Scene

Holdin’ the weight of the Bay

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Still looks like slavery

But it’s the black legacy

Mistah FAB, "100 Bars"

One night last September, I hitch a ride with G-Stack of the Delinquents and Dotrix of Tha Mekanix to Dem Hoodstarz’s album release party in San Francisco. As we park outside the club, Mistah FAB rolls up with a modest posse. In contrast to his usual iced-out Technicolor clubwear, the man also known as Fabby Davis Jr. is low-key, dressed all in black, a pair of designer stunna shades supplying the main clue to his identity. He hops in Stack’s car to hear a newly laid track for the latter’s upcoming Purple Hood, then we set out for the club, a less than half block journey whose distance is lengthened interminably by a series of well-wishers and business consultations. It’s like following two CEOs across the floor of the stock exchange: Stack is on two cell phones, trying to shake hands with someone. FAB, meanwhile, handles minor transactions, poses for a photo, and takes a call, all while briefing me on the deal he had just signed with Atlantic Records for Da Yellow Bus Rydah, the much-anticipated follow-up to his 2005 disc, Son of a Pimp (Thizz Ent.).

Near the door, a man takes FAB aside. "FAB, you gotta do something about the violence," he says, meaning specifically the 141 homicides in Oakland in 2006 under former mayor and present attorney general Jerry Brown. FAB nods at what is clearly an unreasonable request, albeit one that reflects the disproportionate political burden borne by black entertainers in America. No one would turn to, say, Justin Timberlake to stop violence. Then again, I imagine no one asks Keak Da Sneak either. FAB’s position, in other words, is unique.

Though he made his early reputation as a freestyle battle rhymer and owes his success to hyphy hits like "Super Sic Wit It," FAB’s lyrics seldom stray into gangsta or pimp terrain — the title of his last album is simply literal. Yet he can get down on a track with the most thugged-out MCs. Aside from the giants Too $hort and E-40 and on par with the perpetually hot Keak, FAB is the rapper all Bay Area rappers want on their albums, because he has the biggest buzz on the radio and in the streets. His popularity gives him influence, but FAB commands respect in the hood because he’s from the hood: his compass-based hit "N.E.W. Oakland" was the first major rap recognition of his native North Oakland as a hood. This rapport with the alienated and isolated ghetto youth who constitute hyphy’s core audience separates him from the vast majority of MCs to whom the label "conscious" may be applied.

"You go up to someone in the hood and be, like, ‘Dick Cheney had a heart attack,’ they be, like, ‘Who the fuck is Dick Cheney?’" FAB says later. "But you tell him, ‘Jay-Z donated a million dollars to improve water in Africa,’ they be, like, ‘For real?’ That’s something of their world. Being a Bay Area artist, I’m of their world. So you have the opportunity to teach without them knowing."

"People who have influence," FAB continues, "have an obligation to tell people, ‘Preserve life. Save lives. Help lives.’ But it’s hard to reach people if you’re not giving them something they relate to. The hyphy movement is something they relate to. Hyphy gets you in the door, to open their ears to what I’m saying. It’s up to them to digest it."

That night at the club, FAB exerts his influence. When things get salty between security and Dem Hoodstarz’s East Palo Alto associates, the group calls FAB to the stage to perform their collaboration "Ugh." Things chill out. FAB issues an impromptu plea against violence and murders. These are problems no single person can solve, but FAB is doing his part. Yet by the show’s finale — the "Getz Ya Grown Man On" remix, on which he has a verse — Fabby Davis has left the building. Being Mistah FAB, I realize, can be exhausting.

FOLLOW THE YELLOW BUS ROAD


Mistah FAB’s deal with Atlantic is a landmark in a scene long neglected by the majors. Along with Clyde Carson’s signing with Capitol, FAB’s arrangement — including distribution for his Faeva Afta Entertainment — is the first serious acknowledgment of the renaissance Bay Area rap has undergone in the past three years. Unlike E-40, a regional star who’d already achieved putf8um sales on Jive before his push last year by Warner Bros., FAB’s an unknown quantity outside the Bay. And in contrast to Frontline or the Federation — whose deals came through the respective backing of nationally known producers E-A-Ski and Rick Rock — FAB is the first evidence for a new generation of local rappers that enough talent and dedication can get you signed. It’s another weight on the shoulders of the man born Stanley Cox Jr.

"Lots of people are putting their hopes into the album," he acknowledges. "They’re, like, ‘I hope FAB do it, because it’ll kick in the door for all of us.’ I realized when I was creating this album it’s not just something I want to do. It’s something my whole region depends on."

Da Yellow Bus Rydah‘s journey has been anything but smooth, however. Bottom line: Atlantic has postponed the album’s tentatively scheduled spring release, due to controversy surrounding the Ghostbusters-themed advance single, "Ghost Ride It." A tribute to the hood-invented practice of throwing your car in neutral as you walk alongside and steer, "Ghost Ride It" was generating a buzz through its a video on YouTube and the minor-league MTVs when a Dec. 29, 2006, Associated Press story ("Hip-Hop Car Stunt Leaves 2 Dead") linked the song with a pair of unrelated deaths: Davender Gulley, 18, of Stockton, who "died after his head slammed into a parked car while he was hanging out the window of an SUV," and an unnamed "36-year-old man dancing on top of a moving car [who] fell off, hit his head and died in what authorities said was Canada’s first ghost riding fatality." While the scant details obscure whether these incidents stemmed from ghost riding or more traditional automotive horseplay, Fox News’s Hannity and Colmes found the trend alarming enough to call FAB on the carpet in January.

"You understand that a lot of kids look up to you?" Sean Hannity accused rather than asked FAB. "They sing your songs. They dress like you. They talk like you — they wanna be you!" Aside from displaying an oversimplified sense of the relationship between artist and audience, Hannity’s remark reveals a comic lack of familiarity with hip-hop and their guest in particular: what part of "Super Sic Wit It" do you sing? Moreover, while rap fans undoubtedly draw from the same well of slang, the idea that they all talk the same — or even like FAB, for that matter — is a stereotype.

"I don’t think they expected me to be so articulate," FAB recalls with a laugh. Yet among MCs, FAB is singular interview subject. While he has a clear sense of his talent and importance, he’s more apt to discuss his personal relationship with God or how his lonely childhood as a latchkey kid inspired him to create rather than brag about how real he is. His power to articulate the struggle of urban youth — to explain the rage that motivates, say, ghost riding — is the very reason he’s often labeled the spokesperson for a hyphy movement otherwise devoted to "going dumb."

Hannity treated FAB like he’s dumb, but FAB turned the tables. Hannity’s denunciation of his effect on the "kids" prompted the rapper to question whether his influence rightly extends to a Canadian 11 years his senior, which Hannity countered by accusing FAB of wanting as much "money and controversy" as he can get. When FAB speculated on the influence of turning on the TV and seeing 3,000 soldiers die in Iraq, Alan Colmes was sent in as a balm, ending the segment.

"Both those people were adults," FAB says later of the ghost-riding deaths. "I feel bad for the families, but at the end of the day, an adult has to take responsibility for his actions."

GHOSTBUSTED


The next pothole for Yellow Bus was a late March cease and desist letter from Columbia Pictures for copyright infringement in the "Ghost Ride It" video — just as it was about to debut on MTV’s 106 and Park. "We had permission [to use the Ghostbusters van] from the man who built it and owns it," FAB explains. "But Columbia owns the logo." The video was immediately pulled from all media outlets, impairing Atlantic’s ability to market the single nationally. As a result, the Yellow Bus has been parked. The official explanation, from Atlantic VP Mike Carin, is that the label is focusing on FAB’s "artistic development." Despite the inevitable rumor that the rapper was dropped, Carin confirms that "the deal is still in place."

Still, such delays have silenced many MCs’ buzz: witness how the delay of Raekwon’s album on Aftermath has converted excitement into skepticism, or how the Team’s World Premiere (Moedoe/Koch, 2006) dropped too long after its singles had peaked, leading to lower-than-expected sales. Fortunately, the structure of FAB’s distribution deal allows him an unusual degree of freedom.

"They were willing to sacrifice certain things," he says of his initial decision to sign with Atlantic among competing offers. "They allowed me to do what I want to do — if I want to drop an independent album, I can."

ENTER DA BAYDESTRIAN


This flexibility has allowed the prolific FAB to immediately walk out another new album, Da Baydestrian, on May 15, through SMC/Fontana. Although, according to SMC cofounder Will Bronson, Atlantic has options to include as many as five of its songs on Yellow Bus, Baydestrian is an otherwise distinct project intended to satisfy the demand for a follow-up to Son of a Pimp. FAB’s also preparing a series of summer releases, including a second installment of the all-freestyle Tonite Show with DJ Fresh. (Fresh, incidentally, edited FAB’s 2005 DVD, The Freestyle King, now packaged with Baydestrian as a bonus.) With Beeda Weeda and J-Stalin, representing the East and West respectively, FAB’s formed the multihood group N.E.W. Oakland, whose mixtape is nearing completion. Prince of Da Bay (In Yo Face/Hooker Boy Filmz), a documentary on FAB by local hip-hop director Dame Hooker, should be out by press time, while FAB’s next DVD, Shoobalaboobie TV, is in the works.

"You do what you have to do to keep the buzz going," FAB says. "Also sales — on the independent level, your numbers are what’s important [to major labels]." Da Baydestrian thus has Atlantic’s blessing, but its commercial success will determine the fate of his deal.

Yet the need to appeal to the marketplace hasn’t inhibited FAB’s creativity, and Da Baydestrian refuses to play it safe. Rather than exploit the hyphy sound he helped establish, FAB only sprinkles it in, most obviously on the remix of the Traxamillion-produced "Sideshow" and the opening title track, one of six bangers produced by FAB protégé Rob-E. The young Martinez-born producer proves his versatility on tracks like the triumphant "Get This Together" and the melancholy "Life on Track," featuring Faeva Afta vocalist J-Nash, whose Hyphy Love drops in August. Another four productions by Son of a Pimp collaborator Genessee contribute to Baydestrian‘s in-house feel even as the family breaks new ground: "Can’t Wait," say, evokes Andre 3000’s explorations of go-go, filtered through FAB’s hyphy sensibility, while "Shorty Tryin’ 2 Get By" is a contemporary "Keep Ya Head Up" spiced with Bay Area R&B. The album is refreshingly free of skits, and guest stars are kept to a minimum, but Too $hort blesses the disc three times, an unambiguous stamp of approval from Bay rap’s founder.

What makes Da Baydestrian one of the most extraordinary albums since hyphy’s inception, however, is its social consciousness. "Deepest Thoughts," for example, hits out at President George W. Bush, but even more pointedly at Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for expanding the prison system instead of aiding the poor. The Sean T–produced "Crack Baby Anthem" addresses teen dope dealers, seeking to uplift without castigating or glorifying their activities — for the nonghetto audience, the song connects the dots between poverty, crime, and the present political climate. FAB describes his approach as "hip-hyphy," presenting an alternative to hip-hop fans who consider hyphy juvenile or incomprehensible. Granted, the disc’s school bus and helmet imagery — referring to the hyphy concept of acting "retarded" — is hardly p.c. Nonetheless, FAB’s lunchbox-wielding Baydestrian is a welcome change from the exaltation of guns and dope adorning your average rap album.

"In no way am I trying to say I’m like Martin Luther King or Malcolm X," FAB explains. "But I realized I could create nonsense and seem to support ignorance, or I can get people to start looking at the reality of it, and the reality of it is that young blacks are dying, not only in the Bay; they’re dying everywhere. We’ve been raised in a warlike civilization. We’ve been brainwashed to accept war as the proper thing to do when things don’t go right."

"Tupac [Shakur] said it himself," FAB concludes. "He said, ‘I’m not going to be the one to change the world. But I guarantee I’ll plant a seed in the mind of someone who does.’ We’re all the Tupac generation. Pac was hyphy."

While I don’t think it’s my place to declare FAB the next Tupac, I can’t fail to be struck by his invocation of the Bay Area icon. On a superficial level, of course, with all his non-thugged-out, cartoonish imagery, FAB is nothing like Pac, just as the hyphy movement differs from the Bay’s mid-’90s sound. Yet locally, if not nationally, the two rappers occupy the same position on the map of hip-hop: like Pac, FAB has cred with nearly everyone, he has a positive message within an utterly street aesthetic, and he makes tunes everyone wants to hear. No rapper has embodied all three attributes since Pac, and that combination makes FAB extraordinary. *

On death and dining

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS When he talks, his whole face participates, but especially his forehead, which snakes into road maps of thought, and I get lost. When he listens, he listens. This guy went to medical school, completed his residency, and then went, Naw, I reckon I’d rather work in publishing. And for this my new friend Maze is a kind of a hero to me.

A hero and a proofreader.

Phenomenon’s new favorite restaurant is Phnom Penh, a friendly little Cambodian wonderland on the edge of Oakland’s Chinatown. Phenomenon swears by the barbecued chicken, but I ate with the Maze.

And I don’t remember where we were going after, but I guarantee you we were late. I’ve always been a slow eater. Now I’m that plus a chatterbox.

Maze asks about chickens. You almost have to, to be polite. (And then, an hour later, you start to wonder if politeness is perhaps overrated.) I talk about chickens as pets, chickens as dinner, chickens as funny little philosophers, escape artists, workhorses, lessons in vulnerability, art….

I describe in detail how beautiful it looks inside a hen when you butcher her: the bright colors; the next day’s egg, a culinary prize, fully formed; then maybe a soft-shell one; then a full-size yolk; and a winding, twisty twirl of progressively smaller bright yellow globes circling back to the fictional future — which, it turns out, is a clustered galaxy of distinctly astounding yellow dots. I cried the first time I saw it because I didn’t have a camera.

"So in med school when you were dissecting human cadavers and shit," I said, "did it change the way you felt about death?"

The Maze’s brow did what it does when he fixes to speak. He worries about words and sentences them with care. That’s why I really like talking with this guy. "No," he said, finally, thoughtfully. It made him more concretely aware of the fact of mortality and perhaps a little leery of old age — but he was already those things.

He speaks of the smell of formaldehyde, the auxiliary presence of a "prosected" cadaver (in case you can’t find some parts or accidentally mash them or something), and the necessity for keeping things moist, lest "everything starts to look like jerky." And while he is speaking (of these things) … I eat.

Squid salad. Duck curry. Shrimp soup. White rice. Everything was great! Everything was moist! Nothing was missing or mashed or jerkied. Although … never mind.

The squid salad, the squid … There weren’t any tentacles, and that’s my favorite part. The lip ticklers. And the parts that there were seemed almost too nice, too white, and not quite as slimy or chewy or fishy as I like. Which most people would probably see as a plus, I know.

The duck curry had potatoes and string beans and was very mild, maybe coconut milky. And the duck pieces were big and tender and juicy. Delicious!

But the soup had more zing. It was a little bit like canh chua, that Vietnamese hot-and-sour stuff I love, with pineapple and tomatoes. And the shrimp and the zing, but the similarities stop there. This was a different zing, more lemony, more … I don’t know, Cambodian.

Well, I like jerky. I don’t know about cadaver jerky. But beef jerky, turkey jerky, elk jerky. All of these things I have had and enjoyed immensely. Especially on road trips.

But how did I get here? And, more importantly, are we there yet?

No. We are still at Phnom Penh, talking, eating, and being late. There’s a scene of a city or town. I don’t know how to describe this. There must be a word. There is wainscoting, and then above that a kind of continuous strip of low buildings and cool trees and walkways. Not painted or pictured, but protruding, in 3-D or kind of 2 1/2–D. Relief?

All one color. Gold?

And I don’t necessarily recommend this, but if you stood in the middle of the restaurant, spinning around like a ballerina, and were four feet tall with your eyes open, it would be a lot like traveling, looking out the window of a fast car.

Until you fell down and dreamed scrambled eggs with cheese.

"Have nice days," the door of the restaurant says. I’m trying. *

PHNOM PENH

Mon.–Thurs., 11 a.m.–9:15 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 11 a.m.–9:45 p.m.

251 Eighth St., Oakl.

(510) 893-3825

Takeout available

Beer

MC/V

Quiet

Wheelchair accessible

Serious games

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Two weeks before the world premiere of Aaron Loeb’s First Person Shooter, a play that explores the controversial relationship between video games and violence in the aftermath of a Columbine-like school shooting, Virginia Tech suddenly made the subject almost too relevant. SF Playhouse and PlayGround, the coproducing companies, considered a postponement — according to excerpts from e-mails between the theater’s cofounders, the director, and the playwright, which were reprinted in the program — but in the end went forward with the opening. Loeb’s argument to his colleagues for doing so, reasonable enough in itself, echoed the central dramatic thrust of his play: "We need to connect as people, as human beings in the face of this kind of tragedy, not just try to find who’s to blame and move on with our lives."

Even without the uncomfortable timeliness lent the play by the latest massacre on a US campus, First Person Shooter broaches the twin problems of violence and compassion in American society in a way that feels immediate and compelling. Of course, Loeb’s words carry unintended irony, given that for most of the country (released after only a few days from the condensed, media-scripted period of shock, mourning, and introspection reserved for national tragedies of a certain newsworthiness), the Virginia Tech killings are already yesterday’s papers and a fuzzy memory. Just as predictably, the shootings prompted another facile, recycled exercise in blame casting (into which the militarized and imperial system responsible for similar and bigger rampages abroad, needless to say, never enters), since which we’ve all been tacitly encouraged to move on with our lives.

Although it doesn’t go as far as it might, First Person Shooter admirably refuses the usual package of talking points that passes for a discussion of American violence. The plot’s deceptively narrow focus on a boisterous set of twentysomething business execs and video game makers on the one hand and the unassuming farmer parents of a slain student on the other moves beyond stale gun control debates and scientific studies of child brain chemistry to take in the intersecting legal, corporate, media, and racial logics determining how violence plays in the mainstream.

Loeb’s play, moreover, enters this fray from a particularly invested perspective: the rising playwright is also chief operating officer of Planet Moon Studios, a San Francisco video-game-developing house. That background lends a certain insider authenticity to the Bay Area start-up world depicted here and makes the play’s honest wrestling with and socially wide-ranging approach to the issue of video games and violence all the more striking.

Within a sharply written and straightforward drama (imaginatively staged with sustained verve and precision by director Jon Tracy), Loeb sets up a series of relationships and imaginary identifications that resonate increasingly as his story moves forward. In the opening scene, for instance, we see whiz kid programmer Kerry Davis (a terrific Craig Marker), the genius behind JetPack Games’ most violent and popular seller, at the keyboard wearing a pair of headphones, gangsta rapping with gusto in what he assumes is private abandon. Standing behind him, however, is his amused peer and JetPack’s rogue of a CEO, Tommy (an equally strong Chad Deverman). The comic effect of Kerry’s blind spot — an unawareness that his private fantasies might have public aspects — soon comes back in the grimmest guise: a masked shooter named Billy (alternately played by four cast members) posts a fan letter on the company’s Web site praising Kerry’s game as excellent training, shortly before going on a killing spree with a friend at an Illinois high school. As if this weren’t bad enough, among their victims is the school’s lone African American student, a boy, we come to learn, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the villain Kerry has programmed into the game as a secret (virtual) revenge on the man who murdered his wife.

Kerry’s guilt and anxiety are impossible to contain, invading both the haunted dream world where he relives the brutal attack on his wife (scenes impressively rendered in a bold, cinematic style on Melpomene Katakalos’s spare stage of toppled chairs and tables, augmented by Brian Degan Scott’s excellent two-panel video design and Ian Walker’s atmospheric soundscape) and the JetPack offices. Further, the legal and media uproar that results from the killings shakes the tight little team — rounded out by a hip young programmer named Wilson (Sung Min Park) and a forceful MBA named Tamar (Kate Del Castillo) — just as the now notorious and endangered company is set to launch the game’s successor. Enter lawyers all around, played by Park and Susi Damilano, who also plays a slain student’s well-meaning stepmother. They pursue winner-take-all strategies on behalf of the victims’ families and the embattled corporation, respectively, as Kerry and his counterpart on the other side of the battle, a dead student’s father (played movingly, in shades of turmoil and dignity, by Adrian Roberts), grope their way out of the dehumanizing machine that’s caught them up, toward some kind of contact, some identification, grounded in a shared suffering and understanding. *

FIRST PERSON SHOOTER

Through June 9

Wed.–Sat., 8 p.m. (also Sat., 3 p.m.)

$18–$60

SF Playhouse

533 Sutter, SF

(415) 677-9596

www.sfplayhouse.org

Rhymes with work

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johnny@sfbg.com

I have some Björk memories stowed on shelves and in crates. There’s the signed copy of the Sugarcubes’ "Birthday" 12-inch from the days of the group’s English-language interview with Melody Maker, when Björk showed up late and apologized with the immortal first words "I was shitting" (a moment that all who mistook her for a cute elf should have noted). And I’ve got a great teenage Kodak shot of a friend who helped start riot grrrl long before she picked up a guitar, sitting on Björk’s lap.

But whither Björk? Has she indeed withered to nothing but old soulless art zombie bones because Matthew Barney took a flensing knife to her whale of a voice and cut away her personality? Those were the questions a semilapsed Björk maniac and I leaped to the minute her new album, Volta (Atlantic), blasted from his car speakers with its brash yet mannered call to arms, "Earth Intruders." Here it was, a track that united Björk and Timbaland! Ten years ago, swept up by my love for Post and Homogenic (both Elektra; 1995 and 1997) and the late Aaliyah’s even greater One in a Million (Blackground, 1996), I’d have been rapt. Now we both shrugged and wished we could wish ourselves into truly enjoying what we were hearing.

The good news about Volta is that it gets much better as it goes along. The bad news is that it takes a while to get someplace vital or unconventional by Björk’s standards. The arrival occurs when the heavily processed guitar riff and seesawing volume levels of "Declare Independence" kick in and Björk begins issuing commands like a less moldy and more melodic Peaches, a Chick on Speed with pagan fire in her blood, or a Cobra Killer without a sense of the ridiculous. Here, at least and at last, her flag-raising and megaphone-crackling shouts are matched by musical momentum, so that by the end of the track you’d have to be dead not to want to join her cheerleading squad.

She’s spelling out F-E-M-I-N-I-S-M, but in a manner much different from that of the riot grrrl schools with whom she once swam upstream, against dull dude rock currents, though sporting savvier raver gear. Volta‘s glossy color cover art and some of Björk’s comments about the album suggest she’s made a collection of wise party anthems for girls of the next generation. Her dedication to the feminine is there, no doubt, yet her mood and the music surrounding it are — until "Declare Independence" hits — often morose. The Henryk Górecki–influenced horn symphonics of a track such as "The Dull Flame of Desire" were mined a decade ago by Björk’s lesser contemporaries of the time, Lamb, and her duet partner on it, Antony (Hegarty, of Antony and the Johnsons), engages her in a maddening war of affectations. She has more range and emotion; he should be fined for grievous vibrato abuse. In the end, they’re both stampeded by the drumroll cameo of Lightning Bolt’s Brian Chippendale. It’s epic, all right.

Elsewhere, Björk occasionally dips into the orientalist waters near where her husband’s recent ship of a movie, Drawing Restraint 9, sank much too slowly. Built around Min Xiao-Fen’s skittering pipa sounds, "I See Who You Are" gives that film’s anatomy lessons a less violent and possibly lesbian twist, staying chilly, while "Hope," another underwhelming collabo with Timbaland, further proves his ego is bigger than his imagination these days. So what’s to love? Before the anarchic blast of "Declare Independence," Volta‘s highlight is "Vertebrae by Vertebrae"; the sinister symphonic dissonance that was Björk’s métier during parts of Homogenic and most of her Dancer in the Dark numbers comes back, and she’s more than ready for it, unleashing her wildest howls. Instead of Górecki, the deathly cloud formations of Alban Berg come to mind during the song’s interludes. But Björk is no naive Lulu — she uses such a scene to try out some primal vocal and back-stretching calisthenics.

Such signs of life are a step in the right direction, away from the nadir of 2004’s Medúlla (Elektra), which was doomed from its conception as an all-vocal album. Björk has a tendency to overestimate her singing range, as any Ella Fitzgerald fan who has heard the Icelandic one try to get through "Like Someone in Love" on sheer winking cuteness can attest to. Fortunately, this same belief in her power has made for some thrilling songs. Volta only has a couple, but a couple are better than none. *

BJÖRK

With Joanna Newsom and Ghost Digital

Sat/19, 7:30 p.m., $26.50–$70.50

Shoreline Amphitheatre

1 Amphitheatre Pkwy., Mountain View

(415) 421-TIXS

www.tickets.com

Sweet and lowdown

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Scattered throughout Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep are shots in which the camera recedes from the street action — kids throwing rocks, blundering thugs stealing a television — to the yearning treble of the blues-spiritual soundtrack. There are many examples of patterned poetry in Burnett’s 1977 debut, but none are so affecting as these elisions, which literally pull at the viewer, casting the pall of memory over bittersweet scenes of life among the Watts working poor.

This retrospective vision seems all the more acute for the circuitous path Killer of Sheep has taken to a theater near you. Burnett produced the film as his master’s thesis during the heyday of UCLA’s film program, shooting it in his native Watts part-time and, without thought of distribution, artfully arranging his slice-of-life narration over tracks from his rich record collection: selections ranging from Paul Robeson to Earth, Wind and Fire. Word began to spread about Burnett’s lyrical neorealism, but the essential soundtrack proved a sticking point for a commercial release, with licensing costs being prohibitively expensive — a very modern problem that more recently affixed itself to Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation. The film never really went away, winning a major award at the 1981 Berlin Festival and getting selected for the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry, but theatrical distribution remained elusive until a coalition of backers came through to ensure that UCLA’s recent 35mm restoration (in its earlier incarnations the film was shown in 16mm, befitting its film-school origins) could tour the country’s big screens.

Thirty years later the film sings. The plot, such as it is, mostly follows Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders), a broad-shouldered, kindhearted husband and father of two who works long shifts at a slaughterhouse (hence the plainly descriptive title). The family struggles, but not in any particular direction: which is to say, they live. The episodic narrative is borrowed from the Italian neorealists and Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy, but the sensuous film style is Burnett’s own. His framing techniques — close-ups cut off at the head are thick with characters’ midsections — emphasize physicality, while the use of natural light sends shots into a free-floating daydream. There is always this give-and-take between the earthy and the ethereal, never more so than in the digressions of children playing, in which Watts simultaneously seems depressingly abject and dreamily beautiful: a fragile balance, again suggestive of memory.

It is, after all, important to remember that if Killer of Sheep feels timeless, it’s probably because Burnett made it that way. The film was produced in 1977, but it frequently seems as if it had been made decades earlier: it’s the soundtrack, of course, but also the compositions styled after Walker Evans portraits, the camera movements evoking city symphonies, and the dissolving montage sequences, which link the film to the purest strains of silent cinema.

What makes Killer of Sheep frankly overwhelming is the way Burnett brings this evocative style to every part of his narration — a scene in which two hoods try to involve Stan in a murder gets the same attention as one in which two boys see how long they can stand on their heads. Off-the-cuff humor cuts against plaintive despair, one deepening the other. Aestheticized poverty is always a risky proposition, but Killer of Sheep is miles from style for style’s sake: its nebulous, contradictory beauty reaches out to touch the full variety of experience, leaving the audience to feel everything at once.

In the film’s centerpiece (strikingly paralleled in Lynne Ramsay’s memory of underdevelopment, 1999’s Ratcatcher), Stan and his wife rock in each other’s arms to Dinah Washington’s exquisite "This Bitter Earth." It’s a scene of stark relief and a perfect summation of the smoky mix of emotions everywhere apparent in Killer of Sheep. "And this bitter earth," Washington intones, "may not be so bitter after all." As with the great blues singers, so too with Burnett — the lyrics tell the story, but it’s the voice that makes you cry. *

KILLER OF SHEEP

Opens Fri/18

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

Not Coachillin’

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SONIC REDUCER “I can’t believe you slept through the police helicopter above the tent at 3 a.m. and the megaphone going, ‘Disperse immediately or you’ll all be arrested,'” tentmate Fluffy marveled the day after another ear-busting night of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival’s unofficial after-party scene in the campgrounds. It was only 8 a.m., though the sun was already beating down relentlessly like our heedless neighborhood drum circle.

I’ve snoozed through my share of lousy plays, bad bands, and crappy circuses, but I never thought I’d slumber through the 24-7 thrills at the Empire Polo Fields. And the chopper was just the chaser to April 28 trance headliner Tiesto, who began his loud set, pompously booming out over our not-so-fair tent city of spring breakers and Euro tourists, with “In the beginning there was the earth….”

We’re gonna have to sleep through the history of the planet, was my last thought as I drifted off.

O Coachella, don’t you cry for me, ’cause I’ve come from Alabama Street with a heat rash on my knee — and doubts about making the scene at the festival despite the fact that about 160,000 brave music fans were expected to face down the desert swelter as the event swelled to three days.

At this juncture, Coachella might be described as a music festival on steroids: it’s a carnival for 18 and overs with rides, art installations, dancers, and completely insane people wearing full-body chicken costumes in the 110-degree heat, though still boasting a comprehensive bill of today’s so-called hot bands. It’s your one-stop smorgasbord for music lovers, who will happily chat you up about the performer they deemed the most mind-blowing the previous night or the last Rage Against the Machine show they caught.

And they got what they came for: the Björk shroom headdress; the crazed buzz rising from such festival circuiteers as Amy Winehouse and Klaxons; solid pop from Jarvis Cocker and Peter Bjorn and John; show-stopping performances by DJ Shadow, CSS, Arcade Fire, and Konono No. 1; and the rattle of reunion bones by an amped and antic Rage Against the Machine, glowering and balding Jesus and Mary Chain, and, er, Crowded House. You couldn’t go amiss if you stuck to the desert to-do’s rave roots and entrenched yourself beneath the mirror ball, video screens, and pink and blue lights of the Sahara tent: the performances there by Justice and LCD Soundsystem connected with the crowd with a screw-it-all exuberance.

But the untold story lay far away from the press tent and Palm Springs love nests — in the crowded, brutal heat of the campgrounds next to the performance area. Is it possible to review a camping trip? In what seemed like a dusty, straw-strewn football field with thousands of other wake ‘n’ bakers? I spent far too much time taking refuge from the nonstop heat at the campground’s cybercafé, where hundreds of shirtless boys and bikinied girls would miserably crouch, recharging their cells at a bank of outlets, sit stunned watching the Coachella film on a loop, or lie on the ground like clammy, comatose dead fish, waiting out the morning before the acts began in early afternoon.

The southerly discomfort led most campers on a lengthy hike from the tent city, past the obscenely grassy country clubs surrounding the polo grounds, to find refrigerated refuge and 40s at Ralph’s, the nearest supermarket, where people were literally chillin’ on store lawn furniture. Coachella: the fest that inspired global warming — and a post–<\d>Earth Day longing for air-con.

Organizers Golden Voice had a clue: they gave away free water sporadically and provided campers with free Internet use and showers. But there were too few laptops, the wi-fi was too erratic, and the showers were locked down too early — and you knew there was too little shade in general when audience members broiled in the sparse shadows of lemonade stands.

The crowd — weighted with Rage Against the Machine fans eager to see the band’s first concert in more than five years — was also heavy on the testosterone. But maybe that’s just the state of Rage love: the band never really seemed too underground to me but has historically worked to surface activist subversion via modern rock radio. And their audience was still boiling — and amazingly good-natured despite the sleepless nights. As for myself, I finally woke up hours after the helicopter early April 29 to the sound of a random dude shouting, “Whoo!” and yammering loudly in Portuguese to the tentizens the next flap over. Later I was tempted to put my own spin on Zack de la Rocha’s onstage suggestion that Bush and Cheney be “tried for war crimes and shot.” I know the 12-hour roller coaster ride of quality hallucinogens can be a bitch — but then, so can I: is it so wrong to want the early morning shouters and the dude with the air horn to be tried for crimes against humanity’s sleep schedule and shot? I’d settle for finding out where they were dozing it off and delivering a special whoo-gram of my own.

BOB DYLAN STUDIED HERE That’s the rumor, anyway, at the Blue Bear School of Music, which has seen Tracy Chapman and more than 20,000 other musicians come through its doors in the past 36 years. Executive director Kevin Marlatt told me the nonprofit’s second annual fundraiser — showcasing 2007 Grammy Lifetime Achievement winner Booker T. Jones as well as Blue Bear staffer Bonnie Hayes and Sista Monica — will include an appearance by the James Lick Middle School Band, the result of the organization’s efforts in the last year to get more involved in public school music education. Since it took over the James Lick music program and brought in 30 guitars, he says, more than a dozen bands have popped up at just that school. So Stax around for a good cause. *

BOOKER T. JONES

Sat/12, 8 p.m., $45–$125

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

www.bluebearmusic.org

 

David’s Kitchen

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› paulr@sfbg.com

In the kitchen of David’s Kitchen, a tiny restaurant in the Sunset, you will find David. The kitchen is of the semiexhibition sort, viewable from the snug dining room through a rectangular aperture that looks as if it once might have housed a picture window or maybe a large plasma flat-screen television. Was this space once home to a sports bar? David is David Chang, a native of China who opened the place with his wife, Terri, about four years ago. He could have called it David Chang, if he’d cared to join the trend of to-the-greater-glory-of-me chef-owners who name their restaurants after themselves. I have sometimes wondered how often these grand people can actually be found in their own kitchens. "David’s Kitchen" suggests to us that David is actually in the kitchen, and so he is, perhaps cooking your lunch after taking your order. At lunch it can be just you and him; it’s like having your own short-order chef. He seats you, writes down what you want, then makes and serves it. You are happy, even when he presents the bill, which your own short-order chef would never be so crass as to do. But then, even the best fantasies have limits.

It would be difficult to overstate the intimacy of David’s Kitchen. Like Thai Time, the fabulous and impossibly small restaurant on Eighth Avenue in the Inner Richmond, David’s Kitchen has only a handful of tables and fills to near capacity when a few parties of three or four come through the door at about the same time. If there had been an Asian restaurant on Skylab, the makeshift space station from the 1970s, it might have looked something like this. While David’s menu does include a strong Thai element, it’s pan-Asian in a way Thai Time’s isn’t; there are even a few New World items thrown in — for fun? Or because of neighborhood demand? One of them, the chicken barley soup ($3.50), we found to be insipid, but that was the only dish we came across that failed to sing in a clear, strong voice.

Even among the Asian dishes, one finds the occasional global touch. Although fat seafood noodles ($5.95 at lunch) spoke with a pronounced Thai accent — the sauce was coconut-milk green curry, with a strong subplot of chile heat — the noodles themselves were fettuccine, for a slight Marco Polo twist. The seafood, meanwhile (shrimp, mussels, clams, and whitefish, leavened with zucchini quarters), was immaculate, in keeping with the restaurant’s assurance that "we use only the freshest ingredients."

XO chow fun noodles ($5.95), on the other hand, were the broad, glistening Chinese rice-flour kind, tossed with shreds of boneless chicken, bean sprouts, scallions, and (the star ingredient) XO sauce, a Hong Kong–<\d>style paste of dried shrimp and scallop along with garlic, onion, and chile peppers. This saucing gave the dish a flat, fierce heat, like an August day on the Great Plains — quite different from the rounded punch of the fat noodles — with a strong hint of onion breath and some soy saltiness.

Although many of the appetizers will seem familiar to anyone who’s eaten at a Thai or Chinese restaurant in these parts (and who hasn’t?), David’s versions are mostly executed with a soupçon of panache, which helps make them memorable. The crispy fish cakes ($5.75), for example, will never be mistaken for tortilla chips, but they do minimize the characteristic rubberiness of the average fish cake and achieve a delicate stiffening around the edges. It helps that they’re quite flat, like small griddle cakes.

Spring rolls ($4.95) were nearly ordinary, despite a weighty filling — of shredded chicken, bean sprouts, and shiitake mushrooms — and a crime-scene-red dipping sauce redolent of chiles and garlic. But the veggie pancake ($5.25) was unlike anything I’ve had before, a kind of soft Asian crepe, like a socca or farinata, made from ground lotus and taro root (instead of chickpea flour) and spruced up with water chestnuts, scallions, and pesto.

We also detected European influences, or echoes, in a duck curry stew ($9.95), a crock of meat, potatoes, and carrots that resembled beef burgundy, except that the beef was duck (a little fatty, but tasty) and the sauce had no red wine but plenty of yellow curry, mildest of the Thai curries. Spicy sunflower chicken ($6.75), on the other hand, though not yellow, was straight from Thailand — a larb, really, of minced white chicken tossed with a lively combination of Thai basil, garlic, and chiles. The meat was heaped in the center of a large plate, with canoelike leaves of endive set around the perimeter like hour markings on a watch. The endive was convenient for the scooping up of the minced meat, of course, but even after the leaves had run out, all the members of our table, forks in hand, were jostling for a crack at the last of the chicken.

The kitchen at David’s Kitchen doesn’t much look like the kitchen at Canteen, Dennis Leary’s small boutique place downtown. Leary’s kitchen is L-shaped, for one thing, and also more exhibitiony: you can sit at the counter and watch the chef work the stoves.

But to be at either place is to be aware that the restaurant as a labor of love is a phenomenon that persists even in this overpriced city — and that there are a few fine chefs who still do their own cooking. And then some. *

DAVID’S KITCHEN

Lunch: Tues.–Sat., 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m. Dinner: Tues.–Thurs. and Sun., 5–9:30 p.m., Fri.–Sat., 5–10 p.m.

1713 Taraval, SF

(415) 566-6143

Beer and wine

MC/V

Moderately loud

Wheelchair accessible

Nude beaches

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› culture@sfbg.com

In 1967, Northern California gave birth to America’s first nude beach, at San Gregorio, near Santa Cruz. Now, 40 years later, there’s great news coming from the sand: in the biggest surge in more than a decade, clothing-optional beaches and other skinny-dipping sites are booming once again. Check out our miniguide below. And in the near future, visit an expanded version on the web that includes our unveiling of a pristine cove near Capitola and directions to a place where you can take a naked full-moon hike.

The one bummer? The popular Red White and Blue Beach, in Santa Cruz County, is closing in the wake of the retirement of owner Ralph Edwards.

San Francisco County

LAND’S END BEACH


Tucked away among craggy cliffs, patches of sand, and some of the Bay Area’s best scenery, a nude beach is the last thing you’d expect to find within a short walk of the end of Geary Boulevard. But on warm days, Land’s End usually draws dozens of visitors.

HOW TO FIND IT Go to the end of Geary, and park in the dirt lot up the road from the Cliff House. Take the trail at the far end of the lot. A hundred yards past a bench and some trash cans, the path narrows and bends, rises and falls, and eventually becomes the width of a road. Don’t take the road on the right, which leads to a golf course. Instead, keep going past another bench, and as the trail turns right, take a left toward a group of dead trees. Where there’s a stairway with a Dogs Must Be Leashed sign, descend and head left to another stairway, which leads to a 100-foot walk to the cove. Alternately, follow the service road below the El Camino del Mar parking lot a quarter mile until you reach a bench, then take the trail there. It’s rough in spots, and at the end you’ll scramble over rocks.

THE BEACH Rocks and little watery grottoes. Look for some good sandy areas away from the beach’s entrance. For the best sunbathing spots, walk west (left). Some visitors build little rock windbreaks, which provide protection from blowing sand.

THE CROWD The quarter-mile-long cove gets up to 30 visitors on the warmest days, with up to 80 percent gay male usage being fairly standard. One visitor counted six or so nudes, all men, during a May visit.

PROBLEMS Long walk, random "sex patrols" by rangers, reports of drug use, public sex on trails and nearby. Fog and wind. Quite rocky. Swimming not allowed. Trails other than the main one are unsafe and may be closed and have poison oak.

GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE BEACH


Overrun by fans undeterred by its slippery and often dangerous trails, the Golden Gate Bridge Beach usually turns into a mob scene on summer weekends. The waves don’t break as hard here as at Baker Beach, so on the nicest days in low tide, you can go out up to 50 yards. A favorite activity: watching the sunset while staring toward the site’s namesake, the Golden Gate Bridge. But don’t visit if you’re looking for privacy and solitude. "I had to stop going there because it’s such a pickup scene," frequent visitor Joseph Friday says.

Also known as Nasty Boy Beach and Marshall’s Beach, the shoreline here features a trio of adjacent coves. In the spring, check for beautiful flowers on the bluffs. Drawbacks include some poison oak on the path (often trimmed back by volunteers), which is otherwise unmaintained and becomes a muddy bluish goo after rainstorms. Golden Gate National Recreational Area rangers strongly recommend that visitors stay away from the trails and avoid swimming.

HOW TO FIND IT Go to North Baker Beach, park in the main lot, and walk north along Lincoln Boulevard, passing the sand ladder that leads to North Baker. Just north of the ladder trail, look for a dirt road with a gate leading to Battery Crosby. Follow it, then hike up the trail immediately on the south (left) side of the old fort to the top of the bluff. Rangers recently added some rails that make the path a little easier to follow. Take the trail straight west as it goes downhill toward the ocean (wear long sleeves and pants to protect against poison oak). At a small crumbling concrete bulkhead, the trail heads north along the bluffs and eventually down a shorter, steep section with small steps cut into the gully. The main path ends at the south end of Golden Gate Bridge Beach.

THE BEACH Three small rocky beaches located below Fort Winfield Scott. The main beach trail tends to be slippery, heavily eroded, and dangerous.

THE CROWD During the week, Golden Gate Bridge Beach attracts dozens of users. On weekends, (mostly nude) usage soars to between 100 and 300 visitors on the hottest days.

PROBLEMS Slippery, crumbling, sometimes muddy, and poison oak–edged trails. Trash, rocks, wind, fog, unsafe swimming conditions, sex on the beach, too many people often jammed into too little space.

San Mateo County

DEVIL’S SLIDE


Now that its main access road, landslide-prone Highway 1, is finally reopened, visitors are flocking back to one of California’s only state beaches that officially permit nudity. Called Gray Whale Cove State Beach, the site known to many users as Devil’s Slide draws maybe 200 people on warm days — about 25 percent of them nude.

Nude use is especially popular on the north end of the long sandy shore. If you like Frisbee, it’s easy to find somebody to play with at the cove. Signs, though, warn about dangerous surf. There’s no lifeguard on duty. Dogs are prohibited. The beach is open all year and is one of the only California state parks that doesn’t accept an Annual Day Use Pass.

HOW TO FIND IT From San Francisco take Highway 1 south through Pacifica. Three miles south of the Denny’s Restaurant in Linda Mar, turn east (inland, or left) on an unmarked road, which will take you to the beach’s parking lot, from which a 146-step staircase leads to the sand. Coming from the south on Highway 1, look for a road on the east (right) 1.2 miles north of the Chart House restaurant in Montara.

THE BEACH A 300-foot-long site surrounded by orangish sandstone cliffs on one side and the beautiful Pacific Ocean on the other. Devil’s Slide is a great place to read, tan, jog, play Frisbee, and watch (true to its state beach name) gray whales, pelicans, and surfers.

THE CROWD Tourists, families, surfers, and naturists all use the beach.

PROBLEMS Influx of suited visitors, cold water, fog, wind, long walk to the beach. Landslides sometimes close Highway 1, three great white sharks seen in the ’80s. Parking fee. Some sexual activity reported in north cove area in recent past. Rangers have made a few arrests.

SAN GREGORIO


A visit to San Gregorio combines history with recreation. Approaching its 40th anniversary, clothing-optional, privately run San Gregorio is America’s oldest nude beach, founded right next door to San Gregorio State Beach, where nudity is not allowed. The huge property attracts some nude and suited straight couples, singles, and families. First-timers are sometimes a bit put off by the driftwood structures on the sandy slope leading down to the beach, which are used by some visitors as sex condos. Others relish San Gregorio’s scenery. There are two miles of soft sand and tide pools to explore, as well as a lagoon, a lava tube, and, if you look close enough on the cliffs, the remains of an old railroad.

HOW TO FIND IT From Tunitas Creek Way, south of Half Moon Bay, the beach is about a mile up Highway 1. Around 100 yards north of Highway 84 on 1, take the dirt road past the big white gate with the Toll Road sign. Go a few hundred feet, and just after the 55 mph sign on your right, turn left on the dirt road (look for the address 19429 above the fence) and head past a grassy field to the parking lot, where you’ll be asked to pay an entrance fee. Take the long path from the lot to the sand; everything north of the trail’s end is clothing optional. The beach is also accessible from the San Gregorio State Beach parking area to the south; from there hike about a half mile north. Take the dirt road past the big white gate with the Toll Road sign to the parking lot.

THE BEACH You’ll find caves, cliffs, driftwood structures, and a beach full of clean, rolling sand. Pets are OK (though dogs are not allowed on weekends or holidays); fires, cameras, and overnight camping are banned. Swimming is not recommended. There are toilets in the parking lot.

THE CROWD On the warmest days, 50 to 200 visitors may be spread along the sprawling beach, which is so large that it never feels crowded. Straight couples and families tend to hang out on the south end of the beach, gay men on the north side.

PROBLEMS Fee, wind, riptides, cold water, summer fog, sex on the beach or in driftwood condos, not much of a social atmosphere. *

For more nude beaches, please check out our official guide, which is in the process of being updated.

OCD on the LCD

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You really gotta feel for LCD Soundsystem — fresh off the “dance-punk” darlings’ conquest of Coachella, bopping untold thousands of the dehydrous ecstatic, there they were the next day, at Mezzanine, playing big to a relatively teensy roomful of adoring fans. Adoring fans, in SF’s case, meant a whole lotta surprisingly hoochie mamas grinding against their frattish dates’ pelvises (hot, but weird!) and the cream of our post-electroclash scene. Going in, I’d made a joke to my homeboy that the group’s hirsute leader, James Murphy, was probably the superstar aspiration pinnacle of every sensitive tweaker bear who fiddles mindlessly with ambient-electronic music in their room — and sure enough, there was a fair representation of them as well.

Full of Zizek

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Despite Sigmund Freud’s strong distrust of cinema ("I do not consider it possible to represent our abstractions graphically in any respectable manner," he firmly wrote in a letter to an inquiring film producer), Freudian psychoanalytic theory – primarily as reread by the French analyst Jacques Lacan – has come to form the bedrock of much academic film criticism and theory since the 1960s. Anyone who has had a brush with a film class in college has probably gotten an earful of 50-cent concepts such as scopohilia, suture, fantasy, and everyone’s favorite chew toy of power, the phallus.

If you didn’t take notes the first time around, you might want to while watching Sophie Fiennes’s The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, a veritable crash course on what film can tell us about psychoanalysis and what psychoanalysis can (and sometimes can’t) tell us about film. Fiennes may be listed as the director and producer, but this monster of a clip reel is really the baby of its host and our tour guide, the Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek.

Ursine in stature and always slightly disheveled, Zizek is no stranger to the camera. In Astra Taylor’s somewhat worshipful documentary, Zizek! (2005), he delivered his mile-a-minute thought trains, encompassing everything from ethnic jokes to Hegel, with a brusqueness befitting a football coach and the on-the-fly reflexes of a standup comic. Zizek is in similar form in Pervert’s Guide, which isn’t so much a guide as a meandering recapitulation of some of his major talking points, first laid down in books such as Looking Awry and Enjoy Your Sinthome!

Zizek’s central thesis is that film is our most perverted art form, since it doesn’t really tell us what to desire but rather how to desire. Using an array of snippets – from The Exorcist to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, Charlie Chaplin films to vintage Disney cartoons – Zizek illustrates how cinema is the ultimate fantasy machine (which sometimes produces films about fantasy machines. See: Tarkovsky). We project our desires onto the events and characters we watch, Zizek explains, inasmuch as those desires are already psychically inscribed long before they are played out onscreen. Film often literalizes these psychic structures or, at the very least, sets them into relief.

As in his books, here Zizek will often take a basic question or proposition (such as "Why is the only good woman a dead woman?" – when discussing Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo), and turn it inside out, revealing the hidden issue that was actually being addressed or occluded all along ("Because men contain the threat of desire by mortifying their objects of desire: women").

Hitchcock and Lacan make many appearances, being that they are two of Zizek’s favorite bedfellows – the man wrote a book about both. (Zizek has a go at David Lynch now and then, but his readings of Lynch’s "primal scenes" and "terrorizing, clownish father figures" are a little pat.) It is not surprising, then, that some of his most brilliant insights and close readings are delivered on his many return trips to Bodega Bay, the decrepit Bates’s manse, and Judy Barton’s neon-illuminated room at the York Hotel in Vertigo.

Fiennes’s one trick (and granted, it’s an effective one) is to do this literally, casually placing Zizek within mock-ups of the scenes that he has discussed. We see Zizek in Melanie Daniels’s skiff puttering across Bodega Bay; next he’s alongside Regan’s bed from The Exorcist; later he’s speaking from the fruit cellar of Norman Bates’s house, or Dorothy Vallens’s apartment in Blue Velvet, or the dimensionless white field where Neo instantaneously summons weapons in The Matrix. This playful technique helps cut through some of the density of Zizek’s more arcane points, and occasionally, we catch the man off guard, cracking cheesy Freudian one-liners about the inherent obscenity of tulips (while watering a garden a la the opening scene of Blue Velvet).

It is not just that Zizek is as well-versed in Lacan as he is in Hitchcock – or that he casts his critical eye toward topics both high and low – that has made him such a popular figure, even with nonacademics. (Zizek is, as far as I know, the only intellectual to be interviewed for Abercrombie and Fitch’s now-defunct Quarterly). This intellectually challenging, often entertaining, and at times draining lecture-posing-as-a-documentary proves at least one thing: Zizek’s combination of disarming charisma and utter seriousness makes him as entrancing as his arguments are compelling.

THE PERVERT’S GUIDE TO CINEMA

Thurs/3-Fri/4, 7 p.m.; Sat/5, 2 and 7 p.m.; Sun/6, 2 p.m.; $6-$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Screening Room

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

MCMAF: Runoff to run after

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MAY 10

SO SO MANY WHITE WHITE TIGERS


Guitarist Ned flies back from New York City for the return of the art-punk trio that roared. (Kimberly Chun)

With Triangle, Bookworms, and the Tufffetttes. 12 Galaxies, 2565 Mission, SF. Call for time and price. (415) 970-9777

MAY 13

FREDDY MCGUIRE


I’m not sure about this here Freddy McGuire, other than that he might have some Wobbly accompaniment and he is related to a certain Anne McGuire who can sing a song that’ll pierce you straight through the heart – not to mention warble you into a zone of glorious discomfort, as evidenced by her performances in self-directed movies such as Joe DiMaggio 1,2,3 (in which she stalk-serenades the actual slugger as he takes a senior citizen stroll along the Marina piers) and the classic black-and-white Judy Garland reincarnation I Am Crazy and You’re Not Wrong. (Johnny Ray Huston)

With Connie Fucking Francis and Fierce Antler. 12 Galaxies, 2565 Mission, SF. Call for time and price. (415) 970-9777

SONNY SMITH


Mr. Smith has gone to more than Washington – well, I’m not sure if he’s gone there, but he says he’s been everywhere from Europe to Colorado to Central America since he was born in San Francisco in 1972. His songs, well, they travel from Ireland to Idaho, to name just a couple of places. But lately, the handsome guy with "the heartache of the sea" (and a sense of humor about as big) draws inspiration from home – as well as the motel rooms with massage beds down the road. It’s all there in the title of his latest song collection, Fruitvale, issued by Belle Sound. Even a troubadour can stay fixed in one neighborhood for a while. I haven’t been to Fruitvale lately, but I know Smith’s "Mario" all too well. (Huston)

With Virgil Shaw and Kelley Stoltz. Make-Out Room, 3225 22nd St., SF. Call for time and price. (415) 647-2888

MAY 15

EDITH FROST


Maybe Leslie Feist is our new chanteuse, our true post-lounge swooner. But every chanteuse needs a secret twin, and at this year’s fest – while the warm, dusty, music-fests-picnic-mats-and-straw-hats winds of Northern California’s summer blow in from the future – I’d like to nominate Edith Frost to play that other-half role, and not only because her recent work with the Zincs for their killer new disc, Black Pompadour (Thrill Jockey), makes that project even better. Frost is a thoroughly original songmaker in her own right. The crooning Texan has become a core part of the hip and humbling Drag City scene, and her most recent effort, 2005’s It’s a Game, thrives with ripe twang and raw elegance. She has a talent for writing melodies that sound improvised until they get into your head and take up residence. (Ari Messer)

With Spider and Cafe Beautierre, and Willard Grant Conspiracy. Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. Call for time and price. (415) 861-5016

MAY 16

HALLFLOWERS


Cole Porter’s "You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To" has never sounded quite so alluringly sinister as when sung by the Halls – namely, sisters Jennifer and Laurie (the latter from the noisy SF duo Ovarian Trolley) and mom Phyllis. Along with guitarist Doug Hilsinger, they make up the Hallflowers, an SF treat that has just released a second full-length, Hide and Seek (self-issued), which includes a version of "Autumn Leaves" that’ll have you thinking it’s late August in early May. They’re a perfect match for Alela Diane. (Huston)

With King City, the Dodos, Alela Diane, and Two Sheds. Elbo Room, 647 Valencia, SF. Call for time and price. (415) 552-7788

MAY 19

EBB AND FLOW


Many rock bands adopt hep lingo when attempting to describe themselves, as if clever nomenclature could replace substance. Not so with the Ebb and Flow, whose absurdist rhetoric is no jive pitch. A stroll through their Web site could cause one to believe this trio bunks down in Captain Beefheart’s in-law apartment, but when it comes to kicking out the jams, there is much more at stake. Their rock collage is at once poised and disheveled, like a Crazy Horse-Stereolab tea party or a Stevie Nicks-Augustus Pablo blind date. (Nathan Baker)

With Music for Animals, Elephone, Scrabbel, DW Holiday, Solar Powered People, Form and Fate, Tom Thumb, and the Parties. Rockit Room, 406 Clement, SF. Call for time and price. (415) 387-6343

KING KONG


Ex-Slint bassist Ethan Buck utters a comeback bellow. (Chun)

With Andy Tisdall. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. Call for time and price. (415) 923-0923

LAVENDER DIAMOND


The epic quirk-pop combo slayed at ArthurFest a few years back – and its lovely EP is finally out on Matador. (Chun)

Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. Call for time and price. (415) 771-1421

MAY 20

MIA DOI TODD


A persimmon tree isn’t such a strange thing. Thick, dry branches twisting like untold stories, orange fruit hanging off its tips like ornamental paper lanterns, it’s certainly eerie, changing form every day while other plants rest dormant in the dead of winter – but its eeriness is light-giving and never unordinary. Well, literary folk haunter Mia Doi Todd is as complicated, and her musical fruits are as alternately sweet and astringent. I’ve heard more than one misguided listener comment dishearteningly on the LA native’s faux-British accent, and listening to some of her early voice-and-guitar work requires an even better mood than cocking an ear to Marissa Nadler’s music. But, like Nadler, when she’s really on – with Manzanita and the latest reinvention of that album, La Ninja: Amor and Other Dreams of Manzanita (both Plug Research), for example – she pulses somewhere between Roald Dahl and PJ Harvey, and her lattice of lyrical branches and darkly lilting guitar patterns yields a sweet, rare fruit. (Messer)

With Daedelus, Roommate, Flying Lotus, and Ola Podrina. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. Call for time and price. (415) 625-8880

For more, go to www.sfbg.com/blogs/music.

MCMAF: Sweetness and light

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> a&eletters@sfbg.com

"The ghosts come quickly, and they leave quickly," remarks Philipp Minnig about his effective yet unorthodox approach to songwriting for San Francisco electro-disco group Sugar and Gold.

"I always call songwriting ‘ghostbusting,’ " he says over tapas at Picaro in the Mission District, in a German accent softened by years spent in Northern California. "There will be an idea floating around, and you zap it, throw out your trap, and there it goes. For us, our traps are chords, or a rhythm. Someone brings in the ghost, and we all work on it."

Sugar and Gold is the brainchild of the rosy-cheeked lead vocalist, guitarist, and primary songwriter and his longtime friend and collaborator, vocalist and keyboardist Nicolas Dobbratz. They met in middle school in Pacific Grove and decided after a particularly memorable acid trip to start a band. The duo – whose previous combos Dura Delinquent and Connexion were rooted in visceral proto-punk – were always set on making dance-oriented music that was inclusive, countering the snobbish in-crowd ethos of Bay Area hipster groups. It is this generosity of spirit and their infectious, unduutf8g rhythms that led to a friendship and working relationship with Oakland’s dance-punk foursome Gravy Train, who recently enlisted Minnig and Dobbratz to produce their next album.

The two bands met when Gravy Train sought advice from Sugar and Gold about a hard-to-achieve keyboard effect in one of their songs. Minnig was happy to help them out, explaining that he believes in an altruistic approach to making music: "If everyone keeps their musical techniques to themselves, the scene and the music will never expand to get bigger and better."

A beautiful relationship was born. "Sugar and Gold don’t have a too-cool-for-school vibe," Gravy Train’s brazen redheaded vocalist Chunx writes via e-mail. "At their live shows, they are all about letting go, getting wild, and just feeling the music. It doesn’t matter what kind of person you are, or what you look like, which is the same philosophy as Gravy Train." On Sugar and Gold’s debut, Creme (Antenna Farm), the sextet – including Jerome Steegmans on bass, drummer Robin Macmillan, and backing vocalists Susana Cortes and Fatima Fleming – take inspiration from the voluptuous soul of Funkadelic and Sly Stone, the subversive rock ‘n’ roll of the Cramps, and the cerebral electronic mastery of Kraftwerk, creating the seemingly antithetical hybrid of thoughtful yet sexy dance music.

Ghostbusting aside, this musical intellectualism sets Sugar and Gold apart from dance music makers who view music not as a way of life or an extension of themselves but as part of a hedonistic event experienced by a superficial persona. Minnig believes in the music he makes, and he views the process as a fundamental and spiritual necessity. "When we recorded the album, the music was giving us a feeling that was real, authentic," he says. "Music is the only spirituality we have. It’s the only way to believe in something greater than ourselves."

He has a similarly insightful answer to the question of why dance music is important. Between sips of peppermint tea, he says, "Dancing is one of those few things that, when done right, you do without an end in mind. You are free from an objective, which is rare in our society."

SUGAR AND GOLD

With Her Grace the Duchess and the Society

May 19, 9 p.m., $12

Cafe du Nord

2170 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

www.cafedunord.com

MCMAF: Finding refuge in the Harbours

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"Basically I’m just trying to get everything out so I can sleep at night," vocalist Miguel Zelaya said in explanation of the steady stream of bubbling and bursting indie pop springing forth from his rather busy cerebellum. As the songwriter and creative mastermind of local darlings the Harbours, Zelaya is diligence personified. Having released a deadly infectious debut, Second Story Maker (Stab City), a mere six months ago, he and his bandmates are already back in the studio, recording material for the follow-up intended for release later this year.

"I already have a whole new set of songs I’m excited about. I’m always writing, really," he said, beaming from our sidewalk table at a Mission cafe, and I didn’t doubt him for a second. Spotting him among the evening’s bustle was easy: Zelaya was the one scrawling away intently in his journal. Another song closer to a good night’s sleep, I reckoned.

Zelaya has been writing and performing in the Bay Area for ages, but the Harbours are a relatively new addition to a thrillingly revitalized local music scene: their genesis was only two years ago, when the organizers of the 2005 Mission Creek Music and Arts Festival requested that he play at the event. A band was assembled, and within a year they’d finished recording their debut. Numerous lineup changes have since occurred, as members moved away or found other commitments – including Elephone and the Mother Hips – but Zelaya has remained the constant, fervently crafting fetching melodies with one ear pointed to the Band and Neil Young records of his childhood and the other pricked in the direction of the indie rock artists he holds in equally high regard. Second Story Maker is a fitting testament to these twin passions. The pulse-spurring immediacy of "Girl" and "Sick of the Electric" – "my big production number," Zelaya joked about the latter, describing the irrepressible vibrations of the album’s highlight – certainly reflect the finest moments of ’60s and ’70s radio, but in no way could they ever be confined to mere homage territory. These are songs on par with the finest work by Sloan, the Pernice Brothers, and Teenage Fanclub, fellow kindred spirits in reappropriating the sounds of their parents’ record collections in thoughtful, energizing new fashions. And more are on the way. "I have so many ideas right now, it’s crazy," Zelaya said. "I have plenty of stories to tell." (Todd Lavoie)

HARBOURS

With Rykarda Parasol, Michael Zapruder and Rain of Frogs, and Golden Messenger String Band

May 10, 8 p.m., call for price

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com

Back to my Cribs

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By Molly Freedenberg

Sure, British threesome the Cribs are pure indie rock. The boys’ striped shirts and messy haircuts won’t let anyone forget. But the danceable melodies, interesting arrangements, and sing-a-long hooks appear to be catapulting them into pop scene stardom (not to mention backing from Franz Ferdinand and a spot on the Coachella Music Festival roster). At least, that’s what I would’ve assumed before I saw them play before a disappointing crowd at the Independent last Wednesday, April 25.

cribs3.jpg
Indie of all stripes. Photo by Molly Freedenberg.

Maybe the Cribs’ local fans were planning to see them in Indio a few days later. Maybe others missing the festival were drawn to see Coachella artists DJ Shadow or the Decemberists instead, who were both playing in the Bay Area on the same night as the Cribs. Or maybe I saw them in San Francisco before their time, like catching Amy Winehouse last year.

Whatever it was, the dance floor was noticeably empty – and its few occupants were noticeably unenthusiastic – as the band “oh, oh, oh, oh”-ed through “Martell” (from 2005’s The New Fellas) and their guitars noodled through “Men’s Needs” (from the Alex Kapranos-produced new album, Men’s Needs, Women’s Needs, Whatever).

And so the concert that was meant to minimize my Coachella envy – as this was the first in four years I haven’t attended the beast in the desert – instead only heightened it. Because as I hungrily devoured concert coverage (particularly NME’s) on Monday, I could only imagine what it would’ve been like to see the normally cute and compelling (but here, a bit bored) Cribs with a crowd full of people who actually cared. Sigh. Maybe next year.

Perfect storm for Critical Mass

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By Steven T. Jones
It’s a beautiful day for a bike ride! And San Francisco’s daily newspapers are helping set the scene for the biggest Critical Mass ride in years. The latest promotion was the screamer headline on the cover of today’s Examiner, “Critical Mass veterans make push for civility.” The article was far better than the Chron coverage has been, although it did erroneously note that CM intends to stop at red lights, which has never been part of the deal. All that would do is slow the mass down and place cars in the center of it, which isn’t good for them or us (remember, the woman who got her car window broken last month freaked out over being “swarmed” by bikes, which would happen over and over again if a crowd of thousands of bikes kept getting broken up by stoplights). My only concern tonight is with the anger being expressed toward CM among online commenters in places like SFist. But I and others will be out there documenting what happens, so check back to this blog to see how it all went.

Shows!

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Holy F**k at The Independent the next two nights, 27th & 28th, previewing material off of their sophomore full-length, due in September.  As well, thanks for the !!! preview.  Should you care to attend their performance at the Fillmore  Monday night.  Love to have you out.

In addition, sent you a copy of Land of Talk’s debut ep, Applause Cheer Boo Hiss, prior to its March 19th release here in the U.S.  Already critically acclaimed in their home nation of Canada, the Montreal trio have been building momentum here in the U.S. since early last year, performing regularly in New York, before hitting SXSW and taking to the road with Menomena and Field Music.  Paste Magazine was quick on the ball, already calling Applause, “The most perfect debut of 2006”, before running a feature in their current issue, and KEXP’s John Richards, put it quite simply, “Holy crap, this is great!”.   Land of Talk will take to the road with The Rosebuds in June, making their San Francisco debut, June 12th at the Great American.  

Pull it out of your stacks and give a listen.

Thanks,

Brendan
 
Tag Team Media – 45 Main St. – Ste. 604 – Brooklyn, NY 11201
ph. 718-797-4211 fx. 718-797-4524 e: brendan@tagteammedia.com
www.tagteammedia.com



Hit me up about:
!!! * Amandine * Apostle of Hustle * Born Ruffians * Clinic * Dappled Cities * Division Day * Earlimart * Feist * Gonzales * Holy F–K *

Tonight!
THE BLOOD BROTHERS 
Celebration, Triumph of Lethargy Skinned Alive To Death 
Wednesday, April 25 
$14 – Doors 7, Show 8
The Blood Brothers combine experimental, punk, hardcore, and post-hardcore, among many other styles… In small circle discussions, the band related that they have influences from the No Wave punk scene of the 1980’s. The band has cited Botch, Drive Like Jehu, Gang of Four, Angel Hair, Highway 61, True North, and Bootsy Collins as influences. 
More Info & Tickets

THE AVETT BROTHERS 
Kemo Sabe 
Thursday, April 26 
$15 – Doors 8, Show 9
The Avett’s brand new album to be released May 15 entitled “Emotionalism”. The album, like The Avett Brothers, is a mixture of old-time country, bluegrass, pop melodies, folk, rock n’ roll, honky-tonk and ragtime. The songs are honest: just chords with real voices singing real melodies. But, the heart and the energy with which they are sung, is really why people are talking, and why so many sing along. 
More Info & Tickets

KFJC Presents
MONO
World’s End Girlfriend, The Drift 
Friday, April 27
$13 adv/$15 door – Doors 8, Show 9
Despite their albums’ masterful subtleties and majestic walls of noise, the consensus has remained that their transcendent live show is simply incomparable. Tix moving fast, get them now!

Bubblegum bandits

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> cheryl@sfbg.com

I’m only a little bit ashamed to admit that I loved Making the Band. No, not the acceptably addictive, Diddy-produced Danity Kane version. I’m talking about the one that birthed O-Town, baby – the quintet of preppy dudes united by boy-band Svengali Lou Pearlmen for three seasons of semi-emotive crooning, thrusting choreography, manufactured drama, and all the *NSYNC coattail riding instant fame could buy. But in the long run, O-Town wasn’t meant to be – how can anyone walk away from a song called "Liquid Dreams" with dignity intact?

The boy-band phenomenon of the early millennium has thankfully faded, but there’s still parody meat enough for Hong Kong heartthrob (and San Francisco native) Daniel Wu, who makes his writing and directing debut with Heavenly Kings. A mock doc that takes itself a bit more seriously than Christopher Guest’s oeuvre (which is to say, there are fewer laughs), Heavenly Kings follows Wu and fellow HK actors Conroy Chan Chi-Chung, Andrew Lin, and Terence Yin as they spontaneously form Alive, a Backstreet Boys-ish singing group. There’s plenty of comedy in the film’s first half, including encounters with a knob-twiddling studio whiz charged with correcting off-key vocals ("I realized they were fucking shit," he says) and Alive’s sneaky strategy of putting their first (and apparently only) single online – then drumming up media attention by pretending to be mystified and outraged by the leak.

How much of Heavenly Kings is real, and how much is fake? Like the 2004 doc Czech Dream, which followed a pair of prankster filmmakers who launched a huge ad campaign for the opening of a supermarket that didn’t actually exist, the members of Alive are pulling the wool over certain eyes (the actors’ fans who attend Alive concerts) but not others (there’s a scene with a tacky, maybe-too-fey clothing designer that’s clearly a scripted affair). Reality is further blurred by interviews with real HK recording stars, who voice concerns about their industry’s lack of integrity. There is, they explain, a discouraging emphasis on superficiality over legitimate art and talent. (Sounds just like America’s idols, don’t it?)

So while there’s a dose of O-Town-style schadenfreude at work in Heavenly Kings – especially when the friendships between the guys break down amid power struggles, malaise, and boozing – the film is also trying to make a salient point about the music biz. Whether or not there’s room for serious commentary in a film top-loaded with goofy montages, animated sequences, and the band’s oft-repeated frothy ditty ("Adam’s Choice" – coming to a karaoke bar near you!) is never really resolved. But Wu and his cohorts get props for sending up their dreamy images in a film that’ll prove most entertaining to folks who’re in on the joke.

THE HEAVENLY KINGS (Daniel Wu, Hong Kong, 2006). Fri/27, 9:45 p.m., Castro. Also Sun/29, 6 p.m., Kabuki; May 4, 5 p.m., Kabuki

There’s no place like home

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> a&eletters@sfbg.com

In his recent book Poor People, William T. Vollmann writes, "For me, poverty is not mere deprivation; for people may possess fewer things than I and be richer; poverty is wretchedness. It must then be an experience more than an economic state. It therefore remains somewhat immeasurable." Despite the enormity of such a disclaimer, Vollmann attempts to calibrate a calculus of misery. Portuguese director Pedro Costa seems motivated by a similarly conflicted impetus. Over the past decade, Costa has made a trilogy of films with the working poor of Fontainhas, a sprawling slum outside Lisbon. Trading Vollmann’s pained self-consciousness for a meticulous formalism that favors rehearsal over reportage, Costa’s remove sets into relief the humanity of his subjects, rather than objectifying or patronizing them.

Many of Fontainhas’s residents are of Cape Verdean descent. That country’s wretched history – as an exploited colony and the center of the Portuguese slave trade – looms large in the collective memory of Fontainhas, as if stained into the walls of its dilapidated tenements and etched across the beaten visages of its inhabitants. It is a legacy of continual disenfranchisement, displacement, and enforced invisibility, which tentatively approaches a terminus with the trilogy’s final installment, Colossal Youth.

Whittled down from roughly 300 hours of footage to just over two, Colossal Youth is a desultory, snail-paced compilation of everyday interactions and fragmentary conversations that skirts the edges of documentary. Costa’s long, static shots mirror the rhythms of the characters’ daily lives – getting high (or taking drugs to get off drugs), scavenging, day laboring, and speaking in perpetuum of possibilities that will forever remain unfulfilled. It is an existence made all the more precarious by the fact that Fontainhas is being razed and its inhabitants relocated to a new, antiseptic public housing complex that’s even farther removed from Lisbon, a process that was happening as Costa filmed.

At the center of this dispossessed community is Ventura, a retired laborer who, like many of Costa’s leads, is presumably playing a variation of himself. Recently abandoned by his wife – an event that forms Colossal Youth‘s haunting, elliptical two-shot prologue – Ventura spends the rest of the film alternately airing his grief and acting as a father figure to a succession of interlopers: old neighborhood friends, former colleagues, acquaintances, and extended family members both biological and adopted.

These include Vanda, a recovering drug addict (the titular character of Costa’s 2000 film, In Vanda’s Room) who ambivalently calls Ventura "Papa" and awkwardly approaches her new role as mother with a fidgety uncertainty; an estranged daughter still living amid the rubble of Fontainhas; a government housing agent equally amused and annoyed by Ventura’s vague requirements for his new home (when asked how many children will be accompanying him, Ventura replies, "I don’t know yet"); and an illiterate migrant worker who enlists Ventura to write a letter to his beloved, which he continually recites as though it were scripture.

With his shock of gray hair, threadbare suit, and stoic gaze that seems perpetually transfixed by something beyond our vantage point, Ventura shuffles between the crepuscular ruins of Fontainhas and the blindingly white interiors of his future residence like an ineffectual ghost, reluctant to admit that he has to some extent become a spectral remainder of the very past that haunts him.

Costa’s architectonic framing of Ventura – which favors low angles and makes startling use of the play of natural light across the film’s many mottled surfaces – no less contributes to this impression. Costa fully exploits digital video’s ability to capture extremes of contrast, flattening exterior landscapes and the people within them into intersecting planes of light and shadow and discovering new inky variegations of black within the darkest of interiors. Some of the film’s most stunning moments come when Costa lets more vivid hues intrude on the mostly washed-out palette of sickly greens and dirtied off-whites, as in a scene in which Ventura seeks a moment of respite amid the cloistered cool of a gallery hung with the paintings of Spanish old master Diego Velazquez.

Colossal Youth is at times as interminable (Vanda’s extensive improvised monologue about giving birth) as it is bleak and oblique. Above all, though, it is brave. Although the word might seem odd, I put it out there not simply because Costa’s film so flagrantly tests the patience of its audience (since its divisive premiere at Cannes last year, walkouts have become a routine part of its screenings) but because it never solicits our pity or invites our disapproval of the people whose lives it so doggedly follows.

For Costa, the aesthetic’s promise of succor – whether found in the rough-hewn lines of a love poem that will never reach its intended addressee, the supposedly democratized space of a museum, or that other dimly lit image reservoir, the movie theater, in which we yearn to be relieved of ourselves – is an illusion, which, however sustaining, can never be made good on.

There is simply no rest for the weary or for the filmmaker who trails alongside them. On the razed grounds of a home that was never really one to begin with, Costa clears a place for the impoverished to testify about their lives. It is a space that, as Vollmann’s problematic volume attests, can perhaps only be realized on film – an expanded freeze-frame on the pause between the two halves of Samuel Beckett’s famous couplet: "I can’t go on, I’ll go on." *

COLOSSAL YOUTH (Pedro Costa, Portugal/France/Switzerland) Sat/28, 1:15 p.m., Kabuki. Also Tues/1, 3:15 p.m., Kabuki; May 5, 8:15 p.m., PFA

Another close one

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Noise luminary Tom Smith’s nearly three-decade jaunt through the experimental rock abyss has been part of a sustained continuum of all his undertakings. Throughout the late ’70s and much of the ’80s, the main brain and entrepreneur of To Live and Shave in LA occupied his time in bands such as Of Boat, Pussy Galore, and Peach of Immortality, before TLASILA took its first few breaths in July 1990. After migrating to South Florida in 1991, the Georgia native quickly stumbled on bassist and engineer Frank "Rat Bastard" Falestra and oscillator operator Ben Wolcott. Alongside contemporaries such as Harry Pussy and Tamato duPlenty, the threesome submerged themselves in Miami’s flourishing noise rock scene of the early ’90s, carving a sonic palette void of any real structure but fraught with their influences: Throbbing Gristle, UK glam, kraut rock, and the avant-garde.

"We had no overt goal in mind, but we knew what we loved and shared a particular excitement for the things we deplored," Smith wrote in an e-mail. "It’s all problem-solving, really – a race toward unknowing. I gravitate towards reproduction and demolition."

Wolcott agreed via e-mail, attesting to the Miami scene’s love-hate relationship with the band. "We were respected for our perseverance but hated by the public. We were just reaching out to like-minded people, looking to commune with fellow extremists in the arts," he explained. "There is a slight obsessive bent to spreading the Shave gospel. We logged a lot of hours touring, and it’s hard to believe we would drive so many hours to blast our pedagogy that would only last for 15 minutes in an empty bar."

Originally devised by Smith as a solo project, TLASILA’s history is about as labor-intensive as it is legendary. Diligent – and sometimes violent – performances, a steady flow of albums and tours, and a rotating cast of players and slayers from a miscellany of eclectic musical realms have included everyone from Thurston Moore to Andrew W.K. to the Bay Area’s own Weasel Walter.

"Tom is a very peculiar, singular talent," Walter noted in yet another e-mail. "He is an outsider artist essentially. He is an obsessive organizer, and his inspiration comes from a wide swath of cultural vantages, from the highest to lowest. He puts Xenakis and the Dark Brothers on an even keel, and that’s why his art is simultaneously so visceral and intellectual. His lyrics are almost James Joyce-like in their pure semantical deconstruction…. What he does is absorb, cut up, and regurgitate everything in culture and spit it back out."

Following a festival performance in 2000, Smith broke ranks with the group and formed OHNE with Swiss performance artist Dave Phillips. With Wolcott already out of the picture, Falestra soldiered on with TLASILA, from which numerous spin-offs and clones surfaced, including TLASILA 2 and I Love LA. Falestra and Smith reconvened in 2003 and shaped the band into its strongest lineup yet: an 11-member ensemble residing throughout the country, in Atlanta; Las Vegas; Northampton, Mass.; LA; Charleston, SC; and Adel, Ga. Guitarist-producer Don Fleming, Sighting’s Mark Morgan, stripper Misty Martinez, Chris Grier, and Andrew "Gaybomb" Barranca are some of the noiseniks, along with Moore, Wolcott, and W.K., rounding out TLASILA’s current incarnation. A touring version, of Wolcott, Graham Moore, Martinez, and Falestra, will undertake the group’s West Coast dates – its first since 1996 – and will support TLASILA’s great 2006 full-length, Noon and Eternity (Menlo Park), and the forthcoming Les Tricoteuses (Savage Land). But the ceaseless TLASILA work ethic won’t allow the ensemble to stop there: Smith promises that even more albums can be expected to materialize during the ensuing tour. Live, shave, live again.

TO LIVE AND SHAVE IN LA

With Rose for Bohdan, Tourette, and the Weasel Walter Quartet

May 3, 8:30 p.m., $6-$10

21 Grand

416 25th St., Oakl.

(510) 444-7263

Also with Kreamy ‘Lectric Santa and Rose for Bohdan

May 4, 9:30 p.m., $8

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

Small Business Awards 2007: Chain Store Alternative Award

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Since it opened in 1954, Waldeck’s Office Supplies in downtown San Francisco has been a true neighborhood store. In spite of the growth of now-ubiquitous large chains such as Staples and OfficeMax, this family-run retailer has carved a niche with its host of regular local customers and businesses large and small in the neighborhood.

Of the supply shop started by his father, owner Cliff Waldeck says, "Neighborhood-serving retail businesses are why people live, work, and visit specific communities." For him, seeing regulars come in is the best part. "It’s like a scene out of Cheers."

Waldeck’s also leads its industry in being environmentally conscious. Two years ago it was certified as a green business by the San Francisco Department of the Environment.

As Waldeck, a former member of the Mill Valley City Council and a current member of the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, puts it, "I always like to say, ‘In my industry we’ve killed a lot of trees, and I have sap on my hands.’ "

Having done environmental work and advocacy as a public servant, Waldeck decided to make the transition to green practices. To get green certified, he had to demonstrate to inspectors from the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and Public Health Department that he uses good environmental practices, abiding by criteria including recycling and reusing products, conserving energy and water, and maintaining a healthy office space.

The office supplies retailer also stocks green products such as recycled copy paper, greeting cards made of recycled paper, and energy-efficient items. And you can drop off your fluorescent tubes, toner cartridges, cell phones, and other electronics for free recycling.

Survival is a constant issue for a small business, particularly one downtown, where Waldeck’s competes for retail rental space alongside billion-dollar companies. Waldeck points out, "You might have formula retail legislation that helps preserve places like North Beach and Hayes Valley, but the Financial District doesn’t have that. I have five Starbucks within five blocks." With national chains creating the market rate for retail space, he adds, "it’s extremely difficult to make it just on your foot traffic of people coming in paying cash."

Believing that green practices and the success of a small business can go hand in hand, the retailer has an interesting proposition for San Francisco’s political leaders: anyone bidding on a city contract for goods or services should be required to name seven or so green-certified San Francisco entities they do business with, which would encourage huge companies to work with small, green-certified businesses. "What I’m advocating is that since the city and county of San Francisco is the largest employer and purchaser here, they can lead by example," Waldeck says. "Procurement in SF is basically a cage match now. Whoever wants to sell a product at the lowest price is the one who gets the contract."

With a stockpile of past awards, including the San Francisco Urban Solutions Neighborhood Business Award, San Francisco Small Business Network’s Green Business of the Year, and one from the Environmental Protection Agency Region Nine, Waldeck’s plans to keep up the good work. (Julie Park)

WALDECK’S OFFICE SUPPLIES

500 Washington, SF

(415) 981-3381

www.waldecks.com

Small Business Awards 2007: Golden Survivor Award

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It didn’t seem like Harold and Larry Hoogasian were going to take up the family business, floristry. The brothers, exactly three years apart in age (both were born on Bastille Day), attended UC Berkeley in the ’70s – Harold studied genetics; Larry majored in architecture.

But a love of the customers and the family tradition drew them back into the fold. "We grew up in the business," says Larry, who remembers working with his older brother and father, Harold Sr., after school and on weekends at the flower stand that has occupied a spot in front of Gump’s on Post Street since Feb. 14, 1953.

Prior to establishing possibly the first stationary flower stand in the Financial District, the siblings’ grandfather was one of many small vendors of gardenias and violets operating a pushcart around the bustling downtown area. "One day he just got lazy and stayed in one place," Larry says, recalling what he’s always been told about his grandfather’s bold move.

It was their father who extended the reach of the business to the Cannery on Fisherman’s Wharf and Treasure Island, then a naval base. Both locations afforded the stand’s customers large doses of ’60s flower power. The tourists who flocked to the Cannery had all heard Scott McKenzie croon, "If you’re going to San Francisco …," and made sure to wear one of the Hoogasian blooms in their hair. The Treasure Island business was the spot where soldiers wired their last tokens of affection to loved ones before heading overseas.

After taking ownership, the sons brought the business to the next level. Harold took on marketing and promotions; Larry handled all of the designs and arrangements, then opened a storefront on Lombard Street, which closed shortly after he set up the current shop in South of Market six years ago.

It seems fitting that Harold and Larry, both fans of the city’s vibrant music scene as teens, would become an important part of the city’s music culture – florally speaking.

As the story goes, Harold entered a design contest at a flower show in 1976. Larry’s task was to build a gazebo. He pulled out all the stops, constructing a massive 1,000-square-foot structure. As he was nailing flowers over the trellises, a man strolled by and exclaimed, "My, my, my. I’ve never seen a pile of sticks so beautiful." That man happened to be Bill Graham. Not only did the siblings win the contest, but they also began a long relationship as the concert promoter’s florist, decking out dressing rooms for the Grateful Dead and Elton John and even putting together the wedding bouquet for Madonna’s "Like a Virgin" tour.

A career highlight for Larry, who was raised Catholic and had a contract with St. Mary’s for many years, came when he won the bid to make all of the arrangements for Pope John Paul II’s 1987 visit. "I had to chase away all the nuns," he says, explaining that many habited women were trying to snatch keepsakes from the floral decorations that were being broadcast to millions of television viewers.

His brother, Harold, has received his fair share of accolades too. His efforts have put the company in online and telephone floral service FTD’s top 100 in volume sales since the mid-’90s. To keep up with the competition, Harold has sealed contracts with 30 Walgreens, where a lot of last-minute flower sales occur these days.

Larry foresees customers soon pouring into the location on Townsend and Seventh streets as more residents move into the increasingly residential neighborhood. It looks like Hoogasian Flowers will be creating beautiful arrangements for locals on their birthdays and for their weddings and funerals for many years to come. (Deborah Giattina)

HOOGASIAN FLOWERS

615 Seventh St., SF

(415) 229-2732

www.hoogasian.com

A Stooges fan’s serenade: “Fuck, yeah!!!”

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Someone had a real good time the other night. Stooges fans Mark Breshears and David Bernstein write in with their experiences at the Warfield on Saturday, April 21. Love the black and silver balloon drop in honor of Iggy Pop’s 60th b-day that night (most memorable salutation from the crowd – “Happy birthday, you fuck!”).

stoogestage.jpg
Our man in the scene is…somewhere up there.
Photos by Kimberly Chun.

Mark Breshears: So I saw the Stooges last night and it totally rocked. Iggy was on fire, and it was great to see Mike Watt play bass with him. It was a dream come true. A two-‘fer-one. The old songs were great to hear, especially “Dirt.” I’ve seen Iggy many times (seven) and have probably seen most of the songs performed last night live at least once (besides the new ones, of course). I’ve never seen him do “Dirt” before, one of my favorites songs ever, and it was excellent. The songs held up and more so.

It was Iggy’s 60th birthday, and we all sang Happy Birthday to him two-thirds of the way through. It was great to see the Asheton brothers playing with him like the old days. I loved and adored the Stooges records growing up and looked up to Ron as a guitar hero. That being said, I think Watt, another hero of mine, kept the band tight and rockin’ like no one else. Without him, or Iggy of course, this thing would not have been as good.

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Dare you to look away from the Igg-meister.

The highlight: Iggy, during “Down on the Street” (I think – I was wasted), asked people to come up and join him. I’ve seen the clips on the Internet of this and knew that he was inviting people onto the stage. Without hesitation I was bumping and pushing people out of the way as I made my way onto the stage. There were a few in front of me getting up, but I knew I’d make it. I raised myself up with others pushing up on me making it easy to get on stage. I danced and jumped and acting crazy during the song. I heard it winding down.

I thought, “I need to get to Iggy.”

Circus city

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by Molly Freedenberg
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My friends are circus freaks. Literally. And one of my favorite circus freaks is Marina Kardjieva (pictured), a Bulgarian beauty who is as talented at aerial work (silks, straps, aerial hoop, trapeze) as she is sweet. Lucky for me, I’ve gotten to see a lot of her lately, as she’s been in town rehearsing with musician/performer/community activist extraoardinaires think13 for balance, a multi-media performance opening this Friday at Fort Mason Center.marina.jpg

I stopped by the think13 rehearsal last night to watch the incomparably beautiful Hollis try on her costume, and the scrumptious and hilarious Brennan Figari practice his aerial tissu, and to hear think13 co-founder Dee Kennedy’s strong, haunting voice layered over her partner Christoph’s rockin’ tribal music. And, of course, to watch Marina do what she does absolutely best.

I didn’t see the whole run-through, so I can’t really report on what it will be like. But I do know there will be modern dance, fire dancing, plenty of aerial work, spoken word delivered by a cute boy in a kilt, live drumming, video projections, and lots of think13’s rich, ethereal (think Amy Lee) music.

I also was duly impressed with the performers I did see, and with the story the performance purports to tell. If all goes as I expect, balance will be a gorgeous spectacle that continues to blur the boundaries between the music scene and the performance art scene (which, by the way, sooo needs to be blurred).

If nothing else, it’ll be another reflection of the circus that is this city. Long live the freaks.

Save the green planet

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

With I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang has made something of a modern silent movie. I didn’t count, but I am pretty sure there are only a handful of words (if not less) spoken by the movie’s main characters. Taking the place of dialogue is ambient noise — snippets from a Cantonese opera, a Malaysian news report, a talk show in Mandarin — and most of all, unadulterated silence. With communication perpetually out of reach, it is no wonder alienation is such a major theme in Tsai’s films. Visually, the director is all about stationary long shots and understatement. He fashions an environment that dwarfs and suppresses its inhabitants.

In many instances this environment is literally ecological. Pollution, contamination, unknown illnesses, and inexplicable catastrophes run deep in Tsai’s world: in 1997’s The River, the main character contracts a nagging, stubborn neck pain after being in a filthy river (the causality, however, is never made explicit). His peripatetic quest for a treatment leads to a denouement of son-and-father bonding in a gay sex club. The Hole, Tsai’s 1998 follow-up, imagines Taipei after a deadly and unknown pandemic strikes; the entire city is emptied out but for two people, surviving unbeknownst to each other. Taipei is once again under ecological threat in 2005’s The Wayward Cloud as a dire water shortage drives people to eat watermelons for liquid sustenance.

Similarly, the Kuala Lumpur of I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone is not doing too well. In one scene a noxious haze blankets the city, generated by a wildfire in Indonesia that has been blown across the Strait of Malacca. People are warned to stay inside or wear masks if they have to venture out. Unfortunately, there is a mask shortage, so plastic bags and disposable Styrofoam bowls are deployed as makeshift substitutes.

"It is a truthful reflection of the world we live in at this moment," Tsai says during an interview when asked about the scenarios of ecological trouble in his films. "We are living in a moment [when] the world is actually sick. For example, the fire you see in this film [I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone] is something that Malaysians and the countries around Malaysia have to face every year. It is a real problem that has a lot of repercussions — not just environmental but also social and economical."

In a sense, the intersection of these outcomes is embodied in the massive unfinished construction site that serves as a kind of structural centerpiece in the film. Located in the middle of Kuala Lumpur, the building to be, along with many others, was started during an economic boom in the country. In the late 1990s the Asian financial crisis devastated the entire region, and the project was left unfinished and abandoned. The foreign laborers brought into Malaysia to help build it instantly became jobless.

Tsai first saw the structure in 1999 when he visited Malaysia, his birth country. Six years later he decided to enter the site for the first time. What he found was a giant pool of dark water — a collection of rain, soot, and runoff that had gathered inside the building over the course of years.

Water, of course, is Tsai’s preferred element; his first three features — Rebels of the Neon God (1992), Vive l’Amour (1994), and The River — are known as his water trilogy. Tsai has said before that he sees his characters as plants and their loneliness as a sort of thirst that needs constant watering. As such, discovering that large body of water within a gutted structure was, to him, an unmistakable sign. "I saw the water and decided I had to make a film at that place," Tsai says. "I felt the water was waiting for me to come back." *

I DON’T WANT TO SLEEP ALONE

Thurs/19–Sat/21, 7 and 9 p.m.; Sun/22, 4 and 7 p.m.; $6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Screening Room

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

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