| BOOK Stumbling and Raging: More Politically Inspired Fiction (MacAdam/Cage) | BLOG Sparkletack.com | CD Goapele: Change It All (Skyblaze/ Columbia) | DVD Where The Sidewalk Ends (Fox) | BOOK John Tayman: The Colony: The Harrowing True Story of the Exiles of Molokai (Scribner) |
| Given the truthlessness of most politicians, accounting for politics is a task perhaps best left to writers of fiction. More than 30 contribute to this uneven anthology, the second in a series edited by San Francisco novelist Stephen Elliott. The best capture the consequences of bad-faith government, here and abroad, in narrative too nuanced to take sides: in Courtney Angela Brkic's stunning tale, for example, an Iraqi woman supports her family by working as an interpreter for the U.S. military. But many of the selections read as either shrill parody or self-righteous commentary. Dave Eggers's smug contribution, describing a perfect world in which elections are publicly funded and lobbyists are exiled to Greenland, comes to mind. Fiction may help explain politics, but neither benefits when fiction itself gets political. B- Jonathon Keats | Sometimes "educational" entertainment—think Ken Burns or NPR—has an eat-your-peas quality. You know you shoud pay attention but, well, when does The O.C. come on? Not so with Sparkletack.com. Once a week, San Francisco resident Richard Miller offers an audio blog with a chunk of local history or culture that you can load straight into your iPod. Discussing the iconic (Golden Gate Bridge as suicide magnet) as well as the obscure (Black Bart, prospector turned bandit and bad poet), the posts are infused with Miller's quirky personal musings. He confesses, for instance, to a crush on Patty Hearst during her outlaw days. Most entries run 10 to 20 minutes, and although the narratives occasionally bog down—a meandering post on fog never quite takes off—Miller's irreverence and good humor give even dry subjects an appealing intimacy. A- Chris Smith | Ever since Lauryn Hill's 1998 solo record, the airwaves have been flooded with neosoul chanteuses in kinky dreads warbling synthesized Earth-mama R&B. On her second LP, Oakland's Goapele (pronounced "gwa-pa-lay" and meaning "to go forward" in the Tswana language) attempts to join the genre's upper echelon, going so far as to hire Pink pal Linda Perry to cowrite and produce one track. Goapele has a voice that, while fluid enough, is thinner and reedier than that of contemporaries like Angie Stone, lending a monotonous feel to her songs. And her lyrics are bland at best (yeah, "there are people left out from living comfortably"), leaving most of the work to the production, which often blends into a smooth-jazz morass. The tracks on which she breaks out of her sonic ghetto—the propulsively funky "Love Me Right," say, and the strutting "Fly Away"—suggest that with the right backing, Goapele could reconcile her hippie roots and her Top 40 dreams. B- Dan Strachota | With a sharp Ben Hect script and magnetic lead performances by Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney, Otto Preminger's nimble, tensely satisfying 1950 thriller would—if the DVD had been available—have made a fine keepsake from last year's San Francisco Noir Festival. (This year's runs Janualy 13 to 24th.) The new DVD benefits from lively, knowledgeable commentary by festival impressario Eddie Mueller. Hecht produced a note-perfect genre plot in which, as Mueller puts it, "the formerly trustworthy authority figure acts out of some sort of twisted self-interest or some ingrained psychosis. Gee, aren't you glad that kind of thing doesn't happen in real life?" Whenever Andrews's abashed expression belies his roughhouse manner, it's unsettling and suspenseful—just as any self-respecting corrupt-detective story should be. You're never quite sure what moral choices he'll make. A- Jonathan Kiefer | A multiple magazine-award winner and former Outside editor, San Francisco's John Tayman brings a meticulous, compassionate eye to the saga of the leper colony on Molokai, founded in 1866 and functioning as a city of medical exile until 100 years later. The story of the men, women, and children—almost 9,000 in all—forced into this natural prison by fears of contagion is both a stain on American history and an inspiring testimony to the strength of the exiles themselves. It's a must-read today, when fears of superflus, bioterror, and the resurgence of old plagues fill the headlines. As Tayman's riveting account shows, disease is often not nearly as threatening to civilization as our uncivilized treatment of the ill. A Sheerly Avni |