This week, our picks are Travis who are playing with Maximo Park at the Fillmore tomorrow night. Friday night at the Fillmore, The Drones (listen to "Shark Fin Blues" here) are opening for Band of Horses, an indie-rock band based out of Seattle. Saturday night is where it gets good - Miggs (pictured above), based out of San Francisco, will be headlining at Cafe du Nord. Miggs have been singled out as "the next big thing outta the San Francisco Bay Area," it seems. You don't want to miss that show.

Full listings after the jump.

For those of you who don't care what happens to Pam and Jim:

-- 49ers Fan Night: Biggest 49ers fan ever, Bevan Dufty, invites you to celebrate football. In the Castro. 49ers alumni stars will be present, and Gold Rush cheerleaders will be on hand to sign calendars. In the Castro. Sounds like a homerun kind of night! Goes from 7 p.m.-9 p.m. at Mix, 4086 - 18th Street (at Castro); free.

-- Circle, Triclops!, Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound: Experimental rock, rock, metal rock, psychedelic rock, and Finish rock abound! Starting at 9 p.m. at Bottom of the Hill, 1233 - 17th Street; $10-$12.

-- Terminator 2: Judgment Day: The robot develops feelings. Aw. Thumbs up to you too, Arnold! Starts at 9:10 p.m. at the Castro Theatre, Castro & Market Streets; $6-$9.

-- Candye Kane: Jazzy blues singer/sex activist or bluesy jazz singer/sex activist? You make the call tonight at 8 p.m. at Biscuits & Blues, 401 Mason (at Geary); $12.50.


Alex Smith image: "Courtesy photo"

-- Trannyshack's Siouxsie and the Banshees Night: Trannyshack icon and Scissor Sisters [NSFW] star Ana Matronic returns home to help Heklina host tonight's Siouxsie tribute. Also, we heard a rumor that Ana likes to watch live Broadway musical clips on YouTube. (i.e., str8-gay hipster suicide.) Is this true? We don't believe it. But if she does, she just landed herself a new stalker. Music starts at 10 p.m. and the show begins at midnight at the Stud, 399 - 9th Street (at Harrison).

-- Blues in the Night: A musical-romance using the work of Benny Goodman, the totally amazing Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, and other jazzy legends. Created and directed by Sheldon Epps. Starts at 8 p.m., Post Street Theater, 450 Post (at Mason); $35.

-- Patti Smith: Brilliant punk-rock poet/singer, Michael Stipe's fag hag, and leave-in conditioner hater performs, beautifully. Seriously, go see her. Starting at 9 p.m., the Fillmore; $35.

-- Paprika (2006): Japanese detective-anime flick screens twice at the 7:15 p.m. and 9:15 p.m. at the Red Vic, 1727 Haight (at Cole); $5-$8.50.

Love is Chemicals will be at Café Du Nord tomorrow night, and if you haven’t seen this local act yet, Go! Nate Grover, the singer of Love is Chemicals. has undergone the arduous SFist interview in anticipation of the event. True, this show may not involve fighting robots, but you gotta love Grover’s hopeful and realistic attitude about the music scene in this town as well as his picks for movies and artists and tips on pet photography. You can listen to songs from Love is Chemicals here.

Best show you've ever played and what made it great?
We played a show in an art space in the SOMA where they build fighting robots. We played with good friends The Invisible Cities and The Child Who Was A Keyhole (from Salt Lake City). The venue had a house kit that was situated behind a giant rhino skull. We shared the stage with a gang of chainsaw-wielding robots, which somehow made our music sound better. This, of course, was the show our parents decided to come to.

Best venue in the world?
The world? That's hard to say. Our favorite so far has been Mezzanine. They've got dressing rooms, a shower, and a fully-stocked fridge. The stage is big enough so that we're not all bumping into each other. The sound was great and they even had a lighting technician. They have couches for the audience to sit on. Really great place.

Best fans in the world?
The ones that come to see us headline at 12:30 on a Tuesday night and still find the energy to cheer.

What's your favorite song to perform?
Occasionally we'll do a cover of "Brand New Key" by Melany. There's something beautiful about a sizable, bearded man (me), singing in sweet falsetto, "I've got a brand new pair of roller-skates." I also get to scream a lot, which is cathartic.

Favorite collaborators?
My mates! To me, Love is Chemicals is a dream line-up. We're constantly working on a million new songs because these people make collaboration so fun. It's part of what keeps me engaged; I'm in love with our chemistry (clever, I know).

Lamest request made at a show?
An event planner asked us to play lighter so that people could talk. No joke.

What's it take to get a gig in this town anyway?
Not a lot. There are hundreds of places to play in San Francisco. If you're in a band here, there's no reason you shouldn't play out. If you're a small touring band, I hear it's tougher. I believe they're taking bribes at the Hemlock Tavern.

Check out Lovis Chemicals November 1st at Café Du Nord. They open for Finest Dearest and Teri Falini and go on first. Door at 8:30. 21+ $7

The rise in fatalities in recent years has caused people to call for better safety measures. The fact that most of the fatalities are due to suicide will probably call for other types of measures, somewhere along the lines of the debate over barriers on the Golden Gate Bridge to stop people from jumping.

To quote Sgt. Esterhaus from "Hill Street Blues," let's be careful out there.

Oh wait, there's going to be no booze allowed this year? Nevermind.

Apparently, some people have been complaining about the drunken hordes of frat boys, Marina girls, and aging alcoholics who have descended upon the Festival year after year. The complaint says that drunken people take away from a "family atmosphere” and well; won't somebody think of the children? So a ban was pushed through, much to the chagrin of Festival organizers.

In today's Examiner, grumpy ole Ken Garcia claims that the ban was enacted in an act of revenge upon the Festival organizers by the Telegraph Hill Dwellers and their errand boy, Aaron Peskin, for a big fight over some property in North Beach (in short, developers were given permission to build housing, Dwellers complained, Peskin claimed eminent domain and the developers were kept from developing-- one of our favorite "School House Rock" episodes, BTW, was the sequel to "I'm Just a Bill" where Bill The Bill is stopped from going into effect when a politician declares eminent domain. We just loved that song "Eminence Domain Front").

Which maybe the case and considering how things work in this town, possibly true. On the other hand, the North Beach Festival does have a tendency to devolve into drunken rowdiness. And not just by us. People for the ban also say that this way the Festival will be less with the drunken keg party and more with the North beach flavor as apparently all the drinking makes it harder to tell the difference between the exact same vendor and artist at this fair as at other fairs. We'd also like to point out that it won't exactly be Disney Land out there-- you can still drink at the bars and there will be a section to drink at the festival, just not near anything.

Which means that if you want to look for us, we'll be the one's at the bar.
Image, bra, from TheTwins.org

On the bright side, at least matchbox 20's Rob Thomas won't be here: Gavin Newsom took some time out from romancing to regretfully announce that a planned free Santana concert at the Civic Center on April 22, in connection with the centennial festivities for the April 18, 1906 earthquake, has been indefinitely postponed due to lack of funds. We're not super huge Santana fans or anything, but it's cool that he was going to play free of charge -- and we were definitely disappointed once we heard that Green Day was possibly also in negotiations to play that same show. We love Green Day!

Newsom is doing his best to put a positive spin on it: they're going to keep fundraising, and you know, an earthquake celebration isn't about the date of the earthquake, it's about Survival! and Community Togetherness! -- that's what we're celebrating and that'll go on ! A concert is appropriate at any time! "It will be even bigger and better than what we had been planning," Newsom bravely said, though he also declined to state when that bigger and better concert might actually take place, or even be announced.

We hope the show'll be like Lollapalooza, with the big names on the center stage and a smaller stage for local acts! Barring that, we hope Huey Lewis and the News play.

Picture of Carlos Santana performing at the 2004 SF Blues Festival

In 1950, the great mystery writer Raymond Chandler wrote of the contemporaneous critical response to his stories and those of James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, et. al. that:

It takes a very open mind indeed to look behind the unnecessarily gaudy covers, trashy titles and barely acceptable advertisements and recognize the authentic power of a kind of writing that, even at its most mannered and artificial, made most of the fiction of the time taste like a cup of lukewarm consommé at a spinsterish tearoom.

We were reminded of Chandler's defensive tone on Saturday at the Palace of Fine Arts, where the Film Noir Foundation and LitQuake combined to present NoirQuake! (exclamation point sic.), "a hard-boiled afternon of noir readings and film clips." The museum-opening crowd, dotted with more fedoras than usual, assembled to sip chardonnay and hear local authors read from their favorite noirs. Chandler's come a long way, baby--these are exactly the kind of people who, 50 years ago, dismissed hard-boiled fiction as trashy, gaudy, and barely acceptable. They had fun Saturday, though; it was hard not to. Joe Gores read from Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, Joyce Maynard read from Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely, Barry Gifford read from Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, Joe Loya read from W.R. Burnett's The Asphalt Jungle, Daniel Handler read from Patricia Highsmith's Strangers On A Train, Robert Mailer Anderson read from Cornell Woolrich's "Rear Window," Gary Phillips read from Mickey Spillane's Kiss Me Deadly, Michelle Tea read from Jim Thompson's The Grifters, and Peter Plate read (more like declaimed, actually, from memory, sounding like a poetry slam--interesting choice) from Charles Willeford's Miami Blues. Each reading was followed by the same scene from the film adaptaion of the novel or story.

Although a program that starts with Hammett and Humphrey Bogart and ends with Willeford and Alec Baldwin tells a rather unpleasant story about U.S. culture and progress since the 40s, these books and movies are almost uniformly great. As if to drive home the point about how noir's cultural status has changed, M Is For Mystery bookstore was hawking the high-class Library of America collections of Chandler's and Hammett's work alongside The Life and Times of Sean Penn (Spicoli himself appeared later in the evening to talk about film noir).

“Operation Softball Connect was in full effect,” said a proud Delepine.

On the other side of the diamond, the Mayor’s Board Liaison and team captain Wade Crowfoot tried to explain the Blues’s crushing defeat. “Softball is a perplexing game, a game that can break your heart,” mourned Crowfoot, “and our heart was broken as we were beaten once again by a stronger team.”