Radio

Stage listings

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

THEATER

OPENING

The Divine Sister New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; www.nctcsf.org. $25-45. Previews Fri/31-Sat/1 and June 7, 8pm; Sun/2, 2pm. Opens Sat/8, 8pm. Runs Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through June 29. Charles Busch’s latest comedy pays tribute to Hollywood films involving nuns.

Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? Costume Shop, 1117 Market, SF; www.therhino.org. $15-30. Previews Thu/30-Fri/31, 8pm. Opens Sat/1, 8pm. Runs Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Through June 16. Theatre Rhinoceros performs Caryl Churchill’s play that asks, “Do countries really behave like gay men?” Included in the program are two one-act plays: Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza and Deborah S. Margolin’s Seven Palestinian Children.

Frisco Fred’s Magic and More Alcove Theater, 414 Mason, Ste 502, SF; www.thealcovetheater.com. $35-50. Opens Thu/30, 7pm. Runs Thu-Sat, 7pm. Through June 29. Performer Fred Anderson presents his latest family-friendly show, complete with magic, juggling, and “crazy stunts.”

Into the Woods Eureka Theatre, 215 Jackson, SF; www.rayoflighttheatre.com. $25-36. Opens Fri/31, 8pm. Runs Thu-Sat, 8pm (check website for matinee schedule). Through June 29. Ray of Light Theatre performs Stephen Sondheim’s fairy-tale mash-up.

Killing My Lobster Learns a Lesson Stage Werx Theatre, 446 Valencia, SF; www.killingmylobster.com. $10-25. Previews Thu/30, 8pm. Opens Fri/31, 8pm. Runs Thu-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 7pm. Through Jun 9. The sketch troupe performs “comedy vignettes for the avid achievers.”

BAY AREA

Dear Elizabeth Berkeley Rep’s Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison, Berk; www.berkeleyrep.org. $24-77. Opens Wed/29, 8pm. Runs Wed and Sun, 7pm (also Sun and July 3, 2pm); Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat and June 6, 2pm; no matinee June 8; no show July 4). Through July 7. Berkeley Rep performs Sarah Ruhl’s play in the form of letters between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell.

ONGOING

Arcadia ACT’s Geary Theater, 415 Geary, SF; www.act-sf.org. $20-95. Tue-Sat, 8pm (also Wed and Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2pm. Through June 9. American Conservatory Theater performs Tom Stoppard’s literary romance.

Birds of a Feather New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; www.nctcsf.org. $25-45. Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2pm. Through June 29. New Conservatory Theatre Center performs the San Francisco premiere of Marc Acito’s tale inspired by two gay penguins at the Central Park Zoo.

Black Watch Drill Court, Armory Community Center, 333 14th St, SF; www.act-sf.org. $100. Tue-Sat, 8pm (also Wed and Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2pm. Through June 16. American Conservatory Theater presents the National Theatre of Scotland’s internationally acclaimed performance about Scottish soldiers serving in Iraq.

Burqavaganza Brava Theater Center, 2781 24th St, SF; www.brava.org. $20. Thu/30-Sat/1, 8pm; Sun/2, 3pm. Brava! For Women in the Arts and RasaNova Theatre present Shahid Nadeem’s Bollywood-style “love story in the time of jihad.”

Foodies! The Musical Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter, SF; www.foodiesthemusical.com. $30-34. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Open-ended. AWAT Productions presents Morris Bobrow’s musical comedy revue all about food.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch Boxcar Theatre, 505 Natoma, SF; www.boxcartheatre.org. $27-43. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Open-ended. John Cameron Mitchell’s cult musical comes to life with director Nick A. Olivero’s ever-rotating cast. Sat/1, the production celebrates its 100th performance with an expanded cast of special guests and a post-show party.

Krispy Kritters in the Scarlett Night Exit on Taylor, 277 Taylor, SF; www.cuttingball.com. $10-50. Thu, 7:30pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm; no shows June 8); Sun, 5pm. Through June 16. Cutting Ball Theater performs Andrew Saito’s Howl-inspired portrait of San Francisco.

Sex and the City: LIVE! Rebel, 1760 Market, SF; trannyshack.com/sexandthecity. $25. Wed, 7 and 9pm. Open-ended. It seems a no-brainer. Not just the HBO series itself — that’s definitely missing some gray matter — but putting it onstage as a drag show. Mais naturellement! Why was Sex and the City not conceived of as a drag show in the first place? Making the sordid not exactly palatable but somehow, I don’t know, friendlier (and the canned a little cannier), Velvet Rage Productions mounts two verbatim episodes from the widely adored cable show, with Trannyshack’s Heklina in a smashing portrayal of SJP’s Carrie; D’Arcy Drollinger stealing much of the show as ever-randy Samantha (already more or less a gay man trapped in a woman’s body); Lady Bear as an endearingly out-to-lunch Miranda; and ever assured, quick-witted Trixxie Carr as pent-up Charlotte. There’s also a solid and enjoyable supporting cast courtesy of Cookie Dough, Jordan Wheeler, and Leigh Crow (as Mr. Big). That’s some heavyweight talent trodding the straining boards of bar Rebel’s tiny stage. The show’s still two-dimensional, even in 3D, but noticeably bigger than your 50″ plasma flat panel. Update: new episodes began May 15. (Avila)

Sonia Flew Phoenix Theatre, 414 Mason, Sixth Flr, SF; www.viragotheatre.org. $20. Fri/31-Sat/1, 8pm. Virago Theatre Company performs Melinda Lopez’s drama about a Cuban immigrant grappling with her son’s decision to enlist in the military after 9/11.

Steve Seabrook: Better Than You Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Thu, 8pm; Sat, 8:30pm. Extended through June 29. Self-awareness, self-actualization, self-aggrandizement — for these things we turn to the professionals: the self-empowerment coaches, the self-help authors and motivational speakers. What’s the good of having a “self” unless someone shows you how to use it? Writer-performer Kurt Bodden’s Steve Seabrook wants to sell you on a better you, but his “Better Than You” weekend seminar (and tie-in book series, assorted CDs, and other paraphernalia) belies a certain divided loyalty in its own self-flattering title. The bitter fruit of the personal growth industry may sound overly ripe for the picking, but Bodden’s deftly executed “seminar” and its behind-the-scenes reveals, directed by Mark Kenward, explore the terrain with panache, cool wit, and shrewd characterization. As both writer and performer, Bodden keeps his Steve Seabrook just this side of overly sensational or maudlin, a believable figure, finally, whose all-too-ordinary life ends up something of a modest model of its own. (Avila)

Talk Radio Actors Theatre of San Francisco, 855 Bush, SF; www.actorstheatresf.org. $26-38. Wed-Sat, 8pm. Through June 15. Actors Theatre of San Francisco performs Eric Bogosian’s breakthrough 1987 drama.

Tinsel Tarts in a Hot Coma: The Next Cockettes Musical Hypnodrome, 575 10th St, SF; www.thrillpeddlers.com. $30-35. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Extended through June 29. Thrillpeddlers and director Russell Blackwood continue their Theatre of the Ridiculous series with this 1971 musical from San Francisco’s famed glitter-bearded acid queens, the Cockettes, revamped with a slew of new musical material by original member Scrumbly Koldewyn, and a freshly re-minted book co-written by Koldewyn and “Sweet Pam” Tent — both of whom join the large rotating cast of Thrillpeddler favorites alongside a third original Cockette, Rumi Missabu (playing diner waitress Brenda Breakfast like a deliciously unhinged scramble of Lucille Ball and Bette Davis). This is Thrillpeddlers’ third Cockettes revival, a winning streak that started with Pearls Over Shanghai. While not quite as frisky or imaginative as the production of Pearls, it easily charms with its fine songs, nifty routines, exquisite costumes, steady flashes of wit, less consistent flashes of flesh, and de rigueur irreverence. The plot may not be very easy to follow, but then, except perhaps for the bubbly accounting of the notorious New York flop of the same show 42 years ago by Tent (as poisoned-pen gossip columnist Vedda Viper), it hardly matters. (Avila)

Vital Signs: The Pulse of an American Nurse Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Sun, 7pm. Through June 16. Registered nurse Alison Whittaker returns to the Marsh with her behind-the-scenes show about working in a hospital.

The World’s Funniest Bubble Show Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $8-50. Sun, 11am. Through July 21. Louis “The Amazing Bubble Man” Pearl returns after a month-long hiatus with his popular, kid-friendly bubble show.

BAY AREA

The Beauty Queen of Leenane Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller, Mill Valley; www.marintheatre.org. $36-52. Tue, Thu-Sat, 8pm (also June 6, 1pm; June 15, 2pm); Wed, 7:30pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through June 16. Marin Theatre Company performs Martin McDonagh’s award-winning black comedy about a dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship.

By & By Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; www.shotgunplayers.org. $20-30. Opens Wed/31, 8pm. Runs Wed-Thu, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through June 23. Shotgun Players presents a new sci-fi thriller by Lauren Gunderson.

Hanging Georgia, a play with music about Georgia O’Keefe Pear Avenue Theatre, 1220 Pear, Mtn View; www.thepear.org. $10-30. Thu-Sat, 8pm (additional shows Sat/1 and June 8, 2pm); Sun, 2pm. Through June 9. Pear Avenue Theatre marks its 75th show with Sharmon J. Hilfinger and Joan McMillen’s world premiere, a co-production with BootStrap Theater Foundation.

The Medea Hypothesis Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant, Berk; www.centralworks.org. $15-28. Thu-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Through June 23. Central Works performs Marian Berges’ reconfiguration of the Euripides classic.

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

“Bay Area Cabaret presents a Gala Birthday Tribute to Marvin Hamlisch” Venetian Room, Fairmont San Francisco, 950 Mason, SF; www.bayareacabaret.org. Sun/2, 8pm. $75-100. The late, legendary composer is honored by Broadway stars and award-winning musicians.

“Dancing Across Cultures” Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, 3301 Lyon, SF; www.presidiodance.org. Fri/31, 7pm. $40-120. The multi-generational Presidio Dance Theatre performs ballet and international dance as part of its 15th anniversary celebration.

“Desires and Desiderations” Theatre of Yugen, NOHspace, 2840 Mariposa, SF; www.apiculturalcenter.org. Fri/31-Sat/1, 7:30pm. $15-25. Theatre of Yugen and JypsyJays Productions present new works by butoh artist Judith Kajiwara and Kathak dancer Jaysi.

“Kunst-Stoff Arts Fest 2013” Kunst-Stoff Arts, One Grove, SF; www.kunst-stoff.org. Through June 7. Most events $10-15. Morning classes, afternoon workshops, and evening performances are the focus of this festival of dance, film, music, and more.

“Misery Index” Rite Spot, 2099 Folsom, SF; miseryindexsf.tumblr.com. Mon/3, 8pm. Free. Stand-up comedy hosted by Trevor Hill.

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

Red Hots Burlesque El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF; www.redhotsburlesque.com. Wed, 7:30-9pm. Ongoing. $5-10. Come for the burlesque show, stay for OMG! Karaoke starting at 8pm (no cover for karaoke).

“San Francisco Ballet School Student Showcase” Lam Research Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard, SF; www.sfballet.org. Wed/29 and Fri/31, 7:30pm; Thu/30, 6pm. $35-40. Students from the official San Francisco Ballet school perform.

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

“State: Not Anywhere Near to Now” CounterPULSE, 1013 Mission, SF; www.funschdance.org. Fri/31-Sat/1, 8pm. $15-20. New dances by Christy Funsch with guest artist Katherine Longstreth.

“Through Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall” Herchurch Lutheran, 678 Portola, SF; www.sflgfb.org. Fri/31, 8pm. Free. The San Francisco Lesbian/Gay Freedom Band performs a concert celebrating civil rights pioneers.

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

“Viva Cuba!” Southside Theater, Fort Mason Center, Marina at Laguna, SF; www.fortmason.org. Fri/31-Sat/1, 8pm. $12-20. American Theater Company performs a musical about post-revolutionary Cuba.

“Walking Distance Dance Festival” ODC Theater, 3153 17th St, SF; www.odcdance.org. Fri/31, 7-9pm; Sat/1, 4-6pm and 7-9pm. $20 (festival pass, $50). Three separate programs of contemporary dance highlight this fringe-style festival.

BAY AREA

“Peter” Marin Veterans’ Memorial Auditorium, 10 Avenue of the Flags, San Rafael; www.marincenter.org. Sat/1, 7pm; Sun/2, 6pm. $18-23. RoCo Dance celebrates its 20th anniversary with a contemporary dance performance inspired by Peter Pan.

“Swearing in English: Tall Tales at Shotgun” Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; www.shotgunplayers.org. Mon/3 and June 17, 8pm. $15. Shotgun Cabaret presents John Mercer in a series of three stranger-than-fiction dramatic readings.

“33rd Annual Planetary Dance” Mt. Tamalpais State Park, Marin County; www.planetarydance.org. Sun/2, 11am (main event; visit website for directions and related events). Free. Dance legend Anna Halprin leads this participatory event that honors the Earth through movement.

Functional hyphy

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Functional hyphy

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC Here, in the depths of the pot smoke-drenched green room of Slim’s, the muffled chants of an insatiable gathering of Bay Area hip-hop fiends grows louder and more forceful by the second. The crowd is brazen in its vocal yearning for the show’s main act of IamSu! and Compton rapper Problem.

This show, which took place at the end of last month, was a de facto homecoming spot on the Million Dollar Afro mixtape tour and the leader of the HBK (Heart Break Kids) Gang was keen to give his fans what they wanted, and then some.

After a quick team prayer, IamSu! and Problem make their way up the back stairs towards the stage, giving the ceremonial daps to the homies along the way. Then amid a torrent of blaring horn drops courtesy of HBK Gang DJ Azure, IamSu! and Problem leap out on stage like they’re t-shirts being launched from a cannon, the kind you’d traditionally see at baseball games.

IamSu!’s lumbering 6-foot-something frame is rocking a dashiki and a slim leather jacket. The duo commandeers the performance with the skills of a group of season veterans and dutifully maintains the hype level two clicks above organized calamity for the majority of the show. Between each track, someone or some group out there is getting a shout-out, but the biggest shout-out of them all is reserved for the completely unexpected appearance of Juvenile, who is trotted out to perform his verse on “100 Grand.”

If IamSu! had followed the conventional hip-hop career path, he would have quickly spat out an album following his 2011 potty-mouthed, Gold-certified single “Up” and filmed the all-too-common hip-hop club music video with Lil Wayne. But for all his youthful cheerfulness, IamSu!, or Su for short (his real name is Sudan Williams), embodies a dexterous patience when it comes to decisions regarding his budding career.

He has plans for an album but no specific date. He frankly would rather kick it in the studio with his HBK crew laying down tracks on tracks on tracks than strut it out on the national stage, at least for the time-being. Su cheerfully remarks that “with or without music, HBK Gang would be having fun together,” but, almost conversly, holds high aspirations for his crew: “I want it to be a brand like Nike and you see our logo and you already know it’s from the Bay Area. That bond is what keeps us so humble right now, the fact that people will check me when I’m being an asshole, I’ll check somebody else and vice versa.”

A handful of major labels have courted Su and he has rejected generous offers from at least one. In fact, he’s still residing at home because he admits he “just hasn’t had the time to find a new spot”, but he did confirm to me that his pockets “are on sumo.” It was there in his childhood room/makeshift studio that he recorded his incredibly slippery and jolting verse on E-40’s “Function,” while recovering from a cold.

Su, who raps and talks with an undeniable East Bay twang, is just as adept in the studio as he is on the mic and just like the Kanye-model, Su produces nearly every track he raps on. Like East Bay hip-hop stalwarts Trackademiks and Kool A.D., Su explored and absorbed the craft of beat-making at the Oakland nonprofit media center, Youth Radio. Starting at the age of 15, he spent three days a week immersing himself in knobs, keyboards, and drum pads. The first poignant moment of his time there — and of his rap career — occurred when he performed for his peers at Youth Radio, which was the result of a weeklong competition. Su fondly recalls it was “one of the best feelings ever” when he observed the positive reactions of the crowd at Youth Radio.

Su now does the bulk of his production at a small and almost claustrophobic studio tucked away in a nondescript office on the border of Emeryville and Berkeley. There in that studio, I caught a glimpse of the process of constructing a slap.

Starting with a simple synth riff and voice sample, Su gradually and artfully added layers of drum hits, hi-hats, and bass jabbed while twisting and warping the voice sample. Operating the keyboard drums with his left hand, Su maneuvered the mouse to dig in the sample database and drop in instrument clips, all while methodically bobbing his head like a metronome. It wouldn’t be an IamSu! joint if he wasn’t also testing out some indistinguishable lyrics under his breath. Around 15 minutes later, the result was a rough draft of what will likely be a banger, which had the overwhelming approval of his crew present in the studio. Though Su affirmed for me that this joint won’t be hitting speakers “for at least a while”.

While in the studio, Su couldn’t help but bug out with giddiness every time he listened to one of his unfinished tracks, he seemed playful yet focused, relaxed yet determined. That brimming combination of curiosity and enthusiasm remains the driving force behind his dozen or so mixtapes.

Overarching questions pertaining to the status of hyphy or Bay Area hip-hop don’t apply to Su. Whether or not he brings back hyphy or becomes the first rap superstar of the decade from the Bay Area, the self-described “laid back friendly kid who likes to make music, go shopping, and listen to ’80s music,” is going be having the time of his life in the studio, with the full support of his crew.

 

Sarah Palin = REO Speedwagon

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One of the more remarkable components of the so-called “Right Wing Entertainment Complex” (Fox/AM Radio/a gazillion reactionary websites) is the agonizing and complete predictability of its content. Barack Obama is the most evil, traitorious, illegal usurper, Muslim, Kenyan Socialist dictator alive and the besieged heroes of American patriotism are outnumbered and will be outgunned when Obama seizes their weapons, Obamacare will kill every member of your family assuming they haven’t committed suicide after it bankrupted them, Benghazi was worse than 9/11, Iraq and the 1962 Mets combined and the IRS only hates the brave and fierce Republican Party. Who are the only ones that can keep you safe against the fifth column of baby-killing Hollywood liberals that will brainwash your son into marrying a barnyard animal.

(Also remarkable is however much you try to lampoon their cray-cray, they’re inevitably more out there than even a parodist can dream of).

Flip on any of these mediums and this is what you get and if I know this in advance, so do their fans and they like it that way. Like a soothing wash of a New Age mixtape in the foyer of a yoga studio.Except that the whoosh of the mixtape is familiar in form and not content.

Nope, the real parallel between the RW Entertainment Complex and its musical equivalent would be the aging classic rock dinosaurs of the 70’s and 80’s and the state fair/shitty casino/low rent rally circuit. Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, the battery of Sunday morning news show dildolatry and especially the Mega MILF of Moosery Sarah Palin are completely and totally identical to the slog it out warriors of faceless corporate FM rock–Foreigner, Journey, Styx, Nightranger and REO Speedwagon.

Think about it–what do Kevin Cronin (REO), Mick Jones (Foreigner, not the Clash’s Mick Jones) and whomever is left in the other bands do for a living? They mount the boards and play their hits–period. And vamoose off to the next hellhole whose main fiscal purpose at this point is alimony, child support and back taxes. 12 tunes, maybe, paycheck and screw. They try not to think about their better days, one imagines, and just do their jobs–which consist now of rote recitation. In that, they are exactly like Palin or Glenn Beck–who hit all the talking points, massage the prejudices of their chosen audience and remind them that only they understand their plight (and then batter them with ads for merchandise and books). Like peas in a pod.  

Except that at one time, these bands were cranking out hit songs and even if you don’t like their hits, writing a hit is hard to do. Regurgitating “the best of Joe McCarthy” only replacing “Communists” with “Muslims” or “libs” is all these verbal midgets need do to cash in. “Hot Blooded” or “Don’t Let Him Go” or “Babe” may sound trite and brittle and overwrought to some, but they had to be concocted, recorded with care and sung in tune. That is a hell of a lot more than these repulsive mountebanks on the right are capable of. 

(And there is, of course, the gent that straddles both worlds with ham-handed, blockheaded glory, the Nuge himself–except he’s third on the bill beneath REO and Styx this summer and is but a mere guest on FOX at best. Sorry, Ted).

Lastly, the rock bands who are on rickety stages this summer outside Lincoln NE or Bakersfield or Dothan Alabama next to livestock and ferris wheels are fucking honest men and women. They travel endless hours for vastly less pay than they used to get. They have seen their expected annuities disappear via digital downloading and YouTube. They look into the smaller crowds and see their reflections in the once fist pumping but now worn looking fans. And they still have enough pride to deliver the goods, because that’s what they do–not chauffered from their expensive mansions to TV and radio studios to spew out the party line that has been focus group and poll tested to perfection. And then home to mansion. I may not like the dino bands but I respect ’em–I have no respect for these reactionary carny barkers at all.

 

Talk Radio’s Funny Secret

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Most folks do one thing for a living and are happy that way. I’m not. I need a lot of challenges that change all the time. I have a lot of different occupations, acting, playing music, writing and talk radio host on an LA station.Of the latter, I knew nothing about the genre at all when I got into it 10 1/2 years ago. Never listened to it and still don’t. News stations occasionally, but generally, the sound in the car is music.I found that there are a lot of people that just love talk radio and in all walks of life. Most remarkably, lots of fellow musicians. They’re addicted to it, the raving and the story-telling, the “painting a picture with words”. And many talk show hosts are “lifers” that dread being “on the beach“. It’s a massive rush to keep spieling, as Mike Watt would say and it is a rare skill. As I have never had a problem freely offering an opinion (asked for or not) or at a loss for words, it was a natural fit.Thing is, talk radio is really not at all what it appears to be. On the surface, it is the voice of outrage, the sound of angry people, villagers rising up with pitchforks to the sound of their leader’s voice, pure populism. And that’s what many successful hosts do. They represent for the little person–or so it seems.

In reality, no. If one listens closely to what 95% of talk hosts actually say, it’s fairly clear that they are not challenging the audience’s ideas, but bolstering them for the most part. Picking a common enemy and railing on same for hours–the voices inside the heads of the listener are congruent with what the show host is saying–he or she isn’t even articulating it half the time but spitting out time worn cliches.Ask yourself–when was the last time you heard a talk show host take a completely unexpected turn? As almost all news/talk is rightist, when was the last time you heard a private entity (not owned by a liberal) railed on? The government is fair game, but as right-wing Americans have been trained since diapers to hate the government (while mooching off same), who cares? Or suggested that nationalism (ours and the Muslims) is the root cause of terrorism. Or that the NRA are conmen. Or…….Also, the hatred of the government seems to abate on the airwaves five minutes after a Republican is elected. Which makes sense as a lot of talk shows hosts see themselves as indispensable parts of the GOP’s machine.This isn’t news to anyone, really. But the idea that the talk show host is the valiant bearer of the torch of freedom is pure fantasy. When was the last time a talk host was hauled off the air by the government for saying anything? Yes, profanity brings high fines. But all action against talk hosts comes from the public, generally in the form of embargoes or from stations afraid of a backlash fomented by the same public.

That the genre is getting beaten up on badly of late has a few proximate causes. An aging base of fans is one reason. Another is the sheer tedium of predictability–a road trip from Portland Me to Portland OR would be about 4 days long and there is almost no chance you’d ever hear anything on AM that’s different one city from another. That means dullness and laziness and copycatting, 

The irony is that when AM talk stations–supposedly moribund–go back to their roots and go local and social and personal, they thrive. In California, KMJ in Fresno and KFI in Los Angeles are the prime examples. Limited national babble and lots of local means the hosts can’t lean on talking points or be completely predictable (as the audience is right there in the center of the topics, not distant from DC). It helps that in the latter station’s case, their morning and afternoon shows have hosts whose politics are wildly unpredictable. KFI is the nation’s #1 talk station and since KMJ became privately owned, its ratings have soared. What does that tell you?

Yes, saying shit on the air to piss people off on purpose sounds like it would work, but it never does. Conversely, kissing the audience’s ass for three hours at a time is just as bad. If talk really were the voice of the people, it would be impossible to suss what it would do, just as it’s impossible to figure out what people (us) do. Simple, huh?

Björkphilia

Andrew Lam
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Björkphilia

MUSIC Can you even recall your first run-in with the mythic, boundary-less creature that is Björk? Perhaps it was bounding through the neon blue forest with tiny crystals underneath her eyes as a giant paper-mache bear chased her through Michel Gondry’s video for “Human Behaviour,” off 1993 solo album Debut. Or maybe it was poised for the tabloids in an elegant swan dress, holding a large egg purse and preening for the worst dressed lists at the ’01 Academy Awards after her devastating performance in Dancer in the Dark (2000). Those long obsessed will likely point to first hearing ’88’s “Birthday” by the Sugarcubes, her early Icelandic act (post teenage punk bands), on international radio.

Whenever — and however — it went down, it left a lasting impression, the stunning shock of that otherworldly voice tends to permeate memories. Solo, Bjork has long coupled that voice with innovation, always grasping at new objects and sounds, or as she described it to me in conversation, she’s “like a kid in a toy shop.”

Her latest triumph was Biophilia, the ’11 album that paired science, nature, iPads, Tesla coils, and tinkling church bells. Since its release, she’s hopped the planet with her sonic education in tow, spreading pixie dust and learning tools at schools and museums along the way. Next up, she’ll play a trio of shows at the Craneway Pavilion in Richmond (Wed/22, Sat/25, and Tue/28). Also during that time, her Biophilia Education Program comes to the Exploratorium, which means interactive workshops exploring connections between music and technology, Wed/22 through Tue/28.

In her unassuming but confident way — with the most endearing accent I’ve ever heard — the avant-pop megastar opened up to the SF Bay Guardian about her song writing process (yes, there’s a new project in the works), early punk career, natural musicology, and how to keep it all DIY:

SF Bay Guardian How did you initially come up with idea to include apps for every song on Biophillia?

Björk It started in 2008. I wanted to use touch screens…though the iPads weren’t out ’till 2010 or something. But I’d been using touch screens on my Volta tour, but more just to perform on stage. When I started doing Biophillia, I was very determined that I wanted to write with [touch screens], not just perform. That’s when I started to map out, to visualize. I had to decide, what did I want to hear on the touch screen when I’m writing this song. That sent me back to my own music education as a child, when I felt the way they explained scales and rhythms and those basic musicology themes, was way too academic. It was like reading a book to learn to dance.

Music is something that doesn’t work that well in the written word, you know? Especially not explaining to kids. So I started making my own map…this is how I would I like to have scales and this is how I would like to have chords and this is how I would like to have arpeggios and this is how I would like to have counterpoint, and so on. This project became naturally educational. I was kind of like, repairing my own education. I was trying to cover what I thought was lacking when I was in music school. In that way, I was able to share it.

We [created] a different program for each song. For example, one song would feature arpeggios, and then I would pick an actual element that would be the simplest way for a kid to understand what an arpeggio is, to visualize it. So we took a pendulum to explain counterpoint, a little bit like how church bells swing back and forth, and that’s like a bass line that swings.

I wrote 10 songs and we did different programs for each song, and it came together using natural elements. For example, one song is called is called “Crystalline” and there are crystals kind of growing as the song changes.

In 2010, when we were programming this and were kind of almost done, the iPad arrived, so we were like, ‘wow!’ It’d be silly just to record these songs and put them on a CD because we’d already written all these programs, we might as well share the programs, and put them with some more poetic, natural things — the moons, the tides, things like this. It was a very gradual thing.

SFBG And now it’s been brought in to educate children at schools throughout Iceland, but also there are related events where you’re touring, as well?

Björk It differs from city to city. So far it’s been in Manchester, Iceland, New York, Buenos Aires, and Paris, and now it’s going to be in California. Some places, like for example, New York Library and the Children’s Museum of Manhattan, took on the curriculum for a few months, and the middle school of Reykjavik, the 10 to 12-year-olds, they have it now in their curriculum for the next three years. It’s looking like it’s going to go to more countries. It sort of keeps growing.

SFBG It seems like you’ve long been ahead of the curve, as far as creating music with new technology, is that something you grew up with as well?

Björk I’m actually really bad with technology. I think that’s why I’m so excited about, for example, the touch screen, because it’s like I waited until technology caught up with me, for it to be simple enough. You have your imagination, and whatever helps you express yourself, I’m all for it, if it’s the violin or piano or singing. Or what has been really helpful for me, since I started doing my own solo albums, the computer has made me a lot more self-sufficient. I guess that comes from being in bands for 10 years, where things are more democratic. It was always drums and bass and keyboards and guitars in every single song [laughs], which is great. But then when I started doing my own album, I was like a kid in a toy shop, I wanted to have every single noise. And this is great, using the computers to do this yourself. It’s quite empowering, especially for a girl. You don’t have to go through this whole hierarchy of whatever, you can just be self-sufficient.

SFBG Some of your early groups were punk bands [Tappi Tíkarrass, and KUKL, which toured with Crass], I was wondering how you discovered punk as a teen, and ended up working with Crass?

Björk I was hanging out with kids that were older than me, like the other guy who used to sing in the Sugarcubes and another guy who was friends with Crass. They played our country, and then we would go and visit them at their farm [Dial House in Essex], and for me what was most important was that one of the bands that was on Crass’ label, a band called Flux of Pink Indians, had a bass player called Derek Birkett and he helped the Sugarcubes release their first album, just from his bedroom. And he’s my manager still today. So I’ve worked with him for like, 30 years now.

It’s pretty much DIY, especially now when the labels are not really functional like they used to be. It’s pretty much just three of us that do most of my stuff.

SFBG Do you have any other long-term goals with Biophillia, or are you working on your next project?

Björk I think I will be doing that on the side, but when it comes to writing my own stuff, I always like the first couple of years to be kind of mysterious. It’s important to play around in the dark, blind-folded, not really knowing what you’re doing. Biophillia was very much like that the first two years, it was very intuitive and impulsive and having no idea what would come out of it. And I’m at that stage with my next album. I really enjoy that. As much as it’s rewarding when [an album] first sees the daylight, I think I even enjoy more the first half of the process, when it’s all still a mystery.

SFBG Were you living in New York during the early playing stage of Biophillia? It seems to have a real connection to natural elements, and science, so I assumed you were in Iceland?

Björk I’ve been living half the year in New York and half in Iceland. I think Biophillia addresses my life in Iceland and the financial crises in a direct way because it’s sort of very DIY. And one of my first dreams was that Biophillia would be a music house and each room would be a song — eventually these rooms became the apps. But it might be that we would be able to go back and make a musical house in Iceland that would serves also as a children’s’ museum and we would use one of the buildings that got kind of half-built in the financial crises and create jobs that way.

But also Biophillia is also about urban areas, because you could stay connected with the moon through your iPad, or to nature and natural structures with your phone.

SFBG My time is almost up but may I ask a few of your favorite things? Like your favorite songs currently, or music that’s helping inspire you creatively now?

Björk At the moment I’ve been listening to the new James Blake album a lot. These things change all the time!

SFBG Favorite mythological story or creature?

Björk I like Icelandic mythology, there’s a lot of amazing tales there.

SFBG And a favorite tour snack?

Björk Um, I like berries.

SFBG Any kind in particular?

Björk Mmmm, no, I like all of them.

BJÖRK

Wed/22, Sat/25, Tue/28, 8:30pm, $75

Craneway Pavilion

1414 Harbour Way, Richmond

www.craneway.com

Music listings

Andrew Lam
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0

Music listings are compiled by Emily Savage. Since club life is unpredictable, it’s a good idea to call ahead or check the venue’s website to confirm bookings and hours. Prices are listed when provided to us. Visit www.sfbg.com/venue-guide for venue information. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

WEDNESDAY 22

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Atriach, Wild Hunt, Lycus, Caffa Thee Parkside. 8pm, $10.

Belle Noire, Great Work, Soonest Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

Boris, deafheaven Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $18.

Matthew Dear Mezzanine. 8:30pm, $20.

Quinn DeVeaux Rite Spot. 8:30pm.

Gunshy Johnny Foley’s. 10pm, free.

Hanzel and Gretyl DNA Lounge. 8pm, $13.

Jason Marion vs Susan Johnny Foley’s Dueling Pianos. 10pm, free.

Mortar and Pestle, Visibles, Great Spirits Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 9pm, $8.

Nick Moss Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $20.

Shout Out Louds Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $19.

Slippery Slope, Lady Elaine, Easy Reader Tupelo, 1337 Grant, SF; (415) 981-9177. 8pm, free.

Speck Mountain Hemlock Tavern. 8:30pm, $7.

Twin Trilogy, Tomb Weavers, Andrew Graham and Swarming Branch Elbo Room. 9pm, $7.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Big Bones Royal Cuckoo, 3203 Mission, SF; www.royalcuckoo.com. 7:30-10:30pm, free.

Dink Dink Dink, Gaucho, Eric Garland’s Jazz Session Amnesia. 7pm, free.

Terry Disley Burritt Room, 417 Stockton, SF; www.burrittavern.com. 6-9pm, free.

29th Swingtet Tupelo, 1337 Grant, SF; www.tupelosf.com. 9:30pm.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Quinn DeVeaux Rite Spot Café. 8:30pm.

Jesse y Joy Regency Ballroom. 8pm, $27.50-$40.

DANCE CLUBS

Booty Call Q-Bar, 456 Castro, SF; www.bootycallwednesdays.com. 9pm. Juanita MORE! and Joshua J host this dance party.

Cash IV Gold Double Dutch, 3192 16th St, SF; www.thedoubledutch.com. 9pm, free.

Coo-Yah! Slate Bar, 2925 16th St, SF; www.slate-sf.com. 10pm, free. With Vinyl Ambassador, DJ Silverback, DJs Green B and Daneekah

Full-Step! Tunnel Top. 10pm, free. Hip-hop, reggae, soul, and funk.

Hardcore Humpday Happy Hour RKRL, 52 Sixth St, SF; (415) 658-5506. 6pm, $3.

Jukebox Baby Monarch. 9pm, $8. With Actually, Silent Pictures, DJ Johnny the Boy, Jungle Sniff.

Martini Lounge John Colins, 138 Minna, SF; www.johncolins.com. 7pm. With DJ Mark Divita.

Stay Sick Monarch. 9pm, free. With DJ Omar.

Timba Dance Party Bissap Baobab, 3372 19 St, SF; www.bissapbaobao.com. 10pm, $5.

THURSDAY 23

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Beets, Fine Steps, Tiaras Hemlock Tavern. 8:30pm, $8.

Black Cobra, Ken Mode, Judgement Day Thee Parkside. 9:30pm, $10.

Bobby Joe Ebola and the Children Macnuggits, Water Tower, Tornado Rider, Mystic Knights of the Cobra Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $16.

Cold War Kids, SUPERHUMANOIDS Regency Ballroom. 8pm, $25.

Craig and Meredith Rite Spot. 8:30pm.

Detroit Cobras, Pangea, Chaw Slim’s. 9pm, $16-$18.

Front Country, Laura Cortese, Mariel Vandersteel, Valerie Thomas, Roosevelt Dime Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 9pm, $10.

Infernoh, Permanent Ruin, Merdoso, Effluxus Knockout. 10pm, $8.

Sonny Landreth Yoshi’s SF. 8pm, $26.

Dave Moreno and Friends Johnny Foley’s. 10pm, free.

Jackie Payne Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $20.

Sir Sly, JMSN, Dresses Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

Sons of Fathers, Builder and the Butchers Café Du Nord. 8pm, $10.

Susan vs Jason Marion Johnny Foley’s Dueling Pianos. 10pm, free.

Ted Tones Chapel, 777 Valencia, SF; www.thechapelsf.com. 9pm, free.

Victoria and Vaudevillians, Unwoman, Blah Boutique DNA Lounge. 8pm, $13.

Youngblood Hawke, Pacific Air, popscene DJs Rickshaw Stop. 9:30pm, $13-$17.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Craig and Meredith Rite Spot Café. 8:30pm.

Spencer Day Feinstein’s at the Nikko, 222 Mason, SF; www.ticketweb.com. 8pm, $55-$75.

Jack Curtis Dubowsky Ensemble: Current Events Luggage Store Gallery, 1007 Market, SF; www.outsound.org. 8pm, $6-$10.

Chris Sibert Royal Cuckoo, 3203 Mission, SF; www.royalcuckoo.com. 7:30-10:30pm, free.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Gigi Amos Tupelo, 1337 Grant, SF; www.tupelosf.com. 9pm.

DANCE CLUBS

Afrolicious Elbo Room. 9:30pm, $5. DJs Pleasuremaker and Señor Oz spin Afrobeat, Tropicália, electro, samba, and funk.

All 80s Thursday Cat Club. 9pm, $6 (free before 9:30pm). The best of ’80s mainstream and underground.

Foxy Monarch Lounge. 9pm, free. With DJ Kizmiaz.

Pa’lante! Bissap Baobab, 3372 19 St, SF; www.bissapbaobao.com. 10pm, $5. With DJs Juan G, El Kool Kyle, Mr. Lucky.

Pompeya, DJ Mykill, Matt Haze Monarch. 9pm, $8.

Psymbionic Mighty. 10pm, $10.

Ritual Temple. 10pm-3am, $5. Two rooms of dubstep, glitch, and trap music.

Tropicana Madrone Art Bar. 9pm, free. Salsa, cumbia, reggaeton, and more with DJs Don Bustamante, Apocolypto Sr. Saen, Santero, and Mr. E.

FRIDAY 24

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Black Moth Super Rainbow, Hood Internet, Oscillator Bug Fillmore. 9pm, $19.50.

Ian Franklin and Infinite Frequency Simple Pleasures, 3434 Balboa, SF; www.ianfranklinmusic.com. 7:30pm.

Inc., Dam Funk Mezzanine. 9pm, $15-$17.

Imperial Teen, Churches, Gone to Ground Bottom of the Hill. 10pm, $12.

Kinski, Phil Manley Life Coach Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $10.

Gino Matteo Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $20.

Presidents of the United States of America Independent. 9pm, $20.

Sea Lions, Still Flyin’, Burnt Palms Café Du Nord. 9:30pm, $10.

Sole Johnny Foley’s. 10pm, free.

Stornway Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 7pm, $15.

Tainted Love, Stung Bimbo’s. 9pm, $25.

TSOL, VKTMS, Rush and Attack Thee Parkside. 9pm, $13.

This Charming Band, Purple Ones, Jean Genies Slim’s. 9pm, $15.

Twin Shadow, Elliphant Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $23-$25.

Greg Zema, Susan, Jason Marion Johnny Foley’s Dueling Pianos. 10pm, free.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Audium 1616 Bush, SF; www.audium.org. 8:30pm, $20. Theater of sound-sculptured space.

Spencer Day Feinstein’s at the Nikko, 222 Mason, SF; www.ticketweb.com. 8pm, $55-$75.

Dyadic Resonance: New Music by Zachary James Watkins Center for New Music, 55 Taylor, SF; www.centerfornewmusic.com. 7:30pm, $15.

Hammond Organ Soul Jazz, Blues Party Royal Cuckoo, 3203 Mission, SF; www.royalcuckoo.com. 7:30-10:30pm, free.

James Moore Unitarian Universalist Society of San Francisco Chapel, 1187 Franklin, SF; www.tangentguitarseries.com. 7:30pm, $15.

Diana Reeves SF Jazz Center, 201 Franklin, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 7:30pm, $30-$70.

Peter White Yoshi’s SF. 8pm, $29; 10pm, $22.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Sambada Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 10pm, $10.

Sinister Dexter Tupelo, 1337 Grant, SF; www.tupelosf.com. 9pm.

DANCE CLUBS

Fag Fridays DNA Lounge. 10pm, $10. Monthly gay dance party with Quentin Harris and David Harness.

Joe Lookout, 3600 16th St.,SF; www.lookoutsf.com. 9pm. Eight rotating DJs, shirt-off drink specials.

Night Moves: Lazarao Casanova Monarch. 9pm, $10.

Old School JAMZ El Rio. 9pm. Fruit Stand DJs spinning old school funk, hip-hop, and R&B.

120 Minutes Elbo Room. 10pm, $15. With Mater Suspiria Vision, How I Quit Crack, S4NtA MU3rTE, Chauncey CC.

Paris to Dakar Little Baobab, 3388 19th St, SF; (415) 643-3558. 10pm, $5. Afro and world music with rotating DJs including Stepwise, Steve, Claude, Santero, and Elembe.

SATURDAY 25

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Blue Diamond Fillups Riptide. 9:30pm, free.

BOAT, Gold Bears, Surf Club Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $8.

Bobby Love and Sugar Sweet Johnny Foley’s. 10pm, free.

Mikal Cronin, Audacity, Michael Stasis Rickshaw Stop. 9pm, $10-$12.

Gentlemen’s Heroes, Who Does That?, Red Shift Thee Parkside. 3pm, free.

Kylesa, Blood Ceremony, White Hills, Lazer, Wulf Slim’s. 8pm, $16.

Presidents of the United States of America Independent. 9pm, $20.

Sudor, Kurraka, Replica El Rio 10pm, $7.

Susan, Jason Marion Johnny Foley’s Dueling Pianos. 10pm, free.

Tainted Love, Minks Bimbo’s. 9pm, $25.

Tera Melos, TTNG, Evkain Bottom of the Hill. 9:30pm, $14.

Earl Thomas and the Blues Ambassadors Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $24.

Twin Shadow, Elliphant Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $23-$25.

Warbringer, Hatchet, Vektor, Apothesary Thee Parkside. 9pm, $15.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Audium 1616 Bush, SF; www.audium.org. 8:30pm, $20. Theater of sound-sculptured space.

Spencer Day Feinstein’s at the Nikko, 222 Mason, SF; www.ticketweb.com. 7pm, $55-$75.

Hammond Organ Soul Jazz, Blues Party Royal Cuckoo, 3203 Mission, SF; www.royalcuckoo.com. 7:30-10:30pm, free.

North Beach Brass Band Brunch Tupelo, 1337 Grant, SF; www.tupelosf.com. 1:30pm.

Diana Reeves SF Jazz Center, 201 Franklin, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 7:30pm, $35-$85.

Lavay Smith and her Red Hot Skillet Lickers, Big Bones Yerba Buena Gardens, Mission between Third and Fourth Streets, SF; www.ybgfestival.org. 1-2:30pm.

Voicehandler and Zeek Sheck Center for New Music, 55 Taylor, SF; www.centerfornewmusic.com. 7:30pm, $15.

Peter White Yoshi’s SF. 8pm, $29; 10pm, $25.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Cradle Duende and Safiya Red Poppy Art House. 8pm, $10-$20.

Sambada Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 10pm, $10.

DANCE CLUBS

Bootie SF: Mashup Prom DNA Lounge. 9pm, $10-$15. With DJ Tripp, Faroff, Dada, Smash-Up Derby.

Claptone, Steve Huerta, Bells and Whistles Monarch. 9:30pm, $10.

Lights Down Low Seventh Anniversary Mezzanine. 9pm, $18-$22. With Azari and III, Lee Foss, Todd Terry, LDL DJs, BT Magnum.

Paris to Dakar Little Baobab, 3388 19th St, SF; (415) 643-3558. 10pm, $5. Afro and world music with rotating DJs.

Temptation Cat Club. 9:30pm. $5–<\d>$8. Indie, electro, new wave video dance party.

SUNDAY 26

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Big Long Now, Adult Dude Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $7.

Dave Moreno and Friends Johnny Foley’s. 10pm, free.

Goh Nakamura, Jane Lui, Paul Dateh Café Du Nord. 7:30pm, $10.

Tropical Popsicle, Bixby Knolls, Panic is Perfect Bottom of the Hill. 9:30pm, $9.

Qwel and Maker, Rec League, Genie, DJ Mr. Bean, Johnny 5 Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 9pm, $15.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Gospel Gators of San Francisco State University Yoshi’s SF. 7 and 9pm, $25.

Diana Reeves SF Jazz Center, 201 Franklin, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 7:30pm, $30-$70.

Lavay Smith Royal Cuckoo, 3203 Mission, SF; www.royalcuckoo.com. 7:30-10:30pm, free.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Brazil and Beyond Bissap Baobab, 3372 19 St, SF; www.bissapbaobao.com. 6:30pm, free.

Marshall Law Tupelo, 1337 Grant, SF; www.tupelosf.com. 4-7pm, free.

Silver Threads, Sevon and the Lovesick Ramblers Thee Parkside. 4pm, free.

DANCE CLUBS

As You Like It Monarch. 9pm, $15. With Magic Mountain High, Move D, Dave Anju, Mossmoss, Rich Korach.

Beats for Brunch Thee Parkside. 11am, free.

Creeme Fraiche ft. Mrs. Blythe Monarch Lounge. 9pm, free.

Dub Mission Elbo Room. 9pm, $10. With Twilight Circus Dub Sound System.

Espirit du Monde Bissap Baobab, 3372 19 St, SF; www.bissapbaobao.com. 9pm, $5. Carnival after-party with DJs Cecil, Orfeu Negro, Son of Son.

Jock Lookout, 3600 16th St, SF; www.lookoutsf.com. 3pm, $2.

Stompy and Sunset, DJ Deep Café Cocomo, 650 Indiana, SF; www.cafecocomo.com. 2pm, $10-$20.

Trannyshack: Madonna Tribute DNA Lounge. 9:30pm, $15. With Heklina, Becky Motorlodge, Exhibit Q, Raya Light, Cookie Dough, and more.

MONDAY 27

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Better Maker, An Isotope, Jordan River Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 9pm, $9.

Damir Johnny Foley’s. 10pm, free.

“Shit Kickin’ Memorial Day” El Rio. 4pm, $10. With 77 El Deora, Evangenitals, Kit and the Branded Men, Patsychords.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Seva Kirtan Palace of Fine Arts Theater, 3301 Lyon, SF; www.seva.org. 7pm, $40-$150.

Slowpoke Tupelo, 1337 Grant, SF; www.tupelosf.com. 9pm.

DANCE CLUBS

Crazy Mondays Beauty Bar, 2299 Mission, SF; www.thebeautybar.com. 10pm, free. Hip-hop and other stuff.

Death Guild DNA Lounge. 9:30pm, $3-$5. With Decay, Joe Radio, Meltin Girl.

DJ Jules, Jacob, Alden Monarch. 8pm, free.

M.O.M. Madrone Art Bar. 6pm, free. DJs Timoteo Gigante, Gordo Cabeza, and Chris Phlek playing all Motown every Monday.

Soul Cafe John Colins Lounge, 138 Minna, SF; www.johncolins.com. 9pm. R&B, Hip-Hop, Neosoul, reggae, dancehall, and more with DJ Jerry Ross.

Vibes’N’Stuff El Amigo Bar, 3355 Mission, SF; (415) 852-0092. 10pm, free. Conscious jazz and hip-hop with DJs Luce Lucy, Vinnie Esparza, and more.

TUESDAY 28

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Asad Messiah, Burning Monk, Ironwitch, DJ D’sasster Knockout. 9:30pm, $6.

Big K.R.I.T., Smoke DZA DNA Lounge. 8pm, $24.

Fat Tuesday Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $15.

Grouper, Danny Paul Grody, Irwin Swirnoff Hemlock Tavern. 8:30pm, $8.

Kids, Bodies, Neon Piss, Re-Volts, Cyclops Thee Parkside. 8pm, $12.

Whitney Myer, Lindsey Pavao, Odd Owl, Mad Noise Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 8pm, $8.

Radiation City, Cuckoo Chaos Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $10-$12.

David Ramirez, Jay Nash, Max Porter Café Du Nord. 9pm, $10-$12.

Suuns, Wymond Miles, Foli Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $12.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Terry Disley Burritt Room, 417 Stockton, SF; www.burrittavern.com. 6-9pm, free.

sfSoundSalonSeries: Maggi Payne, Varese, John Ingle, sfSound Center for New Music, 55 Taylor, SF; www.centerfornewmusic.com. 7:30pm, $7-$10.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Balkan Brass Elbo Room. 9pm, $3.

Toshio Hirano Rite Spot. 8:30pm.

DANCE CLUBS

DJ4AM Laszlo, 2526 Mission, SF; www.laszlobar.com. Boom bap hip-hop, beats, and dub.

Level Vibes Monarch. 9pm, free. With Now Time DJs.

Soundpieces Monarch. 10pm, $5. With Zeno, El Diablo.

Stylus John Colins Lounge, 138 Minna, SF; www.johncolins.com. 9pm. Hip-hop, dancehall, and Bay slaps with DJ Left Lane.

Takin’ Back Tuesdays Double Dutch, 3192 16th St,SF; www.thedoubledutch.com. 10pm. Hip-hop from the 1990s.

ZouKizomba Bissap Baobab, 3372 19 St, SF; www.bissapbaobao.com. 8pm, $5-$10.

Stage listings

Andrew Lam
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0

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

THEATER

OPENING

The Beauty Queen of Leenane Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller, Mill Valley; www.marintheatre.org. $36-52. Previews Thu/23-Sat/25, 8pm; Sun/26, 7pm. Opens Tue/28, 8pm. Runs Tue, Thu-Sat, 8pm (also June 1 and 15, 2pm; June 6, 1pm); Wed, 7:30pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through June 16. Marin Theatre Company performs Martin McDonagh’s award-winning black comedy about a dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship.

By & By Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; www.shotgunplayers.org. $20-30. Previews Wed/22-Thu/23 and May 29-30, 7pm; Fri/24-Sat/25, 8pm; Sun/26, 5pm. Opens May 31, 8pm. Runs Wed-Thu, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through June 23. Shotgun Players presents a new sci-fi thriller by Lauren Gunderson.

Hanging Georgia, a play with music about Georgia O’Keefe Pear Avenue Theatre, 1220 Pear, Mtn View; www.thepear.org. $10-30. Previews Thu/23, 8pm. Opens Fri/24, 8pm. Runs Thu-Sat, 8pm (no show Sat/25; additional shows June 1 and 8, 2pm); Sun, 2pm. Through June 9. Pear Avenue Theatre marks its 75th show with Sharmon J. Hilfinger and Joan McMillen’s world premiere, a co-production with BootStrap Theater Foundation.

ONGOING

Arcadia ACT’s Geary Theater, 415 Geary, SF; www.act-sf.org. $20-95. Opens Wed/22, 8pm. Runs Tue-Sat, 8pm (also Wed and Sat, 2pm; May 28 show at 7pm); Sun, 2pm (additional show Sun/26, 8pm). Through June 9. American Conservatory Theater performs Tom Stoppard’s literary romance.

Birds of a Feather New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; www.nctcsf.org. $25-45. Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2pm. Through June 29. New Conservatory Theatre Center performs the San Francisco premiere of Marc Acito’s tale inspired by two gay penguins at the Central Park Zoo.

Black Watch Drill Court, Armory Community Center, 333 14th St, SF; www.act-sf.org. $100. Tue-Sat, 8pm (also Wed and Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2pm. Through June 16. American Conservatory Theater presents the National Theatre of Scotland’s internationally acclaimed performance about Scottish soldiers serving in Iraq.

Boomeraging: From LSD to OMG Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Tue/28, 8pm. Comedian Will Durst performs his brand-new solo show.

Burqavaganza Brava Theater Center, 2781 24th St, SF; www.brava.org. $20. Thu-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Through June 2. Brava! For Women in the Arts and RasaNova Theatre present Shahid Nadeem’s Bollywood-style “love story in the time of jihad.”

Dirty Dancing: Live! Dark Room, 2263 Mission, SF; dirtydancinglive-fbe.eventbrite.com. $20. Fri/24-Sat/25, 8pm. Watermelons will be carried, lifts will be attempted, eyes will be hungry, and nobody better put Baby in a corner.

Foodies! The Musical Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter, SF; www.foodiesthemusical.com. $30-34. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Open-ended. AWAT Productions presents Morris Bobrow’s musical comedy revue all about food.

Krispy Kritters in the Scarlett Night Exit on Taylor, 277 Taylor, SF; www.cuttingball.com. $10-50. Opens Thu/23, 7:30pm. Runs Thu, 7:30pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm; no shows June 8); Sun, 5pm. Through June 16. Cutting Ball Theater performs Andrew Saito’s Howl-inspired portrait of San Francisco.

The Merry Wives of Windsor Buriel Clay Theater, African American Art and Culture Complex, 762 Fulton, SF; www.african-americanshakes.org. $10-35. Sat/25, 8pm; Sun/26, 3pm. They might be two of the town’s most respectable matrons, but Mistresses Page (Safiya Fredericks) and Ford (Leontyne Mbele-Mbong), the titular Merry Wives of Windsor, at the African-American Shakespeare Company, are nobody’s fools. When the bawdy, ne’er-do-well Falstaff (a cross-dressing Beli Sullivan) tries to woo the two at the same time (as much for money as lust), they easily turn the tables on his plotting, and further dampen his ardor by having him tossed in a ditch. Their husbands, in particular the suspicious yet constantly flummoxed Master Ford (Armond Edward Dorsey), fare not much better against the wonder-twin powers of their BFF wives, and for anyone keeping score, the entire female population of Windsor generally makes out better than their slow-on-the-uptake menfolk, and they do it in style thanks to Linda Tucker’s astute, 50s-era costume design. Under Becky Kemper’s direction, the attitude skews sassy, and each character — from the befuddled town elite to the simplest servant — is a broadly-painted stroke of buffoonery, one part Desperate Housewives melodrama and one part Marx Brother’s farce. Kemper calls her rowdy take on this battle-of-the-sexes comedy “a guilty pleasure,” reminding us that however hallowed the name of Shakespeare might remain in posher circles, a good portion of his canon was written not for the austere glory of posterity, but for the base enjoyment of the general populace. (Gluckstern)

“PlayGround Festival of New Works” Various venues, SF and Berk; www.playground-sf.org. $15-40. Through Sun/26. The long-running short-play contest and development lab marks its 17th season with an evening showcasing the best of the previous year. The six plays come from six (familiar and new) playwrights out of a pool of 36 new short plays developed by PlayGround since October (and those were drawn from over 190 new original scripts created). The best of the best receives a rotating cast of strong Bay Area actors under six accomplished directors (including PlayGround founder Jim Kleinmann) but is a mixed affair, nevertheless. Katie May’s The Spherical Loneliness of Beverly Onion is a sometimes funny but generally tepid short story about a lonely mortician’s assistant (Carla Pantoja) who confronts her handlers, the natural forces of Fate (Jomar Tagatac) and Luck (Anne Darragh). Simple and Elegant, by Evelyn Jean Pine, is an ocean-side fairytale whose themes don’t sound too deeply, about the titular pair of sisters (Rebecca Pingree and Pantoja) who have a near-fatal falling out over a gold coin salvaged from the belly of a fish (Dao) who may be a handsome prince for one of them or just a nice hideaway bed. In Ruben Grijalva’s Value over Replacement, a major league player (Tagatac) confronts a career-jeopardizing accusation from a journalist-guest (Delzell) on his talk radio show in a somewhat prosaic but dramatically compact, carefully written and well-acted piece. Significant People, by Amy Sass, follows two docents (Darragh and Delzell) through the preserved home of two significant others who seem to be the same people. It’s a quirky conceit that doesn’t quite produce the necessary dramatic tension, the stakes feeling too low. In My Better Half, by Jonathan Spector, quirkiness goes full-bore as a wife (Pingree) with a justifiable complaint against her obliviously self-centered, what-me husband (Dao) looks to have him rubbed out by a reluctant hit man (Tagatac) and his couples-therapist colleague (Darragh). Finally, Symmetrical Smack-Down is William Bivins’ funny and nicely orchestrated foursome, in which the dynamic between two antagonists in the wrestling ring (Tagatac and Delzell) overlaps (literally and dramatically) with that between a long-term lesbian couple (Pingree and Pantoja) on the brink of a break-up and/or rumble. (Avila)

Sex and the City: LIVE! Rebel, 1760 Market, SF; trannyshack.com/sexandthecity. $25. Wed, 7 and 9pm. Open-ended. It seems a no-brainer. Not just the HBO series itself — that’s definitely missing some gray matter — but putting it onstage as a drag show. Mais naturellement! Why was Sex and the City not conceived of as a drag show in the first place? Making the sordid not exactly palatable but somehow, I don’t know, friendlier (and the canned a little cannier), Velvet Rage Productions mounts two verbatim episodes from the widely adored cable show, with Trannyshack’s Heklina in a smashing portrayal of SJP’s Carrie; D’Arcy Drollinger stealing much of the show as ever-randy Samantha (already more or less a gay man trapped in a woman’s body); Lady Bear as an endearingly out-to-lunch Miranda; and ever assured, quick-witted Trixxie Carr as pent-up Charlotte. There’s also a solid and enjoyable supporting cast courtesy of Cookie Dough, Jordan Wheeler, and Leigh Crow (as Mr. Big). That’s some heavyweight talent trodding the straining boards of bar Rebel’s tiny stage. The show’s still two-dimensional, even in 3D, but noticeably bigger than your 50″ plasma flat panel. Update: new episodes began May 15. (Avila)

Steve Seabrook: Better Than You Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Thu, 8pm; Sat, 8:30pm. Extended through June 29. Self-awareness, self-actualization, self-aggrandizement — for these things we turn to the professionals: the self-empowerment coaches, the self-help authors and motivational speakers. What’s the good of having a “self” unless someone shows you how to use it? Writer-performer Kurt Bodden’s Steve Seabrook wants to sell you on a better you, but his “Better Than You” weekend seminar (and tie-in book series, assorted CDs, and other paraphernalia) belies a certain divided loyalty in its own self-flattering title. The bitter fruit of the personal growth industry may sound overly ripe for the picking, but Bodden’s deftly executed “seminar” and its behind-the-scenes reveals, directed by Mark Kenward, explore the terrain with panache, cool wit, and shrewd characterization. As both writer and performer, Bodden keeps his Steve Seabrook just this side of overly sensational or maudlin, a believable figure, finally, whose all-too-ordinary life ends up something of a modest model of its own. (Avila)

Talk Radio Actors Theatre of San Francisco, 855 Bush, SF; www.actorstheatresf.org. $26-38. Wed-Sat, 8pm. Through June 15. Actors Theatre of San Francisco performs Eric Bogosian’s breakthrough 1987 drama.

Tinsel Tarts in a Hot Coma: The Next Cockettes Musical Hypnodrome, 575 10th St, SF; www.thrillpeddlers.com. $30-35. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Extended through June 29. Thrillpeddlers and director Russell Blackwood continue their Theatre of the Ridiculous series with this 1971 musical from San Francisco’s famed glitter-bearded acid queens, the Cockettes, revamped with a slew of new musical material by original member Scrumbly Koldewyn, and a freshly re-minted book co-written by Koldewyn and “Sweet Pam” Tent — both of whom join the large rotating cast of Thrillpeddler favorites alongside a third original Cockette, Rumi Missabu (playing diner waitress Brenda Breakfast like a deliciously unhinged scramble of Lucille Ball and Bette Davis). This is Thrillpeddlers’ third Cockettes revival, a winning streak that started with Pearls Over Shanghai. While not quite as frisky or imaginative as the production of Pearls, it easily charms with its fine songs, nifty routines, exquisite costumes, steady flashes of wit, less consistent flashes of flesh, and de rigueur irreverence. The plot may not be very easy to follow, but then, except perhaps for the bubbly accounting of the notorious New York flop of the same show 42 years ago by Tent (as poisoned-pen gossip columnist Vedda Viper), it hardly matters. (Avila)

Vital Signs: The Pulse of an American Nurse Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Sun, 7pm. Through June 16. Registered nurse Alison Whittaker returns to the Marsh with her behind-the-scenes show about working in a hospital.

The World’s Funniest Bubble Show Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $8-50. Sun, 11am. Through July 21. Louis “The Amazing Bubble Man” Pearl returns after a month-long hiatus with his popular, kid-friendly bubble show.

BAY AREA

The Medea Hypothesis Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant, Berk; www.centralworks.org. $15-28. Thu-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Central Works performs Marian Berges’ reconfiguration of the Euripides classic.

Pericles, Prince of Tyre Berkeley Repertory Theatre, 2025 Addison, Berk; www.berkeleyrep.org. $29-77. Wed/22 and Sun/26, 7pm (also Sun/26, 2pm); Thu/23 and Sat/25, 2 and 8pm. Mark Wing-Davey directs Berkeley Rep’s take on the Bard.

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

“Acting Out — For the Health of It” Brava Theater Center, 2781 24th St, SF; bcaction.org/events/actingout/. Wed/22, 7pm. $35-75. Breast Cancer Action benefits from this evening of comedy, author readings, bluegrass tunes, and more.

“Alonzo King LINES Ballet Training Program Spring Showcase” ODC Dance, 351 Shotwell, SF; www.odcdance.org. Fri/24-Sat/25, 7pm; Sun/26, 2pm. $20. Dancers in training (ages 17-24) perform works by Kara Davis, Gregory Dawson, and others.

“Dionysian Festival” Mary Sano School of Duncan Dancing, 245 Fifth St, Studio 314, SF; www.duncandance.org. Sat/25, 8pm; Sun/26, 5pm. $20. Celebrating the 136th anniversary of Isadora Duncan’s birth with works by the pioneering choreographer.

“Dream Queens Revue” Aunt Charlie’s Lounge, 133 Turk, SF; www.dreamqueensrevue.com. Wed/22, 9:30pm. free. Drag with Collette LeGrande, Diva LaFever, Sophilya Leggz, and more.

“Improvised Murder Mystery” Bayfront Theater, B350 Fort Mason Center, SF; www.improv.org. Sat/25, 8pm. $20. BATS Improv performs one of its most popular shows.

“Kunst-Stoff Arts Fest 2013” Kunst-Stoff Arts, One Grove, SF; www.kunst-stoff.org. Through June 7. Most events $10-15. Morning classes, afternoon workshops, and evening performances are the focus of this festival of dance, film, music, and more.

Lady Rizo Z Space, 450 Florida, SF; www.ladyrizo.com. Sat/25, 8pm. $20. The NYC cabaret star performs.

Lily Cai Chinese Dance Company Lily Cai Dance Studio, 301 8th St, SF; lilycaidance.brownpapertickets.com. Fri/24-Sat/25, 8pm; Sun/26, 3:30pm. $15. The company’s 2013 studio concert includes three works, including 2013’s Xing.

“Love and Taxes” Z Space, 450 Florida, SF; www.zspace.org. Wed/22-Thu/23, 8pm. $25-70. Josh Kornbluth performs his hit stage show as a benefit for Z Space.

“Mariko Passion’s Whorrific Popcorn Theatre Bus and Cabaret” Center for Sex and Culture, 1349 Mission, SF; www.sexworkerfest.com. Fri/24, 7pm (cabaret); 9:30pm (bus tour). $15-30. Performance followed by a bus tour “visiting the haunts and landmarks or SF whoredom.” Part of the SF Sex Worker Fest.

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

“Performance Research Experiment #2: Paradox of the Heart (Phase 1)” CounterPULSE, 1310 Mission, SF; www.counterpulse.org. Fri/24-Sun/26, 8pm. $15-20. Jess Curtis/Gravity presents a “performance/science experiment” in collaboration with French-German dance and circus artist Jörg Müller.

Red Hots Burlesque El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF; www.redhotsburlesque.com. Wed, 7:30-9pm. Ongoing. $5-10. Come for the burlesque show, stay for OMG! Karaoke starting at 8pm (no cover for karaoke).

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

Shaping Sound Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, 3301 Lyon, SF; www.shapingsoundco.com. Wed/22, 8pm. $30-85. This touring company includes dancers featured on reality competitions All the Right Moves and So You Think You Can Dance.

“Tickled Pink!” Café Royale, 800 Post, SF; (415) 441-4099. Thu/23, 8pm. Free. Comedy showcase with Mike Cappazola, Nina G., Greg Asdourian, and more; this month’s theme is “Grown Up.”

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

Wasatch Collective Dancers Dance Mission Theater, 3316 24th St, SF; www.dancemission.com. Fri/24-Sat/25, 8pm; Sun/26, 7pm. $12. The Utah company makes its Bay Area debut with “Aggregate,” an evening of original and commissioned work.

“When You’re In Love, The Whole World is Jewish” Marines’ Memorial Theatre, 609 Sutter, SF; www.worldisjewishtheplay.com. Fri/24-Sat/25, 8pm (also Sat/25, 2pm); Sun/26, 2pm. $45-66. Seinfeld‘s Jason Alexander directs this musical comedy revue.

“You Killed Hamlet, or Guilty Creatures Sitting at a Play” Main Street Theatre, 915 Cayuga, SF; youkilledhamlet.brownpapertickets.com. Fri/24, 8pm. $15-25. Naked Empire Bouffon Company and the International Home Theatre Festival present an even more outrageous version of their Best of the Fringe-winning show.

BAY AREA

Big Moves Laney College Theater, 900 Fallon, Oakl; www.bigmoves.org. Sat/25, 8pm; Sun/26, 2pm. $17. The company performs En Masse, a new music and dance spectacular featuring resident dance company emFATic DANCE.

“City Ballet School Spring Showcase” Showcase Theater Marin Civic Center, 10 Avenue of the Flags, San Rafael; www.cityballetschool.org. Sat/25, 1-5pm. $25. Student dancers ages 6-19 perform.

“Jewish Chronicles” Cabaret at the Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Shattuck; www.themarsh.org. Wed/22, 8pm. $15-50. Songwriter and storyteller David Canier performs.

Smuin Ballet Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro, Mtn View; www.smuinballet.org. Wed/22-Sat/25, 8pm (also Sat/25, 2pm); Sun/26, 2pm. $52-68. Also May 31-June 1, 8pm (also June 1, 2pm). $54-70. Lesher Center for the Arts, 1601 Civic, Walnut Creek. The company presents the West Coast premiere of Helen Pickett’s Petal and Darrell Grand Moultrie’s JAZZIN’, among other works.

“Swearing in English: Tall Tales at Shotgun” Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; www.shotgunplayers.org. June 3 and 17, 8pm. $15. Shotgun Cabaret presents John Mercer in a series of three stranger-than-fiction dramatic readings.

Alerts

Andrew Lam
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WEDNESDAY 22

Harvey Milk Day The GLBT History Museum, 4127 18th St., SF. (415) 621-1107 . 11am-6pm, free. California marks Harvey Milk’s birthday, May 22, as an annual statewide day of significance. The GLBT History Museum will honor the occasion this year by offering free admission to all visitors. In addition, the museum is extending a special welcome to Bay Area schools.


Talking about ecology and science in public 518 Valencia, SF. 7:30-10:30pm, free. Join environmental scientist and climate change activist Azibuike Akaba, Brent Plater of the Wild Equity Institute and Rose Aguilar of KALW’s Your Call radio for a debate on the best way to communicate issues about climate change with the general public.

THURSDAY 23

Report-back from Cuba Modern Times Bookstore Collective, SF. (415) 282-9246. 7pm, Free. Tony Ryan, longtime bookseller and Cuba solidarity activist, will give a presentation on the Havana International Book Fair and discuss the work of Nancy Morejón, the best known and most widely translated woman poet of post-revolutionary Cuba.

FRIDAY 24

Outdoor Film screening: Who Bombed Judi Bari? Mythbusters, 1268 Missouri, SF. tinyurl.com/aoha47n. 8:30-11:30pm, free. On May 24, 1990, a bomb blew up in the car of two of the most prominent Earth First! redwood activists: Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney — while they were driving through Oakland, CA on an organizing tour for Redwood Summer. The FBI and Oakland Police immediately accused the pair of carrying their own bomb and of being environmental terrorists. Bari and Cherney launched a lawsuit against the FBI and Oakland Police for violations of the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution, and when their case went to trial in 2002, they won. Watch this film on the anniversary of the explosion.

TUESDAY 28

The Future of Bicycle Parking: An International Exhibition SPUR, 654 Mission, SF. www.spur.org. 11am-8pm, free. Yerba Buena Community Benefit District presents an exhibit featuring designs from 100 international teams who entered a student competition to craft a portable bicycle corral for the Yerba Buena neighborhood. The exhibit goes till May 31, till 5pm most days.

Heads Up: 7 must-see concerts this week

Tony Robles
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Bjork is coming! She’ll bring Biophilia’s ambitiously in-the-round and touch screen app-filled show to Richmond, Calif. this week. Plus, the educational component of that tour will make its way to the Exploratorium via a handful of science and sound experiments.

The sparkly avant-pop star is the major music news this week in the Bay, however there also is the annual (and reliably well-curated) SF Popfest, plus a bunch of other shows you should be checking out as well, like Japanese doom masters Boris, Swedish indie popsters the Shout Out Louds, the gritty B-side soul goodness of the Detroit Cobras, and local rock’n’roller Mikal Cronin — high on the release of a celebrated new solo album, MCII.

Here are your must-see Bay Area concerts this week/end:

Boris
The experimental Japanese drone legends are playing two shows at the Rickshaw Stop this week — only one of those is sold out (that would be Tuesday). At Wednesday’s show, Boris will perform the four song, 70-minute masterpiece/“cult classic” album Flood, in its entirety. The ‘00 sludge-rock album hovers between psychedelic and doomy in all the right ways.
With deafheaven
Wed/22, 8pm, $18
Rickshaw Stop
155 Fell, SF
www.rickshawstop.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvCLhq8okxc

Mortar and Pestle
On its self-titled new full-length, Oakland’s Mortar and Pestle sounds something like a trippier Little Dragon. There are bouncy keyboard lines and scattered upbeat found-sound touches boosted by the lush and dreamy vocals of lead singer Janaysa Lambert. On first single “U.V” there’s even the familiar ping-ping-ping of a classic pinball game, forcing you to picture the full Mortar and Pestle set-up placed neatly between games in a 1980s arcade. The tropical synth-pop trio is also one of the first acts to see release on Metal Mother’s new label-collective, Post Primal, so you know it has her stamp of approval.
With the Visibles (Record Release), Great Spirits
Wed/22, 9pm, $8
Brick and Mortar
1710 Mission, SF
www.brickandmortarmusic.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqEGK6li2rE

Bjork
Can you even recall your first run-in with the mythic, boundary-less creature that is Björk? Perhaps it was bounding through the forest with crystals underneath her eyes as a giant paper-mache bear chased her through Michel Gondry’s video for “Human Behaviour,” off 1993 solo album Debut. Or maybe it was poised for the tabloids in an elegant swan dress, holding a large egg purse at the ’01 Academy Awards after her devastating performance in Dancer in the Dark (2000). Those long obsessed will likely point to first hearing ’88’s “Birthday” by the Sugarcubes, her early Icelandic act (post teenage punk bands), on international radio. Whenever — and however — it went down, it left a lasting impression, the stunning shock of that otherworldly voice tends to permeate memories. Solo, Bjork has long coupled that voice with innovation, always grasping at new objects and sounds, or as she described it to me in conversation, she’s “like a kid in a toy shop.”
Wed/22, Sat/25, Tue/28, 8:30pm, $75
Craneway Pavilion
1414 Harbour Way, Richmond
www.craneway.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvaEmPQnbWk

Shout Out Louds
“My favorite songs by this Swedish pop group have clear antecedents in ’80s New Wave. With Our Ill WIlls (2007) opener “Tonight I Have To Leave It” singer Adam Olenius was a ringer for Robert Smith at his most ebullient (read: “Just Like Heaven”) and “Impossible” hit on the Human League and Simple Minds. It could be derivative, but with the Joy Division via Interpol meets the B-52s sound of “Glasgow” on its latest album Optica, the system the group has is working, particularly the sparkling production. Opening band Haerts seems a perfect match, as its slick debut single “Wings” sees the SOLs referent for referent, and adds in some Spandau Ballet and Stevie Nicks vocals to great effect.” — Ryan Prendiville
With Haerts
Wed/22, 8pm, $19
Great American Music Hall
859 O’Farrell, SF
(415) 885-0750
www.slimspresents.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dXpmbZDnRk

The Detroit Cobras
“Some bands you’ll just never be able to judge by their album cover(s). Some bands just don’t have time for all that studio nonsense. They wanna rock — and they wanna rock with you. Up close and personal. In your face. Get it? That pretty much describes the rough-and-ready Detroit Cobras method, after releasing a scant handful of albums, they’ve continued to tour extensively, bringing the husky, tough-girl vocals of Rachel Nagy and the gritty, jangling guitar riffs of Mary Ramirez to the people. Their reinterpretations of vintage, B-side rock, soul, and Motown give songs that could have been contenders a brash new life, while their relentless stage show gives their adoring fans a good, old-fashioned, foot-stomping workout.” — Nicole Gluckstern
With Pangea, the Chaw
Thu/23, 9pm, $16
Slims
333 11th St., SF
(415) 255-0333
www.slimspresents.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8ZhLBO9NZY

Sea Lions
The pizza-loving Sea Lions (think a more beachy Vaselines) come to the Bay via Oxnard, Calif. courtesy of this weekend’s SF Popfest. And that fest lineup for the evening is rather ingenious, bookended with the awesome “stoner-punk” LA shredder Colleen Green — go now and check fuzzy “Heavy Shit” — along with distorted-pop maker Permanent Collection, and more.
With Still Flyin’, Burnt Palms
Fri/24, 9pm, $12
Café Du Nord
2170 Market, SF
www.cafedunord.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ko_FxbKq9PM

Mikal Cronin
“Mikal Cronin has been bouncing around the San Francisco music scene for a couple of years as an unsung hometown hero, collaborating with Thee Oh Sees, recording with Ty Segall and performing in the Ty Segall Band, while quietly releasing his own solo records and singles. Finally, Cronin is no longer sidekicking. This year’s full-length MCII has received rave reviews from major music publications (SPIN and Pitchfork have labeled it among the best new music of the year) and Cronin is enjoying a headlining slot on a national tour. Tonight’s gig at the Rickshaw Stop is a much-deserved album release-party, and I wouldn’t be too surprised if Cronin pulls up some old friends to help him celebrate.”  — Haley Zaremba
With Audacity, Michael Stasis
Sat/25, 9pm, $12
Rickshaw Stop
155 Fell, SF
(415) 861-2011
www.rickshawstop.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0S2eTV2v3V0

The “Do Nothing” Solution to “Illegal Immigration”

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Both sides of the political aisle have made a major issue out of the problem of the 11 million people inside the US illegally or presently undocumented. The president has said this is a priority and Florida senator Marco Rubio has agreed. They are theoretically opposed to each other, yet Rubio’s proposals entailed in the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013 don’t differ a great deal from Obama’s. In a nutshell, Rubio has suggested that the wholesale eviction of 11 million people is impossible and that the bill offers them an opportunity for legalization and permanent residence and citizenship. Naturally, the “jump through hoops” process begins here: Fines and background checks and no federal bennies.

Sounds completely reasonable, but you’d think Rubio had suggested that the government was handing out lollipops and bon-bons, making Spanish the new “official language” and changing the “Star Spangled Banner” to “Guantanmera” by the reaction of his “conservative” peers. A cursory Google reveals an enraged base represented by such intellectual heavweights as Townhall.com and Ann “To Hell With Palin, I Was Here First” Coulter. Any concessions to the teeming masses of south of the border is treasonous amnesty and in their hardly humble opinions, this will lead to “de-Europeanization” (ie less white).

As far as what the generally pitiful Democrats are offering, it is only marginally different than Rubio’s idea. Which is also reasonable, but overlooks the crux of the issue, because no one anywhere has to unmitigated gall (until now) to say it: “Illegal Immigration reform” is a solution in search of a problem, because in reality, it isn’t a problem at all!

The way I see it, a problem means an aggrieved party and in this instance, there isn’t one. People want to hire help for whatever the task is, other people agree to do it for a price, end of story. The idea that “illegal immigrants are stealing American workers jobs” sounds fairly solid on its face unless you happen to live in the American Southwest and notice that wherever day laborers congregate, there aren’t a whole hell of a lot of white folks. As far as “taking away jobs that union carpenters/plumbers/electricians do”, isn’t it the union’s job to protect their own for one and for two, a skyscraper isn’t built and wired with dudes from the Lowe’s parking lot. It is not worth a major contractor’s license to screw with E-Verify (I passed an E-Verify check myself a few months ago for my radio show!).

Assuming you “legalized” every man, woman in child in the US tomorrow, what happens? The working person’s price rises. Which means that they will be replaced by new people from Central America or Asia that will remain invisible. See, we are a free country with open borders–people can come and go as they please, this isn’t a gulag (yet) (The irony of the most virulent anti-USSR voices being the loudest for a border fence is astounding). Not only is there no way to stop it, there isn’t even a real reason to stop it–as China and Japan might tell you, an aging and shrinking worker base is starting to hurt them and hard.

Fact is, both major political parties support and oppose it for a pair of reasons of their own. Democrats love this, as it accelerates the “Bluing” of the Southwest with millions of new voters beholding and grateful to them, making a Republican national electoral victory mathematically impossible. The other reason they love it is because it replenishes their most loyal and organized base, labor. Republicans hate it for two reasons as well–newly legal workers will have more rights, bargaining power and higher pay, which means that a new cheap labor era is gonna take a while. The other reason is the one they vehemently deny but is as obvious as the honkers on their maps–their base’s great unifier isn’t economics or even social issues, but race. That the Dixiecrats of the last century are now almost entirely Republican. The glue that holds them intact, whether they’d care to admit it or not, is white supremacy. And a sea of legal Americans that are a deeper shade of soul galls them to the cores of their rancid selves. Were they serious about “sending all of these people back to where they came from”, they’d boycott every and any business that employs them, which means they’d pretty much have to stop eating. I’ve seen what the average reactionary looks like--that ain’t happening.

In fact, when the “illegals” are white, they say nothing.

Obama and Rubio both cry out that the system is “broken” but it isn’t. Undocumenteds pour billions into the coffers of state and federal and don’t get it back and whatever their costs are to health or schools, they’re balanced off by what the public saves in lower food and service costs. They’re a wash. Which means that any changes to the laissez-faire system only make everyone’s life harder and more complex. If there is a solution, the easiest one would be a “seven year rule”–you prove you’ve actually been here 7 years, no criminal record, you take a citizenship test, that’s it. 

We have undocumented people in this very neighborhood. They want the same things we do. That’s good enough for me.

 

JAW

 

 

 

 

 


Stage listings

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

THEATER

OPENING

Arcadia ACT’s Geary Theater, 415 Geary, SF; www.act-sf.org. $20-95. Previews Thu/16-Sat/18, 8pm (also Sat/18, 2pm); Sun/19, 2pm. Opens Wed/22, 8pm. Runs Tue-Sat, 8pm (also Wed and Sat, 2pm; May 28 show at 7pm); Sun, 2pm (additional show May 26, 8pm). Through June 9. American Conservatory Theater performs Tom Stoppard’s literary romance.

Birds of a Feather New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; www.nctcsf.org. $25-45. Previews Fri/17-Sat/18, 8pm (also Sat/18, 2pm); Sun/19, 2pm. Opens Fri/24, 8pm. Runs Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2pm. Through June 29. New Conservatory Theatre Center performs the San Francisco premiere of Marc Acito’s tale inspired by two gay penguins at the Central Park Zoo.

Burqavaganza Brava Theater Center, 2781 24th St, SF; www.brava.org. $20. Opens Thu/16, 8pm. Runs Thu-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Through June 2. Brava! For Women in the Arts and RasaNova Theatre present Shahid Nadeem’s Bollywood-style “love story in the time of jihad.”

Krispy Kritters in the Scarlett Night Exit on Taylor, 277 Taylor, SF; www.cuttingball.com. $10-50. Previews Fri/17-Sat/18, 8pm; Sun/19, 5pm. Opens May 23, 7:30pm. Runs Thu, 7:30pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm; no shows June 8); Sun, 5pm. Through June 16. Cutting Ball Theater performs Andrew Saito’s Howl-inspired portrait of San Francisco.

ONGOING

Acid Test: The Many Incarnations of Ram Dass Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Fri/17, 8pm; Sat/18, 5pm. Playwright Lynne Kaufman invites you to take a trip with Richard Alpert, a.k.a. Ram Dass (Warren David Keith), as he recounts times high and low in this thoughtful, funny, and sometimes unexpected biographical rumination on the quest for truth and meaning in a seemingly random life by one of the big wigs of the psychedelic revolution and (with his classic book, Be Here Now) contemporary Eastern-looking spirituality. Directed by Joel Mullennix, the narrative begins with Ram Dass today, in his Hawaiian home and partly paralyzed from a stroke, but Keith (one of the Bay Area’s best stage actors, who is predictably sure and engagingly multilayered in the role) soon shakes off the stiff arm and strained speech and springs to his feet to continue the narrative as the ideal self perhaps only transcendental consciousness and theater allow. Nevertheless, Kaufman’s fun-loving and extroverted Alpert is no saint and no model of perfection, which is the refreshing truth explored in the play, but rather a seeker still, ever imperfect and ever trying for greater perfection or at least the wisdom of acceptance. As the privileged queer child of a wealthy Jewish lawyer and industrialist, Alpert was both insider and outsider from the get-go, and that tension and ambiguity makes for an interesting angle on his life as well as the complexities of his relationships with a homophobic Leary, for instance, and his conservative but ultimately loving father. Perfection aside, the beauty in the subject and the play is the subtle, shrewd cherishing of what remains unfinished. (Avila)

Black Watch Drill Court, Armory Community Center, 333 14th St, SF; www.act-sf.org. $100. Tue-Sat, 8pm (also Wed and Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2pm. Through June 16. American Conservatory Theater presents the National Theatre of Scotland’s internationally acclaimed performance about Scottish soldiers serving in Iraq.

Boomeraging: From LSD to OMG Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Tue, 8pm. Through May 28. Comedian Will Durst performs his brand-new solo show.

Dirty Dancing: Live! Dark Room, 2263 Mission, SF; dirtydancinglive-fbe.eventbrite.com. $20. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through May 25. Watermelons will be carried, lifts will be attempted, eyes will be hungry, and nobody better put Baby in a corner.

Foodies! The Musical Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter, SF; www.foodiesthemusical.com. $30-34. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Open-ended. AWAT Productions presents Morris Bobrow’s musical comedy revue all about food.

Last Love Mojo Theatre, 2940 16th St, SF; www.mojotheatre.com. $17-30. Thu/16-Sun/19, 8pm. Will the apocalypse save us from ourselves? Mojo Theater again raises that question as it presents the second installment in director-playwright Peter Papadopoulos’ Love-Gone-Wrong-at-the-End-of-the-World trilogy, the follow-up to last season’s fertile and funny Lost Love. The story centers on a George and Martha-esque couple, Charles (Jonathan Bender) and Lucida (Kimberly Lester), who on the eve of their fifth wedding anniversary declare all-out war, lobbing younger lovers at each other only to find their new partners (played by an increasingly endearing Michael Saenz and an unexpectedly powerful Gloria McDonald) have a past together and unresolved issues of their own. The grimly romantic comedy returns to, without greatly elaborating on, a familiar fantasy: blowing away the haze of our fractious, insecure, and muddled love lives in the clarifying immediacy of disaster. That this may be more than pure fantasy — that the seemingly discrete realms of personal and political trauma may be in some subtle and profound way connected — is an animating dimension of the trilogy, but here in a more superficial and perfunctory fashion than in Lost Love. The strength of the production lies less in its premise than in the penetrating humor and emotional veracity in Papadopoulos’ sure, heightened dialogue, which is played generally well by the cast and exceptionally so by a vibrantly intelligent Lester, Mojo’s co–artistic director. The staging also benefits, albeit inconsistently, from a stylized approach that revels in self-conscious artifice (including a trio of stage managers from “Command Center Communications,” a video-backdrop by Micah Stieglitz, and some light choreography by Lester). These strengths lend a restless, occasionally inspired production a slow-burning charm, but leave one wondering what might be left when all the dust settles. (Avila)

Little Me Eureka Theatre, 215 Jackson, SF; www.42ndstreetmoon.org. $25-75. Wed/15, 7pm; Thu/16-Fri/17, 8pm; Sat/18, 6pm; Sun/19, 3pm. 42nd Street Moon performs Neil Simon’s outrageous musical.

The Lost Folio: Shakespeare’s Musicals Un-Scripted Theater, 533 Sutter, Second Flr, SF; www.un-scripted.com. $10-20. Thu/16-Sat/18, 8pm. Un-Scripted Theater Company performs a fully-improvised, full-length musical inspired by Shakespeare.

The Merry Wives of Windsor Buriel Clay Theater, African American Art and Culture Complex, 762 Fulton, SF; www.african-americanshakes.org. $10-35. Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Through May 26. They might be two of the town’s most respectable matrons, but Mistresses Page (Safiya Fredericks) and Ford (Leontyne Mbele-Mbong), the titular Merry Wives of Windsor, at the African-American Shakespeare Company, are nobody’s fools. When the bawdy, ne’er-do-well Falstaff (a cross-dressing Beli Sullivan) tries to woo the two at the same time (as much for money as lust), they easily turn the tables on his plotting, and further dampen his ardor by having him tossed in a ditch. Their husbands, in particular the suspicious yet constantly flummoxed Master Ford (Armond Edward Dorsey), fare not much better against the wonder-twin powers of their BFF wives, and for anyone keeping score, the entire female population of Windsor generally makes out better than their slow-on-the-uptake menfolk, and they do it in style thanks to Linda Tucker’s astute, 50s-era costume design. Under Becky Kemper’s direction, the attitude skews sassy, and each character — from the befuddled town elite to the simplest servant — is a broadly-painted stroke of buffoonery, one part Desperate Housewives melodrama and one part Marx Brother’s farce. Kemper calls her rowdy take on this battle-of-the-sexes comedy “a guilty pleasure,” reminding us that however hallowed the name of Shakespeare might remain in posher circles, a good portion of his canon was written not for the austere glory of posterity, but for the base enjoyment of the general populace. (Gluckstern)

“PlayGround Festival of New Works” Various venues, SF and Berk; www.playground-sf.org. $15-40. Through May 26. The long-running short-play contest and development lab marks its 17th season with an evening showcasing the best of the previous year. The six plays come from six (familiar and new) playwrights out of a pool of 36 new short plays developed by PlayGround since October (and those were drawn from over 190 new original scripts created). The best of the best receives a rotating cast of strong Bay Area actors under six accomplished directors (including PlayGround founder Jim Kleinmann) but is a mixed affair, nevertheless. Katie May’s The Spherical Loneliness of Beverly Onion is a sometimes funny but generally tepid short story about a lonely mortician’s assistant (Carla Pantoja) who confronts her handlers, the natural forces of Fate (Jomar Tagatac) and Luck (Anne Darragh). Simple and Elegant, by Evelyn Jean Pine, is an ocean-side fairytale whose themes don’t sound too deeply, about the titular pair of sisters (Rebecca Pingree and Pantoja) who have a near-fatal falling out over a gold coin salvaged from the belly of a fish (Dao) who may be a handsome prince for one of them or just a nice hideaway bed. In Ruben Grijalva’s Value over Replacement, a major league player (Tagatac) confronts a career-jeopardizing accusation from a journalist-guest (Delzell) on his talk radio show in a somewhat prosaic but dramatically compact, carefully written and well-acted piece. Significant People, by Amy Sass, follows two docents (Darragh and Delzell) through the preserved home of two significant others who seem to be the same people. It’s a quirky conceit that doesn’t quite produce the necessary dramatic tension, the stakes feeling too low. In My Better Half, by Jonathan Spector, quirkiness goes full-bore as a wife (Pingree) with a justifiable complaint against her obliviously self-centered, what-me husband (Dao) looks to have him rubbed out by a reluctant hit man (Tagatac) and his couples-therapist colleague (Darragh). Finally, Symmetrical Smack-Down is William Bivins’ funny and nicely orchestrated foursome, in which the dynamic between two antagonists in the wrestling ring (Tagatac and Delzell) overlaps (literally and dramatically) with that between a long-term lesbian couple (Pingree and Pantoja) on the brink of a break-up and/or rumble. (Avila)

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

Steve Seabrook: Better Than You Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Thu/16, 8pm; Sat/18, 8:30pm. Self-awareness, self-actualization, self-aggrandizement — for these things we turn to the professionals: the self-empowerment coaches, the self-help authors and motivational speakers. What’s the good of having a “self” unless someone shows you how to use it? Writer-performer Kurt Bodden’s Steve Seabrook wants to sell you on a better you, but his “Better Than You” weekend seminar (and tie-in book series, assorted CDs, and other paraphernalia) belies a certain divided loyalty in its own self-flattering title. The bitter fruit of the personal growth industry may sound overly ripe for the picking, but Bodden’s deftly executed “seminar” and its behind-the-scenes reveals, directed by Mark Kenward, explore the terrain with panache, cool wit, and shrewd characterization. As both writer and performer, Bodden keeps his Steve Seabrook just this side of overly sensational or maudlin, a believable figure, finally, whose all-too-ordinary life ends up something of a modest model of its own. (Avila)

Talk Radio Actors Theatre of San Francisco, 855 Bush, SF; www.actorstheatresf.org. $26-38. Wed-Sat, 8pm. Through June 15. Actors Theatre of San Francisco performs Eric Bogosian’s breakthrough 1987 drama.

Tinsel Tarts in a Hot Coma: The Next Cockettes Musical Hypnodrome, 575 10th St, SF; www.thrillpeddlers.com. $30-35. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Extended through June 29. Thrillpeddlers and director Russell Blackwood continue their Theatre of the Ridiculous series with this 1971 musical from San Francisco’s famed glitter-bearded acid queens, the Cockettes, revamped with a slew of new musical material by original member Scrumbly Koldewyn, and a freshly re-minted book co-written by Koldewyn and “Sweet Pam” Tent — both of whom join the large rotating cast of Thrillpeddler favorites alongside a third original Cockette, Rumi Missabu (playing diner waitress Brenda Breakfast like a deliciously unhinged scramble of Lucille Ball and Bette Davis). This is Thrillpeddlers’ third Cockettes revival, a winning streak that started with Pearls Over Shanghai. While not quite as frisky or imaginative as the production of Pearls, it easily charms with its fine songs, nifty routines, exquisite costumes, steady flashes of wit, less consistent flashes of flesh, and de rigueur irreverence. The plot may not be very easy to follow, but then, except perhaps for the bubbly accounting of the notorious New York flop of the same show 42 years ago by Tent (as poisoned-pen gossip columnist Vedda Viper), it hardly matters. (Avila)

The Waiting Period Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $25-50. Fri/17, 8pm; Sat/18, 5pm. Brian Copeland (comedian, TV and radio personality, and creator-performer of the long-running solo play Not a Genuine Black Man) returns to the Marsh with a new solo, this one based on more recent and messier events` in Copeland’s life. The play concerns an episode of severe depression in which he considered suicide, going so far as to purchase a handgun — the title coming from the legally mandatory 10-day period between purchasing and picking up the weapon, which leaves time for reflections and circumstances that ultimately prevent Copeland from pulling the trigger. A grim subject, but Copeland (with co-developer and director David Ford) ensures there’s plenty of humor as well as frank sentiment along the way. The actor peoples the opening scene in the gun store with a comically if somewhat stereotypically rugged representative of the Second Amendment, for instance, as well as an equally familiar “doood” dude at the service counter. Afterward, we follow Copeland, a just barely coping dad, home to the house recently abandoned by his wife, and through the ordinary routines that become unbearable to the clinically depressed. Copeland also recreates interviews he’s made with other survivors of suicidal depression. Telling someone about such things is vital to preventing their worst outcomes, says Copeland, and telling his own story is meant to encourage others. It’s a worthy aim but only a fitfully engaging piece, since as drama it remains thin, standing at perhaps too respectful a distance from the convoluted torment and alienation at its center. Note: review from an earlier run of the same production. (Avila)

Vital Signs: The Pulse of an American Nurse Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Sun, 7pm. Through June 16. Registered nurse Alison Whittaker returns to the Marsh with her behind-the-scenes show about working in a hospital.

The World’s Funniest Bubble Show Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $8-50. Sun, 11am. Through July 21. Louis “The Amazing Bubble Man” Pearl returns after a month-long hiatus with his popular, kid-friendly bubble show.

BAY AREA

The Dead Girl Avant Garde, 1328 Fourth St, San Rafael; www.altertheater.org. $25. Wed/15, 7:30pm; Fri/17-Sat/18, 8pm; Sun/19, 3pm. AlterTheater performs 90-year-old playwright Ann Brebner’s new family drama.

A Killer Story Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Thu/16-Sat/18, 8pm (pre-show cabaret at 7:15pm). Dan Harder’s film noir-inspired detective tale premieres at the Marsh Berkeley.

Pericles, Prince of Tyre Berkeley Repertory Theatre, 2025 Addison, Berk; www.berkeleyrep.org. $29-77. Tue, Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat and May 23, 2pm; no show May 24); Wed and Sun, 7pm (also Sun, 2). Through May 26. Mark Wing-Davey directs Berkeley Rep’s take on the Bard.

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

ACT Master of Fine Arts Program performances ACT’s Hastings Studio Theater, 77 Geary, SF, and ACT’s Costume Shop Theater, 1117 Market, SF; www.act-sf.org. $30 (two shows for $40; three shows for $50). American Conservatory Theater’s acclaimed grad program presents Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9 (Wed/15 and Fri/17, 7:30pm; Sat/18, 2pm); Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo (Thu/16-Sat/18, 7:30pm); and August Wilson’s Seven Guitars (Thu/16 and Sat/18, 7:30pm; Sun/19, 2pm) in repertory.

Ananta Project Z Space, 450 Florida, SF; www.theanantaproject.org. Fri/17-Sat/18, 8pm. $20. The dance company presents its spring season performances, including two world premieres: The Hush Hush Chronicles and Kittleslip.

“Asia on Stage” SOMArts Cultural Center, 934 Brannan, SF; gapashow@yahoo.com. Sat/18, 7pm. $20. Performance program featuring LIKHA Pilipino Folk Ensemble’s Pilgrim, a dance theater work about gay Asian immigrants.

Sandra Bernhard Bimbo’s 365 Club, 1025 Columbus, SF; www.bimbos365club.com. Thu/16-Fri/17, 8pm. $45. The comedian performs her latest show, I Love Being Me, Don’t You?

Caroline Lugo and Carolé Acuña’s Ballet Flamenco Peña Pachamama, 1630 Powell, SF; www.carolinalugo.com. Sat/18, 6:15pm. $15-19. Flamenco performance by the mother-daughter dance company, featuring live musicians.

“Cirque de l’Arc” Arc San Francisco, 1500 Howard, SF; cirque2013.eventbrite.com. Thu/16, 6-9pm. $100. Help raise money for the Arc San Francisco, serving adults with developmental disabilities, at this circus-themed party featuring an all-star drag performance and the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus.

“The Fantasticks” Mission Dolores Academy Auditorium, 3371 16th St, SF; www.16thstreetplayers.org. Sat/18, 7:30pm; Sun/19, 3pm. Free. The 16th Street Players perform the classic musical.

“The Gospel of Mary Magdalene” Kanbar Hall, JCCSF, 3200 California, SF; www.jccsf.org. Sun/19, 7pm. $25. Live musical excerpts from a San Francisco Opera world premiere by Mark Adamo.

“Improvised Murder Mystery” Bayfront Theater, B350 Fort Mason Center, SF; www.improv.org. Sat/18 and May 25, 8pm. $20. BATS Improv performs one of its most popular shows.

“Kunst-Stoff Arts Fest 2013” Kunst-Stoff Arts, One Grove, SF; www.kunst-stoff.org. May 15-June 7. Most events $10-15. Morning classes, afternoon workshops, and evening performances are the focus of this festival of dance, film, music, and more.

Lenora Lee Koret Auditorium, de Young Museum, Golden Gate Park, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Dr, SF; www.deyoungmuseum.org. Fri/17, 7pm. Museum admission $6-10.The multi-disciplinary dance artist and de Young Artist fellow presents a live performance by composer Frances Wong (Miyoshi Sketches) and an excerpt from her own The Escape.

Liss Fain Dance Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF; www.lissfaindance.org. Thu/16-Sat/18, 8pm; Sun/19, 5pm. $15-30. The company presents an encore showing of The Water is Clear and Still, a performance installation that combines dance, music, and spoken text from stories by Jamaica Kincaid.

Ross Matthews Regency Ballroom, 1300 Van Ness, SF; www.theregencyballroom.com. Thu/16, 8pm. $32.50. The TV personality performs stand-up and celebrates the launch of his new book, Man Up! Tales of My Delusional Self-Confidence.

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

“Mutant Creatures and Unlikely Teachers: Short Plays by Short People” Brava Theater Center, 2781 24th St, SF; www.stagewright.org. Thu/16, 6:30pm, $10; and Fri/17, 7pm, $50 (fundraiser for StageWright program). StageWright presents plays by fifth graders at Starr King Elementary School, performed by professional actors and museums.

Red Hots Burlesque El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF; www.redhotsburlesque.com. Wed, 7:30-9pm. Ongoing. $5-10. Come for the burlesque show, stay for OMG! Karaoke starting at 8pm (no cover for karaoke).

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

Smuin Ballet Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF; www.smuinballet.org. Thu/16-Sat/18, 8pm (also Sat/18, 2pm); Sun/19, 2pm. $24-65. Also May 22-25, 8pm (also May 25, 2pm); May 26, 2pm. $52-68. Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro, Mtn View. Also May 31-June 1, 8pm (also June 1, 2pm). $54-70. Lesher Center for the Arts, 1601 Civic, Walnut Creek. The company presents the West Coast premiere of Helen Pickett’s Petal and Darrell Grand Moultrie’s JAZZIN’, among other works.

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

“Yerba Buena Gardens Festival” Yerba Buena Gardens, Mission between 3rd and 4th Sts, SF; www.ybgfestival.org. Through Oct 15. Free. This week: “Let’s Go Salsa@Jessie” with Anthony Blea y su Charanga (Thu/16, 6-7:30pm); Gamelan Sekar Jaya (Sat/18, 1-2pm).

BAY AREA

“Swearing in English: Tall Tales at Shotgun” Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; www.shotgunplayers.org. June 3 and 17, 8pm. $15. Shotgun Cabaret presents John Mercer in a series of three stranger-than-fiction dramatic readings.

Music listings

Andrew Lam
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Music listings are compiled by Emily Savage. Since club life is unpredictable, it’s a good idea to call ahead or check the venue’s website to confirm bookings and hours. Prices are listed when provided to us. Visit www.sfbg.com/venue-guide for venue information. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

WEDNESDAY 15

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Appleseed Cast, Hospital Ships, Dandelion War Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $14.

Caldecott, Super Water Sympathy, Emily Moldy Café Du Nord. 8:30pm, $8.

Alice Dimicele, Dave Mulligan, Jordan Feinstein, James Nash Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 9pm, free.

Lee Huff vs Todd Johnny Foley’s Dueling Pianos. 10pm, free.

Kevin Russel Band Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $15.

Mister Loveless, Teenage Sweater, Happy Fangs, Here Come Dots Elbo Room. 9pm, $10.

Terry Savastano Johnny Foley’s. 10pm, free.

Soul Train Revival with Ziek McCarter and the Revival Band Boom Boom Room. 8pm, $5.

Surplus 1980, Disonova, Aberrant Phase Hemlock Tavern. 8:30pm, $7.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Dink Dink Dink, Gaucho, Eric Garland’s Jazz Session Amnesia. 7pm, free.

Terry Disley Burritt Room, 417 Stockton, SF; www.burrittavern.com. 6-9pm, free.

Freddie Hughes Royal Cuckoo, 3203 Mission, SF; www.royalcuckoo.com. 7:30-10:30pm, free.

Redwood Tango Trio Rite Spot. 9pm.

William Parker Quartet Yoshi’s SF. 8pm, $25; 10pm, $16.

DANCE CLUBS

Timba Dance Party Bissip Baobab. 10pm, $5. Timba and salsa Cubana with DJ Walt Diggz.

Booty Call Q-Bar, 456 Castro, SF; www.bootycallwednesdays.com. 9pm. Juanita MORE! and Joshua J host this dance party.

Cash IV Gold Double Dutch, 3192 16th St, SF; www.thedoubledutch.com. 9pm, free.

Coo-Yah! Slate Bar, 2925 16th St, SF; www.slate-sf.com. 10pm, free. With Vinyl Ambassador, DJ Silverback, DJs Green B and Daneekah.

Hardcore Humpday Happy Hour RKRL, 52 Sixth St, SF; (415) 658-5506. 6pm, $3.

Martini Lounge John Colins, 138 Minna, SF; www.johncolins.com. 7pm. With DJ Mark Divita.

Stay Sick Monarch. 9pm, free. With DJ Omar.

THURSDAY 16

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Big Boi, Killer Mike, Fishawk, Goast Mezzanine. 8:30pm, $35.

Burnt Ones, Week of Wonders, Fronds, Jollapin Jasper Hemlock Tavern. 8:30pm, $7.

Delorean, Romans, DJ Aaron Axelsen Rickshaw Stop. 9pm, $16.

Egg, Sophie Barker Red Devil Lounge. 9pm, $15-$20.

Exhausted Pipes 50 Mason Social House, SF; www.50masonsocialhouse.com. 10pm, free.

Foxy Monarch. 9pm, free. With DJ Kizmiaz.

Groovy Judy Johnny Foley’s. 10pm, free.

J Boogie’s Dubtronic Science Boom Boom Room. 8pm, $7.

Chris James and the Showdowns, Pebble Theory, Voodoo Switch Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

Picture and the Frame, Exhausted Pipes, Peck the Town Crier 50 Mason Social House, SF; www.50masonsocialhouse.com. 10pm, free.

Religious Girls, San Francesca, Split Screens, Hoot Hoots Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 9pm,$10.

Shady Maples, Whiskerman, Cave Clove Café Du Nord. 8:30pm, $10.

SRV Tribute with Alan Iglesias Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $20.

Todd vs Lee Huff Johnny Foley’s Dueling Pianos. 10pm, free.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Bela Fleck SF Jazz Center, 201 Franklin, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 7:30pm, $20-$60.

Goapele Yoshi’s SF. 8pm, $35; 10pm, $30.

Nick Rossi Rite Spot. 9pm.

Chris Siebert Royal Cuckoo, 3203 Mission, SF; www.royalcuckoo.com. 7:30-10:30pm, free.

DANCE CLUBS

Afrolicious Elbo Room. 9:30pm, $8. DJs Pleasuremaker and Señor Oz spin Afrobeat, Tropicália, electro, samba, and funk.

All 80s Thursday Cat Club. 9pm, $6 (free before 9:30pm). The best of ’80s mainstream and underground.

Pa’lante! Bissip Baobab. 10pm, $5. Electro-cumbia, dancehall, and soca with DJs Juan G, El Kool Kyle, Mr. Lucky.

Ritual Temple. 10pm-3am, $5. Two rooms of dubstep, glitch, and trap music.

Tropicana Madrone Art Bar. 9pm, free. Salsa, cumbia, reggaeton, and more with DJs Don Bustamante, Apocolypto Sr. Saen, Santero, and Mr. E.

FRIDAY 17

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Black Angels, Hanni El Khatib, Wall of Death Fillmore. 9pm, $25.

Hello Monster, Audiodub, Culprit, Bulkhead Betty Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 8pm, $13.

Lee Huff, Jeff V, Todd Johnny Foley’s Dueling Pianos. 10pm, free.

Lee Vilenski Trio Rite Spot. 9pm.

Main Squeeze Boom Boom Room. 8pm, $10.

Midi Matilda, OONA, holychild Rickshaw Stop. 8:30pm, $10-$12.

MIRV, Kehoe Nation, Polkacide Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $17.

Mobb Deep DNA Lounge. 8pm, $20.

Ocean Blue, Orange Peels Café Du Nord. 7pm, $15.

Savoy: Live With Lasers, Lobounce Slim’s. 9pm, $16.

SRV Tribute with Alan Iglesias Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $20.

Sweet Chariot, Chelsea Crowell, Happy Family Singers Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $8.

Top Secret Band Johnny Foley’s. 10pm, free.

Claude Von Stroke, Justin Martin, Kill Frenzy, Leroy Peppers, J. Philip, Worthy Mezzanine. 9pm, $5-$20.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Audium 1616 Bush, SF; www.audium.org. 8:30pm, $20. Theater of sound-sculptured space.

Bela Fleck SF Jazz Center, 201 Franklin, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 7:30pm, $25-$65.

Goapele Yoshi’s SF. 8pm, $40; 10pm, $35.

Hammond Organ Soul Jazz Blues Party Royal Cuckoo, 3203 Mission, SF; www.royalcuckoo.com. 7:30-10:30pm, free.

Mike Reed’s People Places and Things, Darren Johnston Ensemble Center for New Music, 55 Taylor, SF; www.centerfornewmusic.com. 8pm, $10-$15.

Trance Mutations #3 Lab, 2948 16th St, SF; www.thelab.org. 9pm, $5. Soundscapes by Idaho Joe, Waxy Tombs, Black Thread, Business Etiquette.

Lee Vilenski Rite Spot. 9pm.

 

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Flamenco del Oro with Kina Mendez cante ya baile, Stephanie Narvaez baile, Glopal Slavonic Emerald Tablet, 80 Fresno, SF; www.flamencodeloro.com. 8pm, $10.

Shapes Redwood Grove at the SF Botanical Gardens, 1199 Ninth St, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. 6-8pm.

DANCE CLUBS

DJ What’s His Fuck Riptide Tavern. 9pm, free.

Hella Tight Amnesia. 10pm, $5.

Joe Lookout, 3600 16th St.,SF; www.lookoutsf.com. 9pm. Eight rotating DJs, shirt-off drink specials.

Old School JAMZ El Rio. 9pm. Fruit Stand DJs spinning old school funk, hip-hop, and R&B.

Paris to Dakar Little Baobab, 3388 19th St, SF; (415) 643-3558. 10pm, $5. Afro and world music with rotating DJs including Stepwise, Steve, Claude, Santero, and Elembe.

Smoke N’ Mirrors Monarch. 9:30pm, $10. With Wildkats, Shiny Objects, Sleight of Hands, Trev Campbell.

Thirsty Third Fridays Atmosphere, 447 Broadway, SF; www.a3atmosphere.com. 10pm, $10.

Queer Cumbia Bissip Baobab. 8pm, $3-$7. Musica tropical, cumbia, merengue with DJs Adan Atl, Rosa La Rumorosa, Jiggles and AlumiuX.

SATURDAY 18

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Bay Area Heat Johnny Foley’s. 10pm, free.

Bhi Bhiman, Meklit and Quinn SF Live Arts at Cyperian’s, 2097 Turk, SF; www.noevalleymusicseries.com. 8pm, $15.

Black Pus, CCR Headcleaner, Reptilian Shape Shifters Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $10.

Crackerjack Preacher Riptide Tavern. 9pm, free.

Disappears, LENZ, Tambo Rays Bottom of the Hill. 10pm, $12.

Foreverland: Michael Jackson tribute Slim’s. 9pm, $16.

Hibbity Dibbity Thee Parkside. 3pm, free.

Juanes Warfield. 8pm, $39.50-$100.

Laura Marling Chapel, 777 Valencia, SF; www.thechapelsf.com. 9pm, $25.

Mud City Manglers, Vans, Arabs, Spider Garage Thee Parkside. 9pm, $7.

Project Pimento Rite Spot. 9pm.

Robert Randolph and the Family Band Bimbo’s. 8pm, $75-$150. Blue Bear School of Music Benefit.

“R5 Loud Tour” with Brandon and Savannah, Taylor Matthews, Alex Aiona Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $18-$20.

Shahram Solati, Firoozeh, Sami Beigi Mezzanine. 9pm, $50.

Skerik’s Bandalabra feat. members of MCTuff Boom Boom Room. 8pm, $10.

Sonny Rhodes Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $20.

Todd, Lee Huff, Jeff V Johnny Foley’s Dueling Pianos. 10pm, free.

Y&T Fillmore. 9pm, $36.50.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Audium 1616 Bush, SF; www.audium.org. 8:30pm, $20. Theater of sound-sculptured space.

Bela Fleck SF Jazz Center, 201 Franklin, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 7:30pm, $30-$70.

Goapele Yoshi’s SF. 8pm, $40; 10pm, $40.

Project Pimento Rite Spot. 9pm.

Hammond Organ Soul Jazz Blues Party Royal Cuckoo, 3203 Mission, SF; www.royalcuckoo.com. 7:30-10:30pm, free.

Wear? Hear! Suitable Actions, Lost and Found, Exo-Skatch Center for New Music, 55 Taylor, SF; www.centerfornewmusic.com. 7:30pm, $10-$15.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Free Dive Red Poppy Art House. 8pm, $12-$15.

Gamelan Sekar Jaya Yerba Buena Gardens, Mission between Third and Fourth Streets, SF; www.ybgfestival.org. 1-2:30pm, free.

Go Van Gogh Revolution Café, 3248 22nd St, SF; (415) 642-0474. 9pm, free.

Trans Balkan Expressway Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 9pm, $10.

DANCE CLUBS

Bootie SF: Bay to Breakers Pre-Party DNA Lounge. 9pm, $10-$15.

Fringe Madrone Art Bar. 9pm, $5. Indie music video dance party with DJ Blondie K and subOctave.

Kinky Disko Underground SF, 424 Haight; www.kinkydisko.com. 10pm, $7. Vintage boogie.

Kiss the Sky Bissip Baobab. 9pm, $5. Afro-soul, house, and world with DJs Nina Sol and Emancipacion.

OK Hole Amnesia. 9pm, $5-$7.

Paris to Dakar Little Baobab, 3388 19th St, SF; (415) 643-3558. 10pm, $5. Afro and world music with rotating DJs.

Radio Franco Bissap, 3372 19th St, SF; (415) 826 9287. 6 p.m. Rock, Chanson Francaise, Blues. Senegalese food and live music.

Saturday Night Soul Party Elbo Room. 10pm, $5-$10.

Smiths Party Slate Bar, 2925 16th St, SF; www.slate-sf.com. 10pm, $5. Sounds of the Smiths, Morrissey, the Cure, and New Order.

Super Big Gay Dance Party El Rio. 3-8pm, $7. Benefit for 2013 Dyke March, with Hard French DJs, Mango, Stay Gold, and more.

Trapeze VI: Electro-Casba Monarch. 9pm, $10.

Uncanny Valley, DJ Sean Dimentia, hostess Lady Bear and her Dark Dolls Café Du Nord. 9:30pm, $7.

Wild Nights Kok BarSF, 1225 Folsom, SF; www.kokbarsf.com. 9pm, $3. With DJ Frank Wild.

SUNDAY 19

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Dillinger Escape Plan, Faceless, Royal Thunder, Rob Metal DNA Lounge. 8:30pm, $20.

Hans Eberbach Castagnola’s, 286 Jefferson, SF; www.castagnolas.com. 2pm, free.

Fabolous, Pusha T Mezzanine. 9pm, $27.50-$60.

Flobots, Wheelchair Sports Camp, All City Elite Café Du Nord. 7:30pm, $15.

Gothic Tropic, Seatraffic, Cruel Summer Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 9pm, $10.

Terry Savastano Johnny Foley’s. 10pm, free.

Tunnel, Ghostfoot, Gashcat Hemlock Tavern. 6pm, $6.

Yard Sale, Scott Young Rite Spot. 5pm.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Bela Fleck SF Jazz Center, 201 Franklin, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 7:30pm, $25-$65.

Goapele Yoshi’s SF. 7pm, $35; 9pm, $30.

Lavay Smith Royal Cuckoo, 3203 Mission, SF; www.royalcuckoo.com. 7:30-10:30pm, free.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Coburns Tupelo, 1337 Grant, SF; www.tupelosf.com. 4-7pm, free.

GoldDiggers, Moonshine Maybelline Thee Parkside. 4pm, free.

ZOFO’s Mosh Pit Red Poppy Art House. 4pm, $20.

DANCE CLUBS

Beats for Brunch Thee Parkside. 11am, free.

Crème Fraiche ft. Mrs. Blythe Monarch Lounge. 9pm, free.

Dub Mission Elbo Room. 10pm, $5-$10.

Jock Lookout, 3600 16th St, SF; www.lookoutsf.com. 3pm, $2.

Ms White, Vin Sol, Matrixxman, Robert Jeffrey Monarch. 9:30pm, $5.

MONDAY 20

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Jeremy Messersmith Café Du Nord. 7:30pm, $12.

Tyler the Creator, Earl Sweatshirt Regency Ballroom. 8pm, $30.

DANCE CLUBS

Crazy Mondays Beauty Bar, 2299 Mission, SF; www.thebeautybar.com. 10pm, free. Hip-hop and other stuff.

Death Guild DNA Lounge. 9:30pm, $3-$5. Gothic, industrial, and synthpop with Joe Radio, Decay, and Melting Girl.

M.O.M. Madrone Art Bar. 6pm, free. DJs Timoteo Gigante, Gordo Cabeza, and Chris Phlek playing all Motown every Monday.

Monarch Live Mondays Monarch. 8pm, free. With DJ Jules, Jacob, Alden, and live acts.

Soul Cafe John Colins Lounge, 138 Minna, SF; www.johncolins.com. 9pm. R&B, Hip-Hop, Neosoul, reggae, dancehall, and more with DJ Jerry Ross.

Vibes’N’Stuff El Amigo Bar, 3355 Mission, SF; (415) 852-0092. 10pm, free. Conscious jazz and hip-hop with DJs Luce Lucy, Vinnie Esparza, and more.

Tuesday.

TUESDAY 21

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Devendra Banhart, Rodrigo Amarante Regency Ballroom. 8pm, $30.

Boris, Bosse-de-Nage Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $18.

Butt Problems, D’Jelly Brains, Nanash 774 Riptide Tavern. 9:30pm, $6.

Joey Cape, Kevin Seconds, Russ Rankin, Mick Leonardi Thee Parkside. 8pm, $10.

Fpod BPod Amnesia. 9:30pm, $5-$7.

Level Vibes Monarch Lounge. 9pm, free. With Now Time DJs.

Nick Moss Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $20.

Noise Tour: Marianas Trench Powered by Journeys, Air Dubai, Good Natured Slim’s. 7:30pm, $18.

Ariel Pink Chapel, 777 Valencia, SF; www.thechapelsf.com. 9pm, $28-$32.

San Quinn, Repp Money, Tadaysha, Don Toriano, DaVinci Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 10pm, $10.

Sea Wolf, Savoir Adore Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $16.

3 Leafs, Resin Cum, Heroic Trio Hemlock Tavern. 8:30pm, $6.

Union Trade Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Terry Disley Burritt Room, 417 Stockton, SF; www.burrittavern.com. 6-9pm, free.

Drizoletto Rite Spot. 9pm.

Rova Saxophone Quartet Center for New Music, 55 Taylor, SF; www.centerfornewmusic.com. Noon, free.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Drizoletto Rite Spot. 8:30pm.

DANCE CLUBS

Brazilian Wax Elbo Room. 9pm, $7.

Soundpieces Monarch. 10pm, $5. With Bogl, Ryury, and more.

Alerts

Andrew Lam
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WEDNESDAY 15

Bike ride for fallen cyclists Justin Herman Plaza, SF. ramona.wheelright@gmail.com. tinyurl.com/bq623vg. 6:30pm, free. On the third Wednesday of May each year, the Ride of Silence is held in cities throughout the world to honor cyclists injured or killed while riding. The ride is also intended to advocate for safe streets for all users. The San Francisco 2013 contingent will visit nine locations, where ten bicyclists have been killed since 2001, to honor their memories.

THURSDAY 16

Sportswriter Dave Zirin in conversation with KALW’s Rose Aguilar Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, 2868 Mission, SF. tinyurl.com/cyujal2. 7pm, $10. The Center for Political Education (CPE) and Solespace present Rose Aguilar, the host of KALW’s “Your Call,” for a special on-stage discussion with noted author Dave Zirin, an author who writes regularly for The Nation and whose commentaries decode the political messages and messaging embedded in sports. Aguilar has hosted Your Call, a daily public affairs radio show on KALW, since 2006. This the only chance to catch Zirin in SF; he’ll appear a second time on May 17 in Oakland (visit link for details).

SATURDAY 18

Yogathon to raise awareness of HIV Madison Square Park, 849 Madison, Oakl. asianhealthservices.org/0518/ 8:30am-1pm, $10. Join Asian Health Services’ HIV/AIDS program for its Fourth Annual Strike a Pose! Yogathon, held in observance of National Asian and Pacific Islander (API) HIV Awareness Day. The event was created to raise awareness and resources for HIV/AIDS prevention within the Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) community in Alameda County.

Bay Area Debtors’ Assembly. Unite Here, Local 2, 209 Golden Gate, SF. strike-debt-bay-area.tumblr.com. (415) 568-6037. 2-5pm, free. Strike Debt Bay Area, a local chapter of an international movement formed to resist unjust debt, will host its second Debtors’ Assembly, with the goal of rethinking debt as a political platform for collective resistance and action. Come to the Assembly to learn about tools for escaping debt, sharing resources, skills and experiences, and brainstorming.

MONDAY 20

Eve Ensler reads from her memoir First Congregational Church, 2501 Harrison, Oakl. tinyurl.com/brcvovn. 7:30pm, $35 advance / $38 door. KPFA Radio, Code Pink and Pegasus Books present “Eve Ensler: In the Body of the World,” hosted by Erica Bridgeman. Internationally renowned playwright, activist and author Eve Ensler is the founder of V-Day, the global movement to end violence against women and girls. Ensler will discuss her memoir, In the Body of the World, taking readers through her personal history of sexual abuse, her travels to the Congo, her diagnosis with cervical cancer, and her reflections on the resilience of humanity.

TUESDAY 21

An Evening with Eduardo Galeano First Congregational Church of Oakland, 2501 Harrison, Oakl. tinyurl.com/bl8mb4z. 7:30-9:30pm, $15 advance. One of Latin America’s most distinguished writers, journalists and historians, Eduardo Galeano is the author of the Memory of Fire Trilogy, Open Veins of Latin America, Days and Nights of Love and War, and many other works. Born in Montevideo in 1940, Galeano lived in exile in Argentina and Spain for many years before returning to Uruguay. In his latest work, Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History, each page has an illuminating story that takes inspiration from that day of the calendar year. Hosted by KPFA Radio.

Psycho beach party

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Psycho beach party

emilysavage@sfbg.com

TOFU AND WHISKEY Why don’t more surfers listen to surf music? I found myself in one of those fuzzy-eyed, web-based black holes, frustrated, rhetorically asking the question through the endless prism of social media a few months back. And furthermore, why don’t surfer-musicians play authentic surf rock? While the sound was born in Southern California in the early 1960s, most of the early musicians who incorporated it weren’t active participants in the sport for which it was named, save for Dick Dale. The oft-repeated story is that Dale wanted to reflect the sounds he heard in his mind while surfing. And around that time, Santa Ana, Calif. based guitar-maker Fender even ran ads with beach babes and the tag “Fender makes music to surf by.”

But in the past few decades at least, the more prominent surfer-musicians seem to mostly vacillate between producing pop-punk, reggae, or more commonly, your ubiquitous, folky, banana pancake-loving Jack Johnson boredom block.

Tom Curren is in an elite class, a world champion surfer and son of legendary big-wave rider Pat Curren, he’s an athlete who took all his souped-up energy, and left his sport to pursue…folk rock. He released first album In Plain View in March.

During an ancient ritual in which I participated last week — that would be my honeymoon on Oahu — the bus drivers, tour leaders, cabbies, and general friendly tourist industry folks kept offering up slice-of-life songs for our listening pleasure. You like music? Well, get a load of this beach-ready sound. Cue soft rock (Hawaiian-born) Jack Johnson, or, the late Honolulu singer-ukulele musician Israel “Iz” Kamakawiwo’ole. We heard Iz’s “Somewhere Over The Rainbow/What A Wonderful World” medley no fewer than 15 times in seven days. I asked my husband, who grew up surfing on the Central Coast, what was up with the surfer/surf rock divide and he quietly responded, “I’ve never participated in surf culture, I have no idea.”

When I returned to work this week, I asked local surf musician Donald Bell of Aloha Screwdriver a similar question, and he shut it down more academically, “I can’t speak for surfers. I don’t surf. I grew up skateboarding. I don’t know a single one of our fans who surf. What’s funny is that our biggest fans live in the gloomiest climates. We have a bunch of fans in Seattle.” He added, “I think that Californians have a kind of cultural cringe when they hear surf music, because it’s the kind of thing that always gets played in the background whenever a California beach scene is shown on TV. It can feel cliché. But once you get outside of California, that baggage tends to disappear and you get treated like an exotic import.”

Bell got it though, what I was after. I wanted the explosive electric guitar of Dale and the Trashmen, the wet noodling power of ’90s revival acts like Phantom Surfers and Man Or Astro-Man?, or powerful throwback shock of Guantanamo Baywatch or Trashwomen (those last two, by the way, will play the Burger Boogaloo fest July 6-7 in Oakland). OK, so Hawaii wasn’t technically the place to find the thriving surf rock stuff; if I’m being fair, I knew the style I desired wasn’t based there. Plus, I didn’t exactly plow through underground punk shows while visiting, being buried deep in the sand and fruity alcohol-based beverages and all.

So maybe it doesn’t matter if professional surfer-musicians are out there playing the music of their cultural ancestors, there’s still an avid fan base.

A week earlier, the husband and I walked down the aisle to the Ventures, “Walk Don’t Run” (“Pipeline” was considered but ultimately dismissed). See, this was the music I grew up loving. The vroom-vroom-vroom of wild guitar riffs, heavy reverb, Eastern scales, rapid and escalating drumming peaking, crescendoing, wiping out. Proto-beach punk.

“People forget that before the Beatles hit, surf music was once pop music in this country. Right now, pop music is very focused on a synthetic sound, but everything comes back around,” Bell says.

And there will be a fix of the good stuff nearby this weekend, at radio station KFJC’s Battle of the Surf Bands benefit (Sat/18, noon, $10, all ages. The Surf Spot, 4627 Coast Hwy., Pacifica. www.kfjc.org). Bell’s Alameda-based trio will play the yearly event for the second time. And the 16-band battle also includes Beachkrieg, Deadbeats, Mighty Surf Lords, Tomorrowmen, Frankie and the Pool Boys, Meshugga Beach Party, and more surf acts with cheeky names. The event benefits the station itself, and also will be broadcast using Live Cam.

Given that it does often feel like a maligned art form, the abundance of traditional surf bands participating every year at KFJC’s event (now in its sixth year) seems surprising.

“There are probably more surf rock groups in the Bay Area than any other location in the world,” Bell says, naming off many that will play the battle, and beyond. “A lot of that has to do with the continued support of KFJC and DJs like Phil Dirt and Cousin Mary who really championed the genre…I formed my first surf band when I was 16, and Dirt brought us into the studio to play live on the air for 30 minutes. It was crazy to have that kind of outlet. It’s unheard of.”

Now in his early 30s, Bell has continued to play in surf bands with his musician friends from high school — drummer Steve Slater and bassist Grant Shellen. They grew up together in Fremont and that’s where they formed that first band: Chachi, Boba Fett and the Wookiee. Bell says he initially found the genre through the surf revival acts of the ’90s like the Phantom Surfers and Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, but then, once he was hooked, he tumbled backward toward the Ventures, Link Wray, the Shadows, and of course, Dale.

Aloha Screwdriver began in ’09, and the trio plays all instrumental music. “Sometimes it veers into rockabilly or like a Ennio Morricone spaghetti western vibe, or even like a Disney Haunted Mansion feel, but I’m always holding our songs up to this idea that they could carry a Tarantino-worthy action sequence.”

 

MYRON AND E

Listen to Myron and E’s single “If I Gave You My Love” and you’ll start to feel some involuntary movements, your head bouncing in agreement, shoulders shimmying side to side. It’s the nature of the solid gold soul beast. The duo was recently signed to tastemaker Stones Throw, and will release newest album Broadway, backed by Timmion Records house band the Soul Investigators, on the label July 2. With a handful of 45s already out there, the two — Bay Area bred Myron Glasper and Eric “E da Boss” Cooke — have successfully maneuvered an authentic soul sound that’s at once smooth and celebratory (with the help of some well-placed horns). The duo, which met on tour with Blackalicious, stops by Berkeley this weekend for the East Bay Soul Stomp 2. With Bang Girl Group Revue, New Love Soul Revue, DJ Derek See, DJ Der.

Sat/18, 8pm, $9–$12. Starry Plough, 3101 Shattuck, Berk.www.starryploughpub.com.

 

BLACK PUS

The first thing you need to know about Black Pus is that it’s just a looping Brian Chippendale — he of Lighting Bolt fame. For this project, the madman drummer (and forever art-school kid at heart) uses percussion, a triggered oscillator, and those echoing, distorted Lightning Bolt style vocals you’d expect. Most tracks sound like a spaceship lifting off and exploding into starry darkness, repeatedly. With CCR Headcleaner, Reptilian Shape Shifters.

Sat/18, 9:30, $10. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com.

 

Pick-up bball legends tell the tale of the game outside

Andrew Lam
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We’re talking about basketball, NYC pick-up announcer legend Bobbitio “Kool Bob Love” and I, but our conversation is hardly hinging on the Warriors-Spurs match-up or LeBron James’ shot at MVP this year. Rather, we’re discussing the power of the men and women ballers on the playground — a culture that Garcia and French filmmaker Kevin Couliau painstakingly documented for their film Doin’ it in the Park, which begins its Bay Area run at the Clay Theatre on Thu/16. 

“There wouldn’t be an NBA without pick-up basketball,” Garcia tells me in the voice made famous by his narration of countless pick-up tournaments, his pioneering ESPN feature on sneaker culture, and his turn as the New York Knicks’ first Latino broadcast team member. “Our culture and movement has informed every level of organized basketball. It’s informed even hip-hop fashion — all the iconic sneakers have taken their cues from pick up basketball.”

Pick-up powerhouse Niki Avery takes it to the boys in a shot from Doin’ it in the Park

Given the subject matter, the DIY style in which the duo shot Doin’ It was fitting. “I was sleeping on Bobbito’s couch,” while filming the movie, says Couliau, checking in via phone from France. The videographer grew up on the ball courts of his homeland, and learned about NYC’s thriving basketball scene — the metropolitan area is home to no less than 700 outside courts — through the Internet. Small wonder that the Frenchman eventually wound up in the Big Apple documenting the game in the gorgeously shot music video for rapper Red Cafe’s “Heart & Soul of New York City”.

Garcia caught wind of the short and proposed a feature-length project that turned into Doin’ it in the Park. To shoot the film, the duo traveled (“90 percent by bike,” says Bobbito) to 180 borough courts.

The film lands candid commentary that assesses playground ball going back decades from court legends like James “Fly” Williams, takes viewers to the court at the Rikers Island jail complex, investigates court-side style (be careful where you wear your NBA jersey, let’s just say), talks to women who’ve found their home under hoop like Niki “the Model” Avery, and documents game from all kinds of players.

Garcia says diversity in age, race, and social standing on court is a trademark of pick-up ball. To illustrate his point, he tells me about a game he ran in which his teammates were, “a Wall Street banker, a priest, and two homeless dudes. Where are you going to find that variety engaging in physical activity anywhere?”

Doin’ it in the Park, Garcia says, is one the most important projects he’s worked on — which is saying something. The man created Bounce Magazine, the first magazine devoted to the art of pick-up. He’s the voice on the NBA Street and NBA 2K videogames, written for Vibe, has turned guest roles in Summer of Sam and Above the Rim. His half-time commentary at Madison Square Garden for the Knicks was a crowd favorite. His hip-hop radio show with Stretch Armstrong in the early ’90s was called the best ever and gave airtime to an unsigned Notorious B.I.G. and Jay-Z. 

Garcia says that pick-up courts in New York dispell the notion that young people eschew sports for smart phones these days. If you’re gotten your fill for the day of Stephan Curry’s three-point percentage, one of this week’s Bay Area screenings of Doin’ It would be a fresh look at the streetside passion for b-ball. 

“It’s hard to say who are the [current pick-up] stars,” says Garcia. “If I go to Staten Island and destroy everybody, it’s not going to show up on ESPN. There’s a lot of great players, but most of them aren’t really known.”

Doin’ it in the Park Bay Area screenings

SF premiere and Q&A:

Thu/16, 8pm, $10-15

Clay Theatre

2261 Fillmore, SF

After-party:

Thu/16, 10pm-2am, free

Social Study

1795 Geary, SF

diitpmovie.eventbrite.com


Fri/17 screening and reception, 7pm; Sat/18, 3:30pm; Mon/20-May 22, 9:15pm; $8-10

New Parkway Theater

474 24th St., Oakl

www.thenewparkway.com

The Pulitzer Prize Board surrender – and how the New York Times blew the Ed Kennedy story (Part l)

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The Pulitzer Prize Board surrender – and how the New York Times blew the Ed Kennedy story (Part l)

In the May 19, 1945 edition of the New Yorker magazine, the legendary press critic A. J. Liebling wrote a prescient article on what happened when Edward Kennedy, an Associated Press combat correspondent, defied military censorship to break one of the century’s biggest and most important stories.

His lead said that “the great row over Edward Kennedy’s Associated Press story of the signing of the German surrender at Reims served to point up the truth that if you are smart enough you can kick yourself in the seat of the pants, grab yourself by the back of the collar and throw yourself out on the sidewalk. This is an axiom that I hope will be taught to future students of journalism as Liebling’s Law.” Liebling titled his piece, “The AP surrender,” because AP, caving in to government pressure, led the attack on its own reporter by publicly censuring and then firing him. He cited the New York Times as leading the charge with a nasty editorial blasting Kennedy only two days after it had splashed Kennedy’s story on the front page with huge heads. Kennedy, the editorial intoned solemnly, had done a “grave disservice to the newspaper profession.”

Liebling, a mid-1920s  student at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York City, was presumably aiming his axiom at his alma mater, which was in a building endowed by Joseph Pulitzer, a crusading liberal publisher in New York at the turn of the century.  Pulitzer also endowed the prestigious Pulitzer Prizes, which are housed in the school and administered by a senior member of the faculty.

I especially enjoyed Liebling’s Law as a Columbia journalism graduate (’58) and as a charter member of the committee working to get Kennedy a posthumous Pulitzer prize this year for his story. The axiom was timely because my wife Jean and I were at the journalism school in April to attend my 55th class reunion and the school’s centennial celebration. The event was full of Pulitzer references and remembrances, highlighted by an address by James McGrath Morris, a respected Pulitzer biographer, speaking in the World room, named after Pulitzer’s newspaper.

The day after the centennial weekend, the Pulitzer Prize Board announced its Pulitzers and rejected the two Kennedy nominations without comment. One nomination was for his story, the other for a previously unpublished book by Kennedy on his career as a WWII foreign correspondent. The rejections demonstrated a serious flaw in the Pulitzer Prize process.

The point of quoting Liebling today, in May of 2013, is that almost seven decades after his article, the Pulitzer Prize Board and the New York Times have once again left Kennedy out on the sidewalk for doing his job as a reporter who, in a favorite Pulitzer phrase, knew “the  right and had the courage to do it.” Since this is a historic story of military censorship for political reasons, it is as timely and relevant now as it was then, since the Pulitzer Board and the Times still do not get the point.

So let me put the issue in context. Let me start by quoting Liebling’s main arguments and link his full six page piece, written in the heat of the censorship battle.

Liebling, who was himself a distinguished World War II correspondent, wrote,  ”The important aspect of the story of the row, I am sure, is not that Kennedy got his dispatch out of Europe before the SHAEF Public Relations bosses wanted him to but that only three representatives of the American press were admitted to one of the memorable scenes in the history of man, and only on condition that they promise not to tell about it until the brigadier general in charge of public relations gave them permission.

“No correspondent of a newspaper published in the United States was invited to the signing; besides Kennedy, Boyd Lewis of United Press, and James Kilgallen, of Hearst’s International News Service, the official list included four radio men, an enlisted correspondent for the Stars and Stripes, and a collection of French, Russian, Australian, and Canadian correspondents.

“Whether a promise extorted as this one was, in an airplane several thousand feet up, has any moral force is a question for theologians…I suppose Kennedy should have refused to promise anything and thus made sure of missing an event that no newspaperman in the world would want to miss, but I can’t imagine any correspondent doing it.

“I do not think Kennedy imperiled the lives of any Allied soldiers by sending the story, as some of his critics   have charged. He probably saved a few, because by withholding the announcement of an armistice you prolong the shooting, and, conversely, by announcing it promptly you make the shooting stop. Moreover, the Germans had broadcast the news of the armistice several hours before Kennedy’s story appeared on the streets of New York, and Alsie, the OWI’s American Broadcasting Station in Europe, broadcast it in 24 languages, including English, within an hour after.”

Liebling noted that the Russians “had their own surrender show in Berlin, and probably had a better publicity break on it than they would have had if the two surrenders has been announced simultaneously… One unconditional surrender of the Reich a day is as much as the public can absorb.” 

Liebling brought out the crucial political censorship point. “Moreover, the row can do a lot of good if it brings into the clear the whole disturbing question of military censorship imposed for political, personal, or merely capricious reasons and reveals the history of the prodigious amount of pure poodle-faking that has gone under the name of Army Public Relations.” Liebling was right on because it later turned out that a secret agreement between Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill had imposed a 24 hour embargo on the surrender story so the Russians could announce it the next day in Berlin. Kennedy’s story was in effect the start of the Cold War.

Last year, almost 70 years later,  Tom Curley, as president and CEO of AP,  backed up Liebling’s Law and apologized publicly on behalf of  AP. for the way it treated Kennedy. “tt was a terrible day for AP,” he was quoted as saying on the AP wire.  “It was handled in the worst possible way,.” He wrote a strong  defense of Kennedy in an introduction to a book published last year by the Lousiana State University Press,  titled “Ed Kennedy’s War: V-E Day, Censorship & the Associated Press.” The book was a personal account by Kennedy of his career as a foreign correspondent and a detailed account of his side of the controversy. His daughter, Julia Kennedy Cochran, found Kennedy’s manuscript in his papers after he died in a pedestrian accident in Monterey in 1963 at age 58 where he was editing the Monterey Peninsula  Herald. 

Curley wrote that “Kennedy and his editors performed superbly. They delivered one of the most significant scoops in journalism history. They did four things right. A great correspondent was assigned to the story. He kept reporting even after the censors tried to shut him down. The London desk moved the news without hesitation. The correspondent and editors adhered to the wartime rules as they knew them.  Finally, Kennedy wins the argument on a technicality. With the signing of a surrender treaty, there was no longer a war in Europe and not any excuse to submit to censors.”

Curley said “the book matches the best memoirs by World War II combat reporters for the quality of writing and telling detail, some of it gripping.  And in one way it surpasses the others. Not only does Kennedy give his final, thoughtful explanation for what happened on May 7, 1945. In describing his struggles with censorship and bureaucratic red tape and stupidity over many months, not just on May 7, he provides the fullest first-person account we have of the difficulties World War II correspondents encountered every day trying to do their jobs.

“Perhaps in some small way we bring posthumous recognition to an American hero and embrace – too belatedly – what McClean and Cooper (B3: AP executives) and the AP board could not admit. Edward Kennedy was the embodiment of the highest aspirations of the Associated Press and American journalism.” Curley said his account drew upon newly available records held in the Associated Press Corporate Archives.

Curley’s co-author was John Maxwell Hamilton, founding dean of the Manship School of Mass Communications at LSU.  He is the editor of “From Our Correspondent,” a series of books that features forgotten works and unpublished memoirs by pioneering foreign correspondents and illuminates “the development of foreign news gathering at a time when it has never been more important.” Hamilton, once a foreign correspondent himself, is currently the executive vice chancellor and provost of LSU. The book was submitted by LSU Press for a Pulitzer in the book category but the board rejected the nomination and, in keeping with tradition, rejected it without comment.

Following V-E Day, Kennedy was out at AP and the big  mainstream dailies. He became a managing editor for two years at the Santa Barbara News-Press and then edited the Monterey County Herald, later the Monterey Peninsula Herald.   The Herald won lots of journalism awards under Kennedy and he wrote many international commentaries under the initials E.K. He loved his community and he loved his job. .A memorial to Kennedy stands in the form of a sundial in Laguna Grande Park in nearby Seaside. It reads: “He saved the world an extra day of happiness.”

Meanwhile, Ray March, editor of the Modoc (Calif.) Independent News  and a former reporter under Kennedy on the Herald, decided it was time to nominate Kennedy for a posthumous Pulitzer prize and help right a historic journalistic and public policy wrong. With the help of Eric Brazil, a former Examiner editor and reporter, he put together a committee and petition.  I signed up immediately when Brazil called me.  And I helped put together the first ever panel anywhere on the Kennedy story for last year’s annual meeting of the California Press Association. It featured as moderator Ward Bushee, the Chronicle editor whose father had been recruited by Kennedy to work on the Herald. (He turned down the offer.)  Ward’s father had earlier won a Pulitzer as editor of the Watsonville Register-Pajaronian for exposing corruption involving the local district attorney.

The historic panel included March, Kennedy’s daughter, and Dave Perlman, a Chronicle reporter at 93, who was in Paris as a reporter at the time of the surrender. Jim Ewert, general counsel of the California Newspaper Publishers Association, drafted  a stirring resolution supporting the nomination and the members approved it unanimously.  It was submitted as part of the nomination package, put together by the Chronicle’s promotion department. March, Brazil, and  Frank McCulloch, former bureau chief for Time magazine in Vietnam who later held top editorial positions at the LA Times, the Sacramento Bee, and the old San Francisco Chronicle, wrote the nomination letter. It stressed that Kennedy had been the victim of military censorship for political reasons.  Meanwhile, the nomination got much media coverage, including the Chronicle, Washington Post, Sacramento Bee, Atlantic Magazine, Portland Oregonian, Editor and Publisher, and many other print and online venues.

When the New York Times announced this year’s Pulitzers, the paper gushed that  it got four Pulitzers, giving it a total of 112 Pulitzers, ”far more than any other newspaper,” as trumpeted in full page promotion ads. Margaret Sullivan, the public editor, was even more glowing in her Sunday column (4/21/2013). Her lead:  “The Times, it is safe to say, had a very good week. On Monday, it won four Pulitzer prizes – “the third most in its history and twice a many as any other news organization this year.”  (She also quite properly gave credit to the Times for its coverage of the Boston bombings and in particular for staying on the safe side of the “Rubicon of inaccuracy” by not reporting that an arrest had been made and a suspect was in custody.) She concluded her appraisal by saying that “The Times is far from perfect.  But last week, in its intelligent and restrained handling both of images and facts, it looked like a newspaper worthy of this year’s Pulitzer glory.”

However,  I and many others weren’t as smitten by Pulitzer glory. We were disappointed to see that the Pulitzer Board  not only rejected a Pulitzer for Kennedy, but that it did so without reference or mention of the Kennedy nominations, made no special citation (such as the special citation to the late Chronicle columnist Herb Caen) and gave no reasons nor acknowledgment of any kind for the rejections or to the historic importance of righting a major  journalistic and public policy wrong on one of the most crucial issues of our time:  military censorship for political reasons of news the public needs to know. I couldn’t find any evidence that the Times ever changed its editorial opposition to Kennedy and that it ever properly covered Kennedy’s side of the story. And the Times, unlike AP and so many other papers, didn’t cover the current story of the nominations to award Kennedy a posthumous Pulitzer prize or the censorship issues, before or after the Pulitzer awards were announced. Will it do so now? I am sending this report to the public editor and other Times editors and public  for comment.

I emailed Sig Gissler, the former Milwaukee Journal editor who now administers the Pulitzers.as a journalism professor. I put the above points to him and asked why the committee “instead of coming down on the side of the free press that Pulitzer and his school and prizes represented, the committee in effect came down on the side of government censorship for political reasons and supported a politically charged embargo agreement that would allow Stalin to catch up on the surrender announcement and hold his own press conference in Berlin.” 

Specifically, I asked Gissler  “was there any discussion on the Kennedy nominations, was there a vote and what was it, who voted for and against, what were the reasons for the rejection, was there any real internal debate on the importance and timeliness of this issue, and anything else that you or the Columbia officials (Outgoing Dean Nicholas Lemann or incoming Dean Steve  Coll, President Lee Bollinger) or the committee chairs or member would like to add. Is there a spokeperson I can talk to?”  I also asked for the names and contact information of the full Pulitzer committee and subcommittees and the appropriate Columbia spokespeople.

Gissler is a good man in a tough job burdened with honoring a dated policy. He emailed me back promptly and thanked me for my “interesting note.”  He said that, “regarding Kennedy, your desire for an explanation is testimony to your earnestness. However, each year the Pulitzer process produces many similar situations. Entrants desire to know why they did not become finalists. Finalists desire to know why they didn’t become winners. Petitioners for special citations desire to know why no special citations were bestowed. The Board declines to provide explanatory details, consistent with its tradition of basically not discussing, debating or defending its decisions.

“I understand your disappointment. However, at the risk of eternal irritation, I can only reiterate that the request for a special citation for Ed Kennedy was duly considered and that we do not issue statements when a request does not result in a citation.” He didn’t send me the names or contact information of the board or Columbia spokespeople. 

To give Gissler every opportunity to explain, I emailed him again and asked more questions: “So, after all these years, are you saying that the Pulitzer Board has no way for anyone (entrants or journalists or the public) to comment on the awards or the contest or the process? If not, why not?” I also asked again how the Kennedy nominating committee and others could make comments this year, right now. I ended by saying there was now much interest in “making the Pulitzer process more transparent, representative, and accountable.” I hope you agree, I told Gissler, and that you “at least present the issue to the board and the proper Columbia officials.”  I got no further comment from Gissler.

The Pulitzer School of Journalism and the Pulitzer prizes are endowed by Joseph Pulitzer. The school has the venerable Columbia Journalism Review magazine with a mission to “encourage excellence in journalism in the service of a free society.” And it has the excellent  CJR.org website that “weighs in daily, hosting a conversation that is open to all who share a commitment to high journalistic standards in the U.S. and around the world” and that could, let me suggest,  display the Pulitzer winners properly and host a lively forum for congratulations and comment  on the Pulitzers and the Pulitzer process,  It has a large and distinguished faculty and hosts a wide array of newsworthy panels and programs. It attracts each year an excellent class of students. It has a huge statue of Thomas Jefferson, paid for by Pulitzer, standing as a beacon of press freedom in front of the entrance to the journalism building. It is situated in the media capital of the world and promotes itself as the best journalism school in the country and a source of many of the country’s best journalists. It can do better, much better, with the prizes that the New York Times proclaimed, in its full page ad promoting its four Pulitzers, as “widely considered journalism’s highest honor.” .

And so I recommend that Columbia, the Graduate School of Journalism, and its Pulitzer Prize Board use the rejected nominations of Edward Kennedy, the reporter who was tarred and feathered for the crime of committing journalism, as the catalyst for major Pulitzer reforms. I recommend making the Pulitzer process more transparent, more responsive, and more prepared in our militarized age to fight government censorship and more prepared to promote and defend the First Amendment values of free speech and free press.

I will keep you posted. B3

POSTSCRIPT:  THE RUSSIAN PLAN TO PREEMPT THE SURRENDER STORY:   Ed Kennedy writes in his book that in the turmoil over his dispatch the correspondents overlooked another story almost as big as the surrender story. It came from  “no less august an official spokesman”  than Brig. Gen. Frank A. Allen Jr., the SHAEF commanding officer,  who told the corresponents in a May 8 meeting that “the official announcement might be delayed even further beyond the time set for it–3 p.m., Paris time.  He revealed that the Russians, having induced Washington and London to hold up the announcement, until the hour set for their own ceremony in Berlin, now were asking that news of the real surrender at Reims be suppressed until some hours after the phony surrender of Berlin. HIs disclosure was ‘off the record’ at the moment but could have been legitimately been reported the following day. It never was. 

“The sole purpose of the Soviet request, it was later established–and even then was obvious–was to convince a large part of the world that the Russians had obtained the surrender of Germany, with but contributory help from the Western Allies, whom they had generously invited to share in the final honor.  The Berlin ceremony was staged purely for Soviet propaganda purposes. Although a Russian correspondent was one of those whom General Allen had invited to Reims to the exclusion of any reporter of an American newspaper, no word of the Reims surrender appeared in the Russian press. So far as I know, none has to this day.

“The Russian action was the inauguration of the propaganda build-up for the course of expansion on which the Soviet Union was shortly to embark in Europe. Its importance as news was that it was the first clue to Moscow’s postwar policy.  But it went unreported at that time.”

Bruce B, Brugmann, writing as editor at large of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, as editor and co-founder and co-publisher of the Guardian with his wife Jean Dibble (1966-2012, now  retired), as a graduate of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism (’58), as a recipient of  the Columbia Journalism School’s  Distinguished Alumnus award (2011), as a former bureau chief of the Korea Bureau of the Pacific edition of Stars and Stripes who encountered milItary censorship  (1959-60), and as a charter member of the Kennedy nominating committee. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stage listings

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

THEATER

OPENING

Black Watch Drill Court, Armory Community Center, 333 14th St, SF; www.act-sf.org. $100. Previews Thu/9-Sat/11, 8pm. Opens Sun/12, 7pm. Runs Tue-Sat, 8pm (Tue/14, show at 7pm; also Wed and Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2pm. Through June 16. American Conservatory Theater presents the National Theatre of Scotland’s internationally acclaimed performance about Scottish soldiers serving in Iraq.

Vital Signs: The Pulse of an American Nurse Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Opens Sun/12, 7pm. Runs Sun, 7pm. Through June 16. Registered nurse Alison Whittaker returns to the Marsh with her behind-the-scenes show about working in a hospital.

ONGOING

Acid Test: The Many Incarnations of Ram Dass Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm (Sat/11, show at 8pm). Through May 18. Playwright Lynne Kaufman invites you to take a trip with Richard Alpert, a.k.a. Ram Dass (Warren David Keith), as he recounts times high and low in this thoughtful, funny, and sometimes unexpected biographical rumination on the quest for truth and meaning in a seemingly random life by one of the big wigs of the psychedelic revolution and (with his classic book, Be Here Now) contemporary Eastern-looking spirituality. Directed by Joel Mullennix, the narrative begins with Ram Dass today, in his Hawaiian home and partly paralyzed from a stroke, but Keith (one of the Bay Area’s best stage actors, who is predictably sure and engagingly multilayered in the role) soon shakes off the stiff arm and strained speech and springs to his feet to continue the narrative as the ideal self perhaps only transcendental consciousness and theater allow. Nevertheless, Kaufman’s fun-loving and extroverted Alpert is no saint and no model of perfection, which is the refreshing truth explored in the play, but rather a seeker still, ever imperfect and ever trying for greater perfection or at least the wisdom of acceptance. As the privileged queer child of a wealthy Jewish lawyer and industrialist, Alpert was both insider and outsider from the get-go, and that tension and ambiguity makes for an interesting angle on his life as well as the complexities of his relationships with a homophobic Leary, for instance, and his conservative but ultimately loving father. Perfection aside, the beauty in the subject and the play is the subtle, shrewd cherishing of what remains unfinished. (Avila)

Boomeraging: From LSD to OMG Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Tue, 8pm. Through May 28. Comedian Will Durst performs his brand-new solo show.

Dirty Dancing: Live! Dark Room, 2263 Mission, SF; dirtydancinglive-fbe.eventbrite.com. $20. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through May 25. Watermelons will be carried, lifts will be attempted, eyes will be hungry, and nobody better put Baby in a corner.

Foodies! The Musical Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter, SF; www.foodiesthemusical.com. $30-34. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Open-ended. AWAT Productions presents Morris Bobrow’s musical comedy revue all about food.

Last Love Mojo Theatre, 2940 16th St, SF; www.mojotheatre.com. $17-30. Thu-Sun, 8pm. Through May 19. Will the apocalypse save us from ourselves? Mojo Theater again raises that question as it presents the second installment in director-playwright Peter Papadopoulos’ Love-Gone-Wrong-at-the-End-of-the-World trilogy, the follow-up to last season’s fertile and funny Lost Love. The story centers on a George and Martha-esque couple, Charles (Jonathan Bender) and Lucida (Kimberly Lester), who on the eve of their fifth wedding anniversary declare all-out war, lobbing younger lovers at each other only to find their new partners (played by an increasingly endearing Michael Saenz and an unexpectedly powerful Gloria McDonald) have a past together and unresolved issues of their own. The grimly romantic comedy returns to, without greatly elaborating on, a familiar fantasy: blowing away the haze of our fractious, insecure, and muddled love lives in the clarifying immediacy of disaster. That this may be more than pure fantasy — that the seemingly discrete realms of personal and political trauma may be in some subtle and profound way connected — is an animating dimension of the trilogy, but here in a more superficial and perfunctory fashion than in Lost Love. The strength of the production lies less in its premise than in the penetrating humor and emotional veracity in Papadopoulos’ sure, heightened dialogue, which is played generally well by the cast and exceptionally so by a vibrantly intelligent Lester, Mojo’s co–artistic director. The staging also benefits, albeit inconsistently, from a stylized approach that revels in self-conscious artifice (including a trio of stage managers from “Command Center Communications,” a video-backdrop by Micah Stieglitz, and some light choreography by Lester). These strengths lend a restless, occasionally inspired production a slow-burning charm, but leave one wondering what might be left when all the dust settles. (Avila)

Little Me Eureka Theatre, 215 Jackson, SF; www.42ndstreetmoon.org. $25-75. Wed, 7pm; Thu-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 6pm. Through May 19. 42nd Street Moon performs Neil Simon’s outrageous musical.

The Lost Folio: Shakespeare’s Musicals Un-Scripted Theater, 533 Sutter, Second Flr, SF; www.un-scripted.com. $10-20. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through May 18. Un-Scripted Theater Company performs a fully-improvised, full-length musical inspired by Shakespeare.

The Merry Wives of Windsor Buriel Clay Theater, African American Art and Culture Complex, 762 Fulton, SF; www.african-americanshakes.org. $10-35. Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Through May 26. African-American Shakespeare Company performs a twist on the Shakespeare classic, set in an urban neighborhood in the 1950s.

“PlayGround Festival of New Works” Various venues, SF and Berk; www.playground-sf.org. $15-40. Through May 26. The 17th fest presented by “San Francisco’s incubator for a new generation of playwrights” includes the PlayGround Film Festival, staged readings of four new full-length plays, a fully-produced program of six short plays, panel discussions, and more.

reasons to be pretty San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post, Second Flr, SF; www.sfplayhouse.org. $30-100. Wed/8-Thu/9, 7pm; Fri/10-Sat/11, 8pm (also Sat/11, 3pm). Completing a trilogy of plays about body awareness and self-image (along with The Shape of Things and Fat Pig), Neil LaBute’s reasons to be pretty begins with a misconstrued remark that quickly gathers enough weight and momentum to tear three sets of relationships apart in the span of a two-hour play. The SF Playhouse production begins with a bang, or rather an awesomely knock-down, blow-out breakup fight between a righteously pissed-off Steph (Lauren English) and her awkwardly passive boyfriend Greg (Craig Marker), who has inadvertently referred to her as “regular” in a conversation with his jerkish buddy Kent (Patrick Russell), which she takes to mean he finds her ugly. English’s Steph is at turns ferocious and fragile, and her comic timing as she eviscerates Greg’s looks in a mall food court zings, while the hyperkinetic Russell elevates the condition of noxiously irredeemable douchebag to an art form. But terrific acting and polished design can only make up so much for a script that feels not only flawed, barely scratching the surface of the whys and wherefores each character has internalized an unrealistic view of the importance of conventional beauty standards, but also already dated, with its circa-2008 pop culture references. Ultimately it gives the impression of being a rerun of a Lifetime television drama that wraps itself up into a too-neat package just in time for the final credits to roll to its admittedly kickass soundtrack (provided by Billie Cox). (Gluckstern)

Sam I Am: A Processional of Short Plays and Prose About Samuel Beckett Bindlestiff Studio, 185 Sixth St, SF; www.pustheatre.com. $10-20. Fri/10-Sat/11, 8pm. Performers Under Stress remounts and revamps its series of short plays and pieces by Samuel Beckett, this time staging it throughout the basement quarters of Bindlestiff Studio, where audiences are led around an economical maze of performance spaces. Opening weekend consisted of too much text and too little in way of staging ideas, especially with several spoken selections of Beckett prose (which have reportedly since been dropped from the program). The best of what remains (in a program of six short plays total) includes Valerie Fachman’s respectable performance as the disembodied “mouth” of the brilliant Not I; and James Udom and Geo Epsilany’s duet in Rough for Theatre I, in which a wheelchair-bound food-hoarder (a softly eccentric Epsilany) strikes up a doomed friendship with a blind beggar (a solid Udom) amid a colorless and barren landscape. The bucket of Beckett dreary gets less satisfying from there, though director Scott Baker’s wordless performance as the titular Joe in Eh Joe proves poised and the doubled voices in his head (by Melissa Clason and Allison Hunter Blackwell) both haunting and intriguing. (Avila)

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

Steve Seabrook: Better Than You Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Thu, 8pm; Sat, 8:30pm. Extended through May 18. Self-awareness, self-actualization, self-aggrandizement — for these things we turn to the professionals: the self-empowerment coaches, the self-help authors and motivational speakers. What’s the good of having a “self” unless someone shows you how to use it? Writer-performer Kurt Bodden’s Steve Seabrook wants to sell you on a better you, but his “Better Than You” weekend seminar (and tie-in book series, assorted CDs, and other paraphernalia) belies a certain divided loyalty in its own self-flattering title. The bitter fruit of the personal growth industry may sound overly ripe for the picking, but Bodden’s deftly executed “seminar” and its behind-the-scenes reveals, directed by Mark Kenward, explore the terrain with panache, cool wit, and shrewd characterization. As both writer and performer, Bodden keeps his Steve Seabrook just this side of overly sensational or maudlin, a believable figure, finally, whose all-too-ordinary life ends up something of a modest model of its own. (Avila)

Talk Radio Actors Theatre of San Francisco, 855 Bush, SF; www.actorstheatresf.org. $26-38. Wed-Sat, 8pm. Through June 15. Actors Theatre of San Francisco performs Eric Bogosian’s breakthrough 1987 drama.

Tinsel Tarts in a Hot Coma: The Next Cockettes Musical Hypnodrome, 575 10th St, SF; www.thrillpeddlers.com. $30-35. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through June 1. Thrillpeddlers and director Russell Blackwood continue their Theatre of the Ridiculous series with this 1971 musical from San Francisco’s famed glitter-bearded acid queens, the Cockettes, revamped with a slew of new musical material by original member Scrumbly Koldewyn, and a freshly re-minted book co-written by Koldewyn and “Sweet Pam” Tent — both of whom join the large rotating cast of Thrillpeddler favorites alongside a third original Cockette, Rumi Missabu (playing diner waitress Brenda Breakfast like a deliciously unhinged scramble of Lucille Ball and Bette Davis). This is Thrillpeddlers’ third Cockettes revival, a winning streak that started with Pearls Over Shanghai. While not quite as frisky or imaginative as the production of Pearls, it easily charms with its fine songs, nifty routines, exquisite costumes, steady flashes of wit, less consistent flashes of flesh, and de rigueur irreverence. The plot may not be very easy to follow, but then, except perhaps for the bubbly accounting of the notorious New York flop of the same show 42 years ago by Tent (as poisoned-pen gossip columnist Vedda Viper), it hardly matters. (Avila)

The Waiting Period Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $25-50. Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Through May 18. Brian Copeland (comedian, TV and radio personality, and creator-performer of the long-running solo play Not a Genuine Black Man) returns to the Marsh with a new solo, this one based on more recent and messier events` in Copeland’s life. The play concerns an episode of severe depression in which he considered suicide, going so far as to purchase a handgun — the title coming from the legally mandatory 10-day period between purchasing and picking up the weapon, which leaves time for reflections and circumstances that ultimately prevent Copeland from pulling the trigger. A grim subject, but Copeland (with co-developer and director David Ford) ensures there’s plenty of humor as well as frank sentiment along the way. The actor peoples the opening scene in the gun store with a comically if somewhat stereotypically rugged representative of the Second Amendment, for instance, as well as an equally familiar “doood” dude at the service counter. Afterward, we follow Copeland, a just barely coping dad, home to the house recently abandoned by his wife, and through the ordinary routines that become unbearable to the clinically depressed. Copeland also recreates interviews he’s made with other survivors of suicidal depression. Telling someone about such things is vital to preventing their worst outcomes, says Copeland, and telling his own story is meant to encourage others. It’s a worthy aim but only a fitfully engaging piece, since as drama it remains thin, standing at perhaps too respectful a distance from the convoluted torment and alienation at its center. Note: review from an earlier run of the same production. (Avila)

The World’s Funniest Bubble Show Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $8-50. Sun, 11am. Through July 21. Louis “The Amazing Bubble Man” Pearl returns after a month-long hiatus with his popular, kid-friendly bubble show.

BAY AREA

The Arsonists Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk; www.auroratheatre.org. $35-60. Wed/8-Sat/11, 8pm; Sun/12, 2 and 7pm. There’s a lot of humor to be found in Alistair Beaton’s crackling translation of Max Frisch’s The Arsonists, playing now at the Aurora Theatre, but much of the laughter it elicits is of the nervous variety, as the play’s mostly protagonist, the effete, bourgeois Herr Biedermann (Dan Hiatt) inadvertently signs off on his own destruction when he invites an uncouth arsonist to come and stay in his attic (Michael Ray Wisely). “If we assume everyone is an arsonist, where does that get us?” becomes his standard deflection, as one arsonist becomes two (adding in the unctuous, nihilistic Tim Kniffin), and the empty attic a repository for giant drums of gasoline, a detonator, and fuse wire — arousing the suspicions of a chorus of firefighters (Kevin Clarke, Tristan Cunningham, Michael Uy Kelly), who act as the conscience and guardians of the township. Although on the surface the scenario is patently absurd, the message that passivity in the face of evil is like helping to measure out the fuse wire that will eventually claim your life, is relatively clear. “Not every fire is determined by fate,” point out the firefighters right in the first act. Hiatt, as Biedermann, strikes an admirable balance between loathsome and powerless, while Gwen Loeb shines as his socialite wife, Babette, as does Dina Percia as his agitated housemaid, Anna. (Gluckstern)

The Dead Girl Avant Garde, 1328 Fourth St, San Rafael; www.altertheater.org. $25. Wed, 7:30pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Through May 19. AlterTheater performs 90-year-old playwright Ann Brebner’s new family drama.

A Killer Story Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Thu-Sat, 8pm (pre-show cabaret at 7:15pm). Through May 18. Dan Harder’s film noir-inspired detective tale premieres at the Marsh Berkeley.

Pericles, Prince of Tyre Berkeley Repertory Theatre, 2025 Addison, Berk; www.berkeleyrep.org. $29-77. Tue, Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat and May 23, 2pm; no show May 24); Wed and Sun, 7pm (also Sun, 2). Through May 26. Mark Wing-Davey directs Berkeley Rep’s take on the Bard.

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

“Bailout! Or can you picture this prophecy? The temperatures are too hot for me.” Dance Mission Theater, 3316 24th St, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Fri/10-Sun/12, 8pm. Pay what you can. Navarrete x Kajiyama Dance Theater perform a site-specific multidisciplinary performance inspired by environmental disasters.

“Bitch and Tell: A Real, Funny Show” Garage, 715 Bryant, SF; www.ftloose.org. Sat/11, 8pm. $8-10. Comedy with Tracy Shapiro, Carolé Acuña, Allison Mick, and more.

“Bob’s Burgers Live!” Nob Hill Masonic Auditorium, 1111 California, SF; http://bit.ly/bobssanfrancisco. Sat/11, 8pm. $32.50. The cast of the animated series performs.

“Bound for Glory” Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. Fri/10, 7:30pm; Sat/11, 2pm. $8-50. Marsh Youth Theater’s MainStage Performance Ensemble presents a musical (written by the ensemble with director Lisa Quoresimo) about a Dust Bowl-era family.

Caroline Lugo and Carolé Acuña’s Ballet Flamenco Peña Pachamama, 1630 Powell, SF; www.carolinalugo.com. Sun/12, 3 and 6:15pm. $29.95-49.95 (includes meal). Flamenco performance by the mother-daughter dance company, featuring live musicians.

“Comedy Returns to El Rio” El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF; www.elriosf.com. Mon/13, 8pm. $7-20. Fourth anniversary show with Frankie Quiñones, Dan St. Paul, Aundre the Wonderwoman, and more.

“The Fantasticks” Mission Dolores Academy Auditorium, 3371 16th St, SF; www.16thstreetplayers.org. Fri/10 and Sat, 7:30pm (also Sat/11, 3pm); Sun, 3pm. Through May 19. Free. The 16th Street Players perform the classic musical.

“I Am a Lie that Always Tells the Truth” Garage, 715 Bryant, SF; www.kingdomofnot.com. Fri/10, 8pm. $10-20. The Kingdom of Not (Dan Carbone and Andrew Goldfarb) perform “music, monologues, and emergency dispatches.”

“ImmigraNation” Punchline Comedy Club, 444 Battery, SF; www.punchlinecomedyclub.com. Tue/14, 8pm. $15. Comedy about the immigrant experience with Dhaya Lakshminarayanan, Samson Koletkar, and more.

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

“Mortified” DNA Lounge, 373 11th St, SF; www.getmortified.com. Fri/10, 7:30pm. $21. Also Sat/11, 7:30pm, $20. Uptown, 1928 Telegraph, Oakl. The storytelling series, which specializes in all things embarassing, ups the ante with a Mother’s Day theme this month.

“Mutant Creatures and Unlikely Teachers: Short Plays by Short People” Koret Auditorium, De Young Museum, Golden Gate Park, SF; www.stagewright.org. Tue/14, 11am. Free (advance reservations required). Also May 16, 6:30pm ($10) and May 17, 7pm ($50; fundraiser for StageWright program), Brava Theater Center, 2781 24th St, SF; www.stagewright.org. StageWright presents plays by fifth graders at Starr King Elementary School, performed by professional actors and museums.

“Once in Love with Loesser” Eureka Theatre, 215 Jackson, SF; www.42ndstreetmoon.org. Mon/13-Tue/14, 7pm. $45-70. 42nd Street Moon presents Tony nominee Emily Skinner performing songs by Frank Loesser.

Red Hots Burlesque El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF; www.redhotsburlesque.com. Wed, 7:30-9pm. Ongoing. $5-10. Come for the burlesque show, stay for OMG! Karaoke starting at 8pm (no cover for karaoke).

San Francisco Ballet War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness, SF; www.sfballet.org. Wed/8, 7:30pm; Thu/9-Sat/11, 8pm (also Sat/11, 2pm); Sun/12, 2pm. $45-250. Performing the US premiere of Christopher Wheeldon’s Cinderella.

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

Smuin Ballet Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF; www.smuinballet.org. Fri-Sat and May 16, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2pm. Through May 19. $24-65. Also May 22-25, 8pm (also May 25, 2pm); May 26, 2pm. $52-68. Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro, Mtn View. Also May 31-June 1, 8pm (also June 1, 2pm). $54-70. Lesher Center for the Arts, 1601 Civic, Walnut Creek. The company presents the West Coast premiere of Helen Pickett’s Petal and Darrell Grand Moultrie’s JAZZIN’, among other works.

“A Spaghetti Western” Stage Werx Theatre, 446 Valencia, SF; www.clownsnotbombs.com. Fri/10-Sat/11, 8pm (also Sat/11, 2pm). $15-20. ClownSnotBombs performs a circus adventure about pasta and the Wild West.

“Stretchmarks” Creativity Theater, Children’s Creativity Museum, 221 Fourth St, SF; www.themommadrama.com. Fri/10-Sat/11, 8pm. $25. The Momma Drama presents this play as part of a mom-centric event on Mother’s Day.

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

“Yerba Buena Gardens Festival” Yerba Buena Gardens, Mission between 3rd and 4th Sts, SF; www.ybgfestival.org. Through Oct 15. Free. This week: “Asian Improv aRts: 25th Anniversary: Traditions in Transformation,” Sat/11, 1-3pm; “Taiwan in the Gardens,” Sun/12, 1-2:30pm.

BAY AREA

Company C Contemporary Ballet Lesher Center for the Arts, 1601 Civic, Walnut Creek; www.lesherartscenter.org. Thu/9-Sat/11, 8pm; Sun/12, 1pm. $23-45. The company’s spring program features Natoma, a world premiere by Company C dancer David von Ligon.

Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg Zellerbach Hall, Bancroft at Telegraph, UC Berkeley, Berk; www.calperformances.org. Fri/10-Sat/11, 8pm; Sun/12, 3pm. $30-92. The company performs the Bay Area premiere of its latest ballet, Rodin.

“A History of the Body” Oakland Asian Cultural Center, 388 Ninth St, #290, Oakl; historyofbody.eventbrite.com. Sat/11, 7:30pm. $15-25. Work-in-progress performance of Aimee Suzara’s new play.

Oakland Ballet Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts, 1428 Alice, Oakl; www.oaklandballet.org. Fri/10-Sat/11, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm). $20-35. The company performs its spring season program, “Diaghilev Imagery.”

“The Shout: Life’s True Stories” Grand Lake Coffee House, 440 Grand, Oakl; www.theshoutstorytelling.com. Mon/13, 7:30pm. $5-20. Ten-minute tales from a variety of storytellers.

“Swearing in English: Tall Tales at Shotgun” Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; www.shotgunplayers.org. June 3 and 17, 8pm. $15. Shotgun Cabaret presents John Mercer in a series of three stranger-than-fiction dramatic readings.

Music listings

Andrew Lam
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0

Since club life is unpredictable, it’s a good idea to call ahead or check the venue’s website to confirm bookings and hours. Prices are listed when provided to us. Visit www.sfbg.com/venue-guide for venue information. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

WEDNESDAY 8

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Andy Cabic and Eric D. Johnson Band, Neal Casal, Bart Davenport Chapel. 9pm, $17.

Michael Barrett Johnny Foley’s Irish House. 10pm, free.

Born Ruffians, Moon Kings Slim’s. 8pm, $17.

Great American Cities, Kallisto, DJ Creepy B Elbo Room. 9pm, $8.

"Johnny Foley’s Dueling Pianos" Johnny Foley’s Irish House. 9pm. With Michael C. vs. Rags Tuttle.

Laura Stevenson Band, Field Mouse, Haunted Summer Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $12.

Low Magic, Yellow Dress, Jaberi and Deutsch Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $10.

Tom Odell, Cillie Barnes Café Du Nord. 9:30pm, $15.

Joshua Radin, My Name is You Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $41.

Teddy Riley and Blackstreet featuring Dave Hollister Yoshi’s San Francisco. 10pm, $39.

Two-Tone Steiny and the Cadillacs Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $15.

Kurt Vile, Steve Gunn Independent. 8pm, $20.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Dink Dink Dink, Gaucho, Eric Garland’s Jazz Session Amnesia. 7pm, free.

Hammond organ soul jazz blues party with Big Bones Royal Cuckoo, 3203 Mission, SF; www.royalcuckoo.com. 7:30-10:30pm, free.

Edward Schocker Meridian Gallery, 535 Powell, SF; www.meridiangallery.org. 7:30pm, $8-10.

Sophisticated Ladies Rite Spot Café, 2099 Folsom, SF; www.ritespotcafe.net. 9pm, free.

Terry Disley’s Rocking Jazz Trio Burritt Room, 417 Stockton, SF; www.mystichotel.com. 6-9pm, free.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Daniel Seidel Plough and Stars. 9pm.

Curt Yagi and the People Standing Behind Me, Katie Garibaldi, Salet, Lauren Sturm Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 8pm, $8.

DANCE CLUBS

Debut DNA Lounge. 8pm, $5 suggested donation. SFEIC students showcase their work in a hair and make-up show, with DJ C-Lektra.

Timba Dance Party Bissip Baobab. 10pm, $5. Timba and salsa Cubana with DJ Walt Diggz.

THURSDAY 9

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Allah-Las, Blank Tapes Chapel. 9pm, $17.

Chrysta Bell, Emily Jane White Bimbo’s 365 Club. 8pm, $20.

Brasil Couches, Old & Gray Amnesia. 9pm.

Cloud Cult, JBM Independent. 8pm, $17.

Paula Cole Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8pm, $32.

"An Evening with Chris Thile and Michael Daves" Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $19.

French Cassettes, Ash Reiter, yOya, Annie Girl and the Flight Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

Glitter Wizard, Carlton Melton, Joy Hemlock Tavern. 8:30pm, $8.

Gunshy Johnny Foley’s Irish House. 10pm, free.

"Johnny Foley’s Dueling Pianos" Johnny Foley’s Irish House. 9pm. With Nathan Temby vs. Michael C.

Machine Gun Kelly Regency Ballroom. 8pm, $28.

Rolando Morales Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $16.

Picture Atlantic, Little Daylight, Finish Ticket Rickshaw Stop. 9:30pm, $10. Plus Popscene DJs.

Spanish Moss, Feeding People, Holy Wave, Mr. Elevator and the Brain Hotel Thee Parkside. 9pm, $5.

That1Guy, Captain Ahab’s Motorcycle Club Café Du Nord. 9pm, $15.

Zodiac Death Valley, Leopold and His Fiction, Sporting Life, Rusty Maples, DJ Neil Martinson Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 9pm, $10.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Hammond organ soul jazz blues party with Chris Siebert Royal Cuckoo, 3203 Mission, SF; www.royalcuckoo.com. 7:30-10:30pm, free.

Tin Cup Serenade Rite Spot Café, 2099 Folsom, SF; www.ritespotcafe.net. 9pm, free.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Haesemeyer Lost Church, 65 Capp, SF; www.thelostchurch.com. 8pm, $15.

Tipsy House Plough and Stars. 9pm.

DANCE CLUBS

Afrolicious Elbo Room. 9:30pm, $8-15. Six-year anniversary celebration with hosts Pleasuremaker and Señor Oz, plus the Afrolicious 12-piece band, DJ Smash, J Boogie, and Captain Planet.

DAMSF DNA Lounge. 10:30pm, $10-20. Hip-hop performance showcase.

DJ Kaos, Mozhgan, Jason Greer Monarch, 101 Sixth St, SF; monarchsf.ticketfly.com. 10pm, $10.

8bitSF DNA Lounge. 9pm, $11. Chiptunes with DJ Cutman, A_Rival, E.N. Cowell, and more.

Pa’lante! Bissip Baobab. 10pm, $5. Electro-cumbia, dancehall, and soca with DJs Juan G., El Kool Kyle, and Mr. Lucky.

FRIDAY 10

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Acid Mothers Temple and the Melting Paraiso UFO, Tjutjuna, 3 Leafs Bottom of the Hill. 10pm, $12.

B.A.P. (Best.Absolute.Perfect.) Warfield. 7:30pm, $40-100.

Body and Soul Johnny Foley’s Irish House. 10pm, free.

Chris Duarte Group Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $20.

Dead Winter Carpenters, Cody Canada and the Departed Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $16.

Justin Townes Earle Chapel. 9pm, $20-25.

Greyboy Allstars Independent. 9pm, $25.

"Johnny Foley’s Dueling Pianos" Johnny Foley’s Irish House. 9pm. With Greg Zema, Nathan Temby, and Michael C.

Pokey LaFarge, West Coast Ramblers Rickshaw Stop. 9pm, $13-15.

Of Montreal, Wild Moccasins Slim’s. 9pm, $21.

Paul Collins Beat, Courtney and the Crushers, the Cry Thee Parkside. 9pm, $10.

Lydia Pense and Cold Blood featuring Rick Stevens Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8 and 10pm, $19-26.

Secret Chiefs 3 Café Du Nord. 9:30pm, $20.

Technicolors, Fictionist DNA Lounge. 8pm, $12.

Thrive!, Dewey and the Peoples, Sono Vero, Da Mainland Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 9pm, $15.

Tomihara, Fox and the Law, Tokyo Raid Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $8.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Audium 1616 Bush, SF; www.audium.org. 8:30pm, $20. Theater of sound-sculptured space.

Mike Burns Rite Spot Café, 2099 Folsom, SF; www.ritespotcafe.net. 9pm, free.

Regina Carter, John Blake, Jr. SFJAZZ, 201 Franklin, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 7:30pm, $20-40.

Hammond organ soul jazz blues party Royal Cuckoo, 3203 Mission, SF; www.royalcuckoo.com. 7:30-10:30pm, free.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Big Lion, Rich McCulley Plough and Stars. 9pm.

Underskore Orchestra, Sour Mash Hug Band Amnesia. 9pm, $5.

DANCE CLUBS

Afrolicious Elbo Room. 9:30pm, $8-15. Six-year anniversary celebration with hosts Pleasuremaker and Señor Oz, plus the Afrolicious 12-piece band and DJ Smash.

DJ What’s His Fuck Pop’s Bar, 2800 24th St, SF; (415) 401-7677. 9pm, free. Old-school punk and metal.

Indie Slash Amnesia. 10pm. With DJ Danny White.

Kitsune Club Night Mezzanine. 9pm, $17. With Fred Falke, Chrome Sparks, and Beni.

Makossa West Bissip Baobab. 10pm, $5. Classic salsa, funk, Afrobeat, reggae, and more with DJs Wonway Posibul and Joe Quixx.

That 90s Dance Party DNA Lounge. 10pm, $7-9. With DJs Devon, Netik, Sage, Starr, and Myster C.

TBMA, Syd Gris, DJ Icon, Ultraviolet Monarch, 101 Sixth St, SF; monarchsf.ticketfly.com. 10pm, $10.

SATURDAY 11

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Big Blu Soul Revue Grant and Green. 9pm, free.

Blame Sally, Lia Rose Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $26-31.

Jay Brannan, Rin Tin Tiger, Plastic Arts Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $14.

Bright Grey Wing, Rebecca Pronsky, Eight Belles Amnesia. 6:30pm, $7.

Fonseca Regency Ballroom. 8pm, $38.

Greyboy Allstars Independent. 9pm, $25.

Hanalei, Divided Heaven, Rob Carter, Keeley Valentino Thee Parkside. 3pm, free.

"Johnny Foley’s Dueling Pianos" Johnny Foley’s Irish House. 9pm. With Michael C., Greg Zema, and Nathan Temby.

K’Jon Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8 and 10pm, $24-28.

Kids on a Crime Spree, Number One Smash Hits, Manatee Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $7.

Man or Astro-Man?, Terry Malts, Ogres Bimbo’s 365 Club. 9pm, $18.

Meat Sluts, Thee Merry Widows, Dirty Shakers Bender’s, 800 S. Van Ness, SF; www.bendersbar.com. 10pm, $5.

Kate Nash Chapel. 9pm, $18-20.

Rose Windows, Extra Classic, Zig Zags Thee Parkside. 9pm, $8.

Rustangs Riptide. 9:30pm, free.

Secret Chiefs 3 Café Du Nord. 9:30pm, $20.

"Slim’s Goes British: Revue #3" Slim’s. 8:30pm, $15. With RaveUps, Blondies, Haunted by Heroes, and Whitecliff Rangers with special guest Girl Named T. 8:30pm, $15.

Lavay Smith and Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $20.

2 Men Will Move You Amnesia. 9pm.

Wild Rumpus Salle Pianos, 1632 C Market, SF; www.wildrumpusmusic.org. 8pm, $15-25.

Wolf + Lamb, Soul Clap, Pillowtalk, Nick Monaco Mezzanine. 9pm, $10-20.

X-Static Johnny Foley’s Irish House. 10pm, free.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Audium 1616 Bush, SF; www.audium.org. 8:30pm, $20. Theater of sound-sculptured space.

Regina Carter SFJAZZ, 201 Franklin, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 11am (family matinee), $5-15, and 7:30pm, $25-60.

Cottontails Rite Spot Café, 2099 Folsom, SF; www.ritespotcafe.net. 9pm, free.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Flux Pavilion, Cookie Monsta, Funtcase, Brown and Gammon, Roksonix Warfield. 9pm, $42.

Fogo Na Roupa, DJs Ras Rican, Sake One, and Epic, live percusion by Quique Padilla Bissip Baobab. 10pm, $5. Fundraiser for Mission Girls Violence Prevention Program.

Lovebirds Plough and Stars. 9pm.

Mision Flamenca Bissip Baobab. 7:30pm, $15.

DANCE CLUBS

Bootie SF DNA Lounge. 9pm, $10-15. Mash-ups with A Plus D and others.

Cockblock Rickshaw Stop. 10pm, $10. Queer dance party with DJs Nuxx and Zax.

Dark Days Eagle. 3-6pm. Lady Bear and her Dark Dolls host this beer bust (tickets benefit the AIDS Emergency Fund) with beats from DJ Le Perv and guests.

Tormenta Tropical Elbo Room. 10pm, $5-10. With resident DJs Shawn Reynaldo and Oro11, and guest DJ Quality.

SUNDAY 12

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Karina Denike and friends Rite Spot Café, 2099 Folsom, SF; www.ritespotcafe.net. 8:30pm, free.

Hydrophonic, My Victim, Bad Bones Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

Jamaican Queens, Maus Haus, Black Jeans Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 9pm, $7.

Merchants of Moonshine, DJ Quarterman Jack Champion Thee Parkside. 4pm, free.

Buddy Miller and Jim Lauderdale, Max Gomez Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $23.

Dave Moreno and friends Johnny Foley’s Irish House. 10pm, free.

Rotten Sound, Early Graves, Hellbeard, Aurgurs, Parasitic Explosion DNA Lounge. 7:30pm, $16.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Regina Carter and Carolina Chocolate Drops SFJAZZ, 201 Franklin, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 3 and 7pm, $25-50.

Hammond organ soul jazz blues party with Lavay Smith Royal Cuckoo, 3203 Mission, SF; www.royalcuckoo.com. 7:30-10:30pm, free.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Brazil and Beyond Bissip Baobab. 6:30pm, free.

Hipwaders Contemporary Jewish Museum, 736 Mission, SF; www.thecjm.org. Sun, 11am. $10-12 (kids under 18 free).

Junior Brown Yoshi’s San Francisco. 7pm, $25.

Darcy Noonan, Richard Mandel, Jack Gilder, and friends Plough and Stars. 9pm.

Thee Old Country Tupelo, 1337 Grant, SF; www.tupelosf.com. 4pm, free.

MONDAY 13

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Damir Johnny Foley’s Irish House. 10pm, free.

Highlands, Orange Revival Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 9pm, $10.

Yngwie Malmsteen Regency Ballroom. 8pm, $32.

Collin Ludlow-Mattson and the Folks, Casual Dolphins, Air Surgeon, Catharsis for Cathedral Elbo Room. 9pm, $6.

Milk Carton Kids, Barefoot Movement Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $17-19.

Sweat Lodge, Photo Atlas, Father President Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $8.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Toshio Hirano Amnesia. 9pm, free.

"The Pick: Open Bluegrass Jam" Amnesia. 6pm.

DANCE CLUBS

Death Guild DNA Lounge. 9:30pm, $3-5. Gothic, industrial, and synthpop with Decay, Joe Radio, and Melting Girl.

TUESDAY 14

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Buffalo Tooth, Joy, A Million Billion Dying Sons, Disappearing People, DJ Dahmer Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 9pm, $9.

Go Time, pseudotunesmith, Reliics Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $8.

IAMX, Moto Boy Slim’s. 8pm, $20.

John Garcia Band Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $15.

Kisses, Sister Crayon, Astronauts etc. Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $10-12.

Laurels, Moonbeams, Fleeting Joys Hemlock Tavern. 8:30pm, $8.

Pow, Cold Beat, Cold Circuits, Daisy World, DJ Ack Ack Ack Knockout. 9:30pm, $6.

Stan Earhart Band Johnny Foley’s Irish House. 10pm, free.

Steve Adamyk Band, Needles // Pins, Primitive Hearts, Adam Widener Thee Parkside. 8pm, $7.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Frisky Frolics Rite Spot Café, 2099 Folsom, SF; www.ritespotcafe.net. 8:30pm, free.

"sfSoundSalonSeries: Xenoglossia/Leishmania (Christopher Burns and Bill Hsu)" Center for New Music, 55 Taylor, SF; www.centerfornewmusic.com. 7:49pm, $10.

Terry Disley’s Rocking Jazz Trio Burritt Room, 417 Stockton, SF; www.mystichotel.com. 6-9pm, free.
DANCE CLUBS
’90s Hip-Hop Sample Night Double Dutch, 3192 16th St, SF; www.thedoubledutch.com. 9pm, free. With Mr. Murdock and DJ Haylow.

Alerts

Andrew Lam
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0

WEDNESDAY 8

Tales from the Mission District 518 Valencia, SF. www.shapingsf.org. 7:30pm, free. Adriana Camarena, a longtime Mission District resident famous for interviewing everyone in her midst, unveils her new multimedia work, “Unsettlers: Migrants, Homies, and Mammas in the Mission.” Join Shaping SF for an evening of storytelling featuring the Mission’s most precarious residents: Indigenous migrant workers from Mexico, day laborers, war veterans, and youth in gangs.

THURSDAY 9

Debate: Hack the Sky? Richard and Rhoda Goldman Theater, David Brower Center, 2150 Allston, Berkl. www.earthisland.org/events/skyhack. 7pm, $10. Join Earth Island Journal and Grist.org for an important debate about geoengineering: Controversial proposals to artificially reduce the amount of sunlight filtering through earth’s atmosphere, using technological fixes, to solve climate change. Atmospheric scientist Ken Caldeira and Australian professor of ethics Clive Hamilton will debate this timely, provocative issue.

SHOUT! Art by Women Veterans San Francisco Women’s Building, 3543 18th St, SF. www.swords-to-plowshares.org. 6-9pm, free. RSVP requested. Hosted by Swords to Plowshares, a San Francisco-based veteran service organization, the fifth annual SHOUT aims to engage with women veterans and bring about greater public awareness to the issues they face. The event, which began as an annual art show and celebration of women veterans, was inspired by the intersections of art, community, health, and healing.

FRIDAY 10

Jeremy Scahill Lecture on Dirty Wars First Congregational Church of Oakland, 2501 Harrison St, Oakl. 7:30pm, $12 advance / $15 door. 800-838-3006 www.kpfa.org/events. KPFA Radio hosts author and journalist Jeremy Scahill, author of the New York Times best-seller Blackwater. Scahill will discuss his latest book, Dirty Wars, tracing the consequences of the declaration that “the world is a battlefield.” From Afghanistan to Yemen, Somalia and beyond, Scahill reports from the frontlines of his high-stakes investigation.

SUNDAY 12

Conflict Kitchen: The two Koreas Headlands Center for the Arts, 944 Simmonds Rd, Sausalito. tinyurl.com/2koreas. 6:30pm, $35. RSVP requested. Artists Jon Rubin and Dawn Weleski bring their Pittsburgh-based project, Conflict Kitchen, to the Marin Headlands’ Mess Hall. Serving cuisine from countries with which the United States is in conflict, the artists present flavors from North and South Korea. Featuring three courses, as well as guided discussion on the culture, politics, and issues at stake within the two countries.

Music Listings

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0

Music listings are compiled by Emily Savage. Since club life is unpredictable, it’s a good idea to call ahead or check the venue’s website to confirm bookings and hours. Prices are listed when provided to us. Visit www.sfbg.com/venue-guide for venue information. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

WEDNESDAY 1

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Bob B. vs Jason Marion Johnny Foley’s Dueling Pianos. 10pm, free.

Face Jam, Easway Slim’s. 9pm, $15.

Family Crest, Foolproof Four, Roem Baur Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

Kontravoid, Scott Arford, DJ Justin, DJ Crackwhore Elbo Room. 9pm, $8.

“Live Hardcore Karaoke with Girl-illa Biscuits, DJ Ty Webb Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, free.

Harvey Mandel Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $18.

My Revolver, Trainwreck Riders, Vows Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $15.

“Ourshelves Benefit Concert” 50 Mason Social House, SF; www.50masonsocialhouse.com. 7pm, $10. With Dawn Oberg, Ira Marlowe.

Terry Savastano Johnny Foley’s. 10pm, free.

Sleepy Sun, Feral Ohms, Meg Baird, DJ Brett Wilde Chapel, 777 Valencia, SF; www.thechapelsf.com. 9pm, $15.

Stereo Total, Super Adventure Club, Giggle Party Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $15.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Freddie Hughes Royal Cuckoo, 3203 Mission, SF; www.royalcuckoo.com. 7:30-10:30pm, free.

Dink Dink Dink, Gaucho, Eric Garland’s Jazz Session Amnesia. 7pm, free.

Terry Disley’s Rocking Jazz Trio Burritt Room, 417 Stockton, SF; www.mystichotel.com. 6-9pm, free.

Ricardo Scales Top of the Mark, 999 California, SF; www.topofthemark.com. 6:30pm, $5.

Craig Ventresco and Meredith Axelrod Cafe Divine, 1600 Stockton, SF; www.cafedivinesf.com.7-9pm, free.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Cha Ching Boom Boom Room. 8pm, $5.

Subcontinental Drift Cafe Du Nord. 8pm, $5.

Timba Dance Party Bissap Baobab, 3372 19th St, SF.; www.bissapbaobab.com 10pm, $5. With DJ Walt Diggz.

DANCE CLUBS

Booty Call Q-Bar, 456 Castro, SF; www.bootycallwednesdays.com. 9pm. Juanita MORE! and Joshua J host this dance party.

Cash IV Gold Double Dutch, 3192 16th St, SF; www.thedoubledutch.com. 9pm, free.

Coo-Yah! Slate Bar, 2925 16th St, SF; www.slate-sf.com. 10pm, free.

Hardcore Humpday Happy Hour RKRL, 52 Sixth St, SF; (415) 658-5506. 6pm, $3.

Martini Lounge John Colins, 138 Minna, SF; www.johncolins.com. 7pm. With DJ Mark Divita.

THURSDAY 2

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Beautiful Machines, Moonlight Orchestra, KnightressM1 Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

Frank Bey Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $20.

City Tribe, Before the Brave, Cold Eskimo Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 9pm, $10.

Clinic, No Joy, popscene DJs Rickshaw Stop. 9:30pm, $15–$20.

Custom Kicks, Acorn Bcorn, Vignettes Hemlock Tavern. 8:30pm, $7.

Guido vs Bob B. Johnny Foley’s Dueling Pianos. 10pm, free.

Robyn Hitchcock and the Venus 3, Colin Meloy, Amanda Palmer, Rhett Miller, Young Fresh Fellows Fillmore. 8pm, $35.

Dave Moreno and Friends Johnny Foley’s. 10pm, free.

Bob Schneider Swedish American Hall. 7:30pm, $20.

Drew Schofield Hotel Utah. 8pm, $8.

Mariee Sioux, Alela Diane, Conspiracy of Venus Great American Music Hall. 8:30pm, $16

Naked Soul Boom Boom Room. 8pm, $8.

Zomboy DNA Lounge. 8pm, $15.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Stompy Jones Top of the Mark, 999 California, SF; www.topofthemark.com. 7:30pm, $10.

Jason Moran SFJazz Center, 201 Franklin, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 7;30pm, $25–$60.

Chris Siebert Royal Cuckoo, 3203 Mission, SF; www.royalcuckoo.com. 7:30-10:30pm, free.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Pa’lante! Bissap Baobab, 3372 19th St, SF.; www.bissapbaobab.com 10pm, $5.

Two Man Gentleman Band, Misisipi Mike and the Midnight Gamblers Amnesia. 9pm,$7.

DANCE CLUBS

Afrolicious Elbo Room. 9:30pm, $8. With Pleasuremaker, Senor Oz.

All 80s Thursday Cat Club. 9pm, $6 (free before 9:30pm). The best of ’80s mainstream and underground.

Ritual Temple. 10pm-3am, $5. Two rooms of dubstep, glitch, and trap music.

Supersonic Lookout, 3600 16th St., SF; www.lookoutsf.com. 9pm. Global beats paired with food from around the world by Tasty. Resident DJs Jaybee, B-Haul, amd Diagnosis.

Tropicana Madrone Art Bar. 9pm, free. Salsa, cumbia, reggaeton, and more.

FRIDAY 3

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Back Pages Johnny Foley’s. 10pm, free.

Buckeye Knoll, Choirs, Emily Moldy Band Bottom of the Hill. 9:30pm, $10.

Creeping Pink, Slam Dunk, Pure Bliss, Violent Change Thee Parkside. 9pm, $7.

Forrest Day, Latyrx, Ghost and the City Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $21–$26.

Dead Skeletons, Old Testament, Mark Matos/Os Beaches, Infinity Rider Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 9pm, $20–$35 (three-day pass).

Funk Revival Orchestra Boom Boom Room. 8pm, $10.

Helmet DNA Lounge. 8pm, $20.

Killing Joke, Czar Fillmore. 9pm, $35.

K’s Choice, Ash Thursday Cafe Du Nord. 9pm, $20.

Little Boots, Avan Lava, Feathers, popscene DJs Rickshaw Stop. 9pm, $15–$20.

Mindless Self Indulgence, Chantal Claret Regency Ballroom. 8:30pm, $27.

Pierced Arrows, Pins of Light, New Flesh Elbo Room. 9pm, $12.

Poor Man’s Whiskey, Lonesome Locomotive Chapel, 777 Valencia, SF; www.thechapelsf.com. 9pm, $18–$20.

Alice Russell Mezzanine. 9pm, $20–$25.

Nathan Temby, Chris A., Bob B. Johnny Foley’s Dueling Pianos. 10pm, free.

Vietnam, Gap Dream Independent. 9pm, $15.

Sharrie Williams Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $22.

Young Fresh Fellows, Peter Buck, Chuckleberries Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $18.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Audium 1616 Bush, SF; www.audium.org. 8:30pm, $20. Theater of sound-sculptured space.

“COPUS Artist Showcase” WestSide ArtHouse, 540 Balboa, SF; www.copusmusic.com. 8pm, $10. With Jonny Mac, and open mic.

Rachelle Ferrell Yoshi’s SF. 8pm, $32; 10pm, $28.

Hammond Organ Soul Jazz Blues Party Royal Cuckoo, 3203 Mission, SF; www.royalcuckoo.com. 7:30-10:30pm, free.

Jason Moran “Fats Waller Dance Party” SFJazz Center, 201 Franklin, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 7;30pm, $30–$50.

Prince de Dame Center for New Music, 55 Taylor, SF; www.centerfornewmusic.com. 8pm, $10–$20.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Rustabouts Bluegrass Band Plough and Stars. 9pm, $6.

DANCE CLUBS

Funkin’ Fridays with Swoop Unit Amnesia. 6pm.

Joe Lookout, 3600 16th St.,SF; www.lookoutsf.com. 9pm. Eight rotating DJs, shirt-off drink specials.

Old School JAMZ El Rio. 9pm. Fruit Stand DJs spinning old school funk, hip-hop, and R&B.

Paris to Dakar Little Baobab, 3388 19th St, SF; (415) 643-3558. 10pm, $5. Afro and world music with rotating DJs including Stepwise, Steve, Claude, Santero, and Elembe.

Strangelove Cat Club. 9:30pm, $3–$7. Industrial and goth with DJs Tomas Diable, Joe Radio, Skarkrow, and Fact 50.

Twitch DNA Lounge. 10pm, $8. With Youth Code, Sewn Leather, resident DJs Justin, Omar, Rachel Aiello, Kevin Sniecinski.

SATURDAY 4

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

American Professionals, Bobbleheads, Last Out Thee Parkside. 4pm, free.

Bob B., Nathan Temby, Chris A. Johnny Foley’s Dueling Pianos. 10pm, free.

Claire on a Dare, Son of Invention, Night Falls 50 Mason Social House, SF; www.50masonsocialhouse.com. 10pm, free.

Conquest for Death, Complete Disorder, Bankrupt District El Rio. 10pm, $7.

Creative Adult, Spitting Image, Curiosity, Know Secrets Thee Parkside. 9pm, $8.

Dead Meadow, Dead Skeletons, LSD and the Search for God, Shine Brothers Brick and Mortar Music Hall.10pm, $20–$35 (three-day pass).

Dirty Hand Family Band Riptide Tavern. 9pm, free.

Electric Jellyfish Hemlock Tavern. 5pm, $6.

Fallen Riviera Neck of the Woods, 406 Clement, SF; www.neckofthewoodssf.com. 8pm.

Foxtails Brigade, Battlehooch, Hogs of Change Bottom of the Hill. 9:30pm, $12.

Frightwig, Gone to Ground, Quaaludes Cafe Du Nord. 9pm, $12.

Infamous Stringdusters Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $22–$25.

Javelin, Helado Negro, Silver Hands, EpicSauce DJs Rickshaw Stop. 9pm, $12.

New Spell, Anita Stryker, Odd Owl Amnesia. 9pm.

Os Mutantes, Capsula, Killbossa Independent. 9pm, $25.

Prizehog, Drunk Dad, Connoisseur Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $7.

“Rock for Life” Sutter Room at the Regency, 1290 Sutter, SF; rockforlifesf.eventbrite.com. 7pm, $10–$15. With Global Affront.

Caitlin Rose Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 7pm, $15.

Scissors for Lefty, Beta State, Breakdown Valentine, Deer Park Avenue Slim’s. 9pm, $13.

Stone Foxes, Little Hurricane, She’s Fillmore. 9pm, $21.50.

Taaryn, Light Fantastic Chapel, 777 Valencia, SF; www.thechapelsf.com. 9pm, $15.

Tall Shadows Johnny Foley’s. 10pm, free.

Voodoo Fix Boom Boom Room. 8pm, $10.

Sharrie Williams Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $22.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Audium 1616 Bush, SF; www.audium.org. 8:30pm, $20. Theater of sound-sculptured space.

Hammond Organ Soul Jazz Blues Party Royal Cuckoo, 3203 Mission, SF; www.royalcuckoo.com. 7:30-10:30pm, free.

Booker T. Jones Yoshi’s SF. 8pm, $35; 10pm, $28.

Jason Moran Bandwagon and Skateboarders SFJazz Center, 201 Franklin, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 7:30pm, $20–$40.

Trespassers/Adrian, Buckaroogirl SF Live Arts @ Cyperian’s, 2097 Turk, SF; noevalleymusicseries.com. 8pm, $15.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

La Santa Cecilia, Dr. Loco’s Rockin’ Jalapeno Band Yerba Buena Gardens Festival, Mission between Third and Fourth St, SF; www.ybgfestival.org. 1-3pm, free.

DANCE CLUBS

Bootie SF DNA Lounge. 9pm, $10–$15.

Cockfight Underground SF, 424 Haight, SF; (415) 864-7386. 9pm, $7. Rowdy dance night for gay boys .

Foundation Som., 2925 16th St, SF; (415) 558-8521. 10pm, $5–$10. DJs Shortkut, Apollo, Mr. E, Fran Boogie spin Hip-Hop, Dancehall, Funk, Salsa.

Go Bang! Stud. 9pm, $7. With DJs Pavone, Pone, Steve Febus, Segio Fedasz, and more.

Haceteria Deco Lounge, 510 Larkin, SF; www.decosf.com. 9pm, free before 11pm, $3 after.

Paris to Dakar Little Baobab, 3388 19th St, SF; (415) 643-3558. 10pm, $5. Afro and world music with rotating DJs.

Saturday Night Soul Party Elbo Room. 10pm, $5–$10. With DJs Lucky, Paul Paul, Phengren Oswald.

SUNDAY 5

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Absurdo, Side Effects, Ruleta Rusa, Brain Rash Knockout. 4:30pm, $7.

Bleached, Ex Cops Independent. 8pm, $14.

HIM, Eyes Set Kill Fillmore. 8pm, $41.50.

Psyclon Nine, Vile Augury DNA Lounge. 9pm, $15.

Terry Savastano Johnny Foley’s. 10pm, free.

Spider Heart, Brubaker, Rare Animals Bottom of the Hill. 7pm, $10.

Spirit Family Reunion Chapel, 777 Valencia, SF; www.thechapelsf.com. 9pm, $12.

Taxes, Major Powers and the Lo-Fi Symphony, Tall Sheep Cafe Du Nord. 7:30pm, $10.

Tesla Regency Ballroom. 8pm, $38.

Touche, Seatraffic, DJ CoolGreg Thee Parkside. 8pm, $8.

UV Race, Shannon and the Clams, Life Stinks Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $10.

Justin Vivian Bond, Carletta Sue Kay Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $27.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Jason Moran Bandwagon and Skateboarders SFJazz Center, 201 Franklin, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 7:30pm, $20–$40.

Noertker’s Moxie, Blue Lotus Musicians’ Union Hall, 116 Ninth St, SF; www.noertker.com. 7:30pm, $10.

Kally Price Old Blues and Jazz Band Amnesia. 8pm, $5.

Lavay Smith Royal Cuckoo, 3203 Mission, SF; www.royalcuckoo.com. 7:30-10:30pm, free.

Kim Waters Yoshi’s SF. 7pm, $24; 9pm, $18.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Brazil and Beyond Bissap Baobab, 3372 19th St, SF.; www.bissapbaobab.com. 6:30pm, $5.

Doncat, Mosshead, Windham Flat Thee Parkside. 4pm, free.

No One From Nashville Tupelo, 1337 Grant, SF; www.tupelosf.com. 4-7pm, free.

Dance clubs

Jock Lookout, 3600 16th St, SF; www.lookoutsf.com. 3pm, $2.

MONDAY 6

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

BLAMMOS!, Dandy Lions, Jazz Guys Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $8.

Damir Johnny Foley’s. 10pm, free.

Jerry Joseph and Walter Salas-Humarar Chapel, 777 Valencia, SF; www.thechapelsf.com. 9pm, $15–$17.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Front Country Amnesia. 9pm.

DANCE CLUBS

Bass is Great Elbo Room. 9pm, $5. With Mad Vatsky, Cosby Kid, Megabus.

Crazy Mondays Beauty Bar, 2299 Mission, SF; www.thebeautybar.com. 10pm, free. Hip-hop and other stuff.

Death Guild DNA Lounge. 9:30pm, $3–$5.

M.O.M. Madrone Art Bar. 6pm, free. DJs Timoteo Gigante, Gordo Cabeza, and Chris Phlek playing all Motown every Monday.

Soul Cafe John Colins Lounge, 138 Minna, SF; www.johncolins.com. 9pm. R&B, Hip-Hop, Neosoul, reggae, dancehall, and more with DJ Jerry Ross.

Vibes’N’Stuff El Amigo Bar, 3355 Mission, SF; (415) 852-0092. 10pm, free. Conscious jazz and hip-hop with DJs Luce Lucy, Vinnie Esparza, and more.

TUESDAY 7

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

B. Hamilton, bad Bad Hemlock Tavern. 8:30pm, $6.

Cool Ghouls, Pyyramids, Hindu Pirates Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 9pm, free.

Kegals, Loss, Breaks, DJ Motorchad Knockout. 9:30pm, $7.

Kvelertak, Cancer Bats, Black Tusks Slim’s. 7:30pm, $15.

Outsiders, With Wolves, Boo Radley’s House Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $8.

Stan Erhart Band Johnny Foley’s. 10pm, free.

Joseph Vincent Cafe Du Nord. 7:30pm, $12.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Terry Disley’s Mini-Experience Burritt Room, 417 Stockton, SF; www.mystichotel.com. 6-9pm, free.

“Inspire Music presents HipKids Chorus and VOICES Chorus” Yoshi’s SF. 7:30pm, $8–$25.

DANCE CLUBS

Pendulum Elbo Room. 10pm, $5. Gothik danse party with DJs Nako and Hether.

 

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