Music Archives — Page 219 of 279 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Frameline 32: Anti-pity party

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June 17, 2008

Films about people dealing with serious diseases are often hard to watch and frequently difficult to criticize. They make for rough viewing because of the empathy a viewer has for the suffering subject. Perhaps due to this same sense of compassion, admitting that such movies are cheesy — as they sometimes are — is sort of taboo.

Feminist and experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer bypasses such niceties and constraints with A Horse Is Not a Metaphor. The title of Hammer’s movie might have ties to Susan Sontag’s writings on illness, but it also connects to the dreamlike imagery of horses that she mixes with footage of her stay in a hospital. Structurally, A Horse Is Not a Metaphor‘s chapters correspond to the stages of ovarian cancer treatment. Hammer reinforces all these elements with the magnificently strange music of Meredith Monk to create a very personal retelling of her experience. Her movie is a highly relatable testimony of feelings that rage from sheer darkness to happiness and hope.

Horse‘s visceral quality makes it a different and almost cathartic response to the subject of disease. Each ingredient conveys a desire to connect with the physical and emotional world on a basic sensory level. In doing so, Hammer and her movie relinquish pity and fear.

A HORSE IS NOT A METAPHOR

June 27, 7 p.m.

Roxie

Frameline 32:That’s us

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June 17, 2008

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› johnny@sfbg.com

Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell is like an audiovisual kiss from Russell to those who loved him, and to a greater audience who has yet to discover him. That’s the highest praise I can think of for Matt Wolf’s movie about the composer and musician, who died of AIDS in 1992. Clearly enamored with Russell’s wonderful and unique world of echoing sound, Wolf breaks free from the all-too-familiar generic commercial tropes of music documentaries to try a little tenderness. The gesture of affection is more than fitting: though Russell wasn’t a pop sentimentalist, he was capable of writing entire songs (such as "A Little Lost" and "Lucky Cloud" from the 1994 album Another Thought) about equally entire days spent thinking about his lips pressing against those of his beloved. As he sang, "Kissing I go overboard."

That beloved is Russell’s boyfriend Tom Lee, whose generous intimacy while being interviewed is one of the qualities that makes Wild Combination special. Though the Talking Heads are mentioned more than once as Wolf’s movie follows Russell’s idiosyncratic paths through the creative spots of downtown ’80s New York, the film’s chorus of commentators never falls into the kind of talking-heads detachment one associates with documentaries. There is a rare, moving intimacy to the camera’s rapport with Lee and with Russell’s Iowan parents, Chuck and Emily. That rapport only builds in the emotionally powerful final moments, yielding a story about love and family that, through sheer openhearted understatement, is a revelation. Think of it as a nonfiction answer to Brokeback Mountain: more shattering, nuanced, and hopeful because it is based in a commitment to creative life rather than manufactured myth.

"I’m watching out of my ear," Russell’s voice declares, with characteristic quiet softness, as Wild Combination first flickers onto the screen. This synesthetic intuitiveness seems to guide the film as it simultaneously travels his life story and communes with his spirit. The cinematography of Jody Lee Lipes passes like wind through the corn fields of Russell’s youth and the New York piers of his adult life, both of which provided lyrical inspiration. By simply tapping into Russell’s relaxed and meditative creativity (at least when Russell was working solo), Wolf makes the film’s charm and depth seem so easy. But subtly potent structural corollaries emerge, as when Chuck Russell’s remembrance of a physical fight with his gentle yet maddening son is mirrored — same words, but a recollection of a different situation — by musician and friend Ernie Brooks.

Wild Combination is the first feature film by the 25-year-old Wolf, whose Web site (www.mattwolf.info) is a treasure trove of gay sensibility and whose early short films suggested an affinity for this kind of project. Wolf has already made a short fictive documentary about the late artist-writer David Wojnarowicz, a contemporary of Russell’s — in a Guardian article on Russell (see "Prince Arthur, 03/04/04), I compare the two — who followed similar paths. That 2003 film, Smalltown Boys, possesses the acutely critical parodic imagination of early Todd Haynes movies, a rare characteristic. But Wolf has since graduated from Haynes’ academic tendencies. He’s soulfully true to Russell, whose idiosyncratic gifts and personality led him to butt heads with avant-garde heartlessness and dance through underground discos. While alive, Arthur Russell never found a creative home outside of himself and those he loved. But in Wild Combination, Wolf proves those homes are more than enough. *

WILD COMBINATION: A PORTRAIT OF ARTHUR RUSSELL

Sat/21, 9:45 p.m.

Roxie

FRAMELINE

The 32nd San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival runs June 19–29 at the Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF; Roxie Film Center, 3117 16th St., SF; Victoria Theatre, 2961 16th St., SF; and Rialto Cinemas Elmwood, 2966 College, Berk. Tickets (most shows $10) are available at www.frameline.org.

Pixel Vision blog: Johnny Ray Huston interviews Matt Wolf. Plus: an Arthur Russell discography and short Frameline reviews

Hitting up West Indian Girl

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June 17, 2008

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By Josh Rotter

Los Angeles space-rock outfit West Indian Girl captures – with their sunny sound and meditative lyrics — the duality of their alternately glitzy and gritty city, sandwiched between serene beaches and skid row. It’s an easy, breezy beautiful oasis for some – a boulevard of broken dreams for others. But West Indian Girl’s story begins in early-’90s Detroit, with the meeting of bassist Francis Ten and vocalist-guitarist Robert James. Moving westward, the two eventually signed with Astralwerks, adding vocalist and percussionist Mariqueen Maandig, drummer Mark Lewis, and later, keyboardists Nathan Van Hala and Amy White.

After the 2004 release of their self-titled debut and remix EP, West Indian Girl moved to Milan Records for their sophomore disc, 4th & Wall (2007), named for the unsavory downtown intersection that is home to their current recording studio. But it’s the entire LA landscape that intrigues this band on their latest album, evinced by both the memorable sand and surf-set pop track “Blue Wave,” and the more dire, downtown rocker “To Die in LA.” If beach living symbolizes success in the music capital, downtown’s homelessness – only a 30-minute drive away – hints at the greater potential for failure.

With a headlining gig as part of the LA Invasion tour at the Rickshaw Stop on Thursday, June 19, West Indian Girl co-founder Francis Ten took an hour and 10 to talk about the band’s upcoming performance, their latest album, and the immense difficulties of making it in today’s music climate.

Homonuptial stories: Persian sugar cones, matching fedoras, and princess bouquets

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June 17, 2008

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Janna Brancolini reports from City Hall

Photo by Ariel Soto

At 3 pm, everyone in the City Hall rotunda erupted into cheers as two women in beautiful white gowns walked down the grand stairway.

I glanced over at a nearby sign, “Quiet Please. Business of the City and County of San Francisco is in progress,” which was being thoroughly ignored despite its strategic location.

Cameras flashed as the two women pumped their brightly colored bouquets in the air, grinning and cheering like excited kids at a birthday party.

String music floated through the air, and the hall’s echoing acoustics made it difficult to determine which direction it was coming from. I later identified the lone violinist on the second floor balcony, who was creating enough sound to be heard from everywhere in the room.

The women in white, like every other couple getting married today, were greeted with cupcakes, congratulations, and camera companies, in addition to the applause.

The marriage stations, unceremoniously identified with folding plywood chairs and “Ceremony Location X” printed on plain white paper, seemed to all be on the second floor.

2 cute. Photo by Charles Russo

Although the sites of the ceremonies were less than impressive, they afforded an incredible view and an attention-grabbing exit. Every couple had to descend the great stone steps.

During their descents, the couples were backlit by a small dome, stone carvings, and arches. Cherubic stone carvings in the walls decorated the scene, and the third-story windows leaked natural light into the room. The scene kept reminding me of a fairy tale wedding, as the princess gracefully leaves the balcony and walks down the stairs with all eyes on her.

City Hall day 2 pics: Love reigns supreme

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June 17, 2008

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Guardian photog Ariel Soto reports from City Hall

About every five minutes the air was filled with the sounds of cheering and applause as newly-wed couples made their way down the huge marble steps of San Francisco’s City Hall. Cupcakes were handed out, there was music and so many flashing bulbs that I think everyone felt like a celebrity. Love reigns supreme!

The wonderful politics of gay marriage

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June 17, 2008

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I was listinging to Forum this morning on my way to work and although a few complete idiots called in, most of the talk was about how great it is that California now has legal same-sex marriage. I was struck by one caller who announced, with a kind of bemused confidence, that the protests and acrimony are really old news and will soon by ancient history.

The man, who identified himself as straight and 30 years old, said that when his generation takes control of this country, same-sex marraige will be legal, accepted and no longer an issue at all.

Michael Krasny, the host, pointed out that there are stil some young, religious types who oppose gay marriage, but the called shrugged that off. Sure, there are a few, and there will always be a few bigots and nuts around, but in fact, even the young religious types aren’t as adamant about this issue. When you grow up exposed to something as part of your culture, you come to accept it, the man said.

Yeah, I know, when I was in college I thought that when my generation took control, pot would be legal and war would be outlawed, but this guy is right. The wonderful politics of same-sex marraige is that fact that the battle is over, and we’ve won.

When two 80-year-olds who had fought all their lives for basic human rights and dignity took their vows from a mayor about half a century younger than them, it was both a victory celebration and a passing of the torch. Thanks to older queer pioneers like Lyon and Martin, and the generation that followed them, homosexuality is now a part of mainstream American society. Queers are everywhere, literally — on TV, in the movies, in magazines, in comedy, in popular music, in professional sports, going to high-school proms … and that’s never going to change.

So the religious right can make a last gasp attempt to overturn the Supreme Court decision, but that’s going to fail. The tide has turned.

Manimal Fest makes us feel like animals

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June 17, 2008

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Kicking up some dust at Pioneer Town. All photos by Jen Snyder.

By Jen Snyder

I feel like I’m airing a secret by writing this, but have you ever been to Pioneer Town? If you haven’t, I’d like to suggest that you think of a reason to go there. If possible, make it a reason full of rock ‘n’ roll, music critics covered in dust and beer, and plenty of the locals. On June 7 and 8 in Pioneer Town, two hours east of Los Angeles and deep in the burning June desert, Manimal Vinyl held their first major event, Manimal Festival. The LA label showcased a string of bands including the resurfacing Ariel Pink and his Haunted Graffiti as well as some up-and-coming bands and projects.

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Picture a basin dotted with Joshua Trees and red rock. Pioneer Town seems to just appear out of nowhere behind the rust-colored formations, looking more like an amusement park than a bar. There’s a pod of teepees, an entire fake town – complete with bowling alley – full of weathered mannequins, miniature ponies, and tons of bikers. The bar and the outside patio both have separate barbecues. There I saw someone with a Bloody Leroy, a Bloody Mary with a barbecued rib in it.

I don’t know why people aren’t flocking to Pioneer Town constantly. It was a kitsch dream, as you can imagine, stuffed with velvet paintings and chili-pepper lights and boasting the nicest legless bouncer you ever met. To top it all off, the music was incredible. Highlights include Mariee Sioux, We Are the World, and Aeriel Pink.

Facing the music

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June 11, 2008

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Mini video-enhanced chamber operas seem to be the flavor of the month, at least in a certain stretch of the Mission District. Only three weeks ago, Bay Area composer Erling Wold’s solo opera Mordake began its world premiere run at Shotwell Studios (as part of the San Francisco International Arts Festival) with inimitable tenor John Duykers in the part of the titular medical mystery and suicide — a pampered Victorian gentleman with the seemingly sentient face of his sisterly "evil twin" pasted to the back of his head. Beautifully constructed throughout (beginning with Wold’s prerecorded but generally enthralling minimalist score and Dukyers’ expansively human turn as "the man who ate his family"), Mordake availed itself of an exquisite and all-encompassing video design that cunningly developed the opera’s themes while allowing traditional lighting, costumes, and sets to be kept to a select minimum.

Meanwhile, a few blocks away at the Lab on 16th Street, composer-librettist Lisa Scola Prosek’s Trap Door followed suit with a one-hour chamber work on the plight of a US soldier in Iraq accused of killing an unarmed civilian. Billed as a "video opera," Trap Door is in fact performed live by a cast of seven and another six musicians (including composer Prosek at the piano) but unfolds against a wall-projection (designed by filmmaker-videographer Jacob Kalousek) whose purpose is to open up and to some degree comment on action otherwise constrained by a physically tight, nontraditional stage with minimal scenic components.

Like Wold, Prosek is a gifted local composer happy to work at or near the Bay Area’s new-theater fringes, and is well versed in its multimedia possibilities. Her last chamber opera, Belfagor, based on Machiavelli’s satirical comedy and set to an Italian libretto, also incorporated an elaborate video-based design scheme as part of its impressive debut at the Thick House. But the results in Trap Door prove far less successful this time around.

Only part of the problem has to do with the multimedia dimension: missing Kalousek’s synched video contains some arresting images and evocatively incongruous backdrops (such as the negative image of a revolving Ferris wheel overlapping one particularly dramatic scene), but others feel either less inspired or arbitrary, simultaneously being difficult to read or fully take in against the multiple surfaces at the back of the stage.

Beyond these individual elements, it’s the underlying theme that proves problematic. Based on a dream of the composer’s, Trap Door uses music as both vehicle and metaphor for exploring the moral agency of a hapless soldier, Private Able (Clifton Romig), who is presented with an impossible situation in which his simple human wants and patriotic dreams run up hard against the chaos, hypocrisy, corporate double-dealing, and native outrage that dwell at the bloody forefront of American empire. As promising as that may sound, it seems to have been too complex an idea to adequately develop here, at least not without falling back on overly compressed musical motifs and a kind of stiff dramatic shorthand that skirts mere caricature.

Director Jim Cave’s solid staging ensures that the many swift scene changes come over gracefully. But the condensed action means that even the main character and his Iraqi counterpart — the taxi driver Omar (tenor Mark Hernandez) — have little dramatic depth, while characters like Jane the Journalist (soprano Bianca Showalter) can only come across as cartoons. The more choice aspects remain, unsurprisingly, the musical ones. Romig’s smooth, rich bass meshes nicely with a set of agreeable voices, including several fairly strong duets with sopranos Maria Mikheyenko and Eliza O’Malley. But in general, even the music feels too cramped and underdeveloped, like a series of tantalizing abstracts for some larger vision.

TRAP DOOR

Thurs/12–Sat/14, 8 p.m., $15–$20 sliding scale

Lab

2948 16th St., SF

(415) 864-8855, www.thelab.org

Mo’ Jello

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June 11, 2008

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER What do you give a 50-year-old punk icon who has everything? A silver-studded dog collar? A reason to believe — or rebel? Peace of mind?

"Boy, I can’t think of much," Jello Biafra, né Eric Boucher, says with a chuckle at the question of what to gift him for his 50th birthday June 17. "I’m already such a pack rat, the last thing I need is more stuff. The main vice is vinyl, but I archive a lot of stuff. I’m a librarian’s kid."

Instead, the ex–Dead Kennedys vocalist, in characteristically against-the-grain fashion, will gift celebrants at his birthday-bash-to-end-all-bashes, the two-day "Biafra Five-O" at Great American Music Hall, with turns alongside the Melvins and a newly assembled band, the Axis of Merry Evildoers, which includes Victims Family’s Ralph Spight on guitar, Faith No More’s Billy Gould on bass, and Sharkbait’s Jon Weiss on drums. Oh yeah, and each punk-rock fire-/party-starter will receive a poster, or if it arrives in time, a 7-inch of Biafra and members of Zen Guerilla covering Rev. Horton Heat’s "Speed Demon" and Frankie Laine’s "Jezebel."

So what gives with the very public celebration of three decades of punky monkey-wrenching? "I saw the Stooges on Iggy’s 60th last year, and that was a great show," Biafra tells me while snacking in his San Francisco digs. "I got carried away with the moment and promised myself, if he’s that good at 60, I better be a tenth as good at 50 and get something together."

Expect Biafra’s new group to be part of a continuum: one that began with Dead Kennedys and has manifested in collaborations with the Melvins, DOA, No Means No, Al Jourgensen, Mojo Nixon, and others. "The hope is you’re still going to get a pretty sharp set of teeth," he promises. And speaking of DK, the man who would be SF’s mayor ("It was done as a prank") — and who was nominated as the Green Party’s 2000 presidential bid, right on the coattails of Ralph Nader ("It kind of got dumped in my lap") — is also recognizing the 30th anniversary of the Dead Kennedys, which played its first show in July 1978 opening for the Offs, DV-8, and Negative Trend, despite an extremely acrimonious lawsuit between the vocalist and his bandmates that led a jury to award control of the catalog to the rest of the group.

Despite intimations of a reunion on the part of the remaining Dead Kennedys, the bitterness of the conflict still rankles, with Biafra confessing with a wry chuckle, "I’ve had battles with suicidal depression — especially after that ugly Dead Kennedys lawsuit." Further, he says, "I really resent all the times they played these so-called reunion shows advertised as reunions, and there’s my picture in the ad. I think we have a new genre of punk, and it’s called fraudcore!"

Nonetheless, he hasn’t completely ruled out a reconciliation: "Sure, if those guys were ever willing to undo every last bit of damage they’ve done, I’d consider going back on stage with them. But so far they’ve been way too greedy and way too cowardly to even consider it."

So leave it to the Melvins to convince Biafra to tackle a few DK songs in honor of his birthday. The once SF-based band — in a near-original lineup including Mike Dillard — also will attack early hardcore tunes culled from a 1984 demo sent to Biafra. It turns out those pack-rat tendencies, coupled with Biafra’s abiding love of music, led him to hold onto that ancient tape, which the Melvins lost long ago. "It’s a good thing I saved these things," Biafra says. "They’d forgotten those songs existed." *

BIAFRA FIVE-O

With Jello Biafra and the Melvins, Biafra and the Axis of Merry Evildoers, the Melvins, and (Mon/16) Drunk Injuns and Los Olvidados, and (Tues/17) Triclops! and Akimbo

Mon/16–Tues/17, 8 p.m., $22-$40

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

www.gamh.com

COUNTRY TEASIN’ WITH NEIL HAMBURGER

Moanin’ and groanin’ has never been so hammily hilarious. Comedian Neil Hamburger has a brand new hat — namely, a sorry-ass Stetson — to go along with his new bag: the recently released Neil Hamburger Sings Country Winners (Drag City). Teaming with longtime Bay Area–ite Dave Gleason on guitar, Amoeba Music co-honcho Joe Goldmark on pedal steel, and Todd Rundgren cohort Prairie Prince on drums, Hamburger, a.k.a. onetime Bay stalwart Gregg Turkington, plans to stir misery-loving odes to classic backwoods grimness ("Please Ask That Clown to Stop Crying") into his archetypal miasma of whining/joke-telling during his present tour. So why turn to C&W, which currently seems to consist of "songs about shopping," rather than tears, beer, and chicken dinners? "A lot of rock ‘n’ roll is just people screaming," groans Hamburger from Los Angeles, far from the SF storage locker he claims to have once dwelt in. "You hear enough of that in San Francisco on the streets. With those big, bushy beards and screaming — what’s the difference between a contingent of homeless guys carrying signs and the Doobie Brothers?"

June 11, 9 p.m., $13–<\d>$15. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. (415) 885-0750, www.gamh.com

IT’S TIME FOR TIMES NEW VIKING

They may be pegged as part of the so-called shitgaze underground — thanks to their pals in Psychedelic Horseshit who coined the term — but Columbus, Ohio, trio Times New Viking are as grounded as a trio of Midwestern ex-art-schoolers can be. Keyboardist Beth Murphy met guitarist Jared Phillips and drummer Adam Elliott while attending Columbus College of Art and Design, and the three found that their education came in handy when it came to playing together nicely — and noisily, particularly on their new Matador album, Rip It Off. "When you’re in art school you’re always forced to critique your work and think about everything you’re doing," Murphy, 26, explains from her hometown. "That got, like, really annoying to have to validate every mark you made. But now I think it’s kind of like ingrained in us, so we can’t help but think about every aspect of what we do." Their creative approach to music-making? "One of the first rules we set up was 300 percent creative control," she says. "We all have 100 percent say in everything, and we don’t ever tell each other what to do."

With Hank IV, Psychedelic Horseshit, and Fabulous Diamonds. Fri/13, 9 p.m., $12. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com

New foragers

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June 11, 2008

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Jack Carneal is trying to locate a Malian musician to secure the release of a much-cycled bootleg on his microlabel, Yaala Yaala Records. Fueled by exuberance and somewhat chastened by controversy, Carneal is worrying over Yaala Yaala No. 4 more than he did the first three releases: a dubbed set of howling electric kamelen music by Pekos and Yoro Diallo; a popular bootleg recording of griot Daouda Dembele; and an audio collage of Carneal’s minidisc field recordings from his yearlong stay in Bougouni, Mali. Yaala Yaala No. 5 recently materialized in the form of a magisterial compilation of traditional hunter’s music by vocalist Yoro Sidibe, but the old bootleg is taking more time. "I heard it decades ago, and it just really stuck with me," Carneal reflects over the phone from his Baltimore, Md., home. "I didn’t even know it was from Mali until I lived there and I saw the musician’s name…. It was mastered and everything, and I’m still trying to find the musician to get him some money. In the past this wouldn’t have stopped me. I just would have done it."

No one contends that the music on the initial Yaala Yaala CDs isn’t dazzling. The rough sonic textures of cassette dubbing and crowd noise only thicken their cinematic quality, especially with the skip-and-start rhythms of Pekos and Yoro Diallo’s rumbling blues. But a number of critics — most notably Clive Bell of The Wire — were incredulous about the packages’ lack of annotative liner notes and Carneal’s rush-delivery approach. (Unable to recompense for bootlegs, Carneal established a fund called the Yaala Yaala Rural Musicians’ Collective for whatever scant profits the discs might produce.)

It’s evident talking to Carneal — an English professor at Towson University and former drummer of Anomoanon and Palace Music — that profit motive isn’t part of the Yaala Yaala equation. But past exploitations cast a long shadow. Labels like Yaala Yaala, which is distributed by Drag City, and Sublime Frequencies don’t play by the outmoded rules of so-called world music production, eschewing both academic empiricism and the major labels’ reductive tendency to isolate bankable masters. Meanwhile, kids in Mali listen to dubbed tapes of Led Zeppelin and Jay-Z.

For the new Yoro Sidibe release, Carneal went through the proper contracting but was ultimately foiled by a corrupt producer. "We did everything above-board and legally, and the musician still got ripped off," he laments. Cullen Strawn’s liner notes explain that the donso music Sidibe powers through — long, call-and-response narrations designed to praise and bully hunters into action — is an especially ancient form, but it’s easy to appreciate why the vocalist is popular in the Bougouni marketplaces, beyond the music’s traditional context. Sidibe sounds intensely poised throughout the CD’s three cascading chants, periodically popping into a rapid-fire oratory that crowds out even his accompanist’s confirming hum. The dense ngoni (six-stringed spike harp) flurries capping each verse are perfect examples of the visceral highs Carneal relishes in Malian music.

"I recognize the danger in bringing this music back from Mali and having it reflect my very limited interpretation of an experience," he tells me. "I really want the listener to be able to listen to the music and derive something of their own that was not affected by my subjective take on things." Good taste certainly doesn’t mitigate responsibility, but listeners can only hope that music distribution might continue to be the province of committed amateurs, the sort of imprints like Yaala Yaala, Sublime Frequencies, and Dust-to-Digital that value the unclassifiable and throw the spigot open in accordance with the Mississippi Records motto, "Always — Love before Gold." (Max Goldberg)

www.myspace.com/yaalayaalarecords

Scramble for Africa 3.0

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June 11, 2008

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Africa is not a monolith. Africa is not even Africa: the outsider bastardization kicked off in earnest when the Roman misnomer of a finite North African region was allowed to stand for the entire continent. However, for the West’s millennial hipsters currently emuutf8g such early adopters of 30 years ago — the oft-cited David Byrne and Brian Eno/Talking Heads, Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, and the Police — the space formerly known as the Dark Continent has come to resemble the Golden Corral.

Vampire Weekend and other indie participants in the sonic Scramble for Africa 3.0 obviously see midcentury and postcolonial African pop culture as a cheap date, a provider of organic rock mystery where one can queue for heaping sides of hi-life, soukous, mbaqanga, mbalax, juju, rai, township jive, and Ténéré desert blues. La Présence Africaine is renewing rock ‘n’ roll — again. Striving ahead of the pale pack of black Yankee rockers is retired Nuer boy soldier Emmanuel Jal, justly a current press darling for his fine new second release, Warchild (Sonic 360).

Yet the acclaim for Jal has not outstripped the simultaneous giddiness and hand-wringing of a music press delighted by indie’s abrupt romance with African styles — hot on the heels of a new generation’s overlapping yen for English folk and Balkan gypsy sounds — but vaguely concerned about white exploitation of same, wagging fingers concerning musical "miscegenation." Race mixing yielded my family, cultural exchange has been the way of the world since antiquity, and as a critic whose mission involves exposing audiences to new sounds, I would never deny peoples’ enjoyment of genres seemingly beyond their ken. However, as Jal bitingly reminds us on Warchild‘s unabashed "Vagina," the rape of Africa — that blood-soaked project most essential to modernity — has gone down long enough.

Vampire Weekend, “A-Punk”

The problem with indie’s Karen Blixen close-up is that the transference of African mystery is going one-way — as usual. Vampire Weekend (XL) has sold 27,000 and counting and debuted on Billboard at no. 17, whereas, according to writer Robert Christgau in the New York Times, Sterns’ recent anthology encompassing the career of Congolese soukous master Tabu Ley Rochereau, The Voice of Lightness, has sold barely 9,000 copies.

Meanwhile, indie’s gone natives — including Mahjongg, the Dirty Projectors, Rafter, Yeasayer, and, from across the pond, Foals (Oxford), Courteeners (Manchester), and Suburban Kids with Biblical Names (Sweden) — seem to consider themselves smugly above postcolonial guilt (per DP’s Dave Longstreth) and the 1980s-vintage political correctness that plagued Simon and his apartheid-chic Graceland (Warner Bros., 1986). Vampire Weekend is good enough indie entertainment when you find Björk’s favorite Congolese likembé ensemble Konono No. 1 too repetitive and prefer songs about summertime splendor in the grass. But when Vampire Weekend’s unapologetically preppy white/white-ethnic musicians dub their music "Upper West Side Soweto" and seemingly aspire to come on like Brazzaville Beach Boyz — without any consciousness of such late 20th-century African titans or tyrants as Patrice Lumumba and Mobutu Sese Seko, respectively — it rankles this daughter of third world coalition builders raised in the ’70s and ’80s postcolonial era. Further, when Mahjongg’s Hunter Husar can tell Rhapsody’s Play blog that "to steal musically from another culture is to do a service to humanity," and "we don’t care about Africa any more than any other place," my everything-but-the-burden radar rings sharply.

Certainly there is energy around Africa on the independent music scene: black string band revivalists like Ebony Hillbillies have made the crossing back to West Africa in deep study of old-timey and country’s African ancestry. Funky Africa reissues are all the rage among crate-diggers: think Lagos Chop Up (Honest Jon’s, 2005), etc. And that Western-Kenyan summit Extra Golden was purposely omitted from the above indie roll call, for this multiracial quartet and their latest recording Hera Ma Nono (Thrill Jockey) suggest a way out of the cultural cul-de-sac their trendier fellows are already trapped in.

Further, the tug-of-war between disenfranchised folk of African descent who desired preservation of their mysteries and the white folks who possessed inchoate love for same has raged throughout modern times. As my friend Wendy Fonarow, author of Empire of Dirt: The Aesthetics and Rituals of British Indie Music (Wesleyan, 2006), recently told the UK Guardian: "There are interesting theories as to why rock ‘n’ roll happened when it did. There’s evidence to suggest Christianity, which exists as a missionising religion, had run out of ‘exotic others’ to missionise after the fall of colonialism. Therefore it was in their interests to get adolescents to act like heathens, so they had a supply of unconverted people to convert. So what we did was produce a heathen in our own midst to act out all the same things we’d accused other societies of doing."

Extra Golden promo for “Hera Ma Nono”

By Fonarow’s reckoning it would seem what Longstreth and company are up to is a necessary will to neotribalism, their recorded work a reversal of the detrimental European separation of mind and body. I would counter that these groups’ appropriation of African sounds is a means to the end of escaping the internally imposed authenticity rules of indie rock, a refutation of the linear trip between Greg Ginn and Kurt Cobain when their monoculture reduced them to the last of their race. Then again, options are at the heart of white privilege, as is the agency to cherry-pick from the non-Western bounty. It remains utterly disappointing that millennial musicians can quote Africana without making reference to kwassa kwassa‘s source in the Congo, where millions people have died, young boys mercilessly conscripted and countless women raped as tool of war, while their own blessings of Ivy League degrees and the lack of a draft amid a resurgence of American imperialism permit them a guilt-free stance toward postcolonial upheaval and their gentrification of longtime black neighborhoods. Vampire Weekend’s Brooklynites apparently see no irony in their song "Walcott": "Hyannisport is a ghetto / … Lobster’s claw is sharp as knives / Evil feasts on human lives."

Evil definitely feasts on human lives in the Congo, but evildoers are also harvesting bones in New York City, where the 50 bullets martyring Sean Bell’s body are currently being reduced to mere accident. These white African prodigals don’t and will never suffer the psychic angst of being black and oppressed. Vampire Weekend can always go home again, but we’ve got no home.

EXTRA GOLDEN

June 22, 7 p.m., $15

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

www.rickshawstopcom

E-Z Sleaze

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June 11, 2008

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› superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO "You’ve gotta have the graphics," 26-year-old party promoter extraordinaire, Floridian transplant, smart-talkin’ electro DJ, and graphically explicit designer Sleazemore (www.myspace.com/sleazemore) recently whispered into my tender, somewhat incredulous ear. "The scene’s gotten to a point where it’s not only about who you bring in, what you wear, and who’s there to document your clubs — it’s also about the look you project in your promotions. Everything ties into style."

I just knew graphic designers would someday rule the world. Too bad I’d never risk smudging my minty-fresh nail art on an Axiotron Modbook.

Still, I can’t deny Mr. S’s drag-and-drop skills when it comes to flyers: he’s got the Stanley Mouse-meets-bored-goth-girl’s-notebook thing down, though he often jumps visual genres, and his musical taste is top-notch: Lazaro Casanova’s bowel-shaking banger "Venganza," Nacho Lovers’ mix of Style of Eye’s minimal-bleepy, Dirty Birdish "The Big Kazoo," and classic Brit lush-raver duo Underworld’s "Ring Road (Fake Blood remix)" are Sleazemore platters du jour.

Plus, he seems to be everywhere at the moment: when not inflaming the woofers of gritty ground zero Club 222’s bimonthly Lights Down Low (www.myspace.com/lightsdownlow) or lending a hand to occasionals like the Are Friends Electric? parties, he’s popping the spots for his mostly free and carefree weekly Infatuation shindig with his partner in grime Rchrd Oh?! — of whom you’ll hear a lot more from me later — at the incongruously fancy-shmancy Vessel. "I’m slowly convincing our electro crowd that it’s OK to be there, to mix with the fruity cocktail people," Big Sleazy said with a laugh.

Sleazemore acknowledges, too, that right now electro’s undergoing the same micro-niching that techno, house, and hip-hop did more than a decade ago. "Everybody’s making music right now. It’s great and almost too much, and not all of it’s good." That’s an opinion oodles of other electro DJs I’ve spoken with hold. "Everyone wants to hype their sound as unique, which is cool — if they can back it up," he added. "In fact, lately I’ve been getting into the Crookers, Boy 8-BIT, Drop the Lime, and Fake Blood sound — fidget house, kind of like the speed garage thing revisited."

Envision a chipmunk on steroids riding a ravey beat so skittish it can often cross over into traditional Latin American dance styles — ay, like the Crookers’ kick-ass crunk-samba remix of Bonde do Role’s "Marina Gasolina" — and that’s fidget house. Yes, I’m a trend whore. Italian duo Crookers themselves will steal fidgety thunder June 24 at Infatuation after DJ Assault assaults the crowd’s ass cracks June 18 and latest scene sweethearts Shit Disco fuzz up Vessel’s needles June 11. But is it art? Who cares, it’s infatuating.

Crooker, “Wassup” (Video by Pommes)

INFATUATION

Wednesdays, 10 p.m.–2 a.m., free (Crookers, $10 — advance tix $5 at www.blasthaus.com)

Vessel

85 Campton, SF

(415) 433-8585, www.vesselsf.com

This ain’t the singularity

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June 11, 2008

0

› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION I’m surrounded by people who think the world is changing because Amazon released an e-book reader called the Kindle and because Apple released a new, cheaper iPhone that supposedly will run faster. Really, just search for "3G iPhone" and you’ll see, like, thousands of articles raving about the Second Coming of iPhone. Are these technologies transforming our lives forever, or has the whole idea of world-changing technology finally become nothing more than an advertising jingle?

You can get the answer, in part, from a normally staid engineering journal called IEEE Spectrum. This month Spectrum did a special issue on "the singularity," a term from science fiction that refers to the moment when the technology and culture of the present evolve to the point that they would be incomprehensible to people from the past (www.spectrum.ieee.org/singularity). Airplanes, for example, would be a singularity technology for people from the 1700s. None of the brainiacs and visionaries writing for Spectrum have much to say about e-book readers or mobile phones that play music.

That’s because the Kindle and the iPhone actually represent the death throes of 20th-century technology. They are not changing the world; they are putting a new interface on yesterday’s innovations. When you want to evaluate whether a piece of tech really is "revolutionary," just put it to the simple singularity acid test. Ask yourself if you could explain it in a few sentences to people living 100 years ago. So let’s sit down with your typical resident of San Francisco in 1908, and explain Kindle and iPhone to her.

First the Kindle: "This mechanical instrument allows you to read every book in your library by pressing these levers." Our 1908 San Franciscan may be startled that she can read so many books with one instrument, but does she intuitively get the idea? Yes. Now let’s give her an iPhone. "This artful device is a combination phonograph and telephone that you can slip into the sleeves of your jacket for safekeeping." Again, she’s going to be startled by the size and shape of this artful device, but she’s seen phonographs and she’s used telephones before. Will she go into a state of catatonic future shock? No. She’ll slide that baby up her lacy sleeve and call her friend while shopping for records and mass-produced books on Market Street.

The Kindle and iPhone are the end-state and convergence of technologies developed, for the most part, in the 19th century. The only element inherent in both devices that I think might throw our 1908 woman for a loop is the Internet. One could certainly explain that it is like a giant repository of newspapers, but of course that isn’t quite right. Nor is it shops, or notes and scribbles on walls, or storytelling, or pictures or phone calls. It isn’t even really a convergence of all of those things: it is something genuinely new, socially and technologically.

But adding our era’s one singularity-level technology to 100-year-old technologies does not make more singularity technology. It’s like electrifying a device that was once driven by steam. Upgrades are not the same thing as paradigm shifts.

If you want to know what kinds of technologies really will transform our lives, you need to think about things we take for granted that would be hard to explain to our 1908 person — or indeed, to a 1978 person: Internet technologies. Global positioning system technologies. Space-going technologies. (Though pretty much anybody in 1908 would get the idea of robots on Mars — "mechanical creatures on Mars" sounds like a 19th-century sci-fi novel.) Most of all, look to technologies that are changing social relationships the way the Internet has. Sites like Facebook are literally changing the way we understand friendship. Our culture would be incomprehensible to the people of 1908 just due to the rate at which we exchange knowledge online — passing around the "dramatic lemur" video to millions of people in a day, for example.

Oh, now you want to see it? Search for "dramatic lemur." Try explaining that to our 1908 friend.

Annalee Newitz (annalee@techsploitation.com) is a surly media nerd who has no interest whatsoever in the iPhone because she’s waiting for her augmented reality lenses with the blink interface.

Greater Goode

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June 11, 2008

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Actors are advised to avoid sharing the stage with kids and dogs because they steal the show. Maybe puppets should be included. Joe Goode’s hero in Wonderboy is a not-quite-three-foot concoction of wood, plaster, and cloth. He is adorable and you can’t take your eyes off him. Master puppeteer Basil Twist gave him his body; Goode and his dancers gave him a soul.

With this world premiere Goode has created one of his most poetic works in years. It is not to be missed. He has done so with five new dancers who seem to have inspired choreography as richly physical as any he has done. The piece’s floating lifts, wrestling holds, and tumbling rolls looked spontaneous but were finely shaped. A male-female duet spoke of tortuous relationships with fury and compassion; a quartet for four bare-chested males came across as erotic and tender.

Melecio Estrella, Mark Stuver, and Jessica Swanson gave the puppet its brittle and slightly raspy voice for a narrative by Goode and what he called "some of the wonderboy artists and thinkers" he has known. He explored a question that has preoccupied him for his entire career: how does an outsider find a place for himself in life? Bringing his customary tenderness, wit, and melancholy to the inquiry, he rarely hit a wrong note. Wonderboy‘s outsider character begins life as a sensitive little boy who watches the world from the safety of his home (designed by Dan Sweeney). Gradually he steps out and encounters rejection, rage, and love — especially with dancer Andrew Ward — before finally finding a community of his own. Twist coached Goode’s six dancers in the nuances of puppetry to exquisitely animate the nuances of the boy’s trajectory.

The program opens with excerpts from the 1996 installation piece, Maverick Strain. The Western barroom scene includes two hard-drinking hookers (Patricia West plays the confused one, Swanson the tough one). As a lounge singer (music by the brilliant Beth Custer), Goode is never less than a star — as is Alexander Zendzian as a transvestite rape victim, in a performance that chills the soul.

JOE GOODE PERFORMANCE GROUP

Fri/13–Sat/14, 8 p.m.; Sun/15, 7 p.m.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater

700 Howard, SF

(415) 978-ARTS, www.ybca.org

The house that Hiero built

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June 11, 2008

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

**Update: The Paid Dues Independent Hip Hop Festival has been cancelled. See below for more details.

I’m not accustomed to receiving rappers at my home at 8 a.m. — an hour most rappers have only heard of — but I made an exception for Tajai Massey, member of Souls of Mischief and Hieroglyphics. A self-confessed early riser and the first MC to ever accept my offer of a cup of coffee, Massey is a busy man.

While gearing up for the Hieroglyphics’ Freshly Dipped tour, which kicks off June 14 with the Paid Dues Festival at the Berkeley Community Theatre, the lanky 33-year-old head of the group’s Hiero Imperium label was about to head to Seattle for a spot date with his new rock outfit, Crudo, with Dan the Automator and ex-Faith No More frontman Mike Patton. Meanwhile Massey’s been juggling two upcoming projects, one of which he hopes to release in the fall: a new, self-produced Hieroglyphics disc and the fourth studio release by Souls of Mischief, produced by legend Prince Paul. In the interim, he’s prepping fellow Souls-member Opio’s second solo album, Vulture’s Wisdom, Vol. 1 (Hiero Imperium), for July.

Yet none of this accounts for our meeting. Our conversation instead focused on Massey’s other job: overseeing his own imprint within Hiero, Clear Label. Though begun in 1999 to release his SupremeEx trip-hop collaboration with Hiero Web designer StinkE, Projecto: 2501, Clear Label really established itself circa 2005 with two artists of a very different sort: Shake Da Mayor of "Stunna Shades" fame and Beeda Weeda, whose 2006 full-length, Turfology 101, yielded the hit "Turf’s Up."

While Shake has since departed, Beeda has cemented his Clear Label connection, moving his whole camp, Pushin’ the Beat (PTB), into Hiero’s two-story East Oakland compound, which was purchased by the veteran collective in 2004. Known within Hiero as "the Building," though designated "Hiero" by everyone else, the space houses nine rooms, five studios, and a small warehouse of T-shirts, CDs, and other goods. Soon Beeda’s friend and collaborator, J-Stalin — himself signed to one of the Bay’s biggest rap independent labels, SMC — began bringing his own Livewire crew by, including Shady Nate, Clear Label’s next signee.

Bulging with the usual conglomeration of computers, mixing boards, rough-hewn vocal booths, and a fine layer of empty 1800 bottles and Swisher Sweet ashes, PTB’s two ground floor studios contrast with the Building’s general tidiness, like a kids’ playspace in an otherwise adult house. Yet they also exhibit an atmosphere of dedication. Dropping by on any given day, among the crowd of just-past-high-school aspiring MCs, you might see Beeda and Stalin studiously hunched over spiral notebooks with Mistah FAB, working on their NEW (North-East-West) Oakland project.

And FAB isn’t the only high profile visitor: everyone from San Quinn to the Federation comes through. Too $hort stops by regularly, and even national acts like Dem Franchize Boyz and Cease of Junior Mafia have found their way here. Given that Beeda and Stalin are two of the hottest young Oakland rappers and attract such elite company, Hiero suddenly finds itself at the center of what might be called the Bay’s post-hyphy moment, one embodied in a tougher, less dance-oriented sound, combined with classic Bay slap and tempered by R&B overtones.

"I wasn’t after a bunch of streeter-than-street dudes," Massey said, laughing. "But I sure ended up with some."

THE OTHER BAY BRIDGE

Intentional or not, the current emphasis on street rappers is consistent with Clear Label’s overall mission.

"Our fans aren’t that forgiving. Even bringing up other acts like Knobody or Musab, who are on the same tip as Hiero — our fans want Hiero music," Massey said, in reference to Hiero Imperium artists and the group’s demanding backpacker following. "So we’ll give it to them, and let Clear Label be the outlet for other acts, especially my relationship with PTB/Livewire."

Oakland hip-hop converges on the Hiero HQ. Photos by Alexander Warnow

It helps, Massey continued, that J-Moe, the CEO of PTB, has a vision. "That dude is a genius," the Clear Label honcho said. "He’s called the Machine, because he’s always working." With an uncanny ability to spot new talent — like 17-year-old phenom Yung Moses, who J-Moe dubs "the future face of the franchise" — the Machine is a crucial part of the evolution of Clear Label.

But Clear isn’t just a "street label," Massey continued. He’s working with a "rock ‘n’ roll" dude, Chris Maarsol, as well as League 510, which he describes as working in "really a new genre." Hailing from East Oakland, 510 blends lyrical, positive rap and house-influenced grooves in a mix the group calls "Town Techno." "It’s like bridging the hyphy movement and the alternative crowd," Massey said. "I know they’ll do well in cities like Miami, Chicago — where they have a house scene — and in Europe."

Interestingly, according to Massey, European fans have been more receptive to Hiero’s new connections than the domestic audience. "It’s crazy," he said with a laugh. Among other acts, Massey also scooped up Baby Jaymes, digitally re-releasing his 2005 debut, The Baby Jaymes Record (Ghetto Retro), and dropping a new single, "The Bizness," including Turf Talk. "Baby Jaymes is huge in Germany and Belgium, even Australia," Massey added. "I’m in Amsterdam and people are like, ‘Where’s Beeda Weeda?’ Out there people understand the association, whereas in Oakland, they have no idea. It’s odd how Europeans look deeper into it, and it’s a whole different language."

‘WE ALL FROM OAKLAND’

Perhaps it isn’t so odd. The language barrier may even facilitate European acceptance, because despite the differences between Hiero’s conscious lyricism and PTB/Livewire’s grimy topics, the musical bond is already there.

"There are more similarities than differences," Opio told me. "We all from Oakland. Hiero looked to Too $hort and E-40 when we began our independent hustle."

Though he admittedly can’t keep track of the crews’ ever-expanding rosters, former Hiero Imperium head Domino — who, after helming the organization from its mid-’90s inception, stepped down in 2006 to concentrate on production — also welcomes the influx of young talent. "As you get older," he said, "there’s not the same excitement as an artist. You can’t totally get it back, but you can feed off their new energy."

Beyond their shared approval, members of Hiero have already begun to collaborate with PTB/Livewire. Souls member A-Plus, for example, produced the dancehall-inspired opener, "Da Town," on Beeda’s new all-original mixtape, Talk Shit Swallow Spit — possibly the hottest Bay Area disc this year — while Casual appears on Beeda’s forthcoming album, tentatively titled Turf Radio. PTB, moreover, has added a more conscious lyricist, Tre Styles, upsetting what Opio describes as "the boxes the corporate market puts people in."

Massey agrees. "Look at Beeda or Shady. Their mentality isn’t ‘go dumb, go stupid,’<0x2009>" he noted. "Their lyrics are militant, and these guys are growing." Massey was also quick to point out the multidimensional side of J-Stalin, whose crime-ridden raps are infused with melancholy ambivalence about street life. "Stalin could be big like 2Pac," he opined. "He’s not trying to look hard. He’s a little dude, but he’s got all this heart and emotion."

Stalin himself is more modest, albeit slightly, at least concerning his upcoming SMC disc, The Pre-Nuptial Agreement. "Pre-Nup is going to be one of the greatest Bay Area albums ever," he said. "I ain’t saying I’m the best rapper. I’m saying I put together a great album." Judging by the songs he played for me that day — including the radio-ready "Get Me Off" with E-40 — he’s right. SMC’s Will Bronson is sufficiently confident in Stalin — and Beeda — to partner with Thizz Entertainment this summer to bring out the former’s Gas Nation as well as the latter’s The Thizzness, both pre-albums designed to tide fans over before their full-lengths in the fall.

"Stalin and Beeda are the only two new artists really buzzin’," Bronson said. "I couldn’t go a week without hearing about them."

As a result, Stalin and SMC plan to collaborate on future Livewire projects, including a group disc showcasing up-and-comers Shady and J Jonah, longtime members such as ROB, Lil Blood, and Ronald Mack, and newer recruits like Philthy Rich and 17-year-old Lil Ruger, whose wild, almost Keak-esque flow foretells fame.

The connection to SMC and Vallejo’s Thizz, moreover, suggests a serious new coalition which, given the waning of hyphy, threatens to become the next major force in Bay Area rap. "We’re just trying to keep the unity," Stalin concluded. "Because we’re all from different places, we wouldn’t be able to do this in the street."

UNITED FRONT

Such unity, always in short supply in the Bay, is one of the most intriguing aspects of the Hiero/PTB/Livewire situation. "We’ve got a movement, but it’s not a movement," said Jamon Dru, who, along with DJ Fresh, Tower, and others, formed the Whole Shabang, an autonomous production squad linked to both PTB and Livewire. "We’re trying to make music everyone will feel, not just the Bay. That’s put a hurt on us because we do have a ‘fuck everyone else’ attitude, like, ‘I don’t care if anyone else likes this shit.’ But we got families, friends, people in jail we gotta feed. We can’t be half-steppin’ like that."

Like Traxamillion, and unlike many local producers, Dru is candid about the influence of the radio on his sound. "It’s a little Southern-influenced," he said, "a little East Coast with Fresh chopping up samples, but with the 808s and a West Coast bassline. Every beat we make with samples, we gotta put an 808 knock in it." While it’s difficult to generalize, given the work of so many producers, Dru’s statement is a good sketch of the PTB/Livewire sound: it looks to the Bay’s older mob music through the modern lens of hyphy, even as it sheds the more gimmicky excesses of the latter.

Beginning his career under Beeda Weeda’s wing, Dru is already a mogul of his own, currently developing 19-year-old Gully, whose work can sampled on his mixtape Hustla Movement. Like Yung Moses, the saltier-voiced, vowel-stretching Gully is considered one of the most promising rappers in the camp, and the two are already slated for a collaboration. A song like Gully’s "Bush," imagining the life of a ghetto youth who suddenly finds himself a soldier in Iraq, even suggests that Hiero’s more politically progressive themes are creeping into the youngster’s work.

At present, however, Beeda remains the "face of the franchise" for PTB and Clear Label.

"Beeda’s got the biggest buzz," Massey said, "so it makes sense to lead off with him. I just want to set him up properly." Proper set-up in the Bay generally involves a "pre-album," and Beeda’s got three. Besides the all-original Talk Shit mixtape and The Thizzness, Beeda’s collaboration with DJ Fresh, Base Rock Baby — an ’80s-themed disc referring to Beeda’s generation as the first to be born after the crack epidemic began — appears in July.

"We’re going to push that online," Massey said, though there will be hard copies for sale. "Right now, if Beeda’s record sales matched his popularity, I’d be ready to retire." Still, he confessed, "everyone has Turfology, but only a few people bought it," citing the difficulties of selling albums in the era of burnt CDs and file-sharing, not to mention ongoing recession under the George W. Bush administration.

Another problem was the lag between Beeda’s video for "Turf’s Up" becoming popular on YouTube and the actual release of Turfology, confusing consumers who assumed the CD was already out. "This time we got the timing down," Beeda said. "We’ll build that buzz first, and everything will be ready to go." Nonetheless, as falling numbers of mainstream releases attest, selling albums has grown increasingly difficult regardless of timing.

"That’s not how we eat anymore," Dru said. "You put out an album to get shows and verse features [guest appearances on other artists’ songs]. So we gotta look at these songs as bait." Massey, meanwhile, is seeking other income streams to support his label and artists, like soundtracks and licensing.

As Massey confirms, street rap comes with headaches not usually associated with Hiero. A few weeks ago, as Clear Label began preparing Shady Nate’s debut, Son of the Hood, for release, Shady was arrested on an alleged weapons violation and remains incarcerated pending trial.

"They’re trying to throw the book at him," Massey said. "I’m hoping we can work it out because Shady’s a good dude, and his album is great." Even if Shady has to do a stretch in prison, Son of the Hood will probably see the light of day sometime later this year.

Ultimately the big question for PTB/Livewire is whether the coalition can achieve the mainstream success that eluded the hyphy movement. Beeda and Stalin think so, and with the support and mentorship of the Hiero camp, they have as good a chance as any in the Bay — and maybe even the best.

With the long view of a rapper 15 years into his career, Massey is philosophical about the prospects of his Clear Label empire. "If we break even it’s cool," he said. "If we make money, even better. But if I break even, I’m happy, because it wasn’t a loss for me to put out great music."

PAID DUES FESTIVAL***

With Hieroglyphics and others

Sat/14, 5 p.m., $40

Berkeley Community Theatre

1900 Allston, Berk.

www.ticketmaster.com

***This show has been cancelled. From the promoters: Guerilla Union and MURS 3:16 regret to announce that the PAID DUES INDEPENDENT HIP HOP FESTIVAL scheduled for Saturday, June 14 at the Berkeley Community Theatre in Berkeley, CA, has been cancelled due to matters beyond our control.

For fans that have purchased tickets to the show, we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. Refunds are available for ticketholders at the point-of-purchase.

Election as prologue

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June 11, 2008

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› steve@sfbg.com

San Francisco politics shifted June 3 as successful new coalitions altered the electoral landscape heading into the high-stakes fall contests, when seven of the 11 seats on the Board of Supervisors are up for grabs.
Progressives had a good election night even as lefty shot-caller Sup. Chris Daly suffered a pair of bitter defeats. And Mayor Gavin Newsom scored a rare ballot box victory when the southeast development measure Proposition G passed by a wide margin, although voters repudiated Newsom’s meddling with the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission by approving Prop. E.

But the big story wasn’t these two lame duck politicians, who have served as the two poles of local politics for the past few years. It was Mark Leno, who handed Sen. Carole Migden her first electoral defeat in 25 years by bringing together progressives and moderates and waging an engaged, effective ground campaign. In the process, he may have offered a portent of things to come.

The election night speech Leno gave just before midnight — much like his entire campaign — didn’t break along neat ideological lines. There were solidly progressive stands, like battling the religious right’s homophobia, pledging to pursue single-payer health care, and blasting Pacific Gas & Electric Co. for funding sleazy attack pieces against him, reaffirming his commitment to public power.

But he also thanked Newsom and other moderate supporters and heaped praise on his political consulting firm, BMWL, which has run some of downtown’s nastiest campaigns. "It was clean, it was smart, and it was effective," Leno said of his campaign.

The Migden campaign, which had the support of Daly and many prominent local progressives, often looked dirty by comparison, marred by past campaign finance violations that resulted in Migden getting slapped with the biggest fine in state history and by Daly’s unethical misuse of the Guardian logo on a mailer that made it appear as if we had endorsed Migden.

Old alliances seemed to crumble around this election, leaving open questions about how coalitions will form going into an important November election that’s expected to have a crowded ballot and huge turnout.

UNITY AND DIVISION

There are things that unite almost all San Franciscans, like support for public schools. In this election that support came in the form of Prop. A — a measure that will increase teacher salaries through a parcel tax of about $200 per property owner — which garnered almost 70 percent of the vote.

"These numbers show that people believe in public education. They believe in what we’re doing," school superintendent Carlos Garcia told a jubilant election night crowd inside the Great American Music Hall.

Also uniting the city’s Democrats was the news that Barack Obama sewed up the party’s presidential nomination June 3, ending a primary battle with Hillary Clinton that had created a political fissure here and in cities across the country.

"The winds of change are blowing tonight. Let me congratulate Barack Obama on his victory," Leno said on election night, triggering a chant of "Yes we can" from the crowd at the Upper Market bar/restaurant Lime.

Local Clinton supporters were already switching candidates on election night, even before Clinton dropped her campaign and announced her support for Obama four days later.

"As a strong Hillary person, I’m so excited to be working for Obama these next five months," DCCC District 13 member Laura Spanjian, who won reelection by placing fourth out of 12 slots, said on election night. "It’s my number one goal this fall."

Leno also sounded conciliatory themes. In his election night speech, Leno acknowledged the rift he created in the progressive and LGBT communities by challenging Migden: "I know that you upset the applecart when you challenge a sitting senator."

But he vowed to repair that damage, starting by leading the fight against the fall ballot measure that would ban same-sex marriage and overturn the recent California Supreme Court decision that legalized it. He told the crowd, "I invite you to join together to defeat the religious right."

A day later we asked Leno about whether his victory represented a new political center in San Francisco and he professed a desire to avoid the old political divisions: "Let’s focus on our commonalities rather than differences," he said, "because there is real strength in a big-tent coalition."

But this election was more about divisions than unity, splits whose repercussions will ripple into November in unknown ways. Shortly before the election, Daly publicly blasted "Big Labor" after the San Francisco Labor Council cut a deal with Lennar Corporation, agreeing to support Prop. G in exchange for the promise of more affordable housing and community benefits.

On election night, Newsom couldn’t resist gloating over besting Daly, whose affordable housing measure Prop. F lost big. "I couldn’t be more proud that the voters of San Francisco supported a principled proposal over the political proposal of a politician," Newsom told us on election night, adding, "Today was a validation of community investment and involvement over political games."

While Daly and some of his progressive allies have long warned that Leno is too close to Newsom to be trusted, one of the first points in Leno’s speech was the celebrate the passage of Prop. E, which gives the Board of Supervisors more power to reject the mayor’s appointees to the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. "As an early supporter I was happy to see that," Leno said.

Susan Leal, the former SFPUC director who was ousted by Newsom earlier this year, said she felt some vindication from the vote on Prop. E, but mostly she was happy that people saw through the false campaign portrayals (which demonized the Board of Supervisors and erroneously said the measure gave it control over the SFPUC.)

"This is one of the few PUCs where people are appointed and doing the mayor’s bidding is the only qualification," Leal told us on election night.
Sup. Tom Ammiano, who will be headed to the Assembly next year, agreed: "It shows the beauty contest with the mayor is over and people are willing to hold him accountable."

ANALYZING THE RESULTS

On the day after the election, during a postmortem at the downtown office of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, political consultants Jim Stearns and David Latterman sized up the results.

Latterman called the Prop. E victory "the one surprise in the race." The No on E campaign sought to demonize the Board of Supervisors, a strategy that clearly didn’t work. Firing Leal, a lesbian, helped spur the city’s two major LGBT groups — the Harvey Milk and Alice B. Toklas Democratic clubs — to endorse the measure, which could have been a factor when combined with the high LGBT turnout.

"This may have ridden the coattails of the Leno-Migden race," Stearns said.

In that race, Stearns and Latterman agreed that Leno ran a good campaign and Migden didn’t, something that was as big a factor in the outcome as anything.
"Migden did too little too late. The numbers speak for themselves. Leno ran a really good race," Latterman said, noting how Leno beat Migden by a large margin in San Francisco and came within a few thousand votes of beating Joe Nation on his home turf of Marin County.

"It was a big deal for Leno to get so close to Nation in Marin," Stearns said.

Leno told us the polling his campaign did late last year and early this year showed he had a strong advantage in San Francisco, "so with that, I invested a lot of time and energy in Marin County."

Stearns attributed the big Prop. G win to its large base of influential supporters: "The coalition-building was what put this over the top." Daly chalked it up to the $4 million that Lennar spent, saying it had bought the election. But Stearns, who was a consultant for the campaign, didn’t agree: "I don’t think money alone ever wins or loses campaigns."

Yet he said the lack of money and an organized No on G/Yes on F campaign did make it difficult to stop the Lennar juggernaut. "You need to have enough money to get your message out," Stearns said, noting that "Nobody knew that the Sierra Club opposed [Prop. G]."

In the one contested judge’s race on the ballot, Gerardo Sandoval finished in a virtual dead heat with incumbent Judge Thomas Mellon. The two will face off again in a November runoff election because a third candidate, Mary Mallen, captured about 13 percent of the vote.

"How angry is Sandoval with Mallen now?" Latterman asked at the SPUR event. "If that 13 percent wasn’t there, Sandoval wins."

Both Latterman and Stearns agreed that this election was Sandoval’s best shot at unseating a sitting judge. "He’s going to face a tougher test in November," Stearns said.

The other big news was the lopsided defeat of Prop. 98, which would have abolished rent control and limits on condo conversions in addition to its main stated aim of restricting the use of eminent domain by local governments.

"It just lost bad," Latterman said of Prop. 98, the second extreme property rights measure to go down in recent years. "It just needs to go away now…. This was a resounding, ‘Just go away now, please.’<0x2009>"

LOOKING FORWARD

Aside from the Leno victory, this election was most significant in setting up future political battles. And progressives won a big advantage for the battles to come by picking up seats on the city’s two Democratic County Central Committees, a successful offensive engineered largely by Daly and Peskin, who were both elected to the eastside DCCC District 13.

"On the DCCC level, we took back the Democratic Party," said Robert Haaland, a progressive who was reelected to the DCCC District 13.

"The fight now is over the chair. The chair decides where the resources go and sets the priorities, so you can really do a lot," Haaland told us.

Many of the fall supervisorial contests feature races between two or three bona fide progressives, so those candidates are going to need to find issues or alliances that will broaden their bases.

In District 9, for example, the candidates include housing activist Eric Quezada (who lost his DCCC race), school board president Mark Sanchez, and Police Commission member David Campos — all solid progressives, all Latino, and all with good bases of support.

Campos finished first in his DCCC District 13 race just ahead of Peskin. Speaking on election night at the GAMH, Campos attributed his strong showing to walking lots of precincts and meeting voters, particularly in the Mission, an effort that will help him in the fall.

"A lot of Latino voters are really eager to be more involved [in politics]," Campos said. "Speaking the language and being an immigrant really connects with them."

Campos thinks public safety will be a big issue on voters’ minds this fall, an issue where he has strength and one that progressives have finally seized. "Until Ross Mirkarimi came along, progressives really weren’t talking about it," Campos said.

So, does Campos’ strong DCCC showing make him the front runner? When I asked that question during the SPUR event, Latterman said he didn’t think so. He noted that Sanchez has always had strong finishes on his school board races, citywide contests that includes the Portola area in District 9 but not in DCCC District 13. In fact, Latterman predicted lots of acrimony and close contests this November.

"If you like the anger of Leno vs. Migden, we’ll have more in the fall," Latterman said of the competitive supervisorial races.

Leno hasn’t been terribly active in local contests since heading to Sacramento, and he told us that his focus this fall will be on state ballot fights and the presidential race. He hasn’t made endorsements in many supervisorial races yet, but his two so far are both of progressives: Ross Mirkarimi in District 5, and David Chiu in District 3. And as he makes more supervisorial endorsements in the coming months, Leno told us, "I will be fighting for progressive voices."

Sarah Phelan contributed to this story.

San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival

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June 10, 2008

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PREVIEW World premieres are not what you expect in traditional, culturally specific dance. But the myth of the unyielding art form passed from generation to generation dies hard, perhaps because there is comfort in believing that "some things don’t change." Sorry, but the village square has gone the way of stoop sitting. So-called ethnic dance started to change the minute it moved from the grange to the stage. What’s great about the enduring appeal of World Art West’s San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival — celebrating 30 years this year — is that its producers encourage rethinking traditional forms so that they honor the past while embracing the future. It’s the only way an art can survive. To put more than moral support toward that effort, SF EDF gave out four 30th-anniversary commissions this year. Ensambles Ballet Folklorico de San Francisco presents its commission, Las Cortes Mayas, a celebration of Mexico’s regal past, this weekend. Another highlight is the first appearance of one of India’s classical dance genres, Kuchipudi, which is related to but faster-paced and more feathery than Bharatanatyam. Sindhu Ravuri’s solo is inspired by Indian temple sculptures. Hailing from Oakland is hip-hop/modern dance troupe Imani’s Dream in a premiere that reflects the youth group’s everyday reality. What else can you expect on this second of four weekends of cultural dance offerings? Afro-Peruvian footwork, Middle Eastern belly, Korean memorializing, Chinese court, Caribbean-flavored flamenco, and Scottish ritual dance. You’ll also hear a lot of live music: these days, EDF is almost as much a world music as a dance festival. And if that’s not enough to lure you in, throughout the month of June, World Arts West is offering a series of low-cost participatory workshops that welcomes all comers.

SAN FRANCISCO ETHNIC DANCE FESTIVAL June 1–29. This week: Sat/14–Sun/15, 2 p.m. (also Sat, 8 p.m.). $22–$44. Palace of Fine Arts, 3301 Lyon, SF. (415) 392-4400, www.worldartswest.org

Valet

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June 10, 2008

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PREVIEW I admit I was a little skeptical on first receiving Valet’s Naked Acid (Kranky) in the mail. I was burned out on Terry Riley–inspired meditation music even before seeing the garishly New Age "vibe painting" gracing the sleeve. It took a couple of weeks for me to get around to actually listening to the thing, and I’m glad I waited: the album begins with bell chimes, distant drums, and a what sounds like a thumb-piano loop, but what follows is hardly Tubular Bells, part two. Naked Acid is a drone album, but an incredibly brave one in which emotions are laid bare and a surprising range of musical textures flow from a minimalist sonic palette. Take three tracks in their chronological order: "Drum Movie"’s milky growl sounds fit for a David Lynch movie. "Keehar"’s reverb-licked guitar plays like celestial rock. "Fuck It"’s scraping drawl evokes Patti Smith played at half-speed or a duskier Mazzy Star.

Though Valet springs from the same Portland, Ore., DIY scene as White Rainbow, guiding light Honey Owens’ musical family tree includes Austin, Texas’ Jana Hunter, Finland’s Lau Nau, and fellow Portlander Grouper. All these women are pushing the female singer-songwriter format into new atmospheric, painterly territory, taking advantage of loop pedals and thick layers of reverb to collapse the distance between performance and production. Naked Acid‘s constant dissolve hovers uneasily between Karen Dalton remove and electronic opacity. After 40 minutes of enclosed drifting, Owens finally bobs to the surface on "Streets," turning a few pirouettes over a bustling programmed beat before clipping it off in noisy heat.

When Owens opened for Atlas Sound here last March, she was plagued by sound problems and seemed lost in the gestalt of her multiplanar drones. This time she plays at two smaller venues — Hemlock Tavern and a Mission District underground space — better suited to her diffuse blues, though it may take something else for her to shake something indelible from what, for now, remains ineffable.

VALET With Galactic Core, Kawabata Makoto, and Numinous Eye. June 18, 9 p.m., $7. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. (415) 923-0923, www.hemlocktavern.com

3 Good reasons to hate Meghan McCain’s blog (besides the obvious)

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June 9, 2008

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By Marianne Moore

Meghan McCain, the senator’s young, hot, keffiyeh-wearing daughter, has taken to blogging from the campaign trail, and the media is lapping it up: depending on who you read she’s alternately “hilarious,” “refreshing,” or even “adorable.” Lest you be seduced by the blog’s seemingly innocent, light-hearted descriptions of bad campaign food or the Governator’s neckwear, find below the tools you need to remain ruthlessly scowling at Meggers and her Daddy.

1. Revolting Fake Hipness

In addition to sharing her observations and insights from the road, Meghan also graces us with her iTunes playlists, a sure way to show us that she’s down. The playlists are a truly bizarre mix of predictable indie bands (Architecture in Helsinki, Neutral Milk Hotel, Broken Social Scene: seriously, it’s like she hired a consultant) older artists (David Bowie, Stevie Wonder), shite (Rod Stewart), and music a Republican just has no business listening to (Joni Mitchell, Iggy Pop). Really, she can listen to whatever she wants; I guess what I object to is Meggers turning some of my favorite artists into hollow McCain shills, just like I generally object to the pollution and degradation of things I hold sacred.

According to a hysterically enthusiastic article in Britain’s The Observer, Meghan has single-handedly “reinvented the campaign blog” and “injected [McCain’s] political persona with some much-needed street cred.” Right. Because nothing says street cred like private jets, ditzy gushing over mass murderer Henry Kissinger’s loafers, and “self-deprecating” admissions of Starbucks addiction.

shannon!.jpg
Shannon Bae shows us What Asian People Like: Soda! John McCain!

From Cave In to Clouds: heaviness delivered

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June 9, 2008

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Clouds
We Are Above You
(HydraHead)

By Ben Richardson

In 2003, Boston metalcore band Cave In were raising eyebrows and horns in the rock world, touring in support of their major-label debut Antenna (RCA) with the Foo Fighters and gracing the stage at the resurrected Lollapalooza.

This success didn’t last, however, and the aftermath of the Foo-tour was marred by label tensions that led to the band leaving RCA. Even after they released a well-received album called Perfect Pitch Black on indie-metal beehive HydraHead in 2005, Cave In saw their momentum collapse, and the bevy of rock critics willing to bestow descriptors like “emo-metal Radiohead” suddenly turned their attention elsewhere. In 2006, the band went on an indefinite hiatus.

While fans of Cave In’s introspective, textured brand of heavy music are right to mourn the band’s demise, it had a hell of a silver lining in the form of a band called Clouds. Formed by Cave In guitarist Adam McGrath, Clouds released the preposterously titled Legendary Demo on HydraHead in 2007, concatenating stoner rock, hardcore, blues, and classic rock into a widely allusive sound that the group itself refers to as “party grunge.”

R.I.P. Anthony “Big Ant” Marin of Black Fiction, Amoeba Music

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June 6, 2008

1

Anthony “Big Ant” Marin in action. Photo courtesy of Amoeba Music.

By Billy Jam

This past week the Bay Area lost one of its most dedicated music fans and musicians. Anthony Marin, a.k.a., “Big Ant,” who most knew as a hip-hop DJ on the local scene for many years or from working at Amoeba Music on Haight Street, died sometime last weekend of heart failure (a full medical report has not yet been released to determine exact cause or time of death). He was 37 years old.

Born in SoCal Marin had lived in the Bay Area for most of his adult life toiling at various record stores since the ’90s including at Tower Records in the South Bay, Cue’s Records in Daly City, and Amoeba on Haight, where he had worked for many years and was much loved by his co-workers. In fact one of them, Jason Chavez, a.k.a., 4AM, whom he counted as his best friend and with whom he was a member of the band Black Fiction, was instrumental in discovering his body last Sunday, June 1.

Reportedly the last anyone had seen Marin was when he was at a concert last Thursday, May 29. The next day he was off work, but when he didn’t show up for work on Saturday and then on Sunday without calling in sick, his buddies at Amoeba got anxious. Chavez and others went to his apartment where Marin lived alone and had the cops and landlord gain access to the unit where they found his body. Another co-worker Luis Soria said that Marin told him he had been to the doctor on Tuesday, May 27, after complaining of some weight-related ailments (including swelling feet).

Tennishero on Roland Garros and The French

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June 5, 2008

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By Johnny Ray Huston

With this year’s French Open entering its last few dramatic days, the time is right to consult the Swedish duo Tennishero for their thoughts about the event. Alexander Berg and Jens Andersson have the qualifications. They hail from Sweden, the home country of six-time French Open champ Bjorn Borg. On MySpace, they initially described their music as “Roland Garros techno,” though that witty tag has since been joined by others such as “snowjogger acid,” as well as the wise declaration that they want to “sound like a David Hockney picture.” They’re off to a good start at that with “Alone,” their first single, one version of which features Chelonis R. Jones on vocals and a Lego fragment of the two-handed great Monica Seles on the sleeve art. According to Andersson, Tennishero has left 2006’s “Alone” behind to explore new realms of melody.

Tennishero’s Alexander Berg and Jens Andersson shake hands

I have to genuflect for days to Andersson for telling me about a tennis movie by the great William Klein, one of my all-time favorite photographers, who is experiencing a resurgence of sorts as of late. I have to argue with his assertion below that there are no tennis players today with the good-bad taste and intellect to enjoy Serge Gainsbourg, though. I once saw some Gainsbourg albums in the background of an at-home picture of the devilishly handsome and somewhat mad Marat Safin, whose kid sister Dinara is the story of this year’s tournament so far. You could say Dinara’s 4th-round match with Maria Sharapova was a “requiem pour un con” — especially since Sharapova, no wilting lily, mouthed some hilariously off-color words during the defeat.

SFBG: Who is your pick to win the French Open this year on the men’s side?
Jens Andersson: I don’t really know. The Swedes aren’t at the top of their game right now so I have to go with (Roger) Federer. Has he ever won Roland Garros? Tennis players today are boring and mundane. Hopefully there will be some new guy with the headband over — not under — his hair and the attitude of Serge Gainsbourg, but we doubt it. Now, you only see players like Nadal — I mean, come on.

The sleeve art for Tennishero and Chelonis R. Jones’s “Alone”

SFBG: Do you have any favorite and least favorite tennis players, past and present? (I ask this since older or vintage tennis styles have had an influence on your look.)
JA: Actually, we are more fascinated by the atmosphere surrounding tennis in the past – for example the culture around old French tennis clubs, like in the Truffaut movie La femme d’a cote. Another great film is William Klein’s The French, a documentary about Roland Garros in 1983 that captures this old charming atmosphere in a fantastic way. Back then, it was all about personality. McEnroe and Yannick Noah were inspiring in their own ways.

Disco intro trilogy — unexpurgated!

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June 4, 2008

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By Johnny Ray Huston

Daniel Baldelli djing

In the last three issues of ye olden newspaper version of the Guardian, I’ve used the itsy-bitsy space that I have to intro each week’s A&E section as a chance to travel the many currents of disco: present, future and retro. The fact is, in 2008, disco’s present strobe-morphs into its future, which strobe-morphs into retro disco, which then strobe-morphs back into disco’s present. Below is a guided tour of recent disco releases I mentioned in my intros, with commentary and a final note about something to look for in the immediate future.

Dancers at Baia Degli Angeli

Daniele Baldelli, Cosmic the Original (Mediane) and Daniele Baldelli Presents Baia Degli Angeli 1977-78: The Legendary Italian Discotheque of the ‘70s (Mediane)
The waves of space disco or cosmic disco activity in recent years have brought some noteworthy comps, including 2006’s Confuzed Disco: A Retrospective of Italian Records (Mantra/Vibes), Disco Deutschland Disco: Disco, Funk and Philly Anthems from Germany, 1975-1980 (Marina), and especially Dirty Space Disco (Tigersushi). But to get a true sense of the music’s energy, it’s always best to go to back to the source, and one such European font – along with Cerrone — is Daniele Baldelli.

Daniele Baldelli (left) with Grace Jones and cute friend named Mozart at Baia Degli Angeli

The influential DJ has released two mixes that convey and revive two sides of –and two clubs from — his heyday. Cosmic: the Original is the dark half, with new wave from Fad Gadget and even a pre-Boy George Culture Club. Baia Degli Angeli is the bright side, with ebullient moments from Cerrone, crooner John Forde (who is also on Dirty Space Disco), two tracks from Black Devil (aka Black Devil Disco Club) and the wonderfully shameless mix of Donna Summer-or-Brigitte Bardot orgasmic moans and Love Unlimited Orchestra strings that is “Pazuzu,” by Tony Silvester and the New Ingredient. Both collections are worth it for their booklets alone, with numerous amazing photos of the clubs where Baldelli made his name.

Sealed with a fest

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June 4, 2008

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER "Obviously I wanted to be part of this wealthy cause … whoops, I mean, worthy cause — a Freudian slip!" blurted Seal to amassed gowns and tuxes at a packed Davies Symphony Hall May 31. Well, it was pretty B&W at this, the Black and White Ball 2008. He went on to explain that he was more than glad to play the benefit bash for the San Francisco Symphony’s Adventures in Music education program, until he realized that night’s event was just a day before wife Heidi "And sometimes you’re out … in the doghouse" Klum’s birthday. "Even though it was written almost 20 years ago, I never knew what this song was about till four or five years ago," he drawled graciously, before easing into a swooningly romantic "Kiss from a Rose." The coiffed and painted debs swayed in the seats behind the stage like tropical palms, the gray-tressed oldsters in tuxes yawned as if their jaws would dislocate, and all the right — and leftie — blondes flitted to the front as if drawn to a gyrating, white-scarfed flame. The irony that Seal was putting in a high-energy set and working in an establishment-jabbing anthem titled "System" — "but you won’t get to hear it here because record companies aren’t what they used to be, but this isn’t that kind of show," according to the UK crooner — was not altogether lost on the assembled partygoers at this very establishment affair.

Still, the Grey Goose quaffing, shrimp chomping, and dance-it-up musical offerings lining the closed-off swath of Van Ness added up to a surprisingly solid good time — not to mention further confirmation of the latest urban SF curiosity: packs of underdressed, strapless-clad or micro-miniskirted, microclimate-besieged fashion victims who insist on braving hypothermia sans outerwear. Is it really that toasty over the bridge and through the tunnel?

Nonetheless I got a kick out of Extra Action Marching Band, its flag girls drooling faux-blood while chilling, kicking it iceberg-style beneath the polka-dot-lit, fireworks-bedecked City Hall. Pete Escovedo still had what it took to pull me to the dance floor and get the salsa out. Hot on the heels of Harriet Tubman (Noir), Marcus Shelby riled up Strictly Ballroom wannabes in the bowels of the War Memorial Opera House, and upstairs DJ Afrika Bambaataa turned in an unforgettable old-school hip-hop and rock-pop set, sweetly warbling, "I just want your extra time … " to Prince’s "Kiss," as a mob of gorgeous freaks mobbed the stage. Be it ever so old-fashioned and ever so obligatorily glammy, the B&WB was such a ball that I was inspired to use it as the barometer of sorts for a few other music-fest contenders.

B&W BALL BY THE NUMBERS Kilts: two. Turbans: three. Closeted waltz-heads eager to make the Metronome Ballroom lessons pay off: more than a dozen. Misguided ladies who looked like they tried to repurpose their wedding gowns as white formalwear: two. Gavin Newsom look-alikes: a toothy handful. Jennifer Siebel look-alikes: hundreds. Former hippies in formalwear: six. Men in all-white who looked like they stepped out of an alternate "Rapture" video: two. Burning Man references as City Hall was bookended by pillars of fire at midnight: two. Screeching highlights-victims upon seeing their girlfriends: more than two ears can handle. Sneaky types who looked like they’ve probably worn the same thing to B&WB every year since 1983: more than designers and luxury goods manufacturers would care to know.

HARMONY FESTIVAL (June 6–8, Santa Rosa, harmonyfestival.com, including Damian "Jr. Gong" Marley, George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic, Arrested Development, and Mickey Hart Band) Expected Gavin look-alikes: zip unless you count the Cali boys who look early Gavin — with dreadlocks. Rich hippies with perfect hair and lavishly embroidered coats: three.

BERKELEY WORLD MUSIC FESTIVAL (June 7, Berkeley, www.berkeleyworldmusic.org, with Dengue Fever, and Sila and the AfroFunk Experience) Expected turbans: the Sufi trance music guarantees at least a couple. Kilts: zero. Swirlie dancers: a dozen-plus.

OUTSIDE LANDS (Aug. 22–24, SF, www.sfoutsidelands.com, including Radiohead, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Jack Johnson, Wilco, Beck, and the Black Keys) Expected bikes piled in the racks: a thou. Concert-goers overcome by heat: C’mon, this is San Francisco.

TREASURE ISLAND MUSIC FESTIVAL (Sept. 20–21, Treasure Island, treasureislandfestival.com, with Justice, the Raconteurs, TV on the Radio, and Tegan and Sara) Projected number of great views of SF: innumerable. Gold-trimmed "ironic" sunglasses: a gazillion. Concertgoers who discover far too late that shorts are only ideal for an hour a day: 135.

LOVEFEST (Oct. 4, SF, www2.sflovefest.org) Ever-recyclable ’70s-style bells: a couple-dozen. Fabulous-faux hairpieces: Wigstock is forever. Swirlie dancers: you got ’em.

YOU BREAK IT — YOU BOUGHT IT

FROG EYES, LITTLE TEETH, AND CHET

Eke out a few tears of valedictorianism: it’s an Absolutely Kosher explosion of untrammeled, happily eccentric talent. Fri/6, 9:30 p.m., $10–<\d>$12 Café Du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. www.cafedunord.com

FOOT FOOT AND FOX PAUSE

Lo-fi dust-ups coupled with folkie meanders are a–Foot Foot, flanked by the solo musings of ex-Guardian-ite Sarah Han. With Casiotone for the Painfully Alone. Sat/7, 9:30 p.m., $8. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

RADIO SLAVE

Taking a break from the sweltering, disco-imbued exotica of Quiet Village and its Silent Movie (K7), producer Matt Edwards dons his dark techno persona, Radio Slave. Sat/7, call for time and price. Endup, 401 Sixth St., SF. (415) 646-0999, www.theendup.com *