History

DropBox employees drop money for Mission soccer field, kick out neighborhood kids

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Mission neighborhood tension has never been higher. The tech fueled boom has predominantly white and Asian newcomers butting heads with Latino neighbors who are long-time residents. 

The newest scuffle is over a small patch of green: Mission Playground’s soccer field, located on Valencia between 19th and 20th streets.

A video now making the rounds captures an argument between Dropbox employees and Mission neighborhood kids. The Dropbox employees, including designer Josh Pluckett, argue they’ve already paid for and reserved the field.

The Mission youth counter that the field historically has always been pick-up-and-play (first-come, first-serve), no reservations required. 

The video has many startling moments, highlighting the divide between the two groups. Can we all just acknowledge the oddness of a Latino man asking a white tech dude to “show me your papers,” as he asks for his soccer field use permit? Later in the video, things really heat up.

Just because you’ve got the money to book the field doesn’t mean you could book it for an hour,” one taller youth tells the Dropbox employees. When the dudes-in-Dropbox-shirts explain they paid $27 to rent the field, the kid replies “It doesn’t matter, this field has never been booked. How long have you been in the neighborhood bro?”

The Dropbox employee responds “over a year.”

Another one off camera says “Who gives a shit? Who cares about the neighborhood?”

“I’ve been born and raised here for my 20 years, and my whole life you could just play here,” the youth responds. 

On the surface this is a gentrification argument: the kids may not be able to afford regular use of the field, wheras those with big dollars can pay up for use. But the incident also highlights the problem with privatization of our public spaces. 

As Mission Local pointed out, the field used to be concrete pavement, but neighborhood folks still played soccer. And damn, they played soccer, injuring themselves frequently on the asphalt. That was then. Now, you’ve got to pay to play. 

Suffice to say, less neighborhood folks play there now. 

Renting out the field for only one night costs $27 per hour, but to rent the field regularly (like neighborhood kids playing weekly would have to) costs $5 to $10 per player per week. What kid has that kind of money on a weekly basis?

The Guardian has long covered the privatization of neighborhood parks, a charge led largely by Recreation and Parks Department General Manager Phil Ginsburg. 

Connie Chan, a spokesperson for RPD, responded with this statement:

“Last year Mission Playfield was available for free, drop-in play 96% of the time. Like all parks and recreation facilities, Mission Playfield is open for both drop-in and permitted use.  Users of Mission Playfield are guaranteed a minimum of 16 hours per week of free, drop-in play and last year were able to access 4021 hours of free, drop-in play. In 2013 the field was permitted for 734 hours of free youth permitted play, and 185 hours of paid adult permitted play.  The Department has long recognized that our City has limited open space for recreation, and we definitely lack playfields for both adults and youth to play; we encourage all our park users to respect one another and share our parks.”

She also shared this image of Mission Playground signage:

paytoplay

It’s a matter of history that much of Golden Gate Park, including the arboretum, used to be free (or rather, paid by our tax dollars). In a movement that started over five years ago, San Franciscans now pay a premium to enjoy many park amenities throughout San Francisco. 

“What a lot of us think the Recreation and Parks Department is actually doing is relinquishing the maintenance of park facilities to private entities,” Denis Mosgofian told the Guardian in 2011, when the park privatization battle heated up. Mosgofian founded Take Back Our Parks following his battles with the RPD over the closures and leases of rec centers. “They’re actually dismantling much of what the public has created.”

For the past six years, RPD has sought to build more astroturf soccer fields at the end of Golden Gate Park near the Beach Chalet. This November, Proposition H is poised to take down the project, if the measure passes. The Guardian endorsed No on Proposition H, because we felt that particular soccer field in Golden Gate Park often went unused as is. But Proposition I is shady ballot box politicking.

Proposition I would ease city rules and public democratic processes around park construction to allow the rapid creation of many more astroturf fields. If it passes this November, you can look forward to seeing many more arguments like the YouTube video above. 

Essay: Revisiting the Coen Brothers’ 2013 ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’

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Joel and Ethan Coen have been creating films for 30 years, dating back to their still-stunning, low-budget debut, neo-noir Blood Simple (1984); it premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1985. They followed with the screwball satire Raising Arizona (1987), which contains a pair of timeless (and quotable) performances by Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter.

And yet the Coens’ next three films lost millions: the tough-nosed noir Miller’s Crossing (1990), the darker-than-black comedy Barton Fink (1991), and their surprisingly enjoyable ode to Frank Capra, The Hudsucker Proxy (1994). Luckily, their brilliant mid-Western Fargo (1996) followed, winning them an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and a trophy for Frances McDormand (Joel’s partner in crime) for Best Actress. 

Their next two films were genre twisters: cult classic The Big Lebowski (1998), and Preston Sturges Depression-era homage O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000). This approach worked, and both were financial as well as critical successes. And even if critics were mixed about their next three releases (2001 surreal noir The Man Who Wasn’t There, Howard Hawks screwball homage Intolerable Cruelty (2003), and 2004 remake The Ladykillers, an ambitious misfire), the Coens mined more gold in 2007 with No Country For Old Men, which scooped up Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director(s), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor for Javier Bardem. 

While briefly returning to Fargo-esque crime turf with Burn After Reading (2008), a kind of maturing seemed to envelop the Coen’s films after No Country. Recently, they seem to be reaching some sort of apex. Their most personal story, A Serious Man (2009), was followed by their haunting and melancholic remake of the revisionist western True Grit (2010). Last year, they achieved their most powerful film to date with the oddly misunderstood Inside Llewyn Davis

MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD. (Only read if you have seen Inside Llewyn Davis.)

Llewyn (played to perfection by Oscar Isaac) is a confused character which led many audiences to deem him unlikeable, giving up on him and ultimately dismissing him to sleep in “the bed that he has made.” Taking place in the pre-Bob Dylan coffee houses of Greenwich Village in 1961, Llewyn is attempting to make folk music, while at the same time hating people who play folk music. This sort of contradicting philosophy runs parallel to many other parts in his life: He gets his friend’s girlfriend, Jean (Carey Mulligan), pregnant and then has the audacity to ask his same friend, Jim (Justin Timberlake) to secretly lend him money to pay for the abortion. He ridicules both Jean and his own older sister for their suburban “square” lifestyles, yet he’s constantly asking them for a place to crash. His seafaring father now “exists” in a rest home, unable to speak or control his bowels, while Llewyn’s mother seems to have passed on. 

The Coens have asked us to spend 104 minutes “inside” Llewyn Davis and if one decides to not just turn their back on this self-proclaimed asshole, one needs to ask, “Why is he acting this way?” One reason is his singing partner, Mike Timlin, has recently killed himself by jumping off the George Washington Bridge. Not only has this left Llewyn a solo act musically, I think the film’s big secret is that this unsettling act has left our antagonist heartbroken. What if they weren’t just making music and for reasons only Llewyn understands, Mike took his own life? The film has numerous (supposedly humorous) references to queerness, and you get the feeling the Coens are practicing what the 1961 culture preached (or rather, refused to discuss.)

When Llewyn puts on their album, If We Had Wings, we see an image of Mike for the only time in the film. A shot of his sweet demeanor on the cover is followed by a quiet gaze from Llewyn that rarely surfaces throughout the rest of the movie. 

Multiple people speak of missing Mike, one even urging Llewyn to “get back together with him.” A sort of father figure for Llewyn, Mr. Gorfein (Ethan Phillips), refers to Mike as being the “life of the party” and if this theory of them being in love were true it would make their album name If We Had Wings more than just a prophetic reference to Mike’s suicide.

The film is also a diegetic musical, meaning all of the songs performed are in fact involved in the actual lives of the characters themselves (as opposed to someone breaking out into song to express their innermost feelings.) This makes the lyrics of the songs sung by each character even more important.The traditional title track off of Timlin & Davis’ album is in fact “Dink’s Song” and could be read as quite a declaration when listened to closely, “If I had wings like Noah’s dove, I’d fly the river to the one I love. Well fare thee well, my honey, fare thee well. Well I had a man who was long and tall. Who moved his body like a cannon ball.” 

And then there’s Ulysses, the wandering cat. Llewyn accidentally lets this crafty creature out of the Gorfeins’ apartment, watching helplessly as it escapes into Manhattan. Later, he finds a lookalike to sneak into its place. Why is Llewyn constantly confusing the cat’s gender as being female? After an unfortunate dinner-party episode in which Llewyn is belligerent toward Mrs. Gorfein (her crime: singing along with him to “Dink’s Song”), she notices that “Ulysses” is an imposter, shrieking “Where’s his scrotum Llewyn?! Where’s his scrotum?”

At the beginning of the film, a secretary mishears Llewyn’s phone message that “Llewyn has his cat!” and asks “Llewyn is the cat?!” Misunderstanding is a theme throughout Llewyn’s journey, especially during a surreal road trip to Chicago with scene-stealing jazz player and heroin addict Roland Turner (memorably performed by Coen Brothers regular John Goodman.) After establishing that he’s another character who doesn’t get Llewyn (“What does the L. stand for in Lou L. Wyn?”), Roland asks him if he’s queer, since he’s folk singer and and is carrying around a cat. Llewyn does not respond. After the men are abandoned on the highway, Llewyn hitchhikes a ride past Akron, the town that his ex-girlfriend and the two-year-old child he’s never met reside.

As he drives down a long and twisted snowy highway, he hits a tabby cat in the middle of the snow storm while listening to opera on the radio. Was this all a fever dream? Is this a piece of music that Mike loved and should Llewyn personally feel guilty for his suicide? As the limping cat works its way off the dark and snowy path, Llewyn is yet again all alone in the middle of nowhere. Again, lyrics speak volumes: “Well fare thee well, my honey, fare thee well. I remember one evening, in the pourin’ rain. And in my heart was an achin’ pain. Well fare thee well, my honey, fare thee well. Muddy river runs muddy ‘n’ wild. Can’t give a bloody for my unborn child.” 

Llewyn seems to be purposefully sabotaging his own future. And again, the Coens seem to be hiding their main character’s driving issue as carefully as the character himself. Why can’t he just snap out of this self-destructive cycle? When Jean (like his sister) directly questions him about his future, he yet again resorts to sarcastic put downs that leave anyone who attempt to care about Llewyn in a flabbergasted state.

So Llewyn finds himself riding the subway back and forth. And it brings us to perhaps the final piece of this existential puzzle. Early in the film, Llewyn observes a fellow passenger, an older man around 60 with a small moustache, wearing a coat and hat. The man is also watching him. It feels understandable since Llewyn is carrying a cat on the subway. In fact a pair of twins look at him and smile as well. But the older man appears a second time on a late night, when no one else is on the train and Llewyn is now cat-less. This time, the older man is turned and staring directly at Llewyn.

It took me four viewings in the theater (and one on Blu-ray) to confirm that the man shows up a third time, near the end of the film as Llewyn is passing by a movie theatre, which happens to be playing Walt Disney’s The Incredible Journey (1963). The man is walking just a few steps ahead of Llewyn, but this time he is not looking at our character. He is now just another bystander.

Could this be Llewyn Davis, decades later, wandering the streets alone, remembering a time in his life when he lost his lover, his friends, and gave up his passion for playing music? Is this whole film just a looping memory for someone whose heart had been broken so badly that he was never able to put the pieces back together again? Is this a side effect of a society whose condemnation drove Mike to suicide, or did Llewyn break Mike’s heart with one of his casual hookups? “Fare thee well, my honey, fare thee well. So show us a bird flyin’ high above. Life ain’t worth living without the one you love. Fare thee well, my honey, fare thee well.”

Whatever is actually happening “inside” Llewyn Davis, he is for sure carrying the weight of the world on his hunched over, coatless back and it would be all too easy to dismiss him as a selfish and intolerable person. Like many of their characters over the past three decades, the Coen Brothers make sure not to fall for Hollywood’s tropes. They are not always easy to love, but audiences who choose to (re)take odysseys like Inside Llewyn Davis may be confronted with an alternative cinema that isn’t just inspired by film history, but has become film history. Llewyn Davis fought for dignity in his era. And like many of the characters before him (Barton Fink, The Dude, Larry Gopnik, Mattie Ross), no matter how hard he tries, his life does not go the way he hopes and imagines. Fortunately for their fans, the Coens continue to be able to choose their own remarkable adventures.

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks is the Film History Coordinator at the Academy of Art University, curates MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS, and writes film festival reviews for the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

“All our families are f-ed up:” Director David Dobkin on his Duvall vs. Downey drama ‘The Judge’

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With dysfunctional family tale-meets-courtroom drama The Judge (out Fri/10), director David Dobkin is no longer simply “the guy who directed The Wedding Crashers (2005)” — he’s also the guy who got Robert Downey, Jr. and Robert Duvall to go toe-to-toe. Downey plays hotshot Chicago lawyer Hank, who verrrry reluctantly returns to his rural hometown after the death of his mother; he’s met with hostile hospitality from his aging, long-estranged father, the town judge (Duvall), who verrrry reluctantly allows his son to represent him when he’s accused of murder. 

The Judge‘s biggest flaw (besides its nearly two-and-a-half-hour running time and some sentimental tendencies) is that it tries to be too many genres at once. But those marvelously acted Downey vs. Duvall tête-à-têtes — and one memorably hilarious jury-selection scene — can’t be ignored. Prior to its theatrical release, The Judge screened at the Mill Valley Film Festival, and I got a chance to speak with Dobkin about his latest film.

SF Bay Guardian The film opens with quite a comedic scene, with Hank dressing down a fellow attorney in a courtroom men’s bathroom. While there are funny moments throughout, it’s not a comedy. Why did you decide to begin there?

David Dobkin I wanted to open the movie with some sort of unexpected little bang, and I also wanted to start with a character that was kind of the Robert that everyone loves in so many of his movies: the most flamboyant, fun, arrogant, sarcastic guy. Part of the design of the movie was, “What if that guy was a real guy?”, and then had to go through this real journey. What would it be when he strips himself down and gets put through a grinder? How does a guy like that fit into a real family? I think that’s part of what’s cool about the movie — he starts there, and he’s very much that guy throughout, but he does slowly peel the onion back. The layers and layers come out, and you get to see Downey in a different way.

SFBG I’m interested to hear how you approached characterizing a typical American small town. Though Hank hated living there — there’s the scene when he first drives back into town, and is moaning to himself, “This sucks!”, it’s actually an incredibly idyllic place. 

DD I’m psyched that you caught that. These are the things that, as a geeky director, have in your head and you think they’ll work a certain way, and you pitch it to your producers. I said to this to Downey, too: The town is the other glimpse of Hank’s father. It’s about certain values and a certain time period. It’s a world that’s preserved in time, like our memories of being a child, or nostalgia. What’s interesting is when he comes back, it’s something that’s appealing to the audience, but he’s put off by it. It makes us curious about him, so you lean in because of that. And then you slowly discover that he was exiled. There was no way he and his father were going to be able to live under the same roof, and there’s something that makes you sad for him about that. 

But at the end of the movie, without giving away the end, hopefully there’s a way he can reconcile that. I think we all wish we could get back home, to an imaginary home — I don’t think it’s really the home we think it was when we were kids. But the older we get, the more nostalgic we get when we think back on it. Our psyches lie to us to keep us connected.

SFBG One way you bring the past into the story is through the family’s home movies. What inspired you to use that as a narrative device, and how did you decide which scenes to depict in them?

DD We wanted to do it for real. We wanted to make it seem authentic, which meant hitting certain notes that you’d expect to see, but in our own way. Especially for [Hank’s younger brother,] Dale [Jeremy Strong]. The movies are centered around him, and it’s almost like he’s trying to put the family back together again. He’s trying to take these old image and reconstruct the stories, and he’s trying to work out what happened. He’s the innocent. We see the collateral damage of that family through his eyes of what’s happened between Robert Downey, Jr. and Robert Duvall’s characters. And the truth is, if there’s discord in a family on that level, everybody’s fucked up by it. Nobody can heal until that thing gets fixed. I think that there’s an unconscious part of you that roots for them to somehow work it out, so that the family can come together again. But we all have that. All our families are fucked up.

SFBG There’s that line, “This family is a fuckin’ Picasso painting.”

DD Yeah. That was Downey, just off the top of his head.

SFBG I enjoyed the bit in the screenplay about selecting jurors based on their bumper stickers. Who came up with that?

DD [Co-screenwriter] Bill Dubuque. He said to us, “I have an idea for a scene with the jury selection.” I was like, “What? Nobody wants to hang around for that. Get into the trial!” But he knew we were trying to find more comedy. You have to have some fun in a movie like this. We didn’t want to make a serious movie in that way. We knew there was a lot of drama in the film, but there’s a lot of humor because those were the [types of] movies that we love. We’d always talk about Rain Man (1988), or Terms of Endearment (1983), when Hollywood would make movies about people, but with movie stars. Which does not happen anymore for the most part. They happen here and there, but they’re certainly not on the agenda.

Aside from those ones in the 1980s, we all loved those ones from the ’70s, when movies were really about people. Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), Ordinary People (1980) — movies that were talking about cultural issues, like divorce and going to therapy, that people hadn’t worked out yet. The films were having the conversation with the audience at the same time. 

The Judge is not an agenda movie, but healing your family and taking care of a parent that’s in trouble is something we’re seeing a lot more of. Certainly for me, I never imagined I was going to have to parent one of my parents. That was the impetus that created the story for this movie — this really difficult experience [in my own life].

SFBG I read that you got the main cast together beforehand for family bonding, or dysfunctional family bonding, as the case may be. Is that a technique you’ve used before, and what does it accomplish?

DD All my movies, I do a three-week rehearsal. I bring the actors in and we build their characters and kind of do a workshop. I never actually perform the scenes all the way — I don’t want to see an emotional scene be on its feet until we’re there on set. But we break it apart, we study it, we talk about it. We talk about our own experiences. I do exercises on back story. It’s kind of like Outward Bound. 

By the time you’re done, everybody has had a shared history, even if it’s only a three-week history. We all get on the same page — I’m able to listen to them talk about stuff, or build things from improvisations into the movie, and everybody gets a chance to be in the room and have a connection that’s real. It’s a sign of commitment. It’s hard to do with big movie stars because their schedules are just really crazy busy, and sometimes it’s hard to do with big actors, someone like Robert Duvall, who is a legend, because they may not want to get down in the dirt and do that kind of work anymore. But for me, I think it informs the work deeply, and part of the reason why the performances in this movie are as powerful as they are is because these guys were all behaving as a family.

THE JUDGE opens Fri/10 in Bay Area theaters.

Events listings: Oct 8-14

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WEDNESDAY 8

Mylene Fernández-Pintado City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus, SF; www.citylights.com. 7pm, free. The Cuban novelist reads from A Corner of the World.

“Making History by Making Maps” Eric Quezada Center for Culture and Politics, 518 Valencia, SF; www.shapingsf.org. 7:30-9:30pm, free. Panel discussion as part of Shaping San Francisco’s public talks series, with author Dick Walker (The Atlas of California: Mapping the Challenge of a New Era). Join the related free “Bikes to Books” tour by meeting at Jack London Street (at South Park, SF), Sat/11, 1pm, and cycle through streets named for notable SF authors and artists; fittingly, the end point is North Beach’s City Lights Bookstore.

THURSDAY 9

ArtLaunch: SF Open Studios Exhibition Opening Reception SOMArts Cultural Center, Main Gallery, 934 Brannan, SF; www.somarts.org. Opening reception tonight, 7:30pm. Free. Exhibit runs through Nov 9. Get a peek at 450 artworks contributed by artists participating in the SF Open Studios event (more info on SF Open Studios at https://artspan.org).

Satire Fest 2014 Marines’ Memorial Theatre, 609 Sutter, SF; http://satirefest.com. 9am-5pm, $20. (Check website for additional events, including live drawing and a “Boatload of Cartoonists” cruise.) Through Sun/11. Celebrate satire with animators, web-comics creators, and political cartoonists, with hands-on events, performances, exhibits, and more. Participants include Keith Knight, Will Durst, and longtime Bay Guardian contributor Tom Tomorrow.

Union Street Wine Walk Union between Gough and Steiner, SF; www.sresproductions.com. 4-8pm, free (sampling tickets, $25). Restaurants and merchants offer wine tasting and small bites at this fifth annual neighborhood event.

FRIDAY 10

Litquake Various venues, SF; www.litquake.org. San Francisco’s annual literary festival turns 15 this year, with a week full of live readings, performances, panels, and multimedia events, including tributes to Octavio Paz and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It kicks off today with “Viva Fifteen: Litquake’s Quinceañera 15th Anniversary Bash” (7pm, $15, Z Space, 450 Florida, SF).

SATURDAY 11

Death Salon Fleet Room, Fort Mason Center, Marina at Laguna, SF; www.deathsalon.org. Day session 10am; night session 6-9pm, $30-45. “The culture of mortality and mourning” is examined from all angles at this event, with participants like author Loren Rhoads (speaking about the history of SF’s cemeteries); hospice-care worker Betsy Trapasso; attorney Jordan Posamentier (speaking about death with dignity laws); musician Jill Tracy (performing songs composed inside of Philadelphia’s Mutter Museum); comedian Beza Merid (speaking about the pop culture of cancer); a discussion of “ghostly sexual encounters” with Dr. Paul Koudounaris, and many others.

Indigenous Peoples Day Powwow and Indian Market Berkeley Civic Center Park, Allston at Martin Luther King Jr, Berk; www.idpowwow.org. 10am-6pm, free. Intertribal dancing, dance contests, Native American foods and crafts, singing and drumming, and more highlight this 22nd annual event.

Leap’s 31st Annual Sandcastle Contest Ocean Beach (adjacent to the Great Highway between Balboa and Fulton), SF; www.leaparts.org. 10:30am-4:30pm (sandcastle building finishes at 2:30pm), free. They call ’em sandcastles, but this annual competition yields so much more. Past years have seen giant frogs, sea monsters, sharks, and pyramids (complete with camel) appear on the beach.

“Pride: Parade, Prom, Community” PhotoCentral Gallery, Hayward Area Park and Recreation District, 1099 E St, Hayward; www.photocentral.org. Opening reception today, 2:30-5:30pm. Free. Exhibit runs through Dec 6. Photographers and Guardian contributors Saul Bromberger and Sandra Hoover present a new exhibit of images capturing the SF Gay and Lesbian Freedom Day Parade (1984-1990) and the Hayward Gay Prom 2014.

World Veg Festival SF County Fair Building, 1199 Ninth Ave, SF; www.worldvegfestival.com. 10:30am-6:30pm, $3-10 donation (free for kids under 12). Through Sun/12. The SF Vegetarian Society’s annual event features cooking demos, exhibitors, speakers, entertainment, a “Children’s Corner,” and more.

Yerba Buena Night Yerba Buena Lane, Jessie Square and Annie Alley, Yerba Buena Lane, SF; www.ybnight.org. 6-10pm, free. Free outdoor festival of music, dance, art, and performance, with five stages of entertainment, giant video projections, and interactive installations.

SUNDAY 12

Blessing of the Animals First Unitarian Church of SF, 1187 Franklin, SF; www.uusf.org. 2-3pm, free. Bring your furry, feathered, scaly, or otherwise creature-tastic companions (or just a photo of them) to this symbolic ritual, held in the tradition of SF patron saint, St. Francis of Assisi.

MONDAY 13

World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off IDES Grounds, 735 Main St, Half Moon Bay; weighoff.miramarevents.com. 7-11am, free. Who will reign supreme at this 41st annual battle of the bulge, dubbed the “Superbowl of Weigh-Offs”? Last year’s champ tipped the scales at 1,985 pounds — that’s a lotta pie! *

 

A joyful noise

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esilvers@sfbg.com

LEFT OF THE DIAL Christopher Owens, San Francisco resident, has a problem.

It’s one of those problems that maybe doesn’t sound like a problem to people who didn’t achieve critical darling status in the artistic industry of their choice by age 30, but it is a problem nonetheless. The problem is that Girls, his old band, was a very, very good band that wrote complex but catchy, rocking but intimate songs, drawing from ’80s power-pop and ’60s doo-wop and orchestral rock to talk about breakups and his escape from a deeply complicated childhood ensconced in the cult-like Children of God sect of Christianity. Girls was instantly, recognizably, good — in a way that seemed, on first listen, to stem from very little effort, though the depth of Owens’ confessional songwriting forced you to understand otherwise if you spent 30 seconds thinking about it.

The Christopher Owens problem is that after two albums of very good music by his very good band, the band broke up and he decided to go it alone, and not everyone was impressed with the result. Lysandre, Owens’ debut solo work, released in January of last year, was a concept album, full of proggy theatrical flair and flute solos. It had moments where it shined, but it was not the seamless work we’d come to expect from the songwriter; Owens himself later admitted he just sort of had to get it out of his system.

Fast-forward about 18 months, and the music press seems almost breathlessly relieved by his second go. A New Testament (Turnstile), released last week, is indeed easier on the ears. It’s a straight-up countrified Owens, an identity he’s hinted at previously but never fully embraced, with clear gospel influences and a renewed appreciation for pop structure and aesthetics; it allows Owens’ first-person lyrics to take center stage again. (He’ll play songs from the new record at Great American Music Hall Sat/11).

Is it a safer record than his previous effort? Sure. Does it follow more conventional Americana-pop rules? Yep. Does he sound like he’s having more fun actually making the music? Hell yes.

It’s that sense, actually, that seems to be confusing and alarming critics left and right (to an amusing degree, if you were to read, say, a dozen reviews in a row.) Christopher Owens seems happy. The Christopher Owens? He of the loaded religious upbringing, who made a name writing incredibly well-crafted songs about doomed relationships? How could he?

“That reaction has definitely surprised me,” the 35-year-old says with a laugh. He’s a little weary from doing press interviews all day from his home in SF when I catch up with him by phone about a week before the record comes out, but otherwise seems like he’s in good spirits.

“For one, the writing spans about four years, so it doesn’t make sense to paint it as a ‘Oh, he’s happy now,’ type of thing. Yes, I’m grateful for a lot in my life right now.” (One can’t help but think his stable, long-term relationship and relatively recent sobriety have played a part, though he doesn’t really want to discuss either topic.)

“I would never set out to make a ‘positive record,’ but I’m glad it’s having that effect on people.” He thinks a moment. “I also think that’s maybe just the sound of a lot of people working together who like each other very much, having fun.”

Those people include producer Doug Boehm, who produced Lysandre, as well as Girls’ acclaimed second record, Father, Son, Holy Ghost; the band also includes a keyboardist, drummer, and guitarist who played on that Girls album. Other people — like gospel singers Skyler Jordan, Traci Nelson, and Makeda Francisco, who provide backup on “Stephen,” a weighty, cathartic elegy of a song for Owens’ brother who died at age two — were instrumental in how Owens selected tracks once he decided this was going to be his country record. (He has hundreds of songs and half-songs to choose from, written and stored away on his computer at home.)

The overwhelming influence of gospel — not to mention the biblical record title — will likely come off as something of a wink to longtime Owens fans; his struggle to reconcile his ultra-religious upbringing and the tumultuous period of his life that followed his leaving the church at age 16 are both well-documented.

But the reference isn’t quite so straightforwardly tongue-in-cheek, says Owens. Gospel, in particular, has come full circle for him.

“I’ve had a long history with spiritual and religious music,” he says. “We weren’t Pentecostal, but it was still about asking God to take away your burdens. There’s a desperation to it, a genuineness and earnestness.

“If you talked to me about gospel music in my teens I would probably have been very disparaging, but as I got older and calmed down more in my 20s, I started appreciating it as music,” he says. “The fact of, we’re going to sit around and sing together, and what that does to the energy in the room.”

It was in his early 20s that someone gave him a record by the singer Mahalia Jackson, known as “the Queen of Gospel,” also known for her contributions to the Civil Rights movement. The gift was almost as a joke, says Owens.

“Knowing my history [with religion], it was ‘Here, Chris, you’ll like this,'” says the singer. “But I remember realizing, this woman is fantastic. So it’s been about coming to a place where I can see the value in the music itself, which I think is part of the point. ‘Let us make a joyful noise unto the Lord.’ And as I started to write and play music myself, it’s been about figuring out a way to do that with a non-religious quality, how to strip the music of its religious associations. I’ve listened to a lot of Elvis’ gospel albums…

“If you’re from the Ukraine and you walk into a gospel church, even if you don’t understand the language, you’re still going to get goosebumps,” he continues. “There’s still power in the sound.”

As for the Christopher Owens problem: Judging by early reviews, he’s appeased some Girls fans who were left cold by his first solo effort. Not that he puts too much stock in other peoples’ opinions of him. He’s happy with the record. And yeah, he admits, he is happy, in general, at the moment. And yet:

“It’s kind of funny that people are thinking of the record like that. Because even when you have these blessings, life always goes both ways. I think life is an uphill climb,” he says. “If you’re climbing the right way.”

CHRISTOPHER OWENS

With The Tyde and Carletta Sue Kay

Sat/11, 9pm, $21

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

www.slimspresents.com

Still Steppin’

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arts@sfbg.com

The Boogaloo is a dance, descended from the Twist but landing firmly between the Philly Dog and the Skate.

“I like to dance. Always did,” says Oscar Myers, who turns 70 next week, while demonstrating his moves in front of a whooping, sweating, grinning 1am crowd at San Francisco’s Boom Boom Room. Myers knows the Boogaloo because he was there when it happened, and because he plays the melange of funk, soul, jazz, and Latin music that make up its unique sound.

Myers, a trumpet player, percussionist, and singer, has been a Bay Area mainstay for decades, but if you wandered into any of his regular nights here or Madrone Art Bar, you might not immediately realize you were in the presence of a musical forefather.

“Want something slow, something fast, or something half-assed?”

His band, Steppin’, plays tunes by Lou Donaldson, Melvin Sparks, and Ivan “Boogaloo Joe” Jones, alongside classics by James Brown and Michael Jackson. The 30-somethings in Steppin’ are talented, but all eyes are usually on the man up front: It’s Myers who played with James Brown, Ray Charles, Charles Mingus, Lowell Fulson, and R&B icon Jimmy McCracklin. There aren’t many musicians of Myers’ era left — much less playing regular late-night gigs around San Francisco. (His next will be his 70th birthday party, at the Boom Boom Room this Friday, Oct. 10.)

No one ever asks for anything “half-assed.”

Born in Montego Bay, Jamaica, in 1944, Myers moved to Charleston, South Carolina as a kid. His father worked the graveyard shift at the city water pump station and dug actual graves during the day. His parents weren’t especially musical, but they had a piano, on which Myers began to pick out songs by ear. Through the family’s record player, he got to know the era’s swing greats: Benny Goodman, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, and McKinney’s Cotton Pickers. He picked up the trumpet as a teenager, which got him into the orchestra and marching band at North Carolina A&T, alongside classmate (and future saxophone legend) Maceo Parker.

oscar
Oscar Myers. Photo by Saroyan Humphrey.

Following college, he joined the military, landing in San Francisco after serving in Vietnam. He doesn’t talk about it much, but he was wounded in the Tet Offensive, and ended up in physical therapy at the Letterman Army Hospital in the Presidio. He ultimately decided to stay: “The Bay Area was humming,” says Myers, with an inimitable, throaty husk in his voice. “There was music coming from everywhere.”

His list of collaborators is an index to the Bay Area’s music history — “The Bishop” Norman Williams, Jackie Ivory, Julian Vaught, Bill Bell, Bill Summers, and Babatunde Lea — and his gigs map out its nearly forgotten musical nervous system: the jazz, funk, and R&B clubs that once hosted the area’s thriving scene.

By the ’90s, Myers was leading a band that included two former bandmates of James Brown: organist Louis Madison and saxophonist C.A. Carr. Madison — a member of the Famous Flames, who were unceremoniously fired by Brown after a gig in San Francisco in 1959, reportedly after asking to be paid fairly — is rumored to have penned such Brown hits as “I Feel Good,” “Try Me,” and “Please, Please, Please.” Sans Brown, the Flames stuck around the Bay for good.

“How many of y’all know who the Godfather of Soul is?”

In the early ’90s, Myers got a call from James Brown’s manager, saying Brown wanted to meet up with Madison and this new bandleader in San Francisco. Myers declined, citing their gig at Eli’s Mile High Club in Oakland that night. Since two of Brown’s alumni were in the band, Myers added, Brown should actually come to them. Sure enough, during the show, Brown showed up with his wife, and the band broke into “I Feel Good.” After “I’ll Go Crazy,” Brown rushed the stage to hug his old band-members.

Soon after, Brown invited Myers to sit in on trumpet when he played the West Coast. Myers did about eight gigs with Brown, a perfectionist who notoriously fined his musicians for mistakes.

“All that’s true,” says Myers, though he didn’t personally receive any penalties. “He’d go down to the front of the stage and be leaning and crying and singing and then he’d hold up his hand: $5.” Don’t miss a note, was the lesson. “And don’t be late either!”

“I’ve never seen so many dead people breathing in my life!”

It takes a lot to get away with chastising a crowd. “He can tell the audience to shut up and it’s ok, because he has the credibility to do it,” says organist Wil Blades, who’s been playing with Myers for over a decade, since Blades was 20. “Oscar has big ears and he knows how this music should sound, because he came up with it.”

Mentorship is important to Myers, who now lives with his wife off Alamo Square. “Nowadays, you don’t see that stuff happening, where the older cats let the younger ones come and play and test their knowledge,” says the bandleader. Go to any Myers gig, and you’ll see one or two young musicians trying to prove their worth. If Myers likes what he hears, they’ll receive a smile and a handshake at the end of the night.

That said: “If you can’t play I’m not going to let you get up there. If you’re bad, I’ll run your ass off stage.” He’s not kidding.

“He let me up there and gave me an old-school butt-whooping,” remembers Blades. “That’s how you really learn this music, to me. You don’t learn it in school.”

How does it feel to be playing on his 70th birthday? “I did it when I was 69!” says Myers with a laugh. “You’re blessed just to be here this long. You can wake up, open your eyes, wiggle your toes, everything’s working. Everything from here on out is gravy for me.”

Which might explain why, on a typical night, you’ll find him dancing spontaneously during a set break, even when the curtain is down and the audience can’t see a thing.

OSCAR MYERS & STEPPIN
With Bootie Cooler & DJ K-Os
Fri/10, 9pm, $10
Boom Boom Room
1601 Fillmore, SF
www.boomboomblues.com

 

Head First: Explosive Sexual Healing hurts so … good?

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I’ve got a lot of repressed issues, and I came to San Francisco to try to get them resolved. But I never imagined a possible solution to my problems would be to have some guy finger me while his wife does reiki over my naked body and I scream bloody murder. 

But this kind of thing is an option in the Bay Area, and it’s called Explosive Sexual Healing (ESH). The practice uses things like pain, pleasure, breath work, spiritual alchemy, vocal therapy, and g-spot massage to access emotions and trauma stored in the body. The idea is that once these deep-rooted issues are discovered, they can be dealt with and ideally released. 

ESH isn’t more than a few years old and there are only a few practitioners in California. I did a session with Becky and Cory Center — a husband and wife team that got married four months after meeting each other. When they met, Cory had been released on probation from having been in prison for bank robbery for three years, and Becky was transitioning from her life as a math teacher to a spiritual healer. They met at Landmark Forum, they clicked, and now they’re ESH practitioners. 

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think this practice was weird. But would that stop me from trying it? No way. I was down to sexually explode.

When I arrived at their home office in Alameda, I sat with them at a table in their entryway and we started the Awakening Session — which involved an alchemical card reading by Cory. He pulled out three cards that he drew himself with marker, laid them on the table in front of me, and told me of my past, present, and future. The reading was pretty accurate, but I couldn’t help but wonder if the detailed form I filled out earlier about my personal history and future desires could have aided in his fortune telling.

Next, they gave me a description about what to expect in the session — explaining that there would be both pain AND pleasure. They asked me about what I wanted healed, and I said that I wanted to stop feeling guilty for feeling satisfied with my accomplishments. I also said I wanted to feel like my brain was just as valuable as my body. They then asked me to come up “affirmations,” which were positive statements that I’d like recited during ESH that would reprogram my brain to think the way I want it to.

“They should be as simple as what a child would say,” Cory said. “As long as they ring true for you.”

So after a lot of back and forth, we came up with the basic statements: “I am free,” “I am wanted,” “I am desired,” “I am important.” These are all nice things to think about, but I thought they were a bit too vague to mend anything specific going on in my head.

Next, they led me into their living room where there was a massage table, psychedelic music, and a blue and green peacock painting above the fireplace. I kept my clothes on and lied on the table.

They taught me how to do what they call “the big draw” — which involved me breathing in and out really fast, tightening my body up into a vertical crunch, then relaxing back onto the table. 

After that, I flipped over onto my stomach.

They told me to relax and breathe while Becky did reiki over my body. 

“Something is telling me you’re ready, Krissy,” Becky said. “That doesn’t have to mean anything to you. Just know it’s saying ‘You’re ready. You’re ready.’” 

When I was finally good and relaxed, Cory started to knead his hands into my muscles — and not in an “Ahh that feels good” way, but in an “I’m gonna leave marks” way. I knew there was going to be pain, I just underestimated how much. I clenched my jaw. They made it clear that I could tell them to stop touching me whenever I wanted to, but I wanted to commit to the experience, so I hung in there.

They told me to scream, but I’m not much of a yeller when something hurts — I’m more of a grunter. I let out a few shouts that weren’t quite to their satisfaction. Becky told me to scream louder, so I did until my throat hurt.

After the process went on for many minutes, my body started reacting to the heat, the pain, and the screaming. I felt like the table was vibrating, and my hands kept cramping up into fists from all the stimulation. Becky told me to kick my legs and pound my hands into the table to get the tingles out. It was both terrifying and embarrassing. But what could I do? I wanted my hands to stop cramping. So I kicked around like a child having a tantrum until my fingers relaxed. 

Finally the pain part was over, and I flipped over onto my back. They blindfolded me, then ran their hands over my body and crotch to top off all that pain with a little pleasure. Then they told me it was time for me to go reflect on my own.

They sent me off for a dinner break. I ate a sandwich and sat on the steps of a building outside — feeling really confused and a little lost. I didn’t think it was responsible of them to leave me alone like that for an hour after such an emotional beating. But I was willing to believe it was a part of their strange methods, and I let it slide.

When I got back, I talked to them about feelings and thoughts that were coming up for me – like how I felt kind of high and had trouble writing in my notebook on account of loopy-ness. 

Soon, I stripped naked and was back on the table, face down. 

“Ow, shit,” I said as Cory shoved his elbow hard into my ass muscles. 

“How would you rate your pain right now?” he asked. 

“Ugh, an eight?” I said. 

“Well, your voice is at a three.”

Becky told me to scream as loud as I could. So I sucked in a deep breath and screamed. 

“Your scream is coming from your throat right now,” she said. “Do it from your belly.” 

Becky told me to match her volume, and she started screaming. So we were both wailing while Cory pressed hard into every part of me he could find — even the inside of my crack.

“Who do you want to speak to?” Becky asked.

I said nothing at first because I had no idea.

“Who? It can be anyone,” she said.

“Men?” I was really guessing. 

She told me to shout what I wanted to say to them. Fortunately, I had let go of my shame much earlier on in the session, so I started yelling shit.

“READ A BOOK ON CUNNILINGUS!” I shouted. “STOP TRYING TO FUCK ME IN THE ASS!”

The point of this part of the session is to find physical pain held in the body and then release it. And as weird as it was, when I screamed like a banshee and cussed at dudes, the pain actually did stop in my ass — even though Cory was digging into it with his elbow. 

“We moved the pain right out,” he said, a satisfied tone in his voice. 

It was time for the pleasure part.

I got up to take a piss, then returned and lied down on my back, exhausted as fuck. I was blindfolded again and Cory slipped and slid his fingers over my sweat drenched body.

“Finally,” I thought. “Time for an orgasm.”

I was wrong.

It was actually time to endure a 10 minute tease session, where I was getting fingered and brought to the brink of orgasm without being allowed to come. And on top of that, they made me say my affirmations while I was trying to get off. So I was screaming, “I am free!” and “I am wanted!” at the top of my lungs while trying to focus on having an orgasm. Finally, I had one, and it was pretty good (definitely juicy). But then it was time for another 10 minutes of teasing, and they brought me right up to the brink of coming, and then stopped me. I did the “big draw” and collapsed back onto the table. They left me alone for a bit.

After awhile, I slowly sat up, feeling like I’d just slept for three days and like I weighed an extra 30 pounds. 

I went back to the entryway and sat down at the table with them. They were kind and checked in with me and my emotions. I felt high, tired, but weirdly alert, confused, and at the same time, relaxed. I was in glass case of emotion.

A few days later Cory called me for a follow-up to check in on me. The two of them recognized that ESH can be jarring, and they were there to make sure I was okay — which I appreciated.

I think the intensity of sensation during the session induced heightened states of awareness which led me to have deep thoughts. Did those deep thoughts help me to stop feeling guilty about being satisfied with my accomplishments? No. Do I feel like my brain is just as valuable as my body? No. But to be fair, to fully heal, you’re supposed to do six sessions, not just one.

ESH could potentially open someone’s mind to new things, and I could see how it would be helpful to a person stuck in a mental or emotional rut. But I don’t think I’d go back for another rendezvous any time soon. I think I prefer a healing experience with more sex and less explosion.

Bearing it all

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arts@sfbg.com

DANCE Whatever else Keith Hennessy’s homespun ritual Bear/Skin offered its audience last Wednesday night at the Joe Goode Annex, it brought the rain. One night’s worth fell on the thirsty ground and into a record-making drought, displaying itself marvelously on the clothes and flattened hair of the last audience members to wander in as Hennessy walked about the postindustrial performance space in fuchsia track shorts prepping the show, his first solo since 2008’s Bessie-winning Crotch.

A white teddy bear recognized from that earlier solo sat propped against a far wall of the stage area, beside a white rabbit, though from some angles you’d miss them both thanks to one of two large silvery obelisks that stood nearby — both composed of Mylar sheets hoisted maybe 10 and 14 feet high on wire rigging. More of the material was stuffed into an oversized Mission Street market bag, among other colorful piles and pools of materials around the floor of the white utilitarian box theater, much of it referenced in the single-page program: “Floral tights, inheritance from Remy Charlip; plaid blanket skirt, inheritance from my family; pompom tail, Lisu people in northern Thailand; embroidered neck piece, fabric market in Dakar, Senegal; credit cards, personal collection.”

Personal objects and personal history would soon reverberate with a collective consciousness, a political and animal consciousness, in a sacramental performance that, among other things, seemed to limn the potential for an alternative destiny on an ever more blighted planet. (In an alternately hushed and rustling moment later that night, those extra space blankets covered the audience, almost as if to shield it for a moment, not from space rays, but from all the noxious energy beamed from every orifice of a loud, lurid, snooping, thieving hydra that is entirely local.)

The first incarnation of Bear/Skin was in spring 2013 at Subterranean Art House in Berkeley, during an edition of the roving monthly performance series of East-Bay collective SALTA. It was the centenary of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, an avant-garde assault on convention that became a modernist classic. Hennessy both addressed it and appropriated a key part of it, not reverently but critically and creatively. His partly impromptu and wholly brilliant 40-minute performance was built around a comical bear suit, a feed-backing microphone, intimate direct address, a discussion of three “suicide economies,” and his re-creation of the last section of Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography in that seminal ballet — a series of dozens of jagged leaps that Hennessy’s middle-aged body essayed with remarkable, heaving determination, doubling the ballet’s sacrificial climax with one of his own.

These elements are all retained in the latest iteration, though amid further elaboration, not all of which works equally well. The aforementioned moment with the audience under Mylar blankets acts as a bridge between two rough halves, as Hennessy, donning the personal articles and totems listed in the program, reemerges as a glittery thrift-store shaman amid a Hardkiss track and a scattering of patterned laser light. The piece builds intelligently, shrewdly toward this new climax, with a kind of honesty few artists can manage so well. But it both broadens and dilutes those original components in a progression of movements that feels more rigid, less fluid, while not necessarily adding depth to the themes or experience.

At the same time, Bear/Skin will continue to evolve. It’s slated for more San Francisco and East Bay showings in January, right after it returns from New York, where young but astute maven of contemporary dance-performance Ben Pryor has slotted it into 2015’s American Realness festival. It is a must-see.

Moreover, some of the newer elements are commanding — especially an original poem near the beginning, an inspired response to epidemic police violence. Hennessy speaks with pounding legs and trembling form, in a furious rapid-fire monotone that evokes the banal bullets of Hollywood’s white male machine-gun entertainment. If that sounds didactic, it is and it isn’t — which is to say, it is only in the best sense of a clear, precise blow. Hennessy is not just an inimitable but also a highly skilled performer, and the intersection of his political awareness and his performance “realness” is a purposefully relaxed, open and porous zone in which a genuine sense of moment rises gently but surely, like some measure of the miraculous or of simple joy, some small grace; a little rain maybe for a world on fire. *

www.circozero.org

Bridgeworthy

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Clouds of Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas, US/France/Switzerland/Germany) A cunning backstage drama occupying the middle ground between Olivier Assayas’ naturalistic dramas and reality-bending puzzles, Clouds of Sils Maria is set in the Swiss Alps and more nearly in the charged intimacy between an aging actress (Juliette Binoche) and her young assistant (Kristen Stewart). The grand dame has been cast in the same play in which she made her name decades earlier, only now she’s playing the older half of a Sapphic duo. “The play’s the thing,” and as actress and assistant rehearse lines they are simultaneously testing the bounds of their shared privacy. Further complicating things, Assayas’s brash characterization of the young starlet (Chloë Grace Moretz) cast opposite Binoche in the play invariably recalls Stewart’s own tabloid trials; like any hall of mirrors, entering Clouds of Sils Maria is much simpler than finding your way out. Assayas certainly isn’t the first filmmaker to examine slippages between actor and role, and yet he seems uniquely sensitive to rendering performance as simultaneously being a matter of artifice and absorption — the fact that it’s never entirely one thing or the other is what keeps things interesting. Fri/3, 8:45pm, Sequoia; Mon/6, 1pm, Smith Rafael. (Max Goldberg)

Dracula vs. Frankenstein (Al Adamson, US, 1971) MVFF had the bright idea this year of inviting Metallica to be its artists-in-residence, with each of the four members selecting a new or revival feature for the program. The most eccentric choice by far is guitarist and diehard horror fan Kirk Hammett’s. Drive-in schlock king Al Adamson’s 1971 cult classic is a triumph of lurid incoherence starring genre veterans Lon Chaney Jr. and J. Carrol Naish (both in their last film appearances), the director’s busty peroxided wife, Regina Campbell, Russ Tamblyn of 1961’s West Side Story (and Adamson’s 1969 biker epic Satan’s Sadists), and as Count Dracula, one Zandor Vorkov — aka Roger Engel, a goateed stockbroker who got the part because the filmmakers couldn’t afford forking out $1,200 for their first choice, John Carradine. Cobbled together from stock footage, a prior abandoned feature, and whatever trendy ideas came to mind (LSD, biker gangs, etc.), Dracula vs. Frankenstein is the ultimate exploitation-movie example of make-do disorder so profound it achieves a sort of surrealist genius. Fri/3, 10pm, Smith Rafael. (Dennis Harvey)

 

Imperial Dreams (Malik Vitthal, US) Focused on survival rather than violence, Malik Vitthal’s accomplished first feature offers a strong riposte to those who dismiss crime in African American communities as some kind of pervasive racial characteristic. Released from a prison stint on an assault charge, Bambi (John Boyega) wants nothing more than to keep his nose clean and reconnect with his four-year-old son (played by twins Ethan and Justin Coach). The latter has been raised — if you can call it that — by Bambi’s strung-out mother (Kellita Smith) and drug-dealing uncle (Glenn Plummer); the boy’s own mother (Keke Palmer) is still stuck in prison herself on an unrelated charge. It’s no healthy environment for a kid, or an adult either, since the uncle keeps trying to force Bambi back into illegal doings. Our protagonist can’t get a job without a driver’s license; can’t get a license without paying the back child support his imprisoned ex didn’t even file for; as a parolee, can’t move into government housing with his brother (Rotimi Akinosho); and can’t seem to make a move without local cops suspecting the worst of him. This low-key, Watts-set drama is sobering but not hopeless, and the tenderness between father and son never feels like a sentimental ploy. Sat/4, 5:30pm, Lark; Sun/5, 2pm and Oct 8, 11:30am, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

 

Diplomacy (Volker Schlöndorff, France) Based on Cyril Gely’s play — itself inspired by real-life events — this drama from Volker Schlöndorff (1979’s The Tin Drum) is set during the waning days of World War II and stars the actors who originated the stage roles: Niels Arestrup as weary German military governor von Choltitz, and André Dussollier as crafty Swedish consul-general Nordling. Diplomacy puts a tighter focus on chaotic Paris, circa August 1944, than previous works (like 1966’s similarly-themed Is Paris Burning?), with most of the action confined to a hotel suite as the men discuss von Choltitz’ orders, handed down from a spiteful Hitler, to blow up Paris as the Allies loom. Nordling’s negotiating skills are already known by history, but how he got there, as imagined here, makes for tense, tightly-scripted and -acted viewing. Sat/4, 8pm, Sequoia; Oct. 8, 3:30pm, Smith Rafael. (Cheryl Eddy)

 

Charlie’s Country (Rolf de Heer, Australia, 2013) David Gulpilil memorably made his film debut as the nameless aboriginal youth whose ability to live off the land in harsh Outback terrain saves two lost British children in Nicolas Roeg’s 1971 Walkabout. Forty-three years later he’s an embittered hostage to “civilization” yearning for that near-extinct way of life. Living on a reservation in northern Australia, chafing under the regulations of well-intentioned government overseers (or “thieving white bastards,” as he calls them), he tries to regain some sense of independence and harmony with nature by hunting — only to have his weapons confiscated. Peers who remember traditional ways are dying out or being hauled off to urban hospitals where they feel completely alienated. This latest from ever-idiosyncratic Aussie director Rolf de Heer (2006’s Ten Canoes, 1993’s Bad Boy Bubby) is one of his more conceptually simple efforts, sans elements of fantasy, black humor, or outrageousness. But it’s all the more poignant for its clear-eyed purity of intent. Sun/5, 7:45pm, Lark; Oct. 8, noon, Sequoia. (Harvey)

Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem (Ronit Elkabetz and Shlomi Elkabetz, Israel/France/Germany) Ever felt trapped in a relationship? Odds are what you went through was nothing compared to the maximum-security imprisonment suffered by the titular protagonist in siblings Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz’s Israeli drama. The former plays a middle-aged woman who was married off at age 15, and three decades of incompatibility later has decided the only solution is divorce. (By this point she’s already lived separately with most of their children for several years, supporting them with her own work.) But that can only be granted by a Rabbinical Court whose three members seem to see almost no reason why man should put asunder what God purportedly joined together in matrimonial contract. Seemingly out of sheer spite, the strictly religious (and humorless) husband played by Simon Abkarian further drags the process out for months, even years by refusing to cooperate when he doesn’t flat-out refuse to show up for mandated court sessions. Set entirely in the plain courtroom, this Israeli Oscar submission is claustrophobic both physically and psychologically — the strangling sensation of being in a situation our heroine’s culture and laws won’t permit escape from is excruciating at times. Mon/6, 7:30pm, Sequoia; Oct. 8, 6pm, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

 

What We Do in the Shadows (Jermaine Clement and Taika Waititi, US/New Zealand) Before you groan “Oh no, not another mockumentary horror spoof,” be informed that this is THE mockumentary horror spoof, rendering all other past and prospective ones pretty well unnecessary. Vijago (Taika Waititi) is our 379-year-old principal guide as a film crew invades the decrepit Wellington, New Zealand, home he shares with three other undead bloodsuckers: Callow newbie Deacon (Jonathan Brugh), who refuses to do his assigned domestic chores; medieval Transylvanian warlord Vladislav (Jermaine Clement), still “a bit of a perv” torture-wise; and Nosferatu-looking mute Petyr (Ben Fransham), who’s scarier than the rest of them combined. When the latter recklessly “turns” local layabout Nick (Cori Gonzalez-Macuer), his loose lips — really, you don’t want to go around telling every pub acquaintance “I’m a vampire!” when you really are — threaten this fragile commune of murderous immortals. Though it loses steam a bit toward the end, Shadows is pretty hilarious for the most part, with its determined de-romanticizing of vampire clichés from Bram Stoker to Twilight. Tue/7, 7:45pm, and Oct. 9, 4pm, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

The Theory of Everything (James Marsh, UK/US) It’s instant attraction when Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) meets Jane Wilde (Felicity Jones), though a dark cloud passes over the sweet romance between the Cambridge students when Stephen learns he has motor neuron disease. The odds are against them, but they get married anyway; as Stephen’s fragile condition worsens, his fame as a brilliant physicist grows. Though The Theory of Everything suffers from biopic syndrome (events are simplified for dramatic convenience, etc.), director James Marsh (2008’s Man on Wire), working from Jane Hawking’s memoir, does offer an intimate look at an extraordinary marriage that ultimately failed because of utterly ordinary, ultimately amicable reasons. In the end, the performances are far more memorable than the movie itself, with Redmayne’s astonishingly controlled physical performance matched scene for scene by Jones’ wide-rangingly emotional one. Oct. 9, 7pm, Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

In Order of Disappearance (Hans Petter Moland, Norway/Sweden/Denmark) Stellan Skarsgård makes like Liam Neeson in this bloody yet droll revenge saga. His unfortunately named Nils Dickman is a Swedish émigré living in a remote Norwegian community, working as a snow plowman. When their only son is kidnapped and killed — the innocent victim of a co-worker’s stupid plan to steal cocaine from major-league drug traffickers — his wife bitterly assumes he must have been the hapless addict that circumstances paint him as. But Nils refuses to accept that explanation, his own dogged investigations (and heavy fist) soon exposing a complex web of goons responsible, most notably rageaholic vegan racist villain Ole (Pal Sverre Hagen). He triggers full-scale war between local and Serbian crime factions to eliminate those few perps he doesn’t off himself — an ever-rising body count marked by onscreen titles commemorating each latest casualty. Hans Petter Moland’s film has been compared to Tarantino, and indeed there are similarities, but the frozen-north setting and bone-dry humor are Scandinavian as can be. Oct. 10, 5:45pm, Smith Rafael; Oct 12, 2:45, Sequoia. (Harvey)

MILL VALLEY FILM FESTIVAL
Oct 2-12, $8-14
Lark Theater
549 Magnolia, Larkspur
Cinearts@Sequoia
25 Throckmorton, Mill Valley
Smith Rafael Film Center
1118 Fourth St, San Rafael
www.mvff.com

Strictly speaking

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LEFT OF THE DIAL When Slim’s booker Dawn Holliday first met with Warren Hellman in 2001, she had no way of knowing that the quaint little music festival the investor wanted to organize would grow to be one of San Francisco’s most fiercely cherished traditions.

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, which runs this Friday, Oct. 3 through Sunday, Oct. 5 (featuring this rather impressive lineup of bands, whose music you’ll find in the YouTube playlist below) is special for a number of reasons. It’s free, thanks to an endowment from the late sir Hellman. You can’t buy alcohol. You won’t find huge video screens projecting tweets about the festival in real time. To get distinctly San Francisco on you and use a word I generally avoid, its vibe — yes — is about a solar system away from certain other huge music festivals in Golden Gate Park that shall remain nameless. And it just couldn’t take place anywhere else.

Little story for ya: Four years ago this week, I moved back to the Bay Area from New York. I was unemployed and aimless and temporarily living with my parents again at 26, and the future was terrifying. I was regrouping, but I didn’t know if I was back here for good. The day after I landed — hungover, disoriented by the smells and sounds and lack of sensory overload of not-New York City — I headed to Hardly Strictly with a few old friends. I remember foraging our way into the park, just pushing toward the music, and literally stumbling out of a wall of shrubbery to find Patti Smith just starting her set.

The crowd was insane: people tightly packed in, drinking, passing joints, hollering, bundled in seven layers each, sitting on each other’s shoulders, stepping on each other’s army blankets full of microbrews and organic rice chips and apologizing as they tried to push up closer to the stage.

My eyes darted from the older woman with flowing batik-print pants, eyes closed, swaying joyously by herself, to the young couple with matching dreads who were tripping on god knows what, to the balding-but-ponytailed and potbellied man who seemed to be trying to get a hacky sack game going to the beat of “Because the Night.”

I don’t want to speak for all Bay Area kids, but I’ve always been pretty ambivalent about large groups of hippies — there’s just a saturation point when you grow up here. Unlike so many of my transplant friends, I have never found the remnants of the Summer of Love overly enchanting; this is what happens when you are forced to watch the documentary Berkeley In the Sixties in high school history classes. I am also, for what it’s worth, not the biggest fan of crowds.

I knew I’d been gone a while because I was in love. I’d never been so happy to see ridiculous, stoned, absolutely beside themselves weirdos all doing their own weird things next to each other and nobody caring. Little kids dancing with grandparents; teenagers making out. I felt like I’d stumbled onto some sort of magical island, one where nobody talked about the stock exchange and everyone was incredibly, almost purposefully unfashionable and the thought of waiting in line to get into a club was ludicrous. I wanted to live in this smelly pile of humanity forever, and that was a new one for me. I knew I’d been gone a while because I was seeing SF the way transplants see SF. And I also knew I was home.

That atmosphere, I learned while talking to Holliday last week, is absolutely by design.

“I think of it more as a gathering of music lovers than a festival, really,” says Holliday, who’s booked Hardly Strictly every year since its inception. “I think having no fences — you can walk away at any time — and not selling alcohol makes a huge difference in people’s attitudes.”

As for the task of putting together a lineup each year that appeals to everyone from teenagers to folks in their 70s and 80s — the announcement of Sun Kil Moon, Deltron 3030, the Apache Relay, Sharon Van Etten, and others had many pronouncing this the hippest (read: appealing to folks under 40) lineup in years — Holliday says she actually keeps it relatively simple.

“When it started, and I kind of still do this, it was just with Warren in mind,” she says. “I was thinking about what he hadn’t heard yet. I knew he didn’t start listening to music until later in life, so I wanted to book music that I thought he should be turned on to. As long as there was some kind of roots in it. The Blind Boys of Alabama, Gogol Bordello, all stuff that he would really love to hear, but he’d never go out and see because he went to bed at 9:30. That was my goal for 12 years. ‘What would blow Warren’s mind?'” She laughs, noting that Hellman’s early bedtime is also the reason for the festival ending not long after dark.

“I don’t think [my booking] has changed that much with his passing,” she says. “It’s still music that I feel doesn’t get a whole lot of attention. Nothing’s bigger than the Fillmore. A lot of the bands don’t fill our rooms [Great American Music Hall and Slim’s], so a lot of people get to hear music they’re not normally exposed to. The age range is all over the place. And with bands that usually are a higher ticket, it’s a an opportunity for fans to go see $60, $70 shows for free.”

The park itself also has a lot to do with how she books: “I walk through it and see what I hear,” she says. “The contours of the meadows at different times of the year speak differently to you. Sometimes when I walk down JFK, I still hear Alejandro Escovedo singing, and that was eight years ago now.”

She also has a long-running wish list of artists; Lucinda Williams and Yo La Tengo, both playing this year’s fest, have been on it for some time. And she’s especially looking forward to the annual tribute to those who’ve passed away, which happens Saturday afternoon at the banjo stage — Lou Reed, Pete Seeger, and the Ramones will all be honored this year.

“It’s the best gift,” she says. “I mean if someone were able to give us world peace, I’d say that was the best gift. But since no one’s going to — yep, this is the best.”

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass is all day Fri/3 through Sun/5, for free, of course, in Golden Gate Park. Check www.hardlystrictlybluegrass.com for set times, and visit our Noise blog at www.sfbg.com/noise for more coverage of the fest. Until then — we’ll see ya in the park.

 

Sound sneak preview: Ai WeiWei Alcatraz exhibition

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Here’s a taste from @Large, the exhibition by internationally renowned Chinese artist Ai WeiWei, which will open to the public on Alcatraz Sat/27.

This recording is from Illumination, one of the sound installations, which makes use of the prison hospital – an Alcatraz site not normally open to daytime visitors. 

To hear it, visitors must enter psychiatric observation cells, small tiled chambers with a chilling history: Inmates who had psychotic breaks were held there for observation while in their most acute states.

Step into one of the tiny cells and you are enveloped in sound from a Buddhist ceremony at the Namgyal Monastery, in Dharamsala, India, where monks from Tibetan lineages perform rituals associated with the Dalai Lama.

The musical chanting piped into the observation cell next door is Eagle Dance, a traditional song of the Hopi tribe, recorded in 1964. That has historic significance, too, because Hopi prisoners were held at Alcatraz in 1895 for refusing to send their children to boarding schools set up by the US Government.

The @Large exhibition on Alcatraz Island is the product of a collaboration between the FOR-SITE Foundation, the National Park Service and the Golden Gate Parks Conservancy. The seven sound, sculpture and mixed-media works center on the themes of freedom of expression and the social implications of incarceration.

“The major tenets of this exhibition are the need for basic human rights, freedom of expression, our individual responsibility and the role that we play in helping create a just society,” said FOR-SITE Foundation executive director and @Large curator Cheryl Haines.

“Also, the importance of communication – there’s an interesting parallel in this exhibition about how a prison populace is controlled, and they’re not allowed to communicate with their community, and there are some cases here on Alcatraz, when it was a federal penitentiary, where that was the case. It was a silent prison for a number of years, and some of the works relate to that.”

Extended review: British prison drama ‘Starred Up’

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By Haley Brucato

Scottish filmmaker David Mackenzie’s prison drama Starred Up is a brutally raw indie film starring rising actor Jack O’Connell as Eric, a 19-year-old offender who has just been “starred up,” or transferred to an adult prison due to his uncontrollable and dangerous behavior. Though he’s passive when we get our first look at him, he won’t be for long: One of the first things Eric does upon entering his new cell is expertly rig a shank out of a toothbrush and a shaving razor, which he then hides in an overhead light fixture. Clearly, he’s done this before.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zE4ziBfu0JA

This weapon takes awhile to be deployed, but he’s not so patient with his fists, nor is anyone here; inmates regularly resolve their differences by beating each other to a pulp. Screenwriter Jonathan Asser provides powerful insight with his own history as a psychotherapist in a London jail, an experience that inspired the character of therapist Oliver (Rupert Friend). Oliver has hope for the violent Eric — he’s maybe the only one who does — knowing that this furious creature is likely destined to slip through the cracks like so many before him.

The well-meaning doc attemps to challenge prison authorities who prefer slapping troublemakers into solitary confinement by offering anger-management treatment to the worst offenders. This includes, however briefly, an inmate who happens to be Eric’s surly, long-absent father (Ben Mendelsohn). But there are no quick fixes for any of these characters, especially with shifty allegiances between different factions both in front of and behind bars. 

Although American viewers will likely struggle to understand the thick accents (not to mention the free-flying jailhouse slang), this doesn’t exactly matter in a film that propels itself via physical confrontations rather than dialogue. As for star O’Connell, he’ll soon be seen as a very different kind of prisoner in Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken

STARRED UP opens Fri/26 at the Roxie.

This Week’s Picks: Sept. 24 – 30, 2014

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WEDNESDAY 24

 

Jean-Pierre Gorin

The title of the Pacific Film Archive’s terrific Jean-Luc Godard retrospective is “Expect Everything From Cinema,” but in the aftermath of May 1968, Godard’s radical deconstructions of film form suggested a less sanguine outlook. His comrade in the collectivist Dziga Vertov Group, Jean-Pierre Gorin, visits the PFA tonight to lecture on this frequently underestimated period. Always a lively presence, Gorin will stick around for another night to introduce a screening of Ici et ailleurs (1976), an hourlong reckoning of 1970 footage shot in Palestinian refugee camps, charged by subsequent events (specifically the 1972 Munich Olympics). “The film’s complex, layered text and imagery, its anguish and skepticism all confute its agit-prop approach,” writes James Quandt, “and the result is as touching and beautiful as it is incensing.” (Max Goldberg)

Gorin speaks Wed/24 and Thu/25 at 7pm; each event $9.50

Pacific Film Archive Theater

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-1412

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

 

 

 

50th Big Book Sale

Claiming to be the “biggest book sale west of the Mississippi,” the 50th annual Big Book Sale at Fort Mason is a collector’s dream, with over 500,000 books, DVDs, CDs, vinyl, tapes — you name it — all to be scavenged for under $3. (At a super big sale on Sunday, prices plummet to $1.) If that isn’t exciting enough, Friends of the SF Public Library have hidden prizes amongst the towering stacks of words, so follow the clues and you could win tickets to the SF Symphony, DeYoung, the Roxie, and more! All proceeds benefit the SF Public Library’s education programs. (Haley Brucato)

Through Sun/28, 10am-6pm; free

Fort Mason Center

2 Marina, SF

(415) 441-3400

www.friendssfpl.org

 

THURSDAY 25

 

 

Slaughterhouse-Five

Become “unstuck in time” with Billy Pilgrim as he recounts his life, spent largely as an American prisoner of war and witness to the firebombing of Dresden, in this satirized theatrical adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s anti-war 1969 classic, Slaughterhouse-Five. Produced by Custom Made Theatre Co. — known for its socially conscious and intimate productions — this is sure to be an emotionally-moving and humorous 100-minute performance (without intermission), mirroring Vonnegut’s own nonlinear narrative style. (Haley Brucato)

Through Sat/27 at 8pm; also Sun/28 at 7pm, $35-$40

Gough Street Playhouse

1620 Gough, SF

(501) 207-5774

www.custommade.org

 

 

 

 

Oakland Underground Film Festival

The Oakland Underground Film Festival is back for its sixth year, and the programming is, as the East Bay kids say, hella great. Opening night films are Aussie writer-director Hugh Sullivan’s sci-fi rom-com The Infinite Man (a hit at South by Southwest and Fantasia), and Brazil-set martial arts saga Falcon Rising — featuring the high-flying Michael Jai White, star of 2009 OAKUFF hit Black Dynamite. There’s also ¿Qué Caramba Es La Vida?, a doc about female Mariachi musicians; a late-night screening of 1988 cult classic Heathers (how very!); multiple shorts programs (including “Sick and Twisted Horror Shorts”); Nick Cave docudrama 20,000 Days on Earth, and more. (Cheryl Eddy)

Through Sun/28, $10

Grand Lake Theatre

3200 Grand, Oakl

 

Humanist Hall

390 27th St, Oakl

www.oakuff.org

 

 

FRIDAY 26

 

decker.

San Franciscans may think they have the market cornered on psychedelia, but things sound a little different in the desert — dusty, moody, lonely, and super atmospheric. All of these are apt words for decker., a Sedona-based “desert folk” act led by singer-songwriter Brandon Decker that won hearts with its soulful live act at SXSW, among other stages. This show, which serves as a record release party for the band’s fifth album, Patsy, will actually be a double-helping of soul: Oakland favorites Whiskerman, with Graham Patzner’s whiskey-coated vocals at the helm, will help open the evening. (Emma Silvers)

With Whiskerman and Brother Graham

9pm, $12

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St, SF

(415) 626-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com


SATURDAY 27

 

5th Annual SuperHero Street Fair

Villain or hero? You decide. For the fifth year, thousands of event-goers will be disguised in their favorite capes, masks, and tights, donning a sword or perhaps a whip, to fulfill their ultimate superhero fantasies. Thanks to the co-creators of How Weird Street Fair, Sea of Dreams NYE, and Decompression Street Fair, this heroic outdoor fetish-fest will bump the costume-ridden streets with seven electronic music stages, light installations, comic exhibits, climbing walls, cartoon art, and a Jack Kirby museum. But the founders challenge each to first ponder one thing: “What creativity and superpowers do you bring to the everyday world?” (Haley Brucato)

1pm-11pm; $15

Waterfront Boardwalk Oasis

1700 Indiana, SF

www.superherosf.com

 

 

 

Yatra: Masters of Kathak and Flamenco

In his collaboration with Jason Samuel Smith, Kathak virtuoso Chitresh Das explored common and different qualities in their improvisatory approach to percussive dance-one donned tap shoes, the other ankle bells. So, now Das has taken the idea closer to home. Flamenco, as historians have speculated for a long time, may have had its origins in Northern India—Kathak’s own territory—from where gypsies brought it through the Middle East and North Africa to Spain. In Yatra: Masters of Kathak and Flamenco, Flamenco dancer Antonio Hidalgo Paz and Das bring their own musicians, who hopefully will have a collaborative moment of their own. What do we know for sure that they have in common? Fierce feet, verticality, an almost reverential use of the music, expressive use of arms and hands, and an immaculate sense of timing. (Rita Felciano)

Sept. 27 8pm, Sept. 28, 2pm, $28-$58

Palace of Fine Arts

3301 Lyon St, SF

(415) 333-9000

www.kathak.org

 

 

Iranian Film Festival

Iran’s rich cinematic tradition has perservered despite the country’s political upheaval and unrest — and a new generation of filmmakers continue to emerge and share their stories. The Iranian Film Festival spotlights indie films made by or about Iranians, no matter where they live. Its two-day run packs in 12 programs, most of which include a feature and multiple shorts. True tales include Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States, about the CIA’s role in the 1953 coup in Iran; and Abbas Kiarostami: A Report, a doc about the pioneering filmmaker. There are also several empowering films about women, including Sepideh — Reaching for the Stars, about an Iranian woman who dreams of a near-impossible career as an astronaut, and Iranian Ninja, about, yes, Iran’s first female ninja. (Eddy)

Through Sun/27, $11-12 (passes, $60-120)

San Francisco Art Institute

800 Chestnut, SF

www.iranianfilmfestival.org

 

 

SUNDAY 28


Hushfest

How do you get away with throwing a bonkers dance party on public Ocean Beach in broad daylight? Pipe the music directly into the crowd’s headphones, that’s how. The Silent Frisco crew has found the ultimate underground vibe, above ground. Here’s how it works – gather at the party spot (imbibe your libations beforehand, please, no drugs or alcohol on the beach), pay $20 for special wireless headphones, and dance in the sand with a huge gaggle of other wildly, silently gesticulating aficianados. DJs at this annual event around include genius duo Psychmagik, who rejigger deepest funk-rock memories of the 1970s, Rob Garza of Thievery Corporation, and Fort Knox Five. Yes, you can still yell “woo!” (Marke B.)

11am, $20

Ocean Beach, SF

www.silentfrisco.com


MONDAY 29


John Darnielle

Mountain Goats devotees know him as the prolific pen and idiosyncratic voice behind the band’s complex story-songs — some 14 studio albums of ’em, over the course of 18 years. But with Darnielle’s richly imagined and darkly memorable debut novel, Wolf in White Van, the lyricist proves his writing chops go well beyond the CD insert, weaving a mysterious tale through the eyes of a narrator we won’t soon forget: All readers know at the novel’s outset is that our loner protagonist runs a complex, interactive adventure game from his house, and that he was seriously disfigured at some point in his youth. In the process of uncovering his full story, we find ourselves sympathizing with people we might never expect. At the only Bay Area stop of his book tour, Darnielle will read from the novel and discuss it with author Robin Sloan. (Silvers)

7pm, free

Green Apple Books on the Park

1231 9th Ave, SF

www.greenapplebooks.com



TUESDAY 30


Royal Blood

Up-and-coming UK duo Royal Blood may have formed just last year, but the band is already making quite a name for itself on the basis of awesomely blues-fueled, snarling garage rock, which is showcased on the new, self-titled album that came out last month on Warner Bros. Records. That release debuted at No. 1 on the British charts, and the band is up for a prestigious Mercury Prize. Tonight is your chance to catch the explosive band in an intimate setting — the newly remodeled Masonic — before the pair likely moves on to much bigger venues. Royal Blood opens for The Pixies. (Sean McCourt)

7:30pm, $50-$75

The Masonic

1111 California, SF

www.sfmasonic.com

 

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Ruinous beauty

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esilvers@sfbg.com

LEFT OF THE DIAL Bob Mould seems like a good multi-tasker. The legendary singer-guitarist is just signing out of a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session as he answers the phone in New York for our interview Sept. 9; he’ll play at the Bowery Ballroom the following night.

“Sorry, we went a little over because there were technical difficulties at the beginning,” he says, when I explain that I’ve been watching for the last hour in real time as his superfans — as well as guitar nerds of all stripes, from all over the world — ask him questions.

These queries range in topic from pleas for his explosively influential punk band Hüsker Dü to get back together (“Some things can’t be replicated, and those eight years are best left untarnished”) to interest in his diet and exercise regimens (little to no starches, lots of running staircases when he’s home in SF), wrestling opinions (Mould at one point wrote music for the professional wrestling industry) to “what positions were your guitar pedal knobs at when I saw you play this one particular show?” (generally, 3pm for both).

If the fans seem all over the place, it’s for good reason: Mould’s career is as varied as the people who count him among their heroes. After fronting Hüsker Dü in the early ’80s; he ushered in a higher standard for hard-hitting alt-rock in the ’90s with a new band, Sugar. His solo career has taken him into melancholy singer-songwriter territory, then back to all-consuming wall-of-deafening-sound guitar rock, with forays into the aforementioned wrestling business. In 2011, after decades of being known for his intense love of privacy, he penned an acclaimed memoir about his life thus far, including his tortured early years spent closeted, at times using meth and cocaine to cope.

After that 180, it should come as no surprise to anyone that Mould’s most recent work, Beauty and Ruin (which came out June 3 on Merge), grapples with highly personal territory.

In the first half of 2012, Mould was riding high off the book’s success. He’d just been honored by dozens of younger rock titans who consider him a god — Dave Grohl, Spoon, Ryan Adams — at a tribute performance in LA. He had a new record out, the critically acclaimed, harder-than-he’d-rocked-in-a-while Silver Age, and was celebrating the 20th anniversary of Sugar’s much-loved Copper Blue. And then, in October, Mould’s father died.

“It was not unexpected, but it was still tough nonetheless,” says Mould, who has written candidly about his complicated relationship with his father — an alcoholic who was physically abusive at times, but also introduced him to rock ‘n’ roll, and acted as one of Hüsker Dü’s biggest supporters in the band’s early years.

“[Losing a parent] is something most of us go through, but I don’t think I’d realize how a loss of the size really shifts your perspective…it was an emotional time. And that became the marker for the next 12 months of touring, dealing with my relationship with my family and my work.”

The record takes on four key themes or acts, says Mould: “There’s the loss, and the reflection, and then acceptance. And then there’s moving on to the future, which is how the album closes out. It’s a work about a really confusing experience.”

Backed by Jason Narducy on bass and the tireless Jon Wurster on drums (Mould shares Wurster’s time with Superchunk and the Mountain Goats), Mould channels that confusion into a something like a condensed, theatrical rock ‘n’ roll epic. (His tour for the record brings him to The Fillmore this Fri/26.)

Considering its subject matter, it’s hardly a downer of a record. “I’m sure it confuses some of the longtime fellow miserablists [to hear the bright, upbeat tunes],” says Mould with a laugh. “It’s a heavy record; it’s got its own darkness, but it has an equal amount of light to keep it balanced out.”

Beauty and Ruin also demands to be heard as an album: As a listener, even if you were to shut off the part of your brain that comprehends lyrics, it’s the cathartic, hook-driven guitar thrum throughout these missives — which builds to unrelentingly passionate levels on “The War,” marking the end of side 1 on the record, if it were an LP, before sliding into the naked clarity of “Forgiveness” — that engages your full body, that makes you question whether or not aging affects Bob Mould the way it affects regular humans, because the man honestly sounds like he could sing and play electric guitar and run a marathon at the same time.

Not so, Mould says. On days off when he’s on tour, he tries to talk as little as possible to protect his voice. “I sing really hard, probably too hard for my own good, and naturally it gets a little tougher to recover from that each night.”

When he’s not on tour, of course, he’s home in San Francisco — he’s lived in the Castro for the past five years. And yes, as a guy who made $12 playing Mabuhay Gardens in 1981 with Hüsker Dü, he’s noticed that the scene here has changed in the last few years. But it’s not all doom and gloom.

“I’ll still go to the Independent, Bottom of the Hill, Great American to see shows. I like the Chapel. There are still great clubs. But yeah, historically, when there’s been development — especially these big condo developments — when that’s on the rise in the city, at first, the neighbors are going ‘Oh, we love living next to the nightclub!'” says Mould. “Then they have their first kid, and the nightclub keeps them up at night. And they start fighting the nightclub, and if they get it closed down the neighborhood turns into a really boring place, and they don’t know it until it’s too late. I’ve seen it happen in so many cities around the world.”

“…I’m not certain how anybody can live in San Francisco, with the cost of living and the rents. It’s just such a massive change,” he continues. “Cities change. And we can fight City Hall, fight the developers…but cities evolve. And people who make art for their living are leaving for other places, which is tough because San Francisco has such an amazing history with music and how it’s affected world cultures. I’ve honestly just learned to deal with it.

“Because you never know what’s going to happen. Things change. Maybe it’ll change back.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNuR5KPCn0M

BOB MOULD

With Cymbals Eat Guitars

Fri/26, 9pm, $25

The Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

www.thefillmore.com

Southern light

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marke@sfbg.com

FEAST: ITALY There are 22 Caravaggio paintings in southern mainland Italy, and we were determined to feast our eyes on every last one of them this past May. (We got up all the way up to 21: one was on loan to the Dallas Museum of Art.) As important: We would eat and drink a wide path to each painting, leaving no plate unlicked in that famously delicious part of the world. Here are some highlights.

 

ROME

While you’re basically tripping over ancient ruins and gorgeous people everywhere you turn, Rome’s chic bistro and cute street food scene will have your head in the culinary clouds. Several experiences really stood out: relaxing in the super old-school family feel of Trattoria di Carmine (squid casserole, insanely layered eggplant parmagiana, gorgeous citrusy anchovies); wandering through the Jewish ghetto devouring as many traditional fried artichokes as we could; scooping up all the gelato at Giolitti; dropping into the trendy spots of the Pigneto neighborhood (kind of like the Mission, gentrification woes and all); drinking and dancing all night at one of the best clubs I’ve been to, Frutta e Verdura.

But there are three I keep coming back to. One is the fantastic, kind-of-hidden lunch treasure Coso near the Spanish Steps, with its lovely takes on classics like hefty but somehow delicate polpette (meatballs) and cacio e vaniglia (a sweet twist on Rome’s eternal pasta dish, spaghetti with cheese and ground pepper). Another was the almost too-hip, yet still laid-back, scene at Barzilai — how those fashionable scruffy models could eat all that rich, irresistible sfumato de artichoke and asparagus flan, we couldn’t figure. But the top of it all was a trip out to the suburbs to visit the fabled Betto e Mary, which serves pretty much what the gladiators ate, but in a family atmosphere, its walls lined with socialist memorabilia. Here we had a vast assortment of interestingly prepared sweetbreads (thymus in lemon, fried pancreas), pasta sauce with more unfamiliar animal parts, and calf’s brain in a zingy orange tomato sauce. Those gladiators sure loved their organs!

 

NAPLES

Probably my favorite city in the world right now — brimming with chaotic energy, street art, and strange corners and ancient alleyways, which often overflow with music and partying until 4am. The city was bombed heavily in World War II, and it looks like instead of rebuilding all those Renaissance-era monastic buildings and 17th century armories, they just graffitied them with abandon. Pizza, pizza, pizza is what you’ll get here — who’s complaining? — and a lot of bold, full-bodied wines from the surrounding Campagnia region: Taurasi red and Fiano di Avellino and Greco di Tufo whites. Fried balls of dough and zucchini make excellent street bites. Pasta with beans and pan-fried rabbit break up the pizza routine. But perfectly blistered thin-crust pies will make you weep with joy (especially if you’ve spent all day exploring the vast ruins of Pompeii. Hopping, affordable, late-night Pizzeria I Decumani is definitely a top choice.

 

AMALFI COAST

The thin, winding cliff roads of this region are terrifying — but you’ll gladly risk death (preferably on a motorbike) for stunning views of pastel-colored towns sprawling up mountains, imposing 1,000-year-old Saracen towers left over from the coast’s Arab occupiers, and fantastic seafood galore. Every town boasts quaint delights, but my husband and I were really taken with tiny Atrani, with its staircase streets, large clock tower, and main plaza lined with good restaurants. Here we dived into octopus, sardines, squid, every kind of fish imaginable, and bright chartreuse glasses of limoncello liquor alongside the sparkling Mediterranean.

 

MATERA

The sprawling, ancient cave city of Matera, in the central south, is a home base for cucina povera, peasant cooking that serves as some of the best comfort food in the world. Among the moonlit, picturesque stone buildings jutting from their original cave bases, warm dining spots serve orecchiette (ear-shaped pasta) or cavatelli (rolled up orecchiette) cooked with the region’s leafy species of broccoli rabe and sprinkled with lard-fried breadcrumbs. Sometimes they drown the whole plate in melted mozzarella. Paired with a local primitivo wine — the Basilicata region has been producing grapes since 1300 BC — it’s pure hog heaven. “You will never have orecchiette as good as this,” said our waiter at incredible neighborhood favorite Trattoria Due Sassi as he dropped off a giant bowl to share. Why? “Because my mother makes it.”

 

TRANI

Trani is a seaside resort town on the east coast with some serious maritime history, and a cathedral — Cattedrale di San Nicola Pellegrino — that dates back to the fourth century. When we were there, it was windy and cold. No beach weekend for us, but we took necessary solace in a magical little wine shop called Enoteca de Toma Mauro. Octogenarian owner Francesco was a perfect guide to the wines of Lucania, Salento, and Puglia (the heel of Italy’s boot) in general. He also carried some killer Amaro, the favored digestif of the region — herbal and bittersweet, but with an exceptionally smooth finish, I couldn’t get enough of it. *

 

Georgian rhapsody

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arts@sfbg.com

FILM Spanning nine months of programs and a full century of cinema, “Discovering Georgian Cinema” is the kind of ambitious exhibition that reminds us how much of film history is yet to be written. The series, presented by the Pacific Film Archive, represents a remarkable feat of coordination: Its opening weeks feature prints from Toulouse, Berlin, New York, Tbilisi, and, most delicately given recent history, Moscow.

Building upon a core collection of Soviet-era Georgian films held by the PFA, curator Susan Oxtoby organized the program around three periods: the silent era, the art cinema explosion of the 1950s through the 1980s, and the contemporary scene. While many titles will be unfamiliar even to dyed-in-the-wool cinephiles, echoes and premonitions of broader trends in international cinema abound. To take only one example, series opener Blue Mountains (1984) seems to draw upon Jacques Tati while at the same time anticipating the New Romanian Cinema in its elegant formalist satire of state bureaucracy. But then perhaps the ultimate lesson of a series like “Discovering Georgian Cinema” is that every New Wave renews some earlier illumination.

SF Bay Guardian What was the genesis of your work on “Discovering Georgian Cinema”?

Susan Oxtoby The genesis for the project really comes from the fact that BAM/PFA holds an important collection of Soviet Georgian films — 37 prints in total. Individual films have shown in different contexts, but we haven’t done a major Georgian series in many years. In 2011 I received a curatorial research grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to travel to other archives with significant holdings, and then we raised funds for a touring series from the National Endowment for the Arts. We invited Nino Dzandzava, who is currently working at the National Archives of Georgia, to visit Berkeley to examine our collection. Viewing prints with her was a wonderful experience because she could supply me a sense of the history behind these films and the connections between them. There was also my visit to the Tbilisi International Film Festival, which was extraordinary in terms of getting a sense of the current film scene in Georgia and having an opportunity to meet with contemporary filmmakers.

SFBG Was it always your intention to be linking the historical films to more contemporary work?

Oxtoby Absolutely, I think it is very important to see the contemporary era in light of the history of Georgian cinema. It’s quite evident that young filmmakers working in Georgia today are aware of their country’s film heritage.

SFBG Can you talk about some of your priorities in trying to create a context for a national cinema?

Oxtoby My priority is to show strong examples of what has been created in Georgia within an art cinema tradition. Over the course of the retrospective we will spotlight numerous directors and have a chance to examine their individual film styles. We launch the series with two guests from Tbilisi, veteran filmmaker Eldar Shengelaia (The Blue Mountains, 1963’s The White Caravan, 1968’s An Unusual Exhibition), who will present his own films plus his father Nikoloz Shengelaia’s Twenty-Six Commissars (1928); and Nana Janelidze, the executive director of the Georgian National Film Center, who is herself a filmmaker (2011’s Will There Be A Theater Up There?!, 1985’s The Family) and screenwriter (1984/1987’s Repentance). In October, film historian Peter Rollberg will join us to speak about Georgian films from the silent era, and archivist Nino Dzandzava will present a program of Georgian Kulturfilms from the early 1930s. In mid-November, Levan Koguashvili (2010’s Street Days, 2013’s Blind Dates) will be our guest.

SFBG The silent films in the series that I’ve seen are quite striking in the way they refigure elements of Soviet filmmaking. A film like Eliso (1928) has such strong elements of montage.

Oxtoby Yes, that’s true. We will present Eliso with a newly commissioned score adapted from traditional Georgian folk songs by Carl Linich and performed by Trio Kavkasia on October 25 and 26; this will be a truly unique way to experience this beautiful silent era classic presented with choral accompaniment. The silent era films by Ivan Perestiani, Mikhail Kalatozov, Nikoloz Shengelaia, Lev Push, and others are absolutely wonderful. There’s also an interesting short 40-minute silent film called Buba (1930) by Noutsa Gogoberidze, which we will screen on November 8. She was traveling in the same circles with Dovzhenko and Eisenstein and collaborated with the avant-garde painter David Kakabadze, but her work was not endorsed by the Stalin regime and so she was more or less written out of film history. Her film is a bit like Buñuel’s Las Hurdes (1933), made a few years later.

SFBG Were there any other films that were especially surprising to you in terms of style or theme?

Oxtoby Oh yes, many. Little Red Devils (1923) could be a Douglas Fairbanks film; My Grandmother (1929) is Dadaist in character and very fresh stylistically. Then there’s a film like Nikolai Shengelaia’s Twenty Six Commissars (1932), which deals with the geopolitics of the oil fields in Baku — its political concerns might have been pulled out of today’s news headlines. I’m intrigued to see the influence of Italian neorealism on such films as Magdana’s Donkey (1955), Our Courtyard (1956) or even the contemporary work Susa (2010), as well as the influence of the French New Wave on Otar Iosseliani’s films from the 1960s. I want to hear more from the filmmakers and historians as to how much back and forth there was during the Soviet era. How much world cinema was being seen in Tbilisi? How much were filmmakers traveling abroad and seeing things at festivals? One definitely senses a strong connection with international cinema when you watch these films from Georgia. *

DISCOVERING GEORGIAN CINEMA

Sept 26-April 19

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft, Berk

bampfa.berkeley.edu