A visceral local rock experience, and possible extravaganza is in store for those that wander down to the Eagle Tavern tonight…

It’s long been a bastion of gay biker culture, run by members of the Rainbow Motorcycle Club, who’ve made it into a veritable museum & proudly fly the colors of all their fallen comrades from many other clubs as well on the walls. The friendly & loyal staff, plus large patio with it’s heat lamps & roaring fire pit is a great place to hang out & chat no matter what the weather. For at least the last 7 years or more , it’s also one of SF’s most beloved and low profile musical venues whenever a hard rocking edition of their long running Thursday Night Live series goes off.

The Sorrow Town Choir will be celebrating the release of their new EP “Espinas de la Vida” ( aka Thorns of Life), with some special musical guests including Eagle bartender/booker Doug Hilsinger (Waycross, Eno-orchestra etc) sitting in.

Opening sets will be provided by local up & comers Empty Rooms, as well as perennial punk rocktivist Jimmy Shotwell. Also on the bill is an increasingly rare live appearance by local musician/bartender Bone Cootes, tonight jamming with The Poontones who feature ol’ pals like Stinky ( Buck Naked) , Kevin Ink ( Kelley Stoltz) and Mike Hunter ( Naysayers, Tales of Terror).

I’ve linked up some mp3’s of the previously mentioned groups for anyone interested in previewing the noisy hubbub after the jump…
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One of the year’s horticultural highlights & a bastion of the bustling Bay Area botanical biz is SF’s Flower & Garden Show. A must see event, it annually attracts thousands of fans of flora, some from as far as Canada, the South Pacific and Europe. I first attended a dozen years ago when it was a smaller scale affair at Fort Mason, and it is now a huge event held at the Cow Palace.

Here’s a selective bit of look back on the scene that went down last week, as the show was built & opened to entertain eager enthusiasts of eragrostis, admirer’s of amaryllis, lovers of lilys, and ooglers of orchids. Acres of displays and hundreds of sales booths dot the grounds of the rodeo ready Cow Palace, providing ample space to gather and gander and tour truly awesome takes on the gardening arts, and some occasionaly ostentatious exhibits.

Take this year’s Golden Gate Cup (aka Best of Show) winner, a display created by Organic Mechanics, that was an amazing undersea-esque garden replete with submersed looking succulents, ocotillos in bloom and sculpted tritons, octopus & seahorses provided by Oakland metal sculptor Patrick E that woulda made Ringo Starr feel right at home.

To the right is a pic of the durable duo known as the Organic Mechanic’s James Pettigrew and Sean Stout, proud winners of the Golden Gate Cup with Show Producer Kay Estey at last Tuesday’s opening night fete’.

Below is a shot of ornamental grass expert and “meadow maker” John Greenlee ( in hat ) talking to interested fans of his work on the last day of the show, amazingly he and his garden are holding up well after a week in the cold and cavernous concrete Cow Palace. Greenlee’s garden display won three awards including recognition from the other garden designers and an award from the American Horticultural Society for environmental stewardship. Entitled “The Metropolitan Meadow, Driving Towards A Solution”, the garden highlighted ways people can make a small but real difference in our environment with their lawns & gardens alone. Greenlee has long been appalled that conventional lawns, their chemicals & maintenance account for 100’s of tons of air pollution weekly throughout California.
He and his partner’s display asked the provoking question “Is Your Garden Part of The Problem or Part of the Solution”, by incorporating literally thousands of low water using, natural habitat friendly, and maintenance unintensive plants. To knock home his “step lightly” point, parked smack dab in the middle, was his wife’s cherry red Nash Metropolitan, a car that still gets 40 mpg, but was made 50 years ago.

check out some more random SF garden show pix after the jump…
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nice atmosphere for a cafe

Originally uploaded by Liz Henry.

The promising combination of cafe, patio, next to interesting train station, and breakfast food drew us to this crepe place in Menlo Park. I don’t remember its name, but it’s around the corner from Cafe Borrone and Kepler’s Books, and it’s some variant of “Crepe Cafe” or “Crepes Place”. The physical atmosphere was indeed lovely. Alas, the food and service totally blew. There are reasons why this place isn’t crowded on a Sunday morning during brunch primetime.

It was that inexplicable thing where no one takes your order or brings you water and coffee for like half an hour, and then a slow clumsy process involving multiple waiters dribbles out a little stuff, all wrong somehow and with elbows in your face, and then I asked for the coffee they forgot, and some of the food they forgot, and then got up again to ask for cream, and then realized I didn’t have a spoon, gave up and stirred the coffee with a fork. Food and coffee not quite even up to “mediocrity” standards.

However, I think this would be a fine, fine place to have some free wireless and a latte! For breakfast, not so hot. Stick to the baguette with butter and jam, and the perfectly okay latte.

Trains came and went, soothingly. Kids played with the toys on the patio. This cafe could be so awesome! I wish! Next time I’ll go to Cafe Borrone… again… for the millionth time… like everyone else in town.

I will always be one of the first to admit that I’m Not From Around Here. I grew up outside Atlanta, Georgia. A staple of my life before San Francisco was always fast food. This is not, as my stomach has tricked me into thinking, a good thing. As a matter of fact my brain makes me realize that it’s a bad thing. I nonetheless occaisionally have cravings for fast food. It’s turned into a rarely-indulged comfort food, much the way some people view tuna casserole. Despite having grown up with Krispy Kreme and watching folks queue up for them in mile-long lines in disbelief, I still want one every once in a while.

What is worse than this is having a fast food restaurant and then having it snatched away from me. There are no more Wendy’s — the one on Market Street closed. Arby’s remains a 45 minute bus ride up Geary to sit on a patio inundated by gay techno and being served by the same mid-forties asian male with a combover that I have been served by for 12 years — it’s never worth it and my childhood memories make Arby’s seem like the best of the lot. Of course, there is In-N-Out burger at the Wharf. We never had these in Georgia. It’s my new addiction. The most disturbing thing is the new Del Taco on Market Street. These went bankrupt in Georgia twenty years ago, and I could have gone my whole life without seeing another one.

The problem is television. I often see advertising for some new fast food blasphemy on TV and literally start salivating. When Burger King came out with their ENORMOUS OMELET SANDWICH, I had to have one to say that I had eaten the largest sandwich ever devised by fast food. In reality, it gave me the worst heartburn I’d had in ages. I’m definitely a sucker for anything featuring that really creepy Burger King mascot.

Krispy Kreme is an example of obtainable desires from my past, though. The closest one is in Daly City. There are television ads for many fast food places that taunt me mercilessly. I know that this is a quirk of how they sell television ads, but it’s still cruel. There is not a Dunkin Donuts in the state of California, yet I see commercials for them every day now. I am haunted by visions of the Dairy Queen chili cheeseburger (I WANT IT) yet the closest DQ Brazier is in Redwood City. I have no car and it’s not worth a ride on Caltrain to me. I will more than likely NEVER KNOW the joy that is the Sonic Blast drinks — from what I understand, that’s a schlep out to Livermore beyond where the BART train goes.

I know that it’s all an illusion — if I actually ate anything they were advertising, the illusion would be shattered. I cannot have them, yet I desire them. So many things in life are like this.

RWC Library in the moonlight

Originally uploaded by Liz Henry.

Downtown Redwood City has a restaurant of decent quality, with free wireless, across from the library. It’s beautiful at night, a pleasant patio, though traffic is heavy on Middlefield Road.

My friend Liz Ditz told us about her memories of the town as being much seedier, smaller, and nothing-ish back when El Camino was a road that went through groves of fruit trees. “Alameda de las Pulgas was only paved after The War,” she told us, expecting us to know that meant World War II. “When Zotti’s was still a dance hall and whorehouse.” Zotti’s turned out to be the old-school name for the Alpine Inn in Portola Valley. It is now a slightly vile but enjoyable family-friendly hamburger and beer joint where you eat outside on picnic tables. Sounds good but I was glad at that moment we were eating 18 dollar plates of capellini with basil and olives.

The library is built in Redwood City’s old fire station. Their outside park and patio, with cafe tables and umbrellas right on the sidewalk on Middlefield, also has free wireless and makes a great downtown hangout. Sitting there, I feel I’m part of the city. Every once in a while, Caltrain roars by with clanging and horns.

As I was looking up the history of the library, I came across this site they sponsored, Redwood City Remembers, which is about the history of the Japanese-American community in this town, and of the internment camps like the ones at Tanforan Racetrack and Topaz.

sunny cafe

Originally uploaded by Liz Henry.

At my local hangout today, Main Street Coffee in Redwood City, city council members rubbed elbows with construction workers, policemen, moms talking school politics, and a swarm of tiny children, who play with the patio toys and climb the big rock in the garden. Today was perfect and sunny and mild.

It’s a ten dollar splurge for breakfast - an omelette or chilaquilles, which comes with an enormous plate of other stuff like potatoes and scones and fruit. The food has that homey and wholesome aura and I happen to know that Mona, one of the owners, gets up at 2am to bake every morning. The staff here never quits. They know all our names, what times we are likely to come in and what we’re likely order.

Many other regulars talk to me, and a few stand out. The guy with the purple car” who likes to talk about computers, and of course the guy who plays the dulcimer and the ripply music people play on saws.

Part of its coolness is that it’s unexpected. It’s hidden away behind corrugated iron warehouses and auto body shops in the sort of neighborhood I would from my vast Sim City experience call “light industrial”.

Anyway, it’s been my home away from home for five years.

I’ve been working in Redwood City for almost two years, and this is still the greatest cafe I’ve found: A full menu for breakfast and lunch, freshly prepared good food, reasonable prices, plenty of parking.

They have really good food — not just cafe stuff — but real substantial stuff for breakfast and lunch. Often available is home-baked pie that’s just unbelievably good.
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My friend Miss Jessi got me out of my sunday pajamas (and blues) yesterday to go “terrorize gay bars” with her, and it sort of turned into an informal “girls crash Castro bars” afternoon. Which is something we’ve talked about doing for at least a year, getting dressed up and just venturing into the all-male enclaves and sort of either forcing them to tolerate us being there, or possibly having a really good time. We wanted the good time. What we got is after the jump.
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The seemingly never-ending saga that is the Patio Cafe’s alleged redevelopment continues… Last week, I came across 2 guys at the corner of 18th & Castro drumming up petition signatures as a demonstration of ‘community support’. Their outward goal: to show that the neighborhood wants that space alive again. (Phrased like that, who wouldn’t, eh?) Initially, I was confused and assumed it was to specifically combat the latest tug in the war regarding its permit status. Apparently not. Whatever your personal feelings regarding [Castro land baron] Les Natali are - and trust me, people have strong ones - or his foes for that matter, the fact that this formerly beloved space has been shuttered and essentially abandoned for 6 years is preposterous. If history’s a guide, tomorrow’s Board of Appeals hearing should be every bit the spectacle befitting what’s preceded it.

“Fading” artist rendering of what the the fabled space might ultmately look like, after the jump.
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Okay, I’m tired of the anti-Oaklandism. A friend is considering moving from the City to Oakland with her boyfriend. She said she had looked up the crime stats and felt it’d be unsafe living in Oakland, compared to the Haight. My pet peeve! argh! I once went to a networking event at Ramblas in the Mission, and one of the guys had the balls to ask me if I were afraid living in Oakland, and he admitted he’d never gone over the Bay Bridge to check out the East Bay. Don’t blast Oakland if you’ve never been. True, Oakland has a notorious, murderous rep, but all parts of Oakland don’t harbor raving lunatics (I do admit I hate the MacArthur BART station). I used to work for the City of Berkeley Police Dept and read police reports for a living. I know that even chintzy North Berkeley can be dangerous (last year a girl slashed an old woman’s throat at the Berkeley Rose Garden). No place is 100% safe.

Here are reasons why I “hella love Oakland”:

My #1 thing - there are trees and grass in Oakland, and it’s warmer! It’s not the “concrete jungle” that SF is.

The OUTDOORS
Chabot Space Center - see Jupiter and Venus from the Oakland Hills!
Redwood Park
Sibley Volcanic - yes, you read right! volcanic!
Davie Tennis Courts - best public courts around
Lake Merritt - 3 miles of paved trail, watch the rowers or see Disney’s inspiration for Disneyland (Children’s Playland)
Lake Temescal
** Club One has the best health club in the Bay at Oakland’s City Center. Indoor track, lap pool, spas in the locker rooms. A reasonably priced version of SF Bay Club (I know, I used to be a member there!).

The MOVIES
The Parkway - snuggle in comfy couches and eat pizza and drink beer while you catch up on movies you missed in the big houses
Grand Lake Theater - historic art deco theater - well known for its political activism via its marquee
Piedmont Theater - another Landmark favorite

The SHOPPING
College Avenue - Jeremy’s, Heartfelt, The Homesteader
Piedmont Avenue- The Bees Knees

The ENTERTAINMENT
Yoshi’s Jazz - World class jazz in Oakland!
Oakland Metro
The Alley - Rock that piano, Rod Dibble!
The Paramount - fine art deco building, reminds me of the Emerald City of Oz
G.S. Warriors - okay, they’re not doing that great, but hey it’s fun to watch, plus you’ve got the Cal Bears!

The FOOD
Farmer’s market at Lake Merritt and Jack London Square
Citron and A Cote - college
GG - Oakland’s speakeasy
Tropix - Cajun food with a super patio

If you’re considering moving to Oakland, look up these districts on craigslist.org. There are plenty of wonderful arts and crafts bungalows as well as Victorians and lofts:
Montclair - Mountain Blvd, Snake Road
Broadway Terrace
Piedmont - specific streets include 41st, 40th, John, Monte Vista, Bayo Vista, Santa Rosa, Jean, Chetwood
Lakeshore - Grand Avenues - specific streets include Warfield, Mandana, Vermont, Brooklyn
Lake Merritt - specific streets include Bellevue, Perkins, Adams, Orange, Pearl
Rockridge - try searching College Avenue, Manila, Hudson
North Oakland/Claremont - Alcatraz, Claremont
Jack London Square - Oak, 3rd and 4th Streets
Laurel District
Glenview - Trestle Glen