SF

After the ruins

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

ESSAY In a journal entry dated Dec. 27, 1835, from his 1840 book Two Years before the Mast, student-turned-seafarer Richard Henry Dana recorded his first impressions of the area we know as the City, while his ship, The Alert, traveled through the Golden Gate:

We passed directly under the high cliff on which the presidio is built … from whence we could see large and beautifully wooded islands and the mouths of several small rivers … hundreds of red deer, and [a] stag, with his high branching antlers, were bounding about, looking at us for a moment and then starting off …

Dana arrived in the Bay Area after one era had ended and before another began. Until the coming of the Spaniards a generation earlier, some 10,000 people, members of around 40 separate tribes, lived between Big Sur and San Francisco, in the densest Native American population north of Mexico. Despite the existence among them of as many as 12 different languages, the people collectively referred to now as the Ohlone lived in relative peace for some 4,500 years.

On his first visit, Dana predicted that the Bay Area would be at the center of California’s prosperity. When he returned more than 30 years later in 1868, he discovered that his hotel was built on landfill that had been dumped where The Alert first landed.

Then in middle age, Dana wrote, "The past was real. The present all about me was unreal." Making his way through the crowded streets where the new city he’d predicted was being built, he remarked, "[I] seemed to myself like one who moved in ‘worlds not realized.’" Thus Dana became one of the first to articulate the peculiar San Franciscan combination of nostalgia for a lost past and despair over an unrealized future.

The past and future are always alive here. On his first visit, Dana wrote in his notebook about the great city to come. But like many residents of SF today, he slept on the cold, hard ground.

In George Stewart’s 1949 science fiction classic Earth Abides, a mysterious disease has killed 99 percent of the Earth’s population; the main character, Ish, roams the City and East Bay until he finds a wife. Stewart’s book ends in a Twilight Zone scenario, as an old, feeble Ish — now the last living pre-plague American — watches in dismay while his illiterate offspring hunt and frolic like the Ohlone, wearing animal skins and fashioning arrowheads from bottle caps.

After a wildfire, Ish notices that a library has been spared. All the information is still in there, he thinks. "But available to whom?"

Perhaps the knowledge Ish once begged his children to learn can be found in 1970’s The Last Whole Earth Catalog. Its 450-plus yellowing Road Atlas–size pages contain terse recommendations of publications about plant identification, organic gardens, windmills, vegetable dyes, edible mushrooms, goat husbandry, and childbirth, while also sharing the fundamentals of yoga, rock climbing, making music with computers, space colonization, and — of course! — the teachings of Buckminster Fuller.

The initial Whole Earth Catalog sought to reconcile Americans’ love of nature and technology. In Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism (University Press of Kansas, 303 pages, $34.95), author Andrew Kirk credits its creator, Stewart Brand, with bringing a sense of optimism to environmentalism. A character in Tom Wolfe’s 1968 Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Brand embodied the cultural intersection of acid and Apple at mid-1960s Stanford University. Kirk examines Brand’s 1965 "America Needs Indians" festival, his three-day Trips Festival in 1966, and his time riding the bus as one of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters.

Counterculture Green correctly suggests that Brand’s utopian lifestyle has a hold on our imagination. But Brand was a leader of the counterculture, not a revolutionary. He believed that the market economy, not political change, would usher in a better world. While today’s market — at the behest of individuals — has started to demand renewable energy or sustainable growth, it also has brought us the SUV, suburban sprawl, and the highest fuel prices in history. Apple may empower the individual — or want consumers to believe it does — but at 29, Silicon Valley has the highest concentration of Superfund sites in the country.

Brand deserves credit for intuiting the peculiar "machine in the garden" Bay Area we live in today, a place perhaps more "California Über Alles" than utopian. It’s far from the postmarket SF envisioned in Ernest Callenbach’s 1975 novel Ecotopia, which is set in 1999, nearly 20 years after Northern California, Oregon, and Washington have seceded from the United States to form the titular nation. A colleague of Brand’s, Callenbach bases his society on ideas from the Whole Earth Catalog, but for one major difference — Ecotopia comes into being not through the free market but through an environmental revolution. (I won’t spoil it, but here’s a hint: it starts in Bolinas!)

While Callenbach’s future sometimes resembles a mixture of the Haight Street Fair and Critical Mass, there are twists. Ancient creeks have been unearthed, and on Market Street there is a "charming series of little falls, with water gurgling and splashing, and channels lined with rocks, trees, bamboos and ferns." Ecotopians have instituted a 20-hour work week that involves dismantling dystopian relics such as gas stations. There is a surplus of food produced close to home. Materials that do not decompose are no longer used. This new world is no wilderness — it reconciles civilization and nature. Yet perhaps its most radical idea is that humans can create a utopia without help from a plague, apocalyptic war, or earthquake.

The 1906 San Francisco earthquake leveled 4.7 square miles — or 508 city blocks. It destroyed 28,188 structures, including City Hall, the Hall of Justice, the Hall of Records, the County Jail, the Main Library, five police stations, and more than 40 schools. Yet strangely, many apocalyptic tomes — including recent ones such as the speculative nonfiction best-seller The World Without Us and the born-again Christian Left Behind series — are reluctant to imagine a totally destroyed San Francisco.

In contrast, Chris Carlsson’s 2004 utopian novel, After the Deluge (Full Enjoyment Books, 288 page, $13.95), suggests the City is at its most charming when at least partially in ruins, like the old cities of Europe. In Carlsson’s post-economic SF of 2157, rising sea levels from global warming submerge much of the Financial District, yet the City adapts by serving old skyscrapers — now converted into housing — with a network of canals.

After the Deluge‘s vision of reduced work, free bikes, and creeks unearthed from beneath streets borrows from Callenbach’s Ecotopia. Yet Carlsson seems to have his most fun imagining a city transformed by ruins: take a subtle comment on the Federal Building at Seventh and Market streets. In Carlsson’s map of SF circa 2157, the monstrosity that some call the Death Star is simply labeled "The Ruins."

Similarly, the photographs in After the Ruins 1906 and 2006: Rephotographing the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire (University of California Press, 134 pages, $24.95) appear to delight in the City’s impermanence. Mark Klett presents famous images of the smoldering city in 1906 alongside carefully shot contemporary photographs from the same vantage points. Cleverly, these images are arranged in a manner that suggests the ruins aren’t just the past but also an inevitable future.

The aftermaths of SF’s earthquakes are often described in utopian terms, as if cracks in the landscape revealed the possibility of a better world. In After the Ruins, a 1906 quake survivor remembers cooperation not seen since the days of the Ohlone:

A spirit of good nature and helpfulness prevailed and cheerfulness was common. The old and feeble were tenderly aided. Food was voluntarily divided. No one richer, none poorer than his fellow man.

In an essay accompanying After the Ruins, Rebecca Solnit recollects the 1989 earthquake similarly:

The night of the quake, the liquor store across the street held a small barbecue … I talked to the neighbors. I walked around and visited people. That night the powerless city lay for the first time in many years under a sky whose stars weren’t drowned out by electric lights.

Greta Snider’s classic early ’90s punk and bike zine Mudflap tells of a utopia for bicyclists created by the 1989 Loma Prieta quake. Until torn down, a closed-off section of damaged Interstate 280 became a bike superhighway where one could ride above the City without fear of cars. Earthquakes are seen to have utopian potential in SF, because, like protests or Critical Mass, they stop traffic. In 1991, Gulf War protestors stormed the Bay Bridge, shutting down traffic on the span for the first time since the 1989 quake. Perhaps in tribute to the utopian possibilities of both events, William Gibson’s 1993 book Virtual Light imagines a postquake-damaged Bay Bridge as a home for squatter shanties and black market stalls.

Carlsson’s new nonfiction book, Nowtopia (AK Press, 288 pages, $18.95), explores new communities springing up in the margins of capitalist society. Subtitled How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclists, and Vacant-Lot Gardeners Are Inventing the Future Today, it looks for seeds of post-economic utopia in places such as the SF Bike Kitchen and the Open Source software movement. According to Carlsson, these communities "manifest the efforts of humans to transcend their lives as wage-slaves. They embrace a culture that rejects the market, money, and business. Engaging in technology in creative and experimental ways, the Nowtopians are involved in a guerilla war over the direction of society."

A founder of Critical Mass, Carlsson praises the biofuels movement and bicycle culture for promoting self-sufficiency through tools. With its optimism and endorsement of technology, Nowtopia occasionally evokes the Whole Earth Catalog. Yet unlike Brand’s tome, it focuses on class and how people perform work in today’s society. Carlsson finds that in their yearning for community, people will gladly perform hours of unpaid labor on behalf of something they love that they believe betters the world.

Within today’s SF, Carlsson cites Alemany Farm as an example of nowtopia. Volunteers took over an abandoned SF League of Urban Gardeners (SLUG) farm next to the Alemany Projects, farming it for several years before the City gave them official permission. "Instead of traditional political forms like unions or parties, people are coming together in practical projects," Carlsson writes. "They aren’t waiting for an institutional change from on-high, but are getting on with building the new world in the shell of the old."

Ironically, the only literature that truly envisions the complete destruction of large areas of the City are the postwar plans of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency. In 1956, it began the first of two projects in the Fillmore, slashing the neighborhood in two with a widened Geary Boulevard and demolishing over 60 square blocks of housing. Some 17,500 African American and Japanese American people saw their homes bulldozed.

With their dreams of "urban renewal," the heads of SF-based corporate giants such as Standard Oil, Bechtel, Del Monte, Southern Pacific, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America reimagined the City as a utopia for big business. The language of a Wells Fargo report from the ’60s evokes the notebooks of Dana: "Geographically, San Francisco is a natural gateway for this country’s ocean-going and airborne commerce with the Pacific area nations." Likewise, Prologue for Action, a 1966 report from the San Francisco Planning and Urban Renewal Association, might have been written by dystopian visionary Philip K. Dick:

If SF decides to compete effectively with other cities for new "clean" industries and new corporate power, its population will move closer to "standard White Anglo-Saxon Protestant" characteristics. As automation increases the need for unskilled labor will decrease…. The population will tend to range from lower middle-class through upper-class…. Selection of a population’s composition might be undemocratic. Influence on it, however, is legal and desirable.

This dream of turning San Francisco into a perfect world for business required that much of the existing city be destroyed. First, the colorful Produce District along the waterfront was removed in 1959, its warmth and human buzz replaced by the four identical modern hulks of the Embarcadero Center. Beginning in 1966, some 87 acres of land south of Market — including 4,000 housing units — were bulldozed to make way for office blocks, luxury hotels, and the Moscone Center.

The dark logic of the Redevelopment Agency’s plans are projected into the future in the profoundly bleak science fiction of Richard Paul Russo’s Carlucci series from the ’90s. Russo’s books are set in a 21st-century SF entirely segregated by class and health. The Tenderloin is walled off into an area where drug-addicted and diseased residents kill each other or await death from AIDS or worse. Access to all neighborhoods is restricted and even the series’ hero, stereotypical good cop Frank Carlucci, submits to a full body search in order to enter the Financial District because he lacks the necessary chip implant to be waved through checkpoints.

Russo’s nightmares have their real side today, and many dreams found in Ecotopia and the Whole Earth Catalog — composting, recycling, widespread bicycling, urban gardening, free access to information via the Internet, Green building design — have also come to pass. (There is even a growing movement to unearth creeks like the Hayes River, which runs under City Hall.) Pat Murphy’s 1989 novel, The City Not Long After, imagines these opposing visions of the city will continue even after a plague wipes out all but one-thousandth of SF’s population. In Murphy’s book, those still alive turn the City into a backdrop for elaborate art projects, weaving ribbon and lace from Macy’s across downtown streets and painting the Golden Gate Bridge blue. This artists’ utopia is threatened when an army of survivors from Sacramento marches into SF. But the last forces of America, unlike the dot-com invaders of the ’90s, prove no match for the artists, who use direct action tactics and magic to rout Sacramento in an epic showdown at Civic Center Plaza.

In Carlsson’s After the Deluge, several people enter a bar called New Spec’s on Fulton Street. The walls are covered with old SF ephemera. One character explains to Eric, a newcomer, "Its all about nostalgia, a false nostalgia." Was the City a better place before the war, before the earthquakes, or before it was even the City? So many utopian visions of the future evoke a simpler past that one wonders if believing in one is the same as longing for the other. It’s a question that would make sense, once again, to Philip K. Dick.

Perhaps no fiction about a future SF captures utopian yearning as well as Dick’s decidedly dystopian works, because his stories, though full of futuristic gadgets, are really about the ways human characters relate to them. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) is set in a radically depopulated postwar SF of 2021. The air is filled with radioactive dust and the streets are hauntingly empty as humans race to colonize Mars. Main character Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter assigned to "retire" humanlike androids, yet he’s mostly concerned about his electric sheep. Because there are almost no animals left on Earth, owning a fake one helps a striver like Deckard keep up appearances.

In 1962’s The Man in the High Castle, Dick imagines life in SF after the Nazis and Japanese have won World War II. Nostalgia haunts this story, too. Protagonist R. Childan makes his living selling rare prewar Americana to rich Japanese collectors. Not much has changed in this alternate SF, though. Market Street is still a place of "shooting galleries [and] cheap nightclubs with photos of middle-aged blondes holding their nipples between their wrinkled fingers and leering." While most utopian futures look to the past, Dick’s dystopian futures are all eerily about the present.

So how does Mr. Childan deal with the pain of living in a world where Nazis have won the war? How else? "To inspire himself, he lit up a marijuana cigarette," Dick writes, "excellent Land-O-Smiles brand."

Erick Lyle is the editor of Scam magazine. His book, On the Lower Frequencies: A Secret History of the City, is out now on Soft Skull Press.

NOWTOPIA BOOK RELEASE PARTY

Wed/9, 7:30 p.m.; $20 suggested donation (includes book, reading/discussion, and contribution to site)

CounterPULSE

1310 Mission, SF

(415) 626-2060

Metamorphenomenal

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› superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO Positivity — can we get some, please? Sure. Zing! Spring’s come bounding from its musty, dusty closet like a newly out Floridian, little rainbow fanny pack ablaze, itchy pink nipple rings jingling. Poor green thing! Isn’t it up to us to lead her, tripping and grinning, into the limelight fantastica? Aren’t we already there? Change, unlike Aqua Net and Paco Rabanne, is in the air. The clubs, they’ve gone azalea-crazy, bursting with neon irises and tuneful fuchsia streaks. Cocktails mysteriously grow stronger in our hands. And parties, parties everywhere — there’s far too much to do right now. Hell, my nightlife Blackberry just exploded all over my fresh electric Onitsuka Tiger shoes.

Anybody here got a Wet Ones?

"We’re spinning in the pyramid of life / As day turns to night," goes a latest wriggly dance-floor burner. "I wish the stars could shine now / For they are closer / They are near," goes another. "Let’s make out!" goes a third. Sex, stars, spinning, and you — sounds like a few times I’d love to have. How ’bout we do the bunny hop and rock our burgundy hair at the following affairs? Oh, and bring that spring girl, too. There’s always room for one more in the back.

WELCOME TO PARADISE


What do you do when you get too famous? Besides wipe up dog shit with your borrowed Chanel? How ’bout change your name and make a record? I sincerely hope you’ve made it at least once to two of the most regularly orgiastic parties in the city: Frisco Disco and Blow Up. If you have, then you’re intimately familiar with the semi-nude gymnastics, lubed-up disco-house-electro jams, and jailbait fanbase of one DJ Jefrodesiac, our fair burg’s current reigning turntable sex god.

I may just win that tiara back, though, because Jefrodesiac is dead. Metaphorically. Witness the birth of Jeffrey Paradise, his latest incarnation, who’s about to release a new EP on PrinceHouse Records and make us all update our contacts. He’ll be debuting this next evolution at Blow Up on Friday, April 11, which is also, somewhat confusingly, his birthday bash. Because one personality is never enough!

WILL THEY SERVE COSMOS?


I’m not sure how I feel about the space program, but hey, if the nearby NASA Ames Research Center and something rather ominously called the Space Generation Advisory Council want to cohost a big rave at Moffett Field, presenting forward-minded DJs like Amon Tobin, John Tejada, Dr. Toast, and Tycho, well, beam me up (snort). I’m talking about Yuri’s Night, an astro-fantastical, techno-futuristical anniversary celebration of Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s historic first flight into space in 1961. Yuri’s Night, Saturday, April 12, is being feted this year with 153 parties in 46 countries on goddess-knows-how-many giant-screen satellite feeds, so make sure your outfit is tight. Also on the blast-off tap: a huge technology fair with zippy visual installations and electronic doodad demonstrations galore. Pack your sonic screwdriver.

BIGGER BOOTY


Srsly, I wept when longtime San Francisco mainstay Fag Fridays ended in February — and not just because my Moisture Wear wasn’t quite so hypoallergenic after all. The gay and their ilk really lost something when the party shut down after 12 years, not least of all a soulful house crashpad in the weekend’s early afterhours.

No more tears, though. "Girl, we couldn’t wait to have a Friday off!" David Peterson, one half of Fag promoters Big Booty, exuberantly told me. Big Booty’s certainly taking advantage of its free time. Peterson’s Booty partner, Jose Mineros, just launched a bouncy house Saturday weekly, Collide, at the fab Club 222 (www.myspace.com/222hyde). Fag Fridays will make a special return at Mighty for Pride. And biggest of all, Big Booty just launched a new dance-music label, Thread Recordings. They’ll be toasting Thread’s first release, "The Rhythm" by DJ David Harness, with a deep and thrilling party at luminous megaclub Temple, featuring Harness and legendary NYC DJ Tedd Patterson. Boys keep swinging.

BLOW UP

With Jeffrey Paradise

Fri/11, 10 p.m.–2 a.m., $10

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com

www.myspace.com/blow_up_415

YURI’S NIGHT

Sat/12, 2 p.m.–2 a.m., $40–$50

NASA Ames Research Center

Moffett Field, Mountain View

www.ynba.org

THREAD RECORD RELEASE PARTY

With Tedd Patterson and David Harness

April 19, 10 p.m.–4 a.m., $20

Temple

540 Howard, SF

(415) 572-1466

www.templesf.com

Alembic

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› paulr@sfbg.com

If Cheers had served good food instead of cheap beer and persiflage, Dr. Frasier Crane might never have fled to Seattle to start anew. Also, the place might have come to resemble the Alembic, a smallish installation along upper Haight that has been distilled from that nearby citadel of suds, Magnolia Pub and Brewery, now an institution. Unlike Cheers, the Alembic isn’t in a basement; it occupies a storefront that was most recently home to Maroc. But, like its distant sitcom relation, it does have a bar scene that radiates human energy, not to mention a bar that looks the way a bar should: busy and used.

The bar is a spectacle, but it isn’t there for show. The bottles arranged on the high wall shelves aren’t all perfectly turned so the label faces outward, and they’re not all in immaculate rows. This is because the bartenders are constantly reaching for them, then reaching for measuring cups, strainers, napkins, and glasses for the whipping up of various libations, from simple to complex. (There’s wine too, and if you’re a fat guy named Norm, you can even get a beer.) The action is blurring but precise, and Sam Malone probably wouldn’t last five minutes under the strain. Like so many other food industry jobs, bartending is a game for the young.

Speaking of the young: there are tons of them at the Alembic, and not just behind the bar. The clientele has a modern Mission District look, yet the Mission, for all its cultural variety, has no street to match Haight Street, no comparable collection of goofballs, edge-dwellers, hustlers, dropouts, and misfits prowling the sidewalks, or just sitting on them. But that’s outside, and inside … well, out is out and in is in, as Kipling might have put it, and never (or at least hardly ever) the twain shall meet. Getting to the Alembic can be an excellent adventure, but once you’re inside, you might as well be at 16th and Valencia streets.

Because the front of the small space is dominated by the shrine-like bar, it’s possible to overlook the dining area toward the rear. Here people are eating food, and it’s surprisingly sophisticated food — sophisticated for a bar, sophisticated for the Haight, which despite or because of its international reputation is a little short on interesting places to eat.

Let’s say you were interested in a dish with truffles, for instance, and you could only look on Haight Street. You might try RNM, which is probably the best restaurant on either Lower or Upper Haight. But the Alembic has truffled dishes; one is the macaroni and cheese ($9), which carries the definite black-earth perfume of truffles as relayed through infused oil. The mac and cheese is also made with Gruyère (another discreet flash of toniness) and, we thought, a bit of bacon or pancetta for some meatiness. If the truffle is an incitement to class warfare, how clever to put its essence in dish that’s the very picture of Middle American modesty.

Truffling the gnocchi ($9) might be riskier — the word is harder to pronounce, for one thing. But the truffle infusion goes nicely with the hedgehog mushrooms nestled next to the gnocchi pillows themselves, while splintered asparagus stalks bring some green and speak of spring.

The menu is notably vegetarian-friendly, even beyond the gnocchi. The kitchen performs discreet wonders with that revolting winter beauty, the beet, by turning both red and yellow examples into carpaccio ($6) and topping each slender, glistening, geutf8ous coin with a dab of goat cheese and sprig of watercress. And let’s give some extra credit for the presentation, which is on a slightly concave porcelain rectangle like those used for serving sushi rolls. (All the plates and platters are handsome, incidentally. Very unbarlike.)

Then there are the little snacks, or nibbles, among them slightly sweet nuts roasted with sage ($3) and a cone of excellent herbed frites ($5) spiked with lemongrass and accompanied by with a small tub of chipotle aioli. We found the nuts underpowered; they could have used some salt and maybe some chili heat to balance the sweetness. But the fries were svelte, crisp, and sublime.

They also went nicely with one of the menu’s handful of meaty dishes: Moroccan-style sliders ($10), halves of a beautifully juicy, medium-rare lamb burger served on toast points, with harissa aioli, roasted peppers, and tapenade. The burger doesn’t come with the fries, but you might think about having them together, in part because burgers cry out for fries, and if you’re interested in a burger you’re probably pretty hungry, and this burger isn’t that big. A man in full dinner mode could easily eat three, and that would put the tab at a Manhattan-ish $30.

If that seems a little(or a lot) steep, you could go to Plan B: dessert. No one would ever mistake the Alembic for Sweet Inspiration, but the kitchen does manage to turn out some respectable confections. A strawberry beignet ($7), for example, turns out to be an actual freshly fried doughnut, complete with a tight hole in the middle, but the strawberry refers only to the pat of strawberry ice cream on top, which was a pretty pink but too sweet. Better balanced are the troika of s’mores ($7), with homemade marshmallow, lengths of fresh banana on top, and a chocolate hazelnut sauce slithering around the plate. The sauce is tasty but difficult to eat, since the s’mores themselves aren’t very absorbent and have a way of disappearing in a single, gratifying bite. A smaller s’more need not be a lesser s’more.

ALEMBIC

Dinner: nightly, 5 p.m.–midnight

Lunch: Fri.–Sun., noon–5 p.m.

1725 Haight, SF

(415) 666-0822

www.alembicbar.com

MC/V

Full bar

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Neo Geo trio

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› johnny@sfbg.com

"Bay Area Now" roundups have come and gone since Glen Helfand coined the term "the Mission School" in an influential 2002 Guardian cover piece (See "The Mission school," 04/07/02). Exactly six years later, the "heartfelt, handmade" traits Helfand described still hang heavy over or range freely through local art aesthetics, even if a few core creative forces from the loose movement — Alicia McCarthy, especially — didn’t cash in on the cachet of a higher profile. But April is always a month for growth: this year it brings a trio of shows by San Francisco (or SF-to-NYC) artists who’ve moved through or around Mission School color and figuration, forging a new direction and forming a new pattern. Call it 21st-century Neo Geo, though the tag might not apply to what these artists will be doing 12 months from today.

A playful approach to geometric shape is at the core of distinct traits shared by Todd Bura’s, Ruth Laskey’s, and Will Yackulic’s new shows. Dozens of triangles form formidable spheres in "A Prompt and Present Cure," Yackulic’s collection of 10 works on paper at Gregory Lind Gallery. These spheres have been likened to geodesic domes, disco globes, and IBM Selectric typewriter balls. I’d throw in mentions of Asteroids and the orb from Phantasm (1979) for good measure, though such 1980s pop cult references are no longer as near the forefront of Yackulic’s visuals as when he offered a twist on the phrase cubist via images that suggested the video game Q-Bert gone existentially lonely. Yackulic’s new work is a breakthrough, due to sheer inventiveness: in all the show’s pieces, he paints with a typewriter.

Throughout most of "A Prompt & Perfect Cure," Yackulic uses endlessly repeated asterisk and period symbols to generate waves and horizons of visual energy, and sometimes even employs the typewriter to create the show’s signature orbs. Like op art, the resulting pieces lure one to press one’s face against the object itself, and they take on three-dimensionality when viewed as group formations from a distance. The potent, disconcerting humor of Yackulic’s show stems partly from his laconic use of text, a strategy that — along with his use of pre-electric typewriters — obliquely acknowledges his New York School poetic roots. But it stems primarily from his spheres, a gang of faceless main characters. Some are darker, some lighter, as if the viewer facing them is giving off varying degrees of glare. Yackulic also has a droll flair for timing, saving his bravura gesture for the tenth, last, and largest piece, where one orb joins another — a cause for celebration, or worry?

Some Time to Mend the Mind, the title of that duel-sphere finale, might apply in reverse to Todd Bura’s "Misfits" at Triple Base Gallery. Like Yackulic, Bura has an interest in geometrically-based architectural representations of mental states. But his penchant for arranging wooden right angles results in three-dimensional sculptural forms in addition to two-dimensional painterly ones. He also has a poetic sensibility, though his gambit of giving 14 pieces the title Untitled, followed by a small group of capital letters in parentheses, is cumulatively closer to language poetry, albeit language poetry overcome with angst.

"Misfits" has a unique quality, as if Bura found fragments from his inner world, brought them to a room, then mounted or arranged them for people to see. (Its quietude and careful use of placement, akin to that of the Bay Area’s Bill Jenkins, also draws attention to the space around Bura’s works — even or especially if they are framed or on canvas.) While Bura might be devoted to the idea of a unfinished whole that is nonetheless greater than the sum of its parts, there are a few standout enigmas. Untitled (NIT) builds from his past explorations of — and emphasis on — paper’s materiality, while remaining a riddle: does it utilize the inset of a book’s cover, or is it a collage in which comics peak from the very edges of aging blank pages? (A small formation of pinpricks on the surface characterizes Bura’s varied minimalism.) Perhaps indebted to Richard Tuttle, the much larger oil painting Untitled (ETRI) layers light over darkness. (Or does it cover darkness with light? Regardless, Bura plays the recurrent binary both ways.) The latter suggests a buried cross or intersection.

Ruth Laskey’s approach to geometric form is based upon intersections, though her presentation, at least at first glance, trades Bura’s evocative, open-ended symbolism for a plain approach that recognizes that literal meaning is many-faceted. As the saying goes, Laskey’s "7 Weavings," at Ratio 3, is what it is: seven tapestries from her ongoing "Twill" series, where the structures or perhaps strictures of the loom and the diagonals of twill shape help form diamonds, triangles, pyramids, and crosses of color. Like Yackulic, Laskey’s process involves extreme repetition that yields varying waves of visual energy — albeit megaminimal, muted waves that might require squinting. As Rachel Churner notes in a recent Artforum essay, Laskey’s tapestries "are not fields for projection, but rather instances of the figure being imbedded in the ground itself."

One of the rich literal pleasures of Laskey’s tapestries is their deployment of specific reds, blues, yellows, and greens, which is less antic but just as imaginative as the peak Mission School–era in terms of drawing from Josef Albers’s color theories. At times, new hues emerge from the intersection of two individual colors that Laskey has first created by blending dyes and then painting the thread that she weaves through cloth. There’s an inscrutable quality to "7 Weavings" that echoes that of Bura’s and Yackulic’s shows: the colorful cloth shapes Laskey forms might as well be flags for countries in a world a bit more observant, and less brutish, than our own.

MISFITS: NEW WORK BY TODD BURA

Through May 4; Thurs.–Sun., noon–5 p.m.

Triple Base

3041 24th St., SF

(415) 643-3943

www.basebasebase.com

RUTH LASKEY: 7 WEAVINGS

Through April 26; Wed.–Sat., 11 a.m.–6 p.m.

Ratio 3

1447 Stevenson, SF

(415) 821-3371

www.ratio3.org

WILL YACKULIC: A PROMPT & PERFECT CURE

Through May 17; Tues.–Sat., 10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.

Gregory Lind Gallery

49 Geary, Fifth Floor, SF

(415) 296-9661

www.gregorylindgallery.com

The new zoo blues

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

Ten years ago, the San Francisco Zoo asked voters for $48 million in bonds to overhaul its decaying animal enclosures, rebuild its entrance, expand educational facilities for children, and make a host of other improvements.

Every major figure in San Francisco with even an ounce of political ambition made sure his or her name was attached to the voter information pamphlet that went out to residents in 1997 urging passage of the bonds.

The list included Willie Brown, Dianne Feinstein, and Nancy Pelosi; members of the community college and school boards; the district attorney and city attorney then in office; Republican judges and local chambers of commerce; and countless grade school teachers.

The entire board of supervisors signed on, declaring that the improvements would "include new habitats where many of the animals will experience grass under their feet for the first time."

Prop. C passed, and the private San Francisco Zoological Society, which had taken control of the zoo from the city five years before, was on its way to introducing real live sod to exotic animal species. Just like a sanctuary, or even the wild itself.

But it hasn’t quite turned out like the pretty pictures suggested.

On March 18, the San Francisco Animal Control and Welfare Commission quietly released a report that made it clear many of the promises of that bond campaign were never kept. The private zoo didn’t spend the money the way all of those giddy city officials had told the voters it would.

The report was largely overlooked because on the same day the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, which inspects San Francisco’s zoo for accreditation, released its own long-anticipated investigation of what happened at Christmastime when a hulking Siberian tiger named Tatiana mauled three people, killing one.

That attack, as we all know now from the relentless headlines, is the sexier story. But the commission, in a document with much greater long-term implications, said that only two significant new exhibits were built using the bond money — the African Savannah and the Lemur Forest, completed in 2004 and 2002 respectively.

A scheduled $13.4 million Great Ape Forest was deferred from the list of projects. The zoo promised that project would "remain a fundraising goal for the SF Zoological Society," according to an update on the bond expenditures presented to the public in 2005. Orangutan and chimpanzee exhibits scheduled for improvement with the bond money were cancelled, the commission said, and the lone hippo was moved to an "arguably worse exhibit."

NICE RESTAURANT


Besides a new exhibit for grizzlies, habitations for the other bears "have not undergone any meaningful renovation," according to the commission.

And while the zoo spent the last decade downgrading projects promised to voters from the construction of new exhibits to the mere renovation of existing ones, others targeting the feel-good sensibilities of patrons that had little to do with actually caring for animals were completed as swiftly as possible.

The zoo’s miniature train system, "Little Puffer," was fully restored with $700,000 worth of private funds in 1998. A $4 million education center, which doesn’t actively house animals, was completed in 2001 using the bond money. A new entryway, improved streetscapes, parking, and a restaurant costing $20 million, which came largely from the zoo bonds, were completed two years late and $10 million over budget in 2002.

The renovation of an amusement ride for kids — the historic Dentzel Carousel — was also finished that year at a cost of more than $1 million. (Restorers spent almost 1,000 hours on each fake animal, according to the zoo’s Web site.)

"It’s evident that capital improvements from the bond measure focused on visitor amenities, not improvements for the animals," the report states. "The Joint Zoo Committee and Recreation and Park Commission did not provide adequate oversight to ensure capital improvements made with bond money focused on animal enclosures and exhibits."

The report also points in part to a 1999 performance audit of the zoo conducted by San Francisco’s respected budget analyst, Harvey Rose. The audit at that time argued that improving animal exhibits should come before building new gift shops and dining facilities, but that this recommendation was "not heeded," according to the commission.

"It was clear that none of that had been addressed," Mara Weiss, an animal welfare commissioner and veterinarian in the city, said of the 1999 audit.

Zoo officials received repeated invitations to attend recent commission meetings on the zoo, but they were mostly ignored. Weiss, however, acknowledged that the zoo was distracted by the tiger attack and resulting media circus.

‘UTTERLY IMPOVERISHED’


Early this year, three zoo experts from abroad visited the San Francisco Zoo at the request of the group In Defense of Animals. Each sent a letter to the supervisors that decried the conditions in San Francisco. Robert Atkinson, a former Oxford University conservation, welfare researcher and one-time curator at the Woburn Safari Park in the United Kingdom, noted a failure "to adopt modern approaches to animal husbandry." Peter Stroud, a former zoo director from Australia, described the Black Rhinoceros exhibit as "utterly impoverished."

"It is in fact completely barren…. This exhibit conveys the general impression of a stock yard in which the interests of the animals are of no concern whatsoever," Stroud wrote.

The crown jewel of the zoo’s animal habitations constructed using bond money, the African Savanna, was completed in 2004. It features giraffes, zebras, kudus — a species of antelope — and a bird aviary. But even that exhibit, the welfare commission argues, has problems.

"The new African Savanna exhibit was located in the most weather-exposed part of the zoo, and constructed without shelter or windbreaks for the warm-weather animals displayed there," the report states. "In fact, the most sheltered part of the African Savanna exhibit was designed for the human visitors, leaving the animals who live there exposed to the cold wind and fog off the ocean just across the street."

We tried to reach the zoo for comment, but an administrative assistant told us that spokesperson Paul Garcia recently left his job there and a replacement wasn’t available for questions. Another spokesperson was out of town. We were told that Bob Jenkins, the zoo’s director of animal care, might return our call but he never did.

Jim Lazarus, a former zoo executive and current rec and park commissioner, said the zoo had to devote significant funds to its entrance to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. In addition, he said, the cost of construction materials globally has ballooned since 1997.

"None of this money goes as far as originally thought with the worldwide demand for steel and concrete…. We need a multiyear plan, both in terms of priority construction and a capital campaign funding strategy, to complete the half of the zoo that hasn’t been renovated and that should be our goal," Lazarus said. "It’s a wonderful facility."

But future projects planned for the zoo appear to continue the emphasis on visitors. A wish list of projects from the zoo’s 2007 master plan update includes adding new conference spaces and retail, improving areas for family activities, creating a 1,000-seat amphitheater, installing yet another new café, and possibly a full-service restaurant called Windows on the Pacific.

The commission, however, has proposed that the zoo become a haven for saving animals rather than simply exhibiting them for the enjoyment of people. A rescue zoo, as they describe it, would provide a new home for exotic animals once held by private owners in inhumane conditions. Zoo veterinarians and other staff already possessing experience treating sick animals would naturally fit into the new concept, and the zoo’s past conservation efforts, like programs for eagles and wild cats, could be grandfathered in.

Deniz Bolbol, a co-coordinator of the Bay Area–based Citizens for Cruelty-Free Entertainment and supporter of the rescue zoo idea, describes the joint committee that oversees the zoo as a rubber stamp and says, "everything the zoo proposes is approved; everything is unanimous."

"The Board of Supervisors really needs to reform the zoo at its base," Bolbol said.

Lazarus opposes the idea of a rescue concept because he believes it won’t generate enough revenue to keep the zoo self-sufficient. Sup. Sean Elsbernd, whose district includes the zoo, was also cool to the idea, saying no one has an idea of how much it might actually cost. Discussions at the board about how the $48 million in bond money was spent, in the meantime, would likely take a back seat to the lingering citywide $338 million budget deficit.

Besides, he said, the zoo’s new Grizzly Gulch, where two bears that were close to being euthanized by Montana wildlife officials live, represents what the commission is asking for.

"In concept, it’s a great idea," Elsbernd said. "In concept, I also support every street being repaved every year. But there’s reality. There was no realism in their report that showed us how to achieve [a rescue zoo] in the means that we have."

The operating agreement between the Zoological Society and the city comes up for renewal in June.

The 100-yard diet

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› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Locavorism — the practice of eating only or mostly food raised with a 100-mile distance — has been a hot trend the past couple of years. It’s a concept that makes a lot of sense — even organic food grown hundred or thousands of miles away can hardly be considered sustainable once you figure in the resources used to ship it.

But a committed breed of urban farmers is challenging even the 100-mile definition of local food. These folks are cultivating their own cornucopia in their backyards and community garden plots, pruning their own fruit trees, raising their own chickens….

Hold on a minute. Chickens? In the city?

It’s true. Not only is it possible to raise your own small brood (four or less) in San Francisco, but it’s less labor intensive and materially more rewarding than caring for your household pets. Do you need to take a chicken out for walks? No. Does your Chihuahua lay eggs? No.

And you can expect to reap more than just eggs from your new feathered friends. As Walter Parenteau of the Panhandle puts it, "Chickens fill an important spot in the cycle of a sustainable backyard." From their nitrogen-rich manure (an excellent catalyst for compost) to their enthusiasm for pest control, chickens earn their keep — even without the dozen eggs a week you’ll get from each pair of first-year layers.

A major issue for raising chickens in your backyard is space. In San Francisco, the city’s Department of Public Health requires that chicken coops be situated at least 20 feet from all buildings — which rules out keeping chickens on your patio or in your living room. Chickens also need space to thrive in: their run should ideally provide a minimum of four square feet per chicken and include a predator-proof covering of chicken wire or nonmetallic "poultry netting," which also will prevent escapees (contrary to popular belief, chickens can fly, albeit clumsily and infrequently).

A fully enclosed chicken coop built of sturdier materials — plywood or bamboo — is also necessary. Interior nesting boxes should be about one square big foot — just large enough for one chicken. For cleanliness and insulation, a thick layer of straw or hay should be scattered over all the surfaces and changed every couple of months. The old, excrement-laden material can then be composted immediately.

The other main consideration for urban chickens is protection from predators.

"We never saw raccoons in our garden until they discovered we had chickens," says Walter, a San Francisco chicken farmer. "But when they did, we saw them in there every night for three weeks." The unwelcome visitors’ persistence finally paid off when the coop was left unlocked, and the coons made off with one of two hens.

Brian W., who raised chickens for 10 years in the Bayview District, also cites hawks as a major threat to chickens living in uncovered runs, and says that rats are attracted to unclean or unsupervised coops.

"You have to think hard about how you’re going to shelter your chickens from predators," agrees Paul Glowaski, who teaches workshops on raising urban poultry at SF’s Garden for the Environment. "You might need to get creative with your space."

These considerations aside, city-dwelling chicken farmers remain overwhelmingly positive about their experiences. Inexpensive to feed (kitchen scraps, garden snails, and cracked corn play the biggest dietary roles) and content, for the most part, with entertaining themselves, backyard birds provide a gentle gateway experience for novices to animal husbandry. They offer benefits to the ecology of their environment, and help restore a connection to the food production chain. Chickens are the missing link to perfecting what Novella Carpenter of Oakland calls "the 100-yard diet." Even as a hobby, raising chickens can impart an irresistible element of eco-chic to their respective owners.

"At the end of the day, you get to be the ‘guy with chickens in his backyard,’ " Walter says. "And that can be a lot of fun."

Company C

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PREVIEW Good things are happening in the East Bay. One is the Walnut Creek-based Company C, Charles Anderson’s 14-member chamber ballet company. In the six short years of its existence, these dancers have created a respectable following. Anderson is a former New York City Ballet dancer whose family runs the well-established Contra Costa Ballet Centre. No doubt this helped the company initially, but today Company C draws good crowds — and not just of the family and friends variety. They take their programs all over the Bay Area and as far north as Santa Rosa and Mendocino. This weekend they take over Yerba Buena Center for the Arts with an ambitious quintet of works, including the world premiere of Twyla Tharp’s duet Armenia, set to 10 folksongs from that region. Michael Smuin’s 1997 darkly lush Starshadows, created for three couples and set to music by Maurice Ravel, pays tribute to the late choreographer. Former Paul Taylor dancer and now-choreographer David Grenke went to Tom Waits for inspiration for his duet, Vespers (1997). Artistic director Anderson’s two works from 2007, Bolero and Echoes of Innocence, close the show.

COMPANY C Sat/12, 8 p.m. and Sun/13, 2 p.m. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF. $20–$35. (415)978-2787, www.ybca.org

Club Gossip

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REVIEW Wanna gossip? Of course you do. Can you believe that Justin Timberlake is inducting Madonna into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? Wasn’t he, like, one when her first single dropped? I know.

OK, so I was four years old, but at least I remember watching the "Lucky Star" video premiere on MTV, in which Madonna exposed the navel that would launch a now-25-year career.

But it wasn’t fuzzy navels I was hung up on at video dance night Club Gossip’s Madonna tribute Feb. 29. It was the Material Girl: a vodka, peach schnapps, and cranberry juice concoction. Two sticky-sweet cocktails later, it was time to dance to DJed songs and VJed videos that documented Madonna’s many reinventions from her playful early years to her controversial Sex book era to her current kabbalah/yoga-mother period.

If my Madonna moves had been rusty, all those tips on Wikihow.com’s entry labeled "How to Dance Like Madonna" — which encouraged me to wear a tight outfit, get edgy, and release my inhibitions — really helped me get into the groove. Before I knew it, I was bopping, vogue-ing, and disco dancing along with a new crop of twentysomething Madonna wannabes in headbands and bangles.

While Madonna may have been an odd artist to honor at a night that generally concentrates on darker bands such as the Smiths, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Depeche Mode, there is no disputing her brief goth flirtation via her "Frozen" video. I may have heard a rumor that that wasn’t her song, but no, that kinda gossip isn’t welcome on this night. The girls would’ve taken my eyes out with their crucifixes.

CLUB GOSSIP Second Saturdays, 9:30 p.m.–3 a.m. $7. Cat Club, 1190 Folsom, SF. (415) 703-8964, www.myspace.com/clubgossip

“No Borders, No Limits: 1960s Nikkatsu Action Cinema”

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PREVIEW In 1960s Japan, Nikkatsu meant a new kind of action. Promotional materials for the studio even spelled "action" in katakana, the syllabary used for borrowed foreign words. Indeed, the studio’s super-stylized films — only a smattering of which are showcased in this all too brief series presented by Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Outcast Cinema — reflected many of the postwar period’s cultural sea changes. Played by an exclusive line of marquee names including boyish rake Watari Tetsuya and the chipmunk-countenanced Joe Shishido, Nikkatsu’s lone wolves and hit men hang out at rock and jazz clubs, drive hotwired foreign cars, get in brawls with white devil sailors, and possess the kind of smoldering cool that Elmore Leonard thinks he copyrighted. Similarly, directors such as Toshio Masuda, Takashi Nomura, and the better-known Suzuki Seijun developed a kinetic visual style that cribbed from Jean-Luc Godard, Sergio Leone, and Frank Tashlin in equal measure (Suzuki’s extreme stylistic bravura eventually got him canned). It’s the first two directors who merit closer looks. Nomura’s awesomely titled A Colt Is My Passport (1967) stars Shishido as a sniper on the lam, and its finale — both desolate and explosive — tops any spaghetti western’s final showdown. Shishido makes another appearance in Masuda’s The Velvet Hustler (1967), this time sporting a creepy Chaplin-stache. His quarry is Goro (Tetsuya), a Tokyo hit man and all around playboy who is forced to lay low in the international port city of Kobe after a botched job and becomes the city’s slacker underworld kingpin. But even a poor little rich girl (the perfectly coy Ruriko Asaoka) from the capital can’t hold Goro’s fickle attentions for long. In Nikkatsu action, it’s a man’s world. Dames come and go, but these boys only have eyes (and silent tears) for their fallen brothers in crime.

"NO BORDERS, NO LIMITS: 1960S NIKKATSU ACTION CINEMA" Thurs/10–Sun/13, $6–$8. See Rep Clock for schedule. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF. (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org

“Form +”

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REVIEW With the evolution of the gallery into a white, blank space, the artwork displayed within its walls has metamorphosed as well. The first-floor exhibit at the Meridian Gallery, "Form +," — curated along with two adjacent shows, "Franck André Jamme: New Exercises" and "Dhyana" by California College of the Arts dean Larry Rinder — call into play both of these factors.

In its very nature, the three-story Victorian that houses Meridian already opposes the clean lines most contemporary art galleries aspire to. Instead, one enters to a bare first floor, ripe with references to its early 20th-century past. A fireplace nook, a step down from the level of the rest of the floor, houses an installation — penned directly on the walls — of tiny paintings in graphite and gouache by Léonie Guyer. Her clean forms are abstract — as are all of the works included in the three shows — and filled with solid colors. Within this busy context, Guyer’s pieces help to establish the crux of "Form +." Guyer’s clean forms are abstract, as is all the work included in these shows; filled with solid colors; and within this rather busy context, help to establish the crux of "Form +." Aiming to address the meditative qualities of form, this exhibition posits formalism as not merely about the materials but a very specific cerebral process. Guyer rejects the necessity for a space devoid of context in favor of a site-specificity that almost obliterates her pieces yet maintains the viewer’s consideration.

"Form +"’s remaining works, exhibited in less quirky settings, are slightly more insular. In spite of the self-referential qualities of the pieces on paper by Todd Bura or Prajakti Jayavant, who both account for every line or crease in their compositions, there is an overarching sense of history: the immediate history of the artist’s hand and that of the artists’ awareness of their place within the broader timeline of art history. As a result, the throwback atmosphere of Meridian’s space both complements and highlights the beautiful subtleties of these works by a somewhat underrepresented contingent of contemporary Bay Area artists.

FORM + Through May 3. Tues.–Sat., 11 a.m.–5 p.m., free. Meridian Gallery, 535 Powell, SF. (415) 398-7229, www.meridiangallery.org

Tift Merritt takes on ‘Another Country’

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By Nathan Baker

Tift Merritt is giving something away. It seems delicate but could be strong as steel, a gift from a solitary place but one that she openly shares. It is Another Country (Fantasy). When Lost Highway Records broke things off with the Grammy-nominated songwriter in 2006 she retired to a room in Paris to put down this portrait of a spirit that is at once resilient and vulnerable. “Sometimes you fall up these stairs,” Merritt sings on “Tender Branch,” bruised but not beaten.

If there is a bit of the expatriate in this record it is not the decadent self-destruction of Papa Hemingway but the anxiety and awe of a stranger navigating a mysterious place. In “Love is Another Country” her sentiment is simple and perfect: “I wanna go with you.”

Produced by George Drakoulias, whose clients include the Black Crowes and the Jayhawks, Another Country both reflects and refracts country music. “Tell Me Something True” and “My Heart is Free” illustrate what all the Bonnie Raitt and Lucinda Williams comparisons are for, but mostly Merritt’s is an Americana of the mind – the vernal pleasures Saint-Sulpice, a pastoral stroll along the Seine, the silver needle of a Parisian clothier pushing through a linen summer dress.

TIFT MERRITT
With Sara Watkins of Nickel Creek
April 14, 8 p.m., $16
Great American Music Hall
859 O’Farrell, SF
(415) 885-0750

SF’s new deal for fossil fuel plants

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The SF Public Utilities Commission and the Board of Supervisors will soon be hearing details of a new contract to build two fossil fuel-burning power plants in the city. JPower, an Illinois-based subsidiary of the national power company of Japan, backed out of a deal to build a plant for the city when, back in October, the Board and PUC urged city staffers to pursue a city-owned operation instead.

Now a company called ICC is negotiating a deal with the city to build and run the plant, but according to PUC staff, the city would own the facility outright. The previous deal would have given JPower control of the facilities to run for profit, eventually turning ownership over to the city after 30 years. The ICC contract includes upgrading the four turbines, constructing the plants, and negotiating the land transactions, and power purchase and interconnection agreements.

The “peaker” power plant, which includes three natural gas combustion turbines generating 150 megawatts of power for “peak” needs, will be sited in the Bayview/Potrero neighborhood. A fourth turbine will be in southern San Francisco, as emergency reserve power for the airport.

The California Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO) has said San Francisco needs an on-demand “firm” power source for optimal grid reliability, but many have questioned the viability of that claim now that the Transbay Cable will be funneling more wattage our way and Community Choice Aggregation is coming online, a plan that would cut our electricity needs and replace much of them with renewables. The Brightline Defense Project, representing the A. Philip Randolph Institute and residents of Bayview who have been overwhelmed with power plant pollution for decades, have sued the city to stop the plant.

At last Friday’s LAFCO hearing, PUC staffer Barbara Hale offered a brief update on the contract and said it would be heard by the PUC on Tuesday and if accepted, sent on to the Board for ultimate approval. Despite a more publicly-owned and controlled plan for the plants, Supes. Ross Mirkarimi and Chris Daly are still questioning whether the city really needs then at all. “I’m just not sold on the fact that we need the peakers,” said Mirkarimi.

Daly asked about the status of closing the notoriously noxious Mirant power plant, which has been the hook for the peakers – ISO has said they’d pull the “reliability must-run” agreement that keeps Mirant open if they could count on power coming into the grid from the peakers. Back when JPower was still in the picture, Mayor Gavin Newsom negotiated a sweet deal with Mirant, which agreed to shutter in exchange for special favors from the Planning Department when they settle on a new use for the land.

Daly, citing the deal, said, “Very clearly the goal posts have been moved on the issue of Mirant.” He urged the city to move them again when it comes to the peakers, by coming together to oppose them and tell Cal-ISO we don’t want them. “I think what Sacramento is taking advantage of is we’re not together…I’m sick of getting bullied around by Sacramento bureaucrats….If we really want to wean ourselves off the dirty fossil fuel plants it’s going to take the spending of some political will.”

Mirkarimi asked Hale, if the peakers didn’t exist, what would shut Mirant. Hale said Cal-ISO only sees dispatchable, on-demand power as adequate. Intermittent renewable resources like wind and solar (though ISO may be changing their tune on solar) don’t count. “There are renewable resources that do, like geothermal.” She said the PUC was currently studying the possibility of deep-well geothermal for San Francisco.

Clubs: Anavan sans Ativan

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Holy Spazmosis!. Jumpy young rockers Anavan drove up from Salt Lake City to play the queer (and friends!) punk monthly Trans Am at Club Eight for a rapturous beer-spurtin’ crowd last Saturday.

Anavan, “You’re Taking Me Out”

The frantic foursome greeted us with mucho fog machine, trademark hockey helmets, drum, bass, and a wall of synths. And then everything got crazy in a voices-in-your-head way (mostly thanks to the skittering, hyperactive vocals mixed waaaay back in the echo-delay mix.)

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Courtesy of the muthafuckin’ LA Times

In the case of the hockey helmets, visual connections to those masked masters Daft Punk, MSTRKRFT, and occasionally (if primly painted-on facial scruff counts — yes, I’m calling those skinny French boys out) Justice might be made. And sonically they can sometimes resemble those glam-tech outfits a teeny-tad, mostly in their boppy keyboard riffs. But Anavan adds its own cymbal-crashing, wildly energetic No-Wave twist, sure to please the art school crowd (Richard Hell is all the rage again, haven’t you heard?) and dance floor maniacs as well as indie kids. I expect you’ll hear them burning down discos near you soon.

(Next month a Trans Am, Sat May 3, features SF native cuties Ex-Boyfriends — should be rocking’.)

Clubs: You still hold me, Devotion

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Before he jetted off to be all jetset in Miami at the WMC, SF-native DJ Ruben Mancias jammed EndUp last Saturday night for the Devotion 7-Year Reunion party. Oh yes, I’m one o’ them dancing hands-up fools in this clip:

Ruben and his partner Eric left to find fortune and fame in NYC a few years ago, taking their regular EndUp Sunday night party Devotion with them. It was great to have it (and them) back for one night only — if only to get that ol’ EndUp Saturday at 5 in the morning bangin’ house feeling back (one day I’ll write about all the crazy amazing — cramazing! — night people you encounter on the dancefloor at that time.)

Ruben — who I’ve known since we used to run with legendary SF house maestro Aaron O (RIP, croissant goddess) back in the early ’90s — really turned it out, playing some of my favorite tracks, like Teddy Douglas’s “Whatcha Gonna Do,” and classics like the ’88 Ralphi Rosario barnstormer above. The mood was electric-atmospheric with a bouncy bass undertow and more than a little nostalgia. The crowd was mixed and ready. Work.

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PS — Devotion may be ovah, and somewhat similar-tracked Fag Fridays long gone, but you can still get a taste of the above with DJ David Harness, another well-known Aaron O acolyte, when he returns from the WMC to play new goodies all night long at Super Soul Sundayz this coming Sunday, 4/6 10pm-4am at the EndUp. See you (sweaty) there.

WMC: Om Records whoops it up in Miami

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Vikter Duplaix and Daz-I-Kue (Bugz in the Attic) get down at the Om party. All photos by Robin Russell.

Contributing photographer Robin Russell swung through Miami’s Winter Music Conference, which ran from March 25-29, and sent these dispatches. First up: the fete thrown by SF-based Om Records at Y Ultralounge on Thursday, March 27.

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Cobblestone Jazz settles in.

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Things heat up at the Om party.

METAL: High time for Hightower

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What’s up with San Francisco skate-metal-punk contenders Hightower?

Well, they’re kind of on hiatus, according to bassist Dave Fallis, taking a break from his SF picture-framing business to talk despite his bandmates’ absence – “We can’t form the Voltron,” he warned. Hightower has made the rounds, touring every summer for the last six years, so this time, they’ve decided to just “concentrate on getting their lives back together” before writing songs and recording – once they raise enough funds.

“We’re, like, the least marketable band out there,” Fallis explained matter-of-factly. “We’re not quite a metal band and not a, quote-unquote, punk rock band. It just seems like when we’re at punk rock show, we’re the regular dudes in jeans and T-shirts, and when we go to a metal show, we’re the same way.” Still, the band that met each other skateboarding around their SF neighborhood continues to find their way with the help of kindred skaters. “If we didn’t skate we wouldn’t know each other,” Fallis said, “and as far as touring and getting shows, we’ll contact people we know through skateboarding, and we’ll decide which town to go to according to which ones have a great skateboarding spot or swimming hole.”

HIGHTOWER’S TOP FIVE SPOTS TO SKATE OR SWIM WHILE ON THE ROAD

– Montreal, the Big O or the Olympic Stadium
– Chattanooga, Tenn., Suck Creek (“A great spot in the Smoky Mountains.”)
– “Late-night skinny-dipping in Lawrence, Kansas.”
– Maine’s cliff jumps
– Assorted skateparks in Louisville, Ky.

HIGHTOWER
With Walken, Three Weeks Clean, and Soulbroker
May 1, 9 p.m., $8
Cafe Du Nord
2170 Market, SF
(415) 861-5016

SEIU skullduggery

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>jesse@sfbg.com

As an internal power struggle wracks the giant Service Employees International Union, emails obtained by the Guardian suggest that SEIU officials may have violated union rules by working to influence an important San Francisco delegate election last month.

Delegates selected by Local 1021, based in SF, will attend the union’s international convention in June and will vote on a series of democratic reforms put forward by dissident labor leader Sal Rosselli. In recent weeks, Rosselli has clashed publicly with SEIU’s international president Andy Stern over Stern’s increasing consolidation of the 1.9 million-member labor organization.

And the emails appear to show a concerted effort by Stern’s senior staff and local loyalists to ensure that the dissidents don’t dominate the convention delegation.

Referring to themselves in the emails as the “Salsa Team,” SEIU staffers discussed strategy and coordinated campaign activity for the delegate election with high-ranking union officials like Damita Davis-Howard, the president of Local 1021, and Josie Mooney, a special assistant to Stern, the emails show.

Critics charge that these activities violated Local 1021’s Election Rules and Procedures – specifically Rule 18, which states, “While in the performance of their duties, union staff shall remain uninvolved and neutral in relation to candidate endorsements and all election activities.”

While Rule 18 does not specifically spell out when union staff can advocate for candidates, other than proscribing such activities “while in performance of their duties,” the emails in our possession are date and time stamped and several of them were sent during business hours.

Furthermore, the Guardian has obtained an internal memo from Local 1021 official Patti Tamura in which she warned union staffers that the phrase “‘performance of their duties’ goes beyond [Monday through Friday] and 9-5p.”

One Local 1021 official who asked not to be identified told us that Tamura’s memo appeared to be a clear message that staff should stay completely out of the election. “They made it perfectly clear to the lower staff that your employment doesn’t stop [after hours], you’re still staff. That means, you don’t get involved. But now it turns out they themselves were doing it. That’s a double standard … it’s certainly not right.”

The messages between Salsa Team members show them actively working to recruit potential delegates sympathetic to Stern’s vision for the SEIU and to aid Davis-Howard in her bid to represent the union at the June convention. One missive, dated February 18, which appears to come from the personal email account of Local 1021 employee Jano Oscherwitz and was sent to what appear to be the personal accounts of Tamura and Mooney, requests that a “message for Damita” be drafted.

According to the time stamp on the message, Oscherwitz sent it at 12:03 PM. Feb. 18 was a Monday. [Update: February 18th was the President’s Day holiday. However an email stamped 4:26 PM on the following day, Tuesday the 19th, shows Salsa Team members continuing to confer about Davis-Howard’s campaigning, as well as the recruitment of potential delegates.]

A forwarded email stamped 3:18 PM on that same day, from Oscherwitz to what appear to be personal email accounts for Tamura, fellow 1021 staffer Gilda Valdez, and “Damita” includes a “Draft Message” with bulleted talking points, apparently for Davis-Howard to use as she “Collect[s] Signatures on Commitment Cards.”

“Commitment cards” refers to pledges from union members to support certain delegates.

At the convention, scheduled for June 1 through 4 in Puerto Rico, delegates will weigh in on a series of reforms backed by Roselli, chief of the United Health Care Workers West. These reforms include eliminating the current delegate system for electing union leaders, giving local unions more authority in bargaining for their own contracts, and granting locals more say in proposed mergers.

Stern opposes Rosselli’s reforms. A March 5 Salsa Team message includes an attached document with several talking points critical of Rosselli. In the body of the email, SEIU staffer Gilda Valdez advises Davis-Howard, Mooney, 1021 chief of staff Marion Steeg, and others to “Memorize the points in talking to folks.” Valdez goes on to say in the email that she “will be calling … about your assignments.”

Reached for comment, Davis-Howard confirmed that the AOL email account listed as “Damita” was hers. But she claimed no knowledge of the Salsa Team or the messages sent to her. “If you’re saying those emails went to my home computer, who knows if I ever even got them?”

Despite her unwillingness to acknowledge whether she had received the messages, Davis-Howard bristled at the suggestion that the Salsa Team’s activities violated union rules. “Are you trying to tell me that I can never campaign? Does it [Rule 18] say that I have to be neutral and uninvolved 24 hours a day?”

Calls to Mooney, Oscherwitz, Valdez, and Tamura were not returned.

But some union members think there’s a serious problem here. In a written statement, Roxanne Sanchez, who was the president of the San Francisco local before it was merged with other Northern California locals to create 1021, accused Davis-Howard and the Salsa Team of “rigging the outcome” of the delegate election.

“This type of breach in ethical conduct – at such a high level – threatens the foundation of trust and confidence in our Union and in President Damita Davis-Howard’s ability to hold fair elections,” she said.

Sanchez informed us by phone that a formal complaint will be filed with the union’s election committee by Friday.

Tumbleweed noir

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

In a humble Southwestern bar tended by a chatty waitress (Lorraine Olsen), three pairs of customers on the edge of nowhere discuss the past and future with a certain growing desperation. Coronado, though the title of the play, isn’t exactly the setting. It’s one of the up-and-coming towns in the area, referred to in passing as not a bad place to be — something to aspire to, maybe. In other words, Coronado is the goal, the ideal, or the bit of luck perennially nearby — a mock-up El Dorado just off the interstate.

This one, at least, comes from a writer who knows what he’s doing. Dennis Lehane’s reputation as a novelist of the hard-boiled genre, including sordid redemption tales like 2002’s Mystic River (HarperTorch), makes the subject matter of his first play a promising enterprise. In SF Playhouse’s able if uneven West Coast premiere (the play debuted in New York in 2005), Coronado unfolds intriguingly, in gritty but witty dialogue heady with a whiff of destiny or doom. If the past plays constant companion to the three couples warming the Naugahyde booths and barstools in Lehane’s barroom noir, it’s worked so cunningly into the plot and mise-en-scène that it starts to take on the unmistakable air of fate.

By the end of the first act, you begin to get some idea of what these people have in common, besides proximity to Coronado. Finding out is half the fun. For Gina (Kate Del Castillo) and Will (Will Springhorn Jr.), the couple in the booth stage right (and officemates turned adulterers), the hyperbole of cooing love talk gives way to a deadpan decision to do away with her husband, who’s also his boss (invigoratingly played with good ‘ol boy verve by Phillip K. Torretto). Meanwhile, in the booth opposite, a psychiatrist (Louis Parnell) and his fidgety, chain-smoking, drink-slugging patient (Stacy Ross) discuss their own illicit affair in less than professional, rather threatening terms. And upstage by the bar, recently released convict Bobby (Chad Deverman) has a cool one with his old man (Bill English), a desperate character with a killer’s grin who’d seriously like to know where Bobby stashed the plump diamond they heisted together before Bobby took two bullets to the head and landed in the pen.

With less rigor and poetical imagination than Denis Johnson but more compassion and insight than, say, the Coen brothers, Lehane’s noir crime mystery weaves from these strands a psychological and existential tale that begins to read, with effortless dark humor, like a modern-day frontier exegesis. But as the barroom and its endless country vista transforms in the second act to a barren field haunted with evil deeds and irrevocable acts (the moody sets skillfully realized by Bill English), the drama meanders despite the coming together of various narrative threads over the weighty specificity of a single plot of earth.

Lehane’s Southwestern setting doesn’t offer the same familiarity and depth of scene that come with his New England–based thrillers, which may contribute to the waywardness here. Director Susi Damilano keeps the pace lively and the performances from her strong cast focused throughout, but one can’t help feeling that the heaviness is a bit forced, the thematic seriousness kind of lightweight.

Still, Damilano’s cast helps make the going worthwhile. Del Castillo and Springhorn deliver admirably complex, intense performances. English takes on the part of Bobby’s father with infectious glee, a wild-eyed ferocity glinting just behind the expansive machismo of his bar-side manner. He and Deaverman share some of the play’s more tense, tripwire moments.

At the same time, Bobby’s worried reiterations concerning his psychopathic father — in flashbacks with girlfriend Gwen (a vivacious Rebecca Schweitzer) that set up for us the bungled heist as well as the blood-quenched well of emotional turmoil between father and son — seem overdone. The Bobby and Gwen story, meanwhile, barely compels. More moving is the resolution achieved between patient and shrink, as Ross and Parnell transition gracefully from fearfully menacing one another to divulging secrets and vulnerabilities and, finally, offering each other small but meaningful gestures of support.

Like a tipsy raconteur, Lehane’s morality tale starts to lean heavily on the bar by the end, with a graveside breakdown that is too predictable and sentimental to really grab us. Then again, the denouement back in the old barroom itself (by now grown quite familiar if not familial) has a certain low-key classical appeal.

CORONADO

Through April 26

Wed–Sat, 8 p.m. (also Sat, 3 p.m.), $20–$38

SF Playhouse, 533 Sutter, SF

(415) 677-9596, www.ticketweb.com

Metal maidens

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER How are we driving — in terms of womanly representation in the Bay Area metal scene? The verdict: we’re pretty bitchin’, but we could do better.

Anyone who’s gotten an eyeful of hoary ole hair-band imagery, courtesy of Headbanger’s Balls of yore, is all-too-familiar with the form’s sexism — excused by such critics as Chuck Klosterman and Robert Walser in Fargo Rock City (Scribner, 2001) and Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (Wesleyan, 1993), respectively, with claims that it’s beside the point to even critique the genre and that the music was simply "shaped by patriarchy." Nonetheless, when I wondered where all the girl groups had gone, following the demise of Sleater-Kinney, Destiny’s Child, and le Tigre (see "Band of Sisters, 07/18/06), I might have found solace in the fact that the Bay Area’s headbanging underground is fairly bangin’ for ladies: women can be found onstage in heavy bands ranging from Hammers of Misfortune, Ludicra, and Totimoshi to Bottom, Embers, and Laudanum.

The New Jersey–raised Leila Rauf is in a position to know as the guitarist-vocalist of the four-year-old Saros: female metal musicians are still "rare," she said, "having lived in other cities where that was the case. I think a lot of it has to do with the political climate in the Bay Area. Maybe there’s more women just not participating in traditional gender roles and you find women doing lots of things that women normally don’t do in more conservative parts of the country — being in a metal band being one of them."

Her San Francisco group is just completing their new untitled album, which they’re in the midst of mixing with producer Billy Anderson (High on Fire, the Melvins, Neurosis). Over the phone on her way to meet her Amber Asylum/Frozen in Amber bandmate Kris Force, Rauf described the recording as "still metal, but there’s more going on — a lot more singing, a lot more harmonic, and a lot more acoustic." It’s part of the evolution she and cowriter-guitarist Ben Aguilar have undergone since their five-track release, Five Pointed Tongue (Hungry Eye, 2006). "We’re just getting bored playing the same thing, loud all the time, technical all the time. We’re trying to get more negative space into the songs."

Still, even an accomplished, intelligent figure such as Rauf — who was working on a PhD in speech pathology at Purdue when she dropped out to pursue her muse — has had to wash out the nasty taste of Neanderthal behavior, even in the relatively forward-thinking Bay metal scene. In a later e-mail she recalled multiple instances of violent passes at San Francisco metal shows, including an time when "a really big dude grabbed me and tried to stick his tongue in my mouth. Eww." All of which pales next to other moments of intense sexism, she added: "I have been denied band auditions before — later finding out that it was due to my gender — but being told to my face it was because they didn’t think I had the chops. I even read an ad on Craigslist recently for a metal band looking for members that made it a point to exclude women. To believe this is happening in 2008 … "

One is loathe to think that the local metal resurgence is linked to a kindred revival in gender stereotypes. Are they still so charged, now that the music and its imagery seems to have moved toward less-biased turf? While there are still bastions of all-boy metal exclusivity — thrash, Rauf noted, is one of them, which parallels the general absence of women in chart-topping hard rock — area players should be quietly (or loudly) proud of its estrogen-friendly underground. It will only make for more unique work — and a new generation of girls who aren’t afraid to kick out the jams. *

AMBER ASYLUM

With Graycion and Embers

April 19, 9 p.m., $8

El Rio

3158 Mission, SF

www.elriosf.com

SAROS

With Black Cobra and Mendozza

April 24, 9 p.m., $7

Annie’s Social Club

917 Folsom, SF

(415) 974-1585

www.anniessocialclub.com

HAIGHT’S NEW METAL HQ

Something wicked heavy — and ambitious — this way comes with the opening of the Shaxul Records storefront at 1816 Haight. Scheduled to throw open its dark doors on April 1, the shop takes over the narrow, shoebox-like spot across the street from Amoeba Music, where Reverb Records once purveyed dance 12-inches — after much delay, said co-owner Stone Shaxul, a.k.a. DJ Shaxul of Rampage Radio on KUSF 90.3 FM. There are reasons why this will likely be the only metal store in the Bay, he wrote in an e-mail, citing the high cost of San Francisco retail space and the Haight in particular as prohibitive to most metalheads as he madly prepped the operation, which carries vinyl, CDs, and 7-inches focusing on Bay Area underground metal scene and the label’s releases (including the vinyl version of Above the Ashes by lost ’80s local thrash unit Ulysses Siren), as well as T-shirts, books, patches, and other "blasphemous goods."

"We want Shaxul Records to be a place where real metalheads can come and be proud and where new metalheads can learn what the real stuff is about. We also want to give all the metalheads from around the world who visit a place to go that acknowledges our great metal tradition when they visit," Shaxul offered. Does he have any misgivings considering the struggles of music retail? "Not many people," he philosophized, "get a chance to live their dream."

Listening deeply to future’s past

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

With this month’s release of Quaristice (Warp), Manchester electro pioneers Autechre have proven once again why they remain the most vital experimental force of the Warp generation — invoking, in their dance-floor songscapes, a considerable 50-year palimpsest of hermetic sounds, from classical avant-garde to fin de millénaire techno. Nearly two decades into their careers, musical partners Sean Booth and Rob Brown still generate, synthesize, and surpass cutting-edge diapasons, matched by a timeless — and dare I say archetypally English — craftsmanship. By turns baroque and warm, then granular and cold, Autechre’s sonic creations continue to defy and frustrate the ramifying narratives of critics and hipster musos, who often label the mysterious duo with vague descriptors like "architectonic."

"There’s plenty of bad grandiosity — like Jean Michel Jarre," Booth says, laughing on the phone from Manchester. "People used to say our music sounded Wagnerian, weirdly enough. Of course, there are other European composers I prefer."

While the sutured beats and acid loops of past classic recordings like 1995’s Tri Repetae (Warp) and 1999’s EP7 (Warp) are based in the futurist ’80s hip-hop of Mantronix and Afrika Bambaataa, Autechre’s dissonant tones and eerie melodies are also a product of the same decade’s underground cinema. "Soundtrack music was my sideways introduction to classical electronic music," recalls Booth. "I really love John Carpenter, more than I even like Kraftwerk, which is a lot." In the age of glammy mainstream new wave, during which Yamaha keyboards were built and played like guitars and Trevor Horne–style production was all brass and filigree, sci-fi and horror provided an inroad to the sounds of future’s past — and its composers. Booth goes on to praise Tod Dockstader and Roland Kayn, among others.

In Booth’s studied references to musical obscurants, whose accompanying concepts of cybernetics and generative synthesis are usually reserved for the Uni computer lab set, the self-taught Northerner is not engaging in the familiar game of highbrow name-checking that has pervaded certain pockets of electronic culture since the early ’90s — and that indirectly birthed the dubious title Intelligent Dance Music. Rather, he is trying to articulate his deep passion for a kind of music that is nearly indescribable in everyday language and always alludes and evades more than it expresses.

Call it deep listening, call it microtonal, but don’t call it IDM. "I kind of looked at the computer [when we began] as a means to an end," Booth explains. "Like how far could you take music using this machine and still create reasonably interesting music? [Karlheinz] Stockhausen was all over this. He was even blurring the line between what a tone is and what a succession of events is. And that’s a major turning point in 20th century music. I think by the time we got to those ideas, it was about reapplication."

Of course, for all of its new possibilities, techno culture has its obvious downside, Booth contends, mostly as a result of market saturation. "I think that if people are overequipped, they can find it harder to make decisions, because they’ve got more things to choose from," he explains, referring both to the music industry and cultural spheres. He points to the phenomena of MySpace as comparable to the glut of plug-ins and processors that have become the norm for music producers. "But it’s all fixation in a way, because it’s not like if you buy a synth, then everything is going to change."

The progression of drum ‘n’ bass and dub techno met such a fate, being outstripped from within by idle bandwagoners who capitalized on the mechanics but not the soul of the genres’ originators: Dillinja, Ed Rush, and Jeff Mills, or the highly influential Basic Channel label. "Unfortunately, there are loads of idiots waiting in the wings to capitalize on that originality," Booth laments. "I think the whole electronic scene is really conservative now, and safe. In the early days when Xenakis and Cage and Stockhausen were first discovering these sounds, it was absolutely terrifying."

Autechre has always tried to maintain a certain minimalist craftsmanship in response, according to Booth. And it is apparent in Quaristice that they have put as much emphasis on flow, narrative, and rhythm as bricolage, creating a sophisticated "live" feel throughout. While some punters might say Autechre has now returned to the safety of its roots after mining the difficult territory of computer processing and software algorithms, Booth is quick to point out that most of the gear they have used of late is identical to what they used before. "It’s just much more reactive," he says. "I’m making decisions based on what Rob just did and vice versa. In a way it’s more rewarding than spending six months programming something that’s very elaborate and complex in a different way."

And if there is one descriptor we might use to encapsulate Booth and Brown, it would never be "safe." In their tireless soundtracking of a subterranean past and underground future, Autechre continues along an innovative path of music with as much heart as hardware.

AUTECHRE

With Massonix and Rob Hall

Sat/5, 9 p.m. doors, $18

Mezzanine

444 Jessie, SF

www.mezzaninesf.com

Metal Mania: Just keep Walken

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› duncan@sfbg.com

How would you feel? Your band has been together since 1999, struggling through lineup changes, two US tours, hundreds of shows, an album and two EPs, without so much as a write-up in the local weekly. Finally, after dropping your most recent CD last year — an untitled, self-released disc of skull-crushing riffs — you get a review in the bible of modern metal, Metal Maniacs, and the photo that runs with it is of another band.

In the case of the San Francisco four-piece Walken, it was a photo of a three-piece party-rock outfit from Sioux City, Iowa, whose MySpace "sounds like" reads: "Rush meets Metallica meets Blink 182 meets Nickelback meets Matchbox 20 meets Live meets Red Hot Chili Peppers." With all due respect to Neil Peart and pre-Load era Metallica — seriously?

"They’re total dicks," Shane Bergman, 25, vocalist and bassist for the Original Walken — otherwise known as Vintage Walken or Walken Classic — says during an interview at the Western Addition Victorian he shares with roommate and guitar player Sean Kohler, 27. It’s the crack of noon and the guys are posted up on the couch, drinking coffee, and eating toast and jam in their finest sweatpants. "I’d written the guy a long time ago," he continues. "’Hey, this isn’t cool. We’ve had this name for seven or eight years. We’ve actually put out stuff and toured the US. It’s not cool.’ And they were like, ‘Oh, it doesn’t really matter — we’re in different states.’ I just let it slide. And then I pick up that" — he points to the magazine — "and I’m, like, ‘Well, now it’s gone too far.’ You look through and see a picture of those tools … "

There have been more Walkens, including a band from Melbourne that played weddings and broke up in 2004. The reason for the popularity, most likely, is Christopher Walken’s 2000 "more cowbell" skit on Saturday Night Live. While this settles the name game with pretenders enamored with the sketch, it raises the question: if not for "more cowbell," then why "Walken"?

Like the actor, dancer, and celebrity beer-can-chicken chef, Walken is hard to pin down. When walking in on Walken’s live set and hearing the crushing, dual-guitar assault "Bitch Wizard," from their untitled, self-released 2007 EP, all pummeling drums and clean backing vocals contrasting with deathly, oven-throat howls, it’s difficult to characterize the group — which includes guitarist Max Doyle, 26, and drummer Zack Farwell, 29 — as anything but metal. Perhaps "fuckin’ metal" might be more apt. But it hasn’t always been so clear-cut. "Our Unstoppable record, it was just a weird record," Kohler says of the self-released 2004 full-length. "We thought we were being all revolutionary having these funny rock songs, with funk songs and blues songs … "

"And math rock," Bergman interjects. Unstoppable was Walken’s version, to steal a phrase from Lou Reed, of ‘growing up in public.’"

"Most people sit in their garage when they’re coming up with their sound, but we were actually out there playing it, trying to figure it out in front of people," Bergman says. The band’s music has coalesced into a pointed metal attack. It couldn’t have happened at a more opportune time. While the bottom has fallen out of the housing market, and spending $3 trillion bucks on blowing up Iraqis has wreaked havoc on the economy, stock in metal is clearly on the rise.

"That’s one thing that’s changed about metal," Kohler says. "All of the sudden it’s getting cool again. You can be big and be in a metal band, with Mastodon and High on Fire and bands like that." I’m sworn to (semi-)secrecy, but there’s something on the horizon for Walken, something that Kohler demanded I euphemistically term a "great opportunity," which will put the days of touring cross-country with Hightower on their own dime, playing a couple dozen shows, and coming home dog-dick broke, behind them.

But are the vanguard of 21st-century metal warriors and their burgeoning audience really anything new? While it’s no doubt refreshing to see metal — true metal, not the Hollywood hair-farmer crap that lined record company coffers in a pre-Nirvana world — crawl out from the underground, it seems that it’s still largely aimed at the dudes in black hoodies. Which leads us to simultaneously discuss two major concerns about the future of heavy music: is anything really new, truly revolutionary, or is it all just a remix of old ideas? And just what will it take to woo a crop of hot new metal women away from the evils of floppy-haired emo boys in so-called chick pants?

Thankfully, Kohler’s got some insight: "Everything that’s new is just a reinvention of something else. The only way that I really believe that there can be a new beginning is after most of the human population is annihilated. And then it starts over, just as creative expression is part of life. It slowly becomes a community thing. It starts organically, that’s the point."

"So basically, you blow up the world, and more chicks will come to metal shows," Bergman quips.

Walken is already well into writing a new full-length, but I’ve got to advise them: scrap those songs and work on the concept album. Imagine this: the year is the year is 3052. Global warming and perpetual war have taken their toll. The ice caps have melted and a tribe of mutant metal warrior women of Amazonian stature have arisen from the rubble, repurposing military technology found in underground bunkers into hybrid instrument-weapons, with which they can both rock out and kill you. They rock you to death. Everything metal is new again.

WALKEN

With Hightower, Three Weeks Clean, and Soulbroker

May 1, 9 p.m., $8

Cafe Du Nord

2170 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

www.cafedunord.com

Metal Mania: Rock of ages, for all ages

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

It was June 2007, and the Friday night crowd at Thee Parkside was primed for brutality. When headliners Hatchet took the stage, two of my senses immediately spiked: my hearing, which seemed not long for the world, and my sight, which couldn’t believe that such aggressive thrash was emanating from what appeared to be a quintet of teenagers.

Well, not quite. As of March 2008, the median age of the North Bay band was 20.2, with vocalist Marcus Kirchen, 23, and lead guitarist Julz Ramos, 22, bringing up the average. Guitarist Sterling Bailey and drummer Alex Perez are both 19, and bassist Dan Voight is 18. Granted, Death Angel drummer Andy Galeon was 14 when The Ultra-Violence (Enigma) was released in 1987. Nonetheless, by ’87, not even half of Hatchet were born.

Raised in the post–Headbanger’s Ball era, its members forged their own paths to a place that local metalheads can both recognize and appreciate. "Hatchet is breathing new life into a scene that has been pretty dead for a long time," Shaxul, owner of San Francisco’s Shaxul Records, told me over e-mail. "They pay homage to ’80s thrash metal and they do a great job. I think they are about as relevant as a band can get in what you would call the ‘Bay Area thrash metal underground.’ Especially since they are the ones carrying it right now!"

Kicking back around a table at Thee Parkside one recent afternoon, Ramos — Hatchet’s main songwriter, though Kirchen pens most of the lyrics and all members contribute to the overall process — recalled getting Metallica’s Black Album (Elektra, 1991) at age 10 or 11, and discovering Master of Puppets (Elektra, 1986) soon after. Possessing a similar story, the 11-year-old Kirchen also checked into Metallica kindred like Exodus and Testament.

Growing up in the Internet age has its advantages: Bailey and Kirchen joined Hatchet after answering Craigslist ads, and the band hooked up with their label, Metal Blade, via MySpace.

One day the group logged on to read a message beginning, "’Hello from Metal Blade,’" Ramos said. "We were scratching our heads — ‘Is this a joke?’ That was the label that I always [wanted] to be on, because they are strictly metal. They’re not gonna try and change anything, or steer you in another direction."

Hatchet’s album, Awaiting Evil, was recorded in Petaluma and is tentatively due out May 31, with a tour in the works for later this year. Thematically, the disc addresses dark topics: what Ramos described as "a post-apocalyptic world future." Musically, Kirchen promised, "it’s gonna crush."

Staunch fans of the original Bay Area thrash bands, Hatchet is proud to be part of the scene’s legacy — but they don’t see themselves as imitating what came before. "Even though a lot of [our music] is reminiscent of [earlier bands], it really takes from that and stems into new directions," Kirchen explained. "I think it helps that we’re coming along about 20 years down the line, because there’s so much that’s happened in metal since then.

"When I listen to bands like Exodus or Vio-lence, I hear such a difference — it’s all thrash, but it’s different," he added. "If you were to put Hatchet into that, you couldn’t say ‘Hatchet sounds like Exodus’ or ‘Hatchet sounds like Testament.’ You’d say ‘Hatchet sounds like Hatchet.’" While their sound does owe a certain debt to the thundering riffs and drumbeats of bands like Exodus and Testament — as well as Slayer, Metallica, and even Iron Maiden — Hatchet’s enthusiasm is a large part of their appeal. It’s music made by metal fans, for metal fans, with the stage barely keeping the two groups apart.

"When you think of Hatchet, you think Heavy Metal Parking Lot (1986). At the shows, we thrash together. We bring that vibe where everybody’s included," Kirchen said. And my experiences seeing them live bear this out, particularly at a January Fat City show that included a rambunctious pit of Hatchet-aged fans.

"That’s really key in developing this young crowd," continued Kirchen, "that feeling of all these kids coming together to be a part of something. We really throw away the rock-star vibe. I think that separates us from a lot of the older bands who’ve been playing for a long time, and they have the thing built up to, ‘We’re untouchable.’ We don’t want to be like that. We want to be down-to-earth."

HATCHET

April 25, 7 p.m., check Web site for price

Balazo Gallery

2183 Mission, SF

Metal Mania: See you in the darkness

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While Oakland’s metal elders continue to thrash despite the odds, a new generation of bands is poised to augment the Bay’s already fearsome reputation. San Francisco’s Animosity was founded in a summer school classroom, where 14-year-old Leo Miller found the accomplices he needed to start gigging with his local hardcore heroes. Although Miller lists NorCal skull-crackers like Hoods and Sworn Vengeance as inspirations, Animosity’s goals were clear: "If you listen to our first demos, as pathetic as they were — we were 14 — we were trying to play extreme metal, from the beginning."

Their fall 2007 album, Animal (Black Market Activities), is a maelstrom of frantic leads, limber blast-beats, and guttural roars, produced by Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou. "We didn’t want to make an overproduced, studio death-metal record," explains Miller. "The trend nowadays is to have everything doctored, triggered, and quantized." The band begins a North American headlining run on April 7.

Likeminded Oakland death metallers All Shall Perish have raised eyebrows with their chunky syncopation and eerie guitar parts, working alongside Animosity to establish the Bay Area as a flashpoint for metal’s most extreme permutations. The group is currently in the studio smelting a follow-up to 2006’s The Price of Existence (Nuclear Blast), and the lockstep interplay between drummer Matt Kuykendall and guitarists Ben Orum and Chris Storey is sure to yield thunderous breakdowns and furious shredding, with singer Hernan "Eddie" Hermida glass-gargling over the top. Expect the album in late 2008.

The region’s extreme contingent might pile on the beats per minute, but there’s also a groovier game in town. If you think that San Francisco’s stoner story starts and ends with High on Fire, prepare to be blown away by Floating Goat. Drawing on the best of Pentagram, Sabbath, C.O.C., and a host of others, the outfit’s surging, sinuous riffs are infectiously heavy. Vocalist Chris Corona’s soulful singing and dive-bombing hammer-ons soar above the fray, while bassist Ian Petitpren and drummer Aaron Barrett comprise the rest of an extremely powerful trio. The band is currently unsigned, plying 2006’s self-released album The Vultures Arrive on the Northwest touring circuit.

Even more thunderous than the swung hum of Floating Goat are the volume-addicted San Francisco duo Black Cobra. Eschewing the classic rock roots of stoner metal in favor of tectonic doom and clattering thrash, Los Angeles expats Jason Landrian and Rafael Martinez make a racket that defies their paucity in numbers. Buried deep within the sludgy, swirling fuzz are hoarse shouts and gloomy guitar dirges, anchored by Landrian’s two titanic tom-toms. The duo is currently touring Europe with Austin riff-minstrels the Sword and Oakland hesher-darlings Saviours, and return to play Annie’s Social Club on April 24.

This untapped vein of younger metal is only just now being disinterred. Although the death of the Pound has made venues harder to come by, these rough new ingots continue to forge themselves in the fires of relentless touring, building a reputation that might one day be compared to that of the Bay’s thrash greats, one riff at a time. Call your friendly neighborhood concert booker and request the best in San Francisco metal by name.

FLOATING GOAT

With Super Giant and HDR

May 27, 8 p.m., call for price

Parkside

1600 17th St., SF

(415) 503-0393

www.theeparkside.com

Grooves

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KYLIE MINOGUE

X

(EMI)

As with any highly anticipated release from a pop siren, there’s sure to be predictable praise from diehard fans: think of all the Janet devotees who’ve supported her multiple failed attempts to relaunch as an pop icon, instead of a wardrobe-malfunctioning pariah. Also to be expected are the rip-to-shreds haters who will use any sign of weakness as bait. For miniature Aussie pop goddess Kylie Minogue, her 10th effort, X, was receiving equal amounts of love and hate many moons before its repeatedly pushed-back release date. Thanks to the cyberpirates of the techno-age, Minogue’s aural goodies were offered up for all of the online world to hear — even before the official tracklist was determined.

Leakage aside, opinion didn’t deter this überpop-tart from bringing a fiercer, more sexed-up version of her already adorable self to the dozen tracks on the uneven but thoroughly enjoyable X. Highlights include the vampy swagger of opener "2 Hearts" and the frenetic disco-meets-electro jam "In My Arms," written and produced by Scottish electro prodigy Calvin Harris and laced with his signature warped, underwater synths and pert handclap percussion. In its weaker moments, X sounds like a mashup of modern pop heavies. The robotic chant of "Speakerphone" recalls a made-for-TV version of Daft Punk’s "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" and "Nu-di-ty" is a Britney-esque banger, with jolts of ripping bass and nasally vocal "whoops" that would have fit perfectly into the guiltily pleasurable Blackout (2007). Back in her skyscraping stilettos, Kylie proves with X that her kitten-with-a-whip dance anthems still titillate. (Hayley Elisabeth Kaufman)

THE BREEDERS

Mountain Battles

(4AD)

Eighteen years after debuting with the alluringly odd Pod (4AD), and 15 since careening full force into the mainstream for a few months with the bubble-bass alterna-anthem "Cannonball," the Breeders return with Mountain Battles, their fourth album in nearly two decades. While hardly prolific, the Kim Deal–led enterprise has been successful in concocting fetchingly askew garage-pop, and their latest presents the band in marvelously fevered, fearless form, covering a considerable amount of stylistic and emotional territory over the course of 35 minutes.

Deal’s exuberantly woozy vocals remain as cough syrup–thick as ever, and the microphone give-and-take with sister Kelley once again yields delectable results. "Bang On" — a fiercely minimal hip-wiggling thump à la ESG — focuses around the chanting proclamation, "I love no one, and no one loves me," with Kim’s sunny assertion of the phrase chased by Kelley’s frowning echo. Elsewhere, the opiated melodica backdrops of "Istanbul" make for a seductive travelogue, as does "Regalame Esta Noche," an exquisitely vulnerable Spanish-language ballad rendered in the dustiest, huskiest of tones. Listeners seeking the familiar Breeders guitar-chug, however, will gleefully throw themselves face-first into the psychedelicized swirls of "Overglazed," an ecstatic thunderer set a-twitch by Kim’s howling repetition of a simple, inarguable line: "I can feel it." Honestly, though: who couldn’t? (Todd Lavoie)

THE BREEDERS

With Colour Revolt

April 30, 8 p.m., $23

Slim’s

333 11th St., SF

www.slims-sf.com

VARIOUS ARTISTS

Om: Miami 2008

(Om)

Back when I was a younger young ‘un, Om helped open my ears to the world of San Francisco house music. I’d waste gallons of gas I couldn’t afford, driving around listening to the likes of Miguel Migs and Colette because my car had a decent sound system. Lately, though, I’ve been disappointed with the label since it seems to have drifted away from the soulful house I had grown to love. So I was skeptical when I popped the new Om: Miami 2008 in my deck while driving down I-580. Two bridge tolls and four missed exits later, I was still in a trance from the Fred Everything’s deliciously nostalgic "Here I Am." Overall the compilation stitches together a slew of impressive sounds, including Eric Kupper’s remix of Samantha James’s "Breathe In." Om is clearly back to its old tricks, and I’m all ears. (Jamilah King)

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