Snap Judgments

Dan Strachota, Marc Weingarten, Chris Smith, Jennifer Wolfe, Jonathan Kiefer

CD Grandaddy: Just Like the Fambly Cat (V2)	BOOK Sheerly Avni: Cinema by the Bay (George Lucas Books)	BLOG Curbed SF (http://sf.curbed. com)	BOOK Dashka Slater: Baby Shoes (Bloomsbury)	DVD Duma (Warmer Bros.)
On Grandaddy’s fourth and final long-player, leader Jason Lytle sounds exhausted by the machinations of the music business, murmuring, “I don’t wanna stare at stacks of paper all the while, while the world goes by / Trading out the weather for a clever lyric written by an Ikea light” (on “Elevate Myself”). Of course, over the last 14 years, the recently disbanded Modesto outfit has never been one for outright ebullience. More often than not, the quintet has trafficked in a pretty kind of apocalyptia, detailing suburban ennui (forlorn vacant lots) and futuristic torpor (alcoholic robots) amid a miasma of floaty keyboards and fuzzed-out guitars. Lytle’s mix of country strum and electro bleep once sounded shockingly new; now it sounds dated. Only a few tracks—the delicate “Summer… It’s Gone” and the cheery “Skateboarding Saves Me Twice”—are imbued with any kind of enthusiasm, any blip of invention. Recently, Lytle moved to Montana, where he plans to quit drinking. Maybe there he’ll find a way to “make an honest sound and watch it fly around.” B- DAN STRACHOTA	San Francisco practically screams the word “cinematic,” yet until recently few writers had bothered to catalog the filmic history of the most picturesque city in the world. Jim Van Buskirk and Will Shank took the taxonomic approach in their recent book, Celluloid San Francisco, documenting all the movies and TV shows shot in locations from Fort Bragg to Big Sur and providing thumbnail histories of the sites as well as the films. If their book belongs in a backpack, put San Francisco contributing writer Sheerly Avni’s oversize contribution on your coffee table. Since it’s the first work published by George Lucas Books, it’s not surprising to find large sections devoted to the Star Warrior’s oeuvre and to that of his longtime buddy Francis Ford Coppola. But that’s fine: it’s a blast to riffle through this gorgeous volume, with its large color stills from films we all love. Even better, Avni provides lots of tasty insider anecdotes. For instance, when Coppola first opened his American Zoetrope studio, it was right around the corner from Rolling Stone. Jerry Garcia, Woody Allen, Akira Kurosawa, and just about everyone else would drop by, which might explain why Lucas and sound editor Walter Murch finished editing Lucas’s first film, THX 1138, in the relative quiet of a Mill Valley attic. B+ MARC WEINGARTEN	San Francisco’s real estate market rarely makes you laugh, except in a bleak sort of way (the median home price rose how much last year?). Curbed SF, however, is intent on changing that, one irony-drenched post at a time. The newest outpost in a mini-empire of “blogs for real estate whores,” which began in New York in 2004 and colonized L.A. last year, Curbed SF tracks the absurdities of our bubble by the bay, while conveying nuggets of news and gossip about neighborhoods from Bayview to Seacliff. Many of the posts are pure shelter-magazine porn—who wouldn’t want to call that Noe Valley place with the Barcelona chairs and killer views home? And some display a social conscience, such as the withering post on a monstrous $65 million Pac Heights villa whose excesses boggle the mind. The site is at its best, though, when it takes aim at that ultimate of evils: bad design. On the plan for a Potrero Hill playground, chief blogger Philip Ferrato opines, “The blandiosity of the vision statement makes one long for broken glass, burnt wrecks, and the odd homeless schizophrenic in the bushes.” Now that’s funny. A CHRIS SMITH	Though perhaps not destined to become a Goodnight Moon, Dashka Slater’s second children’s book has the makings of a family favorite. With illustrations by Hiroe Nakata that nail the teetering, breakneck style of a toddler on the move, Baby Shoes tells the tale of a child’s first day in a new pair of white shoes that don’t stay white for long. Rhythmically, the text has a few bumps and choppy transitions, but in all, its pacing has that combination of quick and unhurried that is key for reading aloud (over and over again). The story cleverly offers instruction in its use of objects and their colors and, in another smart touch, Slater, a San Francisco contributing writer, uses some words unusual for a children’s book, as in “City workers painting signs / touch up yellow crosswalk lines.” The book seems best suited for late toddler to age 3 and should engage both these children and—almost more important—the adults who read to them. A- JENNIFER WOLFE	Family fare that isn’t at once overwrought and underwhelming? Heaven forfend. It’s easy enough to see why the scaredy cats at Warner Bros. stifled the theatrical release of Duma, the long-awaited new film by Bay Area director Carroll Ballard (The Black Stallion, Fly Away Home) last year. The movie, about a South African farm boy who undertakes the adventure of returning the orphaned cheetah he’s adopted to the wild, actually goes pretty easy on the clichés. It doesn’t mug, isn’t overly cute, and has humility enough not to belabor its own majesty. Never mind the storybookish improbabilities of the plot, or that Ballard keeps making kids-and-animals films. For one thing, he makes them so infrequently. For another, with his great eye and his affinity for the natural world, he makes them better than anybody. B+ JONATHAN KIEFER