Performance Archives — Page 130 of 132 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

NOISE: Sonic on Sonic – Vice Cooler’s best 24th B-day ever and Sonic Youth Kim and Thurston’s drop-by

July 17, 2006

Whoa, did Vice Cooler of XBXRX, KIT, and Hawnay Troof have an awesome birthday or what at 21 Grand in Oakland July 15? The topper came around midnight: Mirror/Dash, Sonic Youth twosome Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore’s seldom-performed experimental side project.

Moore and Gordon arrived after finishing up their opening set for Pearl Jam at the Bill Graham Civic, sans entourage; set up and plugged in their own gear; and then played a short set of textural fragments with Kim Gordon on drums and then guitar. It was rad to see Gordon and Moore performing together outside of an SY context – a first for me. I dug the piece that featured Gordon playing a propulsive rhythm guitar.

I also like the way hundreds of people suddenly materialized when the SYers appeared (despite the sketchy sign at the door stating “Sonic Youth are NOT playing” – oh yeah, OK, technically, no). I guess folks got busy texting their pals when Vice, performing as Hawnay Troof, announced that Mirror/Dash was coming up soon.

After a few songs, Moore and Gordon warmly wished a happy birthday to Cooler, grinning from ear to ear up front after helping with setup. Is it too much to see them as Cooler’s spiritual parental units? Troof-ully, they seem to adore Vice. To drive the point home further, Moore jumped into the audience and tackled the birthday boy. Someone was in a hugging mood…

And on a complete side note, can we all agree that Gordon is probably the hottest (and coolest) 50-something lady in rock, resembling a downtown Charlotte Rampling? Madonna and her aerodynamic thighs have nothin’ on her. She also pulled a nice kid-like, twirly dance off at the previous night’s Fillmore performance.

Get Hustle didn’t make the bash, and Friends Forever canceled due to the girl drummer’s back injury. I missed Sharon Cheslow’s improv set with Magik Marker’s Elisa Ambrogio, as well as Always. But I did catch the spunky Dinky Bits. Cute costumes, guys.

Harry Merry was a maniac, playing a fairly long set of his looney, loveable bizarro tunes. This number was about a bus driver who refused to obey.

The Vice, in his Hawnay Troof guise, got on stage, rocked the mic, and worked the crowd up to a lather.

Cooler continued sweating his heart out, as Thurston Moore peered over the top of heads from the sidelines. A cornucopia of local bands also represented in the audience, including sundry peeps from Comets on Fire, Erase Errata, Xiu Xiu, So So Many White White Tigers, Curtains, and Death Sentence! Panda.

At the end of Hawnay Troof’s set, three lovely ladies jumped on stage and led a “Happy Birthday” singalong. Awww, shucks.

Oh, well, my camera sighed and died before Quintron and Miss Pussycat got into the music, but let it be said, they were busy busting out some manic jams when I made my way out of the sweaty, steamy 21 Grand. Outside, venue honcho and bartender Sarah told me she ran out of booze and beer and that the worst drink she resorted to serving was a gin and coke in someone’s used beer bottle. Yum. Better luck with the beverages next year – but just try to top this party.

FRIDAY

July 12, 2006

JULY 14

VISUAL ART

“Cosmic Wonder”

Green baked goods, acid flashbacks, good times, bad trips – one expects all that and more packed into the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ latest extravaganza, “Cosmic Wonder,” guest curated by onetime Bay Area promoter, writer, and all-around nightlife scenester Betty Nguyen. The opening-night party will likely make you want to dunk your head in the Kool-Aid: Dreamy, drifting NY freak-folked collective Feathers headline with music culled from their recent self-titled disc on Gnomonsong. (Kimberly Chun)

July 15-Nov. 5.
Opening night party Fri/14, 8-11 p.m.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts,
701 Mission, SF.
Opening party admission $12-$15.
Regular admission $3-$6.
(415) 978-ARTS
www.ybca.org

DANCE

Erika Shuch Performance Project

Dancer- choreographer Erika Shuch is a Bay Area wild child. She is running, always. Where to? She probably doesn’t know. But she usually ends up in some unusual places. Orbit examines that search for connection between us and whatever – if anything – is “out there.” (Rita Felciano)

Through Aug. 5.
Thurs-Sat, 8 p.m.
Intersection for the Arts
446 Valencia, SF.
$9-$20, sliding scale.
(415) 626-3311
www.theintersection.org

Mexico splits in half

July 12, 2006

MEXICO CITY (July 11th) — A full week after the most viciously contested presidential election in its modern history, a Florida-sized fraud looms over the Mexican landscape and the nation has been divided almost exactly in half along political, economic, geographical and racial lines.

Mexico has always been two lands — “Illusionary Mexico” and “Profound Mexico” is how sociologist Guillermo Bonfils described the great divide between rich and poor. But now, should it be allowed to stand, right-winger Felipe Calderon’s severely questioned 243,000 vote victory over left-wing populist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) will split the country exactly in half between the industrial north and the impoverished, highly indigenous south with each winning 16 states — although the southern states won by Lopez Obrador, who also won Mexico City by a million votes, constitute 54% of the population.

Moreover, the disputed election pits an indignant Indian and mestizo underclass that believes AMLO was swindled out of the presidency by electoral fraud against a wealthy white conservative minority that controls the nation’s media, its banks, and apparently, the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), Mexico’s maximum electoral authorities. Lopez Obrador charges the IFE and its president Luis Carlos Ugalde with orchestrating Calderon’s uncertain triumph.

At a raucous July 8th rally that put a half million supporters in Mexico City’s vast Zocalo plaza, the political heart of the nation, Lopez Obrador called upon his people to demand a complete vote by vote recount of the results. Speaking from a flatbed truck set up in front of the National Palace, the official seat of the Mexican government, the fiery, former Mexico City mayor characterized President Vicente Fox as “a traitor to democracy” and for the first time at a public meeting uttered the word “fraud,” accusing the IFE of rigging the election to favor his opponent.

Indeed, fraud was the central motif of the mammoth meeting. Large photos of IFE president Luis Carlos Ugalde slugged “Wanted for Electoral Fraud” were slapped up on central city walls and tens of thousands of protestors waved home-made signs dissing the IFE official with such colorful epithets as “No To Your Fucking Fraud!” Throughout the rally, (which was billed as a “first informative assembly”), the huge throng repeatedly drowned out Lopez Obrador’s pronouncements with thunderous chants of “Fraude Electoral!” At times, AMLO seemed on the verge of tears at the outpouring of support from the sea of brown faces that pressed in around the speakers’ platform.

The gathering in the Zocalo signaled the kick-off to what is sometimes called “the second election in the street,” a mass effort to pressure electoral officials into a ballot-by-ballot recount that Lopez Obrador is convinced will show that he was the winner July 2nd. The IFE has resolutely resisted such a recount.

AMLO, a gifted leader of street protest, is always at the top of his game when he is seen as an underdog battling the rich and powerful, and the next days will be heady ones here. This Wednesday (June 12th), the left leader is calling upon supporters in all 300 electoral districts across Mexico to initiate a national “exodus” for democracy that will converge upon the capital on Sunday, July 16th for a mega-march that may well turn out to be the largest political demonstration in the nation’s history. Indeed, AMLO already set that mark in April 2005 when 1.2 million citizens surged through Mexico City to protest Fox’s efforts to bar the leftist from the ballot; the president dropped his vendetta three days after the march.

But Lopez Obrador and his Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) will not just do battle in the streets. Evidence of wide-spread ballot box manipulation in a third of the 130,000 polling places (including ballot-stuffing and duplicate numbers in thousands of them), malfeasance in the reporting of district totals to the IFE, inexplicable cybernetic confabulations in both the preliminary count or PREP (3,000,000 mostly AMLO votes were removed) and the final tabulation in the districts, are being presented to the nation’s top electoral tribunal (code-named the TRIFE) by Lopez Obrador’s battery of attorneys in an effort to persuade the seven justices that a hand recount is the only way to determine who will be the next president of Mexico. Such recounts have recently been conducted in close elections in Germany, Italy, and Costa Rica (as well as in Florida 2000 until ordered shut down by the U.S. Supreme Court).

Felipe Calderon and the PAN and Ugalde’s IFE consider AMLO’s demands to open the ballot boxes an “insult” to the “hundreds of thousands of citizens” who were responsible for carrying out the election. “The votes have already been counted – on Election Day” Ugalde upbraids Lopez Obrador.

The TRIFE is an autonomous judicial body with powers to annul the presidential election. It has annulled gubernatorial elections in Tabasco (AMLO’s home state) and Colima and invalidated results in entire districts because of electoral flimflam in recent years. Lopez Obrador and the PRD have also petitioned Mexico’s Supreme Court to invalidate the election because of Vicente Fox’s apparently unconstitutional meddling on behalf of Calderon, and this reporter has learned that AMLO is considering calling upon all PRD elected officials not to take office December 1st if the ballots are not recounted, a strategy that could trigger a constitutional crisis.

Despite the uncertainty about who won the July 2nd election, the White House and Ambassador Tony Garza, a Bush crony, have been quick to congratulate Felipe Calderon for whom they exhibited an undisguised predilection during the campaigns. President Bush actually called the right-winger from Air Force One, and Garza has been lavish in his praise of the much-questioned performance of the IFE as proof of “a maturing Mexican democracy.”

The U.S. embassy has a track record of intervening in Mexico’s presidential selection. Ronald Reagan recognized Carlos Salinas as the winner of the stolen 1988 election within 96 hours of the larceny. In 1911, U.S. Ambassador Henry Lane Wilson signed off on the assassination of Mexico’s first democratically elected president Francisco Madero, to whom Lopez Obrador has often compared himself.

Most of the U.S. Big Press has followed in lockstep with the White House. The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and Washington Post all expressed editorial satisfaction at Calderon’s coronation based on the results of the admittedly manipulated preliminary count. The New York Times, however, which 18 years ago, after free-marketeer Carlos Salinas stole the presidency from leftist Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, called that tormented proceedings “the cleanest election in Mexican history,” this time around was more cautious, urging a ballot-by-ballot recount.

As tens of thousands of AMLO’s supporters — “the people the color of the earth” Subcomandante Marcos names them — march across the Mexican landscape on their way up to the capital to demand electoral justice, invoking scenes of the great movement of “los de abajo” (those from down below) during Mexico’s monumental 1910-1919 revolution, the country holds it breath.

In Mexico, the past has equal value with the present and the memory of what came before can sometimes be what comes next. T
hese are history-making moments south of the Rio Bravo. North Americans need to pay attention.

A shortened version of this piece appeared on the Nation.com. John Ross’s “Making Another World Possible: Zapatista Chronicles 2000-2006” will be published this October by Nation Books.

WEDNESDAY

July 11, 2006

JULY 12

PERFORMANCE

“Flappers, Femmes Fatales, and Vitriol”
Does history get any better than this? From Eskimo women smoking cigarettes to Japanese women lopping off their hair, the Flapper movement of the 1920s had some serious legs. Learn all about Flapper culture and Weimar Berlin’s own “Priestess of Decadence,” Anita Berber. Berber was the quintessence of the femme fatale, and her behavior was scandalous even by today’s standards. UC Berkeley professor Mel Gordon has re-created two of Berber’s dances, Morphine and Shipwrecked, both banned in most European cities. This Bastille Day celebration intends to soak you in smut, so stick around for the Thrillpeddlers adaptation of Rene Breton’s 1930s opium thriller, The Drug. It takes place in Saigon, and a truly horrific Grand Guignol climax has been promised. (K. Tighe)

7 p.m.
San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum
401 Van Ness, fourth floor, SF
$10
(415) 255-4800
www.sfpalm.org

THEATER

The Legendary
and Fabulous Passion Play

Combining drag and messiah figures is an almost foolproof formula for success, so el Gato del Diablo Theatre Company are onto something with their latest production. The follow-up (but not sequel) to last year’s The Rise and Fall of the Monkey King, also by Shawn Ferreyra, The Legendary and Fabulous Passion Play is inspired by the ongoing battles over same-sex marriage in our oozing-with-talent United States. Throw Bertolt Brecht, Butoh dance, and Bard-style baddies into the mix, and the result promises to be bizarre. (Johnny Ray Huston)

8 p.m. (Fri.-Sat., through Aug. 19)
EXIT Stage Left
156 Eddy, SF
Previews, pay what you can;
$20 after Fri/15
1-800-838-3006
www.elgatotheatre.org

Sweet 16mm

July 11, 2006

› a&eletters@sfbg.com
In 1967, the Bay Area’s Brotherhood of Light transformed the average rock show into a full-blown psychedelic spectacle. Using 16mm film and Technicolor dyes and oils, the collective began projecting swirling visuals on larger-than-life backdrops at venues like the Fillmore. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and, of course, the Dead all got the Brotherhood treatment. The projectionists definitely livened up those 20-minute drum solos — Iron Butterfly, I’m looking at you — but ultimately, their improvisations couldn’t continuously jell with the music.
“Traditionally it’s been, put up the trippy image, and sometimes it’ll hit and look cool, but not always,” says Small Sails multi-instrumentalist Ethan Rose. “Not that there aren’t more people doing syncing today, [but] that became kind of our whole MO — let’s do something more with this and make it part of the performance.”
Sonically speaking, Small Sails is a trio. Three Portland, Ore., musicians trade off on keyboards, guitar, vibraphones, and drums to concoct an electro-organic, mostly instrumental panorama reminiscent of a less melancholy Album Leaf. But in keeping with their visual focus, the band formerly called Adelaide is actually composed of four members. Ryan Jeffery, who’s collaborated with Rose since their days at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, handles the projectionist duties.
The use of 16mm projectors isn’t unique by today’s standards: Godspeed You! Black Emperor, the Rachel’s, and Broadcast have used them. But Small Sails — which played its first Bay Area show in March and has since opened for Fog and the Helio Sequence — is one of the few acts to tout its projectionist as a full-fledged member.
It’s easy to understand why. Jeffery, who cites New York artist Bruce McClure as an inspiration, doesn’t simply press a few buttons and drink Amstels during the show. He literally plays two dueling Kodak Analyst IIs, projectors Rose discovered by chance at an old camera shop in San Diego five years ago. (Incidentally, the model was a favorite among football coaches in the late 1970s because its variable-speed control allows footage to be viewed at a mesmerizing eight frames per second; real time is three times that rate.)
Looping 10 minutes of footage into a 45-minute set, Jeffery will tinker with speed, pull things in and out of focus, and use his hands to create subtle strobing effects timed perfectly to a shift in the melody. Though there are no LSD-inspired Rorschach swirls, the way he mashes up a rural landscape from one projector with a random figure’s silhouette via the other highlights the abstract vibe of a project that’s trippy in its own right but never long-winded.
While Adelaide stretched its post-rock meanders to seven minutes, Small Sails injects a lighter pop sensibility that keeps the music trim and utterly buoyant. After a few radio blips and digital hiccups, “Aftershocks and Afterthoughts,” an unreleased song that may appear on their debut, flows forth in a wave of catchy guitar noodles, crisp beats, and spacey ambient noise that layers and peaks in under a minute. Then as a punchy synth hook enters the mix (think: Duran Duran’s “The Chauffer” sped up and almost danceable), a bright “hi-oh, hi-oh” vocal refrain comes charging in. The words are sparse and nonsensical, but somehow such ambiguity is what helps make Small Sails so compelling, both on record and in person.
“The aim is to gently guide a narrative idea, but at the same time it’s not telling some specific personal narrative. It’s sort of everybody’s narrative,” Rose says. “With the imagery and the colors and the sounds, it creates this space that opens up emotionally to a whole bunch of different places for different people. It’s a platform for an open experience.”
The Brotherhood would be proud. SFBG
SMALL SAILS
With Lazarus and Only
Thurs/13, 9 p.m.
Hotel Utah
500 Fourth St., SF
$6
(415) 546-6300

Polly wanna rob ya!

July 11, 2006

› johnny@sfbg.com
Hear ye! Hear ye! Step right up to the Castro Theatre. Behold a bizarre trio of crooks. One an expert ventriloquist in old lady drag. Another a Goliath whose fickle heart is bigger than his brain. The third a pint-size schemer, who thinks nothing of pretending to be a baby in a stroller in order to case a high-class joint for jewels. Witness these three sell counterfeit parrots — you heard right, counterfeit parrots! — to unsuspecting mugs in order to visit their homes and rob them blind. Watch 1925’s The Unholy Three, just one of director Tod Browning’s circus-influenced nightmares.
The treats at this year’s San Francisco Silent Film Festival include Frank Borzage’s Seventh Heaven and Madonna muse Dita Parlo in Au Bonheur des Dames with live music by the Hot Club. But all of this city’s imps of the perverse will be gathering for The Unholy Three (screening Sun/16 at 5 p.m.), if only to pay homage to Browning, “Man of a Thousand Faces” Lon Chaney, and mein liebchen, the one and only Harry Earles (real name: Kurt Schneider), who later approached Browning with the idea of turning the Tod Robbins story “Spurs” into what became 1932’s nightmarish and unforgettable Freaks. Also based on a Robbins story, The Unholy Three might contain Earles’ best performance, especially since, as Danny Peary notes in an entry within his book Cult Movie Stars, Earles’ high-pitched voice was often “unintelligible” when transmitted through the primitive sound technology of early talkies.
He may be a dead ringer for tear sprayer extraordinaire Ricky Schroder in The Champ, but don’t cross him: Peary incisively observes that Earles’ face “was doll-like and seemed harmless until you looked closely and saw it was hard and quite eerie.” The Unholy Three mines this effectively. Earles’ character, Tweedledee, is introduced performing on a sideshow stage. When the audience within the film mocks him, it doesn’t take long for him to lose his temper and kick a laughing little boy in the face. Soon afterward he’s in infant disguise, whether locked in a stroller and acting as if ruby necklaces are mere baby beads or half in and half out of masquerade, smoking a cigarette while wearing a jumper. According to Browning biographer David Skal’s Dark Carnival, this type of outrageousness reached its apex in a child-killing Christmas Eve scene by a tree that doubtless would have given Dawn Davenport at the start of Female Trouble a run for her murderous money — if it wasn’t censored.
Though Browning’s astute biographer verges on going too far in comparing it to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’s shadow play, The Unholy Three humorously and kinetically uses comic strip speech bubbles in a way that prefigures pop art and Batman on TV. Also, as writers such as Skal, David Thomson, and Carlos Clarens have observed, it exemplifies early-20th-century horror’s interest in reconfiguring common romantic and sexual aggravation into fantastic stories of vengeance. Himself forced to perform as an infant and a circus runaway who made an early living as “The Living Hypnotic Corpse,” Browning no doubt related to Earles and to Chaney (whose pantomime abilities stemmed partly from childhood communication with his deaf parents).
The Unholy Three’s titular characters form a perverse trinity of sorts, with Earles’ Tweedledee a modern child of mythical Leprechaun figures and a less lusty uncle of Cousin Lymon from Carson McCullers’ Sad Café. You don’t have to be Leslie Fiedler to recognize that both Earles and Chaney present an interested viewer with a mythic image of his or her secret self. SFBG
SAN FRANCISCO SILENT FILM FESTIVAL
Fri/14–Sun/16
Castro Theatre
429 Castro, SF
(925) 866-9530
www.silentfilm.org

NOISE: Where our beloved, late show reviews go to live, live, LIVE, MOO-HOO-HA-HA!!!

July 7, 2006

Er, yes, well, we do have quite a bit of catching up to do since the Big Blog Crash of ’06.

Magik Markers get sketchy at ArthurFest, LA, in 2005. Credit: Kimberly Chun

MAGIK MARKERS

First off, wow, Magik Markers certainly drank dat kosmic Kool-Aid last night, July 6, at the Hemlock Tavern, didn’t they? I went with my pal who’s been psychic since birth, reads animals’ pea-brains, and is currently taking a trance-medium class — and she swears that the MM’s magnetic cutie-pie vocalist Elisa Ambrogio is working with three beings — WITHOUT EYES, mind you (Did we need that detail? TMI!) — when she performs. Hey, different strokes, y’all — some kick back with a six-pack; others go for the eyeless, fleshless variations on the out-of-bod theme. OK, can I consider my music journalist license revoked now? Am I free to go?

Liars, Liars, pants on fire at Bottom of the Hill. Credit: Kimberly Chun

LIARS

In other live show notes, here’s a much-belated review of the mega June 5 Liars show at Bottom of the Hill, courtesy of Guardian freelance writer Chris Sabbath:

I had seen the Liars open for the YYY’s four years ago back in Cleveland, Ohio, when they were still a quartet, and I was blown away. However, the band has undergone a lot of changes in terms of lineup and sound, so I was anticipating tonight’s performance to be different.

Several thoughts raced through my mind as I waited in line for the band’s sold-out show at the Bottom of the Hill. Would they play songs off of They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top? I guessed no, but pondered anyway. Could the band’s live sound top their new album’s slick production work? Would any faux-Simon instruments be involved like last time? How tall is Angus? I hope I have enough money for at least three beers. Will the girl standing behind me please shut the fuck up? Anyhow, I had missed the Liars last tour and was eager to see if they could best the one I had seen in Cleveland.

As I stood in the back patio chain-smoking cigarettes and chatting it up with friends, the muffled yet catastrophic din of Portland, Ore.’s Rabbits lured me back into the club. I was met with a wall of deafening feedback, layered fuzz, and a drummer way too happy to slam his sticks against his cymbals. The trio ripped through a tight sounding set of chaotic sludginess and doom metal (or for lack of an annoying classification — tom rock, which is usually committed by drummers that beat their rack toms into the ground) that brought to mind several bands (Venom, Amphetamine Records-era Helmet, the Melvins 20 years back, High on Fire right now). The sound of two guitars locking horns and spiraling downward into one giant puddle of gritty tumult surpassed my expectations. I spilled more beer on myself, then in my mouth at the end of the band’s performance. My only disappointment was the fact that the band didn’t have any CDs for sale — just LPs and T-shirts.

I saw the Apes open for the Gogogo Airheart three years ago in San Diego, and can vividly remember the performance being really intense and fun to watch. Yet I wasn’t too enthused with tonight’s set, mainly due to the fact that they had a new lead singer (which I had found out much to my dismay a few weeks back). As the Washington, DC, quartet was setting up, a short costumed character (somewhat resembling a Mighty Morphin Power Ranger) came onto the stage and began talking to the crowd. I really couldn’t make out what he was saying, partly because I was trying to get the bartender’s attention, and mainly because I really didn’t care, but as the rest of the band took the stage, the costumed figure took off the mask and revealed that herself to be the Apes’ organ player. Somebody in the group began to roll call each band member’s name off (Jackie Magik, Majestic Ape — obviously not their real names) and then introduced the new vocalist before exploding into the first song.

I’m not sure if the songs they were playing were new or not, but I can assure you that it definitely sounded like classic Apes: proggy eruptions that seem to bounce up and down somewhere along the lines of King Crimson spitting out energetic, dancey chops. The costumes were pretty humorous — the bass player looked like a war vet wearing disco tights, and the drummer resembled a track star. The vocalist stood out amongst the rest, a tall, lanky fellow wearing normal street clothes, shimmying back and forth and lunging at the crowd. His vocals were too watered down and didn’t seem to mesh well with the rest of the band. Maybe I am too attached to their old singer. Perhaps if I heard a recorded song with the new vocalist on it, I would feel differently, but I prefer the old singer’s nasally growl. In any case, the Apes’ musicianship did stand out — though, sad to say, their show made me picture Morris Day fronting a dynamite-sounding rock band. The crowd was definitely digging it, and the club was twice as crammed as it was for the Rabbits’ set.

I secured a corner of Bottom of the Hill just as the Liars were about to come on. As guitarist-percussionist Aaron tweaked some gadgets on stage, Julian jumped up and sat behind the drum set, dressed in what looked like an old boxing robe. The two started playing drums simultaneously and were joined shortly thereafter by singer-guitarist Angus (dressed to kill in a one-piece garage jumpsuit). The crowd yelled gleefully upon his arrival, and the band went into its first song, an ear-scathing mixture of guitar, drum banging, and effects pedals whipping the crowd into a frenzy. Most of the songs were from the band’s new album, Drums not Dead, but the Liars did dip into the breadbasket of old tunes from its last album. The trio strayed away from the dance-punk numbers from their first album, but at this point, I don’t think anybody really cared. The Liars’ new songs are just as fun, and geared to make hips swivel and legs rattle up and down.

The band sounded much more balanced and explosive with three members as opposed to four. Julian’s drumming really helped thicken the sound and branched off past the simple disco beat that made the band earlier albums digestable. Aaron’s and Angus’s cohesiveness as a duo was topnotch and more well-rounded than the last time I had seem them. I can only hope that they continue to explore different sound textures and not stick with the particular model that they have going on right now.

During the show, I noticed a few crowd surfers, men with shirts off beating their bare chests in approval, the occasional hipster covering his or her ears, and more beer — spilled on me.

By the middle of the set, Angus had stripped off his uniform, to reveal a black and white checkered secretary dress. The crowd really didn’t react to the costume change.

…Therefore skirts for everyone. Credit: Kimberly Chun

I was very excited to hear “Be Quiet Mt. Heart Attack!”, the first song off the new album, followed by an equally impressive “Let’s Not Wrestle Mt. Heart Attack.” Other good numbers were the tom-happy “A Visit from Drum,” as well as a resounding version of “Broken Witch.” I didn’t recognize some of the songs but found them just as mesmerizing — thanks in part to Angus’s hollow delivery on vocals and the band’s knack for improvisation. Needless to say, the set was very comforting, with few pauses in between songs and lots of pleasing noise. No encore, but I felt the Liars had already proved their point in the hour that had passed, so I went home with head and body buzzing.

But I love it!

July 5, 2006

Valley of the Dolls
(Fox Home Entertainment)
PRESS PLAY My favorite anecdote about Susan Hayward hides in a Nicholas Ray biography. When director Ray first met Hayward before the filming of 1952’s The Lusty Men, he launched into one of his characteristic orations about methods of acting. Hayward knitted. Ray jabbered. After a while she cut him short. “Listen, honey, I’m from Brooklyn,” she said with a trademark from-the-gut growl that could stop a linebacker short. “What’s the story?”
In the case of 1967’s Valley of the Dolls, the story was Jacqueline Susann’s — at least until Mark Robson’s botched-in-so-many-wondrous-ways movie landed like an Evening in Paris smoke bomb in theaters. It’s easy to forget what, um, rich material Val Lewton acolyte Robson was failing to work with here, and you can’t count on today’s Castro clone to point out the protofeminism or the latent and perhaps Ethel Merman–inspired lesbianism in Susann’s novel, a megapopular follow-up to a best seller about her pet poodle. If heterosexual men fuck the way Susann’s book claims they do, no wonder Neely O’Hara was just the dame to prove Ted Casablanca was “not a fag!”
“Finally!” exclaims a sticker affixed to the Valley of the Dolls DVD in the window display of Streetlight Records on Market, and indeed it feels like it has taken longer than forever for Valley of the Dolls to make the transition from VHS to headed-for-obsolescence disc. The wait has brought us some average packaging and a number of extras, including a documentary about Susann that’s no deeper than the biodrama Isn’t She Great? (wasn’t that terrible?) and some mercifully brief clips of Judy Garland’s screen tests for the role of Helen Lawson. But we didn’t buy this thing for an E! network facsimile’s commentary. We bought it for the movie, 200 proof, “straight,” no chaser.
It’s all here. Dionne Warwick’s rendition of the title song, still as cold as New England snow. The other awful musical numbers, copenned by Dory “Midgets” Previn before Mia Farrow gave her a reason to beware of young girls. Sharon Tate’s absurd calls from “Mother” (surely the inspiration for Julianne Moore’s phone chats in Todd Haynes’s Safe) and Lee Grant’s stage-wings glare (ditto Grant’s own performance in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive).
There are so many wacky moments to love, like the lingering seconds when a necklace around Patty Duke’s neck assumes a bra shape over what her character would call “boobies” midway through one musical number. There is Duke’s rollicking performance, which careens from cross-eyed lousy to directly — not just campily — wonderful and back again with a fervor matched only by Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls. There are the tossed-off lines — so true — about how bitchy fags can be, and how booze helps dolls work faster. And finally there is Hayward, marching forward through this stinkin’ show, rolling with the below-the-belt punches, with or without a wig, but always with dignity. When Hayward’s Helen Lawson declares that you need a “hard core” to survive — you know, shortly after her yapping former understudy has tried one scheme too many — you better believe it. (Johnny Ray Huston)

Explosive

July 5, 2006

› a&eletters@sfbg.com
China, the burgeoning frontier of unfettered capitalism these days, naturally gives rise to much scholarly and popular commentary as one market follows another. Much of this is predictably pervaded by a sense of inevitability, as if so-called globalization were nothing but the natural march of human reason toward a higher evolutionary plain, and not the hodgepodge of policies, rules, initiatives, laws, power grabs, scams, offices, organizations, strong-arm tactics, lies, capitulations, and conspiracies that it is.
Two news stories out of China — the explosion of a school where children also assembled firecrackers for a factory and the torching of an illegal Internet café by two teenagers — served as inspiration for We Are Not These Hands, a new play by Sheila Callaghan that questions just the sort of assumptions basic to the neoliberal program busily rending the world in the name of inexorable economic laws.
The play follows two desperately poor teenage girls, Moth (Juliet Tanner) and Belly (Cassie Beck), natives of a riverside city in an imaginary, rapidly developing country not unlike China, with their noses habitually pressed to the glass of an illegal Internet café. The “café” (handily realized by scenic designer Joel Frangquist) is a ramshackle affair of plywood walls and foldout tables with barely a functioning computer and not a drop of actual java. But to the girls it represents the great big beautiful world leaving them behind.
All the more alone since their school blew up (in an accident kindled by the makeshift firecracker factory in the lunchroom), their outsider status is underscored by their private language, childish pet terms and patterns of speech as imaginatively askew as their understanding of the world across the river (patrolled, we learn ominously, by men with machetes) or flashing across the working screens inside the Internet café.
Soon they spot a meal ticket and maybe more in a Western man they dub Leather (Paul Lancour) working at one of the terminals. When they don “the sex clothes” and approach him in a naive and humorously grotesque imitation of professional soliciting, the ensuing interaction is one of mutual incomprehension, but somehow a transaction of sorts takes place. The more amenable Moth returns with Leather to his room at the hostel, beginning what turns into an offbeat and lopsided but semiviable romance, with the promise of salvation attached. “He not a hinky scuzzer,” she assures her friend later on. “He from across the river.”
Leather, it turns out, is a “freelance scholar” writing a thesis on the region’s development, determined to ride the cresting market to private glory on a particularly pathetic raft of economic gobbledygook. His imitation of academic jargon is another instance of mangled language, although with Leather it never leads anywhere, trailing off in ellipses, doubting parenthetical notes, and brilliant points “to be determined at a later time.”
As Moth spends time with Leather at the hostel, Belly takes the coins she’s stolen from his room to the Internet café, later describing to Moth, in terms vaguely mystical and full of wonder, her temporary escape to a paradisiacal beach encountered somewhere in cyberspace. A plan is hatched to get back there, across the river, with Leather as the key.
The play never quite registers the intensity it seems at times to be going for, but Callaghan’s characters reflect a set of tensions, affinities, and contradictions as they negotiate love and survival that speak fluently of their mutual alienation from a half-illusory world of winners. Kent Nicholson’s direction is lively and sure, capturing well the play’s pent-up energies — a mostly satisfying if kooky mix of the satirical, madcap, and bizarre — while also paying due attention to its darker surfaces. Beck and Tanner somehow make natural the comic physicality and verbiage of their characters, successfully plumbing the humor and poignancy in Belly and Moth’s playful but vital dependence on one another. Lancour’s fine, focused performance as the frazzled, disturbed, lonely, and beset Leather, meanwhile, is a nicely original creation, broadly absurd yet also shaded by a deep ambivalence. SFBG
WE ARE NOT THESE HANDS
Through July 16. Thurs.–>Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.
Ashby Stage
1901 Ashby, Berk.
$10–$30
www.crowdedfire.org

HELLO LARRY

July 5, 2006

“My basic photography lesson is this: You frame the perfect composition, exactly like you want it, and then you step forward,” says Larry Clark. “What that does is screw things up a little bit, so they’ll become more real, more like the way you see.”
We’re at a restaurant South of Market, and the man behind the monographs Tulsa and Teenage Lust and the films Kids, Bully, and the new Wassup Rockers is talking when he should be eating. I’m glad, because he has a lot to say. On the car ride to Zuppa, he reminisced about a brief late-1960s spell in San Francisco after an Army stint in Vietnam — once here, Clark’s time included a few Janis Joplin encounters. Once we’ve sat down at the table, when I mention the ties between Wassup Rockers and the underrated 1968 Burt Lancaster vehicle The Swimmer, Clark agrees that Lancaster’s performance is “extremely brave” and then serves up a real whopper: A film publicist once told him that Lancaster had a love affair with Luchino Visconti during the filming of 1963’s The Leopard, and that Lancaster was left an emotional wreck when Visconti dumped him.
Well, when in Rome …
It’s an interesting, clichéd truism to apply to Clark’s work, which doesn’t fit the tired modern sense of gay by any stretch of the imagination but is certainly appreciative of male as well as female allure. In the silly and energetic Wassup Rockers, his distinctive eye rolls with a band of Guatemalan and Salvadoran skateboarders as they travel through Beverly Hills, a gated community that starts to seem more and more like a prison. Wassup is often like a 21st-century version of a Bowery Boys comedy, with Clark (in his words) “riffing off of white people” and “riffing off of pop culture.” Before one of the title characters shares a bubble bath with Janice Dickinson, he and a friend — whose jeans and bulge would make Peter Berlin envious — have a tender tête-à-tête with some Hilton types. “Paris and Nicky were too old for me [when the film started shooting],” Clark jokes.
Born in Oklahoma but sporting a huggable Brooklynese accent and looking surprisingly healthy and sweet (if worn) at 63, Clark is still very much a child at heart, the nonsnarky and better-dressed real-life answer to Strangers With Candy’s former smack user and permanent high schooler Jerri Blank. Wassup Rockers is his third collaboration with cinematographer Steve Gainer, who picked up tricks of the trade working under Roger Corman in the 1990s. The link is an apt one because Clark is still working with genre in the Corman teensploitation or celebration-of-youth-culture sense.
Does Clark think his one-step-forward approach to camerawork dates back to the early 1970s and the speed-shooting and baby-death days of Tulsa? “It was a little more formal then,” he says, adding that he was more influenced by Robert Frank imitators — and by “the best,” Walker Evans — than by Frank, whom he knew little about when he made the book. “Tulsa is really about rooms. We’re in very small rooms, and we’re very close.”
Going back to those rooms means going down with Janis again; as the fellow Clark enthusiast with me observantly notes, a Joplin poster appears on the wall of one of those dark spaces. “The first time I met her it was early in the morning and we were walking across that big park in Haight Ashbury,” Clark recalls. “She was with someone from Big Brother [and the Holding Company] and I was with someone who knew him. I remember she was smoking a cigarette and she was holding it like this” — he imitates a loose gesture — “and her fingers were all yellow, and she said, ‘I really like these Pall Malls because you smoke them right down to the end like a junkie.’”
Clark hasn’t gone right down to the end like a junkie, though Tulsa certainly pictures exactly that type of fate with a void-gazing ferocity that no television episode of Intervention will match. It’s crazy, really, how many ways mass media — fashion and advertising and “indie” film in particular — have both copped and watered down or misinterpreted Clark’s aesthetics (a bit similar to what’s happened with John Waters, though perhaps even more subtly pervasive). The producers of MTV’s Laguna Beach and The Hills, original offender Calvin Klein, and now American Apparel owe him a mint’s worth of royalties for their third-rate rip-offs. At least the latter recently threw a huge party for the cast members of Wassup Rockers and their families, complete with live performances by the band featured in the movie.
If Clark is still thriving in art and life today, some credit should be given to his girlfriend, Tiffany Limos, whose candid criticism of Clark’s past movies doubtless informed his approach to Wassup Rockers. Limos is too young to be responsible for the genius choice of soundtracking Clark’s recent mammoth Manhattan gallery show, “Punk Picasso,” with Nancy Wilson’s But Beautiful, but she did tell him to place a hilarious video installation of her beyond-hyper bichon frise near the show’s end, an element that is echoed in a funny dog-attack scene within Wassup Rockers.
“That video is like the real Larry Clark,” Clark says with a laugh. “Tiff was coming home, and when she would leave I would always tell her that I could not say her name while she was gone because the dog would go crazy. I thought, ‘I’m going to show Tiffany what happens when I say her name.’ But when I made the video, never in my wildest imagination did I think I would use it. It’s funny because I’m talking to this dog like it’s a human being. Sammy runs into the street and I scold him — ‘You’re going to get killed!’ — just like I was talking to a kid.”
Limos also got her friend the fashion designer Jeremy Scott cast in Wassup Rockers as a lascivious gay photographer who looks like Perry Farrell and has a mansion full of horrendous steroidy physique shots (actual work by Tom Bianchi). “Tiffany would bring these photos of Jeremy home,” says Clark. “We had this private joke about him that if you pointed a camera at him he would always do something incredible. Then we would see photos of him at parties in magazines, and true to form, he would always be making some flamboyant pose.”
As the interview winds down, the man who began with a photography tip says he now prefers making films. Then Clark makes a final distinction. “I was never really a photographer,” he says. “I was an artist and a storyteller [when I started out with Tulsa], and I was using photography because that’s what I had.” (Johnny Ray Huston)
WASSUP ROCKERS
Opens Fri/7
Lumiere Theatre
1572 California, SF
(415) 267-4893
Shattuck Cinemas
2230 Shattuck, Berk.
(510) 464-5980
See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com
for showtimes
www.wassuprockers.net

Johnny bravo

July 5, 2006

› cheryl@sfbg.com
Just a few summers ago, we were all snickering into our popcorn tubs: a Pirates of the Caribbean movie? Yo-ho-no! But what could’ve sucked harder than The Haunted Mansion turned into a monster 2003 hit, buoyed by ghostly buccaneers, showy effects, and Johnny Depp’s impeccably bizarre turn as Captain Jack Sparrow, surely the most inventive character yet to emerge from a 21st-century blockbuster. Long before Depp’s Oscar nomination, plans were afoot to increase Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl’s bootylicious haul with a pair of sequels filmed back-to-back. So, how can you love a series based on a rather sedate Disneyland attraction — films accompanied by a merch deluge not seen since fanboys were still jazzed about gettin’ to know Darth Maul?
Pretty much, it’s the pirates. Peg legs, cannon battles, talking parrots, mutiny on the high seas, rum chugging — pirate shit is damn near irresistible, especially when Depp’s riding the mast. Within the first reel of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, a chorus of arrrs is raised, a mangy bird plucks out some poor soul’s rotting eyeball, and a crew member remarks that Captain Sparrow is acting “strange … er” than usual. Chest’s plot is more convoluted than Pearl’s, but every character — including Sparrow, feisty Elizabeth (Keira Knightley), heroic Will (Orlando Bloom), and prissy Lord Beckett (Tom Hollander) — is searching for someone, or something, with single-minded determination. Chest also shares Pearl’s ticking-clock pacing, with lives and relationships and eternal souls hanging perilously in the balance. Naturally, all these quests become interwoven and complicated by distractions, including a detour to a Skull Island–meets–Joe Versus the Volcano atoll, a gung ho swordfight, a beast bearing giant and aggressive tentacles, and the salty whims of Davy Jones (Bill Nighy), whose ghostly Flying Dutchman operates like a kelp-strewn variation on the Philadelphia Experiment.
Unlike, say, flicks based on beloved comic books, Chest has no touchstones to hit or homages to pay, other than dropping in a few references to the first film. This allows director Gore Verbinski and scripters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio (like sultan-of-slick producer Jerry Bruckheimer, all back from Pearl) the freedom to toss whatever they want into their Chest, which runs almost as long as Superman Returns but is infinitely more jolly, Roger. For a big-budget studio confection, there’s actually a lot of imagination at play; Nighy’s sneering performance, coupled with the special effects used to create Davy “Fishface” Jones’s slimy visage, allows for a character who’s equal parts Phantom of the Opera and Sigmund and the Sea Monsters.
Of course the main reason the Pirates movies are so fun is Depp, without whom we’d be talking about a few hours of flashy CG and a couple of pretty faces (Bloom, you’re still on notice for Elizabethtown). Sparrow prances, turns tail, delivers flowery double-talk, and cares only about saving his own skin (and, of course, his precious hat) — yes, he’s a showboaty clown, but Depp manages to make him likable where others (Jim Carrey?) would simply come up annoying. I’m still not sold on Depp’s Willy Wonka interpretation. But it’s with good reason that Sparrow’s the only film character he’s played more than once.
And he’ll play him again, to be sure. It’s not spoiling anything to say that Chest ends with classic middle-film-of-a-trilogy ambiguity; fates and loyalties wind up shakier than the points on Sparrow’s discombobulated compass. The third Pirates is due next summer, so you won’t have long to wait to see what happens. In the meantime, Chest is a solid adventure with a sense of adventure — cinematic currency that’s as good as gold these days, ye scurvy dog. SFBG
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN:
DEAD MAN’S CHEST
Opens Fri/7
See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com for theaters and showtimes
disney.go.com/disneypictures/pirates

Ra, Ra rah-rah

July 5, 2006

› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Wassup Lauryn Hill? Well apparently she’s been busy morphing into Sun Ra.
A staight-skankin’, massive fro–sportin’, partyin’-with-Method-Man-at-the-Clift-Hotel, “la, la, la, la”-ing Sun Ra.
The lady had about 13 people onstage at Great American Music Hall on June 29 for two last-minute “rehearsal” sets: two drummers, two keyboardists, at least three guitarists, the works. Because the lady clearly wanted to play a bandleader from a galaxy far, far away — and frankly, I haven’t been so interested in Lauryn Hill in years.
She was an artist in her own little world, all right — miming Bitches Brew, turning her unrehearsed Arkestra into an engorged rock-steady big band, and at around 2 a.m., at the end of the second show, launching passionately, stubbornly, into her most popular tunes.
The lights went up. The stage lights flicked off. The power to the mics finally ebbed. And Hill had found her own power trip of a groove — in the dark, where it’s safe — and the audience was in deep doo-doo in love, shouting, “One more! One more! Lau-Ren! Lau-Ren!” At about 2:15 a.m., after much shushing, she began singing “Killing Me Softly” a cappella. Softly. Then she descended into the crowd like an empress to meet her biggest fans.
FISHIN’ MUSICIAN But enough Arkestra-ted diva tripping, we gotta work together, so follow the lead of Aesop Rock and longtime Bay Area artist Jeremy Fish, who have done an ace job in collaborating on a new book playing off those golden children’s record-and-storybook combos. The release of their The Next Best Thing book–7-inch comes with a mini-multimedia promo juggernaut July 6: Fish (who has a load of product in the works, including a new vinyl toy and a board series and short film for Element Skateboards titled Fishtales with a soundtrack by Rock) will show his paintings at Fifty24SF Gallery. And then later that night Aesop Rock will bump up against Rob Sonic, DJ Big Wiz, Murs with Magi, and producer Blockhead at a benefit concert at the Independent for 826 Valencia.
The pair met through a mutual friend and discovered that they’re mutual fans: Rock owned a Fish piece, and the artist had been an avid Rock listener for years. “I saw a lot of his work had cute stuff mixed with evil stuff, which is a lot like what I write about,” says the jovial Rock.
Aesop Rock, of late, has found his work skewing toward the more narrative side of hip-hop: He already has about five “really linear stories” for his next album, expected in 2007. That recording is likely to include more instrumentation by musicians like Parchman Farm, which includes Rock’s wife, Allison “the Jewge” Baker.
Rock moved from New York City to San Francisco to be with her. Romantic — not many superstar underground rap bros will drop everything and uproot for their, um, ho, no? As a result, the music has definitely become “reflective in the sense that I moved out of New York City, turned 30, and got married all in the same year,” he explains. “Those three things all have me doing stories about random childhood stuff, super-folktaley story songs that are almost like the stories you’d read to a child.”
CORE CREW Director Dick Rude was enlisted to make Let’s Rock Again, a documentary of his friend Joe Strummer’s time with the Mescaleros around the time of 2001’s Global a Go-Go. And he captured Strummer in deep working-musician mode. “Having done the Clash and having reached that height of stardom, he was really just consumed with getting his music heard and not reaching that level again, so there was a real humility and passion to his approach on the tour,” says the LA videomaker. “It became about breaking the record so he could have a chance to record another record.”
Rude, who met Strummer while he was working as an assistant to director Alex Cox on Sid and Nancy, calls the film — which will be screened one time in San Francisco and is now out on DVD — more of a “memoir of that time” than a biopic of Strummer. As for Strummer’s posthumously released music on Streetcore, Rude believes, “There are tracks on that record that rival any Clash tune. There is no pretension, nothing to prove, just straight-out passion.” SFBG
JEREMY FISH
Opening Thurs/6, 7 p.m.
Fifty24SF Gallery
248 Fillmore, SF
(415) 252-0144
AESOP ROCK
Thurs/6, 9 p.m.
Independent
626 Divisadero, SF
$17
www.independentsf.com
LET’S ROCK AGAIN
Wed/5, 7 p.m.
Roxie Cinema
3125 16th St., SF
(415) 863-1087
OH, MY STARS
SARA TAVARES
Sweetness from the Cape Verdean–Portuguese vocalist. Wed/5, 8 p.m., Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. $25. (415) 771-1421.
MAGIK MARKERS
Bookish by day at last year’s ArthurFest. Howling and riding seated audience members in performance. Thurs/6, 9:30 p.m., Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. $8. (415) 923-0923.
THEE MORE SHALLOWS
Don’t turn your back on these indie experimentalists. Thurs/6, 9 p.m., Café du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. $8. (415) 861-5016.
LEGENDARY PINK DOTS
Did you eat the Dots — and their glowering psychedelia? Sat/8, 9 p.m., Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF. $16–$18. (415) 522-0333.
GOD OF SHAMISEN
Members of Secret Chiefs 3 and Estradasphere create likely the first metal unit bearing down on the Japanese instrument. Mon/10, 9 p.m., Café du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. $8. (415) 861-5016.
PARENTHETICAL GIRLS
Let’s talk about (((GRRRLS))) — with exploding viz-art mover–rad dude BARR. Mon/10, 6 p.m., Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. $6. (415) 923-0923.

Queen of the double feature

June 27, 2006

HORROR-LARITY If there’s anything better than peaches and cream, it would have to be Peaches and Elvira. Movie maniacs will get a taste of the two great horror hosts this weekend, when Peaches Christ kicks off this year’s tantalizing Midnight Mass series with a pair of prizes — two nights costarring the queen of the double feature, the famous alter ego of Cassandra Peterson.
Peterson sees Elvira as a variation of herself as a teenager: “know-it-all, really sassy, and treats the guys like crap.” She and Pee Wee’s Playhouse writer John Paragon collaborated on the screenplay for the underrated 1988 satire Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, which whips the religious right of the Reagan–Bush Sr. years. Besides featuring a wickedly witty lead performance, Mistress also boasts a great villain in Chastity Pariah, perhaps the best busybody role ever given to feisty Edie McClurg, who along with Peterson and Paul “Pee Wee” Reubens was a member of the Groundlings comedy troupe. “Our relationship was always similar to the movie,” says Peterson. “Edie would always say, ‘Are you wearing that tonight?’ — she was worried I wasn’t covered up enough.”
A poor farm girl from Kansas and Colorado who played with Frankenstein and Dracula dolls while her peers favored Barbie, Peterson brought a love of Vincent Price (“especially his Roger Corman movies loosely — and I mean loosely — based on Edgar Allan Poe”) with her when she first arrived in Hollywood. Her time in the haunted hills has included some strange pit stops, such as a guest appearance on CHiPS (“Erik Estrada was the most egotistical jerk. I hope he’s gotten a little more humble because then he was at the top of his game and he thought he was god’s gift to women”) and televised exercise with Richard Simmons (“He was really fun. He could be a little overly energetic. He kept calling me ‘Ellie,’ and I remember him screaming down the hall: ‘ELLIE!’ It could burst your eardrums”). Her own TV shows, pairing terrible movies with commentary and comedy in the grand style of Ghoulardi and others, will soon be reissued on DVD.
What’s the question that Peterson most often gets regarding Elvira, and what does she wish people would ask? “The most frequently asked question is probably ‘Are they real?'” she says. “I assume they are talking about my fingernails.”
“The question I wish people would ask? … I think they’ve gotten everything. I don’t think there’s anything left they haven’t had.” (Johnny Ray Huston)
MIDNIGHT MASS
Friday/30, 11:59 p.m.
“Uncut Night of the Living Dead Spooktacular with Elvira”
Saturday/1, 11:59 p.m.
“Carrie with Elvira”
$12
(415) 267-4893
www.peacheschrist.com
www.elvira.com

Steel crazy

June 27, 2006

› cheryl@sfbg.com
Imagine that Supermans III and IV never happened, and that in Superman II Lois Lane never realized that Clark Kent was really the Man of Steel disguised in a pair of dorky glasses. (The part about Lois and Superman knocking boots, however, still stands). Now you’re up to speed on Superman Returns, whose title reflects the film’s story — after a five-year outer space sojourn, Superman (Brandon Routh) heads back to Metropolis, to the consternation of ex-sweetie Lois (Kate Bosworth) and supervillain Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey) — as well as the film itself, which like Batman Begins heralds a return to cinematic form for its title character. The result may not be as giddily triumphant as Spider-Man 2, but all told, the 21st century is officially a damn good time to be a superhero.
Director Bryan Singer (X-Men) is clearly a huge Superman fan; Superman Returns takes its subject very seriously. With two and a half hours to fill, all the cool super-shit you want to see (X-ray vision, bulletproof body parts, swooping around with one fist extended, etc.) is in there, plus plenty of iconic moments. (Marlon Brando’s Jor-El makes multiple from-beyond-the-grave appearances — and has the cry of “Great Caesar’s ghost!” ever before inspired audience applause?) Needless to say, Superman Returns’ superbudget (imdb.com estimates it at $260 million) spells jaw-dropping special effects. Sure, you’ll believe a man can fly, but you’ll also believe a man can stop a fiery airplane from smashing into a baseball stadium.
The effects can get out of control, though — the climax, which takes place partially underwater, drags a bit despite looking great. At least by the time we get there, all of Superman Returns’ hard work building sympathetic characters pretty much pays off. The film’s intertwining story lines follow Superman as he dons Clark Kent garb at the Daily Planet and wistfully yearns for Lois, who’s semi-happily settled down with nice guy Richard (perennial third wheel James Marsden). Oh yeah, and she has a scraggly-haired five-year-old who may or may not be half-Kryptonian. Meanwhile, bald baddie Luthor is out of jail, ridiculously well funded, and as set on world domination as he is on knocking Superman out of the sky.
The Luthor stuff inevitably supplies the film’s comic relief, thanks to Spacey’s manic performance and certain weird touches (like sidekick Parker Posey’s time-warp wardrobe and a running gag about a Pomeranian). And if you’re looking for correlations between Superman Returns and current events, try Luthor’s plan to destroy the United States — eagerly reported on by Metropolis’s version of cable news. (In the 21st century, the Daily Planet stays afloat thanks to this editorial mission: “There are three things that sell papers: tragedy, sex, and Superman.”)
Of course, the main conflict in Superman Returns doesn’t even involve Luthor: It’s whether or not Lois will forgive her super soulmate for abruptly skipping town. (You know how all that tension between Spider-Man and Mary Jane kind of overshadowed the Doctor Octopus shenanigans? Yeah, it’s like that.) The film’s overriding theme, though, is of fathers and sons. Not for nothing does Brando keep popping up, reinforcing the idea that Superman (Jor-El’s “only son”) was sent to Earth to save humankind — a concept that everyone on earth pretty much buys, including, eventually, the bitter Lois (author of a Pulitzer-winning editorial titled “Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman”). But even if you ignore the religious metaphors and check your watch during the mushy relationship bits, it’s hard not to get summer movie thrill-chills when John Williams’s familiar theme (recycled here as part of John Ottman’s score) plays under the swooshing title credits. Absolute perfection, maybe not — but super’ll do. SFBG
SUPERMAN RETURNS
Opens Wed/28 in Bay Area theaters
See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com for theaters and showtimes
supermanreturns.warnerbros.com

Lust for life

June 27, 2006

› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Ah, spring — it seems like a distant memory in June as we get socked an SF summer’s weaving, one-two punch of Westside fog and SoMa heat. But spring is the thing when we think about love. Love that picks us up, brings us down, lifts us back up to where we belong, then bitch-slaps us about the face and neck until we’re ready to trade in our valentines for matching straitjackets and a tray of stiff drinks. Pull up a chair and tell it to Jolie Holland, who dredged up her own love–gone–sour mash life lessons for her latest lovely, lithely limned album, Springtime Can Kill You (Anti). “Yeah, it was just one pretty horrible set of emotional circumstances,” she drawls from Salt Lake City while on perpetual tour. “Just a terrible accident of communication–slash–long distance relationship–slash–my life totally changing due to the music taking off.”
Holland knows of what she speaks: She tried to settle down in San Francisco with her Stanford-jobbing scientist, dubbed the “Moonshiner” in song on Springtime, until he went off on a scholarship to Russia for 10 months. “I was tryin’ to basically be married to a nice, normal guy who had a job and all that, which I’d never really sincerely tried before,” she says. “I thought, this is normal — I’ll try this. But the relationship had a vitamin deficiency. Anyway, that’s what “Springtime Can Kill You” is about — trying to make something work that’s not functional.”
Now she’s back to what a friend calls “the buckshot version of romance. I’m dating people who have fucked-up lifestyles like me — I’m dating other traveling musicians.”
Dub it the bitter, beauteous fruit of Springtime and its absinthe-hued wedding of new grit, olde art, and lightly borrowed blues. The full-length’s ballads of sexual codependency and earthy comradeship sound creamy and sensually nostalgic, yet never self-consciously musty, in the lily hands of coproducers Holland and Lemon DeGeorge. Springtime is haunted — by faraway lovers (“Moonshiner”), outright specters (“Ghostly Girl”), smashed hopes (Riley Puckett’s “You’re Not Satisfied”), old jazz records (“Springtime Can Kill You”), and a certain intoxicating insanity (Holland’s old hip-hop collaborator CR Avery’s “Crazy Dreams”) — though it’s far from a relic.
Likewise, Holland is far from antique. In contrast to the sometime Be Good Tanya’s recent femme fatale photo stylings — complete with Bellocq–Belle Epoque cleavage and Veronica Lake peekaboo locks — she’s still a girl’s girl. She worries over the aforementioned image making, laughs like a hungry bird of prey, dishes band politics, sprinkles her speech with “fucked-up”s, shops vintage like a hipster magpie, drops references to a friend’s “psychic power,” and — true to form for the lusty lady who dedicated a song (“Moonshiner”) to Memphis Minnie and Freakwater — gets creeped out by Mormontown. “Oh, thank God, we’re leaving!” the redheaded vocalist says with a relieved, panicked laugh of her current stop, Salt Lake City. “I just walk down the street and people stare and yell stuff at me. And, like, weird shit was happening. Yeah, I don’t like this town, and people are definitely treating me like a freak here. My hair is a particularly unnatural color, right now.”
Still, life — even one far from her ex’s arms — appears to be swinging much smoother these days for Holland, who now considers New York City, Vancouver, and Portland home. “I’m actually being pretty productive. The other day I wrote two songs in a hotel room.” Even quickie genre classifiers don’t matter. The New York Times may have plopped her into a recent splashy “freak folk” feature — amid Vetiver and Espers, a crowd she’s seldom associated with — but that’s OK. “Yeah, it said nothing about me, but it did say my name, like, three times,” she says with her ah-ah-ah laugh. “It’s interesting because we’re Bay Area people, so we can see the fine details of who’s actually associated with who. But from the East Coast, it probably looks different, y’know. My picture looks really funny in there, right?! It looks totally stuck on.
“The thing is … it actually sounds really fun to have a scene!”
Hey, it may be summer, but we can keep those fresh, dewy buds springing eternally, within. Holland is on her way to Cheyenne, where she says her band has heard rumor of a pond they can dip their wings in, and after that there are collaborations lined up with Michael Hurley and Sage Francis, among others. “It’s so great to be not pretending to be a housewife anymore!” says the singer. “I don’t have to stay home and clean the floor.” SFBG
JOLIE HOLLAND
Sat/1, 9 p.m.
Bimbo’s 365 Club
1025 Columbus, SF
$18
(415) 474-0365
NO, YOU CAN’T BE EVERYWHERE AT ONCE
MARIN COUNTY FAIR
Come for the corn — stay for the cool-ocity. Shee-it, Eddie Money and Nelson play Sat/1, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts and Ricky Skaggs perform Mon/3, and Beausoleil and Preservation Hall Jazz Band bring New Orleans to the North Bay Tues/4. Civic Center Drive, San Rafael. $11–$13. (415) 499-6800, www.marinfair.org.
FAIRPORT CONVENTION
The “acoustic trio” incarnation of the English folk-rock maestros — including founder Simon Nichol — soldiers on. Wed/28–Thurs/29, 8 p.m., Freight and Salvage, 1111 Addison, Berk. $19.50–$20.50. (510) 548-1761.
ZEMOG EL GALLO BUENO
Abraham Gomez-Delgado cuts his zany out-jazz with Cuban-world fusion. Wed/28, 8 and 10 p.m. Yoshi’s, 510 Embarcadero West, Oakl. $10–$14. (510) 238-9200.
FIONA APPLE
An Extraordinary Machine rolls onward with a headlining tour. Thurs/29, Sleep Train Pavilion, Concord. Fri/30, Mountain Winery, Saratoga. For times and prices, visit www.ticketmaster.com.
CORINNE BAILEY RAE
The new Billie — or Sade? The gorg Brit plays it smooth like Karo, but does she have the songs? Thurs/29, 9 p.m., Café du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. $12. (415) 861-5016.
BLOW AND YACHT
DIY performance art plus your roommate at Evergreen College equals Blow. Blowster Joan Bechtolt also breaks away for a heaping helping of positivity as Yacht. Fri/30, 6 p.m., Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. $6. (415) 923-0923.
DOUG HOEKSTRA
A Pushcart Prize nominee folks up. Sun/2, 9 p.m., Hotel Utah, 500 Fourth St., SF. $6. (415) 546-6300.
KEKELE
The Congolese supergroup dusts off the effervescent ’60s sound of Cuban rumba melded with African rhythms. Mon/3, 8 and 10 p.m. Yoshi’s, 510 Embarcadero West, Oakl. $20. (510) 238-9200.

Cooler heads

June 27, 2006

› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:
I’ve been dating a beautiful girl, and I mean she is hot. The problem? She’s really jealous and we fight all the time. I can’t look at another girl. She is incredibly possessive and wants to be involved in every element of my life.
I’ve never had any sort of sexual problems before, but I’m having problems orgasming. We have sex all the time. It’s never boring; she has an amazing body and is a great lay. But I just don’t come. I have no problems coming on my own. Can my mental frustration lead to physical problems in bed?
Love,
Feel Free to Come Up with a Clever Acronym
Dear FFTCUWACA:
I don’t do those; that’s the other guy.
I keep reading and rereading and I have yet to find the part of your letter where you say you love, like, or are in any way interested in this girl beyond the purely physical, and that stuff’s not going so well. This lack of any genuine affection makes the solution to your problem pretty simple: Get the hell out and date someone you like next time.
If you were actually planning a future with Miss Hot Thing, I’d be expressing concern about the extreme possessiveness and warning you that little good ever comes of a relationship based on the desire to control and possess, rather than enjoy, the object of one’s alleged affection. You probably know this already, but how hard someone latches on to you and how much control that person wishes to exert over every aspect of your life is not a measure of affection, not by a long shot. At best, it’s about her, not you, and it could and will be easily transferred to the next object of obsession. At worst, well, does the term “bunny boiler” mean anything to you?
Frustration can indeed lead to performance issues, as can just plain not liking the person you’re attempting to perform with. Face it, she drives you crazy, and not in a good way. Your body has noticed this and is refusing to cooperate any longer. Your brain, or what passes for one, is still convinced that a girl who’s “hot” and “beautiful,” “has an amazing bod,” and is “a great lay” ought to be enough. Your other head, on the other hand, has proved itself the smarter for once. I suggest you listen to it.
Love,
Andrea
Dear Andrea:
I’m a virgin, though I recently became involved in my most sexual relationship ever. I think we’re nearly ready to have sex, but I’m concerned about not having an orgasm. I hadn’t experienced much penetration before, but now I get a lot. Still no orgasm. I don’t get very far on my own, but when he’s using his tongue or fingers, I occasionally feel close but never experience a release. Is this normal? Does it suggest that I’ll have similar difficulty when it’s his penis instead of a tongue or finger? Or will the difference in size make me more likely to orgasm?
I take an antidepressant but I’ve been on it years longer than I’ve been sexually active, so it’s hard to tell if that’s the problem. I’m working on lowering the dose slightly, but stopping isn’t an option right now.
Love,
Please Release Me
Dear Release:
Are we having That Clinton Problem? You say you’re about ready to have sex, but you’ve already had his tongue and fingers and who knows what else all up in your business, which sure sounds like sex to me. It would also be useful to know where exactly he’s sticking those things. My guess is, nowhere useful.
There comes a time in every woman’s life where she must use the power of the Internet to access a nice vulva diagram. I found an alarmingly colorful but rather nice one at www.vaginaverite.com/diagram1.html, but there are plenty more where that came from. See how there’s nothing inside the vagina, but there are plenty of external structures that look worthy of attention in their own right? The clitoris and related bits in particular? Direct his (or your own) attention there for a change and stop worrying about penetration until you’ve gotten what you’re looking for. Although some women are capable of a purely internal orgasm and far more enjoy penetration, if you were going to find your bliss poking about in there, you probably would have already.
As for the drugs, they may indeed be inhibiting you. Many people find that the effect wears off over time, but you’ve had time and it still isn’t working. I suggest trying the clitoral route (your fingers, a vibrator, a shower massage, his fingers, his tongue … you get the picture) while also putting your doctor on notice that you may need to lower or change your medication soon. Perhaps remind him or her that never ever having an orgasm is a depressant in its own right.
Love,
Andrea
Andrea Nemerson has spent the last 14 years as a sex educator and an instructor of sex educators. She rarely has That Clinton Problem. Visit www.altsexcolumn.com to view her archived columns.

It’s a small world after all

June 20, 2006

> a&eletters@sfbg.com

Are you a good dwarf or a bad dwarf? In the storied production history of The Wizard of Oz, there were notoriously (and no doubt, apocryphally) so few of the former that Glinda-like attempts at taxonomy seem pointless. They were all bad, or at least naughty, as dwarves have historically seemed in the popular imagination. Celebrated novelist Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting) and screenwriter Dean Cavanagh’s ribald new stage comedy, however, about four “Munchkins” housed together during the filming of Oz, brings such stereotypes of good and evil center stage, where size may not count at all.
Babylon Heights, receiving a rocky world premiere at San Francisco’s Exit Theatre, builds on the towering Hollywood tale that has the 100-plus dwarves cast as Munchkins running amok in their Culver City hotel, converting it into a den of drunken rioting and sex orgies. But if the premise climbs to the heady stratosphere of urban legend, its story keeps us resolutely low to the ground. First of all, its average-size actors play on an oversize set (a dingy hotel room designed to surreal effect by Tony Kelly and Colby Thompson), giving us a waist-high perspective on the big-people world throughout. Moreover, the germ of its story line has to do with an even more sordid detail in that lasting legend: the rumored suicide of an MGM Munchkin on the set of the film (supposedly just visible in the background, swinging from an artificial tree, in the scene where Dorothy and company set off down the Yellow Brick Road).
With that tasty morbid morsel as an appetizer, Babylon introduces four misfits thrown together by circumstance, each drawn for subtly different reasons to Tinseltown’s mirage utopia, not unlike Dorothy to Oz. There’s Bert Kowalski (Russ Davison), an archetypal ’30s Brooklynite in all but stature, and a bilious, foulmouthed, raunchy little opium addict to boot. There’s Raymond Benedict-Porter (Dennis McIntyre), the self-styled master thespian and an unctuously pretentious name-dropper (who Bert mercilessly teases, recognizing the poseur from the circus circuit). There’s the equally disingenuous Philomena Kinsella (Brittany Kilcoyne McGregor), an Irish working-class girl who’s left the drudgery of a nunnery for the adventure of Hollywood and who artfully feigns fearful innocence in the face of a roomful of men. And finally there’s the true innocent, Charles Merryweather (Chris Yule), the play’s own Dorothy. Cast as a Munchkin infant, the sheltered Englishman (once in the king’s employ at Kew Gardens until driven off by big bullies) is the literal babe of the story, and its sacrificial lamb.
It sounds like a good arrangement for a saucy Rabelaisian send-up of the existing order of things. After all, the dark corners of Oz will never cease to fascinate. And as a depression-era tale, tall or otherwise, the desperation, tribulations, affinities, and infighting among a far-flung group of irregularly employed actors take on some added significance from the vantage of the “little people.” But Babylon never does much with the themes it broaches. In fact, its sardonic comedy never really takes off, although much of the blame could be laid at the feet of a lackluster production that, on opening night at least, could only stumble down the runway.
Contrary to the cavalier myth, the actors who played Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz were more like overworked and underpaid studio fodder, and Babylon’s gritty focus plays on that harsh reality. But here at least the focus blurs, and the surprisingly halfhearted dialogue repeatedly goes slack. Welsh and Cavanagh probably wrote something slightly different, and no doubt director Jesse Reese intended something a bit tighter, but it’s hard to tell going by opening night’s performance (and absent the published version of the play, which is not yet available). Merryweather’s lines are decidedly dull, confining Yule, for the most part, to one or two wide-eyed reactions. McIntyre and Davison, meanwhile, though both capable actors, seemed to be fishing for their lines so often that it began to resemble an evening of unflattering improvisation. The only suitably sharp performance came from McGregor, who immediately infuses the proceedings with much needed energy, while helping to pick up the pace in two acts that drag out to nearly three hours.
Leaving aside opening night missteps, for all its ribaldry, Babylon Heights ends up giving conventional morality much less of a comeuppance than you might expect, or would find, for example, in a wittier Joe Orton farce. SFBG
BABYLON HEIGHTS
Through July 1, Wed.–Sat., 8 p.m.
Exit Theatre
156 Eddy, SF
$15–$20
(415) 249-9332
www.babylonheights.com

Calleth he, calleth I

June 20, 2006

> johnny@sfbg.com

When I reach the Ark’s rock idol Ola Salo on the phone at his apartment in Malmö, Sweden, he’s getting ready to meet friends to watch his country’s team take on Paraguay in the World Cup. Sheer lack of time calls for forward gestures, so I ask him to describe his boudoir, a CD- and book-strewn “one and a half” room apartment. “It looks like a pretty storage room,” he says, amusedly. “I have a plastic chandelier. I’ve got my big black piano and my black angel wings. I have art and furniture that friends of mine have made, such as a big purple lamp made out of ladies’ stockings. The apartment is a color explosion of chlorophyll green and bright yellow and pink and black and white. That’s the scheme — and purple. It’s harmonic but playful and energetic.”
Sort of like the Ark’s music, as showcased on State of the Ark (Virgin), the band’s first US album and third to date. In the recent glam sweepstakes, Salo and his four bandmates trump the Darkness with greater songcraft and less falsetto gimmickry — they also have more chops than any prefab pseudo-punk American loogie hocked up by the MTV machine in the last decade. Basically, the Ark prove a 21st-century band can honor the likes of the New York Dolls, Bowie, Queen, and company while still being relevant. On songs like the fabulous handclap stomper “Calleth You, Calleth I” (from the 2002 Virgin import In Lust We Trust) they are capable of turning a banal gesture — in this case, the fleeting impulse to reach out to phone an ex — into an act of ludicrously glorious, wide-screen, Bic-waving grandeur.
Perhaps it’s fate that gave Salo a last name that echoes the subtitle of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s filmic revision of the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom. Because he’s the son of a priest, it’s tempting to think of him as a real-life rock version of bishop’s stepson Alexander from Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander, rebelling against punishing strictures. But it’s a bit more complicated — Salo taps into and adds a twist to his religious roots, embracing the Bible’s (and rock’s) messianic outcast aspects and imagining his own miracles. One example is In Lust We Trust’s “Father of a Son,” which hit big in Sweden at the precise moment that a law preventing homosexuals from adopting children was banished. The song doesn’t just refer to queer parenthood, it drapes an ascendant Salo in choral hallelujahs.
“The Book of Revelations was the coolest part of the Bible to me because of all the parts about smoke and fire and demons,” Salo says. “It’s very heavy metal. Growing up in a Christian family gives you this kind of stigma of being a pussy. People think that Christians are … forget pussy, they’re Ned Flanders–like. I wanted to do something of Biblical proportions, something magical or sensational, something with power and joy, something that if people thought it was silly or uncool or ludicrous I wouldn’t mind.”
The Ark’s new State of the Ark might not contain anything quite as spine-tingling and sublime as “It Takes a Fool to Remain Sane,” the gauntlet-throwing leadoff hit from their 2000 debut We are the Ark. (That track has the “Hand in Glove” urgency of someone who has waited years to sing their life, and in pledging allegiance to the queer kids, the weird kids, and the fat kids, Salo’s probably saved some lives.) But it has some great moments, such as the single “One of Us Is Gonna Die Young,” an anthem to the joy of life rather than the allure of death. On State of the Ark, as on the Ark’s previous album, Salo called upon Velvet Goldmine soundtracker and ex–Shudder to Think member Nathan Larson (whose girlfriend Nina Persson fronts Malmö’s other top group, the underrated Cardigans) to help him recognize the difference between “stupid strange” and “creative strange” English lyrics.
Nonetheless, Salo agrees that one billion ABBA fans can’t be wrong in noting that a Swedish band’s approach to the English language as an “artifact” yields special interpretive appeal. He’s also more than willing to discuss the country’s past and current role in the musical landscape, lauding Göteburg-based Sarah Assbring’s el Perro del Mar project for making “probably last year’s best debut album” and playfully admonishing me for ignoring ’60s garage instrumentalists the Sputniks when I race through a shorthand version of the country’s pop history. “Sweden has a very good social welfare system and people have good living standards and we haven’t had any wars,” he pointedly observes. “We have had a lot of time to do luxurious peacetime things like making pop music.”
Perhaps because Salo is “too egocentric” to be a fan of the past rock stars he admires, the Ark’s brand of performance is exactly the type designed to incite maniacal worship. Such fan-demonium hasn’t kicked in all over the United States, but it has in other countries. “Fans are crazy in Italy, which you know if you’ve ever watched Italian television,” says Salo. “And the paparazzi — there’s a reason why that’s an Italian word.” He goes on to tell the story of a girl who was paid by an Italian tabloid to sleep with him. “I was not interested at all,” he concludes, with a dry laugh. “She got drunk and failed at her goal — miserably.”
As opposed to Salo, who is more than ready to seduce at any time. All those who saw or read about the Ark’s springtime South by Southwest shows know that he has no qualms about treating an industry barbecue like a stadium gig — he’ll bump and grind in his boots and tighty whities right on past the most jaded zombie. Something tells me that sort of attitude and behavior mean this city will love him even more frenziedly than he might love it. What might he wear, or not wear, for his first visit to San Francisco? “Some flowers in my hair, I guess,” he deadpans. “I’ve heard that’s obligatory. Actually I’m getting a new suit, or dress, for the SF shows. I hope it’s a smash.”
That said, it’s World Cup time, and who is Salo’s favorite player on the Swedish team? “Zlatan Ibrahimovic,” he answers, in a tone suggesting that looks might have something or everything to do with it. “Now I’m going to go watch him do his thing.” SFBG
THE ARK
With Mon Cousin Belge
Fri/23, 9 p.m.
Cafe du Nord
2170 Market, SF
$13
(415) 861-5016
www.cafedunord
SF Pride Festival
Sun/25, 3:30 p.m. (Shadowplay stage) and 5:15 p.m. (main stage)
Civic Center, SF
Free
(415) 864-3733
www.sfpride.org
www.thearkworld.com

DJ without borders

June 14, 2006

> barsandclubs@sfbg.com

If you were born in Algeria, of Jewish and Berber descent, and had a penchant for classical Indian raga, you might be as disinclined to align yourself with any one school of thought or music as genre-blending DJ Cheb i Sabbah is. Equally at home in Morocco, France, India, and San Francisco, he has been skillfully infusing traditional South Asian, Arabic, and North African melodies with modern electronic beats in the Lower Haight since 1990, first at Nickie’s BBQ and now every Wednesday night at Underground SF. On June 16, Cheb i Sabbah celebrates the release of his sixth album with Six Degrees Records, La Ghriba, with 1002 Nights, his performance group of vocalists, percussionists, and dancers, and superstar Senegalese singer Baaba Maal.
SFBG You started DJing in Paris, how many years ago now?
DJ CiS It makes me look ancient, but 1963, 1964 is when I started. I was 17.
SFBG And have you DJed continuously for 40 years?
DJ CiS I’ve had three professional DJ incarnations. In 1963 that was the first one. Second one was 1980, also in Paris, and then the next one was about 16 years ago, here. In between I performed with the Living Theatre, then raised a family. Working at Rainbow Grocery, working at Amoeba Records …
SFBG You worked at Rainbow?
DJ CiS Actually it’s a funny story, because that’s how I started spinning again. I worked at the one on 15th, before the big new one opened on Folsom. I would make tapes, and then whenever I went to work, if somebody liked my tape, they would play it. One day this guy comes up to me, his name is Bradley, and he says, “Man, this music is cool.” I say, “Yeah, that’s raï music from Algeria,” and he says, “You know what, I have a little club in the Lower Haight called Nickie’s, and if you want to come on a Tuesday Night and spin some music, I’ll give you $40.” At first I was, like, “I don’t know about this, it’s not like Paris,” although within two weeks there was a line outside the door. Then [legendary jazz musician and sometime Sabbah collaborator] Don Cherry would come to Nickie’s, and I would say to him, “I don’t know if I’m going to stick with it,” and he actually forced me to. He said, “No, you should stick with it. It’s important.”
SFBG So we have Don Cherry to thank.
DJ CiS From there I spent 10 years spinning at KPFA. Later on I became the world music buyer in Berkeley for Amoeba, and in those 14 years I put on close to 40 shows which I produced.
SFBG The 1002 Nights shows?
DJ CiS Yes, with Khaled. With Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. It was a period where I did quite a few shows.
SFBG And you’re going to be doing that again, the 1002 Nights?
DJ CiS Yeah, but this time I’m being hired more than actually putting on the show. The last show I did produce, which was actually a huge one, and very successful, was one I recently did with Khaled at the Berkeley Community Theatre, and there were 3,300 people there.
SFBG Do you decide in the club what kind of beats you’re going to add, or do you decide in the studio?
DJ CiS I think the producing aspect is different than the dance floor one. However, the great thing about being a DJ is if you do a mix, you can try it out right away. You don’t have to wait to find out if people like it or not. But it’s really two different approaches, because also it’s very subjective. Is Shri Durga [his first record on Six Degrees] a danceable album or not? Well, I don’t know. I think it is. Maybe not every track, but not every minute of the day is there to dance. And it does have a focus on the tradition, you know. I’m not trying to do such a modern thing with just a little bit of the tradition. I’m doing the opposite. The tradition is first; second is bringing in what we call these days “global electronica,” which is better than “world music.”
SFBG You’ve referred to it as “outernational” music. How is that different from “international”?
DJ CiS It just goes … out [gestures, hands apart]. It seems like “outer” opens it up to the idea that we don’t need national boundaries and restrictions and all of that, but maybe that’s a whole other discussion. I think the challenge for a DJ is to never refuse any kind of audience. If you were to spin a heavy metal set, you would find the heavy metal that appeals to you, because there’s good music in every area. It’s a gift, Don Cherry would say. You have to give it. SFBG
DJ CHEB I SABBAH AND 1002 NIGHTS WITH BAABA MAAL
Fri/16, 8 p.m.
Masonic Auditorium
1111 California, SF
(415) 776-4702
www.masonicauditorium.com
www.sixdegreesrecords.com

Goode is great …

June 7, 2006

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Before his dancers had even taken a single step, a huge round of applause greeted Joe Goode at his group’s 20^th-anniversary concert at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Goode is probably the best-loved choreographer in town. For two decades he has chronicled his generation’s unease about living in its own skin. When AIDS began to devastate this town in the early ’80s, Goode was there to speak out with pieces that were blunt, poignant, and theatrically savvy.

Goode is the poet of anxiety, pain, and uncertainty. He’s able to see a major catastrophe on its own terms but also as a metaphor for what ails us. His heroes — and they are heroes — are the outsiders, the watchers, and the misfits whose values and existence society would like to deny. He has a self-deprecatory wit that makes us wince and laugh at the same time. And he has developed a genre of dance theater that’s exceptionally successful at blending speech and movement. Very few choreographers have Goode’s ability to use language so acutely.

The anniversary concert offered the standing-room-only audience two pieces, the new Stay Together, to a score by San Francisco Symphony music director Michael Tilson Thomas, and the haunting 1998 Deeply There (stories of a neighborhood).

In Stay Together, Goode tackles what is glibly summarized as the midlife crisis: when long-term relationships unravel, careers begin to meander, and time ahead is shortening. A secondary strand explores the process of creating a piece, of finding a direction in which to take it. The ever-efficient Liz Burritt, clipboard in hand and glasses on her nose, was there to give the largely silent Goode plenty of advice of the “listen deeply” and “be in the moment” type.

The challenge here for Goode was to make a work about being clueless without coming up with a piece that goes nowhere. It’s a challenge he doesn’t quite meet. To achieve “a perfect little euphoria” is, no matter what Burritt says, no easier in art than it is in life. Despite good collaborators and several splendid episodes, there’s something wan about Stay Together that makes for a disconcerting theatrical experience.

Tilson Thomas’s score is perfectly serviceable, with monochromatic sections punctuated by percussive elements. Several times it hilariously called up sci-fi and Movietone music associations.

Goode and Melecio Estrella, as his maybe young lover, maybe younger self, had some telling shadowing duets together. During their first meeting, silhouetted against separate screens, heads longingly turning toward each other, they almost trembled with excitement and fragility. Throughout, Austin Forbord’s live videos contributed excellent tonal nuances and a sense of sometimes almost painful intimacy.

Stay Together‘s most theatrically cutting moment came with Marit Brook-Kothlow’s sex-starved Norma Desmond figure. The intensity of the character’s obsession split her screen image and spilled over into some vigorous dancing.

Deeply There remains one of Goode’s finest works. Robin Holcomb’s on-tape score, with its echoes of Shaker and Americana folk tunes, is inspired; the a cappella singing by Goode’s dancer-actors, haunting. With this quasi–musical theater work, Goode hones in on and pays tribute to a community that pulled together and learned to take care of and bury its own. Goode’s piece just barely avoids sentimentality by calling up equal measures of laughter and tears.

On many levels the piece remains disjointed. The outrageous Imelda figure (Ruben Graciani) and a voguing Jackie O sequence have little to do with the work’s subject except to point to the excesses of the times. These are the segments that today seem the most dated, perhaps because they look so innocent.

Yet the work rode an emotionally convincing trajectory from the opening prologue between Frank (Goode) and little Willis (Joshua Rauchwerger), who wants to know where Goode’s lover Ben is, to the last monologue about carrying on, however uncertainly. The scenes seamlessly flowed one to the next; the characters looked all too plausible. Estrella as the well-meaning goody-goody neighbor was positively nauseating, while Brook-Kothlow has grown in stature as D.D. the dog and Felipe Barrueto Cabello’s silent Mauricio has more backbone. The only false note remains Joyce (Burritt), Ben’s virago of a sister. She is still too much of a caricature. SFBG

joe goode performance group

Fri/9–Sat/10, 8 p.m.; Sun/11, 7 p.m.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater

700 Howard, SF

$16–$40

(415) 978-2787,

Passion plays

May 30, 2006

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Campo Santo is currently celebrating its 10th anniversary, a significant milestone for any small theater company. But this one really does have something to celebrate. The past decade has been an intense, vibrant, unconventionally structured experiment in multicultural communal theater that’s not your typical "community theater," but an ambitious undertaking that takes seriously both its own immediate community and the various communities making up society at large. Along the way, it’s consistently produced by far some of the most exciting and risk-taking productions around. And with more than 30 world premieres to its credit as the resident company at Intersection for the Arts (San Francisco’s premier multidisciplinary alternative arts organization), it’s fair to say Campo Santo’s output has been nothing short of awesome.

But Campo Santo + Intersection is more than the sum of its production history, as anyone who goes to a performance knows. Not just situated in the Mission District but very much a part of it — it’s a place, a space, an environment, a neighborhood, and to many, precisely the hallowed ground the company’s name implies. With a loose and flexible network of individuals and groups capable of supporting and elaborating on each other’s artistic and social work — as well as an atypically astute and diverse audience — Campo Santo and Intersection’s personnel, setting, and semipublic work process all contribute to making it a conspicuously unique site on the theatrical landscape.

There’s probably no more ready proof of that, or the success of its formula, than the willingness of so many nationally prominent playwrights to repeatedly collaborate with Campo Santo on new work — a list that includes Naomi Iizuka, John Steppling, Greg Sarris, Jessica Hagedorn, Erin Cressida Wilson, Philip Kan Gotanda, and Octavio Sol??s. It’s even famously coaxed the first stage works out of well-established writers and poets like Jimmy Santiago Baca, Dave Eggers, and Denis Johnson.

The series of events marking Campo Santo’s 10th anniversary — from workshops, open discussions, and staged rereadings of past productions with the playwrights to a major blowout planned for June 3 — comes as a rare opportunity for company and audience to reflect on a decade of feverish, often brilliant work that has always looked restlessly ahead, as if to the next fix.

The retrospective has been something of a revelation to the company’s members and associates, judging by the rapt discussion that followed a rehearsal last week for the Denis Johnson program.

Words like simple, basic, naked — these recur repeatedly in any discussion of the theater with company member and Intersection program director Sean San Jose, who founded Campo Santo in 1996 with fellow actors Margo Hall, Luis Saguar, and Michael Torres. The occasion was a production of Octavio Sol??s’s Santos y Santos, a major dramatic success when Thick Description premiered it at Theater Artaud in 1993. San Jose, with Saguar and Torres (who had both been in the original production), staged a new version. Sol??s, who has since worked repeatedly with the company — most recently on 2005’s world premiere of The Ballad of Pancho and Lucy, a modern folkloric joyride set in the bars of the Mission District — remembers that first production as a portent of things to come.

"I found the production totally different but equally exciting to the one Tony Kelly had directed at Theater Artaud," he told me. "It was such a pressure cooker situation — I didn’t think it would ever work in a small space like New Langton Arts. But it was stirring. I knew this company had a future. I saw it as very hungry and focused — intense, brooding, and always on. Never a second wasted."

The decision to stage Santos at New Langton came out of another experience with bare bones performance. "These guys read the play in a youth correctional facility," explains Deborah Cullinan, who at the time had just been hired as Intersection’s new executive director — financial straits having temporarily shuttered the arts organization — and was tasked with reviving it. (The rise of Campo Santo and the resurgence of Intersection are intimately tied together, as it turns out.) "They were just reading it for these youth and the water pipe broke in the auditorium, so they got stuck in one of the living quarters, this tiny space. But Luis, Sean, and Michael will all tell you that’s when they understood that the words could drive something forward, because the boys were riveted."

The full production impressed Cullinan, and after their next one — an equally successful staging of a very different play, Erin Cressida Wilson’s Hurricane — she was convinced this was the sort of broad-ranging company Intersection wanted on board. In turn, Intersection gave Campo Santo crucial support, not least the Valencia Street space, to continue doing the kind of theater it had been groping toward.

The key to the company, Sol??s explains, is that "each actor is a dramaturge. They know what the play needs. They start to intuit it. It’s just part of their aesthetic now."

"It’s very much a playwright’s theater," notes Philip Kan Gotanda, whose A Fist of Roses was a thorough surprise last year, an exploration of male domestic violence whose highly original and unusually collaborative nature did as much credit to the veteran playwright as to the small company. "You just don’t find it that often — especially if you’re interested, as I’m interested, in writing pieces that are a little off the beaten path, both in form and content."

"They’re a writer’s theater in that they do exclusively new work, and find the playwrights that appeal to them," Sol??s agrees. At the same time, however, he believes Campo Santo is a strong actor’s theater. "There’s a reason why they’re drawn to Erin Cressida Wilson or Naomi Iizuka. There’s a real reason why they’re drawn to Denis [Johnson]. And Denis now, as I do and I’m sure the other writers are doing — we’re writing to suit the company. They have a great core of talent. They really know how to stretch and take chances. They do very dangerous acting."

Remarkably, 10 years along, Campo Santo continues to convey that sense of immediacy, a sense of raw intensity, risk, and daring, while always matching it with exceptional skill and a youthful, street-smart confidence.

Sol??s puts the formula succinctly: "They like passion. They like works about passion. And passion also in that religious sense." SFBG

Campo Santo 10^th anniversary

Gala, Sat/3, 7 p.m.

Brava Theater Center, 2781 24th St, SF. $25

Real Women, Rock ’n’ Roll, and Karaoke:

The Work of Campo Santo and Jessica Hagedorn, June 9, 7:30 p.m.

Finale: Finding the Future, June 10, 7:30 p.m.

Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia, SF. $9–$20

(415) 626-3311

www.theintersection.org

Doing the Cannes-Cannes, Part Two

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May 25, 2006
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Gary Meyer of the Balboa is at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Here is the second of his reports.

What a day! They’ve moved things around. Problems with my accreditation badge mean I can’t get into the movies. Offices that used to be in the Palais are at the other end of the Croisette, a 20 minute walk. The lines are huge and don’t seem to move. Finally I get my problems cleared up but every screening is full. Even my friends connected with some movies can’t get me in. The day is almost over and I haven’t seen one film yet. BUZZZZ. “Good morning. This is your 7am wake up call. Have a nice day.” Anxiety dreams are the worst here. I am feeling guilty that I only saw four films yesterday, but that was all there was worth seeing.

The morning started promisingly. Ken Loach’s newest, The Wind that Shakes the Barley , is generally well-received. Cillian Murphy proves that his acting turns in Breakfast on Pluto and Red Eye were not flukes. He stars as a young doctor faced with an offer to practice medicine in London — or stay in his village and become increasingly involved in forming a guerilla army to fight the “Black and Tan” army from England, sent to squash Irish independence. Set in the 1920s, the film has contemporary relevance. The first half is exciting, playing like a grand adventure with a political conscience, just as we have come to expect from Loach. The second half slows a bit but still worked for me.

Continuing in the history vein, with sociology and myth thrown in, is Rolf de Heer’s Ten Canoes. This Dutch director has developed a small but faithful following with his diverse filmography of under-distributed movies including The Quiet Room, Dance Me to My Song, and Alexandra’s Project. Ten Canoes was developed with actor David Gulpilil (most known for starring in Walkabout) who was interested in the stories of his own tribe, the Ramingining people. Gulpilil narrates (in English) simultaneous stories related to forbidden love but separated in time by many generations. There is a certain irreverence in his storytelling that is surprising: What is a flatulence reference doing in a story set hundreds of years ago? But then one realizes people have passed wind as long as they have existed. The guilty warrior is moved to the back of the line as they go through the forest — and more bawdy humor reminds us that dirty jokes aren’t new.

Ten Canoes is an impressive accomplishment on many levels. Though its austerity may be off-putting for some audiences, the fascinating stories, stunning visual delights, and truly unique experiences make it worthy of distribution.

The next two films shouldn’t be watched on a full stomach … but a viewer might not want to eat afterwards either. Taxidermia is the second feature from Hungarian director György Pálfi, after his astonishing Hukkle. Like Ten Canoes — another film dealing with several generations in a family — Taxidermia opens with a story of an orderly masturbating while observing his master’s young daughters, and servicing the man’s rather large wife on a monthly basis. The accidental offspring grows up to become a champion eater, winning contests while becoming a national, very fat, hero. Just as the sexual escapades of his father were graphically portrayed, we are shown huge amounts of vomit following the son’s competitions. The absurdity of it generates nervous laughter from those who haven’t turned away from the screen. He grows older, and becomes so large he cannot move. When he explodes, his son, a taxidermist, does what you might expect — and then what you won’t expect.

In some ways Taxidermia is a brilliant piece, with incredible cinematography, black humor, and a couple of visual treats. A brief sequence in a pop-up storybook and one exploring the myriad of uses for a bathtub are moments I should like to see again. But this is a hard movie to recommend to most; the gross outs just keep coming, each topping the previous one. Obviously, it’s only for those who can stomach it.

If one hasn’t lost his or her appetite after Taxidermia, the fiction film adapted from Eric Schlosser’s non-fiction book Fast Food Nation could move anyone in that direction. The author developed the screenplay with director Richard Linklater (whose animated science fiction film, A Scanner Darkly, screens here next week). The story centers around an executive at a thinly disguised hamburger chain — “Mickey’s” — who is sent to Colorado to investigate reports concerning fecal matter in beef. Along the way he encounters a number of characters working at the slaughterhouse and at the chain’s local burger joint.

In trying to cover as many controversial bases as he can, Schlosser may have taken on too many issues (the treatment of illegal aliens, sexual harassment, America’s poor dietary habits, the lack of sanitary conditions in both the meat-processing plant and the retail outlets, corporate neglect for bigger profits, etc). But the over-ambitious narrative rarely makes the impact these issues deserve. Following Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel, The Jungle, Schlosser’s investigative book confirmed that things aren’t much better in the 21st century. Though trying to reach a wider audience with a narrative film is a noble idea, it doesn’t succeed as either entertainment or piece of muckraking. The French seemed to generally like Fast Food Nation, probably because it makes for an easy anti-American target. But they also eat fast-food burgers in huge numbers.

High concept

The Marche is a massive film market that happens simultaneously with the film festival. More junk that you ever imagined is produced all over the world, and thousands of films are being sold here. Some are finished and others are in development. Many will never be finished.

We can always expect ripoffs of Hollywood blockbusters. There is no description for Sacrament Code or Stealing the Mona Lisa in the ads because the makers are probably hoping for some down and dirty direct-to-international video and cable sales. I’ve seen ads for at least three pirate movies, each looking very much like the upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean II, with supernatural elements floating through the art work and featuring casts of total unknowns who look a lot like Johnny Depp and Keira Knightley.

One of my favorite things at Cannes is seeking out the most ridiculous titles for movies selling in Marche. Are you ready for a horror film about “hair extensions that attack the women that wear them?” Japan’s Toei is selling it here. Exte will star Chiaki Kuriyama, the crazy chain-swinging schoolgirl in Kill Bill.

And how about Motor Home Massacre? No description offered and none is needed.

Whatshisnamesnewfilm

The masses gathered at Cannes rarely refer to upcoming Festival movies by their title. We are asked, “Are you going to see the new Almodovar?” or “Did you see the Turkish movie?”

We say: “I liked the first feature from the director of that short Wasp,” and “Don’t miss the Indonesian documentary about the tsunami aftermath.”

This puts the film in a context that is easier to explain than “Are you going to see Volver? Iklimler? Red Road? Serambi?”

What do those titles mean? Until enough people have seen or heard about them, they are merely strange words or odd phrases. Volver is the new film from Pedro Almodovar; it’s a bit more subdued than some of his over-the-top recent entertainments. Penelope Cruz, who returns to her roots in Spanish cinema, plays a mother dealing with a teenaged daughter, a lonely sister, and an aging aunt. When the aunt dies, her dead mother appears, first as what the women assume is a ghost — but, maybe she never died in the fire that took their father? Initially the filmmaker continues his homage to Hitchcock with a surprise murder (and Bernard Herrmann-like music) before moving more to melodrama. While not a great film, Volver is wonderfully entertaining, full of surprises, and features a performance by Cruz that made me an instant fan. The buzz is great.

Iklimler has an English title of Climates, an appropriate description of the hot and cold relationship between a man and a woman who break up during a beach vacation and meet again in the snow. Like director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s previous film Uzak (Distant), the Cannes Grand Prix winner in 2003, this film could be best described as contemplative. On the surface it is a simple story of a relationship, but the emotions and motivations dig much deeper. The characters are believable, the emotions real, and the performances powerful. With virtually no camera movement, the filmmaker beautifully composes each shot; so impressed with his work, the camera stays in that one position for long sequences. Some raved about this “work of art,” but gorgeously composed images don’t make a movie. For me, this slowed too much midway. I stayed with it and appreciated the ending, but as with so much at the festival, Iklimler is an acquired taste. No doubt I will be damned for my comments.

Red Road is another story. Scottish director Andrea Arnold’s first feature is a tense and original thriller. Working from a concept proposed by Lars Von Trier’s team, three different filmmakers set out to create original stories based on the same main characters. Each were given notes; the same two actors will star. Red Road is the first to be made. A woman works for a security company watching various video monitors for possible troublemakers in a rough neighborhood. She concentrates on a man recently released from prison for a crime obviously committed against someone close to her. This variation on Hitchcock’s Rear Window grows increasing more tense as details are carefully revealed. Despite a few missteps, the film works well and Arnold is a talent to watch (her Oscar-winning short, Wasp, was a knockout).

In a given day there will rarely be a logical pattern to the order of film-watching — and the segue from one to the next can be very strange. Following Red Road with Serambi was such a radical shift. This documentary explores the aftermath of the tsunami, following children, young adults, and adults who search for their friends and relatives while coming to the realization they must rebuild their lives and city.

Another documentary, Boffo! Tinsletown’s Bombs and Blockbusters proved a good way to end a day that also included a program of shorts and a long Korean film about young soldiers that left me cold (The Unforgiven). Boffo! is by onetime Bay Area director Bill Couturie. Packed with film clips and great interviews, it tries to help us figure out why a movie is a hit or flop — even if people from filmmakers to studio heads come back to writer William Goldman’s quote: “Nobody knows nothing.”

Multi-angle magic

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May 23, 2006
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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

If you have any doubts about the imagination’s ability to transform time and space, you can find proof positive by going to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts this weekend. Thanks to Margaret Jenkins’s new A Slipping Glimpse, the YBCA’s Forum — that ugly box of a multipurpose theater — has been changed into a place of magic reality. Jenkins’s 75-minute piece (plus a 10-minute prologue performed outdoors) is a rapturous celebration of fragility and resilience, a canticle of what it means to be alive. And yet how ironic: This is a work whose fierce physicality is as ephemeral as a gust of wind or the felt presence of something that may not be there.

Jenkins has been choreographing and collaborating for more than 30 years. She has always chosen carefully, but rarely has a piece of hers emerged so completely from its mold. It helps that she has worked with three of her collaborators — poet Michael Palmer, designer Alexander V. Nichols, and composer Paul Dresher — for a very long time. Still, Slipping shows a remarkable congruence of spirits and style.

Major credit has to go to Nichols’s brilliant design of red-hued, multilevel platforms and elevated walkways positioned between four wedges of seating areas. The effect is of a theater in the round with a nondirectional performance space, where perspectives are shaped by where you sit. The musicians are placed on opposing balconies above everyone else. Dresher’s score is full of rich textures, sometimes percussive, sometimes ballad-like, with a quasi rock beat now and then, plus Joan Jeanrenaud’s cello soaring like a lark. While not offering much of a rhythmic base, the music provides its own commentary — and often envelops the dancers in a multi-colored sonic mist.

Poet Michael Palmer’s suggestive texts, read on tape, give just enough of a grounding to set signposts for Slipping‘s four sections. First, he suggests oppositions to be considered; later he evokes a group of dancers’ dreams about sailing on a frozen lake.

Slipping is the result of a partnering between the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company and the Tanusree Shankar Dance Company from Kolkata, India, where the Jenkins company had a residency in 2005. Choreographer Shankar also worked with Jenkins’s company in San Francisco. The resulting work is performed by 15 dancers, including four from India. At times the two groups intermingle, but the Indian dancers also perform by themselves. It is gorgeous to observe how the Americans and the Indians — so differently trained despite the fact that both perform in contemporary styles — move from a common base. The details of the gestural vocabulary and use of levels, for instance, are varied, but similarities are striking and unforced.

Slipping opens with a tableau on one of Nichols’s red platforms. One by one the dancers find individual ways to lower themselves onto the equally red floor. In a traditional greeting gesture, they fold their hands in front of their faces, then open them as if peering into a mirror or a book. Then off they go, on communal, loping runs that move forward and also recoil back. Picking up gestures from each other, they pull and they yield. Twice, multi-level chains form and simply dissolve when lifted dancers cannot breach the space between the two groups; overhead horizontal lifts often freeze in time.

Jenkins also showcases her dancers individually. Heidi Schweiker, whom I have never seen dance better, roams the stage on her own while everyone else is busy on platforms. Melanie Elms burrows into a knot of bodies only to emerge on the other side. When the stage is packed with multiple activities, Ryan T. Smith runs around its periphery tying them all together. Levi Toney is all over the place, holding Schweiker and “dropping” her to the floor; he later partners a splendid new dancer, Matthew Holland, who has his own jaw-dropping solo.

Slipping recalls Jenkins mentor Merce Cunningham’s Ocean, particularly in the way the choreography is multi-focused. Even though the lighting cues provide some direction, audience members make their own choices about what to watch. At one point, my eye caught four dancers on one of the platforms as they deeply inhaled and exhaled toward their colleagues. Were they sending them energy or were these movements a coincidence? At another moment, the four Indian dancers appeared high above, posing as temple statues, as a vigorous male duet unfolded on the floor. Why then, why there? Right in front of me, a woman pulled away from another dancer who had reached out to her. Who else saw that gesture?

Slipping doesn’t have a linear trajectory, but its ebb and flow, the way hyperactivity balances stillness, suggest purpose and something like an underlying unity — and maybe even order. SFBG

A Slipping Glimpse

Wed/24–Sat/27, 7 p.m.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum

701 Mission, SF

$18–$25

(415) 978-ARTS

www.ybca.org

Cave in

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May 23, 2006
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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Pop styles of the oh-so-rich and silly!

Britney Spears nearly drops her infant son, baby in one hand, drink in the other, while angling through an NYC crowd! And so soon after being bitch-slapped by the paparazzi for misusing her infant car seat! Oops, she can’t do anything right!

Blaming "media intrusion" for his marital breakup, prenup-less Beatle Paul McCartney promises to hit the charts with the most costly divorce in Brit(pop) history — at an estimated $188 to $376 million. Most referenced Beatles lyric: "Can’t buy me love"!

Gossip — so slight it’s surreal — comes and goes. What remains are the exclamation point–free, consistently sinister talents of Nick Cave — now back in form as the screenwriter of John Hillcoat’s bloody, lyrical Australian western, The Proposition. His red right hand extends to yet another film opening this week in the Bay Area, Olivier Assayas’s Clean, which features sometime Bad Seed James Johnston playing a simian-mugged ’80s rock star — you rang? — whose death by overdose leaves the addict mother of his child, Emily (Maggie Cheung), high and struggling to dry out.

Bathing in bloodshed and unflinchingly embracing the visceral, The Proposition immediately brought to mind the other recent movie by another rocker with punk, metal, and underground roots who hit a commercial peak in the early ’90s and found a temporary home in the arms of an Alternative Nation: The Devil’s Rejects, by Rob Zombie. The two movies might be seen as spiritual kin — if not responses to each other — and might even be read as thinly disguised metaphors for life on the road in a rock band: Cave’s bespattered, greasy, tangled-haired outback outlaws would blend in fine at Lollapalooza, while the do-you-want-to-stop-for-ice-cream-or-to-disbowel-passing-strangers repartee between Zombie’s killer hillbillies on the lam smells like a kind of sociopathic teen spirit, circa ’92. The fact that the Rejects — the very title of the film sounds like a band name — torture a C&W band reads as uncensored rock ’n’ roll ribaldry to me.

Cave, on the other hand, takes hellfire, carnage, and, once again, torture scenes seriously: His is a morality play, with a fatalistic acknowledgment of the way race and class operate in an Australian frontier injustice system. Likewise, rather than relying on crowd-pleasing rock akin to that in Rejects, Cave and Dirty Three violinist Warren Ellis unveil a shockingly restrained, elegiac, occasionally screeching score for The Proposition, now available on Mute.

Clean wasn’t written by Cave, but his dark yet redemptive residue is all over it. The main flaw in this otherwise graceful tale of a jet-set junk-bird’s descent, flight, then ascent is the fact that the finale falls flat: This movie is all about the hangers-on, the incidental characters orbiting an absent, dark hole of a star, so when Cheung finally takes the mic and dares to fill the void left by her dead lover, her performance should have hit some Marianne Faithfull–esque lowlife high. Still, amid Assayas’s detailed, obvious pleasure depicting ex-wife Cheung floundering after her man’s passing, Cave look-alike Johnston gets in a few of the most memorable, candid lines in Clean when he tells Cheung that his latest album is simply mediocre, and while he may make better once again, he’ll settle for whatever he can get to put it out now.

Why Cave now? Perhaps the culture is finally ready for his plain, unpleasant truths; his horror stories; and his scary, survivor’s revisioning of reality. Dubbing him goth is too easy; calling him Johnny Cash’s black-suited successor, facile. He’s proof that one can go to hell and back.

Stealin’ and Gilman Is anyone beginning to feel like Jack White’s voice is a little like squeaky tires doing donuts on chalkboard? No? Excellent, because the Raconteurs, his current band with other mad Midwestern too-cool-for-schoolies, have put out a pretty swell rock record, digging into late-’70s to late-’80s sounds, be they Romantics-style new wave or AOR hair-band histrionics. And by gum, don’t they look like the Replacements in the above promo pic — miming a much reproduced Let It Be–era ’Mats photo? A tribute to off-the-cuff randomness? … The rock never quite stops — Bay Area party starters Rock ’n’ Roll Adventure Kids are back, recording a new album and playing shows once again. This week’s is a doozy: 924 Gilman’s annual Punk Prom — for students who can’t afford the high price of dull high school–approved entertainment. Costumes, dancing, and like-minded souls — sounds like a rock ’n’ roll adventure worth crashing. SFBG

Raconteurs

July 23, 8 p.m.

Warfield, 982 Market, SF.

$27.50–$37.50

(415) 775-7722

Punk Prom

Fri/26, 8 p.m.

924 Gilman, Berk.

$5

www.924gilman.org

Quit moping

Kultur Shock

Gypsy-inspired punk mixes it up with bilingual thrashers La Plebe. Wed/24, 9 p.m., Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17^th St., SF. $10. (415) 621-4455.

Tough and Lovely

Garage rock, ’60s soul, and girl group are all within groping distance. Thurs/25, 9:30 p.m., Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. $6. (415) 923-0923. Sat/27, Stork Club, 2330 Telegraph, Oakl. Call for time and price. (415) 444-6174.

Grind and Glory hip-hop conference

15- to 25-year-olds are invited to get down and throw their hands in the air at this DJ Project music conference with Dead Prez, Amp Live, and Jurassic 5’s Chali 2Na. Sat/27, 10 a.m.–5 p.m., 425 Market, SF. Free. www.grindandglory.com.

Mogwai

That’s Mr. Beast to you. Turge-rockers Earth open. Sat/27, 9 p.m., Fillmore, 1805 Geary, SF. $22.50. (415) 346-6000.

Shoplifting

The band takes punk to the jagged cliffs where politics and art meet and dance a jig. Tues/30, 9 p.m., Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17^th St., SF. $8. (415) 621-4455. SFBG

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