Calendar of Events

Thursday, September 09

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  William Gibson

  The Booksmith

  It’s a forgone conclusion that author William Gibson is remarkably prescient. This is the guy who coined the term "cyberspace," after all. Sure, every prognosticator gets lucky once in a while — if this wasn’t the case, the Psychic Friends Network would have gone out of business within a few weeks. What’s remarkable about Gibson’s predictions is their consistency. For... More >>

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  Little Wings

  Cafe Du Nord

  The best concert ever took place on Seabright Beach near Santa Cruz in the late 1990s. The lineup was Little Wings, Phil Elverum (who back then was not called Mount Eerie but the Microphones), and Karl Blau. Having set up sturdy windbreaks of thick driftwood and hippie blankets, the trio lit roaring pit fires and proceeded to kill, in the sweet, rough way that K Records cult figures have. Karl... More >>

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  Nick Zinner

  Hemlock Tavern

  At first glance, it's hard to judge the work in the photography book Please Take Me off the Guest List. The work asks not only “What do I mean?” but also “What does the guitarist of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs think I mean?” — because Nick Zinner, the spiky-haired man with the huge guitar and the surprising synth, took all the photos. Take Me Off is filled with pictures of the... More >>

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  John Németh

  Biscuits & Blues

  There is a great tradition of performers walking the line between blues and soul: Bobby "Blue" Bland, Little Milton, Etta James, and — based on his work in the last three or four years — John Németh. A transplant from Boise, Idaho, the Bay Area-based Németh has both the harmonica-sizzling savvy of Carey Bell and Kim Wilson and the polished-yet-spirited poise of Otis... More >>

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  Trey Songz, Monica, Dondria

  The Warfield

  Trey Songz has etched out a career as the go-to-guy for rappers wanting to add a soulful chorus to their latest songs. Despite three successful solo albums, including 2009's gold-certified Ready, the Virginia-born singer is most readily identified by the rap royalty he has worked with. This year, his fervent vocals have been featured on songs by Rick Ross, Ludacris, Diddy and Fat Joe; before... More >>

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Friday, September 10

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  Between Lived Experiences

  Southern Exposure

  For better or worse — and we’d say worse — the art world is often driven by things safe and familiar. Think about it: The paintings that sell for $10,000 at high-end galleries are usually landscapes, fruit bowls, or works “heavily influenced” by Warhol or Dalí. Let us instead suggest something challenging: Between Lived Experiences at Southern Exposure.... More >>

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  DatA, Nisus, Sleazemore

  Rickshaw Stop

  The music of DatA, Parisian DJ and producer David Guillon, finds a meeting point among falsetto-rich '70s disco, '00s synth riffs à la Daft Punk, and timeless pop hooks. Last year's debut album, Skywriter, featured songs like "One in a Million" — which isn't far from a Flight of the Conchords impression of a Bee Gees love song — and "Blood Theme," a raging instrumental that... More >>

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Saturday, September 11

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  John Brandon

  Book Passage

  Spend any time driving around this country, and you’ll find that the one thing America has a surplus of is dead-end towns. These are the kinds of places where job prospects dried up with Henry Ford’s death, the bowling alley serves as the town’s cultural nexus, and high school grudges marinate for decades. It’s these towns that interest author John Brandon. His new... More >>

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  “A Few Dream Palaces of San Francisco”

  Multiple San Francisco locations

  The shaky status of the Clay Theatre has recharged the debate over the role and necessity of single-screen movie houses in the era of Netflix and the multiplex. Our view? Society suffers immeasurably when the only public spaces most people ever share are malls and ballparks. With “A Few Dream Palaces of San Francisco,” SFMOMA imagines movie theaters as brick-and-mortar repositories... More >>

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Sunday, September 12

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  Opera in the Park

  Golden Gate Park, Sharon Meadow

  When it comes to free al fresco opera, San Franciscans quite possibly lead the nation in arias per capita. SF Opera’s twice-yearly simulcasts at the baseball stadium may have captured the city’s imagination in recent years, but the company’s venerable Opera in the Park counters with something not even the slickest JumboTron could trump — real, live musicians, braving the... More >>

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  Shonen Knife, The Go-Going-Gone Girls, T & A

  Bottom of the Hill

  Shonen Knife is aging gracefully. Formed in 1981, the Japanese outfit — which has shuffled members over the past decade, but continues to be led by singer and guitarist Naoko Yamano — is still on top of its playful, punky power-pop game, as demonstrated by new album Free Time. Good Charamel Records recently issued an English-language version in North America so that fans on this side... More >>

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Monday, September 13

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  Mao's Last Dancer

  Embarcadero Center Cinema

  Good films about ballet can be numbered on one hand. And about Chinese dissidents? I've still got enough fingers to type this review. Based on the memoirs of Li Cunxin, Mao's Last Dancer means well, but it stumbles between genres. Li is played by three actors as he grows from plucky peasant lad in the '70s to grim-faced trainee at a Beijing dance academy to visiting student at the Houston... More >>

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  Sleep, Saviours, Black Cobra

  The Regency Ballroom

  Within the sweaty milieu of depravity that is Harmony Korine's Gummo, a film loosely based on the cat-hunting teens and other backwoods delinquents of Xenia, Ohio, one scene epitomizes the essence of misunderstood youth at the end of the '90s. Two boys, each full of contempt for anything but their favorite bands and drugs of choice, fly downhill through an injured suburbia on BMX bicycles.... More >>

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Tuesday, September 14

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  A Time to Dance

  The Marsh

  A Time to Dance is for anyone with an attention-hungry sibling. Libby Skala’s play is based on the life of her great-aunt, Elizabeth Polk, who had an interesting life: she survived World War I aka “The Great War” (people were more excited about wars back then), intense sickness, and the Holocaust. But on top of all that, Polk had a famous sister, an actress of all things, who... More >>

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  Angie Chau

  City Lights Books

  The terrible legacies of our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq include compounding the terrible legacy of our war in Vietnam. Add to that the disadvantage of the memory loss that comes with a generation gap — as if all the souls displaced by that horror hadn’t fallen through enough of history’s cracks already. But some reassurance may be had from Angie Chau, a young writer still... More >>

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Wednesday, September 15

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  Claude the Albino Alligator's 15th Birthday

  California Academy of Sciences

  We've got a soft spot for albino alligators. We're not alone: Everyone in the Bay Area is half in love with Claude, the iconic superstar at the science museum. He's just so ... weird and elegant and 181 pounds. At Claude the Albino Alligator's 15th Birthday, the focus is on kids who share Claude's birthday -- they will be invited to help sing Happy Birthday, and to decorate the gator-chow... More >>

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  Los Cenzontles

  The Fillmore

  Fans of Los Lobos probably already know all about Los Cenzontles. The local roots-Latino group recently recorded an album, American Horizon, with a couple of really, really special guests: blues mage Taj Mahal and Los Lobos' David Hidalgo. And the worshipful way people are about Hidalgo, well, word probably got around fast. This is good, because the band, whose name means "the mockingbirds,"... More >>

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