DVD In her Assassin tour earlier this year, San Francisco comedian Margaret Cho returned from the elaborate narratives of her solo shows to a more straight-ahead style of stand-up. As a political, bisexual, overweight, feminist Asian American, Cho has inhabited many subcultures; onstage she revels in their excesses and decries their hardships through a hilarious, finely honed array of voices and facial expressions. She also skewers all manner of ultraconservative sanctimony. After an X-rated l-can't-believe-she-said-it swipe at the First Lady, Cho asks, "Do you see why I was disinvited to the Democratic National Convention?" She is dangerous, actually, in that she makes personal, topically outrageous humor seem so hip and easy. A- | BOOK Amy Tan's new novel is narrated from the afterlife by a socialite Union Square dealer in Asian art whose spirit now presides over the Burmese jungle excursion she'd intended to lead. She described, often cattily, how her tour group becomes memorably entwined with the tribal people of "No Name Place." Tan's bent for circumstantial absurdity may not please everybody, but her book is impressively character driven; the explorers' dallying, infighting antics should resonate with anyone who's experienced Bay Area group-hike dynamics. Although very funny, this is a sober, nuanced look at clashing cultures—wryly cautionary, as its title implies, about the shortsightedness of even the best intentions. B+ | CD Over the last seven years, the artists on Emeryvilles Anticon label have melded rock and hip-hop with more panache than anyone around. The sophomore release by Oakland foursome Why? is the imprint's most accessible mishmash yet. On tracks like "Yo Yo Bye Bye" and "Rubber Traits," leader Yoni Wolf unspools rambling couplets that move from the caustic to the clever to the surreal, as the band layers cascading piano runs, chaotic hip-hop drum loops, and noisy rock-guitar hooks. The effect is akin to a drunken Beck reading one-liners from his journal while an equally wasted rock band wrestles with a DJ in the background. Brilliant! The band performs November 11 at San Francisco's Bottom of the Hill. B+ | BOOK When San Francisco's Craig Clevenger published his first novel three years ago, veterans of the gritty surrealist style were astonished. Irvine (Trainspotting) Welsh put him in "the top echelon of writers," and Chuck (Fight Club) Palahniuk proclaimed The Contortionist's Handbook the best fiction he'd read in "easily five years." Clevenger returns with the story of a master chemist who designs a drug that makes memories visceral. One day fire engulfs the chemist's lab; he swallows the pharmaceutical evidence and runs. At least that's what the cops want him to believe when he wakes up gruesomely burned and practically brain-dead, able to recall only the name Desiree—possibly a woman he loved, or maybe slang for the drug. Dermaphobia advances Clevenger's dark art, powerfully evoking the paranoia of a man attempting to reconstruct his life from memories that others may be fabricating. A- | BLOG Say you're a politician who's convinced the media is biased against you. What do you do? Well, you can hold press conferences until you're blue in the face, or you can start a blog, as District Six Supervisor Chris Daly did this past spring. Now the board's fightingest liberal wages his war against big business and the political establishment online. He posts about once a week, and his writing is eloquent, if occassionally marred by an excess of power-to-the-people rhetoric. Most entries are chock-full of budget minutiae, but there's no shortage of bomb throwing, either. Protesting a recent city hall initiative, Daly wrote, "It's kind of like poking someone's eyes out and taking credit for giving one of them back." B |