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Halloween in Rock Rapids. What really happened on Halloween Eve in l95l in the almost famous town of Rock Rapids, Iowa

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

I was just settling down to get back into the business of blogging (I have been away at an assembly of the Inter American Press Association in Miami and a convention of the California First Amendment Coalition at USC in Los Angeles) when an ominous email from Washington, D.C., popped up on my computer.

At first I thought it was just more fear-mongering out of the Bush administration, but the head did intrigue me, “Millions of children could be exposed to dangerous toys on Halloween.” It was the announcement for a news conference call with reporters on Tuesday, to release a new report on the “toxic trade of deadly Halloween toys,” toys made in China and being recalled for containing dangerous levels of lead in violation of U.S. safety standards. Halloween was the news peg.

Meanwhile, the word was dire back in San Francisco. The mayor and city fathers were warning people to stay out of the Castro, the gay area that annually sees a tumultuous gathering of hundreds of thousands and police in full riot gear. “HALLOWEEN WARNING: KEEP CLEAR OF THE CASTRO,” trumpeted the San Francisco Chronicle in its Halloween morning edition. “City puts word out: There’s no party, just stay home.”

I was astounded. A full year has gone by since I wrote an almost famous blog disclosing in graphic detail, naming names, what really happened on Halloween Eve in 1951 in my almost famous hometown of Rock Rapids, Iowa. As Halloween seems to spin out of control, the story of Halloween in Rock Rapids is worth retelling, as anybody in the almost famous Hermie Casjens gang would argue. And so I am going to do so.

There weren’t any “deadly Halloween toys” nor any toxic trade thereof nor any tumultuous hordes creating a riot situation in Rock Rapids, but there was a bit of targeted hell raising on Halloween. In fact, it was understood that Halloween was the one night of the year when the more adventurous youth of the town could raise a little hell and hope to stay one step ahead of the cops. Or, in the case of Rock Rapids, the one and only cop, Elmer “Shinny” Sheneberger.

Shinny had the unenviable job of trying to keep some semblance of law and order during an evening when the Hermie Casjens gang was on the loose. Somehow through the years, nobody remembered exactly when, the tradition was born that the little kids would go house to house trick and treating but the older boys could roam the town looking to make trouble and pull off some pranks.

It was all quite civilized. The Casjens gang would gather (no girls allowed) and set out about our evening’s business, being careful to stay away from the houses of watchful parents and Shinny on patrol. Dave Dietz and I specialized in finding cars with keys in the ignition and driving them to the other end of town and just leaving them. We tipped over an outhouse or two, the small town cliche, but one time we thought there was someone inside. We never hung around to find out. There was some mischief with fences and shrubs and swings hanging in back yards.

After an evening of such lusty adventures, we would go home about ll p.m. and tell our parents what we had been up to and how we evaded Shinny the whole evening and they would (generally) be relieved. Shinny would just drive around in his patrol car and shine his lights here and there and do some honking. But somehow he never caught anybody nor made any serious followup investigation. And the targets of our pranks never seemed to make police complaints. I once asked Paul Smith, the editor of the Lyon County Reporter, why he never wrote up this bit of zesty small town lore. “Bruce,” he said, “I don’t want things to get out of hand.” During my era, they never did.

Nonetheless, the city elders decided to keep Halloween devastation to a minimum and scheduled a dance in the Community Building, with the misbegotten idea the pranksters would give up their errant ways and come to the dance. The Casjens Gang would have none of this. In fact it was the year of the dance diversion that we made our most culturally significant contribution to Halloween lore in Rock Rapids. We happened upon a boxcar, loaded with coal, parked on a siding a block or so from Main Street, which also served as a busy main arterial highway for cars coming across northwest Iowa.

It is not clear to this day who came up with the idea of rolling the boxcar across Main Street and blocking all traffic coming from both directions. We massed behind the car and pushed and pushed but it wouldn’t budge. Then Bob Babl came up with a brilliant stroke: to use a special lever his dad used to move boxcars full of lumber for his nearby lumberyard. Bob slipped through a fence behind the yard and somehow managed to find the lever in the dark. We massed again, now some 20 or so strong, behind the car and waited for the signal to push. Willie Ver Meer climbed to the top of the car and wrenched the wheel that set the brakes. We heaved in unison and the car moved slowly on the tracks until it reached the middle of Main Street. Willie gave a mighty heave and ground the car to a dead stop, bang, square in the middle of the street. Almost immediately, the cars started lining up on both sides of the car, honking away. Grace under pressure. An historic event. Man, were we proud.

We slipped away and from a safe distance watched the fruits of our labor unfold. Shinny, the ever resourceful police chief, soon came upon the scene. He strode into the dance in the nearby Community Building and commandeered enough of the dancers to come out and help him move the car back onto its siding. We bided our time and then went back and pushed the car once again into the middle of the street. Jerry Prahl added a nice touch by rolling out a batch of Firestone tires onto the street from his Dad’s nearby store. Suddenly, Main Street was a boxcar- blocked, tire-ridden mess. Again, the cars started lining up, honking away. Then we fled, figuring we were now wanted pranksters and needed to be on the lam.

The Casjens gang and groupies have retold the story through the years at our regular get togethers at the Sportsmen Club bar at Heritage Days in Rock Rapids and at our all-Rock Rapids Cocktail Party and Beer Kegger held in the back lawn of the Mary Rose Babl Hindt house in Cupertino. We would jokingly say that the statute of limitations never runs out in Rock Rapids and so we needed to be careful what we said and ought not to disclose fully the involvement of Dave Dietz, Hermie Casjens, Ted Fisch, Ken Roach, Jerry Prahl, Bob Babl, Romain Hahn, Willie Ver Meer, and lots of others, some who were there working in peril, others who declared they were there safely after the fact.

Two years ago, just before Halloween, I was invited back to Rock Rapids to speak to a fund-raising event for the local high school. It was a a crisp clear night just like the night of Halloween in l95l and a perfect setting to tell the story publicly in town for the first time. The event was at the new community building, on Main Street, just a block or so from the old Community Building, and a block or so from the siding where we found the boxcar. I told the audience that Shinny had assured me the statute of limitations had run out in Rock Rapids and that I could now, 54 years later, tell the boxcar- across -Main -Street caper with no fear of prosecution. And so I did, with relish.

Chuck Telford was in the audience and I recalled that he had driven up to us that night, as part of a civilian patrol, and inquired as to what we were doing. When he could see what we were doing, he just quietly drove off. “Very civilized behavior,” I said. Afterward, I told Chuck I would back him for mayor, on the basis of that incident alone. Craig Vinson, then the highway patrolman for the area, came up to me and said he remembered the incident vividly because he was on duty that night and came upon the boxcar blocking the highway with long lines of honking cars. “I got ahold of Shinny that night and told him it was his job to move the boxcar and get it off the highway,” he said. Others said they had gotten a whiff of the story but were never able to pin it down. The high school principal and superintendent didn’t say much and, I suspect, were worried my tale might lead to the Rock Rapids version of the movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”

For years, I said in my talk, I didn’t think that Shinny ever knew exactly what happened or who was involved in the caper or how we pulled it off, twice, almost before his very eyes. Shinny retired in Rock Rapids and I saw him twice a year when I came back to visit my parents. But I never said anything and he never said anything but finally a couple of years ago I found the right moment and cautiously filled him in. He chuckled and said, “Let’s drink to it.” We did. And we have been drinking to it ever since. He calls me now and then in my office in San Francisco. He always tells the receptionist, “Tell Bruce, it’s Shinny. I’m his parole officer in Rock Rapids.”

Those were the days, my friends. The days of Halloweens without dangerous toys and toxic trade with China and riots on Main Street. B3

From our Bay to Norway

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› johnny@sfbg.com

I hear a new world calling me. It’s beeping transmissions from some faraway place in the future and the past where a mysterious craft hovers near calypso rock and choruses of friendly voices — some human, some not — echo or call to each other. It’s a free-floating territory charted by someone obsessed with creating and sharing sounds that would otherwise go unheard. Only those with a similar obsession seem to respond to its clarion call.

I hear a new world, so strange and so real. Something tells me this world has ties to Norway and the Bay Area, that it streams from Oslo to San Francisco and back. Along the way it opens doors — some familiar, some not — to unheard-of zones. In Norway it can’t help isoutf8g and celebrating a conga rhythm from a vintage Michael Jackson track. It also combines the famous chords of Richard Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra and the roller coaster sensuality of Donna Summer’s Giorgio Moroder–produced "I Feel Love" in order to fill and feel space with as much pleasure as possible. In San Francisco it forms warm electronic waves, uses white magic to surf those waves’ white diamond tips at midnight, and then wakes up the next morning with a heartbreaking conversational hymn.

I hear a new world, haunting me from beyond the known realms of space disco, the shorthand term writers have applied to the music of Norway’s Lindstrøm (who has combined Strauss with Summer), Prins Thomas, and Todd Terje (the aforementioned Jackson mix master). It asks me to explore the songs of San Francisco musicians who offer clues to — and share — those Norwegians’ vast and prodigious love of sound and song. It suggests I contact Sorcerer (a.k.a. Daniel Judd) and Hatchback (a.k.a. Sam Grawe), brothers in oceanic melody and rhythm, who have both been remixed by Thomas. It tells me to talk with Dominique Leone, whose gorgeous and deranged pop will soon be released by Lindstrøm on his Feedelity label. It implores that I reach across this small town of super sounds to speak with Arp’s Alexis Georgopoulos, who has forged a cluster of electro-Nordic projects in which beauty emerges — with a sunlike glow — from intensity.

I hear a new world, calling me to chart links between musicians in San Francisco and in Norway, to discover that neighboring, unacquainted San Francisco sound makers can share friendships with the same Norwegian musicians. Perhaps this musical passage from Norway to our Bay is pure folly. Perhaps the seaside Northern European kingdom recently voted the most peaceful country in the world by the Global Peace Index doesn’t share the same spirit as coastal Northern California. Perhaps the country that remained neutral in World War I and rebelled against insurgent World War II Nazism doesn’t have much in common with Bay Area resistance. Perhaps Oslo and San Francisco only share a pocket-size but ferocious love of black metal. I still hear a new world — how can I tell what’s in store for me?

THE BEACHSIDE BRAIN WAVES OF SORCERER


Donna Summer has already come and gone on the jukebox of the Van Ness corner bar with the bright yellow sign as Sorcerer’s Daniel Judd looks at the cover art for Prins Thomas’s Cosmo Galactic Prism (Eskimo). Thomas’s epic, oft-resplendent two-CD mix opens with "I Hear a New World," the title track of producer Joe Meek’s innovative 1960 exploration of the outer spaces of stereo and studio sound. It then segues into the country twang and power-chord dub of "Devil Weed and Me," by the late-’70s Nashville, Tenn., session-player supergroup Area Code 615. "It’s funny that the CD starts that way," Judd says with characteristic almost-sly-or-shy understatement. "My friend Sam [Grawe, of Hatchback,] is a big fan of Area Code 615, and I love "I Hear a New World." The fact [Thomas] put those two songs together is weird, like he was reading our minds."

Encyclopedic musical passions bring serendipity. But Thomas and Judd’s bond dives deeper: Thomas has remixed "Surfing at Midnight," the slow-blooming single from White Magic (Tirk), the first album Judd has recorded as Sorcerer. White Magic is a casual labor of love (all too rare in these studied-yet-throwaway days) that’s easy to fall for on the first listen. Judd — who sometimes writes about music for the Web site Dream Chimney — is still capable of the Johnny Marr–like rush, push, and spangled jangle he brought to the band Call and Response, but freed from group strictures he lands on a relaxed approach to writing and recording that allows for gorgeous chord changes, compositions that morph, and keyboards and guitars that shimmer.

White Magic’s track listing primarily consists of two-word titles — "Airbrush Dragon," "Egyptian Sunset," "Bamboo Brainwave" — that inspire visualization, and on MySpace, Judd invents a variety of apt and funny pseudogenres, such as "’80s montage music," to describe the Sorcerer sound. "So many friends, when I played [Sorcerer’s] music for them, would say, ‘This would be great for an ’80s movie scene or a montage,’" he explains when asked about the various substyle terms he coined on a lark. "I definitely grew up during that period and watched the movies, so it’s ingrained. I thought I might as well just go for it. I like having some humor and playfulness, like Thomas Fehlmann, the Kompakt [label] guy who was in the Orb…. At some point [more recently] electronic music got caught up in always trying to do something new. That’s fun for the musician but not always for the listener. In my stuff the beat isn’t what’s making you go, ‘Oh wow.’ If it’s happening, it’s from the chords."

Judd and his girlfriend recently moved from Oakland — where he’d also spent much of his early childhood with a mom who loves Prince — into the Mission. Sorcerer, however, can usually be found loitering on either side of a magic door where kitsch transforms into loveliness. One side of that door definitely opens onto the beach. White Magic‘s "Blind Yachtsman" is a love child born from Takeshi Kitano’s Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman and yacht rock. Judd often draws on whatever he’s listening to or watching, but other seafaring Sorcerer songs, such as "Surfing at Midnight" and "Hawaiian Island," flow directly from his experiences while surfing and scuba diving.

"Maybe the beach represents this free place, away from computers and technology," Judd posits when I mention that Norwegian counterparts such as Terje (whose MySpace interests are "Coconuts, Hawaiian sunsets, moose/dolphins/unicorn/practically everything in a sunset") share his fondness for littoral motifs. Whether discussing his girlfriend’s most recent Midnites for Maniacs–ready movie rental (Side Out, a beach volleyball drama starring C. Thomas Howell) or a weekend visit to Nippon Goldfish Co. on Geary ("You’re so close to the animals, and they look kind of crazy"), Judd keeps returning to the waterfront. "In the ocean," he notes, "you feel like there’s almost no rules. You’re having fun, and it’s almost dangerous fun — a kind that you don’t find in the city."

THE RISING AND SETTING SUNS OF ARP


A setting sun, bisected by clouds, hovers over darkening ocean waves on the cover of In Light, the first album by San Francisco’s Arp; the title, drawn in slim neon-tube cursive by San Francisco artist Tauba Auerbach, is suspended from the upper left-hand corner of a tangerine and gold sky. The summer sun happens to be setting outside the upper Guerrero living room window of Arp’s Alexis Georgopoulos as he talks about this image (partly inspired by the melancholic found-film cosmograms of visual artist Tacita Dean) and how it relates to the music on the album, which will be released by the Oslo label Smalltown Supersound next month.

"An overwhelming number of people still tend to think of electronic music as being cold," Georgopoulos says while sitar notes from an LP quietly resonate through his and roommate Kathryn Anne Davis’s blue-walled apartment, where a large chunk of coral rests on a clear Plexiglas coffee table. "I wanted to make something that was warm, that had human qualities, that was a little worn, and that — along with the imagery of the record — dealt with memory, the degradation of memory, and revisionist memory. I also wanted to make something that referenced landscape and light and natural things in a way that wasn’t new age." I point to a fat tome about the proto–new age label ECM on a nearby bookcase, which Georgopoulos built. "Proto–new age music, if you select carefully, can be amazing," he responds. "Even the kernels of early sequencing in Ash Ra Tempel sound really radiant."

If a new age of electronic music spanning from San Francisco to Oslo is dawning (or setting), then Georgopoulos — a chief member of Tussle until just after the group recorded last year’s Telescope Mind (Smalltown Supersound) — has taken it to the bridge and maybe even been the bridge. In 2002, after writing about the graphic design of Smalltown Supersound’s Kim Hiorthøy for Tokion, Georgopoulos — who edits the music section of SOMA magazine and sometimes contributes to the Guardian — offered to put together a Bay Area showcase at Club Six for the label. "I don’t think he had done anything like that before; he just wanted to have us over, which was very generous," label owner Joakim Hoaglund recalls via e-mail before turning to a discussion of his and Georgopoulos’s latest collaboration. With Arp, "it’s a relief [for me] to do a small personal project. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel [In Light] has this great and unique mix of US West Coast art and culture with European avant-gardism and kraut rock. It’s a very special album."

Clutter and clusters are on Georgopoulos’s mind as we discuss music and its surroundings. "I was a huge stacker [of books and records]," he says when I mention his well-ordered home studio. "But I take after my mother — she’s very neat and feels like she can’t do the work she needs to do unless things are organized." The first-generation American child of parents from France and Greece, Georgopoulos has chosen the dreamy, maternal lull of a track titled "St. Tropez" to open In Light before "Potentialities" surges out of speakers (or from headphones) with a subtly rising force that’s ultimately awesome to behold. Most of In Light‘s seven meditative tracks were first showcased in a 2006 group exhibition at New Langton Arts, where up to two listeners could climb into a feather bed enclosed in a small podlike space. "It wasn’t cerebral. It wasn’t about dissecting a suspended space," Georgopoulos says. "Though with a lot of [Arp]’s music, suspension is one of the effects I’m trying to create."

For Georgopoulos, Arp’s state of suspension runs counter to different kinds of tension. While discussing his love for the analog organ-drum machine sounds employed by groups such as Cluster (a few of whose albums have just been reissued by Oakland label Water), Suicide, and Spacemen 3, he notes that "too much electronic [today] sounds like coke-related music." In contrast, Arp’s electronic music is humane — a rarity not just in electronic music but also on the streets of San Francisco during the Gavin Newsom era, when homelessness has become more difficult and abject and attitudes toward it more hostile. "I can’t remember the last time I left the house and didn’t have a confrontation with a very disturbing sight, and after a long time that really starts to chip away at you," Georgopoulos says. "I drove a cab for four years, until 2004, and when I think about it I can’t believe that I did. It suited my life at the time, but you’re interacting with [people on] PCP, meth, and all kinds of shit — you just never know. Now that I don’t drive a cab I’m hardly ever in the Tenderloin."

PRINS THOMAS, LINDSTRØM, AND THE INTERNATIONAL UNDERGROUND


Wearing a pair of shades, Prins Thomas is chatting with the doorman of his hotel in the Tenderloin when I stumble out of a taxi to interview him. It’s a sunny, hot late afternoon, but Thomas — who has just woken up — isn’t exactly on Norway time or California time. Later in the evening he’ll be DJing Gun Club’s night at Temple Nightclub. Right now, though it’s too late for lunch and too early for dinner, the moment calls for a meal, so we settle into a restaurant on Polk Street. "I used to play in Oslo for the same people again and again," he says after we order food. "Now I can travel and meet like minds. It’s inspiring to meet people who can help you out and who you can help out."

In San Francisco two such people are Sorcerer’s Judd and Hatchback’s Grawe. Only after remixing tracks by Judd’s and Grawe’s solo projects did Thomas discover (by following Web links) that they also record together as Windsurf. Next year he plans to release some Windsurf recordings on a new label, Internasjonal, that will step outside the Norwegian and dance music confines of his established label, Full Pupp. This season, though, he and Lindstrøm have released — in addition to a variety of vinyl projects — a full-length collaboration (Reinterpretations, the beat-driven follow-up compilation to their 2006 debut on Eskimo) and individual mix CDs. Lindstrøm has contributed a chapter to the mix series Late Night Tales (released by the label of the same name), while Thomas has unleashed Cosmo Galactic Prism (Eskimo), a two-and-a-half-hour CD cornucopia that moves from strange and delightful multigenre tracks by Glissandro 70 (the bizarrely beautiful "Bolan Muppets") and Metalchicks (the awesome "Tears for Fears/Conspiracy") through Hawkwind into the classic disco of "Get Down Boy" by Paper Dolls.

"I thought it fit the whole collection as an introduction," Thomas says when I ask him about Cosmo Galactic Prism‘s opener, "I Hear a New World," which Arp’s Georgopoulos also says he’s included in mixes. "It kind of sets the tone — it’s so freaky that anything that comes after it is going to sound pretty normal. When I first heard it I couldn’t tell if it was new or old. There’s a similar quality to a track by Art Blakey called "Oscalypso" [from the 1956–57 album Drum Suite, now on Dusty Groove]. The drums are so distorted that it sounds relevant next to new, compressed dance music, even though it’s 50 years old."

It isn’t surprising that Thomas’s expansive love for and knowledge of music stems from his family. "My stepfather has been as obsessed with music [as I am]," he explains while charting Lindstrøm’s background in country and gospel bands and his own early days DJing hip-hop records at youth clubs. Thomas’s stepfather "would play Ry Cooder and the Sex Pistols for me. He had the Robert Christgau Consumer Guide books, which are great. I think it’s funny how [Christgau] can write similarly about an Eric Clapton album and a Chic album. For me, it really isn’t about bad music or good music, but about music that excites you and music that doesn’t."

It also probably isn’t surprising that one genre Thomas’s stepfather didn’t like — prog rock — figures heavily in his and Lindstrøm’s music. As for newer terms or styles, like Lindstrøm (who good-naturedly told me, "I guess the good thing is that some people are telling me I invented a genre"), Thomas has a sense of humor about the phrase space disco. "It could have been a lot worse," he says. "It could have been called crunk or syrup [Houston’s cough syrup–influenced hip-hop sound]. In my hometown, at underage school dances 15-year-old girls used to soak their tampons in moonshine. I guess that’s the Norwegian version of syrup."

UP, UP, AND AWAY WITH DOMINIQUE LEONE


When I meet Dominique Leone, he’s sitting in a San Francisco café that might have the highest number of laptops per square foot. Leone has one too, but instead of staring into its screen he’s feverishly using a pencil to draw on a page in a sky blue Strathmore sketchbook. I’m not surprised, because scribbler nonpareil Sol LeWitt caps a list of audio and visual influences on Leone’s MySpace page. That site also offers an opportunity to hear the gorgeous song "Conversational," on which Leone’s spare keyboard arrangement and ascendant choirboy-gone-slightly-cuckoo voice update the plaintive yet celestial highlights ("I’ll Be Home," "Living Without You") of Harry Nilsson’s classic 1970 cover collection Nilsson Sings Newman (Buddha).

Leone’s MySpace page contains audio treats, but what about his sketchbook page? It turns out he’s drawing, in his words, "a giant skyscraper-sized robot that streams music and scents into the air and every 10 minutes or so spews out free kittens." Indeed, Leone’s sketch does look a bit like that, so when he says he’ll try his hand at an idea I have — a constellation that playfully demonstrates links between San Francisco and Norway musicians — I take him up on the offer.

Though Leone doesn’t include himself in the finished rendering ("More an exploding molecule than a constellation," he says), which accompanies this article, he belongs in a nearby orbit, thanks to his collaborations with Lindstrøm. In addition to providing the quiet heart of that artist’s Late Night Tales mix, "Conversational" is also featured on an EP, simply titled Dominique Leone, that Lindstrøm is releasing next month on Feedelity (with art by Hiorthøy) as a precursor to Leone’s album. The gonzo centerpiece of the EP is "Clairevoyage — a Medley Performed by the 16th Rebels of Mung," on which Lindstrøm and Oslo Bee Gees maniacs Mungolian Jet Set, responding to Leone’s song "Claire" (on the EP’s B-side), construct a 12-minutes-plus propulsive fantasia that builds to a helium-voiced climax not far from the munchkin antics of Meek’s "I Hear a New World." Leone is no slouch at reaching countertenor octaves naturally or through tape manipulation. But since the EP also credits Mungolian figures named Katzenjammer and Izzy Tizzy as vocalists, it’s anyone’s guess as to who has inhaled a few balloons before singing.

Leone says he grew up listening to the Beatles and the Beach Boys, and the latter’s influence is especially apparent in the semielated, semiagitated high harmonies that fly through intricately braided compositions like his "Nous Tombons dans Elle." A self-described "band nerd" in high school and music major at Texas Tech University, he feels a kinship with the more overtly postmodern academic songwriting approaches of friends such as Matmos and Kevin Blechdom. To Lindstrøm, though, he’s a 21st-century answer to the progressive pop of Todd Rundgren (who happens to be a favorite of Sorcerer as well). "I remember the first time Lindstrøm wrote to me [about my music]. He was talking about Paul McCartney, but his big thing was Rundgren," Leone says with a laugh. "I wasn’t a big Rundgren fan, but [Lindstrøm] wasn’t the first person to listen to my music and mention Rundgren.

"The first track [‘Forelopic Bit’] on Lindstrøm and Prins Thomas is, to me, the best example of how to make a dance track from prog and fusion influences," Leone notes before adding some observations that probably stem from his experience as a freelance music writer for Pitchfork more than from his far-flung everyday listening tastes, which have ranged from salsa to bluegrass over the past few months. "A lot of people are trying to [bring prog and fusion to dance floors] right now. You can go out [to a club] and hear these Balearic and beardo DJs just playing tracks. Sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn’t. But Lindstrøm is one of the few guys who are actually trying to make original songs incorporating those influences."

A HATCHBACK DRIVE TO WINDSURF


Sam Grawe of Hatchback and Windsurf sings the praises of his Sony tape recorder as I place my old, cheap, and wonderful Panasonic next to some glasses of wine on a table in his home recording studio. Plastic owl wall fixtures and a rug with shaded steps of color that resemble the volume bars of a digital stereo rest above and below the assortment of keyboards (including that prized prog possession, the Rhodes) in the room. "You can listen to instrumentals as background music, but I’ve always been into [moments] when music connects you with what’s happening or what you’re doing," Grawe says. "So much of my [youth] was spent driving around the rural countryside and finding the perfect song. Sound can fulfill an opening or void in your emotional experience. Images can be part of it, smell can be part of it, but sound can take it to another level."

Grawe’s sympathy for trusty old tape recorders, his playfully decorated recording space, and the attentiveness to setting in his reminiscence all make sense — by day he is the editor in chief of the modern architecture and design magazine Dwell. By night and whenever else he can find the time, he listens to and makes music. It’s an enduring passion that goes back to high school years spent using MIDI to put music theory into practice and compose fugues in the manner of Rick Wakeman and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. "The guy who stocked the import section [at a nearby record store] was some crazy prog freak," Grawe remembers. "A friend of mine had The Gibraltar Encyclopedia of Progressive Rock, so I could read about some crazy Italian or German band and then go to the mall and buy the CD."

"White Diamond," the 21st-century prog rock of Gibraltar that Hatchback has just made public (on the UK label This Is Not an Exit), showcases the fuguelike interplay between simplicity and complexity in Grawe’s compositions. While a 17-minute remix by Prins Thomas adds club elements, the original version, with its hallucinatory, starlit varieties of arpeggio, makes for an ideal personal soundtrack. Hatchback’s next 12-inch release on This Is Not an Exit, a track called "Jet Lag," is funkier yet similarly majestic, layered, and emotive. In both cases vocals would be a pointless distraction — synthesizers seem to sing to one another, becoming increasingly, endearingly creaturelike by song’s end. "Friends chide me for not knowing the words to songs I’ve heard a thousand times," Grawe says after testifying to his love for the film scores of Vangelis, Piero Umiliani, and Francis Lai. "But often a little synth part [in a song] is more interesting to me."

Grawe sings on some of the Windsurf songs that he and Judd have recorded for Prins Thomas to release on Internasjonal. Windsurf allows him to tap into a longtime interest in duos and groups ranging from the many projects of Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Haruomi Hosono and Neu!’s Michael Rother (Grawe recently contributed liner notes to an upcoming reissue of Rother’s first solo album, 1977’s Flammende Herzen, by Oakland’s Water) to … Steely Dan. "To a lot of people they embody what’s wrong with music," Grawe says of the last. "But to me they embody everything that’s right. Not only is their music well crafted, but some of their lyrics, to me, are on a par with [Bob] Dylan."

As for Oslo and San Francisco, Grawe — who recently created a Venn diagram for Mike Bee of Amoeba Music that illustrates the fusion of influences within Sorcerer, Hatchback, and Windsurf — welcomes the growing, glowing galactic prism formed by artists from both areas who have an affinity for one another’s music. "I think it’s interesting that all these records happened without [the people involved] ever meeting in person or sometimes even talking on the phone," Grawe says. "It’s all been through the Internet. It was great to finally see [Thomas] when he came to town and hang out, have dinner, and play records. We connected instantly."

I HEAR A NEW WORLD


To trace musical connections between a pair of geographical areas is reductive. The artists I’ve written about love music from a number of other countries (Germany and Brazil, to name just two) and cumulatively have friendships with contemporary musicians from all over the globe. But in focusing on sonic signals being sent forth between Norway and our Bay, signals that have yielded some of my favorite recordings of the past year, I also discovered unexpected commonalities that open into new words about — and worlds of — sound. Almost all of the San Francisco musicians I spoke with also write about music, and three of them are journalists, for example. It seems the divisions between writers and musicians continue to blur, leading to the formation of a new music of the spheres.

When Joe Meek composed and recorded I Hear a New World: An Outer Space Music Fantasy (RPM) in England in 1960, his intense, obsessive love of music and sound resulted in the audio equivalent of what is called visionary. But he remained isolated. Today it’s great to see — and hear — figures such as Meek and disco innovator Arthur Russell living on, their spirits floating through many people’s songs and being revived in upcoming documentaries. Meek heard a new world of sound, calling him and haunting him. He couldn’t tell what was in store for him, but his new world of sound has arrived. It spans from Norway and our Bay to the farthest reaches of inner and outer space.

Hear it!

www.dominiqueleone.com

www.feedelity.com

www.myspace.com/feedelity

www.myspace.com/arp001

www.myspace.com/dominiqueleone

www.myspace.com/fullpupp

www.myspace.com/hatchback76

www.myspace.com/mungolianjetset

www.myspace.com/prinsthomas

www.myspace.com/sorcererjams

www.myspace.com/toddterje

www.myspace.com/windsurfmusic

www.smalltownsupersound.com

www.sorcerermusic.com

Torn apart

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

Let’s start with the Ian Curtis dance. Part march in place, part ecstatic flail, it conveyed the singer’s trancelike connection to Joy Division’s music; it also eerily echoed the epileptic seizures he began suffering at age 21, just as his band was becoming famous. If you don’t have the Curtis dance down — let alone his gaunt frame or haunted eyes — you don’t have Curtis.

Fortunately, Control director Anton Corbijn — making his feature debut after a long career photographing musicians including Joy Division — found Sam Riley, an unknown who more or less resembles Curtis physically. But beyond that, the performance is uncanny — the dance is there, along with the anguish and the hunger of a first-time lead actor anxious to do right by the star he’s portraying, not to mention his own career. Apologies to Joaquin Phoenix, but imitation isn’t always the best route. If you want to make your troubled-artist biopic feel authentic, the spirit of desperate urgency is well in order.

Of course, Johnny Cash lived a long life; post-punk poster child Curtis only lived to be 23, though he packed a lot of drama into his adult years. Control swoops in circa 1973; we first meet Curtis as a David Bowie–obsessed, William Wordsworth–quoting, dreaming-of-a-way-out-of-Manchester high school student. Soon after, he marries Deborah Woodruff (Samantha Morton), and the film hustles ahead to Joy Division’s formation, with early gigs, recordings, and a performance on Tony Wilson’s Granada Reports TV show (sparked when Curtis passes a note to Wilson urging him to book the group in so many words: "Joy Division you cunt"). Though Control is based on Deborah Curtis’s biography of her husband, Touching from a Distance (Faber and Faber, 1996), the film devotes ample attention to dynamics within the band, with Factory Records mogul Wilson (Craig Parkinson), and with manager Rob Gretton (Tony Kebbell). Concerts are re-created with keen realism, enhanced by Corbijn’s decision to shoot in no-frills black and white, a choice that also complements the dreary, working-class surroundings that inspired the band’s music. (For more on Joy Division and late 1970s Manchester, check out Grant Gee’s richly detailed doc, Joy Division, which screened alongside Control at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival and should be hitting theaters in 2008. Or there’s always Michael Winterbottom’s 2002 goofy-insane look at the Manchester scene, 24 Hour Party People.)

The heart of Control, though, is Curtis’s tangled home life. After impulsively marrying at 19, he tries to fit the role of dutiful family man, even keeping his desk job (while wearing his coat with "HATE" written on the back) as Joy Division takes off. Deborah gives birth to Natalie, and despite his intentions of doing the right thing, Curtis can’t help but fall for Annik Honoré (Alexandra Maria Lara), a bewitching journalist who’s portrayed as sympathetically here as any Other Woman could hope to be.

So yeah, you have your wife (whom you feel incredibly devoted to, despite everything), your mistress (whom you love more than anything), your burgeoning fame (which you’re not sure you want), and a mysterious disease that requires you to take so many pills your sense of self is completely compromised. What do you do? Everyone knows what happened to Curtis, and while Control — beautifully filmed and performed — can’t quite crack his entire enigma, it’s almost enough that it hints at answers. Control‘s final shot, a haunting image as gorgeous as it is morbid, is a lingering wonder. *

CONTROL

Opens Fri/26 in Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

CMJ 2007: Deerhunter, Japanther, Islands, Santogold, and more cake for all

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Mighty Reatard-ed. All photos by Michael Harkin.

By Michael Harkin

There had been murmurs all week among college radio music-director types that this year’s CMJ line-up wasn’t as cool as in years past, and this seems correct to a certain degree. For one thing, there should have been more hip-hop and electronic showcases than there were, even if only to break up the obvious indie-rock bent of the overall conference. That said, the showcases that did go down often felt pretty representative of the best in the various represented genres: this week saw Mariee Sioux, Erol Alkan, Mika Miko, Earthless, and the Dirtbombs pass through the city limits and give it a go amid the abundant crowds of music industry hawks.

It was a week of late nights, little sleep, and perhaps one Belgian fry too many, but there was a lot of music to be taken in each day from 1 p.m. onward, one had to arise by 11 a.m. if he/she wanted a chance at sighting the next big thing. Here are some highlights from the last three days of the NYC festival:

THURSDAY

Memphis’s Jay Reatard is still pretty young, but he’s already got a certain mythological status among garage-punk mavens: as a former member of the Lost Sounds and the Reatards, and now with his solo career, he’s had a King Midas touch of tunefulness that’s ramped up lately. The dude’s on a roll in the studio, having cranked out the spotless Blood Visions LP last year, as well as some brilliant slabs of vinyl on the side, like the glorious “I Know a Place” single, whose B-side is a stunning acoustic cover of the Go-Betweens’ “Don’t Let Him Come Back.” Tonight at a crowded Cake Shop, he greeted the crowd with “Hey douchebags!” and proceeded to play most of Blood Visions at triple speed, finishing his set in less than 20 minutes. Every song was introduced with the song title and a “LET’S GO” – superb punk from a fiery, poofy-haired, tough-looking group of dudes. Jay will be rolling through the Bay Area in November (12 Galaxies and the Stork Club), and he remarked in a conversation after the show that there are a series of singles coming next year, so look out for that!

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Double Dagger take a stab.

Following Mr. Reatard, Double Dagger brought punk of a different flavor: a more sinister, Fugazi-like intensity characterized their set, as vocalist Nolen Strals hap’ly danced about the stage in his blue, black, and white
camo tee. They didn’t face quite as thick a crowd as the preceding set did, but those that stayed paid witness to a spastic stomp-along series of howls and tight bass grooves. These guys channel the nerdy anger of Shellac and the slanted guitar riffs of Swell Maps in a convincing way, and form yet another piece of evidence that the Baltimore music scene is blooming.

Historically challenged

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

The central scene in Appomattox, Philip Glass’s new opera now world-premiering with San Francisco Opera, is the fateful meeting of generals Ulysses S. Grant (Andrew Shore) and Robert E. Lee (Dwayne Croft) in a private residence in the Virginia town of Appomattox Court House, where Lee surrendered on behalf of the South on April 9, 1865, officially bringing the catastrophic Civil War to a dainty close. The opera’s lucid libretto (by British playwright and screenwriter Christopher Hampton) faithfully instills the gravitas, human drama, and personal idiosyncrasy associated with that eminently chivalrous encounter between formal enemies. And with two excellent performances from Croft and Shore, deft staging by renowned director Robert Woodruff, and not least Glass’s score — with its immediately recognizable orchestral voice in a distinctly somber mood — it’s a meeting that manages to be rather riveting.

That’s also why it has to be undercut, and this the opera shrewdly does, though with mixed success. It’s not just that the story of two great men with the weight of history on their shoulders will not do by itself — not least because the Civil War is not the story of two people, or even three, if you count the imposing figure of Abraham Lincoln (Jeremy Galyon). As Appomattox‘s decentering portrait makes clear (in scenes flashing forward as far as the civil rights era, which literally burst in on the proceedings at Appomattox Court House), the Civil War belongs for better or worse to many more people, then and now. The opera’s seminal scene must be undercut because history would soon come to mock the grandeur and moment of Grant and Lee’s highly civilized encounter, made on the heels of their brilliant mutual orchestration of unprecedented devastation and bloodshed.

Thus, Hampton’s libretto (coming from a skilled dramatist with a global curiosity) is aware of not only the concentrated power of the intimate drama at the opera’s center but also the quasi-reactionary limits it threatens to impose on the work’s greater engagement with history, which is to say, with the burden of the past. And so, even before broaching the legacy of white racism and black struggle, the opera comes bracketed with the voices of women. In the semiabstract and fiercely deromanticized opening panorama, it’s the women who carry the refrain "War is always sorrowful," attributed to Grant by his wife, Julia (Rhoslyn Jones).

Glass’s score — too recognizable at times but nonetheless mood altering in its characteristically descending bass lines, unduutf8g strings, neobaroque arpeggios, and delicately soaring melodies — rolls on just as solemnly and purposefully, rising and falling like bated breath, anxious with anticipation and weary with private and collective grief. Racing to a few notable climaxes, the score’s sad and sinister tone is broken by alternately haunted and ecstatic choral sections. Elsewhere, in a layering of period texture, a marching song lends poignant revelry to Lee’s first entrance: "Many are the hearts that are looking for the light, hoping to see the dawn of peace."

Peace is not in the cards. Immediately following the surrender scene, Woodruff’s mise-en-scène deconstructs the mismatch of old-fashioned civility and confident optimism at the dawn of the industrial age and its refurbished caste system. A frenzy of greedy souvenir hunting leaves the owner of the house where the surrender happened dazed and helpless as his fellow Americans strip it bare, leaving only an empty frame through which the future rolls in on a shiny wheelchair in the solitary figure of Ku Kluxer and convicted murderer Edgar Ray Killen (Philip Skinner). An old man spending his last years in prison for his part in the notorious 1964 killing of three civil rights workers, Killen may be finished, but what he stands for is not. And stand he does, defiantly larger than life, as he rises from his chair and strides offstage into a gray-toned future.

APPOMATTOX

Thurs/18 and Oct. 24, 7:30 p.m.; Sat/20, 8 p.m.; $20–$275

War Memorial Opera House

301 Van Ness, SF

(415) 864-3330

www.sfopera.com

The unexpected altar

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This year’s SomArts’ Day of the Dead installation includes one very unexpected altar. Jack Davis has died, and the remembrances are flowing in from all over the city and the world.

Most people knew Jack as a pivotal contributor to every important cultural scene in San Francisco, whether established or underground. But this is not the Jack Davis that I knew. My Jack Davis was a neighbor, mentor, friend and my captain at the Mission Creek Harbor Association (MCHA), the community of boaters down by the ballpark. He was perhaps less famous than the bad-boy political consultant who shared his name, but he was my political consultant. He never saw me without giving me a recommendation for what the national Democrats ought to do to win an election or, more profoundly, to change our democracy for the better.

Jack was my mentor at MCHA; he was the president for many of my years of residence. He conducted our monthly governing town-hall meetings with respect, efficiency and effectiveness. He forged the kind of consensus where each contributing member believed the final product to be his or her own. He would always discern the essential, and intuitively lead to the right course. No important project at the creek was ever done without his vision and hand.

He taught me how to deal with bureaucracy, to go with the flow. The only way to fight the immovable objectifier is to make her right and then lead him in your direction. The world of permits and inspectors is best negotiated with a Jack-like attitude of making them understand that the way you want to do something is exactly what they insist you do, never fighting, always agreeing — and then doing what you want.

Three years ago, when the home I share with Sean and Jasper sank into the creek, Jack presided over the raising and the salvage from a chair he set up on the shore. Like the captain on the bridge, he sat for hours and considered angles and depths, changes over time. He offered, rejected, revised and reviewed strategies for bringing her up from the bottom, and devised the successful one. The night she was raised, his daughter Sara and her partner Shawn bought over a vase of flowers, a ray of hope and beauty in the midst of all the destruction. Then on Sunday, Jack organized the cleanup and salvage of what was left of our belongings, an effort that my depression would never have let me put together.

It was that day he taught me how to teach. First you do a thing yourself. Then you figure out how to do it best. Finally, you show the way to someone else.

Once, I asked Jack for a recommendation for a small public address system that I wanted to buy. Two days later a set of web addresses arrived by e-mail with comments about each of three appropriate possibilities and two days after that, I was driven to Hayward for a demonstration and analysis of the unit he thought was best. Jack was a master of advice; somehow I thought I had made the decision.

Architect, designer, builder or consultant on many of the homes floating in Mission Creek, Jack moved into his last project just a few months ago. With his family, he built a boat that would house three generations on three levels. Like so much of his life, his home was a work in progress; the living was the finishing. In a day where the young move away from the old, Jack, Sara, Shawn, Olivia and Arthur formed a very traditional family unit with a very modern cast.

Jack was a classical renaissance man with his feet firmly planted in the future. He was an unsung hero of his many worlds. To paraphrase Malherbe, in his honor will the angels stand.

Philip De Andrade owns Goat Hill Pizza in Potrero Hill and is a longtime small-business and neighborhood activist.

Jack Davis, 1940-2007

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› news@sfbg.com

Jack Davis was a relentless and often unheralded advocate for underfunded, outflanked, and ignored artists, community groups, social movements, and others shunted aside by mainstream venues and the art establishment.

Davis died Sept. 23 at Henry Mayo Newhall Memorial Hospital in Valencia from injuries sustained in a car accident. He was born Nov. 16, 1940, in Phoenix, Ariz., and came to California to attend the University of Santa Clara and San Francisco State University in the late 1950s and ’60s. He studied theater arts in Northern California, then was one of the directors and founding actors of the South Coast Repertory in Orange County. He married Judith Watson and returned to San Francisco in 1968.

Well known in the underground art world that he helped pioneer, Davis was a pivotal figure in the growth and public awareness of hundreds of uniquely San Francisco creative projects. For nearly 20 years he was director of the SomArts Cultural Center, which provides classrooms and work space for community-based programs and theater and gallery access to nascent and established artists.

But his contributions went far beyond SomArts. He and Rene Yáñez helped found CELLspace, a unique community and cultural center in the Mission. Davis was an early supporter of Burning Man and hosted its parties, meetings, and large-scale events at SomArts. He also provided technical support and counsel for the Day of the Dead and other San Francisco street events.

Under his leadership SomArts hosted myriad edgy and unconventional troupes and shows. Davis hosted early events by Survival Research Laboratories, which essentially created the machine-and-fire art scene that is now renowned around the world. Davis would often need to run interference with the Fire Department and other authorities who were concerned about the SRL’s seemingly dangerous experimentation.

Davis assisted in the evolution of that scene at every step, recently providing support services so the Flaming Lotus Girls could bring their massive Serpent Mother project to the "Robodock" festival in Amsterdam last month. Other SomArts projects Davis facilitated include the offbeat Naughty Santa’s Black Market, the Queer Arts Festival, Balinese shadow theater, DadaFest, the SF Electronic Music Festival, and the SF Indie Fest.

Davis also helped win national recognition for the alt-art movement by working with Eric Val Reuther, a panelist for and consultant to the National Endowment for the Arts, to bring many worthwhile (and underfunded) groups to the attention of the NEA. Davis also cofounded the Neighborhood Arts Program National Organizing Committee and helped set up its West Coast office in San Francisco.

Among the community-based groups Davis helped establish were the Bayview Opera House, the Native American Cultural Center, the Mission Cultural Center, and the Western Addition Cultural Center. He helped create a theater at Lone Mountain College, was director of Intersection for the Arts, and organized the San Francisco Blues Festival with Tom Mazzolini. In the summer Davis and his son Hayden and their friend Ernie Rivera built stages and performance areas for street fairs and other events.

As director of Intersection for the Arts, Davis hosted many unknown performers who went on to acclaim in the larger world of theater, including Diane di Prima, Whoopi Goldberg, Bob Carroll, Ntozake Shange, Bill Irwin, Paul Dresher, and Rinde Eckert. Other groups Davis supported include the SF Mime Troupe, the Farm, the Pickle Family Circus, Make a Circus, and Dance Mission. Davis and George Coates were cofounders in the 1980s of the San Francisco International Theater Festival, which brought the early work of Spaulding Grey and others to the public’s attention.

"Jack was unflappable — nothing threw him," Coates once told me.

Davis lived on a houseboat — one of three he built over the years — with his daughter, Sarah, and his son-in-law, Shawn Lytle, in Mission Creek in San Francisco’s China Basin. As the longtime president of the Mission Creek Harbor Association, Davis fought developers and bureaucrats in a never-ending battle for the right of an organic, human-scale community to simply exist in this city. Many a weekend afternoon Davis could be found tinkering away on his or perhaps one of his neighbors’ boats. Due in great part to Davis’s efforts, Mission Creek remains one of San Francisco’s garden spots, even while surrounded by new development.

Davis was seen as a Buddha-like figure in the often-fractious world of community arts and politics. He was a bear of a man who exuded a preternatural calm. Composer, producer, and photographer Doug McKechnie noted once after a particularly rough MCHA meeting, "I was in awe of his ability to get things done with such grace, style, and simplicity. He could come into a crowd of bickering people, and they listened."

Davis was also instrumental in rejuvenating the Bay View Boat Club. "One day in 1984, Jack called me up and said, ‘Meet me at the Bay View Boat Club,’>" McKechnie said. "He showed me around the place and said, ‘I think this place has tremendous potential. Let’s join and see what we can do.’ Jack talked the club into having a special, one-year membership drive that allowed people who didn’t have a boat to join. We called everyone we knew, and before you could say ‘Bottle of beer’ the club had 200 new members, all of whom eventually got boats. Jack was elected commodore two years later and set the model for what is still one of the most astonishing, real, funky places in the world."

Davis is survived by his wife, Noriko Tanaka; ex-wife, Judith Davis; daughter, Sarah Coseby Davis; son-in-law, Shawn Lytle; son Arthur Fumiko Davis; daughter-in-law, Tesa Davis; grandchildren, Jordan Alexander Davis, Jacquelyn Rae Davis, and Olivia Davis Lytle; brother, Bill Davis; sister, Lynn Davis; and cousins, Patty Costello, Martha de la Cruz, and Amy de la Cruz. Jack’s mother, Jean Davis Mueller, age 94, resides in Scottsdale, Ariz. His son Hayden Carlos Davis died in 1999.

A celebration of Jack Davis’s life will be held Nov. 18 at the SomArts Cultural Center, 934 Brannan, SF, from 3 to 8 p.m. The family is establishing a scholarship fund for Arthur Davis. For information visit www.somarts.org.

Jack Davis will be deeply missed by all who were touched by his calm, generosity, and soothing presence over his 40-year involvement in Bay Area arts. 2

Mike Noland and Charlie Gadeken contributed to this report.

Open up to opera

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By Amber Peckham

Opera is kind of like really kinky sex; some people are afraid to try it because they don’t think they’ll like it, but almost everyone who tries it loves it. If you’ve been hesitating to have your first experience (we’re talking opera now, not sex; you can figure the sex out on your own) tonight’s the perfect opportunity to ease yourself into the opera scene.

For $25, tonight San Francisco State University hosts its second annual Opera Gala, where patrons will enjoy highlights from popular operas performed by current students and alumni of the university’s renowned vocal and opera program.

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SFSU production of The Magic Flute

Sputnik, 50 Years Later

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[This is an excerpt from Norman Solomon’s new book “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State.”]

A story could start almost anywhere. This one begins at a moment startled by a rocket.

In the autumn of 1957, America was not at war … or at peace. The threat of nuclear annihilation shadowed every day, flickering with visions of the apocalyptic. In classrooms, “duck and cover” drills were part of the curricula. Underneath any Norman Rockwell painting, the grim reaper had attained the power of an ultimate monster.

Dwight Eisenhower was most of the way through his fifth year in the White House. He liked to speak reassuring words of patriotic faith, with presidential statements like: “America is the greatest force that God has ever allowed to exist on His footstool.” Such pronouncements drew a sharp distinction between the United States and the Godless Communist foe.

But on October 4, 1957, the Kremlin announced the launch of Sputnik, the world’s first satellite. God was supposed to be on America’s side, yet the Soviet atheists had gotten to the heavens before us. Suddenly the eagle of liberty could not fly nearly so high.

Sputnik was instantly fascinating and alarming. The American press swooned at the scientific vistas and shuddered at the military implications. Under the headline “Red Moon Over the U.S.,” Time quickly explained that “a new era in history had begun, opening a bright new chapter in mankind’s conquest of the natural environment and a grim new chapter in the cold war.” The newsmagazine was glum about the space rivalry: “The U.S. had lost its lead because, in spreading its resources too thin, the nation had skimped too much on military research and development.”

The White House tried to project calm; Eisenhower said the satellite “does not raise my apprehension, not one iota.” But many on the political spectrum heard Sputnik’s radio pulse as an ominous taunt.

A heroine of the Republican right, Clare Boothe Luce, said the satellite’s beeping was an “outer-space raspberry to a decade of American pretensions that the American way of life was a gilt-edged guarantee of our material superiority.” Newspaper readers learned that Stuart Symington, a Democratic senator who’d been the first secretary of the air force, “said the Russians will be able to launch mass attacks against the United States with intercontinental ballistic missiles within two or three years.”

A New York Times article matter-of-factly referred to “the mild panic that has seized most of the nation since Russia’s sputnik was launched two weeks ago.” In another story, looking forward, Times science reporter William L. Laurence called for bigger pots of gold at the end of scientific rainbows: “In a free society such as ours it is not possible ‘to channel human efforts’ without the individual’s consent and wholehearted willingness. To attract able and promising young men and women into the fields of science and engineering it is necessary first to offer them better inducements than are presently offered.”

At last, in early February 1958, an American satellite — the thirty-pound Explorer — went into orbit. What had succeeded in powering it into space was a military rocket, developed by a U.S. Army research team. The head of that team, the rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, was boosting the red-white-and-blue after the fall of his ex-employer, the Third Reich. In March 1958 he publicly warned that the U.S. space program was a few years behind the Russians.

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Soon after dusk, while turning a skate key or playing with a hula hoop, children might look up to see if they could spot the bright light of a satellite arching across the sky. But they could not see the fallout from nuclear bomb tests, underway for a dozen years by 1958. The conventional wisdom, reinforced by the press, downplayed fears while trusting the authorities; basic judgments about the latest weapons programs were to be left to the political leaders and their designated experts.

On the weekly prime-time Walt Disney television show, an animated fairy with a magic wand urged youngsters to drink three glasses of milk each day. But airborne strontium-90 from nuclear tests was falling on pastures all over, migrating to cows and then to the milk supply and, finally, to people’s bones. Radioactive isotopes from fallout were becoming inseparable from the human diet.

Young people — dubbed “baby boomers,” a phrase that both dramatized and trivialized them — were especially vulnerable to strontium-90 as their fast-growing bones absorbed the radioactive isotope along with calcium. The children who did as they were told by drinking plenty of milk ended up heightening the risks — not unlike their parents, who were essentially told to accept the bomb fallout without complaint.

Under the snappy rubric of “the nuclear age,” the white-coated and loyal American scientist stood as an icon, revered as surely as the scientists of the enemy were assumed to be pernicious. And yet the mutual fallout, infiltrating dairy farms and mothers’ breast milk and the bones of children, was a type of subversion that never preoccupied J. Edgar Hoover.

The more that work by expert scientists endangered us, the more we were informed that we needed those scientists to save us. Who better to protect Americans from the hazards of the nuclear industry and the terrifying potential of nuclear weapons than the best scientific minds serving the industry and developing the weapons?

In June 1957 — the same month Nobel Prize–winning chemist Linus Pauling published an article estimating that ten thousand cases of leukemia had already occurred due to U.S. and Soviet nuclear testing — President Eisenhower proclaimed that the American detonations would result in nuclear warheads with much less radioactivity. Ike said that “we have reduced fallout from bombs by nine-tenths,” and he pledged that the Nevada explosions would continue in order to “see how clean we can make them.” The president spoke just after meeting with Edward Teller and other high-powered physicists. Eisenhower assured the country that the scientists and the U.S. nuclear test operations were working on the public’s behalf. “They say: ‘Give us four or five more years to test each step of our development and we will produce an absolutely clean bomb.’”

But sheer atomic fantasy, however convenient, was wearing thin. Many scientists actually opposed the aboveground nuclear blasts. Relying on dissenters with a range of technical expertise, Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson had made an issue of fallout in the 1956 presidential campaign. During 1957 — a year when the U.S. government set off thirty-two nuclear bombs over southern Nevada and the Pacific — Pauling spearheaded a global petition drive against nuclear testing; by January 1958 more than eleven thousand scientists in fifty countries had signed.

Clearly, the views and activities of scientists ran the gamut. But Washington was pumping billions of tax dollars into massive vehicles for scientific research. These huge federal outlays were imposing military priorities on American scientists without any need for a blatant government decree.

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What was being suppressed might suddenly pop up like some kind of jack-in-the-box. Righteous pressure against disruptive or “un-American” threats was internal and also global, with a foreign policy based on containment. Control of space, inner and outer, was pivotal. What could not be controlled was liable to be condemned.

The ’50s and early ’60s are now commonly derided as unbearably rigid, but much in the era was new and stylish at the time. Suburbs boomed along with babies. Modern household gadgets and snazzier cars appeared with great commercial fanfare while millions of families, with a leg up from the GI Bill, climbed into some part of the vaguely defined middle class. The fresh and exciting technology called television did much to turn suburbia into the stuff of white-bread legends — with scant use for the less-sightly difficulties of the near-poor and destitute living in ghettos or rural areas where the TV lights didn’t shine.

On the surface, most kids lived in a placid time, while small screens showed entertaining images of sanitized life. One among many archetypes came from Betty Crocker cake-mix commercials, which were all over the tube; the close-ups of the icing could seem remarkable, even in black and white. Little girls who had toy ovens with little cake-mix boxes could make miniature layer cakes.

Every weekday from 1955 to 1965 the humdrum pathos of women known as housewives could be seen on Queen for a Day. The climax of each episode came as one of the competitors, often sobbing, stood with a magnificent bouquet of roses suddenly in her arms, overcome with joy. Splendid gifts of brand-new refrigerators and other consumer products, maybe even mink stoles, would elevate bleak lives into a stratosphere that America truly had to offer. The show pitted women’s sufferings against each other; victory would be the just reward for the best, which was to say the worst, predicament. The final verdict came in the form of applause from the studio audience, measured by an on-screen meter that jumped with the decibels of apparent empathy and commiseration, one winner per program. Solutions were individual. Queen for a Day was a nationally televised ritual of charity, providing selective testimony to the goodness of society. Virtuous grief, if heartrending enough, could summon prizes, and the ecstatic weeping of a crowned recipient was vicarious pleasure for viewers across the country, who could see clearly America’s bounty and generosity.

That televised spectacle was not entirely fathomable to the baby-boom generation, which found more instructive role-modeling from such media fare as The Adventures of Spin and Marty and Annette Funicello and other aspects of the Mickey Mouse Club show — far more profoundly prescriptive than descriptive. By example and inference, we learned how kids were supposed to be, and our being more that way made the media images seem more natural and realistic. It was a spiral of self-mystification, with the authoritative versions of childhood green-lighted by network executives, producers, and sponsors. Likewise with the sitcoms, which drew kids into a Potemkin refuge from whatever home life they experienced on the near side of the TV screen.

Dad was apt to be emotionally aloof in real life, but on television the daddies were endearingly quirky, occasionally stern, essentially lovable, and even mildly loving. Despite the canned laugh tracks, for kids this could be very serious — a substitute world with obvious advantages over the starker one around them. The chances of their parents measuring up to the moms and dads on Ozzie and Harriet or Father Knows Best were remote. As were, often, the real parents. Or at least they seemed real. Sometimes.

Father Knows Best aired on network television for almost ten years. The first episodes gained little momentum in 1954, but within a couple of years the show was one of the nation’s leading prime-time psychodramas. It gave off warmth that simulated intimacy; for children at a huge demographic bulge, maybe no TV program was more influential as a family prototype.

But seventeen years after the shooting stopped, the actor who had played Bud, the only son on Father Knows Best, expressed remorse. “I’m ashamed I had any part of it,” Billy Gray said. “People felt warmly about the show and that show did everybody a disservice.” Gray had come to see the program as deceptive. “I felt that the show purported to be real life, and it wasn’t. I regret that it was ever presented as a model to live by.” And he added: “I think we were all well motivated but what we did was run a hoax. We weren’t trying to, but that is what it was. Just a hoax.”

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I went to the John Glenn parade in downtown Washington on February 26, 1962, a week after he’d become the first American to circle the globe in a space capsule. Glenn was a certified hero, and my school deemed the parade a valid excuse for an absence. To me, a fifth grader, that seemed like a good deal even when the weather turned out to be cold and rainy.

For the new and dazzling space age, America’s astronauts served as valiant explorers who added to the elan of the Camelot mythos around the presidential family. The Kennedys were sexy, exciting, modern aristocrats who relied on deft wordsmiths to produce throbbing eloquent speeches about freedom and democracy. The bearing was American regal, melding the appeal of refined nobility and touch football. The media image was damn-near storybook. Few Americans, and very few young people of the era, were aware of the actual roles of JFK’s vaunted new “special forces” dispatched to the Third World, where — below the media radar — they targeted labor-union organizers and other assorted foes of U.S.-backed oligarchies.

But a confrontation with the Soviet Union materialized that could not be ignored. Eight months after the Glenn parade, in tandem with Nikita Khrushchev, the president dragged the world to a nuclear precipice. In late October 1962, Kennedy went on national television and denounced “the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba,” asserting that “a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island.” Speaking from the White House, the president said: “We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth — but neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced.”

Early in the next autumn, President Kennedy signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, which sent nuclear detonations underground. The treaty was an important public health measure against radioactive fallout. Meanwhile, the banishment of mushroom clouds made superpower preparations for blowing up the world less visible. The new limits did nothing to interfere with further development of nuclear arsenals.

Kennedy liked to talk about vigor, and he epitomized it. Younger than Eisenhower by a full generation, witty, with a suave wife and two adorable kids, he was leading the way to open vistas. Store windows near Pennsylvania Avenue displayed souvenir plates and other Washington knickknacks that depicted the First Family — standard tourist paraphernalia, yet with a lot more pizzazz than what Dwight and Mamie had generated.

A few years after the Glenn parade, when I passed the same storefront windows along blocks just east of the White House, the JFK glamour had gone dusty, as if suspended in time, facing backward. I thought of a scene from Great Expectations. The Kennedy era already seemed like the room where Miss Havisham’s wedding cake had turned to ghastly cobwebs; in Dickens’ words, “as if a feast had been in preparation when the house and the clocks all stopped together.”

The clocks all seemed to stop together on the afternoon of November 22, 1963. But after the assassination, the gist of the reputed best-and-brightest remained in top Cabinet positions. The distance from Dallas to the Gulf of Tonkin was scarcely eight months as the calendar flew. And soon America’s awesome scientific capabilities were trained on a country where guerrilla fighters walked on the soles of sandals cut from old rubber tires.

Growing up in a mass-marketed culture of hoax, the baby-boom generation came of age in a warfare state. From Vietnam to Iraq, that state was to wield its technological power with crazed dedication to massive violence.

_____________________________________________________

Norman Solomon’s book “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State” was published this week. For more information, go to: www.MadeLoveGotWar.com

Going down…In Flames

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inflames sml.bmp

By Ben Richardson

In 1994, as most of the musical world mourned the death of Kurt Cobain, a humble band from Gothenburg, Sweden, released an album called Lunar Strain, which would go on to help situate the sleepy Scandinavian university town at the center of a swirling metal maelstrom. The band was In Flames, and their incendiary interpretation of the nascent death metal genre would go on to spawn a legion of imitators on both sides of the Atlantic.

The fulcrum of the In Flames sound was a keen ear for neoclassical melody, which they fused seamlessly with the groovy thrash ‘n’ roll that defined the Swedish Death scene at the time. This penchant for soaring arpeggios and Iron Maiden-style close-harmony leads made their music accessible, adaptable, and widely popular. Subsequent LP’s The Jester Race and Whoracle won critical and fan acclaim.

Six years and five albums later, the fire had begun to dwindle. The band had undergone numerous lineup changes, and a seismic sonic shift had been set in motion. By the release of 2000’s Clayman, In Flames was experimenting with slower tempos and crunchier, dumbed-down riffs, while retaining enough soaring leads and double-bass gallop to keep their fanbase placated. 2002’s Reroute to Remain was a different story, a galling stumble into gussied-up nü-metal pablum that introduced triggered trip-hop drumbeats and vocalist Anders Friden’s ghastly embrace of both clean singing and dreadlocks

Beauty and the beasts

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SCREAM QUEEN What kind of a woman tempts both Dracula and Frankenstein? Gorgeous Veronica Carlson, that’s who — star of Hammer classics Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968) and Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969). Now an artist and devoted grandmother living in Florida, Carlson’s coming to town to share her memories of the golden age of British goth horror as part of this weekend’s "Shock It to Me!" film fest. I spoke with the classy Carlson over the phone to get some blood-curdling scoop.

SFBG Were you always a fan of horror films?

VERONICA CARLSON Absolutely! I skipped college classes to go and see them. I was a fan of the gothic horror of Hammer. It was absolutely magical. [Movies today, as well as the real world,] are too scary — you could be safely horrified back then.

SFBG What was it like working at the Hammer studios?

VC The set was always beautiful, and [after I got my hair and makeup done] I would wander around and just see everything, all the details. It was quite extraordinary. I loved every minute of it. When I wasn’t in a scene, I would sit and watch the other actors and be part of it.

SFBG Who’s scarier, Dracula or Frankenstein?

VC When [Christopher Lee] is in character, he is really spooky. But then when Peter [Cushing] is his own cold self, he’s really scary too — that cold, calcuutf8g, distant person that’s chopping people up. They’re so convincing in what they do. I can’t choose who’s worse!

SHOCK IT TO ME!

Fri/5–Sun/7, $6–$10 (festival pass, $48)

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

www.shock-it-to-me.com

Gay times

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

A series of slide projections cycling through a gamut of theater posters greets audiences taking their seats at Theatre Rhinoceros’s 30th season opener. Ranging in design from the openly trashy to the quietly tony, many of these posters offer eye-catching portions of skin and equally intriguing titles: Cocksucker: A Love Story, Deporting the Divas, Pogey Bait, Show Ho, Intimate Details, Barebacking, and Hillbillies on the Moon. It adds up to a hefty if scantily clad body of work that owes its existence to a good extent to the advent of Theatre Rhinoceros. Begun in 1977 by Alan Estes in a SoMa leather bar with a production of Doric Wilson’s The West Street Gang, the Rhino today is the longest-running LGBT theater in the country.

Thirty years like these call for a moment of reflection, and the Rhino’s lasts a brisk and enjoyable 70 minutes. Conceived and directed by John Fisher, who became artistic director in 2002, Theatre Rhinoceros: The First Thirty Years takes a jaunty look back at a raucous, at times traumatic, but overall remarkable theatrical career intimately tied to the social and political history of the queer community. While making no attempt to be exhaustive, or exhausting, Fisher’s swift, celebratory pastiche (with dramaturgy by actor and associate artistic director Matt Weimer) neatly suggests the range of artistic output and the sweep of events and personalities that have gone into defining the theater and its times.

The bulk of the show comprises a choice selection of scenes and songs from productions past (with some original compositions and arrangements by Don Seaver and snazzy choreography by Angeline Young), put on by a capable five-person ensemble, all but one veterans of previous Rhino shows. Sporadically introduced by Fisher — who as MC strikes the right note at once, with a deadpan motorized entrance onto a stage decked out (by designer John Lowe) in a shimmering red glitter curtain worthy of Cher or Merv Griffin — the selections progress more or less chronologically, though the cast leads off with a rendition of "Dirty Dreams of a Clean-Cut Kid," from the musical of the same name by lyricist Henry Mach and composer Paul Katz, which was a hit for the Rhino in 1990. It’s an apt piece to introduce part one of the show, "Coming Out/Living Out," the first of four sections charting the development of the theater and its audience.

Other highlights include a scene from Theresa Carilli’s Dolores Street, an early lesbian-themed play that marked the Rhino’s (at the time somewhat controversial) turn to more inclusive queer programming. It’s a still tart and funny comedy about the relationships in a young lesbian household in San Francisco, at least judging by the scene expertly reproduced by Laurie Bushman and Alice Pencavel.

The live sequences come interspersed with videotaped interviews of Rhino founders and associates, including Lanny Baugniet, P.A. Cooley, Donna Davis, and Tom Ammiano. The cast also reads excerpts from letters to the theater from subscribers and some well-known playwrights, most offering praise and thanks, others caviling at the quality of a specific production, expressing indignation over liberties taken with a script, or offering resistance to the changes in programming that opened the stage to lesbian themes and, eventually, many other queer voices. (It’s indicative of how far things have come that a letter like this last one, which pointed to once serious divisions in the larger gay community, elicited only comfortable laughter from the opening night’s audience.)

In part two, "AIDS," the ensemble re-creates highlights from the Rhino’s historic long-running revue, The AIDS Show: Artists Involved with Death and Survival. A collaborative venture between 20 Bay Area artists and an unprecedented, defiantly upbeat response to the terrifying onset of the AIDS crisis, the show took aim at the still largely repressed issue of safe sex through such numbers as Karl Brown and Matthew McQueen’s cheeky sizzler "Rimmin’ at the Baths" and their equally clever and forthright "Safe Livin’ in Dangerous Times" (both beautifully rendered by the full cast of Theatre Rhinoceros), as well as the terrible toll in drastically foreshortened lives (seen here from the perspective of a mother, affectingly played by Bushman, in Adele Prandini’s "Momma’s Boy"). The AIDS Show, which went on to tour the country and put the Rhino on the national map, premiered to packed houses in 1984, the year its creator and Rhino founder Estes died of the disease.

This show’s parts three and four deal with the growing diversity of voices and issues in the years of relative liberation and mainstream exposure for the LGBT population. A scene from Brad Erickson’s Sexual Irregularities (played by Weimer and Kim Larsen) broaches the conflict between homosexuality and religion, a theme increasingly explored in new work for the stage, while one from Guillermo Reyes’s Deporting the Divas (played by Larsen and Mike Vega) points to the increasing presence of minority voices, reporting on the gay experience from the perspectives of particular ethnic subcultures.

In the postmodern micropolitics of sexual identity characteristic of the new millennium (and spoofed hilariously by Weimer, Larsen, and Vega in a scene from Fisher’s Barebacking), queer theater is characterized by increasingly hybrid categories and a plethora of voices from all sectors of experience. The cast sums up the road thus far with a characteristically proud and wry glance at the possibilities ahead in the show’s final, original number, "The Rhino" (by Seaver, with lyrics by Weimer). But, to invoke an older song, anything goes.

THEATRE RHINOCEROS: THE FIRST THIRTY YEARS

Through Oct. 14

Wed.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 and 7 p.m.; $15–$35

Theatre Rhinoceros

2926 16th St., SF

(415) 861-5079

www.therhino.org

Now there’s a Cure

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Are you for reals? Seriously, dude, when the going continues on its war path, peace-promoting Buddhist monks land in Myanmar jails, and Pamela Anderson grasps at marriage straws once again — with Paris Hilton sex-vid jock Rick Salomon, yet — we can all safely say that reality looks to be drastically overvalued.

How else to explain the fact that the biggest music news in the past week was pranked out as now-it’s-true-now-it’s-not-now-it’s-true-again fiction: the would-be Meg White sex tape starring a black-haired lady who looks absolutely nothing like the besieged drummer — no wonder White’s acutely anxious; sometimes they really are out to get you — and a faux Radiohead new-album announcement that shuffled you toward a YouTube page flying a pretty hee-hee-larious music video for furiously hip-swiveling ’80s pop star Rick Astley’s "Never Gonna Give You Up." Then hot on Astley’s wiggly behind came the real — I think — announcement of Radiohead’s Nigel Godrich–produced seventh, In Rainbows; the band’s fan service is now taking your order at radiohead.com for the MP3 download (arriving Oct. 10) and blown-out double vinyl and CD "Discbox" including exclusive art and photos, a CD of additional songs, and bundled MP3s, all of which sounds like a way for Radiohead to test the self-release waters à la Prince.

So what’s the next reality hack, hoaxsters? An imminent Led Zeppelin reunion spotlighting the reanimated corpse of John Bonham, thanks to Jimmy Page’s rumored Aleister Crowley connections? A "Big Girls Don’t Cry"–flogging Fergie auditions for the Pussycat Dolls, fronted by Jersey Boys–revived, "Big Girls Don’t Cry" flailer Frankie Valli?

Going against the tide of such prankery is UK goth pop vet Robert Smith of the Cure, famous for his singles-chart cri de coeur "Boys Don’t Cry." I’ve never been a rabid Cure fan, but I must admit that the voluble, down-to-earth Smith won me over with his earnest intelligence in a call from his studio outside Brighton, where the band is embroiled in its forthcoming double album. Making further inroads against fakery, Smith told me he’s been writing more "socially aware lyrics" than he normally pens. "Obviously I live in the real world, contrary to what a lot of people think," he said. "I get angry about things, and I thought it was time for me to put those things into songs."

"It’s just kind of insane," he continued. "The world seems to be reverting almost to the Middle Ages, with the rise of the idiocy of religion. The whole policing of thought and action is anathema to any artist. Any artist has to react!" He described "Us or Them," off the band’s last self-titled LP (Geffen, 2004), as the closest he’s gotten to writing a song protesting "childish, black-and-white portrayals of the world — that isn’t a world I want to live in!"

It’s just been a matter of fitting the words to the right music; otherwise, Smith said, "it sounds like I’m singing, quite literally, from a different hymn book." The band recorded more than 25 songs two years ago, rerecorded them last year, and is back at work on them, although the Cure will take a brief break to play the Download Festival in the Bay Area despite pushing the rest of their North American tour to next year. "We can postpone 27 shows, but we can’t postpone Download Festival," he said. "So we’re just doin’ it! We’re coming over on the Friday, playing that Saturday, and then home on Sunday and going back to the studio. So it’s quite a bizarre weekend for us, but good fun."

The return of on-off guitarist Porl Thompson seems to have inspired the Cure’s latest surge in creativity, though the shock-headed vocalist’s involvement in the band’s recent live DVD, The Cure: Festival 2005, interrupted progress on the double album, which Smith said he will mix and Geffen will release at the same price as the single-album version, which someone else will mix. Smith is wagering most listeners will want to buy the double CD for the price of one. "The difficulty now is to get the digital domain to accede to our wishes and price two songs at the price of one," he said, though ultimately he’s not worried. "I’m at the stage now — well, I’ve always been at the stage — of making music primarily for myself, that I enjoy, and then for Cure fans. So whether or not it’s commercial is not a great concern."

The plan so far is to release three singles, he said. "One is a very heavy, dark single, one is an incredibly upbeat, stupid pop single, and one is out-and-out dance, so that shows you the variety of stuff on the record."

Stupid? How can anyone as obviously smart as Smith go for that? "I’m saying that most good pop singles are stupid — otherwise they’re not good pop singles," he demurred. "I’m from an age when disposable wasn’t necessarily a bad thing." *

THE CURE

Download Festival

Sat/6, 2 p.m., $29.50–$75

Shoreline Amphitheatre

1 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View

www.ticketmaster.com

GET A LOAD OF THIS

YELLOW SWANS


Ex-Guardian staffer and guitarist Gabriel Mindel returns to the scene of so much aural mayhem alongside electronic blitzkrieg Pete Swanson. With Mouthus and NVH. Wed/3, 9:30 p.m., $7. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

ALIENS


Psych pop meets Larry David? What else from the former Beta Band–niks? With Augie March and Kate Johnson. Fri/5, 9 p.m., $15. Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF. www.slims-sf.com

DATAROCK


Norwegian nü ravers pop it up with Foreign Born. Fri/5, 9 p.m., $13. Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell, SF. www.rickshawstop.com

"GIRLSTOCK"


Organizer Mael Flowers busts out the bands, belly dancing, spoken word, art, and free barbecue at this benefit for local groups helping those living with HIV/AIDS. Sat/6, Mama Buzz Café, 2318 Telegraph, and the Stork Club, 2330 Telegraph, Oakl. For more info, go to www.girlstock.com

Atmosphere and an actress

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Olivier Assayas’s films are both strange and engrossing, so much so that they may evade broad comprehension on the first go-round. Whereas instigating French new wave directors like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut played fast and loose with tone and narrative structure to create jarring juxtapositions, Assayas does so to effect a subtler, more mysterious sense of illumination. We frequently lose our bearings in cinema Assayas — as in two poetic refractions of the same scene in Irma Vep (1996) and Demonlover (2002): the female lead donning an alter ego, scurrying through hallways, committing a crime in a space that seems to overlap reality, dream, and fantasy — but there is always an underlying trust in the director’s guiding hand, earned by his hyperkinetic narration and apparent devotion to his actors. Assayas’s résumé does indeed resemble the archetypal new wave trajectory (from Cahiers du Cinéma critic to what Manny Farber calls a termite filmmaker), but the connection runs deeper still: like his forebears, he makes films about what it means to live in the modern world.

It’s a world that invariably entails the restless confusion and complex social systems of the globalized marketplace. He arrives in this slipstream through any number of inputs. For starters, his films are multilingual, multilocation affairs (in this respect they resemble spy thrillers, though it’s only Assayas’s most recent film, Boarding Gate, that feels pointedly designed along genre lines). Second, his plots usually revolve around business people. Even in Les Destinées (2000), an intimate fin de siècle period piece, a lapsed minister struggles for "new methods and new machines" to capture the American market for porcelain. This concern for France’s mediated role in global trade — it supplies luxury items in Les Destinées, film production in Irma Vep, and Internet pornography in Demonlover — is a constant in Assayas’s work, as are characters who are swallowed whole by an abstract marketplace. In Irma Vep, the film that still seems like Assayas’s most intuitive work, it’s a film director (played by new wave favorite Jean-Pierre Léaud) who succumbs to the impossibilities of postmodern enterprise, in this case remaking a French classic (Louis Feuillade’s Les Vampires) with an actress from Hong Kong (Maggie Cheung).

Film Comment critic Amy Taubin is right to point out that Boarding Gate is "closer to Feuillade than [Assayas’s] Irma Vep," though it seems to me that this is as much a matter of the film’s riveting embodiment of Feuillade’s metaphor of society as so many trapdoors and secret passageways as it is "because [Boarding Gate‘s Asia] Argento is a contemporary Musidora [the star of Les Vampires]." Feuillade confined his lucid vision to the backstreets of Paris, whereas Assayas snaps between the City of Light and Hong Kong. More disconcertingly, he evokes virtual realities as well. In Irma Vep and Demonlover, alter egos take on a confusing, extrareal presence befitting the Internet age. Compulsively drawn to modern, floating spaces, Assayas frequently sets his action in glassy airports and offices. In this respect, the director’s use of Brian Eno’s ambient music, in Boarding Gate, seemed a long time coming, though Sonic Youth’s harmonics had previously supplied the same glide to Irma Vep and Demonlover.

Of course, all of these touches are only so much window dressing for Assayas’s mesmerizing female leads. Godard’s dictum that cinema is a matter of "a girl and a gun" falls short with Assayas: for this director it takes atmosphere and an actress. Irma Vep, Demonlover, and Boarding Gate all abide by the "a woman in trouble" scheme espoused by David Lynch, but with cleaner lines and punchier scrambles. Is there any doubt that Irma Vep conveys the plight of an actress lost in the marketplace with greater grace and acuity than Lynch’s slogging Inland Empire (2006)?

Because really, cinema Assayas could hardly be called glum or even despairing in spite of its heavy themes. Indeed, some of the filmmaker’s champions were upset with Demonlover for crossing that line into David Cronenberg country (the film is being screened at the PFA with the Canadian director’s 1983 Videodrome), but in Irma Vep and Cold Water (1994) it’s striking just how light Assayas’s touch remains even when he broaches oceans of malaise. Some of this, of course, is simply a matter of finely honed cinematic storytelling: fluid editing, detailed soundscapes, and restless handheld-camera work all give his films a stylishness that seems miles away from Dogma austerity.

Despite lacking the dreamlike depths of Irma Vep and Demonlover and the closely observed social mores of Les Destinées and Cold Water, Boarding Gate might just be the smoothest machine Assayas has built yet. The film’s minimalist, on-the-run scenario allows the director to intensify his stylistic template — the cutting has never been more electric, the natural light never so beautifully pale. And to return to Taubin’s point, Argento may well be the perfect Assayas heroine for all of her different looks — in Boarding Gate she’s alternately terrifying and terrified, spasmodic and inert, in control and at a loss. Unlike so many damsels in distress, she’s essentially active — as is cinema Assayas.

OLIVIER ASSAYAS IN RESIDENCE: CAHIERS DU CINÉMA WEEK

Oct. 4–11, $5.50–$9.50

See Rep Clock for schedule

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft Way, Berk.

(510) 642-1124

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Last Tango in Shanghai

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

There’s a moment in Lust, Caution (Se, Jie) in which you can clearly make out the writing, and this most awkward title’s embedded warning, on the wall. The scene: a humid, tryst-friendly boudoir in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. Our spunky, beauteous resistance heroine, Wang Jiazhi (the flowerlike Tang Wei, whose long, cheongsam-clad stems resemble those of Maggie Cheung in 2000’s In the Mood for Love), and her supposed prey and the movie’s antihero — secret police head, invading-force collaborator, and mild-mannered torturer in bespoke tailoring Mr. Yee (an appropriately ossified Tony Leung) — are caught up in a series of Kama Sutra–esque sexual positions. Even as she masquerades as Mrs. Mak, a rich man’s cheating spouse, Wang is laid bare, in all her full-frontal, erect-nippled splendor, eyes closed and face contorted, as Yee thrusts at her from across the box spring, as intimate and as far away as a spy satellite.

Yee is far from transported. Looking like a slender, slightly leathery brown lizard on a rock, he levels an unblinking, penetrating stare at Wang-Mak, all while eliciting pleasure and pain from his porcelain-fleshed paramour. Both unflinchingly creepy and unintentionally funny, the scene is as liable to draw nervous chuckles as it is to unsettle the tidy arc of this World War II espionage love story. The glare brings to mind golden age porn films, such as The Devil in Miss Jones (1973), in which the onscreen sex and gaze exchanged between actors and spectators are as likely to disrupt as to arouse. It’s as if Chow, the suave, restrained writer in Wong Kar Wai films like the aforementioned Mood and 2046 (2004), also played by Leung, finally got to shed his skintight suits, only to reveal something truly startling: a glance more charged than — whoa — visible scrotum.

"Little Brown Fucking Machines Powered by Rice" is the title of a chapter in professor and filmmaker Celine Parreñas Shimizu’s The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene, referring to the myth — and popular Southeast Asian T-shirt slogan — centered on diminutive, impoverished, highly bangable Asian poonanny, available for a price and rhapsodized in confessional doc-cum-reality porns like 101 Asian Debutantes. In that film, Shimizu points out, the gaze that the LBFMPBRs level at the camera, midcoitus, is their only visible sign of agency or power against their camera-wielding johns. Likewise, Leung’s look threatens to tear through the multiple fictions and revolutionary frictions propelling Lust, Caution. And like all spy-versus-spy stories, Lust, Caution hinges on the threat of betrayal — something Eileen Chang reveled in so bitterly in her original incandescent short story, begun in the 1950s and published in 1979, after she finally perfected the rewrite of her own compromising affair with a WWII collaborator.

A fresh-faced country girl possessing unexpected acting skills, Wang is plucked by her revolution-hungry theater group to play a plum part: that of a married femme fatale in the company’s most daring production — the assassination of influential Japanese collaborator Yee, whom Wang will get to via his wife (Joan Chen). But amid the click of mah-jongg tiles, glittering gossip, and decadent shopping sprees by the Yees, Wang comes to wonder who’s zooming whom, as Yee drops confessional hints of his tough days at work torturing her resistance kindred.

Working in tropes of fatalistic love previously explored in Brokeback Mountain (2005) and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), director Ang Lee does his best to overlay a sense of both depth and humanism on Chang’s prismatic pessimism — occasionally at the disservice of genuine, complicating complexity. As Wang-Mak and Yee hotbox in an airless, silk shantung–<\d>lined dream world, Lee faithfully fixes on Wang-Mak’s point of view, choosing — like her, perhaps — not to visualize exactly what Yee is up to on his "business" trips to brutalized Nanking. His violence, like his wartime atrocities, is largely invisible, except in the bedroom, making it easier for us to identify with his monster. Yet why not really show it all — to viewers more accustomed to seeing WWII dramas of occupation and resistance through the filter of the European theater — as Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum (1987) and even this year’s other WWII resistance narrative revolving around a would-be Mata Hari trading sex for violence, Black Book, did? In even the most notable instance of explicit sex in the Asian art-house cinema, In the Realm of the Senses (1976), Nagisa Oshima sent his sybaritic hero against the tide of Japanese soldiers, doubtless marching toward Nanking as well. Yet Lust, Caution bends over backward, as if assuming a new, gymnastic sexual position, to find the misguided, miscommunicated affection — for country, for enemy — between lust and caution, only to tumble into the abyss.

LUST, CAUTION

Opens Fri/5

Embarcadero Center Cinema

One Embarcadero Center, promenade level, SF

(415) 267-4893

Metro Kathmandu

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› paulr@sfbg.com

On the list of pleasures a restaurant can offer, let’s agree that unexpectedness sits pretty high. Scene: you are drifting along Divisadero in the lower Haight, a still-scruffy region filled with filling stations, along with cafes and liquor stores whose signage has faded. You are hungry and not feeling especially picky. You stop in front of a place that used to be a decent French bistro, Metro, and note that it is now called Metro Kathmandu. You wonder if it has become a French bistro serving Nepalese food, in some wrinkle of a twist of a trend. Stranger things have happened — they happen all the time. Clearly something has happened; change has come. You shrug your shoulders and, because you detect pangs amidships, you step inside, not supposing that when you emerge, an hour or so later, you will scarcely be able to remember how modest your expectations were as you went in, nor how wildly they were exceeded.

Metro Kathmandu opened over the summer under the auspices of Jacques Manuera, a name that gives us a clue as to why the place is so good so soon. For one of Manuera’s earlier ventures was Baker Street Bistro, an astounding little French jewel tucked into a side street near the Presidio’s Lombard Gate. Manuera knows how to run small restaurants to the highest standards, and with the help of a partner and co-owner, Roshan K, and a gifted chef, Bishnu Chaudhary, he has done it again, this time with a Himalayan accent.

The foods of Nepal aren’t completely exotic here. For the past several years, the adventurous have had a choice between Little Nepal, in Bernal Heights, and Taste of the Himalayas (which replaced a Tibetan restaurant, Lhasa Moon) on Lombard. Those places are good, in their way, but Metro Kathmandu is remarkable, bringing forth dish after splendid dish at low prices in an appealingly modern setting. My dinnertime confrere, never one for fatuous praise ("I don’t need to come back here!" is an oft-made comment), allowed that the restaurant is among the best he’s ever been in.

Well, what is the secret? Little touches, of course, combined with some subtle surprises. Because Nepal lies along the border between India and China, its cooking is Indochinese in the broadest sense, a blend of influences from these two huge neighbors. At a given moment, you could easily mistake chicken momos ($6) — steamed dumplings filled with chicken, garlic, and ginger — for Chinese pot stickers (except they’re not seared on the bottom), and the next moment you are dunking your momo into a chutney of sesame and tomato while daydreaming of the Taj Mahal.

That said, the food seems more Indian than anything else. The department of bread offers roti ($2) and buttery paratha ($3). The kitchen, having presented your table with a complimentary dish of pickled daikon radish, turns out a splendid, creamy dal ($3) in which the red Indian lentils are puréed into a thick, peach-colored sauce for the al dente cooking of dark green (possibly Puy) lentils. This is an unusual and elegant multilayering. Pakodas, or fritters — whether of shrimp ($7) or a vegetarian combination ($6) of baby spinach, onions, and cabbage — are made feather light, yet golden crisp, by a coating of garbanzo bean flour. And saag paneer ($7), spinach cooked in spices with cubes of fresh white cheese, is none the worse for having been enjoyed many times before.

Despite the preponderance of Indian and Chinese influences, the cooking occasionally ranges farther afield. We caught a hint of Thailand in the shrimp masala ($9), whose intensely flavorful sauce seemed to carry some of the thickness and sweetness of coconut milk. And the menu offers an array of kebabs, including a daily fish kebab ($8). One day’s fish was tilapia, which I found a little uninspiring, but at least the kitchen gave the flesh a good spicing up before grilling it, then plated the pieces with quartered tomato slices and long slivers of green bell pepper (though no skewers).

Two dishes were novel to me. The first was chana chatpat ($5), a chickpea salad that differed from its better-known near relation, chana masala, in dispensing with a curry sauce in favor of a toss in a lemon vinaigrette, along with tomato slices and rings of sweet onion. The second, lamb chhoila ($7) featured several kebablike chunks of boneless lamb meat, seared and tossed with a sharp-edged ensemble of ginger, garlic, and chile pepper.

Given the high style of the savory cooking and the handsome redo of the now vividly red dining room — modifications include an encircling belt of Swiss-cheese mirrors, black chairs in an updated taverna style, and clusters of fanciful light fixtures, like big parade balloons with their bottoms cut off — the dessert menu is perfunctory. We did, one evening, treat ourselves to a carrot-cardamom pudding ($5), a molded disk of seasoned, lightly sweetened carrot shreds. I wouldn’t put it on any best-dessert list, but it was unusual, not fattening, and better than the usual choices at such places.

The "metro" in Metro Kathmandu reminds us of the restaurant that once occupied the space, of course, but it also sends a subliminal signal of urbanity. Metro Kathmandu is in some sense an "ethnic" restaurant, and its cooking, while sophisticated and impeccable, is more conservative and traditional than was the case at, say, Tallula, which for a few brief but memorable years fused subcontinental and French themes in the Castro. At the same time, it is a date restaurant, full of style and atmosphere and suggestive energy. Now all you need is a date.

METRO KATHMANDU

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 9:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m. Dinner: Tues.–Sun., 6 p.m.–1 a.m.

311 Divisadero, SF

(415) 552-0903

www.metrokathmandu.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Magic time: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band return

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brucesml.bmp
Brooooce. Photo by Mark Seliger.

By Todd Lavoie

They’re back! Well, almost. This coming Tuesday, Oct. 2, to keep things official and all. That’s when the Magic happens.

Proving that patience really does pay off from time to time, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band are about to reward us rather handsomely for riding out their extended hiatus. Their latest Columbia Records thunderer Magic hits the racks, and if the glowing adjectives tossed around by the press are any indication, the phrase “return to form” is written all over it. Sure, I could’ve already checked for myself, maybe even previewed a couple of songs – thanks to this handy-dandy Internet thing all the kids are raving about – but I really do relish the freshness of a CD when it’s been shucked from its shrink-wrap within hours of its release into the world. There’s nothing quite like it, is there? In an age where everything seems to be so readily available and spoilers are just a click away, I’d rather keep it old-school, thank you all the same. And so I’ll wait till Tuesday to find out for myself. Besides: why would I want to get rid of the one single interesting feature Tuesdays have to offer?

“But it’s Bruce Springsteen – big deal!” Yes, I can already hear them, snipping and quipping away up there on the horizon, a veritable sea of ironic haircuts and tight-legged trousers poo-pooing away my excitement over what promises to be a highlight of this already-impressive fall music season. Maybe it’s because the Boss reminds the Vice Generation too much of Dad or Uncle Joe?

Furthermore, I doubt Springsteen possesses a single ironic bone in his body; there’s no cheeky winks or clever-for-clever’s sake at play here. He’s far too straight-up for that, thankfully, but such directness might come across as so unfashionably retro in or post-everything culture. It’s probably only a partial explanation, and I could even counter my own argument by pointing out the wonderfully refreshing arrival of what I’ve taken to calling the current sincerity movement in indie rock: witness the impact of emotionally-direct, irony-free acts such as Antony and the Johnsons, Joan as Policewoman, and perhaps even Broken Social Scene.

Hotpants wildfires

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PART-TIME PUNKS


Honey Soundsystem rocks out, hosting an appearance by Los Angeles’s current DJ queens of the no wave revival. Fri/28, 9 p.m.–2 a.m., $5. Transfer, 198 Church, SF. (415) 861-7499, www.honeysoundsystem.com

CHARLIE HORSE KICKS FOLSOM OFF


A special trash-punk, leather-and-lace "Fuck you" from this weekly drag club as the world’s biggest fetish weekend launches. Fridays, 10 p.m.–2 a.m., free. Cinch, 1723 Polk, SF. (415) 776-4162, www.myspace.com/charliehorsecinch

MANQUAKE!


DJ Bus Station John delivers hankie-flying bathhouse cruising tracks for the indiscriminate homosexual. Sat/29, 10 p.m.–2 a.m., $5. Gangway, 841 Larkin, SF. (415) 776-6828

BEARDED GIRLIE BOY


Limitless drag goddess Juanita More! offers Italo disco, glitch techno, and free mustache rides all night long. Sat/29, 10 p.m.–4 a.m., $8. Stud, 399 Ninth St., SF. (415) 863-6623, www.juanitamore.com

FOLSOM STREET FAIR


This leather and fetish mega-event break ranks with its all-circuit past to highlight indie dance sets by Imperial Teen, Cazwell, and the Ladytron DJ Tour. Sun/30, 11 a.m.–6 p.m., donation requested. Folsom between Seventh and 12th streets, SF. www.folsomstreetfair.org

TRANS AM


DJ Dirty Knees and Bill Picture spill the queer metal tea monthly at their club Trans Am. Freaking the scene live: naughty glam duo the Passionistas. Oct. 6, 10 p.m.–late, $5. Club Eight, 1151 Folsom, SF. (415) 461-1151, www.myspace.com/transamtheclub

REMEMBER THE PARTY


A sizzling hot, 30th-anniversary tribute to the legendary Trocadero Transfer, with disco, Hi-NRG, and old-school scene queens galore. Oct. 7, 6 p.m.–3 a.m., $25. Glas Kat, 520 Fourth St., SF. (415) 495-6620, www.remembertheparty.com (Marke B.)

Gayest. Music. Ever.

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› marke@sfbg.com

Something horrible happened.

The promo package, marked Special, arrived on my desk in May from Ultra Records in New York City. Hastily, I tore the envelope open and yanked out the CD within, letting squiggles of packing confetti fall where they may. A bronze and glistening, near-naked, possibly underage Brazilian boy stared fiercely from the cover. His bulging genitalia were not quite stuffed into a Gummi-red Speedo. His hair dripped with viscous product. Posed stiffly against a seaside shack the color of processed cheddar, he looked like he was about to either blow me or feast on my liver. The text across his sculpted, slightly veiny torso read DJ Ricardo! Presents Out Anthems 2.

Oh, good lord. If there’s anything that turns me off more than DJs with exclamation points appended to their monikers — OMG! The ’90s! Low carb! Wow! — it’s some gay fool from Ultra Records in New York City trying to tell me what my "out anthems" are. Sorry, but tin-eared "Don’t Want No Short Dick Man" remixes, spacey-diva "Deeper Love" covers, mindless melodramatic thumpers, and obnoxious washes of sizzle and screech don’t quite sum up my raggedy, faggoty lifestyle or speak to my proud, if occasionally morally compromised, experience.

I adore dance music — it’s my life. Any packed dance floor is a good thing in my book. But I also have some taste, and this was the apogee of cheesiness. The presumption that these bland corporate farts are the tunes of my loony-queer times crosses a clear homo-to-homo line in the shimmering sands. (For the record, Ultra Records, my current personal out anthems are the Cinematics’ "Keep Forgetting," Shazzy’s "Giggahoe," and Gladys Knight and the Pips’ "Love Is Always on Your Mind." Go mix that.)

Listen, I can ride with the tsunami of cheap and sleazy DJ dance compilations that has flooded various music stores, in-boxes, and jittery Wal-Marts for the past decade or so, featuring tightly clenched glutes, toxic tans, and spandex-stretching silicone explosions. (And that’s just the music. Someone should really publish a picture book of all of the blindingly awful, grinding-Barbie-in-headphones cover designs. Title suggestion: Writhe the Ibiza Abysmal. Or how about just Champagne and Crap?) There’s definitely a market out there for pulsating pabulum, and I dug my own grave with two coke spoons and a mirror ball when I became a nightlife critic. I was even OK with the knowledge that because I had Out Anthems 2 grasped shakily in my hot little palm, it meant that somewhere out there an Out Anthems 1 must exist. You go, DJ Ricardo!! Work it however you can. No, that wasn’t the horrible part.

SPLICING THE MONOLITH

The horrible part was this: I actually kind of liked it.

Bursting with a weird glee that’s unique to our media-saturated moment — "Holy shit, you’ve got to hear-see-watch this, it’s the most horrifying thing ever!" — I had rushed the CD over to my boyfriend Hunky Beau’s house before listening to it, eager for us to put it on and tear it a new one together. That’s our modern gay love.

Yet once I’d slipped the disc into Hunky’s Mac and readied myself a hot shot of schadenfreude, I realized I don’t hear this sort of heinous stuff when I’m out and about as much as I used to. The once-omnipresent, thousand-nostriled behemoth of overbearing, poorly produced circuit and "progressive house" music has been somewhat tamed. Sure, much of the CD was atrocious, but now that this cookie-cutter hokum is no longer forced on me at every gay turn I take, pouring forth from restaurant patios and flashy video bars, after-hours megaclubs and fisting pornos, open gym windows and passing Miata convertibles, I could listen to it not as some soulless dominant paradigm that was threatening to rob gay culture of every last ounce of scruff and sparkle, but as mere tacky noodling: harmless fun in an ironic way, if you’re into irony anymore. (Not poor Hunky Beau, though. A die-hard devotee of skinhead mosh and East Bay punk, he dived beneath the covers as soon as the first few high-hat sprays had rung in the air, moaning like he had aural hepatitis.)

What happened that night — a night that found me wriggling around in my Underoos and torturing my man with shouts of "Look at me! I’m a tweaked-out fan dancer!" — sparked the more masochistic aspects of my curiosity.

Ever since the supastar DJ scene of the late ’90s and early ’00s became economically impossible to sustain — the Sisyphean task of convincing thousands of people to spend $40 to hear a scrawny dude from Manchester, UK, or Miami spin yet again burned many promoters out — the dance floor playing field has blown wide open. Megaclubs, with their monolithic sounds, gave way to smaller venues where independent promoters could experiment with fresh ideas and vent their wacky stylistic impulses, minus hefty cover charges and pat-down security. Clubs became more like house parties: the kid with the most friends or the biggest iTunes collection could plug into the DJ booth and let ‘er rip.

Gay clubs, especially, had followed the newfound freedom from big-time pressure and flight-booking budgets in myriad zany directions. Today’s gay club scene is more diverse than it’s ever been. Almost every night of the week there are options.

So maybe it was time for me to reappraise a style that I’d grown to hate, now that it was fading from mainstream gay scene ubiquity in favor of sleek hip-pop and ’80s hair bands. Maybe I could stare into the numb, drooling jaws of circuit and progressive terror and dance, dance, dance. Could it really be as bad as I remembered? Was I ready to let go of my bitterness toward a music so insidious that even my grandmother thought my life was one big party scene from — gag — Queer as Folk?

Was it possible for me to tune into KNGY, 92.7 FM (Energy), the aggressively gay-friendly "pure dance" local radio station that had become synonymous with such music — and had recent hosted a party spotlighting, yes, DJ Ricardo! — without retching uncontrollably at the first few modulated wails?

Perhaps. I dug out the hand-crank radio from my earthquake emergency kit because, like, transmission radio — who still listens to that? I reacquainted myself with how to adjust a dial. Then I turned the volume up.

DOWNSIZE QUEENS

Mention Energy 92.7 to most gay men, and curious things happen to their bodies. The shoulders pop, the eyes roll, the hands begin to gesticulate wildly. Those are the gay men who love the station. The others absolutely loathe it. Their bodies convulse in a spasm of disgust. Their faces twist into ghoulish grimaces. Spittle flies from their lips. The hatred is palpable. There’s no middle ground when it comes to Energy. I’ve been in cars where people have fought over it until blood spurted.

Such reactions may be the legacy of the circuit party scene. Fifteen years ago, if you asked the average straight person to close their eyes and think about "gay music," the image that would first leap to his or her mind would be a turtlenecked show-tune queen clipping pink rosebuds in her garden while whistling something from Les Miz. Or, if the hetero were more contemporary, the archetype called up would be a sweat-dripping, mustachioed disco nymph collapsing into a pile of Studio 54 fairy dust or a bleached and tragic Madonna fan in an oversize cable-knit sweater with a regrettable yen for cheap eyeliner. Many gay club kids today would gladly take those images over what replaced them in the mid-’90s: buffed-out ‘roid heads in sailor caps and tighty whiteys frantically tooting whistles while some faceless diva yelped them into an aerobic frenzy.

The colossal circuit scene had its strengths: with its world-conquering voraciousness, it served as an accessible entry point for the vast numbers of gay men who came out at the time. Clattering circuit beats and ecstatic progressive swells and breaks — the natural evolution of corporate rave music in a mainstream gay environment — pushed many HIV-positive men through despair in the time before effective AIDS meds became available, and served as an all-purpose celebration template afterward. But circuit parties also marginalized queers with no taste for militaristic conformity, gratingly regurgitated tunes, or the alphabet soup of designer drugs then in vogue. The fact that the circuit had once been a credible, if snobbish and expensive, underground movement held no sway when it hatched into a gargantuan space tarantula from Planet GHB that swallowed all semblance of queer individuality. It was the Will and Grace of clubland, and most of us got jacked.

But that was then, this is neu. Dissing the circuit scene for gay club music’s discouraging popular image is like nail-gunning a dead, glitter-freckled horse. "The scene has really downsized, along with the whole megaclub thing in general," a popular San Francisco circuit DJ confided to me recently. "The energy we’re riding on is nostalgia."

Michael Williams, co-owner of Medium Rare Records in the Castro, the go-to store for dance mix compilations, told me, "We still sell a lot of that music, but people aren’t asking for it as they once did. I think the market got oversaturated and quality became a real factor. People began asking, ‘Where’s the talent?’ Our biggest sellers now are more complex artists like Shirley Bassey, Thelma Houston, and Pink Martini, or DJs who really work to have an interesting sound, like Dimitri from Paris." Even the odiously corporate Out magazine declared the circuit party over in its current issue, so you know it must be true.

Still, the sour taste of the circuit era in many alternaqueers’ mouths has proved hard to wash out. And the stereotype of awful gay club music still reigns supreme in the straight world. Even though Energy 92.7’s been around for less than three years and is in truth, as I found out after tuning in, more prone to playing Billboard Hot 100 pop remixes than actual circuit music, it’s had to bear the backlash brunt. As the most visible mainstream gay dance music giant of the moment, it’s become guilty by association.

CREEPIN’ LIKE BOUGAINVILLEA

Greg: "Oh my god, he is such a freakin’ moron."

Fernando: "Thirty-six percent approval ratings is far too high for this president."

Greg: "The only way my gay ass would be impressed by [George W.] Bush is if he put a VJ in the Oval Office. Bitch, please — how many more troops have to die?!"

Fernando: "You’re listening to Energy, 92.7 FM. Here’s Rihanna with ‘Don’t Stop the Music.’"

—Fernando and Greg in the Morning

This is how gay Energy 92.7 is: when I first visited the station recently, the station’s party promoter, Juan Garcia, recognized my hair product from 50 paces. "Little orange can, girl?" he called out to greet me.

This is how gay Energy 92.7 is: when I sat in on the morning show with hosts Fernando Ventura and Greg Sherrell, they agonized during songs over the fact that something called the "smart-fat diet" forbade them to eat nuts for a week. "You can write anything you want," Sherrell, a high-voiced, blond spitfire who frequently informs listeners that he’s wearing his most expensive jeans, told me. "But if you don’t say I’m thin, I finna kill you."

Fernando and Greg in the Morning, on air weekdays from 6 to 10 a.m., is one of the most popular shows on Energy, which has a potential reach of 3.2 million listeners. The show could be accused of a lot of things — gay minstrelsy, pandering to stereotypes, making me get up at 4 a.m. to sit in — but it could never be accused of being unexciting. It’s the only openly gay morning show on commercial radio, and some of the live quips traded by DJ Fernando, Greg "the Gay Sportscaster," and their "straight man" producer Jason are dizzy scandal. Vaginal pubic hair "creeps up like bougainvillea," poppers are bad on first dates "because they’ll make your throat sore," and Kylie Minogue gets the verbal knockdown but "Oh, we love her: she had breast cancer!" Interspersed with segments like "Homo vs. Hetero," during which one caller of each orientation is quizzed about the other’s lifestyle, are Kelly Clarkson and the Killers remixes, "Vintage Beats" by Blondie and Michael Jackson, and current dance-chart toppers by Bananarama, David Guetta, and the Sunlovers.

It’s a thing of wonder in a society still riddled with homophobia — I dare you to find a YouTube video with more than 5,000 views that doesn’t have the word fag in the comments — to have such an unequivocally queeny experience, with a strong straight following, sail through the airwaves each morning. The tunes take a backseat to the dish. "At 9:30 in the morning you can only get so adventurous with your music selections," Ventura, an easygoing, bearish guy, told me. "I mostly stick with the hits."

The station, located in a murky green downtown office building, is a buzzing hive of fluid sexuality and good-natured candidness. The hyperdrive strains of DJ Tiesto and Deepface fill the air. As the only independently owned and operated commercial radio station in San Francisco, Energy’s done well. As a suitor of the gay audience, it’s done spectacularly. Even though its press materials emphasize its appeal to a broad variety of dance music fans, Energy’s known as "the gay dance station" to most San Franciscans. (That’s not so much the case across the bay, where Energy has gained a lot of traction in the Latino and Asian communities.)

Balancing a constant need for revenue with gay political intricacies can get tricky. A chill shot through me when I saw "Energy 92.7 owns the gay community" printed in bold and underlined in the station’s media kit — apparently we’re all slaves to remixed Cher. And even though the station is a major sponsor of most large gay charity events, there have been a few controversies. The gay media has fussed that Energy is co-owned and run by a straight man, Joe Bayliss, and the station has been blamed for dumbing down gay culture to grasp the pink dollar (although that’s like saying Britney Spears’s performance sucked because her heel broke). And last year Energy released a branded compilation mix CD — with an Army recruitment ad slipped into the packaging.

"We made a mistake. It was just stupid and insensitive on our part," Bayliss, a frank, handsome man with a ready smile, said when I asked him about the Army debacle. "This institution offered us a lot of money, and hey, we’re a struggling, independent business. We answered every complaint personally to apologize. We learned our lesson." (A new, military-free compilation comes out next month, to be carried by Best Buy, with proceeds going to local AIDS charities.)

PROGRAMMED RAINBOWS

That’s the politics, but what about the music? "I’m starting to build up a dance music collection," said Bayliss, who’s been working in radio since he was a kid. "This particular format tested through the roof in this market when we were looking to buy the station. I had no idea who Paul Oakenfold or Kaskade was when we started. I used to run a country station, and I didn’t know Merle Haggard from a hole in the ground either. But we’re 100 percent committed to this music and its audience. We have to be — our listeners are very dedicated."

Rabid may be a better word. The phone lines were jammed while I was there, and according to programming manager John Peake, the in-boxes are full every morning with e-mails from gaga enthusiasts. Good portions of Energy listeners stream the station online, and employees interact continuously with members of Energy’s E-Club virtual community. Even the afternoon DJs were leaping up and down in the booth while I was there, pumping their fists heavenward.

"Often we’ll get these enormously long e-mails from people listing every song we played that night, going into intense detail about each one and exactly why it was so important to them," Peake told me. "We get a lot of e-mails at six in the morning."

Looking compact in a lavender oxford, faded jeans, and a kicky Italian snakeskin belt, Peake took me through the music selection process. Each week he and music programmer Trevor Simpson go through new releases, recently submitted remixes, and requests from the station’s fans. They form a playlist based on what they think will most appeal to listeners and then program their picks into a hilariously retro MS-DOS program called Selector with, I shit you not, a rainbow-colored interface. "It’s tacky, but it’s bulletproof," Peake said, laughing. DJs either punch up the tracks automatically or refer to the playlist to make their own mixes using Serato software. Zero vinyl’s involved.

Peake and I talked about the criteria for choosing songs. "It’s a moving target. There’s definitely a ton of music out there that falls within our brand, and our nighttime and weekend DJs get to play a huge variety of mix music from around the world, so there’s a lot of latitude. I think our biggest challenge right now is figuring out the role of hip-hop. Our younger listeners demand it, but a lot of our demographic is still afraid of it. If we play something with rapping in it, we get flooded with angry callers screaming, ‘How dare you play this! Don’t you know it’s homophobic?’"

Later I spoke with Energy’s promotions director, Tim Kwong, about the backlash against the station. "We get it from both sides," Kwong, a young Bay Area native with impressively gelled hair, said. "Trance and progressive fans say, ‘Why don’t you play more harder, locally produced records?’ Rock and hip-hop fans want us to play fewer remixes of their favorite songs. We try to strike a balance, but the truth is what we do works for our audience."

"I can totally understand the frustration people feel when a certain image is projected that doesn’t fit them," he continued, addressing the gay question. "As an Asian American with a punk and indie background, I have a lot of experience with stereotypes, believe me. But we try to be as broad as possible in our appeal and acknowledge differences. And we’re not bribing people to listen to us."

(OTHER)

To their credit, the folks at Energy also acknowledge that their programming may not be in sync with what’s going on in the gay club scene now. "It’s apparent when you listen to the morning show that I don’t go out to clubs very much," DJ Fernando told me. "But when I do, I notice there is so much more choice these days. In the past there were a bunch of huge nights or clubs, and everybody went. Now there’s a night or a bar for everybody."

"Ick! I think it’s total crap. It’s like the dance music equivalent of Weird Al," said Bill Picture, who, along with his partner, DJ Dirty Knees, is the city’s biggest gay rock club promoter, when I asked him his opinion of Energy. "We’re much more into visceral rock energy and seeing live, local queer punk. But a lot of gay people do like that kind of music. And I’m glad that there’s a radio station that they can tune in to. How boring would it be if all gay people liked the same things? We’re happy to be an alternative."

The alternatives have arrived aplenty. In addition to Picture’s metal events, there’s DJ Bus Station John’s bathhouse disco revival scene, which fetishizes pre-AIDS vinyl like the smell of polished leather. There’s DJ David Harness’s Super Soul Sundayz, which focuses on atmospheric Chicago house sounds. There’s Charlie Horse, drag queen Anna Conda’s carnivalesque trash-rock drag club that often — gasp! — includes live singing. Queer-oriented parties with old-school show tunes, square dancing, tango, hula, Asian Hi-NRG, hyphy, mashups, Mexican banda, country line dancing, and a bonanza of other styles have found popularity in the past few years. The night’s a sissy smorgasbord of sound.

There’s even a bit of a backlash to all of this wacky fracturation and, especially, the iTunes DJ mentality. A segment of gay club music makers is starting to look back to the early techno and house days for inspiration, yearning for a time when seamless mixing and meticulously produced four-on-the-floor tunes — not sheer musical novelty — propelled masses onto dance floors.

Honey Soundsystem, a gay DJ collective formed by DJs Ken Vulsion and Pee Play and including a rotating membership of local vinyl enthusiasts, attempts to distill Italo disco, Euro dance, acid house, neominimal techno, and other cosmic sounds of the past three decades into smooth, ahistorical sets spanning the musical spectrum from DAF’s 1983 robo-homo hit "Brothers" to Kevin Aviance’s 1998 vogue-nostalgic "Din Da Da" to the Mahala Rai Banda’s 2006 technoklezmer conflagration "Mahalageasca (Felix B Jaxxhouz Dub)."

"Girl, that shit must be pumped out by a computer with a beard somewhere," the 21-year-old Pee Play opined of Energy 92.7’s music. I didn’t tell him how close to the truth he was as he continued, "But I’m over most of the goofy alternashit too. I never lived though circuit, but the music is fucked-up. I’m just really into quality. I want to play records that every time you hear them, they just get better."

PLAY LIKE BROTHERS DO

I’m not sure if there’s such a thing as gay music. If there were, its representative incarnation would probably be closer to experimental duo Matmos’s homophilic soundscapes, like those on their 2006 album The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of the Beast (Matador) — each track named for a gay community hero and composed of poetically related sampled objects ("Sequins and Steam for Larry Levan," "Rag for William S. Burroughs") — than anything that ever soared from Donna Summers’s throat. As far as gay dance goes, the epochal choreography of the uncompromisingly out Mark Morris, currently the hottest dance maker in the country, may prove more historically resilient than the image of semiclothed bears raving on a cruise ship.

Yet despite the Internet drain, clubs are still where homos meet to get sweaty, and the music they get sweaty to has a big impact on the culture at large. Dance music is ephemeral in the best sense: how good it sounds has everything to do with how and where you experience it and what and who you experience it with. Energy’s playlist was perfectly amusing in a broadcast booth full of campy, happy people or while twirling half naked in my BF’s bedroom. But in a club setting, maybe not so much — it all depends on who my been-there, done-that ass is dancing next to, no?

I recently spoke with Steve Fabus, one of the original DJs at San Francisco’s legendary Trocadero Transfer gay disco, launched in 1977. He’s been spinning continuously for 30 years and has pretty much seen it all. "Dance music is magic — it’s what gay people are," he explained. "It brought us together and kept us going through some incredibly hard times. Disco gathered everyone under one roof, and then house came along and did the same. Circuit was fun in the beginning, but it got too aggressive, and people of color or people into other things didn’t feel welcome. It took over everything, and, of course, it burned out."

"I love that kids are expressing themselves in smaller clubs, with different kinds of playing. It’s encouraging," he continued. "But it’s a shame that circuit took the big clubs down with it, where everyone could share in this experience together. Of course, there are other factors involved — crystal meth, the Internet, economics. You have to be very clever to be gay and live here now. It’s just so damned expensive."

"But oh well," he said with a laugh. "Everything comes in cycles."

Extra! Click here for the Gayest. Videos. Ever.

Click here for a list of upcoming alternaqueer dance events

The works

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Some films glean artful pleasure from the pains of labor. One flourishing subgenre or strain of documentary tackles working conditions in countries across the world, highlighting the plight of the marginalized to make ends meet and maintain dignity in the face of unjust or extreme conditions. In a sense, Ghosts and Numbers and Luchando, two features at this year’s San Francisco Documentary Film Festival, belong to this group, but they are most interesting for the ways that they differ from it, in content and style. Both movies highlight the precariousness of labor and favor a less direct and centralized consideration of employment’s role in shaping an individual’s existence.

Ghosts and Numbers and Luchando are like distant cousins; they are blood-bound by an integral interest in the working class, but they reside in different lands and possess divergent personalities. In fact, the title of each film suggests something about its filmmaker’s approach to theme.

Alan Klima’s Ghosts and Numbers is a bit cryptic, with a penchant for interweaving ostensibly unrelated elements. One may wonder what the relationship is between ghosts and numbers, but the more relevant inquiry relates to that between labor and modernity. Convictions and a critique can be discerned amid Klima’s clever array of images and concerns, but no easy conclusions are reached.

Noelle Stout’s Luchando, on the other hand, is more up-front and focused in its presentation of the titular subject matter. Of course, the title’s meaning is obscure for non-Spanish speakers, and, even in Spanish, the term is slang instead of a standard word for people who get paid for having sex. But once the slang is understood (it is explained onscreen by one of the subjects), there is no uncertainty that Luchando is a clear and determined depiction of the lives of Cuban hustlers, without any overt class analysis.

These films share a relatively subtle sense of subversion. Klima’s Thailand-set documentary presents the quagmires of modernization and shows compassion for its victims at a time when the more popular sentiment is to rally patriotically around the Asian country’s entrance into the global community (and thus celebrate a preference for glistening urbania over a bucolic tradition). Klima observes lottery-ticket sellers as they discuss the vulnerable state of their occupation in the face of human-replacing technology and governmental limitations. Their earnest and desperate presence contrasts powerfully with other more reflective components and is part of an almost unsettling mixture of elements. Shots of unfinished Bangkok skyscrapers are matched with a voice-over concerning the Thai economy. Abstracted imagery is paired with stories of encounters with ghosts. Vérité-style footage is used for political protest and for a visit to a fortune-teller. At worst, these methods are a bit desultory, with some scenes in need of truncation. But aside from those moments, Ghosts and Numbers glimmers with a rare blend of mystery and humanity.

The humanity of Luchando is more intimate. Whereas Klima’s film uses cinepoetic musings to break up its direct human engagement, Stout’s presents pure portraiture — though it is difficult not to succumb to awe before Havana’s photogenic splendor. Stout surreptitiously captures the daily lives of four prostitutes, hesitantly heeding the warning of subjects when cops appear on the scene. These moments and bits of testimony give the sense that her subjects exist on the outskirts of safety, perpetually in a danger zone because of their gay identity or association. This is most poignant in the case of the transgender woman who is verbally assaulted as the film opens and later talks about being forced to dress as a man. Perhaps Luchando would be enhanced by a look outside the immediate scope of its subjects, in order to get a larger sense of the social conditions in which they are struggling. But there is also satisfaction to be found in its tightly focused account of lives that are both ordinary and foreign.

The sixth SF DocFest runs Sept. 28–Oct. 10 at the Roxie Film Center, 3117 16th St., SF. Information about tickets ($10) and a complete schedule can be obtained by calling (415) 820-3907 or visiting www.sfindie.com.


GHOSTS AND NUMBERS

Tues/2, 7 p.m.; Oct. 7, 2:45 p.m.; $10

LUCHANDO

Sat/29 and Oct. 5, 9:15 p.m.; Oct. 6, 7 p.m.; $10

For an interview with Luchando director Noelle Stout, go to Pixel Vision at www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.

Hayes and Kebab and Stacks’

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› paulr@sfbg.com

On a warm late summer afternoon a few weeks ago, a friend and I stood in front of a shuttered market on Hayes Street, marveling at the shutters themselves. These really weren’t shutters but a kind of corrugated-steel fortification, the sort of thing people in hurricane country buy at Sears so high winds don’t blow out all the windows. Here the danger would not have been hurricanes but vandalism and perhaps an occasional touch of civil unrest — but during our momentary vigil we saw nothing of the kind, not a possibility nor even a hint. Just a dowdy old market that had come to seem out of place, slightly scruffy and paranoid, on what has become, in the past 15 years or so, one of the city’s most transformed stretches of culture and commerce.

Although Hayes Street’s darkest days probably fell in the mid-1990s — when a long symphony strike turned the western precincts of the Civic Center into a ghost town — the neighborhood’s prospects were already brightening even then. True, the idling of the symphony meant that the area’s restaurants had fewer people to serve preperformance dinners or postperformance desserts to, and things were already bad enough with the earthquake-related closures of government buildings near City Hall and the dislocation of the people who worked in them and made up a reliable lunch crowd. But the elevated Central Freeway, the malignant tendril of concrete that cut the neighborhood in two, was succumbing, bit by bit, to ballot initiatives, and removal of that blight meant that there was nowhere to go but up.

When the sun shines in Hayes Valley these days, it’s difficult to remember that dank structure and its scary shadows, or how unsettling it could be to walk along Hayes west of Gough in the evening. Today the scene is one of quirky, pricey boutiques, the wonderful village green, which is full of lunchtime people and romping dogs and whizzing bicycles — and of course restaurants.

There are some excellent restaurants in the vicinity: Jardinière, Hayes Street Grill, Indigo, Absinthe. Although Essencia is too new to put firmly in this category, its bona fides are impressive. But all these places are east of or on Gough. West of Gough, there’s still surprisingly little beyond various sorts of cantinas that cater to the lunch folk.

Suppenküche, with its au courant German cooking, is interesting and worthy in an oddball sort of way, but it’s held down its far corner for more than a decade. Modern Tea, across the street, is also interesting and worthy, but its food service, while estimable, is circumscribed. Frjtz has fabulous frites and sandwiches, Patxi some excellent pizzas, but you’re in and out of those places.

For a time there seemed the possibility of something notable opening in the glassy new building at the corner of Octavia. The restaurant space was large and commanded views of the green, but the first occupant was Café Grillades, which was essentially a creperie. Some months ago the place reopened as Stacks’ — as in stacks of pancakes, as in we deal in breakfast and lunch and, like West Coast stockbrokers, are done by midafternoon.

The restricted hours appear to have heightened the restaurant’s allure. Grillades served dinner but was often emptyish in the after-dark hours. Stacks’, by contrast, actually seems to have people waiting at the host’s station for tables. I would like to say the public’s renewed enthusiasm has to do with the food, but Stacks’ menu doesn’t seem too different from Grillades’ and even includes a wide selection of crepes, along with Belgian waffles, omelets, soups, and sandwiches.

The food is good rather than memorable, except for the prices, which reflect the chichification of Hayes Street. Soup and sandwich (the combination changes daily) will run you $8.69. For that you get a pretty-good-size bowl of, say, chicken noodle soup (with plenty of wide, fettucelike noodles) and a turkey and cheese sandwich on soft whole wheat bread. This is just the sort of lunch your nutrition-involved mother would make you eat, if she could still make you do anything.

A plaudit too for the turkey burger ($8.89), which was cooked through — as is essential with poultry — but not dry. Turkey burgers need a secret ingredient; I use an egg yolk, which helps keep the meat moist and also provides a binding effect. Could this be the Stacks’ technique? I couldn’t tell, but the kitchen knows what it’s doing here.

For years a noontime stalwart was Sage, one of those Chinese restaurants that seemed as if it had always been there and always would be. Then, one day last fall, it wasn’t. Now it is a Middle Eastern place called Hayes and Kebab. Not much has changed except the cuisine, and the fact that there is no longer full table service: you order at the counter, take a numbered placard, and wait for the food to be brought to you.

The falafel ($5.95) is served burrito-style, wrapped in lavash instead of the usual pita bread, and this is an improvement. There is also, squirting gently from the cylinder, a tasty sauce of yogurt spiked with paprika — a nice touch, since falafel can be dry. We liked the charcoal-grilled chicken shish kebab ($9.95), in part because the marinated meat remained juicy and because it was presented with tasty little salads of bulgur wheat and rice pilaf dotted with green peas, raisins, and slivered almonds.

Hayes and Kebab serves dinner, if you can’t get into Essencia next door or you overlooked Stacks’ daylight-only policy. Said King Théoden as he led the Rohirrim into battle before the walls of Minas Tirith, "Fear no darkness!"

HAYES AND KEBAB

Mon.–Thurs. and Sun., 11 a.m.–10 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 11 a.m.–11 p.m.

406 Hayes, SF

(415) 552-3440

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

STACKS’

Daily, 7 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

501 Hayes, SF

(415) 241-9011

www.stacksrestaurant.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Saint Steven Morrissey – comedien et martyr

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morrissey.JPG

By Erik Morse

In the inaugural vignette grotesque of Genet’s 1949 memoir-cum-roman noir Le Journal du voleur, the black prince of literature recalls his childhood travels between Paris and the ruins of Tiffauges. Here, along the verdant slopes of the Loire, was the crime scene of France’s most diabolical pederast and murderer, Lord Gilles de Rais. Genet claims his adoration for the countryside’s eponymous genets (a kind of flower endemic to Europe
also known as Spanish broom) compelled him to worship at their rhizomes while they, in turn, bowed to their human counterpart in a veritable miracle of the rose.

“They know that I am their living, moving, agile representative, conqueror of the wind,” he writes. “They are my natural emblem, but through them I have roots in that French soil which is fed by the powdered bones of the children and youths buggered, massacred, and burned by Gilles des Rais.”

This recurring trope, Genet’s “artifice of the flower” framed his every character and crime from the “spiky blossoms” of Darling Daintyfoot’s theft to the prostitute Divine’s “warm anal stele” to the “decorous pageantry” of Querelle’s murders. Flowers were, for Genet, a synecdoche for beatification growing rampant in the charnel house of absolute evil.

The figure of Steven Morrissey on the Smiths’ 1983 Top of the Pops debut had all of the Dionysian and homoerotic charge of Genet’s underworld flaneur. With his chiseled, Northern jaw line, coiffed pompadour, and back pocket overflowing with gladioli, Morrissey summoned, in his melodramatic rendition of “This Charming Man,” the saintly icons of condemned playboys Weidmann and Pilorge who adorned Genet’s cell at Sante prison.

The lachrymose crooner achieved a similar macabre infamy, penning odes to the victims of the Moors Murders and using gay icons Joe Dallesandro and Terence Stamp on the Smiths’ album covers. During a 1986 “graveyard” photo session for the New Musical Express where he mused to a reporter, “I can stand in a graveyard for hours and hours, just inhaling the individuals. When they lived, when they died, it’s all inspiring,” he inspired a new generation to mourn the slaughter of the innocents.

Cold case

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

The gruesome death of a French national living in San Francisco is becoming a political hornet’s nest for local top law enforcement officials and the Mayor’s Office.

It’s still not clear how local homicide cops will define 36-year-old Hugues de la Plaza’s death after months of allowing for and even favoring the possibility that he took his own life. Suicide would have made things much less difficult for everyone in San Francisco responsible for catching those who kill, but few people close to de la Plaza believe that he killed himself.

But the French ambassador to the United States, Pierre Vimont, a confidant of newly elected president Nicolas Sarkozy, is following the case closely, and a police officer at the French consulate in Los Angeles is transutf8g hundreds of e-mails from de la Plaza’s Google and Yahoo accounts as well as mining material from the hard drive of his computer after breaking into it last week, a task homicide inspectors here apparently hadn’t yet bothered with.

"I have notified others regarding the implications contained in your letter and the wishes that you expressed to ensure an in-depth and serious inquest into the death of your son," Vimont wrote to de la Plaza’s parents, Mireille and François, earlier this year, according to our rough translation.

The status of the case right now is hardly reassuring for the de la Plazas, who forked out their own cash for a private investigator.

Recent photos of de la Plaza show him with unshorn black hair spilling out from an army cap and wide dark eyes under a pair of bushy brows.

His ex-girlfriend, Mellisa Nix, with whom he remained close, will testify soon in front of the Board of Supervisors’ Public Safety Committee on how well the SFPD is investigating violent crimes in the city as the homicide rate marches swiftly toward a 15-year high.

More than half of the annual homicide cases in San Francisco since 2001 have resulted in no arrests, according to the Police Department’s statistics, and that includes those in which the feds became involved.

Nix has doggedly pursued de la Plaza’s case, starting a blog with photos and updates, frequently calling area newsrooms to urge follow-up stories — she’s a reporter for the Sacramento Bee — and pestering the SFPD’s homicide unit to the point that it now refuses to answer her questions. Messages we left with the SFPD’s Bureau of Investigations seeking comment were not returned.

"From the get-go I had a sense that this investigation was being conducted in a fashion that doesn’t shed a very good light on the SFPD," Nix told the Guardian. "I was the one who had to call the parents and tell them their son was dead."

Two police officers kicked open the back door of 462 Linden on the morning of June 2 after a neighbor discovered blood dripping off de la Plaza’s front doorknob, with spattered pools of it leading from the threshold. They found de la Plaza lying on the floor, stabbed multiple times amid a grizzly scene of more blood that spread from the bathroom up the hallway to the kitchen and into the living room, where it soaked the coach and a television was knocked over.

De la Plaza had recently purchased land in Argentina, earned a promotion at work, acquired a new laptop, and made plans for the upcoming week — all things friends say a man considering suicide wouldn’t have done. But Nix said he had been frequently dating online, and it’s possible that an estranged lover or someone’s boyfriend attacked him.

The night of June 1 he’d met with a friend from work at SF Underground in the Lower Haight after going on a date to an art gallery with another transplant from France.

Nothing significant appeared to be stolen from his apartment after he made it home after last call, and both the front and back doors were locked when the two officers arrived. Immediately, police and officials from the Medical Examiner’s Office suspected a suicide. But Nix and others close to de la Plaza believe that persistent assumption has allowed the case’s trail to grow cold despite evidence suggesting he was murdered.

"It’s fucked-up in retrospect," said Orion Denley, a friend and neighbor who was briefly questioned by police the day de la Plaza was found. "I kept thinking, ‘How come they aren’t asking me if I heard anything?’ All they did was ask over and over again if he was suicidal, like they had already made up their minds that he had committed suicide."

No one from the Police Department contacted him again, but Denley said he heard de la Plaza’s front door slam three times, followed by two crashes and the sound of a distinct set of footsteps on the stairs leading from the apartment.

"It was definitely someone exiting the building," he said, "because you could hear the footsteps getting quieter as they ran away."

There was no suicide note or apparent weapon, nor was there an immediate suspect. Police found a knife in the sink with trace substances that could have been de la Plaza’s blood. They’ve since missed at least two promised deadlines for the completion of a DNA analysis, and now there’s no telling when the results will be available. It’s the only real piece of evidence left allowing investigators to regard de la Plaza’s death merely as suspicious rather than a murder.

"It’s something that I don’t think Hugues would have ever considered doing," Nix said of the suicide theory. "He had his ups and downs. He was a very private person. But if he were going to kill himself, he would probably write a letter. He was very precise and particular about how he conducted his life."

But there’s no doubt the pressure’s on. Sup. Ross Mirkarimi has vocalized his disapproval of the way skyrocketing homicides in his district — which includes the Hayes Valley neighborhood, where de la Plaza lived — are being handled by the Police Department, and District Attorney Kamala Harris has paid special attention to the case. Her chief assistant met twice with de la Plaza’s family, who visited for several weeks earlier in the summer.

The family also met with Inspector Tony Casillas and bureau captain Kevin Cashman but returned to France largely empty-handed. They’ve since discussed using insurance money they received after de la Plaza’s death to establish a support group in San Francisco for the families of victims whose murders go unsolved.

"Is that what it takes in San Francisco? Hire a private investigator and involve a foreign police force?" Nix wrote to Mayor Gavin Newsom in July. "If so, shame on the leaders of San Francisco. If so, God help those in your city who do not have such resources."

New haunts

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When Jake Mann ponders his recent move from Davis to San Francisco, he puts it in terms of a song. "Left behind the right things I know / How does this one go?" Mann muses on "Beat the Drum," as though making your way in a new scene were like playing a tune whose chords you haven’t quite learned. That SF has scenes at all was part of Mann’s concern. "People are specific about their genres here," he notes. "I’ve always felt spread across a lot of sounds."

This is borne out on Mann’s new LP, Daytime Ghost (Crossbill). Made with a backing three-piece band, it’s low-watt singer-songwriter rock that’s almost shoegazily bothered by texture. The first thought — thanks to the skuzzy guitar and dirty-weekend vocals of "Flames at My Feet" — goes to some less vain Marc Bolan: all the seamy T.Rex aesthetics without the bad intent. But a more accurate ancestor may be the Neil Young of 1975’s Zuma (Reprise). Mann lists the album as a recent "obsession," and its meld of fractured melodies and grimy guitars is an obvious influence on Daytime. "Take You for a Ride" plays like unraveling country rock, its broad American horizons — "Those big skies won’t betray us," Mann hopes — as ominous as Young’s had become.

Mann built Daytime over the past couple of years after the breakup of his Davis group the Zim-Zims, and it shows the marks of protracted writing. Evidently, the artist hasn’t quite decided his feelings on laptop beats, which pop up sporadically, though the sublime "Our 1st Assumptions Were Correct" shows he can corral them. Still, the disc sticks together, largely because those guitars have an almost tactile presence — we’ve always got a toehold. Mann knows this is the promise his live show has to keep. With a second guitar added and carte blanche given to vocal improvs, he claims they’re "getting most of it across."

JAKE MANN

Sept. 30, 9 p.m., $6

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

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