Perhaps you’ve seen the billboard on your daily Bay Bridge commute: simple white background, a hand with two fingers pressed together, and in bold type, the words GreatIntegration: A Chamber Hip-Hop Opera.
If you, like many commuters, are intrigued by the concept, allow me to shed some light. The two-act performance, which takes places this week, is a true blend of classical music and hip-hop; it’s 90 minutes of continuous flow, MCs spinning a dark and moral tale of modern corruption over a live ensemble of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, drums, and bass. It’s a production spearheaded by the duo behind Oakland’s Gold Fetus Records – Christopher Nicholas and Joo Wan Kim, musicians who met in the dorms at Berklee College of Music, and Kim’s Ensemble Mik Nawooj. For this particular piece, Nicholas is mostly behind the scenes in organizing mode, and Kim is the music director who wrote the lurid tale at the heart of Great Integration.
“I think in order for something like this to happen, there has to be a general hybridization,” says Kim, “if you think about ‘crossover’, it generally means you’re compromising the genre, but what I’m doing is not necessarily hip-hop or classical, but bringing the elements of [both] and creating something new. In that way, to my knowledge, I don’t think anybody has done this – or to this length.”
The basic storyline follows five material lords, each corporate tycoons who represent fundamental elements of the world – wood, fire, earth, water, and metal – and what happens when the Gods decide to assassinate the lords. Kirby Dominant is the MC for act one of Great Integration, playing a character in this act called “the Black Swordsman of Dominance.” Rico Pabón, the MC for act two, plays a character dubbed “the Water Bearer.”
Initially, Kim planned to base Great Integration on a comic book, but Dominant disliked the idea and pushed him to look deeper. The final plot came to Kim in a vision during a routine BART ride between San Francisco and Berkeley. It was those cryptic messages about God coming to earth and the material world’s end that inspired his story.
Creating the initial concept behind the chamber hip-hop opera itself took even longer. If you’ll allow it, I’ll reach farther back into Kim’s musical past to illuminate the hybridization. Born and raised in South Korea, he got his bachelors at Berklee, studying Western European classical music, and later received his masters at the San Francisco Conservatory Of Music . He was introduced to hip-hop by his friend, drummer Valentino Pellizzer, and initially hated it.
“I just didn’t understand it, then one day it clicked to me, I realized it was actually good,” Kim says. “I listened to NWA and really liked it. People think it’s really weird, because I’m totally into classical so they’re like ‘you might like J Dilla or Mos Def’ or some like, conscious hip-hop, but no, I listen to gangster rap.”
In 2005, Kim wrote a piece that started as chamber music. Pellizzer suggested he add an MC on it, so Kim contacted Dominant and they did a show together. That was the musical precursor to Great Integration, long before the storyline was written. With the concept, the plots, the ensemble, and the MCs all in place, Kim and Co. presented the first act of Great Integration in 2010 with live dancers. They later performed it again at Yoshi’s and the Red Poppy Art House with just the musical elements. Now, for the first time, Great Integration premieres the second act, and the debut of MC Rico Pabón in the production – all going down this Friday, Sept. 30 at the Old First Concerts. Kim hopes the piece will expand the public’s understanding of what you can do with a piece of music.
“For our culture, the only thing we have is pop art. And unfortunately some of it, is really bad,” he complains, “People running the business don’t really care about good or bad, as long as they make money.”
Though he also sees the importance of music for the people: “On the other end of the spectrum there are people who are in school, getting grants, and writing this work that has nothing to do with anything – so nobody gets that. They drink wine and talk about fucking Stravinsky. Stravinsky wouldn’t like that. When he was writing music, he was writing for people. What Golden Fetus is doing, we’re bringing sophistication, but we’re not snobs. We love NWA as well.”
Great Integration: A Chamber Hip-Hop Opera Fri/30, 8 p.m., $14-$17 Old First Concerts 1751 Sacramento, SF www.goldenfetus.com
Some weeks feel so long (thanks a lot Week After Labor Day), you just need another spirited kick in the proverbial ass. So I give you, a second Localized Appreesh this week: Rank/Xerox. The San Francisco punk trio – known for its connections with bands such as Grass Widow (friends/split cassette tape output), and for its other creative endeavors (DIY labels, Web-based videozine Mondo Vision, eye-catching graphic illustrations) – comes from a long tradition of reputable underground punk and arty post-punk, much of which was hatched in San Francisco (Flipper) and London (Wire).
Rank/Xerox is made up of Australian singer-guitarist David West, Jon Shade, who taught himself to play drums for the band, and singer-bassist-illustrator Kevin McCarthy, who, along with Shade, is a former member of the now-disbanded party punk act, Jump off a Building. This weekend, Rank/Xerox celebrates the release of its new self-titled long-player, which was recorded by King Riff and Ty Segall, with a show at Hemlock Tavern.
Year and location of origin: Early 2009 in San Francisco. Band name origin: Swiped from an old corporate merger, thought it sounded catchy. Band motto: Stark and dark, bland not grand. Description of sound in 10 words or less: Antiquated punk junk. Instrumentation: Jon plays drums, David plays guitar and voice, Kevin plays bass and voice. Most recent release: Brand new self-titled LP on Make A Mess Records, the Hemlock show on Saturday will actually be a release party of sorts… and a song on the new Maximum Rocknroll all-Bay Area band compilation LP called Noise Ordinance. Best part about life as a Bay Area band: Getting mistaken for Don Nelson. Worst part about life as a Bay Area band: Getting mistaken for Danielle Steel. First record/cassette tape/or CD ever purchased: Jon – Ozzy, The Oz Man Cometh; Kevin – Cyndi Lauper, True Colors; David – The Dandy Warhols are Sound (a guess because he didn’t answer). Most recent record/cassette tape/CD/or Mp3 purchased/borrowed from the Web: Jon – a copy of the Rat Columns 7″ was waiting for me on my bed when I got home, thanks David; Kevin – Crazy Band Fuck You tape; David – the Ovens new 7″ on Catholic Guilt (another question unanswered, another guess). Favorite local eatery and dish: Golden Gate Indian Cuisine and Pizza on Judah. Best restaurant in the city, eat everything but the Italian dishes.
Rank/Xerox With Kitchen’s Floor, Fat History Month, Yi Sept. 10, 9:30 pm, $7 Hemlock Tavern 1131 Polk, SF www.hemlocktavern.com Facebook event
Localized Appreesh is our weekly thank-you column to the musicians that make the Bay. Each week a band/music-maker with a show, album release, or general good news during those seven days is highlighted and spotlit. To be considered, contact emilysavage@sfbg.com.
The Jaunting Martyrs were chosen for Localized Appreesh because the seven-piece band has a great, thoroughly San Franciscan in spirit, show this week and it could use your attention: Kimo’s tonight (Tuesday) with Fierce Bad Rabbit, Wesley Woo, Halftime Heros.
Plus, have you heard its music? It’s like an Eastern European circus took a folky Appalachian holiday. It’s both quiet, classical bedtime story and traveling, rambling, carnival party. The song “Surfin Tzigane” off last year’s self-titled EP is probably the most telling. With initially delicate Spanish-style strumming, it leads eventually to rowdy wet reverb – not out of place within a true-blue American surf rock Dick Dale track – and, laid over that, Bulgarian drumming and Turkish horn. It’s world traveling from the ground-pillow comfort of your own intimate local music venue.
Year and location of origin: 2008, San Francisco, Calif. Band name origin: Originally, it began as the random name of the track of space music Justine was sending off in the mail when she met Brendan on the BART train, but has come to mean something deeper, communicated in some of the characters in our songs, such as Mickey, Lila, and Bonnie Blue. Basically, A Jaunting Martyr is one who has moved past anger and angst into acceptance of their plight, and is able to laugh and dance in the face of hopelessness. Band motto: “Never mind the baby faces, this is a savage band.” Description of sound in 10 words or less: A sound that tells a story, fluttering from intimate to intense. Instrumentation: Electric guitar, bass, banjo, mandolin, trumpet, tapan (Bulgarian drum), fiddle, charango, kaval. Most recent release: A self-titled self-released, self-mixed self-published EP. Best part about life as a Bay Area band: This is simply the most beautiful, spiritually powerful place in the world. We are all natives here, we all consider it home. (Except for Ivan, he’s from Bulgaria, which I’m sure he digs as well). Worst part about life as a Bay Area band: Those folks with the tightly crossed arms at shows. First record/cassette tape/or CD ever purchased: The Mermen – A Glorious Lethal Euphoria. Most recent record/cassette tape/CD/or Mp3 purchased/borrowed from the Web: Spirits of The Red City – Hunter Moon. Favorite local eatery and dish: Lucca Foods on Irving and 20th. Best deli in SF, baby. Get the Billy Filly. (You can only get it when Billy’s working).
With Fierce Bad Rabbit, Wesley Woo, Halftime Heros Tues/13, 9 p.m., $6 Kimo’s 1351 Polk, SF www.kimosbarsf.com
Try not to fall in love: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOC31u1GzxU&feature=related
Localized Appreesh is our weekly thank-you column to the musicians that make the Bay. Each week a band/music-maker with a show, album release, or general good news is highlighted and spotlit. To be considered, contact emilysavage@sfbg.com.
Let’s get this out of the way: the boys behind Religious Girls are neither pious, nor female. They are however, worthy of your time, ear drums, and ultimately, devotion. I mean, the band once described itself as “spider-jazz clusterfuck” —- which is why I’m naming Religious Girls our first Localized Appreesh (you’ll see a different local music act in this slot every week). The Oakland-based arty noise trio bestows upon listeners a synth-y wave of gurgling keyboard, waterfalling beeps, and crashing drums. The vocals are repetitive, tribal, soothing; for the most part lacking actual words. Like a more ambient Battles.
If you want to see Religious Girls with Born Gold and Part Time for free* this week, then scroll down below the quick and dirty bio:
Need to know: Religious Girls Year and location of origin: Summer 2008 in Oakland, Calif. Band name origin: It was originally a song name, then we decided it was better than the old band name… Destroy Tokyo Band motto: Shred til we Ded / Cry me Out / Q-ZAR Description of sound in 10 words or less: We just say yes to everything we like about music. [ed. – nice, way to use precisely 10 words] Instrumentation: Nick: drums / vocals / live loops; Chris: highend / keys / vocals / samples; Guy: lowend / keys / auxdrums / samples. Most recent release: Midnight Realms 12″ EP released by Everybodies Stomached (LA) and Echolalic Records(Seattle) in July 2011 Best part about life as a Bay Area band: Playing too many shows Worst part about life as a Bay Area band: Playing too many shows First record/cassette tape/or CD ever purchased: Nick: Space Jam soundtrack Most recent record/cassette tape/CD/or Mp3 purchased/stolen from the Web: The Weekend – House of Balloons Favorite local eatery and dish: Bake Sale Betty’s fried chicken sandwich
Live at the Bay Bridged’s Phono Del Sol: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrhiNSExtL8&feature=player_embedded
*Win two guest list spots for the Religious Girls/Born Gold (formerly Gobble Gobble)/Part Time show (presented by Epicsauce.com) this Thursday, Sept. 8 at the Knockout. Just go to our Facebook page and comment on the link to this post with your favorite Religious Girls song today before 6 p.m. We’ll choose a winner at random. [contest is now closed].
Religious Girls With Born Gold and Part Time Sept. 8, 9 p.m., $6 The Knockout 3223 Mission, SF www.theknockoutsf.com www.epicsauce.com
SOUND TO SPARE For some gays the definition of a good night out dancing isn’t Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, or whatever else is making it in music’s top 40 these days. Instead, we go against the grain, defy the unwritten rules, and satiate our dance floor needs to more primal, aggressive tunes. Enter Erase Errata.
Listening to the San Francisco rock trio recalls a time in my youth when I transitioned out of baggy JNCO cargo pants and tingly, mind-numbing pills into the stark contrast of a much grittier, more realistic yet still liquor-soaked world of sounds. Through them I was encouraged to picture myself alive and dancing. Though I was thousands of miles away from the creature they so vividly described in the song “The White Horse if Bucking,” I somehow knew that greener pastures lay ahead, bucking and all.
Launched in Oakland in 1999, categorized as lesbian post-punk anthem-makers or no-wave revivalists, and responsible for some of the most contagious dance-rock albums (Other Animals from 2001 and 2003’s At Crystal Palace), Erase Errata is back, sharing a bill with longtime friends, local trio Bronze, at the Fri/12 release show for Bronze’s first full-length, Copper (RVNG Intl. Records), coming out September 13.
I recently sat with Erase Errata’s Jenny Hoyston and Bronze’s Rob Spector at the bustling Duboce Park Café, sipped tea at an outdoor tables. I imagined it must be a little weird for Hoyston, who just spent three years in Portland, Oregon living life as a full-time “upper-lower class accountant,” to return to music and live in a slightly different San Francisco. We touched on the recent changes the city has gone through since her absence — local music institutions like KUSF and the Eagle Tavern’s Thursday Night Live are either struggling for existence or have disappeared altogether. However, they both agree that there are too many creative types in the Bay for the scene to be successfully shut down.
They shared horror stories of Erase Errata’s otherwise triumphant reappearance at Public Works during San Francisco Pride, when New Orleans sissy bounce queen headliner Big Freedia was (not surprisingly) revealed to be a dressing-room diva who needed the backstage area cleared before entering. Even Hoyston got sissy bounced. Freedia then turned on the sound man, they said, nitpicking to the point where he was allegedly told to leave. The two witnesses could only cringe.
“People don’t care what you sound like,” Spector said. Hoyston agreed that it was unfortunate to “flip-out” on the sound guy. She should know, now that she’s running the sound board at El Rio, and on some nights playing the role of part-time DJ. When I asked if she had a secret-weapon jam in her arsenal that packs ’em on the dance floor, she shook her head and referred to the type of aforementioned top 40 hits. I joked that her moniker should be DJ Malice, since she admits to doing this to sort of torture her audience. (Alas, “Malice” was already taken by a stripper she recalls from her time in the Pacific Northwest.)
For now, we’ll just have to look forward to thrashing about as Hoyston and her band mates entertain us with relentless bass lines, swarms of guitars, and lyrics that alternate between simplistic and complex, delivered with Hoyston’s peculiar intonation.
Speaking of intonation and vocal delivery, I pussy-footed around a bit when it came to addressing what I consider to be Spector’s androgynous voice. I told him that when I first heard Bronze’s “One Night In Mexico” his genderless voice entranced me. He said he gets a lot of comparisons to Nico.
Bronze’s new album features that weird custom-built synthesizer that has caused a lot of fascination at live performances. As a bonus, the designers of the album’s sleeve actually incorporate a thin strip of copper that can be bent in the shape of a ring and worn. It’s pretty slick for rough and charming sounds, a bangle for a future recovered.
LIGHTS OUT Ironically, the Bay Bridged founders Christian Cunningham and Ben Van Houten were on their yearly pilgrimage to South by Southwest when they came up with the idea for a local music website.
In 2006, the two were watching a San Francisco band whose name has since been lost to time, wondering why they’d come all the way to Austin to discover how much they liked this band from their own town. “It just struck us as odd,” Van Houten explains.
Life-long music fans, they decided they wanted to take active roles in promoting the local SF indie scene. When they returned to the Bay Area, they started an audio podcast. “Since I had done college radio, my friend kept telling me about podcasting and he finally sold me on the idea,” Van Houten says. “We just decided we would interview a band every week that was always local, and that all the music was going to be local.”
From there, the mission expanded — now the Bay Bridged is a nonprofit with a complete website that gives out recording grants and other creative support to local music groups. The podcast continues, airing every other week. During the first week of the month, the site offers tracks from a sampling of bands coming to the Bay Area. Later in the month, it releases a mixtape with a thematic binding agent, like a single artist (the most recent mix featured a set of 15 favorite Ty Segall songs) or a festival (for example, 20 tracks by bands playing at SF Pop Fest 2011). “The question we’ve been asking ourselves for the past five years is how to get people interested in local music,” Van Houten says.
These days, it’s not a Bay Bridged deal breaker if you’re not a local band. Van Houten explains that the organization’s new focus is on getting people out to see the music for themselves. “If you stay just on the Internet, then you’ll discover good things — but you’ll never have that visceral experience one gets with live music.”
Many Bay Area shows are a mix of local and other music, a combination of sounds that becomes part of the experience of seeing these bands. The site clues you into a gig with one of your favorite visiting bands, and in the process you discover a rad local opener: mission accomplished. The website also curates its own concert and festivals, including the third annual Regional Bias fundraiser showcase that will stuff four local indie groups into the Verdi Club on Aug. 6.
“On the radio waves you can’t find independent rock in San Francisco,” Van Houten says. “[But] podcasts are good for many of the same reasons radio is great. I still think there’s a value to being a passive participant in music, to being part of the audience and letting someone else do the programming.”
We’re living in an era when most of our AM and FM radio waves are stuck in a controlled loop. Luckily, it’s also the age of the Internet and for many music fans, creating a podcast is just mic check away.
The Bay Bridged recently made its 250th podcast. And Van Houten sees no end to his role as a local hype man. “Periodically we say, ‘Surely, we’re going to run out of things we’re interested in.’ But It hasn’t happened yet — and I don’t see it happening in the near future.”
THE BAY BRIDGED’S REGIONAL BIAS 2011
With Royal Baths, Little Wings, Sea of Bees, and White Cloud
I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It was gorgeous: a two-way protected bicycle lane. It went the length of Figueroa Alcorta Avenue, a wide, tree-covered boulevard that traverses Buenos Aires’ central neighborhoods. And people were riding bikes on it — cruisers and those funky low-riding foldable bikes. It was a totally different but super-familiar scene. I had to join.
I didn’t come to Buenos Aires expecting to find the bike culture I did. Call me provincial, but the Bay Area bike scene is so exhilarating — the various Bike Party group theme rides, the radical workshops of the East Bay’s Cycles of Change, the gonzo tunes on trailers of the Bicycle Music Festival, SF Bike Coalition’s advocacy work, the slammin’ art and fashion of the Bikes and Beats parties — that it can make a body think we’re taking the whole lane, as it were.
But what else is cruising around out there?
“Buenos Aires does not have any formal complete streets initiatives as the term is understood in the United States,” says Andrés Fingeret, director of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP). Fingeret’s organization helps cities on three continents — including Jakarta; Guangzhou, China; and Denver — create sustainable transit systems, so I figured the organization would be a good start if I was going to understand where Buenos Aires stands in terms of biking.
“It’s a rare case,” Fingeret continues in an e-mail to me. “A compact city with great weather that is very flat but has no history of urban cycling.”
Following a visit from former Bogotá mayor and bike path champion Enrique Peñalosa, the Buenos Aires city government began working on 100 kilometers of new bike lanes in 2010, many of which are like the one I fell in love with: barrier-protected and luxurious. BA even has Mejor en Bici (“Better on a bike”), a network of free bike rental stations for city residents.
“When these plans were presented, it seemed like a utopia, something that would be impossible in our city,” says Fingeret. “Luckily nowadays, it is debated less and less that bicycles deserve an important role in the mobility of porteños (residents of Buenos Aires).”
But it’s one thing to create bike infrastructure — quite another to get people riding. And despite the city’s ambitious plans, BA has some serious roadblocks when it comes to its population accepting bikes as acceptable forms of transit.
DUMPSTERS IN THE BIKE LANES
A few days after catching sight of that first bike lane, I was on my way to La Bicicleta Naranja (“The Orange Bike”), the Buenos Aires equivalent of SF’s Blazing Saddles bike rental shops. The shop is true to its word — it specializes in renting tangerine-colored cruisers for goober tourists.
Not to retread the path of David Byrne’s Bicycle Diaries too much, but there is something spectacular about seeing a new city from a banana seat. Being a tourist is way more attractive when you can check out multiple neighborhoods in a day, especially in a metropolitan area of 12 million people.
Compared to American cities, traffic in Buenos Aires had a different flow. “Right of way” is a more fluid notion with fewer traffic lights and stop signs but just as many people on the roads — bicyclists, motorists, and pedestrians just have to use their eyes a lot more. Also Buenos Aires appeared to have little emissions level oversight — colectivo buses belched fumes into the streets, discouraging for people commuting without the protection of car walls and windows.
The reality of riding my bike through the city wasn’t quite as paradisiacal as it appeared when standing on the curb — especially given motorists’ ignorance of hand signals (they’re still an uncommon practice among bicyclists there), oblivious pedestrians, and garbage bins parked in delineated bike lanes.
“THE STREETS ARE FOR EVERYBODY”
On a busy street in one of the city’s northern neighborhoods, a year-old bike workshop and skill-share operates out of the back room of a community center. Two days a week, La Fabricicleta is staffed by volunteer bike mechanics who created the workshop after they met through city’s two-year-old Masa Critica (Critical Mass, in one of its many global incarnations), which attracts up to 2,000 riders in the warm summer months and takes to the streets every first Sunday at 4 p.m., with special rides on full-moon nights.
On any given day of operation, the tiny room is packed with mostly young people drinking yerba mate, pumping music, teaching each other how to fix flats and true wheels, and leaving donations for parts and to keep the shop running. It’s similar to SF’s Bike Kitchen — save for its provenance.
Buenos Aires’ neighborhood asambleas were formed in the wake of the country’s 2001 economic collapse, in the midst of runs on the banks, 25 percent unemployment rates, and looting — but also remarkable community organizing. In scenes reminiscent of this spring’s Madrid indignado demonstrations, the city’s plazas filled with demonstrations and entire neighborhoods occupied abandoned buildings, establishing a space where they could try to work through the seismic craziness rocking their country.
Villa Urquiza’s asamblea was one of these — it once housed La Ideal pizzeria, whose sign hangs over the doorway and whose massive ovens still greet visitors. Still buzzing a decade after the crash, the asamblea now hosts political meetings, an anarchist library, occasional fundraiser parties with live music and cheap beer — and La Fabricicleta.
“This is a lifestyle,” says Gustavo Troncoso, one of the workshop’s six core volunteer mechanics. He was introduced to La Fabricicleta through cyclist friends and was impressed by the way people “come to spend the day, and then end up doing mechanics.”
The shop protests throwaway culture, encouraging people to put in the time to resuscitate old bikes. Some of the volunteers who run the shop roll through with decades-old rides restored to impeccably detailed perfection. Another Fabricicleta goal is to provide bikes (and the smarts to maintain them) to low-income riders in the community.
Pausing from helping two young women take their bikes through a routine tuneup, Troncoso explains that riding in the city provides him with some much-needed autonomy from the sardine-packed subway system and environment-polluting car life. “When you get in a car and go somewhere quickly — well you’re not leaving much room for yourself.”
“The streets are for everybody,” he says. “We think everyone can share the same streets with respect. Bikes make you more autonomous, free — you can do it yourself.”
But the social stigma of bikes in Argentina is hard to shake. “Older people still believe that bicycles are for poor people,” says Troncoso, shaking his head. “It’s just a question of education.”
It’s easy to see why La Fabricicleta is packed during its open hours. People come to help out and tune up — but many are there just to kick it. More than a functional service center, the small room is a clubhouse in a town that’s not totally ready for the bike life.
LA VIDA IN BICI
It would be simplistic to say there is a single face of Buenos Aires’ bicicultura (“bicycle culture”). But if you had to choose one, you might select native porteño Matias Kalwill, director of nascent bike culture blog La vida en bici.
Kalwill believes that his city is hitting a “creative boiling point” when it comes to bikes — and other cultural vehicles, for that matter. “Buenos Aires is in a sweet spot,” he tells me over a late night beer. “For example, there’s been new kinds of sounds emerging in the local music scene over the last few years — it’s like a new kind of porteño energy.”
A bicyclist since his high school days who previously worked in a young family education center, Kalwill and friends started Biciconga in October 2010. The group promotes the bike as a part of Buenos Aires’ burgeoning creative culture, not just as a cool toy.
“We wanted to generate bicycle culture by fashion or style. We wanted to make it cool — not just a hippie or sporty thing,” says Felix Busso, one of the group’s founders and a fashion photographer. They began organizing free bike parties, riding en masse to predetermined secret locations where live bands played. The parties took off and in February, Kalwill started La vida en bici.
In the beginning, he used it to share his bike illustrations and videos of various bike happenings. Its popularity grew quickly. Kalwill’s simple view of cycling freedom (“You know how superheroes fly around the city using their own energy? That’s what happens you ride your bike to see a friend across town.”) and anthropomorphic animal characters make bikes seem like something so elementary as to be a common sense part of city living.
The success of the blog and the events Kalwill sponsored through it earned La vida en bici entry into the British Council’s Climate Generation program, a worldwide network that supplies promising young environmental activists with the practical tools needed to make their organizations more effective. Theirs is one of the program’s only bike projects.
I met Kalwill three months after the launch of La vida en bici, at an event he curated at the city’s Museo de Arquitectura y Diseño (The Museum of Architecture and Design). He and the other artists who’d begun working with La vida en bici had been granted use of the museum’s minimalist concrete basement as studio space and had lined it with whimsical bike illustrations, silkscreens, and photographs.
That day, the group was holding its second Bicifriendly event at the museum. On the schedule were art demonstrations, bike maintenance lessons, and a discussion with city experts on the potential of complete streets plans in the city. Kalwill was dashing around in his signature Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou-esque red beanie, playing welcome wagon, docent, and hype man.
“One year ago, none of this existed,” he said. “This idea that the bicycle was cool, that’s really something special. It broke into the culture of the city without permission. And since it didn’t ask permission, it has people asking, ‘Hey, where are you going?'”
But he’s had something to do with this shift in perception. The Biciconga collective and the artists in La vida en bici — rarely older than Kalwill’s 30 years — are experts at packaging the joy of riding a bike in the city into a thousand easily digestible, easily sharable forms — key in the Facebook era. Bicifriendly, although an inspiring moment for those who could make it to the architecture museum, would soon have its impact magnified one-hundredfold by sweetly soundtracked event videos and professional-quality photographs posted onto blogs.
This dispersal is a big part of Kalwill’s plan. “For me, my work is like seeds. Thanks to the Internet, what I do is in part a result of things happening in other countries. And other things will come from what we’re doing here.” He is an avid follower of sites like Streetsblog in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., as well as the San Francisco Critical Mass site. He regularly posts bike happenings from around the world on his own websites.
La vida en bici‘s tastemaking ability has also caught the attention of city officials. Paula Bisiau, director of the Palermo neighborhood government, tapped the group to create a “Bicifriendly plaza” featuring a massive mural inspired by Luna de Enfrenta, a book of Jorge Luis Borges poems. In La vida en bici‘s typical cartoonish style, the design will revolve around the question “What would it be like to ride a bike to the moon?”
Bisiau has high hopes for promoting bicicultura projects in her neighborhood. “We hope that these spaces will be starting points to develop more ideas to help foment the use of bicycles in the rest of the city of Buenos Aires,” she wrote to the Guardian. “I think that this change is possible because it’s positive and healthy for everyone. I’m sure that in four more years, we’re going to see many more bicycles in circulation throughout the whole city.”
But it’s not all line drawings and bike music. In the run-up to the July 9 mayoral election, representatives from the office of the city’s current mayor, Mauricio Macri, as well as the two opposition candidates called Kalwill to discuss bike policy in the city.
He chatted with them about what’d he seen in the city — a bit reluctantly. Kalwill is loathe to get involved in politics, wary of the limitations they can impose on cultural movements. But soon afterward the two challengers reversed their previously held viewpoints that the city’s burgeoning bike lane network was a waste of street acreage and resources. Days before the election, everyone could agree that bikes were key to sustainable mobility. “It’s like bicycles won in this election,” reflects Kalwill, who maintains a strictly nonpartisan stance. Between the city’s cultural activists and politicians, he says, “the dialogue is happening.”
At a recent rally, Macri announced plans to build 100 new stations for the city’s Mejor en Bici program. Kalwill was pleased to learn of the plan but does have one bone to pick: at the moment all the free bikes are yellow. He thinks adding different colors to the mix would make the system more attractive to potential bike riders and would “reflect the diversity of the users.”
RUNWAY TO CHANGE
I didn’t bring a bike to the June Masa Critica Buenos Aires ride, and it hurt — I wanted to ride it bad. But my flight back to the States was scheduled to depart in three hours so I stood beneath the massive obelisk that soars from a plaza in the middle of Buenos Aires’ 14-lane 9 de Julio Avenue, the widest street in the world, saying goodbye to my new friends on their two wheels.
But Buenos Aires wasn’t done with me yet — a volcano explosion in the Andes delayed my flight home for three days. As luck would have it, I neatly missed the Biciconga post-Masa bike runway show, where 30 bikers, fresh from the ride, rolled down a makeshift red carpet on the front porch of an organic food co-op to live music by the Mahatma Dandys, a local folk-rock ensemble.
Busso, a driving force behind the show, hoped the spectacle would be a moment that helped change the way Buenos Aires looks at the way it uses bikes. “The more people who use the bicycle, the better. The change will not come from the government, it will come from these groups.”
After biking in Buenos Aires, it seems clear that people in other cities are forming indigenous, exciting bike cultures. But this turn to bicycles is less of a globalized fad as much as water naturally finding its level. In a world where the future of fossil fuels is uncertain and people everywhere are beginning to see the need for a more sustainable lifestyle, urban biking is a matter of common sense.
For Kalwill, the rise of the bike means a better future for his home. “It brings hope that things can change. And we need big changes if we expect to survive in a world that’s getting more crowded and warmer. We need hope. In Buenos Aires, bikes seem to be providing that.”
It’s purple and bloodied, scuffed and raw from a blind leap and yet if you dig your finger in deep enough, there’s a soft spot back and to the left. The Oakland-based quartet Wax Idols— playing Sun/26 at Thee Parkside — puts on a badass punk front, but those shiny hooks expose just enough emotion to keep things from scabbing. Wax Idols are super-gritty and always promise to play their noisy garage punk loud and hard. The band is fronted by Hether Fortune who’s got a firecracker reputation and a long list of local music projects, including Blasted Canyons and previously, Hunx and his Punx. She’s joined by Keven Tecon on the drums, Jennifer Mundy on the guitar and vox, and Amy Rosenoff on bass, and although the band is dominated by ladies, it keeps an angsty, andro-sound.
Fortune told 7×7 that the band’s name was inspired by the lyrics “flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark” from Bob Dylan’s “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”, which isn’t creepy at all, right? A quick scroll through the band’s blog and it’s obvious this stellar mix of freak-show inspiration is constantly being collected, analyzed, and hopefully churned into some new music. Think bones, lots of nude ladies in strange public arrangements, bizarre music icons, and all kinds of other awesome dream material; puts some physical creep into the layered emotions. More please!
Wax Idols will be joined by the grungy, ’90s-rock of San Francisoc’s Lilac, the surfy sounds of The Wrong Words, and Paperhead, a psych-pop trio from Nashville.
WAX IDOLS w/Lilac, The Paperhead and The Wrong Words
An afternoon show under fruit trees and bright sunshine is always nice, but a line-up of super chill local music is extra conducive to ideal weekend mentality. As long as the weather keeps up its good behavior, Saturday’s Ears of the Beholder four-band showcase will be a total hit and a great introduction to some homegrown electro-pop.
Ears of the Beholder is a pretty rad indie-music blog, started by an San Francisco guy named Peter in 2008. The site promotes a lot of great shows around the city, handpicked with the best intentions. Start with beer, dab your beak with sunscreen and don’t forget the layers; the show may start early at the lovely El Rio, but it won’t wrap until after sunset. The ticket price also includes food, which means you won’t have to run-off mid-set for dinner and instead, you’re encouraged to plop down for a full evening. Take a listen to the line-up:
This SF band keeps things feather-light with pretty, super mellow guitars. They’re minimalist post-rock that’s super easy on the ears and their new synth addition is sure to add in a sweet surge of electro-pop.
The mystical chimes, mermaid voices, and super glassy synth melodies of San Francisoc’s Blackbird Blackbird wash over your senses in slow-motion. They’re a perfect soundtrack for underwater swimming.
These Santa Cruz guys keep things psychedelic, but add in a heavier, more danceable punch. Their random bag of tricks switches up quick and the super diverse samples insures things stay uber fresh from track to track.
The honest, fragile vocals from this Oakland native are compelling enough, but then he adds in pianos and totally weird racing beats. There’s something twisted about the combinations he throws and the unpredictability of it all keeps you along for the bright ride.
Before he’d excuse himself to dance the boogaloo on stage, Soul Brother No. 1 would quip into the mic, often saying things like, “So much soul, I got some to spare!” So in case you’re wondering, James Brown is pretty much the inspiration for the name of this column. As for my intentions, I hope to keep the parameters somewhat loose, but focused on celebrating our local music scene. However, sometimes these Bay Area bands want to celebrate elsewhere.
Take Bare Wires, for example. On my recent trip to Portland, Ore., I unexpectedly caught one of their shows at a bar. Not that I haven’t seen them play here numerous times. It was more of a pleasant surprise, sort of like the tulips that were in full bloom everywhere, but not like the great scrutiny my nearly expired driver’s license went through. Most bartenders would normally just wish me a happy birthday, but nine times out of 10, I’d get discerning looks and these stern words of caution: “You know this expires in a few days?” I conclude that Portland hates birthdays but loves flowers and the way Oakland’s Bare Wires, decked out in ’70s garb, straggle out of their van, a virtual Mystery Machine. It was a solid performance with an engaged audience, complete with an attendee who stole the mic at the end of the set for some shrieking. Way to represent.
Speaking of ’70s-inspired, I was listening to KUSF in Exile’s web stream — which has been available thanks to WFMU for about two months now — and I heard a song that sounded familiar in more ways than one. I didn’t recognize it as a Marc Bolan song at first, until the chorus gave way. The DJ read the playback and the singer was revealed to be Ty Segall. The song, “Fist Heart Mighty Dawn Dart,” was from Tyrannosaurus Rex’s 1970 Beard of Stars album. Segall’s limited edition 12-inch of all T. Rex covers, appropriately titled Ty Rex (Goner Records), is a bold move that almost addresses taboo. The idolizing of Bolan is up-front and out in the open. It’s kind of like saying ‘Screw it, I wanna sound like T. Rex, so I’m just gonna do a bunch of their songs.’ And the result is pretty right on.
“Woodland Rock” — a song I’m less familiar with — is reminiscent of “Go Home,” the opening track from Segall first self-titled album. The explosion of fast-paced energy sounds like fun or the discovery of one’s creative self.
I was glad he chose to cover “Salamanda Palaganda,” partly because of its absurd title. Here Segall chooses to slow down what was once a hyper-frenzied acoustic Tyrannosaurus Rex workout and puts his own twist on it, which consists of lots of fuzz and reverb that was the prevailing affect on 2009’s Lemons (Goner Records). His version of “Elemental Child” is full of distortion and there may even be a slight mimicry of Bolan’s trademark warbled vocal.
I guess it’s interesting that the six tracks chosen on this album seem so carefully picked from a period where the lyrically long-winded and acoustic Bolan would transform his mystical, musical image and persona by going electric and abbreviating the band’s name. Segall even takes on two tracks from the iconic Slider album where Bolan, by then glamorous, had perfected his craft, tapped into the industry, and attained mass appeal.
I managed to get my hands on the record at one of those last packed Eagle Tavern shows in April which doubled as a Save KUSF benefit (Segall being an avid Save KUSF supporter). I saw Segall by the merch booth after his set while Thee Oh Sees were playing and jokingly asked how he’d feel if Marc Bolan covered his songs. He just kinda smiled and said something like “That’d be it.” As fate would have it, Bolan wouldn’t boogie past 1977.
“It’s $40 for one game with shoes. Or, $38 for one hour and shoes,” says the Serra Bowl cashier with mild frustration while he Lysols a pair of freshly-worn bowling shoes at the counter. Gabe Turow, percussion, keys, and back-up vocals for the chamber pop-turned-funk duo King Baldwin, turns to me, perplexed. Which is the better deal? Off to the side, Alexander Eccles, lead vocalist of the San Francisco-based duo, sits comfortably in a plastic chair, wearing his brown “bowling hat” slightly askew. Turow and I deliberate. We opt for the hourly rate.
As I tie the frayed green laces of my black-and-red, slightly damp rented bowling shoes, I begin to wish that King Baldwin and I had chit-chatted about the self-released LP Music For Unsafe Sex over coffee.
It’s off to lane five. I’m the first to bowl. My pink eight-pound bowling ball ricochets off the lane’s side rail and knocks down one pin. Eccles is next up, so I turn to Turow to ask how King Baldwin got its moniker.
“Alex is King Baldwin. The persona is captured in many, many YouTube videos at this point. Some of them of which, I mean, he takes his shirt off in some of them,” says Turow, laughing. “Each track [on Music for Unsafe Sex] is written from a different person’s point of view, but it’s all clearly King Baldwin fantasizing about what it would be like to actually have a life.”
Music With Unsafe Sex begins with “Ron Jeremy,” named after the iconic porn star. On this track, Eccles sings, “When I come to town/ All the horses scream/ With envy/ I don’t care baby I just do/ I’m Ron Jeremy,” against a sleazy funk groove.
“Every song on the album is encouraging sex in some way or another. It’s either foreplay or, like, decent doing it,” Turow explains as he approaches the lane.
It’s the end of the second frame. The score: Jen, 14; Alex, 9; Gabe, 11.
Completely written, recorded, and produced by Turow and Eccles, Music For Unsafe Sex is a departure from King Baldwin’s five-song 2009 debut, and its six-song 2010 release, Castle of Love. In the group’s previous recordings, Eccles, a classically trained pianist, took more of a Talking Heads/David Bowie approach to the songs he composed. “Musically, there were a couple of things I had written that had come off as romantic or more feminine. Let’s just put it this way — not very cool in any kind of rock way. So [Turow] sort of helped get a sense of groove in there,” he says.
After five frames, the score is: Jen, 34; Alex, 24; Gabe, 24.
“[Music for Unsafe Sex] was the first time I’d ever revised lyrics and done so with anyone else,“ Eccles recalls, bending his knees as he readies himself to bowl.
“These songs are like narratives, which is nice, because before they were about nothing,” he adds with sarcasm.
As the ’80s hit “Forever Young” by one-hit-wonder Alphaville blares in the background, Eccles gets a running start while he approaches the lane. Turow and I notice he’s using his left hand. He assures us that he is ambidextrous. The ball travels down the lane at roughly 8 mph. Gutter ball.
Before Turow takes his turn, he talks about Music for Unsafe Sex’s funk influence. “There are a lot of grooves. When they are grooves, they put you in a certain place and then try to hold you there.” As is the case with “Secretary,” where Eccles sings, “You don’t need protection cuz the market’s up/ And we know what happens next/ Oh my secretary! Get away from it all/ I have a wife and family/ I also have my secretary.”
In between turns, Turow finds a magenta-colored ball with five finger holes, seemingly engineered for an alien species with seven digits.”There’s something wrong with this ball! There is something really wrong with this ball,” he blurts out.
By the ninth frame, none of us have broken 100.
Music for Unsafe Sex‘s last track, “Muse,” is a melancholic slow jam of disillusionment — far different from the preceding songs of male hypersexuality. “All of that masculinity and sexuality that we were sort of playing with in the first eight [songs] is basically tongue-in-cheek, and at the end of the day I am not the most masculine or sexy person. I’m just not,” Eccles says with seriousness. “Gabe and I both knew that, so we figured it’s sort of a reveal at the end.”
By the tenth frame, Eccles, who is a part-time golf coach, knocks down nine pins with one ball. “I know how to do it now. You stand there. You roll your arm back and forth like a golf swing, then you make the golf swing. No running. No running.”
RAVE CULTURE Here’s a classic San Francisco rave story for you. First the official legend: “In the spring of 1991, a small, brave crew of acid house seekers set sail from southeast England in search of adventure. San Francisco was the destination. They made their mark under the Golden Gate Bridge at Baker Beach with the first in a six-year run of wild and lawless Full Moon parties.” And now the party reality: the crew set up during heavy fog after touching down from Britain — and at least two of Wicked’s four members, Garth and Jenö, had absolutely no freaking clue that they were beneath the Golden Gate Bridge.
“We Brits were virgins to that beach,” Garth told me. “We were all enjoying a psychedelic dance when the sun started to come up, and the fog peeled back to reveal the bridge above our heads, lit up like a spaceship! We were hooked from that moment on. The decks were set up on a blanket on the sand. No table. Walkman speakers made makeshift monitors. One well-prepared gay friend improvised a cardboard dancefloor for himself and went about his vogueing like he was back at the Endup or Paradise Garage.”
The Wicked Brit saucer, launched from the illustrious Tonka Sound System renegade rave base, touched down on our shores at a moment when the Bay Area psychedelic sound and spirit was flagging. The West Coast underground party scene was being commercialized into the kind of slick, infantile, overproduced spectacles that unfortunately came to define rave in many ’90s people’s minds. And the music was veering from true basement soul to Big Bird carnival woo-woo — not that there was anything too awful about that, at the time it was fresh. But a pagan squadron of prog-rocky, deep acid house and baggy beats lovers setting up on a beach was a blast of fresh air.
Update on the Wicked crew: Almost all have benefited from our wonderful current dance music moment that values historical broad-mindedness over genre lockstep. (Really, the era-roving Wicked DJs have never sounded better than right now). Garth now lives in Los Angeles and has been releasing a steady stream of re-edits and remixes on his two labels, and through his King & Hound project with beloved local disco archivist James Glass. Former punk protestor and anarchist bookstore haunter Jenö plays live acid house every first Saturday at 222 Hyde, broadcasts the weekly “Noise from the Void” radio show (Tuesdays at 9 p.m. at www.90hz.org), and is codirecting a documentary on the social implications of San Francisco’s early rave scene, due out this summer. Thomas is in New York City as one-half of the awesome Rub N Tug production team and owns Whatever We Want Records. And Markie? The dude is and always will be Markie, party legend.
On the eve of the full moon Wicked: 20 Years of Disco Glory reunion party (the name is a cheeky play on one of Garth’s already cheeky dance floor hits), I talked to Garth, Jenö, and Thomas over e-mail.
SFBGIt seems like a boatload of Brits emigrated here in the ’90s and had a huge impact on the party scene — in fact, they’re still coming. Is there something special about San Francisco that draws you guys?
Garth I think a lot of Brits followed us here after they heard what was going on in the Bay Area, the freedom. The U.K. party scene was outlawed by Thatcher’s conservative government when it passed the criminal justice bill, which made it illegal for groups of more than 10 people to congregate while listening to repetitive beats. So there was a kind of party exodus: trance heads went to India (specifically Goa), other Brits went to Thailand, Australia, and Spain in search of a more fun life. San Francisco is particularly appealing to Brits because the climate suits us. It’s never too hot or too cold, and there’s a good dose of fog. It’s very liberal, the architecture is Victorian, it’s by the ocean with hills and those trams — plus great food and a strong, self-sustaining music scene.
Thomas It’s poetic, cosmopolitan, and charming without being European: we like that.
SFBGYou definitely did bring a pagan spirit with you — not just with the full moon and witchy Wicked angles, but also in the sense of reinfusing the local music scene with a particularly enchanting Northern California-British psychedelic rock sensibility. Is that spirit still alive? After seeing how the West Coast techno scene has progressed in the past 20 years, do you have any thoughts or gripes?
Garth Life’s too short for gripes. And I don’t consider it a “West Coast techno scene,” really. It’s all just music. We’ve always played the best in disco, acid house, psych rock, and all points in between. It’s the tempo that keeps things moving, and move it always will.
Jenö I wouldn’t consider Wicked as even being a part of the techno scene. Our music was a lot broader than that, dominated more by psychedelic house and soulful disco grooves. But we definitely influenced the West Coast music scene, and that influence can still felt today in the style and sounds of the current crop of local DJ crews, from the Sunset parties to the hipster clubs currently delving into obscure house and disco-driven sounds.
Thomas I’ll tell you this: I live in New York, and there’s too much disco.
SFBGAny good stories from the early days of Burning Man?
Garth We were the first and only sound system there in 1995, and of the 5,000 or so people out on the playa, we had a few thousand of them all grooving out under the open skies: no marquees, no lightshow, just a kick ass 15K Turbosound system, right out of the box. During the height of my five-hour set on Saturday night, one naked freak (they never seem to be clothed) ran up and flipped the tables on top of me. There was thunder and lightning and a mad electrical hum until we got the gear up and running again. The crowd went apeshit — it’s still the highlight of my DJ career!
Jenö I didn’t make it the Wicked BM camps back then. But I did attend the last-ever Stonehenge Free Festival in the U.K. during summer solstice in 1984, which was the epiphany that drove me to want to create my own anarchic and free-spirited musical gatherings. Very similar to BM in style and substance — art and music-driven with countercultural ideals, but without the dust and ridiculously expensive admission of Black Rock City.
Thomas I didn’t go because I didn’t think I’d get served a proper cocktail. A foolish mistake on many levels.
SFBG Top five quintessential Wicked records?
Wicked DJ Garth & Eti, “20 Minutes of Disco Glory” — all the boys did excellent remixes of this seminal West Coast classic.
!!!, “Hello Is This Thing On? (Rub N Tug Remix)” — this incredible remix really sums up the Wicked sound, and they recorded it on a full moon!
Colm III, “High as a Mountain” — the title of this 1988 release says it all. Jenö brought it with him from England and played it at the first SF Full Moon party.
Marshall Jefferson, “Open Your Eyes” — deep vibes from the master of early Chicago house. More than just good music, it’s a spiritual journey.
The Man Collective, “No Hassle From the Man” — anthem. It’s rock and rave and soul and psych and passion. That’s maybe what we’re all about.
In conjunction with the continuing “Fantomas by the Bay” series presented by City Lights, the Cultural Services of the Consulate General of France, and the Mechanics’ Institute Library, here’s an interview with the Slow Poisoner, who may be casting a musical shadow over the Fri./8 event, “An Elegant Threat.” The man also known as Andrew Goldfarb holds forth on his Fantomas bonds, surrealist activity in San Francisco, and the Slow Poisoner’s current and next moves.
SFBGWhat is your interest in Fantomas, and do you have any favorite Fantomas-related works? Andrew Goldfarb I first discovered French villain Fantomas during an absinthe binge abroad, and was immediately drawn to his unrepentant sinisterism and stylish fashion sense, especially the black mask and top hat combination. I would say that aside from the original 1911 literary serial, my favorite Fantomas work is the 1915 film series, because there’s nothing that captures the decadence of criminal Paris like a hand-cranked silent movie tinted with blood.
SFBGYou’re a native San Franciscan. Do you feel there is surrealist activity present here at the moment, and if so, what are its facets? AG As long as San Francisco is coated with a thick coat of fog in the morning, the City will remain mysterious, and surrealistic activity will be present. I’d say my favorite examples of modern surrealism in S.F., aside from the schizophrenic rants posted on telephone poles in the Tenderloin, are the costumed noise bands that flourish in the Mission District, such as the Spider Compass Good Crime Band, which features two oversized vultures, one of whom plays lounge music on an organ while the other generates electronic dissonance with analog synthesizers. Very entertaining, and feathered.
SFBGWhat is the Slow Poisoner up to these days? AG I just completed a roots-rock-opera about ghosts and liquor, which is titled Lost Hills. It tells of my days as a traveling curio salesman, my brief engagement to a phantom hitchhiker, and my eventual hanging (after some misfortunes involving a tainted Mint Julep). I’ve been illustrating it with felt art, kindergarten-style. I’ve also just brewed up a new batch of my Slow Poisoner Miracle Tonic, which is made with pure Egyptian oil and is proven effective in the treatment of Consumption, Women’s Troubles, Gout, Neuralgia, Wandering Limbs, Stoutness, Onanism, Disinterested Bladder, Elephantiasis, Cholera, Barnacles and Boils, The Fits, Excessive Abscesses, Necrosis, Lavender Fever and General Wasting.
FANTOMAS BY THE BAY: AN ELEGANT THREAT Fri/8, 8 p.m. Location undisclosed and secret (invitations available at the front desk of City Lights); free (415) 362-8193 www.citylights.com
Help raise money for Fire and Ink, the Bay Area’s foremost advocate for LGBT writers of African descent for an evening of readings, soliloquies, music, and more.
Enjoy a complimentary screening of Exile Nation: An Oral History of the War on Drugs and the U.S. Criminal Justice System. The film discusses unprecedented imprisonment — more than any other country in the world — in this so-called land of the free, as well as the failed war on drugs.
Social Work Advocates for Visions of Empowerment (SWAVE) presents Sounds of Justice: Relief Fund for Japan, a night of local music performances to raise money for the earthquake and tsunami relief efforts of the Japanese Cultural and Community Center.
Mark Danner presents his latest book Stripping the Bare Body: Politics, Violence, War. The book was written to help Americans understand the U.S.’s role in political conflict and upheaval around the world.
Join Bay Area localize for a delicious, organic, and locally grown dinner, spirits, and desserts. Expect inspiring words, video premiers, hip-hop, reggae artists, and more to entertain.
This biannual national conference unites supporters and allies for the environment including the Filipino American Center for Environmental Solidarity (FACES), Communities for A Better Environment, and the Philippine Solidarity Task Force for engaging discussions and workshops about the oil industry and accountability. Includes a special report on Chevron.
9:30 a.m.–4:30 p.m., $10–$30
3878 Ninth St., Room Four Oakl.
Www.facessolidarity.org
MONDAY, APRIL 3
Confronting compassion fatigue
Get help coping with the burnout in the animal protection movement with a bevy of speakers, including Cindy Machado of the Marin Humane Society. Proceeds benefit Harvest Home Animal Sanctuary.
5:30-7–30 p.m., $10/free for students
UC Berkeley
126 Barrows Hall, Berk.
Facebook: compassion fatigue workshop
TUESDAY, APRIL 5
Prisons dissected
An expert panel discusses the ramifications of solitary confinement and experimental isolation units in U.S. prisons, as well as prisoners’ rights and racial and religious profiling.
Susan Rosenberg, a political activist during the 1960s through the 1980s, discusses her new book An American Radical: Political Prisoner in My Own Country and recounts her journey from the FBI’s most wanted list to a 16-year incarceration.
Mail items for Alerts to the Guardian Building, 135 Mississippi St., SF, CA 94107; fax to (415) 437-3658; or e-mail alert@sfbg.com. Please include a contact telephone number. Items must be received at least one week prior to the publication date.
On the Cheap listings are compiled by Jackie Andrews. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.
WEDNESDAY 23
Paula Frazer and company Make-out Room, 3225 22 St., SF; (415) 647-2888, Facebook: The Hypnotist Collectors, Big Eagle, Skystone. 8pm, $7. San Francisco musician Paula Frazer is no stranger to those familiar with the local music scene. She has been performing around these here parts since the ’80s, with her own band Tarnation as well as the likes of Virginia Dare and the Tindersticks. Tonight, check out her new newest psych-heavy project Skystone as they open for Hypnotist Collectors and Big Eagle.
THURSDAY 24
Wham City meets the Bay Milk Bar, 1840 Haight, SF; www.milksf.com. 8pm, $6. Baltimore’s Wham City collective, who has brought us synthy ear candy like Dan Deacon and Future Islands, makes its way to San Francisco in the form of Adventure, a super melodic synth-pop project reminiscent of vintage Nintendo and New Order. Also on the bill are Bay Area locals Exray’s, Phantom Kicks, and Yalls for a night of electro-pop bliss.
FRIDAY 25
Black Gold Ever Gold Gallery, 441 O’Farrell, SF; www.evergoldgallery.com. 6pm, free. Clean out your closets and get ready for a night of transformation that brings up-cycling to a whole new level. Combining performance art with spiritual and physical metamorphosis, artists Joshua Short and Otto Von Busch will be joining forces with the Dark Satanic Northern European Arts and the American Junk Culture to turn your junk into gold – conceptually, of course.
SATURDAY 26
Visit with the cartoonist in residence Cartoon Art Museum, 655 Mission, SF; (415) CAR-TOON, www.cartoonart.org. 1-3pm, free with admission. Today comic buffs and dark humor enthusiasts can talk to Audrey Soffa about the art of cartooning and her latest projects as well as her long-running series “The Bunny System” and her recent book, Endangered Species. Be sure to bring something from your collection for an autograph – although the museum’s bookstore is sure to be well stocked.
An afternoon with Lewis Lapham and Michael Krasny San Francisco Waldorf High School, 470 West Portal, SF; (415) 213-6194, www.sfwaldorfhighschool.com. 3pm, $10 suggested donation. Join two noted scholars as they discuss the future of education in America as writer and historian Lewis H. Lapham and KQED Forum’s Michael Krasny offer their insights. Educators, parents, and concerned citizens alike should all benefit form this important event.
Kristi Yamaguchi book signing Yerba Buena Ice Skating Center, 750 Folsom, SF; (415) 863-8688, www.booksmith.com. 6-8:30pm, $6.25-8 including skate rental. Olympic champion skater Kristi Yamaguchi will be talking about and signing copies of Dream Big, Little Pig, her new book about a little piggy name Poppy, her dreams to be a supermodel ballerina, and the encouragement she receives from her family to keep believing in herself. Copies of the book will be available at the event.
SUNDAY 27
Homo Hoedown for Lyon Martin El Rio, 3158 Mission , SF; www.elriosf.com. 1-3pm, $10 suggested donation. Lyon Martin Health Services – the only community clinic in California with a specific emphasis on queer women and transgender healthcare – is raising funds to meet their March goal of $200,000 in order to avoid facing a closure plan. They’ve managed to throw some awesome parties, which is partly why they’ve been so successful in their past fundraising efforts. Tonight, music will meet art and craft for an auction that includes, paintings, photographs, tattoo sessions, and more.
MONDAY 28
Bands, booze, and frybread El Rio, 3158 Mission , SF; www.elriosf.com. 7pm, $5. There’s a lot going on at El Rio tonight to keep you busy while you sip $1 Pabsts and $2 cocktails – bands like French surf rockers Le Mutant and local Prog metalheads Tank Attack, and even yummy Navajo-style frybread to help soak up the alcohol. Don’t want to pay the cover? No problem – hang out inside and enjoy DJs spinning eclectic vinyl from punk to country to psych and beyond.
TUESDAY 29
The Heartbreak Turtle Today Bay Model Visitor Center, 2100 Bridgeway, Sausalito; 7-9pm, free. The Sea Turtle Restoration Project will be hosting the premier of The Heartbreak Turtle Today, a documentary chronicling the effort to protect the Gulf of Mexico’s sea turtle population up until the catastrophic BP oil spill. Following the screening will be a presentation with STRP’s Dr. Chris Pincetich – who worked in the Gulf during the spill – on California’s own sea turtle conservation projects and how you can help.
Do you remember rock ‘n’ roll radio, as the Ramones once quizzed us, ever so long ago? If not that “Video Killed the Radio Star”-era iteration, a leather-clad punky nostalgia for Murray the K and Alan Freed, then do you remember college rock when it became the name of a musical genre in the early 1990s?
I’m trying to make out its faint strains now: a sound nominally dubbed rock, but as wildly eclectic and widely roaming as the winds blowing me over the Bay Bridge on this blustery, rain-streaked afternoon. I’m not imagining it. New, shaken-and-stirred PJ Harvey nudging family-band throwback the Cowsills. Nawlins jazzbos Kid Ory and Jimmy Noone rubbing sonic elbows with winsome Tim Hart and Maddy Prior. Brit electropoppers Fenech-Soler bursting beside Chilean melody-makers Lhasa. The ancient Popul Vuh tangling with the bright-eyed art-rock I Was a King. It’s an average playlist for KALX 90.7 FM, the last-standing free-form sound in San Francisco proper — though it hails from across the bay in Berkeley.
But what about SF’s own, KUSF? A former college radio DJ and assistant music director at the University of Hawaii’s KTUH and the University of Iowa’s KRUI, I’m one of those souls who’s searching for it far too late, even though I benefited from my time in college radio, garnering a major-league musical education simply flipping through the dog-eared LPs and listening to other jocks’ shows. Like so many music fans, I got lost — searching for the signal and repelled by commercial radio’s predictable computerized playlists, cheesy commercials, and blowhard DJs — and found NPR.
Today, I’m testing the signals within — the health of music on SF terra firma radio — by driving around the city, cruising City Hall, bumping through SoMa, and dodging bikes in the Mission. KALX’s signal is strong on the noncommercial side of the dial, alongside the lover’s rock streaming from long-standing KPOO 89.5 and the Strokes-y bounce bounding from San Jose modern rock upstart KSJO 92.3, whose tagline promises, “This is the alternative.” But KSJO’s distinct lack of a DJ voice and seamless emphasis on monochromatic Killers-and-Kings-of-Chemical-Romance tracks quickly bores, slotting it below its rival, Live 105.
Dang. I wind my way up Market to Twin Peaks. Waves of white noise begin to invade a Tim Hardin track. KALX’s signal fades as the billowing, smoky-looking fog rolls majestically down upscale Forest Hill to the middle-class Sunset. But I can hear it — with occasional static — on 19th Avenue, and later, in the Presidio and Richmond.
Throughout, KUSF’s old frequency, 90.3, comes through loud and clear — though now with the sound of KDFC’s light-classical and its penchant for swelling, feel-good woodwinds. The music is so innocuous that to rag on it feels as petty and mean as kicking a docile pup. But I get my share of instrumental wallpaper while fuming on corporate phone trees. It’s infuriating to realize that it supplanted KUSF, the last bastion of free-form radio in SF proper. Where is the free-form rock radio? This is the city that successfully birthed the format in the 1970s, with the freewheeling, bohemia-bred KSAN, and continued the upstart tradition with pirate stations such as SF Liberation Radio. Doesn’t San Francisco deserve its own WFMU or KCRW?
FEWER INDEPENDENTS, MORE CONSOLIDATION
Online radio — including forces like Emeryville’s Pandora and San Diego’s Slacker Radio — provides one alternative. This is true for listeners who use the TiVo-like Radio Shark tuner-recorder to rig their car (still the primo place to tune in) to listen to online stations all over the country. The just-launched cloud-based DVR Dar.fm also widens the online option.
Nevertheless, online access isn’t a substitute for free radio air waves. “We get the wrong impression that everyone is wired, and everyone’s online, and no one listens to terrestrial radio,” says radio activist and KFJC DJ Jennifer Waits. “Why then are these companies buying stations for millions of dollars?”
Waits and KALX general manager Sandra Wasson both point to the consolidation that’s overtaken commercial radio since deregulation with the Telecommunications Act of 1996 — a trend that has now crept onto the noncommercial end of the dial.
As competition for limited bandwidth accelerates (in San Francisco, this situation is compounded by a hilly topography with limited low-power station coverage) and classical radio stations like KDFC are pushed off the commercial frequencies, universities are being approached by radio brokers. One such entity, Public Radio Capital, was part of the secretive $3.75 million deal to sell KUSF’s transmitter and frequency. Similar moves are occurring throughout the U.S., according to Waits. She cites the case of KTXT, the college radio station at Texas Tech, as akin to KUSF’s situation, while noting Rice and Vanderbilt universities are also exploring station sales.
“The noncommercial band is following in the footsteps of the commercial band in the way of consolidation,” Wasson says, from her paper-crammed but spartan office at KALX, after a tour of the station’s 90,000-strong record library. Wire, Ringo Death Starr, and Mountain emanate from the on-air DJ booth, as students prep the day’s newscast and a volunteer readies a public-affairs show. “Buying and selling noncommercial radio seems to me very much like what used to happen and still does in commercial radio: one company owns a lot stations in a lot of different markets and does different kinds of programming in different markets. Deregulation changed it so that 10-watt stations weren’t protected anymore. There were impacts on commercial and noncommercial sides.”
Lack of foresight leads cash-strapped schools to leap for the quick payout. “Once a school sells a station, it’s unlikely it will be able to buy one back,” says Waits. “Licenses don’t come up for sale and there are limited frequencies. They have an amazing resource and they’re making a decision that isn’t thought-through.”
DREAMING IN STEREO
There are still people willing to put imagination — and money — behind their radio dreams. But free-form has come to sound risky after the rise of KSAN and FM radio and the subsequent streamlining and mainstreaming of the format.
Author and journalist Ben Fong-Torres, who once oversaw a KUSF show devoted to KSAN jocks, cites the LGBT-friendly, dance-music-focused KNGY 92.7 as a recent example of investors willing to try out a “restricted” format. “They were a good solid city station that sounded quite loose,” he explains. “But even there they weren’t able to sell much advertising because they were limited to the demographic in San Francisco and they couldn’t make enough to pay their debts.”
Nonetheless, Fong-Torres continues to be approached by radio lovers eager to start a great music station. “I’ve told them what I’m telling you,” he says. “It’s really difficult to acquire a stick in these parts, to grab whatever best signals there are.” This is especially true with USC/KDFC rumored to be on a quest for frequencies south of SF.
“There are some dreamers out there who think about it,” muses Fong-Torres. “A single person who’s willing to bankroll a station just out of the goodness of his or her heart and let people spread good music — someone like Paul Allen, who did KEXP in Seattle.”
THE FIGHT TO SAVE KUSF
The University of San Francisco has touted the sale of KUSF’s frequency and the station’s proposed shift to online radio as a teaching opportunity. But the real lesson may be a reminder of the value of the city’s assets — and how easily they can be taken away. “We’re learning how unbelievably sacred bandwidth is on the FM dial,” says Irwin Swirnoff, who was a musical director at the station.
Swirnoff and the Save KUSF campaign hope USF will give the community an opportunity to buy the university’s transmitter, much as Southern Vermont College’s WBTN 1370 AM was purchased by a local nonprofit.
For Swirnoff and many others, listener-generated playlists can’t substitute for the human touch. “DJs get to tell a story through music,” he explains. “They’re able to reach a range of emotions and [speak to] the factors that are in the city at that moment, its nature and politics. Through music, they can create a moving dialogue and story.”
Swirnoff also points to the DJ’s personally selective role during a time of corporate media saturation and tremendous musical production. “In the digital age, the amount of music out in the world can be totally overwhelming,” he says. “A good station can take in all those releases and give you the best garage rock, the best Persian dance music, everything. One DJ can be a curator of 100 years of music and can find a way to bring the listener to a unique place.”
Local music and voices aren’t getting heard on computer-programmed, voice-tracked commercial stations despite inroads of satellite radio into local news. In a world where marketing seems to reign supreme, is there a stronger SF radio brand than the almost 50-year-old KUSF when it comes to sponsoring shows and breaking new bands for the discriminating SF music fan? “People in the San Francisco music community who are in bands and are club owners know college radio is still a vital piece in promoting bands and clubs,” says Waits. “There are small shows that are only getting promotion over college radio.”
“It was a great year for San Francisco music, and we [KUSF] got to blast it the most,” Swirnoff continued. “It’s really sad that right now you can’t turn on terrestrial radio and hear Grass Widow, Sic Alps, or Thee Oh Sees, when it’s some of the best music being made in the city right now.”
PIRATE CAT-ASTROPHE — AND THE DRIVE TO KEEP RADIO ALIVE
Aside from KUSF, the only place where you could hear, for instance, minimal Scandinavian electronics and sweater funk regularly on the radio was Pirate Cat. The pirate station was the latest in a long, unruly queue, from Radio Libre to KPBJ, that — as rhapsodized about in Sue Carpenter’s 2004 memoir, 40 Watts From Nowhere: A Journey into Pirate Radio — have taken to the air with low-power FM transmitters.
After being shut down by the FCC and fined $10,000 in 2009, Pirate Cat is in limbo, further adrift thanks to a dispute about who owns the station. Daniel “Monkey” Roberts’ sale of Pirate Cat Café in the Mission left loyal volunteers wondering who should even receive their $30-a-month contributions. Roberts shut down the Pirate Cat site and stream on Feb. 20. Since then, some Pirate Cat volunteers have been attempting to launch their own online stream under the moniker PCR Collective Radio.
“We would definitely start our own station,” says Aaron Lazenby, Pirate Cat’s skweee DJ and a Radio Free Santa Cruz vet. “The question now is how to resolve the use of Pirate Cat so we don’t lose momentum and lose our community. We all love it too much to let it fizzle out like that.”
Some people are even willing to take the ride into DIY low-power terrestrial radio. I stumbled over the Bay Area’s latest on a wet, windy Oakland evening at Clarke Commons’ craftsman-y abode. The door was flung open and a colorful, quilt-covered fort/listening station greeted me in the living room. In the dining space, a “magical handcrafted closet studio station” provided ground zero for the micro-micro K-Okay Radio — essentially a computer sporting cute kitchen-style curtains and playing digitized sounds.
A brown, blue, and russet petal-shingled installation looked down on K-Okay’s guests as they took their turn at the mic. And if you were in a several-block radius of the neat-as-a-pin house-under-construction and tuned your boombox to 88.1 FM, you could have caught some indescribably strange sounds and yarns concerning home and migration. I drove away warmed by the friendly mumble of sound art.
Who would have imagined radio as an art installation? Yet it’s just another positive use for a medium that has functioned in myriad helpful ways, whether as a life link for Haitians after the 2010 earthquake or (as on a recent Radio Valencia show) a rock gossip line concerning the Bruise Cruise Fest. As Waits puts it, radio is “about allowing yourself to be taken on a musical journey rather than doing the driving yourself online.” Today it sounds like we need the drive to keep that spirit alive.
Today we continue Johnny’s interview with local music legends — he talks to Howie Klein, the co-founder of 415 Records, about his start in the music industry, Harvey Milk, Bill Graham, and more. We’re keeping these things short, so this is part one; we’ll post part two to the interview Feb. 14. Listen after the jump.
NEWS/MUSIC/CULTURE Anyone who entered University of San Francisco’s Presentation Hall the night of Jan.19 was confronted by the signs — literal and figurative — of a participatory approach to media. A sizable number of the almost 500 people packed into the site for a public meeting to discuss the abrupt sale of KUSF were carrying cameras. Other brandished signs, with slogans running the gamut from pointedly angry (“KUSF is Our Radio”; “Shame on USF”) to comic (“Suck It”).
The scene was a public meeting to discuss KUSF. In a matter of hours the previous morning, the station had gone from a left-of-the-dial college station of 34 years with deep and numerous local community connections, to an online-only operation, its frequency now owned by the USC-affiliated Classical Public Radio Network.
The atmosphere itself was contemporary political — and perhaps religious — theater brought to life, a loud embodiment of scripted and spontaneous dissent regarding education, the changing face and nature of radio and media, and cultural shifts in San Francisco. Before the event got underway, chants of “Community” broke out, and KUSF music director Irwin Swirnoff addressed the crowd in an attempt to ensure the venue’s balcony was opened up to people still left outside. As USF faculty arranged a pair of podiums on stage, a call-of-response of “What do we want? Noise rock! When do we want it? Now!” briefly went up from the back of the hall.
Father Stephen A. Privett, the president of the Jesuit university,soon stepped into view, taking a place behind a stage-right podium at some distance from the audience. “Thank you for being here with me this evening,” Privett began, before leading those assembled (or some of them) in prayer. “It’s very clear to me that there is justifiable anger with the decision I made. I don’t anticipate or expect you to agree with me.”
The decision Privett referred to and sometimes took full responsibility for was the choice to sell KUSF to CPRN, a move that, brokered by Greg Guy of Patrick Communications, came cloaked in a nondisclosure agreement. He was correct to not expect approval. Privett’s initial statement contextualized the $3.8 million sale of the station within his responsibility to provide a “quality education” for USF’s students, only a small percentage of which he felt were engaged with the station. “We teach broadcasting, we aren’t fundamentally a radio station,” Privett said of USF, in one of many assertions that drew jeers from some of the crowd.
The floor was then opened to questions from those assembled, as a school representative kept hold of the microphone. Linda Champagne, a KUSF DJ, was first to speak, holding back emotion as she told Privett that the sale of the station “should have been handled better.” Dorothy Kidd, a media studies professor, wanted to know why the decision took place while USF was on break, and the school’s faculty and students weren’t notified. “If the station is to be a teaching facility, why is the first time I learned about this decision last night?,” she asked Privett to roaring applause. “I am a teacher, [and] there are a lot of faculty members who are angry you made that agreement.”
LEFT IN THE DARK
KUSF’s sudden disappearance from the airwaves has left a void in its wake, and a wide variety of questions and contradictions swirl within it. It’s clear that Classical Public Radio Network is “flipping” KUSF’s former frequency, 90.3, to the classical music station KDFC (formerly on 102.1 FM), shifting KDFC to noncommercial status. But while USF’s Privett claimed that he accepted “the first offer that came across [his] desk” and had not actively put KUSF on the market, on the Jan. 19 installment of KQED’s Forum, CPRN Managing Director Brenda Barnes asserted that the company only solicited radio stations that were for sale.
One avenue for those protesting the sale of KUSF is to take their case to the FCC, while another is to increase scrutiny of USC’s role. Nikk Fell, a DJ on KUSF’s “Liquid Konspiracy,” sees hope in the fact that the FCC has not yet approved KUSF’s sale. “The FCC has not received the contract yet,” he says. “We think we have a chance to change the decision, and that’s one of our plans right now.”
“I was on a street law program the other day and there was talk about pursuing an injunction,” says attorney and former Supervisor Matt Gonzalez. “Jello Biafra also had an interesting idea — he thought the pressure should be put on USC.”
USC’s involvement in the purchase of KUSF is one of a number of recent acquisition moves by USC within the radio marketplace. It left KUSF a casualty of a growing related trend, in which commercial classical musical stations are being shifted to nonprofit public radio status — thanks in part to USC, a college station that broadcast many languages and musical genres (including classical) and foregrounded local music was booted off the dial and replaced by KDFC’s uniformly classical programming. “Every major city has at least one college station,” observes Krystal Chambers, who co-DJed “Liquid Konspiracy” with Fell. “Cleveland has four college stations and L.A. has three. For San Francisco to have no station is a travesty. We felt the voice of San Francisco was sold to a Southern California conglomerate. They have four other stations — why do they need us?”
The sudden erasure of KUSF — which had strong ties to the local music scene and related venues and businesses, as well as sponsored events such as Rock ‘n’ Swap — has cultural repercussions on a local and broader scale. “It’s going to have a huge impact,” Carolyn Keddy, who DJed at KUSF and volunteered for the station for 20 years, says. “So many voices were silenced. It isn’t just about the change of format and the loss of programming.” According to Keddy, who managed KUSF’s website until she was suddenly denied access to it on the morning of Jan. 18, the university’s abrupt sale and closure of the on-campus station was akin to saying, “Thanks for making us look good and doing all that work for us. Now get the hell out of here.”
LEFT OF THE DIAL
Of course, KUSF’s former staff and volunteers are not going away quietly. Initially, Privett had not planned on attending the Jan. 19 meeting regarding KUSF’s sale, but the immediate media response and subsequent public outcry changed at least that decision on his part. The sale of KUSF cuts to the heart of disputes about outside corporate influences on the local media landscape, and more directly about San Francisco itself: what the city represents, and its changing — more generic and corporate? — public identity. Three of its call letters may have been shared with the university, but KUSF didn’t have that name for nothing. It was a musical nexus for the city, and in the musician community, a bridge to and from San Francisco and the rest of the world.
“Takeovers like this seem all too common in our greedy little country, but I can’t accept the fact that they’re trying to do this in San Francisco,” says Howard Ryan, a.k.a. DJ Schmeejay, who was kicked off the air without an opportunity to sign off when the station was locked down by campus police on Jan. 18. “This city sets the example. This city doesn’t take shit lying down. I’m trusting that the citizens, the Board of Supervisors, and support from the international community will stop the sale from going through and we can return [the station] to the airwaves where it belongs.”
Ryan, Keddy, Hardwick, Edna Barron, and others who had volunteered at KUSF agree that the online-only version of KUSF will bear little resemblance to the station that had been on the radio. “I want to clear up the myth about the online fate of the station,” says Barron, a.k.a dj nobody. “It will not include any aspect of the community. Father Privett made it abundantly clear during the [Jan. 19] meeting that the online station will only be open to training students.”
SILENCE, THEN LOUDER
A week after KUSF went off the airwaves, it’s fair to say that the covert way in which the change went down has resulted in an overt and spreading reaction. Besides local and national media coverage in mainstream and independent outlets, as of Jan. 24, close to 6,000 people had joined a “Save KUSF” page on Facebook. Other sites, including www.savekusf.org, have also been started in response to the sale.
One of the more interesting and in-depth responses is an open letter to Privett published by the veteran East Coast-based music magazine and website The Big Takeover. The author of the letter, local musician Chris Stroffolino, begins by praising Privett’s and USF’s rescue efforts during the Salvadorean war, before delving into questions regarding USF possible redistribution of funds from the sale. “Even in 2010,” Stroffolino writes, “the medium of radio has a power that cannot be denied, a power in bringing people together even when apart.”
It’s one irony of recent times that the actual sale of KUSF made this power physically tangible, in events such as the Jan. 19 meeting. Stroffolino’s letter looks to a 1932 essay by Bertolt Brecht to illustrate what distinguished KUSF’s public, participatory nature from that of ordinary radio stations, and the dilemma those involved in the station face today. “Radio is one-sided when it should be two,” Brecht wrote. “It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. [Radio should] step out of the supply business and organize its listeners as suppliers. Any attempt by radio to give a truly public character to public occasions is a step in the right direction.”
In talking with some of KUSF’s DJs for this piece, it seemed worthwhile to ask what song they would have signed off with to comment on the sale, had they been given the opportunity. Barron chose “The Boiler” by the Specials, while Hardwick and Fell mentioned “Generika,” a song by their space rock band Galaxy Chamber. “I would play Bad Brains’ “Pay to Cum”,” Keddy said, going on to recite a lyric: “And all of this time, with just our minds, we soon will find, what’s left behind.”
Ryan, who was in the studio when KUSF was taken off the air, had another perspective. “My last two songs were Bobby Goldsboro’s “Danny is a Mirror to Me” — he turned 70 that day — and Vangelis Papathanissiou’s “Apocalypse des Animaux,” he said. “Maybe two of the saddest songs I’ve ever played on [the program] Radiodrome. I’ve thought a lot about what I would have played had I known what was happening. I don’t think I’d want to change a thing.”
Addititional writing and reporting by Carly Nairn.
Jeff Greenwald’s life is a trip, and he’s happy to take you along for the ride. The Oakland-based travel writer has made a name for himself slaking an unquenchable wanderlust in lively, enlightening books like Shopping for Buddhas and, most recently, Snake Lake, a memoir of one year (1990) that saw a poignant collision between Nepalese revolution and personal upheaval. But many who know the writer don’t know the performer. A natural storyteller, Greenwald returns this week to the Marsh with his improvised, low-key but engrossing Strange Travel Suggestions. Making use of an idiosyncratic “wheel of fortune,” the journey changes each night, relying like all good wanderings on the collective mood and dumb chance. (Robert Avila)
Alas, I lost the thread and completely missed the moment when emo reached its New Romantic period. Which is sad, because right around 2007, I really could have used a sharp-shirted, electro-emo stomper from Blaqk Audio called “Semiotic Love.” I think at that point in my mope-rock attention, I was too busy gawking at footage of the punks vs. emos riots breaking out across Mexico. (According to one punky hater, emos “are stupid, they cry about stupid things.”) Too bad those rowdy Mexican kids didn’t know about Blaqk Audio, a side project of Davey Havoc and Jade Puget of Ukiah stalwarts AFI, which fluffs a punk pedigree and emo self-longing into synthy, baroque, slightly dark power pop. Think Depeche Confessional or maybe My Chemical Numan — or just be pulled into Blaqk Audio’s chilly, wriggling embrace at weekly club Popscene. (Marke B.)
Grammy-award winning pianist George Winston is known in the music world for a wide variety of his projects, ranging from his own outstanding original material to his reworkings of Vince Guaraldi’s beloved Peanuts compositions, as well as reinterpreting music from the Doors. During his 30 years and counting music career, Winston has long worked with various food banks and service organizations throughout the country when he tours — he donates 100 percent of his merchandise sales to the organizations he works with at each show. Tonight benefits the Berkeley Food Bank, so prepare for an evening of good music for a good cause. (Sean McCourt)
This month sees the release of the Velvet Teen’s first new material since 2006, an EP titled No Star. That’s a big gap in the band’s discography, particularly for a group that released three albums and a handful of EPs between 2000 and 2006. But tragedy takes priority in life, and while fans of the Santa Rosa indie rockers certainly have been eager for new sounds, there’s also a sense that things take time, particularly after the loss of original drummer Logan Whitehurst in 2006. Tonight’s show, the CD release, is a chance to see what the Velvet Teen has made of the intervening years. (Ryan Prendiville)
Used to be, you’d have to choose which rock superstar to celebrate come Jan. 8. Would you meticulously apply glittery makeup and sway to “Life on Mars?” or slick your hair into a pompadour and pound a peanut-butter-and-banana concoction to the beat of “Suspicious Minds”? This year, head to the Edinburgh Castle’s “Bowie and Elvis Birthday Bash,” offering equal time to each rock titan on their shared birthday (Ziggy’s 64th, and what would’ve been the King’s 76th). Shindog and Skip spin tunes “from Hound Dog to Diamond Dog,” poet Alan Black pays tribute, and there’ll be a costume contest in the image of each legend. If you already own a sparkly jumpsuit, a two-in-one homage is certainly possible. (Cheryl Eddy)
There was no single club whose aesthetic ruled world dance floor sensibilities in 2010 (this may be a good thing). No Berghain, no Misshapes, no Hollertronix, no Body & Soul, no Fabric, no Space — and unfortunately no Optimo (Espacio), the wee Glasgow joint that helped birth one of the most thrilling recent trends in DJ styling, the “never know what you’re gonna get, but it’ll be amaaazing” thing. Optimo shut down in April, and the San Francisco scene mourned the loss of a sister spirit. Honey Soundsystem even mounted an elaborate wake on the same night Optimo closed. Fortunately, Optimo’s wildly diverse musical policy lives on. DJ JD Twitch founded the club with JG Wilkes — Twitch will hopefully beat through the snow to bring his club’s still-thriving vibe to 222 Hyde, along with unexpected sonic goodies from Midnight Star and Chicks on Speed to Gui Boratto and beyond. (Marke B.)
Rear Window(1954), Vertigo(1958), Psycho(1960) — not only have you seen ’em multiple times, you can recite all the dialogue and catch yourself miming along with the shower scene. It’s likely even Alfred Hitchcock diehards haven’t gotten around to watching all of the prolific director’s 60-something works. But thanks to the Castro Theatre, you can skip a random TV viewing and catch some of Hitch’s lesser-known but no less compelling films on the big, glorious screen (as he’d no doubt rather prefer). Highlights include The Lady Vanishes (1938), Rope (1948), The Trouble With Harry (1955), and The Wrong Man (1956), though there’s not a bad double-feature during the six-day event. (Eddy)
Traditions central to the Japanese New Year: the pounding of boiled sticky rice into mochi, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and well-meaning gaijin galuts asking everybody where the Chinese dragon is. Unversed in the dawn of the new year in the Land of the Rising Sun? This Japantown community center is holding a day to honor the Year of the Rabbit’s arrival, which Japan celebrates in tune with the Gregorian calendar along with the Western world. Bring the kiddos for art activities and make yourself comfortable for demonstrations of mochitsuki (the aforementioned rice preparation), kendo sword-fighting, and odori, the dance to welcome the dead. (Caitlin Donohue)
11 a.m.–3 p.m., free
Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California
Had he not died in a helicopter crash after leaving a 1991 Huey Lewis concert, legendary San Francisco rock promoter Bill Graham would have turned 80 today — local music fans can celebrate his birthday at tonight’s concert, featuring Los Lobos and Jackie Greene, all benefiting the Bill Graham Memorial Foundation. Run by a group that includes members of Graham’s family and other community leaders, the foundation strives to raise money for a variety of social and charitable causes. Raise your glass to Wolfgang (a childhood nickname for Graham, born Wolodia Grajonca) at this fitting tribute — remember, the reason Graham was at the concert that fateful night was to plan a benefit show to help victims of the 1991 Oakland firestorm. (McCourt)
What does it mean to be a “conscious” rapper? That label has been applied to Talib Kweli ever since he emerged on the musical scene in the mid-1990s, particularly for Black Star, a 1998 collaboration with fellow Brooklyn artist Mos Def and DJ Hi-Tek. Beyond charity work, it means being able to get past the divisive beefing that plagues hip-hop. That ability has kept Kweli busy with guest appearances between albums, on tracks with the Roots, Little Brother, UGK, Gucci Mane, and beyond. His new album, Gutter Rainbows, is out Jan. 25. (Prendiville)
With Be Brown, Skins and Needles, My-G and Rose, and Lowriderz
“Outlaw” is a term that tends to be thrown around a little bit too liberally these days, particularly when it comes to discussing musicians. But one man who undoubtedly deserves that title is Willie Nelson, whose five-decades-and-counting career as a singer, songwriter, poet, author, and social activist has been forged entirely on his own terms. Known for his own recording hits, his partnerships with artists such as Johnny Cash, his slew of songwriting successes (notably the classic tune “Crazy” as made famous by Patsy Cline), and more recently his newsmaking, weed-related tour bus arrests, the 77-year-old icon continues to prove that he is a musical and social force to be reckoned with. (McCourt)
The University of Oregon Duck is a champ. Omnivorous, excellent paddler, wearer of fetching sailor shirts — a gentleman and a scholar, truly. Except when he’s beating up the University of Houston’s Cougar (as seen in a popular YouTube clip), but that happened all the way back in 2007! This year, his football Ducks ended the regular season undefeated to face the Auburn Tigers in the national championships. Though we may not have the benefit of a fine Oregon drizzle to fully appreciate the Duck’s waddle, there is a lovely vantage point from which to watch the mayhem: the Independent, where the game will be played on its pull-down movie screen and microbrews will flow like the mighty Willamette. (Donohue)
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(For a review of Slough Feg’s latest, The Animal Spirits, go here. Read on for an interview with the band’s guitarist-singer, Mike Scalzi.)
San Francisco Bay Guardian: I noticed a clear theological theme running through the album. Was that – the Reformation – an area of historical interest to you? I’m interested in that choice, of a less exciting historical topic than maybe a more violent event…
Mike Scalzi: It’s not as metal, certainly. But in another way, Martin Luther was very metal, in that he was dedicated. Though he was Christian, in his dedication and his rebellion, he was metal. I was reading about all that stuff in an anthology of Western cultures. It was very general – I had to teach it. I’m a teacher. I started teaching Philosophy of Religion a year ago for the first time, and I’m not really that into teaching it, because its not my area of expertise, but I kinda had to.
[Writing music] helps me, actually. If I can write a song about it, it becomes more ingrained in my everyday thought. It becomes more second nature to say “oh, the 95 Theses!” It’s not just as a teaching aid, though. When it comes to Renaissance Christian theologians, he’s the most metal one. He’s out in the world. He’s out doing stuff, being a revolutionary. And a lot of his views are funny, a lot of the things he said were really funny and really extreme.
SFBG: Less metal for being ultimately successful, though. A lot of those so-called heretics were metal in the sense that they died for their principles, or were burnt at the stake or what have you.
MS: But he was the most badass one! Obviously, I don’t agree with him – he was a fundamentalist and all that, and he brought on fundamentalism in a way, I guess. But at least he said that trying to believe that the Bible is literal fact by reason alone is preposterous. That’s why he thought you had to exercise faith – because it’s preposterous. Everything in the Old Testament is preposterous, but you have to believe in it, purely to test your faith.
After seven records, you have to think of new things. I don’t want to repeat myself.
SFBG: What was the rubric for the lyrics that were included in the liner notes?
MS: Oh, those are the lyrics to “Trick the Vicar”
SFBG: Oh, so it’s just the one song?
MS: That was my decision. I’m sick of like…I’ve done that on every record and…
SFBG: People parse your lyrics?
MS: Oh, I don’t care about that. They come up with all sorts of weird interpretations, as if I really care that much. “Oh this means this and that means that. This is the deep meaning in this.” There’s no deep meaning in this shit! At least not that I know about! But at this point, trying to find things to say is a challenge.
With “Trick the Vicar,” I thought the lyrics to that would be important because it’s all one big pun. There’s obviously no deeper meaning, other than just being entertaining. It’s like something from a Benny Hill skit or something. So on the inside of the CD, I had all the puns – I came up with all those puns in the same month. They’re really silly, obviously.
SFBG: Well I did mean to confirm whether or not “boister” was a word.
MS: Good, good! No, its not. But when I say “There’s a boister that goes on in the cloister”…
SFBG: …from context it’s pretty clear.
MS: Yeah. It’s just a bunch of silliness, but it works for the song. I like silliness, and that’s one of the things that’s missing from a lot of metal: a good sense of humor. Metal used to have a sense of humor, in the 70s and 80s.
SFBG: That’s something that I was meaning to ask you about, if there’s a way to account for that sudden lack of humor. You have this form of music that has this potential to be taken seriously, but also the potential to be looked at with a sense of humor, or with an understanding of its many tongue-in-cheek aspects. It seems like a lot of its biggest fans, a lot of the people with the kind of familiarity with it that would enable them to see the humor, are the people least able to see it.
MS: Well, there are a lot of stupid people. You go to a metal show and you run into a lot of morons. Around here, you don’t have as many.
SFBG: I think it’s sort of like a dumbbell shaped-graph. On the one end, it attracts a lot of stupid people, but on the other end, it attracts a lot of people who are discerning and smart.
MS: I think, basically, they’re going to laugh at you one way or another. Being a metal guy, especially when you’re old, or older, or from the last generation of metal, they’re going to laugh at you. You make the choice of whether they’re going to laugh at you or with you. And I choose to laugh with them!
Also, metal, or indeed all rock and roll, is inherently funny. It is! People used to know that!
SFBG: Or inherently fun. That’s what a lot of people seem to lose sight of.
MS: Metal is inherently funny. No matter what! It’s funny. That’s one of the best things about it! It’s ridiculous, and it’s great because it’s ridiculous. People realized that way back. Black Sabbath, maybe not Led Zeppelin — they never had much of a sense of humor – Deep Purple, Judas Priest. The New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Early glam metal – Twisted Sister, Quiet Riot – they all had a sense of humor. Van Halen! Give me a break…that band was all humor until Sammy Hagar came, and it lost its sense of humor, and it started to suck.
The way that these things incorporated humor resembled vaudeville. That was David Lee Roth’s whole thing. Humor is part of entertainment. The most serious, heavy band, Black Sabbath, was also the most funny, because they realized – they were a British band with a British sense of humor.
SFBG: It’s interesting that you mention that. Do you think the trans-Atlantic shift had anything to do with that loss of humor?
MS: No, because Van Halen is the funniest. Maybe they’re not metal. Manowar! I don’t know if you want to open that can of worms. There’s a lot of evidence that they started out as a joke. They started out tongue-in-cheek and got serious as they went along. They know they’re funny; they may not want to acknowledge it, but they are.
SFBG: And the humor is bound up in the fact that everyone knows there is a joke, but no one will actually admit it. You can listen to it and pretend that you’re taking it seriously.
MS: It’s true of hardcore too. It used to be funny, now its all [imitates hardcore singing]. It’s lost its humor – some of it hasn’t, but most of it has. That’s one of my problems with a lot of the metal in this country, or in Germany too – people take it too seriously.
It’s the same thing with entertainment. I’m accused of being too traditionalist and narrow, but I’m bored by anything else. The way that entertainment used to be, in my opinion, was better. Period. It just used to be better. And now, it lacks.
I guess the question you’re asking is “why?” I don’t know why. I think it’s something about the world and the way people see entertainment. It has a much wider scope than it used to. People are much more involved in it as fans, and take it seriously as a statement, which is great, but maybe some of the actual enjoyment of it – from the performance standpoint and the artists’ standpoint – has been diminished by the fact that people hold it too close to their heart. The fragility of their egos and their identity are wrapped up in it in a way that causes problems.
SFBG: Like many discussions about the evolution and history of metal, I blame Nirvana. They taught people, or people took away from them this idea that if a band was trying to entertain you, that was somehow false.
MS: Well, that happened way before Nirvana, but that’s when it hit mainstream.
SFBG: There’s that line in Smells Like Teen Spirit: “Here we are now/Entertain us.”
MS: I don’t know if I have much to say about that. At the time, I didn’t like it. I heard their first album, before they were really popular, and I didn’t like it then. I was playing shows in San Francisco at the time, and I knew that I was not down with what was happening as a result of them. “Don’t try.” “Don’t give a shit.” “Nevermind.” “Be a loser.” I mean, sure, I thought that when I was a teenager. That’s the 14-year-old mentality: “everything sucks, so fuck it, man.” By the time you’re in your twenties you’ve grown out of that, you try to do something, unless you end up like Kurt Cobain, and you just fade off into negative, negative, everything sucks, and then die. [Sarcastically.] That’s great! That’s my hero! [Chuckles ruefully.] What the fuck is that?
SFBG: So, part and parcel of the conversation we’ve been having is the fact that you’re a very opinionated guy…
MS: So you’ve read my blog posts. There’s a new one today! I was just reading the comments.
SFBG: I did read them. I can only imagine what kind of comments you’re going to get on the most recent one. I was wondering if there’s something you can identify about metal that helps it attract opinionated people. Or, to reverse the chicken and the egg, if there’s something about being into metal that makes people opinionated?
MS: Well, I don’t think people get into metal for some other reason, and then get opinionated once they’re into metal. Unless you want to get into the fact that most metal is so bad now that you can get into it and say “oh god I’m so opinionated because there’s so much garbage out there. That’s true of a lot of kinds of music though.
It attracts opinionated people because it is extreme music. It attracts people who are into a certain kind of mentality. It happens from such an early age! I can’t analyze it. I got into metal, like a lot of people, when I was pretty young, and that was a long time ago! I don’t remember exactly. I don’t have immediate access to that feeling first being attracted to it. To me, its something that happened so far back that its like…
SFBG: …it’s like asking “why do you like mac ‘n’ cheese?”
MS: Exactly. And I have more access to what’s happened since then. But I don’t feel like I’m actively opinionated. People take things in, and they call them like they hear them. To me, things assault my sense, not the other way around. Nobody remembers being born into the world of music or food or anything and going “Hmm, I’m going to investigate this thing!” It’s more you hear something and you’re passed into this impression that you have. And some things, you get an impression and you go “Argh, that sucks! That really bothers me!” So my opinions, like those of most people who are opinionated, come from being stimulated by something in a positive or negative way. I would say I call it like I hear it.
I never thought of myself as opinionated until I moved here. People said that if I moved to San Francisco there would be all this great music. They said, “People out there are very enlightened.” And then I got here – 20 years ago – and I thought, “Everybody here’s not really that enlightened. There’s a lot of stupid bullshit going on out here.”
SFBG: Switching tacks completely, I’m curious about your master’s degree in philosophy. I read a little bit in another interview about what you teach, but I’m curious about what you focused on in your studies.
MS: I ended up studying Descartes for my thesis. I was interested in Descartes as a graduate student because his method was very simple and intuitive, and the whole point of it was a do-it-yourself type thing, rather than getting involved in this long academic tradition. Obviously, like anyone else, he comes from an academic tradition, but his point in Meditations [on First Philosophy] was to say “let’s erase everything that happened beforehand in philosophy and science and start on your own, with what you can know by yourself.”
I just found Descartes pretty easy to understand. I was able to maneuver in that ontology. I started taking seminars on Descartes, and I subsequently got interested in German idealism, like Kant and Schopenhauer, and like every metalhead, I was interested in Nietzsche.
In a master’s degree, you end up focusing on major guys because they have these comprehensive exams that test your knowledge of Plato, Descartes, Hume, etc. I stuck to a lot of that, because I knew I would have to take an exam on it.
SFBG: That Kantian or Cartesian originalist thinking – wiping the slate clean, starting with the Categorical Imperative, or something like that…
MS: …well, Kant is much more in the tradition, he’s not trying to wipe the slate clean. He’s just trying to be revolutionary.
SFBG: I’ll admit I’m only tenuously familiar with Kant, but I remember his ethics being founded on a sort “first principle” that ignores cultural baggage and so forth.
MS: Well, that’s what people say, but his point is to come up with something that is not dependent on circumstance in any way at all. Something that’s not empirical, that’s totally dependent on reason. Just like Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am,” in a way.
It’s something that you try to universalize by saying “what if everybody did this?” [Motions toward cookie on the table.] What if I were to steal this cookie? What if everybody did that? If it produces a contradiction – if its unreasonable for everybody to do something – you have to decide if it would be possible. Not if it would be right or wrong.
In order to establish a standard of right and wrong, you have to decide if it’s reasonable – could everyone do it. Suppose I don’t keep a promise – I say I’m going to show up here at 11, and I don’t. If I don’t do that, and I don’t keep my promise, what happens? It undermines the principle of the promise in the first place. If I don’t keep a promise, whatever, no big deal. What if nobody keeps promises. Could everybody do what I did? If no one keeps promises, there wouldn’t be promises in the first place.
SFBG: There’d be no point.
MS: You couldn’t make promises, because there’d be no such thing.
SFBG: Like if everyone stole, there would be no point in having property.
MS: If there were no property, you couldn’t steal. If there were no taking anybody’s word for anything, you couldn’t make a promise. It undermines its own possibility. It’s a contradiction that makes the act itself impossible. If its irrational to that extent, to the point where it makes the act itself a contradiction, then, according to Kant, its not morally permissible. That’s a little bit of a long answer.
SFBG: I’m going to attempt a sort of interviewer Triple Lutz here. Is Descartes’ idea of discarding what has come before, or Kant’s idea of ignoring circumstance to come up with principle…
MS: …Rational principle…
SFBG: …purely rational principle. Can that be applied to your creative process? In the sense that…
MS: No. [Laughs.] I wish I could say that it could. That’d be a brilliant piece of journalism. But as much as I’d love to be able to say that there’s some heavy metal calculus that I use in order to write by sheer principles of reason…no. At least, not for me. It’d be cool if there was some guy, some alchemist songwriter guy who was trying to find the principle of guitar or whatever.
SFBG: You could sort of take a stab at the categorical imperative of metal though, being like Maiden, Priest, and Sabbath, and not being affected by sort of the whims of circumstance.
MS: That’s the problem I’m encountering though. I don’t want to say that everything’s all based on the past. I don’t want to be a heavy metal anachronism. That’s what I’m getting in a lot of these responses to my Invisible Oranges articles. Again, to be philosophical about it, I get this confusion of cause and consequence. A lot of people say to me: “you don’t like death metal because you haven’t explored it.”
I try to keep the analysis somewhat objective, about why I don’t like the cookie monster vocals, the guitar sounds that are very brittle, and the drums that are triggered – clickety, clackety, clickety doesn’t sound “brutal.” It sounds like some bullshit to me.
People say, “You haven’t explored it enough. You haven’t heard the good stuff. You haven’t gone to the lengths that it takes to appreciate it.”
SFBG: If it’s good, it shouldn’t take any “lengths.”
MS: It’s confusing the cause with the consequence. It’s not that I don’t like extreme metal because I haven’t listened to enough of it. I haven’t listened to enough of it because I don’t like it. People think that I’ve come up with some sort of rigid heavy metal calculus and say “I like Priest, I like Maiden, I like Sabbath, Saint Vitus, whatever, some underground stuff too. These are the criteria of what I will listen to.”
It’s not like that! I grew up with the evolution of the whole thing, listening to it happen, and I heard things, and I said “I don’t like that! That’s crap! That sounds like someone who doesn’t care about what they’re doing.” It just sounds like shit to me, for whatever reason. And I heard more and more of it, and I chose not to investigate it.
SFBG: Getting back to philosophy just briefly, I saw in another interview that you described your music as having a Machiavellian aspect. I understand a Nietzschian aspect, but how does Machiavelli come into it?
MS: I was probably joking! I’m not sure. I was just being macho, talking about taking over the world. It’s a very vague characterization of Machiavelli, who I don’t really know shit about anyway.
SFBG: I was struck by the William Blake references in one of your old songs, “Tiger! Tiger!” Blake has always struck me as very metal.
MS: The reason that I put that stuff in there is not because of William Blake. It’s because of Alfred Bester, who quoted him.
SFBG: I noticed that you mentioned that author a lot in other interviews.
MS: A lot of sci-fi fans haven’t read him! This is insane to me. When people read The Stars My Destination – the original title of which was Tiger! Tiger! – they say “that’s the greatest fiction book I’ve ever read.” I was not a sci-fi or fantasy reader until I was 26, and someone got me that book. It was completely a fluke. I got it and I was like, “Ehh, I don’t really like science fiction books,” and then I finished it and said, “This is the best book I’ve ever read in my life.” Only on the basis of that did I get into science fiction.
SFBG: It’s tempting to ask you questions about Slough Feg’s distinctive sound, but seeing where my fellow interviewers have gone before, I was wary. It seems like we journalists want to get you to say “Oh, I choose to write songs with major chords because of this reason which is easy to print,” and your response is to say, “Look, this just my creative process; it’s how it sounds good to me.”
MS: Well, something that sounds good to me vocally sounds good because it’s catchy. If I remember it. I don’t always tape everything that I do. So, why do I remember it? That’s a whole question. Maybe I remember it because it sounds a little bit unique, maybe for some other reason.
SFBG: I think the music stands out to people, whether on record or live, because it makes melodic choices that almost seem like a deliberate subversion of the conventions of metal, like all those major chords. But I’m assuming that wasn’t a choice to subvert. That there wasn’t a point at which you were like, “Heavy metal is in minor keys – I’m going to do it a different way.”
MS: Well maybe there was! Again, it wasn’t a conscious choice. I don’t write Slough Feg songs according to music theory. I don’t say, “Now we’re going to do a song like this; now we’re going to do a song with these chords, or with this type of vocals.” If you do that, it ends up sounding overly stiff and deliberate.
But having said that, that’s not to say that there isn’t some kind of overall approach. When I do write stuff, what do I edit out? What do I keep? Stuff that reaches a certain criteria after the fact. Not when I come up with riffs, or vocals – that just happens. But what do I choose to keep? I don’t think about it consciously – it’s second nature to me now, so its hard to say – but basically, at one point, I wanted to write things that imitated Maiden, Sabbath, Thin Lizzy, Alice Cooper, Saint Vitus, Black Flag, and all that.
It became second nature to say “I want to pick up where Maiden left off,” but not to use major chords. The first “Irish-sounding” song I ever did was called “The Red Branch,” and I was sitting around in my living room, in a place I lived in years and years ago, I was sitting in my living room with an acoustic guitar, just joking around, singing to somebody as a joke, and I thought, “That’s a cool chord change!”
I keep a lot of things that other people would throw away, that they’d be scared to put on a record because it’s too silly-sounding. I say to myself “this is actually something that someone else wouldn’t do, and have the nerve to take seriously.” I think a lot of people are embarrassed to play Slough Feg-type songs. They were 20 years ago, at least. And now we’ve developed the sound to the point that it’s sort of obnoxious. People are like “what the hell man! This guy is willing to do this?!”
That’s what happened in San Francisco in the mid-nineties, playing this music. People would be like “God, you’re willing to get up onstage and play that? That sounds like nursery-rhyme music with metal instruments. It’s major. You’re singing like you’re in a 50s musical!”
Those are the kind of influences that I incorporate, maybe because it was something people weren’t willing to do, and so it sounded fresh to people.
SFBG: That sort of discomfort you describe is interesting, because you have this whole other offshoot of metal that’s built on discomfort. Black metal is based around saying “which chords can I play that will make people uncomfortable, that are the most dissonant.” You’ve come up with an incredibly unique way to do the same thing. You challenge people’s expectations, you make them uncomfortable, you take them out of their comfort zone, but instead of being really really heavy, or really fast, or really dissonant, or really down-tuned, you just have your own personal approach: to write chord changes that are, you know, silly.
MS: Or just really, really, traditional. Not that I intended that. But this is good, I think we hit the nail on the head in sense. When I started developing the sound, in the early nineties, a lot of it was a reaction. I didn’t write these looney tunes in 1989. I wrote them when I got here, and I started playing some shows, and I noticed that all the bands were drab, and all the bands played sort of one-dimensional speed metal. And I was totally nonplussed by it.
What I was writing was a reaction. I was saying “what can be done at this point?” Punk rock and speed metal and grindcore are just an extension of the same dirge – being obnoxious by being a dirge.
SFBG: And it’s an arms race, right? You can only go so fast. And then the next band that comes along has to go faster than that.
MS: And also it’s the attitude that’s so passe after a while. Spitting blood and whatever. I wanted touch on what people inevitably heard – kid’s music, or what your parents were playing – and pose the question: “are you willing to admit that this is enjoyable to you?” Slough Feg songs that do sound like they’re from a 50’s musical. Are you able to admit that this is catchy to you? That’s the punk rock maneuver, that I was able to think of it in those terms. And that’s what set us apart. But in a totally different way, in a way that goes back to like, “This is inherently enjoyable. Are you willing to partake in it, or are you too cool for it?”
SFBG: And it’s diametrically opposed to black metal. Black metal is “I will alienate you by doing something that is not enjoyable.” Your approach is “I will alienate you by doing something that is too enjoyable.”
MS: After the fact, that’s how we can analyze it. I think that’s a proper way to look at it. My songs do assault the listener, and people say “I can’t get it out of my head!” Because it’s written in very simple way – they’re really not that hard to write, but it’s a kind of songwriting that people aren’t willing to do.
Someone said to me in the 80’s, when I liked Venom a lot – they’re a very silly, vaudevillian form of Satanic metal – “Why do you like this? Anybody can do that. Anybody can play Venom songs.” And I said “yeah, that’s true. But nobody is willing to. That’s what makes it special.”
It should come as no surprise that a gay 30-year-old male living in the Bay Area who borrows elements of his fashion-forward look from Freddie Mercury is putting out the “gayest music ever.” He’s a Pisces who rocks a switchblade comb and blends leather daddy duds with a 1950s-meets-1980s juvenile delinquent touch.
Seth Bogart, a.k.a. Hunx, has been devoted to rock and trash pop culture for years. He made zines as a teen in Arizona when riot grrrl was happening, and has essentially created a life from his variety of enthusiasms.
“I do it for myself, to have fun. It makes me feel better being constantly creative. As cheesy as it sounds, happiness is doing what you want to do,” says the rather butch-looking Bogart over tortas at a 24th Street restaurant. His eyes are piercing, he’s wearing a torn biker jacket, and he’s sporting a few days more than a five o’clock shadow.
Probably tired from having just gotten back from New York City, where he spent eight days recording the next Hunx and His Punx album for Sub Pop’s subsidiary label Hardly Art, Bogart appears happy to be home. After years living in Oakland, he currently resides in the Bayview District.
Thematically, Bogart describes the first proper Hunx and His Punx album as being similar to this year’s compilation Gay Singles (True Panther) in that it deals with love and teenage heartbreak. “It sounds like a dream,” he exclaims. But the upcoming album delves deeper into a sadness he said he’s never really written about before. His father committed suicide when he was just a teen, and with his mom left “out of it and depressed” in the immediate aftermath, it’s no wonder he grew up fast and was on his own by 17.
Bogart found catharsis in freedom of expression. As the tale goes, after his previous group Gravy Train!!! disbanded, friends such as Nobunny and Christopher McVicker helped pen some of the early Hunx and His Punx songs. On the new album, Bogart more fully takes the reins, writing half the album’s tracks himself, with his bold bassist and bandmate Shannon Shaw also contributing a few numbers. As for Hunx’s flirty and quick-witted onstage candor, Bogart attributes some of his brazen confidence to old pal and former roadie Nobunny, who instilled in him that you only have one chance in life. This attitude has led to a colorful album insert of Hunx in the buff, as well as an awkward moment when his Internet-browsing mom unexpectedly saw his boner in a Girls music video.
If you think Bogart’s skills to pay the bills begin and end with music, guess again. He happens to co-own Down at Lulu’s, a popular Oakland vintage boutique and salon, with Tina Lucchesi (of Trashwomen, Bobbyteens, and now Midnite SnaXXX). The shop has been open four years, and Bogart, a licensed cosmetologist, cuts hair there three days a week. He and his friend Brande Baugh are also developing a TV talk show.
Although owning his own shop and contributing to the local music scene are two obvious ways Bogart serves the Bay Area community, it’s what he stands for on a larger scale as a unique gay personality in the still hetero male-dominated genre of punk — and broader realm of rock — that makes him bold and noteworthy. You can call him bubblegum and outrageous, but the fact remains that Hunx exudes an image of strength and confidence. He fills a void in garage rock that isn’t quite clean enough for the Castro and maybe too queer for some fans of harder sounds. He blurs the lines, breaks down boring boundaries, and stays true to himself all the while.
Vader’s history stretches back almost 30 years. Borrowing Darth’s moniker might not have been the world’s most original idea, but they were likely among the first to have done it. The Polish death metal stalwarts formed in 1983 in Olstzyn, deep behind the Iron Curtain. Successful demo recordings got them hooked with Earache Records, and the band has been pillaging the world’s stages ever since. Guitarist-singer Piotr Wiwczarek is the only original member left in the fold, but the band’s anthemic music is as potent as ever, mixing impossibly thick blast beats with heavy slabs of neoclassical melody. Their upcoming album Return to the Morbid Reich is a nod to the 1990 demo that made their name; this tour, they’re inviting you along for the ride. (Ben Richardson)
With Immolation, Abigail Williams, Lecherous Nocturne, and Pathology
The story of Scheherazade and her 1,001 nights of tales to postpone her beheading by the Persian king has intrigued and captivated audiences for ages. Choreographer Alonzo King’s dance adaptation Scheherazade delves beyond the story to explore themes ranging from the symbolism of abused women to the transformative power imbued in the tales. The company of chiseled titans dance alongside tabla master Zakir Hussain’s score, which incorporates traditional Persian instrumentation into the original classical composition by Rimsky-Korsakov. The piece premiered in Monaco last December; San Franciscans can now experience King’s artistic rendering of Scheherazade’s classic tale for themselves. (Emmaly Wiederholt)
“Jim Henson and Friends: Inside the Sesame Street Vault”
Consider the Muppet. Made of foam and googly eyes, set atop spindly legs under a mop of primary-color hair, these brave figures have become our children’s teachers on a level unparalleled in the world of infotainment. We’re talking street, of course — Sesame Street, which since its 1969 debut has won 97 Emmy awards, more than any other show. Yerba Buena Center for the Art is running a series of Sesame clip collections, and today’s viewing pays homage to the contributions of the show’s early creative team, with a special furry hug to creator Jim Henson, and little-seen guest appearances from the show’s early days. (Caitlin Donohue)
“CounterPULSE’s Performing Diaspora: Sri Susilowati”
Stripping world dance of its trappings is quite the rage these days. But few have done it so radically as Indonesian classical dancer did Sri Susilowati at last year’s Performing Diaspora festival. Yet this was the same artist who, only a few months before at the Ethnic Dance Festival, had performed an exquisite, contemporary Javanese mourning dance. Now she is back, having been invited to expand on her 2009 piece. Susilowati may look one of those ethereal dance creatures whose bodies are so stylized that it’s difficult to think of them having earthly passions. Yet they do. Hint on Susilowati: food. Another Indonesian dancer, Prumsodun Ok, opens the show for her. (Rita Felciano)
San Francisco-based artists the Fresh and Onlys and Kelley Stoltz will both have new albums on hand at this double CD release blowout. The new Fresh and Onlys disc, Play It Strange, showcases the band’s garage-rocky spin on 1960s pop, and was recorded for the first time outside of a DIY studio setup with Comets on Fire producer Tim Green. Stoltz releases his newest batch of throwbacks to the Beatles’ and Beach Boys’ style of sunny pop with To Dreamers. This is a perfect night to come out and support local music. (Landon Moblad)
Known for its loud, provocative works merging dance, drama, and music, Dandelion Dancetheater turns its attention to motherhood in MamaLOVE: Seeds of Winter. The seven-women cast explores mom-related themes by diffusing fairy tales, myths, and lullabies to discover the context and relevance of the cultural archetypes and stereotypes surrounding motherhood. Each evening brings a rotating roster of guest mama-choreographers: Mary Carbonara, Tammy Cheney, Laura Elaine Ellis, Suzanne Gallo, Dana Lawton, Laura Renaud-Wilson, and Chingchi Yu. Directed by Kimiko Guthrie, the show promises to be haunting, hilarious, and not to be missed as the mom-artists address the complexities of love, loss, connection, and independence. (Wiederholt)
“Longplayer San Francisco: 1,000 Years in Three Simultaneous Acts”
As a founding member of legendary rabble-rousers the Pogues, Jem Finer helped the band deconstruct traditional Irish music and create a new musical creature out of its varied influences. Taking this willingness to experiment with different sounds and ideas and bringing it to another level, Finer composed Longplayer, a piece designed to last 1,000 years and played on instruments such as Tibetan bowl gongs. Today’s special performance will be a 1,000-minute excerpt performed by 18 musicians on a custom-built, 60-foot-wide circular “instrument” — so slow down and take some time to absorb some art that goes against today’s faster-is-better mentality. (Sean McCourt)
Several years and millions of bucks in the making, ODC is at last ready to unveil its new state-of-the-art “cultural campus” in the Mission in a celebratory free day of “dance, theater, performance, and community.” With more than 20 performers and organizations participating, there will be something for everybody — yes, even clogging — at this one-of-a-kind public offering. A glance at the roster includes such names as Scott Wells and Dancers, Robert Moses’ Kin, Killing My Lobster, Youth Speaks, and of course ODC/Dance, all curated by ODC Theater director Rob Bailis in collaboration with the likes of choreographer Joe Goode, world music expert Lilly Kharrazi, and playwright-director Mark Jackson. (Robert Avila)
Noon–11 p.m., free (tickets available one hour prior to each performance)
I still wish they’d call them Street Car Dances instead of Trolley Dances, because that’s what they are, but the name is a registered trademark and has its origins in San Diego (where they actually have trolleys). However, there is nothing else I would change on these annual easy-rider events. They are pure fun, and curator Kim Epifano always comes up with an intriguing lineup of entertainers. This year you’ll see, among others, dancers from Joe Goode Performance Group, Sara Shelton Mann, Ensohza Minyoshu (traditional Japanese folk music and dance), and Sunset Chinese Folk Dance Group. And do look out for a special treat on Ninth Ave for our animal friends, courtesy of brilliant maskmaker Mike Stasiuk. Boarding takes place at Duboce Park. (Felciano)
Through Sun/17
11 a.m. (runs every 45 minutes until 2:45 p.m.), free with Muni fare ($2)
Do you ever want to stroll into other people’s homes simply from sweet curiosity? Perhaps you covet thy neighbor’s art, or maybe just appreciate light and shadow and like talking with the peeps who represent it? Do all three at the largest and oldest open studios event in the country. The self-guided art tour is ongoing through October, but this weekend doors will open in the artsy northern and eastern neighborhoods. From the nude drawings of Derriere Guard (ahem, Beavis) to the ultraviolet photos of South African succulents, it’s the best opportunity to get to know your local artists. And maybe take home a derriere or two. (Kat Renz)
Through Oct. 31
Sat.–Sun., 11 a.m.–-6 p.m., free
Bayview, Excelsior, Financial District, North Beach, Potrero, Russian Hill, SoMa,Tenderloin
Featuring two of the founding architects of punk rock — guitarists Sylvain Sylvain from the New York Dolls and Cheetah Chrome from the Dead Boys — Batusis already has its street cred and headliner status firmly in place. Taking its name from the groovy dance that Adam West performed in the campy 1960s Batman TV show, the band came together and released a new self-titled EP earlier this year that’s steeped in the sounds that earned these six string slingers their place in the punk pantheon in the first place. This dynamic duo may not be so young anymore, but they’re sure as hell just as loud and snotty. (McCourt)
Previously known for fronting the popular indie-rock project Pedro the Lion, David Bazan has returned to working under his own name. His most recent solo album, Curse Your Branches, covers some religious-themed lyrical ground that fans should be familiar with by now, like the tales of sinners losing their way and Bazan grappling with his own faith. But it also presents itself in a much more upbeat, poppier setting than we’re used to, often at odds with the reflective and sometimes dark themes of the songs. Moody, country-tinged Baltimore duo Wye Oak opens. (Moblad)
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VIDEO Birds chirp and branches part like curtains in the opening scene of the music video for Myles Cooper’s anthem “Gonna Find Boyfriends Today.” Suddenly the pristine wilderness scene is shattered and, along with pulsating beats, a big-lipped strawberry greets us with Mickey Mouse paws. A Cyclops-peanut runs across the screen and leads us to a stack of televisions; zooming into one we catch Cooper singing, “It doesn’t matter what you wear/It doesn’t matter if you have money/We’ll find guys to buy us drinks/And tell us that we’re young and funny.”
“I think Myles’ video tells it best, because it’s this kinda caffeinated euphoria,” explains Skye Thorstenson, the mastermind behind the wild imagery of the video. “It’s unrealistic and there’s a little melancholy imbued in it, because this is sooo not the way life really is. There are no cupcakes who are going to help you find boyfriends.”
WHAT? No, wait, hold up. But I thought … So the mountain topped with lollipops looking like Candyland isn’t real? Without realizing that he’s burst my bubble, Thorstenson continues, “But I like that. I like to hide the fact that life is boring. What the world needs is some more color.”
“I never imagined myself doing music videos. For Myles, it was all about the music,” Thorstenson explains. “I wanted to do some visual thing. I told him it won’t be a music video, but it might be like a short film.” In the course of the narrative, Cooper finds puppet lovers, a chorus of gassed angels, and becomes the man-in-the-moon. In the end, a vagina dentata resembling Aunt Charlie’s Lounge — a dive-bar at Turk and Taylor streets— literally eats itself. “I feel like an Aunt Charlie’s is always going to be there, and it’s always going to eat its predecessor,” Thorstenson says. “And there are always different nights there, and sometimes they survive and sometimes they don’t. But what Myles and Alexis [Penney, who cohosts the club night High Fantasy with Cooper] created will always be there, or some essence of it.”
Throughout Thorstenson’s repertoire, he constantly plays with the notion of a fragmented past and explores how essences persist into the present. He is currently filming an experimental documentary that he named after Roland Barthes’ S/Z. It’s an extension of his earlier film, called Gunk Land, which starts at Wisconsin’s Oneida Indian reservation where Thorstenson’s mother lives. “I wanted to do a documentary on my identity: who I am and where I come from,” he explains. Highlighting the ambiguous — possibly fake — moments of documentaries, as in Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, which glamorizes pre-World War II Germany, or The Thin Blue Line, which reenacts a murder scene, Thorstenson utilizes reenactments with different edits and different actors playing him to construct an ambiguous reality. “With S/Z, it’s going to be more how I imagined it and colored in some ideas based on what my mom told me about my past.”
As with “Gonna Find Boyfriends Today” and Gunk Land, S/Z finds Thorstenson working with a mess of “floating fragments” left over from a childhood spent watching PBS specials and Disney movies. Pieces of puppets, stereotypes or songs — “like the plastic floating in the middle of the ocean,” as he puts it — are smashed together. In the 1970 book S/Z, Barthes explores how narrative works and how we recollect memories. Instead of linearity, Thorstenson explains, memory offers “more of a pastiche of experiences and sensations that are pulled together to bring an experience.” This, he adds, is how authors often work: the reader fills in the gaps and links the situations together.
Thorstenson’s take on S/Z turns this idea into a visual experience. It will be released online in pieces that can be navigated like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, and a path through separating branches might reveal the same scene reenacted with different actors, or the same scene with alternative edits. In this way, varied connections and present-versions of Skye are constructed, based on how the past is perceived. “You’re meant to know it might’ve gone differently,” Thorstenson says, “and you can’t trust anything.”
Even the way Thorstenson speaks parallels this fragmented pattern, as he seamlessly jumps from one memory to another or from one project to the next. “The music inspired that video and we worked closely together for four months,” he explains about his work with Cooper. He also has done videos set to Xiu Xiu and Antony and the Johnsons’ songs, to local music-maker Adam Finken’s “Firebird,” and is about to undertake a movie-themed project for San Francisco electronic duo johnathan. In all of the music videos, there’s an interaction between the mood, beats, and lyrics of the music and the visual narrative. “With me, it’s more about improvisation, and something magical happens. I have no idea how it happens, but I don’t intend for people to react. I’m always surprised at how people react to something.”
In undergrad film school at the Academy of Art, Thorstenson was taught how to look at film from a business perspective — it has to look clean, polished, and intentional. Grad school at CCA, along with a filmmaking crew he befriended, dubbed Nightmare City, allowed Thorstenson to think more about process, forcing his aesthetic to evolve. “I decided I’ll show faux interpretations of my process because I was curious about what is actually real.” These are readily featured in his work and create meta-moments, which make the viewer aware. “So I’m playing with this fake façade, and the truth hidden behind all these bright colors,” he said. “It’s the same thing with Myles’ video. There’s something behind all that happiness.”
Digital music files are the Snuggie of the music industry; so comfy, so easy, but it’s fleece is cheap and one dimensional. Vinyl is a thick quilt, a layered labor of love Grandma crafted just for you– a product that brings about a whole new quality of life when you’re wrapped beneath it. Strange analogy, but if you’re unfamiliar with the loveliness and depth of vinyl’s sound possibilities, Record Store Day– this Sat/17 at locations across the Bay– is your day to give ’em a spin.
Steve Stevenson, owner of Oakland’s 1-2-3-4 Go! Records understands why people chuck and trade their physical albums for digital– to simplify their lives and clear out some clutter. He says he did the same thing two years ago when he opened the store.
“I ended up selling almost all of my records– it’s basically how the store started. And now I don’t have many…” he says, pauses, and looks around at the loaded shelves in his shop. “Or I guess I have more than I’ve ever had.” Exactly. Stevenson didn’t cut his collection– his passion for records blew up, the physical stacks of beats and sounds have become his livelihood.
Maybe you’re not into building a gigantic vinyl collection over the weekend, but a short celebratory stack for the holiday can make for a healthy collection. And what’s great about visiting a small, boutique shop like Stevenson’s, is what it’s lacking– no over abundance of records to sift and flip for hours on end.
“My shop is small, but it’s packed with almost all exclusively good things,” he smiles. “We have good turnover on everything in here. And customers often tell me it’s nice to come in here for a half-hour and leave with something. It’s not a six-hour process of digging to get to one album you care about.”
So what are some things Stevenson is currently caring about? He would love to share.
The self-titled debut of Vermont’s grunge-pop trio Happy Birthday [Sub Pop, 2010] is by far this record shop’s pride and joy right now. Stevenson claims it’s the best collection of music he’s heard in the past two years and while he has yet to confirm totals with the label, he’s pretty he has sold more copies than any store around.
“It’s only been out a month and I’ve sold 35 copies. I tend to push it on people. It’s just so good.”
He’s also pretty proud of Seattle’s Cute Lepers‘ sophomore release, Smart Accessories, [1-2-3-4 GO! Records, 2009] put out on Stevenson’s very own label. Why he gleams and grins so big when it comes to this particular record? It glows in the dark! Trippy!
“Perfect for dark listening,” he says.
Besides music, 1-2-3-4 GO! also showcases the work of local artists each month. Currently it’s Danny Neece’s totally awesome paintings that pair oh so perfectly with the store’s colors. Get introduced to new music, new people and new art: everybody wins.
While these goodies and other rotating gems are available every day at local music shops, the grandiose appeal of Record Store Day is the limited edition, exclusive releases both labels, artists and shops put out each year in celebration of the under-appreciated music hubs. From in-store performances to mix tapes and snacks (maybe?), put down your iPod this Saturday and let a physical person give you an earful of inspiration.