Scene

Nth loop

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superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO “I’m from Indiana,” confided the partly melted drag queen, after nailing “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” in a wicked patent-leather Duchess of Spades dress. “You know we do things different out there. I just got here a couple weeks ago, and when I first pulled my hair out the box, the other girls asked if it was three wigs or one.”

BRUNCH

“So you’re a Hoosier,” I replied. My observation went ignored. “The scene here’s much more weave than cone,” she winked, then disappeared behind a wall of mirrors. A tape-recorded version of “Is That All There Is?” kicked in. Metaphors!

I wish I could remember what she called herself, but I was knee-deep in my English Summer, an acrobatic concoction hovering halfway between a mojito and a Pimm’s Cup. Mnemonic device, it wasn’t. We were at Harry Denton’s, 46 stories atop the Sir Francis Drake Hotel, peeping Scarlet Empress Donna Sachet’s swank new “Sunday’s a Drag” brunch show — me and a posse of party kids looking so out of place we may as well have been Skittles in the deviled eggs. The combined total of our online ages was probably half that of any one of the cackling grandes dames around us.

But no matter: “Sunday’s a Drag” blasted off into outer space and gladly took us with it. A parade of energetic old-school queens teased the roomful of swilling octogenarians into Depends-dampening titters, and the whole affair took on the air of legendary drag club Finocchio’s, circa 1985 — but with better prosthetics. (“A lot of money and a lot of surgery,” rasped the nonorganically gorgeous Cassandra Cass as she handed me a “Cassandra Cass: Fantasy Girl 2006” calendar. Memo to Cassandra: It’s June.)

Donna Sachet’s one of those amazing creatures who do so much I often think there are two of her. (“Well, alcohol is a fuel,” the little voice in my head pipes up, the one I call Deficit of the Doubt.) And it was somehow fitting that I was applauding our fair city’s 30th Empress that afternoon, seeing as how I’d come to three hours earlier on brand-spanking-new Jose Sarria Court in the Castro, named after the ass-kicking queen who’d started the whole gay Emperor-Empress dealie — the Widow Norton, her Big Kahuness, Madame Awe. I had Jose Sarria pebbles in my y-fronts, bits of Jose Sarria laurel bush drifting from my hair.

The afternoon launched to another cosmic level when Hoosier-name executed a full-on backbend to Taylor Dane and one of her press-on nails flew off, somersaulted in midair, and landed on the table next to my blueberry pancakes. Which made me lose my bacon.

BRATS

“It’s like Mabuhay Gardens or the Deaf Club, only gay,” I thought the first time I went to Sissy, the new punk rock monthly run by my favorite obnoxious club brat, Foxy Cotton. When people see Foxy a-comin’ they usually take to runnin’ — he’s kind of like an amped-up Woody Woodpecker with half the feathers missing — but the queen’s got talent pumping somewhere through his veins and an impecc-pecc-peccable sense of style. Plus, he’s actually kinda sweet to me.

Sissy hit me as the potential realization of all my stuck-in-the-Midwest teenage dreams, which imagined the underground punk scene of ’80s San Francisco as a writhing network of gay-friendly mohawks, complete with carpeted dance floors, passed-out hotties, and who-knows-what in the bathrooms. Dead Kennedys in the front, Mutants on the roof. Plus it’s after hours. Rad!

Since its early days (no naked mosh pit, alas), Sissy’s expanded its musical format — but it’s still the ginchiest metal-heavy queer experience out there. Where else you gonna hear L7 nowadays outside a lesbian jukebox? And it’s fun to drop that brainy “post” from post-punk and just let loose. Although clubs may have stopped moving into the future, they’re at least digging into the past with sharper queer nails.

BOOBS

“Did you hear about Kevin Aviance?” It was a friend from New York City calling me, which always means more now that there’s e-mail. Kevin was one of the fiercest things of the ’90s, a club queen with chart-topping dance records, a towering hulk of ferocious, ebony-skinned femininity. Like Eartha Kitt on stilts, but breathier. And bald.

He was famous for never wearing falsies. Now he was in the hospital with a fractured jaw and a useless knee, felled as he left a Manhattan gay bar by six kids shouting “faggot” as they kicked him in the chest. People just stood around and watched.

Every year around Pride I overhear some visitor squealing, “Your Pride here’s so political!” and I think, what’s the opposite of politics? Advertising? Circuit music? Sex on marijuana truffles? This year when I heard it, I wanted to spin around with my slapping hand out and scream, “Kevin just got gay-bashed, dammit! Everything’s political!” But when I turned I saw the person who had said it was smiling. He had a “Queers Bash Back” bumper sticker on his bike bag. He was wearing a T-shirt that read, “It’s The Tits.”

BABES

Suddenly I was surrounded by munchkins. They were everywhere — in the lobby, on the dance floor, hanging over the balcony railing. “Oh, no,” I thought with a pang, “my cocktails are interacting. Better dance it off.” I slammed another Stoli Cran and wobbled through the knee-high crowd toward the speakers.

“When I stop the music and yell freeze, everybody freeze!” hollered DJ Sake 1 over “Groove is in the Heart” by Deee-lite. “Freeze!” I looked around again. Dear god, these were children. Even more horrifying, I was at Ruby Skye. It was Saturday afternoon. Obviously my medication wasn’t working. I backed slowly off the dance floor before anybody’s parents mistook me for a Pampers snacker.

Luckily, the ’rents were too busy mobbing the bar. I had landed at “Baby Loves Disco,” the mind-blowing summertime monthly new wave and disco dance party for toddlers ($10 for walkers, free for crawlers). The place was packed with young ’uns running every which way, occasionally chased after by their stumbling progenitors. The club was completely trashed. The music veered from “Celebration” by Kool and the Gang to “Controversy” by Prince, and the whole thing had more than a whiff of bar mitzvah party, but less mature. What’s less mature than a bar mitzvah party? Oh yeah, Ruby Skye.

I made my way upstairs to the VIP lounge — why not? To get there, I passed chilluns with pink mohawks, chilluns with sunglasses, chilluns with full-on ’80s-fierce attitude. I entered the dimly lit backroom. There, on a VIP chaise, reclined the most beautiful toddler I’d ever seen. His little fedora was pushed back on his perfectly round head. His leg straddled the chaise’s red velvet arm. He may have been smoking an inflatable cigar. For a moment our eyes locked, my being immersed in the crystal clear beam of his unjaded, baby-blue gaze.

“Someday,” I realized, “this baby will rule the world.”

SUNDAY’S A DRAG Sundays, noon and 3 p.m. Harry Denton’s Starlight Room 450 Powell, SF $30 (415) 395-8595 www.harrydenton.com SISSY CLUB First Fridays, 10 p.m.–4 a.m. Deco Lounge 510 Larkin, SF $5 (415) 346-2025 BABY LOVES DISCO July 15 and Aug. 19, 2–5 p.m. Ruby Skye 420 Mason, SF $10 (415) 693-0777 www.babylovesdisco.com

Slay time!

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THEATER If you love comedy, horror movies, and the singular sensation of being doused with oddly fruity stage blood, you’re probably already a Primitive Screwheads fan. If you’re not, it’s time to familiarize yourself with the madcap masters of mayhem behind such spectacles as Re-Animator of the Dead: The Tale of Herbert West and the inimitable Evil Dead: Live. Named for a favorite Army of Darkness quote, the young company was founded by a group of San Francisco State theater students in 2003; now something of a splat-stick phenomenon, they’ve also mounted two hugely successful shows as part of the Another Hole in the Head film festival.
A few weeks back, a rowdy HoleHead crowd greeted their latest, The Chainsaw Massacres — a riff on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (with The Devil’s Rejects, Saturday Night Fever, and other pop culture insanity tossed in) that’s now returning to CELLspace. Codirectors Sean Madeira and Robert Selander — the troupe’s standout ham, who played Evil Dead’s Ash and has a juicy role in Chainsaw — are in the process of attaining nonprofit status for the Screwheads. It’s an exciting development for a group that basically runs on a self-fueled (and self-funded) mix of ingenuity, enthusiasm, and a staggering ability to multitask.
“Sean is our main writer, and I’m our main blood technician and fight choreographer, but we split directing evenly,” Selander explains. Madeira, who dreamed up the Evil Dead play while at a comics convention, drew on his screenwriting background for the company’s first production, filling a previously undiscovered niche in the San Francisco theater scene in the process.
“Everyone’s seen Shakespeare,” Madeira says. “I figured I’ll just give them something different, something wild.” The Sam Raimi cult classic was chosen because of its single location and handful of characters — and, of course, its gore-tastic possibilities, though the company’s audience-splattering ways (now a trademark) were stumbled upon with utter spontaneity.
“I knew we were gonna have a lot of blood, because it was Evil Dead,” Madeira recalls. “But then once it started accidentally hitting the audience, they went crazy.”
“By the end of the first run, Sean was, like, ‘Well, they liked it! We should just spray it at the audience,’>

Heavy petting

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The reasons were manifold, many-furred, and multihued, but this much was clear at South by Southwest 2006: The Nashville teen punk sensations Be Your Own Pet were definitely a band to raise your right fist Arsenio-style and woof at, like a member of the Bloodhound Gang at a sports bar. Fronted by the kittenish Courtney of a vocalist Jemina Pearl Abegg and filled out by the impressively fro’d bassist Nathan Vasquez, guitarist Jonas Stein, and drummer Jamin Orrall, and shaking it like Smell-style teenage kicks, Be Your Own Pet gave off the delicious fumes of scruffy Jack Russell terriers hopped up on ’roids, Pop Rocks, and raucous hip-shaking noise punk. They made all the right moves. They were as cute as little pink pills. They threw outrageous parties. They played heavenly bills.
Life in the fast lane. Frankly the entire scene made Orrall want to lose his mind, he said last week, fading in and out on the fiber-optic freeway leading from Texas to Arizona. “I didn’t really like that week,” the asthmatic drummer said — his nose clearly stuffed to hell and back. “We did a lot of shows and a lot of meetings and it was too much stuff with people who aren’t really into music. It felt gross.”
Orrall, who turned 18 last month, and his bandmates must have had some inkling of what would happen — they were born into the business. BYOP’s 2004 single “Damn Damn Leash” initially came out on Infinity Cat, the label run by Orrall, his brother, Jake, and his father, singer-songwriter Robert Ellis Orrall. Stein’s father is said to have managed Vince Neil, Vasquez’s pops is a flamenco guitar player, and Abegg’s dad is a rock photographer.
Helmed by multiple producers, including pater Orrall, Modest Mouse producer Jacquire King, Kings of Leon knob fondler Angelo, and Redd Kross’s Steve McDonald, Be Your Own Pet’s self-titled debut on Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace (distributed by Universal) is a spiky, spastic — and yes, adorable — little mutt of a recording, reminiscent of early, primitive Yeah Yeah Yeahs and knuckle-skating riot grrrl, with the odd ode to bicycles, felines, and, urp, “Stairway to Heaven.”
Orrall doesn’t know if their music is “necessarily punk. We’re not really protesting anything,” he wheezed. Nonetheless he and Jake have been writing songs since they were 9 or 10, with few assists from the parental unit. “I wrote a lot of lyrics just in school when I was kind of bored,” he explained.
So isn’t there a bit of a cultural disconnect occurring? The bands that sound like them are still toiling old-school, while Be Your Own Pet’s early single was slipped to Zane Lowe at BBC Radio One before finding its way to XL in England — and the teens have already played massive UK fests like Reading and Leeds and Glastonbury. Orrall likes the idea of their music finding its way into the hands of kids who shop chain stores in Dookieville, Pa. — are such creatures still out there? — but will confess, “It’s, like, pretty strange. We do the same thing, just in a different environment, but it’s hard to connect with the audience because they’re so far away.” (Kimberly Chun)
Be Your Own Pet’s Jamin Orrall’s five current faves
Dirty Projects, New Attitude EP (Marriage)
Thin Lizzy, Jailbreak (Mercury/Universal)
Chocolate Watchband, Inner Mystique (Sundazed)
Deluxin’, Deluxin’ (Stoneham Tapes) “Nathan [Vasquez’s] other band — it’s just like the Sun City Girls but a little more pop-rocky.”
Letho, Wood Ox (Stoneham Tapes) “I listen to my brother’s albums a lot. He’s made five or six records under that name on four-track cassette, but the last one was this six-part epic story of him being raised by oxen on the plains.”

Lust for life

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› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Ah, spring — it seems like a distant memory in June as we get socked an SF summer’s weaving, one-two punch of Westside fog and SoMa heat. But spring is the thing when we think about love. Love that picks us up, brings us down, lifts us back up to where we belong, then bitch-slaps us about the face and neck until we’re ready to trade in our valentines for matching straitjackets and a tray of stiff drinks. Pull up a chair and tell it to Jolie Holland, who dredged up her own love–gone–sour mash life lessons for her latest lovely, lithely limned album, Springtime Can Kill You (Anti). “Yeah, it was just one pretty horrible set of emotional circumstances,” she drawls from Salt Lake City while on perpetual tour. “Just a terrible accident of communication–slash–long distance relationship–slash–my life totally changing due to the music taking off.”
Holland knows of what she speaks: She tried to settle down in San Francisco with her Stanford-jobbing scientist, dubbed the “Moonshiner” in song on Springtime, until he went off on a scholarship to Russia for 10 months. “I was tryin’ to basically be married to a nice, normal guy who had a job and all that, which I’d never really sincerely tried before,” she says. “I thought, this is normal — I’ll try this. But the relationship had a vitamin deficiency. Anyway, that’s what “Springtime Can Kill You” is about — trying to make something work that’s not functional.”
Now she’s back to what a friend calls “the buckshot version of romance. I’m dating people who have fucked-up lifestyles like me — I’m dating other traveling musicians.”
Dub it the bitter, beauteous fruit of Springtime and its absinthe-hued wedding of new grit, olde art, and lightly borrowed blues. The full-length’s ballads of sexual codependency and earthy comradeship sound creamy and sensually nostalgic, yet never self-consciously musty, in the lily hands of coproducers Holland and Lemon DeGeorge. Springtime is haunted — by faraway lovers (“Moonshiner”), outright specters (“Ghostly Girl”), smashed hopes (Riley Puckett’s “You’re Not Satisfied”), old jazz records (“Springtime Can Kill You”), and a certain intoxicating insanity (Holland’s old hip-hop collaborator CR Avery’s “Crazy Dreams”) — though it’s far from a relic.
Likewise, Holland is far from antique. In contrast to the sometime Be Good Tanya’s recent femme fatale photo stylings — complete with Bellocq–Belle Epoque cleavage and Veronica Lake peekaboo locks — she’s still a girl’s girl. She worries over the aforementioned image making, laughs like a hungry bird of prey, dishes band politics, sprinkles her speech with “fucked-up”s, shops vintage like a hipster magpie, drops references to a friend’s “psychic power,” and — true to form for the lusty lady who dedicated a song (“Moonshiner”) to Memphis Minnie and Freakwater — gets creeped out by Mormontown. “Oh, thank God, we’re leaving!” the redheaded vocalist says with a relieved, panicked laugh of her current stop, Salt Lake City. “I just walk down the street and people stare and yell stuff at me. And, like, weird shit was happening. Yeah, I don’t like this town, and people are definitely treating me like a freak here. My hair is a particularly unnatural color, right now.”
Still, life — even one far from her ex’s arms — appears to be swinging much smoother these days for Holland, who now considers New York City, Vancouver, and Portland home. “I’m actually being pretty productive. The other day I wrote two songs in a hotel room.” Even quickie genre classifiers don’t matter. The New York Times may have plopped her into a recent splashy “freak folk” feature — amid Vetiver and Espers, a crowd she’s seldom associated with — but that’s OK. “Yeah, it said nothing about me, but it did say my name, like, three times,” she says with her ah-ah-ah laugh. “It’s interesting because we’re Bay Area people, so we can see the fine details of who’s actually associated with who. But from the East Coast, it probably looks different, y’know. My picture looks really funny in there, right?! It looks totally stuck on.
“The thing is … it actually sounds really fun to have a scene!”
Hey, it may be summer, but we can keep those fresh, dewy buds springing eternally, within. Holland is on her way to Cheyenne, where she says her band has heard rumor of a pond they can dip their wings in, and after that there are collaborations lined up with Michael Hurley and Sage Francis, among others. “It’s so great to be not pretending to be a housewife anymore!” says the singer. “I don’t have to stay home and clean the floor.” SFBG
JOLIE HOLLAND
Sat/1, 9 p.m.
Bimbo’s 365 Club
1025 Columbus, SF
$18
(415) 474-0365
NO, YOU CAN’T BE EVERYWHERE AT ONCE
MARIN COUNTY FAIR
Come for the corn — stay for the cool-ocity. Shee-it, Eddie Money and Nelson play Sat/1, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts and Ricky Skaggs perform Mon/3, and Beausoleil and Preservation Hall Jazz Band bring New Orleans to the North Bay Tues/4. Civic Center Drive, San Rafael. $11–$13. (415) 499-6800, www.marinfair.org.
FAIRPORT CONVENTION
The “acoustic trio” incarnation of the English folk-rock maestros — including founder Simon Nichol — soldiers on. Wed/28–Thurs/29, 8 p.m., Freight and Salvage, 1111 Addison, Berk. $19.50–$20.50. (510) 548-1761.
ZEMOG EL GALLO BUENO
Abraham Gomez-Delgado cuts his zany out-jazz with Cuban-world fusion. Wed/28, 8 and 10 p.m. Yoshi’s, 510 Embarcadero West, Oakl. $10–$14. (510) 238-9200.
FIONA APPLE
An Extraordinary Machine rolls onward with a headlining tour. Thurs/29, Sleep Train Pavilion, Concord. Fri/30, Mountain Winery, Saratoga. For times and prices, visit www.ticketmaster.com.
CORINNE BAILEY RAE
The new Billie — or Sade? The gorg Brit plays it smooth like Karo, but does she have the songs? Thurs/29, 9 p.m., Café du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. $12. (415) 861-5016.
BLOW AND YACHT
DIY performance art plus your roommate at Evergreen College equals Blow. Blowster Joan Bechtolt also breaks away for a heaping helping of positivity as Yacht. Fri/30, 6 p.m., Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. $6. (415) 923-0923.
DOUG HOEKSTRA
A Pushcart Prize nominee folks up. Sun/2, 9 p.m., Hotel Utah, 500 Fourth St., SF. $6. (415) 546-6300.
KEKELE
The Congolese supergroup dusts off the effervescent ’60s sound of Cuban rumba melded with African rhythms. Mon/3, 8 and 10 p.m. Yoshi’s, 510 Embarcadero West, Oakl. $20. (510) 238-9200.

Why is Asa Sullivan dead?

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> gwschulz@sfbg.com

Kahlil Sullivan hasn’t had time to do much lately other than plan for his younger brother’s funeral. He hasn’t even had time to find out exactly why his brother is dead.
“We feel like we’re lost,” he said over the phone a week after his cornered and unarmed brother was shot and killed by the San Francisco Police Department.
The cops have offered two stories as to why officers fired a still-undisclosed number of bullets into the body of Asa Sullivan on June 6. And neither one seems to make much sense or explain why they shot Sullivan.
Meanwhile, the family hasn’t been offered a dime for burial expenses from the Victim Services Division of the District Attorney’s Office. The state won’t spend money to help the families of former felons, but there’s local money available too. That’s off-limits, it turns out, because the SFPD hasn’t classified Sullivan’s death as an “unlawful killing,” according to the DA’s office.
Sullivan’s mother, Kathleen Espinosa, even told us on the day of his funeral, June 15, that the department did not provide a liaison to the family, as the Office of Citizen Complaints two years ago recommended the SFPD do for the families of officer-involved shooting victims.
In fact, Espinosa hasn’t heard a word from the department. Everything she knows has come largely from two stories in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Espinosa, a short, relentlessly cheerful woman with chestnut hair, held a smile throughout her son’s funeral while hugging Sullivan’s tearful young friends. She said any new information from the department right now hardly matters.
“Let them get their story straight first before they come to me,” she said. “I don’t want another wrong story.”
According to early reports, Sullivan and his friend, 25-year-old Jason Martin, were staying with two tenants at a Villas Parkmerced townhouse, part of a 3,200-unit complex close to the San Francisco State University campus. Sullivan had been in some trouble in the past; his criminal record included an armed robbery, and he was on probation for selling pot. But he’d secured a job at Goodwill and had a six-year-old son to look after.
Martin and Sullivan were helping to clean up the townhouse so their friends could receive their security deposit when they moved out. The tenants were being evicted for not paying rent, but a Parkmerced official told the media that the tenants were still legally living there.
The cops said a neighbor called the police, believing the unit had been taken over by nonresidents. Police Chief Heather Fong insisted in press statements that the complex was having problems with squatters. But Parkmerced public policy director Bert Polacci told the Guardian that the complex had no such problems. If the cops had called him, he might have cleared up the residency status of the occupants of 2 Garces Drive.
When Officers Michelle Alvis and John Keesor arrived, they immediately detained Martin, in response to the neighbor’s complaint. Sullivan, who feared going to jail for a probation violation, fled to a two-and-a-half-foot-high attic space.
The officers attempted to talk him down with Martin’s help but eventually went into the attic. Martin later insisted, according to Espinosa, that he told the officers Sullivan was unarmed before they went after him.
The way the cops tell it, Sullivan — who would have been unable to stand up in the tiny space — took a combative stance from inside the attic, and the officers believed he had aimed a gun at them.
The department first reported that Sullivan had shot at the officers through the attic floor. Further, the cops reported that Sullivan’s gun was found at the scene. The truth is, all they found was the case to a pair of eyeglasses.
SFPD spokesperson Neville Gittens told us only that the first story was based on “secondhand information” and “witness statements.”
The official story changed several hours after the department offered its first explanation of what happened. According to Gittens, Keesor fired first, and a ricochet nicked his partner’s ear, “perhaps” causing her to fire as well. When the smoke cleared, Sullivan was dead. No gun was ever found.
“They got flashlights,” Sullivan’s brother Kahlil exclaimed. “Can’t they see his hands? Why didn’t they ask him questions first? We may never know the truth.”
One of the two officers had their flashlights on, Gittens said, but he couldn’t confirm whether the illumination was enough to identify exactly what was in Sullivan’s hand. Gittens told the Guardian that Fong has not yet made a decision about whether to return the officers to regular duty.
Gittens initially refused on June 9 to release the names of the officers involved to the Guardian, but the day after we asked for them, they appeared in the Chronicle. And the department has not yet responded to a Guardian request for documents associated with the shooting.
In 2004, the police commission voted unanimously to conditionally require the disclosure of incident reports to the families of officer-involved shooting victims as swiftly as possible. That change, and the request that the SFPD provide a liaison to the family, were inspired by the death of Cammerin Boyd, who was shot and killed in the spring of 2004 by SFPD officers following a car chase.
But during several subsequent commission meetings, the recommendations disappeared into the ether. And it’s not the first time that proposed reforms were simply ignored by the SFPD, a fact commission vice president Theresa Sparks readily admits.
“I was a little surprised the chief released the names as fast as she did,” Sparks told us.
Sparks nonetheless said that she is still troubled by the so-far inconsistent stories the department has offered to the public and the commission.
“The first story that came out was totally incorrect, [and] the chief could not tell us why the story changed,” Sparks said. “It’s criminal that these families sit there with no specific knowledge about what happened.”
Sullivan’s funeral was attended by his siblings — Kahlil, brother Sangh, and sisters T-sha Sullivan and Tasha Mosby-Greer — and a capacity crowd of Asa’s friends and other family, all in Duggan’s Funeral Home, right across from the Mission Police Station.
Born on Sept. 8, 1980, Asa grew up in San Francisco and attended Bay Area schools. Friends remembered his playful sense of humor. For a time recently, he stayed with his mom while working at Goodwill, commuting from San Jose at 5 a.m. and returning late.
“He made everybody laugh,” Espinosa said. “He didn’t deserve to be cornered in an attic and gunned down.”
The family has contacted Oakland civil rights attorney John Burris, who told the Guardian that during his handling of hundreds of officer-misconduct cases, he’s seen families victimized by police denied documents, explanations, and the truth.
“If there’s one thing I’ve found, it’s police agencies do a disservice to the victim’s family when they don’t provide information,” Burris said. “When the families ask questions, they don’t respond.” SFBG

TOKYO DRIFT-ER

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Before the pinks start flying, let’s get the snap critique out of the way: The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift is completely ri-drift-ulous. Start with the deeply tanned, pastel-loving, hella-bleached-blond ganguro girls (now with highly buoyant boob jobs!), proceed to the silly gang-drifting scene down a mountain (why not make it Mt. Fuji?), and fly toward the smirking absurdity of Sonny Chiba playing a deeply tanned, pastel-loving ganguro yakuza boss — this movie throws as much sex and speed in the mix as it can, yet still manages to lag disastrously mid-race.
What is fast-cinating is the fact that The Fast and the Furious (2001) has become a franchise with a record of roping in quality independent directors: 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003) dragged out John Singleton, and Tokyo Drift apparently got Asian Amerindie filmmaker Justin Lin to roll over as well. Lin became Asian American film’s great yellow hope after some hard-won success with Better Luck Tomorrow (2002), and he’s a politic choice. The original Fast and the Furious cast its Asian characters in such a villainous light that certain viewers were blinded by the hypocrisy. After all, the LA street-facing flick was loosely based on a Vibe story by Chinese American writer Ken Li. In that initial installment, the gangs of gearheads broke down along color lines as they prepped for a tourney called “Race Wars.”
At the time, I read the demonization of the Asian crew as a sort of hangover from the American vs. Japanese auto industry wars. Everything, however, has been upended these days, as Japanese imports of the cinematic variety are being made over regularly and J-pop culture has steadily filtered into the mainstream. A genre film set in Japan with a determinedly multicultural cast doesn’t seem out of the question, if somewhat odd, in that fairly homogenous country (the lead, Southern-accented honky Lucas Black, is joined by African American short stuff Bow Wow, Korean American friend Sung Kang, and South Asian Aussie love interest Nathalie Kelly). Where’s the Russian drift monger?
Betraying his indie filmmaking roots, Lin spends so much time developing the characters and detailing the Japanese mise-en-scène that he actually puts a dent in the movie’s pacing. And the racial mix seems closer to Better Luck Tomorrow’s melting-pot LA than Tokyo, or even Yokohama. But the absolutely weirdest quirk that Lin brings to Tokyo Drift is the fact that he has Better Luck Tomorrow’s Sung Kang reprise his role as the honorable teen grifter, Han, in the film. “Tokyo is my Mexico,” Han says mysteriously at one point, referring to the Wild West gunfighters who’d run for the border. Han’s character bleed, it’s implied, might be attributed to a flight from Better Luck’s black market of cheat sheets. It’s fitting then that Kang strides into his initial frames of Tokyo Drift like Sergio Leone’s Man With No Name or Seijun Suzuki’s Tokyo Drifter. As if we’re supposed to know who he is. I loved Better Luck, but I still didn’t get it till I checked Internet Movie Database. If only Han had a classier vehicle, one that wasn’t built for a quick buck. (Kimberly Chun)

It’s a small world after all

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> a&eletters@sfbg.com

Are you a good dwarf or a bad dwarf? In the storied production history of The Wizard of Oz, there were notoriously (and no doubt, apocryphally) so few of the former that Glinda-like attempts at taxonomy seem pointless. They were all bad, or at least naughty, as dwarves have historically seemed in the popular imagination. Celebrated novelist Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting) and screenwriter Dean Cavanagh’s ribald new stage comedy, however, about four “Munchkins” housed together during the filming of Oz, brings such stereotypes of good and evil center stage, where size may not count at all.
Babylon Heights, receiving a rocky world premiere at San Francisco’s Exit Theatre, builds on the towering Hollywood tale that has the 100-plus dwarves cast as Munchkins running amok in their Culver City hotel, converting it into a den of drunken rioting and sex orgies. But if the premise climbs to the heady stratosphere of urban legend, its story keeps us resolutely low to the ground. First of all, its average-size actors play on an oversize set (a dingy hotel room designed to surreal effect by Tony Kelly and Colby Thompson), giving us a waist-high perspective on the big-people world throughout. Moreover, the germ of its story line has to do with an even more sordid detail in that lasting legend: the rumored suicide of an MGM Munchkin on the set of the film (supposedly just visible in the background, swinging from an artificial tree, in the scene where Dorothy and company set off down the Yellow Brick Road).
With that tasty morbid morsel as an appetizer, Babylon introduces four misfits thrown together by circumstance, each drawn for subtly different reasons to Tinseltown’s mirage utopia, not unlike Dorothy to Oz. There’s Bert Kowalski (Russ Davison), an archetypal ’30s Brooklynite in all but stature, and a bilious, foulmouthed, raunchy little opium addict to boot. There’s Raymond Benedict-Porter (Dennis McIntyre), the self-styled master thespian and an unctuously pretentious name-dropper (who Bert mercilessly teases, recognizing the poseur from the circus circuit). There’s the equally disingenuous Philomena Kinsella (Brittany Kilcoyne McGregor), an Irish working-class girl who’s left the drudgery of a nunnery for the adventure of Hollywood and who artfully feigns fearful innocence in the face of a roomful of men. And finally there’s the true innocent, Charles Merryweather (Chris Yule), the play’s own Dorothy. Cast as a Munchkin infant, the sheltered Englishman (once in the king’s employ at Kew Gardens until driven off by big bullies) is the literal babe of the story, and its sacrificial lamb.
It sounds like a good arrangement for a saucy Rabelaisian send-up of the existing order of things. After all, the dark corners of Oz will never cease to fascinate. And as a depression-era tale, tall or otherwise, the desperation, tribulations, affinities, and infighting among a far-flung group of irregularly employed actors take on some added significance from the vantage of the “little people.” But Babylon never does much with the themes it broaches. In fact, its sardonic comedy never really takes off, although much of the blame could be laid at the feet of a lackluster production that, on opening night at least, could only stumble down the runway.
Contrary to the cavalier myth, the actors who played Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz were more like overworked and underpaid studio fodder, and Babylon’s gritty focus plays on that harsh reality. But here at least the focus blurs, and the surprisingly halfhearted dialogue repeatedly goes slack. Welsh and Cavanagh probably wrote something slightly different, and no doubt director Jesse Reese intended something a bit tighter, but it’s hard to tell going by opening night’s performance (and absent the published version of the play, which is not yet available). Merryweather’s lines are decidedly dull, confining Yule, for the most part, to one or two wide-eyed reactions. McIntyre and Davison, meanwhile, though both capable actors, seemed to be fishing for their lines so often that it began to resemble an evening of unflattering improvisation. The only suitably sharp performance came from McGregor, who immediately infuses the proceedings with much needed energy, while helping to pick up the pace in two acts that drag out to nearly three hours.
Leaving aside opening night missteps, for all its ribaldry, Babylon Heights ends up giving conventional morality much less of a comeuppance than you might expect, or would find, for example, in a wittier Joe Orton farce. SFBG
BABYLON HEIGHTS
Through July 1, Wed.–Sat., 8 p.m.
Exit Theatre
156 Eddy, SF
$15–$20
(415) 249-9332
www.babylonheights.com

CHATTING WITH MR. VENGEANCE

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During the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival, where Lady Vengeance screened under its original title, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, director Park Chanwook (through a translator) discussed payback, villains, and cyborgs.
SFBG Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, and Lady Vengeance don’t really form a conventional trilogy in terms of characters and plots — but they share themes [betrayal, revenge] and motifs [child kidnappings, kidney transplants]. Were all three films conceived at once?
PARK CHANWOOK They just happened. I didn’t plan them from the beginning. After the first film [Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance], I didn’t want to make another film about revenge, but somebody brought me a very nice script about revenge: Oldboy. The third one [Lady Vengeance] actually came out in relation to the questions I received at a press conference before filming Oldboy. People asked, why would I deal with revenge again?
SFBG What made you decide to have a female character as the lead in the final film?
PC Because it’s the last film of the trilogy. In my previous films, the females did not have any major roles. I wanted to compensate for the lack of female presence, so I decided to have a female as the lead character. I wanted to give it a different touch, so I thought a female would be best.
SFBG The lead actor from Oldboy [Choi Min-sik] also appears in Lady Vengeance. Why did you choose to use him again, and why did you cast him as a villain instead of a hero this time?
PC There’s no direct connection between those two films, simply because it’s the same actor. He happens to be a great actor who can portray the role of a villain. Actually, the actor Choi had never taken any role as a villain previously — his image in Korea is warm and like a patriarch. In this film he has this image of a children’s teacher, but underneath there is this image of villain. The fixed image actually helped to disguise the real villain.
SFBG Your films are known for being violent, but there is also a sense of humor, however dark, that’s very apparent in all of them. What do you think is the connection between humor and violence?
PC I wanted to avoid ending the film with a dark, heavy scene because I wanted to give the audience room to have a more intelligent interpretation of the whole story. If you have only violence then you may miss that chance. This way, you can step back and think about it more objectively.
SFBG What’s next for you?
PC The title of my next film is I Am Cyborg — that’s the direct translation from Korean. Once I release it the English title might be different. It’s the story of this mental patient who thinks that she may be a cyborg, and she meets a boy. It’s a romance! (Cheryl Eddy)

Foreign cures

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> barsandclubs@sfbg.com

It’s Saturday morning, 10 a.m., and the sun streaming into your bedroom is driving a wedge into your brain. Someone put little socks on your teeth while you were sleeping. You smell like a distillery. You failed to follow any of the drunken rules when you stumbled home, pantsless, the night before: You didn’t drink a big jug of water and take two ibuprofen, and you didn’t make yourself a fried egg sandwich. (You know about that one, right? Grilled cheese sandwich with a fried egg and mayo inside — works every time.) You promise yourself you’re never going to mix mai tais, margaritas, and merlot again. With a Mary Jane finale.
But if you’re up for some real chow (instead of crackers, club soda, and Emergen-C), fortunately you’ll find salvation in a number of our city’s dining outposts. Since there are cultures that have been dealing with hangovers for many moons longer than our little post–Barbary Coast enclave has, I went on a citywide tour to unearth the best international food cures to help counteract the deleterious effects of knowing a bartender, blacking out at bachelor parties, or just drinking to forget.
A hot bowl of the Vietnamese noodle soup pho (pronounced fuh) comes highly recommended as a restorative by a couple restaurant owners I know, and some bona fide boozehounds. Turtle Tower (631 Larkin, SF. 415-409-3333) in Little Saigon has the best pho in the city, and number nine, the Pho Ga/chicken noodle soup — a steaming bowl of silky, hand-cut rice noodles and some darned good white chicken meat — is your rescue. Since Turtle Tower’s pho is considered to be northern, or Hanoi, style, it comes in a light broth with cilantro and a side of lemon and sliced peppers. Order the small size — it’s plenty big enough, trust. Back it up with a tangy lemon soda and you are seriously set. Lucky you, they’re open early, so you can get your slurp on.
Some other folks wise to the soup-as-hangover-antidote method are those wild ones of the mountains, the Basque. Sheepherders really know how to party. (What else can you do there? Wait, don’t answer that — just leave the sheep out of this.) Their classic day-after elixir is garlic soup. Visit Piperade (1015 Battery, SF. 415-391-2555, www.piperade.com) and order a bowl of hearty soup made with rock shrimp, bacon, bread, garlic, and egg. It covers all the bases. You can eat at the cozy bar, so don’t let the white tablecloths scare you.
OK, everyone has heard of the infamous Mexican hangover cure, menudo. (No jokes about the band, please, that’s tired.) Menudo is a soup made with beef tripe (yes, it comes from three of a cow’s four stomachs), hominy, onion, and spices. Sometimes you’ll find some pork knuckles or calf’s foot. The Greeks have a version of it; same goes for a number of South American countries, and you’ll even find a variant in the Philippines. Menudo is traditionally only available on the weekends, so I made sure I was good and hungover the Sunday I stumbled into Chava’s (2839 Mission, SF. 415-282-0283) to try it. How hungover? How about a wedding rehearsal dinner the night prior, with a cavalcade of flutes of sparkling wine, red wine, and a couple French 75s followed by two old-fashioneds? Yeah, I was feeling it.
But, um, here’s what I’ve decided about menudo: On the days when you’re so nauseated you need to get sick, come to Chava’s, get a bowl of menudo to go, bring it home, and open the lid. Just one whiff, partnered with the sight of the rubbery tripe and animal parts, will inspire a great big Technicolor yawn. No offense to Chava’s, but you simply had to grow up with the stuff to be able to eat it, let alone eat it when you’re hungover.
Speaking of fatty food: It’s supposedly tough on your liver the day after, since it’s already working double time to flush out all those nasty toxins, but I say whatever — if the fat makes you feel good, eat up. This is where el Farolito (2951 24th St., SF. 415-641-0758) lives up to its “little lighthouse” name, especially for those who can’t see through their morning-after daze. The doctor is ready to see you now: The super quesadilla suiza is a flour tortilla exploding with a mass of carne asada, cheese, meat, avocado, salsa, and sour cream that you can pick up and hold in your quivering DTs-afflicted hands. It’s so huge you can bring the rest of it home for when you’re hungry again. (What is it about hangovers that turns everyone into Count Snackula?)
A runner-up in the “Mexican food–bad for you” category are the nachos (and a Pacifico, if you can manage it) at Taqueria Can-Cun (2288 Mission, SF. 415-252-9560). The nachos saved me one afternoon after a bleary night in North Beach with some Italians (don’t ask). You’ll get a pile of meat, refried beans, avocado, cheese, sour cream, jalapeños, and their lousy grainy chips that actually come to life in the nachos. Spicy too. Feeling more arriba now?
The Irish know a thing or two about hangovers, and you can find a hearty Irish breakfast — sausage, bacon, black-and-white pudding (you might not want to eat it — it’s made with blood), baked beans, potatoes, mushrooms, and eggs any style — at the Phoenix Bar and Irish Gathering House (811 Valencia, SF. 415-695-1811, www.phoenixirishbar.com). The place is nice and dark, even during the day, so you don’t have to dine in your sunglasses (unless someone punched you in the eye because you were mouthing off). There are all kinds of brunch dishes and other greasy foods served until late in the day, and you have plenty of options for some hair of the dog at the bar. I’d say they know their clientele.
A partyer pal was kind enough to let his secret out of the (barf) bag for me: the Korean dish bi bim bap from Hahn’s Hibachi (1305 Castro, SF. 415-642-8151), a magic combo of chicken, pork, or marinated beef and vegetables on a bed of rice, with a raw egg on top. Throw some hot sauce on and mix it all up in its hot stone bowl so the bits of rice on the edge get crispy and the egg cooks. The name literally means “thrown-together rice,” and while there are definitely more authentic places around town, hangover day is never good for serious exploration — you need a sure thing.
The hungover French (well, those from the region of Brittany, anyway) would surely cosign a crepe from Ti Couz (3108 16th St., SF. 415-252-7373). These aren’t the finest crepes in the world, but I would say an order of the complete crepe (ham, cheese, and a sunny-side up egg inside) with the Ti Couz mimosa (made with peach schnapps — I know, you thought you were done with schnapps) while sitting out in the sun will get you feeling très bon again.
Lastly, our tour of the culinary landscape of San Francisco wouldn’t be complete without a couple classic American burger options. I am not alone in vouching for the wonders of a Whiz Burger (700 S. Van Ness, SF. 415-824-5888) cheeseburger and a root beer freeze. There’s even a decent veggie burger, and tasty seasoned waffle fries. But it’s hard to beat a giant juicy burger hot off the grill while hanging out on the patio of Zeitgeist (199 Valencia, SF. 415-255-7505) on a Sunday, with an ice-cold beer or one of their Bloody Marys. My badass bartender friend Kenny Meade from Vertigo Bar recommends either a shot of Fernet or, post-Zeitgeist, a Mexican chocolate milkshake from Mitchell’s Ice Cream (688 San Jose, SF. 415-648-2300, www.mitchellsicecream.com). He’s gotten me drunk enough times for me to totally trust him on this little piece of advice. SFBG
In between potential Betty Ford benders, Marcia Gagliardi somehow publishes a delicious weekly column about the SF restaurant scene, the Tablehopper, at www.tablehopper.com. Got a favorite foreign hangover cure? Let us know: barsandclubs@sfbg.com.

Great head here

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> barsandclubs@sfbg.com

“Half of Americans haven’t tried decent beer,” says William Brand, the Oakland Tribune’s resident beer columnist and local brew expert. Back in the sixth grade, Nebraska native Brand was himself weaned on the likes of Budweiser, Hamm’s, and Coors, wan beverages he now refers to as mere “alcohol vehicles” — brewed with rice and corn, cheaply made, and lacking any real taste. “That’s not beer,” he says, “that’s just crap.”
Brand encountered his first crap-free beer during a stint in the Navy, when he was stationed near Washington, DC. Friends took him out to a posh German restaurant and there, he recalls, he ordered a Wurzburger amber “in a very nice pilsner glass.”
“I took one taste,” he says, “and it was amazing. I never tasted anything like it. Until then, everything I ever tasted was awful.”
He soon mail ordered a home-brewing kit from England and began his long journey to respected beer connoisseurship. Since 1989, his Oakland Tribune column, “What’s on Tap,” has been steering beer fanatics toward the finest local suds. We asked him to share some Bay Area brewery history and talk about some of his local favorites.
SFBG You used to brew your own beer. Why did you stop?
BRAND I moved to California in 1970. I had one glass of Anchor Steam and realized I didn’t have to brew any beer. And of course then the whole beer-making revolution happened. It really all started in the Bay Area, with the Portland area right behind it. In the United States, home brewing was made legal in ’78. Brewpubs became legal in California in ’81.
SFBG How has the American microbrew movement evolved since then?
BRAND For a while it was all Northern California and the Pacific Northwest. But that’s all ancient history. Young Americans traveled to Europe, discovered good beer, and started brewing it. Now there’s about 1,300, 1,600 breweries in America. There’s more beer — and more styles of beer — in America than in any other country in the world.
SFBG What distinguishes the Bay Area microbrew scene?
BRAND Well, you can’t really say “the Bay Area.” You have to say “Northern California.” And it’s a toss-up between Northern California and the Pacific Northwest for beer nirvana. In the US it’s becoming like Germany or Belgium, where different people from different regions have their own styles. In the Pacific Northwest they go for dark and strong beers. In Northern California we’re famous for extremely hoppy beers.
Beers are measured in international bitterness units — it’s a scale that beers use. For comparison purposes, Budweiser is 13 IBUs; Stella is 30 IBUs. We have lots of beers that are 100 IBUs or more. It’s a style that’s becoming known as double IPA [India Pale Ale].
SFBG With an eye toward both quality and adventurous weirdness, what are some of your favorite Bay Area beers?
BRAND There’s one called Watermelon Wheat from 21st Amendment Brewery in San Francisco. It’s a blend of wheat and barley, and they actually put watermelon in it, which really comes through. You’d think it would be ghastly beer, but it’s quite good. Another of my favorites comes from Drake’s Brewing in San Leandro, and it’s called Papa Denogginizer. It’s hugely hops — and somewhere around 11 percent alcohol. Then go to Marin Brewing Company in Larkspur, and the guy there is making barrel-aged beers. With barrel-aged beers, you brew your beer, you ferment your beer, then you put it in a whiskey barrel or a wine barrel. Going over to Magnolia Brewery on Haight Street, the brewer makes a mild beer in a high hop area. And he brews cask ales — real ale — in the English style.
SFBG If you really want to impress, say, a Belgian — which local beers would you introduce them to?
BRAND Actually, the ones that are really interested in what we’re doing in the US are the Belgians. They’re really smart, and they’re watching us, and there are a few Belgian breweries that are making American-style beer. Most of the Belgians that come over here are looking for something strong and hoppy. So I’d try and find them something like Old Yeltsin — brewed by HopTown Brewing Company in Pleasanton — or a barley wine. There’s a bar and grill called Schooner’s in Antioch that makes a barley wine. It’s quite strong — around 10 or 11 percent — and they age it for a year or two or three, and it’s astounding. So I’d go with our own styles. There are also some American breweries that are doing a Belgian style. In the Bay Area one place for that is Russian River Brewing Company in Santa Rosa — they do stunning stuff.
SFBG So you might say that Europeans understand American beer.
BRAND There’s a lot of respect in Europe for American beer makers today. And there’s no animosity at all. The thing about beer is that people are never snobby. People only become beer snobs when they don’t know what they’re talking about — or when they’re talking about crappy beer. SFBG
Want more brew-haha? Contact William Brand at whatsontap@sbcglobal.net.
THE BREWERIES
21st Amendment Brewery www.21st-amendment.com
Drake’s Brewing www.drinkdrakes.com
Marin Brewing Company www.marinbrewing.com
Magnolia Brewery www.magnoliapub.com
HopTown Brewing Company www.hoptownbrewing.com
Schooner’s www.schoonersbrewery.com
Russian River Brewing Company www.russianriverbrewing.com

CLUB REPORT: RIYADH

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Saudi Arabia is hilarious. Liquor is totally banned, clubbing is seriously frowned upon, and the government can kill you for even glancing at someone in a gay way. Last year more than 100 men there were tortured, publicly flogged, and imprisoned for “dancing and behaving like women” at a wedding. I love our Saudi allies!
Still, you can’t stop the party. Earlier this year in Europe I ran into “Ahmed,” a young Saudi gay man who works in the capital, Riyadh. I immediately asked him how he manages to hook up in such a place:
“Contrary to beliefs, Riyadh has a big social scene. It takes place in the hookah bars, where men get together to relax and smoke and talk, and the women are not there, of course. There are gatherings at people’s houses. And Saudis can be very fashionable and dress in a Western way. I myself find the traditional white thobe, or tunic, and thagiya headwear very comfortable. But then I started to go to the gym on my lunch hour, and it took half an hour to get dressed afterward, so I switched to jeans.
“To find other gays, you use your cell phone and Bluetooth technology. You can identify them when you walk into the hookah bar and log on to a certain IP address. If another person is registered at that address, you can see where they are in the room. This has become less common as people catch on, though.”
What about drag queens? “There are drag performances, usually held at houses. And yes, they do sometimes perform in the abaya, the black dress, and the boshiya, or facial veil. They often perform Madonna.”
So, does he have a lot of success meeting other gay men? “I find that many Saudi men are sexy, but many are uptight. Jordanian boys are easier.” (Marke B.)

CLUB REPORT: REYKJAVIK

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Vikings party, hard. That famous take-no-prisoners vigor applies, big time, when it comes to getting down and conquering pints of good ole bjor (beer by local breweries Viking, natch, Egils, Thule, Spegils, and Litli Jon), the low-alckie malt (brown ale), and lagerol (pale ale). Ducking into Reykjavik’s three-floor dance palace NASA (slogan: “EXPECT HANGOVERS!”), I didn’t glimpse too many elfin Icelanders sucking down the native caraway schnapps, brennivin, also known locally as svartidauoi (“black death” — sch-weet). I was served that on the jet over, along with yummy business-class reindeer sashimi. (Svartidauoi is a very necessary chaser when it comes to tourist palate-tester skyrhakari — putrid shark).
Drinks, schminks, the locals were out on the dance floor, booty dancing to Ali “Dubfire” Shirazinia of Deep Dish live on the tables. Got to love the native boogie that evening: a condensed, pixieish finger-and-shoulder wiggle that was a smidge early Steve Martin and more than a little high-nerd. High, for reals — my sturdy male traveling companions later reported back from the men’s room, which they described as a “total scene.” A woman apparently waltzed in at one point and set up a pharmacy, surrounded by a crowd that proved Viking blood courses through their veins — according to one fellow traveler, they elbow something fierce.
Though the packed club was bustling, I met with no outta-hand shoving, just friendly offers to dance with groups of fresh-faced men, handsome, slender, and high-cheekboned. This evening, the internationally renowned Icelandic ladies paled in comparison — many appeared a wee bit wenchy. You know what I’m talking about — too much maquillage, too little too-tight clothing, too many servings of rotten shark. Meow! Where’s my kitten tartare? Time to repair to a quieter watering hole, like Asian fusion temple Apotek, mod lounge Oliver, or the chandeliered Rex, where Quentin Tarantino is said to have matched shots with Björk and the Iceland cultural minister.
Forget about live music tonight, although Iceland is chock-an-ice-block with creative musical originals. I followed Tarantino’s lead once again — as well as Bill Clinton’s — and ended the morning at the Baejarins Beztu hot dog stand by the wharf, right next to my deco lodging, Hotel 1919, circa 1919. Mind-cleansing, chill sea air. Warm light emanating from the oldest fast-food joint in Reykjavik (established 1935). The finest dog in town (homemade lamb wieners topped with delish dried onion and rémoulade). No better way to watch the dawn melt into day. (Kimberly Chun)

Gnaw on this

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

There’s always room for another film festival in this town, especially when said fest is drowning in blood, guts, and supernatural shenanigans. The San Francisco Independent Film Festival’s festering youngest child, Another Hole in the Head, returns this week for its third year of ghouls gone wild.

Standouts include The Hamiltons (think Party of Five meets Martin), directed by a local duo whose enticing nom de screen is "the Butcher Brothers,” and, from Greece, Yorgos Noussias’s excellent To Kako (Evil), which cribs from Romero and 28 Days Later in its tale of a ragtag band of urban survivors scrambling to evade the marauding undead. And yes, it does incorporate the dreaded fast-moving breed of zombies, but even genre purists turned off by that factoid will forgive the film once things start going apeshit; I’m thinking in particular of a scene in a deserted restaurant that unleashes 2006’s most satisfying head-squashing to date. The film also has enough of a sense of humor to include the line "If you don’t trust me, trust this!" (cut to: a giant rifle) and a last shot of near-genius proportions.

Per usual, HoleHead brings in several Asian horror flicks, including Shinya Tsukamoto’s enduringly creepy Haze and Yudai Yamaguchi (Battlefield Baseball) and Junichi Yamamoto’s disappointing Meatball Machine. There are also a handful of classics, like Bruce Kessler’s 1971 psych-out Simon: King of the Witches and — in perhaps the festival’s most inspired move — John Boorman’s 1973 Zardoz. Sean Connery’s spectacular loincloth is but the first of many, many reasons to view this neglected masterpiece on the big screen.

Also well worth catching (either at the fest or during their June 29–July 2 run at CELLspace): splat-happy theater troupe the Primitive Screwheads (Evil Dead: Live!, Re-Animator of the Dead), who return with their latest, The Chainsaw Massacres, which boasts a rumored 60 gallons of stage blood poised to rain down on the audience. Plus: disco!

ANOTHER HOLE IN THE HEAD

June 8–15

See Film listings for venue and ticket information

www.sfindie.com

Mini mini CinemaScope!

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The term CinemaScope might conjure a 2.66-to-1 vision of an extra-bodacious Marilyn Monroe in How to Marry a Millionaire, or, if you’re a certain breed of movie maniac, it might inspire a recitation of Fritz Lang’s famous Contempt-uous remark that the format is fine for filming snakes and coffins, but not for capturing people. Bizarre, then, that Liu Jiayin has taken an outmoded approach known for gargantuan celluloid spectacle and revived it — brilliantly — for small-scale digital family portraiture. Winner of numerous festival prizes, including the competitive Dragons and Tigers award bestowed in Vancouver last fall, Liu’s BetaSP debut feature, Ox Hide, has more than once been deemed the most important first feature to emerge from China since Jia Zhangke’s 2000 Platform. That’s a fest obsessive’s way of saying that Liu is the real deal — in addition to possessing a charismatically baby-butch camera presence, she knows how to write, stage, and shoot a funny, unsettling, and pointed scene.

Twenty-three scenes, to be exact, a number reflecting Liu’s age when she made the movie. Ox Hide consists of just that many immobile but rarely "static" shots, each used to depict a moment from the cramped and quarrelsome domestic life she shares with her mother and her father, the latter a stubborn and slowly failing leather goods merchant. (Thus the title.) Making "reality" TV look about as stupid as it is, Liu shares a unique use of format and a sharp focus on the family with ’90s teen PixelVision pioneer — and former Le Tigre member — Sadie Benning, and like Benning, she’s got terrific timing both on-screen (bickering about noodles at the dinner table) and off (using a close-up of a printer to reveal her kin’s economic struggles). Local curator Joel Shepard deserves thanks for bringing this movie to the Bay Area, kicking off a "Beijing Underground" series that will span a few more Fridays this month. (Johnny Ray Huston)

OX HIDE

Thurs/8, 7 and 9 p.m.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

$5–$8

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Blinded by Scientists?

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER It may be yet another sign of a time-space-buckling rock apocalypse. Or a chilling harbinger of imminent, sonic-subtlety-be-damned deafness. Or simply a case of sudden, acute perceptiveness. But you had to wonder, watching We Are Scientists and Arctic Monkeys at the Warfield on May 31, how two such different bands (at least on record) could blur together into one indistinctive, loudly guitar-oriented mass. And I like that fetchingly raucous and hook-slung Arctic Monkeys album. I enjoy the forceful post-punk rock of We Are Scientists, live — wisecracks about dead dads, babes up front, and all.

Both bands work hard for their money — though I can’t speak for the second half of Arctic Monkeys’ set. I had to flee because of my lumbago, left charring in the oven. But as I was racing to my vehicle, I did wonder about the so-called ’00s rock revolution: Could it have gotten stalled somewhere around the time the Arctic Monkeys decided to jettison their straight-forward approach at Great American Music Hall earlier this year and reach for the shadows, smoke machines, and drum-triggered, classically trite rock light show?

Perhaps they’re trying too hard, and if the bands aren’t, then someone is, be it their stylists or marketing departments. What they and other nouveau rock heads should realize is that some arts are beyond science. It’s too easy to slag We Are Scientists, as so many have, starting with a tone set by wink-wink song titles like “This Scene Is Dead” and “Cash Cow” and gamboling forth to the canny exploitation of cute kittens on the cover of With Love and Squalor (Virgin). The cellular building blocks of a fun, poppy, and even harder rock band are there, once you start hacking away at the thick, waxy snark buildup. It’s not that I don’t want to hear about the bad new good times of bands like We Are Scientists and the Killers — but whether they dig deeper and darker into the not-so-secret life of hotties or step back (rather than up, to a privileged perch) and develop a sense of songcraft, they need to make me wanna walk on their wild side.

Killers and bad dudes Speaking of Killers, word has it the Hundred Days show at Bottom of the Hill June 3 was buzzing with A&R types because the SF band’s demo was mixed by Mark Needham, who also worked with the Killers. Colin Crosskill e-mailed me to confirm that Killers producer Jeff Saltzman has expressed interest in working with Hundred Days on their next album, based on the recordings…. Shoplifting’s name, unfortunately, proved too prescient: The Seattle band’s gear was lifted from their van parked on Guerrero Street before their May 29 SF show. They’ve posted a list of stolen gear at www.myspace.com/shoplifting for sharp eyes at Bay Area shops and swap meets…. In other thieving matters, Annie of Annie’s Social Club had a green-and-white guitar autographed by X stolen from her premises; if you have info, contact anniesbooking@gmail.com.

Running in the streets Paranoia, punch-ups, temper tantrums, spread-betting losing sprees, and banging cracked-out, nameless pop stars — nope, that wasn’t the scene at Sonic Reducer’s recent birthday splashdown. Instead that’s all on the new album from the Streets (a.k.a. Mike Skinner), The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living (Vice/Atlantic), a riff on the trials and tribulations of fame that has divided many who have heard it.

“Honesty has always been what I’ve been good at,” says a subdued Skinner, calling from his London home. Making Machiavelli look like a po-faced naïf, one crack at a time, he adds, “People have definitely not liked it as much. But on the whole I think it’s gone down really well.”

I spoke to Skinner when his first CD, Original Pirate Material, came out stateside, when neither of us was completely sure his brand of hip-hop would go over well in the United States. Even now, Skinner says, “I didn’t expect anyone outside the UK to give a shit about it,” so sidestepping the gangster game seems easy. These days, he believes, “it’s a competition to be the hardest. Who’s the most credibly tough. I do think it’s very difficult to stand out against that.”

Why get rich and die trying? Worse, you can stiff like 50 Cent in his own biopic. Instead, Skinner sounds like he’s going the Jay and Em route and concentrating on running his own label, the Beats. “I just want to stay busy and hopefully never work at Burger King again.” SFBG

The Streets with Lady Sovereign

Fri/9, 9 p.m.

Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

$21.50

(415) 346-6000

OH, THE PLACES YOU’LL GO!

Cat Empire

Putf8um-selling Aussie Latin-jazz-ska-hip-hop fusion purveyors make the Latin-jazz-ska-hip-hop kittens purr. Fri/9, 9 p.m., Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. $15. (415) 771-1421.

Oakley Hall

Back-to-the-garden refusniks? Cali-fucked-up dreamers? Brooklyn’s mega ensemble can’t stop putting out music this year; their latest is the bejeweled Gypsum Strings (Brah). Fri/9, 9 p.m. Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. $12. (415) 861-5016.

Soundwave Series

Its first Live Play show at ATA will be documented by KQED’s Spark. Myrmyr, Luz Alibi/Mr Maurader, and Moe! Staiano’s Quintet with guest curator Matt Davignon improvise to previously unseen videos culled by 21 Grand’s Sarah Lockhart. Fri/9, 8 p.m., Artists’ Television Access, 992 Valencia, SF. $6–$10. www.projectsoundwave.com.

James Blackshaw

The young UK guitarist grabbed Wire and Fakejazz’s attention with last year’s O True Believers (Important) — and now has ours. Sat/10, 9:30 p.m., Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. $10. (415) 923-0923.

Canvas with the Reilly people

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By Steven T. Jones
The mood at Canvas Cafe is a little glum and doesn’t seem to fit the artsy, airy interior. They all know that it’s over, and they can’t stand to have lost to someone like Fiona Ma and the dirty campaign people fought on her behalf. Janet and Clint Reilly aren’t here yet, so I’ll keep this brief, with just one quote that seems to sum up the feelings of many of these volunteers, who fought hard to overcome Ma’s early lead and establishment support. “When you work hard for the right reasons, it really sucks to lose the good ones, like tonight,” said Alex Morrison, whom the campaign knows as Mo.

More after I write up the inspirational scene at the Prop. A party I just came from.

Howlin’ at the sun

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Something wicked this way came, right in the middle of last week’s spate of strangely beautiful, beastly hot days, as I sipped a pint on El Rio’s back patio with Comets on Fire vocalist-guitarist Ethan Miller. You can bet — with 6/6/06 plastered all over town, prophesizing an ominously large marketing onslaught for The Omen — that wickedness probably involved horror movies. And you’ll be right. Because Miller is happy to talk about the fruits of Howlin’ Rain, a solo project aided and abetted by Sunburned Hand of the Man’s John Moloney and childhood Humboldt County pal Ian Gradek. But Miller gets really "fanned out" when the subject of mind-gouging, low-budg cinematic howlers like his all-time faves — Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Beyond, Maniac, Suspiria — come up. I can dig it, but do all rockers really bond over the joy of having their eyeballs violated?

"My wife doesn’t want to watch it with me," he says jovially. "I’m, like, ‘Babe, I just got my copy of Cannibal Holocaust in the mail! And she’s just, like, ‘No! Fuck that! No! No! You have to watch that after I go to bed.’

"I had this one friend, I thought he and I had the same taste, and he just wasn’t really speaking up, and I kept giving him films to watch, and he was, like, ‘Dude, I told you. I hate that. That was fucking traumatizing.’”

For all his movie-collector madness, Miller can be reasoned with — and likewise is perfectly reasonable. The Comets’ de facto leader and cofounder tells me their fourth full-length, Avatar (Sub Pop), is ready to go after what sounds like a grueling but fully democratic process recording with Tim Green at Prairie Sun in Cotati. "It’s hard to know if you’re in control of the macro-organism or if it’s in control of you," Miller muses. "Like a minidemocracy, you can’t steer it more than your one-fifth influence. These are real social people wed to each other through their art and music and now through a band."

The Howlin’ Rain project, meanwhile, was quick and dirty, spat out in about eight days, and driven solely by Miller, relying on two trustworthy friends from far-flung parts of the country, with Moloney in Massachusetts and Gradek in Kauai.

Dust demons of fuzz and growling guitar tone still crop up, but here Miller has conjured his own ’06 version of early-’70s "mellow gold" rock ’n’ roll, pulling from the Allman Brothers, Cream, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Neil Young without resorting to outright … cannibalism.

"I tried to pack it full of the psych you could have from this vantage point right now," he says. "Not make a record that’s, like, ‘Fuck, that sounds just like Sabbath. I mean, just like Sabbath.’”

Keep your bloody Sabbath — instead a laid-back, sun-swept blues-rock vibe, edged with moments of darkness, comes in as clear as a rushing river. You can hear Miller’s relatively effects-free voice, for once not screaming over the maelstrom as if flesh were being ripped from his bones, cushioned by the occasional harmony, which he describes as "Simon and Garfunkel on a bad trip or something."

Nonetheless, Miller isn’t ready to forsake the power jams of yore. He sees Howlin’ Rain and Comets as populist entertainments, much like those beloved horror films. "The best ones succeed in an absolute emotional manipulation that’s kind of a ride, like listening to Queen or Mahavishnu Orchestra, music that’s made for an absolute thrill ride. It’s just so dense and thrilling, and they don’t make you sit around waiting for something to happen. Though maybe Mahavishnu wouldn’t appreciate that because their shit is supposed to be more spiritual …"

Stinky no more What’s it like growing up rock? Ask XBXRX, or Gaviotas’s Simon Timony, who had his share of alterna-cool attention at a very young age: The 22-year-old San Franciscan led the Stinkypuffs — which included his onetime stepfather Jad Fair of Half Japanese, his mother Sheenah Fair, Gumball’s Don Fleming, and Lee Ranaldo’s son Cody Linn Ranaldo. Fronting and writing for the most notable child-centered supergroup of the early-’90s alt-rock scene, Timony learned guitar from family friend Snakefinger, was home-schooled by his parents, who ran Ralph Records (his father Tom was in the Residents), and eventually befriended Nirvana when Half Japanese opened for them during the In Utero tour. "I was actually trusted to go wake up Kurt before a show," Timony says wonderingly today.

After notably performing with Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl, together for the first time after Cobain’s suicide, at the 1994 Yo Yo a Go Go fest in Olympia, Wash., Timony grew disillusioned with music at around age 13. But he picked up his moldy guitar again after discovering Korn and now he’s making Gaviotas his full-time job. He performs at a suicide-prevention benefit May 31. "My dad and my mom were, like, ‘If this is what you want to do …,’” Timony explains. “‘As long as you don’t suck!’ My dad is a very honest person — too honest sometimes." SFBG

Howlin’ Rain

Thurs/1, 6 p.m.

Amoeba Music

1855 Haight, SF

(415) 831-1200

Also with Citay and Sic Alps

Sat/3, 9:30 p.m.

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

$6

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

Gaviotas with Crowing and Habitforming

Wed/31, 9 p.m.

Annie’s Social Club

917 Folsom, SF

$5

(415) 974-1585

Ouch

SMOOSH

Play nice with Chloe and Asya, those übertalented but otherwise normal preteens in Seattle’s Smoosh. Their new album, Free to Stay, is here to stay June 6. Eels headline. Wed/31, 8 p.m., Fillmore, 1805 Geary, SF. $25. (415) 346-6000.

FLESHIES

Frontperson John lays down his Foucault — and likely won’t set himself on fire — for a few choice shows celebrating the release of Scrape the Walls (Alternative Tentacles). Fri/2, 10 p.m., Annie’s Social Club, 917 Folsom, SF. $7. (415) 974-1585; June 9, 8 p.m., 924 Gilman, Berk. $5. (510) 525-9926, www.924gilman.org.

Blood brothers

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

It’s Easter weekend in the Mission District, and despite the rabbit snuffling around Rick Popko’s backyard, Cadbury eggs are the last thing on anyone’s mind. "I think we’ve killed everyone we know," Popko explains grimly, grabbing his cell phone to try and recruit one more zombie for the final day of filming on the horror comedy RetarDEAD. Moments later, Popko and RetarDEAD codirector Dan West survey the scene in Popko’s basement. To put it mildly, it’s a bloodbath: The ceiling, walls, and carpet are dripping with cherry red splatters. A smoke machine sits primed for action near a table loaded with gore-flecked prop firearms.

Waste not

Several weeks later (plus several coats of paint, though a faint pinkness lingers), what had been a gruesome morgue has now reverted to its natural domestic state, save an editing station assembled at one end. A framed poster commemorating Popko and West’s first feature, 2003’s Monsturd, hangs on a nearby wall.

Monsturd is a true B-movie. Thanks to some seriously weird science, a serial killer morphs into a giant hunk of raging poop. Drawn into this sordid small-town tale are an evil doctor, a down-and-out sheriff, and an intense FBI agent, plus Popko and West as a pair of screwball deputies. Toilet jokes abound. After a three-day premiere at San Francisco’s Victoria Theatre, Monsturd found some success on video, most triumphantly surfacing in Blockbuster after the chain purchased 4,000 DVD copies.

Popko and West hope Monsturd‘s cult notoriety will aid RetarDEAD, which happens to be its direct sequel. It starts exactly where Monsturd ended. "Dr. Stern [the mad scientist played by Popko-West pal Dan Burr] rises from the sewer," West explains. "He gets a job at an institute for special education and starts a test group on these special ed students. They become remarkably intelligent, and then the side effect is they become zombies."

"In a nutshell, we kind of liken it to Flowers for Algernon meets Night of the Living Dead," Popko interjects.

"It’s a background gag to get the whole premise of the joke title. People go, ‘Well, why is it RetarDEAD?’ It’s because we needed a gimmick," says West, adding that the title came before the film (and was settled upon after an early choice, Special Dead, was snatched up by another production).

Best friends since bonding over a shared love of Tom Savini, circa 1984, at Napa’s St. Helena High School, Popko and West are so well matched creatively that Burr describes them as "like the left hand and the right hand" on the same body. Both are keen on beguiling titles. Monsturd‘s original moniker (Number Two, Part One) was dropped after being deemed too esoteric; Monsturd, they figured, would solicit more interest in video stores.

"We knew it’s such a stupid title that you would have to rent it just to see if it was as dumb as you thought it was," West explains. And for self-financed filmmakers like West and Popko (who both have full-time jobs and estimate they spent $3,000 on Monsturd and $12,000 to $14,000 so far on RetarDEAD), clever marketing strategies are essential.

"We have to think, when we’re making these movies, what can we sell, what can we get out there, what can we make a name for ourselves with?" Popko says.

"On this level, you go to the exploitation rule, which is give ’em what Hollywood cannot or will not make," West adds. "And they’re not gonna make Monsturd."

Dirty deeds . . .

Monsturd took years to complete and taught the duo scores about the capriciousness of the DVD distribution biz. Though one review dubbed it "the greatest movie that Troma never made," Popko and West actually turned down a deal with the famed schlock house, unwilling to sign over the rights to their film for 25 years. After hooking up with another distributor, they didn’t see any money from their Blockbuster coup. Still, they remain proud of Monsturd and its success.

"We tried to make it the best movie we possibly could, but we had nothing," West explains. "We didn’t piss it out in a weekend. It took a year to shoot it, then it took a year to put the thing together."

"We didn’t just shit out a crappy movie, pardon the pun," Popko says.

Neither filmmaker seems concerned that their trash-tastic subject matter might prevent them from being taken seriously as artists. And it doesn’t bother them that Monsturd‘s joke tends to overshadow the film itself — not just for viewers, but for critics, who were by and large polarized by the killer shit-man tale.

Popko also recalls unsuccessfully submitting Monsturd to a half dozen film festivals intended to showcase DV and underground flicks. Quickly pointing out that the film got picked up anyway, he blames image-conscious programmers: "It’s like, how can you have a respectable film festival when you’ve got a shit monster movie playing in it?"

Though Popko and West live in San Francisco and filmed both Monsturd and RetarDEAD in Northern California, they say they don’t feel like part of the San Francisco filmmaking scene. Again, they suspect the whiff of poo might have something to do with it.

"We’ve kind of been ignored," West says. "We’re not bitter about it, but it would be nice to be acknowledged for what we’re doing — we’re making exploitation films, and we don’t really have any guilt about what we’re doing. It’d be nice for somebody to develop a sense of humor and acknowledge it once in a while."

. . . done dirt cheap

As with Monsturd, RetarDEAD is a nearly all-volunteer effort, pieced together when the responsibilities of real life permit. Despite the obstacles — say, a sudden insurance crisis involving a rented cop car — unpredictability is clearly part of the thrill.

"When you undertake this shit, it’s an adventure: ‘What did you do this weekend?’ ‘Well, I was chased by 42 zombies, and the weekend before that, a bunch of burlesque dancers ripped our villain apart and ripped his face off,’” West explains. "It’s like, how else would you spend your free time?"

This sentiment extends to the film’s cast, several of whom have known Popko and West for years and reprise their Monsturd roles in its sequel. Coming aboard for RetarDEAD were members of San Francisco’s Blue Blanket Improv group, as well as the Living Dead Girlz, a zombie-flavored local dance troupe.

Beth West, who jokingly calls herself a "fake actor," stars in both films as the X-Files-ish FBI agent (Dan West’s former wife, she was roped into the first production after the original lead dropped out). Despite both films’ bare-bones shoots — and other concerns, like trying (and failing) to keep continuity with her hairstyle over multiple years of filming — she remains upbeat about the experience: "I loved being part of such a big creative effort."

Though his character is torn to shreds in RetarDEAD, Burr agrees. "This film is going to be 100 times better than the last one, as far as direction, camera shots — everyone was more serious this time," he says. He hopes that RetarDEAD will help Popko and West expand their audience. "Someone’s gonna notice the talent there. Maybe not in the acting, but this is these guys’ lives. It’s never been my whole dream, but it’s always been their whole dream."

Splatter-day saints

For RetarDEAD, technical improvements over Monsturd, including the introduction of tracking shots, were important considerations. However, first things first: "We knew we wanted this to be gory as fuck," West says. An ardent fan of Herschell Gordon Lewis — notorious for stomach turners like 1963’s Blood Feast — West once hoped to lens a biopic of Lewis and his producing partner, David Friedman. Though it was never completed, he did get the Godfather of Gore’s permission to use a snippet of dialogue from the project in RetarDEAD.

"This whole thing begins with his intro — it’s like that Charlton Heston thing for Armageddon, where it’s like the voice of God — but it’s Herschell Gordon Lewis talking about gore," West says. "It was the one way I could go to my grave saying I finally figured out a way to work with Herschell Gordon Lewis."

Appropriately enough, RetarDEAD pays homage to Lewis’s signature style. "Monsturd had a couple of bloody scenes in it, but it was pretty tame," Popko says. "This here, we’re planning on passing out barf bags at the premiere because, I mean, it’s gross. We’ve got intestines and chain saws and blood all over the place."

Overseeing the splatter was director of special effects Ed Martinez, one of the few additional crew members (and one of few who were paid). A late addition to the production, he "made the movie what it is," according to West.

"A zombie film in this day and age, you can’t do amateur-quality makeup and get away with it — it’ll be a flop," says Martinez, who teaches special effects makeup at San Francisco’s Academy of Art University and is a veteran of films like The Dead Pit. "And [Popko and West] know that."

Though Martinez is used to working on bigger projects, he stuck with RetarDEAD — dreaming up such elaborate moments as a Day of the Dead–inspired man-ripped-in-half sequence — because, as he says, "In a way, I’m a coconspirator now." He also appreciates the directors’ sheer enthusiasm and appreciation. After a killer take, they were "literally high-fiving me. Most low-budget filmmakers are so egocentric they would rarely do anything like that. Good effects are important, but they’re not the only things that are important."

Dawn of RetarDEAD

Though a third movie in the Popko-West canon is already in the planning stages (Satanists!), it’s looking like several months before RetarDEAD — still being edited from 30-plus hours of raw footage — has its world premiere.

"We only get one to two nights a week to do this," Popko explains. Making movies for a living is the ultimate dream, but for now, both men view their films as being in the tradition of early John Waters: made outside the system and laden with as much bad taste as they please. Potential distributors have already advised the pair to adjust RetarDEAD‘s divisive title, a notion they considered "for about five minutes," according to West.

Popko and West’s films may be throwbacks to the drive-in era, but their outlook on the movie biz is actually quite forward-looking. Popko — "the carnival barker" to West’s "guy behind the curtain pulling levers and switching things," according to Burr — anticipates a day when tangling with queasy distributors won’t even be necessary, because many films will simply be released directly over the Internet. Both directors are also very interested in high-definition technology; they plan to upgrade from their old DV camera to a new HD model for their next effort, for reasons beyond a desire for better visual quality.

"What HD has done is bring grind house back," West says. "Now you can make stuff on a level that can compete, aesthetically, with what Hollywood’s doing — almost. As far as your talent, you’ll be able to compete realistically with other movies. Now people can make good horror movies on their own terms."

"If you really want to make a movie, you can," Popko notes, stressing the importance of production values. Though the cutthroat nature of the indie film world is always on their minds, they welcome the new wave of B-movies that HD may herald.

"Now, there aren’t movies like Shriek of the Mutilated that were done in the 1970s, which could compete [with Hollywood]. These movies can now come back into the fold as long as they’re shot on HD — and there will be a shit fest like none other," West predicts, adding that he’s looking forward to the deluge. "The world’s a better place with shitty movies in it." SFBG

The Guardian presents Monsturd

Mon/5, 9 p.m.

12 Galaxies

2565 Mission, SF

Free

(415) 970-9777

NOISE: Live, live, live, if you want it — Mission Creek and so much more

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You didn’t ask for it but you got it anyway…here’s beginning of your belated, scattershot lowdown on Mission Creek Music and Arts Festival as well as recent and not-so-recent shows.

vincentsm.jpg
Vincent Gallo on Polk Street last year.
He was in town to promote Brown Bunny.
Credit: Kimberly Chun

Last week, the name on everyone’s lips was Vincent Gallo. Vincent, Vincent, Vincent, we just can’t stop talking about him. Word had it he was a dick; other words had it he was charming; still more words had it that he had quite a dick (see BJ scene in Brown Bunny).

I caught the last couple songs of his Friday, May 19, show at Bimbo’s 365 Club, and boy, was it a madhouse. Gallo and Sean Lennon were seated, playing acoustic and electric instruments, trading quips. Gallo was in beige and in a chatty mood; most quoted bit of stage patter had to do with where he was staying (the Phoenix) and the fact that he was very lonely. You could practically read the minds of all the hot, fashionable ladies out on the sidewalk afterward the show: Do we swing by the Phoenix now, or later? I haven’t see so many cool, cute women in one spot in ages…

I guess the merch booth was partly geared toward them — Gallo was in sheer superstar mode, charging more than a $100 for plenty of items including art books, tankini and bikini sets, and “hand-made” Gallo shirts (a little bird told me he was up the night before spray-painting them in his Phoenix hotel room).

Chris Sabbath reports that at one point, Gallo made a remark about how he likes looking at Lennon naked but, to loosely paraphrase the man, “we all know the size of Asians.” Even Lennon looked uncomfortable at that moment, and vague noises of discontent and disgust were audible. The love returned quickly, though, as shout-outs of “We love you, Vincent,” “Chloe,” “Brown Bunny” began once again. After someone yelled, “Chloe,” Gallo said something about how they’re not really close friends.

Gallo also made a comment toward the end of the show that Lennon is his best friend and that he has such tremendous respect for him onstage because he’s so calm onstage. Meanwhile, he’s a ball of tension ready to explode. Reports have it he was all charm backstage, however, though a genuine worrier. Rumor was that he demanded a large pile of cash up front to play the show and then more handed to him the moment he left. It turned out to be just that: rumor.

DINOSAUR JR. ON THE RAMPAGE

Lets go back a way: Remember Dinosaur Jr.? Seems those April 19-20 shows were notable for their rockingness — and utter, abject loudness. Word has it that stuff broke as a result of the sheer volume at those shows — this after the Great American Music Hall had a new sound system installed. Triple-bummer.

mascissm.jpg
Stacked and jacked: J. Mascis at Great American Music Hall.
Credit: Kimberly Chun

Sources say J. Mascis is so deaf he needs the massive volume to simply hear himself on stage. Those Marshall stacks surrounding him had a real function after all.

Attack of the NIMBYs!

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› marke@sfbg.com

A fairy tale: Once upon a time there was a stone-hearted ogre named Capt. Dennis Martel of the San Francisco Police Department’s Southern Station. The Ogre Martel — either through manic moodiness, misguided morality, or perpetual constipation owing to the enchanted stick up his ass — was determined not to let people party like it was 1999. Thus he began terrorizing the nearby Clubbers of SoMa, a benign race of ravers, burners, and freaks who desired nothing more than peace, unity, respect, and free bottled water near the dance floor.

The ogre was relentless. Soon, after-hours party permits were being pulled, club owners fined for "attracting loiterers," and gentle electronica fans in bunny suits hauled downtown for daring to reek of reefer. SF’s premillennial party scene was in grave danger of becoming extinct, until a brave group of party people banded together and formed the San Francisco Late Night Coalition. These fair Knights of the Twirl-Around Table dedicated themselves to political action, local petitioning, and raising community awareness about the harmlessness of all-night dancing. Slowly but surely, they won over the hearts and votes of the townspeople, making clubbing safe again for all and banishing the evil Ogre Martel to parking lot duty at the airport. The end.

Well, not quite. Once again, good-natured fun in the Bay seems to be under attack. Only this time the threat comes not from one rogue cop and his wonky "cleanup" attempts, but from several nervous Nellies among the citizenry. As Amanda Witherell details in this issue, many of the city’s most revered street fairs, festivals, and outdoor events are now threatened by, among other things, higher fees, lack of alcohol sales permits, and sudden, oddball "concerns." And the story doesn’t stop there. The Pac Heights ski jump, amplified music in public spaces, and car-free Saturdays in Golden Gate Park have all recently been nixed by our supposedly green-minded go-go-boy mayor and his minions, under pressure from crotchety party poopers. Well-established clubs like the DNA Lounge, the Eagle Tavern, and — irony of ironies — the Hush Hush Lounge have had to dance madly and expensively around sound complaints. A popular wet-jockstrap contest in the Tenderloin was raided last month by cops, not because of the (whoops) accidental nudity and simulated sex, but because it was … too loud. Huzzacuzzawha?

While money and politics are certainly involved, the one common denominator in all this anti-fun is the squeaky wheel, the neighborhood killjoy who screams "not in my backyard!" These irksome drudges, the NIMBYs, are strangling San Francisco’s native spirit of communal cheer and outrageousness. Big business and corrupt political interests hinge their arguments for more money and less mirth on the whining of one or two finger waggers, despite overwhelming community support for the events being targeted. As often occurs in life, a single complaint carries far more weight than a hundred commendations. A few whack cranks bust the bash.

At this point one wants to shriek, "Move back to Mountain View, spoilsports!" And that’s exactly the message of the San Francisco Party Party, the latest grassroots effort to combat what Party Party leader Ted Strawser calls "the rampant suburbanization of the most gloriously hedonistic city on earth." NIMBYs are hard to spot; they come in every class and color and don’t always sport the telltale Hummers and French manicures of the previous generation of wet blankets (although they do often smell like diapers). The changing demographics of the city suggest that many new residents, mostly condo owners, commute to out-of-town jobs — in San Jose, say — and may be trying to transform San Francisco into a bedroom community.

"I don’t know who these quasi prohibitionists think they are, but they don’t belong here, that’s for sure," Strawser says. "Street culture and community gatherings are the reason San Francisco exists. We live our happy lives on the sidewalks and in the bars. And it’s bad enough we have to quit drinking at 2 a.m. Now we have to be quiet, too?"

The San Francisco Bike Coalition, the newly formed Outdoor Events Coalition, and the still-active Late Night Coalition are out in fabulous force to combat the NIMBYs. But, realizing the diffuseness of the problem, the Party Party is taking a less directly political, more Web-savvy approach to fighting San Francisco’s gradual laming, using its site as a viral locus for disgruntled partyers, a portal linking directly to organizations combating NIMBYs, and a guide to local fun stuff happening each week. "We’re a bunch of partyers, what can I say?" Strawser says. "We’re doing our best to shed light on all this insane NIMBY stuff, but we also love to go out drinking. And that’s a commitment many folks can relate to."

Let’s hope we can win the fight again this time (tipsy or no). San Francisco is a progressive city, dedicated to the power of microgovernment and the ability to have your voice heard in your community. If you don’t like what’s happening next door, you should be able to do something about it. But it’s also a city of constant reinvention and liveliness, exploration and celebration. That’s the reason we all struggle so much to stay here. That’s what shapes our soul.

If some people can’t handle it — well, the less the merrier, maybe. SFBG

www.sfpartyparty.com

www.sflnc.org

www.sfbike.org

Porn 2.0

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› pornomovies@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION In downtown San Francisco, if you wander off Fifth Street down a small, twisting alley nestled among the sky-high monuments to money, you’ll find a freshly installed steel door, the glowing numbers affixed to it bearing little relationship to the other addresses on the street. If you’re lucky enough to get past the security cameras and locks, you’ll find yourself at the edge of a huge warehouse space full of stages and sets.

Climb up the stairs that lead away from the "medieval castle" set, and you’re in a huge office space full of computers. People are on the phones, or swapping stories as they return from a trip to the Starbucks around the corner, or gathered in tight huddles around large, flat-screen monitors full of partial layouts. Only the bathrooms offer a hint about what’s really going on here. No ordinary office would stock its toilets with an enormous rack of baby wipes, paper towels, and every feminine hygiene product known to woman. This is Kink.com, home to half a dozen of the Web’s hottest porn sites.

Everyone always asks what porn has done for the Web, but they never ask what the Web has done for porn. A place like this, full of queer hipsters, geeks, and models, would never have existed before 1995. It certainly wouldn’t have looked quite so Ikea.

I’ve come here to visit the set of Fuckingmachines.com, a Web site devoted to images and movies of women having sex with machines. Usually the machine involves some sort of piston and at least one moving part to which a dildo can be attached. The sensibility is perfectly San Francisco: a cross between high-tech fetishism and sexual fetishism. Tomcat, the site’s understated Web master, wears a tie and jeans to the set. With a degree in film and digital media from a large public university, the self-consciously androgynous Tomcat is precisely the sort of hip young professional who is attracted to second-generation Web porn operations like Kink.

Tomcat makes sure the first machine (called "the chopper") is ready to go and picks out a pale blue dildo from a huge, tidy cart that contains — laid out with surgical precision — an array of silicone cocks in various sizes, a fanned display of condoms, towels, baby wipes, and several lube bottles. Next to it is a pine cabinet full of carefully labeled drawers containing "large dildos" and "small dildos." A tiny table holds some soft drinks packed in ice, as well as a handful of lemon Luna bars.

"Last week we did an alien abduction scene," Tomcat says. "It was great — I got to be the alien." Today’s model, a tall brunet with a lascivious smile, named Sateen Phoenix, arrives in a little dress and fuck-me shoes. Like Tomcat, she’s the sort of person who has the education and resources to choose from many careers and has chosen this one because she likes it. "I’m moving to LA to get more work," she says, sipping water. "But I just got into this about six months ago — I like having sex in public, so I thought, why not do it here?"

Settling onto the chopper, Sateen poses and reposes, replaying her naughty grin as many times as Tomcat asks. The scene behind the scenes here is all business. PAs discuss the merits of various lubes and dildos; everyone tries to figure out the ideal position for Sateen’s pussy so that everything fits together when the machine starts pumping. Tomcat manages to issue directions in the tone of a nice but task-masterish boss.

"I know it’s awkward with your knees and the handlebars, but go ahead and insert it so that it’s comfortable," the Web master says. "Now just wank a little until you get off."

"I don’t know if I can get off like this," Sateen suggests. "I’m too lubey."

"Get some baby wipes for her to take care of that lube," Tomcat directs the PA.

Eventually, using another machine called "the predator," Sateen starts screaming in a way that marks this whole scene, again, as something that could only happen in the world of Porn 2.0. She’s had a genuine orgasm, the kind of thing you’d almost never see a woman do in porn before the Web took over.

Ten minutes later, still shaking and sweaty, Sateen pulls on a robe and stumbles over to the snack table. She falls into a chair and lets out her breath in a whoosh.

"Hard work, eh?" she sighs, grinning at me. "Having orgasms all day?" SFBG

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who’s never met a machine she didn’t like.

Dishin

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For a complete schedule of the 10th annual Mission Creek Music and Arts Festival shows and events (May 14–22), go to www.mcmf.org. Check Noise, the Guardian‘s music blog, at www.sfbg.com/blogs/music, for more Mission Creek festival coverage.

Ane Brun

This Scandinavian neofolkie — it’s probably safe to say — is the only musician at Mission Creek who’s also had the pleasure of performing alongside Annie Lennox. Fittingly, sweet dreams are indeed made of the beautifully understated hymns on her putf8um-selling (overseas, at least) second album, A Temporary Dive (DetErMine/V2). The recording radiates so much warmth that even its bleakest lyrics — e.g., "I’m crawling on your floor, vomiting and defeated" — can’t help but sound strangely comforting. With Volunteer Pioneer, Tingsek, Ben and Barbara, and Fiji Mermaid. Sun/14, 8 p.m., Argus Lounge, 3187 Mission, SF. Call for price. (415) 824-1447 (Jimmy Draper)

Cloud Cult

Cult leader Craig Minowa suffered the loss of his two-year-old son in 2002 and has since used the tragedy to become an obsessively prolific writer and eco-activist. Hailing from Minneapolis, Cloud Cult offers a tie-dyed indie with the slightest hint of trip-hop and includes multimedia, such as live painters, as part of its stage show. With Hijack the Disco, Ebb and Flow, and Radius. Tues/16, 8 p.m. Make-Out Room, 3225 22nd St., SF. $8–$10. (415) 647-2888 (Izquierdo)

Edmund Welles Bass Clarinet Quartet

The bass clarinet is the granddaddy of all woodwinds, with a deep, warm tone and a punch, if used the right way. No one does it better than "the world’s only composing group of four bass clarinets." This foursome tackles Radiohead’s "Creep," original compositions with a metal sensibility, and even the Knight Rider theme with skill, humor, and a taste for the experimental. Tues/16, 9 p.m. 12 Galaxies, 2565 Mission, SF. $6. (415) 970-9777 (Eliana Fiore)

Ettrick

With 6/6/06 so rapidly approaching, it’s comforting to know that we’ve got hell’s house band right here in our own city. Enter Ettrick, a sax and drums duo that offers up a bludgeoning amalgam of black metal and skronk sure to summon the apocalypse. Jacob Felix Huele and Jay Korber rotate instruments to create an excruciating free jazz that feels like being trapped in a metal shed during a thunderstorm. Noise fans have no business missing this show. With Moe! Staiano, Tussle, Jackie O-Motherfucker, and Weasel Walter Quartet. May 20, 8 p.m., The Lab, 2948 16th St., SF. Call for price. (415) 864-8855 (Kate Izquierdo)

Hello Fever

The LA gothic garage-rock trio shows us how good an unholy alliance between Blonde Redhead and Joy Division can sound. Comb your hair over your eyes, stare at your shoes, and think very angry thoughts — this is the soundtrack to your angst. With Hey Willpower, Anna Oxygen, and Flaming Fire. May 17, 9 p.m. 12 Galaxies, 2565 Mission, SF. $8–$10. (415) 970-9777 (Izquierdo)

Joules

Technical without being contrived, and lush without being wimps, this Seattle post-math trio takes unduutf8g guitars and peppers them with beats of varying persuasions. Check out Joules’s MySpace page for "Hole Ole," a flamenco send-up with hand claps that morphs into a crashing sonic expedition. With Crime in Choir, Modular Se, and Madelia. Tues/16, 8 p.m. Knockout, 3223 Mission, SF. Call for price. (415) 550-6994 (Izquierdo)

Sunburned Hand of the Man

The band jams folk-drone psychedelia without all the hippie baggage — awesome! For almost a decade this Boston collective of improvisers has cut its teeth in the experimental-noise circle on distortion-charged blowouts, backbiting electronics, and tribal-chanting powwows. With the Alps, the Cheapest and Best, and Effi Briest. Tues/16, 9:30 p.m. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. $8. (415) 923-0923 (Sabbath)

Vincent Gallo

Actor, musician, and painter extraordinaire Vincent Gallo is no stranger to controversy. After the online sperm auctions and the fire-eater scene with a certain deep-throater, it should come as to no surprise that the Republican-happy, onetime break-dancing b-boy and ex–Calvin Klein model is the talk of the town. Though the Buffalo, NY, native’s narcissistic reputation might not earn him any brownie points, his musical contributions are something of another world — he has a sharp know-how for fabricating song structures seeded somewhere between the modestly stark, incredibly warm, and overtly depressive. He’s the sole producer and performer on his recordings in the same way that he’s the singular auteur behind Buffalo 66 and Brown Bunny, and like those absorbing films, his short, penetrating songs leave you salivating for more. You can only hope Gallo’s debut musical performance in the Bay Area will leave you with the same afterglow his movies do. With Sean Lennon and Carla Azar. May 19, 9 p.m., Bimbo’s 365 Club, 1025 Columbus, SF. $20. (415) 474-0365 (Chris Sabbath)

Real huff

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

There was a period in the early to mid-’80s when Dieselhed absolutely ruled the San Francisco music scene. Like the previous generation’s Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 or Primus, or maybe today’s Joanna Newsom or Deerhoof, fans enthusiastically lined up to catch the popular quintet every time the group played. To see Dieselhed once was to love them forever. You’ve got that chance, as they’re re-forming for one night at this year’s Mission Creek Music Festival.

What made them so fucking great? For starters, the music: crashing cow-punk guitars alternating with twangy tearjerkers and, over it all, Virgil Shaw’s and Zac Holtzman’s sweet, incandescent harmonies. Dieselhed was a band with a fully formed aesthetic whose keenly observed stories (and all their songs told stories) wheeled out quintessentially quotidian Northern Californian lives: dreaming of a world beyond Humboldt County, summers spent working on fishing boats in Alaska, weddings on the Hornblower, buying titty mags at the 7-Eleven, touring Sonoma Valley small towns and playing breweries, the guy who makes the hash browns at the local greasy spoon.

It was easy to imagine they were singing about you, and sometimes they were: Dieselhed’s number one fan was always the taxi dispatcher and perpetually tipsy Corinne, and, heck, they wrote a song about her: "Corrine Corrine/ Look at you spin / You’ve got me in a half nelson." The shit was funny — because it was so real — to everyone, including the characters they sang about in their songs: the girl who whispers into her poodle’s ear, the waitress at the truck stop, the guy studying for the forklift operator’s exam.

The band was wonderfully inclusive: Sing-alongs quickly came to include audience-participatory gestures, like the big O-shaped upstretched arms we all flew to represent the diamond ring in "The Wedding Song." Shaw’s then-adolescent sisters, who were budding songwriters in their own right, made guest appearances.

In another example of Dieselhed’s absolute command of who they were and what they meant, there were the improv numbers that charted their growing popularity and the changes in their lives. In "Someday We Won’t Be a Band," each member took to the mic to weave an always different story of what someone else in the group would be doing years hence. What will that tune sound like this time around? It’s guaranteed to have us laughing and crying.

The main thing is this: Dieselhed will always be relevant, and they never fucking lost it. Shaw’s now an acclaimed solo act. Holtzman formed the Cambodian pop group Dengue Fever and is licensed in Chinese medicine. Drummer Danny Heifetz up and moved to Australia. And I can’t wait to hear what bassist Atom Ellis and guitarist Shon McAllin are up to. "Someday we won’t be a band," Dieselhed sang, "but for now, we totally exist!" SFBG

Dieselhed

With Fantasy, Sonny Smith, and Marc Capelle

May 21, 8 p.m.

12 Galaxies

2565 Mission, SF

$10 advance, $12 door

(415) 970-9777

When the lights go up

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

"I wanted to make something that was really grand and epic, that was really composed, and maybe kind of mythic, in the way that a lot of those protometal bands were trying to do," Ezra Feinberg of Citay says, his postpsychedelic, postmetal outfit. Feinberg is inspired by hard rock–metal bands of the late 1960s and 1970s, such as Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Deep Purple, whose used power chords as the basis for their grand, jazz-inspired, narrative song structures. Favoring melodies interwoven with narratives over power chords, Feinberg has turned Citay into a kinder, gentler incarnation of the archetypal headbanging unit. "I wasn’t writing the songs with a drummer, you know, where it’s about power chords and physical energy," he explains. "Instead, it was more melody-driven composition and harmony."

Anyone who has listened to Citay’s carefully crafted, self-titled debut will tell you that composition is clearly Feinberg’s modus operandi. Each song is knit tightly around melodies that aren’t so much meandering as on a journey with a distinct destination. Though Feinberg is admittedly obsessed with Led Zeppelin, and Citay’s emphasis on instrumentation wears its classic rock–metal influences on its sleeve, it is the disciplined melodies and more nuanced harmonies, à la the Beach Boys and the Byrds, combined with a scampering mandolin and lackadaisical tambourine, that make Citay’s music accessible and original. Citay’s forthcoming Mission Creek performance and upcoming summer tour with Vetiver might make a comparison to the psych-folk movement an apt one, even though Feinberg is quick to distance Citay from any such categories.

The 29-year-old Boston native wrote and composed the album using a cache of instruments and a multitrack computer program in his Excelsior apartment, the results of which he brought to Louder Studios to collaborate with Tim Green (the Fucking Champs, Nation of Ulysses), with whom Feinberg had worked previously in Brooklyn when Green produced the album by Feinberg’s "sludge metal" band, Feast.

Feinberg credits Green with much of the Citay sound and with adding another dimension to his music. "If the record is any good, a lot of it is because of Tim," he says. "I had the songs, which were written — the parts and the melodies were already there — but he added so much." Tim Soete, of the Fucking Champs, also contributed backing vocals and guitar.

Not only is Green’s Louder Studios the home of Citay the band, but it was also the home of Feinberg for about a month after he moved from Brooklyn to San Francisco in 2004. Having spent four years in Brooklyn working with Feast and a few other musical endeavors, Feinberg felt as though he was "done" with the Brooklyn music scene and considered moving to be an opportunity to focus on writing music for himself, outside of a collaborative band environment. "I felt that I needed to musically be alone for a little while, which sounds really juvey and dramatic, but I had just been doing the band thing for so long. I knew that I wanted to keep writing music, but I knew that I wanted to do it in another way."

Now that the Citay album has been released, on Important Records, to largely glowing reviews, the challenge for Feinberg has been transutf8g that sound in performance, a process that has always evolved the other way around for the songwriter. He’s still solidifying Citay’s live lineup, which currently includes eight friends drawn from Crime in Choir, the Dry Spells, Ascended Master, By Land and Sea, Skygreen Leopards, and Tussle. "It’s the first time that I’ve ever gone from the studio to the stage," he says. SFBG

Citay

With Silver Sunshine, Persephone’s Bees, the Winter Flowers, and Willow Willow

May 20

7 p.m.

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

$10 advance, $12 door

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com

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