SF

Guardian poised for legal victory

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Judge Marla Miller appeared poised May 9th to finalize a $15.6 million award to the Bay Guardian and to issue an injunction barring SF Weekly from continuing to sell ads below cost.

In a post-trial hearing on the Guardian’s lawsuit against the Weekly and its chain parent, Miller said she was inclined to rule that some, but not all of the damages a jury awarded to the Guardian in March should be trebled. And she said in a tentative ruling that she was prepared to issue an order forbidding the Weekly from engaging in further predatory behavior.

The ruling hit the front page of Sfgate this afternoon with the headline “SF Weekly loses big, again.”

SFIFF award winners: Up the Yangtze and Ballast

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The SF International Film Festival’s Golden Gate Awards ceremony took place last night. Below, Jeffrey M. Anderson sounds off on two films that nabbed honors: Best Documentary Feature winner Up the Yangtze, by Yung Chang, and FIPRESCI winner Ballast, by Lance Hammer:

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

The documentary Up the Yangtze is a perfect companion piece to Jia Zhangke’s Still Life. Both deal in specific ways with China’s humongous Three Gorges project, although neither film ever goes into detail as to what the project — which will displace some 2 million people — is supposed to accomplish.


A trailer for Yung Chang’s Up the Yangtze.

Go Daddy-o

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CULT FILM STAR Veteran actor Robert Viharo apparently doesn’t like talking about the shlockier stuff in his résumé. Of which there is a lot — although maybe no more than typical for any long-term Hollywood player who didn’t reach that plateau where one can be picky.

For each prestigious film he was involved in — Romero (1989) with Raul Julia, television’s Evita Perón (1981) with Faye Dunaway, even 1967’s endlessly campy but hugely popular (even before gay people were invented) Valley of the Dolls — there were gigs of lesser repute. He guest-starred in network series from good (Hill Street Blues, The Fugitive, Kojak) to iconically beyond-good-and-evil (Dark Shadows, The Mod Squad, Starsky and Hutch, The A-Team). He appeared in independent features both cool — notably Over-Under, Sideways-Down, SF collective CineManifest’s forgotten agitprop 1977 feature — and crappy. The following year in The Evil, he got electrocuted by Victor Buono as a cackling Satan.

Ironically, the very private Los Angeles resident’s son is East Bay "Thrillville" impresario Will Viharo, a man who looooves his retro shlock. Expressing filial affection — if perhaps not exactly as dad might prefer — Will "The Thrill" presents two of pop’s prime ’70s big-screen vehicles in a Thrillville "Papa-Palooza" at Oakland’s Parkway. Neither assignment likely thrilled a Lee Strasberg–trained Actor’s Studio protégé who had hoped his career would turn out more Brando and less CHiPs. But they’re both fun throwbacks that he brings considerable presence to.

Return to Macon County (1975) has him as a Georgia cop in pursuit of hot-rodders who royally ticked him off: then-unknowns Nick Nolte (Bo) and Don Johnson (Harley). This quasi-sequel to the 1974 hicksville hit Macon County Line (which featured Max "Jethro" Baer Jr. as Viharo’s equivalent) is a larkier affair, all ’50s nostalgia, wacky car chases, homoerotic undercurrents (when Bo gets a girlfriend, Harley bridles), and dialogue like so: "Arright, skin ‘er on back, Jack, and don’t talk back!"

Viharo got the too-rare chance to carry a movie in 1977’s Bare Knuckles. Los Angeles bounty hunter Zachary Kane, clad in shiny leather and tight denim throughout, is friendly-to-flirty with every street denizen, including tranny hookers — yet he kicks snarling leatherman ass in a gay bar scene. Message: sure he’s hep, but still a man, muthablowahs! (Even if in private moments he assumes the lotus position to play the flute.) Kane rescues a mistress (Sherry Jackson) from her abusive sugar daddy … in a Pizza Hut parking lot, no less. Naturally she ends up menaced by the ladykiller (Michael Heidt) Kane is hunting down, psycho son of a Hollywood socialite mother ("Bring me another double Bloody!") resented both for commencing and ceasing incestuous relations.

Thespian (Gidget Goes Hawaiian, Green Acres) turned occasional director (1975’s Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS) Don Edmonds here combines blaxploitation-style action with proto-slasher horror. But the centerpiece is Viharo Sr. With frizzy ‘do, thick ‘stache, and middling fitness (despite a training montage), he’s like a more realistic Looking for Mr. Goodbar take on Burt Reynolds, then riding high on big-budget versions of Bare Knuckles and Macon County. Kane is hardboiled sexy ("I’m in a rough business! I don’t need a woman tellin’ me how to do it!"), but you’d best get an STD check after sharing that hot tub.

Robert Viharo ditched commercial gigs by the early ’90s, eventually finding worthy screen work again in Rob Nilsson’s improv-based "9@Night" series, which premiered in recent years at the Mill Valley Film Festival. With tenderness and rage, he plays the homeless Malafide, who as much as any character connects all nine films together. The whole cycle is expected to play Bay Area theatres this fall, an occasion the actor might even be willing to comment on.

But don’t expect him to show up for "Papa-Palooza," where his vintage visage shares the bill with the live Twilight Vixen Revue.

"PAPA-PALOOZA"

Thurs/8, 7:30 p.m., $10

Parkway

1834 Park Blvd, Oakl

(510) 814-2400, www.thrillville.net

Another peaker analysis

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Steven Moss, of SF Community Power, an organization that does energy efficiency work with small businesses, sent us an analysis showing we don’t need the peaker power plants.

Check it out. (It’s an Excel file.)

“This is all publicly available data,” Moss told us. “And all the data is right there. People can mess with it any way they want,” he added, encouraging number crunchers to dig into the spreadsheet.

For example, the tab titled “DC Line 72 Trans” was generated “based on Cal-ISO’s claim that 28 percent of transmission is not available,” said Moss. According to their analysis, with the Transbay Cable online, we’d still have a 100-megawatt cushion of extra power.

Moss said the data was collated and crunched by James Fine, an economist for the Environmental Defense Fund, and Richard McCann, of M.Cubed, who doesn’t seem like a slouch either.

Fine told me they did the analysis about a year ago and it came from questioning whether or not the city needed the 400 megawatt Transbay Cable. They assumed we’d have the peakers and factored them in. Now we’re getting the cable but questioning if we need the peakers, so the data’s the same but the question is different. Moss presented this data to the Mayor’s office last week. Mayor Newsom’s support for the peakers seems to have waned a bit recently.

Rhyme and reason

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER "All rap is, like, ‘I’m rapping like a brain-damaged grandpa.’ All this ‘I’m so rich and ate so much. I’m not running on this beat, even if I have to.’ It’s arrogance — that’s the style these days. Y’know, savvy and wit still show up once in a while in this modern rap, but, uh, style, discipline, such things, are fucking gone."

Best to just jump out of the way of the barreling train o’ thought when the engineer is Adam Drucker, a.k.a. Doseone, a formidable, motor-mouthed MC in his own right — Subtle semiotician, Anticon collective co-padre, and a legendary freestyle battle rapper who went up against the then-raw Eminem at Cincinnati, Ohio’s Scribble Jam all of a decade ago. Add more descriptors to that ‘shrooming list of credentials: teacher, mentor, succorer of aspiring word-slingers.

When I called Drucker last week, he was thwack in the middle of evaluating the freestyle rap class of Oakland kids at Youth Movement Records. Drucker went in a couple months ago to talk about rap. "I didn’t really have an idea if I was gonna be, like, a white man coming in with a lot of unusable knowledge, because if they weren’t even in touch with recording equipment there wasn’t a lot I could tell them except funny stories about rappers they don’t know because they’re too young," he told me. Instead he walked in, and, he says, "I’m like, ‘Uhhh,’ while the guys who run this thing are trying to talk to me, and the whole time I’m looking at the cipher and I’m like, ‘Oh, shit, I wanna go rap!’<0x2009>"

All right, then. As Drucker confessed, "freestyling is a zen thing — you can’t really teach it," but he’s quick to add that "it will take these kids from rap writers to vocal personalities." YMR, at the very least, teaches the kids Reason software, how to make beats, and even better, records them. And in addition to his critiques, Drucker handed each student a "pivotal rap record to take home and memorize for the summer."

He was particularly psyched when one of the kids, a promising rapper and vocalist, started singing "5 O’Clock Follies," word for word, from the Freestyle Fellowship LP he gave him: "I was like, ‘Wow, there you go.’ I did one good thing, that’s for sure."

Even as Drucker is effecting change, his main project Subtle has been going through switch-ups of its own: take, for instance, the group’s new album, Exiting Arm (Lex), the latest installment in the mythical adventures of Drucker’s alter ego, Hour Hero Yes, which displays a softer, gentler, dare I say, even cunningly subtle side of Subtle, with Drucker doing more singing than slanging.

"It likes you, this record," he said happily, before quickly qualifying that thought. "Actually this isn’t a pop record. I’m not singing out about making out with three girls in one night on this motherfucker. There’s more doors and windows to a song. Things seem simpler. The tempos are more accepting — you’re not behind all the time."

Even Subtle survivor and onetime Amoeba Music hip-hop buyer Dax Pierson has weighed in positively on the new recording, reported Drucker, saying that it’s the happiest Pierson’s been with a Subtle record since the accident that left him a quadriplegic. Drucker said Pierson took control of "Gonebones," playing autoharp, creating basslines, singing, beatboxing, and programming drums.

Still, with Vanilla Ice back in the news and Mariah Carey at the top of Billboard‘s R&B/hip-hop charts, it’s hard not to follow Drucker’s choo-choo concerning the dubious state of hip-hop — just ask the Oaklander about Nas ("He talked about the streets and being gangsta, and he was on the verge of becoming a rapping man’s rapper, five mics, rap incarnate, and then he had to choose and he became the lesser of the two. He became the guy in the Versace pants."). But his disillusionment hasn’t stopped Drucker from continuing to apply the core hip-hop tenets — contrived or no — that he forged as a young fan to his music.

In case you were wondering, those beliefs include: (1) the thing where "you were always in the dark in a park and you hafta be ready to fucking fight for the meat on the hide — this battle mind," (2) "You can’t do the same thing twice — that’s for old people and studio gangstas," and (3) "Steal, steal, steal. But you do it with fucking respect — you want to be accountable for that shit, and you want to be able to see those people and somehow possibly say, without feeling like a douche-bag, ‘You inspire me. I made music out of your music.’<0x2009>"

Hell, Drucker added merrily, "It’s just a large-form steal. There are no boundaries. Unfortunately it’s a little annoying sometimes, but mostly all’s fair in love and hanging out with me."

SUBTLE

With Facing New York and Clue to Kalo

Wed/7, 9 p.m., $15

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

www.gamh.com

HITTIN’ TOWN: METAL BON MOTS AND ELFIN FOLK


BLOODHAG


Hell Bent for Letters (Alternative Tentacles), indeed. The combo issues short, sharp metal bons mots to their beloved sci-fi and fantasy writers. Fri/9, 9:30 p.m., $8. Eli’s Mile High Club, 3629 MLK Jr. Way, Oakl. www.oaklandmilehigh.com. Sat/10, call for time, free. Dark Carnival Books, 3086 Claremont, Berk. (510) 595-7637. Sat/10, 9 p.m., $10. Annie’s Social Club, 917 Folsom, SF. www.anniessocialclub.com

POI DOG PONDERING


With a new album in paw, the Hawaii-Chicago transplants puzzle over the folk-rock good times once again. Sat/10, 9 p.m., $21. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. www.gamh.com

FERN KNIGHT AND EX REVERIE


No, there is no Fern. Philly combo Fern Knight nurtures Margaret Wienk’s acoustic-electronic musings. Having transitioned from death metal to elfin folk, Ex Reverie’s Gillian Chadwick turns in a gorgeous The Door into Summer, released on Greg Weeks’ Language of Stone imprint. With Mariee Sioux. Sun/11, 9 p.m., $8. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

A beginner’s — and teacher’s — mind

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Ask Toshio Hirano how he discovered honky-tonk music and he replies with the question: "How much time do you have"? It’s not a simple answer and he explains his transformation from fanatic to performing artist the same way a musicologist might discuss the development of recording techniques from the Edison cylinder to digital audiotape. Hirano is part teacher, anyway — and part student — still discovering his roots at age 57.

His audiences can be divided into two camps: faithful veterans and incredulous newbies. No doubt the newbies are brought to gigs with reassurances akin to "No, really, it’s good." They enter the bar together, and Hirano is onstage doing one from the repertoire: maybe it’s Hank Thompson’s "Humpty Dumpty Heart." Hirano’s vocal twang, inflected with his Japanese accent, wraps around the hillbilly syllables of the song as if his native Tokyo were an Appalachian homestead. Meanwhile his acoustic guitar, with its jangling hammer-ons, rattles over the chord changes like a train passing over railroad ties, convincing the audience that this is no novelty, but an authentic piece of Americana. The believer looks eager: "Are you feeling this?" Hirano has already charmed the first-timer, who inevitably wonders, "This is crazy. What’s his deal?"

Japan was awash with American records during the early 1960s, and although Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley held sway in the schoolyards, it was Hank Williams, Bob Dylan, and the Kingston Trio who captured Hirano’s imagination. From there it wasn’t a far leap to his first bluegrass record — by the Country Gentlemen — which he could only acquire from a specialty shop. "It was a funny feeling [to be] listening to music that not a lot of people knew," he confessed on a recent Saturday afternoon, flanked by a wall of used books at the Mission Creek Café. "I felt cool."

The galvanizing moment in his early education came in 1972 when a friend lent him a Jimmie Rodgers record. "On the cover he was leaning over a Cadillac with a cowboy hat, looking so good," Hirano remembered. "It was recorded in 1928, before Hank Williams and before Bill Monroe." Rodgers’ reading of "Peach Pickin’ Time in Georgia" was the Big Bang for Hirano, an event that still roars 35 years later. "When I play any songs the sound of Jimmie Rodgers is in there," he explained. "I would not be singing Hank Williams without Jimmie Rodgers. Every song fits on the foundation of his sound."

In 1975, on his 24th birthday, Hirano arrived in Atlanta, Ga., an employee in a Japanese mushroom enterprise. "I don’t believe in God in the religious sense but I do believe in fate," he offered as a way to sum up his American life, a pilgrimage of sorts cast with fortuitous acquaintances and serendipity. It wasn’t long before his mushroom interest went south, and facing an expiring work visa, Hirano chanced into a job as the maître d’ in Music City’s first Japanese restaurant, where he routinely catered to Nashville’s biggest country stars.

Three years later Hirano was enrolled in a guitar course in Red Wing, Minn. — a town bisected by Highway 61, he notes. At the end of the term, the class held a party where everyone had to play a song. "There was a punk rock guy from San Antonio in the class and he said, ‘Toshio, did you just play Hank Sr.? You have to come to Texas.’ "

Once installed in Austin, Hirano busked on the streets and played gigs his friend arranged. "I never thought about performing until he encouraged me," Hirano said. But an Asian man playing old-time country standards in Texas attracts a kind of attention that is not altogether genuine. "I was overly welcomed. I was only playing Jimmie Rodgers in cafes, and they treated me like a big star." He simply wanted to share the music he loved, but the novelty of his act became a burden.

San Francisco promised freedom from celebrity, and from audiences for whom country music is a birthright. "I started feeling, wow, I’m reintroducing old American music to Americans." Ultimately this role evolved into a neat byproduct of his act. "My original pleasure is still the same," he continued. "Every time I sing an old country tune, I just feel so good." Now his satisfaction is in part due to the torch he bears for America’s musical heritage, "If [the audience] likes the songs, I tell them, ‘Buy Jimmie Rodgers.’ "

The exchange goes both ways. Hirano, a self-confessed guitar amateur, learns songs based on suggestions from audience members. On any given night, he and his band — bassist Kenan O’Brien and violinist Mayumi Urgino — play 25 songs, less than half by the Blue Yodeler. Hirano has yet to perform the one original song he has written in the 40 years since he first picked up a guitar.

There’s something utterly refreshing about an artist with nothing to sell. Hirano’s only ambition is to keep his once-a-month gigs at Amnesia and the Rite Spot, where the pass-the-hat informality is infectious and the singing is as authentic as an early Victrola recording. A performer for whom authorship is foreign and attention is baneful, Hirano finds his fulfillment in participating. "I am fortunate to have run into this old music," he told me, grinning.

TOSHIO HIRANO

Second Mondays, 8:30 p.m., free

Amnesia

853 Valencia, SF

(415) 970-0012

www.amnesiathebar.com

Also last Saturdays, 9 p.m., free

Rite Spot

2099 Folsom, SF

(415) 552-6066

www.ritespotcafe.net

Elbow on the table

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"Darling, is this love?" asks Elbow’s Guy Garvey quietly in the middle of "Starlings." He is answered by a deafening blast of horns, an apocalyptic brass rejoinder meant to warn the world of an oncoming storm of romantic uncertainty. What kind of universe renders the joys of love as equal parts worry and wonder? One that has fallen in and out of obsession — a planet of newly born babies, lost lovers, and fallen friends. Elbow brings this cast of characters and plots to life with Seldom Seen Kid (Polydor), its first album in three years, a study in carefully crafted atmospherics that intrigue without descending into melodrama.

Elbow began 17 years ago when the members met in college at Bury, England. They moved to Manchester and proceeded to release a series of critically lauded EPs before offering up 2001’s Asleep in the Back (V2) followed by Cast of Thousands (V2, 2004) and Leaders of the Free World (Fiction/Geffen) in 2005. Along the way, the group became famous for clever, multilayered orchestral pop music and the evocative storytelling of Garvey’s lyrics. For Seldom Seen Kid — a tribute to late singer-songwriter and friend of the band Brian Glancy — Elbow created the album on its own in a Salford, England, studio, giving production credits to keyboard player Craig Potter.

While the so-called concept album can easily be construed as pretentious endeavor, nowhere is it more appropriate than with Elbow. Using ambient noise between sweet lulls and stark melodic layers, Seldom Seen Kid invites listeners to poke around its aural library and browse for stories until they find one that suits them. On songs like "Grounds for Divorce," heavy, churning riffs buoy Garvey’s wary summation of the dangers embedded in a typical day of British life. "There’s a hole in my neighborhood down which of late I cannot help but fall," Garvey explains in the track, making pointed reference to a local pub and the lure of drowning daily concerns in a pint glass.

Not that Elbow’s world is a completely dark land: for every glum reminder, there are moments of bliss, domestic and otherwise. "Audience with the Pope" is a tongue-in-cheek litany of overstatement, during which Garvey attests that he’s "saving the world at eight / But if she says she needs me / Everybody’s gonna have to wait." Whether examining the victories and failures of life or swooning under the charms of love, Seldom Seen Kid spins a smartly crafted series of vignettes that keep Elbow in the upper eschelon of thinking-person’s rock.

ELBOW

With Air Traffic

Thurs/8, 8 p.m., $20

Bimbo’s 365 Club

1025 Columbus, SF

(415) 474-0365
www.bimbos365club.com

Growing up

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› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Arguments about urban sprawl and the need to drastically improve transit services at the Transbay Terminal are driving plans for massive new skyscrapers in the SoMa District. Although the project is still in its initial phase, as many as seven towers — some higher than the Transamerica Pyramid — would surround the centerpiece Transbay Tower.

At an April 30 public hearing on the project at Golden Gate University, about 150 people, mostly developers and architects, voiced their opinions as they listened to the city’s updates on the proposal. For the most part, the business community audience wanted buildings as high as possible and felt that even the city’s most ambitious proposal, to build a Transbay Tower more than 1,200 feet high — almost twice the height of One Rincon Hill — was insufficient.

"I support raising the heights. By increasing density, we’re taking better care of our environment," Rincon Hill resident Jamie Whitaker told the room.

The original plan called for a 550-foot Transbay Tower, but the city wants to double its height to ensure sufficient funds for the Transit Center, the Caltrain extension, and other infrastructure improvements. The project’s environmental impact report will study three height options: 850, 1,000, and 1,200 feet. The addition of a couple of hundred feet would raise revenue from about $150 million to between $310 million and $410 million, according to the San Francisco Planning Department.

Although increasing the height of the planned office buildings will bring in more money for other improvements, the increased density comes with transit and quality of life costs. Some worry that the higher population will create an unlivable space.

"Mission Street is turning into a canyon," Jennifer Clary, president of the urban environmental group SF Tomorrow, told the Guardian. "Already there are virtually no parks in this side of the city. They’re creating a demand for more open space, but they’re not fulfilling it."

Although a new park will extend about 11 acres on the roof of the Transbay Terminal, some existing open spaces may be in jeopardy. If the Transbay Tower is higher than 1,000 feet, it will cast a shadow for part of the day over Justin Herman Plaza and possibly Portsmouth Square.

Even though Proposition K, which passed in 1984, states that new buildings cannot cast shadows on public parks, the city’s planning department has the ability to waive that rule. "The law says no new ‘significant’ shadows, so it’s really a judgment call and can be interpreted in a variety of ways," Joshua Switzky, project manager for the San Francisco Planning Department told the Guardian.

For example, the city allowed the Asian Art Museum, remodeled in 2003, to cast a small shadow over Civic Center Plaza. "Shadow impacts can be precisely calculated, and we’re working to mitigate the impact on parks," Switzky said.

In addition to thoughts on how to keep parks sunny, several ideas to ease congestion were introduced at the meeting, including changing one-way streets, restricting terminal access to public vehicles, installing more bike lanes, and increasing curb width.

According to a 2004 Planning Department study, 70 percent of downtown workers commute using public transit, 17 percent drive, and the rest walk or bike. Sufficient funding has yet to be secured to connect Caltrain tracks to the Transbay Terminal, instead of its present end at 4th and King streets. Either way, the planning department hopes to increase commuters using transit by 6 percent, according to the April 2008 Transit Center District Plan.

"Right now all we have is a huge skyscraper for a bus terminal, and it’s not clear if the city will invest the extra money from taller buildings to improve transit," Clary told us.

The planning department estimates it will need an additional $1.9 billion to connect Caltrain, and if it doesn’t reach that goal, SoMa may be inundated by even more cars since there will be no direct commute route from the Peninsula to the new Transbay Terminal offices. In November, California voters will decide on a $10 billion bond measure to create a high-speed rail line linking Los Angeles to San Francisco at the new Transbay Terminal, the centerpiece of the planned project.

The next public meeting will be held at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on Thursday, May 8 at 5:30 p.m.

Summer 2008 fairs and festivals

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Grab your calendars, then get outside and celebrate summer in the Bay.

>Click here for a full-text version of this article.

ONGOING

United States of Asian America Arts Festival Various locations, SF; (415) 864-4120, www.apiculturalcenter.org. Through May 25. This festival, presented by the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center, showcases Asian Pacific Islander dance, music, visual art, theater, and multidisciplinary performance ensembles at many San Francisco venues.

Yerba Buena Gardens Festival Yerba Buena Gardens, Third St at Mission, SF; (415) 543-1718, www.ybgf.org. Through Oct, free. Nearly 100 artistic and cultural events for all ages take place at the Gardens, including the Latin Jazz series and a performance by Rupa & the April Fishes.

MAY 10–31

Asian Pacific Heritage Festival Oakland Asian Cultural Center, 388 Ninth St, Oakl; (510) 637-0462, www.oacc.cc. Times vary, free. The OACC presents hands-on activities for families, film screenings, cooking classes, and performances throughout the month of May.

MAY 15–18

Carmel Art Festival Devendorf Park, Carmel; (831) 642-2503, www.carmelartfestival.org. Call for times, free. Enjoy viewing works by more than 60 visual artists at this four-day festival. In addition to the Plein Air and Sculpture-in-the-Park events, the CAF is host to the Carmel Youth Art Show, Quick Draw, and Kids Art Day.

MAY 16–18

Oakland Greek Festival 4700 Lincoln, Oakl; (510) 531-3400, www.oaklandgreekfestival.com. Fri-Sat, 10am-11pm; Sun, 11am-9pm, $6. Let’s hear an "opa!" for Greek music, dance, food, and a stunning view at the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of the Ascension’s three-day festival.

MAY 17

Asian Heritage Street Celebration Japantown; www.asianfairsf.com. 11am-6pm, free. The largest gathering of Asian Pacific Americans in the nation features artists, DJs, martial arts, Asian pop culture, karaoke, and much more.

Saints Kiril and Methody Bulgarian Festival Croatian American Cultural Center, 60 Onondaga; (510) 649-0941, www.slavonicweb.org. 4pm, $15. Enjoy live music, dance, and traditional food and wine in celebration of Bulgarian culture. A concert features special guests Radostina Koneva and Orchestra Ludi Maldi.

Taiwanese American Cultural Festival Union Square, SF; (408) 268-5637, www.tafnc.org. 11am-5pm, free. Explore Taiwan by tasting delicious Taiwanese delicacies, viewing a puppet show and other performances, and browsing arts and crafts exhibits.

Uncorked! Ghirardelli Square; 775-5500, www.ghirardellisq.com. 1-6pm, $40-45. Ghirardelli Square and nonprofit COPIA present their third annual wine festival, showcasing more than 40 local wineries and an array of gourmet food offerings.

BAY AREA

Cupertino Special Festival in the Park Cupertino Civic Center, 10300 Torre, Cupertino; (408) 996-0850, www.osfamilies.org. 10am-6pm, free. The Organization of Special Needs Families hosts its fourth annual festival for people of all walks or wheels of life. Featuring live music, food and beer, a petting zoo, arts and crafts, and other activities.

Enchanted Village Fair 1870 Salvador, Napa; (707) 252-5522. 11am-4pm, $1. Stone Bridge School creates a magical land of wonder and imagination, featuring games, crafts, a crystal room, and food.

Immigrants Day Festival Courthouse Square, 2200 Broadway, Redwood City; (650) 299-0104, www.historysmc.org. 12-4pm, free. Sample traditional Mexican food, make papel picado decorations, and watch Aztec dancing group Casa de la Cultura Quetzalcoatl at the San Mateo County History Museum.

MAY 17–18

A La Carte and Art Castro St, Mountain View; (650) 964-3395, www.miramarevents.com. 10am-6pm, free. The official kick-off to festival season, A La Carte is a moveable feast of people and colorful tents offering two days of attractions, music, art, a farmers’ market, and street performers.

Bay Area Storytelling Festival Kennedy Grove Regional Recreation Area, El Sobrante; (510) 869-4946, www.bayareastorytelling.org. Gather around and listen to stories told by storytellers from around the world at this outdoor festival. Carol Birch, Derek Burrows, Baba Jamal Koram, and Olga Loya are featured.

Castroville Artichoke Festival 10100 Merritt, Castroville; (831) 633-2465, www.artichoke-festival.org. Sat, 10am-6pm; Sun, 10am-5pm, $3-6. "Going Green and Global" is the theme of this year’s festival, which cooks up the vegetable in every way imaginable and features activities for kids, music, a parade, a farmers’ market, and much more.

French Flea Market Chateau Sonoma, 153 West Napa, Sonoma; (707) 935-8553, www.chateausonoma.com. Call for times and cost. Attention, Francophiles: this flea market is for you! Shop for antiques, garden furniture, and accessories from French importers.

Hats Off America Car Show Bollinger Canyon Rd and Camino Ramon, San Ramon; (925) 855-1950, www.hatsoffamerica.us. 10am-5pm, free. Hats Off America presents its fifth annual family event featuring muscle cars, classics and hot rods, art exhibits, children’s activities, live entertainment, a 10K run, and beer and wine.

Himalayan Fair Live Oak Park, 1300 Shattuck, Berk; (510) 869-3995, www.himalayanfair.net. Sat, 10am-7pm; Sun, 10am-5:30pm, $8.This benefit for humanitarian grassroots projects in the Himalayas features award-winning dancers and musicians representing Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan, India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Mongolia. Check out the art and taste the delicious food.

Pixie Park Spring Fair Marin Art and Garden Center, Ross; www.pixiepark.org. 9am-4pm, free. The kids will love the bouncy houses, giant slide, petting zoo, pony rides, puppet shows, and more at this cooperative park designed for children under 6. Bring a book to donate to Homeward Bound of Marin.

Supercon San Jose Convention Center, San Jose; www.super-con.com. Sat., 10am-6pm; Sun., 10am-5pm, $20-30. The biggest stars of comics, sci-fi, and pop culture — including Lost’s Jorge Garcia and Groo writer Sergio Aragonés — descend on downtown San Jose for panels, discussions, displays, and presentations.

MAY 18

Bay to Breakers Begins at Howard and Spear, ends at the Great Highway along Ocean Beach, SF; www.baytobreakers.com. 8am, $39-59. See a gang of Elvis impersonators in running shorts and a gigantic balloon shaped like a tube of Crest floating above a crowd of scantily clad, and unclad, joggers at this annual "race" from the Embarcadero to the Pacific Ocean.

Carnival in the Xcelsior 125 Excelsior; 469-4739, my-sfcs.org/8.html. 11am-4pm, free. This benefit for the SF Community School features game booths, international food selections, prizes, music, and entertainment for all ages.

BAY AREA

Russian-American Fair Terman Middle School, 655 Arastradero, Palo Alto; (650) 852-3509, paloaltojcc.org. 10am-5pm, $3-5. The Palo Alto Jewish Community Center puts on this huge, colorful cultural extravaganza featuring ethnic food, entertainment, crafts and gift items, art exhibits, carnival games, and vodka tasting for adults.

MAY 21–JUNE 8

San Francisco International Arts Festival Various venues, SF; (415) 399-9554, www.sfiaf.org. The theme for the fifth year of this multidisciplinary festival is "The Truth in Knowing/Threads in Time, Place, Culture."

MAY 22–25

Sonoma Jazz Plus Festival Field of Dreams, 179 First St W, Sonoma; (866) 527-8499, www.sonomajazz.org. Thurs-Sat, 6:30 and 9pm; Sun, 8:30pm, $40+. Head on up to California’s wine country to soak in the sounds of Al Green, Herbie Hancock, Diana Krall, and Bonnie Raitt.

MAY 24–25

Carnaval Mission District, SF; (415) 920-0125, www.carnavalsf.com. 9:30am-6pm, free. California’s largest annual multicultural parade and festival celebrates its 30th anniversary with food, crafts, activities, performances by artists like deSoL, and "Zona Verde," an outdoor eco-green village at 17th and Harrison.

MAY 25–26

San Ramon Art and Wind Festival Central Park, San Ramon; (925) 973-3200, www.artandwind.com. 10am-5pm, free. For its 18th year, the City of San Ramon Parks and Community Services Department presents over 200 arts and crafts booths, entertainment on three stages, kite-flying demos, and activities for kids.

MAY 30–JUNE 8

Healdsburg Jazz Festival Check Web site for ticket prices and venues in and around Healdsburg; (707) 433-4644, www.healdsburgjazzfestival.com. This 10th annual, week-and-a-half-long jazz festival will feature a range of artists from Fred Hersch and Bobby Hutcherson to the Cedar Walton Trio.

MAY 31

Chocolate and Chalk Art Festival North Shattuck, Berk; (510) 548-5335, www.northshattuck.org. 10am-6pm, free. Create chalk drawings and sample chocolate delights while vendors, musicians, and clowns entertain the family.

Napa Valley Art Festival 500 Main, Napa; www.napavalleyartfestival.com. 10am-4pm, free. Napa Valley celebrates representational art on Copia’s beautiful garden promenade with art sales, ice cream, and live music. Net proceeds benefit The Land Trust of Napa County’s Connolly Ranch Education Center.

MAY 31–JUNE 1

Union Street Festival Union, between Gough and Steiner, SF; 1-800-310-6563, www.unionstreetfestival.com. 10am-6pm, free. For its 32nd anniversary, one of SF’s largest free art festivals is going green, featuring an organic farmer’s market, arts and crafts made with sustainable materials, eco-friendly exhibits, food, live entertainment, and bistro-style cafés.

JUNE 4–8

01SJ: Global Festival of Art on the Edge Various venues, San Jose; (408) 277-3111, ww.01sj.org. Various times. The nonprofit ZERO1 plans to host 20,000 visitors at this festival featuring 100 exhibiting artists exploring the digital age and novel creative expression.

JUNE 5–8

Harmony Festival Sonoma County Fairgrounds, Santa Rosa; www.harmonyfestival.com. $30-99. One of the largest progressive-lifestyle festivals of its kind, Harmony brings art, education, and cultural awareness together with world-class performers like George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic, Jefferson Starship, Damian Marley, Cheb I Sabbah, and Vau de Vire Society.

JUNE 7–8

Crystal Fair Fort Mason Center; 383-7837, www.crystalfair.com. Sat, 10am-6pm; Sun, 10am-5pm, $6. The Pacific Crystal Guild presents two days in celebration of crystals, minerals, jewelry, and metaphysical healing tools from an international selection of vendors.

BAY AREA

Sunset Celebration Weekend Sunset headquarters, 80 Willow Road, Menlo Park; 1-800-786-7375, www.sunset.com. 10am-5pm, $12, kids free. Sunset magazine presents a two-day outdoor festival featuring beer, wine, and food tasting; test-kitchen tours, celebrity chef demonstrations, live music, seminars, and more.

JUNE 8

Haight Ashbury Street Fair Haight and Ashbury; www.haightashburystreetfair.org. 11am-5:30pm, free. Celebrate the cultural contributions this historical district has made to SF with a one-day street fair featuring artisans, musicians, artists, and performers.

JUNE 14

Rock Art by the Bay Fort Mason, SF; www.trps.org. 10am-5pm, free. The Rock Poster Society hosts this event celebrating poster art from its origins to its most recent incarnations.

BAY AREA

City of Oakland Housing Fair Frank Ogawa Plaza; Oakl; (510) 238-3909, www.oaklandnet.com/housingfair. 10am-2pm, free. The City of Oakland presents this seventh annual event featuring workshops and resources for first-time homebuyers, renters, landlords, and homeowners.

JUNE 14–15

North Beach Festival Washington Square Park, 1200-1500 blocks of Grant and adjacent streets; 989-2220, www.sfnorthbeach.org. 10am-6pm, free. Touted as the country’s original outdoor arts and crafts festival, the North Beach Festival celebrates its 54th anniversary with juried arts and crafts exhibitions and sales, a celebrity pizza toss, live entertainment stages, a cooking stage with celebrity chefs, Assisi animal blessings, Arte di Gesso (Italian street chalk art competition, 1500 block Stockton), indoor Classical Concerts (4 pm, National Shrine of St. Francis), a poetry stage, and more.

BAY AREA

Sonoma Lavender Festival 8537 Sonoma Hwy, Kenwood; (707) 523-4411, www.sonomalavender.com. 10am-4pm, free. Sonoma Lavender opens its private farm to the public for craftmaking, lavender-infused culinary delights by Chef Richard Harper, tea time, and a chance to shop for one of Sonoma’s 300 fragrant products.

JUNE 7–AUG 17

Stern Grove Music Festival Stern Grove, 19th Ave and Sloat, SF; www.sterngrove.org. Sundays 2pm, free. This beloved San Francisco festival celebrates community, nature, and the arts is in its with its 71st year of admission-free concerts.

JUNE 17–20

Mission Creek Music Festival Venues and times vary; www.mcmf.org.The Mission Creek Music Festival celebrates twelve years of featuring the best and brightest local independent musicians and artists with this year’s events in venues big and small.

JUNE 20–22

Jewish Vintners Celebration Various locations, Napa Valley; (707) 968-9944, www.jewishvintners.org. Various times, $650. The third annual L’Chaim Napa Valley Jewish Vintners Celebration celebrates the theme "Connecting with Our Roots" with a weekend of wine, cuisine, camaraderie, and history featuring Jewish winemakers from Napa, Sonoma, and Israel.

Sierra Nevada World Music Festival Mendocino County Fairgrounds, 14480 Hwy 128, Boonville; (917) 777-5550, www.snwmf.com.Three-day pass, $135; camping, $50-100. Camp for three days and listen to the international sounds of Michael Franti & Spearhead, the English Beat, Yami Bolo, and many more.

JUNE 28–29

San Francisco Pride 2008 Civic Center, Larkin between Grove and McAllister; 864-FREE, www.sfpride.org. Celebration Sat-Sun, noon-6pm; parade Sun, 10:30am, free. A month of queer-empowering events culminates in this weekend celebration: a massive party with two days of music, food, and dancing that continues to boost San Francisco’s rep as a gay mecca. This year’s theme is "Bound for Equality."

JULY 3–6

High Sierra Music Festival Plumas-Sierra Fairgrounds, Quincy; (510) 547-1992, www.highsierramusic.com. Ticket prices vary. Enjoy four days of camping, stellar live music, yoga, shopping, and more at the 18th iteration of this beloved festival. This year’s highlights include ALO, Michael Franti and Spearhead, Built to Spill, Bob Weir & RatDog, Gov’t Mule, and Railroad Earth.

JULY 4

City of San Francisco Fourth of July Waterfront Celebration Pier 39, Embarcadero at Beach; 705-5500, www.pier39.com. 1-9:30pm, free. SF’s waterfront Independence Day celebration features live music by Big Bang Beat and Tainted Love, kids’ activities, and an exciting fireworks show.

JULY 5–6

Fillmore Jazz Festival Fillmore between Jackson and Eddy; www.fillmorejazzfestival.com.10am-6pm, free. More than 90,000 people will gather to celebrate Fillmore Street’s prosperous tradition of jazz, culture, and cuisine.

JULY 17–AUG 3

Midsummer Mozart Festival Various Bay Area venues; (415) 392-4400, www.midsummermozart.org. $20-60. This Mozart-only music concert series in its 34th season features talented musicians from SF and beyond.

JULY 18–AUG 8

Music@Menlo Chamber Music Festival Menlo School, 50 Valparaiso, Atherton; www.musicatmenlo.org. In its sixth season, this festival explores a musical journey through time, from Bach to Jennifer Higdon.

JULY 21–27

North Beach Jazz Fest Various locations; www.nbjazzfest.com. Various times and ticket prices. Sunset Productions presents the 15th annual gathering celebrating indoor and outdoor jazz by over 100 local and international artists. Special programs include free jazz in Washington Square Park.

JULY 26, AUG 16

FLAX Creative Arts Festival 1699 Market; 552-2355, www.flaxart.com. 11am-2pm, free. Flax Art and Design hosts an afternoon of hands-on demonstrations, free samples, and prizes for kids.

JULY 27

Up Your Alley Dore Alley between Folsom and Howard, Folsom between Ninth and 10th Sts; www.folsomstreetfair.com. 11am-6pm, free. Hundreds of naughty and nice leather-lovers sport their stuff in SoMa at this precursor to the Folsom Street Fair.

AUG 2–3

Aloha Festival San Francisco Presidio Parade Grounds, near Lincoln at Graham; www.pica-org.org/AlohaFest/index.html. 10am-5pm, free. The Pacific Islanders’ Cultural Association presents its annual Polynesian cultural festival featuring music, dance, arts, crafts, island cuisine, exhibits, and more.

AUG 9–10

Nihonmachi Street Fair Japantown Center, Post and Webster; www.nihonmachistreetfair.org. 11am-6pm, free. Japantown’s 35th annual celebration of the Bay Area’s Asian and Pacific Islander communities continues this year with educational booths and programs, local musicians and entertainers, exhibits, and artisans.

AUG 22–24

Outside Lands Music & Arts Festival Golden Gate Park; www.outsidelands.com. View Web site for times and price. Don’t miss the inaugural multifaceted festival of top-notch music, including Tom Petty, Jack Johnson, Manu Chao, Widespread Panic, Wilco, and Primus.

AUG 25–SEPT 1

Burning Man Black Rock City, NV; www.burningman.com. $295. Celebrate the theme "American Dream" at this weeklong participatory campout that started in the Bay Area. No tickets will be sold at the gate this year.

AUG 29–SEPT 1

Sausalito Art Festival 2400 Bridgeway, Sausalito; (415) 331-3757, www.sausalitoartfestival.org. Various times, $10. Spend Labor Day weekend enjoying the best local, national, and international artists as they display paintings, sculpture, ceramics, and more in this seaside village.

AUG 30–31

Millbrae Art and Wine Festival Broadway between Victoria and Meadow Glen, Millbrae; (650) 697-7324, www.miramarevents.com. 10am-5pm, free. The "Big Easy" comes to Millbrae for this huge Mardi Gras–style celebration featuring R&B, rock ‘n’ roll, jazz, and soul music, as well as arts and crafts, food and beverages, live performance, and activities for kids.

AUG 30–SEPT 1

Art and Soul Festival Various venues, Oakl; (510) 444-CITY, www.artandsouloakland.com. 11am-6pm, $5-$10. Enjoy three days of culturally diverse music, food, and art at the eighth annual Comcast Art and Soul Festival, which features a Family Fun Zone and an expo highlighting local food and wine producers.

SEPT 1–5

San Francisco Shakespeare Festival Various Bay Area locations; www.sfshakes.org. This nonprofit organization presents free Shakespeare in the Park, brings performances to schools, hosts theater camps, and more.

SEPT 6–7

Mountain View Art and Wine Festival Castro between El Camino Real and Evelyn, Mountain View; (650) 968-8378, www.miramarevents.com. 10am-6pm, free. Known as one of America’s finest art festivals, more than 200,000 arts lovers gather in Silicon Valley’s epicenter for this vibrant celebration featuring art, music, and a Kids’ Park.

SEPT 20–21

Treasure Island Music Festival Treasure Island; treasureislandfestival.com. The second year of this two-day celebration, organized by the creators of Noise Pop, promises an impressive selection of indie, rock, and hip-hop artists.

SEPT 28

Folsom Street Fair Folsom Street; www.folsomstreetfair.com. Eight days of Leather Pride Week finishes up with the 25th anniversary of this famous and fun fair.

Listings compiled by Molly Freedenberg.

Pizza Place on Noriega

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Surfer dudes are people too, and they get hungry just like the rest of us. Surprisingly, San Francisco has such dudes; unsurprisingly, they tend to cluster at the city’s western edge, a land whose great highway is the Great Highway. Just beyond the Great Highway is the beach, pounded by surf, and surfer dudes (of any and all sexes) love the surf. Fog? This is irrelevant. Surfers have other issues to contend with, such as great whites.

The far Sunset District has its mild and fogless days, anyway — a blessing for those of us who sometimes bumble in from more sheltered corners of town, expecting the worst and swaddled in woolens — and the prosaically named Pizza Place on Noriega has been laid out with such beatific weather in mind. Although the restaurant’s glassy face peers north, its huge windows (including transoms) are filled with the light of the westering sun on spring evenings, and the woody interior (rather ski-lodgey, I thought) glows at this golden hour. Of course it rains in the Sunset too, and is foggy, and in these abysmal conditions we would have to trust to the warmth and perfume of the pizza oven, which dominates the unconcealed kitchen in its far corner of the double-width storefront space.

In my increasingly remote youth, pizza meant a visit to Shakey’s, whose amusements included a player piano. PPoN doesn’t have a player piano, but it does seem to attract small children — evidence that the city’s baby belt now extends well beyond Noe Valley. Despite the abundance of little ones, the restaurant doesn’t offer a kiddie menu; the tone throughout, in fact, seems pitched for young adults, from the jokey sign (courtesy of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer) just inside the front door — "I only eat pizza on days that end in ‘Y’" — to the huge cardboard profile of a Chevy Caprice mounted on the rear wall, with spinning tires that happen to be pepperoni pizzas.

Pabst is available on tap, which isn’t something you see too often out here, as opposed to in Milwaukee. And while the menu doesn’t offer pepperoni pizza per se, such a pie can be created from the list of DIY toppings. Pepperoni does turn up as a member of the ensemble in several of the house specialty pies, among them the Dimitri (with sausage, garlic, and mushrooms) and the Meathead (with sausage, salami, ham, and red onion).

We, however, could not resist the Spicoli ($15.99 for a 14-incher), topped with sausage and double cheese and named for — no, not an obscure pasta shape or a type of cured pork, but Jeff Spicoli, king of the surfer dudes and high priest of stoned slackerdom, as brilliantly depicted by Sean Penn in the 1982 movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The Spicoli is the simple declarative sentence of pizzadom: a nicely crisp crust that’s a bit thicker than vogue, plenty of fennel-scented sausage chunks, and a lava flow of melted cheese. I love cheese as a birthright and hesitate to say that there can be such a thing as too much of it. But, post-Spicoli, I wonder.

The kitchen also turns out some interesting side dishes, including cauliflower florets ($5) roasted with black olives, orange zest, chili flakes, and parsley for a real Mediterranean, even Sicilian, flair. Then there are the sweet potato steak fries ($7), their faint sweetness resembling the fried yucca root you sometimes find in Brazilian restaurants. To broaden their appeal, PPoN presents the fries with little cups of blue cheese dressing and buffalo sauce (tomato-based and sweet-hot, though more hot than sweet), along with piles of baby carrots and celery stalks. A family of dunkables.

And since even pizzas less cheesy than the mighty Spicoli can be overwhelming, the midday snacker can find an attractive array of sandwiches to choose from. These are called grinders and are available from noon until four in the afternoon. Perhaps their best characteristic is the bread they’re served on: torpedo-shaped, wonderfully soft rolls from Amoroso Bakery in Philadelphia.

The rolls are like focaccia rolls except not olive-oily. They’re also discreetly absorbent, an important consideration if one’s grinder is the housemade meatball version ($6.50). The meatballs themselves are veal-inflected, to judge by their subtle texture, and they’re bathed in plenty of tomato sauce, which could easily get all over everything but doesn’t because most of it settles into the bread. Some melted provolone provides an additional seal.

More complex is the uncomplex-sounding roast turkey grinder ($6.25). Plenty of meat here, along with mayo, mustard, and provolone — but also a puckery zing provided by slivers of red onion and chunks of pepperoncini. We’re a long way from sandwiches made from Thanksgiving leftovers.

As for the crowd: surfer-dudish, though a little older than Jeff Spicoli, and no sign of Sean Penn, but plenty of the aforementioned kids, dangling like chimps from chairs and the edges of tables. The surfer-dude community has discovered family values, apparently.

The pizzeria is just about a year old: a whippersnapper with sharp new wood flooring and, over the roof, a tell-tale curvy exhaust flue, in a faded part of town. It’s not yet the equal of the Richmond’s Pizzetta 211 and maybe it doesn’t mean to be. But friends and acquaintances of mine who live in the western Sunset (some surfer dudes, some regular dudes) are certainly eager for renewal in the restaurant scene — if not fast times, at least ambulatory ones.

PIZZA PLACE ON NORIEGA

Wed.–Thurs., Sun.–Mon., noon–10 p.m.

Fri.–Sat., noon–10:30 p.m.

3901 Noriega, SF

(415) 759-5752, www.pizzaplacesf.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Cheerfully noisy

Wheelchair accessible

The yard sticks

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com
I hopped my first freight train in the spring of 1993, outside a small central Florida town. My first train sat behind a drive-in theater along old Highway 301, among the pines sometimes seen in old photos of turpentine camps and prison work crews. Under a Southern moon, I battled mosquitoes and listened to a chorus of swamp frogs that must have been heard by the very men who built the railroad. I waited impatiently on the porch of a grainer car, as if it were the threshold of adulthood, for the train to carry me somewhere else.

As the ’90s ushered in a new era of gentrified, cookie-cutter, chain-store cities, I crisscrossed the country several times on freight trains. Today, I still think about that place in Florida outside of time, and when I’m sick of computers and phones and NPR news, I find myself heading to the train yard. In recent works that seem eerily timed to headlines announcing an impending US financial collapse, the writer William T. Vollmann and the photographer Mike Brodie have headed there too. This resurgence of interest in train-hopping stories might be a barometer of public dissatisfaction.

The somewhere else I thought I wanted to go on that first train ride probably looked a lot like the romantic universe encapsulated in the Polaroid photos of train-hopping friends taken by Mike Brodie, a.k.a. the Polaroid Kidd. Brodie’s photos, posted on his Web site, Ridin’ Dirty Face (www.ridindirtyface.com), depict a hobotopia where packs of grubby kids (and dogs!) play music, share food, and forage in the ruins of postindustrial America, traveling from town to town on freight trains and homemade river rafts. Everyone’s good looking and no one appears to be over 25.

As my first train left the yard that long-ago day, I sang some words by Johnny Cash because at 19 I wished my life were an epic country song. Similarly, the subjects of Brodie’s pictures wear suspenders and fedoras and patched-up oversize suit coats, as if they’ve walked out of newsreels from the Great Depression. In Brodie’s version of somewhere else, though, the Depression is glamorous. One of the most charming — and possibly most emblematic — photos in his current show at SF Camerawork depicts a young woman standing in the doorway of a rickety shack, a yard full of chickens pecking at her feet. At first glance, the image seems lifted straight from Walker Evans’ classic photos of 1930s austerity in his 1941 collaboration with James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. But in Brodie’s photo, the light is sensual, the mood somehow humid — it’s summertime — and the woman is, incongruously, wearing a beaded ballroom gown.

Brodie’s photos might depict a wish for a world uncomplicated by money or its absence — an aesthetic nostalgia for a time when no one had any money, and everyone had, perhaps, more integrity without it. Yet these images of romanticized destitution have, quite ironically, become high-priced art objects. Frankly, I find it creepy that art collectors will pay top dollar for highly aesthetic portraits of cute — and apparently penniless — teenage punk waifs staring guilelessly from dirt-smudged faces into the camera. Brodie’s photos have become valuable just as the country stands on the edge of the kind of Great Depression they romanticize. The winner at age 22 of the 2008 Baum Award for Emerging American Photographers, Brodie is highly talented. But the buzz about his subjects suggests that the weary art world is willing to go to as great lengths as the train-hopping kids in a search for authenticity. The Great Depression to come is on some level longed for.

Brodie seems motivated by a sincere desire to celebrate his community. "I just want to spend the next couple of years traveling around, following the warm weather, and documenting the train-hopping youth of America," he said in one recent interview. The joy of young friendship and the camaraderie of the road come through in his work. One soon-to-be-classic photo captures three train-hoppers from the waist down on a moving train: three sets of rolled-up trousers exposing dirty legs hang off the train, with the gravel rail bed and tracks below a blur. Near the center of the image, a can of beans with a spoon sticking out of it is being passed to someone whose hand reaches down from the upper right. It’s sort of a tramp reenactment of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, and the meeting of the hands on the can gives the photo an emotional punch. Though the young legs look straight out of The Little Rascals, the image is timeless, as poignant and enduring as summer itself.

When Brodie photos like this one escape from the self-consciousness of staged portraiture, they effortlessly capture the exhilaration of being young and on a freight train with your whole life seemingly ahead of you. The picture in this show of the kid hanging off the back of a moving train by one tattooed arm may be bought, but the middle-finger salute he triumphantly gives to the camera says the joke is on the collector who pays for it.

That the kid giving the finger will likely one day resemble William T. Vollmann in the new train-hopping memoir Riding Toward Everywhere (Ecco Press, 288 pages, $26.95) is a joke — played by time — on all of us. As the book begins, Vollmann finds himself nearing 50, recovering from a broken pelvis, and too hobbled to catch moving freights. Without even a fedora, he humbly cowers around the perimeter of a train yard carrying his only fashion accessory, a trusty orange bucket ("One could sit on it, carry things in it, and piss into it"), while contemputf8g his life’s narrowing options: "I hope that as what I get diminishes thanks to old age, erotic rejection, financial loss, or authority’s love taps, I will continue to receive it gratefully."

Like a veteran pitcher who has lost some zip on his fastball, Vollmann gets by on guts, his vitality flowing from an ornery and uncompromising hatred of authority that isn’t matched by young Brodie. "The activities described in this book are criminally American," he states in a disclaimer. In an increasingly controlled and uptight America, where "year by year the Good Germans march deeper into (your) life," Vollmann holds onto the hope that a freight train can still help him find a hole in the net.

Riding Toward Everywhere includes 20 or so pages of photos by Vollmann. In sharp contrast to Brodie’s, none feature anything you could really call pretty — except perhaps a snapshot of a friendly waitress in Wyoming, whose inclusion here only underscores the loneliness and desperation he finds on the rails. Vollmann’s camera finds cardboard camps in the weeds, toothless tramps, stern rail cops, and racist graffiti under rail bridges. For him, the train yard represents a collection of failed possibilities. In a boxcar heading from Salinas to Oakland, he finds an old hobo moniker from La Grande, Ore., written on the wall and spends the long boxcar night contemputf8g a woman from there whom he’d loved — and what might have been if they’d stayed together. In the morning light through the boxcar doors, looking out over "cornfields and the half-constructed houses of our ever-swarming California," he mourns "not merely my past but the vanished American West itself, where I would have homesteaded with my pioneer bride."

Well versed in the lore of rail-hopping, Vollmann goes to such places as Spokane, Wash., and Laramie, Wyo., in search of the hobo jungles of today’s American West. However, where proud Wobblies and tramps once cooked up a mulligan stew and waited to catch out, he finds a police lineup of blown-out drunks and SSI recipients. Though free to roam the rails under that big Western sky, they seem as herded and docile as those last few sad bison living out their days at the end of Golden Gate Park.

As in his last book, Poor People (Harper Perennial, 464 pages, $16.95), Vollmann records somewhat incoherent interviews with these subjects, an approach that stands in for sociology. While the elliptical conversations do give a somewhat impressionistic take on what life on the rails is like, Riding Toward Everywhere‘s subjects are hardly representative. Like Brodie, Vollmann is in thrall to a particular aesthetic. He’s committed to sensationalizing the ugliest aspects of the rails, to obsessing over swastika tags and crude drawings of women’s genitalia scrawled by bums on boxcar walls.

While spending much of Riding Toward Everywhere looking for the Freight Train Riders of America, a half-mythical hobo gang whose members supposedly will "kill you for $5 in food stamps," Vollmann fails to mention possibly the largest population on the West Coast train lines — undocumented Latino farmworkers. In my own experience hopping trains, I’ve shared food, water, and a sweet sense of humanity beyond language with such laborers. (Just last October, when I got off a train that stopped at the bridge over the American River in Vollmann’s hometown, Sacramento, I looked back to see five Latino guys carrying their belongings in Safeway plastic bags, scurrying up the embankment to get on the train before it started moving again toward Stockton.) Their presence on the rails is so great that I’d venture to say that if train cops actually tried to stop them from riding, an apple would cost five bucks, because there’d be no one left to pick them.

Still, despite self-consciously labeling himself a "fauxbeau," the 2005 National Book Award winner gets most details of train hopping right. Insider safety tips — don’t forget to put a rail spike in the boxcar door so it can’t slam shut on you! — are well represented, and Vollmann is especially good on the sights, sounds, and feelings of actually being on a train. He captures perfectly that indescribably victorious moment when your train is finally leaving the yard and it starts to accelerate just as you pass the cursed patch of weeds and litter where you’ve been hiding from the yard bull for 24 hours. Riding Toward Everywhere is most enlivening when this old pro simply lies back and describes what he sees out of his boxcar door.

Unfortunately, it turns out Vollmann doesn’t have even a relatively short book’s worth of train-hopping stories. After the excitement of a handful of train rides described early in the book, he pads the page count by dusting off other writers from the past and their takes on the road. Jack Kerouac, Jack London, and Ernest Hemingway are, predictably, quoted at length. Mark Twain’s raft on the Mississippi makes a guest appearance. Riding Toward Everywhere, it turns out, is a lot like a freight-train ride itself: in the beginning it’s really exciting and feels like it could lead anywhere, but after a while it starts moving so slowly that you can’t wait to get off!

Yet Vollmann’s book still has something to say about the search for real freedom — about its elusiveness and the price of trying to find it. "And we flee in search of last summer or next summer," he writes, "but there’s no harm in it if we know all the time it’s only a shadow show." Somewhere between the eternal search for next summer and the eternal search for last summer is the real ache Vollmann feels in his bones as he struggles to climb aboard a boxcar. In the years between the kid that Brodie photographs hanging off the back of a speeding freight train and the incoherent drunk living by the tracks that Vollmann interviews, there are cherished bits of freedom. They’re snatched from razor-wired train yards and robot train cops: a view through a boxcar door of elk at sunrise, or the taste of cold water from a trackside creek in the middle of nowhere Montana. These experiences are so rare and true that mere images of them are worth thousands in galleries.

The holes in the net are rare these days. I think often of my first train ride from that place out of time. It is a place seen in my favorite photo from Brodie’s exhibition at SF Camerawork. Through a rear window, it catches seven kids in the back of a pickup truck rolling down a flat Middle American prairie road at dusk. Hair is blowing all around in the wind, but one guy on the left is bent over in cool concentration, rolling a smoke, as warm yellow sunlight the very color of nostalgia floods the image. Whether you’re Mike Brodie, 22, or William Vollmann, 48, or myself, just now 35, you can’t help it; you want to live in this photo forever.

MIKE BRODIE: THE 2008 BAUM AWARD FOR EMERGING AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHERS

Through May 24

SF Camerawork

657 Mission, second floor, SF

(415) 512-2020

www.ridindirtyface.com, www.sfcamerawork.org

More train hoppin’ in this issue:

>>The end of the line
Trainspotting America with James Benning’s RR

>>Time travel ticket
Excerpts from a book that is Mostly True

>>What is Who is Bozo Texino?
“I hear you callin’, baby, but you ain’t gettin’ me. Not today, anyhow.”

Dandelion Dancetheater

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PREVIEW The San Francisco Ballet closes its season this week, but Bay Area dance keeps pulsing. Across town in the Mission’s modest CELLspace, Dandelion Dancetheater is starting its own rather remarkable program of new dance. The two-week run — which heads to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for the third week — features the company’s own performers plus guest artists from Montreal and Madrid. Collectively these performers and choreographers call what they are doing "physically integrated dance," the moniker folks who have long been expanding the concept of who is a dancer seem finally to have settled on. It’s a movement pioneered by Oakland’s AXIS Dance Company, so it should be no surprise that these programs draw heavily on former AXIS dancers Jacques Poulin-Denis, who has returned to Canada, and Nadia Adame, who has gone back to Spain. Eric Kupers, Dandelion’s codirector and a former AXIS collaborator, initially became interested in working with nontraditional dancing bodies for the challenges it poses to his own creativity. Kupers has investigated ideas of identity, body image, beauty, intimacy, loneliness, ability, and disability. In The Undressed Project series (2002 to present), he asked his very diverse group of dancers to perform in the nude, challenging their vulnerability and our willingness to look. In his Physically Integrated Dance Program at California State University-East Bay, he works with performers with emotional and physical challenges. They will perform in one program with his newest company dancer, a young man with a learning disability. Kupers’ work-in-progress, oust, and Adame’s 9 días y 20 horas a la deriva look at issues of displacement, particularly surrounding immigration. Poulin-Denis, with Mayday Dance, will bring Les Angles Morts (2007), while his DORS investigates sleeplessness.

Dandelion Dancetheater Fri/9-S0un/18, 7 (Program A) and 8:30 p.m. (Program B), CELLspace, 2050 Bryant, SF. $10–$20. (510) 885-3154, www.brownpapertickets.com

Small Business Awards 2008: Small Green Business Award

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As soon as you enter the woman-owned Luscious Garage, you know you’re not in your typical stinky, boys-only auto repair shop. The art-lined walls are painted creamy yellow. Plants and open windows — in place of energy-sucking exhaust systems — act as an air filter. The second-hand furniture, all dark wood, gorgeously contrasts with the light walls and green leaves. A corkboard beckons with fliers from other green businesses like Green Cab, which sends its fleet to Luscious for maintenance.

Beauty meets function on the spotless floor made of nonporous cement, not the usual grease-stained epoxy. It won’t absorb toxins, making it easier to clean and maintain. Natural light fills the room with a sunny glow while soft halogen task lighting shines only on the necessary work areas.

More than just the so-called "women’s touch," it is the culture of hybrids, which are exclusively serviced at the shop, that the appearance of Luscious Garage reflects. That culture acknowledges driving as a necessary evil that’s not going to disappear anytime soon — but one that shouldn’t stop us from being environmentally responsible.

The impetus for all this beauty and responsibility came to owner and lead technician Carolyn Coquillette soon after she got degrees in English and physics from the University of Michigan — when her car promptly broke down. "I thought it was stupid that I couldn’t solve the problem because I didn’t have basic car knowledge," she recalls. She began taking auto repair night classes at a community college and eventually took a job at her instructor’s garage. But she was eager to understand more about advanced hybrid technology and followed that interest to California.

Apparently she wants to pass some of that education onto her customers. At Luscious, a technician uploads car information to the shop’s Web site, which customers can access online to track the repairs. Not only does this practice make the services "fully transparent" to the car-illiterate, it allows Coquillette to follow another important green business practice: keeping her garage paper-free.

That’s not all: Luscious Garage brews its own windshield fluid out of vinegar and water and uses re-refined oil in place of crude-refined oil. All linens are washed on site to monitor water, energy, and chemicals, and a gray water system is being set up to water plants. Rags are used to clean residue off the concrete, and a service launders them off-site so that the chemicals are disposed of properly. Containers are refillable and fabrics are repurposed to make durable, reusable floor mats and fender covers.

When it comes to being green, Coquillette sums it up: "People are like, screw it, there’s nothing I can do. But there are small things you can do: make better choices, make greener choices."

Seems like she’s doing some pretty big things too. (Ailene Sankur)

LUSCIOUS GARAGE

459 Clementina, SF

(415) 875-9030

www.lusciousgarage.com

Small Business Awards 2008: Die-Hard Independent Award

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One day last August I was standing in line at my favorite local sandwich shop, Hazel’s Kitchen, chatting about boats with a guy I’d seen around the Potrero neighborhood.

Meanwhile, the owner, Leslie Goldberg, overheard our conversation while she prepped my sandwich. She asked if I was a sailor and I confirmed that yes, before wrestling deadlines at the Guardian, I hauled lines as a deckhand. I told her I missed sea life and was thinking about getting in on some local yacht club action. "If you know any hot single sailors, send them my way," I joked.

"Actually, I do," she said, smiling wryly.

This is how I met Brian and learned that a handful of happy couples in the neighborhood can testify to Goldberg’s sixth sense for matchmaking.

But the talent most patrons see is sandwich-making. Wholesome, grab-and-go comfort food is the theme of Hazel’s lunch and catering menus. Homey standards like mac and cheese and minestrone soup mingle with sandwiches of turkey and cranberries or roast beef with horseradish.

Goldberg, a Pennsylvania native, opened the sandwich shop 16 years ago with a $10,000 seed grant from another Potrero local she calls her guardian angel. The standing-room only shop serves fresh salads, soups, and sandwiches with ingredients sourced from family-owned local distributors. Produce hails from Marin Organics and the to-go containers are compostable, a move that cut her garbage bill in half.

The shop’s not named after a distant relative, but the wife of Farley, the namesake of the café next door. To Goldberg, a single mother who lived and raised her 12-year-old twins, Emma and Jake, in the apartment upstairs, being a part of the neighborhood is what it’s all about. "Every merchant, every neighbor, helped take care of my kids with me."

When asked about the challenges of being a small business in San Francisco, she immediately cites big-business competition. "When Whole Foods came it was the first time I saw such a drastic change in business," she said. She checked out the grocery chain’s new Potrero location shortly after it opened and was blown away. "Whatever you wanted, they had and it was done beautifully. No one can compete with that."

So how does Hazel’s keep up? Goldberg says the magic ingredient is service. "That’s what I do. It’s my pleasure. When people walk into Hazel’s I want them to smile and feel good."

Perhaps that’s why a couple of months after the Whole Foods grand opening she saw her business go back to normal. "What a small business really has is service and community. Those are two things Whole Foods can’t give people."

I bet it’s hard to order up hot, single sailors there too. (Amanda Witherell)

HAZEL’S KITCHEN

1319 18th St., SF

(415) 647-7941

Small Business Awards 2008: Small Business Activist Award

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Scott Hauge is the Scarlet Pimpernel of the small business community. He’s here, he’s there, he’s everywhere.

Hauge’s day job is president and owner of CAL Insurance & Associates, a company that specializes in providing insurance for small to medium-size businesses. But his real job is operating as a classic San Francisco activist, representing small business on local, state, and national levels almost every day. Hauge is widely recognized as one of the most knowledgeable and effective small-business leaders in the country, and last year was named the National Small Business Association’s Advocate of the Year.

Hauge is a fourth-generation San Franciscan whose great-grandfather was in the Fire Department, fought the l906 fire, and later died fighting another San Francisco fire. His grandfather was a cable car grip. His parents met in the San Francisco Public Library. His father took over CAL Insurance in 1960, and Hauge came into the firm in the early l970s after an activist student life at Washington State University at Pullman. He wrote a thesis on Karl Marx, and was a leader in the student movement whose anti-Vietnam War protests closed down the university two years in a row.

Hauge became politically active in San Francisco shortly after he joined CAL Insurance. He was a major force in the battle in the mid-l980s to establish a Small Business Commission, the first in the country, and served as its first commissioner.

He has introduced government legislation on behalf of small business in San Francisco, Sacramento, and Washington, DC. He is currently a member of more than 20 boards and commissions in San Francisco and California.

He founded Small Business Advocates, a local advocacy group, and Small Business California, a statewide advocacy group, and was a leading advocate during last year’s successful campaign for a Small Business Advisory Center, a City Hall agency helping small businesses with permits and navigating the city’s bureaucracy.

A lot of City Hall progressives consider Hauge a conservative, but his Small Business California organization is considered the most liberal small business group in the state.

He’s a Democrat, and cornered Hillary Clinton early on in the presidential campaign and tried to get her to put small business issues on her agenda. So far, he reports, no luck.

Hauge likes to say his proudest activity is serving as vice chair of the Volunteers in Medicine program. The program has 6l clinics around the country that recruit retired physicians, nurses, and dentists as volunteers to provide health services to the working uninsured. Next stop: San Francisco.

Hauge maintains that San Francisco is the only city in the country that has the infrastructure — with the city’s Small Business Commission and the new assistance center — to really help small business.

"Now we just have to get City Hall to pay attention."

SCOTT HAUGE

CAL Insurance & Assoc., Inc

2311 Taraval, SF

(415) 680-2109

Small Business Awards 2008: Community Spirit Award

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El Rio is the kind of place that makes your head spin. So much happens in this neighborhood bar and venue, affectionately referred to as "your dive." On any given night, DJs play an eclectic mix of music while neighborhood locals shoot pool. Every Sunday night, revelers dance salsa and enjoy BBQ on one of the most spacious back patios in the city. Local bands rock out old-school punk and metal in the adjoining live music space several times a week. Once a month, women of color meet for a Saturday afternoon salsa event, Mango. It’s also where the annual MadCat Women’s International Film Festival will be held for the 11th year in a row.

All this makes El Rio one of the most diverse intersections of San Franciscans you’ll ever find.

For the last 13 years, the club has been owned and run by Dawn Huston, who sees herself more as support for her staff — the overflow person doing whatever needs to be done — than the boss. Mostly she thinks of herself as someone who enables communities. Send her an e-mail about the kind of event you want to put on and, if inspired, she’ll figure out how to make it happen.

She started out working the door when Malcolm Thornley (who passed away this year) and Robert Nett owned the place. The two started the business 30 years ago, primarily as a Brazilian gay men’s bar. Thornley and Nett branched out beyond the typical role of neighborhood watering hole proprietors to help a lot of people, especially in the LGBT community and the Mission District. The partners eventually made a very reasonable financial arrangement with Huston so she could take over when they were ready to retire.

Continuing in the spirit of the original owners, the staff at El Rio makes its rental prices accessible so that a constant flow of benefits — as many as 250 per year — can be held. Day after day, El Rio helps teachers, public schools, the women’s surf club, the Dyke March, various AIDS riders, independent filmmakers, and animal rescuers raise money so they can contribute to the community at large.

By aiming to break even, the club maintains its bent toward fundraising. The whole point is not to make profit but to make the business something that allows all of us — drinkers, dancers, musicians, activists — to live in the city comfortably and to keep doing it so brilliantly.

EL RIO

3158 Mission, SF

(415) 282-3325, www.elriosf.com

Afrolicious Anniversary

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PREVIEW One of my favorite movie moments involves a big-ass cup of orange soda. It’s the opening scene of Undercover Brother (2002), when an Afro-clad Eddie Griffin navigates his drop top, burnt orange Caddy with one hand while holding his Big Gulp cup of orange soda in the other. He’s driving with the confident swag of someone who cruises the strip, filled with fruit-inspired sugar water, often. Mid-cruise, he swerves to avoid hitting something and loses control of the car. Or does he? While the car spirals in the middle of the intersection and he strong-arms the steering wheel to regain control, he holds up the orange soda to avoid any spillage. The camera pans to the miraculous survival of the soda — and the rest is history. You might wonder: what does this have to do with the one-year anniversary of Afrolicious at the Elbo Room? Nothing. Except that when I think of things that are Afrolicious and still surviving, I think of that scene, and that cup of orange soda. Alas, the weekly get-down of the African diaspora’s plethora of musical innovations is celebrating a full year of existence. Headlining the celebration is Miami’s popular Spam All Stars, whose live sets kick off the two-night party. The band is joined by DJs Pleasuremaker and Señor Oz, and their live percussionists. Celebrate birth, revival, and the joys of springtime in the city at Afrolicious. Too bad the Elbo Room doesn’t have orange soda.

AFROLICIOUS ANNIVERSARY With Spam All Stars. Thurs/8 and Fri/9, 10 p.m.–2 a.m., $10. Elbo Room, 647 Valencia, SF. (415) 552-7788, www.elbo.com

Small Business Awards 2008: Big Box Alternative Award

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Rick Karp’s parents bought the first Cole Hardware at the corner of Cole and Parnassus streets in 1961. Today the family business is still independent, but it now has four city locations.

"I told my wife I’d give it five years," Karp said with amusement, reflecting on how he’s worked in hardware ever since he started helping out after school at age 12 before making it his full-time career in 1975.

After 40-plus years, Cole Hardware has 95 employees and is "green certified" by the San Francisco Department of the Environment. The stores carry earth-friendly products, denoted by a green sticker, so customers can make an informed decision about the products they buy. Each location also uses sustainable, low-energy, and renewable resources in a commitment to taking a green path as a business.

"It’s trying to walk what we talk," Karp said.

On top of its environmental practices, Cole Hardware is an example of local industry successfully fighting big-box store invasion. A few years ago, Karp was active in community efforts to prevent Home Depot from opening on Bayshore Blvd., going so far as to put up money for a legal challenge to the project. He noted that this was a particularly prudent issue for him given the nature of his business — but he didn’t act solely for himself. "The important thing for me is to keep big-box retail out of San Francisco," he said.

Around 1970, Karp joined ACE, a buying cooperative with approximately 4,500 stores worldwide, as a response to such big-box invasions. Membership allows small business owners to buy at high-volume prices and use the savings to provide benefits and fair wages to employees.

"I would typify them as the savior of mainstream America," Karp said, referring to ACE. "You won’t see the demise of the hardware store because of chain stores."

Some thanks need to go to Karp of Cole Hardware for that as well.

COLE HARDWARE

956 Cole, SF

(415) 753-2653

3312 Mission, SF

(415) 647-8700

70 Fourth St, SF

(415) 777-4453

2254 Polk, SF

(415) 674-8913

www.colehardware.com

Sci-fi campsterpiece

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PREVIEW OK, so 2007’s Transformers was Michael Bay’s best movie — which is sort of like saying "best strep throat experience," but let it go. Still, he will never, ever equal the achievement of Starslyderz (2005), an intergalactic adventure made with about 1/7,500th of Transformers‘s budget (yes, I used a calculator) and several megatons the awesomeness. Premiered here two years ago at the Another Hole in the Head film festival, Garrin Vincent and Mike Budde’s homemade epic is the poignant tale of Capt. Johnny Taylor (Brandon Jones), dashing and horny leader of the United Planets of America’s elite crime-fighting force. When the evil Gorgon kidnaps the president’s daughter, Princess, Johnny and his mates must pursue, ending up on the prison planet Zoopy, where they are forced to fight gladiator-style for the amusement of bloodthirsty puppets and stuffed animals. Song interludes, heavy-metal twins, gleefully cheesy FX, and a whole lot more are thrown into this giddy campsterpiece, which pays snarky homage to everything from Star Wars, Star Trek, Transformers (natch), the Power Rangers, anime, TV commercials, 1980s video games and … er, Biography. Writer-director Vincent, producer-cinematographer Budde, and some furry pals will be on site for a Dead Channels–presented multimedia extravaganza that encompasses a screening of Starslyderz‘s new-to-SF final cut, "live hyphy Japanimation" by the Zoopy Show, production numbers, reckless acts of audience wetting, and action-figure sales. Perhaps if we are very lucky, an excerpt from Vincent’s original Star Wars: The Musical, which was performed at Palo Verdes Peninsula High long, long ago. If not, you can sample that magic in excerpts on YouTube.

THE STARSLYDERZ EXPERIENCE Wed/7, 8 p.m., $5. Hypnodrome, 575 10th St., SF. www.starslyderz.com

Small Business Awards 2008: Chain Alternative Award

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If there was ever a metaphor for San Francisco’s growing income divide, it might be its furniture market: a sea of IKEA particleboard and Craigslist castoffs swirling around islands of Danish modern and high-end boutiques.

Books and Bookshelves, a small shop on the corner of Sanchez and 14th streets owned by the husband/wife duo David and Gade Highsmith, provides some much-needed middle ground while filling two niches: affordable, solid wood bookshelves and poetry.

The simplicity of this pairing matches the no-frills feel of Books and Bookshelves’ Sanchez Street storefront. Fancy it’s not: white walls and high ceilings surround the rows of bare bookshelves crowding the aisles. A small collection of books hides in the back.

Customizing — whether it’s choosing a varnish color or commissioning a specially built shelf — is what gives Books and Bookshelves a competitive edge over chain outlets. David Highsmith estimates that half his business is custom work — from doghouses to specialized shelving — made at one of the store’s two local workshops or by someone from a network of independent woodworkers and other manufacturers Books and Bookshelves contracts with. Highsmith says they attempt to buy green or locally sourced materials whenever possible while striving to keep costs low.

Prices manage to keep pace with the big chains as well. Basic bookshelves run between $100 and $200 unfinished; larger, fancier pieces run from $500 on up. A custom paint or varnish job adds 40 to 60 percent to the cost, but customers can do their own finishing for about $30 in supplies.

The gem of the store for browsers is the poetry section, full of chapbooks with silkscreen or letterpress covers that most bookstores no longer bother to carry. Occasionally the Highsmiths host in-store readings with local poets. More than just cute, Books and Bookshelves’ commitment to selling books — clearly not the most profitable part of the operation — gives the place a true sense of character and reflects a commitment to something greater than the bottom line.

BOOKS AND BOOKSHELVES

99 Sanchez, SF

(415) 621-3761

www.99sanchez.com

“Broken Promised Land”

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REVIEW "Broken Promised Land" is a distracting title for Israeli photographer Shai Kremer’s exhibit at the Robert Koch Gallery. Though broken dreams and bombed-out promises are certainly present in the 11 color photographs on display from Kremer’s seven-year project shooting Israel’s militarily disfigured landscapes, it’s ultimately the subtlety of his work that defines its wide-ranging resonance.

Kremer also has shown works from this series at New York City’s Julie Saul Gallery. They grabbed the title "Infected Landscape," part of the name of Kremer’s forthcoming monograph from Dewi Lewis Publishing, advance copies of which are available for perusing at Robert Koch. That name is fine but "Broken Promised Land" might have been more potently called "Earth" — or in Hebrew, "Eretz." Kremer’s exquisitely lit land of riddled targets, separation walls, and military training centers with their sad, flimsy, make-believe villages appears simultaneously abandoned by humanity and swarming with energy, spiritless and ghostly. The edges of the landscapes feel as if they’re about to swallow up entire scenes and spit them out, dispensing with the human elements. Burned Olive Trees and Katyusha Crater, Lebanon War (2006) combines the beauty and timelessness of a Mediterranean hillside village with a scar in the landscape so severe that every glance reveals something different in the foreground: a controlled burn; a clean photograph of an olive grove, mounted on a dirty one; or the destruction wrought by a rocket. Shooting Defense Wall, Gilo Neighborhood, Jerusalem, Israel (2004) displays a wall strangely painted to blend in with the street and landscape.

Kremer, born in 1974, shares a broad affinity with younger Middle Eastern artists such as Oraib Toukan, whose interest in cultural memory is returning significant results. "My goal is to reveal how every piece of land has become infected with loaded sediments of the ongoing conflict," Kremer has stated about the series. Unfortunately, he’s immensely successful.

BROKEN PROMISED LAND Through May 31. Tues.–Sat., 10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m. Robert Koch Gallery, 49 Geary, fifth floor, SF. (415) 421-0122, www.kochgallery.com

Sizzle-shazam: Lazer Sword cuts loose

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In which the breathless writer of this week’s Super Ego column in the paper, laying out the deets on the emerging lazer bass sound, cuts deeper with bass-bangin’ SF duo Lazer Sword (and gets a li’l spankin’ for slapping the “lazer bass” genre header over their sick-ass beats.) Stick it to me! Below is my e-mail interview with swordsters Lando Kal and LL …

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The dynamic duo
Photo by Jordan Fraker

SFBG: So what’s the Lazer Sword backstory?
LL: I’m 26 years old and originally from Portland, OR, back when the Trailblazers were hot, but have been in SF for nearly 5 years now. Before I made the move I was heavily into making hip-hop beats in a rap group called Evil Hands, and when we started getting some shows around town I had no choice but to be the DJ (the guy who mans the CD player and does little scratches over the hook) so I was kind of forced to get used to standing on stage and learn to actually spin records a bit since I wasn’t one of the rappers.

After landing in SF I continued to work on music and started playing around with more instrumental type of shit since I had no homies who rapped in the immediate area. Lando and I had crossed paths a few times in the city before we actually got together on some music, but after an official introduction from our mutual hombre Keenan (2005?) we found many similarities in what each other were doing in our respective studios and how we were both trying to do some new experimental shit as well. For a couple months we dabbled around and got a feel for where things were going, but after some people heard what we were doing there was a bit of force put on coming up with a way to hit the streets, so insert a few more months of hard work and eventually we had a live show.

Lazer Sword rip up Rickshaw Stop, May 2007

LANDO: Well I’m 24 and though born in San Francisco, I grew up in Sacramento. I’ve been back for about 6 years now and still enjoy every bit of it. I’ve been producing/ DJing for about 8 years now, messing around with various styles throughout the years. I met Bryant about 4 years ago here in San Francisco and we’ve been labcolabin’ ever since. We met through mutual friends and through passing at Amoeba records (where I worked at the time), trading thoughts on good records for sample material and what not, and began visiting each others’ respective home studios to jam the fuck out. Noticing we had very similar tastes in music and production styles, we naturally began throwing our ideas together, creating boosty tunes and realizing it all worked well together. We’ve been performing for a little over a year now and the sets have changed quite a bit since the first show. I think we can read each other a bit more.

SFBG: What’s going on up there on stage and how do you work together to produce your sound? Especially, how do you produce your lazer bass sound?

D-Structuring the Antique Roadshow

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By Vanessa K. Carr

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First Fridays aren’t just for Oakland anymore: D-Structure now hosts art openings the first Friday of every month at their boutique in the Lower Haight.

After a successful show last month with painter Aaron Nagel, D-Structure is launching their latest exhibit, The Antique Roadshow, this Friday, 5/2. The launch party also celebrates the addition of San Francisco-based clothing line Correct Clothing to their stock.

According to Correct Clothing co-founder Thomas Lerou, “Correct Clothing is a lifestyle brand, which means we draw inspiration from the music and art that create the lifestyle. Our clothing will always be linked to music and art.”

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Coming Correct

The line keeps it simple – t-shirts and hats only – that they design to be more classic than trendy.

D-Structure’s Antique Roadshow features more than 40 pieces of artwork by local artists Ian Hill, ZenTen, and TenFold, who together are known as the Swedish Milk Toast Collective. In his own way, each of these artists re-envisions the past from a futuristic perspective through the lens of urban and pop art.

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Ian Hill’s “Skeptic”

To make the event “a true antique bazaar and roadshow,” says D-Structure’s Cassidy Blackwell, the store will have “antique trinkets displayed all over the gallery space.”

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Tenfold takes it on the road

Music will be provided by local DJs Bogle, DJ Centipede, and Citizen Ten (a.k.a. artist TenZen).

The Antique Roadshow
Reception May 2, 8 p.m.
D-Structure
520 Haight, SF
415-252-8601

Dirty, dirty bedroom secrets

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By Justin Juul

I once lived with a girl whose bedroom looked and smelled exactly like a landfill. Stained panties, pieces of trash, and soup-bowls-turned-ashtrays were strewn from one corner of her private hellhole to the next. The strange thing was that if you had never seen this girl’s room you would have thought she was normal and nice. She dressed well, spoke eloquently, and never did anything too crazy. But I knew the truth. She may have looked nice on the outside, but I knew that somewhere deep down inside there lurked a slovenly beast with no regard for order or cleanliness, a heathen with dirty underpants. That’s the thing about bedrooms. The way we decorate them can reveal something about who we really are.

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Bay Area photographer Andrew McClintock certainly understands this truth. He recently spent about five years documenting the living habits of young San Franciscans. So if you’ve ever wondered what all those waiters, starving artists, and late-night-computer nerds are really like, you should check out his show at the Bluesix Acoustic room. Prepare to be shocked.

Opening reception for Andrew McClintock’s Bedrooms Series
Friday, May 2nd. 7:30 PM.
Bluesix Acoustic Room
3043 24th. SF.

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