Volume 42 [2007–08] Archives — Page 12 of 68 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

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2008 Bay Area Playwrights Festival

July 22, 2008

PREVIEW Even 32 years after the Playwrights Foundation chose a young Sam Shepard for its first Bay Area Playwrights Festival in 1976, the annual celebration of the script still runs below the radar of the larger local theater-going audience. Perhaps that’s because most fans of the stage want to see a full production — with costumes, sets, and lighting design — rather than the bare-bones staged readings at the festival. Over the decades, the event has played an important role in keeping stages across the country full of vital new works and aiding the budding careers of now-established playwrights such as Pulitzer Prize–winner Nilo Cruz and Liz Duffy Adams, who won critical acclaim with 2002’s Dog Act. (SF’s Crowded Fire is currently premiering her latest, The Listener). Venture off to Fort Mason during the 10-day festival and you can check out the up-and-coming talent. Of particular interest to conspiracy theorists will be Dominic Orlando’s Danny Casolaro Died for You. In the thriller, the writer attempts to suss out the circumstances of his brother’s death. A freelance journalist, Casolaro was found dead in a hotel room in 1991 while investigating labyrinthine connections between spy software company Inslaw, US and Israeli governments, and various Islamic organizations. Marcus Gardley is another promising writer worth getting a peek at. The Yalie who made a name for himself here with the East Bay historical drama Love Is a Dream House in Lorin brings a new work, every tongue must confess, about the burning of black Baptist churches in a small Alabama town during the late 1990s. Proving that there is an art to the reading of the play, popular Bay Area director Amy Glazer takes on Whisper from the Book of Etiquette, Claire Chafee’s look into the dynamics of wooing surrogate mothers.

2008 BAY AREA PLAYWRIGHTS FESTIVAL July 25–Aug 3. See Web site for details. Magic Theatre, Fort Mason Center, Marina and Buchanan, SF. $15–$25. (415) 626-0453, ext. 105, www.playwrightsfoundation.org

Stoner rock

July 22, 2008

PREVIEW One morning futzing around on Craigslist trying to avoid the addictive looky-loo temptation of "casual encounters," I decided to waste time checking out what "musicians" were up to instead. I must’ve been directed there by a higher power, for I, curious, had clicked on a desperate request from a fan of seminal mid-1990s San Jose stoner-metal trio Sleep seeking any footage of their Sabbath-y riffage. Holy cannabis! I totally had some, buried amid S-M porn, scenes of teenage anarchy in Over the Edge (1979), and poignant Crass videos compiled into tripper montages my friend, who got kicked off Santa Cruz’s public access station, likes to craft.

We were back to the historic days of tape trading (though she and I both later remembered a little cheating trick called YouTube). But since crackly VHS renditions only satisfy so much, and since that quintessential band has moved on to debatably bigger and better musical mastery with zero hope of any reunion, it’s vital to find the real, live thing. Could fulfillment lie in this weekend’s Black Summer of Doom and Fuzz? Two days of 18 mostly East Bay bands, presented by Eric Hagan and Purple Astronaut Records, promises to at least acquaint you with the local scene’s offerings, and, at most, jumpstart devotion to yet another awesomely doomy, fuzzy ensemble. It’s high time I filled my summer stoner rock quota. Gorge on sustained power chords, languish in spacey amethyst tracers, float on a sea of Orange amplification. Ride the dragon!

Which reminds me, I have to get that tape back.

BLACK SUMMER OF DOOM AND FUZZ Sat/26 with Soul Broker, White Witch Canyon, House of Broken Promises, HDR, and Scorched Earth Policy. Sun/27 with Butcher, Sludgebucket, BRNR, Greenhouse Effect, and Automatic Animal. See Web site for complete lineup. 3 p.m., $10 per day. Stork Club, 2330 Telegraph, Oakl. (510) 444-6174, www.storkcluboakland.com

Goofy name, good band

July 22, 2008

PREVIEW Start with the name, take in the oversized T’s, and then turn an ear toward the big, fat, buzzy beat. Just who were these dudes, we all wondered, as the group took the Fader Fort stage at this year’s South By Southwest and proceeded to dangerously distract the ironically mulleted, sarcastically sunglassy hipsters and jaded music-biz buzzards from the free bevs at the bar. As the set progressed, all and sundry tromped to the front, pulled by the massive beats and the leaping, high-stepping antics of lead vocalist James Rushent.

Yeah, these guys were not cool in the strictly hyper-trendoid sense of the word — meaning cool down to the millisecond edge of the moment. The band’s floppy shorts and wholesome miens probably reminded bleary-eyed, cynical scenesters of normal suburban dudes down the block more than any affected decadent they might ordinarily aspire to ape. Yet there was nothing poseur about the cool kids’ fists pumping down front: the fact that the guys of Does It Offend You, Yeah? — goofy name and all — managed to get the most tired of industry booty moving was a testament to the power of their sound and their infectious enthusiasm onstage. Apart from a few tracks like the nu-rave "Battle Royale" and "With a Heavy Heart (I Regret to Inform You)," does their new album offend with its inconsistency — and its occasional trite Euro-rock tropes? Yeah. But that’s what iTunes is for: pick and choose which Does It Offend You, Yeah you prefer — and unlike some other dance poppers, rest assured, they won’t repulse live.

DOES IT OFFEND YOU, YEAH? With Steel Lord. Fri/25, 9 p.m., $13. Popscene, 330 Ritch, SF. (415) 541-9574, www.popscene-sf.com. Also with Bloc Party, July 30, 9 p.m., $27.50. Fillmore, 1805 Geary, SF. (415) 346-6000, www.ticketmaster.com

Orson

July 22, 2008

› paulr@sfbg.com

If there was ever a doubt that Elizabeth Falkner had a thing for Orson Welles, her new restaurant — named Orson — should lay to rest any lingering uncertainties. Falkner’s first venture, a bakery called Citizen Cake, first appeared in the late 1990s in a northeast Mission District space (near Rainbow Grocery) now occupied by Chez Spencer. After a few years it moved to considerably posher quarters in the performing arts quarter while retaining its Wellesian moniker.

But even the upscaling of Citizen Cake, including its expansion to a full-scale, full-service restaurant, could not begin to prepare people for the strange wonder of Orson. (Orson is a fine name, but am I alone in being reminded first not of Orson Welles but of Orson Bean, the character actor who’s turned up in all sorts of movies and TV shows over the years?) The restaurant’s design doesn’t offer much in the way of clues, either. It’s very au courant SoMa: large and lofty, with a huge wall of exposed concrete, a mezzanine, swaths of industrial carpeting on the floor, and a persistent hiss of ambient sound, as if a huge white-noise machine in some hidden corner had been turned up to "loud" but not "very loud." The noise doesn’t preclude conversation, but, like cigarette smoke, it’s impossible to ignore. Perhaps this is the new standard.

So we have a SoMa restaurant with a whimsical name, bearing a general physical resemblance to other SoMa restaurants with whimsical names and run by a woman whose reputation is rooted in high-style baking and what we might call classic California cuisine. And we find, on the menu of that restaurant, a dish called parmaggiano pudding ($5), an ivory-colored custard presented in a crock. The idea of a savory flan made with parmesan cheese might seem like plenty of cleverness for one dish, but Orson’s kitchen, under the guidance of Falkner and chef de cuisine Ryan Farr, isn’t likely to be called complacent. They are full of wild and wacky ideas, such as lacing the parmesan pudding with cocoa nibs. The wonder is not that a few of these gambits fail — they do, spectacularly, like some of those early space shots in which the rocket collapses in flames or whizzes off in the wrong direction — but that so many of them so sensationally succeed. The parmesan pudding is only one such success.

The only dish on Orson’s rather complex menu I would describe as a total flop is the foie bonbon ($5), a chocolate truffle filled with a buttery pâté de foie gras. One by one, the faces around our table wrinkled in distaste after a nibble, and while I didn’t hate the bonbon, I did think it was a bad marriage between incompatible elements that had nothing more than richness in common.

On the other hand, the jolt of espresso in the potato cream bathing the short ribs ($15) was, like the cocoa nibs, a cunning bit of counterpoint, adding depth, mystery, and a little smokiness to what might otherwise have been an ordinary soupy sauce. (Leaves of braised spinach brought some color but were texturally uncooperative; they reminded me of sails left in choppy water by a capsized sloop.) And the egg atop a pizza ($14) of tomato, crisped guanciale, chile flakes, and robiola cheese was less out of place than it looked — and it looked quite out of place, as if there’d been some kind of head-on collision in the kitchen. But the yolk drained nicely across the pie (imagine flooding a rice paddy, in miniature, with yellow paint) and added a nice note of velvetiness to what was otherwise a rather brash Neapolitan pizza.

Not all the food is eccentric. A boudin noir pizza ($14), for instance, was topped with (in addition to the blood sausage), arugula, oregano, and thin slices of potato — a perfectly genteel combination you might find at any number of places. Garganelli ($11) — pasta tubes that looked like mottled cinnamon sticks — were tossed in a simple sauce of basil and splinters of summer squash. A sprightly kimchee ($5) was festooned with throw pillows of fried tofu. Chicharrones ($5), a.k.a. pork rinds, arrived in a tall cup looking like twisted French fries suitable for dipping in the shallow tub of barbecue sauce on the side. And a chicken beer sausage link ($14), although accompanied by flecks of nectarine, whispers of frisée, and a hint of pistachio, was satisfyingly all about the sausage.

Some of the exotic touches were discreet to the point of being unnoticeable. Actual French fries ($7) were cooked in duck fat and presented with a small ramekin of browned butter béarnaise, a subtle aioli alternative. Tongue ($5), never an easy row to hoe, was transformed into a golden-crusted, nicely rectangular croquette and served with cherries and what might be one of our most underappreciated greens, purslane.

Does all this sound like the stuff of DIY tasting menus, a sequence of memorable bites? The glory of DIY is the randomness of it — we’ll have a few of those and one of that — but for more orderly types, Orson does offer four formal tasting menus that consist of three to five courses and cost from $50 to $65. One is vegetarian, another pork-based. Caveat: your whole table must participate. Tables for two have several additional "for two" options, though Orson doesn’t really strike me as a restaurant for couples. Its pulsing energy is that of a crowded club for the young and the restless, whose packs are forever rearranging themselves. It’s easy to picture them talking about movies. But do they talk about, or have they even seen, Citizen Kane?

ORSON

Dinner: Mon., 6–10 p.m.

Tues.–Sat., 6 p.m.–midnight

508 Fourth St., SF

(415) 777-1508

www.orsonsf.com

Full bar

AE/MC/V

Fairly noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Guy Maddin’s special specimen

July 22, 2008

REVIEW We all knew it was his Winnipeg after gobstoppers like Cowards Bend the Knee (2003) and The Saddest Music in the World (2003), but Guy Maddin certainly puts a fine point on it with his latest. Finally, a Maddin film that fully incorporates the homely comic-pathos of his essays and movie reviews. In My Winnipeg, the Canuck filmmaker’s punch-drunk dissolves and superimpositions aren’t just cinematographic cake-frosting; they’re visual portents and analogues of his seasick crawl through the past. While his festival-circuit peers increasingly strive for transcendent realism, Maddin still slops on the Vaseline. Curiously, he ends up in the same place that they do, blurring lines of autobiography and fictional representation. To wit: after Maddin introduces his "sleep-chugging" city in voice-over, he sets in explaining his missive to reenact key episodes of his childhood with stand-in actors in his family home. This meta-"making of" is a wonderful joke on the psychologically overwrought status of the auteur, complete with inflated reminiscences and digressions (segments on Winnipeg’s spiritualists, 1919 labor strikes, and the National Hockey League’s conspiratorial malevolence stand as mini-movies of their own). Casting Ann Savage (the belligerent face of Vera in Edgar Ulmer’s 1945 noir Detour) as his mother renders the psychodrama of cinephilia with florid hilarity. Beneath all Maddin’s Oedipal goofing, there’s a serious reflection on the way that movies seen at an impressionable age — or rather our memories of them — can burnish real experiences with chiaroscuro drama. Maddin’s always deserving of kudos for his bricolage assortments of essay, silent film, lantern show, melodrama, and papier-mâché, but My Winnipeg is a special specimen: his finest testament yet to memory and imagination being a two-way street.

MY WINNIPEG opens Fri/25 in Bay Area theaters.

Pedal power

July 22, 2008

›steve@sfbg.com

Hundreds of bicyclists invaded City Hall July 21 to demand safer bike routes and decry new bureaucratic delays in environmental review work on the Bicycle Plan, which a judge said the city must complete before it can make any improvements mentioned in the plan, from new lanes to simple racks (see "Stationary biking," 05/16/07).

But they arrived a couple hours too late to change the tenor of a hearing on another priority for car-free advocates: the Sunday Streets proposal by Mayor Gavin Newsom to close the Embarcadero to cars Aug. 31 and Sept. 14, which is being challenged on procedural and economic grounds by Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin and conservative supervisors.

Presentations to the board’s Government Audit and Oversight Committee in support of Sunday Streets were overshadowed by a big turnout of merchants from Pier 39 and Fisherman’s Wharf — who have vociferously opposed the proposal, citing concerns about lost business — and labor leaders, who unexpectedly lent their support to Peskin’s play.

"We just don’t want to have a beta test of a new program on one of the busiest days of the year," said Karen Bell, executive director of the Fisherman’s Wharf Community Benefits District. "People want to drive down the Embarcadero. They don’t want to take side streets."

Advocates of the program are resisting Peskin’s effort to postpone the events until after an economic study can be done.

"Every other city that’s tried this has found it has tremendous economic benefits, as well as tremendous health benefits and social benefits," said Andy Thornley, program director for the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition.

The committee moved Peskin’s resolution to the full board with no recommendation after Sups. Sophie Maxwell and Tom Ammiano voiced support for Sunday Streets. It was set to be heard July 22 after Guardian press time, but Mayor’s Office officials said they intend to hold the events as scheduled no matter what the outcome and work with opponents to ease their concerns.

But most cyclists were focused on the Bike Plan, which might not have final approval until late next year, as an afternoon Land Use Committee hearing called by Sup. Gerardo Sandoval revealed.

Bicycle Advisory Committee member Casey Allen called the delay unacceptable, and said he’s working with others to formally intervene in the case next month, arguing that unsafe conditions are a public health issue demanding immediate action.

"We have to take risks sometimes and challenge the status quo," Allen said. "That’s how we move forward as a society."

For more on both issues, visit www.sfbg.com

“Conflux Vignettes”

July 22, 2008

REVIEW Being unpatriotic, I spent the Fourth of July observing indoor fireworks at the opening of the group show, "Conflux Vignettes," at Mama Buzz Café’s Buzz Gallery. I was lured in by poet-painter Brian Lucas, whose 2006 book, Light House (Meeting Eyes Bindery), is out of print but obtainable secondhand. Like his longer poems, which accumulate as aphoristic remarks, Lucas’ abstractions accrue in obsessively worked increments. Whereas in his earlier work these parts formed discrete centers of interest, his more recent paintings, like the acrylic Correspondence, reveal a more unified sense of composition, their lush brightness influenced by his six-year stay in Thailand, from 2001 to 2007. Lucas’ paintings have the complexity of the finest abstraction, with an illusion of depth hitherto unrealized, and suggest equally the cosmos and the lotus.

Also here are odd assemblages by Daniel Glendening, black mat-board cutouts overlaid with rainbow-colored gouache and acrylic. The edges are shaped alternatively as pistols, cacti, and AK-47s. The most ambitious, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory, includes all three — its overall shape suggestive of the southwestern United States and a good metaphor for a country refusing gun control. Paper squares repeating the title are affixed by copper nails driven through the piece and into the wall. (If you buy the work, Glendening offers to come nail it to your wall at home.)

Rounding things out are large paper-on-canvas pieces by Julie Oppermann, executed in watercolor and acrylic, yet defying most viewers’ conceptions of watercolor. The concentric circles, overlaying each other yet slightly askew, create the moiré effect, hovering like a Duchamp rotorelief without the literal motion. Tree-Cells, a smaller series in mostly red shades of oil, resembles something like exploded alligators — in a good way. All in all, a well-curated grouping, indicating why the space has its buzz.

CONFLUX VIGNETTES: BRIAN LUCAS, DANIEL GLENDENING, AND JULIE OPPERMANN Through July 31. Mon.–Thurs., 7 a.m.–9 p.m.; Fri., 7 a.m.–10 p.m.; Sat., 8 a.m.–10 p.m.; Sun., 8 a.m.–9 p.m. Mama Buzz/Buzz Gallery, 2318 Telegraph, Oakl. (510) 465-4073, www.mamabuzzcafe.com

High speed rail on track

July 16, 2008

› steve@sfbg.com

It’s crunch time for high speed rail in California, a project 12 years in the planning that will finally go before voters in November, following a controversial July 9 vote in San Francisco on the system’s Bay Area alignment and ongoing political struggles in Sacramento.

As envisioned by project proponents, riders would be able to board the sleek blue-and-gold trains in San Francisco’s remodeled Transbay Terminal and travel at speeds of up to 220 mph down the Peninsula, cutting over Pacheco Pass into the Central Valley, and arriving at Union Station in Los Angeles two hours and 38 minutes later — or continuing on to Anaheim and arriving 20 minutes after that.

The $9.95 billion bond measure, Proposition 1, would cover about a third of the costs for this initial phase (the plan would eventually extend the tracks to run from Sacramento to San Diego), with the balance borne almost equally by the federal government and private investors. With around 100 million passenger trips per year, and LA-SF tickets projected to cost around $60, fiscal studies show the project will more than pay for itself in less than 20 years, then generate about $1 billion a year in profits.

Perhaps most important in these times of heightened environmental concern, the system is now proposed to run entirely on renewable energy sources and would use about one–third of the energy of air travel and one-fifth that of driving, eliminating 18 billion pounds of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and reducing California’s oil dependence by 22 million barrels per year.

Yet there are still obstacles that could derail high speed rail, which was set in motion in 1996 by then–state senator Quentin Kopp, a San Franciscan and retired judge who chairs the California High Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA).

Critics of the CHSRA’s unanimous vote choosing Pacheco Pass over Altamont Pass are threatening to sue and now have about 30 days to do so. Union Pacific Railroad has complicated the right-of-way acquisition process by claiming it won’t allow the project on its property. And Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his allies have been inconsistent in their support for the project (see "Silver bullet train," 04/17/07).

On top of that, legislation to update the six-year-old language of the bond measure, Assembly Bill 3034, appeared at Guardian press time to have fallen short of winning needed support on the Senate floor before the July 15 deadline set by Secretary of State Debra Bowen. And there was a renewed effort by Republican legislators to try to push the bond measure back to 2010.

Yet for all the challenges the project continues to face, the recent hearings in San Francisco demonstrated that there is a consensus emerging among some of the most powerful political players in the state that California is finally ready to catch up to Europe and Asia and start building the first high speed rail system in the United States.

CHSRA met in San Francisco July 8-9 to take public comment and finalize its last critical decision before the November bond measure — selecting the train’s route through the Bay Area and making the legal and environmental findings to support that decision. The stakes were high as the board weighed whether to select Pacheco Pass or Altamont Pass as the route from the Bay Area to Central Valley.

CHSRA staff and consultants, along with most Bay Area politicians and civic groups, favored Pacheco Pass, which is the faster and cheaper option, and one that doesn’t require a logistically difficult crossing of the San Francisco Bay to reach the Peninsula.

Most environmental groups favored Altamont Pass, which avoids ecologically sensitive Henry Coe State Park and areas where activists feared the rail line might induce urban sprawl or threaten agricultural viability. The conflict seemed intractable just a few months ago, with South Bay politicians threatening to oppose the project if it used Altamont and organizations, including the Sierra Club, threatening litigation if Pacheco was chosen.

But it appears that project proponents have allayed many of the environmentalists’ concerns by eliminating a proposed rail station in Los Banos or Avenal and including strong preservation policies in the project.

"We have worked with as many of these individuals as we could to accommodate their concerns," CHSRA executive director Mehdi Morshed said at the hearing, noting that they’ve done all they could to make changes and still have a sound project. "We can’t deal with the dogma. Some people say you must do this or else, and we can’t deal with that."

After years of studying the options, Morshed said the choice is clear.

"Pacheco is the appropriate corridor for fast intercity rail service," Morshed told the CHSRA board. "Somewhere along the line, we have to decide we’ve studied enough and move on, and this is one of those circumstances."

Most of the dozens of people who spoke at the hearing agreed, including Tim Frank, who represented the Sierra Club of California and praised CHSRA staff for addressing most of the group’s concerns.

"The opportunity to get people out of cars and out of airplanes and get them into steel wheels running on steel track is very important," Frank said, noting that the project was essential to meeting the state’s goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Yet others are still threatening litigation, among them Oakland attorney Stuart Flashman, who addressed the hearing on behalf of clients that include the Planning and Conservation League, the California Rail Foundation, and the Mountain Lion Foundation. He made a number of technical points about the project’s environmental impact reports, such as the use of alignment corridors rather than more specific routes.

"We find your report completely inadequate," Daniel McNamara, project director for the California Rail Foundation (a train users group), told CHSRA.

After the vote didn’t go his way, Flashman told the Guardian that the coalition he represents will meet soon to decide what’s next. They have 30 days from when the notice of decision was entered July 9 to sue unless the Attorney General’s Office waives the statute of limitations. "We’re going to be considering what to do now, but litigation is certainly on the table," Flashman said.

Whether filed by this group or another entity, the CHSRA has been working closely with Deputy Attorney General Christine Sproul to create a project that will withstand a legal challenge.

"We wanted to make sure that if and when there is a lawsuit — and there probably will be a lawsuit — that we are capable of defending it," Morshed told the board, noting how Sproul was brought in because of her expertise in environmental law.

Before the authority voted, Sproul explained that the environmental documents are for the overall program to build the project and are therefore not as detailed as the specific project studies that will be performed after CHSRA secures specific property to build on.

"Today, before you is really a broad policy choice," she said.

Sproul also said that the project is likely to proceed even if a lawsuit is filed, noting that getting an injunction to stop the project would require the litigants to secure a bond against losses to the state as it pursues this high-dollar project, "which could be millions."

But recent CHSRA actions have appeased many of the would-be plaintiffs and created a project that was effusively praised by stakeholders.

Mayor Gavin Newsom said San Francisco is "very supportive" of the project and will work to make it a reality. "We stand behind your efforts to bring high speed rail to the state of California," Newsom told CHSRA, later adding, "We need to connect the state to itself."

Newsom said San Francisco International Airport officials support the project. While it might seem to be a competitor, Newsom said high speed rail will take some of the pressure off SFO, which would otherwise experience congestion at problematic levels by 2020. Current plans call for a high speed rail station at SFO, as well as one near Palo Alto.

"We recognize that we need to have competitive modes of transportation," Newsom said. "Our airport is very supportive of this effort, and that’s very important."

Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin echoed the point, noting that he began his political career as an activist opposed to filling in more of the bay, something an airport expansion would probably require. He told the authority that his board has unanimously endorsed the project.

Jim Lazarus, vice president of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, also announced that group’s support for the project, telling the authority that Californians have long been ready for high speed rail: "I think the public is ahead of the politicians in Sacramento on this one."

Many of the speakers spoke knowledgably about high speed rail.

"I’ve ridden on the Japanese Shinkansen and I can’t wait to ride on the first high speed rail system in the United States," said Dean Chu, a commissioner with the Bay Area’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission.

"I’ve been building high speed rail systems for 15 years in Asia and Europe, and I just want to say, ‘It’s about time’," said Robert Doty, the rail operations manager for Caltrain, who has worked in Germany, England, Taiwan, and China.

Echoing that sentiment was Eugene K. Skoropowski, who also worked on high speed rail projects in Europe before taking his current job as managing director for the Capital Corridor Joint Powers Authority: "It’s about time we bring our American firms that have expertise (on building high speed rail systems) back home to work here."

Enthusiastic supporters of the project urged the authority the move quickly.

"We feel a great deal of urgency over this project," said Emily Rusch, a San Francisco–based advocate with the California Public Interest Research Group.

"Everyone I talk to is very excited about the idea," said San Francisco resident Mary Renner. "It’s embarrassing that we’re so far behind the rest of the world, and I just want to tell you the public is supportive of this project."

"Our priority is to get this thing built and get it built quickly," said Dave Snyder, transportation policy director for the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association. "Let’s get rolling on high speed rail."

The final step in getting high speed rail ready for the November ballot was to be AB 3034, which sought to update the language and financial oversight provisions of Prop. 1, whose language was written for the election of 2004 before changes in the project.

"I feel good and I’ll feel better when AB 3034 is in appropriate condition," Kopp said after the vote on the Bay Area alignment.

Kopp was critical of Sen. Leland Yee for amending the bill to guarantee the bond money went to the San Francisco to Anaheim section, something Yee said he did to protect San Francisco’s interests but that Kopp felt hurt the measure’s statewide chances. Yet that tiff was overshadowed by the bill’s apparent and unexpected failure in the Senate.

Sen. Mike Machado (D-Stockton) was unhappy with the Pacheco choice and decided to oppose the project, meaning that proponents needed three Republican votes to win the two-thirds needed for passage and only Sen. Abel Maldonado (R-Santa Maria) was willing to cross party lines, Capitol sources told the Guardian.

Secretary of State Debra Bowen had set a deadline of July 15 for substituting the new language in Prop. 1, so at Guardian press time it appeared the old language would remain in place, which Kopp said was acceptable and probably wouldn’t hurt the project.

Meanwhile, a project opponent, Roy Ashburn (R-Bakersfield), sought to kill Prop. 1 by doing what’s known as a "gut and amend" to an unrelated bill, SB 298 by Senate Minority Leader Dave Codgill (R-Modesto), in an attempt to push the bond measure back to 2010.

If he can find the two-thirds vote in both houses — which most sources consider unlikely — it would be the fourth time the bond measure has been delayed. So barring any unusual political deals, the high speed bond measure is still up in November.

If a majority of voters approve Prop. 1, the CHSRA would begin negotiating rights-of-way and working on final technical studies. Construction could begin as early as 2010, although completion could take up to 10 years.

In the meantime, CHSRA unanimously voted to work with regional rail agencies such as BART to create a rail system over Altamont. As Morshed said, "We need to immediately start working on the Altamont corridor and find a solution to that."

Poultrygeist

July 16, 2008

WINGIN’ IT Veteran filmmaker Lloyd Kaufman spoke to me from Troma Entertainment’s Long Island City, N.Y., headquarters about Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead — a scathing and explosive (as in "explosive diarrhea") look at the fast-food industry. He calls this hilarious, stomach-turning epic "the first chicken-Indian-zombie movie that has singing and dancing." He also had quite a bit to say about the state of the media and cinema today. (Cheryl Eddy)

LLOYD KAUFMAN "The biggest misconception [about Troma films] is that people who haven’t seen them assume that we make these movies formulaically — that we just throw together some gyno-Americans in bikinis, slap some ketchup on ’em, and have ’em run through the woods. Troma is a 35-year-old company, and we wouldn’t be around if that was all we did. The problem is, most people who dismiss us are too busy taking [in] the Burger King advertisement called Iron Man. The Village Voice has a conglomerate — the so-called ‘alternative newspaper,’ the LA Weekly, the New Times — they don’t even have the interest in reviewing [Poultrygeist]. They have some idiot review it in New York who, in my opinion, didn’t even look at the movie, and says that Trey Parker is in Poultrygeist and gives it a cursory review. I can’t imagine how they could have seen the movie if they think Trey Parker is in the movie. Somebody put it up on imdb.com because Trey Parker was discovered by Troma, and because Trey Parker has acted in other Troma movies. Some fan put it [on the Internet]. And this has been repeated by other critics — critics! who are supposed to be reviewing the movie. So if the alternative media is a disgrace like the LA Weekly, if they’re just vomiting out an inaccurate, uninspired reviews, if this is the alternative media that’s supposed to be embracing art and embracing independent art, we don’t have a chance. When Toxic Avenger came out in 1983, Vincent Canby — the lead reviewer for the New York Times — chose to review it when it came out. He cared, he was interested. That’s gone. It’s over.

"All of us independents have got to fight for the future of art. The big hope is that [independent filmmakers] come out swinging: that they be aggressive and not be afraid to whore for their art. I think too many talented directors feel that doing what Lloyd Kaufman does is low-class, going out there and promoting the film — like, ‘I don’t wanna get my hands dirty doing that.’ As long as you don’t compromise your art, as long as you don’t try to remake Pulp Fiction 10 times, as long as you’re doing something you believe in once it’s finished — as long as you’re not breaking any laws or hurting people — what is wrong if I wear a clown suit and go to Cannes and throw blood on people? Why is that wrong?"

POULTRYGEIST: NIGHT OF THE CHICKEN DEAD opens Fri/18 at the Roxie. See Rep Clock for showtimes.

Local Heroes/ Big Picture Week 2

July 16, 2008

PREVIEW In the second of ODC Theater’s Local Heroes summer series, Yannis Adoniou, Manuelito Biag, and Alex Ketley are taking over Theater Artaud. Over the past decade or so, each has developed a profile of making dances that leave impressive individual footprints. Choreographically speaking, Biag is the youngest. His work is emotionally and physically boiling with the dark, complex currents that swirl inside relationships, yet he manages to create an odd beauty out of these struggles. Ballast, created for SHIFT Physical Theater, is his newest excursion into that thorny territory called home. A former ballet dancer and a cofounder of the Foundry (with Christian Burns), Ketley often works with a small number of dancers. But for the 2006 WestWave Dance Festival, he set Careless on 10 advanced ballet students from the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance. With the premiere of Monument, performed by 14 dancers, he continues his interest in larger-scale ensemble choreography. He also demonstrates his penchant for juxtaposing live and virtual dance. This memorial for a friend incorporates video, movement, and music. In the 2005 Less-Sylphides, Adoniou (a former ballet dancer as well) pays tribute to Michel Fokine’s 1909 pointe-shoes-and-white-tulle Les Sylphides, which is considered the first abstract ballet. It’s a highly creative take and radical in both senses of the term — deeply rooted while still a complete departure from the original.

LOCAL HEROES/BIG PICTURE WEEK 2 Thurs/17–Sat/19, 8 p.m. Theater Artaud, 450 Florida, SF. $18–$25. (415) 863-9834, www.odctheater.org

“Elsa and Fred”

July 16, 2008

REVIEW Bombshell Anita Ekberg embodies spontaneity as she playfully wades through the Trevi Fountain in that classic moment from Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960). Inspired by this scene, spry octogenarian Elsa (China Zorilla) has a photo of Ekberg hanging on her wall and confronts each day with the exuberance of a woman a quarter of her age. She speaks her mind and lives with reckless abandon — but not necessarily wreck-less abandon: a fender-bender just outside her apartment building eventually gives her reason to pay a visit to her new neighbor Alfredo (Manuel Alexandre), a recent widower. Aside from focusing on a pair of late-in-life lovers, this Spanish romantic dramedy rarely veers from the expected: Elsa inevitably encourages cautious Alfredo (or "Fred") to make the decision to truly live. Still, you’d be hard pressed to find anything quite as adorable as Elsa and Fred. Whether they’re kissing sweetly or pulling a dine-and-ditch at a swanky restaurant, these elderly lovebirds are an irresistible pair. Both actors deliver delightful performances, but Zorilla in particular is a much appreciated treat as Elsa, breathing life into some of the film’s flatter moments. Director Marcos Carnevale’s recreation of the Trevi Fountain scene is beautiful and heartwarming.

ELSA AND FRED opens Fri/18 in Bay Area theaters.

“3”

July 16, 2008

REVIEW For "3," artist Chris Duncan gathers a trio whose work explores pattern-making — either through the mark itself (Kyle Ranson’s decorated figures and Derrick Snodgrass’ prismatic constellations) or ordering select bits of visual information (Ernesto Burgos’ wall collage).

Bay Area artist Snodgrass’ Easter egg–colorful watercolors on paper from 2000 are refracted architectural shapes dotted with sunspots. Between then and now, Snodgrass loosened his grip and minimized his palette. Untitled, a tapestry in shades of browns and blacks, records the physicality of making the work. An orb at the tapestry’s center anchors a profusion of comet tails — the splattered streams radiate outward to the infinite. Back here on earth, local artist Ranson’s seven-panel The Rape depicts the Romans’ so-called rape or abduction of the Sabine women, a story ultimately about maintaining familial lines. Ranson’s rape is literal and explicit. The main male figure’s deadened eyes stare somewhere over the viewer while his naked conquest’s head tilts backwards, her steady gaze revealing nothing. The action across the panels is disconnected: a sentry stands off to the right, his outsize hands hanging dumbly by his sides, and a woman lounges naked and unaware. And is that God above, grinning slightly?

New York City artist Ernesto Burgos’ The Dumb Are Mostly Intrigued by the Drum offers a surrealistic plane where patterns and figures collide. A wall collage of black-and-white photocopies repeats photographic images of predatory birds, variously shaped atomic bomb clouds, lambs, a wide-eyed man whose mouth has been altered to a ghoulish grin, a naked woman whose wrists are bound in bondage ropes, and swatches of grids, to name a few. It isn’t so much that we are interested in patterns but that patterns are dependent on us: how can we repeat mistakes if they don’t make themselves recognizable?

3 Through Aug. 16. Tues.–Sat., 10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m. Gregory Lind Gallery, 49 Geary, fifth floor, SF. (415) 296-9661, www.gregorylindgallery.com

Yosvany Terry

July 16, 2008

PREVIEW With his new suite of songs, "Ye-dé-gbé and the Afro-Caribbean Legacy," Yosvany Terry puts his audience on a swivel, looking forward while also looking back. The Cuban-born composer-saxophonist-percussionist incorporates elements of Arará rhythms — a style brought to Cuba by slaves taken from Dahomey, now Benin, in West Africa — into his angular modern jazz writing.

"Even though I’m looking back at history, I’m trying to create something which can be combined with the most modern material I’ve been working on," Terry said from his New York City home. Three of Terry’s compositions were recorded on pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba’s latest album, Avatar (Blue Note), which was released this spring. Though Terry was most recently heard on that disc with Rubalcaba’s brilliant new quintet, the "Ye-dé-gbé" project has a more anthropological genesis. Terry traveled to Matanzas, Cuba, and studied with Mario "Mano" Rodriguez Pedroso, one of the greatest living drummers in the Arará tradition. He even had his own Arará drums made there. "The way the drums are played with sticks is a Dahomey tradition, which I bring up to date," he explained. "You can hear the deep foundation, which is very old, but at the same time, you hear it in a context which sounds very modern."

The music combines percussive layers with call-and-response chants and modern jazz soloing. Terry also gives credit to Bay Area percussionist Sandy Perez as a key element in the development of the suite, which receives its West Coast premiere in a series of Bay Area performances by Perez and his Afro-Caribbean Legacy band. The group includes lead vocalist and percussionist Pedro Martinez, pianist Osmany Paredes, dancer Felix "Pupi" Insua, percussionist Roman Diaz, and Terry’s brother Yunior Terry on bass. (Marcus Crowder)

YOSVANY TERRY AND THE AFRO-CARIBBEAN LEGACY With Jesus Diaz, John Santos, and Michael Spiro. Fri/18, 8 p.m., $12–$15. Lecture-demonstration by Terry, Tues/22, 7 p.m., $10–$12. La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck, Berk. (510) 849-2568, www.lapena.org. Also Sat/19, 1–3 p.m., free. Yerba Buena Gardens Festival, Mission and Third Sts., SF. www.ybgf.org. Also Sun/20, 7:30 p.m., $14–$28, Stanford Jazz Festival, Dinkelspiel Auditorium, Stanford. (650) 725-ARTS, www.stanfordjazz.org

Guilt to the hilt

July 16, 2008

› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Watching the chopped and cropped black-and-white promo vid for Beck’s new album, Modern Guilt (DGC) — a study in cut-rate Super 8 ways to make static images of the reedy rocker and cohorts look exciting and fresh — I can’t help but think of Velvet Underground hanger-on/documenter Andy Warhol and his bricolage brethren and kindred experimentalist Bruce Conner, who sadly passed July 7. Memories of the toothpick-thin, turtlenecked Bay Area beat-gen grandpappy shaking and shimmying beside breakdance troupe Sisterz of the Underground on an impromptu dance floor at the Guardian‘s 2005 Goldies bash are burned forever in my olde retina, for sure — right alongside indelible images from Conner’s Ray Charles–driven Cosmic Ray (1962) and his Toni Basil-go-go-happy Breakaway (1966). Where’s the joy in contemputf8g Conner’s fierce life force — one that happily, darkly captured the pure products of America gone mad — finally breaking away and making a run for the ether? And likewise — in an era of diminished expectations, recession-inspired belt-tightening, and exploding oil prices — who cares to question why Beck has got the 21st-century blues but bad?

Readings of Modern Guilt‘s songs as covert Scientology tracts can wait: the overt critical prognosis is that Beck’s latest disc is terminally bummed. "Modern Guilt sounds like an obligation," writes Amy O’Brien of Vancouver Sun. "It sounds like Beck has disengaged from his music." Meanwhile, Greg Kot of Chicago Tribune theorizes that the songwriter and producer Danger Mouse’s collaboration "sounds like it was dashed off between appointments on Danger Mouse’s increasingly stocked calendar." All grouse about the overall darkness of Beck’s mood: there are ruminations on bones, abandonment, and corrosive rain on the gluey exotica-bop "Orphans" and on melting ice caps, hurricanes, and heat waves amid the blissfully brisk, purring pop "Gamma Ray." "Replica" takes on a drum ‘n’ bass face, bright chimes tolling with dread at the age of mechanical reproduction, whereas "Profanity Prayers" invokes a spanking Devo rhythm and inverts "Mr. Soul" motifs to encapsulate soulless urban drift. "You couldn’t help but stare like a creature with the laws of a brothel and the fireproof bones of a preacher with your lingo coined from the sacrament of a casino … ," Beck breathes. "You stare into space trying to discern what to say now and you wait at the light and watch for a sign that you’re breathing." We’ve heard such expressions of ennui before from Beck, but can the weariness of age — he made 38 on July 8, the date of Modern Guilt‘s release — lie at the heart of the album, behind the minimalist bass bumps of "Youthless"? Or is Beck simply saving such crowd-pleasers as last year’s Grammy-nominated digital-only single "Timebomb" — just check the homemade video tributes on YouTube — for some Gallic-inspired megarelease to come?

I doubt it. Modern Guilt is far from giddily upbeat. It’s no Midnite Vultures (DGC, 1999), the larkiest Beck has ever skewed, nor is it as self-consciously crafted as The Information (DGC, 2006). Instead it reads like the man who is in touch, as usual, with the moment — one that would make Philip K. Dick’s skin crawl. My favorite songs emerge when Beck plunges into a Mutations-ish darkness and Sea Change–like doom. Downed jet passengers drown amid viewer paranoia in the dreamy, Gainsbourgian "Chemtrails," which roils in a gorgeous funk, and the fatalistic "Volcano" turns out be one of the most beautiful, beautifully imperfect songs Beck’s ever written. Its trudging beats dissolve like a heavy heart into his weary "I’m tired of evil / And all that it feeds." He continues, "I’m tired of people who only want to be pleased / But I still want to please you / And I heard of that Japanese girl who jumped into the volcano / Was she trying to make it back / Back to the womb of the world," and the melody resolves, ever so briefly, before returning to its sorrowful grind. "I’ve been drinking all these tears so long / All I’ve got left is the taste of salt in my mouth. I don’t know where I’ve been / But know where I’m going / To that volcano." Beck’s protagonist doesn’t want to fall in — nirvana has not been achieved, nor has the promise of Beck and his generation been completely fulfilled — but those uncredited violins make the brief journey out, into silence, a guilty pleasure. *

BECK

Aug. 22, 5 p.m., $85–<\d>$225.50

Outside Lands Festival

Golden Gate Park, SF

www.sfoutsidelands.com

MINE EARS HAVE HEARD THE GLORY

THE REAL TUESDAY WELD

Really, for reals. Wed/16, 7 p.m., $12. Café Du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. www.cafedunord.com

JASON ANDERSON

The K artist and ex–Wolf Colonel joins the aerobics and sock-puppet fun of the Unlimited Enthusiasm Expo ’08. With Harry and the Potters; Math, the Band; and Uncle Monsterface. Fri/18, 9 p.m., $12, and Sat/19, 1 p.m., $14. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com

COLDPLAY

Chris Martin et al. were recently jumped by Lil Wayne at the top of the US pops, where they were perched with Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends (Capitol). Fri/18, 7:30 p.m., $49.50–<\d>$89.50. HP Pavilion, 525 W. Santa Clara, San Jose. www.ticketmaster.com

NOBUNNY

Bouncing with witchy hooks. With Gravy Train!!!!, the Floating Corpses, and Bridez. Sat/19, 9 p.m., $12. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com

CHRIS SCHLARB

The Sounds Are Active label head lets loose his Twilight and Ghost Stories (Asthmatic Kitty). Sat/19, 10 p.m., $7. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

A HAWK AND A HACKSAW

Feeling horn-y? The Albuquerque, N.M., band recently hacked out a score for a documentary about cultural critic Slavoj Zizek. Mon/21, 8 p.m., $13. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

Download festival

July 16, 2008

PREVIEW If there was an contest for the most cringe-inducing festival name ever, Download would win handily. This is the future, I guess: international corporations sponsoring Wal-Mart-style festivals that pack as many bands as possible into oversize, out-of-the-way suburban locations with deals that are hard to ignore. Aye, there’s the rub.

Scottish noise punk pioneers the Jesus and Mary Chain headline the seductively-priced one-day throwdown. Reformed last year, brothers William and Jim Reid became infamous in the early days for their too-wasted-to-play live shows, standing with their backs to the crowd during their 15-minute sets. But with newfound sobriety and a slew of recent festival dates under their belts, JAMC might have perfected their arena rock charisma by now.

Gang of Four is another UK band that originally broke up before Al Gore invented the Internet. Since re-forming in 2004, the British blowhards have released a remix album, toured hard, and plan to put out a new disc later this year, updating their rhythmic Marxism for a fresh generation of activist dance punks.

Wait — I know what you’re thinking: the members of the headlining acts probably can’t check their e-mail without assistance, let alone download. They probably still, like, tape things. But like any big-box retailer, Download has something for the kids: Yeasayer, which dominates college radio with its groovy world beats; Blitzen Trapper, the Portland-based six-piece with a flair for alt-country and lotsa buzz; and Airborne Toxic Event, who hails from Los Angeles and, just like their muse Don DeLillo, captivate audiences with their melodramatic pretension. And man, that’s just the beginning. With 26 bands slotted to play in one day, that’s only 77 cents a band!

DOWNLOAD FESTIVAL See Web site for complete lineup and set times. Sat/19, 1 p.m., $20. Shoreline Amphitheatre, 1 Amphitheatre Pkwy, Mountain View. (650) 967-3000, www.downloadfestival.com

Dangerous jumpers

July 16, 2008

"We’re not just late ’90s scientifical backpack revivalists," says Ian "Young God" Taggart, one-half of production duo Blue Sky Black Death.

It’s a reference only a hip-hop head could appreciate. The "super-scientifical" tag comes from a verse in Jeru tha Damaja’s 1994 classic "Can’t Stop the Prophet," a bizarre drama in which the Brooklyn MC battles thugs who represent the seven deadly sins. The term has come to represent an influential wing of ’90s hip-hop culture, evoking yin-yang flights of lyrically ornate action fantasy and pre-millennial dread.

But with its fourth album, Late Night Cinema, Blue Sky Black Death has distilled its essence into something more original than Wu-Tang Clan homage. Released on independent hip-hop label Babygrande this spring, it blends live instruments — by Young God and various musician friends — and samples into a dense tapestry of themes, from the antiwar epic "Ghosts Among Men" to the yearning romance "The Era When We Sang." The disc expertly evokes the group’s namesake, a skydiving term for snatching ecstasy from oblivion.

"Probably the most beautiful thing when you’re jumping out is all the blue sky, but it’s the most dangerous thing you can do at the same time, you know?" explains Taggart by phone from his Upper Haight District home. "That’s the black death. I thought it went well with our music because I thought it could be really dark or really pretty."

The 23-year-old Taggart doesn’t earn a living from music yet. Instead, he lives a journeyman’s existence sustained by a hodgepodge of retail and restaurant gigs. Meanwhile his Seattle musical partner, 30-year-old Kingston Maguire, has more stable employment as an apartment complex manager. "I feel like I’m attracted to bullshit jobs so I can focus on my music," Taggart says.

Since joining forces in 2005, Taggart and Maguire have worked hard to expand their audience beyond a small but appreciative following of hardcore rap fans. Their label has a — sometimes unfair — reputation for issuing angry, conspiracy-obsessed rap epics. Its flagship artist is Jedi Mind Tricks, a Philadelphia group whose ’90s-style beats and verbal assaults against organized religion and the government have become a controversial subgenre unto itself.

Blue Sky Black Death has expertly mined this niche with wintry street dreams such as 2007’s Razah’s Ladder, an album recorded in conjunction with Hell Razah from former Wu-Tang affiliate Sunz of Man. But Taggart’s afraid his group is being dismissed as a JMT acolyte. "Honestly, I don’t want to be lumped in with them," he says. "That’s not a diss towards any of those artists, and it’s probably our fault because of the people we’ve worked with. But we try to drift away from that with our instrumental music because we don’t want to be pigeonholed with our sound."

Blue Sky Black Death wants to break out of the super-scientifical ghetto without forsaking its roots. Upcoming projects range from Slow Burning Lights, a San Francisco downtempo band with Yes Alexander from the Casual Lights, to an album with rappers Ill Bill from Non-Phixion and Crooked I. "As far as when we’re making actual beats and we have rappers in mind, I guess we’re definitely influenced by the ’90s sound," says Taggart. "But we take it a lot farther."

Bittersweet symphonies

July 16, 2008

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Indie culture tends to romanticize dog-eared production as a sign of authenticity rather than one of limited means. When I interviewed Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang last winter, they emphasized how they strove for professionalism designing Galaxie 500’s epochal album sleeves and then laughed when we talked about how younger bands try to recreate their so-called handmade quality. Phil Wilson suffered an altogether nastier shock when fans of the June Brides rejected his attempts to expand the scope of the band’s singles from tattered nursery rhymes like "Every Conversation" to the more poised pop songsmithery of "Josef’s Gone."

Of all the casualties of indie capriciousness, the Junies seem to have had especially rotten luck. Originally formed in 1983 by Wilson and schoolmate Simon Beesley, the June Brides quickly swelled to accommodate trumpeter Jon Hunter and John Cale–inspired violist Frank Sweeney. The group was a staple of Alan McGee’s Living Room venue, but McGee didn’t sign the Junies to his ascendant Creation Records, purportedly writing the band off as too obvious a choice.

The Junies’ slapdash discography of postcard singles and a mini-album — all collected on Cherry Red’s essential 2005 anthology, Every Conversation: The Story of The June Brides and Phil Wilson — was par for the era, but the outfit had several brushes with something more: an NME cover story, opening slots for the Jesus and Mary Chain at their infamous Ambulance Station shows, and taking Morrissey’s vote as "best band of 1985." But before they could get their footing, the combo got caught in an unenviable snare of nostalgic fans and a press backlash toward the twee bands associated with the C86 (Rough Trade/NME, 1986) compilation.

Alan McGee did invite Wilson to record solo material for Creation after the Junies split up in 1986, but after a couple of tender, country-tinged singles didn’t sell, the singer-songwriter extricated himself to a career in civil service. A new four-song EP, Industrial Strength, released by Oakland indie-pop aficionados Slumberland, picks up the quirky folk-rock vein he left off with on "10 Miles" and "A Jingle." Wilson’s voice is a bit less herky-jerky than it once was, but he sounds refreshed on the jangly opener, "Neon Lights." The best song of the set, a hypnotic swirl of dream-pop called "United," shows he still has a knack for making a ecstatically romantic lyric sound a little anxious.

In the past, Wilson used to work the opposite way, dabbing forlorn verses in his quicksilver melodies and soft-curving arches of verse-chorus-bridge. Bittersweet pop doesn’t come any more delicately folded than the vocalist’s gorgeous goodbye to the ’80s on the Caff Records’ 1989 "Better Days"/"The Written Word" single. The flubbed notes and flat harmonies of the early June Brides singles are endearing, but Wilson’s later efforts with the band — see the glitzy panache of "Just the Same" — show that the singer-songwriter was drawn to Brill Building polish as much as Television Personalities scruff.

This was a solid decade before it became fashionable for indie-rockers to mine baroque pop à la Pulp and Belle and Sebastian — an English association that could easily be expanded to put the Junies in the same league as American melancholy artists like Yo La Tengo and Sebadoh. Wilson won’t be netting a check for his California mini-tour comparable to the one the Jesus and Mary Chain got for headlining Coachella last year, but his songbook remains ripe for rediscovery, this summer or any other.

PHIL WILSON

With Magic Bullets and the Mantles

July 23, 8 p.m., $10

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com

Self-help books

July 16, 2008

ISBN REAL In a recent, much-discussed Washington Post op-ed, Twelve publisher Jonathan Karp said, "There are thousands of independent publishers and even more self-publishers. These players will soon have the same access to readers as major publishers do, once digital distribution and print-on-demand technology enter the mainstream. When that happens, [major] publishers will lose their greatest competitive advantage: the ability to distribute books widely and effectively."

The "widely" Karp refers to is an advantage that major publishers lost a long time ago. A physical copy of the latest Robert Ludlum novel is far less accessible to the global community than Joe Shmuck’s online prose poem about his first drug experience. It’s the "effectively" that’s taking its sweet-ass time to materialize. After all, thanks to the ease of e-distribution, the Internet has already become a cosmic slush pile.

Karp foresees a time when the glut of options for disposable entertainment will make brand-establishment for "formula fiction" a less successful strategy, leaving attention to quality as the only way for a major publisher to stay relevant. On the contrary, it seems to me that the agoraphobic variety offered by the Internet would make brand-establishment quite successful for a major publisher. Maybe it’s defeatist thinking, but I wonder if the only truly exciting possibility for seekers of uncompromising work in the near future is that smaller enterprises might have a better chance to survive alongside the larger ones. Maybe the practical hope is that the eventual normalization of "digital distribution and print-on-demand technology" might be sufficient to sustain the talented independent writer of modest financial expectations.

One potential beneficiary of this modest revolution is novelist Carl Shuker, who is publishing his brainy horror experiment Three Novellas for a Novel all by his lonesome at www.threenovellasforanovel.com. This month, Shuker — a New Zealander now living in London — has made the second of the three titular installments, ?O Hills Park, available for download. Also available is the first novella, The Depleted Forest, about an editor in an alternate-present Japan who is proofreading the computer-translated memoir of a member of a secret society of rape-tourists. The third installment, Beau Mot Plage, will be uploaded soon. For the PDFs, he’s charging — à la Radiohead — whatever you want to pay.

Since Shuker has already published two well-regarded novels (2005’s award-winning The Method Actors and 2006’s The Lazy Boys), he’s not exactly at the bottom of the slush pile. But he’s not Radiohead, either. More to the point, while The Depleted Forest is a relatively accessible and not unmarketable story, ?O Hills Park is the kind of thing only an Internet could love. It’s the full memoir excerpted in the first novella and presented in the quasi-English of computer translation. Rushed to publication to catch the public’s fleeting interest in the first book’s sex scandal, the text of ?O Hills Park is as much a mesmerizing word puzzle as an intriguing piece of fiction. It’s also a supremely ironic comment on the publishing culture from which the work was spared — the culture whose cathartic rehabilitation Karp is so optimistic about.

It’s doubtful either Karp or Shuker is making that culture hang its head in shame. Back when writers with a taste for food and shelter were at the mercy of those with the exclusive means of wide distribution, they had no choice but to pretend publishers answerable to stockholders had an obligation to publish works with all the mass appeal of a conscript military. It’s always been an honorable delusion, but it may be that such an insistence is now a waste of the energy that should be spent learning how to cut out the middleman.

Diaboliques

July 16, 2008

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Sex is such an unalloyed force in Catherine Breillat’s films that it actually seems to consume narrative. Among a controversial lot that includes Fat Girl (2001) and Romance (1999), The Last Mistress is unique for its classical trimmings, but its plot points and character development are still no more or less important than the emotional content of a moan. All the French writer-director’s films are anatomies of hell, but this time she’s courting provocations instead of simply imposing them. The thickening of Breillat’s stock may be due to her 2004 stroke, or her decision to adapt an earlier work (the film freely elaborates on an 1851 novel by Jules Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly), or the fact she’s finally snagged an actress who enlarges her take on female appetite-for-destruction.

That actress is Asia Argento. In performances typically labeled raw or animalistic by a mostly male press, the daughter of Dario bottles up the rage simmering underneath every black magic woman and femme fatale in film history. It’s telling that Argento’s daredevil acting style doesn’t conjure other actresses so much as rockers like Diamanda Galás, PJ Harvey, and Courtney Love — women who live on the literal edge of a stage.

In The Last Mistress, Argento isn’t so tongue-in-cheek that she’s willing to slobber a rottweiler (as in a much-discussed moment from Abel Ferrara’s 2007 Go Go Tales). Breillat has given Argento a character who dovetails with her persona. Her Vellini is constantly described as a creature and, in a key moment, as a mutt. Her titular courtesan — rumored to be the illegitimate offspring of an Italian princess and a Spanish matador — is conjured by flashbacks and the looks and idle gossip of others. The film opens with a churlish count and countess plotting to inform Vellini that the object of her longtime amour fou, Ryno de Marigny (Fu’ad Ait Aattou), is marrying the virginal Hermangarde (Roxane Mesquida). Our first image of Argento — a double-portrait of actress and character, stretched over a divan in a classic pose of seduction — instantly explodes any element of Merchant-Ivory farce, with the actress already burnishing the angry glow of her character’s typecast destiny.

A moment later, Vellini is relishing Ryno’s porcelain weight, her pleasure-hungry visage adjacent to the glassy eyes and growl of a stuffed tiger head. The shot suggests Breillat is playfully embracing her unsubtle craft. Radical plot offensives aside, she isn’t so different from Joseph Mankiewicz in her camera movements, editing, and composition. Her reactionary feminism might sink into serviceability except for one thing: when it comes to staging and directing her actors’ body language, she’s a master.

Pascale Ferran’s Lady Chatterley (2006) flushed cheeks where Breillat’s dark drama gnashes teeth, but the films are united in loosing their actresses to trammel over history. Ferran crafts an amorous epic; Vellini climaxes only a few minutes into Last Mistress, raising the discomfiting question: what if the enabling (and ennobling) freedom that lets us do as we please only turns us into slaves of desire? The answer might look something like Sofia Coppola’s fizzy tonic of lethargy and shopping, Marie Antoinette (2006), though Argento’s supporting role as Comtesse du Barry in that film practically beggared Breillat’s fleshy rejoinder. Where Sex and the City‘s infantilized Manhattan suggests constant airbrushing, woman directors such as Breillat make Paris drawing rooms, Versailles, and the French countryside shimmer with unsettled agendas.

THE LAST MISTRESS

Opens Fri/18 at Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at sfbg.com

www.ifcfilms.com

Home field advantage

July 16, 2008

› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Bars are wired for weird times. I know that. The combination of amplified music and vodka makes for surreally truncated, garbled conversation (if any). Which in turn makes for strange looks, nods of unknowingness, flights of fancy, and colorfully elaborate misunderstandings. Then the next day you have to e-mail everyone and say, "Christ, what happened?"

Restaurants are wired for romance. Coffeehouses are wired for wirelessness. That’s why you get coffee on first dates. If they don’t show up, you can check your e-mail. Second date, dinner. Third date, drinks and dinner — then hopefully more drinks, then hopefully breakfast. But you don’t just drink until after you are bored with each other, or are at least married.

I was not on a date. My date, the dumb fuck, cancelled on me. It would have been a second date, so I would have had dinner. As it turned out, I did have dinner with a good friend instead, so it was actually enjoyable — if not romantic — and then we went to see another friend’s band play and everyone was there.

Now, if you’re me, all your friends are in love with all your other friends, with the possible exception of me. And all their relationships are always at various stages of disappointment/dissipation, in which case they may want to confide in you, or else they are on Cloud Nine, in which case they may want you to confide in them.

It might be the same mechanism that makes people rubberneck car crashes or turn into drooling zombies in the glow of the Disaster Channel. They could be safe, held, and accounted for, but some rare, blissless part of them misses loneliness and/or craves the vicarious ache of your dumb fuck dates and serial dicklessness.

And some not-very-rare but raw part of you wants to talk, and tell, and hear, and feel, so this all works out very nicely, or would except that you’re in a loud bar with a lot of strong drinks in your hands. And the next thing you know, if you’re me, all your friends have left, some having said good-bye, some not … and you live an hour and a half away, have keys to several neighborhood couches and crawl spaces, but miss Weirdo the Cat and are in general very, very confused.

It’s late it’s dark you’ve had at least a drink you’re a lightweight you’re afraid to go let yourself in to any of your many oddly departed friends’ apartments because they are probably all in bed with each other, making happy, sexual, slurpy noises.

How did this happen? You trade your unfinished drink for a cup of coffee to go and, replaying the strange night in your head, you drive home on the verge of tears and, more dangerously, sleep. You feel hardly understood, hardly understanding, in broad daylight on solid ground, outside. Let alone at shows.

You remember saying to someone back at the bar: "I think I might try dating younger men, since older ones strike me as disappointingly immature. With younger ones at least I won’t be disappointed. And there will be hope. Insane hope, but hope."

What they heard, between guitar solos and microphone feedback: "I think the fire was in the bedroom, since something something scintilutf8gly immature. With young rum the peaches won’t be disappointing. Something something. I’m insane! Ho ho ho!"

Little wonder they looked at you sideways and left.

Fuck bars. Fuck restaurants. Fuck coffeehouses. From now on I’m going to stay home, in the woods. If my friends want to see me, they are more than welcome here. And I will feed them. Complete strangers too. If they want it to be a date, I have coffee!

We can sit outside, and the only interference to our clear, body-boggling verbal connection will be birds and squirrels, and/or the sizzling of chops and chicken. Inside, the sound of a clock and the smell of bacon. This is called home field advantage.

Which … I think I could use me some.

———————————————————————-

My new favorite restaurant is Taqueria Guadalajara. You know how I know? I had just bought about 15 pounds of Flint’s barbecue for my band, and Little Him showed up with a Guadalajara burrito. I couldn’t keep my eyes off it, ribs, brisket, and chicken notwithstanding. This burrito was eight-feet long and weighed 420 pounds. Next chance I got, I went to Guadalajara myself for about three solid meals’ worth of al pastor, and was not disappointed. Open late, and pretty nice inside, too.

TAQUERIA GUADALAJARA

Sun.–Thurs., 9 a.m.–1 a.m.; Fri.–Sat., 9 a.m.–3 a.m.

3146 24th St., SF

(415) 642-4892

Beer & wine

AE/DISC/MC/V

Belay that

July 16, 2008

› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

Ever since I was nine or so, I’ve had unexplored dominant-role power exchange fantasies. Now they are at odds with my marriage of 20-plus years (my wife isn’t into it) and my worldview/faith. I feel pretty strongly that I’m fooling myself when I think that finding a similarly-situated woman to clandestinely and mutually scratch this itch would somehow be cathartic and result in resolution once and for all, but the fantasy persists. Are these type of fantasies typically lifelong? Do they wane with age?

Love,

Hoping

Dear Hope:

Is it national S-M month or something? Shouldn’t I have been flooded with gay, lesbian, bisexual, transexual, and questioning questions all June instead? I do like a good S-M question, of course. I was just wondering.

I doubt you experienced those childhood urges as "dominant-role power exchange fantasies." I guess, rather, that you really enjoyed playing pirates, but only if you got to tie the prisoners to the mast and do weird stuff to them, and you never wanted to be the prisoner yourself. And eventually your friends got bored or irritated, but you wanted to keep playing. Likewise, I assume that more recently you’ve been doing some reading and now you recognize your youthful leanings for what they may have been: early indicators of later inclinations.

These types of fantasies are fairly likely to be lifelong, but like any other enthusiasm they are apt to wax and wane with the seasons, the hormones, and the circumstances. One of those circumstances may be deprivation, but I have to say that it’s just as likely to be immersion — if sex breeds sex (and it does), then kink no doubt breeds kink as well. Therefore, indulging in online simulacra or other noncorporeal outlets is not necessarily a cure for inappropriate fantasizing. (Hold that thought.)

"Wait," you say. "What’s so inappropriate about S-M fantasies? I thought Andrea was kinda in favor of those?" Maybe I am and maybe I amn’t, but that’s beside the point. It is obvious, given your commitment to your marriage and your wife’s lack of interest, your power-play longings are not doing you any favors, so dwelling on them may not turn out to be very helpful. Individual real-life appropriateness aside, I actually think S-M is morally neutral: great for some people, a bad choice for others, and, as my Hispanophone friend Melissa would say, bla bla y bla.

Now, is it really a bad idea to immerse oneself in S-M fantasies if one will not be indulging them in real life? No, of course it isn’t. If there is one tenet by which all sex educators swear, it is that fantasy is fantasy and reality is reality, and there is no obligation that ever the twain should meet. If, however, the fantasy ignites and will not quiet, and you find yourself spending ever more of your precious waking hours obsessing on it, then cultivating a very rich fantasy life is probably not for you.

Ah, but you didn’t really ask about fantasy. You asked about finding a real person, similarly unfulfilled at home, and embarking on a S-M-only clandestine nonromance. And I say, in the immortal words of Rocky the Flying Squirrel, "That trick never works!"

Is it possible to have a partner with whom one only does S-M, no sex, and with whom one does not fall in love? Emphatically yes. Is it a good idea to do this without one’s spouse’s agreement? Of course not. Add in the special intimacy, false or not, that you and such a partner would likely forge, based largely on the seductive call of "my partner doesn’t understand me," and really, just no. I didn’t miss the part about your worldview and faith being incompatible with acting on any of this, either. Happily you do see that putting yourself through that many uncomfortable and potentially unethical contortions at once can only lead to injury — psychic and possibly otherwise. I think.

I do not believe that acting out a power differential with a fully informed and consenting partner is incompatible with an egalitarian or nonviolent worldview, but if you do, that’s going to be a bad fit. As for not fitting in with your faith, well, I’m unaware of any organized religions except perhaps what a friend once referred to as "Episcopaganism" that expressly embrace kinky sex, but many insist only that you respect your body and your partner’s, an idea that is open to hairsplitting interpretation. You would know best, of course. If what I’m hearing from you is what you meant to present, though, I’d have to say that a moderate amount of (porn-assisted, if you like) fantasy and no real-life contacts will be the healthier choice for you. Finding a girl on the Internet and flogging her? Not gonna help.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question.

Biennialmania

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July 16, 2008
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Biennials, triennials, and whatever other rotation of years, are place-based exhibitions. They obviously happen somewhere, and the place dictates the context. The "Whitney Biennial 2008," for example, focused on "American art," an increasingly ambiguous term — in recent years the show has included growing numbers of artists with hyphenated identities. "Today there are more artists working in more genres, using more varieties of material, and moving among more geographic locations than ever before," reads the blurb on the Web site for this year’s edition. "By exploring the networks that exist among contemporary artists and the work they create, the Biennial characterizes the state of American art today."

That sense of international movement seems to be informing the shape and scope of biennials everywhere, creating curatorial fashions that are almost predictably inventive — and often place structural concepts ahead of visual appeal. The West is riding a surge of art surveys, and you just have to skim the institutional rhetoric to sense how complicated, or perhaps rote, the idea of location has become.

The current Site Santa Fe biennial in a very identifiable New Mexico location is a salient example. It was created by the curator/organizer, Lance Fung, who contacted curators at alternative spaces around the world and asked each to recommend artists. The 22 selected artists and collectives were commissioned to produce ephemeral "site-inspired" projects. As the release notes, "All the works are created on site, and are informed by this specific locale and the surrounding Santa Fe environs…. Much of the show has actually occurred prior to the opening, on the ground in Santa Fe, and prior to that, in virtual space, as ideas, proposals, and thoughts that have been transmitted around the world." The show contains just one collaborative team that lives in Santa Fe.

According to its Web site, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ fifth triennial "Bay Area Now" exhibition, opening Saturday, July 19, "explores questions around how to re-imagine a regional survey in the midst of globalization." The Bay Area is an interesting case in this regard because it is a fairly self-enclosed, self-defined site — and unlike the Santa Fe show, few people will travel to San Francisco just to see "BAN 5." Curators Kate Eilertsen and Berin Golonu tackle this formidable scenario with a cross-generational, cross-disciplinary gallery exhibition and four guest-curated shows that "will diversify ‘Bay Area Now”s curatorial vision and extend the artwork beyond the walls of our galleries and beyond the confines of our region." It remains to be seen how successfully they meet the challenge.

It’s interesting to compare "BAN 5" rhetoric with that surrounding the "2008 California Biennial," which opens in October at the Orange County Museum of Art. (Full disclosure: I contributed a short interview to the catalog.) "How does one approach a regional biennial?" states the promotional literature on the show’s Web site. "In a climate of globalism and transnationalism, how does a regional biennial serve artists and audiences? What is distinctive and different about cultural production at this point in time, in this context? How does one approach contemporary artistic practices based on locational parameters?"

The "CAB," organized by Lauri Firstenberg, will also stage off-site projects at venues such as Estación Tijuana, an independent exhibition space in Tijuana, Mexico, and SF’s Queens Nails Annex, a space that hosts BAN 5 as well. Extending an exhibition’s geographical reach is admirable and interesting, though those efforts may fracture these shows and make them harder to see — one wonders, if you just make it to Queens Nails, will you really see "BAN 5" or "CAB"?

The parallels are distinct and reflective of the zeitgeist. But as much as we’d like to think these exhibitions are about now, they most directly reflect the years in which they were organized. America will be getting a new president, but it’s shrinking from rising fuel costs and economic woes. In such an environment, regional identity — think locavores — most likely will grow stronger. Here’s hoping "BAN 5" captures some of that energy.

You’re going to myth me

-

July 16, 2008
0

You don’t need to pick up all the subtleties of Berkeley-born Iranian American artist Ala Ebtekar’s work to appreciate the resonant beauty of, for instance, The Ascension II (2007), and its angelic, part-griffin, semi-human, quasi-Homa messenger drawn from Persian mythology, winging across reams of Farsi as assorted readers’ delicate notes intricately lace the printed manuscript. But it helps to know that the iconography of that winged messenger reaches back 5,000 years to a pre-Islamic Iran, was eventually appropriated in depictions of Ayatollah Khomeini, and that the angels with keys dangling from their necks, surrounding the wary mythical creature, refer to the child soldiers enlisted during the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) to run across battlefields and detect land mines. "They’d give these kids these keys to heaven," explains Ebtekar at his Palo Alto studio near Stanford University, where he received his MFA. "It’s like, ‘Whoa!’ That’s a certain kind of mythology, but it’s tapping into something apocalyptic."

And you don’t need to know the specifics of aerospace design to appreciate the watercolor, acrylic, and ink jets tearing across script in The Breeze of Time (2002): they happen to be the exact ones used in the Iran-Iraq War. Ebtekar is aware that viewers bring their own connections to the work. "Yeah, I was doing this stuff before 9/11, in school, on book pages, and then 9/11 happened and I stopped. I thought, there’s no way I can do this," he recalls. Much of his work tied in directly with the Iran-Iraq War, a part of his own personal mythology, and the reason his activist Iranian parents remained in the States. "I was very much tapped into those older stories and histories. But then they announced the [Iraq] war, and I thought, actually, if there’s any time to do it, it’s more important to do it now than not."

The urgency of the present continues to call to Ebtekar, who draws from his studies in Iran of the refined art of Persian miniature painting and the less-known, more visceral field of coffeehouse painting for his works, which range from the aforementioned pieces that play off rich layers of text and imagery — and Iranian poetry and history — to large-scale graphite drawings that superimpose the outlines of Iranian wrestlers — current street-level mythological heroes — with hip-hop figures culled from Ebtekar’s music-obsessed youth, one spent DJing at parties and interning as a hip-hop DJ at KALX 90.7 FM.

As we listen to classic tracks by his mother’s pop idol, Iranian diva Googoosh, and scope out images of strongmen striking poses in a zurkhaneh (house of strength), juxtaposed with aerodynamic break-dancers in his studio — aptly situated over a downtown Palo Alto coffeehouse and crammed with art supplies, books, cassettes, vinyl, and a Tehrangeles T-shirt Ebtekar made for the 2006 California Biennial — it’s clear the artist’s pop interests still find a way to light: witness the 2004 Intersection for the Arts show that saw Ebtekar pairing a white-washed Iranian coffeehouse installation with shoes sporting fat laces fashioned from ornate Persian textile. "Bay Area Now 5" will find him combining his two approaches with a piece that layers ancient and modern-day warriors in a ghostly epic that looks backward and forward — a gesture familiar to Ebtekar, who rolls his eyes over John McCain’s comment on recent cigarette exports to Iran — "Maybe that’s a way of killing them" — and is currently teaching art at UC Berkeley in preparation for his dream. By 2011, he wants to start an art foundation and school in Iran.

After the US presidential election, Ebtekar hopes he can make it happen. First, he says, "there needs to be more diplomacy. In Iran, there’s this thing about nostalgia. You had such a great empire in the past — how do you move forward?" As a Bay Area 18-year-old who fell in love with Iran when he studied art there in 1997, he’ll be able to synthesize the past and future, bringing his ancestral mythology back to the old country in new forms. "It’s like having these multiple identities and being able to tap into this side of you and that side of you," Ebtekar explains. "They’re not clashing, you know what I mean. They’re rocking it full force."

Doing it naturally

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July 16, 2008
0

Donald Fortescue and Lawrence LaBianca’s "Bay Area Now 5" work — jokingly referred to earlier this month as the "Top Secret Oyster Project" — is not just about the creation of a well-crafted object. The piece also deals with the current state of San Francisco Bay’s wildlife, tides, and geography. So the two artists decided to let the physical environment affect the work — literally.

After putting in plentiful research, studying ocean survey charts, and talking with local environmental authorities on the work’s impact of their piece, the pair hired a diver to install the steel-table form they built — a muscled-up version of traditional cabriole or animal-legged furniture, as Fortescue describes it — on the floor of Tomales Bay, where it was designed to sit for several months. During the installation, however, their diver told them that the conditions weren’t the best for the hoped-for weathering and oyster- and barnacle-encrusting process, so the table was relocated to Pillar Point. In the meantime, they gathered hydrophone recordings in Bodega Bay to augment the work.

Fortescue, an Adelaide, Australia, expatriate who now heads the California College of the Arts’ furniture department, and LaBianca, who teaches interior architecture at CCA, share more than a keen interest in the physicality of the Bay Area: the two master craftsmen have a history of creating fine-art sculpture. "For me, it’s all just one spectrum — sometimes located more in one area than the other," says Fortescue from Sebastopol. Although this will be the pair’s first manifestation of an object together, it’s not the first time they’ve worked together. The met in Chicago six years ago when they each had work in a retrospective show of recipients of Virginia A. Groot Foundation grants. About two years ago, they collaborated on a proposal to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for an installation based on Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Even though that project didn’t get the green light, they learned a great deal about collaboration, an approach that seems suited to the Bay Area art scene. "Unlike New York, with artists jockeying to get into the best galleries, you see a lot less ruthless, cutthroat behavior here," Fortescue says. "This is a much more friendly environment, much more helpful.

"I wouldn’t be surprised if what we are making is the most crafted object" in "BAN 5," Fortescue continues. "We use making as a way to explore new ways of making — crafting as an excuse for crafting." Oh, and it’s a great excuse to spend even more time amid the Bay Area’s natural settings.

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