Street Art

Barry McGee, you tricked me

Andrew Lam
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Granted I’m not out in Berkeley a ton, but I found it strange that someone had tagged an entire concrete side of the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive the very first week that thousands of impressionable minds were invading the UC Berkeley campus and waiting in half-block lines to enjoy a free grilled cheese sandwich in between classes.

“SNITCH,” the 15-foot-tall graff screamed, with a bubble dotting its “I.” Wow, I thought, proceeding to the media preview of Barry McGee a.k.a. Twist a.k.a. Lydia Fong a.k.a. Ray Fong’s first mid-career retrospective (opening today, through Dec. 9) — someone’s not big on Twist.

But duh, everyone (everyone in the Bay who would tag a museum wall, at least) is big on Twist. The “SNITCH” tag, just like the massive red piece that obscured the museum’s glass front doors, was engineered by McGee and his some-dozen team of be-cardiganed, baseball cap flat-brimmed artistic cohorts, many of whom were still bustling about on Thursday trying to get the exhibition ready for the opening reception mere hours away. 

He came up earning tagger cred for his masterful tags and cartoon anti-heroes all over the streets of SF, but the hyper-successful and hyper-problematic museum-street art confluence is a crossroad that Twist has stood firmly atop for decades now. Of course he’s the first to tag his own opening.

I’m not going to go into too much depth about the exhibit here, because that would make the paper piece I’m going to write about it in a few weeks totally pointless, but know that it is the most ambitious spread BAM/PFA has ever undertaken (how the hell did they get that van in there? Curator Larry Rinder had no answers for the passel of press assembled at the preview), in terms of mediums it is wildly diverse, and you will probably never see any thing like it because the days of astronomical funding for art are dead and many of the rarely-seen Twist projects — he hasn’t had a Bay Area solo show since 1994 — took stacks to produce.

If you’re looking for a good moment to check out the show, I suggest that you don’t do it during university passing time unless you dig flip-flops, and that you coordinate instead with one of the rad events that BAM/PFA has scheduled to run in accordance with the show. Here’s a couple: 

L@TE: Friday Nights @ BAM/PFA

Sept. 21, curator Larry Rinder in conversation with Jeffrey Deitch 6-7pm; Lawrence Rinder; Devendra Banhart, Justin Hoover, and Chris Treggiari 7:30-9pm, $7. McGee chats with the guy who funded his biggest splashes, Deitch, and exhibit curator Rinder. The artist’s SF Art Institute fellow alum Barnhardt brings his wacky brand of folk to the L@TE night event, with Hoover and Treggiari slinging their street-based cuisine. 

Oct. 19, Jim Prigoff: “Graffiti: A History in Photographs” 6pm; T.I.T.S. and Erick Lyle (Scam) 7:30-9pm, $7. Prigoff, along with peers Martha Cooper, Jon Naar, Jack Stewart, Henry Chalfant, traveled the world when graff was still in its young’n stages, snapping shots of a youth-based art form that had yet to run through the commercial grinder. Tonight, he runs through some of his archival images of Bay greats like DREAM, and of course, Twist. Zinester Lyle and grrrl mob quartet T.I.T.S. raise a rebel yell later that night at L@TE. 

Nov. 16, Peggy Honeywell and Bill Daniel 7:30-9pm, $7. Visual artist Clare Rojas, a.k.a. folk singer Peggy Honeywell shares an affinity with partner McGee for aliases, and is sure to turn out a hot show (check out our 2011 interview for her woman-centric, quietly lovely artwork). Bill Daniels tracks indie film and hobos with his “dirt lot cinema.”

Barry McGee

Fri/24-Dec. 9

Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive

2626 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-0808

bampfa.berkeley.edu

Finally: All-female street art takes over ATL

Andrew Lam
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As colorful and diverse as the global street art scene is these days, it’s still overwhelmingly a boy’s game. That’s why we’re so stoked to hear about the first days of Living Walls Atlanta, a street art conference in its third year that decides to step out and feature all-female artists in 2012 Wed/15-Sun/19. Its lead organizer Monica Campana and her team have attracted an ace crew for what by all accounts will be the first all-women global street art festival.

New York-New Jersey wheatpaste artist LNY is on the ATL scene now and will have a Guardian exclusive for us next week. Read on for a preview of some of the baddie artists featured at this year’s Living Walls.

 

Go here for a video a day from the Living Walls crew

Molly Rose Freeman – Memphis

Cake — New York

Tika – Zurich 

Plus! 

Hyuro – Spain/Buenos Aires

Sten and Lex – Rome

Olive47 – Atlanta

Generations confer over La Peña’s second skin

Andrew Lam
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Generations confer over La Peña’s second skin

I’m sitting in on a meeting between two generations of muralists. In name, our encounter was designed as an interview about La Peña Cultural Center’s plans to redo its decades-old facade, a historic piece that right now is a 3-D tableau named “Song of Unity” and meant to represent the people of North and South America coming together in art.

But it has become clear to me the interviewer that’s it’s way more momentous to let these groups talk largely unimpeded by my questions. Two people who created the mural in 1978 are speaking with two people who will design its rebirth in 2012 about changes in the world of street art over the last 34 years. It’s the first time the four have met together. Assasinated Chilean artist-activist Victor Jara‘s detached hands strum a guitar in silent soundtrack over us as we sit on folding chairs in front of the mural in question. 

In contrast to his “Song of Unity’s” figurative style, “graffiti is an abstract art,” says Osha Neumann.

Neumann was able to pay his original mural crew largely with funds from government-sponsored community arts program meant to train and employ creative types. La Peña’s wasn’t the only piece the group worked on — they also masterminded the piece on Berkeley’s Amoeba Music and a large wall at People’s Park. Their work was inspired, he says, by the school of Mexican muralists that included Diego Rivera, José Orozco — the masters that gave birth to the last mural renaissance in the United States. 

Osha Neumann, Cece Carpio, and O’Brien Thiele — two generations of La Peña artists. All Guardian photos by Caitlin Donohue

“Song of Unity” was meant to illustrate the coming-together of two continents through activist culture, at a time with US interventionism in Latin America was reaching a fevered pitch of corruption and when Bay Areans and Latin American refugees were coming together to form La Peña. It was a heavy moment. Jara’s hands, by way of illustration, are portrayed severed from his body for a reason. After the 1973 Chilean coup, they were said to have been cut from his body by military junta.

“Graffiti has no connection at all to the work of the Mexican muralists,” Neumann continues in response to my question about how street art has changed since his time.

“Graffiti artists don’t usually work collectively,” adds O’Brien Thiele, Neumann’s co-artist.

But here, Robert Trujillo must step in. Trujillo is a member of the Trust Your Struggle collective, the team of California-bred young people that have been elected to take up this historic mantle.

“But there are graffiti crews that are really well-established,” he interjects gently. “CPS from Los Angeles. TKO and MSK have crews worldwide. These are the groups that pioneered graffiti art on the West Coast.”

Trujillo should know — in a time in which street art has come into vogue and become a big-money game, TYS is a sterling example of what is still great about the genre. TYS travels the world connecting with communities in parts of the developing world like Latin America and the Phillipines. It uses graffiti-inspired murals to illustrate social problems, solutions. The center already bears the group’s mark — its superlative Cafe Valparaiso, which serves Chilean food at lunch and dinner, is adorned with a striking mural done by TYS members.

 

“When you’re in school, writing on the walls — that’s the thing they tell you not to do,” Trujillo tells us, by way of explaining the power of graffiti. “You don’t have a voice. With graffiti, suddenly you have a voice. People have to realize that it exists because of society.” He pauses, then hits upon an eloquent sum-up. “Graffiti is the perfect answer to society.”

“This is a really huge project for us,” says TYS member Cece Carpio. Carpio is La Peña’s program manager, one of many ties the local group has to the center. “This is a place of gathering. [With the new mural] we want to honor the history of Latin American activism here, but also the diversity that the place has now.”

This comes to the heart of why La Peña wants a new mural. Certainly, “Song of Unity” is in bad shape. It is crumbling at the junctures of its panels. Water is seeping in through the cracks, a death sentence for its three-dimensional figures. 

“Song of Unity” today

But perhaps even more importantly, the re-envisioning of the center’s facade will represent something rather extraordinary — that a radical institution that has been relevant in this community for decades has found itself in the hands of a new, dedicated generation.

La Peña’s programming has continued to diversify. Upcoming events include July 13’s Asian Rock Fest and this year has seen the fifth year of Queendom, DJ Zita’s all-female celebration of the five elements of hip-hop — not to mention the Immigrant Voices Festival that brought openly undocumented journalist Jose Antonio Vargas to the center last week. The Immigrant Voices Festival is a project explicitly sponsored by this “second generation” group — referred to as LP2G by the center. 

“I was sorry when they said they wanted to take [“Song of Unity”] down,” Neumann admits to the group that is assembled that sunny Sunday afternoon. “But they said they wanted new blood. What could I say to that?”

What indeed? Because if there is one good reason to donate to La Peña’s campaign to step, facade-first, into the new generation of activism — and you can! The last day to contribute to its Indie Gogo campaign is today, Mon/2 — it is to celebrate that a radical institution started in the fire of the ’70s has successfully found relevance today among the Internet generation. 

So what is TYS going to paint on this wall? Will it be three-dimensional, like Jara’s memorialized fingers and guitar? The final design won’t be determined until the collective’s done more meetings like this with the community members of La Peña. But you can rest easy on one point. Says Trujillo: “We all know it’s going to be fresh though.”

Open Walls Baltimore: What the murals said, how the streets responded

Andrew Lam
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Most of you will know the neighborhood I was walking that early evening in from The Wire. In fact, the school where season four was shot was a few blocks away. That TV show is an eternal point of reference for Baltimore’s Greenmount West neighborhood, which Open Walls, the town’s first street art festival which I was in the hood to cover, was hoping to combat. The festival, going since March, will conclude with a closing party on May 25.

“Hey! I have a question for you!” Sometimes when you’re walking through half-vacant blocks at dusk you don’t turn around when people yell at you from across the street (you know white people), but this time the Argentines and I turned. A woman was walking towards us and pointing up at Jetsonorama’s massive, half-finished wheatpaste of a man’s face hovering in the dark above our heads.

>>RELATED READ: CAITLIN DONOHUE’S INTERVIEW WITH GAIA, THE 23-YEAR OLD STREET ARTIST-ORGANIZER OF OPEN WALLS

“What are you guys doing with that wall? Is that Mr. Tony?”

It should be noted that I have little to nothing to do with Open Walls, though I managed to secure a spot sleeping on a half-inflated mattress in 23-year street artist and festival organizer Gaia‘s cavernous live-work space for a week to watch the haphazard business of trucking half-cans of paint and open containers of paste across town in various station wagons by underpaid, incredibily dedicated staff and volunteers.

But even though – alongside season four’s Primary School No. 42 – hundreds of young artists lived in a massive ex-cork factory just a few blocks from where we had our exchange, it struck me the woman that evening saw us (some white and Latino scruffy-types) as a big enough anomaly on her block that she knew we had to be associated with the steet art festival.  

“You know Mr. Tony?” I asked. “Yeah,” she replied, with something that sounded like worry in her voice. “Why is he up on the wall?” “You’ll have to ask the artist,” I said. “Do you like it?” “Oh yeah, it’s really nice,” she told us, walking away, back into the night.

Around the corner in an alleyway, I’d seen Jetsonorama’s mirror-image pasting on either side of the narrow corrdor; a black kid on his bike. It seemed like he was reflecting the neighborhood back at itself, in stark contrast with the neon triangles and backwards wording of Baltimore artist Josh Van Horn’ previously-completed building-sized piece or even Argentine Jaz‘s corner park, which he’d lined with regal, painterly drawings of big cats. 

So that night, back at Gaia’s paint-covered live-work circus, Jetsonorama and I found a quiet place to talk about street art. Of course, I set my Android up wrong and none of the video footage of our epic, enlightening interview recorded, so I’ll steal his quotes from an epic and enlightening blog post he later wrote on his trip to Bmore. 

Jetsonorama, a.k.a. 50-something family physician Chip Thomas, lives on a northeastern Arizona Navajo reservation. He initially came for a four-year engagement to pay back his medical school loans, but, he tells me, “I loved the land, loved the people. So I decided to stay on.” His street art career began in 2009 on a trip to Brazil where he was struck by the sense of community that had arisen among the street artists he met there. 

And so upon his return to the rez, he began printing and posting images from photos he’d taken of people and animals there in the community. Jetsonorama saw them as an expression of the hip-hop culture he’d grown up in, love letters to the beleagured reservation he adored. He called the series Big. His next project was the Painted Desert Project, started with a friend. The work started earning props from those omnipresent street art blogs, and Jetsonorama began an online correspondence with Gaia, another artist who does “site-specific” (often a code word for “something the neighborhood will like”) wheatpastes.

The decision of what to paint is a defining aspect of street artists. Many of the artists at Open Walls like Rome’s Sten and Lex, Argentina’s Jaz, and Capetown’s Freddy Sam, create works that follow a specific artistic canon — like gallery painters, their inspiration can be culled from all over. Others, like Gaia, Jetsonorama, Chris Stain — even the New York artist LNY who dropped through Baltimore for a night to put up his wheatpaste of a boy astride a halo-ed horse — will often choose themes that reflect the geographic location of their work. This approach can often lead to a sense that a piece was created for neighborhood residents, avoiding the fate of pieces like Swoon’s Open Walls wheatpaste of an ancient woman (an Aborigine elder she met in Australia, though that fact was apparent in the finished piece.) The neighborhood, it was said around among the street artists, didn’t really get that piece, found it “creepy.”

Freddy Sam comments on his wall’s reception in Baltimore

To date, Jetsonorama is the only African American artist that is part of the Open Walls, which made his exchanges with neighborhood residents particularly meaningful. 

Indeed, they shaped his time in Baltimore. When Jetsonorama’s first attempt at pasting up Mr. Tony — a neighborhood legend, by the way, known for raising pigeons and wearing quarters in the stretched holes in his earlobes, which Tony will tell you is his change for the payphone — failed on an unprepped wall, he tried again. As he and street artist-festival organizer Nanook worked into the wee hours of the morning on the first draft, the block turned out to support them, telling them how much they liked the piece. So when the wheatpaste refused to stick to the wall, Jetsonorama extended his eight-day trip, eventually staying for two weeks and turning out a second version of Tony and a few other pieces. 

Open Walls Baltimore was all about balancing art and neighborhood – an apt reflection of the city’s plan for those blocks, given that Greenmount West and adjoining Charles North are both parts of the planned Station North arts district. In addition to the half-vacant blocks, Greenmount West is marked by old factories that have been filled with hundreds of working artists. Artists plus low-income renters: an age-old recipe for gentrification.

Those involved with Open Walls are well aware that their project may be a harbinger of higher rents in the neighborhood. “There’s a latent fear of this being one aspect of a changing neighborhood,” festival organizer and 23-year old wheatpaste artist Gaia told me when I interviewed him in his live-work studio space, the chaotic center of Open Walls. 

“Not all developers are totally evil, despite what people may say,” says Ben Stone, executive director of Station North, the area’s arts advocacy organization that is playing a large role in the implementation of Open Walls. Our interview took place at a sidewalk cafe in front of Cafe Bohemian on Charles Street, the bustling center of the North Charles neighborhood that was once the commercial center of the city in addition to being its geographic hub (the bus and train station is a few blocks away.) Stone told me that neighborhood associations envision a future for the area that includes the same number of low income units – but no more. That means that all the infill of those abandoned buildings can be more expensive housing, even “30-story buildings,” Stone says.

Stone tells me that the aim behind Open Walls is to attract real estate developers to the area so more of the empty properties can be turned into housing and other businesses. It also looks to make visible the art scene that is going on in Greenmount West behind the doors like those of the famous Copy Cat, an ex-factory megalith of artist housing. Doing murals out on the street inspires conversation between the street artists and the other residents of Greenmount West. 

Jetsonorama certainly found that to be true. He tells me a handful of stories of neighbors taking pride in the fact that a black man was participating in an endeavor that was seen as being controlled by forces outside the neighborhood. He recounts an exchange that happened while putting up a piece for Open Walls in the Station Village area. A woman stopped at a light, rolled down her car window, and yelled at him the following: 

“That’s nice! I like that. Thank you for sharing your art with us. Be sure to put your name on it when you’re done because if you don’t, the white man will come along and say he did it.”  

A street art festival in Baltimore?

Andrew Lam
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Ever since I visited the Wynwood neighborhood of Miami during the shock and awe of Art Basel 2011, the concept of street art as an agent of neighborhood change has been loitering around my brain space. What does it mean that an art that was once deemed outsider is now on the radar of bankers and real estate brokers alike as a means of increasing property value?

Perhaps no one has looked more into the matter than Gaia, sociological wheatpaste artist and 23-year old organizer of Baltimore’s first large-scale public arts festival Open Walls. Since March, Gaia has coordinated walls by over 23 artists in his neighborhood of half-vacant blocks of row houses and factory buildings, Greenmount West (and the adjacent, less economically-depressed Charles North.) The area has been pegged as an arts district by Baltimore’s cultural organizations – and perhaps more importantly, the bank sponsors of Open Walls. The festival culminates in a Final Friday celebration on May 25.

Gaia thinks a lot about where his murals are placed. For a wheatpaste series he called his Legacy Project, he installed the faces of developers throughout history — Robert Moses, Le Corbusier — often alongside their most damning quotes, on the very urban areas they irrevocably altered with slum clearance. 

I sat down with him to talk in his studio and festival mission control, a ramshackle converted factory space where the bulk of Open Walls’ artists bunk on air mattresses and sometimes – I can personally attest – in the building’s freight elevator. We talked about what the murals would mean to Baltimore, and geeked out on social contradiction.

SFBG: Tell me about Open Walls.

G: It’s not very community involved. It is more of a street art, public art situation where a lot of material for the work is being generated from the neighborhood. But a lot of it is not specific, it’s just about mural-making. I’ve been trying to find a balance as a curator of site-determined work and work that’s not generated by the context of Baltimore.

SFBG: Why is site-specific street art important for a festival like this?

G: One, it provides more access to the artwork for the initial introduction of the piece to the neighborhood. Advertising and street art, we utilize the same signifiers and tools. The difference being, the artwork attempts to communicate beyond the place of sale. The less specific your work is, the closer to guerrilla branding it is, rather than street art or genuine public art. So by working with the history of a place in a manner that’s determined by the space you’re working in, you circumvent the problem of promoting yourself. You’re not just plastering a single image all over the city – that’s a graffiti mentality that is more like straight advertisement.

SFBG: Why do you like living in Baltimore?

G: I like how tough this city is. It feels almost human in scale. You can be on a first name basis with the neighbors. Plus, I can make a living and not have to work two jobs or be a barista rather than focusing on my art. And it has all these secrets that take a million years to find. All the cutty neighborhoods, all the cutty streets…

SFBG: Do you think that there’s any way current residents will be able to keep their space here in Greenmount West, what with all the arts and revitalization movement?

G: Most of the vacant buildings are owned by the government. It all depends on the government. A significant portion of the neighborhood is subsidized housing. When the government decides to flip this neighborhood, that’ll change everything. Most everything you see that is vacant is vacant for a reason – it’s not this mysterious, mystical, organic situation. A lot of them are being held by speculators, Many public, private organizations are responsible for holding onto them so that something could be done to them. For the most part, it’s decades of the waiting game.

SFBG: Did you talk to neighborhood groups before painting started?

G: We talked to the New Greenmount West Community Association. There was a plan that was presented to them, there was an idea of these are the artists and this is where we want to paint. We worked on lining up landlords with an artist that they dig. Balancing that local aesthetic and the more spectacular aesthetic. We’ve definitely had a little negative feedback and a lot of positive feedback. I think people are wary of it because its the most visible aspect of this process of gentrification. People never walk up to a contractor and say ‘Hey you cant build this building,’ but people walk up to murals all the time. It becomes a lightning rod. There’s a latent fear of this being one aspect of a shifting neighborhood.

SFBG: What does Open Walls mean for Baltimore?

G: We’re coming at this project from a lot of different angles. We want to put Baltimore on the map, at least give it some shine. We want to fuel more interest in the local art scene and make visible what happens invisibly inside. Putting it out on the streets, so you know exactly where you’re at. Really it’s just about pushing the envelope in Baltimore. You know, we have so many vacant properties. But this is also about cooperation between stakeholders in this neighborhood.

A year and a half ago my block was two rows of vacant buildings, the abandoned coat factory, and an abandoned green space in front of my house. Now there’s City Arts, which is subsidized living for artists. There’s a lot going on in the neighborhood, a lot of reinvestment.

There’s so many abandoned buildings in Baltimore. I mean it’s suburbanization fueled by the flow of capital and racism. The city went from one million people to a city of 640,000 so there’s a lot of empty space and not much to do with it. The flow of capital comes back around. We have this aesthetic conjuncture of people moving back to the city. We’ve been experiencing divestment for sixty, seventy years now, so its about time.

SFBG: Is that the goal of the festival, to reverse suburbanization?

G: The goal is to make good art work. The goal is to find a balance between interesting, really inspiring, and also intriguing art on the walls – but also to find a balance between that and something that speaks to the neighborhood. I’ve been [placing] the more spectacular, flashy murals on Charles Street. The theater is there, that’s where all the nightlife is. I’ve been keeping it more local on the west side. It’s all about trying to understand the sliding scale of subjectivity. I try to shy away from artwork “by consensus” if you will. 

Watch this space for Caitlin Donohue’s continued coverage of Open Walls including — duh — shots of the actual murals

Artists still puzzling over destruction of international exchange mural

Andrew Lam
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In 2003, artists from a San Francisco-Indonesia cultural exchange painted murals on one of the outer walls of Project Artaud, a non-profit art collective in the Mission that provide live-work studios and exhibition space for artists. Within nine years, the expansive mural became a part of the street’s geography — adorning the street like colorful flowers or trees — and was loved by neighbors and passersby alike. But starting last month, tags started to appear on top of the paintings, and within a 24-hour span, the mural faced its tragic and final destruction.

“It feels like a death,” said Jonah Roll, one of the mural’s artists, during a Guardian interview at his home in Project Artaud. During their interview with the Guardian, Roll and Alejandra Rassvetaieff (another artist whose mural was ruined) attempted, to no avail, to understand the reasoning behind the tagger’s recent actions. With so many other empty street walls, why did somebody choose to tag here? Could it have been a personal attack? And is there ever a worthy excuse that justifies destroying someone else’s artwork? 

“If you consider yourself an artist, I don’t think you can just paint on top of another artist’s work,” commented Rassvetaieff. “It’s sad because the murals in the Mission have been here for years, and it’s something that people should respect.”

Scenes from the mural’s 2003 creation. Photos via Project Artaud

The mural was created in 2003 as part of a collaboration between San Franciscan artists from the Clarion Alley Mural Project and artists from a public art collective in Indonesia (the project also gave birth to murals at Rainbow Grocery, Clarion Alley, and Le Beau Market in Nob Hill. Entitled “Sama-sama/You’re Welcome,” the wall was completed after a cultural exchange that sent CAMP artists to Indonesia, and Indonesian artists here to San Francisco. The wall recieved a Best of the Bay award from the Guardian in 2004 for Best Transnational Art Undertaking.

Although there are rumors as to who may have done the taggings — Rassvetaieff noticed the same signature sprayed on her friend’s mural on Market Street — the artists preferred not to disclose names during the interview. “It coincide[d] with a big tagging of work in Clarion Alley that got destroyed around the same time,” said Roll, “they’re doing it for publicity, to spread their name.”

Graffiti is increasingly becoming accepted as a respected art form — and for many good reasons. It serves as an expressive channel for underrepresented people, especially  youth, and is a kind of satisfying slap in the face of corporate advertising that often mars our streetscapes. But tagging on community murals is not a stance against big business. Individual people dedicated hours towards creating these panels of art. 

“I respect the art form of graffiti — there’s a lot of amazing work out there— but it’s sad when something that has value to our community is destroyed,” said Roll. 

The mural in question was a community project that was self-funded by the seven artists. Roll’s section of the mural was a painting dedicated to the passing of his mother and the birth of his new family. Rassvetaieff’s mural, titled “Happiness,” showed a couple embracing under a starry night sky. She said it was meant to celebrate the soul of the human being. 

But Roll’s love for her work was no match for the endurance of the taggers, who returned again and again to re-tag the wall. “I couldn’t even go out there in the end for the last tags,” concluded Roll. “I was completely exhausted.” 

Perhaps the most regrettable loss of all was Federico “Pico” Sanchez’s colorful watermelons. The esteemed muralist and art community leader recently passed away in November 2011. 

Street art and graffiti should be working alongside each other — challenging traditional notions of art and working together to promote a sense of expressive cohesiveness in the community. Competition is great, if it fuels growth and demands progress. But artists, hone your craft and create an attention-worthy piece. Real talent tends to get noticed — especially on the streets. 

Weary of covering up tags, Project Artaud members eventually painted the wall a solid shade of green. Bummer.

Guardian photo by Marke B.

Arting around: Monthly Polk Street art cruise debuts today

Andrew Lam
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Arting around: Monthly Polk Street art cruise debuts today

Lower Polk has surged forth as one of the city’s more exciting hubs of gallery art. So it’s no surprise that the neighborhood is expanding its quarterly art walk into a monthly event — the Lower Polk Art Walk, which will take over the sidewalks every first Thursday, starting today. 

The beauty of an art walk is that there is no start point or end point — and there’s plenty of chin-scratching and ah-oohing to be done at galleries up and down Larkin and Polk Streets. So throw away your itinerary and let your feet do the planning for you as you peruse the participating eight galleries. Just make sure to meander into the showing by Larkin Street Youth Services, a collection of works by the young people who are participants in its programs geared towards homeless youth. Here’s three other gallery spaces that’ll be worth a look: 

Art installation in former “Leftovers” furniture store

Pretty much, there it is. Chad Hasegawa and other artists are rumored to be involved in this pop-up art exhibit in an old furniture store, repurposing the Polk Street milieu for the debut of this new monthly art event.  

1300 Polk, SF

“Calamity” a solo show by Mary Iverson at Shooting Gallery 

Iverson’s exhibit includes five large-scale oil paintings and six to ten smaller acrylic on panel works, and feature shipping containers superimposed on sublime landscapes. She critiques the tolls that have been taken on the environment for the sake of private profit by integrating cutouts from environmental magazines and basing much of her paintings off views of national parks. Her signature marks are the measurement lines that she leaves sprawling to the edges of the canvas. 

839 Larkin, SF. www.shootinggallerysf.com

“Young and Free” at 941 Gallery

Sun, surf, boxing kangaroos — sorry, that’s reductive, but you do get the general sense of youth and devil-may-care-ity when you think of Australia. Time to move beyond the stereotypes? Check out what is being created Down Under at this group show, which highlights the work of 13 of Oz’s most talented “urban” (the new term for art traditionally on the street that’s being shown into gallery) creatives. 

941 Geary, SF. (415) 931-2500, www.941geary.com

Lower Polk Art Walk

First Thursdays

Thurs/1 6-10 p.m., free.

Polk and Larkin between Geary and Bush, SF

lowerpolkartwalk.blogspot.com

Muralation: Swoon’s wheatepaste is reborn, in color this time

Andrew Lam
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Swoon’s work has been haunting me. On a recent trip to DJ Rusty Lazer’s house in New Orleans it was there, bedecking a rundown Bywater neighborhood fence that concealed a village of homes that can be played as a symphony (she also designed a structure for the mini-city, a dream tree house atop stilts). As one strolls though the world one sees it here, there – fairy webs of delicate wheatpaste strands on city walls. 

So it’s no surprise that the Mission’s been eager to replace the wheatpaste Swoon (also known as Caledonia Curry) installed on Tony’s Market at 24th Street and Hampshire. Rejoice: after the original was defaced in August 2011, the female street artist’s new piece will finally adhere to Tony’s on Tue/28.

Goddess knows there are superlative female street artists based in San Francisco. Mona Caron, Juana Alicia — but here as in other places in the world women still (still!) haven’t gained the firmest of footholds in the street art world. Swoon is probably the best-known XX-chromosoned public artist out there, along with NYC’s Lady Pink.

So it was nice to have her around the city. Mission Local’s Molly Oleson penned a rather lovely little account of how Swoon’s piece — originally an image of a woman who had been kidnapped in Mexico’s spates of femicide — came to be on 24th Street and Hampshire. It has to do with Chicken John’s house, says Chicken John. 

The neighborhood liked it very much. But in one of the more bizarre cases of vandalism I’ve heard of, someone wrote the word ‘VOTE’ over it in big, artless red letters last August. Subsequent efforts to scrub off the letters half-obliterated Swoon’s work, so a team of concerned creative types including street art book editor Annice Jacoby, Lesley Freeman, and Chicken John contacted Swoon for a replacement, which she was reportedly happy to make. Oleson’s story includes a slightly humorous retelling of the moment when the team realized the replacement piece Swoon had sent wasn’t going to work out — happily for San Francisco, she was happy to create a second version of the replacement. 

This version, Swoon says in an artist’s statement, is a commentary on water issues surrounding the Gulf disaster in New Orleans. And the rendering that’s been done of the piece shows that its in color, not always the case in Swoon’s body of work. You’re welcome to go check out the piece getting put up tomorrow, and hear more about the inspiration behind the design in the video Swoon shot for Time Out New York below: 

Swoon mural re-installation

Tue/28 noon, free

Tony’s Market

24th Street and Hampshire, SF

 

Bounce to this: Rusty Lazer does Mardi Gras

Andrew Lam
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Due to health problems, Big Freedia had to cancel her and Rusty Lazer’s Noise Pop gig at Public Works Sat/25. The event been transmutated into a big gay dance party with Double Duchess, DJ Bus Station John, and more. You should still read this interview, though.

With all its technicolor thrift flair, Mardi Gras costumes in state of midway-preparedness, and sleepy passels of breakfast-cooking houseguests, Jay Pennington’s New Orleans clapboard house is pretty hallucinatory on the Saturday afternoon of Carnaval weekend. Staring out the window waiting for the bounce DJ to call me up for our interview, I was to be excused for imagining that the shed in the side lot was producing actual chords while the New Orleans monsoon that raged outside hit it.

When I come across him in his bedroom, Pennington – who is also known as Rusty Lazer, and is the now-famous transgender NOLA bounce artist Big Freedia’s DJ and informal manager – is threading colored paper onto a string. He was going to be Hanuman the monkey god at the Mardi Gras parades on Sunday, his day off from work over Mardi Gras weekend. Around him, the city has ballooned with tourists and locals chucking beads at targets, high-stepping through brass numbers, eating frosted king cake, and peeing in inappropriate places.

I braved the rain that afternoon to talk about bounce music and Mardi Gras with Pennington, so it was kind of a surprise when our conversation swerved into the intricacies of 501(c)3 registration. It shouldn’t have been. He is a lot like New Orleans itself, a town that counts as a centuries-old melting pot, where the frat boys hang at the same bars as the career jazz musicians hang at the same bars as the pretty queer kids who sometimes party at dark gay leather bars (I was privy to this last comingling within six hours of landing in the Big Easy, at Daddy Aki’s Peacock party at the Phoenix Eagle Leather Bar where Pennington and his new managee Nicky Da B spun). [Correction: An earlier version of this article identified Peacock as Jay Pennington’s party. It is actually organized by Daddy Aki. Our bad.]

If you are a NOLA entertainer, Mardi Gras weekend counts among the most hectic of the year. Pennington had evenly informed me that my suggested meet-up time of noon was at least two hours too early considering the aftermath of the night shift on the decks he’d pulled before and that he would surely pull again that evening. But it’s two thirty now and for the moment, he’s able to focus on Hanuman, and attempt to tell me what’s so special about his city.

Hands-on Hanuman: Rusty Lazer in mid-Mardi Gras repose. Guardian photo by Caitlin Donohue

Though the DJ is playing less and less a role in Big Freedia’s career as she blows up and sells out shows around the country, Pennington continues to be a driving force in bounce’s dispersal outside NOLA. He signed his first official managerial contract with Nicky Da B, an adorable local whose track with Diplo hit Soundcloud last week. Bounce is indigenous to New Orleans — like Chicago’s juke and Detroit’s jit — a Caribbean-inflected dance music that is well known for the way its dancers pop their hips at machine gun rates.

Pennington is also is the co-founder along with Delaney Martin of New Orleans Air Lift, an international program he made to support local artists post-Katrina. This loosely-incorporated organization (it’s not 501(c)3 and relies instead on private donations, like the sales of the work of Swoon, one of the few females in the upper echelons of the street art world – her intricate, delicate wheatpastes blanket the fence next to Pennington’s house.) The Airlift Project has sponsored trips by New Orleanian artists to Berlin, even the import of Siberian breakdancer Ivan Stepanov to New Orleans.

This last story illustrates one of Pennington’s biggest turn-ons — fostering the artistic combustion that happens when a bunch of different energies get together. As illustration, he shows me a high fashion video shoot made by Lady Gaga’s stylist Nick Knight featuring the 19-year-old local bounce dancer Quack. 

After seeing a video of the improbably Barbie-bodied dancer, Knight contacted Pennington to ask if she’d care to do the same dance wearing Alexander McQueen for a fashion film series. Quack didn’t have a passport, but she went and got one with Pennington. The next day they went to London, found themselves “sitting in a room with nothing but Amazonian models.” Quack danced for eight hours to make the video, which turned out to be a testament to not just the extreme sexuality of bounce music, but also its athleticism, and emotional panacea. 

“This is the music that makes people forget that they’re hungry,” Pennington tells me, excitedly clicking through videos of schoolkids bouncing in rec centers, and endless YouTube clips of home bounce practice, done against a wall, ass to the camera. “It’s finally tuned to helping you forget your problems.” He wants to “take a New Orleans plane full of people all over the world,” to teach bounce to the masses. “In case anybody around here has forgotten how to have fun.”

The music lends itself to teaching — singers often give specific commands in songs, a popular request being for everbody to bend over and keep their ass popping. “Bounce is all instructions,” Pennington says.

The ability to move among social groups is one of the reasons why Pennington fell in love with New Orleans. 

“Here, you’re part of a community, not just part of a scene,” he reflects. “The difference is that the communities include all the people in your community. I don’t feel that in Portland or Austin.” He says the young arrivals in other artsy, liberal towns “hang out in mirrored social groups. I don’t know if that means anything, but it makes sense to me.” Pennington considers the neighborhood connections he’s made through participating in NOLA’s famous informal second line parades as, if not more, crucial than the ones he’s made with fellow travelers who have alit upon New Orleans as a haven for weirdos and music freaks. “New Orleans black community is nothing if not family-oriented,” he says.

Those mirrored social groups are a concept that should make sense to those beyond DJ Rusty Lazer. Part of what makes gentrification such a bummer is that when young bohos move into low-rent, family-oriented neighborhoods, they don’t form connections with the existing culture, imposing their own wacky adventures on top of the landscape as though they’re the first to really enjoy it. 

This missed connection leads newcomers away from frequenting established neighborhood businesses, and doesn’t provide for enough interconnectedness to get any kind of organizing come when rents start to rise and the condos come in. So good for New Orleans, and especially the rapidly changing Bywater neighborhood if they can avoid the typical storyline of minority community attracting broke artists attracting yuppies who can pay first, last, second, and third months’ rent in cash. 

Not the town doesn’t have other defense mechanisms. “The heat, the bugs, that lack of industry, the violence — that keeps it from growing out of control,” says Pennington. “It keeps the excessively ambitious away. When this place piles it on, it really piles it on. You can’t just casually live in New Orleans.” Wise words to the San Franciscan exodus that will surely come in the next months after tech boom 2.0. 

And for the record, I wasn’t hallucinating the house making music. The Ninth Ward’s musician mad scientist Quintron installed a rain organ into the Music Box, a small village of structures built in Pennington’s sideyard by 70 people to be played like a symphony, complete with Quintron playing conductor and a capacity crowd crammed into bleacher seating and crouching amid the structures themselves. At recent performances during last fall, 750 people showed up to watch the show. There was space for 250 in the sidelot. 

This art will move you: 1AM SF Gallery’s homage to truck graffiti

Andrew Lam
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“Graffiti is anti-corporation,” says Optimist, a long time Bay Area street artist in a Guardian phone interview. “Whereas advertisements on billboards are trying to sell you something, graffiti is trying to open your eyes to see who else is alive out there.” Spurred by this love of street art, Optimist partnered up with fellow street artist Plantrees to curate “Truck Show SF,” a group show which opens at 1AM SF gallery on Fri/10.

At the root of graffiti is an earnest longing for social emancipation, self-expression, and communication. Sadly, graffiti writers are often misunderstood, seen as vandals or gang members. “Truck Show” was put together to fight these stereotypes. The group show is a look at graffiti writers’ move from tagging on subway trains to box-style delivery trucks, and how this transition represents the ceaseless human desire for self-expression and unrestricted communication.

By making the show a charity event, Optimist says he wants to show that graffiti isn’t about “the ego or the fame of the name,” but is something that has the potential to serve as a creative outlet for the youth. “Truck Show SF” will feature 80 Bay Area writers. All profits will be dedicated to the non-profit organization Visual Element, a visual arts program in East Oakland that uses graffiti and mural painting programs to empower high school students.

The graffiti writers in the show range from burgeoning young artists to people who have been involved in graffiti for over 20 years. The sheer number of different individual artists who are coming together for a greater cause is notable. “People always say graffiti writers are taking away from society and they’re selfish,” adds Optimist. “This is a chance for graffiti writers to still do graffiti but at the same time give back to the younger generation who really needs the help.”

Graffiti has been around forever, of course. But long after the cave painting days, the art form experienced a rebirth in the 1970s and ‘80s in New York when a miserable economy bred social dissatisfactions in inner-city neighborhoods. During that era, the idea of the subway train as a moving canvas that could extend writing to the farthest corners of a city took hold. But due to transit regulations and chemical buffering methods which made it nearly impossible to spray on subways, graffiti had to conquer new ground. Optimist says that “the art of graffiti [has transitioned] from underground to up above ground and in to the streets.” Nowadays, you’ll see more graffiti on delivery trucks, which zoom through inner cities all throughout America.

“Graffiti is mostly concerned with letters and hand writing, so it’s all about inventing your own style to express yourself through the confines of the letters,” Optimist continues.

With “Truck Show,” Optimist wanted to show just how completely those confines could be ruptured. The exhibit showcases not only classic letterings, but the emerging style of graffiti shown in galleries.

One of the show’s artists Leon Loucher gets self-referential — he painted an entire night scene as the backdrop behind a figure spraying the first stages of his graffiti piece on a truck. Another artist, Alex Pardee, is more set on experimenting with surrealism. He paints insect-like creatures that burst out of trucks. Artists like Saze used the opportunity to make humorous responses to anti-graffiti sentiments, creating cut-outs of infamous buffers like Jim Sharp, placing the images in front of toy models and paintings of trucks.

“Graffiti is all about the moment,” says Optimist. And although the gallery is removed from the city streets, the pieces it will feature aim to capture the dynamism, action, and spontaneity that drive street art. To emphasize the liveliness of the art form, the actual sides of tagged trucks were brought in and placed amongst a collaged installation to grace the walls of 1AM.

In addition to the obvious similarities of a graffiti-themed art exhibition, Optimist was able to connect the street scene with his 1AM show by virtue of limited resources. “Graffiti writers usually have to deal with their work being next to or in the same space as [pieces done by] people they dislike.” He hopes that this show will achieve something the streets often fail to do, which is to create “a collective of graffiti writers who are joining forces to give back to something much greater – the youth.”

 

“Truck Show SF” opening reception

Fri/10 6:30 – 9:30 p.m., free.

1AM Gallery

1000 Howard, SF

(415) 861-5089

www.1amsf.com

 

Wall played

Andrew Lam
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Wall played

Also in this issue, Guardian writer Matt Sussman on who got the hype — and who earned it — in the galleries at Art Basel Miami 2011

VISUAL ART The popular face of Miami is made of aqua blue views and chrome rims, but the parts of Wynwood that haven’t been covered by murals yet look more like asphalt and the muted tones of low-cost rentals. Since the 1950s it’s been largely a Puerto Rican neighborhood. It’s also where many African Americans moved when they got priced out of the Overtown neighborhood to the south, where they were originally relegated by Jim Crow laws.

But, in a high-low art tornado last month, Wynwood is also where I learn that the popular legend labeling the Mission District the neighborhood with the most densely-packed street art in the world is total bunk.

Wynwood’s main drag Second Avenue is Clarion Alley on acid. Having come straight from Miami International Airport, my rental car barely inches down the strip, so omnipresent are the weaving, goggling packs of urban art voyeurs in oversized silk shirt-dresses and vertiginous wedge heels or where’d-you-get-’em sneakers. The only sign of the neighborhood’s year-round residents are the sporadic flaggers in self-bought orange vests waving cars into parking spots.

Angry sharks, Persian cat-women, color-washed streetcars, and owls sitting shotgun in convertibles — sometimes layered on top of each other — grace walls here. Designs pour off walls and onto the sidewalk. Here, the fairytale nymphs and walking houses of Os Gemeos on a fancy restaurant; there, a massive black-and-white photo wheatpaste by JR of bulging, watching eyes that echo the look of passers-by. I nearly break my neck on Mexico City artists Sego and Saner’s horned beetle-men, who clutch amulets and wear fanged leopard masks on the backs of their heads. Absolut Vodka has occupied a parking lot with a temporary open-air club, dotting it with human-sized aerosol cans and fencing it off with chainlink. It’s enough to make any street art fan lose their shit, or at least the rental car.

I’ve parachuted into the middle of Miami’s yearly art inferno, a.k.a. the week that the Art Basel art fair comes to town. Since 2002, this Swedish import has filled Miami Beach Convention Center with astronomically-priced works from over 260 international galleries. Umpteen ancillary art and design fairs populate deco hotel-land and its surrounds during this time — the city becomes one largely, loudly turned-out gallery opening.

Wynwood, with its surplus of 80-foot blank walls, hosts many an art collection — but it’s most visible contribution to the scene is its dense network of murals. Of these, the undisputed center is a compound of buildings grouped around a courtyard of marquee works dubbed Wynwood Walls. The properties were purchased by (in)famous neighborhood rejuvenator Tony Goldman in 2004. Many hold Goldman responsible for the gentrification of Soho, South Beach, and city center Philadelphia.

Wynwood Walls is his carefully orchestrated attempt to use the allure of street art to change the area’s economic fortune. Shortly before Art Basel 2011, Goldman produced a series of YouTube shorts dubbed “Here Comes the Neighborhood,” in which longtime graffiti photographer Martha Cooper cheerfully opines “Now we’ve got something [street art] that people are calling the biggest art movement in history of the world. And it just might be.”

The night of my arrival, the amount of in-progress murals at which the crawling traffic gives one an opportunity to gawk is striking. At least a dozen artists labor within a four-block radius, greeting fans, drinking beers and staring up at their half-finished creations contemplatively.

Such was the mood in which I find Buenos Aires street artist Ever, who along with an assistant is completing a massive wall featuring two disembodied heads emitting his signature riotously colorful cognitive mapping hives, which in the past he’s painted emerging from the brains of Mao Tse-Tung and his own younger brother. Ever was flown up by a community-based Atlanta street art festival, Living Walls, to paint a Second Avenue parking lot wall as part of the festival’s first project outside of Georgia.

It’s not his first international street art festival, but Ever is among the artists under-impressed with the Basel-time scene in Wynwood.

“It’s like the alcohol. I hate the shit — but one drink more!” We talk when the dust of Basel has long settled; Ever, fellow street and gallery artist Apex, and I perched around Apex’s studio in a Market and Sixth Street garment factory building.

Apex, who has been to Miami during Basel week four times, and twice to paint the crystallized, color-saturated “super burner” murals he is known for, explains that for him, the problem is exploitation. Street artists typically paint walls for a pittance or for free, in a neighborhood where businesses are making boatloads of money off spectators that come to marvel.

“You have, like, Tony Goldman, he gives a certain amount of money, property owners make money, but artists, a few make money,” Apex explains. “The rest, no. Artists get caught in the excitement of it. But who is getting paid off of it?”

“Who wins,” Ever adds.

“If someone is making money off of it, you should know who that is,” concludes Apex.

But the two artists agree that Art Basel week is an excellent education in the workings of the high art world for aspiring professionals, and that the camaraderie that flourishes between street artists can be important, inspirational.

And of course, the parties. Basel is known for them — 2011 featured everything from the $200-a-ticket “Fuck Me I’m Famous” David Guetta show to surprise kudos for the partykids from Pharrell onstage at Yelawolf’s Saturday night gig at a castle-shaped outdoor club in Wynwood. On my first night in town, the whole Living Walls gang — organizers, artists, errant alternative journalist from San Francisco — pile into cars and hit the Design District to check out the opening of the group show of Primary Flight, a local collective that got its start commissioning murals wall-by-wall in Wynwood.

“We started noticing we weren’t the breadwinners of the galleries,” Primary Flight founder Books Bischof tells me in a phone interview. “It was like fuck you, we’re going to take to the streets. We’re all curators in a sense, so we might as well get up and be seen.” Bischof logged time connecting with local graffiti crews and Wynwood’s homeless population to make sure he had community support for bringing the art crowd into the neighborhood during Basel week. He somewhat resents Goldman’s “just buy it” approach. “When we learned about [his Wynwood building purchases] we were like, well that’s kind of fucked.” (Though officially the two camps exist amicably, Goldman told me he upon arriving in the neighborhood he found Primary Flight’s piecemeal approach to its murals “helter-skelter.”)

But along with Wynwood’s art scene, Primary Flight has grown. In addition to its mural program — through which Apex painted his 2011 Miami wall — attendees at the collective’s gallery space could take in traditional paintings and sculptures, but also Mira Kum’s “I Pig, Therefore I Am” installation featuring the artist in the nude, living with two pigs in a small enclosure for 104 hours. “We represent artists with a street art, fuck you swagger,” comments Bischof.

Things are much more established now in Wynwood, which by most counts serves as Miami’s arts district year-round. There are expensive coffeeshops and bars, fine restaurants, precious florists, and blocks of galleries selling accessible art. (During Art Basel week, one of these is given over to an artist who specializes in kawaii food art printed onto affordable decals and posters. An entire wall is covered in swirly-topped ice cream cones in a hundred color options.)

Though professional street art certainly existed prior to his engagement, this upscaling can largely be attributed to Goldman’s speculative interest. Goldman’s PR agency sends me press materials dubbing Wynwood “the next great discovery in the Goldman Properties portfolio.” His company’s general methodology is to buy up historic buildings in socioeconomically depressed neighborhoods and fill them with upscale businesses that attract more pedestrian traffic.

There is little doubt that Goldman envisions the future of Wynwood as a place where housing units rent for far more than many of its current residents can afford. His team has spent considerable time and effort working with Miami’s city council on creating live-work zoning in Wynwood (not unsimilar to the type of zoning that loaded San Francisco’s SoMa with high cost condos). After the Basel hangover has dissipated, I get a chance to talk with him.

“When I went to Wynwood and I had boxy warehouse buildings, it was a much different challenge for me,” says Goldman during our decorous phone interview. “Now I could be free. Some people would look at ugly buildings and empty parking lots and loading zones — what I saw was an international outdoor street art museum. Huge canvas opportunities.” He bought six of those buildings in the center of the neighborhood, two of which now house spendy restaurants run by his son and daughter.

Goldman is not completely without street art cred. Since 1984, he has owned a massive wall on Manhattan’s Bowery and Houston Streets that has hosted murals from Keith Haring, Barry McGee, and Shepard Fairey. “[Street art] is freer in a lot of ways than walking in a museum, which a lot of street artists consider graveyards,” he says. “Not that I agree with them, not that I disagree with them either. I think Wynwood Walls is one place that has validated the art form as an important contribution to contemporary art.”

But Wynwood Walls also serves as the main attraction to an area in which Goldman Properties has monetarily invested. “It [is] a center place that the arts district really didn’t have, a town square, a centerpiece that was defined architecturally,” reflects Goldman. “It served its purpose.”

But perhaps this use of street art as tool of gentrification is not so incongruous. After all, most if not all professional street artists are able to create murals only by selling gallery-ready pieces. Ever tells of painting a mural for Coca-Cola with studiomate Jaz, only to use his paycheck to create three more public walls. “The reality of art is you always need a rich person,” he says.

Which is, more or less, to say that even in Wynwood, professional street art is not entirely soulless. Take for example one of Ever’s favorite Wynwood pieces, done by Spanish artist Escif. The wall was so popular, in fact, it merited a cameo in a “Here Comes the Neighborhood” episode. And not for its bright colors or revolutionary design; it’s just black capital letters on a flat white background.

But it does have a pretty direct message for good-intentioned folks in Wynwood. It says: “Remember, u’re not doing it for the money.”

What recession?

Andrew Lam
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What recession?

Also in this issue: Guardian culture editor Caitlin Donohue on Art Basel Miami 2011’s street art scene

VISUAL ART Now in its 10th year, Art Basel Miami Beach (ABMB)— the art world’s annual “spring beak” during which power brokers, status-seekers, and a curious public descend on Miami Beach over the first weekend in December — makes for an easy target, engorging South Beach’s already cartoonish version of “living large” by bringing its own cold strains of entitlement, status, and exclusivity.

Perhaps this is what advertising mogul and mega-collector Charles Saatchi decried (somewhat sanctimoniously) as “the hideousness of the art world” in an op-ed piece for the UK Guardian, conveniently published during the fair’s run. Those who liked to show off certainly did: luxury SUVs continually clogged the viaducts across Biscayne Bay; I counted more blue-chip handbags and heels than in the September issue of Vogue; and there was always buzz of a party or dinner you weren’t on the list for. (Party-crashing is ABMB’s unofficial blood sport).

“I just stopped Tweeting,” remarked a social media manager for a San Francisco museum, as we shared a bleary-eyed ride to the airport on Monday night. “I mean, how many jokes can you make about the money?”

My van-mate’s fatigue was understandable. The fair itself is exhausting, having grown to include some 260 international exhibitors that transform the Miami Beach Convention Center into a warren of aisles and booths, as well as programs of outdoor sculpture, video, and a series of panel discussions and Q&As. And this isn’t even including the aforementioned endless circuit of afterhours soirées.

But his bafflement also pointed towards the way business is done at Art Basel, bringing to mind Marx’s characterization of capital as a kind of magic act. Most of the transactions happened offstage, with a majority of pieces selling before the fair had even opened. As a curator friend jokingly asked, echoing sentiments she has been hearing all weekend from gallery associates: “Where’s the recession?”

There certainly wasn’t much in the way of finger-pointing on the convention center floor. Threats of an Occupy-style protest remained just that. Danish collective Superflex’s giant flags emblazoned with logos of bankrupt banks (at Peter Blum Gallery) attempted to reveal the elephant in the room. They might have been overpowered, however, by the flash of Barbara Kruger’s riotous wall texts at Mary Boone, which proclaimed “Money makes money” and “Plenty should be enough.” The ripest visual metaphor for wasteful abundance was certainly Paulo Nazareth’s “Banana Market/Art Market,” a green Volkswagen van filled with real bananas that spilled out onto the convention floor.

Even though the writing was on the wall, visitors seemed more keen on getting their pictures taken with some of the single-artist installations that were part of the”Ark Kabinett” program. Ai Weiwei’s barren tree made from pieces of dead tree trunks collected in Southern China had almost as long of a queue as Elmgreen and Dragset’s marble sculpture of a neoclassical male nude hooked up to an IV, the centerpiece of Amigos, the un-ambiguously gay duo’s deconstructed bathhouse that took over Galeria Helga de Alvear’s booths.

There were a few welcome surprises: new LA-based artist Melodie Mousset’s mixed-media piece “On Stoning and Unstoning” (at Vielmetter) offered a politically astute and formally bold tonic to the generally conservative, painting-heavy selection, as did older sexually and politically frank pieces by second-wave feminist artists such as Martha Rosler and Joan Semmel.

However, the most exciting art could be found outside the convention center, mainly in the rapidly-gentrifying Wynwood neighborhood which now boasts more than 40 galleries (nearly quadruple the number from eight years ago). Many of Miami’s biggest collectors have followed suit, setting up warehouses in the adjacent Design District where their collections are on view to the public.

“Frames and Documents,” the Ella Fontanalas-Cisneros Collection’s sensitively curated selection of Conceptualist art from the 1960s to the late ’80s— which juxtaposed the work of Central and South American artists with that of their American and European contemporaries — was brimful with lush aesthetic rewards delivered with the barest of means.

I renewed too many loves that afternoon (and found some new ones, as well) to list in full, but another institutional stand-out was the Miami Art Museum’s “American People, Black Light,” a retrospective of Faith Ringgold’s early paintings from the ’60s that capture with unflinching clarity the anguish, ambivalence and rage of the Civil Rights era. Given Ringgold’s profile, it’s shocking that they’ve never been the subject of their own exhibition until now.

Much has been made of the “trickle down” effect ABMB has had on the cultural revitalization of Miami. (Wynwood is the most frequently cited example). The most hopeful and lasting sign I saw of any such change was a few blocks down from the Cisneros collection, at the small gallery Wet Heat Project. For the group show “A Piece of Me” pairs of art students from local high schools had been matched with four mid-career alumni from Miami’s New World School of the Arts. Each student team then conceived, developed, and produced a video installation in response to a piece by their alumni mentor, with both the final video pieces and those works that inspired them on display in the gallery.

What could’ve been a gimmicky set-up resulted in some truly inventive, thoughtful, and original work on the part of the students. Moreover, “A Piece of Me” offers one portable model for bridging the community at large and the art community. As Max Gonzalez, one of the participating students who was on hand, said of his installation, “It was go big or go home for us.”

Next to that vote of confidence, the Miami Beach Convention Center floor — littered with big names and bigger baubles destined for law firm lobbies and penthouse living rooms — seemed that many more miles away.

Matt Sussman writes the Guardian’s biweekly Hairy Eyeball column.

Just gimme the nudes: Art Basel’s pervy side

Andrew Lam
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I dare you to lay your fingers on a city that’s sexier than Miami. The whole urban area is one big infinity pool — Cuban dancing, too-much-is-not-enough cleavage, shiny shirts, flirting in traffic jams. Add Art Basel weekend, when the population of nubile arty types skyrockets and you have yourself an I-saved-my-money-up-to-blow-it-here powder keg. Small wonder that the Miami Convention Center was packed with nudes and nakeds last weekend. Art’s a great excuse to be pervy.

The Convention Center was sexy on Saturday, Dec. 3. There was this vibrating hush in the cavernous building, the result of a massive group of people (the show attracted 50,000 people over the course of four days, according to official festival numbers) trying to be quiet. But it was hard to be quiet when you wanted to yelp in pleasure every 15 minutes. A voluptuous python curling sleepily around a brother from another mother (the latter attached to another man’s crotch). A classic Helmut Newton starlet, leaning coquettishly on a hot rod, Hollywood sign evident in the background. 

From a pure beauty standpoint, what can beat a nude? Like food porn, images of the tropics, and cuddly kitty portraiture, the art of the nude necessitates no graduate level art history seminar to appreciate. It’s flesh. You want to be on it. But you’re in one of the largest makeshift gallery spaces in the world, so try to hid your aesthetic exuberance until the after-party. Lucky for you, there’s quite a few at Art Basel.

There was clothed art there too. I’ve already posted an exploration of Wynwood, Basel’s street art district. And you’ll definitely want to check out my trip to the SCOPE Festival for urban art and rhinestone hamburgers. Shh, there’s a naked in that one too. 

Unless otherwise noted, all images were on display at Art Basel Miami Beach

 


Art Basel frontlines: Thursday night in Wynwood

Andrew Lam
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All I did was program in the coordinates of a wall my friend was painting in the midst of Miami’s mega Art Basel weekend and all of a sudden I’m in mural heaven. Going traffic snail-slow down the Wynwood neighborhood’s Second Avenue (at one time a Puerto Rican enclave, now a place where corner restaurants are popping up with floor-length windows that display spindly humanoid statues clad in multi-colored sweater), all I could see were flood light-illuminated muralists in the finishing stages of turning the street into the most painted lane I’ve ever seen.

The art galaxy has descended upon Miami for the week. It’s a big blender-fuck of small dresses, dyed eyebrows, free drinks (hell yes), and mmhmm, ART. You can read a little bit about the general mayhem in Erick Lyle’s two–part story for the Guardian about 2009’s festival — arts writer Matt Sussman and I will be covering the festival for y’all this year.

Wynwood is serving as ground zero for the street art world, which explains why Art Basel established the “Wynwood Walls” courtyard in 2009 in the neighborhood, though since then side streets and new galleries have added their own murals to the week’s list of must-sees. 

This year, Wynwood Walls has been decked out by names that even the most high brow art lover will recognize: Shepard Fairey, the Brazilian whimsy-worlders Os Gemeos. Retna, the early front-runner for the festival’s 2011 street art darling, has a massive wall here, plastered with his recognizable columns of symbols and big block painting. 

Danilo Gonzalez, a Dominican who moved to Miami two years ago to open his gallery at 2722 Second Avenue, says the weekend is a marked difference from the rest of the year when “it’s really quiet.” Though his gallery featured three modern Dominican artist (including his own thicket of wooden abstract shapes, “Forest”) he says a lot of the art scene here was “too fancy” for his tastes.

Wynwood’s residents get in on the action too — kind of. Though signs of neighborhood art are not forthcoming, many of the neighbors themselves have set up informal valet systems and viewing parties. They’re probably hoping that girl in the Gaga heels is going to trip in front of their lawn. I kind of am too… 

 

Really living at the Life is Living Festival (and now there’s a stage show too!)

Andrew Lam
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Every once in awhile, an festival comes along that seems so seamless, so positive, and so needed that it’s like it sprang from the Bay Area gods. Such an event is the Life is Living Festival, which took over West Oakland’s De Fremery Park last Sat/8 in big, happy puppy pile of art and kids and music. “We began this, but as you can see, it’s expanded so that it’s kind of everyone’s thing now,” says Marc Bamuthi Joseph, the founder of the Life is Living organization which has overseen the event’s growth into yearly happenings in Harlem, Houston, and Harlem. Bamuthi, who helped start the Bay’s pioneering spoken word nonprofit Youth Speaks, seemed as gleeful to be out in the Oakland sunshine as the kids flipping head over heels at the padded beginner’s parkour course set up in one side of the park.

In another corner, a spoken word stage pedal-powered by the velo-minded geniuses of Rock the Bike. In another, a simple floor set up on the grass where drummers pounded away for an all-are-welcome dance show-and-tell. A woman in her forties gyrated joyously in precisely free African patterns. A kid that didn’t go up to my waist breakdanced to thunderous applause, finally sitting down in a folding chair just offstage, rubbing the spot on the back of his head that had just been supporting his entire body in an upside-down spin. 

In between stellar sets by Panamanian-cum-Oaklanders Los Rakas and Questlove, a man took the stage to vocalize what it seemed like many in the crowd were already feeling — that this day, with its serenity and family-friendly vibes, was a big deal for West Oakland. He talked about how we were all standing on a corridor of public land. Across the street was a senior citizen’s center. It was a Saturday and its doors were locked. Was this, the man asked the crowd, acceptable? He encouraged us all to utilize public land as something that could nurture community, not to let it lie fallow. 

Such was the overall message of Life is Living — doing stuff with what we have, while we strengthen our voices to ask for more. What we had wasn’t too shabby — a food justice information area, a health and wellness zone that offered free HIV testing, shows from local hip-hop duo the Coup and Haitian dance troupe Ra Ra Loumen. 

Not to mention another of the festival’s major draws: the Estria Invitational Graffiti Battle. Around the country, Bay Area graff legend Estria Miyashiro has been organizing themed graffiiti contests. Competitors hear the word of the day’s showdown (Saturday’s was “proud”) and create vivid works of aerosol cleverness in an alloted time. When the panel of expert street artist-judges had tallied up their impressions Los Angeles artist Vyal received the day’s top honors for the second year in a row. 

The feel-good event of the year, I’m calling it. And community organizers are in luck: Life is Living directors and artists have come together to produce a performance piece about the festival that will combine its environmental agency, a call to arms for members of underserved communities across the country, and the festival’s graffiti art for visual punch. It starts on Thursday at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Especially if you missed the message on Saturday, it’s a production that demands attention. 

 

“Red Black and Green: A Blues”

Thu/13-Sat/15 and Thu/20-Sat/22 7:30 p.m., $25 ($5 on Thursdays)

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-ARTS

www.ybca.org

 

Check yo’ head: “The Book of Skulls”

Sue Vaughan
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Check yo’ head: “The Book of Skulls”

Sure, it’s still only September, but in my mind (and at Walgreens, have you noticed?) it’s totally Halloween season. What better time to get your bony hands on The Book of Skulls (due in October from Laurence King Publishing, 160 pages, $14.95), Faye Dowling’s new compilation of all things Memento mori? The table of contents page is illustrated by San Francisco’s own Matt Furie, people. Get on this!

The strikingly-designed (dig the nifty “skeleton binding”) Book of Skulls packs a lot into its petite pages. Dowling, a “freelance editor, curator, and art buyer,” draws together a huge array of representations of skulls (in fine art, street art, fashion, rock n’ roll, etc.), all of them visually stirring but with different levels of spookiness.

Page through and you’ll find a Noel McLaughlin photograph of Paris’ catacombs; examples from Noah Scalin’s popular “Skull-A-Day” blog; Boo Davis of Quiltsrÿche‘s “evil quilts,” works by Shepard Fairy and Damien Hirst; plus giant skull skull-ptures, teeny skull minatures, Day of the Dead art, skull murals and graffiti, crystal skulls, jewel-encrusted skulls, skateboard skulls, skull tattoos, biker skulls, Grateful Dead skulls, the Misfits fiend, Skullphone (you know it), and Alexander McQueen and Vivienne Westwood jewelry. (Blessedly, there’s no Ed Hardy.) The Book of Skulls isn’t your typical hefty art book — obviously, it’s aimed at a wider audience, and is potentially something you’d pick up and flip through while in line at Urban Outfitters. So what? It’s a thoughtfully-curated, great-looking book. Read it while eating your way though that bag of Creepy Peepers.  

Film Listings

Andrew Lam
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OPENING

Brighton Rock Writer Rowan Joffe (2010’s The American) moves into the director’s chair for this Graham Greene adaptation, previously filmed in 1947 with an early-career star turn by Richard Attenborough. Joffe’s version updates Greene’s 1938 story to 1964, allowing the brutal actions of small-time hood Pinkie Brown to unfold as Britain’s mods vs. rockers youth riots boil in the background. Don’t get too excited, though — despite a cool premise and even cooler setting, and the presence of veterans Helen Mirren and John Hurt in supporting roles, Brighton Rock rages without a rudder. Pinkie is played by Sam Riley (so good as Ian Curtis in 2007’s Control), who snarls like a sociopathic James Dean and is so transparently hateful it’s hard to root for anything other than his hastened demise. Brighton Rock‘s most memorable element is probably Andrea Riseborough, an on-the-verge young Brit who’s being touted as the next Carey Mulligan. She has the thankless yet showy role of Rose, a naïve waitress who becomes entangled in Pinkie’s web after being in the wrong place at the wrong time. A far-from-storybook ending awaits, and you’ll experience little enjoyment watching the characters claw their way there. (1:51) Embarcadero. (Eddy)

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark If you’re expecting a traditional haunted house story, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark might be a disappointment. The film, which was co-written by Guillermo del Toro, has a lot in common with his Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) — both movies are more dark fairy tale than horror. They follow a young girl who discovers a mystical world around her, much to the disbelief of the adults around her. It’s worth noting that Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is lighter fare: despite all the peril involved, it’s actually pretty fun. Young Bailee Madison, who made such an impression in 2009’s Brothers, is a charming lead, precocious but believable. And Katie Holmes is surprisingly sympathetic in her role as the caring stepmother, a nice switch from the standard fairy tale trope. As with Fright Night, the ad campaign for Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is misleading, so here’s hoping audience members looking for a gory slasher will appreciate a whimsical fable instead. (1:40) California. (Peitzman)

*The Hedgehog You needn’t possess the rough, everyday refinement of the characters of The Hedgehog to appreciate this debut feature by director-screenwriter Mona Achache — just an appreciation for a delicate touch and a tender heart. Eleven-year-old Paloma (the wonderful Garance Le Guillermic) is too smart for her own good, bored, neglected by her parents, and left to fend for herself with only her considerable imagination and a camcorder. She drifts around her fishbowl of privilege, a deluxe art nouveau-style apartment building in Paris, leveling her all-too-wise gaze on its denizens and plotting certain suicide on her 12th birthday — that is until a new resident appears in her viewfinder: a kindly Japanese gentleman Kakuro Ozu (Togo Igawa). He has as much of a connoisseur’s eye as Paloma — the proof is in his unlikely focus of attention, the building’s concierge Renée Michel (Josiane Balasko, resembling a burly Gertrude Stein), who hides her cultured and bookish inclinations behind a gruff, drab exterior. They recognize in each other a reverence for an almost monkish life of the mind, the austere elegance of wabi-sabi, and the transient beauty of rough-hewn imperfection, even in the sleek, well-heeled heart of the City of Light. To the credit of Achache, working with Muriel Barbery’s novel, these unlikely fragile friendships between outsiders take hold in a way that sidesteps preciousness and stays with you long after its pages have turned. (1:40) Clay, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Chun)

Motherland When Raffi Tang (Francoise Yip) learns of her estranged mother’s death, the prodigal-daughter returns to her hometown, San Francisco, only to discover that nothing is as first supposed. Forced to contend with the protracted legal battle between her late mother and re-married father (Kenneth Tsang) as well as an incompetent (and poorly acted) police detective (Jason Payne), Tang drifts, looking distracted, lost, and maybe vaguely concerned throughout the first two thirds of the film. Yip does little to enliven a flat script rife with stock phrases and worn cinematic conventions, and while her emotional distance seems genuine, it’s boring nonetheless. Motherland is, to its credit, an angry movie — director Doris Yeung drew on her own experience with the murder of her mother — but the rage fizzles when it finally does erupt, smothered by uninspired acting and a directionless screenplay. (1:33) Four Star. (Cooper Berkmoyer)

Our Idiot Brother Paul Rudd is the ne’er-do-well sibling to Emily Mortimer, Elizabeth Banks, and Zooey Deschanel. (1:36) Presidio.

*Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure Once upon a time (1987 to be exact), two young men moved to San Francisco from the Midwest. Eddie Lee “Sausage” and Mitchell “Mitch D” Deprey wound up living in a somewhat derelict apartment in the Lower Haight. The paint was peeling and the walls were thin, but the rent was cheap. What Eddie and Mitch didn’t count on was having Peter J. Haskett and Raymond Huffman as their neighbors. “You blind cocksucker. You wanna fuck with me? You try to touch me and I will kill you in a fucking minute.” “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Shut up little man!” The insults, tantrum throwing, and threats of violence coming from next door were constant. Eddie and Mitch started to lose sleep; after one failed attempt at complaining to Raymond’s face (he threatened death), they started tape-recording the endless geyser of vitriol — first, as possible future evidence, but also out of a growing voyeuristic fascination with these two seniors who had to be the world’s oddest and angriest odd couple. The rest is history. Mitch and Eddie started including snippets of Peter and Ray’s bickering on mix tapes for friends. Somehow, the editor of the now-defunct SF noise music zine Bananafish heard a snippet and approached Mitch and Eddie about distributing compilations of the recordings to a large network of found sound fans. Gradually “Peter and Raymond” became known and much-beloved characters. Their warped repartee inspired several theatrical adaptations, short animated films, pages of comic book panels by artists such as Dan Clowes, and even a one-off single from Devo side project the Wipeouters. Matthew Bate’s documentary Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure is much an attempt to comprehensively recount the above long, strange trip from start to finish; it is also the newest chapter in the now 20-year saga of Peter, Raymond, Mitch, and Eddie. (1:30) Roxie. (Sussman)

*!Women Art Revolution Bay Area artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson’s vibrant look back at the first waves of feminist art in the ’60s and ’70s is an extremely necessary and impassioned recounting of a history that perpetually seems to be on the edge of erasure. Mixing old and new interviews with artists, critics, and scholars — many of which are from Hershman Leeson’s own personal archive — !W.A.R. lets those who stood at the frontlines of one the most significant movements in contemporary art tell their own stories. Seeing and hearing the testimonies of the likes of Yoko Ono, Cindy Sherman, B. Ruby Rich, Judy Chicago, Carolee Scheeman, Rachel Rosenthal, and Ingrid Sischy, one after another, is dazzling — like being in the presence of an Olympian summit — even as their overlapping tales of pushback, casual misogyny and outright ridicule from critics, the art establishment, and in some cases, their colleagues, paint a damning picture of just how endemic sexism was, and as the need for a film such as !WAR attests to, in many ways still is. (1:23) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Sussman)

ONGOING

*The Arbor An audaciously conceived and genuinely haunting chronicle of a family, The Arbor reinvents two of the most debased forms of nonfiction film: the venerating portrait of an artist who died young and the voyeuristic confession of abuse. The locus here is the short, bottle-strewn life of Andrea Dunbar, a brilliant playwright whose work distilled the manners and speech of the West Yorkshire housing projects. The Arbor effectively stages some of this work in a park near the same apartments, but the project’s focus is Dunbar’s shambling private life and its devastating effect on friends, lovers, and daughters. Our emotions are strained by their collective fury and grief, but never cheated. Curiously, Clio Barnard accomplishes this by being up front in her manipulations. After collecting interviews with the key players, she cast actors to lip sync the answers — that is, the voices are documentary while the images are staged, an uncanny effect that becomes even more so when Barnard stitches together responses to narrate a single event. The technique is eerie and literally disembodying. In the same way that one affected by trauma may experience a separation from his or her self, so the image of the actor speaking comes unglued from the “real” voice — and so too is there a crucial hesitation in our assigning authenticity to a single, undivided subject. There are shades of Greek tragedy in The Arbor‘s patient, distanced unfolding of its characters’ fates. The speakers are imagined as a chorus, and though the drama is offscreen, long since buried, the pain still lives. (1:34) Roxie. (Goldberg)

*Beginners There is nothing conventional about Beginners, a film that starts off with the funeral arrangements for one of its central characters. That man is Hal (Christopher Plummer), who came out to his son Oliver (Ewan McGregor) at the ripe age of 75. Through flashbacks, we see the relationship play out — Oliver’s inability to commit tempered by his father’s tremendous late-stage passion for life. Hal himself is a rare character: an elderly gay man, secure in his sexuality and, by his own admission, horny. He even has a much younger boyfriend, played by the handsome Goran Visnjic. While the father-son bond is the heart of Beginners, we also see the charming development of a relationship between Oliver and French actor Anna (Mélanie Laurent). It all comes together beautifully in a film that is bittersweet but ultimately satisfying. Beginners deserves praise not only for telling a story too often left untold, but for doing so with grace and a refreshing sense of whimsy. (1:44) Four Star, Lumiere. (Peitzman)

*Bellflower Picture Two Lane Blacktop (1971) drifters armed with “dude”-centric vocabulary and an obsession with The Road Warrior (1981) and its apocalypse-wow survivalist chic. There are so many pleasures in this janky, so-very-DIY, heavy-on-the-sunblasted-atmosphere indie that you’re almost willing to overlook the clichés, the dead zones, and the annoying characters. Seeming every-dudes Woodrow (director-writer-producer Evan Glodell) and Aiden (Tyler Dawson) are far too obsessed with tricking out their cars and building a flamethrower for their own good — the misfits must force themselves out of the metal shop of the mind to meet women. So when Woodrow goes up against Milly (Jessie Wiseman) in a cricket-eating contest at a bar, it’s love at first bite. Their meet-gross morphs into a road trip and eventually a relationship, while the flamethrower nags, unexplained, in the background, like an unfired gun — or an unconsummated, not-funny bromance. These manifestations of male fantasy — muscle cars, weapons, and tough chicks — are cast in a dreamy, saturated, and burnt-at-the-edges light, as Glodell and company weave together barely articulated reveries and bad-new-west imagery with a kind of fuck-all intelligence, culminating in a finale that will either haunt you with its scattershot machismo-romanticism or leave you scratching your noggin wondering what just happened. (1:46) Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Buck This documentary paints a portrait of horse trainer Buck Brannaman as a sort of modern-day sage, a sentimental cowboy who helps “horses with people problems.” Brannaman has transcended a background of hardship and abuse to become a happy family man who makes a difference for horses and their owners all over the country with his unconventional, humane colt-starting clinics. Though he doesn’t actually whisper to horses, he served as an advisor and inspiration for Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer (1998). Director Cindy Meehl focuses generously on her saintly subject’s bits of wisdom in and out of a horse-training setting — e.g. “Everything you do with a horse is a dance” — as well as heartfelt commentary from friends and colleagues. In the harrowing final act of the film, Brannaman deals with a particularly unruly horse and his troubled owner, highlighting the dire and disturbing consequences of improper horse rearing. (1:28) Opera Plaza. (Sam Stander)

Captain America: The First Avenger OK, Marvel. I could get behind 2008’s Iron Man (last year’s Iron Man 2, not so much), but after Thor and now Captain America, I’m starting to get cynical about this multi-year build-up to the full-on Avengers movie, due in May 2012. Can even a superhero-stuffed movie directed by Joss Whedon live up to all this hype? There’s plenty of time to ponder, and maybe worry a little, with Captain America’s backstory-explaining picture now in theaters. Chris Evans stars as the 90-pound weakling who morphs into a supersoldier, thanks to the World War II-era tinkerings of a scientist (Stanley Tucci) and an inventor (Dominic Cooper as Howard Stark, a.k.a. Iron Man’s dad). The original plan for the musclebound shield-bearer (fighting Nazis, natch) gets waylaid a bit when the newly famous Captain America becomes a PR prop for the U.S. government; it’s abandoned entirely when a worse-than-Hitler foe, in the guise of power-obsessed Red Skull (Hugo Weaving), threatens the world. Directed by Spielberg cohort Joe Johnston, Captain America is gee-whiz enjoyable enough, but it’s very nearly the same movie as Thor, which no amount of Tommy Lee Jones (as a sarcastic army colonel) wisecracks can conceal. And here’s an anti-spoiler: there’s no post-credits surprise in this one, so you can bolt as soon as they start to roll. (2:09) SF Center, Shattuck. (Eddy)

Conan the Barbarian Neither 3D (unnecessary) nor Jason Momoa (beefcake-y) are enough to make this Conan the Barbarian competition for the 1982 Schwarzenegger classic. This new take is a barely adequate adventure movie helped along by Rose McGowan’s leering turn as an evil witch with Freddy Krueger claws. Would that everyone involved (including frequent remake director Marcus Nispel) had McGowan’s razor-sharp grasp of tone; as a whole, the film is never quite sure if it’s a camp-tastic voyage (the prologue, containing Conan’s birth and much Ron Perlman nostril-flaring, suggests what might have been) or a semi-straightforward fantasy actioner. A totally forgettable female lead (Rachel Nichols), a he-was-scarier-in-Avatar villain (Stephen Lang), a blah mixture of two tired plots (revenge + “chosen one”) — there’s just not a lot here, aside from a few hilarious lines of dialogue and Momoa’s muscles. He was so great in Game of Thrones, though, I suspect this dud won’t keep his career from skyrocketing. (1:42) 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

Cowboys and Aliens Here ’tis in a nutshell: the movie’s called Cowboys and Aliens — and that’s exactly, entirely what you’ll get. Director Jon Favreau may never best 2008’s Iron Man (actor Jon Favreau will prob never top 1996’s Swingers, but that’s a debate for another time), but that doesn’t mean he won’t have a good time trying. Cowboys is a genre mash-up in the most literal sense; as the title suggests, it pits Wild West gunslingers (Harrison Ford as a crabby cattleman, Daniel Craig as an amnesiac outlaw) against gold-seeking space invaders who also delight in kidnapping and torturing humans. As stupidly entertaining as it is, this is a textbook example of a pretty OK movie that could have been so much better … if only. If only the alien characters had a little bit more District 9-style personality. If only the story had a shred of suspense — look ye not here for “spooky” and “mysterious;” this shit is 100 percent full-on explosions. If only Craig’s comically fine-tooled physique didn’t outshine his wooden acting. And so forth. (1:58) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Eddy)

Crazy, Stupid, Love Keep the poster’s allusion to 1967’s The Graduate to one side: there aren’t many revelations about midlife crises in this cleverly penned yet strangely flat ensemble rom-com, awkwardly pitched at almost every demographic at the cineplex. There’s the middle-aged romance that’s withered at the vine: nice but boring family man Cal (Steve Carell) finds himself at a hopeless loss when wife and onetime teenage sweetheart Emily (Julianne Moore) tells him she wants a divorce and she’s slept with a coworker (Kevin Bacon). He ends up waxing pathetic at a slick nightclub where he catches the eye of the well-dressed, spray-tanned smoothie Jacob (Ryan Gosling), who appears to have taken his ladies man stance from the Clooney playbook. It’s manly makeover time: GQ meets Pretty Woman (1990)! Cut to Cal and Emily’s babysitter Jessica (Analeigh Tipton), who is crushing out on Cal, while the separated couple’s tween Robbie (Jonah Bobo) hankers for Jessica. Somehow Josh Groban worms his way into the mix as the dullard suitor of Hannah (Emma Stone) in a hanging chad of a storyline that must somehow be resolved in this mad, mad, mad, mad — actually, the problem with Crazy, Stupid, Love is that it isn’t really that crazy. It tries far too hard to please everybody in the theater to its detriment, reminding the viewer of a tidy, episodic TV series (albeit a quality effort) like Modern Family more than an actual film. Likewise I yearned for a way to fast-forward through the too-cute Jessica-Robbie scenes in order to get back to the sleazy-smart, punchy complexity of Gosling, playing adeptly off both Carrell and Stone. (1:58) Marina, 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

The Devil’s Double Say hello to my little friend, again— and rest assured, it’s not a dream and you’re seeing double. New Zealand filmmaker Lee Tamahori gets back to his potboiler roots with this campy, claustrophobic look back at the House of Saddam Hussein, based on a true story and designed to win over fans of Scarface (1983) with its portrait of mad excess and deca-dancey ’80s-ish soundtrack. The craziest poseur of all is Hussein’s son Uday (Dominic Cooper), a petty dictator-in-the-making — and, according to this film, a full-fledged murderous pedophile — who chomps cigars and wraps his jaws around schoolgirls while Cooper happily chews scenery. Uday needs a double to sidestep all those troublesome assassination attempts, so he enlists look-alike childhood friend Latif (also Cooper) to get the surgery, pop in the overbite, bray like a madman, make appearances in his stead, and function as a kind of pet human. Never mind Ludivine Sagnier, glassy-eyed and absurd in the role of Uday’s favorite sex kitten Sarrab — Double is completely Cooper’s, who seizes the moment, investing the morally upstanding Latif with a serious sincerity with just his eyes and body language and infusing evil odd job Uday with a dangerous, comic-book unpredictability. To his credit, Cooper imbues such cult-ready, blow-the-doors-off lines as “I love cunt! I love cunt more than god!” with, erm, believability, even as the denouement rings somewhat false. (1:48) Empire. (Chun)

*Final Destination 5 The thing about my undying love for the Final Destination series is that it’s completely legitimate and 100 percent sincere. You know exactly what you’re getting with each new movie, and these films never try to tell you otherwise. Yes, everyone will die. Yes, the deaths will be creative and disgusting. Yes, the quality of acting will be sacrificed for some of the more expensive splatter effects. For those of us who understand what the series is all about, Final Destination 5 is a triumph. It’s gory, wickedly funny, and a notable improvement on previous sequels. Not to mention the fact that Tony “Candyman” Todd gets a beefed-up role. For once, the 3D is actually a big help, with some of the best in-your-face effects I’ve seen. As for non-fans, I can’t say Final Destination 5 has much to offer. You have to embrace the absurdity and the mission statement before you can fully appreciate death by laser eye surgery. (1:32) 1000 Van Ness. (Peitzman)

Fright Night Don’t let the spooky trailer fool you: the Fright Night remake is almost as silly as the original. In fact, it follows the 1985 film closely, as young Charley Brewster (Anton Yelchin) comes to realize that his neighbor Jerry (Colin Farrell) is a vampire. The biggest change is a smart one — this Fright Night transforms late-night TV host Peter Vincent into Criss Angel-type illusionist Peter Vincent (David Tennant). The casting is spot on all-around, and frankly, Farrell is a lot more believable than Chris Sarandon as the seductive bad boy. The only real problem with the new Fright Night — other than the unnecessary 3D — is that it never fully commits to camp the way the original did. There’s a bit too much back-and-forth between serious scares and goofy blood splatters. Luckily, it’s still an entertaining remake that doesn’t crap all over a classic. It’s also a great reminder that vampires don’t have to be moody — remember, they used to be fun. (2:00) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio. (Peitzman)

*The Future Dreams and drawings, cats and fantasies, ambition and aimlessness, and the mild-mannered yet mortifying games people play, all wind their way into Miranda July’s The Future. The future’s a scary place, as many of us fully realize, even if you hide from it well into your 30s, losing yourself in the everyday. But you can’t duck July’s collection of moments, objects, and small gestures transformed into something strangely slanted and enchanted, both weird and terrifying, when viewed through July’s looking glass. Care and commitment — to oneself and others — are two vivid threads running through The Future. Cute couple Sophie (July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater) — unsettling look-alikes with their curly crops — appear at first to be sailing contently, aimlessly toward an undemanding unknown: Jason works from home as a customer-service operator, and Sophie attempts to herd kiddies as a children’s dance instructor. But enormous, frightening demands beckon — namely the oncoming adoption of a special-needs feline named Paw-Paw (voiced by July as if it’s a traumatized, innocent child). Lickety-splitsville, they must be all they can be before Paw-Paw’s arrival. The weirdness of the familiar, and the kindness of strangers, become ways into fantasy and escape when the couple bumps up against the limits of their imagination. This ultra-low-key horror movie of the banal is obviously remote territory for July (2005’s Me and You and Everyone We Know). The Future is her best film to date and finds her tumbling into a kind of magical realism or plastic fantastic, embodied by a talking cat that becomes the conscience of the movie. (1:31) California, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Glee: The 3D Concert Movie (1:30) 1000 Van Ness.

The Guard Irish police sergeant Gerry Boyle (Brendan Gleeson) is used to running his small town on his own terms — not in a completely Bad Lieutenant (1992) kind of way, though he’s not afraid to sample drugs and hang with hookers. More like, he’s been running the show for years, and would prefer that big-city cops stay the hell out of his village. Alas, a gang of drug smugglers is doing business in the area, so an officious group of investigators from Dublin (horrors!) and America (in the form of an FBI agent played by Don Cheadle) soon descend. His mother’s dying, his brand-new partner’s missing, and between all the interlopers on both sides of the law, Boyle’s having a hard time having a pint in peace. Good thing he’s not as simple-minded as all who surround him think he is. Writer-director John Michael McDonagh (brother of playwright Martin, who directed 2008’s In Bruges — also starring Gleeson) puts an affable Irish spin on what’s essentially a pretty typical indie comedy, with some pretty typical crime-drama elements layered atop. Boyle’s character is memorably clever, but the film that contains him never quite elevates to his level. (1:36) Embarcadero, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Gun Hill Road Though the visibility of gays and lesbians in cinema remains (largely) confined to independent film, Rashaad Ernesto Green, in his debut feature Gun Hill Road, uses the creative freedom afforded by that closeting to explore issues of race and confused sexuality amid the Latino population of the Bronx. Esai Morales is Enrique, a former drug dealer returning from prison to his wife Angela (Judy Reyes) and teenage son Michael (Harmony Santana). But everyone seems to have moved on with their lives. Angela is having an affair, and Michael has created a new persona, Vanessa. Green’s film focuses on the relationship between the damaged Enrique and Michael, whose cross-dressing and budding transsexuality puts the family members at odds. Nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and an entry in this year’s Frameline Film Festival, Gun Hill Road is one in a recent spate of films that deals with coming out in an urban setting. Like Green’s film, Peter Bratt’s La Mission (2009) offered a picture of homophobia in the Latino community. But Gun Hill Road, despite its bulging dramatic heft, shirks the after-school-special formula of La Mission by imagining complex characters rather than hewing them from instantly recognizable, sympathetic archetypes. (1:28) Sundance Kabuki. (Ryan Lattanzio)

*Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 Chances are you aren’t going to jump into the Harry Potter series with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2. So while the movie is probably the best Harry Potter film yet, it’s more a fitting conclusion than a standalone film. For fans of the books, there are no real surprises — this is a close adaptation. And for those Harry Potter movie fans who haven’t read the books, shame on you, and kudos if you managed to not get spoiled. It’s hard for me to offer a serious critical analysis of Part 2, because it represents the end of a long and very emotional journey. (Everyone in that audience was crying. Everyone.) I will say that, as was the case in the book, there are a few overdone, schmaltzy moments that aren’t really necessary. But in the context of the series, they’re forgivable — this may not be the great cinematic event of our generation, but Harry Potter as a whole is sure to be one of our most enduring cultural icons. (2:10) 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

The Help It’s tough to stitch ‘n’ bitch ‘n’ moan in the face of such heart-felt female bonding, even after you brush away the tears away and wonder why the so-called help’s stories needed to be cobbled with those of the creamy-skinned daughters of privilege that employed them. The Help purports to be the tale of the 1960s African American maids hired by a bourgie segment of Southern womanhood — resourceful hard-workers like Aibileen (Viola Davis) and Minny (Octavia Spencer) raise their employers’ daughters, filling them with pride and strength if they do their job well, while missing out on their own kids’ childhood. Then those daughters turn around and hurt their caretakers, often treating them little better than the slaves their families once owned. Hinging on a self-hatred that devalues the nurturing, housekeeping skills that were considered women’s birthright, this unending ugly, heartbreaking story of the everyday injustices spells separate-and-unequal bathrooms for the family and their help when it comes to certain sniping queen bees like Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard). But the times they are a-changing, and the help get an assist from ugly duckling of a writer Skeeter (Emma Stone, playing against type, sort of, with fizzy hair), who risks social ostracism to get the housekeepers’ experiences down on paper, amid the Junior League gossip girls and the seismic shifts coming in the civil rights-era South. Based on the best-seller by Kathryn Stockett, The Help hitches the fortunes of two forces together — the African American women who are trying to survive and find respect, and the white women who have to define themselves as more than dependent breeders — under the banner of a feel-good weepie, though not without its guilty shadings, from the way the pale-faced ladies already have a jump, in so many ways, on their African American sisters to the Keane-eyed meekness of Davis’ Aibileen to The Help‘s most memorable performances, which are also tellingly throwback (Howard’s stinging hornet of a Southern belle and Jessica Chastain’s white-trash bimbo-with-a-heart-of-gold). (2:17) Balboa, California, Empire, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Midnight in Paris Owen Wilson plays Gil, a self-confessed “Hollywood hack” visiting the City of Light with his conservative future in-laws and crassly materialistic fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams). A romantic obviously at odds with their selfish pragmatism (somehow he hasn’t realized that yet), he’s in love with Paris and particularly its fabled artistic past. Walking back to his hotel alone one night, he’s beckoned into an antique vehicle and finds himself transported to the 1920s, at every turn meeting the Fitzgeralds, Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), Dali (Adrien Brody), etc. He also meets Adriana (Marion Cotillard), a woman alluring enough to be fought over by Hemingway (Corey Stoll) and Picasso (Marcial di Fonzo Bo) — though she fancies aspiring literary novelist Gil. Woody Allen’s latest is a pleasant trifle, no more, no less. Its toying with a form of magical escapism from the dreary present recalls The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), albeit without that film’s greater structural ingeniousness and considerable heart. None of the actors are at their best, though Cotillard is indeed beguiling and Wilson dithers charmingly as usual. Still — it’s pleasant. (1:34) Albany, Four Star, Embarcadero, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

*My Perestroika Robin Hessman’s very engaging documentary takes one very relatable look at how changes since glasnost have affected some average Russians. The subjects here are five thirtysomethings who, growing up in Moscow in the 70s and 80s, were the last generation to experience full-on Communist Party indoctrination. But just as they reached adulthood, the whole system dissolved, confusing long-held beliefs and variably impacting their futures. Andrei has ridden the capitalist choo-choo to considerable enrichment as the proprietor of luxury Western menswear shops. But single mother Olga, unlucky in love, just scrapes by, while married schoolteachers Lyuba and Boris are lucky to have inherited an apartment (cramped as it is) they could otherwise ill afford. Meanwhile Ruslan, once member of a famous punk band (which he abandoned on principal because it was getting “too commercial”), both disdains and resents the new order just as he did the old one. Home movies and old footage of pageantry celebrating Soviet socialist glory make a whole ‘nother era come to life in this intimate, unexpectedly charming portrait of its long-term aftermath. (1:27) Balboa. (Harvey)

*The Names of Love Arthur (Jacques Gamblin) is a 40-ish scientist being interviewed about the threat of a bird flu epidemic when his radio broadcast is interrupted by 20-something Baya (Sara Forestier), who denounces him on-air as a “fascist” for frightening the public. But then, Baya tends to use that label rather indiscriminately, applying it to anyone who might conceivably have views to the right of the dial — and Arthur is in fact a solid liberal, which means she can bed him for love. As opposed to the many, many other men she beds as a self-described “political whore,” seeking out conservative types in order to seduce them and hopefully induce an idealogical shift by whispering sweet nothings (“Not all Arabs are thieves,” etc.) as they orgasm. Raised by parents whose emotions are so tightly wound his mother won’t acknowledge her parents were Jews killed at Auschwitz, Arthur has a hard time adjusting to a relationship with a lover who is faithful emotionally but sees promiscuity as her propagandic gift to the world. Meanwhile Baya’s largely Algerian family treats garrulous political argument as the very air they breathe. This odd-couple story written by Baya Kasmi and director Michel Leclerc deals with serious issues in both humorous and respectful fashion, making for one of the more novel, delightful and depthed French romantic comedies in a long time. Added plus: lots of antic gratuitous nudity. (1:42) Opera Plaza, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

*One Day Why do romantic comedies get such a bad rap? Blame it on the lame set-up, the contrived hurdles artificially buttressed by the obligatory chorus of BFFs, the superficial something-for-every-demographic-with-ADD multinarrative, and the implausible resolutions topped by something as simple as a kiss or as conventional as marriage, but often no deeper, more crafted, or heartfelt than an application of lip gloss. Yet the lite-as-froyo pleasures of the genre don’t daunt Danish director Lone Scherfig, best known for her deft touch with a woman’s story that cuts closer to the bone, with 2009’s An Education. Her new film, One Day, based on the best-selling novel by David Nicholls, flirts with the rom-com form — from the kitsch associations with Same Time, Next Year (1978) to the trailer that hangs its love story on a crush — but musters emotional heft through its accumulation of period details, a latticework of flashbacks, and collection of encounters between its charming protagonists: upper-crusty TV presenter Dexter (Jim Sturgess) and working-class aspiring writer Emma (Anne Hathaway). Their quickie university friendship slowly unfolds, as they meet every St. Swithin’s Day, July 15, over a span of years, into the most important relationship of their lives. Despite the blue-collar female lead and UK backdrop that it shares with An Education, One Day feels like a departure for Scherfig, who first found international attention for her award-winning Dogme 95-affiliated Italian for Beginners (2000). (1:48) Balboa, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, SF Center, Shattuck. (Chun)

*Point Blank Not for nothing did Hollywood remake French filmmaker Fred Cavaye’s last film, Anything for Her (2008) as The Next Three Days (2010) — Cavaye’s latest, tauter-than-taut thriller almost screams out for a similar rework, with its Bourne-like handheld camera work, high-impact immediacy, and noirish narrative economy. Point Blank — not to be confused with the 1967 Lee Marvin vehicle —kicks off with a literal slam: a mystery man (Roschdy Zem) crashing into a metal barrier, on the run from two menacing figures until he is cornered and then taken out of the action by fate. His mind mainly on the welfare of his very pregnant wife Nadia (Elena Anaya), nursing assistant Samuel (Gilles Lellouche) has the bad luck to stumble on a faux doctor attempting to make sure that the injured man never rises from his hospital bed. As police wrangle over whose case this exactly is — the murder of an industrialist seems to have expanded the powers of the stony-faced, monolithic Commandant Werner (Gerard Lanvin) — Samuel gets sucked into the mystery man’s lot, a conspiracy that allows them to trust no one, and seemingly impossibly odds against getting out of the mess alive. Cavaye never quite stops applying the pressure in this clever, unrelenting cat-and-mouse and mouse-and-his-spouse game, topping it with a nerve-jangling search through a messily chaotic police station. (1:24) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Chun)

*Rise of the Planet of the Apes “You gotta love a movie where the animals beat up on the humans,” declared my Rise of the Planet of the Apes companion. Indeed, ape must not kill ape, and this Planet of the Apes prequel-cum-remake of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972) takes the long view, back to the days when ape-human relations were still high-minded enough to forbid smart apes from killing those well-armed, not-so-bright humanoids. I was a fan of the original series, but honestly, I approached Rise with trepidation: I dreaded the inevitable scenes of human cruelty meted out to exploited primates — the current wave of chimp-driven films seems focused on holding a scary, shaming mirror up to the two-legged mammalian violence toward their closest living genetic relatives. It’s a contrast to the original series, which provided prisms with which to peer at race relations and generational conflict. But I needn’t have feared this PG-13 “reboot.” There’s little CGI-driven gore, apart from the visceral opening and the showdown, though the heartbreak remains. Scientist Will (James Franco, brow perpetually furrowed with worry) is working to find a medicine designed to supercharge the brain in the wake of Alzheimer’s — a disease that has struck down his father (John Lithgow). When the experimental chimp that responds to his serum becomes violently aggressive, the project is shut down, although the primate leaves behind a surprise: a baby chimp that Will and his father name Caesar and raise like a beloved child in their idyllic Bay Area Victorian. Growing in intelligence as he matures, Caesar finds himself torn by an existential dilemma: is he a pet or a mammal with rights that must be respected? Rise becomes Caesar’s story, rendered in heart-wrenching, exhilarating ways — to director Rupert Wyatt and his team’s credit you don’t miss the performance finesse of Roddy McDowell and Kim Hunter in groundbreaking prosthetic ape face in the original movies — while resolving at least one question about why humans gave up the globe to the primates. One can only imagine the next edition will take care of the lingering question about how even the cleverest of apes will feed themselves in Muir Woods. (1:50) Empire, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Sarah’s Key (1:42) Albany, Bridge, Piedmont.

*Senna When Ayrton Senna died in 1994 at the age of 34, he had already secured his legacy as one of the greatest and most beloved Formula One racers of all time. The three-time world champion was a hero in his native Brazil and a respected and feared opponent on the track. This eponymous documentary by director Asif Kapadia is nearly as dynamic as the man himself, with more than enough revving engines and last minute passes to satisfy your lust for speed and a decent helping Ayrton’s famous personality as well. Senna was a champion, driven to win even as the sometimes-backhanded politics of the racing world stood in his way. A tragic figure, maybe, but a legend nonetheless. You don’t have to be an F1 fan to appreciate this film, but you may wind up one by the time the credits roll. (1:44) Embarcadero, Smith Rafael. (Berkmoyer)

Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness This documentary cuts to the chase right at the beginning: yeah, Sholem Aleichem was the guy who wrote the Tevye stories that inspired Fiddler on the Roof. But filmmaker Joseph Dorman isn’t trying to make Fiddler: Behind the Musical. Instead, he takes an in-depth look at the life, writing career, and cultural significance of “one of the great modern Jewish writers — and our greatest Yiddish writer,” per the film’s press notes. Fans of Jewish lit will be particularly engaged by Sholem Aleichem’s tale; raised in a shtetl in what’s now the Ukraine, he moved around Europe and to the United States pursuing various careers, but always writing the popular stories that addressed not just Jewish life, but broader issues facing turn-of-the-last-century Jews, including the cross-generational conflicts that make up much of Fiddler‘s plot and humor. That said, this film does rely an awful lot on PBS-style slow pans over black-and-white photos and intellectual talking heads; one suspects the subject himself (so devoted was he to entertaining the regular folk who gobbled up his tales) would’ve preferred his life story to unfold in a livelier fashion. (1:33) Opera Plaza. (Eddy)

Spy Kids: All the Time in the World (1:29) 1000 Van Ness.

30 Minutes or Less In some ways, 30 Minutes or Less is reminiscent of 2008’s Pineapple Express: both are stoner action comedies about normal people shoved into high-stakes criminal activity. But while Pineapple Express was an exciting addition to the genre, 30 Minutes or Less is a flimsy 80-minute diversion that still feels like a waste of time. Jesse Eisenberg plays Nick, a pizza delivery boy who is forced to rob a bank after two would-be criminals strap a bomb to his chest. Strangely, Eisenberg was more charming as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network (2010) — and his buddy Chet (Aziz Ansari) doesn’t exactly up the likability factor. There’s actually the potential for an interesting story here: something darker seems appropriate, given that 30 Minutes or Less was inspired by a true story with a very unhappy ending. But the film completely fumbles, delivering an action comedy that’s neither tense nor funny. That means the pizza’s free, right? (1:29) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Shattuck. (Peitzman)

The Tree of Life Mainstream American films are so rarely adventuresome that overreactive gratitude frequently greets those rare, self-conscious, usually Oscar-baiting stabs at profundity. Terrence Malick has made those gestures so sparingly over four decades that his scarcity is widely taken for genius. Now there’s The Tree of Life, at once astonishingly ambitious — insofar as general addressing the origin/meaning of life goes — and a small domestic narrative artificially inflated to a maximally pretentious pressure-point. The thesis here is a conflict between “nature” (the way of striving, dissatisfied, angry humanity) and “grace” (the way of love, femininity, and God). After a while Tree settles into a fairly conventional narrative groove, dissecting — albeit in meandering fashion — the travails of a middle-class Texas household whose patriarch (a solid Brad Pitt) is sternly demanding of his three young sons. As a modern-day survivor of that household, Malick’s career-reviving ally Sean Penn has little to do but look angst-ridden while wandering about various alien landscapes. Set in Waco but also shot in Rome, at Versailles, and in Saturn’s orbit (trust me), The Tree of Life is so astonishingly self-important while so undernourished on some basic levels that it would be easy to dismiss as lofty bullshit. Its Cannes premiere audience booed and cheered — both factions right, to an extent. (2:18) Four Star, Lumiere, Shattuck. (Harvey)

*The Trip Eclectic British director Michael Winterbottom rebounds from sexually humiliating Jessica Alba in last year’s flop The Killer Inside Me to humiliating Steve Coogan in all number of ways (this time to positive effect) in this largely improvised comic romp through England’s Lake District. Well, romp might be the wrong descriptive — dubbed a “foodie Sideways” but more plaintive and less formulaic than that sun-dappled California affair, this TV-to-film adaptation displays a characteristic English glumness to surprisingly keen emotional effect. Playing himself, Coogan displays all the carefree joie de vivre of a colonoscopy patient with hemorrhoids as he sloshes through the gray northern landscape trying to get cell reception when not dining on haute cuisine or being wracked with self-doubt over his stalled movie career and love life. Throw in a happily married, happy-go-lucky frenemy (comic actor Rob Brydon) and Coogan (TV’s I’m Alan Partridge), can’t help but seem like a pathetic middle-aged prick in a puffy coat. Somehow, though, his confused narcissism is a perverse panacea. Come for the dueling Michael Caine impressions and snot martinis, stay for the scallops and Brydon’s “small man in a box” routine. (1:52) Opera Plaza. (Devereaux)

*Vigilante Vigilante Eschewing any pretense of objectivity and adopting a civic-journalism approach, Bay Area director Max Good and producer Nathan Wollman exhaustively explore the issues at stake in the current graffiti and street art scene by focusing on some unexpected, once-hidden antagonists: the so-called buffers, graffiti abatement advocates, and self-styled vigilantes who obsessively paint over graffiti in cities like Los Angeles (Joe Connolly) and New Orleans (Fred Radtke). Good wraps his interviews with well-known street artists like Shepard Fairey, cultural critics such as Stefano Bloch, and graf advocates a la SF author Steve Rotman around his central pursuit: he’s trying to uncover the identity of the Silver Buff, the mysterious figure who has splashed silver over artwork and tags in Berkeley for more than a decade. After capturing the Buff on camera in the wee hours of the morn, the documentarian get his story — it’s Jim Sharp, a stubborn preservationist intent on “beautifying” the blight, tearing down street posters, picking up trash, and covering over what he sees as vandalism, even if he has to damage the property he claims to be cleaning up. In a witty twist on if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em, Good and Wollman ratchet their tale up a notch when they follow Sharp with colorful paint of their own, brilliantly driving home an appeal for freedom of expression and a reclamation of public space. (1:26) Roxie. (Chun)

The Whistleblower (1:58) Opera Plaza, Shattuck, Smith Rafael.


Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Michelle Devereaux, Max Goldberg, Dennis Harvey, Louis Peitzman, Lynn Rapoport, Ben Richardson, and Matt Sussman. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock. 

Bartlett Street showing shades of Clarion

Andrew Lam
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Bartlett Street showing shades of Clarion

We asked Jet Martinez, the mural artist, yesterday at the mural unveiling for “Amate” at the Mission Community Market:

“Soo… it’s all about loving yourself?” [Such is the title’s meaning in Spanish.]

Not really, kind of, not really. The word — depending on where you place the accent — can refer to auto-adoration, or to the brown paper on which many Mexican folk art designs are painted. Whatever the ultimate meaning of the title, Martinez’ new piece (there’s a gorgeous full shot of it here) is easily the most vividly colored wall we’ve seen in this city in a minute — it’s like those scenes in Disney movies where all the woodland forest creatures get frenzied-happy during the climax of a musical number. Make you wonder what song they’re singing.

And there’s more street art where that came from on Bartlett

“Amate” is not the only large-scale street art you should peep on the street (preferably while you’re heirloom tomato shopping with a greasily-transcendent pupusa balanced precariously in one hand). You perhaps know about Ben Woods’ recreation of a 1700s Ohlone mural from Mission Dolores — which sits directly next to Martinez’ creation. 

A few more from the block:

Roa‘s three seals (there’s another stretched out along the bottom of the building, sorry I suck at taking photos) are amazing. 

And here’s a piece which has gotta be by Ben Eine (UPDATE: aaand it is), even though it’s not included on this White Walls map of the recent pieces the British artist painted around the city. Whoever did it, it appears to have garnered the attention of some paint-throwers. 

Word on the street from the Mission Community Market is that the organization is in talks with property owners of the condo-parking lot on the southwestern side of the block to liven up that surface as well. Pretty soon, we may have a block so colorful enough to match the MCM produce stalls. 

Vigilante Vigilante: The anti-anti-tagging movie

Andrew Lam
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Vigilante Vigilante: The anti-anti-tagging movie

Fred Radke buffs Banksy and can’t stand public mural walls, even when they’re meant to inspire  hope in his post-Katrina NoLa. 

Joe Connolly deals with the death of his 11-year old son by zealously trucking around cans of paint and paint-removing chemicals, occasionally throwing up his own tag as a caution sign to the other, bad, graffiti artists.

Jim “Silver Buff” Sharp will even take down signs for lost dogs in his mission to purge Berkeley’s streets of DIY expression.

Meet your anti-graffiti activists, courtesy of a new film by Berkeley producers, Vigilante Vigilante.

The movie, shot over the course of 500-some days by Max Good and Nathan Wollman, gives a breathless history of people writing on walls (including a dubious reference to graff buffers back in the Paleolithic days), right up to modern day Bay Area strife – anybody remember the Warm Water Cove “clean-up”? The timeline focuses on the conflict between taggers and law-and-order types. If, in this age of JR and other highly-publicized and lauded street art, you don’t think is for real anymore, watch this video. 

Good capturing Sharp’s technique

The movie then moves onto Good and Wollman’s mission to expose the unaffiliated lone wolfs who spend their days erasing other people’s works of self-expression. They travel across the country, gaining surprising amounts of access to the three men’s routines.

But as it turns out, Vigilante isn’t down to use the middle-aged to elderly white guys they profile (add to this list a one “Silver Circle” from Portland, who is now retired) as the faces of evil. Instead, the movie couches its critique in the wack broken windows sociological theory – itself a tool used by elite populations to justify wiping clean the visible signs of any disenfranchised citizens. 

By the end of the movie, Good and Wollman are arranging meet-ups between the anti-taggers so that they can swap paint-matching and poster removal techniques. The scene is almost heartwarming: the anti-graffiti vigilantes, with their relentless schedules and dedication to their craft almost win the audience over. Even if we’re a little creeped out by them.

Coca Cola vs. Twist’s tag wall: Which is the visual pollution?

So who is the villan in all this? Vigilante Vigilante finds a plausible symbol of nefariousness: James Q. Wilson, the sociologist behind the broken window theory (the inspiration, by the way, for Rudy Giuliani’s 1990s purging of downtown Manhattan).

The producers were right to do so. For the community member upset that their neighborhood is poor, that their area’s youth are unemployed, that circumstances seem beyond their control, Wilson’s theory successfully obfuscates cause and effect, a standard conservative trick of defeating class consciousness. Graffiti doesn’t cause race riots, poorly-dealt-with natural disasters, or high unemployment rates. Writing on a wall is often the response to a society that belittles minority youth, the middle class and poorer, and anyone who is having trouble with the capitalistic treadmill. Jeff Chang‘s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop is a great place to start if you’re interested in this anti-colonialist view of street art.

The obsessive cover-ups of the vigilantes (that in more than one case have morphed into tags themselves, a fact the filmmakers highlight when they begin covering up Sharp’s silver buffs with neon pink and gold buffs, to his dismay), are ultimately their attempt at regaining control in a world that can seem really mean at times. Which doesn’t change the fact that what they’re doing is lame — can hardly blame this guy… 

Vigilante Vigilante is at the Roxie through Sat/20

 

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