Arts & Culture

Arts & Culture

The online-learning challenge

Andrew Lam
-
7
The online-learning challenge

culture@sfbg.com

CAREERS AND ED Mixing, mashing, chatting, tweeting: This is how the University of California envisions the future of learning for what it calls a new breed of students. Also on the syllabus? Podcasting, vodcasting, blogging, and Skype.

Last week, UC was awarded a $750,000 Next Generation Learning Challenges grant, moving it one step closer to a curriculum composed of words that barely existed a decade ago. But some fear — with good reason — that online education will become a low-cost, high-return alternative to traditional instruction. And the students will be the losers.

UC’s Online Instruction Pilot Program grew out of recommendations to explore online learning discussed by the UC Commission on the Future over the past two years. This spring, a subcommittee of faculty and administrators selected 29 courses to be developed over the next two years.

The pilot program is a long-term initiative to evaluate and ultimately increase the role of online education as a regular part of the UC curriculum — a chance to respond, according to the program’s website, to a “transformation” in the way students learn.

The commission promotes online learning as a boon without trade-offs, a way of answering questions of accessibility, efficiency, and, ultimately, costs — and is not shy about outlining the relationship between the three. Chartered to help wiggle UC out of a “vise of rising costs and drastically reduced resources,” the commission is proposing sweeping changes to California’s public university system.

 

ALL BUT THE KEG PARTY

UC envisions a greater number of students served and increased diversity, “from Kentucky to Kuala Lampur,” according to Law School Dean Chris Edley, cochair of the commission’s Education and Curriculum Working Group.

Edley, one of the most enthusiastic proponents of digital learning, initially referred to online education as an 11th UC campus, promising it would offer an equivalent college experience — minus only the “keg party.”

Critics were quick to condemn the plan as overblown excitement. Concerned undergraduates and skeptical faculty raised questions about the quality of online learning. Angry graduate student instructors (understandably) balked at Edley’s grandiose vision of a cybercampus where “squadrons of GSIs” will serve on the “frontline of online contact” with undergraduates.

Political science professor Wendy Brown is one of the leading critics. “Personal engagement with students is crucial,” she told us in a phone interview. “Real teachers don’t just teach subject matter. You have to know students and where their experience and level of engagement is. I don’t want them just to come out with content — I want them to come out as thinkers … have a new way to analyze the world.”

Brown said she believes that acclimating to the intellectual culture of a university — especially important in the first year — can’t be achieved online. Yet first-year courses are exactly where administrators are looking to channel online efforts.

Administrators hope to relieve pressure on overcrowded gateway math and science courses, as well as freshman reading and composition. As many as 40 percent of first-year students test out of their first semester of reading and composition, indicating that the students remaining are those most in need of attention. Even so, a generous smattering of general chemistry, intro calculus, and reading and composition classes like Humanities 1A are among the pilot courses moving forward.

Craig Evans, professor of mathematics and chair of the course committee for calculus, echoes Brown’s concerns. “I don’t think it’s impossible to make this work, but I think it would be very, very difficult,” he said. “Part of what we do as teachers is applied psychology, things like checking in with students and keeping up morale, in addition to teaching classical mathematics. It’s hard to see how to convey that in an online course.”

Robert Anderson, faculty representative to the Board of Regents and professor of economics and mathematics, agreed that there is “something important about being on campus for four years, rubbing shoulders with students and faculty.”

And when short-term goals — taking pressure off overcrowded introductory courses — are met, what comes next?

The academic senate approved the pilot program on the condition that the necessary funding — as much as $7 million — come from outside sources. With the exception of the $750,000 NGLF grant, that money hasn’t materialized. The university has borrowed money from internal sources; half of that will be directed toward infrastructure development, according to Anderson.

With money-saving rhetoric underlining every stage of the program’s development and millions to be invested in online infrastructure, how will UC officials avoid the temptation to simply use online learning as a revenue source — regardless of what academic benefits pilot program researchers find?

 

CASH COWS

The answer is: they won’t.

In a post on the Berkeley Blog last summer, Edley attempted to allay fears that an online program would eliminate campus learning by assuring that future online pupils would be “new, tuition-paying, UC-eligible students we otherwise wouldn’t have the room or resources to serve. And any net revenue would be plowed back into supporting the on-campus program.” In this model, off-campus students would be cash cows milked for the additional revenue they could produce.

Though the committee has delayed visions of an entirely online degree since then, crucial questions regarding a long-term trajectory remain: Would online students pay the same price? Would they be accepted exclusively for online matriculation? Would their degrees be identical?

Nobody knows, but already the pilot program is relying on projected revenue from off-campus students to help recoup some of the borrowed $7 million, according to Anderson.

Keith Williams, Edley’s cochair on the commission’s education and curriculum working group, confirmed that UC is planning to offer newly developed classes on a per-credit basis to students enrolled at UC and others.

According to Williams, these new courses will offer full course credit — and the full price tag. Pricing was made consistent with brick-and-mortar courses, Williams explained, to avoid causing UC students to make a tough decision: either pay full price for an on campus course or save money by taking a less desirable online course.

And yes, conveniently, offering the courses at full price does generate revenue to be reinvested. (Williams balked at the phrase “skimmed off the top.”)

Now that the pilot program is underway, administrators are treading more lightly around its money-making intentions. But for a reminder of the project’s origins, one need only look at the commission’s recommendation to up enrollment quotas for nonresident students — a recommendation slated to be met next year.

The commission’s final report explicitly calculates the amount of money ($12,000) that can be generated for each Californian replaced with a nonresident student, stating “each 1 percent increase in nonresident students would generate almost $1 million” — a dubious maneuver at a time when the university claims it must expand online education to meet the shortages of space for its own residents.

The culture betrayed by this vision of UC education is clear — one in which educational models are constructed according to business practices.

Despite the pilot program’s rhetoric of innovation and breakthrough, it’s not the first to fuse Internet with education. Brown is quick to note that despite her criticism of the pilot program “[she] is not a Luddite.” She described to us how the faculty is increasingly making use of online educational aids.

Many professors choose to broadcast their lectures online, allowing students — and anyone else for that matter — to virtually peek in on a lecture, either live or with a delay of hours or days.

Currently, more than 40 UC Berkeley lecture halls are fitted for video and/or audio recording. Thousands of transmissions, from biology to history, have been uploaded to iTunes and YouTube (see sidebar).

Although webcasts are highly popular with students — and students are undoubtedly the main priority for the program — people are tuning in from all continents, according to Benjamin Hubbard, who runs the webcast program.

For Hubbard, webcasts “[broaden] the window of access to all the scholarly activity on campus. We are fortunate in that we are public university, so first and foremost we have a mission of community service and making this content freely and publicly available matches this mission.”

 

THE PUBLIC OPTION

Recognizing the enormous challenges of decreased accessibility and increasing cost, a growing consortium of educators and researchers are building momentum and developing a vision for a truly public online educational program.

Lisa Petrides, president and founder of the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education, calls herself a “public education fanatic.” She told us that the instead of using online teaching as a money-maker, schools can adopt a principled, egalitarian approach.

Petrides is a signatory of the Capetown Declaration, a manifesto for the open education movement. The declaration calls for collaboration that cuts across institutional lines; for the use and promotion of free educational resources; and for policy support for open education.

“You start to have this pedagogical collaborative community that can use resources in this way, changing how we teach and how we learn,” she said. To take analogy for computer software, Petrides says her movement is akin to the open source movement.

Now there’s an innovative approach to online education — with its eyes on the future, not its pocket.

 

Found in translation

Andrew Lam
-
0
Found in translation

arts@sfbg.com

Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.

— Goethe

THEATER In Mark Jackson’s breakout theatrical hit, 2003’s The Death of Meyerhold, title character and playwright Vsevolod Meyerhold asserts that “the classics are always new. That is why they are called the classics.” That philosophy of theatre is one that Jackson’s other plays frequently embrace. From reimagined Shakespeare to adaptations of underproduced Russian dramas, Jackson’s work is invariably characterized by his respect for and understanding of the universal nature of human emotion, regardless of location or century, as well as an intensely verbal style of playwriting and often aggressively physical staging.

It’s a logical progression that a writer with such a facility for his own language might eventually turn to the translation of theatrical works in other languages — especially after spending a year abroad, steeped in the theater scene of another country (in Jackson’s case, Germany). To date, Jackson has translated two full-length works, Faust, Part 1 by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Mary Stuart, by Friedrich Schiller, presented in 2009 and 2010 by the Shotgun Players at the Ashby Stage. Translating from a director’s perspective, Jackson’s primary focus is on the spirit of the original play, and the intentions of the playwright, not necessarily a word-for-word direct interpretation.

“Why do that,” he wonders when asked about his approach, “except out of academic interest?” In addition to preserving the overall intention of the pieces he translates, Jackson also focuses on what he calls the “music” of the German language.

“Fortunately, because English is a Germanic language, it’s easier to retain the melody of it,” he explains. “To streamline the text but keep the poetry.” From Jackson’s perspective and personal experience, it’s the music of a language that ultimately reveals the character of its people, and therefore the characters of the pieces he translates.

For Rob Melrose of the Cutting Ball Theater, an experimental Bay Area company with a dedicated bent for the classics and the avant-garde, translation is an opportunity to stretch his comprehension of the English language and language in general. A dabbler in five languages in addition to English, Melrose has translated a total of seven plays from French and German and appreciates the insight into different cultures learning languages has given him: how the spare simplicity of French reveals the elegance of the French; how the logical, tightly constructed phrases of German are engineered as flawlessly as one of their vaunted automobiles. But even more, he appreciates the ways that these other languages push him as a writer and an artist.

“Working in another language makes you think differently,” Melrose explains. “Learning how other languages work helps me appreciate our language better and helps me identify what is unique about it. It also helps me stretch English a bit by trying to make it do what French can do or what German can do.”

It’s fair to say that Bennett Fisher, a cofounder of San Francisco Theatre Pub and an English teacher, has an in-depth understanding of English, which may be why for fun he chooses to translate plays from ancient Greek and French. The convivial atmosphere created by San Francisco Theatre Pub doesn’t mask its emphasis on thinking theatre, including Fisher’s translations of Cyclops and Ubu Roi. For his Greek translations, Fisher relies on the translation website Perseus project (www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper), first translating chunks of text verbatim, then struggling to fill in the blanks.

“What I end up with is a kind of “me Tarzan, you Jane” sentence,” he says. “Then it’s a kind of puzzle to figure out what it means and how to phrase it to make it sound conversational. Once I get a handle on that, I can do all the stuff I do with French in terms of getting at feeling, tone, intent, and all that. There’s a lot of trial and error. It’s kind of like being a director — you try interpreting the dialogue in different ways and eventually you find a choice that feels right.”

It’s not just the classics that inspire local theatre-makers to try their hand at translation. One of the most exciting productions of 2006 was foolsFURY’s take on Fabrice Melquiot’s The Devil on All Sides, translated by artistic director Ben Yalom. A harrowing blend of magical realism and atrocity, Melquiot’s play set in the former Yugoslavia was pronounced the theatrical discovery of the year in his native France in 2003. The production went on from San Francisco to New York City, and helped inspire foolsFURY’s ongoing Contemporary French Plays Project, with two more Melquiot translations in the works and more possibilities waiting in the wings.

Daniel Zilber, cofounder of the Thrillpeddlers, translates original Grand Guignol plays from early 20th-century Paris, retaining all the melodrama and humor of the originals. Both the foolsFURY’s emphasis on physical artifice and the extreme naturalism of the Thrillpeddlers stem from French theatrical traditions, an influence that even extends to the writing and staging of their English-language productions. Much the way the art of translation pushes theatre-makers like Jackson and Melrose to think differently about the language of playwriting, so does the language of French theatricality encourage foolsFURY to create seething tableaux of writhing bodies, as in 2008’s Monster in the Dark, and the Thrillpeddlers to push the playfully edgy Grand Guignol aesthetic in their English original shows.

It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that some of Bay Area theatre’s most compelling risk-takers are also drawn to the possibilities translation offers them — from the challenges of the process to the rewards of producing a fresh interpretation of a classic work for the modern stage. But the greatest impact of the translation process may well be the way it continues to influence these theatre-makers during the creation of their original works. Perhaps Melrose puts it best: “It’s only by knowing these other languages well and by translating classic works that I have the idea to push English in my own writing.”

 

Inside job

Andrew Lam
-
0
Inside job

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER A man lies in the woods, his arm in a hole. A mystic? A mushroom hunter? A mad monk maybe? He’s in tatters, grimy, seemingly unconscious, bearded.

Magnificently leafless tree trunks (courtesy of scenic designer Lisa Clark) rise ominously around the man, while nestled among them lurks a somewhat inconspicuous string quintet. Finally, the local peasant who owns the land (Josh Pollock) asks for some explanation. He brings the man home to his wife (Sarah Mitchell), who looks askance at the stranger as she shaves the evening’s fare with a sharp knife. She soon finds herself inexorably charmed by the magnetic outsider as he breaks into a self-promotional song, inspiring the peasant to pound the kitchen table with a soft mallet and his wife to take knife to potato in the manner of a Puerto Rican güiro.

Those who thought Rasputin just sold records on Telegraph Avenue are in for a musical and cunningly skewed history lesson, in addition to a wholly agreeable evening. In the opening salvo of its 20th anniversary season, Shotgun Players hits a raucous, ribald, and consistently clever bull’s eye with Beardo, the latest from Brooklyn-based Banana Bag & Bodice, creators of 2008’s Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage. Each detail of this exquisite production — from a pitch-perfect cast to the rich palette employed by composer Dave Malloy to Christine Crook’s gorgeously layered, vibrantly crimson-marked costuming — serves an inspired reappraisal of madness and revolution in and beyond the never-named Romanov household.

Concepts of inside and outside percolate productively throughout Jason Craig’s book and lyrics, as Beardo (Ashkon Davaran), guided by a resolute yet warped-sounding inner voice, penetrates the household of Imperial Russia’s grief-stricken Tsarista (Anna Ishida) and her affably effete tsar-husband (Kevin Clarke). His way with their sickly child (Juliet Heller) has them deeply in his debt and enthralled. Meanwhile, Beardo shakes and shimmies behind competing, maybe complimentary, countenances: that of the mystic healer, and that of the debauched cowboy on one hell of a bender. A transcultural mashup of outlaw whimsy, class war, and the banalities of upper-class decadence take flight in some inspired set pieces too fresh to give away here, and a wonderfully orchestrated score.

Composer and musical director Dave Malloy, whose gifts for composition and drama have been growing apace since relocating to New York City (where his beautiful and rollicking venture Three Pianos at the New York Theatre Workshop recently won a well-deserved Obie), conjures a very convincing Russian cabaret atmosphere. Doses of Rachmaninoff and other authentic samplings strategically arise amid his brisk Weimar-esque rhythms, lilting melodies, and one fantastic choral arrangement — a startling convergence of roughly 40 “peasants” who suddenly erupt into song.

Shotgun’s artistic director Patrick Dooley helms the production with a deft hand, his witty detailing and precise staging perfectly in sync with the loose and wild composure of writer Craig’s sure, literate, post-punk poetics. The cast is uniformly terrific. As the hirsute healer and unlikely royal heartthrob, Davaran delivers — in a Wild West drawl reminiscent of a young Tom Waits crossed with John Huston — a performance that accomplishes the seemingly impossible: making utterly magnetic and finally sympathetic a preposterously unkempt and ridiculous antihero.

From Rasputin to Putin, Russia’s political history has been one long cabaret act in much poorer taste than anything you’ll find here. But Beardo, virile and viral, is less about Russia (although it lends tacit support to the long-standing theory that the Russian Revolution was in part galvanized by Rasputin’s undermining of tsarist authority) than about a crazy social hierarchy so steep and brittle, so vast in its gulf between high and low, that a single does of mayhem can become a political force “where the outside meets the inside.” It’s then that a little disorder is what’s in order.

BEARDO

Through April 24; $17–$26

Ashby Stage

1901 Ashby, Berk.

(510) 841-6500

www.shotgunplayers.org

 

Two for the road

Andrew Lam
-
0
Two for the road

MUSIC Erik “Ripley” Johnson is on the road. As the mastermind behind psych rock quartet Wooden Shijps and krautrockers Moon Duo, he spent eight months on tour last year. When he started Moon Duo with Sanae Yamada, Johnson knew that there’d be a degree of convenience in traveling as a twosome: it’s cheaper and much easier to be flexible and mobile. He was ready to tour as a full-time job.

Since Moon Duo began in 2009, Johnson and Yamada have put out two singles, the EP Killing Time (Sacred Bones) and the album Escape (Woodsist). Moon Duo’s just-released second full-length, Mazes (Sacred Bones), relays the story of a wandering life.

“We decided to name the album Mazes after we moved from San Francisco,” Johnson says over the phone, while the pair is on the road from New York to Massachusetts for their next gig. “That song is about choosing a path in life, but how you don’t necessarily know where it’s going to take you.”

Moon Duo creates trance-inducing music that builds minimalist, rhythmic repetition from drum samples and keyboards that support Johnson’s guitar freak-outs. It’s an experience of texture and tone that is sustained and then rerouted.

Most of Mazes was recorded lo-fi in Johnson’s and Yamada’s Mission District apartment last spring, when the couple was in transition. While they worked on the album, Johnson and Yamada packed up. “We needed to get out of the city because we were never there and we were paying all this rent,” Johnson says. By summer, the pair had moved to the wild highlands of Blue River, Colo.

“We thought we’d finished recording the album in San Francisco, but we weren’t happy with some elements,” he adds. So Moon Duo headed to Germany. Although Johnson acknowledges the synchronicity of recording in Berlin, he says it wasn’t motivated by his interest in krautrock, which he came to through Julian Cope’s influential book Krautrocksampler. “Every record he talks about, he’s so enthusiastic,” he says of Cope’s writing. “I can’t say I agree with all his choices, but it’s a guide book, and I went through it and bought stuff that sounded cool.”

The process of making Mazes reached Germany because Johnson and Yamada’s friends in Berlin had a studio and offered to help mix the album. “It just seemed like we should try it out in a different perspective, and go into a proper studio,” Johnson explains. There, the pair rerecorded some parts, tweaked things, and played with a collection of vintage drum machines.

The results are tight. Mazes‘ opening track “Seer” is a variant of a song off Escape, but lighter on the fuzz and denser with the rock ‘n’ roll. It gives you a good hint of where the band is heading on the rest of the many-layered album. Forerunners in the current kraut revival, Moon Duo is inspired by two-piece predecessors Silver Apples and Suicide while also exploring other sounds, including psychedelic wanderings, Velvet Underground-style hypnosis, and Modern Lovers post-punk.

“When You Cut” starts with lush synth and deep-throated vocals, and upbeat claps keep the song going steady, providing the framework for an untamed guitar solo. The band goes pop with the two-step “Run Around,” then gets dark again on the reverb-drenched “In the Sun” and on the closer, “Goners.” Ultimately, Mazes is a personal journey through music history, but one that also reflects the travels of life.

MOON DUO

With Lilac, Royal Baths

Mon./11, 9 p.m., $10

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

Hare-raising

Andrew Lam
-
0
Hare-raising

MUSIC This I know, having heard the name discussed in hushed yet excited tones among ecstatic ex-hardcore kids, having taken in all of two Lightning Bolt shows by Brians Chippendale and Gibson since Ride the Skies (Load, 2001). Having felt the gale-force winds of their live fury while swapping sweat with pinballing strangers. Having tasted the salad and found it delightful. Having waited with anticipation for their next show in the Bay Area—this time the night before they play Coachella.

Lightning Bolt’s most recent album, Earthly Delights (Load, 2009), is just as majestically noisy — and chock-full of wonder — as their seeming-career-best Hypermagic Mountain (Load, 2005). The time is right to share some truths about the dynamic duo.

 

DRUMMER-VOCALIST BRIAN CHIPPENDALE LIKES HIS FRIENDS FURRY.

“Mustard ran off, Weird appeared out of nowhere. Omni died,” says Chippendale of his Fort Thunder felines, driving the van and deep into the weeds of Peter Glantz and Nick Noe’s 2002s documentary, Lightning Bolt: The Power of Salad [and writ small like an afterthought] & Milkshakes. “Calico is too stupid to leave. Warlord ran off …” The talented cartoonist then goes on to recount the sad end of a pet rabbit, which broke its neck playing around metal. Seeing it bare its teeth, arch its back, and let lose a hair-(or hare-)raising “death scream,” Chippendale was forced to put it out of its misery with a sledgehammer. “Aw, I can’t believe I did that,” he says. “I love animals! Better than people, animals.”

Unless Lightning Bolt is playing, freakishly, on a stage, you must make the effort to get up close — or find a rafter or pole to dangle from.

I first saw ’em around ’03 when they played the Verdi Club, the old-folks rec hall near that sketchy patch of Bryant Street where working gals like to service their johns curbside. I wasn’t one of the lucky dozen or so standing right next to the twosome on the floor, so I wasn’t able to see much, even when I climbed up on a rickety metal folding chair to get a glimpse of sock-monkey-ish-masked Chippendale, looking like a mad drummer from the island of lost toys.

I fared better at Lobot Gallery in 2007, when I used all my best pit skills to wiggle up to the front for the first couple songs, risking a broken nose to get my fill of Lightning Bolt’s unforgettable way with Sabbath-style volume and Phillip Glass-style repetition, primal rambunctiousness and raw poetry. Certainly they’re the fiercest bass-and-drum duo ever to step into the formidable footwear of Ruins and godheadSilo, but has there ever been another hardcore or noise combo that has fully tapped the melodic and textural possibilities buried within a full-force blast beat?

 

BASSIST BRIAN GIBSON WORKS FOR VIDEO GAME COMPANY HARMONIX AS THE LEAD ARTIST ON GAMES SUCH AS ROCK BAND.

“I wish more of my projects were pure recreation,” the Rhode Island School of Design-schooled painter told Motherboard.tv. “I just get caught up in this sort of addiction to doing art and music stuff, but it would nice to be just fishing or exercising or drag racing.

So much of what I do is about me being deeply obsessed with projects and being alienated from communities and wanting to do something different.”

Don’t worry about missing the companion cassette that once went with Lightning Bolt’s “yellow album” debut — the CD includes the enthralling 30-minute noise epic “Zone.”

You also get the funny intro to “Caught Deep in the Zone,” in which a Euro-accented fellow warns, “Next time you go and buy a record and you think you’re all alternative and groovy — and everyone is into the alternative charts — remember it’s just like the other side, just a bit stranger.” Cue an onslaught of feedback-wracked, crunching skree: the death scream of Godzilla as lizard flesh is wrenched from bone.

 

ONE OF THE BEST LIGHTNING BOLT VIDEOS: PAPER RAD’S “13 MONSTERS.”

This ode to terrifyingly cute cartoon imagery, à la headless, bass-playing hot-pink tigers, opens with Gumby comforting a distraught Goo, who sobs, “There were 13 of them …” 

LIGHTNING BOLT

With T.I.T.S. and High Castle

Wed./13, 8 p.m., $10

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com

Acid-washed terror

Andrew Lam
-
0
Acid-washed terror

RETRO GORE With the upcoming release of Scream 4 — the overlong-awaited latest in a series riffing on 1980s slasher clichés — it feels like a good moment to review the source material, which is to say the deadly spawn of Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980). Issued at the heyday of the direct-to-video market, those films’ myriad cheap-and-cheaper knockoffs explored the full range of variably amateur charm.

Two years ago Ti West made a very nice homage in The House of the Devil, a babysitter-in-peril thriller that was slick and canny enough to get an actual theatrical release. No such thing is risked by Drew Rosas’ Blood Junkie, a new DVD release from Troma — the company so indiscriminate it can’t help but release a good movie once in a while. (Still, it should dial down its contempt: Lloyd Kaufman’s recycled all-purpose introduction suggests any movie might be better than the one you’re about to watch.) This dead-on parody of no-budget VHS horror circa 1987 (according to its website, Blood Junkie was “shot in Wisconsin for $7,000”) is a sleeper and a keeper for anyone who covets the worst of Reagan decade style.

Mulleted Craig (Nick Sommer) and fellow pencil-‘stached buddy Teddy (Mike Johnston) are on the prowl for chicks, a quest answered when they meet high school best friends Rachel (tube-topped Emily Treolo) and Laura (feather-haired, four-eyed Sarah Luther), who has just come into a big $35 booze budget left as grocery money by traveling parents for her insect-tormenting brainiac little bro Andy (Brady Cohen). The attraction is irresistible; Teddy alone sports a lime-green tiger-striped T, denim vest, and acid-washed jeans. Babe magnet!

Anyway, this quartet plus imp go camping near an abandoned chemical plant. Bad things happen, thanks to a killer of extremely vague identity and motivation. Which is just as it should be.

With its dweezly synth score, post-synched dialogue, lowbrow FX, fake aerobics workouts, and pseudo-age-streaked “film” stock, Blood Junkie is pure retro-flavva’d silliness. One nice touch is the male protagonists’ bromantic frisson — played as a joke, albeit so persistently that Craig’s offhand mid-wrestle “I seriously want you, man” feels like a naked confession. 

 

Tome time

Andrew Lam
-
0
Tome time

arts@sfbg.com

LIT This week brings the 30th installment of the National California Book Awards. Some of the books up for awards have been written about in the Guardian during the past year, including Rebecca Solnit’s Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, Richard O. Moore’s Writing the Silences, and Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes, by the 2011 Fred Cody Award for Lifetime Achievement winner Tamim Ansary. Local authors, editors, and translators among this year’s nominees include Solnit, Moore, Aife Murray, Brian Teare, Damion Searls, Michael Alenyikov, John Sakkis (who has contributed to the Guardian), Kate Moses, Matthew Zapruder, Lewis Buzbee, Neelanjana Bannerjee, and Pireeni Sundaralingam.

The 2011 edition of NCBA arrives at a time when the value and resolve of independent booksellers is clear. For many years, Borders and other chain stores seemed poised to kill small businesses devoted to selling books, and in fact, chain marketing undoubtedly has had a negative impact on individual shops. But Borders recently filed for bankruptcy, while a number of unique booksellers in the Bay Area and beyond continue to survive and thrive. Thanks to the Berkeley-based Small Press Distribution and San Francisco shops such as Needles & Pens, small publishing is also alive and within real-life reach. Here is the list of this year’s NCBA nominees, for the next time you venture into the neighborhood bookshop or library.

 

FICTION

• Ivan and Misha, stories, Michael Alenyikov (TriQuarterly Books, 212 pages, $18.95)

• Heidegger’s Glasses, Thaisa Frank (Counterpoint, 320 pages, $25)

• Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, stories, Yiyun Li (Random House, 240 pages, $25)

• Death is Not an Option, stories, Suzanne Rivecca (W.W. Norton, 22 pages, $23.95)

• The More I Owe You, Michael Sledge (Counterpoint, 320 pages, $15.95)

GENERAL NONFICTION

• Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson (Simon & Schuster, 368 pages, $27)

• The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, Michael Lewis (W. W. Norton, 320 pages, $15.95)

• Maid as Muse: How Servants Changed Emily Dickinson’s Life and Language, Aífe Murray (University Press of New England, 324 pages, $35)

• Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future, Robert B. Reich (Alfred A. Knopf, 273 pages, $27.95)

• The Twilight of the Bombs: Recent Challenges, New Dangers, and the Prospects for a World Without Nuclear Weapons, Richard Rhodes (Alfred A. Knopf, 400 pages, $29.95)

 

CREATIVE NONFICTION

• Not by Chance Alone: My Life as a Social Psychologist, Elliot Aronson (Basic Books, 304 pages, $27.50)

• A State of Change: Forgotten Landscapes of California, Laura Cunningham (Heyday, 352 pages, $50)

• Cakewalk, a memoir, Kate Moses (The Dial Press, 368 pages, $26)

• Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, Rebecca Solnit (University of California Press, 167 pages, $24.95)

• Deep Blue Home: An Intimate Ecology of Our Wild Ocean, Julia Whitty (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 256 pages, $24)

 

POETRY

• Suck on the Marrow, Camille T. Dungy (Red Hen Press, 88 pages, $18.95)

•Trance Archive: New and Selected Poems, Andrew Joron (City Lights Publishers, 120 pages, $14.95)

• Writing the Silences, Richard O. Moore (University of California Press, 136 pages, $19.95)

• Rough Honey, Melissa Stein (The American Poetry Review, 96 pages, $14)

• Pleasure, Brian Teare (Ahsahta Press, 88 pages, $17.95)

• Come on All You Ghosts, Matthew Zapruder (Copper Canyon Press, 96 pages, $16.95)

 

TRANSLATION, FICTION

• Translation by Anne Milano Appel, Blindly, by Claudio Magris, from Italian (Penguin Group Canada)

•Translation by David Frick, A Thousand Peaceful Cities, by Jerzy Pilch, from Polish (Open Letter Books, 143 pages, $14.95)

• Translation by Damion Searls, Comedy in a Minor Key, by Hans Keilson, from German (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 144 pages, $22)

 

POETRY

• Translation by Kurt Beals, engulf—enkindle, by Anja Utler, from German (Burning Deck, 96 pages, $14)

• Translation by Joshua Edwards, Ficticia, by María Baranda, from Spanish (Shearsman Books)

• Translation by John Sakkis and Angelos Sakkis, Maribor, by Demosthenes Agrafiotis, from Greek (Post-Apollo Press, 86 pages, $15)

 

CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

• Arroz con leche/Rice Pudding: Un poema para cocinar/A Cooking Poem, Jorge Argueta, illustrator Fernando Vilela (Groundwood Books/Libros Tigrillo, 32 pages, $18.95)

• The Haunting of Charles Dickens, Lewis Buzbee (Feiwel and Friends, 368 pages, $17.95)

• The Vinyl Princess, Yvonne Prinz (HarperTeen/HarperCollins Publishers, 320 pages, $16.99)

• Other Goose: Re-Nurseried!! and Re-Rhymed!! Children’s Classics, J. Otto Seibold (Chronicle Books, 80 pages, $19.99)

• Shooting Kabul, N.H. Senzai (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers/Paula Wiseman Books, 272 pages, $16.99)

 

SPECIAL RECOGNITION AWARD

Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry, edited by Neelanjana Banerjee, Summi Kaipa, and Pireeni Sundaralingam (University of Arkansas Press, 220 pages, $24.95)

 

FRED CODY AWARD FOR LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT

Tamim Ansary 

NORTHERN CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARDS

Sun/10, 1 p.m.–2:30 p.m.

Koret Auditorium

San Francisco Main Library

100 Larkin, SF

(510) 525-5476

www.poetryflash.org

 

Hanna and her sisters

Andrew Lam
-
0
Hanna and her sisters

arts@sfbg.com

FILM With great girl power comes great responsibility — words that only a few of the Powerpuff Girls of 2011 have lived by. Behold the new generation, too young to settle down, prepped to suit up in skintight Lycra or schoolgirl gear, and eager to mete out punishment to the baddies. Girls mature faster than boys, sure, but that diary-keeping wimpy kid reigning the other half of the cineplex would have plenty to jot down in his diary if he met up with one of these slay-belles.

These babes in boyland, with all its the traditionally masculinized violence and bloodshed, aren’t exactly the next Supergirls. They’re nowhere near as bloodless or wholesome as the original DC product (or the 1984 Helen Slater film), and they’re less likely to fall prey to the dangers of womanly representation for a mainstream fanboy audience that, say, 2004’s Catwoman succumbed to. But the little girls understand — what it’s like to grapple with a strength that just might spiral out of control. The tension between their innocuous, angelic looks and semi-socialized, she-tiger ferocity parallels the balance between their highly trainable programmability and their own desires. They’re damaged kid sisters of Lisbeth Salander more than they are the mutant second-banana femme students of the X-Men, and they’re itching for freedom like Ellen Page’s reality-hampered Boltie in Super, or the fantasy girl-gang hos in Sucker Punch. Or they’ve been souped up as angels of vengeance at the service of embittered father figures, much like Kick-Ass scene-stealer Chloe Moretz’s pint-sized Hit-Girl with her Saturday-morning-cartoon purple wig and stone-cold killer instincts. STAY ON TARGET

The title character of Hanna falls perfectly into the Hit-Girl mold. Add a dash of The Boys from Brazil-style genetic engineering — Hanna has the unfair advantage, you see, when it comes to squashing other kids on the soccer field or maiming thugs with her bare hands — and you have an ethereal killing/survival machine, played with impassive confidence by Atonement (2007) shit-starter Saoirse Ronan. She’s been fine-tuned by her father, Erik (Eric Bana), a spy who went out into the cold and off the grid, disappearing into the wilds of Scandinavia where he home-schooled his charge with an encyclopedia and brutal self-defense and hunting tests.

The repellent association with real-life child soldiers who are forcibly conscripted to fight wars for corrupt elders is somewhat dispelled by the back-to-the-land-of-the-Vikings backdrop, with the film opening on Hanna hunting, clad in furs and skins, hidden in the white-on-white snowy woods beside other predators and prey. Atonement director Joe Wright plays with a palette associated with innocence, purity, and death — this could be any time or place, though far from the touch of modern childhood stresses: that other Hannah (Montana), consumerism, suburban blight, and academic competition. The 16-year-old Hanna, however, isn’t immune from that desire to succeed. Her game mission: go from a feral, lonely existence into the modern world, run for her life (the Chemical Brothers’ score gives her the ideal Run Lola Run-ish background music), and avenge the death of her mother by killing Erik’s CIA handler, Marissa (Cate Blanchett). The nagging doubt: was she born free, or Bourne to be a killer?

Much like the illustrated Brothers Grimm storybook that she studies, Hanna is caught in an evil death trap of fairytale allegories. One wonders if the super-soldier apple didn’t fall far from the tree, since evil stepmonster Marissa oversaw the program that produced Hanna — the older woman and the young girl have the same cold-blooded talent for destruction and the same steely determination. Yet there’s hope for the young ‘un. After learning that even her beloved father hid some basic truths from her — and that family life can be less desperately cutthroat, especially when she encounters the celebrity-gossip-spouting tourist teen Sophie (Jessica Barden) and her family — this natural-born killer seems less likely to go along with the predetermined ending, happy or no, further along in her storybook life.

 

CABARET DURING WARTIME

It’s a mental game for Baby Doll in Sucker Punch, Zack Snyder’s exercise in supergirl action fantasy and gothic Lolita dread. Emily Browning’s puffy-lipped, anime-eyed darling is far from infallible, except in the crazed, mixed-metaphor war games in her mind. Her talent for disassociation kicks off with her primal crime: she mistakenly kills her younger sister while trying to protect them both from a menacing stepfather. Escape and heroism can be had via one’s fertile yet traumatized imagination: Baby Doll is imprisoned in an asylum for girls where she’s next in line for a lobotomy, thanks to her stepdad’s machinations. And like a multilayered fantasy game, reminiscent of Dorothy’s dreamy recasting of friends and family in The Wizard of Oz (1939), she’s transported to a brothel-dancehall, along with other girlish inmates.

Here Baby Doll has just a few days to hatch a plan that will allow the girls to escape before her virginity is sold off. Her very special defense: she mesmerizes all who see her dance, and then goes far, far away, into a dream world where she’s dressed like a sexy J-pop schoolgirl and battles giant samurai or robot-zombie Nazis. Thoughts of Burlesque (2010) are mercifully vanquished.

Though Baby Doll’s initial battle scene at a Japanese temple evokes Quentin Tarantino’s take on girl-power revenge fantasy, Kill Bill (2003-2004) — while catering to the fanboys who ogle (and fear) deadly hotties in vixenish costume — Sucker Punch distinguishes itself not with its blatant po-mo plundering of movie, game, and music history, but with its adherence to the idea that sisterhood is powerful, as Baby Doll forms a girl gang of super-fighters with her fellow inmates-dancers. Therein lies the real super-heroism: the organizing, hearts-and-minds might of an underdog who can imagine overcoming huge odds. Even if the hero and the final girl, Baby Doll, is only a legend in her mind.

HANNA opens Fri/8 in Bay Area theaters.

 

The joy of life

Andrew Lam
-
0
The joy of life

arts@sfbg.com

FILM To say that Bill Cunningham, the 82-year old New York Times photographer, has made documenting how New Yorkers dress his life’s work would be an understatement. To be sure, Cunningham’s two decades-old Sunday Times columns — “On the Street,” which tracks street-fashion, and “Evening Hours,” which covers the charity gala circuit — are about the clothes. And, my, what clothes they are.

But Cunningham is a sartorial anthropologist, and his pictures always tell the bigger story behind the changing hemlines, which socialite wore what designer, or the latest trend in footwear. Whether tracking the near-infinite variations of a particular hue, a sudden bumper-crop of cropped blazers, or the fanciful leaps of well-heeled pedestrians dodging February slush puddles, Cunningham’s talent lies in his ability to recognize fleeting moments of beauty, creativity, humor, and joy.

That last quality courses through Bill Cunningham New York, Richard Press’ captivating and moving portrait of a man whose reticence and personal asceticism are proportional to his total devotion to documenting what Harold Koda, chief curator at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, describes in the film as “ordinary people going about their lives, dressed in fascinating ways.”

Press goes about filming Cunningham the way the photographer claims to capture his own subjects: “discreetly, quietly, invisibly.” Press, along with producer Philip Gefter and cinematographer Tony Cenicola (also a Times staff photographer), followed Cunningham for two years with no crew (after Press spent eight attempting to get Cunningham’s consent), tailing the photographer from uptown soirees to the runways of Paris fashion week.

Interspersed with Cunningham’s own sharp insights and footage of the photographer biking around Manhattan and throwing himself into oncoming traffic to get the perfect shot, are interviews with old friends and frequent subjects: Upper West Side grandes dames, fashion powerhouses, former editors, neighbors, and strutting peacocks. The loving accounts they share of encounters with Cunningham sing his artistic praises and unwavering kindness but stop short of revealing much about the man himself, save for his monasticism.

Cunningham famously lived for decades in a tiny studio apartment above Carnegie Hall filled almost exclusively with negative-stuffed file cabinets and an Army cot. His uniform is the cheap blue jacket worn by French street sweepers, augmented by a duct-tapped poncho in inclement weather. He rarely stops to schmooze, let alone sleep or eat. When a real estate agent shows Cunningham, who over the course of filming was evicted from his Carnegie Hall cell, the kitchen of the new apartment he will be relocated to, he genially scoffs, “What would I do with that?”

Cunningham’s disdain for the material and emotional comforts most of us take for granted might seem at odds with the worlds he documents (perhaps the film’s most shocking moment comes when Cunningham casually reveals he has never been in a romantic relationship). Fashion has become a hydra-headed beast of which street style, and the myriad bloggers who document it, have been completely swallowed by.

What Bill Cunningham New York makes clear, however, is that for this man, sustained by indefatigable reserves of passion and the ability to see what others can’t, the pursuit of beauty is not merely his chosen vocation; it has always been and always will be a calling.

BILL CUNNINGHAM NEW YORK opens Fri/8 in Bay Area theaters.

Next step

Andrew Lam
-
0
Next step

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater may be an American treasure, but it’s one that has been adopted by the world. Wherever these dancers go, they jam the houses with enthusiastic audiences. That’s why it may seem curmudgeonly to say that while fabulous, they could be better. Not the dancers: technically, they are top-notch, as well as brave, fierce, and committed. What the company needs — and will now get — is a new vision.

It was both hopeful and disconcerting to see the company’s last Zellerbach engagement (March 30) under the leadership of Judith Jamison, Ailey’s first muse. She took over the company upon Ailey’s death, in 1989, when it was demoralized and deeply in debt. Today, Ailey’s repertoire is in good hands, and Jamison has built an enviable infrastructure. But the dancers are such technical powerhouses that audiences the world over gladly indulge work with surface glitz as long as they get Revelations at the end.

The first of this year’s programs showed what is right and wrong with the company. The best pieces by far were by Ailey: Cry (1971) and Revelations (1960). Both received excellent performances. They also showed that the Ailey dancers can be nuanced and expressive, when given half a chance.

Cry is dedicated to “all black women everywhere — especially our mothers,” and was created for Jamison. Here its three sections were entrusted to the majestic Rachel McLarec, a fiercely despairing Constance Stamatiou, and Briana Reed as the victorious survivor. The approach worked, though when performed by one woman, Cry feels more complex.

In Revelations, Linda Celeste Sims and Glenn Allen Sims pushed themselves physically and emotionally to the edge during “Fix Me, Jesus,” while Amos J. Machanic Jr. almost turned himself inside out in “I Wanna be Ready.” For “Rocka My Soul,” the dancers held back. A wise move: the audience wouldn’t let them go without an encore.

The first of two Bay Area premieres, Christopher L. Huggins’ three-part Anointed was intended as a tribute to the growth of the company under Jamison. Unfortunately, it played to the worst of the audience’s expectations. It was visually full of sound and fury, but conceptually and choreographically dim. A dark-clad figure (Jamar Roberts) calls upon a fierce, fist-clutching fighter (the incredibly fit Sims) to follow him. In voice-over, a reluctant Jamison accepts the call. Next, “Sally Forth,” the work’s best choreography, features Sims in a female quintet with a modicum of rhythmic invention as five dancers fly apart and coalesce into solidarity. A parallel men’s quintet, with a “transfigured” Roberts now in white, presented the men in unison turns that spun off into the wings. Not much there. Only the dedication of the dancers kept Anointed from burning itself to ashes.

In the second Bay Area premiere, Robert Battle’s The Hunt, Brown, Sims, Roberts, Antonio Douthit, Kirven James Boyd, and Yannick Lebrun used every ounce of reserve strength. Battle created a convincing evocation of masculinity that turned a cliché — man as hunter — into a complex ritual expression of solidarity, submission, and friendship. Good times were mixed with aggression and victimhood. The ideas flowed in and out of each other in rhythmically intricate stomping, skipping, and running patterns of considerable nuance. All were immaculately performed to music by the outstanding percussion ensemble Les Tambours du Bronx. It’s reassuring to hear that Battle will be taking over the company.

 

The real deal

Andrew Lam
-
0
The real deal

culture@sfbg.com

BODY ART Two weeks ago more than 300 tattoo, piercing, and body modification artists hung out their shingles at the Cow Palace for the San Francisco Body Art Expo. They came from Beijing, Samoa, Los Angeles, the Haight. Their booths ranged up and down the hall in no particular order. Hip-hop playing over the speakers in the booths did little to cut the pervasive metallic whine of tattoo machines.

It was difficult, at first, to tell one artist from another — the same Boris Carloffs and beautiful corpses were everywhere. I overheard Daat Kraus of Santa Rosa Tattoo recommend Freddy Negrete to two young men who’d been flipping through his portfolio. “He’s the real deal, the O.G. Definitely get tattooed by him if you can.” I asked him what sets Freddy apart, but his answer was slippery: “He’s like, 60 years old. He’s an old-school cholo artist.”

I wasn’t totally sure what that meant, but I began to perceive two major styles coexisting at the expo — you could call it East Coast versus West, old school versus new, or color versus black-and-gray. East Coast style is partly inspired by old sailor tattoos and vintage poster art — winking pin-up girls and devils, mermaids and anchors. West Coast style is influenced by Asian and Latino art and characterized by script and portraits in black and gray.

George Christian of L.A.’s South Style Tattoo, began his career in prison on a tattoo machine made out of a Walkman. He says his style is a Chicano art form, invented in East L.A. “It’s barrio art, self-expression,” he said. He showed me some of his own tats: a portrait of his mom, a sun goddess, a gargoyle — a talisman of protection — and, on his right arm in flowing script, “White Fence” — the oldest Chicano gang in East L.A. I asked how he feels giving someone a tattoo he knows is gang-related. “That’s on them,” he laughed. “I don’t ask why.”

As tattoos become more mainstream, tattoo collectors become more diverse — and so does the form. Barnaby, of Mom’s Tattoo in the Haight, has a B.F.A. from Otis College of Art and Design. He gave himself his first tattoo, a Dead Kennedys symbol, when he was 15. Barnaby seemed a little disillusioned with the expo — he was concerned, for example, about hygiene. He pointed to the rafters above our heads, where a layer of dust was plainly visible. “Would you go to a gynecologist in a garage?” he asked.

He showed me his setup — everything, including his lamp, was wrapped in plastic, like in a dentist’s office. He explained that all his precautions are more for his own safety than for his customers’. He keeps himself safe by assuming the worst. “Even if you’re the cutest little blonde virginal 18-year-old, I assume you have everything, you’re the dirtiest gutter punk I’ve ever seen, with an abscess on your arm. Can you draw?” he asked. I shook my head no. “You can probably get a booth here.”

Toward the end of my second day at the expo, by accident, I found Freddy Negrete. He was bent over someone’s forearm, outlining a detailed black-and-gray portrait of Danny Trejo — the famous image where Trejo is lighting up a blunt, smoke wreathing his face, his bare, tattooed chest on display.

His client Brian Boulware explained why he’d chosen Danny Trejo. “He’s this great character actor — he’s been in everything” he said. “People will see it and be like, hey, it’s that guy from those movies!”

I asked Freddy if he’d ever done any work on Trejo. “Once,” he said, “a long time ago.”

 

alt.sex.column: Positive too negative?

Andrew Lam
-
0
alt.sex.column: Positive too negative?

Dear Andrea:

I’m having a problem with my girlfriend. “Grace” is the hottest girl I’ve ever dated, but things aren’t going so well. She is possessive and gets mad at me for wanting to do anything she doesn’t want to (like going hiking or anything outdoors), and wants to know where I am every second, and who I talked to, and was she pretty, etc., etc. We used to have great sex, but lately I can’t come no matter what she does. It used to be just looking at her could practically make me come. Can this be fixed?

Love,

Not My Dream Girl After All?

Dear Not:

While not news, dissatisfaction can be — indeed, often is — partner-specific. But you two were doing fine before you, well … before you got to know each other. Oops!

Did you notice how in your description of “Grace” herself, and of your relationship, you never once mention being crazy about her? Hot for her, sure But love her, cherish her, want to spend your life with her … like her? Did I miss the part where you said any of those things? No? Then why are we bothering with this? You don’t like her. Frankly, she doesn’t sound all that likable. Go find a mirror and practice saying this: “I’m sorry, “Grace.” It isn’t working out. It’s not you, it’s me.” And then run like hell. She sounds like she might be an ashtray-thrower. And you don’t have a pet bunny, do you?

I’m not wrong about this, am I? We can talk therapy. You guys could go to couples counseling and try to tease out what’s making her feel so insecure, and what, short of never doing anything without her and never talking to anyone not preapproved by her, you could do to assuage it. You could learn some techniques for deescalating your disagreements before they get to DEFCON 1, and you could … yeah, no. You could, but why bother, since do I need to remind you? You don’t like her.

Frankly, I find extreme possessiveness extremely creepy. And even if you’d mentioned anything like affection here, I’d probably be urging you to get out. It’s not like she’s likely any fonder of you than you are of her. You’d think it would be obvious that desire to possess and control cancels out love, but seeing how the model for romantic love on TV and in the movies often goes: “meet cute, then stalk relentlessly until the object of your obsession is broken enough to give in,” clearly it is not.

So we have established that being hot does not actually qualify a person to be your, or anyone else’s partner — any more than having a lot of money does, or having great connections, or the good drugs, or even being perfect on paper and approved of by one’s mother. If you don’t really care about her, or she for you, she is not for you. For once — seriously, I don’t think I’ve ever said this before — your dick is smarter.

Love,

Andrea

 

Stage Listings

Maria Poblet
-
0

Stage listings are compiled by Guardian staff. Performance times may change; call venues to confirm. Reviewers are Robert Avila, Rita Felciano, and Nicole Gluckstern. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks. For complete listings, see www.sfbg.com.

THEATER

ONGOING

The Busy World is Hushed New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van ness; 861-8972, www.nctcsf,org. $24-40. Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through May 1.New Conservatory Theatre Center presents the world premiere of a play by Keith Bunin.

*Caliente Pier 29, The Embarcadero; 438-2668, www.love.zinzanni.org. $117-145. Wed-Sat, 6pm; Sun, 5pm. Open-ended. Teatro Zinzanni presents a new production conceived in San Francisco.

*40 Pounds in 12 Weeks The Marsh, Studio Theater, 1074 Valencia; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $15-35. Call for dates and times. Through April 30. Pidge Meade’s one-woman show extends its successful run.

*Geezer Marsh, 1062 Valencia; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Thurs, 8pm; Sat, 5pm; Sun, 3pm. Through May 1. The Marsh presents a new solo show about aging and mortality by Geoff Hoyle.

It is not about pomegranates! Boxcar Playhouse, 505 Natoma; (510) 982-6311, www.darvag.org. $20. s-Sun, 8pm. Through Sun/10. “It’s not about pomegranates,” the exasperated playwright Atoosa (Ana Bayat King) tells dramaturge Sean (Richard Reinholdt), referring to the fact that her play about love doesn’t deal directly with her purported cultural identity as a woman “between two worlds,” Iran and the US. Any artist who has felt the pressure to play an easily marketable role can sympathize with her dilemma. As a woman from the Middle East (“middle of what,” she demands to know), her story is a hot commodity, but only as it fits the preconceived notion of what her story should be. It’s a premise worthy of exploration, but in Darvag Theatre’s awkwardly-staged production, the exposition comes off as being more preachy than genuine, and the characters confined by the very stereotypes they are battling against. Indeed, though the lady doth protest, the play becomes very much about pomegranates as the broad assumptions the protagonists make about each other in the beginning of the play are little dispelled by their actions by the end. Sean is a rude American man, Atoosa a passionate enigma. There is some quiet humor that infuses the dialogue and the actors are a likable pair, but the piece itself feels underdeveloped and unresolved. (Nicole Gluckstern)

Lady Grey (in ever lower light) EXIT on Taylor, 277 Taylor; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $15-50. Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through Sun/10. Cutting Ball Theater presents the Bay Area premiere of three short plays by Will Eno.

Loveland The Marsh, 1062 Valencia; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $20-35. Fri, 8pm; Sat, 8:30pm (also May 1 and 8, 7pm). Through May 8. Ann Rudolph’s one-woman show continues its successful run.

M. Butterfly Gough Street Playhouse, 1620 Gough; (510) 207-5774, www.custommade.org. $20-28. Thurs-Sat, 8pm (also Sun/10, 7pm). Through April 16. Custom Made Theatre presents David Henry Hwang’s award-winning play.

*Obscura: A Magic Play Exit Studio, 156 Eddy; 673-3847, www.sffringe.org. $20-25. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through April 16. Christian Cagigal is back with the magical. Over the last several years, the popular Bay Area writer/performer has developed a series of dramatically structured magic shows (the most recent being the autobiographical Now and at the Hour), each a different attempt at blending expert prestidigitation with elements of narrative theater. Tightly focused and deliberately small-scale, Obscura is in some ways his most successful foray yet. In the Exit Theater’s new studio space, Cagigal (with occasional help from his audience) unfolds a series of sly Gothic stories combined with extremely clever, sometimes dementedly playful card and coin tricks—the majority a collection of favorite pieces from other magicians—all played out on a delicately managed little table augmented by overhead projection (a set-up that offers various visual opportunities, including use of title cards). Rapid-fire narration (occasionally indistinct but generally articulate) and a laid back, slightly mischievous demeanor combine here with consummate skill in an intimate and very enjoyable evening of crafty little tales. If there’s an overarching theme, it probably has something to do with human folly, the persistence of mystery, and the devil, but then any good fable involving a deck of cards probably should. (Avila)

*The Oldest Profession Brava Theater, 2781 24th St; 647-2822, www.brava.org. $10-25. Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 3 and 8pm. Through Sat/9. Brava Theater presents a play by Paula Vogel, directed by Evren Odcikin. Who says tricks are for kids? Five elderly women of the night (Linda Ayres-Frederick, Lee Brady, Tamar Cohn, Cec Levinson, Patricia Silver) converge by day at a park bench to swap stories, cavil, and defend their turf amid a changing world and one or two last hurrahs in Brava Theater’s production of Paula Vogel’s 1988 play about sex work, aging, and class solidarity. The subject matter is ripe, but the drama feels somewhat undeveloped. Although consciously set on the cusp of the Reagan era—an era culminating now in roiling confrontations everywhere you look—this fitfully amusing if generally well-acted and enjoyable feminist drama-cum-floorshow gives only a gentle political bite, preferring the tickle and caress of heartfelt comedy centered on the seeming incongruity of streetwise matrons. As the group dwindles, each final bow comes as a sexy and/or raunchy swan song—highlights of the evening—accompanied with Old New Orleans ambience by Angela Dwyer’s jaunty upright piano. It’s a bit like Cabaret meets Going in Style, and as directed by Evren Odcikin makes for a short but sweet ride. (Avila) Party of 2 — The New Mating Musical Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter; 1-800-838-3006, www.partyof2themusical.com. $27-29. Fri, 9pm. Open-ended. A musical about relationships by Shopping! The Musical author Morris Bobrow.

*Pearls Over Shanghai Thrillpeddlers’ Hypnodrome, 575 Tenth St; 1-800-838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $30-69. Sat, 8pm. Through Sat/9. Thrillpeddlers’ acclaimed production of the Cockettes musical ends its successful run.

7 Sins…One More Time! EXIT Theatre, 156 Eddy; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $25-40. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through Sun/10. James Judd’s long-running comedy hit has a return engagement.

Secret Identity Crisis SF Playhouse, Stage 2, 533 Sutter; 869-5384, www.un-scripted.com. $10-20. Thurs-Sat, 8pm (no show may 7). Through May 14. Un-Scripted Theater Company presents a story about unmasked heroes.

Shopping! The Musical Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter; (800) 838-3006, www.shoppingthemusical.com. $27-29. Sat, 8pm. Open-ended. A musical comedy revue about shopping by Morris Bobrow.

A Streetcar Named Desire Actors Theatre, 855 Bush; 345-1287, www.actorstheatresf.org. $26-38. Wed-Sat, 8pm. Through May 28. Actors Theatre of San Francisco presents the Tennesse Williams tale.

Talking With Angels Royce Gallery, 2901 Mariposa; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $21-35. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through may 21. A play by Shelley Mitchell set in Nazi-occupied Hungary.

Twelfth Night African American Art & Culture Complex, 762 Fulton; (800) 838-3006, www.African-AmericanShakes.org. $15-35. Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm (no performance April 24). Through may 1. African-American Shakespeare Company presents a jazzy interpretation of the Bard.

*Wirehead SF Playhouse, 533 Sutter; 677-9596, www.sfplayhouse.org. $30-50. Tues-Wed, 7pm; Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 3and 8pm. Through April 23. Perfectionism’s ruthless class dimensions come to the fore in SF Playhouse’s smart, fun, and sharply staged Bay Area premiere about the super-smart posthumans of the near future, and the rest of us. A shady China-based conglomerate with a name that sounds like Sin-Tell sells a scintillating if dangerous procedure for those already well connected: a hardwire boost to the neural circuitry that gives the recipient more than an edge on the competition and something just shy of godlike powers. Two friends and colleagues in a banking firm (Craig Marker and Gabriel Marin) and their variously class-marked but equally ambitious girlfriends (Lauren Grace and Madeleine H.D. Brown) are all drawn into this cyborgian gold rush, and it gets sticky in more ways than one, as meanwhile a brash local DJ named RIP (Scott Coopwood) raps sardonically over the airwaves about this latest twist in an old game. SF Playhouse’s Susi Damilano directs a charismatic cast (including a terrific Cole Alexander Smith in a related series of frenetic roles) in Matt Benjamin and Logan Brown’s culture-jamming riposte to tech-mad humanist hogwash about Progress. It gets you thinking. (Avila)

BAY AREA

*Beardo Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; (510) 841-6500, www.shotgunplayers.org. $17-26. Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through Apil 24. Shotgun Players present a an original songplay about Rasputin.

East 14th – True Tale of a Reluctant Player The Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston Way, Berk; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Sat, 8pm; Sun, 7pm. Through May 8. Don Reed’s one-man show continues.

Eccentricities of a Nightingale Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison; (510) 843-4822, www.auroratheatre.org. $34-45. Tues, 7pm; Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through May 8. Aurora Theatre Company presents a Tennessee Williams drama.

Free Range Thinking Marsh Berkeley, TheaterStage, 2120 Allston, Berk; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Through Sat/ 9. The Marsh Berkeley presents a new comedic solo show by Robert Dubac.

Not a Genuine Black Man The Marsh Berkeley, TheaterStage, 2120 Allston Way, Berk; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Thurs, 7:30pm. Through May 5. Brian Copeland’s one-man show continues.

Out of Sight The Marsh Berkeley, Theaterstage, 2120 Allston Way, Berk; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Sat, 5pm (no show Sat/9); Sun, 3pm. Through May 8. Sara Felder’s one-woman show returns.

*Ruined Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison, Berk; (510) 647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org. $29-73. Call for dates and times. Through Sun/10. Berkeley Rep presents Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer-winning play about the lives of women in Africa.

Singing at the Edge of the World The Cabaret at The Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston Way, Berk; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $15-35. Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Through April 16. The Marsh presents a one-man show by Randy Rutherford.

Snow Falling on Cedars TheatreWorks at Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro, Mtn View; (650) 463-1960, www.theatreworks.org. $24-67. Tues-Wed, 7:30pm; Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 2 and 8pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through April 24. TheatreWorks presents a stage adaptation of the David Guterson novel.

The World’s Funniest Bubble Show The Marsh Berkeley, Cabaret, 2120 Allston Way, Berk; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $8-50. Through July 10. The bubbles keep flowing.

 

Music Listings

Maria Poblet
-
0

Music listings are compiled by Cheryl Eddy. Since club life is unpredictable, it’s a good idea to call ahead to confirm bookings and hours. Prices are listed when provided to us. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

WEDNESDAY 6

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Ani DiFranco Fillmore. 8pm, $33.50.

Fences, Rin Tin Tiger, Passenger and Pilot Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $10.

Emma Jean Foster and Glide Gospel 50 Mason Social House, 50 Mason, SF; www.50masonsocialhouse.com. 9pm, free.

Aaron Glass and friends, Mowgli’s, Sufis Elbo Room. 9pm, $8.

A Rocket to the Moon, Valencia, Anarbor, Runner Runner Bottom of the Hill. 7pm, $15.

Spider Heart Submission, 2183 Mission, SF; www.sf-submission.com. 10pm, $5.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Cosmo Alleycats Le Colonial, 20 Cosmo, SF; www.lecolonialsf.com. 7pm.

Dink Dink Dink, Gaucho, Michael Abraham Amnesia. 7pm, free.

Ben Marcato and the Mondo Combo Top of the Mark. 7:30pm, $10.

Michael Parsons Revolution Café, 3248 22nd St, SF; (415) 642-0474. 8:30pm, free.

Denise Perrier Rrazz Room. 8pm, $30.

DANCE CLUBS

Booty Call Q-Bar, 456 Castro, SF; www.bootycallwednesdays.com. 9pm. Juanita Moore hosts this dance party, featuring DJ Robot Hustle.

Buena Onda Little Baobab, 3388 19th St., SF; (415) 643-3558. 10pm, $3. Soul, funk, swing, and rare grooves with residents Dr. Musco and DJB.

Cannonball Beauty Bar. 10pm, free. Rock, indie, and nu-disco with DJ White Mike.

Jam Fresh Wednesdays Vessel, 85 Campton, SF; (415) 433-8585. 9:30pm, free. With DJs Slick D, Chris Clouse, Rich Era, Don Lynch, and more spinning top40, mashups, hip hop, and remixes.

Mary-Go-Round Lookout, 3600 16th St, SF; (415) 431-0306. 10pm, $5. A weekly drag show with hosts Cookie Dough, Pollo Del Mar, and Suppositori Spelling.

No Room For Squares Som., 2925 16th St, SF; (415) 558-8521. 6-10pm, free. DJ Afrodite Shake spins jazz for happy hour.

Respect Wednesdays End Up. 10pm, $5. Rotating DJs Daddy Rolo, Young Fyah, Irie Dole, I-Vier, Sake One, Serg, and more spinning reggae, dancehall, roots, lovers rock, and mash ups.

Synchronize Il Pirata, 2007 16th St, SF; (415) 626-2626. 10pm, free. Psychedelic dance music with DJs Helios, Gatto Matto, Psy Lotus, Intergalactoid, and guests.

THURSDAY 7

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Dark Star Orchestra Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $35.

Dodos, Reading Rainbow Fillmore. 8pm, $18.50.

Futur Skullz, Blown to Bits, Trouble Kidz, Born Uglies Eagle Tavern. 9:30pm, $7.

Heavy Metal Kings, Danny Diablo Slim’s. 8:30pm, $18.

Hydrophonic, Burn River Burn, Electric Shepherd Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $8.

Loto Ball, Moira Scar, Tunnel Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $7.

Peelander-Z, Anamanaguchi, Glowing Stars DNA Lounge. 8pm, $16.

Ron Sexsmith, Caitlin Rose Café Du Nord. 9pm, $16.

“Shock and Roll Therapy” Stud. 8pm, free. With Havarti Party, Poor Sons, Narooma, and Cool Ghouls.

Society 50 Mason Social House, 50 Mason, SF; www.50masonsocialhouse.com. 9pm, free.

Sounds, K.Flay, DJ Aaron Axelsen, Miles the DJ Rickshaw Stop. 9pm, $14.

Tycho, Inu, Soma FM DJs Independent. 8pm, $20. SOMA FM 11th anniversary party.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

“Activating the Medium XIV: Radio: Chapter One” San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St, SF; www.sfmoma.org. 7pm, $10. With Richard Garet and Jim Haynes and Allison Holt.

Raul Midion Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8pm, $28.

Organsm featuring Jim Gunderson and “Tender” Tim Shea Bollyhood Café. 6:30-9pm, free.

Stompy Jones Top of the Mark. 7:30pm, $10.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Bill Monroe Tribute Band Atlas Café. 8-10pm, free.

Chris Milam Revolution Café, 3248 22nd St, SF; (415) 642-0474. 8:30pm, free.

Rafael and Ingrid Red Poppy Art House. 7pm, $12.

“Twang! Honky Tonk” Fiddler’s Green, 1330 Columbus, SF; www.twanghonkytonk.com. 5pm.

DANCE CLUBS

Afrolicious Elbo Room. 9:30pm, $5. DJs Pleasuremaker and Señor Oz spin Afrobeat, tropicália, electro, samba, and funk.

Caribbean Connection Little Baobab, 3388 19th St, SF; (415) 643-3558. 10pm, $3. DJ Stevie B and guests spin reggae, soca, zouk, reggaetón, and more.

Club Jammies Edinburgh Castle. 10pm, free. DJs EBERrad and White Mice spinning reggae, punk, dub, and post punk.

Culture Corner Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; www.kokococktails.com. 10pm, free. Roots reggae, dub, rocksteady, and classic dancehall with DJ Tomas’ Bunny Wailer and Big Youth Birthday Celebration.

Diapers, Binkies, and Friends Knockout. 9:30pm, free. Dad-to-be Jamie Jams spins baby-themed jams with DJs Stab Master Arson and DJ Eli Glad.

Drop the Pressure Underground SF. 6-10pm, free. Electro, house, and datafunk highlight this weekly happy hour.

Electric Feel Lookout, 2600 16th St, SF; www.fringesf.com. 9pm, $2. Indie music video dance party with subOctave and Blondie K, plus guest DJ Candy.

80s Night Cat Club. 9pm, $6 (free before 9:30pm). Two dance floors bumpin’ with the best of 80s mainstream and underground with Dangerous Dan, Skip, Low Life, and guests.

Wolfgang Gartner Ruby Skye. 9pm, $25.

Guilty Pleasures Gestalt, 3159 16th St, SF; (415) 560-0137. 9:30pm, free. DJ TophZilla, Rob Metal, DJ Stef, and Disco-D spin punk, metal, electro-funk, and 80s.

Holy Thursday Underground SF. 10pm, $5. Bay Area electronic hip hop producers showcase their cutting edge styles monthly.

Jivin’ Dirty Disco Butter, 354 11th St., SF; (415) 863-5964. 8pm, free. With DJs spinning disco, funk, and classics.

Lacquer Beauty Bar. 10pm-2am, free. DJs Mario Muse and Miss Margo bring the electro.

Mestiza Bollywood Café, 3376 19th St, SF; (415) 970-0362. 10pm, free. Showcasing progressive Latin and global beats with DJ Juan Data.

1984 Mighty. 9pm, $2. The long-running New Wave and 80s party has a new venue, featuring video DJs Mark Andrus, Don Lynch, and celebrity guests.

Peaches Skylark, 10pm, free. With an all female DJ line up featuring Deeandroid, Lady Fingaz, That Girl, and Umami spinning hip hop.

Thursday Special Tralala Revolution Café, 3248 22nd St, SF; (415) 642-0474. 5pm, free. Downtempo, hip-hop, and freestyle beats by Dr. Musco and Unbroken Circle MCs.

FRIDAY 8

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Bryan Adams Warfield. 9pm, $25-85.

Akron/Family, Delicate Steve, Honeymoon, DJ Britt Govea Independent. 9pm, $15.

Buxter Hoot’n, Devotionals, Nick Jaina Café Du Nord. 9:30pm, $10.

Danielson, Battlehooch, Half-handed Cloud Bottom of the Hill. 10pm, $13.

Dark Star Orchestra Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $35.

Fiver Brown and the Good Sinners 50 Mason Social House, 50 Mason, SF; www.50masonsocialhouse.com. 9pm, free.

Larry Graham and Graham Central Station Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8 and 10pm, $30-38.

Hillside Fire, Narwhal Brigade, Ayurveda, Sandy Greenfield Band Kimo’s. 9pm.

Hot Lunch, Blank Stares, Pre-Legendary and the Dreamers Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $7.

Mantles, Wrong Words, Lenz, Wet Illustrated Knockout. 9pm, $7.

Or the Whale, Chamberlin, Steve Taylor Rickshaw Stop. 8:30pm, $12.

Protest the Hero, Maylene and the Sons of Disaster, TesseracT Slim’s. 8:30pm, $17.

Volbeat, Damned Things Fillmore. 7pm, $22.50.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Black Market Jazz Orchestra Top of the Mark. 9pm, $10.

Empty Space Revolution Café, 3248 22nd St, SF; (415) 642-0474. 9pm, free.

Madeleine Peyroux Palace of Fine Arts, 3301 Lyon, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 8pm, $30-75.

Redshift, Rootstock Community Music Center, 544 Capp, SF; www.sfcmc.org. 8pm, $10.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

“Cowpokes, Gunslingers, and Outlaw Country” Red Devil Lounge. 9pm, $12. With Good Luck Thrift Store Outfit, Whisky Richards, Tiny Television, and Preservation.

Tito y Su Son De Cuba Quinteto Red Poppy Art House. 8pm, $12-15.

DANCE CLUBS

Afro Bao Little Baobab, 3388 19th St, SF; (415) 643-3558. 10pm, $5. Afro and world music with rotating DJs including Stepwise, Steve, Claude, Santero, and Elembe.

Bass Time Continuum Session 4 Club Six. 9pm, $5. With Lotus Drops, Energy Alchemist, Bitch Plz, Benito, and Mr. Rise.

Blow Up DNA Lounge. 10pm, $10-15. “Miss Blow Up USA Pageant” with Jeffrey Paradise.

Cartagena! CD release party   Elbo Room. 10pm, $5. Cumbia with DJs Beto, Vinnie Esparza, and B. Cause.

Deeper 222 Hyde, 222 Hyde, SF; (415) 345-8222. 9pm, $10. With rotating DJs spinning dubstep and techno.

Dirty Rotten Dance Party Madrone Art Bar. 9pm, $5. With DJs Morale, Kap10 Harris, and Shane King spinning electro, bootybass, crunk, swampy breaks, hyphy, rap, and party classics.

Exhale, Fridays Project One Gallery, 251 Rhode Island, SF; (415) 465-2129. 5pm, $5. Happy hour with art, fine food, and music with Vin Sol, King Most, DJ Centipede, and Shane King.

Fo’ Sho! Fridays Madrone Art Bar. 10pm, $5. DJs Kung Fu Chris and Makossa spin rare grooves, soul, funk, and hip-hop classics.

Fubar Fridays Butter, 354 11th St., SF; (415) 863-5964. 6pm, $5. With DJs spinning retro mashup remixes.

Good Life Fridays Apartment 24, 440 Broadway, SF; (415) 989-3434. 10pm, $10. With DJ Brian spinning hip hop, mashups, and top 40.

Hot Chocolate Milk. 9pm, $5. With DJs Big Fat Frog, Chardmo, DuseRock, and more spinning old and new school funk.

Rockabilly Fridays Jay N Bee Club, 2736 20th St, SF; (415) 824-4190. 9pm, free. With DJs Rockin’ Raul, Oakie Oran, Sergio Iglesias, and Tanoa “Samoa Boy” spinning 50s and 60s Doo Wop, Rockabilly, Bop, Jive, and more.

Some Thing Stud. 10pm, $7. VivvyAnne Forevermore, Glamamore, and DJ Down-E give you fierce drag shows and afterhours dancing.

Vintage Orson, 508 Fourth St, SF; (415) 777-1508. 5:30-11pm, free. DJ TophOne and guest spin jazzy beats for cocktalians.

SATURDAY 9

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Jeff Beck, Imelda May Fillmore. 8pm, $75.

Danger Babes 50 Mason Social House, 50 Mason, SF; www.50masonsocialhouse.com. 9pm, free.

Dark Star Orchestra Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $35.

Deskonocidos, Criaturas, Needles, Ruleta Rusa Knockout. 10pm, $7.

Funk Bros Revolution Café, 3248 22nd St, SF; (415) 642-0474. 9pm, free.

Larry Graham and Graham Central Station Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8 and 10pm, $38.

Jesse Morris and the Man Cougars Riptide Bar. 9pm, free.

Papercuts, Banjo or Freakout Café Du Nord. 9:30pm, $14.

Pollux, Bonnie Dune, Lite Brite Bottom of the Hill. 10pm, $12.

Rise Against, Bad Religion, Four Year Strong Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, 99 Grove, SF; www.ticketmaster.com. 7:30pm, $32.50.

Shearing Pinx, Continues, Victory and Associates Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $7.

Submarines, Nik Freitas Slim’s. 9pm, $16.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Hypnotist Collectors, Shareef Ali and the Radical Folksonomy, Fancy Dan Band, Slow Motion Cowboys Hotel Utah. 8pm, $8.

Mamacoatl Red Poppy Art House. 8pm, $15.

Craig Ventresco and Meredith Axelrod Atlas Café. 4pm, free.

DANCE CLUBS

Afro Bao Little Baobab, 3388 19th St, SF; (415) 643-3558. 10pm, $5. Afro and world music with rotating DJs including Stepwise, Steve, Claude, Santero, and Elembe.

Bootie SF: Halloween in April DNA Lounge. 9pm, $6-12. Who says Halloween only comes once a year? Mash it up with DJs Adrian and Mysterious D, guest Faroff, and more.

Club Gossip Cat Club. 9pm, $5-8. Pay tribute to Janet Jackson and other 80s ladies at this party guest-hosted by the Bay Area Flash Mob.

New Wave City New Order Tribute Mezzanine. 9pm, $7-12. Celebrate “Blue Monday” on a Saturday with DJ Shindog, guest Andy T, and more.

Rock City Butter, 354 11th St., SF; (415) 863-5964. 6pm, $5 after 10pm. With DJs spinning party rock.

Same Sex Salsa and Swing Magnet, 4122 18th St, SF; (415) 305-8242. 7pm, free.

Spirit Fingers Sessions 330 Ritch. 9pm, free. With DJ Morse Code and live guest performances.

Spotlight Siberia, 314 11th St, SF; (415) 552-2100. 10pm. With DJs Slowpoke, Double Impact, and Moe1.

Tormenta Tropical Elbo Room. 10pm. Electro cumbia with Chancha Via Circuito, El G, and DJs Shawn Reynaldo and Oro 11.

SUNDAY 10

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Band of Heathens Slim’s. 7:30pm, $15.

Let the Night Roar, Pigs Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $6.

G. Love and Special Sauce, Belle Brigade Fillmore. 8pm, $25.

Mark Growden and His Tucson String Band, Conspiracy of Venus Amnesia. 9pm, $10.

John Mellencamp Warfield. 7pm, $49.50-130.

Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, Now You, Listo Independent. 8pm, $18.

Whiskerman, 7 Orange ABC, Magic Leaves Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $8.

David Wilcox Yoshi’s San Francisco. 7pm, $25.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Assad Brothers Palace of Fine Arts, 3301 Lyon, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 7pm, $25-60.

John Santos Bliss Bar, 4026 24th St., SF; www.blissbarsf.com. 4:30pm, $10.

Tom Lander Duo Medjool, 2522 Mission, SF; www.medjoolsf.com. 6-9pm, free.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Family Folk Explosion Revolution Café, 3248 22nd St, SF; (415) 642-0474. 8:30pm, free.

Jenny Lynn and Her Gone Daddies Thee Parkside. 4pm, free.

“San Francisco Festival of the Mandolins” Croatian American Cultural Center, 60 Onondaga, SF; www.croatianamericanweb.org. 10am-5pm, $15.

DANCE CLUBS

Batcave Cat Club. 10pm, $5. Death rock, goth, and post-punk with Steeplerot Necromos and c_death. Dub Mission Elbo Room. 9pm, $6. Dub, roots, and classic dancehall with DJ Sep, Vinnie Esparza, and guest Adam Twelve.

Gloss Sundays Trigger, 2344 Market, SF; (415) 551-CLUB. 7pm. With DJ Hawthorne spinning house, funk, soul, retro, and disco.

Honey Soundsystem Paradise Lounge. 8pm-2am. “Dance floor for dancers – sound system for lovers.” Got that?

La Pachanga Blue Macaw, 2565 Mission, SF; www.thebluemacawsf.com. 6pm, $10. Salsa dance party with live Afro-Cuban salsa bands.

MONDAY 11

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Elephant and Castle, Pixel Memory, Butterfly Bones Elbo Room. 9pm, $5.

Moon Duo, Royal Baths, Lilac Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

Scala and Kolacny Brothers Independent. 8pm, $25.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Broun Fellinis Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8pm, $25.

Lavay Smith Orbit Room, 1900 Market, SF; (415) 252-9525. 7-10pm, free.

DANCE CLUBS

Death Guild DNA Lounge. 9:30pm, $3-5. Gothic, industrial, and synthpop with Joe Radio, Decay, and Melting Girl.

Krazy Mondays Beauty Bar. 10pm, free. With DJs Ant-1, $ir-Tipp, Ruby Red I, Lo, and Gelo spinning hip hop.

M.O.M. Madrone Art Bar. 6pm, free. With DJ Gordo Cabeza and guests playing all Motown every Monday.

Network Mondays Azul Lounge, One Tillman Pl, SF; www.inhousetalent.com. 9pm, $5. Hip-hop, R&B, and spoken word open mic, plus featured performers.

Sausage Party Rosamunde Sausage Grill, 2832 Mission, SF; (415) 970-9015. 6:30-9:30pm, free. DJ Dandy Dixon spins vintage rock, R&B, global beats, funk, and disco at this happy hour sausage-shack gig.

Skylarking Skylark. 10pm, free. With resident DJs I & I Vibration, Beatnok, and Mr. Lucky and weekly guest DJs.

TUESDAY 12

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Olof Arnalds Café Du Nord. 9:30pm, $15.

Amee Chapman, Jenny Kerr, Sugarplums Club Waziema, 543 Divisadero, SF; (415) 356-6641. 8pm, free.

Ms. Lauryn Hill Warfield. 8pm, $59.50-90.

Omar Rodriguez Lopez Group, Zachs Marquise Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $21.

Haroula Rose, TD Lind Hotel Utah. 8pm, $8.

Rural Alberta Advantage, Lord Huron, Vandella Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $14.

Scala and Kolacny Brothers Independent. 8pm, $25.

Sydney Ducks, Something Fierce Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $6.

DANCE CLUBS

Boomtown Little Baobab, 3388 19th St, SF; www.bissapbaobab.com. 9pm, free. DJ Mundi spins roots, ragga, dancehall, and more.

Eclectic Company Skylark, 9pm, free. DJs Tones and Jaybee spin old school hip hop, bass, dub, glitch, and electro.

Share the Love Trigger, 2344 Market, SF; (415) 551-CLUB. 5pm, free. With DJ Pam Hubbuck spinning house.

 

Film Listings

Maria Poblet
-
0

Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Michelle Devereaux, Peter Galvin, Max Goldberg, Dennis Harvey, Johnny Ray Huston, Louis Peitzman, Lynn Rapoport, Ben Richardson, and Matt Sussman. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock. For first-run showtimes, see Movie Guide.

OPENING

Arthur For those keeping score at home, this is 456th remake of 2011. And it’s only April! (1:45) Four Star, Marina.

*Bill Cunningham New York See “The Joy of Life.” (1:24) Embarcadero, Shattuck.

Born to Be Wild Morgan Freeman narrates this IMAX nature doc. (:40)

*Hanna See “Hanna and Her Sisters.” (1:51) Presidio.

*In a Better World Winner of this year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, this latest from Danish director Susanne Bier (2004’s Brothers, 2006’s After the Wedding) and her usual co-scenarist Anders Thomas Jensen (2005’s Adam’s Apples, 2003’s The Green Butchers) is a typically engrossing, complex drama that deals with the kind of rage for “personal justice” that can lead to school and workplace shootings, among other things (like terrorism). Shy, nervous ten-year-old Elias (Markus Rygaard) needs a confidence boost, but things are worrying both at home and elsewhere. His parents are estranged, and his doting father (Mikael Persbrandt) is mostly away as a field hospital in Kenya tending victims of local militias. At school, he’s an easy mark for bullies, a fact which gets the attention of charismatic, self-assured new kid Christian (William Jøhnk Nielsen), who appoints himself Elias’ new (and only) friend — then when his slightly awed pal is picked on again, intervenes with such alarming intensity that the police are called. Christian appears a little too prone to violence and harsh judgment in teaching “lessons” to those he considers in the wrong; his own domestic situation is another source of anger, as he simplistically blames his earnest, distracted executive father (Ulrich Thomsen) for his mother’s recent cancer death. Is Christian a budding little psychopath, or just a kid haplessly channeling his profound loss? Regardless, when an adult bully (Kim Bodnia as a loutish mechanic) humiliates Elias’ father in front of the two boys, Christian pulls his reluctant friend into a pursuit of vengeance that surely isn’t going to end well. With their nuanced yet head-on treatment of hot button social and ethical issues, Bier and Jensen’s work can sometimes border on overly-schematic melodrama, meting out its own secular-humanist justice a bit too handily, like 21st-century cinematic Dickenses. But like Dickens, they also have a true mastery of the creating striking characters and intricately propulsive plotlines that illustrate the points at hand in riveting, hugely satisfying fashion. This isn’t their best. But it’s still pretty excellent, and one of those universally accessible movies you can safely recommend even to people who think they don’t like foreign or art house films. (1:53) Embarcadero. (Harvey)

Max Manus One of Norway’s most expensive films to date, Max Manus follows the rise to infamy of the title character, a charismatic World War II resistance fighter whose specialty was blowing up German ships docked in occupied Oslo harbor. Again, I emphasize: this is a World War II movie about Norway made by Norwegians — though the Brits play a role, there’s nary a mention of the United States. That fact is the single most refreshing part of a movie that’s nonetheless clearly been inspired by stateside war epics, with traumatic flashbacks, male bonding, sadistic Nazis, rousing if familiar-sounding dialogue (“Being a commando takes more than courage!”), etc. Star Aksel Hennie anchors a film that’s painted in pretty broad strokes with a nuanced performance befitting the real-life Manus’ legacy as an everyman who became a hero. (1:58) Balboa. (Eddy)

*Poetry Sixtysomething Mija (legendary South Korean actor Yun Jung-hee) impulsively crashes a poetry class, a welcome shake-up in a life shaped by unfulfilling routines. In order to write compelling verse, her instructor says, it is important to open up and really see the world. But Mija’s world holds little beauty beyond her cheerful outfits and beloved flowers; most pressingly, her teenage grandson, a mouth-breathing lump who lives with her, is completely remorseless about his participation in a hideous crime. In addition, she’s just been diagnosed with the early stages of Alzheimer’s, and the elderly stroke victim she housekeeps for has started making inappropriate advances. Somehow writer-director Lee Chang-dong (2007’s Secret Sunshine) manages not to deliver a totally depressing film with all this loaded material; it’s worth noting Poetry won the Best Screenplay Award at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. Yun is unforgettable as a woman trying to find herself after a lifetime of obeying the wishes of everyone around her. Though Poetry is completely different in tone than 2009’s Mother, it shares certain elements — including the impression that South Korean filmmakers have recognized the considerable rewards of showcasing aging (yet still formidable) female performers. (2:19) Opera Plaza, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

Soul Surfer Biopic about teen surfer and shark-attack survivor Bethany Hamilton. (1:46)

Your Highness Failed Oscar host James Franco goes back to his day job in his anachronistic medieval comedy from David Gordon Green (2008’s Pineapple Express). (1:42) Presidio.

ONGOING

The Adjustment Bureau As far as sci-fi romantic thrillers go, The Adjustment Bureau is pretty standard. But since that’s not an altogether common genre mash-up, I guess the film deserves some points for creativity. Based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, The Adjustment Bureau takes place in a world where all of our fates are predetermined. Political hotshot David Norris (Matt Damon) is destined for greatness — but not if he lets a romantic dalliance with dancer Elise (Emily Blunt) take precedence. And in order to make sure he stays on track, the titular Adjustment Bureau (including Anthony Mackie and Mad Men‘s John Slattery) are there to push him in the right direction. While the film’s concept is intriguing, the execution is sloppy. The Adjustment Bureau suffers from flaws in internal logic, allowing the story to skip over crucial plot points with heavy exposition and a deus ex machina you’ve got to see to believe. Couldn’t the screenwriter have planned ahead? (1:39) Four Star, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

*Battle: Los Angeles Michael Bay is likely writhing with envy over Battle: Los Angeles; his Transformers flicks take a more, erm, nuanced view of alien-on-human violence. But they’re not all such bad guys after all; these days, as District 9 (2009) demonstrated, alien invasions are more hazardous to the brothers and sisters from another planet than those trigger-happy humanoids ready to defend terra firma. So Battle arrives like an anomaly — a war-is-good action movie aimed at faceless space invaders who resemble the Alien (1979) mother more than the wide-eyed lost souls of District 9. Still reeling from his last tour of duty, Staff Sergeant Nantz (Aaron Eckhart) is ready to retire, until he’s pulled back in by a world invasion, staged by thirsty aliens. In approximating D-Day off the beach of Santa Monica, director Jonathan Liebesman manages to combine the visceral force of Saving Private Ryan (1998) with the what-the-fuck hand-held verite rush of Cloverfield (2008) while crafting tiny portraits of all his Marines, including Michelle Rodriguez, Ne-Yo, and True Blood‘s Jim Parrack. A few moments of requisite flag-waving are your only distractions from the almost nonstop white-knuckle tension fueling Battle: Los Angeles. (1:57) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Chun)

*Carancho What Psycho (1960) did for showers this equally masterful, if far more bloody, neo-noir is bound to do for crossing the street at night. Argentine director Pablo Trapero has spun his country’s grim traffic statistics (the film’s opening text informs us that more than 8,000 people die every year in road accidents at a daily average of 22) into a Jim Thompson-worthy drama of human ugliness and squandered chances. Sosa (Ricardo Darín of 2009’s The Secret in Their Eyes) is the titular “carancho,” or buzzard, a disbarred lawyer-turned-ambulance chaser who swoops down on those injured in road accidents on behalf of a shady foundation that fixes personal injury lawsuits. It’s only a matter of time before he crosses paths with and falls for Lujan (a wonderful Martina Gusman, also of Trapero’s 2008 Lion’s Den), a young ambulance medic battling her own demons and a grueling work schedule. A May-December affair begins to percolate until Sosa botches a job and incurs the wrath of the foundation, kicking off a chain reaction that only leads to further tragedy for him and his newfound love. Trapero keeps a steady hand at the wheel throughout, deftly guiding his film through intimate scenes that lay bare Lujan’s quiet desperation and Sosa’s moral ambivalence as well as genuinely shocking moments of violence. The Academy passed over Carancho as one of this year’s nominees for Best Foreign Language Film, but Hollywood would do well to learn from talent like Trapero’s. (1:47) Lumiere. (Sussman)

*Cedar Rapids What if The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005) got so Parks and Rec‘d at The Office party that he ended up with a killer Hangover (2009)? Just maybe the morning-after baby would be Cedar Rapids. Director Miguel Arteta (2009’s Youth in Revolt) wrings sweet-natured chuckles from his banal, intensely beige wall-to-wall convention center biosphere, spurring such ponderings as, should John C. Reilly snatch comedy’s real-guy MVP tiara away from Seth Rogen? Consider Tim Lippe (Ed Helms of The Hangover), the polar opposite of George Clooney’s ultracompetent, complacent ax-wielder in Up in the Air (2009). He’s the naive manchild-cum-corporate wannabe who never quite graduated from Timmyville into adulthood. But it’s up to Lippe to hold onto his firm’s coveted two-star rating at an annual convention in Cedar Rapids. Life conspires against him, however, and despite his heartfelt belief in insurance as a heroic profession, Lippe immediately gets sucked into the oh-so-distracting drama, stirred up by the dangerously subversive “Deanzie” Ziegler (John C. Reilly), whom our naif is warned against as a no-good poacher. Temptations lie around every PowerPoint and potato skin; as Deanzie warns Lippe’s Candide, “I’ve got tiger scratches all over my back. If you want to survive in this business, you gotta daaance with the tiger.” How do you do that? Cue lewd, boozy undulations — a potbelly lightly bouncing in the air-conditioned breeze. “You’ve got to show him a little teat.” Fortunately Arteta shows us plenty of that, equipped with a script by Wisconsin native Phil Johnston, written for Helms — and the latter does not disappoint. (1:26) California, Four Star. (Chun)

Certified Copy Abbas Kiarostami’s beguiling new feature signals “relationship movie” with every cobblestone step, but it’s manifestly a film of ideas — one in which disillusionment is as much a formal concern as a dramatic one. Typical of Kiarostami’s dialogic narratives, Certified Copy is both the name of the film and an entity within the film: a book written against the ideal of originality in art by James Miller (William Shimell), an English pedant fond of dissembling. After a lecture in Tuscany, he meets an apparent admirer (Juliette Binoche) in her antique shop. We watch them talk for several minutes in an unbroken two-shot. They gauge each other’s values using her sister as a test case — a woman who, according to the Binoche character, is the living embodiment of James’ book. Do their relative opinions of this off-screen cipher constitute characterization? Or are they themselves ciphers of the film’s recursive structure? Kiarostami makes us wonder. They begin to act as if they were married midway through the film, though the switch is not so out of the blue: Kiarostami’s narrative has already turned a few figure-eights. Several critics have already deemed Certified Copy derivative of many other elliptical romances; the strongest case for an “original” comes of Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy (1954). The real difference is that while Rossellini’s masterpiece realizes first-person feelings in a third-person approach, Kiarostami stays in the shadow of doubt to the end. (1:46) Embarcadero, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Goldberg)

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules (1:36) 1000 Van Ness.

Even the Rain It feels wrong to criticize an “issues movie” — particularly when the issues addressed are long overdue for discussion. Even the Rain takes on the privatization of water in Bolivia, but it does so in such an obvious, artless way that the ultimate message is muddled. The film follows a crew shooting an on-location movie about Christopher Columbus. The film-within-a-film is a less-than-flattering portrait of the explorer: if you’ve guessed that the exploitation of the native people will play a role in both narratives, you’d be right. The problem here is that Even the Rain rests on our collective outrage, doing little to explain the situation or even develop the characters. Case in point: Sebastian (Gael García Bernal), who shifts allegiances at will throughout the film. There’s an interesting link to be made between the time of Columbus and current injustice, but it’s not properly drawn here, and in the end, the few poignant moments get lost in the shuffle. (1:44) Opera Plaza. (Peitzman)

Hop (1:30) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, Shattuck.

I Am File in the dusty back drawer of An Inconvenient Truth (2006) wannabes. The cringe-inducing, pretentious title is a giveaway — though the good intentions are in full effect — in this documentary by and about director Tom Shadyac’s search for answers to life’s big questions. After a catastrophic bike accident, the filmmaker finds his lavish lifestyle as a successful Hollywood director of such opuses as Bruce Almighty (2003) somewhat wanting. Thinkers and spiritual leaders such as Desmond Tutu, Howard Zinn, UC Berkeley psychology professor Dacher Keltner, and scientist David Suzuki provide some thought-provoking answers, although Shadyac’s thinking behind seeking out this specific collection of academics, writers, and activists remains somewhat unclear. I Am‘s shambling structure and perpetual return to its true subject — Shadyac, who resembles a wide-eyed Weird Al Yankovic — doesn’t help matters, leaving a viewer with mixed feelings, less about whether one man can work out his quest for meaning on film, than whether Shadyac complements his subjects and their ideas by framing them in such a random, if well-meaning, manner. And sorry, this film doesn’t make up for Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994). (1:16) Shattuck. (Chun)

*The Illusionist Now you see Jacques Tati and now you don’t. With The Illusionist, aficionados yearning for another gem from Tati will get a sweet, satisfying taste of the maestro’s sensibility, inextricably blended with the distinctively hand-drawn animation of Sylvain Chomet (2004’s The Triplets of Belleville). Tati wrote the script between 1956 and 1959 — a loving sendoff from a father to a daughter heading toward selfhood — and after reading it in 2003 Chomet decided to adapt it, bringing the essentially silent film to life with 2D animation that’s as old school as Tati’s ambivalent longing for bygone days. The title character should be familiar to fans of Monsieur Hulot: the illusionist is a bemused artifact of another age, soon to be phased out with the rise of rock ‘n’ rollers. He drags his ornery rabbit and worn bag of tricks from one ragged hall to another, each more far-flung than the last, until he meets a little cleaning girl on a remote Scottish island. Enthralled by his tricks and grateful for his kindness, she follows him to Edinburgh and keeps house while the magician works the local theater and takes on odd jobs in an attempt to keep her in pretty clothes, until she discovers life beyond their small circle of fading vaudevillians. Chomet hews closely to bittersweet tone of Tati’s films — and though some controversy has dogged the production (Tati’s illegitimate, estranged daughter Helga Marie-Jeanne Schiel claimed to be the true inspiration for The Illusionist, rather than daughter and cinematic collaborator Sophie Tatischeff) and Chomet neglects to fully detail a few plot turns, the dialogue-free script does add an intriguing ambiguity to the illusionist and his charge’s relationship — are they playing at being father and daughter or husband and wife? — and an otherwise straightforward, albeit poignant tale. (1:20) Opera Plaza. (Chun)

Inside Job Inside Job is director Charles Ferguson’s second investigative documentary after his 2007 analysis of the Iraq War, No End in Sight, but it feels more like the follow-up to Alex Gibney’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005). Keeping with the law of sequels, more shit blows up the second time around. As with No End in Sight, Ferguson adeptly packages a broad overview of complex events in two hours, respecting the audience’s intelligence while making sure to explain securities exchanges, derivatives, and leveraging laws in clear English (doubly important when so many Wall Street executives hide behind the intricacy of markets). The revolving door between banks, government, and academia is the key to Inside Job‘s account of financial deregulation. At times borrowing heist-film conventions (it is called Inside Job, after all), Ferguson keeps the primary players in view throughout his history so that the eventual meltdown seems anything but an accident. The filmmaker’s relentless focus on the insiders isn’t foolproof; tarring Ben Bernanke, Henry Paulson, and Timothy Geithner as “made” guys, for example, isn’t a substitute for evaluating their varied performances over the last two years. Inside Job makes it seem that the entire crisis was caused by the financial sector’s bad behavior, and this too is reductive. Furthermore, Ferguson does not come to terms with the politicized nature of the economic fallout. In Inside Job, there are only two kinds of people: those who get it and those who refuse to. The political reality is considerably more contentious. (2:00) Opera Plaza. (Goldberg)

Insidious (1:42) 1000 Van Ness.

*Jane Eyre Do we really need another adaptation of Jane Eyre? As long as they’re all as good as Cary Fukunaga’s stirring take on the gothic romance, keep ’em coming. Mia Wasikowska stars in the titular role, with the dreamy Michael Fassbender stepping into the high pants of Edward Rochester. The cast is rounded out by familiar faces like Judi Dench, Jamie Bell, and Sally Hawkins — all of whom breathe new life into the material. It helps that Fukunaga’s sensibilities are perfectly suited to the story: he stays true to the novel while maintaining an aesthetic certain to appeal to a modern audience. Even if you know Jane Eyre’s story — Mr. Rochester’s dark secret, the fate of their romance, etc. — there are still surprises to be had. Everyone tells the classics differently, and this adaptation is a thoroughly unique experience. And here’s hoping it pushes the engaging Wasikowska further in her ascent to stardom. (2:00) Albany, Embarcadero, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

Kill the Irishman If you enjoy 1970s-set Mafia movies featuring characters with luxurious facial hair zooming around in Cadillacs, flossing leather blazers, and outwitting cops and each other — you could do a lot worse than Kill the Irishman, which busts no genre boundaries but delivers enjoyable retro-gangsta cool nonetheless. Adapted from the acclaimed true crime book by a former Cleveland police lieutenant, the film details the rise and fall of Danny Greene, a colorful and notorious Irish-American mobster who both served and ran afoul of the big bosses in his Ohio hometown. During one particularly conflict-ridden period, the city weathered nearly 40 bombings — buildings, mailboxes, and mostly cars, to the point where the number of automobiles going sky-high is almost comical (you’d think these guys would’ve considered taking the bus). The director of the 2004 Punisher, Jonathan Hensleigh, teams up with the star of 2008’s Punisher: War Zone, Ray Stevenson, who turns in a magnetic performance as Greene; it’s easy to see how his combination of book- and street smarts (with a healthy dash of ruthlessness) buoyed him nearly to the top of the underworld. The rest of the cast is equally impressive, with Vincent D’Onofrio, Val Kilmer, Christopher Walken, and Linda Cardellini turning in supporting roles, plus a host of dudes who look freshly defrosted from post-Sopranos storage. (1:46) SF Center. (Eddy)

The King’s Speech Films like The King’s Speech have filled a certain notion of “prestige” cinema since the 1910s: historical themes, fully-clothed romance, high dramatics, star turns, a little political intrigue, sumptuous dress, and a vicarious taste of how the fabulously rich, famous, and powerful once lived. At its best, this so-called Masterpiece Theatre moviemaking can transcend formula — at its less-than-best, however, these movies sell complacency, in both style and content. In The King’s Speech, Colin Firth plays King George VI, forced onto the throne his favored older brother Edward abandoned. This was especially traumatic because George’s severe stammer made public address tortuous. Enter matey Australian émigré Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush, mercifully controlled), a speech therapist whose unconventional methods include insisting his royal client treat him as an equal. This ultimately frees not only the king’s tongue, but his heart — you see, he’s never had anyone before to confide in that daddy (Michael Gambon as George V) didn’t love him enough. Aww. David Seidler’s conventionally inspirational script and BBC miniseries veteran Tom Hooper’s direction deliver the expected goods — dignity on wry, wee orgasms of aesthetic tastefulness, much stiff-upper-lippage — at a stately promenade pace. Firth, so good in the uneven A Single Man last year, is perfect in this rock-steadier vehicle. Yet he never surprises us; role, actor, and movie are on a leash tight enough to limit airflow. (1:58) Empire, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Shattuck, Smith Rafael, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

*Last Lions It’s hard being a single mom. Particularly when you are a lioness in the Botswana wetlands, your territory invaded and mate killed by an invading pride forced out of their own by encroaching humanity. Add buffalo herds (tasty yes, but with sharp horns they’re not afraid to use) and crocodiles (no upside there), and our heroine is hard-pressed to keep herself alive, let alone her three small cubs. Derek Joubert’s spectacular nature documentary, narrated by Jeremy Irons (in plummiest Lion King vocal form) manages a mind-boggling intimacy observing all these predators. Shot over several years, while seeming to depict just a few weeks or months’ events, it no doubt fudges facts a bit to achieve a stronger narrative, but you’ll be too gripped to care. Warning: those kitties sure are cute, but this sometimes harsh depiction of life (and death) in the wild is not suitable for younger children. (1:28) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

*Limitless An open letter to the makers of Limitless: please fire your marketing team because they are making your movie look terrible. The story of a deadbeat writer (Bradley Cooper) who acquires an unregulated drug that allows him to take advantage of 100 percent of his previously under-utilized brain, Limitless is silly, improbable and features a number of distracting comic-book-esque stylistic tics. But consumed with the comic book in mind, Limitless is also unpredictable, thrilling, and darkly funny. The aforementioned style, which includes many instances of the infinite regression effect that you get when you point two mirrors at each other, and a heavy blur to distort depth-of-field, only solidifies the film’s cartoonish intentions. Cooper learns foreign languages in hours, impresses women with his keen attention to detail, and sets his sights on Wall Street, a move that gets him noticed by businessman Carl Van Loon (Robert DeNiro in a glorified cameo) as well as some rather nasty drug dealers and hired guns looking to cash in on the drug. Limitless is regrettably titled and masquerades in TV spots as a Wall Street series spin-off, but in truth it sports the speedy pacing and tongue-in-cheek humor required of a good popcorn flick. (1:37) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Galvin)

*The Lincoln Lawyer Outfitted with gym’d-tanned-and-laundered manly blonde bombshells like Matthew McConaughey, Josh Lucas, and Ryan Phillippe, this adaptation of Michael Connelly’s LA crime novel almost cries out for an appearance by the Limitless Bradley Cooper — only then will our cabal of flaxen-haired bros-from-other-‘hos be complete. That said, Lincoln Lawyer‘s blast of morally challenged golden boys nearly detracts from the pleasingly gritty mise-en-scène and the snappy, almost-screwball dialogue that makes this movie a genre pleasure akin to a solid Elmore Leonard read. McConaughey’s criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller is accustomed to working all the angles — hence the title, a reference to a client who’s working off his debt by chauffeuring Haller around in his de-facto office: a Lincoln Town Car. Haller’s playa gets truly played when he becomes entangled with Louis Roulet (Phillippe), a pretty-boy old-money realtor accused of brutally attacking a call girl. Loved ones such as Haller’s ex Maggie (Marisa Tomei) and his investigator Frank (William H. Macy) are in jeopardy — and in danger of turning in some delightfully textured cameos — in this enjoyable walk on the sleazy side of the law, the contemporary courtroom counterpart to quick-witted potboilers like Sweet Smell of Success (1957). (1:59) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Miral (1:42) Embarcadero.

*Of Gods and Men It’s the mid-1990s, and we’re in Tibhirine, a small Algerian village based around a Trappist monastery. There, eight French-born monks pray and work alongside their Muslim neighbors, tending to the sick and tilling the land. An emboldened Islamist rebel movement threatens this delicate peace, and the monks must decide whether to risk the danger of becoming pawns in the Algerian Civil War. On paper, Of Gods and Men sounds like the sort of high-minded exploitation picture the Academy swoons over: based on a true story, with high marks for timeliness and authenticity. What a pleasant surprise then that Xavier Beauvois’s Cannes Grand Prix winner turns out to be such a tightly focused moral drama. Significantly, the film is more concerned with the power vacuum left by colonialism than a “clash of civilizations.” When Brother Christian (Lambert Wilson) turns away an Islamist commander by appealing to their overlapping scriptures, it’s at the cost of the Algerian army’s suspicion. Etienne Comar’s perceptive script does not rush to assign meaning to the monks’ decision to stay in Tibhirine, but rather works to imagine the foundation and struggle for their eventual consensus. Beauvois occasionally lapses into telegraphing the monks’ grave dilemma — there are far too many shots of Christian looking up to the heavens — but at other points he’s brilliant in staging the living complexity of Tibrihine’s collective structure of responsibility. The actors do a fine job too: it’s primarily thanks to them that by the end of the film each of the monks seems a sharply defined conscience. (2:00) Albany, Lumiere. (Goldberg)

*Orgasm, Inc. Liz Canner’s doc begins as she’s hired to do some editing work for a drug company in need of a loop of erotic videos to excite the women who’re testing its latest invention: a cream targeting so-called “Female Sexual Dysfunction.” As it turns out, basically everyone with a lab is frantically trying to develop a female Viagra; potential profits could rake in billions. Canner’s intrigued enough to leave the porn-editing bay and further investigate the race to scientifically calculate exactly what women need to achieve orgasm. Of course, it’s not as simple as what men need — though that doesn’t stop pharmaceutical giants from pushing potentially harmful drugs, inventors from convincing women to get invasive operations to test something called the “Orgasmatron” (note: Woody Allen not included), surgeons from pimping scary “genital reconstruction surgery,” or TV doctors from defining what a “normal” woman’s sex life should be. San Francisco’s own Dr. Carol Queen is among the inspiring experts interviewed to help cut through all the big-money bullshit. (1:19) Roxie. (Eddy)

Paul Across the aisle from the alien-shoot-em-up Battle: Los Angeles is its amiable, nerdy opposite: Paul, with its sweet geeks Graeme (Simon Pegg) and Clive (Nick Frost), off on a post-Comic-Con pilgrimage to all the US sites of alien visitation. Naturally the buddies get a close encounter of their very own, with a very down-to-earth every-dude of a schwa named Paul (voiced by Seth Rogen), given to scratching his balls, spreading galactic wisdom, utilizing Christ-like healing powers, and cracking wise when the situation calls for it (as when fear of anal probes escalates). Despite a Pegg-and-Frost-penned script riddled with allusions to Hollywood’s biggest extraterrestrial flicks and much 12-year-old-level humor concerning testicles and farts, the humor onslaught usually attached to the two lead actors — considered Lewis and Martin for pop-smart Anglophiles — seems to have lost some of its steam, and teeth, with the absence of former director and co-writer Edgar Wright (who took last year’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World to the next level instead). Call it a “soft R” for language and an alien sans pants. (1:44) 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

Potiche When we first meet Catherine Deneuve’s Suzanne — the titular trophy wife (or potiche) of Francois Ozon’s new airspun comedy — she is on her morning jog, barely breaking a sweat as she huffs and puffs in her maroon Adidas tracksuit, her hair still in curlers. It’s 1977 and Suzanne’s life as a bourgeois homemaker in a small provincial French town has played out as smoothly as one of her many poly-blend skirt suits: a devoted mother to two grown children and loving wife who turns a blind eye to the philandering of husband Robert (Fabrice Luchini), Suzanne is on the fast track to comfortable irrelevance. All that changes when the workers at Robert’s umbrella factory strike and take him hostage. Suzanne, with the help of union leader and old flame Babin (Gerard Depardieu, as big as a house), negotiates a peace, and soon turns around the company’s fortunes with her new-found confidence and business savvy. But when Robert wrests back control with the help of a duped Babin, Suzanne does an Elle Woods and takes them both on in a surprise run for political office. True to the film’s light théâtre de boulevard source material, Ozon keeps things brisk and cheeky (Suzanne sings with as much ease as she spouts off Women’s Lib boilerplate) to the point where his cast’s hammy performances start blending into the cheery production design. Satire needs an edge that Potiche, for all its charm, never provides. (1:43) Clay, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Sussman)

Rango (1:47) Empire, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki.

Red Riding Hood In order to appreciate a movie like Red Riding Hood, you have to be familiar with the teen supernatural romance genre. Catherine Hardwicke’s sexy reinterpretation of the fairy tale is not high art: the script is often laughable, the acting flat, and the werewolf CGI embarrassing. But there’s something undeniably enjoyable about Red Riding Hood, especially in the wake of the duller, more sexually repressed Twilight series. Amanda Seyfried stars as Valerie, a young woman living in a village of werewolf cannon fodder. She’s torn between love and duty — or, more accurately, Peter (Shiloh Fernandez) and Henry (Max Irons). Meanwhile, a vicious werewolf hunter (Gary Oldman) has arrived to overact his way into killing the beast. It’s a silly story with plenty of hamfisted references to the original fairy tale, but if you can embrace the camp factor and the striking visuals, Red Riding Hood is actually quite fun. Though, to be fair, it might help if you suffer through Beastly first. (1:38) SF Center. (Peitzman)

*Rubber This starts out just on the right side of self-conscious prank, introducing a droll fourth-wall-breaking framework to a serenely surreal central conceit: An old car tire abandoned in the desert miraculously animates itself to commit widespread mayhem. Credit writer-director-editor-cinematographer-composer Quentin Dupieux for an original concept and terrific execution, as our initially wobby antihero wends its way toward civilization, discovering en route it can explode (or just crush) other entities with its “mind.” Which this rumbling black ring of discontent very much enjoys doing, to the misfortune of various hapless humans and a few small animals. Rubber is an extended Dadaist joke that has adventurous fun with filmic and genre language. Beautifully executed as it is, the concept tires (ahem) after a while, reality-illusion games and comedic flair flagging by degrees. Still, it’s so polished and resourceful a treatment of an utterly peculiar idea that no self-respecting cult film fan will want to say they didn’t see this during its initial theatrical run. (1:25) Lumiere. (Harvey)

*Source Code A post-9/11 Groundhog Day (1993) with explosions, Inception (2010) with a heart, or Avatar (2009) taken down a notch or dozen in Chicago —whatever you choose to call it, Source Code manages to stand up on its own wobbly Philip K. Dick-inspired legs, damn the science, and take off on the wings of wish fulfillment. ‘Cause who hasn’t yearned for a do-over — and then a do-over of that do-over, etc. We could all be as lucky — or as cursed — as soldier Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal), who gets to tumble down that time-space rabbit hole again and again, his consciousness hitching a ride in another man’s body, while in search of the bomber of a Chicago commuter train. On the upside, he gets to meet the girl of his dreams (Michelle Monaghan) — and see her getting blown to smithereens again and again, all in the service of his country, his commander-cum-link to the outside world (Vera Farmiga), and the scientist masterminding this secret military project (Jeffrey Wright). On the downside, well, he gets to do it over and over again, like a good little test bunny in pinball purgatory. Fortunately, director Duncan Jones (2009’s Moon) makes compelling work out of the potentially ludicrous material, while his cast lends the tale a glossed yet likable humanity, the kind that was all too absent in Inception. (1:33) Marina, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Sucker Punch If steampunk and Call of Duty had a baby, would it be called Baby Doll? That seems to be the question posed by director-cowriter Zack Snyder with his latest edge-skating, CGI-laden opus. Neither as saccharine and built-for-kids as last year’s Legend of the Guardians, nor as doomed and gore-besotted as 2006’s 300, Sucker Punch instead reads as a grimy Grimm’s fairy tale built for girls succored on otaku, Wii, and suburban pole dancing lessons. Already caught in a thicket of storybook tropes, complete with a wicked stepfather and vulnerable younger sister, Baby Doll (Emily Browning) is tossed into an asylum for wayward girls, signed up for a lobotomy that’s certain to put her in la-la land for good. Fortunately she has a great imagination — and a flair for disassociating herself from the horrors around her —and the scene suddenly shifts to a bordello-strip club populated by such bad-girls-with-hearts-of-gold as Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish) and sister Rocket (Jena Malone). There Baby Doll discovers yet another layer in the gameplay: like a prospective hoofer in Dancing with the Stars, she must dance her way to the next level or next prize — while deep in her imagination, she sees herself battling giant samurai, robot-zombie Nazis, dragons, and such, assisted by the David Carradine-like, cliché-spouting wise man (Scott Glenn) and accompanied by an inspiring score that includes Björk’s “Army of Me” and covers of the Pixies and Stooges. Things take a turn for the girl gang-y when she recruits Sweet Pea, Rocket, and other random stripper-‘hos (Vanessa Hudgens and Real World starlet Jamie Chung) in her scheme to escape. Why bother, one wonders, since Baby Doll seems to be a genuine escape artist of the mind? The ever-fatalistic Snyder obviously has affection for his charges: when the shadows inevitably close in, he delicately refrains from the arterial spray as the little girls bite the dust in what might be the closest thing to a feature-length anime classic that Baz Luhrmann would give his velvet frock coat to make. (2:00) Empire, 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

Super Naive, vaguely Christian, and highly suggestible everyman Frank (Rainn Wilson) snaps when his wife (Liv Tyler) is seduced away by sleazy drug dealer Jacques (Kevin Bacon). With a little tutoring from the cute girl at the comic store, Libby (Ellen Page), he throws together a pathetically makeshift superhero costume and equally makeshift persona as the Crimson Bolt. Time to dress up and beat down local dealers, child molesters, and people who cut in line with cracks like, “Shut up, crime!” Frank’s taking stumbling, fumbling baby steps toward rescuing his lady love, but it becomes more than simply his mission when Libby discovers his secret and tries to horn in on his act as his kid sidekick Boltie. Alas, what begins as a charming, intriguing indie about dingy reality meeting up with violent vigilantism goes full-tilt Commando (1985), with all the attendant gore and shocks. In the process director James Gunn (2006’s Slither) completely squanders his chance to peer more deeply into the dark heart of the superhero phenom, topping off this vaguely Old Testament reading of good and evil with an absolutely incoherent ending. (1:36) Embarcadero, California. (Chun)

*Win Win Is Tom McCarthy the most versatile guy in Hollywood? He’s a successful character actor (in big-budget movies like 2009’s 2012; smaller-scale pictures like 2005’s Good Night, and Good Luck; and the final season of The Wire). He’s an Oscar-nominated screenwriter (2009’s Up). And he’s the writer-director of two highly acclaimed indie dramas, The Station Agent (2003) and The Visitor (2007). Clearly, McCarthy must not sleep much. His latest, Win Win, is a comedy set in his hometown of New Providence, N.J. Paul Giamatti stars as Mike Flaherty, a lawyer who’s feeling the economic pinch. Betraying his own basic good-guy-ness, he takes advantage of a senile client, Leo (Burt Young), when he spots the opportunity to pull in some badly-needed extra cash. Matters complicate with the appearance of Leo’s grandson, Kyle (newcomer Alex Shaffer), a runaway from Ohio. Though Mike’s wife, Jackie (Amy Ryan), is suspicious of the taciturn teen, she allows Kyle to crash with the Flaherty family. As luck would have it, Kyle is a superstar wrestler — and Mike happens to coach the local high school team. Things are going well until Kyle’s greedy mother (Melanie Lynskey) turns up and starts sniffing around her father’s finances. Lessons are learned, sure, and there are no big plot twists beyond typical indie-comedy turf. But the script delivers more genuine laughs than you’d expect from a movie that’s essentially about the recession. (1:46) Bridge, California, Piedmont, SF Center. (Eddy)

Winter in Wartime (1:43) Embarcadero, Shattuck, Smith Rafael.

 

On the Cheap Listings

Maria Poblet
-
0

On the Cheap listings are compiled by Jackie Andrews. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

WEDNESDAY 6

Fantomas by the Bay City Lights Books, 261 Columbus, SF; (415) 362-8193 , www.citylightsf.com. 7pm, free. Help kick off a four day celebration of Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain’s literary pulp arch-villain, Fantomas, with a reception and absinthe-tasting featuring readings, lectures, film screenings, art exhibitions, and performances by Robin Walz, Daniel Handler, Mel Gordon, Howard Rodman, Jill Tracy, and more.

Japan relief fundraiser Project One Gallery & Lounge, 251 Rhode Island, SF; (415) 938-7173, www.p1sf.com. 7pm-2am, $10. Join forces with the American Red Cross to raise money for those who have been affected by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan with DJs, drinks, and dancing. All proceeds from the bar – including tips! – as well as the door price will go directly to the cause. While you’re here, check out the gallery’s current exhibition, “Warhol Reimagined: The New Factory”.

THURSDAY 7

Iconic gay paper celebrates 40th anniversary GLBT History Museum, 4127 18th St., SF; (415) 621-1107, www.glbthistory.org. 7pm, $5. Tonight, the Bay Area Reporter, the country’s oldest continuously published newspaper, celebrates its 40th anniversary and will launch their first ever Best of the Gays reader’s poll with an awards ceremony – be sure to vote online beforehand. Plus, a new special exhibit chronicling B.A.R.’s struggle to secure justice and equality for the entire gay-munity.

FRIDAY 8

West Portal Avenue sidewalk sale West Portal between Ulloa and 15th St., SF; www.pacificfinearts.com. 10am-5pm, free. Today, the West Portal neighborhood — bustling with quaint stores, restaurants, and coffeehouses — will line it’s main thoroughfare with an arts and crafts exhibition. Come admire the work of over 60 artists, including Mendy Marks and Locke Heemstra. Expect to find everything from jewelry and photography to handcrafted leather bags, sheepskin slippers, and more.

Community Wellness Fair Glide Memorial Church, 330 Ellis, SF; www.glide.org. 10am-2pm, free. While the rest of the country debates health care reform, we in San Francisco enjoy plenty of health care options for the under-insured. Today, everyone can celebrate health and wellness as Glide Health Services launches their new Wellness Center – which will build upon their holistic healthcare approach by adding nutrition and cooking classes, stress reduction services, and even relationship help. There will be games, prizes, healthy vendors, and free health screenings for the whole family.

SATURDAY 9

Cesar Chavez Day celebration Dolores Park, Dolores and 19th St., SF; www.cesarchavezday.org. 10am-6pm, free. Celebrate the legacy of Caesar Chavez, the American farm worker and activist who helped found the National Farm Workers Association, at this day-long celebration featuring a parade and street fair. Assemble at Dolores park at 10 am and march toward the 24th Street fair where festival booths, speakers, and other entertainment await.

Obscura Day festivities Peralta Hacienda Historical Park, 2465 34th Ave., Oakl.; www.peraltahacienda.org. 2:30-5:30pm, free. Peek behind the scenes at Peralta Hacienda on Obscura Day, an international day of expeditions, back-room tours, and hidden treasures in cities and towns around the world. Here, step back in time and experience a Victorian farmhouse by candlelight while enjoying tamales in the kitchen. Or, if you’re brave enough, try to catch a glimpse of the ghost of Maria Peralta!

SUNDAY 10

Sunday Streets Great Highway, SF; www.sundaystreetssf.com. 11am-4pm, free. The second “Streets” of the season will begin at the SF Zoo and follow the Great Highway down to Golden Gate Park and continue down JFK Drive, ending at Sloat. Bring your roller skates, unicycle, skateboard, or just a plain pair of walking shoes and enjoy the activities and vendors that line the nearly six miles of car-free roads.

MONDAY 11

“How to coexist with coyotes” San Francisco Public Library Sunset Branch, 1305 18th Ave., SF.; (415) 355-2808, www.sfpl.org. 7-8:30pm, free. Coyotes are making a comeback here in San Francisco, and the resident expert on the topic, filmmaker Melissa Peabody, will show and discuss her film San Francisco: Still Wild at Heart and tell you how our new furry friends add richness and surprise to our already kooky town.

TUESDAY 12

Lit & Lunch with Yiyun Li Minna Street gallery, 111 Minna, SF.; www.catranslation.org. 12:30-1:30pm, free. Fans of Yiyun Lee the novelist may not be aware of her lesser known translations of the works of the late Chinese writer Shen Congwen. Tonight, Li will discuss Congwen’s modernist style and how he challenged the political sensors in China.

 

 

Psychic Dream Astrology

Maria Poblet
-
0

 

April 6-12

Mercury is retrograde — can you feel it?

ARIES

March 21-April 19

You have traveled as far as you can go in your present direction. Think about laying the groundwork for whatever you want to have come next. Envision a better path than the one you’re on now.

TAURUS

April 20-May 20

You don’t need to know how things are going to play out in order to be secure. Pour your highest aspirations over all you touch this week, and trust that you’re on the right path. Matter follows vision.

GEMINI

May 21-June 21

If your actions match your intentions. you’re in a great place to sow some seeds that will bear the fruit you want next season. Make sure you want what you are striving for, and the universe will take care of the rest.

CANCER

June 22-July 22

Anxiety has a compelling voice, and you should it ignore this week. Set clear limits for yourself and stick with them so that you don’t find yourself winging it in anxious reactive whirlwinds. Don’t apologize for having needs.

LEO

July 23-Aug. 22

Your challenge this week is to stop yourself from taking on other people’s crap.! Pay close attention to what you feel and move slowly through your relationships. Be kind, not enabling.

VIRGO

Aug. 23-Sept. 22

Too much willfulness will get you in a heap of trouble this week, Virgo. Instead of trying to control outcomes, your best bet is in cultivating your strength and enlisting the support of the people around you.

LIBRA

Sept. 23-Oct. 22

You can’t change the past, all you can do is be mindful enough in the now to not recreate the mistakes you once perpetrated. Go slowly enough to ensure that you make new errors, not the same old ones all over again.

SCORPIO

Oct. 23-Nov. 21

In the wise words of Kenny Rogers, “You got to know when to hold ’em/ Know when to fold ’em/ Know when to walk away, and when to run”. Pay attention to your needs before they get out of hand, Scorpio.

SAGITTARIUS

Nov. 22-Dec. 21

Patience is a virtue your sign is not associated with on the best of days, and on particularly stressful days you can be downright spazzy! Find a way to get and stay grounded in the face of uncertainties this week.

CAPRICORN

Dec. 22-Jan. 19

Don’t let your fears drive you, no matter how concerning things get. Maintain your faith and optimism even if it feels like it’s against all odds. No promising solutions will come from your inner Debbie Downer.

AQUARIUS

Jan. 20-Feb. 18

Solidify your friendships, Aquarius. There are two or three special people you’re invested in who can use a little TLC. Be real with your intimacies and get real value from them in return.

PISCES

Feb. 19-March 20

What are you waiting for, Pisces? It’s time to change some crummy old habits that have been weighing you down for too long now. Step up to the plate and take a swing, batter!

Jessica Lanyadoo has been a psychic dreamer for 16 years. Check out her website at www.lovelanyadoo.com or contact her for an astrology or intuitive reading at (415) 336-8354 or dreamyastrology@gmail.com.

Rep Clock

Maria Poblet
-
0

Schedules are for Wed/6–Tues/12 except where noted. Director and year are given when available. Double features are marked with a •. All times are p.m. unless otherwise specified.

ARTISTS’ TELEVISION ACCESS 992 Valencia, SF; www.atasite.org. $6. Amreeka (Dabis, 2009), Thurs, 7:30. Woven (Vargas), Fri, 8. With live music by Ever Isles and Honeycomb. “Other Cinema:” “All-16mm, All Retro Music-on-Film Party,” Sat, 8:30.

BERKELEY FELLOWSHIP OF UNITARIAN UNIVERSALISTS 1924 Cedar, Berk; www.bfuu.org. $5-15. “A Quarter Century of Chernobyl:” Chernobyl4Ever, Sun, 4. With panel discussion featuring anti-nuclear activists.

CASTRO 429 Castro, SF; (415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com. $7.50-10. The Fighter (Russell, 2010), Wed, 3, 5:30, 8. “Orson Welles Double Feature:” •The Lady From Shanghai (1947), Thurs, 3, 7, and Touch of Evil (1958/1998), Thurs, 4:45, 8:45. “Jane Russell Double Feature:” •The Outlaw (Hughes, 1943), Fri, 1, 5, 9, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Hawks, 1953), Fri, 3:15, 7:15. “Justin Vivian Bond in Concert,” Sat, 8. This performance, $27-75; call (415) 863-0611 or visit www.ticketfly.com. Seven Samurai (Kurosawa, 1954), Sun, 2:30, 7.

CHRISTOPHER B. SMITH RAFAEL FILM CENTER 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; (415) 454-1222, www.cafilm.org. $6.50-15. Certified Copy (Kiarostami, 2010), call for dates and times. Trophy Wife (Ozon, 2010), call for dates and times. Winter in Wartime (Koolhoven, 2009), call for dates and times. Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead (Cross, 2010), Wed, 7. Filmmaker Joe Cross in person. Poetry (Yun, 2010), April 8-14, call for times.

CITY COLLEGE OF SAN FRANCISCO Cloud Hall, Room 246, 50 Phelan, SF; (415) 23903580. Free. The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill (Irving, 2003), Wed, 7. With filmmaker Judy Irving in person.

HUMANIST HALL 390 27th St, Oakl; www.humanisthall.org. $5. Crude: The Real Price of Oil (Berlinger, 2009) Wed, 7.

MECHANICS’ INSTITUTE 57 Post, SF; (415) 393-0100, rsvp@milibrary.org. $10. “CinemaLit Film Series: French Twist:” Irma Vep (Assayas, 1996), Fri, 6.

PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE 2575 Bancroft, Berk; (510) 642-5249, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu. $5.50-9.50. “Film 50: History of Cinema: Fantasy Films and Realms of Enchantment:” Dreamchild (Millar, 1985), Wed, 3:10. “Alternative Visions:” “The Chicago Survey Trilogy” (Cornerford, 2002-2010), Wed, 7:30. “Patricio Guzmán:” The Southern Cross (1992), Thurs, 7; The Battle of Chile (1975-1978), Sun, 1 (part one), 3 (part two), 5:30 (part three). “Under the Skin: The Films of Claire Denis:” The Intruder (2004), Fri, 6:30 and Sat, 8:30; •U.S. Go Home (Denis and Kahn, 1994) with Claire Denis: The Wanderer (Lifshitz, 1996), Fri, 9. “First Person Rural: The New Nonfiction:” Alamar (González-Rubio, 2009), Sat, 6:30.

RED VIC 1727 Haight, SF; (415) 668-3994; www.redvicmoviehouse.com. $6-10. The Housemaid (Im, 2010), Wed, 2, 7:15, 9:20. “An Evening with Les Blank,” Thurs, 7:30. Enter the Void (Noé, 2009), Fri-Sun, 8:30 (also Sat-Sun, 2, 5:15). Blue Valentine (Cianfrance, 2010), Mon-Tues, 7, 9:20.

ROXIE 3117 and 3125 16th St, SF; (415) 863-1087, www.roxie.com. $5-9.75. Orgasm, Inc. (Canner, 2009), Wed-Thurs, 6:45, 8:30, 10. “San Francisco International Women’s Film Festival,” Wed-Sun. Visit www.sfwfi.com for program info. “It’s the Paul Meinberg! Show:” All-American Co-Ed (Prinz, 1941), Tues, 7 and 9:45; Big Town Girl (Werker, 1937), Tues, 8.

SEBASTANI THEATER 476 First St East, Sonoma; www.sonomafilmfest.org. $15. “14th Annual Sonoma International Film Festival,” documentaries, world cinema, and more, including a Susan Sarandon tribute, Wed-Sun. YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS 701 Mission, SF; (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org. $6-8. “Fearless: Chinese Independent Documentaries:” Tape (Li, 2010), Thurs, 7; Ghost Town (Zhao, 2008), Sun, 2.

Take back the knit

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
Take back the knit

caitlin@sfbg.com

STREETWISE The dinosaur outside my library makes my day. Someone knit a little green bike rack cozy with floppy yellow spikes, right next to the rack that now has a custom-sized, rainbow-colored, beaded sweater. Indeed, the whole neighborhood has been knit-tagged — the stretch of Divisadero between Post and California streets has nary a rack that hasn’t been dressed against the spring chills.

The woman who answered the phone at Atelier Yarns, the knitting store down the block on Divisadero, didn’t know who had done the pieces, which is not to say they’d gone unnoticed. “They’re really good,” she said. “I wish I knew who had done them.”

Digging further, I fell into the deep abyss of Internet craft blogs and found that the Western Addition isn’t the only place where knit is joining the textures of the concrete jungle. Across the world, “yarn bombing” groups have sprung up. Last year, a group altered the Oakland-Berkeley border’s controversial “Here There” statues, knitting a colorful cozy over the T in “There” that renders the words equal, symbolically erasing the hierarchical positioning of the two bergs. There have been knitted seat covers on Philly’s Blue line subway and a knitted tank cover in shades of Pepto-Bismol pink in Copenhagen — not to mention jauntily decorated stop signs, trees, and railings the world over.

Magda Sayeg, a.k.a. PolyCotn, is generally regarded as the mother of this peaceful barrage. So I called her to find out why she — and now the rest of the world — yarn bombs.

It all started seven years ago with a knit cover for the doorknob of her Houston art studio. “It was about me making my door-handle pretty,” she remembers. Then she knitted a cover for a stop sign, which attracted lots of attention. “People would get out of the car, take pictures, scratch their head.”

She did more pieces. She formed a yarn bomb collective called “Knitta Please.” Since then, Sayeg has knitted everything from a riotously rainbow cover on a Mexico City bus to a powder pink coat for a single stone on the Wall of China.

Sayeg’s work makes knitting, once a private activity, part of the public domain. “You’re taking something so traditional and homey and placing it in an environment — graffiti art, it’s so male-dominated.”

Which is not to say that she doesn’t locate yarn bombing inside the tradition of street art. “I identify with the street artists more than the knitters,” Sayeg says, remembering the first time she saw the moaning cartoon faces of a gallery show by seminal SF street artist Barry McGee. “That really rocked my perception of what street art was. You could say [the yarn bombing] story started there.”

Like “traditional” street artists, Sayeg uses her creations to make her mark on her physical surroundings. She loves tagging the redundant bits of the urban landscape, like street posts whose signs have been removed and rendered useless. “It’s a visual pollution that we just accept. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t cover up something that’s not needed.” She pointed to the 3-D video game sprites of Space Invader and moss graffiti artists like Edina Tokodi as others who “are putting the can down” in the street art world.

But Sayeg also likes how yarn bombing questions the assumptions of what knitting is, which brings us to the question of the genre’s feminist interpretation. Though there are certainly male yarn bombers, you can’t deny that this kind of functional art, and craft in general, has historically been thought of as “women’s work” — and has had its worth denigrated and minimized as such. With yarn bombing, “there’s something there that might make people uncomfortable. An edge to something that never seems edgy. Like we’re supposed to be making sweaters and socks,” Sayeg says.

That stereotype has been turned on its head by craft activism, a form of protest that has its modern day roots in the 1980s and ’90s peace demonstrations at Greenham Common Royal Air Force base in England, where the U.S. military installed cruise missiles in 1981. Women gathered around the cyclone fencing at the base, stuffing its grid with knitted objects and hoisting handmade signs that read “Women’s Struggle Won The Vote, Now Let’s Use It For Disarmament.”

More recently, as Kirsty Robertson recounts in an essay in Extra/Ordinary (Duke University Press, 306 p., $24.95), the Revolutionary Knitting Circle held a “knit-in” at the 2002 G-8 summit in Alberta, Canada. Betsy Greer — who has a day job as an anti-sweatshop activist and also wrote an essay in Extra/Ordinary — coined the term “craftivism” to describe efforts similar to her own antiwar cross-stitch art. In Greer’s words, craftivism is “about using what you can to express your feelings outward in a visual manner without yelling or placard-waving. It was about channeling that anger in a productive and even loving way.”

Which is not to say that all urban crafters — as I’ve come to think of the men and women reclaiming textile and other forms of craft in a modern setting — are explicitly political. I was reminded of Sayeg’s desire to subvert the masculine face of street art when I visited the SoMa studio of Amy Ahlstrom, a San Francisco textile artist who is taking images from the walls of cities and translating them into painstakingly crafted quilts.

Ahlstrom, who has made her own clothes since her Molly Ringwald childhood, started quilting as an art student in 1991. She had a successful career in comic art and returned to stitching in 2005. “To me, this is a very natural thing,” she says, surrounded by her eye-popping creations hanging on stark white walls. “This was the most unique way I could speak to the world.”

Living in the Mission, Ahlstrom found the neighborhood’s murals, street signs, and tags an integral part of her city life. She began photographing them and was struck by an urge to alter their context. “I saw this tag and thought, ‘Wouldn’t that be funny in gingham?’ “

Like a textile DJ, she cut and sewed patterns made from the digital images she had captured into textured Dupioni silk. Now she’s working on a series of pieces dedicated to the visual cues of specific neighborhoods. Her SoMa quilt contains depictions of furniture leaping from public art installation “Defenestration”‘s decrepit Sixth Street building, Jeremy Novy’s ubiquitous stenciled koi, and the neon signs of Holy Cow and Brainwash. She’s not the only artist to harness the power of the quilt — Ben Venom is another SF quilter who creates heavy metal motifs from old band shirts (his “Listen to Heavy Metal While You Sleep!” skull-cross design is a Guardian staff favorite).

Ahlstrom brings the street to textile and the yarn bombers bring their textiles to the street, but they all work to the same end. Though Ahlstrom’s pieces will sell for hundreds of dollars and hang like the gallery pieces that they are, she creates them with the intention of breaking down the art world stipulation that craft cannot be art.

She cites the Gee’s Bend quilts as one inspiration for her work. Gee’s Bend is a small Alabama River community whose women inhabitants came together to have their quilts exhibited by the Houston Museum of Fine Arts in 2002, to great critical acclaim. In contrast to previous exhibitions, the quilts were not divorced from their functional use — museum literature placed the stories of Gee’s Bend quilters front and center in an attempt to highlight how the beauty of their geometric patterns was accentuated, not diminished, by their status as household objects.

So what did the gentle crafter of my beloved dinosaur have in mind when she or he looped that clover green around the bike rack? You’d have to ask the knitter — but at the very least, they’ve made their presence known.

alt.sex.column: Positive too negative?

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
3
alt.sex.column: Positive too negative?

Dear Andrea:

I’m a 40-something M2F transsexual woman (though my gender status isn’t that important). I recently met a great guy I’ll call John and I’ve developed feelings for him. I’d jump his bones in two seconds except for one thing; he’s HIV-positive.

Love,

Paralyzed

Dear Para:

It would be hard to come up with a decision more individual and personal than this one. Plus, this isn’t a situation where I can pooh-pooh your concerns. Of course you have concerns. I have them for you.

Although having some sort of sex with an HIV-positive person is hardly risk-free, it is undertaken nightly by thousands of people who never sero-convert. There are condoms, and condoms are quite good at what they do. And there are all the noninsertive things one can do that are more or less incapable of introducing any virus. It may not be what you want, but it’s doable and, under the right circumstances, you can build a sex life based on what you’ve got rather than what’s missing.

If your big fear is not contracting the virus yourself, but loving somebody who already has it, there is no cute trick with latex or frottage that is going to fix that. Most any article you pull up on the subject is going to contain the statement, “HIV is no longer a death sentence.” Which is true as far as it goes, but it’s not like it’s no longer a problem. Either one of you could be hit by that bus that always crops up when people are discussing the capriciousness of fate. But he could also stop responding to his meds, or develop debilitating side effects, or follow some other course we’re not too up on yet because it occurs 40 years after starting therapy and nobody’s done that yet. We don’t know. And we, being human, like to.

But this sounds like something you can’t just walk away from — you have, as you say, “developed feelings.” But neither is it something you can just walk into. If you’re going to make a go of it, the two of you are going to have to get a therapist with expertise in exactly these issues and work through some stuff. You’re going to admit your concerns. To him. And he’s going to have to admit whatever it is he feels about the prospect of undertaking a long-term threesome: you, him, and HIV.

On other hand, you two are not officially an item yet. You do not have to do this. He probably wouldn’t think less of you if you decided you couldn’t hack it. Well, OK, actually, he might, but you can’t make a huge decision like this one on the basis of conflict-avoidance.

On the other, other hand, it’s possible your decision will get made for you when you spend more time together and find that he’s hopelessly argumentative about baseball trivia or in some other way not nearly as dreamy as you thought. And then you can ditch him with a clear conscience.

Love,

Andrea

The world Maclaine made

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
2
The world Maclaine made

arts@sfbg.com

FILM For a biographical abstract of Christopher Maclaine, try the famous first lines of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. For greater precision, observe poet David Meltzer’s letter to film historian P. Adams Sitney (reproduced in Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-2000): “Poet, filmmaker, stand-up comic, bagpiper, chaser of mysteries.” Meltzer’s letter continues, “In the mid-’60s sacrificed his nervous system to methedrine.” Stan Brakhage wrote of Maclaine, “He courted madness and he finally got it.” Before he did, he completed four films, the first of which — his preemptive magnum opus, The End (1953) — flattened a very young Brakhage at its infamous Art in Cinema premiere. Sixty-seven years after the museum crowd balked at Maclaine’s celluloid testament, the film is back at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

We still haven’t found the categories that will contain Maclaine’s non-sync film of revelations: a found-footage narrative composed of original materials; a lettrist pulp fiction; a proto-punk murder ballad radioed to the void; a hipster “duck and cover” drill with time enough for Beethoven and Bartok. Like Sunset Blvd. (1950), The End is narrated from beyond the grave — only this voice (Maclaine’s) speaks behind nuclear holocaust rather than mere murder. First thing, we see the mushroom cloud (annihilation was in the air: America had recently tested the hydrogen bomb in the Pacific). Maclaine insinuates us over extended black leader: “Soon we shall meet the cast. Observe them well. See if they are not yourselves. And if you find none of them to be so, then insert yourself into this revue.” The cast, he explains, were his friends: “They all have stories. We shall be able to learn a little about each of them before our time runs out.”

The following 30 minutes snakes through six sections and four clearly identified characters. Though the cast is unwitting of the coming apocalypse, they are not innocent of its destructive energies. Before the blast, two die by their own hand and one on the wrong side of a stranger’s gun. The fourth, an innocent poet in a cruel world (played by Wilder Bentley II, who will be in attendance for the Thurs., March 31 screening), seeks redemption as a leper. They are all on the run from America — each “couldn’t face the 20th century.” Maclaine’s montage scatters images from the different mini-narratives and pulls together a mash of insert motifs that function as another layer of poetic commentary — a lyrical compliment to the voice-over’s epic address.

The cubist construction of these episodes is such that you would know a bomb had gone off even if you hadn’t seen the mushroom cloud. Scholar J.J. Murphy helpfully suggests Charlie Parker’s phrasing as a possible influence on Maclaine’s frenzied cutting, though the North Beach Scotsman also seems to anticipate the rhythms of Blank Generations to come. There are many jolting connections throughout The End, some delightfully unforeseen (the Powell Street trolley turnaround next to a gun barrel’s spin) and others simply damning (dramatization of a suicide’s collapse intertwined with documentary footage of a homeless man flat on the street). The montage reaches its zenith in the film’s closing moments, when a tumble of images registering sexual release and last-gasp poignancy are set to “Ode to Joy” as final shards of the known world.

It’s hard to fathom The End‘s originality now that so many of its techniques have become familiar avant-garde strategies. At the time, most experimental films strove for self-conscious lyricism, drawing on abstraction, silence, and psychosexual expressionism to articulate a space outside society. Maclaine dramatizes the break, never more explicitly than when he directly addresses the audience (“The person next to you is a leper!”) With its strong conviction that death itself has changed, The End is often discussed as an expression of atomic-age nihilism. Even more radical is the way Maclaine channels what was then still a new mode of address: the live television feed, which Sen. Joe McCarthy was just then exploiting in his Voice of America hearings. A decade before Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, Maclaine intuits the connections between medium and message — the mushroom cloud and television being two sides of the same terrifying totality.

Maclaine made only three short films after The End, all of which will be shown Thursday night: The Man Who Invented Gold (1957), Beat (1958), and Scotch Hop (1959). None of these match The End‘s x-ray vision, although The Man Who Invented Gold and Beat both unfold the same vivid imagination of the San Francisco terrain. Scotch Hop is something different and, on first viewing, my favorite of the later works: the Scotsman’s equivalent of Olympia (1938), with low angles and slow motion placing bagpipers, log-throwers, and fiercely proud dancers on a heroic plain. Brakhage claims it a masterpiece in his poignant remembrance of Maclaine in his book Film at Wit’s End, but there’s little doubt that The End had the more profound impact on his own filmmaking — specifically in the way it demonstrated the liberating effects of a film grammar built of “mistakes.”

Meanwhile, the search for Maclaine continues in a serial analysis of The End on SFMOMA’s Open Space blog by filmmaker and projectionist Brecht Andersch in collaboration with Hell on Frisco Bay blogger Brian Darr. As of this writing, “The The End Tour” has reached its 15th installment. All together, it constitutes a supremely dedicated work of media archaeology, and one of the liveliest works of film criticism I’ve encountered in some time. Andersch and Darr’s spirited dissection of the film’s psychogeographic dynamics has illuminated the film’s subliminal operations as well as its creative mapping of the local landscape. Most remarkable is their discovery that a prominent patch of graffiti (“PRAY”) that appears in the film is still tattooed on a China Beach wall — as if Maclaine’s imagined nuclear blast fixed it there for all time.

IN SEARCH OF CHRISTOPHER MACLAINE: MAN, ARTIST, LEGEND

Thurs/31, 7 p.m., $10

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third St., SF

(415) 357-4000

www.sfmoma.org

 

Exercises in style

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
Exercises in style

arts@sfbg,com

HAIRY EYEBALL Will Yackulic’s return to painting has none of the grandiosity or pretension that the phrase “return to painting” might suggest. Rather, Yackulic’s abstract canvases at Gregory Lind offer a contained (one might say modest, even, as each rectangle measures in the neighborhood of 144 square inches) but no less exhilarating exploration of the tension between the two qualities of his work that are so perfectly pinpointed by the show’s title, “Precision and Precarity.”

Although it has been six years since Yackulic last picked up a brush, his approach here is not unlike the works on paper he has steadily created in the interim. Much like his wave fields made from the dense accumulation of precisely spaced typewriter keystrokes, there is a finessing of the medium in this new group of (mostly) oil paintings that never claims mastery. The material seems to have had as much of the final say as the artist’s hand.

The subject of the conversation — geometric abstraction — has been a recurring one for Yackulic. This time, instead of floating geodesic orbs, the starting point was a Jenga-like stack of woodshop scraps Yackulic constructed and then set about capturing using a variety of colors, paint application techniques, perspectives, and degrees of abstraction. One canvas, the appropriately titled Smolder, even appears to have been burnt with a cigarette.

Some paintings come across as proper still lifes, engaging with the woodpile as a physical object. Taken together, the heavy yolk-yellow highlights and brown shadows of Claypool’s and the nocturnal blues and watery purples of Crepuscular and Evening Arrangement form a dance of the hours played across what could be a model of one of mid-20-century architect Joseph Eichler’s experiments in suburban modernism.

Other canvases respond to the form as a prompt about pure shape, discarding fixed dimensionality. In Over/Under, jutting lines become breakwalls for an incoming tide of indigo that has spilled over into the canvas’ azure lower half. Yackulic also employs other shapes (the cross-hatches in XXX, the Easter-ish green and pink dots of Sick Day) to colonize what becomes, over the course of the show, familiar terrain.

All this shape shifting brings to mind Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style (1949), in which the experimental French writer retells the same banal incident 99 times employing a different voice, genre, or formal device with each successive iteration. Yackulic does much of the same thing in “Precision and Precarity,” only the story he’s retelling is the abstract tradition in modern art.

Retelling, though, shouldn’t be confused with repeating, and Yackulic doesn’t shy away from giving his exercises in style some bite when necessary. The aforementioned Smolder, although hung closest to the gallery’s entrance, provides a humorous coda to the rest of the show. Slanted lines, suggestive of the beams of Yackulic’s original model, disappear into a black cloud of pencil smudge as if to playfully say, “You know what else depends on precision and precarity? Arson.”

 

SKELETONS IN THE CLOSET

Camilla Newhagen’s soft sculptures made from everyday clothing are anything but soft. Bras and reclaimed suits are stuffed full of polyester and contorted into unsettling anthropomorphic forms reminiscent of Hans Bellmer’s monstrous feminine sculptures. However, the strongest piece in the powerful but small selection of Newhagen’s work now at Jack Fischer is the least assuming: a man’s white Oxford shirt on a hanger, sheared of everything save its collar and one sleeve, and tacked to the wall with the aid of invisible push pins.

Ghostly and extremely sensuous, Pin Point Oxford evacuates gender and class from an overly marked and rather quotidian garment. The white button-down is no longer so buttoned-down. Much like the work of Belgian designer Martin Margiela, who famously fashioned dresses to look like dress-forms and vests from leather gloves, Newhagen has created a piece of irresistible anti-clothing. It’s a pity you can’t slip it on. *

WILL YACKULIC: PRECISION AND PRECARITY

Through April 30

Gregory Lind Gallery

49 Geary, Fifth Floor

(415) 296-9661

www.gregorylindgallery.com

CAMILLA NEWHAGEN

Through May 7

Jack Fischer Gallery

49 Geary

(415) 956-1178

www.jackfischergallery.com

1...114115116...279Page 115 of 279

48hills.org is the official publication of the non-profit San Francisco Progressive Media Center.
Contact us: info@48hills.org