Stage

Superlist No. 825: Restaurants with DJs

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It’s a fact: lousy music can spoil a dining experience. We’ve all been to the too-loud restaurant where talking over the cheap sound system quickly becomes a losing battle. And nobody goes back to the place that put the Lionel Ritchie Millennium Collection on loop, or the hole-in-the-wall with the wonderfully authentic foreign food and the borderline torturous background music. Avoid aural indigestion by trying one of the many restaurants that have gone to great lengths to ensure the ambiance is as pleasing to your ears as the food is to your taste buds. The best time to hear dinner’s new soundtrack is typically during the weekend; however, a few eateries serve DJs with midweek meals.

Big-name residents such as Tom Thump lay down the tracks at Frisson (244 Jackson, SF. 415-956-3004, www.frissonsf.com), the quintessential meals and wheels of steel restaurant. With the main dining room’s circular layout and warm colors, the new American cuisine’s premium quality, and the neosoul, jazz-infused electronic audio, Frisson has the right chemistry.

Many DJs spin into the wee hours of the morning, but Levende Lounge (1710 Mission, SF. 415-864-5585, www.levendesf.com) DJs don’t hit the decks until breakfast. Live electronic music, a self-service Bloody Mary bar, and a build-your-own Benedict menu option reinvent Sunday brunch. Levende strives to bring up-and-coming local talent as well as internationally recognized names to the table.

Residents Sabrina and Benji set the mood for the stunning, floor-to-ceiling bay view and noteworthy fusion of California and pan-Asian cuisine at Butterfly (Pier 33, Embarcadero, SF. 415-864-8999, www.butterflysf.com).

Eastside West (3154 Fillmore, SF. 415-885-4000, www.eastsidewest.com) creates a live music feel by putting resident DJ Morgan on a small stage. Its American regional menu features home-style favorites such as macaroni and cheese and buttermilk fried chicken. The mix usually includes Top 40 hits, so you may find yourself humming along between bites.

Head to North Beach’s Impala (501 Broadway, SF. 415-982-5299, www.impalasf.com), where you’ll instantly be transported south of the border. Here the tequila goes down as smooth as the tunes, which residents D-Tek and Zhaldee often infuse with a Latin flair.

If it weren’t for the flatware and delicious rolls in front of you, you’d swear Mas Sake (2030 Lombard, SF. 415-440-1505, www.massake.com) were a nightclub. Resident DJs Kimani, Solarz, Booker, and Chris Fox keep the mashups pumping all dinner long.

Lose yourself in the hypnotizing tunes, jungle decor, and flavorful Thai food at Lingba Lounge (1469 18th St., SF. 415-647-6469, www.lingba.com).

Hit up Poleng Lounge (1751 Fulton, SF. 415-441-1710, www.polenglounge.com) on a Friday or Saturday night if a little hip-hop, a dash of soul, and some Asian fusion cuisine sounds like a recipe for a good time.

DJ Adrian keeps things mellow at Mecca (2029 Market, SF. 415-621-7000, www.sfmecca.com) on Thursdays and Fridays with old-school electronica from the ’70s and ’80s.

As you might expect, Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack (18 Virginia, SF. 415-206-2086) serves pasta dishes galore, but there’s a little something extra on the menu on Fridays and Saturdays: rotating DJs who spin everything from oldies to new wave and punk — but never house music.

At Nihon (1779 Folsom, SF. 415-552-4400, www.nighonsf.com), DJ Gray spins house and lounge while diners enjoy sushi and other Japanese fare.

Sushi Groove South (1516 Folsom, SF. 415-503-1950) is another chic sushi spot where resident DJs spin nightly.

DJs Michael Anthony, B-Smiley, Didge Kelli, and Drunken Monkey make the dinner-in-bed experience at Supperclub (657 Harrison, SF. 415-348-0900, www.supperclub.com) all the more cozy by channeling chill ambient and other funky forms of electronica through the sound system.

DJs only spin in the lounge at Sutra Restaurant and Lounge (100 Brannan, SF. 415-593-5900, www.sutrasf.com), where Asian fusion and downtempo are on the platters. *

WEDNESDAY

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March 21

THEATER

Blood Wedding

Ever felt like a cockroach in love with a butterfly? Federico García Lorca explored such feelings in his first play. By the time he penned Blood Wedding, in 1933, García Lorca was brilliantly acquainted with the painful four-letter word that begins with an l in English and an a in Spanish. The first play in a trilogy of rustic tragedies, Blood Wedding has had almost as many lives as it has staged deaths over the years. The presence of local flamenco diva Yaelisa in the Shotgun Players’ take on the archetypal tale means there will be dance amid the romance. (Johnny Ray Huston)

Through April 22
8 p.m., $17–$25
Ashby Stage
1901 Ashby, Berk.
(510) 841-6500
www.shotgunplayers.org

EVENT

San Francisco Flower
and Garden Show

On moving to urban San Francisco, the land of limited space and time, many transplants forget the soothing childhood pleasures of tending to backyard gardens. Thankfully, the San Francisco Flower and Garden Show has returned for its 22nd year with 21 inspiring designer gardens, 60 free seminars, and retailers to help you regain your green thumb. (Joshua Rotter)

Through March 25
Wed.–Sat., 9 a.m.–8 p.m.;
Sun., 9 a.m.–6 p.m.
Free–$20; five-day pass, $65
Cow Palace
2600 Geneva, SF
(415) 771-6909
www.gardenshow.com

Angel’s wing

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Kudos to SF Playhouse for its part in introducing Bay Area audiences to Stephen Adly Guirgis. Guirgis is a member of New York’s LAByrinth Theater Company — a collective that includes playwright John Patrick Shanley and actor Philip Seymour Hoffman. Guirgis has been making a name for himself during the past decade as an actor, director, television writer, and more particularly, the author of several engagingly sharp and gritty off-Broadway comedies.

SF Playhouse had a hit on its hands last season with its slick West Coast premiere of Guirgis’s 2002 Our Lady of 121st Street. In that play, a circle of former Catholic schoolmates from Harlem reconvenes in the old neighborhood for the funeral of their bad ol’ but beloved teacher, Sister Rose. Alternately saint and sinner, more or less like the rest of them, Rose is seemingly larger than life now that she’s gone. Really gone: as the play opens, someone has swiped her embalmed remains from the mortuary, throwing the whole service into limbo as the characters, in a state of anxious expectancy, rip open both fresh and long-festering wounds. Together their stories slyly interrogate the nature of free will, right and wrong, and our ambivalent reliance on forms of moral accountability. Artistic director Bill English’s shrewd casting and razor-sharp staging brought the high-spirited ensemble work and Guirgis’s loosely interlocked scenes to life.

In Jesus Hopped the "A" Train, a Guirgis play originally produced in 2000 and now at SF Playhouse, a young Puerto Rican man named Angel Cruz (Daveed Diggs) finds himself in jail — after bursting into the church of a cult leader responsible for brainwashing his best friend and shooting the former in the ass. Angel, having tried every other means of rescuing his childhood pal, cannot see much of a crime in this desperate act. Mary Jane Hanrahan (Susi Damilano), the public defender initially assigned to his case, begs to differ. Yet something draws the haggard but upright lawyer to the recalcitrant Angel’s side. In a monologue addressed to the audience, she recounts a childhood memory of a similar (if not quite as illicit) act by her working-class Irish father.

Angel’s plight and Mary Jane’s legal defense make up one half of the play. Brutally assaulted in jail and in dire threat of being killed after his target, the Sun Myung Moon–like Reverend Kim, unexpectedly dies, Angel soon finds himself in a special protective custody lockdown wing at Rikers Island prison. The wing is overseen by a guard named Valdez (Gabriel Marin), whose frustration with institutionalized justice has given way to sadism. A deeply shaken Angel shares the yard with a kindly born-again serial killer named Lucius Jenkins (Carl Lumbly) as the latter fights extradition back to Florida, where he would face the death penalty.

As an exploration of ethics and the nature of personal responsibility, Jesus Hopped the "A" Train takes a slightly different route from Our Lady but winds up in notably similar territory. It teases out volatile questions from complacent notions of faith and justice while demonstrating the playwright’s marked gift for dialogue that is gritty but also dazzlingly vibrant and ferociously funny. English again shows judiciousness in direction and casting, and Lumbly in the role of Lucius is a real coup. Lumbly (the Berkeley actor best known for work in films and television shows such as Alias) turns in a finely tuned performance that is one of the best things on a Bay Area stage at the moment. Also, Diggs, a relatively young actor recently seen in Magic Theatre’s production of Elaine May’s triptych Moving Along, continues to prove himself capable of great things. The resulting production is a winner, no matter what a jury may decide.

UNDER THE RADAR


Last week Jess Curtis/Gravity’s Under the Radar slipped into San Francisco from Berlin for a smooth and gentle (except when it didn’t want to be) landing on the CounterPULSE stage. It’s a decidedly unsentimental and altogether moving night of dance theater that is, despite the name of the company, anything but heavy.

Two years in the making, this cabaret-style movement-based exploration of virtuosity and disability — or the mental limits we set for one another and ourselves — features an international seven-member ensemble. It’s composed of dancer-singer-musician-performers from the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, and (in the case of the Chico-born, longtime Bay Area–based Curtis) the United States. Under the Radar‘s winning chemistry includes casual, puckish humor (the performers, who variously play instruments as a band or climb into harnesses for aerial solos or duets, watch each other perform with admiring and catty commentary that is surely meant to prod stultified consciences). The evening’s almost nonchalant quality belies its technical rigor, striking eclecticism, and inspired invention.

Axis and other dance companies have long made integrated work (for disabled and other performers) a staple of the Bay Area dance scene, and the addition of circus and cabaret elements is not in itself new either. But Under the Radar‘s highly theatrical amalgam is nonetheless freshly inventive, fun, and lovely to behold. What willingly comes down to earth can rebound to heavenly heights. *

JESUS HOPPED THE "A" TRAIN

Through April 21

Wed.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.; $18–$60

SF Playhouse

533 Sutter, SF

(415) 677-9596

www.sfplayhouse.org

UNDER THE RADAR

Through April 1

Wed.–Sun., 8 p.m., $18–$30

CounterPULSE

1310 Mission, SF

(415) 435-7552

www.counterpulse.org

www.jesscurtisgravity.org

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Sleepless fights

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In May 2002, El Producto issued the acidic collage Fantastic Damage on his label, Definitive Jux. Winning universal acclaim for its compendium of broken-home tales, hard-won insights, and teenage misadventures, the recording crystallized a moment when rap musicians could reject the corporate-approved pay formulas proliferating on MTV without losing a receptive and knowledgeable audience.

Five years later that promise has seemingly passed. Rhymesayers, once famous for selling hundreds of thousands of CDs without major-label support, is now distributed by Warner Bros. LA rap scion Busdriver likes to wear a T-shirt that reads, "Sorry, underground hip-hop happened ten years ago." The controversial Anticon collective, once renowned for its vision of rapping as avant-garde art, has turned its attention to experimental rock.

Meanwhile, critics have long since withdrawn their support. "Independent pop — not just hip-hop — has in many ways become a version of graduate school, a safe zone where artists can eke out a living, take their time doing specialized work," New Yorker critic Sasha Frere-Jones wrote in 2004. "In most cases, this is the last thing a popular musician should be doing." Unlike the participants of past movements — think early ’80s hardcore or mid-’90s indie rock — neither indie rap artists nor the popist critics who hate them can imagine an alternative, noncommercial universe that is profitable as well as artistically successful.

Some things haven’t changed, however. El-P, the man whose Definitive Jux imprint represents the best in underground hip-hop, remains a restlessly intelligent and caustically opinionated maverick. I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead, his just-released follow-up to 2002’s Fantastic Damage, is one of the year’s most remarkable albums, hip-hop or otherwise. I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead is hallucinatory and strange, but it ain’t a coke rap epic. It’s the equivalent of a distorted lens refracting El-P’s mind, bent during wartime, and he stays afloat through torrential word pours and samples collated into Sheetrock. "Why should I be sober when God is so clearly dusted out of his mind / With cherubs puffing a bundle tryna remember why he even tried / Down here it’s 30 percent every year to fund the world’s end / But I’m broke on Atlantic Ave. tryna to cop the bootleg instead," he raps on "Smithereens (Stop Cryin)." Despite the knotty slanguage, however, his lyrics are conceptually grounded, even when he musses with the details.

"I think the record has a political tinge to it, but it wasn’t me trying to feed you my crappy, base understanding of geopolitics," El-P says via phone from Planet New York. "I think the record is a snapshot of a mind state during a time that is highly politicized and strange…. I don’t think anyone needs to hear my perspective on why war is bad or what’s happening in the world. I just think that I’m very influenced by the tone of the times, and it comes through."

Deliberately twisted, I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead isn’t, as El-P puts it, "constructs for the radio." Some of the tracks, such as "Everything Must Go" and "No Kings," are simple yet evocative b-boy rants with fresh rhymes. Others are stories. "Habeas Corpses" details a prison guard and firing-squad technician in a futuristic American prison camp — "This is incredibly nerdy," El-P says — who falls in love with one of the prisoners destined to be executed. He questions his feelings for her, but in the end he shoots her.

Eye-catching names such as Cat Power, Trent Reznor, members of the Mars Volta, and Daryl Palumbo from Head Automatica riddle I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead ‘s liner notes. El-P submerges the cameos — a rap by Slug from Atmosphere here, a vocal hook by Matt Sweeney there — into the maelstrom along with the X-Clan samples. With few exceptions, they’re barely noticed. El-P retains center stage.

"It’s been five years since he’s put out a record, so there’s people coming out of the woodwork to get behind him," Amaechi Uzoigwe, El-P’s longtime manager and business partner, says. He describes a postrelease schedule that includes appearances on late-night TV talk shows and international tours. "I think this record is what El-P has done every five years, going back to Funcrusher on Rawkus with Company Flow," Uzoigwe says. "He redefines what indie hip-hop is and can be every time he drops a record."

Throughout his career, El-P has consistently pushed the boundaries of hip-hop. As the leader of the trio Company Flow, in 1997 he issued the totemic Funcrusher Plus, a disc that eventually sold more than 100,000 copies with no radio or video support. (Vibe magazine recently called it "the defining document of ’90s hip-hop dissent.") Shortly before the group disbanded, El-P cofounded Definitive Jux with Uzoigwe. The label grew into an outpost for idiosyncratic visions from Aesop Rock, RJD2, and Mr. Lif. I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead continues that tradition as El-P reconfirms his status as a serious artist worthy of the same consideration as Nine Inch Nails and Cat Power. It’s his first since 2002, but he argues, "It seems like a long time, but for me it didn’t seem that long." Remixes for others (TV on the Radio, Hot Hot Heat, and Beck), beats for his Definitive Jux roster (Mr. Lif and Cage), exotic collaborations (High Water with jazz pianist Matthew Shipp’s Blue Series Continuum), and a soundtrack assignment (Bomb the System) helped the years pass by.

"Those things were me getting into the role of different characters. None of it was really me," El-P says. "The outside production that I do is about me trying to step into the role of furthering someone else’s vision and working within those confines. I seek those things out. I wanna know how to do it. I want to get better at it. I seek these experiences out because I know I’m going to go back and make my record, and hopefully there’ll be something I can pull from those experiences to enhance what I do for myself."

If all goes to plan, I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead will anchor a busy year for Definitive Jux. New albums from Aesop Rock, Cage, Camu Tao and Rob Sonic and a 10th-anniversary reissue of Funcrusher Plus are in the offing. The label has been relatively quiet in recent years, only releasing one album (Mr. Lif’s Mo’ Mega), in 2006. In 2007, Definitive Jux hopes to reclaim its past and map out its future.

"We spent last year getting everything together internally so that we can go into these next couple of years as strong as possible," El-P says. He bristles at the notion that Definitive Jux is on the verge of a comeback. The label’s inactivity, he explains, was due to operational issues from launching a digital download store (the Pharmacy) to simply waiting for artists to finish their albums. "We’re very lucky, especially given a time where record labels are dropping like flies. It’s hard to maintain a business, and it’s hard to keep going. Somehow we’ve managed to be healthy and line up great projects. I’m very excited, to be honest."

In some ways, El-P has it easy. As a New York artist who came of age during the Wu-Tang era, the 32-year-old is a critic’s darling who isn’t as scrutinized and second-guessed as many of his peers, a group that ranges from the aforementioned Atmosphere and Busdriver to People under the Stairs and Sage Francis. But if mainstream audiences and critics continue to write off indie rap as a province for silly idealists and college nerds, then I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead indicates that the genre survives in spite of their disdain. At the very least, it sets an impressively high standard for a much-maligned and beleaguered art form.

"I think the genre is a little bit stagnant, musically and creatively. And I think we’ve seen the result of that, whether it’s show attendance, record sales, and just general complaints from the music community," Uzoigwe says. "I think [I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead] is a much-needed addition to the indie hip-hop canon." *

EL-P

Sun/25, 9 p.m., $15

Mezzanine

444 Jessie, SF

mezzaninesf.com

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Mission: fresh-air beer

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Listen up, troops: Spring is here and decent weather may be on the radar. It’s time to escape from the barracks and attack life with a blitzkrieg of beer and BBQ. Below is a list of checkpoints that are reported to condone and encourage the outdoor consumption of alcohol.

Good luck, soldier. Now get out there and knock ’em back!

Big guns

ZEITGEIST


The HQ of patio bars — the grand pooh-bah, the big cheese. Hands down the biggest, baddest patio west of the bay. Although owing to the line of porta-potties, it’s probably one of the stinkiest. This is your safe station, no matter what company you’re signed up with. Zeitgeist’s commissary will stock you up on burgers and fries, and its Bloody Marys will keep you flying.

199 Valencia, SF. (415) 255-7505, myspace.com/zeitgeistsf

EL RIO


Outer Mission hideaway El Rio is big enough for large outfits but romantic enough for a date while on leave. A portion of the yard is sheltered by a tent for rainy-day ops — and there’s nothing to stop you from lighting up. Mmmm — gotta love the smell of cigarettes in the midafternoon.

3158 Mission, SF. (415) 282-3325 www.elriosf.com

PILSNER INN


Few cantinas can muster as many features as the Pilsner Inn. Twenty-four beers on tap, two pool leagues, and a lush, landscaped garden patio with two koi ponds should be enough to make anyone stand at attention. A strong contingent here flies the rainbow flag, but the Pilsner welcomes troops from all outfits to its relaxed environs.

225 Church, SF. (415) 621-7058, www.pilsnerinn.com

Smaller outposts

PAPA TOBY’S REVOLUTION CAFÉ


This little Mission spot will flash you back to life as a guerrilla fighter in Cuba or Guatemala. A beer and wine café with a secluded backwoods feel and a heated streetside patio, Papa Toby’s Revolution Café offers a variety of troop entertainment, from free trade to tango lessons. With enough alcohol here, you may be able to brainwash your copilot into believing he or she is the reincarnation of Che Guevara.

3248 22nd St., SF. (415) 642-0474

FINNEGAN’S WAKE


An enclave of Cole Valley regulars is keeping Finnegan’s Wake top secret. The back patio is a mini-Zeitgeist, equipped with a grill and picnic tables. Surrounded by apartments, this little retreat goes on lockdown after 21:00 hours, making this site good for daytime expeditions only.

937 Cole, SF. (415) 731-6119

GOLD CANE COCKTAIL LOUNGE


The patio of this Haight Street joint has a nicely elevated rear portion — high ground, easy to defend from marauding tourists and the like. And if you can’t successfully pilot your hand-rolled smokable through the crowd, you’ve no business flying so high, soldier.

1569 Haight, SF. (415) 626-1112

MAD DOG IN THE FOG


Bright red and green paint often makes the Mad Dog in the Fog’s vibrant little patio hard to handle without a pint or two. Local hostiles have managed to shut down maneuvers here after 22:00, so your best bet is to set up a happy-hour camp during the soccer off-season — around World Cup time, soccer insurgents outfitted in reversible jerseys and knee-high socks seize the position.

530 Haight, SF. (415) 626-7279

THE AXIS OF BURGERS


Taken together, Flippers restaurant and Marlena’s bar in Hayes Valley can provide a prime afternoon drinking and lounging target. Flippers serves burgers, beer, and wine. Its patio is outfitted with a variety of flora: lilies, trees, and lawn. Right next door, with a full bar, Marlena’s has a minimal cagelike smoking facility with just three benches gated off from the street.

Flippers Gourmet Burgers, 482 Hayes, SF. (415) 552-8880

Marlena’s, 488 Hayes, SF. (415) 864-6672

MARS BAR AND RESTAURANT


A secluded SoMa bar and restaurant often overrun by hordes of concertgoers and workers from the neighboring Concourse Exhibition Center in the evening, Mars Bar and Restaurant makes for an excellent outdoor lunch break. Late at night you’ll often locate barkeeps from other watering holes gathered here to blow their tips.

798 Brannan, SF. (415) 621-6277, www.marsbarsf.com

Coast Guard

PIER 23 CAFE


This waterfront bar and restaurant features live music most nights of the week. Its outdoor area is an expansive field of patio furniture flanked by the bay. A popular evening destination for locals, Pier 23 Cafe just underwent a complete remodel, now ready for inspection.

Pier 23, SF. (415) 362-5125 www.pier23cafe.com

RED’S JAVA HOUSE


Little more than a kitchen shed up front and a tent with bar in back, Red’s Java House is nestled beneath the Bay Bridge on Pier 30. The only thing that might obstruct your skyward reconnaissance is the occasional SUV parked next to the fenced-off, bare-bones patio. There’s a widescreen TV for sports fans in the tent and a menu of burgers, dogs, and fish and chips.

Pier 30, SF. (415) 777-5626

MOMO’S


Right next to PhoneCompany Park, Momo’s has a limited view — the baseball stadium and a massive apartment complex obstruct most of the horizon. The bar is incredibly well equipped, but Momo’s is a restaurant, which may impair smoking operations. While there, enrich yourself with the art installation in the front garden box: a giant heart-shaped olive. Enriching!

760 Second St., SF. (415) 227-8660, www.sfmomos.com

Eastern Theater

JUPITER


Just a short flight east of San Francisco, Jupiter is the majordomo outdoor operation of the East Bay. This two-story brewpub and pizza restaurant in downtown Berkeley is attached to a giant compound replete with heating lamps and ivy. You’ll have to stow those stogies, though: this place is a restaurant and doesn’t take kindly to smoking.

2181 Shattuck, Berk. (510) 843-8277, www.jupiterbeer.com

BECKETT’S


The two-story Irish pub is equipped with two fireplaces and two functional bars. Its patio is a small balcony above a cobblestone alleyway — the perfect size for an elite task force to secure a position and commence a-blazing.

2271 Shattuck, Berk. (510) 647-1790, www.beckettsirishpub.com

OASIS RESTAURANT AND BAR


Deep into East Bay territory is the Oasis Restaurant and Bar. By day this Oakland position operates as a Nigerian restaurant; at night it becomes a grooving outdoor lounge with DJs and two dance floors. A staggering canyon of cement surrounds the small rear patio. The heated paradise has multiple tables and chairs, a stage, a massive sound system, and a wraparound grass-covered overhang.

135 12th St., Oakland.

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MORE OUTDOOR DESTINATIONS

Carmen’s, Pier 40, SF. (415) 495-5140

Cinch, 1723 Polk, SF. (415) 776-4162, www.thecinch.com

Connecticut Yankee, 100 Connecticut, SF. (415) 552-4440, www.theyankee.com

Eagle Tavern, 398 12th St., SF. (415) 626-0880, www.sfeagle.com

Jay ‘n Bee Club, 2736 20th St., SF. (415) 824-4190

Kennedy’s Irish Pub and Curry House, 1040 Columbus, SF. (415) 441-8855, www.kennedyscurry.com

Lone Star Saloon, 1354 Harrison, SF. (415) 863-9999, www.lonestarsaloon.com

Lucky 13, 2140 Market, SF. (415) 487-1313

Medjool, 2522 Mission, SF. (415) 550-9055, www.medjoolsf.com

Mix, 4086 18th St., SF. (415) 431-8616

Parkside, 1600 17th St., SF. (415) 503-0393, www.theeparkside.com

Il Pirata, 2007 16th St., SF. (415) 626-2626

Ramp, 885 Terry Francois, SF. (415) 621-2378

Red Jack Saloon, 131 Bay, SF. (415) 989-0700

Rosewood, 732 Broadway, SF. (415) 951-4886, www.rosewoodbar.com

Wild Side West, 424 Cortland, SF. (415) 647-3099

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Dance dance revolution

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"If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution" is a club-friendly sentiment traditionally attributed to estimable anarchist Emma Goldman. But even if she didn’t put it in quite those words, the message is clear: changing the world doesn’t have to be a grim slog. Why struggle at all if it doesn’t result in a world we can actually enjoy? That’s where these benefit-hosting, rabble-rousing, community-oriented bars, clubs, cultural centers, and performance spaces come in. Like the spoonful of sugar that masks the medicine, a nice pour and a few choice tunes can turn earnest liberation into ecstatic celebration.

DANCING QUEENS


Billing itself as "your dive," El Rio defines "you" as a crowd of anarchists, trannies, feminists, retro-cool kids, and heat-seeking salseros as diverse as you’re likely to find congregating around one shuffleboard table. Whether featuring a rawkin’ Gender Pirates benefit show or a rare screening of The Fall of the I-Hotel as part of radical film series Televising the Revolution, El Rio encourages an intimacy and camaraderie among its dance floor–loving patrons less frequently found these days in an increasingly class-divided Mission.

3158 Mission, SF. (415) 282-3325, www.elriosf.com

THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE SANITIZED


Although it’s really an aboveground Mission storefront, Balazo 18 has a great "in the basement" underground vibe, and within its gritty labyrinth, upstart idealists lurk like scruffy Minotaurs. The low overhead and inclusive ambience has proven fertile ground for local activist functions such as the recent Clarion Alley Mural Project fundraiser and December 2006’s Free Josh Wolf event (freedom still pending). The dance floor’s generous size attracts top-notch local bands and sweaty, freedom-seeking legions who love to dance till they drop.

2183 Mission, SF. (415) 255-7227, www.balazogallery.com

STARRY-EYED IDEALISM


Applause for the Make-Out Room‘s green-minded stance against unnecessary plastic drink straws (it doesn’t serve ’em), its championing of literary causes (Steven Elliott’s "Progressive Reading" series, Charlie Anders’s "Writers with Drinks"), and its calendar of benefit shows for agendas as diverse as animal sanctuary, tenants rights, and free speech. Plus, not only are the (strawless) drinks reasonably priced, but the wacked-out every–day–is–New Year’s Eve disco ball and silver star decor hastens their effect.

3225 22nd St., SF. (415) 647-2888, www.makeoutroom.com

STOP IN THE NAME OF ART


The Rickshaw Stop hosts progressive literary luminaries by the library-load, raising the roof and the funds for programs such as the 61-year-old San Francisco Writer’s Workshop and the reading series "Inside Storytelling." Other beneficiaries of the Rickshaw’s pro-arts programming include SF Indiefest and Bitch magazine, and the club calendar is filled with queer dance parties, record release shows, and even an upcoming "Pipsqueak a Go Go" dance party for l’il kiddies with the Devilettes and the Time Outs. If teaching a roomful of preschoolers the Monkey isn’t an act of die-hard, give-something-back merrymaking martyrdom, well …

155 Fell, SF. (415) 861-2011, www.rickshawstop.com

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS


A dancer- and activist-run performance incubator, CounterPULSE hosts a diverse collection of cutting-edge artistes ranging from queer Butoh dancers to crusading sexologists to mobility-impaired aerialists. It’s also home to the interactive history project Shaping San Francisco and a lively weekly contact jam. But it’s the plucky, DIY joie de vivre that pervades its fundraising events — featuring such entertainment as queer cabaret, big burlesque, and an abundance of booty-shaking — that keeps our toes tapping and our progressive groove moving. Best of all, the "no one turned away for lack of funds" policy ensures that even the most broke-ass idealist can get down.

1310 Mission, SF. (415) 626-2060, www.counterpulse.org

MORE THAN THE SUM OF ITS PARTS


Sometimes a dance club, sometimes an art gallery — and sometimes not quite either — 111 Minna Gallery is pretty much guaranteed to always be a good time. Funds have been raised here on behalf of groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the West Memphis Three, and Hurricane Relief as a plethora of local and big-name artists and music makers — from Hey Willpower to Henry Rollins — have shown their stuff on the charmingly makeshift stage and the well-worn walls.

111 Minna, SF. (415) 974-1719, www.111minnagallery.com

THE HUMAN LAUGH-IN


It’s true — the revolutionary life can’t just be one big dance party. Sometimes it’s an uptown comedy club adventure instead. Cobb’s Comedy Club consistently books the big names on the comedy circuit — and it also showcases some side-splitting altruism, such as last month’s THC Comedy Medical Marijuana benefit tour and the annual "Stand Up for Justice" events sponsored by Death Penalty Focus. Even selfless philanthropy can be a laughing matter.

915 Columbus, SF. (415) 928-4320, www.cobbscomedyclub.com

OLD FAITHFUL


The headless guardian angel of cavernous, city-funded cultural center SomArts has been a silent witness to countless community-involved installations and festivals, such as the "Radical Performance" series, a Day of the Dead art exhibit, the annual "Open Studios Exhibition," and the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival. And plenty of fundraising celebrations have been hosted beneath its soaring rafters on behalf of organizations such as the Coalition on Homelessness, Survival Research Labs, and the Center for Sex and Culture. We’ve got to admit — nothing cries "community" like a space where you can drink absinthe and build misfit toys one night, dance to live salsa the next, and attend a sober seminar on pirate radio the following afternoon.

934 Brannan, SF. (415) 552-2131, www.somarts.org

STORMING THE CASTLE


Even if the Edinburgh Castle were run by community-hating misanthropes, we’d come here for the craic and perhaps a wistful fondle of the Ballantine caber mounted on the wall. But general manager Alan Black has helped foster a scene of emerging and established writers, unsigned bands, and Robbie Burns lovers in the lively heart of the upper TL. The unpretentious, unflappable venue also hosts benefits for causes such as breast cancer research and refugee relocation. And the Tuesday night pub quiz, twice-monthly mod-Mersybeat dance nights, and annual swearing competition keep us coming back for more (except maybe the haggis).

950 Geary, SF. (415) 885-4074, www.castlenews.com

SHAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT


Turning martini shaking into charitable moneymaking, Elixir has been the go-to drinks dispensary for fundraisers of all varieties since it launched its unique Charity Guest Bartending program. The concept is simple: the organizers of a fundraising effort sign up in advance, beg or bully a hundred of their best buddies to show up early and stay late, get a crash course in mixology, and raise bucks behind the bar of this green-certified Mission District saloon (the second-oldest operating bar in San Francisco). Did we mention it’s green certified? Just checking. Barkeep, another round.

3200 16th St., SF. (415) 552-1633, www.elixirsf.com

SPACE IS THE PLACE


A 2006 Best of the Bay winner, CELLspace has weathered the usual warehouse-space storms of permit woes and facility upgrading, and yet it continues to expand its programming and fan base into some very far-flung realms. From roller disco to b-boy battling, hip-hop to punk rock, art classes to aerial performances, the CELL has been providing an urban refuge for at-risk youth, aging hipsters, and community builders since 1996. Though we mourn the loss of the Bike Kitchen, which moved to its new SoMa digs, we’re glad to see the return of the Sunday-morning Mission Village Market — now indoors!

2050 Bryant, SF. (415) 648-7562, www.cellspace.org

>

NOISE: How very SXSW – Federation, Saafir, Jandek, Silver Daggers, “Monotract,” and more

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Shame you gotta to go-go-go to Austin to see Bay hip-hop talents like the Federation, Saafir, the Pack, Kirby Dominant, and Rico Pabon. They more than made up for it with a Friday, March 16, showcase at Blender Bar Patio.

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Federation get up for Saafir, holding it up (and down) stage left in the audience. All photos by Kimberly Chun.

The rarely seen, good-natured Saafir was great, spitting “Crispy” and “Cash Me Out,” as the Federation cheered from the sidelines.

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Saafir makes The Transition live.

After the Pack – who were said to have performed atop booker Todd P’s car at his series of Mrs. B’s house parties earlier that week – Federation got it up for the crazed crowd, bringing out the Pack for the last few songs. More dancing was sighted in the Patio tent than, well, maybe ever…

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Federation stun ’em.

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The next night, March 17, the Load Records showcase at Room 710 brought out all-ages noise-skronk fave Silver Daggers, who invited the entire audience up on stage at the end. Thurston Moore was in the haus, helpfully finding a wallet on the floor.

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The crowd blew it up with Silver Daggers.

Next up, the broken-up NY band “Monotract” got up on stage – and lo, it was Moore with his Ecstatic Peace noise lineup including Monotract’s Nancy Garcia on guitar, Burning Star Core’s C. Spencer Yeh on violin and vocals, and Magik Marker’s Pete Nolan on drums. Nice, nice noise.

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Thurston Moore works it out with “Monotract” once more.

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On a completely different rock tip, I caught ex-Guardian staffer and Budget Rock organizer Chris Owen’s Hook or Crook showcase. By all accounts, Hank IV ruled; the Golden Boys followed with tuneful garage.

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Golden Boys horn in.

Burning Star Core also showed at Holy Mountain’s show at Spiro’s, March 16, alongside Blues Control, Lesbian, Wooden Shjips, and Psychic Paramount. Tokyo psych duo Suishou no Fune built slowly, burned softly.

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Burning Star Core on a slow burn.

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Suishou no Fune fuming.

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SF’s Wooden Shjips drew the biggest crowd that night – thought they sounded great, like souped-up Velvets. The frontperson for Psychedelic Horseshit cheered up front.

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Wooden Shjips bend light eerily.

One of the fest’s highlights, however, had to be Jandek’s extremely rare performance, backed by what looked like Oaklander and former Houstonite Tom Carter, at the Central Presbyterian Church. Vulnerable lyrics coursed through thoughtful noise improv – ending with the sole standing O that I witnessed this year.

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Is that Jandek or is that a preacher man straight outta Flannery O’Connor that I spy?

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Obama rocks my socks

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Sarah Phelan reports from Saturday’s Obama lovefest in Oakland

Barack Obama has the cutest, toothy, crinkly-at-the-edges smile. Yeah, he’s the Democratic Presidential candidate with the dangerously high level of charisma and everyone knows it. (A recent poll, taken the same week as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill giving California an early Feb. 5 2008 presidential primary, placed him only a few points behind Sen. Hillary Clinton, with Sen. John Edwards trailing in third place.)

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(pic by Khalil Abusaba)

That’s why folks during Obama’s St Patrick’s Day appearance in Oakland were wielding a “You’re Barackin’ Me Crazy” sign, and Double Funk Crunch, the band chosen to serenade this youthful presidential hopeful, warmed up the crowd by singing “Crazy.”

Not that the crowd needed any warming. Oakland crowds are hot. And the minute the youthful Senator from Illinois stepped onto the stage, things got even hotter.

“How’s it going, Oakland? I’m fired up! This is a good-looking crowd,” Obama told the 10,000 + people crammed into Oakland’s Frank H. Ogawa Plaza outside City Hall.

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(pic by Khalil Abusaba)

NOISE: Partay, dude, at SXSW

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Ah SXSW, the land of a thousand dances, afterparties, and beery day bashes. You gotta have a good time, even if the bands don’t start on time and the barbecue is far from free. David Cross and company staged a series of Mess with Texas shows as well as a midnight scavenger hunt March 16 – hosted by Andrew WK (sample quote from his power-of-positive-thinking speech, “We have the power to decide how it feels to be us.” Thrill Jockey publicist Jamie Proctor also reported, “Some people might not expect to be philosophically captivated by a man also known for his ability to kick himself in the face on stage, but I think someone should give him a book deal.”).

The great late Arthur mag, along with Lionsgate, threw a soiree over at the French Legation Museum. Good bands, including Bat for Lashes, an all-female Brit ensemble complete with bells, two violins, very Kate Bush-like, Bjork-enstein vocals, and plenty of headbands for all. A harrowing song titled “Sarah” and a moving cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire” put them completely over with me.

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Batty for Bat for Lashes.

Also up at the Arthur/Lionsgate party – Entrance who showed off a new video, started, stopped, and then unfurled the acid jams.

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Entrance-a-go-go.

NOISE: From stone-thrower to powerbroker – Gilberto Gil

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Whoa, you really had to catch your breath and race to the Austin Convention Center to catch the major stories, speakerwise, at SXSW. Gilberto Gil took the stage Wednesday midafternoon to talk about tropicalia, new technology, and hip-hop initiatives Brazil has undertaken since he’s become the country’s Minister of Culture.

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With a laptop firmly placed in his lap, the disarming Gil gamely tackled words thrown at him like “expediency” (“one of those Latin words,” he mused) and discussed the cultural points program, which provides resources to hip-hop artists in Brazil, and his first encounter with the form in the US. “Someone gave me a Last Poets tape, and I said, what is that? It isn’t music but it’s music,” he said.

Big wheel

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› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Perhaps Fall Out Boy said it most succinctly: this ain’t a scene — it’s an arms race. Joe Boyd — Hannibal Records founder, producer, general 1960s-era scenemaker and welcome arm for many an intrepid musical tourist, and now author of White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s (Serpent’s Tail, $18) — has seen battle on the front lines of UK rock. He knows when to drop his fascinating bombs, when to jump into the fray — such as when he stage-managed Bob Dylan’s landmark electric Newport performance — and when to step back and let nature or L. Ron Hubbard take the course — like the time his discoveries the Incredible String Band glommed on to Scientology. Battle-scarred but unbroken, Boyd has soldiered on down the road with Muddy Waters and Coleman Hawkins, scored early production credits overseeing Eric Clapton and the Powerhouse’s “Crossroads” and Pink Floyd’s first single, discovered Nick Drake and Fairport Convention, and gone on to make records for songwriting enlistees ranging from Toots and the Maytals and REM to Billy Bragg and Vashti Bunyan, in addition to organizing inspired scores for films such as McCabe and Mrs. Miller. So trust that Boyd knows whereof he speaks when he says that when it came to writing his first book, it was best to take a long view.
“Of course, I have read a lot of music books in my time,” the 64-year-old says on the phone from London, “and there’s a lot of books that I’ve read that are full of interesting information, but they’re very stodgy, and they’re very crammed with information that only guys who live alone with 8,000 LPs really want to know about. So I was very conscious of wanting to write a book that, every once in a while, occasionally, a young person or a female might want to read.”
Is Boyd trying to say that most music books seem to cater to male collectors? “Yeah, I’ve done a lot of book signings, and I can tell you what the queue looks like. There’s a lot of beards. There’s a lot of bald pates. There’s a lot of gray hair, and every once in a while there’s a twentysomething woman in the queue, and then you kind of make sure your hair is combed straight,” Boyd says mirthfully. “Then she comes up to the head of the queue and says, ‘Will you please sign it “To Peter”? It’s for my father for his 60th birthday.’<\!q>”
Of course, in attempting to dodge the earnest fan, Boyd has taken fire from the obsessives who say he didn’t include enough about, for instance, John Martyn. And some women, as luck and long lines would have it, have griped that he didn’t include enough about his love life. Guess they didn’t get to the end of a chapter deep in where, almost as a punch line, he allows that his on-and-off girlfriend Linda Peters — who was with him when he was producing his sole number one hit, “Dueling Banjos,” for Deliverance — eventually married Fairport Convention guitarist Richard Thompson.
Telling his tales plainly as if, he confesses, he’s “sitting at a table with a bottle of wine, dominating the conversation,” Boyd throws out his take on the fetal ABBA; the quasi-resident combo at his UFO Club, Pink Floyd; artists less known stateside, such as the Watersons; and crazy diamonds in the elegant rough such as the painfully shy Drake. Boyd produced 1969’s Five Leaves Left and 1970’s Bryter Layter (both Hannibal) and witnessed some of Drake’s sad decline, going as far to write, “There is certainly a virginal quality about his music, and I never saw him behaving in a sexual way with anyone, male or female. Linda Thompson tried to seduce Nick once, but he just sat on the end of the bed, fully clothed, looking at his hands…. Yet Nick’s music is supremely sensual: the delicate whisper of his voice, the romantic melodies, the tenderly sad lyrics, the intricate dexterity of his fingers on the guitar.”
“I don’t really say anything that isn’t already out there,” Boyd says now. “In a way what I’m saying is his privacy remains inviolate.” Boyd’s ear has also remained inviolate, as seen with the ’90s attention to Drake, whose “Pink Moon” Boyd licensed to Volkswagen, although “by the time the commercial came out, the records had been selling more and more,” from the initial 3,000 to 100,000 a year. “My feelings are best described as ‘what took you so long?’<\!q>”
Regardless, he continues, “I never made the sort of records that you put into the normal process. You had to come up with original strategies and eccentric ways of presenting a group in order for the kind of records that I made to sell.”
These days Boyd prefers to battle the page (his next book is on world music) rather than run a label after all he has been through with Rykodisc, which bought Hannibal, and Palm Pictures, which in turn swallowed Rykodisc. Still, the feisty music lover isn’t above a parting volley. “I’m optimistic about the music industry,” he says, equal parts wag and curmudgeon. “I think the dinosaurs will go to the tar pits and that will be fine. And all their distant cousins will turn into birds.”<\!s>SFBG
JOE BOYD
Tues/20, 7:30 p.m., free
Black Oak Books
1491 Shattuck, Berk.
(510) 486-0698
Also March 21, 7 p.m., free
Booksmith
1644 Haight, SF
(415) 863-8688
LISTEN, DON’T BE DISSIN’
DR. DOG
We All Belong (Park the Van) finds the Philly psych-swamp canines breaking out some toothsome songcraft. Thurs/15, 9 p.m., $10–<\d>$12. Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. (415) 861-5016
PINK CLOUDS AND THE PSYCRONS
Gnarly SF psych rockers caterwaul alongside paisley-drenched Kyoto kids — all hail garage skronk, mademoiselle. Sun/18, 8 p.m., $10–<\d>$12. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. (415) 621-4455
UNDER BYEN
Does this highly touted sprawling ensemble boil down to Denmark’s Bjorkestra — with kalimba, strings, and tuba? Mon/19, 8 p.m., $13. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. (415) 885-0750
SNAKE FLOWER II
Matthew M. Melton (Memphis Break-ups, the River City Tanlines) was stranded by his bandmates in San Francisco but has managed to peel out the muy groovy reptilian garage punk once more. March 26, 8 p.m., $5–<\d>$20 (Mission Creek fundraiser). 12 Galaxies, 2565 Mission, SF.

FRIDAY

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March 16

MUSIC

Fukwerk Fridays with DJ Limacon

If you’re like most office workers, you’re already working for the weekend as soon as your alarm unleashes its first thumpings Monday morning. Then why not get the weekend started early at Fukwerk Fridays, the Bay Area Beatdrop-run happy hour dance party featuring local DJs who share an affinity for minimal Berlin techno? This week’s guest, DJ Limacon, a.k.a. Santa Cruz’s Christopher T. Lee, has released synth-heavy, tech funk discs Muster Funk (Intrinsic Design, 2006), which are great late-night grooves. (Joshua Rotter)

5 p.m., free
111 Minna Gallery
111 Minna Street, SF
(415) 974-1719
www.babd.org

MUSIC/EVENT

Hotel Utah 30th Anniversary Weekend with the Culver City Dub Collective

It’s hard to believe but true: that venerable venue of low-key, low-cost live music, the Hotel Utah, hits the big 3-0 just in time for St. Patrick’s Day weekend. Don’t expect any jigs or reels, though, as the Culver City Dub Collective take the stage – their mellow beats are tinged with the tonal colors of old Jamaica rather than the cool green of the Emerald Isle. (Nicole Gluckstern)

With Pollo del Mar, White Thighs,
and Thao Nguyen
Also Sat/17 with the Mumlers
8:30 p.m., $10
Hotel Utah
500 Fourth St., SF
(415) 546-6300
www.thehotelutahsaloon.com

THURSDAY

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March 15

THEATER

H 3-D: The True Tale of the Haddonfield Babysitter Murderer

Film critics always get asked to name their favorite movie. My twisted, popcorn-flavored heart belongs to Halloween, John Carpenter’s 1978 horror masterpiece. Gods of gore be blessed, the Primitive Screwheads are mounting H 3-D: The True Tale of the Haddonfield Babysitter Murderer. It’s being presented in something they’re calling Screw-U-Vision, with special specs provided. With the Screwheads in the house, audience members will be hosed with stage blood every time a certain trick-or-treater draws his butcher knife. Mixed holiday alert: on St. Patty’s, the blood’ll be green as a whistle. (Cheryl Eddy)

Through March 24
Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m., $20-$25
Xenodrome Theater
1320 Potrero, SF
www.primitivescrewheads.com

MUSIC

Dr. Dog

“We All Belong” (Park the Van) finds the Philly psych-swamp canines breaking out some toothsome
songcraft. (Kimberly Chun)

9 p.m., $10-$12
Cafe du Nord
2170 Market, SF
(415) 861-5016

On white planes

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By Johnny Ray Huston


› johnny@sfbg.com

Life on tour isn’t just about partying. It’s partly about crafty use of time and space. In that sense, the German electronic duo Booka Shade are expert pragmatists. Walter Merziger and Arno Kammermeier don’t just attempt to write songs while they’re on planes or in hotel rooms — they’ll record them as well. "In a traditional studio you always have the same atmosphere. Day and night changes, of course, yet it’s basically the same," Kammermeier explains over the phone from Berlin. "But if you travel and have a laptop with you, you can look out the window and see a new, completely different thing while recording."

Such flexibility is at the core of Booka Shade’s second album, on their self-run label, Get Physical. Its very title, Movements, reflects a recording process propelled by the touring connected with flagship club hits such as "Body Language" and the irresistible dance floor stormer "Mandarine Girl," which boasts a melody that sounds like it was made with a gargantuan electronic woodwind. "We had a good time meeting people internationally, and all that energy went into Movements," Kammermeier says, discussing the record, which like most of the group’s releases sports Hannah Hoch–like cut-with-a-kitchen-knife body parts on its sleeve art. "That’s probably why it’s a lot less dark than Memento [the duo’s 2004 debut] and has more drive."

It would be hard for Movements to be darker than Memento, considering Booka Shade’s first album, complete with a name that might have been borrowed from Christopher Nolan, repeatedly digs into the realm of film ("16MM") and especially film noir ("Vertigo"). "It’s not like we have a library of 10,000 DVDs, but we like the combination of pictures and music," says Kammermeier, who also scores commercials with Merziger. "One thing we did for [Memento] was put a film on with the sound off and watch the pictures while we were working — that atmosphere gave us a lot of inspiration."

GET A REP


Booka Shade’s inspiration and reputation stem from their label as much as their music. In recent years Get Physical has garnered a critical rep that calls to mind canonical imprints such as Warp and the still thriving house-inflected Kompakt. This praise is due to Booka Shade’s constant collaborations with mix-oriented labelmates such as DJ T and M.A.N.D.Y. and to their production work on tracks such as a pair of classic early singles by Chelonis R. Jones, "One and One" and "I Don’t Know?" Those tracks are peerless in both a pop and a club sense, with "I Don’t Know?" suggesting what would happen if a male diva from the heyday of Chicago house who possessed encyclopedic brilliance hooked up with "Blue Monday"–era New Order. "The chorus of ‘One and One’ wasn’t originally a chorus as Chelonis had sung it," Kammermeier says while discussing the collaborations. "We placed it there, like part of a puzzle."

Working with a talent as singular as Jones is a far cry from the duo’s early days in the music business, when they created Europop for Spice Girls–esque major-label prefab acts such as No Angels, a girl group for whom they designed a cover of Alison Moyet’s "All Cried Out." The dead-end results of those efforts and of Merziger and Kammermeier’s first venture as a group, called Planet Claire, led them to start Get Physical. That, and a desire to broaden the formulaic boundaries of techno in particular and electronic music in general — a desire further sparked on hearing well-arranged ’70s- and ’80s-tinged tracks by the likes of Metro Area.

"Walter and I were both kids of the ’80s," says Kammermeier, who grew up with a jazz musician father and guitar- and piano-playing siblings, while Merziger was raised by a Richard Wagner–loving father. "Anything that came out of England — Soft Cell, the Smiths, Depeche Mode — was very influential to us." Last year the duo’s ’80s influences came full circle when Booka Shade remixed and shared concert bills with the last group. And it turns out Kammermeier is listening to Soft Cell again, having recently downloaded both their underrated aggro 1984 finale, This Last Night in Sodom, which includes early studio work by the influential producer Flood, and their 1983 sophomore effort, The Art of Falling Apart. "I just listened to [Art] again," Kammermeier admits. "There’s so much frustration and darkness in those songs."

THE ART OF COMING TOGETHER


There’s so much frustration that it might seep into Booka Shade’s sound, if song titles are worthwhile clues. One single from The Art of Falling Apart was the club ho litany "Numbers," and it turns out the first single from Booka Shade’s next full-length recording will bear the same name. "We want to introduce a vocal side on the next album," Kammermeier says when describing "Numbers" and some of the group’s other songs, including a track created by Merziger in a Rio hotel room. "We’ll introduce it in a different way — not verse-chorus vocal but little parts that we perform. We’re not great fans of these ‘featured artist’ albums, where people just get a handful of star vocalists to perform on different tracks. Also, we can’t bring a bunch of vocalists or a session vocalist on the road."

That said, Booka Shade do aim to put their show on the road in the old-school sense — an ambitious plan at a time when many of the best electronic music makers are still better off DJing than pulling rock star poses on a stage. "People always ask what instrument I play, and I say, ‘I’m one of those guys who hangs out with musicians — I’m a drummer,’ " Kammermeier jokes. He’ll have to put that joke into practice as he and Merziger embark on their second US tour — and maybe he’ll write and record some songs while in flight as well. *

BOOKA SHADE

With Future Force and Hours of Worship

March 23, 9 p.m., $14 advance

Mezzanine

444 Jessie, SF

(415) 625-8880

www.getphysical.com

For a top 10 list from Booka Shade’s Get Physical labelmate Chelonis R. Jones, go to www.sfbg.com/blogs/music.

SFIAAFF: These monsters are real

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

"Even though it’s difficult to be human, let’s not turn into monsters." This is said as a reprimand to Gyung-soo (Kim Sang-kyung), a mildly successful stage actor, by one of his colleagues early in South Korean director Hong Sang-soo’s Turning Gate (2002). Gyung-soo repeats the words twice more in the film — first to make amends with his old friend Sung-woo after a liquor-soaked spat and then over the phone in a failed attempt to shame the woman, Myung-sook (Ye Ji-won), who eventually leaves him for Sung-woo.

Yes, it’s difficult to be human, especially in a Hong film, given that his characters’ attempts to satiate their own emotional needs often devolve into cruel and childish displays of selfishness. With each repetition Gyung-soo seems to be reassuring himself that he understands the significance of his friend’s words, but with each successive film, Hong seems to suggest that maybe no one really does understand.

Hong writes in his director’s statement for his most recent feature, Woman on the Beach (2006), "Repetition is a great framework and basis for filmmaking. On the other hand, if repetition is part of a person’s behavior, we can take that as an indication of obsession. I wanted to see through repetition, but also to reduce repetition." Like Sung-woo in Turning Gate or Woody Allen throughout his messily imbricated career, Hong’s films grapple with the question of seeing through repetition: can we ever do something over as an intervention rather than a symptom? It is the problem many of the characters in Hong’s films — particularly the men — struggle with, stumble over, deny, and often by movie’s end, are unexpectedly forced to confront.

Indeed, Hong’s entire oeuvre seems like evidence of a repetition compulsion to tell variations of the same story. It’s a tale that goes something like this: an unexpected reunion between two middle-aged buddies gradually sours when old insecurities and jealousies are played out in a pathetic rivalry over a woman, resulting in innumerably consumed bottles of soju (real), some of the most spectacularly uncomfortable sex scenes ever committed to film (fake), and damaged egos all around.

In The Power of Kangwon Province (1998) we revisit the popular vacation locale twice in two subtly interlocking narratives told from the perspectives of a college professor and his student who recently ended their affair. Later in the aforementioned Turning Gate, Gyung-soo falls in love with a stranger on a train, though he’s clearly trying to regain his crushed pride after Myung-sook uses and drops him. Woman Is the Future of Man (2004) focuses on two old friends reuniting to see the woman they both once loved. It’s a meeting that leaves all parties disappointed. In 2005’s Tale of Cinema (Hong at his most meta) a sad-sack filmmaker attempts to re-create the courtship portrayed in his rival director’s film — which he claims was inspired by events from his own life — with its lead actress to predictably lukewarm effect.

Watching Hong’s films back-to-back is a bit like experiencing one of the protracted drinking jags his characters frequently undertake. You emerge bleary-eyed with a hangover from the desperation and ugliness you’ve witnessed. Exactly what happened and who got fucked (over) remain a blur, but the mundane conversations and chance encounters that incrementally and elliptically contributed to the general unpleasantness are strangely crystal clear. Such a viewing binge sets into relief the careful orchestration behind the happenstance realism often attributed to Hong’s matter-of-fact style of filmmaking. The conversations no longer seem mundane, encounters are only chance for the characters involved but not for the viewer, and the deadpan humor of many of the films’ situations becomes more apparent, as does Hong’s subtle skewering of romantic comedy and buddy movie clichés (such maudlin scores!).

What then can we make of all the women who are both objects of and obstacles to the men’s internal returns? While it’s tempting to read Woman Is the Future of Man‘s title as a neon arrow pointing toward the way out, Woman on the Beach suggests a necessary detour through another popular excursion destination: Shinduri Beach. Gray and lifeless in the off-season, this small town on Korea’s west coast serves as the natural backdrop (much like the breathtaking scenery of Mount Odae in Power) for two overlapping love triangles, which in typical Hong fashion form as quickly as they dissolve and neatly bisect the narrative.

Film director and lech Joong-rae (Kim Seung-woo) is trying to hammer out a new script but seems more interested in putting the moves on the headstrong girlfriend, Moon-sook (Ko Hyeon-gang), of his friend Chang-wook (Kim Tae-woo). Chang-wook, clearly aware that he has been dishonored, drives back to Seoul with Moon-sook. Two days later Joong-rae randomly interviews (and later sleeps with) a woman named Sun-hee (Song Seon-mi), whom he repeatedly compares to Moon-sook. Sun-hee eventually crosses paths with the woman she resembles, despite her and Joong-rae’s slapstick precautionary measures to avoid such an encounter. The women’s claws are soon retracted as the soju hits their bloodstreams, and Moon-sook calls it like it is: "Two women shouldn’t be fighting dirty over a man. It’s boring. This is why hell is boring."

Not all of Hong’s characters are such astute, self-critical observers. Their rapacious appetites — for sex and booze (often in combination); for love (often hastily declared while drunkenly having sex); for recognition from their peers and families; in short, for a balm to ease the atrophying routine of middle age — brings to mind another Korean monster currently stalking theaters, whose own indiscriminate satisfaction of its needs also invariably damages those closest to it.

At the same time, to call them monsters, however loutishly or cruelly they treat each other, would be to resolutely condemn them. Hong’s meticulous direction and his actors’ extremely nuanced (even when under the influence) performances refrain from going so far. Much in the same way that a competitive skater or gymnast repeatedly watches footage of their falls to pinpoint the exact moment and cause of mechanical error, Hong’s films let us see up close, again and again, the ways in which the veracity of our needs and desires causes us to fumble our relationships — with lovers, with friends, with strangers — regardless of our intentions. In the words of Aaliyah, "If at first you don’t succeed, dust yourself off and try again." Hong is willing to grant his characters, however confused or outright pathetic, at least that much. *

RETROSPECTIVE: HONG SANG-SOO

March 16–25

For schedule, call or see Web site

(415) 865-1588

www.asianamericanfilmfestival.org

>

SFIAAFF: 25 Alive: SF International Asian American Film Festival

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SFIAAFF Extras:

Kim Chun on director Justin Lim

Cheryl Eddy on this year’s crop of war docs

Matt Sussman on the films of Hong Sang-soo

Air Guitar Nation (Alexandra Lipsitz, US, 2006). Considering the so-called sport of air guitar consists of one-minute spates of cheesy posturing by proudly self-identified poseurs whose musical chops (and instruments) are a figment of the imagination, mockumentarian Alexandra Lipsitz manages to squeeze plenty of drama, one-liners, self-importance, and rock ‘n’ roll chutzpah out of her spot-on material. Brooklyn actor David Jung — in the kimonoed, Hello Kitty–breastplated air guitarist guise of C-Diddy — is the reason Air Guitar Nation is Asian and American: Lipsitz follows Jung as he hams his way into the US air guitar crown, doing battle with stubborn arch nemesis Björn Türoque (Nous Non Plus–Les Sans Culottes bassist-vocalist Dan Crane), and then travels to Finland to compete in the world championship against Euros who take their air guitar very seriously. Seriously. Regardless, Jung is the real reason this doc rocks, guitar or no guitar. For his good humor, over-the-top buffoonery, and ready wisecracks, I give him at least a 5.8. (Kimberly Chun)

Sun/18, 7:15 p.m., 1000 Van Ness; March 24, 7:15 p.m., Camera 12 Cinemas

Do Over (Cheng Yu-Chieh, Taiwan, 2006). Hopefully, you’ve got a little room left in your heart for one more movie of interlocking stories with connections to each other that aren’t immediately apparent (patent pending). Taiwanese director Cheng Yu-Chieh’s first feature film follows the events in the lives of five people on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day as they spiral downward into compelling, if improbably concurrent, personal crises. You may leave the theater having forgotten a plot point or two, but you will certainly remember the satisfyingly disorienting fight scene shot from a behind-the-shoulder perspective, or the image of four people with their ears to a table listening for lottery numbers being announced in the room below. (Jason Shamai)

Mon/19, 6:45 p.m., 1000 Van Ness; March 23, 8:45 p.m., Pacific Film Archive; March 25, 4 p.m., Camera 12 Cinemas

The Great Happiness Space: Tales of an Osaka Love Thief (Jake Clennell, US, 2006). On any given night in downtown Osaka’s neon jungle, one can see handsome young men — uniformed in designer suits, their meticulous Rod Stewart shags in various shades of bottled blond — incessantly chat up nearly every passing woman in sight. These would-be suitors are actually hosts, male drinking companions who are, as host club boss Issei explains, "in the business of selling dreams" to female clients with empty hearts and deep pockets. The sad irony that the majority of these women support themselves doing "night work," whether as hostesses themselves or prostitutes, is lost on neither director Jake Clennell nor his subjects, the employees and customers at popular host bar Rakkyo. The thoughtful candor with which the hosts and their regulars speak of their investment in "fake love" only underscores the financial and emotional costs demanded by such a fantasy. But beneath the bankrupt surfaces, Clennell finds a stronger desire for connection that’s tended to in, as one host poetically describes it, this "space to rest your heart." (Matt Sussman)

Sun/18, 9:30 p.m., Van Ness 1000; March 23, 7 p.m., Pacific Film Archive; March 25, noon, Camera 12 Cinemas

In Between Days (So Yong Kim, South Korea/US/Canada, 2006) Fighting a world as cold as a city freeway overpass and as lonely as the reverb in a karaoke box for one, In Between Days is closer to a contemporary South Korean feature — formed from an individual, female point of view — than anything belched forth from Sundance’s labs. The film’s friction between South Korean and North American identities lives and breathes within Aimie (Jiseon Kim), who resentfully semi-inhabits a Toronto block apartment. So Yong Kim’s camerawork holds Aimie close even as she’s dismissive of a boy she likes and cruel to her divorced live-in mother, whom she keeps on the periphery. Impulsive actions with permanent results — be they skipped classes or homemade tattoos — are at the fore of this past-haunted tale of first sorta-love gone wrong. Waking up with Aimie each morning and more than once watching her looking at something painful just around the corner, Kim is as attuned to intimate frustration and revelation as Gina Kim (Invisible Light, Never Forever). Together, they’re two of the top young feature directors in the United States today. (Johnny Ray Huston)

Fri/16, 7 p.m., Pacific Film Archive; Sat/17, 2:30 p.m., Van Ness

It’s Only Talk (Ryuichi Hiroki, Japan, 2005). Like Sofia Coppola with a sense of humanity, Ryuichi Hiroki takes his bored and aimless female characters seriously. This film — like his lovely 2004 road movie Vibrator — features an unwell woman with more time on her hands than is probably good for her. Last time the trouble was bulimia; this time it’s manic depression. Yuko (the impossible to dislike Shinobu Terajima) has been living off the insurance money from her parents’ deaths for several years and has just moved to the outskirts of Tokyo, where she spends her more chemically balanced days snapping pictures and smiling beatifically. Horny as the next girl, she further occupies herself with a series of relationships that range from the involuntarily platonic to the incestuous. Hiroki makes truly therapeutic films, the kind that dispense with pat resolutions in favor of a general reassurance that life can be beautiful even when it sucks. (Shamai)

Sat/17, 6 p.m., Pacific Film Archive; Tues/20, 9:15 p.m., Van Ness; March 22, 6:45 p.m., Van Ness

King and the Clown (Lee Jun-ik, South Korea, 2005). The world’s but a stage, and we are merely players — either playing or being played — in this loving, gender-twisting tribute to entertainers of the Chosun Dynasty in the 1500s. On the road to Seoul, a pair of actors — enterprising scruffster Jang-seng (Karm Woo-sung) and beauteous cross-dresser Gong-gil (Lee Joon-gi) — discovers the key to the kingdom and possible fortune in poking dangerous fun at their regent and his courtesan. But in the process of tweaking authority, the companions find themselves straying a little too close to ugly reality while clowning for their lives and triggering a bloody burst of truth telling, along with some unexpected guffaws from imperial quarters. (Chun)

Sun/18, 2:45 p.m., Castro; March 24, 2 p.m., Camera 12 Cinemas

Pavement Butterfly (Richard Eichberg, Germany/UK, 1929). Roland Barthes may have rhapsodized over Greta Garbo’s face, but Anna May Wong’s eyes in Pavement Butterfly belong no less to "that moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy." At times they are narrow slits through which flicker sparks of vindictiveness. At others they open to seemingly inhuman proportions, tremulous moons that drip rivulets of tears. Like the similarly coiffed Louise Brooks, Wong did some of her greatest work with European directors. Here, Richard Eichberg casts Wong as a circus fan dancer on the lam after being framed for murder. Given her namesake, strains of Giacomo Puccini (as well as a blackmailer) trail behind this butterfly’s fateful climb from Paris’s bohemian demimonde to the scaffold of high society. While the narrative damns her to the gutter, Wong’s optical pyrotechnics alone confirm her rightful place in that empyrean of stars Hollywood so stubbornly refused her. (Sussman)

Sun/18, 12:30 p.m., Castro

>

FRIDAY

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March 9

MUSIC

“Video Games Live”

To gamers, there is no touching longtime Nintendo composer Koji Kondo. Kondo, a classically trained musician, scored such games as Super Mario Bros. and the Legend of Zelda, which some might say are more culturally relevant, in this digital age, than Beethoven’s Fifth. Hear for yourself when Kondo takes the stage at “Video Games Live,” an interactive multimedia concert featuring orchestral and choral renditions of popular video games, from Mario to Final Fantasy, synched to cutting-<\h>edge visuals. (Joshua Rotter)

8 p.m., $38.50–$65
Nob Hill Masonic Center
1111 California, SF
(415) 776-4702
www.videogameslive.com

MUSIC

George Michalski and Friends

My résumé has nothing on George Michalski’s. He’s recorded with Blue Cheer, performed at Whiskey a Go Go with the first white band signed to Motown (Foxtrot), and played the role of Barbra Streisand’s favorite pianist. Disco lovers should recognize that it’s Michalski who scored the dramatic soundtrack for the couture slasher The Eyes of Laura Mars. I’m not even going to get into Michalski’s connections to Don Johnson or Shields and Yarnell. I’ll just say he’s recently been working with Eddie Fisher, he has a new album called San Francisco that’s devoted to the city, and he’s celebrating the 50th anniversary of his first piano recital with this show. (Johnny Ray Huston)

8 p.m., $18
Larkspur Cafe Theatre
500 Magnolia, Larkspur
(415) 924-6107
www.georgemichalski.com

Pop goes Panther

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Prince may have his devoted popites canonizing those purple-clad jewels once again after his recent Super Bowl halftime performance, but in Portland, Ore., there’s an equally crude one-man dance-aster who could soon take the crown from His Royal Badass. This beat blaster and master, however, comes in the form of a scrawny gyrator whose elasticlike body rapidly contorts, recoils, and slams against walls during his pop-flushed freak-outs.

Since 2002, Panther, a.k.a. Charlie Salas-Humara, has administered a hip-spasming dose of what his press literature describes as "damaged soul," fusing pulsating drum machines and bassy hooks with disheveled synths and glass-cracking falsettos. MTV2 has even taken a liking to the 32-year-old, nominating "You Don’t Want Your Nails Done," the single from his debut, Secret Lawns (Fryk Beat), for Video of the Year. During the video a brown-suited Salas-Humara rocks the microphone in a room cluttered with cardboard furniture, cell phones, and iPods. The fidgety performer busts into the Robot like a Tourette’s-afflicted Michael Jackson and beatboxes, "When you’re making these fists / You don’t want your hair / When you’re making these fists / You don’t want your nails done." Watching the video makes you want to grab the sweat-drenched vocalist by his shoulders and yell, "Go, white boy, go!"

But according to Salas-Humara, Panther’s intoxicating bite hasn’t taken that much effort. "It’s a great project because I don’t have to think about it, and there’s no concept besides whatever shit I pull together in my basement," he says on the phone from Portland. "It’s just me, and I don’t have to be a Gang of Four cover band or try and be some pop thing."

And Salas-Humara doesn’t always sound like he’s in pursuit of pop. Songs such as "Rely on Scent" and "Take Us Out" evoke a free jazz and R&B artiness and rely heavily on organ to keep them afloat. Others, such as "How Does It Feel?" and "Tennis Lesson," recall the mechanized keyboard bluster of early-’80s Herbie Hancock and the Art of Noise while integrating densely arranged hip-hop beats as their driving force.

Born in Florida but raised in Chicago’s suburbs, Salas-Humara moved to Portland in 1995 with his band, the Planet The. The trio stuck it out for 11 years, though Panther had already sprung to life before the group’s demise.

"I started doing Panther because somebody asked me to do one of those solo performance nights where people from different bands get together and play acoustic songs," he says with a laugh. "I thought it would be funny to terrorize it with prerecorded drum machines."

Salas-Humara claims that he thought he would never perform as Panther again, but he continued producing new music because his friends kept egging him on.

"It was really fun to try and fill up a lot of space on a stage with one person, so I started experimenting with dancing and doing different things with the stuff I would choreograph," Salas-Humara explains. "Basically, I just get weird."

In addition to the MTV2 nomination, 2006 saw Panther embark on tours with the Gossip and Ratatat, and Fryk Beat released the lauded 12-inch Yourself.

Gearing up for his first national tour, Salas-Humara confirms he’s a bit nervous about the jaunt.

"You never really know where your fans are," he says. "I’m sure it’ll be pretty awesome in some places and dismal in others. I guess that’s the way that it goes." (Chris Sabbath)

PANTHER

With Yip Yip, Lemonade, and Like Nurse

Thurs/8, 9:30 p.m., $7

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

>

Cake to audience: Eat me (then buy my record)

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I had honestly forgotten how much I like Cake. Years of too much radio play hardened me to those catchy tunes like Never There and The Distance, making me forget all about the beats so steeped in funk you can’t help but move your hips, the spot-on transitions that would make any music major proud, the deep melodic sarcasm of John McCrea’s voice, and the plain old virtuosity of these people as musicians. What I hadn’t forgotten was McCrea’s attitude: bitter, jaded, and a bit antagonistic to his audience. 466193460_l.jpg

In fact, when I last saw Cake in Portland almost a decade ago, McCrea went so far as to insult the crowd for only showing up to hear the radio single I Will Survive, asking if anyone even knew their other songs. (Would it have killed him to thank them for padding his paycheck, however they found him?…) My embarrassment at being associated with one of the mindless minions (though I was a true Cake fan at the time, and didn’t even like I Will Survive that much), and my anger at McCrea for making me feel embarrassed about it, might have been part of the reason I’ve hardly listened to the Sacramento songsters since then.

Until the last night of Noise Pop, when it all came rushing back. The band took the stage at Bimbo’s in front of a packed crowd of mostly 30-somethings, all die-hard fans who sang along with nearly every song. And as that twangy guitar intros started and McCrea banged the vibraslap and they launched into some of my old favorites – You Part the Waters and Is This Love? – I remembered: This is is a great fucking band.

And then as McCrea yelled at people in the front row for taking pictures, and responded to audience requests by saying, “Thanks for the input, but we don’t want to feel like a jukebox. So what do we want to play?”, and as he launched into a tirade against the music industry, I also remembered that McCrea is still an asshole (or in need of a really big hug). A hilarious, sarcastic, droll, witty, talented asshole, but an asshole all the same.

Of course, that’s part of what gives Cake character. And if being an asshole isn’t enough to make me not date you (you know who you are…), then it sure isn’t enough to make me stop buying your records.

Since the band is on an anti-corporate (and anti-publicity) kick, the chances of them playing anywhere near here anytime soon is pretty slim. But you can get their self-released CD “B-Sides and Rarities,” with its scratch and sniff cover art, here. As for me? I’m getting another copy of Motorcade of Generosity. I suddenly have a craving to hear about birds falling from window ledges like small loaves of bread…(Molly Freedenberg)

Girls Rule

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IMG_0375.JPGOooh, how I love me some rockin’ women. And last night seemed to be chock full of ’em. (The men weren’t half bad either…)IMG_0364.JPG

First was Noise Pop Happy Hour at the Parkside (are we seeing a theme here?) featuring the mesmerizing Loquat. Listening to the adorable Kylee Swenson (pictured top right) layer gorgeous, haunting vocals over the band’s catchy guitar-pop-meets-danceable-electronica (thanks to bandmates Earl Otsuka, Anthony Gordon, Christopher Lautz, and the newest band member, a laptop) was the perfect way to start off an evening of rock.

IMG_0378.JPG
Next up was Slim’s, for a stellar line-up featuring French Kicks (moderately far away photo here)and Scissors for Lefty(very far away photo here), both of whom were fantastic. But opening band The Oohlas really stole the show. The music was true, heart-pounding rock’n’roll — and so was frontwoman Olivia Stone (in the other two photos), whose smile was as engaging as her on-stage antics.

Watch video here.

(And by the way, this isn’t some “I Am Wemoon Therefore I Heart Womyn In Rock” thing. Merely having a vagina is not enough to make me like your band. These chicks have vaginas — presumably…I didn’t actually see ’em — and they fucking rock. Uh, the chicks. Not the vaginas….Never mind.) (Molly Freedenberg)

An evening of esoteric indie rock

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So there’s this guy named Tommy Lee. Maybe you’ve heard of him? Played drums in a little-known rock band? Married some blonde in a red bathing suit? Starred in a salacious home video? Well, apparently this obscure musician is still making his art in the small, private, cult-following-type venues he’s become accustomed to (like Oakland’s Oracle Arena, on two different reality shows, and in a book he’s co-writing, among about a dozen other gigs).

And because I’m on the inside of the indie scene, with my ear to the ground and finger on the pulse and my nose buried deep in music mags you’ve never heard of, I caught wind of Mr. Lee’s recent appearance in the Bay Area. Not only caught wind, mind you, but rode that wind all the way to the stage and then behind it, where I watched this lean, muscled, tattooed, talented, teenager-in-a-man’s-body (If only he could be saved from his obscurity so the rest of the world could appreciate his crush-worthiness…) wail away on the drums while his friends from other little known bands (Guns N Roses, anyone? Black Crowes? Nah, I haven’t heard of ’em either…) and a guy they found on a TV show played along in their tiny garage band named Rockstar Supernova .

Now’s probably the part where I should review the show, but thanks to appropriately rockstar amounts of beer and Jagermeister that took me a week to recover from (and therefore that long to write about it), you’ve probably already read about the show somewhere else. And considering that I met (and liked) the fantastic Mr. Lee before he went on stage, I’m not exactly an unbiased observer anyway.

Instead? Look at some pictures from the Rockstar Supernova show on Thursday, February 22 (with Juke Cartel, fronted by Rockstar Supernova reality show runner-up Toby Rand, and Panic Channel, featuring Dave Navarro):

Lukas Rossi, the former Hooter’s cook from Canada who won the reality show contest and now fronts Rockstar Supernova
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Tommy Lee on keyboards during a cover of The Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony
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The encore, a cover of Prince’s Purple Rain, climaxes with – what else? – a rain storm of purple confetti
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(Molly Freedenberg)

Pinkos, painters, and pansies

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› marke@sfbg.com

REVIEW Los Angeles has lately become quite a hot spot for queer studies scholars, their investigations slipping out of the Hollywood Babylon mode of starstruck speculation and into the lives of everyday Angelenos. In the wake of Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons’s well-received 2006 volume, Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians (Basic Books), comes Daniel Hurewitz’s Bohemian Los Angeles and the Making of Modern Politics, an ambitious, fascinating attempt to show how Communists, postsurrealist artists, civil rights activists, and pre-gay "fairies" converged in the crucible of early 20th-century Silver Lake — then called Edendale — to create the modern notion of identity, in particular queer identity.

Bohemian Los Angeles is bookended by two extraordinary characters who made their home in Edendale: lauded vaudeville female impersonator Julian Eltinge and gay-rights giant Harry Hay. Both of these men had sex with other men, but they couldn’t have been more distant in their conception of their own identity. The idea of gayness, or the notion of a true inner self that relied on sexuality to achieve its public expression, was as alien to Eltinge and his time (the 1910s) as Grand Theft Auto. Despite the expensive stage gowns and fellatio, the otherwise macho Eltinge was enraged by the showy "cissies," dandies, and fairies who claimed to have "woman’s blood in them" and made up much of his fan base. For him and other prominent male-on-males, homosexuality was a private act that needed no community or publicity to ensure its satisfaction. Hay, who came to prominence 40 years later as the first official gay activist, was a different fish entirely. His Mattachine Society insisted that homosexuality was an underlying impulse knitting everyone who was "that way" into a kinship with a shared cause: civil rights.

Hurewitz’s project is to trace how Eltinge’s view gave way to Hay’s, how activity was transformed into identity and gay pride was born. To do this, he recounts the history of Edendale as one of transformative communities, paying close attention to the artists who gathered around guru Jack Zeitlin in the late 1920s and began exploring the idea of an inner essence that could be communicated through the arts. He looks at members of the Communist Party of Los Angeles who experimented in communal living in Edendale in the 1930s and, in the wake of World War II’s Zoot Suit Riots and Japanese internments, agitated for a notion of civil rights based on ethnic identity. And he tracks the growth of homosexual networks in LA, the prototypes of a community based on sexual desire.

All of these bohemian groups, Hurewitz argues, laid the groundwork for Hay’s and others’ ultimate politicization, their embrace of a sexual inner essence worthy of public declaration. A further inspiration was the steep uptick in homosexual arrests in the 1920s, as the city’s politicos seized on the notion of "degeneracy" as a moral-panic strategy. (One of Hurewitz’s fabulous insights is that the idea of degeneracy was once embraced by some homosexual men as a way to divorce their actions from their character.)

Many gays today feel exhausted by identity politics yet trapped in a ghetto of conformist sexual expression. Refreshingly, this sharply written, well-researched history brings to light some of the magically diverse, willfully perverse, and politically immersed foundations of who we are now. *

BOHEMIAN LOS ANGELES AND THE MAKING OF MODERN POLITICS

By Daniel Hurewitz

University of California Press

377 pages

$29.95

>

The Flowering Tree

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The opera world has never been quite the same since director Peter Sellars teamed up in 1985 with composer John Adams to premiere Nixon in China. The production, which was unveiled in 1987 at the Houston Grand Opera, marked the start of one of the most brilliant artistic partnerships of our time. While controversy is perennially present in Sellars and Adams’s stage collaborations, few would deny what the pair has achieved is nothing short of revolutionary.

Adams and Sellars’s collaborations — The Death of Klinghoffer; I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, El Niño, and the massive Dr. Atomic, which had its world premiere at the SF Opera in 2005 — have redefined the musical and theatrical landscapes of the modern opera. Even more remarkable, the basis for this innovation wasn’t the European avant-garde but an identifiable and modern American sensibility. While Adams successfully integrated academic and experimental techniques with popular urban genres, Sellars explored cultural juxtapositions between the contemporary American experience (including those of marginalized communities) and the histories of people from other times and places.

This week Adams and Sellars return to Davies Symphony Hall for the SF Symphony’s US premiere of Adams’s A Flowering Tree. The multimedia performances, directed by Sellars and conducted by Adams, incorporate Balinese theater dancers; soloists Jessica Rivera, Eric Owens, and Russell Thomas; and the SF Symphony Chorus.

The new score isn’t typical of most other Adams works — it’s remarkably lyric, energized by soaring vocal passages and an ever-present feel of magical transformation. Contrary to the claustrophobic, doomsday intensity of Dr. Atomic, A Flowering Tree is a warm fable with an uplifting message of redemption, based on A.K. Ramanujan’s version of a 2,000-year-old south Indian folktale. It is the story of a young woman who can magically turn herself into a flowering tree, and like Mozart’s The Magic Flute (a partial inspiration), it explores themes of growing up, loss, hope, truth, and reconciliation. "Each work is generated from a very different impulse," Sellars says in a recent interview. "We had just worked on this intense, highly toxic opera that had lots of ticking sounds. We needed to go to the warmth and the light, with a tale existing in a springtime of its own."

Originally created for Austria’s New Crowned Hope Crowned Festival (of which Sellars was appointed artistic director) to celebrate Mozart’s 250th birthday, A Flowering Tree is infused with messages of universal spiritual harmony. "People may wince, but multiculturalism has been the reality of the world for so long," Sellars notes. "Mozart already had a global imagination under way in his Magic Flute. The opening stage direction is ‘a Javanese prince enters the stage,’ so we’ll have dancers from Java onstage with the San Francisco Symphony. For Mozart, that’s his imagination, but for us, it is actually our reality." (Ching Chang)

THE FLOWERING TREE

Thurs/1–Sat/3, 7:30 p.m., $31–$114

Davies Symphony Hall

201 Van Ness, SF

(415) 864-6000

www.sfsymphony.org

>

SATURDAY

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Feb. 24

EVENT/MUSIC

Benefit for AIDS/Lifecycle

Toph One has been kicking around SF clubs longer than he’d care to admit, most likely, since the old b-boy graffiti days of yore. No spring chicken myself, I met Toph while working the door at the Endup. He describes his sets as “hip-slop, junk rock, electro trash, jellyfish jazz, and lazy beats,” though I get the feeling he knows enough about music to play just about anything. Putting his mensch credentials on the line, Toph has been doing the AIDS/Lifecycle ride down to Los Angeles: this year will be his fourth ride with Team Wino, the wheeled faction of the RedWine DJs. The lineup for this benefit also features Timoteo Gigante, another Lifecycle rider, and Pam the Funkstress from the Coup. (Duncan Scott Davidson)

With DJ Smash and Sake-One
9 p.m., $10 donation
Elbo Room
647 Valencia, SF
(415) 552-7788
www.elbo.com

MUSIC

Ladybug Mecca

Leaving New York City rap group Digable Planets, where she demanded attention without raising her voice on the top 10 hit “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat),” to record her soul-bearing 2005 solo LP, Trip the Light Fantastic (Nu Paradigm), hasn’t softened Ladybug Mecca like an overripe avocado. Just watch her get all Brooklyn on your ass when she takes the stage at the Om: Hip Hop showcase party. So forego the Berkeley freestyle for a pop-and-lock in anticipation of her “Dogg Starr” remix, a beat-laden, bass-driven heavyweight track guaranteed to knock you out. (Joshua Rotter)

With Crown City Rockers, Strange Fruit Project, J Boogie’s Dubtronic Science, Zeph and Azeem, Black Spade, and the One
9 p.m., $10
Mezzanine
444 Jessie, SF
(415) 625-8880
www.mezzaninesf.com

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