Punk

Counting chickens

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› le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS When it’s cold and dark in the trees, and drippy. When I get cabin feverish. When the dog bites, when the bee stings, when Weirdo the Cat camps out on my forehead and taps my cheeks all night to make sure I don’t drift … when my witchy, woodsy ways bite my own bad ass and instead of chicken farmerly I start to feel isolated and scared, that’s when my bathtub steps up. Or, more literally, I step in.

If you ask me, I’ve got the sweetest bathing situation in the whole Bay Area. Yeah, rats in the chicken coop, yeah, skunks under my shack, yeah, my clothes and me smell like smoke all the time (at best), yeah, it’s been three days since I saw another human being, yeah, raiding Dumpsters for firewood, yeah, washboard washing and an indoor clothesline … but at least I get to take a bath like this. Outside. Smell of eucalyptus, sight of my raspberry-tipped toes against a California-blue sky, the creaking of redwoods, taste of popcorn, or chicken.

And then the sound of chicken too, a live one making that very particular sound live ones make when something has teeth in them. Or, in this case, talons. A hawk’s got my chicken.

But a farmer who bathes out of doors has a say in this, see? Indoor bathtub, or worse, a shower … forget about it. Your girl is someone else’s dinner. There was a corner of a woodpile and a wall of a coop between me and the action. I couldn’t even see my adversary, at first, let alone get a good angle on it, from where I soaked. But if there’s one thing the English-speaking predators of west Sonoma County will tell you, it’s that the pretty little kook in the old white boat does not throw like a girl. She’s got toys, shampoo bottles, stiff-bristled brushes, bars of soap, and a big, slow, loopy curveball that she’s not afraid to use, behind in the count or behind a wall and a woodpile.

This is me talking again, and I mean to tell you (in case you don’t know from personal experience): there’s something enormously gratifying about spooking off four-foot wing-spanned, razor-beaked, bloodthirsty birds of prey with a rubber ducky. You wouldn’t think it possible, but then, you haven’t seen my rubber ducky. It’s black with a pink mohawk and an A-for-anarchy tattooed to the side of its head. Not no standard-issue Bert and Ernie model, no.

So it turns out that big bad hawks are every bit as skittish about anarchy as, say, my dad, or most people. Fwop fwop fwop fwop … and awayyyyy.

Who knew?

But this isn’t the Nature Channel. Sockywonk, who happens to have given me my punk rocker rubber ducky, moved and then moved again, as I was saying. Me and her little hockey player boyfriend Flower "The Fury" Flurry helped with the haul. Two weekends in a row! And after the second one Socky took us to dinner. Technically, we didn’t know she was going to pay, or we’d have held out for sushi instead of ducking into the first cheapo Mexican/Salvadorean joint we saw, which was Restaurante Familiar, Sockywonk’s new neighborhood being the Excelsior District.

It’s a cozy, comfy, cheerful, friendly, tasty little place. The fried plantains were great. The black beans were great. The pupusas were great. Chicken soup, great. Enchiladas with green sauce, great.

The chicken tamale was great. It had whole chickpeas in it, and was wrapped in a banana leaf instead of a corn husk. That’s Salvadoran style. Great.

Everything was great, but for my money (or, for the sake of accuracy, Sockywonk’s) the tamale is the way to go, because for $5.75 it comes with beans, rice, and salad. And that’s more than a meal. It’s a meal and a nap.

I count chickens in my sleep. It’s not like counting sheep, or blessings, for one thing because I’m already asleep. I don’t need help going to sleep. Thanks to Weirdo the Cat, I don’t need help waking up, either. I count chickens because, in my heart of hearts, I suppose, they are exactly what I have.

RESTAURANTE FAMILIAR

Sun.–Thu.: 10 a.m.–10 p.m.; Fri.–Sat.: 10 a.m.–11 p.m.

4499 Mission, SF

(415) 334-6100

Beer and wine

V/MC

L.E. Leone’s new book is Big Bend (Sparkle Street Books), a collection of short fiction.

New from Jawbreaker’s Blake – Thorns of Life

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Signs: Thorns of Life in Brooklyn.

Whither Jawbreaker? Well, vocalist Blake Schwarzenbach is back, alongside Aaron Cometbus (Cometbus zine, Pinhead Gunpowder) and Daniela Sea (The L Word), with a new band, Thorns of Life. The punk combo performs at a special early show tonight, Jan. 26, with Pins of Light and Songs for Mom. As Hemlock Tavern booker Anthony Bedard says, “a not-to-be-missed chance to see them in something smaller than a sports arena!”

THORNS OF LIFE
With Pins of Light and Songs for Mom
Mon/26, 7 p.m., $6
Hemlock Tavern
1131 Polk, SF
(415) 923-0923

Fresh jam

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER The perfectly passive postmodern approach to pop nostalgia? Allow the milky waves of 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s retro navel-gazer rehash to simply wash over you — like so many warm, narcotic jets of synthetic baby formula. The opposite tact is the one that San Francisco trio Mi Ami takes: reject the rockist, retread trappings of the old and stale and make new and likely original sounds from a place of authenticity and openness. Breathe. Good. An excellent example might be Mi Ami’s recent spasm of songwriting after the completion of their debut, Watersports, out Feb. 17 on Quarterstick: the jams weren’t quite "up to snuff," as vocalist-guitarist Daniel Martin-McCormick puts it. But the essential flow was restored after drummer Damon Palermo spoke up in favor of letting the songs flow and allowing the changes to happen naturally rather than getting clogged with details.

"We started opening the songs up and started letting the changes happen naturally," explains the clear-eyed Martin-McCormick on this clear-skied, brilliant, balmy winter day in the Mission District. "I feel like when it works, it’s really great because it doesn’t seem like something locked in by something like repetitions of four. But at the same time, when it doesn’t work it can be kind of frustrating because it’s just like trying to have a conversation when you’re just not feeling it. It has to be like a lived experience. You can’t fake it."

You might not know it from glancing at the tall, lanky, check-shirted bandmates stalking down Alabama Street in search of coffee and nutrients at Atlas Cafe, but Martin-McCormick — a former member of Dischord punk outfit Black Eyes along with Mi Ami bassist Jacob Long — and the soft-spoken Palermo are pop philosophers of sorts: amiable, laid-back, yet ready to hold forth politely and passionately on their favorite disco singles and free jazz LPs, the multiple meanings one might glean from the title Watersports, or the role African funk guitar might play in, say, pulsing workouts like "The Man in Your House."

It’s easy to get lost in Martin-McCormick’s high-pitched, keening vocals, equal parts no wave nervousness and androgynous nerve; his bursts of scratched-out guitar skronk; Palermo’s primal-power beats; and Long’s reassuringly melodic bass lines. But Mi Ami never over-thinks its lengthy forays into that anxious and pleasure-strewn interzone between improv and noise, space-is-the-place dub and neverending party jams. Like groups such as !!! and the Rapture and locals à la Tussle and Jonas Reinhardt, which Palermo also drums for, Mi Ami sounds as if it was bred on hardcore’s aggression and reborn on a seething dance floor.

Martin-McCormick and Palermo met two years ago, after relocating from the East Coast and Vancouver respectively, while performing at an Adobe Book Shop art opening. The one thing they were sure of: they didn’t want to be a rock band. "Boring!" blurts Martin-McCormick.

"We are a rock band," says Palermo mildly in Atlas’ noisy back patio. "But you know what we’re talking about. There’s a lot of cool bands that are rock bands but a lot of it is a default setup, the structure of the songs and instrumentation."

"I think we came to be a guitar, bass, and drums trio very much on our terms," Martin-McCormick offers. "I didn’t want to play guitar when I started, but I realized that was what I’m best at and began to find ways to play it that suited what I was looking for." Their resistance to rock habit was helped by the fact that Palermo didn’t own a drum set: at first the duo had only two drums between them. They acquired bits as they progressed, while relying on a janky drum machine prone to crapping out at crucial moments — like their September 2007 opening date for No Age at Bottom of the Hill.

The turning point arrived when the twosome ditched the drum machine and put out a Craigslist ad for a bass player in ’07. "We got a few responses," says Martin-McCormick. "One was super confrontational. I wrote that we’re into disco, gamelan, and no wave — and no old people. We wanted someone who was kind of our age-ish. I just didn’t want an 48-year-old dude who was like, ‘I just need to jam!’ This guy wrote back and said, ‘How do you think gamelan musicians learn? They respect their elders, blah-blah-blah. You should go fuck off and die!’ Whoa!"

The second response: a hip-hop producer working with an "awful singer-songwriter." The third: Long, who happened to be roaming Craigslist during his day job.

"There was no going back after that," says Martin-McCormick. Listening to the forward-facing future-rock of Watersports, I’d say there’s little fear of that scenario. *

MI AMI

Fri/23, 10 p.m., $10

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

www.bottomofthehill.com

ROCK FOR LOVERS

THE ETTES


The primal beat band got theirs — where’s yours? Thurs/22, 8 p.m., $10. Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell, SF. www.rickshawstop.com

E-ZEE TIGER


One-man massive energy generator Anthony Petrovic rouses himself from dormancy. With Wooden Shjips and Hank IV. Thurs/22, 9 p.m., $7. Eagle Tavern, 398 12th St., SF. www.sfeagle.com

WAVVES


Going big with bristly, lo-fi garage rock. Fri/23, 9 p.m., $16–$18. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. www.gamh.com

AZTECA


The sprawling fusion combo including Pete Escovedo and Sheila E. rocks for autism awareness. With War, El Chicano, and Los Cenzontles. Sat/24, 7:20 p.m., $45–$75. Warfield, 982 Market, SF. www.goldenvoice.com

THE PHENOMENAUTS


The selfless Oakland space-rockers dish out For All Mankind (Springman). Sat/24, 9 p.m., $13. Slim’s, 33 11th St., SF. www.slims-sf.com

JAY REATARD


He’s watching you watching him. With Nobunny and Bare Wires. Sun/25, 9 p.m., $15. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

Super Ego: Nonprofit drag queens on fire

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Wow, oh wow — not only is San Francisco’s premiere punk-mess drag queen Anna Conda hosting a very-special-guest version of her weekly Charlie Horse party this Friday, BUT she’ll then be retracting her greedy, greedy claws for a really good cause on Saturday afternoon at The Mix bar in the Castro. Sleeplessness!

annaconda091a.jpg
Anna Conda: doin’ good, whatever it takes

She’ll be hosting a beer bust — featuring a gaggle of too-wild and possibly just-assembled drag performances — to help out Community Housing Partnership, a lovely local nonprofit which houses formerly-homeless people. For ONLY $10, you can mingle with the rock stars of indie drag and refill your little plastic beer cup as much as you like. For a good cause! Plus, a raffle.

Anna Conda’s Sublebrity Beer Bust for CHP
Sat/17, 3-7pm, $10
The Mix
4086 18th St., SF
www.sfmixbar.com

Local Artist of the Week

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169-localartist.jpg

LOCAL ARTIST David Young

TITLE Untitled

BIO A San Francisco resident for just over five years, David Young draws inspiration from postapocalyptic films, punk music, street art, graphic novels, and war photography to present a damaged and hostile vision of SF and its place in America. All of the work in his "Live Forever" series is executed with Micron8 pens on Strathmore Bristol and American Masters paper.

SHOW "David Young: Live Forever," Thurs/15 through Feb. 14 (reception Thurs/15, 6–9 p.m.). Babylon Falling, 1017 Bush, SF. (415) 345-1017, www.babylonfalling.com

WEB www.myspace.com/dyoungv

Mo Biggie

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Wait for it, wait for it: the moment when Jamal Woolard as Notorious B.I.G., a.k.a. Biggie Smalls, a.k.a. Big Poppa, utters, with admirable understatement, "Mo money, mo problems." The woman he married three days after he met her, vocalist Faith Evans (a sad-eyed Antonique Smith), is pregnant but estranged; his spunky protégé Lil’ Kim (Naturi Naughton) is hopping mad that her lover-protector-mentor has dropped her and is instead bossing her in the studio; his original baby mama is miffed that his daughter gets zero Big Poppa time, and his ex-BFF Tupac Shakur (Anthony Mackie) thinks Biggie is out to get him, and the East Coast vs. West Coast beef is now fully fired up. ‘Nuff said.

"Mo Money Mo Problems" is the obvious alternate title for Notorious, which has the ring of a men’s cologne by Sean "I Am King" Combs, aka Puff Daddy, aka P. Diddy, aka Diddy, the film’s executive producer. It’s certainly more glammy — and feeds into the mythmaking that Combs has been so adept at when it comes to his Bad Boy artists — than Unbelievable: The Life, Death, and Afterlife of the Notorious B.I.G. (Three Rivers, 2004), the title of the book by Cheo Hodari Coker that this biopic is based on.

The drive-by shooters who killed the legendary rapper, born Christopher Wallace, at the far-too-young age of 24, remain cloaked in mystery, despite the attention given the MC’s murder in Randall Sullivan’s 2002 book, LAbyrinth (Grove/Atlantic) and Nick Broomfield’s ’02 doc Biggie and Tupac, and his death is still embroiled in knotty intrigue, having triggered multiple wrongful-death claims against the Los Angeles Police Department. But of course, history is written by the winners — and those happen to be Combs and Notorious‘ producers, Biggie’s mother Voletta Wallace and Biggie managers Wayne Barrow and Mark Pitts — and in the end, they prefer to skip the speculation and allegations of conspiracy surrounding the rapper’s unsolved murder and focus on the love.

So much like recent musicmaker biopics à la 2007’s Control, which privileged the perspective of Joy Division frontperson Ian Curtis’ wife over his bandmates’, there’s an element of noticeably selective memory-picking to Notorious — even as it tries to play fair with those outside the equation, such as Shakur and Lil’ Kim. The latter has slammed the movie, according to MTV: she believes it hews to the version of history as written by Biggie’s mother and wife and portrays her inaccurately.

Still, director George Tillman Jr. (Men of Honor, Barbershop) seems to have thrived on the tension between a mother who adored Biggie but disapproved of his criminal activities, and label heads and managers aware that the dope-dealing, dues-paying gangsta grind girding Notorious B.I.G.’s lyrics must be shown to authenticate the first-person experiential honesty the rapper was known for. Thus we get a multidimensional Biggie — the big-kid vulnerability he showed to his moms and his "Faith-Faith," as well as the tough, rock-slinging-to-pregnant-crackheads, money-making front. Plenty of respect is also given to the MC’s art, which this rags-to-riches/gats-to-bitches tale (with much due given to a kind of golden-age of hip-hop label patronage in the form of Puffy [Derek Luke] and Biggie’s friendship) reverently visualizes on the street, in the basement, in the studio, and on the arena stage.

Putting his interest in street-level soul, characters less than well-represented in mainstream Hollywood, and his touch with rappers to work, Tillman subtly injects more cinematic interest into his already-dramatic material than it might have had on the page. Biggie’s childhood is washed with glowy, golden hues, while his time dealing on the street is leached of hues and clad in corroded grays, blacks, whites, and browns, until the MC battles another rapper on the sidewalk and color begins to enter the picture.

And unlike 2008’s Cadillac Records, which bought into the overt displays of bling that talent can bring, Tillman and company give adequate shrift to the musicmaking that built Biggie’s renown: the mic is shot as if it’s a grail, swathed in a silvery aura. The symbols of power — such as the Big Daddy Kane–like throne Biggie mounts — speak louder than his kicks, cribs, or cars. And the scenes in which Woolard actually raps — particularly in a basement scene after he emerges from prison and a bout of lyric writing and soul searching — are believable and compelling: flecks of his spit shimmer in the harsh light. Woolard, who grew up blocks from Biggie’s original hood and had a promising career until a shooting in front of NYC’s Hot 97, is the perfect choice to portray the man.

Notorious‘ melodramatic, overly amped conclusion may ring a bit artificial with its drawn-out return to the opening scenes: as "Hypnotize"’s "Rise" sample ripples through the dancers, Notorious B.I.G. says, in flashback, that he’s finally found peace, he’s become a man, and, well, he’s Ready to Die (Bad Boy, 1994), to crib the title of his classic debut. But I dare anyone to not get choked up by Notorious‘ coda, as Voletta Wallace, portrayed with grand-dame grit by Angela Bassett, looks out on the crowd surrounding her son’s NYC funeral procession, playing his music and flinging their arms, and realizes that, though she never quite trusted the easy money and fast friends surrounding her son, Biggie will always be remembered for his way with words.

NOTORIOUS opens Fri/16 in the Bay Area

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JUST PLAYING

BRIGHTBLACK MORNING LIGHT


It’s not a hologram: the roving musicmakers return to the region they once called home. Wed/14, 8 p.m., $15. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

LOS YEUX NOIR


They’re dark-eyed and infatuated with gypsy, Yiddish, and Manouche jazz. Wed/14, 8 and 10 p.m., $20–<\d>$25. Yoshi’s SF, 1330 Fillmore, SF. sf.yoshis.com

LENKA


Cutie-pie pop oozes from the Aussie charmer who once studied acting with Cate Blanchett. Thurs/15, 8 p.m., $13–<\d>$15. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

WILD WEEKEND


We’re lost in an all-girl punk rock wilderness. Sat/17, 9:30 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

FOUNTAINS OF WAYNE


The popsters go acoustic with tunes from an album-in-progress. Sun/18–Mon/19, 8 p.m., $25. Café Du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. www.cafedunord.com.

BARRINGTON LEVY


The acclaimed live performer taps Obama samples for his new single, "No War." Tues/20, 9 p.m., $28. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

The Hard Times Handbook

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We all have high hopes for the new administration. We’d all like to believe that the recession will end soon, that jobs will be plentiful, health care available to all, and affordable housing built in abundance.

But the grim reality is that hard times are probably around for a while longer, and it may get worse before it gets better.

Don’t despair: the city is full of fun things to do on the cheap. There are ways to save money and enjoy life at the same time. If you’re in trouble — out of work, out of food, facing eviction — there are resources around to help you. What follows is a collection of tips, techniques, and ideas for surviving the ongoing depression that’s the last bitter legacy of George W. Bush.

BELOW YOU’LL FIND OUR TIPS ON SCORING FREE, CHEAP, AND LOW-COST WONDERS. (Click here for the full page version with jumps, if you can’t see it.)

MUSIC AND MOVIES

CLOTHING

FOOD

CONCERTS

WHEELS

HEALTH CARE

SHELTER

MEALS

COCKTAILS

DATE NIGHTS

YOGA

PLUS:

HOW TO KEEP YOUR APARTMENT

HOW TO GET UNEMPLOYMENT

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FREE MUSIC AND MOVIES

For a little extra routine effort, I’ve managed to make San Francisco’s library system my Netflix/GreenCine, rotating CD turntable, and bookstore, all rolled into one. And it’s all free.

If you’re a books-music-film whore like me, you find your home maxed out with piles of the stuff … and not enough extra cash to feed your habits. So I’ve decided to only buy my favorites and to borrow the rest. We San Franciscans have quite a library system at our fingertips. You just have to learn how to use it.

Almost everyone thinks of a library as a place for books. And that’s not wrong: you can read the latest fiction and nonfiction bestsellers, and I’ve checked out a slew of great mixology/cocktail recipe books when I want to try new drinks at home. I’ve hit up bios on my favorite musicians, or brought home stacks of travel books before a trip (they usually have the current year’s edition of at least one travel series for a given place, whether it be Fodor’s, Lonely Planet, or Frommer’s).

But there’s much more. For DVDs, I regularly check Rotten Tomatoes’ New Releases page (www.rottentomatoes.com/dvd/new_releases.php) for new DVD releases. Anything I want to see, I keep on a list and search www.sfpl.org for those titles every week. About 90 percent of my list eventually comes to the library, and most within a few weeks of the release date.

And such a range! I recently checked out the Oscar-nominated animated foreign film, Persepolis, the entire first season of Mad Men, tons of documentaries, classics (like a Cyd Charisse musical or Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy’s catalog), even Baby Mama (sure, it sucked, but I can’t resist Tina Fey).

A music fanatic can find virtually every style, and even dig into the history of a genre. I’ve found CDs of jazz and blues greats, including Jelly Roll Morton, John Lee Hooker, Bessie Smith, Muddy Waters, kitschy lounge like Martin Denny and singer Julie London, and have satiated rap cravings with the latest Talib Kwali, Lyrics Born, Missy Elliott, T.I. or Kanye (I won’t tell if you won’t).

Warning: there can be a long "holds" list for popular new releases (e.g., Iron Man just came out and has about 175). When this happens, Just get in the queue — you can request as many as 15 items simultaneously online (you do have a library card, right?) You’ll get an e-mail when your item comes in and you can check the status of your list any time you log in. Keep DVDs a full seven days (three weeks for books and CDs) and return ’em to any branch you like.

I’ve deepened my music knowledge, read a broader range of books, and canceled GreenCine. Instead, I enjoy a steady flow of free shit coming my way each week. And if I get bored or the novelty of Baby Mama wears off, I return it and free up space in my mind (and on my shelf) for more. (Virginia Miller)

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STYLE FOR A SONG

Shhh. The first rule about thrifting, to paraphrase mobsters and hardcore thrift-store shoppers, is don’t talk about thrifting — and that means the sites of your finest thrift scores. Diehard thrifters guard their favorite shops with jealous zeal: they know exactly what it’s like to wade through scores of stained T-shirts, dress-for-success suits, and plastic purses and come up with zilcherooni. They also know what it’s like to ascend to thrifter nirvana, an increasingly rarified plane where vintage Chanel party shoes and cool dead-stock Western wear are sold for a song.

Friendships have been trashed and shopping carts upended in the revelation of these much-cherished thrift stores, where the quest for that ’50s lamb’s fur jacket or ’80s acid-washed zipper jeans — whatever floats your low-budg boat — has come to a rapturous conclusion. It’s a war zone, shopping on the cheap, out there — and though word has it that the thrifting is excellent in Vallejo and Fresno, our battle begins at home. When the sample sales, designer runoff outlets, resale dives, and consignment boutiques dry up, here’s where you’ll find just what you weren’t looking for — but love, love, love all the same.

Community Thrift, 623 Valencia, SF. (415) 861-4910, www.communitythrift.bravehost.com. Come for the writer’s own giveaways (you can bequeath the funds raised to any number of local nonprofits), and leave with the rattan couches, deco bureaus, records, books and magazines, and an eccentric assortment of clothing and housewares. I’m still amazed at the array of intriguing junk that zips through this spot, but act fast or you’ll miss snagging that Victorian armoire.

Goodwill As-Is Store, 86 11th St., SF. (415) 575-2197, www.sfgoodwill.org. This is the archetype and endgamer of grab-and-tumble thrifting. We’re talking bins, people — bins of dirt cheap and often downright dirty garb that the massive Goodwill around the corner has designated unsuitable, for whatever reason. Dive into said bins, rolled out by your, ahem, gracious Goodwill hosts throughout the day, along with your competition: professional pickers for vintage shops, grabby vintage people, and ironclad bargain hunters. They may not sell items by the pound anymore — now its $2.25 for a piece of adult clothing, 50 cents to $1 for babies’ and children’s garb, $4 for leather jackets, etc. — but the sense of triumph you’ll feel when you discover a tattered 1930s Atonement-style poison-ivy green gown, or a Dr. Pimp-enstein rabbit-fur patchwork coat, or cheery 1950s tablecloths with negligible stainage, is indescribable.

Goodwill Industries, 3801 Third St., SF. (415) 641-4470, www.sfgoodwill.org Alas, not all Goodwills are created equal: some eke out nothing but stale mom jeans and stretched-out polo shirts. But others, like this Hunter’s Point Goodwill, abound with on-trend goodies. At least until all of you thrift-hungry hordes grab my junk first. Tucked into the corner of a little strip mall, this Goodwill has all those extremely fashionable hipster goods that have been leached from more populated thrift pastures or plucked by your favorite street-savvy designer to "repurpose" as their latest collection: buffalo check shirts, wolf-embellished T-shirts, Gunne Sax fairy-princess gowns, basketball jerseys, and ’80s-era, multicolored zany-print tops that Paper Rad would give their beards for.

Salvation Army, 1500 Valencia, SF. (415) 643-8040, www.salvationarmyusa.org. The OG of Mission District thrifting, this Salv has been the site of many an awesome discovery. Find out when the Army puts out the new goods. The Salvation soldiers may have cordoned off the "vintage" — read: higher priced — items in the store within the store, but there are still plenty of old books, men’s clothing, and at times hep housewares and Formica kitchen tables to be had: I adore the rainbow Mork and Mindy parka vest I scored in the boys’ department, as well as my mid-century-mod mustard-colored rocker.

Savers, 875 Main, Redwood City. (650) 364-5545, www.savers.com When the ladies of Hillsborough, Burlingame, and the surrounding ‘burbs shed their oldest, most elegant offerings, the pickings can’t be beat at this Savers. You’ll find everything from I. Magnin cashmere toppers, vintage Gucci tweed, and high-camp ’80s feather-and-leather sweaters to collectible dishware, antique ribbons, and kitsch-cute Holly Hobbie plaques. Strangest, oddly covetable missed-score: a psychiatrist’s couch.

Thrift Town, 2101 Mission, SF. (415) 861-1132, www.thrifttown.com. When all else fails, fall back on this department store-sized megalith. Back in the day, thrift-oldsters tell me, they’d dig out collectible paintings and ’50s-era bikes. Now you’ll have to grind deeply to land those finds, though they’re here: cute, mismatched, mid-century chairs; the occasional designer handbag; and ’60s knit suits. Hint: venture into less picked-over departments like bedding. (Kimberly Chun)

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FREE FOOD

San Francisco will not let you starve. Even if you’re completely out of money, there are plenty of places and ways to fill your belly. Many soup kitchens operate out of churches and community centers, and lists can be downloaded and printed from freeprintshop.org and sfhomeless.net (which is also a great clearinghouse of information on social services in San Francisco.)Here’s a list of some of our favorites.

Free hot meals

Curry without Worry Healthy, soul pleasing Nepalese food to hungry people in San Francisco. Every Tues. 5:45–7 p.m. on the square at Hyde and Market streets.

Glide, 330 Ellis. Breakfast 8-9 a.m., lunch noon-1:30 p.m. everyday. Dinner 4-5:30 p.m., M-F.

St. Anthony Dining Room, 45 Jones, Lunch everyday 11:30 a.m.–1:30 p.m.

St Martin de Porres Hospitality House, 225 Potrero Ave. Best bowl of oatmeal in the city. Tues.-Sat. breakfast from 6:30-7:30 a.m., lunch from noon-2 pm.. Sun. brunch 9-10:30 a.m. Often vegetarian options.

Vegetarian

Food not Bombs Vegetarian soup and bread, but bring your own bowl. At the UN Plaza, Mon., 6 p.m.; Wed., 5:30 p.m. Also at 16th and Mission streets. Thurs. at 7:30 p.m.

Mother’s Kitchen, 7 Octavia, Fri., 2:30-3:30. Vegan options.

Iglesia Latina Americana de Las Adventistas Seventh Dia, 3024 24th St. Breakfast 9:30-11 a.m., third Sun. of the month.

Grab and go sandwiches

Glide, bag meals to go after breakfast ends at 9 a.m.

St. Peter and Paul Catholic Church, 666 Filbert. 4-5 p.m. every day.

Seniors

Curry Senior Center, 333 Turk. For the 60+ set. Breakfast 8-9 a.m., lunch 11:30 to noon every day.

Kimochi, 1840 Sutter St. Japanese-style hot lunch served 11:45 am (M-F). $1.50 donation per meal is requested. 60+ only with no one to assist with meals. Home deliveries available. 415-931-2287

St. Anthony Dining Room, 10:30-11:30 a.m., 59+, families, and people who can’t carry a tray.

Free groceries

San Francisco Food Bank A wealth of resources, from pantries with emergency food boxes to supplemental food programs. 415-282-1900. sffoodbank.org/programs

211 Dial this magic number and United Way will connect you with free food resources in your neighborhood — 24/7.

Low-cost groceries

Maybe you don’t qualify for food assistance programs or you just want to be a little thriftier — in which case the old adage that the early bird gets the metaphorical worm is apropos. When it comes to good food deals, timing can be everything. Here are a couple of handy tips for those of us who like to eat local, organic, and cheap. Go to Rainbow Grocery early and hit the farmers markets late. Rainbow has cheap and half-price bins in the bread and produce sections — but you wouldn’t know it if you’re a late-riser. Get there shortly after doors open at 9 a.m. for the best deals.

By the end of the day, many vendors at farmers markets are looking to unload produce rather than pack it up, so it’s possible to score great deals if you’re wandering around during the last half hour of the market. CAFF has a comprehensive list of Bay Area markets that you can download: guide.buylocalca.org/localguides.

Then there’s the Grocery Outlet (2001 Fourth St., Berkeley and 2900 Broadway, Oakland, www.groceryoutlets.com), which puts Wal-Mart to shame. This is truly the home of low-cost living. Grocery Outlet began in 1946 in San Francisco when Jim Read purchased surplus government goods and started selling them. Now Grocery Outlets are the West Coast’s version of those dented-can stores that sell discounted food that wasn’t ready for prime-time, or perhaps spent a little too long in the limelight.

Be prepared to eat what you find — options range from name brands with trashed labels to foodstuffs you’ve never seen before — but there are often good deals on local breads and cheeses, and their wine section will deeply expand you Two-Buck Chuck cellar. Don’t be afraid of an occasional corked bottle that you can turn into salad dressing, and be sure to check the dates on anything perishable. The Grocery Outlet Web site (which has the pimpest intro music ever) lists locations and ways to sign up for coupons and download a brochure on how to feed your family for $3 a day. (Amanda Witherell)

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LIVE MUSIC FOR NOTHING — AND KICKS FOR FREE

Music should be free. Everyone who has downloaded music they haven’t been given or paid for obviously believes this, though we haven’t quite made it to that ideal world where all professional musicians are subsidized — and given health care — by the government or other entities. But live, Clive? Where do can you catch fresh, live sounds during a hard-hitting, heavy-hanging economic downturn? Intrepid, impecunious sonic seekers know that with a sharp eye and zero dough, great sounds can be found in the oddest crannies of the city. You just need to know where to look, then lend an ear. Here are a few reliables — occasional BART station busks and impromptu Ocean Beach shows aside.

Some of the best deals — read: free — on world-class performers happen seasonally: in addition to freebie fests like Hardly Strictly Bluegrass every October and the street fairs that accompanying in fair weather, there’s each summer’s Stern Grove Festival. Beat back the Sunset fog with a picnic of bread, cheese, and cheap vino, though you gotta move fast to claim primo viewing turf to eyeball acts like Bettye Lavette, Seun Kuti and Egypt 80, and Allen Toussaint. Look for the 2009 schedule to be posted at www.sterngrove.org May 1.

Another great spot to catch particularly local luminaries is the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival, which runs from May to October. Rupa and the April Fishes, Brass Menazeri, Marcus Shelby Trio, Bayonics, and Omar Sosa’s Afreecanos Quintet all took their turn in the sun during the Thursday lunchtime concerts. Find out who’s slated for ’09 in early spring at www.ybgf.org.

All year around, shopkeeps support sounds further off the beaten path — music fans already know about the free, albeit usually shorter, shows, DJ sets, and acoustic performances at aural emporiums like Amoeba Music (www.amoeba.com) and Aquarius Records (www.aquariusrecords.org). Many a mind has been blown by a free blast of new sonics from MIA or Boris amid the stacks at Amoeba, the big daddy in this field, while Aquarius in-stores define coziness: witness last year’s intimate acoustic hootenanny by Deerhoof’s Satomi and Tenniscoats’ Saya as Oneone. Less regular but still an excellent time if you happen upon one: Adobe Books Backroom Gallery art openings (adobebooksbackroomgallery.blogspot.com), where you can get a nice, low-key dose of the Mission District’s art and music scenes converging. Recent exhibition unveilings have been topped off by performances by the Oh Sees, Boner Ha-chachacha, and the Quails.

Still further afield, check into the free-for-all, quality curatorial efforts at the Rite Spot (www.ritespotcafe.net), where most shows at this dimly lit, atmospheric slice of old-school cabaret bohemia are as free as the breeze and as fun as the collection of napkin art in back: Axton Kincaid, Brandy Shearer, Kitten on the Keys, Toshio Hirano, and Yard Sale have popped up in the past. Also worth a looky-loo are Thee Parkside‘s (www.theeparkside.com) free Twang Sunday and Happy Hour Shows: a rad time to check out bands you’ve never heard of but nonetheless pique your curiosity: Hukaholix, hell’s yeah! And don’t forget: every cover effort sounds better with a pint — all the better to check into the cover bands at Johnny Foley’s (www.johnnyfoleys.com), groove artists at Beckett’s Irish Pub in Berkeley (www.beckettsirishpub.com), and piano man Rod Dibble and his rousing sing-alongs at the Alley in Oakland (510-444-8505). All free of charge. Charge! (Kimberly Chun}

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THE CHEAPEST WAY TO GET AROUND TOWN

Our complex world often defies simple solutions. But there is one easy way to save money, get healthy, become more self-sufficient, free up public resources, and reduce your contribution to air pollution and global warming: get around town on a bicycle.

It’s no coincidence that the number of cyclists on San Francisco streets has increased dramatically over the last few years, a period of volatile gasoline prices, heightened awareness of climate change, poor Muni performance, and economic stagnation.

On Bike to Work Day last year, traffic counts during the morning commute tallied more bicycles than cars on Market Street for the first time. Surveys commissioned by the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition show that the number of regular bike commuters has more than doubled in recent years. And that increase came even as a court injunction barred new bike projects in the city (see "Stationary biking," 5/16/07), a ban that likely will be lifted later this year, triggering key improvements in the city’s bicycle network that will greatly improve safety.

Still not convinced? Then do the math.

Drive a car and you’ll probably spend a few hundred dollars every month on insurance, gas, tolls, parking, and fines, and that’s even if you already own your car outright. If you ride the bus, you’ll pay $45 per month for a Fast Pass while government will pay millions more to subsidize the difference. Riding a bike is basically free.

Free? Surely there are costs associated with bicycling, right? Yeah, sure, occasionally. But in a bike-friendly city like San Francisco, there are all kinds of opportunities to keep those costs very low, certainly lower than any other transportation alternative except walking (which is also a fine option for short trips).

There are lots of inexpensive used bicycles out there. I bought three of my four bicycles at the Bike Hut at Pier 40 (www.thebikehut.com) for an average of $100 each and they’ve worked great for several years (my fourth bike, a suspension mountain bike, I also bought used for a few hundred bucks).

Local shops that sell used bikes include Fresh Air Bicycles, (1943 Divisidero, www.fabsf.com) Refried Cycles (3804 17th St., www.refriedcycles,com/bicycles.htm), Karim Cycle (2800 Telegraph., Berkeley, www.teamkarim.com/bikes/used/) and Re-Cycles Bicycles (3120 Sacramento, Berkeley, www.recyclesbicycles.com). Blazing Saddles (1095 Columbus, www.blazingsaddles.com) sells used rental bikes for reasonable prices. Craigslist always has listings for dozens of used bikes of all styles and prices. And these days, you can even buy a new bike for a few hundred bucks. Sure, they’re often made in China with cheap parts, but they’ll work just fine.

Bikes are simple yet effective machines with a limited number of moving parts, so it’s easy to learn to fix them yourself and cut out even the minimal maintenance costs associated with cycling. I spent $100 for two four-hour classes at Freewheel Bike Shop (1920 Hayes and 914 Valencia, www.thefreewheel.com) that taught me everything I need to know about bike maintenance and includes a six-month membership that lets me use its facilities, tools, and the expertise of its mechanics. My bikes are all running smoother than ever on new ball bearings that cost me two bucks per wheel, but they were plenty functional even before.

There are also ways to get bike skills for free. Sports Basement (www.sportsbasement.com) offers free bicycle maintenance classes at both its San Francisco locations the first Tuesday of every month from 6:30-7:30 p.m. Or you can turn to the Internet, where YouTube has a variety of bike repair videos and Web sites such as www.howtofixbikes.com can lead you through repairs.

The nonprofit The Bike Kitchen (1256 Mission, www.thebikekitchen.org) on Mission Street offers great deals to people who spend $40 per year for a membership. Volunteer your time through the Earn-a-Bike program and they’ll give you the frame, parts, and skills to build your own bike for free.

But even in these hard economic times, there is one purchase I wouldn’t skimp on: spend the $30 — $45 for a good U-lock, preferably with a cable for securing the wheels. Then you’re all set, ready to sell your car, ditch the bus, and learn how easy, cheap, fast, efficient, and fun it is to bicycle in this 49-square-mile city. (Steven T. Jones)

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LOW-COST HEALTH CARE

When money’s tight, healthcare tends to be one of the first costs we cut. But that can be a bad idea, because skimping on preventive care and treatment for minor issues can lead to much more expensive and serious (and painful) health issues later. Here is our guide to Bay Area institutions, programs, and clinics that serve the under- and uninsured.

One of our favorite places is the Women’s Community Clinic (2166 Hayes, 415-379-7800, www.womenscommunityclinic.org), a women-operated provider open to anyone female, female-identified, or female-bodied transgender. This awesome 10-year-old clinic offers sexual and reproductive health services — from Pap smears and PMS treatment to menopause and infertility support — to any SF, San Mateo, Alameda, or Marin County resident, and all on a generous sliding scale based on income and insurance (or lack thereof). Call for an appointment, or drop in on Friday mornings (but show up at 9:30 a.m. because spots fill up fast).

A broader option (in terms of both gender and service) is Mission Neighborhood Center (main clinic at 240 Shotwell. 415-552-3870, www.mnhc.org, see Web site for specialty clinics). This one-stop health shop provides primary, HIV/AIDS, preventive, podiatry, women’s, children’s, and homeless care to all, though its primary focus is on the Latino/Hispanic Spanish-speaking community. Insurance and patient payment is accepted, including a sliding scale for the uninsured (no one is denied based on inability to pay). This clinic is also a designated Medical Home (or primary care facility) for those involved in the Healthy San Francisco program.

Contrary to popular belief, Healthy San Francisco (www.healthysanfrancisco.org) is not insurance. Rather, it’s a network of hospitals and clinics that provide free or nearly free healthcare to uninsured SF residents who earn at or below 300 percent of the federal poverty level (which, at about $2,600 per month, includes many of us). Participants choose a Medical Home, which serves as a first point-of-contact. The good news? HSF is blind to immigration status, employment status, and preexisting medical conditions. The catch? The program’s so new and there are so many eligible residents that the application process is backlogged — you may have a long wait before you reap the rewards. Plus, HSF only applies within San Francisco.

Some might consider mental health less important than that of the corporeal body, but anyone who’s suffered from depression, addiction, or PTSD knows otherwise. Problem is, psychotherapy tends to be expensive — and therefore considered superfluous. Not so at Golden Gate Integral Counseling Center (507 Polk. 415-561-0230, www.goldengatecounseling.org), where individuals, couples, families, and groups can get long- and short-term counseling for issues from stress and relationships to gender identity, all billed on a sliding scale.

Other good options

American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine (450 Connecticut, 415-282-9603, actcm.edu). This well-regarded school provides a range of treatments, including acupuncture, cupping, tui ma/shiatsu massage, and herbal therapy, at its on-site clinics — all priced according to a sliding scale and with discounts for students and seniors. The college also sends interns to specialty clinics around the Bay, including the Women’s Community Clinic, Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, and St. James Infirmary.

St. James Infirmary (1372 Mission. 415-554-8494, www.stjamesinfirmary.org). Created for sex-workers and their partners, this Mission District clinic offers a range of services from primary care to massage and self-defense classes, for free. Bad ass.

Free Print Shop (www.freeprintshop.org): This fantabulous Webs site has charts showing access to free healthcare across the city, as well as free food, shelter, and help with neighborhood problems. If we haven’t listed ’em, Free Print Shop has. Tell a friend.

Native American Health Center (160 Capp, 415-621-8051, www.nativehealth.org). Though geared towards Native Americans, this multifaceted clinic (dental! an Oakland locale, and an Alameda satellite!) turns no one away. Services are offered to the under-insured on a sliding scale as well as to those with insurance.

SF Free Clinic (4900 California, 415-750-9894, www.sffc.org). Those without any health insurance can get vaccinations, diabetes care, family planning assistance, STD diagnosis and treatment, well child care, and monitoring of acute and chronic medical problems.

Haight Ashbury Free Clinics (558 Clayton. 415-746-1950, www.hafci.org): Though available to all, these clinics are geared towards the uninsured, underinsured "working poor," the homeless, youth, and those with substance abuse and/or mental health issues. We love this organization not only for its day-to-day service, but for its low-income residential substance abuse recovery programs and its creation of RockMed, which provides free medical care at concerts and events. (Molly Freedenberg)

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THE BEST HOMELESS SHELTERS

There’s no reason to be ashamed to stay in the city’s homeless shelters — but proceed with awareness. Although most shelters take safety precautions and men and women sleep in separate areas, they’re high-traffic places that house a true cross-section of the city’s population.

The city shelters won’t take you if you just show up — you have to make a reservation. In any case, a reservation center should be your first stop anyway because they’ll likely have other services available for you. If you’re a first-timer, they’ll want to enter you into the system and take your photograph. (You can turn down the photo-op.) Reservations can be made for up to seven days, after which you’ll need to connect with a case manager to reserve a more permanent 30- or 60-day bed.

The best time to show up is first thing in the morning when beds are opening up, or late at night when beds have opened up because of no-show reservations. First thing in the morning means break of dawn — people often start lining up between 4 a.m. and 6 a.m. for the few open beds. Many people are turned away throughout the day, although your chances are better if you’re a woman.

You can reserve a bed at one of several reservation stations: 150 Otis, Mission Neighborhood Resource Center (165 Capp St.), Tenderloin Resource Center (187 Golden Gate), Glide (330 Ellis), United Council (2111 Jennings), and the shelters at MSC South (525 Fifth St.) and Hospitality House (146 Leavenworth). If it’s late at night, they may have a van available to give you a ride to the shelter. Otherwise, bus tokens are sometimes available if you ask for one — especially if you’re staying at Providence shelter in the Bayview-Hunters Point District.

They’ll ask if you have a shelter preference — they’re all a little different and come with good and bad recommendations depending on whom you talk to. By all accounts, Hospitality House is one of the best — it’s small, clean, and well run. But it’s for men only, as are the Dolores Street Community Services shelters (1050 S. Van Ness and 1200 Florida), which primarily cater to Spanish-speaking clients.

Women can try Oshun (211 13th St.) and A Woman’s Place (1049 Howard) if they want a men-free space. If kids are in tow, Compass Family Services will set you up with shelter and put you on a waiting list for housing. (A recent crush of families means a waiting list for shelters also exists.) People between 18 and 24 can go to Lark Inn (869 Ellis). The Asian Woman’s Shelter specializes in services for Asian-speaking women and domestic violence victims (call the crisis line 877-751-0880). (Amanda Witherell)

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MEALS FOR $5: TOP FIVE CHEAP EATS

Nothing fancy about these places — but the food is good, and the price is right, and they’re perfect for depression dining.

Betty’s Cafeteria Probably the easiest place in town to eat for under five bucks, breakfast or lunch, American or Chinese. 167 11th St., SF. (415) 431-2525

Susie’s Café You can get four pancakes or a bacon burger for under $5 at this truly grungy and divine dive, right next to Ed’s Auto — and you get the sense the grease intermingles. , 603 Seventh St., SF (415) 431-2177

Lawrence Bakery Café Burger and fries, $3.75, and a slice of pie for a buck. 2290 Mission., SF. (415) 864-3119

Wo’s Restaurant Plenty of under-$5 Cantonese and Vietnamese dishes, and, though the place itself is cold and unatmospheric, the food is actually great. 4005 Judah, SF. (415) 681-2433

Glenn’s Hot Dogs A cozy, friendly, cheap, delicious hole-in-the-wall and probably my favorite counter to sit at in the whole Bay Area. 3506 MacArthur Blvd., Oakl. (510) 530-5175 (L.E. Leone)

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CHEAP DRINKS

When it comes to free drinks I’m a liar, a whore, and a cheat, duh.

I’m a liar because of course I find your designer replica stink-cloud irresistible and your popped collar oh so intriguing — and no, you sexy lug, I’ve never tried one of those delicious-looking orange-juice-and-vodka concoctions you’re holding. Perhaps you could order me one so I could try it out while we spend some time?

I’m a whore because I’ll still do you anyway — after the fifth round, natch. That’s why they call me the liquor quicker picker-upper.

And I’m a cheat because here I am supposed to give you the scoop on where to score some highball on the lowdown, when in fact there’s a couple of awesome Web sites just aching to help you slurp down the freebies. Research gives me wrinkles, darling. So before I get into some of my fave inexpensive inebriation stations, take a designated-driver test drive of www.funcheapsf.com and www.sf.myopenbar.com.

FuncheapSF’s run by the loquacious Johnny Funcheap, and has the dirty deets on a fab array of free and cheap city events — with gallery openings, wine and spirits tastings, and excellent shindigs for the nightlife-inclined included. MyOpenBar.com is a national operation that’s geared toward the hard stuff, and its local branch offers way too much clarity about happy hours, concerts, drink specials, and service nights. Both have led me into inglorious perdition, with dignity, when my chips were down.

Beyond all that, and if you have a couple bucks in your shucks, here’s a few get-happies of note:

Godzuki Sushi Happy Hour at the Knockout. Super-yummy affordable fish rolls and $2 Kirin on tap in a rockin’ atmosphere. Wednesdays, 6–9:30 p.m. 3223 Mission, SF. (415) 550-6994, www.knockoutsf.com

All-Night Happy Hour at The Attic. Drown your recession tears — and the start of your work week — in $3 cosmos and martinis at this hipster hideaway. Sundays and Mondays, 5 p.m.–2 a.m. 3336 24th St., (415) 722-7986

The Stork Club. Enough live punk to bleed your earworm out and $2 Pabsts every night to boot? Fly me there toute suite. 2330 Telegraph, Oakl. (510) 444-6174, www.storkcluboakland.com

House of Shields. Dive into $2 PBR on tap and great music every night except Sundays at the beautiful winner of our 2008 Best of the Bay "Best Monumental Urinal" award. (We meant in the men’s room, not the place as a whole!) 39 New Montgomery, SF. (415) 975-8651, www.houseofshields.com

The Bitter End. $3 drafts Monday through Friday are just the beginning at this Richmond pub: the Thursday night Jager shot plus Pabst for five bucks (plus an ’80s dance party) is worth a look-see. 441 Clement, SF. (415) 221-9538

Thee Parkside Fast becoming the edge-seekers bar of choice, this Potrero Hill joint has some awesome live nights with cheap brews going for it, but the those in the know misplace their Saturday afternoons with $3 well drinks from 3 to 8 p.m.1600 17th St., SF. (415) 252-1330, www.theeparkside.com

Infatuation. One of the best free club nights in the city brings in stellar electro-oriented talent and also offers two-for-one well drinks, so what the hey. Wednesdays, 9 p.m.–2 a.m. Vessel, 85 Campton Place, SF. (415) 433-8585, www.vesselsf.com

Honey Sundays. Another free club night, this one on the gay tip, that offers more great local and international DJ names and some truly fetching specials at Paradise Lounge’s swank upstairs bar. Sundays, 8 p.m.–2 a.m. Paradise Lounge, 1501 Folsom, SF. (415) 252-5018, www.paradisesf.com (Marke B.)

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IMPRESS A DATE WITH DINNER UNDER $50

You’ve got a date this weekend, which you’re feeling pretty good about, but only $50 to spend, which feels … not so good. Where should you go?

You’ll appear in-the-know at the underrated Sheba Piano Lounge (1419 Fillmore, www.shebalounge.com) on lower Fillmore Street, right in the middle of the burgeoning jazz revival district. Sheba was around long before Yoshi’s, offering live jazz (usually piano, sometimes a vocalist) and some of the best Ethiopian food in the city in a refined, relaxed lounge setting. Sure, they’ve got Americanized dishes, but skip those for the traditional Ethiopian menu. Sample multiple items by ordering the vegetarian platter ($13) or ask for a mixed meat platter, which is not on the menu ($16 last time I ordered it). One platter is more than enough for two, and you can still afford a couple of cocktails, glasses of wine or beer, or even some Ethiopian honey wine (all well under $10). Like any authentic Ethiopian place I’ve eaten in, the staff operates on Africa time, so be prepared to linger and relax.

It’s a little hipster-ish with slick light fixtures, a narrow dining room/bar, and the increasingly common "communal table" up front, but the Mission District’s Bar Bambino (2931 16th St., www.barbambino.com) offers an Italian enoteca experience that says "I’ve got some sophistication, but I like to keep it casual." Reserve ahead for tables because there aren’t many, or come early and sit at the bar or in the enclosed back patio and enjoy an impressive selection of Italian wines by the glass ($8–$12.50). For added savings with a touch of glam, don’t forget their free sparkling water on tap. It’s another small plates/antipasti-style menu, so share a pasta ($10.50–$15.50), panini ($11.50–$12.50), and some of their great house-cured salumi or artisan cheese. Bar Bambino was just named one of the best wine bars in the country by Bon Apetit, but don’t let that deter you from one of the city’s real gems.

Nothing says romance (of the first date kind) like a classic French bistro, especially one with a charming (heated) back patio. Bistro Aix (3340 Steiner, www.bistroaix.com) is one of those rare places in the Marina District where you can skip the pretension and go for old school French comfort food (think duck confit, top sirloin steak and frites, and a goat cheese salad — although the menu does stray a little outside the French zone with some pasta and "cracker crust pizza." Bistro Aix has been around for years, offering one of the cheapest (and latest — most end by 6 or 7 p.m.) French prix fixe menus in town (Sunday through Thursday, 6–8 p.m.) at $18 for two courses. This pushes it to $40 for two, but still makes it possible to add a glass of wine, which is reasonably priced on the lower end of their Euro-focused wine list ($6.25–$15 a glass).

Who knew seduction could be so surprisingly affordable? (Virginia Miller)

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FREE YOGA

You may be broke, but you can still stay limber. San Francisco is home to scores of studios and karmically-blessed souls looking to do a good turn by making yoga affordable for everyone.

One of the more prolific teachers and donation-based yoga enthusiasts is Tony Eason, who trained in the Iyengar tradition. His classes, as well as links to other donation-based teachers, can be found at ynottony.com. Another great teacher in the Anusara tradition is Skeeter Barker, who teaches classes for all levels Mondays and Wednesdays from 7:45 to 9:15 p.m. at Yoga Kula, 3030a 16th St. (recommended $8–$10 donation).

Sports Basement also hosts free classes every Sunday at three stores: Bryant Street from 1 to 2 p.m., the Presidio from 11a.m. to noon, and Walnut Creek 11 a.m. to noon. Bring your own mat.

But remember: even yoga teachers need to make a living — so be fair and give what you can. (Amanda Witherell)

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HOW TO KEEP YOUR APARTMENT

So the building you live in was foreclosed. Or you missed a few rent payments. Suddenly there’s a three-day eviction notice in your mailbox. What now?

Don’t panic. That’s the advice from Ted Gullicksen, executive director of the San Francisco Tenants Union. Tenants have rights, and evictions can take a long time. And while you may have to deal with some complications and legal issues, you don’t need to pack your bags yet.

Instead, pick up the phone and call the Tenants Union (282-6622, www.sftu.org) or get some professional advice from a lawyer.

The three-day notice doesn’t mean you have to be out in three days. "But it does mean you will have to respond to and communicate with the landlord/lady within that time," Gullicksen told us.

It’s also important to keep paying your rent, Gullicksen warned, unless you can’t pay the full amount and have little hope of doing so any time soon.

"Nonpayment of rent is the easiest way for a landlord to evict a tenant," Gullicksen explained. "Don’t make life easier for the landlady who was perhaps trying to use the fact that your relatives have been staying with you for a month as grounds to evict you so she can convert your apartment into a pricey condominium."

There are, however, caveats to Gullicksen’s "always pay the rent" rule: if you don’t have the money or you don’t have all the money.

"Say you owe $1,000 but only have $750 when you get the eviction notice," Gullicksen explained. "In that case, you may want to not pay your landlord $750, in case he sits on it but still continues on with the eviction. Instead, you might want to put the money to finding another place or hiring an attorney."

A good lawyer can often delay an eviction — even if it’s over nonpayment or rent — and give you time to work out a deal. Many landlords, when faced with the prospect of a long legal fight, will come to the table. Gullicksen noted that the vast majority of eviction cases end in a settlement. "We encourage all tenants to fight evictions," he said. The Tenants Union can refer you to qualified tenant lawyers.

These days some tenants who live in buildings that have been foreclosed on are getting eviction notices. But in San Francisco, city officials are quick to point out, foreclosure is not a legal ground for eviction.

Another useful tip: if your landlord is cutting back on the services you get — whether it’s a loss of laundry facilities, parking, or storage space, or the owner has failed to do repairs or is preventing you from preventing you from "the quiet enjoyment of your apartment" — you may be able to get a rent reduction. With the passage of Proposition M in November 2008 tenants who have been subjected to harassment by their landlords are also eligible for rent reductions. That involves a petition to the San Francisco Rent Stabilization and Arbitration Board (www.sfgov.org/site/rentboard_index.asp).

Gullicksen also recommends that people who have lost their jobs check out the Eviction Defense Collaborative (www.evictiondefense.org).

"They are mostly limited to helping people who have temporary shortfalls," Gullicksen cautioned. But if you’ve lost your job and are about to start a new one and are a month short, they can help. (Sarah Phelan)

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OUT OF WORK? HERE’S STEP ONE

How do you get your unemployment check?

"Just apply for it."

That’s the advice of California’s Employment Development Department spokesperson Patrick Joyce.

You may think you aren’t eligible because you may have been fired or were only working part-time, but it’s still worth a try. "Sometimes people are ineligible, but sometimes they’re not," Joyce said, explaining that a lot of factors come into play, including your work history and how much you were making during the year before you became unemployed.

"So, simply apply for it — if you don’t qualify we’ll tell you," he said. "And if you think you are eligible and we don’t, you can appeal to the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board."

Don’t wait, either. "No one gets unemployment benefits insurance payments for the first week they are unemployed," Joyce explained, referring to the one-week waiting period the EDD imposes before qualified applicants can start collecting. "So you should apply immediately."

Folks can apply by filling out the unemployment insurance benefits form online or over the phone. But the phone number is frequently busy, so online is the best bet.

Even if you apply by phone, visit www.edd.ca.gov/unemployment beforehand to view the EDD’s extensive unemployment insurance instructions and explanations. To file an online claim, visit eapply4ui.edd.ca.gov. For a phone number for your local office, visit www.edd.ca.gov/unemployment/telephone_numbers.

(Sarah Phelan)

We’ll be doing regular updates and running tips for hard times in future issues. Send your ideas to tips@sfbg.com.

The Funeral Party

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PREVIEW By the late 1990s, the better part of the country had reached a consensus. The whole East Coast vs. West Coast thing had officially run its course and was, decidedly, un-chill. A pimp-stick-wielding Snoop Dogg blowing a gasket at The Source Awards and doing his damndest to incite a riot was one thing. But, once the two most transcendent, brilliant musicians of the generation were murdered in cold blood, America and everyone else involved decided, enough was enough.

Ten years on from Biggie’s death, a new crew of whippersnappers has decided to boil up some East Coast/West Coast beef. Though they aren’t talking about engaging in sexual congress with anyone’s betrothed, Los Angeles dance-punk quartet the Funeral Party is sick of the Big Apple hoarding all the indie cred. On the raging "NYC Moves to the Sound of LA," from their jarring debut EP, Bootleg (Fearless, 2008), the precocious upstarts take aim at the "unoriginal," "contrived" New York City scene. Vocalist Chad Elliot venomously spits, "Stole all of your ideas from other cities<0x2009>/ Things are lookin’ stale<0x2009>/ It’s time to turn around<0x2009>/ New York City loves to mess around with the LA sound!" You hear that, Vampire Weekend? You’re fucking going down!

Only time will tell if this sick burn will plant the seeds of a feud that will dominate the back pages of publications nationwide. If I was a betting man, I’d give the "FP vs. NYC" feud between a 2 percent and .00231 percent chance of captivating America. But I would bet the ranch that the Funeral Party’s arresting brand of punk-based dance-rock — imagine Babyshambles on uppers, jamming with At the Drive-In-era Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Johnny Marr — landing them on the front pages of a few magazines in the coming years. Popscene has a knack for booking artists with solid buzzes before they blow up, so get ready to add the Funeral Party to the list of bands you saw before Carson Daly 2.0 informed America who they were.

THE FUNERAL PARTY Thurs/15, call for time, $8–$10. Popscene, 330 Ritch, SF. (415) 902-3125, www.popscene-sf.com

Super Ego: Tossed Horse

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By Marke B.

Is there such a thing as talent? REALLY? Every philosophical question you have about drag gets tossed up and around when the famously scattered yet oddly hypnotic and definitely entertaining House of Salad takes over, as it will this Friday at Charlie Horse, the infamously packed and outlandish punk/rock/grunge/country/??? party hosted by Anna Conda at the Cinch on Polk Street.

salad-1a.jpg

I haven’t ever been able to assign an aesthetic to the Saladeers — mostly because there’s so many of them, and mostly because no matter what’s been planned going in, it all usually ends up pretty fucked up. But this newest House does give off a few pungent qualities: they always defy definition, from queen bee Ambrosia’s post-melodramatic take on contemporary dance anthems to Kadija’s super-techno and dubstep shakedowns, to Stanley and friends’ old-school vaudeville. And they always put on a good show — even if it’s hilariously undercut by a fierce lack of studious stage effects. The girls need to find the spotlight sometime.

Yet of course I adore them, and you never know WHO is gonna pop up in the Salad spinner. Or what “giveaways” they’ll be packing. (Hint: little, brown.) Basically it’s all about thrown-together deliciousness, so just hold out your bowl and dive in.

Ambrosia Salad et al at L.A.’s Shits & Giggles party

House of Salad at Charlie Horse
Fri/16, 10pm (show at midnight), free
The Cinch
1723 Polk, SF.
www.thecinch.com

Reel time travel

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

How often do you encounter a living artist whose radical and prolific body of work is criminally obscure? I can’t evangelize enough about the German filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger, whose work is the subject of Laurence A. Rickels’ Ulrike Ottinger: The Autobiography of Art Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 288 pages, $22).

Some glimpses into Ottinger’s dazzling and genre-defying oeuvre: baroque lesbian pirate adventure (1977’s Madame X: An Absolute Ruler); an aristocratic alcoholic tourist drinking herself to death in a post-apocalyptic West Berlin (1979’s Ticket of No Return); and a trans-Siberian train journey that makes an unexpected pit stop in Mongolia, where a two-hour ethnography of an all-female tribe unfolds (1989’s Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia).

There are hardly words to describe these striking and innovative films, but Rickels’ ambitious new book — drawing upon extensive interviews with the filmmaker — provides compelling interpretations. I recently interviewed him via e-mail.

SFBG It puzzles me how Derek Jarman’s queer-punk classic Jubilee (1978) is available as a Criterion DVD and Ulrike Ottinger’s contemporaneous and similarly groundbreaking Madame X is virtually inaccessible. Why do you think Ottinger isn’t better known in the states?

LAURENCE A. RICKELS Ottinger was very well known throughout the art cinema network in the 1980s. Though [her] fiction films were "long" in density and attention-surfeit, they in fact observed the time limits of features made for theatrical release. With the turn to documentary, she engaged in what I once referred to as "real time travel" — involving durations of viewing time up to nine hours in length. But once she began again to show her photography in acknowledged art venues, her current film work was rediscovered at least for that world.

Just as important, no doubt, is her refusal to release her films as readily available videos or DVDs. But this brings us back to the point that she operates, even when she identifies herself as filmmaker, as an artist who tries to oversee her reception.

SFBG Many of Ottinger’s films — both the documentaries and narrative films — deal with the exotic and otherness. She persistently crosses genres, cultures, and genders.

LAR What is so radical about her film art is an insistence on encountering the other, on meeting the other "halfway." For the other’s arrival, Ottinger constructs out of her own (formal) language a sort of terminal, which anticipates or fantasizes about what the other will bring to their "first" contact and exchange.

SFBG Which film from Ottinger’s oeuvre is essential viewing for those who haven’t seen her work? What about this film should a new viewer expect?

LAR If I had to choose one, it would be Ticket of No Return. It introduces the viewer to the distance Ottinger observes with regard to the very conditions of trauma. By drinking herself to death, the protagonist seeks, as Nietzsche counseled, to become who she is.

SFBG In your book you describe Ottinger’s next narrative work, Diamond Dance, about Jewish gangsters in Brighton Beach, the diamond business in New York, a gay psychoanalyst, and more. The film sounds incredible. What’s happening with the project?

LAR Diamond Dance was a new fictional film project at the start of the 1990s. There have been more near-miss attempts to find suitable conditions for its realization, even according to a more modest plan. However, Ottinger has not given up, and has been revising some of the pressure plot points in the original screenplay to reflect and invite another time period in which the film will be made and set. But the original film is in a sense lost — together with the era of art cinema to which it belonged.

Lethal force

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Editors note: This story ran Dec. 12, 1992

The autumn air was crisp and clear in Hayward on the night the kid called Glasstop took a shotgun blast in the back of the head and died for the theft of a $60 radio.

It was just before 8 p.m., on Sunday, Nov. 15. The lights were on in the parking lot outside the Hayward BART station, where a six-car southbound train had arrived a few minutes earlier. About 50 passengers had gotten off, and some were still straggling into cars or waiting around for the next AC Transit bus.

Glasstop, a 19-year-old warehouse worker from Union City whose legal name was Jerrold Cornelius Hall, had ridden the train from Bayfair, one stop north, along with John Henry Owens, a 20-year-old unemployed custodian who lived in Oakland. The two young African American men were standing at the bus stop, not far from the station entrance, when Officer Fred Crabtree pulled into the parking lot in a BART police cruiser.

Crabtree was a white 16-year veteran of the transit police agency and a member of its elite Canine Corps. His partner was a highly trained German shepherd imported from a special obedience school in Germany. The dog trotted at Crabtree’s side as he approached Owens and Hall. The officer carried a loaded 12-gauge pump-action shotgun.

Crabtree was responding to a report of an armed robbery: Halfway between Bayfair and Hayward, a passenger had told the train operator that two black men had taken his Walkman personal stereo. The passenger said one of the robbers had a gun and described what they looked like; the trainman passed on the message, and the BART dispatcher passed it on again. Owens and Hall matched the third-hand description that came over Crabtree’s radio.

Within a matter of minutes, Hall was lying in a pool of his own blood, Owens was in handcuffs, and the parking lot was a mass of sirens and flashing red lights. Hall was pronounced dead shortly after midnight at Eden Hospital; Owens is still in the Alameda County jail. The police never turned up a gun.

And the man who reported the robbery disappeared without leaving his name.

That’s about all BART officials will say about the incident. They’ve clamped on a lid of secrecy that defies most normal local police procedures and violates the California Public Records Act. The San Francisco newspapers have almost entirely ignored the shooting, and there’s been little reaction from the East Bay community.

But an extensive Bay Guardian investigation has turned up a long list of troubling questions about the death of Jerrold Hall – and a long list of serious problems in an agency that has some of the most sweeping police powers in California, and some of the least civilian oversight.

Our investigation, based on a dozen interviews, a review of public records, and more than 50 pages of unreleased internal documents from the BART police and other local authorities, shows:

Officer Crabtree violated one of the most basic rules of modern law enforcement – and his own department’s written policy – when he fired a warning shot toward the suspect, potentially endangering the lives of passersby in the busy urban area. The nine .33-caliber pellets from that shotgun cartridge wound up in the side of a tree, about 4-1/2 feet above the ground.

BART’s own internal documents contradict the official claim that Hall was attacking or threatening Crabtree at the time of the shooting. Statements filed by several witnesses, and at least two BART police officers, suggest that Hall was more than 10 feet from the officer when the shots were fired, and was walking away. Medical records obtained by the Bay Guardian show that he was shot in the back of the head.

The shooting appears to violate nearly every modern police standard on the use of deadly force. In fact, the latest BART Police Operational Directive, dated July 22, 1987, states that guns may be fired only to prevent a suspect from killing or wounding another person, or to stop a suspected felon who is presumed to be armed and dangerous from fleeing and escaping arrest. But BART internal documents and other records obtained by the Bay Guardian provide little evidence to suggest that Hall fit either category.

Nevertheless, on Dec. 4, a BART Firearms Review Board, consisting entirely of BART police officers appointed by the chief, determined that the “use of lethal force in this instance was justified.” BART officials refuse to release the report or comment further on the findings.

The fact that Crabtree fired a gun to subdue Hall seems to undermine one of BART’s central reasons for the use of trained attack dogs. The dogs, BART officials say, are supposed to support officers in situations just like the one in question – to intimidate, and if necessary, pursue and immobilize a suspect when other backup isn’t available, and to attack immediately if an officer is under assault. Some law-enforcement experts, and many civil-rights advocates, question the use of dogs for that purpose – but all those contacted by the Bay Guardian agreed it was rather curious that Crabtree’s canine partner sat out this whole bloody incident.

Officer Crabtree is on administrative leave, with pay, pending the final outcome of an internal investigation. Owens is still facing robbery charges, despite the lack of a victim willing to testify against him. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for this week.

But the problems with the BART police go far beyond the arrest of John Owens and the death of Jerrold Hall. In fact, the Bay Guardian has learned:

BART’s Internal Affairs Division, which reviews citizen complaints against BART police officers, has investigated 162 cases in the past five years, 39 of them involving excessive use of force – and not a single charge was sustained. Law-enforcement observers say that’s an astonishing statistic, one that casts severe doubt on the department’s ability to control police abuse.

“I’ve never heard of any department with a rate of zero sustained complaints,” said John Crew, director of the American Civil Liberties Union Police Practices Project. “I can’t believe that none of those people had a single valid case.”

The BART Police Department has a written procedure for civilians filing complaints. A 1991 directive signed by Chief Harold Taylor states that every department employee should accept complaints by mail, by phone, or in person, and refer them to the watch commander or the Internal Affairs Division. But there’s nothing posted in any BART train or station to tell the public about the complaint process, no procedure for appealing a Police Department decision to a civilian review agency, and not much visible effort to inform BART employees about how to handle complaints.

The BART police use dogs for purposes inconsistent with many modern law-enforcement guidelines. Most local police agencies employ canines primarily to sniff out bombs and narcotics, or to search for dangerous suspects hidden in dark, confined areas. Berkeley has banned police dogs altogether. The BART police dogs are not trained to sniff out bombs or drugs, and are rarely involved in searches; the officers use the animals as standard backup, to intimidate and apprehend suspects in even fairly routine arrests.

The elected BART Board of Directors has demonstrated virtually no effective control over the BART police, and most board members don’t seem to know or care what their armed employees are doing with those badges, dogs, and guns.

None of the board members contacted by the Bay Guardian could even guess how many citizen complaints had been filed against the BART police since 1988, or what the outcome of the cases had been. None could explain the complaint procedure, or identify the person responsible for supervising internal investigations. Most didn’t know how the police chief was hired, or to whom he reported; some board members didn’t even know his name.

Several years ago, I asked Art Shartsis, a downtown lawyer who was then the BART Board president, if he knew who ran the BART police. His answer was unusually blunt, but entirely typical of the attitude board members show toward the force.

“I don’t know,” he told me. “I guess we must have a chief.”

A DAY AT THE MALL

Jerrold Hall was the son of Alameda Fire Department Captain Cornelius Hall, a retired Navy Reserve officer who lives with his wife, Rose and two other sons in a comfortable middle-class home in suburban Union City. Both of Jerrold’s brothers are in college, earning top grades; his aunt is the first black woman ever to serve on the Board of Trustees of Auburn University.

Jerrold, who graduated from high school in 1991 and was living with his parents, “had some problems, like a lot of kids these days,” his father told me. “But we hoped he’d outgrow them. He was a good kid, never into guns or killing or any of that sort of thing.”

On Sunday, Nov. 15, at about 2 in the afternoon, Hall met Owens at the Eastmont Mall in Oakland. According to a sworn statement Owens gave to the police, the two drank a few beers and part of a small bottle of E&J Brandy. Early in the evening, Hill invited Owens to his home, and they left the mall on an AC Transit bus to catch a BART train for Union City.

According to Owens and several other witnesses, Owens and Hill encountered a black man in his late 30s on board the train, and the man asked them if they wanted to buy one of the Walkmans he was carrying in a bag. When first questioned by police, at about 1:35 a.m., Owens said he declined the offer, went to another train car “where more girls were,” and met up with Hall again a few minutes later. At about 4:30 a.m., he made another statement, acknowledging that he was present when the friend he called “Glasstop” told the would-be salesman, “give me your Walkman.”

Several other witnesses on the train agreed that Hall had confronted the man, and walked away with a bag. None, including Owens, saw a gun.

However, the victim of what the BART police still call an “armed robbery” called the train operator on the intercom and said two men with a gun had stolen his Walkman. The operator, who never saw Hall or Owens, reported the incident, and it was relayed to BART police, who instructed the trainman to stop in Hayward, and, after a brief delay, to open the train doors. Hall and Owens left with about 50 others; according to the station attendant, they jumped the emergency gate and walked into the parking lot.

The police were able to find several eyewitnesses to the alleged robbery; however, other than Owens and Crabtree, who was the only police officer on the scene at the time, the internal report does not identify a single witness who actually saw the shooting.

An official Dec. 7 statement, written by BART Police Chief Harold Taylor at the request of the Bay Guardian and reviewed by BART’s legal department, notes that “witnesses disagreed as to the precise sequence of the next events.”

The internal BART police documents obtained by the Bay Guardian contain no formal statement or direct quotation from Crabtree; he apparently filed no written report. The reports were all prepared by other officers, who arrived at the scene after the shooting.

According to those reports, filed shortly after the incident, Crabtree approached Hall and Owens, who were standing near a bench in the parking lot’s bus-stop area, and ordered them to lie on the ground with their hands over their heads. Owens complied; Hall did not.

Hall, the reports state, “confronted and challenged Officer Crabtree, attempting to take Officer Crabtree’s shotgun from him at one point.” There is no mention of what the dog, who was trained to bite anyone who attacked Officer Crabtree, was doing at the time. BART officials refuse to elaborate, saying the incident is still under investigation.

However, one Bay Area dog trainer, who has trained police dogs, said it’s highly unlikely that a German shepherd of the sort imported by the BART police (see sidebar) would fail to respond in such a situation. “Dogs are very loyal and protective,” the trainer, who asked not to be identified, told the Bay Guardian. “These dogs are carefully bred and taught to attack anyone who physically endangers their human handler. Sometimes they overreact; they very rarely underreact.”

TO TAKE A LIFE

Owens told the police he “did not see the cop and Glasstop get into any physical fighting. They did not touch. They were just arguing.” After a few moments, Owens said, “Glasstop walked over to me and said we could go. So we started to walk away.”

Whatever the nature of the confrontation between Hall and Officer Crabtree, the police report and witness statements leave very little doubt that it ended with Hall walking away – and, as the internal police report states, “with Officer Crabtree retaining the shotgun.”

It’s also clear that some time, perhaps as much a minute or two, passed between the initial clash and the shooting – more than enough time for Hall and Owens to start walking away. During that period, the documents suggest, the passenger who had initially reported the robbery – and had not made any contact yet with police – suddenly ran out into the parking lot, pointed toward Hall and Owens and shouted, “That’s them.” Then the passenger fled.

Crabtree then ordered the two young men to halt again – and at that point, the statements get very fuzzy.

According to the official statement released Dec. 7 by BART, Crabtree “summoned his canine, but Hall resisted the dog.” A medical report filed by Alameda County emergency technicians who examined Hall after the shooting includes no mention of any dog bites or wounds of any sort other than those caused by the shotgun. A copy of the report, which has not been released, was obtained by the Bay Guardian.

Crabtree, the official BART statement continues, “fired a warning shot at a nearby tree. Hall continued to move toward the other suspect, and at one point turned and assumed a position which concealed his hands.”

The internal police report, however, states that Owens was the one who was “failing to keep his hands in view,” and who, in what the report described as “an effort to get rid of the evidence [Walkman],” put his hands into his pants pockets. At that point, the report states, Crabtree “used deadly force on suspect Hall.”

Owens said he responded immediately to the second command to halt, but that Hall kept walking away. When Owens heard the shots, he turned around, “and my partner was lying face down…. Then I heard all the cops coming with sirens.”

In fact, within a matter of minutes, at least three more BART police cars and a backup unit from the Hayward Police Department had arrived on the scene. Even if Hall, who by all accounts was walking, not running, had been attempting to “flee,” it’s unlikely he would have been able to get far.

And after an extensive search of the train, the tracks, the station, the parking lot, and everything else in the vicinity, the BART police acknowledge they were unable to find a gun.

Although the BART police initially insisted that Hall had been shot in the chest, and most of the news reports carried that statement unchallenged, even BART now admits that the shot struck the young man in the back of his head. His father, Cornelius Hall, never had any doubt.

“I’m a trained emergency medical technician,” he told the Bay Guardian. “I was in the hospital room when the nurse was washing down the body. I know what an entrance wound looks like, and my son was shot in the back.”

In Modern Police Firearms, a textbook on law-enforcement procedures, Professor Allen P. Bristow of California State University, Los Angeles, writes that deadly force should be used to stop a fleeing felon only when “he cannot be contained or captured” through other means. Further, Bristow notes, an officer considering deadly force should ask the following question:

“Is the crime this suspect is committing, or are the consequences of his possible escape, serious enough to justify my taking his life or endangering the lives of bystanders?”

The San Francisco Police Department guidelines on deadly force embody some of that same philosophy. “Officers shall exhaust all other reasonable means of apprehension and control before resorting to the use of firearms,” the Aug. 24, 1984, policy states. Officers are allowed to shoot at a dangerous, fleeing felony suspect “only after all other reasonable means of apprehension and control have been exhausted.”

San Francisco, like almost every other police agency in the Bay Area, and most in the country, strictly prohibits warning shots. So does BART: “Discharging of firearms [is] not allowable as a warning,” BART’s official weapons policy states.

The BART police are a bit more lenient than San Francisco on the use of deadly force to stop fleeing suspects. The officer must only believe that “the suspect is likely to continue to threaten death or serious bodily harm to another human being,” according to BART’s July 22, 1987, operational directive. Yet the directive also states that a firearm may not be used “when the officer has reason to believe … that the discharge may endanger the lives of passersby, or other persons not involved in the crime, and the officer’s life, or that of another person, is not in imminent danger.”

THE OPEN RANGE

Armed guards have patrolled BART trains and stations since the agency started running trains about 30 years ago. At first, they were simply known as “BART Security”; the officers had the authority to carry weapons and arrest suspects, but under state law, they weren’t members of a real police department. For the most part, that limited their authority to the confines of BART property.

In 1976, the state Legislature granted BART the authority to run a police department with jurisdiction and authority second only to the California Highway Patrol. BART officers now have full police powers, not only on their own turf, but in every one of the 58 California counties.

The department, headquartered near the Lake Merritt BART station, currently employs 151 sworn officers and nine dogs (see sidebar Page TK). An undisclosed number work undercover, in plain clothes, riding the trains and looking for crimes that range from fare evasion, “eating,” and “expectoration,” to assault, robbery, and rape. By far the most common crime, according to a BART police statistical breakdown for 1992, is “vagrancy”: 4,227 separate instances were reported by BART officers in the first 10 months of the year.

The BART Police Department has a $12 million annual budget, a fleet of patrol cars, and its own communications system. Officers earn salaries that Chief Taylor calls “competitive” with other departments in the Bay Area.

And at a time when California law-enforcement agencies are coming under increasingly strict civilian control, the BART police operate with nothing more than token oversight.

Chief Taylor reports to no commission, mayor, or city council. The department is administered by BART’s assistant general manager for public safety, who reports to the general manager, who reports to the board. BART spokesperson Michael Healy said the board plays no role in hiring or firing a chief, much less in disciplining police officers.

Former BART Board member Arlo Hale Smith said that in his term of office, the BART police chief rarely showed up for board meetings. “Even when we had something to discuss about the department – usually a labor-contract issue – the assistant general manager would come,” Smith explained.

Citizen complaints against the BART police are handled by the Internal Affairs Department, which is not a separate agency, as it is in many police departments, but a branch of the Detective Division, Taylor told the Bay Guardian.

That, some critics say, may explain why BART has the lowest possible rate of sustained complaints against its police officers. “There’s a very good reason for civilian agencies to handle complaints against the police,” said the ACLU’s John Crew. “People who have been abused by the police have a hard time trusting the same police department to do an honest investigation.”

Cornelius Hall, who is no stranger to government bureaucracy, said he ran into a stone wall when he tried to get some basic information about his son’s death from BART. “They wouldn’t even give me the police report,” he told the Bay Guardian. “The only way I can find out what happened to my son is to hire a lawyer and have it subpoenaed.”

Crew said he finds the situation “chilling.” He said he saw a “complete dearth” of civilian oversight in the BART administrative structure. “There’s no opportunity for meaningful public input, for hearings, for discussion of issues,” he continued.

“It’s not an acceptable situation. But under the circumstances, the members of the BART Board have an increased responsibility to ask questions and keep on top of their police department’s practices.”

In the case of Jerrold Hall, at least, that doesn’t seem to be happening. The shooting hasn’t been on the agenda for any board meeting since Nov. 15, and board members say they haven’t received any information about it from BART management.

And unlike Cornelius Hall, they haven’t even bothered to ask.

TO TELL THE TRUTH

The day after a BART police officer shot Jerrold Hall in the back of the head, transit agency spokesperson Mike Healy told reporters that Hall had been shot in the chest.

Not true.

Healy also told reporters that Hall had attacked Officer Fred Crabtree, and continued to attack him after Crabtree fired a warning shot.

Not true.

And Healy said that the warning shot was fired “over Hall’s head.”

Not true, either.

Healy freely referred to an alleged “armed robbery,” but he didn’t tell reporters that BART police had searched the entire area and never found a gun. He didn’t say that the alleged robbery victim had vanished without a trace, either.

So the public got a one-sided – and, as it turns out, largely inaccurate – picture of the incident. The press, taking Healy’s information at face value, portrayed Jerrold Hall as a violent, gun-wielding punk, shot in the act of attacking a cop.

“In some ways,” says Hall’s father, Cornelius, “that’s the saddest part of all.”

And while Healy finally put out a statement Dec. 7 acknowledging that some of his previous comments were in error, he did so only after a three-week barrage of questions from the Bay Guardian – and he never issued a word of apology to the Hall family.

It’s hard to blame Healy for the initial round of misinformation: In the heat of a bloody battle, the truth is often obscured. But Healy clearly knew, or could have known, within a few days after the incident that his official press statements had been wrong – that, for example, the medical reports showed Hall had been shot from behind. He could have called the reporters who were covering the story and let them know, or issued a new press release with updated information.

He could have tried to rescue some of what was left of the dead 19 year old’s personal reputation – and salvaged a bit of his own in the process. Instead, he fell back on the old BART strategy: When in doubt, stonewall. Then duck for cover, and hope it will all go away.

The BART Police Department may be the least-responsive law-enforcement agency I’ve seen since the discovery of the shredding machine in the White House basement. There is no press officer. The watch commanders, lieutenants, and captains refer all press calls to Chief Harold Taylor, who won’t come to the phone; his secretary refers the calls to the BART Public Affairs Office.

When I first called Healy Nov. 16 to ask about the shooting, he told me he hadn’t seen a police report, and didn’t know if one existed. He also said he didn’t know what the citizen complaint procedure was for the BART police, and had no idea if it was in writing. I filed a formal request for those and other records Nov. 17; under the Public Records Act, I had a legal right to a response within 10 days.

I let it slide to 15 days (holidays and all), then started calling Healy’s office. He was too busy to come to the phone at first, but after I harassed him for several hours, he told me that Chief Harold Taylor was handling my request, and that I should call him directly. Taylor wouldn’t come to the phone at all: He had an assistant tell me that Public Affairs was handling the request, and that I should call Mike Healy.

I spent another day trying again to reach Healy, who finally told me he wanted to set up an interview with Taylor – for Dec. 4, 17 days after I’d sent in a request for information most police agencies would probably have provided in less than an hour.

Chief Taylor showed up for the interview with a BART lawyer, who promised that the chief would fax me a statement of the facts of the shooting sometime later that afternoon. The brief, incomplete statement finally arrived three days later, around 3:30 p.m. Dec. 7, 21 days after my initial request. And BART officials still won’t release the full police report.

If I were a suspicious reporter, I’d wonder what they were trying to hide.

————

Deputy dog

In Philadelphia, the Inquirer revealed several years ago, police dogs attacked 358 people in the course of 33 months, leaving many of them scarred or maimed for life. In Los Angeles, the Times recently reported, the local K-9 Corps recorded more than a thousand bites in three years. In Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, trained German shepherds tore into a total of 375 legs, arms, and torsos in the course of their law-enforcement work.

In the past 10 years, canine corps scandals have tarnished the reputations of police departments all over the country and have cost taxpayers millions of dollars in lawsuits.

In Berkeley, however, police dogs have been banned since the early 1970s, when a City Council member named Ron Dellums responded to the brutal use of dogs against blacks in the South with a resolution abolishing the local canine corps. In San Francisco, dogs handle only a few very limited tasks.

But since 1990, the BART Police Canine Corps has been expanding into the sort of work that created such extensive problems in other American cities – a use for dogs that critics say has little justification.

“There are two basic rationales for using police dogs,” explained Richard Avenzino, director of the San Francisco SPCA, whose agency has worked with the local Police Department canine program. “One is for sniffing out explosives or narcotics. The other is for searches, mainly in enclosed spaces, where the dog’s sense of smell can aid in finding a hidden human suspect.

“But there’s also a perception that a snarling dog can intimidate people, which creates a lot more potential for trouble.”

The first BART Police canine corps dates back to the early 1970s. But the BART Board disbanded the program in 1975, after a police dog on a train in Philadelphia barked at BART Director John Glenn.

In 1990, Police Chief Harold Taylor restored four dogs to the force, saying they would be “a strong statement of police presence,” would deter violent crime, and could be used to help clear homeless people from trains and stations. In an interview last week, Taylor said the dogs, which now number nine, are used “to back up officers, in all their law-enforcement duties.”

The dogs, imported German shepherds, are bred and undergo Schützhund training at a special school in Germany, where they learn to attack on command. “The dogs only [understand] German,” explained Deputy Chief Kevin Sharp. “The officers learn to issue their commands in that language.”

Sharp said none of the BART dogs are trained to sniff out bombs or drugs and that they aren’t often needed for searches. In normal situations, he said, the dogs stay in the police car, with the window open, while the officer approaches a suspect. “They’re trained to jump out and attack without any command if they see that the officer is under assault,” he added.

ACLU Police Practices lawyer John Crew found that description alarming. “In other words,” he said, “we have dogs deciding on their own when to use what amounts to lethal force. That’s not a very good idea.”

Avenzino said the training methods used for such dogs “are, to put it mildly, controversial. A dog will do anything to please its owner; if you teach it to attack on command, it’s like loading a gun. In my opinion, it’s very dangerous.”

Jim Chanin, a Berkeley lawyer who has filed several lawsuits over attacks by police dogs, said he sees no good reason for BART to have a canine corps. “The problem is that these dogs are just trained to attack,” he explained. “You can’t use them to search for some kid lost in the BART tunnel.

“If there’s something the BART police do on a regular basis that requires the use of dogs, I certainly can’t see what it is.”

Chief Taylor told the Bay Guardian that dogs provide much less expensive backup than additional sworn officers. Berkeley Police Lt. Tom Grant said he agrees, to a point: “But then you have to pay out those big legal settlements if one of the dogs does something wrong.”

Prophet sees

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER "I’m going to start smoking again. I’m going to start eating bad and quit working out."

Here, have a few determinedly daft new year’s resolutions from an old hand at San Francisco music-making from Chuck Prophet, who happens to be headlining the old year out at Starry Plough Dec. 31. Don’t say he never gave you anything. But seriously, our Prophet?

Actually ’09 vows are the last thing Prophet wants to be burdened with. "I’m just lazy," the singer-songwriter confesses from his South of Market mini-HQ. "Why would I put any more assignments on myself?"

You know what he means. New Year’s resolutions — what better way to hang an albatross round the old oak tree and set yourself up for FAILblog? Still, ’tis the season, and I have a few ideas on how to institute change in this recession-wracked music scene, inspired by the last time the pink slips flew round the turn of the century, post-tech boom. Call these my "Keep the Scene Strong Goals for ’09," all related to stamping out the scourge of many a creative milieu: passive consumption. Though, hell, who even has the time and cash to consume very much these days?

— Engagement. It’s as simple as talking to the performer after the show. And no, I don’t mean hit on the band. Instead, start a dialogue — of either the positive or constructively critical ilk — with your friendly neighborhood musicmaker. Who wants to play into a void, to a passive, glazed-look blank generation? Feedback ain’t just a whole lotta noise. If the spirit moves you, feel free to buy those hard-working musicians and DJs a round of drinks. The Hemlock’s $1 bag of hot peanuts is a nice gesture.

— Dance. OK, the early ’00s saw a rock crew shook it up at shows, but San Francisco is slipping, regaining that bad reputation of resembling zombie-like, arms-folded slabs of tofu. Hold up your end of the bargain and get a move on.

— Stretch. Yes, stretching before dancing helps with muscle aches. But I mean listen to new sounds. If you’re a metal dude, lend an ear to weird new America-style folk — think about Zep’s connections betwixt loud and languorous. If you’re an indie rock chippie check into Fania salsa reissues; a gangster rap head, a bit of death metal or a dab of indie-literati-pop.

— Prepare yourself for the worst — and possibly the best. Everyone’s wondering if they’re going to be laid off or face a work drought in ’09. Instead resolve to put that anxious energy and restless imagination to good use. Come up with some nice, meaty, beaty post-layoff projects. Take up an instrument, even if it is simply a shareware synthesizer. Switch up your recorded listening by swapping records or MP3s with pals — or dive into an affair like KUSF-FM’s Rock ‘n’ Swap on Jan. 11 (www.kusf.org/rocknswap.shtml). Throw a show at your abode, or better yet, put on a free music happening in a public space (i.e., the Toxic Beach throw-downs, mobile Flag Day jamboree).

Sure, everyone knows resolutions are made to be broken. Even Prophet spurned his faux resolutions after we spoke, via e-mail: "So last night after eating cereal for dinner, passing out watching the Food channel, I’ve decided my NY resolution is to cook more often. Taking up smoking is a bit daft, I have to admit." Tasty words — and food — for thought.

CHUCK PROPHET

Wed/31, 9:30 p.m., $26.50

Starry Plough

3101 Shattuck, Berk.

www.starryploughpub.com

For more from Chuck Prophet, go to Noise blog at sfbg.com.

THE MOST INTRIGUING READER TOP 10: MITCH CARDWELL

"Budget Rock-er, zine scribe, lover, drunkard"

1. Hank IV, Refuge in Genre (Siltbreeze) They’ve made SF home to Earth’s greatest punk band once again.

2. Nothing People, Anonymous (S-S) They only play great shows, release great records, etc.

3. The Hospitals, Hairdryer Peace (Stonehouse) Ear-splitter of the year, without question.

4. Buzzer, Disco Kiddz EP (Douche Master) Glam, proto, pub — it’s all here.

5. Nobunny, Love Visions (Bubbledumb) Punk parody is always a winning concept.

6. Colossal Yes, Charlemagne’s Big Thaw (Ba Da Bing) Piano pop-psych crafted in a totally winning fashion.

7. Wounded Lion, "Pony People" 7-inch (S-S) Pop that is both brainy and fun.

8. Mayyors, both 7-inches (self-released) Mayyors wow with sheer force of volume.

9. Scarecrow and the Shuckers at the Stork Club

10. Thee Oh Sees, The Hounds of Foggy Notion CD/DVD (Castle Face) I’ll take this over their recent hit LP.

PRESSURE TO PERFORM: A FEW MORE NYE OPTIONS

LES CLAYPOOL


The Bay Area original makes the leap from his longtime NYE venue at the Fillmore. With Zappa Plays Zappa and Tim Fite. Wed/31, 8 p.m., $69–<\d>$126. War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness, SF. www.goldenvoice.com

BORTS MINORTS AND THIS BIKE IS A PIPE BOMB


NYE Hemlock reg This Bike is joined by the SF troupe Kelley Stoltz describes as "fun SF weirdness without the Burning Man remorse." Wed/31, 9 p.m., $10. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

MOS DEF


Most definitely "Sneakers Required" with DJs like Apollo and Sake One. Wed/31, 9 p.m., call for price. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF. (415) 978-2787.

LAUGHTER AGAINST THE MACHINE


Funny fellahs W. Kamau Bell, Bucky Sinister, and Nato Green issue their response to all the ‘WHOOOOOOHOOOOO!’ that typically goes down on NYE. Wed/31, 7:30 and 10 p.m., $30 (friendofkamau discount code for $10 off). Phoenix Theatre, 414 Mason, SF. www.brownpapertickets.com/event/50525

Reel leaders

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MIDNITES FOR MANIACS CURATOR JESSE HAWTHORNE FICKS’ TOP TEN (AND THEN SOME):

1 Downloading Nancy (Johan Renck, USA) People were literally running out of the Sundance screening of this brutally honest exploration of a couple’s complacent relationship. Maria Bello and Rufus Sewell bare all, while Christopher Doyle’s camera traps them in the year’s coldest blue harshness.

2 Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Woody Allen, Spain/USA) After 2007’s Cassandra’s Dream, another tiny gem from the greatest living filmmaker.

3 Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, USA) Quiet and haunting, this follow-up to Reichardt’s wonderful Old Joy (2006) is a perfect antithesis to Sean Penn’s overly romanticized Into the Wild (2007).

4 Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas, France) I cried throughout this unique family drama and immediately called my parents as soon as it was over. Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953) is the closest thing I can think of.

5 JCVD. (Mabrouk El Mechri, Belgium/Luxembourg/France) Jean-Claude Van Damme is a genuine genre actor and this deconstructive meta-film lovingly proves it.

6 CJ7 (Stephen Chow, Hong Kong) Overlooked by adults and kids alike, this little Furby comedy is insanity at its most brilliant!

7 Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh, UK) Leigh’s loving tribute to teachers is a dark and lonely place. En-Ra-Ha.

8 Redbelt (David Mamet, USA) Mamet does martial arts: the metaphors are limitless.

9 Funny Games (Michael Haneke (USA/France/UK/Austria/Germany/Italy) Mean, lean and totally gene!

10 Rambo (Sylvester Stallone, USA/Germany) Sly captures American destruction and cynicism in half the time as PT Anderson’s meandering There Will Be Blood (2007).

Favorite actor: Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler (Darren Aronfsky, USA) Ignore Aronfsky’s overly sentimental tendencies and Rourke will blow your mind. Then go watch Tsui Hark’s Double Team (1998) for the ultimate ’90s rumble: Rourke vs. Van Damme!

Favorite actress: Emmanuelle Béart, Vinyan (Fabrice Du Welz, France/Belgium/UK) Wealthy white tourists will stop at nothing to colonize every corner of this planet. Watch Béart and husband Rufus Sewell (see Downloading Nancy) go absolutely nuts as they battle each other and creepy jungle kids in this hypnotic hybrid of The African Queen (1951) and Don’t Look Now (1973).

Favorite animated movie: Wall*E (Andrew Stanton, USA) This unofficial remake of Silent Running (1972) should win the Oscar for Best Picture.

Favorite mumblecore film: Baghead (Duplass Brothers, USA) The brothers continue to nail their jokes hilariously and earnestly.

Favorite trailer: The Class (Laurent Cantet, France) Tears well up every time I see the trailer for this Cannes Golden Palm winner (due in early 2009). Can’t wait.

MICHELLE DEVEREAUX’S "ANTIDOTES TO BROMANCE" LIST

Best pluck: Sally Hawkins, Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh, UK)

Worst pluck: Angelina Jolie, Changeling (Clint Eastwood, USA)

Best train wreck: Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme, USA)

Worst train wreck: Marianna Palka, Good Dick (Marianna Palka, USA)

Best tween vampiress: Lina Leandersson, Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, Norway)

Worst teen vampire groupie: Kristen Stewart, Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke, USA)

Worst mother in an awful movie: Julianne Moore, Savage Grace (Tom Kalin, Spain/USA/France)

Worst mother in a good movie: Debra Winger, Rachel Getting Married

Best outlaw: Anamaria Marinca, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu, Romania, 2007)

Worst outlaw: Angelina Jolie, Wanted (Timur Bekmambetov, USA/Germany)

Best Princess Diana impression: Keira Knightly, The Duchess (Saul Dibb, UK/France/Italy)

Better than a Princess Diana impression: Marisa Tomei, The Wrestler (Darren Aronofsky, USA)

ERIK MORSE’S TOP TEN:

1 My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, Canada)

2 Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, Sweden)

3 The long-awaited DVD release of Stranded in Canton (William Eggleston, USA, 1974)

4 The Man From London (Béla Tarr, France/Germany/Hungary)

5 Man on Wire (James Marsh, UK/USA)

6 Tell No One (Guillaume Canet, France)

7 The Bank Job (Roger Donaldson, UK)

8 Alexandra (Alexander Sokurov, Russia/France)

9 In Bruges (Martin McDonagh, UK/USA)

10 The Wrestler (Darren Aronofsky, USA)

HEIDI ATWAL’S TOP TEN:

1 Towelhead (Alan Ball, USA)

2 The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, USA)

3 Milk (Gus Van Sant, USA)

4 Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle, UK/India)

5 Pineapple Express (David Gordon Green, USA)

6 Encounters at the End of the World (Werner Herzog, USA, 2007)

7 Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme, USA)

8 Reprise (Joachim Trier, Norway, 2006)

9 Gomorra (Matteo Garrone, Italy)

10 Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Woody Allen, Spain/USA)

JIM FINN’S TOP 10 MOVIES LOVED AT 2008 FILM FESTIVALS AROUND PLANET EARTH

1 The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, Argentina)

2 Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso, Argentina)

3 Lion’s Den (Pablo Trapero, Argentina)

4 Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone, Italy)

5 On the Assassination of the President (Adam Keker, USA)

6 United Red Army (Koji Wakamatsu, Japan, 2007)

7 Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (Wang Bing, China, 2007)

8 Observando el Cielo (Jeanne Liotta, USA, 2007)

9 Brilliant Noise (Semiconductor, USA, 2006)

10 Outer Space (Peter Tscherkassky, Austria, 1999)

Jim Finn’s films include The Juche Idea, La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo, and Interkosmos.

ROSS LIPMAN’S TOP 10

As I’m usually absorbed in restoration and production, my film viewing is erratic, and I’m hopelessly unable to keep up with all the films I’d like to see. Thus this list is not so much a critical 10 "best" list as it is a list of new works which, having somehow cut through the clutter and pulled me to the theater, struck me as excellent — each one in a unique way. I’ve allowed it to include "film events" of 2008, enabling notable restorations and experimental works to stand alongside conventional releases.

In alphabetical order:

Absurdistan (Veit Heimer, Germany/Azerbaijan)

Four Nights with Anna (Jerzy Skolimowki, Poland/France)

Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh, UK)

Man on Wire (James Marsh, UK/USA)

Once Upon a Time in the West restoration (Sergio Leone, Italy/US, 1968)

The Orphanage (Juan Antonio Bayona, Mexico/Spain, 2007)

Quiet Chaos (Antonio Luigi Grimaldi, Italy/UK)

Song of Sparrows (Majid Majidi, Iran)

Think of Me First as a Person restoration (George Ingmire, USA, 1975)

Untitled film projector performance (Sandra Gibson, Luis Recoder, and Olivia Block, USA)

Ross Lipman’s recent film restorations include Killer of Sheep, The Exiles, and Kenneth Anger’s Magick Lantern Cycle.

MICHAEL ROBINSON’S TOP 10

1 Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/France/Netherlands/Germany, 2007)

2 Body ÷ Mind + 7 = Spirit (Shana Moulton, USA, 2007)

3 Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh, UK)

4 Origin of the Species, (Ben Rivers, UK)

5 La France, (Serge Bozon, France, 2007)

6 False Aging (Lewis Klahr, USA)

7 Paranoid Park and Milk (Gus Van Sant, USA, 2007 and 2008)

8 Lost, season four (Jack Bender and others, USA)

9 Singing Biscotts (Luther Price, USA)

10 The Fall (Tarsem Singh, India/UK/USA)

Michael Robinson’s films include Light Is Waiting and The General Returns From One Place to Another.

MATT WOLF’S TOP 10

1 Milk (Gus Van Sant, USA)

For the fake political ephemera; the meticulous reconstruction of Harvey’s camera shop; DP Harris Savides’ recurring visions of San Francisco; and Sean Penn’s queer, Jew-y affectation.

2 RR (James Benning, USA, 2007)

A hypnotic structural film about railroads and the romantic landscapes they traverse, devoid of signs from contemporary life.

3 The Order of Myths (Margaret Brown, USA)

A lovingly crafted documentary about Mardi Gras traditions and race in Mobile, Alabama.

4 Happy Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh, UK)

For Sally Hawkins’ stellar performance as a recklessly childlike schoolteacher, who transforms into a fearless adult.

5 Maggie in Wonderland (Mark Hammarberg, Ester Martin Bergsmark, and Beatrice Maggie Andersson, Sweden)

Swedish documentary about an African immigrant, Maggie, which mixes her poignant video diary with savvy reenactments. A fertile cross between Lukas Moodysson and Spencer Nakasako.

6 Tearoom (William E. Jones, USA, 1962/2007)

An evocative resurrection of archival police footage from the 1960s of public sex crackdowns in the Midwest.

7 Derek (Isaac Julien, UK)

Tilda Swinton’s absorbing monologue about queer-punk filmmaker Derek Jarman thrusts his radical work into the present.

8 Reprise (Joachim Trier, Norway, 2006)

A bombastic film about the literary ambitions of a group of post-punk boys in Oslo.

9 Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, USA)

The sobering alternative to the pre-recession revelry of Sex and the City: The Movie.

10 A Mother’s Promise: Barack Obama Bio Film (David Guggenheim, USA)

Romantic Barack-oganda screened during the DNC.

Matt Wolf is the director of Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell.

BARRY JENKINS’ TOP 10

1 Still Walking (Hirokazu Kore’eda, Japan)

Perfection.

2 Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman, USA)

One of the most unbridled films ever funded by Hollywood coffers. Thank you, Sidney Kimmel.

3 Useless (Jia Zhangke, China, 2007)

Yerba Buena Center. You know, they show films there. And usually, they’re pretty fuckin’ crucial.

4 Flight of The Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-hsien, France, 2007)

A dream.

5 Phone Banking for Obama @ Four Barrel Coffee

Not cinema, but visual storytelling nonetheless: when Jeremy Tooker brought ironing boards and voter rolls into his glittering café for a few exemplary weeks, we glimpsed a version of San Francisco where shiny new things brought us together rather than separated us.

6 The Website Is Down: Sales Guy vs. Web Dude (Josh Weinberg, USA)

My favorite short of the year. Truly independent "cinema."

7 Waltz With Bashir (Ari Folman, Gemany/France/Israel/USA)

Animation is the ideal medium for the recollection of memories. This film proves it.

8 Che (Steven Soderbergh, Spain/France/USA)

Someday, we’ll look upon Soderbergh’s effort for the sum of its parts: RED.

9 Craig Baldwin interview with SF360 Movie Scene

The most exciting four minutes of local film-speak in all of ’08.

10 There Will Be Bud (P.O.T. Anderson, USA)

Old-school spoofing done right.

Barry Jenkins is the director of Medicine for Melancholy.


>>More Year in Film 2008

Best in show

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YEAR IN REVIEW The time is right to pay tribute to the Bay Area’s artists and galleries. Without further ado, here’s an alphabetical guide to 2008’s delights.

A is for the amazing SF art opening section at www.artbusiness.com; and for Ryan Alexiev, whose "Land of a Million Cereals," at Mission 17, hit Larry King and Damien Hirst with sugary comedy

B is Todd Bura, whose "Misfits" at Triple Base used minimalism to make one see things anew; Jonathan Burstein, whose "Visage" at Patricia Sweetow Gallery turned museum recycling into the year’s best portraiture; and Luke Butler, whose "Invasion," at [2nd floor projects] tickled with Spock landscapes and Republican presidential beefcake

C is for Victor Cartagena, "The Invisible Nation," at Galeria de la Raza; Julie Chang, "Ox-herding," at Hosfelt Gallery; Ryan Coffey, "Recent Works," at Adobe Books Backroom Gallery

D is for Lauren DiCioccio, threading through the death of the newspaper era in "Lauren DiCioccio, Aliza Lelah," at Jack Fischer Gallery; and Emory Douglas, making his own activist news in "The Long Memory: Works Past and Present," at Babylon Falling

E is for David Enos, Frank Haines, and Wayne Smith, pronouncing "Zen With a Lisp," at [2nd floor projects]; and 871 Fine Arts, the Bay’s best art books, now at a new site.

F is for Matt Furie and his "Heads," at Adobe Books Backroom Gallery; and "Nature Freak," at Jack Fischer Gallery

G is for the Great Tortilla Conspiracy, who — with help from a Paris Hilton Endowment for the Tortilla Arts — served up "Tortilla Art for the 21st Century," at SomArts Gallery

H is for Jay Howell, who teamed up with Matt Furie for Receiver Gallery’s "Return to Innocence," and brought curatorial goodness to 111 Minna

I is for inventiveness

J is for Bill Jenkins, whose self-titled show at Jancar Jones Gallery was the understatement of the year; and Ian Johnson, whose "Other Voices/Other Rooms" turned jazz into color bursts at Park Life

K is for the brother duo George and Mike Kuchar, presenting dinosaur and dog love via "paintingsdrawingspaintingsdrawingspaintings," at [2nd floor projects]

L is for Ruth Laskey, and the amazing intricacy of her "7 Weavings," at Ratio 3; and Frank Lyon and David Wilson, "Enter the Center," at Eleanor Harwood Gallery

M is for Dave Muller, " Medium (Six Times,)" at Anthony Meier Fine Arts

N is for nothing

O is for Open Studios

P is for Nathan Phelps, turning a corner from white to black with "The Neti Project," at 20 GOTO 10 Gallery

Q is for Queen’s Nails Annex, which saw the future with Maximo Gonzalez’s "Recession: The Alternative Economies of Maximo Gonzalez."

R is for onetime Bay Area queer punk Gwenaël Rattke, bringing collage back with "Nouveau Système," at Ping Pong Gallery; and Lordy Rodriguez, blasting us with color in "201 Drawings," at Hosfelt Gallery

S is for Bott Scarry, tweaking op art and his name with "Weezing the Juice," at CCRider

T is for David Tomb, heeding the call of the wild with the beautiful paintings of "Birds of the Sierra Madre," at Electric Works

U is for underground art that you keep at home and show only to friends

V is for Jacques Villegle, whose "Decollage from 1965-2006" brought the art of torn posters to Modernism Gallery

W is for William T. Wiley, turning ecology into pinball at Electric Works’ "Punball — Only One Earth"; and Michael Wolf, whose "The Transparent City" eyed city-of-now Chicago, at Robert Koch Gallery

X marks the spot

Y is for Will Yackulic, "A Prompt and Perfect Cure," at Gregory Lind Gallery

Z is for "Zebulun," by Goldie winner Kamau Patton, at Queen’s Nails Annex; and for all the zzzs needed to rest up before the barrage of Bay Area art in 2009.

Crystal magic

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Light a candle, burn a wand of sage, and singe your bangs. Then fondle a frosty pink hunk of rose quartz and ask the goddess, "Are crystals the new wolves — or at least the new bears? Maybe even the new alps/mountains?" ‘Cause I swear, I’m not a miner — ’49-er, tweenie-bopper, or otherwise — but I can almost smell the crystals everywhere. Especially when it comes to artist-band names like Crystal Castles, Crystal Stilts, Crystal Waters, and wow, now juxtaposing crystal with defensive head-growths, Crystal Antlers.

I clash gently this sparkling SOMA morning with said smiling, scruffy, shambolic Long Beach combo — half chimney sweeps by day and all capable of metamorphosing magically into fierce psych-garage warriors by the light of a mountain-wolf-bear moon. The obvious question goes to tousled vocalist-bassist Jonny Bell, his hoodie bunched over his brow in the very un-Cali cold and just roused from his slumber at Closer Recording where the band is completing its first full-length: what is it about crystals that resonates? Is this a conspiracy (of beards)? And more importantly — the goddess craves a response after spotting those vaginal folds on the cover of Crystal Antlers’ recent self-titled Touch and Go EP — do you believe in crystal magic?

"Yeah, well, we came up with the name three years ago, so we didn’t know about those other bands," mumbles Bell, weary of being given the crystal shit. "We’ve done a lot of interviews where they ask about that, and I’ve given a lot of sarcastic answers." The non-sarcastic rejoinder? "It sounded fragile."

No wonder the band leader is a wee bit wary about conjuring a name for the Crystal Antlers’ album, due out in April, which he says sports mellow and ambient musical percolations as well as "more of a soul influence." Crystal Antlers have been gobbling up old soul from ’60s Miami like Della Humphrey and George McRae and spilling out their own revamp — strained through the filter of their punk background and miles away from the well-inked and -oiled Daptone/Mark Ronson new-old-school. Judging from the EP produced by Mars Volta’s Isaiah "Ikey" Owens, Crystal Antlers roam another neck of the woods altogether: a noisier, more distorted dead meadow where hirsute beasties like Comets on Fire and Mammatus roam near Holy Mountains, where Andrew King’s careening guitar skirts squalling psych-cacophony and Victor Rodriguez’s textural, low-screaming organ revels in a garage-goth parking lot, out behind the rock ‘n’ roll wilderness preserve.

"We wanted to try to play beyond our abilities," Bell says of the recording. "I think we’re always trying to push our limits, and a lot of stuff on the EP was really difficult for us. None of us have any formal training." Noisy, dark matter far from the manic weekday traffic tearing down Howard Street as the Crystal Antlers tuck into eggs and bagels at a café near the studio.

It’s the kind of recession-strapped, pre-Christmas week — a ruthless admixture of hope and fear — that brings out the take-that holiday light displays in the Mission and makes it a great moment to get your fill of your friendly neighborhood Bay Area bands, as the clubs stock up on local talents choosing to staycation. Instead Crystal Antlers are here, forsaking primo chimney sweep season ("I can write songs while laying bricks," explains Bell. "It’s a nice contrast to sitting in a van") to record with engineer Joe Goldring (the Enablers, Touched by a Janitor). Today they’ll track keyboards, saxophone, and vocals, though Bell caught a cold from bunking down in their veggie-oil van during last week’s hail.

At least they’re out of the vehicle — now convalescing on a SoMa byway — though Bell is proud that it got the band out and on tour on a single tank of diesel. "Ten thousand miles and we only used one tank of diesel fuel the whole time. We were able to find vegetable oil all around the country," he says. "We filled up when we were leaving for the tour. We didn’t go to a single gas station the whole time on the way back." The group’s recent Fuck Yeah tour with Monotonix, Dan Deacon, the Death Set, and others was similarly veggie-oil-fueled, though somewhat nuttier from the sound of the stories of smashed vans and spilled instruments that drummer and kindred chimney sweep Kevin Stuart regales me with. There was also that time when Crystal Antlers were in Oakland, touring with Canada’s Fucked Up, and Bell offers, munching, "Kevin forgot to lock the trailer."

"Hey, I didn’t forget it!" Stuart protests. "That was Fucked Up’s fault!"

"We started driving," continues Bell, "and all their stuff started falling out onto the freeway." Word from the goddess: unlock that Crystal power — with limits. *

CRYSTAL ANTLERS

With Two Gallants and the Tallest Man on Earth

Fri/26, 9 p.m., $20

Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

www.livenation.com

LOCAL POTION

QBERT


Hamsters unite! The Invisibl Skratch Pikl re-emerges. With Mochipet and Joyo Velarde. Fri/26, 9 p.m., $20. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

ZIGABOO MODELISTE


The Meters percussion mainstay whoops it up for his b-day. With Bhi Bhiman. Sat/27, 9 p.m., $20. Café du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. www.cafedunord.com

BLACKALICIOUS


Gift of Gab’s Mighty Underdogs project weighs in at this hefty indie hip-hop hoedown. Sat/27, 9 p.m., $26.50. Fillmore, 1805 Geary, SF. www.livenation.com

CRACKER AND CAMPER VAN BEETHOVEN


Having a cracked Cracker-Camper Christmas comedown — and how good it is. Sat/27, 9 p.m., $23. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

MICHAEL TALBOTT AND HELENE RENAUT


The Brooklyn-by-way-of-SF wolf king grows starry-eyed with the winsome Brittany-born Beam warbler at an Antenna Farm convo. With the Naked Hearts. Sat/27, 9:30 p.m., $7. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

TOMMY GUERRERO’S GET RAD SIX


Skating, designing, music-making — Tommy Guerrero veers off from Jet Black Crayon with his birthday bash band at this SF Food Bank benefit. With Marc and the Casuals. Tues/30, 8 p.m., $6–$10 sliding scale. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

Scene: Bersa Discos hits the bueno

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Here’s an interview with new-cumbia whizzes Bersa Discos — on the eve of their party Tormenta Tropical’s first anniversary this Friday at the The Elbo Room — as published in this week’s Scene: The Guardian Guide to Nightlife and Glamour magazine, on stands inside the Guardian…

“The reception to our sound has been amazing here,” says new-style cumbia pioneer DJ Oro11 — who, along with partner DJ Disco Shawn, heads the Bersa Discos label (www.myspace.com/bersadiscos) and puts on the packed Tormenta Tropical monthlies at Elbo Room. “A place like the Bay Area is a perfect spot for new cumbia sounds to take hold. People here are always looking for new music, plus there’s obviously a huge Latino population. A lot of younger Latinos who grew up hearing cumbia also listened to hip-hop and electronic music. They’re really into what we’re doing.”

Cumbia, the irresistible traditional accordion-driven dance music of Latin America (originally from Colombia), has undergone a mutation of sorts, opening up to include electronic augmentation, hip-hop beats, and even punk styles. The new iteration has taken hold in clubs like the cutting-edge Zizek, in Buenos Aires, where Oro11 was living and performing when Disco Shawn sought him out in 2006 for a taste of the electro-cumbia sound. The two returned to San Francisco, their home base, to form the Bersa Discos label as a kind of sonic nexus. “DJs and producers were selling burned CDs and swapping MP3s, but nothing was very organized at the time,” says Disco Shawn. “We just wanted to get some of these amazing tracks pressed up on vinyl and circulated a little more officially.”

Bersa Discos is now on its fourth release, titled, appropriately, Bersa #4 and featuring Afro-Colombian-tinged tracks by Brooklyn’s Uproot Andy and deeper sounds from the Netherlands’ Sonido del Principe. And the Tormenta Tropical party has seen legends like DJ/Rupture, South Rakkas Crew, Buraka Som Sistema, Toy Selectah, and even the Zizek folks burn up the stage. Shawn says to keep a 2k9 ear out for DJ Panik’s Texan “crunk cumbia.” Meanwhile, UK “bashment” crew the Heatwave hop in Dec. 19 to enliven the party’s first anniversary.

SFBG What originally attracted you to the new cumbia style?

ORO11 I first got into cumbia in 2001 while I was in Buenos Aires — the same time that the Argentine economy was collapsing. Kids were still heading to the clubs all night, but as a whole the music was pretty unimpressive. Lots of ’80s, trance, Ramones, and Rolling Stones — seriously, whole subcultures based on those last two. But one day I caught a Sunday TV variety show called Pasion Tropical that had the group Pibes Chorros on. Those dudes were repping heavy keyboard-guitars, long hair, and skull tees. They had a different sound that grabbed me, meaner than most cumbia I had heard. So I started tracking down their mixes, chopping up their samples, and making cumbia remixes with dancehall and hip-hop thrown in. Guys like Marcelo Fabian, Villa Diamante, Sonido Martines, and Daleduro were messing with cumbia too. So we started linking up, throwing parties together. Shawn and I met not too long after and started throwing the idea of Bersa Discos around.

SFBG What are some of your most memorable Tormenta Tropical experiences?

DISCO SHAWN It’s all been amazing. But the best thing has been getting to play with artists whose music I was already a fan of. The crowd has also been great. It’s totally mixed — Latino cumbia diehards, hipsters, dancehall heads, etc. Even better, people are really into dancing. Most of the time we’re playing songs that people don’t know — most of the songs are in Spanish, so a good portion of the crowd may not even understand the language — yet everyone goes crazy on the dance floor. It’s really nice because we’re not slaves to playing any sort of “hits.”

SFBG Drop a new cumbia top five on us.

ORO11 How about these?

Petrona Martinez, “La Vida Vale la Pena (Uproot Andy Remix)”
Los Rakas, “Esa Mulata”
El Guincho, “Kalise (Frikstailers Remix)”
DJ Panik, “Gettin’ Some Head”
BananaClipz featuring MC TIDAL, “Bluetooth Riddim”

TORMENTA TROPICAL ONE-YEAR ANNIVERSARY PARTY
With the Heatwave and Paul Devro
Fri/19, 10 p.m., $10
Elbo Room
647 Valencia, SF
(415) 552-7788
www.elbo.com

Tops in 2008

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TOMAS PALERMO’S TOP DANCEHALL AND REGGAE ARTISTS 2008


This year saw American pop (Rhianna, Kardinal Offishall, and Sean Kingston) broadly embracing Jamaican music. Likewise, Jamaican artists emulated, covered, and incorporated American pop and R&B motifs more than ever. The trend in JA was toward hot singles over hot albums, while dozens of new artists broke out. Women in particular had a massive resurgence in reggae (Queen Ifrica, Etana, Cherine Anderson) and dancehall (Tifa, Timberly, D’Angel, Tami Chynn). Money — having it, making it, spending it — was the most prevalent song topic. Here are six categories of reggae artists who made as big an impact on music as Jamaican athletes did on the track in Beijing.

TOP DAWGS Dancehall chart-toppers included Mavado, Vybz Kartel, Beenie Man, Elephant Man, and Busy Signal.

ROOTS REFRESHERS Taj Weekes, Dwayne Stephenson, Morgan Heritage, Pressure, and Tarrus Riley enlivened one-drop traditional reggae.

LADIES IN CHARGE Women charged the charts, including Spice, Tifa, Natalie Storm, Timberlee, Pompatay, D’Angel, Etana, and Queen Ifrica.

CATCHING FIRE Newcomers galore emerged, like Bugle, Serani, Demarco, Erup, Black Ryno, and Konshens.

SOLID AS A ROCK Veterans who didn’t let us down included Beres Hammond, Tony Rebel, Jah Cure, Mr. Vegas, and Junior Reid, as well as Damien and Steven Marley.

POP GOES REGGAE These reggae/pop/R&B combinations and remixes made us smile: Estelle/Sean Paul, Jazmine Sullivan, John Legend/Buju Banton, plus French roots-boots remixes of Mary J. Blige, Lil Wayne, Nas, and Motown.

WOODEN SHJIPS’ TOP 10 (IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER)


•Art Lessing, Sleeping Ghost (An Electric Eggplant)

•Der TPK (Teenage Panzerkorps), Games for Slaves (Siltbreeze)

•Endless Boogie, Focus Level (No Quarter)

•Expo 70 and Rahdunes’s split-LP (Kill Shaman)

•Fabulous Diamonds, Fabulous Diamonds (Siltbreeze)

•Los Llamarada, Take the Sky (S-S)

•Nothing People, Anonymous (S-S)

•Sic Alps, US EZ (Siltbreeze)

•Suicide, Live 1977–1978 (Blast First)

•Times New Viking, Rip It Off (Matador)

GEORGE CHEN’S DISORDERLY 10


•Grouper, Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill (Type)

•Krallice, Krallice (Profound Lore)

•Mount Eerie, Lost Wisdom and Black Wooden Ceiling Opening (P.W. Elverum & Sun)

•Ecstatic Sunshine live

•Prurient live

•Bulbs, Light Ships (Freedom to Spend)

•Mincemeat or Tenspeed in a cave

•Thee Silver Mt Zion Memorial Orchestra and Tra-La-La Band, 13 Blues for Thirteen Moons (Constellation)

•Pukers cassette

BEN RICHARDSON’S "BEVY OF HEAVY" TOP 10 METAL ALBUMS


•Testament, The Formation of Damnation (Nuclear Blast)

•Gama Bomb, Citizen Brain (Earache)

•Bloodbath, The Fathomless Mastery (Peaceville)

•Cannabis Corpse, Tube of the Resinated (Forcefield/Robotic Empire)

•Hail of Bullets, …of Frost and War (Metal Blade)

•Bison B.C., Quiet Earth (Metal Blade)

•Grand Magus, Iron Will (Rise Above/Candlelight)

•Jucifer, L’Autrichienne (Relapse)

•Gojira, The Way of All Flesh (Prosthetic)

•Enslaved, Vertebrae (Indie)

DJ AMPLIVE’S TOP 10


1. MGMT, Oracular Spectacular (Sony)

2. Zion-I, "Juicy Juice" (Gold Dust)

3. Grouch, Show You the World (Legendary Music)

4. Weezer, "Pork and Beans" (Geffen)

5. Santogold, Santogold (Downtown/Atlantic)

6. The Foals, Antidotes (Sub Pop)

7. T-Pain, "Chopped ‘N Skrewed" (Jive)

8. Tapes ‘N Tapes "The Dirty Dirty (Recession Remixes)"

9. Jamie Lidell, Jim (Warp)

10. Hottub, "Man Bitch" (LeHeat)

THEO SCHELL-LAMBERT’S TOP 10 OF ’08


10. The Kills, Midnight Boom (Domino)

Hince and Mosshart’s latest was forceful and impressively consistent, which, yes, meant it was professional, and which, no, didn’t mean it was soulless. The pair spotted the rhythmic snap and hypnotism in ’60s playground sing-alongs. Working with these features instead of nostalgia or camp, they had the basis for a percussion-driven ’00s rock.

9. Steinski, What Does It All Mean? 1983–2006 Retrospective (Illegal Art)

Steve Stein’s influential ’80s tracks were extreme hip-hop: not only any song, but any sound that society had made could be sampled and woven into his boom-box fabrics. Of course, this made for legal nightmares. In 2008, we got the gift of a straightforward packaging.

8. Benga, Diary of an Afro Warrior (Tempa)

The Croydon dubstep man shoved the movement forward with Warrior, but he played it as a nudge. An eclectic, graceful, and terrifically undogmatic outing, it seemed to stroll along the Thames, picking up a new rhythm in each neighborhood. Through that, it remained fierce.

7. Bon Iver, For Emma, Forever Ago (Jagjaguwar)

When you head off to the cabin in the woods to record your masterpiece, it doesn’t tend to work out well. You realize the woods are cold and boring, and that you are missing some helpful equipment. Justin Vernon’s excursion into the Wisconsin snow should inspire a new crop of such failures, because it polishes the myth. In its austerity and bone-cooling effect, Emma recalls a more focused Bonnie "Prince" Billy.

6. The Magnetic Fields, Distortion (Nonesuch)

In 2008, soaking an indie album in Jesus and Mary Chain noise was about as original as what Bon Iver did (see above). Yet it too worked. Critically, Stephin Merritt never let his latest become a disc about texture: he knew that the key to noise pop is the pop. And Distortion delights in the girl-group drums and pert melodies while dramatically cringing at the feedback it pretends is just part of every record. "Drive on, Driver" is more indebted to Fleetwood Mac than anyone else.

5. Lucinda Williams, Little Honey (Lost Highway)

We extend the same sort of charity to Lucinda Williams as we do Chan Marshall — we just really want those gals to be in a happy place. For the first time in a while, Lucinda cut a studio set with optimistic poetry, and Honey not only warmed anyone who got close to Essence or West (both Lost Highway; 2001, 2007), it even matched the elegance of those discs — and with a way juicier palette.

4. Vampire Weekend, Vampire Weekend (XL)

The culture-jamming ("Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa") wasn’t as deeply meaningful as some held, but the light touch with which it arrived made the record a bit of a marvel. It was sweet, it was for parties, and it had nothing to do with Paul Simon. And the lyrics cribbed from freshman classes at Columbia were remarkably workable and unsophomoric.

3. Lil Wayne, Tha Carter III (Cash Money)

Wayne has a monopoly on ink. What doesn’t make it onto his neck goes into his paeans. Both outlets — the tats, the praise — can seem excessive, but the latter just keeps on being reasonable. Wayne is the rapper as post-rapper, deliciously self-aware. Rapping is a funny thing to do, and rap albums are increasingly funny things to make. He’s getting inside it: looking with awe at that thing he just said, then riffing off it, then riffing off that, wheezing and grunting until his syllables morph, and enjoying himself.

2. Beach House, Devotion (Carpark)

The Baltimore pair found a sound on their debut. On their second record, they improved it and grew into it. Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally seemed to be operating in some last outpost of melody, where tart country-pop hooks could be heard in a final, furry form before they collapsed. That made Devotion both comforting and lonely.

1. Drive-By Truckers, Brighter Than Creation’s Dark (New West)

For starters, DBT are shaping up as their generation’s premier bards of booze. When not singing mid-bender, they’re suffering through the aftermath or plotting the next go-round. What that really means is that their songs teeter powerfully between the concomitant bitterness and shame. The 19-song Creation was built to have room for all the less proud emotions.

Honorable mentions: Lykke Li, Youth Novels (LL); White Hinterland, Phylactery Factory (Dead Oceans); Kathleen Edwards, Asking for Flowers (Rounder); James Pants, Welcome (Stones Throw); Fleet Foxes, Fleet Foxes (Sub Pop)

THE FUCKING CHAMPS’ TIM SOETE’S TOP 10 2008 RELEASES


1. Various artists, Obsession (Bully)

2. Kurt Vile, Constant Hitmaker (Gulcher)

3. Jonas Reinhardt, Jonas Reinhardt (Kranky)

4. Ariel Pink, Oddities Sodomies Vol. 1 (Vinyl International)

5. Lindstrom, Where You Go, I Go Too (Smalltown Supersound)

6. Bum Kon, Drunken Sex Sucks (Smooch/Maximum Rocknroll)

7. La Dusseldorf, Viva (Water)

8. John Maus, Love Is Real (Upset the Rhythm)

9. RTX, JJ Got Live RaTX (Drag City)

10. Sic Alps, US EZ (Siltbreeze)

CHRIS SABBATH’S TOP 10


1. Godwaffle Noise Pancakes

A cluster of floor-crouching noiseniks + a heaping helping of syrupy waffles hot off the griddle = a great way to kill two hours on a Saturday afternoon.

2. Beth from Times New Viking tells me outside the Great American Music Hall that she likes my cat sweatshirt: And according to her, she only gives out one sweatshirt compliment per year — oh, snap!

3. Spire Live, Fundamentalis (Autofact/Touch)

Dynamite double LP compilation of live recordings dubbed in various European cathedrals from the likes of Philip Jeck, Christian Fennesz, BJNilsen, and more.

4. Eat Skull, Sick to Death (Siltbreeze)

Hurrah to the Philadelphia noise imprint for releasing this gem of a debut.

5. Kevin Drumm, Imperial Distortion (Hospital)

The Chicago native once again falls head over heels for the drone.

6. Wavves, Wavves (Woodsist)

I love this kid! Bedroom-spun beach punk in the vain of Beat Happening and the Embarrassment.

7. Common Eider, King Eider, Figs, Wasps, and Monotremes (Root Strata)

If I could fork a Goldie over to Rob Fisk for every time this album made its way through my stereo speakers, he would have a lot of Goldies.

8. Excepter, Debt Dept (Paw Tracks)

The Brooklyn electronic performance troupe sings about burgers, sunrises, and killing people on its new disc.

9. Blank Dogs, On Two Sides (Troubleman Unlimited)

New-wave synths soiled in grime, decayed vocals, and tape hiss galore from this prolific newbie.

10. John Wiese at the Lipo Lounge

Sounded like chunks of metal swelling to the size of balloons and then bursting into my chest for 10 awesome minutes.

PETER NICHOLSON’S TOP 10 TUNES TO DANCE AWAY THE HEARTACHE


1. Yellowtail featuring Alison Crockett, "You Feel Me" (Bagpak)

2. Dave Aju, "Crazy Place" (Circus Company)

3. Jazzanova featuring Randolph, "Let Me Show Ya (Henrik Schwarz Remix)" (Sonar Kollektiv)

4. Grace Jones, "La Vie en Rose (Casinoboy Version)" (Trackybottoms)

5. Mike Monday, "The 11 11" (Om)

6. Recloose, "Catch a Leaf" (Loop Sounds)

7. La Vida Buena, "Humanidad" (Amalgama)

8. Sebo K, "Too Hot" (Mobilee)

9. Art Bleek, "Modern Spaces" (Connaisseur)

10. Jimpster, "Dangly Panther" (Freerange)

IRWIN SWIRNOFF’S FAVORITE RECORDS AND MUSICAL MOMENTS OF 2008


•John Maus, Love Is Real (Upset the Rhythm)

•Hercules and Love Affair (DFA) and at Mezzanine

•Erykah Badu, New Amerykah, Pt.1: 4th World War (Motown)

•Magnetic Fields, Distortion (Nonesuch)

•Stereolab, Chemical Chords (4AD)

•White Magic, New Egypt (Latitudes)

•Cluster at Aquarius Records and the Boredoms at the Fillmore

•My Bloody Valentine at the Concourse

•Flying Lotus, Los Angeles (Warp)

•Grouper, Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill (Type)

I can’t not mention: Sparks, Exotic Creatures of the Deep (Lil Beethoven); Beach House, Devotion (Carpark); Cut Copy, In Ghost Colors (Modular Interscope); Nagisa Ni Te, Yosuga (Jagjaguwar); the Alps, III (Type); Paavoharju, Laulu Laakson Kukista (Fonal); Antony and the Johnsons, Another World (Secretly Canadian).

ERIK MORSE’S TOP RECORDS OF 2008


•Gas, Nah und Fern (Kompakt)

•Fennesz, Black Sea (Touch)

•Mavis Staple, Live: Hope at the Hideout (Anti-)

•Various artists, Thank You Friends: The Ardent Records’ Story (Big Beat)

•Abdel Hadi Halo and the El Gusto Orchestra of Algiers, Abdel Hadi Halo and the El Gusto Orchestra of Algiers (Honest Jon’s)

•Skyphone, Avellaneda (Rune Grammofon)

•Autechre, Quaristice (Warp)

•Susanna, Flowers of Evil (Rune Grammofon)

•Raymond Scott Quintette, Ectoplasm (Basta)

•The Last Shadow Puppets, The Age of the Understatement (Domino)

•Tape, Luminarium (Hapna)

•Al Green, Lay It Down (Blue Note)

•Beach House, Devotion (Carpark)

TWO GALLANTS’ TOP 10 OF 2008


•Fleet Foxes, Fleet Foxes (Sub Pop)

•Various artists, Victrola Favorites: Artifacts from Bygone Days (Dust to Digital)

•Moondog: The Viking of 6th Avenue: The Authorized Biography by Robert Scotto (Process, 2007)

•Barack Obama

•Blitzen Trapper, Furr (Sub Pop)

•What It Is: What It Is by Paul G. Maziar and Matt Maust (Write Bloody)

•Various artists, Eccentric Soul: Trager and Note Labels (Numero)

•Immortal Technique, The 3rd World (Viper)

•Grayceon, The Grand Show (Vendlus)

Two Gallants perform Dec. 26, 8 p.m., at the Fillmore. www.twogallants.com

DEERHOOF’S ED RODRIGUEZ’S TOP 10 THINGS OF A MUSICAL NATURE 2008


• I Got the Feelin’, James Brown in the ’60s DVD (Shout! Factory)

It will remind you why you decided to play music in the first place. If you don’t play music then it will make you want to start.

• Silentist, Silentist (Celestial Gang)

Mark Burden always keeps me interested. Nancarrow or Reich with blast beats.

• Over the course of more than two months of touring I saw and got to know several bands that were new to me. Coconut, Experimental Dental School, Parenthetical Girls, Flying, and so many more. I can’t remember ever getting to see so much inspiring music made by so many creative, energetic, and completely fun people.

• Weasel Walter, solo, duos, trios, and on and on

No matter what the setting, he pushes the situation further with his drive, talent, and humor (all of which are refreshing and needed in the improvised music scene).

• Bronze

Nominated for the best act of commitment that didn’t involve self-mutilation. All in unison, shaving their heads onstage and then revealing perfect Marine dress uniforms under their smocks. They looked so good it inadvertently might have been the best recruiting campaign since Kid Rock and NASCAR teamed up to con kids across the US.

• Death Sentence: Panda! and …

• Burmese

I went to every show of both these bands over the year whenever I was in town. Without fail I would be deaf, destroyed, and smiling, or dancing, laughing, and smiling. Check them out to match those descriptions to the correct band!

• Earth, Wind and Fire: In Concert DVD (Geneon, 2000)

I work at Lost Weekend Video, so I watch more new music DVDs more often than I get new CDs. But maybe you’ll do the same after watching this bass player do high kicks for an hour and not miss a note.

• Touring with old friends KIT and Hawnay Troof. Watching Vice Cooler get a bunch of crossed-armed kids dancing, cause bartenders to leave their posts to run to the stage and move, and VC almost break his neck jumping off monitors all in single-digit minutes. With KIT, add in the insane attack of Steve, the bouncing energy of Kristy, and the apologetic guitar soloing of George Chen, and try not to beam.

• Joining Deerhoof! Getting to spend so much time of 2008 with John, Greg, and Satomi has made this year feel like no other.

>>MORE YEAR IN MUSIC 2008

You heard it here first

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

The first time I noticed that my city of art and innovation was getting short shrift was when The New York Times started going on about "freak folk," Joanna Newsom, and Devendra Banhart and really, you know, getting rhapsodic about these baroquely retro space-folk flavors.

And somehow it never quite came up that these people are San Francisco people, and that their music is San Francisco music. I mean, yes, Banhart has a rep as being a bit of a drifter. Yes, Newsom is really from, you know, Nevada City … and yet, where else could they have first truly taken root, where else could they have first broken through the topsoil, drunk of the dew, and soaked up the dappled sunlight, except in the rich, loamy cultural compost heap that is San Francisco, the Bay Area, and its wooly NorCal surround?

This germination of culture, color, sound, and flavor is, in the most organic sense of it, completely cyclical. Ken Kesey’s garden parties put out roots and rhizomes and threw up spores that took hold almost immediately among music lovers in the region. The result was a distinctly American growth medium for the archetypes of Dionysus, Pan, and Astarte; for the mystic and mythic yearnings of the Victorians; and for the willful, self-starting proto-anarchism of the English Diggers. Cross-pollinate that with the intellectual and aesthetic rebellion of situationism and free jazz, borne in with the gusting, blowsy Beat generation, and you have yourself a rather fecund and folkloric little bramble — one that got even more biodiverse with all the punk rock springing up like weeds in the 1970s.

This polyglot epoch of musical discovery gave us so much. Not just the Dead’s first three records, the Airplane, or even David Crosby’s If I Could Only Remember My Name (Atlantic, 1971) — what about Blue Cheer, Moby Grape, Fifty Foot Hose, the Flamin’ Groovies, the Avengers, and the DKs? Rather a multifaceted mix, but relevant, because Bay Area bands like these set the pattern for divergent waves of underground music-making during the next three or four decades.

The last 15 years in particular have seen these retro sounds made new in the Bay Area and then breaking into the critical, and sometimes commercial, mainstream somewhere else. Usually New York is quickest to take all the credit. Like with that whole garage rock revival. Yeah, yeah, the Strokes, blah, blah, the latest in NYC retro-cool. It’s not that we were first, here in SF. It’s just that we’ve been playing that stuff on KUSF-FM for years, and fabulous local bands have been cranking out that sound for years, and suddenly the Big Apple is basking in the hipniz.

Or in the glorification of Williamsburg, which totally followed the Mission District in terms of exuberantly youthful, excruciatingly hip, oft-naïve, and fearlessly spasmodic creative gusto. Dang, before there was a TV on the Radio, Kyp Malone was working at the One World Cafe on McAllister and Baker streets, making music with Rocket Science and the Nigger-Loving Faggots and handing out fresh-pressed records to the community-radio DJ down the street. OK, so that’s not the Mission, but it sort of was a suburb of the Mission.

Or with the whole freak-folk thing. Back in 2004 or thereabouts The New York Times started noticing there were hairy kids playing spacey and folkoric acoustic sounds. They quickly championed the term "freak folk," and in 2006 even ran a big, lushly illustrated, front-page article in the "Sunday Arts & Leisure" section, Will Hermes’ "Summer of Love Redux," that curiously never once mentions San Francisco, despite bolting the whole thesis down with repeated references to Banhart, Newsom, Vetiver, Comets of Fire, the Six Organs of Admittance, and Jolie Holland.

Now we see, from the foggy depths, a new rising of fuzz and hair, the shambling and very organic children of Blue Cheer. Parchman Farm was an early bloomer, as was Comets on Fire, and now the Bay Area is throbbing with shaggy combos exploring the idiom. Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound, Sleepy Sun, and so many of those Frisco Freakout acts — how will these vibrations resonate across the nation over the next five years? And will New York City somehow take credit for that, too? I think not. They’re just too damn cool to grow out their bangs past the uncomfortable midlength stage.

Philly, though, which gave us Bardo Pond, Brother JT, Siltbreeze Records — there’s a hairy, done-it-all scene stealer I can live with.

JOSH WILSON’S TOP FIVE

1. Godwaffle Noise Pancakes closing show at the former ArtSF, Nov. 8

2. William Hooker, Hemlock Tavern, July 24

3. Heavy Metal (1981) and Conan the Barbarian (1982, with James Earl Jones and some other guy) at the Castro Theater’s "Analog Adventures" showcase

4. All Tomorrow’s Parties, Monticello, NY, Sept. 19-21

5. Expo for Independent Arts moves to Dolores Park and triples in size, Sept.

>>MORE YEAR IN MUSIC 2008

Daughters of the drone

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Whether it was the Numero Group’s 2006 Ladies from the Canyon compilation, the Water reissues of Judee Sill and Anne Briggs, Vashti Bunyan’s return, Devendra Banhart’s heroine-worship of Karen Dalton, or Sheila Weller’s Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (Atria) — the history of female singer-songwriters has received welcome revisions over the past few years. Lone wolves like Townes Van Zandt and domestic collaborations like John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s are the exception to the rule: hallowed solitude and spiritual doubt belong to the women at their pianos and guitars. The brilliant innuendos and cavalier remonstrations of the Leonard Cohens and Paul Simons of the world are too arch to nick the lonely edge of invisibility. It’s that old "show, don’t tell" lesson: the men fulminate despair, masquerading transparency, while the women blur the singer and the song.

From the outskirts of the musical map there are persistent rumblings of a new solo sound. Some of my favorite albums of the year are by women who fling their voices across miles of echo, and push chords into thick drifts of dub drones and nursery rhyme traces. I’m thinking of Grouper’s Dragging a Dead Deer up a Hill (Type), Valet’s Naked Acid (Kranky), Avocet’s Morning Singing in Afternoon (self-released), Christina Carter’s Original Darkness (Kranky), Lau Nau’s Nukkuu (Locust), and Inca Ore’s Birthday of Bless You (Not Not Fun), though surely there are others. Add to this already-stellar group Pocahaunted, the Los Angeles duo whose full-length, Chains (Teenage Teardrops), is a mandala wheel of Stevie Nicks yowls and grungy repetition, and you’ve got a stacked playlist.

On the face of it, these women artists appear to contradict the basic tenet of singer-songwriterdom: make sure everyone can understand the words. But Sill, Dalton, and Mitchell all registered opacity. Their albums often seem as much about stealing away from the outside world as they are about letting the listener in. The records by Grouper, Valet, Avocet, Carter, and Inca Ore are too distended and punk-streaked to pass as folk, though they have that same sense of precarious balance as the earlier so-called ladies from the canyon. Diffuse in sound and space, their music is concentrated in effect. Grouper’s recording is my favorite of the bunch for the slippery melancholy of Liz Harris’ hunched acoustic strums. Her starry vocals conjure stillness and distance without sounding aloof. Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill ends with the stark, sad pop of an amplifier being unplugged, an apt reminder of the limits of intimacy. And yet, how else to describe the experience of these albums? Following their designs, we find ourselves in a mental state as free as it is familiar.

MAX GOLDBERG’S TOP 10 REASONS TO BELIEVE


(in alphabetical order)

•Michael Hurley, Little Wings, Avocet, Lucky Dragons, and a sunset for all time at Angel Island, July 12–13

•Beach House, Devotion (Carpark)

•Sam Cooke, "A Change Is Gonna Come" (RCA Victor, 1964)

•Bob Dylan, Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series Vol. 8 (Columbia)

•Flying Lotus, Los Angeles (Warp)

•Group Inerane, Guitars from Agadez (Sublime Frequencies)

•Grouper, Dragging a Dead Deer up a Hill (Type)

•My Bloody Valentine at Concourse, Sept. 30

•Rodriguez, Cold Fact (Light in the Attic)

•Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell (Matt Wolf, US)


>>MORE YEAR IN MUSIC 2008

Wilderness on fire at Bottom of the Hill

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wilderness 3 IMG_1967.JPG
Ponderosa stomp: James Johnson of Wilderness. All photos by Lisa Weiss.

By Michelle Broder Van Dyke

Up above the still of a serene California night, a dry thunderstorm is brewing. Like the tom-heavy drum patterns of Wilderness’ William Goode and the angular guitar lines of Colin McCann, the dry lightning splits from the sky striking down on Earth, igniting wildfires. The blaze destroys in a gradual and shapeless but fierce trail that builds as James Johnson’s howls brew from the bottom of his belly, filling his throat before rising and bursting forth like a clairvoyant issuing forth the voices of the dead, while Brian Gossman sustains the flames with long-held bass notes.

Or at least that’s what I imagined as I watched Wilderness perform at Bottom of the Hill on Thursday, Dec. 11. Their distinct post-punk sound builds on echoes that resound throughout the space, stirring the vibrations until trance-like they seep into your pores and take over, completely hypnotizing you. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the audience began speaking in tongues.

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The wonderfully crooked Mayyors of Sacto

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By Jen Snyder

Last Saturday, Dec. 8, at El Rio marked the cementing of yet another dirty brick in the growing wall of West Coast punk. I could talk about the amazing performances by the Traditional Fools, who thankfully seem to be playing shows again after a short hiatus. Or I could talk about Hank IV, who were bad as hell – by which I mean good – but I’d much rather talk about the gnarliest show ever performed by the Mayyors hailing from our state capital of Sacramento.

The Mayyors certainly proved that Sacramento is a crazy, corrupt place. From the moment they played their first song, the entire room trembled with angst and energy. Vocalist John Pritchard pummeled through the crowd thrashing and screaming, stoking the fire in the crowd. Pritchard salivated endlessly while he sang, barking and demonically whipping around as strings of spit flew everywhere. It was undeniably awesome. All of my disdain for mosh pits and people knocking into me kind of melted away into a nostalgic appreciation for a reckless youth.

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Streetlight serenade

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER ‘Tis the season to max out with shopping merriment, and San Francisco still being a record-picking spot of worldwide renown, it’s bittersweet to flip through this year’s handsome UK gifty-paperback, Old Rare New: The Independent Record Shop (Black Dog), and spy the "hi-de-ho"-ing Cab Calloway logo of the late, lamented Village Music in Mill Valley. Such an overflowing vinyl goldmine till it shuttered last year — another victim of high rents and a wildly fluctuating music marketplace. The book is far from perfect: was Amoeba Music ever called Amoeba Records, and why isn’t Grooves listed in the US store directory?

But Old Rare New has its heart in the right place in its offhand celebration of brick ‘n’ mortar music trolling, filled out with short Q&As with collector-head artists like Chan Marshall, Quiet Village’s Joel Martin, and Cherrystones’ Gareth Goddard. It’s refreshing to get an eyeball of Byron Coley’s contrarian ‘tude: if independent music stores are going bye-bye, he writes, "Don’t blame me or my record scum buddies. We’re still as idiotically interested in fetishizing vinyl product as we ever were, but we’re all getting goddamned old, and we’re not being replaced in a fast and timely manner."

Nonetheless, it’s sad to see Open Mind Music in the US store directory, still listed at 342 Divisadero even though owner Henry Wimmer closed that locale long ago, reopened at 2150 Market, and then — argh! — closed that storefront at the end of October to concentrate on online sales (a small Open Mind record enclave, however, remains within the collective-run Other Shop II at 327 Divisadero). Also not listed — and why not with such reissue jewels as Brigitte Fontaine and Areski Belkacem’s L’Incendie (Byg, 1974) and Humble Pie’s Town and Country (Immediate, 1969)? — is Streetlight Records in Noe Valley, set to close on Jan. 31.

Codgers in the know will recall the days when Aquarius sat a few doors down from Streetlight, making the spot a twofer destination for serious LP trawling. Streetlight took up the indie and avant slack in the area when Aquarius moved to Valencia Street: amid its substantial vinyl selection, you can dig up Les Georges Leningrad’s Deux Hot Dogs Moutarde Chou (Les Records Coco Cognac, 2002) on red vinyl and TITS’ and Leopard Leg’s estrogen-athon split-LP Throughout the Ages (Upset the Rhythm, 2006). Deals can be had with the 10 percent-off-everything sale that kicked off on Black Friday.

The ever-increasing gentrification of the street — the mob in front of Starbucks was nutty on a recent Sunday morn — has definitely had an impact on the shop, according to manager Sunlight Weismehl, who has worked at the 32-year-old flagship store for more than two decades. "I believe over the years the area has become a destination for high-end houses," he says, "and the artists and working class have been pushed aside as they have in many neighborhoods. Because of that we don’t get as many people coming in during the day." The San Jose and Santa Cruz Streetlights are doing fine, and the Streetlight at Market and Castro reaps the benefit of better foot traffic.

One twist concerning the 24th Street store’s demise: Streetlight isn’t getting kicked out by greedy out-of-town landlords — they’re closing themselves down. Streetlight owner Robert Fallon owns the Noe Valley shop’s building. "I believe he feels that the rent in the neighborhood is higher than what we’re paying," explains Weismehl.

In an effort to stay afloat and pay its way, the manager says the store tried to "touch on everything. We certainly tried to have strong international, jazz, and roots sections and to try to serve the neighborhood as much as possible. Half crazy obscure things and half whatever the neighborhood is looking for."

And Noe Valley music mavens have reacted in kind. "We’ve been getting a lot of responses ranging from writing letters to the owner to just saying they’ll be sad when we’re gone. Some say it’s the last thing they came down to the street for," Weismehl says, adding that with Real Foods gone and the neighboring video store closed, "it’s a question of how much [the remaining] shops serve the neighborhood." Not to mention the fact that there’s one less accommodating spot that will keep on a touring musician: Weismehl recalls such staffers as Rova’s Bruce Ackley, Comets on Fire’s Noel Harmonson, Sebadoh’s and Everest’s Russ Pollard, and Unwritten Law’s Pat Kim. And after Jan. 31? I’m going to have borrow a baby stroller to feel even remotely at home in the hood.

LET THE GAMES BEGIN

NO AGE AND TITUS ANDRONICUS


ShockHound music site parties up its launch with a free show by the LA noise duo and the Glen Rock, N.J., rock five-piece, now signed to XL. Thurs/4, 7 p.m., free with RSVP at www.shockhound.com. Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell, SF. www.rickshawstop.com

A FOGGY HOLIDAY 2008


SF indies give it up for this Talking House CD of carols. With the Trophy Fire, the Heavenly States, and more. Fri/5, 8:30 p.m., $10. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com

MURS


Expect a jammed club for the prescient Murs for President MC. Fri/5, 10 p.m., $15–<\d>$20. Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck, Berk. www.shattuckdownlow.com

SOULFUL HOLIDAY PARTY


The now-NorCal-dwelling soul-OG Darondo is spreading the deep magic. With Wallpaper and Nino Moschella. Fri/5, 9 p.m., $16–<\d>$21. Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF. www.slims-sf.com

ENERGY ANNIVERSARY BLAST


Energy 92.7’s takes off for the fourth year with Cyndi Lauper, Michelle Williams, Lady GaGa, Morgan Page, and others. Sat/6, 8 p.m., $36–<\d>$46. Grand Ballroom at Regency Center, 1300 Van Ness, SF. www.ticketmaster.com

HANK IV AND MAYYORS


The SF garage-punk scrappers return from their luminary-littered East Coast tour and join the souped-up Sacto rock unit. With Traditional Fools. Sat/6, 9 p.m., $7. El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF. www.elriosf.com

RAILCARS


Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart produced the SF band’s Cities vs. Submarines EP (Gold Robot) in his kitchen. With Religious Girls and Halcyonaire. Tues/9, 9 p.m., $8. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com

Torch songs

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

In the best promo photo for Sébastien Tellier’s third album, Sexuality (Record Makers), he sits in a shaft of light before a piano, his ever-present fitover sunglasses pushed up on the crown of his head, and a burnished gold hand rests on the shoulder of his Members Only jacket. Hovering over his left shoulder is a blank, benevolent casque belonging to the album’s producer, Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo — one half of Daft Punk. It’s a silly scene of symbolic torch-passing. Outside of France, Daft Punk’s role as a synecdoche for modern French pop as a whole has previously only been played by Serge Gainsbourg, and imagining the Jesus-like Tellier trying to fill out Gainsbourg’s Repetto footwear and the Punks’ Gap khakis simultaneously is awkward.

At points, Sexuality makes that mantle fit better. The recording starts with "Roche," its gently slapping rhythm and Moroder-esque synth-sequencing mimicking the Biarritz surf Tellier conjures as he sings, "Je sens la chaleur de l’été / C’est ahh, c’est ahh." After tackling family and politics with his debut, L’incroyable vértité (2001), and his still-more-ambitious Politics (2005), respectively, Sexuality is Tellier’s latest go at finding what he calls a "master subject." The challenge here has nothing to do with taboo, but instead with how to approach such a massive topic without parroting the clichés that make it possible to talk about it in the first place.

In terms of pacing and mood, much of Sexuality stays with the tight knot of anticipation that forms in your gut before foreplay or even making out. De Homem-Christo is a light touch, and his main purpose is to keep Tellier from plunging into the masturbatory. Even if nothing here attempts to encompass the whole of human experience as Tellier’s "La Ritournelle" did, the album’s greatness is sublimated and spread out over its 11 tracks — plenty of time to warm up your lover, with no dips in concentration.

As with everything else on the full-length, "Roche" is nothing if not paced: the drum programming in particular has a Cartesian precision to it and the sounds are arranged in rational space. Having little to do with the labyrinthine wind-ups of Modeselektor’s Eurocrunk beats and none of the oversize, bitcrushed rock kits in Justice’s arsenal, Tellier seems to be working within another decade’s technological limitations — the results, if not always sexy, feel somehow closer to the mood, texture, and pace of actual sex.

More than half a dozen listens into the disc, the lyrics have already given up on revealing themselves as narrative or typically poetic. The meaning is only half there on a song like closer "L’amour et la violence," with the words’ other halves rolling off into pink steam over roiling classical arpeggios. With few established roles and nothing resembling an erotic scenario, Sexuality‘s bi-curious Franco-Teutonic funk is not quite enough to establish sensuousness and romance in brains scorched by the general availability of hardcore porn and its imaginary, but it’s one of the best places we can start. *

SÉBASTIEN TELLIER

With Hearts Revolution, Lilofee, and DJ sets by Black Shag, BT Magnum, and Safety Scissors

Thurs/4, doors 9 p.m., $15 advance

Mezzanine

444 Jessie, SF

(415) 625-8880

www.mezzaninesf.com

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