WOW: WE'RE Wade Randlett's official public enemy.

Randlett is the guy who runs SFSOS, the group that claims the rich are oppressed and abused in this city. As Steven T. Jones point out on page 18, the Bay Guardian was the centerpiece of Randlett's fundraising message at a lunch last week.

It would all be pretty funny if it weren't for the fact that some very powerful people, starting with Mayor Gavin Newsom and school superintendent Arlene Ackerman, were on hand as speakers – and their presence lent the group a level of political credibility it doesn't deserve.

On a very different note: In this week's cover package, Johnny Ray Huston and Kimberly Chun get lost in The Woods, Sleater-Kinney's seventh album. Huston, one of the first music writers to cover the band, finds much to love in the tension between the band's punk roots and new classic rock bent. "The best bands sound like no one but themselves," he writes. "Sleater-Kinney are one of those bands, and they'll continue to be whether they're crafting quiet folk songs (a future idea) or forging headbanging anthems."

The beauty of The Woods, Huston adds, is that "it can trick you into thinking it's 1969, that a throwback can work, that rock can still send shock waves through a fucked-up world. It's that big of an album, and that's no small feat."

Huston also catches up with vocalist-guitarist Corin Tucker and guitarist-vocalist Carrie Brownstein, whom he's known since their start. "The album also felt like a reaction to all the simplification and reductivism in language and ideas today," Brownstein tells him, "the way people take a complicated political idea and just dumb it down. Or even music starting to feel safer."

Chun – another veteran fan who tells me she remembers the old Covered Wagon show at which Brownstein's group Excuse 17 opened for Tucker's band Heavens to Betsy, takes the other side, sort of:

"As Sleater-Kinney settle down, make at least one baby, decide they're not quite in league with Kill Rock Stars anymore (hell, they are rock stars), and make themselves at home amid Sub Pop's grunge legacy (and all the male-identification the genre implies), desiring what would be is boiled down to maybe-not-so-simple desire between men and women."

These are, she gripes, simply "love songs – between a fox from Mars and a duck from Venus."

Tim Redmond