Live Archives — Page 252 of 254 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

“Dance/Screen: Innovative International Dance Films”

May 16, 2006

PREVIEW Dance on film looks flat, distorted, and without nuances, right? Yes and no. In general, dance does not take kindly to the screen. Good enough for documenting or teaching, films simply don’t convey the effervescent presence of a live performance. But in some cases the medium goes beyond simply recording and actually partners with the choreography in a way that can be every bit as exciting as a live performance. As a genre, dance films are fairly new and, often, still don’t get no respect. Charlotte Shoemaker, who curates San Francisco Performances’ "Dance/Screen" series, is doing her best to change that perception. Every May she packs a collection of what she can find internationally into a one-evening program. This year that includes the 60-minute CounterPhrases, by Flemish filmmaker and composer Thierry de Mey, Anna Teresa de Keersmaker’s longtime collaborator. De Keersmaker is one of Europe’s most influential, rigorous, and imaginative choreographers, and CounterPhrases is based on 10 of her dances, each set to a different piece of contemporary music. The program also includes Miranda Pennell’s British homage to Wild West fights, Fisticuff, and Arcus, a short directed by Alla Kogan and Jeff Silva and choreographed by Nicola Hawkins. (Rita Felciano)

DANCE/SCREEN: INNOVATIVE INTERNATIONAL DANCE FILMS Tues/23, 7 p.m.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Screening Room, 701 Mission, SF

$7. (415) 392-2545, www.ybca.org

Free kitten?

May 16, 2006

› Kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Mother’s Day: the primo time to think about reasons why mom rules. So why did I spend it listening to Grandaddy’s new, possibly last album, Just Like the Fambly Cat (V2)? I also lost about four solid hours watching Amon Duul, MC5, and Scott Walker videos on YouTube and thinking back to my adolescent years, when my household chores fell by the wayside and dear ole mum would threaten to spirit away a sackful of our 20 or so semiferal "fambly" cats and kittens and abandon them by some desolate roadside pineapple cannery. Thanks, ma!

Really, Hallmark and the assorted commercial pressures that guilt you into shuffling to the post office with an annual tribute to motherhood bring out the absolute worst — namely, inappropriate memories — in me. Though that certain special someone never carried out those acts of probable feline-cide, it’s clear not all of us come psychologically, emotionally, and financially equipped to be parents — just as many of us were not well kitted out to be pet owners. We try: Glance through the approximately 17,000 cat videos on YouTube — John Lennon’s scant 415 refs are no match against the cuddly-wuddly, flea-bitten hordes. The majority are amateurish, dull, full of "aw-isn’t-she/he/it-cute — quick get it on the cameraphone" tumescent adoration.

Still, between the anticlimactic "Puppy vs. Cat" snippets, music fans can kill an entire Mother’s Day watching Magma serenade Catholic padres in some strange French B-movie or study a drowsy Velvet Underground supposedly writing "Sunday Morning" ("They all look so fucked up. Heroin is bad for you," comments one viewer) or check out the most viewed music-related vid that day (perhaps related to the new service that started last week allowing users to upload footage directly from a phone or PDA): a blurry, too-loud, obviously cellie-derived clip of Guns n’ Roses blasting out "Welcome to the Jungle" at NYC’s Hammerstein Ballroom on May 12.

How perfect then that I stumble across a few Grandaddy videos on my YouTube travels, including a slightly oogy bit showcasing, as its maker puts it, "a slug on a cucumber listening to Grandaddy." A comment on the lysergic lethargy embedded in the Modesto band’s tunes? Animals, or rather people in animal suits, operate as stand-ins for nature in the group’s shared videos, representing a star-crossed love for the junky delights of an infinitely disposable, shareable information culture, as well as the earthly attractions of the Central Cali natural world. I can totally relate, dudes.

Sluggish Grandaddy fans who can’t break away from waxing their own cucumbers will be pleased to know that Just Like the Fambly Cat is a suitably great, elegiac outro for the disbanding band (so says songwriter Jason Lytle). A pop symphony to that final solution to dissolution and aimlessness: death. If Grandaddy always seem to teeter betwixt stoner listlessness and slacker lack of focus, the threat of imminent nonexistence and looming loss has brought a sense of purpose, opening with a child’s repeated, lisping, "What happened to the fambly cat?" and closing with Lytle’s grandiose finale, "I’ll never return!" The act of recording melts into biography, as Lytle angrily mourns his broken engagement with all the infectious pop trappings ("Jeez Louise") and then gets lost in dusty, hermetic yet elegant reveries reminiscent of such peers as Air ("Oxygen/Auxsend"). There are, as Lytle sings, about "fifty percent less words" here, breaking from pop formulae, but the writing is more than up to providing the mental visuals for Fambly Cat‘s aural invocation of the last, sad days of summer.

Nonetheless, YouTube comes through with some Fambly Cat imagery, as Lytle has come out from behind the animal costume on a lo-fi video for the "single" "Where I’m Anymore." He bicycles down orchard and suburban lanes, bridging Modesto’s agri and aggro environs, as a papier-mâché cat head jumps into the frame for the slow-jamz chorus of lost-pussy meows. This shy number may have emerged after Margot and the Nuclear So and So’s similar catcentric number, but Grandaddy’s easy, sensuous paw tracks promise to stick with you longer, even after Lytle supposedly says good-bye to Modesto, a place tied tightly to another dubbed Grandaddy. After all, Magnet magazine recently reported that Lytle has sold his Modesto house and is moving to Montana, with no plans to perform Fambly Cat songs live ("If we go on tour, somebody’s gonna fucking die"). But perhaps this media-lavished long good-bye isn’t what it seems — and Grandaddy fans can dry their tears — because it appears Lytle will play those tunes after all, at Amoeba Saturday. Like a cat that always comes back, all may not be lost. SFBG

JASON LYTLE OF GRANDADDY

Sat/20, 6 p.m.

Amoeba Music, 1855 Haight, SF

Free

(415) 831-1200

Eviction battle continues

May 16, 2006

› sarah@sfbg.com

Back when the tsunami of condo conversions now rolling across San Francisco was but a ripple on the rental pool, local resident William Johnston didn’t know "the ins and outs of the Ellis Act."

"Now I have a Ph.D. in it," jokes Johnston, 70, about the legislation allowing landlords to get out of the rental market, which has been increasingly abused over the past decade by landlords wishing to sell their buildings in a scheme known as tenancy-in-common.

Under the TIC system, tenants share the same mortgage but live in their own unit, which they usually hope to convert to an individually owned condo. And it was a letter proposing a TIC in the 10-unit rent-controlled building where Johnston has lived for 33 years that finally got the feisty septuagenarian to start learning about the Ellis Act in detail.

"That letter scared the crap out of me," says Johnston, who was shocked when a real estate agent claimed that the one-bedroom unit, for which Johnston pays $512 a month, would fetch half a million dollars if it were converted into a condo … if only Johnston could pony up $90,000 for a down payment.

Johnston was relieved when none of his fellow tenants took his landlord’s TIC bait, but they’re all worried the landlord plans to put the building up for sale anyway. So he’s closely following the latest chapter in the Board of Supervisors’ effort to protect renters like him.

On May 9 the board gave an initial 7–3 approval to a measure that would prevent condo conversions in buildings where seniors, the disabled, the catastrophically ill, or multiple tenants have been evicted.

Three previous board efforts to help tenants have been vetoed by Mayor Gavin Newsom, so Sup. Aaron Peskin heeded input from the Mayor’s Office and amended the measure to move the cutoff date for considering evictions from Jan. 1, 1999, to May 1, 2005.

That change, and the fact that he’d been getting public pressure from renters, apparently won the support of Sup. Bevan Dufty, who had voted to uphold Newsom’s vetoes of the previous renter measures. But with Sup. Ross Mirkarimi forced to abstain because he owns a TIC, the board is still left one vote shy of being able to override a veto.

The date change could affect renters like Debra Hutzer, who is disabled by thyroid problems and whose eviction papers were filed January 2005, forcing her to move on May 13, 2006, from the rent-controlled apartment on Church Street where she’s lived for 19 years to a place where she’s already paying $250 more a month.

"It’s been very disconcerting," says Hutzer of the eviction, which one of her neighbors, Carole Fanning, may now fight. Fanning is also supposed to leave, but she’s now hired an attorney to fight for "a stay of execution" that would allow her to remain in her rent-controlled unit.

"It’s possible, since seniors, disabled, and the catastrophically ill have one year from the date their eviction notice was served, that some may yet be able to convince landlords not to proceed," Peskin board aide David Owen told us.

As for the watering down of Peskin’s original measure, Ted Gullicksen of the San Francisco Tenants Union says the alternative was to put a version backdated to November 2004 on the November ballot — a strategy that would have involved taking risks on an initiative that, even if it had passed, wouldn’t have gone into law until January 2007.

"Instead we have a measure that’s acceptable and has passed its first reading, which means tenants should be protected in another week," Gullicksen says. Peskin’s other amendment allows buildings with multiple evictions — but not those involving the elderly or disabled — to be eligible for condo conversions after 10 years. "This means those buildings get taken off the speculative real estate market," Gullicksen adds. SFBG

NOISE: Have another slab of John Vanderslice

May 11, 2006

Duncan Scott Davidson interviewed Tiny Telephone honcho and Barsuk artist John Vanderslice for a piece in the May 3 issue of the Guardian. Here’s more from his interview with the SF singer-songwriter, who performs tonight, May 12, at the Independent.

Bright lights, big city, and Mr. Vanderslice.

On running Tiny Telephone, during an interview at the studio sometime in January

John Vanderslice: Basically, I keep my rates under market, so [the engineers] are always busy. I kind of use that leverage with them to have them be undermarket, too. So we’re affordable enough for a band. Every band has access to computers now, so you have to be. My whole goal was just to be sold out all the time. My business model was to, without question, have a waitlist every month. You have a client base where, if someone drops a day, it doesn’t matter. We just send out one e-mail to another band that’s on the list, you know what I mean? We’d just rather be generating 30 days of income at a much lower price.

When I started the studio, the reason I did it is that, another studio that we loved that we were working at, Dancing Dog in Oakland, closed. So we toured all the other studios, and they all had these sliding rates. It’s all bullshit. The typical studio business model is retarded. You know what it reminds me of, is the airline kind of model of wildly sliding rates based on the desperation of the client, you know?

[Vanderslice talks about JT Leroy at length before realizing he’s strayed off topic.]

JV: I don’t care if we talk about the studio at all. I mean, this has been central to my life for maybe the past eight and a half years and it’s starting to be an organism. It’s like a child, and all the sudden this kid is like a 12, 13 years old and I can now leave the house and not get a babysitter.

BG: Are you afraid you might come back and find the flowerpot broken, Brady Bunch style?

JV: Or I might come back and the kid’s huffing paint or something? There are things that happen when I’m not paying attention in the studio, but the crew down here…

BG: Do bands get loaded up in here? I mean, not like…in a bad, non-professional, non-rock ‘n’ roll way…

JV: I would say the insight I have into working bands is fascinating. I would say that the more successful the band is, both creatively and financially, the more they’re like an office. There’s laptops, wireless. There’s like organic Columbia Gorge lemonade, and there’s no alcohol. The more it’s like a weekend-warrior project, the more it’s a band that’s frustrated or trying to generate energy like they’re having a career, the more there’s cocaine and pot and alcohol.

BG: Yeah! We’re fuckin’ it up!

JV: “We’re gettin’ it goin’!” Sometimes it’ll be 4 p.m., and they’ll be kind of a little bit out of control. And what you want to say is, “You’re, like, at a construction site right now. You should be really mindful.”

BG: Well, they’re fucking paying $400 a day.

JV: They’re paying $600 dollars a day. Plus the tape.

BG: And if they want to fuck it off, more power to ‘em.

JV: The thing is you want to remind them, “Dude, you’re going to be in here for 12, 14 hours.” Tons of bands come in here and make a record in three or four days. Some bands are so efficient in the studio, it’s like a marvel. I’m not nearly as efficient. I don’t necessarily have to be as efficient, but it is expensive for me to book time in here. Like everybody else, when I book time in here, because it’s sold out all the time, it costs me $400 a day. I pay engineers what they charge. I pay rates to engineers.

What studios try to do is they try to be booked between 10 and 15 days a month, and they try to charge a fucking shitload of money. And what they do is that they have a lot of open days that are those days…because people call all the time, “Hey, are you open tomorrow? Are you open next week?” They’re always the worst clients. The least prepared, they always have a problem. They always have a story. Like, they tried to save money in some other studio, and they went there and it was fucked up.

The kind of clients I like — we’ll get a band that calls us up, like when we did Transatlanticism here, Death Cab called us like seven months before the dates and they’re like, “We want May 1 to June 20.” Those days never moved. It was like, booked. The deposit was in. Then seven months later, they show up, make a record, and leave. And not one day was ever shifted. The bands that are like that, those are the bands you want to have in your studio.

And there’s tons of bands that are not really… they’re making music for themselves or to put on their Myspace page, but they’re just as deliberate and they’re just as farsighted. That’s how this studio runs smoothly. I’ve cleared out a lot of the time for those bands.

BG: Any band that you thought was just totally not getting it and selling millions. Not the fact that they were selling, but that they were lame. Would you not record them?

JV: No. I think that we’re like a hospital. We’re like a responsible hospital with good gear that can only meet the patient in the middle somewhere. Like if you come in here and you’re a meth addict and you’ve been working the street for 15 years, we can only help you up to a point. But if you’re a healthy person and you need a heart operation, well, we have great equipment, right? We have good doctors. They’re not going to cut you open and leave shit in your body. We have sterile equipment. I tell engineers this metaphor and they’re like, “Dude, whatever. You’re overthinking.” But I really do think there’s something here. You know, we can’t save anyone’s life, all we can do is kind of not make mistakes. And also not provide gear that’s either dangerous or is out of date or is poorly maintained, poorly calibrated…

BG: You’re like a halfway house.

JV: Yeah. I’m a halfway house. Or a restaurant. Or a dry cleaners. The things that excite me are when we get things out of genre. When someone comes in and they say, “I’m going to make a 40-minute concept record that’s based on a sea shanty that’s about being on a whaling ship.”

BG: With their bouzouki.

JV: Yeah, with their bouzouki. And they get on ladders, and they have pails of water—I’m not kidding you, they do — and they do a concept album. And there’s no electric guitars, there’s all these weird instruments, it’s very obtuse, and it’s interesting. It’s anti-genre. It’s anti-rock ‘n’ roll. That’s fascinating to me.

Guitars or no guitars?

BG: When you saw the dude’s bouzouki, you said, “Anything but an electric guitar excites me.” You have old guitar amps…

JV: I love guitars.

BG: And you play guitar…

JV: I love guitars.

BG: Was guitar your first instrument?

JV: I love guitar. It’s just that, the thing is, it’s like, when you’re building a house, a guitar is like a hammer. It’s very useful. But if you’re putting in windows, there are other things that need to be there to balance out. There’s some sonic space that is not available when electric guitars are everywhere.

BG: In your own records, the last three, you seem to be going away from guitars.

JV: Yeah, going away from guitars, but the interesting thing is, the other day, I was thinking, “You know what? The next record, I need to make a guitar record.” Maybe it is because I’m collecting all these amps. And I do love guitar, but I think that for me, it’s more likely that I will deconstruct music when I see people stepping back from rock ‘n’ roll, you know, strictures, if guitars are not part of the equation. And they’re forced to build up melodic elements with keyboards, with rhythmic instruments, with strings, horns — things that are outside of the realm. I was listening to Otis Redding on the way over here. There’s some guitar in that. There’s a lot of other things going on in that. There are background voices used as harmonic, you know, shifting agents — things that pull you from key to key, that bring you into the bridge, that provide counterpoint to the vocal melody and the horns.

[JV starts to talk about the tug between digital and analog technology.]

On one side I do think that the Internet is the best thing that’s ever happened. Also, I live on the internet. Like, I’m surfing all the time. This studio was put together by the information I learned on the Internet. Most of my communication is through e-mail. The Web site is a very important part of my creative output. You know there’s like a thousand photos on the site? There’s tons of music that’s never been pressed that’s on the site. Tour diaries. That’s very important to me.

But, on the other side, the craft of making albums: I’m a purist. I’m an old, hard core recording purist. And the standards, and the quality of recording have been in a freefall since… Listen, the good and bad thing about consumer audio is that everyone can afford it and everyone can own it. I think that’s great. I think that’s actually better than the downside. The downside is that the quality of everything goes downhill. I don’t gripe about other people’s recording because I think that, if you’re going to complain, the proof is in the pudding: What the fuck are you doing? Sometimes people come up to me and they’re like, “I like this album, but I don’t like this album.” I don’t say anything, but I want to say, like, “Dude, I don’t care either way. Make your own record.” It doesn’t matter to me whether you like my record or you don’t like my record, and it’s OK either way. But the thing is, you need to make your own shit regardless of whether you like something or don’t like it.

BG: There’s the analog/digital tension, but it seems like you do stuff with analog that’s sort of like a sampling, a deconstruction, like you take a digital technique and analog-ize it.

JV: Absolutely. Well, I have been heavily influenced in the way that certain people make records. The Books. Four Tet. Radiohead is probably the most influential band for me of the past five or six years. I mean, I’m totally obsessed with Radiohead. Everything that they’ve done, really from OK Computer to Hail to the Thief. I think Hail to the Thief is one of my favorite records of all time. It kind of actually flew under the radar, but from an idea point of view: You can hear the process of six smart people in a room thinking about music. It’s fascinating on that level.

All things being equal, A and B, analog sounds so much better to me than digital. And it’s not that I’m just some Luddite in the studio. We have Pro Tools HD in here every other day. We have installed a Pro Tools rig, we have Radar, we have Sonic Solutions, we have every high end converter in here all the time. To me it sounds awful. Still. And I advise people all the time, like, “Listen, we’ll make more money off you if you record digitally. That’s all there is to it. You’ll take longer — even though you think it’s faster. You’ll edit everything, you’ll obsess.

I don’t care about the editing. It’s not the “cheating” thing that bugs me. Scott and I will be recording and flying back tapes on the reel — Scott Solter’s my engineer — and like, we’ll think, “God, if we could only just do this on a hard drive.” We don’t like to do things by hand — it’s just that they sound so much better. It’s like a hand-fashioned piece of furniture versus something that comes out of a machine. We can’t get the detail, the nuance, the taper, the finish right unless we do it by hand.

BG: And the whole digital thing just seems like a cultural, reactionary…you know, “it’s newer, it’s faster, it’s easier.” And I think artists seem to overestimate that. It’s like when microwave ovens came out, and everyone’s like, “You can cook a Thanksgiving dinner in it!” And a year later they were like, “You can heat coffee in it.”

JV: Yeah. Unlike the hospital metaphor, which is like a cart that has one wheel on it, the microwave metaphor’s perfect. It’d be better if I just didn’t tell bands anything. Use whatever format you want. But what I always tell bands is, “Listen. A good analog tape deck, properly calibrated, is like a fucking Viking stove, or a wood oven at Chez Panisse, where they put in the pizzas and the crostini or whatever, and your Pro Tools system—and believe me, I’m telling you this because I own the system. I paid a lot of money for it. People when they buy gear, their ears turn off. Because they don’t want the truth, you know what I mean? It’s like a fucking microwave! That’s all there is to it. It’s faster…

BG: A big, fancy microwave.

JV: Yeah, it’s a really fancy microwave with 50,000 adjustments. “Bread Crustener,” you know what I mean? It’s worthless.

[JV focuses on conspiracy theories and politics.]

JV: The stuff that interests me is Iran-Contra, Total Information Awareness. I’m much more into ground level, you know, stuff that’s happening right now. What did we do in Columbia? You know, what are we doing with the FARC? You know, why are we there?

I’m fascinated by politics. I’m interested in the most mundane things. Like, for instance, we found Saddam Hussein in a foxhole. One of the Marines on that team comes out a couple months later and says, “Listen, we fuckin’ found him in a house. We put him in that thing, covered it, got the film crews there…” That’s where I’m interested in. I’m interested in Guantanamo.

In other words, I’m interested in mainstream stuff. It’s not Area 51.

Later, John Vanderslice meets for another interview at Martha and Bros. on 24th Street.

BG: Do you realize that whatever you say is going to be completely overruled by Enya, or whatever is going on there.

JV: Should we check to make sure it’s not too loud? I can have them turn it down.

D: You’ve got that kind of pull?

JV: Oh yeah. I used to live down the street. I’ve been here, like, 9,000 times.

[JV asks them to turn it down, saying, “I really appreciate it. That’s great. Thank you.” Then he talks about coffee and tea.]

JV: Well, for me, I’m a tea guy. I actually drink coffee every two weeks. For me, the cleanest way to get caffeine is through really thick black tea.

BG: I get stomach aches from that.

JV: I know, you have to get used to it. It’s like hash or pot. It’s just different. You how you’re like, “Well, pot is kind of superior,” you know?

BG: Are you a big pothead?

JV: No. I don’t do any drugs. I barely drink. I mean, I like the idea of doing drugs. I have no moral quandary with drugs whatsoever. It’s impossible… because of singing…

[Coffee grinding noise.]

BG: Can you tell them not to grind any coffee?

JV: Yeah, totally. I’ll just unplug…no, I’ll trip the breaker. Singers get neurotic for a reason. I used to look at other singers and think, “Wow,” you know? Like, you’d read an interview with someone, and they would have these rituals. They’d have like steam machines or all these bizarre contraptions I thought totally unnecessary. But the thing is, the more shows you play, the more volatile your livelihood is. You’re tied to your health and your body. You know, anything that messes with my mojo. Alcohol. Never drink alcohol on tour. Never.

BG: You don’t drink it to “take the edge off” or whatever?

JV: I wish I could. But alcohol for me, it does something to my vocal chords that — I lose a little bit of control. I lose some resonance in my voice. So I never drink alcohol on tour. And then, there are times when you’re at the Mercury in New York and they give you 25 drink tickets and they’re like, “You can have whatever you want.” They’ve got all these single malts. I’m totally into single malt scotch. If they’ve got some weird shit I’ve never heard about, I want to drink it. So yeah, it’s a bummer, definitely.

BG: Do you do it after the set?

JV: I never drink after. It affects my voice the next day. Alcohol dries out your vocal chords. Like, if you put rubbing alcohol on your hand, you’ll immediately feel what it does to your skin.

BG: It dehydrates you.

JV: It dehydrates you, but because you’re passing it over your vocal chords, you’re a little bit more susceptible. Also cigarette smoke. It’s a problem.

Spy vs. spy

BG: What about this domestic spying bit? That sounds like a Vanderslice song.

JV: Yeah, that’s a hard one. I haven’t really felt the need to write about Total Information Awareness, yet.

BG: What’s Total Information Awareness? Is that the NSA’s acronym or something?

JV: That was the program that John Poindexter, from Iran Contra, was in charge of. It was like, basically, “we’re going to data-mine everything.” Of course, all the civil-libertarians on both sides of the fence go crazy when that stuff’s happening. Did you see the paper today? Grover Norquist, the anti-tax guy, basically the guy who spearheaded the repeal of Proposition 13 in California — the anti-tax California guy — is coming out now saying that he’s totally opposed to data mining. This is a hardcore, right wing constituency that Bush has tapped for a long time, and this guy is now coming after him.

BG: Well, now it’s without a warrant.

JV: Yeah. And that presses all their buttons, you know? That, hardcore, right wing, civil libertarian branch, which is fine with me. It’s great.

BG: OK, here it is. This is kind of random. “I’d harbored hope that the intelligence that once inhabited novels or films would ingest rock. I was, perhaps, wrong.” That’s Lou Reed. You seem to have a novelistic…

JV: There’s a lot of great lyricists working in music. I mean, you could look at the new Destroyer record. You could look at The Sunset Tree. You could look the new Silver Jews record. I mean, there are a lot of very literate, very verbally adept and complex albums coming out. I’ve spent a lot of time with those records. I think they’re rich, and interesting, and well-written enough to stand up on their own from a language point of view.

And you get into hip-hop — all the verbal inventions, most of it is in hip-hop. It’s not necessarily in indie rock.

There’s a lot of people operating on different levels. You could say, there’s a lot of arty stuff, purely political — Immortal Technique. He’s the farthest thing from a gangsta that you could get. Or MF Doom. Murs. There’s a lot of these guys that are super arty. Any Def Jux things or Anticon stuff, all that stuff is far away from “thug life.”

BG: Do you listen to a lot of hip-hop?

JV: Yeah. Like tons. The other thing is, you can even see people like 50 Cent or the Game on a different level. I think that when you understand that there’s a coded humor that’s going on in hip-hop. Like when 50 Cent says, “We drive around town with guns the size of Lil’ Bow Wow,” now, is that a threat, or is that a joke? I’m sorry, I laugh when I hear that. There’s so much humor in 50 Cent. C’mon, he lives in a $20 million dollar mansion in Connecticut. There’s a comedy side of the stuff.

And then there’s other mainstream people like Nas. Incredible lyricist, very complicated. He’s like a sentimentalist. I wouldn’t even say he’s a thug. He’s just always writing about memory. He’s so sentimental.

[I hip JV to Andre Nickatina.]

BG: The latest album [Pixel Revolt] is more straightforward. Before, you’ve done cut and paste stuff. It’s more linear. I mean, if you’re talking about hip-hop, there’s sampling. What do you think about that?

JV: Well, it’s hard for me. At some moments I would agree with you that the record is more linear. I mean, you’re saying that the new album is more linear, maybe orchesterally more simple, and more placid, more patient. But we’re doing remixes right now — Scott Solter is remixing the records. And we’re going in and listening to individual tracks.

It doesn’t seem that way to me, for better or for worse. It seems like there’s a lot of textures and a lot of very understated stuff that’s more complicated than on other records. There’s a brute force element that’s missing from that record on purpose. A couple weeks ago, before we started doing the remixes, I would’ve agreed with you, but now when I go back and I hear all these individual tracks, and I hear the textures that are underneath the vocals and some of the main harmonic instruments, to me there’s a lot of cross-rhythms. There’s a lot of harmonic shifts. There’s a lot of dissonance. It’s maybe more varied. It’s more of a relief. Like, Cellar Door has a lot of distortion, has a lot of compression, it’s all forward. Those impulses I have to over-orchestrate, and to, you know, over overdub, have been buried, but they’re still there.

BG: Why the remixes? You did a remix of Cellar Door.

JV: Yeah, called MGM Endings. One reason is that I put it out myself. I can sell them and make money off of them.

BG: You would love Nickatina. Basically, his big underground album that you can’t find is Cocaine Raps Vol. I. There’s this big thing about comparing selling tapes out of the trunk to selling coke.

[Talk turns to Tom Waits, recording at Prairie Sun, and then vocal chord damage and those who have used it in their music.]

BG: Being drawn to that Radiohead thing: You don’t use effects on your voice. Your sound guy doesn’t flip a lot of…

JV: And on records, I have these militant rules about what we can and can’t do as far as using effects. My rule for a long time has been, if we want an effect on an instrument, we have to record it that way. It’s all analog, we don’t use digital recording whatsoever.

[Death Cab for Cutie’s Grammy nomination is discussed and JV mentions that he was part of the committee that chose nominees for Best Engineered Album.]

JV: I was part of a group of people that met in the Bay Area. There were four of us that met at the Plant, and we voted on, for the National Committee, who we thought should be moved into the five spots, right? Then you can vote, as a Grammy member, you can vote on the next round. So basically we were like, pre-voting for the pool of five albums.

It’s interesting, because you have a lot of good albums that are in the pool. The pool is pretty huge. I mean that year there was some very good classical stuff, some really good jazz stuff, Elvis Costello…

BG: That’s apples and oranges.

JV: It’s retarded. What is this, a race? I did it because, when I got invited, I was kind of like, “Wow.” I was honored to be even — to even sit in a room with engineers that I really liked and get to talk about albums was fantastic for me. But, after the process, I thought, this is polluted.

BG: The engineering standards, or what you’re going for, your aesthetics, are totally different.

JV: And people in the room are pretty savvy. They have mixed feelings about the process. So they weren’t all gung ho, pro-Grammy, but I think that they felt that if they weren’t involved, then there would be decisions made… They wanted to be part of the decisions made to push good-sounding records up to the next level.

Tweaking in the studio

BG: Okay, so you’re interested in fucking around with your voice, as long as it fits into the rules of doing it live.

JV: I like using the analog instruments of the studio, meaning analog compressors and mic pre’s and effects as instruments. The great thing for me is, when you start combining all these things — the keyboard into some mic pre you found in a pawn shop into some weird compressor into delay. You get some almost unknowable reaction between these pieces of gear that were made in different decades, for different reasons, for different specs, for the BBC or for an airline company. And chasing down that kind of shit is fascinating for me. That’s part of the reason why I got into the craft of recording.

BG: Back to the studio—you’re annoying people, plugging in all these different things…

JV: It goes beyond that. To me, there is no sacredness to me of someone’s performance. People come in and spend a day recording something and then we erase it immediately. With them right there, like, “none of this is working, we’re going to erase it and move on.” I do it to myself all the time. I erase my own performances all the time. It’s not a feel-good session. You have to have a flamethrower mentality when you’re making records.

BG: So with Spoon and Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle…

JV: Well, those are different. You have to be more conservative working with other bands. It’s not appropriate. John’s singing a song about avoiding family trauma by playing his stereo loud and listening to dance music. It’s a beautiful narrative; it’s a wonderful song. It’s not necessary that you play a vibraphone through an old Federal military tape rack.

BG: The Spoon album’s sort of a deconstructed album.

JV: I would say that they’re more appropriate…

BG: Everyone’s recorded at Tiny Telephone, but you’ve only recorded a couple of people yourself. Like for instance, Steve Albini, another analog master, sought after everywhere. Everyone goes to him to get the “Albini sound” — they want it recorded like that, in that studio, sounding like that. And then, half the time, people come away with, “Well, he’s a dogmatic asshole. That’s not how we wanted it to sound.” But they did want it to sound like that.

JV: Well, the engineer in the equation is Scott Solter. He’s the guy I always work with. I mean, Albini’s a recordist. Albini is not there to become editorially involved with production decisions or with performance decisions. He is there simply as a recordist. In many ways, he’s an old school engineer. And once you understand that philosophy, you shouldn’t have any beefs with it, or you’re in the wrong place. You should understand that he’s going to set up microphones that he likes and understands, in a room that he likes and understands, and use gear that he thinks accurately describes what’s happening from a sonic perspective, and that’s it. That’s his end of the bargain.

BG: Well, there’s always the “the drums are too loud; the vocals are too low.” I love his records…

JV: I think he’s a total genius. I think you could listen to Rallying the Dominoes, the Danielson Family record, and well, you couldn’t necessarily say anything about the balance of that record compared to like, Jesus Lizard. It’s a totally different recording. He may perceive that, you know, the drums are loud in the Jesus Lizard, so they should be placed loudly in the mix. Because that’s what’s happening to them when you play in a room, you know?

But the thing is, Scott and I work tag team. Tiny Telephone is very separate from us working as a team in production and engineering, because the only people that I’ve ever worked with has been Spoon, and I was relatively a small part of that new Spoon record. Like basically, I recorded with them for eight days. They probably spent 60 days on that record. So I would imagine that they had a lot of other decision makers, you know, Mike McCarthy. Jim Eno, the drummer, is a great engineer in his own right. The Darnielle stuff is different because I feel that I understand where he’s coming from and where he wants to go in the studio and I can translate his narratives into a different setting from him sitting in front of his Sony boombox, you know, six inches away.

BG: Going back to the whole thing about rock as literature. I think Cellar Door sort of plays itself out like that, even though they’re not necessarily the same characters. It’s very novelistic. Most rock bands are very first person. Do you get a lot of misunderstanding on that?

JV: Oh, yeah. Someone asked me about my two sons the other day. I mean, yes, people either infer that I’m almost unglued psychologically or they infer that I’ve had a family history and a romantic history that’s really dangerous and fucked up.

BG: John Darnielle has a lot of that stuff, right? But he still does a lot of fictional stuff.

JV: He does a lot of fictional stuff. I think he does more fictional stuff that people realize. He lives in a nice house. He has a wonderful wife. Now, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have demons the size of Detroit in his brain.

BG: I think he does. “I dreamt of a house / Haunted by all you tweakers with your hands out.” I love that line.

JV: Dude, I played with the Mountain Goats. I did a West Coast and an East Coast tour, and I sang that song with John every night. That’s probably one of my top three songs of all time.

BG: With your stuff, though, how much of it is…? I might be totally wrong on this, but you can tell with a song like “Speed Lab.”

JV: But “Speed Lab” is a metaphor for starting a band or starting a studio, and having those things implode. So “Speed Lab” is, while it’s not about a speed lab, a meth lab…

First off, I have a great sympathy toward a lot of different people. I have sympathy for people who work in methamphetamine labs. I’m sure there’s a lot of people who work in meth labs, they might have been backed into it, it might be a family business. Who knows? And, to me, you know…[sings] “Recording Studio, brr nanna nanna…” You know what I mean? Speed lab…let’s put a finer point on it. What’s interesting about writing about stuff is that you sharpen the blade, that you exaggerate, that you explode personal experience. And become so super egocentric that every slight becomes this great, damning. Listen, if you really write down Morrissey’s gripes on a piece of paper. OK: “Lonely, sad…”

BG: “Horny.”

JV: Yeah, “horny.” Maybe, yeah—“would die in a car wreck.” That’s not the beauty of writing. Like “Up Above the Sea” on Cellar Door. That song, I mean, do I really have a bluebird that haunts me? But is it about depression? Maybe. Is it about Saddam Hussein? Maybe.

BG: Do you think that you’re constantly looking to metaphor-ize your own experience?

JV: Yeah, definitely. Because, part of it is that it’s an allegory. I feel saner. I feel more human and I feel more normal and more cope with stuff if I write music. So evidently, this is very important that I translate something that’s going on up here onto the page. But my own aesthetics dictate that narrative is interesting or it’s egregious.

BG: Some people are naturally diarists. Andre Gide, Jim Carroll…that’s what they’re known for. Do you think that there’s something in you that’s naturally, in music writing? That’s a fictionalist?

JV: Yeah. Absolutely. I would’ve been comfortable if I’d had the skills to be a novelist. And I would’ve been comfortable if I’d had the connections and the wherewithal to do it all again, to be in movies. What I’d really like to do is make movies. I mean, I would never do it. I think people who switch crafts, I mean — good luck. It would take me 20 years to figure out cameras. I would like to be a cinematographer.

BG: Do you ever write?

JV: I stopped. I did a couple of interviews for DIW, I interviewed Grandaddy, I did a Radiohead Hail to the Thief review, I did an article about Pro Tools, and that was it. I was like, “Man, it takes so much. Writing is hard.” It took me forever to edit myself, to finish a piece. I’m very wary of anything that takes me away from writing music. It really is hard enough. Touring is, like, you put walls up.

BG: Do you do a lot of in-stores and stuff like that?

JV: I came up with this idea that on the day Pixel Revolt came out, that I was going to play a bunch of free shows around the country. And that it was all going to be non-transactional, all ages. Doesn’t matter where it was. Acoustic guitar and voice, that’s all it was going to be. And it could be anywhere. So I played in, like, a bake sale. I played tons of record stores. I played an art gallery. A house party. I played a backyard. I played tons of on-airs. Between the shows, I probably played 35 times that month. And they were all open free shows.

I was able to rent a car, drive from place to place, and just show up with a guitar and play. We would have contests. Like I played at Amoeba in LA, and I invited everyone at the show to bowling that night. We had enough people for seven lanes of bowling. So then we have this contest: Whatever lane had the highest score would get into my next show for free.

Anything that’s like, getting out of a dark club with a bunch of graffiti. That’s fine, but when you do that every fucking night. It’s like, anything to get you away from that is great.

Dishin

May 9, 2006

For a complete schedule of the 10th annual Mission Creek Music and Arts Festival shows and events (May 14–22), go to www.mcmf.org. Check Noise, the Guardian‘s music blog, at www.sfbg.com/blogs/music, for more Mission Creek festival coverage.

Ane Brun

This Scandinavian neofolkie — it’s probably safe to say — is the only musician at Mission Creek who’s also had the pleasure of performing alongside Annie Lennox. Fittingly, sweet dreams are indeed made of the beautifully understated hymns on her putf8um-selling (overseas, at least) second album, A Temporary Dive (DetErMine/V2). The recording radiates so much warmth that even its bleakest lyrics — e.g., "I’m crawling on your floor, vomiting and defeated" — can’t help but sound strangely comforting. With Volunteer Pioneer, Tingsek, Ben and Barbara, and Fiji Mermaid. Sun/14, 8 p.m., Argus Lounge, 3187 Mission, SF. Call for price. (415) 824-1447 (Jimmy Draper)

Cloud Cult

Cult leader Craig Minowa suffered the loss of his two-year-old son in 2002 and has since used the tragedy to become an obsessively prolific writer and eco-activist. Hailing from Minneapolis, Cloud Cult offers a tie-dyed indie with the slightest hint of trip-hop and includes multimedia, such as live painters, as part of its stage show. With Hijack the Disco, Ebb and Flow, and Radius. Tues/16, 8 p.m. Make-Out Room, 3225 22^nd St., SF. $8–$10. (415) 647-2888 (Izquierdo)

Edmund Welles Bass Clarinet Quartet

The bass clarinet is the granddaddy of all woodwinds, with a deep, warm tone and a punch, if used the right way. No one does it better than "the world’s only composing group of four bass clarinets." This foursome tackles Radiohead’s "Creep," original compositions with a metal sensibility, and even the Knight Rider theme with skill, humor, and a taste for the experimental. Tues/16, 9 p.m. 12 Galaxies, 2565 Mission, SF. $6. (415) 970-9777 (Eliana Fiore)

Ettrick

With 6/6/06 so rapidly approaching, it’s comforting to know that we’ve got hell’s house band right here in our own city. Enter Ettrick, a sax and drums duo that offers up a bludgeoning amalgam of black metal and skronk sure to summon the apocalypse. Jacob Felix Huele and Jay Korber rotate instruments to create an excruciating free jazz that feels like being trapped in a metal shed during a thunderstorm. Noise fans have no business missing this show. With Moe! Staiano, Tussle, Jackie O-Motherfucker, and Weasel Walter Quartet. May 20, 8 p.m., The Lab, 2948 16^th St., SF. Call for price. (415) 864-8855 (Kate Izquierdo)

Hello Fever

The LA gothic garage-rock trio shows us how good an unholy alliance between Blonde Redhead and Joy Division can sound. Comb your hair over your eyes, stare at your shoes, and think very angry thoughts — this is the soundtrack to your angst. With Hey Willpower, Anna Oxygen, and Flaming Fire. May 17, 9 p.m. 12 Galaxies, 2565 Mission, SF. $8–$10. (415) 970-9777 (Izquierdo)

Joules

Technical without being contrived, and lush without being wimps, this Seattle post-math trio takes unduutf8g guitars and peppers them with beats of varying persuasions. Check out Joules’s MySpace page for "Hole Ole," a flamenco send-up with hand claps that morphs into a crashing sonic expedition. With Crime in Choir, Modular Se, and Madelia. Tues/16, 8 p.m. Knockout, 3223 Mission, SF. Call for price. (415) 550-6994 (Izquierdo)

Sunburned Hand of the Man

The band jams folk-drone psychedelia without all the hippie baggage — awesome! For almost a decade this Boston collective of improvisers has cut its teeth in the experimental-noise circle on distortion-charged blowouts, backbiting electronics, and tribal-chanting powwows. With the Alps, the Cheapest and Best, and Effi Briest. Tues/16, 9:30 p.m. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. $8. (415) 923-0923 (Sabbath)

Vincent Gallo

Actor, musician, and painter extraordinaire Vincent Gallo is no stranger to controversy. After the online sperm auctions and the fire-eater scene with a certain deep-throater, it should come as to no surprise that the Republican-happy, onetime break-dancing b-boy and ex–Calvin Klein model is the talk of the town. Though the Buffalo, NY, native’s narcissistic reputation might not earn him any brownie points, his musical contributions are something of another world — he has a sharp know-how for fabricating song structures seeded somewhere between the modestly stark, incredibly warm, and overtly depressive. He’s the sole producer and performer on his recordings in the same way that he’s the singular auteur behind Buffalo 66 and Brown Bunny, and like those absorbing films, his short, penetrating songs leave you salivating for more. You can only hope Gallo’s debut musical performance in the Bay Area will leave you with the same afterglow his movies do. With Sean Lennon and Carla Azar. May 19, 9 p.m., Bimbo’s 365 Club, 1025 Columbus, SF. $20. (415) 474-0365 (Chris Sabbath)

When the lights go up

May 9, 2006

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

"I wanted to make something that was really grand and epic, that was really composed, and maybe kind of mythic, in the way that a lot of those protometal bands were trying to do," Ezra Feinberg of Citay says, his postpsychedelic, postmetal outfit. Feinberg is inspired by hard rock–metal bands of the late 1960s and 1970s, such as Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Deep Purple, whose used power chords as the basis for their grand, jazz-inspired, narrative song structures. Favoring melodies interwoven with narratives over power chords, Feinberg has turned Citay into a kinder, gentler incarnation of the archetypal headbanging unit. "I wasn’t writing the songs with a drummer, you know, where it’s about power chords and physical energy," he explains. "Instead, it was more melody-driven composition and harmony."

Anyone who has listened to Citay’s carefully crafted, self-titled debut will tell you that composition is clearly Feinberg’s modus operandi. Each song is knit tightly around melodies that aren’t so much meandering as on a journey with a distinct destination. Though Feinberg is admittedly obsessed with Led Zeppelin, and Citay’s emphasis on instrumentation wears its classic rock–metal influences on its sleeve, it is the disciplined melodies and more nuanced harmonies, à la the Beach Boys and the Byrds, combined with a scampering mandolin and lackadaisical tambourine, that make Citay’s music accessible and original. Citay’s forthcoming Mission Creek performance and upcoming summer tour with Vetiver might make a comparison to the psych-folk movement an apt one, even though Feinberg is quick to distance Citay from any such categories.

The 29-year-old Boston native wrote and composed the album using a cache of instruments and a multitrack computer program in his Excelsior apartment, the results of which he brought to Louder Studios to collaborate with Tim Green (the Fucking Champs, Nation of Ulysses), with whom Feinberg had worked previously in Brooklyn when Green produced the album by Feinberg’s "sludge metal" band, Feast.

Feinberg credits Green with much of the Citay sound and with adding another dimension to his music. "If the record is any good, a lot of it is because of Tim," he says. "I had the songs, which were written — the parts and the melodies were already there — but he added so much." Tim Soete, of the Fucking Champs, also contributed backing vocals and guitar.

Not only is Green’s Louder Studios the home of Citay the band, but it was also the home of Feinberg for about a month after he moved from Brooklyn to San Francisco in 2004. Having spent four years in Brooklyn working with Feast and a few other musical endeavors, Feinberg felt as though he was "done" with the Brooklyn music scene and considered moving to be an opportunity to focus on writing music for himself, outside of a collaborative band environment. "I felt that I needed to musically be alone for a little while, which sounds really juvey and dramatic, but I had just been doing the band thing for so long. I knew that I wanted to keep writing music, but I knew that I wanted to do it in another way."

Now that the Citay album has been released, on Important Records, to largely glowing reviews, the challenge for Feinberg has been transutf8g that sound in performance, a process that has always evolved the other way around for the songwriter. He’s still solidifying Citay’s live lineup, which currently includes eight friends drawn from Crime in Choir, the Dry Spells, Ascended Master, By Land and Sea, Skygreen Leopards, and Tussle. "It’s the first time that I’ve ever gone from the studio to the stage," he says. SFBG

Citay

With Silver Sunshine, Persephone’s Bees, the Winter Flowers, and Willow Willow

May 20

7 p.m.

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

$10 advance, $12 door

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com

Those lovable peckerheads

May 9, 2006

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

An aggro dance-punk explosion of smart-ass energy and drunk-kid shit, Clipd Beaks can be summed up in an endless bout of name-game banter: They’re tweaked shoegazer for the top 40 soul. Nauseated psychedelia. The guitar-driven grittiness of Prince’s "Darling Nikki" meets the smooth-as-glass PM Dawn faux-original "Set Adrift on Memory Bliss." Man, fuck Prince. He doesn’t have shit on PM Dawn. What did he give us after Sign of the Times?

Needless to say, the tugboat of inspiration doesn’t drop anchor there. Since migrating from the Purple One’s old stomping grounds of Minneapolis to Oakland, the quartet hasn’t shied away from any particular aspect of the music world — they’ll pump your ears full of all types of loud, freaked-out noise.

The band wallows in a hearty hybrid of electrofunk and kraut rock ambience, cavorting amid tropical storms of sonic upsurges and acid-laced melodies. Colorful aural washes seem to crawl up your nostrils like billows of tonic mist and pulsate down your brain stem. If this flavorsome visual doesn’t have your toes tingling for the nearest club floor just yet, maybe you’ll think otherwise when the band’s latest EP, Preyers (Tigerbeat6), latches itself onto your hindquarters. CB fabricate a cluster of feel-good turbulence with proggy synth bursts, octopuslike drumbeats, and the hollow resonance of vocal distortion. Add jumbled samplers and grimy bass squawks thick enough to saw through your ankles and you have what Beaked vocalist Nic Barbeln refers to as a "total meltdown."

CB’s kick-out-the-dance-jams ethos grew out of the merging of two bands that shared a practice space back in Minneapolis in early 2003. Searching for something more invigorating than the mellower waters each group’s sound was treading on, Barbeln, synth player Greg Pritchard, bassist Scott Ecklein, and drummer Ray Benjamin chose to align.

After building up a fan base in Minneapolis and self-releasing a couple of homemade CD-R EPs, Pritchard departed for the Bay Area just after the recording of Preyers while the other Beaked players continued working at home. "I knew that they were still recording and doing Clipd Beaks," Pritchard says. "But when I heard the music, I said, ‘This cannot exist without me being involved with it.’<\!q>”

The rest of the group soon packed their bags and joined Pritchard on the West Coast, and before long fate came knocking. Pritchard had been mailing the band’s music to the Bay Area’s Tigerbeat6 through another friendly community: MySpace. Pritchard laughs: "I happened to ask them to be our friend on MySpace, and they wrote back and were like, ‘You guys are awesome.’<\!q>”

"They asked us to send more shit than what we had, and then a half an hour later, they were like, ‘Do you want to put out a record?’<\!q>” Barbeln continues.

Grateful for the massive amount of support they’ve received from the label and their fans in such a short amount of time, CB will spend the summer recording their full-length debut. Seeking to expand beyond the layered walls of sonics that hatched two years ago during the recording of Preyers, the band has expended a great deal of time perfecting the gem that’ll capture the intensity of their live performances and have the Bay Area party people passing out on the dance floor.

"We’re trying not to have jobs," Barbeln says.<\!s><z5><h110>SFBG<h$><z$>

Clipd Beaks

With Kid 606 and Friends, Dwayne Sodahberk, Eats Tapes, and Gregg Kowalsky

May 19, 9 p.m.

Elbo Room

647 Valencia, SF

Call for price.

(415) 552-7788

www.elbo.com

Brass in pocket

May 9, 2006

› kimberly@sfbg.com

Considering its bodacious flag team and its players’ general inclination to treat every day like birthday-suit day, Extra Action Marching Band has boasted its share of fleshy, fantastic, and extra-weird gigs, though none quite so intimate as the time they were hired by a would-be groom to crash his marriage proposal. Let into their client’s abode by a friend, about 20 members of the drum corps, horn section, and flag team stomped into the couple’s bedroom just after the "act." "His girlfriend was naked, jumping up and down on the bed, going, ‘Yaaarrr!’" modified-bullhorn manipulator Mateo remembers. "She was totally psyched."

Sit down with whichever members of the 30-odd, proudly odd members of the Bay Area troupe you can rustle up, and you’ll get an earful of many similar stories. There was the time they transformed a school bus into a 60-foot-long, 50-foot-tall Spanish galleon, a.k.a. La Contessa, to drive around Burning Man. "But they started to get really strict and created a five-mile-an-hour speed limit," trombone player Chad Castillo explains after a recent practice in seven-year vet Mateo’s cavernous Oakland warehouse space, the Meltdown. "We were always going faster because we always had been going faster and never had problems. So they finally banned us from Burning Man."

As with most tales, the exact events are in question, and Castillo and Mateo argue good-naturedly about whether their school-bus-run-amok was actually, er, expelled, before the trombonist continues: "The point is, they banned us, and we brought it back, and we took it on a maiden voyage and crashed it," putting a four-foot-high hole in La Contessa’s side.

Hunter Thompson’s wake and East Bay Rats soirees aside, performance highlights include opening for David Byrne on his 2005 SoCal tour, stopping at the Hollywood Bowl and later careening through a pelvic thrust–heavy version of Beyoncé’s "Crazy in Love." And then there was a Mardi Gras tour that re-created Black Sabbath’s heavy metal debut classic, with plain ole heavy eXtreme Elvis on vocals, and special, sexy rifle and fan-dance routines, flag team dancer and original member Kelek Stevenson relates.

The band upped themselves two years ago, when they played the Balkan Brass Bands Festival in Guca, Serbia, deep in the heart of gypsy horn country, one of the inspirations for Extra Action’s cosmopolitan mosh pit of Sousa, Latin, and New Orleans second-line sounds. A recent DVD by Emmy-winning nature documentarian and Extra Action flag girl Anna Fitch supports the stories and catches the combo in action as villagers cheer, fall to their knees, and hug the ensemble as they blow through the streets. One grandmotherly onlooker even gets some extra, extra action, copping a feel of a manly member’s bare chest.

But with the anarchic joys come the passionate battles, such as the recent knockdown blowout over the possibility of doing a Coke commercial, one of many battles regularly undergone in the collective, which has only one CD to its name, last year’s self-released Live on Stubnitz. "There was this huge firestorm between those who wanted to take the gig and use the money to further social change in the world and show that we don’t support Coke and its policies," Mateo explains.

"And a bunch of people threatened to quit the band," Castillo adds. "This band is so big — you’ve got homeowners and you’ve got people who are basically living in their campers — and when it came to doing the Coke commercial, there were a lot of people who just don’t like the big multinational corporations."

It’s remarkable that such an unruly, perpetually shifting, shiftless bunch has managed to hold it together for all of seven or eight years with few agreed-upon "leaders" (although Castillo asserts, "the original members always walk around like aristocracy"). The wireless, untethered energy they bring to the trad rock lineup is impressive. When they marched onto the stage at Shoreline Amphitheatre to join Arcade Fire (after crashing the women’s room) at last year’s Download Festival — ragtag horn and drum corps ripping through a few numbers as the flag girls and boy bumped and grinded in blond wigs and glittery G-strings — you realized what was really missing from indie at this performance, at so many performances: sex appeal. Theater. A drunken mastery of performance and the dark arts of showmanship, along with the sense of team spirit linked to so much marching band imagery bandied about in today’s pop.

As Castillo quips, "Record companies are interested in having us play with their bands because their bands are so boring onstage. People pay big money to go to these concerts because the music is all great and produced, and then they go to these shows, and these guys are sitting there bent over their Game Boys. Oh, that’s really exciting. Where’s the show?"

This show emerged from the ashes of Crash Worship, the legendary SoCal "cult, paganistic drum corps," as Castillo describes it, "where people would just strip naked and writhe in orgiastic piles." Extra Action was the processional that would cut through the heaps, eventually marching north to a Fruitvale warehouse, at the behest of ex-Crash Worshipper Simon Cheffins.

"I’ve been pretty much kicked out of every band I’ve been in," Castillo says, who has played with the group for five years. Members — many of the sculptor, performance artist, or "computer geek" persuasion — come and go, sometimes after a few practices, spinning off into combos like the As Is Brass Band. But it’s a family of sorts — a band-geek gang cognizant of the Bay Area’s countercultural/subcultural performance traditions and the unchartable wildness extending from the Diggers to the Cacophony Society. And only "one thing seems to be a requirement," Castrillo continues. "People have to have some problem that needs to be expressed. Everybody’s an exhibitionist. We like to take off our clothes." Those are family values we can get behind. SFBG

Extra Action Marching Band

With Death of a Party, Sugar and Gold, and Hank IV

May 18, 8 p.m. door

Eagle Tavern

398 12th St., SF

Call for price.

(415) 626-0880

Into the ether

May 9, 2006

› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS My first two girlfriends were boys. My next three were girls. My wife was a crustacean, and it’s hard to tell with crustaceans. Crawdad and I have been divorced now for closer to two years than one, and I’m starting to get to be about ready to squeeze someone, maybe. Question is: procedure. I’m in a funny position, and I talk about it, and my friends say, "Online dating. Online dating."

In the world, there are not a lot of people lining up to date chicken farmers of ambiguous gender and weirdo ways. There are some people, but not a lot of people. There are five people. And probably in general they are not hanging out at my new favorite restaurant, or haunting Bay Area scrap yards and baseball fields. No, they’re at home in front of their computers, online, looking for love. Cool. Because while the world is beautiful, exciting, fun, unpredictable, unimaginably immense, and inspiringly odd, the Internet allows you to type in exactly what you’re looking for.

Me!

Of course, the big huge question on everyone’s mind right now, online and off, is: Well? But which kind is the Chicken Farmer going to go for? M. Male, I think, probably, this time. But it’s been a while, and I’m scared. So a man with a small penis. And a sense of humor. And, since I may as well shoot myself in the other foot too while I’m at it, a 1990 Ford F-150 pickup truck, lime green. Oh, and an open mind.

I see the wisdom in online dating. I do. You can’t pack all this information into the creases on your forehead, or what color shirt you wear, or the world’s best pickup line. Even if you manage a long conversation, there are some things you’re not going to be able to say — unless you drink a real lot, and then you run the risk of not being understood or, worse, wetting your pants.

In print you can be very clear. You can be sober. You can know exactly who you are and exactly what you want, and, in exact American English, you can spell it out: "B W MTF TG CF seeks M w/SP (or F w/SSOD) for F, F, and maybe F. No V!" … where V = vegetarians.

This column will appear on the World Wide Web along with a valid e-mail address that I will no doubt have to change soon due to a deluge of four or five offers. There. I am officially online dating. But I still don’t have a cell phone. Does this make me eccentric?

(Oh, btw, F = fried.)

How about if I start hanging out all the time at Café International, my new favorite coffeehouse in my new favorite neighborhood, the Lower Haight? I went there on Saturday afternoon to see my new favorite band, the Mercury Dimes. Earl Butter (of my new favorite band, the Buckets), was with me, and we ran into Mike and Tom from my new favorite band, the Shut-Ins. What a place!

Earl ordered a Turkish coffee, and the Chicken Farmer ordered a chicken turnover with salad. The Mercury Dimes were taking a break. Then they started to play again, and they were my new favorite band. Old-time music. Two fiddles, banjo, guitar, bass, no mics. And when they sing, they just all belt it out together.

I’m not a music reviewer, but the chicken turnover was great. It was perfectly turned over, and the salad had grapes on top of it, and olives with the pits still in them, and all kinds of other stuff. Nice, big salad. I forget what it costed. Probably exactly what you’d expect it to cost. Otherwise: sandwiches, bagels, soup, Middle Eastern things, a Cuban thing, um, international things. Eclectic, good, friendly, artsy. Reminds me of the Mission District’s beloved Atlas Café (only friendlier) — and not necessarily because that’s where I’ve usually seen the Mercury Dimes. The layout’s very similar, counter to your left, music all the way back. Then beyond that there’s an outdoor patio.

And lots of very beautiful, cool-looking, real live people hang out there, just like at the Atlas, having coffee, reading newspapers, and thinking about sex or sports, probably for all I know wondering where their next eggs are going to come from. But what’s a chicken farmer supposed to do? Talk to them?

No lie. This is the truth: I have laryngitis right now, but I’ll be back. Meanwhile, imagine me on a gorgeous day like today, in front of my computer, eating lemons and drinking tea. SFBG

Café International.

Sat.–Thurs., 8 a.m.–9 p.m.; Fri., 8 a.m.–midnight

508 Haight, SF

(415) 552-7390.

Takeout and delivery available

Beer and wine

Credit cards not accepted

Quiet

Wheelchair accessible

Another round

May 9, 2006

› news@sfbg.com

Members of the newly formed San Francisco Outdoor Events Coalition gathered on the evening of May 3. It had been a long, discouraging day, and the mood was somber.

Robbie Kowal of the North Beach Jazz Festival apologized for not having an agenda ready. "Frankly, I was too busy fighting for the future of my festival at City Hall today," he joked, but nobody really laughed.

Earlier that day, the Recreation and Park Commission Operations Committee voted to deny the jazz festival the right to sell beer and wine inside Washington Square Park. The decision followed a precedent the committee first set last month regarding the larger North Beach Festival (see "Last Call?" 5/3/06).

Alcohol sales provide the bulk of the funding for the free music, but commission president Gloria Bonilla suggested they explore other money sources and sponsorship.

"The idea that there can’t be successful events in the city without alcohol, I can’t buy into," Bonilla said at the meeting.

Unfortunately, the jazz festival isn’t solvent enough for such a firm policy and can’t afford to lose the source of 75 percent of its funding less than three months before the event.

"She wants us to pass the hat," Kowal said at the coalition meeting. "We did that last year and we got 78 bucks."

North Beach Jazz Festival is a big generator of fun and revenue for the city, but its organizers say they don’t make any money off the deal.

"It’s a labor of love," said Kowal, who is considering canceling the festival despite the signed contracts and purchased plane tickets for performers.

Twenty-seven individuals came to the hearing to speak in support of the festival, including Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin, who represents North Beach and has been critical of how the North Beach Festival beer gardens prevent underage people from entering the park.

The three-member committee encouraged the Jazz Festival promoters to pursue other options, like beer gardens on barricaded streets, but took a hard line on booze in the park.

"What I’m interested in is a consistent and fair application of the policy. We’ve said no alcohol. While I appreciate having Supervisor Peskin come speak to us today, I think we need to be consistent in this policy," Commissioner Meagan Levitan said at the hearing.

Rec and Park general manager Yomi Agunbiade and director of operations Dennis Kern have said "a growing public concern" caused them to recommend against the sale of alcohol for the two North Beach festivals.

"Rec and Park has a new general manager and a new director of operations who are very experienced but come here from other cities," Kowal said. "There’s some missing institutional knowledge. We are not Walnut Creek, we are not Chicago, we are not DC. We’re San Francisco, and we have our own unique culture."

On May 8, a select group from the coalition met with senior staff from the mayor’s office to express its growing concern over increased fees and decreased city services and to discuss the grave implications of Rec and Park’s recent decisions for other outdoor festivals in the city. After the meeting Kowal was optimistic and said the mayor and supervisors expressed support for the festivals, but he acknowledged, "We don’t live in a city where the mayor can say, ‘This is how it’s going to be.’ It’s going to come down to the commission again. If people want to see this festival survive, they have to come to City Hall on May 30."

That’s the date that the full Rec and Park Commission will decide whether to overrule the Operations Committee and allow booze back into the park during the two festivals. SFBG

On the “Con” with cartoonist Daniel Clowes

May 5, 2006

It was so much fun talking to Eightball cartoonist and Ghost World and now Art School Confidential writer Daniel Clowes –- and so much conversation was left on the cutting room floor that I thought I’d resurrect a few choice tidbits here.

Max Minghella (left) sports a mean beret in Art School Confidential.

Bay Guardian: How did you get into the minds of teenage girls with Ghost World?

Daniel Clowes: I don’t know. I remember one day I did an interview with [Hate cartoonist] Peter Bagge, and they transcribed it word for word. Usually they’ll fix up our syntax and everything, but really it was like two teenage girls talking. It was really gossipy, “And then I went and she goes,” you know. I said to him, “We really sound like two teenage girls,” and he said, “Yeah, haven’t you ever noticed that that’s how we are.” And I thought, “Hmmm, ching-ching! Maybe I can make a fortune!”

BG: Maybe the differences aren’t that stark between teenage girls and older men?

DC: I think men have the maturity of a teenage girl when they’re about 30. I think that’s sadly true.

BG: And before then they have the maturity of…?

DC: A fetus. Yeah. To me, I had a revelation of those girls in high school, that’s why that girl cried at that time! You think back and think, now I get why they were like that! Now I’m at a 25-year-old maybe. At a certain point, women slow down and men get overly mature and turn into little old men. I think I’ve gone past that stage. [Laughs]

BG: On the other hand, the Steve Buscemi character in Ghost World seems like a character straight out of Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb.

DC: We thought of Steve Buscemi and just we kept expanding the character. There are a lot of great scenes that Terry wrote that we didn’t use that I wish we’d filmed. Just pointless scenes that had funny moments from his life, like we had one at an antique collectors’ faire. It was pre-eBay. Enid was like, “There’s a place where you’re going to meet a girl!” And it’s 600 overweight men, and this one woman, and she’s like this grotesque ‘20s flapper. I was reading it recently and laughing my head off, thinking, oh I wish to god we had filmed this. Totally inappropriate for the movie.

[We talk about how the movie might be scary for Clowes’ 2-year-old son, Charlie, and films that frightened Clowes like The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T]

BG: Do you cherish those movies like 5,000 Fingers, which scarred you?

DC: I was traumatized yet couldn’t wait to see it again. I was talking to some of my friends about this recently. Nowadays any movie you hear about. You just get it on Netflicks or rent it, or whatever. Soon it will be a computer click away. When we were kids, Night of the Living Dead or something was on, we’d hear about it and we’d scour the TV guide, and there it is, it’s at 2 in the morning on Thursday, and we’d have to sneak downstairs and not let our parents know and watch it really close to the screen so you could hear the sound. You were all alone but you had this weird communal feeling, like my friends are across town doing the same thing. And it was so much more exciting and it was charged with something. Its gone for me totally now. Now I’ll just Tivo it, and watch it whenever. I remember staying up late to watch the Wolfman or something. Literally, like, holding my eyelids open — so tired! “Gotta get through it! Gotta tell my friends that I saw the ending!” I don’t know, it’s gone.

BG: Whatever happened to Ghost World’s Thora Birch?

DC: She was a child actress, and did stuff from the time was a 2 or 3 years old, and it’s so much money. She didn’t seem that gung-ho about doing all that stuff. She’s like, “I can live without it.” She always said, “I never get scripts like Ghost World.”

BG: You ruined her for other movies.

DC: That’s our goal. Trying to destroy as many young talents as we can.

BG: Max Minghella in Art School Confidential is also great.

DC: We were friends with producer of Bee Season — Terry has known him for years. It was that old story you always hear and you never believe: We looked at a hundred actors and we literally looked at every single actor you’ve heard of or never heard of under 20. It’s just post-child actor, pre-adult actor. So it’s this very iffy area. It’s this awkward age because they change and they’re not who they were.

This producer said there’s this guy Max – he’s really good. and we met him and it just hit us right away, there he is. There’s Jerome. He was finally the guy we felt right about. Bee Season was first film he had ever done, and we gave him a lead in a feature, second time out. He’s a great guy — most kids that age are really arrogant and obnoxious and he’s just the sweetest, nicest, most modest guy. He was exactly 18 also. We always hit these guys at the right age.

BG: Young and impressionable!

DC: Yeah so we can mold them to our own devious ends! We were desperate to find somebody who was innocent and had sort of a charming quality but take it in this dark direction and not let the darkness kind of dominate him. It’s a very tough part – it’s all about who you really are.

BG: What about the other parts in Art School?

DC: John Malkovich produced Ghost World, and he said, “Next time give me a part.” “Oh we didn’t know you wanted one.” That’s the only part I ever wrote with an actor in mind.

Jim Broadbent was Terry’s idea. At first I thought that’s a very weird idea, but then actually it was pure genius. In the script it was supposed to be a very American guy, a Jerry Van Dyke or something. Someone who you know as being a real friendly, avuncular guy, but is seething with anger underneath. I once saw Jerry Van Dyke get really pissed off in a restaurant in LA — his hair was pure white and his face turned all red. That’s what gave me the idea.

BG: Speaking of your son, do you have an urge to do a children’s film or comic?

DC: No, I really don’t at all. I did a thing once, Art Speigelman did a thing once called Little Lit, kids’ stories, and I did a thing for it that was just not something I felt good about. It was not my way of thinking at all. I can’t censor what I’m doing. I just can’t think in terms of this is inappropriate for an 8 year old, so I better change it.

I do drawings for my son all the time but it’s not something I ever want to publish. People always say, “Oh, I wanna do a children’s book,” and I always thought, “Why? Why would you want to do that? Don’t you want adults to read your work.” [Laughs]

COMING SOON

Longer discussions with the two artists who contributed paintings to Art School Confidential: his old friend Charles Schneider, who painted the serial killer’s workers, and Oakland painter and SF Art Institute instructor Caitlin Mitchell-Dayton, who made the protagonist Jerome’s pieces.

NOISE: Coachella cracked open?

May 5, 2006

Guardian intern Jonathan Knapp checked out Coachella last week and lived to tell the tale:

Jose Luis Pardo of Los Amigos Invisibles
holds forth Sunday at Coachella.
Photo: Mirissa Neff.

As someone who has lost his once-vigorous passion for indie rock and large music festivals, I approached my trip to Coachella with caution and confusion. Why the hell was I driving 500 miles to spend two days in the brutally hot desert sun to see a bunch of bands that I had, at best, an intermittent interest in? All right, my girlfriend really wanted me to, and our companion — a good friend and a guitarist from local post-hardcore outfit And a Few to Break — was the perfect guide: He’d been before and has been largely responsible for turning me on to the little new music that excites me.

It’s not as if I now hate indie rock — I’ve just become preoccupied with the music of the past. I’d much rather, for instance, discover nearly forgotten gems like O.V. Wright’s “You’re Gonna Make Me Cry” and Wanda Jackson’s “Fujiyama Mama” than be the first to herald the Bloc Party or Clap Your Hands. There were definitely some newer bands at Coachella that had already easily won me over — Animal Collective, TV on the Radio — and some holdovers from my indie rock youth: Sleater-Kinney, Cat Power. Additionally, Madonna was playing; though I wouldn’t have admitted it at the height of my Drag City- and Merge-fuelled ecstasy, this was unquestionably exciting.

To a relatively recent East Coast transplant, Coachella’s setting is nothing short of alien. Set aside the heat (which is consuming and oppressive) and what remains is a beautiful, if stark and bleak, atmosphere: palm trees, miles of flat, bush-littered sand, and — when the Los Angeles smog recedes — snow-capped mountains. This year’s fest brought a mostly predictable mix of inappropriately black-clad SF/LA hipsters, shirtless/bikini-topped OC trust-funders/frat types, Arizona college hippies, and — given that this was Tool’s first show in five years — metalheadz. Though people-watching is certainly fruitful and entertaining, Coachella does not provide as much craziness as one might expect — but it certainly does exist.

The festival, held over Saturday and Sunday, April 29 and 30, on the incongruously green and groomed Empire Polo Fields, is a whirlwind of simultaneous activity and overstimulation. If you’re really only there to see one act (like Depeche Mode), it’s no problem. But for those whose interests are a bit more catholic, the prospect of navigating five separate stages that feature virtually nonstop, and eclectic, music from noon till midnight is daunting.

Do you choose Kanye West or My Morning Jacket? Wolf Parade or Jamie Lidell? In my case, both these choices proved easy, if not fully satisfying. For the former: With tickets on Kanye’s late-2005 tour being at least $45, the relatively reasonable one-day Coachella pass of $85 (about $190 for both days, including service charges) makes it
the best opportunity to see him.

West’s set was entertaining, if not transcendent. Mindful of the temperature (he played a still-blistering 6 p.m. slot), West substituted the angel-winged getup he’s favored recently for a white Miles Davis T-shirt and jeans. Backed by live drums, turntables, backup singers, and a string section, he offered a respectable but awkward approximation of his increasingly ornate recordings (no Jon Brion in sight). The highlight: West inexplicably announced his DJ would play a few of his biggest influences, moving from Al Green and Off the Wall-era Michael Jackson to a-ha’s “Take on Me,” dancing around the stage with a goofiness that, though obviously calculated, seemed charmingly unselfconscious.

Following West on the main stage, Sigur Ros created one of the festival’s moments of impossible beauty, bringing their ethereal noise to day one’s lofty sunset slot (7:00-7:50 p.m.). Admittedly, I’ve been a bit hesitant to embrace the beloved Icelandic group. Though I’ve enjoyed much of their work, I’ve been turned off by what I’ve interpreted as delusions of grandeur: a made-up language (there’s already one Magma), bullshit declarations of “creating a new type of music,” and the hushed reverence with which they’re frequently discussed. However, I can’t think of a better band to accompany a desert dusk, or a better setting for the band — apart from a glacier, perhaps. Backed by a mini-string section, they played a set that, at that time and in that place, was astonishing. My gratitude goes to the man and woman who danced behind the netting just immediately off stage right: Their undulating silhouettes would have brought me to tears, had dehydration and hours of standing not already beaten them to it.

My other day one highlight was Animal Collective, a band whose aesthetic of psych-pop, tribalism, and general weirdness was perfectly suited to the surreal setting. Though I’ve adored many of their recordings (they’re one of the few current bands that I’m genuinely excited to watch evolve), I’d heard that their propensity for wandering and wanking can be their downfall live. I found that they kept this mostly in check, grounding their less accessible and more abrasive experimentations with hypnotic rhythms and a convincing feeling that this was, in fact, going somewhere. Much of the crowd didn’t seem to know what to make of it. Too bad: To my ears, few artists approach their inventiveness, live or recorded.

That day I also caught some of Deerhoof (appropriately erratic, with some fantastic moments), Cat Power (as expected, the Memphis Rhythm Band has given her a new sense of confidence and composure, and they sound fucking great), Wolfmother (energetic, but dull), White Rose Movement (I’ll stick to my Pulp records, thank you), the New Amsterdams (nothing new about them), and the Walkmen (solid).

After returning to the grounds Sunday (we fortunately camped at the much-less-populated Salton Sea, about 20 minutes away), we immediately went to catch Mates of State (adorable and infectious), who closed with a decent version of Nico’s “Time of the Season,” and Ted Leo, who was reliably engaging. To try to get close for Wolf Parade, we headed to the medium-sized tent (there were three) and watched Metric. I’d been intrigued by their Broken Social Scene connections, but their set of dancey agit-pop left me cold and bored (my companions disagreed).

I separated from my friends to stand in the back for Wolf Parade, so I could head to the main stage for Sleater-Kinney. After starting late, Wolf Parade apologized for technical issues (“Everything’s fucked”) and began a set that, from my perch hundreds of feet away, sounded slight and thin. Disappointed, I left after three songs. I’ve been told that the experience up-front, however, was quite different, and among the best of the festival.

I fell in love with the women of Sleater-Kinney about a decade ago when I was 16. I’ve tried to see them a number of times over the years, but something always fell through: sold-out, unbreakable engagements, etc. I usually don’t think about them, except when they release a new album and, maybe once or twice a year, when I put on Call the Doctor or Dig Me Out — briefly reminding myself why they once meant so much to me.

Clearly, this has been a huge mistake: Focusing mostly on songs from the past couple albums, the trio played a fierce, powerful set that all the years of hearing about their live show hadn’t prepared me for. At a festival that celebrated scenes that I’ve mostly abandoned, this became my essential moment. Mses. Corin Tucker, Carrie Brownstein, and Janet Weiss reminded me not only why I loved them, but why I loved going to shows in the first place — for the sheer raw, sweaty energy. These women deserve to fill stadiums.

After watching a bit of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, who impressed me more than I expected, I headed to the dance tent, joining an apparent majority of festivalgoers in an attempt to see Madonna. Unable to get anywhere near the stage, we settled for a spot outside it, where our view was of a large screen and, when we were lucky enough to be able to peek through the massive throng at a distant stage.

Several minutes before the set (which unsurprisingly started late), a line of people carrying parasols and decked out in lingerie bondage gear made their way through the crowd on stilts. Managing the seemingly impossible feat of reaching the front of the stage, they were easily the festival’s smartest and most inventive attendees.

When Madonna finally took the stage, all hell broke loose — an appropriate response, perhaps, but not one that the performance itself warranted. Predictable and short, Madonna’s set started with the superb “Hung Up,” then moved on to “Ray of Light” and four more songs, most of them newer material. Most surprising was her guitar playing (or at least the appearance of it) and the rock-like arrangements of all the tunes. She occasionally provoked the audience (“Don’t throw water on my stage, motherfuckers,” “Do you want me to take my pants off?”), but nothing here was shocking. That said, the woman looks fantastic and commands a stage in a way that few could. After six songs, she left abruptly. It was anticlimactic, yet still somehow thrilling. It was, after all, fucking Madonna.

Immediately after, we ran into Andy Dick, who stood talking to a pair of starstruck 13-year-old girls. Far more behaved than the blogs have reported he later would be, Dick seemed as amused with the girls as they were with him. Though he claimed to have to go meet his “girlfriend,” he talked to them for several minutes: “Oh, I love Madonna too. Hey — how are you even here? Aren’t people, like, drinking? Where are your parents?”

After catching a fantastic, fun set from the Go! Team (who had Mike Watt guesting on bass), we attempted to see Tool. Unable to get anywhere close to the stage (this seemed by far to be the most crowded show, though Madonna was close), we sat down, expecting to watch the band on the giant screens on either side of the stage. While the band played, however, their videos (you know: internal organs and jittery, alien-looking people doing painful things) were projected on the screens. Bored and wary of the inevitable hours of traffic that we’d hit if we stayed for the set, we bid Coachella adieu.

Acts I wished I had caught, but couldn’t for various reasons: Lady Sovereign, Jamie Lidell, Gnarls Barkley, Seu Jorge, My Morning Jacket, Phoenix, Mogwai, Depeche Mode, Coldcut, and TV on the Radio. Biggest regret (by far): missing Daft Punk. Word of their closing Saturday night set hovered all day Sunday, discussed in whispered, but rhapsodic tones.

I left the festival exhausted, anxious to return to San Francisco, and — most importantly — reminded why I devoted so many years to indie rock. Will I stop seeking out New Orleans R&B, rockabilly, and Southern soul? No, but that doesn’t mean I have to ignore this wave of postpunk, does it? That said, I’ll take Gang of Four, Wire, and Pere Ubu over Bloc Party and Franz Ferdinand any day.

But, right now, I just want to listen to Sleater-Kinney.

Festival decompress

May 2, 2006

The last few days of the San Francisco International Film Festival usually have a calmer quality, perhaps even more so this year, in the wake of a second weekend “Super Saturday” that bounced from big events such as talks with Jean-Claude Carriere and Tilda Swinton to the wild ’round-midnight screening of the cave-expedition-gone-horribly-wrong nightmare The Descent. (Scariest movie I’ve seen in years, and the characterizations, such as Natalie Mendoza’s Juno, are evocative.)

Yet early on Monday the SFIFF intensity level was high, as The Bridge screened to a packed house at the Kabuki. While I haven’t sorted out the intense emotions and serious ethical issues triggered by Eric Steel’s controversial movie – aspects of the post-screening discussion and some of his decisions as a filmmaker really troubled me, for a start – I can say that there is no film quite like it. Jenni Olson’s The Joy of Life has other roots in relation to the subject, but a recent song on Sleater-Kinney’s The Woods, much of the revived interest in the art and life of Golden Gate suicide Weldon Kees, and now Steel’s documentary all attest to the lingering potency of Tad Friend’s late 2003 New Yorker piece “Jumpers.”

Those with unmatched pain thresholds could have followed up an early Monday Bridge viewing with the second Descent screening. I saw A Short Film About the Indio Nacional (or The Prolonged Sorrow of Filipinos) and was struck by the film’s daring and often exquisite shifts in tone, as well as a very particular approach to late 19th century Filipino history. An early diegetic sound scene brings across the experience of insomnia like no movie I’ve seen, before young director Raya Martin makes a sudden jump into a wholly different (or is it?) realm of black-and-white silent pictorial storytelling. I’m hoping to interview Martin here later this week.

Other SFIFF quick hits or misses…“I hated it!” was one local filmmaker’s immediate response to Deerhoof’s live score for Harry Smith’s Heaven and Earth Magic. But a few days later, a different SF moviemaker testified their eternal love for the band when that program was mentioned. I fell between those two responses, sometimes enjoying the band’s approach but just as often wondering if the sound was trapped in mannerism rather than the alchemical realm Smith deserves. As for Werner Herzog in interview the night previous, truer words about Anna Nicole and the “mainstream” have never been spoken.

“Fab Mab Reunion”

May 2, 2006

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

April 8, Fillmore

LOCAL LIVE "Typical Flipper," Flipper frontperson Bruce Loose quipped at one point during the band’s set at the recent "Fab Mab Reunion." Not to suggest that Flipper don’t know what they’re doing — they do. But dotting is never were top priorities for them. Their improbable, ragged, and yet ultimately triumphant return to the Fillmore April 8 was a case in point, featuring its share of false starts, wrong notes, and out-of-sync vocals, along with a bass amp on the verge of crapping out throughout their approximately 40-minute set. "Know your history," Loose added at another point in the show.

Speaking of history, fellow showgoers who had actually experienced the legendary Mabuhay Gardens back in its late-’70s/early-’80s heyday remarked that the most authentic part of the show was MC Dirk Dirksen. His rambling, semicoherent monologues, which included a roll call of the dead that made reference to deceased Flipper member "Will Shatner [sic]," drew groans and heckles, as well as a bona fide noogie from Loose at one point.

On the other side of the coin, in terms of historical accuracy, were the Avengers and the Jeff Penalty–fronted Dead Kennedys. The Avengers’ set had a decidedly mall-punk feel to it, sounding more like third-generation MTV punks than a class of old-school ’77 graduates. As for the controversial DKs, at least Penalty brought a touch of surreal ridiculousness as he bounded onstage, manically hopped around, and even went so far as to slyly beckon applause with a "come on, come on" hand gesture. One might have expected him to be dodging beer bottles instead.

But with all due respect to the Mutants — we walked in with just a couple of songs left in their set of solid-sounding, if somewhat quaint, set of Sex Pistols–ish punk — Flipper were the highlight of the evening. Just over a year ago, the remaining members from the band’s classic early-’80s lineup — Loose, drummer Steve DePace, and guitarist Ted Falconi — were barely on speaking terms, so to see them onstage together and clearly enjoying themselves was great in itself; the fact that they sounded like themselves, not like a slick facsimile, was even better. Filling in for Shatter was unofficial fifth member and longtime utility player Steve DeMartis, who turned in an intense vocal performance on "Shine." Elsewhere, Loose — who dyed his hair bright blond for the occasion — handled the mic with his trademark sarcasm and lovable obnoxiousness, tossing off trademark lines like "Forget it, you wouldn’t understand anyway."

They opened with unlikely sing-along "Ha Ha Ha," stumbled through the Shatter anthem "Life," and played zero songs from their Shatter-less 1993 Warner Bros. album, American Grafishy. The set closed with a barely recognizable rendition of "Flipper Blues" and a sped-up, runaway-train version of "Sex Bomb" with original session-player Ward Abronski of Polkacide on tenor sax.

Yes, there were rough edges, but as far as their sense of humor, focused sloppiness, and don’t-give-a-damn attitude went, it was indeed typical Flipper. And that’s a good thing. SFBG

Dumpling drifter

May 2, 2006

› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Me and Wayway went to the store and bought 67 chicken wings, a carton of buttermilk, and a big bottle of oil. Then we went out to eat. I had a show that night in the Sunset, at my new favorite bar, the Riptide, so the plan was to point ourselves in that direction and just roll.

The Riptide is on Taraval, way out there, almost all the way to the beach. But we barely got past 19^th Avenue, of course, before we had to stop rolling and walk. What pulled us over was this new Hawaiian joint where JT’s diner used to be. It looks pretty good. I looked in the window, and Wayway looked at the menu in the window.

"Eggs and rice," Wayway said. "Spam and eggs."

"Hay," I said. "Straw."

We meant all these things as compliments. You know, sometimes I wear Hawaiian shirts when I play the Ping-Pong, and sometimes I wear Western shirts. If I had been wearing a Hawaiian shirt, I might have had a new favorite Hawaiian restaurant to tell you about, but as fate would have it, I was wearing a Western shirt.

Which was just as well because I’d already eaten about five eggs that day anyway. We looked into a couple other places and wound up agreeing on a hole-in-the-wall just a few doors down called White Horse Dim Sum & Restaurant.

Hot dang it smelled good in there. It smelled kind of like celery. There was no art on the walls, no music, and just a couple of tables. So the atmosphere was the smell of celery. And general hominess. The White Horse family, from little kids to Gram and Gramps, was just sitting down to eat at this one big table. Every now and again one or another of them would get up and pour our tea and take our order and cook and everything.

So now, finally, I have a new favorite Chinese restaurant. Check this out: Dim sums are 60 cents each, they have Shanghai dumplings for $3.50 for six, lunch specials for $3.95 with rice and wonton soup or coffee, and they have almost 20 kinds of soup for under 5 bucks, most of them under 4. Rice plates, noodles … a lot of $3.50s, $3.95s, and $4.50s. I don’t think anything was more than 5 bucks.

What I’m getting at: Cheap!

And don’t forget that it smells real good in there. So, OK, so what we wanted, in honor of yet another soupy San Francisco day, was soup. And the guy sitting behind us was eating dumplings, so, sure, we were going to need dumplings too. You can’t talk about frying and barbecuing chicken wings without dumplings. At least a dozen.

Wayway told me how when he was living in Shanghai he used to eat these things for breakfast every day, and how sometimes, because of the language barrier, he’d ask for six, which was one order, and they’d bring him six orders of six.

"I want to live somewhere with a language barrier," I said.

Shanghai dumplings, those are the steamed pork ones with like little bowls of soup in them. Pig drippin’s, you figure. It pools inside while the pork cooks, and stays warm but somehow not too hot, and then when it erupts inside your mouth you get this flow of buttery, greasy goodness all over your tongue, and … and … um . . .

I lost my train of thought.

Chicken wings. Buttermilk. Barbecue sauce. Strategy. Celery. Oral sex. Oh yeah, soup. That was the other thing we were eating. Fish ball noodle soup, and pork noodle soup ($3.95 either way). Both were great. The broth was excellent, the noodles had to have been homemade, they tasted so good, and the vegetables were done perfectly, with still a little life left to them. Bok choy, broccoli, celery.

I’ll tell you, I walked out of the White Horse feeling really good. And I stayed that way all through the rest of the evening. Pabst Blue Ribbon. Rum. Coffee, next morning, and we went to work like two well-oiled machines, Wayway frying, or parfrying the wings, and the chicken farmer manwomanpersoning the grill. Barbefried chicken. My joke is that it’s health food, if two wrongs make a right, which, conventional wisdom being, for our purposes, damned, they do. Right? SFBG

White Horse.

Mon.–Sat., 7 a.m.–8 p.m.; Sun., 8:30 a.m.–3:30 p.m.

937 Taraval, SF

(415) 665-9080

Takeout available

No alcohol

Credit cards not accepted

Quiet

Wheelchair accessible

After the Murmur

May 2, 2006

› news@sfbg.com

One could be forgiven for staring. Oakland’s lower Telegraph Avenue on a wet, cold, windy Friday night is not a location renowned for its street parties, particularly those involving dozens of young, white hipsters happily mingling with an equal number of young African Americans, both watching an impromptu rap show.

But a street party is precisely what was happening outside the Rock Paper Scissors (RPS) Gallery, at Telegraph and 23rd Street, that night. Welcome to Art Murmur, Oakland’s very own art walk on the first Friday of every month. What started in January as an eight-gallery venture has, in a mere four months, blossomed. A dozen Oakland galleries now participate, exhibiting everything from installations featuring massively oversized pill bottles and pillboxes to traditional oil portraitures and, in the case of the Boontling Gallery, unnerving little sculptures that co-owner Mike Simpson described as "whimsical takes on decapitation."

"We want to improve the art scene in the East Bay so that people will call Oakland an artistic force to be reckoned with," the lanky Simpson told the Guardian. "Oakland has a lot of potential, and I have a lot of pride in the city…. A lot of artists who show in San Francisco are from Oakland. Why not represent where they are from?"

But jump-starting an artist-driven revival of lower Telegraph also has its potential hazards, prime among them gentrification. As San Franciscans know all too well, such revitalization carries the danger that the community will be made safe for real estate agents, developers, and urban professionals who quickly eliminate less desirable residents, i.e., the folks who were there first and the new artists’ community.

When asked about the issue, Sydney Silverstein of the RPS Collective knowingly said, "Oh, you mean artists laying the groundwork for gentrification?"

Setting the gentrification question aside for a moment, something new and very exciting is happening along Telegraph Avenue, come rain or shine.

"We want to get people to buy art that have never bought art before," nattily attired Art Murmur cofounder Theo Auer said as he sipped free wine. It is not just the young and trendy who show up — more than one gray-haired art aficionado was spotted making purchases at Boontling.

How did it all start? According to Auer, the midwife was beer. "It was after a show, and we asked each other, ‘Why doesn’t Oakland have an art walk?’ ‘How hard can it be?’" The result was a meeting last year at which RPS, Mama Buzz Café, Ego Park, 21 Grand, 33 Grand, Auto Gallery, Boontling, and the Front Gallery all chipped in money for logistics, postcards, an www.oaklandartmurmur.com Web site, and a newspaper ad.

"It’s a tight community," said Tracy Timmins, the pale-blue-eyed and enthusiastic co-owner of Auto Gallery. "We are all very supportive of each other." And that support also comes from her landlord, who is only too happy to have a group of impoverished students who want to improve the neighborhood with art.

This, of course, is what raises the specter of gentrification. History shows that the shock troops of gentrification — a Starbucks on every corner, a yuppie in every Beamer — are the artists, freaks, punks, and queers who move into marginal areas. They happily pay low rent and live in iffy areas so they can create alternative communities. But that success can sow the seeds of a community’s destruction.

What makes the Art Murmurers different from alternative communities of the past is they are well aware of how they can be a mixed blessing for neighborhoods. The night before the April Art Murmur, Murmurers held a five-hour meeting to revisit their founding principles, which include a commitment to a sustainable neighborhood as a way to prevent yuppification.

"We are trying not to alienate the current residents," Silverstein said, while noting the harsh reality of gentrification. "If this neighborhood goes to hell and becomes another Emeryville, I don’t think you can do anything about it."

Silverstein said RPS is proactively linking to, and becoming part of, the community by offering sewing classes, art classes, a community space for events, and by forging a partnership with a local high school so the collective is not just an invasive bohemian Borg.

Silverstein told us she sees more new faces at classes offered by the gallery, a statement backed by the youths of color running in and out of the gallery space. Timmins too sees a role for the galleries to provide a place for art and education for local kids, because they "are not getting it in school."

Other galleries are less clear on the concept of community and gentrification. Esteban Sabar, owner of the upscale Esteban Sabar Gallery, moved from the Castro to affordable Oakland with a grant from the city of Oakland.

"This is affordable for me," Sabar said. "It will take awhile for gentrification to happen. By putting a gallery here I will help artists and the community. I will not let anyone kick me out." But he failed to address what might happen to the poorer local residents already living there if gentrification heats up.

Perhaps Jen Loy, co-owner of Mama Buzz Café, has the most realistic take on the issue. Lower Telegraph isn’t like areas that used to have vibrant communities until they were decimated by dot-commers. She said there were few people living in the area.

"The more people, the better," Loy said. "People [who have been] living here 10 or 15 years are saying, ‘Thank you, it is great to have you here.’" Loy says businesses like a local market, a pizzeria, and the bar Cabel’s Reef all benefit from an influx of capital.

So the question is, as always, who benefits? If an area is revitalized, tax revenues go up, more people move in, and a more vibrant area ensues, but where do the artists and people who were there first go? Will they be able to create a community strong enough to resist displacement?

Or will they do what Tracy Timmins of Auto Gallery has already had to do: "As far as being pushed out, it happens," she says. "If that happens, I start again somewhere else." SFBG

Last call?

May 2, 2006

› news@sfbg.com

Concerns about public drinking in North Beach and stifled public debate are conspiring to cripple a pair of popular outdoor festivals, possibly creating a troubling precedent for other events at the start of San Francisco’s festival and street fair season.

"We’ll have to cancel this year’s festival," Robbie Kowal, who runs the North Beach Jazz Festival, said of the possibility of not getting his alcohol permit. "Seventy-five percent of our funding comes from the sale of alcohol."

The Recreation and Park Commission’s Operations Committee is set to review the jazz festival’s permit May 3, and if sentiments among the three mayor-appointed commissioners haven’t changed, they might not allow Kowal and his partners, John Miles and Alistair Monroe, to set up bars and serve drinks to local jazz fans in Washington Square Park, as they’ve been doing without challenge for the past 12 years.

"We’ve never even had a hearing to get a permit before," Kowal said. "We’ve had no arrests and no [California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control] violations. We’re being punished when we haven’t done anything wrong. We’re caught up in this whole North Beach Festival situation."

Kowal was referring to a dispute involving the neighborhood’s other popular street fair, the North Beach Festival, a 52-year street fair that had its permission to sell alcohol in the park yanked this year. The festival is hosted by the North Beach Chamber of Commerce, whose director, Marsha Garland, is a political adversary of the area’s supervisor, Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin.

The problem started when parks general manager Yomi Agunbiade determined that a long-standing ban on alcohol in city parks should also apply during festivals. Two out of three members of the Rec and Park Commission’s Operations Committee agreed with that ruling during an April 5 meeting, and it became official policy.

Then, as the North Beach Festival permit went to the full commission for approval April 20, the words "permission to serve beer and wine" disappeared from the agenda item. Those words had appeared on an earlier version of the agenda, allowing the commission to grant what Garland had received with every permit for the last 20 years. The agenda change meant the commission couldn’t even discuss the alcohol issue, let allow issue a permit that allowed it.

Commissioner Jim Lazarus questioned a representative of the City Attorney’s Office about it and was told that the full commission couldn’t hear the policy if the general manager and Operations Committee were in agreement.

"I was taken aback by the fact that the full request of the applicant to serve beer and wine was not on the calendar," Lazarus told us. "I’ve been on the commission for three and a half years, and I’ve never seen that happen before for this kind of issue."

This story is still unfolding, but observers are openly wondering whether this is an isolated case of political sabotage or whether this battle over beer could hurt the summer festival season.

Wine and beer sales have always played a critical role in the financial viability of many of the city’s summer festivals. In a city that’s never been afraid of a liberal pour, many are beginning to wonder if the good times are over, and if so, why?

"The Rec and Park meeting was so disheartening, and if it’s used as a precedent in any way, it will harm other events. If the oldest street fair in this city can be chipped away at like that, who’s next?" said Lindsey Jones, executive director of SF Pride, the largest LGBT festival in the country.

Some North Beach residents think this Rec and Park procedural shell game is punishment for Garland and her organization’s opposition to Peskin, whom they blame for the change.

"Aaron Peskin would like to take Marsha Garland’s livelihood away," said Richard Hanlin, a landlord and 30-year resident of North Beach who filed a complaint over the incident with the Ethics Commission.

"They want to railroad Marsha," said Lynn Jefferson, president of the civic group North Beach Neighbors. "They want to see her out of business. If she doesn’t have those alcohol sales, she’ll personally go bankrupt."

At the heart of the Garland-Peskin beef is a 2003 battle over a lot at 701 Lombard St. known as "the Triangle," which the owner wanted to develop but which the Telegraph Hill Dwellers wanted for a park after they found a deed restriction indicating it should be considered for open space. Peskin agreed with the group he once led and had the city seize the land by eminent domain, drawing the wrath of Garland and others who saw it as an abuse of government power.

Peskin told the Guardian that it’s true he doesn’t care for Garland, but that he did nothing improper to influence the commission’s decision or agenda. However, he added that he’s made no secret of his opposition to fencing off much of the park to create a beer garden and that he’s made that point to Rec and Park every year since the festival’s beer garden started taking over the park in 2003.

“Just let the people use Washington Square Park. It’s the commons of North Beach,” Peskin said. “The park should be open to people of all ages 365 days a year. That’s just how I feel.”

Yet Peskin said that neither the North Beach Jazz Festival, which doesn’t segregate people by age, nor festivals that use less neighborhood-centered parks, like the Civic Center and Golden Gate Park, should be held to the same standard. In fact, he plans to speak out in favor of the jazz festival’s right to sell alcohol during the May 3 meeting.

Access became the buzzword this year, in response to last year’s decision by the San Francisco Police Department to gate two-thirds of the park off as a beer garden, effectively prohibiting many underage festivalgoers from actually entering a large part of the park. The section near the playground remained ungated, but many families were disillusioned by the penning of the party.

Enter the North Beach Merchants Association, a two-year-old rival of the Chamber of Commerce with stated concerns about booze. President Anthony Gantner learned that the park code banned alcohol from being served in any of the parks listed in Section 4.10, which includes Washington Square as well as nearly every other greenway in the city, unless by permission of the Recreation and Park Commission, which should only be granted as long as it "does not interfere with the public’s use and enjoyment of the park."

Gantner and Peskin both argue that the beer garden does interfere with the right of those under 21 to use the park. "The Chamber is basically doing a fair, and that’s it," Gantner said. "A lot of its members are bars, and they run a very large fair with beer gardens that result in incidents on the streets for merchants."

Though Garland contends that the festival is an economic stimulator, resulting in an 80 percent increase in sales for local businesses, Gantner claims that a number of businesses don’t benefit from the increased foot traffic. He associates alcohol with the congruent crime issues that crop up when the clubs let out on Broadway, and thinks that selling beer and wine in the park only accelerates problems in the streets after the festival ends at 6 p.m.

Gantner has the ear of local police, who are understaffed by 20 percent and looking for any way to lower costs by deploying fewer cops. "It used to be we could police these events with full staff and overtime, but now we’re trying to police them with less resources, and the events themselves are growing," Central Station Capt. James Dudley said.

He’s also concerned about the party after the party. The police average five alcohol-related arrests on a typical Friday night in North Beach, most after the bars close. But those numbers don’t change much during festival weekend, leading many to question the logic behind banning sales of alcohol in the park. Besides, if sales were banned, many festivalgoers would simply sneak it in. Even one police officer, who didn’t want to be named, told us, "If I went to sit in that park to listen to music and couldn’t buy beer, I’d probably try pretty hard to sneak some in."

At the April 20 Rec and Park meeting, Garland presented alternative solutions and site plans for selling beer and wine, which represents $66,000 worth of income the festival can’t afford to lose. Beyond her openness to negotiations, Rec and Park heard overwhelming support for the festival in the form of petitions and comments from 30 neighbors and business owners who spoke during the general public comment portion of the meeting.

Father John Malloy of the Saints Peter and Paul Church, which is adjacent to the park, spoke in support of Garland’s request. "I think I have the most weddings and the most funerals in the city," he said. "I’m praying that we don’t have a funeral for the North Beach Festival. If anyone should be against alcohol, it should be the priest of a church."

So who are the teetotalers? Testimony included 10 complaints from members of the Telegraph Hill Dwellers, Friends of Washington Square, and the North Beach Merchants Association, as well as Gantner and neighborhood activist Mark Bruno, who came down from Peskin’s office, where he was watching the hearing, to testify.

Commissioner Megan Levitan said, "If anyone knows me, they know I like my wine," before going on to explain that she was born in North Beach and even used to serve beer at O’Reilly’s Beer and Oyster Festival. However, she said, she’s a mother now, and parks are important to her.

"It does change a park when alcohol is there," she said. "I do not believe we should serve alcohol in the park."

Will that still be her stance May 3 when the North Beach Jazz Festival requests its permit? The jazz fest has never had beer gardens, and the organizers don’t want them. Instead, they set up minibars throughout the park, which remains ungated, allowing complete access for all ages.

Although there is hired security and local police on hand, by and large people are responsible for themselves. The organizers say it’s just like going to a restaurant for a meal and a drink, except in this case it’s outside, with a stage and free live music.

Though Kowal remains optimistic, he’s rallying as much support as possible, even turning the May 3 meeting into an event itself on his Web site (www.sunsettickets.com). His partners, Monroe and Miles, were concerned enough to swing by City Hall to see Peskin, who agreed to testify and help the Jazz Festival retain the right to sell booze.

"The first person to write a check to start this festival was Mayor Willie Brown," Kowal said. "Peskin has always been a big supporter of the festival, which is why we think it will all work out."

The festival is a labor of love for the three organizers, who barely break even to put the event on; after expenses are covered, any additional profit from the sale of alcohol is donated to Conservation Value, a nonprofit organization that aids consumers in making smart purchases.

"We were the first fair to use Washington Square Park," Monroe, the founding father of the jazz festival, said. "We’re standing up for the right to access the park. It’s not about ‘he said, she said’ or who did what to whom. It’s about hearing free live music."

So now comes the moment when we find out whether this is about alcohol, parks, or simply politics, and whether future street fairs could feel the pinch of renewed temperance. If the jazz festival gets to sell booze, Garland’s supporters argue, that will represent a bias against the North Beach Festival.

The commission will hear Garland’s appeal at the end of May, just two weeks before the festival begins. With contracts already signed and schedules set, the stakes are high. Owing to lack of funds, Garland has already canceled the poetry, street chalk art, and family circus components of the fair. She did receive an e-mail from Levitan promising a personal donation to put toward the street chalk art competition. Even so, she’s preparing for a funeral.

And if alcohol is prohibited at the jazz festival, it could send out a ripple of concern among street fair promoters and lovers around the city. To be a part of the decision, stop by the meeting and have a say. SFBG

PS This weekend’s How Weird Street Faire, on May 7, centered at Howard and 12^th Streets, will have beer gardens in addition to seven stages of music and performances. But organizers warn that it could be the last festival because the SFPD is now demanding $14,000, a 275 percent increase from the police fees organizers paid last year.

operations committee hearing

May 3, 2 p.m.

City Hall, Room 416

1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place, SF

(415) 831-2750

www.sfgov.org

Chain Alternative: Brownie’s Hardware

April 25, 2006

1563 Polk Street, SF

(415) 673-8900

It’s a Brownie’s tradition: Every owner of the hardware store has served as president of the Polk Street Merchants Association at one time or another. And the current owner, Steven Cornell, is no exception. Recently his hardware store hosted a press conference and awards ceremony for small businesses, like Brownie’s, that have been in San Francisco since the 1906 earthquake.

An open hardware store comes in handy during a disaster. Cornell remembers when his neighborhood lost electricity for three days during the 1989 quake. Neighbors came to him in need of batteries, flashlights, and candles, and nearly half of them didn’t have any cash. Cornell didn’t keep track of any names; he just kept a tally of goods that went out the door and asked people to come back when they had the money. "They all did," he says with a broad smile beneath his fatherly brown mustache. "After it all, we had one unaccounted hatch mark, and I’ll chalk that up to poor accounting."

Brownie’s seems like any other neighborhood hardware store. It’s small and crowded; shelves tower with housewares, paint, plumbing, and hardware. According to Cornell, what sets it apart is service. As many as eight employees a day sporting Brownie’s name tags work the registers and offer assistance among the narrow aisles. "Most people come in with a project,” he says. “Our job is to help them find what they need and think of the problems they’ll encounter."

That quality of service extends outside the walls of a store that’s been in Cornell’s family since 1950. Located on the corner of Polk and Sacramento — in the heart of what the old-timers still call Polk Gulch, just five blocks from where Cornell went to elementary school — the shop occupies an avenue of small businesses. "I do most of my business with people who live in apartments," says Cornell, who stocks his store for a renter’s needs. Instead of throwing down a couple hundred dollars for a drill, customers can rent one or even bring in whatever needs a hole or a screw.

From selling Muni passes at no profit to working with city legislature to get health insurance companies to cover domestic partners of small-business employees, Cornell has always been an active community member. (Amanda Witherell)

Virtual sausage

April 25, 2006

› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Sometimes it’s almost too much. You’re driving home in the middle of the night, country roads, nothing but static on the radio, sky full of stars stretched out before you, big balls of rain tapping into the windshield, small and large animals darting across the road in the beam of your headlights, graceless, confused. And you think, It rains without clouds now! Large blocks of ice are crashing through roofs in Southern California. San Francisco is the new Seattle. My friend Steve the Turkey Hunter in Maine says winter never came there this year.

How are you supposed to tell the difference between awake and asleep? This is an important distinction for operators of motor vehicles. People ask me: "When did you know?" And I just look at them because it’s all I can do, like a deer in their beams, like, Know what?

I can’t help it, personally. My mind returns and returns to the contemplation of antimatter, the uncertainty principle, and quantum chicken farming in general. Life keeps getting funner, and funnier. For example: the popular misconception that the world won’t likely come to an end in any of our lifetimes. Um, that depends, Mr. and Mrs. Physicist, does it not, on your definition of words like life, and time, and doo-da? Where, exactly, does the world happen? Out there somewhere? And how do they get all that juice to stay on the inside of Shanghai dumplings?

Huh?

I do have a new favorite dim sum restaurant out on Taraval near

19th Avenue

, but that’s little consolation under the stormy stars,

Valley Ford Road

, middle of the night. Think I’ll pull over and have a nervous breakthrough.

Oh, now I get it. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarghhh!

Next thing you know: venison sausage. Next thing you know: homemade hot Italian sausage. The Chicken Farmer is standing outside next to his or her mailbox, waiting for the mail, wondering how human beings, the animals that invented sausage, can still find it necessary to believe in god. Or something. Let’s see, we can turn pigs into pork, pork into sausage, and so on — milk into butter. We can make airplanes and air mail and post offices, and one still craves … what? Answers? Spirit? Church?

But we have the Internet! Just like that, I can receive an e-mail from my friend Rube Roy in Ohio saying, "I mailed you some sausages. Go stand by your mailbox."

Personally, I don’t need any more information than that. The sausage is in the mail. The coals are glowing. The chickens are looking at the Chicken Farmer like, Well, what’s in it for us?

Answer: grass. There’s a lot of grass around my mailbox, and they can’t get at it. You talk about your symbidiotic relationships. I love to graze, but I don’t particularly like grass. I prefer eggs, and sausage. So, while I’m waiting for the mail, I’m basically mowing the lawn with my hands, throwing it over the fence to the chickens, and they’re going to town, converting green into yellow, healthier, tastier eggs for tomorrow’s lunch, for me, with sausage.

What’s in it for Rube Roy? Well, he gets to be, very fittingly, the first official inductee into the Cheap Eats Hall of Fame. Are you kidding me? He made and mailed me about five pounds of meat — a long string of venison sausage, a short, fat string of hot Italian, and three sticks of spicy, smoked, dried whatever-the-fuck. Soppressata?

It’s delicious, whatever it is. I’m chawing on some right now, writing this. And I still want to tell you about my new favorite dim sum place too, but that’s probably a story unto itself, soupy enough to sink me to the bottom of this column and off the page, into your lap. Where, with all due respect, I don’t know if I want to be, so let’s save that for next week and stay for now with the Cheap Eats Hall of Fame.

You want in, send me something. By e-mail. To eat!

In the meantime, so Rube Roy doesn’t get too lonely, I’m going to take this opportunity to also induct a couple other inductees, that philosophy-talking piano student who hand-delivered to me an order of North Carolina barbecue, hush puppies, and sweet tea. And this Red Cross worker in Seattle (Ketchup County, or something like that) who sent me a big bottle of barbecue sauce. I don’t know. She works for the Red Cross. The bottle says Jones on it, and it’s fantastic.

So if your name is Jones, and you live in Seattle, and you gave blood, I love you. On ribs, especially, but you also go good with meatballs. SFBG

Deeper into sushi

April 25, 2006

› paulr@sfbg.com

Opera Plaza doesn’t look like restaurant heaven, and, for the most part, it isn’t. The development’s long-running success story is Max’s Opera Café, a faux deli that deals in mountainous portions, with dill pickles and fries. Over the years there have been a few places with more style, among them Carlo Middione’s Vivande and Bruce Cost’s Monsoon, but in neither case was traction established, and neither concern lasted long.

The crash of Monsoon isn’t all that difficult to understand in retrospect. Whereas Vivande at least had a big sign overlooking the busy corner of Franklin and Golden Gate Avenues to let potential patrons know it was there, Monsoon (which opened soon after the 1989 earthquake) was buried deep in the complex and wasn’t all that easy to see even from the interior courtyard, complete with its Stalinist concrete and fountain. Here, too late, are my directions: Enter the courtyard from Van Ness, with A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books on your right, pass the fountain, and shear to your right as you approach the movie theater. You will see a neon sign and, beyond some glass doors, will find yourself at the host’s station in a restaurant, and while the restaurant won’t be Monsoon (which closed early in 1993), it will be pretty good. It is Shima Sushi and represents a return to respectability for a centrally located yet obscure site that had fallen into slightly tacky gloom.

A postulate I have been forming recently is that many troubled and oft-flipped restaurant spaces find a stable life serving sushi and other Japanese food, and Shima Sushi bolsters the argument. It helps, certainly, that uncooked fish has long been a form of fast food in Japan, for the large lunchtime crowds at Shima consist, one supposes — to judge by the office garb and accoutrements — largely of people who work in the neighborhood’s complex of municipal, state, and federal offices, and they are visibly under some time pressure. Shima accommodates them gracefully, with bento boxes ($7.95 for a choice of two items, $8.95 for three) featuring such delicacies as tuna sashimi and crisp-skinned, smoky-sweet salmon teriyaki, along with miso soup, mixed green salad, and bean sprouts with scallions. (There is also a vegetarian bento box.) Other choices include a sushi lunch special ($8.95), with a California roll (real crab is $1 extra and worth it) and a mix of sushi pieces likely to include tuna, hamachi, salmon, and shrimp. Those averse to raw flesh have recourse to various forms of teriyaki, tempura, donburi, and udon. Service is quite swift and polite, but the staff is too busy hurrying to do much hovering, and once you’re served, they’re likely to let you be unless you make some want or need known. Then they do come running.

By evening, the mood of the restaurant visibly softens: The light seems a bit yellower, the blond wood of the Japanese-style partitions a bit warmer, the bubbles in the aquarium a bit bigger and lazier. The patronage, too, mellows — but then, people do live in and around Opera Plaza, and for them, Shima is a jewel of a neighborhood restaurant, with a favorable quality-to-price ratio and enough room to accommodate walk-ins while keeping the noise level reasonable. The dinner menu resembles an expanded version of the lunch menu; the chief additions are a list of specialty rolls and a trio of "special combinations" — blow-out sushi festivals served in wooden boats. You order according to the size of your party; we were three and opted for the Shima special ($75, "serves three or more") but quailed when the ship approached the table looking like one of those freighters you sometimes see sailing through the Golden Gate, so laden with booty as to be nearly submerged.

"We’ll never be able to eat all that," said one of my fellow musketeers and one justly renowned for doughtiness in the face of huge amounts of food. As things turned out, we did empty the ship of its cargo, which the other musketeer, to my right, perhaps a bit less doughty, described as "tuna-heavy." As indeed it was, not that there was anything wrong with that. We worked our way through nigiri and sashimi editions of maguro, toro, and albacore (underrated; always fabulously buttery), along with salmon, red snapper (thin sheets of pearly flesh splashed with rose), and bonito, whose ribbing gave each piece the look of a chunk of burst all-terrain tire on the shoulders of a mountain highway. Astern, the ship had been laden with rolls, among them Super California — strips of barbecued eel laid atop rice disks stuffed with avocado and snow crab — and Lion King, a California roll wrapped in salmon, then baked in foil like a potato.

In due course the denuded ship sailed away, guided by a smiling server who nonetheless shook her head in polite awe at what we had accomplished. A few moments later she showed up with small bowls of green tea ice cream: reward or penalty? Neither; the ice cream was included in the deal, to be shipped under separate cover. The doughty musketeer made a face at the prospect of green tea ice cream but polished it off since, in the end, a sweet is a sweet is a sweet, especially if at no extra cost. SFBG

Shima Sushi

Dinner: Mon.–Thurs. and Sat., 5–9:30 p.m.; Fri., 5–10 p.m.

Lunch: Mon.–Sat., 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

601 Van Ness, SF

(415) 292-9997

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible

King of Shadows

April 25, 2006

TRIBUTE Days of Our Lives had Patch and Kayla; Passions had Precious, Timmy, and Zombie Charity (don’t ask). But Dark Shadows had werewolves, time travel, ghosts, a vampire protagonist (Jonathan Frid), and plots that revolved around such curious objects as the severed hand of one Count Petofi (much sought after for its mystical powers). Dark Shadows — the original version of which ran from 1966 to 1971; it also spawned multiple films and revivals — was clearly a singular sensation, and much of the credit goes to its beloved creator-producer, Dan Curtis.

Curtis, who passed away March 27 at the age of 78, was also noted for his many 1970s TV films. Most contained gothic elements, includingThe Night Stalker and the Karen Black –tastic Trilogy of Terror, plus versions of Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Dracula (the latter two starring Jack Palance). On the big screen he directed Black in the haunted-house tale Burnt Offerings; he also helmed the anthology tale Dead of Night, written by frequent collaborator Richard Matheson.

These days, The Montel Williams Show tapes in Dark Shadows’ old New York City studio (not among Dark Shadows’ horrors, as far as I can tell, are unexpected paternity test results). But the soap’s cult lives on, much like lovelorn vamp Barnabas Collins, with multiple DVD collections from MPI Home Video (www.mpihomevideo.com) — endearing flubs from the show’s live tapings intact. For more information on Curtis, visit the frighteningly complete www.collinwood.net, operated by European fanzine Dark Shadows Journal. (Cheryl Eddy)

Kill-er dude

Kill the Moonlight

(Plexifilm)

PRESS PLAY It coulda been Slacker, and instead, true to "Loser" form, it got lost. That was the fate of Steve Hanft’s 1994 "underground classic" feature Kill the Moonlight.

Kill has a rep for being rarely seen but, weirdly, widely disseminated — due to the fact that its title character, would-be race car driver, fish hatchery feeder, and toxic waste cleaner Chance, provided the direct inspiration for Beck’s first Gen X–Rosetta stone single, "Loser." Samples from the movie ("I’m a driver/ I’m a winner/ Things are gonna change/ I can feel it," drones the never-say-die, ultimately unkillable Chance) popped up in the sleeper pop hit itself, and clips of the movie surfaced in the song’s video, directed by Hanft (who also played with Beck in a band called Liquor Cabinet).

Alterna-strippers, Kiss revivalism, and bitchin’ Camaros — how much more ’90s can you get? With the release of this DVD — which includes a bonus soundtrack CD of music by Beck, the Raunch Hands, and Go to Blazes — you can finally bask in the low-budget, occasionally funny, often stiff, yet extremely atmospheric lo-fi glory of this 76-minute feature, which Hanft seems to have spun off with his bigger-budget 2001 feature,Southlander, starring a goofy musician named Chance and, well, Beck. (Kimberly Chun)

San Francisco International Film Festival: Week two

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April 25, 2006
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WED/26

*Art School Confidential (Terry Zwigoff, USA, 2005). Pulpy with a deep noirish cast, this second collabo between Ghost World director Terry Zwigoff and cartoonist Daniel Clowes jumps off the artist’s scathingly on-target Eightball strip of the same name, taking aim at misbegotten would-be genius Jerome (Max Minghella), on campus with a serial killer on the loose, and painting Clowes’s comic exposé even blacker. Jerome’s hilarious and progressively unsettling trajectory through the art school con is studded with such delicious characters as condescending, failed-artist instructor John Malkovich, haughty art history teacher Anjelica Huston, wiseacre friend Joel David Moore, and graduate burnout/washout "guru" Jim Broadbent. 6:30 p.m., Kabuki (Kimberly Chun)

*The Wild Blue Yonder (Werner Herzog, Germany/England/France, 2005). Herzog’s latest dispatch from the reaches of inner and outer space orbits around found footage from NASA, mesmerizing underwater-camera work by Bay Area Grizzly Man player Henry Kaiser, and supposed space oddity Brad Dourif, furrowing his brow with all his might and telling tales of aquatic constellations elsewhere and environmental devastation on his adopted planet Earth. This elegiac, doomsaying — and at times pixieish — riff on Herzogian themes of hell- and heaven-bent exploration, vision quests, survival, and a certain rootlessness finds the auteur delving further into his Grizzly technique of piecing together a compelling narrative from whatever he can find in his cupboard. 7:30 p.m., Castro (as part of "An Evening with Werner Herzog") (Chun)

THURS/27

See You in Space (J??zsef Pacskovsky, Hungary, 2005). Hungarian writer-director Pacskovsky’s latest is another whimsical contraption of crisscrossing multiple story lines that sigh and shrug over the human condition. An astronaut stuck in orbit grows desperate as (back on Earth) his wife leaves him for a suave magician; a macrobiologist stalks, woos, and wins a virginal African refugee; a young hairdresser edges toward romance with an elderly client; a criminal psychologist finds herself attracted to a jailed murder suspect. Sprawling cross the globe, these alternately sardonic, fantastical, and silly threads are united by a sense that obsessive love is as unavoidable as it is inevitably disappointing. 4 p.m., Kabuki. Also Tues/2, 8:45 p.m., and May 4, 5:45 p.m., Kabuki (Dennis Harvey)

*The Shutka Book of Records (Aleksandar Manic, Czech Republic, 2005). A Roma town in Macedonia stuffed with self-proclaimed champions is the setting for this weirdly joyful film, which is far too bizarre to be anything but a doc. Here’s some of what you’ll see: the "most powerful dervish in the world"; Mondo Cane–ish interludes (one word: circumcisions!); a woman known as "The Terminator" whose stock-in-trade is exorcising evil genies; break-dancers and boxers; exceedingly competitive Turkish music fanatics; and a young butcher named Elvis. My head was about to explode after I saw this film … but in a good way. 1:45 p.m., Kabuki. Also Sun/30, 12:45 p.m., Kabuki (Cheryl Eddy)

The Sun (Alexander Sokurov, Russia/Italy/France/Switzerland, 2005). Third in a planned quartet of features about figureheads of 20th-century totalitarianism — earlier ones focused on Hitler and Lenin; the fourth is yet to be announced — this latest by Sokurov (Mother and Son, Russian Ark) focuses on Emperor Hirohito (Issey Ogata) at World War II’s end. The first half is as claustrophobic and tedious as the emperor’s underground bunker. Things get more interesting when he emerges to meet with the occupying forces’ General MacArthur (Robert Dawson) and sheds his age-old status as a living god — a move that lets the Japanese people off the hook while allowing a bookish, mild-mannered monarch to finally live like a human being. This is a fascinating situation as well as a key historic and cultural moment. But The Sun is heavy going; seldom has a subject generated so little of Sokurov’s trademark metaphysical poetry, despite some striking moments. 9:15 p.m., Kabuki. Also Sat/29, 3:15 p.m., Kabuki; and May 3, 7 p.m., PFA (Harvey)

FRI/28

Executive Koala (Minoru Kawasaki, Japan, 2005). It all starts so promisingly: An overworked koala, who is a celebrated executive in a pickle company, spends his time away from the office in bed with his doting human girlfriend. When she turns up dead, the cops come after him, causing our marsupial hero to question his assumed gentleness and his past. But this ridiculous Japanese comedy fails to build upon its initial setup; once the novelty of a guy in a koala suit wears off, so does the enjoyment. 10:30 p.m., Kabuki. Also Tues/2, 4:15 p.m., Kabuki (Jonathan L. Knapp)

SAT/29

*The Descent (Neil Marshall, England, 2005). What’s worse than being trapped underground? How about being trapped underground with creepy cave dwellers — creepy, hungry cave dwellers? And maybe, just maybe, losing your mind at the same time? Believe the hype: British import The Descent is the scariest movie since The Blair Witch Project, thanks to a killer premise, flawless pacing and casting, and Dog Soldiers writer-director Neil Marshall’s unconcealed love for the horror genre. 11:30 p.m., Kabuki. Also Mon/1, 4 p.m., Kabuki (Eddy)

*Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple (Stanley Nelson, USA, 2006). Nearly 30 years after the deaths of more than 900 people in the Guyanese jungle, Nelson’s deeply affecting documentary replays Jim Jones’s final, twisted address: "We didn’t commit suicide — we committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world." That speech sets in motion what the doc tabs "the largest mass ‘suicide’ in modern history." Using a remarkable cache of vintage footage, as well as candid interviews with Peoples Temple survivors, relatives, and other eyewitnesses, Nelson examines the massacre with a journalist’s eye. Why the tragedy happened may never be explained, but seldom before has the how of Jonestown been so clearly delineated. 6:15 p.m., Kabuki. Also Sun/30, 7 p.m., Intersection for the Arts; Mon/1, 7 p.m., PFA; and Tues/2, 4:30 p.m., Kabuki (Eddy)

*Wide Awake (Alan Berliner, USA, 2005). Documentary filmmaker Berliner (Nobody’s Business, The Sweetest Sound) takes his celebrated self-scrutiny to dizzying heights in this portrait of the artist as an insomniac. The subject is specific, but it’s readily apparent how sleeplessness touches Berliner’s life and work. As his trademark virtuosic montage editing flashes by (like many heralded avant-garde filmmakers before him, Berliner meticulously constructs scenes and meaning from the detritus of film history), we realize the extent to which artistry can be tied to neurosis — a message unusual in its candor and transparency. 5:45 p.m., PFA. Also Sun/30, 4:15 p.m., Aquarius; and Tues/2, 9:30 p.m., Kabuki (Max Goldberg)

SUN/30

Half Nelson (Ryan Fleck, USA, 2005). Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling) is both an inspiring, idealistic teacher of history and a long-suffering addict of crack and cocaine in this challenging character study. Aside from a laughable reliance on stroking his scruff to convey existential angst, Gosling is largely up to the task of playing the bipolar lead, but the swaying narration of his character’s downward spiral feels shapeless. Still, the scenes in which Dan and a knowing student (Shareeka Epps) guardedly discuss immobility, race, and life in Brooklyn avoid the histrionics that mar typical teacher films, making Half Nelson a powerful, if overly ambitious first feature for writer-director Fleck and writer-producer Anna Boden. 6:15 p.m., Kabuki. Also Tues/2, 9 p.m., Kabuki (Goldberg)

TUES/2

*Backstage (Emmanuelle Bercot, France, 2005). Emmanuelle Seigner convincingly plays — and sings as — sexily imperious Euro-pop goddess Lauren in this headlong remix of All about Eve, Persona, and the psycho-stalker genre. She commands hysterical worship from her fans, few being more hysterical than suburban teenager Lucie (Isild Le Besco). Improbably, the latter manages to insinuate herself into the spoiled, neurotic, rather awful pop princess’s inner circle as new confidante, servant, and toy. But if Lauren is a mess, Lucie might well turn out to be the much sicker puppy. Nasty fun, smartly directed. 7 p.m., Kabuki (also with Zoom! party at Roe, 9:30 p.m.) (Harvey) SFBG

Love is blond

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April 25, 2006
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

"I don’t want to be compared to Blondie all the time, but I can absolutely see why people do it," the Sounds’ Maja Ivarsson says.

Calling from a tour stop in Albuquerque, the charismatic Swede readily acknowledges that as the blond vocalist of an infectious, synth-driven band that’s heavily influenced by ’80s music, she’ll never escape the shadow of Debbie Harry. Unlike most of today’s retro revivalists, however, who are so desperate not to appear derivative that they barely admit to even their most obvious influences — Interpol and the Killers, you’re fooling no one — Ivarsson doesn’t mind the comparison. In fact, she takes it as a compliment.

"The Blondie thing is flattering because it’s a great band," she continues. "At the same time, I can see why people want to be their own band. But I think it’s kind of silly to get upset about it, because every band that you’ve been listening to since you were a kid has been compared to something before that. It’s the way it works."

Of course, the Sounds aren’t the second coming of Blondie — they’re even better. On 2003’s Living in America (Scratchie/New Line), the Swedish new wave sensations sound like they spent years deconstructing their favorite early-’80s hits, cribbing notes from Missing Persons, Kim Wilde, and, yes, Blondie, to create a danceable pop-rock album so outlandishly catchy it sounds less like a band’s debut than a collection of greatest hits. If that seems too good to be true — and really, songs like "Mine for Life" and "Dance with Me" kind of are — it helps to remember they hail from the country with probably the most hit-makers per capita in pop history, including ABBA, A-ha, Ace of Base, and Max Martin.

"We’ve been brought up with great, great melodies and songwriting," Ivarsson says. "We’re just suckers for hit music, even music like that Kelly Clarkson song, ‘Since U Been Gone’ — it has a great hook! Maybe it’s not your favorite artist, but if you took that hook and added your shit to it, you could build a great pop song out of it."

Surprisingly, they weren’t always so smitten with such accessible songwriting. Formed in 1998 while still in high school, the Sounds started out playing six-minute rock epics that Ivarsson describes as "dark and weird and very arrrgh." When those songs failed to find them a fan base, however, they decided to shift direction and try their hands at new wave. "We were just like, ‘Oh, dude, this is the way we’re going to sound!’" she recalls. "It was so much more fun. It was cheesy, but it was good cheese!"

They weren’t the only ones who thought so. In 2002, after the Sounds signed a major-label deal with Warner Sweden, Living in America went putf8um and earned them a Swedish Grammy before getting released stateside a year later on James Iha’s Scratchie Records. Tours with the Strokes and Foo Fighters, as well as a stint on the 2004 Vans Warped Tour, ensued, along with massive word of mouth surrounding the band’s glamtastic, adrenalin-spiking live show. Unfortunately, the Sounds’ success here still fell far short of what they have back home.

That may change with the recent release of Dying to Say This to You (Scratchie/New Line). Helmed by Jeff Saltzman, who produced the Killers’ Hot Fuss (Island), and mixed by Paul Q. Kolderie (Radiohead, Hole), the Sounds’ second album is an even better blitzkrieg of retro wrist-pumping anthems — glitter-punk riffs! Euro-disco keyboard lines! Ivarsson’s tough-gal taunts! — that’s so relentlessly catchy it practically dares America not to listen. And while many people who’ve tired of the ’80s revival will do just that, it’s their loss: Stadium-ready stompers such as "Queen of Apology" and dance floor confections like "Tony the Beat" prove that sharp hooks — even when rooted in Reagan-era nostalgia — never go out of style.

Why should it matter, then, that we’ve heard all this before? The Sounds may not be today’s most innovative rock band, but they’re one of the most efficient when it comes to creating exuberant, unabashedly poppy rock. So it’s best to follow Ivarsson’s lead and shrug off the fact that her band will probably always be seen as Blondie wannabes. They’re not, of course, but nor are they overly concerned with anyone else’s notions of originality, authenticity, and indie credibility. Rather, quite refreshingly, the Sounds simply want to show as many people a good time as possible.

"We don’t think it’s anything to be ashamed of if you’re a great pop band — pop means popular, and it’s a pretty good sign if you’re popular," Ivarsson says, laughing. "In the beginning, only hip bands and elite people knew about us, and they were like, ‘This is my band.’ Of course, they don’t like us anymore, but that’s OK. As long as the people like us, then we’re happy. We just want to get you down."<\!s><z5><h110>SFBG<h$><z$>

The Sounds

With Morningwood and Action Action

Mon/1, 7:30 p.m.

Slim’s

333 11th St., SF

$13–<\d>$15

(415) 522-0333

Ruling party

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April 25, 2006
0

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J-Stalin knows how to make an entrance.

The first time we meet, in November 2004 at the Mekanix’s recording studio in East Oakland, he enters nonchalantly, sporting an embroidered eye mask as though it were everyday wear. He walks up to me and shakes my hand. "I’m J-Stalin. I write and record two songs a day," he says with boyish pride.

I had a hard time retaining the notion the rapper wasn’t a boy, for though he’d recently turned 21, his five-foot frame and preternatural baby face gave the impression of a raspy-voiced, blunt-puffing, Henny-swilling 14-year-old.

Yet he already had a storied past. A teen crack dealer, or "d-boy," from West Oakland’s Cypress Village, Stalin was busted at age 17, spending the next 11 months on parole with weekends in juvenile hall. During this period, to both stave off boredom and possibly escape the multigenerational cycle of dope-dealing in his family, the young Jovan Smith began writing raps, finding out about the other Stalin in 11th-grade history class, and soaking up game at the Grill in Emeryville, where family friend DJ Daryl had a recording studio.

After letting him watch for a year, Daryl put Stalin on a track — the result so impressed Daryl’s frequent collaborator, Bay Area legend Richie Rich, he immediately commissioned a hook. Stalin would end up on three cuts on Rich’s Nixon Pryor Roundtree (Ten-Six, 2002) and on two as a member of the Replacement Killers, a group that included Rich and Crestside Vallejo’s PSD. Several more songs from this period had just surfaced on Rich’s 2004 compilation, Snatches, Grabs, and Takes (Ten-Six), though Stalin had since defected to the Mekanix’s production company, Zoo Entertainment. By the time we met, the highly productive crew had recorded most of Stalin’s upcoming debut, On Behalf of Tha Streets.

He’s next

During the next 18 months, J-Stalin would generate no small amount of buzz, thanks in part to high-profile guest shots on projects like the Jacka’s The Jack Artist (Artist, 2005) and the Delinquents’ Have Money Have Heart (Dank or Die, 2005). Three advance tracks from On Behalf — "Party Jumpin’," featuring Jacka; a clean version of "Fuck You"; and an homage to the classic drum machine, "My 808" — have accumulated spins on KMEL, while the video for "My 808" has more than 20,000 plays on Youtube.com. Too $hort says he’s "next," E-40’s dubbed him "the future," and major labels like Capitol and Universal are checking him hard.

To crown these achievements, Stalin’s copped a coveted spot hosting an upcoming project for the Bay Area’s mix-tape kings, DJ Devro and Impereal, alias the Demolition Men (see sidebar). Named after Stalin’s penchant for calling the DJs at 7 a.m., ready to lay verses, The Early Morning Shift is a potent fusion of mix tape beats and Mekanix originals, laced with Stalin’s melodic raps and distinctively raw, R&B–style vocals. Taking advantage of the industry’s current structure, whereby you can drop a mix tape or two without compromising your "debut" album marketability, The Early Morning Shift will be most listeners’ first chance to hear the prolific J-Stalin at length, in the company of stars like Keak, F.A.B., and the Team, as well as Stalin’s Cypress Village crew, Livewire. Having generated some 60 tracks in the scant two weeks devoted to recording the disc, Stalin has literally given the Demolition Men more than they can handle: Talk of a "part two" is already in the air, though the DJs are still rushing to finish the first for an early-May release.

The Early Morning Shift comes at a pivotal time in J-Stalin’s career. At the very least, the mix tape will warm up the Bay for On Behalf, which Zoo Entertainment plans to release independently in the next few months. With everywhere from Rolling Stone to USA Today catching on to the Bay’s hyphy/thizz culture, and major labels lurking in the wings, it’s probably only a matter of time before Stalin gets a deal. But the rapper is adamant on signing only as part of the Mekanix’s Zoo.

"We don’t want an artist deal," he says. "If they give us a label deal, it’ll work, because I ain’t fittin’ to sign no artist deal."

If this sounds a tad dictatorial in the mouth of so young a playa, consider that Stalin left a famous rapper’s camp to work with a then-unknown production duo, a decision fraught with risk. But Stalin’s instincts regarding his own artistic strengths are sound. He thrives on quantity, and the Mekanix’s intense productivity suits Stalin’s seemingly endless supply of rhymes and hooks. The duo’s ominous, minor-key soundscapes provide perfect vehicles for the rapper’s exuberant tales of West Oakland street hustle and melancholy, often poignant reflections on d-boy life.

"I used to listen to their beats," Stalin recalls, "and be like, ‘Damn, them niggas got heat!’ Plus they ain’t no haters. I mean, I’m a leader; I ain’t no follower. They allow me to still be me and fuck with them at the same time."

A few months ago I had a chance to watch this process in action, dropping by the studio as Dot and Tweed were putting the finishing touches on a hot new beat, one in tune with current hyphy trends yet retaining the dark urgency characteristic of the Mekanix sound.

"Let me get on it," Stalin says, as he usually does when he hears something he likes.

Sometimes Dot says yes, sometimes no, depending on their plans for a particular session. With a beat this fresh and radio-ready, one they could easily sell, Dot is noncommittal: "What you got for it?"

Without a pause Stalin breaks into a melody, accompanied by an impromptu dance: "That’s my name / Don’t wear it out, wear it out, wear it out …" Simple, catchy, the phrase totally works, and in less time than it takes to tell, he’s in the booth laying down what promises to be the main single from On Behalf: "That’s My Name."

Sitting behind the mixing board, Dot shoots me a smile, as if to say, "See why we work with this guy?"

On the Go Movement

With The Early Morning Shift about to drop, and On Behalf on the way, the only thing Stalin needs is his own catchword, à la hyphy or thizz. Enter the Go movement. Among recent innovations in Bay Area hip-hop slang is a certain use of the word go to indicate a kind of dynamic state of being, widely attributed to Stalin.

"I ain’t sayin’ I made it up, but somebody from West Oakland did," Stalin says. "Even before there was hella songs talkin’ about Go and shit, that shit came from ecstasy pills. We used to say, ‘Goddamn, you motherfuckers go.’ And then you refer to a female like, ‘She go.’ I swear it used to just be me and my niggas in the hood. I started fuckin’ with the Mekanix and sayin’ it at they place. Then, before I knew it, everybody was talking about Go."

Like thizz, Go quickly expanded beyond its drug-related origins, partly because it epitomizes so well the fast-paced environment of rappers’ lifestyles. Among the early cosigners of the Go movement is the Team, whose album World Premiere (Moedoe) dropped at the beginning of April. Not only did the group release a between-album mix tape and DVD called Go Music (Siccness.net, 2005), but Team member Kaz Kyzah has hooked up with Stalin and the Mekanix for a side project called the Go Boyz. First previewed on Go Music, on a track also featuring Mistah F.A.B., the Go Boyz have already recorded their self-titled debut, and Zoo is in talks with Moedoe about an eventual corelease.

"Where I’m from, we don’t say, ‘Go stupid.’ ‘Go dumb.’ We just go," Kaz Kyzah says, explaining the term’s appeal.

"Really, it’s a way of life for us," he continues. "Me, Stalin, Dot, and Tweed, we’d be up all night just goin’. Every song was recorded at like four in the morning. Listening to some of the stuff now, you can feel it in the music."

Getting in early

Since I began this piece, Stalin, it seems, has gotten even bigger, as word of The Early Morning Shift and the Go Boyz has spread through the scene. People are suddenly lining up to work with him, and he’s already committed to new projects with DJ Fresh, Beeda Weeda, the Gorilla Pits, and J-Nash, an R&B singer featured on Mistah F.A.B.’s upcoming Yellow Bus Driver. In a late-breaking development, E-40 confirms he intends to sign the Stalin/Beeda Weeda duo project to Sick Wid It Records.

During our interview, Stalin and I run by DJ Fresh’s studio so J can lay a rhyme for an upcoming installment of Fresh’s mix tape series, The Tonite Show. Another rapper, watching Stalin pull a verse out of thin air four bars at a time, is clearly awed: "He’s amazing. I mean, he’s on the records I buy."

Stalin takes it all in stride, though; aside from when I’ve watched him perform live, this is the first time I’ve ever seen someone react to him like he was a star. I get the feeling, however, it’s far from the last. SFBG

J-Stalin

Fri/28, 10 p.m. doors

Club Rawhide

280 Seventh St., SF

$20

(415) 621-1197

myspace.com/jstalinofficialpage

Bring on the Demolition Men

The Demolition Men, Impereal and DJ Devro, definitely didn’t earn their reputation as the Bay Area’s mix-tape kings by staying at home. As DJs the duo has performed together and separately at clubs all over the world, from China and Japan to South America and Europe. Native Spanish speakers — Impereal hails from the Colombian community in Queens, NY, while Devro is Southern California Creole — the pair also hosts Demolition Men Radio, broadcast Thursdays from 6 to 7 p.m. on Azul 1063, a hip-hop station in Colombia’s Medell??n. Yet if you live in the Bay, you’re most liable to see them on the street, selling mix tapes out of their backpacks.

"We’re like a walking promotional retail machine," Impereal jokes. "If you don’t buy a mix tape, you going home with a flyer."

Such determination, coupled with the DJs’ high output (more than 30 releases since late 2003, including three volumes each of R&B and reggaeton) and elaborate graphics, has finally kick-started the Bay’s once lackadaisical mix tape scene.

An integral component of hip-hop in New York and the South, enabling new talents to be heard alongside vets and vets to issue bulletins with an immediacy unavailable to corporate labels, DJ-assembled mix tapes at their best are the ultimate in no-holds-barred hip-hop. Considered "promotional material" and usually printed in limited quantities, the discs are generally unencumbered by legal requirements like sample clearance.

Until recently, however, mix tapes weren’t much of a factor here. While the Demolition Men are quick to pay homage to their local predecessors — like Mad Idiot, DJ Natural, and DJ Supreme — Natural acknowledges the mix tape scene was a bit dead before the Demolition Men began shaking it up.

"Out here DJs were concentrating on clubs," Natural says. "Then they started putting stuff out constantly." Now there’s sufficient trade in mix tapes for Natural to move his formerly virtual business, Urban Era, to brick-and-mortar digs at 5088 Mission, making it the Bay’s only all–mix tape music store. Yet even with increased competition, he notes, the Demolition Men still routinely sell out.

In addition to their up-tempo release schedule, the success of the Demolition Men’s mixes might be attributed to the conceptual coherence they bring to their projects. While they do put together general mixes featuring more mainstream fare — such as the Out the Trunk series, which boasts exclusives from Ludacris — the duo’s hottest projects tend to tap into the Bay’s reservoir of talent. Aside from their multifaceted Best of the Bay series, the Demolition Men have released mix tapes hosted by Bay Area artists like Balance, Cellski, El Dorado Red, and the Team.

Currently the Demolition Men’s most successful disc has been their most ambitious: Animal Planet, not so much a mix tape as music cinema, starring the Mob Figaz’ Husalah and Jacka. A mighty 34 tracks — featuring production by Rob Lo, Traxamillion, and the Mekanix, and appearances by F.A.B., Keak, and Pretty Black — Animal Planet is an incredible collection of almost entirely exclusive, original material, seriously blurring the boundary between mix tape and album. Its success has encouraged bold undertakings, like The Early Morning Shift with J-Stalin and Block Tested, Hood Approved, a mix tape/DVD starring Fillmore rapper Big Rich. "I guess we’re taking the mix tape to the next level," Devro says. (Caples)

Demolition Men DJ

Thurs/27 and the last Thursday of every month, 9 p.m. doors

Vault

81 W. Santa Clara, San Jose

$10

(408) 298-1112

myspace.com/demolitionmenmusic

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