SF

3-D Technicolor

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› johnny@sfbg.com

A Cornelius concert at the Fillmore is great because Cornelius, a.k.a. Keigo Oyamada, appreciates the setting’s history far better than your average rocker. It’s also ideal because the venue is kitty-corner from Japantown, where the colors on the metal boxes containing pencils and crayons at the Kinokuniya stationery store aren’t far — logistically or in spirit — from the drip-paint blue, yellow, red, and black on the cover of his latest album, Sensuous (Everloving).

Vivid color has long been important to Cornelius’s aesthetic. I’ll never forget the day I bought the initial, Japanese edition of his 1997 album Fantasma (Matador) at Kinokuniya’s bookstore. I was blown away to discover that its Orangesicle packaging included a pair of white earphones — and even more wowed when I put on those earphones and realized that Oyamada had used three-dimensional digital recording to chart new rock-and-space vistas.

A decade later Oyamada remains clear about his concepts, breaking down the differences between his last three albums in the simplest terms. "Fantasma was an album that included all sorts of information that was gathered and edited," he writes via e-mail when asked about his approach to music and visuals. "Point (Matador [2001]) was an album that included information that was necessary, and it was arranged that way. Sensuous is like a brushed-up version of Point." Indeed, commencing with the breeze-grazed chimes of the title track and closing with the warm cyborg nighty-night of Oyamada’s take on the Dean Martin chestnut "Sleep Warm," Sensuous finds a precise midpoint between Fantasma‘s meta-Disney excess and Point‘s sharp minimalism.

Filtered through e-mail channels, Oyamada is less forthcoming than I remember him being during a stroll through Chinatown one night around the time of Fantasma‘s United States release. He suggests that his wife, Takako Minekawa — who hasn’t released a recording under her own name since 2000’s Maxi On, on Polygram — will probably share her music with listeners again someday, noting that last year she recorded with Ryuichi Sakamoto. Oyamada says his son, Milo (named after the child of Planet of the Apes‘s Cornelius), is a fan of the ’70s pop band Godiego, who made the theme song for the Japanese TV show Monkey. He states that he’s looking forward to visiting relatives and eating Italian food while in San Francisco. (It’s no accident that Oyamada named his influential — though now defunct — record label Trattoria.)

Nonetheless, Southern California might be a highlight of Cornelius’s current tour. He has a date at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. "A Cornelius show is a synchronization of sound and visuals and it’s influenced by Disney’s Fantasia," Oyamada says when asked about the venue. "I was trying to make a rock version of Fantasia [in Fantasma]. So I’m very happy [to be playing there]."

Oyamada knows better than anyone that sound charts limitless outer and inner space, suggesting other worlds and also bridging different countries (say, Brazil and Japan) and time periods (say, from the ’60s to 10 years from now). Looking through one of Cornelius’s Web sites, I happened on a photograph of Oyamada posing happily with Caetano Veloso, a find that immediately brought a new perspective to the way I hear particular recordings by both artists. Certainly, the inspiration for Fantasma (a still-ahead-of-its-time collection that was rejected as too fractured and manic by some US rock critics who had no problem kissing Beck’s feet) can be found in Veloso’s recently reissued 1972 album Araçá Azul (Lilith), an album that — returned for refunds by a multitude of confounded consumers — was similarly radical in its application of collage aesthetics to symphonics.

"About two years ago I went to go see [Veloso’s] show around the time Takako [Minekawa] did a remix of his son Moreno’s band [Moreno+2]," Oyamada explains when asked about the photo. "He performed music that ranged from standard bossa nova to avant-garde compositions, and covered DNA and Nirvana. It’s in my top three of the best shows I’ve ever seen in my life."

Some people rank Cornelius shows high on their lists, thanks to Oyamada’s gift for spectacle. As for Sensuous, its highlights — especially the gliding flight of "Omstart," a collaboration with Erland Øye — have a prismatic quality that no colored pencil or paintbrush, even the 70-some varieties at Kinokuniya, can approximate.

CORNELIUS

Fri/18, 8 p.m., $25

Fillmore

1805 Fillmore, SF

(415) 346-4000

www.cornelius-sound.com

Bye bye beautiful

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

There’s a wonderful moment during the performance of "Bye Bye Blackbird" that opens the 1964 Chet Baker set preserved on a recent Jazz Icons DVD (Chet Baker Live in ’64 and ’79 [Reelin in the Years]). In the midst of the squarish piano player’s solo, the star trumpeter shuffles into the medium close-up frame, shucking a cigarette from his accompanist’s pack. Chiseled even when sporting a stuffy sweater, Baker takes a long drag and glides back to his place on the stage. The pianist plays on, but the camera operator tracks Baker, plainly in the clutch of a lonely lothario.

The cigarette break is more revealing of Baker’s largesse — his ineffable cool and the desire it produced — than any of his softly sustaining trumpet solos for the television program are. It also sheds some light on the side-winding portraiture that marks Bruce Weber’s adoring documentary Let’s Get Lost, filmed during the last months of Baker’s life in 1987 and now playing in a restored print at the Castro Theatre.

The first interview in Let’s Get Lost is with photographer William Claxton, an early admirer of Baker’s who waxes poetic about the revelation of shooting such a naturally photogenic subject. Weber, known for innumerable sleek Calvin Klein and Abercrombie and Fitch spreads, riffles through these striking stills in contact-sheet form, a neat solution to the persistent documentary problem of how to make archival photographs move. Twenty minutes pass before we begin to explore Baker’s music, and there are another 20 minutes after that before we meet his Oklahoma mother, our first whiff of personal history. Backward, it might seem, except for Baker’s being a cipher of his own iconography.

"He was trouble and he was beautiful," an interviewee muses early in Let’s Get Lost, and it might as well be the film’s byline. He was beautiful, possessing a ravaged, introspective glamour attractive to both men and women: writing about Baker’s underfed croon in his excellent liner notes for The Best of Chet Baker Sings (Blue Note, 1953), Will Friedwald notes, "His moony voice twangs like an Oakie [sic]-cum-valley person at times, but more often he achieves geographic — not to mention sexual — ambivalence." Though less remembered today than James Dean or Jack Kerouac, Baker had a comparable rogue appeal, his missing front tooth suggestive of wounded sensitivity, his shoulders bent under the unknowable weight of being himself.

Weber’s velvety black-and-white cinematography has never met a silhouette it didn’t like, and indeed, his documentary is first and foremost a tribute to Baker’s arch stylishness. Insofar as Josef von Sternberg, Leni Riefenstahl, and Michelangelo Antonioni’s idolatrous visions are often said to anticipate modern fashion imagery, Weber must rightly be considered their direct descendent: a fashion photographer turned filmmaker unapologetically devoted to surfaces. He is equally attentive to the silvery bleach of Santa Monica, the inky black swallowing various stage spotlights, and the shadows of heroin abuse running across Baker’s unbearably gaunt 57-year-old face — all shot in an amorous chiaroscuro evocative of the trumpeter’s West Coast cool musical phrasings, his constant drug nod, and the late-night languidness of his smoking and speech.

But, of course, Baker was trouble too, and this is where Let’s Get Lost can feel strained. Though clearly a labor of love, the film shrugs off conclusiveness as casually as one of Baker’s shopworn melodies might. For one thing, Weber isn’t much of an interviewer, asking the musician’s mother, "Did he disappoint you as a son?" and directing one of Baker’s ex-wives to "tell me something romantic." Still, with the recent documentary explosion prizing kinetic revelations at all costs, Weber’s patient accumulation is a virtue in itself. We hear several versions of a story about Baker getting his teeth knocked out, and although none of them paints a convincingly specific picture, we do get the overarching thrust of a sad decline.

Originally released the same year as Gus Van Sant’s similarly loving debut, Mala Noche, Let’s Get Lost gives the lie to the notion that every gaze is created equal. Weber may wrap the disillusionment of Baker’s life in the romanticism of the latter’s demeanor, but the director also gives the spiraling musician space for self-expression (including a couple of lovely, understated full performances) and, in an empathetic final scene, offers to buy him a methadone fix. The film is as recklessly lyrical as Baker was himself, and it’s in this way that — in spite of its shortcomings as biography — Let’s Get Lost has the spiritual heft of an ample epigraph. The ragged icon mumbles about the film’s production being "a dream," and the inevitable fade to black and memorial that follows seem exactly the type of void he’d like to walk into. *

LET’S GET LOST

Opens Fri/18, $6–$9

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

Imagine San Francisco without rent control

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OPINION If you think the mortgage foreclosure crisis is big, imagine what would happen to San Francisco if rent control were repealed.

With 180,000 rent-controlled apartments currently housing more than 350,000 San Franciscans, the end of rent control would be disastrous. Literally hundreds of thousands would be forced from their homes and forced to leave the city.

The pain and suffering people would face as they lost their homes would be immense, making the foreclosure problem seem insignificant by comparison. Maybe even worse, repealing rent control would destroy forever the soul of San Francisco, eliminating altogether the city’s character and diversity and leaving it nothing more than a wealthy enclave affordable only to the very rich.

Envisioning the loss of rent control and the effect that would have is not fantasy. A statewide ballot measure this June would abolish rent control in San Francisco and all across California. The measure would also abolish requirements that developers include affordable housing in their projects. That means we could wake up on June 4 this year with all affordable housing in San Francisco gone — unless we all work as hard as we can to save our rent control and our affordable housing.

In 1979, rent control was adopted in San Francisco, and it was accomplished only because thousands of San Francisco tenants made it happen. People collected signatures, made phone calls, walked precincts, packed City Hall hearings, and demonstrated and marched. Through collective grassroots activism, rent control became a reality. Now many of us think of rent control as something we’ve always had and a law that will always be there.

But we need to face reality: in five months, all limits on rent hikes could be gone. It won’t be easy to save rent control, and we need to begin our work now. The fate of rent control will largely be up to voters in San Francisco and Los Angeles, where most California renters live. Los Angeles tenants are organizing and mounting a strong campaign there. We need to do the same in San Francisco.

The San Francisco campaign to save rent control will kick off Jan. 19 with a citywide mobilization of tenants and allied organizations to plan and begin our work. If we’re going to save rent control, we need the same level of grassroots activism we had when we fought to get rent control in 1979, and we need tenants to come to the Save Rent Control Convention and begin the hard work to keep our homes.

This will be a working convention: following an overview about the measure, we will map out strategies and plans for fundraising, voter registration and education, media strategies, Web site development, rally organization, and all of the other components that make for a successful grassroots campaign. The tasks are many, and there’s not much time.

If we lose rent control, we’ll lose not just our homes but also our city. Saving rent control is not a fight people can sit out and hope someone else will do something about.

Ted Gullicksen

Ted Gullicksen runs the San Francisco Tenants Union.

The Save Rent Control Convention will be Jan. 19, 1–4 p.m., at Centro del Pueblo, 474 Valencia (at 16th St.), SF. For more information on the rent control repeal measure, see www.saverentcontrol.net or www.sftu.org. For more information, call (415) 282-5525.

Showdown at 55 Laguna

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› sarah@sfbg.com

Time is running out on attempts by Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, State Sen. Carole Migden, and Assemblymember Mark Leno to secure greater affordable-housing levels from the University of California, which wants to build private residential units on its UC Berkeley Extension campus at 55 Laguna in San Francisco.

Since the school site closed more than three years ago, critics have questioned how the UC’s plan for the campus, which served a public use for more than 150 years, will benefit the community, while preservationists succeeded in getting the campus awarded historic landmark status.

But with the UC claiming "unrestricted power to take and hold real and personal property for the benefit of the university" in a public statement, the city’s regulatory power is limited. The San Francisco Planning Commission is scheduled to consider the project Jan. 17, including the demolition of Middle Hall Gymnasium, the oldest building on the campus, and Richardson Hall Annex. But local and state legislative officials are focused on trying to get more affordable housing at the site.

Although negotiations were still ongoing at Guardian press time, the UC’s plan was to demolish the two historically landmarked buildings on the 5.8-acre Hayes Valley campus and build 450 new housing units, 16 percent of them to be offered below market rates, about the minimum number under the city’s inclusionary-housing law.

"But we’re pushing hard at the bottom line," said Mirkarimi, who, along with Migden, Leno, the city’s Planning Department, the Mayor’s Office of Housing, and affordable-housing activists, has been meeting with developer A.F. Evans and Openhouse, a local nonprofit that intends to build an 80-unit, market-rate, LGBT-friendly, senior residential community on the site.

"And we are trying at a separate venue to appeal to the UC Regents to be more sensitive and cooperative in what their bottom line profitability level is," Mirkarimi, whose District 5 includes Hayes Valley, told the Guardian.

Mirkarimi said he’s in favor of preserving all five buildings at the site but that both the Planning Commission’s Landmark Advisory Committee and the Board of Supervisors have voted to preserve only three. "We are trying to be pragmatic yet clear as to what our objectives are in trying to make a complex deal that’s triangulated by UC Berkeley, A.F. Evans, and Openhouse, with UC as the big daddy in the room.

"UC can do almost what UC wants. But the city’s leverage comes from UC asking for housing to be built and requesting a zoning change at a site that has become a magnet for grime and crime," Mirkarimi said. "It would also be negligent for UC to let this site remain in its current condition.

Under state law, the UC is exempt from city and county zoning and building codes if it builds educational facilities or projects that are deemed to be in the public interest. But according to officials with the City Attorney’s Office, the UC is not exempt from such codes if it turns over its land for private development.

And then there’s the city’s claim that it never conveyed the title to Waller Street, which lies between Buchanan and Laguna streets and is essential to the project, giving opponents some leverage. The UC disputes the city’s claim, but Mirkarimi maintains that the Board of Supervisors’ control of the street "provides a contingency plan if we are not making progress. And either way, UC is going to have to pay for the right to Waller."

The UC’s 55 Laguna project manager Kevin Hufferd confirmed that he is having "ongoing discussions with state and city officials" but declined to comment further.

"Frustrating" is how queer affordable-housing activist Tommi Avicolli Mecca described the last-minute discussions about the 55 Laguna development plan. "A.F. Evans claims it won’t be making any money and that they can’t do any more," Mecca told the Guardian. He attended a Jan. 11 meeting with the company at which, he claims, the developers offered to increase affordability levels to 19.5 percent but Mirkarimi pushed for more.

"To his credit, Sup. Ross Mirkarimi keeps saying this is unacceptable," Avicolli Mecca said, also lauding the Mayor’s Office of Housing for trying to make Openhouse’s project "100 percent affordable."

Currently, Openhouse’s development includes no below-market-rate units, a situation Avicolli Mecca claims the MOH hopes to change "through bringing in subsidies."

"Obviously, we are not against queer senior housing," Avicolli Mecca said. "The issue is that this is a lousy deal. What are we getting? Nothing, but UC gains a lot of money. There’s a crazy need for affordable housing and no way to justify this plan."

Filmmaker Eliza Hemingway, whose documentary Uncommon Knowledge records how the UC shuttered 55 Laguna with no input from — and little concern for — staff, students, and the surrounding community, believes that people have lost sight of the public use issue.

"They are worn down by the struggle, by trying to find a compromise because the space is empty, but the question remains: why is a public campus being privately developed?" Hemingway told us. She mourns the loss of educational programs and spaces that benefited the community and the lack of transparency that has marred the UC’s plans.

"For there to have been such huge barriers to the public process over what is a huge amount of public land is unfortunate," Hemingway said.

Cynthia Servetnick of the Save the UC Berkeley Extension Laguna Street Campus told us her group is prepared to file a lawsuit under the California Environmental Quality Act if the project as currently proposed is approved.

"We’d rather see a project that has 40 percent affordable housing at 50 percent [area median income] than a lawsuit, but $38,000 a year [which would be the annual income requirement for seniors, the disabled, and people with AIDS to be able to afford one of Openhouse’s units] is too high," she said, noting that the proposed units are small but could go for $4,000 a month, rising to $7,000 monthly for those who need more services and staff.

Claiming that recognition of the campus as a historic landmark assists project sponsors in accessing preservation incentives, including federal tax credits, Servetnick said, "A.F. Evans has its [environmental impact report] complete and is clearing the way for 450 units, but they could do that and save all the historic buildings, thus having the same profitability but more affordability. It’s now or never. This is a new term for the mayor, we have a new city planning director, John Rahaim, and officials open to negotiating a win-win."

Migden was even more blunt. "Poor old queers need a place to retire too," she said. "Either Evans and the UC up the affordability level to 40 or 50 percent and guarantee that some of the senior LGBT units are subsidized, or the project dies."

As of press time, A.F. Evans, Openhouse, the SF Planning Department, and UC representatives had not returned the Guardian‘s calls.

Deferring to Mirkarimi to make an official announcement, Leno said, "I know that the meetings have been ongoing and that the issue of affordability is a priority, and I’m hopeful that we will have an agreement among all stakeholders shortly."

Friday fluff: Possibly the cutest thing ever

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What with tiger attacks, sonic booms killing off arctic life, and leopard and bear near-escapes at the SF Zoo — not to mention another oil-laden barge crashing into another bay bridge! — we turn our attention to the Tiergarden Nuernberg zoo, where this little fuzzy wonder popped out.

polar.jpg

Sure, it had to be removed from its mother for fear that she would attack it, but we love nature anyway. Here’s more.

Bad to the (funny) bone

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HELLA SKETCHY Stop acting like you don’t love bad movies. Me, I’ll go to the mat for Point Break or Reign of Fire any day of the week. This is why I feel a kinship with Michael J. Nelson, formerly of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and currently of RiffTrax.com, which peddles Nelson’s downloadable commentaries for more than 50 snarkworthy movies and TV shows. A past favorite at SF Sketchfest, "RiffTrax Live!" invades the Castro Theatre as part of this year’s fest, with MST3K vets Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett taking on the notorious Plan 9 from Outer Space. I got Nelson on the phone for a pre-grave-robbin’-aliens chat.

SFBG You’re showing the colorized version of Plan 9, whose DVD has your commentary track. Will the live show have different jokes? And how many times have you seen the movie?

MICHAEL J. NELSON Some of the [jokes] will remain the same, but most of [them] will change. I’ve probably only seen [the movie] all the way through about 10 times, but each time through, it takes hours and hours, so it adds up to 100 times or something.

SFBG Don’t you get sick of it?

MJN The craft of the joke writing is what I love and what energizes me. Also, when you become so familiar with a movie — it’s weird — it’s almost like seeing the movie at a different level. There are some movies that I couldn’t take that with — bad movies that are just bad and boring. And Plan 9 is one of those that’s obviously stood the test of time because it’s funny-bad. Most bad movies are not funny-bad. They’re just bad — grinding, horrible bad.

SFBG How would you define a good-bad movie?

MJN It has to be sincere. It has to take itself seriously, and then it just has to fail in some really silly ways, rather than failing in some really boring ways — goofy elements [like] ridiculous costumes or dialogue [that makes] you just wonder, how could they have possibly written that?

SFBG Is it ever hard for you to watch a movie and not make fun of it?

MJN No, it’s pretty easy. I think if you’re in the business you do tend to be more critical — there are people who watch movies, just, [like,] "I don’t really care. I enjoyed it. I don’t look at it critically." I’ve gotten to the point where I respect that view. I just happen not to be one of those people. I watch and I’m hypercritical. But when the movie is good I have no problem enjoying it.

SFBG Do you think MST3K influenced audiences to heckle the screen?

MJN I think it encouraged people in what they already did, which was get together in groups and watch these cultish movies. Or to interact when things like Batman and Robin come along, where your only recourse is to shout back at the screen. In general, though, I think people did it in a party atmosphere — we always said, "Don’t go to the theater and do it!"

SFBG What are the elements of newer good-bad movies, like recent Rifftrax.com selection 300?

MJN I think the excesses of modern movies have become the funny thing — the thing that makes you laugh is the way that they calculate how they think they can get a reaction from you. It’s sort of a cynical act: "Let’s figure out exactly what the average guy would like, and let’s just give it to him in giant doses." They try to entertain the living hell out of you, and when they fail it’s kind of funny.

RIFFTRAX LIVE!

Jan. 17, 9 p.m., $25

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

www.ticketweb.com

SF SKETCHFEST

Jan. 10–27

See Web site for program info

www.sfsketchfest.com

Rain on me

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER How can two goods get mashed so bad? How can an act of generosity get so twisted? What sort of storm hath Radiohead wrought? And in an age of easy digital reproduction and reappropriation, a mashup era, what kind of rights do listeners have regarding music disseminated, seemingly so freely, online — namely, the United Kingdom band’s In Rainbows album? Why can’t hip-hop and indie rock values segue together as gracefully, as artfully, as Oakland DJ-producer Amplive’s trip-hop–tinged remix of "Nude," a suturing together of his group Zion I’s "Don’t Lose Ya Head" and Radiohead’s ethereal hum, with classic Yay touches of Too $hort?

This fall Radiohead released their In Rainbows as a pay-what-you-will download, allowing listeners to grab the sounds for free if they chose and inspiring Amplive to remix their music as a measure of his admiration. The gesture conjures Dangermouse’s hybrid hijack of Jay-Z’s The Black Album (Roc-A-Fella, 2003) and the Beatles’ The Beatles (Apple, 1968), otherwise known as "The White Album," for his Grey Album (2004), though Amplive went as far as to get contributions from Del Tha Funkee Homosapien and Jurassic 5’s Chali2na.

"I just did it to do it, and I love the In Rainbows album — it was just tight!" Amplive told me on the phone this week from the East Bay. "And especially in this age, with remix culture, a lot of people do them. I just did the same. I just wanted to do a hip-hop version of their stuff, and I guess I underestimated what would happened. It just took off."

Word spread, and listeners urged Amplive to remix the entire In Rainbows, a project he dubbed Rainydayz Remixes. As news arrived of the producer’s plans to give away the remix album free of charge online on Jan. 10 to those who had already downloaded In Rainbows or supported a Radiohead-favored charity, Friends of the Earth, the forces that be — i.e., Radiohead publisher Warner/Chappell — moved to put a stop to the fun and games, tribute or no tribute. Amplive had received 3,000 orders when, a few weeks ago, he was sent a cease and desist letter stating that he needed to get approval "before making arrangements of other writers’ work, especially if you have plans to commercially exploit the arrangements/remixes or make them publically available."

Preferring not to get into a legal battle royal and instead appealing to Radiohead online via a video posted on his MySpace page, Amplive decided to put the project on hold. Meanwhile Gigwise.com spoke to Radiohead’s manager Bryce Edge on Jan. 7; he claimed the issue was the use of an image of Thom Yorke to promote Rainydayz Remixes, which implied the Radiohead frontman was involved in the project, and that management had a problem with fans being asked to forward their In Rainbows purchase e-mail in order to receive a free remix LP, which he described as "a bit naughty!" "To be honest, I’m not sure the band have even heard [the remixes]," Edge continued, adding they will meet Jan. 8 to discuss the matter.

Perhaps Edge and company need to take a cue from "Don’t Lose Ya Head"<0x2009>‘s verses. Amplive told me he hadn’t used Radiohead images to promote Rainydayz and instead pointed to music blogs like Hood Internet, which regularly splices together photos of mashed artists. One wonders if Radiohead’s suits have scoped out the other mashups on that specific site (Eve and Thom together at last!) and whether they’re aware of how hypocritical the group appears in putting the kibosh on free remixes — from which Amplive stands to gain nothing apart from praise for his production skills — for what appeared to be a free recording. There’s little talk these days about the other Black Album remixes spawned by the tracks Jay-Z freely released: maybe those reworks failed to capture critics’ imaginations. Amplive’s remixes have caught listeners’ ears, making him the beneficiary, and victim, of too much positive press.

After being hailed as both visionary and realistic in their release of In Rainbows, Radiohead stand only to get a public relations black eye from this entire affair, and perhaps Amplive — who is working on Zion I’s new CD — simply made the mistake of doing deft work and getting more attention for it, from The New York Times among others, than some kid chopping beats on his PC in Pinole. "I just hope Radiohead listens to [the Rainydayz Remixes] and thinks, ‘This is pretty tight. As long as it’s free, let ’em do it,’<0x2009>" the humble Amplive said. "I definitely didn’t want to disrespect their management and infrastructure. I did it totally out of support and love for the group and the music. And it could give them a different kind of exposure — not that they need any help!" *

ZION I

Sat/12, 9 p.m., $20–<\d>$22

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

www.theindependentsf.com

MUSIC WITH A SIDE OF MAYORAL POKES

Mary Van Note has it made: in addition to hosting two nights of the San Francisco Sketchfest at the Hemlock Tavern, the local comedian and mistress of the monthly "Comedy, Darling" show at Edinburgh Castle (the next is Feb. 6) was recently tapped to make shorts for the Independent Film Channel, thanks to her online videos. Too bad the Gav had to ruin everything. "The videos were going to be about me getting a date with Gavin Newsom, and just the other day I saw he’s getting married," Van Note says. "Now it’s going to be about me breaking up his marriage."

Tues/15 and Jan. 22, 8:30 p.m., $10. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk St., SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

DAVID DANIELL


The San Agustin guitarist, onetime Thurston Moore collaborator, and Douglas McCombs cohort works a vein of electronic and acoustic composition and improvisation. With Tom Carter, Donovan Quinn, and Barn Owl. Wed/9, 9:30 p.m., $12. Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. www.cafedunord.com

NEVER HEALED


Thrash like those eardrums never quite stopped bleeding. With Skin like Iron and Grace Alley. Sat/12, 9:30 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

THAO NGUYEN


The Kill Rock Stars starlet hopes to make music more than a hobby once she graduates from college. With Ray’s Vast Basement and the Dry Spells. Sat/12, 9:30 p.m., $10. Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. www.cafedunord.com

EMILY JANE WHITE


The Cat Power–like Bay Area vocalist waxed hauntingly on her recent Dark Undercoat (Double Negative). With the Complications and Mylo Jenkins. Sun/13, 8 p.m., $6. Make-Out Room, 3225 22nd St., SF. www.makeoutroom.com

RICKIE LEE JONES


The many moods of the beat poetess shift with each performance of this intimate, monthlong residency. Tues/15, Jan. 22 and 29, and Feb. 5, 8:30 p.m., $25–<\d>$30. Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. www.cafedunord.com

Resort recollections

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Welcome to Mi Ami — where the only hint of tropical exposure is the stifling humidity of an all-night dance party. Here in Mi Ami, there are no arced palms, hungry crocs, or pesky tourists getting in the way of all the sheer nastiness shaking and stirring about. Within its pulsating realm — a world-beat machine of tireless, congalike aerobics — delayed and jangly guitars, dirty bass, and skronky electronics fill the dank atmosphere as sticky, gyrating bodies press up against one another and ripple to and fro. The sweat beads will probably sting your eyeballs, and you might even collapse from near exhaustion, but perhaps that’ll just indicate that your body is kicking into overdrive. At least you’ll know the noisesome dub punkers of San Francisco’s Mi Ami have put a dent in your psyche.

Daniel Martin-McCormick, the group’s lead vocalist and guitarist, confessed to me over the phone that his involvement with Mi Ami began as a result of his frustrations and technical limitations as a musician. Raised in what he described as a "very conservative" Washington DC, Martin-McCormick spent most of his time there playing in punk bands with current Mi Ami bassist Jacob Long, one of them the explosive dance-punk outfit Black Eyes. After that combo fizzled, the discouraged Martin-McCormick — who cited free jazz and modern composition as primary motivations to advance his guitar playing beyond punk rock — relocated to the Bay Area to study classical guitar at San Francisco State University in January 2005.

"At a certain point I felt like I was trying too much to fit into a box of what I thought my music probably should be and I wasn’t spending enough time on it," he explained. "I started to get into free jazz, which had a big impact on me because I was thinking, ‘Wow, this is insane,’ and it got me thinking, ‘Well, what am I doing with my life?’

"Not too many people playing punk are going to get beyond three good records, or whatever. So I felt I needed to take this a step further and start pushing myself in this kind of abstracted, rigorous way," he added.

After he chanced on Damon Palermo at a summer 2006 noise show where they were both playing sets, Martin-McCormick said, the two agreed that "playing in the improv genre wasn’t quite taking us to the places we were hoping to get to." So the pair decided to start their own project together.

"I’d gotten too far away from the original feeling of inspiration and more into wanting to imitate things I admired but couldn’t necessarily play," Martin-McCormick revealed. "I felt I needed to get back to something more personal and was listening to a lot of dance music, so I thought, ‘Well, I don’t know if this is a place to stay, but it’s a place to start. Here’s a beat — I can at least borrow this beat for a second, and maybe that’ll resuscitate me.’<0x2009>"

Since reinserting the beat into their life, Mi Ami played the hell out of the Bay Area DJ circuit before regrouping and handing bass duties to Long this past fall. Martin-McCormick is hopeful the band’s White Denim–issued 12-inch debut, African Rhythms, will see the light of day before Mi Ami embark on an East Coast tour in February, but in the meantime this dance party is just getting started. And it will never be the same again.

MI AMI

With Short Hair, Planets, and Manacle

Sat/12, 9:30 p.m., $5

Edinburgh Castle

950 Geary, SF

(415) 885-4074

www.castlenews.com

The stranger

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Where to begin with Jandek? First, a definition: Jandek is a phenomenon, as plainly uncanny as a lightning storm. Then on to the facts of the case: initially emerging in 1978 with the Ready for the House album (Corwood), Jandek has since released a steady stream of haunting LPs: 51 at last count, each talismanic of a cumulative mystery. The records originate from Corwood Industries, PO Box 15375, in Houston, a company that seems to exist solely to disseminate Jandek music. The discs contain no supplemental information, and the whole enterprise propagates with pseudocorporate anonymity — the performer is usually invoked as the "Representative from Corwood."

These inputs are nothing in and of themselves, but like a Rubik’s Cube, they have become a source of tantalizing fascination for a few. The music, which ranges from the inscrutable to the harrowing, comes on like icebergs in the night. The first full-lengths (especially 1981’s Six and Six) lay out the basic Jandek sound: immersive death-letter blues, unstudied and intense. Misshapen chords crumble in his clanking tunings and obtrusive picking patterns. Songs end with the dull thud of a stopped tape recorder.

There have been additions and subtractions since this first period: a thudding racket of drums on a string of releases in the mid-’80s, cryptic collaborations ("Nancy Sings"), a wonderfully severe "breakup" album (1987’s Blue Corpse), and a short phase of unlistenable a cappella (2000’s Put My Dream on This Planet, 2001’s This Narrow Road, and 2004’s Worthless Recluse). Evaluative criteria have been junked, lyrics and titles scrambled, and explications left unanswered. Even something as basic as Jandek’s chronology is up in the air: many of his closest listeners do not believe the albums are released in the same order in which they were recorded.

The covers further channel these constantly shifting parameters, as well as the intensely desolate nature of the Jandek persona. Like the recordings, they are pointedly unprofessional, evoking the titular hero without pinning him down. When the figure does appear, he is inevitably alone and dour. Like the lyrics, multiple album covers are drawn from a single photo session, if not from one single photograph (2006’s What Else Does the Time Mean and The Ruins of Adventure).

Jandek has carved a tremendous field of negative space and achieved a collusion with his devotees as remarkable, in its way, as the one associated with the Grateful Dead. As far as dedicated fandom goes, Seth Tisue’s annotated Web site (tisue.net/jandek) is simply amazing. While looking over Tisue’s notes, it’s easy to appreciate how much the Representative from Corwood rocked the boat when he announced his first live performances in 2004. Thirty shows later, he is making his first scheduled West Coast appearance at the appropriately chaste Swedish American Hall.

Unprecedented perhaps, though not necessarily as shocking as it might first appear. A proper recluse doesn’t want any kind of attention, whereas Jandek simply seems to want to tightly regulate the flow of information. There’s an unexpectedly illuminating moment in a 1985 phone interview highlighted in the Jandek on Corwood documentary (2003) when Jandek confesses he only decided to go on with his project after Ready for the House received a good notice from now defunct OP magazine. Is it such a stretch, then, to connect Jandek’s decision to begin performing live to the increased attention following the film?

Regardless, any fears that Jandek would be sacrificing his essence have been allayed by the fiery quality of the concerts. He pens a new set of lyrics for each, performing the compositions with an unfamiliar nest of collaborators plucked from the local experimental music community. San Francisco is especially rich in this regard, and two of the area’s best will fall into Jandek’s orbit Jan. 12: Ches Smith (Xiu Xiu, Good for Cows) is marked down for drums and Tom Carter (Charlambides, Badgerlore) for bass.

Carter wrote to me about a previous experience playing with the Representative from Corwood, "It was one of the heaviest playing situations of my life. He didn’t demand much specifically from the other musicians, but there was definitely a sense that there was something he wanted, and that if you didn’t figure it out yourself, it was on your head if the performance fell flat."

The shows may last longer than the records, but this seems less of an issue when you acknowledge the elastic, architectural quality of the music. The recordings, in any event, are an apt preparation for the appearances, as they too seem to unfold in stuttering real time. After we listen, our throats are dried out, our blinking irregular, and it seems the preceding minutes have passed through a dark star. We do not ask for music to move us like this, but once it does it is hard to imagine anything else.

Some fans think the performances and recent spike in releases indicate that the Representative from Corwood has retired from his day job. Regardless of whether he has, he’s certainly earned the right to embrace his artist self. Whether we choose to visit his terrain or keep away is inconsequential next to the fact that Jandek is undeniably there. Insofar as this body of work represents the buzzing strangeness lurking just behind the flecked curtains of everyday Americana, the Representative from Corwood is on a track similar to that of Thomas Pynchon or David Lynch. Ever inscrutable and increasingly undeniable, the Jandek discography has somehow wormed its way onto the map. 2

JANDEK

Sat/12, 7:30 p.m., $25

Swedish American Hall

2170 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

www.cafedunord.com

Lucky 13

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Since 1996 the Goethe-Institut’s annual Berlin and Beyond Film Festival has been bringing German-language cinema from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland to the Europhiles of San Francisco. As 2008 marks the festival’s 13th year — which signals a transition toward maturity in many cultures — it’s perhaps appropriate that several offerings come from directors who have already brought their first or second films here. One example is Robert Thalheim, winner of the fest’s 2005 Best First Feature Award for Netto, who returns with his fictional account of a young German’s experience of working in Auschwitz today, And Along Come Tourists. But perhaps no triumphal return is more anticipated than that of Fatih Akin, whose The Edge of Heaven comes to San Francisco after garnering multiple awards on the festival circuit, including best screenplay honors last spring in Cannes.

Akin is a director much concerned with connection. After exploring the tenuous alliances of family and homeland in 2002’s Solino and the complex, at times violent bonds of love in 2004’s Head-On, he meditates on death’s unanticipated capacity to unite the living in his newest film. The slow pace and nonlinear construction of his latest offering might initially surprise audiences looking for the visceral force of his previous movies, but it’s a surprise worth following to the film’s introspective conclusion.

Heaven begins by focusing on characters of Turkish descent living in Germany, a diaspora of more than two million people. When aging pensioner Ali (Tuncel Kurtiz) seeks comfort in the arms of middle-aged prostitute Yeter (Nursel Köse), it is their common language, not just the blow job, that excites him. Ali also speaks Turkish to his son Nejat (Baki Davrak), a fastidious intellectual, but divines that otherwise their relationship lacks closeness. Nejat and Yeter quietly ally after she reveals she is prostituting herself in order to put her daughter through school in Istanbul, and when an act of unexpected violence shatters their fledgling harmony, he resolves to find Yeter’s daughter and finance her studies himself.

At this point Heaven breaks away from simple narrative to trace the intricately entwined paths of three strong-willed women. Yeter’s daughter, Ayten (Nurgül Yesilçay), is not a student after all, but a revolutionary and a freedom fighter. Following a police raid on her flat, she comes to Germany to find her mother. Instead, she finds Lotte (Patrycia Ziolkowska), a headstrong German girl who offers her a place to stay. Soon they embark on an almost gratuitous (yet earnestly portrayed) lesbian relationship. Former Rainer Werner Fassbinder muse Hanna Schygulla’s nuanced performance as Susanne, Lotte’s disapproving mother, is one of the film’s strongest. Struggling to relate to her stubborn daughter, she adds a necessary ballast of reason, even as Lotte abruptly leaves home to follow Ayten, who’s been deported to Turkey and jailed.

Another death is all it takes to draw the survivors together, discovering in one another and themselves the attributes they thought were lost with the deceased. Susanne and Nejat in particular find solace in their unifying memories, creating a link that, though forged from tragedy, speaks more to life. Leaving all final reconciliation offscreen, Akin deftly ends his film on a note of pensive ambiguity, a restraint that befits his rising reputation as a director entering his prime.

Another Berlin and Beyond alum, Christian Petzold, delivers a film that — though it couldn’t be more texturally different from Akin’s — is strangely complementary to Heaven. Disassociation, not connection, is the overriding theme of Yella, propelling the titular protagonist from East to West, desperation to determination, the bottom of a river to the head of a boardroom. Nina Hoss plays a woman haunted in every sense of the word. After leaving her small East German village and abusive husband behind in search of a new life as a corporate drone in Hannover, she can’t keep remnants of her past from resurfacing in disorienting ways. Even though you can spot the supposed surprise plot twist an hour away, Hoss’s slow unraveling casts a spell. *

THE EDGE OF HEAVEN

Thurs/10, 8 p.m., Castro (opening-night party 6:30–8 p.m., $35)

YELLA

Sat/12, 8 p.m., Castro

BERLIN AND BEYOND FILM FESTIVAL

Runs Jan. 10–16 at the Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF, and the Goethe-Institut, 530 Bush, SF, and Jan. 19 at the Arena Theater, 210 Main, Point Arena. For tickets (most films $10) and additional information, call (415) 263-8760 or visit www.berlinandbeyond.com

Angels with dirty faces

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

The Bay Area boasts some of the most forward-thinking film programmers in the country, but even here there’s often no getting around the circuitous, arbitrary workings of foreign film distribution. No matter how big a hit in its festival travels, the foreign film must dutifully wait untold months until it is dressed up by Sony Pictures Classics or released to no fanfare by a small distributor like Film Movement. That particular company is backing the belated American opening of Francisco Vargas’s The Violin, a plainly appealing sleeper that picked up major festival awards from Cannes to San Francisco as well as major props from star director Guillermo del Toro (quoted as saying, "In The Violin lies the future of Mexican cinema").

I mention all of this here only to emphasize that it’s something of a coincidence that The Violin is opening in the shadow of several American movies obsessed with death in the open West, a landscape in which violence congeals as fast as the pop of an air gun or the rush of an oil geyser. A coincidence perhaps, but a bracing one for the way it compounds the eerie calm of Vargas’s debut feature, which, completely contrary to the excellent No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood (let alone Redacted), works to profess the fullness of the soul locked in dubious battle.

As with many overtly lyrical westerns, The Violin‘s coordinates — mountains and village, the bar and the barracks, guerrillas and soldiers — aren’t specific. Whichever war is being fought, it has already spiraled into abstraction; the opening credits roll over a ravishingly composed torture sequence in which military men maim peasants for no reason other than their being indistinguishable from the guerrillas. The sequence establishes the tone through its look, with soft black-and-white cinematography suffusing the villagers’ tragedy with an ennobling grace reminiscent of Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men portraiture.

This prologue is unnerving for being a composition before it is an action — even as that action is so despairingly brutal. As Vargas slips into the main of The Violin, though, this predilection for romantic chiaroscuro inscribes his fable with the dangerous delicacy of a daydream. The plot, such as it is, gets under way when an old man and his adult son go busking with their violin and guitar, the youngest member of this patrilineal trio, Lucio, collecting the change. Later the adult son, Genaro, slips into the back room of a bar (another space painted in shadow and smoke) to procure weapons for his village’s guerrillas. It’s to no avail, since by the time he returns to the town with his child and his violinist father, the magisterial Don Plutarco (the Cannes-awarded Ángel Tavira), the Army has already done its cruel work, taking over the village and its hidden cache. Flashing modesty and feigned foolishness as another person might their teeth, Plutarco wins the favor of the presiding captain, serenading with his creaky violin ballads while surreptitiously smuggling out supplies with every adios.

Instead of drumming up dramatic impact with the story’s inherently suspenseful elements, Vargas’s film floats by with its head in the clouds, tragedies and trivialities enfolded in caressing close-ups and violin whistles. This dreamlike ambiance paradoxically seems to dovetail with Vargas’s laudable neorealist technique, especially in his work with a nonprofessional cast and his easy command of direct sound. So many films overplay their hand here; drunk on Terrence Malick movies, the nature score is often magnified to absurd sharpness, crickets chirping in your ear, blades of grass aflame in song. Vargas’s sound is comparatively obscure, but besides being pleasurably spacious, it’s true to his vision of a humble poetry of the everyday. The music too is appreciably authentic, as Vargas (who spent five years producing radio shows featuring traditional Mexican melodies) uses Tavira’s wobbly pitch to seam together his loose narrative.

All of this lyricism can have a flattening effect, as scenes of torture and vignettes of tacos hold the same smoky finesse. Innumerable close-ups of Tavira’s cracked hands aside, there is nothing gritty about the film, which is a problem insofar as it can give The Violin‘s realism a bitter aftertaste of simplistic moralism. And yet, in the film’s refined emotional palette (the final shot seals it), Vargos achieves something that the recent tongue-tied American pictures don’t. Wordless in long stretches, The Violin demonstrates a visual command of faces and editing on par with those of D.W. Griffith’s expert melodramas — minor masterpieces that recognize cinema’s strange ability to summon reality without being beholden to it.

THE VIOLIN

Opens Fri/11

Roxie Film Center

3117 16th St., SF

(415) 863-1087

http://www.roxie.com

www.filmmovement.com
=

Metal is forever

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Andreas Geiger turns his camera on his hometown of Donzdorf, Germany, a tidy little village containing half-timber houses, oompah band–loving old-timers, and the hugely successful metal label Nuclear Blast. Clocking in at just under an hour, Heavy Metal in the Country does peek into the Nuclear Blast HQ — where middle-aged moms carefully tape-gun mail-order packages stuffed with Eddie statues, Cannibal Corpse LPs, and T-shirts glorifying corpsepainted Norwegians Dimmu Borgir — but this isn’t a doc about the label. The film’s main focus is Donzdorf’s populace: in addition to Nuclear Blast’s Markus Staiger, who founded the company as a teen 20 years ago, we meet some dedicated local metalheads (including a 12-year-old Star Search contestant who worships AC/DC) and a few residents (like the town’s vicar) who admire metal’s ability to inspire, even if they think it’s inspiring all the wrong things. Fans of the local scene, take note: a shot in a record store features a quick cameo from Bay Area folk-metal outfit Slough Feg’s self-titled first release.

HEAVY METAL IN THE COUNTRY

Sun/13, 10:30 p.m., $8–$10

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

Cafe Andree

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Someone says the word global and — quick! — what’s the first association that occurs to you? Warming? Expect a congratulatory phone call from Al Gore. I like Gore and wish he’d managed to become president, but he won’t be calling me, because I would shout out knives! in response to global. Global knives, beloved of sushi chefs, are those ultrasharp Japanese knives made from ceramic material.

There’s no sushi on the menu at Café Andrée, though executive chef Evan Crandall describes his new menu as global. On the other hand, there is tempura — but I am getting ahead of myself. The restaurant might deal in a world’s worth of food, but its aesthetic tone is low-key Euro; it looks like a bistro that’s somehow been engulfed by a London men’s club. (Actually, it’s part of the Hotel Rex, a Joie de Vivre concern.) An entire wall is given over to a set of framed drawings that amount to a kind of study, while atop a tall wooden breakfront at the rear of a dining room perches a globe. There is a reddish bordello glow to the small space that faintly insinuates we’re not seeing the whole picture; does the breakfront peel away to reveal a secret staircase?

An issue haunting the diner in any hotel restaurant is the suspicion that the surrounding tables are filled with travelers, tourists, and other itinerants, people too tired, busy, or anxious to get out there and see the city and mingle with the locals. These people prize convenience and often have the expense account funds to pay for it, and hotel restaurants are generally obliging on both counts. On the other hand, more than a few hotel restaurants are worthy in their own right; some of San Francisco’s best restaurants are to be found in hotels. The question, then, is whether Café Andrée is a nicely tricked-out expense account joint or a bona fide interesting restaurant or, possibly, both.

The prices, certainly, are worthy of the Union Square neighborhood. Many first courses cost well into the teens, while main courses cluster in the mid- to upper 20s. For those kind of bucks, we expect some serious bang, and lo! Café Andrée delivers it. Crandall’s food is simply splendid: innovative but not sloppy or overwrought, carefully plated, and attentively served. By the time you’ve finished, you really don’t care anymore whether the people at the next table are from Tulsa or Aberdeen or Mint Hill, and from the satisfied looks on their faces, they don’t care where you’re from either.

Let’s start with some bread, slices of sweet baguette, still warm and presented with a tray of butter and salt granules in their respective chambers. I liked the flexibility here, though the butter was too chilled to handle gracefully. It would have been clever to use the bread to mop up some soup or sauce instead of trying to spread it with uncooperative butter, but the soup we’d had our eye on, a Cajun crab chowder, had sold out. Apparently the pent-up demand for crab around here is considerable. So, no sopping.

I could not regard a roasted beet salad ($10) as proper restitution, even if enlivened with a Mediterranean mélange of fennel shavings, toasted pine nuts, and a vinaigrette lumpy with goat cheese, but the beet connoisseur loved it. And halfway around the world we went — the other way — for crab, not in chowder but in a panfried cake ($14), with shrimp: a single entity looking like a gilded Easter egg, riding on a magic carpet of Thai cucumber salad (thin pickled slices, perfumed with Kaffir lime essence), with a sweep of red curry aioli arcing across the plate as if from a painter’s brush.

A fillet of black cod ($25) was coated with a caramelized persimmon glaze, and while I’m not wild about persimmons, I liked the glaze. It flattered the fish the way the right clothes can help somebody skinny look more substantial. The bed of lacinato kale and maitake mushrooms was both visually interesting and tasty, but the most arresting characters on the plate were the pair of butternut squash tempura, tabs of orange flesh battered and flash-fried. "They’re sweet!" cried my tablemate, a noted dessert maven, but they weren’t that sweet and also retained a savory richness.

And speaking of savory richness: we come now to the mushroom ravioli ($22), the free-form kind, like a trio of round sandwiches built with disks of spinach pasta and filled with a dice of sautéed wild mushrooms lifted to the sublime by the earthy breath of black truffles and an impressive, buttery wash of what the menu card calls "mushroom consommé." Here at last we had a liquid worthy of being sopped up with the fine bread, but the fine bread was long gone by then.

Bread pudding is an exercise in both frugality and expansiveness, so why not make one tres leches–style ($8), with an angel food–like cake soaked in various forms of milk? For additional interest, sauce it with dulce de leche (sugar caramelized in milk) and toss a few tapioca pearls in there. The result was sweet but not cloying, substantial but not heavy, and wet but not soggy. Our knives went right through it, and they weren’t even Globals. *

CAFÉ ANDRÉE

Breakfast: Mon.–Fri., 7–10:30 a.m. Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 7:30 a.m.–1:30 p.m. Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–2 p.m. Dinner: Mon.–Thurs. and Sun., 5:30–10 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 5:30–10:30 p.m.

Hotel Rex, 562 Sutter, SF

(415) 433-4434

www.thehotelrex.com

Beer and wine

AE/DC/DISC/MC/V

Pleasant noise

Wheelchair accessible

Good luck

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS We’re not related by blood, but he’s as much of a brother to me as my many brother brothers are. He has brothers too, but no sisters, and he always wanted one. So there’s that.

My brother Boomer makes poetry out of radio news like I turn food sections into fiction, sports, gossip, society, philosophy, agriculture, gender studies, travel, apolitical commentary … If, during the past 20 years, you have found yourself in Boston with a radio on, you may recognize his voice.

"Sister!" he boomed, and I heard it in the pay phone receiver and in the room. (Here room = Logan Airport.) I turned and saw him walking toward me, cell phone pressed to his silvering head with the big goofy grin and shining eyes.

"Brother," I said. We hugged, and he took my bags.

It had been some years. A lot had changed. He was skinnier. I’d been long divorced; he was getting there. His wife, always the insanely jealous type, had been cheating on him and was in love with some guy in LA.

Boomer had taken a couple of days off work to chauffeur me to the University of Maine, where I was giving a reading. It’s five hours from Boston to Orono — plenty of time to catch up, but not enough time, apparently, to eat.

Starving, I dropped hints. "Hilltop Steakhouse still there?" I asked, perhaps too casually.

He nodded. Then: "I tell you, Sis," he said. "I don’t know what I’m going to do. The boys …"

Route 1 was a parking lot. Boomer called his station’s traffic desk: "Hi Jim. Boomer."

While he was getting the inside scoop and then getting us out of it, I sat there seat belted and safe, feeling kind of cushy, or soft, like I was in good hands. Informed. I wondered if this was how people expected to feel when they ate in restaurants with me or came over to cook something.

"Why are you laughing?" Boomer asked.

There was the Hilltop. "Nothing," I said, twisting in my seat.

Surprisingly, little had changed on the Saugus Strip in the 20 years since I’d haunted it. I looked at my now silver-templed, golden-voiced newscaster friend and remembered him shirtless behind a drum kit, spit-shouting angry, stupid, and inspiringly poetic punk.

Over barbecued chicken, jerked chicken, and chicken sausages at the party after the reading, Boomer confessed. We were pressed between a table and a refrigerator, holding paper plates and drinking fizzy water while all around us the academics, grad students and their teachers, were drinking hard.

Years ago Boomer had driven back and forth, he told me, between a tree and a telephone pole — tree, telephone pole, tree, telephone pole — in the end settling on the pole, which snapped like a bean.

Power outages, burned houses, abandoned babies, train-wrecked lives, gang bullshit …

"Do you think you knew deep down it would do that?" I asked. "Is that why you picked the pole, do you think?"

"I don’t know," he said.

Call me crazy, but I think that — compared to at least one alternative — half-assed suicide attempts rock.

On the way back down to hard news, as on the way up, Boomer periodically rolled his funny car’s window down and shouted at the trees, at Maine, at the way life should be, "Good luck!"

Environmental disasters. Assassination. God. Government. There’s a cat, a fox, and a hawk stalking my chickens. Not to mention the farmer.

"Good luck!" Boomer booms, and you can hear him clear across the country.

——————————————————————–

My new favorite restaurant is Taqueria Reina’s. It has the cheesiest chiles rellenos ever, very good carnitas, and excellent salsa. My only complaint was we had to eat with gloves on, it was so cold in there. And speaking of cheesy, there were Mexican soap operas instead of soccer on TV.

TAQUERIA REINA’S

Daily, 9 a.m.–11:45 p.m.

5300 Mission, SF

(415) 585-8243

Takeout available

Beer

Careers & Ed: Get schooled

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With the holidays over, it’s back-to-school time — and not just for kids and college students. Adult education classes also are starting up after their winter hiatus, so take that money you’d promised to spend on a gym membership (like you’d use it anyway) and put it toward learning that skill you’ve always wished you had. Here’s a list of some of our favorite upcoming courses, all perfect for beginners.

DUCT TAPE DRESS FORMS


The idea of this course is to teach you to make customized dress forms so you can mend and create outfits that exactly fit your body. And even if you aren’t a budding designer … what room’s decor wouldn’t benefit from the addition of a duct tape mannequin?

Jan. 19, 11 a.m.–3:30 p.m. $75

Stitch Lounge, 182 Gough, SF. (415) 431-3739, www.stitchlounge.com

URBAN COMPOSTING


This hands-on workshop teaches the basic methods of both backyard and worm composting.

Jan. 19, 10 a.m.–noon. Free

Garden for the Environment, Seventh Ave., SF. (415) 731-5627, www.gardenfortheenvironment.org

YOGA 101


A good place to start for the would-be yogi who doesn’t want to jump in blind, this Sunday workshop explores basic postures, breathing, and meditation for the beginner.

Jan. 27, 1:30–3:30 p.m. $35 (includes one free week of yoga)

Yoga Tree, 519 Hayes, SF. (415) 626-9707, www.yogatreesf.com

CURIOUS SOUL: THE VISUAL JOURNAL


Instructor Suzanne Merritt helps you discover eight universal patterns of beauty and translate your experience into visual form. Includes collage, tearing, layering, image transfers, and mixed media.

Jan. 28–29, 10 a.m.–5 p.m. $190 plus $20 materials fee

San Francisco Center for the Book, 300 De Haro, SF. (415) 565-0545, sfcb.org

PAPER LANTERNS


Learn to construct a wooden reed skeleton frame before covering it with handmade paper — and leave with a finished paper lantern, complete with bulb and 12-foot wire with on-off switch.

Jan. 31, 6:30–9:30 p.m. $65 (includes $15 materials fee)

Craft Gym, 1452 Bush, SF. (415) 441-6223, www.craftgym.com

WOMEN’S BLACKSMITHING


A special workshop for women offered by women who teach the fundamental skills needed to forge steel, including tapering, upsetting, flattening, and twisting.

Feb. 2–3, 10 a.m.–6 p.m. $345

Crucible, 1260 Seventh St., Oakl. (510) 444-0919, www.thecrucible.org

MOROCCAN FLAVORS


A relaxed, comfortable cooking class that shows how to use seasonal, organic, unrefined, and local ingredients to make Moroccan delights beyond the standard couscous.

Feb. 4, 6:30–9:30 p.m. $60

Sage Table, Oakl. Call for address. (510) 914-1142, www.thesagetable.com

IMAGE AND THE BOOK


Explore contemporary art-making practices in this six-session series covering alternative approaches to painting, drawing, collage, sewing, image transfer, binding, narrative development, and subject investigation.

Feb. 13–March 13, Wednesdays, 7:15–10 p.m. $180 plus $10 materials fee

California College of the Arts, 5212 Broadway, Oakl. (510) 594-3771, www.cca.edu/academics/extended

2-DAY FILM SCHOOL


Why waste money on an expensive film school when you can learn all you need to know over one weekend? This crash course is taught by Dov S-S Simens of the Hollywood Film Institute.

March 15–16, 9 a.m.–6 p.m. $389

Call for location. (310) 659-5668, www.mediabistro.com

WINE TASTING: BASICS FOR BEGINNERS


Learn to taste the way the pros do, then apply your new knowledge to 20 wines in this continuing education class provided by City College of San Francisco.

April 26, 1–3 p.m. $50

Fort Mason, bldg. B, room 106, Marina at Laguna, SF. (415) 561-1860, www.ccsf.edu

Careers & Ed: The Roots of teaching

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› culture@sfbg.com

The last day of class before Christmas break presents a challenge for any educator, in any class, at any school. It’s usually considered completely devoid of teachable moments, a phenomenon that’s chalked up (pun intended) to prevacation excitement: PlayStation daydreams, visions of sugarplum romance, and the promise of two and a half weeks of sleeping in don’t exactly encourage industrious behavior.

So the popular course of action among teachers remains the party approach — some snacks, some games, a dose of holiday frivolity. Why swim against the prevailing yuletide, hopelessly and in vain, when you can just float home on a mess of soggy pizza boxes lashed to some two-liter pontoons?

When I visited Claire Keefer’s class Dec. 14, she seemed to be taking this approach. Sure enough, she’d brought a bag of her favorite Christmas candies, a little soda, and some healthier-looking crackers. And she informed her students they’d be playing a game for the better part of the period. But before giving in to the swell of a winter recess so near at hand, during the second-to-last period of the calendar year Kiefer gave her students an honest-to-goodness assignment. She asked them to pull out their journals and respond to a writing prompt she’d posted on the board. And they did, after a collective, semipolite grumble.

And before they knew it — before I knew it — Kiefer’s prompt became a complex sociopolitical discourse on the visual representation of traditional Christmas characters like your boys Jesus, Santa, those creepy little white-guy elves (hee-hee), et al.

Being the literate, postfeminist, righteously liberal San Franciscan that I am, it wasn’t difficult for me to see the purpose of Kiefer’s holiday exercise: to allow her students to problematize the whiteness that so often masquerades as normalcy by paying special attention to holiday symbols.

Looking back on my high school experience, I can say for certain that they, those nefarious they, never stretched my cultural IQ like that. Kiefer’s kids have access to these kinds of ideas. I listened as her students commented on race, power, religion, and misnormalized iconography with intelligence, all quite comfortable in the task. Dare I say, what an important challenge? (I’ll admit I didn’t know Jesus was brown skinned until well into my second year of college.) And what a show of teaching chops it was, to take the least teachable moment of the least teachable day of 2007 and pull some learning out of it.

Quite unlike the stereotype of the emergency-credentialed twentysomething pushover left to rattle all alone in an urban trial by fire, at 26, Kiefer cuts a most confident, no doubt pedagogic figure. Her intelligence, craft, and experience have made her transition from jail to prison to Balboa High School a seamless one.

Jail? Let me explain. Kiefer teaches Roots, a classroom-based initiative that serves children affected by incarceration, which falls under the umbrella of a California nonprofit called Community Works. To clarify: Kiefer works for Community Works at Balboa High School, where she teaches the Roots elective. At a glance, one might conjecture a circumstance of triangulated, bureaucratic-type tension, considering she basically has two bosses, Principal Patricia Gray at Balboa and Ruth Morgan of Community Works. Yet both not only hold Kiefer in the highest regard but also seem equally keen on giving her all the support she needs. And as to the question of distance between Kiefer and the rest of the faculty at Balboa, there is none, plain and simple. Everybody knows her, and everybody knows she puts her students first.

One of the great advantages of teaching Roots is that Kiefer gets to develop and implement the curriculum as she sees fit, in a manageable, supportive classroom environment. Small class size really helps, as does the freedom to design a program that encourages students to respond to their feelings by communicating creatively.

"We always go back to incarceration, sharing personal stories, learning empathy, meeting it head-on." Some of her kids have been incarcerated themselves; most attend her Roots class because their parents have recently been or are currently incarcerated. Control of her curriculum means Kiefer can account for the academic and emotional complexities of her classroom and adjust, midstream if necessary, to the needs of a group of 9th to 12th graders of varied ages, from diverse backgrounds, and with different personalities. Kiefer tailors her lessons to make room for all types of learners.

Curriculum design, creative writing, learning and teaching empathy — these happen to be Kiefer’s experiential strengths. "I’ve never not designed my own curriculum," she says. How many teachers, at 26, can claim such autonomy? How many teachers, at 26, have already worked for years inside correctional facilities? The public school system has placed Kiefer perfectly, in exactly the right circumstances, with kids who respond to her sense of responsibility, her gift of honesty, and her desire to challenge them.

In fact, there is something of a university feel to her classroom dynamic, and she is well aware that her MFA qualifies her to be a college-level instructor. However, neither tweedy aspirations nor hubris figure into Kiefer’s seeming raison d’être. Instead, it has everything to with finding those places where "the need is so transparent," she said. Kiefer’s life path seems so clearly marked as to appear predestined.

At the age of 20, during summer break from Tulane University and entirely of her own volition, Kiefer contacted the Cobb County Jail in Marietta, Ga., asking to be let inside to teach. When someone at the jail returned her call, offering her an administrative position at the facility, she politely insisted, "I already have a job. I just want to teach creative writing." She took the $8 per hour position then offered to her and started showing up about eight hours per week, as much as she could.

She spent her senior year of college editing the school’s literary magazine, the Tulane Review, while volunteering with adult literacy programs in New Orleans. She graduated with a double major in religious studies and English in 2003 and immediately afterward embarked on a yearlong Josephine Louise Newcomb Fellowship.

With the acceptance of her proposal, a plan involving a three-month stint teaching inside three institutions, Kiefer found herself first at San Quentin, then at Noriega, a federal institution in Miami, and finally at the Dale Women’s Facility in Vermont, implementing her curricula, sharing her love of the written word, and saddling her students with rigorously academic assignments. She always stresses the importance of word economy and limitation and is notorious for teaching entire sections around somewhat esoteric poetic forms — e.g., the villanelle and the sestina. "Society doesn’t expect much from [prisoners]. I sure as hell was going to," she said.

The same uncompromising, formal approach has helped Kiefer earn a reputation at Balboa for sticking to her guns, but her firmness comes with the deepest, most genuine regard for those around her. Thinking back on her first semester-long class at San Quentin, which she titled Art in Response to Gang Violence, Kiefer recalled, "A lot of these guys needed this creative outlet, or channel, and I needed to find a community."

Her attachment to the place was so profound that she returned to San Quentin in 2005, a year after her fellowship had ended, to teach one night per week while running down an MFA at San Francisco State University — all while holding a full-time position at Saint Vincent’s in Marin, where, she said, she learned how to handle emotional turbulence in young people after being threatened, groped, and cussed at, seeing desks and chairs fly, and watching a BBQ grill crash to the ground from a second-story window. Trying times at St. Vincent’s taught her how to be available at an authoritative distance.

Kiefer took the Roots job at Balboa High School just last year, the final one of her MFA program at SF State. Some attribute her teaching skill to her lifelong study of the written word, as students do make the best teachers. However, while acknowledging her diligence, she noted that fate, more than any other factor, has landed her right where she needs to be. Ask her if educating kids who’ve been affected by incarceration is something of a calling, and without hesitation she’ll tell you, "Totally."

"Prison education has been proven to prevent recidivism, and it injects humanity into the reality of being incarcerated…. Our society has it so wrong: we’re doing nothing to rehabilitate," Kiefer said with obvious sincerity. Her urgency is born of six years’ hands-on experience, and it still has her visiting prisoners and their families on her own time and acting as an advocate.

Notwithstanding her clarity of vision, though, she says she can be very wrong now and again. For example, I asked if she’d ever failed at anything. "I have a terrible sense of direction," she said. Well, Ms. Kiefer, I beg to differ. Your inner compass seems perfectly calibrated.

Shut down the zoo

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OPINION In San Francisco’s June 1997 special election, the swells convinced the voters to float $48 million in bonds to build a "world-class" zoo, which would entail largely privatizing a public institution, leaving the city on the hook for liabilities while giving a private nonprofit the benefits.

The initiative passed — you can’t get warmer or fuzzier than a tiger or a koala — and the San Francisco Zoo, relinquished to the tutelage of corporate fixer Jim Lazarus, was largely gifted as another privatized party space for the rich.

The case might be made that zoos can serve as genetic incubators in the face of widespread habitat destruction. But the city’s precautionary principle, like the Hippocratic oath, should prevail on us to do no harm in seeking to prevent extinction.

The record of the privatized Zoo has hardly been a story of precaution:

•In 2000, two already sick koalas were kidnapped from the Zoo and not returned for two days.

•A 12-year-old Siberian tiger, Emily, died in October 2004. Tatiana was just murdered at age four. Siberian tigers generally live to be 24 years old in captivity.

•Two elands, majestic African antelope, were introduced improperly into close quarters with an already resident eland at the Zoo, which led to a spate of deadly eland-on-eland violence and the deaths of the two newcomers.

•Apparently, shoddy attention to detail hastened the demise of Puddles the hippopotamus in May 2007. Hippos, like African elephants, thrive in nature preserves located in their native tropical habitat.

If zoos are to be a successful component of protecting endangered species, it’s paramount that their conditions not kill the specimens. Perhaps an affiliation with a major research institution is required to ensure that professionalism is the order of the day to ward against what appears to be amateur hour at the zoo.

It’s one thing for the swells to occupy public spaces such as the de Young Museum, City Hall, and the San Francisco Public Library as edifications to their egos — only fellow humans are inconvenienced. But for the rich to wrap themselves in the distinction of being movers and shakers in the San Francisco Zoological Society and wring glee from the glow of imprisoning animals in inhospitable conditions is truly pathological.

The Zoo should be closed, its animals sent to facilities capable of caring for them, and the land used for affordable housing. The city should replace the Zoo with an academic partnership with legitimate wildlife sanctuaries around the world to subsidize conservation, produce video footage of animals in their natural habitats, and arrange trips to see wild animals in the wild for San Francisco youths who otherwise could not afford it.

That would be a true 21st-century, world-class approach to bringing the wonder of exotic animals to San Franciscans.

Marc Salomon

Marc Salomon is a member of the SF Green Party County Council.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

My brother called me from the East Coast over the weekend to ask if I was still alive and my house still standing. He’d been watching CNN, which apparently was showing nonstop reports of terrible storm carnage in Northern California, complete with breathless voice-overs talking about hurricane-force winds.

"Yeah," I told him. "It rained."

It was windy too. Some trees came down, my roof leaked a little, and some people who built houses on unstable hillsides learned what happens to unstable hillsides when it rains. None of this is terribly unusual or strange. It’s just that people in San Francisco aren’t used to living in a world where there’s actual weather. You’d think a place that could be shaken into dusty wreckage any minute by the inevitable earthquake would be a little less freaked about precipitation.

Still, I found a bit of a lesson here.

Just hours after the storm broke, while the bold and adventurous tech pioneers of Google were still huddled in their homes and afraid to go to work, the San Francisco Department of Public Works had crews on the streets clearing fallen trees. The response was stunningly efficient — the stuff that couldn’t be chopped up right away was hauled off to the side so cars could get through. By that evening the worst of the fallen timber was corralled and being cut up with chain saws. It’s fun to talk about the lazy, inefficient public sector, but frankly, the DPW did its job.

And 36 hours later, the efficient, private utility company, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., still couldn’t get the power back on along Third Street.

We got a press release Friday from the Democratic Leadership Council, which runs the Bill Clinton wing of the party and has long supported Democrats who hew to the center-right. The DLC folks call these hawkish neocons "new Democrats." And according to their Jan. 4 statement, the "New Democrat of the Week" was … San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom.

Newsom got the award for "his continued commitment to reducing his city’s carbon footprint," which is fine and lovely. But it came the same week he announced, in a very DLC style, that he was bringing Kevin Ryan, the former United States attorney, on board as the head of his criminal justice council.

Ryan’s a right-wing prosecutor, a George W. Bush appointee who was in charge of the witch hunt and persecution that sent videographer Josh Wolf to jail for 226 days. Why, exactly, is a guy who has no respect for the First Amendment working for the mayor of San Francisco?

Newsom’s big plans to shake up his administration seem to amount to firing Public Utilities Commission general manager Susan Leal (who can’t be fired right now because she’s on job-related disability) and replacing her with controller Ed Harrington. Leal had to go because she might run for mayor in four years against whomever Newsom and chief consultant Eric Jaye handpick (Assessor Phil Ting seems to be the choice right now) and because, as Sup. Bevan Dufty put it, "PG&E was not happy about her."

Sounds like an award-winning strategy to me.

PS Our predatory-pricing case against the SF Weekly and its parent company goes to trial Jan. 14 in San Francisco Superior Court with Judge Marla Miller presiding.

Tiger tales

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More on the SF Zoo:
>>20 Questions the zoo won’t answer
>>Editorial: Take back the zoo
>>Opinion: Shut down the zoo
>>From 1999: The Zoo Blues

› news@sfbg.com

When I first heard about the attack at the San Francisco Zoo, I felt strangely vindicated to learn that a Siberian tiger had been involved. I am irrationally prejudiced when it comes to big cats: I don’t like Siberians. Of all the tigers, lions, jaguars, and other exotic animals I have known in my day — and I grew up on a wild animal farm, so I have known quite a few — the only ones that truly frightened me were a chimpanzee named Lolita and a pair of Siberians (they’re known as Amurs now) that lived in an old shed about 100 feet from my front door.

When I read in March that two chimps from a California primate sanctuary had attacked a 62-year-old man, biting off much of his face, tearing off his foot, and mutiutf8g his genitals, I thought of Mike’s thumb. And when I heard that Tatiana had attacked three young men, killing one of them, I immediately thought of his ear.

Mike Bleyman was a biologist who built a research and breeding compound outside Pittsboro, NC, and like many exotic-animal fanatics he had a tendency to lose body parts. Fortunately, the surgeons in Chapel Hill were skilled at sewing them back on.

Mike was also my stepfather. My parents divorced when I was in junior high, and when my mother moved in with Mike on "the farm," I went with her.

I was present when Lolita bit Mike’s thumb right through the bone, almost severing it completely. I was away at college when the tiger got him.

Mike had arranged a trade with the Albuquerque Zoo in New Mexico — two Siberians and a Himalayan black bear for a young Sumatran tiger. Mike hit both tigers with tranquilizer darts. But ketamine, the drug of choice for sedating big cats, takes several minutes to work, and being an impatient man who didn’t play by the rules, Mike entered the cage before the recommended time had passed. When he approached the male, the female roused herself. She slashed Mike across the back, dislocated his elbow, and removed his ear.

The fact that Mike was able to extract himself from the cage alive is testament to the fact that the ketamine had at least begun to have an impact. Siberian tigers are not creatures you want to mess with.

Our other tigers, all Bengals, were sociable and playful. As I walked by they would chuffle their hellos. I would chuffle back and reach through the fence to scratch their necks or rub their noses. The Siberians, however, had a flat affect, rarely vocalized, and menacingly tracked passing humans.

I know it’s not fair to judge an entire subspecies by two individuals, and these cats had every reason to be sullen. They had evolved to preside as alpha predators over rugged territories of hundreds of square miles, and they were being forced to live sedentary lives in a gloomy shed probably no bigger than 200 square feet. But fair or not, they freaked me out.

I have been thinking a lot about those cats in the past couple of weeks as I have read the news stories coming from San Francisco. As someone who has bottle-fed several cubs, built my share of tiger cages, and shoveled more than my share of tiger shit, I know more than a little about Felis tigris.

I have been equally fascinated, if not more so, by the behavior of the other species that populates this tragic tale, the one known as Homo sapiens. In addition to being a former tiger farmer, I am also a journalist who once covered San Francisco politics. I still work occasionally as a communications consultant to nonprofits, and in my day job I am a manager of a small state agency and work regularly with elected officials. So when I look at this story through the lens of a behaviorist, I think about the traits of various human subspecies — politicians, bureaucrats, managers, spin doctors, journalists, self-proclaimed experts, and supposed guardians of health and safety. Frankly, I am not impressed.

Tatiana was killed for being a tiger. Tigers have only one self. They are what they are; end of story. Humans are a different order of being: we are capable of self-deception. We can lie to ourselves, we can deny what is right in front of us, we can try to shift blame, and we can avoid the things we know we should face.

And thereon hangs this tiger tale.

TARZAN AND TIGER ISLAND


People have often asked me over the years why my stepfather had all of his animals. I like to tell them it was because he thought he was Tarzan. It’s not the absolute truth, but it is as valid as any other answer.

It started in the 1970s, when he just drove down to Florida one day and came back with a tiger cub.

For her first several months there, Gretchen had the run of the farm. I remember one weekend when Mike was teaching us to shoot: my sister Gwenn was lying in the bed of a battered red Toyota pickup, one eye closed and the other sighting down a rifle barrel at a paper bull’s-eye. She never saw the tiger stalking her from behind. As soon as Gretchen was near enough, she closed in a sudden burst, easily cleared the side of the bed, and landed squarely on Gwenn’s back. Gwenn just huffed, "Gretchen, get off," and calmly squeezed the trigger.

Gretchen, however, was soon too large to be treated like a funny-looking dog. Mike hired a backhoe operator to dig a moat around a knoll where an abandoned farmhouse perched. The man arrived on a day when Mike’s very wild foster daughter, Dianne, had cooked brownies. The backhoe operator didn’t realized they were laced with pot and ate a few. It took a long time to finish the job, in part because the guy kept nodding off, and in the end the moat had a peculiar shape.

Mike didn’t mind. He just put up an acircular fence around the acircular moat and called it Tiger Island.

The fence was 12 feet tall and built of heavy-gauge chain link. A barbed-wire overhang jutted inward from the top at a 45-degree angle. A tiger might be able to leap to the top of a 12-foot fence, but the moat meant there was no solid place from which Gretchen could launch herself.

If she tried to hurdle the fence, she’d have to start at least 10 feet back. And if she crossed the moat and pulled herself onto the narrow bank, she would have to jump straight up. That would mean an encounter with the overhang. She wouldn’t climb the fence because chain link is too wobbly. It was the way the moat and the fence and the overhang worked together that made the compound secure. Even when the moat ran dry in later years, a tiger would still have had to jump from the bottom of the dry moat, making the total leap on the order of 16 or 17 feet.

In other words, a stoned heavy-equipment operator and a somewhat oddball zoologist, with a few thousand dollars’ worth of chain link and barbed wire, managed to make a very secure tiger pen. I have to wonder why the privatized San Francisco Zoo, with millions of dollars in bond money and a director who earns $339,000 a year, couldn’t.

THE MISSING WALL


Early reports from San Francisco described the tiger grotto as having a wall and a moat as if they were separate things and gave dimensions for both — initially 15 feet for the moat and 20 feet for the wall. When I read that, I began examining aerial photos to look for other points of egress. I studied the height and the angle of the side walls.

All tigers can climb trees. Amur habitat includes mountain ranges. They don’t like steep slopes, but they’re capable of scrambling over rocky faces. Perhaps Tatiana got out that way, I thought, but I soon rejected the idea.

The aerials showed me the initial reports were inaccurate. There never was a wall and a moat. Tatiana’s compound was nothing like Gretchen’s. There was only a moat, and the so-called wall was simply the far bank. The moat isn’t, in zoological terms, either a physical or a psychological fail-safe. It’s simply a way of recessing a wall into the earth so it doesn’t block human sight lines.

A dry moat can actually be worse than a wall because the far bank gives a tiger launching points. When the jump-off point is around the same elevation as the top of the far bank, as it is at the San Francisco Zoo, the moat’s depth may not matter. The question becomes not how high the tiger can jump but how far it can leap. History and a close look at pictures of the grotto suggest that is exactly the question San Francisco and zoos everywhere should be asking.

One rule of thumb is that a moat needs to be four times the average body length of the species it is suppose to contain, which for an Amur is just an inch shy of six feet. That means a moat should be at least 24 feet across. I’m skeptical of this calculation. Mean body length for a mountain lion, for example, puts the recommended moat distance at just over 13 feet, yet there are credible reports of mountain lions leaping 35 feet.

An alternative is the cat’s known leaping distance plus 20 percent. The oft-reported leaping distance is 20 feet, so the minimum width would again be 24 feet. There are accounts of tigers leaping 30 to 33 feet, but I have not been able to determine whether these were documented. In China, the Yangtze River runs through Leaping Tiger Gorge, so named because a tiger leaped the river to escape a hunter, according to local lore. The river at its narrowest is about 82 feet wide. The story is a fable, but it gives you a sense of the tiger’s reputation as a prodigious leaper. Based on my years of observing tigers at play, 30 feet does not seem at all out of the question.

Such calculations likely contributed to the standards of two Association of Zoos and Aquarium committees. Both the AZA Felid Technical Advisory Group and the AZA Nutrition Advisory Group recommend a minimum width of 25 feet for a tiger moat.

So imagine my reaction when Zoo director Manuel Mollinedo stated his belief that the tiger could not have escaped from the moat, while also saying that according Zoo records, the moat was 20 feet across. I have never met Mollinedo, and he didn’t return my calls, but in my opinion the man has no idea what he is talking about.

Then came reports that the moat is 33 feet across. Well … sort of, maybe, kind of. It may be 33 feet from wall to wall, but the bank on the grotto side slopes to a flat floor 20 feet across. Some clever bloke decided to make the transition look more natural by placing fake boulders atop the slope. These project out into the moat and in some cases rise above the grotto floor. A tiger that launched from the lip of one of these would have to cross far less than 30 feet.

I asked the Zoo for the narrowest leap between the outside wall and these "rocks." Zoo officials didn’t respond. So I went out there with my tape measure.

The tiger grotto is closed off, and Zoo officials also declined to answer my request for access to the area. But through a side window I was able to study a neighboring lion grotto with a similar design. A rock ledge stuck out into the moat more than seven feet, leaving a gap I measured along the outer wall at about 25 feet. Using aerial photographs and online measuring tools to look at Tatiana’s grotto, I repeatedly got widths of less than 24 feet.

In other words, the width of the moat most likely does not meet AZA standards, which could hardly be described as overly cautious.

NO MARGIN FOR ERROR


The world soon found out the bank of Tatiana’s grotto was less than 12.5 feet high, and experts quickly agreed that a motivated tiger could have surmounted the wall. Yet Mollinedo was still expressing disbelief.

We know tigers pluck monkeys from tree branches, bound over steep rock faces, and jump on the backs of large prey. But how tall do they stand, and how much can they elevate? The best evidence I can find of an Amur’s reach comes from the field studies of Anatolii Grigor’evich Yudakov. One way Amurs mark their territory is by making scratches high in the bark of trees. Yudakov measured these marks at 210 to 290 centimeters, or roughly 7 to 9.5 feet.

For an Amur standing on its hind legs to reach the top of a 12.5 foot wall, it would have to elevate another 3 to 5.5 feet. Remember Gretchen jumping effortlessly over the side rail of a small pickup? Four feet.

A major prey species for Amurs is the Manchurian red deer, which stands up to five feet at the shoulder. Though not sourced, many references report a vertical leap for tigers of six feet. Take a tiger with a reach of almost 10 feet and a vertical leap of six feet, and suddenly the industry standard of a 16-foot wall has no appreciable margin for error.

Then there are the events of May 14, 1994, when a Bengal tiger in India’s Kaziranga National Park attacked a man on the back of an elephant. According to a press release from Wildlife Trust International, executive director Vivek Menon reviewed footage of the attack and exclaimed, "I could never imagine that a tiger could so effortlessly leap from the ground onto an adult elephant’s head, which is at least 12 feet above the ground."

There has been much speculation about whether a captive tiger is capable of matching the jumping ability of a wild cat. Presumably a confined tiger would be sluggish, out of shape, her muscles atrophied. No one to my knowledge, though, has studied the sports physiology of tigers.

I can say from personal experience that even captive tigers are incredibly agile and powerful. We had a Bengal named Engels (the litter was born on May Day) who lived on Tiger Island. One day a female Bengal tried to snatch some food from him. He swiped at her almost casually, hitting her in the side. The force of the blow immediately stopped the young tiger’s heart, and she fell over dead.

THE LONG JUMP


So what happened that day at the Zoo? So far, none of the witnesses are talking. Media accounts suggest one scenario: Tatiana may have stood on her hind legs against the wall, pushed off from the bottom of the moat, grabbed the top of the wall with her front paws, and leveraged herself up and over by digging her hind claws into the wall. That’s conceivable, I guess. Tatiana may even have escaped before the attack and waited for her prey in the tall grass beside the moat.

I have a very hard time imagining that, though. For one thing, the wall curves outward at the top. For another, such methodical, incremental movement is not typical of a tiger. They stalk their prey slowly, but in a brutal burst, they close with amazing speed. I am convinced Tatiana exploded from the grotto, landed on the lip, and then powered her way up. Whether she sprang from one of the protruding rocks, the sloped bank, or the moat floor is almost immaterial, but I am inclined to believe she jumped over the moat.

Strangely, Mollinedo may have been on the right track at a Dec. 28 press conference when he said, "How she jumped that high is beyond me." She may not have jumped high at all; I suspect she just jumped long.

I base this on my observations of tigers and my study of grotto photographs, but it is supported by history. There are three known escapes from Tatiana’s grotto and one near escape. In one case the escape went unwitnessed.

Keepers Jack Castor and John Alcaraz walked by the grotto one day a few years back and saw a Bengal named Jack wandering outside, Alcaraz told me by phone. They yelled at him, and he jumped back in.

David Rentz witnessed another escape in 1959, when he was a young Zoo volunteer. He’s an entomologist in Australia now, and he recently wrote in his blog that the tiger "flew across the moat from his position on the other side … and sprung back to the grotto all in one graceful movement." There had been previous reports this same tiger could jump the moat.

Then there’s the near escape witnessed by Marian Roth-Cramer in 1997. In an interview in the Dec. 27 San Francisco Chronicle, she said, "I saw the tiger leap over the moat." This makes me wonder why so much coverage has focused on the height of the wall and not the width of the moat.

Media coverage has also focused on whether the men taunted or teased Tatiana. I find this discussion ludicrous. Zoos know animal abuse comes with the territory. They must anticipate it, prevent it, and prepare for its consequences. It’s part of the job. And besides, how does one taunt a tiger?

When I think of taunting, I think of the French kibitzers and King Arthur’s men in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a scene reprised in Spamalot. I imagine some kids shouting into the grotto, "Your mother was a wild boar, and you father smelt of porcelainberries. I scent-mark in your general direction."

Teasing a confined animal means tempting it with something it can’t have — a ball, say, or your throat.

Tatiana wasn’t teased. She got what she wanted.

Tigers attack for limited reasons — they see you as prey, they see you as a threat to them, their cubs, or their food, or they dislike you because of something you did to them. Perhaps Tatiana saw the young men as a threat. Perhaps they pissed her off. But a simpler explanation is that their behavior got the cat’s attention, and perhaps they crossed the fence and got too close to the edge, until at some point Tatiana identified Kulbir Dhaliwal as prey that had come within range. It seems significant that the attack occurred at twilight, since tigers are crepuscular, meaning they are most active then. It’s their favorite time to hunt.

Naturalist and western novelist Dane Coolidge wrote in 1901 that Indians classify tigers as game killers, cattle lifters, or man killers. People have suggested tigers become human killers because they develop a taste for human flesh. I believe tigers will eat almost anything — but they’re wary of taking on prey that might fight back effectively. They lose any hesitancy when they discover just how vulnerable we humans are. Tatiana proved she had no inhibitions about dining on human flesh when she attacked keeper Lori Kamejan in 2006.

Carlos Sousa Jr. apparently tried to distract Tatiana from her attempted "kill," and I use that term loosely since tigers naturally feed on prey that is still alive, and captive tigers are in-between creatures, psychologically speaking. Wild cubs learn from their mothers to dispatch prey effectively, but captive-bred tigers are never taught that skill. In terms of hardware, they may be the world’s finest killers, but their software is buggier than Windows Vista.

Tigers often have to protect their prey after an attack. They are followed by wild dogs and bears that try to scavenge their kills, and herd animals will sometimes try to rescue a herdmate. Tatiana most likely fought off the threat from Sousa, slashing his throat in the process, then tracked her wounded prey to finish what she started. It wasn’t a rampage, a vicious and angry outburst, as media reports have described it, just the methodical, instinctive actions of a top-of-the-line predator.

THE BIPED PROBLEM


If you look at what led up to Tatiana’s escape, you follow a trail of denial and avoidance.

Consider the players, starting with Zoo management and keepers.

Zoo staffers have known for almost a half century that a tiger could jump out of that grotto. Carey Baldwin, then the Zoo director, witnessed the escape with Rentz in 1959. His solution, according to Rentz’s blog, was to post instructions to keep the offending tiger indoors. Castor’s solution to Jack’s escape was to fill the moat with water, according to Alcaraz, but that practice ended after Jack died. Neither solution was permanent or designed to deal with the next strong-legged, strong-willed tiger to come along.

When Roth-Cramer witnessed the near escape, a passing keeper apparently laughed it off. She reportedly wrote a letter to then–Zoo director David Anderson, but there is no evidence her letter produced any response.

As far as we can tell, no one ever tried to convince the AZA or federal regulators that they needed tougher standards or tougher enforcement. No one took the story to the press or published a journal article to warn other Zoo professionals. No one posted public warnings, ordered changes to the grotto, banned tigers from the exhibit, or shut the lion house.

Mollinedo should have known about the problem if his keepers knew. But there seems to be a lot he doesn’t know, and previous Guardian reports and a recent Chronicle article suggest communication has broken down between employees, particularly keepers, and Zoo management. Lower-level staff complain of not being heard, not being consulted. Morale is low. Institutional knowledge is being lost as keepers quit in frustration.

And what about the regulators? Ron Tilson, the conservation director of the Minnesota Zoo, said in a Dec. 27 Chronicle story that the AZA standard, which he said was seven meters (closer to 23 feet), is "very conservative." Yet this has less than a 20 percent safety margin when you consider the conventional wisdom about how far a tiger can jump, and it is far less than reported leaps of 30 feet or more.

The day after the attack, the AZA issued a statement that "AZA accreditation standards contain no specific dimensions for big cat enclosures." The AZA did not return calls seeking comment, but what it provides is really a set of guidelines produced by advisory committees for a voluntary association composed of the very institutions being regulated. The guidelines aren’t consistently known and have never been fully implemented.

We know the AZA accredited the San Francisco Zoo despite a wall almost four feet shorter than the recommended height.

In 1974 the Philadelphia Zoo surveyed 10 other zoos about their tiger moats. It published the findings in the 1976 International Zoo Yearbook. San Francisco reported its moat was 13.5 feet deep. Detroit said its moat was 15.5 feet deep. Chicago’s moat was only 21 feet wide, and Tulsa reported between 15 and 20 feet. Oklahoma’s moat was only 17 feet wide. Half of the surveyed zoos couldn’t meet AZA recommendations.

There are signs the San Francisco Zoo did not meet other AZA standards. For example, the AZA’s 2008 Accreditation Standards and Related Policies states, "A written protocol should be developed involving local police or other emergency agencies." On Jan. 3, I e-mailed 20 questions to the Zoo’s public relations firm, many of which related to AZA standards. For example, I asked about the last emergency drill and about gun training. I also asked for copies of related Zoo policies. The Zoo never responded. But the next day Mollinedo announced that the Zoo is working with police at Taraval Station on a coordinated emergency response and that police and Zoo shooters will be training together.

The United States Department of Agriculture regulates zoos as exhibitors under the Animal Welfare Act. That act and the rules written to implement it are primarily meant to ensure healthy conditions for the animals. They contain specifications for the size of the fences around the outside of a zoo facility to keep unauthorized people out, not for the fences separating the animals from visitors.

And local oversight? The city owns the grounds and the animals. Zoo employees are part of the city employees union. But since 1993 the nonprofit San Francisco Zoological Society has owned the institution and operated it under a contract with the city. There were problems at the Zoo when the city ran it, but, as Sup. Tom Ammiano told me, "Nobody died."

The contract retains a role for the city through a Joint Zoo Committee of society board members and Recreation and Park Department commissioners. I have gone though the minutes of that committee going back several years, and I have to say the committee provides as much oversight as the stuffed animals in the Zoo’s gift ship. As Ammiano put it, "It’s all lip service."

The employee relations problems, the animal injuries and deaths (see Opinion, page 7), and other management issues at the Zoo are nothing new. Savannah Blackwell reported on these same sets of issues for the Guardian twice — see "The Zoo Blues" (5/19/99) and "The Zoo’s Losers" (5/7/03) — and there is no indication anything has been done.

The city’s contract with the Zoological Society and the Joint Zoo Committee should mean Zoo documents are public under the city’s sunshine laws. But the Zoo has not been forthcoming with key documents requested by the media. Sup. Sean Elsbernd has called for hearings, and Ammiano said there will be multiple hearings. "I think the key issues are accountability and transparency," he said.

The Zoo’s high-priced director has demonstrated that his knowledge of the animals under his care, the condition of his facilities, and the concerns of his staff are embarrassingly limited. In press conferences he looked befuddled, evaded questions, broke every rule of crisis communication, and speculated about the victims without clear information.

The Zoo hired Sam Singer, supposedly a crisis communication specialist, but I have attended multiple trainings in crisis communication, and I have to say he seems more like a fixer to me. And despite this, Mayor Gavin Newsom and the society’s board publicly support Mollinedo.

Mollinedo and his PR people have tried to direct blame toward the victims. Perhaps they were drunk, stoned, rowdy, throwing things — but if Tatiana was killed for being a tiger, it could also be argued that Sousa was killed for being a young man.

There’s a whole process of brain development that scientists are now beginning to understand. The maturation of brain cells through something called myelination starts from the back of the brain. The front of the brain, the seat of executive functions like judgment, matures last. Young people often don’t make good decisions. Boys, in particular, take unnecessary risks.

In the public health world, we understand this and concentrate on policies that control risk and reduce harm. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t hold the survivors accountable for anything they might have done, but it does mean the Zoo has no business shifting the blame.

So where does that leave us? It leaves us with more avoidance than a tiger has stripes.

In the end, this was a human problem. People weren’t doing their jobs. They had not taken action when it was clearly needed. And in the end, the only innocent creature in this drama was the one that had no choice other than to be what she was. Her name was Tatiana.

And now she is dead, along with a young man whose parents loved and miss him very much.

Craig McLaughlin is a former Guardian managing editor. He is coauthor of Health Policy Analysis: An Interdisciplinary Approach (Jones and Bartlett, 2008).

The questions the zoo won’t answer

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Editors note: Craig McLaughlin sent the following questions to the office of the zoo’s hired flack, Sam Singer. We received no reply by press time.

I was raised around tigers. I know their habits and capabilities and was personally involved in constructing cages for them. I have been amazed by some of the comments attributed to Mr. Mollinedo in local news accounts. He initially reported that the wall of the moat was 20 ft high but the moat was 20 feet across. The difference between the elevations of the grotto and the viewing area is clearly, by any direct observation, only a few feet. That means that regardless of the depth of the dry moat, there is a question of whether the tiger could simply leap from bank to bank. Conventional wisdom in the tiger literature is that they can jump 20 feet, and there are accounts in the literature of leaps as long as 30 or even 33 feet. Given this, it makes no sense based on records available to Mr. Mollinedo that the grotto could be considered secure. In the end, we learned the moat’s width varied from 20 to 33 feet depending on how far one descended, but that the far wall was only 12.5 feet. Mr. Mollinedo then expressed surprise that a tiger could leap or climb over a wall of that height. Given my own knowledge of and direct observation of tigers, a tiger making that leap, even a captive tiger, is not surprising in the least, and taunting would not be a prerequisite. I would have to say that Mr. Mollinedo has no idea what he is talking about when it comes to tigers, and would even go so far as to say it was idiotic for him to make the comments he did–and I am prepared to say that in print. Does Mr. Mollinedo or your firm have any response?

1. Please provide a copy of the zoo’s written protocol concerning tiger escapes.

2. What is the size, caliber, and make of the zoo’s kill rifle(s)?

3. Where is it/are they stored?

4. How many people are authorized and trained to use it (them)? How often do they practice?

5. How many of those people were on the zoo grounds from 5-5:30 pm Christmas day?

6. Was a kill rifle (or rifles) and/or a shooting team deployed during Tatiana’s escape?

7. Minutes of the San Francisco Joint Zoo Committee talk about the improvements, including improvements to the lion house, providing keeper staging areas. Where is the nearest staging area to the to the tiger grotto and was it staffed at 5 pm on Christmas day?

8. When was the last date that the zoo conducted an emergency drill for an animal escape? AZA accreditation standards state “Emergency drills ensure that the instiutution’s staff know their duties and responsibilities and know how to handle mergencies properly when they occur…. Emergency drills shouldbe conducted at least once annually for each basic type of emergency.”

9. Please provide a copy of the record and evaluation of the last animal escape emergency drill? AZA standards state that “these drills need to be recorded and evaluated … Records of these drills need to be maintained.”

10. What training do security personnel recieve in how to respond to an animal emergency. How long is the training, who provides it, and are refreshers required? Had security personnel on duty that night been trained?

11. Why did cafe personnel not let the injured patrons inside so they would not be subject to further attacks? What are the policies about sheltering patrons in concession, entertainment and administrative areas during an animal attack?

12. Please provide a copy of the written protocol between the zoo and local police and other local emergency responders as required by AZA standards.

13. The Chronicle and other sources have reported that the tiger grotto was refurbished/remodeled recently and the cats returned in September. Is this true? Please describe what alterations or improvements were made? What contractor did the work? Was an architect involved in preparing plans and if so, who and at what firm? Was Tatiana housed in the same grotto prior to the remodel? Were keepers consulted in the rennovations?

14. There are at least two credible media accounts of tigers escaping from that grotto previously and one account of a near escape. These were known to keepers and in one case reported in a letter to zoo management. Was the zoo director aware of any of these accounts? Should he have been?

15. It is common practice in the business, public and nonprofit sector to consult with subordinates when conducting performance reviews of senior managers (a so-called 360 is one of the best known examples). When was the last performance review of Mr. Mollinedo conducted? Were keepers and other direct and indirect subordinates consulted as part of that review? Does the zoo have written policies in place concerning executive performance reviews? If so, please provide a copy.

16. I believe the zoo’s agreement with the city makes clear that zoo documents should be made available to the city Rec and Parks Department and therefore should be available to the public under the city’s sunshine law. The zoo, however, has not been forthcoming with specifics about the incident or readily provided related documentation. Why is this and how is this allowed under the contract?

17. Who was the designated person for emergency contact for the zoo at the time of the escape? When was that person accessed and by what form of communication?

18. Your firm specializes in crisis communication. The field of crisis communications is well established and has some commonly accepted principles. One of these is truthfulness–officials and spokespersons should be forthright and direct when communicating with employees, the public and the media. Another is timeliness–respond quickly to media and legal inquiries and be be proactive. Expressing empathy and putting people first are also important. Accepting responsibility goes a long way and blaming and attacking is contraindicated. As a public health official, I have been trained in crisis communication. Zoo management seems to be evasive and not forthcoming. Requests for interviews have not been responded to. How do you think the zoo performed initially in this regard and how have things changed since your firm became involved? For example, simple questions are still not being answered. I was surprised to know the zoo had been closed for a long time for a variety of reasons (including the fact that it was a crime scene) and then after they hired your firm, the Web site announces the zoo is closed in honor of the victims. This seem disingenuous to me. I find it dubious that that was really the motivating factor for the extended closure. Any response? (My own opinion is that given joint oversight, the wording of the agreement, and the fact that many dispositions will be conducted, I see no advantage to not responding affirmative and immediately to requests for information and records.)

19. Did the zoo have a media relations policy in place concerning employee interactions with the media prior to this incident. If so, please provide a copy.

20. Does the zoo have a response to SF Chronicle articles that paint a picture of poor management and very bad employee morale at the zoo?

Chiaroscuro Ristorante

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REVIEW The word chiaroscuro is an Italian art term referring to the use of light and shadow to create a three-dimensional effect — and it’s a fitting name to describe this small restaurant’s decor (cement benches, a white-gray-black color scheme, and an exposed kitchen) as well as its cuisine.

My companion and I started with the degustazione di salume e formaggi, a selection of salami and cheese. As a salami lover (my roommates always know whom to blame when their salami is missing after one of my nights out), I truly enjoyed Chiaroscuro’s options. And the cheese, a spectrum from soft to sharp, was also impressive. Plus, our waitress recommended a matching wine that even pleased my companion, who’s more of a wine-no than a wino.

Next came the entrées. I tried fresh gnocchi, which melted like potatoey butter — and with sage, like Mom makes! — in my mouth; lamb chops, polenta, and greens. The lamb was everything it should have been: lean meat, cooked medium and spiced lightly. The polenta came as a mini soufflé with a raw cracked egg in the center — too bland for non–polenta lovers like my dinner companion, but perfectly gritty, dry, and palatable for me. In fact, the polenta was the most impressive dish I ate all night, hands down.

The prices are considerable and the portions are small, but the food is both simple and solid: there’s no gray there.

CHIAROSCURO RISTORANTE Tues.–Sun., 11 a.m.–midnight. 550 Washington, SF. (415) 362-6012, www.chiaroscurosf.com

One word: SIRENS!

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1215_07_2---San-Francisco-Fire-Dept-Ambulance--San-Francisco--California_web.jpg

Dunno about you all, but I live pretty close to SF General hospital and I have got to say the sirens haven’t quit since the early hours of today. Three cheers for all our emergency workers out there dealing with shit in this crappy weather. Heroic. I couldn’t even face leaving the house today.

Club Guide

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0

AMNESIA


853 Valencia

(415) 970-0012

ANNIE’S SOCIAL CLUB


917 Folsom

(415) 974-1585

ARGUS LOUNGE


3187 Mission

(415) 824-1447

ASIASF


201 Ninth St

(415) 255-2742

ATLAS CAFE


3049 20th St

(415) 648-1047

BALAZO18


2183 Mission

(415) 255-7227

BAMBUDDHA LOUNGE


601 Eddy

(415) 885-5088

BAOBAB


3388 19th St

(415) 643-3558

BAZAAR CAFÉ


5927 California

(415) 831-5620

BEAUTY BAR


2299 Mission

(415) 285-0323

BIMBO’S
365 CLUB


1025 Columbus

(415) 474-0365

BISCUITS
AND BLUES


401 Mason

(415) 292-2583

BOHEMIA LOUNGE


1624 California

(415) 474-6968

BOOM BOOM ROOM


1601 Fillmore

(415) 673-8000

BOTTOM
OF THE HILL


1233 17th St

(415) 621-4455

BROADWAY
STUDIOS


435 Broadway

(415) 291-0333

BRUNO’S


2389 Mission

(415) 643-5200

BUBBLE LOUNGE


714 Montgomery

(415) 434-4204

BUTTER


354 11th St

(415) 863-5964

CAFÉ CLAUDE


7 Claude

(415) 392-3515

CAFE COCOMO


650 Indiana

(415) 824-6910

CAFE DU NORD


2170 Market

(415) 861-5016

CAFE INTERNATIONAL


508 Haight

(415) 665-9915

CASANOVA LOUNGE


527 Valencia

(415) 863-9328

CATALYST
COCKTAILS


312 Harriet

(415) 621-1722

CAT CLUB


1190 Folsom

(415) 431-3332

CITY NIGHTS


715 Harrison

(415) 546-7938

CLUB CALIENTE


298 11th St

(415) 255-2232

CLUB DELUXE


1509 Haight

(415) 552-6949

CLUB NV


525 Howard

(415) 339-8686

CLUB SIX


60 Sixth St

(415) 863-1221

CONNECTICUT
YANKEE


100 Connecticut

(415) 552-4440

CRASH


34 Mason

1-877-342-7274

DALVA


3121 16th St

(415) 252-7740

DANNY COYLE’S


668 Haight

(415) 431-4724

DELIRIUM


3139 16th St

(415) 552-5525

DNA LOUNGE


375 11th St

(415) 626-1409

DOLCE


440 Broadway

(415) 989-3434

DOLORES PARK CAFE


501 Dolores

(414) 621-2936

DOUBLE DUTCH


3192 16th St

(415) 503-1670

DUPLEX


1525 Mission

(415) 355-1525

EAGLE TAVERN


398 12th St

(415) 626-0880

EDINBURGH CASTLE PUB


950 Geary

(415) 885-4074

EIGHT


1151 Folsom

(415) 431-1151

ELBO ROOM


647 Valencia

(415) 552-7788.

ELEMENT LOUNGE


1028 Geary

(415) 571-1362

ELIXIR


3200 16th St

(415) 552-1633

ENDUP


401 Sixth St

(415) 357-0827

FAT CITY


314 11th St

(415) 861-2890

FILLMORE


1805 Geary

(415) 346-6000

540 CLUB


540 Clement

(415) 752-7276

FLUID ULTRA LOUNGE


662 Mission

(415) 615-6888

FUSE


493 Broadway

(415) 788-2706

GLAS KAT


520 Fourth St

(415) 495-6626

GRAND


1300 Van Ness

(415) 673-5716

GRANT AND GREEN


1371 Grant

(415) 693-9565

GREAT AMERICAN MUSIC HALL


859 O’Farrell

(415) 885-0750

HARRY DENTON’S STARLIGHT ROOM


Sir Francis Drake Hotel

450 Powell

(415) 395-8595

HEMLOCK TAVERN


1131 Polk

(415) 923-0923

HIFI


2125 Lombard

(415) 345-TONE

HOMESTEAD


2301 Folsom

(415) 282-4663

HOTEL UTAH SALOON


500 Fourth St

(415) 546-6300

HOUSE OF SHIELDS


39 New Montgomery

(415) 495-5436

ICON ULTRA LOUNGE


1192 Folsom

(415) 626-4800

INDEPENDENT


628 Divisadero

(415) 771-1421

IRELAND’S 32


3920 Geary

(415) 386-6173

JACK’S CLUB


2545 24th St

(415) 641-5371

JAZZ AT PEARL’S


256 Columbus

(415) 291-8255

JELLY’S


295 Terry Francois

(415) 495-3099

JOHNNY FOLEY’S


243 O’Farrell

(415) 954-0777

KATE O’BRIENS


579 Howard

(415) 882-7240

KELLY’S MISSION ROCK


817 Terry Francois

(415) 626-5355

KIMO’S


1351 Polk

(415) 885-4535

KNOCKOUT


3223 Mission

(415) 550-6994

LASZLO


2534 Mission

(415) 401-0810

LEVENDE LOUNGE


1710 Mission

(415) 864-5585

LEXINGTON CLUB


3464 19th St

(415) 863-2052

LINGBA LOUNGE


1469 18th St

(415) 355-0001

LI PO LOUNGE


916 Grant

(415) 982-0072

LOFT 11


316 11th St

(415) 701-8111

LOU’S PIER 47


300 Jefferson

(415) 771-5687

LUCID BAR


580 Sutter

(415) 398-0195

MAD DOG IN THE FOG


530 Haight

(415) 626-7279

MADRONE LOUNGE


500 Divisadero

(415) 241-0202

MAKE-OUT ROOM


3225 22nd St

(415) 647-2888

METRONOME DANCE CENTER


1830 17th St

(415) 252-9000

MEZZANINE


444 Jessie

(415) 625-8880

MIGHTY


119 Utah

(415) 626-7001

MILK


1840 Haight

(415) 387-6455

MOJITO


1337 Grant

(415) 398-1120

MOOSE’S


1652 Stockton

(415) 989-7800

NICKIE’S


466 Haight

(415) 255-0300

OLD FIRST CHURCH


1751 Sacramento

(415) 474-1608

111 MINNA GALLERY


111 Minna

(415) 974-1719

PARK


747 Third St

(415) 974-1925

PARKSIDE


1600 17th St

(415) 252-1330

PIER 23


Pier 23

(415) 362-5125

PINK


2925 16th St

(415) 431-8889

PLOUGH AND STARS


116 Clement

(415) 751-1122

PLUSH ROOM


York Hotel

940 Sutter

(415) 885-2800

POLENG LOUNGE


1751 Fulton

(415) 441-1710

PUBLIC


1489 Folsom

(415) 552-3065

PURPLE ONION


140 Columbus

(415) 217-8400

RAMP


855 China Basin

(415) 621-2378

RASSELAS JAZZ


1534 Fillmore

(415) 346-8696

RED DEVIL LOUNGE


1695 Polk

(415) 921-1695

RED POPPY ART HOUSE


2698 Folsom

(415) 826-2402

REDWOOD ROOM


Clift Hotel

495 Geary

(415) 775-4700

RETOX LOUNGE


628 20th St

(415) 626-7386

RICKSHAW STOP


155 Fell

(415) 861-2011

EL RINCON


2700 16th St

(415) 437-9240

EL RIO


3158 Mission

(415) 282-3325

RIPTIDE BAR


3639 Taraval

(415) 240-8360

RITE SPOT


2099 Folsom

(415) 552-6066

ROCCAPULCO
SUPPER CLUB


3140 Mission

(415) 648-6611

ROCK-IT ROOM


406 Clement

(415) 387-6343

ROHAN LOUNGE


3809 Geary

(415) 221-5095

ROYALE


1326 Grant

(415) 433-4247

RUBY SKYE


420 Mason

(415) 693-0777

SAVANNA JAZZ


2937 Mission

(415) 285-3369

SHANGHAI 1930


133 Steuart

(415) 896-5600

SHINE DANCE LOUNGE


1337 Mission

(415) 421-1916

SKYLARK


3089 16th St

(415) 621-9294

SLIDE


430 Mason

(415) 421-1916

SLIM’S


333 11th St

(415) 255-0333

SOLUNA CAFE AND LOUNGE


272 McAllister

(415) 621-2200

SPACE 550


550 Barneveld

(415) 550-8286

STUD


399 Ninth St

(415) 252-7883

SUEDE


383 Bay

(415) 399-9555

SUGAR LOUNGE


377 Hayes

(415) 255-7144

SUITE ONE8ONE


181 Eddy

(415) 345-9900

SUPPERCLUB


657 Harrison

(415) 348-0900

1015 FOLSOM


1015 Folsom

(415) 431-1200

330 RITCH


330 Ritch

(415) 541-9574

TOP OF THE MARK


Mark Hopkins Intercontinental Hotel

1 Nob Hill

(415) 616-6916

TRANSFER


198 Church

(415) 861-7499

TUNNEL TOP


601 Bush

(415) 986-8900

12 GALAXIES


2565 Mission

(415) 970-9777

26 MIX


3024 Mission

(415) 826-7378

222 CLUB


222 Hyde

(415) 864-2288

UNDERGROUND SF


424 Haight

(415) 864-7386

VELVET LOUNGE


443 Broadway

(415) 788-0228

VODA


56 Belden

(415) 677-9242

WARFIELD


982 Market

(415) 775-7722

WISH


1539 Folsom

(415) 431-1661

BAY AREA

ALBATROSS PUB


1822 San Pablo, Berk

(510) 843-2473

ANNA’S JAZZ ISLAND


2120 Allston Way, Berk

(510) 841-JAZZ

ASHKENAZ


1317 San Pablo, Berk

(510) 525-5054

BECKETT’S


2271 Shattuck, Berk

(510) 647-1790

BLAKES


2367 Telegraph, Berk

(510) 848-0886

CAFE VAN KLEEF


1621 Telegraph, Oakl

(510) 763-7711

DOWNTOWN


2102 Shattuck, Berk

(510) 649-3810

FOURTH STREET TAVERN


711 Fourth St, San Rafael

(415) 454-4044

FREIGHT AND SALVAGE COFFEE HOUSE


1111 Addison, Berk

(510) 548-1761

JAZZSCHOOL


2087 Addison, Berk

(510) 845-5373

JUPITER


2181 Shattuck, Berk

(510) THE-ROCK

KINGMAN’S LUCKY LOUNGE


3332 Grand, Oakl

(510) 465-KING

MAMA BUZZ CAFE


2318 Telegraph, Oakl

(510) 465-4073

19 BROADWAY


19 Broadway, Fairfax

(415) 459-1091

924 GILMAN STREET PROJECT


924 Gilman, Berk

(510) 525-9926

NOMAD CAFÉ


6500 Shattuck, Oakl

(510) 595-5344.

PARAMOUNT THEATRE


2025 Broadway, Oakl

(510) 465-6400

RUBY ROOM


132 14th St, Oakl

(510) 444-7224

SHATTUCK DOWN LOW


2284 Shattuck, Berk

(510) 548-1159

STARRY PLOUGH


3101 Shattuck, Berk

(510) 841-2082

STORK CLUB


2330 Telegraph, Oakl

(510) 444-6174

SWEETWATER


153 Throckmorton, Mill Valley

(415) 388-2820

TIME OUT BAR AND PATIO


1822 Grant, Concord

(925) 798-1811

21 GRAND


416 25th St, Oakl

(510) 444-7263

UPTOWN


1928 Telegraph, Oakl

(510) 451-8100

WHITE HORSE


6551 Telegraph, Oakl

(510) 652-3820

YOSHI’S


510 Embarcadero West

Jack London Square, Oakl

(510) 238-9200

Acting pleasant

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0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

George Bernard Shaw once titled a bound collection of his dramas Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant, thus inadvertently summing up any year in any theater scene anywhere. But this is a happy time, so we can concentrate on the former.

The pool of local acting talent, in particular, spoils us in the Bay Area. While it’s not hard to find a strong performance from last year, finding room to list them all is another story, and a much longer one. But there’s space enough to list a few especially deft turns from 2007, including feats of physical and verbal dexterity, like the trio of weirdly gesticuutf8g women in Crowded Fire’s wowing production of Lisa D’Amour’s word-struck trailer-park gothic, Anna Bella Eema. Cassie Beck, Julie Kurtz, and Danielle Levin never left their chairs, but watching them — under the superb direction of Rebecca Novick (who stepped down as CF’s artistic director this year) — you didn’t want to leave yours either.

Then there was Alias‘s Carl Lumbly, skipping rope like a welterweight throughout his opening monologue in Jesus Hopped the "A" Train. A world-class actor with an East Bay address, Lumbly crossed the bridge this spring to appear in SF Playhouse’s excellent local premiere of Stephen Adly Guirgis’s raucous drama. As in many Playhouse productions, the cast (astutely directed by the ensemble’s Bill English) was strong as a whole, but the moments when Lumbly’s upbeat, ever-hopeful death-row sociopath played unlikely mentor to a young neophyte out of his depth (a solid Daveed Diggs) were truly prime time.

The physically and comically nimble cast of writer-director Mark Jackson’s notable premiere, American Suicide — a smart, lively, and very funny adaptation of Soviet Russian Nikolai Erdman’s scathing 1928 comedy that had its lock-solid debut at the Thick House in February — also merit special mention for their fine fleshing out of the play’s arch, cartoonlike histrionics. Headed by the pitch-perfect pair of Jud Williford and Beth Wilmurt in what would have been a suicide mission in lesser hands, they managed the mishmash of zany caricature, a certain 1930s allusiveness, and macabre social satire with engrossing panache. The Coen brothers might have attempted something similar in The Hudsucker Proxy, but remember: they had special effects and coffee breaks. These actors work without a net — though the show’s madcap pace put them at risk of ending up in one.

Although not necessarily as athletic as the title might lead you to expect, Sex (at the Aurora Theatre) threatened to be hard enough, given that the play, while an interesting theatrical relic, has little in its lippy melodrama to shock audiences 80 years after its scandalous Broadway opening. Furthermore, stepping into Mae West’s shoes is a fine-line idea that had better be managed with grace and attitude. Fortunately, Delia MacDougall (in the attention-grabbing role West wrote for herself) proved a dazzling tightrope walker in pumps, creating a West-worthy impression in no way reducible to a mere impersonation (which is still fine at parties). (MacDougall, incidentally, was a hilarious part of Jackson’s American Suicide cast.) Costume designer Cassandra Carpenter decked out MacDougall and the rest of the company beautifully in pristine period threads indicative of the unexpected degree of life director Tom Ross and his thoroughly fine cast found in the play.

And as memorable costumes go, I wonder who among us present for Kiki and Herb: Alive on Broadway (at the American Conservatory Theater’s Geary Theater in July) could forget that frilly-legged chiffon number (by designer Marc Happel) on Justin Bond as the singing, slinging half of those two lounge legends? Needless to say, in the brilliant haute tastelessness of the Kiki and Herb aesthetic, this was genius swathing genius.

But back to casts (and premieres): the Custom Made Theatre Company scored a real coup, if not a coup d’état, with the Bay Area premiere of Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins. The small black box company assembled a terrific cast and offered a smart production design in no way lessened by its clearly low-budget proportions. Artistic director Brian Katz’s agile execution, if that’s the right word, of Sondheim’s musical-drama rumination on the men and women who tried to assassinate various American presidents was one of the year’s little big surprises and, heading into election year 2008, left us on a feel-good note.

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