Davis might not have those frog signs along the westbound side of Highway 80 anymore — "Live in Davis because it's green, safe, and nuclear free.... Read more »

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"They're the ones that pushed E-40 into hyphy," says Hamburger Eyes photographer Dave Potes, in reference to his friends the Mall, a San Francisco art punk trio, and the hype that surrounds them.
"Yeah, we're part of the hyphy movement," adds Mall guitarist-keyboardist Daniel Tierney, 27, and his bandmates erupt into cacophonous chuckling.
I've heard the "h" word dropped incessantly for weeks now and have pretended to be hip to the Bay Area hip-hop phenomenon. Read more »

New York City band Grizzly Bear's gently ambient Yellow House (Warp) manages to delicately conjure bittersweet associations of musty, memory-cluttered childhood homes and reference Charlotte Perkins Gilman's feminist-modernist novel The Yellow Wall-Paper — but the real household dirt on this band has to remain in one's imagination.
Vocalist-keyboardist-guitarist-autoharpist Edward Droste is up-front about his own sexuality — saying he's been in a relationship with one man for most of the band's existence — but when it comes to the love lives of his straight mates, the sometime journalist and P Read more »

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I meet bandleader, videographer, and Mission District indie icon Leslie Satterfield at Ritual café on a summer evening as she walks up Valencia Street looking weather-beaten and weary from her recent travels. Is she just back from a cross-country tour, I wonder? No, she was precisely where you'd expect the guitarist from Boyskout to have been: camping. Read more »

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Emily Haines is not known for keeping her thoughts to herself.
As part of Toronto's Metric, the notoriously outspoken singer-keyboardist incorporates her political beliefs into wildly infectious synth-rock songs. On 2003's Old World Underground, Where Are You Now? (Everloving) and last fall's Live It Out (Last Gang), Haines tackled such unlikely pop-song subject matters as war, Big Brother, and the emptiness of consumer culture with thrilling, often thought-provoking results. Read more »

› kimberly@sfbg.com
Sneak a peak at the California Cereals factory — a gray, boxy concrete sprawl looming over an otherwise peaceful West Oakland neighborhood lined with wood frame houses and a sugary spray of Victorians — and you immediately expect that mulchy aroma of processed wheat products to assault the senses. So why do you detect ... barbecuing oysters? Read more »

HYPERREAL.ORG
Monthly-ish e-mail calendar (a.k.a. Hyperreal Rave Interface) of upcoming SF underground events
BAYRAVES.COM AND NORCALNIGHTS.COM
Affiliated BBS sites that list upcoming parties
RAVELINKS.COM
Links to a calendar of SF events
SPRACI.COM
"Site for Party, Rave, and Club" Info with links to a calendar of SF parties
NITEWISE.COM
Weekly newsletter that includes major underground events
PACIFICSOUND.NET
The underground and overground crew that throws free parties in Golden Gate Park and on the Bay

By Marke B.
› marke@sfbg.com
Thousands of fantastically perverse revelers (most of them gay) will flood San Francisco for the Folsom Street Leather Fair on Sept. 23, ensuring that every cranny of the city brims with wanton copulation — which really is the way it should always be in our famously lewd burg, no? Read more »

› kimberly@sfbg.com
Looking for hints of San Francisco's renowned underground nightlife? It pays to keep your eyes and nose to the ground — and to be textable. That's one of the few subtle signs that the hottest underground party in town is happening right here on an early Sunday summer morning: reedy, peg-legged hipsters standing out by the curb on this barren, bulldozed Hunters Point artery, busily texting and talking up fidgety, insomniac friends about their next landing strip. Read more »

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Discovering new metal bands worth their salt these days isn't just hit-and-miss — it's mostly miss. In fact, most kids now trying to crack the genre make me want to jump onstage, grab them by their greasy hair, and scream, "Satan is boring!" or "You are not Metallica!" into their prematurely damaged eardrums.
So when a friend slipped me the unmastered studio tracks of Totimoshi's forthcoming album, Ladron, I was hesitant. Read more »