› cheryl@sfbg.com
It was dark and stormy the night I journeyed to Oakland to meet the Saviours — a perfect weather match for their music, which I’ve had on constant ear blast since picking up their Tim Green–<\d>produced debut, Crucifire (Level Plane, 2006). These guys are fucking serious. They proffer fierce, hard-driving metal so metal you could pronounce it me-tal, spreading their gospel with lyrics such as “All crosses burn into the sky, and their ashes fall to serve as hell’s floor.” Live — forget it: heads involuntarily bang when the Saviours unleash their thunder.
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I knocked on the door of the Saviours’ lair (the Telegraph Avenue digs of singer-guitarist Austin Barber, guitarist Dean Tyler Morris, and drummer Scott Batiste). A giant, fiery pentagram? A life-size diorama of Slayer’s Reign in Blood album cover?
Actually, it was a pretty normal apartment, all things considered. Barber, Batiste, and Morris were chilling around a coffee table that displayed evidence of a post-Thanksgiving weekend winding to a boozy end. (Bassist Cyrus Comiskey, the only member who doesn’t live there and who also plays with Drunk Horse, was stuck at work.) We settled in to chat about the band and expand on the latest update posted on their Web site, www.killforsaviours.com: “We’re writing new songs and partying.”
The members all have pre-Saviours history: Barber and Batiste played in screamo outfit Yaphet Kotto, while Batiste and Morris have known each other since junior high.
“Me and Scott had the idea to start the band a couple of years ago. We got together, started jamming, and we were on tour a month later,” said Barber, who at 24 is the youngest Saviour and the only one who isn’t from Santa Cruz. (He hails from Fort Smith, Ark.) “We just wanted to start a killer heavy band. Now we’re trying to chill out and write a new record — and not play very many shows until spring.”
Their music may visit dark places, but the guys share an easygoing chemistry that extends to their songwriting technique.
“Pretty much everything starts with something that Scott writes, and then everybody adds to it until we decide it’s done,” Morris said. “A lot of times he’ll do stuff musically that I would never do, so of course it makes me think about something new and forces me to figure out a way to work myself into it. Everybody does that — Austin does that with his parts, and Cyrus does that with all his bass parts, and Scott does that with the drums too. It’s very collaborative.”
Batiste added, “This band’s pretty amicable. Like, at the end of 42 days of tour, we were all hanging out and drinking and not sick of each other.”
The Saviours have also found support in the Bay Area metal scene, where peers include High on Fire and Green’s band, the Fucking Champs. Of course, they’re also fans of the genre gods: Slayer, Black Sabbath, and Metallica. The anti-Christian imagery that appears in their lyrics and album artwork is owed to Barber, who grew up surrounded by conservative types. In other words, he’s not a Satan worshipper.
Christianity, he explained, “has always been such a bummer in my life. I just always identified with the dark — partying, do whatever the fuck you want, just living your life. And they’re trying to not live life. All that shit’s representative of doing your own thing, and fuck everybody else.”
Doing their own thing is important for the Saviours, who said they’ll never hook into Ozzfest-style bullshit. They’ve just settled into a new practice space and have plans for a live album (possibly to be recorded at their upcoming Hemlock Tavern show) as well as their next studio full-length, which will be “an extension of the first album,” Barber said.
“It’s gonna sound different, though, ’cause we only have two guitar players now and we used to have three,” Morris noted. (Fifth member Mag Delana, a Yaphet Kotto vet, left the band after Crucifire was recorded.) “I think the songs are getting more intricate.”
“They’ll also stay kinda raw, though,” Batiste added. “Consciously, we try to stay simple.”
Though they joke that they only do “extreme tours,” owing to past jaunts that saw them navigating icy highways in the Midwest and sweltering in East Coast summer heat, the Saviours are eager to hit the road next year. This year they traveled across America playing songs from Crucifire and their 2005 EP, Warship (Level Plane), recorded soon after the band formed, and they’ve picked up fans everywhere.
In New Orleans, Barber recalled, “We were partying all night after the show. I’m out front eating some food, and I hear our band blasting out of some car. And it’s the sheriff — literally the sheriff of New Orleans. He’s all, ‘Fuckin’ Saviours! Aaaah!’ Just screaming at me. He was blasting our CD from the cop car. It was fucking awesome.”<\!s>
SAVIOURS
With California Love
Dec. 29, 9:30 p.m.
Hemlock Tavern
1131 Polk, SF
$6
www.hemlocktavern.com
Scene
Unholy spirit
Dreamboys
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Never mind whether or not this is the year of Dreamgirls. I mean, forget the musical if you can — it’s not possible here in Los Angeles, where it’s taken over the town — although dreams never go out of style. What I want to know is what category does it fit in? New music? Reissued with a twist? Covers? And, for old folks who remember 1982, was the original sort of a reissue? (It is the story of Motown, after all.) Or just a memory — fond or otherwise? (See the movie if you don’t know what I’m talking about.)
In any case, my year-end begins and ends with “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” — Jennifer Holliday’s 1982 original kicks off my Top 10 chart, and Jennifer Hudson’s take on the tune, from the just-released movie, closes it. It’s a great song: Holliday’s version is simply out of this world, but that’s only a small part of why I love it so much. The real reason is the killer, utterly surreal ending, when both women are pouring it out, singing, “And you, you, you, you’re gonna love me, yeah!”
Ask yourself, what’s wrong here? For instance, in Dreamgirls, do you think she succeeds in making her man love her? Of course she doesn’t. Do the Iraqi people love the US Armed Forces just because George Bush wants them to? Life doesn’t work that way.
So while my wife apparently loves me, for reasons I do not understand, what I spent the entire year doing was trying to get my daily parade of hits to do the same — to find new music that reached out and grabbed me, knocked me on my ass, obsessed me to the point where I drove down Sunset Boulevard with my iPod blowing out my eardrums, feeling like I was 16 again. It didn’t happen. I gave Snow Patrol more than the time of day. I fell in (and out) of love with Gnarls Barkley. I dove headlong into Jay-Z. I downloaded more singles from iTunes than you can possibly imagine, and I’ll say this for all of them: not bad.
Still, the most important aspect of a year in music is finding the center of gravity — one’s personal ground zero — and proceeding from there. And in years past that’s meant locating a scene, a band, or an album that somehow says it all. Not this year, not for me. As far as I’m concerned, music 2006 was anchored by a parade of fabulous reissues and by one live performance — in Bangkok, Thailand, no less. It was so stunning that I need only think of it to feel good all over.
On Aug. 1, many thousands of miles from home, former Guardian music critic, boho baseball commissar, and one-time coolest guy in San Francisco Mike McGuirk cut loose with a karaoke version of Procol Harem’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” Not only did he stun the house, he finished by pouring a pitcher of beer over a noisy limey sitting at the bar. And he lived to tell the tale.
I know that to be true, because a week later I had a two-hour visit with McGuirk, whom I picked up at LAX and drove to a strip mall in nearby Ladera Heights. We traded stories until I ran out and he had the floor all to himself. He spoke of life in Southeast Asia, about being mistaken for Superman — black frames being what they are in a land where all white guys look alike — and about the pain and glory of leaving it all behind. McGuirk, when all was said and done, radiated a glow that I could only dream about. If that ain’t rock ’n’ roll, I don’t know what is.
See you next year — and hang on to your hat; things look like they could get rough. SFBG
TOMMY TOMPKINS’S TOP 10
(1) Jennifer Holiday, “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going,” Dreamgirls (1982 Original Broadcast Cast) (Decca US)
(2) Byrds, There Is a Season (Legacy)
(3) Various artists, What It Is! Funky Soul and Rare Grooves (1967–<\d>1977) (Rhino)
(4) Clash, The Singles (Legacy)
(5) Various artists, American Music: The Hightone Records Story (Hightone)
(6) Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers, This Is a Journey … into Time (Liaison/Raw Venture)
(7) Pretenders, Pirate Radio (Rhino)
(8) Waylon Jennings, Nashville Rebel (RCA)
(9) Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, Legends of Country Music: Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys (Legacy)
(10) Jennifer Hudson, “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going,” Dreamgirls (Music from the Motion Picture) (Sony)
Monday
Music
Spank Rock
Spank Rock’s Yo Yo Yo Yo Yo (Big Dada) is a hot rock because of xxxchange’s deep minimalist production. I’ll also give a little love to the Urkel-like Spank and his pubescent nerd’s pussy fixation, even if I dream of the day when xxxchange’s Yo Yo beats are wed to Roxanne Shante. Some self-employed prosecutors claim Spank Rock exploit Baltimore club music, while an entirely different group claim they’re misogynist. But if you like beats that ricochet into the future, you’d better start practicing your air cock thrust and get your ass down to Mighty. (Johnny Ray Huston)
10 p.m.
Mighty
119 Utah, SF
$15
(415) 762-0151
www.mighty119.com
www.spankrock.net
www.aircockthrust.com
Film
The Architect
Each streamlined scene has been carefully laid out to maximize character and plot development, seemingly creating the beginnings of a rich, thoughtful film. The strong cast — led by Anthony LaPaglia and Isabella Rossellini — provides ample reason to remain hopeful. But as the plot progresses, these characters seem increasingly stereotypical and each facet feels calculated. Writer-director Matt Tauber has the makings of a talented designer, but The Architect needs a less hollow structure. (Jonathan L. Knapp)
Lumiere Theatre, 1572 California, SF
www.landmarktheatres.com
www.magpictures.com
Give, give, give
It’s happened again. December has rolled around, and last year’s promise not to buy gifts for anyone has melted into a familiar panic. “Just a few people,” I thought — and those few quickly snowballed into a dozen, that dozen into many, that many into, well, the onset of a big ol’ holiday freak-out. What the hell to buy for everyone? The thought of going to a mall gives me the all-overs. Too many people, too many shiny displays. Too many “it” items this year — though I must admit, this season is mild compared to past years of Tickle-Me-Elmos and Furbies. Furbies really freaked me out, man. At least there aren’t any Furbies this year.
It’s not that I’m a Scrooge. In fact, on a holiday scale from “Ho, ho, ho!” to “Bah humbug!” my seasonal sentiments rate a solid “Fa la la la la.” I’m just oozing with holiday cheer — what I’m lacking is the cash to spread that cheer around.
Another major deterrent to the mother of all shopping seasons: people scare the hell out of me. Last year I almost lost an eyeball attempting to navigate around the umbrellaed masses of Union Square. There was barely a light drizzle, but the umbrellas were up, the people combative, and once I reached the safety of the Disney Store, there was another enemy force: children. Screaming, snot-nosed children. Sleep-deprived mothers trailing behind, trying to wrangle the ankle biters to the next shopping destination.
Is it worth all the stress? Not in my estimation. That’s where good planning comes in. I have three rules. One: make every gift thoughtful, personal, and original. Two: stay the hell away from shopping centers, big-box stores, and those umbrella-wielding maniacs of Union Square. Three: spend as few of my hard-earned dollars as possible. I’m no expert on shopping, but I’ve made enough mistakes to know I’ll need one hell of a strategy to pull off the perfect shopping caper. The plan? Divide and conquer. Get ’er done. Make it up.
DIVIDE AND CONQUER
Consider who the most important people on your list are. The people you love the most are always the most difficult to shop for. Get the important stuff out of the way early to minimize stress. Special people call for special circumstances — that’s why shopping at smaller, local businesses is best. Your big brother might love that copy of Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, but you can bet your ass he saw it on the Border’s clearance shelf for $6.98.
THE HEAD HONCHO
Chances are most bosses have received more bad gifts from their underlings than they can fill their oversized offices with. Steer clear of tchotchkes and give the gift of booze. A good bottle of wine goes a long way. Try K and L Wine Merchants (638 Fourth St., SF; 415-437-7421, www.klwines.com) for a huge selection and a staff so helpful they could explain the nuances of a petite sirah to a donkey. Or try Coit Liquor (585 Columbus, SF; 415-986-4036, www.coitliquor.com). This San Francisco landmark looks like your basic bodega, but the corner haven offers one of the best selections of fine wines in the city.
YOUR COWORKERS
If you have to buy for half the office, at least take comfort that these are the only people on your list who truly understand your financial woes. Think stocking-stuffer small. Think clever. Think original. Think Wishbone (601 Irving, SF; 415-242-5540, www.wishbonesf.com) for all the odds and ends of your shopping this season. Everyone loves adorable useless bullshit.
YOUR (FEMALE-GENDERED) SWEETIE
Known affectionately among locals as “Oh — that store with all the skulls?” Martin’s Emporium (3248 16th St., SF; 415-552-4631, www.martinsemporium.com) also happens to have an obscenely large collection of antique jewelry. So if your honey has an itch for F. Scott Fitzgerald, get her all Gatsbyed up with some jazz age earrings, brooches, and pendants. Or pull a Clinton: find a signed or first edition of your lady’s favorite book among the antique items at Thomas A. Goldwasser (486 Geary, SF; 415-292-4698, www.goldwasserbooks.com) or the pulp paperbacks of Kayo Books (814 Post, SF; 415-749-0554, www.kayobooks.com).
YOUR (MALE-GENDERED) SWEETIE
I blame Sears. Men are hard to shop for, yeah, but it seems like department stores have all but given up. Steer clear of the mall stores with the prepackaged wallet–<\d>watch–<\d>grooming kit gift sets. Stay away from the cologne-aftershave-and-soap-on-a-rope gift set he’ll never use, and think outside the little boxes. If you can’t spring for the PlayStation 3 that he really wants, you can agree to let him loose for an afternoon in Isotope Comics (326 Fell, SF; 415-621-6543, www.isotopecomics.com). Or if you refuse to feed his geeky side, go for his cuddly one. The San Francisco Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (2500 16th St., SF; 415-554-3000, www.sfspca.org) always has little friends who need loving homes. What’s better than a faceful of puppy kisses for the holidays?
MOM
It’s hard to skimp on Mom’s gift. Something heartfelt, personal, and dirt cheap — is that so much to ask? Lucky for us, moms these days are hardly the June Cleaver types. Give her something original, social, and rewarding. She’ll thank you for foregoing another year of bath salts. Classes make great gifts, and she’ll never expect it. It’s never too late to learn a new language: The Alliance Français (www.afsf.com) has beginner courses starting at $365. The Goethe-Institut (www.goethe.de/sanfrancisco) will teach Mom German starting at $230. For every other language in the world, starting at $175, try the ABC Language School (www.abclang.com). For even cheaper options, hit up Craigslist for a private tutor (most start at around $20 an hour) or send her packing to City College.
If you don’t think Mommy Dearest is into spending her days conjugating verbs, she might give yoga a try. At Mission Yoga (2390 Mission, SF; 415-401-9642, www.missionyoga.com), the Bikram program rules. The huge studios are open every day of the year, and they even offer Spanish language classes! Yoga Tree (www.yogatreesf.com) has locations all over town and offers tons of different styles. Perfect if Mom still thinks “asana” is a swear word.
DAD
Ah — my Republican Dad. We both love Johnny Cash and mob movies — that’s pretty much where the similarities end. Instead of delving into the dangerous world of politically themed gifts (boy, was that year fun), hiding behind an ugly tie, or grabbing yet another ratchet set, shoot for the common ground. Records are great because they are traditional, and Daddy can get all nostalgic about how much better Gordon Lightfoot sounds on vinyl. Check out Grooves Inspiralled Vinyl (1797 Market, SF; 415-436-9933) for a huge country section.
YOUR BFF
Time to play Let’s Make a Deal. No gifts until January. My closest friends and I are all always broke, so we have a tradition of buying each other dinner for birthdays, holidays, and special occasions. More often than not, by the time our schedules align we all owe each other at least one meal. This means we can justify an outlandishly expensive restaurant, split the bill evenly, and settle all debts. If this won’t swing in your inner circle, go for something experiential. Close friends are close for a reason — usually a common interest. Bond over art? Buy each other yearly memberships to the SF Museum of Modern Art (www.sfmoma.org) or Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (www.yerbabuenaarts.org). Love music? Concert tickets at Slim’s (333 11th St., SF; 415-255-0333, www.slims-sf.com) and the Independent (628 Divisadero, SF; 415-771-1421, www.theindependentsf.com) are as cheap as CDs and, as something you can do together, much more personal.
LITTLE BRO OR SIS
It’s every older sibling’s privilege — nay, responsibility — to introduce the younger family members to the more subversive side of life. If the kids happen to be teenagers, now is the time to pump them full of all the J.D. Salinger and Jack Kerouac you can get your hands on. Go to the source of the rebellion and buy from City Lights (261 Columbus, SF; 415-362-8193, www.citylights.com). If you really want to start a fire, hit up anarchist ground zero Bound Together Books (1369 Haight, SF; 415-431-8355). You are also well-placed to mold their fallible little minds into appreciating good music. Find all the songs that riled you up in your adolescence at Streetlight Records (3979 24th St., SF; 415-282-3550, www.streetlightrecords.com). Even if they hate your picks, you’ll have taught them a valuable lesson about snubbing all that fancy marketing and finding their own taste. You’re such a good role model.
BIG BRO OR SIS
It’s always hard to shop for the person who made your young life a living hell. To help you turn the page on that awkward history of rivalry, sign your tormentor up for the gift that keeps on giving. Magazine subscriptions are always a great idea for the holidays — but really, who wants to funnel their money into publishing houses all the way out in New York? We have tons of extraordinary publications based right here in the Bay Area! You can’t go wrong with Planet (www.planet-mag.com) for culture vultures, SOMA (www.somamagazine.com) for artsy types, Mother Jones (www.motherjones.com) for the world conscious, or Wired (www.wired.com) for the tech savvy.
THE YOUNG ’UNS
The only reason I tolerate the holiday shopping madness is that it offers a valid excuse for grown people like myself to play with toys. Now that there are some nephews in the picture, I don’t feel so creepy fondling everything on display at the Discovery Channel Store (865 Market, SF; 415-357-9754, shopping.discovery.com) in the Westfield Center. I know, you have to brave the big, scary new mall, but the payoff is strong. From crime scene kits to talking globes, this store will make you feel like a kid again. Everything is educational, but the children will never know. Ambassador Toys (186 West Portal, SF; 415-759-8697, www.ambassadortoys.com) has all the lovely LeapFrog (a local company!) baby things and tons of interesting multicultural stuff too.
GRANDPARENTS
Mom-mom and Pop-pop are so easy. If you remember to call, they’re thrilled. Getting them a gift? Oh, you’re such a honey pie! Head to Paxton’s Gate (824 Valencia, SF; 415-824-1872) and pick up some orchids or carnivorous plants for her to fawn over. Grandpa will probably be happy if you just show him how to use the digital camera you got him last year, but go the extra mile and start an aquarium for him. This way you’ll know exactly what to get him every year: more fish! The folks over at Ocean Aquarium (120 Cedar, SF; 415-771-3206) will get you started right.
PETS
Don’t forget about your little critters this season. San Franciscans like to give their pets the run of the house — in my case, the tortoise Bukowski has the painfully slow and woozy stagger of the place, but you get the idea. Bukowski will be getting a tasty bouquet of dandelion greens from Golden Produce (172 Church, SF; 415-431-1536) in his stocking this year. Fido probably won’t enjoy chewing the weeds, so try Babies (235 Gough, SF; 415-701-7387, www.babiessf.com). This store is pretty much the holy grail for spoiled little dogs.
DREADED EX
Admit it, you have an inkling that your ex is probably stalking you on MySpace. Why not call the sneak out with some kitschy spy wear from the International Spy Shop (555 Beech, SF; 415-775-47794, www.internetspyshop.com)? Nothing says “I can still see right through you” like some X-ray glasses. The Fisherman’s Wharf shop is also ground zero for all things private dick.
THE IN-LAWS
Just put your name on the damn card. Fin.
GET ’ER DONE
So you waited until the last minute — you haven’t bought a single gift. People have started dropping hints about the great things they’ve found for you (some of these people weren’t even on your list — the jerks). What the hell do you do now? Don’t panic. Get to the Castro. Stat.
Cliff’s Variety (479 Castro, SF; 415-431-5365, www.cliffsvariety.com) is the best store in San Francisco. OK, I’ve shown my hand. The toy section is top-notch. It’s got games, gizmos, and playthings galore. Great for the kids, even better for your coworkers and casual friends. The windup animals, novelty tokens, and traditional knickknacks will have them waxing nostalgic for days. The kitchenware section has the best in sleek, smaller appliances (FYI: giving a French press or percolator to everyone on your list who still subsides on drip coffee will make you a hero for years to come) and unnecessary (but totally useful) gadgetry. Check out the annex for swanky furniture, household items, baby clothes, and all things craft. Oh, and shopping at Cliff’s is dirt cheap.
MAKE IT UP
Do yourself a favor and don’t put all your holiday stock in a DIY project you’ve never tried. Even if you have every intention of knitting scarves for the 35 people on your list, even if you bought every spool of fancy yarn in the city, even if you took three weeks off from work to do the project — if you still don’t know how to handle the needles, you may as well shoot yourself in the foot. Your peeps will get squat, and all you’ll have is a three-by-five-inch scrap of knotty wool. There are safer ways to craft. Here are some:
Use those concert tees. Music is a huge part of my life — likely one of the reasons I’m always broke and most certainly the reason I have an enormous collection of swag I never wear. This year that T-shirt collection overflowing the closet is going to shrink. The quick how-to: Pick out the ones with obscure bands, ridiculous logos, or just great colors and restructure them into cost-free, made-with-love gifts. Cut a big square out of the center of both sides of the shirt (this should include whatever graphic is involved). Put the insides on the outside. Stitch around all four sides, leaving a three-inch gap in the center of one side. Turn right-side out and stuff (use cotton, newspaper, more old shirts — whatever isn’t perishable). You just made a pillow! Simple quilts and tote bags are also pretty easy to swing with limited knowledge of sewing. If all you learned in junior high home ec has escaped, run over to the Stitch Lounge (182 Gough, SF; 415-431-3739, www.stitchlounge.com) in Hayes Valley. The rockin’ ladies there will show you the ropes for a nominal fee. Bonus: they offer gift certificates, so you can give the gift of craftiness even if you gave up on threading the needle.
Feeling guilty for paring down your list? Making personal holiday cards for everyone you snubbed will cure your ills. This project will only take an afternoon (or an evening with friends and lots of liquor), and you already have the supplies! Look at all the paper crap you’ve collected around the house. Those calendars you got at a discount last January have some high-quality photos. Magazines stacked everywhere, coffee table books on their last legs, and all that cheesy holiday junk mail. Got scissors? Glue? You know what to do. Try Paper Source (www.paper-source.com) if your home stock won’t cut it.
Since you’ve already made such a mess, here’s another project for you. Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First, sit back and let me tell you a thing or two about gift baskets. They suck. They are predictable, boring, and awkward as hell to carry on Muni. The day of basket-wrapped gifts is over. Instead, take all that stuff you’re cutting up and do some decoupage. My favorite gift vessels are mason jars and shoe boxes — both are simple, portable, and look great once you start decorating them. Stick to themes and you’ll be golden. Example: decoupage a box with images from Italy and fill it with gourmet noodles, a decent wine, and that killer sauce recipe you have. Add a cheap vintage apron from Held Over (1543 Haight, SF; 415-864-0818), and voilà — you have a gift!
Use your skills. Computer savvy? Check your list for any artist, comedian, musician, or writer who could benefit from your illustrious Web site–<\d>designing skills.
Take great photos? This is San Francisco — chances are several people on your shopping list are in struggling bands. Bands need press kits. Press kits need photos. Photos are expensive. You take great photos. Are you there yet?
Do you give Rachael Ray a run for her perky money? Baking for people is still way festive — just steer clear of fruitcakes, and your gift will be well received. Or cheat like hell — that’s why they put cookie dough in those convenient little tubes.
If you totally suck at the DIY thing, you aren’t alone. Lucky for you there are some people in the city who are very, very good at making things. Needles and Pens (3253 16th St., SF; 415-255-1534, www.needles-pens.com) showcases a variety of paper goods and clothing made by local craftsters. My favorite is the 2007 Slingshot Organizer, but be sure to check out the other DIY goodies at this little shop that loves you back.
The Architect
REVIEW Writer-director Matt Tauber has clearly taken his debut movie’s title to heart. Each streamlined scene has been carefully laid out to maximize character and plot development, seemingly creating the beginnings of a rich, thoughtful film. The strong cast — led by Anthony LaPaglia, Isabella Rossellini, and Viola Davis — provides ample reason to remain hopeful. Tauber, with playwright and coscreenwriter David Greig, gives us a movie full of multifaceted characters, but as the plot progresses, these characters seem increasingly stereotypical and each facet feels calculated. LaPaglia plays Leo, a successful architect unaware of the world crumbling around him: his wife (Rossellini) is bored and depressed; his son (Sebastian Stan) questions his cozy, straitlaced upbringing; and his blossoming teenage daughter (Hayden Panettiere) sure wants some male attention. Elsewhere, a low-income housing complex of Leo’s design deteriorates, and a resident (Davis) works to tear it down. Tauber has the makings of a talented designer, but The Architect needs a less hollow structure.
THE ARCHITECT Opens Fri/8. Lumiere Theatre, 1572 California, SF. See movie clock at www.sfbg.com. www.landmarktheatres.com, www.magpictures.com
Wholly noise
Trying to fathom the arcane and somewhat frustrating demeanor that shrouds a Bay Area noisenik is like cross-examining Walt Disney on LSD. I’ve been at the mercy of Rubber O Cement’s Bonnie Banks for the past week, meticulously querying the mumbo jumbo he (or she, as Banks likes to be referred to) sends in response to interview questions while nagging him for answers to my more dogged inquiries. One e-mail reply might yield a pensive thought, only to be followed by a farrago of chaotic imagery — swarms of schizo babble about vocal chord mulch, mosquito broccoli, and rabid zombie snowmen. When asked what people can expect from the impending Brutal Sound Effects Festival, Banks answers that performers “will present the sound of a stuffed horse and cat calliope skidded via hydroplane base into a volcano of semi-liquid thorium pellets.” In another e-mail he writes that he hopes people will come to the event “adorning their larger-than-life scramble nightmare Bosch slip-and-slide mask.”
Though put off at first by Banks’s excursive, seemingly psychotomimetic rants, I soon realize this is his world. What I mistook as some puerile screwball who’s simply fucking with me — I’m still convinced he’s doing that to a degree — is actually the eccentric, visionary heart of the Bay Area noise scene.
Since the early 1980s, Banks has exhaustively chiseled San Francisco into the West Coast hub for underground noise by playing in prominent acts such as Caroliner, bringing up young bands (his musical influence has extended from Wolf Eyes to Deerhoof), and encouraging others to engage in the scene. In 1995 he established the Brutal Sound Effects Festival — a musical community of misfits who, according to Hans Grusel of Hans Grusel’s Krankenkabinet, “didn’t fit in anywhere else.” Shortly afterward, Banks founded an online BSFX message board where people could discuss noise acts, events, and other bizarre topics.
Now in its 40th incarnation — Banks is said to organize four to five events a year — the forthcoming BSFX Festival includes some of the Bay Area’s renowned noise addicts: Xome provides power noise onslaughts, and Nautical Almanac’s James “Twig” Harper indulges in electronic cannibalism. Other notable acts include Anti Ear and Bran (…) pos of Beandip Troubadours, Skozey Fetisch, and Joseph Hammer of the Los Angeles Free Music Society in Psicologicos Trama, offering “a fun way to sample experimental sound,” says Joel Shepard, film curator at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, which is hosting the event for the first time. Each act will integrate improvised film and video clips into a short performance, creating what Shepard describes as “a real multimedia sensory overload event.” If something seems boring, he adds, there will be another performance in minutes.
“I’ve been really impressed with what he’s been doing,” Shepard says, referring to the industrious Banks. “I find what he’s doing to be a very important part of the art and cultural scene in San Francisco, and I want to show my support.”
The freaks and geeks of BSFX push performance art to its limits, playing under unpronounceable aliases and often incorporating elaborate costumes and scenery unlike anything you see at conventional concerts. Musicians execute a medley of odd sounds using home-wired equipment and analog gadgets at warehouses like the Clit Stop and Pubis Noir. Blistering resonance is one element at these shows. Relying heavily on feedback and distortion, artists such as Xome, Randy Yau, and Tralphaz create a getting-sucked-through-a-vacuum effect by hooking up 20 guitar pedals and feeding them into each other. But don’t be fooled — not all noise acts use volume as an instrument. The Spider Compass Good Crime Band, a duo that will play the upcoming BSFX show, is described by its members as “giant vultures who play instrumental music based around a keyboard.” Their YouTube video is just as outlandish: two costumed performers (one dressed as a giraffelike character, the other as a flamingo) dance and fiddle with samplers; the chamber-driven organs and rubber-sounding belches resemble industrial surf pop.
It’s easy to get sucked into the abstract, visual noise. Costumes range from the cuckoo-clock masks of Hans Grusel to the moss-covered floor crouching of Ecomorti. “Some performers will move an entire set of scenery into a show, which takes two to three hours to set up, and then play a 15-minute set,” Grusel says over the phone. “That shows the dedication people have to this sort of thing.”<\!s>
BRUTAL SOUND EFFECTS FESTIVAL
Fri/8, 7:30 p.m.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission, SF
$6–<\d>$8
(415) 978-2787
www.ybca.org
Failure, so thrive
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
“Ever heard of Wisconsin Death Trip?” Jacob Heule asks. Ettrick’s alto sax–playing half and I are in my living room discussing the rigors of life in the Midwest as they pertain to the metal-listening youth of today. Heule, a Wisconsin native, has jokingly — or maybe not so jokingly — cited Michael Lesy’s book about the disintegration of the 19th-century town Black River Falls as we make loose connections between freezing cold weather, insanity, and locales that death metal and its fans call home. He’s certain of one thing: “Black metal is the perfect stuff when you don’t feel like a human anymore. When I was a receptionist at a medical center, I got really into it because I just felt terrible about certain things. It was a dehumanizing job. Cold, bleak black metal — I could relate to it.”
Ettrick are indeed a black metal duo, and their music harbors the telltale signs: ferocious blast-beats, gargantuan expanses of pitch-black noise, and drums like a self-propelled howitzer gone berserk. They also happen to be a free-jazz pairing as well, in which Heule and partner Jay Korber, both drummers and saxophonists, rotate between the two instruments to create a grueling improvisational skronk. A well-circulated YouTube video featuring their collaboration with Weasel Walter reveals a dimly lit scene of busted drum kits with the bleating screams of Korber’s tenor sax piercing the deafening cloud of beats raining down from the stage. For all its grandiose chaos, however, the players never lose track of each other in the din. Heule credits this to time spent practicing. “It’s difficult to improvise, but it’s a skill that you can work on,” he says. “We have developed certain patterns that we call on sometimes, but we don’t really discuss things ahead of time. We realized that it sounds a lot better if we don’t.”
ART BRUTAL
Ettrick’s beginnings hark back to 2004, when Heule was looking to sublet his practice space and Korber answered his ad. Korber — a Pittsburgh native who shares his bandmate’s love of brutal music and calls Immortal’s Battles in the North “one of the best black metal albums ever made” — had coincidentally been playing sax for a few years as well. (Heule has played the instrument since age 10.) As it turned out, they were even recording Ettrick-style music independent of one another. “We both had recordings that we had made of ourselves, overdubbing all the instruments onto each other, drums and sax, but we were doing it all ourselves,” Heule explains with a laugh. “So then we found the ‘other guy.’ We could play live now!”
A year and a half later, Ettrick recorded their first self-released album, Infinite Horned Abomination, in their practice space. Though starkly minimalist (doom-laden atmospherics are largely restricted to the first track), Infinite Horned Abomination hints at the separate yet intertwined paths Heule and Korber have forged. Their second disc, Sudden Arrhythmic Death (American Grizzly, 2006), is an absolute must-have, a 15-minute live session recorded in Portland, Ore., that begins as an achingly radiant saxophone duet before it explodes into a maniacal barrage of beats that push the eardrum till white noise is the only sense the brain can make. It concludes with Ettrick’s signature: bloodcurdling screams and the sound of drum kits being destroyed.
THE SOUND OF MAYHEM
Heule muses on the carnage during their recent tour: “The last show in LA was pretty destructive. I broke my snare stand in half. I dropped my kick drum. I wasn’t really thinking about what it would break if I just picked it up and dropped it.”
Korber amassed similar injuries, breaking both heads on his snare drum. He confesses that his sax is “a piece of shit to begin with” and is sure that his other band, Sergio Iglesias and the Latin Love Machine, isn’t helping matters: “Last time [Sergio played] I rolled over it a couple times.”
The improv community in the Bay Area is a tightly intermingled mass of weeds that entangles every act in its path. Ettrick are no exception, having collaborated not only with the aforementioned Weasel Walter but also with Moe! Staiano (Moe!kestra!, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum), Mike Guarino of Oaxacan, and most recently, Tralphaz, a one-person pedal feedback assault.
Tralphaz embodies what Heule enjoys most about their chosen genre. “One of my favorite things seeing improvisers play is when things just start going totally wrong, and they bring it back,” says the saxophonist. “I’ve seen Tralphaz do that a couple of times.”
Ettrick follow that lead, constantly pushing their black cloud of noise into failure’s clutches. They hope to tempt even more sonic dissolution with their forthcoming album, Feeders of Ravens (Not Not Fun), which will be released on vinyl in early 2007. Korber is matter-of-fact about the strategy. “There’s always a chance that it’s going to fail,” he confesses.
Heule nods. “That’s one of the best reasons to do it.” SFBG
ETTRICK
With darph/nader and Ant Lion
Thurs/30
Luggage Store
1007 Market, SF
Call for time and price
(415) 255-9171
www.luggagestoregallery.org
Crap of the future
› annalee@techsploitation.com
TECHSPLOITATION Because I write about technology and science for a living, a peculiar burden falls on my shoulders every holiday season. I’m expected to make pronouncements about what stupid gadgets people should buy for the holidays. I’ve already been asked repeatedly if I’d rather buy a Wii or a PlayStation 3. I’ll admit I found it vaguely glamorous that people were shooting and rioting in line while waiting to buy the PlayStation — it gave me that retro concert-trampling-frenzy feeling. But it didn’t make me want to own one.
However, I reserve the right to do another thing that tech-sci writers are supposed to do: predict the future. So instead of bitching about the stupid holiday gadgets of today, allow me to predict what kinds of lameass holiday crap I’ll be bitching about in the future.
1. Peer-to-peer brain distribution client: Everybody is uploading and downloading their brains via the Internet. It’s certainly the best way to travel — just upload your brain in San Francisco and download it into another body in France. The problem is bandwidth. With everybody uploading and downloading their brains around the holidays, the network gets awfully slow. That’s why Yahoo! BitTorrent has introduced the P2P brain distribution client, which allows you to store several copies of your consciousness on multiple computers across the network. Downloading goes a lot faster because you grab segments of your consciousness from different computers at the same time, assembling it piecemeal at your destination. The problem is that sometimes the pieces arrive out of order, so you spend half an hour thinking the Star Wars series has gotten better over time. Also, people often mislabel copies of your consciousness. You think you’re downloading your mind, but actually you’ve gotten Cher’s childhood or somebody’s false memory of being abducted by aliens.
2. DNA DRM: The latest solution to the problem of media copying is a digital rights management (DRM) scheme that relies on identifying the DNA of the consumer. When you purchase a piece of media, your licensed copy is encoded with 13 unique sequences of nucleotides from your genome. Each time you hit the power button on your new DNA DRM Zune media player, a hair-thin needle painlessly pierces your flesh and feeds a drop of blood into an embedded genome sequencer. If you are the registered owner of the media, you are permitted to play it. If you aren’t, the media is deleted from your device and a record of your transgression is reported to the central media certification authority. You will be forced to pay an extra “unlicensed play penalty tax” to license it next time. The only thing good about this system is that biohackers can take the DNA DRM Zune apart, remove the embedded sequencer, and use it to figure out if they have cancer.
3. Animal mashup maker: A home biology kit for kids, the mashup maker lets you create new animals by combining the best of all your favorite pets’ genomes. What could go wrong? The dats and cogs are great, but when you start getting into fish-frogs or bird-fish or snails combined with anything, cleaning the litter box really gets kinky. Also the product tie-ins suck. I’m going to spit if I see another one of those cutsey, knitted lizard-pig holsters.
4. Retinas-B-Gone: While I sympathize with the political project that inspired the invention of this device, I’m not sure the means justify the ends. Retinas-B-Gone temporarily burns out people’s retinas to stop those annoying in-eye ads. But this extreme adbusting technique feels too much like poking out your eyes to spite your own ubiquitous mediascape. Plus, people could get hurt. What if unscrupulous users start burning out everybody’s retinas in traffic? And what if there are people who want to see the price of toothpaste flashed into their eyes as they pass the Walmart-Google store? I don’t like seeing those tiny ads marching up the side of my vision either, but sometimes it’s worth it to see a free movie. At least the damn things are relevant, though admittedly it’s weird to see plugs for cheap funerals when you’re watching the death scene in Romeo and Juliet. Instead of tearing your retinas out and feeding your blood to the Zune this holiday, why not learn how to build a potato launcher or a Tesla coil instead? Or go write some free porn for asstr.org, fer chrissake. This is the season for giving! SFBG
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who will be celebrating the holidays by eating your brain.
Drilling Mexico
› news@sfbg.com
Macuspana, Tabasco, Mexico — The billboard posted along the scrubby highway running east in the sultry southern state of Tabasco displays lush jungle, a sun-dappled iguana, and a flock of dazzling macaws. “We’re working for a better environment” the giant road sign radiates.
The leafy graphic contrasts starkly with the blighted scenery of this tropical state, where rivers have been contaminated, the fish envenomed, and the corn fields blasted by acid rain that drips from the polluted sky thanks to the efforts of Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX), the national oil monopoly and its multiple transnational subcontractors. It is a testament to the fact that Tabasco holds Mexico’s largest land-based petroleum deposits.
But the billboard here in Macuspana — the swampy, oil-rich region settled by the Chontal tribe — was not posted by the Environmental Secretariat to inspire conservationism or even by PEMEX to burnish its tarnished image. No, this pristine scene is signed off by a familiar name for the United States: Halliburton de Mexico. The Houston-based petroleum industry titan’s south-of-the-border subsidiary is PEMEX’s largest subcontractor. Vice President Dick Cheney’s old megacorporation and the largest oil service provider on the planet has been doing business in Mexico for many years.
The privatization of PEMEX, nationalized in 1938 after depression-era president Lázaro Cárdenas expropriated Caribbean coast oil enclaves from Anglo American owners, was right at the heart of Mexico’s still-questioned July 2 presidential election. Right-winger Felipe Calderón, a former energy secretary, is committed to selling off Mexico’s diminishing oil reserves — or at least entering into joint agreements that would guarantee private corporations a substantial quotient of them (the reserves have only 10 more good years, according to the worst-case scenario).
On the other side of the presidential ledger, leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a native of Macuspana who many Mexicans believe actually won the presidency, advocates maintaining the state’s control over PEMEX, an entity that pays for more than 40 percent of the Mexican government’s annual budget, on the grounds that the oil wealth of the nation belongs to the Mexican people and no one else.
Knowing full well which side their bread was buttered on, transnationals like Halliburton rushed to support Calderón — as did Cheney, the corporation’s former CEO (1995–2000), and his running mate, George W. Bush. Both Cheney and Bush have long-standing ties to the Mexican oil industry. Bush’s daddy ran Zapata Offshore, a PEMEX subcontractor, back in the 1960s. His partner Jorge Diaz Serrano, a former PEMEX director, served prison time for an oil tanker kickback scheme. Cheney’s Halliburton somehow finagled its way into lucrative service contracts for the newly opened offshore Cantarell field (said to contain upward of 12 billion barrels) back in the 1990s.
How Halliburton got in on the ground floor smells fishy to National Autonomous University professor John Saxe-Fernandez, who tracks strategic resources. The Cantarell contracts were assigned while Cheney was running the show in Houston. At the same time, the Texas conglomerate was busy across the Atlantic allegedly bribing Nigerian oil officials, according to press reports and a French magistrate.
The truth is the debate about privatizing PEMEX is no longer much of a debate. PEMEX has long since subcontracted virtually its entire exploration and perforation divisions to transnationals such as Halliburton, Fluor-Daniels, and the San Francisco–based Bechtel, leaving PEMEX a virtual shell.
Cheney’s old outfit has grabbed the lion’s share of this billion-dollar prize. Between 2000 and 2005, Halliburton picked up 159 contracts with PEMEX’s Perforation and Exploration division for a total of $2.5 billion, about a quarter of PEMEX’s annual operating budget, according to Saxe-Fernandez. The contracts cover everything from drilling slant and vertical wells to maintaining offshore platforms to logging out a jungle for the drilling of 27 turnkey wells in Tabasco and Chiapas.
With 1,250 employees and thousands of contract workers, Halliburton de Mexico has offices in Ciudad del Carmen, Campeche (the fast-shrinking Cantarell operation); Reynosa Tamaulipas, where Cheney’s boys are helping to exploit the Burgos natural gas fields; and Poza Rica Veracruz, a region in which Standard Oil’s Harry Doherty and Lord Cowry (Weetman Pierson), owner of what eventually became British Petroleum, once ruled with an iron fist and where Halliburton is now combing through what is left of its old Chicontepec field.
Halliburton also maintains offices in Mexico City and Villahermosa Tabasco, from which it oversees its off- and onshore Caribbean domain. Mexico’s Gulf Coast is not Halliburton’s only Caribbean operation. The KBR (Kellogg Brown Root) division of Cheney’s conglom built 207 cells at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in 2002 to house so-called enemy combatants.
Halliburton has had a boot planted in the rebel-ridden state of Chiapas since 1997, three years after the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (known in Mexico as the EZLN) rose up and declared war on the Mexican government after the conglom built a natural gas separation plant in the north of that southernmost state. In 2003, Halliburton won a $20 million contract to expand natural gas infrastructure at Reforma — autonomous Zapatista communities lie south and east of the Halliburton installations.
Both PEMEX’s and Cheney’s associates have their eyes on Chiapas — ample reserves lie under the floor of the Lacandon jungle in areas where the Zapatistas have established their caracoles, or public centers, according to studies by National Autonomous University political geographer Andrés Barreda. Indeed, the first battle between the EZLN and the Mexican military took place near a capped well at Nazaret in the canyons that lead down to the jungle floor near where the Zapatista Road to Hope (La Garrucha, the autonomous municipality of Francisco Gomez) now sits.
According to closely held PEMEX numbers unearthed by Houston oil investigator George Baker, Nazaret was putting out a million cubic feet of natural gas a day when it was capped back in the early 1990s. If Halliburton had been in the picture then, it probably would have picked up the contract, and Dick Cheney, an avid if erratic hunter, would have gotten a chance to exterminate many endangered Lacandon jungle species.
In a religious mood, Cheney once wondered out loud why God did not put the oil under democratic countries, and with that mission in mind, he has set out to democratize foreign oligarchies. His endeavor to bring democracy to Iraq has resulted in more than 50,000 Iraqi dead, civil war, devastation and destruction in every corner of the land, and the systematic sabotage of that nation’s petroleum infrastructure.
Now Cheney and his Halliburton associates say they are democratizing Mexico, having aided and abetted the stealing of the presidential election from López Obrador in favor of Calderón, who would privatize PEMEX. As a member of the Council of Communication, which groups together transnationals doing business in Mexico, Halliburton helped pay for a vicious TV campaign that featured defamatory hit pieces tagging López Obrador a danger to Mexico. Because only political parties can mount such campaigns, Halliburton’s participation was patently illicit, according to Mexico’s highest electoral tribunal.
Planted outside Halliburton de Mexico’s offices in a soaring skyscraper overlooking Paseo de Reforma, where López Obrador’s people would soon be encamped last summer, 80-year-old former oil worker Jacinto Guzman remembered the great strikes (his father was a striker) that had impelled Cárdenas to expropriate the Caribbean complexes where Halliburton now rules — and bemoaned the depredations of Cheney and others of his ilk against what belongs to the Mexican people.
Dressed in a wrinkled suit and hard hat, the old oil worker said he was even more vexed by Halliburton’s participation in the smear campaign to vilify López Obrador.
As he told me, “The gringos think they own our elections too.” SFBG
John Ross is the Guardian’s correspondent in Mexico. His latest book is ZAPATISTAS — Making Another World Possible: Chronicles of Resistance 2000–2006.
SATURDAY
Nov. 25
Dance
Diamano Coura West African Dance Company
In the Senegalese language Wolof, diamano coura means “those who bring the message.” For more than three decades that’s exactly what Oakland’s Diamano Coura West African Dance Company has been doing, through performances, lectures, and youth programs. Codirectors Zak and Naomi Diouf prize culture over entertainment – rather than present a vision of dance that is separate from other arts, they emphasize that singing and polyrhythmic movement can be vital presences within everyday life. This year’s annual repertory show manifests African dance’s past, present, and future. (Johnny Ray Huston)
8 p.m. (also Sun/26, 3 p.m.)
Malonga Casquelord Center for the Arts
1428 Alice, Oakl.
$10-$30
(510) 733-1077
www.diamanocoura.org
Music
West African Highlife Band
While a lot of African music is mainly rhythm driven, highlife is largely melodic, incorporating jazzy horns and intricate yet laid-back guitar lines. The West African Highlife Band is a veritable all-star group of musicians who have been a crucial part of the West African scene for decades, touring and recording with greats such as Fela Kuti, Hugh Masekela, and King Sunny Ade. Come at 9 p.m. for an African dance lesson with Comfort Mensah. (Aaron Sankin)
9:30 p.m.
Ashkenaz
1317 San Pablo, Berk.
$15 general, $12 student
(510) 525-5054
www.ashkenaz.com
THE BOURNE IDENTITY
Well, Tim Burton it isn’t. Since Matthew Bourne’s Edward Scissorhands is inspired by Burton’s delightful but dark 1990 film, a comparison seems fair enough. Right off the top, Bourne’s dance musical has neither the gentleness nor the creepy underbelly of the filmed adaptation of Caroline Thompson’s gothic story. It’s coarser, more cartoonish, and fits too smoothly into the conventions of the Broadway musical.
And yet there is a lot to be said for what Bourne has done. Most important, he has made the parable his own. He tells his version of the old story clearly and with a light touch. It’s the one about the outcast who is destroyed by the civilization into which he is thrust. But it’s also a story of growth from naïveté to wisdom, a tale with a twist in the happy ending. These threads are woven into an at-times entertaining, mostly well-paced, and always splendidly performed piece of musical theater.
Edward Scissorhands (Sam Archer) is a leather-clad creature created by an inventor (Adam Galbraith) who is literally scared to death by Halloween pranksters — leaving the unfinished boy an orphan. How Edward makes his way in the world, becoming more vulnerable as he becomes more human, takes up the bulk of the story. Archer brilliantly realizes the trajectory, from stumbling through life to learning about love and pain to ultimate self-acceptance.
Lez Brotherston’s fabulous sets and costumes create a Hope Springs in which perfect tract houses and perfect families are perfectly color coded. Bourne creates amusing portraits of these homes in which the men go to work and play sports while the more or less desperate housewives keep the family machinery humming. It’s a world of sibling rivalries, raging hormones, secret lives, and unrealized aspirations. Within the stock character tradition in which he chooses to work, Bourne creates reasonable facsimiles of the kindly Peg Boggs (Etta Murfitt), the poodle-walking Charity Upton (Mikah Smillie), and the ever-pregnant Gloria Grubb (Mami Tomotani). But the scene-stealer is the local vamp, the man-eating Joyce Monroe (a splendid Michaela Meazza), who regularly cuckolds her husband (Steve Kirkham), an adoring father.
Bourne specializes in a genuinely new form of musical theater. At his best — Swan Lake, Cinderella, and Play Without Words — he creates characters and situations that resonate with theatrical truth. That’s exactly where I felt many parts of Scissorhands came up short. The big production numbers, in particular “The Boggs’s Barbecue” and “Christmas in Hope Springs,” fell flat. One sensed that Bourne, who clearly loves the energy of social dancing, has watched a lot of movie musicals. But he doesn’t give a fresh perspective on the genre. During “Christmas” I couldn’t help but think of the sparkling invention seen in the holiday party scene in Mark Morris’s The Hard Nut.
Yet there are moments when the choreography works excellently. “The Suburban Ballet,” depicting the town’s awakening and daily activities, was smartly layered and fast paced, with many clever touches. It was great fun to watch. “A Portrait of Kim,” which takes place in the bedroom of the Boggses’ teenage daughter (Kerry Biggins as the ingenue), has an intriguing premise. Deposited into this pink boudoir, a bewildered Edward admires three life-size pictures of Kim. They come alive through his yearning glances. Unfortunately, what could have been an enchanting dream ballet was shortchanged by bland und undistinguished choreography.
“Topiary Garden” was Scissorhands’ more successful dream ballet. Bourne had Edward and Kim waltzing through and with whimsically trimmed, tutu-wearing bushes. Though using fairly standard steps and patterns — I saw echoes of both Fred Astaire and George Balanchine — he deftly combined them for a first act closer resplendent with wit, charm, and emotion.
The “Farewell” pas de deux, at the end of the piece, showed just how good Bourne can be. Here the two lovers unite for the first and last time. Back-to-back, in and out of each other’s arms, they swirled and swooned and held each other. When Kim finally came to rest inside Edward’s enfolding embrace, the scissors against her chest looked like silver flowers. (Rita Felciano)
EDWARD SCISSORHANDS
Through Dec. 10
Orpheum Theater
1192 Market, SF
$35–$90
www.shnsf.com
Plays of the year
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
You may not have noticed, but an unprecedented theatrical experiment was launched nationwide last week. Its San Francisco segment unfolded the night of Nov. 23 before an audience of 80 to 100 people in a modest wood-shingled community center atop Potrero Hill, with the playwright who started it all in attendance.
Suzan-Lori Parks’s 365 Days/365 Plays project — a national yearlong grassroots theatrical festival premiering a unique and audacious play-a-day cycle by one of the country’s foremost dramatic voices — took off at a benefit performance put on by the Z Space Studio as a group of 11 performers, directed by Lisa Steindler and director-actor Marc Bamuthi Joseph, unveiled the first seven playlets in the cycle.
The pieces (each no longer than 10 minutes) percolate with a mixture of mischievous invention, absurdist humor, pointed irony, and somber reflection on a variety of themes. In the first, for example, the aptly titled Start Here, an African American man gets vague encouragement and direction as he prepares, with some trepidation and confusion, to head out on a path as obscure, ambiguous, and mysterious as the history behind him. (The names of the characters, Arjuna and Krishna, invoke the tale of the Bhagavad Gita and overlay it on this seemingly American allegory.) In another piece, a young woman from a long line of “good-for-nothings” fails miserably to make nothing of herself — rejected by a crowd as inadequately worthless, she is forced to reinvent herself as something instead.
In Veuve Clicquot, which deftly reframes a comic situation into one of pathos and acute ambivalence, a seeming gourmand is in the process of ordering a sumptuous meal until his waiter balks at his pretension, and a chorus of women haunts him with the ethereal voice of his departed victim — whose own last meal, as it turned out, was nothing all that special.
Well acted and smartly blocked on and around a nearly bare stage (with some choice choreography added by six female dancers), the evening’s performances coincided with similar premieres around the country involving a wide range of local theater companies (more than 800 and counting) that have each signed on to produce a week’s worth of Parks’s yearlong cycle (which she composed daily for one full year, beginning in November 2002). Locally, the project is spearheaded by the Z Space Studio, Playwrights Foundation, and Cutting Ball Theater (the last of which recently staged a very fine production of Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World). The Bay Area manifestation of the 365 Days/365 Plays festival (which runs daily to Nov. 12, 2007) will ultimately involve more than 40 companies and 300 theater artists. This week’s shows are by the all-female Shakespeare company Women’s Will.
Parks — the Pulitzer Prize–winning creator of Topdog/Underdog, In the Blood, and The America Play, among other works (including screenplays and a novel) — was in a jocular and expansive mood during the Q&A. She explained her commitment to the idea of writing a play a day for one year as the product of an inclination to entertain any idea that comes into her head — “through the window of opportunity,” she laughed, nodding to the suspended prop window stage left that had featured as the thematic and titular center of one of that evening’s seven playlets.
Plays in the cycle beyond these first seven run a varied and quirky gamut of inspirational matter, with themes of war, family, and spiritual life among the leitmotifs. There are pieces that revisit some of the playwright’s favorite themes (Abe Lincoln comes around again), some that pay homage to people who happened to have passed on during the course of the year (Johnny Cash, for instance), others that take off from real-life encounters (one piece incorporates Parks’s meeting with Brad Pitt, for whom she was developing a screenplay). At the same time, the festival aims to do much more than showcase Parks’s enviable talents. Each company is free to stage the plays as it sees fit, giving the festival a panoramic scope that takes in the diversity of the whole theatrical scene. This kind of coordinated national grassroots effort — something Parks described as an extension of a process of “radical inclusion” — has probably not been seen since the days of the Federal Theater Project in the 1930s.
According to Parks, many of her best ideas for the stage have come from entertaining spontaneous ideas others would prudently dismiss after a gratifying chuckle. (Two African American brothers named Lincoln and Booth? Why not?) In her telling, it was her husband, blues musician Paul Oscher, who first responded affirmatively from the couch to her spontaneous idea to write a play a day for a year. “Yeah?” she asked. “You really think it’s a good idea?” That, apparently, was enough. The rest is theater history. SFBG
365 PLAYS/365 DAYS
Through Nov. 12, 2007
This week: Fri/24–Sun/26
Oakland Public Conservatory of Music
1616 Franklin, Oakl.
Pay what you can, $15–$25 suggested
(510) 420-1813
www.zspace.org/365plays.htm
www.365days365plays.com
The other home of Bay hip-hop
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
If you don’t know about the Filthy ’Moe
It’s time I let real game unfold….
Messy Marv, “True to the Game”
I meet Big Rich on the corner of Laguna and Grove streets, near the heart of the Fillmore District according to its traditional boundaries of Van Ness and Fillmore, although the hood actually extends as far west as Divisadero. “Me personally,” the 24-year-old rapper and lifelong ’Moe resident confesses, “I don’t be sticking my head out too much. But I make sure I bring every photo session or interview right here.”
At the moment he’s taping a segment for an upcoming DVD by the Demolition Men, who released his mixtape Block Tested Hood Approved in April. Since then, the former member of the San Quinn–affiliated group Fully Loaded has created a major buzz thanks in part to the snazzy video for “That’s the Business,” his E-A-Ski- and CMT-produced single, which was the Jam of the Week in August on MTV2 and added to straight-up MTV in time for the Oct. 3 release of the Koch full-length Block Tested Hood Approved. (Originally titled Fillmore Rich, the album was renamed to capitalize on the mixtape-generated hype.)
Presented by E-40 and featuring Rich’s dope in-house producer Mal Amazin in addition to heavyweights such as Sean-T, Rick Rock, and Droop-E, BTHA is a deep contribution to the rising tide of Bay Area hip-hop. While Big Rich’s gruff baritone delivery and gritty street tales make his music more mobster than hyphy, the album is not unaffected by the latter style’s up-tempo bounce, helping the movement hold national attention during this season of anticipation before Mistah FAB’s major-label debut on Atlantic. “I don’t necessarily make hyphy music,” Rich says. “But I definitely condone it. As long as the spotlight is on the Bay, I’m cool with it.” Coming near the end of a year that has seen landmark albums from San Quinn, Messy Marv, Will Hen, and fellow Fully Loaded member Bailey — not to mention JT the Bigga Figga’s high-profile tour with Snoop Dogg, which has taken hyphy all the way to Africa — Rich’s solo debut is one more indication of the historic district’s importance to the vitality of local hip-hop and Bay Area culture in general.
THE EDGE OF PAC HEIGHTS
The Fillmore is a community under siege, facing external and internal pressures. On the one hand, gentrification — in the form of high-end shops and restaurants serving tourists, Pacific Heights residents, and an increasingly affluent demographic creeping into the area — continues to erode the neighborhood’s edges. “If you grew up in the Fillmore, you can see Pacific Heights has crept down the hill, closer to the ghetto,” says Hen, who as a member of multiregional group the Product (assembled by Houston legend Scarface) moved more than 60,000 copies of its recent “thug conscious” debut, One Hunid (Koch). “Ten years ago there were more boundaries. But the Fillmore’s prime location, and I’m not asleep to this fact. We’re five minutes away from everything in the city. That has to play a role in the way the district is represented in a city that makes so much off tourism. You might not want your city portrayed as gangsta, even though it is.”
Hen has a point. The notion of San Francisco as gangsta is somewhat at odds with the way the city perceives itself. As an Oakland writer, I can attest to this, for even in San Francisco’s progressive artistic and intellectual circles, Oakland is usually understood to be beyond the pale in terms of danger and violence. Yet none of the Oakland rappers I’ve met talk about their hoods in quite the same way Fillmore rappers do, at least when it comes to their personal safety. As Big Rich films his section of the DVD, for example, he remarks on the continual stream of police cruisers circling the block.
“They slowed it down,” he says. “Now they only come every 90 seconds. Right around here is murder central — people be shooting each other every night. By 7 o’clock, we all gotta disperse, unless you want to get caught in the cross fire.” He waves his hands in mock terror. “I ain’t trying to die tonight!”
“BUSTING HEADS”
Though Rich is clowning, his statement is perfectly serious — indiscriminate gunfire among gang members, often in their early teens, makes nocturnal loitering a risky proposition at best. As of September, according to the San Francisco Police Department’s Web site, the Northern Police District, which includes the Fillmore, had the city’s second highest number of murders this year, 11, ceding first place only to the much larger Bayview’s 22. For overall criminal incidents, the Northern District led the city, at more than 10,000 so far.
Though Fillmore rappers might be given to stressing the danger of their hood, insofar as such themes constitute much of hip-hop’s subject matter and they feel the need to refute the city’s nongangsta image, no one I spoke to seemed to be boasting. They sounded sad. Hen, for example, reported that he’d been to three funerals in October, saying, “You hardly have time to mourn for one person before you have to mourn for the next person.” While the SFPD’s Public Affairs Office didn’t return phone calls seeking corroboration, both Rich and Hen indicate the neighborhood is suffering from an alarming amount of black-on-black violence.
“Basically, it’s genocide. We’re going to destroy each other,” Hen says. “It used to be crosstown rivalries rather than in your backyard. Now there’s more of that going on. If you get into it at age 15, the funk is already there. Whoever your crew is funking with, you’re in on it.” The ongoing cycle of drug-related violence — the Fillmore’s chief internal pressure — has only ramped up under the Bush administration’s regressive economic policies. It’s a fact not lost on these rappers: as Rich puts it succinctly on BTHA, “Bush don’t give a fuck about a nigga from the hood.”
“Everybody’s broke. That’s why everybody’s busting each other’s heads,” explains Rich, who lost his older brother to gun violence several years ago. “If you don’t know where your next dollar’s coming from …”
To be sure, the rappers give back to the Fillmore. They support large crews of often otherwise unemployable youth, and Messy Marv, for example, has been known to hand out turkeys for Thanksgiving and bikes for Christmas. But Bay Area rap is only just getting back on its feet, and while the rappers can ameliorate life in the Fillmore’s housing projects, they don’t have the means to dispel the climate of desperation in a hood surrounded by one of the most expensive cities on earth. Moreover, they are acutely aware of the disconnect between their community and the rest of the city, which trades on its cultural cachet.
“It’s like two different worlds,” Hen muses. “You have people sitting outside drinking coffee right in the middle of the killing fields. They’re totally safe, but if I walk over there, I might get shot at. But the neighborhood is too proud for us to be dying at the hands of each other.”
HOOD PRIDE
The neighborhood pride Will Hen invokes is palpable among Fillmore rappers. “I get a warm feeling when I’m here,” Messy Marv says. “The killing, you can’t just say that’s Fillmore. That’s everywhere. When you talk about Fillmore, you got to go back to the roots. Fillmore was a warm, jazzy African American place where you could come and dance, drink, have fun, and be you.”
Mess is right on all counts. Lest anyone think I misrepresent Oaktown: the citywide number of murders in Oakland has already topped 120 this year. But my concern here is with the perceived lack of continuity Mess suggests between the culture of the Fillmore then and now. By the early 1940s, the Fillmore had developed into a multicultural neighborhood including the then-largest Japanese population in the United States. In 1942, when FDR sent West Coast citizens of Japanese origin to internment camps, their vacated homes were largely filled by African Americans from the South, attracted by work in the shipyards. While the district had its first black nightclub by 1933, the wartime boom transformed the Fillmore into a major music center.
“In less than a decade, San Francisco’s African American population went from under 5,000 to almost 50,000,” according to Elizabeth Pepin, coauthor of the recent history of Fillmore jazz Harlem of the West (Chronicle). “The sheer increase in number of African Americans in the neighborhood made the music scene explode.”
Though known as a black neighborhood, Pepin says, the Fillmore “was still pretty diverse” and even now retains vestiges of its multicultural history. Japantown persists, though much diminished, and Big Rich himself is half Chinese, making him the second Chinese American rapper of note. “My mother’s parents couldn’t speak a lick of English,” he says. “But she was real urban, real street. I wasn’t brought up in a traditional Chinese family, but I embrace it and I get along with my other side.” Nonetheless, Pepin notes, the massive urban renewal project that destroyed the Fillmore’s iconic jazz scene by the late ’60s effectively curtailed its diversity, as did the introduction of barrackslike public housing projects.
The postwar jazz scene, of course, is the main source of nostalgia tapped by the Fillmore Merchants Association (FMA). Talk of a musical revival refers solely to the establishment of upscale clubs — Yoshi’s, for example, is scheduled to open next year at Fillmore and Eddy — offering music that arguably is no longer organically connected to the neighborhood. In a brief phone interview, Gus Harput, president of the FMA’s Jazz Preservation District, insisted the organization would “love” to open a hip-hop venue, although he sidestepped further inquiries. (Known for its hip-hop shows, Justice League at 628 Divisadero closed around 2003 following a 2001 shooting death at a San Quinn performance and was later replaced by the Independent, which occasionally books rap.) The hood’s hip-hop activity might be too recent and fall outside the bounds of jazz, yet nowhere in the organization’s online Fillmore history (fillmorestreetsf.com) is there an acknowledgement of the MTV-level rap scene down the street.
Yet the raucous 1949 Fillmore that Jack Kerouac depicts in his 1957 book, On the Road — replete with protohyphy blues shouters like Lampshade bellowing such advice as “Don’t die to go to heaven, start in on Doctor Pepper and end up on whisky!” — sounds less like the area’s simulated jazz revival and more like the community’s present-day hip-hop descendants.
How could it be otherwise? The aesthetics have changed, but the Fillmore’s musical genius has clearly resided in rap since Rappin’ 4Tay debuted on Too $hort’s Life Is … Too $hort (Jive, 1989), producer-MC JT the Bigga Figga brought out the Get Low Playaz, and a teenage San Quinn dropped his classic debut, Don’t Cross Me (Get Low, 1993). While there may not be one definitive Fillmore hip-hop style, given that successful rappers tend to work with successful producers across the Bay regardless of hood, Messy Marv asserts the ’Moe was crucial to the development of the hyphy movement: “JT the Bigga Figga was the first dude who came with the high-energy sound. He was ahead of his time. I’m not taking nothing away from Oakland, Vallejo, or Richmond. I’m just letting you know what I know.”
In many ways the don of the ’Moe, San Quinn — reaffirming his status earlier this year with The Rock (SMC), featuring his own Ski- and CMT-produced smash, “Hell Ya” — could be said to typify a specifically Fillmore rap style, in which the flow is disguised as a strident holler reminiscent of blues shouting. While both Messy Marv and Big Rich share affinities with this delivery, Will Hen, for instance, and Quinn’s brother Bailey — whose Champ Bailey (City Boyz, 2006) yielded the MTV and radio success “U C It” — favor a smoother, more rapid-fire patter.
What is most striking here is that, with the exception of fellow traveler Messy Marv (see sidebar), all of these artists, as well as recent signee to the Game’s Black Wall Street label, Ya Boy, came up in the ’90s on San Quinn’s influential Done Deal Entertainment. Until roughly two years ago, they were all one crew. While working on his upcoming eighth solo album, From a Boy to a Man, for his revamped imprint, Deal Done, Quinn paused for a moment to take justifiable pride in his protégés, who now constitute the Fillmore’s hottest acts.
“I create monsters, know what I’m saying?” Quinn says. “Done Deal feeds off each other; that’s why I’m so proud of Bailey and Rich. We all come out the same house. There’s a real level of excellence, and the world has yet to see it. Right now it seems like we’re separate, but we’re not. We’re just pulling from different angles for the same common goal.”
“We all one,” Quinn concludes, in a statement that could serve as a motto for neighborhood unity. “Fillmoe business is Fillmoe business.” SFBG
myspace.com/bigrich
myspace.com/williehen
myspace.com/sanquinn
WEDNESDAY
Nov. 15
Event/Performance
“The Wicked Stage: Horror Theatre in Jazz Age London”
Join copresenters Thrillpeddlers (voted Best Live Onstage Bloodbath in our Best of the Bay 2006 issue) and the San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum for “The Wicked Stage.” Featuring professor Michael Wilson, coauthor of the forthcoming This Troublesome Theatre: London’s Grand Guignol and the Performance of Horror, this multimedia presentation will delve into the history of London’s take on this Parisian theatrical import. As fans of Thrillpeddlers’ annual Shocktoberfest are aware, Grand Guignol combines belly laughs with bloody splats, creating a roller coaster of emotional extremes. For a fitting climax to the evening’s entertainment, Thrillpeddlers will perform a scene from The Old Women, the English version of the Grand Guignol classic A Crime in the Madhouse. (Nicole Gluckstern)
7 p.m.
San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum
War Memorial Veterans Bldg., fourth floor
401 Van Ness, SF
$10
(415) 255-4800
www.sfpalm.org
www.thrillpeddlers.com
Music
Marc-André Hamelin
The San Francisco Symphony continues to tickle our tympana with programs of rare intelligence and far-out aural adventurousness. From Nov. 15 to 18, Montreal’s hugest pianist, Marc-André Hamelin, dazzles in the debut of überhip South African composer Kevin Volans’s oceanic mini-epic, Atlantic Crossing – 14,000 notes in 23 minutes! That’s a lot of plink-plonk for your moola. Also on tap: Russian legend Dmitry Shostakovich’s famous, ecstatic, gloves-off slap to Joseph Stalin’s face, the Symphony No. 5 in D Minor. Soviet smackdown never sounded so good. (Marke B.)
Wed/15 and Fri/17-Sat/18, 8 p.m.
Thu/16, 2 p.m.
Davies Symphony Hall
201 Van Ness, SF
$25-$110
www.sfsymphony.org
Outsourcer
› superego@sfbg.com
SUPER EGO The best thing about childhood obesity is I can fit in all the clothes now. Dora the Explorerwear, Juicy Couture for Kids, even Mary-Kate and Ashley Teen Look. No door, no path, no avenue is closed to my cheap and whimsical fashion tastes. No “Barfin’ BILF” tube top for toddlers can squeeze me out of my juvenile fancies. Thank you, overweight preteens of America! Viva los junk foods!
And so goes the mind. I was rifling through a rack of knockoff baby Baby Phat the other day when the fluorescents at Thrift Town grew one shade of puke green lighter, and I fell into a consumerist reverie — my thoughts rippling and stretching like the toxic, Korean-stitched Spandelux beneath my gas station press-on fingertips. Tell me, has Clubland become a tangle of infinite niches? Do the tight, glowing pockets of each individual scene form a Great Barrier Reef: part of a vibrant, neon nightlife tapestry, yet each a total entity unto itself? Do the hefty-boobed metal-chick wonders at Crash form a silicone wall, the sideways-haired Casanova scruffsters a moat of cold shoulders, the overexcitable twinks at Bar on Castro an army of flamboyant spastics, their tweezed brows raised like little red flags, two high-pitched shrieks of warning?
And while we’re at it, what’s up with Nancy Pelosi’s eyes? Girl looks spun as a dinner plate at a Chinese circus. Nancy, meet Tramadol. Tramadol, Nancy.
There, like, used to be this thing that happened. The “cool” kids would start a music and nightlife scene. They’d get a couple months to revel in cooler-than-thou, bonding with freaks of like mind. Eventually, the scene would get too big for its britches and start being overrun by “normals.” Everybody wanted in, diluting the scene’s insular charms and making the original fans bitter, smugly smoking their pastel Nat Shermans and sharpening their claws on the newcomers. But that hasn’t happened since house and techno were bastardized into horrid music for aerobics classes. It’s not the kind of music that matters anymore, it’s the attitude that defines. My dreamboat rock critic, Kalefa Sanneh, calls this phenomenon “mini-monoculture.” I call it kind of boring (although I’m lovin’ the lack of scene cattiness). Without overpopularity to push you on to the next scene, it’s all too easy to get stuck. That may be why we’re all still falling backward into the ’80s. Aa-aaahhh …
But sometimes something refreshing comes totally out of left field, something no one can claim to own or hole up in. I’m talking about clubs like the monthly NonStop Bhangra, one of my favorite places to watch people of all stripes let their J/A/S/O/N/-gelled hair down and get a little silly, which does an end run around the whole American underground malaise by packing a woven hemp record bag and flying us off to the world of Bollywood and Bangalore, fronting a cosmopolitan style that totally disarms.
Punjabi by way of London, bhangra music is the tabla-driven electroclash of now, mixing 15th-century Indian folk music with bass-heavy hip-hop (henna-tinted hyphy?) — without an inkling of disco drama. Other great joints such as Dhamaal at Club Six and Bollywood Nights in Santa Clara have pumped the bang-bang-bhangra for years, but NonStop, started a couple years ago by Vicki Virk and Suman Raj-Grewal of dholrhythms dance troupe and DJ Jimmy Love, delivers the whole Punjabi enchilada to the heart of mini-mono scensterdom, Rickshaw Stop. Professional dance performances, lessons for beginners, live painting and drumming, superduper psychedelic visuals, and the fabulous, mini-multicultural sight of people shaking their bangles in glee — what’s better? The upcoming NonStop, Nov. 18 with guest DJ Sep, is the last one of the year, and it’ll be a doozy of a Delhi, a much-needed tonic for anyone feeling trapped in their scene.
Whoa. Amazing the thoughts that pop into your head while you’re stuffing fat kids’ clothes into your Wonderbra, no?
THIS JUST IN: What do club goddesses Heklina, Lady Bunny, Lady Kier from Deee-Lite, and practically every cheap-ass, to’-up drag queen in this whole gloriously damned burg have in common? That’s right, tax problems. Oh, and they’ll also be at the fantasmic, sure-to-be-scandal-ridden Miss Trannyshack Pageant on Nov. 18. I’m not pumping this long-running institution just because Trannyshack head honchette Heklina has a nail gun to my ear hole. Really. I’m pumping it because it’s wild fun! SFBG
NONSTOP BHANGRA
Every third Saturday, 8 p.m.–2 a.m. (no event in December)
Rickshaw Stop
155 Fell, SF
$10 advance, $15 door
(415) 861-2011
www.nonstopbhangra.com
MISS TRANNYSHACK PAGEANT
Sat/18, 9 p.m.–4 a.m.
Regency Center
1300 Van Ness, SF
$25 advance, $35 door
www.trannyshack.com
Fast Food Nation
Book lovers always lament movie adaptations: they rarely deliver. But Fast Food Nation, like a swift injection of growth hormone, adds flesh and character to the very real problems of where America’s food comes from and the different ways it’s absolutely mishandled. The feature film is based on the 2001 nonfiction book by journalist Eric Schlosser, who helped director Richard Linklater finesse the screenplay into something of a morality tale tracing the true origins of a Mickey’s hamburger.
Following the tangled strands of food production and consumption, the film jumps between the perspectives of exploited immigrant workers clad in Hazmat suits in a meat processing plant and Greg Kinnear playing the hapless corporate hack trying to figure out just how in the heck his company’s Big Ones are coming up contaminated on the buns. There’s a predictable arc to the narrative, most noticeable in teenage character Amber (Ashley Johnson), a bright-eyed Mickey’s employee who gets a see-the-light lesson from her ex-activist uncle (Linklater favorite Ethan Hawke). Paul Dano (Little Miss Sunshine) as the apathetic burger flipper is the perfect antidote to Amber’s painful optimism, serving up some old food service clichés. But his spit in the burger isn’t the biggest “eww-gross” moment.
Linklater, a vegetarian, wasn’t able to get permission to shoot in an American meat processing plant, so the movie uses real footage from a Mexican one that agreed to be filmed because Schlosser’s tale casts a true light on America’s despotic immigration policies. The scenes of women trading sex for jobs at the border-town plant become very believable when juxtaposed with images of real-time slaughter. Schlosser said workers at a Greeley, Colo., plant whom he interviewed for the book criticized the movie after a screening in Denver — the Mexican plant looked too sterile and unrealistic compared to where they work.
It’s been 100 years since Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle inspired laws to reform meat packing plants. By turning journalism into fiction and transutf8g that from print to real, stomach-turning imagery, Fast Food Nation once again questions America’s massive appetite. I still haven’t eaten meat since I saw the scene in which a cow’s skin is stripped off its body with a chain and a winch, a process more befitting an offshore oil rig than a slaughterhouse. (Amanda Witherell)
FAST FOOD NATION
Opens Fri/15 in Bay Area theaters
See Move Clock at www.sfbg.com
www.foxsearchlight.com/fastfoodnation
Congratulations, Dan Savage!
By Bruce B. Brugmann
Congratulations to Dan Savage, editor of the Stranger in Seattle who writes a syndicated sex column called “Savage Love” for the Voice/New Times chain and other papers. I am toasting him once again with a Potrero Hill martini at our neighborhood local.
Dan performed heroically in the referendum on Bush, the war, and neocon policies. He helped knock out Rick Santorum in Pennsylvania with personal appearances in the state. He managed to get key endorsements into his column in the ll New Times papers that traditionally don’t endorse. He helped voters in Arizona (the non-endorsing Voice/New Times is headquartered in Phoenix) to be the first in the nation to reject a ballot measure to ban same-sex marriage. He kept a liberal and activist spark alive in his column in the Village Voice (and the other Voice papers purchased last fall by New Times and were therefore shut out of doing endorsements and strong election coverage. They were besides the Voice, the Minneapolis City Pages, Seattle Weekly, Nashville Scene, LA Weekly, and OC Weekly, all of whom traditionally did endorsements and strong election coverage until the sale to the Voice. The OC Weekly to its enormous credit did endorsements.)
Dan also wrote a typically useful op ed piece in today’s New York Times, titled “The Code of the Callboy” in which he explains why the callboy outed Ted Haggard, one of the most powerful evangelica ministers in the country. “Ultimately,” Savage wrote, “it was Ted Haggard’s hypocrisy–railing against homosexuality and campaigning against gay marriage while apparently indulging in sex romps with a gay escort–that prompted Mr. Jones to shove him out of the closet. The homophobia promoted by Mr. Haggard and other agents of intolerance, if I may use John McCain’s phrase (he’s not using it any more), undermined the callboy code of silence that Mr. Haggard himself relied on. Most callboys are gay, after all, and most are out of the closet these days.
“And while most callboys will continue to respect a code of silence where the average closet case is concerned, the Ted Haggards of the world have been placed on notice: You can’t have your callboy and disparage him too.”
Repeating: Dan, in this critical election, showed he had more real balls than MIke Lacey, the editor of the Voice/New Times papers.Dan, Keep it up, B3, savoring the ascendancy of San Francisco Values and Guardian editorial positions
PS: Repeating: The staffs of New Times papers have been long baffled by the New Times non-endorsement policy. And the staffs of the Voice and other Voice papers who had been endorsing and doing strong election coverage were particularly baffled when Lacey shut down their endorsement process this year without explanation. What are Lacey and the Voice/New Times afraid of? Of annoying their advertisers? Of giving up control to local chain editors who may be (gasp!) more liberal and activist than the gang in Phoenix? Are they worried that endorsements and strong political coverage would disclose just how cynical and out of touch Lacey and New Times are in their politics and in their view of the cities i n which they have papers? That chain-driven endorsements would expose the template that Voice/New Times uses in their papers? As always, I will send this blog and these questions to Lacey in Phoenix for comment. Stay alert.
By the way, MIke, what do you think of the election results? Will your papers be allowed to comment on them?
Is Mike Lacey for real? More on Mike’s massacre at the LAWeekly/Voice/New Times and the culture war at the LA Weekly
By Bruce B. Brugmann (B3)
Lacey’s Wednesday night massacre. The LA Weekly’s Harold Meyerson says to all staffers on the l7 Voice/New Times papers: Don’t deviate from the template or you are out. Lacey publicly savages Meyerson.
By Bruce B. Brugmann (B3)
The comments roll in on the search for endorsements in Village Voice/New Times papers? Is it a snipe hunt? Does San Savage or Mike Lacey have the real balls?
By Bruce B. Brugmann (B3)
Dan Savage comes through in the clutch. The gay sex columnist endorses in his pre-election column in the Voice and other New Times papers, but the Voice and New Times papers do not endorse. Hurray for Dan Savage!!!
By Bruce B. Brugmann (B3)
“NAN-CY! NAN-CY!”
No on 85/Yes on F Election Party
by Ailsa Chang
The scene at Medjool Bar tonight is upbeat, confident and loud. This election party hosted by the San Francisco Labor Council and Medjool’s owner, Gus Murad, is the party for everyone who didn’t have a party: No on 85, Yes on F, supporters for Bob Twomey for School Board, State Assembly Candidate Fiona Ma.
Goldies Music winner Deerhoof
It’s hard to picture a band as wild, mild, and Apple O’–pie sweet as Deerhoof causing a ruckus — yet they really have. Just picture the humidly frantic, hopped-up, and happy sold-out scene last year at the release show for Runners Four (5RC) at the Great American Music Hall. Or the national CMJ college radio chart assault by that same brave, increasingly addictive album, notable for the way it brings the voices of Deerhoof’s crack instrumentalists — drummer Greg Saunier, guitarist John Dieterich, and bassist Chris Cohen — to the fore along with vocalist-guitarist Satomi Matsuzaki. Or the thousands at recent Flaming Lips and Radiohead shows bopping in place (or scratching their heads in bewilderment) at the opening group. Or the way the unassuming combo has of increasingly popping up on film (the forthcoming Dedication), on other artists’ albums (backing Danielson on 2006’s Ships), and even at elementary school (inspiring a ballet this year at North Haven Community School in Maine).
Now if only Deerhoof could cause a stir making political music or protest songs. “That’s the one thing I wish we could do that I think is very hard to do,” says Saunier on the phone from the Tenderloin apartment he shares with Matsuzaki before they leave to tour with the Fiery Furnaces. “I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to do it, but I think it’s a very interesting thing that bands or artists can grapple with — is it possible to do music that specifically makes some kind of political statement? That’s sort of an eternal question. It’s hard to find a way to sing an angry song about something bad that doesn’t start to kind of need that something bad to exist.”
Angry music is a challenge for a band that’s as optimistic to its fruity core as Deerhoof. (Or else call them Madhoof?) The group began life in April 1994 as Rob Fisk’s solo bass spin-off project from Nitre Pit, a goth metal quartet that the 7 Year Rabbit Cycle founder shared with Saunier. It has since evolved, eight albums along, from a rudimentary noise improv duo into a cuddly-cute but deeply idiosyncratic and utterly distinctive unit that seems intent on beating out a new rock ’n’ roll language: part singsong child jazz, part cockeyed quirk pop, part J-pop dance moves, and part exhilarating and life-affirming anthems to stinky food, universally appealing pandas, combustible fruit, and toothsome cartoon critters. Deerhoof are making rock ’n’ roll relevant again — and maybe even sexy in a noncliché, edible way — for punk nerds, jazz codgers, and baby-voiced girls who make their own clothes. Though Deerhoof’s is an expansive tent.
“Something that is particularly cool about them is how generous they are with their time and talent and increasing popularity,” Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart said of Deerhoof in 2003. “I have never heard them utter a snooty remark about other bands that are new and not well-known…. If they think that a band that is unknown but has a cool demo can possibly perk the ears of any record people they know, they send it on without asking for favors.”
Matsuzaki joined in 1995, guitarist Dieterich and keyboardist Kelly Goode in 1999, guitarist-bassist Cohen in 2002. Fisk, Goode, and Cohen have since departed, but Deerhoof’s compact herd has occasionally enlarged to include such players as Blevin Blechdom, Steve Gigante (Tiny Bird Mouths), Chris Cooper (Fat Worm Error), Arrington (Old Time Relijun), Joe Preston (the Melvins), and Satomi’s dog in Japan, Brut. The members have busied themselves during their increasingly rare spare time with side endeavors such as Retrievers, Gorge Trio, Natural Dreamers, and Nervous Cop.
Now down to the lean Reveille-era lineup of Saunier, Matsuzaki, and Dieterich, the band sounds as fiery and fulsome as ever, reworking the Runners Four compositions to fit the three like a soccer jersey. And a dozen years on, Saunier is excited about the new paths the group has yet to pound. “I still think that there’s a lot that’s never even been tried in this universe with just guitar, bass, and voice,” he says. “I still feel like almost a total beginner.” (Kimberly Chun)
Goldies Visual Art winner Chris Duncan
Artist Chris Duncan came to Northern California for the Tahoe powder — and to get away from his routine in Delaware and his native New Jersey of catching hardcore shows every weekend and doing absolutely nothing else with his life. Duncan recalls he and a friend “snowboarded for a season, and it was rad and it was horrible at the same time. Every night it was the same party with the same 40 guys and three girls, so I started to stay in and draw.”
Since then, that need to draw a line between the fun but perhaps meaningless life of nightly parties and his own creative urges has led Duncan to San Francisco, where he moved in 1996 and spent the next years working, skateboarding, and attending California College of the Arts, where he began to find direction, to chart his own personal map to the color theory of Mark Rothko and Josef Albers, and to dip into sacred geometry, string theory, Eastern philosophies, and increasingly, simple nonfigurative forms. In his current work temporal strings converge, intersect, and radiate above needle-nose pyramids, shooting off across ceilings and traversing rooms. Flat works are stitched with ragged stars or painted with dark rays that explode above kaleidoscopic ziggurats.
“For me, it’s about dealing with being fully overwhelmed by humans, to be perfectly honest,” confesses Duncan, 32, kicking back in his tidy wood box of an Oakland studio, off the downtown-area railroad tracks. Dressed head to toe in black, tattoos crawling up his neck and down his arms to hands that jerk to punctuate a point, the artist is far from slick, but he exudes an amiable earnestness raving about his young daughter, Aya-mea Mourning. “I’m also completely amazed by people. People are fantastic and can do such great things. Look how far we’ve come — and the mirror image of that is look at what we’ve done.”
What has Duncan done? Perhaps he’s captured the zeitgeist, one that’s both physical and ethereal, give or take a planet. His SF gallerist Gregory Lind says, “Chris Duncan’s laboriously rendered works on paper and his intricate string sculptures seek to combine the spiritual with the scientific, which is compelling to me in this kind of dark period we find ourselves in today.”
Whether the artist’s pieces trace strings of energy or ecstatic explosions in some acid-laced map room, he’s found a way to tap some sort of fuel source for his numerous projects, including his striking grab bag of an art zine, Hot and Cold, in which he and Griffin McPartland showcase artists like Matt O’Brien, Chris Pew, and Jen Smith. They took a page from their own periodical to produce a catalog for Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ 2005 exhibit “The Zine UnBound: Kults, Werewolves and Sarcastic Hippies.” Duncan has also curated exhibits as part of Keepsake Society, a site he maintains with ex-girlfriend Aki Raymer, and he is editing an anthology of “my first punk show” stories for AK Press.
“When I got older and found art making, I found a spot to do the things I saw happening as a teenager, with what all my friends were doing,” he says. “I began making zines and started curating, and in terms of how active and how DIY everything was in that [East Coast hardcore] scene, I found a place to put that to use when I got a little older. And this is the perfect city for that — there are so many examples of people doing it. It’s a nice blanket to be under.”
And speaking of blankets: Duncan will be stitching together a cosmic ray–embellished quilt of sorts in memory of his recently deceased 99-year-old great-grandmother for his forthcoming show at Jeff Bailey Gallery in New York City. Much like a handmade, toy- and goodie-bundled, affordable and accessible limited-edition art zine, the project embodies an aesthetic Duncan embraces. “We just totally outdo the last thing we did and totally overwhelm people. Things don’t exist like that anymore,” explains the artist. “Everything’s so not made by hand and so not giving in a way. I think with a little energy you can give a lot, and I think that’s really important.” (Kimberly Chun)
Rob Black’s paid “volunteers”
By Tim Redmond
Everyone’s having fun with this story: Apparently, the Rob Black campaign in District 6 is paying people $15 an hour to act like volunteers. There’s a great photo on Sfist that sets the scene. Then KPFA sent a reporter to interview Black “volunteers” and got some great stuff. Here’s a partial transcript, thanks to leftinsf.
REPORTER JOSHUA SMITH: On a busy street corner in District 6, campaigners are out in full force. Eric Wilson is wearing an I Black Back Button and standing next to a large poster endorsing the candidate. He says he got involved with the campaign through the Glide Church. But from a glance you would never guess his political stance.
ERIC WILSON: “Allegedly I’m going to be paid fifteen dollars an hour cash. I support Chris Daly, but I’m doing this for Rob Black for the cash. And it’s an oxymoron, but well, you gotta do what you gotta do to eat in this city.”
In other words, Black doesn’t actually have a lot of volunteers, so he’s trying to buy them.
The comments roll in on the search for endorsements in Village Voice/New Times papers. Is it a snipe hunt? Does Dan Savage or Mike Lacey have the real balls?
I put out a call to the alternative press across the country to see if anybody could spot an endorsement or strong political story in pre-election issues of Village Voice/New Times papers. (Scroll to the bottom for some vintage Mike Laceyism and some answers to the pressing question of the day: who has the real balls: Dan Savage or Mike Lacey?
The OC Weekly in Orange County did endorsements this year, but that appeared to be the only one of the l7 Voice/New Times papers that did. I also asked Voice/New Times CEO Jim Larkin and Editor in chief Mike Lacey, as well as the new Voice editor David Blum for their comments and for their rationale for not running endorsements in one of the most important mid-year elections in U.S. history. No reply. Here are a few of the replies that came to me by private email:
From: Ron Kretsch, Art Director, Cleveland Free Times, which competes with the Voice/New Times-owned Cleveland Scene
Sending the entire altweekly industry on a snipe-hunt, Bruce? Niiiiiiice.
(B3 comment: Back where I come from, at Camp Foster on Lake Okoboji in northwest Iowa, we called it whippenpoof hunting. But we never found any.)
Actually, I found something – Derf has this in the obScene this week: Cleveland Scene Election 2006. Then again, you did specify “serious coverage” – yeah, go ahead, post my comment. I doubt I’ll have much crow to eat.
And yeah, we had pretty substantive election coverage – I think in terms of quantity of coverage we actually outdid our election ’04 issue, which by my reckoning has never happened before for a midterm or an off-year. Even some obscure-seeming judicial races got the flashlight shined on ’em. It worked out to be a pretty damn fine issue.
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From: an East Coast blogger
Okay, I’ll play. Here’s a story broken by Bob Norman in Broward-Palm Beach that could have a big impact on the gubernatorial race there.
Broward Palm Beach
You won’t find endorsements, of course, because they don’t do any. But you will find coverage of the elections. Bob Norman down in south Florida (who wrote the piece I just sent you) is one of their good reporters on the politics beat.
(B3 comment: Thanks, glad to see an election story in a New Times paper in Florida. But they still didn’t do endorsements. And I’m still looking for someone who can tell me the reason for this policy.)
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From: Jonny Diamond , editor in chief of The L Magazine in New York City
Yes, the Savage stuff is in, but it’s the only thing remotely related to the election in the entire issue. This is the cover story: Village Voice Cover Story – remarkable stuff from the country’s formerly foremost alt-weekly on the eve of the most important midterm election in a long, long time.
I’d say this is the final, no-doubt-about-it end of the Voice. As for our own coverage, we’re working on something for Friday… best Jonny Diamond
It is as silly as it seems. The movie stuff is atrocious. The cover stories laughable. And people are noticing. Here’s our endorsement, btw. The L Magazine Endorsements. I’d really appreciate if you could link to this, it deals explicitly with the The Voice’s failure to step up. Thanks, jd
(B3 comment: Perhaps this is a snapshot of the situation in New York. The Voice, a liberal bastion in New York for its entire history, endorser in all elections, didn’t endorse or even run a strong election story in its pre-election issue or an explanation of its knuckling under to the New Times template. However, the L Magazine, a a relatively new arts and entertainment fortnightly, did, happily and with gusto and with every intention of beating the Voice/New Times in every election hereafter. Note its coverage in the link above.)
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From: a Manhattan media watcher
Bruce, they don’t have anyone on staff at the Voice any more who is either competent or even interested in covering local politics. It’s just way too cerebral for any of them now. Sad to say, but it’s all fluffernutter stuff. Anything above 34th Street doesn’t exist.
++++++++++++++
From: Anthony Pignataro (former OC Weekly staffer)
Editor, Maui Time Weekly
This week’s OC Weekly has tons of political coverage, including this list of actual endorsements: OC Weekly
(B3: at last, a Voice/NewTimes paper that made endorsements, the OC Weekly in Orange County. So Will Swaim, a strong liberal editor, joins Dan Savage, the gay sex columnist, as the only two who got endorsements into New Times papers. How did Will do it? I sent him an email but didn’t hear by blogtime.)
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From: The Association of Alternative Newsweeklies
Speculation About VVM’s L.A. Moves ‘Simply Silly,’ Lacey Says
From: LA Observed
Dear kids: Meyerson sad about Contreras piece
Lacey on Meyerson and LA Observed
Scene at the Weekly
Stewart gives notice
On Jill Stewart at the Weekly
Big turmoil at the Weekly
(B3: There was so much turmoil at the LA Weekly that it was hard to tell what happened this year. Harold Meyerson “quit” writing his excellent political column and no endorsements appeared in the paper, though the paper has for years been a traditional endorser and many ex-staffers and ex-managers were pushing for endorsements this year.)
Meanwhile, the LA Observed media site summed up the Weekly’s sudden knuckling under to Voice/New Times non endorsement policy: “Since the Weekly has dropped its well-read pre-elecition endorsements, City Beat (B3: the competitive alternative in LA) has jumped in to fill the void. The paper backs Democrats for all the state offices except Governor (no endorsement) and insurance commissioner (Steve Poizner over Cruz Bustamente.) Locally, they recommend yes on H and no on R.” And they give a link to the full list.
Meyerson addressed the issue in a farewell email to the staff (see link above) in which he addresses the New Times template: “The paper’s decision, for the first time since forever, not to run endorsements makes that even clearer (that Lacey/New Times have have forced a reverse in editorial policy). Tha’s unfortunate, but it’s no disgrace. But becoming a tabloid in the New Times model is absolutely a disgrace. The New Times model churns out ‘gotcha’ news stories, it snipes at an undifferentiated establishment, it makes little effort to understand larger social issues at work in a city (that would require deviations from the model), it has a weakness for rants. It produces columns like ‘LA Sniper,’ in the Jill Stewart mode of reducing commentary to drive-by shootings…” (B3: Stewart is the new deputy editor in charge of news and wrote in her last independently syndicated column that
she was “thrilled to be joining the Village Voice Media chain under Mike Lacey.”
More on Lacey’s management style: In a letter responding to Meyerson’s criticism of the LA Weekly (see above link), he sums up: “But the reasons why Meyerson’s contract with LA Weekly was not renewed transcend finance and are on display in his embarrassing note to the staff. His ethical lapses, motivated by decades of cronyism, are aggravated by his insufferable pomposity.
“‘Hey, Kids,’ is his salutation.
” ‘Hey, Hack,’ is my response.”
(B3: Lacey, for all his lathering and steaming, still does not address the fundamental issue of why the New Times and now, sadly, the Voice papers, refuse to endorse. So once again: Is there someone somewhere, inside or outside the Voice/New Times, who can say why their papers do not endorse in any election and in particular in a extraordinarily critical election that amounts to a referendum on Bush, the war, the occupation, and his domestic policies?
What’s Lacey and the New Times afraid of? Of annoying their advertisers? Of giving up control to local chain editors who may (gasp!) be more liberal than the gang in Phoenix? Are they worried their endorsments would disclose just how cynical Lacey and the New Times are in their politics and in their view of the cities in which they have papers? MIke? Mike? You sound real big and tough, writing from a safe haven in corporate headquarters in Phoenix, and attacking as a hack a highly respected liberal LA Weekly veteran.
(Could you explain why Dan Savage, the gay sex columnist, has the only real endorsements in all the Voice/New Times papers in his sex column (excepting the OC Weekly, bless their hearts)? Why do you and the Voice/New Times contiinue to duck the tough issues and endorsements in election after election as a matter of institutional policy? As you will recall, Dan went into Pennsylvania at a critical moment in the campaign and gave Sen. Rick Santorum some much justified trouble on the gay family issue. if Santorum goes down, Dan can take some credit. What can you and the Voice/New Times say about the way you wimped through another election? Why does Dan have the balls and you do not? Mike?
B3, working hard in San Francisco to create and perpetuate San Francisco Values (note: SF Chronicle head yesterday: THREE DIRTY WORDS: SAN FRANCISCO VALUES, front page, lead story, big type, no blushing)
MONDAY
Mon/6
Author
Listen to the messenger
Hear OC Weekly writer Nick Schou read from his book, Kill the Messenger. The book covers the story of Gary Webb, a journalist who wrote the Dark Alliance series for the San Jose Mercury News in the mid-’80s investigating connections between the CIA and Southern California crack cocaine rings and later committed suicide. Schou’s book includes interviews with editors involved with Webb who have never before spoken about the scandal. (Deborah Giattina)
7 p.m.
Cody’s Bookstore
1730 Fourth St., Berk.
Free
(510) 559-9500
Music
Lindsey Buckingham
When I was in college, we were talking about the scene in School of Rock where Joan Cusack gets drunk and dances on a table like Stevie Nicks, and this hipper-than-thou chick in my class asked smugly, “Does anyone even like Fleetwood Mac anymore?” She was nearly killed by the rain of backpacks, cell phones, and unadulterated scorn. So the moral of the story is that everyone fucking loves Fleetwood Mac and everyone fucking loves Lindsey Buckingham. (Aaron Sankin)
8 p.m.
Palace of Fine Arts
3301 Lyon, SF
$55
(415) 563-6504
www.palaceoffinearts.org
www.lindseybuckingham.com