SF

The Weekly’s expert, laid low

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The chain that owns the SF Weekly brought its star witness to court today, a Harvard economist with a stack of academic credentials who typically works for oil companies and who charges $1,075 an hour. He delivered quite a lecture on his own economic theory of predatory pricing – and then was laid low by a little newspaper called the Bodega Bay Navigator.

Some background before we get into the juicy details.

I was an economics major way back when. I have sat through many lectures by learned economists, have read their learned papers, and have tried to keep up somewhat on the dismal science. And I can say without hesitation that most academic economists live in a world devoid of reality.

Economists try to study human behavior as it’s manifested in markets, but they don’t want to be confused with people who actually study human behavior. They will tell you they aren’t (gasp) sociologists; they want to make everything fit in nice little mathematical theories.

To do that with such non-mathematical concepts as the actions of a small business and its owners in a community, you have to make a lot of assumptions. That’s what economists do; they make assumptions. They assume, for example, that all the participants in a market have the necessary knowledge and information to make the proper decisions. They assume that random factors like politics, love, passion, pride, anger, envy or simple nastiness are never part of the economic equation. They assume that everyone in a marketplace acts “rationally.”

That, of course, is an irrational assumption, particularly when it comes to small businesses (and even more so when it comes to the alternative press). If all of us in this business had acted rationally, there would be no Bay Guardian. There would be no SF Weekly, New Times or Village Voice Media. The entire alternative press exists because some utterly irrational people with little background in business and no rational hope for success decided to start little newspapers. They were – and many still are – motivated by politics, community service, excitement and a lot of other things, but rational business motives were never really high on the list.

Which brings us to the eminent Dr. Joseph Kalt.

DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist rock SF

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Two turntables and a microphone? Hells no, try EIGHT turntables, four mixers, two DJs on two microphones, a looping system, and some big ass speakers. That’s what DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist used to rock a capacity crowd at the Regency Ballroom last night. That, and stacks of vintage vinyl 45s (not a computer or CD anywhere in sight), a concept that was the subject of a short informational film that kicked off the show. Technically impressive, yes, but whatever this venerable duo was using to rock the place with funky old school beats and inspired scratching, it worked! Great show.

Weekly publisher admits below-cost sales

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The former publisher of the SF Weekly admitted today to a key part of the Guardian’s lawsuit against the Weekly and its corporate parent.

Chris Keating, who was the Weekly publisher between 2004 and 2006, was on the stand for cross-examination by Guardian lawyer Ralph Alldredge. After a lengthy discussion in which he discussed numerous examples of efforts to win ads away from the Guardian by cutting rates, Alldredge asked him directly:

“You knew those [prices] were below your cost, right?”

Keating replied, “Yes.”

That’s a significant admission: The Guardian is claiming that the Weekly sold ads below cost with the intent to harm the locally owned paper. That’s a violation of California law.

Deerhoof’s Satomi and Tenniscoats’ Saya whoop it up at Aquarius tonight

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Deerhoof’s Satomi – oh, my. Photo by Ryan Schreiber.

Cool beans! One of the best impromptu in-stores around is happening tonight, Wednesday, Feb. 13, at 6 p.m. at Aquarius Records, 1055 Valencia, SF.

Deerhoof‘s Satomi is playing a special acoustic set with Tenniscoats‘ Saya as Oneone. (To read Johnny Ray Huston’s review of Tenniscoats’ latest CD, Tan-Tan Therapy, go here.) You have been warned – now you have no excuse not to go!

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Lob you, Tenniscoats. Courtesy of Fat Planet.

Team Newsom’s $$$ value. More or less.

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Before we get to the juicy details of how much money Team Newsom is taking home, it’s worth noting that Mayor Gavin Newsom spent last Friday handing out draft copies of the report in which these figures can be found–a report that Budget Analyst Harvey Rose drew up at Sup. Jake McGoldrick’s request to figure out the impacts that staff changes within the Mayor’s Office would have on the City’s budget–changes Newsom announced Jan. 4.

It’s also worth noting that Rose didn’t know that Newsom Chief of Staff Phil Ginsburg was standing around last Friday telling the press that his report was a piece of “bull-.”, until the press called him later that same day and asked him for a comment.

And that all this unauthorized report distribution and undefended “bullshit” calling was happening just five weeks after Newsom announced that the City is facing a $229 million budget deficit and that therefore the city must implement an immediate hiring freeze and across-the-board departmental budget cuts.

Unlike Sups. Chris Daly or Aaron Peskin, who are more typically the targets of the mayor’s famously snippy wrath, Rose isn’t a politician, but a widely respected analyst, and so Team Newsom could hardly accuse him of “political theater”.

Instead, Ginsburg told the Chronicle that, “The budget analyst has no understanding of how salaries work in this city,” while Newsom made the vague claim that, “It’s personal.”

But however much they tried to put a negative spin on Rose report, Team Newsom could not deny that it paints an unflattering picture of the Mayor’s Office as a place that is using over $1 million from other departmental budgets to make new hires and increase the salaries of staff that are assigned to the Mayor.

As Rose reports “The Mayor’s practice of including positions assigned to the Mayor’s Office, but funded in the budgets of the Municipal Transportation Agency, the Human Services Agency and the Planning Department Budgets, understates the Mayor’s Office’s budgeted and actual costs for such positions, while such costs are overstated in those three other Departmental budgets.”

Rose’s report found that

a) The estimated total increased annual salary and fringe benefits costs of the 17 newly-appointed department directors to replace existing directors, and the ten Mayor’s Office staff appointments, two of which are completely new functions, are $553,716.

b) Other City departments fund about $1.34 million in annual salary and fringe benefits for ten positions assigned to the Mayor’s Office, including the mayor’s new climate change director Wade Crowfoot and new Homelessness Policy Director Dariush Kayhan.

c) The costs of appointing Ed Harrington, as General Manager of the SF Public Utilities Commission, Ben Rosenfield as Controller, Mirian Saez, as Interim Director of the San Francisco Housing Authority, and Jordanna Thigpen, as Acting Director of the Taxi Commission have yet to be announced.

d) Terminating Susan Leal, General Manager of the SF PUC, without cause, as is Newsom’s stated intention, will add a further $401,392 to City costs.

e) the mayor’s Office is also recruiting for a replacement to the CityBuild Director, at a cost of $144,596.

In face of these dicey accounting practices, Rose suggests that the Board of Supervisors rescind funding for positions assigned to the Mayor’s Office but included in other departments’ budgets, and the cost of these positions, estimated to be $898, 718, could then come from the Mayor’s General Fund monies.

The Board, says Rose, could also eliminate MTA funding for Mayor’s Office positions which do not directly benefit the MTA’s core functions. Those positions could then be funded, Rose reports, to the tune of $240,943, from the Mayor’s Office’s General Fund monies.

Rose’s report also notes that, “The newly appointed Climate Protective Initiatives Director is a new function unrelated to the MTA’s Safety and Training Unit,” even though the position if currently being funded through monies set aside for that unit.

And now, here are the figures, taken directly from Rose’s report, which show who, on Team Newsom, is making more or less, compared to previous directors and appointees:

Team Newsom t heads making more than Predecessors (the “Gimmee More” gang)

Kevin Ryan, Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice: $160,862—$42,848 more.

Joyce Hicks, Director Office of Citizen Complaints: $$171,262—$42,276 more.

John Rahaim, Director Planning Department, $210,000—$34,422 more.

Michael Cohen, Director Mayor’s Office of Economic And Workforce Development,
$193,570—$33,930 more.

Mike Farrah, Director Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Services: $120,900—$28,340 more

Adrienne Pon, Director Mayor’s Office of Community Development: $143,123—$12,993 more.

Luis Cancel, Arts Commission Director: $140,000—$8,648 more.

Chris Iglesias, Director Human Rights Commission: $149,058—$3,146 more.

Team Newsom members making less than Predecessors:

Ed Reiskin, Director, Department of Public Works: $195,000—$25,419 less

Fred Blackwell, Director, SF Redevelopment Agency: $178,724—$18,000 less

Nancy Alfaro, Director, 311, $149,058—$15,942 less

Micki Callahan, Director, Human Resources, $195,000—$9,672 less.

Anita Sanchez, Executive Director, Civil Service Commission, $128,752—$6,986 less.

Cristine Soto-DeBerry, Mayor’s Liasion to the Board of Supervisors: $91,000—$6,084 less.

Appointments to New Functions

Dariush Kayhan, Homeless Policy Director, $169.624
Wade Crowfoot, Climate Protection Initiatives Director, $130,112

Appointments to Existing Functions

Nancy Kirschner Rodriguez, Director of Government Affairs, $143,123—$19,207 more.

Dwayne Jones, Director of Community Engagement and Communities of Opportunity: $143, 123—$14, 371 more.

Catherine Dodd, Deputy Chief of Staff for Health and Human Services: $143, 123—$4,513 more.

Maya Dillard-Smith, Violence prevention Director, $91,520—$4,342 more)

Astrid Haryati, Greening Director, $111, 228—no change.

Jason Chan, Mayor’s Liasion to Commissions, $81,276 ($13,442 less.

Erin Hicks, State and Federal Affairs, tba.

The Salary ‘To Be Announced” Gang.
Ed Harrington, General Manager, SF PUC—tba
Ben Rosenfield, Controller
Mirian Saez, Interim Director, SF housing Authority,
Jordanna Thigpen, Acting Director, Taxi Commission.

Pollo Del Mar explains it all for you

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Eager-eyed writer Justin Juul continues his Guardian’s SF series “Meet Your Neighbors” by interviewing the current reigning Miss Trannyshack (and local journalist) Paul E. Pratt, aka Pollo Del Mar.

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Paul E. Pratt is an entertainment journalist who leads a double life as a crazy ass drag queen. So, when he’s not interviewing people like Spike Lee and Oliver Stone he’s getting all fierce and fabulous down at Trannyshack, where he was recently crowned Miss Trannyshack 2007. I’m not exactly sure how it happened, but I wound up spending the better part of a recent quiet Sunday drinking Pilsner and watching a drag show with Pratt at Mecca in The Castro. Here’s what he had to say.

SFBG: Hey, you don’t look like a drag queen at all. Whaddup with that?

Pratt: Well, I like to keep a fine line between who I am in drag and who I am out of it.

SFBG: Yeah, I didn’t know what to expect before I met you. I kind of thought you’d be all dolled up, ten feet tall and scary.

Pratt: Well that’s something you see more of in the Midwest, where I used to live. A lot of the drag queens out there feel sort of forced to live in drag all of the time. You’ll see a lot of transgender people, men trying to become women. The point of the community out there is different in that sense. San Francisco has another side. There’s the pageant circuit — the Imperial Court thing — that you’re seeing some of now. And then there’s the Trannyshack crowd. It’s not so serious out here. I mean, there are straight guys who perform occasionally. There are also female drag queens — we call them faux queens — and even couples like Landa Lakes and Miso Hornay. You don’t find too much of that elsewhere.

SFBG: So what you do is more just for fun then?

Pratt: It’s for fun and glamour and fabulousness.

The SF Weekly’s war of attrition

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Another fascinating day in court in the Guardian’s predatory-pricing lawsuit against the SF Weekly and its corporate owner. The Weekly is now well into its defense case, and the lawyers for the 16-paper chain that owns the paper are making the same arguments they’ve made all along. And they aren’t holding up very well.

The Guardian, as readers of this blog know by now, is claiming that the Weekly and Village Voice Media, the chain formerly known as New Times, sold ads below cost in an effort to harm the local competitor.

Today’s main witness was Jed Brunst, the company’s Phoenix-based CFO. H. Sinclair Kerr, the Weekly’s lead attorney, asked Brunst why New Times decided to buy the Weekly in 1995. “We saw San Francisco as a very vibrant market,” Brunst testified. “We saw it as an opportunity to make money and to practice good journalism.”

It was clear that Brunst was well prepared – much of his testimony seemed pre-rehearsed, which is not terribly surprising. Lawyers in a case like this typically make sure their own witnesses aren’t going to surprise them.

But Brunst got out of the box with a big problem: He said the chain saw San Francisco as a good opportunity to make money. And it became clear as the day went on that the Weekly had never made any money at all. Neither had the East Bay Express, which New Times bought in 2001. Both lost huge amounts of cash.

Talking points

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

The two women invited to a mysterious dinner party in the American Conservatory Theater–commissioned Brainpeople have no idea why they’re there. For some time we’re not sure why we are either. After detouring into the uncharacteristically straightforward screenplays of The Motorcycle Diaries and Trade, playwright José Rivera is back in quirky magic-realist overdrive. Too much of this 80-minute one-act feels propelled by a willful eccentricity less delightful than pointless. There is a point, though — and it’s worth the wait.

Dressed-to-kill beauty Mayannah (Lucia Brawley) has summoned two houseguests to her Los Angeles manse, which is heavily fortified against the violent police state outside. Both are promised substantial monetary reward for their attendance, though it seems all they’ve got to do is arrive (via armored limo) and enjoy "the meal of your lives."

This must be too good to be true. Garrulous wallflower Ani (Sona Tatoyan) voices our suspicions by nervously inquiring if the huge platter o’ mystery meat is, er, people. (It ain’t, but it is something equally seldom masticated.) Fellow guest Rosemary (Rene Augesen) doesn’t care what it is — she is hungry. She also displays odd shifts in mood and accent, soon exposed as a whole cacophonous chorus of schizoid "brainpeople" taking turns à la Sybil with her body and behavior.

In Daniel Ostling’s creepy-elegant dining room set, beautifully lit by Paul Whitaker, all three women reveal their demons via flamboyant yet unfelt monologues. Augesen in particular contorts through multivoice fireworks more actor punitive than audience rewarding. But Rivera and director Chay Yew’s premiere production are heading somewhere. When the "miracle" Mayannah hoped would occur this evening does, performers and play transcend all prior filigreed excess. Brainpeople ends on a sustained grace note that’s unsettling, poignant, and haunting.

CURVY, BALLSY?


There’s just one woman’s voice revealing all in Curvy Widow, the Cybill Shepherd showcase that’s opened here after a reportedly very rough Atlanta tryout and considerable retooling. But it’s the kind that can suck air out of a room all by itself.

A first playwriting effort by Bobby Goldman, widow of stage and screen writer James Goldman (The Lion in Winter), this plotless autobiographical monologue is the precise equivalent of an experience everybody suffers sometime: you’re stuck with that worst-case-scenario stranger who views every social contact as a passive admirer to regale with dazzling banter about their adventures, knowledge, professional stature, and general fabulousness. Yet all you’re hearing is the deafening roar of hot air. Under such circumstances even an elevator ride can seem interminable. Curvy Widow is 90 minutes long.

Shepherd’s "character" (the program leaves no doubt that Goldman "IS The Curvy Widow") is a 57-year-old professional fixer who does everything from choose furniture to chase squirrels out of the house, enabling other rich folk to do zilch for themselves. Her meant-to-be-hilarious dating travails include many descriptions of men who are rude, unattractive, "dumb as posts," or otherwise less than worthy of her. But just what does the widow deserve? Not jury duty, vaginal dryness, or various other complaints that amazingly made it into this revised script. It’s true men get away easier with being pushy and abrasive — they’re "ballsy," not "bitchy." But when women like Goldman and (in interviews) Shepherd celebrate having those qualities as empowerment, are they inverting a stereotype or just making excuses for being spoiled jerks?

There are a handful of funny lines, plus others Shepherd sells as funny. One can’t really blame her mostly awkward performance, Scott Schwartz’s direction, or the ugly physical production for everything else. You want to tell the Curvy Widow, "Shaddap and get a vibrator." But she already has an autopleaser. This play is the ultimate act of self-love.

BRAINPEOPLE

Thurs/14–Sat/16, 8 p.m. (also Sat/16, 2 p.m.), $12.50–$20.50

Zeum

221 Fourth St., SF

(415) 749-2228

www.act-sf.org

CURVY WIDOW

Through March 9

Wed.–Sat., 8 p.m. (also Sat., 3 p.m.); Sun., 3 and 7 p.m.; $50–$75

Post Street Theatre

450 Post, second floor, SF

(415) 771-6900

Your funny Valentines

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER "It’s 60 percent embarrassing and 40 percent hot. And the hotness is derived from how embarrassing it is. Or maybe that’s just me."

Talkin’ ’bout Valentine’s Day, the big VD, that bad case of lovin’ you, with a digest-to-impress din-din and a small but meaningful token of my esteem. Specifically, Club Neon organizer Jamie Guzzi, a.k.a. DJ Jamie Jams, is speaking of Club Neon’s fourth annual Valentine’s Underwear Party.

Yep, I know you know good times sans culottes have been happening for aeons — years, even — on a, ahem, more informal basis, way before Fuse TV’s Pants-Off Dance-Off. But guarens, it’ll be way sweeter and sexier at Club Neon: the first year at the Hush Hush, in 2003, "people were pretty tentative, and there were still lurkers," Guzzi says. "When you hear about these sorts of events, it’s more of a creepier crowd. When people first hear about it, they think it’s a Power Exchange or more Burning Man kind of thing — a lot of people you don’t want to see in underwear leering at each other. But this is a more indie crowd, and the kids are all cute and twee, and everyone shows up in American Apparel underwear." At least the clothing company’s soft tease is good for something more than selling terry cloth hot pants: vive le thunderwear as social equalizer!

"When you’ve got a couple hundred people in underwear, it’s pretty hard to front," Guzzi says, explaining that the idea emerged after he got frustrated with kids dressed to the nines vibing one another. The bonus: once stripped down at Club Neon’s key soiree, Guzzi claims, "you end up realizing that a lot of your friends are way cute. It shuffles the deck in terms of who’s attractive!"

And thank St. Valentine for dynamos like Guzzi. Sour grapes, bitter pills, badasses, bummed punks, gloomy goths, and hardcore realists have long realized all holidays have become co-opted as multimillion-dollar promotional vehicles to buy more, by playing off residual guilt, goodwill, or simply that overarching existential emptiness concerning life’s perpetual gerbil wheel. But what if you decide to suspend disbelief and descend into the commercialized maelstrom, mindfully participating in the recommended shopping, wining, and dining rituals? You’re accustomed to rocking outside the system, so what to do with your bad self when you need back in? Still no reservations? I’ve got a few ideas for every subculty cutie.

Indie Rock Ian Grub: fixed with a laid-back bike ride to Bernal Heights’ MaggieMudd for Mallow Out! vegan cones. Gift: an all-show pass to the Noise Pop or Mission Creek music fest or a steamy copy of the baby-making Juno soundtrack.

Hyphy Heather Grub: grind down on maple syrup–braised short ribs at the bupscale 1300 on Fillmore. Or for old times’ sake, snatch Sunday brunch at the latest Powell’s Place in Bayview (2246 Jerrold) now that gospel star Emmitt Powell has been forced to relocate. Gift: she voted for Barack Obama, but today she’ll swoon for Mac Dre’s Pill Clinton (Thizz Ent., 2007).

Metal Sven Grub: pick up a nice red wine and some stinky cheese for a Mountain View Cemetery picnic in Oakland — pretend you’re downing the fresh blood and putrid flesh of virgins. Gift: Santa Cruz combo Decrepit Birth’s Diminishing Between Worlds (Unique Leader) inspires … birth control.

Techno Cal Grub: nibble sour plum, shiso, and flaxseed sushi and other vegan Japanese delights at Medicine New-Shojin Eatstation. Gift: avert your eyes from the Versace boutique on your way outta the Crocker Galleria minimall, and here you go, the Field’s From Here We Go Sublime (Kompakt, 2007)

Country Kat Grub: fried rabbit — oh hell, we’re in former cow country, go for the porterhouse at the deliciously ’40s-western retro-authentic Hayward Ranch. Tip the blue-haired waitress well — she’s gotta have the patience of St. Val to deal with you two after your fourth Bloody Mary. Gift: seal the deal with Queen of the Coast (Bear Family, 2007), a four-CD box set of tunes by Bonnie Owens, who stole both Buck Owens’s and Merle Haggard’s hearts.

Jam Band Jessie Grub: grab your nut cream at Café Gratitude and chase each other around the table with wheatgrass shots. New game: if you don’t make me utter the goofy menu item names, I will be grateful. Gift: crash into the Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds: Live at Radio City Music Hall Blu-ray DVD (Sony, 2007).

So hurry up and give your favorite pop tot some love — or you just might find yourself without on VD.

CLUB NEON’S VALENTINE’S UNDERWEAR PARTY

With DJs Jamie Jams, Emdee, Little Melanie, and Aiadan

Thurs/14, 9 p.m., $5

Make-Out Room

3225 22nd St., SF

www.neonsf.com

LOVE VENUS, LOVE DENGUE FEVER

J’adore Dengue Fever’s new Venus on Earth (M80), and the band provides the perfect post-love-in aperitif with Sleepwalking Through the Mekong. The John Pirozzi documentary on the Los Angeles combo’s trip to Cambodia ended up involving more than anyone anticipated. "Every contact was, like, ‘Don’t worry about anything! Just show up! Everything will be great!’<0x2009>" tour mastermind and bassist Senon Williams explains. "We’d be, like, ‘Where are we playing?’ ‘I don’t know. Just show up!’ So we were all nervous going over there. We had all our instruments, but we needed amplifiers and PAs and a crowd to play to." Fortunately, Dengue Fever were quickly booked to appear on Cambodian Television Network, and a two-song turn mushroomed into 10 numbers and a two-hour appearance. "Instantly, we became famous across the country," Williams tells me, "because everyone watches TV there."

SLEEPWALKING THROUGH THE MEKONG

Fri/15, 9:30 p.m.; Sat/16, 12:30 p.m.; $10.50

Victoria Theatre

2961 16th St., SF

www.sfindie.com

Robert Moses Kin’ and Black Choreographers Festival

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PREVIEW In February, as the days start getting longer again, two things come to mind: Black History Month summons deep reflections, and all of that extra light brings the advent of fresh views. In the Bay Area no better example of clear-sighted perspectives can be found than in the work of the Robert Moses’ Kin company and from the codirectors of the fourth Black Choreographers Festival: Here and Now, Kendra Kimbrough Barnes and Laura Elaine Ellis. Moses starts his two-week season at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco on Feb. 14, while the Barnes-Ellis team is entering its festival’s second half at Project Artaud Theater in San Francisco.

From Moses, be prepared for a smaller company of six dancers performing in a brand-new program that includes three world premieres and a revival of 2007’s Rose (set to Beethoven), which is new to San Francisco. In addition to choreographing, the prodigious Moses also created the score for one of the evening’s pieces, Reflections on an Approaching Thought. In step with the company’s tradition of addressing social issues, the program’s Consent delves into the ethics of medical experimentation on poor people.

The Black Choreographers Festival has scheduled three lineups spanning work representative of the African diaspora — jazz, African, Afro-Brazilian — as well as modern and dance theater. If you have never seen site-specific choreographer Joanna Haigood and her Zaccho Youth Group, from the Bayview neighborhood, don’t miss them on the afternoon of Feb. 17. They are exceptional young artists.

ROBERT MOSES’ KIN Thurs/14–Sat/16 and Feb. 20–23, 8 p.m.; Sun/17 and Feb. 24, 2 p.m.; $23–$26. Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, 3200 California, SF. (415) 292-1233, www.jccsf.org

BLACK CHOREOGRAPHERS FESTIVAL Fri/15–Sat/16, 8 p.m.; Sun/17, 3 and 7 p.m.; $10–$20. Project Artaud Theater, 450 Florida, SF. (415) 863-9834, (510) 801-4523, www.bcfhereandnow.com

Uri Caine and Friends

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PREVIEW The versatile jazz pianist Uri Caine has carved a niche for himself as a fearless interpreter of classical music. His discography includes idiosyncratic recordings of music by Mozart, Beethoven, J.S. Bach, Mahler, and Wagner. In 2006 he began to investigate Hungarian folk music at the source, delving into Béla Bartók’s original field recordings of village performances, documented on wax cylinders in the early 20th century. While Caine notes that some aspects of the music are tough to translate into Western terms, given the inflection and distinctly unsquare rhythms of traditional dances, the melodic material serves as an ideal springboard for his brand of agile improvisation. For his Feb. 16 performance, Caine and his ensemble visit Hungary’s distant musical territory with no pretension to exact authenticity. It’s a good hook, considering both Caine’s credentials and the local craze for Eastern European traditions, with Balkan brass bands and Roma-inspired DJs abounding. It will be exciting to hear Caine explore this expansive concept with artful and inspired clarinetist Chris Speed and respected long-time contributors to the adventurous downtown New York improvisational scene drummer Jim Black, violinist Joyce Hamman, and bassist John Hebert. Even if their distinctive flavors take a moment to blend, these are the ingredients for a good stew. Caine will round out his visit to the Bay Area with a solo piano performance and discussion at the Community Music Center in the Mission District, free of charge.

URI CAINE Fri/15, 6 p.m., free. Community Music Center, 544 Capp, SF. (415) 647-6015, www.sfcmc.org

URI CAINE AND FRIENDS Sat/16, 8 p.m., $27–$39. Herbst Theatre, War Memorial Veterans Bldg., 401 Van Ness, SF. (415) 392-2545, www.performances.org

Dub trio

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PREVIEW Let’s say you’re a fan of dub — the remixed reggae subgenre pioneered by the studio experimentalism of King Tubby and Lee "Scratch" Perry — and I say to you, "Hey, come over. You have to hear this new dub CD I’ve got." Excited, but in a laid-back, dubby way, you roll a semistereotypical joint and skate down to my place on a longboard with big, soft wheels, smoking all the way. I throw on Another Sound Is Dying (Ipecac), the new Dub Trio CD. Immediately bombarded by crunchy guitar riffs and a distorted, growling bass line reminiscent of New York noise mavens Unsane, you become confused. Why the fuck is this metal record harshing my mellow?

Dub Trio — three spot-on musicians whose lists of recent session work reads like a who’s who of putf8um hip-hop artists — eventually work island rhythms and delayed reggae riffing into the album, which may or may not bring your buzz back, Smokey. Yet the band is most true to the core idea of dub — the experimental manipulation of sound — in its willingness to destroy it, to go beyond the confines of traditionally dubable reggae material and say, "Fuck it, we can do a dub of this and that too." The trio’s ambition, their sheer steeze to take the chains off the dub aesthetic, makes them fascinating, if not brilliant, and they go from nut-crunching sludge riffs to long, loping chill-outs without flinching. "What the guys in the beginning of dub were doing in the studio, we try to bring that element and re-create that concept live," drummer Joe Tomino said over the phone from New York City.

They stay true to the roots of dub in a wild new way: each band member controls effects for everyone else’s instruments as well as their own. Which means Dub Trio’s 12 Galaxies show will be a must-see: these guys can’t just sleep through the same set every night. They’ve got to be on it, reacting to and changing the music as it’s being made. "It’s a constant way of thinking as one and listening to exactly what’s happening onstage," Tomino said, "so you don’t get in the way of the conversation or dialogue that’s happening."

DUB TRIO With Foreign Island and Hour of Worship. Fri/15, 9 p.m., $12. 12 Galaxies, 2565 Mission, SF. (415) 970-9777, www.12galaxies.com

Cocoa-a-go-go

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HOT CHOCOLATES In honor of Valentine’s Day, the official holiday of chocolatiers (and florists, and jewelers, and marriage counselors) nationwide, I’m giving you a list of some of my favorite places to get your chocolate on — for Feb. 14 and beyond.

Democratic candidates: eat me So food has always been political — is it genetically-modified-organism free? Farmed fairly? Packaged responsibly? — but this is something else altogether. Designer Chocolate (www.designerchocolate.org) wraps its 100 percent natural chocolate in either Hillary Clinton– or Barack Obama–themed paper, complete with photos and quotes. I don’t feel qualified to say which candidate tastes better.

Fair trade truffles Love humankind as much as you love chocolate? You’re in luck. Global Exchange (4018 24th St., SF; 415-648-8068; 2840 College, Berk.; 510-548-0370; store.gxonlinestore.org) has a full selection of certified fair trade and organic chocolate, from special holiday versions (like the Fair Trade Valentine’s Day Action Kit for $15) to year-round delights (like the Chocoholics Gift Basket for $75), including offerings from Divine, the world’s first farmer-owned fair trade chocolate brand.

Design within reach (of your mouth) When it’s just as important for the chocolate you buy to be pretty as it is for it to be delicious, Richart Chocolate (393 Sutter, SF; 415-291-9600, www.richart-chocolates.com) is the only place worth looking. These tiny rectangular delights come marked with classic, understated designs like swirls, polka dots, flowers, and geometric shapes and in creative flavors like licorice ganache, thyme praline, and ginger. They’re almost too pretty to eat … almost.

A pint of pleasure It might possibly be the second most brilliant idea anyone ever had: pairing beer with chocolate. The most brilliant? A whole festival dedicated to the two. And the Beer and Chocolate festival (Feb. 15, 8 p.m., $90; Cathedral Hill Hotel, 1101 Van Ness, SF; www.beer-chef.com) is no PBR–and–Hershey’s kisses kind of affair. Oh no. We’re talking a four-course dinner with items like roasted quail with chocolate port sauce served with Koningshoeven Bock. Do I hear last-minute Valentine’s Day plans being made?

“Lautrec in Leather: Chuck Arnett and the San Francisco Scene”

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REVIEW The clean-cut man in the portrait looks straight ahead with knowing eyes, his leather jacket open — an invitation, perhaps? — revealing a muscular torso and chest, on which is tattooed a purple butterfly. The painting’s mix of leather and a little lace sums up much of the art and life of Chuck Arnett, a habitué and documenter of the leather bar scene during gay liberation’s golden age in the 1960s through the late ’70s.

The majority of Arnett’s work was inspired by and made for the bars and back rooms he frequented. Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll are unapologetically front and center, a potent mix reflected in styles that veer wildly from rough sketches of men fucking in bathhouses to carefully executed psychedelic oils. The surviving fragments and photos of Arnett’s large-scale painted murals for the original Stud, the Tool Box, and the Detour — and related ephemera like patchwork wall hangings of tanned scraps instructing "Eat It!" — not only tell the story of Arnett’s transformation from Southern ballet sissy to acid-dropping public-sex advocate but also illustrate the radical changes the gay community underwent between The Wild One (1953), Stonewall, and Harvey Milk’s murder.

Arnett’s national coming-out as a painter arrived when Life included a photograph of his Tool Box mural in its landmark 1964 spread "Homosexuality in America": the bar’s leather-clad denizens mirrored Arnett’s black-and-white swathe of butch fauna. Five years later Arnett would quote himself in a massive Day-Glo mural for the Stud — sadly, reproduced in photo only: a panorama in which Marlon Brando clones warp into a cosmic chessboard dominated by an American Indian and a Sahasrara chakra. In a corner of the piece one surviving component is an appropriately phallic biker, whose badge says what could have served as Arnett’s maxim: "Freak Freely."

LAUTREC IN LEATHER: CHUCK ARNETT AND THE SAN FRANCISCO SCENE Through April 26. Tues.–Sat., 1–5 p.m. GLBT Historical Society, 657 Mission, no. 300, SF. (415) 777-5455, www.glbthistory.org

Shocked, G?

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When I first heard Digital Underground in 1989, via "The Humpty Dance," little did I imagine it would someday fall to me to announce the group’s end. After a 20-year run — including five albums, one EP, one rarities disc, solo albums by Shock-G and Money B, and a helluva lot of touring — DU are calling it quits. Their Feb. 22 show at the Red Devil Lounge may be your last opportunity to see these putf8um Bay Area OGs. You’d be a fool to miss it: their shows are a cut above most live-rap, P-Funk-style fests, driven by Shock’s keyboards and an endless array of MCs, including, at one time, 2pac himself.

"Every group from [Public Enemy] to the Stones has experienced a hiatus, some straight-up fallouts," says Shock, a.k.a. Humpty Hump, on the phone from Los Angeles. "I think we hold the record for longest harmonious run without a breakup. I gave it a loyal 20 years — ya can’t be mad at that."

Despite the lack of internal beef, however, Shock’s decision to disband DU is both personal and artistic. Constant touring, for example, has taken its toll, particularly with the group’s partying reputation.

"The energy was gettin’ bad," Shock concedes. "Both the group and the audience were becoming a bunch of alcoholics. That means it’s time for a break.

"I did several sober shows over the past few years, like 1 in every 10. However, when I suggested this to the band, everyone looked at me like I’m crazy, as if I suggested doing the show naked!"

Even more pressing, however, is Shock’s desire to expand as an artist, musically and otherwise.

"I’ve always wanted to give serious musicianship a shot," he says, "to sit down at the piano like a jazz musician and do complicated arrangements and improvisations with other musicians. But it’s hard to be fully present anywhere when I’m outta town every weekend to do DU shows."

While Shock confirms he has about two albums’ worth of unreleased DU he’ll eventually drop and doesn’t rule out the possibility of a reunion — "Ask me in five years," he says — for now he wants to direct his energies in nonmusical directions.

"I wanna go down to Hollywood and see what it do: voice-overs, comedic acting, films, TV — stuff I never had time for from recording and touring. For the first time since 1987, I have time to commit to something else. I’m excited.

"I used to use George Clinton, Sting, and RZA as my models," he concludes. "Now I plan to be more Ice Cube, more Puffy, more Jamie Foxx, more wherever I wanna be."

DIGITAL UNDERGROUND

Feb. 22, 8 p.m., $20

Red Devil Lounge

1695 Polk, SF

1-866-468-3399

www.reddevillounge.com

Drink, then Swallows

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

When Jon Miller was a boy, his parents pulled off an impressive trick: convincing him there was beauty to be found on the New Jersey Turnpike. Wondering, as any hopeful naïf might, about the strange fogs puffing from roadside refineries, the lad was given a celestial explanation. Those were, he was told, cloud machines.

Miller is old enough now to be a bit more suspicious of Garden State industrial output, but that entrancing image gets new life as the title of his second record with Portland, Ore., duo Swallows. The pair, Miller on drums and pal Em Brownlowe covering vocals and guitar, have been honing a sinewy turn on Pacific Northwest alt-rock since 2003. They call it garage pop, but that term feels too claustrophobic, too sweaty for the sound they develop on their Cloud Machines EP (Church of Girl, 2007). The previous Swallows effort, Me with Trees Towering (Cherchez la Femme Projects, 2006), was fairly sludgy, with guitars thrust forward in the mix and Brownlowe’s piercing vocals left to fight it out from the rear. Cloud Machines is no less textural, but it is largely free of such gridlock. Its filthy space is bigger. Put a warehouse or a factory in front of that pop.

But be sure to keep calling it pop. Cloud Machines‘ intrigue stems from the cohabitation it gins up: cheery American melody making keeps its shape amid angular chord charts and sharp vocal tones. On lead track "Anchors," Brownlowe has moments of channeling Patti Smith, but she’s also describing how she’ll kick out the jam: "Start to move your feet / Jon’s gonna find his beat / And it’ll burn the house down." Much like its titular image, which envisions a utopia on dystopia’s home turf, the record gets fantasy and disaffection all mingled up.

I asked Miller and Brownlowe about this, and they confirmed that their songs are meant not just as tracks but as ditties. Brownlowe copped to aiming for "memorable and catchy" music: "stick in your head"–type cuts. But on this point, even the band isn’t sure where the parody ends and the sincerity begins. Brownlowe related how the most sugary track here, "When You’re in Love," initially started as a "mockumentary" dashed off as a joke with her girlfriend. Portland bands, after all, do not sing things like "When you’re in love, nothing else matters / When you’re in love, you smell the flowers." But then she showed the gag to Miller, and "he wanted to write a verse too," she said.

The vocals are key to Swallows’ evolution on Cloud Machines, but equally crucial are Miller’s increasingly adventurous drums. The group’s earlier songs hint at impatience with straight-ahead rock rhythms — both "Words of Love" and "Pulsar Heart Attack" from Me with Trees Towering include unorthodox tom-tom rumbles — and tradition has now been pretty thoroughly dismissed. The beats of Swallows 2.0 almost encroach on world music territory, an effect increased by Miller’s out-of-order kit and unusual tuning. He claims to have copied his intervals from "Three Blind Mice," but whatever manual he’s using, it’s effective. On album closer "Language Is Restless," for example, he uses shifty rhythms to leave the melody unmoored and adrift, cleverly scrambling our wish for a quick fix.

All of this sullied pop got me thinking about another image, complementary to those merry smokestacks, that Brownlowe detailed in an e-mail about Swallows’ early days. When she and Miller first began playing together — in a "dank practice space in the industrial part of Portland run by a crazy alcoholic stoner" — they cut an EP as Dirty Shirley, a reference to the vodka-laced Shirley Temples that fueled the sessions. Other bands just have beers. These two had to spike a nonalcoholic drink.

SWALLOWS

With Agent Ribbons and the Moral Tourists

Feb. 22, 9:30 p.m. doors, $5

Edinburgh Castle Pub

950 Geary, SF

(415) 885-4074

www.castlenews.com

SWALLOWS

With Agent Ribbons and Light Peaks

Feb. 24, 9:30 p.m., $6

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

The return of the return of the DJ

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Born from the ashes of New York hip-hop DJ supergroup the X-ecutioners and from a frustration with the current state of turntablism, Ill Insanity are on a mission to return the art of the DJ to its former glory.

Composed of ex-X-ecutioners Rob Swift and Total Eclipse along with younger inductee DJ Precision, the turntable trio have just released their progressive scratch music debut, Ground Xero, on Fat Beats, which includes among its turntable guests fellow former X man Roc Raida, plus Excess and DJ Q-Bert.

Ill Insanity’s ongoing national tour, which stops in San Francisco on Feb. 21 for a performance and a workshop at Guitar Center and a party-rocking throw-down at Levende Lounge, seems less like a jaunt and more like a crusade to its three impassioned turntable ambassadors.

"This is the beginning of us taking the art form back," Rob Swift said, sounding something like one of the Marvel Comics heroes from which his original group, the X-Men, took their name. "And I feel that we are putting it on our shoulders to show people that this is real creative music. And we are educating people about this art form because it seems to me like no one else is really doing it right now."

Speaking a few weeks ago at Swift’s Queens, NY, apartment, which also serves as the group’s recording studio and rehearsal space, the trio had gathered to mourn what they see as a creative lull in the art of turntablism and to prepare for its pending renaissance.

"Basically we were all bored with music, and that’s what brought us together," Total Eclipse said. All three agreed that for several years now DJ battles, traditionally the barometers gauging the advancement of the turntable art form, have been in a decline. "There has been a really poor attendance at DJ battles for the past five years, especially here in the US," said Precision, the 2007 USA DMC Finals DJ battle champion. "And it’s because the art form has slipped so much."

Part of this artistic stagnation, they believe, is because DJs of recent years have been satisfied with merely imitating instead of trying to innovate. "The younger DJs are too caught up with looking up to what came before, so they stop practicing when they master that trick that QBert or whoever has already done years ago," Swift said, "and consequently now everyone is sounding the same."

Precision jumped in: "And a lot of them don’t even know the complete history of the DJ, like that Steve Dee created beat juggling."

In performance Ill Insanity’s setup includes five turntables, three mixers, and computers to operate the Serato program. "What we are trying to do is to use the new technology without dumbing down the art," Swift insisted. "We have much respect for what came before us, still applying the skills of Grandmaster Flash, party-rocking, and so on…. But we’re saying, ‘Let’s do a 2008 version of what’s already been done in the past.’<0x2009>"

And as for the future of turntablism? Swift is optimistic: "There could be a kind of DJ revolution again. I predict that in a couple of years things will go back to the way they were." (Billy Jam)

ILL INSANITY

Feb. 21, 6 p.m. performance and workshop, free

Guitar Center

1645 Van Ness, SF

(415) 409-0350

www.guitarcenter.com

Love on the road — and on the page

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Dean Wareham mainly remembers his last San Francisco performance for a "botched guitar solo." Though the alleged incident was hardly a blip during the seductive show he and wife Britta Phillips delivered with their band, he promises on the phone from New York City, "It won’t happen again."

We’ll see. Dean and Britta come back to San Francisco to play Yoshi’s with French postmodern chanteuse Keren Ann in the first nonjazz performance at the tony new venue on Fillmore.

Wareham met bassist-vocalist Phillips in 2000 when he was first considering leaving Luna, a band he fronted for 10 years and eight albums. She replaced longtime Luna member Justin Harwood, piquing Wareham’s interest in keeping the group together — at least for a little while.

"I was thinking, ‘I’m just not sure I want to do it without Justin,’" Wareham recalls.

Not only did he feel his longtime friend and bassist’s departure was a sign to move on, but the music business had entered a funk that had the modestly popular but hugely respected band scrambling for a label. Wareham wasn’t really a happy camper.

"Then Britta joined the band, and I have to say if I’m being honest with myself that that made it fun again," he says.

Indeed. The intriguing, siren-voiced Phillips was already something of a cult figure when she joined Luna, having gained notoriety as the singing voice of animated TV character Jem.

Wareham thinks the last two Luna records made with Phillips, Romantica and Rendezvous (Jetset; 2002, 2004), are two of the best from the group, which mainly developed its music together.

"We would be in a rehearsal studio playing electric guitars so it was a louder thing," Wareham says. "Someone would have an idea that we would just play again and again."

Luna played their final concert at the Bowery Ballroom in New York City on Feb. 28, 2005.

In contrast, Dean and Britta make silkier, sexier pop, though their first recording together, 2003’s L’Avventura (Jetset), started as a Wareham solo project that Phillips gradually became a part of. "Neither one of us really knew what we were doing," Wareham explains. "It was going to be all covers and then, bit by bit, sort of transformed into something else." The album encompasses an eclectic batch of songs by other writers — the Doors’ "Indian Summer," Madonna’s "I Deserve It," Buffy St. Marie’s "Moonshot" — but the couple’s intimate sound became defined by Wareham’s "Night Nurse" and two outrageously seductive Phillips originals, "Out Walking" and "Your Baby," as the couple’s vocals purr through floating washes of strings and vibes courtesy of producer Tony Visconti.

Wareham concedes last year’s Back Numbers (Zoe) was more thought-out. "We probably had a better plan, and more of it was recorded at home," he says. "The record was built brick by brick in the studio. Then we have to learn to play the songs live, which makes it quite a challenge, actually." The couple took time to get married when producer Visconti left to work on a Morrissey album in England.

Indie-rock gossip hounds might be interested to know that Wareham and Phillips didn’t become a couple immediately after they met — and they kept it on the down low even after they hooked up. Wareham promises to tell all in his new memoir, Black Postcards, which will be published by Penguin in March. "The dirt is going to be out there soon," he deadpans with a laugh. The frontman seems circumspect in conversation, though he also clearly strives for as much honesty as propriety allows.

"It covers a lot of personal stuff," he adds.

The writing was difficult for Wareham, and he likens the two-year process to a "very long therapy session," albeit one in which they pay you instead of the other way around.

"Obviously I’m used to writing, but when you write lyrics they can be cryptic and you don’t really need to reveal very much of yourself. Sometimes you might, but you can pretend something’s about you or it’s about someone else. This was a different kettle of fish," he says.

He believes people may be surprised by what he chooses to reveal, particularly fans of his first band, Galaxie 500, who thought he was "such a nice boy," as he puts it. "There will probably be some people who are disgusted with my behavior, but," he says, sighing, "oh well."

DEAN AND BRITTA

With Keren Ann

Mon/18, 8 p.m., $18–$22

Yoshi’s San Francisco

1330 Fillmore, SF

(415) 655-5600

www.yoshis.com

Tiger Beat bard

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

If 1967 was the Summer of Love, then late 1968 through mid-1969 brought the seasons of mass deflowering. This wasn’t due to LSD, flower power, or even the trickling down of the sexual revolution. Rather, it was the perfidious influence of a nearly 400-year-old play that teenagers had previously read and watched with glazed eyes. Franco Zeffirelli’s big-screen version of Romeo and Juliet made underage sex look extremely hot, virtuous, and stick-it-to-the-man rebellious. And because it was rated G (until the Motion Picture Association of America subsequently wised up and gave it a PG) and based on, you know, the Bard, parents couldn’t object.

Foolish adults, so not with it! As sheer incitement to Get Laid Now, this Romeo and Juliet was the worst celluloid influence on America’s impressionable youth since Splendor in the Grass seven years earlier — and that was an old-fashioned movie whose mature stars (Natalie Wood, Warren Beatty) were only playing at being teens. Plus, they kept their clothes on.

Not so Zeffirelli discoveries Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey, age 17 and 15, respectively. It took her frenziedly heaving bosom and his famously bare ass (the shot that perhaps heated up gay lib as much as Stonewall) to add new life to hitherto yawnsville poetry, making everyone under the age of consent desperate to be in love, thwarted, secretive, coital, and tragic. That last is, after all, the ultimate teenage fantasy: to die knowing that grown-ups will finally realize that crushing your delicate feelings drove you to it. Oh, now you’re sorry! Enjoy that eternal guilt! (In 1981, Zeffirelli would film the ultimate camp incarnation of this theme, Endless Love.)

Much was made of the principals’ youth, for once close to that of the characters as envisioned by Shakespeare. The most famous prior screen version, MGM’s 1936 extravaganza, had cast thirty- to fiftysomethings in the lead roles. Onstage, various famed thespians practically portrayed the young lovers into senility. Zeffirelli — who’d successfully tamed famous couple Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in a robust Taming of the Shrew the year before — not only selected young actors but also juiced Romeo and Juliet with a hyperbolic style designed to excite. The film’s color-saturated photography, costumes, and production design make Renaissance-era Veronese life the apex of sensuality. Nino Rota’s score (with a love theme that topped the United States pop charts as a Henry Mancini instrumental) is romantic catnip. Male testosterone — including that of Tybalt, as played by Michael York, who’d never seem so flamingly heterosexual again — jumps off the screen in splendor, with equally rattling sword fights and projectile codpieces.

The goal was intoxication, and as obvious as some of the above tactics might appear now, Romeo and Juliet remains a heady brew. The mega make-out movie’s principals handled such fantastic early pop culture fortunes with varying success. Hussey carved out a long, diverse adult acting career in projects around the globe. Whiting, an unhappy teen idol ("Oh Romeo, Romeo, why are you so difficult to talk to?" Tiger Beat lamented), tried to earn cred in an eccentric array of projects. But most were poorly received, apart from 1973’s exceptional all-star TV movie Frankenstein: The True Story, in which he played the bad doctor. The next year he retired to engage in other pursuits.

Zeffirelli — an opera director before, during, and after his relevancy as a screen auteur — revealed himself to be a maestro of overripe kitsch in such films as 1971’s Brother Sun, Sister Moon (a now-unwatchable Jesus People Movement–era shampoo-commercial take on St. Francis), 1988’s Young Toscanini (La Liz meets C. Thomas Howell), and 1999’s Cher-starring Fascist Italy soft sell Tea with Mussolini. He’s openly gay, yet a big-time papist (who supports the church’s stance on homosexuality), as well as a member of media magnate and corruption magnet Silvio Berlusconi’s conservative Forza Italia party. One of his greatest legacies may turn out to be inadvertent: Bruce Robinson, who plays Benvolio in Romeo and Juliet, later claimed Zeffirelli’s on-set overtures inspired the genius character of Uncle Monty in Robinson’s immortal 1987 directorial debut, Withnail and I.

Thanks to Marc Huestis’s one-night-only 40th anniversary revival at the Castro Theatre — with Hussey in person, interviewed, and no doubt impersonated by local personalities in the preshow — Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet will be celebrated as a cultural phenomenon. The cheesy contemporary amp-up that Baz Luhrmann engineered in 1996, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes doing the heavy breathing, also struck a popular adolescent chord, but its trendy vulgarity has already aged a whole lot worse than Zeffirelli’s version. The latter remains breathless, and is duly classic.

ROMEO AND JULIET

With Olivia Hussey in person

Thurs/14, 7 p.m., $12.50–$25

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 863-0611

www.castrotheatre.com

Cuckoo for Coco500

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› paulr@sfbg.com

An adage favored by the paterfamilias: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. He has generally deployed this wisdom in the matter of automobiles, while for me it has tended to apply to … well, practically everything. Bizou, for instance. This was the restaurant Loretta Keller opened at the corner of Fourth Street and Brannan in 1993, a time when the corner of Fourth Street and Brannan was a pretty lonely place at night. There was as yet no baseball park or light-rail line nearby, just the dowdy Caltrain station and lots of empty-looking warehouses slouching in the gloom.

Keller had worked at Stars in its glamorous heyday, but her restaurant, which served rustic French and Italian foods in a setting of rustic elegance, most closely resembled Zuni Cafe. The place was always, in my experience, discreetly stunning, and when I learned a few springtimes ago that she was recasting it for contemporary tastes, I thought, Oy. The subtext of the change seemed to be that the city’s most recent bevy of young, rich plutocrats was uninterested in a restaurant with a hint of Provençal languor; to lure them in, you needed halogen spot lamps, unadorned surfaces, certainly more noise, and a menu promising excitement.

Coco500, Bizou’s successor, does answer to this description, but it is nonetheless just as stunning in its own way and is a worthy bearer of the torch. I went in warily, full of skepticism, and was almost instantly won over, and that is about the loudest hallelujah I can sing for any restaurant, reinvented or otherwise.

Most of Coco500’s magic has to do with the food and the service, it must be said. The redesign of the interior emphasizes blond wood and is reminiscent of a Scandinavian Designs store or a sauna, and while there’s nothing wrong with the Danish modern look, it doesn’t exactly send the most accurate subliminal signals about what sort of food to expect. If the cooking is no longer about Provence and Italy, it’s still Cal-Med in some fundamental way. You’re not likely to find lutefisk on the menu, though there is plenty of seafood, and even in California an ethos of seasonality has to account for winter’s being one of the seasons. Bizou was good at this; so is Coco500.

Let’s start with a marvelous flat bread ($10), like the thinnest of thin-crust pizzas, topped with a fine mince of mushrooms and, for some extra chthonic intensity, truffle oil. The sense is of eating slices of especially flavorful winter-dampened earth, and the crust could not be better.

Seafood is more seasonal than we’re sometimes aware, though most Bay Areans probably associate king salmon with summer, and this Bay Arean associates halibut with winter. Ono, on the other hand, I associate with Hawaii; it’s one of those marvelous fish taken from the deep, clean waters around the islands, and while it makes a doubtful entrant on a restaurant menu in San Francisco, thousands of miles distant, Coco500’s kitchen does manage to turn it into a delicious crudo. The chunks of opalescent white flesh are sprinkled with fennel shavings, drizzled with a blood orange gastrique, and wrapped in wildly unseasonal, but tasty, basil leaves. It’s like eating prescooped Chinese lettuce cups.

More winter: celery root ($6), roasted with thyme and neatly cubed, could almost have passed for some sort of potato dish. A cream of cauliflower soup ($6) did not lack for cream — an ingredient of underappreciated potency that can overwhelm through sheer richness but didn’t quite here. Bits of chervil and squirts of paprika oil over the soup’s surface helped maintain balance.

Duck is also wintry for me, maybe because it’s a close relation to goose and roast goose is a classic holiday dish, dramatic if, in the end, more trouble than it’s quite worth. Boneless duck breast, on the other hand, is a type of flesh for all seasons: red and meatlike for bad weather but also highly grillable and always easy to deal with. At Coco500 the duck breast ($23) was grilled (medium), sliced, and presented with two extraordinary companions. One was a whole braised endive, almost like a torpedo onion, the other a duck baklava, rillettes under a pastry roof — completely unexpected and natural at the same time. Also delicious.

Alaskan black cod ($23), also known as sablefish, was another faraway fish, and I should have resisted it on carbon footprint grounds if nothing else, but I was lured in by the bit players: smashed (skin-on) fingerling potatoes and creamed rapini, like creamed spinach but with a sharper edge. The gently sautéed fillet itself, delicate and immaculately white, was good though not exceptional. I did find some ex post facto consolation at Seafood Watch, which reports that black cod is a best choice; the fish are line-caught from well-managed and sustainable fisheries. Please, restaurants, trumpet this kind of information! Don’t assume we have it or always have the presence of mind to ask for it.

We might not have had the presence of mind because we were probably thinking ahead to dessert and other postprandial wonders, such as Armagnac ($10), my latest passion in the liquid fires. Less fiery but not less worthy was a warm apple-huckleberry tart ($8) — basically a single-serve apple pie stained blue by the berries, with an immensely flaky (in the good sense) crust. As for the fruit: I love apples and apple pie, but the huckleberry (a close relation of the blueberry) is an American original, so how about a starring role someday?

COCO500

Mon.–Thurs., 11:30 a.m.–10 p.m.; Fri., 11:30 a.m.–11 p.m.; Sat., 5:30–11 p.m.

500 Brannan, SF

(415) 543-2222

www.coco500.com

Full bar

AE/DC/MC/V

Moderately loud

Wheelchair accessible

Rain on Diego’s Umbrella

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By Molly Freedenberg

I don’t what’s going on, but I’ve been hearing about break-ins happening to bands more and more over the past few months. The latest? SF darlings Diego’s Umbrella. Here’s the story, and how you can help, in their own words:

“Hello everybody, Unfortunately we had a bit of tragedy strike while we were on tour in the Northwest as our trailer was broken into and a good deal of our equipment was stolen.

The police have no leads as of yet and many times these crimes go unsolved so we are coming to terms with the reality of the situation. As we are still starving musicians this comes as a huge blow and we are trying to reach out to anybody who can help. If you have ever seen us, heard us, met us, danced with us or laughed with us, please consider the smallest donation to help keep Diego’s Umbrella playing.

They can be sent to:
Diego’s Umbrella
530 Divisadero St. 204
San Francisco, CA 94117

Anything and everything is appreciated

Thanks,
D.U.

To contact:
diegosumbrella@yahoo.com”

diegos umbrella - Diego's Umbrella at The Roxy in LA.jpg
DU at the Roxy in L.A. With equipment. See, bands play better that way.

SFBG vs. SF Weekly lawsuit

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@@http://www.sfbg.com/blogs/politics/2008/03/guardian_wins_156_million.html@@

Slap that ass for spring

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By Justin Juul

“I don’t know what it is about women, but I will go to my grave wanting to pet their butts and boobs.” — Kurt Vonnegut

spank.jpg

If Mr. Vonnegut had been born 50 years later, his famous quote might read something more like I don’t know what it is about women, but I will go to my grave wanting to spank their asses. What? Haven’t you heard? Spanking is the new hugging. Everyone’s doing it. And it’s totally natural too. Behind-the-scenes activities may differ from relationship to relationship, but nearly all of them involve some sort of spanking ritual. My girlfriend, for example, gets spanked whenever she reaches for fruit from the bottom drawer of the fridge. She gets it when she’s tying her shoes, petting her cat, and well, anytime really. And she loves it! (I hope.) But alas, there’s a stigma attached to spanking. It’s something only immoral sex freaks do, some people say. Well, this is San Francisco and we say spank away.

But how, you ask. Well, there are plenty of ways to slap an ass. But, as with most things, it’s best to get some guidance. Thank god for Good Vibrations. And thank god for Rosy Cheeks, the store’s new spanking instructor. Apparently, while the rest of us were out stuffing our faces and drinking eggnog over the holiday break, Ms. Cheeks was drafting the lesson plan for her new class, Hot Spanking, which she’ll be teaching in March at The Good Vibrations store on Polk Street. Too late for Valentine’s Day — but springtime’s coming, people. Time to get that ass in gear!

Hot Spanking
March 18, 8pm-10pm
$25 pre-register/$30 drop-in
Good Vibrations
1620 Polk Street, SF
(415) 345-0400
www.goodvibes.com

The bears are a-comin’!

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If you happen to notice large numbers of big furry gays prowling the streets, gyms, cafes, dance floors, and internets of SF this week (craigslist M4M is a total hirsute hoot this time of year), then be not alarmed — it’s merely the influx of hearty attendees for International Bear Rendezvous 2008, the huge hairy gathering sponsored by the Bears of San Francisco.

The conference/celebration takes place Feb 14-18 at the Holiday Inn Golden Gateway — and it’s pretty all-encompassing, with satellite pudge-parties and ravenous ribaldry (with Tiffany?!?), and also a few panels and local vendor booths (although the emphasis seems less and less on these each year).

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Cub and the City

I got a lot of shit last year for writing about changes in the bear community (what I dubbed Bear 2.0) now that a younger generation of bears has come of age, with its focus less on community activism and combating negative gay mainstream stereotypes a la twinky Will and Grace and more on dancing to techno and having slutty fun (and a sense of humor, duh). It’ll be interesting to see how right I was again this year, but I’m a full on chubby-chaser, darlings — and February is huntin’ season in this neck of the woof woods. Suit up!

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