SF

RZA: better to give…

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rza.jpg

By Chris DeMento

Tuesday night, Dec. 11, and I was feeling really zoned in: got the good word that the RZA and his stagemate Monk were just getting to town after a long drive up the coast, and that meant I didn’t need to stress about getting
down there all that early. I happened to be on their clock.

The openers – Audible Mainframe, Mr. Sayre, and Benflowz – held it down as a packed-full Independent waited for its headliner. Didn’t seem like all that much time to me, although more than one audience member expressed disrelish while waiting for a such a “prima donna.” Feeling really zoned in, completely ignorant of time, I reminded more than one audience member it was the RZA about to come on, be patient, dudes. Have youse a Heinekin.

Whatever route the RZA and Monk took from LA to SF had inspired them. First thing they did was soak the crowd in bubbly. Later they fed it Black Label and Grey Goose. Having officially dropped the Wu’s brand-new album that very same day, 8 Diagrams, Bobby Digital was in quite good spirits, lolling around the stage with a smile, stumbling upon a set of hand drums to beat on, feeling zoned in: “I’m feeling really zoned in,” he said.

A key legal filing in the Guardian’s lawsuit

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Since it appears that our lawsuit against SF Weekly and its parent company isheaded for trial the first week in January, and the Weekly has been running a lot of misleading stories about the case, I thought I’d post the key document in the case so far — our brief explaining why the case should not be dismissed and should go to trial.

Here’s the brief, as a pdf. Although it’s marked “confidential,” it was introduced and discussed in open court and is now public record.

The judge in the case, Richard Kramer, tossed out the SF Weekly’s summary judgment motion, and the court of appeals rejected an SF Weekly writ seeking to have that dismissal overturned. So the case is going forward, and if you read our brief, you can see what this is all about.

Surrender Dorothy — symphonized

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Imagine our grandfatherly gay delight at the megaspectacle promised by the approaching SF Symphony’s holiday show: a big screen showing of The Wizard of Oz accompanied by a live symphony orchestra! Imagine!

Wizcut.jpg

Let’s hope the piccolos don’t drown out those flying monkeys …

This event is looking to be super-popular, so get your tix now! Oh! And come dressed as your favorite character — there’ll be a contest in the lobby!

The Wizard of Oz with the San Francisco Symphony

Thursday, December 20 at 7:00 p.m.
Friday, December 21 at 7:00 p.m.
Saturday, December 22 at 2:00 p.m.
Children welcome and encouraged!
(Pint-sized ruby slippers not supplied)
www.sfsymphony.org

Year in Music: Sub obsession

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When listeners go mad for a track they hear on London’s dubstep pirate radio station Rinse FM, the DJ quickly backspins the vinyl or CD turntable and says, "All right, from the edge!" It’s an apt metaphor for music that has San Franciscans like myself clinging to bass bins and feverishly tracking the music’s forward march from South London across the globe.

Dubstep was 2007’s most fun and relevant electronic music form. The sound encompasses our war-weary planet’s apocalyptic throb, with the promise of technology’s tones twinkling in the distance. It welds dub reggae’s weighty bass with UK garage’s insistent rhythmic pulse and, like a massive black hole, draws in techno, grime, industrial, drum ‘n’ bass, and other electronic subgenres.

This year, seven years after its gritty South London birth, dubstep music was everywhere in the Bay Area, from small bars like Underground SF to multiple Burning Man camps. Parties like Grime City, Narco Hz, Brap Dem, and Full Melt drove the music, while promoters like SureFire booked big out-of-town acts. Brit expat Emcee Child ruled the mic with Axiom and Audio Angel contributing vocal vibes, and DJs like SamSupa!, Djunya, Ripple, Cyan, Subtek, Kozee, Jus Wan, and Kid Kameleon sorted the platters.

So why dubstep, and why now? Well, house, techno, hip-hop, and mashups have mined familiar, even worn, territory for years, addled by heaps of cocaine and mediocre productions. Meanwhile, innovation is dubstep’s main component: London’s Benga dropped electro-influenced steppers, local artist Juju gave us dub-fueled tunes, Skream issued acidy tracks, and new names like Elemental offered glitchy breaks as dubsteppers broke all the rules. This inspired a clutch of devoted SF enthusiasts to launch a full-scale takeover, with club nights, legal and pirate radio shows, and labels and local producers getting international acclaim. SF is now respected internationally as America’s dubstep ground zero.

The good news: this scene is more down-to-earth than the city’s notoriously cliquey drum ‘n’ bass crews were in their mid-’90s prime. The first time you go to a dubstep party you’re more apt to be handed a shot than shot down as a newbie. And remember: when you hear a sick dubplate rinsed out there, don’t forget to put five fingers in the air and shout, "From the edge!"

TOP 10 FROM DJ TOMAS, A.K.A. DUB I.D. DUBSTEP


1. Various artists, Hotflush Presents: Space and Time (Hotflush)

2. The Bug featuring Killa P and Flow Dan, "Skeng" (Hyperdub)

3. N-Type’s Sunday radio show, Rinse FM

4. Benga, "The Invasion" (Big Apple)

5. SamSupa!, Fallinginto DJ mix

6. Cotti and Clue Kid, "The Legacy" (–30)

7. Burial, Untrue (Hyperdub)

8. Babylon System, "Loaded" (Argon)

9. Coki, "Spongebob" (DMZ)

10. Skream, "Skreamizm Vol. 4" (Tempa)

Labor of Glover

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WHAT IS IT? Beowulf may be raking in box office bucks worldwide, but its monster has been making his own rounds. Crispin Hellion Glover and I holed up in Chicago’s House of Blues to wait out a snowstorm and talk about the second installment of his It trilogy, It Is Fine! Everything Is Fine.

Twenty years ago Fine codirector David Brothers handed Glover a script penned by a man with severe cerebral palsy. This wasn’t a touchy-feely autobiographical affair nor a trite story about overcoming diversity to make the world a better place. No, this was a sinister genre spin into the mind of a sociopath; the gentle hero was a villain. "He didn’t like the idea that handicapped people were always portrayed as these good people," Glover explained, careful to point out that the screenwriter, Steven C. Stewart, preferred the term handicapped. "He wanted to play a bad guy."

Protagonist Paul Baker, played by Stewart, has a hair fetish. He falls in love with a weathered divorcee — played by ever-luminous Rainer Werner Fassbinder muse Margit Carstensen — and her lengthy locks. She purrs at Baker, "You might be handicapped, but you’re still a man. I’m going to treat you as such." And she follows through, right until he strangles her. We watch as he charms, beds, and slays his way through the female cast. "The women are his allies, but there’s an antagonism within them as well," Glover explained. "It has to do with the hair." Indeed, anytime a woman threatens to chop off her mane, we know she’s on her way out.

"The fact that he had these particularities — that he wasn’t a good guy, that he had this hair fetish — this is what made it interesting," Glover said of the Baker character. It isn’t long before we learn that it’s OK to hate the guy in the wheelchair. The cerebral palsy becomes moot. It’s all about the hair.

Despite the fact that the speech of Fine‘s leading man is nearly impossible to decipher, the audience never loses track of what’s going on. As the screenwriter, Stewart could have given himself any worldly talent; instead, he chose a fantasy in which everyone understands him with ease. It’s this naïveté that attracted Glover to the script, and the directors made strenuous efforts to preserve it throughout the film.

After the death of his mother, Stewart spent 10 years locked in a nursing home, penning the script on his release. Glover read it shortly after. "I don’t know how he got me to make this film, but I’m glad I did it," said Glover, who told me several times that he believes this is the best film he will ever be associated with. "If this film didn’t get made, I genuinely would have felt like I’d done something wrong."

Although Fine was originally slated to be the third installment of the It trilogy, a turn in Stewart’s health sparked an urgency to start shooting. Glover accepted his role in Charlie’s Angels to bankroll Fine, and filming began in Salt Lake City in 2000.

A month after shooting wrapped, Glover received a telephone call from Stewart, who asked if it was OK to take himself off life support. "It was a very heavy responsibility to say, ‘Yes Steve, we have enough footage. You do what you need to do,’" Glover said.

Without Stewart around to field questions about his script, the codirectors had to interpret the writer’s intentions on their own — and audiences and reviewers will keep asking questions that can’t be answered. Did Stewart write the script to be surrounded by beautiful women, graphic sexuality, and the artistic attentions of Glover and Brothers? Did he understand the important, albeit off-putting, nuances presented for unassuming audiences to chew on? As I rambled about the things Stewart might have said if only he were here with us, Glover stopped me: "Steven would have loved to have been here to talk to you. He probably would have wanted to touch your hair. But I don’t know that he would have been particularly analytical about this."

So, in the Steven C. Stewart tradition of eschewing analysis for the good stuff, I’ll leave you with this: Graphic sex on gorgeous sets. Cameos by both Glover parents. Death by wheelchair. Don’t overthink it. Just go see the film. It’ll be fine. Everything will be fine. (K. Tighe)

IT IS FINE! EVERYTHING IS FINE.

With Crispin Hellion Glover in person

Fri.–Sun., 8 p.m., $20

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.ticketweb.com

Heaven knows

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› johnny@sfbg.com

In the virtuoso first and last shots of Silent Light, director Carlos Reygadas has the audience seeing stars. At first it’s difficult to tell that you’re staring at the nighttime sky: those glimmering lights could be electric. But once the camera completes its initial 180-degree acrobat maneuver and begins to creep over a rural landscape, it’s apparent that Reygadas’s vision is stratospheric. A time-lapse tracking shot matched with a magnified, morphing soundtrack of insect and animal noises, this opening sequence (echoed at the end) eclipses the mechanical spectacle of Koyaanisquatsi-style ethnographic docs and the intimate splendor of nature films. Even if Reygadas is simply being a show-off, there’s something uncanny about his merging of the cinematic and the choreographic — the spectrum of light, darkness, and color inspires wonder.

When Reygadas breaks free from human subject matter, Silent Light takes on a mystical air. But those moments bookend a tale of adultery set amid a Mennonite community in Chihuahua, Mexico, and the people in that story move — not for the first time in a Reygadas film — like dolls at the mercy of a drowsy child-god. Try as he might, Reygadas can never quite tell a straight story when he fixes his gaze on human subjects. He leaves the corpulent realm of 2005’s Battle in Heaven for the blond hair, extreme tan lines, and reptilian beads of sweat of a farmer and his family. But he never mocks the beliefs of his human subjects, even if his latest film’s eternally smiling grandfather figure seems like a creature out of Beatrix Potter. Shades of blue and white, Ford T-shirts and 4×4 pickup trucks, a sweaty Jacques Brel glimpsed in pixel-pointillist close-up, the untamed aspects (and bizarre elderly features) of children, sun drops — refracted jewels from beams of solar light that hang like stained-glass mobiles amid the daytime landscape — and, when indoors, reflections in the golden pendulum of a tick-tocking clock: these ingredients are all as important as the narrative and its mystical outcome.

If he or she exists, God works in mysterious ways, allowing Silent Light to rediscover Denmark in rural Mexico and letting Reygadas try on the robes of Carl Theodor Dreyer — the film’s connections to Dreyer’s 1955 Ordet (also invoked reverently in João Pedro Rodrigues’s cockeyed, blasphemously faithful 2005 Odete, a.k.a. Two Drifters) are many and varied. Reygadas’s point of view ceaselessly circles the action, sometimes crawling toward (or past) dark thresholds. But only at the beginning and the end of Silent Light does his direction — with an emphasis on that word’s searching as much as literal cinematic terminology — reach a sublime realm. This isn’t a miracle — he’s already demonstrated a flair for elaborate beginnings and finales: his overrated 2002 debut Japón closed with a marathon tracking-shot trek over a train crash. Silent Light lacks the bracing pairings of the sacred and profane that characterize Battle in Heaven, but its starry-eyed beginning and end prove that that Reygadas’s scrutiny of the ineffable is far from complacent. If cinema is a corpse, his kiss just might bring it back to life.

SILENT LIGHT

Thurs/13 (with Carlos Reygadas in person) and Sun/16, 7:30 p.m., $6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, screening room, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Le P’tit Laurent

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Although for years I have believed and maintained that you could never get good cassoulet in a restaurant, I find that I must now recant. You can get good cassoulet in at least one restaurant in this town, and that restaurant is Le P’tit Laurent, which opened a few months ago at the corner of Chenery and Diamond, in the heart of Glen Park’s utterly transformed commercial village.

The restaurant bears the name of its owner, Laurent Legendre, who was one of the partners in Clémentine, a late-’90s presence in the Inner Richmond. I never quite warmed to Clémentine, whose rather formal and correct French cooking seemed a little crimped after the exuberant whimsy of Alain Rondelli, previous holder of the Clement Street space. But no such ghost haunts Le P’tit Laurent, whose predecessor was a blues club named Red Rock. The new bistro already feels as if it’s been there since time out of mind; it has that nicely worn-in Parisian look, from the clutter of liquor bottles (and a miniature Eiffel Tower) behind the mirrored bar to the little, distinctively French signs posted all over the place, including one for cave at the mouth of the wine closet. There is also a pressed-tin ceiling and a service ethic that is French in the best sense: friendly, yes, but knowledgeable and crisp first.

Best of all is the street scene that continuously unfolds beyond the many windows. One of the drawbacks of the French bistro in America is that America isn’t France, and our street scenes don’t look French. Glen Park would never be mistaken for the Marais, even at night, but one evening, amid early darkness and the descending scent of winter, I thought I caught a whiff of the 11th arrondissement: blurred streetlamps, a metro station at the corner, pedestrians hurrying home from work up quiet side streets, though not carrying baguettes under their arms.

Of course, I was eating an excellent cassoulet at the time, and this might have affected my perception. The only flaw in Le P’tit Laurent’s cassoulet ($19) is that it can’t be ordered as part of the three-course, $19.95 prix fixe menu (available Monday to Thursday, from 5:30 to 7 p.m.). Otherwise, the dish is flawless: an earthenware crock of white beans in a sauce thickened by a long, slow simmer with duck-leg confit, chunks of pork, and oblong coins of Toulouse sausage.

The cassoulet is a meal in itself and then some, so our first course — steamed mussels in a creamy white-wine sauce ($9), with pale gold frites ($2.50 extra) — was overkill in the form of an overture. (Prekill?) The broth was excellent if conventional, and it seemed to gather a bit of extra magic when sopped up with the fries or (when they ran out, because of course they did) chunks of baguette. And it probably made more sense as a prelude to a lighter main course, such as sautéed sea bass ($16) in a Grenobloise sauce — a rather forceful concoction of melted butter spiked with herbs and capers (and possibly a dab of mustard, I thought).

One of the kitchen’s themes, in fact, seems to involve giving hearty treatments to seafood. On an earlier visit we found several chunks of monkfish ($17.95) sprawled on a bed of shredded cabbage and bacon (a combination reminiscent of the Alsatian dish choucroute). On that same visit we liked suprême de poulet ($14.95), a roasted leg and thigh of chicken on a bed of couscous and garlic confit, with a cheery sauce of citrus reduction and ginger, but were less enthusiastic about the vegetarian plate ($14.95), a pair of large, free-form ravioli stuffed with red beet slices and bathed in too much of a decent but unremarkable mushroom sauce. If you needed proof that the traditional French gastronomic ethic is unenthusiastic about vegetarianism, I give you exhibit A.

If we felt we’d drifted into an unstated conflict, we were soon mollified by dessert: to wit, profiteroles ($5.95), in fact the best profiteroles in recent memory. There was nothing too out of the ordinary about the flavors; the pastry balls were stuffed with vanilla ice cream and sauced with chocolate and caramel. But the pastry! Sublimely flaky. Profiteroles are too often tough and rubbery, like old racquetballs, but Le P’tit Laurent’s were yieldingly delicate, bits of buttery finery that surrendered themselves and were soon gone but not forgotten. They were so not forgotten, in fact, that we ordered them a second time a few evenings later, and while I was tempted to cap things off with a snifter of Armagnac, I felt no need in the end. (To paraphrase the endlessly paraphrasable Homer Simpson: my gastronomic rapacity did know satiety.)

As for Glen Park — well, these days I hardly know ye. When Chenery Park opened just a few doors up in 2000, it was a lonely outpost of upscaleness in a Sleepy Hollow sort of urban enclave that seemed little changed since the 1950s. But these first years of the new millennium have brought all sorts of newness, from the cool pizza place across the street (Gialina) to the gorgeous Canyon Market (viewable through Le P’tit Laurent’s windows as part of the faux–11th arrondissement display) to, finally, a retro-chic Parisian bistro that serves quite good food at reasonable prices and is, accordingly, packing them in. The case for cassoulet has been made.

LE P’TIT LAURENT

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 9 a.m.–2 p.m. Dinner: daily, 5:30–10:30 p.m.

699 Chenery, SF

(415) 334-3235

Full bar

MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Club Guide

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PHOTO BY LYLE OWERKO

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 CAFE


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


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


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


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

Antidepressants

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS In the morning I dropped him off at the bus stop and he jumped out of the car, a big meeting at nine. Work. I smiled and waved through the window, blew him a kiss that I don’t think he saw, and pulled away.

Went to Crawdad de la Cooter’s to see her baby and her, but they were on their way out the door. Inside, her man was in bed sick. I should have stayed and made him soup, or something. We talked a little through the door, and I got back in my car and went.

Stopped at my favorite dumpster for firewood, and the gate was closed. I lingered, looking through the chain-linkage at an inviting overflow of sawed-off two-by-fours and scrapped corner cuts, all with everyone-else-in-the-world’s name on them, not mine.

It was a long drive home. And cold. Oh, the sky was sunny and brilliant, but all that was, like everything else in life, on the other side of my windshield. I turned the heater on and my chest tightened. My breathing became irregular. Goddamn, I hate these little heart attacks. I turned the heater off and rolled down my window.

At the Ping-Pong table in my mind, nothing and Nothing were duking it out, and no one was winning. I was dripping sweat, gritting my teeth, stomping and grunting, darting and lunging. Takes me an hour and a half to get home to the woods. That’s a lot of Ping-Pong. Final score: 0-0. I made a mental note to call my therapist.

Inside my shack it was in the mid-40s. I resisted the temptation to go to bed. Let me rephrase that: I went to bed, but first I got a fire going and only slept for a couple hours. Then, instead of my therapist, I called the feed store. It’s not the next best thing; it’s better. I may be hopelessly hopeless, useless, clueless, and gutless, but I’d be damned if I was going to stay chickenless.

"Got pullets?" I said. And for the first time in six weeks they said yep. So I called Mountain Sam’l. "Mister," I said, "your chickenless chicken farmer is about to be chickenful."

We met down at Western Farm, and after, while the new girls peeped and pooped on my passenger seat, we stopped for my favorite antidepressant, duck soup.

What friends are for: Sam’l talked to me, long after our noodles were all slurped up, and, with poetic patience and kind, country eyes, he reminded me How To Be Crazy. That’s golden. It’s practical, realistic information, especially compared with How Not To Be Crazy. And after way more than an hour, he not only didn’t charge me $60 or even $25 but even insisted on picking up the check.

Next day we went for a hike. He showed me some things you can eat, like cattail root, acorns for mush, and madrone bark for tea. Mountain Veronica made a pot roast and we watched A Beautiful Mind.

The chickens were not still in my car. They were digging their new digs in the redwoods — redecorating, unpacking: you know, settling in. On Sunday I drove down to the city, played three consecutive soccer games for three different teams, then, lunch-breaking only for a slice of pizza and a glass of water, I went and played baseball. Caught four innings, pitched three, and never knew the score, but it was a nine-to-five sports day. Imagine my soreness.

I could barely shift gears on my way back to the Mountains’ for salmon, mashed potatoes, and green beans. When I hit their hot tub at 11 that night, the cure was complete. But Mountain Veronica, ever the big sister, wouldn’t let me drive home.

In the morning, Monday morning, I would go to work: I would sing to and sit with my chickens. Help them paint. I would cook them a coop-warming corn bread with the buggy cornmeal and stinky flour I’d been saving. Welcome home!

And this, from Mr. and Mrs. Mountains: me! — your new, improved chicken farmer, and a can of worms.

My new favorite restaurant is Pizza Orgasmica, not because their thin slices are as good as you can get here in Not–New York. No. Because I play on their soccer team, and that must mean they bought our uniforms. The butts of our shorts say: "We Never Fake It." And we don’t, but we tend to lose anyway. The pizza’s good, though.

PIZZA ORGASMICA

Mon.–Wed. and Sun., 11 a.m.–midnight; Thurs., 11 a.m.–2 a.m.; Fri.–Sat., 11 a.m.–2:30 a.m.

3157 Fillmore (at Greenwich), SF

(415) 931-5300

Takeout available

Beer

AE/MC/V

Live Sushi Bar

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REVIEW When you’re looking for a restaurant in Potrero Hill, Live Sushi Bar is the proverbial needle in the haystack. But with a good location, great service, and fresh food at reasonable prices, it’s worth finding.

First of all, our server figured out I was a vegetarian when I ordered the Green Combo, and he replaced the beef-based miso soup that accompanies the combo with edamame before I had to ask. He also helped my sushi-novice companion choose a combination of rolls she’d be comfortable with.

As for the food, the vegetable tempura was nothing to sneeze at, but the sushi is really where this place shines. The highlights of my meal were the veggie swamp rolls, cucumber and avocado topped with a delicious seaweed salad that made them look like edible Fraggles curled up on my plate. My friend ordered the Roll Combo and was pleasantly surprised by the all-veggie cucumber rolls, a nice balance to the fishy tuna and crab rolls that constituted the rest of her order. The combos are certainly the best way to go: for the price of one order of rolls, you can get three different rolls, as well as miso (or edamame) and salad. Plus, everything arrives so beautifully arranged, you’ll almost feel guilty ruining the edible works of art with your chopsticks.

And an extra bonus? The women’s bathroom, which not only smells like a tropical paradise but also has a miniature village inside: ducks rowing a boat, a bridge, and little buildings all arranged in an alcove. Stuffing yourself and a friend on great sushi for $30 and then visiting a tiny fantasyland — who wouldn’t love that?

LIVE SUSHI BAR Daily, 11 a.m.–3 p.m. and 5 p.m.–late. 2001 17th St., SF. (415) 861-8610

Calling all shred-heds: Hesher finals at Thee Parkside

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By Justin Juul

Karaoke isn’t just for drunk bachelorettes, annoying frat boys, and Japanese man-whores anymore. (Such language! — ed.)

heshercut.jpg

Now, thanks to the folks down at Thee Parkside, you and all your goofy and jaded hipster friends can enjoy it too. Hesher, Thee Parkside’s monthly karaoke and air guitar contest, has been building up heavy metal steam all year long and is about to go into finals mode. On December 14th, the cream of the Bay area’s butt-rock crop will be choking down cleverly marketed Olympia Brewery/Miller products and royally fucking up your favorite anthems from the eighties, nineties, and beyond. Expect to hear a lot of Guns and Roses, Skid Row, Def Leppard, and maybe even some Iron Maiden or Slayer type shit if you’re lucky.

And make sure you bring a camera. You never know who you might run into at a karaoke bar.

Hesher finals
$5 / December 14th @ 9:00pm
Thee Parkside
1600 17th St. SF.
(415) 503-0393
www.theeparkside.com

Fashion forward

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Simon Doonan, creative director for Barneys New York, defines San Francisco style this way: “People here are into design,” he said, while in town in September for the grand opening of Barneys’ Bay Area flagship store. “It’s about the craft of fashion, not the hype of fashion.” In L.A., he pointed out as an example, style is all about exhibitionism, about what other people think of what you’re wearing. “Here, it’s what you think of what you’re wearing.”

ohmygodshoozJPG.jpg
Oh my God, shooz! Simon Doonan shows off the SF flagship store’s bright, airy floor full of women’s footwear.

Now, before I go on, I realize you could argue that San Francisco has a scene with a uniform as much as anyplace else, even if here it’s fedoras and Fluevogs instead of short shorts and Uggs. But what really makes the difference – at least, to me – is how much fashion culture here appreciates creativity, independent designers, and funky combinations of styles, trends, and shit we just made up. Fashionistas in this city create a style that is uniquely ours, more emulated by the outside fashion world than affected by it.

I was thinking about this on Saturday night, while attending the official grand opening party for Pandora’s Trunk, a retail space and artists’ coop that provides places for indie designers to both work and sell their wares (reconstructed dresses and jackets made from scraps of fleece, lace-trimmed arm warmers and twisty scarves – all gorgeous and unusual). And true to the co-op’s mission, the opening not only supported artists involved with the store, but other independent creators like Jesse Wilson, one-half of the newly named Flamenco Feathers musical group, and Sterling, an up-and-coming chef who made guests a mean spanikopita (among other delectables). It was fun and festive, and both homegrown and professional.

Iron and Wine is what happens when you’re making plans for Friday night

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By Erik Morse

So the night, Nov. 30, was a disaster of sorts but not for the reasons you’d think – and before you gag yourself with the prospect of another music review-turned personal soapbox or group session, bear with me. I’d like to think there is a point to my mawkishness. There is a certain regimen that proceeds from a typical Friday evening in the Bay that includes: 1) Driving with abandon, windows down, sunroof retracted, a hurly-burly of pre-weekend tune-age, a ritualized exorcising of the week’s frustrations, fleeting Bay vistas obstructed by billboards to the right and a swathe of mountains to the left; 2) The trickle of evening that always seem to greet you at that asymptote of the Peninsula where the sepia tones of suburbia meets the neon city with its bleary-eyed halogens and dayglo pleasuredoms; 3) A fine meal, which is to say nothing in moderation and everything in excess; and 4) A moment of love, nostalgia, tomfoolery, or any of a number of sensuous terms that might describe the simple, inexplicable pleasures that only live music can afford us – jouissance, freude, orphic plaisir, or, at the very least, “like a monkey making love to a skunk – maybe didn’t get all he wanted, but got all he could stand…”

Of course, you see, it didn’t happen that way. Driving up the 101 in Friday rush-hour has its occasional pleasures and aesthetic appeals but not when dinner reservations in the Mission and a hop-skip-jump over the Bay Bridge are timed out perfectly to coincide with Sam Beam’s performance at the Paramount. Over an hour parked in the concrete desert is a numbing death-trip. Honk. Break. Lurch. Then there’s the inevitable parking morass that is downtown SF: where one parks in the Richmond to play on Harrison – and the confusing cell-phone tag-games that often delay dinner reservations and sometimes end friendships.

Reservations cancelled, eh?

What?! 7:30 already! I’m barely through the second scotch and soda and already it’s time to move on. Back onto the road and across the great steel artery leaving the flickering night of the city before it’s even begun in earnest. Wait…wait…where’s my WALLET?!

Believe it or not, we all might learn a thing or two from Iron and Wine’s Sam Beam – namely, not to sweat the little things and embrace your quotidian flaws. His Hirsuiteness took the cavernous auditorium of the Paramount on Nov. 30 for two hours of brittle ballads and po’ boy twee pop.

Pollution for truth? Egads!

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By Benedict Sinclair

SF Tea Party for 9/11 Truth
Dec. 16, 1pm
Pier 39
415-451-8102
www.communitycurrency.org

Hoo, boy — here come the truth fetishists. They’re still groping away at that mirage in the distance where we all get to know what actually happened on 9/11, who was behind it, and how to claim the tragedy for political means in order to replace one lame duck for another in that most outmoded of positions, “American president”. The Boston Tea Party is slated to become another terribly misused reference to successful protest in this, its 234th anniversary, as activists try to gather angry Americans not sold on the media’s representation of the World Trade Center bombings at both Bostonian and San Franciscan docks. Attendants are asked to dress in colonial attire—preferably from the late 18th Century (leave the pith helmet at home, Grandpa)—and to bring fifes and drums, presumably for their distracting novelty value.

tparty.jpg
Not exactly recycling, but ….

“Proclamations” will be made denouncing such garbage as the 9/11 Commission Report, PATRIOT Act, Military Commissions Act, and just the broad, general notion of all-around tyranny. “Genuine” investigation, accountability and impeachment will be called for. The final act of protest will be a mass dumping of cardboard and bleached paper—a series of large, corny replicas of the actual published work being protested—into that precious natural resource: the San Francisco Bay. At least they could make ash of the boxes first, like they’re doing in Milwaukee, and in a slightly more tasteful and harmless move stick to dumping spent carbon instead.

Yes, let’s all wheel a bunch of junk effigies down to the bay and dump them in the water in a game of dress-up, all on the basis that errors can be found in each account given on the attacks, which isn’t exactly the most surprising turn of events since the trial in Rashomon.

Frisee

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REVIEW When I visited Frisée — the Castro eatery that markets itself as a bastion of fast, healthy gourmet food — I expected lots of steamed vegetables, light fish entrees, and creatively flavored oil-free salad dressings. In short, I imagined "healthy" to mean "diet friendly," and I therefore imagined Frisée’s offerings to be something like an upscale version of the Applebee’s Weight Watchers menu. Luckily for my taste buds — though not necessarily my waistline — this was an erroneous assumption. What’s healthy about Frisée’s food is that it’s fresh and well made, which sets it apart from other fast food places (you can get Frisée’s entrees to go at lunchtime) but not so much from other gourmet eateries.

Which is not to say it doesn’t hold its own against its gastronomic peers. Certain items on the menu are truly remarkable — notably anything with cream sauce, such as pasta dishes and special soups. And less exceptional items, like the tuna tartare, are still quite good. The space is surprisingly charming, managing to balance large street-facing windows and a to-go counter — both of which could seem cold or too casual — with intimate, sumptuous seating beneath a red leather canopy that’s something like the interior of a luxury jet.

But the very best thing Frisée has going for it is its service, which is friendly, professional, and helpful. In fact, my waiter for my recent visit, Chad, was undoubtedly the best who’s ever served me — helpful, cheerful, charming, and attentive without being overbearing. He seemed to know what I needed before I did and went out of his way to accommodate my special needs (e.g., a vegetarian companion, a midmeal cigarette break). I’d return to Frisée just for Chad. After all, isn’t good service also part of a healthy diet?

FRISÉE Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m. and 5:30–10 p.m.; Sat. 11:30 a.m.–3 p.m. and 5:30–10 p.m.; Sun., 11:30 a.m.–3 p.m. and 5:30–9 p.m. 2367 Market, SF. (415) 558-1616, www.friseerestaurant.com

Legends of the follicle

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TRIPLE FEATURE It may be hard to fathom now, but Burt Reynolds was probably the biggest movie star of the 1970s. Other actors of his generation have gained more prestige, made fewer flops, or carried above-the-title status to the grave or today (like Robert Redford, who arguably has zero marquee value left). Reynolds put up a feeble fight as his career ebbed into TV shows, supporting roles, and self-parody. But he had many hits, both high- and lowbrow. He was the first since Bing Crosby to be the top box office star five years in a row. More, he exuded the defining territorial scent of Me Decade masculinity: wearing open wide-lapel shirts with an exposed medallion, smelling of Jovan Sex Appeal ("a provocative blend of exotic spices and smoldering woods interwoven with animal musk tones"), and equally at ease ogling the new secretary, prowling singles bars, and being the complete angler … in a hot tub, preferably.

This supremely confident archetype sported the au naturel mossy mounds of an athletically fit chest. (Later Reynolds became a notorious patron of the topside kind of rug.) He wasn’t "hairy" — he was hirsute, virile. His swagger might’ve evaporated like Samson’s had that pelt — or the manly ‘stache typically hovering above it — been shorn.

Billed as "Three Moustache Rides with Burt Reynolds," Midnites for Maniacs’ Castro Theatre salute presents the star in the very prime of his beef. Two artifacts on the triple bill must be counted among Burt’s greatest misses — one is practically a lost film — while the last was indeed his single greatest hit. But they’re all Burtalicious.

A college football star whose pro prospects ended with a knee injury, Reynolds was discovered onstage in New York, reached Hollywood in 1959, and spent subsequent years doing episodic TV and B movies. He seemed stuck in the second tier until cast as the most defensively capable of four suburban guys facing extreme redneck peril in 1972’s Deliverance. That did it. Even in a harrowingly unpleasant movie, Reynolds oozed charisma. Such cock-of-the-walk confidence led him to pose nude (hand covering genitals) that year in Cosmopolitan. He later complained this particular career move had typed him as a sex symbol who couldn’t be taken seriously. But Burt Reynolds was always first among people not taking Burt Reynolds seriously.

The public liked best the amused wise guy of talk show appearances, particularly when he was running from–slash–smirking at the law in action comedies ideal for the drive-in circuit. His biggest (if not best) was 1977’s Smokey and the Bandit, Midnites for Maniacs’ midnight show. Not far removed is the program’s middle feature, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, a felicitous pairing with Dolly Parton that stalled in the transfer from the Broadway stage.

But Reynolds didn’t want to be forever moonshinin’ and doggin’ the sheriff. He wanted to be suave and elegant, like his idol Cary Grant. Thus he dove into At Long Last Love, a film so excoriated in 1975 that it’s never been released on VHS or DVD. This Castro showing might well be its first United States projection since the original run. Love is a throwback to giddy, art deco 1930s musicals. Unwisely, it had Reynolds, Cybill Shepherd, and others not known for their song and dance skills performing vintage Cole Porter tunes live on set.

A gorgeous-looking soufflé that failed to rise, the film met with complete commercial and critical rejection. Hollywood gloated, director Peter Bogdanovich having impressed too many as an arrogant arriviste foisting a "talentless" model-actress girlfriend on the public. (Though Shepherd’s career would ultimately recover better than his.) Still, it has charms — including Reynolds, who makes musical amateurism seem a wry in-joke.

Always haphazard in picking projects (he reportedly turned down James Bond, Die Hard, Terms of Endearment, and Star Wars), Reynolds gradually eroded his stardom. Despite a prestige boost from Boogie Nights (which he thought dreadful until it started getting raves), he’s continued to take work whenever, wherever. He’s now 71 years old, a trooper who can’t or won’t quit, though his odds of ending on a grace note grow remote. He certainly deserves better than Cloud 9, one of eight acting jobs he took last year alone that no one noticed. He has the starring role: coach to an all-stripper volleyball team. Sigh. If he understood that he remains well loved, would he be choosier? Unlikely. The Reynolds archetype is an all-American winner who knowingly pratfalls into loserdom, winking en route. That fallen-jock-angel persona remains sexy. He minted it.

THREE MOUSTACHE RIDES WITH BURT REYNOLDS

Fri/7 (At Long Last Love, 7:30 p.m.; The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, 9:45 p.m.; Smokey and the Bandit, midnight), $10

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

Turn up the volume

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER I read the news the other day, oh boy, and the dimming days of early winter appear to have gotten darker: the Xmas lights have begun to twinkle down my street, above the Red Poppy House, but they can’t draw attention away from the little shrine of bedraggled plastic balloons and dampened candles around the corner dedicated to 21-year-old Erick Balderas, who was shot to death at Treat Avenue and 23rd Street on Nov. 18. I hobbled home from No Country for Old Men and a lychee-infused cocktail just a few hours before he was slain only a block away, but I failed to hear the gunshots. Thinking about his death and that of 18-year-old Michael Price Jr., shot near the Metreon box office by, allegedly, another teenager, one wonders why nightlife has grown so deadly for the kids who can really use some fun.

Reading is a safe substitute. When going out seems to be getting more hazardous, who can blame a culture vulture for wanting to stay in and nest with a good book and a CD, preferably the two combined in one? Those in the market for juicy boomer-rock dirt will likely dig this year’s Clapton: The Autobiography (Broadway), ex Pattie Boyd’s Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me (Harmony), and Ron Wood’s Ronnie: The Autobiography (St. Martin’s) — survivor’s tales all. But perhaps this is also the moment to revisit a musician who perished as violently and mysteriously as autumn’s lost boys: Elliott Smith. Photographer Autumn de Wilde manages to skate between the coffee table and the fanzine rack with a handsome tome of photos, many snapped around the time of Smith’s Figure 8 (DreamWorks, 2000).

Figure 8 was a divisive recording, alienating early lo-fi lovers and seemingly reaching out to the "Miss Misery" masses, and Smith looked self-consciously awkward slouching in front of the music store swirl that turned into a shrine after his death. Talking to friends, exes, family, managers, and producers who haven’t gone on the record since Smith’s death, de Wilde gathers snatches of intriguing info — for instance, it was engineer ex-girlfriend Joanna Bolme who gave Smith the sorry bowl haircut that de Wilde documents — and thoughts on the art of capturing spirits like Smith on the fly. Centering Elliott Smith (Chronicle) on images from her "Son of Sam" video, a poignant reworking of The Red Balloon, she finds the innocence that made Smith’s songs — and their anger over quashed hope — possible amid the listener cynicism and the songwriter’s lyrical bitterness. The kicker: an accompanying five-song CD of live acoustic solo Smith tracks, culled from 1997 appearances at Los Angeles’ Largo, including a sweetly screwed-up rendition of Hank Williams’s "All My Rowdy Friends Have Settled Down."

Another volume to really turn down the covers with is Wax Poetics Anthology, Volume 1 (Wax Poetics/Puma), a mixologist’s spin cycle of stories from the great mag. Editor Andre Torres taps interviews with golden era hip-hop knob twirlers Prince Paul, the RZA, and Da Beatminerz, as well as pieces on James Brown’s drummer Clyde Stubblefield, reggae producers King Tubby and Clive Chin, salsa giant Fania Records, Henry Chalfant of Style Wars, and much more than you can down in one chill evening. Extensive discographies aside, the only thing that’s lacking here is a soundtrack.

Not so with the much slimmer but no less passionate new issue of Ptolemaic Terrascope zine, once financed by the Bevis Frond. Mushroom drummer and Runt–Water Records consultant Pat Thomas has assumed the editorship. Apparently after 15 years and 35 issues, previous head Phil McMullen was "burned out, for lack of a better word," Thomas told me from his Oakland home, where he was happy to get away from a take-home exam on menstrual cycles. The new editor is even on the cover, looking appropriately put-upon; it’s the Alyssa Anderson photo shot in the Haight that was adapted for Devendra Banhart’s Cripple Crow (XL). Banhart is so ubiquitous these days that some Guardian staffers are tempted to start a swear jar to gather quarters every time his name is invoked. But he’s a natural cover star, also doing a jukebox jury piece with Thomas and Vetiver’s Andy Cabic within Terrascope.

United Kingdom folk luminaries like Shirley Collins and Davey Graham crop up in interviews and on the zine’s CD, which teems with wonderful unreleased tracks by the Velvet Underground’s Doug Yule, Willow Willow, Six Organs of Admittance, Ruthann Friedman, and Kendra Smith, among others, all playing off the issue’s Anglo-folk orientation, though pieces on Elaine Brown and the Black Panther Party parallel Thomas’s ongoing work assembling a box set for Water on the Panthers’ music and spoken word. The editor already has interviews with Wizz Jones and Ian Matthews ready for the next issue, but he’s tempted to put the zine on hold while he assembles a guidebook to black power music, foreshadowing new turns in Terrascope. "The magazine was always, for lack of a better word, very white," Thomas quips. "I want to blacken it up a little bit." 2

For more picks, see Sonic Reducer Overage at www.sfbg.com/blogs/music.

THE RUBINOOS BASSIST AL CHAN’S TOP MUSIC BOOKS

•<\!s>The Kinks: All Day and All of the Night: Day by Day Concerts, Recordings, and Broadcasts, 1964–1997, by Doug Hinman and the Kinks (Backbeat, 2004)

•<\!s>The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, by Michael Weldon (Ballantine, 1983)

•<\!s>Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere: The Complete Chronicle of the Who, by Andy Neill (Virgin, 2005)

•<\!s>Hollywood Rock, by Marshall Crenshaw (HarperCollins, 1994)

•<\!s>The Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits, eighth edition, by Joel Whitburn (Billboard, 2004). "I can just sit down with that on an eight-hour flight and look at charts. I’m a total music geek!"

The Rubinoos open for Jonathan Richman, Thurs/6, 8 p.m., $15. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. www.musichallsf.com.

Take Dap

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Take it from me: with our purist hearts and crate-digging proclivities, we true-blue soul believers and bright-eyed funk freaks tend to be a pretty devoted lot, but Brooklyn Stax-Motown revivalists Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings inspire a level of commitment that would make even Dr. Phil blush. A friend of mine loves to tell me about the time she spent her last $15 to get into their show in Austin, Texas. There she was, penniless, thirsty, and without a paycheck in sight for another week, and none of it mattered. "Why would it?" she whoops and grins as she recalls that night of empty pockets and high spirits. "I danced my ass off, honey! Money — who cares?"

It’s a story worth mentioning, since so much of what makes Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings such an electrifying force comes from their ability to whisk listeners away from their day-to-day worries while delivering glorious emotional, hip-loosening release. Man problems, woman problems, cash flow problems — these headaches happen to everybody, and Jones and her eight partners in greasy-groove know-how are no exception, as such songs as "My Man Is a Mean Man" attest. Still, soul music’s all about catharsis through a band’s connection with its audience on a feel-it-in-the-gut level, and what better way to make that communion than with the inarguably simple message "There ain’t no troubles we can’t dance away!"

This declaration has resonated with so many listeners because it has been articulated flawlessly. Never mind that the Dap-Kings have been catching new fans since they were tapped to back Amy Winehouse on her Back to Black (Island, 2006). Every chicken-scratch guitar, every fat-bottom bass line, every popping horn arrangement is a triple-take-inducing transmission from a predisco soul universe — a rare event in today’s more technology-driven neosoul market. The Dap-Kings — led by bassist-producer Bosco Mann — have clearly ingested every ounce of ’60s and ’70s R&B and funk, and their authenticity-prizing take on the sweat-soaked rhythms of James Brown’s beloved house band, the JB’s, has yielded a righteously old-school backdrop for Jones’s mighty pipes. In a live setting, the JB’s comparison is tough to miss. Swiss-clock precise but blazing with passion, these workhorses are unstoppable and a joy to behold.

And those mighty pipes I mentioned? Jones can do it all, whether she’s snapping and snarling like Etta James, giving the gospel lowdown à la Aretha Franklin, or sassing away like the second coming of Lyn Collins, and she rightfully deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Bettye LaVette and Irma Thomas, while we’re at it. Endowed with a full-throated, bottomless-lunged attention grabber of a voice, Jones can slide effortlessly from tender, sweet-lipped supplications to tougher-than-nails put-downs — the latter ability possibly stemming from her years of employment as a prison guard — often within the same song. A master interpreter, she has not only reconfigured the Woody Guthrie folk ditty "This Land Is Your Land" into a slinky call for social equality but also scraped away the cheesy gloss of Janet Jackson’s "What Have You Done for Me Lately?" to reveal the stinging nettles lying underneath.

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings’ recently released third album, 100 Days, 100 Nights (Daptone), is a stirring document from a band at the height of its powers. All of the familiar funk and fire are there, and the addition of bluesier elements on tracks such as "Humble Me" and "Let Them Knock" demonstrates that they still have plenty of ideas to kick around. Best of all, they’ve never sounded as smoky, as sultry, as they do on this disc. If you haven’t yet offered up your heart to these folks, here’s your chance.

SHARON JONES AND THE DAP-KINGS

Wed/5, 8 p.m., $18–$20

Bimbo’s 365 Club

1025 Columbus, SF

(415) 474-0365

www.bimbos365club.com

Rock on the sidelines

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Did Ian Hunter kill rock for Cleveland? Growing up in that blue-collared grime zone of fiery rivers and industrial blur, I never saw much rock rolling through my old haunt, and I never really understood what drove the former Mott the Hoople frontman to patronize us with "Cleveland Rocks" and provide my hometown with a surefire anthem for our flawed sports teams. While the city does get cited for a lot of proto-punk activity (the Electric Eels, Rocket from the Tombs), its influence on the rock world abruptly screeches to a halt there. If there’s any truth to Hunter’s rallying cry for the Mistake on the Lake, I’m pretty certain he wasn’t getting loud and snotty with the likes of the barflies and crusty punks at a Pagans show, or fostering a soft spot for the quirk-ball nerdiness of Devo, for that matter. "It’s all bollocks," as you might say, Mr. Hunter, so thanks, but no thanks.

If anything, "no one gets out of this town alive" seems like a more applicable rock slogan for this northeastern Ohio hub. While I rapped over the phone with fellow Clevelander Chris Kulcsar, the throaty lead vocalist of This Moment in Black History, that notion recurred as he discussed some of the disadvantages that come with being in a Midwestern band. For one, according to Kulcsar, there’s nothing glamorous about Cleveland, so a lot of music critics tend to ignore its scene.

"I feel like people from outside the city never take bands from Cleveland seriously," he explained from his parents’ house. "It’s so hard for bands from here to get a booking agent to be interested in you, and if you want to get beyond playing at peoples’ DIY spaces and basements — which is fine; it’s great doing that — I find it’s really tough.

"It’s killed a lot of bands from around here," Kulcsar continued, "because they’ll try and tour, and there’s nothing more demoralizing than spending six weeks playing to 10 people every night."

But Kulcsar’s not that bent out of shape: his band’s already sizable following in the underground punk community has swelled in the past year due to the release of its sophomore full-length, It Takes a Nation of Assholes to Hold Us Back (Coldsweat, 2006), and a much-acclaimed performance at this year’s South by Southwest conference.

TMIBH’s roots trace back to a housewarming party that Kulcsar threw in the fall of 2002, but its members are seasoned vets of the garage and punk scenes who have served time in such outfits as the Bassholes, the Lesbian Makers, the Chargers Street Gang, and Neon King Kong. Recorded in two 12-hour sessions at Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio studio in Chicago, It Takes a Nation explodes with a raw, art-punk aggressiveness that’s both innovative and open-ended, offering an honest portrayal of the group’s run-down Middle America surroundings with lyrics that touch on alienation, humor, oppression, and rage. Guitarist Buddy Akita paws out filth-driven noise in minute-long bursts from one tune to the next, while Kulcsar frantically screams like a rabid lunatic and noodles with a detuned keyboard. The rhythm section of bassist Lawrence Daniel Caswell and drummer Lamont "Bim" Thomas thunders noisily in the background, alternating between brutal avidity and blues-driven backbone.

Though It Takes a Nation comes across as full-on garage punk, it should be viewed as more of a celebration of interracial assimilation and interaction within music, no matter what the genre. And while not all of TMIBH’s members are African American, the band explicitly emphasizes the theme throughout the recording’s 35-minute run. According to Kulcsar, TMIBH are focused on stressing the significance of black culture and its advancements in rock music.

"People forget a lot of the time that rock music is actually black music, and I think that’s important to all of us in the band, but especially to Bim and Lawrence — this idea that rock music came out of a blues and R&B tradition and now it’s just viewed in this really homogenized, white culture," he opines. "A lot of it comes from wanting to just get back to the idea that there can be black rock music or black people involved in punk."

And Kulcsar is conscious enough to step away from the role of spokesperson for black rock. "I feel like out of all the people in the band, I’m the least apt to speak about it, because sometimes I get weirded out saying I’m in a band called TMIBH and I’m a white singer," he confesses. "There’s just baggage that goes along with that I’m sometimes weighed down by…. But I guess it’s too late now." *

THIS MOMENT IN BLACK HISTORY

With the Late Young and Epic Sessions

Dec. 12, 9:30 p.m., $6

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

Cinema critiques sinophilia

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Just as the serious-minded traveler to a foreign land sacrifices certainty and ease of understanding to derive fresh insight, viewers of Ellen Zweig’s video works must jettison their expectation of narrative in order to embrace Zweig’s fragmentation — its disorientation and truthfulness. Her interwoven snippets of interview, performance, and language are decontextualized in a way that is apropos of her thematic consideration of how Westerners construct, imagine, and experience China and Chinese-ness from a distance. Her HEAP series is akin to being parachuted into profundity — your peripheral vision has to adapt hastily.

Language is essential to Zweig’s form and content. It is both an alienating force and a means of bonding. In (The Chinese Room) John Searle, after absorbing calligraphy and vacilutf8g between being "embarrassed" and "ecstatic" while in China, she concedes, "I cannot speak Chinese." The repeating, graphic Chinese text of (Unsolved) Robert van Gulik feigns a connection with the English that is being spoken, but actually tells its own story. On the other hand, language is shared amicably between the artist and Chinese strangers in (Flick Flight Flimsy) Ernest Fenollosa.

Zweig is a fascinating guide because she is a semi-insider; she navigates the much-mythologized land of her heritage with a privilege and a passion the non-Chinese necessarily lack, but she must arrive at knowledge through translation and inquiry. Language and privilege are cleverly wielded when, in A Surplus of Landscape, she interrogates fellow filmmaker Leslie Thornton about choosing to shoot a film about China, with no prior experience of the land, in a Japanese garden. Zweig’s videos juxtapose Western Sinophile "experts" with Chinese common folk and customs in a manner that continually questions cultural (mis)understanding.

ELLEN ZWEIG’S CHINA TAPES

Sun/9, 7:30 p.m., $6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, screening room, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.sfcinematheque.org

Hotlines

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› superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO Gurl, my phones have been ringing themselves right out of my brand-new Safeway paper bag purse. The pink one, the silver one, the little lavender one I usually keep tucked in my Dita Von Teese fringed mesh teddy — they’re all off the hook, jingling like sequins in daylight. Bitches are chatty — scandal for the holidays, how novel — and you know I’d rather gag on Josh Groban or jack off to the L.L. Bean winter catalogue than keep the gossip from you.

Besides the dish that a certain local magazine is paying clubs to have its "personalities" staff the door at parties (drag queens as product placement — I love it) and the rumors flying around that many long-running weekly parties are shutting down (congratulations, Miss Trannyshack 2007 Pollo Del Mar!), there’s some serious nightlife shit going down. The "not in my backyard" whiners of our gloriously gentrifying city are squawking up a storm, and the San Francisco Police Department and the Board of Supes might actually be listening.

After-hours clubs and restaurants are feeling the heat (North Beach barhoppers may have to do without their postparty slices of pizza soon, and possibly any new bars as well), some up-and-coming neighborhoods may be zoned to exclude any nightlife or "adult" establishments, and I’m even hearing that new bars with liquor license transfers are being pressured to shout "Last call!" at midnight. Say quoi???

On top of all that, violence. Several bars have been brazenly robbed of late, and most clubs are rightly reminding their patrons to stay aware of their turbulent surroundings. Yet nothing can stop the dance floor love. Be careful out there, don’t mix up your mace and your mascara, and check out some great parties — before we’re all forced to boogie softly in our bedrooms.

TURN IT ON


Folks I know and trust have been living for Love It! Wednesdays at Icon Ultra Lounge lately. And given the DJ lineups that often include some of my new faves like No Battles, the dirtybird boys, and way-too-cute Tee Cardaci, I can hardly deny them their bliss. I’ll even be partaking gladly of it Dec. 5, when San Francisco’s very own tidal wave of techno, DJ Alland Byallo, washes over the dance floor to showcase his new label, Nightlight Music. Joining him will be Berlin-via-Detroit techno nomad (technomad?) Lee Curtis, whose live set of tweaky synths, sticky bass, and lo-fi disarray will surely rock the fuzzy Kangols off the crowd. Also glowing lively: a tag team live–versus-DJ set by Nightlight stablemates Jason Short and Clint Stewart. Brutal with the millimeter, kids.

CUMBIN’ AT YA


Cumbia electro-hop? Ah si, it’s happening. And global-eared local DJs Disco Shawn and oro11, of the new label Bersa Discos, are bringing it straight up. "We both went down to Buenos Aires and discovered this crazy experimental cumbia scene," Disco Shawn recently MySpaced me. "Bedroom producers were mixing the classic Latin American sound with electro, hip-hop, dancehall…. We’re bringing this music to the other side of the equator, to unleash it on gringo nightlife." Feel the tap-tap-typhoon of the Bersa Discos boys’ awesome cumbiaton discoveries at their new monthly, Tormenta Tropical, Dec. 7 at Club Six, as well as other synced-up styles of electro Sudamericano, baile funk, and live spazzy hip-hop from the mind-blowing Official Tourist.

TIEFIN’ OUT


Surely one of the best video mashups in the cyberverse is "Tiefschwarz Is Burning" on YouTube, wherein some enterprising goofball laid UK electropop sweetness Chikinki’s "Assassinator 13 (Ruede Hegelstein Remix)" over scenes from Paris Is Burning. The hypnotic minimal techno tune, which turns out, oddly, to be the perfect soundtrack for voguing ’80s downtown queens — RIP Willie, Anji, Pepper, Venus — was taken from Teutonic duo Tiefschwarz’s Essential Mix for BBC’s Radio 1, and before this explanation gets any more complicated, just look it up and fall into a Yubehole about it, already. Better yet, check out Tiefschwarz live (they’re hot, they’re brothers — why not?), courtesy of Blasthaus at Mighty on Dec. 15. German techno soul isn’t, amazingly, oxymoronic.

NIGHTLIGHT MUSIC SHOWCASE AT LOVE IT! WEDNESDAYS

Wed/5, 9 p.m.–2 a.m., $5

Icon Ultra Lounge

1192 Folsom, SF

(415) 626-4800

www.myspace.com/loveitwednesdays

www.nightlight-music.com

TORMENTA TROPICAL

Fri/7, 9 p.m.–2 a.m., $5

Dark Room, Club Six

60 Sixth St., SF

(415) 861-1221

www.clubsix1.com

www.myspace.com/bersadiscos

TIEFSCHWARZ

Dec. 15, 9 p.m.–2 a.m., $20

Mighty

119 Utah, SF

(415) 762-0151

www.blasthaus.com

www.tiefschwartz.net

House of Prime Rib

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Beef: it’s what’s for dinner at House of Prime Rib, and it’s pretty much all that’s for dinner. There is a lonely listing for a fish of the day in a far corner of the menu; you must ask about the details. But really, we have no cause to complain, since if ever a restaurant honored the WYSIWYG principle, that restaurant would be House of Prime Rib. If you expect braised halibut cheeks or a timale of roasted winter vegetables to be served to you at a restaurant whose very name proclaims meat, you are inattentive to some of life’s most basic clues, and we must fear for you.

HPR is probably the least grand of the city’s high-profile beef emporiums. Nearby Harris’ has a spare, high-ceilings-in-1948 elegance, while nearby (the other way) Ruth’s Chris is a haven of plush intimacy, as if it were part of a Neiman-Marcus store. Morton’s I haven’t been to, but the steak aficionado assured me that it costs about twice as much as HPR for an experience that isn’t drastically different.

The experience I was hoping to avoid was one of those immiserating episodes familiar to any holiday diner: cholesterol overload and soaring glycemic indexes. Beef is rich, and prime rib (marbled from feeding corn to the cattle) is the richest kind of beef you can have — and huge slabs of it, etcetera. Add to this the usual buttery accompaniments, and you soon picture your heavily intubated self departing on a gurney, pausing for a moment at the entryway while the valet pulls your ambulance around.

A departure by gurney might not attract all that much attention at HPR, since plying the dining room are carts that look like the sarcophagi of ancient Egyptian child-kings. Within these huge steel footballs are sides of roasted beef, and when the bell tolls for thee and thine, the cart rolls to your table and a crew starts slicing, putf8g, and distributing. The prudent will have settled on the city cut ($32.95, including all the fixin’s), a single slice of boneless meat, nicely pink and juicy, big but not massive. The more ambitious might go for the weightier House of Prime Rib cut ($34.95, and you can get it on the bone if you prefer) or the English cut ($34.95), a fan of scaloppinelike thin slices. Let us not speak of the Henry VIII cut ($37.65), other than to note that it bears the name of that fellow who had the heads chopped off of some of his more unsatisfactory wives.

By the time the meat juggernaut reaches you, you will have seen the better part of the dinner’s nonmeat componentry. There will have been a round loaf or two of warm, fragrant sourdough bread, presented with a serrated knife, like an ax in a tree stump, and a tub of good butter; there will have been the "salad bowl," a surprisingly tasty concert of iceberg lettuce, watercress, and slivers of roasted beet soaking luxuriously in French dressing.

The beef’s sidekicks include choice of potato (mashed or baked), choice of creamed vegetable (spinach or corn), a chunk of Yorkshire pudding (basically a popover or savory pastry), and an array of horseradishes in ramekins. These range from the straight stuff, which soon finds its fiery way up your nose, to leash-broken versions cut with mayonnaise or sour cream. The horseradishes are flavorful enough — and even, in one case, thrilling — but the beef does not need them. If ever you need reminding, in fact, why good beef is the chef’s best friend, an elegant food that barely needs salt and pepper and scarcely any cooking, then a visit to HPR is in order.

And if you happen to be in the company of small children who don’t like vegetables, then HPR’s vegetables will appeal. The mashed potatoes are buttery, while the baked potato is topped by a flourish of sour cream. The spinach and corn are as creamy as their names suggest. We did indeed see a number of tables featuring small children, none of whom seemed to be squalling or otherwise rejecting the food being set before them. They were under the spell of fat.

Is HPR a kiddie restaurant, then? No, though kiddies are welcome; so too are tourists from foreign lands (or people we took to be tourists, on data that included their slow, accented English and strange shoes), family groups of various ethnicities, and — that increasingly rare bird here — plain, middle-aged, middle-American folk, people for whom a nice dinner must include meat and potatoes in some recognizable form, in a handsome but not overwrought setting with the warmth of Grandmama’s dining room.

House of Prime Rib is, in this sense, one of the dwindling number of outposts of this city’s dwindling middle class. Youth and wealth — and our peculiar, much-celebrated amalgam of the two — congregate elsewhere. Beef, meanwhile, doesn’t command the audience of yesteryear; the food cognoscenti tend toward fish (for reasons of health and vanity) and often away from flesh altogether. Dinner, under the new regime, no longer must include a big slab of red meat and a blob of potatoes. In fact, it probably shouldn’t.

Still, we all have our cravings for those very foods from time to time, and for an old-time atmosphere to enjoy them in. House of Prime Rib’s pleasures might be atavistic, but they are real enough, even a form of time travel, back to an era when the youthful rich weren’t quite so much with us. 2

HOUSE OF PRIME RIB

Dinner: Mon.–Thurs., 5:30–10 p.m.; Fri., 5–10 p.m.; Sat., 4:30–10 p.m.; Sun., 4–10 p.m.

1906 Van Ness, SF

(415) 885-4605

houseofprimerib.ypguides.net

AE/MC/V

Full bar

Well-managed noise

Wheelchair accessible

Dirty girl

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS I washed the dishes. Put my clothes away. Emptied the compost. I let the fire go out and sat on top of the wood stove in my underwear. The phone rang: how was my weekend?

Let me think about it, I said. I said there was blood on my bed, every single thing smelled like smoke, my eyes burned, I hadn’t shat since Thursday, and my cat was lucky to be alive. Me too, but for a whole different reason. In short, it was my new favorite weekend ever, I said. Yours?

What reason?

Because I care. You said, "How was your weekend?" I say, "Fine, thank you, yours?"

No. I mean why are you lucky to be alive — compared to why the cat is.

Life is good, I said. We have fun, we make a mess, we clean it up, we listen to music. And the mess keeps creeping back in and we keep cleaning it up. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Yes I would, because eventually, I’m told, it wins. It dirties us.

Are you in love, or just weird?

Lost signal. What I was was dirty, so I took a bath. I thought about scrubbing the smoke damage off of my walls with a sponge. I thought about the look that cats get in their litter boxes, the glazed place that they go, at once so far away and yet never more at home.

We can get there too! Weed’s too easy. Try hot sauce. Try three years of almost nothing followed by three days of almost-nothing-but.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. The Mountains hosted and I, the Woods, cooked. Our guests were Cities. Smoked turkey, sausage-and-cornbread-and-biscuit stuffing–stuffed red peppers, mustard greens, apple sauce, cranberry relish, cranberry sauce, and an apple pie.

Everything had meat in it. I had asked 10 times if any of the Cities were vegetarian, and the Mountains had said no (no no no no no no).

There was a vegetarian. For me, the novice cooker and enthusiast-at-large, all will and no clue, this was a dream come true. A last-minute vegetarian at my meatfest, like a drowning kid to a teenage lifeguard, and the boy she’s liked all summer is watching…. Splash!

I looked at Mookie, the Brick, my Chief Number One (and only) Assistant, who I was going to go home with but nobody knew that yet, and I smiled.

He looked neutral. Maybe he was tired of taking orders, chopping this, grating that … everything else was in the oven. And on the grill, chilling in the fridge, or simmering on back burners, waiting for the bell. This was supposed to be Miller Time, not a cross between Baywatch and Iron Chef.

Now the Mountains, as you know, are two of my favorite people ever, even though — or maybe partly because — neither one of them likes to cook. But they both love to eat, so I get to express my devotion, my gratitude, my love, my little sisterhood, my best-friendship, and my unwavering appetite with trays of homemade-noodled lasagna and huge pots of gumbo. If I wasn’t there, they would have had Stove-Top stuffing with their store-cooked turkey.

One of the guests brought Rice-A-Roni. I’m not a snob. While Mookie cored two more peppers, I got that going and scoured their refrigerator for doctorings (carrots, asparagus, a tomato, fake sausage links, and leftover chickpeas). We stuffed the peppers with the San Francisco treat, mixed with all of the above, and put them on the grill with the others. Main course: mushroom burgers. And I had not figured out a way to get bacon into the cranberry things, so he could have that too.

Well, the vegetarian looked about as happy as anyone else at the table. "Hey Mookie! He likes it!" But this was supposed to be a poem, and it had turned into bad television.

For almost all of November I’d been trying to write a song about being a dirty girl on the low road. Which wasn’t working, probably because I’m too fucking angelic. In the bathtub on Monday morning or whatever the hell it was, I gave up on writing the song and just started singing it.

The phone rang. From the tub I could hear the same cellular voice screaming into my answering machine: Who was he?

My new favorite restaurant is El Delfin, mostly for the guacamole. It has some interesting main dishes too, with a recurring natural disaster theme, like "Salmon Tornado" and "Volcan en Molcajete" — which is beef, sausage, cactus, onion, cheese, and red sauce, all a-sizzle. And not as good as it sounds.

Also not particularly cheap, most dishes at or over $10.

But the guac! … *

EL DELFIN

Wed.–Mon., 9 a.m.–9 p.m.

3066 24th St., SF

(415) 643-7955

Take-out available

Canadian astronaut

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› marke@sfbg.com

REVIEW Kids are bored. They’re hanging on the sidewalk outside a nightclub, splashed in sick amber light. Many of the usual suspects are here: the skinny postgoth chick in golden heels, the stereotypical Russian-looking muffin top trapped on a crappy date, the about-to-ralph dude in an untucked striped Oxford, some rasta hoppers, a hipster gal in rave flats and a trucker cap. Most are smoking and none look happy, except maybe the tranny-licious blond who’s about to skate the cover, glimpsed in the doorway flirting with the bouncers. She looks as fake as the rest of the scene.

I mean, what club is this? Yes, the breakdown of rigid nightlife subcultures has accelerated in recent years (no one can be only one thing in the Internet age) but these kids — part Marina, part Mission, part Oakland, part imaginary — would never traffic the same joint, let alone one that looks like a cheap storefront with Styrofoam gargoyles over the door, a tacky wrought-iron gate, and, oh yeah, a hilariously retro surveillance camera trained on them. Gross. Or paradise?

When I heard the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is displaying Vancouver-born photographer Jeff Wall’s gigantic In Front of a Nightclub (2006) as part of its retrospective of the artist’s three-decade career, my little ivory feet got tingly. Not just because I live in Clubland, but also because I trust Wall to get it right. Most club photographers have reeled back from Nan Goldin’s tear-jerking parties of grief in the ’80s to grease those spinning Warhol wheels again, dazzled by outsize personalities, druggy outfits, and pantomimed omnisexuality. But Wall’s a major artist with his own agenda, which looks so hard at the mundane, the normal, and the pointless that it often shoots right through into revelation. The humdrum apocalypse of a bad night out in a parallel universe fits perfectly. The picture is sensational.

This is a nice time for a Wall retrospective, mostly because his monumental intelligence — which ranges far beyond nightlife — provides a nifty alternative to both the tawdry macho "heroism" of the Matthew Barney–Damien Hirst–Jeff Koons art world establishment bonanzas and the current indie scene’s seemingly endless slide into infantilism and abnegation. No quilts made of dryer lint, deliberately embarrassing emotional outbursts, or snaps of naked skater chums for Wall. No scaling atria with Björk in tow either.

That doesn’t mean Wall lacks hipster cred: his first exhibited picture, 1978’s The Destroyed Room, provided the cover art and title for Sonic Youth’s 2007 collection of B-sides. But the Édouard Manet–like social commentary of Wall’s gorgeously staged scenes — a Cops-worthy outdoor argument in a run-down tract-home neighborhood, day laborers posed on a "cash corner" under flabbergasting winter skies, open-sore industrial operations in the pristine Canadian wilderness, an asshole mocking an Asian man while his girlfriend squints in the sun — and an eye that combines William Eggleston’s rough-and-tumble photographic haphazardness with the natty mannerism of ’70s photorealist painting seem revelatory, if a tad safe, in these times of numbed, numbing self-projection.

Trained in art history and drenched in way too much theory, the 60-year-old Wall works on a grand scale. His typical Cibachrome prints are several feet across, mounted on light boxes — an idea he ripped off from bus shelter advertising — and full of compositional winks at old masters and references to dense sociological notions. Much of this work heretically clings to the old-fangled notion of transcendence, that even the most mundane things, if examined closely enough, can send the metaphorical mind — the soul — soaring into space. Sure, he’s not above filling a grave in a Jewish cemetery with fluorescent pink sea urchins (Flooded Grave [1998–2000]), packing an entire basement ceiling with burned-out lightbulbs (After "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue [2001]), or reimagining a platoon of slaughtered Russian soldiers in Afghanistan chatting as their innards spill out (Dead Troops Talk [1992]). Those are the kinds of blockbuster photoconceptualist images that made him famous and provide instant shivers to first-time viewers.

The real metaphysics come in Wall’s luminescent details, when he’s in hyperreal mode. He’s like a Martian poet, glossing the earthly everyday with a cosmic eeriness. In Insomnia (1994), possibly the most tweaked-out photograph ever, an empty plastic bottle of dish soap, under flickering kitchen lights, resembles a beckoning angel. A tiny octopus flopped onto a kid’s school desk, in An Octopus (1990), somehow summons all the horror in the world. Filthy linoleum roils biblically under a discarded mop in Diagonal Composition No. 3 (2000). And in Sunken Area (1996), the white vinyl siding of a trashy house morphs into abstraction, its glowing lines swooning into the room. It made me dizzy, and I had to sit down. *

JEFF WALL

Through Jan. 27, 2008

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third St., SF
Mon.–Tues. and Fri.–Sun., 11 a.m.–5:45 p.m.; Thurs., 10 a.m.–8:45 p.m.; $7–<\d>$12.50 (free first Tues.)

(415) 357-4000
www.sfmoma.org

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