21st century culture dump

The "official mashup" of the Beatles' catalog, originally done for the Cirque du Soleil's show "Love," goes on sale next Tuesday. Perhaps the most poignant piece of the story is that the work was ostensibly done by Sir George Martin and his son Giles, but that Dad is now "hard of hearing and his primary job was to interpret his knowledge of the Beatles, saying whether or not Lennon would have liked something, for instance."

The National Book Awards were announced, with Richard Powers winning the fiction prize for "The Echo Maker," Timothy Egan for nonfiction, and Nathaniel Mackey for poetry for "Splay Anthem." I noted that the latter is a New Directions book -- good to see them still bringing out winners. Haven't hard so much from New Directions lately, it seems.

Finally, notice Violet Blue's weekly column on SFGate, unpacking (you should pardon the expression) the Republicans' last-ditch attempt to scare the nation before the election -- the phrase "San Francisco values." She writes:

We have sex shops aplenty from the Marina to the Mission, leather shops, fetish wear shops and free condom bowls at card stores in the Castro (alongside bowls of free biscuits for your pug). There are all-gender, all-orientation sex clubs (one is three levels), sex-positive hotels and B&Bs, and we have places where porn and hookups are made, from SOMA's Porn Palace to the Mission District's Kinky Salon. We have the ginormous, family-friendly and not really sexual (but highly sexualized by homophobes) San Francisco Gay Pride Parade and the overtly sexual (but every year, more like Six Flags does leather) BDSM-positive Folsom Street Fair, bringing in hundreds of thousands of sex-happy tourists to bask in our values, from all over the nation and the world.

Note the sentence I italicized. Everything else you can look up in the Yellow Pages, but where do you find out about these sex clubs, you may want to know? I no longer am quite sure, but calling San Francisco Sex Information at (415) 989-SFSI would be a good bet. Also, Violet usually puts in her blog whatever links and info the Chronicle wouldn't let her publish on their site.