her supermarket job one last time to deal with mundane stuff (collecting her last paycheck, turning in her uniform) before the trio can flee to safety. If they gave out Oscars for short-film acting, Drucker would be tough to beat; her performance balances steely determination and extreme fear in equally hefty doses. Embarcadero. (Eddy)

“Oscar Nominated Short Films 2014: Documentary (presented in two separata programs)” Opera Plaza.

The Past Splits in country, culture, and a harder-to-pinpoint sense of morality mark The Past, the latest film by Asghar Farhadi, the first Iranian moviemaker to win an Oscar (for 2011’s A Separation.) At the center of The Past‘s onion layers is a seemingly simple divorce of a binational couple, but that act becomes more complicated — and startlingly compelling — in Farhadi’s capable, caring hands. Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) has returned to Paris from Tehran, where he’s been living for the past four years, at the request of French wife Marie (Bérénice Bejo of 2011’s The Artist). She wants to legalize their estrangement so she can marry her current boyfriend, Samir (Tahar Rahim of 2009’s A Prophet), whose wife is in a coma. But she isn’t beyond giving out mixed messages by urging Ahmad to stay with her, and her daughters by various fathers, rather than at a hotel — and begging him to talk to teen Lucie (Pauline Burlet), who seems to despise Samir. The warm, nurturing Ahmad falls into his old routine in Marie’s far-from-picturesque neighborhood, visiting a café owned by fellow Iranian immigrants and easily taking over childcare duties for the overwhelmed Marie, as he tries to find out what’s happening with Lucie, who’s holding onto a secret that could threaten Marie’s efforts to move on. The players here are all wonderful, in particular the sad-faced, humane Mosaffa. We never really find out what severed his relationship with Marie, but in the end, it doesn’t really matter. We care about, and end up fearing for, all of Farhadi’s everyday characters, who are observed with a tender and unsentimental understanding that US filmmakers could learn from. The effect, when he finally racks focus on the forgotten member of this triangle (or quadrilateral?), is heartbreaking. (2:10) Smith Rafael. (Chun)

Philomena Judi Dench gives this twist on a real-life scandal heart, soul, and a nuanced, everyday heft. Her ideal, ironic foil is Steve Coogan, playing an upper-crusty irreverent snob of an investigative journalist. Judging by her tidy exterior, Dench’s title character is a perfectly ordinary Irish working-class senior, but she’s haunted by the past, which comes tumbling out one day to her daughter: As an unwed teenager, she gave birth to a son at a convent. She was forced to work there, unpaid; as supposed penance, the baby was essentially sold to a rich American couple against her consent. Her yarn reaches disgraced reporter Martin Sixsmith (Coogan), who initially turns his nose up at the tale’s piddling “human interest” angle, but slowly gets drawn in by the unexpected twists and turns of the story — and likely the possibility of taking down some evil nuns — as well as seemingly naive Philomena herself, with her delight in trash culture, frank talk about sex, and simple desire to see her son and know that he thought, once in a while, of her. It turns out Philomena’s own sad narrative has as many improbable turnarounds as one of the cheesy romance novels she favors, and though this unexpected twosome’s quest for the truth is strenuously reworked to conform to the contours of buddy movie-road trip arc that we’re all too familiar with, director Stephen Frears’ warm, light-handed take on the gentle class struggles going on between the writer and his subject about who’s in control of the story makes up for Philomena‘s determined quest for mass appeal. (1:35) Embarcadero, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Ride Along By sheer dint of his ability to push his verbosity and non-threatening physicality into that nerd zone between smart and clueless, intelligent and irritating, Kevin Hart may be poised to become Hollywood’s new comedy MVP. In the case of Ride Along, it helps that Ice Cube has comic talents, too — proven in the Friday movies as well as in 2012’s 21 Jump Street — as the straight man who can actually scowl and smile at the same time. Together, in Ride Along, they bring the featherweight pleasures of Rush Hour-style odd-couple chortles. Hart is Ben, a gamer geek and school security guard shooting to become the most wrinkly student at the police academy. He looks up to hardened, street-smart cop James (Cube), brother of his new fiancée, Angela (Tika Sumpter). Naturally, instead of simply blessing the nuptials, the tough guy decides to haze the shut-in, disabusing him of any illusions he might have of being his equal. More-than-equal talents like Laurence Fishburne and John Leguizamo are pretty much wasted here — apart from Fishburne’s ultra lite impression of Matrix man Morpheus — but if you don’t expect much more than the chuckles eked out of Ride Along‘s commercials, you won’t be too disappointed by this nontaxing journey. (1:40) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

Saving Mr. Banks Having promised his daughters that he would make a movie of their beloved Mary Poppins books, Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) has laid polite siege to author P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson) for over 20 years. Now, in the early 1960s, she has finally consented to discuss the matter in Los Angeles — albeit with great reluctance, and only because royalty payments have dried up to the point where she might have to sell her London home. Bristling at being called “Pam” and everything else in this sunny SoCal and relentlessly cheery Mouse House environ, the acidic English spinster regards her creation as sacred. The least proposed changes earn her horrified dismissal, and the very notion of having Mary and company “prancing and chirping” out songs amid cartoon elements is taken as blasphemy. This clash of titans could have made for a barbed comedy with satirical elements, but god forbid this actual Disney production should get so cheeky. Instead, we get the formulaically dramatized tale of a shrew duly tamed by all-American enterprise, with flashbacks to the inevitable past traumas (involving Colin Farrell as a beloved but alcoholic ne’er-do-well father) that require healing of Travers’ wounded inner child by the magic of the Magic Kingdom. If you thought 2004’s Finding Neverland was contrived feel-good stuff, you’ll really choke on the spoons full of sugar force-fed here. (2:06) Metreon. (Harvey)

The Square Like the single lit candle at the very start of The Square — a flicker of hope amid the darkness of Mubarak’s 30-year dictatorship — the initial street scenes of the leader’s Feb. 11, 2011, announcement that he was stepping down launch Jehane Noujaim’s documentary on a euphoric note. It’s a lot to take in: the evocative shots of Tahrir Square, the graffiti on the streets, the movement’s troubadours, and the faces of the activists she follows — the youthful Ahmed Hassan, British-reared Kite Runner (2007) actor-turned-citizen journalist Khalid Abdalla, and Muslim Brotherhood acolyte Magdy Ashour, among them. Yet that first glimmer of joy and unity among the diverse individuals who toppled a dictatorship was only the very beginning of a journey — which the Egyptian American Noujaim does a remarkable job documenting, in all its twists, turns, multiple protests, and voices. Unflinching albeit even-handed footage of the turnabouts, hypocrisies, and injustices committed by the Brotherhood, powers-that-be, the army, and the police during the many actions occurring between 2011 and the 2013 removal of Mohammed Morsi will stay with you, including the sight of a tank plowing down protestors with murderous force and soldiers firing live rounds at activists armed only with stones. “We found ourselves loving each other without realizing it,” says Hassan of those heady first days, and Noujaim brings you right there and to their aftermath, beautifully capturing ordinary people coming together, eating, joking, arguing, feeling empowered and discouraged, forming unlikely friendships, setting up makeshift hospitals on the street, and risking everything, in this powerful document of an unfolding real-life epic. (1:44) Marina. (Chun)

Stranger by the Lake Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps) is an attractive young French guy spending his summer days hanging at the local gay beach, where he strikes up a platonic friendship with chunky older loner Henri (Patrick d’Assumcao). Still, the latter is obviously hurt when Franck practically gets whiplash neck swiveling at the sight of Michel (Christophe Paou), an old-school gay fantasy figure — think Sam Elliott in 1976’s Lifeguard, complete with Marlboro Man ‘stache and twinkling baby blues. No one else seems to be paying attention when Franck sees his lust object frolicking in the surf with an apparent boyfriend, one that doesn’t surface again after some playful “dunking” gets rather less playful. Eventually the police come around in the form of Inspector Damroder (Jerome Chappatte), but Franck stays mum — he isn’t sure what exactly he saw. Or maybe it’s that he’s quite sure he’s happy how things turned out, now that sex-on-wheels Michel is his sorta kinda boyfriend. You have to suspend considerable disbelief to accept that our protagonist would risk potentially serious danger for what seems pretty much a glorified fuck-buddy situation. But Alain Guiraudie’s meticulously schematic thriller- which limits all action to the terrain between parking lot and shore, keeping us almost wholly ignorant of the characters’ regular lives — repays that leap with an absorbing, ingenious structural rigor. Stranger is Hitchcockian, all right, even if the “Master of Suspense” might applaud its technique while blushing at its blunt homoeroticism. (1:37) Clay. (Harvey)

That Awkward Moment When these bro-mancers call each other “idiots,” which they do repeatedly, it’s awkward all right, because that descriptor hits all too close to home. Jason (Zac Efron) and Daniel (Miles Teller) are douchey book-marketing boy geniuses, with all the ego and fratty attitude needed to dispense bad advice and push doctor friend Mikey (Michael B. Jordan), whose wife recently broke it off after an affair with her lawyer, into an agreement to play the field — no serious dating allowed. The pretext: Anything to avoid, yup, that awkward moment when the lady has the temerity to ask, “So — where is this going?” How fortuitous that Jason should run into the smartest, cutest author in NYC (Imogen Poots), all sharp-tongued charisma and sparkling Emma Stone-y cat eyes; that Daniel would get embroiled with his Charlotte Rampling-like wing woman (Mackenzie Davis); and Mikey would edge back into bed with his ex. That’s the worst — or best — these tepid lotharios can muster. The education of these numbskulls when it comes to love and lust aspires to the much-edgier self-criticism of Girls — but despite the presence of Fruitvale Station (2013) breakout Jordan and the likable Poots, first-time director Tom Gormican’s screenplay lets them down. (1:34) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

12 Years a Slave Pop culture’s engagement with slavery has always been uneasy. Landmark 1977 miniseries Roots set ratings records, but the prestigious production capped off a decade that had seen some more questionable endeavors, including 1975 exploitation flick Mandingo — often cited by Quentin Tarantino as one of his favorite films; it was a clear influence on his 2012 revenge fantasy Django Unchained, which approached its subject matter in a manner that paid homage to the Westerns it riffed on: with guns blazing. By contrast, Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave is nuanced and steeped in realism. Though it does contain scenes of violence (deliberately captured in long takes by regular McQueen collaborator Sean Bobbitt, whose cinematography is one of the film’s many stylistic achievements), the film emphasizes the horrors of “the peculiar institution” by repeatedly showing how accepted and ingrained it was. Slave is based on the true story of Solomon Northup, an African American man who was sold into slavery in 1841 and survived to pen a wrenching account of his experiences. He’s portrayed here by the powerful Chiwetel Ejiofor. Other standout performances come courtesy of McQueen favorite Michael Fassbender (as Epps, a plantation owner who exacerbates what’s clearly an unwell mind with copious amounts of booze) and newcomer Lupita Nyong’o, as a slave who attracts Epps’ cruel attentions. (2:14) Embarcadero. (Eddy)

Vampire Academy (1:45) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness.

The Wolf of Wall Street Three hours long and breathless from start to finish, Martin Scorsese’s tale of greed, stock-market fraud, and epic drug consumption has a lot going on — and the whole thing hinges on a bravado, breakneck performance by latter-day Scorsese muse Leonardo DiCaprio. As real-life sleaze Jordan Belfort (upon whose memoir the film is based), he distills all of his golden DiCaprio-ness into a loathsome yet maddeningly likable character who figures out early in his career that being rich is way better than being poor, and that being fucked-up is, likewise, much preferable to being sober. The film also boasts keen supporting turns from Jonah Hill (as Belfort’s crass, corrupt second-in-command), Matthew McConaughey (who has what amounts to a cameo — albeit a supremely memorable one — as Belfort’s coke-worshiping mentor), Jean Dujardin (as a slick Swiss banker), and newcomer Margot Robbie (as Belfort’s cunning trophy wife). But this is primarily the Leo and Marty Show, and is easily their most entertaining episode to date. Still, don’t look for an Oscar sweep: Scorsese just hauled huge for 2011’s Hugo, and DiCaprio’s flashy turn will likely be passed over by voters more keen on honoring subtler work in a shorter film. (2:59) Marina, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki, Vogue. (Eddy) *

Pixies 2.0

Michael Redmond

February 11, 2014

There’s something to be said for recording four great, distinctive albums, and quitting while you’re ahead. This live-fast/die-fast approach worked wonders for the Velvet Underground’s legacy and influence, and one might say it served the Pixies’ notoriously frenetic rock explorations equally well.

While the renowned Boston group has been on the reunion circuit for nearly a decade now, coasting on the fumes of its brief, yet potent, back-catalogue, the prospect of new material has always seemed like an improbable dream of overeager fans. (After all, their last record, Trompe Le Monde, saw its release on the same day as Nirvana’s earthshaking Nevermind in 1991.)

But then, out of nowhere, one day last September, came EP-1, a self-released, digitally distributed four-song set that the blogosphere proceeded to pounce on and dissect instantaneously. While Pitchfork, among other tastemakers, complained of dubious quality, it was clear: With one bold move, the Pixies were no longer mere revivalists, but a full-on band once again.

Next Friday, at Oakland’s Fox Theater, will mark the Pixies’ first Bay Area show in support of fresh material in over two decades, in a performance that should test the band’s ability to blend the old and the new convincingly.

Characterized by the erratic vocals and twisty songwriting of bandleader Black Francis, the angular guitar-work of Joey Santiago, the rock-solid drumming of David Lovering, and the alternately sweet and snarly backing vocals of bassist Kim Deal (who left the band last year, without warning, during the EP-1 sessions), the Pixies remain one of the most impactful, singular groups from the transitional period between rock’s punk and indie movements.

From the initial jolt of the Come On Pilgrim EP (1987), to the devastating four-album punch of Surfer Rosa (1988), Doolittle (1989), Bossanova (1990), and Trompe Le Monde (1991), the band’s signature balance of abrasion and tenderness continues to permeate the rock world incalculably. Radiohead has repeatedly admitted their indebtedness to the Pixies’ sound, while Kurt Cobain contended that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” might not have been written without it. As Deerhunter, TV on the Radio, and the end credits to Fight Club continue to prove, the Pixies’ influence remains powerful as ever.

After calling it quits in ’92, the band regrouped in 2004 (to many a fan’s surprise) for a reunion tour that was only to last a year. After one year turned to five, and a front-to-back Doolittle tour stretched the revival to the seven-year mark, the four members came to a realization.

“We all looked at ourselves and said, ‘Wait a minute, hold on. We’ve been a band longer during this reunion than we were initially,'” Lovering told the Bay Guardian from a tour stop in Washington, D.C.

“There was talk of doing new material, but with all this nonstop touring, nothing came to fruition until maybe about two years ago. We stopped touring, started writing stuff, and then we went and did it.”

Just last month, the Pixies landed another sucker punch with EP-2, the band’s second release since last September, while rumors of an impending EP-3 have begun to circulate since then. Produced by Gil Norton, who’s worked on every Pixies release since Surfer Rosa, the newly released EPs bear a fuller, rounder, warmer sound than any of the band’s past work, while leaving Francis’ erratic songwriting and the group’s off-kilter dynamics largely intact.

“Blue Eyed Hexe” strongly recalls the cowbell-addled thump of “U-Mass,” while “Greens and Blues” brings to mind the zigzagging chord progressions of “Where Is My Mind?”. “What Goes Boom” evokes the surfy explorations of Bossanova, while “Indie Cindy” and “Andro Queen” approach the jangly sensibility of “Here Comes Your Man,” before going unpredictably down their respective paths.

“We just like to drop surprises, I guess,” Santiago explains, while on tour in Durham, N.C. “We just try and do something different out there. And I think we might be one of the first ones to do this…you know, doing a series of EPs.”

Speaking of surprises, the band was dealt a serious blow during the sessions for the EP series, when Deal left the band unexpectedly, for reasons she has declined to elaborate on in the months since. The former bandleader of the Breeders, whose bass lines and soft backing vocals proved integral to the Pixies equation in their contrast to Francis’ manic wail, Deal left a sizable void behind upon departing the group.

“When Kim did leave, we didn’t know what to do,” Lovering explains. “We were in a lurch, and we were thinking, should we get a guy bass player? Or should we quit the band? Or whatever. But, what the Pixies is is a masculine/feminine thing. It’s always been that yin and yang, especially with the vocals. That’s just part of the Pixies. So that’s what we had to do. We had to get a female, you know? We’re keeping with that.”

After hiring Kim Shattuck of the Muffs to assume Deal’s spot for a brief European tour, the three core members made the decision to move forward with Paz Lenchantin, the former bassist for A Perfect Circle.

“Paz is fantastic,” Lovering mentions. “She’s so good, she’s making me play better. I really have to watch how I’m playing, and keep it up. But it’s wonderful; it just sounds very powerful and precise. And her vocals are incredible, as well.”

“Not to diminish Kim,” Santiago says. “We miss her very dearly, but after a while, you know, life goes on. The hard reality is, good is good, and Paz is a real bass player. She’s a pro.” So how might Lenchantin approach Deal’s signature tracks like “Gigantic,” “Silver,” and “Havalina”? How keenly will Deal’s absence be felt? Aside from the prospect of hearing new material played live, Lenchantin’s introduction to the Pixies leaves more questions to be answered than any other element surrounding next Friday’s show.

Faced with a lineup change that smacks of uncertainty and transition, and the mixed critical response to their first new music in 22 years, Francis, Lovering, and Santiago have more to prove this time around than ever before. Yet Lovering contends that this unstable territory is just what the Pixies need after a decade of celebrating past glories.

“I don’t think we could’ve toured anymore, just going on this reunion kind of stuff. We just needed to do something new.”

Fri/21: Pixies

With Best Coast

8pm, $55 (sold out)

Fox Theater

1807 Telegraph, Oak.

(510) 302-2250

www.thefoxoakland.com

A very Indy decade

Steven T. Jones

February 11, 2014

esilvers@sfbg.com

LEFT OF THE DIAL If there’s one thing Allen Scott remembers from opening the Independent 10 years ago, it’s the rush. Not the emotional high (though surely that was a factor too), but the literal rushing around that was necessary to open a state-of-the-art live concert space with a capacity of 500 “on a shoestring budget.”

“We barely got open on time,” recalls Scott, the managing owner of the venue at 628 Divisadero — the latest in a long line of storied San Francisco clubs that have shared that address. “We had friends painting it right up until about the day before we opened. We’d moved the sound system in but didn’t have alarms set up, so we were taking turns sleeping on the stage overnight. People would come by and say ‘When are you opening?’ and we’d say ‘In a couple days,’ and they’d laugh, like ‘Good luck with that.’ The night we opened, the fire department signing everything off while the band was sound-checking.”

That band was I Am Spoonbender, and that show was the first of more than 2,500 that have taken place within the Independent’s walls since February 2004. If the space feels like it has a deeper history than that, it’s for good reason: In the late 1960s, it was home to the Half Note, a popular jazz club that saw the likes of Miles Davis and Thelonius Monk; the house band featured George Duke and a young Al Jarreau. In the early ’80s it became the VIS Club, and served as a hub for local punk, new wave, and experimental bands; by the late ’80s it was the Kennel Club, and hosted up-and-comers like Nirvana and Janes Addiction. In the mid-’90s, it was reborn as the Justice League, nurturing burgeoning electronic and hip-hop acts — Fat Boy Slim, Jurassic 5, the Roots, and plenty others all found enthusiastic crowds. To put it mildly, if those walls could talk, they’d tell a lot of good party stories. Next week’s lineup of shows will only add to the vault: From Feb. 19 through Feb. 26, the Independent will host Allen Stone, John Butler Trio, Beats Antique, DJ Shadow, Two Gallants (below), Rebelution, and Girl Talk in a series of special performances to celebrate the club’s 10th anniversary.

As the club has changed, San Francisco — as it is wont to do — changed around it. The formerly gritty Western Addition is now shiny NoPa (at least according to real estate agents); what was once a bustling center for the city’s African-American population and jazz scene is now more of a bustling dining destination for the upper-middle-class. Regardless, says Scott, there’s no question that the Independent is “in the heart of the city…being part of this neighborhood, this community, is so important to us.”

Scott was just a young San Francisco promoter with an impressive track record when he was approached in 2003 by Gregg Perloff and Sherry Wasserman — proteges of Bill Graham and owners of the scrappy, barely-year-old concert promotion/marketing team Another Planet Entertainment — to run booking and promotions at the unopened venue.

“The name ‘The Independent’ came up through some discussions with music industry friends,” Scott told SF Weekly at the time of the club’s opening. “The whole idea of the Wal-Marting of America applies to the music industry as well. We wanted to stand alone: independent thinking, independent music. We’re an independent company. Of course, it was also an elbow in the side of the corporate giant out there.” (Perloff had just parted ways with Clear Channel under less-than-friendly circumstances.)

A decade later, of course, APE runs a couple of the biggest festivals in Northern California, and functions as the exclusive promoter for Berkeley’s Greek Theatre, Oakland’s Fox Theater, and the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco, among others. And Scott’s now the vice president of APE. But The Independent, now the smallest APE operation, is still his baby.

“We wanted a utilitarian room that had great sound, great lights, and perfect sight lines,” he says. “And because it’s a box, the sight lines there really are perfect — no matter where you’re standing in the room, you can make eye contact with the performers and vice-versa. I think it’s the best-sounding room in the city. And I’d say it has the best lights of any venue underneath the size of the Fillmore.”

Nicki Bluhm is among the local artists who now regularly pack larger venues (see: her sold-out Fillmore show Jan. 25) but maintain a soft spot for the Independent. “[The club] treats their artists with so much respect,” she says, adding that the atmosphere there has led to some of her band’s most memorable shows. Also memorable, says Scott: Obama’s first presidential win, when the club held a free results-viewing party with live music. “When he won, the place erupted, and everyone spilled out into the streets…so there was a band playing inside and people just raging outside,” he recalls. “Very San Francisco.”

What does a quintessentially Brooklyn-loft-party-post-punk band sound like when two of its principal members relocate to LA? Judging by VoyAager, the lush, layered, immersively and epically spacey new album from experimental stalwarts Aa (“big A, little a”), it sounds like someone sent an assortment of synthesizers, samplers, and drum sets into the future, and the future is an industrial cityscape full of curiously advanced life forms who don’t communicate in a narrative sense, but they sure have lots of energy, and they like writing melodies (though not the kind you’ll likely hear on the radio anytime soon). Life sounds rough around the edges on this planet, but you kinda don’t ever want to leave. (Give the first track a listen at the end of this story.)

John Atkinson, the drummer-heavy band’s main vocalist and one of said members who relocated to the West Coast about three years ago, said the album — the band’s first in seven years — is actually the culmination of nearly seven years of recording. “We all work on songs together even when we’re not in the same place,” explains Atkinson, who lived (and recorded some of his parts) in France in the mid-aughts. Though Aa’s lineup and instrumentation seem to be constantly in flux (at this point, says Atkinson, there’s something of an East Coast lineup and a West Coast one), the band’s sound is distinctly more cohesive and melodic than on its 2007 debut, gAame.

“We don’t want to be making straight-ahead pop songs, but at the same time, I’d say the sounds of pop music have broadened our palette, while sticking to the way we like to put songs together,” says Atkinson. The changing lineup has helped the band’s sound evolve, as well: “Everyone listens to different music…dark industrial heavy stuff, electronic stuff, metal, punk, another drummer is into Samba, world music and jazz…everyone brings something different, so it’s great to watch that kind of stew congeal into something that still sounds like us.”

Playing the Hemlock on Feb. 15 will be the second stop on a weeklong West Coast tour that will take the guys up to Seattle, after which Atkinson will be making a point to stop at every basketball stadium he can on the way back down — the Jersey native is a fairly new appreciator (not a bandwagon fan, he wants to be clear) of California basketball.

As for the NYC/LA transition in general: “New York’s always gonna be home to me, but every time I go back, so much has changed about Brooklyn — all these condos, cookie-cutter new restaurants, and the vibe of the city is just not what it used to be,” he says, “LA is a really hard city to get to know, but that also means there’s a ton of interesting new stuff to discover all the time. It’s starting to feel like home.”

Last but definitely not least: Don’t forget to check out the first Bay Area Record Label Fair, (or B.A.R.F., which is funny whether or not you are 12, admit it), at Thee Parkside on Feb. 15, the brainchild of SF promoters Professional Fans and the city’s own Father/Daughter Records. Some 18 different labels will be represented at the daylong affair, plus live performances from Cocktails, Dog Party, and others TBD. Oh yeah, and it’s free — so bite your tongue the next time you find yourself saying that everything in this city has gotten too expensive.

The Independent’s 10th Anniversary Celebration
Feb. 19 – Feb. 26, show times and prices vary
Independent
628 Divisadero, SF
www.theindependentsf.com

Aa
With Alan Watts, Wand, and Violent Vickie
Saturday, Feb. 15 9pm, $8
Hemlock Tavern 1131 Polk, SF
www.hemlocktavern.com

B.A.R.F.
Saturday, Feb. 15 12pm – 5pm, free
Thee Parkside
1600 17th Street, SF
www.theeparkside.com

Full steam ahead

Michael Redmond

February 11, 2014

arts@sfbg.com

BEER Just across McCovey Cove from AT&T Park, the San Francisco Giants and Anchor Brewing Company are concocting a beer-filled future for Pier 48. As part of the Mission Rock development project, the new Anchor brewery, slotted to break ground in late 2015, would allow Anchor to quadruple production and remain in San Francisco.

The proposed brewery will eventually contain a restaurant, museum, educational space, and distillery. It’s being designed with giant windows that will offer an unprecedented view of operations. Brewing would be transparent enough to be observed while casually strolling the pier or even from certain seats inside the ballpark.

“As you come in and you look into the brewery, the first thing you’ll see will be one of the cold fermentors,” says architect Olle Lundberg, referring to the large cooling pans or “cool ships” Anchor still uses to chill its boiled beer batches. “The bar for the restaurant will look out over that, so you’ll be looking out over this kind of sea of beer into the brewery. If that doesn’t inspire you to drink, I don’t know what will.”

Anchor has been poised to expand for years. It even has a copper German brewhouse ready to install in the new facility. It’s been sitting in storage since it was purchased in the early 1990s by then-CEO Fritz Maytag. He left the collection of kettles, mash tuns, and fermentors unused when his plans for a new brewery were sidelined by that rarest of business concerns: happiness.

“In 1990 the brewery was doing about 100,000 barrels, which made it the number one craft brewery in the country,” says CEO Keith Greggor in his cheery British accent. “Further expansion was going to be very difficult, very costly. At the same time, [Maytag] got very interested in distilling and he decided, ‘You know what? I’m number one. I don’t need to focus on being the biggest and the baddest. I’m happy with what I’m doing and I’m going to focus on distilling now.’ And he was one of the first in that kind of craft distilling revolution that’s happened.”

This was the second craft revolution that Maytag, the great-grandson of Maytag Appliance founder Frederick Maytag, helped to ignite. In 1965, he was enjoying a “Steam Beer” at a North Beach restaurant when he was told it would be the last he would ever have: the brewery, which had survived Prohibition decades earlier, was closing. Hearing this, he purchased a controlling share of the company, saving from extinction not only a brewery in operation since 1896, but one of the only known styles of beer to have originated in America. “Steam Beer,” technically classified as “California Common Beer,” is a lager fermented at ale temperatures.

But times have changed since 1965. Craft brewing has been revived in America to the point that decorative plastic hops are A Thing. And competition demands more than being the only kid on the block with flavorful barley-pop. So in addition to the new brewery plans, Anchor will be discontinuing its bock beer and Humming Ale, while offering a new saison and an IPA.

“We like to say that we’re resting those beers,” says Greggor of the discontinued lines. “We have to respond to the consumer and retail demand for beer. And the demand for today is: ‘I want new. I want new.'”

And new it will be. Since 2010, when Maytag sold the brewery to the Griffin Group of Novato, most noted for their work with Skyy Vodka, Anchor has introduced several new beers to its regular line, including Brekle’s Brown, California Lager, and Big Leaf Maple. One the most recent is Small Beer, which draws from well-trod brewing techniques, making a lighter, more session-able ale from the mash of Old Foghorn — a more robust, flavorful brew.

And the Mission Rock development hopes to get even more out of those spent grains. As part of a proposed district-wide energy management facility, Anchor’s waste and run-off could be used to create methane for heating, and gray-water for toilets and sprinklers.

“We’re looking at all kinds of crazy, fun ideas for waste recapture,” says Fran Weld, director of real estate for the Giants. (The team, which is partnered with the Port of San Francisco on the project, asked Anchor to be the first tenant.) “The idea of looking at a district-wide solution is you can consolidate all of those chilling towers and boilers that the developers would otherwise build. You can do fewer of them because of the fact that you’re meeting the demands of the site as a whole — so your baseline of required energy is much lower.”

Still awaiting final approval from city agencies, the Mission Rock plan also includes mixed-use office, retail, restaurant, and manufacturing spaces, as well as affordable housing. But perhaps most remarkable is the development will enable San Francisco’s oldest and largest manufacturer to remain within the city, though at no small cost.

“You can imagine there are much, much cheaper places for them to build this facility,” says Lundberg, whose design firm is joint-venturing the project with Bohlin Cywinski Jackson. “They could just keep Potrero Hill as a kind of, you know, boutique signature facility and then make most of their product in Chico or somewhere. But instead they’ve decided that they really want to be here and they want to do it all here and there’s a big number attached to that.”

When asked if he has considered a opening an additional brewery elsewhere (as Petaluma-based Lagunitas has done in Chicago), Greggor is almost offended.

“I believe that Anchor belongs in San Francisco. That’s our history, that’s our heritage,” says Greggor. “People have an affinity to us, whether they drink beer or not, they like us being part of the city. They applaud our efforts to stay on in the city and make beer here even though it’s a very expensive environment to do so. And we ourselves are all committed personally and passionately to the city. And we don’t want to go anywhere else! We’ll make less money and live here, please.” *

Thirsty for more? Check out all the sudsy goings-on at SF Beer Week (www.sfbeerweek.org), including events featuring Anchor beers, now through Sun/16.

The layout

Michael Redmond

February 11, 2014

SUPER EGO “A man, a plan, a gram: anal canal!” Why some queen just shrieked this quasi-palindrome in my earhole at 5am outside the 7-Eleven — not the Castro one, I have my pride — absolutely no idea. But the poor, bedraggled dear has a point: BE PREPARED.

Next week is the Guardian’s fab annual Goldies issue, a wall-to-wall celebration of up-and-coming artists. And there’s no room in it for your beloved Super Ego (old). So here’s looking ahead to the next hot fortnight’s-worth of shindigs. Of course, the biggest hoot of all will be the Guardian 25th Annual Goldies party (Fri/21, 8-11pm, $10. Folsom Street Foundry, 1425 Folsom, SF.) DJs Primo and Wam Bam Ashleyanne will do a special soul-groove “golden oldies” set — and it’s $10 for all the beer you can drink. Plus, duh, the coolest people. Stick it in your calendar, already.

QBERT

Last week’s SFBG cover star, scratch legend Qbert, joins with Dan The Automator, Del The Funky Homosapien, and more local hip-hop/turntable heroes for a wild time, in support of his crowdsource campaign for his new album, Extraterrestria/Galaxxxian (www.djqbert.com).

Thu/13, 9pm, $10 advance. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. wwww.mezzaninesf.com

SLOW HANDS

Talk about heartthrobs, yum. This cutie brought major sexy back to dance floors when he slowed tempos down to a crawl and let everyone stretch out. Now he’s all about crooning live and steaming things up with Tom Croose as the Worst Friends duo — also appearing at this As You Like It lovefest.

Fri/14, 10pm-4am, $10–$20. Beatbox, 314 11th St, SF. www.ayli-sf.com

JOHN TALABOT

That thing where a DJ is also a magician, creating a whole new psychedelic-ecstatic universe out of common sounds, rearranging how you hear music forever. He’s also Spanish and wears a lot of tinfoil over his face for photos. At the Icee Hot party.

Sat/15, 10pm-4am, $10 advance. Public Works, 161 Erie, SF. www.publicsf.com

DISCO DADDY

There is a thing called Bear Weekend with a long and dramatic history (let’s not get into it) — and here’s this year’s fun-furry climax: DJ Bus Station John turns the Eagle leather biker bar into a glorious old school gay disco evening t-dance. Bring your own chic towel, but no Schick razors, please. “Endorsed by the Tamale Lady,” fyi.

Sun/16, 7pm-midnight, $5. SF Eagle, 398 12th St, SF. www.sf-eagle.com

HONEY SOUNSYSTEM PRESIDENTS EVE

Celebrate the presidents with Honey’s lovely residents: P-Play, Kendig, Josh Cheon, and Robot Hustle give the cute queer boys, girls, and others steamy techno all night long. (Hot straight people also eligible.)

Sun/23,10pm-4am, $10 advance. Beatbox, 314 11th St, SF. www.beatboxsf.com

GILLES PETERSON

“Rare groove” would be nothing without this absolutely incredible, omnivorous DJ. And neither would Diplo. Experience a Whole Earth Catalog of sounds in his mindblowing sets. I love him.

Fri/21, 10pm-3am, $20. Mighty, 119 Utah, SF. www.mighty119.com

CARL CRAIG + FRANCOIS K

If you know anything about dance music, you have probably just wet yourself. If not, let’s be clear: One of Detroit techno’s most poetic innovators and one of the best disco, house, and dub producers of all time will be on the decks, as part of Red Bull Music Academy Bass Camp 2014.

Sat/22, 9:30pm-3:30am, $15–$20. Public Works, 161 Erie, SF. www.publicsf.com

KEVIN SAUNDERSON

Happy eighth birthday to the Lights Down Low party. And happier birthday to us dancers! LDL’s bringing in this true legend, basically one of three guys who invented techno — from Detroit, duh — and changed the world forever.

Sat/22, 9pm-3am, $15–$20. Monarch, 101 Sixth St, SF. www.monarchsf.com

PUT ON THE BREAKS

I’ve been wondering when this would happen. A breakbeat revival has been hitting the underground rave and techno connoisseur scene for a couple years. Now there’s an official dedicated party. Noice. With Kapt N Kirk, Tamo, Nerd Nate, and more.

Sat/22, 10pm-3am, free before midnight (RSVP at www.mighty119.com). Mighty, 119 Utah, SF.

HONEY DIJON

Beloved and classic DJ Nikita is headed off to London. But first he’s counting down eight monthly London Calling parties with incredible special guests, like NYC banging house royalty Honey Dijon and Tedd Patterson.

Sun/23, 2pm-2am, $10 advance. Audio, 316 11th St, SF. www.audiosf.com

Staying power

Michael Redmond

February 11, 2014

rebecca@sfbg.com

Despite the rain on Feb. 8, organizers of a citywide tenants’ convention at San Francisco’s Tenderloin Elementary School wound up having to turn people away at the door. The meeting was filled to capacity, even though it had been moved at the last minute to accommodate a larger crowd than initially anticipated.

“Oh. My. God. Look at how many of you there are!” organizer Sara Shortt, executive director of the Housing Rights Committee, called out as she greeted the hundreds in attendance. “Tenants in San Francisco, presente!”

The multiracial crowd was representative of neighborhoods from across the city, from elderly folks with canes to parents with small children in tow. Translators had been brought in to accommodate Chinese and Spanish-speaking participants.

Six members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors also made an appearance: Sups. John Avalos, David Campos, Eric Mar, Malia Cohen, Jane Kim, and Board President David Chiu.

In recent weeks, the convention organizers had convened a series of smaller neighborhood gatherings to solicit ideas for new policy measures to stem the tide of evictions and displacement, a problem that has steadily risen to the level of the defining issue of our times in San Francisco.

Ana Godina, an organizer with the SEIU, went to the convention with her daughter Ella, 5. Godina drove from Sacramento to support her colleagues. Three of her fellow union members have been evicted recently, all of them Tenderloin and Mission residents. Guardian photo by Amanda Rhoades

While several legislative proposals are on track to move forward at the Board of Supervisors, the meetings were called to directly involve impacted communities and give them an opportunity to shape the legislative agenda on their own terms, according to various organizers.

Addressing the crowd, Shortt recalled what she termed “some amazing jiu jitsu” during last year’s tenant campaigns, which resulted in a 10-year moratorium on condo conversions rather than simply allowing a mass bypass of the condo lottery, as originally proposed.

That measure, which won approval at the Board of Supervisors last June, was designed to discourage real estate speculators from evicting tenants to convert buildings to tenancies-in-common, a shared housing arrangement that’s often a precursor to converting rent-controlled apartments into condos.

That effort brought together the founding members of the Anti Displacement Coalition, and momentum has been building ever since. “This is the beginning of a movement today,” Gen Fujioka of the Chinatown Community Development Center, one of the key organizations involved, told the gathering. “We are shaking things up in our city.”

MAINTAINING DIVERSITY

Around 160 participants attended the first in a series of neighborhood tenant conventions in the Castro on Jan. 10. The one in the Richmond a week later drew so many participants that organizers had to turn people away to appease the fire marshal.

“The idea of the neighborhood conventions was to solicit ideas,” explained Ted Gullicksen, head of the San Francisco Tenants Union. “The idea of this event is to review existing ideas and ultimately rank them.” From there, the campaign will pursue a ballot initiative or legislative approval at the Board of Supervisors.

Ted Gullicksen, director of the San Francisco Tenants Union, and his dog Falcor. Guardian photo by Amanda Rhoades

But first, a few speakers shared their stories. Gum Gee Lee spoke about being evicted from her Chinatown apartment last year along with her husband and disabled adult daughter, an event that touched off a media frenzy about the affordable housing crisis taking root in San Francisco.

“There were times that were very stressful for me. I would call places only for the owner to say, ‘I’ll get back to you,’ but they never did,” she said of that ordeal.

“To see everyone here, all kinds of people, it makes me really happy,” she later told the Bay Guardian through a translator. “I just hope they don’t get evicted.”

Mike Casey, president of UNITE-HERE Local 2 and an executive committee member of the San Francisco Labor Council, also made a few comments at the forum.

“Having the ability to live and vote in this city makes a difference,” he pointed out, saying workers who have to commute long distances for political actions because they’ve been displaced from San Francisco are less likely to get involved.

“The struggle of our time is the widening gap between the rich and the poor,” Casey added. “That is exactly what this struggle is about: to maintain that diversity. What we need to move forward on is bold, effective, measurable change that makes sure we are able to protect the fabric of this community.”

Maria Zamudio, an organizer with Causa Justa/Just Cause, emphasized the idea that the problem of evictions in San Francisco is less of a market-based problem and more of a threat to the city’s existing, interwoven communities.

“Those are our neighborhoods and our communities,” Zamudio said. “We’re fighting for the heart of San Francisco. Fighting for strong tenant protections is a necessary struggle if we are going to keep working class San Franciscans in their homes.”

ELLIS ACT UNDER FIRE

As Gullicksen noted at the start of the convention, San Francisco rents have ballooned in recent years, rising 72 percent since 2011.

“We are seeing the most evictions we have seen in a long, long, long, long time,” Gullicksen said. “Most Ellis evictions are being done by one of 12 real estate speculators — evicting us and selling our apartments, mostly to the tech workers.”

Even though median market-rate rents now hover at around $3,400 per month in San Francisco, low-income tenants can avoid being frozen out by sudden rental spikes because rent-control laws limit the amount rents may be increased annually.

But that protection only applies to a finite number of rental units, those built before 1979. That’s why tenant advocates speak of the city’s “rent-controlled housing stock” as a precious resource in decline. Long-term tenants with rent control — in the worst cases, elderly or disabled residents who might be homeless if not for the low rent — are often the ones on the receiving end of eviction notices.

From 2012 to 2013, according to data compiled by the Anti Eviction Mapping Project, the use of the Ellis Act increased 175 percent in comparison with the previous year. That law allows landlords to evict tenants even if they’ve never violated lease terms. Advocates say real estate speculators frequently abuse Ellis by buying up properties and immediately clearing all tenants.

Concurrently with local efforts agitating for new renter protections, organizers from throughout California are pushing to reform the Ellis Act in Sacramento.

Assemblymember Tom Ammiano has promised to introduce a proposal by the Feb. 21 deadline for submitting new legislation, and Sen. Mark Leno is working in tandem with San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee on a parallel track to pursue some legislative tweaks aimed at softening the blow from the Ellis Act.

“Our goal is to change the conversation in Sacramento, where tenants’ concerns are routinely ignored,” said Dean Preston, director of Tenants Together, a statewide organization based in San Francisco.

Those who didn’t speak English were given head sets so they could listen to each of the speakers comments, which were translated into either Spanish or Chinese. Guardian photo by Amanda Rhoades

On Feb. 18, busloads of protesters will caravan to Sacramento from San Francisco, Oakland, and Fresno for a rally. Preston said they’ve got three demands: reform the Ellis Act, restore a $191 million fund that provides financial assistance for low-income and senior renters, and pass Senate Bill 391, which would provide new funding for the construction of affordable housing.

Even though the law is technically intended to allow property owners to “go out of the business” of being a landlord, Ellis Act evictions in San Francisco are most often carried out by speculators who purchase real estate already occupied by tenants, Gullicksen said.

“Our focus is on the most immediate problem, which is the misuse of the Ellis Act by real estate speculators,” Preston said. “It’s urgent to address that specific use. That’s what Ammiano and Leno are looking at, is ‘what’s the best way to stop speculative use?'”

LOCAL POLICY CHANGES SOUGHT

Tyler McMillan of the Eviction Defense Collaborative said his group is often the last resort for tenants threatened with the loss of their rental units. “Too often, we face a losing fight at court,” he said. “We need to write better laws that work better to keep people in their homes.”

The legislative proposals moving forward at the local level seek to attack the problem of evictions and displacement from several angles. On Feb. 3, Sup. David Campos introduced legislation to require landlords who invoke the Ellis Act to pay a higher relocation fee to displaced tenants, equaling two years’ worth of the difference between the tenants’ rent and what would have been considered market rate for that same unit.

“It is time that we recognize that tenants must receive assistance that is commensurate with market increases in rent if we are to truly address our affordability crisis and check the rampant growth of Ellis Act evictions,” Campos said.

As things stand, relocation assistance payments are around $5,261 per tenant, and are capped at $15,783 per unit, with higher payments required for elderly or disabled tenants. But at current market rates, a tenant would not last more than a few months in the city relying solely on the relocation fee to cover rental payments.

Surveying the strong turnout at the tenant convention, Campos said, “There is a movement that’s happening in San Francisco to take our city back, and to make it affordable for all of us.” Yet he noted that he is concerned there will be major pushback from the San Francisco Apartment Association and the real estate industry, formidable interests that oppose the relocation fee increase.

Meanwhile, Sup. Mar has proposed an ordinance that would require the city to track the conversion of rental units to tenancies-in-common, a housing arrangement where multiple parties own shares of a building through a common mortgage. Speculators who buy up properties and immediately evict under the Ellis Act often angle for windfall profits by immediately converting those units to TICs.

Campos is also working on legislation that would regulate landlords’ practice of offering tenants a buyout in lieu of an eviction, a trend advocates say has resulted in far greater displacement than Ellis Act evictions without the same kind of public transparency.

Peter Cohen of the Council on Community Housing Organizations said there’s “no silver bullet” to remedy San Francisco’s affordable housing crisis. “This process is going to come up with another bundle of things,” he said. “All of that is also complimentary to the state campaign. You could have five, six, or seven policy measures going forward — and all of them winnable.”

An idea Cohen said has received traction is the idea of imposing an anti-speculation tax to discourage real estate brokers who abuse the Ellis Act by buying up properties and evicting all tenants soon thereafter (see “Seeking solutions,” for details).

During a breakout session at the tenant convention, longtime LGBT activist Cleve Jones piped up to say, “Harvey Milk proposed the anti-speculation tax back in 1979.”

It wasn’t successful at that time, but Cohen said that given the current level of concern about housing in San Francisco, it’s being talked about in some circles as the most winnable ballot initiative idea.

TENANTS FIGHTING BACK

At the Feb. 8 convention, tenants shared stories of challenging orders to vacate their rental properties. “The most important thing that has brought us to the victories we’ve had so far is that tenants have stayed in their homes,” Shortt said. “Tenants have fought, tenants have sought help, tenants have organized.”

Tenants from a North Beach building owned by real estate broker Urban Green shared their story of banding together and successfully challenging an Ellis Act eviction. Chandra Redack, a nine-year resident of 1049 Market St., where tenants continue battling with owners who submitted eviction notices last fall, described to the Bay Guardian how her small group of tenants has continued to organize in the face of ongoing pressure, including the owners’ recent refusal to accept rent checks.

“Our organizations only can support tenants when they stand up and fight,” said Fujioka. “The tenants’ resistance themselves is part of the strategy. If we don’t have rights, we are going to create them.”

Paula Tejeda, a longtime resident of the Mission District originally from Chile, told the Bay Guardian that she’d been threatened with an eviction from her home of 17 years, a Victorian flat on San Carlos Street.

“I thought I was dealing with an Ellis Act, now he’s trying his best for a buyout,” she explained.

Living in that rent-controlled unit made it financially feasible for her to contribute to the Mission community as a small business owner, as well as a poet, author, and active member of the arts community, she said. Tejeda is the proprietor of Chile Lindo, an empanada shop at 16th and Van Ness streets.

“Having the rent control made it possible for me to build Chile Lindo, go back to college and get my MBA,” she said. That in turn gave her the resources to employ one full-time and three part-time staff members, she said.

When she was initially faced with the prospect of moving out, “I wanted to shut down and leave, and go back to Chile,” she said. “We are suffocated, as a society that cares only about the bottom line.”

But surveying the hordes of tenants milling about at the convention, she seemed a bit more optimistic. “The fact that this is happening to everyone at the same time,” she reflected, “is kind of like a mixed blessing.”

Free lunch, had some vegan options. Guardian photo by Amanda Rhoades

Seeking solutions

A number of policy ideas emerged from the neighborhood tenant conventions, which were held by the San Francisco Anti Displacement Coalition in the Mission, Chinatown, Haight/Richmond, Castro, SoMa, and the Tenderloin.

Here’s a list of what tenants came up with at those forums, which attendees ranked in ballots collected at the event. The ideas will most likely result in a November ballot initiative and one or more legislative proposals, which organizers plan to announce in the near future.

Anti-speculation tax: One idea is to impose a tax on windfall profits garnered by speculators who buy up housing and then sell it off without maintaining ownership for at least six years. The tax would be structured in such a way that the quicker the “flip,” the higher the tax. This would require voter approval.

Eviction moratorium: This proposal is to put a yearlong freeze on certain kinds of “no-fault evictions,” instances where a tenant is ousted regardless of compliance with lease terms. State law would prohibit it from applying to Ellis Act evictions. It might potentially require voter approval.

Department of Rent Control Enforcement and Compliance: This new department, which could be done by local legislation, would create a new city department with the mission and mandate to enforce existing tenant-protection laws and conduct research on eviction trends.

Relocation assistance: While Sup. David Campos is working on legislation to upgrade relocation assistance payments to displaced tenants who face eviction under the Ellis Act, this proposal would do the same for all other forms of “no-fault” evictions. This would require voter approval.

“Excessive rents” tax: While the Costa-Hawkins state law does not allow for cities to control rents in vacant units, this proposal would create a tax on new rental agreements where rents exceed an affordability threshold.

Housing balance requirement: This proposal would make it so that approval of new market-rate housing would be restricted based on whether affordable housing goals were being met. It would create new incentives to build affordable.

Legalize illegal units: This would provide a way to legalize the city’s “illegal” housing units that nevertheless provide a safe and decent source of affordable housing. (Board President David Chiu has already introduced a version of this proposal.)

Granny slap

Michael Redmond

February 11, 2014

Lisa Gray-Garcia, aka “Tiny,” led a press conference outside the San Francisco Hall of Justice on Feb. 5 to announce that she and fellow activists were filing elder abuse charges against San Francisco landlords.

Flanked by activists and senior citizens who were facing eviction or had lost housing in San Francisco, the Poor News Network founder condemned landlords who’ve invoked the Ellis Act as “dangerous criminals.”

Gray-Garcia said criminal charges were being filed against the landlords in accordance with California Penal Code 368, which creates a special category for crimes — such as infliction of pain, injury, or endangerment — committed against elders and dependent adults.

The theory is that carrying out an Ellis Act eviction against a senior citizen qualifies as a criminal act under that law, since an elder can suffer physical harm as a result of being turned out of his or her home.

“Seniors who live in houses that they’ve lived in for a really long time are being evicted,” said Erin McElroy, who joined the rally. “That could mean homelessness, that could mean poverty, that could mean death, that could mean losing your access to health care.”

“The real criminals are the ones who use paper, and money, and lawyers to evict us,” Gray-Garcia said. “We at POOR Magazine get five to 10 calls a week from elders — 70, 80, 90 years old — at the point where they’re actually going to be evicted,” she added. “In the elder abuse law, if you willfully or unwillfully cause harm or inflict harm on a body of an elder, you actually can do one year jail time or pay a $6,000 fine.”

The targeted landlords were taken from a list compiled by the San Francisco Anti Eviction Mapping Project, a volunteer-led group that published names, property ownership, and identifying information of 12 landlords who had repeatedly invoked the Ellis Act in San Francisco. Garcia read out their names as part of the press event.

Beyond that, however, the announcement was short on specifics. Gray-Garcia told the Bay Guardian she did not want to share the names of the affected seniors because she did not feel comfortable exposing the elderly tenants to potential backlash.

Joining the group of activists was an 82-year-old woman who used a walker and declined to share her name. She told the Bay Guardian she had lived in her Richmond District flat for more than 30 years, and had recently received a verbal warning from her landlord that if she did not move out, he would invoke the Ellis Act.

When Gray-Garcia and others filed into the San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon’s office inside the Hall of Justice, however, Chief Assistant of Operations Sharon Woo discouraged them from filing the charges.

“We don’t actually initiate investigations,” Woo told the activists, but when attorney Anthony Prince, who had accompanied the activists, pushed back on that point, she responded, “We could, potentially.”

However, she urged them to first “go to the normal channels, which is a law enforcement investigation,” then scheduled a follow-up meeting at a later date to discuss the issue further. She discouraged the activists from bringing a large group to the meeting. “There’s a 98-year-old woman being forced out of her home in April and she has nowhere to go,” McElroy told Woo during that interaction. “And we’re filing criminal charges against the people who are forcing her out.”

Watch: Lia Rose’s “Trainwreck Tuesday”

Steven T. Jones

February 11, 2014

“You ever been in that place where you really want to be in love, deep down you know you deserve love, but some part of you manages to mess every good thing up?” That’s what SF indie-folk songstress Lia Rose says when asked what inspired the song “Trainwreck Tuesday.” (Answer: Duh.) “So, that’s where I was at when I wrote that song.”

Rose is one of those rare, lucky songwriters who can sing about dark places in a jaunty way without it seeming forced, thanks in no small part to the singularly sweet, lilting clarity of her voice — she always sounds like she’s been there, and she can report that it’s all going to be OK. Her live shows don’t disappoint, but you also kind of just wish she were your summer camp counselor that year you got poison oak.

In honor of Tuesday, which has been scientifically proven to be most miserable day of the week, check out her new video for the track, which was shot in her hometown of Long Beach, featuring Mike Wolf on the guitar and Kyle Caprista (the Joel Streeter Band, Megan Slankard, others) on the drums.

If you want to catch Rose’s next show, it’s a super-intimate March 6 living room gig that will be streamed online. Happy Tuesday, kids.

Sole-searching: get to know local shoe designers Freda Salvador

Sue Vaughan

February 11, 2014

Freda is mysterious and anonymous.

She walks the hills of San Francisco with purpose. Her style is classic, a bit androgynous, with flair for edginess. She’s always up for new adventures. She marches to the beat of her own drum. She’s fashion-forward but she values comfort, veering away from the misconception that beauty is pain. She loves rock ‘n’ roll. She’s a San Francisco chick through and through.

Freda Salvador is the creation of San Francisco residents Cristina Palomo-Nelson and Megan Papay. Combining their mutual obsession for Frida Kalho (“more like her badass persona than her folkloric art”) and Palomo-Nelson’s El Salvadorian origins, the duo created footwear brand Freda Salvador. They launched the company two years ago with the intention of bringing contemporary artisan shoes to Bay Area Fredas.

“We wanted to create a fictional character that’s bigger than us,” explains Palomo-Nelson in the company’s Union Street design studio and flagship store.

The Freda Salvador store is a combination of the pair’s personal styles: Palomo-Nelson sticks to the classics with an edge, wearing an oversized blazer, a simple white blouse, ripped jeans and the line’s popular black “Star” Jodhpur ankle boots. She comes from a shoe-making family in Central America; her studies in fashion and footwear design brought her to Milan and then San Francisco, where she’s lived for 13 years.

Her blonde counterpart, Papay, veers toward a simple bohemian look with paint-stained jeans, a boxy sweater, a chunky statement necklace, and her favorite “Roam” lace-up combat boots with studded welt. Papay hails from the East Coast, via Delaware, Virginia, and New York City, where she began her fashion career in celebrity styling for Calvin Klein, then at top fashion public relations firms. Her husband’s job moved her to San Francisco, where she began working at a comfort footwear company. The soft-spoken designers met there, working together for a year.

“The chemistry was really great,” says Papay. “Our desire to create the same aesthetic of shoe was there so we decided to do our own thing and launch Freda.”

With Palomo-Nelson’s background in footwear construction and Papay’s experience in fashion trends, the footwear brand has become a household name in the industry. Seen on the heels of fashion bloggers, in magazine editorials, and on fashion must-have lists, Freda shoes balance high fashion aesthetics with no-fuss comfort.

“A big source of our inspiration comes from men’s shoes,” says Palomo-Nelson. “Easy, classic, concentration on lines and materials.”

“And wearable details,” adds Papay. “In ladies’ fashion, the details are a little bit bizarre to the point where they’re not wearable or understandable. In men’s shoes the flair is always wearable because no boy is going to sacrifice anything for style.”

The designers prefer to stick to classic shapes like Jodhpur boots, oxfords, and loafers and incorporate some sort of edgy detail: removable bracelets and harnesses, mixed leathers, haircalf accents, and studded soles.

With San Francisco consumers in mind, the designs rely heavily on comfort. Each shoe is entirely made of leather with padded footbeds. “They’re made to be put on at 7 o’clock in the morning and taken off at 11 o’clock at night,” says Papay. “Our shoes are perfect for the city, walkable and urban.”

The beauty of the shoes also lies in the craftsmanship. Palomo-Nelson and Papay travel to Italy twice a year to pick out leathers for the next season. They then design the shoes in San Francisco based on trend watching and trips to New York Fashion Week. After that, they travel to Spain for production. The shoes are handmade in a small family-run factory in Elda, Spain.

“We truly are blessed. We live in one of the best cities in the world. We travel to New York for shows all the time and then Italy and Spain for our production,” says Palomo-Nelson.

The San Francisco flagship store is the company’s only retail location and doubles as the pair’s design studio. With wood paneling and staircase, the store mixes a rustic, comfort atmosphere with modern simplicity. The shoes are aligned on metal shelves and vintage bookcases in the first room. A small Dia de los Muertos-inspired shrine to Frida Khalo sits on a shelf in the corner. On the walls of the second room are framed old black and white photos. In the third room — the design studio — a giant mood board with color swatches, fashion editorials and a large painting of Frida Kahlo hangs above a large wooden table.

“It was in our five year plan,” says Palomo-Nelson about setting up a retail location. “But I think it’s the best thing we could have done. We really built a presence and a brand point with our physical location where people can experience not just the shoes but also the aesthetic of who we are and our designs.”

At the store, the designers will occasionally get phone calls asking for Freda. They also sell T-shirts with the question “Who is Freda Salvador” printed. But there is no answer: This mysterious woman was created so that women could build their own idea of Freda based on their personal style and inspirations.

“We’re like, ‘No, there actually is no Freda,’” says Papay. “But it’s good. It’s meant to be that way.”

Live Shots: Lucius sells out the Independent on a rainy Friday

Steven T. Jones

February 10, 2014

Live Shots: Lucius sells out the Independent on a rainy Friday

by Avi Vinocur

1:53am. Just got home.

Ok so listen. Tonight I saw this band at the Independent. Two girls. Super cute. All hip in matching red dresses. They sang together like they were related. Don’t think they were though.

The shorter one was totally flirting with the drummer. Bet they’re dating. Or worse: Married.

My buddy in New York has raved about them for years. And then I saw the Shook Twins cover their song at Cafe Du Nord a few months back. “This is a Lucius song,” they said. All of that means they must be legit, I thought. Definitely were. Holy schnikes the songs. Not to mention their guitar player crowdsurfed.

Apparently the girls in the band (Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig) met where most young confused musicians meet on the East Coast: Berklee in Boston. But then they fled the frigid northland for warm tropical Brooklyn, New York where they are now based. To give you an idea: they both stand facing each other in the middle of the stage, dwarfed and mirrored by their new but quickly iconic backdrop, playing a smattering of keyboards and tom drums. They have three dudes backing them up (Peter Lallish, Dan Molad and Andrew Burri) on two guitars and a strange but advanced kick-drumless drum set.

They encored the show by going in the middle of the crowd around one mic and singing two songs — like all singers should be able to do (but most can’t). “Two of Us on the Run” was a fantastic one. I’ll play that later tonight on the record I bought. Reminds me I need to move my record player from the living room into my bedroom. For that song.

The opening band was better than great. Seriously. They were called You Won’t. I bet they’ll headline this place in their own right in like three months. They came out in wigs dressed like Lucius. Brilliant. Who does stuff like that these days. A few songs in the singer goes, “You guys smell great…hint of lavender here, whiff of thyme there. I like a tidy cohort and San Francisco, you’ve really delivered.” Sold.

Raky Sastri and Josh Arnoudse are it. Just two guys. I could see them as supporting characters in a college movie with Tom Green. On stage, the pair aren’t beholden to specific instruments but they tend toward drums and a Telecaster respectively. But they also tickled and blew a harmonium, harmonica, and musical saw as well as other stuff I’ve never seen. They are self-described “Massholes,” which is both a testament to their sense of humor and a great way to figure out where they are from: Cambridge, Massachusetts.

They covered some familiar songs — “Two of Us” and also “Can’t Help Falling in Love” sung through some sort of car hose or pool toy. It was awesome. Their originals were the best part though. “Television” and “Who Knew” are on their record. And then they did some new stuff that I didn’t recognize from the album I legally downloaded. But I liked it all a lot.

Long story short, Lucius and You Won’t were both phenomenal, drew a sold-out crowd of outlandishly attractive girls, and are the reason I accidentally had a couple more beers than I planned to. Otherwise I’d be in bed by now, sad and songless.

I have work in the morning I think.

Advocates for higher minimum wage celebrate past success and look ahead

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

February 7, 2014

Advocates for higher minimum wage celebrate past success and look ahead

Balloons, snacks, cake, live music, an open wine bar and nearly 100 guests marked a Thu/6 celebration at the Women’s Building in San Francisco’s Mission district. You might never guess a party this fun would be held to celebrate the birthday of a city ordinance.

February marks the 10-year anniversary of San Francisco’s minimum wage ordinance, passed by voters in 2003 with Proposition L. The landmark initiative not only raised the minimum wage in San Francisco to $8.50 per hour, but stipulated that the amount would rise every year to reflect inflation. Thanks to Prop. L, San Francisco now boasts the highest minimum wage in the nation, at $10.74.

But being the nation’s highest still isn’t enough.

“Who thinks living in San Francisco is really expensive?” asked one of the event organizers and staff member of the Chinese Progressive Association, Shaw San Liu. All hands in the room shot up before the Spanish and Mandarin translators even had a chance to repeat the question.

Raising the minimum wage in San Francisco has been a hot topic recently, and Mayor Ed Lee even endorsed a significant increase back in December. The number that keeps floating around is $15 per hour, but nothing has been set in stone.

In addition to celebrating the 10-year anniversary of the minimum wage ordinance, Thursday’s event was also the official launch of the Campaign for a Fair Economy, a push to support the city’s lowest-paid workers and close the ever-growing wealth gap.

Raising the minimum wage is only part of the campaign, and advocates are also fighting for accountability from large chain businesses, stricter enforcement of existing labor standards, and expanding access to jobs for disadvantaged workers.

“San Francisco has led the way for employment policies in the past,” said Kung Feng, lead organizer for Jobs With Justice, a group that fights for workers’ rights. “We need to continue that.”

To say that San Francisco is leading the way is no understatement. In addition to having the highest minimum wage in the country, SF was also the first place in the U.S. to mandate paid sick leave, and the Health Care Security Ordinance works to guarantee medical benefits for all workers in the city.

Despite San Francisco’s long legacy of championing workers’ rights, there is still a tough battle ahead. Currently, minimum wage in the city automatically goes up every year to match inflation (on Jan. 1, 2014, it rose from $10.55 to $10.74). Any further increase requires voter approval.

While it seems a higher minimum wage does have strong support and has already been endorsed by major political figures, there’s still a powerful lobby against it from some businesses and restaurant associations. Despite the upcoming battle, advocates seemed optimistic.

“Who in here can tell me the significance of the Year of the Horse?” Liu of CPA asked the audience, referring to the ongoing Lunar New Year. A small woman sitting in the front row excitedly responded, “Maa dou gung sing!”

“Success comes in the horse year,” Liu explained. “And this will be a year of success and accomplishments for workers rights in San Francisco.”

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