› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Hey, dude, while you were busy abiding, you totally snoozed on last year's Budget Rock Showcase. We came, we were conquered, we rocked, we rolled, we had joy, we had fun, we had seasons at the Stork. Oh yeah, and we wet our lips, shook our hips, and swore we'd never dip back into that pretty, pretty poison of a garage rock fest, yet said soiree kept dragging us back the weekend of Nov. Read more »

REVIEW Years after Europunk deconstructionists copped a few tears, ties, and folds from Comme des Garçons' Rei Kawakubo and A-list fashionista Carolyn Bessette Kennedy championed the cutting austerity of Yohji Yamamoto, it's safe to say that the once-coupled Japanese designers and their slight predecessor Issey Miyake have been firmly ensconced as pillars of avant-garde fashion. But that doesn't mean their work — and that of Kawakubo acolytes Junya Watanabe and Tao Kurihara — is ready to be filed away without another look. Read more »

› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Some of the sweetest words to deliver to impecunious types like myself: pay what you can. This I can work with — be it a noise show at 21 Grand or the new Radiohead album. After blowing my newspaper wage-slave paycheck on rent, ramen, recreational intoxicants like lychee jellies, and sticker pics of my homegirls in goth Lolita getups, there's not much cheddar left to slap on surplus grillables. Read more »

› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Do you believe in magic? Or voodoo? Or the links between ecstasy and long-term memory loss? If you're a firm believer in the last, then you probably can't recall the good ole days of garage rock — and no, I'm not talking about '60s snarlers like the Seeds, the Standells, and the Chocolate Watchband nor '80s revivalists like the Fleshtones, the Chesterfield Kings, and Holly Golightly. Read more »

On the horn from his native Toronto, Sadies vocalist-guitarist-keyboardist Dallas Good sounds as courtly and old-world as any immaculately suited and Stetsoned gentleman picker doing time in Boys bands that go by the name of Blue Grass or Foggy Mountain. Read more »

› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Are you for reals? Read more »

› kimberly@sfbg.com

There's a moment in Lust, Caution (Se, Jie) in which you can clearly make out the writing, and this most awkward title's embedded warning, on the wall. The scene: a humid, tryst-friendly boudoir in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. Read more »

› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER What flying snacks do not kill me only make me harder, better, faster, stronger — come all ye children of Kanye West and Friedrich Nietzsche. I love San Francisco. Where else can you catch hell and come this close to getting brained by a pupusa hurled by a nattering, nutty nutbag in orangey pink stretch pants? Read more »

› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Last night I dreamed that Morrissey played San Francisco. And waking, stumbling out of the top bunk, and triggering an avalanche of promo CDs, I was happy in the haze of that Estaban-drunken hour, but heaven knows I'm wondering, what difference does it make when that charming man has teased us so often before? Now I know how Joan of Arc felt, charging into Mr. Steven Patrick Morrissey's onetime Los Angeles hood to flyer his street with mash notes. And on the cusp of Mr. Read more »

› kimberly@sfbg.com

Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich, Federico Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni, Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune — legendary screen team-ups betwixt a vision-questing director and his or her alter ego star filter are the stuff of cinematic legend. Read more »