New Music listings column: Synthetic Pleasures

ON ANY GIVEN day the scenery at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' "Beautiful Losers" show could double for a nightclub, with its attendees easily plucked from the Arrow Bar, a skate park, or a SOMA fashion shoot. Christ, even Beastie Boy Mike D is here on the day I visit.

Beautiful losers? Yeah, we've got a few. It's just nice to see jobless hipsters out during the day every once in a while, without a smoke or a drink in hand, especially when they're flocking to works by skater-painter Tommy Guerrero, director-designer Mike Mills, and photographer Terry Richardson. It's actually quite a sight to behold – Richardson's schlong, that is. Man, that thing is everywhere these days, and it's definitely not limited to "Beautiful Losers." But there's a lot to be said for taking your influences from the sticky amateur pages of Hustler and getting your photos up on bona fide gallery walls, with your cable release in one hand and your tension release in the other.

By documenting New York's downtown scene – along with snapping pics of Sonic Youth, Vincent Gallo, and that whole crowd – Richardson has become a master of sleaze-style creation and is owed a massive debt from all the heroin-chic Joe Dallesandro clones. In fact, blame Richardson for the proliferation of the mesh cap and pointed shoe-tapered jean fad we're finally beginning to kill off.

Richardson's a different breed of cat, though. He's not exactly the first to admit fashion has got nothing to do with clothes, but he might be the first to admit it's got nothing to do with models either. Terry World – also the title of his recent coffee-table book – is Terry's world, and through it runs an endless stream of Richardson's nude self-portraiture, where the T-Bone (his name for it, not mine) is both clothing and model combined. Richardson's real lasting effect, though, is his penchant for making losers beautiful. There's no extreme makeover quite like suddenly finding oneself in a magazine or on a gallery wall, and for that we – and the scores of sense-eroding imitators he's spawned, many also featured in the show – love him. At the core, it's what "Beautiful Losers" is all about: art that's lowbrow, backward, "street," self-referential, fuckable, narcissistic, and everything else you want in indie porn.

I guess the gallery is as good a place as any for that flashy, trashy, fashy fix now that U.K. style rags Sleazenation and the Face have bought the farm, or sold the fax-phone-copier combo, as it were. Ah, the negative reverberations of London's electro-backlash, long after those leg-warmered, raccoon-eyed Liquid Sky enthusiasts sported "Dior Not War" pinbacks and went gaga for Nag Nag Nag. For the most part, London's returned to its tried-and-true club formula – the one the trendy shit comes crawling back to time and again when crazes prove to be flat-out crazy and club owners can only maintain their sanity by adopting an "easy come, easy go" mantra.

At least Fabric, the city's dance mecca, is laying it down right. It's got its hands in every pot, with a wildly popular club night and a series of last-night-a-DJ-saved-my-life mix discs slowly making their way stateside. Of the Fabric label's recent stunners – including live-to-disc sets from Cologne's Michael Mayer and Detroit's Stacey Pullen – Montrealer Akufen's Fabric 17 will have minimal techno freaks speaking in tongues and doing dervish twirls, or scratching their stubble, whatever their fancy. Akufen's range is pretty far-reaching, and those who aren't totally into the threads that hold a good techno set together (like instrumental tracks from Pantytec, Wighnomy Brothers, and Cabanne) will be poppily pleased with Señor Coconut's salsa cover of "Smoke on the Water" and Matthew Dear's glamtastic "Dog Days" remix.

Speaking of Canadians doing a fierce number on all we know and love about techno, Jake Fairley (OK, he's now officially a Berliner) just might have a thing or two to contribute. Sure he looks demure smoking a pipe on the cover of his full-length debut, Touch Not the Cat, but he sure did rip shit up T-Rex style at the Rx Gallery a couple weeks back, from behind his laptop-strong wall of gear. Don't these guys realize we've got to conserve our energy for the Love Parade?

Joseph Malik and Ayro perform Thurs/23, 10 p.m., Rx Gallery, 132 Eddy, S.F. $10 (415) 474-RXSF.

DJ Clever performs Fri/24, 10:30 p.m.-3 a.m., AsiaSF, 201 Ninth St., S.F. $10. (415) 255-2742.

Future Forward Fest, with B. Fleischmann, Christian Kleine, and Bonobo, takes place Sun/26, noon-5 p.m., Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, S.F. $20-$45. (415) 625-8880.

DJ Krush performs Sept. 29, 9 p.m., Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, S.F. $20. (415) 820-9669.

Love Parade San Francisco takes place Oct. 2, 1 p.m., starts at Market and Beale Streets, S.F. www.loveparadesf.org.

Solvent performs Oct. 2, 10 p.m., Rx Gallery, 132 Eddy, S.F. Call for price. (415) 474-RXSF