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540 Clement Street • (415) 752-7276
InternatIonal art Gallery
October 17-27, 2013
Stanford University • Palo Alto East Palo Alto • San Francisco unaff.org
Japanese Woodblock prints and paintings Japan center #202 1581 Webster street san Francisco, caliF. 94115 tel/Fax (415) 567-4390
www.tokaidoarts.com
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folkway. The rite takes place each year during the Halloween season, or Samhain, as the pagan holiday of death and regeneration is best known. During the gathering — which also serves as Reclaiming Bay Area’s biggest fundraiser of the year — dance, acrobatics, elaborate altars, and song mark a program largely geared around the spiral dance itself, in which group members move in a whorl (widdershins, as the counterclockwise movement is known in faiths from Wicca to Judaism) that invokes rebirth as the cold season approaches. It’s a gorgeous, all-inclusive sight, regardless of the number or character of the deities to which you pay homage. (You’re invited too, atheist babes.) www.reclaimingspiraldance.org
BEST PUNK-LIT SPIT ‘N SHINE Oh, how we love Sister Spit — that incubator of radical feminist artists and punk-lit creators, host for two decades of some the best Bay Area spoken word performances. But the literary series (birthed by Michelle Tea and Sini Anderson back in 1994, and then again in 2006) may well hold more significance to those outside of the Bay. After all, when Sister starting touring in the late ‘90s, packing its erudite rabble-rousers into a series of ramshackle vans, towns like Detroit and Tucson got a very special dose of San Francisco’s “talented, tattooed, and purple pigtailed” poets, writers, sexual outlaws, and more. Cultural ambassadors, we deem them all. The series continues to go on the road — with writers like Ali Liebgott, Eileen Myles, Robin Akimbo, and many more — and grow. Earlier this year publisher City Lights debuted its new Sister Spit imprint with a glorious anthology of pieces performed at past events, Sister Spit: Writing, Rants and Reminiscence from the Road. www.sisterspit.com
BEST PET SOUNDS Different Fur Studios is esteemed by the current generation of music fans for churning out a staggering variety of hip music from San Francisco — A B & the Sea, Main Attrakionz, Lilac, the She’s — and beyond. Given the storied studio’s long history, however, it’s no wonder it’s still helping define the sound of the Bay. It was founded in 1968, at the height of San Francisco sonic weirdness, by Patrick Gleeson, an energetic electronic music composer who brought in the likes of Herbie Hancock, Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, Stevie Wonder. The Fur stands on
Show up at the polls with our annual voter clip out guide in hand. Find it in the October 23 issue of the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Read up on the issues at sfbg.com/endorsements2013
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54 SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN
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