HAS PEACHES BECOME a moldy relic? A jarring specimen expiration-dated 2000 – year of the dot-com apex and low-fat latte? There's something about Merrill Nisker's music that seems part and parcel of the X-tremely competitive, all-edge era we seem to have just left. Anyway, how is a girl supposed to out-transgress herself after "Cum Undun" and "Diddle My Skittle"?

With her latest release, Fatherfucker (Kitty-yo/Beggars Group), Peaches is out to prove she's no canned act. The Teaches of Peaches fired a direct, hot pink, feminized hit at Sticky Fingers' crotch shot. Fatherfucker's tracks zip off in the more abrasively rocking, less pop-schlocking direction, starting with a riff on Joan Jett's "Bad Reputation" and picking up duet partner Iggy Pop along the way.

Plucked from the lyrics of "Shake Yer Dix," the very name Fatherfucker, for instance, now seems like the ideal way to turn the tables on all those toxic lady haters who like to spout off about "motherfuckers" in vain. "It's over. It's, like, you stub your toe and say 'motherfucker,' " Peaches tells me over a cell phone while riding through Vermont in a tour bus that'll stop at San Francisco's Bimbo's 365 Club Oct. 24. "That's a pretty intense word, 'motherfucker.' I'm not going to say don't use 'motherfucker' ever again. I'm saying, if we do, then let's use 'fatherfucker,' too."

Strange how a word like "fatherfucker" foregrounds the incestuous overtones of both phrases, I say.

"Yeah, yeah! And then some people say, 'Makes me think of 'father figure,' " the 35-year-old vocalist says. "It's just like, 'What did 'motherfucker' make you think of then?' "

Living in Berlin now after teaching music to children for years in Toronto, Peaches is eager to know whether it was I who talked up the "Itty Bitty Titty Club" the last time she came around, and is scornful of electroclash, which she was lumped into at one time. "That kind of died, and I didn't die with it, which is really great," she says.

Kid stuff Peaches may have had her share of teaches, but she wasn't certified like Eric San, a.k.a. Kid Koala, who got his fallback certificate to teach elementary school when his parents became concerned about his career choice of scratch DJ prodigy. After all, opening for, or playing with, the Beastie Boys, Radiohead, Del tha Funky Homosapien, Coldcut, and Dan the Automator seemed pretty transitory.

But San's real dream job came true recently when he shook a tail feather for Big Bird on Sesame Street, doing the music for animated shorts by his friend and video collaborator Monkmus. The pieces are scheduled to run this fall.

"Sesame Street – that became my little tunnel-vision goal for a while, writing songs about the number four," the perpetually merry San says.

San was barely out of Bert and Ernie's demographic group in 1988 when he started teaching himself how to scratch at age 13, far from the club world.

"I went to Radio Shack once and asked if I brought in an album cover, whether they could tell me what the box was between the record players. I needed one of those because the hi-fi at home doesn't have it," San says. "I didn't even know what a mixer was. I was just taking shots in the dark."

The Montreal mixmaster's latest is Some of My Best Friends Are DJs (Ninja Tune). And San's comic, released with his first full-length, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, has morphed into the 339-page graphic novel, Nufonia Must Fall, featuring the romantic adventures of a robot that began as a doodle on a waffle house place mat.

Mission accomplished Jeff Ray, Mission Creek Music Festival coproducer and former Zrmzlina member, recently snagged a coveted residency at Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin to work on sound installations – it was one of only three awarded this year due to funding cuts. Currently working on a sound installation for a Philadelphia gallery with Bay Area conceptual artist Shane Montgomery, Ray plans to use his time at Headlands to work on a piece on – holy Ren Faire! – elves.

Meanwhile, Ray has formed a new very nonjokey folktronica band with Mark Edwards of Mr. Toad's called Radius. The duo will play at the Clarion Alley festival Oct. 26 at 4 p.m. He's also organizing a dress-up winter ball with the Gossip, Crack: We Are Rock, and others at StudioZ Jan. 17, as well as planning a European tour for local singer-songwriters. Is he busy enough? "I'm trying not to be blasé. I'm confused. I'm overwhelmed, and I don't know why I'm taking on all these things. I'm almost walking around in a daze," Ray says hastily. "I have all my creative faculties intact, but day-to-day activities suffer. Like paying bills. Shaving. Taking showers. But I'm happy about things and humbled in some ways. Hopefully Schwarzenegger won't cut me."

Awarded weakly Speaking of cuts, apparently some winning bands were busy cutting up, and cutting down, at last week's SF Weekly Music Awards. The Vanishing's Jessie Trashed stalked onstage to get her award for best "lifestyle" band – whatever that is – and screamed something celebratorily about "lifestyles!" and attempted to smash her award not once but twice before getting a good talking to as she tried to leave the stage. "Now, young lady," you can imagine the bruiser tut-tutting, "don't you know those mass-produced, circa-early-'90s Haight Street, dumpster-reject faux-gargoyle figurines cost good money?" Actually, it turns out the Man had other damage on the brain, according to Trashed, who later said in an e-mail, "Afterwards security grabbed me and told me that I just punctured a $600 hole in a gym mat which was laying on the stage (???)." Topping that off, the Fleshies managed to get theirs, for best punk purveyors, while swinging from the Starlings' rigging and sporting at least one homemade "Corporate Weeklies Still Suck" T-shirt. Spread the word.