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Feature

Bluesman's Blues

Paul Pena,who's played with everyone from Jerry Garcia to B.B. King, is coming out of the musical shadows, thanks to the award-winning documentary Genghis Blues. He's also blind, and sick, and entirely tired of living.

By Mark Athitakis

Published: April 21, 1999

Two men showed up to offer their own tribute: Jorge Molina playing a conch and Paul Pena blowing into a five-foot-long digeridoo, an Australian instrument crafted from a hollow eucalyptus branch....

Letters

Letters

Published: April 21, 1999

Editor's note: Since so many readers felt compelled to vent about George Cothran's April 7 column, "Sisters of Perpetual Conspiracy," we decided to uncork the vox populi and let it flow. Free...

News

Dog Bites

By Laurel Wellman

Published: April 21, 1999

My So-Called Repetitive Fatigue Syndrome MISSION STATEMENT: Our mission is to design and construct improvements which meet the needs of the public. Operations and Maintenance, and which meet...

Music

Riff Raff

By Mark Athitakis

Published: April 21, 1999

Run for Cover -- the Junior League Is Rockin' Out! The 2,000 women who make up the Junior League of San Francisco have a bad reputation. As member Betsy Wilkins points out, a lot of people seem to...

Music

The House of Tudor

By Silke Tudor

Published: April 21, 1999

When William S. Burroughs passed over, San Francisco had already expended itself on the memory of beat poet Allen Ginsberg. And since Burroughs wasn't a city resident at the time of his empyrean...

Music

Hear This

By Sam Prestianni

Published: April 21, 1999

John Bischoff Tired of warm and fuzzy music, electronics wiz John Bischoff set out 25 years ago to invent a compositional language based on a sonic reality nearly devoid of human emotion. A...

Music

Notes From Underground

For two years, Beni B and Oakland's ABB Records have taken on the hip-hop establishment one vinyl single at a time

By Mike Seely

Published: April 21, 1999

Beni B is spooning ice cream into his mouth as he talks about ABB Records, the Oakland-based independent hip-hop label he founded in 1997. The empty calorie intake is ironic: A graduate of UC...

Music

Street Musician

By Frako Loden

Published: April 21, 1999

It's an enormous pity that Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambety died last summer while making The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun, because the films he did manage to make seemed to promise a long,...

Eat

Social Grilling

By Paul Adams

Published: April 21, 1999

Coriya Hot Pot City 852 Clement Street (at 10th Avenue), 387-7888. Open Sunday through Tuesday noon to midnight, Wednesday 4 p.m. to midnight, Thursday noon to midnight, Friday and Saturday...

Eat

Side Dish

By Harry Coverte

Published: April 21, 1999

Ahead of the Times Hate to spill the beans, but I just caught wind of an article that's coming out soon in the venerable New York Times' Sunday travel section. It's yet another feature on our...

Film

The Persistence of Experimentalism

By Gary Morris

Published: April 21, 1999

The choice of Johan van der Keuken to receive this year's Persistence of Vision Award is a welcome one, but also an unfortunate reminder of how marginalized experimental film has always been. The...

Film

The Dawning of A Hard Day's Night

By Michael Sragow

Published: April 21, 1999

It's triply fitting that what Andrew Sarris called "The Citizen Kane of jukebox musicals" will play the San Francisco Film Festival. (Miramax will re-release the film this fall.) The director of A...

Film

Jonathan Demme's First Talking Heads Interview

By Michael Sragow

Published: April 21, 1999

In February 1984, I went to Los Angeles partly to interview Jonathan Demme about the trouble he'd run into on Swing Shift, a dream project that, after star-dictated re-shoots, had turned into a...

Film

New France

By Sura Wood

Published: April 21, 1999

One of the best-represented nations at this year's festival is France. The 30 French films on the roster include three from the masters of French cinema -- Alain Resnais, Erich Rohmer, and Claude...

Film

Karen Morley: Still Sexy After All These Blacklisted Years

By Michael Sragow

Published: April 21, 1999

LOS ANGELES -- There's an irony at the center of The Unvanquished, the festival series "that honors filmmakers who have faced repression and censorship." The blacklisted honorees have been sharp,...

Film

Reel World

By Michael Fox

Published: April 21, 1999

Thy Kingdom Come ... Thy Will Be Done "I write you today," Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association begins, "because a pro-homosexuality bombshell has been fired into our children's...

Film

Wonderful Lives

By Frako Loden

Published: April 21, 1999

The three recent Japanese features showing at the San Francisco International Film Festival are all astonishing in their ways. An old-fashioned live radio drama is transformed into a high-octane...

Film

S.F. International Film Festival

By Michael Fox, Joe Mader, Tod Booth, Gregg Rickman, Sura Wood, Michael Sragow, Frako Loden

Published: April 21, 1999

The 42nd annual San Francisco International Film Festival runs over 15 days and presents over 100 movies. It's the biggest annual celebration of cinema in this city -- which is saying a lot, given...

Night&Day;

Night & Day

By Heather Wisner

Published: April 21, 1999

Wednesday April 21 Sticky Business The country in question sounds like Afghanistan, where the Islamic fundamentalist rule of the Taliban has severely curtailed women's freedoms, but Gum...

Night&Day;

Will You Join the Dance?

By Heather Wisner

Published: April 21, 1999

Conventional wisdom dictates that aspiring actors move to Hollywood and aspiring dancers head for the Big Apple, but what conventional wisdom doesn't mention is that the Bay Area is the West...