SF

Guide to greener living

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ERECYCLE CAMPAIGN


Want to obey the bumper stickers and kill your television? That’s OK. But be careful where you bury it. TVs, as well as computers, DVD players, and all kinds of electronics, have no business in landfills. They’re made of plenty of metal which can be recycled, along with plenty of chemicals that are hazardous to the public. The eRecycle campaign, sponsored by the California Integrated Waste Management Board, maintains a Web site of local pickup and drop-off services for your e-waste — and thankfully, just in time for the high-def TV changeover in 2009.

www.erecycle.org

ECO HOME IMPROVEMENT


Want a greener home from the ground up? This is your one-stop shop. From flooring and cabinets to decor and lighting, everything here is natural, sustainable, and eco-friendly.

2617-2619 San Pablo, Berk. (510) 644-3500, www.ecohomeimprovement.com

DR. NAMRATA PATEL


Finding the right dentist is tough. But Dr. Namrata Patel makes your decision easier with her new LEED-certified (that’s Leadership in Energy Efficiency and Design) office. Patel uses nontoxic products — keeping PVC, formaldehyde, and chlorine out of everything from floors to cabinetry. She’s careful about reducing waste. She uses minimal radiation and a special filtration system for dealing with mercury fillings. Even her office furnishings are made with recycled materials. And yes, she accepts insurance!

360 Post, Suite 704, SF. (415) 433-0119, www.sfgreendentist.com

SAN FRANCISCO GREEN BUSINESS PROJECT


Want to make sure your favorite restaurant or preferred electrician uses green practices? This online resource will point you toward businesses in SF, from bars to baby clothes retailers, who are committed to the environment.

www.sfenvironment.com/greenbiz

LUSCIOUS GARAGE


The actual act of driving isn’t the only reason having a car is hard on the environment. Maintaining it is too. But Luscious Garage is trying to help on both accounts. This woman-owned and operated facility specializes in hybrids, and runs the whole business as sustainably as possible, from the machine shop to the office. And for these luscious ladies, sustainably goes beyond chemicals and objects — they also sustain their community by hosting classes and a hybrid car club in their beautiful facility.

459 Clementina, SF. (415) 875-9030, www.lusciousgarage.com

PAT’S GARAGE


Like Luscious Garage’s brother, Pat’s also focuses on environmentally friendly business practices. Bring your Honda, Acura, or Subaru for services you can feel good about. Or, if you have a hybrid, you can work with Pat’s partners, Green Gears, to upgrade your hybrid with plug-in capabilities. Bonus? They offer free car classes for women.

1090 26th St., SF. (415) 647-4500, www.patsgarage.com, www.greengears.com

KEETSA


This SF-based business wants you to rest easy with their eco-friendly mattresses. With recycled steel in the coils, bamboo and unbleached natural cotton for fabrics, nonchemical odor-controlling and antibacterial treatments, and ingenious use of scrap memory foam bits, every mattress is as kind to the earth as it is to your body. Keetsa further reduces its carbon footprint with its innovative mattress compression technique, allowing for easier and more efficient transport. But are they good mattresses? They must be. After less than a year in business, they’re already opening a store in Fairfield.

271 Ninth St., SF. (415) 252-1575, www.keetsa.com

ECOHAUL


Just bought a new Keetsa and want to get rid of your tired old Sealy? Don’t just throw it in the trash. If you don’t live on one of those SF streets where a stranger will pick up your stuff from the sidewalk within an hour, call San Rafael–based Ecohaul. This nationwide service will pick up your furniture, appliances, yard waste, and just about anything else you can think of. Then they’ll reuse, recycle, and repurpose everything they can, diverting as much from the landfill as possible.

1-800-ecohaul, www.ecohaul.com

THE ORCHARD GARDEN HOTEL


You’ve greened up your home, so why not find an eco-friendly home away from home? The Orchard Garden was the third hotel in the United States to be given LEED certification for its key card energy control system (SF’s first — it’s based on the European model), organic bath products, natural materials, and general commitment to sustainability. Also check out its sister hotel, the Orchard, on Union.

466 Bush, SF. (415) 399-9807, www.theorchardgardenhotel.com

EPI CENTER MEDSPA


Ten years ago, Epi Center was the first spa in the country to combine traditional spa treatments and medical procedures. Now it celebrates its anniversary with a new innovation: the ecomedspa. This LEED-certified arm of the original spa combines regular procedures with organic treatments in a healthy environment, all according to the principles of William McDonough’s "Cradle to Cradle."

450 Sutter, SF. (415) 362-4754, www.skinrejuv.com

NEPALESE PAPER


Based in Penngrove, this company imports handmade Nepali paper made from bark of a white shrub called lokta, which regrows after pruning. Not only does this mean no trees are cut down, it also means employment for many women in Kathmandu Valley and financial support for village regions of Nepal. Plus, the paper’s gorgeous. Order online, or find it at Stylo, Autumn Express, Kinokuniya Stationery and Gifts, or San Francisco State University.

(707) 665-9055, www.nepalesepaper.com

MORE DIRT


Make a fashion statement with these simple, 100-percent organic T-shirts by Heidi Quante. The shirts, which are brown with white lettering saying "More Dirt" on the front are meant to capture attention and send people to Quante’s Web site, which shows people how to combat global warming through planting trees, establishing community gardens, and using permaculture techniques. Inks are made without PVC or phthalates, and shirts come in sizes for men, women, and babies.

www.moredirt.org

A. MACIEL PRINTING


Family owned and operated since 1984, A. Maciel specializes in recycled and tree-free papers as well as soy-based inks. What’s even better? The shop is completely wind-powered. Though the print shop is capable of doing corporate jobs, A. Maciel caters to nonprofits and community groups like the American Land Conservancy, Forest Ethics, and Greenpeace. They’re also part of Northern California Media Workers/Typographical Union. Sure beats Kinko’s.

50 Mendell, Unit #5, SF. (415) 648-3553, www.amacielprinting

TRANSPORTEDSF


All aboard the ecobus! This organization takes Das Frachtgut, the veggie oil–fueled bus Jens-Peter Jungclaussen uses as a mobile classroom, on an ecofriendly party tour. Movie nights are all about watching modern classics and then doing some kind of relevant outdoor activity (e.g., see The Big Lebowski, then bowl outside). Dance nights turn the bus into a mobile DJ booth and an instant, impromptu club. It’s fun, safe (no drunk driving, kids!), and above all, Earth friendly.

www.transportedsf.com

The seeds of health

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› culture@sfbg.com

One warm winter day at Ruus Elementary in south Hayward, Chef Tiffany sweeps a roomful of second-graders into their only cooking class of the year. Before long, they’re shouting out the names of body parts that benefit from fresh veggies: "Eyes!" "Teeth!" "Heart!" And even if Swiss chard elicits a wary silence, the kids already know spinach from bok choy, and Chef Tiffany, known to adults as Tiffany Chenoweth, smoothly transitions from her talking points about leafy greens into the hands-on section of the class (after delivering a squirt of antibacterial gel onto the palms of each child). Meanwhile, out past the bustling blacktop, garden instructor Rachel Harris walks an ethnically diverse group of third graders through the concept of soil enrichment. They reluctantly tear down a lush patch of fava beans that reaches over their heads, pretending to pull nitrogen out of the air (hands up!) and deposit it into the soil to benefit spring crops (hands down!). This is school garden time.

If there’s a downside to teaching children how to nurture a green, nutritious school garden, it’s hard to fathom. The list of touted benefits is lengthy: students reap fresh air and physical exercise, hands-on participation, awareness of the natural environment, so called "school bonding," and an unprecedented taste for raw spinach. For school faculty, there are welcome breaks in the classroom regimen, an engaging outlet for unruly pupils, and a bridge to involvement with volunteers in the community. And parents get to share skills and experience, from farm expertise to carpentry, that once felt irrelevant to an academic setting.

But in an educational realm where standards reign supreme, the benefits of gardens can be tough to quantify. In promotional literature, the Network for a Healthy California, a funder of Hayward Unified School District’s program, stresses connections that reflect common sense, like the idea that making fresh vegetables readily accessible to low-income families will reduce the growing rate of obesity. But the future of garden instruction in the long term, when inroads against sprawling ills like obesity might become broadly measurable, is unpredictable when grants and appropriations change from year to year. Even in the Bay Area, where strawberry patches and kale flourish beside asphalt schoolyards, garden educators continually scramble to afford basic supplies, sometimes spending more time cultivating donors than mulching vegetables.

That’s how it often feels to Miriam Feiner, program director for the Willie Brown Jr. Academy Garden. "We’re pretty much our own two-person nonprofit," Feiner says of herself and assistant Joti Levy at an Arbor Day work party on March 8, where dozens of native seedlings — coffeeberry, sticky monkey flower, and other species attractive to bees — awaited planting on a weedy slope.

The duo’s fundraising efforts have been rewarded with sizable grants from SF Environment’s Environmental Justice Grant Program and Alec Shaw of the Shaw Fund, as well as partnerships with San Francisco Beautiful and Friends of the Urban Forest.

Even more rewarding though, Feiner says, weekly garden-based classes at Willie Brown have students literally begging for kale. But she concedes that ultimately the current model, which is based on constant fundraising, is "not sustainable."

Difficulties in funding aside, people like Abby Jaramillo, the youthful director of San Francisco nonprofit Urban Sprouts, will gladly explain why it’s important to find a way to sustain such programs. When Jaramillo and her team took over the Excelsior Garden, shared by the June Jordan School for Equity and Excelsior Middle School, she said she was "up to her armpits in fennel."

But the overgrown herbs weren’t the only sign of disrepair. "It was a struggling middle school desperately in need of something that would make the students have a stake," she said. Describing the community’s "food environment," a term of art in nutrition education, she listed liquor store fare and junk food as the most prevalent options. Five years and six new school gardens later, Jaramillo thinks school administrators and teachers are genuinely on board with Urban Sprouts, whose mission is to serve low-income youth in San Francisco. "When the kids come outside; they are leaders, teaching each other how to plant," she says. "We need to make the garden a core, that will remain here and make a difference."

Whether that happens depends on whether garden education becomes institutionalized, not just a supplemental benefit reliant on the assiduousness of leaders like Jaramillo and Feiner. "My dream," Jaramillo says, "is that it would be like gym." That is to say, an expected feature of the precollege landscape. I asked her if there were models for this kind of integration. She, and everyone else I spoke with, pointed to the Edible Schoolyard, the celebrated collaboration between local-food pioneer Alice Waters and Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley. At the Schoolyard, a beneficiary of the Chez Panisse foundation, the perpetual cycle of seasons meshes with the academic year as rising eighth graders ceremonially plant corn for incoming sixth graders to harvest in the fall, suggesting a garden practice that is truly rooted in the school experience.

According to the San Francisco Unified School District, out of 104 K-12 school sites in the city, 36 maintain "green schoolyards," with 45 new gardens planned over the next four years. Statewide, $10.8 million from Sacramento was awarded in the form of California Instructional School Garden Program grants in October. It’s not nearly enough to fulfill the California Department of Education’s stated goal of "a garden in every school." But as Jordan students prepare to sow enough lettuce to provide the entire school with a lunch salad for one day, Jaramillo is hopeful that showing even a small percentage of kids where food comes from will have a lasting effect, with lessons about healthy eating rippling out through them to their families and into the community.

With the infrastructure of garden education still in its founding stages, assessing its efficacy poses a conundrum. The kind of life-changing transformations that green schoolyard proponents hope for might not be apparent in the short term, while slashed budgets threaten to endanger the longevity of even the most lovingly planted plots. Still, educators like Harris aren’t daunted by the relative nonstandardization of their field. She’s seen the results first-hand — like the student at a Hayward school barbecue who traded a Butterfinger for a second helping of grilled zucchini. After our interview, as Harris left the grocery store where she’ll teach her class to distinguish between processed and fresh food, a Ruus student in pigtails greeted her excitedly. "Miss Rachel!" she cried, throwing her head back with a wide grin. "I like garden!"

Destination unknown

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> a&eletters@sfbg.com

Jeff Greenwald has done his show Strange Travel Suggestions dozens if not hundreds of times and still has no idea where it’s going. No wonder he and his audience keep coming back for more. The unknown, an aphrodisiac to the traveler, also makes great catnip for the storyteller.

Still, there are consistent elements. There is no need to reinvent the wheel — or the impressive Wheel of Fortune that sits just off center stage, painted with a map of the globe and ringed with symbols abstract and evocative enough to conjure up myriad adventures, peak experiences, and humbling encounters from the vivid grab-bag memory of an accomplished travel writer and inveterate globe-trotter. There’s also a real grab bag, just in case, and an oversize Tarot card, a sort of visual aid cum talisman sporting a classic image of the Fool, patron saint of the traveler’s heedless leaps of faith. In the end, Greenwald’s show, as reliable as it is unpredictable, mimics a genie-from-a-bottle experience: what you get is three spins, three stories, and a lot of unexpected truth.

Greenwald is the author of several travel books, including 1996’s Shopping for Buddhas (which began as a staged monologue), 1997’s Size of the World, and 2002’s Scratching the Surface. He’s also cofounder of Ethical Traveler, a human rights and environment-conscious grassroots alliance of travel lovers who act as "freelance ambassadors" worldwide. Strange Travel Suggestions takes its title from a key authorial and ethical influence, Kurt Vonnegut, whose 1963 book Cat’s Cradle declared that "strange travel suggestions are dancing lessons from god." The current revival of the show, which originated at the Marsh back in 2003, coincides with the recent demise of another important influence, science fiction writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke, who was a close friend of Greenwald’s since Greenwald was 16 and first met the longtime Sri Lanka–based author during a stint in New York City.

Last weekend, the first spin of the wheel sent Greenwald reminiscing briefly about his late friend, including Clarke’s surprise at humankind’s recent slight retreat from space exploration, which Clarke viewed as a promising new and necessary growth in species consciousness. Greenwald invoked Clarke’s love of scuba diving as the best earthbound analogy for space travel. After landing on the glyph for Rites of Passage (by tradition, the wheel is given a whirl by an audience member), Greenwald recalled a trip he made after turning 40, a milestone he says made him want "to rediscover the size of the world" by avoiding the homogenizing and distance-compressing effects of airports and airplanes entirely. The trip, which began with passage on a freighter from Red Hook, Brooklyn, to Dakar, Senegal, included an incredible predawn dive off an island in the Philippines that perfectly captured the extraterrestrial venture Clarke had in mind.

From there, the strange grew stranger, climaxing with a tale about a road trip (inspired by a wheel spin that landed on an Outlaw symbol) that might have been out of a movie codirected by Quentin Tarantino and the late Spalding Gray. Greenwald’s stories possess more than a fine sense of humor and knack for shrewd detail and telling observation. They also contain a Zen-inflected homespun wisdom no doubt born of leaving home on a regular basis. If slightly self-conscious at times, these stories are always genuine and appealing.

Throughout Strange Travel Suggestions, Greenwald sits on a high stool or slowly paces the stage, wearing comfortable shoes and casual clothes with ready pockets that quietly suggest the seasoned voyager. But this is hardly a costume, and Greenwald the performer is not really an actor. He is instead a talented storyteller, with a mellow, easy, and sure delivery. Even if the stories he delivers on any given night have been told before (he selects from more than 50), spontaneity keeps them fresh and limber. The only time his delivery strained was when he recited from memory a passage from one of his books. The recall was perfect, but the prearranged words forced a histrionic note. Then again, the passage itself (a scene set at the rail of a ship, describing the character of the open sea) was eloquent and apt. Ultimately, anywhere Jeff Greenwald wants to take you is worth the detour. *

STRANGE TRAVEL SUGGESTIONS

Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m., through April 26 (no show Sat/19); $15–$35

The Marsh

1062 Valencia, SF

(415) 826-5750 information; (800) 838-3006 tickets

www.themarsh.org

CO2 stew

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER It’s not easy being green, music lover. Because I’ve tried to shove my big fat cultural consumption hoof into a smaller carbon footprint, but I can’t dance around the numbers.

I’ve ponied up the green stuff for nonprofits, come correct at the composting and recycling bins, and threatened to finally get the crusty Schwinn into shape despite the near-death horror stories from bike messenger chums back in the day. But what can a music-gobbling gal do when faced with the hard if rough facts spat out by, for instance, the free online Carbon Footprint Calculator? After selecting "I often go out to places like movies, bars, and restaurants," I watched my print soar to Bigfoot proportions — thanks to my nightlife habit I supposedly generate around the US average of 11 tons of CO2 per person — rather than the mere 8.5 tons if I indulged in only "zero carbon activities, e.g. walk and cycle." Even if this out-late culcha vulcha flies on zero-emission wings to each show, I’m still feeding a machine that will prove the undoing of the planet, since the Calculator estimates that hard-partying humanoids need to reduce their CO2 production to 2 tons to combat climate change. We won’t even get into the acres of paper, publications, and CDs surrounding this red-faced, would-be greenster. I’m downloading as fast as I can, but I wonder whether my hard drive can keep up: hells, even MP3s — and the studios and servers that eke them out — add to my huge, honking footprint. Must I resign myself to daytime acoustic throw-downs within a walkable radius from my berth? Can I get a hand-crank laptop? Just how green can my music get?

Well, it does my eco good to know that a local venue like the Greek Theatre has gone green all year round: Another Planet has offset an entire season’s 113 tons of CO2 emissions; composted over two tons of cups, plates, and utensils; used recycled paper and soy-based ink on all their printed materials; and offered a $1 opt-in to ticket-buyers to offset their environmental impact. I can feel my tonnage shrinking just staring at the numbers. And while gatherings such as last year’s Treasure Island Music Festival sported zero-emission shuttles and biodiesel generators and this year’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival will team with Amtrak to provide a free train that will move campers from Los Angeles’ Union Station to Empire Polo Field sans smog-spewing traffic jams, artists like José González have embarked on green tours, adding 50 cents to tickets to support nonprofits. Yet such efforts might prove more consciousness-raising than anything else, González concedes: "For me, playing mostly solo and touring with a small crew, I feel like the actual cut down on emissions is marginal comparing it to major artists, so it’s more about the symbolic value of it, and the ripple effect it might bring."

Still, CO2 spendthrifts like me need a swift kick in our waste-line. Lining up to deliver are such music-fueled events as the free South Lake Tahoe Earth Day Festival April 19 and the Digital Be-In 16 April 25 at Temple nightclub, organized by the Cyberset label with an "ecocity" theme aimed at sustainable communities. Green practices, Be-In founder Michael Gosney says, "may not be huge in of themselves, but they set an example for communities to take these practices back into their own lives." One such community-oriented musician is String Cheese Incident mandolin player Michael Kang, who’ll perform at the Digital Be-In and appear with Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks at the free Green Apple Festival concert April 20 in Golden Gate Park.

Organizing seven other free outdoor Earth Day shows throughout the country on April 20 as well as assorted San Francisco shows that weekend, the Green Apple Festival is going further to educate artists and venues — the usual suspects that inspire me to make my carbon footprint that much bigger — by distributing to participating performers and clubs helpful Music Matters artist and venue riders: the former encourages artists to make composting, recycling, and offsets a requirement of performances; the latter suggesting that nightspots consider reusable stainless-steel bottles of water and donating organic, local, fair-trade and/or in-season food leftovers to local food banks or shelters.

But how green are the sounds? Musicians like Brett Dennen, who also performs at SF’s Green Apple event, may have grown up recycling and composting, but he confesses that environmentalism has never spurred him to craft a tune: "Things as big as global warming have never moved me to write about it, even though I’m doing what I can." And Rilo Kiley’s Blake Sennett, who plays April 17 at the Design Center Concourse, may describe himself as a "recycling animal — I love it! I go through trash at other people’s houses!", yet even he was unable to push the rest of the his group to make their latest CD, Under the Blacklight (Warner Bros., 2007) carbon neutral.

So maybe it comes down to supporting those leafy green rooms, forests, and grasslands we otherwise take for granted. Parks are the spark for ex–Rum Diary member Jon Fee’s Parks and Records green label in Fairfax, which wears its love of albums on its hand-printed, all-recycled-content sleeves and plans to donate a percentage of all its low-priced CD sales to arboreal-minded groups like Friends of the Urban Forest. Fee and his spouse Mimi aren’t claiming to have all the answers in terms of running a low-carbon-footprint imprint, but they are pragmatic ("In order to support bands, labels need to give them something they can sell to get gas money," Fee says) and know their love of the outdoors segues with many musicians. "You develop that camping mentality from touring," he offers. "You’re not showering, and you’re hanging out for long periods of time. Everyone loves to be outside." That’s the notion even those too cheap to buy offsets can connect with — until the weird weather is at their doorstep.

Not for locals only

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

The Botticellis stick to the coast like gulls. Until recently, they all lived a few blocks from the ocean in an Outer Richmond flat, but drummer Zach Ehrlich decided to move into a beachfront apartment so he could have easier access to the surf. Before moving, he used a telescope pointed out his window to check for waves at Ocean Beach, but he gave that up after realizing the overall creepiness of the set-up, and he never could get to the beach in time to catch the waves he saw from his window.

Earlier this month, the band performed at Aqua Surf Shop on Haight Street. Beside surfboards propped against the walls and surf videos playing in the background, the Botticellis delivered a short set, bundled in sweatshirts and jackets against a door open to the San Francisco night. Afterward two men from the small crowd approached lead vocalist Alexi Glickman and said, "Dude, your music totally made us wanna surf." To Glickman, this was the ultimate compliment.

Their very name originates in surf culture — a botticelli is a tightly wound wave distinctive to the Southern California coast — but don’t assume the group is just a Beach Boys rip-off. While the Botticellis borrow from those hitmakers as much as any jangly indie-pop band does, their lyrics never come close to those of blatantly beach-themed tunes. The Botticellis are classier than that.

Glickman and Ehrlich grew up together in the Los Angeles area, where they developed a shared enthusiasm for music and surfing. They both began training in the Suzuki violin method in kindergarten, and have performed in original rock bands since age eight: first as an instrumental duo called Powerstrike, a recording of which Glickman says "sounds like Sleater-Kinney before Sleater-Kinney."

Now, almost two decades later, the pair is climbing toward indie stardom with their friends and fellow surfers Burton Li, Ian Nanson, and Blythe Foster as the Botticellis. Their new album, Old Home Movies, will be officially released next month on Antenna Farm Records. Local fans have a chance to grab an advance copy at their release party April 18.

Although they’ve begun headlining at SF’s larger clubs, they say they still prefer the lower-key atmosphere of spots like Aqua Surf. For these performances, the outfit brings their own sound system and mixes the vocals high to their soft-pop liking. "Every venue that we go to, we try to explain," Glickman said. "Usually people are totally unreceptive and say ‘Fuck you! Don’t tell me how to do my job!’ — which is probably why we like doing these house shows and small shows because we don’t have to go through some fucking huge PA system." With the vocals mixed down and the bass and drums cranked up, they metamorphose from a detailed, modern evocation of a ’60s pop group into a blaring indie-rock combo.

The Botticellis made a conscious decision to refine their sound: two years ago, they were a rock band with a self-released, self-titled EP showcasing guitar-driven power-pop. The transformation didn’t come easily. Some songs have been reworked and rerecorded multiple times before making it onto Old Home Movies. Seven of the new disc’s 10 tracks were laid to tape at Tiny Telephone in SF, and from the start, their goal was to re-create the crackly feel of a vinyl LP. They even toyed with the idea of releasing the recording on cassette before a quick survey of friends found that none of their pals owned a tape player.

"We were listening to Big Star records and Big Star side-project records, like Chris Bell," said Glickman. "We tried to get that sort of chewy analog mid-fi feeling." To round out that sound, the Botticellis sought out Matt Cunitz of SF’s Vintage Keyboard Repair for unusual instruments: Mellotron, folding pump organ, Minimoog, bassoon, and toy piano can all be heard at some point in the recording, beneath the fuzzy, light guitars. While Blythe Foster does not perform live with the band — she usually puts her voice toward work as an actress in local theater — the addition of her winsome vocals alongside the three male singers is nothing short of captivating.

The resulting Old Home Movies fully realizes the Botticellis attempts to bring wonder to the simplicity of California pop. And with summer coming, now is their chance to shine. One listen to Old Home Movies transports the listener back to a time when the state was known for cheerful sounds that matched clear skies. Still, the Botticellis aren’t deluding themselves. San Franciscans know that California isn’t all sun and fun, and the group’s nostalgic, delicate numbers match the melancholy nature that a July day in the Bay often holds. *

THE BOTTICELLIS

With Papercuts and the Mantles

Fri/18, 9 p.m., $10

Cafe Du Nord

2170 Market, SF

www.cafedunord.com

Dark days

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› amanda@sfbg.com

› sarah@sfbg.com

Like a lot of San Franciscans, John Murphy wants to put solar panels on his roof. He’s worried about the environment, but it’s also about money: “I want it to pay for all my electricity,” he said one recent evening as we chatted in front of his house.

Murphy pays top dollar for power from Pacific Gas and Electric Co., every month hitting the highest tier of energy use and getting spanked 34 cents a kilowatt hour for it. He’s tried to cut costs by switching to energy-efficient appliances and light bulbs with motion sensors — with little incentive from PG&E’s billing department.

Murphy thought installing solar panels would be worth the up-front cost, especially if federal and state rebates made it more feasible. His roof — sturdy and pitched toward the south, unshaded by trees or other buildings, and located in the fogless hollow of the Mission District — seemed perfectly suited for solar energy.

So last fall he invited a representative from a local solar installation company to the house for a free consultation. He was told his roof could only fit a 2.8 kilowatt system, which would cover about 60 percent of his energy needs — and cost about $25,000.

Murphy is apoplectic about the results. “What’s 60 percent? That’s like going out with her for three-quarters of the night. I want to take her home,” he said.

While the federal incentive shaves $2,000 off the cost, the state rebate program — in place since January 2007 — is a set allocation that declines over time: the later you apply, the less you get. Today Murphy can get about $1.90 per watt back from the state, whereas at the start of the program it was $2.50 per watt. To him, the upfront costs are still too steep and the results won’t cover his monthly PG&E bill.

“The snake oil salesmen of yesterday are the solar panel installers of today,” Murphy said.

But Murphy still wants to install panels — and he’s not alone. The desire for clean, green energy runs deeply through San Francisco and the state as a whole. After the launch of the California Solar Initiative, the number of solar megawatts, represented by applications to the state, doubled what they’d been over the last 26 years. Almost 90 percent of the installations were on homes, indicating that citizens are jumping at the chance to decrease their carbon output.

Yet in San Francisco, where environmental sentiment and high energy costs ought to be driving a major solar boom, there’s very little action.

Back in 2000, then-mayor Willie Brown announced a citywide goal of 10,000 solar roofs by 2010. That would add up to a lowly 5 percent of the 200,000 property lots within the city of San Francisco.

But even that weak goal seems beyond reach: it’s now 2008, and the number of solar roofs in San Francisco stands at a grand total of 618 installations by the end of 2007. In terms of kilowatts per capita, the city ranks last in the Bay Area. The city’s total electricity demand runs about 950 megawatts; only 5 megawatts is currently supplied by solar.

 

WHAT’S WRONG?

Well, it’s not the weather. While heavy cloud cover can hinder panels, fog permits enough ambient light to keep panels productive. San Francisco’s thermostat isn’t much of a factor either — panels prefer cooler temperate zones, not blazing desert heat.

It’s also not for a lack of political ideas — Mayor Gavin Newsom is pushing a major solar proposal and several others are floating around, too.

But Newsom is clashing with the supervisors over the philosophy and direction of his plan. It’s complicated, but in essence, the mayor and Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting put together a task force that included representatives of solar installers and PG&E — but nobody from the environmental community and no public-power supporters.

The plan they hatched gives cash incentives to private property owners, takes money away from city-owned solar installments, and does nothing to help the city’s move to public power.

While all this plays out, the solar panels so many San Franciscans want aren’t getting installed.

 

SUN AND SUBSIDY

What makes solar work, according to local solar activists, is a combination of sun and subsidies. “Almost every area in the United States has better sun exposure than Germany, and Germany is leading the solar market worldwide today,” said Lyndon Rive, CEO of Solar City, a Foster City-based solar installer.

The price per kilowatt hour, with current state and federal subsides, is about 13 cents for solar, just two cents more than PG&E’s base rate for energy produced mostly by nuclear power and natural gas.

Still, the average installation for the average home hovers between $20,000 and $30,000. For many, that kind of cash isn’t available.

“The biggest reason for lack of adoption [of solar energy] is that the cost to install in San Francisco is higher than neighboring cities,” Rive said. It’s about 10 percent more than the rest of the Bay Area, according to a December 2007 report of the San Francisco Solar Task Force.

Why? According to Rive, system sizes are smaller. Solar City’s average Bay Area customer buys a 4.4 kilowatt system, but the average San Franciscan — with a smaller house and smaller roof — usually gets a 3.1 kilowatt installation. The smaller the system, the more the markup for retailers amortizing certain fixed costs such as material and labor. On top of that, San Francisco’s old Victorians can have issues — weak rafters need reinforcement; steep roofs require more scaffolding; wires and conduits have to cover longer distances. It adds up.

“There’s an extra cost to doing business in San Francisco,” said Barry Cinnamon, CEO of Akeena Solar and a member of the SF Solar Task Force. “I can expect $100 in parking tickets for every job I do.”

That was the motivation for Ting to establish the Solar Task Force in 2007, with the goal of creating financial incentives, including loans and rebates, to bring down the costs of San Francisco solar. The 11-member task force came up with an ambitious program that involved a one-stop shop for permits, a plan to give property owners as much as $5,000 in cash subsidies, and a system to lend money to homeowners who can’t afford the up-front costs.

The task force said installing 55 megawatts of solar would combat global warming, improve air quality by reducing pollution caused by electricity generation, and add 1,800 green collar jobs to the local economy.

The streamlined permit program is in place. None of the rest has happened.

 

THE MAYOR’S MONEY

The first obstacle was the loan fund. Newsom and Ting wanted to take $50 million currently sitting unspent in a bond fund for seismic upgrades on local buildings. Sup. Jake McGoldrick wanted to know why the money wasn’t being used to upgrade low-income housing; the city attorney wasn’t sure seismic safety money could be redirected to solar loans.

Then Newsom decided to take $3 million from the Mayor’s Energy Conservation Fund to pay for the first round of rebates. Over the next 10 years, that could add up to $50 million. McGoldrick balked again. That money, he said, was supposed to be used on public facilities (like solar panels at Moscone Center and Muni facilities and new refrigerators for public housing projects). Why should it be diverted to private property owners?

There’s a larger issue behind all this: should the city be using scarce resources to help the private sector — or devoting its money to city-owned electricity generation? “In 10 years, there could be $50 million in the fund,” McGoldrick said. “That’s a lot of money, and it’s power the city could own.”

Sup. Chris Daly agrees. “I would support this program if we were running out of municipal [solar] projects,” he said. “But we’re not.”

In addition, the progressive members of the Board of Supervisors, who have all advocated a citywide sustainable energy policy known as community choice aggregation, or CCA, weren’t represented on the Solar Task Force.

The fund Newsom wanted to tap for his project is also the source of funding for the community choice aggregation program, which the progressive supervisors see as the city’s energy plan, which in turn constitutes a far more comprehensive response to climate change, with a goal of relying on 51 percent renewable energy by 2017.

Sup. Gerardo Sandoval is working on a loan program that would allow residents to borrow money from the city for renewable energy and efficiency upgrades for their homes and pay it back at a relatively low interest rate folded into their monthly tax bills. (See “Solar Solutions,” 11/14/07.) Sandoval’s plan would enable loans of $20,000 to $40,000 at 3 percent interest to people who voluntarily put solar on their homes.

The city of Berkeley is pursuing a similar plan. But the task force never consulted Sandoval — in fact, he told us that he had no idea Ting’s task force was meeting until a few months ago.

The supervisors’ Budget and Finance Committee is slated to review Newsom’s plan April 16.

Solar installers aren’t happy about the delays: “I’m on the disappointed receiving end of that start and stop,” Cinnamon said.

While city officials duke out where the money should come from and who gets it, San Franciscans interested in purchasing panels are left in limbo. Jennifer Jachym, a sales rep from Solar City who used to handle residential contracts in San Francisco, said, “I have worked all over the Bay Area and I’d have to say it seems that the delta between interest and actual purchase is highest here.

“It was hard to get people to pull the trigger,” she continued. “What the San Francisco incentive program basically did was bring the cost incentives here to where they are everywhere else.”

The holdup has dispirited customers and solar companies. Cinnamon said he wasted 10,000 advertising door hangers because of the delay. Solar City also put on hold a handshake deal with the Port of San Francisco to rent a 5,000-square-foot warehouse in the Bayview District for a solar training academy that could turn out 20 new workers a month.

“As a San Francisco resident, I really want to see it happen there, but as a business, I have to think about it differently,” said Peter Rive, chief operating officer of the company. “Almost every city in the Bay Area is aggressively trying to get us to build a training academy in their city.”

 

TENANTS AND LANDLORDS

Another reason we don’t see more panels on San Francisco roofs is that most San Franciscans are renting and have no control over their roofs. “The landlord doesn’t care. They don’t pay the electric bill,” Cinnamon said. When asked if there were any inroads to be made there, he said, “Nope. That’s not a market I see at all.”

In spite of that, solar companies still are eager to do business here, which means there’s either enough of a market — or enough of a markup.

Rive wouldn’t tell us their exact markup for panels, but said, “The average solar company adds 15 to 25 percent gross margin to the installation. Our gross margin is in line with that.”

Rive’s company has another option for cash-poor San Franciscans, a new “solar lease.” In this scenario, Solar City owns the panels and leases them to homeowners for 15 years. The property owner pays a low up-front cost of a couple of thousand dollars and a monthly lease fee that increases 3.5 percent per year.

For Murphy, the price would be $2,754 down and $88 a month. The panels would still cover only 64 percent of his energy needs, so he would owe PG&E about $70 a month. Because he would be using less energy, PG&E would charge a lower rate, which is something Solar City typically tries to achieve with a solar system.

However, people can’t make money off their solar systems. “People ask about it all the time,” Jachym said. “Especially people in San Francisco. They say ‘I have a house in Sonoma with tons of space. Can I put panels there and offset my energy here?'”

The answer, unfortunately, is no, which means San Franciscans have no incentive to put up more panels than they need and recoup their costs by selling the energy to the grid. Unlike Germany, for example, where people are paid for the excess solar energy they make, California’s net metering laws favor utility companies. If you make more power than you use, you’re donating it to the grid. PG&E sells it to someone else.

If the law was changed — which could be a feature of CCA — citizens could help the city generate more solar energy to sell to customers who don’t have panels, helping the city to meet its overall goal of 51 percent renewable by 2017.

Under Solar City’s lease program, the company gets the federal and state rebates. If Murphy leased for 15 years he’d have an option to buy the used panels, upgrade to new ones, and end or continue the lease. If San Francisco launches the incentive program, the $3,000 from the city could cover the up-front cost and he could get the whole thing rolling for almost no cash. It sounds like a sweet deal.

Except it’s not going to work. Solar City only leases systems of 3.2 kilowatts or more, and only 2.8 could be squeezed onto Murphy’s roof. “I think it’s Murphy’s Law,” Jachym says wryly. “If you have a house that wants solar, a whole row of houses on the street nearby are better suited for it.”

She says the 3.2 cutoff has to do with the company’s bottom line. “If it’s any less than 3.2 the company is losing money.” Ironically, she tells me, “the average system size in San Francisco is even smaller” — usually less than 3.1. Solar City has set the bar high in a place where many people like Murphy are prevented from leasing.

He tells us he isn’t interested in a lease anyway: “I don’t own that.” He’s now more interested in a do-it-yourself situation and wishes the city would put some energy toward that. “If they were serious they would have a city solar store,” he said, imagining a kind of Home Depot for solar, where one could buy panels and wiring, talk with advisors, contract with installers, or just fill out the necessary paperwork for the rebates.

Some people are going ahead anyway, without city support. Nan Foster, a San Francisco homeowner now installing photovoltaic panels and solar water heating, says her middle-class family borrowed money to do these projects, “because we want to do the right thing about the environment and reduce our carbon footprint. It would be a great help to get these rebates from the city.

“The public money for the project would increase the spending of individuals to install solar — so the public funds would leverage much more investment in solar on the part of individuals and businesses,” Foster argued.

There’s another approach that isn’t on the table yet. Eric Brooks, cofounder of the Community Choice Energy Alliance, told us that the city, through CCA, could buy its own panels to place on private homes and businesses, giving those homes and businesses a way to go solar — free.

“Clearly there would be a much higher demand for free solar panels over discounted ones that are still very expensive,” he said. “And because the panels would be owned by the city, all of the savings and revenue could be put right back into building more renewables and efficiency projects, instead of going into the pockets of private property owners.”

Proponents of the mayor’s plan argue that the city can build more solar panels — faster — by diverting public funds to the private sector. “While on its face this is technically true, it is actually a dead-end path,” Brooks said. “Yes, a little more solar would be built a little more quickly. However, once those private panels are built the city will get nothing from them.”

Full disclosure: Murphy is Amanda Witherell’s landlord.

 

Sheik it

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How much hot queer Arab on the dance floor can you handle? If you’re dating me, it better be a lot.

Others can test their capacity for swivel-hipped, uluutf8g cuties this Saturday at what more sensationalist club critics might dub a "Battle of the Belly Dancers." Two gay-oriented Middle Eastern–themed parties, Bibi and Club La Zeez, butt bejeweled foreheads in different venues — on the first night of Passover, no less. But that’s a different geopolitical kettle of couscous.

Hitting up both events would be ideal, since each is put on by folks of SWANA (Southwest Asian–Northern African) descent; pumps out zills-tinkling contemporary and traditional Persian, Arabic, Latin, and South Asian floor bangers; and serves an underrepresented audience hungry for connection in these unfashionably volatile times. If you are forced to choose, I recommend Bibi. La Zeez, a monthly launched in March at Club Eight by Los Angeles playwright Saleem, is good fun but gives off a touristy vibe — "Magic Carpet" lounge, really? It also caters to a mostly mainstream gay male crowd and uses the word exotic in its press materials. Tacky.

Bibi, on the other many-ringed hand, is a quarterly charitable grassroots affair that has delighted queers of all genders for a year now and is hosted by local playboys Rostam and J. Maximilian. This time around, the party’s at Six and called Bibi Chic, so dress yourself fancy and free. Proceeds go to six queer Middle Eastern foundations, including Iraqi LGBT; IRQO in Iran; and Beirut’s fabulous new LGBT center, Helem. DJs Emancipacion, Masood, and Josh Cheon will throw down beats and performance artist Cherry Gallete and belly dancer Amira will dazzle the crowd.

And what about us queer Arab Americans who’ll be sitting down to Passover seder that evening with our gorgeous Jewish boyfriends? "Both of you come afterward! Bring cookies!" Rostam entreated me over the phone. "There’s room on our dance floor for everyone."

BIBI CHIC

Sat/19, 10 p.m., $15.

Six

60 Sixth St., SF

(415) 863-1221

www.clubsix1.com, www.myspace.com/bibisf

CLUB LA ZEEZ

Sat/19, 9 p.m.–2 a.m., $12–$15

Club Eight

1151 Folsom, SF

(415) 431-1151

www.eightsf.com

Putting power into perspective

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Amount the US Department of Energy granted SF San Francisco in 2007 to help encourage the deployment of solar energy: $200,000

Amount the DOE says it has spent nationwide over the last year making solar power more accessible on the energy market and underwriting new research and development: $288 million

Amount San Ramon–based Chevron Corp. made in net income (profit) during 2007: $18.7 billion

Amount David J. O’Reilly earned in total compensation per business day during 2007 as the San Ramon–based Chevron Corp.’s chairman and CEO: $121,153

Amount O’Reilly earned in total compensation during 2007: $31.5 million

Amount Chevron spent during 2006 defeating Proposition 87, a California ballot measure that would have funded renewable energy research through a drilling fee imposed on oil producers: $38 million

Amount oil and gas industries spent attempting to influence Sacramento during 2006: $97.8 million

Amount the oil and gas industries spent contributing to federal political candidates and parties and for lobbying expenses in 2006: $94.9 million

These figures came from the California Secretary of State’s Office, the Center for Responsive Politics, Followthemoney.org, and financial documents publicly traded companies are required to maintain by the Securities and Exchange Commission.<

Bumping and thriving

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

"Crazy be the knowledge of self." If you’re into conscious hip-hop, you might expect such an interpersonal refrain as this intro to Black Spade’s "Good Crazy" on his intricately self-produced debut, To Serve with Love, out last month on Om Hip Hop, an imprint of San Francisco’s Om Records. Still, there’s something new going on here, something hot that snags your mind and your kicks and refuses to let go.

Maybe it’s Spade’s technique. The rapper otherwise known as Veto Money easily shifts between samples from every genre imaginable, funked-out click tracks, alien blips reminiscent of delightfully geeky hip-hop producers such as Styrofoam, and choruses that sound like he’s singing to you personally. His tight flows simulate a head bobbing up and down and grinning by pushing syllables into full beats, with rhymes and emphases hitting on downbeats instead of more typical upbeat syncopation.

Or maybe it’s just a simple sense of freedom. Remember when freedom was fun? Om Hip Hop is doing for the experimental hip-hop community what they’ve become known for worldwide in the electronic music world: finding talented musicians who could be superstars but are more interested in the music than in superficial fame, connecting them with other mavericks, and giving them free reign to rock the house. It’s the hip-hop version of what the Los Angeles CityBeat has dubbed Om’s effective "anti-superstar-DJ music policy."

"I’ve never worked on a project I didn’t believe in 100 percent," said Jonathan McDonald, speaking in Om’s SoMa headquarters, surrounded by countless promo discs and magazines. McDonald, who started out as an intern at Om while he was working as the hip-hop buyer at Amoeba Music, is now in charge of A&R and publicity for Om Hip Hop. He was psyched two years ago when Om founder Chris Smith decided to create and devote resources to the new imprint. Hip-hop was integral to Smith’s original vision for Om in 1995, said McDonald. "But when dance culture really took off in the city, Om followed," he said. The phenomenal success of Mark Farina’s Mushroom Jazz Vol. 1 (1996) — still Om’s bestselling record — outplayed early hip-hop projects such as People Under the Stairs.

With a stage name that plays on race, death, and the name of a ’70s New York street gang, Black Spade easily shifts between social critique ("Head Busters fightin’ security at the Mono / Should I sell dope or slave at McDonald’s?") and romanticism ("Excuse me miss, I know we’re fighting / But what is that smell? It’s so exciting"). Yet another Om Hip Hop artist, Crown City Rockers’ Raashan Ahmad, who now resides in Oakland, expands this sense of storytelling on The Push, which will be out in May. Considering everything from his mother’s battle with cancer to the birth of his son, Ahmad’s liquid lyricism takes us on a striking emotional ride, with stops for inspiration ("The linguist synonymous with soul power") and praise ("Hip-hop saved my life"). "I wanted to show all sides of hip-hop — and all sides of me," said Ahmad, on the phone from Los Angeles. By offering unprecedented support, Om let him create an album that even shows his "insecurities," he said. "Everything they said they’d do, they’ve done. They gave me complete creative freedom."

In June, Om will release the One’s Superpsychosexy. McDonald hopes that the Spade and Ahmad discs will help prep listeners for the Charlotte, N.C., artist’s "left field" sound, which includes hypnotic production and elastic, naughty-and-nice soul vocals. The One, né Geoffrey Edwards, would probably think of this pre-exposure as foreplay. "Superpsychosexy is music to make babies to. No, scratch that — it’s music to practice making babies to!" he said with a laugh, on the phone from his home. The One’s father is a minister. From a young age, his family was encouraged to create on multiple instruments, and on tracks such as "Drippin," and "Milkshake Thick," he summons some very hot demons.

The mixture of local and global artists has played a major role in Om Records’ success. Their Bay Area talent includes Zeph and Azeem; Zion I and the Grouch; and J Boogie’s Dubtronic Science, which has a new full-length coming later this year. Om has also formed a partnership with imeem, a San Francisco social networking site based around music, which McDonald believes will be a "driving force in new media."

It’s a perfect match. Om Hip Hop is all about community and shows no signs of slowing down. Colossus’s West Oaktown (2005), the first Om Hip Hop release, presented original funky tracks alongside hip-hop remixes, so you could feel the DJ at work. Om’s "Spring Sessions" show at the Mezzanine is bound to see some healthy human remixing, live and in the house. *

BLACK SPADE

With Supreme Beings of Leisure, Turntables on the Hudson, Samantha James, and J Boogie’s Dubtronic Science

Fri/18, 10 p.m., $15

Mezzanine

444 Jessie, SF

www.mezzaninesf.com

Nickels and dimes

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We get a lot of press releases announcing that San Francisco has made it to the top of another "greenest" list. Popular Science named SF the second-greenest city in the nation last February. Sustainlane.com called this place the second-greenest city in 2006. Reader’s Digest added honors for the fifth-cleanest city in 2005, the same year San Francisco hosted the UN’s World Environment Day.

The city’s ban on plastic grocery bags is spreading, and last year Mayor Gavin Newsom won a Green Cross Award from Global Green USA alongside Irmelin DiCaprio, the mother of film star Leonardo DiCaprio.

But none of that adds up to what the city really needs: cash.

Then the US Department of Energy in late March designated three more California cities — Sacramento, San Jose, and Santa Rosa — as new "Solar American Cities" — and this award came with money attached. And the DOE has dough: the agency requested $25 billion from Congress this year.

The solar grant was worth $2.4 million. The money was divided among 12 cities nationwide, leaving each municipality with just $200,000. And that was supposed to cover a two-year period.

Berkeley, San Francisco, and San Diego made the "Solar American Cities" list in 2007. San Francisco’s Department of the Environment received the money, and a conciliatory Johanna Partin, the renewable energy program manager there, said it was the only grant from Bush’s Solar America Initiative her office had actually applied for.

San Francisco at least will able to use the money to help the owners of large buildings assess what it would take to install solar technology. We’ve already digitally mapped the city’s grandest roofs.

Margie Bates, a project manager for the DOE’s Solar Energy Technologies Program in Golden, Colo., told us that the grant includes $200,000 in additional credit for hiring local experts to advise building owners on the technology or retain the expertise of DOE officials themselves.

"The funding is allowing us to do some pieces of our solar program that we didn’t otherwise have funding for. So in that sense it’s good," she said. "But, you know, $200,000 over two years is not a lot of money."

Twin Olsen meltdown

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>johnny@sfbg.com

If you see one 11-minute video this year, make it Michael Robinson’s magnificent, hilarious, and terrifying Light Is Waiting (2007). The primordial, extreme slo-mo soundtrack is like a glitch mix from beyond the grave by DJ Screw. Robinson’s seizure-inducing blasts of stroboscopic light rival those of the Austrian film experimentalist Peter Tscherkassky.

And I haven’t even mentioned the Olsen twins.

Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen, that formerly pint-size pair of formerly perfectly interchangeable human products, are part of Light Is Waiting. Robinson uses episodes of Full House as source material. His video’s first big punch line arrives after a two-minute unfiltered blast of the sitcom replete with laugh track, bad fashions, and Candace Cameron’s feathered hairdo. Robinson’s deployment of this clip is akin to a magician juggling TVs. He then mines the show’s trip-to-Hawaii episode — a colonialist trope that dates back past The Brady Bunch to another Robinson, last-name Crusoe (and that fires up a torch that’s been passed forward into the Survivor era) — in a manner so kaleidoscopic it’s hallucinatory. A three-eyed John Stamos’ version of "Rock-a-Hula Baby" turns into a Godzilla dirge, as his white-pantsed rump does the bump with itself. One Olsen twin becomes one two-headed Olsen twin, then turns into two Olsen twins forced to smooch each other.

Light Is Waiting exorcises American pop cultural demons via video the way Kenneth Anger did with film in 1964’s Scorpio Rising. Rife with floral symbolism, Robinson’s older studious excavations of the ideologies lurking beneath scenic landscapes don’t have the same impact. He had a semi-breakthrough with 2006’s And We All Shine On, where a karaoke instrumental of "Nothing Compares 2 U" — yet more floral imagery, this time evoked via unsung lyrics — magnifies the loneliness of video game vistas. The sardonic creep factor is akin to that of Bobby Abate’s One Mile Per Min (2002), and it makes me wonder what a recent Robinson video I haven’t seen, 2007’s Victory over the Sun, does to Axl Rose.

SHINE ON: FILMS BY MICHAEL ROBINSON

April 27, 7:30 p.m., $6–$10

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.sfcinematheque.org

Prana

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Prana has a soundstage look of the sort we haven’t seen in restaurants around here since the late 1990s, when Entros and Mercury lived their firefly-brief lives. The main dining room is a vast hall whose ceiling is supported by two parallel columns of whitewashed pillars. With some flagons of mead and a clutch of bit actors in Viking period costume, it’s easy to imagine a scene from Beowulf being filmed there — maybe an early moment in which the warriors are sleeping one off while Grendel comes creeping from the bog.

But no. Prana, despite dim lighting and shadows high in the corners of the great room, is too festive for such gory spectacle. Its incipient energy is that of a nightclub or discotheque, and late at night it actually does become a club called Temple. This isn’t surprising, since the space for more than a decade was home to DV8, a haunt of international reputation. (A few years on, toward the end of the millennium, it became Mercury, an unforgettable hall of glass and mirrors that lasted only a few weeks despite serving pretty good food.)

Chef James Jardine’s cooking, pan-Indochinese with a dash of Filipino, is elegant, stylish, and imaginative. It also tries harder than it needs to; it’s overachiever food, determined to be stimuutf8g at all times. Perhaps the kitchen feels it’s in competition with the relentlessly antic setting. Prana starts tugging at your sleeve and winking at you before you even get inside; the main doors are a set of funhouse mirrors that make you look skinny going in and fat going out. Once inside, you’ll find the music thumps steadily and rather loudly from clusters of huge speakers mounted overhead. As if that weren’t enough, there’s a huge display screen mounted behind the bar. The whole experience seems to be tuned for restless young people with short attention spans who might panic at any interruption in the stream of external sensation.

In such an environment, we can’t really blame the food for raising its voice a little. And it does, practically from the first moment, when the server appears with a basket full of deep-fried wonton skins and toasted pita triangles, along with a trio of chutneys: chipotle, cilantro-mint, and tomato. Certainly there’s more drama here than we would expect in a simpler, more traditional presentation of bread and butter or olive oil, and we found the chutneys to be excellent. But neither the wonton skins nor the pita triangles were of much use in dipping or sopping, and the result, for us, was a tablecloth decorated with dribblings ("It looks like a Jackson Pollock painting," my friend said) before we’d even ordered.

No spattering marred our enjoyment of spicy peanut soup ($9), weighted with basmati rice and shreds of roast chicken and amended with a pesto of vanilla bean and habañero chili that talked a big game but didn’t bring much. It didn’t need to; the basic soup was irresistible in a satay-sauce way, and a sprig or two of cilantro would have been an elegant, less effortful, finish.

The kitchen also cannily reinvented the lumpia ($10) — a Filipino cousin to the egg roll — by stuffing it with ahi tuna and serving it with a dipping sauce of garlic vinegar softened by açai, the Brazilian rainforest berry renowned for its antioxidant properties. Here the berry contributed mainly a pretty bluish-red color, while the tuna’s creamy sweetness made an attractive contrast with the deep-fried skins of the lumpias.

Cooking a lamb shank ($22) in a Filipino adobo marinade of vinegar, garlic, soy sauce, and peppercorns was another fine idea executed with high skill. The resulting meat was lightly crisped at the edges but tender enough to fall off the bone. The shank was plated with a disk of forbidden rice, like pebbles of porphyry arranged into some kind of monument, and a heap of baby mustard greens for discreet healthfulness.

Vegetarian choices are lively. A curried vegetable potpie ($16) was a shade sweet for my taste, though the pastry itself, with its Shar-pei folds and Hershey’s-kiss spire, was spectacular. The filling’s sweetness was cut a bit by the sharp salad of peppercress and halved cherry tomatoes on the side.

Better-balanced was a portobello mushroom "scaloppine" ($16). The cap of the fungus had been coated with rice flour, which turned an appealing crunchy gold in the sauté pan. The heat released the mushroom’s juices, as if it were a piece of steak. The cap was presented as a fan of slices, and the juices mixed with the chili-lime butter to make a slightly thickened sauce. The rest of the story was a small hedge of grilled Chinese broccoli and a neat square of polenta, wearing a strip of nori like a prize ribbon.

No matter what hoops a kitchen has set itself to jump through, there are certain dishes that don’t need to be tinkered with, and one is crème brûlée ($7). But Prana tinkered, on a theme of bananas, and this turned out to mean not a banana-flavored custard but three thin strips of banana laid over the custard in lieu of the standard cap of caramelized sugar. Taste: good, but the banana strips were tough and unwieldy. More texturally pleasing was a shortbread tart ($8) filled with lemon curd and topped with a royal flush of ripe mango slices. They were soft, and soft was good. Now about the music …

PRANA

Dinner: Tues.–Fri., 5:30–10 p.m.

Sat., 5–10 p.m.

Lunch: Tues.–Sat., 11 a.m.–3 p.m.

540 Howard, SF

(415) 978-9942, ext. 319

www.pranasf.com

Full bar

AE/DC/DISC/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

The pope isn’t coming to San Francisco. Too bad; a few of us have a few things to say.

When the last pope, John Paul II, came here in 1987, it felt kind of like a circus. The dude loved theater, and there was plenty of it to go around — he made a point, for example, of meeting with Clint Eastwood, who was then the mayor of Carmel, which gave my friend Victor Krummenacher of Camper Van Beethoven the chance to make up "Monterey Pope Festival" T-shirts. A few enterprising sorts made photos of Eastwood with a gun in his hand telling the Holy Father: "Go ahead, bless my day."

When JPII showed up at the Mission Dolores, some jokers who lived across the street hung a huge banner that read: "The pope is a wanker."

I, of course, didn’t want to miss the show.

It turned out that getting a press pass for the pope’s visit was a little tricky, especially for a reporter for an alternative newsweekly who made no secret of his disdain for the local Catholic hierarchy. But I went to Catholic school and have a good old Irish name, and I wasn’t going to let this one get away.

So I filed my application with the locals, and had it rejected. The day before the pope was due to arrive, I called the archdiocese headquarters to ask who was really in charge of papal press. After a bunch of squirming, they admitted there was a special monsignor in a downtown hotel who made the final decisions. I got his name; I called the hotel and got the suite, where his secretary told me he was seeing nobody, that the deadline had passed, and that, in the vernacular, I was SOL.

But my father taught me well: priests drink bourbon, monsignors drink Scotch. So I picked up a nice single-malt and made my way to the holy press room. I pitched a fit of sadness to the secretary (my poor sainted mother, who was praying for me even now, would be in tears if she thought I’d missed the chance to see His Holiness) and that got me through the door.

The monsignor looked up and told me there was no way anyone was getting credentials the day before the visit and he’d never heard of my newspaper anyway. I pulled out the bottle, and he smiled.

"Bless you, my son," he said. "I think we can do business."

So I got the special Pope press pass, and saw the Popemobile, and saw the big wanker banner, and had a grand old time — and other than the fact that the city tore up all the bushes along the papal route so nobody would plant bombs, the city was pretty quiet.

That would not be the case today.

The new pope isn’t just a wanker — he’s pissing off all sorts of people, including his own believers. Queer groups, women, people who believe in stem cell research, people who believe in sex education for kids, people who think that wiping out family planning and prenatal programs for third-world women to avoid even the slightest mention of abortion … they got a beef with this guy. And they’re more active than ever.

So Benedict, the former Cardinal Ratzinger, won’t make it to SF. Damn. Despite Mayor Newsom’s embarrassing hide-the-ball game, we did a pretty good job on the Olympic torch. And the pope would be too big to hide.

The punch line

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS I wrote a joke. I don’t mean that I tried to write something funny. I’ve been doing that (which is to say, this) since I was nine. I mean that for the first time, I wrote a joke joke, the kind that gets told by comedians, barbers … basically everybody in the world tells jokes. Except me, cause I can never remember the punch line.

For the joke I wrote, I made the punch line first. It was twisted, diabolical, clever, goofy, and just generally pretzels — such an amazing and unthinkable payoff that it took me hours and hours and hours to earn it, to craft the hard part of the joke, the long part, in my head. I was driving. By the time I got the getting-there down, I had forgotten the punch line.

Not really. But I knew I would. So as soon as I got out of the car, I wrote it down in an e-mail and, to be mean, sent it to my most inquisitive, most curious, most questioning, most nearly neurotic friend. I said, "I wrote a joke. Here’s the punch line."

Then I forgot it. I could find it in my out box, maybe, but it’s more fun, in my opinion, not to remember the punch line to the joke you wrote, or not to know the joke to the greatest punch line in the history of humor. My friend probably disagrees.

I never said I was nice. Sweet, yes. Cute. And sometimes, like when I’m not splashing green salsa or dumping noodle soup all over myself (admittedly the moments are rare), I can be charming, dignified, even ladylike. But I’m not a good person.

For example, I hate dogs. I don’t know what dogs ever did to me, or what I ever did to dogs, but I hate them and the feeling seems mutual. I do know what I did, actually, but it was so long ago! I was five! And socially awkward! And incontinent!

My kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Plant, left her toy poodle Muffy in her car, windows closed, on the hottest day of the year, and the poor little feller just melted. When, from the playground, we heard Mrs. Plant’s shriek, we of course went running to see what was biting her.

Well, poor little Muffy had been perched on the armrest, scratching at the passenger seat window, when she gave up the … whatever. Thus, when poor shrieky Mrs. Plant finally opened the car door, Muffy just sort of oozed out into the parking lot. Rigor mortis had not set in. I mean, this dog was practically liquid, sort of steaming, sort of wavy, like a mirage.

Here’s where accounts vary. I say: while my angelic, dog-loving classmates wrapped themselves comfortingly around Mrs. Plant’s considerable legs — I believe there were two of them — I stepped up to little liquid Muffy and, with a perfectly healthy and appropriately morbid curiosity, touched it with my toes. At which, quite naturally, considering the magnitude of the moment, I wet my pants, kind of adding to the mess.

What Mrs. Plant told the principal was I squatted over her dear, departed doggy, lifted my skirt (figuratively speaking) and "scatologically degraded its corpse."

Truth be told, I prefer her version. It’s so punk!

In any case, not to date myself (although it might eventually come to that) … but this was back when corporal punishment was quite in style at public schools. Our principal’s weapon of ass destruction, as we called it, was nicely varnished at the handle, then raw wood at the business end, scuffed and scored to encourage splinters.

I was still crying when my mom, a top-shelf linguistics prof with poetic powers (or at least a liking of alliteration) came home from work.

My mother was a sensible, kind, instructive woman, and at this point anyone who knows her suddenly realizes, without a shred of doubt, that this is a joke. However, exactly what my mother said to me after I tearfully told all, only one person in this wide world knows. And it isn’t me, and it’s certainly not my mom.

What’s in it for you is dinner.

My new least favorite restaurant is La Corneta in Glen Park. I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with it. Now it’s hate. The green salsa, which I love, got stuck in the squeeze bottle. Why anyone would keep salsa in a squeeze bottle is beyond me. But there it was, and stuck it was. Until I squeezed too hard. It became unstuck in dramatic fashion. My face, my eye, my hair, my new dress, my cousins, the wall. I’m still finding green salsa in places where no color salsas should be. Bullshit!

LA CORNETA

Mon.–Sat., 10 a.m.–10 p.m.; Sun., 11 a.m.–9 p.m.

2834 Diamond, SF

(415) 469-8757

Beer

Cash only

Watch what she makes

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Feminist art has reemerged in the past few years as the focus of major exhibitions including "WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution" at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and "Global Feminisms" at the Brooklyn Museum, which coincided with the unveiling of the museum’s permanent home for Judy Chicago’s iconic The Dinner Party (1974–79). On one hand, it’s inspiring to see such work resurface, especially at this political moment, when it becomes increasingly important to recall dissident factions in our country’s history. On the other hand, exhibitions such as "WACK!" can feel like regurgitations of the same old feminist art show with the same discourse, participants, and audience. It’s not enough to dust off these works and lump them under the vague and often misunderstood descriptor "feminist." To engage today’s audiences, it’s necessary to pull apart the threads, identifying what was and is at stake for these artists.

"The Way That We Rhyme: Women, Art & Politics," curated by Berin Golonu and on view at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, unites a new generation of women artists who honor their feminist predecessors while embracing new and more sly and subversive tactics. I increasingly hear women of my generation and younger vehemently disavow feminism, despite the current curatorial interest, as if there’s a stigma attached to the word. But "Way" takes feminist art out of the past and into the present.

In The Counterfeit Crochet Project (Critique of a Political Economy), Stephanie Syjuco takes aim at the luxury goods industry: the beautiful and coveted couture accoutrements that promise to make women equally beautiful and coveted, for a price. Seeking to reconcile the desire to possess such items with not wanting to invest in multinational corporations or sweatshops, Syjuco posted instructions on her Web site on how to crochet one’s own Fendi or Prada bag. Many women heeded the instructions, and their finished products are on display. The project also alludes to crochet as a traditionally devalued variety of "women’s craft." Similar knitted works appear throughout "Way," such as Lisa Anne Auerbach’s 2007 wool sweater and skirt sets, inscribed with political slogans.

Aleksandra Mir captures an unprecedented landmark in First Woman on the Moon, a 1999 video work that might be described as a "small step for a woman, a giant leap for the history of womankind." Playing off some people’s belief that Neil Armstrong’s moon landing was a hoax, Mir creates her own version of the event, wielding her camera — the instrument of news media — to insert women into history. After all, if Armstrong’s landing was — at the very least — plausible, then so is this landing. Filmed on a Dutch beach, Mir doesn’t try too hard to make the setting look authentic; in her version, the moon landing is less a colonization of outer space and more a celebration of life on Earth.

In a more somber piece, Portrait of Silvia-Elena, street artist SWOON and documentarian Tennessee Jane Watson collaborate to bring visibility to the horrifically high numbers of young women disappearing and turning up dead in Juárez, Mexico, and throughout the Americas. Some 400 women’s bodies have been recovered in Juarez, and an additional 1,000 are still recorded missing; in Guatemala, 2,000 women have been murdered. At the entrance to the installation — made to look like a dilapidated brick wall — is SWOON’s beautiful, angelic relief-print portrait of a 15-year-old victim in her quinceañera dress. The installation is also made up of photos of missing girls, as they are found plastered in Juarez, and an audiotrack of Watson’s interviews with the mothers of the disappeared.

One of the more challenging works is Beg for Your Life (2006) by Laurel Nakadate. A video artist accustomed to being looked at by men, Nakadate collapses her experience as subject and object, placing herself in front of her own camera to enact scenes with various older men — all strangers whose gaze she met on the street. In one scene, Nakadate’s back is to the camera as she seductively poses for her admirer. The man thinks he is in the subject seat, dictating his fantasies to the object of his desire, but really the camera is on him. Nakadate scores the video with 1980s pop songs, yet the content is not always amusing: some of the men’s fantasies are violent, and you wonder if the artist didn’t put herself at real risk.

The interplay between female and male subjects and objects in Nakadate’s work brings to mind one thing I might add to "Way": male artists. While I understand the rationale for creating a dedicated space for women’s art, I think in some ways it only further marginalizes women. Let’s integrate women’s political art into the larger context and invite men to participate, reminding them that feminism is — and has always been — about men too.

THE WAY THAT WE RHYME: WOMEN, ART & POLITICS

Through June 29

Tues.–Wed., Fri.–Sun., noon–5 p.m.; Thurs., noon–8 p.m.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

$6, $3 seniors, students, and youths; free for members (free first Tues.)

(415) 978-ARTS

www.ybca.org

CubaCaribe Festival

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PREVIEW The CubaCaribe Festival, now in its fourth incarnation, is a three-week celebration of the African diaspora, as manifested in this country, Brazil, Cuba, and Haiti. (Conceivably, as we continue to learn how widespread and diverse African influences are, the festival might well grow to include dance and music from Peru.) Like many other culturally based dance forms, these diverse African influences of the diaspora grow from pockets that develop around specific newcomers to the fertile Bay Area, who bring the seeds of knowledge with them. Observe this year’s festival performers: Tânia Santiago was born in the Bahia region of Brazil; two members of Nsamina Kongo come from the Republic of Congo; and Luis Napoles, Ramón Ramos Alayo, and Danis "La Mora" Pérez Prades hail from Cuba. Others, such as Portsha Jefferson and Michelle Martin, are American, but their affinities have led them to the sources of their art; Jefferson has lived and worked in Haiti, and Martin in Nigeria, Cuba, and Haiti. Of particular interest is guest artist Pérez Prades’s New York–based Oyu Oro ensemble and CubaCaribe founder Ramos and his Alayo Dance Company. An excellent dancer with Robert Moses’s Kin, among others, Ramos brings a personal, decidedly contemporary perspective to his choreography. Last year’s Three Threes was a thoughtfully built homage to Cuba’s modern dance pioneer Narciso Medina and a smart, excellently danced roundup of Cuban social dance.

CUBACARIBE FESTIVAL Fri/18–Sat/19, April 24–26, and May 1–3, 8 p.m.; April 20 and May 4, 2, and 7 p.m. Dance Mission Theater, 3316 24th St., SF. $18–$22. (415) 273-4633, www.cubacaribe.org, www.brownpapertickets.com

Fool’s Gold vs. Dim Mak

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PREVIEW Here’s how the grumpy jockey wonkette in me kinda wishes the Fool’s Gold vs. Dim Mak record label showdown goes down. In this corner: Montreal vinyl cut-up whiz and Fool’s Gold cofounder A-Trak, winner of the 1997 DMC World DJ Championship at 15 and prime mover of the ’90s turntablism movement. In that corner: Dim Mak owner Steve Aoki, a self-proclaimed "kid millionaire party king" who barely touches vinyl, inspires an entire Internet hatrix due to his immense popularity on the neon indie/cheap sunglasses scene, and often raises the question, if a DJ can’t mix for shit but the party still goes off, does it matter?

Ding! We have a winner. Sorry, Aoki, but Monsieur A-Trak’s all up in your laptop ass like the A in Canada. Everybody switch back to vinyl.

But I gotta be fair. After years of relentless touring, Aoki’s gone easier on the Human League sing-alongs and Michael Jackson breakdowns and has pepped up his sets with some much-needed prickly subversion. Meanwhile, A-Trak has been warming up crowds for Kanye West by backspinning Justin Timberlake. Now is it an even playing field? We’ll see on Saturday, when both take the stage with wacky Sammy Bananas, Alameda’s Trackademicks, and electro-hopper Sinden.

A-TRAK AND STEVE AOKI With Sammy Bananas, Trackademicks, and Sinden. Sat/19, 10 p.m.–4 a.m., $15–$20. 103 Harriet, SF. www.blasthaus.com

The Sword

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PREVIEW For Austin, Texas, rockers the Sword, the cumbersome descriptor "epic fantasy metal" ain’t no joke; it really is the story of their lives. Check out the lyrics to "How Heavy This Axe," from their second full-length, Gods of the Earth (Kemado): "So many men have fallen / So many more must die … How heavy this axe / Burden carried from birth / Wrought in Stygian visions / By the gods of the earth." The album’s got it all: frost giants, witches, warriors, lords, vassals, "Fire Lances of the Ancient Hyperzephyrians," exile, maidens, serpents, and of course, wizards. It’s essentially the transcription of a Ronnie James Dio fever dream. At the same time, the lyric sheet translates as the classic American odyssey of pubescent, pimple-faced Dungeons and Dragons geek to um, axe-wielding metal god.

On a sonic level, the disc is unassailable. Guitarists Kyle Shutt and John Cronise have the magical combination of both riffs and licks, never becoming confused and faltering in the hoary mists of the Moors of Eternal Noodling. Nonetheless, I’m forced to pose the question, Is heavy enough? Not being an avid player of World of Warcraft, I wonder: is a whole album of sword and sorcery motifs satisfying on a level beyond bowel-shaking instrumental thunder? When I try to dig past the fantasy veneer of Sword songs, I hit the frozen tundra of metal cliché. There’s not enough lyrical flux to let the listener hear between the lines.

Don’t get me wrong — I’ll be at the show, banging my head like crazy. But the question remains: Why can’t metal be about something? It’s been suggested that the Sword is playing with the lingua franca of metal, that they’re being tongue in cheek. But irony is a lame gag, especially when you can’t tell it’s ironic. And if it’s not ironic, and it doesn’t allow deeper interpretation, it’s just riffs — albeit excellent riffs — and the Sword is an instrumental band with a vocalist. Again: is heavy enough?

THE SWORD With Slough Feg and Children. Sat/19, 9 p.m., $14. Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF. (415) 522-0333, www.slims-sf.com

Chevron spinning out

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Yuck. Ecuadorian oil pit. All cleaned up, you say? Photo courtesy of Amazon Watch

As if publicly disputing the credibility of the Goldman Prize weren’t enough, Chevron has gone into serious corporate spin cycle, taking out a full page ad in today’s Chron and penning a guest editorial claiming they’re not to blame for 18 billion gallons of toxic waste dumped in unlined pits in the Amazon rainforest. The repeated cry of Charles A. James, Chevron’s vp and general counsel: It’s not us, it’s the government. Chevron, the parent company of Texaco, which began pumping Ecuadorian oil back in 1964, says noone cared about the environment back then, they’ve cleaned up their mess anyway, and anything left over is the fault of Ecuador’s national oil company, PetroEcuador.

Lawyer Pablo Fajardo and activist Luis Yanza, two natives of Lago Agrio, Ecuador – a small village in the heart of the spoils — were just awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize, what our congresswoman Nancy Pelosi called “on par with the Nobel Peace Prize.” Fajardo put himself through law school to take the lead in a suit against Chevron, claiming the company’s responsible for destroying soil, water, and natural resources. Lago Agrians suffer significantly elevated incidences of cancer, disease, and death.

Chevron, which ignored Fajardo at last year’s board meeting, now has Sam Singer handling spin. Singer’s other recent clients: the SF Zoo, post-tiger attack, and Don Fisher’s Presidio art museum. They also have William Haynes on the case. Why does that name sound so familiar? Yes, a la Kevin Ryan, we have another Bush Administration fall guy washing ashore in the Bay Area.

Reading through Chevron’s website on the lawsuit and taking in the pretty green pictures, it seems like there isn’t a thing wrong with this Amazonian rainforest. Everything’s been cleaned up, and if the indigenous people who live there are getting sick, it’s because they shit where they eat.

But MoFilms, an Oakland-based documentary company, shot footage of the region that shows someone has been wrecking environmental hell down there. Their film, Justicia Now, is screening this Thursday at the Roxie, 8 pm, 3117 16th St. San Francisco. The filmmakers will be on hand to answer questions about the issue and the movie, which they also distribute for free on their website.

Newsom’s torch plays SF for fools

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First the route for the Beijing Olympic Torch relay was changed, following a brief opening ceremony.
Then, the closing ceremony was shifted to an undisclosed location.

These last minute changes left all the thousands of people who came to support, protest or simply witness the torch’s historic relay thwarted.

And they meant that China has got some relatively upbeat television footage to show back home, featuring an unencumbered torch being run through the protest-free streets of San Francisco! Talk about a far cry from reality.

“Disgraceful and shameful” said Board of Supervisor President Aaron Peskin of the City’s switch and bait.

‘I have every reason to believe this was a well developed plan by Gavin Newsom and his chief of police in conjunction with the government of China and the US State Department,” Peskin continued. “It was designed to please the government of China and give them the TV footage they want to portray to their people. The bottom line is that Newsom has deceitfully and repeatedly misled the public. Frankly, these are the tactics that the Chinese government uses on its people. It’s a move straight from the Richard Nixon playbook.”

Asked if there was evidence to support the City’s decision to redirect the torch relay and relocate the closing ceremony, Peskin said he’d seen and heard none.

“I went down the route at 11 am, the supporters and protesters were all peaceful. This was a large decoy operation. Only Newsom played the people of San Francisco for fools. I don’t care if you were a supporter or an opponent of the torch, people brought their children, families and friends to San Francisco for a once in a lifetime experience. This was the biggest charade perpetuated by any mayor in anyone’s memory and possibly in the history of this town. The only difference between Newsom and President Hu Jintao is none. Both manipulate, are deceitful and do not run transparent governments.”

The torch, which was variously concealed in a waterfront warehouse, shipped to Van Ness with a Quackers bus in tow, and diverted through the Marina to elude protesters, was taken to SFO for a surprise closing ceremony–presumably so it could be shipped out of SF as fast as possible, away from the whiskey and fandangos–and all those people, inconveniently protesting uncomfortable stuff like China’s abysmal track record of human rights abuses and its support of dictatorship in Burma and genocide in Darfur.

Sonic Reducer Overage: Mocheeba, Hercules and Love Affair, Enon, David Banner, and mo’

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Reflections on Enon. Photo by Emily Wilson.

So much to do and see, Lee. And Prince headlining Coachella on Saturday, April 26, doesn’t make the schedule any easier. Check out all these worthy shows that were fit for print but simply didn’t make the trim this week.


KING BROTHERS AND THE FLAKES
Kawaii-cute Japanese distorto-rockers meet Bay Area garage first-schoolers. With Shellshag and Bananas. Thurs/10, 8:30 p.m., $10. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. (415) 621-4455.



HERCULES AND LOVE AFFAIR
“I cannot hold / a half a life / I cannot be / at half a wife.” So goes “Time Will” off Hercules and Love Affair’s new self-titled DFA/EMI album. Dulcet warbles care of Antony of Antony and the Johnsons meet cool synthetics with keys by Andrew Butler and drum programming by DFA’s Tim Goldsworthy. Instant love affair, for sure. With Timo Maas and Honey Soundsystem. Fri/11, 10 p.m. doors, $15-$30. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. (415) 820-9669.

Done wanderin’

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

It isn’t easy being a Chosen One. Rootsy singer-songwriter Jackie Greene — formerly a big fish in the relatively small pond of Sacramento who now lives in San Francisco — has had great things expected of him since he was a solo troubadour fresh out of high school in Placerville. Rolling Stone critics named Gone Wanderin’, his first album for the indie Dig Music label, one of the best of 2002 and the follow-up, Sweet Somewhere Bound (Dig Music, 2004), was another critical favorite. The excitement led to Greene being signed by Verve/Forecast, and his first disc for that company, 2006’s extraordinary American Myth, seemed to confirm this guy was going places. Produced by Los Lobos’ Steve Berlin, the album was a diverse and confident showcase of Americana styles, from blues to driving rock to Dylanesque rambles. But a not-so-funny thing happened to Greene on the way to certain stardom: his label started to fall apart in the middle of promoting his album, tours were cancelled, and the blush of early success faded.

Yet Greene’s upward trajectory continued. A spellbinding and charismatic performer, he kept playing wherever he could, with his band or acoustic with a partner. It wasn’t long before he had a new label in place, this time with 429, a subsidiary of the Savoy jazz imprint. In the meantime, out of the blue, former Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh, who leads the popular Deadish jam band Phil Lesh and Friends, fell in love with American Myth and invited Greene to join the group as lead vocalist and co-lead guitarist alongside the great Larry Campbell. Though Greene hadn’t listened to much Dead beyond the records his parents owned — and frankly he preferred his folks’ Ray Charles and Big Bill Broonzy discs — he quite naturally fell into the mix. The songwriter was quickly accepted by Dead Heads for his passionate renditions of the band’s tunes, as well as cover songs and a sprinkling of his originals.

"I love playing in Phil and Friends," he says as he sits in the control room of Mission Bells, the Bernal Heights recording studio he shares with Tim Bluhm of the Mother Hips. "Playing those Jerry [Garcia] songs, I kind of feel like I love a lot of them like they’re my own songs."

In the midst of touring with Lesh last fall, Greene and Steve Berlin somehow managed to find time to record the superb, just-released Giving up the Ghost (429). Using both his regular touring band and the same group of hip Los Angeles session cats who sparked American Myth — collectively they’re known as Jackshit, with Elvis Costello drummer Pete Thomas as their best-known member — Greene and Berlin painstakingly put together the album from sessions in Sacramento, Los Angeles, SF, Chicago, and Brooklyn. Greene rightly calls the recording "darker" than its predecessor. That said, it is still filled with sharp lyrics, bright melodies, memorable riffs and hooks, and typically soulful vocals. In keeping with Greene’s and Berlin’s affection for off-the-wall sonics, there are literally dozens of different guitar and keyboard textures, unusual treatments on vocals, and a zillion little touches that give the disc a wonderful variety and depth. It’s easy to picture several songs being embraced by rock radio, but this music is still not exactly at the forefront of the current mainstream.

"Certainly I want to have some successful records — who doesn’t?" Greene confesses. "But I’m not willing to make anything other than what I want to make it sound like. If this is not considered commercially viable, then so be it."

JACKIE GREENE

Thurs/10, 8 p.m., $22.50

Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

www.livenation.com

Mothers of invention

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In spite of music culture’s constant craving for new waves and next-big-things, there are always those bands that do not hew to any marketable bubble, the ones that skew the trends and equations of rock chronologies with their sui generis melds. After several albums of high-flying concepts, sheet music-necessitating technique, and stylistic miscegenation, Dave Longstreth’s Dirty Projectors have firmly established themselves as such a group.

First conceived in New Haven, Conn., Longstreth’s namesake went through many permutations before settling in Brooklyn as an elemental two guitars-bass-drums quartet. The current grouping plays the leader’s chamber-rock compositions with fire and finesse. Bassist Angel Deradoorian and guitarist Amber Coffman’s double-helix backup vocals leave Longstreth free to float his quivering voice and slash at his thin, West African–kissed guitar lines as if they were exclamations. Hypertuned and aerobic, a Dirty Projectors concert is a bold tonic of intellectualism and adrenaline.

I try to say as much to Longstreth when I catch him on the phone in Brooklyn, and he muses, "I kind of like feeling that that’s a component of the feeling of the music … [that] tension of the relatedness, or unrelatedness, of what our mouths are doing and what our fingers are doing." All of Longstreth’s Dirty Projectors records are accordingly stretchy, though last year’s Rise Above (Dead Oceans) is probably the most cohesive formulation of the project’s intrinsic push-pull. The back story, well trod by now, is that Longstreth recovered a cassette case for Black Flag’s hardcore LP, Damaged (SST, 1984), without the actual tape, and in a flight of Borgesian invention, set out on writing songs refracted by his memory of the original album.

Longstreth has indulged similarly sly threads before — 2005’s The Getty Address (Western Vinyl) had something to do with Don Henley — though hardcore pieties meant Rise Above received more scrutiny than usual. "We got some really amazing hate mail on our MySpace page," Longstreth says, laughing. Hardly a straightforward tribute, Rise Above references the essential "no" of Black Flag’s attack in both music and lyric, but inscribes the songs with double-consciousness and complexity rather than Greg Ginn’s brute strength.

Syrupy strings introduce a snaky, sweet guitar line and a dirty disco bottom. Thundering female and male choruses overhang Longstreth’s echoing verse before launching off for an oasis of backwards guitars and cymbals. This all happens a couple of minutes into "No More." Longstreth may think in fragments, but the resulting sound is one of passion, not math. His hot-blooded appreciation of pop and R&B — he mentions T-Pain and Chris Brown as two current interests — doesn’t come with a smirk. Though these elements are mostly cloaked in convolution on Dirty Projectors recordings, Longstreth occasionally offers a more unobstructed view of his visionary soul music. The title track of Rise Above sounds almost newborn in its plaintive wail, and the same can be said for older tracks like "Not Having Found" from The Getty Address and "Unmoved" from Slaves’ Graves and Ballads (Western Vinyl, 2004).

With all the rehashing of post-punk over the last several years, it’s hard to imagine a more eloquent last word on the subject than Rise Above. When Longstreth looked back on an earlier era, it wasn’t to revive something: it was to let it go, and then keep right on pushing ahead. When I ask Longstreth what he’s been up to, he tells me he’s been busy working through new material with the band for their upcoming tour. "The music’s written with [them] in mind," he explains. "It’s the first stuff I’ve done that’s been like that."

DIRTY PROJECTORS

With No Kids and Rafter

Fri/11, 9 p.m., $13

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1422

www.theindependentsf.com

While their guitars gently weep

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In the liner notes for his 1978 album, Ambient 1: Music for Airports (Editions EG/Polydor), Brian Eno wrote that the music contained within "must be as ignorable as it is interesting." Though that watershed release launched a thousand new age imitators under the banner of ambient music, Eno’s ambivalent criteria still holds as a descriptive litmus test for any music that only partially depends on focused engagement in order to be fully appreciated.

Or as Adam Wiltzie, one half of the dreamy instrumental duo Stars of the Lid, puts it: "There is a narcoleptic feeling that I want to get within each tune. If the piece doesn’t make me fall asleep, then it’s probably not finished."

Wiltzie and musical partner Brian McBride have taken their time refining their soporific version of Eno’s barely there aesthetic, releasing just a handful of beatless, slow-burning full-lengths during the past decade. Coming six years after their epic sophomore Kranky release, The Tired Sounds of (2001), last year’s And Their Refinement of the Decline (Kranky) proved to be another gentle juggernaut: treated violin, cello, and fog-horn brass provided tonal counterpoints to the clouds of diaphanous guitars over the course of two hours. Given that the duo tours even less frequently than they put out new material — primarily due to the fact that Wiltzie and McBride now live on opposite sides of the Atlantic — their April 15 stopover at the Independent is the equivalent of catching a passing comet with the naked eye.

Eno is an obvious touchstone, although Wiltzie responds somewhat begrudgingly on the phone from Brussels when I bring up the comparison. "I grew up listening to Eno’s ambient works and whether I liked them or not they must have influenced me somewhat," he explains. "But influences — and whether or not people hear this or that artist in our work — can be like a strange beauty pageant where everyone has their personal favorites."

Granted, Eno’s earlier ambient experiments on Music for Airports and Discreet Music (Editions EG, 1975) focused on creating systems that would self-generate infinite variations from prerecorded tape loops. SOTL is a far more compositionally oriented project, and many of Wiltzie’s "personal favorites" are composers: Gavin Bryars, Arvo Part, Bernard Herrmann, and Alexandre Desplat. Their influence is clear. And Their Refinement sounds, well, refined compared to the rough-hewn compositions of earlier releases. On many tracks the strings and horns are upfront in the mix, and even then only lightly brushed with a wash of delay and soft EQ, while longer pieces, such as the 17-minute album closer, "December Hunting for Vegetarian Fuckface," are suites unto themselves.

"Maybe my classical music influences are showing more and more," Wiltzie suggests when I ask him about And Their Refinement‘s more delicate arrangements. "I also am on a lot less drugs than I used to be as a kid. Maybe I just have more clarity now," he laughs. "I’m just growing older, I guess."

What hasn’t changed is the evocative power of SOTL’s music, even as it tends to massage listeners into slumber. Perhaps it is the blank-canvas quality of ambient music that has made "cinematic" such an ubiquitous way to describe what’s being heard (as prescient as ever, Eno’s Music for Films [Editions EG, 1978] offered soundtracks for imaginary movies). No one ever hears a song the same way, yet SOTL’s music touches a specific emotional range — one that is definitely in a minor key.

Case in point: And Their Refinement‘s "Don’t Bother They’re Here," a reverb-soaked gloss on the opening bars of Stephen Sondheim’s maudlin ballad "Send in the Clowns." Stripping away the original’s thick coating of show tune schmaltz, SOTL leave only a whispered trace of the lonely little melody at its center.

"We both love Judy Collins’s version of that song. It’s just a nod to beautiful melody," Wiltzie explains. "I’ve just wanted to create a beautiful sound that encapsulates a feeling of beauty and sadness in the same breath."

STARS OF THE LID

With Christopher Willis

Tues/15, 8 p.m., $15

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

www.theindependentsf.com

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