SF Weekly | Complete Issue

Room with a Few

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

It wasn't meant to be one of those damned open houses.

They — the innumerable aspiring Tiger House roommates — were supposed to come for their appointments at 30-minute intervals. During his years in the coveted seven-bedroom Cole Valley party house, Dan Nazarian, aka the Danl...

"Conservative" Arizona couple gets judge to gag gay SF blogger

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

While Violet Blue couldn't get restraining orders against her online foes (see main Sucka Free story), a couple have persuaded a judge in Arizona to issue one banning S.F. freelance writer and gay rights blogger David Nahmod from posting their names or hometown on the Internet.

On his blo...

Sex columnist Violet Blue tries to restrain online foes

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

SFGate's sex columnist Violet Blue is no stranger to controversy. There was, for instance, her recent public feud with the rulers of Boing Boing, who pulled down her postings from their Web site for reasons never made clear. Then there was her trademark-infringement lawsuit against a porn actress...

Plastic bags still in SF stores despite ban

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

The victorious hoopla that followed the passage of a 2007 ordinance designed to reduce plastic bag litter in San Francisco may have been a bit premature. A year and a half after the law was passed, environmentalists admit the measure has fallen short of its promises.

In fact, what was hai...

Keeping track of your offline sex life online

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

The Clickable Clit continues this week with more online adventures from the personal diary of an SF-based cybersex expert…

Monday, August 18th

I signed up for MyBlackBook today...

SF Weekly Letters

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Hubbard Hubbub

Scien-follow-gists: I Thank you for the recent article regarding Scientology ["Scientology's Antagonists," Lauren Smiley, Feature, 8/13]. Not only have you informed the pu...

Schedule Outside Lands trip with playlists of our favorite artists

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Golden Gate Park has seen its share of Human Be-Ins since it was reclaimed from the dunes in the late 19th century. Now add to those events the first Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival, bringing almost 70 acts to perform in the park on multiple stages over three days from Aug. 22 to 24.

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The New Tweedy Bros! craft one of rock’s most collectible LPs

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Collecting records is more than a simple hobby. The Internet has changed the game dramatically: While it's much easier to find that once-elusive LP, you now have more cut-throat competition between buyers, driving up prices on rare finds. Every genre has its crown jewels, but one of the most soug...

Catch a ride on the ridiculous: Yacht Rock hits S.F.

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

I can't scientifically prove it, but I swear the reason I hear so much Hall & Oates in neighborhood bars these days is Yacht Rock. The now cult-classic Web video series identified the innocuous Southern California-style pop of the late '70s and early '80s and gave it fresh comedic context....

Stereolab

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

In the '90s, Stereolab albums were charming junkshops selling rock history's neglected treasures, mainly '60s French pop and '70s Krautrock. This decade, on one chirpy release after another, the London-based group's extreme stylistic conservatism has been laid bare, its retro-rock demoted from "i...

Amy Ray

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

There's a well-known saying among diehard fans of dyke-folk duo the Indigo Girls: "Everyone wants to marry Emily; everyone wants to sleep with Amy." With a new solo album on her own label, Amy Ray (the brunette Indigo — the blonde is Emily Saliers) should continue to stoke her fans' passion...

Sleepy Sun

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Music is so damn finite, and it's all been done before, and there's nothing left to say anyhow, and everybody knows it. But then something like Spacemen 3, or the Jesus and Mary Chain, or the Brian Jonestown Massacre happens along and suddenly what's old is new again, as if an unknown scale has b...

Beachwood Boys

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

For all the ringing Rickenbackers, peaked-cap style points (think Donovan), and general '60s approximating, Beachwood Sparks' most eternal number is a reworking of 2000's "By Your Side," a minor hit by pop-soul outfit Sade. Go figure. Feathered with understated instrumentation and supine v...

!!!: Dance-Punk With a Point

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Ordinarily considered the sole property of bombastically emotive teenage girls, the exclamation point has reestablished its street cred with the band !!! For these dance-punk necromancers, the much-maligned punctuation serves as a fitting precursor to what's in store for anyone who lends a...

Cube with Attitude

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

When someone comes up with a "classic rap" radio format — and it'll surely happen one of these years — you can bet Ice Cube will be in heavy rotation, alongside Bell Biv DeVoe, Mark Morrison, and Sir Mix-a-Lot. Besides having NWA, Westside Connection, and solo hits to his name,...

The Senator Has the Floor at Black Gold

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

You may want your retro-soul weekend parties to be packed, sweaty blasts full of vintage grinders. But on Monday nights, the smooth, sugar-melting tones of '60s soul music work as relaxing tonics to calm party-frazzled nerves — and that's where Black Gold comes in. Hosted by Senator ...

Catch the Bug

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Steve Bug is a DJ, producer, and head of Poker Flat, the Berlin-based label that's a world leader in capturing that blurry edge between deep house and techno. Poker Flat boasts an international roster of artists, including John Tejada in America, Trentemøller in Denmark, and Hå...

Heckled to Death: The Mystery of a Good Joke

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

I love mysteries, preferably British ones with asexual detectives who have odd personality quirks. My entire Netflix queue consists of what my roommate calls "tea and death," disc after disc of various murders that take place in England. I'm fascinated by murder. I even like real-life axings, lik...

Abbondanza

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

After several years of the tapas-inspired small-plates trend influencing practically every new restaurant in San Francisco, could big plates be the next new thing? If the crowds of happy diners inhaling the well-prepared and generously portioned Italian-American fare at Joey & Eddie's in North Be...

New Restaurants

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Aroma Tea: 1806 Polk (at Jackson), www.aromateashop.com. Russian Hill. Tea bar.

Baked: 415 18th St. (at Missouri), 826-9455. Potrero Hill. Coffee and pastries.

Basil Canteen: 1489 Folsom (...

Not to Be

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

In its final 10 minutes, Hamlet 2 is little more than chaos, noise, and nonsense. Those are 10 perfectly enjoyable minutes: It's hard to knock any sequence that climaxes with a musical number titled "Rock Me, Sexy Jesus," done up nice and Grease-y. Problem is, the 80 or so minutes t...

Schoolhouse Rock

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

The Rocker bears the decidedly unmistakable odor of something made in 1983 and left on the shelf ever since. Which isn't to suggest that it's fetid product in need of tossing out: Parts of it are genuinely delightful, and Rainn Wilson doesn't squander his first feature-film starring role (...

Hats Off

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

You may not know Mimi Weddell's name, but you probably know her face: As Jyll Johnstone's documentary shows, the pool of agile 93-year-old women adept at playing aristocratic and/or crazy is a small one. Clips more and less memorable punctuate Johnstone's loving profile, spanning a decade in the ...

Art House

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Artists' Television Access. Bijou and Bayside: Wakefield Poole's hardcore male erotic classics from the 1970s. Wed., Aug. 20, 8 p.m. Shutdown: Fri., Aug. 22, 8 p.m. $6. 992 Valencia (at 21st St.), 824-3890, www.atasite.o...

Feast and Famine

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Put down that burger and listen: We have created a world in which nearly a billion people don’t get enough to eat, while another billion are overweight. So says Raj Patel in his book, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. Patel, a visiting scholar at U....

Lady Liberty Would Like It

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Juxtapositions and new contexts are the twin engines of a lot of visual art; think Marcel Duchamp's early-20th-century found art, for example, in which ordinary objects, transported to a gallery space, became art. At "Undocumented: Latino Immigrant Portraits," Rebeca García-Gonzá...

Brokeback Mohammed

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Muslims, Jews, and Christians may have their, oh, occasional differences, but as an Islamic scholar observes in Parvez Sharma’s documentary A Jihad for Love, there is one point on which the religions agree: Homosexuality is a crime. In his fine Trembling Before G_d, Sandi D...

Pull Back the Curtain

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

The lunatic is on the grass. Or in this case, asphalt and concrete. The identity of the acid-test pioneer who first paired Dark Side of the Moon with The Wizard of Oz is lost in the mists of ’90s history. But his or her flash of inspiration has become a viral phenomenon, fueling i...

Hala Back

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

It’s hard to figure out where we’d be in modern times if not for the ancient Arabs. The brainy race invented algebra, soap, and distillation, thus creating both scourge and solace for contemporary teenagers. And have you ever wondered where the greeting “holler” came from? Etymol...

Lock, Stock, and Workshop

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Locks, like borders, are manmade inventions that define ownership, not just of property but of people (think of chain gangs or suspects in a jail cell). The lock has also become a potent metaphor for control and safekeeping, finding its way into slang. We have Al Gore’s “lockbox,” ...

Resistance Is Fertile

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

They came carrying signs and babies. Eighty-year-olds in sweat suits and 28-year-olds in business suits, staging die-ins and blowing tubas and, sometimes, weeping. On March 20, 2003, thousands of Bay Area residents marched peacefully through San Francisco’s Financial District, protesting Americ...

Getting A Blowout

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Jennifer Blowdryer is the girl version of John Waters, only she's not a director, or from Baltimore, or as famous. Still, for a moment in the late 1970s, punk rock had a sense of humor along with its vicious need to point out hypocrisy, and this was the fertile, filthy ground that nurtured th...

Indie Achy Breaky

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

“I’m 15 centimeters tall” is the first line Caitlin Gutenberger sings on Two Sheds’ new self-titled EP. There’s something similarly modest about the Sacramento/San Francisco band Gutenberger shares with her husband Johnny (she plays guitar; he plays bass). Steeped in...

Make It Work

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

The Mission District becomes the official center of the DIY universe today, as hardscrabble underground craftspeople, music makers, and artists all converge on the appropriately named Treat Street for a free six-hour party known as the First Annual Rock Make Street Festival. Will this meeting...

They Don't Make 'Em Like That Anymore

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Bellissima, a film made by Luchino Visconti in 1951, concerns the fate of a young girl who isn't pretty enough. The adults around her think it's perfectly OK to publicly judge children in this way -- maybe because it was so long ago and people were very, very backwards in that era. Good thing...

Che In Spain

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Robert Crumb pal and compere Spain Rodriguez follows the near-mythical life of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, from book-filled childhood to Bolivian jungle death in Che: A Graphic Biography. Including the now-famous motorcylce ride across Latin America! The book is co-authored by Paul Buhle an...

Ballad of Edgar Cayce Hard to Figure

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

One of the mysterious things about art is the role played in its creation by the unconscious. From the paintings and poetry of William Blake to the psychedelic experiments of the Beatles, artists of all persuasions have explored the powerful yet inscrutable connection between their output and the...

Bad Habits

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

This is the inaugural production of new Bay Area-based theater company Square Mama. Its mission is to revive plays that, for one reason or another, closed on Broadway or never made it to San Francisco before getting due acclaim. This is an excellent but risky idea, because perhaps many of these p...

Also Playing

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

A Bowl of Rose Leaves. Imaginative Productions makes great use of its Studio 300 Theatre home, creating a interesting world where painter Alex must contend with the annoyances of fame, such as a visit from a wealthy couple from Peoria who come wanting more from Alex than just his pa...

Emo the Musical

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

This play is kind of like The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee for goths. Oh, wait a second. Don't call them goths — call them emo kids, as in "emotional." They do wear black, put on eyeliner, and feel perpetually misunderstood, but these kids don't listen to the Cure (l...