One of the most extraordinary products of recent Fillmore history is Messy Marv, a rapper whose life reflects the neighborhood’s struggle with a half century of urban renewal and the ’80s-era introduction of crack into America’s ghettos. In 1996, when he was still in 10th grade, he released his first album, Messy Situations (Ammo). Though it sold around 15,000 units, Mess admits he didn’t take music seriously at first.
“I dropped out of high school due to family issues,” he says. “I had to grow up real fast and do the man thing, but I started doin’ the street thing.”
Nonetheless, Mess’s rap reputation grew, and in 1997 he hooked up with San Quinn to record Explosive Mode (Presidential, 1998), which has sold more than 50,000 copies. “There was a lot of hype around the hood about how he was better than me or I was better than him,” Mess says. “We decided to come together, and we made a classic.”
“At that time, I was really on the street, living outta cars, doing real bad things,” he recalls. “So Quinn and his mom took me in.”
Despite his success when few in the Bay were moving many units, Mess was unable to leave the dope game, partly due to his own addiction. “I inherited a cocaine habit,” the rapper says. “I been clean for a while, but I had a really bad habit. All I can say is ‘Say no to drugs.’” Though he won’t go into details, Mess confirms his triple life as rapper, dealer, and user came to a head one night at an out-of-state show in 2001, when he was forced to jump out a fourth-floor window. “I broke both of my legs, crushed my left foot, lost a lot of blood,” Mess says. “I was in a wheelchair for six months. The doctors said I’d never walk again.”
“It gave me a whole new respect for handicapped people. I was doing shows in my wheelchair, and I rocked the whole crowd. It was a hell of a feeling that they still accepted me,” he says. “That gave me the strength to get up and walk. I learned how to walk all over again, by myself, in four months. After that I decided it was time to go somewhere else with my life.”
As if to atone for time lost, Messy Marv has since pursued his talent with a vengeance, recording a slew of projects for his own label, Scalen LLC, and labels such as Frisco Street Show, which released a reunion with Quinn, Explosive Mode 2: “Back in Business” (2006), and just dropped Explosive Mode 3 with Husalah and Jacka. In 2004, Mess inked a distribution deal for Scalen through Universal/Fontana, helping him move more than 20,000 copies each of Disobayish (2004) and Bandannas, Tattoos and Tongue Rings (2005). While he spent much of 2005 in county jail on a weapons violation, he still managed to score one of the big radio hits of the hyphy movement, “Get on My Hype,” produced by Droop-E. Most recently, he’s been on MTV and other airwaves with the E-A-Ski- and CMT-produced “So Hood,” from The Infrastructure (SMC), his album with Hunters Point rapper Guce, released under the name Bullys Wit Fullys. A self-conscious bid to end hood rivalry between the ’Moe and HP, the Infrastructure project shows Mess’s awareness of the power of his position as a role model even as he continues to spit with the most defiant swagger of any rapper in the Bay.
While Mess admits he has major deals on the table and plans to release the first of a two-volume opus titled What You Know about Me? in December, he also intends to retire thereafter in a nonbinding Jay-Z sort of way in order to concentrate on the younger acts on his label. This intention seems characteristic of the true spirit of the Fillmore as well as an acknowledgment that despite his youth, Messy Marv has already written a chapter in the district’s history. (Garrett Caples)
myspace.com/messymarvonline
Volumes
MAKING MESSY MARV
Gimme back my Bone?
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
When pressed to define obscenity, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously opined, “I know it when I see it.” For me, a more honest answer would go something like “I know it when I masturbate to it.”
Rock music, like smut, offers an equally simple metric for discerning authenticity: if listening to a band inevitably leads to a stoned argument about the fighting prowess of Bruce Lee, then it is probably real rock. I’ve debated so many Bruce Lee combat hypotheticals while listening to Black Sabbath — Bruce Lee versus genius hammerhead shark, Bruce Lee versus Loma Prieta earthquake, one-armed Bruce Lee versus Willy Wonka — that I never question their place as the supreme suicide-inducing, vengeance-advocating rock band.
The biggest Bay Area radio station that claims to rock is 107.7 the Bone. The Bone consciously sells itself as “classic rock that rocks.” When I moved to San Francisco in 2001, it was the only station that reliably got the Led out. It played a ton of Judas Priest, Led Zeppelin, and Black Sabbath — all the bands that scared me as a small boy because I knew in my heart they possessed evil powers and could, with their music, summon from the soil of the Amazon rainforest an army of cloned Adolf Hitlers. The Bone always comforted me, because it — along with Madalyn Murray O’Hare, pony kegs, bringing M-80s to school, and backward masking — inhabited the same demon-haunted rock-metal world I lived in as a frightened but fascinated child.
FLIRTING WITH DISASTER AND LADY REEBOK
So I’ll never forget where I was the first time I heard the Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony” on the Bone. It was 2 a.m. earlier this year, and I was driving west on Fell Street at 60 mph, my 1986 convertible LeBaron catching the timed lights one second after they turned green (Fell’s timed lights work at 30, 60, even 120 mph). I wanted rock and prayed for the Bone to twist me up a threefer of Ronnie James Dio. Instead, I found myself thrust into a Lady Reebok ad: vaguely self-infatuated and optimistic about everything but nothing in particular. I defensively smashed my car into a parked Cooper Mini, did a hundred push-ups and sit-ups next to the twisted wreckage, and ran off into the night. As with all time-bifurcating events — 9/11, the Kennedy assassination, being told my seventh-grade “sweats” were actually parachute pants — it’s often hard to remember what life was like before.
Joe Rock, the Bone’s most metal-friendly DJ and assistant program director, told me recently that the station tweaked its format following a 2004 listener-driven “Classic Rock A–Z Weekend” that saw requests for bands like Pearl Jam and Temple of the Dog supplant classic-rock lifers like Derek and the Dominoes and Bad Company. The switch from “metal-oriented classic rock,” the station’s previous Arbitron-monitored format, to “heritage rock,” a mix of old metal, new guitar-based grunge and post-grunge, and both old-school and contemporary Reebok rock, elicited a mild-to-moderate shitstorm from old-school Boneheads.
Why change the formula? I think the economics of commercial radio came into play. Few listeners in the 18-to-34-year-old demographic really care about Deep Purple deep tracks anymore, so the Bone started dropping in Staind and Godsmack amid Jimi Hendrix and Ozzy Osbourne. If you’re an old-school Bonehead, the change means that now you only hear KISS once in a while, unless you count all the time you and Strutter, your albino python, lock yourselves in your room and listen to every single KISS song on tape, vinyl, CD, CD box set, digitally remastered CD, and digitally remastered CD box set. If, however, you believe Stone Temple Pilots and Buckcherry are where Ted Nugent would have ended up if he didn’t OD on elk jerky and NRA propaganda, then you feel much like John Hinckley probably did after his psychologist let him watch Taxi Driver on DVD: deeply appreciative but still wondering what all the fuss is about.
THE SONG NOT THE SAME?
The mythology of classic rock holds that everything used to be one big fantasy sequence from The Song Remains the Same: coked-up druids, trashed Hilton suites, and roadies deep into black magic. The reality is that the vast majority of classic rock is nerdy or nonthreatening. You’re more likely to hear Supertramp, Fleetwood Mac, Yes, Journey, and Jethro Tull on an Aflac commercial than see them carved into the arm of a berserker teen. The Bone has always needed to appeal to men and women, hawks and doves, parolees and nonparolees. Until the change in format, ubiquitous classic rock loser ballads like the Who’s “Behind Blue Eyes” and Pink Floyd’s “Mother” represented the shadow self of the average Aleister Crowley–worshiping Bonehead. After the tweak the Bone forced its aging listeners to ask themselves a fundamental and humbling question: “Am I getting too old for this I-Roc?” Bone listeners older than 40 — who weren’t impressionable suckers when music, fashion, advertising, and public relations merged with movies, television, and politics in the late ’80s — had to swallow a bitter pill: it’s really all the same now, just younger.
The old Bone — despite its marketing and popularity with grown men who paint their faces silver and black and dress up as Norse war gods for their children’s Pop Warner football games — always played an embarrassing amount of lame music. For every “Dirty Deeds (Done Dirt Cheap)” or “Kashmir,” there were two pieces of shit like “Gimme Three Steps” and “China Grove.” The new Bone basically employs the same formula: Rainbow, Metallica, and Alice in Chains but now with acoustic Nickelback and blink-182 thrown in for the women and the younger sensitive guys.
This, objectively, is no wimpier than the old wimpy stuff, just more corporate and more easily marketable. The new Bone plays songs that strippers born after 1984 can lap dance to and still seem credible to their under-30 clientele. A lot of the new Bone stuff — by so-called active rock bands such as Audioslave and Velvet Revolver — easily out-rocks anything by Don Henley — and anything he ever touched.
Sometimes it’s better to just sound good than appear consistent. What rocks for me doesn’t necessarily rock for my next-door neighbor, unless Alice Cooper is now living in a pupuseria on 24th Street and Harrison. As for the ultimate judge, Bruce Lee’s legacy, I say the Bone still facilitates a Bay Area dialogue, even if it’s only seen Enter the Dragon and the first 10 minutes of Game of Death. SFBG
The other home of Bay hip-hop
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
If you don’t know about the Filthy ’Moe
It’s time I let real game unfold….
Messy Marv, “True to the Game”
I meet Big Rich on the corner of Laguna and Grove streets, near the heart of the Fillmore District according to its traditional boundaries of Van Ness and Fillmore, although the hood actually extends as far west as Divisadero. “Me personally,” the 24-year-old rapper and lifelong ’Moe resident confesses, “I don’t be sticking my head out too much. But I make sure I bring every photo session or interview right here.”
At the moment he’s taping a segment for an upcoming DVD by the Demolition Men, who released his mixtape Block Tested Hood Approved in April. Since then, the former member of the San Quinn–affiliated group Fully Loaded has created a major buzz thanks in part to the snazzy video for “That’s the Business,” his E-A-Ski- and CMT-produced single, which was the Jam of the Week in August on MTV2 and added to straight-up MTV in time for the Oct. 3 release of the Koch full-length Block Tested Hood Approved. (Originally titled Fillmore Rich, the album was renamed to capitalize on the mixtape-generated hype.)
Presented by E-40 and featuring Rich’s dope in-house producer Mal Amazin in addition to heavyweights such as Sean-T, Rick Rock, and Droop-E, BTHA is a deep contribution to the rising tide of Bay Area hip-hop. While Big Rich’s gruff baritone delivery and gritty street tales make his music more mobster than hyphy, the album is not unaffected by the latter style’s up-tempo bounce, helping the movement hold national attention during this season of anticipation before Mistah FAB’s major-label debut on Atlantic. “I don’t necessarily make hyphy music,” Rich says. “But I definitely condone it. As long as the spotlight is on the Bay, I’m cool with it.” Coming near the end of a year that has seen landmark albums from San Quinn, Messy Marv, Will Hen, and fellow Fully Loaded member Bailey — not to mention JT the Bigga Figga’s high-profile tour with Snoop Dogg, which has taken hyphy all the way to Africa — Rich’s solo debut is one more indication of the historic district’s importance to the vitality of local hip-hop and Bay Area culture in general.
THE EDGE OF PAC HEIGHTS
The Fillmore is a community under siege, facing external and internal pressures. On the one hand, gentrification — in the form of high-end shops and restaurants serving tourists, Pacific Heights residents, and an increasingly affluent demographic creeping into the area — continues to erode the neighborhood’s edges. “If you grew up in the Fillmore, you can see Pacific Heights has crept down the hill, closer to the ghetto,” says Hen, who as a member of multiregional group the Product (assembled by Houston legend Scarface) moved more than 60,000 copies of its recent “thug conscious” debut, One Hunid (Koch). “Ten years ago there were more boundaries. But the Fillmore’s prime location, and I’m not asleep to this fact. We’re five minutes away from everything in the city. That has to play a role in the way the district is represented in a city that makes so much off tourism. You might not want your city portrayed as gangsta, even though it is.”
Hen has a point. The notion of San Francisco as gangsta is somewhat at odds with the way the city perceives itself. As an Oakland writer, I can attest to this, for even in San Francisco’s progressive artistic and intellectual circles, Oakland is usually understood to be beyond the pale in terms of danger and violence. Yet none of the Oakland rappers I’ve met talk about their hoods in quite the same way Fillmore rappers do, at least when it comes to their personal safety. As Big Rich films his section of the DVD, for example, he remarks on the continual stream of police cruisers circling the block.
“They slowed it down,” he says. “Now they only come every 90 seconds. Right around here is murder central — people be shooting each other every night. By 7 o’clock, we all gotta disperse, unless you want to get caught in the cross fire.” He waves his hands in mock terror. “I ain’t trying to die tonight!”
“BUSTING HEADS”
Though Rich is clowning, his statement is perfectly serious — indiscriminate gunfire among gang members, often in their early teens, makes nocturnal loitering a risky proposition at best. As of September, according to the San Francisco Police Department’s Web site, the Northern Police District, which includes the Fillmore, had the city’s second highest number of murders this year, 11, ceding first place only to the much larger Bayview’s 22. For overall criminal incidents, the Northern District led the city, at more than 10,000 so far.
Though Fillmore rappers might be given to stressing the danger of their hood, insofar as such themes constitute much of hip-hop’s subject matter and they feel the need to refute the city’s nongangsta image, no one I spoke to seemed to be boasting. They sounded sad. Hen, for example, reported that he’d been to three funerals in October, saying, “You hardly have time to mourn for one person before you have to mourn for the next person.” While the SFPD’s Public Affairs Office didn’t return phone calls seeking corroboration, both Rich and Hen indicate the neighborhood is suffering from an alarming amount of black-on-black violence.
“Basically, it’s genocide. We’re going to destroy each other,” Hen says. “It used to be crosstown rivalries rather than in your backyard. Now there’s more of that going on. If you get into it at age 15, the funk is already there. Whoever your crew is funking with, you’re in on it.” The ongoing cycle of drug-related violence — the Fillmore’s chief internal pressure — has only ramped up under the Bush administration’s regressive economic policies. It’s a fact not lost on these rappers: as Rich puts it succinctly on BTHA, “Bush don’t give a fuck about a nigga from the hood.”
“Everybody’s broke. That’s why everybody’s busting each other’s heads,” explains Rich, who lost his older brother to gun violence several years ago. “If you don’t know where your next dollar’s coming from …”
To be sure, the rappers give back to the Fillmore. They support large crews of often otherwise unemployable youth, and Messy Marv, for example, has been known to hand out turkeys for Thanksgiving and bikes for Christmas. But Bay Area rap is only just getting back on its feet, and while the rappers can ameliorate life in the Fillmore’s housing projects, they don’t have the means to dispel the climate of desperation in a hood surrounded by one of the most expensive cities on earth. Moreover, they are acutely aware of the disconnect between their community and the rest of the city, which trades on its cultural cachet.
“It’s like two different worlds,” Hen muses. “You have people sitting outside drinking coffee right in the middle of the killing fields. They’re totally safe, but if I walk over there, I might get shot at. But the neighborhood is too proud for us to be dying at the hands of each other.”
HOOD PRIDE
The neighborhood pride Will Hen invokes is palpable among Fillmore rappers. “I get a warm feeling when I’m here,” Messy Marv says. “The killing, you can’t just say that’s Fillmore. That’s everywhere. When you talk about Fillmore, you got to go back to the roots. Fillmore was a warm, jazzy African American place where you could come and dance, drink, have fun, and be you.”
Mess is right on all counts. Lest anyone think I misrepresent Oaktown: the citywide number of murders in Oakland has already topped 120 this year. But my concern here is with the perceived lack of continuity Mess suggests between the culture of the Fillmore then and now. By the early 1940s, the Fillmore had developed into a multicultural neighborhood including the then-largest Japanese population in the United States. In 1942, when FDR sent West Coast citizens of Japanese origin to internment camps, their vacated homes were largely filled by African Americans from the South, attracted by work in the shipyards. While the district had its first black nightclub by 1933, the wartime boom transformed the Fillmore into a major music center.
“In less than a decade, San Francisco’s African American population went from under 5,000 to almost 50,000,” according to Elizabeth Pepin, coauthor of the recent history of Fillmore jazz Harlem of the West (Chronicle). “The sheer increase in number of African Americans in the neighborhood made the music scene explode.”
Though known as a black neighborhood, Pepin says, the Fillmore “was still pretty diverse” and even now retains vestiges of its multicultural history. Japantown persists, though much diminished, and Big Rich himself is half Chinese, making him the second Chinese American rapper of note. “My mother’s parents couldn’t speak a lick of English,” he says. “But she was real urban, real street. I wasn’t brought up in a traditional Chinese family, but I embrace it and I get along with my other side.” Nonetheless, Pepin notes, the massive urban renewal project that destroyed the Fillmore’s iconic jazz scene by the late ’60s effectively curtailed its diversity, as did the introduction of barrackslike public housing projects.
The postwar jazz scene, of course, is the main source of nostalgia tapped by the Fillmore Merchants Association (FMA). Talk of a musical revival refers solely to the establishment of upscale clubs — Yoshi’s, for example, is scheduled to open next year at Fillmore and Eddy — offering music that arguably is no longer organically connected to the neighborhood. In a brief phone interview, Gus Harput, president of the FMA’s Jazz Preservation District, insisted the organization would “love” to open a hip-hop venue, although he sidestepped further inquiries. (Known for its hip-hop shows, Justice League at 628 Divisadero closed around 2003 following a 2001 shooting death at a San Quinn performance and was later replaced by the Independent, which occasionally books rap.) The hood’s hip-hop activity might be too recent and fall outside the bounds of jazz, yet nowhere in the organization’s online Fillmore history (fillmorestreetsf.com) is there an acknowledgement of the MTV-level rap scene down the street.
Yet the raucous 1949 Fillmore that Jack Kerouac depicts in his 1957 book, On the Road — replete with protohyphy blues shouters like Lampshade bellowing such advice as “Don’t die to go to heaven, start in on Doctor Pepper and end up on whisky!” — sounds less like the area’s simulated jazz revival and more like the community’s present-day hip-hop descendants.
How could it be otherwise? The aesthetics have changed, but the Fillmore’s musical genius has clearly resided in rap since Rappin’ 4Tay debuted on Too $hort’s Life Is … Too $hort (Jive, 1989), producer-MC JT the Bigga Figga brought out the Get Low Playaz, and a teenage San Quinn dropped his classic debut, Don’t Cross Me (Get Low, 1993). While there may not be one definitive Fillmore hip-hop style, given that successful rappers tend to work with successful producers across the Bay regardless of hood, Messy Marv asserts the ’Moe was crucial to the development of the hyphy movement: “JT the Bigga Figga was the first dude who came with the high-energy sound. He was ahead of his time. I’m not taking nothing away from Oakland, Vallejo, or Richmond. I’m just letting you know what I know.”
In many ways the don of the ’Moe, San Quinn — reaffirming his status earlier this year with The Rock (SMC), featuring his own Ski- and CMT-produced smash, “Hell Ya” — could be said to typify a specifically Fillmore rap style, in which the flow is disguised as a strident holler reminiscent of blues shouting. While both Messy Marv and Big Rich share affinities with this delivery, Will Hen, for instance, and Quinn’s brother Bailey — whose Champ Bailey (City Boyz, 2006) yielded the MTV and radio success “U C It” — favor a smoother, more rapid-fire patter.
What is most striking here is that, with the exception of fellow traveler Messy Marv (see sidebar), all of these artists, as well as recent signee to the Game’s Black Wall Street label, Ya Boy, came up in the ’90s on San Quinn’s influential Done Deal Entertainment. Until roughly two years ago, they were all one crew. While working on his upcoming eighth solo album, From a Boy to a Man, for his revamped imprint, Deal Done, Quinn paused for a moment to take justifiable pride in his protégés, who now constitute the Fillmore’s hottest acts.
“I create monsters, know what I’m saying?” Quinn says. “Done Deal feeds off each other; that’s why I’m so proud of Bailey and Rich. We all come out the same house. There’s a real level of excellence, and the world has yet to see it. Right now it seems like we’re separate, but we’re not. We’re just pulling from different angles for the same common goal.”
“We all one,” Quinn concludes, in a statement that could serve as a motto for neighborhood unity. “Fillmoe business is Fillmoe business.” SFBG
myspace.com/bigrich
myspace.com/williehen
myspace.com/sanquinn
TUESDAY
Nov. 21
Music
Pernice Brothers
Recently I was watching Iron Chef, and one of the contestants whipped up some luscious delight of lightly fried honeycomb with cream and fruit; it looked like the best dessert ever. That night I dreamed about it. Oh, how I slept like a baby! The next day I bought the latest by the Pernice Brothers, Live a Little (Ashmont), and over the course of its 12 songs I realized I was listening to the aural equivalent of that same heavenly concoction. The yearning Americana of their early releases can still be tasted, but Joe Pernice and his crew of lovelorn stargazers have added bursting power pop to the recipe. (Todd Lavoie)
With Elvis Perkins
9 p.m.
Cafe du Nord
2170 Market, SF
$12
(415) 861-5016
www.cafedunord.com
www.pernicebrothers.com
Event
Haiti’s Solidarity Conference
Learn about Haiti from SF Labor Council member David Welsh, who visited the Solidarity Conference in Port-au-Prince last August and witnessed UN troops firing into houses, at the Gray Panther November general meeting. (Deborah Giattina)
12:30-3 p.m.
Unitarian Universalist Church
1187 Franklin at Geary, SF
(415) 552-8000
http://graypantherssf.igc.org
MONDAY
Nov. 20
Music
These Arms Are Snakes
Since their first EP, This Is Meant to Hurt You (Jade Tree), dropped in 2003, it was clear that this band was on some next-level shit. The ante was upped with 2005’s Oxeneers or the Lion Sleeps When Its Antelope Go Home (Jade Tree), with lyrics like this one from “Your Pearly Whites”: “You could have been fine, you could have made it. You could’ve licked the lips of God, but you chose the pavement.” This is like Black Sabbath meets Brainiac. “Crazy Woman Dirty Train” closes out Easter amid malfunctioning computer voices, keyboard shrieks, and the nuthouse screams of an emotional breakdown: hardcore was never meant to be this creative. (Duncan Scott Davidson)
With French Toast, Mouth of the Architect, and Everlovely Lightningheart
7:30 p.m.
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
$10
(415) 621-4455
www.bottomofthehill.com
Film
Casino Royale
The latest actor to embody Ian Fleming’s superagent is also maybe the most controversial: Daniel Craig is blond, beefy, and a relative youngster at 38. The blond part is negligible, but the other factors are imperative to GoldenEye director Martin Campbell’s fresh-you-up approach to the Bond template. Craig’s Bond is newly licensed to kill; he’s not quite the suave cat we’ve come to expect, and there are story beats missing (no Q, relatively few wacky gadgets, no Moneypenny). The film actually plays a bit like The Bourne Identity, with some spectacular chase scenes, including one featuring the nimble Sébastien Foucan, cocreator of the building-scaling art of Parkour. (Cheryl Eddy)
In Bay Area theaters
SUNDAY
Nov. 19
Event
Transgender Day of Remembrance
Remember and honor victims of antitransgender hate crimes as Alameda County joins more than 200 locations around the world to hold the first Transgender Day of Remembrance. Elected officials and community members will speak at the event, which marks the anniversary of the murder of Rita Hester, a Massachusetts transgender woman. (Deborah Giattina)
4:30 p.m.
Preservation Park
MLK and 13th St., Oakl.
(510) 713-6690
Event
Unsung Heroes
Show your support for eight Bay Area residents and one organization recognized for improving lives in the African American community. The 18th annual Unsung Heroes awards ceremony features entertainment from the Praise and Sign Dancers and Stepping Knights. Local comedian Veronica Dangerfield MCs. (Deborah Giattina)
1 p.m.
San Francisco Public Library, Koret Auditorium
100 Larkin, SF
Free
www.sfpl.org
SATURDAY
Nov. 18
Event
Nina Hartley
Nobody has more sex than Nina Hartley. So it’s no surprise that the prolific adult-film performer and sex educator decided to write a how-to on everything you ever wanted to know about the dirty deed. Nina Hartley’s Guide to Total Sex is a humorous and candid book that outlines methods to intensify your sexual experience with or without a partner. Hartley, who is also a registered nurse, applies her years of omnisexual experience to this comprehensive manual filled with user-friendly facts and techniques and punctuated by her witty and spicy candor. At this reading Hartley will talk dirty and share some of the tricks of her trade. (Hayley Elisabeth Kaufman)
7 p.m.
Booksmith
1644 Haight, SF
Free
(415) 863-8688
www.booksmith.com
Music
Pit er Pat
The Chicago trio display less raw aggression on their new album, Pyramids (Thrill Jockey), than their last, 2005’s Shakey, but that doesn’t mean they’ve lost their bite. Now propelled by minor chords, naïf but malevolent keys, and Fay Davis-Jeffers’s gawky vocals, Pit er Pat plunge into their fears, going where aces accustomed to trad post-rock musicianship ordinarily dread stumbling. Recorded with Tortoise’s John McEntire, Pyramids hits its own original apex at around the instrumental “Swans,” throbbing and sailing away on Davis-Jeffers, bassist Rob Doran, and drummer Butchy Fuego’s transparent, ragged rhythms. (Chun)
With Ebb and Flow
9:45 p.m.
LoBot Gallery
1800 Campbell, Oakl.
$5-$10, sliding scale
(510) 282-2622
www.lobotgallery.com
Also Sun/19
With Ebb and Flow
9 p.m.
12 Galaxies
2565 Mission, SF
$8
(415) 970-9777
www.12galaxies.com
FRIDAY
Nov. 17
Film
“The Good Old Naughty Days”
Back in the early 1900s people really knew how to film other people having sex. “The Good Old Naughty Days” is a collection of 12 silent black-and-white hardcore porno movies that have been painstakingly restored by the National Cinematheque in France. Don’t let the high art credentials fool you: these are real porn movies; they were originally played in French brothels while customers waited their turns. (Aaron Sankin)
7:15 and 9:15 p.m. through Mon/20 (also Sat/18-Sun/19, 2 and 4 p.m.)
Red Vic Movie House
1727 Haight, SF
$8
(415) 668-3994
www.redvicmoviehouse.com
Music
The Meters
You would be hard-pressed to find a band funkier than the Meters. They even changed their name to the Funky Meters for a while – that’s how funky they are. The Meters took the chaotic, urban funk of James Brown and Sly and the Family Stone and filtered it through the down-home earthy goodness of their hometown, New Orleans. The result is laid-back, groovy music that’s fun without being urgent. These guys have been around for more than 30 years and in that time have left an indelible imprint on everyone from hip-hoppers to jam-banders. (Aaron Sankin)
9 p.m. (also Sat/18)
Fillmore
1805 Geary, SF
$55
(415) 346-6000
www.livenation.com
www.funkymeters.com
THURSDAY
Nov. 16
Performance
The Outsider Chronicles
Creative is the title of one of Sean Dorsey’s funniest and most heartrending dance theater pieces, a solo in which the keening voice of a guidance counselor yanks on Dorsey’s strings, trying to maneuver his masculine enthusiasm into expressions of gender that aren’t “inappropriate.” Creative is also a good word to describe Dorsey’s impulses – he’s making vital work that charts its own territories without following trad dictates of gender and genre. Dorsey’s skill as a choreographer and his observant quality as a writer are both grounded in naturalism – he makes tough creative work look easy, even as it faces tough subject matter. This weekend brings the return of his acclaimed The Outsider Chronicles. (Johnny Ray Huston)
8 p.m. (through Sat/18)
Dance Mission Theater
3316 24th St., SF
$15
(415) 273-4633
www.freshmeatproductions.org
Music
Partyline
Who’s afraid of the big bad terror suspect – or the prez, for that matter? Not Partyline, that’s for sure. Bratmobile vocalist Allison Wolfe’s new all-femme band lashes together nyah-nyah vocals, punktastic guitar action, and a conscience. “We gotta keep from crying at our monkey terror president!” she yelps on the combo’s Retard Disco debut, Zombie Terrorist, the follow-up to last year’s Girls with Glasses EP. Imagine the Ramones in skirts and with a singular activist attitude, and you’ll get an idea of Partyline’s garagy gumption. (Kimberly Chun)
With French Toast and Golden Bears
9:30 p.m.
Hemlock Tavern
1131 Polk, SF
$7
(415) 923-0923
www.hemlocktavern.com
WEDNESDAY
Nov. 15
Event/Performance
“The Wicked Stage: Horror Theatre in Jazz Age London”
Join copresenters Thrillpeddlers (voted Best Live Onstage Bloodbath in our Best of the Bay 2006 issue) and the San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum for “The Wicked Stage.” Featuring professor Michael Wilson, coauthor of the forthcoming This Troublesome Theatre: London’s Grand Guignol and the Performance of Horror, this multimedia presentation will delve into the history of London’s take on this Parisian theatrical import. As fans of Thrillpeddlers’ annual Shocktoberfest are aware, Grand Guignol combines belly laughs with bloody splats, creating a roller coaster of emotional extremes. For a fitting climax to the evening’s entertainment, Thrillpeddlers will perform a scene from The Old Women, the English version of the Grand Guignol classic A Crime in the Madhouse. (Nicole Gluckstern)
7 p.m.
San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum
War Memorial Veterans Bldg., fourth floor
401 Van Ness, SF
$10
(415) 255-4800
www.sfpalm.org
www.thrillpeddlers.com
Music
Marc-André Hamelin
The San Francisco Symphony continues to tickle our tympana with programs of rare intelligence and far-out aural adventurousness. From Nov. 15 to 18, Montreal’s hugest pianist, Marc-André Hamelin, dazzles in the debut of überhip South African composer Kevin Volans’s oceanic mini-epic, Atlantic Crossing – 14,000 notes in 23 minutes! That’s a lot of plink-plonk for your moola. Also on tap: Russian legend Dmitry Shostakovich’s famous, ecstatic, gloves-off slap to Joseph Stalin’s face, the Symphony No. 5 in D Minor. Soviet smackdown never sounded so good. (Marke B.)
Wed/15 and Fri/17-Sat/18, 8 p.m.
Thu/16, 2 p.m.
Davies Symphony Hall
201 Van Ness, SF
$25-$110
www.sfsymphony.org
Outsourcer
› superego@sfbg.com
SUPER EGO The best thing about childhood obesity is I can fit in all the clothes now. Dora the Explorerwear, Juicy Couture for Kids, even Mary-Kate and Ashley Teen Look. No door, no path, no avenue is closed to my cheap and whimsical fashion tastes. No “Barfin’ BILF” tube top for toddlers can squeeze me out of my juvenile fancies. Thank you, overweight preteens of America! Viva los junk foods!
And so goes the mind. I was rifling through a rack of knockoff baby Baby Phat the other day when the fluorescents at Thrift Town grew one shade of puke green lighter, and I fell into a consumerist reverie — my thoughts rippling and stretching like the toxic, Korean-stitched Spandelux beneath my gas station press-on fingertips. Tell me, has Clubland become a tangle of infinite niches? Do the tight, glowing pockets of each individual scene form a Great Barrier Reef: part of a vibrant, neon nightlife tapestry, yet each a total entity unto itself? Do the hefty-boobed metal-chick wonders at Crash form a silicone wall, the sideways-haired Casanova scruffsters a moat of cold shoulders, the overexcitable twinks at Bar on Castro an army of flamboyant spastics, their tweezed brows raised like little red flags, two high-pitched shrieks of warning?
And while we’re at it, what’s up with Nancy Pelosi’s eyes? Girl looks spun as a dinner plate at a Chinese circus. Nancy, meet Tramadol. Tramadol, Nancy.
There, like, used to be this thing that happened. The “cool” kids would start a music and nightlife scene. They’d get a couple months to revel in cooler-than-thou, bonding with freaks of like mind. Eventually, the scene would get too big for its britches and start being overrun by “normals.” Everybody wanted in, diluting the scene’s insular charms and making the original fans bitter, smugly smoking their pastel Nat Shermans and sharpening their claws on the newcomers. But that hasn’t happened since house and techno were bastardized into horrid music for aerobics classes. It’s not the kind of music that matters anymore, it’s the attitude that defines. My dreamboat rock critic, Kalefa Sanneh, calls this phenomenon “mini-monoculture.” I call it kind of boring (although I’m lovin’ the lack of scene cattiness). Without overpopularity to push you on to the next scene, it’s all too easy to get stuck. That may be why we’re all still falling backward into the ’80s. Aa-aaahhh …
But sometimes something refreshing comes totally out of left field, something no one can claim to own or hole up in. I’m talking about clubs like the monthly NonStop Bhangra, one of my favorite places to watch people of all stripes let their J/A/S/O/N/-gelled hair down and get a little silly, which does an end run around the whole American underground malaise by packing a woven hemp record bag and flying us off to the world of Bollywood and Bangalore, fronting a cosmopolitan style that totally disarms.
Punjabi by way of London, bhangra music is the tabla-driven electroclash of now, mixing 15th-century Indian folk music with bass-heavy hip-hop (henna-tinted hyphy?) — without an inkling of disco drama. Other great joints such as Dhamaal at Club Six and Bollywood Nights in Santa Clara have pumped the bang-bang-bhangra for years, but NonStop, started a couple years ago by Vicki Virk and Suman Raj-Grewal of dholrhythms dance troupe and DJ Jimmy Love, delivers the whole Punjabi enchilada to the heart of mini-mono scensterdom, Rickshaw Stop. Professional dance performances, lessons for beginners, live painting and drumming, superduper psychedelic visuals, and the fabulous, mini-multicultural sight of people shaking their bangles in glee — what’s better? The upcoming NonStop, Nov. 18 with guest DJ Sep, is the last one of the year, and it’ll be a doozy of a Delhi, a much-needed tonic for anyone feeling trapped in their scene.
Whoa. Amazing the thoughts that pop into your head while you’re stuffing fat kids’ clothes into your Wonderbra, no?
THIS JUST IN: What do club goddesses Heklina, Lady Bunny, Lady Kier from Deee-Lite, and practically every cheap-ass, to’-up drag queen in this whole gloriously damned burg have in common? That’s right, tax problems. Oh, and they’ll also be at the fantasmic, sure-to-be-scandal-ridden Miss Trannyshack Pageant on Nov. 18. I’m not pumping this long-running institution just because Trannyshack head honchette Heklina has a nail gun to my ear hole. Really. I’m pumping it because it’s wild fun! SFBG
NONSTOP BHANGRA
Every third Saturday, 8 p.m.–2 a.m. (no event in December)
Rickshaw Stop
155 Fell, SF
$10 advance, $15 door
(415) 861-2011
www.nonstopbhangra.com
MISS TRANNYSHACK PAGEANT
Sat/18, 9 p.m.–4 a.m.
Regency Center
1300 Van Ness, SF
$25 advance, $35 door
www.trannyshack.com
“Yah Mo B There”
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ONLINE TV Contrary to what you might mistake as your better judgment, the soft-rock world of the late 1970s and early ’80s produced some top-notch sounds. Admittedly, nary a twentysomething peer confesses to joining me in enjoying the music of Michael McDonald, but even societal relegation to guilty pleasure status can’t stop the soothe sounds — a sentiment thankfully shared by JD Ryznar and Hunter Stair, creators of the online television series Yacht Rock.
Released by Channel 101, a group based in Los Angeles, Yacht Rock presents humorous, five-minute vignettes (starring Ryznar and Stair kitted out in soft-rock drag) explaining the origins of some “remarkably smooth” hits from such champs as McDonald, Steely Dan, and Toto. “We’re not just sailing the seas of smile on a gentle bed of rock,” says “music industry mogul” character Koko Goldstein, the show’s key promoter of smooth music in the industry. “My artists fuel their vessels with their blood … and their broken dreams!”
It’s some serious business — the songs of that era are given rather dramatic, hilarious backstories that, while stretching the truth, are based in hard facts: for instance, there are indeed Toto members playing on Michael Jackson’s return to smooth production, “Human Nature.”
“Hollywood” Steve Huey, a critic from the All Music Guide, hosts the show, guiding viewers through the hits of 1976 to 1984 in the yacht rock genre, a label referring to smooth pop that would seemingly please the affluent ears of champagne-sipping, island-cruising millionaires. Aside from being completely hysterical, the series presents many facts of interest to yacht rock aficionados: did you know that Ted Templeman, producer of the McDonald-period Doobie Brothers material, also produced the first Van Halen record?
Sellouts come in the form of Hall and Oates, the ever-present bullies who took the funkier, somewhat grittier route away from the Holy Church of Smooth. Kenny Loggins, while presented in a notably heroic light throughout, also comes off as something of a jerk, betting that McDonald’s “I Keep Forgettin’” would never make it past number four on the charts (and although Loggins is initially correct, the salt ’n’ pepper smooth OG comes out on top as the tune is later sampled in Warren G’s hit “Regulate,” ultimately reaching number two).
The myriad brilliant one-liners include such fortunate turns of phrase as “You guys just checked into Hotel Cali-ass-kick!” and McDonald’s ice-cold response to Toto’s threat of a musical climate change in the ’80s, “Me? An irrelevant joke? Please.”
That anybody would want to reexamine the music of this period is certainly unusual, especially considering the reverence Yacht Rock has toward the music. Never before have I seen Loggins placed in anything resembling a heroic light. Not since Footloose anyway. Sadly, Yacht Rock has now ceased production of new episodes, but it’s never too late to tune in to old installments — you’ll soon be sailing away again with Christopher Cross and company. SFBG
www.yachtrock.com
Smart and dangerous
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The Fucking Ocean are seriously fucking refreshing: they’ve taken cues from Mark E. Smith and Ian MacKaye alike to produce biting, sincere post-punk that’s nigh anomalous in American music. In band member John Nguyen’s San Francisco home, the current three-piece talked about their politics, new record, playing under the stairs at the Edinburgh Castle, and a shared affinity for Mexican food and DC punk.
It was collegiate rock enthusiasm that initially helped bring about this ensemble. Nguyen went to Brown with fellow band member Matt Swagler, where they played together in what Swagler said was a “pretty embarrassing ’90s power pop band.” When Nguyen subsequently moved west to enter med school at Stanford, he randomly tuned in to Fucking Ocean cofounder Elias Spiliotis on KZSU, the campus radio station.
“I had a show called Lethal Injection on Saturday evenings where I was playing Greek punk and bands like the Fall, Fugazi, and Blonde Redhead,” Spiliotis said. “Before I ever met him, John called in one night, said he liked the show, and asked me, ‘Where are the cool people at Stanford?’”
They inevitably found each other at a station staff meeting a few months later, and Nguyen started his own finely titled show, Sad and Dangerous. Later, after Swagler moved to San Francisco, a 2003 show from defunct DC no-wave ragers Black Eyes blew the friends’ collective mind. Starting a band was the noble, noisy result.
As cryptic as the Fucking Ocean’s name is, it has rather silly origins: “I was dropping off Matt after band practice when ‘Foggy Notion’ by the Velvet Underground came on the radio,” Spiliotis said. The band had been tossing around possible names, and when he suggested “the Foggy Notion,” his Greek accent unwittingly locked in a different phrase, one that they’ve used to this day.
SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION
Luckily, Swagler explained, the Foggy Notion serves as a name for playing kids’ birthday parties — when his grandmother recently asked his band’s name, that’s the one he gave her. Spiliotis, while no longer in the band (he left in order to continue his research in cell biology at Stanford), appears on the record with Nguyen, Swagler, and Marcella Gries, who joined the group after former bass player Megumi Aihara moved to Boston for graduate school.
For more than a year their rehearsals were tape-recorded on Gries’s clock radio. The band eventually had a friend help them record a five-song EP that, while never released, primed them for their studio time at John Vanderslice’s Tiny Telephone studio.
“We were playing a lot of shows, and our friends in the Mall suggested going to Ian and Jay Pellicci to record an album,” said Gries of the Pelliccis, who have recorded some of their favorite bands, Deerhoof and Erase Errata. They brought the Fucking Ocean newfound on-tape clarity and a pointed drum sound care of Jay Pellicci, as well as some nifty frills — a vintage Gibson amplifier and, appropriately, a telephone, which Nguyen said was “rewired and disordered in a way that makes it sound vaguely like a bullhorn.”
“MUSICAL VOLLEYBALL”
The Fucking Ocean’s affable attitude contrasts with their music’s tension and focus. Drum, bass, and guitar duties aren’t singularly assigned — the band writes collectively and swaps instruments. The approach makes their live show as varied and blindingly fun as their record. On the road they have been carting around new songs and video accompaniment courtesy of local artist Tony Benna. Shawn Reynaldo, who signed the Fucking Ocean to his Oakland label, Double Negative Records, calls them a “musical volleyball team” with a deliberately Minutemen-like songwriting economy. The prevailing maxim among the Fucking Ocean is that if an idea is presented to the listener, it needn’t stick around that long: no use in letting John Q. Listener get too comfortable, right?
Recording the album, all done on analog tape, took six days in June. While a lot of Indian pizza, Gatorade, and various caffeinated drinks fueled their long nights behind the boards, the result, Le Main Rouge, is damn lean. At 11 songs in a little under 27 minutes, it’s an urgent delight of terse angularity from a band bursting with novel ideas, both politically and riffwise.
Addressing abortion rights in the fuzzed, pissed strut of “Adam,” the Fucking Ocean close with the lines “Do you remember when, do you remember when?/ Women had to risk their lives just to live again!” “Bombs in the Underground,” a response to last year’s London Underground bombings, opens with a memorable guitar-bass groove reminiscent of midperiod Sleater-Kinney before bursting into a shouted refrain, then traversing odd tempo shifts and a drum fill — it’s thoughtfully fragmented and endlessly listenable. Le Main Rouge shows a band whose enthusiasm hopefully bodes a good run ahead. You’re advised to polish up that kayak and tune in. SFBG
FUCKING OCEAN
With Kid 606 and Friends and Warbler
Thurs/16, 9 p.m.
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
$8
(415) 621-4455
Mod couple
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One of the hottest hip-hop albums of the year comes from the unlikely combination of a six-foot-seven Canadian producer and a New Orleans mother of two. Voice’s Gumbo (Groove Attack) is a testament to the modern modes of production, with the protagonists only recording in the same room twice but nonetheless able to marry beats and rhymes into a vehicle for a rapper who is not only talking loud but saying something.
Toronto’s too-tall Kevin “Moonstarr” Moon has long been known to heads who like their hip-hop with a side of jazz and a chaser of broken beats through his productions for his own Public Transit Recordings as well as remixes for the likes of Recloose and Jazzanova. In spring 2001 he was introduced to Erin “Voice” Tourey through mutual friend Rosina Kazi of LAL (also on Public Transit), with whom Tourey was staying. “I met with her on a Friday, and we just connected. She came by the studio, and I gave her a beat CD. The next day we got together, Saturday afternoon, and she had already written two complete songs to my beats,” Moon remembered with awe over the phone from Toronto. One of those songs ended up on the Scattered Snares compilation released on Twisted Funk, a label run by Marc Mac of 4 Hero, and the other went on Moonstarr’s own Dupont (Public Transit). The pair have been collaborating ever since.
TOTAL FREEDOM
“She’s so versatile — she’ll flip from a rhyme to poetry and back to a rhyme again, so it’s total freedom with her in terms of what you can get away with,” Moon enthused when pressed to explain why he enjoys producing Tourey. “It’s really cool to work with her because you’re not constricted by, like, a straight-up hip-hop snare on every second [beat].” Witness “Guerilla Hustlin’,” in which Moon swings from three kick-drum beats that lurch into the fourth over to snare drums that threaten and stutter with Brazilian flare beneath a trilling flute as Tourey spits, “Wanna know my name, wanna know why I’m on the streets selling beats instead of chasing fame/ Well I’ve always done my own thing, figure people’ll come around on their own term, used to try and push it but I had to live and learn, now I pick and chose when I be concerned.”
“Guerilla Hustlin’” is a rock-solid tune — and it inadvertently captures one of the few ways in which Tourey and Moon view the world differently, as the rhymes tell of struggling to get paid while the production hints at an affection for Baden Powell and isn’t exactly Clear Channel–friendly. When I spoke with Tourey, who patiently answered my questions from her home in New Orleans while her three-year-old and five-month-old played not so patiently in the background, I mentioned that Moon had described his status as an underground producer as “comfortable.” “Obviously, we’re in a situation where we have to sell records, but we’re independent,” Moon said. “We can get away with a hell of a lot more than an artist that’s stuck in a position where their art has to generate revenue for them. We’re in this really comfortable position where we can get away with whatever.”
So does Tourey treasure the same silver lining to not selling too many records that Moon does? “Mmm, no,” Tourey said succinctly. “I love Kevin, but, well, he doesn’t have kids yet. When he starts reproducing, he might feel the burn a little more, like I do. Underground is great in terms of creative control and street credibility and loyal fan bases, but at some point I gotta pay bills. I’m trying to find a middle ground.”
ALL SYSTEMS FLOW
That’s not to say that Tourey has any interest in focusing on cash flow at the expense of mic flow. As a survivor of the cattle calls and series pilots that litter the past of child actors (her father renewed her agent’s contract every year from when she was 5 to 16 — when she shaved her head bald and started winning poetry slams), Tourey shows a marked animosity toward any kind of Hollywood success in her Gumbo rhymes. The rapper — whose recent listening runs from Bilal to Björk — may want to feed her kids, but her rhymes reflect a keen awareness that one day they’ll want more than just the next meal. To quote Tourey in “Total Eclipse,” the most recently written song on the album, “They said I should dumb it down, appeal to my audience, apparently we like our rap with no substance, but then I’m looking out into the crowd, and I’m seeing me, a sea full of honeys quietly thanking me, ’cause we support, and I’m just tryin’ to find a healthy balance, intellect toes the line, introduces a new challenge.”
Despite the distance between their locales, Moon and Tourey come together on Gumbo to serve up an album full of adventurous production and rhymes for the mind, no matter how far that consciousness has to travel. Moon said, “At the end of the day, good food tastes good — wherever you go in the world.” SFBG
VOICE AND MOONSTARR AT SICK AND LOADED
Sat/18, 8 p.m.
Space Gallery
1141 Polk, SF
$10
(415) 377-3325
Fits and housing starts
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REVIEW There’s a new multistory condo complex rising on a sliver of SoMa between the freeway and the Caltrain tracks. It’s on one of those heretofore undesirable plots that stood vacant for decades, holding their own as a weedy buffer zone between transportation and industry. I wonder if the contractors are using a new high-tech glass that, in the space of a faux bay window, will neutralize the din of traffic. Who’d want to live there?
San Francisco is an urban area, don’t you know. But the way space here is quickly filling in with homes is reflective of a broader condition of (until recently) a healthy real estate market and the resulting sprawl. It’s something I experience when visiting family in unapologetically suburban Southern California. Just outside my old neighborhood, with streets named to invoke the American Revolution — Freedom Drive, Liberty Bell Road — were oak-shaded dry creek beds where I headed for adolescent escapes. Those once-wooded areas have been shaped into fields of roomy new houses in an unspecific Mediterranean stucco style. The arteries there are named after trees — Spruce Drive, Cedar Lane — that I don’t recall being indigenous. Is it progress or loss?
California denizens cannot avoid the quandaries of safe, “affordable” homes and the problematic environmental effects of building auto-centric communities far from any sort of civic center. The state then makes a fitting geographical framing device for a small but notable exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art. “Suburban Escape: The Art of California Sprawl” brings together a couple dozen artists who picture a half century of development in photographs, painting, video, and sculpture, revealing the allure and shortcomings of suburbia.
While compact and high density rather than sprawling and homogenous, “Suburban Escape” manages to address numerous social and cultural concerns, the first of which is the literal, almost sculptural creation of suburbs. At the start curator Ann Wolfe shows us distant views of cookie-cutter homes. The first piece is William Garnett’s grid of six black-and-white aerial photographs documenting the 1950 construction of the Lakewood, a Southern California community that from above looks like fields of housing starts that sprouted into a grid of cubelike buildings. They’re a perfect complement to Robert Isaacs’s 1968 photograph Ticky Tacky Houses in Daly City, an equally geometric composition that inspires waves of comfort and revulsion. The uniformity looks appealingly orderly from a distance, but the idea of living in houses so similar and close together is another concern altogether, something fraught with unsustainable foundations, not to mention nosy neighbors.
RUDE VIBRATIONS
Suburbia is rife with ambivalent vibes, and they are noted throughout the show. Bill Owens’s photo of a Fourth of July block party expresses a cul-de-sac comfort zone and clean, new neighborliness. And yet, the picture also conveys the psychic isolation of spacious lots. Just one photo from Owens’s 1970s-era Suburbia series isn’t enough to convey his vision, although this picture speaks volumes.
Mimicking the physical structure of housing tracts, a number of the artists work in series. Freshly Painted Houses, a grid of small 1991 color photos by Jeff Brouws, shows the Daly City neighborhood where the artist grew up during the 1960s. The cheerful exterior schemes reflect the influx of Asian American immigrants who, the artist states in the exhibition catalog (which includes an expanded, more convincing range of works than the museum presentation), painted their houses in more vibrant colors than did most of “middle class mainstream America.” The piece adds a welcome layer of social context to architecturally insignificant structures.
DECONSTRUCTION ZONES
John Divola’s provocative series Los Angeles International Airport Noise Abatement Zone, House Removal Grid, Present (1975, 2005) is one of those frighteningly irresistible before-and-after projects. It shows a collection of doomed dwellings that were in the sonic path of LAX and the empty lots after the buildings were razed. Shot in a relatively short time span in the 1970s and printed only recently, the pairings suggest the aftermath of a smart bomb that vaporizes only stucco-faced structures. All that remains are a flat landscape, stoic palm and cypress trees, and the occasional pathway to a nonexistent front door. Next to these, Free House (2003), an acrylic work by Deborah Oropallo, addresses the surprising disposability of suburban buildings with images of boarded-up toy houses — literal model homes — inspired by Berkeley structures that were worth less than the land they were erected on.
That same cheap, serial construction of houses is noted in Mark Campbell’s sculpture Maximum Density (2000), a low platform covered with hundreds of tiny honey-hued rubber homes. At once seemingly organically formed and a highly constructed board game, Campbell’s project is difficult not to touch yet equally difficult to reconcile. Similarly, Destroyed Houses (1999–2004), a series of 30 collage paintings by Jeff Gillette, is a gleeful deconstruction of real estate advertisements set against bucolic landscapes. Like a willful child pulling wings off flies, the artist here has devious fun destroying unaffordable homes — and the pervasive dream of owning one.SFBG
SUBURBAN ESCAPE: THE ART OF CALIFORNIA SPRAWL
Through March 4, 2007
San Jose Museum of Art
110 S. Market, San Jose
Tues.–Sun., 11 a.m.–5 p.m.
$5–$8
(408) 294-2787
www.sjmusart.org
Fast Food Nation
Book lovers always lament movie adaptations: they rarely deliver. But Fast Food Nation, like a swift injection of growth hormone, adds flesh and character to the very real problems of where America’s food comes from and the different ways it’s absolutely mishandled. The feature film is based on the 2001 nonfiction book by journalist Eric Schlosser, who helped director Richard Linklater finesse the screenplay into something of a morality tale tracing the true origins of a Mickey’s hamburger.
Following the tangled strands of food production and consumption, the film jumps between the perspectives of exploited immigrant workers clad in Hazmat suits in a meat processing plant and Greg Kinnear playing the hapless corporate hack trying to figure out just how in the heck his company’s Big Ones are coming up contaminated on the buns. There’s a predictable arc to the narrative, most noticeable in teenage character Amber (Ashley Johnson), a bright-eyed Mickey’s employee who gets a see-the-light lesson from her ex-activist uncle (Linklater favorite Ethan Hawke). Paul Dano (Little Miss Sunshine) as the apathetic burger flipper is the perfect antidote to Amber’s painful optimism, serving up some old food service clichés. But his spit in the burger isn’t the biggest “eww-gross” moment.
Linklater, a vegetarian, wasn’t able to get permission to shoot in an American meat processing plant, so the movie uses real footage from a Mexican one that agreed to be filmed because Schlosser’s tale casts a true light on America’s despotic immigration policies. The scenes of women trading sex for jobs at the border-town plant become very believable when juxtaposed with images of real-time slaughter. Schlosser said workers at a Greeley, Colo., plant whom he interviewed for the book criticized the movie after a screening in Denver — the Mexican plant looked too sterile and unrealistic compared to where they work.
It’s been 100 years since Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle inspired laws to reform meat packing plants. By turning journalism into fiction and transutf8g that from print to real, stomach-turning imagery, Fast Food Nation once again questions America’s massive appetite. I still haven’t eaten meat since I saw the scene in which a cow’s skin is stripped off its body with a chain and a winch, a process more befitting an offshore oil rig than a slaughterhouse. (Amanda Witherell)
FAST FOOD NATION
Opens Fri/15 in Bay Area theaters
See Move Clock at www.sfbg.com
www.foxsearchlight.com/fastfoodnation
For Your Consideration
People like Christopher Guest’s improv-based comedies — This Is Spinal Tap, Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind — in a peculiarly self-satisfied way, confident that enjoying them means they’re in on a sophisticated joke that the ordinary Adam Sandler–liking rabble don’t get. Yet for all their small joys, Guest’s films make me wish they had big ones — bigger laughs, sharper satire, more narrative drive. The actors automatically raise a smile because we’ve loved them so many times before. But are they the best judges of their material? I had secret doubts — and A Mighty Wind made it OK to say them out loud.
Still, For Your Consideration seemed a sure thing. But the result is an in-joke without a punch line — one that seems even more impotent due to the proximity of Borat, a satire that actually has something to say and is freakin’ hilarious besides. The idea here is that a small feature with a cast of minor names is being shot with no great expectations when suddenly Oscar rumors start floating around, putting all concerned into an anticipatory tizzy — most notably has-been actress Catherine O’Hara, hungry newcomer Parker Posey, Guest’s own temperamental director, and Eugene Levy’s conniving agent.
So far, so OK. Guest and his most loyal creative partners here (Levy, O’Hara, Fred Willard) have on average logged over three decades on film and TV. They must have experienced more than a few troubled shoots and monumental egos. Yet the major characters here are blandly nice, none more than mildly eccentric. And the Oscar-buzzed movie they’re shooting, Home for Purim, parodies the kind of stagy, earnest, wannabe Arthur Miller prestige project that has been DOA since the ’70s. And back then it would have been a PBS or Hallmark Hall of Fame special.
The only scenes attuned to today’s showbiz — not coincidentally, the funniest here — lampoon empty-hype Entertainment Tonight–type shows, with Willard and Jane Lynch as breathlessly excitable hosts. Elsewhere, For Your Consideration seems to have been made by fogies — it’s stiff jointed and embarrassingly proud of limp drollery that seldom pays off in real laughs. Like Home for Purim, this movie thinks it’s Oscar material. But it’s not even the stuff Golden Globes are made of. (Dennis Harvey)
FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION
Opens Fri/15 in Bay Area theaters
See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com
wip.warnerbros.com/foryourconsideration
Goodbye PG
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When Japanese documentary filmmaker Kazuo Hara was approached by Okuzaki Kenzo — the subject of his 1987 The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On — and asked to film him committing murder, Hara strongly considered it before turning him down, more than anything because he “had become really sick of Okuzaki.” Or so he told an interviewer. This sounds like bullshit, and it may be, but the filming approaches and content of Hara’s body of work make you think that maybe he could have done it. (Okuzaki, incidentally, is currently serving time for the unfilmed murder attempt.) Hara has captured on film, in a doc that is essentially the sanctioned stalking of his ex-wife, the full frontal birth of her child. This was in 1974, understand, way before the Learning Channel or even The Cosby Show. He has followed a head case who once slung pachinko balls at Emperor Hirohito as the leader traveled around Japan accusing ex-soldiers, not without reason, of cannibalism. He has filmed the assaults of old men being accused, not without reason, of cannibalism. This is a filmmaker who might very well show up to a murder if he could still stand his subject.
Two of Hara’s docs will be showing this week at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Goodbye CP (1972) was his first film and caused quite a fuss in Japan for its uncensored look at the lives of people with cerebral palsy. It’s been called sadistic, and it almost broke up the marriage of its main protagonist, but it’s applauded by civil rights groups and is still shown to social service workers as a not-too-gentle reminder that those with CP aren’t anatomically smoothed-over dolls.
A Dedicated Life (1995), about the life and death from cancer of Japanese author Mitsuharu Inoue, isn’t as gonzo as most of Hara’s other films, but it’s one of his fullest and most mature. The transgression of the biography (beyond a fairly fruitless preoccupation with Inoue’s playboy persona) is Hara’s gruesome admission that he was basically waiting for the man to die so that he could get more candid interviews from those who knew him. This information, taken from an interview with professor Kenneth Ruoff, adds menace to the scenes in the doctor’s office and muddies the poignance of conversations Inoue had with his wife about his illness. But the poignance is always there, in this and Hara’s other films. It just usually has to share the spotlight with the creepy methods of the man behind the camera. SFBG
NO BOUNDARIES: THE TRANSGRESSIVE DOCUMENTARIES OF KAZUO HARA
A Dedicated Life, Thurs/16, 7:30 p.m.
Goodbye CP, Sun/19, 2 p.m.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, screening room
701 Mission, SF
$6–$8
(415) 978-2787
www.ybca.org