Volume 45 [2010–11]

Coyote moon

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0

CHEAP EATS Ten minutes, she said. I promise you, the line does not take long. She was like a greeter, which seemed unusual for a grocery store, but I am willing to believe almost anything at this point.

It’s strange: to pride oneself on one’s gullibility. Nevertheless, I grabbed the bread that I wanted, and walked whistling with it to the back of the store, through the storage area past the back of the store, beyond the bathrooms, back outside into the loading zone on the opposite side of the building from the parking lot, through some bushes, under an overpass, entirely outside of the city and into the desert, where I took my spot at the end of the line and said to the person in front of me, “Hi.”

“Hi,” he said. It was a cold crisp night with stars and moons all over the place. And behind me the line kept getting longer, all the while time passing.

The line did not move at all. Apparently, people were buying houses and cars. They had to talk to their lawyers and spouses, and wait for bank loans to be approved. Inspections.

Before long I had finished all the bread and was standing in line with an empty paper bag. The city was nowhere in sight, not to mention the cashiers. Nor could I tell if the line of people who had lined up behind me stretched longer than the line still in front of me. I was, as usual, in the middle.

It’s my nature to use my time wisely, even when it’s only 10 minutes. (She’d promised.) I tried to talk to the man in line ahead of me. First I made eye contact, then I asked questions. I wanted to familiarize myself with concepts like escrow and closing, in case someone else in the line should prove worth flirting with.

Because you never know. Many of my girlfriends met their future husbands while waiting in lines. It’s true that for the most part their future husbands didn’t notice them; they just went about their business, as it is in man’s nature to do. But there are exceptions to every rule, I’m told, so who’s to say I wasn’t going to be one of them?

Instead of educating me, the man in front of me in line flirted with me. I never did learn about escrow; I learned about him. He was married but separated from his wife but still in love with her but she didn’t love him and was living with her tennis teacher.

“The man is a tennis teacher?” I said. I don’t know why I wanted to be perfectly clear about the person his wife was living with, and what he did for a living. In retrospect it seems far from the point.

Still, I said what I said and the man said, “Yes. Do you play?”

“No,” I said. This was a lie.

“Well,” he said, then, “what is your story?”

And just like that I had him where I wanted. A captive audience, middle of nowhere, on a night much like this, waiting, waiting, and already mystified by my mystique. Which is, I’m told, considerable.

“Once upon a time,” I said.

“Don’t give me that shit,” said my future husband.

“Once upon a time,” I said again, because that’s the kind of storyteller I am, and, as if on cue, the rest of the line of people dissolved into the night, and all around us coyotes yipped and yapped.

“The corn on the cob was not fresh. Or it was overcooked,” I said, poking our little campfire with a stick, and my guest nodded, understanding me perfectly. “The brisket and the ribs were just fine, but, you know, it’s nice to have barbecue across the street from where you drink.”

“Where?” he said.

“Anywhere. Your neighborhood dive,” I said. “El Rio, in my case. One meets the love of one’s life in such a place, and the love of my life,” I said, “is barbecue.”

“But the corn …”

“It had dimples in it, yes,” I said. “It stuck to your teeth. Like something you feed to animals.”

He shook his head, in the smoke, in the night. And I shook mine.

We were supposed to have been so much more.

BABY BLUES BBQ

Sun.-Thu.: 11:30 a.m.-10 p.m.; Fri.-Sat.: 11:30 a.m.-11 p.m.

3149 Mission St., S.F.

(415) 796-2837

Beer & wine

AE/MC/V

From an epic, a classic

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
From an epic, a classic

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE What makes watching the Mark Morris Dance Group’s Dido and Aeneas such a satisfying — and ultimately profound — experience? It’s really simple: give a story of love and war to a poet, who creates a rhythmically and imagistically suggestive libretto, which then gets into the hands of a genius composer, and finally ends up with Mark Morris, who just happens to be a great choreographer and company director. That’s it.

Morris created Dido in Brussels in 1989, where the Opera de la Monnaie had everything he needed: a budget for production, support for a large group of dancers, and the freedom do what he wanted. That experience decisively shaped the 33-year-old choreographer and put him on the world stage to which the controversy surrounding the premiere probably did its part.

By casting the Sorceress as Dido’s darker side — and having the characters interpreted by the same dancer — Morris injected an intriguing Freudian note, though it added little to the tragedy. However, it gave Morris, a superb dancer, the role of his life. He did the part until 2000. In his company’s performance at Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall Sept. 16-18, he put his stamp on the production by conducting the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and Chorale (performing Henry Purcell’s 17th century score) in the pit. He did it well — not surprising, since he’s renowned for his musicality.

In this incarnation of Dido and Aeneas, Amber Star Merkens dances the double role convincingly, making it her own, though she doesn’t have Morris’ solid physique and bone-deep expressivity. You couldn’t help but see Morris in the jaunty lift of her chin and the way she placed her hands. As a Sorceress, throwing her arms up in mock desperation at the antics of her fellow witches, Merkens becomes every inch the aging Madam in a roadside whorehouse.

Opposite Merkens, Domingo Estrada Jr. gave Aeneas just a touch of vanity and self-involvement. He seemed very young.

But it’s not only the leads who need to switch emotional gears back and forth; the ensemble of courtiers, witches, and soldiers has to follow suit. Despite some initial hiccups, Morris’ dancers did themselves proud.

What continues to surprise in this remarkable work — certainly one of Morris’ finest, if not his greatest — is the economy of means with which he weaves this tale, drawn from Virgil’s Aeneid, of the outsized passion and grief of Dido, Queen of Carthage and Aeneas, Founder of Rome. The dancers wear black tops and skirts except for Aeneas, who is topless. Robert Bordo’s set consists of two benches and a washed-out curtain that looks like it might have belonged to a traveling theater group.

Though Morris’ vocabulary includes some of his more literal responses to the music that (as a more mature choreographer) he now pretty much foregoes, the depth of his imagination is breathtaking. He plants the legs even as the arms fly out as far as the body can reach. He draws on Martha Graham’s use of the ground, Irish folk dancing, and ballet’s toe work, and makes them his own. The dances, whether in strict unisons or opposing and interlocking patterns, are stenciled into space.

Most unusual is the way Morris infuses Dido with a sense of absence, of negation. We see the dancers in half-profile or with their backs to us. Even the witches cover their eyes. When Aeneas arrives, Dido turns away. In their love duet, he holds her hand, yet looks over his other outstretched hand across the ocean. It is as if the passion and pain were too much for us to witness.

Much like a Greek tragedy, Dido proclaims a sense of order and restraint that is disturbed but ultimately restored. But at what price. At the end of her lament — Purcell at his most lyrical — Dido, with her arms outstretched, lies on the bench that became her bier. Her retinue processes out two-by-two except for the Second Woman (Rita Donahue). She looks at Belinda (Maile Okamura), her lover and Dido’s faithful confidante. Then she turns and leaves. Alone. At that moment the heroic and the human became one.

The last supper

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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2

› paulr@sfbg.com

DINE “I’ve had a good run,” Harry Morant tells a young friend near the end of one of my favorite movies, Breaker Morant. Soon after, he is set before a military firing squad and shot dead. My own circumstances are, I hope, less dire — certainly they’re less cinematic — though I too have had a good run. But all journeys come to an end sooner or later, and so now does this one.

If you’ve read these columns through the years, then you’ve read quite a few columns, and you’ve counted quite a few years passing by. In a better world, you would get a rebate check for all your trouble. Reading is, if not trouble, at least effort; it is a form of work that requires exertion, and it also — unfortunately — reminds too many people of school, with syllabi, assigned texts, pop quizzes, and other such outrages. “Required reading” has always seemed to me to be one of life’s great oxymorons, along with “military intelligence.”

Nonetheless I have always posited the existence of readers, people who would take the time to sit down and concentrate for a few minutes on a piece about a restaurant in a free alt-weekly so that they might discern, and maybe even pleased by, the texture of the piece, the flavors of the language, the sense of a place conveyed, the images and jokes. And I have tried to write for those people, even if (to judge by the occasional appreciative notes I received) they seemed largely to be members of the UC Berkeley faculty.

Readers, as I imagined them, would take pleasure in what they had just read, and they would also have been expanded by it, however slightly. Their effort would have been repaid. As I writer, I have always tried to keep this transaction, the basic transaction of all literary life, in mind.

Never was I an awarder of stars, nor, as I understood things, a recommender. Those tasks fell to others, and in a city stuffed like a fat sausage with people keen to write about food and restaurants, leaving tasks for others struck me as an essential survival skill. The greater good is not served by everyone descending on the same place to write more or less the same thing, as quickly as possible. That is simply hype, and we are dying of hype. I meant to write about places others weren’t writing about. Sometimes I managed this and sometimes I didn’t, but the idea was always in my mind, and when I found myself in the midst of a 10-car pile-up anyway, as happened from time to time, I deducted five points from my account.

For me the model, or ideal, of this gig resembled a travelogue, a running account of places visited, impressions received and relayed. Of course journalism tilts strongly and inevitably to what is new. But I thought it was important to tack against those powerful winds when possible, to go occasionally to places that were not new or were even old, or to places that could be found on roads less travelled. I tried to keep the varieties of cuisines in mind, and of price points. You can spend tons of money and be disappointed, or spend very little and be elated — and it can also be exactly the other way around.

My basic philosophical orientation was that of a cook, setting forth to look for ideas and even a sort of instruction. I’ve been the cook of my little household for more than a quarter-century, and someone in that position naturally is going to be looking for ideas, twists and wrinkles that can politely, or at least discreetly, be taken home and used. Often, when looking at menus, I would find myself wondering: have I made that, or could I, should I try to? And when this or that dish reached the table, I would wonder how it compared to my own version.

One of the big issues with restaurant kitchens is that you never know for sure what they’re putting in your food, but a lot of butter is probably a safe bet. If you believe, as I do, that health is a personal responsibility and that the connection between diet and well-being is as basic as it gets, then there is no substitute for buying and cooking your own food rather than paying somebody else to do it. Restaurant meals should be treats, not staples.

Restaurants are about more than food, of course. They are social fora, gathering places full of talk and clothes and interior design; they are cultural statements, business endeavors, entertainment venues, and labors of love. They are, above all, sensual experiences — great outings for the senses — and describing sensual experience is one of the trickiest and most absorbing operations any writer will ever undertake. The difference between doing it well and doing it badly is often fine and very often involves the presence or absence of cliché. Rote expressions and tired imagery are lethal to sensual description — it seems particularly and bitterly ironic to find the freshness of food being written about in language as stale as month-old bread — and in my small way I have been a committed warrior against these toxins of banality. Down the weeks, months, and years, I have tried to summon language as lively, exact, and unexpected as I could think to make it, so that it might delight the reader and, not coincidentally, stick in the mind.

There is nothing more powerful in language than a phrase, sometimes a single word, that helps you see something you hadn’t seen before, or helps you see something you had seen before, even if it’s just a burrito, in a surprising new way. These glints of words kindle the imagination, and imagination, I would say, is basic to our prospects as a species. This is why good writing, whatever its subject, will always be not just important but central, even when, as now, its value is eclipsed by a rising culture of gadgets and gizmos, of YouTube clips played on smartphones. The heart of human intelligence, of human knowing, is and will remain language, and writing is language’s most potent distillate. What we feed our minds is as important as what we feed our bodies — or at least that is what I believe, since I am a writer and couldn’t possibly believe otherwise.

But enough! I must run.

Difficult loves

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Difficult loves

arts@sfbg.com

FILM The critic Quintín began his review of Mysteries of Lisbon in last winter’s Cinema Scope by noting that the film’s lavish production and strong reception marked a welcome turnaround for its director Raúl Ruiz, who in the years prior struggled with funding and illness. Though produced for Portuguese television, the film won awards and raves on the festival circuit. Suddenly, Ruiz seemed more assured his rightful status as a master. A year later Mysteries of Lisbon arrives for a rather miraculous theatrical run — but Ruiz is gone. He died in August 2011, having directed many more films than his 70 years.

Ruiz’s films have typically been the province of hardcore cinephiles, but this splendid epic holds wider appeal. It’s difficult to think of another movie that so satisfyingly captures the intricacies and volatilities of the 19th century novel — anyone enthralled by the teeming creations of Balzac and Dickens will find that Mysteries of Lisbon‘s four-and-a-half hours stream by. Ruiz was no stranger to the 19th century — his recent films included Klimt (2006) and the Proustian Time Regained (1999) — but the ornately plotted trio of novellas by Portuguese author Camilo Castelo Branco which supply these mysteries seem specially tailored to the director’s affinity for involved narrations.

The story sweeps across dozens of characters and several generations of doomed love, revenge plots, disguised identities, uncertain parentages, and religious vows. We even glimpse the Napoleonic Wars. It’s gripping stuff, in other words, and Ruiz meant it that way — the film refutes the idea that an analytical narration style upbraids narrative pleasure (a cornerstone of much structuralist film theory). One hesitates to launch into describing Mysteries of Lisbon‘s plot, not only because there’s such an awful lot of it, but also because it risks underselling the brilliant means by which information is divulged.

It begins with an adolescent searching out his origins. Pedro da Silva lives under the care of kindly and knowing Father Dinis. The boy becomes dimly aware of his mother, Angela de Lima, when he’s sick with fever (realized with a neat impressionistic distortion). In the film’s first flashback, to the near past, we learn of her cruel treatment at the hands of her husband, the Count of Santa Bárbara. She eventually flees to the church, whereupon her history of misfortune tumbles out in a deeper flashback narrated by Dinis: her passion for Pedro’s father and the iron disapproval of her father, the Marquis de Montezelos. After contracting the elder Pedro’s murder to his thug, Knife Eater, Marquis arranges for the man to snuff out his daughter’s bastard child at birth. A gypsy bargains for the baby’s life from Knife Eater, and that gypsy, we later learn, is one and the same as Father Dinis.

The priest’s shadowy transformations provide a recurring template for Mysteries of Lisbon, as does his eventual commitment to God. An intermission is shrewdly positioned so that the beginning of the second half begins with another origin story — Dinis’s own. The Samsaric wheel of lost love and filial abandonment turns again. A new set of characters emerge, including a mysterious capitalist posing as a Brazilian import who eventually marries the Count of Santa Barbara’s mistress, Eugénia, and takes a peculiar interest in Pedro’s well-being. His former lover, the bewitching Duchess of Cliton, lives for revenge and arouses the idealistic romance of Pedro, now a young man: it seems we’ve spun through the past long enough for him to age.

Delirious yet? That narrow introduction doesn’t begin to convey the vertiginous experience of Mysteries of Lisbon‘s discoveries and resonances. By moving steadily further from the young Pedro’s frame of reference, Ruiz suggests that every doomed love is its own even as they are invariably connected. The immersive nature of the flashbacks all but obliterates any semblance of Pedro’s narrative through line, and leaves us vulnerable to alluring déjà vu (key repetitions of specific objects, framings, and dialog within different spheres of the plot). If Ruiz is partly poking fun at literary convention by repeatedly framing eavesdroppers in the extreme foreground and backgrounds of the frame, for instance, he’s also giving us tangible figures of the thread that connects these disparate stories.

Ruiz’s narrations are commonly likened to labyrinths, but for Mysteries of Lisbon‘s vigorous expansion I reach for the cosmos: one luminous sphere rotates another which in turn rotates a larger system, the whole of it spreading outwards in all directions at once. There are many other ways one could model the narrative’s abundance — in interviews Ruiz cited the mathematical concept of overflow — but the point is not so many films inspire this kind of reflection. And if complexity is one measure of the film’s greatness, flexibility is surely another. Throughout, Ruiz demonstrates that a distant long take need not be emotionally remote; that a shot can reveal as it conceals; that dramatic irony can fluctuate, giving knowledge itself an almost textural quality.

In one of the few scenes set outside a gilded room or convent, the older Pedro searches out his mother’s grave. There he meets his grandfather, the formerly imposing Marquis, now a deluded blind beggar. It’s the umpteenth case of a character cropping up in a different mask, and this one seems the most obvious kind of poetic justice. As the Marquis exits, his beggar companion approaches Pedro. He redundantly recounts the Marquis’ fall, but then adds his own insight, that nobility’s great tragedies are simply the stuff of life for beggars. Ruiz remains light on his feet well past the four hour mark, always prepared with another shift in perspective. Mysteries of Lisbon is not the kind of masterpiece you expect of an old man, but then Ruiz clearly had little use for such a simplistic concept of time. 

MYSTERIES OF LISBON opens Sept. 30 in San Francisco.

Twee of life

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Twee of life

arts@sfbg.com

FILM For a while there it looked like Gus Van Sant, one of the most interesting U.S. directorial sensibilities of the last quarter-century, was going to settle for cashing the checks that have lured many an “edgy” artist over to the dull dark side. His mainstreaming began with the mixed rewards of 1995’s To Die For, peaking commercially with 1997’s Good Will Hunting; Finding Forrester (2000) and Psycho (1998) weren’t justifiable choices on any terms.

But then with the quartet of Gerry (2002), Elephant (2003), Last Days (2005), and Paranoid Park (2007) he was back making films as small, idiosyncratic, personal, and (but for his name) less commercial than anything he’d done since 1986’s Mala Noche. You could call them brilliant, baffling, or boring, but they weren’t works of careerist complacency. Milk (2008) was something else, crafted to reach as many as possible politically. It was a very good rather than great movie, coaxing a warmth and ebullience previously unseen from Sean Penn.

After that streak, it’s no big deal that Restless isn’t very good, let alone great, or that it falls between personal and mainstream categorization — small enough to pass as the former, formulaic enough for the latter. What is notable, however, is that it’s bad in ways Van Sant hasn’t hazarded before, and which you might reasonably have thunk he never would. Yes, Psycho, and maybe 1993’s excessively dissed Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, is still worse. But Restless is pandering and insufferable: it’s got a case of the cutes so advanced the protagonists might as well be puppies and kittens.

Making use of a certified “eccentric” identifier that (if you swap in 12 step meetings, etc.) is already an overexposed narrative gimmick, Jason Lew’s script introduces pettable Enoch (Henry Hopper) as a teenage loner so affectedly angst-ridden his primary occupation is attending the funerals of complete strangers. At one such he meets the perky, equally quirky Annabel (Mia Wasikowska), who finds his surliness delightful and presses friendship upon him. It’s not going to be a major commitment, as she soon explains she’s in treatment for cancer with a very limited remaining lifespan.

Drawn by overlapping cute fixations on morbidity (both have dead parents as well), they are fast spending all their time together, to the somewhat ill explained annoyance of her older sister (Schuyler Fisk). (He’s living with an aunt played by Jane Adams, who gets so little to do here one suspects most of her part is on the cutting-room floor.)

They do moderately wacky things and share secrets, the latter including his conversations with imaginary friend Hiroshi (Ryo Kase), the ghost of a fictive downed World War II kamikaze pilot. (Adding to the Charlie St. Cloud like levels of twee, despite his made-up status wise Hiroshi sometimes knows things Enoch doesn’t yet, and eventually Annabel can see him, too.) Both have plenty of time on their hands because, well, she’s dying and he’s been expelled from school for reasons that naturally turn out to be rather noble.

All young lovers fancy themselves in their own special world beyond others’ full understanding. But Restless buys into that specialness with a vengeance. Its romanticism is that an arrested-adolescent type spanning the tuberculic etherealism of those wasting Victorian heroines Edward Gorey parodied, the girl-dying-from-too-much-spiritual-radiance Love Story (1970) formula, and the smiley face noncomformism of Harold and Maude (1971) and its ilk, wherein acting childish was a rebellious act of sticking it to the Man. In such narratives our protagonists almost never have jobs, likable relatives, or other real-world responsibilities, the better to act out fey fanasties together, then wallow in picturesque pathos alone. They’re their own Make a Wish Foundation, 24/7.

Puppies and kittens are cute, and getting suckered by this kind of enterprise is hardly the worst form of audience manipulation. But why is Van Sant playing enabler? One suspects there was something irresistible about first-time scenarist Jason Lew, just as there doubtless was to Matt ‘n’ Ben (Good Will Hunting) and to Milk‘s Dustin Lance Black.

But those choices were solid ones, at least. Always a fan of youth, the director is to be applauded for encouraging fledgling talent offscreen as well as on it. Still, occasional traces of his recognizable style hardly dilute the sugary sentimentality at the core of Restless, lend it actual gravitas or even the kind of fanciful mood that might excuse potential preciousness as fable. Twenty-two-but-passing-for-younger of the moment Wasikowska is fine, though she has been and will be better. Hopper, son of Dennis — how did such scrubbed, nonthreatening blond adorability arise from that gene pool? — is less evidently an actor in his first film than a prepube’s pinup successor to Justin and Zac. Not that he’s asked to act so much as pose fetchingly, of course. It may be Lew’s idea to make Annabel the “mature one,” but it feels very much Van Sant’s to let the camera fawn so devotedly over Enoch. 

RESTLESS opens Fri/16 in Bay Area theaters.

Heart it or hate it

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Heart it or hate it

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC The term “emo” has become synonymous with whiny, tight-jeans-wearing 13-year-olds with asymmetrical haircuts. (Thanks, Hot Topic.) But stereotypical B.S. aside, in the beginning, emo — short for “emotional punk rock” — was a compelling music movement in the early 1990s and 2000s typified by melodic guitar, motley rhythms, and expressive, pour-your-heart-out lyrics.

“It went from being this really powerful, emotional movement into, like, the annoying little brother of music,” says Kristopher Hannum who co-runs Diary, an emo, screamo, and pop punk music night held every third Saturday of the month at Pop’s Bar. “But I feel like it’s slowly coming back in a good way — not in a Hot Topic-y, YouTube bands they call emo [way]. There are good things happening and they are slowly bubbling up to the surface, like [San Francisco’s] Clarissa Explains It All.” He adds, “It’s a band I point out to people that is kind of taking that [emo] scene and doing good things with it.”

But ever since the term was coined in the mid-80s Washington, D.C. hardcore punk scene, initially to describe bands such as Rites Of Spring, emo has been considered a four-letter word.

“I have never met a band in what I would consider the emo genre that ever copped to calling themselves ’emo.’ It’s weird. Fans throw that around really easily but you’ll never hear, for the most part, a band describe themselves as emo,” explains Leslie Simon, co-author of Everybody Hurts: An Essential Guide To Emo Culture (Harpers, 2007) and former MTV.com editor.

Jim Adkins lead vocalist-guitarist of Jimmy Eat World, which is heralded as a seminal emo band, rejects the label. “I’m pretty much done trying to deflect or change that perception. I don’t really consider us to be [emo]. It’s a long conversation,” Adkins says, curtly. “For me, it’s just flattering that anyone pays attention to what we do. To explain what we do, [I say] guitar-based, melodic rock music.”

Adkins’ sentiment notwithstanding, Jimmy Eat World’s 1999 release Clarity (Capitol) is often lauded as one of the most significant emo albums of the late ’90s, heavily influencing the third wave of emo (2000 — present) which includes bands like My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, and All-American Rejects.

In 2001, as emo broke into mainstream media, Jimmy Eat World released its platinum-selling album, Bleed American (Dreamworks/Geffen). In its introductory title track, Adkins wails “I’m not alone ’cause the TV’s on, yeah / I’m not crazy because I take the right pills everyday” — perfectly encapsulating the angst and disillusionment of Gen Y’ers. With its empowering lyrics (“Just do your best / do everything you can /And don’t you worry what the bitter hearts are gonna say”), the anthemic “The Middle,” another track off Bleed American, reached #1 on Billboard’s Modern Rock Tracks, galvanizing wallflowers everywhere to stay true to themselves. With its impeccably relatable themes, it is no wonder why the album was the band’s biggest commercial success.

To commemorate the 10th anniversary of its release, Jimmy Eat World will play Bleed American in its entirety at the Fillmore on Monday, Sept. 26 and Tuesday, Sept. 27.

“[Bleed American] is a special record for a lot of people. It’s just been kind of a fan request that we do it, so we’re doing it in areas where we’ve always had a good time playing,” Adkins explains.

Coincidentally, Saves The Day released its first studio album in four years, Daybreak, last week. And the once-disbanded-now-reunited Get Up Kids — also wildly popular in the early-2000s — released There Are Rules earlier this year, making a stop on its tour in San Francisco, playing a show with Dashboard Confessional, another iconic emoter, most famous for its single, “Screaming Infidelities.”

Heart it or hate it, in the past year second-wave emo bands seem to be making a comeback. So this begs the question: What is behind the resurgence of this style of music?

“Playing music is an awesome opportunity. Maybe all of these people that are coming back together kind of miss it. We were really lucky that we’ve been able to continually do it,” Adkins says. “The more interesting question is why did they stop?”

“I really like to think that it wasn’t about making money which, I’m sure, half of those bands are doing it just because there are ticket sales in it, you know?” Hannum says with a hint of disillusion in his voice. “[But] I like to think that they are in a position where they can still get back together and tour to give access to these kids that couldn’t access it back then.”

“It does come off sometimes like they’re doing it for the paycheck. But, at the end of the day, who cares?” Simon replies, laughing. “I still love hearing Chris Conley (of Saves The Day) sing “Firefly” and I get a kick out of watching the Get Up Kids play “Don’t Hate Me” because those were songs that meant something to me when I was younger. And I am 22 again. It is wonderful.” 

 

JIMMY EAT WORLD

With Kinch

Mon/26 and Tues/27, 8 p.m., $35

The Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

www.thefillmore.com

Because Princess says so

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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3
Because Princess says so

caitlin@sfbg.com

SEX ISSUE 2011 I saw Donna Dolore for the first time at a Hard French queer soul dance party at El Rio. I remember because she took my drink so authoritatively that I had no choice but to be okay with it. She sipped it, handed it back, and strode away. Can I get a thank you? Throughout the whole, sloppy afternoon, I noticed it was kind of her theme.

But no one seemed to care. Part of it was obvious: Dolore is a Sophia Loren with wider eyes, maybe a little taller, with the same generous tendencies towards sharing glimpses of the bust line. Only — I reflected, shortly before falling back into cheap-beer-and-go-go-dancer melee — that attitude. Who the hell is this woman?

Weeks later, I’m telling her the story in person in the cavernous break room at Kink.com’s headquarters in the San Francisco Armory (everything at the Armory is cavernous). It turns out that Dolore is in fact, a pretty big deal. Just ask her legions of heavy-breathing fans who know her as Princess Donna, the Kink.com director and star queer dominatrix.

“Oh my gosh, I did that?” At the office from where she plans shoots for the three Kink websites she heads, Dolore is a less formidable figure. She’s not wearing any makeup. Her black outfit makes her look like she’s about to take off for a light jog around the Mission.

But she might just be being coy. After all, I’d stalked her up good before our appointment and had come across this gem in a video interview she did a few years back: “I’m pretty true to form — Princess Donna acts a lot like I do.”

Dolore double majored at New York University, perfectly enough, in gender and sexuality studies and photography. She became a stripper while at school, and then on a tip from a coworker, got into professional BDSM shoots. Although she had been to some BDSM play parties, the work was the first time she’d ever been tied up.

“I was immediately into the challenge of being in a really stressful position — being flogged or caned, total sensory overload,” she remembers. “I would leave a shoot feeling really invigorated, a stronger person. It made me want to see what my body was capable of.”

Nowadays, Princess Donna sits — utterly sexily, usually in a short skirt and fuck-me heels — atop the Internet BDSM porn puppy pile.

At Kink she is the mind behind no less than three sites. For “Public Disgrace,” Dolore makes trips around the world to supervise the stripping-down, feeling-up, and penetration of beautiful women in town squares and busy bars. On “Wired Pussy,” she plays with electrical equipment, inducing screaming orgasms in her female partners.

In her latest endeavor, “Bound Gang Bang,” Dolore supervises teams of horny men and one or two women in fantasy-type shoots: high school nerds get their revenge on the bitchy mean girls, a prison warden drops her key and winds up giving head to inmates through a chain link fence. She has guest-starred in many of Kink’s different sites, usually as a top, sometimes as a bottom.

“I get stressed out because we have so much content to produce,” says Dolore, who works on one or two shoots a week. “But it’s a challenge that I enjoy.” One gets the sense that at Kink, Dolore has found a place that can nurture her talent for perversion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYkStoeNtuw

Like most of Kink’s offerings, Dolore’s sites are unapologetically brutal. Women are dominated, wind up covered in ejaculate and with bound breasts that are agonizing to look at (well, at least for the BDSM newbie).

This is exactly the kind of stuff that sends shivers — the bad kind — up the spines of anti-porn feminists. But Dolore is a feminist too. As articulate as she is and as prominent she is and as wild as her porns are, she’s often called on to defend BDSM’s treatment and portrayal of women.

“I think the exact opposite of the people that think that BDSM would promote violence against women,” she says. That tired question — “is porn degrading to women?” — is something that Dolore finds degrading. Why, she asks, don’t the anti-porn musketeers ask the same of men in the industry?

“What is going on in our society that we continue to see sex as something that is put on women that they don’t desire? Why can’t we fathom it being a dream job for a woman?”

Kink is doing its part to raise awareness about the sexual pleasure that can be experienced by submissive actors. Before and after each shoot, the man or woman who you’ve watched screaming, a cattle prod or vibrator pressed against their genitals, is interviewed. That familiar dazed after-sex look is all over their faces, and their endorphin-heavy perk is really all you need to know what Dolore says is true: the models at Kink really, really love their job.

Delore contests the notion that only people who have been sexual abused take pleasure in pain, although she says you’ll find abuse victims in porn studios, just like any other workplace.

“Unfortunately, you could look to any profession and say a lot of them were abused as kids. You could look at secretaries and say that. Personally, I wasn’t sexually abused.” She smiles. “I’m just a natural pervert.”

Delore’s a regular on the queer party circuit — this week, you can catch her stealing drinks at Sunday’s “Deviants” Folsom Street Fair closing party. Her exuberance in exploring the outer realms of sexuality haven’t gone unnoticed in the San Francisco sex community. Kelly Lovemonster, editor of the queer quarterly sexuality zine [SSEX BBOX] is a close friend of Dolore, and calls her a “super heroine.”

“Even when she is portraying a submissive bottom, being cattle prodded, nipples clamped down and attached to electric cords, you can tell she is absolutely in control,” says Lovemonster. “She shows us that our dirtiest, scariest, and wildest sexual fantasies can come true through healthy communication and BDSM play. She rescues us all from a world where sexuality is suppressed and made shameful.”

This, according to Dolore, is a big part of why what Kink produces is important. The website puts BDSM urges out there, lets people that get turned on by being slapped across the face know that they’re not the only ones.

For the dis-empowered and isolated BDSM fan, that can be heady stuff. “You can explore your rape fantasy in a way that the woman is in control of what’s happening to their body — it’s a way to relive a situation where you had no control and relive it in a way in which you do have control,” says Dolore.

In a direct repudiation of the claims that abuse victims fall into BDSM for unsavory reasons. Dolore says she’s seen rough sex and power play rehabilitate partners whose sexuality seems terminally fucked. “I’m not a therapist but I feel like I am sometimes.”

But when I ask her if she considers herself an activist, she says no.

“When I think of the word activist, I think of people who are more outspoken than I am. I do my thing on my website, and people can come watch it if they want to.”

Which is not to say that the forward girl at Hard French doesn’t think she’s affecting change. Says the princess: “I’m just happy that I can help people be honest about what they want in bed.” 

DEVIANTS: OFFICIAL FOLSOM STREET FAIR CLOSING PARTY

Sun/25 4 p.m.-3 a.m., $20-30

Public Works

161 Erie, SF

www.publicsf.com

 

A case for Avalos, Yee and Dufty

Andrew Lam
-
121

OPINION Like all of us, SEIU 1021 can take three dates to the prom when it comes to voting for mayor, but narrowing it down in a field of so many candidates was still challenging. After a month-long process, we arrived at a dual endorsement of Supervisor John Avalos and State Senator Leland Yee for first and second choice, and Supervisor Bevan Dufty for our third choice.

It’s a diverse slate, and the choices are representative of the constituencies, perspectives and priorities in our membership.

Yee’s record on labor issues in Sacramento has been impeccable, and he has long been a staunch supporter of our union, so endorsing him was a no-brainer. The Guardian asked me personally, as I am also a transgender activist, how I could support Leland after his vote against transgender health benefits. Frankly, I was disappointed in how my response was framed.

Leland approached transgender activists a number of years ago and apologized for his vote. Instead of denying or rationalizing like other politicians might do, he had the courage to come to a community meeting of transgender activists, stand in front of us, admit he was wrong, and apologize. For people to continue to attack an individual for having a true change of heart is very discouraging. We would never make any advancement of our rights if we continued to shun those who have come to understand and support the transgender fight for equality. In fact, Yee’s support was critical to the collective effort to save Lyon-Martin, a clinic that is a key service provider for trans folks, after it almost closed earlier this year.

That’s why so many in the transgender community now support Yee so strongly and why he has become an even closer, tested ally through this experience.

SEIU 1021 has always had a very close relationship with John Avalos. Avalos has been a steadfast supporter of crucial social and health- care services, and has been a leader in creating needed progressive revenue measures. But most importantly, John understands how essential jobs are for lifting people out of poverty and stimulating the local economy for everyone in San Francisco.

Last year, he introduced a Local Hire ordinance that is becoming a real jobs generator in our city and a national model. Like many of our members when they first started working for the city, workers hired under the Local Hire ordinance may for the first time have a living-wage job with benefits.

And while some in labor have been critical of this legislation — in fact, it cost him the endorsement of the San Francisco Labor Council — that’s a short-sighted criticism.

As more people are employed in San Francisco with living wage jobs, they spend money in San Francisco, boosting tax revenues and in turn creating more jobs across the city. Moreover, this visionary legislation has other benefits — workers coming from low-income communities bring a new found pride in and community spirit to what could be otherwise economically depressed areas. That’s why SEIU 1021 supports Avalos, and why I am proud to endorse him as well.

Rounding out SEIU’s endorsements in this campaign is former Supervisor Bevan Dufty. Dufty has a history of supporting preserving city services. Some have argued that Dufty can’t handle downtown pressure, and yet, Dufty has consistently supported public power, took a stance against Sit-Lie despite intense pressure, and several years ago, at a critical juncture for Tom Ammiano’s signature health care legislation, Healthy San Francisco, he didn’t blink when we called on him to be our 8th vote. In fact, he committed to the bill, unequivocally, and called on other supervisors, like Fiona Ma, to say it was time. She immediately co-sponsored and eventually it was a unanimous 11-0 vote.

For labor and progressives, Ammiano’s Healthy San Francisco legislation was the single most important piece of legislation of the last decade. And while history has been rewritten, and Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom now takes credit for the legislation, then-Mayor Newsom did not come on board until after Dufty declared his support, and as the 8th supporter, created a veto-proof majority.

Each of these candidates have shown their capacity to grow and transform as leaders making them the best choices for progressive labor, and we believe for the San Francisco. Whatever you do, you have three votes, make them count. 

Gabriel Haaland is a transgender labor activist and the SEIU 1021 San Francisco political coordinator.

 

Editor’s notes

Andrew Lam
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0

tredmond@sfbg.com

So the people who advise President Obama have finally figured out that he was on the road to becoming a one-term president — and the United States was on the road to ruin under President Perry. Whatever combination of self-preservation and fear was at work, it worked, at least for the moment.

Obama is now on record as refusing to accept any cuts in entitlements for poor people unless the rich people give a little, too. It’s a pretty good political statement — in every single major poll taken in the past year, an overwhelming majority of Americans agreed that higher taxes on the wealthy should be part of any deficit-reduction package. And it’s a no-brainer economic statement — the fundamental problem with the U.S. economy is a lack of consumer demand, which is tied directly to the fact that all of the wealth over the past 20 years has gone to the top and the middle class doesn’t have enough money to spend.

But what’s it’s really done is kicked the proverbial tax can — and thus, unfortunately, economic recovery — down the proverbial road another 13 months. Because the Republicans won’t accept higher taxes, and if Obama keeps his newfound spine, he won’t accept any cuts in Medicare and Medicaid, and nobody is talking about cutting the military, so nothing is going to happen.

Instead, this is the launch of Campaign 2012. Obama’s got a tough sell — the number on issue for most voters is jobs, and while I personally believe that the first stimulus plan kept the recession from getting worse, that’s not enough. Things are supposed to get better, and when they don’t, the guy at the top gets the blame.

So Obama has a problem: It’s all his fault, but he can’t do anything about it, and that’s what the Republicans are counting on. His only choice is to come roaring out like Harry Truman, and blame the “do-nothing” Republican Congress for blocking economic growth (and, if he has any sense, will say that the GOP is holding a jobs program hostage to protect the interests of the millionaires), and the Democrats will try to use that message to take back the House — and if it works, we might just possibly get things back on track in 2013. If it doesn’t, it’s going to be a very ugly decade.

SF’s foreclosure crisis

Andrew Lam
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2

EDITORIAL Here’s a great issue for the San Francisco mayor’s race: The big banks that the city uses to hold nearly half a billion in cash deposits are part of a group of financial institutions that are costing the taxpayers $115 million.

That’s the amount the city will wind up paying to cover the lost property taxes and other costs associated with home foreclosures, according to a new report. And the authors of the report, the Community Reinvestment Coalition and the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, estimate that San Francisco homeowners are going to lose a total of $6.9 billion in value because of the foreclosure crisis.

Most of the discussion around foreclosures has focused on the national picture — but there’s plenty the city can do.

The numbers are alarming: 16,355 San Francisco homeowners are underwater on their mortgages, meaning they owe more than the house is currently worth. By 2012, the report estimates, 12,410 local homes will be in foreclosure.

That means 12,400 families facing displacement — which adds to the homeless crisis, puts more pressure on the rental housing market and most likely will force many people who work in the city to find housing a long commute away.

Foreclosures also drive down the value of neighboring property — which means the city collects less property tax. The cost of sending deputy sheriffs out to evict families, of patrolling and monitoring vacant houses, dealing with increased crime in the area — all of that adds up. According to the report, every foreclosure costs the city $19,229. Add up the loss of property taxes and the direct costs to taxpayers and the bill exceeds $115 million.

Two of the top four banks involved in foreclosures in California are Wells Fargo and Bank of America. Those just happen to be two of the three banks that have to contract to handle the city’s cash accounts — which contain $406 million, according to an Aug. 16, 2011 report by Budget Analyst Harvey Rose. So the city is giving its money to banks that are costing the city money.

The banks aren’t paupers, either — and have accepted huge amounts of federal tax money. B of A and Wells together received $270 billion in bailout money — and both are now making nice profits (enough that the CEO of Wells, John Stumpf, earned $17 million last year). They can afford to write down the underwater mortgages and arrange for foreclosure relief for people behind on the bills.

The report suggests that the banks be charged a fee — between $10,000 and $20,000 — for each foreclosure. That would offset the costs and provide a disincentive for throwing families out on the street. The candidates for mayor ought to be pushing that — but the city can do more.

The supervisors ought to call a hearing on the crisis and demand that the B of A and Wells executives come down and explain why they’re moving so slowly on write-downs and relief. And they should be told, in very clear terms, that the city will no longer put a penny of its money in banks that are damaging, instead of investing in, San Francisco.

Harsh times

Andrew Lam
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0
Harsh times

caitlin@sfbg.com

HERBWISE It’s what you would call a recession novel.

The lead character of Tony D’Souza’s Mule: A Novel of Moving Weight (292 pp, Mariner Books, $14.95)has nearly navigated the entirety of the upward-downward spiral to drug kingpin-dom we know so well from Scarface. This is how his story ends, in part:

“And there was the recession and there was not the recession and there was fear from the recession and there was not the fear from the recession. And there was America and there was not America and there was me and there was not me.”

The moment comes after hundreds of pages of violence and paranoia. D’Souza’s James is a successful freelance journalist rendered financially obsolete in the Crash Which Dare Not Speak It’s Name. Reduced from an A-list Austin lifestyle, he decides to drive a pound of marijuana across the country, literally to make ends meet for himself and his young family. His surprising ambition leads to mansions in Florida and reliance on the money-sick and power-mad for business.

Mule reads like an episode of The Wire, drawing from Weeds for some background material. And like those two series, what it has to say about the times we’re living in is worth hearing.

James is a deal-shoot-angst protagonist, a thoroughly middle class character. He wears Lacoste. He can’t get a byline to save his life, hence the drug running. His white skin is an advantage as a mule because it keeps him from being profiled by highway cops.

But if the Obama job plan passes, if unemployment was no longer at 9.1 percent, would James still be hustling? This is where Mule succeeds, its sheer ambiguity making it so much a product of this rightnow. In 2011, it’s not clear if we should be taking deep breathes and job hunting through the madness or straight up losing our shit in the face of economic meltdown, environmental heart attack, and vitriolic culture war.

And yes, Mule is also about marijuana itself. This too is important. How many Cali children have saved their skins by trimming in Mendo?

This is the same substance that supports the professional photographers and glamour shots we profiled in last week’s column. Only in Mule, double murders are performed over the stuff, people lose their minds to transport it. These are the same things that are happening across the hemisphere, despite our privileged Bay Arean cradle where we smoke in the streets and get prescriptions to stoke our appetites. Medicine, felony: marijuana is ambivalence itself these days.

If you’re looking for a novel-length iteration of why cannabis should be legalized, you could do worse than Mule. But you could also do better. That’s because of the book’s omnipresent ghoul, the generation-derailing R-word.

Sure, if selling pot wasn’t grounds for a felony or worse in most of the country, James would never have to smack around that snotty college dealer with the kid’s own textbooks, or been rendered paralyzed by fear in a grotty hotel room in San Angelo, Tex. — but would his world morph to emerald green good vibes? If weed were legal, wouldn’t it be assimilated into that other source of our brave protagonist’s dread? Would it be just one more job field described by our dismal unemployment levels?

Mule is a drug novel. But it’s also a recession novel and it’s not a recession novel and the novel’s about fear from the recession and the novel is not about fear from the recession.

In other words, read it.

Caves of forgotten dreams

Andrew Lam
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0
Caves of forgotten dreams

arts@sfbg.com

HAIRY EYEBALL If you follow Canyon Drive from Hollywood Boulevard all the way up into the hilly territory of Los Angeles’ Griffith Park, you’ll reach a cul-de-sac. Beyond that, accessible by foot, is a small stone bridge which leads to a dirt trail that eventually lets you out in what’s known as Bronson Valley. This is where you’ll find the Bronson Caves.

Even if you’ve never visited the caves in person, you’ve probably at least seen them: they’ve been used in countless motion pictures and television shows. One of the mouths served as the exterior shot for the Bat Cave in the original ’60s Batman TV series. Natalie Wood’s long lost Little Debbie is discovered in one of the caves in 1956 flick The Searchers. The caves also make cameos in plenty of schlocky, B-grade sci-fi and fantasy cheese of both classic (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956) and more recent (The Scorpion King, 2002) vintage.

Given their status as one of the film industry’s leading landscape doubles, it’s only fitting that the caves aren’t actually caves. There’s nothing natural about them: they’re all that remains of an early 1900s quarrying operation to supply stone with which to pave the streets of a rapidly-growing LA. On a clear day, from the other side of one of the tunnels, you can get a seemingly eye level view of the Hollywood sign.

This long history of artifice amid geologic permanence is both everywhere and nowhere in Brice Bischoff’s series of large-scale C-prints of the Bronson Caves currently hanging at Johansson Projects. The caves are the photographs’ crispest formal feature, although it’s the dazzling and seemingly supernatural rainbow-hued blurs within and near them that first catch your eye.

The colorful shapes — which vary in form from blasts of light to smoky wisps — evoke both the caves’ history as a site for staged close encounters of the third kind, as well as nineteenth century spirit photography. They’re also simply beautiful to look at. Their origin, however, is more mundane: wearing raggedy costumes made from colored paper, Bischoff gestures before his stationary camera using the space of the caves to suggest a course of movement. The time lapse captured by the camera’s long exposure renders his presence ghostly while setting into relief the surrounding rocky proscenium, although the artist never disappears entirely. (In one photograph, there is the suggestion of a human form wrapped in the Jamaican flag.)

Even though Bischoff’s presence before the camera is required to create each image, his photographs are the opposite of performance documentation. Rather, they are formally and thematically similar to Hiroshi Sugimoto’s ghostly black and white portraits of old movie palaces, for which the photographer left his exposure open for the duration of a projected feature so that the screen appears as a glowing white light that illuminates the ornate architectural decor around it. So to do Bischoff’s photographs collate an accretion of instances which, individually, are less important than the location in which they’ve occurred. They bring to the fore a history which, at 24 frames per second, has always been relegated to the background.

The Bronson Caves aren’t the only natural feature on display in this exhibit organized around California landscapes. Tabitha Soren’s carbon pigment prints that combine crashing Pacific waves into vertiginous tsunamis and Ellen Black’s videos of doctored beach-scapes and mating snakes pack plenty of visual punch but lack the elegant conceptual underpinnings of Bischoff’s series.

For a more strenuous walk in the wild, you have to trek down Broadway to Jack London Square where at Swarm Gallery Colin Christy’s living installation “Wild and Scenic” throws scare quotes around both terms. For this non-earthwork earthwork Christy transplanted native and invasive plants found around the American River from Coloma, California to a dirt mound in the gallery. The plants are watered on a regular basis, and they’re painted with a bio-luminescent pigment to differentiate between native and non-native plants, so that Christy can track their growth patterns by taking long exposure time lapse photographs at night.

Of course, there’s another contender in this battle royale: humans. The pile of wood, glinting with patches of gold spray paint, that forms a sort of bulkhead on one side of the mound, references the role the American River was forced to play during the Gold Rush, itself a massive piece of terraforming that has indelibly altered California’s landscape. While drawing attention to this history of environmental degradation, Christy’s piece — in all of its gratuitousness — cannot help but be somewhat complicit in perpetuating its legacy. There’s life on the line, here, even if it isn’t human.

BRICE BISCHOFF, TABITHA SOREN, AND ELLEN

BLACK

Through October 15

Johansson Projects

2300 Telegraph Ave., Oakl.

(510) 444-9140

www.johanssonprojects.com

 

INVASIVE HORIZON: NEW WORK BY JOSEPH

SMOLINSKI AND COLIN CHRISTY

Through Sept 23

Swarm Gallery

560 Second St., Oakl.

(510) 839-2787

www.swarmgallery.com

Vive Vigo

Andrew Lam
-
0
Vive Vigo

arts@sfbg.com

FILM The beatification of Jean Vigo as cinema’s Romantic poet — only four films before tuberculosis carried him off at 29 — is one of the less interesting things about him. As myth it’s maudlin and a little corny, nothing like his films which won’t sit still long enough for you to call them immortal. Whether structured as an exploded city symphony (1930’s À Propos de Nice), commissioned portrait (1931’s Taris), anarchic boarding school farce (1933’s Zéro de Conduite) or multivalent love story (1934’s L’Atalante), they crack open the known world and flash epiphanies like jewels before the camera.

Vigo’s most famous sequences — the pillow-fight processional in Zéro de Conduite, the lovers’ séance in L’Atalante — are lyrical outbursts expressing deep yearning. That desire can be sensual or social; the toppling effect is the same. One might take a page from Vigo’s first film, À Propos de Nice (co-directed with Boris Kaufman, Dziga Vertov’s brother and a brilliant cinematographer in his own right), and consider the intense flux of Vigo’s films as pushing towards carnival. The film’s witty comparison of the idle rich and vibrant working class of Nice goes up in smoke with the fade-in to the street fair. The social fabric suddenly tears, egged on by lusty low-angle shots and intoxicating cuts (more than that, Vigo himself appears doing the cancan).

In Vigo’s little-seen short Taris, the titular French swimmer and early media celebrity demonstrates strokes while explaining their form in voice-over. This instructive track is periodically interrupted by the filmmaker’s beautiful (and at times absurd) close-ups and slow-motion shots. In the end the libidinal again wins out, as Vigo takes advantage of a portal window to film Taris underwater turning corkscrews and circles. This sweet celebration of the body is recast as the more famous underwater idyll in L’Atalante, but here seeing Taris at play here provides a striking contrast from his more regimented athleticism. Stepping outside the rules of the sport, he doesn’t even need to come up for air.

Plenty of ink has already been spilled on Zéro de Conduite‘s joyful student revolt, though I’ve always appreciated that when the emboldened kids hail garbage down on the authorities of church and state, some of the figures below are actual puppets. Even when Vigo’s films are deadly serious, they don’t take themselves too seriously. The censors certainly did: the film was banned for its many blasphemies, though it surfaced sooner than the long shipwrecked L’Atalante. The story of a married couple coming together and apart on a barge is simplicity itself, and yet Vigo embroiders it with delicate shifts in mood and setting. The carnival spirit is here embodied by indelible Père Jules (Michel Simon), the salty sailor who whether playing a record with his finger, trying on a dress, clutching a litter of kittens or showing off his tattoos generates a turbulent vitality that’s a full partner in the film’s romance. L’Atalante is a giving film, with a musical sense of character, a wondrous balancing of melancholy and mischief, and always something new to tell you about love.

There are some who might grumble about the obvious irony of seeing Vigo’s freewheeling work packaged as a tidy commodity, but it’s humbling to think what earlier generations of film lovers would have made at being able to stuff his collected works in their coat pockets (also, Criterion’s transfers are stellar). It’s marvelous being able to explore these particular films at leisure — which is to say every which way. You see all the explosions of fantasy into real life and vice versa, and you think how unusual for someone to seek freedom not only in but through cinema.

Green dreams

Andrew Lam
-
0
Green dreams

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Has the landfill, junkyard, and lowly dumpster supplanted the factory as a site of documentary interest and even inspiration? Yerba Buena Center for the Arts features two 2010 docs this week to add to the growing list of recent films centering on scavenging, gleaning, dumpster diving, trash humping, and scrapping — activities illustrating resourcefulness in the shadow of colossal waste.

Scrappers zeroes in on the workaday routines and liabilities facing two laboring subjects, Oscar and Otis, good men who cruise Chicago’s South Side for scrap metal. The film’s three directors spent a couple of years in the passenger seat, long enough for their verité portrait of the scrappers’ lives at work to be anchored in extenuating circumstances: a deportation scare for Oscar, a hospital stay for Otis, and most significantly the collapse of scrap prices as a result of dwindling home construction (the same ton of metal that sold for $200–<\d>$300 in 2007 only brought in 20 bucks in 2008).

Without recourse to a voice-over, Scrappers details economic unrest as well as the complex race and class hierarchies of Chicago’s scrap scene. This is all secondary, however, to the film’s enduring interest in learning how Oscar and Otis actually go about their work — noteworthy in a documentary field crowded with predigested arguments. The filmmakers take liberties in editing together the scrappers’ talk into poetic monologues, but it’s a small price for granting them autonomy in defining not only the necessities but also the dispensations of their work.

While Scrappers works to convey layers of ongoing experience, the Oscar-nominated Waste Land is witness to an exceptional intervention. The film follows Vik Muniz, a successful Brooklyn-based artist originally from São Paolo, as he spearheads a collaborative art project in Jardim Gramacho, a gigantic landfill outside Rio de Janeiro. Muniz first contemplates the site from his Brooklyn studio using land art’s modern surveying tools, Google Earth and YouTube. Once on the ground, his initial disbelief at the scale of the landfill gives way to the more modest realization that many of the pickers working there don’t view themselves as the wretched of the earth.

Waste Land director Lucy Walker omits Muniz’s selection of a handful of the pickers as collaborators and subjects — a thorny process, one imagines — instead fleshing out the backstories of the (admittedly remarkable) chosen ones. They gather material from the dump to help Muniz fashion their iconic portraits back in the studio, with the proceeds of the finished work benefiting the pickers’ labor association.

Muniz’s giving act is more personal and sustained than a benefit concert, but the difference is one of quality not kind. He repeatedly stresses the project as a joint effort in making art of garbage, but the real magic consists of turning garbage into something priced as art, a conversion which undoubtedly helps the pickers but also solidifies Muniz’s privileged position in the world marketplace. In view of this, it’s worth pointing out that many other artists have adapted scavenger aesthetics as a means of dissenting from patronage systems (art or otherwise). In 1965, for instance, Brazilian director Glauber Rocha issued his “Aesthetic of Hunger” manifesto to define Third Cinema’s difference. Some years later filmmakers associated with the Tropicália movement went a step further and called for an “Aesthetics of Garbage.” Needless to say, they envisioned something different than Waste Land‘s sympathetic detachment. It’s not a fair comparison perhaps, but days after seeing the film I’m still bothered by the way it maintains a wry distance from Muniz’s earnest struggle for moral clarity while itself indulging in artsy portraiture of the pickers at work (scored to death by Moby). In any case, magnificent unsigned art grows out of landfill closer to home at the Albany Bulb. There’s a documentary about that too — Bum’s Paradise (2003).

TRASHED: TWO FILMS ABOUT GARBAGE

Scrappers, Thurs/15, 7:30 p.m.; Waste Land, Sun/18, 2 p.m., $8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, S.F.

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

 

Radish

Andrew Lam
-
0
Radish

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE On a recent midsummer’s eve, I found myself gazing down the Valencia Street corridor and (with a slight squint of the eye) though: this is just like the Strip! This is like Vegas for hipst — but no. No more H-bombs from me. The question does remain, however, whether a neighborhood can be as utterly transformed as this part of the Mission has been and still remain a neighborhood. One sunny bit of proof that the answer might be yes is the recent opening of Radish, one of those small, slightly-off-the-beaten path, homemade-with-style places that have long made this city such an appealing place to eat.

Just as some of the better restaurants in Las Vegas are off the Strip, so Radish is a few but important steps off the parade route. It occupies a classic corner spot, an L of windows (including transom windows that have been carefully cleaned — not something you see every day), at 19th Street and Lexington. It feels rather far from the madding crowd — Lexington is a lovely, leafy lane — but it is central. There are some impressive oil paintings on the walls, something else you don’t see every day.

The radish as a foodstuff has won mixed reviews down the ages. It is a crucifer and is therefore believed by some to have anti-cancer properties. But Pliny the Elder (the Roman writer and admiral who perished at Pompeii 1932 years ago last month) found the little root to be “vulgar” and a cause of “flatulence and eructation.” Oh dear. Luckily, the menu at Radish doesn’t emphasize radishes. In fact I spotted just one, a lone coin lurking in a side salad amid a swarm of halved pear tomatoes. Maybe it was a stray. Otherwise, the food is a cheerful mélange that moves winningly between all-American and new American — new-all American, if one is permitted to put it that way, with a slight Southern twist — n’all? — since the chef, Adam Hornbeck, grew up in Tennesee.

But someone in the kitchen has been to the north, all the way to Canada, judging by the poutine ($8) we found chalked onto the specials board one evening. Poutine is the dubious but wildly exciting friend your mother always wanted you to stay away from. Radish’s version was a huge plate of French fries doused with gravy (almost a béchamel sauce, it seemed to me) and topped with shreds of crisp bacon and plenty of ripe avocado slices.

“There are 10,000 calories on this plate,” came the complaint from across the table. Yes. And that was not too high a price to pay. If I were a budget-cutter, I might have dealt away the avocado, which brought some pretty color but otherwise was too subtle for such a muscle-y mess of a dish.

Mac ‘n’ cheese ($4.50) seemed to be nearly as calorie-dense as the poutine, but because it was served in a much more modest portion, in a small crock, it didn’t send the needle on our calorimeter spinning. A nice alternate home for the poutine’s avocado slices, incidentally, would have been the boldly tangy old world salad ($9), a neatly arranged English garden of sliced heirloom and cherry tomatoes, rounds of summer squash, smears of goat cheese, arugula leaves, and a full-throated balsamic vinaigrette that, like a compelling speaker, brought the constituents together and held them rapt.

Hornbeck’s baby back ribs ($14) are really first in show. We found them to be spicy, smoky, and — most important — juicy. It was as if the meat were oozing liquid smoke. It doesn’t matter how tasty your sauce or marinade is if you dry the ribs out when roasting them, and it is awfully easy to dry them out. To find them beautifully cooked and smartly seasoned, as here, was a real treat. The accompanying potato salad was, like its partner (a lone cob of grilled corn), very much a sidekick, but it had been carefully made with big, irregular chunks of new potato and plenty of paprika for color and kick.

A steak sandwich ($13) was served on focaccia, and the flaps of meat were tucked in with strips of orange bell pepper and melted cheddar cheese. The side salad of arugula and spinach turned out to be the home of the fugitive radish coin; finding it was like the culmination of an Easter egg hunt.

One of the desserts deserves a special mention, the shortbread ($6), festooned with strawberry meringue and whipped cream. The shortbread had some of the sublime crispy-spongy quality of a cinnamon bun, and I wondered if it might be some version of brioche. No, we were told, it was a biscuit, the same kind the kitchen uses for its breakfast dishes. This is frugal and prudent — also brilliant, or, as the h-folk sometimes put it, rad. 

RADISH

Dinner: Tues.-Thurs., 5-10 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., 5-11 p.m.; Sun., 5-9 p.m.

Breakfast: Tues.-Fri., 10 a.m.-2 p.m.; Sat.-Sun., 9 a.m.-2 p.m.

Lunch: Tues.-Sun., 11 a.m.-5 p.m.

3465 19th St., SF

(415) 834-5441

www.radishsf.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Fighting to be free

Andrew Lam
-
0
Fighting to be free

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE This past weekend, an unlikely double bill once again proved how fertile the Bay Area soil is for dancers’ imaginations. FACT/SF’s Pretonically Oriented v.3 was steeped in critical theory yet physically grounded. Drawing on local history, Lenora Lee Dance’s Reflections offered a window into self-assertion. While employing Asian American images — martial arts and lion dancing — the work resonated beyond its specific cultural context. Both works were developed during summer residencies at CounterPULSE.

“Pretonic,” a program note explained, refers to the unstressed (“pre”) syllable which precedes a stressed one (“tonic) in a word. Charles Slender used this linguistic precept to fold his rehearsal process into the actual piece. While his trio of exceptionally focused dancers — James Graham, Erin Kraemer, and Catherine Newman — performed variations of material they had accessed through free-writing, we also watched and listened to streamed videos, including Slender at his most slyly professorial, of the rehearsal material that had gone into the making of Pretonically. These layers of information sometimes looked as solid as what happened in real time, sometimes as evanescent as memory floating by.

The idea of conjoining process and product is intriguing. Pretonically could prove utterly absorbing. Watching the trio in one corner of the stage in front of videos taken in exactly the same spot (but depicting different movements) suggested a fascinating sense of simultaneity. Listening to Slender’s voice while his face on the wall clearly spoke different words created a disconnect between two modes of communication.

Toward the end, just as the work seemed to have run its course, the dancers returned and went into a retrograde mode, performing some of their material backwards. It looked as if someone had pushed the reverse button, and they had joined their own selves in a different reality.

At 40 minutes, however, Pretonically could not sustain itself. Once you understood the complex structure, the piece needed to communicate beyond what it became. Like so much conceptual art, the idea behind it often proved more intriguing than its physical realization.

Having said that, the dancers were mesmerizing by the sheer force of their presence. Moving glacially, they inexorably focused on something ungraspable. Perhaps Kraemer’s energy originated from the bottom of her spine, Graham lived off percussive lines, and, though ground-hogging, Newman fixated on the above. Slender is lucky to have dancers as excellent as these; they could run circles around most Butoh practitioners.

Lee’s fine Reflections also benefited from excellent dancers. Translating to the stage the difficulties of retaining or creating one’s identity in an unwelcoming environment is a theme that runs through much of contemporary dance and theater. Lee has previously examined the topic with her Chinese American background in mind; she based 2010’s Passages on her grandmother’s life. In Reflections she strikes a fiercer note as she examines the ferocious, even brutal strength required for self-assertion. A male narrator’s voice movingly personalized the struggle of escaping the bondage of being “the good son.”

Lee made a brilliant choice in enlisting two martial arts group, Kei Lun Martial Arts and Enshin Karate, South San Francisco Dojo. They were the warriors who fought each other in the “cold streets of Chinatown,” but also embodied the ongoing struggle within. Raymond Fong, who is as fine an actor as he is at practicing karate, became Reflections’ everyman. Lee’s mixing of her own choreography with pure martial arts worked well; seeing the real thing onstage (and not often-vacuous “martial arts inspired moves”) was thrilling. At the same these performers looked more nuanced than they might otherwise. Weakest was the choreography for the two women characters, Marina Fukushima as the unattainable dream and Lee herself as a compassionate woman warrior.

Making fine use of a lion dance, including bamboo lion heads that imprisoned, Lee strung together the work’s seven scenes rather straightforwardly. Weaving them more tightly together and including better transitions might strengthen Reflections‘ backbone in future performances.

Bottoms up!

Andrew Lam
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0
Bottoms up!

Rarely do we need an excuse to drink here at the Guardian, but we found some damn good ones for Autumn 2011. Raise a glass, willya?

>>ROGUE PAIRINGS The boys from Pacific Brewing Laboratories match local suds with local snacks for your culinary explorations

>>GET NAKED Exploring the natural wine movement from right here in San Francisco 

>>GENERATION CORK Small vineyard families make their mark on the California wine scene

>>BOOZE EVENTS ‘Nuff said? It’s our run-down of the best places to be seen swilling this season

Three is the so-so number

Andrew Lam
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0
Three is the so-so number

GAMER Take a look at your favorite games from the past few years and you’ll find most were released not only on one system, but on two or three. The days of platform exclusivity are waning, and all these multi-platform releases mean console exclusives like Resistance 3 are increasingly important to manufacturers interested in maintaining their position in the industry.

Sony’s Resistance saga traces the path of a space virus sent to Earth to turn humans into alien-beings called the Chimera. The first two games follow Nathan Hale, a soldier who battles the virus across Europe, and eventually America. Resistance 3 kicks off where the second game ended (Resistance 2 spoiler warning): virus-stricken Hale is shot dead by his second-in-command Joseph Capelli.

Capelli is a more interesting protagonist than his predecessor, and killing off the main character allows developer Insomniac Games to create a more compelling story that deviates from the military action of the first two titles, but it also robs the story of its building tension, and the final product doesn’t have the oomph needed for an epic end to a purported trilogy.

Visually, Resistance 3 boasts some impressive animations and lots of detail. Little things, like trees bent backwards and street signs trembling during a windswept shootout on small-town Main Street, create an uncanny atmosphere that is not unlike Half Life 2 — a game that the cross-country trek of Resistance 3 evokes in more than just atmosphere.

Where Resistance 2 had a more modern shooter attitude (maximum of two guns, regenerative health), the third entry flips the switch in a positively old-school way. Health is distributed via health packs and you can carry a vast and devastating weapons arsenal for the duration of the campaign. Much like Insomniac’s other series Ratchet & Clank, the devil is in the arsenal.

Weapons are introduced at an alarming pace, each with primary and secondary fire, doubling the number of options. Even the earliest of weapons, like the Bullseye (shoots around corners) and the Auger (shoots through walls) are designed to create diverse combat experiences, and a limited ammo supply encourages you to try them all.

Three years of polish has done wonders for Resistance 3, but it’s hard to believe this is the end Insomniac had in mind. Despite its Sony exclusivity, consumer hype is not where it needs to be and Insomniac recently indicated that they are ready to move on. On paper, Resistance 3 is easy to recommend: it’s atmospheric, varied, and has a ton of content when you factor in above-average multiplayer, 3D and Move support. But in a sea of options, it’s hard not to be wary of the sinking ship. 

Still weird after all these years

Andrew Lam
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0
Still weird after all these years

THEATER Here’s a preliminary accounting from the San Francisco Fringe Festival, which remarkably turns the big two-oh this year. (There’s a nifty 2012 wall calendar to mark the occasion available somewhere in the Exit Theatre complex, traditional nerve center for the lottery-based festival started by Exit stalwarts Christina Augello and Richard Livingston.)

Opening night’s grab bag was another of those half-arbitrary groupings that ends up feeling so thematically right you can’t help getting a little creeped out. It started with Angela Neff’s sharp and poignant family tale, Another Picnic at the Asylum, the autobiographical story of her childhood (spent partly in the Bay Area) with seven siblings, a much put-upon young mother, and a wild, reckless, manic depressive cowboy crooner of a dad. Life with Father this ain’t, but the story’s gathering darkness is winningly offset by good-natured humor and an offbeat, almost zany embrace of eccentricity. Neff, a local writer-performer, works with only one prop — a simple wooden box — but you have no trouble imagining an entire landscape and cast of characters, including her intense, unpredictable father and his moth-to-flame charm. This is a well-honed show (developed with director David Ford), featuring vivid acting, nicely tailored prose, and a precise gestural vocabulary. A daughter’s complex fascination and frustration with a parent’s madness ultimately becomes not only the basis for a tribute, but a kind of afflatus too, as Neff reclaims a touch of her father’s larger-then-life scope as her own artistic inspiration.

There’s a similar alchemy underway in director Jeremy Aluma’s fantastic 4 Clowns. Rowdy, irreverent, totally inappropriate, slightly dangerous, and very funny, the titular madcaps — wonderfully individual performances unleashed with fine ensemble precision by Alexis Jones, Turner Munch, Raymond Lee, and Amir Levi — take their unsuspecting audience through the phases of life, dwelling on all its hideous temporal suffering with a macabre glee, accompanied by the fancy piano work of Mario Granville. Morbid curiosity, however, proves an invigorating tonic, beating back despair with fierce gallows humor as only a crazed ejaculating demon clown can.

Evan Kennedy’s Quatre-Vingt-Quatre, while the weakest of the three shows caught before print deadline, fits in pretty well with the fine line between terror and transcendence gracefully negotiated in the two shows above. Five actors in messy but iconic garb (a miner, a hunter, a strongman, a farmer, and a soldier) mince and mewl about the stage, counting off in French until they hit the magic number in the title with the aid of assorted instruments including an abacas. The play between order and chaos here extends subtly to various social norms and categories of existence, a clever calculus that offsets the otherwise wearying numbers game reminiscent of the pedagogical Dada of Sesame Street. 

“SAN FRANCISCO FRINGE FESTIVAL”

Through Sun/18, $7-$10

Exit Theatre

156 Eddy, SF

(415) 673-3847

www.sffringe.org

It’s people!

Andrew Lam
-
0
It’s people!

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER Last Thursday afternoon, the floor before the stage at Z Space was strewn with dollar-store paraphernalia, neon-colored wigs, and the odd piece of kitchenware. On the stage itself, near the front, ran a long makeshift video screen about four-and-a-half feet high. Immediately behind that, at regular intervals, four small video cameras on thin stands faced the back of the stage. Caden Manson, New York–based Big Art Group’s artistic director, had been leading a workshop all week in performance media techniques for about 15 locals (most of them active in the dance-performance scene) but today they were crafting something that would actually be a part of this week’s much anticipated Big Art Group premiere, The People: San Francisco.

To that end, performers picked through the detritus on the floor and fashioned neo-classical costumes for themselves: a broom brush for a centurion’s plume, pot lids for shields, a colander for a battle helmet, a table cloth for a toga, an incongruous toy gun, a festive pair of streamers on sticks, a black cap with beaded veil, swords, plastic flowers, and other pop neo-classical accoutrement. “If anybody wants a Molotov cocktail, there’s four of them right there,” offers one of the group’s members helpfully.

By the time they had assembled themselves on stage they had become a strikingly photogenic band of miscreants and martyrs, like the crew of the Bad Ship Lollipop. Manson, a 40ish blond with an equanimous mien and contrastingly subdued in black coat and blue sneakers, announces they have ten minutes to produce a narrative tableau in an epic vein. Maybe because most of these folks — among them Evan Johnson, Ben Randle, Honey McMoney, Maryam Rostami, Laura Arrington, Rachael Dichter, and Sara Kraft — have worked together before, this all happens surprisingly on schedule.

Manson — who with a few directorial adjustments soon has them all grandly and neatly materializing on the video screen at the front of the stage — explains to me that the pop-up tableau of civil strife the performers have just concocted will act as one of several backdrops to passages from the Oresteia, the ancient trilogy of plays by Aeschylus, which itself acts as counterpoint to the series of contemporary interviews of random Bay Area citizens that forms a key component of The People.

The results you can see for yourself this weekend, as Florida Street outside Z Space (formerly Theater Artaud) becomes a re-imagined public square where a localized discussion of democracy gets played out in a big way, through massive video projections, personal perspectives, and live performance in a dazzlingly intricate and thought-provoking merger of bodies and images, the epic and the mundane, the spectacular and the quotidian.

Big Art Group’s last appearance in the Bay Area was 2009’s deft and rowdy “action media performance,” SOS, at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Founded and led by Manson and executive director and writer Jemma Nelson, Big Art’s distinctive, highly integrated blend of theater and media into something it calls “real-time film” was the basis then for a rousing camp send-up and critique of this culture’s media-immersive materialism and its social ramifications.

The People: San Francisco takes Big Art’s fundamental approach to performance and democratizes it. The fourth installment of a serial project begun in 2007 in Polverigi, Italy (before moving onto Halle, Germany and Salzburg, Austria), The People was designed with two goals in mind, according to Manson. One was to craft a collaborative project that might allow Manson and Nelson greater contact with the communities they’ve been regularly traveling through on Big Art’s annual performance tours. The tradeoff would be some of the precision and expertise on display in shows like SOS for an immediate and interactive bead on a specific locale. In the Bay Area, this contact was managed through three host organizations: Marin’s Headlands Center for the Arts (where Manson and Nelson were in residency a few months ago), YBCA, and Z Space. Through this relationship, the project gathered some 40 hours of taped interviews with 42 subjects (including this writer) who were asked an identical set of questions about terrorism, justice, democracy, and war. (Manson was last week still carefully whittling down those 40 hours to a manageable 16 minutes, but notes the remainder will be archived online).

The other goal was related but more specific and immediate: “At the time we started this, in 2007, Bush was in office and he was always talking about promoting democracy,” explains Manson. “We were touring all over Europe at this time, and we’re wondering: What exactly does that mean, democracy? So we started asking. It’s the first time we’ve asked here, in the United States.”

The timing, coming just after the 10th anniversary of 9/11, is auspicious (if coincidental). As a localized act of public discussion of words like terrorism, justice, democracy, and war, The People reclaims from the centers of power and their diffuse mouthpieces the shibboleths and catchwords that normally act as so many parade floats leading us all down blind alleys, if not over cliffs. Wasn’t this the real discussion we should have had ten years ago? Some did; some tried and were shouted down. This weekend, at least, the conversation continues. 

THE PEOPLE: SAN FRANCISCO

Fri/16-Sat/17, 8 p.m., $10

Z Space

450 Florida, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

 

No shushing

Andrew Lam
-
0
No shushing

emilysavage@sfbg.com

MUSIC Something unexpectedly noisy is happening in the museums of San Francisco. There are two shows taking place in the next couple of weeks that will defy expectations of appropriate gallery sound levels.

The idea for one event was born when artist-quilter Ben Venom wrote a proposal to bring heavy metal music to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Venom’s massive heavy metal quilt, See You on the Other Side, is currently on display in between two motorcycle gang-inspired jackets as part of the ongoing BAN6 exhibition.

The Bay Area metal scene is woven into the fabric of See You on the Other Side. Shirts donated to Venom from local bands such as Hightower, Black Cobra, and Walken — along with old tees for his own collection — were cut up and sewn into his most ambitious design yet: a skull with seven Medusa-style snakes with slithering tongues, multiple pyramids, and lightning bolts.

Venom sewed four other (smaller) heavy metal quilts in the past, so his own collection of vintage shirts has nearly run dry. Along with his friends’ bands, acts such as Gwar, Kylesa, and Red Fang have approached Venom, offering support for his vision or their own collections of shirts to include in future quilts. So far, the only criticisms Venom has faced are from those pissed off that he’s cutting up classic shirts — some of which, like his vintage Testament shirt, can sell for upwards of $80 on Ebay. But he doesn’t see it as destroying something, he’s sees it as giving shirts a new life, a new function. “At the very end of the day, even the beasts of metal need a warm blanket,” he says smiling.

Likely very warm at 13×15-feet, See You on the Other Side includes more than 125 repurposed shirts with vivid and macabre imagery; the red of the snakes’ tongues popping against the white bulls-eye quilting pattern.

The Mission resident takes inspiration from his life growing up in deeply religious, creative family in Southern Georgia, conversely citing heavy metal, the occult, and alchemy imagery as similarly over-the-top exalting. “The way I look at my work is a collision of the outrageous stage antics of Ozzy Osborne collided together with the domestic nature of crafts,” says Venom, arms folded, peering at his work on the high-ceilinged wall.

Another artistic collision of sorts will take place in a few weeks to compliment Venom’s pieces: three local heavy metal bands will play in the sculpture garden at YBCA on Sept. 22, just outside the gallery where Venom’s work hangs.

Venom came up with the event idea when the curator sent out a query to the artists involved in the BAN6 exhibition, to see if anyone wanted to tack on a lecture or performance. “It totally ties into what I’m doing. It’s like, heavy metal at the museum — that’s a little weird,” Venom chuckles. “I contacted Hightower, Black Cobra, and Walken and they were all super amped on it.”

Those three bands are also represented with imagery in the quilt, having donated shirts to Venom, something that the artist notes as meaningful to the spirit of the piece. “I’m hosting the event, but the bands are playing — it’s their night.”

There will be a uniquely different live rock show in a nearby museum this month. The formerly San Franciscan foursome, Deerhoof, is flying in from across the country (New York City, Portland, Oreg., Albuquerque, N.M) to play in the main lobby of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art this Thursday, Sept. 15, as part of the SFMOMA: Now Playing series.

Deerhoof — Greg Saunier, John Dieterich, Ed Rodriguez and Satomi Matsuzaki — was documented by filmmaker Adam Pendelton for his video installation, BAND, a reinterpretation of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1968 film Sympathy for the Devil. Godard’s original included scenes of the Rolling Stones working on the track from Beggar’s Banquet, interlaced with clips of the Black Panthers. Pendelton’s three channel video installation, shot in 2009 while Deerhoof was working on its most recent record Deerhoof vs. Evil, includes beautiful close-ups of the avant-garde musicians working on a song, mixed with audio footage of a day in the life of a politically conscious teenager.

The eight-hour shoot caught the band’s first tinkering with “I Did Crimes For You,” a deceptively upbeat, repetitious pop track that kicks off with clean guitar, hand-clapping, and Matsuzaki’s recognizably high girlish vocals explaining: this is a stick-up/this is a stick-up/smash the windows.

“I don’t know what other bands are like when they’re working on music, but it can be pretty high tension,” says Dieterich, from his new home in Albuquerque, “It’s not like we’re in a war zone or something, but at the time it can pretty nerve-wracking.”

Despite the nerves and early unfounded fears about being filmed, Dieterich says the band ended up enjoying the experience. “It’s good to do things like that, to force yourself to be transparent…to be able to operate under any circumstance.” Deerhoof does have a track record of flexibility, whether it be taking risks with new tones or equipment, switching instruments during live shows, or reaching out beyond the traditional album-concert rock band format. The band created and performed an original score to Harry Smith’s silent film Heaven and Earth Magic during the San Francisco International Film Festival a few years back, and its album Milk Man was turned into a piece of modern dance theater by schoolchildren who performed it in Maine.

The SFMOMA event will include Deerhoof’s performance along with a screening of BAND. There also will be a projection of a different Pendelton project; footage of David Hilliard (former chief of staff of the Black Panther Party) touring landmark Black Panther Party sites in Oakland, and an onstage interview with Hilliard.

Deerhoof hasn’t performed in conjunction with Pendelton’s film since the premiere in New York City last year; Dieterich says he’s looking forward to taking it to the museum. “We’re going to be playing in this big entryway, I don’t know acoustically what that room is like — just thinking from a sound perspective, it will have its own strong character.” 

 

DEERHOOF

Thurs/15, 6 p.m., free with admission

San Francisco Museum of Modern Artist

151 Third St., SF

www.sfmoma.org

 

BLACK COBRA, WALKEN, AND HIGHTOWER

Sept. 22, 6 p.m., free with admission

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts 701 Mission, SF (415) 978-2787 www.ybca.org

Miami sound machine

Andrew Lam
-
1
Miami sound machine

emilysavage@sfbg.com

MUSIC Michael John “MJ” Hancock is in a silly mood. Out on the road with his band ANR (which stands for Awesome New Republic), the drummer-singer picks up my call and says, “Awesome New Republic answering service.” I give pause, waiting a tick for the beep, assuming this was an answering machine. But he was there, in the van in Grand Rapids, Mich., on the phone after a “long, deep night drive.” Flustered from the confusion, I chattily ask about the current tour.

“It’s going very well,” he says. “We’re all getting along swimmingly aside from the 50 percent of the time when we’re yelling at each other. Most of the yelling is just passionate arguments about important sociopolitical issues though — the way a good American tour should go.”

His curious mood might be due to the odd freak accident that happened to ANR a few days before they left for tour. While filming a music video in the band’s Miami home base for the song “It’s All Around You” off the deluxe version of its album Stay Kids, keyboardist-effects pedal charmer Brian Robertson was trying his hand at some modern dance choreography and ended up breaking his foot on the hard cement floor. “[The song] is about hurricanes and earthquakes pummeling the East Coast — which coincidentally has been happening — and he was spinning a girl around in a conceptual imitation of a hurricane,” explains Hancock.

Now here’s where you need to bring in the suspension of disbelief. This story could be bogus, the modern dance, the hurricane imitation, it all just sounds too darkly comedic to be true. And yet, I choose to believe. And that goes for the music ANR makes as well. The songs off Stay Kids — and the deluxe version released this week — are about the magnificent and horrifying scope of natural disasters, and yet, thanks to the synthy-pyschadelic pop tones, they exude futuristic glee. It’s less ha-ha funny, more thought-provoking amusing. A black comedy.

The duo enlisted a friend to come on tour and help with the things Robertson cannot do with his injury — set up equipment, lift heavy machinery, drive the van. “Brian just sits on a nice golden stool and tells us what to do,” Hancock says. But he can still press the effects pedals with his booted foot.

Hancock may be in a mirthful mood, but he takes his work seriously. The band’s next couple of releases sound as divergent as their sound stretches; one is a live instrumentation rock record influenced by violence around the world, the other an electronic R&B and pop record they’ve been recording in motel rooms along the tour. Along with playing three keyboards and a Moog, Robertson also mixes and masters all their albums.

Hancock and his partner in psychedelic pop crime, Robertson, met and began creating beat-heavy music with soulful melodies after both relocated to South Florida a decade ago to attend the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami. In between then and now the duo has released a smattering of well-received records and EPs, toured heavily, and opened for Animal Collective, Neon Indian, and No Age. They got a mention in a New York Times article a few years back about the rise of the Miami indie scene, and have recently been mentioned in the same breath with fellow Miami up-and-comers Jacuzzi Boys.

This tour takes ANR to San Francisco proper for the first time (there was an Oakland show three or so years ago) this Thursday, Sept.15. “Hopefully we’ll make it,” Hancock jokes. “You’ve got a lot of hills and our van doesn’t go up hills very well — I guess we’re playing Bottom of the Hill, so we’ll be okay.” Pause, “If you see three guys pushing a big white creepy stalker van up a hill, you know, that’s us.”

Despite the constant touring and songwriting, the duo says it hasn’t changed all that much in the past eight years. “It’s only really evolved as far as our ability to record better, and lyrically, it’s evolved,” says Hancock. “It used to be a lot more intentionally funny — I guess some people still think we’re pretty funny. But we’re not joking, we’re serious now,” he says with a laugh. Got it, ANR is no laughing matter. *

 

ANR

With We Barbarians, Strange Vine

Thurs/15, 9 p.m., $12

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

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