Video

Wow wow wow wow

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Kevin Killian is an inveterate and unapologetic collaborator: even when writing solo, there’s always another presence. Whether he ventriloquizes through this other, or assimilates or deconstructs it is the reader’s call, and it’s a difficult one to make. The poems in Killian’s most recent book of poetry, Action Kylie (In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni, 128 pages, $15) are places where T.S. Eliot’s cats LOL, Antonio Banderas anagrams to "no brains on a date," and Kylie Minogue’s derivativeness is more compelling than genius. In the process, Killian sinks probes into public-celebrity exchanges that increasingly substitute for news. On the eve of the book’s upcoming release party, I spoke with him about Kylie, Amazon reviews, and Ted Berrigan’s Pepsi addiction.

SFBG When I first saw you in person, I noticed that you were drinking Diet Pepsi. Pepsi is also mentioned in the book, Kylie having been a Pepsi spokesperson. And there’s a video from a band called Ssion, a cover of the Young Marble Giants song "Credit in the Straight World," that starts with the singer drinking from a Pepsi can. So I’ve kind of had Pepsi on the brain. Didn’t Kylie do a Pepsi ad and get shit for it?

Kevin Killian Yeah, at a low point in her career she did a terrifying ad for Pepsi in Australia. In it, she’s on TV in a sexy video and a young boy, like 11 or 12, is watching. He opens a Pepsi, and she’s there in his bedroom, sitting on his lap, and is really tastelessly grinding into him. That video was too raw to be shown very widely. It wasn’t classy — what can I say?

SFBG Since the cola wars are over, I was wondering if there was some sort of cachet to Pepsi.

KK It was Ted Berrigan’s favorite drink. I didn’t know him, but I saw him a few times, and he guzzled it down. He would get a little antsy if he didn’t see a quart of it somewhere nearby.

SFBG There seems to be a kind of split between Action Kylie‘s first three sections, which are explicitly focused on Kylie as a subject, and the last four, where her relationship to the writing is less obvious.

KK The book was written roughly chronologically, and I guess my sense of her was so deep — it’s part of my identity now — that she’s in it equally all the way through. I’m thinking of incidents, circumstances, apparitions of her that maybe aren’t visible to you in those later poems.

SFBG The Action Kylie essay "Kylie Evidence" and the huge number of Amazon reviews you’ve authored collapse a lot of different registers. They’re not exactly straight criticism, or uncomplicatedly ironic. There’s a strange cacophony in the way they’re constructed, going from Wikipedia-style omniscience to something intensely personal. When you identify with Kylie as a "second- or third-rate talent," it’s hard not to feel like you’re giving yourself short shrift, because that kind of writing does something that’s pretty rare to both "creative" writing and journalism or criticism.

KK It wasn’t really a way of fishing for reinforcement, but I realize that’s what it does. I had spent years and years writing about Jack Spicer [resulting in the 1998 biography Poet, Be Like God] and seeing his status change from a kind of cult figure into [an element of] the canon. When I started writing [2001’s] Argento Series, few knew [Dario] Argento; now everybody does. There’s something about the situation of the cult figure that’s always exasperated me. I don’t like it, for some reason. I couldn’t figure out why.

When I started working on Kylie Minogue, I was drawn to her because she was a figure who seemed to me, at this one moment in 1998 or 1999, to have absolutely no talent. You know, she had something, but she had no talent, at all, period. And it’s the same old story: she is fabulous, it just took me a while to understand how. But it was a great period to be a fan. I think my essay was written in that tone.

SFBG Your Amazon reviews could be a conceptual project. Some of the lines are really killer, such as your description of Joe Jonas’ eyebrows being "like crow feathers — feathers from a 600-pound crow."

KK Well, when you do something every day … I had written about a thousand [reviews] before I realized that was an enormous number. I’d write three or four a day, and sometimes they’d be in themes: I’d pick up a dictionary and see a word — "midnight" is one I remember. I’d realize I knew a lot about books with "midnight" in the title — or movies, or records — so I would just do 40 of them, all about midnight. Maybe here or there there’d be something I actually didn’t read.

SFBG I wanted to ask about the Kylie lyrics that preface your book, "These are the dreams of an impossible princess."

KK It comes from an actual LP called Impossible Princess (Deconstruction, 1998). She took the name from Billy Childish, who had a book of poetry called Dreams of an Impossible Princess.

I’m having a book out next summer from City Lights, and it’s called Impossible Princess. It’s impossible for me to be a princess because I’m a man, beyond everything else, and there’s that kind of futility, that ambition to be something other than what you are, that drove her, and that drove me, I guess. Every year you’re alive, you’ll see some possibilities diminishing behind you, things you’ll never be. The good thing is, new windows open up, things you never thought you’d want. I never thought I’d write about Kylie Minogue, and what’s worse is that I can’t stop writing about her, either.

THE NEW READING SERIES AT 21 GRAND: KEVIN KILLIAN AND STEPHANIE YOUNG

Sun/14, 6:30 p.m., $5

21 Grand

415 25th St., Oakl.

(510) 444-7263

www.newyipes.blogspot.com

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!

Hank Plante busts the mayor!

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Why did Mayor Newsom buy a $51,000 Chevy car in Colma when the only Chevy dealership in San Francisco is going out of business? Scroll down for the KPIX video showing how Hank Plante busts the mayor.

By Bruce B. Brugmann

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Photo by Paula Connelly

Newsom’s driver and new Chevy Hybrid Tahoe SUV vehicle, parked in front of the Ark toy store on 24th Street, during a press conference launching the Shop Local–Get More campaign. The city bought the car from a dealership in Colma for $51,000.

It was marvelous. Simply marvelous. Hank Plante busts the mayor.

Let me set the scene: The reporters and small business leaders on Wednesday (Dec. 5) were packed in the Ark, a toyshop on 24th Street, for a press conference to launch formally the “Shop Local–Get More” campaign aimed at getting San Franciscans and everyone else to shop local in San Francisco this holiday season.

Steve Falk, president of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, laid out the chamber’s extensive program for its members to give substantial discounts to customers. Gerald Johnson, owner of the Ark, explained how his store would give 10 per cent off your next purchase with a purchase of more than $100. Mayor Newsom, who rolled in late in his city car, gave a zippy little talk about the values of shopping local and helping out the merchants and business community during tough times.

Newsom is at his best at these informal occasions, a little pep talk here, a genial smile and gesture there, lots of jutting jaw, no tough questions please. Then came time for questions and Newsom visibly relaxed for what he hoped would be some Noe Valley soft balls.

Hank Plante, the savvy political editor of KPIX Television (Channel 5), was positioned in the front of the crowd with his television cameraman and his camera was whirring away. He led off with a timely question.

“Mr. Mayor, you want people to shop in San Francisco. You know the car dealerships are in trouble. Can you tell us why you didn’t buy your new official city car here in the city?”

Newsom replied testily, “Uh, I have no idea. Thanks for the Gotcha question and I don’t have a clue. I didn’t have anything to do with the purchase of that car.” He said he would find out what happened and get back with the answer.

Plante reported the exchange in the KPIX newscast that night. He said, “We’re losing our last Chevy dealership” in San Francisco. He said that the new car was a Chevy Tahoe Hybrid SUV that cost $51,000 at a dealership in Colma. He pointed out that the Chevy was one of the “most visible purchases the mayor made this year.” Marie Brooks, from Ellis Brooks Chevy dealership on Van Ness Avenue, told Plante, “I think it’s wrong for one of our city officials to buy anything outside the city.” Ellis Brooks is a family-owned car dealership and one of the oldest and most famous local names in selling cars in Northern California.

Plante reported that Newsom kept ducking the question and later refused to allow the press corps to take a picture of him leaving the press conference in his gleaming black hybrid car parked in front of the toy store (see pic above.) KPIX showed video footage of Newsom not getting into the car and walking down 24th street.

Plante had nailed a point that has been agitating the small (and big) business community for years. Scott Hauge, a prominent small business leader and founder and president of Small Business California, was at the press conference and picked up on the point immediately. In his followup email to small business people in the city, Hauge noted he had attended the press conference “where the mayor was promoting a shop SF campaign.

“I applaud the mayor and others like the SF Chamber, Bay Guardian, Small Business Commission and Hotel Council for their efforts. What I didn’t hear was anything the city will do to require SF City agencies to buy from SF companies located in SF.”

Then Hauge zeroed in. “SF government does not have a very good track record in this area. In fact the mayor was asked why he did not purchase his hybrid vehicle in SF and he said he didn’t know why. Now is the time to push this issue. SF businesses have a higher cost of doing business because of mandates imposed on us. It seems to me that the least the city can do is buy from SF businesses.” I think he’s spot on.

And so Plante, Hauge, the Guardian, and small (and big) business in San Francisco are waiting anxiously for Newsom’s explanation why he bought a $51,000 city Chevy vehicle in Colma and not in San Francisco where our last Chevy dealership is on hard times and going out of business. And we are all waiting even more anxiously to hear what the mayor plans to do to correct this Shop- outside -San Francisco-syndrome and get the city working to spend its tens of millions of dollars of city tax dollars on businesses and services in San Francisco.

P.S. Full disclosure: the Guardian is a sponsor of the Shop Local campaign. And we sent a delegation to the press conference: Sales and Marketing Director Jennifer Lachman, Vice President of Operations Daniel B. Brugmann, Online and Print Advertising Coordinator Rebecca Frank, Assistant to the Publisher Paula Connelly who took the press conference photos, and myself. We are happy to pitch in on this critical and timely endeavor to put as much instant cash as possible into our local businesses and our community.

Our contribution, as a locally owned, independent newsweekly, is our own Shop Local campaign featuring a key marketing line derived from an analysis provided by the Business Alliance of Local Living Economies (BALLE), using a formula created by the consulting firm Civic Economics. This data is dramatic. It shows that if our 600,000 or so Guardian readers would spend $l00 with locally owned, independent businesses in San Francisco during the holiday season, that would inject $99 million into the San Francisco economy. Immediately.

That’s nearly $15 million more dollars than the city would see if that money were spent on chain stores that send their revenues back to headquarters. That’s because money spent at local businesses tends to stay and circulate in the community and create more local jobs and economic activity and of course more tax dollars for the city. The Guardian is also leading a national Shop Local campaign among alternative papers that would put several billion dollars in total into local economies all over the country. As Guardian Executive editor Tim Redmond puts it, “A sustainable community needs a sustainable economy, and that starts with locally owned, independent businesses.”

Unsolicited advice for the mayor and anybody else at City Hall who keeps sending our money outside of town: check the policy of the San Francisco International Airport that mandates locally owned small businesses get most of the juicy airport franchises. That policy works and works well. When I go through the airport, I always stop to get something to eat at Klein’s Deli. Klein’s was named after Deborah Klein, a Guardian circulation manager in the mid- 1970s who became a restaurant entrepreneur in San Francisco. For many years, she ran Klein’s Deli on 20th Street atop Potrero Hill. B3

Click here to watch yesterday’s KPIX newscast.

Click here to see Guardian photo coverage of the press conference.

Shop Local, get more

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By Paula Connelly

Today Mayor Newsom held a press conference to announce the ‘Shop SF. Get More’, an economic promotion campaign for December / January. This promotion is a collaboration between SF Economic & Workforce Development, SF Office of Small Business, SF Convention and Visitor Bureau, SF Chamber of Commerce, Hotel Council, MTA, MUNI, DPT, BART, Chronicle, Examiner, Business Times and Bay Guardian to encourage people throughout the nine county Bay Area to shop in San Francisco. The Bay Guardian has been promoting small business and sustainable economic programs for years and this holiday season is urging its readers to spend $100 of their holiday money at locally owned, independent businesses – a move that would pump nearly $100 million into the city’s recession-plagued economy.

The press conference was held Wednesday, December 3, 11:45am, at the Ark Toy Store, which is located at 3845 24th St (near Sanchez), in Noe Valley San Francisco.

Visit the San Francisco Visitor and Conventions Bureau’s website: www.onlyinsanfrancisco.com to lean about Shop Local offers from participating businesses or visit www.sfbg.com/local to find out how to win $500 in the Guardian’s Shop Local Reader’s Contest.

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Ark Toy Storefront in Noe Valley

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Gavin Newsom kicks off the Shop Local campaign
http://cbs5.com/video/?id=42754@kpix.dayport.com

Double take: Raconteurs, Ricky Skaggs, and Ashley Monroe collabo on video

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By Kimberly Chun

Jack White and company push forward with their passion for American roots music with this video collaboration – a rework of the Raconteurs’ single, “Old Enough,” shot by rock photographer Autumn de Wilde – alongside longtime bluegrass revivalist Ricky Skaggs and country vocalist Ashley Monroe.

Streetlight serenade

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER ‘Tis the season to max out with shopping merriment, and San Francisco still being a record-picking spot of worldwide renown, it’s bittersweet to flip through this year’s handsome UK gifty-paperback, Old Rare New: The Independent Record Shop (Black Dog), and spy the "hi-de-ho"-ing Cab Calloway logo of the late, lamented Village Music in Mill Valley. Such an overflowing vinyl goldmine till it shuttered last year — another victim of high rents and a wildly fluctuating music marketplace. The book is far from perfect: was Amoeba Music ever called Amoeba Records, and why isn’t Grooves listed in the US store directory?

But Old Rare New has its heart in the right place in its offhand celebration of brick ‘n’ mortar music trolling, filled out with short Q&As with collector-head artists like Chan Marshall, Quiet Village’s Joel Martin, and Cherrystones’ Gareth Goddard. It’s refreshing to get an eyeball of Byron Coley’s contrarian ‘tude: if independent music stores are going bye-bye, he writes, "Don’t blame me or my record scum buddies. We’re still as idiotically interested in fetishizing vinyl product as we ever were, but we’re all getting goddamned old, and we’re not being replaced in a fast and timely manner."

Nonetheless, it’s sad to see Open Mind Music in the US store directory, still listed at 342 Divisadero even though owner Henry Wimmer closed that locale long ago, reopened at 2150 Market, and then — argh! — closed that storefront at the end of October to concentrate on online sales (a small Open Mind record enclave, however, remains within the collective-run Other Shop II at 327 Divisadero). Also not listed — and why not with such reissue jewels as Brigitte Fontaine and Areski Belkacem’s L’Incendie (Byg, 1974) and Humble Pie’s Town and Country (Immediate, 1969)? — is Streetlight Records in Noe Valley, set to close on Jan. 31.

Codgers in the know will recall the days when Aquarius sat a few doors down from Streetlight, making the spot a twofer destination for serious LP trawling. Streetlight took up the indie and avant slack in the area when Aquarius moved to Valencia Street: amid its substantial vinyl selection, you can dig up Les Georges Leningrad’s Deux Hot Dogs Moutarde Chou (Les Records Coco Cognac, 2002) on red vinyl and TITS’ and Leopard Leg’s estrogen-athon split-LP Throughout the Ages (Upset the Rhythm, 2006). Deals can be had with the 10 percent-off-everything sale that kicked off on Black Friday.

The ever-increasing gentrification of the street — the mob in front of Starbucks was nutty on a recent Sunday morn — has definitely had an impact on the shop, according to manager Sunlight Weismehl, who has worked at the 32-year-old flagship store for more than two decades. "I believe over the years the area has become a destination for high-end houses," he says, "and the artists and working class have been pushed aside as they have in many neighborhoods. Because of that we don’t get as many people coming in during the day." The San Jose and Santa Cruz Streetlights are doing fine, and the Streetlight at Market and Castro reaps the benefit of better foot traffic.

One twist concerning the 24th Street store’s demise: Streetlight isn’t getting kicked out by greedy out-of-town landlords — they’re closing themselves down. Streetlight owner Robert Fallon owns the Noe Valley shop’s building. "I believe he feels that the rent in the neighborhood is higher than what we’re paying," explains Weismehl.

In an effort to stay afloat and pay its way, the manager says the store tried to "touch on everything. We certainly tried to have strong international, jazz, and roots sections and to try to serve the neighborhood as much as possible. Half crazy obscure things and half whatever the neighborhood is looking for."

And Noe Valley music mavens have reacted in kind. "We’ve been getting a lot of responses ranging from writing letters to the owner to just saying they’ll be sad when we’re gone. Some say it’s the last thing they came down to the street for," Weismehl says, adding that with Real Foods gone and the neighboring video store closed, "it’s a question of how much [the remaining] shops serve the neighborhood." Not to mention the fact that there’s one less accommodating spot that will keep on a touring musician: Weismehl recalls such staffers as Rova’s Bruce Ackley, Comets on Fire’s Noel Harmonson, Sebadoh’s and Everest’s Russ Pollard, and Unwritten Law’s Pat Kim. And after Jan. 31? I’m going to have borrow a baby stroller to feel even remotely at home in the hood.

LET THE GAMES BEGIN

NO AGE AND TITUS ANDRONICUS


ShockHound music site parties up its launch with a free show by the LA noise duo and the Glen Rock, N.J., rock five-piece, now signed to XL. Thurs/4, 7 p.m., free with RSVP at www.shockhound.com. Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell, SF. www.rickshawstop.com

A FOGGY HOLIDAY 2008


SF indies give it up for this Talking House CD of carols. With the Trophy Fire, the Heavenly States, and more. Fri/5, 8:30 p.m., $10. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com

MURS


Expect a jammed club for the prescient Murs for President MC. Fri/5, 10 p.m., $15–<\d>$20. Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck, Berk. www.shattuckdownlow.com

SOULFUL HOLIDAY PARTY


The now-NorCal-dwelling soul-OG Darondo is spreading the deep magic. With Wallpaper and Nino Moschella. Fri/5, 9 p.m., $16–<\d>$21. Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF. www.slims-sf.com

ENERGY ANNIVERSARY BLAST


Energy 92.7’s takes off for the fourth year with Cyndi Lauper, Michelle Williams, Lady GaGa, Morgan Page, and others. Sat/6, 8 p.m., $36–<\d>$46. Grand Ballroom at Regency Center, 1300 Van Ness, SF. www.ticketmaster.com

HANK IV AND MAYYORS


The SF garage-punk scrappers return from their luminary-littered East Coast tour and join the souped-up Sacto rock unit. With Traditional Fools. Sat/6, 9 p.m., $7. El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF. www.elriosf.com

RAILCARS


Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart produced the SF band’s Cities vs. Submarines EP (Gold Robot) in his kitchen. With Religious Girls and Halcyonaire. Tues/9, 9 p.m., $8. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com

“Lutz Bacher: ODO”

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PREVIEW A continuous line of images adheres to the spacious walls of Ratio 3. They all seem to be produced on the same roll of sticky-backed paper. Thanks to visual literacy conditioning, we follow them as a narrative. There’s a picture of a weird blue guy standing in a forest, dolls, hunky male mannequins, a bearded guy being nailed to a cross, a smiling woman holding a thrift-store sculpture, a Photoshop view of a bottomless Laura Bush standing with her hubby, and other random sights. Videos of banal superstore interiors, fluffy dogs, landscapes, and more are projected in odd corners above our heads.

Lutz Bacher’s current exhibition is as oddly engaging as it is opaque. Don’t look to the press release for answers — it’s a handy recipe for butterscotch pudding. The show’s title refers to a character, played by René Auberjonois, on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. And yet reason pulses beneath the surface of this puzzling installation. You don’t really need to fully get it to tap into its strange intimacy. The images have a stream of consciousness quality similar to contents of an e-mailbox, where personal notes commingle with abject spam — a hefty percentage of the material on view made its way to the artist through that electronic media stream, and if the look of the pictures sometimes seems too hi-res to betray that source, all the better.

Bacher, whose work has involved a dry, incisive use of appropriated and self-made material (Vargas paintings, political joke books, a hauntingly glitchy self-made video of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Stadium), offers another clue at the start of the exhibition: an old-school overhead projector enlarges a handwritten thank-you list marking all that follows with a sense of the artist’s community. "ODO" is engrossing for the images alone, some of which depict the artist and her previous works. But ultimately, it offers an intuitive view — one that may not make immediate sense, but that flares in your memory at the most unexpected moments.

LUTZ BACHER: ODO Through Dec. 13. Wed.–Sat., 11 a.m.–6 p.m. and by appointment. Ratio 3, 1447 Stevenson, SF. (415) 821-3371, www.ratio3.org

Shwayze

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PREVIEW Shwayze would be impossible without reality TV, not only because Buzzin’, their own MTV vehicle, gives them the kind of exposure that YouTube, a place where music videos still circulate, couldn’t. Rather, the music on their self-titled Suretone/Geffen debut is about and of Los Angeles in a way that wasn’t thinkable before that form of programming legitimated some of the city’s embarrassingly tired clichés. Apply the sentiments of either of the Malibu duo’s charting singles — "Corona and Lime" and "Buzzin’" — to mainstream music during the early Bush administration, and you get Crazy Town’s "Butterfly" with an insanely pungent dash of LFO’s "Summer Girls." Not much new here, but the setting for these affectless feelings at least can finally be revealed.

What makes the duo feel current, if far from compelling, is that LA plays itself in their music, in a similar way the town stands for itself in, say, the Cobrasnake’s fake-real candids. From hook man Cisco Adler’s feather-weight, momentum-less production style — the template he figured out on Mickey Avalon’s "Jane Fonda" — to Shwayze’s max-relax loverman toasting, all their too-baked-for-love mellowship jams deliver some combination of the same three pieces of information: 1) girls in LA are probably the best ever; 2) there are a lot of parties in Malibu, and shit is laidback; 3) even if you’re broke, if you have weed, it’s chill — you can still hook up with girls.

Image-wise, Adler and Shwayze embody Urban Outfitters realness with a Pineapple Express sense of brofessionalism: both wear skinny jeans, slightly oversize tees, and high-tops, but Adler’s fedora and wayfarers tell us he’s the rock guy, while Shwayze’s cocked baseball hat tell us he’s the rapper dude. Lyrically, Schwayze’s concerned exclusively with girls — they talk about "girls" so much it’s hard not to imagine they’ve fallen in love with the word as a floating signifier. But watch a video and there they are, the word made flesh and Lycra.

SHWAYZE With Cisco Adler, DJ Skeet Skeet, and Krista. Sat/29, 8 p.m., $16.50. Grand Ballroom at the Regency Center, Van Ness and Sutter, SF. (415) 421-TIXS, www.goldenvoice.com

Shaken, stirred

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Everyone has a tale to spin as part of the AC/DC piecemeal mythology/collective unconscious: the moment when the band’s music scored the cementing of a lifelong friendship, triggered a scarring bar brawl, or set off a particularly torrid tussle in the otherwise-antiseptic CD aisle of Wal-Mart. Mine occurred in Barstow, during a particularly soused night kicking off a college-ending road trip down Route 66, falling for my long-lashed, ringleted, metal guitar player boyfriend, tossing back Jack and Cokes, and dancing in cutoff hot pants in an almost-empty cow bar to "You Shook Me All Night Long." It’s basically impossible to mess up on the dance floor when it comes to that song: all you need to do is wiggle your pinky back and forth to the can’t-miss-it-with-a-sledgehammer beat — good times. American thighs and all.

But that was a lifetime ago: how relevant is AC/DC today — apart from providing the fodder for godawful cover versions of "You Shook Me All Night Long" by Celine Dion and Shania Twain? We won’t even go into Shakira’s wretched "Back in Black." When near-anonymous, rarely grandstanding band members emerge from the silence between albums, they purvey the image of a hard-working, headbanging, rigorously hard-rock constant in a world in the throes of change, an audience-friendly reliable in an unsettled music industry that gives the fans what they want, free of undermining irony and unfamiliar moves. The rock-solid conservative choice for rattled times.

True to its components’ working-class roots, the group is the blue-collar rock ‘n’ roll equivalent of Joe the Plumber: rockers who are pro-rock, hence the innumerable tunes with "rock" in the title and the banishment of power-ballad softness. Get thy Guns N’ Roses operatic self-indulgence away from these manly men, churning out the hard stuff as if from a devilishly well-oiled engine à la their current "Rock ‘n’ Roll Train" stage set. In AC/DC’s hands, all is reduced, or elevated, to rock and its all-too-evident properties: solidity, earthiness (hence those free-floating big balls and bombastic babes), and physicality (thus the band’s refusal to allow its songs to be sold as MP3s). On the new Black Ice, the juggernaut only slightly slows for the ironclad blues-rock figure of "Decibel." Rockism is almost beside the point — what isn’t rock, can’t be rocked, won’t be rocked doesn’t exist in the AC/DC universe. Post-modernist pastiche? Hip-hop? Electro? Psychedelia? Neu-rave? Huh?

That’s not to say that AC/DC is rocking in a void, a timeless Platonic plane completely divorced from encroaching reality. The group that appealed to punkers with its disciplined songcraft and streamlined riffs — and nodded to skinheads with the "oi!"s that decorate "T.N.T." — has at various times embraced a palpable sense of danger (witness Angus Young impaled bloodily on a guitar in the video for "If You Want Blood [You’ve Got It]") while also allowing its music to be licensed to the US Military for use in recruitment ads. Yet Black Ice‘s "War Machine" offers other ways to parse lyrics like, "Make a stand, show your hand / Call in the high command / Don’t think, just obey / I’m like a bird of prey / So better get your name, come on in / Gimme that thing and feed your war," apart from simply "Go Army."

This crack in the armor of certainty — from a combo that hails from ye olde days of rock-as-rebellion monoculture, when big, bad guitars were the only option for revolt in town — reads like a cap tug toward increasingly murky times. And the marketplace concession of giving Wal-Mart exclusive rights to sell the Black Ice CD — even in Wal-Mart-free towns like San Francisco — complicates matters because independent merchants like Amoeba Music are forced to purchase new copies from the big-box retailer, relinquishing their mark-up, in order to provide the disc as a service to their customers (the vinyl Black Ice is not exclusive to Wal-Mart). "It’s a slap in the face for indie record stores and AC/DC fans, especially for a band like AC/DC that has always had a reputation of delivering what the fans want," comments Amoeba Music product manager Tony Green. Note to AC/DC: Wal-Mart does not equal working class — or a passion for music. Give these dogs their bone.

Where’s the party?

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> a&eletters@sfbg.com

The best time to hear AC/DC — besides during the obvious coked-out, high-speed cop chase — is at a party. At least this is my personal fave: during a party I’m throwing and controlling the music being played.

I love the part of the night when it is appropriate to put on the first AC/DC song, really loud. It has to be pretty late — when the strangers start filing in, cigarettes are being smoked everywhere, and the rules have been tossed out. People need to be drunk enough to dance to AC/DC, after all — and the first song has to be "It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll)."

The problem here is that once you start playing AC/DC, you have nowhere to go. You’ve reached the ceiling as far as loud rock ‘n’ roll music goes, from here you have to get into crazy metal or ubernoise in order to keep the bar set in the red. And if you play Pig Destroyer, even though the middle of the song might be awesome, awesome, awesome, by the time you get there, you’ve alienated almost everybody. So some restraint is necessary. I used to actually think about this while DJing parties and I eventually came up with the answer: what you do is play more AC/DC.

You start with Bon Scott-era stuff — a little "Jailbreak," "Beating Around the Bush," "Live Wire," and "Sin City" — then you drop Brian Johnson’s flat, cap-lidded bleat and the high-tech production of "Thunderstruck" on them. You’re now free to play "Safe in New York City," "Sink the Pink," anything — just stay away from "You Shook Me All Night Long," because you may as well play Bob Seger’s "Old Time Rock and Roll." And you gotta put on "Moneytalks" at some point.

AC/DC has a new album, titled Black Ice (Columbia). This is studio album 15 and is officially available for purchase either directly through the group’s Web site or at Wal-Mart. I didn’t get a promo copy of it and I don’t really shop at Wal-Mart much, except to get their spicy wings, which are fantastic, but I was able to hear some of the songs on YouTube, so I can give a somewhat informed review of the album. Like I said, I found the stuff on YouTube, but I didn’t watch the video for lead single, "Rock ‘n’ Roll Train," because, well, I love AC/DC, but even I have to admit that Angus Young wearing a school kid uniform as he approaches AARP eligibility is a little embarrassing.

I mean, the poor guy, he’s been duck-walking around the stage and over-performing for 40 years practically! Doesn’t it get to be like forced labor after a while? After, say, 30 years? Yipes.

Anyway here goes: the songs on Black Ice start with a bass line, then one guitar picks up the rhythm riff, then after exactly eight bars, the second guitar comes in, echoing the riff. Four bars pass, and the drums come in along with Brian Johnson screeching about women that could only have existed in the 1980s — "She’ll burn your eyeballs out," "she’s got it all," "she has two great danes on a leash," etc. Young peels off a blaring solo that erupts at exactly the right time, the chorus is repeated — peppered by "honey"s and "hey-hey"s from Johnson — and it all fades out. For my money, the tried-and-true formula works best on "Skies on Fire" and "Big Jack," which is about a guy who’s really got the knack and also never goes anywhere without a sack.

OK, the guys in AC/DC aren’t geniuses, and maybe they’ve been at it a little too long, but the formula still works, it always will, and Black Ice — like just about every one of their records — is not meant to be sat around with and listened to. The idea is to play it at parties, and you’re not supposed to look too closely at it. The idea is to let it wash over you. *

AC/DC

With the Answer

Tues/2 and Dec. 4, 8 p.m., $94.50

Oracle Arena

7000 Coliseum, Oakl.

(415) 421-TIXS

www.apeconcerts.com

Warming to cold fact

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Now that we’re deep into November, I can safely announce my choice for 2008’s top reissue: Sixto Rodriguez’s scrumptiously echo-rippled psychedelic folk-soul delight Cold Fact (Sussex/Light in the Attic). Originally released in 1970 by Sussex, the album never made a big dent in the American countercultural consciousness. Though it feels like an underground classic on par with the finest from such visionaries as Love, relatively few got a chance to hear it when it first emerged. Based on what I’ve read, Sussex didn’t have much pull with FM underground radio — the try-anything format for which Rodriguez was best suited — and thus the singer-songwriter was never exposed to his greatest potential audience.

Sixto Rodriguez, “Sugarman” (video by Yellowcatz)

That’s a damn shame considering that Cold Fact‘s riveting combination of barbed social commentary, blazing stream-of-consciousness delivery, and shiver-down-the-spine vocal testimonials — often heightened by understated studio freak-out-ery — would have connected with listeners seeking another voice tapping into the darker side of the hippie dream. While very much a product of the ’60s, the recording speaks directly to the rising levels of disillusionment in America at the decade’s turn. For last-name-only Rodriguez, a reconciliation of the bright-eyed optimism of Flower Power with the grim realities of the late ’60s takes place in the form of teeth-gritting folk spiels and soul-stirring calls for social change that barely conceal a seething rage. To seal the deal, he delivers his lyrics with infinite cool, coming across as both aloof and strident within the turn of a phrase.

As for those songs, the immediacy of numbers like "Crucify Your Mind" and "Sugar Man" pulls your ears the quickest. For all of their psychedelic embellishments, these tunes are essentially the sound of one man laying it out over the simple strums of an acoustic guitar. Even decades into the folk-rock phenomenon, many of Rodriguez’s songs will likely hit first-time listeners with that revelatory "Wow, how come I’ve never heard this before?" feeling.


RODRIGUEZ Sun/23, 2 p.m., free. Amoeba Music, 2455 Telegraph, Berk. www.amoeba.com. Sun/23, 8 p.m., $17–$19. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. www.gamh.com

Hot flash gallery

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> johnny@sfbg.com

It was the summer of 1974, when shy, skinny, cute Daniel Nicoletta first stepped through the doors of Castro Camera into adulthood and history. His parents were snapshot enthusiasts. In his words, he had grown up "surrounded by Instamatic moments." But he was about to enter the time of his life. "I stopped in to determine where I would be developing my Super 8 film," he remembers. "I couldn’t get over how friendly the two guys [Harvey Milk and Scott Smith] were. I was 19 years old — I had no idea what cruising was at that point. Of course, within two months I was completely up to speed."

Nicoletta immediately captured the speed of life. His vérité photos of Milk, Smith, and San Francisco from the mid-1970s onward are often great and sometimes iconic. He soon sold his first photo out of Boys in the Sand (1971)and Bijou (1972), filmmaker Wakefield Poole’s hair salon-toy store-art gallery Hot Flash. A regular "Mr. Multimedia," Nicoletta was as interested in half-inch Portapak video as he was in still photography. In 1977, using Castro Camera as one of his chief meeting spots, he worked with David Waggoner and Marc Huestis to found the Gay Film Festival of Super 8 Films, an event now popularly known as the Frameline festival.

Nicoletta’s role in Milk’s life and role in queer film history provide some of the subtler facets of Gus Van Sant’s new film Milk. Those viewers familiar with Van Sant’s earlier work know of his focus on the photographic process: for example, a significant sequence within his 2003 film Elephant is spent in the darkroom, observing the efforts of a young photographer who may as well be a 21st century version of the young Nicoletta. "Even though I don’t say a lot, Lucas [Grabeel, who plays Nicoletta in the film] is a constant presence throughout Milk," Nicoletta notes, when asked about the interplay between his life and Van Sant’s moviemaking. "Gus keeps me there in the film as a cultural observer. In life, Gus has an eye for the role of still photography in culture, and he used my entity as a way of cross-referencing that."

Some of Nicoletta’s photos of Milk and Smith inform or inspire the look of particular scenes in Milk, such as a pie fight between Smith and Milk. "The art department was immersed in stills of all kinds," says Nicoletta, who switched to digital photography to document the making of the film. "I was impressed with all the things pinned up to their walls — the checkerboard analysis was lovely to look at." Nicoletta also lent his copy of the August 1974 San Francisco issue of the barely-subtextual gay culture magazine After Dark — a publication partly defined by the studio portraiture of East Coast gay photographers such as Ken Duncan and Jack Mitchell — to Milk‘s costume designer, Danny Glicker. "He [Glicker] creamed himself over that," Nicoletta says with an affectionate laugh. "There’s a postage stamp-sized photo of Victor Garber [who plays George Moscone in Milk] in it. I’d never noticed, but it took Danny Glicker a second to zero in on that. It was hilarious."

The Milk crew’s devotion to verisimilitude extended to Nicoletta’s camera — and to one of Milk’s two main cameras, one of the first Nikons ever made, which Nicoletta now owns. "They literally had me take jpgs of my camera and Harvey’s camera so they could cast those instruments to the letter," he says. "Harvey’s camera has his name engraved on the bottom. Scott’s [Smith] mom gave it to me when Scott passed away. It’s a real treasure. I never use it, but I saw him use it. Harvey and Scott also had a second Nikon that was their primary camera, and I did use that one quite a bit. We both passed film through the same camera, which was kind of cool — kind of incestuous."

This radical sense of brotherhood informed both Nicoletta and Milk’s photography. "Harvey took great joy in photographing people," Nicoletta observes, noting that a chance to take aerial photos of Christo’s Running Fence was one of Milk’s artistic and free-spirited moments as his political duties increased. "If you look at Harvey’s body of work, one thing that comes through with political potency is that a presiding aesthetic in his life was male-to-male love. You can then zoom out even further and say that the stimulus for his political activism was the sanctification and preservation of male-to-male love."

It’s characteristically modest of Nicoletta to turn an interview about his photography into a discussion of Milk’s endeavors with a camera — everything he says about Milk’s photos is true of his own work, which captures Milk and Smith’s relationship, for instance, with great warmth. He gives vivid background to some of his best-known Milk photos, such as an image of the inaugural walk to City Hall in January 1978. "We were just arriving at the steps," he remembers. "What’s great about that photo is that it’s just one of so many details of the history of the queer community that have unfolded on those very steps. I think I could do a whole book on the steps of City Hall at this point."

The prospect of a Nicoletta monograph is something to savor, even if he jokes that his friends "all roll their eyes to the back of their head and say, ‘There she goes again about her book’," whenever he mentions the prospect. As a documentarian of history, Nicoletta understands the necessity and gravity of a book of his work. He has other excellent ideas, such as an era-based collection that would bring in stylized images by Steven Arnold — like him, one of the chief people to visually capture queer artistic forces such as the Cockettes and Angels of Light. "I loved working with Reggie [of the Cockettes] because the first photo I ever saw of him was in Gilles Larrain’s [1973] Idols," Nicoletta says. "That book just rocked my world. I thought, ‘Who are these people, and where can I find them?’ And I found them."

Nicoletta found those people — the evidence is in books such as Gay by the Bay and Adrian Brooks’ new Flights of Angels (Arsenal Pulp Press, 224 pages, $24.95), and in the photo collection of the San Francisco Public Library. As a chronicler of gay life, he can be seen as a West Coast public counterpart to East Coast photographers such as Peter Hujar, Mark Morrisroe, and David Armstrong, and Nan Goldin. "In a sense I’ve sort of stayed provincial. That’s a little bit self-preservationist," he says, after mentioning the direct influence of the Bay Area studio photographer Crawford Barton on his work. "It’s so great to have a 30-year arc and be mindful of where you are and grateful for things like the mentorship of people like Harvey Milk and Scott Smith, and the inspiration of people like the Angels of Light. I’m for slow growth."

>>Back to the Milk Issue

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

Past, present, future

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> johnny@sfbg.com

REVIEW As a programming move, the Roxie Theater’s decision to screen Rob Epstein’s classic 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk is both a no-brainer and a bit of casual brilliance. It’s a no-brainer because of Milk mania. It’s a little stroke of genius because this great documentary’s return, one week before the theatrical premiere of Gus Van Sant’s feature at the Castro, provides plentiful compare-and-contrast opportunities for all those wise enough to know that they need to see both. This isn’t the first time that the Roxie — which presented Tsai Ming-liang’s homage to movie theaters Goodbye, Dragon Inn during the Castro’s days of turmoil in 2004 — has chimed in like a smart kid brother.

Epstein’s movie is a classic partly because of its historical contents, but there’s a definite mastery to the way in which he assembles and presents that material — if today’s makers of stylized docs haven’t learned from his command, that command has at least influenced Van Sant. The Times of Harvey Milk doesn’t dig into day-to-day San Francisco politics with the same relish or perhaps even specificity of the Van Sant movie (which recalls Barbet Schroeder’s 1990 Reversal of Fortune in its affection for scenes of creative, energetic groupthink). But journeying through candlelight vigil and through riot, it remains the most dramatically powerful response to Harvey Milk. His life and death were the stuff of great drama as well as of history.

The time for The Times of Harvey Milk is now, once again: more than a number connects and separates Proposition 6 of Milk’s era with Proposition 8 today. Thanks to Epstein’s compassionate documentary eye, his talking heads are fully realized human characters, with a range of personalities: the fervor of Tom Ammiano, the gruff candor of union machinist Jim Elliot (who thought the police raids on gay bars were fine until he met Milk), the contemplative sadness and strength of Sally M. Gearhart. Other touches, such as Harvey Fierstein’s uncharacteristically stoic voice-over, are surprising. And Epstein doesn’t glorify or beatify Milk when presenting the relationship between Milk and Dan White — his look at their interactions shows the sharp, competitive edges of Milk’s humanism.

The 2004 anniversary edition of the Times of Harvey Milk DVD is a treasure trove of material providing greater insight into Dan White. But it’s important to revisit this movie outside of the isolated home box office. There are generations of people who, if they’ve seen it, have only seen The Times of Harvey Milk on video at home. Like the man at the core of its subject, Epstein’s documentary thrives in a public, theatrical setting. The events it collects and captures are still relevant to all the random people who will find themselves united by a decision to watch this movie in a cinema — people who will step outside of the Roxie into a city and a world not that different from the one where Harvey Milk died and lived, one that is demanding collective action, and his spirit, once again.

THE TIMES OF HARVEY MILK

Opens Fri/21, $5–$10

Roxie Theater

3117 16th St., SF

(415) 431-3611

www.roxie.com


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Holiday Guide 2008: Seasonal sounds

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Thanks to the continued explosion of musically-oriented Web sites and blogs, you’ll probably be even more inundated than usual this year with "best of 2008" lists come January 2009 — far too late for your tuneful shopping needs. So we’re cranking one out early, organized by affinity groups — some slightly imaginary, some more concrete — in an attempt to cut through the loud hype and scattered bombast while amping up your gift-giving options. At the end is a suggested list of delectable upcoming live shows, if you’re more ticket-oriented.

FOR THE RETRO-FUTURIST DISCO HEAD


Electronic music is a good example of how griping about the state of a scene can sometimes release unexpected creativity. Syclops, nominally a Finnish fusion trio, is the latest we’ve heard from Maurice Fulton since his quasi-breakthrough electro-spazz project Mu. I’ve Got My Eye on You is the longest in a line of pretty epic wins for the label DFA and for electronic music generally: radiating out from "Where’s Jason’s K," the 10 tracks that make up the album tear ass from pharma’d-out Detroit techno to dreamy, lush deep space jazz.

Also: Shed‘s Shedding the Past (Ostgut Tonträger) if your giftee’s the type who longs for the halcyon days of high minimal glitch; Nôze, Songs on the Rocks (Get Physical) if his or her affection for tech house precision is matched only by a love of closing-time sing-alongs and Waitsian growls.

FOR LONG-LIMBED INDIE SCRAPPERS


It would be hard to write enough about "Black Rice," the best song on Canadian indie quartet Women‘s self-titled debut on Jagjaguwar. Starting from an absurdly unambitious guitar line, the song blossoms into something wildly and fiercely beautiful. It could be the impossible falsetto of the chorus, or the way the rhythm section comes unglued from the vocals and guitar, but the song condenses what makes the rest of the album — noisy, lo-fi interludes and all — so engaging. Everything seems held together provisionally on a song like the heartrending "Shaking Hand," but the chorus snaps into place with rubber-banded eagerness.

Also: Abe Vigoda‘s Skeleton (PPM) for its irrepressible youthful longing and controlled thrash; Benoît Pioulard‘s Temper (Kranky) for twining the threads of noise and surprisingly pretty, almost adult-contemporary songwriting into a neither/nor album that’s perfect for gray days.

WEIRDOS ONLY


Although more structured than anything they’ve done before, Saint Dymphna (Social Registry), the newest long player from New York’s mystical vibe crew Gang Gang Dance, still arrives packed with the otherworldliness that characterized its excellent predecessor, God’s Money (Social Registry, 2005). Three years in the making, the album itself is nothing if not well paced: the transitions between songs and the gradual build of rhythmic energy make it less kin to trad rock albums than to DJ mixes. When the swells crest, as on "First Communion" and "House Jam," electronic gurgles and processed sounds that might otherwise sound like trying too hard are transformed into pure pith: they’re as inviting and faceted as a just-split pomegranate.

Also: Paavoharju‘s Laulu Laakson Kukista (Fonal), since these Finnish folksters cover the dance floor with silt on "Kevätrumpu," bust some desperate torch techno on "Uskallan," and spend a number of other tracks sounding stuck between pagan classical radio and deteriorating field recordings; Rings is a trio of new primitives formerly known as First Nation — on Black Habit (Paw Tracks), the outfit sounds like it’s gotten into the Slits’ basements and started making music dictated from beyond.

POST-HIP-HOP BASS SEMANTICS


A DJ mix that stands alone as an album is a rare thing, but leave it to Jace Clayton, a.k.a. DJ/rupture, to make one, as he has with Uproot (Agriculture). Deeply, er, rooted in the bass plate tectonics of dubstep and cut with the finest in eclectic samples, ranging from experimentalist Ekkehard Ehlers to lazer bass don Ghislain Poirier, Uproot rolls deep with dubbed-out ambience, but DJ/rupture is just as happy to turn things upside down, as when he plunks down Ehlers’ gorgeous string loop, "Plays John Cassavetes, Pt. 2," around the mix’s halfway point. And if bangers of the future don’t sound like "Gave You All My Love (Matt Shadetek’s I Gave You All My Dub Remix)," which subs out dub’s organic space for Fisher-Price primary-color contrasts that split the brain evenly in two, I’m not sure it’s a future worth living in.

Also: for the more historically minded, Ragga Twins have released Step Out! (Soul Jazz), a retrospective that collects the work of a duo widely considered to be the inventors of that dubstep ancestor, jungle; Tank Thong Mixtape (Weaponshouse) by Megasoid happens to be free, so spend some money on a nice CD-R, decorate it with glitter, and watch exasperation turn to glee when your loved one blows out his or her speakers with this beast.

HEAVY STUFF


One of the year’s most life-affirming releases comes from a band called Fucked Up; its Chemistry of Common Life (Matador) is grounded in hardcore, and has hardness to spare, but makes its biggest impact when it lets a flute solo emerge from the tempest. With his basso profundo growl, singer Pink Eyes can sound like he’s gargling hot dogs, and harnessed to a song like "Black Albino Bones," with its cooing melody — the closest thing to pop the seven-year-old band has attempted — it makes for an unexpectedly moving juxtaposition. But the group’s real skill comes from mining the void left after the tribal affiliations of high school fall away; "Twice Born"<0x2009>‘s refrain, "Hands up if you think you’re the only one," could be the year’s Miranda July–esque rallying cry.

Also: if you’re wondering what Mick Barr’s been up to post-Ocrilim, the short answer, witnessed on Krallice‘s Krallice (Profound Lore) is black metal; Peasant (Level Plane), an all-encompassing slab of darkness by Baton Rouge–based Thou, is closer to trad sludge than to the transcendent drone of Sunn 0))), but no less impressively bleak.

SHOWS


The holiday season is not always a great time for shows (other than several Nutcracker incarnations), but for folks who want to gift live music this year there are plenty of sonic distractions. On the heels of Everybody (Thrill Jockey), its latest bout of sophisticated jazz rock, the eternally springlike Sea and Cake will make an appearance at Great American Music Hall just in time to counteract your seasonal affective disorder (Dec. 2, 8 p.m., $20). Sebastien Tellier rolls with the Daft Punk posse, so it’s no surprise that his music marries spot-on genre mimicry and a native sense of melody; check out the video for "Divine," in which the Beach Boys–meet–Lio jam turns into a global karaoke marathon of Tellier doppelgängers (Mezzanine, Dec. 4, 9 p.m., $15). There’s no rest for local workhorses Tussle and Jonas Reinhardt — they’ll be bringing their peculiar hot-cold takes on krauty electronics to the Hemlock Tavern (Dec. 6, 9:30 p.m., $7). And even if her music is not your cup of tea, Aimee Mann’s 3rd Annual Christmas Show should be a nice shot of seasonality in a city that tends to avoid big displays of Christmas spirit; consider it a good sign that Patton Oswalt, the stand-up comedian most deserving of your attention, will take part (Bimbo’s, Dec. 7, 8 p.m., $40). His looks call to mind a peripheral character from The Catcher in the Rye, and his preternaturally gentle music is specially designed not to hurt babies’ ears, but the earnest beauty of Jonathan Richman‘s songs might pierce your heart (Great American Music Hall, Dec. 7, 8 p.m., $15). Bearing a post-hardcore pedigree like whoa, San Francisco’s own Crime in Choir moves gracefully beyond its members’ backgrounds — At the Drive-In, the Fucking Champs — into (surprise!) instrumental prog territory (Hemlock Tavern, Dec. 13, 9:30 p.m., $6). *

Click here for more Holiday Guide 2008.

Holiday Guide 2008: The game room

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› culture@sfbg.com

The holidays have always been a time for toys. Back in the day, it was board games, baby dolls, and Rubik’s cubes. Then came Nintendo, Dance Dance Revolution, and The Sims. And now? The world of gaming is exploding, with something for everyone — from sci-fi-loving kids to sports-fanatic adults. Here are a few of our favorite new releases, which are sure to please everyone on your list (except maybe Grandpa):

Spore

Maxis (EA Sports); PC/Mac

"Playing God" just took on a whole new meaning. From Maxis, the people who brought you The Sims, comes the genre-defying Spore, a game designed for people who are tired of creating boring ol’ humans. In its captivating metaverse, gamers create a unicellular organism which must evolve into a social, cognizant creature. Explore the game’s expansive, interstellar landscape while developing a whole new species that can live and thrive in a brave new world. If that isn’t enough, it features ambient soundscapes by avant-garde composer and producer Brian Eno.

Pro Evolution Soccer 2009

Konami; PS3, Xbox 360, PSP, PS2, Wii, PC

The Pro Evolution Soccer series, also known as Winning Eleven, has long been the "Beautiful Games" best-kept gaming secret. While enjoying rampant global popularity, stateside it has long been the Don Swayze to Electronic Arts’ FIFA series’ Patrick Swayze. Its underwhelming sales in the United States are due to EA’s publicity machine and its name recognition. But PES 2009‘s staggering fluidity, graphics, and realism leaves FIFA‘s in the dust. While it features the international and club matches we expect, this year’s version exclusively features UEFA Champion’s League mode, which allows you to navigate through soccer’s preeminent club competition that decides the best team in Europe. A majestic sport demands a majestic game, and Pro Evolution Soccer ’09 best captures the nuances and gravity of the world’s most beloved sport.

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

Blizzard Entertainment; PC/ Mac OS X

If you can control an insatiable appetite for the destruction of your social life during the 42 days between its release and St. Nick’s World Tour, No. 1 on your shopping list should be the latest installment of the soul-sucking, hypnotic genius of Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft. While its global fans’ limitless dedication risks the ire of parents, teachers, and psychologists (read: party poopers), who confuse persistence and attention to detail with addictive behaviors, Blizzard has simply achieved every video game maker’s wet dream. It’s crafted a game intriguing and enjoyable enough that both hardcore and weekend warriors want to get in on the action.

Shaun White Snowboarding

Ubisoft; PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, Nintendo DS, PSP, PS2, PC

Not since Tony Hawk has an athlete been able to seamlessly transition from extreme sports star to bona fide sports hero and A-list celebrity like Shaun "the Flying Tomato" White has. He’s appeared on countless magazines and talk shows, and is now pulling his own "Tony Hawk" by fronting a big-budget, mainstream video game franchise. While time will tell if Shaun White Snowboarding will be as successful as the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series, but early returns have been overwhelmingly positive. The game features four mountain settings — Alaska, the Alps, Japan, and Park City, Utah — with seemingly endless runs and backcountry trails to get lost on. The game flows well, and there are countless opportunities to do hair-raising tricks and twists. White wanted the game to capture the freedom that made him fall in love with snowboarding, and Ubisoft has captured that perfectly, constantly pushing the user to discover the road less traveled without the possibility of death by hypothermia.

Rock Band 2

Harmonix/ Pi Studios; PS3, Xbox 360 (PS2/Wii releasing December 2008)

I’ll be honest with you. There is nothing, but nothing, that can kill a night out quite like Rock Band. Speaking from experience, it usually strikes around 11 p.m., when you and your friends are, theoretically, having your last drinks and preparing to brave the San Francisco nightlife. You may have high hopes for the evening. Maybe you’ll find a cool new bar, meet some new people, or even engage in a hazy dalliance that hopefully leaves you disease- and child-free in the morning. Then, disaster strikes. Someone asks, "Hey, who wants to play a little Rock Band before we go out?" Three hours later, you are wasted, singing "Wanted Dead or Alive" at the top of your lungs, and surrounded by the same four mates you started the night with. Good-bye cool bar, new friends, and Ms. or Mr. Right (Now). The latest version promises even more lost evenings and new opportunities to show off that falsetto, with almost 100 songs from nearly every genre, including classic rock standards (Fleetwood Mac, the Who), a double helping of ’90s grunge (Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains), and ’80s metal jams (Ratt, Bon Jovi).

Mirror’s Edge

Electronic Arts; PS3, Xbox 360

First-person adventure games are the Auto-Tune (T-Pain Effect) of video games, with seemingly every major video game manufacturer using this über-realistic, up-close perspective. That said, Mirror’s Edge looks likely to revolutionize first-person shooters with its unparalleled gameplay. Players control Faith, the game’s tragic hero, on her quest to save her sister from a web of deceit woven by a corrupt communist government. The game’s gorgeous, illuminated metropolitan setting demonstrates its elite graphics, but the real attraction lies in Faith’s ambitious journey. While fighting is involved, the user must navigate the expansive urban labyrinth and find ways to infiltrate the totalitarian regime. Though it boasts more action (read: combat) than most RPG’s, Mirror’s Edge is not a game for the unreceptive, lazy gamer who simply wants to blow shit up. But if you like using your brain as well as your bullets, you will rejoice in its complex storyline, nuance, and overall gameplay.

NBA Live ’09

Electronic Arts; Xbox 360, Wii, PS3, PS2, PSP

Without the mighty Baron Davis, how are the hapless Warriors going to make the playoffs? Easy. Pick up a copy of EA’s new installment of the NBA Live juggernaut, make a few shrewd trades such as swapping Al Harrington and C.J. Watson for Carlos Boozer and Deron Williams (that’s fair, right?), start up your season, and voilà! The Warriors go 73-9, break the Bulls all-time record, cruise into the playoffs, and crush the overmatched Boston Celtics to bring the Bay Area their first title since 1975. Meanwhile, the villainous Utah Jazz are sent tumbling to an abysmal 5-77 mark (guess who’s still bitter about the ’07 playoffs?). Along the way, enjoy graphics clear enough to make out Kenyon Martin’s impressive array of neck tats, high-flying dunks more exciting than a moped ride with Monta Ellis, and gameplay so realistic that while playing as the Knicks, you’ll be too lazy to get back on defense. *

More Holiday Guide 2008.

Race and Prop 8: What’s next? Plus: Transgender Remembrance Day

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The fight against Prop 8 continues — and here’s some touching and empowering video of fierce comedian Wanda Sykes stepping up to the lesbian plate in LA last weekend (via Ta-Nahesi Coates):

(Not in attendance: Prince)

And the somewhat-exhausting dialogue about what role race played in the passage of Prop 8 also continues (um, see funny black dyke above) — and there’s sure to be some intelligent voices included at the below forum on this Wednesday (11/19) at the LGBT Center, sponsored by StopAIDS.

prop8forum08a.jpg

Prop 8 and Race: What’s Next
A community forum
Wed/19, 7pm-9pm
SF LGBT Community Center
1800 Market, SF
www.sfcenter.org

Also, just a reminder: Thursday November 20 is Transgender Day of Remembrance, commemorating our transgender brothers and sisters who’ve lost their lives to live their lives — a surprising number of which are non-white. There will be a rally with community speakers followed by a march through the Tenderloin to City Hall this Thursday evening:

Transgender Remembrance rally and march
11/20, 6pm-8pm, free
Beginning at the TRANS:THRIVE offices
815 Hyde Street, 2nd Floor, SF
info@sfcenter.org

Plus, the fabulous LGBT synagogue Congregation Shaar Zahev will be holding a special Transgender Remembrance Shabbat at 7:30pm in Friday, November 21. (You don’t have to be Jewish to attend, trust me.)

If you can’t make it, at least light a mental candle for these recently passed-on TG warriors.

Will Durst: And they’re off!

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by Will Durst

As the curtain mercifully falls on the Most Important Election of Your Lifetime, the nation breathes a collective sigh of relief. Or do they? Sure, there were enough Byzantine plot twists and darkly rich comic characters to exhaust Dostoyevsky’s older smarter brother. And I imagine more than a few of you are woke up spent, limp, barely able to grasp your coffee cup and raise it to quivering lips; tertiary casualties of Election Fatigue. But, now that the votes have been tallied and the results buried deep in Almanac City, you’re happier than John McCain in a flag factory. Then, this column… is not for you. This is for the millions of us political junkies who feel emptier than a Chrysler SUV showroom. Whose zest for life has faded like the colors of the posters in a video store window, facing West.

Obama 4th, 2008: Where were you?

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By Molly Freedenberg

Some moments we don’t recognize as historic until they’ve passed. Others are so monumental, we feel their future importance even as we experience them in the present. The bombing of Pearl Harbor, Kennedy’s assassination, and 9/11 all were such moments – those old enough to be cognizant all remember where they were the first moment they heard the news.

Our newest such moment is, of course, election night 2008.

And so we’d like to ask, as your history books and children and relatives surely will ask you for years to come: Where were you when you heard the news of Obama’s election? How did you feel? And how did you celebrate? Leave your answer in the comments below. Also, if you have photos or video of election night, we’d like to see them! Please send links or files with subject line “Obama 4th” to art.guardian@gmail.com.

I’ll kick things off:

When I first heard the news, I was at Inner Mission Tavern, watching CNN with a room packed full of strangers. As they hugged and cheered and drank, I stood still and cried. I stayed to watch the speeches, struck by several things …

Kamau Patton

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At the cacophonous intersection of Sun Ra’s wheeling jazz cosmology, P-Funk’s psycho-disco logorrhea, Clarence 13X’s alpha-beta-culto Five-Percent Nation, the early ’90s vainglorious hip-hop of X-Clan, Isis, and Blackwatch, and The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly (1950-64), that sprawling, tinfoil-bedazzled outsider masterpiece by Washington, DC, handyman James Hampton, lies a crazy-ass aesthetic of African American visual and performance culture — the culture of flash. 36-year-old Kamau Amu Patton taps directly into this interstellar shine-on-shine look and feel, jettisoning — or maybe out-transcending — the quasi-theological messages in order to dazzle the mind’s eye blackwards.

Consider Patton’s Talk Show (2007). Two archetypal afrocentric public-access cable hosts, both played by Patton, decked out in on-point dashikis and shells before a pixel projection of Hampton’s Throne, dissemble circuitous phrases. "Knowledge is the foundation of all that is existence … You must respect the thing you observe as being real!" one declaims, while the other sighs loudly and eggs him on: "Ah, damn — that’s the truth." A little silver prayer bell is rung and a 1-800 number flashes across the screen. Telephone message: "Behold, the light has come! Speak on!"

Talk Show‘s blank parody should dead-end in hilarity for anyone familiar with these types of folks. But the dreamlike accumulation of gaudy signifiers, as well as the sense that this is a completely unexplored cultural trope, rockets the video into more thoughtful realms. "I wanted to point up the tautologies of that kind of discourse, to capture the exact aesthetic while highlighting the circular rhythms of delivery, the language of persuasion," Patton says. "But at the same time I felt a responsibility to perfectly perform these characters, the kind of people I grew up with in Brooklyn, who were on my street corner preaching like that. I really freaked out over getting the sunglasses exactly right."

That will to performance perfection, evidenced in several of his other live works, is grounded in Patton’s educational background. He holds a sociology degree from the University of Pennsylvania and completed field coursework at the London School of Economics. "I grew disillusioned with sociology because it seemed the opposite of what I felt I was interested in," says Patton, who educates Bay Area kids on the artistic legacies of their particular communities. "I wanted to start with something tangible, or several things, and use them as a jumping-off point to continuous abstract revelations. It’s a generative aesthetic kind of thing. To keep going down a certain illuminated hallway in my work. At the same time, I’m a black man in America, so I have a certain perception or set of experiences that I can draw on as well. I’m definitely drawn to the shamanistic and the kingly — especially African American representations of the kingly. I can go off on what Eric B. and Rakim were wearing on their first album cover for hours."

Other Patton confluences of the statistical and the flashy: his performances as part of the hip-hop and fashion collective Official Tourist; this year’s gorgeous self-published book Edge Theory of Dematerialized Consciousness, a wiggy, chthonic numerical-poetic tract punctuated by eerie nature photographs; and an unnamed retro-digital-video assemblage, viewable at www.kamau.org, in which Patton, as a voodooistic priest, writhes around a hissing explosion, whose glitchy "digital dropouts" and color-balance freakouts are meant to be Cézanne-like portals into other dimensions. Currently, the Emeryville-based Patton is artist-in-residence at Southern Exposure. He’s represented there by a retina-searing collaboration with photographer Suzy Poling called "Glasshouse," which uses e-wasted CRT screens to bend light into hallucination. Behold the warp of truth, infinite.

www.kamau.org

The Cutting Ball Theater

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If you were at the latest Cutting Ball show, avantgardARAMA!, you entered a theater that looked like an art installation, already buzzing and flickering with video images on a screen suspended in front of a shimmering mirror-box set, accompanied by a soundtrack of voices and droning tones. It was like some serenely wicked room in a purgatorial funhouse, where all you’ve been and all you might become could be reflected at you, from every possible angle, ad infinitum. As it turned out, it was an environment perfectly suited to the material sharply staged that evening: three short experimental plays on war, power, and betrayal by three women writers — Gertrude Stein, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Eugenie Chan — whose bold narrative loops and lacunae literally rebounded off the walls.

The stylish, jarring, exhilarating effect: our sleepwalking world was dramatically distilled into fractal-like figures that somehow made it real again. This is the oblique strategy of the Cutting Ball Theater, a passionately intelligent and skillful company with a declared commitment to poetic truths over superficial naturalism.

As it approaches its 10-year milestone, Cutting Ball transitions from dogged itinerancy into luxurious residency at Exit on Taylor, a satellite stage of the Exit Theater complex in the Tenderloin. Much as a ball rolls forward by turning full circle, the move marks something of a return for the company, which launched its career in a production of Richard Foreman’s My Head Was a Sledgehammer at the Exit-sponsored San Francisco Fringe Festival in 1999.

"That was the last time you had to stand outside at 3 in the morning and camp out," associate artistic director and actor Paige Rogers recalls of that time, before the Fringe established its lottery system. Rogers, and husband and artistic director Rob Melrose, established both the company and a family that year, more or less simultaneously. Melrose did the camping out and rehearsed the play by night at an Alameda Catholic school where Rogers was teaching music.

(As with many a start-up theater, overlapping accommodations was the name of the tune: when the school’s principal expressed surprise at happening upon a late-night rehearsal of Foreman’s madcap dream-world in the kindergarten, Rogers deflected further inquiry by joyfully announcing, "Marilyn! I’m pregnant!")

Cutting Ball has mixed new plays and "re-visioned" classics ever since. The visual metaphor is apt since Cutting Ball productions are nothing if not strikingly designed. For years, the company has had a talented core of collaborators that includes designers Heather Basarab (lights), Cliff Caruthers (sound and electronic music), and Michael Locher (sets). Together in close collaboration with the astute, Yale-trained Melrose, they regularly produce some of the best designs to be found on any Bay Area stage, large or small. Add artistic associates like playwrights Kevin Oakes (2003’s The Vomit Talk of Ghosts) and Eugenie Chan (whose A Bone to Pick was a highlight of this theater season), as well as dependably strong acting from Rogers, Felicia Benefield, Chad Deverman, David Sinaiko, and David Westley Skillman, among others, and you have the makings of some great small theater.

The new residency marks another return. Its ninth season will be inaugurated by a rarely staged early play by Eugène Ionesco, Victims of Duty, a work Melrose says he’s waited 15 years to direct. Centering on the abrupt crisis-ridden invasion of a bourgeois couple’s placid bubble-world and their equally staid conceptions of theatrical art, Victims is a fever-dream of a play that not only sounds strikingly contemporary but echoes the company’s own MO. When theater "holds the mirror up to the world," it’s often the warped glass that furnishes the truest picture.

www.cuttingball.com

Election-night bashes off the grid

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OK, we all know about the free election-daze bevvies at Starbuck’s and gratis donuts at Krispy Kreme (if you’re so hot for free caff, why not get your fix at a local kawfee-seller like Farley’s on Potrero Hill instead?) – but what about all those other parties out there for you freedom-lovin’ America-for-Americans? Tonight it’s time to celebrate (and toast the outgoing, seemingly never-ending campaign cycle). Say “s’long” to those perpetually looping, loopy infomercials… here, there, everywhere:

PARTY LIKE AN ART STAR
Free pizza when the polls close! And an opportunity to write on the walls, think historical thoughts, and live it up at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. YBCA put a call out to makers to help them dream up a got-out-the-vote getdown. And boy did they respond: participants include Hella Hella Acapella with Lara Maykovich, Maya Dorm, Nichole Rodriguez, Marissa Greene and Madeleina Bolduc; Sri Satya Ritual Movement with Micah Allison, Isis, Indriya and Nikilah Badua; Anahata Sound; Derick Ion and the Satya Yuga Collective; Dancing the Dead Dharma (Sara Shelton Mann and Dance Brigade); Alleluia Panis and Dwayne Calizo; Anna Halprin; DJ Wey South; DJ Aztec Parrot with YBCA Young Artists at Work; rigzen; Maji; Sara Shelton Mann; Dance Brigade; Bruce Ghent; Rajendra Serber; Sonya Smith; Kira Maria Kirsch; Folawole Oyinlola; Lena Gatchalian; Sarah Bush; Hana Erdman; Karen Elliot; Richelle Donigan; Kimberly Valmore; Krissy Keefer, and Guardna contributor D. Scot Miller. Whew. Pass the Joe Six-Pack. 6–11 p.m., free with cash bar. YBCA, 701 Mission, SF.

CHICK-CHICK-CHICK THAT BOX
For finger-licking good times after licking the GOP? Free chicken if Obama wins from 9-10 p.m. at Farmer Brown, 25 Mason, SF. (415) 409-FARM.

SAN FRANCISCO’S OBAMA VICTORY PARTY
Oh, why not just call it now. Drink specials, guest speakers, and live election coverage. First 100 attendees get a free Shephard Fairy “Hope” poster. Doors 6 p.m., free. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. (415) 625-8880.

DON’T DODGE THE DRAFTS
Drafts – that’s our cue to drink up! The Guardian bash boasts a free beer special (while it lasts) when you present a voter receipt or sticker. Win prizes like Beach Blanket Babylon tickets at an election trivia challenge. 7-9 p.m., free. Kilowatt, 3160 16th St., SF. (415) 861-2595.

Dance, dance, dance with Lykke Li – and mixed emotions

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btw_lykke_li.jpg

By Michelle Broder Van Dyke

Watching Lykke Li bounce her nimble, lithe body, holding her hand to her head, as she warms up before screaming into a megaphone in the “Breaking It Up (Alternate Take)” video reminds me of a simple fact: sex sells. Better yet, cute Swedish girls who exude sexuality sell.

A standard formula we all know, but these days it has got a twist: GAWS majors and hipster boys wearing their sister’s pants reflect a shift in the standard norms of sex stars from the typical Paris Hilton and Christina Aguilera wannabes, and the spectrum has been widened to less conventional icons like Maggie Gyllenhaal and Swedish pop sensation Lykke Li.

Lykke Li dances with a lot of hopping and arm flinging, which makes her resemble a sexier, less crazed, but still spastic Ian Curtis. She stares into the camera as if she’s looking at you, drops her eyes, and even though she’s breaking up with you, you’re already addicted by the time the catchy hook comes.


Easy to do: the official “Breaking It Up.”

No-brainer

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW The title of David Szlasa’s peculiar, compact, and appealing new work suggests one ready avenue of flight from a world gone mad, but in fact fantasies of escape take more than one form in My Hot Lobotomy, now up at CounterPULSE. And while escapism is exactly what the piece concerns itself with, the import is anything but apathetic or disengaged. A cheerfully quirky, Beckett-like duet wrapped in luxurious silences, snatches of recorded dialogue, short blasts of song and free-style dance, and a dreamy videoscape of environmental disintegration, My Hot Lobotomy is full of restive thought.

Like Szlasa’s installation-performance work on the atomic bomb, 2004’s GADGET, My Hot Lobotomy pokes at that psychic terrain joining the human capacity for denial with man-made catastrophe. In this case, the catastrophe is the rapid warming of the planet, which remains stubbornly just beyond the necessary concerted and rational response. But Lobotomy‘s approach is both more traditional and more oblique than the environmental strategy employed in GADGET, which had audiences wandering around a noisy club-like atmosphere enveloped by video projections and spotted with localized audio segments.

Quietly trained on the internal and external minutiae of its main character — a mute and semi-vegetative post-op named Joey (Erin Mei-Ling Stuart) — the play never feels crudely weighty or political, let alone like a piece of agitprop. Instead, it unfolds like a loopy, semi-looping trance, a restless and sardonic ditty, or a closet poem stashed away in Pee-wee’s Playhouse. Lobotomy‘s low-key faux naiveté bristling with caged energies and subversive instincts — much as Joey’s shiny turquoise sneaks, popping out from under a bland ensemble of sports coat and chinos, hints at dormant life beneath a numbed surface.

The play acts to slow us down almost immediately — almost as much as Joey, who does nothing for the first several minutes but stare back at us blankly from a chair in the center of the stage. This mirror effect, uncomfortably amusing, grows in significance when we learn that Joey — in shades of the Ramones — has given himself a homemade lobotomy. Well, you might ask, who hasn’t? Szlasa gives us plenty of space to ponder the question, gradually unfolding the method and motive behind Joey’s condition as we share in the meditative, vaguely bemused mood he projects.

It’s a knock at the door that disturbs this waking slumber. A guy (Spencer Evans) enters delivering a pizza, a slice of which Joey chews with silent satisfaction. The man then returns with a boombox and a cassette tape, careful to demonstrate to Joey how they go together. On the tape, Joey speaks to himself with prerecorded words of instruction, clarification, and encouragement. The delivery guy, we learn, has been paid in advance to bring all Joey will need in his new, streamlined life. Returning to the stage with a guitar, he also delivers something to the audience, at odd moments and even odd angles: a series of witty songs — variously contributed by Carrie Baum, Cody James Bentley, Sean Hayes, and Joshua Lowe — telling the story of Joey in terms that slyly critique what they describe.

The limited world Joey has structured for his new self — with its prerecorded, too certain insistence that everything is "gonna be really, really great" — eventually unravels among a clutter of pizza boxes and, more alarmingly, a series of fraught dreams, as the unstructured world outside, which appears as a video montage of global warming over a gentle cloudscape at the back of the stage, slips in with growing insistence. The increasing dissonance provokes another transformation in Joey, and another attempt to scurry for cover. It’s a rush of new life whose meaning may be ambiguous, but hardly empty-headed.

MY HOT LOBOTOMY

Through Nov. 2

Thurs.–Sat. and Nov. 2, 8 p.m., $25

CounterPULSE

1310 Mission, SF

1-800-838-3006

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