Trash

Say you, say me

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› superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO Adult contemporary is alive and well and thriving in Southeast Asia. I just touched down from a refreshing jaunt to that worldly hot spot: Cambodia a capitalist riot of beauty and pollution, untamed Laos a communist stoner’s wet dream. Everyone Hunky Beau and I met was gorgeous, despite the odd backpacker overload, which occasioned a few frightful spottings of crocadreadles — northern Europeans sporting poorly waxed dreadlocks, jingle pants, and stomach-churning Crocs.

Memo to the Danes: please stop.

Still, even that led to some perfect Putamayo moments, as when a lovely Jewish-Korean singer at Dead Fish Tower guesthouse in Siem Reap launched into her acoustic version of Daft Punk’s "One More Time." Many of the citizens themselves, however, seemed happily obsessed with Lionel Richie, Westlife, Yanni (it lives!), and Thailand’s answer to Nickelback, Big Ass. The gay clubs were pumping the usual homo-panglobal Kylie Minoguerrhea, sigh, yet the drag was way brill. But alternative DJ and dance music culture — and even the hip-hop aspirations my Amerocentric, quasi-Orientalist mind expected to sense in the region’s rapidly developing economic climate — seemed banished to the land of wind and ghosts.

I’d say I felt a little sorry for the baby-boom youth there, but who am I to make value judgments? Value judgments give me acne, Jessica Simpson — and a few weeks probably aren’t enough time to properly shake out an underground. Besides, here on the other side of the rim our dance charts are clogged with Lady GaGa blah-blah-blah, zombie Prodigy retreads, and something called "Total Dance 2009." Goddess help us all. If ever there was a moment to hit the reboot on Western mainstream dance music — hell, even drag to trash and go running with the night — this may be it.

THE ID LIST

MIKE SLOTT AND KOTCHY


"If you’re tired of all the retro shit, holla," woozes New York City’s Kotchy on one of his typical genre-fuck tracks, blending ambient squelches with trippy bloops from inner space. "Our culture must be in a coma, and I’m not a doctor." Glasgow-based future bass collective LuckyMe brings twilit melodies, brogue-inflected park bench rhymes, and wry Scots humor to the burgeoning genre. Both Kotchy and LuckyMe’s Mike Slott will bruise the speakers with live performances, while graffiti artists sear your sinuses, at this month’s installment of Bass Camp.

Thu/19, 9 p.m., $10–$15. 111 Minna, SF. www.111minnagallery.com, www.myspace.com/basscampsf

DAVIES AFTER HOURS


Do the words "electric strings" excite you as much as they do me? Yeah, that’s right, I’m a geek. The San Francisco Symphony, following in the frisky footsteps of other wildly successful nightlife-aware arts institutions, is launching a monthly post-performance shindig composed of cutting-edge styles. Cellist Alex Kelly’s avant-jazz combo kicks off this month, with electric strings and rock from NTL in April and the massive DJ Masonic with Mercury Lounge in May.

Fri/20, April 24, and May 22, after 8 p.m. concert, free with purchase of symphony performance ticket. Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness, SF. www.sfsymphony.org

WORLD OF DRUM ‘N BASS


The name may sound like a trade show — and I’m here to tell you that drum ‘n bass fans make pretty great trade — but this huge affair brings serious low-end to Temple’s multiple floors, and a boffo chance to reconnect with, and lose your droopy drawers to, the fractured sound of yore. Chase and Status, Radioactive, 2 Cents, A.I., Havoc, and more break it up. Let’s get ready to rumble.

Fri/20, 10 p.m., $20. Temple, 540 Howard, www.templesf.com

DJ SNEAK


Ah, Sneak, how you play with our heart-shaped equalizers. One minute you’re banging chunky techno tunes, the next you’re upping the bongos for some well-earned soul release — and then you drop some serious freaking Chicago house gangster shit on us and we can’t stop screaming. Through it all you keep a shroom-happy smile on our faces and work the soles off our Keds. Here’s to another 15 years of squeaking the woodwork, and your choo-choo new contribution to the Back in the Box series. With Hector Moralez and Oscar Mirada.

Fri/20, 9 p.m., $10–$20. Six, 66 Sixth St., SF. www.clubsix1.com

CLIVE HENRY


Anyone who caught house legend Francois K.’s head-scratching but still rewarding set at Vessel on March 12 may have taken away the same thought I did — the sparkling Balearic revival of the past few years has now congealed into a full-on non-ironic Ibiza attack. That’s kind of scary, but maybe the crappy-champagne-and-carnival-siren sound is an interesting comment on now. Prolific DJ and producer Clive Henry, of the glittery Circo Loco party based at Ibiza’s humongous DC10, may be the best person to help you rethink the microgenre at EndUp. Whether or not he’ll be sponsored by Got 2 B Magnetik hair gel with pheromones, like most Ibiza denizens, remains to be seen.

Sat/21, 10 p.m., $10–$20. EndUp, 401 Sixth St., SF. www.theendup.com, www.sensesf.com

BOOKA SHADE


The moody duo is still touring — and bridging the gap between thoughtful Berlin minimal and the more laconic side of electro. Yet why would Walter Merziger and Arno Kammermeier ever stop accumuutf8g bonus miles as one of the most acclaimed live acts in dance music, especially with their Get Physical label still scoring kudos and their hoards of ready and willing fans? You may have seen it all before, but that doesn’t mean it’s not the tits.

Sun/22, 8:30 p.m., $22 advance. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

San Francisco reactionaries and their crackdowns

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By Steven T. Jones

Fresh off of a nearly averted city crackdown on partying at the Bay to Breakers race, the Chronicle has back-to-back reports that city officials are planning to crackdown on nightlife and on impromptu dance parties, zombie infestations, pillow fights, and other flash mobs. Further embarrassing this city that once embraced parties is the fact that this threat has already made international news.

Why must city officials use threats and zero tolerance as their first resorts? Problems with trash and noise can be solved if there’s creative leadership in City Hall willing to work with the community, and leaders that value San Francisco’s unique, messy, and fun culture. Instead, we have the absentee and conflict-averse Mayor Gavin Newsom, shorttimer Police Chief Heather Fong, and Newsom’s dour, judgmental special events coordinator Martha Cohen playing reactionary roles, time and again.

Twister

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› le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS I love how, on the train, you can see into people’s backyards. Backyards are so much more interesting to me than front ones. What you don’t see from the road … it’s the same in California as Iowa as Pennsylvania: piles of colorful plastic trash, tarp-covered mounds of mysterious not-yet-trash, broken-down swimming pools with bikes sticking out of them, neurotic dogs and malicious children tied to trees …

Sometimes, just outside of cities, between the tracks and the freeway, you see tent towns or hobo jungles, cluttered camps tucked into clusters of trees or just trying to hide in weeds and bushes. Sometimes there is smoke billowing up from a fire pit and you are free to think about coffee or a can of beans.

But litter is more beautiful than people think, especially blooming in an otherwise pristine "natural" landscape. Although … I would argue that our trash is natural too, that Coke cans and candy wrappers are to rocks and leaves what Miles Davis is to wind and rain. We make stuff that outlives us, get over it. Or not. Either way, detritus makes me want to dance.

What I don’t like about train travel, on the other hand, is the museum piece doofus who gets on in Sacramento and blabs about the Donner Party and this scenery and that history, PA system crackling, fracturing, and feeding back, all the way to Reno. I tried to drown him out with my headphones but Utah Phillips wasn’t loud enough. But Abba was, thank you for the music.

After Reno it doesn’t matter. You are too rattled and fuzzy to care — about the sunset or canyons, or the Colorado River, or the Great Plains. Of course, without the voice directing you to look at this, look at that, you tend to notice every single thing.

Two nights in a row I dreamed about tornadoes. The first night I was home in bed, and the second night I was on the train. Only thing tying the two nights together was what I’d had for dinner: Zachary’s pizza. So if I dream about tornadoes tonight, after eating Zachary’s yet again, then we will know the cause.

I’ve got a little cooler and am the envy of this choo-choo train, because I’m holding Zachs.

My thinking: nothing packs more caloric and nutritional value per square inch than a slice of deep-dish pizza. One little piece is a whole big meal. Plus pizza is good hot or cold, as every rocker knows, and it travels well. Well, it travels well in a cooler on a train. Not so much so in a pizza box in the rain. I had to walk five or ten blocks in a downpour, trying to hold my little umbrella over both me and this two-ton pizza. We both got soaked, and the toppings slipped off of the pie and my hat fell off of me. But we made it, and reassembled, and dried off, and by the time I get to Chicago I will have eaten Zachary’s for four straight days, and presumably will have dreamed about tornadoes for four straight nights.

But I mean to tell you about Christopher’s burger joint, which is my new favorite burger joint by virtue of being a little closer to my house than Barney’s. The burgers are made out of Niman Marcus designer cows, but the place itself has a lower brow feel to it, which of course I like.

And they have shoestring french fries, which I like.

Just be ready with the salt and pepper and hot sauce, because nothing, not even the spicy burger, was seasoned very much.

I ate there on a date (speaking of flavorlessness) with one of those guys who only really knows how to talk about himself. You know, the one with an hour-long answer to every question you ask, but he doesn’t have one single question for you. While not exactly what I’m looking for, these dates always go well for me, because while he’s talking, I get to focus on my burger. And fries. Which is ultimately what I’m more interested in.

My date said (among 9 million other things) that he’d met the owner of Zachary’s and, ha ha, told him that Zachary’s was the second-best pizza he’d ever had. And when Zachary asked whose he liked better he said his own homemade pizza. Dude makes better pizza than Zachary’s! And I have no reason not to believe him, except that — and this is pretty flimsy as well as retroactive — I did not dream about tornadoes that night.

CHRISTOPHER’S BURGER

Mon.–Sat.: 11:30 a.m.–9 p.m.; Sun., noon–9 p.m.

5295 College, Oakl.

(510) 601-8828

Beer & wine

AE/DISC/MC/V

L.E. Leone’s new book is Big Bend (Sparkle Street Books), a collection of short fiction.

Score one for fun

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› steve@sfbg.com

City officials and race organizers have dropped plans for a crackdown on partying at the annual Bay to Breakers race in the face of a massive grassroots organizing effort that quickly generated more than 20,000 members opposed to the proposed bans on alcohol, floats, and nudity.

"We’re pleased with the outcome. I think it’s a victory," Ed Sharpless of the group Citizens for the Preservation of Bay2Breakers told the Guardian. "When you have over 20,000 people join your group in two weeks, it means something."

It means that people are tired of the string of crackdowns by Mayor Gavin Newsom (and his special events coordinator, Martha Cohen) that the Guardian has labeled the "Death of fun" (see "Death of fun, the sequel," 4/25/07), which have included canceling Halloween in the Castro District and placing restrictions on the Haight Ashbury Street Fair, How Weird Street Faire, North Beach Festival, North Beach Jazz Festival, and other events.

And the public outcry demonstrates that big events like Bay to Breakers don’t belong to the organizers and sponsors; they’ve become the property of the entire city.

Sharpless was part of a Feb. 27 meeting convened by the Mayor’s Office that included opponents of the crackdown, race organizers, neighborhood groups, and Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, who has been trying to balance complaints about public urination, drunkenness, and trash with his concerns about killing yet another party.

Afterward, the Mayor’s Office issued a statement indicating that floats would be allowed as long as they aren’t used to transport alcohol, urging Bay to Breakers participants to register for the race, and stating that alcohol consumption "will be subject to the laws of California. Race organizers will coordinate with the San Francisco Police Department to proactively remove kegs and glass bottles of alcohol from the race course."

While that alcohol policy was left deliberately vague, those involved with the negotiations and the May 17 event say drinking will be allowed as long as attendees don’t get out of control. As with alcohol, nudity isn’t specifically allowed, but it’s no longer explicitly banned.

"The issue was it had gotten out of hand last year," Sam Singer, a crisis communications specialist brought in by race organizers, told the Guardian. He said the race organizers wanted to put a stop to the mayhem and proposed the restrictions, but eventually agreed to work with the partyers this year.

"There was a request by the pro-float, pro-alcohol group to continue what had been a San Francisco tradition. Now it’s incumbent on them to register for the race so organizers can pay for it," he said. "This debate has created a positive social pressure to be a cool person and to be respectful of one’s self and one’s neighbors."

Opponents of the crackdown agree and say they will work to keep things under control. Or as Citizens for the Preservation of Bay2Breakers wrote in a public statement, "The problems with public drunkenness … we get it and agree. People, you need to act more responsibly. Pace yourself. It’s a long day. Don’t get out of hand and don’t ruin it for the majority of folks who are acting responsibly. Most importantly, take care of your friends and each other."

But there are still outstanding questions about whether race organizers (including for-profit corporations AEG and ING) are providing enough portable toilets and trash receptacles to avoid last year’s problems, concerns that were raised but not resolved on Feb. 26 during a permitting hearing before the city’s Interdepartmental Staff Committee on Traffic and Transportation.

Organizers told ISCOTT they would provide 650 portable toilet this year, compared to 550 last year, and that they would be more concentrated around problem areas such as Alamo Square and the Panhandle. But Sharpless told the committee that still wasn’t adequate, describing last year’s problems as "mostly a logistical issue" and saying the proposed crackdown and hiring of Singer, who often charges $400 per hour, were counterproductive.

"Why is it they bring in such a heavyweight to deal with this when they could have applied their resources to these logistical issues?" Sharpless told ISCOTT. "They want to take away the fun in San Francisco to make a buck."

Longtime runner Tony Rossman, who supports the crackdown, didn’t agree and told ISCOTT, "There is a one-word problem here and that is alcohol. And that requires public enforcement."

But Conor Johnstone, a runner who opposes the crackdown, told ISCOTT that banning alcohol was an attack on the character of the 97-year-old event, rather than dealing with the main stated problems. "I think an increase of 100 Porta-Potties is anemic at best," he said.

Jeremy Pollock, who was representing Sup. Mirkarimi, offered ISCOTT and race organizers a long list of suggestions to mitigate the problems, including using large capacity urinals, creating an end point with entertainment and Dumpsters for those with floats, and setting a cheaper registration tier for those who aren’t serious runners. "Nobody wants to see this race end," he said.

Opponents of the crackdown say they will continue working to resolve the outstanding issues.

"We’re not done, folks. There is still work to be done. Issues to be resolved. Details to be hammered out," Citizens for the Preservation of Bay2 Breakers wrote in a public statement. "What wasn’t discussed at the meeting and tabled for later discussion are the logistical deficiencies we still believe exist with race organizers’ plan for the event. Recent research by our group revealed that the New York Marathon sources 2,250 toilets for 39,000 participants in their race, while AEG race organizers source only 500 toilets for 65,000 participants in Bay to Breakers. Could it be that there are such massive issues with public urination because there simply aren’t enough toilets?"

Mirkarimi was happy with the agreement, but said it didn’t address the logistical concerns he’s been raising. "It’s a good step in the right direction. However, this is predicated on the trust that may not be felt until the day of the race. We were looking for specifics to improve this race."

Partiers save Bay to Breakers

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By Steven T. Jones

Two weeks after city officials and event organizers proposed a crackdown on partying at the annual Bay to Breakers race – announcing a ban on nudity, alcohol and floats – a large and well-coordinated opposition campaign has effectively scuttled the restrictions.

Event spokesperson Sam Singer disavowed the nudity ban almost immediately, then over the course of this week indicated floats would probably be allowed as long as they register and that a zero tolerance policy on alcohol was unenforceable, with the focus now on keeping out kegs of beer and glass bottles.

Although Mayor Gavin Newsom’s announcement today tried to cast the outcome as a negotiated compromise, Ed Sharpless of the group Citizens for the Preservation of Bay2Breakers said they got everything they wanted. “We’re pleased with the outcome. I think it’s a victory,” he told the Guardian. “When you have over 20,000 people join your group in two weeks, it’s means something.”

Yet Sharpless and other opponents of the crackdown – who testified yesterday at a city permitting hearing — say the race organizers are still underestimating how many portable toilets and trash cans will be needed to avoid last year’s problems with litter and public urination, something they will continue working with the city and race organizers to address in the coming weeks.

P.S. For more on this rare victory for preserving fun in San Francisco, read next week’s Guardian.

Fisher’s Folly at the Presidio

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By Tim Redmond

We won’t actually see what Don Fisher’s museum and monument to himself would look like until Sunday, or whenever John King of the Chronicle decides to tell us, since Fisher’s PR team released the drawings only to him.

That’s kinda sleazy and unfair; I hope King decides to utterly trash the design instead of deciding to (as Sfist suggests) pump his golden ejaculate over the museum plans for a glowing review.

But we do know this much: The Presidio Trust has released the basic outlines of what it wants to do with the Main Post area, and the Fisher museum (also known as CAMP, for Contemporary Art Museum Proposal) is very much a part of it. The 200,000-square foot museum, which would house all the modern art Fisher collected with the profits he made off the labor of child slaves in third-world sweatshops is supposed to be inoffensive because most of it will be underground and the roof will be green.

How special for us all.

The bottom line is that this particular land-use plan exists entirely because one very rich man asked the privatized Presidio board (of which was a founding member) to let him have a prime piece of real estate to house his masturbatory edifice. This thing doesn’t belong in a national park, where there is only limited public transit and where it will either be an expensive flop or will cause thousands of people to drive through a crowded neighborhood and into a park where people are hiking and riding their bikes. It’s about an inappropriate a use as you can imagine.

As the Presidio Trust Historical Association said in a press release I got this afternoon,

“We are very distressed by the Presidio Trust’s decision to promote the construction of a massive contemporary art museum, large hotel and theater in the heart of the National Historic Landmark District on the Presidio’s Main Post. The Trust has once again ignored the broad, nearly unanimous public opposition to its proposal.”

Fisher may have a little trouble here. The Trust board is appointed by the President, and there are several positions that open up this spring. If the Obama administration puts real environmentalists and preservationist on the board, they might look askance at Fisher’s Folly. (On the other hand, Obama will probably let Rep. Nancy Pelosi select the nominees, and she is not only close to Fisher, she’s the one who wrote the legislation privatizing the Presidio in the first place.)

The supervisors have passed a resolution calling on Fisher to build his museum in the city, somewhere, perhaps, near the other downtown museums, where there’s plenty of transit. Fisher won’t let MOMA (the logical curator of this kind of collection) touch it, because the folks there wouldn’t give The Don complete and utter control. But maybe he could build his personal monument nearby.

The foes of Fisher’s Folly want the city to do everything possible to encourage him to build downtown. If it looks like he’s going to get blocked at the Presidio, and we all smile nice and invite him to grace us with his artistic presence somewhere else within city limits, then we’ll get this grand museum AND save the Presidio. That’s fine, I guess – but frankly, when you’re dealing with Mr. Fisher, I prefer the stick to the carrot. Let’s fight him to the bitter end at the Presidio, and tell him if he wants to come downtown, we’ll allow him to look for a site with his own real estate brokers and submit a proposal to City Planning just like anyone else. No special favors for a guy who has done more to damage San Francisco in the past decade that just about anyone else alive.

Lunch-drunk love

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AVANT TO BE PUNK If any artist ever self-classified as trash, it was (is?) Lydia Lunch, original ’70s New York City No Wave princess (Teenage Jesus and the Jerks), ’80s underground film star (for Richard Kern, Scott and Beth B., Nick Zedd, etc.), and subsequent spoken-word performer and print autobiographer. In each medium her voice bottled the societally incriminating sarcasm of self-defined detritus, costume-partied as yesteryear’s bullet-bra’d sex object. By 1990, who beyond first-generation punk nostalgists gave a fuck? Europeans, that’s who.

That same year Lunch wrote and codirected (with Babeth Mondini) Kiss Napoleon Goodbye. The featurette — photographed by Mike Kuchar, no less — screened only in Dutch avant-garde and Berlin Film Festival–related events shortly after completion, then perhaps nowhere else until its recent release on the aptly named U.S. DVD label, Cult Epics.

It stars Lunch as Hedda, slinky spouse to Neal (Don Bajema). They’ve retreated to a lovely country château to reboot their relationship. This goes OK before Hedda hears from pal Jackson (Henry Rollins), who’s passing through on an author’s tour and wants to visit for the weekend. His arrival triggers an explosion of both Neal’s paranoiac imaginings and the filmmakers’ poetic ones.

Poet-novelist-playwright Bajema, at the time based in San Francisco and so sinewy he makes pumped costar Rollins look like an empty fitness showboat, was no trained actor. But his conviction as a man tortured by jealousy (and possibly madness) largely puts Napoleon across.

The film is a very odd duck, with aristocratic European locations juxtaposed against a primitive triangle drama, stilted lesbian scenes, bewildering historic flashbacks, Neal’s rather abstract meltdown, and the spectacle of macho lit-punk heroes muscle-tussling on a château lawn. There’s also experimental artist Z’ev as a guy aiming a trepanning drill into his own skull. Posting this under the Guardian‘s Trash umbrella is honest only in vague, associative terms: Napoleon‘s makers were clearly aiming for art beneath the coatings of irony, pop, and punk sarcasm.

An oppressive bounty of DVD extras reveal Lunch’s latter-day sub–Karen Finley spoken-word rants as heckle-worthy, and much-heckled. (Still, her core messages about institutionalized misogyny are hard to argue against.) It all makes one nostalgic for the ironic hatefuck retro sex-kittenry of 1980’s Queen of Siam, the best album Lunch ever made, with or without a band. "Pleasure is always made sweeter at the expense of others," her character says in a Napoleon voiceover. That’s not necessarily the voice of wisdom. Just the voice of Lunch.

www.lydia-lunch.org

Hear, here

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› johnny@sfbg.com

As I walk into City Hall, I hear a horn from the street — not a car horn, but a single trumpet. Further inside, what might be a few notes from a harpsichord hover in the air, followed by the twitters and chirps of swooping birds. A man sits on the steps at the foot of the rotunda stairs, looking up in slight bewilderment, wondering where in the hell the trees and small jungle might be. The source of these sounds is above him, by the rotunda’s dome — eight transducers installed by sound artist Bill Fontana that employ echolocation as part of a site-specific sound sculpture titled Spiraling Echoes.

A few days later, I step out of the rain and onto a wet 22 Fillmore bus, with a persistent hum, drone, or whine in my ears. I’m wearing headphones and listening to Jacob Kirkegaard’s latest recording, Labyrinthitis (Touch Music/Fonik). I hear hearing: Kirkegaard produced the piece by inserting tiny microphones into his ears to record the frequencies — otoacoustic emissions — produced by hairs within the cochlea. Labyrinthitis is both a recording and a live performance, and the live version, during which the audience’s ears are transformed into an orchestra conducted by Kirkegaard, might be even more radical and inventive.

While one work might seem vast and exterior and the other almost infinitely interior in nature, these two sound projects have more than a few things in common. The CD version of Kirkegaard’s Labyrinthitis includes a short piece by the composer Anthony Moore, who conducted an extended interview with Fontana in 2005 that surveyed Fontana’s projects. Labyrinthitis comes with a more extensive essay written in San Francisco by Douglas Kahn. A deeper resonance, however, stems from audio and visual correlations between City Hall’s rotunda and the human ear. Photos of the rotunda’s dome visibly echo the images of the spiraling interior roof of the Medical Museion in Copenhagen, where Kirkegaard created Labyrinthitis, a roof that plays a central role in the recording’s material packaging. Both structures evoke the interior of an ear.

Spiraling Echoes is a more playful work. It’s in keeping with some of Fontana’s other pieces in iconic sites — through sound, he’s taken apart Big Ben’s timekeeping, replaced the traffic noise around the Arc de Triomphe with sea ambience, and brought Niagara Falls to New York City’s Whitney Museum. For more than thirty years, Fontana has made a practice of bringing the "natural" into man-made realms — there is a potent current of environmentalism within his aesthetic. This is true of Spiraling Echoes‘ quicksilver collage of bird chatter, trickling water, and streetcar and church bells, which darts up and down four public-access floors of City Hall in a manner that magnifies the beauty of the architecture and plays with historical markers, such as the smile on a statue of Harvey Milk. (One can imagine Milk enjoying this piece and, eventually, being driven batty by it.) The infusion of nature is a subtle hint to not trash monuments, and in turn the environment, in order to create newer architecture. It’s tempting to suggest prankish unauthorized versions of Fontana’s project in commercial sites such as downtown malls.

Another characteristic that Spiraling Echoes and Labyrinthitis share is the ability to produce disorientation. Fontana’s piece brought out the Scotty Ferguson in me through its combination of surprising sound and potentially dizzying height. Kirkegaard incites a similar lack of balance no matter where one is standing — the title of Labyrinthitis refers to a balance disorder that can be related to tinnitus. It’s easy to imagine a Pekingese ripping out its owner’s jugular upon encountering the recording’s relentless low-key yet high-pitched intensity, what musicologists might refer to as "Tartini tone." With Labyrinthitis, Kirkegaard has given new and revelatory meaning to the idea of a cochlear implant. I hope he performs his piece in San Francisco one day. Recombinant Media Labs, for one, would be an ideal setting.

SPIRALING ECHOES

Through May 8, free

City Hall

www.sfacgallery.org

The shit we’re up against

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By Tim Redmond

Why is it so hard to get a budget deal out of Sacramento? While the gov blames the Legislature, let’s take a look at why it’s almost impossible to get Republican members of the state Assembly or Senate to vote for a tax hike.

Case study: Assembly Member Anthony Adams, R-Hesperia.

Adams emerged from a Republican caucus meeting a few days back to say that a budget deal would require both sides to give in on some hot-button issues. The Democrats would have to accept major cuts in popular programs — and the GOP would have to accept some tax increases.

He is now in serious political trouble.

Two popular right-wing L.A. radio nuts, John and Ken, put out a “call to battle stations”, lambasted Adams for 45 screeching minutes on the air, then put a graphic of the Assemblymember’s severed head on a stick on their website. Adams admits that voting for even modest tax hikes, as a part of a broader budget that includes massive spending cuts, will probably be the end of his political career.

“This,” Assembly member Tom Ammiano told me, “is the shit we’re up against.” The radical anti-tax crew in the GOP is preparing to trash, abuse, challenge and if necessary recall any Republican we dares talk of taxes. And since the Legislative districts in California are so successfully gerrymandered to give Democrats more power, the Republican seats are VERY Republican and these anti-tax nuts have a lot of power.

That’s why the two-thirds majority for approving a budget is crippling this state.

Seeing starzzz

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Pitchfork Media has sort of become synonymous with junk-food news in recent years, sensationalizing almost every aspect of the independent music world for the hungry masses through dirt-dishing bites on the latest breaking headlines and scale-tipping — or dipping — album reviews. While some may see the Chicago online music publication as a rock-snob tabloid, there’s no denying the influence it’s had upon some independent musicians: artists such as Animal Collective and No Age have collared a kind of A-list celebrity status almost overnight thanks, in part, to the site of music sites.

But when I met with San Francisco group Nodzzz at drummer Eric Butterworth’s Upper Haight apartment, the three seemed averse to any hype they may garner from Pitchfork. When I mentioned that the publication had just reviewed the band’s self-titled, 10-song long-player on What’s Your Rupture? that very morning, the three met my remark with silence. Then Butterworth opined: "Pitchfork is lame, and it doesn’t even matter because that shit is stupid. If you base your musical interests on Pitchfork — fuck yourself."

Fair enough. While Nodzzz managed to capture an above-average 7.6 rating for its efforts, the outfit agreed, as vocalist-guitarist Anthony Atlas put it, that "[Pitchfork] reviews are always kind of contradictory" and "a positive review would be just as problematic as a negative review."

"It’s pretty fucking crazy how many people that goes out to," guitarist and backup vocalist Sean Paul Presley added. "It makes you feel pretty nervous because you already hold your own material pretty close to yourself and you wonder what’s gonna happen when you get a review like that, because Pitchfork is single-handedly responsible for making bands, what bands do well, and what bands sell records. It’s been an auspicious day not knowing what it actually means. I’m on the fence about whether it means anything more than just another review."

This review does come at a point not long after Nodzzz’s "I Don’t Wanna (Smoke Marijuana)" single, issued on Butterworth’s Make a Mess imprint. That release ended up on quite a few best-of-2008 short lists. But while the group’s name has amassed a wave of chatter on the blogosphere, Nodzzz have obvious convictions concerning the objectification of its image and the commercialization of its sound — even going so far as to turn down an opportunity to play at this year’s South by Southwest festival.

"I like pop and punk music when they cater to an audience and to fun," said Atlas, who formed the band with Presley and original drummer Pete Hilton in the fall of 2006 after relocating from Olympia, Wash., to the Bay Area for school. "Something about SXSW seems too market driven — kind of like a rock ‘n’ roll tradeshow. There’s a ton of fantastic bands playing, and I’m sure it’s a fun time, but I don’t feel like asserting ourselves in this broader rock ‘n’ roll market is what we’re all about."

Released in November 2008, the album channels the slapdash garage-pop urgencies of ’80s groups like the Feelies and Great Plains. "Is She There" opens the recording with a burst of amp crackle and drum jolt that’s over before you know it. On songs such as "In the City (Contact High)" and "Controlled Karaoke," the bright-eyed harmonies of Atlas and Presley bait you with nagging, sing-along choruses that get lodged in your skull for days on end, while "Highway Memorial Shrine" and "Losing My Accent" smother you in fuzz and chaos with a scrappy, twin-guitar assault of chiming hooks and jangly lo-fi, as well as Hilton’s trash-can rumble.

As Atlas sees it, his band’s fortunes can be chalked up to simply "tunneling through the fog" as each of its "little goals" are accomplished.

"I have no agenda with this band, but I do have goals, and I just see them as they become possible," he explained. "I feel like we have to have a healthy relationship with it because it can just end quickly. It’s so rewarding, but yet it’s a rock ‘n’ roll band — it’s a project with three people. You can’t stake a life on it."

www.myspace.com/nodzzz

>>MORE GARAGE ROCK ’09

Gimme Gimme

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"I fucking hate normal garage rock," says Hunx. "It’s so boring. I love when it’s weirder."

If you’ve heard either of the two 7-inch singles the man born Seth Bogart put out last year under the name Hunx and His Punx — the debut "Good Kisser"/"Cruisin" EP on Austria’s Bachelor Records and "Gimme Gimme Back Your Love"/"You Don’t Like Rock ‘n’ Roll" on Rob’s House — you probably know where a comment like that comes from. Over the phone, Hunx and I agree that Jay Reatard doesn’t fall into the category: he’s too interesting with his combination of power-pop hooks and Public Image Ltd.-esque, spacious production techniques. Hunx, for his part, tweaks the formula by holding onto garage’s obsession with lo-fi recording and trash culture while injecting queercore gender-play into the mix.

In contrast to the genre-hopping hodgepodge of Gravy Train!!!! — the East Bay mainstays and hamburger advocates for which Hunx plays keyboards and sings — the Hunx and His Punx records sound like they’re drawing on fewer sources, but the songs are just as dense with jokes and sneaky melodies. But while the songs carry their own weight, half the story is Hunx’s charisma. Rather than coming off as buttoned-down in comparison to his other, famously raunchy band, the coyness and cuteness of "Gimme Gimme Back Your Love" shifts the focus to the strength of his nasally vocals and the wonderfully complete stories he sketches, running from heartbreak to new hook-up in seconds.

With Gravy Train!!!! scaling back its activities in the wake of vocalist Chunx’s relocation to Los Angeles and the difficult work of making a name for Down at Lulu’s — the Oakland salon-cum-vintage clothing store he runs with friend Tina Lucchesi — mostly behind him, it’s the right time for the quite literally hunky dude to release some new jams into the world.

Jay Reatard’s Shattered Records will be coming out of hibernation to release one of Hunx’s forthcoming records, and two others will be on their way via Bubbledumb and True Panther. The idea is to put out an album collecting the singles in the near future, and then, Hunx explains, "I want to come out with something super gay after that, like a disco record, so that all the people that got into [Hunx and His Punx] that are rockers are like, ‘Blah.’<0x2009>"

Hunx tells me that these records shouldn’t be seen as a Gravy Train!!!! side project, though. The seeds for the Punx were planted when Seth’s friend Nobunny, wrote a batch of songs with the intention of starting a Runaways-esque band made up of high school girls. "That’s why all those songs are about boys and stuff," Hunx says. "But then, he was, like, too creepy or something and couldn’t find any girls."

The two recorded some of the songs in Hunx’s hometown of Tucson and then sat on them for about a year before deciding to release them, along with other songs Hunx had written in the interim, as singles. The vocalist tells me that while he thinks the songs Nobunny wrote would be great sung by a girl, they’re better "sung in a gay way because there’s not that much going on like that."

He’s right, of course: the current crop of unorthodox garage rock revivalists like a dab of New Zealand pop ambition in their recession rock but don’t seem to have much use for gender ambiguity. Nor, for that matter, do they have lines as good as "We’ll go to Del Taco / and order something macho" from the boyf-stealing story "Good Kisser," or "What the hell is wrong with you / I think you sniffed too much glue" from the self-explanatory breakup rocker "You Don’t Like Rock ‘n’ Roll."

Although Hunx sometimes performs live with only a backing track and dancers — he likes the "talent show" feel — the upcoming Gilman show will include a full band of mostly "hot, straight dudes that I make dress up really slutty," the frontman promises. "Leather jackets with no shirt underneath and nylons and stuff. They always try to take home the outfits."

HUNX AND HIS PUNX

Sat/31, 7:30 p.m. doors, $8

924 Gilman Street Project, Berk.

www.924gilman.org


>>MORE GARAGE ROCK ’09

No joy

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

>>READ SFBG’S INTERVIEW WITH DIRECTOR KELLY REICHART HERE

If a road movie has car trouble and gets stuck in an unnamed town — say, somewhere deep in the Pacific Northwest — what we are mostly trained by our moviegoing résumé to see is a setup: for a lesson about small-town life, for a tangle with zombies, for an episode of boy meets girl. In Kelly Reichardt’s sparsely plotted film Wendy and Lucy — from a screenplay cowritten by Reichardt and Jon Raymond and adapted from a short story by Raymond — a stranger comes to town, but with no fanfare to speak of. And the events that follow are so quiet in tone and pace and, in a sense, so familiar that they’re almost unrecognizable as dramatic turns. After a while, something sinks in, and we adapt to the drifting rhythm of the film, in which the stranger, a transient young woman named Wendy (Michelle Williams), goes through hard times while barely anyone pays much attention.

Girl meets train hoppers. Girl meets Walgreens security guard. Girl meets bad luck and self-righteousness and various town-employed individuals, and the fact that these passing acquaintances exert meaningful influence over Wendy’s life and circumstances is mostly a reflection of how fragilely constructed that life is. Traveling north in a janky old car with her dog, Lucy (actually Reichardt’s dog, Lucy), in search of gainful employment in Alaska, Wendy gets stuck in a small Oregon city, and the film is a painstaking record of her attempts to stay on course, to keep it together for herself and her companion. The camera reflects these pains, patiently waiting with her while she exhausts her limited options.

Reichardt’s previous film, 2006’s Old Joy, also adapted from a story by Raymond, and a road movie minus the engine trouble, takes a similarly measured, muted, intimate approach, moving within delicately drawn boundaries describing a small narrative territory. Keeping company with a pair of young men during a two-day drive through rural Oregon, it depicts their reunion and a friendship that has thinned and shifted over the years, then takes them back home to their separate lives again.

The stories Reichardt and Raymond seem most interested in telling are these hushed, submerged ones that unfold unnoticed, barely recognized as stories. Signaling this in Wendy and Lucy are the high school boys who pass by Wendy’s car late one night idly talking some trash, one pausing mid-narrative to note, "Dude, fuck, there’s a lady in there." The dumb malice of the high school bruiser is a familiar enough cinematic element, and we brace ourselves for trouble as they approach, but these kids don’t even care enough to break stride, much less bring more problems into Wendy’s life. And that’s how it goes over the handful of days during which the film tracks her worsening circumstances, quietly asking us to notice her and remain attentive while the world proves largely incurious as to her fate.

But where Old Joy examined the intimacies and discomforts of a frayed relationship, the mood of Wendy and Lucy, two-name title aside, is set by Wendy’s solitude and lack of connection to those in her vicinity. She comes across as relatively incurious herself; fear or disinclination and, one imagines, some unreferenced web of relationships in her back story make her unwilling to engage here, and the few conversations she enters into are like financial transactions.

It’s absorbing to watch Williams vanish into this unapproachable character, but her near-wholesale disconnection makes it hard to be deeply moved by Wendy, even as we remain transfixed by a document of her quiet travails and maneuverings. The result is a sketchiness and a slightness, an impression that will fade. We witness and experience the film’s losses, disruptions, and sorrows, but from a rigorously maintained distance, in the life of someone who was, after all, just passing through.

WENDY AND LUCY opens Fri/30 in Bay Area theaters.

Round and round

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› johnny@sfbg.com

David King and I are staring at a baseball, some screws, and some bolts. More specifically, King and I are looking at Satellite #2, a nine-inch pointy yet round sculpture he constructed from those ingredients for an upcoming show. "To me, this is one of the more successful pieces," King says, as we look around the warehouse art studio at SF Recycling and Disposal Inc. To our left, Christine Lee — who, like King, is an artist-in-residence at the Dump — is working with James Sellier on a wood-based project. To our right, there are many spheres, some suspended, others on pedestals.

A few of the spheres are made of green floral tubes, cassette tapes, lanyards, and balls. A couple brightly colored ones incorporate hair curler ends and board game pieces. "This piece made from curtain rod brackets is one of the first," King says, pointing to an 11-inch silver mass. "I thought I’d try to glue them to a ball, but then I began using string and fishing lines. It looks like a death star." He picks up a huge circular mass of Cliffords, teddy bears, and other stuffed animals that is akin to the work of Mike Kelley (or locally, Matt Furie). A Tickle Me Elmo laughs. "A guy drove up and dropped off two huge bags of stuffed animals. It’s so random. You wonder, ‘Did your daughter no longer want these? Or did someone die?’"

The sense of mortality and waste in those questions is present in King’s new work, particularly through titles that refer to allergens, viruses, and bacteria. But his latest pieces also possess a strong current of playfulness. It manifests via comic shapes and bright cartoon or sleekly attractive colors. King’s sculptures are a departure from his 2-D collages in a series such as last year’s "Beneath All We Know," but they’re also linked to such past projects through a recurrent use of circular shapes that have scientific or metaphysical connotations. With the cellular structures of "Beneath All We Know," King began to foreground floating energy masses that had previously taken the form of jeweled grapevines or crochet patterns. Now those patterns seem to have leapt off the paper of his collages into the three-dimensional world.

In fact, though, they’ve been gleaned from the Dump. "I wanted the challenge of doing something new, of finding a new way of being creative," King says, when asked what motivated him to seek out a residency at the site. "On a personal level, I wanted to put myself out there more and step outside my own studio. The first couple of weeks, it was pretty daunting to witness the sheer volume. I thought, ‘Oh, what have I gotten myself into?’ But over time, I realized you shouldn’t look for a particular thing. Whatever ideas you come in with, you have to let go of — the whole thing is about responding to the waste stream. It was very intuitive. I like to find a lot of one thing: plastic lemons or icicles, bits from chandeliers. When I saw a lot of one thing, I grabbed it."

The sheer volume of material at SF Recycling and Disposal is indeed daunting, if you’re looking for one very specific object. Micah Gibson from the site — who might have been referencing the trash compactor aesthetic of TV Carnage when he titled his 2008 Art at the Dump show "Casual Fridays" — leads me on a quick tour through a small portion of its 40 acres. We walk by enormous seagulls, around a hill covered with carousel horses and capped by a giant ice cream cone, through transfer and sorting stations, and past a pit as a big as football field and 15 feet deep, until we reach a sculpture garden designed by Susan Steinman.

We pause by Bench Curl, a recent piece made by Scott Oliver during his residency. The scent of trees is strong, yet Gibson says it isn’t from the surroundings, but rather a large number of trees in the IMRF (Integrated Materials Recovery Facility). Earlier in the day, when I first showed up, a different mega-pungent smell had been dominant. "It happens whenever food from cruise ships is boiled down," Gibson says, noting that kids on school trips enjoy coming up with descriptions for the occasional olfactory assault.

When Gibson and I return to SF Recycling & Disposal’s main building, I spot a sculpture by Henri Marie-Rose, who has exhibited at the de Young Museum, and who has a long-term artistic relationship with the site. Back at King’s show-in-progress, there are tetrahedrons- and icosahedrons-in-progress, made of cardboard, and a wreath comprised of Chinese food containers is mounted on a wall.

King has discovered a certain joy in multiplicity — he’s capable of cutting 1,000 diamonds out from a waist-high stack of Sotheby’s auction catalogs. Through dedication to repetition, he has used collage to transform the 1980s men’s exercise magazine pinup Scott Madsen into a Shiva figure. With its wide-open skies and mammoth hills — whether green or trash-strewn — his latest creative stomping ground makes for an interesting contrast from the gardens he tends when isn’t making art. It resembles a parody of the Arcadian vistas in his earliest collages. "Sometimes I feel like I want to be narrative, and sometimes I want to be looser," he says, discussing elders and contemporaries he admires, such as John O’Reilly and Fred Tomaselli. "I like the effect of a shift in perspective from a microscope to a telescope, between the tiny and the super large."

DAVID KING: ATOMS, SATELLITES AND OTHER ORBS

With "Christine Lee: Linear Elements"

Fri/23, 5-9 p.m.; and Sat/24, 1-5 p.m., free

SF Recycling & Disposal Art Studio

503 Tunnel, SF

(415) 330-1400

www.sfrecycling.com/AIR

The Blender: What we’ve been eating

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Total holiday comfort food coma on the Guardian staff menu last week:

(1) White trash Bundt cake and Martha Stewart roast beef

(2) Meat pie

(3) Domaine De Canton ginger liqueur

(4) Yule log cake

(5) Dungeness crab and single malt Scotch

Horrible! Overlooked! Best!

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DENNIS HARVEY’S 16 HORRIBLE EXPERIENCES AT THE MOVIES:

1. Over Her Dead Body (Jeff Lowell, USA) Paul Rudd can redeem anything. Or so I thought.

2. Be Kind Rewind (Michel Gondry, USA) When the cause of whimsy and movie-love requires making every character onscreen a grating comedy ‘tard, you gotta wonder: what made this Gondry joint better than Rob Schneider?

3. American Teen (Nanette Burstein, USA) Manipulated à la reality TV trash, Burstein’s "documentary" pushed the envelope in terms of stage-managing alleged truth. That envelope would’ve best stayed sealed.

4. The Hottie and the Nottie (Tom Putnam, USA) A Pygmalion comedy so atrocious that Paris Hilton wasn’t the worst thing about it.

5. Six Sex Scenes and a Murder (Julie Rubio, USA) Local enterprise to be applauded. Lame sub-Skinemax results, not so much.

6. Hell Ride (Larry Bishop, USA) The Tarantino-produced missing third panel of Grindhouse (2007), this retro biker flick unfortunately forgot to be satirical. Or fun.

7. Filth and Wisdom (Madonna, UK) Madge’s directorial debut — so loutish and inept Guy Ritchie could use it as custody-battle evidence.

8. Diary of the Dead (George A. Romero, USA) The worst movie by the sole great director on this list. It was Friday the 13th (1980) meets The Blair Witch Project (1999) — which is just so tired, not to mention beneath him.

9. The Fall (Tarsem Singh, India/UK/USA, 2006) Or, Around the World in 80 Pretentious Ways. A luxury coffee-table photography tome morphed into pointless faux-narrative cinema.

10. Chapter 27 (JP Schaefer, USA/Canada) John Lennon’s assassin, Mark David Chapman, was a disconnected, unattractive, incoherent mutterer. Jared Leto gained 67 pounds to faithfully reproduce this profoundly boring slob. In the movie, Lindsay Lohan befriends him. No wonder she’s a lesbian now.

11. The Happening (M. Night Shyamalan, USA/India) Not the worst Shyamalan. But then again, everything he’s done since 1999’s The Sixth Sense has rated among its year’s worst, no?

12. Surfer, Dude (SR Bindler, USA) This laugh-free comedy proved it’s possible to render 90 minutes of Matthew McConaughey in board shorts into a hard-off.

13. Synecdoche, NY (Charlie Kaufman, USA) What’s like a prostate exam minus the health benefits? The extent to which writer-director Kaufman rams head up ass in this neurotic, pseudo-intellectual wankfest. Its stellar cast walked the plank into elaborate meaninglessness.

14. Australia (Baz Luhrmann, Australia/USA) Possibly the most expensive insufferable movie ever made. Can a continent sue for defamation?

15. Valkyrie (Bryan Singer, USA/Germany) Not even surprisingly decent talk-show Elvis impressions can save you this time, Tom Cruise.

16. The Spirit (Frank Miller, USA) The Dork Knight. Least super hero ever. Frank Miller: stand in the corner!

DENNIS HARVEY’S BEST PERFORMANCES MOST LIKELY TO BE OVERLOOKED:

Elio Germano in My Brother Is an Only Child (Daniele Luchetti, Italy/France, 2007)

Shane Jacobson in Kenny (Clayton Jacobson, Australia, 2006)

Emma Thompson in Brideshead Revisited (Julian Jarrold, UK)

Mathieu Amalric in A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, France)

Jane Lynch in Role Models (David Wain, USA/Germany)

Stephen Rea, Mena Suvari, and Russell Hornsby in Stuck (Stuart Gordon, Canada/USA/UK/Germany)

Naomi Watts and Tim Roth in Funny Games (Michael Haneke, USA/France/UK/Austria/Germany/Italy)

Haaz Sleiman in The Visitor (Thomas McCarthy, USA)

Asia Argento in Boarding Gate (Olivier Assayas, France/Luxembourg) and The Last Mistress (Catherine Breillat, France/Italy, 2007)

Norma Khouri in Forbidden Lie$ (Anna Broinowski, Australia, 2007)

Russell Brand in Forgetting Sarah Marshall (Nicholas Stoller, USA)

Brad Pitt in Burn After Reading (Ethan and Joel Coen, USA/UK/France)

Thandie Newton in W. (Oliver Stone, USA/Hong Kong/Germany/UK/Australia)

James Franco in Pineapple Express (David Gordon Green, USA) and Milk (Gus Van Sant, USA)

Amy Adams in Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (Bharat Nalluri, UK/USA)

Thomas Haden Church in Smart People (Noam Murro, USA)

Emily Mortimer in Transsiberian (Brad Anderson, UK/Germany/Spain/Lithuania)

Judith Light in Save Me (Robert Cary, USA, 2007)

Kathy Bates in Revolutionary Road (Sam Mendes, USA/UK)

Anna Biller in Viva (Anna Biller, USA)

Taraji P. Henson in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (David Fincher, USA)

Anna Faris in The House Bunny (Fred Wolf, USA)

DENNIS HARVEY’S TOP 25 (IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER):

1. Battle for Haditha (Nick Broomfield, UK, 2007)

2. Bigger Stronger Faster (Chris Bell, US)

3. Brideshead Revisited (Julian Jerrold, UK)

4. A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, France)

5. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (David Fincher, USA)

6. Doubt (John Patrick Shanley, USA)

7. Encounters at the End of the World (Werner Herzog, USA, 2007)

8. Forbidden Lie$ (Anna Broinowski, Australia, 2007)

9. Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (Alex Gibney,

USA)

10. Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh, UK)

11. I Served the King of England (Jirí Menzel, Czech Republic/Slovakia, 2006)

12. Kenny (Clayton Jacobsen, Australia, 2006)

13. Milk (Gus Van Sant, USA)

14. Monks: The Transatlantic Feedback (Lucia Palacios and Dietmar Post,

Spain/Germany/USA, 2006)

15. My Brother Is an Only Child (Daniele Luchetti, Italy/France, 2007)

16. Planet B-Boy (Benson Lee, US, 2007)

17. Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant, France/USA, 2007)

18. Reprise (Joachim Trier, Norway, 2006)

19. Revolutionary Road (Sam Mendes, USA/UK)

20. A Secret (Claude Miller, France, 2007)

21. The Signal (David Bruckner, Dan Bush, and Jacob Gentry, USA, 2007)

22. Trouble the Water (Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, USA)

23. The Violin (Francisco Vargas, Mexico, 2005)

24. Viva (Anna Biller, USA)

25. Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, Israel/Germany/France/USA)

Talking heads, part one

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TV DRIVE-BY Are TV commentators covert celebrities? Showbiz Tonight fosters this impression. Instead of junket interviews with fame’s roadkill or TMZ-style rampage-cam footage of them at Starbucks, it devotes the majority of its daily, endlessly-rerun hour to carefully curated prefab arguments about the stars. The show’s reliable go-to panelist crew gets more regular airtime than any celeb-bot. It’s startling — shocking! Thus, in the first of what may be a series of infotainment drive-by portraits, Trash dares to take on the chattering skulls of CNN’s self-billed "most provocative entertainment news show." Please, AJ Hammer, don’t hurt ’em.

Lisa Bloom Based on her facial expressions, celebrity doings leave a slightly lemon-y aftertaste for this lawyer — the literal offspring of Gloria Allred — and host of the truTV series Open Court. According to Bloom’s official Web site, TV Guide deems her "Plucky!" In addition to legal expertise, she’s prone to the occasional psychiatric diagnosis, labeling Britney Spears (a fave topic) "bipolar."

Steve Santagati Need a misogynist bro-down dude with tousled yet dirty hair, tanned and muscular (yet not too muscular) physique, and permanent "Yeah, I’m an asshole" smirk? Santagati, the man who authored 2007’s The Manual, is your go-to guy.

Dr. Judy Kuriansky Let’s keep it simple: she’s the Dr. Joyce Brothers of the 21st century. Along with Bloom, she’s a reliable nemesis of Santagati’s.

Carlos Diaz Cherubic but sometimes party-worn, this ExtraTV correspondent is throwing a Vegas New Year’s bash where people can "party like its $19.99!"

Howard Bragman You have to love CNN for erasing journalistic ethics completely by bringing a PR agent into its editorial fold. Head of the firm 15 Minutes — the Web site of which greets visitors with quotes from Will Rogers, Chuang-tzu, and, of course, Andy Warhol — this out and proud master of the soft sell has never met a comeback kid who didn’t deserve some sympathy, or a train wreck that didn’t deserve rescue efforts. (Except maybe Paula Abdul.)

Ken Baker No stranger to controversy himself, this friend of Ryan Seacrest has blazed a trail from an especially litigious era of US Weekly to his current day gig as Entertainment News Editor of E!.

Janelle Snowden To quote a Bratmobile song," "Janelle! Janelle! She’s so swell! Oh, Janelle!"

Jane Velez-Mitchell Lady justice demands this roundup end with a bang, or in this case, the bewigged bangs of Velez-Mitchell, the campiest and wittiest of Showbiz Tonight‘s growing legion of talking heads. The most surprising thing about Velez-Mitchell’s 100-percent pulp book Secrets Can Be Murder (2007) is that her analysis of tabloid fodder is thoroughly feminist in a manner that contradicts the old canard about feminists having no sense of humor. She may be fond of adding -cide to every other word in the dictionary (e.g., "gendercide," "teenacide"), but she even quotes Shakespeare in the intro. Give this lady a CNN show already. Oh, wait, she just got one: Issues with Jane Velez-Mitchell.

Extra! Extra! Heterosexuality in peril!

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Dear Readers:

I’m kind of pretty

and pretty damned smart

I like romantic things like music and art

and as you know I have a gigantic heart

so why … don’t I have a boyfriend?

— Kate Monster, "Sucks to be me" from Avenue Q

Sucks to be Kate Monster, and it sucks just as much to be my many friends of similar description — not monsters but smart, pretty, funny, adventurous, and moderately level-headed young women of great heart, who are caught in an endless cycle of dating to no (desirable) purpose and no end in sight, at least out here on the coasts. One friend actually moved to the Midwest to get away from the evil scene and was promptly rewarded with an actual boyfriend, the type who proudly introduces you as his girlfriend and can discuss a future together without smirking. I’ve developed a kind of semi-vicarious hate-on for the coastal guys — what gives them the right to treat my friends like instantly replaceable consumer objects of dubious value? — so I’ve been reading with interest some of the recent glut of articles and books on the state of young manhood, First World Problem version.

Most of these come down to "men are just big boys/no they aren’t," the argument currently raging, or at least smoldering, pretty much anywhere you find people discussing the current social climate and where we seem to be heading, love-and-marriagewise.

On the "no wonder you can’t find a boyfriend" side, you find innumerable lifestyle articles, most notably and recently Gary Cross’s Men To Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity, in which the historian blames the immaturity he sees in modern Western males on three decade’s worth of cultural shift, starting with a rejection of the old, unquestionably masculine and often admirable but also frequently rigid and authoritarian paternalism of the "Greatest Generation," which left men wandering, lost and fatherless, for lack of a better role-model to replace the castoff, too-dadly Dad. This is nothing startling — we’ve heard it before — but he does present a decent argument and does so without too much blame, some hope for the future of heterosexuality, and none of the (admittedly rather entertaining) snottiness of our next example, the recent articles by Kay S. Hymowitz in City Journal.

City Journal is the organ of conservative think tank the Manhattan Institute, but so what? It has lively cultural commentary and even if you don’t want to be a conservative yourself, it isn’t (I think) contagious, so why shouldn’t readers of leftish news weeklies read out of their comfort zones occasionally? And its authors, apparently, aren’t afraid to say they were wrong, which is always cheering. The first of the two articles, "Child-man in the Promised Land" was another of the "men suck" pieces. The man-child (whom the writer contrasts with the man, who has or wants a wife and kids and actually seeks out responsibilities and then discharges them rather than avoiding ever acquiring any) has tastes both formed and reflected by Maxim and [adult swim]. He likes video games and junk food and sex but not women, really, and he doesn’t call when he says he will because he never intended to — why should he when there’s always another girl who, not having met him yet, expects even less from him than you do?

That was the first article. The current piece has Hymowitz exploring the (really rather startling) not-so-underground Man Web and finding that a lot of these guys are treating women like trash because the women (they feel) are trashing them right back. Nobody’s acting very mature here, so she could just as well have titled her piece (actually called "Love in the Time of Darwinism") "She Started It!"

Women, say the young men, want it all and switch the rules on you without warning. They want equality except when they don’t, and then you’re in trouble for not bringing roses. Plus, they’re attracted to jerks, they sneer at nice guys, and then they blame you for acting like a prick.

This state of affairs, the shifting rules and roles, may have brought us to this point, writes Hymowitz (and others), where the gulf between male and female mores and modes of expression is wider than it has been since before World War I, and a certain amount of aggression, contempt, and rude gamesmanship (see both The Rules and Rules of the Game ) is both expected and to some extent accepted. I leave it to Hymowitz to troll the gamier recesses of the Web for sites like AlphaSeduction and Eternal Bachelor ("Give modern women the husband they deserve. None."), but you shouldn’t be too surprised to hear that this stuff is out there.

Are these dispatches from the new war correspondents accurate? Somewhat. As much as can be expected from lifestyle journalism, anyway, which by definition requires a phenomenon, the more disturbing the better (would you read weekly articles in The New York Times titled "All Well in Pleasantville?"). Is this state of affairs universal? Certainly not. Is it inevitable? I think not. What’s that everyone’s been saying about hope and change?

Love,

Andrea

Got a salacious subject you want Andrea to discuss? Ask her a question!

Kosher salami: Mickey Avalon at Slim’s

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mickey avalon sml.jpg

By Chloe Schildhause

So many things in this world are disgusting yet delightful at the same time. For some that may be sniffing the smell of gasoline, hearing the sound of a squeaky chair, or watching someone undergo intensive surgery. Such is the case with rap artist Mickey Avalon, whose creepy look – which combines Marilyn Manson, Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow, and a character from a John Waters film – is simultaneously repellent and adorable.

I caught Avalon’s Nov. 20 show at Slim’s, the second show of a two-night stand, and got a taste of his lyrical genius as well as his performance style. The stage was set up to look like a sketchy dark alley with a wire fence, parking meters, a trash receptacle, and a bench tagged with the words “Mickey Avalon” and fit well with Avalon’s rhymes about friends who’ve died from lead poisoning and how the performer himself must “spend another day waiting to die.”

Kickin’ ‘bot

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER A mashed-up stock market and credit-crunked fiscal outlook be damned — just what does the music industry have to do to make you part with your overly stretched entertainment dollar? Pay you to buy, Joe Deflation? Bookended by the double-B bombshells — Beyonce’s Nov. 18-released I Am … Sasha Fierce (Sony) and Britney Spears’ Dec. 2-scheduled Circus (Jive) — this week is likely major-label ground zero for pre-holiday CD releases — ready to tantalize us, peering through Pepto Bismol-smeared turkey goggles, with toothsome collaborations, tempt us with superstar potential, and dazzle with gleaming newness.

I’m taking a cue from a future-focused Kanye West and feeding a few Nov. 24 (Island Def Jam got a jump on the traditional Tuesday release date) and 25 releases to the trusty Micro-Reviewbot, our neutral yet far from neutered critical assessment generator, which will hold these discs up against infuriatingly fuzzy expectations and objectively critique said recordings. The exception: Guns N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy (Interscope) — because it’s hard to review an album when, at press time, the label allows Micro-Reviewbot to listen to only two tracks. But hey, why spoil the shock and awe? Careful now, Micro-Reviewbot can’t not tell the truth. Micro-Reviewbot only knows how to speak truth — to power and powerless alike. All systems go, Micro-Reviewbot!

KANYE WEST, 808S AND HEARTBREAK (ROC-A-FELLA/ISLAND DEF JAM)


Anticipation level: Smokin’ high, tempered with likely some ambivalence about Graduation‘s Daft Punk-Takashi Murakami-Chris Martin alliances. Has West hitched his wagon to one too many trendoids? Still, we are spared the faux drama of a 50 Cent feud with the advance of 808s’ release date.

Micro-Reviewbot’s pop-psych diagnosis: Frankly, Kanye sounds depressed. I know the self-proclaimed genius of rap is working through some deep shit: he broke up with his fiancée, and his mom died a year ago during cosmetic surgery.

Witness the way West has dug himself so deeply into his Afro-futurist themes and coolly digitized sonic landscape. This space-age ice-cold killer is taking the next spaceship from reality, pronto, while yodeling through a thicket of effects, "See you in my nightmares, suckers!" You wouldn’t know that the political/cultural change is breaking out all over this month — straight from the 808, a.k.a., native-born Barack Obama’s Hawaii, where West recorded this album using, a-ha, a Roland TR-808 drum machine. Instead, Kanye has taken refuge in something he can rely on: the love between a man and his Vocoder — or rather, a man and his Auto-Tune plug-in. Still, the songs on the dampened-down 808s and Heartbreak continue to grow on Micro-Reviewbot.

Alternative: Ludacris’ take-that, mob-inciting Theater of the Mind (Disturbing Tha Peace) — with a guest cast including TI, T-Pain, Lil Wayne, Jay-Z, Nas, the Game, Rick Ross, Chris Rock, Jamie Foxx, and Spike Lee — also out Nov. 24. It’s as if Ludi hadn’t ever abandoned the rap game for the cineplex — even if his references tend to ride a pop culture loop of I Hate Chris and Any Given Sunday more readily than anything resembling clichéd gangbanger reality.

THE KILLERS, DAY AND AGE (ISLAND)


Expectations: Fall Out Boy feuds and suits by ex-managers aside, it’s hard to gauge, considering their paean to Wal-Mart moms, Sam’s Town, surprised everyone by taking a left turn from the guilty-pleasure deca-dance-pop of "Somebody Told Me" toward Broooce-fearing Freedom Rock, a then-untapped ’80s retro vein — and shocked further by going Putf8um.

Micro-Reviewbot’s stays-in-Vegas assessment: are the Killers trying to tell us something by opening with a track titled "Losing Touch"? Somebody told the Sin City band they had to drop that Broooce crush that made them look like the girlfriends they had in February 1983. It’s not confidential. They’ve got potential, so they mixed touches of anthemic melody lines, glockenspiel, and sax appeal with more nods to the dance-pop crowd (the cringe-inducing "Joy Ride"). These new-new rock romantics want to have their epics (thundering "A Dustland Fairytale") and eat, too (U2-y pop hit "Human").

Alternative: Look for further throw-away kicks from English-New Zealand trash pleash Ladyhawke — not to be confused with stateside indie vets Ladyhawk — and her weird combo of DIY-rock trappings (the new self-titled Modular/Interscope CD sports rough sketches of a head-banded hipster chick and kittens) and slick electro-pop odes to lovers jetting over the Atlantic, whizzing synth details, and artificial hand claps.

DAVID BYRNE AND BRIAN ENO, EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS WILL HAPPEN TODAY (SELF-RELEASED)


Waxy critical buildup: a quiet storm has been building among graying ’80s-era fans and young ‘uns cognizant of the renewed relevance of the pair’s Talking Heads work and their last co-written full-length, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (Sire, 1981).

Micro-Reviewbot’s "I Am … Fierce" take: the ironic-naïf act is wearing thin. Micro-Reviewbot wants to like Everything, but finds its attention consistently drifting, mid-listen. Likely the best Byrne album in years, though the promise of bitingly ironic opener "Home" and the C&W-laced "My Big Nurse" soon degenerates with obvious Radiohead dig, "I Feel My Stuff," a jab at the crit darlings’ chilly electronic bricolage, which goes terribly wrong in a Midnite Vultures-style Pro-Tools-is-crack kind of way. Except Midnite Vultures is actually more listenable. Sonically songs like "Everything That Happens" are lovely — scattered with plangent piano tinkles and aquatic guitar lines — but perhaps it’s too much to ask elders like Byrne and Eno to eschew the non-Viagra-like sax and trudging tempos on tunes such as "Life Is Long" and find some genuine energy.

Alternative: Shhh, how about giving Micro-Reviewbot a little quiet digestion time for a change? *

Armed love

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW The struggle of young, white activists aspiring to the authenticity, confrontational stance, and street credibility of groups like the Black Panthers has generated some of the most enduring myths and storylines of the 1960s. Among these ’60s groups, perhaps the least documented is New York City’s mythical Motherfuckers, the "street gang with an analysis." Former Motherfucker and current Berkeley activist Osha Neumann’s colorful but uneven memoir Up Against the Wall Motherfucker (Seven Stories Press, 240 pages, $16.95) is the first book-length treatment of the so-called "group with the unspeakable name."

Much like the Diggers (members of the San Francisco Mime Troup who left the stage in 1966 to act out revolutionary change in the streets), the Motherfuckers got their start in art. In January 1967, Neumann attended a meeting for "Angry Arts Week," which called for Lower East Side artists to make politically engaged work against the war in Vietnam. There, he met anarchist painter Ben Morea. Morea and his art group Black Mask had been responsible for a series of actions that brought the heavy street vibe of the Black Panthers to the art world, including an announced "shut down" of the Museum of Modern Art that ended with riot cops ringing the museum. From Angry Arts Week evolved a new group with Morea and Neumann at its core that took its name from a poem by Leroi Jones.

A product of the tenements and rat-infested streets around Tompkins Square Park, the Motherfuckers roamed the Lower East Side in leather jackets, carrying knives and handing out manifestoes. Their political identity, worldview, and brutal tactics were all neatly encapsulated by their first action in January 1968. During a garbage strike in the Lower East Side, they gathered rotten trash from the streets and took it uptown to dump on the steps of Lincoln Center, where they handed out flyers that read, "We propose a cultural exchange: garbage for garbage." Similarly to the Diggers out west, UAW/MF operated a Free Store, and held regular free community feasts for hippies and dropouts. But the Motherfuckers also taught free karate classes; eventually, they stockpiled guns. As Neumann puts it today, "We didn’t fuck around."

Preaching "flower power but with thorns," the group’s politics of escalation anticipated today’s Black Bloc. At the October 1967 march on the Pentagon, while Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies were linking arms and chanting to "levitate the Pentagon," Morea and company tore down a chain-link fence, battled with federal marshalls, and fought their way inside. Although Neumann now mostly dismisses the Motherfuckers’ tactics as macho and ineffective, he skillfully evokes the paranoid, volatile time and place in which they made total sense. Unfortunately for the reader, the group disbands midway through the book, and the back half is devoted to deadly dull soul-searching about the meaning of the ’60s.

Assessing the Motherfuckers’ legacy, Neumann writes, "It is easy to dismiss (their) politics as nothing more than childish tantrums and to profess that a baleful acceptance of the status quo is more ‘mature.’ It is more difficult to disentangle, delicately, as one would a bird caught in a net, the genuinely radical and uncompromising elements in this politics from those which are self-defeating." Though Neumann never satisfyingly solves this challenge for readers or himself, perhaps that’s the point. The group that started out as artists ultimately ended where they began, leaving behind a myth with an irreducible riddle at its core that is perhaps best considered as art. *

Sleaze, if you please

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Thanksgiving is a time for wholesome family togetherness. All the more reason, then, to get your sex on "Holiday Heat," a pre-Turkey Day celebration of retro sleaze. First up is freshly deceased Gerard Damiano’s 1972 Devil in Miss Jones, which followed his prior year’s Deep Throat as the second biggest porn movie ever. (Or at least before celebutantes like Paris Hilton and John Wayne Bobbitt crashed the market.) Throat is historic but amateur; Devil is actually kinda good. An impressively berserk Georgia Spelvin plays the suicidal spinster virgin alllowed to experience all the sin she missed out on before goin’ to hell. "I love you! I’ve waited so long for you!" she says to erotic "teacher" Harry Reems — well, actually directly to his cock. Moments later, Miss Jones is doing double penetration, other chicks, butt plugs, bananas, enemas, snakes (actual ones, not "trouser snakes"), et al. What other porn movie ends like Sartre’s No Exit?

The action goes softcore via 1975’s Teenage Hitchhikers, sole feature for director Gerry Sidley and scenarist Rod Whipple. Bird (Sandra Cassel) and Mouse (Chris Jordan) are two awfully mature "teenagers" traveling "the highway of life seeking truth and beauty" — though they’re blithely OK with sex for money, robbery, commune orgies, and numerous other deliberately over-the-top episodes. The endlessly quotable dialogue and full-frontal frolicking make this drive-in obscurity a find. Last, there’s an evening of "Sexy Trailer Trash" from Yerba Buena Center for the Arts film and video curator Joel Shepard’s personal collection. It dangles previews for such tasty vintage R and XXX treats as Hot T-Shirts, Swinging Stewardesses, Rhinestone Cowgirls, and California Gigolo (trailers span 1968-82). Never mind the tofurkey — get your stuffing early here.

"HOLIDAY HEAT"

Devil in Miss Jones, Thurs/20, 7:30 p.m.

Teenage Hitchhikers, Fri/21, 7:30 p.m.

"Sexy Trailer Trash," Sat/22, 7:30 p.m.

All shows $6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF

www.ybca.org

Competing political narratives in SF

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By Steven T. Jones

San Francisco looks very different depending on where you stand. And that point is certainly being driven home this election season as voters hear two very different political narratives about The City.

One expresses great pride that San Francisco is setting an example for cities across the country in strongly opposing excessive militarism; mandating that workers receive a living wage and decent benefits; protecting tenants from eviction, harassment, and unaffordable rents; maintaining a social safety net; demanding developers provide community benefits; seeking clean energy sources; creating a tax structure that favors small local businesses over large corporations; standing up for the rights of the LGBT and immigrant communities; treating prostitution, drug use, and quality-of-life crimes as social problems rather than strictly criminal matters; and generally standing up for the broad public interest against the self-interest of the wealthy and privileged.

The other side mocks such namby-pamby ideals, arguing that only free markets unfettered by government regulation can create social and economic progress, and that anyone who doubts that is either stupid or unrealistic. They decry taxes (but expect taxpayer support for things like promoting tourism, sweeping streets of trash and the homeless, and subsidizing drivers and development) and consider government a bloated, malevolent entity that is far less trustworthy than corporations. Job creation is their top stated concern (but public sector jobs don’t count). They value unwavering patriotism, property rights, and robust, risk-taking capitalism and generally consider the poor and their sympathizers to be lazy, morally deficient complainers who deserve their lowly status. And they think progressives (actually, “ultra-liberal” is their preferred label) are destroying the city.

Which narrative rings true to you? Because where you stand will largely determine how you vote on Tuesday.

Bottom biscuits

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS My pickup truck died and this time the death was fatal. The clutch, the transmission … costs more to repair than I paid for the mighty ‘mobile four years and 60,000 miles ago.

I rolled into a legal parking spot, got out and walked to a restaurant I like, sat on a bench outside with my head in my hands, and cried. I had $8 and change in my purse, on my lap, and one bar of battery left on my cell. None of my city friends have cars. I called my sister in Ohio.

"When your car dies," she said, "that’s rock bottom. Now you have nowhere to go but up."

I didn’t think this was true, but my sister, this one — Carparts, I call her — is younger than me and therefore wiser, so I decided to take her word for it. Rock bottom. Depressed. Beaten. Hopelessly hopeful. Puked upon. And now wheel-less, an hour and a half from home. And cat. And chickens.

Sockywonk has a car. I called Sockywonk. But she’s had an even unluckier life lately than I have. She has to move from her great place, and was moving, so her car was already in service for at least a week.

Me, I didn’t want to sit on a bench for a week, so I called my brother in Ohio, and then my other brother in Ohio, and then my other brother in Ohio. If there’s a way to eke 75 more miles out of a clutch-fucked junkyard pickup truck, they would know.

So you know, before I say this next part: I do not embrace terms like "trailer trash," or "white trash," or even "college-educated fuck-up farmer trash" in reference to me and my family. We are "people of trash," thank you. We have dignity. We just also have rusted cars on blocks all over the property, it happens. And I know for a fact that any one of my brothers, and many of my sisters, could have and would have pulled the exact parts that my exact situation called for, and shipped them to me.

All I had to do was ask, but I didn’t. Because right now I don’t have any brothers or sisters or even nephews out here on the receiving end, and, while I can do some things myself, I have never replaced a clutch and transmission and had no interest whatsoever in learning how now. Call me unautomotivated.

What I really needed, I’m embarrassed to admit, was for one of my brothers, probably Jean Gene, the Frenchman, to say, "Wait right there, sis. I’m going to book a flight and pull the parts and … what day is street cleaning where you’re parked?"

I would have said, "Thursday," and Jean Gene would have showed up on Wednesday, taken care of it, and I’d buy him a burrito with my $8.

Let me have my fantasies!

How about this one … I open my cell phone contact list, first name: Alice. Hit send and she answers. "Hi, Alice. My car died." And she says, "I have an extra one. I’ll come get you."

Now, the cool thing about this particular fantasy is that it happened. I swear to my sweet sisters, one minute I was a wreck on a bench, publicly losing it, and the next minute I was sitting at Alice’s kitchen table eating biscuits and gravy, a lone car key on the Formica between us. It belonged to a Honda that is registered, insured, and mine until the end of the month, or, you know, longer if I want.

Those were some very important biscuits. For one thing, they tasted great, better than any biscuits and gravy I’ve ever tasted, and not just because my New Favorite Person had made them, from scratch!

They were bottom biscuits, highly symbolic and loaded with sausage chunks. It was easy to believe, eating such biscuits and gravy so soon after feeling so hopelessly fucked so far from home, that in fact I had bottomed out, and was well on my reboundingly upswung and cheerful way to, if nothing else, a second helping of biscuits and gravy.

Which I was. Alice Shaw, everybody!

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My new favorite restaurant is Yummie Fast Food on MacArthur Boulevard. It’s Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese and cheap cheap cheap. Steam table fare. I had chicken fried rice with teriyaki chicken and kung pao chicken, dollar-fitty a thing, that’s $4.50, and it was piled on. Everything was great! New favorite restaurant.

YUMMIE

Daily, 10:30 a.m.–8:30 p.m.

4104 MacArthur, Oakl.

(510) 482-1648

No alcohol

Credit cards not accepted

CBC columnist censored over Palin

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CBC removed Canadian journalist Heather Mallick September 5 column about Palin after Fox complained

News that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation removed a Palin-critical column from its website after FOX News complained, got me seeking out the column in question to see what the fuss was about, ‘natch.

Just in case that link gets blocked, here’s how Mallick began her censored column:

“I assume John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential partner in a fit of pique because the Republican money men refused to let him have the stuffed male shirt he really wanted. She added nothing to the ticket that the Republicans didn’t already have sewn up, the white trash vote, the demographic that sullies America’s name inside adn outside its borders yet has such curious appeal for the right.”

So, was it “white trash” that got FOX going? Or her following suggestions that GOP has irreparably messed up its chances of securing the Pissed-Off-Hillary-supporters’ vote?

“So why do it? It’s possible that Republican men, sexual inadequates that they are, really believe that women will vote for a woman just because she’s a woman. They’re unfamiliar with our true natures. Do they think vaginas call out to each other in the jungle night? I mean, I know men have their secret meetings at which they pledge to do manly things, like being irresponsible with their semen and postponing household repairs with glue and used matches. Guys will be guys, obviously.”

Was that got FOX News going? Or the following?

“Palin has a toned-down version of the porn actress look favoured by this decade’s woman, the overtreated hair, puffy lips and permanently alarmed expression.”

According to today’s New York Times, “CBC ruled that its opinion writers had to stick to the facts even when they were joking around.”

(Now, if only Palin had to stick to the facts, and not duck the questions, during her one and only VP debate.)

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