Respect and homage to Kim K’s big butt

As the days of 2014 dwindle down, Country Joe McDonald, bard of many an era, has composed an ode to the year’s icon: “Kim K’s Butt.”

This poem begins, “I started to think, hey, what’s up? Then I thought about Kim K’s butt,” and goes on in couplets, at quite some length: “No food, no job, life sure gets tough/ But Kim K’s butt brings you back up”; “Kanye’s lucky but it’s gotta be tough/ Taking care of Kim K’s butt.”

Finally, the work concludes: “Years from now, no matter what/ Might happen to the world or to us/ We can thank God for our good luck/ We lived in the age of Kim K’s butt.”

P.S.: M. Barcadero’s kids called it “Tuchisaurus Rex.”

Carey Perloff’s memoir, “Beautiful Chaos; A Life in the Theater,” won’t be published until March, but when a galley arrived, I jumped into it. This was in the middle of a flood of news about the New Republic in New York, where many staff members quit when top editors

Franklin Foer and Leon Wieseltier were forced out (or left, the circumstances are debated), after the unveiling of plans by owner Chris Hughes, a Facebook co-founder who bought the magazine two years ago. Those plans, generally, had to do with turning the magazine, which had been losing money, into a “vertically integrated digital-media company.”

No such situation exists at Perloff ’s ACT, but what’s germane to TNR in her book is her description of communication difficulties between techbased companies and nonprofit cultural institutions, “two radically different and often mutually suspicious tribes who have a great deal to learn about each other. ... How do we who believe in live theater move forward in tandem with an industry that is suspicious of large nonprofits (often rightly so), eager to engage only when there is a technical problem to be solved, and unaccustomed to writing checks so that someone else can do the creative work that they often think they can do better and faster?”

Tech folks think nonprofits are not “disruptive enough,” she writes, but every “theatrical production is a startup, every rehearsal an attempt to create meaning out of chaos. ... The synergies must be there somewhere.”

A pal gave us — dog lovers but not, right now, dog owners — a copy of Mark Ulriksen’s “Dogs Rule Nonchalantly” for Christmas. Over the years, Ulriksen, who lives in San Francisco, has painted many New Yorker covers. He’s especially known for pictures of baseball (he illustrated Arnold Hano’s “A Day in the Bleachers” for Arion Press) and has also created many works about dogs, including numerous portraits of his own dogs.

This book uses many of these images, made at different times, to illustrate a sentence-by-sentence, picture-by-picture essay that’s a paean to the wonders of four-legged friends.

“For all of their seemingly self-indulgences, they have no ego,” observes Ulriksen. “Which may explain why a dog will never ask you if its butt looks big.” (See lead item today; there a theme here.)

Wait, wait, you haven’t yet put the tree of despair out by the curb, have you?

Jennifer O’Loughlin took her 7-yearold to the Fairmont to cast eyes on the traditional gingerbread house placed in the lobby as a warm-and-fuzzy tradition- al holiday ornament. Prominently displayed, she says, were signs telling kids not to eat it. And nearby was a stand in which cookies were being sold for $3 each. They left, and she “went down to Chinatown and bought him a big box of dim sum for $20.”

On the other hand, Chris Lindner tells the tale of Linda Sanchez, who upon leaving Town Hall restaurant last Monday, came upon two dejected-looking young women wearing backpacks. When Sanchez asked if they were OK, they told her they were on their way home to Utah, but had been unable to buy bus tickets.

Sanchez and husband took them to In-N-Out Burger, bought them dinner, then invited them to sleep over at their house, from where they called their parents to tell them they were safe.

The next morning, the Sanchezes took them back to the terminal to catch a bus home. Open for business in San Francisco, (415) 777-8426. E-mail: lgarchik@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @leahgarchik

JON CARROLL will return