Whatever

No castaways here

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We drool over these Treasure Island jewels

CSS


Woman, oh, woman. We’re so not tired of these fiery São Paulo popettes’ brand of sexy. CSS rarely disappoint live — Spandex bodysuits, pop hooks courtesy of their latest album, Donkey (Sub Pop), and all. (Kimberly Chun)

8:25 p.m. Sat/20, Tunnel Stage

DR. DOG


Dusting the crust off Southern rock grooves and biting into the apple of the tenderest harmonies, these unsung sons of the Liberty Bell, the Band, and ELO might be considered the Yankee brethren to My Morning Jacket. (Chun)

6:40 p.m. Sun/21, Tunnel Stage

DODOS


Is anyone doing anything quite like what spunky San Francisco indie duo Dodos do? (Chun)

5:15 p.m. Sun/21, Tunnel Stage

FLEET FOXES


Back in the ’90s, we used to be able to tell the indie rock from the rock proper by the singing: untrained, off-key, and adenoidal. This Seattle quintet are leading the charge to make the voice the center of indie rock-dom. On their self-titled debut and its forerunner, the Sun Giant EP (both Sub Pop), the band brings serious pipes and gorgeous multi-part harmonies like they were trying out for spots in CSNY or "Black Water"–era Doobie Brothers. (Brandon Bussolini)

3:50 p.m. Sun/21, Tunnel Stage

FOALS


The brainy Oxford quintet has been tagged with both the "math rock" and "Afrobeat appropriationist" labels — both true, and gloriously so. Add in a heap o’ (not tired) post-punk reference and some boppy Cure-like atmospherics, and Foals bring dancefloor introspection to new heights. They’ve also gained a rep for missing festivals, so dedicated fans have their horseteeth on edge. (Marke B.)

3:45 p.m. Sat/20 Tunnel Stage

LOQUAT


Comforting and disquieting in equal measure, the Bay Area group’s knowing, ambivalent electro-pop will sound even better if the weather is gloomy and if you are in a ’90s mood. Playing music together for more than a decade and only on the cusp of releasing their second album, Loquat selects subject matter that rarely strays from post-collegiate romantic malaise. The combo’s tasteful, restrained playing and vocalist Kylee Swenson’s honeyed tone signals a perfectionism that sometimes gets the best of them: a song’s meticulousness can turn suffocating without warning, then just as suddenly return to a melody that almost justifies the occasional preciousness. (Bussolini)

12:45 p.m. Sat/20, Tunnel Stage

NORTEC COLLECTIVE: BOSTICH & FUSSIBLE


As anyone who has spent a little time in his or her local Guitar Center knows, "fusion" is a deeply tainted word. The bastard genre — typically evoked when a performer sounds like other fusion artists — has untapped potential to refer to music outside the wanky Weather Report–aping scene. If you are not the type to go in for seven-string fretless bass guitars and deeply contrived chords, this Tijuana quartet’s music might help you imagine a future for the term. Synthesizing traditional norteño music with techno might sound like a dicey proposition, but the group’s crisp, tuneful productions make for an easily graspable mellow. (Bussolini)

3:50 p.m. Sat/20 Tunnel Stage

PORT O’BRIEN


In taking a wisp of personal narrative — songwriter Van Pierzalowski spends his summers helping his dad, a commercial fisherman, on Alaska’s Kodiak Island — as their starting point and main inspiration, this Oakland fivepiece compares with this year’s other rustic isolationist, Bon Iver. Sonically, the outfit’s blood runs a little hotter: they are at their best when confident enough to let their rickety songs — like their gold standard, the loose-limbed "I Woke Up Today" — get away from them. (Bussolini)

1:25 p.m. Sun/21 Tunnel Stage

RACONTEURS


Steady, as they go. The rock ‘n’ roll tricksters tried to dodge critical bullets — and blossoms — when they released Consolers of the Lonely (Warner Bros.). Whatever for, one wonders? The combo’s increasingly massive sound successfully invokes the Who and Britannia’s other ’60s and ’70s rock powerhouses, with an intentional whiff of the good times long gone. (Chun)

9:05 p.m. Sun/21, Bridge Stage

MIKE RELM


This guy makes A/V geeks look good. With Reservoir Dogs–like skinny-tie suavitude and fleet fingers on his editing gear, the SF mix-maestro mashes up songs and sights with the smarts of a pop-cultie compulsive. Can we expect more of the same Clown Alley–style burger-‘n’-vino fun with Spectacle, his studio debut on his own Radio Fryer label? (Chun)

6:45 p.m. Sat/20, Tunnel Stage

SPIRITUALIZED


Beware: Jason Spaceman is more than capable of moving an audience to tears with his live, full-tilt psych-gospel orchestrations. (Chun)

4:30 p.m. Sun/21, Bridge Stage

TEGAN AND SARA


Twins do it better, if by better you mean attract insatiable hordes of fabulous haircuts with wistful tunes that lodge firmly in your earworm. Plus, they’re Canadian — something we all may wish we were soon. Yet the fabulous Quin sisters aren’t just standard keyboard-and-guitar hum-along-tos. They’ve got some curious curveball chops, as last year’s The Con (Sire) showed. (Marke B.)

7:25 p.m. Sun/21, Bridge Stage

Mead notebook

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› johnny@sfbg.com

"Yeah, whatever, I’m just watching Oprah," Taylor Mead lolls over the phone line when I ask if he has time to talk. "Anyway, what do you want to know, because I’m so bored with being interviewed."

Actually, around a half-minute separates Mead’s initial "whatever" from his profession of boredom — 30 seconds that he laconically fills with more wit than other interview subjects might manage in 30 hours. "One day Oprah will be at a petting zoo, loving little animals, and the next she’ll have a banquet, serving 100 people veal," he says. "As a vegetarian, I object. I object to this new vice president, too. She hunts wolves from an airplane. Give me a break."

Such objections are a taste of what’s in store for anyone wise enough to see the 83-year-old Mead crack wise during a brief visit to San Francisco. "Do I dare call it Frisco?" asks the star of Ron Rice’s 1960 North Beach–set cinematic Beat classic The Flower Thief. Though Mead hasn’t been to SF in years, he knows the city today well enough now to liken it to "the richest suburb in the world," so he’s querying himself as much as me. "They called it Frisco when there were tough dockworkers there, when it was a tougher town. Now it’s just Frisky."

The Flower Thief kicks off "Taylor Mead: A Clown Underground," a three- evening Joel Shepard–curated affair at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts that moves on to the 1967-68 Andy Warhol mock western Lonesome Cowboys and concludes with William A. Kirkley’s 2005 documentary portrait Excavating Taylor Mead. The first and last films are bookend — sort of — visions of a self-described "National Treasure / If there were such a thing." Mead is a great American movie star and poet whose stardom is a byproduct of his poetry and vice versa. Just as 2000’s Pie in the Sky: The Brigid Berlin Story reveals that Mead’s rich-rebel-gone-Warhol-superstar peer Brigid Berlin is a master of monologue, Kirkley’s documentary — and more directly, Mead’s books — present a wilder-than-Wilde master of the aphorism.

Mead can also make a lengthy poem sing, as illustrated by a YouTube clip of a serenade to Jake Gyllenhaal, gleaned from one of his regular Monday night appearances at Bowery Poetry Club. If Gyllenhaal’s 2005 Brokeback Mountain character is the gay son of Montgomery Clift in 1948’s Red River and 1961’s The Misfits, then both Mead’s song to Gyllenhaal and Mead’s older poem "Autobiography" prove lonesome cowboys can be lassoed by a rodeo clown.

"For everything that is original, spontaneous, alive, and creative and beautiful, there is some old lady who will complain about it," writes Mead in 1986’s Son of Andy Warhol (Hanuman Books). In the 2005 collection A Simple Country Girl (YBK Publishers, $14.95) his wit and wisdom is even shorter and sharper. "Everything / Has a right to life / except mosquitoes / and religious people."

Airplane willing and anti-anxiety medication in hand, Taylor Mead is returning to the town where Jack Spicer once seethed as he sat on Jack Kerouac’s lap. Shower him with Dewar’s. He’ll be bringing a couple hundred pages of quips in his carry-on bag, but they might not be necessary.

As the man himself says, "I don’t need a script."

TAYLOR MEAD: A CLOWN UNDERGROUND

Thurs/18–Fri/19 and Sun/21, 7:30 p.m., $8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

—————————–

Autobiography

(after a poem by Ferlinghetti)

By Taylor Mead

I have blown

And been blown

I have never had a woman

I have been in great jails and terrible jails

The great jails were the tanks and the terrible jails were the model prisons.

I have seen my mother a few hours before she died.

I have seen my father pinching pennies and felt it.

I have heard and felt my father in his worship of

money worshipping money and the U.S.A. of money

madness, fuck it!

I have been beaten nearly to death before an

"enlightened" Greenwich Village crowd.

I have been beaten in my hospital bed by sadistic

doctors.

I have been arrested by a jealous policewoman and

I should have hit her and killed her.

I have played all the pianos that all the famous

pianists have played in Carnegie Hall in the basement

of Steinway Hall and I still play them

after making it with the elevator boys on a quiet

religious Sunday afternoon.

I have made goo goo eyes at Marlon Brando with no

luck

but not too much discouragement either.

I have made it with Montgomery Clift in Central Park

against a little pagoda

or at least he said it was Montgomery Clift and

it was Montgomery Clift too.

Elizabeth Taylor has really looked at me from under

a veil on Fifth Avenue and Susan Strasberg and

Judith Anderson all on Fifth Avenue and can’t

remember her name on Sixth Avenue now the

Avenue of the Americas and then too

And that year’s winner of the Antoinette Perry

award followed me from the St. Regis where he lived

and I’ve never been in for four blocks until

I regretfully lost him because I’m shy.

And my first day alone in New York almost this famous

cowboy star made goo goo eyes at me on the steps

of the New York Public Library, main branch

And I went into the Times Square Duffy Square

subterranean toilet with one of the movies’ Tarzans

and he showed me his big peter

and I showed him my small one

because it was cold and

I didn’t want to get it excited unless I was sure

something great was about to take place

And it didn’t.

Originally printed in Excerpts from the Anonymous Diary of a New York Youth (self-published, 1961) and Angels of the Lyre: A Gay Poetry Anthology (Gay Sunshine Press, 1975)

Lotsa press on Prop. H

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The SF Weekly is usually against anything we’re supporting (they love to bash the left over there, and particularly like to bash us), but to my astonishment, along with his typical snide comments, Benjamin Wachs actually has some intelligent comments on the Clean Energy Act:

The city has the right -even the duty- to plan responsibly for its future, and then follow-up. Prop H shouldn’t even need to be on the ballot, it should be standard practice. Yes, let us evaluate our options and pick the best one. I wish the city would run its economy, law enforcement, and housing offices the same way. To be clear: anyone who is against Prop H isn’t against public ownership of utilities – they’re against planning.

Randy Shaw’s on the case, too. He’s a little dubious about the political hopes for Prop. H, since it doesn’t fit his own rule of “Keep it Simple,” and he suggests that the measure may get buried in the PG&E propaganda and the flood of other stuff on the ballot. The problem is, you can’t make a serious clean-energy initiative simple; there’s just too much policy involved. And if it were simpler, PG&E would call it “a simplistic solution.”

We all knew from day one that PG&E had endless money and would spend whatever it thinks is necessary to defeat Prop. H. But Shaw acknowledges that

With Mark Leno, Susan Leal, and Bevan Dufty taking high-profile roles in backing Prop H, the initiative has a broader and more diverse base than its similar predecessors.

And the Yes on H campaign is only really starting.

If this wasn’t going to be close, PG&E wouldn’t already be pulling out all the stops.

Jam econo

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› duncan@sfbg.com

Look, I can’t tell you, OK? It’s not that I don’t want to, but when I tell someone it’s "off the record," it’s off the record. It’s not like divulging the day job of Nicole Laurenne, super-saucy singer and Farfisa player for the Love Me Nots, would be some kind of huge, Valerie Plame–style leak, but I refuse to be the Scooter Libby here. Let’s just say she wants to keep her professional and garage-rock lives separate. Brain surgeon? Test pilot? Miniskirted, go-go-booted commando, doing the swim behind enemy lines? "Just tell them I’m a spy. I work for the CIA," Laurenne says during a phone interview from her office in stifling Phoenix, Ariz., or, perhaps, from her secret lair in the caldera of an extinct volcano.

Whatever it is she does, let’s just say Laurenne and the rest of her black-and-white-garbed, pin-sharp quartet aren’t quitting their day jobs any time soon. Not because the band doesn’t pack enough full-throated, ’60s soul, Mosrite fuzz, and hip-shaking, back-alley R&B stomp to rock the door off the proverbial garage — because they do, in spades. This is clearly evidenced by their 2007 debut, In Black & White, and their newly dropped Detroit, both produced in a chicken slaughterhouse-turned-recording studio in the Motor City by Jim Diamond (the White Stripes, the Romantics, the Charms) and both on Love Me Nots’ Atomic a Go Go imprint. "Our day jobs pay for everything," Laurenne tells me. "We’re very careful to work around them. We decided a long time ago we didn’t want to live in a van for a month and play on Tuesdays in Wichita." This allows them to practice an approach that more seasoned touring bands like Les Savy Fav have turned to after decades of midweek dates in nowhere towns: the tour as surgical strike. "We’ll go out to the East Coast and do New Jersey on Thursday and New York on Friday and Boston on Saturday and fly home on Sunday," she says.

I can hear it already: "Man, that’s not punk rock. Where’s the DIY? I’m revoking their indie street cred." Sell out? Hardly. The Love Me Nots are an example of a new paradigm, or at least a rare one: they actually put the horse before the cart. While grinding away in various Phoenix garage outfits over the years — with the exception of their new bass player, Kyle Rose Stokes, a 26-year-old grad student, they’re all in their 30s — the Love Me Nots realized they had to make money so they could do it right from the get-go: they release their own music on their own label, do the distribution, copyrighting, publishing, artwork — not to mention writing songs, rehearsing, and playing gigs. They may not be gluing together 7-inch sleeves, but they’ve got more in common with the DIY ethos of bands like Minor Threat and Black Flag and the labels they created, Dischord and SST, than trustafarians trying to scam street cred by sprinkling a steady diet of ramen with cocaine binges, hoping to float to hipster heaven on the sparkly fart of the first A&R douchebag who recognizes their Casiotone genius.

"You’ve got to give ’em what they want," Laurenne advises an unnamed "little girl" as Detroit nears its crescendo, before adding, "without losing what you’ve got." And while it’s delivered as romantic advice, it sums up the band’s outlook: deliver the goods, on your own terms, in your own time. You can have the career, and the band, and the love life — Laurenne and guitarist Michael Johnny Walker recently got engaged — and not have to slack off on any element of being alive. It is, however, somewhat of a balancing act. "We try to avoid doing stuff that’s too connected," the vocalist says when I asked her if the band’s been asked to play Christmas parties. "We definitely don’t mind people who enjoy that style of music coming out and enjoying it. They certainly need their own release. And, honestly, a lot of people in this type of suit world have other, non-suit interests too, and I think they feel validated, like, ‘Oh, I guess it’s OK to be a sort of renaissance person. You can pursue your own interests, and it’s not shameful anymore.’<0x2009>"

Perhaps it’s my brief stint in the dirty, amoral trenches of mind control, er … "advertising," that immediately leads me to a tag line: "The Love Me Nots: Making It Safe for the Squares to Dance," I tell Laurenne. "That’s your next T-shirt."

THE LOVE ME NOTS

With the Hi-Nobles and the Laundronauts

Fri/12, 9 p.m., $8

Annie’s Social Club

917 Folsom, SF

www.anniessocialclub.com

The discreet musical charms of ‘Hallam Foe’

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hallamfoecd.jpg

Various artists
Hallam Foe: Original Soundtrack
(Domino)

By Todd Lavoie

Some things take a mighty long time to wash up on American shores from abroad. Take Hallam Foe – the British independent film was released last year overseas, but is only now beginning to hit stateside screens, thanks to a distribution deal with Magnolia Pictures. (For whatever reason, the delightfully odd little gem has been re-titled Mister Foe for the American market.)

Trust me: this film’s worth the wait. Charming but occasionally unsettling, whimsical but rippling with currents of darkness, it’s engrossing as hell, and Jamie Bell (Billy Elliott) is riveting as the troubled young man in the title role. In any case, I’m here to focus on the music – and the soundtrack is a wonderful, headphone-hugging treat. Keeping the original title of the film despite the name change on the marquee, the disc works flawlessly as the score to such a curious mix of sweetness and foreboding. Even without the accompanying visuals, these 16 songs link together to sustain a devilishly peculiar mood over the course of an hour. A fine tribute, then, to a film which whirls love into death, innocence into obsession, cuteness into the grotesque.

Hallam Foe takes place mainly in two locations: the rolling hills and ice-cold lochs of the Scottish countryside, and the rooftops and lookout spots above Edinburgh. The soundtrack does an impressive job of conveying both landscapes, sliding skillfully from agrarian folk to pavement-hitting electronics and lurching big-city rock ‘n’ roll. Maybe “sliding” isn’t the right term – “gliding” might be more appropriate, given the film’s focus on Hallam wanting to be above it all, looking down from great heights. Many of the songs contained here are buoyed along by a sense of weightlessness: rhythms wash in and wash out, synth blips and bleeps soar in the highest registers, and occasionally disembodied voices hover and hum somewhere in the vague distance.

The budget stalemate never ends

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Folks in Sacramento are telling me that the state may be without a budget for another month or more. Of course, it’s largely due to the fact that California requires a 2/3rds majority to raise taxes — which means a handful of Republicans, who have signed pledges never to raise taxes, can hold the entire state hostage.

Robert at Calitics has a good line on the need for reform — but there’s no way a Constitutional amendment will happen before 2010. So until then, the Democrats are over a barrel, and eventually will probably have to agree to borrow money to cover the deficit — with no new taxes.

The problem is that, whatever the columnists and critics say, the Republicans have no incentive at all to accept a budget that raises taxes — and they have every incentive not to. Thanks in part to skillful Democratic gerrymanders, the GOP districts tend to be very conservative. And any Republican who breaks his or her pledge and agrees to raise taxes will be targeted for extinction.

It’s an ugly situation, and even Schwarzenegger can’t get the members of his party to move an inch.

How bad will it have to get before the public demands reform? Pretty bad.

Caught up in Damien Jurado

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damien jurado cd cover.jpg

DAMIEN JURADO
Caught in the Trees
(Secretly Canadian)

By Todd Lavoie

If Damien Jurado ever decided to take a break from music and funnel his creative juices elsewhere – not that I’m encouraging him to – I reckon fiction-writing would be his new calling. The Seattle singer-songwriter has long been a recipient of Raymond Carver comparisons, having built a decade-plus career upon crafting taut, literate tales of quiet alienation and shattering despair that share the same spirit with that of the piercing-stared short-story master.

Having largely foregone the confessional fess-ups of, say, Elliott Smith, Cat Power, or Mark Kozelek, Jurado’s indie folk-rock (and occasionally just full-on, unhyphenated rock) tends to stick with character studies and immersions into the emotional lives of others rather than directing the pen towards the ins and outs of his own heart. Or, so I have gleaned from reading interviews with the man, anyway – ultimately, whatever ratio of storytelling-vs.-autobiography offered up in an artist’s body of work is known to him and him only. In any case, these portraits-in-miniature have not only made for gripping listening over the years – credit duly given to Jurado’s wounded, earhole-snuggling hushes – but they’ve given a solid argument for daydreaming about the possibilities of a literary career for the singer.

Jurado’s latest, Caught in the Trees, probably won’t shoo away any such reveries, either – the disc continues what is now a longstanding tradition of engrossing first-person-narrated fiction set to equally absorbing melodies. According to the press kit, it also took longer to make than any other in his catalog – one that is now nearly double-digits-deep with releases. Whether this was due to outside circumstances or the nature of the songs contained within, I am not sure, but the album does offer plenty of that trademark Jurado intensity.

“Not tough”

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It wasn’t long ago that I stood in a small gallery, getting the same feelings I have on the F train in August: I’m going to get stampeded or dehydrate, and no one will notice. But since the Tea Elles had come highly recommended and was the only band playing, I stuck it out — along with a pack of sweaty citizens who, despite the B.O.-heavy sauna atmosphere, didn’t budge from the front of the room.

Months later in SoMa, I’m sitting in an airy kitchen with three of the four Tea Elles. It’s a bit like you imagine the "cool kid" dorm room to be: people with rolled cigarettes and guitars filing in and out and obscure music crackling out of a boom box.

"We picked the name, thinking Tea and Elles are like British and French. The most pansy, flamboyant name, which is kind of fitting for what we are doing," drummer Jigmae Behr tells me. "I mean, we’re not tough."

It’s true, the Tea Elles — which includes vocalist-guitarist Jeremy Cox, guitarist-vocalist Amelia Radtke, and bassist-vocalist Tanner Griepentrog — are not "tough." But funny enough, I’d have to say they’re kind of punk. Kind of punk and kind of surf — and kind of psychedelic too. Oh, yeah, and they’re also amazing.

The randomness of the band’s music is its most enticing aspect. It’s like a cocktail made by a mad scientist that hangs out at your favorite record store — a little Billy Childish with some Ventures and a dash of Syd Barrett thrown in. It makes a lot of sense when you hear it, but I’m amazed someone made this monster walk.

And the Tea Elles aren’t alone. The more independent shows I go to, the more I see this style emerging. Behr has his theory. "There was a mass consciousness," the 26-year-old explains, rolling another cigarette. "There were a lot of kids all over the country, going to the same shows, buying the same records, and loving the same bands. We all made these projects that came from the same cesspool. We are just all coming through the same filter of a punk aesthetic.

"So we evolved and whatever direction we take is going to be through that lens. If we decide we’re gonna be surf-oriented, or have more girl group harmonies, it’s all coming through that lens."

Oh. Where was I when everyone was getting so awesome? While some of us feel like having instant access to every type of media in the world has become daunting, other young musicians are pulling muses from every vine they can reach. And in a city like San Francisco, where — unlike Los Angeles or New York City — you won’t have a talent scout from MTV at every show, these performers seem to be making music for all the right reasons.

"When I’m writing a song or playing music I’m not thinking about any of that shit," says Cox, 19. "I’m thinking about a handful of people whose music I like."

The so-called egocentric notion of a frontperson is out, too, along with the idea that a band would ever release an album — unless it was done independently. It’s as if groups like the Tea Elles never imagined anyone would ever help them, although David Fox of local art collective Wizard Mountain recently recorded the band free of charge. That session, along with a recent Portland, Ore., jaunt means the Tea Elles probably have enough material for a full-length, which means I can finally stop listening to the melodic howling of "Chance of a Trance" on the outfit’s MySpace page. Before the band left for Portland, they felt that their songs weren’t "album material" — but apparently now they are. And regardless of whether San Francisco listeners are finally handed a DIY-burned CD or some indie label gets wise to the Tea Elles’ innovation, I just want to hear them. (Jen Snyder)

TEA ELLES

With Maus Haus and Ty Segall

Fri/5, 8 p.m., call for price (Sew-Op benefit)

Cellspace

2050 Bryant, SF
(415) 648-7562

www.myspace.com/teaelles

Here Today

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

What the heck is going on with the Today contraceptive sponge? My wife and I have always used condoms, but when we saw the sponges a few months back, we figured, "Let’s try ’em."

Oh … my … god. Going bareback after years of condom use was absotively amazing for both of us. We also discovered that what my wife calls her "special trick" — which involves sliding the condomless head of my cock over her clit — worked OK for her with a condom on, but she describes it as "exquisite" without one.

So now, Synova, the company that was making the sponge, has declared bankruptcy, and sponges are going for $8 a pop on eBay. Do you know if Synova is going to come out of its reorganization and start making the sponge again?

Love,

Spongelover

Dear Lover:

I hate to be the one to break your heart, or rather to rebreak it after Synova — cads that they are — already treated you and yours so callously, but you will survive. Your heart will go on.

There’s something about the sponge (beyond the spermicide itself) that just makes people go all gooey. This is the second time sponge fans have loved and lost, and I’m afraid I do not know when, if ever, your beloved will return. Back in the ’90s, Seinfeld‘s Elaine coined the term "sponge-worthy" when she discovered the first shortage and had to start gauging whether or not a boyfriend rated a precious, hoarded sponge. That model was pulled from the market for safety and manufacturing problems, and didn’t come back until last year, along with a media blitz that attracted hordes of new fans. And yes, Synova, the new owner, has declared bankruptcy. The manufacturing rights have passed to yet another company, but I don’t think it’s saying when — or if — it will begin exercising them.

So what’s the big deal? The sponge is nothing but a … sponge, filled to the brim with Nonoxynol-9, the soapy, controversial spermicide that has been around forever. The big advantages are ease of application (pop it in) and forgetability (you don’t have to pop in another one for a day or so). Nonoxynol-9, though, can be some nasty stuff. A number of studies have demonstrated that it causes enough irritation to let in pathogens, including HIV, and it tastes horrible. Plus, I will forever bear a grudge against it since it caused a boyfriend to develop a huge bright red clown-mouth — a scarlet letter "O" — around his lips, just in time for Passover at my mother’s house, and people kept asking him about it all night until he was ready to die. So, um, none for me. But I do understand your dismay at the loss of a dear contraceptive.

There are other forms of spermicide — film or pellets or whatever — but they don’t work well without a diaphragm-y thing to hold them in place. In fact, even with such a device, they work just as poorly as the beloved sponge, which is very poorly indeed in women who have had children and only sort of OK in women who haven’t. The sponge was never a great form of birth control; it just allowed for great sex. Is your wife absolutely sure she wouldn’t like a nice NuvaRing or an IUD? I know, it’s not fair — I’d like to be able to recommend some sort of device to insert — but they’ve got to be better than condoms and eternal sorrow.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

I’m on the pill and monogamous, so I’m not limited to water-based lubricants. Recently my partner and I got the idea to try vitamin E oil — it smells and tastes pretty good, it lasts longer than Astroglide, and if it’s edible, we figured, it must be safe. Well … a short while after we happily started lubing with E, I got a urinary tract infection and have since read numerous lists of suggestions for avoiding UTIs that all seemed to mention specifically using a water-based lubricant. I feel somewhat weird about asking my doctor this question, so I’m turning to you: are "natural" but non-water-based lubes such as vitamin E oil bad for one’s inner girly parts, or have I wrongly linked a few coincidental events?

Love,

Gimme an E?

Dear E:

You’re right that it could be a coincidence, but I’m betting it’s not. I don’t know what kind of carrier oil was used for the vitamin E, but whatever it is, your vagina probably doesn’t know how to get rid of it. I completely agree that water-based lubes are essentially unsatisfactory, but luckily one does not have to reach for weird, random substances off the supplement shelf. What you want is a nice silicone lube, of which there are many. You can get them flavored if that’s your scene, but most are taste- and scent-free, non-irritating, non-drying, and so slippery they are actually kind of dangerous — and you really want to watch where you prop the bottle between applications. You will love them and you will thank me.

Love,

Andrea

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

Also, Andrea is teaching! Contact her if you’re interested in (sex)life after baby classes. Her new blog is at www.gogetyourjacket.com, but don’t look there for the butt sex. There isn’t any.

Sanfranciscoism

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OPINION It appears the San Francisco Chronicle‘s editors have chopped "progressive" from the paper’s approved lexicon for local political reporting, replacing the term with "ultra-liberal" and "far left" to characterize politicians whose views they don’t share. Should we care? After all, the terms of political discourse have been so twisted, warped, and debased in recent years, one might be forgiven for not telling right from left or conservative from liberal. For most Americans, it’s all one big Babel of ideological tongues — confusing to be sure, but increasingly irrelevant.

But I think words do matter. Years ago, in Left Coast City, I took a stab at defining the city’s progressivism as "a system of values, beliefs, and ideas that encourages an expanded role for local government in achieving distributive justice, limits on growth, neighborhood preservation, and ethnic-cultural diversity under conditions of public accountability and direct citizen participation." The major problem with this working definition is that it’s local in scope and closely tied to San Francisco’s unique political culture, history, and setting.

We all know the ideological spectrum is left-shifted in San Francisco, and local politicians labeled as "liberals" or even "radicals" in faraway Washington, DC are often pilloried as moderates or even conservatives back here. Indeed, a major reason driving the use of "progressive" in the city’s local political discourse was precisely to differentiate anti-establishment political leaders from pro-establishment ones who were happy to serve and support a corrupt capitalist system while promising to reform it from within.

San Francisco is the nation’s vanguard city of political reform and social change. It is a working model of progressive community that leads all others in fusing the agendas of economic growth, social justice, and environmental protection.

All great movements must begin and radiate from some place. As Robert Wuthnow put it in his Communities of Discourse, a study of the origins and spread of the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and European Socialism: "None of these ideologies sprang into bloom on a thousand hilltops as if scattered there by the wind. They grew under the careful cultivation of particular movements that arose in specific places and that bore specific relations to their surroundings."

San Francisco activists must find a way to free their homegrown progressive ideology from its local context and scale it up to reach and persuade other Americans. Ironically, most of that scaling up is taking place now under the rubric of "San Francisco values," a derisive epithet originally coined by right-wing pundits but now proudly brandished by some city leaders and opportunistically embraced by others to fuel their political ambitions. By whatever name ("Sanfrancisoism"?), the city’s values have noisily infiltrated national political discourse and have pulled the ideological spectrum back toward the left. Gay civil unions, for example, suddenly seemed acceptable to national politicians, even George W. Bush, after Mayor Newsom began issuing same-sex marriage licenses.

So the term "progressive," although contested, works well in San Francisco. Don’t suppress it or throw it away. Outside the city, scale up with another term that average Americans can relate to and understand.

Rich DeLeon

Rich DeLeon is professor emeritus of political science at San Francisco State University.

Palin’s shotgun wedding

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palin2.jpg

Marry my daughter or else!

By Tim Redmond
I feel sorry for the kids.

Sarah Palin’s daughter is 17. Her boyfriend is either 17 or 18, depending on which reports you read. The New York Post, bless it, has the scoop on the dad: According to his MySpace page, Levi Johnston

boasts, “I’m a f – – -in’ redneck” who likes to snowboard and ride dirt bikes.

“But I live to play hockey. I like to go camping and hang out with the boys, do some fishing, shoot some s- – – and just f – – -in’ chillin’ I guess.”

He also claims to be “in a relationship,” but states, “I don’t want kids.”

Too late now, Levi. If you weren’t screwing the daughter of a woman who wants to be vice president, perhaps there would be other choices. Abortion is legal in Alaska, whatever Gov. Palin thinks, and there are plenty of pregnant 17-year-olds who choose to give babies up for adoption. There might have been a chance for you to go to college, go on with your life.

But not now. These two kids will be forced to get married whether they want to or not, because that’s what the Republican Party needs them to do.

You think that happy marriage is going to last? Family fucking values.

Curtain calls

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Fall arts resolution No. 1: have no faith in leaders. Obummer and McPain will only disappoint, or worse. (Probably worse.) If faith you must ooze, kindly direct it toward people who really care about you and have your interests at heart. Why did Gore Vidal write his play The Best Man (1960), for instance? Most likely it wasn’t to get elected (though he did try). And Frank Wedekind was even less enamored of the powers that be when he penned his way-pre-punk "tragedy of childhood," Spring Awakening, a late 19th-century cri de coeur against authority whose transition to Broadway and electric guitars has both an aptness and an irony going for it that might have amused old FW. As Tom Stoppard confirms, power is a compromised and compromising affair whatever side of history you happen to be on, but rock ‘n’ roll will save your soul. So will Teddy Pendergrass, for that matter, as soul-survivor and kinetic Philly memoirist Colman Domingo brilliantly attests. So this fall, remember who your real friends are. You can direct any remaining or follow-up questions to author-playwright Kobo Abe, as well as the other miscellaneous sage nonconformists referenced in the list below.

The Best Man A Broadway hit for Gore Vidal, this political comedy-drama remains fresh as a daisy, if such a sweet olfactory simile can apply to the mosh pit of electoral politics.

Now playing through Sept. 28. Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk. (510) 843-4822, www.auroratheatre.org

San Francisco Fringe Festival The mighty Exit Theatre turned 25 this year. The SF Fringe Festival, the annual small-theater smorgasbord the Exit serves up each fall, turns a sexy 17. Judging by this year’s lineup, that means stripped-down, butt-plugged, bare-bones, rock-hard, strap-on sexy.

Sept. 3–14. Various venues, including the Exit Theatres, 156 Eddy, SF. www.sffringe.org

A Boy and His Soul (Thick House) and A Bronx Tale (Golden Gate Theatre) If only it were a double bill. These two solo plays about growing up (in Philadelphia and the titular Bronx) take place on radically different Bay Area stages, and deal with radically different stages in the lives of what you might call radically different actors (Coleman Domingo and Chazz Palminteri, respectively). Both are masterful, and as long as you’re at it, throw in Carlo D’Amore’s own deft and hilarious family-centered solo, No Parole, coming to the Marsh in November (www.themarsh.org).

Sept. 3–14. Thick House, 1695 18th St., SF. www.thickhouse.org

Sept. 23–Oct. 19. Golden Gate Theatre, One Taylor, SF. www.shnsf.com

Spring Awakening Best of Broadway brings to town this rock musical makeover of Wedekind’s great drama.

Sept. 4–Oct. 12. Curran Theatre, 445 Geary, SF. www.shnsf.com

Rock ‘N’ Roll Here comes Tom Stoppard’s character-concentrated take on Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution, as well as on leftist politics across several decades of Cold War history. It’s a good play to argue about afterward, in your highest pinko dudgeon, over pinot and tartare de boeuf at the Grand Cafe.

Sept. 11–Oct. 12. American Conservatory Theatre, 415 Geary, SF. (415) 749-2228, www.act-sf.org

HyperReal Bay Area performance artist Sara Kraft’s low-key brilliance by now merits a neologism: krafty (with a k!). Krafty = shrewd, inventive, technically savvy, wry, playful, tuneful, eerie, unsettling, and, generally speaking, not to be missed.

Oct. 10–12. CounterPULSE, 1310 Mission, SF. 1-800-838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com/event/36251

War Peace: The One Drop Rule Living Word Festival 2008, titled "Race Is Fiction," features a new collaborative work by Youth Speaks alumni and Teen Poetry Slam champions Chinaka Hodge, Rafael Casal, Daveed Diggs, and Nico Cary. Directed by festival curator Marc Bamuthi Joseph, War Peace imagines a drought-ravaged Bay Area as potential war zone.

Oct. 23–24. Theater Artaud, 450 Florida, SF. www.youthspeaks.org

Angry Black White Boy Felonious’ Dan Wolf and Tommy Shepherd unveil a poetical rap-fused remix of Adam Mansbach’s satirical and incendiary novel about race and identity in the United States, adapted by Wolf.

Oct. 23–Nov. 16. Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia, SF. www.theintersection.org

Continuous City Last year’s work-in-progress is this year’s full-fledged multimedia outing as New York City–based boundary pushers, the Builders Association, returns with a three-pronged narrative (incorporating much Bay Area–derived material) negotiating the ever-more permeable membrane between the global and the local, and our networked and unplugged experience.

Nov. 6–8. Novellus Theater at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard, SF. (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org

Friends Brava! For Women in the Arts’ new artistic director Raelle Myrick-Hodges carries forward the spirit of its founding mission with offerings eclectic and unexpected. The revival of Woman in the Dunes author Kobo Abe’s play Friends promises to be a timely and potent production, though Abe penned his scathing absurdist take on gentrification some four decades ago.

Nov. 6–17. Brava Theater Center, 2781 24th St., SF. (415) 647-2822, www.brava.org

Notes of a dirty old man.

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

"YOWWWWWWW!"

I was having visions in those days. They came mostly when I was drying out, not drinking, waiting around for money or something to arrive, and the visions were very real — Technicolor and with music — mostly they flashed across the top of the ceiling while I was on the bed in a half-slumberous state. I had worked in too many factories, had seen too many jails, had drunk too many bottles of cheap wine to maintain any sort of cool and intelligent state toward my visions —

"OH, GO AWAY YOU BASTARDS! I BEG YOU! GET THE HELL OUT! YOU’RE GOING TO FLAKE ME FOR SURE! OH MY GOD OH MY JESUS, MERCY!"

It was San Francisco. Then I’d hear a knock on the door. It was the old woman who ran the place, Mama Fazzio.

"Mr. Bukowski?" she said through the door.

"AAAAAAAAKKKK!"

"What?"

"Ulll. Ummph…."

"Are you all right?"

"Oh, sure."

"Can I come in?"

I’d get up and open the door, sweat now cold behind my ears.

"Say …"

"What?"

"You need something to keep your wine and beer cold, you don’t have a refrigerator. Even a pan of water with ice in it would help. I’ll get you a pan of water with ice in it."

"Thanks."

"And I remember when you were here two years ago you used to have a phonograph. You’d play symphony music all the time. Don’t you miss your music?"

"Yeah."

Then she left. I was afraid to lie down on the bed or the visions would come again. They always came just the moment before sleep. Or the moment before one would have slept. Horrible things: spiders eating fat babies in webs, babies with milk-white skin and sea-blue eyes. Then came faces, 3 feet across with puss-holes circled with red, white, and blue circles. Things like that. I sat in a hard wooden chair and peered at the San Francisco Bay Bridge. Then I heard a rumbling sound on the stairway. Some giant beast crawling toward me? I opened the door. There was Mama Fazzio, 80 years old, pushing and twisting an ancient stand-up green wooden Victrola, the wind-’em-up kind, and the thing must have been twice her weight and clumsy up that narrow stairway and I stood there and said, "Jesus Christ, hold it, don’t move!"

"I can get it!"

"You’re going to kill yourself!"

I ran down and grabbed the thing but she insisted on helping me. We took it into my room. It looked good.

"There. Now you can have some music."

"Yes. Thanks very much. As soon as I get some records."

"You had breakfast?"

"Not hungry."

"Come on down to breakfast any day."

"Thanks."

"And if you don’t have the rent, don’t pay it."

"I’ll try to have the rent."

"And excuse me, but my daughter was helping me clean your room when she found some papers with writing on them. She was very fascinated with your writing. She and her husband want you to come to dinner at their place."

"No."

"I told them that you were funny. I told them that you wouldn’t come."

"Thanks."

After she left I walked around the block a few times and when I came back there was a huge pan of ice with 6 or 7 quarts of beer floating in it plus 2 bottles of good Italian wine. Mama came up 3 or 4 hours later and had a beer.

"You goin’ to dinner at my daughter’s?"

"You’ve bought my soul, Mama. Name the night."

She fooled me. She named the night.

The rest of that night I drank the stuff and wound up the old Victrola and watched the empty felt-covered wheel run at different speeds, and I put my head down to the little wooden slits in the belly of the machine and listened to the humming sound. The whole machine smelled good, holy, and sad; the thing fascinated me like graveyards and pictures of the dead, and the night went well. Later in the night I even found a lone record in the belly of the machine and I put it on:

"He’s got the whole world

in His hands

He’s got you and me, brother

He’s got the little babies

in His hands

He’s got everybody

in His hands….."

This scared me so much that the next day, hangover and all, I went out and got a job as a stock boy in a department store. I started the day after. Some old gal in cosmetics (she seemed to be at the bad age for women — 46 to 53) kept hollering that she had to have the stuff RIGHT AWAY. I think it was the insistent shrill insanity in her voice. I told her: "Keep your pants on, baby, I’ll be along soon to relieve you of your tensions…." The manager fired me 5 minutes later. I could hear her screaming over the phone: "If that isn’t the damndest SNOTTIEST STOCK BOY I ever heard!!! Who the hell does he think he is?"

"Now, Mrs. Jason, please calm yourself …"

At the dinner it was confusing also. The daughter looked real good and the husband was a big Italian. They were both communists. He had a fine fancy night job somewhere and she just laid around and read books and rubbed her lovely legs. They poured me Italian wine. But nothing made sense to me. I felt like an idiot. Communism didn’t make any more sense to me than democracy. And the thought often did come to me as it came to me at the table that night: I am an idiot. Can’t everybody see that? What’s this wine? What’s this talk? I’m not interested. It had no connection with me. Can’t they see through my skin, can’t they see that I am nothing?

"We like your writing. You remind us of Voltaire," she said.

"Who’s Voltaire?" I asked.

"Oh Jesus," said the husband.

They mostly ate and talked and I mostly drank the Italian wine. I got the idea that they were disgusted with me but since I had expected that, it didn’t bother me. I mean, not too much. He had to go to work and I stayed on.

"I might rape your wife," I told him. He laughed all the way down the stairway.

She sat in front of the fireplace, showing her legs above the knees. I sat in a chair, watching. I hadn’t had a piece of ass in two years. "There’s this very sensitive boy," she said, "who goes with my girlfriend. They both sit around and talk communism for hours and he never touches her. It’s very strange. She’s confused and …"

"Lift your dress higher."

"What?"

"I said, lift your dress higher. I want to see more of your legs. Pretend I’m Voltaire."

She did show me a little more. I was surprised. But it was more than I could stand. I walked over and pulled her dress back to her hips. Then I pulled her to the floor and was on top of her like some sick thing. I got the panties off. It was hot in front of that fire, very hot. Then when it was over I became the idiot again:

"I’m sorry. I’m out of my mind. Do you want to call the police? How can you be so young when your mother is so old?"

"It’s grandma. She just calls me ‘daughter.’ I’m going to the bathroom. Be right back."

"Sure."

I wiped off with my shorts and when she came out we had some small talk and then I opened the door to leave and walked into a closetful of overcoats and various things. We both laughed.

"Goddamn," I said, "I’m crazy."

"No, you’re not."

I walked on down the stairway, back over the streets of San Francisco, and back to my room. And there in the pan was more beer, more wine, floating in water and ice. I drank it all, sitting there in that wooden chair by the window, all the lights out in the room, looking out, drinking.

The luck was mine. A hundred dollar piece of ass and ten bucks worth of drink. It could go on and on. I could get luckier and luckier. More fine Italian wine, more fine Italian ass; free breakfast, free rent, the flowing and glowing of the goddamned soul overtaking everything. Each man was a name and a way but what a horrible waste most of them were. I was going to be different. I kept drinking and didn’t quite remember going to bed.

In the morning it wasn’t bad. I found a half empty and warm quart bottle of beer. Drank that. Then I lay down on the bed, started to sweat. I laid there quite a time, became sleepy.

This time it was a lampshade that turned into a very evil and large face and then back into a lampshade again. It went on and on, like a repeat movie, and I sweated sweated sweated, thinking that each time, that face would be the unbearable thing to me, whatever that unbearable thing was. There it came AGAIN!

"AAAAAAAAKKKKK! AKKKKK! JESUS! JESUS EAT PUSSY! SAVE ME, OH LORD JESUS!

The knock on the door.

"Mr. Bukowski?"

"Ummph?"

"Are you all right?"

"Yowp?"

"I said, ‘Are you all right?’"

"Oh fine, just fine!"

In came old Mama Fazzio. "You drank all your stuff."

"Yes, it was a hot night last night."

"You got records yet?"

"Just ‘He’s got the little babies in His hands.’"

"My daughter wants you to come to dinner again."

"I can’t. Got something going. Got to clear it up."

"What do you mean?"

"Sacramento, by the 26th of this month."

"Are you in trouble of some sort?"

"Oh no, Mama, no trouble at all."

"I like you. When you come back, you come live with us again."

"Sure, Mama."

I listened to the old woman going down the stairs. Then I threw myself down on the mattress. How the wind howls in the mouth of the brain; how sad it is to be alive with arms and legs and eyes and brain and cock and balls and bellybutton and all the else and waiting waiting waiting for the whole thing to die, so silly, but nothing else to do, nothing else to do, really. A Tom Mix life with a constipation flaw. I was almost asleep.

"AAAAHHHHHHHHKKKKK! WHEEEEE! MOTHER OF MARY!"

"Mr. Bukowski?"

"Glaglaa$$$"

"What’s wrong?"

"Wha’?"

"Are you all right?"

"Oh, fine, jus’ fine!"

I finally had to get out of San Francisco. They were driving me crazy. With their free wine and free everything. I’m in Los Angeles now where they don’t give anything away, and I’m feeling a little bit better…

HEY! What was THAT??? …

Reprinted from National Underground Review, May 15, 1968, courtesy of David Stephen Calonne.

From the forthcoming City Lights collection Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook: Uncollected Stories and Essays 1944-1990, edited by David Stephen Calonne.

Burning woman

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Readers:

It’s late summer again, when the hipper urban enclaves empty out and suddenly there’s parking because all the cool people have gone to Burning Man or some other anarcho-artsy fire-dancing/fairy-wings festival. Burning Man in particular, plunked down as it is on a lake bed as hot as Venus and as barren as the moon, can take a toll on participants’ health and well-being. According to my friends at the Women’s Community Clinic (www.womenscommunityclinic.org) nothing takes more of a beating out there than the private parts (less private than usual due to rampant nudity and a fair amount of random partnering) of female festival-goers.

So what do women need to know to avoid having to rush their rashes straight to the clinic as soon as they’ve unloaded the truck and showered off the playa dust? Staffers there asked me to write a list of common sense self-protection maneuvers for a situation in which sense is less valued than sensation and spontaneity.

(1) This goes for everyone: drink an insane amount of water. I actually recommend bringing double the usual ration of a gallon a day — it’s not like you can easily run out for more in a commerce-free zone like Black Rock City. You want to "piss clear" (an infelicitous phrase that I have nevertheless often found useful since first encountering it at Burning Man). Your health depends on it. Your urinary tract, in particular, will thank you.

(2) Keep clean. This is, of course, one of the many uses to which any extra water can be put, but you’ll also need unscented baby wipes with no greasy or sticky additives. You don’t want to attract every mote of dust (and oh my, is there a lot of dust) and convince it to cling to your damp spots. Out in the desert, I wash my face with witch hazel pads and my other parts with massive numbers of store-brand unscented "natural" baby wipes. Don’t get these mixed up.

(3) Bring a safer sex kit. Consider all casual pickup sex unsafe unless somehow proven otherwise — you don’t want to be having long, intense negotiations with strangers while you’re out of your head on whatever you’re doing out there to get out of your head. Use condoms and, while you’re doubling your recommended water ration, do the same with the lube. The fierce desert wind wicks moisture like you would not believe, and even nice known-quantity sex with your steady partner can chafe. Lube up. You might want to consider using gloves for anything really intimate, too, and just generally being more careful than usual about introducing anybody’s (blank) into your (blank). After a few days on the playa, you’re likely to be abraded, chapped, windburned, sunburned, scraped, scratched, and undefended in a way that’s unfamiliar to the city dweller. It’s much easier to pick up somebody else’s creepy-crawlies when your skin isn’t in top shape, and trust me, it won’t be. Use the condoms and other barriers when reasonable. Piss clear when you’re done and don’t forget the wipes. Bring alcohol gel and clean your hands regularly, even if you haven’t been up to anything. Don’t get crazy and clean things that oughtn’t to be cleaned with alcohol, though.

Most of all, don’t be an idiot. I can’t stress this enough, and the Community Clinic, while staffed by women too nice to call you an idiot, doesn’t want you to be one either. If you’re going to take substances specifically designed to bring out the idiot in you, do so under the safest circumstances you can manage. Party with your friends, make a meeting place, follow a buddy system, and make some rules for yourself. If you’re going to take E or anything else likely to act as an empathogen (or "entactogen") — that is, a drug that makes you think you like people who may not, in truth, be worthy of your affection — try to do it in the presence of people who’ve got your back, and not because they want to climb up on it and hump you like a dog.

There are organizations dedicated to disseminating information on safer drug-taking. I do the sex part, and I habitually worry about young people having sex with people they don’t like, or, especially, with people who don’t like them. If you’re going to do it anyway, use a condom. Not only do you not have these people’s e-mail addresses, you may not even like them, remember? You’re not going to want to track them down later to ask about that funny-looking pimple.

And finally, if you’re female and have sex with men or might have sex with men after enough empathogens, bring Plan B emergency contraception with you. This may seem extreme, but it’s not like you have to use it. Condoms can break or be forgotten. Midnight’s "oh, what the hell" can easily turn to "What the hell did I do?" in the harsh (in Burning Man’s case, extremely harsh) light of day.

Love,

Andrea

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

JROTC is not a choice

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OPINION To hear proponents of the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) talk, it’s a matter of personal choice for 14- and 15-year-olds to sign up for the Pentagon’s military recruitment program, which is being phased out of San Francisco’s public schools June 2009. The San Francisco Board of Education also recently voted to remove physical education credit from the program this school year. It had to: the retired military officers who teach the course don’t meet the educational standards of state law, and the course doesn’t meet state physical education standards.

Supporters of JROTC are taking the issue to the November ballot. Their initiative, albeit non-binding, would put San Franciscans on record as in support of the military program.

As Democratic clubs and other political organizations begin their endorsement process, progressives need to understand the importance of defeating this initiative. It’s not a harmless measure. If it passes, the new school board can use it to reinstate JROTC. If it loses, it’s less likely the board will change its course. Thankfully, last week the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee (DCCC) voted overwhelmingly not to endorse the measure.

JROTC is not summer camp or a harmless after-school activity. It is one more way the military finds bodies for its illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Denisha Williams can tell you that. The African American high school senior in Philadelphia told the City Paper that she left JROTC and opted out of the military having her contact info. It hasn’t made any difference: “I have received phone calls, e-mail, three letters and a 15-minute videotape. I even received a phone call from a female recruiter asking if I was still interested in the Navy. I told her I wasn’t and hung up. A week later I received another letter and the tape.”

Capt. Daniel R. Gager, commander of the US Army recruiting station in south Philadelphia, said he and other recruiters were ordered by the US Recruiting Command to put more time and energy into recruiting high school upperclassmen such as Williams.

In San Francisco, at least 15 percent of the cadets have been placed in the program without their consent. It seems the military will do whatever it takes to get in front of our youngsters in our public schools.

Pressuring kids to join the military is wrong. International law says kids under 18 should not be recruited at all, and the ACLU agrees (see www.aclu.org/intlhumanrights/gen). Recruiters in every high school and at every mall in this country break that law every day.

Nationally about 40 percent of JROTC kids end up in the military. In San Francisco, proponents claim only 2 percent go on to military careers. They are wrong. According to the school district, no tracking of JROTC students is done.

Please work to defeat Proposition V, the pro-JROTC initiative.

Mark Sanchez and Tommi Avicolli Mecca

Mark Sanchez is President of the San Francisco Board of Education and an eighth grade science teacher. Tommi Avicolli Mecca is a radical queer activist and writer whose regular columns appear at beyondchron.org.

Dreams of Obama

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› news@sfbg.com

Barack Obama, it is true, is a transformational leader. But he needs a transformational movement to become a transformational president.

He is transformational not only by his charisma and brilliance, but by embodying the possibility of an African American being chosen president in the generation following the civil rights movement. Whether he wins or loses, the vast movement inspired by Obama will become the next generation of American social activists.

For many Americans, the possibility of Obama is a deeply personal one. I mean here the mythic Obama who exists in our imaginations, not the literal Obama whose centrist positions will disappoint many progressives.

Myths are all-important, as Obama writes in Dreams from My Father (Three Rivers Press, 2004). Fifty years ago, the mythic Obama existed only as an aspiration, an ideal, in a country where interracial love was taboo and interracial marriage was largely banned. As Obama himself declared on the night of the Iowa primary, "Some said this night would never come."

The early civil rights movement, the jazz musicians, and the Beat poets dreamed up this mythic Obama before the literal Obama could materialize. His African father and white countercultural mother dared to dream and love him into existence, incarnate him, at the creative moment of the historic march on Washington. Only the overthrow of Jim Crow segregation opened space for the dream to rise politically.

In one of his best oratorical moments, Obama summons the spirit of social movements built from the bottom up, from the Revolutionary War to the abolitionist crusade, to the women’s suffrage cause, to the eight-hour day and the rights of labor, ending with the time of his birth when the walls came down in Selma and Montgomery, Ala., and Delano. As he repeats this mantra of movements thousands of times to millions of Americans, a new cultural understanding becomes possible. This is the foundation of a new American story that is badly needed.

Obama’s emerging narrative also includes but supercedes the other major explanation of American specialness, the narrative of the "melting pot," by noting that whatever "melting" did occur was always in the face of massive and entrenched opposition from the privileged.

John McCain represents a very different aspect of the American story. His inability to limit the adventurist appetite for war is the most dangerous element of the McCain, and the Republican, worldview. It is paralleled, of course, by their inability to limit the corporate appetite for an unregulated market economy. In combination, the brew is an economy directed to the needs of the country club rich, the oil companies, and military contractors. A form of crony capitalism slouches forward in place of either competitive markets or state regulation.

Yet McCain has a good chance, the best chance among Republicans, of winning in November. He appeals to those whose idea of the future is more of the past, buying time against the inevitable. And McCain is running against Obama, who threatens our institutions and culture simply by representing the unexpected and unauthorized future.

My prediction: if he continues on course, Obama will win the popular vote by a few percentage points in November, but will be at serious risk in the Electoral College. The institution, rooted in the original slavery compromise, may be a barrier too great to overcome.

The priority for Obama supporters has to be mobilization of new, undecided, and independent voters in up-for-grabs states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan, while expanding the Electoral College delegates in places like New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and possibly Virginia.

There are many outside the Obama movement who assert that the candidate is "not progressive enough," that Obama will be co-opted as a new face for American interventionism, that in any event real change cannot be achieved from the top down. These criticisms are correct. But in the end, they miss the larger point.

Most of us want President Obama to withdraw troops from Iraq more rapidly than the 16 months promised by his campaign. But it is important that Obama’s position is shared by Iraq’s prime minister and the vast majority of both our peoples. The Iraqi regime, pressured by its own people, has rejected the White House and McCain’s refusal to adopt a timetable.

The real problem with Obama’s position on Iraq is his adherence to the outmoded Baker-Hamilton proposal to leave thousands of American troops behind for training, advising and ill-defined "counterterrorism" operations. Obama should be pressured to reconsider this recipe for a low visibility counterinsurgency quagmire.

On Iran, Obama has usefully emphasized diplomacy as the only path to manage the bilateral crisis and assure the possibility of orderly withdrawal from Iraq. He should be pressed to resist any escalation.

On Afghanistan, Obama has proposed transferring 10,000 American combat troops from Iraq, which means out of the frying pan, into the fire. On Pakistan, and the possibility of a ground invasion by Afghan and US troops, this could be Obama’s Bay of Pigs, a debacle.

On Israel-Palestine, he will pursue diplomacy more aggressively, but little more. Altogether, the counterinsurgencies in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan are likely to become a spreading global quagmire and a human-rights nightmare, nullifying the funding prospects for health care reform or other domestic initiatives.

In Latin America, Obama has been out of step and out of touch with the winds of democratic change sweeping the continent. His commitment to fulfilling the United Nations anti-poverty goals, or to eradicating sweatshops through a global living wage, is underwhelming and — given his anti-terrorism wars —will be underfinanced.

And so on. The man will disappoint as well as inspire.

Once again, then, why support him by knocking on doors, sending money, monitoring polling places, and getting our hopes up? There are three reasons that stand out in my mind. First, American progressives, radicals, and populists need to be part of the vast Obama coalition, not perceived as negative do-nothings in the minds of the young people and African Americans at the center of the organized campaign.

It is not a "lesser evil" for anyone of my generation’s background to send an African American Democrat to the White House. Pressure from Obama supporters is more effective than pressure from critics who don’t care much if he wins and won’t lift a finger to help him. Second, his court appointments will keep us from a right-wing lock on social, economic, and civil liberties issues during our lifetime. Third, it should be no problem to vote for Obama and picket his White House when justified.

Obama himself says he has solid progressive roots but that he intends to campaign and govern from the center. It is a challenge to rise up, organize, and reshape the center, and build a climate of public opinion so intense that it becomes necessary to redeploy from military quagmires, take on the unregulated corporations and uncontrolled global warming, and devote resources to domestic priorities like health care, the green economy, and inner-city jobs for youth.

What is missing in the current equation is not a capable and enlightened centrist but a progressive social movement on a scale like those of the past.

The refrain is familiar. Without the militant abolitionists, including the Underground Railroad and John Brown, there would have been no pressure on President Lincoln to end slavery. Without the radicals of the 1930s, there would have been no pressure on President Franklin Roosevelt, and therefore no New Deal, no Wagner Act, no Social Security.

The creative tension between large social movements and enlightened Machiavellian leaders is the historical model that has produced the most important reforms in the course of American history.

Mainstream political leaders will not move to the left of their own base. There are no shortcuts to radical change without a powerful and effective constituency organized from the bottom up. The next chapter in Obama’s new American story remains to be written, perhaps by the most visionary of his own supporters.

Progressives need to unite for Obama, but also unite — organically at least, and not in a top-down way — on issues like peace, the environment, the economy, media reform, campaign finance, and equality like never before. The growing conflict today is between democracy and empire, and the battle fronts are many and often confusing. Even the Bush years have failed to unite American progressives as effectively as occurred during Vietnam. There is no reason to expect a President McCain to unify anything more than our manic depression.

But there is the improbable hope that the movement set ablaze by the Obama campaign will be enough to elect Obama and a more progressive Congress in November, creating an explosion of rising expectations for social movements — here and around the world — that President Obama will be compelled to meet in 2009.

That is a moment to live and fight for.

Tom Hayden is a longtime political activist and former California legislator. This article was commissioned by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, of which the Guardian is a member, and is being carried in newspapers across the country this week.

Semiconscious Consumerism: Dope gear for idiots

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Blogger Justin Juul ponders high-end street gear in a time of economic crisis. Read his saga of American Spirits here, and his sassy deconstruction of the Nike and American Apparel connection here.

Here’s a bunch of shit I bought because I thought I was the only person in San Francisco tuned into the world of supercool urban fashion. Most of these items cost hundreds of dollars and almost nothing fit straight out of the box. So, genius that I am, instead of re-selling my stuff on Ebay for a profit, I took everything to a tailor for resizing. Which, most times, wound up costing almost as much as the actual item.

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It wouldn’t have been so bad if I had been right, if indeed I could ever hope to know more about “high-end streetwear” than your average 15 year-old skater thug. But I don’t. By the time most of this stuff got my to house you could buy knock-off versions at any store on Sixth Street. And besides, look at it! I’m almost thirty years old, man. I can’t go outside in this shit. Still, even though I never wear any of the stuff I buy, and even though I’m fully aware that the whole street wear industry is a marketing sham that preys on the ridiculous aspirations of clueless suburban kids, I’m insanely proud of my ghetto-fab wardrobe.

I mean, whatever, right? These clothes may not be worth the money I spent on them, and they may not make me cool, but I have them and you don’t, so there. You can call me shallow and you can call me crazy, but you can’t deny that if you could get your hands on my gear you’d be happy for life. I win.

Here Are the Top Five Coolest Garments in my Collection:

Oberst, Wilco, Wrens rock for net neutrality

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rockthenet.jpg

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Rock the Net: Musicians for Network Neutrality
(Thirsty Ear)

By Ian Ferguson

Although Al Gore considered naming the Internet “Magic,” and it seems that way to some (black magic for John McCain), an actual energy- and bandwidth-consuming infrastructure supports our browsing habits. Once the Net broadened beyond ARPA, private companies (namely service providers like AT&T and Comcast) assumed control of its traffic lights. Service providers are huge corporations: profit machines compelled to consider little else. These companies want to charge content providers (Web sites ranging from Google to your favorite blog) a fee for more bandwith: more bandwith means the Net works faster for a given site.

The FCC hasn’t yet stepped in to regulate the practice, but is currently evaluating the available options. In a show of support for net neutrality – the principle that demands service providers keep the Net free and open and by extension an indie band’s site as fast as any multiplatinum act’s – a coalition of musicians and labels have united to make an album intent on persuading Congress and the FCC to come around to their point of view. After all, as labels suffer, the Net offers itself as an inevitable platform for whatever distribution model to come – take OK Go’s YouTube music video-fueled fame, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s blog-buzzed status, or Radiohead’s acclaimed In Rainbows digital release.

Though none of these bands appear as part of the collective of musicians supporting network neutrality on Rock the Net, the album more than makes up for their absence. Everyone knows that one of the most promising potentials the Internet offers audiophiles is ease of discovery. No longer must one buy countless so-so albums to find one gem: simply peruse Imeem, Muxtape, or MySpace for revelations. This disc provides a microcosm of that in tangible form: 15 artists – some familiar, some not so well-known – present tracks as varied as infinite cyberspace.

Fated to annihilate

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER To get the grimy lowdown on East Bay hard rock combo Annihilation Time, you don’t have to look very far: try the party-starting band’s Oakland townhouse.

"Yeah, it’s barely standing," says guitarist Graham Clise with a chortle. Apparently the best party had to be New Year’s Eve two years ago, he recalls from San Diego, where the group is taking a break at the beach while on tour with its new third album, Tales of the Ancient Age (Tee Pee). "I wake up in the morning, and the entire place is smashed — like all the drawers are smashed out. I look out the window, and in the backyard the couch is on fire.

"It’s still like that, unfortunately."

How much more rawk fun can you have? Hailing from a speedier, hellbent-for-lather breed of ’70s-era metal à la Priest mixed with the set-to-pulverize tendencies of SoCal hardcore, Tales of the Ancient Age is all about the sloppy good times, rug burns, and all-business dual lead guitars as it stumbles through passes at skinhead chicks on public trans ("Bald Headed Woman") and bouts of lousy hygiene ("Germ Freak [I Ain’t No]"). Could Annihilation Time be the seriously anti-sobriety, hard-rockin’ fun-metalists we’ve been waiting for? Contemplate their comic-book vision of apocalyptic Oaktown rendered by former guitarist Shaun Filley on the cover of Tales, and the band seems to slip right in between the politically tinged rigor of High on Fire and the pagan brooding of Saviours, who once lived in Annihilation Time’s raging HQ. Exhibit one: Annihilation Time’s "Jonestown," far from a righteous wail of despair against groupthink. Instead the band embraces a punkily perverse, Ramones-ish, kicks-first perspective — would Clise partake in the Kool-Aid? "That’s my philosophy," he yelps. "I’d give it a try, sure."

The seven-year-old band moved to O-town from the Ventura, Oxnard, and Ojai area about two and a half years ago because "we all decided we were sick of it down there," Clise says. "It seemed like a pretty cool, happening spot. We wanted to try it out. You can get away with anything, too. That’s the other cool thing. You’re kind of free to do whatever you want, and nobody is going to fuck with you too much. It’s kinda like one of the last free places — where you can be a shithead and get away with it!"

Unfortunately a group also runs the risk of finding their music flying under the radar — into obscurity: Tales comes after two other self-released albums and two 7-inches. So this time the band looked to licenser Tee Pee for help. ("We always have big plans of having our own label and getting our shit out there and working hard at it. But the reality is, it’s a lot of work and we’re kind of sick of having to deal with it. We just want to play music.") The next career move? Annihilation Time may just up and move their party to Pittsburgh, following their relocated vocalist Jimmy Rose. They’ll obviously do anything for a ripping yarn — hence the less-than-nostalgic album title. "We chose the name because it sounds all serious and epic," Clise explains. "But we also chose the name because there’s a whiskey called Ancient Age — really cheap, really awful stuff. But it always makes for a good night, and there’s always a story afterwards." Pittsburgh should watch itself. *

Annihilation Time’s Aug. 16 show at Thee Parkside has been canceled. For future dates go to ww.myspace.com/annihilationtime.

OUT OF THIS WORLD: 12 GALAXIES DEPARTS

Last week brought more than one hit of sad news, along with the sorrowful tidings of Isaac Hayes’ passing. 12 Galaxies owner Robert Levy phoned to tell me that his Mission District venue is closing Aug. 28: "Financially we’re no longer able to sustain the business. It’s a very competitive city as far as booking live music is concerned." The 500-capacity venue — which spent about $60,000 on soundproofing when it was hit with neighbor complaints a few years ago — will be sorely missed for its offbeat events, boffo parties (such as the Guardian‘s Goldies), and memory-searing shows by Lightning Bolt, Black Dice, Comets on Fire, Kelley Stoltz, and many others.

Why now? "Our lease is up at the end of the year," Levy says. "Our landlord wanted more than we could conceive doing." Levy now hopes a new face will buy the business. In the meantime he’s looking forward to the club’s remaining awesome-sounding shows, including SF Indie message board’s 10-year anniversary party (Aug. 21) and Parkerpalooza (Aug. 23). "I think," Levy continues, "in a lot of ways we succeeded in what we were trying to do," namely, supporting the local music scene. "We just didn’t succeed financially."

NO REST FOR THE TICKETED

JUANA MOLINA


The ex-TV comedian plies an arrestingly loopy acoustronica with folk elements plucked from her native Argentina. Wed/13, 8 p.m., $18. Yoshi’s, 1330 Fillmore, SF. sf.yoshis.com

PASSENGER


The quivering Britpopsters just might break down Rihanna’s "Umbrella." Wed/13, 7:30 p.m., $15. Swedish American Hall, 2174 Market, SF. www.cafedunord.com

OCTOPUS PROJECT


Samplers are pitted against guitars, and they’re all winners. With the Hot Toddies, Sassy!!!, and Diagonals. Sat/16, 9 p.m., $10. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com

JEPPE


Junior Senior’s tall, gay hunk jumps out solo. With Gravy Train!!!! and Hottub. Sun/17, 9 p.m., $10. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com

EXPO 70


Primo experimento-psycho drone from the Kill Shaman Records founders. With Wooden Shjips and Arp. Tues/19, 9:30 p.m., $7. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

Diving for dollars

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› culture@sfbg.com

Perhaps it’s because I have my basic scuba license, but the idea of diving for profit has always held a certain mystique for me. It’s one thing to look at fish on vacation, but quite another to do something so dangerous and physically demanding every day.

I’ve always wondered: what kind of person chooses such a job?

The earliest commercial divers were salvage workers, roving the alien ocean floor in search of sunken treasure. At that time, when little was known about the physical effects of the frigid, high-pressure environment of the deep ocean, only men of a certain build could do it successfully.

Divers in old-fashioned canvas suits and huge round brass helmets (remember Red Rackham’s Treasure?) laid the foundations for the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge in 90 feet of chilly, turbulent water. Now pretty much anyone can take a simple course, strap on a scuba tank, and get acquainted with a coral reef. Still, it takes a particular mixture of recklessness, humor, and grim determination to do it every working day, at depths where no recreational diver is certified to go, in temperatures that would have most us running for a blanket and a cup of sugary tea.

Dean Moore, operations manager at Underwater Resources, a San Francisco firm specializing in marine construction, has one of those old-fashioned suits hanging in his office. Although the suits were massive and heavy, the brass and copper helmets were so buoyant that divers had to wear lead-weighted boots to keep from shooting to the surface. Moore has a pair of the boots as well, thought they’ve long been replaced by equipment made of Kevlar and Neoprene. Moore admits that being immersed in this world has soured him on recreational diving. When not working, he says, "I wanna stay high and dry. I think you lose a bit of the love of the sport."

Moore and his lead diver, Chris Moyer, showed me around their office and gave me a rundown of the day-to-day operation. The two are frequently called on to do some pretty nasty and unsafe work: crawling into narrow pipes, diving straight into raw sewage, or containing a pollution bloom near an oil refinery. If some politicians get their way, divers like Moyer could be getting a lot more work in the next few years building and maintaining massive offshore drilling platforms, vessels, and pipelines.

I was intrigued by all the equipment, of course — the hazmat suits and tiny robot submarines — but what really interested me is what makes these guys tick.

When asked to describe the diver’s typical personality, Moyer laughs. "Take your average motorcycle gang biker, mix in a little bit of astronaut, and a little bit of, say, a chimpanzee or a lowland gorilla, and that compilation gives you a commercial diver," he said. "I’m partial of course, but I think we’re the sexy fighter pilots of the construction world."

For Moyer, it was an ad in a scuba magazine. Like many divers, he was in the military first. When his enlistment ended, he saw the ad. "There’s this guy climbing up this ladder out of the water, and he’s wearing this neat helmet I’ve never seen before — it’s got like a light and a laser gun on it, and it says ‘Come up a winner,’<0x2009>" he explained, sitting in a small conference room with a whiteboard covered in equations and drawings. "And I’m, like, hmm, yeah."

Inspired, Moyer enrolled in the College of Oceaneering in Wilmington, where he was trained to work in cold water, low visibility, and extreme depths. He specialized as an advanced dive medic, qualifying him to recognize and treat that most notorious of divers’ ailments: the bends. Surfacing too quickly results in a sudden change of pressure, causing dissolved nitrogen in the blood to form bubbles that can lead to stroke. Moyer explains that each dive to a certain depth requires about an hour of decompression in the water, done in a series of "stops," where a diver hangs out a certain depth, allowing the nitrogen to dissolve slowly and naturally. "That buys you a few minutes when your head breaks the surface of the water before you start turning into a shaken up pop bottle," he said. Divers immediately hop in a pressurized chamber to breathe pure oxygen for a couple of hours. The sealed, all-oxygen environment carries its own hazards, and horror stories of fires and explosions abound.

After dive school, Moyer headed to the Gulf of Mexico, where 80 percent of the world’s commercial divers work, maintaining the massive oil platforms that float miles out to sea. He dove for a company whose main business was laying and repairing pipelines between platforms. Unlike Bay Area divers, workers in the Gulf aren’t unionized, so private firms regulate the industry and pay divers whatever they feel like — which, according to Moore, is sometimes a third of what a union diver can make in the Bay Area. Moore explains that though Underwater Resources can’t outbid nonunion firms for big contracts, most ambitious divers will eventually switch to unionized companies because that’s where all the interesting public-works jobs are. "Certainly in the Bay Area and up and down the West Coast, it’s expected that any decent diving company will be in the union," he said.

Maybe it was the promise of better pay that led Moyer to leave the Gulf for the Bay Area after a year. He recalls calling around looking for employment. "I’m, like, hey, I’m here and I’m ready to dive, and they’re, like, oh, that’s nice, so are all the other guys who call me every day," he remembered.

Moyer was surprised to learn that he was expected to join Pile Drivers Local 34, a division of the Northern California Carpenters Union, and start a pile-driving apprenticeship right away. With dive school and a year’s work under his belt, he didn’t like the idea of driving pile for a living. At the same time, he discovered that diving work wasn’t as consistent in the Bay Area as it had been in Louisiana, and realized it would help to have something to fall back on. As long as a member is working, Local 34 will sponsor apprenticeships, provide excellent medical benefits and, after 20 years, a handsome pension. Part of Underwater Resources’ agreement with the union is that the divers get paid for at least an eight-hour day, no matter how much time they actually spend in the water — good news in a profession where weather, complications, and injuries can cut a dive short.

Because divers are freelancers who often work offshore on drilling vessels for months at a time, the trade tends to attract outsiders, people who have difficulty conforming, and people without families. This, in addition to the close quarters that commercial divers on an offshore job have to live in —sometimes spending weeks in a small, pressurized chamber called a "dry bell" that enables them to dive to depths of 400 feet without time-consuming decompression — may partly explain why few women are in this trade. When they do work in marine construction, it’s often topside, supervising or operating the small, remotely operated ROV robots that go where it’s too deep or dangerous to send divers. Moore laments the lack of women in the industry. "We’ve never employed any. I don’t know why. It’s unfortunate — I’d be into it."

As for me? I think I’ll stick to coral reefs for now.

Upsie

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

Now that I’m postmenopausal, I’m worried about how I can get some orthopedic support in our bedroom to make "amore" easier. My arms and back are injured from overuse and wear and tear. I really think about the garage door-opener rig in the movie 9 to 5. Is there something like that hoist that is available for home use? I think this would work great. A friend suggests a sky-chair. What can we do? Grab bars are out since there isn’t a door nearby. Thanks for any help you can offer. I’m not dead yet.

Love,

Ouchy

Dear Ouchy:

Oh, dear. I hear you about the overuse and wear and tear — at some level I simply don’t believe we were meant to last this long, any more than my pampered, heavily medicated house cat was "meant" to still be alive and scratching at 21. Still, merely making it past menopause ought not to doom you to a life of pain and infirmity. Promise me you have seen some doctors and physical therapists and a teacher of some school of gentle and not-too-ridiculous yoga, and I will tell you what I know about assistive devices, which is plenty. Do we have a deal?

Starting on the lower-cost, lower-tech, and lower-to-the-ground options, I have often mentioned "sex pillows" and I will mention them again. You can buy fancy ramps and humpty-things from a company such as Liberator Adventure Gear, whose unintentionally hilarious Web site features apparent Chippendales rejects and their female counterparts posing awkwardly on big foam hummocks that would not look out of place in an ’80s loft-space complete with black leather coffee tables and Nagel prints on the wall. If you can’t deal with that level of retro, you can get foam ramps and donuts and the like from a medical supply company. They won’t come in colors (especially not "premium" colors), but you’re just going to throw a towel over them anyway.

Next we have stand-alone swings and slings. These do not operate on garage-door frequencies, but I’m not sure how good an idea mechanization is anyway. I keep imagining bits and parts getting snagged and hoisted against their will. Plus, while your neighbor may not hit the garage door opener and cause your … something … to go up, I did find a story about an English guy with a Turkish-made erectile implant that responded enthusiastically to a neighbor’s remote, and I’m not Snopesing it. Call me Fox Mulder: I Want to Believe.

There are dozens of swinglike devices made specifically for your purpose (well, not for the creaky and painful of joint, but for suspending a receptive partner in the air, hopefully above the insertive one). You could check out the jauntily-titled justaswinging.com; it carries a full range of swings. These devices are ugly (and the site itself, in sharp contrast to Liberator Adventure Whatsit, looks like the photographer set up shop in the bathroom of a San Fernando Valley furnished apartment and covered whatever he didn’t want in the shot with used bedsheets), but what do you want for $425? That will get you the Effortless model, which not only has a packable, hideable frame for vacations and visits from relatives, it even has a remote for raising, lowering, and possibly swiveling. That oughta solve your garage-door itch right there.

For considerably more money and even less aesthetic appeal, but with a degree of sturdiness and whoops!-lessness I cannot guarantee for a purpose-made sex swing, there are those devices made for lifting a disabled or infirm person in and out of bed. You don’t need any sort of special license to order one of these — or most medical equipment, really (didn’t Tom Cruise buy Katie her own ultrasound machine?). All you need is a charge card. A good charge card, though, because they’re not cheap. You’d need to order something like a "Sani-sling," too, if you think the problem through, and that will set you back another $400 or $500.

Forget that. You’re going to do better in the sex world than in the medical world. The sites may be sleazy and the devices may not be something you’d want either your parents or your kids to see, but the medical versions would require just as much explanation (since you’re not actually disabled, just a little rickety), be twice as ugly, and cost twice as much. I am all for getting the best-designed, toughest gear you can afford (our kids are outfitted as much or more by REI than they are by Babies "R" Us), but there’s such a thing as overkill. And anyway, buying medical supplies is kind of depressing unless you’re, you know, into that. Stick with the swings and slings. They’re the right tools for the job, although anything’s better than hooking yourself up to the garage door. Aren’t you glad you asked?

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question.

Digg, Gawker and Russia

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Gawker is all in a lather about Digg.com and the “white male nerds” there who think

whatever Bush says is wrong, whatever the MSM says is wronger, and if the two are in agreement it’s clearly the wrongest idea ever.

I’m not going to comment on Gawker’s rather harsh (and I must admit, amusing) descriptions of the denizens of Digg, but I will say:

I tracked down the article that the fuss is all about, which ran in the U.K. Guardian. It’s not nutty at all; it’s actually a thoughful, well-reasoned opinion piece about the geopolitics of the Caucaus and the reasons the U.S. should stay the hell out.

So if this is what the Diggers like, they’re a lot more intelligent that Gawker would have you believe.

Two turntables and a saxophone: Meet DJ Purple

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Intrepid reporter Justin Juul hits the streets each week for our Meet Your Neighbors series, interviewing the Bay Area folks you’d like to know most.

Steve Hays, AKA DJ Purple, is a Karaoke DJ — or a KJ as they’re called — who throws dance parties throughout the Bay Area. Forget everything you thought you knew about the karaoke scene. There are no sad old men or drunk frat boys singing Dave Matthews songs at DJ Purple’s shows. Serious music-lovin’ hipsters flock nightly to places like Jacks in The Mission – across the street from where this interview (and drive by shooting!) took place — to sing their favorite heavy metal, rap, and eighties pop tunes while DJ Purple plays back up on the sax. This ain’t your daddy’s karaoke show!!!

djpurple3.jpg

SFBG: So what’s your deal?
DJ Purple: I’m Steve Hays, otherwise known as DJ Purple Hays. Did you get that name connection there?

SFBG: Actually I think I just realized it a minute ago. It’s the Jimi Hendrix thing, right?
DJ Purple: Yeah, it’s more of a Jimi Hendrix connection as opposed to drugs or whatever. I actually started using the name back when I was in my first band. I was a little sophomore kid and there was this band of seniors I knew. I used to hang out at their shows and one day I was like “Can I play?” They asked me what my name was and when I said Hays, they were like “Oh let’s call him Purple.” I had no idea what they were talking about at the time.

SFBG: So then you just used it as your DJ name too?
DJ Purple: Yeah, well when I started deejaying -I used to just be a regular DJ, by the way; not a KJ like I am now- I played around with a few names. But then I made a flyer one night and left a stack of them at the bar while I was performing. Some guy picked one up and yelled “DJ Purple, No Way!!!” I figured if the name could get that kind of response out of some random guy at a bar, then it must be good.

SFBG: How long have you been doing the karaoke thing?
DJ Purple: I got inspired by a show I saw in 2002 in Palo Alto. It was a karaoke dance party as opposed to just your standard karaoke show. So this KJ had somehow managed to sell out a 500-person venue with a karaoke show. People from all over the Bay Area came to see him. It was awesome.

SFBG: So what exactly is the difference between a normal karaoke show and what you do?
DJ Purple: Well, 99% of the karaoke shows out there are kind of boring. As a real DJ, my focus is on moving the crowd. I like to get people dancing. So one of the main differences is that I don’t have slow songs in my book. The slow songs always ruin things. Like, you’ll get some high-energy stuff for a minute but then someone will stand up and sing “Yesterday” by the Beatles and the whole place will yawn. There are always weird pauses between songs too. I’m a DJ so I keep things moving. Each song transitions into the next and I do my best to keep the energy up.

Shoot from the hip

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Def Leppard and Nickelback: you know I want my fantasy, and everyone is aware of how those cool, desirable, shocking, or subversive photographs are integral to fanning the flames of so many rock ‘n’ roll clowns’ dreamscapes. But it’s those moments when a picture delivers more than words that have inspired some to pick up a camera and keep shooting. Local noise-punk photog Lars Knudson can verify this, concerning one Arab on Radar show at Bottom of the Hill back at the turn of the millennium. "I saw this band Pink and Brown, and this audience of people who were absolute freaks, ultra-nerd ‘tards, hipsters, scenesters, or whatever you want to call it, and I felt so alive and so at home," Knudson recalls today from his work as a chef in San Carlos. "I tried to describe it to everyone I worked with, and they looked at me like, ‘Huh?’ Then I stumbled on these images that were taken by Virgil Porter [Burn My Eye] and showed them to people, and they said, ‘ooh!’"

As SF photographer Peter Ellenby [Every Day Is Saturday (Chronicle)] testifies, Jim Marshall put the Bay on the map for music photography and shooters like Jay Blakesberg have kept it there. But what about the newbs — armed with the latest digi point-and-shoot and inspired, à la Knudson, to begin capturing a fragment of the sound and the fury? Around the same instant everyone began to believe they could be a DJ, so too did all and sundry start to assume that they could also be an ace lens swinger.


John Vanderslice: Photo by Peter Ellenby

So how does one carve out a name as a music photog when the glut of images on Flickr and assorted photoblogs threatens to overwhelm? I gathered snippets of sage advice from a few area rock photogs: Knudson, Ellenby, and Debra Zeller, who honed her craft focusing on local indie combos via her Playing in Fog online project and concert series, has since expanded into professional wedding photography (originally shooting the nuptials of the Red Thread’s Jason Lakis), and currently books live music at the Make-Out Room.

•Be a music lover, foremost. "That’s why I did photography part-time for so long — it’s really hard to make a living in music photography," says Zeller (www.playinginfog.com, www.dazrocks.com), who has shot Cat Power, among others, at the behest of their labels. "What magazines pay is absolutely ridiculous and getting the work is another challenge." Additionally, Knudson says, "Part of the reason I have good photos is I know when they’re going to rock out. If you’re not prepared to get lost in the moment, you should go home and be an artist, because it isn’t about you and what you got that night, it’s really about what the band did onstage that night." In the spirit of shareware and the scene he has documented, Knudson makes thousands of his images freely available to bands — and really anyone — on a not-for-profit basis at www.pbase.com/pistolswing.

•Show everyone your work. "I showed my photos to as many people as possible," says Ellenby (www.ellenby.com), who photo-edited zines like Snackcake and Devil in the Woods. "All the bands and my friends knew I was for hire, and you have to not be afraid to be take criticism and set goals. When I was starting out my favorite band was Overwhelming Colorfast, and my goal was to shoot them, and Bob Reed would rip on them all the time."


Elliott Smith: Photo by Debra Zeller

•Know the craft, natch. "I think it’s important to shoot in manual and really know how to work your camera," Zeller insists. "That’s how you get the images. If you just rely on program mode, chances are you’ll be lucky to get a couple of good shots."

•"Don’t be afraid to work for a six-pack," advises Ellenby, who cofounded tech company GeoVector and is currently working on a Joe Strummer photo project. "Don’t think it’s your road to riches, either — especially if you like indie music. I would make more money if I wanted to, but I don’t like working for a giant music corporation. I like it better when I’m working one-on-one for a band — when you’re hired by a band you can let the creativity flow."

•"My only other piece of advice is, shut up and push the button," Knudson says. "When you’re shooting live bands, you’re going to miss the shot if you’re busy telling your friend how cool you are."

I CAN GO FOR THAT

SON AMBULANCE


Dulcet Midwestern pop-smiths take on Someone Else’s Déjà Vu (Saddle Creek). Wed/6, 9 p.m., $8. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com

FUTURE BLONDES AND C.L.A.W.S.


Malevolent Houston beats call up the ground-control SF bass-meister. With Skozey Fetisch. Thurs/7, 9 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

ME FIRST AND THE GIMME GIMMES


Punk supergroupers grope classic hits anew with Have Another Ball! (Fat Wreck Chords). Sat/9–Sun/10, 8 p.m. $15. Parkside, 1600 17th St., SF. www.theeparkside.com

PROJEKT REVOLUTION


A revolution in rock-hip-hop pairings begins with Linkin Park, Chris Cornell, Bravery, Ashes Divide, Busta Rhymes, Hawthorne Heights, and Street Drum Corps. Sat/9, 2 p.m., $34–$77. Shoreline Amphitheatre, 1 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View. www.ticketmaster.com

DARYL HALL AND JOHN OATES


Private eyes, they’re watching you, watching you, watching you-o-o-o-o-o. Tues/12, 7:30 p.m., $49.50–$78. Mountain Winery, 14831 Pierce, Saratoga. www.ticketmaster.com

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