Preview

A fan reacts: ‘The Day of the Doctor’ at Comic Outpost

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No power in the universe was going to stop local Whovians from enjoying the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special, The Day of the Doctor, at Comic Outpost (“home of the largest Doctor Who section in the Bay Area“) this past weekend.

Despite recent financial troubles, which Comic Outpost has managed to bounce back from thanks to big sales and community support, the comic shop hosted the screening party that had been promised way back when the 50th anniversary special had been announced.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mkq8pnvsnQg

A full house of Whovians was ready to go well before 11:50 am, the time when the simulcast premiere was scheduled to start in our time zone, but an audio problem held the show up for over an hour before store-owner Gary Buechler came to the rescue with speakers to hook up. And thanks to free food, fan-made cupcakes, big raffle prizes, and good old-fashioned nerd enthusiasm, most, if not the entire crowd, stuck around to see the show.

As for the big episode itself? Admittedly, I belong to the rather large chunk of Whovians who are not happy with what showrunner Steven Moffat has been doing with Doctor Who. When we learned that the episode would deal with the Time War, and that John Hurt would be playing a regeneration of the Doctor that supposedly came between regenerations eight (Paul McGann) and nine (Christopher Eccleston), it felt like, as usual, Moffat was taking liberties he hadn’t earned the right to take, and tackling major plot points he didn’t have the finesse to handle.

But basically, it could have been worse. (Spoilers ahead!)

While it felt like we were stumbling our way through the plot for most of the episode, that’s really how the show has come to feel over the last couple of seasons, so it was business as usual. Nods to past characters, particularly the use of Captain Jack Harkness’s vortex manipulator, had viewers, including myself, squealing in excitement, but it still felt a bit like a cop out. Okay, I don’t know where Jack would have factored into this episode, but don’t tell me seeing John Barrowman back in the RAF coat wouldn’t have blown your mind.

The best callback to an old character (not counting David Tennant returning as the Tenth Doctor) was probably the return of UNIT’s Kate Stewart, daughter of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, whose first appearance on Doctor Who was back in 1968. Even Billie Piper’s return to the show wasn’t as exciting as I’d hoped, if only because I’d been so stoked to see her in the preview, it hadn’t occurred to me that she might be playing something in the form of Rose Tyler, rather than Rose Tyler herself.

Though I had been skeptical of the insertion of another Doctor into a more-or-less established timeline, John Hurt was actually a riot. Hurt plays the War Doctor, the one who is supposed to have destroyed Gallifrey, and therefore is never acknowledged by the Doctor himself. But we meet him before he makes the big decision, and he hasn’t lost his humor. He takes jabs at his future regenerations, asking “Am I having a midlife crisis?!” when he sees how young they look, and asking if they must speak like children, in response to the now incredibly overused “timey-wimey” catchphrase.

In the end, even though a major plot point of the series was entirely rewritten and loose ends were tied with oversimplifications, I was cheering right along with everyone else when the big fix that saved rather than destroyed Gallifrey involved archive footage of all the Doctors, from William Hartnell right up to Christopher Eccleston. And of course, there was a stunning cameo by our next Doctor Peter Capaldi(’s eyes and forehead), which drew ecstatic screams from an already emotionally compromised crowd.

The final, final big surprise was an actual cameo by Fourth Doctor Tom Baker, who explains to our current Doctor (Matt Smith) that the painting depicting war-torn Gallifrey was not titled “No More” or “Gallifrey Falls,” but a combination of the two: “Gallifrey Falls No More.” Which leaves the Doctor, at last free of his guilt, to set off in search of his home that he managed to save in the end.

Yesterday, fans got a chance to watch The Day of the Doctor again in movie theaters, which, judging by the photos on Tumblr, was a total blast for Whovians. And though I didn’t feel compelled to spend money to go see the episode again, I might rewatch it at some point, which is saying a lot since I’ve generally been apathetic about the direction of the show for the past two seasons.

Like I said, it could’ve been worse.

War of the roses

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emilysavage@sfbg.com

TOFU AND WHISKEY Rock ‘n’ roll guitarists do not typically have the opportunity to play with full, live orchestras. Though legendary avant-punk composer Rhys Chatham has long challenged that notion.

“I thought it would be nice to write a piece for a literal orchestra of guitars, both for its unique sonority, as well as for the social element of massing so many guitarists together, to give them the experience of playing in an orchestra, the way classical musicians do,” the 61-year-old writes from his home in France.

His first piece for multiple electric guitars was back in ’77 — Guitar Trio — and by ’84 he upped the number to six. But this is where the electric guitar orchestras of Chatham took a huge leap: 100 guitars, wailing, riffing, battling, rising in unison and twisting on their own windy paths.

Since then, Chatham has launched multiple pieces based on 100 to 400 electric guitarists, including An Angel Moves Too Fast to See (1989), and A Crimson Grail (2005). His newest piece, A Secret Rose, is back to 100 and will have its Bay Area premiere Sun/17 (7pm, $10–$75. Craneway Pavilion, 1414 Harbour, Richmond. otherminds.org).

The difference? A Secret Rose was a piece intended to be learned quickly, without placing “unreasonable demands” on the participating musicians’ time.

“An added plus as far as ease of mounting the piece is concerned is that I wrote the piece for guitars in a standard tuning, so the musicians can simply arrive with the strings they normally use, cutting down on the time it takes to restring the guitars, not to mention the purchasing of special strings for 100 guitarists!”

Like much of his other work, A Secret Rose is informed by Chatham’s strong connection to the roots of the ’77 punk scene, a world the minimalist composer cracked open in his early 20s. He says at the time he was trying to find his voice as a composer.

He grew up in New York City playing his father’s harpsichord, which he first picked up at age six. By age eight he was playing clarinet, and at 12, he switched to flute. “Luckily, my flute teacher was a contemporary music specialist, so she taught me Density 21.5 by Varèse, Sonatine for flute and piano by Boulez, and many others.”

In his early 20s, he first became entranced with the burgeoning loft jazz scene in NYC.

“I switched to tenor saxophone because the fingering is almost the same as flute, also because it was louder.”

There, he studied alongside the greats, including La Monte Young — he even sang in his group, the Theater of Eternal Music — along with Terry Riley. He was an early member of Tony Conrad’s the Dream Syndicate, and played alongside Charlemagne Palestine.

Around this time though, there was the punk awakening. Everything changed with an electrifying Ramones concert in 1976 at CBGB.

“I had never seen anything like it in my life. Wow! I felt that I had something in common with their music. I mean, as a hardcore minimalist composer, I was only using one chord in the music I was doing at the time — the Ramones were using three — but I loved the repetition, and that’s when I decided to embrace this music into my own.”

He dropped the sax and picked up a Fender Telecaster guitar, and he was soon playing minimal music in a rock context at Max’s Kansas City and CBGB.

The classic Fender is still integral to his performances more than three decades later. For A Secret Rose, each guitarist will bring her or his own electric guitar. Says Chatham, “The piece was written for a Fender kind of sound…so we ask the guitarists to bring guitars that have a Fender type of sound.”

As for finding those 100 talented guitarists to join the orchestra? It was a collaboration with the Other Minds new music community nonprofit, which is presenting the West Coast premiere of A Secret Rose, and Chatham’s manager Regina Greene. The application process was wide open, so the end result is a batch of musicians from all over the world, including the UK, Argentina, and Canada. The Richmond performance in the dramatic waterfront Craneway Pavilion includes musicians from Guided by Voices, Akron/Family, Tristeza, Hrsta, Sutekh Hexen, and Girls Against Boys.

Many of the guitarists are also local: Other Minds received a grant from the James Irvine Foundation that focuses on “nonprofessional and professional musicians from low-income and ethnically diverse communities in Contra Costa and Alameda counties” to help put the event on. After the applications came in, Other Minds and Chatham went to work mixing in musicians with backgrounds in jazz, folk, noise, psych, metal, experimental, classical, and punk.

The final blend includes Oakland’s Carolyn Kennedy, Alameda’s Kurt Brown, Berkeley’s Becky White, and more, plus Chatham alumni (who’ve played in different electric guitar orchestras with him) including John Banister of San Francisco and Brian Good of Walnut Creek.

All those guitarists will be backed by electric bassist Lisa Mezzacappa, and drummer Jordan Glenn, both from the Bay Area. In a much smaller scale preview of A Secret Rose earlier this year, Mezzacappa and Glenn did Guitar Trio (version for eight musicians) with Chatham at the Lab in the Mission. “They are excellent musicians. Well, they’d have to be to accompany 100 electric guitars,” Chatham says. “They are the rhythm section, the wind, indeed the hurricane that lights the fire of the playing of the guitarists!”

The performance itself is structured similar to a symphony, starting with an introduction and slow prelude, followed by an allegro movement

“[And] then I break with sonata form and have a structured aleatory movement, followed by an adagio section, ending with a brisk allegro, although having a vastly different character than the first one,” explains Chatham.

“All the music is notated, even the aleatory section has specific prose instructions. When we mount the piece it will probably be one of the few times the guitarists make use of a music stand!”

HOT TODDIES

For this third annual Friends of Tricycle Records comp release show, the favored local indie label brings out Oakland lady trio Hot Toddies. The Toddies make sunny though rough-edged beach pop with sugary multipart harmonies, and released their Bottoms Up EP on Tricycle earlier this year. The Tricycle Records comp, produced by Julie Schuchard, includes the slow-burning Hot Toddies’ track “Summertime Blues,” along with songs by James & Evander, Happy Fangs, Swiftumz, WOOF, and more. With Tambo Rays, Kill Moi, Odd Owl, Blaus (DJ set).

Wed/13, 8pm, $6–$9. Brick and Mortar Music Hall, 1710 Mission, SF. www.brickandmortarmusic.com.

MELT-BANANA

Melt-Banana has always been a curious subject: rapid, triumphant grindcore matched to yelpy staccato vocals tinted with Japanese accents, like Spazz meets Deerfhoof. And with each album, the group — formed in 1993 — has proved itself still endlessly fascinating, complex, even fun. Its latest, Fetch (A-Zap), is its first in six long years, and it comes speeding back to the present, not a moment of chaos lost. Check “The Hive” — it’s like riding a terrifying roller coaster on acid with a screeching sprite on your shoulder. With Retox. 

Sat/16, 8pm, $15. Oakland Metro, 630 Third St, Oakl. www.oaklandmetro.org.

 

 

 

 


 


Weekly Picks: October 2 – 8, 2013

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Among the undead.

WEDNESDAY 10/2

 

“How to Survive the Zombie Apocalypse”

Who hasn’t thought about who they would want on their zombie apocalypse team, how they would escape the city, or where they would go if they got out? But that’s just the first 24 hours. What about some oh, 28 days later? What about 28 weeks? What about doing more than just surviving? The collection of workshops offered by Curiosity Atlas this fall could be the key to your happy post-apocalypse. Join Curiosity Atlas on opening night to preview such workshops as “Defending Against Multiple Attackers,” “MacGyver Night,” “DIY Herbal Apothecary,” “Aging and Collecting Beer,” “Apocalypse Baking,” and other essential skills for living the good life among the undead. The night will feature hands-on demonstrations, live performances, and human-friendly refreshments. (Nina Glasov)

7-10pm, $10

Verdi Club

2424 Mariposa, SF

www.curiosityatlas.com

THURDAY 10/3

 

The Drunken Botanist

For most drinkers, the word “booze” ignites cerebral images of fluorescently-lit bars and the night, however wild or relaxing, to follow. But for Amy Stewart, author of 2013 New York Times bestseller The Drunken Botanist (Algonquin Books), the sloppy story begins much earlier, as the plants involved evolve, grow, reproduce, ferment, and distill in the days, weeks, and even millennia leading up to liquor’s transformation. Amid overhanging vines and tropic air in the Conservatory of Flowers, Stewart will discuss these diverse herbs, flowers, fungi, and fruit that end up our cups, as well as global drinking practices, comical anecdotes, gardening tips, and some of her favorite razzed recipes. After grabbing cocktails mixed by Amanda Victoria of Lillet and Mark Stoddard of Hendrick’s Gin, don’t leave the event wasted — get your own signed copy of The Drunken Bontanist. (Kaylen Baker)

7pm, $35–$40

Conservatory of Flowers

100 John F Kennedy, SF

(415) 831-2090

www.conservatoryofflowers.org

THURDAY 10/3

 

Father John Misty

It’s easy for musicians to hide behind personas, but when Joshua Tillman (formerly of Fleet Foxes) stopped recording under his real name and released an album — last year’s Fear Fun — as Father John Misty, it was a moment of revelation. Contrary to the faux-sincerity that has made the revivalist strain of folk rock damn near unlistenable in the last few years, Misty embraces a vivid self-awareness that avoids the usual mix of solemn preciousness and vain humility, humorously detailing his own mushroom tripping genesis (“I’m Writing a Novel”) and possible legacy (“Now I’m Learning to Love the War”). This solo show, with support from comedian Kate Berlant, should showcase the real Father John Misty. (Ryan Prendiville)

9pm, $25–$30

Slim’s

333 11th St, SF

(415) 255-0333

www.slimspresents.com

FRIDAY 10/4

 

The Wicker Man

Just to get it out of the way: Yeah, the 40th anniversary “definitive new restoration” of British cult-horror classic The Wicker Man (1973) — we shall not speak of the 2006 bee-laden remake — owes its crisp clarity to digital projection. But if the not-on-actual-film tradeoff means seeing the movie uncut, as director Robin Hardy intended, perhaps it’s worth it. A stodgy, Jesus-loving Scottish cop (Edward Woodward) is in for the shock of his life when he travels to pagan stronghold Summerisle, with residents including Christopher Lee (as flamboyant Lord Summerisle) and sexy-dancin’ Britt Ekland. The eerie folk-song soundtrack, which will presumably sound better than ever, is reason enough to catch this DCP event. (Cheryl Eddy)

Through Sat/5, 7 and 9:30pm (also Sat/5, 4:30pm), $8.50–$11

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

www.castrotheatre.com

SATURDAY 10/5

 

WestWave Festival

Balancing ingredients and flavors is a good way to plan a menu. It seems to work in dance as well. At least that’s what the five-member panel, which chose the artists to be commissioned for the second of this year’s West Wave programs, seems to have had in mind. All the choreographers are women but they bring a huge range of tastes to their practice. Moving here after 20 years in the other dance capital, modern dancer Anne-René Petrarca is creating a quartet about the power of female energy. Anandha Ray calls her fusion piece “tribal belly dance,” remembering its birthplace in India. Gorgeous Flamenco artist Holly Shaw is translating her passion into choreography that considers the figure of the outsider. And finally, ballet dancer Casey Lee Thorne is using the kinetic power of light in her contemporary vision of an old language. Bon appétit everyone. (Rita Felciano)

8pm, $15–$20

West Wave Dance Festival

ODC Dance Commons, Studio B

351 Shotwell, SF

www.westwavedance.org

SATURDAY 10/5

 

It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s Superman

42nd Street Moon kicks off its 2013-2014 season in celebration of 75 years of the Man of Steel. From the songwriters of Bye Bye Birdie and Annie comes the 1966 musical It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s Superman, opening this month at the Eureka Theatre. Starring Lucas Coleman as the man himself, Jen Brooks as Lois Lane, and Darlene Popovic as Dr. Agnes Sedgwick, the show follows Clark Kent/Superman as he juggles heroics and romance. With such lively tunes as “You’ve Got Possibilities” and “Pow! Bam! Zonk!” audiences are in for some riotous fun featuring one of the most prolific superheroes of all time. (Kirstie Haruta)

Through Oct. 20 (Wed-Thu, 7pm; Fri, 8pm; Sat, 6pm; Sun, 3pm), $21–$75

Eureka Theatre

215 Jackson, SF

(415) 255-8207

www.42ndstmoon.org

SATURDAY 10/5

 

Billy Bragg

British folk-punk rocker Billy Bragg’s debut album, Life’s A Riot With Spy Vs. Spy, came out 30 years ago. If anything, time has only strengthened his writing and resolve, as well as his social activism bent, as evidenced on the troubadour’s latest release, Tooth and Nail, on Essential Music. Fans have two chances to see Bragg this weekend in the city, one at the annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in Golden Gate Park — and for others who prefer to skip the crowds and dust, you can see him up close and personal tonight, appearing with his friend Jon Langford. (Sean McCourt)

9pm, $35

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

www.slimspresents.com

SUNDAY 10/6

 

“Bikes to Books”

You admired the artful, informative “Bikes to Books” map, created by Bay Guardian contributor Nicole Gluckstern and local-history buff Burrito Justice, in our Sept. 11 issue. Now comes the map’s official release party. Begin with a group bike tour that visits all 12 San Francisco streets named for notable artists and authors (Jacks London and Kerouac, Isadora Duncan, etc.) with local ties. And since City Lights founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti helped mastermind the street-naming project back in 1988, it’s fitting that the party portion of the day (complete with literary reading hosted by Evan Karp) takes place in Jack Kerouac Alley, just outside the famed bookstore. (Eddy)

Bike tour: 10:30am-2pm, free

Meet at Jack London (north side) and South Park, SF

Reading: 2-4pm, free

Jack Kerouac Alley (near Broadway and Columbus), SF

www.burritojustice.com

MONDAY 10/7

 

Iconic Hair Movie Night

When you think of memorable ‘dos in classic horror films, who else but Elsa Lanchester comes to mind? To honor her famous style, Morphic Salon is screening Bride of Frankenstein for free as part of its Iconic Hair Movie Nights series. Watch as Dr. Frankenstein, revealed to be alive by Mary Shelley, builds a bride for his first monstrous creation. And while you’re at it, perhaps you’ll be inspired to get a shock of white in your own hair to match the leading lady! RSVP for this event at info@morphicbeauty.com. (Haruta)

Free, 7 p.m.

Morphic Salon

660 Market, SF

(415) 789-6682

www.morphicbeauty.com

MONDAY 10/7

 

Tom Odell

Singer-songwriter Tom Odell tends to capture powerful if fleeting feelings of young love and wistfulness, yet with a cheerful energy. Perhaps thanks to bouncy piano chords and Odell’s robust vocals, the British singer’s performances manage to escape the deep, tormented-soul identity adapted by many young acoustic soloists. His 2013 debut album A Long Way Down reached No. 1 on the UK Official Chart earlier this year. And the musician hit an even higher note last month when he reimagined Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” at the annual BRITs awards program to honor John as the first ever recipient of the BRITs’ Icon Award. This charming singer makes his way to the Chapel tonight, where he’ll share the stage with Australian Vance Joy. (Hillary Smith)

9pm, $15

Chapel

777 Valencia, SF

www.thechapelsf.com

TUESDAY 10/8

 

Fucked Up

Toronto-based hardcore punk outfit Fucked Up has made a career of being unapologetically over-the-top. Look no further than its borderline-corny name (how can it be the first punk band to come up with that one?), its insanely ambitious concept albums, and the unparalleled insanity of its live shows. Always on the verge of taking things too far, Fucked Up flirts with that fine line between insanity and brilliance, and occupies the space between with authority. No other band can create high-minded, multi-instrumental rock operas of this magnitude and get away with it (although Titus Andronicus is sure trying). As if its fervent, fearless creativity wasn’t cause enough to go see this band (co-headlining with Terror) also know that frontperson Damian Abraham is seriously the nicest dude in the entire world. (Haley Zaremba)

With Power Trip, Code Orange Kids

7pm, $16

Oakland Metro Operahouse

630 Third St, Oakl.

(510) 763-1146

www.oaklandmetro.org

TUESDAY 10/8

 

La Tigre e la Neve

Somehow, Italian screenwriter Vincenzo Cerami always succeeded in capturing beauty in his films, through the highs as well as the lowest lows of life. The third and final screening of the IIC’s series “A tribute to Vincenzo Cerami,” features actor Roberto Benigni in Cerami’s La Tigre e la Neve (2005) as Attilio de Giovanni, a besotted Italian poetry teacher. Though Giovanni’s children and students adore him, the woman of his heart, Vittoria, spurns him, leaving Italy with another poet for Iraq. When the second Gulf War erupts and Giovanni hears that Vittoria has been injured, he chases after in an attempt to bring Vittoria to safety. Expect hope, despair, laughs, and underlining it all, a sense of utter, expanding beauty. (Baker)

6:30pm, free

Italian Cultural Institute

814 Montgomery, SF

(415) 788-7142

iicsanfrancisco.esteri.it

TUESDAY 10/8

 

The Babies

The Babies have been pegged as a super-band of sorts from the start, with Cassie Ramone from Vivian Girls on guitar and Kevin Morby from Woods on bass. In their latest release, 2012’s Our House on the Hill, the Babies strive to break free from their lo-fi attachments in previous bands and experiment more with country, blues, and folk elements. The Babies aren’t a side project, as much as an entirely new entity with something different to offer. San Francisco’s Tony Molina, hardcore frontperson turned “punky” indie act also plays this show. His newest record, Dissed and Dismissed, released by Melters this year, is impressive. Loaded with undeniably catchy, fuzzy tunes, the album at times harkens back to an era when bands like Guided by Voices and Pavement were king. Get some drinks and get fuzzed out in more ways than one at the Hemlock Tavern tonight. (Erin Dage)

With Alex Bleeker and the Freaks

8:30pm, $8

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

Theater Listings: September 25 – October 2, 2013

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

THEATER

OPENING

“Shocktoberfest 14: Jack the Ripper” Hypnodrome, 575 10th St, SF; www.thrillpeddlers.com. $25-35. Previews Thu/26-Sat/28, 8pm; Mon/30, 8pm. Opens Oct 3, 8pm. Runs Thu-Sat and Oct 29-30, 8pm. Through Nov 23. Thrillpeddlers presents their 14th annual Grand Guignol show, “a evening of horror, madness, spanking, and song.”

BAY AREA

A Winter’s Tale Bruns Amphitheater, 100 California Shakespeare Theater Way, Orinda; www.calshakes.org. $35-72. Previews Wed/25-Fri/27, 8pm. Opens Sat/28, 8pm. Runs Tue-Thu, 7:30pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Oct 19, 2pm); Sun, 4pm. Through Oct 20. Cal Shakes concludes its 2013 season with the Bard’s fairy tale, directed and choreographed by sister team Patricia and Paloma McGregor.

ONGOING

Acid Test: The Many Incarnations of Ram Dass Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Fri, 8pm; Sat, 8:30pm. Through Oct 12. Playwright Lynne Kaufman invites you to take a trip with Richard Alpert, aka Ram Dass (Warren David Keith) — one of the bigwigs of the psychedelic revolution and (with his classic book, Be Here Now) contemporary Eastern-looking spirituality — as he recounts times high and low in this thoughtful, funny, and sometimes unexpected biographical rumination on the quest for truth and meaning in a seemingly random life. Directed by Joel Mullennix, the narrative begins with Ram Dass today, in his Hawaiian home and partly paralyzed from a stroke, but Keith (one of the Bay Area’s best stage actors, who is predictably sure and engagingly multilayered in the role) soon shakes off the stiff arm and strained speech and springs to his feet to continue the narrative as the ideal self perhaps only transcendental consciousness and theater allow. Nevertheless, Kaufman’s fun-loving and extroverted Alpert is no saint and no model of perfection, which is the refreshing truth explored in the play. He’s a seeker still, ever imperfect and trying for perfection, or at least the wisdom of acceptance. As the privileged queer child of a wealthy Jewish lawyer and industrialist, Alpert was both insider and outsider from the get-go, and that tension and ambiguity make for an interesting angle on his life, including the complexities of his relationships with a homophobic Leary, for instance, and his conservative but ultimately loving father. Perfection aside, the beauty in the subject and the play is the subtle, shrewd cherishing of what remains unfinished. Note: review from an earlier run of this show. (Avila)

Beautiful: The Carole King Musical Curran Theatre, 445 Geary, SF; www.shnsf.com. $55-210. Tue-Sat, 8pm (also Sat and Oct 9 and 16, 2pm); Sun, 2 and 7:30pm (no evening show Oct 13 or 20). Through Oct 20. Pre-Broadway premiere of the musical about the legendary songwriter.

Band Fags! New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; www.nctcsf.org. $25-45. Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through Oct 13. New Conservatory Theatre Center performs the West Coast premiere of Frank Anthony Polito’s coming-of-age tale, set in 1980s Detroit.

“Bay One Acts Festival” Tides Theatre, 533 Sutter, SF; www.bayoneacts.org. $20-40. Programs One and Two run in repertory Wed-Sun, 8pm. Through Oct 5. The 2013 BOA fest presents the world premieres of 13 short plays in partnership with 13 Bay Area theater companies.

BoomerAging: From LSD to OMG Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Tue, 8pm. Extended through Oct 29. Will Durst’s hit solo show looks at baby boomers grappling with life in the 21st century.

Buried Child Magic Theatre, Fort Mason Center, Bldg D, Third Flr, SF; www.magictheatre.org. $20-60. Tue, 7pm; Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2:30. Through Oct 6. Magic Theatre performs a revival of Sam Shepard’s Pulitzer-winning classic.

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

Geezer Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $25-50. Wed-Thu, 8pm; Sat, 8:30pm. Through Oct 26. Geoff Hoyle’s hit solo show, a comedic meditation on aging, returns to the Marsh.

The Golden Dragon ACT’s Costume Shop, 1117 Market, SF; www.doitliveproductions.com. $15. Thu/26-Sat/28, 9:30pm. Do It Live! Productions presents Roland Schimmelpfennig’s tragicomic take on globalization, set in and around an Asian restaurant.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch Boxcar Theatre, 505 Natoma, SF; www.boxcartheatre.org. $27-43. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Open-ended. John Cameron Mitchell’s cult musical comes to life with director Nick A. Olivero’s ever-rotating cast.

Macbeth Fort Point, end of Marine Dr, Presidio of San Francisco, SF; www.weplayers.org. $30-60. Thu-Sun, 6pm. Through Oct 6. We Players perform the Shakespeare classic amid Fort Point’s Civil War-era fortress.

1776 ACT’s Geary Theater, 415 Geary, SF; www.act-sf.org. $20-160. Tue-Sat, 8pm (also Wed and Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2pm. Through Oct 6. American Conservatory Theater performs the West Coast premiere of Frank Galati’s new staging of the patriotic musical.

Sex and the City: LIVE! Rebel, 1760 Market, SF; trannyshack.com/sexandthecity. $25. Wed, 7 and 9pm. Open-ended. It seems a no-brainer. Not just the HBO series itself — that’s definitely missing some gray matter — but putting it onstage as a drag show. Mais naturellement! Why was Sex and the City not conceived of as a drag show in the first place? Making the sordid not exactly palatable but somehow, I don’t know, friendlier (and the canned a little cannier), Velvet Rage Productions mounts two verbatim episodes from the widely adored cable show, with Trannyshack’s Heklina in a smashing portrayal of SJP’s Carrie; D’Arcy Drollinger stealing much of the show as ever-randy Samantha (already more or less a gay man trapped in a woman’s body); Lady Bear as an endearingly out-to-lunch Miranda; and ever assured, quick-witted Trixxie Carr as pent-up Charlotte. There’s also a solid and enjoyable supporting cast courtesy of Cookie Dough, Jordan Wheeler, and Leigh Crow (as Mr. Big). That’s some heavyweight talent trodding the straining boards of bar Rebel’s tiny stage. The show’s still two-dimensional, even in 3D, but noticeably bigger than your 50″ plasma flat panel. (Avila)

The Shakespeare Bug Stage Werx Theatre, 446 Valencia, SF; www.killingmylobster.com. $15-30. Thu/26-Sun/29, 8pm. Killing My Lobster in association with PlayGround perform Ken Slattery’s world-premiere comedy.

To Sleep and Dream Z Below, 470 Florida, SF; www.therhino.org. $15-30. Opens Wed/25, 8pm. Runs Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun/29, 7pm; Oct 6, 3pm. Through Oct 6. Theatre Rhinoceros performs writer-director John Fisher’s North Bay-set drama about the challenges of love.

Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind Boxcar Playhouse, 505 Natoma, SF; www.boxcar.org. $11-16. Fri/27-Sat/28, 9pm; Sun/29, 7pm. Want to experience a bit of what those legendary theater towns Chicago and New York probably take for granted? Attempting to establish a West Coast stronghold for the long-running Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, members of both the Chicago and New York ensembles of Neo-Futurists have converged at the Boxcar Playhouse for a three-week run of their signature show. The premise is simple, if dizzying. Thirty short plays are performed within the space of 60 timed minutes while the audience dictates the order of performance by shouting out the number of the play they want to see next. At the end of each performance, a die is rolled and that number of plays is dropped from the lineup to make space for brand-new ones written and rehearsed before the next weekend. The content ranges from silly to cerebral, wistful to weird, and stylistically veers from confessional to confrontational to surreal, using music, minimal props, and a complete irreverence for the fourth wall to move it forward. And while it’s nice to contemplate having our own cadre of Neo-Futurists to boast in the future, catching long-time Neo veterans such as John Pierson, Marta Rainer, and Cecil Baldwin now is a real treat. (Gluckstern)

The World’s Funniest Bubble Show Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $8-11. Sun, 11am. Through Oct 27. Soapy, kid-friendly antics with Louis Pearl, aka “The Amazing Bubble Man.”

BAY AREA

After the Revolution Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk; www.auroratheatre.org. $32-60. Tue, 7pm; Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Extended through Oct 6. Emma (Jessica Bates) is a left-wing lawyer from a lefty Jewish family of Communist Party members and fellow travelers who heads an important defense fund for incarcerated Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal. When Emma learns that a book is coming out that pins her revered late grandfather (a CP martyr to McCarthyism for whom the fund is named) as a spy for Stalin, she collapses into an incapacitating personal crisis exacerbated by the revelation that her adored father (an expansive Rolf Saxon) already knew and kept the secret from her. The crisis leads to Emma’s severing ties with her father and, eventually, alienating her boyfriend (Adrian Anchondo) as the rest of the family do their best to negotiate the new dynamic, including her uncle Leo (Victor Talmadge), her rehab habitué of a sister (Sarah Mitchell), and her mother (Pamela Gaye Walker). Meanwhile, Emma faces the fraught temptation of a large donation to the fund by a wealthy old lefty (a fine Peter Kybart). Almost above the fray, by virtue of her unwavering devotion to the political legacy she shared with her husband, is Emma’s unreconstructed Stalinist of a grandmother, Vera (a jarringly affected Ellen Ratner in fakey-fakey old-lady makeup). Aurora Theater’s production of Amy Herzog’s After the Revolution offers another look at the celebrated American playwright whose Obie Award-winning 4000 Miles recently premiered at ACT. But just as the ACT production left one wondering what all the fuss was about, After the Revolution disappoints in its promise of exploring political commitment through the complexities of modern history and familial bonds. Instead, director Joy Carlin marshals a mostly strong cast to little effect against an unconvincing and strained dramatic narrative that seems oddly out of touch with today’s political currents. (Avila)

All’s Well That Ends Well Forest Meadows Amphitheater, 890 Bella, Dominican University of California, San Rafael; www.marinshakespeare.org. $20-37.50. Presented in repertory through Sat/28; visit website for performance schedule. Marin Shakespeare Company continues its outdoor season with the Bard’s classic romance.

Bonnie and Clyde Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; www.shotgunplayers.org. $20-35. Wed/25-Thu/26, 7pm; Fri/27-Sat/28, 8pm; Sun/29, 5pm. Amorous outlaws and Depression-era rebels Bonnie Parker (Megan Trout) and Clyde Barrow (Joe Estlack) remain compelling as heroes and tragic figures in playwright Adam Peck’s 2010 retelling, but it’s their quieter, frailer, more delicate moments in Mark Jackson’s robust, at times transcendent staging that prove most memorable in this Shotgun Players production. It’s a sign of Jackson’s sure intelligence as a director that he can let a moment happen here wordlessly, without recourse to cut-and-dry cues of one sort or another, as happens near the outset of the evening as Barrow and Parker arrive on the run at an abandoned barn. We study them in such moments, and they breathe, like nowhere else. It’s here in this barn that they rest, woo, tussle, and tease for the next 80 enthralling minutes — interrupted only by Barrow’s moment-by-moment delivery to us of their final violent moments alive, channeling a fate awaiting them just down the road. Embodying the play’s only characters, Trout and Estlack are outstanding, dynamic and utterly persuasive. They’d be worth seeing even if the play and production were half as good as they are. Having “chosen to live lives less ordinary,” it turns out to be their palpable vulnerability and wide-ranging yet ordinary yearnings that make them exceptional creatures. (Avila)

Can You Dig It? Back Down East 14th — the 60s and Beyond Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Sat, 8:30pm; Sun, 7pm. Through Oct 27. Don Reed’s new show offers more stories from his colorful upbringing in East Oakland in the 1960s and ’70s. More hilarious and heartfelt depictions of his exceptional parents, independent siblings, and his mostly African American but ethnically mixed working-class community — punctuated with period pop, Motown, and funk classics, to which Reed shimmies and spins with effortless grace. And of course there’s more too of the expert physical comedy and charm that made long-running hits of Reed’s last two solo shows, East 14th and The Kipling Hotel (both launched, like this newest, at the Marsh). Can You Dig It? reaches, for the most part, into the “early” early years, Reed’s grammar-school days, before the events depicted in East 14th or Kipling Hotel came to pass. But in nearly two hours of material, not all of it of equal value or impact, there’s inevitably some overlap and indeed some recycling. Reed, who also directs the show, may start whittling it down as the run continues. But, as is, there are at least 20 unnecessary minutes diluting the overall impact of the piece, which is thin on plot already — much more a series of often very enjoyable vignettes and some painful but largely unexplored observations, wrapped up at the end in a sentimental moral that, while sincere, feels rushed and inadequate. (Avila)

A Comedy of Errors Forest Meadows Amphitheater, 890 Bella, Dominican University of California, San Rafael; www.marinshakespeare.org. $20-37.50. Presented in repertory through Sun/29; visit website for performance schedule. Marin Shakespeare Company presents a cowboy-themed spin on the Bard’s classic.

Ella, the Musical Center REPertory Company, 1601 Civic, Walnut Creek; (925) 943-SHOW. $37-64. Wed, 7:30pm; Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat/28 and Oct 12, 2:30pm); Sun, 2:30pm. Through Oct 12. Yvette Cason portrays the legendary Ella Fitzgerald in this Center REP presentation.

The Tempest Pear Avenue Theatre, 1220 Pear, Mtn View; www.thepear.org. $10-35. Thu-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through Oct 6. Pear Avenue Theatre performs Shakespeare’s play in a new staging by director Jeanie K. Smith.

Woman in Black — A Ghost Play Douglas Morrison Theatre, 22311 N. Third St, Hayward; www.dmtonline.org. $10-29. Thu/26-Sat/28, 8pm; Sun/29, 2pm. Douglas Morrison Theatre performs Stephen Mallatratt’s adaptation of Susan Hill’s spooky story.

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

Bodytraffic ODC Theater, 3153 17th St, SF; www.odcdance.org. Thu/26-Sat/28, 8pm; Sun/29, 7pm. $25-35. The LA-based repertory dance company performs Bay Area premieres by Barak Marshall and Richard Siegel, as well as a preview of a work by Kyle Abraham.

“Broadway Bingo” Feinstein’s at the Nikko, Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason, SF; www.feinsteinssf.com. Wed, 7-9pm. Ongoing. Free. Countess Katya Smirnoff-Skyy and Joe Wicht host this Broadway-flavored night of games and performance.

Caroline Lugo and Carolé Acuña’s Ballet Flamenco Peña Pachamama, 1630 Powell, SF; www.carolinalugo.com. Oct 6, 12, 20, and 26, 6:15pm. $15-19. Flamenco performance by the mother-daughter dance company, featuring live musicians.

“Death on the Ganges” Mission Cultural Center, 2868 Mission, SF; www.sirenproject.org. Thu/26-Sat/28, 7:30pm; Sun/29, 3pm. $15-50. Siren Project presents a work inspired by 57 real-life stories, staged by an all-female theater troupe, about four Bay Area women who travel to a holy city in India.

“Mission Position Live” Cinecave, 1034 Valencia, SF; www.missionpositionlive.com. Thu, 8pm. Ongoing. $10. Stand-up comedy with rotating performers.

“Mu” Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, 3200 California, SF; www.jccsf.org. Fri/27-Sat/28, 8pm; Sun/29, 2pm. $25. Choreographer Kimi Okada, performer Brenda Wong Aoki, and composer Mark Izu collaborate on this world premiere, based on a Japanese folk legend.

“Okeanos Intimate” Aquarium of the Bay, Pier 39, SF; www.capacitor.org. Sat/28, 7pm. $20-30 (free aquarium ticket with show ticket). Choreographer Jodi Lomask and her company, Capacitor, revive 2012’s Okeanos — a cirque-dance piece exploring the wonder and fragility of our innate connection to the world’s oceans — in a special “intimate” version designed for the mid-size theater at Pier 39’s Aquarium of the Bay. The show, developed in collaboration with scientists and engineers, comes preceded by a short talk by a guest expert — for a recent Saturday performance it was a down-to-earth and truly fascinating local ecological history lesson by the Bay Institute’s Marc Holmes. In addition to its Cirque du Soleil-like blend of quasi-representational modern dance and circus acrobatics — powered by a synth-heavy blend of atmospheric pop music — Okeanos makes use of some stunning underwater photography and an intermittent narrative that includes testimonials from the likes of marine biologist and filmmaker Dr. Tierney Thys. The performers, including contortionists, also interact with some original physical properties hanging from the flies — a swirling vortex and a spherical shell — as they wrap and warp their bodies in a kind of metamorphic homage to the capacity and resiliency of evolution, the varied ingenuity of all life forms. If the movement vocabulary can seem limited at times, and too derivative, the show also feels a little cramped on the Aquarium Theater stage, whose proscenium arrangement does the piece few favors aesthetically. Nevertheless, the family-oriented Okeanos Intimate spurs a conversation with the ocean that is nothing if not urgent. (Avila)

“People Show 121: The Detective Show” Fort Mason Center, Southside Theater, Marina at Laguna, SF; www.peopleshowusa.com. Thu/26-Sun/29, 8pm (also Sun/29, 2pm). $39-149 (all tickets include wine; some also include dinner). The veteran British alt-theater company performs.

“San Francisco Magic Parlor” Chancellor Hotel Union Square, 433 Powell, SF; www.sfmagicparlor.com. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Ongoing. $40. Magic vignettes with conjurer and storyteller Walt Anthony.

“Taps, Tunes, and Tall Tales” Feinstein’s at the Nikko, Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason, SF; www.feinsteinssf.com. Thu/26-Fri/27, 8pm; Sat/28, 7pm. $30-65. Tony-winning legend Tommy Tune performs.

“Union Square Live” Union Square, between Post, Geary, Powell, and Stockton, SF; www.unionsquarelive.org. Through Oct 9. Free. Music, dance, circus arts, film, and more; dates and times vary, so check website for the latest.

BAY AREA

“Bay Area Flamenco Festival” Freight and Salvage, 2020 Addison, Berk; www.bayareaflamencofestival.com. Sun/29, 8pm. $36.50-75. With David Serva, “godfather of Bay Area flamenco guitar.” *

 

Bright future

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arts@sfbg.com

DANCE It’s still early in the new season, yet two programs this past weekend offered worthwhile perspectives on new dance. “New” in this case doesn’t necessarily indicate right out of the oven, but the pieces were novel to these eyes, and more importantly, they looked fresh and left behind a pleasant aftertaste.

Every year Dance Mission Theater schedules two first-come, first-serve choreographer showcases, one in the fall, the other in the spring. Rarely have these evenings been a complete washout. Sure, you get the occasional novice who yet has to find a way to navigate the space (this time, that spot belonged to Erica Pinigis’ A Small and Rapid Sorrow). In the only other single-dancer piece, Todd Eckert’s hermetic Sole Soul felt like it was channeling someone being imprisoned without any possibility of escape.

The evening started on a ghostly note and ended with a paean to percussive feet. Megan Finlay’s Blood will have Blood looked suspiciously as if it were inspired by Macbeth, in the way that the man of the house was repeatedly attacked by something that nobody else could see. The piece, though a little thin, had a good sense for building suspense, starting on a comedic note but quickly becoming sinister.

Una Fusion de Percusiones’ snappy and friendly competition between Vanessa Sanchez and Arturo Flores delighted with its sense of freedom and discipline. While Flores mainly stuck to Mexican-flavored heel work, Sanchez spiced hers up with jazz and tap.

San Mateo’s Monsoon Dance Company brought a group of pre-teen girls in an exceedingly simple but enthusiastically performed Deva Ganesha, a Bollywood-style homage to the pot-bellied Indian god. Natasha Carlitz and Erika Tingey, all in white, wove their trajectories through pathways delineated by white balloons. If there was a subtext, as Subtext implied, it escaped me.

A trio of Afro-Caribbean dancers — Adonis Damian, Jose Carlos Alarcon, and Delvis Savigne Frinon — excelled in Reggaeton Fusion’s mostly unison choreography that benefited from these fine dancers’ skill, energy, and collaboration. They returned later in Ramón Ramos Alayo’s Untitled, which might have been a preview excerpt of a new piece Alayo will premiere in November. Set very closely to a lushly romantic orchestra score, the work featured dancers who kept the choreography aloft.

 

ONCE UPON A MATTRESS

You can’t blame choreographer Gregory Dawson for calling his newly minted hour-long septet fabbrica materasso d’argento. It is a lot more euphonious, and mysterious, than “silver mattress factory,” which refers to the metallically painted walls of Zaccho Dance Theater’s home, a former Serta manufacturing facility.

Though badly in need of better seating facilities, the space is becoming popular as a performance venue. But it has never looked better than in Dawson’s intelligent and spacious choreography, bathed in Patrick Toebe’s bluish lighting design that highlighted the performers one minute before swallowing them up the next.

Dawson, a former member of Alonzo King Lines Ballet, decamps for Italy — he is also a mosaic artist — for extended periods of time. For a choreographer, fabbrica is a major achievement, mesmerizing, puzzling yet ultimately convincing. Of course, he carries within him much of what he learned during his 18-year tenure with King. But he made the fractured lines, the fierce attacks, and the collage approach his own.

There are moments when you began to wonder where what looked like independent units were going, besides showcasing excellent dancers at their best. But in the end the pieces came together. It felt like a veil had been yanked away and, all of a sudden, you clearly saw what had been a journey for these six dancers after all. The exception was Jeffrey Van Sciver, who after an astoundingly virtuosic yet silken solo, performed in a diaphanous white skirt that beautifully set off his dark skin, simply disappeared. Why? Was his presence a guiding force no longer needed? Dramaturgically, this seemed weak.

Dawson brilliantly balanced the vigorous, individualized center-space dancing with a haunting pictorial quality, in which the performers devolved into black silhouettes against the silver coated black wall. Moving friezes, they melted away.

Alton San Giovanni’s tempestuous score excellently supported the choreography. The dancers: Jordan Drew, Oliver Shock, Ilaria Guerra, Christopher DeVita, Jessica Wagner, Isaiah Bindel, and, of course, Van Sciver — who next month is starting his first season with Lines Ballet — performed at the top of their impressive abilities. I want to see them again. *

Theater Listings: September 18 – 24, 2013

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

THEATER

OPENING

Beautiful: The Carole King Musical Curran Theatre, 445 Geary, SF; www.shnsf.com. $55-210. Opens Tue/24, 8pm. Runs Tue-Sat, 8pm (also Sat and Oct 9 and 16, 2pm); Sun, 2 and 7:30pm (no evening show Oct 13 or 20). Through Oct 20. Pre-Broadway premiere of the musical about the legendary songwriter.

Geezer Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $25-50. Opens Wed/18, 8pm. Runs Wed-Thu, 8pm; Sat, 8:30pm. Through Oct 26. Geoff Hoyle’s hit solo show, a comedic meditation on aging, returns to the Marsh.

To Sleep and Dream Z Below, 470 Florida, SF; www.therhino.org. $15-30. Previews Thu/19-Sat/21, 8pm; Sun/22, 7pm. Opens Sept 25, 8pm. Runs Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sept 29, 7pm; Oct 6, 3pm. Through Oct 6. Theatre Rhinoceros performs writer-director John Fisher’s North Bay-set drama about the challenges of love.

The World’s Funniest Bubble Show Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $8-11. Opens Sun/22, 11am. Runs Sun, 11am. Through Oct 27. Soapy, kid-friendly antics with Louis Pearl, aka “The Amazing Bubble Man.”

BAY AREA

The Tempest Pear Avenue Theatre, 1220 Pear, Mtn View; www.thepear.org. $10-35. Previews Thu/12, 8pm. Opens Sat/13, 8pm. Runs Thu-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through Oct 6. Pear Avenue Theatre performs Shakespeare’s play in a new staging by director Jeanie K. Smith.

ONGOING

Acid Test: The Many Incarnations of Ram Dass Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Fri, 8pm; Sat, 8:30pm. Through Oct 12. Playwright Lynne Kaufman invites you to take a trip with Richard Alpert, a.k.a. Ram Dass (Warren David Keith)—one of the big wigs of the psychedelic revolution and (with his classic book, Be Here Now) contemporary Eastern-looking spirituality—as he recounts times high and low in this thoughtful, funny, and sometimes unexpected biographical rumination on the quest for truth and meaning in a seemingly random life. Directed by Joel Mullennix, the narrative begins with Ram Dass today, in his Hawaiian home and partly paralyzed from a stroke, but Keith (one of the Bay Area’s best stage actors, who is predictably sure and engagingly multilayered in the role) soon shakes off the stiff arm and strained speech and springs to his feet to continue the narrative as the ideal self perhaps only transcendental consciousness and theater allow. Nevertheless, Kaufman’s fun-loving and extroverted Alpert is no saint and no model of perfection, which is the refreshing truth explored in the play. He’s a seeker still, ever imperfect and trying for perfection, or at least the wisdom of acceptance. As the privileged queer child of a wealthy Jewish lawyer and industrialist, Alpert was both insider and outsider from the get-go, and that tension and ambiguity make for an interesting angle on his life, including the complexities of his relationships with a homophobic Leary, for instance, and his conservative but ultimately loving father. Perfection aside, the beauty in the subject and the play is the subtle, shrewd cherishing of what remains unfinished. Note: review from an earlier run of this show. (Avila)

Band Fags! New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; www.nctcsf.org. $25-45. Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through Oct 13. New Conservatory Theatre Center performs the West Coast premiere of Frank Anthony Polito’s coming-of-age tale, set in 1980s Detroit.

“Bay One Acts Festival” Tides Theatre, 533 Sutter, SF; www.bayoneacts.org. $20-40. Programs One and Two run in repertory Wed-Sun, 8pm. Through Oct 5. The 2013 BOA fest presents the world premieres of 13 short plays in partnership with 13 Bay Area theater companies.

BoomerAging: From LSD to OMG Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Tue, 8pm. Extended through Oct 29. Will Durst’s hit solo show looks at baby boomers grappling with life in the 21st century.

Buried Child Magic Theatre, Fort Mason Center, Bldg D, Third Flr, SF; www.magictheatre.org. $20-60. Tue, 7pm; Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2:30. Through Oct 6. Magic Theatre performs a revival of Sam Shepard’s Pulitzer-winning classic.

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

The Golden Dragon ACT’s Costume Shop, 1117 Market, SF; www.doitliveproductions.com. $15. Thu-Sat, 9:30pm. Through Sept 28. Do It Live! Productions presents Roland Schimmelpfennig’s tragicomic take on globalization, set in and around an Asian restaurant.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch Boxcar Theatre, 505 Natoma, SF; www.boxcartheatre.org. $27-43. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Open-ended. John Cameron Mitchell’s cult musical comes to life with director Nick A. Olivero’s ever-rotating cast.

Macbeth Fort Point, end of Marine Dr, Presidio of San Francisco, SF; www.weplayers.org. $30-60. Thu-Sun, 6pm. Through Oct 6. We Players perform the Shakespeare classic amid Fort Point’s Civil War-era fortress.

“San Francisco Fringe Festival” Exit Theatreplex, 156 Eddy, SF; www.sffringe.org. $12.99 or less (passes, $45-75). Through Sat/21. The 22nd SF Fringe presents 36 shows that explore the boundaries of theater and performance.

1776 ACT’s Geary Theater, 415 Geary, SF; www.act-sf.org. $20-160. Opens Thu/19, 8pm. Runs Tue-Sat, 8pm (also Wed and Sat, 2pm; Tue/24, show at 7pm); Sun, 2pm. Through Oct 6. American Conservatory Theater performs the West Coast premiere of Frank Galati’s new staging of the patriotic musical.

Sex and the City: LIVE! Rebel, 1760 Market, SF; trannyshack.com/sexandthecity. $25. Wed, 7 and 9pm. Open-ended. It seems a no-brainer. Not just the HBO series itself — that’s definitely missing some gray matter — but putting it onstage as a drag show. Mais naturellement! Why was Sex and the City not conceived of as a drag show in the first place? Making the sordid not exactly palatable but somehow, I don’t know, friendlier (and the canned a little cannier), Velvet Rage Productions mounts two verbatim episodes from the widely adored cable show, with Trannyshack’s Heklina in a smashing portrayal of SJP’s Carrie; D’Arcy Drollinger stealing much of the show as ever-randy Samantha (already more or less a gay man trapped in a woman’s body); Lady Bear as an endearingly out-to-lunch Miranda; and ever assured, quick-witted Trixxie Carr as pent-up Charlotte. There’s also a solid and enjoyable supporting cast courtesy of Cookie Dough, Jordan Wheeler, and Leigh Crow (as Mr. Big). That’s some heavyweight talent trodding the straining boards of bar Rebel’s tiny stage. The show’s still two-dimensional, even in 3D, but noticeably bigger than your 50″ plasma flat panel. (Avila)

The Shakespeare Bug Stage Werx Theatre, 446 Valencia, SF; www.killingmylobster.com. $15-30. Thu-Sun, 8pm. Through Sept 29. Killing My Lobster in association with PlayGround perform Ken Slattery’s world-premiere comedy.

BAY AREA

After the Revolution Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk; www.auroratheatre.org. $32-60. Tue, 7pm; Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Extended through Oct 6. Aurora Theatre opens its 22nd season with the Bay Area premiere of Amy Herzog’s family drama.

All’s Well That Ends Well Forest Meadows Amphitheater, 890 Bella, Dominican University of California, San Rafael; www.marinshakespeare.org. $20-37.50. Presented in repertory Fri-Sun through Sept 28; visit website for performance schedule. Marin Shakespeare Company continues its outdoor season with the Bard’s classic romance.

Bonnie and Clyde Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; www.shotgunplayers.org. $20-35. Wed-Thu, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through Sept 29. Amorous outlaws and Depression-era rebels Bonnie Parker (Megan Trout) and Clyde Barrow (Joe Estlack) remain compelling as heroes and tragic figures in playwright Adam Peck’s 2010 retelling, but it’s their quieter, frailer, more delicate moments in Mark Jackson’s robust, at times transcendent staging that prove most memorable in this Shotgun Players production. It’s a sign of Jackson’s sure intelligence as a director that he can let a moment happen here wordlessly, without recourse to cut-and-dry cues of one sort or another, as happens near the outset of the evening as Barrow and Parker arrive on the run at an abandoned barn. We study them in such moments, and they breathe, like nowhere else. It’s here in this barn that they rest, woo, tussle, and tease for the next 80 enthralling minutes — interrupted only by Barrow’s moment-by-moment delivery to us of their final violent moments alive, channeling a fate awaiting them just down the road. Embodying the play’s only characters, Trout and Estlack are outstanding, dynamic and utterly persuasive. They’d be worth seeing even if the play and production were half as good as they are. Having “chosen to live lives less ordinary,” it turns out to be their palpable vulnerability and wide-ranging yet ordinary yearnings that make them exceptional creatures. (Avila)

Can You Dig It? Back Down East 14th — the 60s and Beyond Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Sat, 8:30pm; Sun, 7pm. Through Oct 27. Don Reed’s new show offers more stories from his colorful upbringing in East Oakland in the 1960s and ’70s. More hilarious and heartfelt depictions of his exceptional parents, independent siblings, and his mostly African American but ethnically mixed working-class community — punctuated with period pop, Motown, and funk classics, to which Reed shimmies and spins with effortless grace. And of course there’s more too of the expert physical comedy and charm that made long-running hits of Reed’s last two solo shows, East 14th and The Kipling Hotel (both launched, like this newest, at the Marsh). Can You Dig It? reaches, for the most part, into the “early” early years, Reed’s grammar-school days, before the events depicted in East 14th or Kipling Hotel came to pass. But in nearly two hours of material, not all of it of equal value or impact, there’s inevitably some overlap and indeed some recycling. Reed, who also directs the show, may start whittling it down as the run continues. But, as is, there are at least 20 unnecessary minutes diluting the overall impact of the piece, which is thin on plot already — much more a series of often very enjoyable vignettes and some painful but largely unexplored observations, wrapped up at the end in a sentimental moral that, while sincere, feels rushed and inadequate. (Avila)

A Comedy of Errors Forest Meadows Amphitheater, 890 Bella, Dominican University of California, San Rafael; www.marinshakespeare.org. $20-37.50. Presented in repertory Fri-Sun through Sept 29; visit website for performance schedule. Marin Shakespeare Company presents a cowboy-themed spin on the Bard’s classic.

Ella, the Musical Center REPertory Company, 1601 Civic, Walnut Creek; (925) 943-SHOW. $37-64. Wed, 7:30pm; Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sept 28 and Oct 12, 2:30pm); Sun, 2:30pm. Through Oct 12. Yvette Cason portrays the legendary Ella Fitzgerald in this Center REP presentation.

Woman in Black — A Ghost Play Douglas Morrison Theatre, 22311 N. Third St, Hayward; www.dmtonline.org. $10-29. Fri-Sat and Sept 26, 8pm (also Sat/21, 2pm); Sun, 2pm. Through Sept 29. Douglas Morrison Theatre performs Stephen Mallatratt’s adaptation of Susan Hill’s spooky story.

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

“Broadway Bingo” Feinstein’s at the Nikko, Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason, SF; www.feinsteinssf.com. Wed, 7-9pm. Ongoing. Free. Countess Katya Smirnoff-Skyy and Joe Wicht host this Broadway-flavored night of games and performance.

Caroline Lugo and Carolé Acuña’s Ballet Flamenco Peña Pachamama, 1630 Powell, SF; www.carolinalugo.com. Sat/21, Oct 6, 12, 20, and 26, 6:15pm. $15-19. Flamenco performance by the mother-daughter dance company, featuring live musicians.

Megan Hilty Venetian Room, Fairmont San Francisco, 950 Mason, SF; www.bayareacabaret.org. Sun/21, 8pm. $95. The Broadway and television (Smash) star headlines Bay Area Cabaret’s tenth anniversary season opening gala.

“Mission Position Live” Cinecave, 1034 Valencia, SF; www.missionpositionlive.com. Thu, 8pm. Ongoing. $10. Stand-up comedy with rotating performers.

“Monkey Gone to Heaven” CounterPULSE, 1310 Mission, SF; www.counterpulse.org. Thu/19-Sat/21, 8pm; Sun/22, 7pm. $20. EmSpace Dance performs the world premiere of a dance-theater work inspired by the relationship between primates and prayer.

“Okeanos Intimate” Aquarium of the Bay, Pier 39, SF; www.capacitor.org. Sat, 7pm. Through Sept 28. $20-30 (free aquarium ticket with show ticket). Choreographer Jodi Lomask and her company, Capacitor, revive 2012’s Okeanos — a cirque-dance piece exploring the wonder and fragility of our innate connection to the world’s oceans — in a special “intimate” version designed for the mid-size theater at Pier 39’s Aquarium of the Bay. The show, developed in collaboration with scientists and engineers, comes preceded by a short talk by a guest expert — for a recent Saturday performance it was a down-to-earth and truly fascinating local ecological history lesson by the Bay Institute’s Marc Holmes. In addition to its Cirque du Soleil-like blend of quasi-representational modern dance and circus acrobatics — powered by a synth-heavy blend of atmospheric pop music — Okeanos makes use of some stunning underwater photography and an intermittent narrative that includes testimonials from the likes of marine biologist and filmmaker Dr. Tierney Thys. The performers, including contortionists, also interact with some original physical properties hanging from the flies — a swirling vortex and a spherical shell — as they wrap and warp their bodies in a kind of metamorphic homage to the capacity and resiliency of evolution, the varied ingenuity of all life forms. If the movement vocabulary can seem limited at times, and too derivative, the show also feels a little cramped on the Aquarium Theater stage, whose proscenium arrangement does the piece few favors aesthetically. Nevertheless, the family-oriented Okeanos Intimate spurs a conversation with the ocean that is nothing if not urgent. (Avila)

“San Francisco Magic Parlor” Chancellor Hotel Union Square, 433 Powell, SF; www.sfmagicparlor.com. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Ongoing. $40. Magic vignettes with conjurer and storyteller Walt Anthony.

“San Francisco Stand-Up Comedy Competition: Preliminary Round” Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, 3200 California, SF; www.jccsf.org. Sat/21, 8pm. $25-35. Stand-up comedians battle it out.

“Union Square Live” Union Square, between Post, Geary, Powell, and Stockton, SF; www.unionsquarelive.org. Through Oct 9. Free. Music, dance, circus arts, film, and more; dates and times vary, so check website for the latest.

“Vak: Song of Becoming” Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF; www.ybca.org. Fri/20-Sat/21, 8pm. $20-35. Composer and vocalist Ann Dyer performs a work inspired by Indian goddess Vak, “who creates the world through sound vibration.” The work features choreography by Erika Chong Shuch.

“The Video Game Monologues” Cartoon Art Museum, 655 Mission, SF; www.cartoonart.org. Thu/19, 5-8pm. $5 (suggested donation). Get a sneak preview of the show that’s drawn from real stories of gamers and game characters.

Xitlalli Danza Azteca San Francisco Botanical Gardens, Golden Gate Park (near Ninth Ave at Lincoln), SF; www.sfbotanicalgarden.org. Sat/21, noon-2pm. Free. The group performs traditional ritual Aztec dances to celebrate the blooming of the SF Botanical Garden’s Mesoamerican Cloud Forest Garden.

BAY AREA

“Bay Area Flamenco Festival” La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck, Berk; www.bayareaflamencofestival.com. Sun/21, 8pm. $30-50. Gypsy flamenco icon Concha Vargas headlines the first weekend of this eighth annual festival. *

 

For whom the bell rocks: hologram rap edition

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This year’s Rock The Bells really is the Costco of hip-hop festivals. Pretty much anyone who’s anyone in the hip-hop world (plus some dead rappers) will be at Mountain View’s Shoreline Amphitheater this weekend. There is literally something for every kind of hip-hop fan out there, with more artists packed into those two days than weed in a Juicy J blunt.

Perennial RTB performers Wu-Tang Clan, Doug E Fresh & Slick Rick, Rakim, Bone Thugs N Harmony, and KRS-ONE will holding it down for the old school. Meme-rap stars Riff Raff, Danny Brown, and Trinidad James will bring their WTF-brands of rap. On the rise Brooklyn youngsters Flatbush Zombies and Joey Bada$$ will be present.

And even though the backpack era is over, mid-aughts underground luminaries such as Talib Kweli, Immortal Technique, Brother Ali, and Tech Nine will transport you back to a not so distant 2005. Headliners Kid Cudi, the entire A$AP and Black Hippy crews, hyphy super duo E-40/Too $hort, and Girl Talk (who might throw down a more hip-hop influenced set) will cap off the long weekend.

But the talk of the festival is not anyone listed above or anyone who has a heart beat. Hologram versions of Easy-E and Ol’ Dirty Bastard will appear in intangible 3D form. To catch a preview of their set you can watch performances of E and Dirty from last weekend’s Rock The Bells LA.

It’s easy to snark or scoff at a somewhat preposterous idea, but as someone who was witnessed hologram Tupac the first weekend at Coachella, I can fully attest that hologram rappers is as awesome as it sounds. I distinctly remember one guy in the crowd who literally thought Tupac had come back from the dead — granted he may have been tripping hard. So make sure to circle the two hologram shows on your setlist.

If you’re planning to travel via Caltrain, know that trains only leave from SF at the 15 of the hour. More importantly, the last train to leave Mountain View on Saturday is 10:49 and the last train on Sunday is at 9:19. Plan accordingly as you sure as hell don’t want to pay for a $120 cab back to the city.

Saturday recommendations:
Tyler The Creator, Chief Keef, Supernatural, Action Bronson, Pusha T, Flatbush Zombies, A$AP Mob, E-40 & Too $hort

Sunday recommendations: Juicy J, Deltron 3030, Rakim, Riff Raff, Earl Sweatshirt, Trinidad James, Danny Brown, Joey Bada$$, Black Hippy, Wu-Tang Clan.

2013 Rock The Bells Festival
Sat/14, Sun/15, $65.50-$239
Shoreline Amphitheater
1 Amphitheatre Pkwy, Mountain View
www.rockthebells.net

Fall films to look forward too … and new movies to see tonight!

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Click this way for my Fall Film Preview, presented as part of this weeks Fall Arts spectacular. With bonus photo of Bradley Cooper’s Brady perm!

Read on for this week’s openings, including one of the best indie films of the year, the latest from Wong Kar-Wai, and, uh…the One Direction movie.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH5oaGgYb-Y

Closed Circuit British thriller about a pair of lawyers (Eric Bana, Rebecca Hall) drawn into a possible government cover-up while investigating a London explosion. (1:36)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YYMY4PcmT4

Drinking Buddies Mumblecore grows up in this latest from actor-writer-director Joe Swanberg (currently starring in You’re Next), about brewery co-workers Kate (Olivia Wilde) and Luke (Jake Johnson), BFFs who’d obviously be the perfect couple if they weren’t already hooked up with significant others. At least, they are at the start of Drinking Buddies; the tension between them grows ever-more loaded when the messy, chaotic Kate is dumped by older boyfriend Chris (Ron Livingston) — a pairing we know is bound to fail when we spot him chiding her for neglecting to use a coaster. Luke’s long-term coupling with the slightly younger but way-more-mature Jill (Anna Kendrick) is more complicated; all signs indicate how lucky he is to have her. But the fact that they can only meander around marriage talk indicates that Luke isn’t ready to settle down — and though Jill may not realize it, Luke’s feelings for Kate are a big reason why. Working from a script outline but largely improvising all dialogue, Swanberg’s actors rise to the challenge, conveying the intricate shades of modern relationships. Their characters aren’t always likable, but they’re always believable. Also, fair warning: this movie will make you want to drink many, many beers. (1:30) Roxie. (Cheryl Eddy)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1w6CWtykK0

Getaway Ethan Hawke and Selena Gomez team up in a high-speed, high-stakes race to save Hawke’s kidnapped wife. Jon Voight co-stars as “Mysterious Voice,” so there’s that. (1:29)

The Grandmaster The Grandmaster is dramatic auteur Wong Kar-Wai’s take on the life of kung-fu legend Ip Man — famously Bruce Lee’s teacher, and already the subject of a series  of Donnie Yen actioners. This episodic treatment is punctuated by great fights and great tragedies, depicting Ip’s life and the Second Sino-Japanese War in broad strokes of martial arts tradition and personal conviction. Wong’s angsty, hyper stylized visuals lend an unusual focus to the Yuen Woo-Ping-choreographed fight scenes, but a listless lack of narrative momentum prevents the dramatic segments from being truly engaging. Abrupt editing in this shorter American cut suggests some connective tissue may be missing from certain sequences. Tony Leung’s performance is quietly powerful, but also a familiar caricature from other Wong films; this time, instead of a frustrated writer, he is a frustrated martial artist. Ziyi Zhang’s turn as the driven, devastated child of the Northern Chinese Grandmaster provides a worthy counterpoint. Another Wong cliché: the two end up sadly reminiscing in dark bars, far from the rhythm and poetry of their martial pursuits. (1:48) (Sam Stander)

Instructions Not Included Mexican superstar Eugenio Derbez stars in this comedy about a ladies’ man who finds redemption when he’s suddenly tasked with being a single parent to his young daughter. (1:55)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55wi0RlBIPU

One Direction: This is Us Take them home? The girls shrieking at the opening minutes of One Direction: This Is Us are certainly raring to — though by the closing credits, they might feel as let down as a Zayn Malik fanatic who was convinced that he was definitely future husband material. Purporting to show us the real 1D, in 3D, no less, This Is Us instead vacillates like a boy band in search of critical credibility, playing at an “authorized” look behind the scenes while really preferring the safety of choreographed onstage moves by the self-confessed worst dancers in pop. So we get endless shots of Malik, Niall Horan, Liam Payne, Harry Styles, and Louis Tomlinson horsing around, hiding in trash bins, punking the road crew, jetting around the world, and accepting the adulation of innumerable screaming girls outside — interspersed with concert footage of the lads pouring their all into the poised and polished pop that has made them the greatest success story to come out of The X Factor. Too bad the music — including “What Makes You Beautiful” and “Live While We’re Young” — will bore anyone who’s not already a fan, while the 1D members’ well-filtered, featureless, and thoroughly innocuous on-screen personalities do little to dispel those yawns. Director Morgan Spurlock (2004’s Super Size Me) adds just a dollop of his own personality, in the way he fixates on the tearful fan response: he trots out an expert to talk about the chemical reaction coursing through the excitable listener’s system, and uses bits of animation to slightly puff up the boy’s live show. But generally as a co-producer, along with 1D mastermind Simon Cowell, Spurlock goes along with the pop whitewashing, sidestepping the touchy, newsy paths this biopic could have sallied down — for instance, Malik’s thoughts on being the only Muslim member of the biggest boy band in the world — and instead doing his best undermine that also-oh-so-hyped 3D format and make One Direction as tidily one dimensional as possible. (1:32) (Kimberly Chun)

The Patience Stone “You’re the one that’s wounded, yet I’m the one that’s suffering,” complains the good Afghan wife in this theatrical yet charged adaptation of Atiq Rahimi’s best-selling novel, directed by the Kabul native himself. As The Patience Stone opens, a beautiful, nameless young woman (Golshifteh Farahani) is fighting to not only keep alive her comatose husband, a onetime Jihadist with a bullet lodged in his neck, but also simply survive on her own with little money and two small daughters and a war going off all around her. In a surprising turn, her once-heedless husband becomes her solace — her silent confidante and her so-called patience stone — as she talks about her fears, secrets, memories, and desires, the latter sparked by a meeting with a young soldier. Despite the mostly stagy treatment of the action, mainly isolated to a single room or house (although the guerilla-shot scenes on Kabul streets are rife with a feeling of real jeopardy), The Patience Stone achieves lift-off, thanks to the power of a once-silenced woman’s story and a heart-rending performance by Farahani, once a star and now banned in her native Iran. (1:42) (Kimberly Chun)

Short Term 12 A favorite at multiple 2013 festivals (particularly SXSW, where it won multiple awards), Short Term 12 proves worthy of the hype, offering a gripping look at twentysomethings (led by Brie Larson, in a moving yet unshowy performance) who work with at-risk teens housed in a foster-care facility, where they’re cared for by a system that doesn’t always act with their best interests in mind. Though she’s a master of conflict resolution and tough love when it comes to her young chargers, Grace (Larson) hasn’t overcome her deeply troubled past, to the frustration of her devoted boyfriend and co-worker (John Gallagher, Jr.). The crazy everyday drama — kids mouthing off, attempting escape, etc. — is manageable enough, but two cases cut deep: Marcus (Keith Stanfield), an aspiring musician who grows increasingly anxious as his 18th birthday, when he’ll age out of foster care, approaches; and 16-year-old Jayden (Kaitlyn Dever), whose sullen attitude masks a dark home life that echoes Grace’s own experiences. Expanding his acclaimed 2008 short of the same name, writer-director Destin Daniel Cretton’s wrenchingly realistic tale achieves levels of emotional honesty not often captured by narrative cinema. He joins Fruitvale Station director Ryan Coogler as one of the year’s most exciting indie discoveries. (1:36) (Cheryl Eddy)

Thérèse Both Emma Bovary and Simone de Beauvoir would undoubtedly relate to this increasingly bored and twisted French woman of privilege stuck in the sticks in the ’20s, as rendered by novelist Francois Mauriac and compellingly translated to the screen by the late director Claude Miller. Forbiddingly cerebral and bookish yet also strangely passive and affectless, Thérèse (Audrey Tautou) looks like she has it all from a distance — she’s married to her best friend’s coarse, hunting-obsessed brother (Gilles Lellouche) though envious of her chum’s affair with a handsome and free-thinking Jewish student. Turns out she’s as trapped and close to death as the birds her spouse snares in their forest, and the suffocatingly provincial ways of family she’s married into lead her to undertake a dire course of action. Lellouche adds nuance to his rich lunk, but you can’t tear your eyes from Tautou. Turning her pinched frown right side up and hardening those unblinking button eyes, she plays well against type as a well-heeled, sleepwalking, possibly sociopathic sour grape, effectively conveying the mute unhappiness of a too-well-bred woman born too early and too blinkered to understand that she’s desperate for a new century’s freedoms. (1:50) (Kimberly Chun)

Can’t-miss treats at the upcoming SF Street Food Fest

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The smells of deliciousness were overwhelming. Where do we start?!

As Sam Love and I wandered around the La Cocina media preview for August 17’s San Francisco Street Food Festival, everywhere we looked there were delightful taste treats, colorful, fresh and also deep fried. I’ll take four of each, thank you.

We made the rounds, chatting with fantastic chefs who are living their dreams, whipping up flavors from around the world. We tried everything and, while we enjoyed it all, becoming clean plate champions many times over, there were three highlights that made our short list. If you don’t have the stomach to make it to all the vendors at the Street Food Festival, we’d recommend trying these first:

Chiefo’s Kitchen
Chiefo served plantain and chocolate bread pudding that was soft and heavenly, but also punched back with a sinful slap of rum. Chiefo’s Kitchen West African flavors are not to miss. Check her out at the Night Market!

Azalina’s Malaysian
I live for Azalina’s smile. She could hand me a slice of cold leftover pizza, and with that smile, it would taste like the most exquisite dish. The fact is, Azalina cooks with tremendous love and care, and eating her food is therapy for the soul. She is an amazing chef, from a long family line of street vendors from Penang, and her food explodes with the island’s spices, but also takes advantage of our freshest local California produce. She prepared sweet potato dumplings, decorated with colorful fruit and veggie bonnets. So yum!

Hella Vegan Eats
Two words: doughnut burger. Wait — it’s not what you’re thinking! It’s a doughnut sandwich stuffed with a beet and kamut patty, topped with kale, pickled red onions and dill weed, and squirted with secret sauce. It’s pretty much the cutest thing ever, perfectly balancing the most unhealthy and healthy food items in a few giant bites, and worth unhinging your jaw for. Vegan can definitely be bad-ass.

Photos by Bowerbird Photography

Music Listings: July 17-23, 2013

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WEDNESDAY 17

ROCK

Bottom of the Hill: 1233 17th St., San Francisco. Joyce Manor, Merry Christmas, Tony Molina, 9 p.m., $10-$12.

DNA Lounge: 375 11th St., San Francisco. Six Feet Under, Decrepit Birth, Dealey Plaza, Cannabis Corpse, Saint Vernon, 7:30 p.m., $15-$20.

El Rio: 3158 Mission, San Francisco. Will Crum, Husband, Impuritan, 8 p.m., $5.

Elbo Room: 647 Valencia, San Francisco. Owl Paws, Cold Eskimo, Dogcatcher, The Crux, 9 p.m., $8.

Hemlock Tavern: 1131 Polk, San Francisco. Kirby Krackle, H2Awesome!, DJ Real, 8:30 p.m., $8.

The Knockout: 3223 Mission, San Francisco. Kids in Heat, The Dead Shakes, The Pentagraham Crackers, DJ Ryan Smith, 9:30 p.m., $6.

Milk Bar: 1840 Haight, San Francisco. Down Dirty Shake, Buffalo Tooth, Grill Cloth, The Spiral Electric, DJ Dahmer, 8 p.m., $2.

Monarch: 101 6th St., San Francisco. Strawberry Girls, These Colors, Oranges, Tommy Boys, 8 p.m.

DANCE

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

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

The Cellar: 685 Sutter, San Francisco. “Eye Candy Wednesdays,” 9 p.m., free.

Club X: 715 Harrison, San Francisco. “Electro Pop Rocks,” 18+ dance party with Mightyfools, more, 9 p.m., $10-$20.

DNA Lounge: 375 11th St., San Francisco. Die Sektor, Frontal Boundary, Techniker Sektion, DJs Decay & Unit 77, 8 p.m., $8-$12.

F8: 1192 Folsom St., San Francisco. “Housepitality,” w/ Terry Mullan, Ben Vallery, Buckner, Derek Opperman, 9 p.m., $5-$10.

Harlot: 46 Minna, San Francisco. “Qoöl,” 5 p.m.

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

Lookout: 3600 16th St., San Francisco. “What?,” 7 p.m.

MatrixFillmore: 3138 Fillmore, San Francisco. “Innov8,” 8 p.m.

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

Showdown: 10 Sixth St., San Francisco. “Nokturnal,” w/ DJs Coyle & Gonya, Third Wednesday of every month, 9 p.m., free.

HIP-HOP

Double Dutch: 3192 16th St., San Francisco. “Cash IV Gold,” w/ DJs Kool Karlo, Roost Uno, and Sean G, 10 p.m., free.

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

ACOUSTIC

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

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

JAZZ

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

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

Club Deluxe: 1511 Haight, San Francisco. The Techtonics, Every other Wednesday, 8:30 p.m., free.

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

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

Oz Lounge: 260 Kearny, San Francisco. Hard Bop Collective, 6 p.m., free.

Rasselas Ethiopian Cuisine & Jazz Club: 1534 Fillmore, San Francisco. M.B. Hanif & The Sound Voyagers, 8 p.m.

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

Savanna Jazz Club: 2937 Mission, San Francisco. “Cat’s Corner,” 9 p.m., $10.

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

Zingari: 501 Post, San Francisco. Brenda Reed, 7:30 p.m., free.

INTERNATIONAL

Bissap Baobab: 3372 19th St., San Francisco. Timba Dance Party, w/ DJ WaltDigz, 10 p.m., $5.

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

Cigar Bar & Grill: 850 Montgomery, San Francisco. Brazilian Night, 8 p.m.

Pachamama Restaurant: 1630 Powell, San Francisco. “Cafe LatinoAmericano,” 8 p.m., $5.

Union Square Park: 333 Post, San Francisco. Ilan Bar-Lavi, 12:30 p.m., free.

Yoshi’s San Francisco: 1330 Fillmore, San Francisco. Debo Band, Young Ethio Jazz Band, 8 p.m., $17-$22.

BLUES

Biscuits and Blues: 401 Mason, San Francisco. MoFo Party Band, 8 & 10 p.m., $15.

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

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

SOUL

Boom Boom Room: 1601 Fillmore, San Francisco. “Soul Train Revival,” w/ “Ziek” McCarter, Third Wednesday of every month, 9:30 p.m., $5.

The Cellar: 685 Sutter, San Francisco. “Color Me Badd,” w/ DJ Matt Haze, Wednesdays, 5-9 p.m.

THURSDAY 18

ROCK

Bottom of the Hill: 1233 17th St., San Francisco. Apogee Sound Club, Death Cheetah, Sex Snobs, 9 p.m., $9.

Brick & Mortar Music Hall: 1710 Mission, San Francisco. Cool Ghouls, Wyatt Blair, Meat Market, Corners, Froth, DJ Al Lover, 9 p.m., $8.

S.F. Eagle: 398 12th St., San Francisco. Thursday Nite Live: Hollow Mirrors, Winter Teeth, Illusion of Self, 9 p.m., $7.

The Independent: 628 Divisadero, San Francisco. Futurebirds, Diarrhea Planet, The Ecstatics, 8 p.m., $12-$14.

Light Rail Studios: 672 Toland, San Francisco. Hungry Skinny, Andre Thierry & Zydeco Magic, The Surgeon Generals, The Campbell Apartment, 8 p.m., $5.

Monarch: 101 6th St., San Francisco. Tall Fires, Tall Sheep, Cash for Gold, Coo Coo Birds, 8 p.m., $8.

DANCE

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elbo Room: 647 Valencia, San Francisco. “Afrolicious,” w/ DJs Pleasuremaker, Señor Oz, and live guests, 9:30 p.m., $5-$7.

The EndUp: 401 Sixth St., San Francisco. EDMSF Thursdays, 10 p.m., $10 (free before midnight).

F8: 1192 Folsom St., San Francisco. “Beat Church,” w/ resident DJs Neptune & Kitty-D, Third Thursday of every month, 10 p.m., $10.

Harlot: 46 Minna, San Francisco. 2000 and One, Pedro Arbulu, MFYRS, 9 p.m., free with RSVP.

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

Laszlo: 2532 Mission, San Francisco. “Werk It,” w/ DJ Kool Karlo, Third Thursday of every month, 9 p.m., free.

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

MatrixFillmore: 3138 Fillmore, San Francisco. “Fusion,” w/ DJ Big Bad Bruce, 9 p.m., $5.

Mighty: 119 Utah, San Francisco. “Ritual,” w/ Irie Cartel & guests, 10 p.m., $5-$10.

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

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

Rickshaw Stop: 155 Fell, San Francisco. “Popscene,” w/ Le Youth, Touch Sensitive, DJs Aaron & Omar, 9:30 p.m., $12-$15.

Ruby Skye: 420 Mason, San Francisco. “Awakening,” w/ DJ Bl3nd, 9 p.m., $15-$20 advance.

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

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

Vessel: 85 Campton, San Francisco. “Base,” w/ Navid Izadi, 10 p.m., $5-$10.

HIP-HOP

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

Park 77 Sports Bar: 77 Cambon, San Francisco. “Slap N Tite,” w/ resident Cali King Crab DJs Sabotage Beats & Jason Awesome, free.

The Parlor: 2801 Leavenworth, San Francisco. “Locals Night Out,” w/ DJ Illy D, 9 p.m., free.

Project One: 251 Rhode Island, San Francisco. Paint the Night: Action Jackson, Young Audiences of Northern California fundraiser featuring free paints and brushes to help you unleash your inner Jackson Pollock, plus music by DJs Mr. E, Max Kane, The Whooligan, and Ry Toast., 6-10 p.m., $25.

Showdown: 10 Sixth St., San Francisco. “Tougher Than Ice,” w/ DJs Vin Sol, Ruby Red I, and Jeremy Castillo, Third Thursday of every month, 10 p.m.

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

ACOUSTIC

Amnesia: 853 Valencia, San Francisco. Zoe Muth & The Lost High Rollers, Miwa Gemini, Margaret Glasby, 9 p.m., $10.

Atlas Cafe: 3049 20th St., San Francisco. Pat Campbell & His Buds, 8 p.m., free.

Plough & Stars: 116 Clement, San Francisco. Tipsy House, Third Thursday of every month, 9 p.m., free.

JAZZ

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

Bottle Cap: 1707 Powell, San Francisco. The North Beach Sound with Ned Boynton, Jordan Samuels, and Tom Vickers, 7 p.m., free.

Cafe Claude: 7 Claude, San Francisco. Shelley MacKay, 7:30 p.m., free.

Cafe Du Nord: 2170 Market, San Francisco. MegaFlame Big Band & Cabaret, The John Brothers Piano Company, Miss Kay & Eva D’Luscious, 8:30 p.m., $12-$15.

Cafe Royale: 800 Post, San Francisco. West Side Jazz Club, 9 p.m.

Club Deluxe: 1511 Haight, San Francisco. Michael Parsons, 8:30 p.m., free.

The Emerald Tablet: 80 Fresno St., San Francisco. Mark Levine & The Latin Tinge, 7:30 p.m., $10.

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

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

Savanna Jazz Club: 2937 Mission, San Francisco. Savanna Jazz Jam with Eddy Ramirez, 7:30 p.m., $5.

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

Yoshi’s San Francisco: 1330 Fillmore, San Francisco. NaJe, in Yoshi’s lounge, Third Thursday of every month, 6:30 p.m., free.

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

INTERNATIONAL

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

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

Rasselas Ethiopian Cuisine & Jazz Club: 1534 Fillmore, San Francisco. Latin Breeze, 8 p.m.

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

Yerba Buena Gardens: Fourth St. & Mission, San Francisco. Ilan Bar-Lavi, 12:30 p.m., free.

Yoshi’s San Francisco: 1330 Fillmore, San Francisco. The Raghu Dixit Project, 8 p.m., $25-$35.

REGGAE

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

BLUES

Biscuits and Blues: 401 Mason, San Francisco. Alvon Johnson, 8 & 10 p.m., $15.

Jazz Bistro At Les Joulins: 44 Ellis, San Francisco. Bohemian Knuckleboogie, 7:30 p.m., free.

The Saloon: 1232 Grant, San Francisco. Chris Ford, 4 p.m.; Wendy DeWitt, 9:30 p.m.

EXPERIMENTAL

Hemlock Tavern: 1131 Polk, San Francisco. Grex, Alto!, Efft, Street Priest, 8:30 p.m., $7.

The Luggage Store: 1007 Market, San Francisco. Heroic Trio, Dunkelpeck, 8 p.m., $6-$10.

FRIDAY 19

ROCK

Bottom of the Hill: 1233 17th St., San Francisco. Mister Loveless, Transfer, Dante Elephante, 9:30 p.m., $10.

Cafe Du Nord: 2170 Market, San Francisco. Bonnie & The Bang Bang, French Cassettes, Down & Outlaws, 9:30 p.m., $10-$12.

Neck of the Woods: 406 Clement St., San Francisco. California Wives, My Gold Mask, on the upstairs stage, 9 p.m., $10; Unruly Things, Fast Piece of Furniture, Spider Garage, on the downstairs stage, 9 p.m., $5-$7.

Slim’s: 333 11th St., San Francisco. Orchid, The Saint James Society, Hell Fire, 9 p.m., $15.

Sub-Mission Art Space (Balazo 18 Gallery): 2183 Mission, San Francisco. Them Creatures, Lucabrazzi, The Yes Go’s, Andrea & The Bad Sugar Daddies, 8 p.m.

Thee Parkside: 1600 17th St., San Francisco. Captured! By Robots, Elephant Rifle, Pins of Light, 9 p.m., $10.

DANCE

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

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

Cat Club: 1190 Folsom, San Francisco. “The Witching Hour vs. Strangelove,” w/ DJ Sage, Daniel Skellington, Joe Radio, and Tomas Diablo, 9:30 p.m., $7 ($3 before 10 p.m.).

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

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

F8: 1192 Folsom St., San Francisco. “Vintage,” w/ DJ Toph One & guests, 5 p.m., free; “Freeform vs. Dubalicious,” w/ resident DJs Floorcraft, Jonboy, and guests, Third Friday of every month, 9 p.m., $5 (free before 10 p.m.).

The Grand Nightclub: 520 4th St., San Francisco. “We Rock Fridays,” 9:30 p.m.

The Independent: 628 Divisadero, San Francisco. Big Black Delta, Breakdown Valentine, 9 p.m., $12.

Infusion Lounge: 124 Ellis, San Francisco. “Escape Fridays,” 10 p.m., $20.

The Lab: 2948 16th St., San Francisco. “Goth Prom,” Decades magazine issue #2 release party with Some Ember, Galaxy Radio DJs Smac & Holly B, readings, art, food, more, 9 p.m., $5-$8.

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

Madrone Art Bar: 500 Divisadero, San Francisco. “That ‘80s Show,” w/ DJs Dave Paul & Jeff Harris, Third Friday of every month, 9 p.m., $5.

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

Mighty: 119 Utah, San Francisco. “Lights Down Low,” w/ Cajmere, Harvard Bass, Matrixxman, 9 p.m., $15-$20.

Monarch: 101 6th St., San Francisco. Safety Scissors, Kit n’ C.L.A.W.S., Jason Kendig, 10 p.m., $10 advance.

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

Ruby Skye: 420 Mason, San Francisco. Torro Torro, 9 p.m., $20 advance.

Slate Bar: 2925 16th St., San Francisco. “Darling Nikki,” w/ resident DJs Dr. Sleep, Justin Credible, and Durt, Third Friday of every month, 8 p.m., $5.

Temple: 540 Howard, San Francisco. “Trap City: 1-Year Anniversary,” w/ heRobust, UltraViolet, Napsty, WolfBitch, Thizz Markie, Lé Swndle, Teleport, Smasheltooth, Nebakaneza, Johnny5, Mr. Kitt, more, 10 p.m., $20.

Wish: 1539 Folsom, San Francisco. “Bridge the Gap,” w/ resident DJ Don Kainoa, Fridays, 6-10 p.m., free; “Depth,” w/ resident DJs Sharon Buck & Greg Yuen, Third Friday of every month, 10 p.m., free.

HIP-HOP

Elbo Room: 647 Valencia, San Francisco. “The Social,” w/ Mars Today, Sayknowledge, Cait La Dee, Ryan Nicole, Do D.A.T., Dynamic, The Whooligan, Mikos Da Gawd, 10 p.m.

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

John Colins: 138 Minna, San Francisco. “Juicy,” w/ DJ Ry Toast, Third Friday of every month, 10 p.m., $5 (free before 11 p.m.).

Showdown: 10 Sixth St., San Francisco. “Fresh to Def Fridays: A Tribute to Yo! MTV Raps,” w/ resident DJs Boom Bostic, Inkfat, and Hay Hay, Third Friday of every month, 10 p.m.

Yoshi’s San Francisco: 1330 Fillmore, San Francisco. “Yoshi’s First Annual White & Pink Affair,” w/ DJs Mind Motion & D-Sharp (in Yoshi’s lounge), 10:30 p.m., $15-$25.

ACOUSTIC

Amnesia: 853 Valencia, San Francisco. Indianna Hale, Small Souls, 7 p.m., $5-$7.

Bazaar Cafe: 5927 California, San Francisco. Sweet Hayah, Jean Marc, Tommy P, 7 p.m.

Brick & Mortar Music Hall: 1710 Mission, San Francisco. Kelly McFarling, Cave Clove, Laura Benitez & The Heartache, DJs Mish Mosh & KillyKill, 9 p.m., $9-$12.

The Chapel: 777 Valencia St., San Francisco. Jolie Holland, Mark Olson, 9 p.m., $20.

Mercury Cafe: 201 Octavia, San Francisco. Toshio Hirano, Third Friday of every month, 7:30 p.m., free, all ages.

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

JAZZ

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

Bird & Beckett: 653 Chenery, San Francisco. The Third Quartet, Third Friday of every month, 5:30 p.m., free.

Biscuits and Blues: 401 Mason, San Francisco. Lavay Smith & Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers, 8 & 10 p.m., $20.

Cafe Claude: 7 Claude, San Francisco. Steve Lucky & The Rhumba Bums, 7:30 p.m., free.

Cafe Royale: 800 Post, San Francisco. Cyril Guiraud Trio, 9 p.m.

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

Revolution Cafe: 3248 22nd St., San Francisco. Emily Anne’s Delights, Third Friday of every month, 8:45 p.m., free/donation.

Savanna Jazz Club: 2937 Mission, San Francisco. Ann Marie Santos, $10.

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

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

INTERNATIONAL

1015 Folsom: 1015 Folsom St., San Francisco. “A Celebration of Fela Kuti,” w/ Tony Allen, Najite & Olokun Prophecy, Lagos Roots, Afrolicious, Rich Medina, Damon Bell, King Most, DJ Leydis, Izzy*Wise, 9 p.m., $15-$20.

Bissap Baobab: 3372 19th St., San Francisco. Qumbia Qrew, Third Friday of every month, 8 p.m.

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

Cigar Bar & Grill: 850 Montgomery, San Francisco. Montuno Swing, 8 p.m.

Little Baobab: 3388 19th St., San Francisco. “Paris-Dakar African Mix Coupe Decale,” 10 p.m.

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

Verdi Club: 2424 Mariposa, San Francisco. “Café Flamenco,” w/ Yaelisa & Caminos Flamencos, Third Friday of every month, 8 & 9:30 p.m., $18-$22 ($10 for kids under 12).

Yerba Buena Gardens: Fourth St. & Mission, San Francisco. Crosspulse Percussion Ensemble, 11 a.m. & 12:15 p.m., free.

REGGAE

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

BLUES

Boom Boom Room: 1601 Fillmore, San Francisco. Bill Phillippe, 6 p.m., free.

The Saloon: 1232 Grant, San Francisco. Highwater Blues, 4 p.m.; Steve Freund, 9:30 p.m.

FUNK

Amnesia: 853 Valencia, San Francisco. “Hella Tight,” w/ resident DJs Vinnie Esparza, Jonny Deeper, & Asti Spumanti, Third Friday of every month, 10 p.m., $5.

Boom Boom Room: 1601 Fillmore, San Francisco. Turkuaz, July 19-20, 9:30 p.m., $15 advance.

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

SOUL

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

The Knockout: 3223 Mission, San Francisco. “Oldies Night,” W/ DJs Primo, Daniel, Lost Cat, and friends, Third Friday of every month, 10 p.m., $5.

Milk Bar: 1840 Haight, San Francisco. The Peach Kings, The St. Valentinez, Baby & The Luvies, 9 p.m., $10.

Public Works: 161 Erie, San Francisco. M.O.M. DJs Gordo Cabeza, Timoteo Gigante, and Malachi, in the OddJob loft, 10 p.m., $5.

Yoshi’s San Francisco: 1330 Fillmore, San Francisco. The Stylistics, July 19-20, 8 & 10 p.m., $35-$42.

SATURDAY 20

ROCK

Bender’s: 806 S. Van Ness, San Francisco. The Butlers, 10 p.m., $5.

Bottom of the Hill: 1233 17th St., San Francisco. Papa, Wardell, Luke Sweeney & Wet Dreams Dry Magic, 9:30 p.m., $12.

Cafe Du Nord: 2170 Market, San Francisco. SMiLE! Progressive Rock Festival, w/ Dominique Leone, Matti Bye & This Forgotten Land, Corima, Once & Future Band, Inner Ear Brigade, DJ Neil Martinson, 8 p.m., $10-$12.

El Rio: 3158 Mission, San Francisco. The Meat Sluts, Bad Cop/Bad Cop, Jabber, 10 p.m., $7.

Hemlock Tavern: 1131 Polk, San Francisco. Wild Hunt, Ionophore, Ephemeros, Thoabath, 9:30 p.m., $7.

The Independent: 628 Divisadero, San Francisco. The BoDeans, The Luke Mulholland Band, 9 p.m., $25.

The Knockout: 3223 Mission, San Francisco. Qui, Feral Ohms, Pigs, 5 p.m., $7.

Neck of the Woods: 406 Clement St., San Francisco. Water District, The Insufferables, 9 p.m., $8-$10.

Thee Parkside: 1600 17th St., San Francisco. Luicidal, Oppressed Logic, Nihilist Cunt, 9 p.m., $10.

DANCE

Amnesia: 853 Valencia, San Francisco. “O.K. Hole,” w/ Painted Caves, Little Debbie, Inhalt, C.L.A.W.S., Tom Sellect, Keith Slogan, 9 p.m., $5.

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

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

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

DNA Lounge: 375 11th St., San Francisco. “Bootie S.F.,” w/ Meikee Magnetic, Mixtress ShiZaam, WolfBitch, Speakerbomb, Reyka, Tommy Arcade, DJ Tripp, David X, Purple Crush, more, 9 p.m., $10-$15.

The EndUp: 401 Sixth St., San Francisco. “The Show,” w/ The Junkies, Ben Seagren, Dean Samaras, Alessandro, Marija Dunn, 10 p.m., $10-$20 (free before 11 p.m.).

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

The Lab: 2948 16th St., San Francisco. “R U That Some Body?,” w/ MicahTron, Sevrinn, Jocquese Whitfield, DJs Jaqi Sparrow & Essex, 9 p.m., $7.

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

Madrone Art Bar: 500 Divisadero, San Francisco. “Fringe: 4-Year Anniversary Bash,” w/ DJs Blondie K & subOctave, 9 p.m., $5 (free before 10 p.m.).

Mighty: 119 Utah, San Francisco. The Twelves, Wool, Nolan Gray, 9 p.m., $18 advance.

Milk Bar: 1840 Haight, San Francisco. “The Queen Is Dead: A Tribute to the Music of Morrissey and the Smiths,” w/ DJ Mario Muse & guests, Third Saturday of every month, 9 p.m.

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

Public Works: 161 Erie, San Francisco. 2 Live Crews, Benefit for Project HOPE Art and Peter Hudson featuring DJs from Brass Tax and Space Cowboys., 9 p.m., $10-$20 sliding scale.

Rickshaw Stop: 155 Fell, San Francisco. “Gameboi S.F.,” w/ VJ LaRock, 9:30 p.m., $12-$15.

Ruby Skye: 420 Mason, San Francisco. “World Town,” w/ Cold Blank, Tyler Sherritt, Trevor Simpson, 9 p.m., $20 advance.

Slate Bar: 2925 16th St., San Francisco. “Smiths Night S.F.: Madonna vs. Blondie,” w/ The Certain People Crew, 10 p.m., $5.

The Stud: 399 Ninth St., San Francisco. “Squrrrl: Underrr the Sea,” w/ DJs Papa Tony, Trevor Sigler, and Joe Pickett, 9 p.m., $5.

Sub-Mission Art Space (Balazo 18 Gallery): 2183 Mission, San Francisco. “Batcave S.F.,” w/ The Tunnel, New Happiness, plus DJs Agitator, Burning Skies, Lori Lust, and Decoffinated, 9:30 p.m., $6.

Underground SF: 424 Haight, San Francisco. “Deep Crates,” w/ DJ Jenö, Bones, Matt Holland, JD, 9 p.m., $5 (free before 10 p.m.).

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

HIP-HOP

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

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

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

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

ACOUSTIC

Amnesia: 853 Valencia, San Francisco. Eric Friedmann & The Lucky Rubes, Porkchop Express, 7 p.m.

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

The Chapel: 777 Valencia St., San Francisco. Lia Rose, We Became Owls, Annie & The Beekeepers, 9 p.m., $12-$15.

The Lucky Horseshoe: 453 Cortland, San Francisco. Slow Motion Cowboys, 9 p.m.

Plough & Stars: 116 Clement, San Francisco. The Shelby Foot Three, 9 p.m.

JAZZ

Cafe Claude: 7 Claude, San Francisco. Vijay Anderson Quartet, 7:30 p.m., free.

Club Deluxe: 1511 Haight, San Francisco. Saturday Afternoon Jazz, w/ Danny Brown, Danny Grewen, Eugene Warren, & Beth Goodfellow, 4:30 p.m., free.

Jane Warner Plaza: Market, San Francisco. Kitten on the Keys, 3 p.m., free.

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

Rasselas Ethiopian Cuisine & Jazz Club: 1534 Fillmore, San Francisco. The Robert Stewart Experience, 9 p.m., $7.

The Rite Spot Cafe: 2099 Folsom, San Francisco. Project: Pimento, 9 p.m., free.

The Royal Cuckoo: 3202 Mission, San Francisco. Jules Broussard, Danny Armstrong, and Chris Siebert, 7:30 p.m., free.

Savanna Jazz Club: 2937 Mission, San Francisco. Jazz Combustion Uprising, 7:30 p.m., $10.

Zingari: 501 Post, San Francisco. Lisa Lindsley, 8 p.m., free.

INTERNATIONAL

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

Artists’ Television Access: 992 Valencia, San Francisco. An Evening with Sublime Frequencies and Filmmaker Hisham Mayet, Seattle record label Sublime Frequencies presents two documentaries about North African music and culture: Palace of the Winds and Folk Music of the Sahara: Among the Tuareg of Libya., 8 p.m., $9.

Cigar Bar & Grill: 850 Montgomery, San Francisco. Orquesta Borinquen, 8 p.m.

Little Baobab: 3388 19th St., San Francisco. “Paris-Dakar African Mix Coupe Decale,” 10 p.m.

Make-Out Room: 3225 22nd St., San Francisco. “El SuperRitmo,” Latin dance party with DJs Roger Mas & El Kool Kyle, 10 p.m., $5.

OMG: 43 6th St., San Francisco. “Bollywood Blast,” Third Saturday of every month, 9 p.m., $5 (free before 10:30 p.m.).

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

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

REGGAE

Slim’s: 333 11th St., San Francisco. Radical Something, The Holdup, 8 p.m., $15.

BLUES

Biscuits and Blues: 401 Mason, San Francisco. Andy T & Nick Nixon Band, 7:30 & 10 p.m., $20.

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

EXPERIMENTAL

Center for New Music: 55 Taylor St., San Francisco. 11th Annual Festival of Contemporary Music, 7:30 p.m., $10-$20.

FUNK

Boom Boom Room: 1601 Fillmore, San Francisco. Turkuaz, July 19-20, 9:30 p.m., $15 advance.

SOUL

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

Mezzanine: 444 Jessie, San Francisco. “Soul Slam S.F. VIII: Prince & Michael Jackson,” w/ DJs Spinna, Proof, Hakobo, and King Most, 9 p.m., $20-$25.

Yoshi’s San Francisco: 1330 Fillmore, San Francisco. The Stylistics, July 19-20, 8 & 10 p.m., $35-$42. “The R&B House Party,” w/ Carl Thomas, plus DJs Pos Red, Supreme, and C.J. Flash (in Yoshi’s lounge), 10:30 p.m., $25.

SUNDAY 21

ROCK

Cafe Du Nord: 2170 Market, San Francisco. Tijuana Panthers, GRMLN, The She’s, 9 p.m., $10.

El Rio: 3158 Mission, San Francisco. Turkey Swamp, Fresh Juice Party, Brentando, 8 p.m., $5.

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

DANCE

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

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

Elbo Room: 647 Valencia, San Francisco. “Dub Mission,” w/ DJ Sep & Vinnie Esparza, 9 p.m., $6 (free before 9:30 p.m.).

The EndUp: 401 Sixth St., San Francisco. “T.Dance,” 6 a.m.-6 p.m.; “Soul Affair,” w/ Atnarko, Cuervo, Mario Dubbz, Roger Moorehouse, 8 p.m.

F8: 1192 Folsom St., San Francisco. “Stamina Sundays: 2-Year Anniversary,” w/ Gridlok, Lukeino, Jamal, 10 p.m., free.

Holy Cow: 1535 Folsom, San Francisco. “Honey Sundays,” w/ Honey Soundsystem & guests, 9 p.m., $5.

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

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

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

The Parlor: 2801 Leavenworth, San Francisco. DJ Marc deVasconcelos, 10 p.m., free.

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

Showdown: 10 Sixth St., San Francisco. “The Dark Wave Rises,” w/ DJ Xtine Noir & DJ From Full House, Third Sunday of every month, 10 p.m.

Slate Bar: 2925 16th St., San Francisco. “She Said…: A Queer Affair,” Third Sunday of every month, 4 p.m., $3-$5.

Temple: 540 Howard, San Francisco. “Sunset Arcade,” 18+ dance party with bar games and video arcade, 7 p.m., $5.

HIP-HOP

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

ACOUSTIC

Bottom of the Hill: 1233 17th St., San Francisco. Roadkill Ghost Choir, Shady Maples, Anju’s Pale Blue Eyes, 9 p.m., $10.

Club Deluxe: 1511 Haight, San Francisco. Musical Mayhem with the Dimestore Dandy, 5:30 p.m., free.

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

Milk Bar: 1840 Haight, San Francisco. The Kentucky Twisters, The Righteous Uprights, 4 p.m., free.

Neck of the Woods: 406 Clement St., San Francisco. “iPlay,” open mic with featured weekly artists, 6:30 p.m., free.

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

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

JAZZ

Club Deluxe: 1511 Haight, San Francisco. Jay Johnson, 9 p.m., free.

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

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

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

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

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

Savanna Jazz Club: 2937 Mission, San Francisco. Vocal Jam with Kelly Park, 7 p.m., $5.

SFJAZZ Center: 205 Franklin St., San Francisco. Laurie Antonioli & The American Dreams Band: The Music of Joni Mitchell, 7:30 & 9 p.m., $20.

Zingari: 501 Post, San Francisco. Kitt Weagant, 7:30 p.m., free.

INTERNATIONAL

Atmosphere: 447 Broadway, San Francisco. “Hot Bachata Nights,” w/ DJ El Guapo, 5:30 p.m., $10 ($15-$20 with dance lessons).

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

Oasis Bar & Grill: 401 California Ave., San Francisco. “El Vacilón,” 4 p.m., $10.

Thirsty Bear Brewing Company: 661 Howard, San Francisco. “The Flamenco Room,” 7:15 & 8:30 p.m.

BLUES

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

Lou’s Fish Shack: 300 Jefferson St., San Francisco. A.C. Myles, 4 p.m.

Revolution Cafe: 3248 22nd St., San Francisco. HowellDevine, 8:30 p.m., free/donation.

The Saloon: 1232 Grant, San Francisco. Blues Power, 4 p.m.; Silvia C, 9:30 p.m.

Sheba Piano Lounge: 1419 Fillmore, San Francisco. Bohemian Knuckleboogie, 9 p.m., free.

EXPERIMENTAL

Center for New Music: 55 Taylor St., San Francisco. Crissy Broadcast: Participatory Site-Specific Music Making, Panel discussion and event preview moderated by KDFC’s Jeffrey Freymann-Weyr., 5 p.m., free.

The Lab: 2948 16th St., San Francisco. MSHR, Rubber O Cement, Waxy Tomb, 8 p.m., $8.

San Francisco Community Music Center: 544 Capp, San Francisco. 12th Annual Outsound New Music Summit: Communications Workshop for Independent Musicians, 3-5 p.m., free; 12th Annual Outsound New Music Summit: Touch the Gear Expo, 7-10 p.m., free.

FUNK

Pier 23 Cafe: Pier 23, San Francisco. Hot Pocket, Third Sunday of every month, 4 p.m., $5.

SOUL

Boom Boom Room: 1601 Fillmore, San Francisco. “Deep Fried Soul,” w/ DJs Boombostic & Soul Sauce, 9:30 p.m., $5.

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

MONDAY 22

ROCK

Amoeba Music: 1855 Haight, San Francisco. Bastille, 5 p.m., free.

Cafe Du Nord: 2170 Market, San Francisco. Colleen Green, Sisu, Burnt Palms, 8 p.m., $9-$12.

El Rio: 3158 Mission, San Francisco. Au Dunes, Rustangs, Sandy’s, 7 p.m., $5.

The Knockout: 3223 Mission, San Francisco. Vampire Circus, Das Fluff, Facts on File, The Tempers, DJ Neil Martinson, 9 p.m., $8.

DANCE

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

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

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

ACOUSTIC

Amnesia: 853 Valencia, San Francisco. The Pick Bluegrass Jam, Fourth Monday of every month, 6 p.m., free; The Earl Brothers, Fourth Monday of every month, 9 p.m., free.

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

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

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

The Independent: 628 Divisadero, San Francisco. Shooter Jennings, Scott H. Biram, Shovelman, 8 p.m., $22-$25.

Osteria: 3277 Sacramento, San Francisco. “Acoustic Bistro,” w/ Jason Berk, Michael Shoup, Josh Hoke, Katie Garibaldi, 7 p.m., free.

JAZZ

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

Rasselas Ethiopian Cuisine & Jazz Club: 1534 Fillmore, San Francisco. Open Mic Jazz Jam with Tod Dickow, 8 p.m.

The Union Room at Biscuits and Blues: 401 Mason, San Francisco. “The Session: A Monday Night Jazz Series,” pro jazz jam with Mike Olmos, 7:30 p.m., $12.

Zingari: 501 Post, San Francisco. Nora Maki, 7:30 p.m., free.

INTERNATIONAL

Elbo Room: 647 Valencia, San Francisco. Bachaco, DJ El Kool Kyle, 9 p.m., $5.

REGGAE

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

BLUES

Jazz Bistro At Les Joulins: 44 Ellis, San Francisco. Bohemian Knuckleboogie, 7:30 p.m., free.

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

EXPERIMENTAL

San Francisco Community Music Center: 544 Capp, San Francisco. 12th Annual Outsound New Music Summit Composers Symposium: Compositional Trace Medium & Traditional Strata, 7-9 p.m., free.

SOUL

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

TUESDAY 23

ROCK

Bottom of the Hill: 1233 17th St., San Francisco. Sweetwater Black, Lee Gallagher & The Hallelujah, Slow Season, 9 p.m., $8.

Brick & Mortar Music Hall: 1710 Mission, San Francisco. Hydrophonic, Soule Faction, Overland, 9 p.m., $5-$8.

Cafe Du Nord: 2170 Market, San Francisco. Midnight Cinema, Sentinel, 8 p.m., $10-$12.

El Rio: 3158 Mission, San Francisco. Mortar & Pestle, The Tempers, Diesel Dudes, 8 p.m., $6.

DANCE

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

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

Monarch: 101 6th St., San Francisco. “Soundpieces,” 10 p.m., free-$10.

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

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

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

HIP-HOP

Double Dutch: 3192 16th St., San Francisco. “Takin’ It Back Tuesdays,” w/ DJs Mr. Murdock and Roman Nunez, Fourth Tuesday of every month, 10 p.m., free.

Elbo Room: 647 Valencia, San Francisco. The Life and Times Tour, w/ Self Jupiter, Spank Pops, L*Roneous, Dregs One, AgentStrike9, DJ Pause, host Michael Marshall, 9 p.m., $10.

Skylark Bar: 3089 16th St., San Francisco. “True Skool Tuesdays,” w/ DJ Ren the Vinyl Archaeologist, 10 p.m., free.

ACOUSTIC

Bazaar Cafe: 5927 California, San Francisco. Songwriter-in-Residence: Alan Monasch, 7 p.m. continues through July 30.

Cafe Royale: 800 Post, San Francisco. Toshio Hirano, 9 p.m.

Plough & Stars: 116 Clement, San Francisco. Sean O’Donnell & John Caulfield, 9 p.m.

JAZZ

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

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

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

Club Deluxe: 1511 Haight, San Francisco. Eugene Warren Trio, 8:30 p.m., free.

Jazz Bistro At Les Joulins: 44 Ellis, San Francisco. M.B. Hanif & The Sound Voyagers, 7:30 p.m., free.

Oz Lounge: 260 Kearny, San Francisco. Emily Hayes & Mark Holzinger, 6 p.m., free.

Revolution Cafe: 3248 22nd St., San Francisco. West Side Jazz Club, 5 p.m., free.

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

Yoshi’s San Francisco: 1330 Fillmore, San Francisco. Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, 8 p.m., $22.

Zingari: 501 Post, San Francisco. Amanda King, 7:30 p.m., free.

INTERNATIONAL

Bissap Baobab: 3372 19th St., San Francisco. “Underground Nomads,” w/ rotating resident DJs Cheb i Sabbah, Amar, Sep, and Dulce Vita, 10 p.m., $5.

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

El Rio: 3158 Mission, San Francisco. “Balkan Brass & Eastern Grüve,” w/ DJ Baron Von East-Infection, Fourth Tuesday of every month, 9 p.m., free.

REGGAE

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

BLUES

Biscuits and Blues: 401 Mason, San Francisco. Rich DelGrosso, 8 & 10 p.m., $15.

Rasselas Ethiopian Cuisine & Jazz Club: 1534 Fillmore, San Francisco. Bohemian Knuckleboogie, 8 p.m., free.

The Saloon: 1232 Grant, San Francisco. Powell Street Blues Band, 9:30 p.m.

EXPERIMENTAL

Center for New Music: 55 Taylor St., San Francisco. sfSoundSalonSeries, w/ Boris Baltschun & Serge Baghdassarians, sfSoundGroup, 7:49 p.m., $7-$10.

Hemlock Tavern: 1131 Polk, San Francisco. NegativWobblyLand, Mitchell Brown, Ecstatic Music Band, 8:30 p.m., $7.

FUNK

Madrone Art Bar: 500 Divisadero, San Francisco. “Boogaloo Tuesday,” w/ Oscar Myers & Steppin’, 9:30 p.m., $2.

SOUL

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

Lia Rose lets go on new album ‘Bricks and Bones’

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Bay Area country-folk artist Lia Rose is a ball of sunshine both on stage and off. But if you listened to her songs, you’d know it’s not because life’s been easy, it’s just that she’s chosen to face its struggles head on, chin up.

Rose played the Great American Music Hall with Blame Sally in early May and performed on NPR’s West Coast Live in April, where she met author Ruth Ozeki, with whom she’s currently collaborating on a song. Her second full-length solo album Bricks and Bones will be released this Sat/20, the night of her record-release party at the Chapel in San Francisco. In short, the bubbly, talented musician is doing quite well.

After listening to an early preview of Bricks and Bones, I noticed quite a few differences from her first two albums When You Need Me Most (self-released, 2011) and Conspire (self-released, 2012). Most obvious of these changes is an overall sunnier sound. Though there are darker toned tracks, like “Mary Edith Barnes” and “Jesse Got Trapped in a Coal Mine,” Rose has emerged more self-informed and in control than ever before, and paradoxically, it was when she let go and let others in to her process.

When the graceful singer walked into Haus Coffee, a café in the Mission on 24th Street, to meet me with a broad smile, I wanted to hear from her firsthand how these differences came about.

She’s certainly changed things around both with the new album and in her live performances.

“I don’t want every show to be the same,” Rose told me in between bites of a veggie galette and sips of green tea. “I tend to just keep my options open and play with quite a lot of folks. I like to adapt the show to the particular audience.”

This album has been a big opportunity for her to not only evolve as an artist, but also to collaborate – something that wasn’t so simple for her in the past.

On Bricks and Bones, though, Gawain Mathews assisted Rose with recording, and contributed acoustic guitar, piano, and bass lines, Charlie Wilson and John Kirchner with engineering, Michael Fecskes on cello, and Kelly McFarling with harmonies. And Rose couldn’t be happier with her decision to broaden her horizon.

“I started to do a lot of coproducing and co-writing, and that has been awesome because I think it becomes way better than anything I could have done on my own. And that’s the case for sure on this album because I got to work with Gawain Mathews.” 

For the artist whose first musical memory is of jumping on the bed at the age of 3, screaming Billy Joel’s “The Longest Time” at the top of her lungs, music has long been an integral part of life. This is why it took her a while to work up the courage to let others in on her creative process.

“It takes a lot of trust – a lot of letting go of what you think it’s supposed to be.”

Rose has tried being the only captain on the ship before, and it’s turned out alright, according to her. But that wasn’t what she was looking for this time around.

“If I stayed control freak on the whole project, which I’ve done in the past – which I can do – it’ll turn out fine. But it won’t be the magic. The magic comes, I think, when you can let go of that control and surround yourself with folks who you love the paint that they throw. And letting go and letting it be something that maybe doesn’t sound right to you right away.”

To me, Bricks and Bones sounded great upon first listen, but even better upon second. Filled with lively, acoustic-heavy twang and stomp, and spitting lyrics – that prove there may just be some fire in this graceful being after all.

“I’m like a loaded mousetrap or a hairpin trigger/I will bite, I will scratch/There’s no tellin’ what I’ll do/It’s a bad state I’m in,” sings Rose in “Trainwreck Tuesday,” letting us know there’s more to her than the soft, gentle side you’ll likely see if you meet her.

Rose seems to have come even more into her own on these tracks, singing of facing down her fears (“Snake in the Water”) and simple straightforward romance (“Secret Stories”).

It’s true, this album is a natural evolution for Rose, but there is one constant – the quality. Her vocals have never been so pure and the dreamy melodies are still present on Bricks and Bones.

Though her album’s title implies a solid, unmoving structure, Rose’s sound is anything but rigid.

“I feel like you’ve got to be able to bend, otherwise you’ll break,” she said.

This is the way the album plays out – it’s quite flexible.

It moves through the angry steam of “Trainwreck Tuesday,” to a cover of “Jesse Got Trapped in a Coal Mine,” a haunting folk tune written by Avi Vinocur of band Goodnight, Texas about a man who met death before his wedding.

You can hear the progression for yourself on Bricks and Bones and even celebrate with her at her live show at the Chapel on July 20. Listen to the angelic vocals of Lia Rose, get lost in her rich acoustic melodies. But don’t expect it to be all lollipops and rainbows. She will bite.

Lia Rose
With We Became Owls, Annie Lynch, Michaela Anne
Sat/20, 9pm, $15
777 Valencia, SF
(415) 551-5157
www.thechapelsf.com

When things get weird: X-Day, Weird Al, and more

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Today is weird. It’s in that black hole gap between a nationally recognized holiday (er, Fourth of July) and the actual weekend, which begins for many traditional workers around 5pm on Fridays. So with this weirdness, we celebrate both X-Day, a parody of cult holidays, and the more literal, Weird Al — he shines down on the Alameda County Fair tonight with a beam of frizzy light.

Let’s get to Al, straightaway. While he used to be big-time MTV stock, parodying Michael Jackson and Madonna types, Weird Al has done something interesting in the past few years, and gone cult. It may have started with his cartoon-genius take on R. Kelly’s masterpiece, “Trapped in the Closet” (by the way, the Castro is having a “Trapped in the Closet” sing-along later this month). Weird Al made it better with strangely appealing “Trapped in the Drive-Thru.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHnTocdD7sk

But before that, there were bona fide hits, this strange musical landscape, including “I Lost on Jeopardy,”  “Fat,” and Coolio’s worst nightmare, “Amish Paradise.” More recently, there was meh Gaga takedown “Perform This Way.”

And now he’s on the county fair circuit (full disclosure: I saw him on said same county fair circuit more than a decade ago, and loved every obnoxious moment, especially the costume changes).

Here’s the info on the fair and concerts. Show starts at 7pm tonight (July 5), and all concerts are free with paid admission to the fair.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOfZLb33uCg

And then there’s X-Day. It’s a faux-holiday celebrated every July 5 as part of the Church of the SubGenius — “a religion formed as a parody of cults and extreme religious groups.”

For X-Day, the church prophesized that an army of weirdo alien invaders would land their spaceship on earth and destroy all the normals, those without sin.

While celebrated worldwide, in Orange County, Calif. for many years and through the late ‘90s there was a nonprofit all-ages venue called Koo’s, which celebrated X-Day with a punky band called the Four Letter words — and a paper mache spaceship. The Four Letter words returned recently for a few reunion shows, and one can only hope that was in part in allegiance with X-Day, the Church of the Subgenius, and the Church’s leader, Bob Dobbs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vj127gtcqdk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APSP0fjHqGQ

Or you could keep the weirdness more local tonight, and see Bart Davenport live in Oakland at the Uptown. The now LA-based leader of the avant-electro group Honeycut did the most surprising thing when he went solo a decade or so back, and put out tender, soulful pop songs, all about gooey love.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g-DOc9gVhM

He plays a free First Fridays show tonight with Extra Classic, Legs, and She Owl.
Fri/5, 6pm, free. Uptown, 1928 Telegraph, Oakl. www.uptownnightclub.com.

Drama queens (and kings), start your engines: SF Opera’s summer season is here

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The annual SF Opera summer season is always a treat — the programmers get a little wild, and the risks, like last year’s extraordinary Nixon in China, always pay off in adventurous spirit. (Ticket prices, starting at $22, aren’t bad, either).

Honestly, I have no idea how they manage to squeeze all the creativity of three whole productions onstage in the space of one month, but that’s opera for you. Kinda magic, kinda crazy, all pretty fascinating.

Oh, and music. Incredible music.

This year’s season opened June 5 and runs through July 7, It includes Mozart’s cheeky Cosi fan tutte, a high-spirited tale of a “school for lovers,” full of that lilting, chattery Mozartian goodness, where the characters excitedly (and excitingly) talk over one another, and if a particular song gets a good audience response, heck, they might just sing it twice.

Cosi fan tutte also contains a nugget of annotation that’s pure genius: “Mozart disliked prima donna Adriana Ferrarese del Bene, [librettist] da Ponte’s arrogant mistress for whom the role of Fiordiligi had been created. Knowing her idiosyncratic tendency to drop her chin on low notes and throw back her head on high ones, Mozart filled her showpiece aria Come scoglio with constant leaps from low to high and high to low in order to make Ferrarese’s head ‘bob like a chicken’ onstage.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKd3NshZGKE

Also on the menu, Offenbach’s grand Tales of Hoffman (Les Contes d’Hoffman) based on three psychologically resonant fairytale-like stories from E.T.A. Hoffman that twist from quasi-absurd to darkly tragic, but retain a strange, affirming liveliness in the music.  (So French!)

The buzzy highlight of the season, though, is new work The Gospel of Mary Magdalene by Mark Adamo. Mary is based on an apocryphal gospel found in 1896, “the Gospel of Mary,” and sprang from six years of Adamo’s own research. It gives a different spin on the Jesus tale, and it’s bound to raise a few eyebrows.

Mary opens Weds/19 and stars Sasha Cooke and Nathan Gunn: the opera hasn’t released any audio or video preview yet, but you can find out more here. And here’s an interesting interview about the costumes:

SF OPERA SUMMER SEASON

Through July 7, various prices and times

War Memorial Opera House

301 Van Ness, SF.

www.sfopera.com

Solomon: Bradley Manning is guilty of “aiding the enemy”–if the enemy is democracy

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By Norman Solomon

Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.

Of all the charges against Bradley Manning, the most pernicious — and revealing — is “aiding the enemy.”

A blogger at The New Yorker, Amy Davidson, raised a pair of big questions that now loom over the courtroom at Fort Meade and over the entire country:

*  “Would it aid the enemy, for example, to expose war crimes committed by American forces or lies told by the American government?”

*  “In that case, who is aiding the enemy — the whistleblower or the perpetrators themselves?”

When the deceptive operation of the warfare state can’t stand the light of day, truth-tellers are a constant hazard. And culpability must stay turned on its head.

That’s why accountability was upside-down when the U.S. Army prosecutor laid out the government’s case against Bradley Manning in an opening statement: “This is a case about a soldier who systematically harvested hundreds of thousands of classified documents and dumped them onto the Internet, into the hands of the enemy — material he knew, based on his training, would put the lives of fellow soldiers at risk.”

If so, those fellow soldiers have all been notably lucky; the Pentagon has admitted that none died as a result of Manning’s leaks in 2010. But many of his fellow soldiers lost their limbs or their lives in U.S. warfare made possible by the kind of lies that the U.S. government is now prosecuting Bradley Manning for exposing.

In the real world, as Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, prosecution for leaks is extremely slanted. “Let’s apply the government’s theory in the Manning case to one of the most revered journalists in Washington: Bob Woodward, who has become one of America’s richest reporters, if not the richest, by obtaining and publishing classified information far more sensitive than anything WikiLeaks has ever published,” Greenwald wrote in January.

He noted that “one of Woodward’s most enthusiastic readers was Osama bin Laden,” as a 2011 video from al-Qaeda made clear. And Greenwald added that “the same Bob Woodward book [Obama’s Wars] that Osama bin Laden obviously read and urged everyone else to read disclosed numerous vital national security secrets far more sensitive than anything Bradley Manning is accused of leaking. Doesn’t that necessarily mean that top-level government officials who served as Woodward’s sources, and the author himself, aided and abetted al-Qaida?”

But the prosecution of Manning is about carefully limiting the information that reaches the governed. Officials who run U.S. foreign policy choose exactly what classified info to dole out to the public. They leak like self-serving sieves to mainline journalists such as Woodward, who has divulged plenty of “Top Secret” information — a category of classification higher than anything Bradley Manning is accused of leaking. 

While pick-and-choose secrecy is serving Washington’s top war-makers, the treatment of U.S. citizens is akin to the classic description of how to propagate mushrooms: keeping them in the dark and feeding them bullshit.

In effect, for top managers of the warfare state, “the enemy” is democracy.”

Let’s pursue the inquiry put forward by columnist Amy Davidson early this year. If it is aiding the enemy “to expose war crimes committed by American forces or lies told by the American government,” then in reality “who is aiding the enemy — the whistleblower or the perpetrators themselves?”

Candid answers to such questions are not only inadmissible in the military courtroom where Bradley Manning is on trial. Candor is also excluded from the national venues where the warfare state preens itself as virtue’s paragon.

Yet ongoing actions of the U.S. government have hugely boosted the propaganda impact and recruiting momentum of forces that Washington publicly describes as “the enemy.” Policies under the Bush and Obama administrations — in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and beyond, with hovering drones, missile strikes and night raids, at prisons such as Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Guantanamo and secret rendition torture sites — have “aided the enemy” on a scale so enormous that it makes the alleged (and fictitious) aid to named enemies from Manning’s leaks infinitesimal in comparison.

Blaming the humanist PFC messenger for “aiding the enemy” is an exercise in self-exculpation by an administration that cannot face up to its own vast war crimes.

While prosecuting Bradley Manning, the prosecution may name al-Qaeda, indigenous Iraqi forces, the Taliban or whoever. But the unnamed “enemy” — the real adversary that the Pentagon and the Obama White House are so eager to quash — is the incessant striving for democracy that requires informed consent of the governed.

The forces that top U.S. officials routinely denounce as “the enemy” will never threaten the power of the USA’s dominant corporate-military elites. But the unnamed “enemy” aided by Bradley Manning’s courageous actions — the people at the grassroots who can bring democracy to life beyond rhetoric — are a real potential threat to that power.

Accusations of aid and comfort to the enemy were profuse after Martin Luther King Jr. moved forward to expose the Johnson administration’s deceptions and the U.S. military’s atrocities. Most profoundly, with his courageous stand against the war in Vietnam, King earned his Nobel Peace Prize during the years after he won it in 1964.

Bradley Manning may never win the Nobel Peace Prize, but he surely deserves it. Close to 60,000 people have already signed a petition urging the Norwegian Nobel Committee to award the prize to Manning. To become a signer, click here.

Also, you can preview a kindred project on the “I Am Bradley Manning” site, where a just-released short video — the first stage of a longer film due out soon — features Daniel Ellsberg, Oliver Stone, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Phil Donahue, Alice Walker, Peter Sarsgaard, Wallace Shawn, Russell Brand, Moby, Tom Morello, Michael Ratner, Molly Crabapple, Davey D, Tim DeChristopher, Josh Stieber, Lt. Dan Choi, Hakim Green, Matt Taibbi, Chris Hedges, Allan Nairn, Leslie Cagan, Ahdaf Soueif and Jeff Madrick.

From many walks of life, our messages will become louder and clearer as Bradley Manning’s trial continues. He is guilty of “aiding the enemy” only if the enemy is democracy.

Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.

(Bruce B. Brugmann, or b3 as he signs his emails and blogs, edits and writes the Bruce blog on the Guardian website at sfbg.com.  He is the editor at large of The San Francisco Bay Guardian and editor and founder and co-publisher of the Guardian with his wife Jean Dibble, 1966-2012, now retired.) He can be contacted at bruce@sfbg.com b3).

New designers show their stuff at this weekend’s Asian Heritage Street Celebration

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The annual Asian Heritage Street Celebration and fashion fever may not be automatically associated in the brains of Bay Areans. But then, most Bay Areans probably are unacquainted with the work of Runway Couturier — the group behind this year’s festival finale, featuring local designers from all across the SF fashion world, on Sat/18.

The show is what Runway’s executive producer Fritz Lambandrake dubs a “little fashion show that could.” But in actually, this is one catwalk that’ll help small-scale fashionistas to realize large-scale dreams. Presenting various Bay Area designers, Runway Couturier promotes young hopefuls free of charge — and even supplies them with fabric, courtesy of sponsor Linda Blake of Discount Fabrics. It is Lambandrake’s goal to “to use fashion as a bridge between cultures and communities”, as he told the Guardian, which explains the show’s presence at this weekend’s Asian Heritage Street Celebration. The fair will also feature cooking demos, live musical performances, a car show, craft market, a blessing by Thai monks, and food galore.  

Although Lambandrake’s heritage lies elsewhere than the Asian continent, he says he feels honored to be a part of the event. San Francisco supervisor Jane Kim was the one responsible for hooking up Lambandrake and Asian Week Foundation, who produces the yearly street fair. “You should see her stiletto heels!” says Lambandrake of his well-shod politician connection.

Making their debut at the show three new designers: Sam Shan, Tina Maier, and Huab Vue. Shan, a 21-year-old Burmese political refugee, shows a collection inspired by the folktales of his homeland. Maier, a self-educated fiber artist, is a master manipulator of materials, and her collection is sure to be high-minded yet grounded, with a mishmash of thrift store finds, unique textiles., and re-purposed upholstery. Check out the AHSC site for a full list of designers. 

A preview of Tomboy Tailors‘ highly anticipated genderqueer debut collection will stalk the catwalk, and there will be a competition for the best designs of the day, judged by a discerning panel including drag mistress Donna Sachet and Supervisor Kim.

Runway Couturier at the Asian Heritage Street Celebration

Sat/18, 3:30pm

Larkin and Eddy, SF

www.runwaycouterier.com

 

Crazy sexy cruel

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FILM Long before VHS demon Sadako glared one eye through a tent of tangled black hair in 1998’s Ring (American viewers may switch that to “Samara” and “2002”), another angry, swampy-coiffed dame was doing her best to scare the bejesus out of ticket buyers. The year was 1825, and the kabuki play was called Yotsuya Kaidan. Ghost Story of Yotsuya, the 1959 version of that oft-filmed tale — which contains visual motifs made famous by J-horror — kicks off the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ titillatingly-titled “Girls! Guns! Ghosts! The Sensational Films of Shintoho” series (Thu/9-May 26).

Exploitation specialist Shintoho is often described as “the Japanese American International Pictures,” with output likened to Roger Corman’s oeuvre. The comparison is apt, what with the overlapping timelines (Shintoho was active from 1949-1961) and shared love of low-budget productions chockablock with daring, sleazy, violent, racy, and otherwise beyond-the-mainstream themes. Most of the films in “Girls!” are under 90 minutes, and a good portion of them are even shorter. Ghost Story of Yotsuya, directed by prolific Shintoho hand Nobuo Nakagawa, clocks in at a pulse-pounding 76 minutes.

It opens on a kabuki stage, with a macabre song hinting at what’s to come: “the greatest horror there is,” we’re warned, is “the fury of a woman maddened.” Though it takes nearly an hour to get to payback o’ clock, that allows plenty of time to pile up just cause: sleazy samurai Iemon woos pretty, naive Iwa (played, respectively, by studio faves Shigeru Amachi and Katsuko Wakasugi) after killing her suspicious father and shoving her sister’s beau over a waterfall. Unsurprisingly, he makes for a cruel, manipulative husband, using his wife for gambling collateral and feeding her “medicine for your circulation” once a younger, richer girl captures his attentions. The poison does a Phantom of the Opera-style number on Iwa’s face before hastening her death. “I will visit my hatred upon you,” Iwa’s pissed-off ghost declares, and boy, does she — no VCR required.

More cranky spirits populate Ghost Cat of Otama Pond (1960), which leans heavily on (blood) red and (supernatural) green lighting effects to weave its tale of, again, revenge from beyond the grave. This time, it’s revenge so patient it waits generations to cause havoc, cursing a contemporary woman who stumbles into an abandoned house when she and her fiancé keep tracing the same route through the woods in a Twilight Zone-ish frame story. (Pro-tip: maybe don’t declare, “I hate cats!” when you encounter one with witchy powers.) A flashback to centuries prior explores a feud between two families that encompasses forced marriages, haunted hairpins, horrific fires, bodies tossed in the titular pond, and a monster that takes on an oddly feline form.

Of course, not all of Shintoho’s films were period-pic screamers. A trio of black-and-white “Girls!” selections embrace pulpy, seedy, noirish characters and situations. Nakagawa’s Death Row Woman (1960) begins, ominously, as a posh family goes duck hunting. (“You could kill a person!” someone remarks of another character’s shooting skill.) Rebel daughter Kyoko (Miyuki Takakura) doesn’t want to marry the man her father has picked out for her — but her stepmother and stepsister are none too pleased with Kyoko’s own choice, for different reasons. When Daddy Dearest suddenly croaks, it’s a death sentence for Kyoko — who is actually guilty only of being shrill pain in the ass. Lightly lascivious woman-in-prison scenes (this isn’t 1983’s Chained Heat or anything) are followed by a daring, Fugitive-style escape, though ain’t nobody getting justice without suffering through a vat full of melodrama first.

Even more entertaining are the two films in “Girls!” directed by Teruo Ishii: 1958’s Flesh Pier and 1960’s Yellow Line. Both make great use of back-alley characters, with fedoras and fishnets to spare. Flesh Pier‘s action is set in Ginza, as an undercover cop who’s in love with a burlesque dancer investigates the city’s “trade in flesh;” also undercover is a female reporter hoping to get a big scoop on same. (This film contains a fashion-show scene in which nightie-clad models smoke cigarettes on the runway.) Meanwhile, Yellow Line follows a moody hitman (Amachi again) who kidnaps a dancer (a sassy Yoko Mihara) and drags her to Kobe’s red-light “Casbah” district, with her newspaper-reporter boyfriend in hot pursuit. (This film contains a hooker named “the Moor,” played by a white actress in blackface.)

Not available for preview, but likely as mind-blowing as any and all of the above: Michiyoshi Doi’s The Horizon Glitters (1960), described as a “black comedy about a prison break gone wrong;” Toshio Shimura’s 1956 Revenge of the Pearl Queen, about a bodacious, ass-kicking female pearl diver played by Michiko Maeda (a.k.a. “the first Japanese actress to appear in a nude scene in a mainstream film” … this film); and Kyotaro Namiki’s Vampire Bride (1960), in which a scarred young dancer transforms into a horrific, hairy beast. If a picture says a thousand words, the widely circulated still from this film positively shrieks them. 

 

“GIRLS! GUNS! GHOSTS! THE SENSATIONAL FILMS OF SHINTOHO”

May 9-26, $8-10

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

www.ybca.org

Food fight

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le.chicken.farmer@yahoo.com

SPORTS Did you see what Jed Lowrie (swoon) did last Wednesday, on the very day my column about him hit the streets? He propelled the A’s to their first win of the regular season, going 3-3 with a walk, the game-winning 2-run double, and a home run. In fact he hit two doubles that game, then two more the next — also a win.

This means he loves me too. Although . . . it’s hard to imagine he got a very good look from way down there on the field.

Well, I stand by everything I said about the new A’s shortstop. In fact, taking his lead, I double it.

Almost everything else about last week’s column, however, I have to retract.

Or correct. As in: of course the A’s record-breaking 20-game win streak was in 2002, not 2001. Last year was the 10-year anniversary, and last year was 2012. And math is math.

More importantly, and even more wrongly, I said that AT&T has better concessions than O.co.

What I meant by that careless assertion was that AT&T has a greater variety of fancier (and generally bad) things to eat for even more money than O.co. I know because Hedgehog and I got ourselves to two of those Bay Bridge Series warm-up games, one on each side of the bay, by way of our own li’l Spring Training.

Surprise surprise. I can’t believe a) how many people go to those games, b) how many innings they are willing to miss while standing in line for garlic fries, and c) that Oakland’s garlic fries are better than San Francisco’s.

What the — ?

I thought I remembered AT&T’s garlic fries being awesome, not to mention edible. True, their fryers, like Marco Scutaro, might not be in mid-season form, but you would think at least some of the fries would have at least some amount of crunch to them.

Nope. Greasy soggy seagull food, every single one.

O.co’s garlic fries had a little more crunch to them for a couple dollars less, but then they don’t have the gluten-free hot dog option over there, or gluten-free beer. I asked around, for my boo, who — believe it or not — is more into the game of the game than I am. Plus she was test-running a new score-keeping app she’d paid $10 for and couldn’t leave her seat.

At AT&T, I’ll tell you: the gluten-free stuff is at section 112 in the Promenade Level. Otherwise, you don’t have to walk far in any direction to find all kinds of tempting yummies. To name a few: carving board sandwiches, bacon-wrapped hot dogs, Chicago dogs, and, for the tourists, clam chowder bread bowls and Dungeness crab on sourdough.

After about four-and-a-half innings of prowling, I pulled the trigger on a Cha Cha Bowl from Orlando’s Caribbean Barbecue in the center field food court, and I paraded it back to our seats like a hunter bringing home her kill: Look, Boo! It’s gluten free too!

Yeah, but not very good. Dry jerk chicken, white rice and black beans, with shredded carrots and zucchini. Best thing about it was the pineapple salsa on top.

Whereas . . . and this is a big whereas: O.co’s gluten-free kill turned out to be barbecue barbecue. As in sloppy, sopping spareribs and sliced pork, or Ameri-cue. And it also turned out to be awesome. Not just for stadium food, either. It was legitimately good ‘cue. And to think, last season I couldn’t even find barbecue at Oakland games. Now this: Ribs n’ Things.

Ribs n’ Things, it turns out, is an actual restaurant in Hayward, and — at the risk of reviewing a restaurant in my sports column — let me tell you that I would go there, if I ever went to Hayward. That’s how good it was. The best of both stadiums.

Okay. I conclude my two-part baseball season preview with sauce on my pants, yes, and the smell of barbecue under my fingernails. But as much as I love these things, and Jed Lowrie, the closing shot comes from the first night of the Bay Bridge Series, in San Francisco.

Not too cold, but not exactly warm either. It’s been a beautiful Spring, rain and all. Hedgehog and I are huddled together in the upper deck, facing the bay, and there is that classic late-inning blizzard of seagulls going on around us. Really, it looks like it’s snowing big white bird-shaped flakes, aglow in the stadium lights. The game and the greasy garlic fries have long since lost our interest, but this is something. It feels like we are on a first date. There’s a big orange moon rising up over the water, attended by wisps of clouds. A plane flies in front of it. Its lights go: blink.

Food fight

3

le.chicken.farmer@yahoo.com

IN THE GAME Did you see what Jed Lowrie (swoon) did last Wednesday, on the very day my column about him hit the streets? He propelled the A’s to their first win of the regular season, going 3-3 with a walk, the game-winning 2-run double, and a home run. In fact he hit two doubles that game, then two more the next — also a win.

This means he loves me too. Although . . . it’s hard to imagine he got a very good look from way down there on the field.

Well, I stand by everything I said about the new A’s shortstop. In fact, taking his lead, I double it.

Almost everything else about last week’s column, however, I have to retract.

Or correct. As in: of course the A’s record-breaking 20-game win streak was in 2002, not 2001. Last year was the ten-year anniversary, and last year was 2012. And math is math.

More importantly, and even more wrongly, I said that AT&T has better concessions than O.co.

What I meant by that careless assertion was that AT&T has a greater variety of fancier (and generally bad) things to eat for even more money than O.co. I know because Hedgehog and I got ourselves to two of those Bay Bridge Series warm-up games, one on each side of the bay, by way of our own li’l Spring Training.

Surprise surprise. I can’t believe a) how many people go to those games, b) how many innings they are willing to miss while standing in line for garlic fries, and c) that Oakland’s garlic fries are better than San Francisco’s.

What the-?

I thought I remembered AT&T’s garlic fries being awesome, not to mention edible. True, their fryers, like Marco Scutaro, might not be in mid-season form, but you would think at least some of the fries would have at least some amount of crunch to them.

Nope. Greasy soggy seagull food, every single one.

O.co’s garlic fries had a little more crunch to them for a couple dollars less, but then they don’t have the gluten-free hot dog option over there, or gluten-free beer. I asked around, for my boo, who — believe it or not — is more into the game of the game than I am. Plus she was test-running a new score-keeping app she’d paid $10 for and couldn’t leave her seat.

At AT&T, I’ll tell you: the gluten-free stuff is at section 112 in the Promenade Level. Otherwise, you don’t have to walk far in any direction to find all kinds of tempting yummies. To name a few: carving board sandwiches, bacon-wrapped hot dogs, Chicago dogs, and, for the tourists, clam chowder bread bowls and Dungeness crab on sourdough.

After about four-and-a-half innings of prowling, I pulled the trigger on a Cha Cha Bowl from Orlando’s Caribbean Barbecue in the center field food court, and I paraded it back to our seats like a hunter bringing home her kill: Look, Boo! It’s gluten free too!

Yeah, but not very good. Dry jerk chicken, white rice and black beans, with shredded carrots and zucchini. Best thing about it was the pineapple salsa on top.

Whereas . . . and this is a big whereas: O.co’s gluten-free kill turned out to be barbecue barbecue. As in sloppy, sopping spareribs and sliced pork, or Ameri-cue. And it also turned out to be awesome. Not just for stadium food, either. It was legitimately good ‘cue. And to think, last season I couldn’t even find barbecue at Oakland games. Now this: Ribs n’ Things.

Ribs n’ Things, it turns out, is an actual restaurant in Hayward, and — at the risk of reviewing a restaurant in my sports column — let me tell you that I would go there, if I ever went to Hayward. That’s how good it was. The best of both stadiums.

Okay. I conclude my two-part baseball season preview with sauce on my pants, yes, and the smell of barbecue under my fingernails. But as much as I love these things, and Jed Lowrie, the closing shot comes from the first night of the Bay Bridge Series, in San Francisco.

Not too cold, but not exactly warm either. It’s been a beautiful Spring, rain and all. Hedgehog and I are huddled together in the upper deck, facing the bay, and there is that classic late-inning blizzard of seagulls going on around us. Really, it looks like it’s snowing big white bird-shaped flakes, aglow in the stadium lights. The game and the greasy garlic fries have long since lost our interest, but this is something. It feels like we are on a first date. There’s a big orange moon rising up over the water, attended by wisps of clouds. A plane flies in front of it. Its lights go: blink.

 

Boooooooooooks: 2 spots to buy ’em cheap

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Since you might be having a hard time finding the funds for your 1. your ticket to Phu Quoc and 2. the Opening Ceremony-Spring Breakers mall trash collection you’ll need for those white sand beaches, you should at least let us help you out with the third essential component of your hypothetical spring escape: books!

You’ll need them for those hypothetically long hours in the sun, and lucky you, two epic sales are going on shortly so you can save your ducats for neon logo cropped tees and duty-free Toblerones. You might also hit up Adobe Books, which has been served its final eviction notice in the face of incoming yuppie muck *sad face*

Friends of the San Francisco Library book fair

What: 250,000 specimens of all kinds of media, the sale of which will not only augment your lit-loving vacay, but also go towards supporting the good old SF Public Library, YAY. If you’re a Friend of the public library with a capital “F,” you can hit up the space on Tuesday night for a special preview, which we hope goes down like those videos from the ’80s of crazed parents trying to bumrush Toys ‘R’ Us for the best Cabbage Patch Doll.

Cop: There’s gonna be hardcover books for $3, and $1 DVDs and CDs since no one knows what those things are anymore — but for the purposes of your Vietnam getaway, immerse in the $2 paperback section. (Please, not The Beach.)

Fri/3-Sun/7, 10am-6pm, free. Fort Mason Center Pavilion, SF. www.friendssfpl.org

Chronicle Books “Back to School” warehouse sale

What: James Franco specifically told us that spring break was forever, but apparently Chronicle Books didn’t get the memo — it’s celebrating the childrens’ return to classes with this storewide sale — selected titles are 65 percent off. 

Cop: You can get the discounted price on all of Chronicle’s titles in travel, literature, food and drink, etc. We are particularly intrigued by the new NPR book, though the book of Andy Warhol fashion sketches may be better suited to your hypothetical vacay.

April 11-12, 9am-7pm; April 13, 10am-3pm, free. Chronicle Books warehouse, 680 Second St., SF. www.chroniclebooks.com

Internet Cat Video Festival pussyfoots its way to Oakland

1

The druggish trip of a heavy Youtube session: you start out looking for that innovative new TED Talk and find yourself, hours later, fixated on a video of sloths in a bucket. How you got there you don’t know.

Sleepy sloths are dangerous to productivity but delve into the endless abyss of cat videos on the web and you might not see the sun for a week. This brings us to our next point of fact: The Internet Cat Video Festival is coming to Oakland May 11, and you can buy tickets starting today.

The EVENT will be held at the Great Wall of Oakland – the large-scale urban projection installation on West Grand Avenue between Broadway and Valley Streets. Proceeds will benefit the East Bay SPCA, so you can feel marginally good about the obsession you share with every other person within swiping distance of an Internet device.

Last year’s fest

The festival got its start last year as a modest award ceremony event organized by the Walker Arts Center in Minnesota. Modest as in over 10,000 people showed up to the center’s grassy field for furry fun. Turns out people really like cats. This year the festival is touring nationally. 

The main event doesn’t start until 8:30pm on May 11, but there will be enough feline festivities to occupy the entire day. Jewelry, clothing, artwork, and meow kitsch will be available from an array of vendors as part of the fest’s “arts and cats” area. Live bands will be playing cat-themed music – more specifics on this later. There will even be a cat-themed aerial performance by the Great Wall’s artist in residence Bandaloop – a pioneer in vertical dance group. Food trucks, etc. 

Those who like their cat vids screened in a more, ahem, exclusive environment should check out the VIP preview screening of the festival’s offerings at the Oakland Museum of California on May 10 at 7pm in the James Moore Theatre. Following the screening will be short talks from the Walker Art Center’s program director Scott Stulen and OMCA’s senior art curator Rene deGuzman. 

The VIP screening may be your best bet if you’re not a crowd kitty. 5,000 or so people are expected to head to Oakland for the big day. 

Internet Cat Video Festival

May 11, festival starts at 2pm, screenings at 8:30pm, $10-75

Great Wall of Oakland

Broadway and W Grand, Oakl.

www.oaklandcatvidfest.com