San Francisco

SF Stories: Mattilda Sycamore Bernstein

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SF Stories: Mattilda Sycamore Bernstein

San Francisco was where I first learned to gasp and grasp at the possibilities of radical queer self-invention and communal care. This was 1992. I was 19: childhood meant suffocation, college was pointless shit. All around me, people were dying of AIDS and drug addiction and suicide, but finally I was finding other queer incest survivors, whores, vegans, runaways, anarchists, dropouts, drug addicts, sluts, activists and freaks trying not to disappear. We were scarred and broken and brutalized but determined to create something else, something we could live with, something we could call home or healing or even just help, I need help here, can you help?

Of course, we were not the first wave of queer migration to San Francisco in search of ways to cope and hope, visions of lust and love not bounded by convention, brazen challenges to the violence of status quo normalcy. But learning how to dream is always a difficult process. It’s what we needed one another for.

And yet, there is a certain kind of smugness in queer San Francisco, this sense that we have arrived, that we’ve done our work, that we’ve created something beyond the twin traps of gay assimilation and straight normalcy. The problem is that often a sophisticated rhetoric camouflages the same tired patterns of abuse and neglect, and this hurts more when it comes from those you believe in, right? I know that it has hurt me more.
Let me tell you about the friend who will always be there, no matter what. We met when I was 19: we held one another and broke apart walls. We tried to share everything about our lives, and then when we ran out of things to disclose we dug deeper. This relationship lasted for 16 years, but I lost it all when I told this friend he was the most important person in my life. I told him I felt confident about the longevity of our relationship, about our intimacy and our trust, but I never felt secure because of the five-year period when he lied about everything due to a disastrous alcoholism, a five-year period he kept telling me he’d gotten past. It’s true that he wasn’t drinking anymore. When I told him I still didn’t feel secure, I thought he would ask me what he could do, but instead he became enraged, and our relationship was over.

This is just one example of the gap between rhetoric and reality; there are too many. When I arrived in San Francisco in 1992, the city sheltered outsider queer cultures unimaginable in most places. Twenty years of gentrification, homogenization, and assimilation later, and yes, these cultures still exist in some form, even if they have been decimated in both density and imagination. Perhaps what’s changed the most for me is that now I need to live elsewhere in order to dream.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (mattildabernsteinsycamore.com) is most recently the editor of Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform. Mattilda’s next book, The End of San Francisco, will be out in April 2013 from City Lights—it might break your heart.

D5 shakeups flip the dynamics of that wild race

Sasha Cuttler
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D5 shakeups flip the dynamics of that wild race

[UPDATED AND CORRECTED] Wild and unsettling political dynamics have rocked the District 5 supervisorial race, with three major candidates having prominent endorsements withdrawn, the most significant being this week’s mass exodus of support from the campaign of Julian Davis following his bad handling of allegations that he has mistreated women.

Those withdrawing their endorsements of Davis since Saturday include Sups. John Avalos, David Campos, and Jane Kim, Assembly member Tom Ammiano, the Bay Guardian, the Examiner, and the League of Pissed-Off Voters. The Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club has scheduled a vote for Monday on whether to withdraw its sole endorsement of Davis.

Avalos gave his endorsement to Sup. Christina Olague over the weekend, and she seems to be getting more progressive support in the wake of Davis’ flame-out and her Oct. 9 vote in favor of reinstating Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi. That vote triggered a strong backlash against Olague from Mayor Ed Lee and his allies, with San Francisco Police Officers Association withdrawing its endorsement.

But former Mayor Art Agnos reached out to Olague – who he didn’t know previously – after the Mirkarimi vote and is rumored to be considering offering her his endorsement and support. Agnos didn’t confirm or deny the rumor, but he did tell us, “I was very impressed by her commitment to the progressive issues we share.”

Olague has a long history of progressive activism and was a consistently good vote during her tenure on the Planning Commission, but many progressives were concerned by her early support for Lee, who then appointed her to the District 5 seat vacated by Mirkarimi’s election as sheriff, and by some of her votes and behaviors since then.

But now that she’s been viciously attacked by Lee’s staffers and allies over the Mirkarimi vote – and iced out by Lee himself, who she says won’t return her calls and who bailed out on a planned campaign appearance – Olague seems to have a newfound independence. “At the end of the day, we serve constituents and the city, and that’s who we should answer to,” Olague told us, agreeing that she feels freed up by recent developments, as difficult as they’ve been. “You don’t become an indentured servant.”

She told us that her decision last year to co-chair the “Run, Ed, Run” campaign to convince Lee to break his promise and run for a full term to the office he’d been appointed to was based on her belief that “we’d see an infusion of new energy and some more diversity” of both ideology and demographics in the Mayor’s Office.

“Sadly, I’m not seeing those changes happening really. I didn’t sign up for another four years of Gavin Newsom and those thugs, and I’ve seen a lot of that same behavior,” she said. “People who played prominent roles in the Newsom administration continue to play prominent roles in this administration.”

Olague said the schism with the administration began this summer when she supported Avalos in trying to bring in new revenue as part of the business tax reform measure that became Prop. E, which Lee had insisted be revenue neutral before compromising with progressives. That was when Olague said she got her first nasty message from Tony Winnicker, the former Newsom press secretary who now works for Lee and wrote Olague a text during the Mirkarimi hearing telling her “you disgust me and I will work night and day to defeat you.”

Some prominent progressives privately worried that schism was an election ploy designed to help Olague win the race for this progressive district given that Davis had captured most of the influential progressive endorsements. But with Lee and his allies continuing to be openly livid over the Mirkarimi vote – and with solid progressive John Rizzo running a lackluster campaign that has less than $5,000 in the bank – there is growing progressive support for Olague.

The big fear among many progressives is that London Breed will win the race, a concern that has been exacerbated by the support that Breed has been receiving from real estate and development interests, both directly and in independent expenditures by the Association of Realtors, which has spent more than $225,000 in this election cycle hoping to knock out progressives in Districts 1 and 5 and tip the balance of power on the board.

Breed told us that she doesn’t know the Realtors or why they’re offering such strong support, pledging to be an independent vote. “I’ve never made any promises to anyone that I would help anyone or that I would be this way or that,” she told us. “I’m not here to do anyone’s bidding, whether it’s Aaron Peskin or Willie Brown or anyone else.”

Brown helped launch Breed’s political career by [CORRECTED recommending then-Mayor Gavin Newsom] appoint her to the Redevelopment Commission, where Breed supported Lennar and other big developers, but she had a falling out with him earlier this year and made impolitic comments about him to the Fog City Journal, causing US Sen. Dianne Feinstein to withdraw her endorsement of Breed.

Brown, Lee, and Chinatown power broker Rose Pak helped raise money for Olague, who has received the maximum $500 donation from such powerful inside players as venture capitalist Ron Conway (and his wife, Gayle), Michael Cohen, Victor Makras, Lawrence Nibbi, Mark Mosher, and John Whitehurst.

But that was before the Mirkarimi vote, which Lee’s allies seem to see as a litmus test on Olague’s loyalty to them. As Tenderloin Housing Clinic director Randy Shaw, who helped engineer the progressive split that brought Lee to power, put it on his Beyond Chron blog, “Olague’s vote was an act of profound disloyalty not only to the mayor who appointed her, but also to those who pushed the mayor to do so.”

Olague says she’s disturbed by that viewpoint, and by those so blinded by their efforts to demonize Mirkarimi “and exploit and politicize issues around domestic violence” that they have failed to consider the price he has already paid for his actions or the legal standards for removing an elected official. “On something like this, it’s not a question of loyalty. It’s about principles,” she said.

Breed says that she has seen an increase in support since the Mirkarimi vote and the Davis meltdown, but she said that she doesn’t want to talk about those cases or exploit them politically. “I don’t take pleasure in the misery of someone else,” she said, adding her hope that the furor about Mirkarimi will die down. “The decision has been made and it’s time for the city to come together.”

Progressive leaders have made similar calls, but Mirkarimi’s critics are showing no signs of letting the issue go. San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee members Zoe Dunning and Matt Dorsey have put forward a resolution condemning the reinstatement vote and calling for Mirkarimi’s ouster, which the DCCC will consider on Wednesday evening, Oct. 24.

[CORRECTED At that meeting, the DCCC will also consider a motion] to reopen the D5 endorsement process, hoping to change the DCCC’s previous “no endorsement” vote, and sources tell us there is currently a strong backroom effort to give the endorsement to Breed. That vote will be a big test for progressives, which lost their majority control over the DCCC in the June elections.

Meanwhile, D5 candidate Thea Selby – who snagged one of the three endorsements by both the Guardian and the Examiner – continues to run a strong and well-funded campaign that has avoided the carnage taking place in the other campaigns. “I feel like I’m in the middle watching out for flying beams,” she told us, adding that both she and Rizzo have been “the grown-ups in the room, so there’s an opportunity there and I’m hopeful.”

But unlike Rizzo, who has seems strangely absent and didn’t return Guardian phone calls [see UPDATE below], Selby has plenty of money in the bank – nearly $60,000 as of the last official report two weeks ago – and could benefit from voter disgust with the ugly politics at play. “It’s my experience that is driving this,” says this small-businessperson, “and not my lifelong desire to be a politician, and that may ring some bells.”

How the ranked-choice voting system will play out in this mess is anyone’s guess, and even Davis seems to be hoping that he still has a shot, resisting calls by the Guardian and others to withdraw from the race. Poorly funded candidates Andrew Resignato and Hope Johnson this week announced they were joining forces for the “People’s Ticket” after being excluded from a University of San Francisco candidates forum.

But most political observers seem to think this race will come down to a two-person contest between Breed and Olague – who each have more than $45,000 in the bank with which to make a strong final push – and the distinctions between them are becoming clearer as more progressives get behind Olague and the moderates and monied interests get behind Breed.

Olague said she’s still “willing to work with anybody,” but that, “I’m worried that moderate forces will seize this moment to try to destroy us.”

UPDATE 4:45: Rizzo just got back to us and said he’s been actively campaigning and feeling good about his chances. “We have a great team and we’ll have enough resources to reach voters,” Rizzo said. He said that he’s had a stong fundraising push in the last couple weeks since the last campaign financing statement was released, and he noted his endorsements and active support by influential progressives including Ammiano, Campos, and Carole Migden. “We’re doing a lot of retail campaigning, meeting voters and getting the message out.”

Nudity and tourism

Zelda Bronstein
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Nudity and tourism

KQED’s Forum weighed in on Sup. Scott Wiener’s anti-nudity law Oct. 18, and I particularly enjoyed the attempts by all to avoid the use of the word “cockring.” I taped a show for KPFA’s morning mix (to air 7:30 am Oct. 19) and host John Hamilton told me that “cockring” wasn’t on the FCC list of unacceptable words and it was ok to use it, but that’s KPFA, not KQED. I also laughed at Michael Krasny confessing that he was beeing “lookist” when he said he’d heard that the men at Jane Warner Plaza weren’t all that good-looking.

At any rate, here’s the real story: A friend’s mom was visiting recently from Switzerland, and what did she want to do in San Francisco? She wanted to go to the Castro and see the naked men. Of course.

You see the buses going down Market Street with all the tourists, sticking their cameras out the window to get a shot? It’s a tourist attraction. 

Remember — when the sea lions first arrived at Fisherman’s Wharf about 20 years ago, and hauled themselves up on the docks, the city tried to get them to leave — they were loud and stinky and unappealing. But they wouldn’t go — and after a few weeks, the merchants realized how good they were for business.

I asked the Convention and Visitors Bureau, now known as SF Travel, if banning nudity might be bad for the tourist industry — and the local economy. The folks there haven’t gotten back to me. But I don’t know; maybe the city economist should study this nudity ban.

Living the dream of the 1840s

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Living the dream of the 1840s

MUSIC There’s no better time for local composer Jake Heggie’s 2010 opera Moby-Dick to wash up on our shores, especially in terms of men’s fashion. Seriously — peacoats galore, henleys-and-suspenders perfection, button-up trousers, glorious galoshes, and perfectly nor’easter-tousled haircuts, not to mention a stubbly wealth of seafarin’ beards. The whole cast, outfitted by ace costume designer Jane Greenwood, might have dropped onto the stage from this fall’s All Saints Spitalfields lookbook. Forget the neoprene hoodies and double-breasted suitcoats of America’s Cup, here lies the real echo of San Francisco’s nautical past.

That echo emanates from Herman Melville’s water-logged epic of 1851, a massive compendium of American Romantic sensibility, arcane sea lore, fiery pagan-ecclesiastical poetry, and the archetypal thrashings of mad Ahab, captain of the Pequod, as he obsessively hunts his nemesis, the “great white fish” who nipped away with his left leg years ago, Moby-Dick. The book is also a full-throated exaltation of the culture of the North Atlantic whale trade, at its peak in the 1840s, and a furrowed-brow examination of humanity’s spooky morality, not to mention a rip-roaring, man’s-man adventure tale (complete enough homoerotic subtext to float a sperm whale).

Boiling all this down into an evening’s entertainment, even one as splashy and spectacle-drenched as opera can provide, is a bit like chasing a white whale itself. Fortunately, Heggie — who triumphed with 2002’s Dead Man Walking — and librettist Gene Scheer, along with a more-than-game San Francisco Opera cast and crew, dive right in.

Moby-Dick immediately grabs attention and grounds itself in the Bay Area (the production debuted at the Dallas Opera) with an eye-popping display of one of our native crafts, digital sorcery. Projection designer Eliane J. McCarthy’s gorgeous 3-D renderings of star-maps and ships’ masts engulf the curtain as Heggie’s roiling, swooning overture guides us into the story. The rest of the production and staging throughout this two-and-a-half hour work, directed by Leonard Foglia with set design by Robert Brill, is equally jaw-dropping, with mobile scrims doublings as sail, a web of rigging filling the stage, and ingenious use of a humongous hull-shaped wall.

Another of Moby-Dick‘s riveting special effects: the SF Opera chorus, in fine and lusty voice, vocally painting in the details of the story. That story contrasts the touching friendship of greenhorn whaler Ishmael and harpooner Queequeg, cannibal prince of fictional South Sea isle Kokovoko, with the contentious relationship between the driven Ahab and his first mate, Starbuck, a homesick family man and devout Quaker who sees the Devil’s work in Ahab’s doomed quest. One of the most affecting characters is Pip, the impetuous and mentally unformed ship’s mascot, whose unhinged ramblings after he’s saved from drowning serve as warped prophecy as the opera progresses.

There’s so many meaty possibilities for a composer in this story, but if you’re expecting “yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum” performed by full orchestra you’re barking up the wrong mizzenmast. To be sure, Heggie’s cinematic, neo-Romantic instincts — he prefers the term “theatrical,” and sometimes we do drift into Les Miz territory — make hay with sea storms, crashing waves, drunken brawls, and the melancholy feel of life adrift on the ocean. (A goofy-cute waltz comes on when the ship’s tipsy crew realize they’ll just have to partner up if they want to party, one of the few funny bits.) Heggie’s white whale is a shimmering arabesque, breaching a swirl of strings and cresting horns, at one momentous climax exploding into an off-kilter samba.

The score is mostly atmospheric, however, its foreboding drama cranked up to eleven throughout, with little standout melody or tonal attenuation to help the characters’ souls drop anchor. Despite a few memorable moments of soaring vocal lines — a duet in praise of Kokovoko’s Edenic promise by Queequeg (Jonathan Lemalu, imposing) and Ishmael (Stephen Costello, cubbishly adorable), sung from neighboring masts ; Starbuck’s ode to homelife back in Nantucket (performed by wonderfully powerful baritone Morgan Smith); the occasional cryptic outbursts of Pip (spry soprano Talise Trevigne, who does a bit of magic with a tambourine) — you’ll have to cling to the singers’ voices and acting technique if you want to keep emotionally afloat.

This becomes a problem with Jay Hunter Morris in the Ahab role. Although strongly voiced and valiantly game, he didn’t connect with me as a man who was truly obsessed, yet who retained enough charisma and cunning to draw the rest of the crew into his singular madness. His role struck me more as “friends’ crazy Tea Party dad” than “scarily fascinating apocalyptic cult leader.”

This could be a wrinkle of the libretto, which retains some of the original’s poetry and blasphemy — a pagan hymn here, an anti-religion diatribe there — but strains to convey an engaging dramatic arc for the characters. (It barely registers when all is lost for the Pequod.) In its earnest bluster, this presentation of the opera also skims over Melville’s haunting metaphysics, the eerie pull of nihilistic depths, the ecstatic fog of moral derangement, that preternatural whistle in fate’s vast gale. I disembarked from the rousing Moby-Dick dazzled and exhausted, though neither questing nor blubbering.

MOBY-DICK through Nov. 2, various times, $10–$340. War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness, SF. www.sfopera.com

 

The Performant: Boxed in at Boxwars

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Putting the glad into Gladiator

You are a warrior. Sheathed in armor of the finest corrugated paper pulp and armed with the righteousness of a hundred possible causes (pick one, any one), you grab your war hammer, fashioned perhaps from a couple of paper towel tubes and an empty case of 21st Amendment Brew Free or Die, and hie thyself to Dolores Park for the grand melee.

The last-gasp October sun beats down hot on the sloping hills of the park, which are covered in defiantly bared flesh and picnic supplies, while blimps slowly drift across the impossible blue of the afternoon sky. A gladiatorial spirit vibrates through the giddy ether, doubtlessly carried over from the Giants and 49ers games being played just a couple of miles away. It’s a good day to do battle. It’s a good day for Boxwars.


Entering the park you start sizing up the competitors, an assortment of deceptively nonchalant combat geeks nursing Tecates and sporting bulky breastplates, cumbersome helmets, cardboard shinguards, and Samurai-inspired shoulderplates. One calamity-courting individual has what appears to be a target centered on his chest, another, dressed like Captain America, pronounces himself “Middle Class America,” perhaps in honor of the ass-kicking he will soon receive at the hands of his fellow combatants. A creative array of medieval weaponry bristles from the hands of each box-warrior: lances, maces, battle-axes, and swords. Some people carry shields. Some have left no holes for arms and therefore carry nothing at all.
“That’s a poor choice,” observes one sage spectator near me.

Entering the battlefield is a man perhaps too congenial to be taken seriously as an uncontrolled berserker, holding a megaphone. This is Mat Kladney, co-creator of the UK version of Boxwars (which originated in Australia), and driving force behind the San Francisco edition. One by one, he introduces the combatants by their *noms de guerre*: the aforementioned Middle Class America, Robox, Tower of Power, I love Microwaves. Five year-old Ben Michaels captures the “aww cute” vote in his self-decorated cardboard cube, while Dapper Ehren (Tye) and Awesome Ashley (Raj) capture the “hell’s yes” award with a pre-battle marriage proposal and acceptance of same—moments before all assembled box-warriors are given the go-ahead to clobber the snot out of each other.

After a countdown from the crowd, the cardboard-clad foot soldiers rush into the mostly unstructured fray, pummeling whoever happens to be nearby. Alliances are forged and broken almost immediately, an armless Gameboy is beaten down and set upon by a mob. Awesome Ashley, recovered from her beau’s surprise announcement, swings her cardboard war hammer with experienced vigor, while a pair of disarmed legionnaires start wrestling each other instead. Just fifteen minutes after it begins, the battle is effectively over, a growing pile of destroyed armor and discarded weaponry left in the middle of the field. There is no clear winner of a Boxwar, which Kladney (whose fight philosophy is simply “have fun”) emphasizes as the point.

“Everyone wins at Boxwars,” he asserts. “When winning…comes into play, people start to take things way too seriously.

Live Shots: ABADA-Capoeira’s “The Spirit of Brazil”

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Sparking machetes. Lots of them, clanking against each other, as the dancers holding them ran in circles.

I’ll be honest, sitting in the front row was slightly intimidating, and also rather exhilarating! The ABADÁ-Capoeira dance troupe, plus special guests from as far Switzerland, filled the stage with pure energy, in rehearsal for the troupe’s “Spirit of Brazil” show, running Thu/18-Sun/20. 

One of the dances tells the story of an ancient church in Brazil, where people of all religions went to be blessed. It was a moody and beautiful piece. There’s live music, soulful singing by the musicians and the dancers, and, yes, seriously speedy dance moves involving very large, sharp knives. It’s primal, wild, and filled with history. Go see it — just make sure your eyebrows don’t get shaved off!

ABADÁ-Capoeira San Francisco’s “The Spirit of Brazil”
Thur/18-Sat/20, 7pm, $23
Sun, October 21, 3pm
ODC Theater
3153 17th St., SF
www.odcdance.org

French Cinema Now: A weeklong French film festival

Maria Poblet
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French Cinema Now: A weeklong French film festival

The San Francisco Film Society presents French Cinema Now.

The weeklong festival brings the most significant new work from international francophone cinema to San Francisco. From the comedic delights of opening night’s Camille Rewinds (Best Screenplay at Cannes Film Festival), Mobile Home, and My Worst Nightmare to more dramatic portraits of modern life such as Sister (Switzerland’s official Oscar submission; watch the trailer below) and Donoma (Louis Delluc Prize Winner), there is something for Francophiles of all flavors. Gallic stars like Isabelle Huppert, Léa Seydoux and Pierre Richard—along with celebrated American actors Jane Fonda and Gillian Anderson notably appearing in French-language roles—come together with directors including Ursula Meier (will be in attendance for Sister), Anne Fontaine, Noémie Lvovsky and newcomer Djinn Carrénard to present compelling stories of aging gracefully, sibling relationships and the difficulties encountered when trying to leave home.  For the full program and tickets, follow this link.

Wednesday, October 24 thru Tuesday, October 30 @ Landmark’s Embarcadero Center, One Embarcadero, SF

 

Bat-hurt

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS After the game we went to the Pilsner Inn to drink with the other team and watch the 49ers. Who, btw, ended up winning that Sunday by twice as much as we did.

Our relatively new li’l football team, like the big ol’ San Francisco one, is developing an identity as a defensive powerhouse. I like this. It was the talk of the opposition, down the bar: how we had befuddled the bejesus out of them, to the tune of four interceptions, two returned by Stringbean for touchdowns, and a fumble recovery.

Their quarterback, who sat next to me at the bar with a gigantic oozing turfburn on her leg, revisited these frustrations smilingly, and with compliments all-around. I doubt the Bills were so gracious, bellying up to the bar with the Niners later that afternoon, but I imagine they oozed too. Football is a tough sport, even when you play it with flags.

But baseball hurts more.

How I know is the next day I was at the Mission Playground with Hedgehog playing one-on-one baseball on the basketball court, and she lined one off my arm, then another one into my stomach, and then a third off the top of my knee.

Now that she’s been cleared to swing a bat, she just won’t leave me alone. She’s making up for lost time, baseballwise. But gets bored easily with soft toss, which is a shame, because really that’s the safest way to perfect your swing in an outdoor basketball court.

So now I am blacker and bluer than ever. And I am soaking in the tub with a package of frozen edamame on my knee, listening to postseason baseball and reading Great Expectations. Re-reading. Technically, if you must know: re-re-re-re-reading.

CHEAP SPORTS

by Hedgehog

I missed Chicken Farmer’s FMOIBWFIOBPFFL (female, male, or otherwise-identified bio-women and female-identified other-bodied persons flag football league) game on Sunday because I had a pre-production meeting with Pork Chop Sal, my right hand gal (Chicken Farmer gets the left because she broke it. And because I’m left-handed so, you know…) We’re in pre-production on the next short movie.

Yes: already.

And no, you’re not working on it.

Why not? You really should be. Chicken Farmer caters, I boss people around … It’s just like any other day in the Chicken Farmer/Hedgehog household except there’s a camera rolling and Earl Butter sits on our couch more, often with the Maze, cracking wise.

Anyways, Sugoi Sushi popped up at Hill and Valencia back in July-uary, around about the same time we popped back into town. Like us, they decided to stay. Which is good because it took us a while to get there. It took us until Monday, when the sushi mood struck. And then again on Wednesday, because Bikkets and her mister were in town and the sushi mood struck them, too.

I’m no food writer but both times the sushi was fresh, the ramen was firm, the waitstaff was friendly, and they brought little treats to the table. For free! Can’t get cheaper than free. The things with prices attached aren’t overly pricey, either. It’s Chicken Farmer’s new favorite restaurant. But be warned: spicy doesn’t mean the same thing to Sugoi as it does to the rest of the world. So don’t expect much heat out of the spicy sausage.

It’s more like smoky, teeny kielbasa.

Cheap Eats continued

But delicious nonetheless. It reminded me a little of longanisa, those little Filipino sausages I so love.

It was the treats I took issue with. A mayonnaise-having dynamite roll one night, and mushrooms the other. And if there are two things that start with m that I don’t like, those are them.

But Hedgehog is right: You can’t argue with free.

As for her over-acronymization of the SFWFFL, I can argue … but won’t.

SUGOI SUSHI

Mon-Thu 5:30-10:30pm; Fri-Sat 5:30-11pm; Sun 5-9:30pm

1058 Valencia, SF

(415) 401-8442

AE,D,MC,V

Beer & wine

 

SF Stories: About the illustrator

Andrew Lam
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SF Stories: About the illustrator

For the special issue marking the 46th anniversary of the Guardian, we gathered stories about the city from some of the its best writers. To illuminate the text, we asked ace San Francisco fine artist and illustrator Lisa Congdon to paint a series of images representing contemporary San Francisco iconography. Lisa is best known for her colorful paintings and collages, and her vast catalog of work includes illustrations for Chronicle Books, Harper Collins Publishing, and Simon and Schuster, among others. She’s also known for her hand-lettering and pattern design, and keeps a daily blog of her work called “Today is Going to be Awesome.” She lives in the Mission District of San Francisco with her partner, chihuahua, and two cats. 

 

Boozy shakes

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Boozy shakes

virginia@sfbg.com

APPETITE A wave of old fashioned soda fountains serving alcoholic and non-alcoholic treats alongside quality food is hitting various parts of the country, with two notables in San Francisco.

I’ve already written about the incredible, one-of-a-kind Ice Cream Bar (815 Cole, SF. 415-742-4932, www.theicecreambarsf.com). Reviving the lactart, phosphate, and traditional sassafras root beer, it reaches past the 1950s all the way back to the 1890s. Recent changes at the family friendly shop include the launch of a food menu of comfortable diner fare and the gain of a beer and wine license.

An egg salad sandwich — made with slices of thick, house-baked brioche and served with a pickle and roasted vegetable salad or house-made sweet potato chips, as with all sandwiches here — is soft and lively, with chives, arugula, and the clincher: pimento cheese. My favorite, the tuna melt, evokes childhood, elevated by Gruyere cheese, organic tomatoes, and arugula.

There’s one “must” on the new alcoholic section of the soda fountain menu: a classic Angostura phosphate. Fizzy with acid phosphate, gum foam and soda, a heavy pour of Angostura Bitters makes for a spiced beauty, conjuring fall and winter simultaneously. Can’t Stop is a notable dessert of butterscotch syrup, whole egg and cream, effervescent with Drakes Bay Hefeweizen (adding notes of grain and hay), topped with a musky Carpano Antica vermouth float.

Joining Ice Cream Bar in the fountain revival is the new Corner Store (5 Masonic Ave., 415-359-1800, www.thecornerstore-sf.com), in the old Hukilau space, from 330 Ritch business partners Miles Palliser and Ezra Berman. Old-fashioned in ethos, contemporary in style, this all-day restaurant and fountain serves sodas, candy, beer, wine, and gourmet food. The airy space and outdoor sidewalk patio nod to an era gone by. The menu seems straightforward, but dishes become more intriguing at second glance.

Chef Nick Adams (Salt House, Town Hall) elevates the umpteenth roasted beets plate ($8) with Greek yogurt, candied almonds, purslane, and radicchio in honey vinaigrette: it’s sweet, nutty, earthy, and creamy. Likewise, house smoked salmon ($10) goes well beyond the usual piece of salmon with potato pancake. An herb-laden egg salad flanks a crisp potato pancake, multiple slices of silky, fresh salmon, and mound of lettuce.

Whether a burger ($12) laden with aged cheddar, pickled red onions, pickles and bacon jam, or a fried green tomato sandwich ($9) with burrata and avocado at lunch, items between bread are done right here. Thoughtful $16 entrees are a steal compared to similar dishes at greater cost elsewhere in town, like Snake River pork loin ($16), co-mingling with fennel, marble potatoes, and pancetta, invigorated with shishito peppers and a zippy nectarine mostarda. A side of house brioche dinner rolls ($3) with honey butter and sea salt makes it homey.

Hans Hinrichs (25 Lusk, Foreign Cinema) helms a soda fountain menu of cocktails ($10), boozy shakes ($10), and sodas ($8), using local or American craft spirits whenever possible. Though not the journey through soda fountain history you’ll find at Ice Cream Bar, Hinrichs creates drinks that make you feel like a kid again… with booze.

The Muir Trail is a tribute to local nature, both in name and the use of St. George Terroir Gin, the Bay Area’s native gin. Hinrichs allows the gin to shine alongside tart huckleberry puree (huckleberry juice is infused with a sachet of spices, thinning it out with port wine reduction), dry vermouth, lemon, and bitters. Sans alcohol, Lone Mountain Egg Cream is dulce de leche and sea salt, creamy with milk, perky with seltzer, plus a number of bottled classic sodas like Cheerwine and Dang! Butterscotch Beer ($4).

Spirits-laden shakes induce cravings. 50/50 — spiced rum, orange marmalade, vanilla ice cream — is textured and rich with rum and marmalade, accented by strips of candied orange peel. My youthful favorite, a Grasshopper, is a minty dream with Tempus Fugit’s unparalleled Creme de Menthe and Creme de Cacao, vanilla ice cream, and a hint La Sorciere absinthe to perk up the mint.

Probably my favorite of all three boozy shakes is the Manhattan. Tasting like a real Manhattan, punchy with bourbon, sweet vermouth, cherry syrup, creamy with vanilla ice cream, bourbon shines though Hinrichs uses no more than one ounce of base spirit plus half-to-one ounce of any other liqueur in any given shake. It’s a perfect combination.

 

Our Weekly Picks: October 17-23

Andrew Lam
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WEDNESDAY 17

Bob Dylan

What does one need to know in order to decide whether or not to go to one of the upcoming Bay Area Bob Dylan concerts? What more can you say about a legendary singer-songwriter who has left an indelible mark on the fabric of American culture for 50 years — the man who earlier this year was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his contributions to this country via his more than 600 songs, including “The Times They Are A-Changin'” and “Blowin’ in the Wind?” All you need to know is that Dylan is in town, there are still tickets available, and you will never forgive yourself if you miss the opportunity to see this one of a kind icon. (Sean McCourt)

With Mark Knopfler

Wed/17-Thu/18, 7:30pm, $59.50–$125

Bill Graham Civic Auditorium

99 Grove, SF

www.apeconcerts.com

 

THURSDAY 18

Makers Nightlife

Do you need to have a reason to engineer cool robots and get generally crafty? If your answer is, “No, just do it!” you might like Maker Faire, a showcase of DIY creativity and cool technology. And there doesn’t seem to be a better place to see it than inside the living domes of the California Academy of Sciences. Many projects will be on display for you to ogle and nerd-out on, including pieces by Applied Kinetic Arts and a jukebox-style dancing robot. If the creativity gets you itching to work with your hands, the event will be ready with a craft table for making freak flags. Or you can just sit back and enjoy a live performance by the very cerebral, digital painter, J-Watt. Either way, it should be a fun night of quirkiness, creativity, and intellectual stimulation. (Molly Champlin)

6pm, $12

California Academy of Sciences

55 Music Concourse

(415) 379-8000

www.calacademy.org


FRIDAY 19

Jason Lytle of Grandaddy

It’s been a great year to be a Grandaddy fan. Not only did 2012 yield a handful of unexpected reunion shows for the Modesto space pop band (including an excellent Outside Lands night show at the Independent), but now frontperson Jason Lytle has just released Dept. of Disappearance, his second album of solo material. Just as on 2009’s Yours Truly, the Commuter, Lytle’s new batch of tracks maintains his knack for penning achingly beautiful songs full of swoon-worthy keyboard lines, touching lyrics, and warmly lush DIY production. (Landon Moblad)

With Sea Of Bees

8pm $20

Swedish American Hall

2174 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

www.cafedunord.com

 

Stolen Babies and the Fuxedos

While there’s a good chance that you’ll be terrified, bemused, appalled, or amazed by the aggressively madcap triple-header of Darling Freakhead, the Fuxedos, and Stolen Babies, you most certainly will not be bored. What with the polymetric layers of Darling Freakhead’s nihilistic introspection, the twisted, sideshow extroversion of the Fuxedos’ leader, Danny Shorago, and the steampunkish dark carnival menace of Stolen Babies, plus plenty of puppet carnage, costume changes, and apocalyptic accordion interludes, this is one evening guaranteed to haunt your consciousness, as well as your eardrums, for a long time afterwards. (Nicole Gluckstern)

9pm, $12

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

 

Tiger Army

Berkeley-spawned rocker band Tiger Army released its self-titled debut record 13 years ago this month — so it’s a fitting time to return to the Bay Area for two special shows, part of “Octoberflame,” a fifth annual run of gigs that take place around each Halloween. Here’s hoping the band kicks off with its classic intro of “Nightfall” and “Nocturnal,” a psychobilly-tinged combo from the early days that would set the standard for the group’s darkly melodic sound — it would be a most appropriate soundtrack for the season. (McCourt)

With the Goddamn Gallows, Death March (Fri.); Suedehead, God Module (Sat.).

Fri/19-Sat/20, 8:30pm, $23

Slim’s

333 11th St., SF

(415) 255-0333

www.slimspresents.com


SATURDAY 20

Trolley Dances

The idea started in San Diego, where streetcars actually are called trolleys. This hasn’t stopped the yearly version of San Francisco Trolley Dances to become a major hit among (some) tourists and (lots of) locals. Now in its ninth year, this mini-festival of public art has yet to run out of steam. More and more artists — and not only dancers — seem to be excited about the format. The offerings this time around include stilt walkers and circus artists, dance theater companies, carnival performers, and dancers from street to modern to African. You can do the whole tour on foot or on a bike if you are so inclined. For a map, consult the website. (Rita Felciano)

Sat/20-Sun/21, 11am- 2:45pm (every 45 min), free with Muni ticket

Starts at Mission and Fifth Street, SF

(415) 226-1139

www.epiphanydance.org

 

The Hula Show 2012

You might think about hula and imagine rapidly shaking grass skirts finishing off a day spent lounging on refreshingly warm, blue beaches. If you feel that Hawaiian vacation nostalgia hitting you, let Na Lei Hulu I Ka Wekiu transport you back. Evoking the slow pace of Hawaiian life, their dances allow you to luxuriate in each movement like a cool breeze rustling through palm trees. But it’s not all poi and roasted pig — the San Francisco-based troupe brings things up to the city pace by mixing traditional Hula with more contemporary music and styles to create a dynamic stage performance. Be prepared to open your eyes to Polynesian dance as an art form in a way you’ll never see at a tourist-attraction luau. (Champlin)

Through Oct. 28

Sat/20, 8pm; Sun/21, 3pm, $35-$45

Palace of Fine Arts Theater

3301 Lyon

(415) 392-4400

www.palaceoffinearts.org

 

Wax Idols

Wax Idols’ badass frontperson Heather Fedewa (who goes by the moniker “Hether Fortune”) has dubbed her refreshingly unique garage pop-punk-death rock genre “morbid classics” and cites Christian Death as a prominent artistic influence. This raucous Oakland-based quartet brings it on heavy, but its fun, sardonic tunes are quite accessible to the less-than-devout death rockers among us. Fortune’s songs focus on morbidity, love, and defiance, and the band’s sound oscillates between the sunny, upbeat punk of “Gold Sneakers” and the dark and raw introspection of “The Last Drop.” Wax Idols recently finished recording their second LP, so stay tuned! (Mia Sullivan)

With Wymond Miles, Evil Eyes

8pm, $10

Brick and Mortar

1710 Mission, SF

(415) 800-8782

www.brickandmortarmusic.com

 

Masquerotica

Those suffering post-Folsom exhibitionist blues need no longer wear overmuch clothing, for one night at least. Masquerotica takes over one of the largest venues in town — which, hooray, isn’t the hard to get to Cow Palace. The Concourse Exhibition Center is way closer to the center of town, way less mileage to truck your thigh highs and stripper-envy through. The bash promises a stadium-sized assortment of erotic artists, DJs, acrobats, and fetish designers vending their leather and lace wares. Rest assured that T&A won’t be the only stars present: Kink.com talent, contortionist Sylvia Currin, the ladies of Trannyshack, and lascivious visual artists will all be featured at the second year in a row of this no-streetwear-allowed blowout. (Caitlin Donohue)

8:30pm-3am, $55–$125

Concourse Exhibition Center

635 Eighth St., SF

www.masquerotica.com


SUNDAY 21

Kaki King

A talented guitarist who has done the indie-rock thing and just married her partner in New York last week (seriously California, get on it), don’t let Kaki King fool you; she’s not another Tegan and Sara. More about the music than the iconery, Kaki King is exploring life through her love of guitar and the result is genuinely heartfelt and evocative work. She began learning the instrument at the age of four but soon became more serious about drums. Luckily for us, she returned to guitar for her classical training in college. Percussive techniques remain a signature of her style though and are just one way she explores all that the instrument can do, including unique tunings and steel lap guitar. Her new album, Glow, is entirely instrumental and a little more experimental than previous work. She describes this step in a new direction as one of those things that you can’t believe you’ve made, like something bigger than you must have been helping out. (Champlin)

With Lady Lamb the Beekeeper

7pm, $20; 9pm, $15

Yoshi’s SF

1330 Fillmore, SF

(415) 655-5600

www.yoshis.com


MONDAY 22

Ultraísta

Few artists split the difference between alt and mainstream as convincingly as Radiohead/Beck/R.E.M. mega-producer Nigel Godrich. Yet, while he’s built a giant reputation as a behind-the-scenes figure, the guy’s true musical sensibility has always remained somewhat of a mystery. Until now, with the development of Ultraísta: a hypnotic, Afrobeaty, Krautified synth-pop band he can proudly call his own. Think of them as a 21st century equivalent to Garbage: another supergroup of sorts, featuring assertive female vocals, synth contributions from an elusive knob-twiddler for the stars (in their case, Nirvana producer Butch Vig), and deep, layered production that’s constantly busy but never muddy or overstuffed. On Ultraísta’s self-titled debut, Godrich’s angular, heavily syncopated King of Limbs aesthetic remains in full force; we’re just glad to hear him writing the hooks this time around. (Taylor Kaplan)

With Astronauts, etc.

8pm, $18

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1421

www.theindependentsf.com


TUESDAY 23

Dan Deacon

If there were anything that could top the hyperkinetic charm of a Dan Deacon album, it would likely be a Dan Deacon show. The Baltimore-based experimental electronic musician treats live performances as joyous, life-affirming events full of enthusiastic crowd participation, all spearheaded by Deacon himself. America, his newest LP, continues to evolve the more nuanced and fleshed out sound he first dabbled with on Bromst in 2009. As a result, this tour’s live shows will include a full backing ensemble to help recreate America‘s frenetic blend of electronic composition and live orchestration. (Moblad)

With Height with Friends, Chester Endersby Gwazda, Alan Resnick

8pm, $16

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

www.slimspresents.com

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. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

THEATER

OPENING

And That’s What Little Girls Are Made Of Tides Theatre, 533 Sutter, SF; www.whatgirlsaremadeof.com. $20-30. Opens Thu/19, 8pm. Runs Thu-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through Nov 4. Jennifer Wilson’s multimedia play chronicles her attempts to break into the male-dominated world of venture capital funds.

Fat Pig Boxcar Theatre Studio, 125A Hyde, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $20. Opens Thu/18, 8pm. Runs Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through Nov 10. Theater Toda presents Neil LaBute’s dark comedy about a man who faces scrutiny from his friends when he falls for a plus-sized woman.

Fierce Love: Stories From Black Gay Life New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; www.nctcsf.org. $25-37. Previews Wed/17-Thu/18, 8pm. Opens Fri/19, 8pm. Runs Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through Oct 28. Pomo Afro Homos performs a revival of of its 1991 hit about the struggles of African American gay men in America.

BAY AREA

Richard III Live Oak Theatre, 1301 Shattuck, Berk; www.aeofberkeley.org. $12-15. Opens Fri/19, 8pm. Runs Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through Nov 17. Actors Ensemble of Berkeley performs the Shakespeare classic.

Within the Wheel Live Oak Park, 1301 Shattuck, Berk; www.raggedwing.org. Free. Previews Wed/17, 6pm. Opens Thu/18, 6pm. Runs Thu-Sat, 6pm (last entry 7:30pm; special Halloween show Oct 31). Through Nov 3. Ragged Wing Ensemble presents an immersive performance experience inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

ONGOING

Bound By Blood Boxcar Theatre Playhouse, 505 Natoma, SF; www.ianiroproductions.com. $20. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through Oct 27. Opening on the heels of ACT’s production of The Normal Heart, local theater-maker Eric Inman’s Bound By Blood also explores the devastating human fallout of the AIDS crisis as experienced by the two families — one of blood relations and one of chosen friends — of a young gay man, whose death affects them all. Appearing onstage both as a ghost and in a series of flashbacks, Justin Walker (played by Inman) deals with his fear of dying by ditching his meds in favor of drink, and his fear of coming out to his conservative family by postponing the inevitable until it’s too late, leaving his friends holding the burden of his inconvenient truth in their unwilling hands. Awkward moments abound as Justin’s buddies ponder the ethics of outing him posthumously, as his mother (Sally Hogarty) and sister (CC Sheldon) bicker incessantly and his erstwhile "beard" Alice (Abigail Edber) pluckily spearheads the funeral planning. This is Inman’s first full-length play, which helps to explain the often-clunky dialogue and under-developed characters that unfortunately obscure the play’s dramatic potential, but the ideals he champions within — tolerance, self-acceptance, integrity, loyalty, love — are ones well worth exploring, even imperfectly. (Gluckstern)

Elect to Laugh Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. Tue, 8pm. Through Nov 6. $15-50. Veteran political comedian Will Durst emphasizes he’s watching the news and keeping track of the presidential race "so you don’t have to." No kidding, it sounds like brutal work for anyone other than a professional comedian — for whom alone it must be Willy Wonka’s edible Eden of delicious material. Durst deserves thanks for ingesting this material and converting it into funny, but between the ingesting and out-jesting there’s the risk of turning too palatable what amounts to a deeply offensive excuse for a democratic process, as we once again hurtle and are herded toward another election-year November, with its attendant massive anticlimax and hangover already so close you can touch them. Durst knows his politics and comedy backwards and forwards, and the evolving show, which pops up at the Marsh every Tuesday in the run-up to election night, offers consistent laughs born on his breezy, infectious delivery. One just wishes there were some alternative political universe that also made itself known alongside the deft two-party sportscasting. (Avila)

The Fifth Element: Live! Dark Room Theater, 2263 Mission, SF; www.darkroomsf.com. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through Oct 27. Comedic adaptation of the 1997 Luc Besson sci-fi epic.

Foodies! The Musical Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter, SF; www.foodiesthemusical.com. $30-34. Fri-Sat, 8pm (no show Nov 17). Open-ended. AWAT Productions presents Morris Bobrow’s musical comedy revue all about food.

Geezer Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $30-100. Sat, 8pm; Sun, 7pm. Through Nov 18. Geoff Hoyle’s popular solo show about aging returns.

Love in the Time of Zombies Café Royale, 800 Post, SF; sftheaterpub.wordpress.com. Free ($5 donation suggested). Mon-Tue, 8pm. Through Oct 30. San Francisco Theater Pub performs Kirk Shimano’s "rom-zom-com."

Of Thee I Sing Eureka Theatre, 215 Jackson, SF; www.42ndstmoon.org. $25-75. Wed, 7pm; Thu-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 6pm; Sun, 3pm. Through Oct 21. 42nd Street Moon performs George and Ira Gershwin’s classic political satire.

The Real Americans Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $25-50. Fri, 8pm; Sat, 8:30pm. Extended through Oct 27. Dan Hoyle’s hit show, inspired by the people and places he encountered during his 100-day road trip across America in 2009, continues.

Roseanne: Live! Rebel, 1760 Market, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $25. Wed, 7 and 9pm (no shows Oct 31). Through Nov 14. Lady Bear, Heklina, D’Arcy Drollinger, and more star in this tribute to the long-running sitcom.

The Scotland Company Exit Theatre, 156 Eddy, SF; www.thunderbirdtheatre.com. $15-25. Thu-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Through Oct 27. Thunderbird Theatre Company performs Jake Rosenberg’s new comedy.

Shocktoberfest 13: The Bride of Death Hypnodrome, 575 10th St, SF; www.thrillpeddlers.com. $25-35. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through Nov 17. Thrillpeddlers’ seasonal assortment of yeasty Grand Guignol playlets is a mixed bag of treats, but it all goes so nicely with the autumnal slink into early nights and dark cravings. Fredrick Whitney’s Coals of Fire is lightly amusing, if far from smoking, as a two-hander about a blind older matron (Leigh Crow) who discovers her young companion (Zelda Koznofski, alternating nights with Nancy French) has been secretly schtupping her husband. I’m a Mummy is a short, not very effective musical interlude by Douglas Byng, featuring the bright pair of Jim Jeske and Annie Larson as Mr. and Mrs., respectively. The titular feature, The Bride of Death, written by Michael Phillis and directed by Russell Blackwood, proves a worthy centerpiece, unfolding an intriguing, well-acted tale about a reporter (Phillis) and his photographer (Flynn DeMarco) arriving at a stormy castle to interview a strangely youthful Grand Guignol stage star (Bonni Suval) making her film debut. After another, this time more rousing musical number, Those Beautiful Ghouls (with music and lyrics by Scrumbly Koldewyn; directed and choreographed by D’Arcy Drollinger), comes the evening’s real high point, The Twisted Pair by Rob Keefe, acted to the bloody hilt by leads Blackwood and DeMarco as the titular duo of scientists driven mad by an experimental batch of ‘crazy’ glue. All of it comes capped, of course, by the company’s signature lights-out spook show. (Avila)

"Strindberg Cycle: The Chamber Plays in Rep" Exit on Taylor, 277 Taylor, SF; www.cuttingball.com. $10-50 (festival pass, $75). Previews Oct 25, 7:30pm and Oct 26, 8pm (part two); Nov 1, 7:30pm and Nov 2, 8pm (part three). Opens Thu/18, 7:30pm (part one); Oct 27, 8pm (part two); and Nov 3, 8pm (part three). Runs Thu, 7:30pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 5pm. Through Nov 18. Cutting Ball performs a festival of August Strindberg in three parts: The Ghost Sonata, The Pelican and The Black Glove, and Storm and Burned House.

The Waiting Period Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Thu-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Extended through Oct 27. 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. (Avila)

BAY AREA

Acid Test: The Many Incarnations of Ram Dass Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Thu-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Through Nov 24. Lynne Kaufman’s new play stars Warren David Keith as the noted spiritual figure.

Assassins Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; www.shotgunplayers.org. $20-30. Wed-Thu, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through Nov 4. Shotgun Players interrupts this season of dreary electoral debates with an important announcement about the country you live in, as the sure and provocative 1990 musical by Stephen Sondheim (music and lyrics) and John Weidman (book) stitches together American history’s odd assortment of successful and failed presidential assassins to explore the darker recesses of the national mythos. Through an eclectic score of deft period-specific songs and the narrative framework of a feverish carnival shooting gallery — overseen by a nefarious proprietor (Jeff Garrett) — a pageant of kooks and rebels parades, beginning with pioneer assassin John Wilkes Booth (an aptly imposing Galen Murphy-Hoffman). He, in turn, acts as a sort of patron saint to those that follow in his footsteps — including Charles Guiteau (Steven Hess), Leon Czolgosz (Dan Saski), Giuseppe Zangara (Aleph Ayin), John Hinckley (Danny Cozart), Sam Byck (Ryan Drummond), Sara Jane Moore (Rebecca Castelli), Squeaky Fromme (Cody Metzger), and of course Lee Harvey Oswald (Kevin Singer, in a part that doubles with that of the Balladeer). Throughout, director Susannah Martin’s strong cast and musical director David Möschler’s lively eight-piece band insure a raucous, thoughtful, and intimate American fever dream. (Avila)

An Iliad Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison, Berk; www.berkeleyrep.org. $14.50-77. Opens Wed/17, 8pm. Runs Tue and Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Wed and Sun, 7pm (also Sun, 2pm). Through Nov 11. Berkeley Rep performs Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare’s Homer-inspired tale.

The Kipling Hotel: True Misadventures of the Electric Pink ’80s Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Sat, 8:30pm; Sun, 7pm. Extended through Dec 16. This new autobiographical solo show by Don Reed, writer-performer of the fine and long-running East 14th, is another slice of the artist’s journey from 1970s Oakland ghetto to comedy-circuit respectability — here via a partial debate-scholarship to UCLA. The titular Los Angeles residency hotel was where Reed lived and worked for a time in the 1980s while attending university. It’s also a rich mine of memory and material for this physically protean and charismatic comic actor, who sails through two acts of often hilarious, sometimes touching vignettes loosely structured around his time on the hotel’s young wait staff, which catered to the needs of elderly patrons who might need conversation as much as breakfast. On opening night, the episodic narrative seemed to pass through several endings before settling on one whose tidy moral was delivered with too heavy a hand, but if the piece runs a little long, it’s only the last 20 minutes that noticeably meanders. And even with some awkward bumps along the way, it’s never a dull thing watching Reed work. (Avila)

Richard the First: Part One, Part Two, Part Three Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant, Berk; www.centralworks.org. $14-25. Opens Thu/18, 8pm (part one); Fri/19, 8pm (part two); and Sat/20, 8pm (part three). Runs Thu-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm (three-part marathon Sundays, Nov 11 and 18, 2, 5, 8pm). Through Nov 18. This Central Works Method Trilogy presents a rotating schedule of three plays by Gary Graves about the king known as "the Lionheart."

Sex, Slugs and Accordion Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. $10. Wed, 8pm. Through Nov 14. Jetty Swart, a.k.a. Jet Black Pearl, stars in this "wild and exotic evening of song."

33 Variations TheatreWorks at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro, Mtn View; www.theatreworks.org. $23-73. Tue-Wed, 7:30pm; Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through Oct 28. TheatreWorks performs Moisés Kaufman’s drama about a contemporary musicologist struggling to solve one of Beethoven’s greatest mysteries, and a connecting story about the composer himself.

Topdog/Underdog Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller, Mill Valley; www.marintheatre.org. $36-57. Wed/17, 7:30pm; Thu/18-Sat/20, 8pm (also Sat/20, 2pm); Sun/21, 2 and 7pm. Marin Theatre Company performs Suzan-Lori Parks’ Pulitzer Prize winner about a contentious pair of brothers.

The World’s Funniest Bubble Show Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. $8-50. Sun, 11am; Nov 23-25, 11am. Through Nov 25. Louis "The Amazing Bubble Man" Pearl brings his lighter-than-air show back to the Marsh.

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

Alonzo King LINES Ballet Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, 700 Howard, SF; www.ybca.org. Fri/19-Sat/20 and Oct 24-27, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through Oct 28. The company celebrates 30 years with its fall home season.

BATS Improv Bayfront Theater, B350 Fort Mason Center, SF; www.improv.org. Fri, 8pm, through Oct 26: "This Just In!," $20. Sat, 8pm, through Oct 27: "Improvised Horror Musical," $20.

"Comedy Bodega" Esta Noche Nightclub, 3079 16th St, SF; www.comedybodega.com. Thu, 8pm. Ongoing. No cover (one drink minumum). This week: Amy Miller, Kurt Weitzmann, Martini Paratore, and Jessica Sele.

"Comikaze Lounge" Café Royale, 800 Post, SF; www.comikazelounge.com. Wed/17, 8pm. Free. Stand-up with Casey Ley and more.

"Crooked Little Hearts" Dance Mission Theater, 3316 24th St, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Fri/19-Sat/20, 8pm. $20. The Ananta Project’s home season includes a world premiere that uses dance to explore the nuances of human intimacy.

"Gravity (and other large things)" NOHspace, 2840 Mariposa, SF; www.performancelab.org. Fri/19-Sat/20, 8pm; Sun/21, 4pm. $12-25. Right Brain Performancelab present this evening-length dance-theater piece.

"Halloween! The Ballad of Michele Myers" CounterPULSE, 1310 Mission, SF; michelemyers2012.eventbrite.com. Fri-Sun and Oct 31, 8pm. Through Oct 31. $25. Drag superstar Raya Light returns in the seasonally-appropriate horror musical.

"The Hula Show 2012" Palace of Fine Arts, 3301 Lyon, SF; www.naheihulu.org. Sat/20 and Oct 26-27, 8pm; Sun/21 and Oct 28, 8pm (children’s matinee Oct 28, noon). $35-90. Na Lei Hulu I Ka Wekiu performs its annual show, featuring a hula satirizing President Obama’s birth certificate controversy.

"Let Us Find the Words" Contemporary Jewish Museum, 736 Mission, SF; www.thecjm.org. Thu/18, 6:30pm; Fri.19, 1pm. Free with museum admission ($5-12). Actors Dominique Frot and Alexander Muheum present a dramatic reading of letters between poets Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan.

"Perverts Put Out: The Election Erection Edition" Center for Sex and Culture, 1369 Mission, SF; www.sexandculture.org. Sat/20, 7:30. $10-20. Dr. Carol Queen and Simon Sheppard host performances by Jen Cross, Greta Cristina, Gina de Vries, and more.

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

"San Francisco Trolley Dances 2012" 925 Mission, SF; www.epiphanydance.org. Sat/20-Sun/21, tours leave at 11am, 11:45am, 12:30pm, 1:15pm, 2pm, and 2:45pm. Free with Muni fare ($2). Climb aboard Muni for a unique performance experience at this annual event presented by Kim Epifano’s Epiphany Productions.

ShadowLight Theatre St. Cyprian’s Church, 2097 Turk, SF; www.noevalleymusicseries.com. Sat/20, 8pm. $15. Balinese shadow puppet theater with live gamelan accompaniment.

"Smack Dab" Magnet, 4122 18th St, SF; www.magnetsf.org. Wed/17, 8pm. Free. Open mic featuring local authors Belo Cipriani and Jim Provenzano.

"Times Bones" Kanbar Hall, Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, 3200 California, SF; www.mjdc.org. Thu/18-Sat/20, 8pm; Sun/21, 7pm. $18-31. Margaret Jenkins Dance Company previews a new work that will premiere in 2013.

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 17

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Bob Dylan Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, 99 Grove, SF; www.apeconconcerts.com. 7:30pm, $59.50-$125.50.

First Aid Kit, Dylan LeBlance Fillmore. 8pm, $22.50.

Scott Holt Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $15.

Lee Huff vs JC Rockit Johnny Foley’s. 9:30pm.

Imperative Reaction, Everything goes Cold, Ludovico Technique, Witch Was Right DNA Lounge. 9pm, $18.

Sonny Landreth, Danny Click Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $22.

Sarah McQuaid Biscuits and Blues. 8:30pm, $10.

Minus Gravity, Headlines, James Cavern Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 9:30pm, $10-$12.

Moral Crux, Deadones, Antizocial Hemlock Tavern. 8:30pm, $8.

Rocket Queens, Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers Elbo Room. 9pm, $8.

Terry Savastano Johnny Foley’s. 9pm, free.

Seatraffic, Real Numbers, American Professionals Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $8.

Soul Train Revival Boom Boom Room. 8pm, $5.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Cat’s Corner with Nathan Dias Savanna Jazz. 9pm, $10.

Orlando Cela Frankenart Mall, 515 Balboa, SF; www.orlandocela.com. 8pm, $10.

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

Frisky Frolics Rite Spote Cafe. 9pm, free.

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

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Radney Foster, Misisipi Mike Cafe Du Nord. 8pm, $15.

DANCE CLUBS

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

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.

Mercedez Munro, and Ginger Snap.

Obey the Kitty: Justin Milla Vessel, 85 Campton Place, SF; www.vesselsanfrancisco.com. 10pm, $5.

THURSDAY 18

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP.

Adam Ant, Brothers of Brazil Regency Ballroom. 8pm, $32.

Emily Bonn and the Vivants, Howell Devine, Stephanie Nilles Amnesia. 9pm, $7-$10.

Chris Cohen, Ashley Eriksson, Coconut Hemlock Tavern. 8:30pm, $10.

Bob Dylan Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, 99 Grove, SF; www.apeconconcerts.com. 7:30pm, $59.50-$125.50.

Freelance Whales, Geographer Mezzanine. 9pm, $20.

Generators, Sore Thumbs, Shell Corporation, Bastards of Young Thee Parkside. 9pm, $8.

Jon Gonzalez 50 Mason Social House, SF; www.50masonsocialhouse.com. 7pm.

Iron Lung, Process, Effluxus, Hunting Party Knockout. 10pm, $8.

Jane’s Addiction, Thenewno2 Warfield. 8pm, $52.50-$62.50.

John Lawton Trio Johnny Foley’s. 9pm, free.

Mansfield Aviator, Butterfly Knives, Capkins El Rio. 8pm, $5.

Meters Experience, Dredgetown Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 9pm, $15-$20.

Minibosses, Crashfast, Gnarboots Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

Poi Dog Pondering Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $21.

Rudy Columbini Band Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $15.

Soft Pack, Crocodiles, Heavy Hawaii Slim’s. 9pm, $16.

Tift Merrit, Amy Cook Cafe Du Nord. 8pm, $16-$18.

Rags Tuttle vs Lee Huff Johnny Foley’s. 9:30pm.

Van She, popscene DJs Rickshaw Stop. 10pm, $13-$15.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Cheryl Bentyne Rrazz Room. 8pm, $35.

Science Fiction Jazz 50 Mason Social House, SF; www.50masonsocialhouse.com. 10pm.

Stompy Jones Top of the Mark, 999 California, SF; www.topofthemark.com. 7:30pm, $10.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Emily Anne Rite Spot Cafe. 9pm, free.

Twang! Honky Tonk Fiddler’s Green, 1330 Columbus, SF; www.twanghonkytonk.com. 5pm. Live country music.

DANCE CLUBS

Afrolicious Elbo Room. 9:30pm, $5-$7. With DJ-host Pleasuremaker.

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

Base: Sasha Vessel, 85 Campton Place, SF; www.vesselsanfrancisco.com. 10pm, $5-$10.

Hubba Hubba Revue: Asylum DNA Lounge. 9pm, $12-$15.

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

FRIDAY 19

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Bleached Palms, Radishes Bender’s, 806 S. Van Ness, SF; www.bendersbar.com. 9pm, $5.

Bombay Bicycle Club, Vacationer Fillmore. 9pm, $22.50.

Coo Coo Birds, Electric Shepherd, Electric Magpie Thee Parkside. 9pm, $7.

Aaron Freeman Independent. 9pm, $25.

Lee Huff, Rome Balestrieri, Nathan Temby Johnny Foley’s. 9pm.

John Brown’s Body, Kyle Hollingsworth Band Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $20.

Kids on a Crime Spree, GRMLN, Manatee Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $8.

Jason Lytle, Sea of Bees Swedish American Hall. 8pm, $18-$20.

Meters Experience, Tracorum, Swoop Unit Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 9pm, $15-$20.

Mixers Johnny Foley’s. 9pm, free.

Mustache Harbor, Sean Tabor Bimbo’s. 9pm, $22.

Night Hikes, Correspondence School, Houses of Light Amnesia. 7pm.

Bill Ortiz Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $22.

Beth Orton, Sam Amidon Regency Ballroom. 8pm, $30.

Stolen Babies, Fuxedos, Darling Freakhead Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $12.

Tiger Army, Goddamn Gallows, Death March Slim’s. 8:30pm, $23.

Whigs, Record Company, Fake Your Own Death Rickshaw Stop. 9pm, $12-$15.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

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

Black Jazz Orchestra Top of the Mark, 999 California, SF; www.topofthemark.com. 9Pm, $10.

Harold Melvin’s Blue Notes Rrazz Room. 8pm, $30-$37.50.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Bluegrass Bonanza Plough and Stars. 9:30pm, $6-$10. With Roseman Creek.

Kaweh Monroe, 473 Broadway, SF; www.kaweh.com. 9:30pm, $15. Flamenco rumba salsa.

Lee Vilensky Trio Rite Spot Cafe. 9pm, free.

DANCE CLUBS

Albino! Fela Kuti Birthday Celebration Show Elbo Room. 9pm, $10.

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

Fedorable Queer Dance Party El Rio. 9pm, free.

Joe Lookout, 3600 16th St.,SF; www.lookoutsf.com. 9pm. Eight rotating DJs.

Odyssey with Neon Leon Public Works. 10pm, $10.

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.

Peaches (DJ set) 103 Harriet, SF; www.1015.com. 9pm.

Rage By the Pound DNA Lounge. 9pm, $25. With Funtcase, High Rankin, Schoolboy, Nerd Rage.

Toolroom Knights: Paul Thomas, David Gregory Vessel, 85 Campton Place, SF; www.vesselsanfrancisco.com. 10Pm, $20-$30.

SATURDAY 20

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Bassnectar, Ghostland Observatory, Gramatik, Gladkill Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, 99 Grove, SF; www.apeconconcerts.com. 8pm, $40.

Rome Balestrieri, Nathan Temby, Lee Huff Johnny Foley’s. 9pm.

Yasiin Bey (formerly known as Mos Def) Regency Ballroom. 9pm, $38.

Bottle Kids, Loose Cuts 50 Mason Social House, SF; www.50masonsocialhouse.com. 7pm.

Cheap Time, Unnatural Helpers, Warm Soda, Krells Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $10.

Zach Deputy Boom Boom Room. 8pm, $15.

Willis Earl Beal, Terese Taylor, Sean Smith Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

Foreign Exchange Mezzanine. 9pm.

GoKart Mozart Biscuits and Blues. 8:30 and 10:15pm, $10.

Jorma Kaukonen Swedish American Hall. 7 and 10pm, $32-$35.

Love Songs, Bar Feeders, Cyclops Bender’s, 800 S. Van Ness, SF; www.bendersbar.com. 10pm, $5.

Oak Creek Band Hotel Utah. 9pm, $8.

Pre Legendary, Chingadero Thee Parkside. 3pm, free.

Skin Divers Johnny Foley’s. 9pm, free.

Lavay Smith Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $20.

Stars, Diamond Rings, California Wives Fillmore. 8pm, $29.50.

Rodger Stella, Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble, Jencks Hemlock Tavern. 5pm, $6.

Tea Leaf Green, Mahgeetah Independent. 9pm, $20.

Tiger Army, Suedehead, God Module Slim’s. 8:30pm, $23.

Nick Waterhouse, Allah-Las Bimbo’s. 9pm, $18.

Michael Ward with Dogs and Fishes Riptide Tavern. 9:30pm, free.

Wax Idols, Wymond Miles, Evil Eyes Brick and Mortar Music Hall. 8pm, $7-$10.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

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

Harold Melvin’s Blue Notes Rrazz Room. 7 and 9:30pm, $30-$37.50.

"UP: San Francisco Street Festival and Exposition" 5M, Fifth and Mission, SF; sf.urbanprototyping.org. With Mark Fell, Aaron David Ross, Afrikan Sciences, Brian Hock, Loric, and more.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

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

Tony Ybarra Red Poppy Art House. 7:30pm.

DANCE CLUBS

Bootie SF: More Cowbell DNA Lounge. 9pm, $15.

Dancing Ghosts Hot Spot, 1414 Market St., SF; www.dancingghosts.com, 9:30 pm, $5, free before 10. DJs Xander and Le Perv host this darkwave dance party.

"DSF Clothing Co. and Art Gallery Anniversary" Public Works. 9pm, free with RSVP. With Motown on Monday DJs, Nickodemus, Afrolicious.

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

Masquerotica Concourse Exhibition Center, 636 Eighth St, SF; masquerotica2012.eventbrite. 8:30pm. With Stanton Warriors, Ron Kat’s Katdelic, Action Jackson, Hubba Hubba Revue, and more.

Nickodemus and Afrolicious Public Works Loft. 10pm, $5.

OK Hole Amnesia. 9pm.

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 pm. Rock, Chanson Francaise, Blues. Senegalese food and live music.

Saturday Night Soul Party Elbo Room. 10pm, $5-$10. With DJs Lucky, Paul Paul, Phengren Oswald.

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

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

SUNDAY 21

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Babmu Station, Inna Vision Independent. 9pm, $18.

Craig Horton Biscuits and Blues. 7 and 9pm, $15.

Tony Lucca, Justin Hopkins Cafe Du Nord. 8:30pm, $15.

Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, Dee-1 Fillmore. 8pm, $25.

Mako Sica, Brandon Nickel, Jeff Zittrain Band Hemlock Tavern. 6pm, $6.

Terry Savastano Johnny Foley’s. 9pm, free.

Socionic Rockit Room. 8pm, $8.

Allen Stone, Yuna, Tingsek Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $17.50.

Mike Stud Slim’s. 8:30pm, $13-$16.

Taking Back Sunday, Man Overboard Regency Ballroom. 7:30pm, $27.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Kaki King Yoshi’s SF. 7pm, $20; 9pm, $15.

Harold Melvin’s Blue Notes Rrazz Room. 7pm, $30-$37.50.

Rob Reich Trio Bliss Bar, 4026 24 St, SF; .www.blissbarsf.com. 4:30pm, $10.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Hillbilly Swing, B Stars Amnesia. 9pm, $7.

Sofia Talvik Hotel Utah. 8pm, $8.

DANCE CLUBS

Daytime Realness El Rio. 3pm, $8-$10. With Heklina, Stanley Frank, and DJ Carnita.

Dub Mission Elbo Room. 9pm, $6 after 9:30pm. With DJs Sep, Ludichris, Silver Back.

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

MONDAY 22

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Damir Johnny Foley’s. 9pm, free.

Shiny Toy Guns, MNDR, Of Verona Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $17.

Allen Stone, Yuna, Tingsek Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $17.50.

Ultraista, Astronauts, etc. Independent. 8pm, $18.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Bossa Nova Tunnel Top, 601 Bush, SF; (415) 722-6620. 8-11:30pm, free. Live acoustic Bossa Nova.

Gregg Marx Rrazz Room. 8pm.

Philippe Petit, Xambuca Cafe Du Nord. 8pm, $16.

Reuben Rye Rite Spot Cafe. 8:30pm, free.

DANCE CLUBS

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

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

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 23

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Bitch Magnet, Life Coach, Gold Medalists, Imperils Rickshaw Stop. 7:30pm, $15.

Calexico, Dodos Fillmore. 8pm, $25.

Tim Cohen, Jessica Pratt, Dylan Shearer Amnesia. 9:15pm.

Dan Deacon, Height with Friends, Chester Endersby Gwazda, Alan Resnick Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $16.

Nick Halstead Cafe Du Nord. 8pm, $16.

Moonbell, Golden Awesome, Indian Summer Knockout. 9:30pm.

Mt Hammer, Ash Thursday, Manzanita Falls El Rio. 7pm, $5.

Room of Voices, Broun Fellinis Elbo Room. 9pm, $10.

Rusted Root Independent. 8pm, $25.

Stan Erhart Band Johnny Foley’s. 9pm, free.

Qumran Orphics, Bill Orcutt, Marissa Anderson Hemlock Tavern. 8:30pm, $6.

Close encounters

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Close encounters

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE The six dancers of Kunst-Stoff’s the moment you stood still…#7 moNOs (Oct. 13-14 at the Old Mint Museum) managed to do something that had previously seemed impossible: they created a playground out of the building’s crumbling courtyard, surely the city’s most oppressive, garrison-like structure. At 50 minutes this romp of stealing, sharing, and varying movement phrases ranged from athletic to balletic, virtuosic to pedestrian. It would have worn out its ability to snare you into its universe, had it not ended with artistic director Yannis Adoniou’s free-spirited and loose-limbed solo, sweetly underscored by Bruno Augusto on keyboard. It’s easy to forget that this entrepreneurial artist is also a fine dancer.

Kunst-Stoff is not so much a company as a place where artists come together to explore affinities and differences. moment, one of a series of such encounters, is the result of this sextet having bounced back and forth ideas of the most disparate nature. Together they came up with scenes which varied between silly and somber, camp and charming. There was as much room for a passing-a-ball game — including, of course, the ubiquitous audience volunteers — as crawls and rolls on the floor and leaps across space. Letting down your hair, as Katie Gaydos did in her initial diagonal, seemed to be the order of the afternoon.

Initially unrelated ideas began to coalesce into something like a patchwork of movement, with rather surprising resilience. A dancer morphed from lying down with beating legs into somersaults and yoga poses. Later, frisky pile-ups did not really look so harmless.

For all the frantic activity in which dancers did not only pick up and vary phrases from each other, but also exchanged clothes, moment did not lack the stillness alluded to by its title. Lindsey Renee Derry, who can scream with the best of them, stood in a relevé in which her toes surely were glued to the floor. Gaydos looked abandoned on top of a “monument” while Calvin Hilpert, holding a weight aloft as if it was about to drop on his head, was hilarious with a screechy Frank Sinatra imitation. moment‘s recurring refrain had the dancers sitting on a bench. We looked at them; sometimes they looked back at us.

Elsewhere on stage this past weekend: British choreographer Russell Maliphant introduced himself at Cal Performances with the theatrically spectacular Eonnagata in 2010. Now, courtesy of San Francisco Performances, he returned with AfterLight (Oct. 13-14, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts), inspired by Russian dancer and Ballets Russes choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky. A great dancer and even greater choreographer, Nijinsky was also schizophrenic and spent the second half of his life in mental institutions. His best-known surviving work Afternoon of a Faun thoroughly shocked audiences at its premiere in 1912.

On the basis of his concept Maliphant intermittently draws you into a murky atmosphere of, perhaps, madness. But as a dance you only want to watch AfterLight once; further exposure is unlikely to reveal hidden treasures.

In Michael Hull’s lighting design, AfterLight is literally dark; at times you can hardly make out the dancers in a couple of shifting spotlights or through a thick carpet of inchoate shapes. As a single-minded expression of a restless mind this worked; in terms of a time-based art, it lacked sustaining power.

AfterLight opened with a solo for Thomasin Gülgeç, spinning as if on a turntable while his arms reached into the darkness around him. At the end we returned to that solitary figure that, instead of opening his body to an enlarging consciousness, shuts down into solitary whirls. In part two, the white-clad Silvina Cortés and Gemma Nixon’s gentle liquidity could have come from Isadora Duncan dancers.

Maliphant’s choreography has no hard edges; its performers spiraled, curled, and spun from one evanescent moment to the next. Sometimes this felt like watching smoke, except that these dancers were anchored in a deep-grounded muscularity that allowed them to connect into an endless stream of rounded shapes. In the first pas de deux, Gülgeç and Nixon’s weighty folding over each other wonderfully recalled Leon Bakst’s illustrations of Scheherazade. Though conceptually intriguing, AfterLight turned out to be a one-shot deal; whether there is more meat to this choreographer remains to be seen.

San Francisco Stories: The literary life

Andrew Lam
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9
San Francisco Stories: The literary life

tredmond@sfbg.com

A few months before I graduated from college, a group of Distinguished Literary Figures came to my Fancy Eastern University and gave a special seminar on careers in literature. At least 150 of my classmates showed up in their $80 Frye boots and their shirts with the alligators on them and the attitudes they’d carefully honed during a life in which things pretty much went their way.

After an erudite discussion of the lofty (the philosophy of writing) and the mundane (write every day and don’t send bad photocopies of your manuscript to your publisher), one of the DLF’s asked for a show of hands: How many of you are planning a career as a writer?

Every hand in the room shot up. And I looked around and said to myself:

No you aren’t.

No, most of you people will never be writers. Because you’re too fucking happy. Because you’re all well-adjusted young men and women with real futures, who will want jobs that pay and apartments with heat and decent food and cars that start and clothes that look cool, and cappuccino that someone else makes for you, and vacations in nice places where the sun always shines.

You’ll never be writers. You don’t know enough about life.

*****

A year or so later, I was sitting in the makeshift loft of my $175-a-month illegal storefront apartment, and my fingers were so cold that I couldn’t work the cheap and nasty typewriter very well, and there wasn’t any heat and the only way to get rid of the chill was to turn on the oven, which was a very bad idea because a banged-up British motorcycle shared the concrete floor of my room with me and the gas tank leaked, not enough to spill but enough that after five or six hours the collected aromatic hydrocarbons in the air were probably enough to ignite and consume me and half the neighborhood in a cataclysmic fireball. So: we sat in the cold.

My girlfriend had left me; her cat was gone but the place was full of fleas, and I’d picked one out of my mustache that morning when I tried to shave. I was finishing a story about antinuclear protests for a magazine that would soon fold, but maybe not before I got my $200 check, and all I could think about was:

I still have a couple cold beers, and Brian Eno on the box, the toilet hadn’t overflowed yet this week — and fuck: This is about as good as it gets.

This is how young writers live.

We don’t ask for much, writers. We don’t need better iPhones or wifi at Union Square or tax breaks. What we need, and have always needed, is chaos, misery, and grit. We need places where money doesn’t rule and where everything isn’t comfortable. We need, more than anything, a kind of cheap that isn’t cool.

You go to the Salvation Army or Goodwill these days and you don’t see many writers who have day jobs as temps in the Zone buying the crummiest suits and ties they can get away with; it’s all, like, hipster fashion.

Writers need real cheap. They need $2 beers and $4 burritos and crappy places to live that cost less than you can make selling a story or two a month. They need to exist, for real, not just for fun, in a world outside the bubble — and they need a city that makes room for that to happen.

I love where I live, but it’s failing me. And I sometimes think that nobody in charge really cares.

*****

The Bay Guardian turns 46 this week. I’ve been part of it for more than half its life, since I sold my first story to the paper in 1982, a shocking expose about police harassing homeless people for sitting on the sidewalk. I got paid $50. It was a huge deal. I ran right out and bought a bottle of whiskey.

The Guardian was always more of a reporter’s paper than a writer’s paper — we wanted news, facts, information more than we wanted flair. And that’s as it should be in a newspaper. But we’ve also always appreciated the local literary scene, and have always been a place where young (and old) writers could find their voices and tell stories.

Now the paper’s under new ownership, and for our birthday, we contacted some of the best writers we could find in town and asked them to tell us their San Francisco story. What is the city’s literary narrative? What, to use a horrible cliché, do we talk about when we talk about San Francisco?

I’m not surprised that some of what we got was about rent — about the fact that nobody like us can live here anymore without rent control, that the housing crisis brought on by the latest tech boom has made it a terribly unfriendly city for writers.

But they also talked about beauty and passion and the reasons that, despite it all, we remain.

*****

One day after I’d been in San Francisco a few years, my brother called me from Boulder, Colorado, where he’d enrolled as a University of Colorado student. “I can’t stand it here,” he said. “There aren’t any fucking problems.”

Yep — everyone he saw in Boulder was rich and white and clean and educated and healthy. He dropped out pretty quickly, and went back to his America, where it’s nasty and you fight for every scrap and life sucks and then you die — but along the way, you meet the greatest people in the world and you live and love and get in some awesome kicks.

Me, I stayed in my city, a place worth fighting for.

I spent my childhood and college years in New York and Connecticut; I grew up in San Francisco. This is my place in the world, and, as the late great John D. MacDonald said of Florida, “It is where I am and where I will stay, right up to the point where the Neptune Society sprinkles me into the dilute sewage off the Fun Coast.”

And for better and for worse, San Francisco is a great story, a world of love and hope and fear and greed and all these people who wake up every morning and try to make it and the world a better place, often against the greatest possible odds.

Herb Caen said it once: “Love makes this town go ’round. Love and hate, pot and booze, despair and buckets of coffee, most of it stale.” We are strange, and we are proud, and we are freaks, and while our local politicians try to tamp us down and make us normal, the rest of the world treats us as special because of who and what we are.

We are immigrants, most of us, and we all love the city we once knew, and those of us who have been here a while are the worst kind of radicals, the ones who hate change … but inside us, inside the ones who know and care and believe, there’s a heartbeat that says: We have something special here, and part of it comes from tradition, and part of it comes from the shabby underclass side of life, from the fight against greed and landlords and smart-eyed speculators who want to charge for what San Francisco once gave away free.

And that’s a kind of style and class that doesn’t fit into anyone’s portfolio of stock options.

I can talk about policy options all night. It’s a disease you get when writing becomes journalism and the fight goes out of the pen in your hand and into the pen where the decisions that change your life get made. I could tell you a thousand ways that San Francisco can stop becoming a city of the rich and too fucking cool for words and could give a little, tiny bit of its soul to the population that made it great.

I could say that the dot.com booms that ruined so much of this city’s crazy madness would never have happened without the Beats and the Summer of Love, and that we ought to honor our ancestors — even if it means the newcomers have to do what everyone else did, and live a little lower for a while.

I could make the case that housing in San Francisco ought to be treated like a public utility, dispensed by seniority, so the folks who worked for 30 years trying to build community without making a lot of cash get priority over the ones who arrived yesterday, with gobs of money and no concept of what the people who came before them did to make this city great.

But mostly I want to say this:

It’s not pretty, being a writer. The ones who succeed are few, and the ones who fail are many, and the city’s poorer for every one who is force to give up because the city would rather have rich people than people who live on the edge.

But in my San Francisco, some people still make it. I love them all. It gives me hope.

SF Stories: Zahir Janmohamed

Andrew Lam
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SF Stories: Zahir Janmohamed

46TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL Of the many things I adore about San Francisco, one of them is that the word “Palestine” is not treated like Voldermort’s name, the one that dare not be uttered. You can say you are Palestinian here and no one will freak out. San Franciscans, most of them at least, will not tell you — as Newt Gringrich did — that your culture is invented, or that your identity (or your struggle) is not a valued part of the tapestry of this city.

I am not used to this. I spent the past nine years living in Washington DC, where I became accustomed to meeting Arab shop owners who dodged questions about their country of origin. Some feared a backlash from customers. Others worried about government harassment and eavesdropping. One Yemeni shopkeeper near the Pentagon even went as far as creating to-go boxes with Americans flags imprinted on them, the words “we are proud of you” under each flag. Unfortunately, it’s like this now in many cities in the US, where to be Arab, Iranian or South Asian is to abdicate your ethnic identity, to pretend it’s just not there.

That’s not exactly true in San Francisco. This city isn’t perfect and it has its own ugly past and current struggles with racial integration — but San Francisco at least tries to inculcate its motto on all who are lucky enough to live here: just be who you are. You can fly a Palestinian flag outside your business and chances are you may even attract more customers because of it. And if you show up to work wearing a red, white and blue covered hijab or turban in the city, people may very well laugh at you.

Last week I walked through the Mission district interviewing Palestinian American business owners. On Mission Street, I saw my friend Ashraf sitting on a bar stool at the café he opened two years ago. The San Francisco born Palestinian-American, whose parents were born outside of Jerusalem, wore an SF Giants baseball cap and adjusted it often during our meeting, revealing a full head of hair already graying at the age of 34.

Ashraf remembers car trips with his parents to the Samiramis Grocery just down Mission Street. Samir Khoury, a Palestinian Christian from Ramallah who came to San Francisco in 1953, opened the iconic grocery store in 1972. For the longest time it was the only place where Ashraf’s family could buy zaatar or rent Egyptian movies. It always had everything we had back home, Ashraf says.

Ashraf points out that within a small radius of his cafe, there are a now number of Palestinian owned businesses, including Philz Coffee and Bi-Rite Creamery.

“But no one really knows these are Palestinian owned businesses,” Ashraf says. “And even if they found out, no one would really care.”

I tell Ashraf about a sandwich shop I used to visit in Washington DC where the owner insisted on telling everyone that he was Jordanian. One day the owner pulled me aside and confessed he was really Palestinian from Bethlehem but told people he was Jordanian because he thought it “sounded better.”

When Ashraf hears this he laughs. “It’s not like that here,” he says. “In San Francisco you don’t have to play that act.”

Zahir Janmohamed is a San Francisco writer and former Congressional aide.

SF Stories: Michelle Tea

Andrew Lam
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SF Stories: Michelle Tea

46TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL When I was about 21, living with my parents outside Boston, I started making zines. I sent my first one, Bitch Queen, to Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll, and it wound up getting reviewed in MRR‘s Queer Zine Explosion issue. I hadn’t even known there was a queer zine explosion happening, but my little P.O. box was soon stuffed with zines from zinesters wanting to trade issues, and with enough dollar bills that I could cross the street to the mall and get lunch. It was the first experience I had of being given something for my writing, and, more importantly, finding community with other writers.

Later that year my relationship fizzled and I found myself unexpectedly moving to San Francisco. It felt like I had stepped right into the zines I’d been devouring — not only because the punk-queer scene really embodied the content and aesthetics I’d become obsessed with — torn, cut ‘n’ paste, glue-sticked and Sharpied, riffing on radical feminism, dirty queer sex, anti-racist, anti-sizest and more — but because the people from the actual zines were slamming up against me at the queer clubs I was dancing at!

There was Lynn Breedlove, whose daredevil fucking-shit-up bike messenger adventure story I’d read in Chainsaw. There was Youme, the sweetly, long-haired girl who inked the pervy, graphic novel-zine Get What You Want. There’s Larry Bob from Holy Titclamps, and Matt Wobensmith from Outpunk! I think that woman with the spiral-shaved head in the front row of the poetry reading at the Bearded Lady is Kathy Acker, from the Angry Woman book. Yeah — it is. And I swear I saw those heavily tattooed, psychotically pierced girls over there in a DIY photo spread in some grainy, Xeroxed number.

An obsessive fan my whole life, it took me an awe-filled moment to understand that I had become obsessed with a scene I could actually participate in. Showing up to dance at Junk at The Stud and getting taken home by the girl on the cover of the latest modern-primitive zine was just something that happened when you were living in the center of everything interesting, San Francisco in the 1990s. No more longing for Warhol’s Factory, the heyday of the Mud Club, front row at CBGBs, a room at the Chelsea, London in the 70s, the East Village in the 80s or whatever cultural moment I was upset at time itself for causing me to miss. I had the tremendous feeling of being part of something larger than myself, righteous with activism and wild with sex and art.

I pierced one nipple at Fakir Musafar (wait, the guy from the ReSearch Book???)’s piercing school, where you only had to pay for the jewelry, the piercing, done by a student, was free. Even so, I could only afford a single ring, so I only pierced one nipple, and the ring fell out anyway, while having sex with someone I don’t remember anymore. The San Francisco queer-punk scene in the 90s was adamant in its invitation that anyone could participate. It didn’t matter what you looked like, you were invited to fuck yourself up a little and whammo, you are getting massively laid. Broke? Write about it, steal copies from Kinko’s –look, you’re a publishing magnate! Got a bad attitude? Awesome, you are now mayor of dyketown, go punch someone. Every bit of antisocial behavior punished elsewhere was here politicized and celebrated in the ongoing experiment of how far could everything be pushed. And at it’s heart, the culture was a literary one, with zines its many bibles, its textbooks, its canon.

Michelle Tea is the author of many books, including the 90s classic Valencia and the forthcoming A Mermaid in Chelsea Creek (McSweeney’s). She is the editor of Sister Spit Books, an imprint of City Lights, and the Executive Director of RADAR Productions, which hosts a Polka Dot Cocktail Party with queer studies scholar and curator Jonathan Katz, at a private home, on October 28th. The link: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/282115

 

SF Stories: Annalee Newitz

Andrew Lam
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SF Stories: Annalee Newitz

46TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL Right now, at UC Berkeley, somebody is inventing a new organism. Across the Bay, at the San Francisco hacker space Noisebridge, somebody is programming a giant array of LEDs they bought from a cheerfully piratical Chinese website that sells the lights on long ribbons rolled tightly into bundles. On Mount Tam, long after the park closes on Saturday night, a group of amateur astronomers has set up telescopes and is surveying Messier objects. In Golden Gate Park, historians are leading walking tours; in the Presidio, the Park Service has just painstakingly recreated a dune ecosystem that had been destroyed by development decades ago. And over at Tech Shop, in SoMa, somebody is inventing a high-tech prosthetic that will turn disabilities into superpowers.

The San Francisco Bay Area is globally famous for its subversive subcultures, from the hippies and punks to the hipsters and steampunks. But what we usually forget is that scientists and engineers are part of the city’s phylogeny of subversives too. The Bay Area was home to the nation’s first conservationist movement in the early twentieth century, as well as the first urban “sidewalk astronomy” club in the 1960s. The Homebrew Computer Club, whose members included a bunch of weirdos who invented the first home PCs, started in Silicon Valley in the 1970s. The people who participated in these groups, like John Muir and Steve Wozniak, were activists. Their goal was to teach everyone about science, so that we could use science to transform our cities and the world.

We did it, too. In the 1960s, conservationists prevented developers from choking the Bay with landfill so they could build more condos. In the 1980s, computer scientists at Stanford and Berkeley organized to educate the public about the incredible dangers of Reagan’s “Star Wars” project, a computerized missile defense system. And today, Bay Area scientists are still trying to save the world. Earthquake engineers at an enormous lab in Richmond are figuring out ways to construct buildings that won’t collapse when the Big One hits. Biologists at Walnut Creek’s Joint Genome Institute are using a fleet of genome sequencers save the environment by figuring out which plants make the best biofuels — and which microorganisms are the best carbon sinks.

It’s no accident that San Francisco is home to two of the country’s most radical experiments in politicized science: the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which fights legal battles to protect people’s privacy and free speech in the realms of technology; and the Public Library of Science (PLoS), which makes scientific journal articles freely available online under open copyright licenses. Both organizations challenge the conventional wisdom that technology and science should be controlled by an elite few.

Here in the Bay Area, we use education to disturb the peace. We do science in the streets. When it comes to rational inquiry, we do not fuck around. And that is why San Francisco will always be a city with one glowing tentacle wrapped tightly around the future. Of course, our version of tomorrow isn’t ruled by brain-eating zombie authoritarians and mind-controlled mutants. Instead, it’s full of green energy, freely-shared information, robotic exoskeletons for people who are paralyzed, carefully maintained ecosystems, and Utopian experiments with Internet democracy. I know you’ve seen that future, too. It lurks in labs and libraries. Of course there are always reasons to be pessimistic. But sometimes, when you climb a hill and look out at the open Bay, you cannot suppress the feeling that we are inventing a better tomorrow.

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who is editor and time distortion field operator for i09.com.

 

Pre-lloween

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Pre-lloween

marke@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO “We wanted to put together something that truly reflects San Francisco on its most popular holiday,” DJ Syd Gris of Opulent temple tells me over the phone. “A titillating, intoxicating kaleidoscope of San Francisco flavor with soulful, sexy music. And zombie strippers.”

He’s talking about the massive Masquerotica (Sat/20, 8:30pm-3am $55–$125, creative costume expected. San Francisco Concourse Exhibition Center, 635 8th St., SF. www.maquerotica.com ), a perfect kick-off to the insane Halloween season, which pretty much does include frisky input from most of the more risquee club scenes SF’s got going — Kink.com, Anon Salon, Mission Control, Vau de Vire, Hubba Hubba Revue, Bondage-A-Go-Go, Asian Diva Girls, Club Exotica … and then for kicks, Trannyshack. Hey, different strokes! Please have sex with Trannyshack if you want.

There also promises to be some intriguing tunes, from electro-house headliners Stanton Warriors and 15-piece funk band Action Jackson right on through to the early R&B Hard French DJs and hard-driving Mr. Gris himself. (We’ll also probably be hearing from a lot from gay rapper Cazwell’s alabaster abs as well. Squee squee!) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyO9D3t0jVM

“The demise of the Exotic Erotic Ball here a few years ago provided an opportunity to put the focus back on local talent while still keeping the sexy vibe. We’d like to think that we’re sanding off some of the rougher edges of what the Erotic Exotic and the Castro became, so that people feel more comfortable being themselves. Or getting out of themselves. Whatever the case may be.”

Although there’s no hardcore sex allowed at Masquerotica (no fear, there’ll be plenty of makeout areas), why do San Franciscans weave so much hanky-panky into our pagan revels? Or did I just answer my own question?

“Halloween is partly about being able to express yourself in ways that don’t involve judgement, and so a lot of subcultural communities found acceptance during the holiday,” Gris said. “We want to honor that. We’re a big tent, and we want to fill it with all the people and things that turn us on in the Bay Area.”

 

MOVE D

I have a scary-powerful crush on this wizard of wide-ranging techno, whose epic sets with live bells and whistles are painterly in their soundscape effects and irresistible in their atmospheres. You can dance to them, too. With DJs Conor, Jonah Sharp, and Mike B.

Thu/18, 9pm-3am, $12–$15. Public Works, 161 Erie, SF. www.publicsf.com

 

REAGENZ

Oh hey, did I mention that the amazing Move D was in town from Berlin? Why not take advantage of that, and his fruitful collaboration with local hero Jonah Sharp, and present them both in their ambitious ambient live-entity form, Reagenz. Tech heads like me are already wetting their drawers for this installment of the Realtime live techno party, also featuring Moniker, Polk & Hyde, and Its Own Infinite Flower.

Fri/19, 9pm, $12–$15. 222 Hyde, SF. www.222hyde.com

 

ODYSSEY

One of the city’s most beloved underground parties emerges to celebrate its anniversary, with SF legend DJ Neon Leon at the helm. Expect tons of warm house tunes and love up the wazoo (plus some nifty projections, too!) With DJs Steve Fabus, Robin Simmons, Jason Kendig, Robert Jeffrey, and Viv Baron.

Fri/19, 10pm-4am, $10. Public Works, 161 Erie, SF. www.public.com

 

HALLOWEEN! THE BALLAD OF MICHELE MYERS

What do you get when you mashup all your favorite teenage slasher flicks with The Facts of Life? Grindr! Kidding. You get this horrifically hilarious musical brought to us by one of SF’s most twisted drag queens, Raya Light. As glamour-ghoul Michele Myers, she’s gonna tear you apart to a disco beat. And you’ll be singing right along.

Fri/19-Wed/31, 8pm and 10pm, $20. CounterPulse, 1310 Mission, SF. michelemyers2012.eventbrite.com

 

DEATH BECOMES HER

You know you live for that campfest movie — wherein Goldie Hawn eats Meryl Streep while Bruce Willis drives away with Freeway the Dog? Something like that, but also the Fountain of Youth and Isabella Rossellini in something really strappy. Anyway, Peaches Christ is giving the 1992 flick, which introduced many of us toddlers to the wonders of CGI, the inimitable uproarious Castro Theatre treatment. Heklina of Trannyshack joins her for a wild live pre-show, with Lady Bear, L. Ron Hubby, and the city’s drag-erati.

Sat/20, 8pm, $20–$25. Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF. www.peacheschrist.com

SF Stories: Jessica C.Kraft

Andrew Lam
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SF Stories: Jessica C.Kraft

46TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL Everyone sees the neon signs on street posts over the weekend, but only a few types of people actually stop at estate sales. Early on Friday come the re-sellers—professionals intent on securing cheap, high quality goods that can be resold at pricey consignment shops and on eBay. On Saturdays come the casual shoppers, drawn by the novelty of IKEA prices on antique store treasures. And on Sundays, the hard-core hagglers and bargain hunters arrive, ready to seize upon whatever’s left for a few small bills.

My husband and I have gone “estate saling” all over the city for the past five years. While we’ve found plenty of cheap treasures, our real attraction to these final close-outs is their view into a hidden and historic San Francisco.

Walking into these properties, we marvel at the lush backyard gardens never visible from the street, and the secret views never seen from hilltop public parks. As in any scenic city, San Francisco builders smartly sited properties to maximize views, adding up to tens of thousands of private vistas that each offer a unique glimpse of the lambent sunsets, the columns of fog, or the itinerant Telegraph Hill parrots on parade.

We note how interior design styles have changed through the decades, and wonder how the elderly residents of these homes were able to put up with railroad hallways, stairways both too steep and too narrow, and the classic Doelger home’s miniature bathrooms.

There are always hordes of tchotchkes, outdated kitchenware, and piles of VHS tapes. But curious, bizarre objects also abound, mostly in mildewed basements where World War II veterans kept elaborate workbenches and harbored unconventional passions. An orthopedist in Forest Hill spent his free time jerry-rigging prosthetic devices in his basement, which, by the time of his sale, resembled a museum for medical patents. One dusty workbench was covered with scale models of world-famous buildings; the architect-collector had traveled to each of the sites and brought home a replica. Now his Hagia Sophia and Taj Mahal perch above our bathroom sink. My favorite find from one of these sub-floor collections was a drink stirrer with a pink, cheeky plastic butt affixed to the top. “Bottom’s Up!” the caption read.

Frequenting these sales allows visitors to paint a cultural map of the city that’s more nuanced than what you might learn on a City Guides walking tour. Headed out to the Sunset? You’ll likely find lacquered furniture, multiple tea sets and jade buddhas — but these might be surrounded by Guatemalan embroidery, Irish beer towels or French literature.

Who knew that Cow Hollow’s Union Street used to be a bohemian enclave? Amidst the posh wine bars and jewelry stores, we visited the apartment of a Life photographer and his oil painter wife who collected esoteric religious books, set their table with African textiles and, we imagined, spent evenings seated on the floor listening to sitar ragas. (We now use their Japanese gong to call our family to dinner.)

Stopping in at a sale in Noe Valley with other baby-clad parents, we’re delighted to discover a closet full of Carmen Miranda costumes, sequined carnival masks, fishnet tights and feather boas. A gay couple had lived there together since the ’50s, each year outdoing one another at Halloween. Thanks to them, our New Year’s party last year was extra sparkly.

At a sale just down the street from our house, at the foot of Grandview Heights in the inner Sunset, we inquired about an upright piano. We learned that its owner — a surgeon and well-known jazz photographer — had shot Duke Ellington and other jazz greats playing that very instrument. We never would have imagined that in our quiet hood of dog walkers and weekend gardeners, music history was made.

When we see these homes and prized collections being dismantled and dispersed, we become the last witnesses to episodes in San Francisco history. We get an intimate glimpse of the personalities that used to fill pockets of San Francisco real estate, before many of these neighborhoods became too costly for more than one privileged demographic.

Ultimately, though, we reckon with loss. Someone has died. Their family heirlooms are deracinated; a resale company makes some dough. A family grieves, and is compensated. The perpetual question that these sales seem to ask is: can we, should we, know a life by the objects left behind? When we bring an item home, we feel enriched, as if some facet of our inner world has been represented in solid substance. Yet we can’t help seeing these objects as memento mori. As my husband wistfully observed: when we’re gone, and after our kids have rifled through our dusty, obsolete books and tchotchkes, we’ll likely have one hell of an estate sale ourselves.

Jessica C. Kraft is a San Francisco writer.

SF Stories: Kevin Killian

Andrew Lam
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SF Stories: Kevin Killian

46TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL Today it’s mostly about the rents. People come to my tiny apartment, a shoebox I share with three cats and a genius, and they wonder two things at the same time—what the mad Romantic poet Holderlin called the condition of “pallaksch,” an occurrence that presses your yes and no buttons simultaneously. I can see my visitors wondering, you’re only an avant-garde writer at the bottom of the heap, how can you afford to live in San Francisco? And another part of them is answering their own questions by guessing, it must be rent control.

We moved into our place in 1990. Minna Street was then the foulest street I’d ever lived on, but because of the recent earthquake of 1989 the rents were dirt cheap and you just couldn’t say no. From what I understand, the building shook so much during the quake that if you didn’t live on the ground floor, you got the hell out. And the bottom feeders, like ourselves, moved in. I said, “Lightning’s not gonna strike twice,” and so far the building hasn’t crumbled. We came to love our little alley, the neighbors, the quiet, even the drug dealers. It was the bohemian quandary: if a neighborhood improves, does gentrification automatically follow?

I write this in the mourning attendant to the September 29th death, in New York, of radical geographer Neil Smith, the Scots-born teacher and theorist whose work on uneven development has helped us identify these patterns more clearly. Walking down the streets of a big city, or even passing through my shoebox (for he taught us that the same patterns that shape a city are shaping our interiors too), it’s impossible not to think of the man. “Capital,” he wrote, “is continually invested in the built environment in order to produce surplus value and expand the basis of capital itself. But equally, capital is continually withdrawn from the built environment so that it can move elsewhere and take advantage of higher profit rates.” That’s the uneven part of the theory of uneven development. We always wondered why there was so much crack and prostitution on Minna Street, a stones throw from City Hall, from the Opera House, from the other landmarks of capital. But Smith knew. How does rent control even survive in a totalizing city like San Francisco? It has to for capital to flourish, to breed, to flex its muscles.

The legends of the uneven are rampant. When I interviewed the poets and artists who flocked to San Francisco after WWII for my book on the life of Jack Spicer, men and women 85 today if still they live, they would invariably mention moving into a room in North Beach that was 19 dollars a month, a four-bedroom flat in the Fillmore for sixty a month. When the evidence of inflation is pressed up to one’s face like a rag dowsed in chloroform, we younger people inhale sharply. And we’re the same way, we who moved here later on, in the 60s, 70s, even the 80s, when rents were 200, 300, 500 dollars. It wasn’t like we could afford our apartments even then. But at least there would be another worse one we could repair to when “times got tough.” And now, instead, there are fields further away, from which capital has been temporarily withdrawn. Oakland we hear. Last month we counted and realized that only three poets under the age of forty remain in San Francisco. And in each case it’s an exception—a quirk in the system—perhaps the wrinkle that determines the system’s face? The face that says yes to us and no to us with the same grinning wet mouth.

Kevin Killian’s new novel is called Spreadeagle (from Publication Studio). His next book is Tagged, a collection of his intimate color photos of poets, artists, filmmakers, musicians naked, or the next thing to it, edited by Darin Klein. (A show of this work opens at White Columns in New York on October 27th). On November 8, SFMOMA and San Francisco Poets Theater present a revival of Killian’s 1995 play WET PAINT, in conjunction with the Jay DeFeo retrospective (Nov 3 — February 3, 2013) organized jointly by SFMOMA and New York’s Whitney Museum.

 

SF Stories: Laura Fraser

Andrew Lam
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SF Stories: Laura Fraser

46TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL

People marvel that I manage to live in San Francisco on what I make as a freelance writer. They wonder if I have a trust fund, secretly write speeches for CEOs, or run a phone-sex business on the side. They figure I must somehow make over six figures to live in a three-bedroom flat in the Haight with high ceilings, hardwood floors, a big kitchen, and a garden as big as a park.

No: I’m able to be a writer in San Francisco because of rent control.

If it weren’t for rent control, I would not live in the city I love, which has been my home since 1984, when I scored an apartment on Waller Street with one woman I’d met in a magazine collective called Processed World and another who’d just gotten off the Green Tortoise bus.

At first I wasn’t sure I wanted the apartment. It was filthy; the living room had been subdivided into four sections with hanging sheets, and only cockroaches dared to enter the kitchen. It was $750 a month, which seemed astronomical to us at the time. But it was so rundown that no one had ever bothered to rip away the original wainscoting, Victorian cabinets, hardwood floors, or clawfoot tub, so it had a lot of charm under its grime. The landlord — an entrepreneurial hippie who bought about ten buildings when the Haight was at its most depressed — insisted we do community service as part of our rent. We pooled our money, took the place, and began scrubbing and painting.

Over the years, by sheer luck, I never moved. Instead, people moved in with me. I lived with a constant parade of roommates, most of them artists or people who worked for nonprofits. There was a drummer, a guitarist, and a composer. Maria was a young journalist from Mexico City who came here to write about migrant farm workers. Stevious was a political refugee from South Africa who worked at Mother Jones. Gail was a chef who left to join the circus. Natalie taught English to new immigrants. Julia was an avant-garde theatre director. Danielle was a filmmaker who wanted to make a documentary about Ghana, where she’d lived in the Peace Corps. Vince worked for the alternative press. All these people had moved to San Francisco because they wanted to do something creative or humanitarian, and to Waller Street, because our rent made that possible.

During the dot-com boom, my flat became a refuge. Two friends, a photographer and a musician, had been effectively evicted by a landlord who made life so hellish they’d leave, so he could raise the rent at a time when Mission rents went up 40 percent in a year. They had nowhere to go, so they moved in with me. It was a very San Francisco story: the guy was my great-grand-ex, who used to live in the flat above me when we dated, and now he was living in my house with his girlfriend. We cooked and played music and got along fine, until they moved into a flat they could afford — in Oakland.

Until the dot-com years, thanks to rent control, you could make a living as an artist or activist and manage to live in San Francisco, even if it meant eating a lot of burritos. Today, that’s not possible, unless you’re as old as I am and somehow had the luck to hang on to the second apartment you moved into after college. I may envy people who had the foresight to buy real estate in the 1980s or 1990s, but the fact is, I didn’t have the money then, either, for what now seems like a laughably low down payment. Rent control is my equity. The neighbors who live in the mirror-image apartment in my building are not artists or activists; they are tech people, whose rent is double mine, and who do make six figures.

Recently, a talented young novelist visited my flat and was amazed at how spacious it is. He’s struggling to keep on living in San Francisco, and I don’t know how he and his wife manage writing and running an international creative nonprofit while paying our city’s rents, especially with a child. I do know that unless San Francisco makes room for people like him, as it made room for me, with rent control, we will lose the distinctive character of our city—or what remains of it. Rent control made it possible for me to be a writer, but 25 years later, it’s a lot harder for him.

Rent control is essential to keeping San Francisco’s creative character. But it isn’t sufficient if the city wants to help young people who are trying to embark on creative careers outside of the tech sector in San Francisco today. We need affordable housing; we need rent controls to extend to vacant apartments; mainly, we need to want to keep San Francisco weird.

Laura Fraser is the author of the New York Times bestseller An Italian Affair, among other books.

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