On Friday, beginning at 8 pm, Artists Television Access, the 25+ year old art space on 21st and Valencia, will hold a year-end fundraiser Electric Revival Party:

In the main gallery:
– DayV Jones, videollusionist extraordinaire, dazzles the house with images from his moving picture trove
– DJX-1138, the Bay Area’s only all-analog sci-fi DJ, electrifies the atmosphere with his collection of far out tunes
– Lee Montgomery, founder of Neighborhood Public Radio, conjures old spectres in a new video installation, from the project “Broadcast Version”

Downstairs in the inner sanctum:
– Craig Baldwin, legendary mad cinema scientist, shares celluloid gems from the Other Cinema archive in his subterranean laboratory
– Low Speed Duplicating, free-spirited Japanese sound duo, beckon spirits from the earth with savage and sublime psychedelic noise

As it’s a fundraiser, they’re charging admission, but they’re also advertising that it’s catered.

I sat at friend’s friend’s restaurant (Cav– rocks, check it out), drinking a great Italian wine, polishing off an excellent ravioli, and discussing Yelp with the staff. Fellow patron, who is a bartender in Oakland, talked about how her boss’s bar doesn’t quite work the Yelp right. In usual digerati showoff mode, I got my iPhone out and we reviewed each one of her reviews. Her bar had 35 reviews, and the first one, where she was called the c-word for cutting off someone who was drunk, was accurate, and she even remembered said patron. So we agreed, if there was a critical mass of serious reviews in general it sustained the project of a user-based review site.
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Cover to Cover Booksellers in Noe Valley isn’t just a great independent bookstore; they’re intimately linked to the affluent Noe Valley community. When the store almost closed in 2003, the neighborhood banded together to save it, with loans from dozens of neighbors and pledges from hundreds of customers to buy at least one hardback book a month.

Now the store returns the favor with community events, including this Thursday, Dec. 6, when from 4 to 9 pm fifteen percent of all purchases will be given to local James Lick Middle School. (And yes, that’s the same Lick as in San Jose’s Lick Observatory. He was also the original owner of the building that became Golden Gate Park’s Conservatory of Flowers. His biography makes him out to have been quite a character.)

And if you can’t make it to the bookstore but still want to support the school, come to El Rio on Saturday from 5 to 8 pm for a benefit concert “by one of the Bay Area’s most booked Latin bands around, led by Miquel Govea.”

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Bill Zwecker’s reports that Barry Bonds is steamed at the announcement that HBO will make a film of Game of Shadows, the BALCO exposé by SF Chronicle reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams. Zwecker quotes “a close friend” of Bonds as saying: “‘On top of everything else, Barry was not happy to hear about this.”

“On top of everything else”? I guess he means the indictment and the fact that Bonds is now radioactive for baseball teams.

Who’ll play Bonds in the movie? Toronto Globe and Mail columnist Jeff Blair suggests Wesley Snipes (pictured at left), an obvious choice as Snipes already appeared in a Giants uniform in the film The Fan.

Of course, that was nearly 12 years ago, and Snipes will be 46 by the time shooting starts in 2008. Come to think of it, not a bad choice to play the aging Bonds, who is actually three years younger.

The Chronicle on Friday had a piece on Wikipedia’s move from Florida to San Francisco, but they didn’t actually ask founder Jimmy Wales why the pioneering organization is making the move. Today the Wikimedia Foundation — the parent organization of the familiar encyclopedic websites — asked and answered the question themselves:

The Wikimedia Foundation is relocating from St. Petersburg, Florida to San Francisco. Why? St. Petersburg is lovely, but no-one would deliberately pick it to be our home; it’s just where Jimmy Wales happened to be living when he started the organization.

Oh, snap! Also, the baseball team there sucks even worse than the Giants.

The 6 pm all-Spanish newscast on KDTV channel 14 beat all other 6 pm news broadcasts in the Bay Area in the ratings for 24 to 54-year-olds, the Chronicle reported Saturday.

In other news news, from Susan Young’s fine TV blog: interchangeable white-man anchor Allen Denton has left KNTV, the NBC affiliate (ch. 3/11), for Nashville. Man, it must be tough for a guy with a totally forgettable face like that to be in the TV news business. It would be like trying to compete by making toilet paper that is somehow more… toilet-papery.

Lots of chitter chatter going on about the “pizza ban.” I find that title somewhat confusing. Friend emailed me really quick about it the other day and I was like, “what?” because I had heard of it as the “late hours on Broadway ban.”

The dealio: some restaurants are allowed to stay open past midnight to get the late bar crowd, namely, pizza joints on Broadway. Having been one of the revelers, I can say, it’s great to get some pizza in your stomach while you’re plastered. It means a more sober walk home, less partying, and a nice night of sleep. The other side is that Broadway Corridor is a mess of teenagers (not much older than, at least) every Friday and Saturday night, and trying to get them safely home has been a trial. Closing things down earlier- which was experimented a few weeks ago- meant less crime was commited. Less “clustering,” until 3-4am, and less neighborhood activity.

Before you have an opinion about this, don’t just dust off your memories, actually visit Broadway and Columbus at midnight on a Friday or Saturday.
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Last night at the San Francisco Symphony, Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas conducted an extended seminar on Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, explaining how the 1937 work, which restored the composer to good odor with Soviet arts commissars at the height of Stalin’s terror, was actually a musical cry of dismay at incipient fascism. The lecture and the concert were taped for the PBS series Keeping Score. The concert repeats tonight.

Today the New York Times has a nice piece on San Francisco’s Church of St. John Coltrane, the unique mix of traditional Christian liturgy, American storefront gospel, and mid-20th century jazz. The later compositions and performances of Coltrane (pictured at left) (official site) are regarded as spiritually inspired, and inspiring.

Search SFGate for tonight’s musical events.