The real world

THERE'S NOTHING LIKE reality – the real stuff, not the TV-borne illness – to bring a historic moment home. –That's how I felt last week, climbing up from the R line stop at Cortlandt and Church Streets, on a windy, darkling plain of concrete sidewalk leading to the gaping hole in the ground: ground zero, the site of the World Trade Center. The facts themselves were staggering – seven buildings wiped out, a "20-acre void" that "echoes the one in our hearts," as it's poetically put on the museum-style plaques atop the fence bordering the site. Those are compounded by the absurdity of tour buses pulling one after another in front of the site and discharging tourists from all over the world. Double that by the fact that right across the street, in white stone and blazing red letters, is ground zero of discount shopping, Century 21.

"Oh! Really? Now you have to go! Because I don't understand why anyone would want to go there," a New York friend almost yelled when I told him I wanted to check out ground zero earlier that week. As a city hall reporter covering the events of 9/11, he spent more than enough time down there – he still has nightmares – so the idea of the WTC site becoming an out-of-towner's macabre sightseeing destination horrified and amazed him. Naturally he wanted someone to explain the urge. Was it as craven as the activities across the street, as bargain scavengers attempted to pick the Century 21 racks clean?

When I finally got to ground zero, I felt a palpable, intense sadness. That scar in the ground is a wound few people, naturally, would want to probe, I told my chum later, but maybe it's important for Left Coast bystanders, a continent and culture away, to understand emotionally. The site is both a grave and a textbook.

Honestly, I felt more like a vulture jabbing away verbally at Dan Geller, one half of the Athens, Ga., duo I Am the World Trade Center. Yeah, that's right – they still have that name, which I guess proves they really weren't trying to cash in on the WTC tragedy.

After all, they came up with the moniker – and yes, they are tired of talking about it – long before 9/11, when Geller and bandmate Amy Dykes were a couple living in Brooklyn. "If you looked across the street, you'd see the towers there," Geller told me, a persistent, nervous giggle bubbling up. "Amy and I were single, but it was the two of us, single and standing for the same thing. Like towers."

They went through their own share of trauma last year. Geller and Dykes broke up after six years, and they lost their label – Kindercore Records, which Geller cofounded with Ryan Lewis. On top of that, last November, Geller and Lewis filed a $350,000 lawsuit against IDEA Inc. (otherwise known as Telegraph Distribution Co.), which took over Kindercore, essentially dispatched the pair shortly after they signed onto the partnership, and proceeded to drive the once-thriving label (which had released music by Call and Response, Japancakes, and Kitty Craft) into the ground.

On the bright side, Dykes got her master's in costume history and fabric design, science fiend Geller got a book deal to write a volume on biodiesel, and the pair managed to complete the polished, effervescent, and synth-driven Cover Up (Gammon). It's part Blondie, part Human League, and all dance-floor heartbreak. "It ended up being a document of our breakup," Geller explained. "On most of the choruses, we're really giving it to each other."

Safe to say there will be no hook-ups on this post-breakup tour, which comes to Bottom of the Hill March 27. "I'd be freaked out," Geller said with a yelp. Dare I say I Am the World Trade Center suffered through their own equivalent of 9/11. "Wow! That's really crazy. That's really insightful. It's kind of scary, almost," Geller said with a complete absence of giggles – and sarcasm.

Name game Mark Kozelek may have had a politically incorrect moment – imitating his Chinese landlord onstage three years ago – but you can't hold back the Red House Painter's unvarnished thoughts. Take his latest project, Sun Kil Moon, and its new album, Ghosts of the Great Highway (Jetset): "I think I'm not doing anything drastically different musically, but all of a sudden journalists who I haven't talked to since the third Red House Painters record are calling and asking, 'Why the name change?' " The new name was inspired by late-'80s Korean boxer Sung-Kil Moon – a left hook at anti-Asian accusations if there ever was one. "To me, that name is like a short poem or a little haiku," he told me.

It's a lovely folk rock recording that evokes the dead and perhaps forgotten (the boxers of the project name and the songs "Duk Koo Kim" and "Salvador Sanchez," as well as Judas Priest guitarist Glenn Tipton and the late owner of a Polk Street donut shop). The Great Highway of the title is less a reference to the Ocean Beach boulevard than to "the world and people that have passed." This time, when he plays at the Great American Music Hall March 30 and 31, he'll be accompanied by string players from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music who appeared on Ghosts. Longtime drummer Anthony Koutsos is sitting this one out. "He's selling real estate now, and people's priorities change, and there just wasn't enough time to break in another drummer," said "Tender Nob" dweller Kozelek, who has also taken time away from the stage and will appear in the movie version of Steve Martin's novel Shopgirl.

Kozelek's priorities are different too at the moment: "It does feel right, not standing onstage, sitting on a stool for two hours rather than standing for two hours with a Les Paul strapped around my neck. Maybe next year I'll do a big rock tour."

Meanwhile the rock-out tour belongs to the other name-gamers: Make Believe. That's the handle of the latest, math punk, even "apocalyptic" incarnation of Chicago's Joan of Arc. Singer Tim Kinsella tried to explain the dynamics to me on the phone from Brooklyn – Make Believe is a collaborative, more formal band than Joan, made up of bassist Bobby Burg (who's also in one-person band Love of Everything), Kinsella's childhood friend and guitarist Sam Zurick, and cousin Nate Kinsella. "[Nate] was always in these impossible math rock bands, and we knew he was young and impressionable, and it was like, 'Let's get him to move to Chicago, and we can bully him around.' It's worked out great," Kinsella deadpanned.

For this tour, the multitasking Make Believe are sharing bills with Joan of Arc and Love of Everything. The tour deal "may sound very contrived, but it's all very intuitive. It's really about keeping ourselves busy and doing what we have to do," Kinsella explained. "We're playing three sets a night, and we have so much equipment it's absurd just loading in and out. It's fun. We're exhausted after every show."

Arrivals Who knew that about eight years after the fact a relatively unknown S.F. combo called the Vulvettes would make an appearance in the Village Voice's 2003 Pazz and Jop poll? Former Vulvette Greg Serpa e-mailed me to announce the news: the group's document of those days, This Is the Science We Believe In, was resurrected by the folks at Dragnet Records last year. They fell for the rawness of the group's old demo DAT, which was chock-full of crunching tin cans and pre-laptop loops/tape splices. Hence long-gone Vulvette's No. 696 position on the recent poll. "Higher than the Coachwhips [No. 948, Bangers vs. Fuckers], I'll have you know," Serpa joked via e-mail.

The band were given to Friends Forever-style "urban terrorism" antics like playing on the street at various unexpected S.F. spots in an open Ryder truck. "We'd pull up and play one song and pull out," Serpa said. "Unfortunately as with everything Vulvettes, we were wracked with technical difficulties like bad patch cords. We had a 19-year-old kid filming us and we said, 'Just make sure you get the crowd as well as us,' and so when he filmed us, it was girls' boobs and stuff like that."

Eventually the Vulvettes dissolved, keyboardist-guitarist Serpa joined the Weegs, guitarist Aaron Hospital/Veuve Pauli got into the Sixteens, and drummer Kennedy Greenrod formed Thin Man. All three groups open for the reunited Vulvettes for a one-time show March 27 at LiPo Lounge.

And departures It's the end of an Errata. Guitarist Sara Jaffe plays her last Bay Area show with Erase Errata at Bottom of the Hill March 25. Vocalist-horn player Jenny Hoyston plans to pick up guitar duties after a tour that includes a live Peel Session and All Tomorrow's Parties in the U.K. and the Coachella Festival in Indio.

As for Jaffe, she told me she was ready to move on – and settle down in S.F. "I just decided that I had a really great time doing it for the past four years, but I'm just ready to not be in that lifestyle anymore." She plans on working on her solo songwriting (she performs at the Eagle May 13) and other projects when she's not grant-writing for Community Works, an arts education nonprofit.... The Rapture played the Wired Reader's Raves reception at the Fillmore March 15. At one point, Bay Guardian staffer Sarah Han reported, they hailed the crowd with "Hey, smart people!" ... Former Magic Band guitarist Moris Tepper had some very special, even magical guests in his band at the Hemlock March 16. A shyly smiling and super-thin PJ Harvey supported her pal Tepper on bass and backing vocals – and erhu – while Beck player Josh Klinghoffer sat in on drums. Giving us a little earful before the summer release of her new album, Harvey is said to be joining Tepper March 27 at Blake's. Thank Sheela-Na-Gig, we're not rid of Polly yet.

E-mail Kimberly Chun