Volume 42 Number 08

November 21 – November 27, 2007

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Pyramental

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› superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO Books are cool, and they can make you taller. Often they even tell you things, things you never thought you’d want to know. They’re like platform heels that talk! But they speak in a flippant whisper, and what they say is delicious.

Sure, books may not be able to dish on how Tyra got rid of her "vag arms" this season (hello, Scotch tape in her hairy pits) or why that one annoying girl on the 22 Fillmore’s still pumping that goddamn "Hot Pocket, drop it" song on her tinny-ass cell phone over and over, a mound of discarded sunflower seed shells scattered around her pastel Superfecta IIs. (Please go download some Lupe Fiasco "Superstar" to your knockoff Chocolate already, sweetie. Seriously. It’s November.)

What books can tell you sometimes is that you’re right. I love that! Take The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art, and Music Drive New York City, by Elizabeth Currid, a new spine that fingerless-gloved intellectuals are cracking all over the Muni. It basically argues that — fuck Wall Street — the arts are the real forces that drive Manhattan’s hopping money market. (Too bad the best new artists can only afford to live in Queens now.) And guess where the linchpins are? Where art, fashion, and music intersect and all the brainy hotties trade lucrative ideas? That’s right: night clubs. All the fabbest deals are made on the dance floor, Ms. Elizabeth says, and nightlife, in which "creative minds set the future trends," should be boosted to top priority by any wannabe successful city, extralegal activities be damned. Of course she’s talking about New York, so her tome’s a tad inapt for our little blow jobs–for–tourists trade show here. But still, nightlife rules! One day it’ll make us all rich and famous! In your face, space coyote.

Speaking of books: I once dated a tech bear. It was the mid-’90s, the Interweb was still shiny, and bears hadn’t morphed into hedge-trimmed candy ravers yet. Don’t hate! Tech bears were hot — I’m still an all-day sucker for them — and this one, like so many others of his ilk, not only could build a Unix server out of two Cherry Coke cans and a pizza box but also spent his nights tripping on krunk and composing ambient electronic odes to his heroes Brian Eno and Arthur Russell. I couldn’t drag his ass onto a dance floor to save my life, but his windowless bedroom in the Tenderloin was a glittery cornucopia of strobe effects and rapid-fire bleeps. Go figure.

If only there had been some kind of school for him to attend, some place that would have guided him toward a career in digital-audio arts before he blew his mind on meth and moved back to the Midwest to become a gay trucker for Montgomery Ward!

Better late than never, maybe; now there is. Pyramind, a full-on media music and production school, is taking over SoMa and providing some of San Francisco’s brightest club-music makers with the skills to conquer the digital world. I recently found myself being chaperoned, somewhat bewildered, through Pyramind’s labyrinthine main campus by director and president Greg Gordon, in the company of old-school dance floor mover and shaker Paul dB. As they led me from one cavernous, soundproofed room to the next, each full of top-flight equipment, giant projection screens, a plethora of enormous monitors, and some mighty fine-looking students, I realized: maybe I should just give up writing and start composing the soundtrack for Halo 4. I could help launch a puke-colored Mountain Dew energy drink in 2009!

My temporary flight of fancy — how could I ever give up getting kind of paid to down well-vodka cosmos and introduce you to several psycho drag queens almost every week? — wasn’t such a pie in the sky. Pyramind’s hooked up with major prestidigitalators like Apple, Ableton, Digidesign, M-Audio, and Propellerhead. Students get possible career leads and exposure to some of the biggest biggies — Pyramind calls these companies "strategic partners," but to me a strategic partner is someone you sleep with to get back at your ex.

But the school is just part of a grand master plan. Pyramind is octopoid, with recording studios, a distribution service, international programs, a music label called Epiphyte headed by industry legend Steffan Franz, a well-established musical showcase–club night called TestPress that’s expanding to other cities (and has spawned an Epiphyte-released CD of bouncy tunes), and, with the recent acquisition of another huge campus a few doors down from the main one, an independent party venue. Pyramind’s stacked. And hey, in case any terrorists were thinking of hijacking any future Pixar productions (although wasn’t Cars terrifying enough?), Pyramind’s got the seal of approval, I shit you not, from Homeland Security. Calling all tech bears: drop that Cheeto and get in the digi-know now.

www.pyramind.com


www.epiphyterecords.com/

Uncuddly Leigh

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Jennifer Jason Leigh is nearly 50 years old. She looks about 15 years younger, yet without that plastic appearance redolent of cosmetic surgery. For a while she was a real movie star, if not quite a popular one, sustaining widely seen films through performances such as her homicidal nut in Single White Female (1992) and tightly wound abuse victim in Dolores Clairborne (1995). Equally memorable, if less seen, were her turns as dirt-dumb yet sympathetic prostitutes in Miami Blues (1990) and Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989), a working-class housewife and mother blasé about her phone-sex day job in Short Cuts (1993), an undercover cop turned junkie in Rush, and the brilliant but dysfunctional Dorothy Parker in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994).

Leigh blazed through ultrastylized retro hard-boiled patter as the female reporter in the Coen brothers’ underrated 1994 flop The Hudsucker Proxy. Who saw her extraordinary performance in Georgia, a painfully astute sibling drama she produced (and her mother wrote) the next year? Hardly anyone. As time passed she could be glimpsed guest-starring on TV’s Hercules and Spawn and retreating into supporting roles (like the wife who gets killed 10 minutes into 2002’s Road to Perdition) when she wasn’t turning to animation voice gigs.

It’s true that mainstream audiences never really embraced Leigh, who enacted real disappointment and displeasure instead of fake romantic bliss while losing her virginity in her first lead role, in 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High. She hadn’t made it easy, unlike the drastically less complicated Julia Roberts. Leigh resisted being ingratiating or easy to understand and consistently played gawky characters in difficult moral circumstances. She was a nervous talk show guest, and she didn’t seem obviously sexy, despite her frequently naked screen roles.

"I’ve never been a careerist," Leigh remarked during an awkward recent onstage conversation with Ben Fong-Torres (who seemed strangely fixated on a lascivious line of questions she wasn’t buying), part of a tribute at the Mill Valley Film Festival. That remains true. She’s as gifted as any actress of her generation but hasn’t quite scaled the high-profile heights of variably contemporary thespians such as Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett, or Nicole Kidman.

The last is her costar in Margot at the Wedding, written by Leigh’s husband, Noah Baumbach. Baumbach is best known for writing and directing 2003’s The Squid and the Whale, though his 1995 debut, Kicking and Screaming, has a cult following, and 1997’s Mr. Jealousy ought to as well. Margot pursues Squid‘s major themes: sibling and parental relationships, comings-of-age, familial wounds inflicted unintentionally and otherwise, and the emotional chaos physical intimacy wreaks. But Margot takes them out of the city, all the way to … the Hamptons. Still, that’s country enough for the neurotic, erudite urbanites who are Baumbach’s specialty. Close proximity to the outdoors can’t get them to relax their grips on historical baggage and personal grudges, even toward kin. In fact, a backyard tree turns out to be the symbolic — and physical — catalyst in the movie’s application of a lit match to blood relations long primed for explosion.

Kidman’s Margot is a type familiar in real life yet seldom so well detailed onscreen: the cunning malcontent who gnaws like a termite at other people’s happiness, convincing everyone that it’s for their own good. And Margot at the Wedding is concise, hilarious and cathartic, portraying cruel behavior sans authorial malice or even basic moral judgment. These people can’t help what they do. The quirky dysfunction feels utterly credible. There’s a moment when Kidman’s and Leigh’s characters reference a relative’s youthful sexual abuse — then erupt in inappropriate laughter. It’s shocking, yet it seems just right, because that kind of gallows humor is typically a survivor’s closely held secret weapon.

Kidman’s chilly, defensive sexpot owns the title, but Leigh’s Pauline is the movie’s emotional ballast. Playing closer to her offscreen personality (or so Baumbach says), Leigh is a one-generation-late hippie chick who gives everyone the benefit of the doubt — no matter how many times they’ve failed to return that favor. The story line and dialogue’s excoriating peak occurs when Pauline is finally driven past endurance, howling well-earned abuse at the monster sister who’s undercut her entire life. Leigh wails on 2007’s most satisfying screen rant. If Baumbach wrote it for her, the favor is returned threefold. Who else could pull off its full, verbose fury — and make sense of the story’s refusal to fade out afterwards?

Leigh’s major performances have always been the kind that people deem difficult: they’re knotty, uncuddly, indelible. This is the rare movie whose scripted complexities are equal to those she brings to it.

MARGOT AT THE WEDDING

Opens Wed/21 in Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

www.margotatthewedding.com“>www.margotatthewedding.com”>www.sfbg.com

www.margotatthewedding.com

All about Bob

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

It’s not that I’m anti–Bob Dylan. I’ve just never been a fan in particular. I’m too young or too fond of metal or too shallow or some combination of the three. But I found I’m Not There — Todd Haynes’s sorta biopic of the icon — entirely fascinating. By now you’ve heard the pitch: six actors (Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, and Ben Whishaw) play facets of Dylan without actually playing Dylan, though Bale and Blanchett come dangerously close. The movie begins with the death of this nebulous character, identifiable only by his distinctive mop of dark curls, and a somber narrator informing us, "Even the ghost was more than one person." And I’m Not There is nearly more than one movie, with different film stocks, casts, tones, and styles deftly stitched together by Dylan’s music (performed, appropriately enough, by an array of artists).

Perhaps you didn’t realize that one of Dylan’s personae is an African American boy (Franklin) obsessed with boxcars, guitars, and Woody Guthrie. Strangers are drawn to this nostalgic little soul, including a kindly woman who feeds him before sternly advising him to "live your own time." This sweet tale, filmed in warm hues with touches of magical realism, is a more abstract reading of Dylan — unlike the story of Jack Rollins (Bale), which is told documentary-style and features Julianne Moore as a Joan Baez clone reminiscing about Jack’s impact on the 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene. He was a visionary, using traditional folk stylings to comment on contemporary concerns. His life becomes intertwined with the showbiz fate of Robbie Clark (Ledger), a James Dean–ish young actor whose starring role in a Jack Rollins biopic catapults him to stardom.

After a freewheeling courtship — with montage-spun happiness undermined by televisions constantly broadcasting the Vietnam War — Robbie marries Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who later leaves him when fame and ego turn him into something of an asshole. But aside from big-head syndrome, Robbie’s worst offense is saying that women can’t be poets. The sins of Jude (Cate Blanchett) are far dirtier, and it’s no coincidence that Jude’s saga — a black-and-white British tour from hell, with snooty reporters and drug-enhanced moments of surreality — is I’m Not There‘s most magnetic segment.

Sexy androgyne Blanchett’s probably got her next Supporting Actress win sewn up with this one, or she should. Her performance is the heart of the movie — snarling, weary, uncanny, and able to make David Cross’s hairy cameo as Allen Ginsberg seem totally logical. Don’t Look Back would be the most obvious frame of reference here, but Haynes is less interested in Dylan’s performances or fans than his inner conflicts. It’s hard to sing about the oppressed when you are rich, famous, and beloved. It’s hard to keep your head on your shoulders when everyone views you as the voice of a generation. It’s hard to be patient when the Man (Bruce Greenwood — OK, his character has a name, but he’s the Man nonetheless) digs into your past, unable to beat you in a war of words but smugly proud of finding dirt that cracks your cooler-than-thou armor. Whoa, you mean his name isn’t really Bob Dylan?

Less compelling are a pair of shorter segments — Whishaw as Arthur (as in Rimbaud), who pops up occasionally to drop science via actual Dylan quotes, and Gere as Billy the Kid, a retired outlaw in hiding whose Halloween-obsessed hometown appears art-directed by Tim Burton. As in other chapters, there are surely nuances that sailed past me but that Dylan obsessives will seize on. Thankfully not represented are Dylan’s less-interesting years — the Victoria’s Secret pitchman era, for example.

As a rock doc–slash–biopic, I’m Not There is proof that the best rendering of a legend isn’t necessarily done with straight, tidy lines. I may not have been a huge Dylan fan before I’m Not There, but I was a Haynes fan. With this, his most ambitious work to date, the director’s affection for re-creating the past finds its match in his innovative dissection of a complex artist’s soul. *

I’M NOT THERE

Opens Wed/21 in Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

www.imnotthere-movie.com“>www.imnotthere-movie.com”>www.sfbg.com

www.imnotthere-movie.com

Do you believe in White Magic?

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

The folkish side of indie rock has been blessed with several female songwriters who have unique, affecting voices — Chan Marshall, Joanna Newsom, Becky Stark — but White Magic’s Mira Billotte is in a different league altogether. Her vocal tracks thunder and shiver all over the register, fearlessly chasing down radical intonations and bold tonal colors. Where the others can all sound a little fey and princessy, Billotte’s full-spectrum blasts hark back to the possessed passion of ’60s stunners like Grace Slick, Karen Dalton, and — why not? — Janis Joplin.

Billotte’s voice hinges on form and freedom, a balance that’s been remarkably well preserved on White Magic’s recordings. Speaking from her New York home about the band’s new EP, Dark Stars (Drag City), Billotte notes, "It’s the first digital recording White Magic recording has done, and we figured that would be cool because we could record in a spontaneous way."

But while the music feels fresh and explorative, it’s clear from my conversation with Billotte that a lot of thought goes into White Magic’s release schedule, a not-insignificant point given indie rock’s de facto buzz-bin setting. To be sure, the hype machine is familiar to the duo: Billotte’s regular partner is Doug Shaw, though they’re frequently joined by other musicians like Gang Gang Dance’s Tim Dewitt and the Dirty Three’s Jim White. Back in 2004, White Magic were frequently cited as leading lights of the burgeoning freak folk movement and were invited by Sonic Youth and Stephen Malkmus to play the hip All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in London.

Perhaps it was Billotte’s previous experience with Quix*o*tic — a band she played in with her sister Christine — that kept White Magic so even-keeled through these early waves. White Magic released an EP (2004’s Through the Sun Door), then took their time with an expansive full-length, Dat Rosa Mel Apibus (both Drag City). Since putting out the album, they’ve mostly shied away from touring. If anything, the band continues to be underrated, especially Billotte’s obvious star-power talent. One wonders if it isn’t the liberties she takes with her tracks — the very things that make them so special — that’s kept mainstream acceptance at bay. Vocalists such as Marshall and Stark may lack Billotte’s range, but their voices are more consistent and pleasant and therefore more likely to nab attention through in iTunes downloads or soundtrack one-offs.

Far from being a stopgap, Dark Stars sounds like a further staking out of White Magic’s idiosyncratic musical terrain: piano-driven ballads that swallow up a field guide’s worth of sounds and textures, everything from Tin Pan Alley jazz to dub chants, West African guitar music to Old Weird America folk. Bookends "Shine on Heaven" and "Winds" spiral out with repetitive, glistening chants — Billotte tells me the first song began as an improvisation at a party with friends — while "Very Late" boasts baroque blues and "Poor Harold" a loose-limbed folk ballad–reggae stomp combination. If this all sounds a little unwieldy, that’s because it is. The EP format is a perfect fit for the duo, since it allows them a full range of exploration in individual songs while still maintaining a succinct arc. Billotte confirms my suspicion that Dat Rosa was composed of four distinct parts, or EPs: "It’s a good format for my songs … and I tend to segment things in fours … so I like that the EP is four songs."

Besides Billotte’s voice, White Magic’s intensity has a lot to do with how they draw so many splintering sounds out of a relatively limited musical palate of mostly piano, guitar, and White’s seasick drums. Their songs sometimes seem to be all incantation, yawping calls without resolution. It’s a musical formula that is intoxicating and dizzying and certainly has something to do with the way the group has retained the sense of excitement and mystery that attended its first transmissions. As freak folk’s star fades, White Magic still seem on the brink.

"Hopefully [the music] can take you to that other place when you’re really listening to it," Billotte says, "because that’s what it does for me when I’m playing it…. That’s kind of what I feel like the trance element is." She sings for the sake of the songs, in other words, making it seem all the more likely that those songs are built to last. *

WHITE MAGIC

With Cryptacize and the Dry Spells

Fri/23, 9:30 p.m., $12

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

Out of the shadows

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

So if you see me, I be where they don’t battle rhyme

28 and zipper or Eighth Street and Adeline

— Shady Nate, "Banga Dance (Remix)" (Zoo Ent.)

I meet up with Shady Nate at Eighth Street and Adeline, in the Acorn neighborhood of West Oakland, where he spent his youth. As we scout locations for photos, a man walks by peeling a tangerine. "I survive in West Oakland," he mutters, more to himself than to us. The statement fits the hard surroundings, though Shady’s presence lifts the general mood.

"Shady Nate?" an older drunk wearing gold chains and riding a kid’s bike enthuses. "You doin’ it big!"

A woman approaches, claiming she knows Shady. He punches her number into his phone. "I don’t know her," he says afterward, laughing. Another dude tells me he loves Livewire, the crew whose members include Shady and pint-size phenom J-Stalin from the adjacent Cypress Village hood. "They make music for us," the dude says with pride.

This appreciation is worth underscoring. The usual criticisms of ghetto rap’s violent, dope-slinging content always overlook the fact that it’s a product of its environment. Glorification or not, the grimy depictions of street life by rappers like Shady mean the world to people who would otherwise have no voice articuutf8g their struggles. As Mistah FAB put North Oakland on the rap map, so Shady has done for the Acorn, appearing alongside heavyweights Keak Da Sneak and San Quinn on J-Stalin’s hit "Banga Dance" remix.

Now Shady has his whole hood behind him, giving him the necessary buzz to launch his solo career. Recently signed to Hieroglyphics member Tajai’s Clear Label Records, which plans to drop his debut, Son of the Hood, in March 2008, Shady is currently warming up the streets with two projects: the Demolition Men mixtape Early Morning Shift 2, cohosted by Stalin, and a DJ Fresh album, Based on a True Story (FreshInTheFlesh). Combined with the recent successful Livewire West Coast tour, the discs confirm Shady’s taking his game to the next level.

BASED ON A TRUE STORY


"I got away with hella bad shit as a teen," the tall, wiry 26-year-old born Nate Findley confesses. "I always went to school, but after I’d be in the street with my partnas. I never got caught until I was 18, an adult. That’s how the corner is."

"My first case was a 211, a robbery," he says ruefully. "That fucked me up. Every time I get jacked [stopped by cops "on suspicion"], they punch my name in, first thing they see: ‘Oh, yeah, 211.’ I ain’t on probation. I don’t do nothing no more. But something you did as a kid haunts you even when you got a new life. So I’m motivating my people to do something else."

Yet even in his young d-boy days, Shady was already honing his MC skills. "The block would get hot, so we’d go to the studio," he explains. "But we wasn’t no real rappers. I started taking it seriously around ’03, when I hooked up with Stalin, seeing all the people he was meeting. I ain’t never really met nobody that really rapped before.

"Stalin helped me record my first solo mixtape, Shady Acres [2004]," Shady continues. "Then I got on his album On Behalf of the Streets [Livewire, 2006]."

GARAGE DAYS RE-REVISITED


That was around the time I met Shady at the Garage, the now-legendary East Oakland studio where On Behalf was produced by the Mekanix. At the time, Shady was hanging back, soaking up game, and the game was thick: everyone from the Mob Figaz to Kaz Kyzah, Keak, and FAB routinely came through. When the Mekanix teamed with Stalin and Kaz as the Go Boyz, Shady hopped on the project, laying down his first major tracks like "What I Seen," which appears on Early Morning Shift 2.

"Meeting these cats on the radio motivated me to work harder," Shady says. "I was kinda timid at first. I knew I could rap, but these niggas been doing this shit for a minute. I just got more confidence now."

It was impossible not to notice. In the months following the Go Boyz sessions and the closure of the Garage due to near-constant police surveillance, Shady’s raps took on a new intensity, documented in appearances on Beeda Weeda’s Homework (PTB, 2006) and Stalin’s original Early Morning Shift (2006). His flow has gone from sick to lethal: it’s an elastic, melodic delivery that accelerates to double time as it plows its way to the end of the verse. Though the slang isn’t as dense, the combination of speed and rhythm treads on E-40 terrain, repeatedly forcing you to rewind to figure out just what Shady is saying.

With his name ringing bells throughout Oakland, it’s easy to see why Clear Label — responsible for Beeda Weeda’s Turfology 101 (2006) — picked Shady as its next artist. Showcasing beats by Droop-E, the Mekanix, Beeda’s PTB camp, DJ Fresh’s Whole Shabang, and Traxademix, the upcoming Son of the Hood promises to be one of the hot releases of 2008.

"That’s my debut right there," Shady says with pride. "It’s sick. This is my first time having unlimited studio time. I can leave the club at 3:30 in the morning and go to the Hiero lab, and I ain’t never been like that before. I got my mojo back, so it’s good." *

Sens Restaurant

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REVIEW My hot date and I spent about as enjoyable an hour and a half as can be spent in a brown bat cave (without doing it in a corner). I don’t know what restaurant occupied this slot on the promenade level of 4 Embarcadero before Sens took it over, but whatever beast it was left Sens with a nightmare dilemma on its hands: how to exorcise California gothic spirits of stone and brown and big buck hunting and death? Sens’s answer? You don’t. You just try to work around the problem, apparently, starting with strong gin and tonics and continuing with great food.

The Caprese here was a complete success, and when interrogated as to the type of cheese on which it hinged, our waiter Anthony was quick to get back to us with an answer: "Manouri — wonderful texture." The lamb meatballs were plated atop some kind of berry reduction, an attempt at underlying sweetness that did little to contrast an overgarlicky finish.

As for the entrées, there’s better halibut out there, but the lamb shank that Anthony brought us was gorgeous and easy off the bone — NC-17 all the way. And dessert? Caramel ice cream sitting on a little cake, all on some wafers. It was gone before we could identify its parts.

The service was politely concerned, not pushy. The Mediterranean spices were authentic, if slightly overpowering. But the hand lamps that adorn every stone pillar seemed straight-up evil. Picture this: put an electric torch in a lamp in the hand of a dead person. Multiply by 25. No joke.

When there’s little an owner can do to overcome such a gnarly aesthetic hex, I guess the only thing left to do is simply to embrace it. Or maybe the interior’s not such a lugubrious affair at lunchtime. Here’s hoping, for the food’s sake.

SENS RESTAURANT Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m. and 5:30–10 p.m.; Sat., 5–11 p.m. 4 Embarcadero, promenade level, SF. (415) 362-0646, www.sens-sf.com

Land of milk and money

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› paulr@sfbg.com


At Gourmet magazine’s recent Wine Cellar extravaganza in the Galleria, I chatted with a Kerrygold functionary about currency exchanges, having first fortified myself with a few glasses of wine and an empanada. One would not want to drift into discussions of the dollar and the euro on an empty stomach, nor in a condition of total and stony sobriety. How about renaming the dollar the bungee, incidentally? Maybe it would help bring the great plunge to a stop.

Kerrygold is an Irish dairy concern with a huge export business in butter and boutique cheeses, much of it on this side of the Atlantic, so the diverging fortunes of the dollar and the euro are of intense interest to its corporate strategists. But an even more pressing issue, I was told, is the rising global demand for milk, as people in China, a onetime land of tea now rapidly becoming citified, start developing the Western taste for coffee and piling into their local Starbucks for morning lattes. It is one of life’s larger ironies at the moment that even as our drive-through way of life shows signs of collapsing, much of the rest of the world seeks to adopt it. Happiness is getting into your car and driving somewhere for a $4 cup of milky coffee. O blessed marketers!

Irony did not seem to be the evening’s theme, but then, irony is seldom to the taste of swells. Groups of the well-dressed and well-off swirled about the huge hall as if at a waltz, nibbling and sipping and nibbling some more. Quite a few of the city’s grandest restaurants — including Aqua, La Folie, Scott Howard, and Limón — were represented among the food stations, while off in a corner a group from Louisiana was barbecuing large prawns in spicy sauce, and a crew on the stage was dishing out low-calorie Indian food. The queues for these treats were formidable. Even swells, apparently, can stand only so much monkfish liver, or spot-prawn sashimi in apple-fennel broth with coconut marshmallow.

Back in the land of Kerrygold, I grazed musingly across a small prairie of cheeses and used toothpicks. For a moment I was alone, the herd of swells having galloped across the floor in pursuit of some new delight. I felt the crinkly dollars in my pocket and murmured reassuringly to them.

Gobblin’ Cobain

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER For too many, Thanksgiving is all about high-priced, high-stress flights home for the holidays, foul fowl, sad slipcovers, and relatives who rove the spectrum from irksome to inspirational. Why the last? I have to say that one miserable Turkey Day spent on the outskirts of Des Moines, Iowa, meeting a squeeze’s enraged and estranged parents while his jock brother dented my Geo Metro during a show-off game of tag football brought me closer to thoughts of suicide than ever before. Thanksgiving: the most annoying event before and since Oracle OpenWorld (only with a tad fewer leering conventioneers)? Discuss.

So it’s fitting, then, that soon-to-be uncomfortably bloated thoughts once again turn to the late Kurt Cobain with the Nov. 30 theatrical release of Kurt Cobain about a Son and the Nov. 30 droppage of Unplugged in New York, the DVD release of Nirvana’s 1993 MTV Unplugged appearance. I watched both 14 years to the day after the band’s Unplugged taping, on Nov. 18. If I weren’t already terrified of tying on the turducken, I’d be totally spooked by the synchronicity: are you sure Halloween is over?

AJ Schnack’s doc About a Son reads like a ghostly document: Cobain’s disembodied voice floats over its entirety, drawn from tapes of 1992–93 interviews conducted by coproducer Michael Azerrad for his book Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana (Main Street, 1993). Beneath the songwriter’s thoughts, Schnack chooses to float images of everyday romance and poetry captured in Cobain’s northwestern haunts: power lines shoot across the sky, dead birds rot beneath burnished sunsets, kids play music in alleyways. Relying on an evocative score by Steve Fisk and Ben Gibbard and songs by Queen, David Bowie, and others that are related to the interviews, Schnack eschews Nirvana’s music and even their photographic image until the very end. He prefers to immerse the viewer in the edited, intimate thoughts of Cobain, who can genuinely touch and surprise a listener with stories of how he felt abandoned by his father and his honesty about his misanthropy (coworkers "get on my nerves so bad I either have to confront them and tell them I hate their guts or ignore them"), heroin use (of his $400 per day self-medicating efforts to stem his chronic stomach pain, he says, "I was healthier and fatter than I am now"), and hatred of the media ("the most ruthless life form on Earth"). By turns moving and excruciating, About a Son raises as many questions as it answers.

Eerily dovetailing with About a Son by way of a cover of Bowie’s "The Man Who Sold the World" and a Queen joke regarding ex–Germs guitarist Pat Smear, the Unplugged performance has long been loaded with the stuff of quintuple-putf8um legend and fan speculation regarding Cobain’s death, which occurred just four months after the program aired on Dec. 14, 1993 on MTV. How else to parse the lyrical references to guns, the white lily set decorations (Cobain’s idea), and the set list’s intermittent aura of doom? In any case, Nirvana completists will want to snag this for the unedited 66-minute concert, which includes two numbers excised from the original 44-minute broadcast: Nirvana’s "Something in the Way" and the Meat Puppets’ "Oh Me." The mistakes and occasional sour notes remain. I was surprised by the general lack of energy in the band; the ordinarily forceful Dave Grohl sounds painfully unsure on brushes. But the conviction, seriousness, and soulfulness of Cobain’s vocal performance make this entire endeavor worthwhile — despite the gritted-teeth grin and protruding tongue that follow the first few songs.

You strain to hear the dialogue between the band members and betwixt Cobain and the audience. When the band seems to dither over the last song, one female audience member yells, "<0x2009>‘Rape Me’!" "Is that Kennedy?" someone asks, referring to the noxious alterna-VJ of the day. "I don’t think MTV will let us play that," Cobain replies with an insouciant, knowing air. If you’re still looking for that classic Gen X cynicism, look no further than MTV, which seems to have ditched music programming in general.

So why did Cobain sing for his TV dinner in the first place? Was it simply because In Utero (DGC, 1993) wasn’t selling well? Just months before his passing, Cobain already looked like another pop idol prepping to die young and leave a gorgeous corpse. Or not. Nonetheless, here, bird-boned with downcast eyes, he edges closer to that beautiful boy outlined in Elizabeth Peyton’s paintings, ready to assume his place in a pantheon of perpetually doodled, iconographic heartthrobs, right after Jim Morrison and James Dean. Nirvana was a great band — but as so many know who were there, cognizant, and occasionally coherent when Nevermind (Geffen, 1991) hit, there were lots of great bands. Ever the authentic article, Cobain knew this as much as any other, which is why he always gave a hand to forebears, bringing on the Meat Puppets (much to the disappointment of MTV, according to an accompanying DVD short) and sporting a T-shirt of the SF all-female art-punk combo Frightwig for this performance. Did it simply take Cobain’s dramatic death to, as an MTV executive dork opines in the short, turn an "interesting, eclectic performance" into "a masterpiece"? Neither of these spooked offerings really fits that descriptor, but for the faithful they might do till another comes along. *

KURT COBAIN ABOUT A SON

Opens Nov. 30

See film listings

www.landmarktheatres.com

For live music picks, see www.sfbg.com/blogs/music.

Disaster preparedness

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Above a semicircle of wooden crates arranged on a weathered wooden stage, two tattered flags of New Orleans and the United States are projected on a back screen. The flags appear to flutter in the rotating series of overlapping still images. This shifting perspective implicitly signals the living and composite nature of the history (recent and long-term, local and national) we are about to hear, as the 11 members of the ensemble representing survivors of Hurricane Katrina’s inundation of New Orleans in 2005 slowly assemble onstage and introduce themselves.

As they tell their individual stories — with charming, informal demeanors — and relate the story of their city, the flags give way to a steady stream of projected images (designed by Daniel Gamberg), including old snapshots, local landscapes, memorabilia, bits of relevant text, a pregnant cloudscape, and, finally, images of an unprecedented natural and human disaster. The social breakdown, government malfeasance, and open racism attendant on the Katrina disaster are balanced by stories of courage, compassion, camaraderie, and resolve — human capacities grounded in individual character and familial and communal solidarity, as well as the resources of a specific cultural life and history made manifest in the play’s wise and winning emphasis on New Orleans’s African American musical heritage.

While not uniformly strong, the cast includes some formidable talents (including Mujahid Abdul-Rashid, Velina Brown, L. Peter Callender, and Elizabeth Carter) and has another actor playing herself: Federal Emergency Management Agency inspector Linda Rose McCoy (whose unique and surprisingly sympathetic perspective makes up for some awkward and rather abrupt entrances and exits). Although the unevenness brings unintended lulls to the show’s pith and pacing, in general these down-to-earth stories and alternately quiet and harrowing disaster testimonials — together with a solid mix of a cappella song, recorded music (from the irresistibly joyful Hot 8 Brass Band), and the occasional burst of movement — bring much life to a relatively spare stage. Amid a growing cult of catastrophe, Stardust reminds us poignantly of the culture of survival.

ARGOS, OR NOT


On dramatically turbulent waters of its own, the latest Mary Zimmerman extravaganza, a retelling of Jason and the Argonauts’ search for the Golden Fleece, sails smoothly into a West Coast premiere at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, the Bay Area berth for the director’s previous work, including the Tony Award–winning Metamorphoses. Zimmerman runs a tight ship and knows how to rig a stage — first of all, with cleverly intricate mise-en-scènes, including a dynamic, even acrobatic ensemble of actors (led by Jake Suffian as an average-dude Jason), beautiful sets (Daniel Ostling’s enormous and pristine wood plank walls and ceiling, with a matching wooden catwalk and a mast rising like a firehouse pole through an aperture, look like the environs of a high-priced New York art gallery), and the playful use of stage properties (including Michael Montenegro’s buoyantly rough-and-ready puppets).

But the play also feels rigged. With humor pitched low (from an occasionally clever angle) and a forced sense of wonder, the spectacle has a vaguely didactic, children’s-theater aspect, as if some assigned learning were being dressed up and played down as "fun." Some episodes work well dramatically, the story of Hercules and Hylas in particular. But in the end, the long (two and a half hours) journey, which scrawls a timely (if wishful) moral about mad missions abroad "to put an end to evil" ending miserably for their instigators, is a short hop, emotionally and intellectually.

STARDUST AND EMPTY WAGONS: STORIES FROM THE KATRINA DIASPORA

Wed/21 and Fri/23–Sat/24, 8 p.m.; Sun/25, 3 p.m.; $18–$50

Brava Theater Center

2789 24th St., SF

(415) 647-2822

www.brava.org

ARGONAUTIKA

Through Dec. 16, $27–$69

See Web site for schedule

Berkeley Repertory Theatre

2015 Addison, Roda Theatre, Berk.

(510) 647-2949

www.berkeleyrep.org

Well-heeled

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Ask a dancer under 30 in Europe about Pina Bausch, and most likely you’ll get a blank stare or a shrug. You might as well mention Isadora Duncan or Martha Graham. Important, yes; relevant, no. For them, Bausch, the most radical innovator of European dance in the past three decades, is passé. But stateside that’s not the case, judging by the many dancers who mingled with the older crowd during Cal Performances’ recent Bausch engagement, her first since a 1997 appearance showcasing the California-inspired Nur Du (Only You).

Part of the reserved reception Bausch receives overseas may be due to prophet-in-her-own-land syndrome. And another part may relate to the revolutionary aspect of her work; once a revolution is institutionalized, it loses its punch. And some of it may simply be a function of aging. Not all artists produce major works in their seventh decade. Bausch is 67.

Although people have complained for years that "there is no dancing" in Bausch’s productions, there was plenty in her 2004 Ten Chi, and it was heroic. These dancers had the physical and emotional training to be ferocious and lyrical, plangent and athletic, sometimes all within the same couple of phrases. They lived off momentum, introspection, and one another. And every one of them was an individual, though they all had that Bauschian stare.

Even longtime company members Helena Pikon, Julie Shanahan, and
Julie Anne Stanzak danced better than ever. As for Dominique Mercy, who has been with Bausch since 1973, his sad-sack clown is getting more ethereal every year, yet he’ll whip himself around the stage with the best of them. He has also given the company something else: his daughter, Thusnelda Mercy, who — along with the rest of the women — dances on heels that are a lot higher than Ginger Rogers’s. High heels are Bausch’s pointe shoes, icons of femininity that radically shift the body’s center of gravity.

Ten Chi is one of Bausch’s better travel pieces, for which she visits a country or a city to gather information, which she and her dancers then incorporate into one of her meandering colossal collages, integrating culture-specific material into a much larger whole. In the impressive Ten Chi, Azusa Seyama, who is Japanese, gave head-bobbing lessons in proper behavior to Ditta Miranda. She also turned herself into a grinning paparazza, snapping pictures of a nonplussed Pascal Merighi. These scenes started out as high comedy, but Bausch pushed them to the point where they turned into something much darker.

It was this underbelly that redeemed much of Ten Chi‘s surface frivolity. Beneath the distinct and sometimes very funny episodes, Bausch and her exceptional set designer Peter Pabst infused a slowly growing sense of dread. Initially, the innocuously falling "cherry blossoms" looked pretty, but as they accumulated, the scene transformed into something akin to an eternal winter. Concurrently, in a brilliant stroke of optical illusion, the tail of a huge whale suggested that an animal was about to rise from the deep. Think Moby-Dick, think wars, think the unconscious. In the prolonged finale the dancers returned individually. They threw themselves into hair-raising contortions, whipping turns, and slithery slides. And they did it again and again and again, until I wanted to scream, "Stop it! Enough!" — which is exactly what Bausch intended. *

Rip, role-play, and burn

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Jeanne D’Arc

(Sony, PSP)

GAMER I had the fortune of winning a PSP in a contest a few weeks ago, and in my hunt for an inaugural game for the system, I spotted Jeanne D’Arc on a shelf in a local toy store. Because the cover sports an awesome girl with a sword and because no one does medieval European history like the Japanese, I picked it up.

Jeanne D’Arc is historical fantasy with a plot that seems a little too familiar. The Level-5-developed title has a lot of the elements of your average Japanese role-playing game: a heroine whose home is put to the torch by agents of a diabolical figure (in this case Henry VI of England) under the influence of a demon summoned by the real villain, who is a sorcerer. Jeanne and her childhood friends set off to fight back, spurred by Jeanne’s discovery of a magical, demon-vanquishing armlet. They are accompanied by a cute animal companion, required in all Japanese RPGs: a giant purple toad. The rough placement of the story within the framework of a well-known legend is what rescues the plot from being completely pedestrian.

The game, a tactical strategy RPG in the style of Final Fantasy Tactics with few deviations from the formula, has a map of locations through which the player travels. Most of them have battles, though some also have shops and plot-revealing cut scenes. On entering a battle, the player chooses various characters with different abilities and arranges them on a large grid. The player and the computer take turns moving all of their characters and making them attack or use an item in their inventory. Think of a chess game in which all of the pieces have big swords and bigger hair. Jeanne D’Arc adds a few little power-ups — such as squares where your attacks have a greater impact — but these don’t affect game play much.

One thing I really liked about the game is that each character has a backstory. You aren’t controlling a bunch of nameless soldiers. Your characters are also fairly customizable. Usually each character in an RPG is locked into a career path for the benefit of the story, and usually the healer is a demure woman. This irks me. Jeanne D’Arc let me create a butch male healer who swoops to the rescue whenever one of my little chess pieces is hurting.

Jeanne D’Arc is nothing new, but it’s fun, and the development of the minor characters involves the player in a way that’s refreshing for a tactical RPG. The quality of the graphics and sound are exceptional for a handheld game; I found myself humming the fight tune in the shower, so I guess the music’s more memorable than most. That said, if the narrative keeps following history, it’s going to be a bummer to see a character I’ve developed for 40 hours get burned at the stake at the end. Oh well.

The art world

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› lit@sfbg.com

REVIEW Somewhere along a Los Angeles freeway, a couple have a tense conversation about hamburgers. In Southwick, Mass., three women allow their hair to be braided together, and a Houston resident writes the eventful story of her life in a day. In a bedroom in Sydney, Australia, the dress a young woman wore the day she lost her virginity is laid out on the floor, along with the shoes that, she notes, stayed on for the duration. A sign goes up in a patch of parkland near Penn State detailing the markings and habits that distinguish the common raven from the American crow.

The pages of Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July’s Learning to Love You More are filled with such earnest explanations, recorded interactions, humble creative feats, and scraps from memory or fantasy or some complicated combination — all of them compiled from the thousands of audio, visual, and textual contributions to Fletcher and July’s Web site of the same name. Begun in 2002, the project was launched with the goal of offering concrete creative inspiration to any and all comers in the form of detailed assignments: to make an encouraging banner or an educational public plaque, to start a lecture series or compose the saddest song, to write down a recent argument or make a neighborhood field recording, to spend time with a dying person or heal oneself.

"Assignments" suggests a classroom exercise, and as the title implies, education in various guises is one aspect of the project; another is the goal of simply freeing participants to be artful. As Fletcher and July note in the introduction, "Sometimes it seems like the moment we let go of trying to be original, we actually feel something new — which was the whole point of being artists in the first place."

As word of the project has spread in unpredictable patterns via clusters of participants and viewers drawn in over time, LTLYM has put art-making inspiration, instruction, and encouragement in the hands of a sizable, indeterminate, dominolike scattering of humans across the globe. The result here is a succession of works that provoke the viewer to unpredictable reactions as the pages turn. A sound might begin somewhere between a snicker and a giggle, as when one flips to the back to see a re-created poster of Jack Nicholson baring his teeth in The Shining from the teenage years of Jack McCalla of Farmville, Va., but it’s likely to resolve into a capitulatory sigh over a press release written by Toronto resident Emily Holton that announces to selected media outlets her late-night gastric troubles and uncertainties about love’s power to last.

Some of the tasks result in the merely adorable or the gently nostalgic, like the high quotient of bright-eyed household pets found amid the dust bunnies during "Assignment 50: Take a flash photo under your bed," or the series of old book covers from "Assignment 45: Reread your favorite book from fifth grade," which turns up A Wrinkle in Time, Pet Sematary, and Amazing Secrets of the Psychic World and does offer the quiet pleasure of noting experiential connections with formerly young and faraway strangers. Similarly, the encouraging banners of Assignment 63 run the risk of slogans everywhere — but who knows what would happen if, on one of those demoralizing, head-in-gas-oven sort of days, one rounded a corner and came face-to-face with "You Have a Spine!" or "Death Is Not the End."

The past is a minefield and thus ripe for artistic endeavor, and here the weight of memory brings a charge to mundane objects like those clothes laid flat on the floor. So does the weight of regret, as in "Assignment 53: Give advice to yourself in the past," which provokes Wendy in North Carolina to tell her 15- and 16-year-old iterations, "Please eat. You are not ‘fat.’"

This and other conversations produce some of the most poignant and painful and pleasurable moments — such as Assignment 52’s "phone call you wish you could have," which produces two siblings catching up across the mortal coil barrier and a mutual coming-out and profession of love between friends, punctuated by phrases that progress from "Hey, wuddup fool?" to "Fine! I’m gay!" to "I love you too much to hate you." The insubstantial nature of the person on the other end of the line is affecting, whether they’re beyond the grave or simply unlikely to answer.

As was Fletcher and July’s hope, their project offers the humbling, heart-expanding experience of recognizing that the globe is dotted with original and inventive humans, busy thinking and suffering and wondering about love — and making work that turns the world into a more recognizable and yet more startling place when it’s seen. *

LEARNING TO LOVE YOU MORE

By Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July

Prestel Publishing

160 pages, $19.95 paper

www.learningtoloveyoumore.com

Marginalia

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>paulr@sfbg.com

When the obituary of the Republican Party is written, it will be noted that the GOP died of war wounds, many but not all of them taken during the kamikaze mission in Iraq. For over the past half century, it has gone from being the party of cautious, America-first realism to one of reflexive belligerence; its embrace of militarism has been passionate and, perhaps, fatal. Over the same half century, meanwhile, the world’s great powers, except us, seem to have come to a gingerly understanding that war may not have much of a future on an environmentally brittle, densely interconnected Earth.

As for the obituarist: John W. Dean offers a strong audition. Dean, a self-described "Goldwater Republican," served as legal counsel in the Nixon White House and testified during the Senate Watergate hearings of 1973 that he’d warned the president about "a cancer growing on the presidency." After Nixon’s crash, Dean left political life for several decades, but he has forcefully returned in the past few years as the author of an accidental trilogy about the Republican Party’s long journey into night. The books have raised alarms about the extreme right’s taste for secrecy (Worse than Watergate, 2004), the psychopathology of authoritarian conservatism (Conservatives Without Conscience, 2006), and now the extent of constitutional ruin wrought by a party interested only in power, not governance (Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches, Viking, 352 pages, $25.95).

Dean’s critique carries particular weight because he is, simultaneously, a longtime Republican, a onetime White House insider, and a lawyer who understands that "proper process … produces good policy," while "compromised processes will lead to bad policy." This is a succinct definition of what is sometimes called process liberalism, the idea that if a society’s institutions are established and operated according to a set of rules and customs generally agreed on, those institutions will produce results that most of the population will be able to accept, if not always cheer. Related ideas in America are the rule of law — the notion that individuals, even self-styled wartime presidents and vice presidents, must respect certain institutional constraints — and the separation-of-powers doctrine, which contemplates that each branch of government will try to curb overreaching by the others.

It is beyond dispute that Republican abuses of process in the past 15 years have been unprecedented and calamitous. Dean is particularly interested in the Bush regime’s use of so-called signing statements to change the meaning of laws duly enacted by Congress. Neither the Constitution nor any statute gives the president such a power, and so such statements are, or should be, legally meaningless. But their plain political purpose is to create what Dean calls a "presidential autocracy"; the statements are (in the words of Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe) "declarations of hegemony and contempt for the coordinate branches — declarations that [Bush] hopes will gradually come to be accepted in the constitutional culture as descriptions of the legal and political landscape properly conceived and as precedents for later action either by his own or by future administrations."

What invading body snatchers have turned the party of Lincoln and abolition into this freak show of power-crazed pod people? Dean doesn’t say, and perhaps he isn’t sure, but he is strangely silent on the military angle. The Constitution grants solely to Congress the power "to raise and support Armies," with the telling proviso that "no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years." The framers did not want a standing army sitting there like a loaded gun, waiting for some president to grab it and start shooting. And for nearly two centuries, the country’s practice was to demobilize after conflicts. As Doris Kearns Goodwin observes in No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (1994), the US Army in 1940 was smaller than Belgium’s. But over the next decade the military was to swell unimaginably, and it remained swollen, even as the "military-industrial complex" a departing President Eisenhower warned us about became a cancer growing on our politics, while its propaganda affiliates assured us that, whether the problem was poverty, drugs, terror, or Manuel Noriega, the answer was war.

The Republican Party chose to dance with this soul-sucking devil at some Mephistophelian ball, only to find later that its throat had been slit and a dagger plunged into its back. For us, the only remaining business is to assign the obituary and then find some way to operate our rickety two-party system with just one party. Unless … some nervy Republican presidential aspirant acknowledges the obvious: that given a choice between democracy and empire, a true Republican — a true American — chooses democracy. A true Republican puts America first by cutting the military budget by 90 percent and redirecting that money into a crash alt-fuel program, into education and health care and environmental protection. Rebuild America. Assuming such a braveheart didn’t soon perish in a mysterious plane crash, next year’s presidential election would immediately become more interesting. *

The big guns

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› lit@sfbg.com

REVIEW Over the past 15 years, a steady stream of good, bad, and indifferent anthologies has promised to deliver the thrills of pulp fiction. But for all the retro cover art, melodramatic blurb copy, and Quentin Tarantino allusions, their contents have been shockingly deficient in what aficionados consider to be the real pulp fiction: stories that originally appeared in the luridly covered popular fiction magazines — printed on incredibly cheap pulp paper — that were the medium for popular and genre fiction during the period between the two world wars.

Even the staunchest purist, however, will be pleased with The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps. No false advertising here. The Big Book is big, roughly the size of the San Francisco yellow pages. And it offers up nothing but the purest in pulp mystery fiction. Save for one story by the iconic James M. Cain, every one of the 45-odd full-length novels, novelettes, and short stories here originally appeared in the pages of long-gone pulps such as Black Mask, Clues, Detective Story, Gun Molls, and Detective Fiction Weekly.

The Big Book is packed with appearances by what is arguably the pulps’ greatest contribution to posterity: the hard-boiled private eye. Excellent, seldom-reprinted stories by Raymond Chandler ("Red Wind," "Fingerman") and Dashiell Hammett ("The Creeping Siamese," "Faith") are joined by clipped-prose gems such as Paul Cain’s ultra-hard-boiled exercise in blackmail, "One, Two, Three," and Frederick Nebel’s tough tale of nightclub murder, "Wise Guy," along with a bevy of unsentimental gumshoe stories by unfortunately lesser-known writers, among them Roger Torrey, Stewart Sterling, and Leslie White.

The pulps weren’t all about tough-talking dicks, though. In a section titled "The Villains," the Big Book focuses on the "bad" guys who often weren’t that bad. In one typical story, Raoul Whitfield’s "About Kid Deth," a sympathetic racketeer beats a bum murder rap with a few of his less-savory fellows. And rounding out the volume is "The Dames," a selection of stories featuring strong female characters. While there were no women PIs in the pulps, there were plenty of broads like the chorine protagonist of Cornell Woolrich’s "Angel Face," who could out-wisecrack the sharpest-tongued gumshoe.

Of course, picture-perfect prose is in short supply. The bulk of the material in the Big Book was written by poor bastards trying to make a living pounding out stories at a penny a word. At that rate, experimentation was idiotic and rewriting a rare luxury. But these strictures guaranteed that the stories would be relentlessly paced and action packed. Someone’s getting knocked over the head, if not shot or stabbed, on every other page.

And even in these bullet-riddled sagas, there is no shortage of rough-hewn beauty. In Steve Fisher’s "You’ll Always Remember Me," the psychopathic protagonist concludes that "one person more or less isn’t so important in the world anyway, no matter how good a guy he is." In Frank Gruber’s "The Sad Serbian," a skip tracer notes, "The noise she makes when she hits the floor reminds me of the time I got drunk at a dance and fell into the bass drum." And the opening line of Woolrich’s "Angel Face"? "I had on my best hat and warpaint when I dug into her bell." Well, who can resist?

After a thousand pages of this, you’ll never want to go back to the fake stuff. The Black Lizard Big Book puts the pulp back into pulp fiction. *

THE BLACK LIZARD BIG BOOK OF PULPS

Edited by Otto Penzler

Vintage Books

1,168 pages

$25

Cemetery days

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› lit@sfbg.com

REVIEW A smaller selection of the poems in A Wall of Two would have been easier to take. Presented here in more than 50 bone-shaking adaptations by poet Fanny Howe, the devastating early works by sisters Henia and Ilona Karmel, survivors of the German concentration camp Buchenwald, are so harrowing I could read only a few at a time. But a lighter load would have detracted from their representation of a horrific captivity and possibly kept us from looking at suffering as the Karmel sisters do: directly in its dirty, doomed face.

When they were sent from Kraków, Poland, to forced labor camps in 1943, Ilona was 17 years old, Henia 20. Amid brutal work shifts behind barbed wire in Germany and Poland, the determined women, bordering on starvation but inspired by an education rich in literature and verse, scribbled poems on stolen work sheets. They sewed them into the hems of their dresses, and Henia, believing that her death was imminent, managed to hand them off, during a forced march near the end of the war, to a cousin, who in turn got them to Henia’s husband, Leon Wolfe. By the time the sisters were reunited with Wolfe, they had suffered mutiutf8g injuries by German tanks and, oddly, had each had one leg amputated.

Smuggled away from such darkness, the poems in A Wall of Two are intimate, physical, sometimes clumsy observations of a dire reality. They home in on a sense of looming threat, evoking the state of captivity as relentlessly as Jacobo Timerman did in sections of Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, his 1981 masterpiece of human rights literature. In "A Child’s Vision of Peace," Ilona, who would later win acclaim for her 1986 novel An Estate of Memory (set in the concentration camps), envisions two boys cautiously standing face-to-face. They "grasp hands and hang on / As if they held a hammer and sickle," then suddenly lash out at each other: "Take that, and that." In "The Land of Germany," Henia is surrounded by wires "Barbed and bright / Like mad-dog teeth."

In many of her bleak little songlike poems, Henia scratches lines as stark as etchings on a prison wall: "Cemetery days / One after the other"; "You don’t believe what’s happening here, / Do you, my poor horrified brothers?"; "Sometimes a dream stupidly hangs on" — her verse rendered in Howe’s minimalist adaptations of literal translations from the Polish. Howe writes that she often chose to prune back "dangling clauses" or "excess adjectives" in order to bring forth the essential images in the poems, and such scaled-back lines cast a light on Henia’s brutal irony in "Snapshots":

And do you want to know

what I do for a living?

I’m not joking.

I sort shell casings

It’s the best job

because killing is good

and time passes fast

when the work has a purpose.

Cunning and immediate, poems such as this are sandwiched between remarkable letters and essays, stories and acknowledgements, reminders that if any of the little twists of fate hadn’t occurred, everything could have quickly disappeared — not just the wall of words, but the women fighting behind it. *

A WALL OF TWO: POEMS OF RESISTANCE AND SUFFERING FROM KRAKÓW TO BUCHENWALD AND BEYOND

By Henia Karmel and Ilona Karmel

Adaptations by Fanny Howe

Translated by Arie A. Galles and Warren Niesluchowski

University of California Press

158 pages; $45 hardcover, $16.95 paper

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