Adoption: The Long Road Ahead (Feature) APIA Leaders Strive to Help Life Go On (in National News) S.F. Schools' Enrollment Plan Still Being Debated (in Bay Area News) Surviving a Free-Market World (in Business) Art and Gut-Deep Emotions (in A&E) My First Protest (in Opinion)

Art and Gut-Deep Emotions

On Sept. 11, the hijackers did more than destroy thousands of lives, topple towers and penetrate the Pentagon. They also managed to shut down street fairs, silence nighclubs and, perhaps contrary to the alleged fundamentalist Muslim terrorists’ desires, close down Arab and Islamic cultural events: the second half of the Arab Film Festival and an Asian Art Museum demonstration of Islamic calligraphy in San Francisco.

Everything related to arts and entertainment — ordinarily my obsession — fell away. All that mattered was watching TV and monitoring the developments surrounding the tragic events in New York, DC and Pennsylvania. Life and death issues were at stake. War rhetoric was in the air. The threat of violence hung in the air. Candlelight vigils supplanted rock shows, as performers were met with canceled flights or simply lost the desire to even step on stage. Anyone singing was warbling “God Bless America.”

Now we’re in recovery mode, taking hesitant baby steps back toward normalcy as the United States prepares itself for war, not in the Middle East, but in Asia, with people who look like the Indian and Pakistani engineers we work with, the Jordanian cobbler who lives downstairs and the Palestinian families that gather for basketball games at the Y.

And art — in all its forms — is an essential part of the healing process, a way of expressing the complex, gut-deep emotions that we’ve all felt and inspiring us to carry on. As PJ Harvey proved last week at the Warfield, singing about kamikazes, “a gun in my hand” and going into battle — and seeming prescient by simply playing songs from her latest album about New York, Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea — music is a way of going to dark places, exploring deep emotional spaces, in circuitous and direct, powerful and purging ways that go beyond explanation.

Loose Change

Mark Ramos Nishita, otherwise known as Money Mark, is used to coping with change through music.

The Beastie Boys’ regular collaborator/touring keyboardist’s latest album, Change Is Coming, puns off his name — and expresses some of Nishita’s own apprehensions about a tech-driven future reeling rapidly out of control. He may have pieced together much of the album on the digital music editing program of choice, Pro Tools, but he still had his qualms about a brave new world of lonely tinkerers and their laptops.

I talked to him on the phone from Chicago weeks before the Sept. 11 hijackings, and even then, the apprehension came through in the seemingly laid-back multi-instrumentalist’s voice.

“It’s an amazing and scary time we’re living in,” the L.A. musician drawled. “I only find it scary in that there’s some amazing technology there that bad people [can] get a-hold of … and that’s what makes it scary. That bad people are in power — that’s what scares me the most. I mean, people in Third and Second World countries that don’t have computers cannot participate in [the technology].”

So, in spite of the fact that Nishita is currently touring with a full band and stopping in San Francisco this week, toting a new album of instrumentals that brims with Latin jazz grooves and inventive electronics, he says he’s also contemplating a career change. Nishita may have played organ on Beck’s “Where It’s At,” generated cheesy ‘60s instrumentals for the recent Johnny Depp film, Blow, and provided the perfect accompaniment, the song “Push the Button,” for the introduction of the new iMacs and titanium PowerBooks, but a new medium calls.

“Some days, I feel like I should just give everything I have away and become a painter,” says the half-Japanese Hawaiian, half-Chicano musician. “I think what I do is like painting because I play all the instruments myself. I stay in my room, and as long as I have a little bit of light, I can work and I work by myself. I change, cut and paste.”

He was thinking about painting before he asked his father for a Fender Rhodes keyboard at 15; he got his wish and started down the path of music. “I had really been illuminating on the idea of painting since I was 9, thinking about it,” he confesses. “Though I haven’t even picked up a brush, I’ve been viewing lots of paintings …and studying them, but I haven’t made a move yet.”

He doesn’t plan much. For instance, Nishita initially got to know the Beasties when he repaired their gate in L.A., while he was working as a carpenter and hanging out with his friends, the Dust Brothers, who were producing Paul’s Boutique. He ended up building their studio and eventually collaborating and performing on the Check Your Head album, before he started recording his own albums: 1995’s Mark’s Keyboard Repair and the 1998’s Push the Button, which yielded the hit, “Hand in Your Head.”

“It’s kind of my philosophy,” Nishita explains, “to just be, ponder on things and meditate on an idea and just kind of wait. Kind of the idea that if you’re at a party and you walk into one of the empty rooms in the house, if you stay in one place and you just sit there for a while, soon that party is going to move into your room and then you’ll be the center of the party.”

Money Mark performs on September 28 at the Justice League, 628 Divisadero St., San Francisco. Lake Trout and Kid Koala open. Showtime is at 9 p.m. Admission is $15. Call 415-289-2038.