Book
Elizabeth McKenzie: MacGregor Tells The World
(random house)
A couple of years ago, a first-time author in Santa Cruz came out with a thoroughly entertaining “novel in stories” called Stop That Girl. The first-person protagonist was so vivid and real, with such an engaging sensibility, you almost felt she was alive and growing up somewhere in California. It’s good to know Elizabeth McKenzie is still creating characters like that. This time we meet MacGregor West, an acerbic, deadpan guy who never knew who his father was and at 22 still has not come to grips with the rather mysterious death of his mother when he was 9. As the novel opens, he is approaching a home in Pacific Heights; its return address is on a batch of empty envelopes he recently found in a shoe box “full of his mother’s loose ends,” and his first clue in uncovering her past, and thus his own. Here he meets another beguiling mess, Carolyn Ware, trapped in a fold-up bed by her much younger sister. So begins a tale that’s part mystery, part coming-
of-age love story, part whirlwind tour of San Francisco. The end may be a bit disappointing, but it also feels true to life for these real if severely quirky characters. More, please. A-
PAMELA FEINSILBER

CD
Gravy Train: All The Sweet Stuff
(Cochon Records) Gravy Train is as prototypically Bay Area as a band can be: since 2001 the Oakland quartet—whose members go by the names Hunx, Chunx, Junx, and Funx—has been perfecting a hella lurid, superkitschy, homofabulous style of bubblegum pop. The band’s third long-player (its first for San Francisco’s Cochon Records, which has released other superhip outfits, such as Hey Willpower and Von Iva) is its most musically sophisticated yet, although that’s a little like saying American Idol just had its most highbrow season ever. Gravy Train’s earlier efforts were minimal and rap-influenced; think of the Beastie Boys collaborating with Joan Jett on the set of a low-budget gay porno film. This one is full of big guitar riffs, swirling garage-rock organ, and stomping beats. If it weren’t for the disco flourishes and pervy lyrics (“I’ll fill you in like an application”), you might confuse the group with ’70s glam rockers like the Sweet or Slade.
Gravy Train (or Gravy Train!!!! as the band has it) is nothing if not salacious, but the double entendres on tunes like “Frat Party” and “Solo
J/O” are so ridiculous you can’t help splitting your pants laughing. All the Sweet Stuff is the kind of nutty dance party John Waters would adore. A
DAN STRACHOTA

Book
Carol Pogash: Seduced by Madness
(william morrow)
After Catherine Crier’s execrable recap of the Susan Polk murder case—I gave it a C- on this page a few months ago—one would think the Orinda housewife who stabbed her husband 27 times and then acted as her own defense lawyer had outstayed her 15-minute welcome. But Orinda writer Carol Pogash, a respected journalist and author of As Real As It Gets: the Life of a Hospital at the Center of the AIDS Epidemic (1992), interviewed virtually everyone, it seems, who ever had contact with the lovely, frosty Susan and the charismatic, narcissistic Felix. Beyond that, she looks at their long-disturbing relationship—should anyone have forgotten, Felix was the much-younger Susan’s therapist when she was a teen—in the context of the changing Bay Area counterculture. With an eye for detail as well as the absurd, Pogash both explores and lampoons three decades of local social trends while describing, for instance, Felix’s predilection for group therapy and the couple’s headline-producing hunts for “satanist” day-care providers. Her easy familiarity with local mores makes this a fascinating read. From their encounter-group pseudo­wisdom to their obsessing over their kids’ safety to their fascination with money, those crazy Polks, it turns out, may have been only a little bit crazier than the rest of us. A
SHEERLY AVNI

DVD
Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars
(Shangri-La entertainment)
“When two elephants are fighting,” sings Reuben
Koroma, lead singer of Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars, “the grass they will suffer.” Like the other members of his band, Koroma is one of hundreds of thousands who fled the civil war in their country in the 1990s and then spent years languishing in camps in neighboring Guinea. In this oddly exhilarating film, San Francisco filmmakers Zach Niles and Banker White follow the Refugee All Stars from the camps where the band members first sought solace in music back to their home in the capital city of Freetown, where the band reunites with old musical comrades, appears on a local radio show, and finally gets the chance to record its music in a studio. The film alternates between interviews with the musicians about the horrors they’ve witnessed and marvelous footage of the men performing—in rehearsals, at the camps, and, of course, in tour van sing-alongs. The music is the best part of the film. In fact, the All Stars’
firm belief in music’s healing power might have been even better served with more focus on the members’ artistry, how they came to be musicians, and even how they got their gear. Still, this is an admirable documentary, one that brims with life and hope. B+
SHEERLY AVNI

Book
David Sheff: Beautiful Boy
(Houghton Mifflin)

Others have written about their teenagers’ descent into the particular hell of drug abuse, including me, once in this magazine. But today one in three families in the United States contains a drug addict or alcoholic, so there’s room on the shelf for David Sheff’s gut-wrenching, incisive, and, yes, addictive account of his son Nic’s struggle—beginning at age 14 and ending, his father reports guardedly in the epilogue, at 24—with methamphetamine. The book suffers from a tinge of hyperbole, uncalled-for in such a dramatic story, and from some jarringly clunky dialogue. (Reading lines such as “We are going,” “I will be fine,” and “I learned how dangerous meth is. It is f-ed up,” one wonders why the author seems allergic to
contractions.) But Sheff, an Inverness journalist best known for Rolling Stone and Playboy interviews with the likes of John Lennon and Jack Nicholson, expertly weaves statistics, interviews, and advice through this riveting account of one family’s 10-year ride on the roller coaster of recovery and relapse. And despite Nic’s apparent year of sobriety at the book’s close, Sheff manages to avoid the kind of sappy, happy ending that parents of addicts crave as achingly as their kids crave the next fix. B+
MEREDITH MARAN