SF

New Years Eve Parties 2008

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Here’s some rockin’ bottle-pops for your 2k9 hello — followed by some all night dance affairs ….

BUTTHOLE SURFERS


One of the best parts of reading Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life (Little, Brown, 2001) is learning how psychotic the Butthole Surfers actually were. Whether filling an upside-down cymbal with lighter fluid and igniting and playing it or projecting scary-ass surgery footage onto huge smoke machine-generated clouds to terrorize the audience, the Buttholes clearly intended to have everyone walk away from shows with physical or mental wounds congruent to their own self-inflicted ones. By the time Electric Larryland (Capitol, 1996) gave them access to post-Nevermind commercial radio, the Butthole Surfers had transformed into a run-of-the-mill heavy rock unit, saving their perverseness for their lyrics.

But all’s you need to do is backtrack to Locust Abortion Technician (Touch and Go, 1987) to find the group’s secret reverence for classic rock juxtaposed with a not-so-secret love of tripping balls on tracks like the genuinely disturbing "22 Going on 23" and imagine that there was a time when the Butthole Surfers toured with a naked dancer named Ta-Da the Shit Lady but managed to devote enough energy to the whole "music" side of being a band to write something as enduring as the proto-grunge of "Human Cannonball." The group’s more recent output isn’t good, and it goes without saying that the ‘Urfers will never be able to equal the antics of their past. This one is a mixed bag, but I’m guessing that, while Gibby Haynes won’t be regaling us with tales of Chinese men with worms in their urethras, he won’t pull any cutesy "you are loved" Flaming Lips bullshit, either. (Brandon Bussolini)

With Negativland. Dec. 31, 9 p.m., $55. (Also with Fuckemos, Tues/30, 8 p.m., $35). Fillmore, 1805 Geary, SF. (415) 346-6000, www.livenation.com

GEORGE CLINTON AND PARLIAMENT FUNKADELIC


"Bow-wow-wow-yippee-yo-yippee-yeh." That was the "Atomic Dog" mantra back in the day when I worked at a mega-music store for minimum wage: it kept us tame, it soothed our frayed nerves, and it never failed to remind all concerned that there was a little dog in me, you, and everybody. Hell, if "Atomic Dog" mastermind George Clinton stopped with just Funkadelic’s Free Your Mind … and Your Ass Will Follow and Maggot Brain (both Westbound, 1970, 1971) many a fan boy and babe would have been satisfied to sing his praises forever more, but nooo, the musical groundbreaker and funk-rock-R&B OG of a dogfather has had more creative lives than a nuclear feline — a good and bad thing, I suppose, in terms of quality control.

Later, I would come to associate Clinton with a tale divulged by a colleague who was once allowed into the icon’s smokin’ sanctum sanctorum — namely a venue bathroom — to, ah, do an interview. This time, however, when the man brings Parliament-Funkadelic to the Warfield for New Year’s Eve, I’ll expect candidate Clinton — settling into his golden years, it appears, with the recent release of his covers album, George Clinton and His Gangsters of Love (Shanachie) — to tear the roof off with a super-stupid rendition of his prescient par-tay anthem "Paint the White House Black." (Kimberly Chun)

With the Greyboy Allstars. Dec. 31, 9 p.m., $79–$89. Warfield, 982 Market, SF. (415) 421-TIXS, www.goldenvoice.com

FANTÔMAS


For all those who don’t want to spend their New Year’s Eves puttin’ the lime in the coconut and twistin’ it all up, General Patton has got you covered. Patton and the melodicidal miscreants of avant-garde metal quartet Fantômas invade the Great American Music Hall on a mission to decimate eardrums and bring aural beasts to life. The San Francisco supergroup — which includes Buzz Osborne of the Melvins, Trevor Dunn, formerly of Mr. Bungle, and Dave Lomabardo of Slayer — formed in 1988, and is Patton’s longest-running project. The resume of the king of musical ADHD reads like an major-indie label discography, but the workaholic always finds time to confound and bludgeon with Fantômas.

The group’s beauty lies in its ravenous experimentation and intensity — and in Osborne’s Don King hair. Over the course of their four LPs, they’ve mix electronic glitches; nonsensical and horrifying utterings; Lombardo’s mind-boggling drum dexterity, which roves from blastbeats to technical jazz; and King Buzzo’s gigantic sludge riffs to create controlled chaos in its most primitive, powerful form. They’ve covered The Godfather (1972), worked with free-jazz sicko John Zorn, and, most of all, done whatever they fucking wanted to. As long as they keep doing that, we’ll keep listening. (Daniel N. Alvarez)

Fantômas’ "The Director’s Cut" with Tipsy and Zach Hill. Dec. 31, 8 p.m., $45. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. (415) 885-0750, www.gamh.com

Here’s a very select blast of bubbly, DJ-driven New Years Eve parties. (Check the Guardian for more as the date approaches.) All events take place Wednesday, Dec. 31 — and those marked "late" go afterhours for your party-hopping pleasure.

Afrolicious


Feel a warm, wet vibe of the new with DJ Sabo of Sol Selectas, residents Pleasuremaker and Señor Oz, live percussionists, and hundreds of gyrating lovelies.

10 p.m., $20. Elbo Room, 647 Valencia, SF. www.elbo.com

Bootie Pirate Party


Arrrr — it’s 2k9! Swing from the mashup club’s mizzenmast with Smash-Up Derby live and DJs Adrian and Mysterious D, Party Ben, Dada, and Earworm.

9 p.m.–late, $25 advance. DNA Lounge, 375 11th St., SF. www.bootiesf.com

Booty Call NYE


Drag mother Juanita More, playboy Joshua J., DJ Initials P.B., performer Hoku Mama Swamp, and star photographer Brandon — look smart! — bring all the hot boys together to pop a few corks.

8:30 p.m., Check Web site for price. The Bar, 456 Castro, SF. www.juanitamore.com

Eclectic Fever Masquerade


Shake your feathers and bhangra in the new with the NonStop Bhangra dance troupe, and then get global with Sila and the Afrofunk Experience, Daronda, and DJ Felina.

9 p.m.–late, $55. Gift Center Pavilion, 888 Brannan, SF. www.eclecticfever.com

Imagine


Spundae and Mixed Elements explode with local house heroes Kaskade, Trevor Simpson, and baLi — plus, a jungle room and "shiny confetti rain."

8 p.m., $60 advance. Ruby Skye, 420 Mason, SF. www.rubyskye.com

Love Unlimited


Almost every fab disco crew — Gemini Disco, DJ Bus Station John, Honey Soundsystem, Ferrari, Beat Electric — comes together for this all-night beat blast with DJ Cosmo Vitelli.

9 p.m., $15 advance. Paradise Lounge, 308 11th St., SF. www.myspace.com/honeysoundsystem

Midnight


Dancehall, reggae, and classic hip-hop go boom with Ali Shaheed Muhammad of A Tribe Called Quest, Amp Live of Zion I live band Native Elements, Trackademicks, and Jah Warrior Shelter.

9 p.m.–late, $25 advance. Club Six, 60 Sixth St., SF. www.clubsix1.com

New Years’ Revolution


Banger, turbocrunk, and electro freaks unite under the sheer speaker-blowing awesomeness of Diplo, Jesse Rose, Ghislain Poirier, Plastician, and hundreds more.

9 p.m.–late, $55 advance. 1015 Folsom, SF. www.1015.com

Opel: Fire and Light


Wacky, burner-flavored breaks and bass from special guest DJs Lee Coombs and Blende, plus Mephisto Odyssey, Syd Gris + Aaron Jae, Jive, and more from the Opel crew.

9 p.m.–late, $25–<\d>$55. Mighty, 119 Utah, SF. www.opelproductions.com

Reveal


"Reveal your inner light" is the dress code at this glamorous Supperclub affair, with DJ love from Ellen Ferato, Liam Shy, and Michael Anthony — and tons of performers.

8 p.m.–late, $120. Supperclub, 657 Harrison, SF. www.supperclub.com

Sea of Dreams


The immense extravaganza is back, with a full live show by Thievery Corporation, beats whiz Bassnectar, circus stars The Mutaytor, and Brazilian soulsters Boca Do Rio.

9 p.m.–late, $79 advance. Concourse, 635 Eighth St., SF. www.blasthaus.com

Second Sunday NYE


The summer favorite lights up in winter with this special blowout, featuring Chi-Town house god DJ Derrick Carter, local legend DJ Dan, Jay Tripwire, and Sen-Sei.

8 p.m., $40 advance. Mission Rock Cafe, 817 Terry Francois Blvd., SF. www.2ndsunday.com

Temple NYE


Cryogenic fog! Whirling lasers! Sonic Enlightenment! "Optix stimuli!" Oh, and a host of rockin’ techno DJs like Paul Hemming, IQ!, and Ben Tom bring the party knowledge to Temple.

9 p.m., $80. Temple, 540 Howard, SF. www.templesf.com

Storyville NYE


Poleng Lounge shoots back to its past incarnation with a jazzy house and hip-hop extravaganza. DJs Lady Alma, Mark De Clive Lowe, and Daz-I-Kue take you there.

9 p.m., $25 advance. Poleng Lounge, 1751 Fulton, SF. www.polenglounge.com

Scene: Bersa Discos hits the bueno

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Here’s an interview with new-cumbia whizzes Bersa Discos — on the eve of their party Tormenta Tropical’s first anniversary this Friday at the The Elbo Room — as published in this week’s Scene: The Guardian Guide to Nightlife and Glamour magazine, on stands inside the Guardian…

“The reception to our sound has been amazing here,” says new-style cumbia pioneer DJ Oro11 — who, along with partner DJ Disco Shawn, heads the Bersa Discos label (www.myspace.com/bersadiscos) and puts on the packed Tormenta Tropical monthlies at Elbo Room. “A place like the Bay Area is a perfect spot for new cumbia sounds to take hold. People here are always looking for new music, plus there’s obviously a huge Latino population. A lot of younger Latinos who grew up hearing cumbia also listened to hip-hop and electronic music. They’re really into what we’re doing.”

Cumbia, the irresistible traditional accordion-driven dance music of Latin America (originally from Colombia), has undergone a mutation of sorts, opening up to include electronic augmentation, hip-hop beats, and even punk styles. The new iteration has taken hold in clubs like the cutting-edge Zizek, in Buenos Aires, where Oro11 was living and performing when Disco Shawn sought him out in 2006 for a taste of the electro-cumbia sound. The two returned to San Francisco, their home base, to form the Bersa Discos label as a kind of sonic nexus. “DJs and producers were selling burned CDs and swapping MP3s, but nothing was very organized at the time,” says Disco Shawn. “We just wanted to get some of these amazing tracks pressed up on vinyl and circulated a little more officially.”

Bersa Discos is now on its fourth release, titled, appropriately, Bersa #4 and featuring Afro-Colombian-tinged tracks by Brooklyn’s Uproot Andy and deeper sounds from the Netherlands’ Sonido del Principe. And the Tormenta Tropical party has seen legends like DJ/Rupture, South Rakkas Crew, Buraka Som Sistema, Toy Selectah, and even the Zizek folks burn up the stage. Shawn says to keep a 2k9 ear out for DJ Panik’s Texan “crunk cumbia.” Meanwhile, UK “bashment” crew the Heatwave hop in Dec. 19 to enliven the party’s first anniversary.

SFBG What originally attracted you to the new cumbia style?

ORO11 I first got into cumbia in 2001 while I was in Buenos Aires — the same time that the Argentine economy was collapsing. Kids were still heading to the clubs all night, but as a whole the music was pretty unimpressive. Lots of ’80s, trance, Ramones, and Rolling Stones — seriously, whole subcultures based on those last two. But one day I caught a Sunday TV variety show called Pasion Tropical that had the group Pibes Chorros on. Those dudes were repping heavy keyboard-guitars, long hair, and skull tees. They had a different sound that grabbed me, meaner than most cumbia I had heard. So I started tracking down their mixes, chopping up their samples, and making cumbia remixes with dancehall and hip-hop thrown in. Guys like Marcelo Fabian, Villa Diamante, Sonido Martines, and Daleduro were messing with cumbia too. So we started linking up, throwing parties together. Shawn and I met not too long after and started throwing the idea of Bersa Discos around.

SFBG What are some of your most memorable Tormenta Tropical experiences?

DISCO SHAWN It’s all been amazing. But the best thing has been getting to play with artists whose music I was already a fan of. The crowd has also been great. It’s totally mixed — Latino cumbia diehards, hipsters, dancehall heads, etc. Even better, people are really into dancing. Most of the time we’re playing songs that people don’t know — most of the songs are in Spanish, so a good portion of the crowd may not even understand the language — yet everyone goes crazy on the dance floor. It’s really nice because we’re not slaves to playing any sort of “hits.”

SFBG Drop a new cumbia top five on us.

ORO11 How about these?

Petrona Martinez, “La Vida Vale la Pena (Uproot Andy Remix)”
Los Rakas, “Esa Mulata”
El Guincho, “Kalise (Frikstailers Remix)”
DJ Panik, “Gettin’ Some Head”
BananaClipz featuring MC TIDAL, “Bluetooth Riddim”

TORMENTA TROPICAL ONE-YEAR ANNIVERSARY PARTY
With the Heatwave and Paul Devro
Fri/19, 10 p.m., $10
Elbo Room
647 Valencia, SF
(415) 552-7788
www.elbo.com

Purple canon

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One of the hot discs in Oakland back in 2004 was In Thugz We Trust (Rap-A-Lot/Asylum) by Thug Lordz, a duo of mob music veterans Yukmouth and C-Bo. It was dope but it underscored a problem: all the big Bay-associated artists established careers in the ’90s, before radio play and major label action dried up. During the pre-hyphy drought, it was tough to achieve any fame outside the hood.

Fast-forward to post-hyphy 2008: the canonical list of Bay Area rappers has expanded considerably. Despite receiving no local airplay through an ongoing dispute with KMEL musical director Big Von Johnson and continued hedging by Atlantic to release his album, Mistah FAB managed to dent national consciousness with his hook on Snoop’s single "Life of Da Party." The increasing clout of SF independent label SMC raised newer acts Beeda Weeda and J-Stalin to the regional stardom necessary to go further. Winner of the Guardian‘s reader choice poll for hip-hop, Beeda had one of the most successful discs of the year with Da Thizzness, while Stalin’s Gas Nation topped the rap best-seller list at Rasputin Music the week of its release, Sept. 23. Other acts like Eddi Projex have cracked the airwaves to remain hot, while the Jacka — whose career began at the tail end of the ’90s as a member of C-Bo’s Mob Figaz — had the biggest local single of the year, "All Over Me," from his highly anticipated album Tear Gas, due in March.

The older acts haven’t disappeared, however, as witnessed by new discs from San Quinn and E-40. A notable development of the past two years has been the solo career of former Delinquent G-Stack. Taking a page from Mac Dre’s book, Stack has developed new personae like Purple Mane and George W. Kush to release four purple-themed compilations, plus a solo EP, preparatory to his SMC full-length, Dr. Purp Thumb, slotted for February. Along the way, he’s begun developing newer acts like Deev Da Greed, a co-owner of Stack’s 4 the Streets Entertainment and, along with Qoolceo and Tay Peezy, a member of the HEEM Team.

"I can rap but that wasn’t my dream," Deev confesses at the Grill studio in Emeryville. "When we opened the label, I was in the lab [the studio] a bunch, so I was, like, let me do a verse." Despite these casual origins, Deev acquired serious buzz this year with his effortless flow — he just floats over any beat — and clever wordplay, co-signing Stack’s fourth comp, Abraham Reekin (4 the Streets).

The accidental rise of Deev illustrates the difference four years has made. The glacial pace of change during the pre-hyphy period has become torrential as fresh acts like Stevie Jo, Philthy Rich, and Yung Moses continue to bubble to the surface. This is partly technological — the fruit of a Pro Tools and YouTube generation — but it’s also inspirational. Unlike the first half of this decade, there’s a place to rise to. The prospect of attaining fame as a Bay Area rapper is still unreasonably difficult, but FAB and others have at least proved the prospect still exists. (Garrett Caples)

GARRETT CAPLES’ TOP 10


1. J-Stalin, Gas Nation (Livewire/Thizz/SMC)

2. Beeda Weeda, Da Thizzness (PTB/Thizz/SMC)

3. G-Stack, My Purple Chronicles (4 the Streets)

4. The Jacka, Fed-X, and AP.9, Mob Trial III (Sumo)

5. Mistah FAB, Playtime Is Over (Demolition Men)

6. Shady Nate, The Graveyard Shift (Demolition Men)

7. G-Stack and Deev Da Greed, Abraham Reekin (4 the Streets)

8. Livewire Da Gang, Pay Ya’self or Spray Ya’self (Livewire)

9. Ise Lyfe, The Prince Cometh (7even89ine)

10. San Quinn, From a Boy to a Man (Done Deal/SMC)


>>MORE YEAR IN MUSIC 2008

You heard it here first

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

The first time I noticed that my city of art and innovation was getting short shrift was when The New York Times started going on about "freak folk," Joanna Newsom, and Devendra Banhart and really, you know, getting rhapsodic about these baroquely retro space-folk flavors.

And somehow it never quite came up that these people are San Francisco people, and that their music is San Francisco music. I mean, yes, Banhart has a rep as being a bit of a drifter. Yes, Newsom is really from, you know, Nevada City … and yet, where else could they have first truly taken root, where else could they have first broken through the topsoil, drunk of the dew, and soaked up the dappled sunlight, except in the rich, loamy cultural compost heap that is San Francisco, the Bay Area, and its wooly NorCal surround?

This germination of culture, color, sound, and flavor is, in the most organic sense of it, completely cyclical. Ken Kesey’s garden parties put out roots and rhizomes and threw up spores that took hold almost immediately among music lovers in the region. The result was a distinctly American growth medium for the archetypes of Dionysus, Pan, and Astarte; for the mystic and mythic yearnings of the Victorians; and for the willful, self-starting proto-anarchism of the English Diggers. Cross-pollinate that with the intellectual and aesthetic rebellion of situationism and free jazz, borne in with the gusting, blowsy Beat generation, and you have yourself a rather fecund and folkloric little bramble — one that got even more biodiverse with all the punk rock springing up like weeds in the 1970s.

This polyglot epoch of musical discovery gave us so much. Not just the Dead’s first three records, the Airplane, or even David Crosby’s If I Could Only Remember My Name (Atlantic, 1971) — what about Blue Cheer, Moby Grape, Fifty Foot Hose, the Flamin’ Groovies, the Avengers, and the DKs? Rather a multifaceted mix, but relevant, because Bay Area bands like these set the pattern for divergent waves of underground music-making during the next three or four decades.

The last 15 years in particular have seen these retro sounds made new in the Bay Area and then breaking into the critical, and sometimes commercial, mainstream somewhere else. Usually New York is quickest to take all the credit. Like with that whole garage rock revival. Yeah, yeah, the Strokes, blah, blah, the latest in NYC retro-cool. It’s not that we were first, here in SF. It’s just that we’ve been playing that stuff on KUSF-FM for years, and fabulous local bands have been cranking out that sound for years, and suddenly the Big Apple is basking in the hipniz.

Or in the glorification of Williamsburg, which totally followed the Mission District in terms of exuberantly youthful, excruciatingly hip, oft-naïve, and fearlessly spasmodic creative gusto. Dang, before there was a TV on the Radio, Kyp Malone was working at the One World Cafe on McAllister and Baker streets, making music with Rocket Science and the Nigger-Loving Faggots and handing out fresh-pressed records to the community-radio DJ down the street. OK, so that’s not the Mission, but it sort of was a suburb of the Mission.

Or with the whole freak-folk thing. Back in 2004 or thereabouts The New York Times started noticing there were hairy kids playing spacey and folkoric acoustic sounds. They quickly championed the term "freak folk," and in 2006 even ran a big, lushly illustrated, front-page article in the "Sunday Arts & Leisure" section, Will Hermes’ "Summer of Love Redux," that curiously never once mentions San Francisco, despite bolting the whole thesis down with repeated references to Banhart, Newsom, Vetiver, Comets of Fire, the Six Organs of Admittance, and Jolie Holland.

Now we see, from the foggy depths, a new rising of fuzz and hair, the shambling and very organic children of Blue Cheer. Parchman Farm was an early bloomer, as was Comets on Fire, and now the Bay Area is throbbing with shaggy combos exploring the idiom. Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound, Sleepy Sun, and so many of those Frisco Freakout acts — how will these vibrations resonate across the nation over the next five years? And will New York City somehow take credit for that, too? I think not. They’re just too damn cool to grow out their bangs past the uncomfortable midlength stage.

Philly, though, which gave us Bardo Pond, Brother JT, Siltbreeze Records — there’s a hairy, done-it-all scene stealer I can live with.

JOSH WILSON’S TOP FIVE

1. Godwaffle Noise Pancakes closing show at the former ArtSF, Nov. 8

2. William Hooker, Hemlock Tavern, July 24

3. Heavy Metal (1981) and Conan the Barbarian (1982, with James Earl Jones and some other guy) at the Castro Theater’s "Analog Adventures" showcase

4. All Tomorrow’s Parties, Monticello, NY, Sept. 19-21

5. Expo for Independent Arts moves to Dolores Park and triples in size, Sept.

>>MORE YEAR IN MUSIC 2008

Hail to the king, baby

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

Evil Dead II was released in 1987. I was a horror-crazed sixth grader, the kind of kid who insisted on screening Psycho at her 12th birthday party. Bruce Campbell became a god to me that year — me, and about a zillion others, who’ve basically worshiped the man throughout his colorful career, which spans TV (including USA Network’s current Burn Notice) and movies (with starring roles in cult hits like 2002’s Bubba Ho-Tep and cameos in Evil Dead series director Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man flicks).

Throughout it all, it’s hard not to see a little bit of Evil Dead‘s cocky Ash in all of Campbell’s roles. Campbell knows this. After two decades, he’s used to it.

"Perceptions are all over the map," Campbell told me over the phone from Minneapolis, where he was screening his latest film, My Name Is Bruce. "On one hand, someone’s pissed if you don’t present that smart-alecky persona. And yet whenever I have characters that are similar to the Ash character, I get blamed for not doing anything different. So you’re kind of screwed if you don’t, screwed if you do."

Enter the mega-meta My Name is Bruce, which is about a movie star named Bruce Campbell who’s kidnapped by a superfan to help rid his town of a seriously pissed-off demon. Campbell directed, co-produced, and hosted the filming ("Now I have a Western town I can’t do anything with") on his rural Oregon property. And, of course, he stars, as "a warped, distorted, worst-case-scenario version of myself."

Campbell the character is a guy so jerky he inspires a production assistant to serve him a bottle of pee instead of his demanded-for lemon water (he drinks it anyway — yep, it’s that kind of movie). His sleazy agent (Ted Raimi) holds business meetings at strip clubs; his ex-wife, Cheryl (Ellen Sandweiss, who played Cheryl in 1981’s The Evil Dead — one of many in-jokes scattered throughout), seeks ever-larger portions of his meager earnings. He spends booze-soaked nights in his trailer, taunting his dog.

In other words, dude ain’t no hero. But li’l goth Jeff (Taylor Sharpe) — "Bruce Campbell is the greatest actor of his generation!" — sees Campbell as Gold Lick, Oregon’s only salvation.

"The idea [for the film] was pitched to me by Mark Verheiden, who wrote it, and by my producer partner, Mike Richardson, who owns Dark Horse Comics," Campbell explained. "It was based on a comic that Mark had read years before called The Adventures of Alan Ladd — Alan Ladd was sort of a swashbuckling guy who did some movies in the ’40s and ’50s. [In the comic], people kidnapped him to help them fight pirates, because they knew he was a swashbuckling actor. So we just decided to do an updated, twisted version of that."

If you’re seeking slick terror, you may be let down by My Name Is Bruce; it’s a staunchly B-grade affair, and the villain is no scarier than anything Scooby-Doo ever faced. The main enjoyment is seeing Campbell on the loose, gleefully mocking his image and all that goes with it, including dorky fans who quiz him about career footnotes. Who else would remember 2002’s Serving Sara?

"I mean, [in My Name Is Bruce], I come across as the biggest jerk on the planet. So I’m taking everybody down with me. If you’re gonna do a dumbbell version of Bruce Campbell, then you’re gonna get a dumbbell version of the fans as well," he said. "There’s a sequence where I talk to a group of fans outside a studio, and it’s basically verbatim various conversations I’ve had. Ninety-eight percent of my fans are really normal, rational people. I just included the other two percent in the movie."

Campbell, whose previous directing experience includes 2005’s Man with the Screaming Brain, said he’s comfortable calling the shots on a low-budget shoot.

"I don’t mind being in this world because we’re kind of left alone," he said. "We don’t have to appeal to everybody. We don’t have to have a $48 million opening. It’s a lot less pressure. If this movie sucks, I’ll take the blame because I have no one else to blame. So I guess that’s the beauty and the horror of that scenario."

Campbell reports back to film the third season of spy dramedy Burn Notice in a few months; it’s a full-time gig for most of the year, and he’s just fine with that. He’s fine with playing second banana.

"That’s the best gig in the world. You watch the other guy sweat, and then I show up and go, ‘What did I miss?’" he said.

But back to My Name Is Bruce, the reason Campbell is crisscrossing the country at present. I had to ask: if Campbell could kidnap one of his idols, who would it be, and why?

"Robert Redford," he said without any hesitation. "Robert Redford, I would kidnap. Just to ask him about [his] movies. I would just sit him down. I wouldn’t hurt him. I would just poke him a little bit and ask him questions."

MY NAME IS BRUCE opens Wed/17 in Bay Area theaters.

Bruce Campbell in person with Peaches Christ

Wed/17, 7 and 9:40 p.m., $10.50

Bridge, 3010 Geary, SF.

Bruce Campbell in person

Thurs/18, 7:30 and 10 p.m.

California Theatre, 2113 Kittredge, Berk.

www.landmarktheatres.com

Amber India

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Whatever you think a tony Indian restaurant might look like, you’re probably not picturing Amber India. On the other hand, if you’re wondering what a tony Indian restaurant smells like, you probably already know: it smells like the regular kind, which is to say, it smells of curry. Amber India smells bewitchingly of curry while looking like, in its elegant stackedness, Postrio.

You step inside from street level — or lane level, since the restaurant lies along a pedestrian plaza, Yerba Buena Lane — and find yourself at the host’s podium, on a small platform, while the restaurant opens out below you like an enchanted, hidden valley. Amber India doesn’t quite have Postrio’s Gone with the Wind staircase or exhibition kitchen, but it does have gorgeous flooring (large tiles of what looks like polished sandstone); impressive columns; a partly coffered ceiling; square leaves of gilded, pressed tin tethered to some of the light fixtures; and atmospheric golden lighting in general. Given the hardness of the flooring material and the scale of the restaurant (which can accommodate nearly 200 people), noise is notably under control.

Amber India opened in the city just this past June, in a neighborhood that has seen drastic changes in recent years. (The restaurant’s siblings, scattered across the Peninsula and South Bay, have been a presence in the Bay Area for nearly 15 years.) For one thing, there is now an actual neighborhood, with people living just steps away — mostly overhead, in the condominiums above the Four Seasons Hotel, and in the many other residential buildings that have sprung up in SoMa. The restaurant is also convenient to shoppers, museum-goers (the new Jewish Museum is just across the walkway, while the Yerba Buena Center and Museum of Modern Art are barely more than one block distant), and out-of-towners.

Why would they come to Amber India, apart from its convenience and style? One reason might be that the food emerging from the kitchen is gratifyingly spicy. We were particularly exhilarated by the dal Amber ($12.95), a shallow dish of black lentils swimming in a thick, rust-colored sauce the menu described as consisting of "cream, tomatoes, and spices." "Spices," in the world of Indian restaurants, is a come-hither word that tells you practically nothing; it doesn’t have to mean "spicy" — i.e. hot — but it does here. Dal is often soupy and can be indifferently prepared in other restaurants, but Amber India’s version had a velvet smoothness that left an erotic tingle on the lips.

If you want the standards, many of them are here. But the menu offers a wide array of imaginative cooking, including the use of unorthodox ingredients. Duck? How about duck tikka kebab ($10.95), chunks of boneless breast meat marinated in spicy yogurt, pan-seared on skewers, and served with an eerily addictive dill-caper sauce the color and consistency of homemade mayonnaise? The meat was beautifully tender and didn’t even need the sauce, but once the meat was gone, we kept dipping out spoons into it as if it were a separate dish.

Thanks to saganaki and The Simpsons, many of us are familiar with fried cheese, but grilled cheese — as in actual chunks of cheese, not packaged in a sandwich — is another matter. Amber offers it as paneer tikka lal mirch ($15.95), elongated cubes of mild white cheese, marinated and grilled. If you’ve eaten grilled tofu, you’ll have a good sense of the look and feel of this dish, although the cheese has more tang.

As a boy, I was unimpressed by the cans of spinach devoured by Popeye the Sailor Man: I liked Popeye, but spinach was repulsive, period, new paragraph. Then, in early adulthood, I discovered saag paneer, an exotic version of creamed spinach punctuated with chunks of white cheese. Every Indian restaurant I’ve been to — except, now, Amber — offers an interpretation of this standard. Amber’s spinach dish is called teen saag ($14.95); it consists of spinach (plus some dill and mustard greens) wilted with cumin and garlic and, for counterpoint, mushroom caps and spears of baby corn instead of cheese chunks.

I would count that dish as vegan, despite a small suspicion that cream was involved. Indian cooking is expansively vegan- and vegetarian-friendly, but if you are a sometime or intermittent vegetarian, or a pesco-vegetarian — or even just some kind of poser — Amber doesn’t disappoint. Our tongues were left pleasurably smoldering by the "thecha" shrimp salad ($9.95), a clutch of small shrimp marinated with garlic and chilis, sautéed, and nested in mixed baby field greens. The masterstroke: a vinaigrette scented with lemon verbena, an herb that, like lemongrass, is lemony in a way distinct from plain lemons.

It’s possible that people eat in Indian restaurants without having naan, but I have never seen such a display. Amber isn’t the place to experiment with the naanless life, either; its flatbreads are wonderful exercises in blistered tenderness, and the signature Amber rounds ($3.95) come with a variety of toppings, including a fragrant and nippy blend of chili and thyme.

On the other hand … $3.95 for a disk of bread sprinkled with a few herbs isn’t exactly the steal of the century. Amber’s prices are, I would guess, about 50 percent higher than the Indian-restaurant average in the farther reaches of the city. So you pay a city-center premium that reflects convenience and the affluence of the surroundings. But you won’t find better Indian food, and in that sense the premium, although steep as a percentage, is modest as a fact.

AMBER

Dinner: Sun.–Thurs., 5–10 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 5–10:30 p.m.

Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.; Sat.–Sun., noon–3 p.m.

25 Yerba Buena Lane, SF

(415) 777-0500

www.amber-india.com

Full bar

AE/DC/DISC/MC/V

Not noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Budget funeral

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› amanda@sfbg.com

Hundreds of people gathered for a funeral among makeshift gravestones buried in the lawn of City Hall on Dec. 11. The tombstones marked some of the essential public health and community services laid to rest by mid-year budget cuts: health care for jail inmates, day services for the homeless, the SRO Collaborative, and the Laguna Honda adult day care center.

Collectively they amount to a $36 million thinning of an already stretched social safety net that is designed to catch the most vulnerable populations in San Francisco. Of the city’s $118 million projected deficit, about 30 percent will be recovered from the Department of Public Health, with cuts to care and counseling for the mentally ill, services for the elderly, and closing some medical respite housing. All these services — and more — have been suggested by the DPH in response to Mayor Gavin Newsom’s request for deep budget cuts.

But advocates and front-line workers say these cuts will only create a greater cost to the city over time, as people with acute illnesses and mental health and substance abuse problems lose their primary care and end up in the emergency room, potentially in worse condition, receiving more costly care.

"The cuts in services are going to cost," Marykate Connor, director of Caduceus Outreach Services, said at the rally. Cuts to nonprofit organizations that handle much of the city’s drop-in health services mean more ill people will end up at SF General.

But the city’s premier — and only — public hospital is already crunched. "It’s sort of crazy right now. Six to eight months from now if these cuts go through, it will get a lot crazier," said Ed Kinchley, an emergency room social worker.

In a memo to the Health Commission, DPH director Mitch Katz pointed to a higher-than-budgeted census at SF General, which provided a short-term boost in revenue but also stretched resources at the busy hospital and exacerbated its budget situation.

Kinchley, who’s been at General for 24 years (12 of them as a social worker), said part of his job is getting substance abusers and people with mental health out of the ER and into care programs. "It’s already hard for me to get someone in detox in a day," he said.

On a typical Friday afternoon, he’s successful with one in five people. Unfortunately, when someone comes in asking for detox is the time when it can do the most good, if it’s available. "It’s really crucial in that situation to seize the time," Kinchley said. Though they try to keep in touch with clients and get them in as beds become available, there’s high attrition on the waiting list. "They don’t have a hell of a lot of choices except to start drinking again that day."

Martha Hawthorne has spent 23 years as a public health nurse for DPH, working out of the Castro Mission clinic. She does targeted case management for high-risk mothers and their newborn babies — essentially making sure they’re connected with other health care workers who specialize in chronic problems such as diabetes, hypertension, and substance abuse. "I’m one of the people that sees the system from the patient’s point of view," she said.

She’s also able to illuminate how certain cuts can have spillover effects on a newborn baby. "There are five to six specialized, highly skilled RNs being eliminated. One is an expert in diabetes care for pregnant women," Hawthorne explained. If that nurse is cut, "the clinic will still exist, the patient will have five to 10 minutes with the doctor and receive instructions, but there will be very few people to teach her how to use insulin, to follow the instructions, to change her diet…. A woman without this care can have very sick babies. This is one little, little example of a staff cutback that has a direct effect on care."

Furthermore, the way the cuts are being exacted carves deeper into the social safety net than ever before. For example, Progress Foundation contracts with the city to do acute diversion and transitional housing and services for mentally ill people coming out of General’s emergency room. Its annual budget is roughly $14.8 million, mostly funded by Medi-Cal with matching state monies. A smaller amount of city money fills the gaps.

DPH has asked Progress, as well as many other nonprofit providers, for a 5 percent cut — but the cut is based on the entire foundation’s funding, not just what the city gives them. Executive director Steve Fields said that means closing two out of three acute diversion programs or four out of six transitional residential treatment programs.

"It ends up closing about $3 million in programs to save $700,000 [of city money] over the next 12 months," Fields said. "I’m sympathetic to the problem, but it just doesn’t make sense to give up that much [state and federal] money." He pointed out this represents 40 to 50 transitional beds or 20 acute diversion beds in facilities that have been licensed, permitted, received neighborhood approval, and have been functioning at 90 to 95 percent capacity. "Once you lose these beds, you don’t get them back."

And, he said, the real effects are felt on their clients. "However you look at it, the need will be there. They don’t leave town. We end up seeing them somewhere. They’re going to be in a hospital bed or they’re going to be in jail or they’re going to be in a longer-term skilled nursing facility" — all more expensive solutions to a chronic problem. "We may be making decisions that we may regret down the road because we’ve had to react so immediately to the crisis," Fields said.

"This is happening at a time when there’s all this increased need," said Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness.

The numbers for families, provided by Compass Community Services, are grim: between 2007 and 2008, the number of families seeking shelter jumped from 75 to 148. At the same time, the city has reduced family shelter beds by 20 percent, and the waiting list is now more than four months long — meaning families are waiting for shelter longer than they can actually stay in it.

"It’s a really brutal time to cut health and human services," said Friedenbach, whose group is advocating for an alternative list of cuts that incorporate some of the suggestions posed by SEIU and the Coalition to Save Public Health. They call for capping city salaries at $150,000 and letting go of all management staff brought in since a 2007 hiring freeze.

Hawthorne pointed out that while these cuts hit the neediest hardest, public health for everyone will suffer, pointing out that the city will be less prepared for a large-scale emergency or epidemic.

"SF General is a trauma center, and anybody who needs top-level trauma care is going to end up there. If it’s crowded with people who don’t need that level of trauma care, their response will be slower," said Hawthorne, adding that all emergency rooms in public and private hospitals are ultimately affected by cuts to clinics and nonprofit services.

"On a hopeful note, there’s huge potential as people realize the depth of these cuts," Hawthorne said. "The public needs to demand the human right to health care."

It’s never too late

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culture@sfbg.com

My dad was a fan of last-minute shopping. As in: he’d go to the mall on Christmas Eve an hour before closing and park in the red zone. Though it drove my mom crazy, it seemed to work for dad — thanks in equal parts to his ability to manage anxiety (he didn’t seem to have any) and the one-stop-shop-iness of the mall experience.

But what if you’ve slacked on your shopping this year and you want to shop locally? Whether your idea of "last-minute" is a week before Santa comes or Christmas morning before the kids wake up, here are some shopping ideas that’ll help make your last-minute mad dash less, well, maddening.

COLLAGE GALLERY


Delisa Sage is as much curator as owner of this charming Potrero Hill shop, which features a mix of vintage and locally-made items with a focus on female designers and hand-made objects. From clocks to cameras and jewelry to housewares, you just might find something for everyone here.

1345 18th, SF. (415) 282-4401, www.collage-gallery.com

LAVISH AND FIDDLESTICKS


These sister stores are an ideal stop when shopping for kids and their parents. Owner Elizabeth Leu carefully chooses toys, clothing, stationery, and books that are stylish, environmentally friendly, and often made by local designers. Both stores have extended holiday hours, and if you sign up for the mailing list, you’ll get a coupon for 20 percent off.

540 and 508 Hayes, SF. (415) 565-0508, www.shoplavish.com and www.shopfiddlesticks.com

DELIRIOUS SHOES


Focusing on unusual styles from small-production shoe companies, Delirious is an ideal stop for your shoe-loving friends and family. Plus, owner Amy Boe has stocked up on socks, tights, bags, and slippers for holiday gifts and stocking stuffers.

317 Connecticut, SF. (415) 641-4086, www.getdelirious.com

SPRING HOME


Come for eco-consciousness, stay for style and selection. Spring always has a variety of gorgeously designed tableware, candles, bath and body products, linens, and often children’s dolls, all sustainable and non-toxic. Think hippie values with Dwell aesthetics.

2162 Polk, SF. (415) 673-2065, www.springhome.com

THERAPY


If there are any holes in your gift list, you can surely fill ’em here. Cards, hats, gloves, jewelry, tchotchkes, home décor, joke gifts … you name it, Therapy carries it — and the Mission District favorite is open Christmas Eve.

541 Valencia, SF. (415) 621-5902, www.shopattherapy.com

CURIOSITY SHOPPE


Fun, funky, and oh-so-cute, this tiny store is chock-full of winsome delights, from wooden mustaches to Russian doll–style stackable bowls. Though usually closed on Mondays, they’ll stay open Dec. 23 for last-minute shoppers.

855 Valencia, SF. (415) 671-5384, www.curiosityshoppeonline.com

PAXTON GATE


An easy hop, skip, and a jaywalk across from Curiosity Shoppe is this weird and wacky favorite where rare stones and plants are as easy to find as taxidermied animals. Plus, they’re open Christmas Eve!

824 Valencia, SF. (415) 824-1872, www.paxtongate.com

CITY BEER STORE


Sure, beer is a niche gift. But there’s no better place to find a unique, imported, hard-to-find brew than this delightful basement shop. Plus, you can drink while you shop.

1168 Folsom, SF. (415) 503-1033, www.citybeerstore.com

BRANCH


Stuck at home with the kids? In bed with the flu? Sometimes shopping online is your only option. But if you’re going to do it, why not shop an SF-based business? The Branch warehouse on Van Ness Street is stuffed floor-to-ceiling with sustainable, adorable gifts, including toys, furniture, housewares, and clothing. Order by Dec. 19 to send gifts by Christmas. Or, if you’re later, simply send a card with a photo of what you’re buying so your giftee knows you weren’t that late.

(415) 626-1012, www.branchhome.com

PHOENIX RISING BODYWORK


What could be easier than a gift certificate, or more welcome than a massage? Purchase an affordable session ($65–$130) with Potrero Hill-based Jennifer Bryce ahead of tiem and let your giftee make an appointment. Bryce is trained in Swedish, shiatsu, hot stone, deep tissue, and many more massage styles, so everybody (and every body) should benefit from her touch.

(415) 215-6205, www.phoenixrisingbodywork.com

THE GIFT OF GIVING


When it’s the idea of a gift that’s more important to you than the object itself, why not donate to your favorite cause — or that of your loved one — in your giftee’s name?

DonorsChoose.org is an interesting option for those who want to know exactly where their money is going. On this site, teachers ask for classroom materials and donors choose which projects to support. Check out the main site at www.donorschoose.org or City Editor Steven T. Jones’ personal choices at www.donorschoose.org/donors/viewChallenge. Support two-wheeled travel by giving to the Bike Kitchen (www.bikekitchen.org), a do-it-yourself resource run by volunteers, or the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition (www.sfbike.org), an alliance promoting the bike for everyday transportation. Other organizations we like are Western Regional Advocacy Project (www.wraphome.org), which seeks to expose and eliminate root causes of civil and human rights abuses; Coalition on Homelessness (www.cohsf.org), which initiates program and policy changes to promote social justice and create exits from poverty; and Nature in the City (www.natureinthecity.org), which seeks to restore wildlife and connect urbanites with the nature where they live. And perhaps the cause closest to our hearts this season is overturning Proposition 8. There’s been some controversy over which of the big marriage equality organizations or smaller grassroots efforts have the tools and resources to affect change, so choose carefully when donating. We like the 10-year-old Equality California (www.eqca.org). Other organizations we trust to support equal marriage rights, as well as other issues of importance to the LGBT community, are the National Center for Lesbian Rights (www.nclrights.org) and Horizons Foundation (www.horizonsfoundation.org).

Need even more ideas? Check out the special deals on the SF Convention and Visitors Bureau site, www.onlyinsanfrancisco.com/shopsf. Also see our staff gift lists on our Pixel Vision blog and our 2008 Holiday Guide. And don’t forget to let us know how you spent your money locally this year at sfbg.com/local, where you’ll enter to win $500 in gift certificates to local businesses.

The Year in Music 2008

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What is this crazy little thing called canon creation in ’08, and what are the new classics and essential listens? SF vs. NYC, drone, pop, the state of hip-hop in the Bay and away — all are up for grabs in 2008 as our writers chime in with their musical must-hears.

Make a list and check it twice: do you have a top 10? Send it to Kimberly Chun at kimberly@sfbg.com by Dec. 26 — we’ll run the most intriguing lists in an upcoming issue of the Guardian.

>>Loose canon
A new set of touchstones for rocky times
By Kimberly Chun

>>Ask a musician
How to cope with musical canon formation in an ever-morphing, anti-matter era
By Johnny Ray Huston


>>Purple canon
Bay hip-hop received an infusion of new blood and fresh inspiration
By Garrett Caples

>>Tops in 2008
Writers and musicians give up their faves and beyond from 2k8
Lists, lists, lists

>>Youthquake
There’s just no stopping the march of the SF nightlife Smurfs
By Marke B.

>>Hungry for Lee Hazlewood
You didn’t have to dig deep to find the canonical figure this year
By Todd Lavoie

>>Hater aid
I Hate New Music, but does new music suck?
By Will York

>>Barf manifesto
Pop ate and re-ate itself, then regressed and regurgitated
By Billy Jam

>>You heard it here first
New York steals San Francisco’s thunder — but who cares?
By Josh Wilson

>>Daughters of a drone
Celebrating a different kind of singer-songwriter
By Max Goldberg

>>Moving forward
Smaller meant better in 2008, in myriad little ways
By Brandon Bussolini

>>A better tomorrow
Hip-hop pins its hopes on the future, despite the buzz
By Mosi Reeves

Half-forgotten memories

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PREVIEW Choreographer-dancer Erika Tsimbrovsky and visual artist–performer Vadim Puyandaev may be new to the Bay Area, but they are old hands in the theater. Having more than a decade of what they describe as "audio-visual-kinetic" performance under their belts, mostly in Eastern Europe and Israel, they have also developed a fine nose for ferreting out good collaborators. For their new Scrap-Soup, they have enlisted some top Bay Area artists: musicians Sean Felt and Albert Mathias and, among others, dancers Suzanne Lappas, Kira Kirsch, and Andrew Ward.

The primary impetus that drives Tsimbrovsky and Puyandaev’s work is an interest in exploring — through improvisational structures — different media and their relationships to one another. The Garden (2007), their first work in this country, looked at how gestures — musical, visual, and kinetic — can reignite half-forgotten memories. For Scrap they went through records of how information has been visually transmitted historically, via medieval manuscripts, hieroglyphs, and Japanese scrolls, and in contemporary mass communication, by way of billboards and computer screens. They want to know whether the preservation of content has been changed by today’s technology, and if so, how? Those are big theoretical questions, but the artists involved — all of them experienced improvisers — are hands-on, dig-into-the-material kinds of collaborators. Scrap‘s format will take the shape of a constantly shifting installation for which Tsimbrovsky and Puyandaev set the parameters, but within which the performers are on their own to hopefully bounce off one another.

SCRAP-SOUP Fri/19–Sat/20, 8 p.m., $15–$20. Project Theater Artaud, 450 Florida, SF. (415) 863-9834, www.artaud.org/theater

Mercury Rev

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PREVIEW "Snowflake in a Hot World," the opening track off Mercury Rev’s new Snowflake Midnight (Yep Roc), seems to touch lightly on the perishable nature of the band’s homegrown psych experiments. The New York combo has been around for more than two decades — often lumped with Flaming Lips due to their common musical explorations and the fact that de facto member Dave Fridmann is also the Lips’ longtime producer — which is long enough to fall into routine. But that’s not the way to make a Snowflake, so the band took a few new approaches to crystallizing the glimmering, moody yet surprisingly urgent psych-pop recording.

Moving blues played a part: Mercury Rev had to relocate its studio twice and was forced to purge unused equipment in the process. The tools that remained explain the electronic textures infusing the album. The group also played tiny clubs in the Catskills and the Hudson Valley area, buried on bills as the Harmony Rockets, and they’d try out one simple idea on generally unsuspecting audiences: "It could be a very simple motif," explains keyboardist Jeff Mercel from Boston. "We’d just take it and embellish and spin it out for 45 minutes in a live, electronic, improvisational sort of way." Back at the studio, the musicians also developed Snowflake Midnight‘s sound via improvisation. "I don’t think any of us wanted to sit by candlelight and try to write the perfect song and then impose it on everyone else," Mercel says. After a year, Mercury Rev had hundreds of hours of instrumental music. The pieces that "kept insisting you pay attention to them slowly rose to the top," says Mercel. The result, as "A Squirrel and I (Holding On…and Then Letting Go)" goes, was "something more beautiful but strange."

MERCURY REV With the Duke Spirit. Wed/17–Thurs/18, 8 p.m., $25. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. (415) 771-1422, www.theindependentsf.com

YaHoWha 13

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PREVIEW It’s hard to know where to begin or end when it comes to telling the story of the Source Family, the commune out of which YaHoWha 13’s recordings emerged. The Source — an organic, vegetarian Los Angeles restaurant founded in 1969 by the group’s leader, Father Yod — had a distinct, documentable existence, but as these things go, the spiritual family that gathered around it was considerably more amorphous. YaHoWha 13 released nine LPs, all of which were improvised and recorded in one take. Listening to the music now, it’s clear that we lack the full transcript for what went on behind the scenes, as most of the group’s philosophy remains a secret. But we can rest assured that the members of the re-formed band — Djin, Octavius, and Sunflower Aquarius — now find themselves in a similar position musically: "For the most part, we’re going to be playing spontaneously," Djin says by phone from Mount Shasta. "But we’ve had requests to do tunes that came out of improvisation on the albums, and that requires us to learn them since we don’t know how we played or even what key we played in."

It’s an unlikely reunion not only due to the nature of the material, but also because of the forces bringing the group together. Considerably more popular with the folks who read the Forced Exposure catalog than, say, Pitchfork followers, YaHoWha 13 don’t hang their reputation on a single, easily communicable musical achievement — they don’t have a Loveless, but they do have Penetration: An Aquarian Symphony (Higher Key, 1974). "It almost seems like there was a divine plan in this entire resurrection," Djin says. "Billy Corgan and his friend Carrie Brown were tripping out at the Bodhi Tree metaphysical bookstore, saw the Father Yod/YaHoWha 13 book, and he just contacted us, in the midst of all of this. Devendra Banhart is another one — he had already been in contact with Sky Saxon. There’s just so many outrageous coincidences, you might say, but not by accident. Really, there’s some organic thing going on here."

YAHOWHA 13 Thurs/18, 8 p.m., $16–$20. Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF. (415) 522-0333, www.slims-sf.com

“Dream On!”

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PREVIEW ‘Tis the season for Bay Area art to slow to a near standstill. Many galleries are closed through 2008. Those still open tend to favor group shows that double as holiday sales — a tough proposition this year. Mission 17 is bucking the trend with "Dream On!," a juried exhibition put together by director-curator Clark Buckner and three others. The show’s dream theme is a mighty wide one. It allows for photographic work by Jessica Rosen (showcased in the Guardian‘s annual August photo issue) and Jason Hanasik, whose verdant Steven in a bed of flowers displays a light touch while grazing up against potentially unsubtle topics such as homoeroticism, militarism, and Andrew Wyeth–like Americana combinations of human and landscape portraiture. (Hanasik is fond of depicting figures in repose.) Mission 17 sneaks some playful and thoughtful art into the city — Ryan Alexiev’s summer solo effort, "The Land of a Million Cereals," was one of 2008’s most enjoyable shows. This group collection, 20 artists strong, holds promise.

DREAM ON! Through Jan. 31, 2009. Wed.–Sat., 1–6 p.m., or by appointment. Mission 17, 2111 Mission, SF. (415) 861-3144, www.mission17.org>.

Mustaches (for Kids) abound in San Francisco

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m4ksf.jpg
By Steven T. Jones

Does it seem there are more mustaches than usual in San Francisco? There are. It’s partly a fashion trend among the hipster set, but my ‘stache and many others are actually being grown for the Mustaches For Kids program that culminates this Wednesday in the Stache Bash at the Rickshaw Stop. This slightly strange benefit with the pervy name has raised more than $40,000 over the last month, all going to small-bore educational programs through the Donors Choose network.
There’s also a bit of civic pride involved: Mustaches For Kids is a nationwide program that pits city against city, and San Francisco now trails New York City and Charlotte, NC (and we’re just ahead of Chicago, Baltimore and Los Angeles). So step up, SF, and donate if you can. In addition, last month was deemed Movember by another mustache drive benefits prostate cancer. So now you know why the streets suddenly seem to be filled with so many off-duty cops and ’70s porn stars.
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Gift List #5: Where to shop for the holidays

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To help with the holiday hullaballoo, the SFBG staff is revealing — at last! — its secret shopping secrets, to perhaps give you some gift inspiration. In this installment: Culture Editor Molly Freedenberg’s gift-giving delights. Previously, Amanda Witherell, Kimberly Chun, Dulcinea Gonzalez and Marke B. shared their faves.

Check out more suggestions in our ginormous 2008 Holiday Guide — and enter our contest to win $500 in gift certificates if you spend $100 locally. Wowza.

blakely-bass-curator_1208.jpg
RAG: Curator Blakely Bass outside the Hayes Valley store

Residents Apparel Gallery (RAG)
When I was a kid, my uncle lived in Eugene, Oregon, a place known to be significantly more artsy, creative, and hip than my suburban hometown. Therefore we always got – and expected – appropriately cool, unique, can’t-get-‘em-at-the-mall gifts from him. Now that I live in SF, I feel it’s my duty to represent what my city has to offer the same way my uncle used to do for Eugene. RAG is one of my favorite places for this kind of shopping. The showcases unique and imaginative clothing and accessories made only by local designers. So from screen-printed T-shirts (for men and women) to whimsical caps, and from hand-crocheted gloves to hand-stitched skirts, I can always find something delightful, one-of-a-kind, and sooo San Francisco.
541 Octavia. (415) 621-7718, www.ragsf.com

Prop 8: Stonewall 2.0?

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By Marke B.

pickets650a.jpg
Photo by Max Whittaker of Sacramento protestors

Did you call in gay to work today? I’m one of those fortunate few whose job it is to actually be as gay as possible — I fought long and hard for it, sweetz, lemme tell ya — so here I am in my fuzzy pink gorilla slippers and hot oil treatment blogging away for you. I’m fixing myself up to look pretty for tonite’s rally:

SF DAY WITHOUT A GAY RALLY & MARCH
Weds/10, 6pm, 24th and Mission, SF
www.daywithoutagay.org
protest8sf.wordpress.com

Protesting is hottt.

ALSO: Great piece in the New York Times today on how a new generation of queer activists was awakened by Prop 8. They’re calling it Stonewall 2.0, which is kind of like “duh,” but it’s great to read about and be inspired by the youth and their crazy internetz.

This quote, in particular, brought a tear to my eye:

“We’re a gay couple in West Hollywood, neither of us involved in activism, but we just wanted to help,” said Sean Hetherington, 30, a stand-up comic who was the first openly gay contestant ever to do battle, however briefly, in the Gladiator Arena. “And we were amazed at what happened.”

From arena to gay-rena, hunky sister-man.

But maybe more on-target would be this:

Sonic Reducer Overage: Mudhoney, Too $hort, Not So Silent Night, the Bug, and more

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Jump in: Too $hort’s “I’m a Player.”

Party-hopping, penny-pinching, craft-making and cookie-baking, and singing for your supper – the holiday activities never let up – and the city responds in kind…with more, more, more shows. Here’s what you might be missing…


All righty: Cold War Kids’ “Something Is Not Right with Me.”

VAMPIRE WEEKEND AND COLD WAR KIDS
“Golden Gate Jumpers” alert. The combos warm up Not So Silent Night with this toasty pre-show. Wed/10, 8 p.m., $25. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. (415) 625-8880.

Dig it

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW Long before Suzan-Lori Parks’ Pulitzer Prize–winning Topdog/Underdog (2002) was bedazzling them on Broadway, an earlier and related work called The America Play (1990-93) was wowing Bay Area audiences in a small but vital production staged by Thick Description. Like the later play, the company’s 1994 West Coast premiere churned themes of memory, identity, kinship, and race in the maw of American history, all of it focused provocatively on a wonderfully fertile conceit: the image of a black man dressed as Abraham Lincoln, sitting watching a play — a human target and one big, very specific arcade duck for the pleasure of patrons reenacting the role of presidential assassin.

The similarities begin to diverge after that. Where Topdog centered with seeming realism on two African American brothers named Lincoln and Booth, The America Play concerns a father and son, the son searching out the father by excavating a theme-park site specified as "an exact replica of the Great Hole of History." It also incorporates the wife and mother, and concentrates on the uncanny Lincoln-likeness of the father — known as the Foundling Father — as well as the life-altering inspiration he receives from the story of "the Great Man." Not least among its differences, the play operates on a more openly abstract, even abstruse plain, albeit one brimming with cultural significance and palpable irony.

The American Play may lack the edginess and also some of the tautness of the more concentrated 2002 two-hander, but revisiting the work in Thick Description’s exquisite revival, as part of its 20th anniversary season, shows it is still worthy and affecting in a sly, haunted fashion that gets its full due from artistic director Tony Kelly’s intelligent and lyrical staging, as well as a fine cast headed by 1994 veterans Rhonnie Washington and Brian Freeman, both brilliantly reprising their roles as, respectively, the gravedigger-turned–Abraham Lincoln impersonator and his son Brazil. Rounding out the enjoyable ensemble are Deirdre Renee Draginoff, Cathleen Riddley, and David Westley Skillman.

Setting us on the abstract expanse of history, "a great hole in the middle of nowhere," Rick Martin’s sublime set is a gorgeous cascade of plank-wood flooring falling in a graceful curve from the top rear of the stage out to the lip, where it meets a proscenium shaped as a large wooden picture frame. The Foundling Father addresses us from a wooden rocker center stage, a pasteboard cutout of Lincoln over his right shoulder, a small bust of "the Great Man" on a table downstage to his left. Sections of the wall/floor come out later to produce an excavation site and a mini stage for a play-within-the-play.

The action and the dialogue — rich, redolent, and blunt as freshly dug earth — resonate powerfully and strangely, taking gradual but firm hold. It’s all funny ha-ha and funny eerie, cuttingly ironic, and wonderfully suggestive — this play built up around the notion of an African American man as latter-day double and relation to the lanky senator from Illinois who became world-historic leader of the country. As for how it reads a decade-and-a-half after the first production, let’s just say the play’s excavations of history are as timely as ever.

THE AMERICA PLAY

Through Sun/14; Thurs.-Sun., 8 p.m.; $15–$30

Thick House

1695 18th St., SF
(415) 401-8081

www.thickhouse.org

Party hardy

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REVIEW Going to Smuin Ballet’s The Christmas Ballet feels like going to a big party. You’re glad to see some guests while others make you want to head for the door. Currently touring the Bay Area, the 15-year-old holiday extravaganza finishes its annual run at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Dec. 17 to 28.

It’s easy to see why this two-part concoction of 30 numbers, divided into The Classical Christmas and The Cool Christmas, has become a holiday staple. If the late Michael Smuin was anything, he was an entertainer. It’s what he loved and it’s what he was good at, even if some of us believe he could have been more.

During its Dec. 4 performance at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, the company, now under the direction of Celia Fushille, showed itself in good shape. The 14 disciplined but free-spirited dancers injected the requisite sentiment and sass into choreography by Smuin and new additions by Amy Seiwert, Viktor Kabaniev, and Val Caniparoli. The Christmas Ballet lives by its musical choices. Smuin’s taste was far-reaching and inclusive: he loved pop as much as Bach, and his unabashed largesse enlivened the sometimes problematic choreography.

At its most objectionable, the choreography dips deep into the sentimental and skims the surface of great classical music as if it were whipped cream. But Smuin also knew when to step back. You can’t compete with "Veni Emanuel," or vocalists like Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby. So he opted for simple strolling patterns, which became a theme weaving throughout the two hours. At its best The Christmas Ballet is unpretentious, musical, and witty.

Contrary to expectations, The Cool Christmas looked more dated than The Classical Christmas, which intersperses carols from around the world with selections from the symphonic repertoire. Cool‘s pop choices stopped at around 1980 — it could have used an injection of more contemporary fare. But don’t even think of touching Santa Baby.

The dancers were a joy to watch. Susan Roemer was lyrical, melodramatic, and super-vampy; Brooke Reynolds, dignified in some seriously convoluted partnering; Shannon Hurlbut, on the dot in his tapping; and Aaron Thayer, joyous and committed in everything he danced. As for Ted Keener’s Elvis, not quite, but he’ll get there.

SMUIN BALLET Dec. 17–20, 23, and 26–27, 8 p.m.; Dec. 20–21, 23–24, 26–28, 2 p.m.; Dec. 21, 7 p.m.; $18–$55. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF. (415) 495-2234, www.smuinballet.org

Broken but not broke

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Replife, a.k.a, Daniel Gray Kontar, leads a well-balanced life. How else can one describe a man who in one breath casually mentions that he’s a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley’s School of Education and in the next brags that the parties at his pad in the North Berkeley Hills "are off the meat rack"? The Cleveland transplant has a lot going on, including a new album for London label Futuristica, The Unclosed Mind, which includes tracks produced by the cream of the broken beat crop, from New York’s Arch-Typ to New Zealand’s Mark De Clive-Lowe.

Like many rappers, Kontar got his start in a breakdancing crew where he evolved into an MC for local DJs and beatmakers. From there he stretched his lyrical talents beyond music, stepping into the realm of the written word, where he wrote for Cleveland newspapers and edited and published the underground monthly magazine Urban Dialect, and wrote poetry, climbing through the spoken word ranks until he was National Poetry Slam co-champion in 1994.

Almost 15 years later, Kontar is excited, yet a little bemused, by the release of his first album, which boasts production by the likes of Dego and Kaidi Taitham, of 4 Hero and Bugz in the Attic fame. "It was a case of being in the right place at the right time," Kontar recalled when asked how he lined up such in-demand producers. After he recorded some raps at a minute’s notice for Mark De Clive-Lowe on his Politik project, De Clive-Lowe suggested he ring up Dego, who lived around the way. "When you record with Mark de Clive-Lowe and Dego in the span of two days," he said, "things just kind of happen after that, y’know?" The favors have been returned, with the piano-and-cymbal bursts of the De Clive-Lowe-produced "Emerald City" and the robotic synth stutter of Dego and Taitham’s "Spirit," slotting in nicely next to tracks crafted by lesser-known artists.

From the bossa sway of "Pangea" to the sultry slap of "Put It Down," The Unclosed Mind shows an MC exploring the limits of broken beat, and Kontar said that, unlike some pundits, he doesn’t see the scene dying off, due in part to a recent wave of emigration. "Daz-i-Kue is in Atlanta; Mark de Clive-Lowe is in Los Angeles; and Dego is in Brooklyn. So I think that having these kinds of folks who are the foundation of the movement now in the states is going to increase people’s knowledge of the broken philosophy," he explained. "I call it the broken philosophy because it’s not necessarily a style of music as much as a state of mind or a feeling." (Peter Nicholson)
AFROTEK FESTIVAL
With Replife, Blaktroniks-, Jaswho?, and Douglas Pagan
Dec. 20, 9 p.m., $5
The Dark Room at Club Six
60 Sixth St., SF
(415) 863-1221
www.clubsix1.com

Demon Days without end

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Like science fiction, techno can elicit automatic cringes when dropped as a descriptor in mixed company. Haters give explanations that aren’t really explanations — much like vocabulary that doesn’t add up to an argument: it’s repetitive, boring, either icy and alienating or overblown and dramatic, frequently both at once. It’s a weird scene. They seem to use drugs in a way that’s both corny-sensual and ego-destroying. Ironically — though, in our irony-saturated discourse, the word may be redundant — with the arrival of digital ubiquity, techno is remarkable not for its insistence on a placeless, distanceless future, but on space, duration, history, and a certain quality of experience and memory that seems purged from the hyper-compressed torrent of pre-nostalgized bloghouse jams.

You can’t say Carl Craig’s name without the word "techno" slipping out of your mouth. As part of Detroit’s second wave of techno producers, he refined and extended the future-shock innovation of Juan Atkins’ and Richard Davis’ work as Cybotron under a number of monikers. Now an expat living in Berlin, Craig most recently released — under his own name and excluding this year’s remix compilation, Sessions (Studio !K7) — 1997’s More Songs About Food and Revolutionary Art on his own Planet E label. Demon Days, a roving club night that Craig has been hosting since 2005 with New York’s DJ Gamall — better known as the guy who runs PR agency Backspin and a former member of Genesis P-Orridge’s postindustrial pranksters Psychic TV — offers a partial explanation of what else he’s been up to in the interim.

Even if Craig had remained silent after the release of More Songs instead of cranking out remixes and collaborations, his reputation would be secure: neither dance music nor trad techno, its tracks build and decay with patience and attention to nuance that’s still unlike anything this side of Berlin’s Basic Channel. And like that group’s work, More Songs‘ futurism hasn’t curdled into camp, and its moods are still penetrable, if odd at first. Despite the abundance of paramilitary imagery in 1990s techno — a tradition that traces back to Throbbing Gristle’s marriage of brutality and abject satire, an early influence on both Craig and Gamall — the album’s cover art literally explicates Craig’s vision of revolution as a basically a mental one. It’s unmistakably a home-listening record, much like this year’s Deutsche Grammophon-approved Recomposed, which appropriately finds Craig collaborating with Basic Channel’s Moritz Von Oswald, reworking orchestral pieces by Ravel and Mussorgsky into tentative, if fleetingly brilliant, new configurations that exist somewhere between minimal techno and the classical minimalism of Steve Reich, Terry Riley, et al.

Little if any of this material is likely to make it into Craig’s or Gamall’s set, which will probably highlight electro-historical bangers, their own remixes, and forthcoming releases from Planet E. But considering the general availability of the means of electronic music production — your cracked Ableton Live setup or the Roland TR-303 bass synth you downloaded to your iPhone — the fact that these guys know how pacing, thoughtfulness, and lineage inform, rather than detract, from body-rocking, their sets should act as a reminder. That is to say, you can come to engage with the tradition within techno that remains autonomous from the auto-nostalgic, meta-authentic economy of bloghouse/indie — or you can come to just dance.

This is electro music without hipster runoff’s signature, meaning-void stamp, "///miss u//." The omissions in their sets, not to mention an utter lack of MP3s, should be enough to make you think twice before unloading another mash-up on the world or listening to Justice’s wack Fabric mix. There is another world, people, and while it doesn’t escape being flawed, stupid, and fatally self-conscious like the indie-bred one that seems to control the Internet, you can at least pour your enthusiasms into this one without worrying about backlash. (Brandon Bussolini)

DEMON DAYS

With Carl Craig, Space Time Continuum, and Gamall

Thurs/11, 10 p.m., $14 advance

Mezzanine

444 Jessie, SF

(415) 625-8880

www.mezzaninesf.com

Hot and bothered

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› le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS After breakfast we went to Whole Paycheck. I needed to pick up a chicken, an onion, and carrots and celery for work. Earl Butter needed a lot more than that, but of course couldn’t afford anything at all, since Whole Paycheck’s pricing is designed to keep out riffraff, such as teachers and newspaper columnists.

Earl was sad, so I bought him a bottle of hot sauce. Floyd & Fred’s, extra hot. My new favorite hot sauce. It’s made out of key lime juice and habanero, and comes in a cute little bottle with a cute little picture of a distressed lime on it, mouth open, eyes rolling, and flames licking out of its head.

I first discovered Floyd and Fred in Crawdad de la Cooter’s refrigerator. Except back then it was just one of them, I forget which. Probably Floyd.

You can’t fit two people in a refrigerator.

"What’s this?" I asked Crawdad, way back whenever, because I’m always interested in new kinds of hot sauce.

"You can have it," she said.

Crawdad is 10 times the heat demon I am. In fact, she taught me how. So as soon as I tasted Floyd & Fred’s, back when it was Floyd’s or Fred’s, I could see why she didn’t go for them. Him.

It was so mild, I used half the 5 oz. bottle on one little bowl of soup. Well, the good news is they make an extra-hot version, which is pretty much perfect. And the bad news is I only ever seem to see it at Whole Paycheck. For $5 a bottle! Those of you who are paying attention, and good at math, will realize immediately that we’re talking, let’s see … 5 oz. bottle, $5 a bottle, carry the one … what? Roughly a dollar an ounce.

At which rate my standard size (10 oz.) bottle of my old favorite hot sauce, Tapatío, for example, would have set me back (hold on, I’m going to use a calculator this time) … $10, exactly.

Actual cost: oh, $3.65.

So you see? This is why I never shop at Whole Paycheck, except when I’m shopping for someone else. My Canadian says they’re union busters. I think, at $5 for a cute little tiny 5 oz. bottle, they’re busting a lot more than unions.

But it is good stuff, Floyd & Fred’s. I’m an addict. I keep a bottle of extra-hot in my purse at all times, and rarely if ever mistake it for perfume.

The other day, though, I was in a public restroom, rummaging frantically through my purse, not quite exactly saying but almost audibly thinking, "tampon tampon tampon" (I do this sometimes, by way of establishing ladies room cred) … when I came upon my little hot sauce bottle and noticed, for the first time ever, that there’s a phone number just below the nutrition facts, 415-987-LIME.

"Cell phone cell phone cell phone," I thought, rummaging. I had one! Took it outside, dialed, and a man’s voice answered. Just: "Hello?"

"Hi … Floyd?" I said. "Fred?"

Silence. Then: "Yes?"

I briefly summarized my situation, that I was a starving artist slash chicken farmer and a hot sauce junky and where I lived, in the woods, and so forth, and he interrupted me after 15 minutes and said, "There’s a Whole Foods right near you."

"Whole what?" I said. "I can’t afford to shop there! Do you sell directly to people?"

By the case, he said. How many bottles in a case? Twelve. How much? (You’re going to love this …) Sixty dollars! He must have heard my mathematical wheels squeaking through the phone because he made a quick adjustment: $50, free delivery.

Well, $4.16 a bottle is still steep. But addiction is addiction, and delivery is delivery, so I made the deal, and now won’t have to worry about hot sauce for a long, long time, fuck Floyd. Fuck Fred.

———————

My new favorite restaurant is Moki’s in Bernal Heights, because Sockywonk picked up the check. Great sushi, but the chicken coconut curry soup (which we expected to be something like Thai tom ka gai), didn’t have no chickens in it. Nor even the flavor of chickens. Fuck Moki.

MOKI’S SUSHI & PACIFIC GRILL

Sun.–Thurs., 5:30–9:30 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 5:30–10:30 p.m.

615 Cortland, SF

(415) 970-9336

Beer & wine

AE/D/MC/V

Superblastered

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› superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO Blue! Red! Yellow! Green! Indigo Girls! (Ew.) This column is on a serious ’90s flashback trip lately — as is the city’s nightlife: witness delightfully grungeful monthly Debaser’s climb to the top of the club charts (www.myspace.com/debaser90s) — dipping its toes into the perilous VH-1 waves of Clintonia. But hardly that icky! My last installment caught up with primal ravers Tribal Funk, and this time around I’m jumping with joy in my silk-tasseled plaid bolero jacket for the 13th anniversary celebration of protean party promoters Blasthaus at Mighty, with techno heartthrob headliners Matthew Dear and Ryan Elliot, a supporting cast of stellar local talent including my DJ crush of the mo’ Nikola Baytala (call me!) a bouncy castle, a sushi bar, and a foot-washer.

Yep, foot-washer.

"His name’s Shrine, and he likes to wash feet. So why not?" breathy Blasthaus Supreme Commander — actual title — Monika Bernstein told me over the phone. That’s a little burner for Blasthaus, whose parties tend to focus more on a dedicated dance vibes than sideshow shenanigans, but no one said they ain’t got dirty sole.

When I think of Blasthaus, I feel the swirly suck of 1998 and its raucous PoP all-nighter at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, inaugurating the neon-sprawling Keith Haring retrospective there. I popped three shitty e’s too many and somehow got locked upstairs in the darkened galleries while thousands raged in the atrium below. I don’t remember much beyond that, but Keith says "hi." Also the Watchmen are real.

Blasthaus is anything but stuck in the era of dial-up modems, though, staying true to founder William Linn’s forward-thinking production intent when he named the nascent collective after Weimar-era German fine-art factory Bauhaus, with a hands-in-the-air wink. The company now employs 30 staffers — "We’re like a buzzing virtual hive of little party elves," Bernstein said, laughing — and not a week’s gone by this past year without a Blasthaus shindig bringing in big underground and not-so-underground names. Glitch Mob, Modeselektor, Ellen Allien, Sascha Funke, and Richie Hawtin have all brought sparkly star-fire to its gigs, as well as longtime party partners — break out the Internet boom bubbly — Thievery Corporation, who’ll be headlining the Haus’ New Year’s Eve blast at the Concourse.

"We bring in who we listen to," Bernstein said, "so we’re just as excited about our parties as the people attending them. And a big part of our aesthetic is the art aspect" — Blasthaus has run several galleries, from Joypad to Rx to BoCA, and there’s something arty on the horizon for 2k9 — "so we think of our parties as forms of expression, not just bottom lines. Otherwise, why bother?" They could just bring in DJ Tiësto and retire.

BLASTHAUS 13TH ANNIVERSARY BLOWOUT

Fri/12, 9 p.m., $15 advance

Mighty

119 Utah, SF

(415) 762-0151

www.partyeffects.biz

************

CLASH AND CARRY ON

Holy crap, dubstep’s still happening. In fact, it’s getting bigger, like a blimp on laughing gas, but with polka-dotted clown feet. Which is surely how anyone who’s heard Coki’s 2007 low-frequency smash "Spongebob" has felt, me included. Coki and Mala, a.k.a. Digital Mystikz, will be melting the woofers at Dubclash Volume II, the excellent all-star dubstep clusterfuck (in a very good way) with "US Ambassador of Dubstep" Joe Nice, Sgt. Pokes, and other up-to-the-nanosecond bass purveyors. This is a heart-pounding chance to get a West Coast taste of Brixton, UK’s much-buzzed positivity-centric DMZ party by way of our very own Surefire dubstep crew. Volume II at Mezzanine is an upgrade on this year’s capacity Dubclash parties at Jelly’s, with much more bounce to the ounce.

Sat/13, 9 p.m., $15–$25. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. (415) 625-8880, www.mezzaninesf.com, www.sfdubstep.com

***********

POKE ‘EM IF YOU GOT ‘EM

I write so much about gay stuff that you’d think my keyboard’s made of fuschia Spandex, and yet the big queer story of 2008 was all the vibrant lesbian nightlife. In particular, the Diamond Daggers, an all-queer-women troupe of vaudevillians, has been putting on spectacularly entertaining offbeat affairs. Grab your golden lasso and get ho-ho happy at their Holiday Roundup, which invites all "Calamity Janes, ranch hands, bronco busters, and rodeo queens" to a Wild West-themed hoedown, with DJ Fairy Butch, live ruckus from the Whoreshoes, and more kooky cowpoke drag and cabaret performers than you can spur on without messing your spangles.

Sat/20, 9 p.m., $12–$20 sliding scale. Fat City, 314 11th St., SF. (415) 525-4676, www.diamonddaggers.com

Andalu

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Before small plates go the way of the brontosaurus and the leisure suit, I thought I should look in on Andalu, which has held down the corner of 16th and Guerrero streets now for the better part of a decade and was one of the progenitors of our much-discussed "global tapas" trend. The restaurant replaced a slightly dodgy taqueria called Maya back in the halcyon dot-com days — this would be two busts ago — and, with its neighbor, Tokyo Go Go, helped bring a luster of money and youth to a neighborhood that was a little lacking in luster of any kind. (Tokyo Go Go’s older sibling, Ace Wasabi’s Rock’n’ Roll Sushi, né Flying Kamikazes, is in the Marina District, to give you some idea of the social flavoring. I wouldn’t say the immediate area is Marina South, but I wouldn’t say it isn’t, either.)

From the beginning, Andalu has enjoyed at least one large basic asset — a surprisingly brick-and-mortar one, considering the restaurant’s birth in the age of Internet pixie dust: it isn’t just located at the corner of 16th and Guerrero, it’s right at the corner. It commands the corner, and it’s a busy corner. You can’t miss the place, with its distinctive green sign — a big green A with a swoosh, like something from The Jetsons — aglow in the twilight. The restaurant is, in effect, its own billboard.

The name, meanwhile, reminds us of Andalucia, that sunny province in the south of Spain, and the reminder subtly helps set us up for small plates. These will turn out to be wildly variegated, borrowing influences from around the world, but the menu does open in distinctively Iberian style, with several sherries and ports, along with a plate of seriously spicy Andalucian-style green and black olives ($3.25). The olives are marinated with fennel, lemon, chili peppers, and garlic — and it’s the last two you notice, since they appear whole, as pod and (peeled) clove.

But after this brief bow to the old country, the world is suddenly our oyster. Unlike nearby Ramblas, which does hew to a certain Spanish authenticity, Andalu’s kitchen turns out versions of items as diverse as miso-glazed sea bass and spare ribs braised in Coke. (The menu doesn’t offer oysters, incidentally; those inclined to shellfish will have to make do with mussels.)

Since I am perpetually curious about macaroni and cheese ($7.50), I was interested to see what freshening could be given to this most American of dishes. Typical restaurant fancifications involve the use of chic cheese — Gruyère is a frequent choice — but Andalu’s menu card described the mac and cheese as "crispy." What could this mean? A particularly heavy fall of buttered bread crumbs over the top — a kind of super-gratin? Whatever I was expecting, I wasn’t expecting what came: wedges of what must have been a kind of mac-and-cheese pie, breaded and flash-fried. The wedges themselves reminded me of slices of Brie or a runny triple-cream cheese within an edible rind. The wedges’ rigidity made them suitable for dipping in a stainless-steel ramekin — like a giant’s thimble — of herbed tomato vinaigrette.

Fish tacos ($10 for four small ones) — a SoCal favorite — were dolled up here with grilled ahi, but mostly they tasted of the mango salsa ladled over their tops. In other words, sweet. Better balanced was a hailbut paillard ($9.50), a thin disk of tissue dressed with a tasty mix of cilantro, ginger, soy, and hot grapeseed oil. The fish was like cooked carpaccio, with the flaw being that it had been cooked right onto the plate, so that eating it was like tearing up a sub-floor.

Who can resist Moroccan lamb cigars ($7.25)? Not me. Flutes of pastry filled with seasoned minced lamb and deep-fried to golden crispiness should have been spectacular — worthy members of the egg roll-flauta family — instead of just very good. The lamb seemed under-seasoned (rather odd, since Morocco is one of the lands of spice), and the accompanying yogurt-mint sauce offered only partial restitution. I had a similar reaction to the sliders ($9.50), a trio of miniature hamburgers on buns slathered with basil aioli and presented with a bird’s nest of battered, deep-fried shallot rings.

The rings were a lovely, more delicate version of onion rings, but the little burgers were overcooked and served on disappointingly thick, not-warm buns. They might have been better, ironically, if they’d been made with the lamb that went into the cigars.

One of the best dishes on the menu is bread salad ($9.25) — what the Italians call panzanella, cubes of stale (or, in this case, grilled) bread tossed with cut tomatoes and basil. Here the herb was arugula — a sly innovation — with the traditional basil being supplied through a vinaigrette. Toasted pine nuts probably aren’t unheard of in Italian bread salads, but I’ve never seen a recipe that called for blobs of burrata, a mozzarella-like cow’s-milk cheese produced in southern Italy. The cheese brought visual interest — it looked like patches of snow receding from a late-winter landscape dotted with hints of spring — and a suggestion of softening creaminess to the plate’s various sharpnesses.

Dessert at the end of a repast consisting of macaroni and cheese and hamburgers with onion rings would have to be something like brownies. Andalu’s version ($5) is pretty satisfying: a plateful of moist, cake-like squares, ankle-deep in warm chocolate sauce, dusted with confectioner’s sugar and each topped with a raspberry, like a ruby in a voluptuous display at a jeweler’s. Or, perhaps, a rose clutched in the hand of an unfortunate fellow clad in a chocolate-brown leisure suit with a red carnation, circa 1975: a Paleolithic era in the annals of style, and Andalu still ages off.

ANDALU

Dinner: Sun.–Tues., 5:30–9:30 p.m.; Wed.–Thurs., 5:30–10:30 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 5:30–11:30 p.m.

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 10:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

3198 16th St., SF

(415) 621-2211

www.andalusf.com

Full bar

AE/DS/MC/V

Can be noisy

Wheelchair accessible

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