SFBG photog Ariel Soto scoops SF street fashion. See her last Street Threads installment here.
Today’s Look: Michael, 18th St. and Castro
Tell us about your look: “My fashion philosophy is all about layers. The weather is so unpredictable; I just always layer up in the morning.”
By Molly Freedenberg
All Benni wants for Valentine’s Day is you … and another tattoo.
The first Suicide Girls event I attended was a prom several years ago, before SGs became minor celebrities, appearing on Real Sex and in Dave Grohl’s video and touring the country with Warped Tour or their own burlesque show. It was held at some dive bar near the Tenderloin, the kind of place where you drink cheap beer and don’t want to put your jacket on the ground. My how things have changed. Now, the alt pin-up site will co-host an event at the swanky Supperclub for Valentine’s Day. The event promises to be interesting eye candy for casual observers and hardcore SG fans alike, as not only will tattooed and Manic Panic-ed sexpots be in attendance, but performing aerial tissu and go-go dancing. And since SGs also have come a long way since their original underwhelming live performances — thanks to an influx of models who also are talented performers, as well as better stage management and choreography — chances are the shows will be worth seeing for more reasons than just witnessing your online masturbation material come alive. (Though that’s as good a reason to go as any.)
Feb. 14, 7:30pm-2am, $100
Love is Hell (in Bed)
Supperclub
657 Harrison, SF
(415) 348-0900
www.supperclub.com
Did VVM hire these people to game Digg?
By Steven T. Jones
SF Weekly parent company Village Voice Media has been exposed for predatory financial practices, undermining good journalists and practicing unethical journalism, and secretly using a social networking tool in a sleazy way to promote its advertisers.
Now, a detailed investigation by thedeets.com shows how VVM has been gaming Digg.com (which is a tenant of ours in the Guardian Building) to inflate the number of page views on its websites, apparently hoping to fool advertisers and the public into thinking they have more readers than they really do.
VVM spokesperson Andy Van De Voorde refused to comment on the substance of the allegation, instead offering only taunts and insults and writing by e-mail, “Now here we go again with the obligatory request for comment, all under the guise of fair reporting.”
Digg spokesperson Beth Murphy told the Guardian, “We don’t really talk specifics with regards to individual Diggers, sites or media outlets in order to protect their privacy and ensure a level playing field. What I can tell you is that various sites can perform better on Digg based on social media tools and the breadth and diversity of their audience. For sites or individuals that attempt to game or spam Digg, as always, we’ve developed the back-end systems and algorithms to flag and detect gaming.”
By Breena Kerr
Send your personal Valentine’s day horror story (300 words or less) to culture@sfbg.com by Wednesday, Feb 11. We’ll print our favorite on the SEX SF blog, and its writer will win two tickets for a five-course meal and a show at Teatro Zinzanni.
Though it’s tempting to write off Valentine’s Day as a Hallmark holiday invented by Corporate America, the truth is that its origins extend back much further than American capitalism. In fact, it’s thought the celebration we know today started with the Christian appropriation of Lupercalia, the mid-February pagan festival ancient Romans celebrated to honor the coming of spring.
Back then, ancient priests (Luperci) sacrificed a goat and a dog for fertility and purification. The goat’s hide would then be sliced into strips and carried into the streets by boys who paraded around, dipping the lengths into bowls of sacrificial blood. Making their way across town, the young men slapped women and crop fields with the bloody strips, marking them with the promise of fertility for the coming year — and getting their girls horny in the process.
Thus the Valentine’s Day connection between sex and carnage was born. In our modern times, however, the carnage is often less literal and more emotional: impossible expectations, botched dates, ridiculous gifts, and horrible sex. In honor of this day of Great Disappointments, we invite you to send in your Valentine’s Day horror story.
I’ll get us started with mine, courtesy of V-Day 2008:
BREAKING NEWS: PG&E electricity goes out at a restaurant just four blocks or so from the Potrero Hill power plant
By Bruce B. Brugmann
And so about 2 p.m. this afternoon (Thursday, 2/5/09), I walked in to the Just For You restaurant, just four blocks or so from the Potrero Hill power plant in the heart of Dogpatch. I wondered if PG&E had known I was coming in for my regular lunch of fried oysters.
For lights were out, the place was empty, and the proprietor, the normally jolly Arienne Landry, was sitting disconsolately in the corner with some friends and workers.
Arienne said that the electricity was off in the whole area and that PG&E had told someone who called that it would be back on at 3 p.m. “But they always say they can’t guarantee power,” she said, shaking her head at her shortened, expensive lunch hour. I asked if PG&E know I was coming. Arienne laughed.
I asked how much she was out in money. She said about $200 to $300. Arienne, who was reported in the Potrero View as a possible candidate for district supervisor, said she needed the money and would write to PG&E and ask for a reduction in her PG&E bill or other form of compensation. She said she would also copy the California Public Utilities Commission, the SF Board of Supervisors, and the Small Business Commission.
She said she would also ask the CPUC, the board, and the SBC to do a study of PG&E’s treatment of San Francisco restaurants and other small businesses on service, reliability, rates, and collection policies.
It looks to me as if she has a good and timely issue. PG&E is a notorious no or slow pay for damages to small business, but the company is quick and tough as hell on small businesses that are slow pay, which many are these days. We get lots of complaints at the Guardian about PG&E hardball policies on small business and on their customers.
Now more than ever, PG&E should be giving a break to small businesses and not shove them against the wall on compensation for blackouts and slow pay and other increasing small business concerns.
We’ll follow Arienne’s request for compensation for damages. And we urge other small business people and their customers/residents to email us their problems with PG&E service and rates. There’s no reason, except for PG&E resistance, that the CPUC and SF shouldn’t start monitoring how PG&E treats our local small businesses. More: they should provide ombudsperson help during these tough times.
Meanwhile, I must report that the power at Just For You did go back on a few minutes before 3 p.m. And I did get my usual lunch of fried oysters with lots of red cajun sauce. They were better than ever today. B3, who sees from my office window the fumes of the Potrero Hill plant, pumping poisons into the city every minute of every day, courtesy of PG&E and Hearst journalism
By Johnny Ray Huston
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Coconot, Cosa Astral (Bcoredisc)
One of the things I like most about Pablo Díaz Reixa is his mode of singing. There’s something really endearing and adorable about it – some of his choruses sound like chants at an athletic event, but not all macho, just enthusiastic.
Coconot is the band he plays with when isn’t being El Guincho. To be honest, I kind of like Cosa Astral even more than El Guincho’s Alegranza, because Diaz-Reixa leaves more space in the overall sound, and things aren’t so exhaustively manic. (Though the manic tendencies can also be endearing.) Amongst the nine tracks, I’m already entranced by at least three: “Te tenía en cinta,” which is like a carnival winding down; the joyous and loose Afrobeat shimmer of “Tao”; and “Miles de ojos,” a Surrealist-influenced sonic vision with a chorus that is impossible to stop singing once you’ve heard it.
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Nite Jewel, My CD (Human Ear) and Good Evening (Gloriette)
One shorthand interpretation of Ramona Gonzalez’s recording project Nite Jewel is that it’s a bit like Glass Candy or Chromatics on Quaaludes. I don’t know if I like Nite Jewel quite as much as Glass Candy’s underrated B/E/A/T/B/O/X (c’mon, they made “Computer Love” melancholic, what’s not to love?) – or if I like it more.
Gonzalez’s singing is both high-pitched and kinda dazed. On “Weak 4 Me,” she reminds me of Mr. Bill, which can never be a bad thing. “What Did He Say” might be the best Nite Jewel song so far – it sounds like a radio playing “I Can’t Wait” by Nu Shooz slowly sinking to the bottom of a pool. I’d like to see Nite Jewel live. SF isn’t that far from LA.
You’re gonna miss me: an old Wild Thing poster.
By L.C. Mason
Newly emerged and ready to rip every show to shreds, the San Francisco-stationed Wild Thing are, as described by their MySpace page, “punk, punk, punk.”
The group’s rough-hewn repertoire and unsigned outsider status certainly fit the punk canon like a glove. Gritty guitars and beer-soaked group vocals are found all over tracks like “You’re a Punk” and “I Can’t Stand It.” Disaffected lyrics and clanging cymbals that sound like Animal of the Muppets got himself a legitimate band, complete with humans, mean you can make Wild Thing your excuse for coming home with inexplicably ripped clothes, lost valuables, or a sore neck.
Having just returned from the Dummer Bummer fest in Portland, Ore., with Bay Area rock denizens Apache and Nobunny, the brazen quartet will get stomping this Sunday, Feb. 8, at Thee Parkside – which may be hell on you come Monday, but will be well worth once you watch this combo spread its wings.
WILD THING
With Annihilation Time, A.N.S., Sabertooth Zombie, and Futur Skullz
Sun/8, 6 p.m., $8
Thee Parkside
1600 17th St., SF
(415) 252-1330
Wanna see my ‘stache: Eagles of Death Metal’s “Solid Gold.”
Confucius may not have approved of 1015’s big ole Chinese NY beat-down – but, hey, he never really knew how to par-tay. Here’s more fun schtuff that shoulda, coulda, but didn’t make it to print.
Delta Spirit
Northern soul and indie rock – just the combo for the San Diego unit. With Other Lives and Dawes. Wed/4, 8:30 p.m. doors, $12. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. (415) 621-4455.
Origami Ghosts
Raul Sanchez hosts the contemplative Seattle indie-rockers at his monthly semi-acoustic Penny Arcade showcase. With Eyes, Il Gato, and Floating Robot Familiar. Wed/4, 8 p.m., $7. Make-Out Room, 3225 22nd St., SF. (415) 647-2888.
LOCAL ARTIST Josh Hagler
TITLE Golgotha (72 by 108 inches, oil on canvas)
BIO Josh Hagler has exhibited artwork in galleries in London, Toronto, New York City, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area. He is the recipient of the Wildgift Movement Grant. In the spring of 2010, he will have his first European solo exhibition at Galerie Raphael in Frankfurt, Germany.
SHOW "72 Virgins to Die For," Thurs/5 through March 1 (reception Thurs/5, 6–9 p.m.). Frey Norris Gallery, 456 Geary, SF. (415) 346-7182, www.freynorris.com
WEB www.joshuahagler.com, www.joshuahagler.blogspot.com
› paulr@sfbg.com
You would expect that a restaurant with "green chile" in its name would serve at least one memorable dish with green chiles, and Green Chile Kitchen does. In fact, the restaurant serves a host of memorable dishes (some with green chiles, many others without) and, because it’s in the middle of NoPa rather than at, or just past, the edge of it, Green Chile could be the best restaurant in NoPa. Much would depend on our understanding of NoPa: region with definite borders or state of mind?
This is the sort of question some of us occasionally mull with respect to Mexico. There is, or was, Old Mexico, whose reach extended all the way up the Pacific Coast to the Strait of Juan de Fuca (near Seattle), and there was (and is) New Mexico, one of the Lower 48. The boundaries of Mexico have long been hazy; a legal border has existed since the end of the 1848 war (a good account of how it was drawn can be found in Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848), but, as travelers through the Southwest can attest, the reality is far more zonal and interesting.
Green Chile Kitchen serves a good deal of what the menu describes as "New Mexican" food, and much of this seems Mexican, or Mexicanish, with Indian and desert overtones: salsas and guacamole, tortilla chips made from blue corn, and pinto beans. The restaurant opened about three years ago in a location easily reached by USF students and Haightsters, and it strikingly combines elements of college-town café and stylish restaurant. You order at the counter and carry a numbered plastic doodad to your table so the service staff can find you, and while you wait you admire the soaring ceiling, the burnished wood trim, and the pale sage paint scheme. Full table service would seem to be about a half baby step away, but maybe the current arrangement provides some real savings. Even given the kitchen’s emphasis on organic ingredients, the prices are surprisingly gentle.
There is no better deal to be had on Green Chile Kitchen’s menu than the green chile stew ($4.50/cup, $6.95/bowl). The scale isn’t quite that of a typical pho at a Vietnamese restaurant, but it’s considerable, and the stew itself is an impressive, faintly smoldering collection of green chile strips, chunks of slow-roasted Niman Ranch pork, quartered potatoes, and bits of tomato in a clear, even-tempered broth. The broth (vegetable, I thought) was key; it didn’t add as much flavor as an animal-based stock might have, but, like subtly textured white walls in a museum, it let the main ingredients be heard without completely disappearing itself.
If you pine for the modesty of Fresca or Limon in their earliest incarnations, you will thrill to GCK’s rotisserie chicken (made with Fulton Valley birds). A half-chicken dinner costs $10.95; the bird is rubbed with your choice of herbed citrus or green chile and is served with blue-corn chips, Spanish rice, beans (pinto, black, or refried), and calabacitas, a succotash-like jumble of green and yellow squash cubes, corn kernels, and bits of green chile. The chicken itself was expertly cooked, the dark meat done through while the white meat remained juicy. That is the test of all roast chicken. The party of the second part did register some mild disappointment with the pinto beans, which were thought to be underpowered. A jolt of some blood-red salsa helped bring them back into trim.
I was slightly disappointed in the quesadilla ($3.50), which combined jack and cheddar cheeses to colorful effect but suffered from a dry and brittle tortilla. And the starters offered what little sticker shock there is to be found on the menu. The plato de aperitivos cost $11.95, and while it was full of bright variety — from a pair of tamales to a crock of pristine guacamole to a quartet of salsas and a heap of blue-corn chips to dip in them — the price seemed a little high for what was, after all, mostly starch, indeed mostly corn.
Still, the salsas were excellent: a tour de force of salsa-making. There was the regular tomato kind (seemingly darkened and deepened by roasting), a smooth-tart, pale-green blend of avocado and tomatillo, a pico de gallo, and — the standout — a habañero number the color of lobster bisque, with a hint of citrus fruitiness mixed in to temper some of the high heat. (Habañeros can be quite deadly to the tongue in their pure, untempered form.) When we wearied of using these salsas to coat chips, we started spooning them over the rice and beans and the forlorn quesadilla to pleasing effect.
In the evenings, the people come and go, talking of … well, probably not Michelangelo so much as takeout, which appears to be an appreciable part of the business. (So are breakfast and lunch services.) The clientele tilts toward hip-looking youth, although older people are not unrepresented and we even noticed what seemed to be a family grouping: a set of parents in late middle age and their young-adult children, everyone eating and happy in one another’s company, as if on a sitcom from the 1950s. Not many restaurants are able to cast so wide a net. Green Chile Kitchen, by serving distinctive, carefully made food in an attractive setting at a moderate cost, manages to appeal simultaneously to the price-conscious, setting-conscious, and quality-conscious constituencies. And for those of us who have finger in each of those pies — or stews — the word can only be jackpot.
GREEN CHILE KITCHEN
Sun.–Thurs., 9 a.m.–-9:30 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 9 a.m.–10 p.m.
601 Baker, SF
(415) 614-9411
Beer and wine
AE/DISC/MC/V
Noisy
Wheelchair accessible
› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER They play together yet dislike each other — that’s Fucked Up. Literally. The Toronto legends of hardcore — add as many "post-"s as you like to that descriptor — and their grew-up-together-but-grew-apart relationship may sound like the tale of so many other long-running rock bands, sticking it out for the big checks, groupies, coke binges, and Courvoisier. Instead the Fucked Up folks appear to be more interested in putting together albums that will stand up against the punk singles on Kill by Death and Dangerhouse that made major indents in their consciousness.
"We were obsessed with those records and wanted to put ourselves in that continuum," says vocalist Pink Eyes, a.k.a., Damian Abraham, 29, sometime TV writer, onetime-reality TV star ("There were some choice moments of me going record shopping juxtaposed with my wife eating a cheap hotdog on the street, me going to an expensive dinner and her going home and doing laundry," he says of Newly Wed Nearly Dead), and frothing, rabid record collector. Eventually, he adds, "we realized that as much as we don’t get along and hate being on the road together, this is the most exciting, most creative thing that any of us will ever do. So we’ll see how it goes."
For their trouble, the group managed to make one of the best rock, punk, or what-have-you releases of ’08 with its second full-length, The Chemistry of Common Life (Matador).
But all that’s natural, normal, and Fucked Up. "We’ve been a band a long time," confesses Abraham. He’s known guitarist Mike Haliechuk, a.k.a., 10,000 Marbles, for about 14 years — since they were 16 — and grew up in the same neighborhood, played in bands, or shared radio shows with the rest. So does familiarity breed hatred? "A lot of us don’t have any shared interests anymore," the vocalist says by phone on the way to a New Orleans show. "But we’re still held together by this thing that is Fucked Up."
After all, "I’m diagnosed with mental problems," Abraham continues with the barest hint of mirth. "But I think there are several people who have undiagnosed mental problems. So we have a bunch of people who are undermedicated and one guy who is overmedicated. People who have crippling record-buying addictions and people who have crippling tastes in techno.
"We do all like sushi."
That search for commonality had to happen after the combo’s first album, Hidden World (Jade Tree, 2006), which made Fucked Up "transition into a quote-unquote real band," explains Abraham. "Prior to that we did a band that was mainly putting out 7-inches and playing the odd show, but then we put out Hidden World and we had the responsibilities of touring and actually playing full-length shows! It wasn’t just kids paying to see a show — it was kids paying to see us, which we weren’t really used to before that."
With Chemistry the members all retreated to their corners to work on lyrics and music separately. "No one person’s voice silenced any one else’s," Abraham says. "I think it was a survival method." The result was a kind of call and response between extremely different makers, a strategy that resolved into a shockingly rich recording that draws from the clean, epic qualities of classic rock as well as the bodyslamming force of hardcore.
"From my perspective [Hidden World] was about identifying social ills," offers Abraham, "and this record was more about trying to understand those social ills, trying to accept and work with the world around us, the forces of nature, government, and religion especially."
And in some ways, among the resonant instrumentals and pummeling rock-outs — music that scrambles the "conventions of punk," as Abraham puts it, much like the sound of Mind Eraser, Cold World, and No Age — Chemistry is about the search for that hard-won community among hardheaded, hardcore individuals. Call these anthems of a kind of togetherness for lone wolves who might wear "Jesus Should Have Been Aborted" T-shirts. "Hands up if you think you’re the only one," the frontman hollers during "Twice Born." The response: "We all got our fucking hands up!"
Still, the fights over the van radio must be monumental. "Mike is the techno fan," Abraham says. "It’s unfortunate because he’s very persuasive and he’s convinced several other members of the band to like it too. I’m resistant, as well as Jonah [Falco, a.k.a., drummer Guinea Beat]. All I can say is thank god for the invention of personal music players."
FUCKED UP
Sun/8, 8 p.m., $13
Independent
628 Divisadero, SF
—————-
LOVE TO HATE YOU, BABY
Switchfoot’s Jon Foreman plus Nickel Creek’s Sean Watkins equals dreamy pop. Thurs/5, 8 p.m., $20. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com
The local label gets down with new CDs by Trevor Childs and the Beholders, Hey! Brontosaurus, and Cyndi Harvell. Fri/6, 9 p.m., $10. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com
Wu-Tang’s five-year-planner breaks out his latest digi-snack, the Afro Samurai Resurrection OST soundtrack (Wu Music/Koch). Sun/8, 8 p.m. doors, $20–<\d>$26. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. www.mezzaninesf.com
The Minneapolis rapper takes his blend of rock and hip-hop up a notch to Never Better (Rhymesayers). Mon/9, 9 p.m., $10. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Drummer Liam Morrison’s bandmates in the Amazements — Brendan, his guitar-playing brother, and Elon Etzioni, vocalist and bassist — could be heard jamming a symphonic-sounding Laibach track in the background when he picked up his phone in Los Angeles. It only got more peculiar from there: the Amazements ended up reeling off more funny, bizarre anecdotes than most groups ever accumulate in their lifetime.
For instance, there’s the incident when the Cobra Snake guy showed up to one of the ensemble’s shows: "He didn’t take any photos … he just left!" Brendan explained. "Either he was intimidated or really unaware." Conversely, they were once photographed by Mick Rock — but never got to see the shots.
In any case, no photo can do justice to the band’s dynamic, which, musically and in conversation, is tight-knit and eccentric. They quietly, relentlessly rib one another through the entire interview, and their music — a fanged and crazed take on garage-rock tradition in the James Williamson–era Stooges sense — seems born of an understanding that’s taken years to sediment. Each of them are quite young — Etzioni and Brendan are 22, and Liam is 20 — but they started playing together as preteens way back in 2001, making what Liam described as "crappy improvised stuff" based around three-chord structures.
They eventually ventured into "song" territory and arrived at a crossroads when they were hired — through Etzioni’s dad, Marvin, a member of 1980s group Lone Justice — to play an instrumental for a record by country vocalist Grey Delisle, who required a "raw garage rock" sound for one of her songs. Such straight-shootin’ session work wasn’t really the Amazements’ thing, however, as their unabashed reverence for some heavily varied sonic touchstones makes clear. As favorites, they name the Rolling Stones’ Tattoo You (Virgin, 1981), L.A. rap station Power 106, and James Brown, whose "Get It Together" they give a possessed, clanging rendition live and on record. They’re likewise fond of Three 6 Mafia: the Amazements can cover 12 songs by the Oscar-winning rap group, including a striking word-for-word version of "Side 2 Side."
An Amazements song sounds like little else: they feel Shaggs-y in their odd, homegrown sense of rock, but they definitely aren’t making music in a vacuum. In fact, last year they curated and headlined four weeks of shows at Pehrspace, the up-and-coming downtown L.A. venue where, according to Brendan, the combo "arrived at performing pubescence." In 2006 they appeared in the 40 Bands 80 Minutes! documentary, and as Etzioni mentioned, their appearance later got shouted out in Thurston Moore and Byron Coley’s column for Arthur magazine.
Finally, after two years of work, they’re now within inches of completing their first full-length, soon to be released by Peter’s Pool Boys. "We’re trying to make a masterpiece!" exclaimed Liam — a claim that, judging by what I’ve heard, will likely be fulfilled. According to the group, one of the record’s most fearsome songs, "Time Anus," is a "skate anthem in Colorado" due to its inclusion in a boarding vid put together by Etzioni’s cousin, Connor MacLeod.
"Watch Your Step," meanwhile, was born of a bewildering, improvised Etzioni vocal over a short, looped sample from the tail end of curio-funk number "Tutti Fruit," and where the original "Step" was distorted with disorienting effect — "Some frequency in the loop made people nauseous and feverish," Brendan said — its finished form pairs a frenzied, devolved-sounding rap with totally wired peals of pitch-shifted guitar. It’s anomalously awesome.
If the album’s not done by tour, the Amazements will have homemade CD-Rs for purchase at their shows, which will be well worth picking up. They don’t get to play out of town that often, so roll by a gig and get your head hammered onto their proverbial stick.
AMAZEMENTS
With Hungry Ghost, Sad Horse, the Sandwitches
Fri/6, 9 p.m., $5
Argus Lounge
3187 Mission, SF
www.arguslounge.com
Also with Pierre Le Robot and Cupids
Mon/9, 9:30 p.m., free
Blondie’s Bar and No Grill
540 Valencia, SF
www.blondiesbar.com
Parisian hottie and Disco Death Tour headliner Arnaud Rebotini sports the slicked-back pompadour and vintage-shirted ensemblage of a primo rockabilly daddy — right down to the fifth of Jack Daniels he usually stashes behind his onstage equipment — augmented by the handlebar mustache of a ’70s porn star.
The music he makes, however, both as the vocalist with "frozen Balearic gay biker house" heroes Black Strobe and on his own as an analog electro-warrior in a laptop landscape, suggests more a canny backroom raver than a rhythm-and-blues or retro-disco traditionalist. Not to say that the rumble of souped-up engines and the salacious whir of Super-8 skin flicks don’t stream through his ancient electronics, but he’s definitely more about raising hands in the air than laying down steamy riffs.
Rebotini’s last solo release, Music Components (Citizen, 2008), was a valiant and largely successful attempt to build an solid dancefloor set around analog fanboy fetish instruments like the Korg Monopoly, Juno 60, and TRs 909 and 808 — no laptops or external sequencers allowed. What emerged was a MIDI wet dream that stomped the jambox and inverted the Valerie and Ghostly International camps’ Ableton-driven nostalgia formula — this man who looked like he walked right out of Can made actual music of the moment on his tinny machines.
Meanwhile, Black Strobe transformed from a witty electroclash-like DJ-vocalist duo into a full-blown live four-piece, which, confusingly, will be performing a DJ set on the tour. Also on hand will be earnest acid-disco hipsters In Flagranti — but my dream of dreams would be for Rebotini, French king of the analog 808, to someday team up with Alexander Robotnik, Italian king of the acid-generating 303, for a mind-blowing all-night session of laptopless hiptwisters. Rebotini and Robotnik in 2010!
DISCO DEATH TOUR
With Arnaud Rebotini, Black Strobe DJ set, and In Flagranti
Sat/7, 10 p.m., $10 advance
103 Harriet, SF
By L.C. Mason
Coupling the two seemingly opposed sonic realms of folk and metal into one paganism-loving, mythology-obsessed subgenre, folk metal is a sphere of music that enjoys a healthy European following. Across the Atlantic in San Francisco, Slough Feg are fiercely holding down the fort.
Taking cues from genre pioneers Skyclad and fantasy metalists Iron Maiden, Slough Feg have been serving up face-melting solos, gut-churning bass lines, and otherworldly lyrics on the same plate since the ’90s. Songs are woven like elaborate sagas, with vocalist Michael Scalzi growling operatically about war, immortality, the cruel hands of fate, and other ancient plagues on the human psyche, while “Don” Angelo Tringali propels them into epic territory with his blistering breakdowns. They lay it down at the Eagle Tavern Thursday with fellow city dwellers Orb of Confusion, but you better watch yourself; this brand of music makes starting a midweek drinking binge seem like a good idea.
SLOUGH FEG
With Orb of Confusion, Modig Wuht, and Cold Cutz
Thurs/5, 9 p.m., call for price
Eagle Tavern
398 12th St., SF
(415) 626-0880
All right, I’m not gonna try and pretend The Achievers: The Story of the Lebowski Fans and Deadgirl have all that much in common, other than they’re both playing the San Francisco Independent Film Festival. But they do both focus on folks with peculiar obsessions, healthy and otherwise.
Camera in hand, television commercial director Eddie Chung descended upon the 2004 Lebowski Fest — since 2002, an annual gathering of fans of the Coen brothers’ 1998 cult phenom The Big Lebowski — and discovered a bona fide subculture. Who are these people? Why are they addicted to Lebowski? What makes ordinary working stiffs fiendishly create movie-inspired costumes (severed toe, Sioux City Sasparilla bottle, walrus, "camel fucker") as detailed as they are obscure?
At 66 brisk minutes, The Achievers can’t help being fun, although I imagine it would be difficult to enjoy the doc without having seen Lebowski. (If you haven’t seen Lebowski, or you saw it when it came out and — like most audiences and critics at the time — didn’t get it, you’re long overdue for a viewing.) Still, that’s probably not gonna be a problem for IndieFest attendees, considering the fest hosts an annual bowling-infused salute to the Dude. Dilettantes will appreciate The Achievers’ many Lebowski clips, which pop up to contextualize lesser-known references; diehards will thrill to the interviews with bit-part actors like "Saddam," the Hussein look-alike who hands the Dude bowling shoes during his dream sequence. Also featured are the real-life inspirations for the Dude, Walter Sobchak, and Little Larry Sellers (you know, the kid who steals the Dude’s car and leaves his D-grade homework paper behind — incredibly, a true story, more or less.) The Coens are absent, but bemused star Jeff Bridges does make an appearance.
As Chung discovers, the most hardcore of the Lebowski fans found each other over the Internet, becoming acquainted via a message board dedicated to the film and the fest. Many have become real-world friends above and beyond the organized Lebowski gatherings, which now attract thousands of White Russian–drenched revelers. Really, they’re no different than heavy metal fans, or Rocky Horror junkies, or Civil War reenactors, tapping shared interests to build a tribe whose activities (Maude Lebowski tattoo, anyone?) might be viewed by the mainstream as crossing the line into low-level insanity.
Far more wackjobby are the protagonists of IndieFest’s closing-night film, Deadgirl, which is described in the fest program as resembling the early films of David Cronenberg. Body horror? Yes! Disturbing? Indeed! The work of filmmakers (Marcel Sarmiento, Gadi Harel) with innovative, artistically daring careers ahead of them? I’m not yet convinced. Deadgirl starts off promisingly enough, as a pair of ne’er-do-well high schoolers (pretty boys Shiloh Fernandez and Noah Segan) stave off boredom by exploring an abandoned mental hospital. But this ain’t slow-burn creepiness like Session 9 (2001); the film’s most original twist — the boys find a zombielike woman chained in the basement — comes early, and the shocks soon revert to tired torture-porn gross-outs. Naturally, the friends are torn apart by the discovery, even as they both become consumed by it. One’s horny enough to declare the woman/monster do-able, while the other’s a tad more sensitive; it’s not long before an unbelievable mix of emo and necrophilia, and a li’l dab of misogyny, oozes to the surface. Queasy does it.
SAN FRANCISCO INDEPENDENT FILM FESTIVAL
Feb. 5–22, most shows $11
Roxie, 3117 16th St., SF; Victoria, 2961 16th St., SF; and Shattuck, 2230 Shattuck, Berk.
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Filmmakers like Jonathan Demme who worked for Roger Corman in the early 1970s were delighted by their freedom to include just about anything — radical political issues, wild tonal shifts, etc. — as long as the basic drive-in requirements of gratuitous T&A and violence were shoehorned in. That moment was brief. But something similar has lasted decades in Japan’s "pink film" milieu, where often youthful talent cut teeth on low-budget softcore features typically an hour in length.
With genital display and graphic sex illegal — we’ve all seen Japanese private parts obscured by a digital fogblot — "pink" makers must exercise a little more imagination than Western pornmeisters. No doubt there’s been much unwatchable dross among the diminished but still-active genre’s thousands of titles to date. But there’s also been inspired, sometimes just-plain-weird stuff, like Godardian Go, Go Second Time Virgin (1969), extreme nunsploitation School of the Holy Beast (1974) and 2003’s Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai (a.k.a. Horny Home Tutor: Teacher’s Love Juice), which played the San Francisco International Film Festival.
In a rare moment of retrospection, this year’s San Francisco Independent Film Festival sidebars "I am Curious (Pink): The Second Wave of Japanese Sex Cinema, 1986–Present." Offering two double bills at a sum length barely more than that of one bloated Hollywood prestige flick, this sampler ranges from the goofy to the gloomy. There are some constants — ironic use of Western classical music, variably consensual abuse of women, vigorously mimed sex acts — but these singular films aren’t much like each other, let alone most adult entertainment you’d see here. Even their misogyny often feels like an in-joke at men’s expense.
Not so in The Bedroom (also known, rather misleadingly, as Unfaithful Wife: Shameful Torture), a 1992 feature by Hisayasu Sato of gay "pink" Muscle — a dismemberment fantasia that set the gold standard for walkouts when bizarrely chosen as 1990’s San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival opening nighter. This cold, morbid, semi-abstract objet d’art queasily mixes identity blur, voyeurism, tranquilizer excess, marital ennui, homicide, and lewd consumption of chopped lettuce. It’s notorious for giving a small role to one Issei Sagawa, who’d committed real-life murder and cannibalism — only to be just briefly institutionalized before becoming a still-popular multimedia "celebrity" back home. Ick.
On a less appalling note, the other three IndieFest "pinks" take themselves less seriously. Osamu Sato’s New Tokyo Decadence: The Slave from 2007 is supposedly based on the experiences of star Rinako Hirasawa, who discovered early on that she was into masochism — though not averse to playing professional dominatrix. She finds fulfillment under the thumb of her eventual office boss, only to discover he’s a wuss in sadist’s clothing. Often funny, New Tokyo Decadence views its heroine not as victim but a sometimes ambivalent power bottom who actually pulls the strings.
For full-on silliness there’s Motosugu Watanabe’s 1986 Sexy Battle Girls, whose schoolgirl protagonist has an anatomical irregularity her father is hell-bent on using to avenge a long-ago wrong. "The Venus Crush is your secret weapon! Love is not an option!" he insists. Sent to a private school where "bad" students are sold to politicians as sex slaves and ballpoint pens are shot like deadly arrows, she combats perils including one highly exotic dildo you won’t find at Good Vibrations.
Shuji Kataoka’s same-year S+M Hunter features a titular character outfitted spaghetti western–style with cowboy boots, priest’s collar, a skull’s-head eyepatch, Morricone-type musical theme, and extraordinary erotic-lassoing abilities. But he and fellow "Pleasure Dungeon" habitués meet their match in the Bombers, a man-hating (and gay-man molesting) girl gang à la H.G. Lewis’ She-Devils on Wheels (1968). If you’ve yearned for a battle of the sexes encompassing gratuitous Nazi regalia and pervasive retro disco woo! woo! — well, prepare to be satiated.
SAN FRANCISCO INDEPENDENT FILM FESTIVAL
Feb. 5–22, most shows $11
Roxie, 3117 16th St., SF; Victoria, 2961 16th St., SF; and Shattuck, 2230 Shattuck, Berk.
Wow, I didn’t think we’d kick off this blog with so much ass play — usually I wait for the check to clear first before the flip. Hang with us folks, we’ve got a bunch of porn posts coming up, including our sure-to-be-classic “Ask a Porn Star” feature, and interviews galore.
Oh, and we here at the Guardian just published our G-Spot guide to love and lust, including features on sexy aphrodesiacs, hipster porn, sending the perfect valentine, and way more Valentine’s Day events than either I or local ramrod Antonio Biaggi‘s sex partners can handle.
Your SEX SF editor,
Marke B.
REVIEW For anyone who has attempted to stare down one of Bridget Riley’s hypnogogic vortices or contemplated the point at which two color blocks mesh in a Rothko, Takako Yamaguchi’s recent set of paintings at Jancar Jones Gallery should produce some pleasantly familiar sensations. Upon entering the shoebox-size space, one sees five three-by-four-foot canvases that form a seemingly continuous horizontal vista of graduated lines and patterned strips done in earth tones and blues, with the occasional wink of metallic shimmer. (This panorama effect is offset when one realizes that an outlier has been sneakily hung in the back office area.)
Viewed individually, Yamaguchi’s warm bands of color and geometric repetition start to take on the cast of Southern Californian geography — oceanic expanse, suburban sprawl, and stretches of desert. Interlocking white donuts and intestinal curlicues suggest clouds; hills and waves roll ad infinitum; distant mountains have the repetitive crenulations of a side-scrolling video game; the faintest line of gold leaf could demarcate city lights twinkling midground, or a sliver of sunset. And yet your eyes never fully adjust to the precise play of blurred and crisp elements, which is especially forceful in the two halves of Strangely Familiar. What looks fuzzy in your peripheral vision sometimes stays that way when studied head-on, just as Yamaguchi’s palette toggles between subtle abstraction and figurative hooks. In this sense, her canvases are Magic Eyes in reverse: if you stare long enough, the geographic reference points start to flicker into the background, like unstable mirages. So meticulous and subtle are the gradations of color — so light is Yamaguchi’s brushwork — that at times you forget you are looking at a painting. (This is underscored by the way in which each landscape continues around the sides of the canvas, as if the image were sprayed onto it and then stretched onto a slightly too-small frame.). Jancar Jones may be the smallest gallery in the city, but from the vantage point of Yamaguchi’s landscapes, you can see for miles and miles.
TAKAKO YAMAGUCHI Through Feb. 28. Jancar Jones Gallery, 965 Mission, suite 120, SF. Thurs–Sat, noon–6 p.m. (415) 281-3770, www.jancarjones.com
PREVIEW It doesn’t take six degrees of separation to link the new breed of local bands performing at the University of San Francisco’s Festival for Freedom benefit show. They’re an interwoven clan of West Coast outfits with garage rock tendencies and psychedelic leanings. And they’re just about all in each other’s MySpace top eight. If I had to label, I’d consider the term "flower punks" for ’em. I mean, c’mon, San Francisco has a huge Haight-Ashbury legacy to live up to. So, in the spirit of hippiedom and smiling on your brother, the undergrads from the university’s Erasmus Community has decided to take on the cause of fighting modern-day slavery and is planning an immersion trip to Uganda and Rwanda, where they will focus their efforts on rehabilitating child soldiers.
This benefit show for that trip is a culmination of the group’s efforts in social justice awareness and activism, combined with a dose of peacenik-punk rock. Taking the stage on campus: Ty Segall, Man/Miracle, and a very Birthday Party-era Nick Cave sounding Depth Charge Revolt, among others. The bands will bring the noise, so you should bring your bucks to help support this worthwhile cause for the marginalized children of Uganda.
FESTIVAL FOR FREEDOM: USF BENEFIT FOR THE REHABILITATION OF UGANDAN CHILD SOLDIERS With A Quantum Visionary, Depth Charge Revolt, Travis Hayes, Ghosttown Refugees, the Vox Jaguars, James Rabbit, Ty Segall, and Man/Miracle. Fri/6, 6:30 p.m., $5–$8. McClaren 250, Phelan Building, University of San Francisco campus, SF. (831) 588-3537
PREVIEW For a band that has leased tracks to Grey’s Anatomy, Sex and the City: the Movie (2008), and Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008), the Bird and the Bee curiously still bear the burden of being just one buzz band among the ravenous, clamoring multitudes. Nonetheless, the duo’s brand of frothy pop has gained traction among various species of photosphere hipsters.
According to their nonchalant MySpace bio, Inara George and Greg Kurstin met, hit it off over jazz standards, played a few, and then never looked back. An established producer, Kurstin has collaborated with artists running the gamut from Beck to Britney Spears. The Bird and the Bee’s self-titled, 2007 Blue Note debut garnered attention for the pair, thanks to songs like "I Hate Camera," a capering, catchy track with glinting synths offset by playful electronic noodlings, The music, which the band itself has described as sounding like a futuristic 1960s American film set in Brazil, fuses Kurstin’s retro inclinations and suave jazz accents with George’s sweet sing-song to darling, almost uniformly excellent results. With George’s bold Cleopatra chop and the twosome’s taste for playfully kitschy promo pics, you can’t say the kids lack style, either.
With the musical intelligentsia stroking their graying beards over the pass/fail results of the second album’s litmus test, the consensus is that new record, Ray Guns Are Not Just the Future (Blue Note), delivers its bubbly pop goods with minimal deviation from what’s already working. It’ll all be up for examination at the Independent.
THE BIRD AND THE BEE With Obi Best. Mon/2, 8 p.m., $15. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. (415) 771-1422, www.theindependentsf.com
