› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Once upon a time, a fair number of people, heartened by the Sexual Revolution and the corresponding collapse of censorship in movies, thought porn was just the preliminary phase to the next obvious step: soon, they assumed, mainstream films would also have real, explicit sex.
The last time anybody thought that was probably 1975 — or if really stoned, 1977. But for a while there, that wild idea seemed not only possible but inevitable. Deep Throat pretty much closed the obscenity conviction book on consenting adults watching adult content in public venues. Hugely successful mainstream films such as Carnal Knowledge and Last Tango in Paris seemed to be tearing down the last “good taste” barriers protecting viewers from having frank discussions about sex and its explicit simulation.
The wide-open ’70s offered a variety of liberated lifestyle choices. Cities had singles bars and sex clubs; the suburbs had hot tubs. Top 40 radio was smirking “Mama’s Got a Squeeze Box” and “More, More, More.” Even network TV had gone raunchy with “jiggle” shows (Charlie’s Angels) and odd one-off leering atrocities like the 1979 Playboy Roller Disco Pajama Party. In the midst of all this sex, sex, sex, it seemed a logical end point would be the total de-shaming of America. Fuck movies would become “real” ones, and “real” movies would include fucking.
Who could imagine how far back the pendulum would swing? Porn would survive, but it and sex would retreat behind closed doors. These days the annual art house succes de scandale, like Brown Bunny and Baise-Moi, is invariably depressing and negative.
Ergo, it is worth all kinds of cheering that somebody has finally made that movie. The one that has talented actors having plot-relevant and unfaked sex, that is beautiful, touching, funny, and artistic enough to be one of the best films of the year. It’s John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus, which knows exactly how anomalous it is and where it fits into the current zeitgeist. (The most quotable line occurs when one character surveys an orgiastic scene: “It’s like the ’60s but with less hope.”) Mitchell is defiant enough to create hope, even his own zeitgeist if need be.
Cute New York City gay couple the “two Jamies” (Paul Dawson and PJ DeBoy) are considering spicing up their routine, so they consult sex therapist Sofia (Sook-Yin Lee). In a frazzled moment, she admits she’s never had an orgasm, something she’s never told her husband (Raphael Barker). These questing characters intersect with others at the sex party held regularly at chez Justin Bond (with the performer playing himself).
Shortbus finds narrative room for stalking, attempted suicide, three-ways, and every numeral on the Kinsey Scale. Yet the film never feels cluttered or sensational. In fact, its openhearted seriocomedy (the script is a collaboration between Hedwig and the Angry Inch writer-director Mitchell and the cast) integrates sex so fully into a plaintive, affirmative call for communality that shock value is only intermittent — and deliberately funny when it occurs.
Will Shortbus occasion new local obscenity challenges? Probably not. But 40 years ago, censorship battles were a constant source of news and box-office draw. Before the United States graduated from softcore to hardcore, with many court decisions en route, the hot spot for all things smutty was several thousand safe yet alluring miles away.
This passing rage for cinematic “sin” from parts North will be chronicled by SF-to-Denmark émigré Jack Stevenson at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts this week. He’ll present three programs (a clip show and features Venom and Without a Stitch) during “Swinging Scandinavia: How Nordic Sex Cinema Conquered the World.”
It really did. This “myth of total sexual freedom” — as put forth in Stevenson’s book Totally Uncensored!, due in 2007 — was particularly seductive to uptight Americans. By and large, Sweden and Denmark enjoyed remarkably progressive social attitudes at the time. After preliminary taboo-nudging efforts, one dam broke with I, a Woman, a notorious tell-all turned into a show-all (by 1966 standards) portrait of the sexually restless “new woman.” It grossed an astonishing $4 million in the United States alone. But that was nothing compared to I Am Curious (Yellow), a Godardian “kaleidoscope” of hard-to-separate documentary, improv, and staged elements encompassing all the era’s sexual, political, and intellectual questionings. Finally allowed to screen in America (over 18 months after its late-1967 Stockholm premiere), it was probably the most-seen and most-loathed crossover hit prior to The Blair Witch Project — similarly drawing audiences who expected familiar genre exploitation but got something much rawer and more challenging.
A whole series of Danish porn comedies and angsty Swedish sex dramas continued to be churned out until the mid-’70s. The Scandis had brought down many original barricades: Torgny Wickman’s 1969 Language of Love (which Robert de Niro takes Cybill Shepherd to see in Taxi Driver) might be the first commercial feature to show unobscured intercourse. But they soon found themselves intellectually bored and pushed aside marketwise by the expanded allowance for soft- and hardcore production elsewhere. The yahoos (us folks) had won by simultaneously commercializing and marginalizing the Sex Rev. SFBG
SHORTBUS
Opens Fri/6 in Bay Area theaters
See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com for showtimes
www.shortbusthemovie.com
“SWINGING SCANDINAVIA: HOW NORDIC SEX CINEMA CONQUERED THE WORLD”
Thurs/5, 7:30 p.m.; Sat/7, 7 and 9 p.m.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission, SF
$6–$10
(415) 978-ARTS
www.ybca.org
Volumes
Roughin’ Justin
› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Don’t be tripping, sit your sexy back down slowly, and I’ll try to break the news to you gently: Justin Timberlake and I have a history.
OK, it’s not like we sat around in Pampers and OshKosh B’Gosh, playing gastroenterologist with Barbie and GI Joe and gurgling along to “White Lines.” Though I am getting a dose of feverish white-line nostalgia listening to coke-daddy ode “Losing My Way” off dusty Justy’s new Jive album, Speakerboxxx … whoops, I mean FutureSex/LoveSounds. And it’s not as if we met on The Mickey Mouse Club, brawling over mouse ears and bawling about diaper rash and paltry camera time. We don’t go that way back.
But Kimberly discovered Timberly long before a certain sheepish someone made contact with that Jackson scion’s nipple ornament. I first saw el Cueball, as I so lovingly dubbed my mousy darling’s shaved pate, fronting *NSYNC at the Santa Clara County Fair around ’98. You know, back when the strings were still apparent. I was there with a few other geezer peers, measuring the hype on the opening local Filipino American vocal group, when the budding boy banders entered prancing and the 14-year-old girls went positively cuckoo, clutching photos and near weeping with longing as Timberlake and company worked the whistled theme to Welcome Back, Kotter into the encore.
Then I met up with Timby again at the Oakland Arena when the “Justified and Stripped” tour broke away from the rest of the bubblegum boys and strapped on Christina Aguilera. Whatever you think of Aguilera’s dirty-girl front, she certainly displayed pipes and pride live, strutting around like Femlin in a black corset and short pants and belting out “Beautiful.” But that was forgotten when Timberhunk emerged — thin voice or no, the little girls were still going utterly nutzoid. They screamed, freaked, and gaped like ravenous baby birds beneath the catwalk he beatboxed upon. That’s the power of cute, man.
But Just-oh doesn’t want to be just cute anymore, as the cover of FutureSex attests: suited up in a skinny black suit like a baby Reservoir Dog, little buckeroo looks outright pissed, crushing a disco ball beneath his heel. If Justified hasn’t made it perfectly clear, Timberlake wants to be considered a force — artistic, tough-guy, whatev — to be reckoned with. Pity the poor pop-pets — Madonna, Britney, Justy — they all have such an ambivalent relationship with le fickle dance floor. FutureSex reeks of such ambition — as the swinging singles prince offers up a kind of archaic devotion to the album format and a familiar if downbeat trajectory tracing a loverboy’s woozy weave from lust to lovesickness. Witness the first half of the full-length: “FutureSex/LoveSound,” “Sexyback,” “Sexy Ladies.” Either someone’s out of synonyms for doing the doity or someone’s ob-sexed.
Musically kitted out by Timbaland in the Neptunes’ absence, FutureSex is clearly intended to be a kind of Prince-ly, sensual opus, and for having the good taste to imitate the most original funk rock stylists of the ’80s, Timba-lake should be commended. But all the CD images of Timbo smashing disco balls seem out of character, overwrought. To wax crassly, Justin tries to show us he has the balls to both musically embrace Grandmaster Flash, Queen, Lil Jon, and yes, the alpha and omega, libertine and spendthrift couple of ’80s soul, Prince and Michael Jackson, and strike out on his own. Just ignore the slimness of Timberlake’s vanilla soul. It’s barely flavored, not quite iced, with techno, barebacked beats, and retro soul, and despite the disc’s initially fluid, almost mirror-ball-like reflective programming, it opens into a dull middle section that’s broken up only by the frisky groove of “Damn Girl.” It makes you wish Timberlake had the courage of his initial fantasy-fueled single’s conviction. If only this disco baller had left it at FutureSex and Timberlake stuck to his, er, cheesy pistols and the Prince of schwing’s original program.
CALIFONE DREAMING Califone’s Tim Rutili can probably understand the urge to try out new personae. While talking about his new, gorgeous album, Roots and Crowns (Thrill Jockey), the frontperson and soundtrack composer fessed up to believing in past lives — and indeed relying on that knowledge when it came to penning tunes about kittens that see ghosts, lost eyes, and black metal fornication. “The writing process is all about that — just letting things bubble up,” he says from Chicago, where the band is rehearsing. And what does he imagine the members of Califone were in a past life? “Circus clowns.”
The ex–Red Red Meat member doesn’t seem to spook easily. Case in point: the last time Califone played San Francisco, their van was broken into. Treasured gear such as Rutili’s grandfather’s 1917 violin and a custom-made acoustic guitar, which he says was “nicer than my house,” were stolen. “They were nice enough to leave stuff that looked shitty,” he waxes positively. “It was heartbreaking, but in the end it forced us to learn a lot of new tricks, open up our ideas, and gather new things. It really did inform the recording to not have to lean on any of the old stuff.”
The scattered Califone seems to be working out the kinks in its evolution, with Rutili in Los Angeles writing music for film and the rest of the band in Chicago and Valparaiso, Ind. “I see us getting older and becoming more creative,” Rutili muses. And most people just get older and watch more TV. “That doesn’t seem to be happening with us, but it makes it more difficult too. TV is easy — keeping your eyes open and your ear to the ground and trying to remain connected and in touch with creativity is difficult.” SFBG
CALIFONE
With Oakley Hall and D.W. Holiday
Tues/10, 9 p.m.
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
$10
(415) 621-4455
Carried away
› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com
CHEAP EATS Over the years I have said goodbye to a lot of cool people in this paper. Haywire went to Maine. Moonpie went to Pittsburgh. Rube Roy went home. E.B. Matt became S.D. Matt. Johnny “Jack” Poetry I packed up and delivered to Idaho with my own two hands and old van and creaking heart. Birdbrain Brad went to Denmark. Satchel Paige the Pitcher, Thailand. Noah, J.C., Jason.
Now this …
Oof, me and Carrie moved here together 16, 17 years ago, after the earthquake. Drove across the country in my ’71 LTD with all our stuff in the backseat and trunk. We were at that time lovers, best friends, and bandmates. Some of that would change, because things do, but whatever the words were, we only got closer and closer and closer.
Tonight I’m cooking for her and Marc, another old relocated pal of mine, who’s here to help move her with him to New York. This will be the first time in our 20-plus years of kindred-spirit-ship that we won’t be living in the same place.
For dinner: one of my chickens!
I was, what, 22 when I met Carrie. Graduate writing program, UNH. In addition to falling immediately in love with her, I became a 10-times better writer on the spot. She’s still my go-to editorial opinion. Got me started playing music, showed me where to put my fingers on a ukulele, crafted the sort of songs that make you have to write them too, started a band with me — my first. So whether it’s songs or sentences, her influence has shone through everything I’ve done ever since.
And now she’s inspiring me in love. I’m serious, you should see her and Marc together. You can’t be jaded or cynical. You just can’t.
So I’m meeting a lot of new people, making new friends, going to parties where I don’t know anyone, smiling and talking a lot, because what can I say? Life is pretty cool.
At a party where I knew almost everyone, we said good-bye to her longtime pad, Belle Manor. Crashed in Joe’s room, woke up too early, crossed paths with Carrie on her way back to bed from the bathroom, hugged her, said I’ll see you tomorrow night, and booked it over to Berkeley to make new friends. This guy Quinn had asked me to have lunch with him and his Cheap Eats fan girlfriend, by way of surprising her for her birthday.
I said what I say now: “Sure!”
They were colorful folks with cool things to say. Beautiful! And the food was all right. I was surprised, actually, because it had been a long time since I’d eaten at Vik’s Chaat Corner. I remembered it being better than this. Which isn’t to say it isn’t my new favorite restaurant, just that I was probably a little overhungover, underslept, and yeah, kind of crunched up inside.
We talked about: dancing, Dickens, the universe, Indiana, growing up weirdos in normal-ass places. We ate: Bhatura cholle, which is a huge puffy mushroom cloud of crispy doughy stuff you break apart with your hands and dip into a delicious garbanzo bean curry. A bunch of other things from the chaat menu, because these folks are vegetarian. And I ordered lamb baida roti to be contrary, but it backfired because it wasn’t very good. It was OK, but all the vegetarian stuff was better, especially bhel puri, which is pretty much rice crispies with onions and cilantro instead of milk and strawberries.
The place got supercrowded while we were sitting there, chatting and chaating. Fortunately, it’s a lot bigger than it used to be. Didn’t the eating area used to be in the same place as the store, tucked away in a corner or something? Well, Vik’s has changed (because things do). People still like it though, and Quinn and Cynthia love it.
She got a little boxful of desserty pastries because it was her birthday. Happy birthday, girl!
Chaat means “to lick,” it says on the menu.
Now I have to hit the kitchen again and see if I can’t make a miracle. I want this tough, too-old hen to be the best thing I ever cooked. I wanted this article to be the best one I ever wrote, but I don’t think that happened either. Edit me, Cares. SFBG
VIK’S CHAAT CORNER
Tues.–Sun., 11 a.m.–6 p.m.
724 Allston Way, Berk.
(510) 644-4432
Takeout available
No alcohol
MC/V
Boisterous
Wheelchair accessible
Small change
› paulr@sfbg.com
Recently a colleague reminded me — in the course of a brief correspondence heavy on mutual commiseration (for what are writers if not commiserators?) — that while change is often deplorable, it also must be accepted. “Hate change, embrace change” was her pithy, I might even say her writerly, formulation. In silent riposte, I thought of Uncle Theodore, the lovable rapscallion from Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop, who relieves “his infrequent bouts of depression” by singing “change and decay in all around I see” (a line from the hymn “Abide with Me”) out the morning-room window of the family’s country manse, Boot Magna, when not whoring about in London.
I like to think that while there may be change in much if not all around I see, there is not necessarily decay. But I do not like the bunches of basil I have been finding at Tower Market, now more than a year and a half under the ownership of the Mollie Stone’s chain. The basil is labeled as “local,” and indeed Mollie Stone’s touts its commitment to local, organic, and sustainable agriculture, but bunch after bunch of this stuff seems to consist of bruised, pitted, and withered leaves that would never have been set out under the old regime. I bought a nice-looking butternut squash for soup, but when I cut it open a few days later it reeked of sulfur and had to be rushed to the compost bin like a code blue patient.
Prices, meantime, have risen sharply, and although I doubt this is entirely the result of chain ownership, I don’t think chain ownership — with centralized procurement and, I suspect, heightened attention to that basic business ethic of buying low and selling high — helps matters. The store no longer sells the nifty little boxes of Spanish saffron at the checkout stands either. Instead there is, for twice as much money, some other kind, elaborately packaged to make it look like there’s more there than there is. I passed.
Wonderful restaurants reinvent themselves for Generation Text-message: first Bizou and soon Hawthorne Lane. Change, decay? I dislike change for its own sake, but fatigue is a fact, and people’s wants and expectations do shift. Yet while casualness is fine, and I have a closetful of blue jeans and T-shirts, there is something to be said for special and elevated moments. Take it away, Uncle Theodore.
Mild to wild
› paulr@sfbg.com
“Mandarin” is a word that suggests a certain grandeur or even haughtiness. Mandarin English is the language of such pompmeisters as William F. Buckley Jr., George F. Will, and all those other East Coast bow-tied toffs with Roman numerals after their names. As for mandarin food: if you are enjoying this style of Chinese cooking, you must sit up straight, keep your napkin in your lap, and not eat with your fingers. Can you see Buckley or Will eating pot stickers with their fingers?
Perhaps that is a needlessly nightmarish image. Mandarin need not mean “chokingly formal.” Even the Mandarin in Ghirardelli Square, despite much plushness and high style, retains an agreeably casual air — and the Mandarin is not the exclusive home of mandarin cooking in the city. Although mandarin cuisine is sometimes known as “the food of the emperors” and is strongly associated with Beijing — China’s imperial city — it can be found in creditable form here in such neighborhood restaurants as Ah Lin, which opened last year on Cathedral Hill in a space left behind when the peripatetic the Window returned to its original home on Valencia.
If you’re looking for cathedrals, Cathedral Hill isn’t a bad place to start your search: at one end of Ah Lin’s Bush Street block stands Trinity Episcopal, an imposing gothic edifice that looks as if it were transplanted from some village in the north of England. If that doesn’t suit, there are plenty of alternative choices just a brief journey down Gough. And at the other end of Ah Lin’s little urban world (to complete our sacred-and-profane cycle) is Wheel Works, a temple of the automotive, whose large, white, mostly windowless garage takes up most of the view through the restaurant’s windows.
Fortunately, it is not necessary to look outside, because the interior of the restaurant is appealing in its modest way: walls done up in a paint scheme of rich blue, with peach accents and some framed art pieces, along with a good-sized light box whose ground-level plantings give it the look of a big (and slightly tippy) terrarium. Linoleum? Didn’t notice any, but then, I wasn’t looking, and one of the reasons I wasn’t looking — apart from the childish hope that if I didn’t notice it, it couldn’t be there — was because I was too engrossed in the food.
As a devotee of spicy food, my Chinese preferences over the years have tended toward Szechuan and Hunan cooking, each of which makes liberal use of chiles — and chilis — to kindle that characteristic blaze on the lips. Mandarin dishes, on the other hand, tend to be milder, but mild does not mean bland, and as the kitchen at Ah Lin proves over and over, even even-tempered dishes can have their own sort of savory intensity.
The restaurant’s chow fun ($6.95), for instance, sounded very Clark Kent–ish to us — wide noodles with a restful choice of chicken, beef, shrimp, or vegetable — but while the array of these last was routine (snow peas, broccoli florets, sliced mushrooms), the noodles themselves tasted as if they had been cooked in some kind of broth. (Chicken, perhaps? Vegetarian sticklers will want to inquire.) This is a very easy and effective way to enliven starches, but just to make sure, the kitchen also added shreds of basil for some freshening perfume.
Another subtly addictive, peppery broth was the basis of the ocean party soup ($5.50 for a small bowl that was more than enough for two people), a mélange of shrimp, bay scallops, water chestnuts, bamboo shoots, mushrooms, and snow peas. Having sampled this soup and the chow fun, we did feel we probably could have passed a pop quiz on what the restaurant’s vegetable bin held.
The menu is full of classic preparations. I fell into a Proustian reverie — memories of long ago and far away on Halsted Street — while engulfing the excellent mu shu pork ($7.50), notable here for its tender pancakes. Even more impressive was a roasted half duck ($8.25). The bird carried a faint and unsurprising whiff of five-spice powder, but its real power lay in the combination of wonderfully crisp, cognac-colored skin and confitlike meat, juicy and tender. At the price, it’s one of the best bargains going.
There is some spice to be had, mainly at lunch. Orange-peel beef ($5.75) is one of those cardiac-arrest dishes you know you shouldn’t have but can’t resist, and there’s a good reason you can’t resist: the knobbly shreds of meat are perfectly crisp and the dark-brown sauce intense with citrus and basil; this is just the kind of thing we might find Homer Simpson gorging on from a big paper bucket, if only it were a little dryer. Hunan fish ($5.75), meanwhile, featured a tangy-sweet sauce with a discreet hint of heat, but what was more striking was the fish itself — fish cakes, really, with a certain sponginess of texture the price of uniformity in size (for more reliable cooking) and the chance to mix seasonings with the flesh. The cakes aren’t unmanageably rubbery, but they can’t match the more usual cod or flounder filets for velvetiness. Lunches come with a cup of soup, a quite lively sweet-and-sour maybe, and rice — brown rice, if you prefer.
Although the restaurant is quite small, service can be stressed. The noontime crowd is sizable, and in the evening take-out orders pile up on the cashier’s podium at the rear of the dining room. So: serenity now, and your order will be along soon enough. SFBG
AH LIN
Continuous service: Mon.–Fri., 11 a.m.–10 p.m.; Sat., noon–9:30 p.m.; Sun., 4:30–9:30 p.m.
1634 Bush, SF
(415) 922-5279
www.ahlinrestaurant.com
Beer and wine
AE/MC/V
Moderately noisy
Wheelchair accessible
Small pieces unjoined
› annalee@techsploitation.com
TECHSPLOITATION I think ubiquitous digital surveillance and searchability have given me a weird new sense of entitlement. I feel like I should be able to find anybody on the Web, and if I can’t — well, why not hire somebody to search the databases I can’t access? I caught myself having this exact bizarro train of thought the other day, when I was trying to locate an old friend of mine from high school.
I did all the usual things that generally yield results and have helped me find out all kinds of useless things about lost childhood friends. (That hardcore rocker boy is now a real estate agent! No way!) First I searched on his name in Google, but all I discovered was that somebody with his exact (and fairly common name) died in the Twin Towers. There was a catch though — my old friend went by his Korean name in high school but adopted an American name in college. So I started searching on his Korean name, feeling very clever. Unfortunately his Korean name is actually more common than his American one. Then I narrowed my searches, looking for his names in connection with our hometown, his college, and the city where he lived the last time I saw him. I searched news groups, MySpace, LiveJournal, and Technorati.
At last I couldn’t think of anywhere else to search. That’s when I had the aberrant thought: why not just hire a private detective? Everybody’s doing it — even HP! And I’d get one that wasn’t too expensive. Admittedly my subconscious was spiked with reruns of Veronica Mars and memories of This Film Is Not Yet Rated, a documentary in which a guy hires private detectives to figure out who the members of the Motion Picture Association of America ratings board are.
But I think I hit upon this rather extreme idea — hiring a detective to find my old friend — because I’ve become conditioned to think that all information should be accessible. Despite my belief in online privacy and anonymity, my unexamined, knee-jerk response to the situation was that somebody should be able to get this guy’s contact information for me. I mean, all I wanted was an e-mail. I wasn’t trying to get his home address or voting records.
Needless to say, I did not get a private detective, nor have I found my old friend yet. I’ve avoided becoming creepy but I’m left unsatisfied. The old promises of the Web, which David Weinberger famously characterized as “small pieces loosely joined,” have turned out to be quite different from what we all imagined. Many of us are connected, sometimes to a degree bordering on incestuousness, but many of us are not. The threads do not attach to each other. Names are lost in a sea of names. People fill blogs with entry after entry that never get read, never get linked, never receive comments. Certainly there are spirited local debates that bring us together online and amateur writing that’s as findable as a New York Times headline, but these things are rare and getting rarer. The Web is beginning to feel just like a city street: you can see all the houses, but you have no idea what’s in them. Unless you’re a thief.
I feel cheated by the walls that have gone up on the Web — not the walls that protect my personal information, but the ones that prevent me from finding friends (real friends — not friendsters). They aren’t the same walls, by the way. Walls that protect personal information should prevent people from getting access to whatever crap ChoicePoint and Visa have on you. The walls that stand between me and my old friend are the cacophony of filtered data that the Web has become. I’m sure his e-mail is out there somewhere floating around, but because he hasn’t been writing a popular blog or posting obsessively on the Linux kernel list, it’s got no juice on the search engines. Because he’s not socially findable, he’s not technically findable either. And no, it’s not because he has no e-mail. The guy is an engineer. So much for the Web breaking down barriers.
I’m going to try one last time to find him — but this time, I’ll go at it from the other direction. I’ll call his name and see if he hears me. Let’s see if there are any holes in those walls. If you know a guy who goes by Lawrence Kim or Chong Kim and who once lived in Orange County, let me know. Especially if you are him.
Let’s see if my experiment works. SFBG
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who can find rare, out-of-print books online but can’t find Chong.
Opposites attract, kinda
› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea:
I have a very close gay male friend who often behaves like he’s interested in me romantically. He has even told me that he gets crushes on girls, that 1 percent of him likes women, and that he’s gotten semihard from girls three different times. He often gazes at me while we’re talking as if he’s thinking of kissing me. Even my friends notice. He also tells me that I brought happiness back to him and that he feels alive when he’s with me. We spend every other night together talking and flirting till 5 a.m.
I don’t need a boyfriend. Even just a kiss or sex with him would be fine with me. I find him attractive, and nothing we would do would ever dissolve our friendship. I once told him in a lighthearted manner that if he ever wanted to do something, I was up for it. He gave a vague response.
How do I approach this without offending him? I’m kinda shy about these things. Also, he is over 30, so he is not in a phase. He is very open about his homosexuality.
Love,
Friend of Friend of Dorothy
Dear Dottie:
Semihard three times in 30 years! Well, that is persuasive.
I have a gay forever-friend who always said that someday he’d marry me, and damned if he didn’t — he became a rabbi and officiated at my wedding. You’ve got to admit that’s something of an exceptional circumstance though.
I’m glad that you say there’s no romantic interest here, since I’d hate to have to shake my head sadly at you. I’m going to pretend to believe you instead, although I think you are interested in him (“My friends say he likes me!”) and I think he’s gay. Really, really gay. The kind of gay that’s so gay it doesn’t matter if he “gets crushes” on girls or even if he has sex with one. He’s still gonna like boys, and he’s still not going to “like” you like that. None of which means he doesn’t love you and consider you his soul mate and think you’re pretty. I’ve no doubt he does. But if you went so far as to proposition him directly and got a “vague response,” well, he already said no. He just didn’t want to hurt your feelings when he did it, because he loves you. And is so, so gay.
Love,
Andrea
Dear Andrea:
Do you think there’s a real chance of a long-term relationship between someone who identifies himself as “maybe poly” and someone who is pretty sure she’s monogamous to the core? It’s a great relationship even with this business, but I feel like I need some kind of resolution. He’s already passed up one opportunity for sex with a long-standing (very poly) friend of his, which made me feel better on the one hand and guilty on the other.
I’m reading about polyamory and looking at it like the trained, rational scientist I am. I can accept it without wanting to embrace the lifestyle myself, but there are times when the whole thing just seems designed to aggravate my insecurities and turn me into a grasping, clingy girlfriend.
I don’t have a problem with the “other close relationships” thing. I just seem to have a problem with the sex. Is this cultural indoctrination, as the books would have it, or a real concern?
Love,
Cling Peach
Dear Peach:
What makes you think they’re mutually exclusive? Wanting your lover all to yourself is certainly culturally supported, if not precisely a matter of indoctrination, and it’s also perfectly natural. It’s a bit like hetero- or homosexuality in that you can cross over and act “as if,” but if you have a natural inclination toward monogamy, it’s going to be a poor fit: too tight, and itchy to boot. One ignores such discomfort at one’s peril.
It’s nice that you have what you term a great relationship with Poly Dude, but you do realize that at this point it’s functioning as something of a three-way — you, your boyfriend, and the elephant in the room? You’re going to have to talk about this eventually: Is being poly part of his core identity? (It rather sounds not, which is good.) If he does feel the need to experiment, can your relationship withstand the stresses, and can you withstand the temptation to throw things at him? Even more important, can you forswear wallowing in guilt for something you did not do and were in fact powerless to affect in any way? If so, great — go forth and pursue whatever it is you hope to pursue with Semipoly Dude. If you answered “no” to any but the first of my too many questions, then your relationship, lovely as it is, is fated to be brief and end either badly later or amicably now. So I hope you didn’t.
Love,
Andrea
Editors notes
› tredmond@sfbg.com
There’s something scary happening in Bayview–Hunters Point, and it’s not the redevelopment bulldozers.
For some reason that I find hard to understand, community leaders like Willie Ratcliff and Marie Harrison, who are opposed to the Redevelopment Agency’s plan for that neighborhood, have signed on with a frightening gang of radical right-wing property rights advocates. The result: Harrison was standing at an antiredevelopment rally last week urging voters to support Proposition 90, almost certainly the worst piece of legislation to face California voters since Proposition 13 devastated local government in 1978.
Prop. 90 would indeed limit the ability of government agencies to seize private land for other private projects. That’s why the redevelopment foes like it. But it goes much, much further. Under Prop. 90, no local government could do anything — anything — that might reduce the value of private land without paying the owner compensation. That means no new tenant protection laws (which could cost a landlord money). No more zoning laws that reduce the maximum development potential of a lot (of course, that means no zoning controls against luxury condos that would displace local business and residents in Bayview). No new environmental or workplace safety laws.
It also places a swift and powerful kick to the midsection of any effort to seize Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s local grid and create a real public power system; under Prop. 90’s rules, that would be prohibitively expensive.
I talked to Harrison about this, and she told me she “didn’t read the law that way.” But this isn’t just a matter of opinion; it’s clear fact, and everyone with any sense realizes it.
It gets worse: I was at a New College event Sept. 29 when Renee Saucedo, the immigrant rights lawyer, asked everyone to vote yes on 90. She told me she trusted Ratcliff and Harrison.
Prop. 90 is almost unimaginably bad. If its supporters can make inroads in San Francisco, I’m very afraid. SFBG
Divorcing Columbus
OPINION This year may go down in history as the one new immigrants reignited a civil rights mobilization in the United States. Their efforts, like those of the black liberation movement of the ’60s, will certainly become a catalyst for progressive action from many communities. As southern Italian Americans, this Columbus Day we have to ask our community the age-old question — which side are we on? Unfortunately, many of us have chosen exactly which side we are on: supporting racist immigrant bashers, whether they are legislators in the halls of Congress or vigilante Minutemen. As progressive Italian Americans, we support new immigrants because of the simple fact that our folks were once in the same situation that newcomers find themselves in: overworked, exploited, and demonized for quick political gain. It’s time for the Italian American community to finally reclaim our social justice tradition, divorcing the dazed and confused explorer who discovered a country that was already inhabited. Instead of Columbus, we honor the Italians, Cubans, and Spaniards of Ybor City, Fla., who worked in the cigar industry and were able to create a Latin culture based on values such as working-class solidarity and internationalism (see “Lost and Found: The Italian American Radical Experience,” Monthly Review, vol. 57, no. 8). We also remember the Italian American radicals who were a part of labor actions in the early 1900s, including the Lawrence textile, Paterson silk, Mesabi Iron Range, and New York City Harbor strikes. This year, instead of conquest, we acknowledge those who stood up for justice. Everyone knows about Al Capone, but what about Mario Savio, a founder of the free speech movement in Berkeley in the ’60s? Most people can recite the names of Italian American singers such as Madonna and Frank Sinatra, but they don’t know Cammella Teoli, the 13-year-old southern Italian girl who appeared before Congress in 1912 to testify in her broken English about the horrible working conditions in America’s sweatshops. It’s not surprising that Italian Americans forgot those things. We faced a lot of discrimination when we arrived: two unionists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were falsely accused of murder and executed. Italian Americans in the south were lynched by white supremacists. During World War II, thousands were relocated or jailed on suspicion of being enemy aliens. After the war, the anticommunist witch hunts began with the arrest and deportation of Italian American radical Carl Marzani. Today, Italian Americans don’t have to face these threats, yet those who immigrate from Central and South America, Asia, and the Middle East do. It is unlikely that Congress will pass any form of legislation reform this year, and many cities have instituted local statutes designed to run immigrants out of town. Minutemen and similar groups are harassing day laborers in the Bay Area and beyond. As Italian Americans, we call upon our paesani and paesane to remember our roots. Emboldened racists can be stopped — when those of us they claim to represent support the work of grassroots organizations of color bravely confronting these throwbacks. By divorcing Columbus, we start to break down the logic of conquest, which invariably leads to wars abroad and repression at home. SFBG Tommi Avicolli Mecca and James Tracy Tommi Avicolli Mecca and James Tracy are Italian American radicals who organize the annual “Dumping Columbus” reading. This year it’s Oct. 9, 7 p.m., City Lights, 261 Columbus, SF, featuring the legendary Diane DiPrima.
TUESDAY
Oct. 10
Event
Litquake
From its beginnings as a modest two-day event in 2002, Litquake has rapidly expanded this year to nine days and will feature over 300 participating readers in a variety of venues. Though pricey, “The Politics of Food” panel at the Commonwealth Club is our pick for Oct. 10. (Nicole Gluckstern)
Through Oct 14.
See www.litquake.org for locations, times, and prices
Music
Sufjan Stevens
Singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Sufjan Stevens creates whimsical musical landscapes with cohesive themes that give even his most abstract endeavors a strange concreteness. Whether fashioning an ambient album dedicated to the animals of the Chinese zodiac or a set of songs about his home state of Michigan, he cleverly binds eccentric whimsy with solid concepts. You can see him perform at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley and pick up his Christmas album, Songs For Christmas (Asthmatic Kitty, 2006), which will give you a few idiosyncratic yuletide tunes to piss off your family with this holiday season. (Hayley Elisabeth Kaufman)
With My Brightest Diamond
8 p.m.
Zellerbach Auditorium
UC Berkeley, lower Sproul (near Bancroft and Telegraph), Berk.
$25
(510) 642-9988
www.calperfs.berkeley.edu
www.asthmatickitty.com
MONDAY
Oct. 9
Music
The Knitters
There’s an epiphany that strikes almost every aging rocker that country music is the perfect medium for tempering youthful, knee-jerk angst into a superficially more contained yet white-hot righteousness that sizzles to the core. Perhaps it’s because affecting a nasal twang is much less taxing on matured vocal chords than outright shrieking, and given the right arrangement, the effect is surprisingly intoxicating. Enter the Knitters, combining members of seminal LA punk band X with members of rockabilly revivalists the Blasters, creating what their old label Bloodshot Records refers to as an “insurgent country” sound and what I like to call a hoedown for the low-down. (Nicole Gluckstern)
With Jesse Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter
8 p.m.
Independent
628 Divisadero
$25
(415) 771-1421
www.independentsf.com
Music
The Bluetones
Citing Buffalo Springfield, Love, and the Stone Roses as influences, London indie favorites the Bluetones have, over the course of their 12-year career, produced a catalog rich in spiky sing-along Britpop with a reverential nod in the direction of ’60s songwriters. The band has grown artistically through an enthusiasm for incorporating new elements into their vision, while many of their contemporaries from the mid-’90s Britpop scene have either dissolved or stagnated. After exploring Southwestern themes, country twang, gentle folk, and even a bit of velour-smooth ’70s disco-soul, these popsters are adventurers of the first order. (Todd Lavoie)
9:30 p.m.
Cafe du Nord
2170 Market, SF
$15
(415) 861-5016
www.cafedunord.com
SUNDAY
Oct. 8
Music
Residual Echoes
Besides having one of the sweetest, smokiest names around, Residual Echoes summon a potent mix of sounds: kraut rock, drone, and SST noise, all hammered into relentless grooves. Coming from Santa Cruz like fellow journeyers Comets on Fire, Residual Echoes can do spacey and heavy with equal aplomb, though it’s the louder stuff – Adam Payne’s squalling guitar swimming upstream against the band’s tight Sabbath groove – that will win converts. (Max Goldberg)
With LSD-March and New Rock Syndicate
9 p.m.
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
$7
(415) 621-4455
www.bottomofthehill.com
Event
Italian Heritage Festival
In a city as filled with pride as San Francisco, it should come as no surprise to discover that we are host to the nation’s oldest Italian Heritage Festival (formerly the Columbus Day Parade), which celebrates its 138th year today. Belly up to one of the sidewalk cafes lining Columbus Avenue and catch an eyeful of parading I-talians, presided over by this year’s grand marshal, Michael Chiarello of Chiarello Family Vineyards, and graced by the presence of “Queen Isabella” (Daniela Maria Romani) and her royal court. The parade begins from Jefferson at Powell and will end at Washington Square Park. (Nicole Gluckstern)
12:30 p.m.
Columbus Parade: Jefferson at Powell to Columbus at Vallejo, SF
Free
(415) 703-9888
www.sfcolumbusday.org
SATURDAY
Oct. 7
Visual Art
ArtSpan Open Studios
Art, it’s often argued, is in the eye of the beholder. During ArtSpan’s 31st Open Studios, you’ll have the opportunity to behold a lot of it as more than 700 working artists open their studios to the public over the course of four weekends. Art aficionados like the Open Studios event as a time to spot emerging trends; artists like it for the chance to display and sell their backlog; plebs such as myself enjoy the accompanying Havarti cubes and two-buck chuck. There will also be a number of events held at SomArts, including a free opening reception on Fri/6 from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m., plus an exhibition of over 400 pieces. (Nicole Gluckstern)
Through Oct. 29
Times and locations vary
(415) 861-9838
www.artspan.org
Dance
Smuin Ballet
You can pick any of three reasons to see Smuin Ballet this month. Reason one: the dancers. Each of the 15 is a strong, well-trained, uniquely talented individual – including the three new ones. Reason two: the rep. It’s a pungent mix of the new and the old. Top billing has to go to the world premiere of Amy Seiwert’s Revealing the Bridge, based on Claude Monet’s painting The Japanese Bridge. Michael Smuin’s new Obrigado, Brazil, set to João Gilberto’s music, probably will rouse the bossa to the point where you wish you could join the dancers. Smuin is also bringing back Shinju, which will be performed to Paul Chihara’s magical score. This piece just might be the most erotic you’ll ever see in ballet form. Reason three: the Palace of Fine Arts. With good sight lines and a relaxed setting, it’s the perfect theater for a company of this size. (Rita Felciano)
Through Oct 15. Opens Sat/7, 8 p.m. Runs Tues.-Sat., 8 p.m. (also Sat., 2 p.m., except Sat/7); Oct 15, 2 p.m.
Palace of Fine Arts
Bay and Lyon, SF
$40-$55
(415) 978-2787
www.smuinballetorg
FRIDAY
Oct. 6
Event/Visual Art/Music/Film
“The Illuminated Corridor”
Let’s face it – live loud music and large projected images don’t take over cities nearly as often as they should. Why in the hell should a street fair be required for it to happen? The visionaries behind “The Illuminated Corridor” have been righting this problem. Their latest collision of sight and sound includes movie-esque stuff by Cinepimps, featuring Canyon Cinema filmmaker Alfonso Alvarez. Music will be made by folks such as Nicholas Chase, Admiral Ted Brinkley, the DC-to-Bay Area multi-instrumentalist Sharon Cheslow, and a trio that includes Guardian contributor George Chen. The fact that Veronica de Jesus is also involved in this shindig is exciting, because while the Bay Area is full of great drawings these days, hers might be the best around. (Johnny Ray Huston)
7-11 p.m.
25th St. between Broadway and Telegraph, Oakl.
Free
www.illuminatedcorridor.com
Film
“Midnites for Maniacs”: They Live
Ours is a culture of obligatory consumerism. The streets and airwaves have become a canvas for messages from corporate entities, and we cannot help but obey. It sometimes seems as though the world is run by an invisible group of aliens who exploit our inferiority complexes to ensure widespread complacency. If only we had some bionic sunglasses that would enable us to distinguish the aliens from the humans. We could lend them to a washed-up professional wrestler and relax as he busied himself chewing bubble gum and kicking ass. So goes the story line of John Carpenter’s seminal sci-fi horror classic, They Live. At once a comment on greed, subliminal messaging, conspicuous consumption, and horrible acting, They Live is widely regarded as the best movie of all time. (Justin Juul)
With The Return of the Living Dead and Sid and Nancy
7:30 p.m.
Castro Theatre
429 Castro, SF
$10
(415) 621-6120
www.midnitesformaniacs.com
www.thecastrotheatre.com
THURSDAY
Oct. 5
Visual Art
“Who’s Afraid of San Francisco?”
Who’s afraid of San Francisco? The whole world, it sometimes seems, including the people who live here. A new group show at Frey Norris Gallery brings together more than 20 works by local artists that examine San Francisco and what it stands for in the public consciousness. Recent “Bay Area Now”-er Frederick Loomis’s apocalyptic work reps the visionary side of matters, while an attractively vivid painting by Enrique Chagoya that chows down on Ellsworth Kelly is one of at least a few works dealing with immigration. (Johnny Ray Huston)
6-9 p.m. reception
Through Nov. 16
Frey Norris Gallery
456 Geary, SF
Free
(415) 346-7812
www.freynorris.com
Music
ADULT.
The Detroit duo, formed in 1997, don’t adhere to the whims of popular youth culture: it is this very aversion that helped inspire their very mature handle. ADULT.’s calculated sparse beats, often reminiscent of kitchen utensils clattering, collide with ominous synthesizers and seething vocals to form a heavily dissonant brand of no wave techno that demands a visceral reaction. They don’t care if it’s love or hate, as long as it makes you listen. (Hayley Elisabeth Kaufman)
With Hardplace and Landshark
9 p.m.
Mezzanine
444 Jessie, SF
$13
(415) 625-8880
www.mezzaninesf.com
www.adultperiod.com
WEDNESDAY
Oct. 4
Event
Don Ed Hardy
What does it take to earn the status of “the Godfather of Tattoo”? Ask Don Ed Hardy, a practitioner of skin art for 30 years, who’s known for his arresting designs and for melding Western and Eastern aesthetics. It is this cross-cultural mixing of horimono, or classical Japanese tattoo, with Americana iconography that has garnered Hardy his formidable reputation and a specialized creative edge. Find out more about the Bay Area native when he lectures at Mills College in Oakland. (Hayley Elisabeth Kaufman)
7 p.m.
Mills College, Music Building Concert Hall
5000 MacArthur, Oakl.
Free
(510) 430-2164
www.mills.edu
www.donedhardy.com
Event
Harmon Leon
Living in one of the bluest corners of blue-state America, it’s easy to forget how the other half lives. This is where Harmon Leon comes in. Leon dives headfirst into the right wing and lives to tell the tale with hilariously savage aplomb. He volunteered on George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign, joined abortion protests, went to Christian rock concerts, dined with a group of white supremacists at an Applebee’s. Leon is having a release party for his book The Infiltrator: My Undercover Exploits in Right-Wing America at the Rockit Room. (Aaron Sankin)
7 p.m.
Rockit Room
406 Clement, SF
Free
(415) 387-6343
www.rock-it-room.com
The final frontier
› cheryl@sfbg.com
Ask Aron Ranen about his filmmaking philosophy, and he won’t pause long. “I’m a reality surfer. Things pop up as I’m quote-unquote traveling around the world with my camera.”
When he says “pop up,” he ain’t kidding. While attempting to uncover the truth about the Apollo 11 moon landing in Did We Go? (which screened in 2000 at New York’s Museum of Modern Art), Ranen stumbled upon the fact that the magnetic tapes used to record the 1969 event had gone missing. This peculiar nugget resurfaced in the news lately, generating enough buzz beyond the conspiracy fringes to nudge NASA into a response via its Web site: “Despite the challenges of the search, NASA does not consider the tapes to be lost.”
A month ago Ranen appeared on CNN to discuss the controversy. Host Glenn Beck tried awfully hard to paint the doc maker as a wackjob; the segment ends with a joke likening those who believe the moon landing was faked to those who are “still wondering why Darrin One was mysteriously replaced by Darrin Two.” This kind of reaction doesn’t seem to bother Ranen, who between movies teaches digital filmmaking at DV Workshops, the school he runs out of his Mission District studio.
“My motto is film the obvious,” he explains. (Later in our conversation he expands that motto to include “trust reality … and also don’t fuck it up.”) “I’m just trying to illuminate some of the things that are going on in our culture.” Did We Go? is actually not a wackjob’s manifesto; it features interviews with Apollo 11 flight director Gene Krantz and astronaut Buzz Aldrin — as well as the NASA employee who physically closed the hatch on the rocket before its launch. The film doesn’t try to discredit the moon landing; it tries, with sincerity, to prove that it actually happened. (In other words, there’s a reason it’s not titled We Didn’t Go.)
A filmmaker since he was 13, Ranen has made so many short documentaries that he’s lost count. Over the years the self-funded artist has developed his own approach to shooting. His films are generally unstructured — expecting the unexpected — and are guided by Ranen’s first-person voice-overs, delivered in a tone that hovers between curiosity and amazement.
“Everyone trusts me and talks to me in my films,” he says. It’s a claim backed up by the openness displayed by his diverse array of subjects, many of whom Ranen meets on the fly. His film Power and Control: LSD in the 60s — a tangent-riddled exploration of the drug’s influence on politics and counterculture — features chats with an ex–Stanford University researcher whose simian LSD tests earned him the nickname “Monkey Mike” and a now-elderly professor who was among the Harvard students who participated in Timothy Leary’s 1962 Good Friday experiment. Ranen attributes this kind of access to his lone gunman style.
“I refuse to let anyone go with me. I believe so much of documentary is about the relationship between the filmmaker and the subject. I don’t want a crew or a sound man to mitigate my relationships with these subjects,” he explains. “When I’m talking to someone, you can see their enthusiasm in talking to me.”
Ranen’s go-with-the-flow methodology extends to postproduction. He “edits organically,” subscribing to what he calls “the pinball effect: as you’re watching it, the edit speaks to you and says, no, take that stuff in the middle and put it up front.” He’s also not opposed to altering his films after they are finished. Power and Control screened as a 70-minute feature at the 2005 San Francisco Independent Film Festival; the version at Other Cinema this weekend hovers closer to 40 minutes. Eventually, Ranen hopes to add a chapter exploring the possible LSD-KGB connection.
His most recent film, Black Hair, is also his most widely seen, thanks to a strategy of free distribution via YouTube. The doc, which Ranen says has been viewed some 100,000 times, delves into the racial and economic issues raised by the fact that most of the black hair-care industry’s retail and wholesale markets are controlled by Korean, not African American, businesspeople.
Ranen’s film inspired Bay Area hair-product manufacturer Sam Ennon to found the Black Owned Beauty Supply Association, or BOBSA, now a national organization aimed at what Ennon calls “reorganizing the whole industry in terms of the distribution channel. It’s not that we want to run the Koreans out of business — we just want to share in the business. We want to recirculate the black dollar.”
Ennon says Black Hair gave BOBSA’s cause a major assist. “A picture speaks better than words. The film is really what turned it completely around.”
It’s all in a day’s work for Ranen, who seems to attract unexpected spontaneity and the not-occasional weird coincidence. His DV Workshops was funded with a settlement he received after learning that Nine Inch Nails had sampled one of his films without permission. The dialogue snippet, taken from Ranen’s film Religion in Suburbia, just happened to include this phrase: “do you believe in miracles?” SFBG
POWER AND CONTROL:
LSD IN THE 60S
Sat/30, 8:30 p.m.
Artists’ Television Access
992 Valencia, SF
$5
(415) 824-3890
www.atasite.org
www.dvworkshops.com
Pixies stick
A smiling Kim Deal holds up a T-shirt with “Pixies Sellout” emblazoned across the back. “Where did you get the inspiration?” she asks guitarist Joey Santiago, who named the band’s comeback tour. “’Cause we sold out in minutes!” he offers sans irony. Santiago might not be in on the joke (somewhat inexplicably), but for the rest of us the subtext is clear. Sure, the Pixies are now well into middle age and showing it, but to claim these indie rock demigods are simply trying to cash in on past success is a little unfair. Since they were never really able to enjoy major-league (outside of the United Kingdom) success (which happened after the breakup) in the first place, they’re just now getting used to this whole rock-glory thing.
LoudQUIETloud, shot during the band’s 2004 world tour, frames their collective “holy shit, they love us!” state of shock perfectly while still managing to focus on the individual members’ personal struggles with art, family, and commerce. Before the tour’s start, lead singer-songwriter Charles Thompson (a.k.a. Black Francis) is plugging away at solo gigs and Nashville records; a newly sober Deal (the only Pixie left with any hair) hasn’t recorded with the Breeders in years and is holed up in Ohio; Santiago is scoring films and raising kids; and drummer David Lovering is pursuing “hobbies of magic and metal detecting” (seriously).
Still, amid all the drug tiffs, card tricks, and mostly energetic renditions of classic tunes like “Caribou” and “Hey,” we get precious little insight into the Pixies’ much-ballyhooed musical influence. Even the film’s title — a reference to the band’s signature seesawing song structure — is never explained. Actually, the title is a good characterization of the movie itself: despite the notorious rancor between members that ultimately led to the band’s demise, for the most part they come off as quiet, funny eccentrics in between the thunderous live footage. They’re so unrelentingly low-key, in fact, it’s hard not to wish one of them would explode, like a Pixies chorus, into something a little less tame. (Michelle Devereaux)
Broken social scene
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Brooklyn, like Oakland and the Mission District, has swelled in the last decade with postadolescents: beards and black hoodies wandering streets on the verge of gentrification. This intermediary space is the setting and premise for indie filmmaker Andrew Bujalski’s latest, Mutual Appreciation. Bujalski first made a splash with Boston-based Funny Ha Ha (2002), an unassuming feature made in the tradition of talky indie forbearers John Cassavetes, Eric Rohmer, and Richard Linklater. Mutual Appreciation again collects a group of guarded postgraduates for its cast, but the film is no angsty trifle. Bujalski pulls off that impossible trick — always surprising no matter the influences — of affecting a naturalistic, improvisational flow while maintaining a clear authorial voice. It’s a dynamic that picks up steam with each exquisitely staged scene, making Mutual Appreciation as absorbing as anything you’re likely to see at the movies this year.
How then do we account for this guided freewheel? Cinematography is, as always, at least part of the answer. The grainy 16mm black-and-white film stock isn’t mere affectation but rather a functional stylistic element, underscoring the drab reality of the movie’s unsettled spaces: apartments with everything secondhand and mismatched, unmade beds on nicked hardwood floors, and rooms that are either too big (making one fret over the lack of proper furniture) or too small (making one crouch). Bujalski and cinematographer Matthias Grunsky court these challenging spaces, always coming up with a revealing composition that frames characters in depth — splayed against walls or hunched in makeshift chairs.
While Bujalski has clearly done his homework on no-budget cinematography, his narration style seems more instinctual and basic to the film’s shape. Like exemplar François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim, Mutual Appreciation pivots on a youthful, untested ménage à trois: boyfriend-girlfriend Lawrence (Bujalski) and Ellie (Rachel Clift) have lived in Brooklyn for some time, while Lawrence’s old friend Alan (Justin Rice) is new in town, lost in an existential quandary over his life and music (“It’s like pop”). Like so many of his progenitors, Bujalski has an innate sense for particular rhythms of talk. This isn’t just a matter of dialogue (“If you kiss me now, my breath’s going to be all beery and burrito-y”) but also of editing — knowing, for example, how to exit a scene, convey a relationship with an unevenly paced phone conversation, and let the camera run on a given close-up to register a character’s unguarded reactions.
More impressive is the way Bujalski subtly orchestrates little one-acts to achieve genuine drama. The principle instance of such narrative structuring is in the many scenes between Lawrence and Ellie, and Alan and Ellie, but none between the old friends in question (until the closing minutes anyhow). If Mutual Appreciation’s narrative seems accidental, it’s a testament to Bujalski’s understated technique. There is certainly method here, from repetitions of dialogue (“That’s flattering”) and theme (gender confusion) to the patient unveiling of character, the apotheosis of which is a sequence of scenes tracing Alan from one Warholian party to another, no better for the omnipresent tallboys of beer.
What begins as nonchalant talk blooms into compelling drama by movie’s end. It seems no coincidence that one of Mutual Appreciation’s three main characters is an indie rocker. Bujalski, after all, registers the fear and trembling that twentysomethings expect from music (middlebrow Indiewood being as unlikely to produce something relatable as the French “cinema of quality” from which the New Wave broke away). But Mutual Appreciation is more than an outlet; in its illuminating narration, many will see a mirror, an ode to these transitional places in which one blusters toward adulthood, talking all the way. SFBG
MUTUAL APPRECIATION
Opens Fri/29
Red Vic Movie House
1727 Haight, SF
$4–$8
(415) 668-3994
www.redvicmoviehouse.com
www.mutualappreciation.com
For an interview with Mutual Appreciation director Andrew Bujalski, go to www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.
Grizzly man
New York City band Grizzly Bear’s gently ambient Yellow House (Warp) manages to delicately conjure bittersweet associations of musty, memory-cluttered childhood homes and reference Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist-modernist novel The Yellow Wall-Paper — but the real household dirt on this band has to remain in one’s imagination.
Vocalist-keyboardist-guitarist-autoharpist Edward Droste is up-front about his own sexuality — saying he’s been in a relationship with one man for most of the band’s existence — but when it comes to the love lives of his straight mates, the sometime journalist and Pro Tools bedroom recordist is the soul of discretion. Grizzly Bear’s tales of random hookups are just “too dirty” to pass along, he explains on the phone from the East Coast college campus where the group is playing before joining the TV on the Radio tour in October. “I usually bond with the girls,” says Droste, 27, miming his role as the band’s father confessor. “It’s cool — we’re leaving town. But it’s totally cool.”
And a certain ethereal cool marks the foursome’s gorgeous soundscapes, now lifted above the tape-hiss fray of their fake-fur-embellished 2004 debut, Horn of Plenty (Kanine; later reissued in 2005 with a CD of remixes by Dntel, the Soft Pink Truth, Final Fantasy, and Solex). Yellow House sounds warm and welcoming, thanks to the production prowess of the band’s brass and woodwinds player Chris Taylor and the recording site: Droste’s mother’s Boston-area home, the yellow house of the disc’s title. The seductive tug of nostalgia takes over as Beach Boys–style harmonies skate over fingerpicked acoustic guitar and strings, bird chirps, and wah-wah pedal flit together on “Little Brother.” Horns lumber alongside busy insectlike electronics and Droste’s and guitarist Daniel Rossen’s cooing vocals during “Plans.” By the time the album breaks into “Marla” — a slowed-down, strings-swathed dusky dirge based on a 1930s-era tune penned by Droste’s great-aunt of the same name, a failed singer who eventually drank herself to death — resistance becomes futile. This is seriously lovely music, a reflection of the group’s recent communal music-making — and far removed from groupie dish.
“Initially, we wanted to record an album before we had a label and didn’t have any money,” recalls Droste, who shares the name of the Hooters cofounder, a distant relation. “My mom was going to be away, it was my old childhood home, and I was, like, ‘Well, we can all have our own bedrooms, record in the living room, and there’s a backyard, and every night we’d have chips and salsa and beer.’”
The laid-back atmosphere and ensuing musical productivity led to a bidding frenzy among indie labels when the recordings emerged, and now Droste is relaxing into a tour schedule that brings him back to San Francisco for the first time since February 2005, when Grizzly Bear — jokingly named after a Droste boyfriend who was anything but — played the Eagle Tavern. How did Droste’s hetero bandmates handle the attentions of SF’s finest bears — and those of the bandleader himself?
“They’re total cock teases. They love attention from boys, but they never do anything,” Droste offers laconically. “Never say never, but I kind of feel like if you’re hanging with me in New York City and there are a million fags everywhere and dozens of opportunities … I’m just gonna drop it and accept the fact.” (Kimberly Chun)
GRIZZLY BEAR
Fri/29, 9 p.m.
Independent
628 Divisadero, SF
$12
(415) 771-1421
www.grizzly-bear.net
Boys? What boys?
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I meet bandleader, videographer, and Mission District indie icon Leslie Satterfield at Ritual café on a summer evening as she walks up Valencia Street looking weather-beaten and weary from her recent travels. Is she just back from a cross-country tour, I wonder? No, she was precisely where you’d expect the guitarist from Boyskout to have been: camping. She survived days of deer watching and near–bear sightings in the Sierras, and despite her desire for a hot shower and warm bed, Satterfield settles in with a cappuccino and some good stories.
Satterfield may be best known for her post-punk quartet Boyskout, a band that’s risen the ranks since its inception in 2001 to tour around the United States and Germany and headline major local venues including Mezzanine and Bimbo’s 365 Club. But the sandy-blond, late-20s songwriter has been also turning heads of late with her filmmaking.
Her video for Film School’s song “11:11” — a minimalist travelogue set in San Francisco streets and tunnels — is the latest work for her own Sharkbone Productions, which has also produced Boyskout videos shown internationally at major gay and lesbian film festivals. Her latest projects include a video for Rough Trade UK–signed act Scissors for Lefty and a self-produced experimental film that she describes as “being about love and creating what you believe.”
“Most of my films have been about how we create our own realities with our mind and how powerful the mind itself is — how your thoughts create everything that happens to you,” Satterfield says.
With her Mission artist garb — black boots and worn dark denim — I figure Satterfield had a youth spent in mosh pits and zine-collective punk hangouts. On the contrary, she grew up listening to the Beatles, Olivia Newton-John, and Simon and Garfunkel, while spending a lot of time drawing. She earned a BA in photography from Savannah College of Art and Design and resided in Amsterdam for a year before moving west. Now in addition to classics from Elton John and Heart, her iPod holds songs by Coco Rosie, the Libertines, and Tapes ’n Tapes. It’s an eclectic collection of music, similar to the local bands she holds dear and performs with regularly. The list includes up-and-coming acts like the Fucking Ocean, Tartufi, Full Moon Partisans, Death of a Party, and the Mall, as well as Shande — the group fronted by her sometime–guest guitarist Jennifer Chochinov.
Admittedly a shy, coy romantic who’s just completed an all-acoustic album, Mixing Memory with Desire (Dial), as J-Mod, Satterfield was initially a reluctant lead vocalist. You wouldn’t know it from Boyskout’s recent rock-out performances: Satterfield’s steely, saucerwide blue eyes zap the audience playfully while she mixes it up with her bandmates onstage. Along with bassist Piper Lewine, keys and violin player Christina Stanley, and drummer Ping (and occasionally adding guest guitarists like Chochinov or Daniel Dietrick to the lineup), Satterfield slayed audiences at South By Southwest this year in Austin and returned immediately to begin recording Boyskout’s now completed second album, Another Life (Three Ring). At the time we speak, eight of the planned 11 songs are done but won’t be out, well, until they’re done. “I’m a huge perfectionist,” Satterfield confesses. “The biggest in the world. I really like to take my time and do things to a tee.”
The songs I’ve heard from the project, including the Nocturne-era-Siouxsie-sounding “Spotlight” and the jittery dance-rock slab of “Lobby Boys,” are as refreshing as local underground music can get (word to Live 105). Meanwhile, Satterfield’s singing on the J-Mod disc (fantastically recorded at Hyde Street Studios) resembles Nico or Hope Sandoval in their darkest, most mysterious moments. Each album serves as an introduction to Satterfield’s thoughtful and dissonant guitar playing, a style that compliments her alabaster-smooth voice. Based on her range of projects and contacts, I get the impression that Satterfield has some big opportunities on the horizon.
Other recent adventures include a trip to Portland to teach at the Rock ’n’ Roll Camp for Girls. “I taught last year in New York, and it was really fun. I worked with a group of 8-year-olds who formed their own band called Pink Slip.” Which reminds me, I never did get to ask Satterfield what her day job is. For now I’ll just assume it’s the professional term for “brilliant multidisciplinary artist.” SFBG
BOYSKOUT
With the Mall and the Plot to Blow Up the Eiffel Tower
Oct. 5, 9:30 p.m.
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
$10
(415) 621-4455
www.bottomofthehill.com
www.boyskout.com
TUESDAY
Oct. 3
Music
Man Man and Pink Mountaintops
With band members identifying themselves as masters of such unusual instruments as the beduggering demonstration and the illustrious quesadilla special, Philadelphia’s Man Man are nothing if not unconventional. Wielding a mightily transfixing power with a carnival-clown playful sound, they bring to mind images of unrelentingly caffeinated children’s choirs playing musical chairs with Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart in Federico Fellini’s junkyard. Providing additional mind-messing are Vancouver’s Pink Mountaintops, whose latest album, Axis of Evol (Jagjaguwar, 2006), is a hypnotically propulsive piece of deliciously twisted modern psychedelia. (Todd Lavoie)
With Dodo Bird
8 p.m.
Independent
628 Divisadero, SF
$12
(415) 771-1421
www.independentsf.com
Visual Art
“Palimpsest; New Paintings” and “Le Silence des Choses”
The shock, misery, and loss of control that a “Dear John” letter recipient experiences are tough topics to sell. In his show “Palimpsest; New Paintings,” Mark Stock captures the dull resignation in the eyes of his subject and builds layers of weight atop it. Catherine Jansens’s watercolors are an inspired complement to Stock’s works. “Le Silence des Choses” shows off her incredible eye for light and unwavering control of the medium. Each exhibit explores a heaviness both in technique and in content that is palpable and startling in the light, airy, whitewashed gallery space. (K. Tighe)
Through Oct. 28.
Tues.-Sat., 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m.
Modernism
685 Market, SF
Free
(415) 541-0461
www.modernisminc.com