Arts & Culture

Arts & Culture

GOLDIES 2010: Ruth Laskey

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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GOLDIES 2010: Ruth Laskey

One thing that Bay Area art has no shortage of is color. Whether it be Albers-informed theory, Op-influenced repetitious patterns, Mission muralismo, or mural-like Mission School paintings, in general, local color has been primary, if not outright garish. Ruth Laskey’s palette stands apart — confident enough to be low-key or even muted in comparison. “Color is kind of it for me,” Laskey says, in the middle of a sleepy afternoon at a Mission cafe. “It’s where a piece gets its emotion.”

You could say that there’s a quality of quiet intensity to Laskey’s work, and the artist herself is soft-spoken. She’s also strong, clear, and candid in terms of viewpoint. “My relationship to color is not very systematic,” she says, when the topic of Albers references in relation to her work is broached. “It’s more intuitive. I already see things from a painter’s perspective. When you’re a painter making color, there’s an evolution that happens.”

In Laskey’s case, this evolution is ongoing — and it isn’t taking place within traditional painting. Both “7 Weavings,” her first solo exhibition at Ratio 3 in 2008, and a self-titled show at the same space this year are taken from her larger “Twill Series,” a growing group of “investigations” that she began in 2005, years after taking a weaving class in between undergraduate and graduate studies at California College of the Arts. “Twilling is basic, the first pattern weave you learn,” she says. “The loom I’ve been using from the beginning is basic. I was thinking about my understanding of weaving, and I was interested in how twill creates shape on its own. It kind of clicked one day that I could use twill, but insert the thread in the same way I would with tapestry.”

That moment kick started Laskey’s unique use of dye and weft and warp to create color forms in which minimalism and materiality intersect. Her “Twill Series” has generated a cover story critical appraisal in Artforum and many responses locally — in some ways, the discourse about her growing body of work (including my own 2008 piece for this publication, which focused on geometric elements) reveals as much about the writers as it does about the art itself, which invites contemplation and allows open interpretation. It’s a mistake to assume this openness is cool detachment, though. “It’s fabric,” she says. “It’s inherently warm.”

At the moment, Laskey’s studio is in the garage of her apartment in Glen Park, a neighborhood that has housed some artists of renowned dedication, like Bruce Conner. Her day job at California College of the Arts’ Oakland library is one source of inspiration and perspective. Music could be another. When I ask her what sounds might make apt accompaniment for an audiovisual presentation of her art, her choice is Sun Ra. Thinking of her work as what Ra would call an “art form of dimensions tomorrow” adds another a playful element to its fabric. She uses blankness around an image as he uses the silence that surrounds sound. Space is the place.

As for Laskey’s “Twill Series,” at the moment it’s hard to gauge how large it will grow, but there is no doubt her deployment of dye and geometric shape is subtly shifting. “It’s an issue that artists have to deal with all the time,” she reflects. “I might still be interested in what the work is doing, but is it still engaging for everyone else? There’s always that tiny figure on your shoulder saying, ‘Maybe you need to move on.’ But I feel like it’s taking me on this journey. It might be a really slow journey. It might have small steps. But I’m enjoying that. For me, it’s fruitful.” 

www.ratio3.org; www.ruthlaskey.com

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GOLDIES 2010: Christopher Kuckenbaker

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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GOLDIES 2010: Christopher Kuckenbaker

In September, the San Francisco Fringe Festival offered patrons an off-Beat gem, The Burroughs and Kookie Show. A deftly performed blend of homage and intimate psychic excavation, the play imagines William S. Burroughs (actor-playwright Christopher Kuckenbaker) as talk show host, opposite a deadpan, laconic musician named Loubis the Pubis (Louis Libert), and a missing cohost, “Kookie,” symbolized in absentia by a small, empty chair. Tonight’s guest? An unsuspecting actor named Chris Baker (Christopher Kuckenbaker again). At once mood-alteringly dreamy and piquant, shrewdly funny and unexpectedly poignant, the show deservedly scampered off with “Best of Fringe” honors.

Kuckenbaker is a sharp, versatile actor who’s plied the more vibrant fringes of Bay Area theater since the 1990s. He and his now ex-wife moved away in 2001 to pursue professional careers as actors in Chicago and Boulder, but Kuckenbaker returned in 2007. The timing was auspicious. A month later, he was memorably cast as real mama’s monster Grendel in Banana Bag & Bodice’s bicoastal hit, Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage. Next up, Kuckenbaker appears at Z Space opposite 2009 Goldie winner Beth Wilmurt in The Companion Piece, directed by Mark Jackson.

Kuckenbacker came to acting while at Santa Barbara City College. This followed a scattered upbringing in California towns like Hollister and Salinas, and far-flung lands like Australia. He credits all the moving around with seeding his actor’s outgoing personality. “It maybe forced me to be a little more gregarious than other people,” he suggests.

Arriving in San Francisco in 1993, Kuckenbaker received a degree from San Francisco State’s prolific theater department in 1997. Since then, his graceful work and alternately intense and quirky looks have made him a unique presence onstage. He’s also an astute and generous ensemble player who’s worked repeatedly with leading smaller companies like Art Street and the Shotgun Players; been part of a now defunct sketch comedy troupe called Old Man McGinty; and appeared repeatedly in Playground’s popular stagings of contest-generated short plays.

His own shift to playwriting, meanwhile, is more than a lark. He and Burroughs go way back. They first met in the Interzone of the imagination around the time Kuckenbaker left Santa Barbara with some Beat-obsessed cohorts for Bellingham, Wash., in the early 1990s. He stayed only a year in the Pacific Northwest rain, but something had happened to him up there, some inter-era nod, some afflatus. A mind-meld with old Bill.

“When I first moved to Bellingham, I’d go to the grocery store and pick up CDs of him reading his own works. That turned me on. There was something about his voice that triggered something in my brain, released some kind of new chemical in my head, and it just made sense.”

After gestating for nearly two decades, that initial inspiration has become a Möbius strip seamlessly joining in one actor two complex identities: Burroughs and the actor alter ego called on to process the painful end of a marriage. In giving a compelling dramatic shape to the voices in his head, Kuckenbaker says he’s found new definition in a still-unfolding career.

“When I look back, it seems to me I was just going from one show to the next, never really seeing myself any further along than the next show. Now, after giving birth to something in a very personal way, I want with all my power for it to grow and be seen, to spread itself out across the world. I have some big ideas about where I want to take the next iteration of The Burroughs and Kookie Show, making it a much larger and richer piece.” 

www.kuckenbakery.com

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GOLDIES 2010: Hunx and his Punx

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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GOLDIES 2010: Hunx and his Punx

It should come as no surprise that a gay 30-year-old male living in the Bay Area who borrows elements of his fashion-forward look from Freddie Mercury is putting out the “gayest music ever.” He’s a Pisces who rocks a switchblade comb and blends leather daddy duds with a 1950s-meets-1980s juvenile delinquent touch.

Seth Bogart, a.k.a. Hunx, has been devoted to rock and trash pop culture for years. He made zines as a teen in Arizona when riot grrrl was happening, and has essentially created a life from his variety of enthusiasms.

“I do it for myself, to have fun. It makes me feel better being constantly creative. As cheesy as it sounds, happiness is doing what you want to do,” says the rather butch-looking Bogart over tortas at a 24th Street restaurant. His eyes are piercing, he’s wearing a torn biker jacket, and he’s sporting a few days more than a five o’clock shadow.

Probably tired from having just gotten back from New York City, where he spent eight days recording the next Hunx and His Punx album for Sub Pop’s subsidiary label Hardly Art, Bogart appears happy to be home. After years living in Oakland, he currently resides in the Bayview District.

Thematically, Bogart describes the first proper Hunx and His Punx album as being similar to this year’s compilation Gay Singles (True Panther) in that it deals with love and teenage heartbreak. “It sounds like a dream,” he exclaims. But the upcoming album delves deeper into a sadness he said he’s never really written about before. His father committed suicide when he was just a teen, and with his mom left “out of it and depressed” in the immediate aftermath, it’s no wonder he grew up fast and was on his own by 17.

Bogart found catharsis in freedom of expression. As the tale goes, after his previous group Gravy Train!!! disbanded, friends such as Nobunny and Christopher McVicker helped pen some of the early Hunx and His Punx songs. On the new album, Bogart more fully takes the reins, writing half the album’s tracks himself, with his bold bassist and bandmate Shannon Shaw also contributing a few numbers. As for Hunx’s flirty and quick-witted onstage candor, Bogart attributes some of his brazen confidence to old pal and former roadie Nobunny, who instilled in him that you only have one chance in life. This attitude has led to a colorful album insert of Hunx in the buff, as well as an awkward moment when his Internet-browsing mom unexpectedly saw his boner in a Girls music video.

If you think Bogart’s skills to pay the bills begin and end with music, guess again. He happens to co-own Down at Lulu’s, a popular Oakland vintage boutique and salon, with Tina Lucchesi (of Trashwomen, Bobbyteens, and now Midnite SnaXXX). The shop has been open four years, and Bogart, a licensed cosmetologist, cuts hair there three days a week. He and his friend Brande Baugh are also developing a TV talk show.

Although owning his own shop and contributing to the local music scene are two obvious ways Bogart serves the Bay Area community, it’s what he stands for on a larger scale as a unique gay personality in the still hetero male-dominated genre of punk — and broader realm of rock — that makes him bold and noteworthy. You can call him bubblegum and outrageous, but the fact remains that Hunx exudes an image of strength and confidence. He fills a void in garage rock that isn’t quite clean enough for the Castro and maybe too queer for some fans of harder sounds. He blurs the lines, breaks down boring boundaries, and stays true to himself all the while. 

www.myspace.com/hunxsolo; www.myspace.com/gayestmusicever

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GOLDIES 2010 LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT: Marc Huestis

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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GOLDIES 2010 LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT: Marc Huestis

“What a swimmer is Dracula’s daughter!,” exclaims John “the Cool Ghoul” Zacherle, as “Dinner With Drac” blares from the speakers in Marc Huestis’ Redstone Labor Temple office. ‘Tis the season for Huestis’ tribute to Poltergeist‘s Jobeth Williams, and the activist, filmmaker, and camp impresario is in the final stretches of preparing for the big night.

What hasn’t Marc Huestis done? As a youngster, he arrived in San Francisco from Long Island, New York, unafraid to recite poetry while sporting a pompadour that would make any Elvis impersonator feel size envy. Soon you could see him singing in drag or writhing around on stage in a dirty diaper in Angels of Light productions. But from the very beginning, film was at the heart of Huestis’s life. His father was an editor who worked on the ’60s teen music TV show Hullabaloo, while his mother was a showgirl. “I have a little bit of both in me,” he jokes, and it’s the truth — a Marc Huestis extravaganza involves informed editing and explosive creative freedom.

One of Huestis’ first notable celebrations was the San Francisco Gay Film Festival, now known as the Frameline fest, which he and his non-biological twin-of-sorts Daniel Nicoletta (born just three days apart from him) began with other like minds in 1976. “It was fun, a bunch of kooky hippie kids who wanted to get their movies shown,” he remembers. “There was no pretense, and the group of us were able to get together to do it. It’s great to see what it has evolved into, and feel a bit like a patron saint. Some people will always hate you, but at this age” — Huestis is 55 — “you get to the point where some people respect you. And you respect yourself.”

In 1982, after making some short films, Huestis wrote and directed Whatever Happened to Susan Jane?, his distinctly San Francisco answer to the kinds of antic comedies John Waters was making on the East Coast. In recent years, the movie has found a new audience amongst music lovers devoted to San Francisco’s new wave heyday — one of its strongest aspects is its documentation of wild performances from Tuxedo Moon and other groups of the day. “It was a great combination of gay culture and punk culture,” Huestis says of the era. “There’s a kindness to it, and it was very smart.”

Huestis’s next feature-length movie, 1993’s Sex Is… is very much a film of its time. A direct look at and discussion of the experience of gay sex and intimacy amid the AIDS crisis, it was also a do-it-yourself, many-year labor of love, with DIY aesthetics one common thread throughout Huestis’s creative life. “It’s very heartfelt,” he says of the film. “It was an important film when it came out because no one was talking about sex, and if they were, it was really hypocritically. The high point of my life was to be at the Berlin Film Festival for the world premiere, and then several days later, be at the awards presentation with Billy Wilder sitting nearby. For me, having HIV, and not thinking I was going to live, that moment was a gift.”

One year later, Huestis moved into his office in the Labor Temple, a treasure trove of film memorabilia where the walls are lined with autographed photos, and VHS tapes, DVDs, VCRs and DVD players are stacked on top of each other — in a well-organized fashion. The site is his base for the celebrity events that he puts on at the Castro Theatre, theatrical and cinematic programs that have blazed a trail for another generation of movie mayhem purveyors such as Jesse Hawthorne Ficks and this year’s Goldie winner Joshua Grannell, a.k.a. Peaches Christ.

Old media surrounds us as we talk, but there is little doubt that Huestis, experienced at putting together political and community fundraisers, is always focused on the present and future as well. “I love new media,” he says. “I could not do what I do if I didn’t have knowledge. I design the posters, I do the clip reels, I get the music together, I do the PR. I would sell the popcorn if I could. I love it. I never get tired of movies.”

It’s fitting, then, that Huestis gets to call one of this country’s oldest and most beautiful movie palaces, the Castro Theatre, home. “One of the first shows I put on there was when the Republicans took control of Congress, so everything comes around,” he says. “The best thing is seeing someone go there for the first time. To me it’s like the town barn, but it’s an amazing, beautiful place.”

If star power can me measured in size, some of the players that Huestis has brought to the Castro over the years — Debbie Reynolds, Jane Russell, Tony Curtis, Piper Laurie, Patty Duke — rival the size of the fabled venue. He’s also given eccentric talents such as Sylvia Miles and Karen Black the type of spotlight they deserve. In the end, it’s about gratitude, on his part, on behalf of the audience, and hopefully, from the subjects of his tributes. Huestis’ night for Tony Curtis resulted in him being hired by the actor to create a clip retrospective that ultimately wound up being shown at Curtis’s funeral. “I had a great fondness for and connection with him,” he says. “I love it when they’re thankful, because no one shows gratitude, the world is so entitled. After the [Castro] show, he [Curtis] held my hand really hard, looked me straight in the eyes, and said, ‘Thank you.'”

Thank you, Marc Huestis.

www.myspace.com/marchuestispro  www.youtube.com/user/hostesshue

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GOLDIES 2010: Jesse Hewit/Strong Behavior

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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GOLDIES 2010: Jesse Hewit/Strong Behavior

Most shows start with a request to turn off your cell phones. Tell Them That You Saw Me begins with an implicit request to leave your virtual mind outside. As the lights come up in this latest work from Jesse Hewit/Strong Behavior (which premiered after a residency at CounterPULSE in August), five utterly gobsmacked women, sprawled in enervated postures on floor and furniture, stare back at the audience for a very long time. The audience is still, but maybe still not seeing everything in front of them, as a micro-choreography of breath and saliva and eyelash unfolds amid a glacial volley of questions and answers. The real seeing takes time and patience and something like courage, things that feel in short supply these days — unless you attend this piece, which requires as well as rewards “attending.”

“It’s a study in focus,” says Hewit, “and it’s a study in what we’re looking at and why, and how we deal with each other for long periods of time.” The piece, he says, made him conscious of a concern he’s had with duration as a condition of social life and a strategy for art. Like an aikido master, Hewit uses the sheer weight of time to unsettle our usual, predictable, and tyrannical rhythms. In doing so he advances an invigorating and revelatory body of work exploring our myriad personal and social identities.

For his part, the 30-year-old choreographer and theater maker is both a unique artist and part of a tight-knit milieu making serious waves across the Bay Area’s performance scene. Much of this network of young, bold, savvy, and mostly queer artists gathers under the banner of The Off Center, an ongoing artist-run performance initiative originally formed around recently-shuttered queer performance incubator Mama Calizo’s Voice Factory. (The group includes close colleague Laura Arrington, the other CounterPULSE summer residency artist, whose Hot Wings shared the bill with Tell Them.)

From ages 8 to 13, Hewit studied ballet in Montreal. But dance went by the wayside as his family kept pulling up stakes and moving, since in most places “it wasn’t cool to be a boy who was a dancer.” He got back into dance while at New York University in Tisch’s Experimental Theater Wing. Then, unexpectedly, he headed to a psychology program in central Florida: “I don’t know what the deal was, but something didn’t agree with me in New York anymore.” After a year-and-a-half, Hewit found San Francisco State’s graduate program in sexuality studies. “I thought I was going to be a sociologist,” he admits. “[But] my mode of expression while in graduate school kept coming back to mounting performances or looking at bodies and posturings, so I realized, ‘Oh, okay, I have to go back and do dance stuff.'”

The theoretical rigor explicitly informs Hewit’s work, but he’s also inspired by an international discourse among dance/theater makers. He recently trained with choreographer Meg Stuart and names among other significant influences New York–based choreographer Miguel Gutierrez, Bulgarian-born physical theater artist Ivo Dimchev, North Carolina–raised feminist choreographer-provocateur Ann Liv Young, and New York’s Big Art Group. Locally Hewit cites people like Erika Chong Shuch, Jess Curtis/Gravity, and Sara Kraft.

Hewit particularly credits Keith Hennessy, a friend and mentor, with drawing his work into an international context. He brings up Hennessy’s balancing of two boards on his head in his Bessie Award–winning show Crotch. “It’s really relentless and impossible and it takes way too long,” he recounts with satisfaction. “It’s nice. It’s always these little sites of resistance — just how quickly do we think things are supposed to happen?” 

www.jessehewit.com

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GOLDIES 2010: Joshua Grannell

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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GOLDIES 2010: Joshua Grannell

Whether he’s all dolled up as Peaches Christ or wearing his everyday attire, Joshua Grannell is a cinematic force to be reckoned with. He turned a love of cult film into a modest empire, with a memorable drag character, a popular midnight movie series, and All About Evil, his first full-length feature film.

But back in 1998 when Grannell was working for Landmark Theatres, Midnight Mass was a tough sell. “Midnight movies had really died in San Francisco,” he recalls. “It was sort of a thing that was considered passé and relegated to the suburbs.”

To Landmark’s credit, Grannell did get the go-ahead to create Midnight Mass, which he hosted as his alter ego Peaches Christ. He screened camp classics like Showgirls (1995), Female Trouble (1974), and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970). The stage show was led by Peaches, who Grannell describes as “a character born out of the world of cult movies.”

“I’m not just programming a movie,” he explains. “I’m also creating an entire environment and a whole show to go along with it.”

While Grannell still produces Midnight Mass sporadically, he no longer maintains it as a regular series. And who can blame him? He has plenty on his plate as a filmmaker, the role he’s wanted to play since childhood.

“I went through a period where I started to freak out and think, oh my God, what have I done?” he admits. “I’m best known for being a clown named after Jesus. And I was proud of that … but I really did start to think that no one was ever going to invest any money in me or my filmmaking.”

But it was his Peaches Christ fame and the popularity of Midnight Mass that gave Grannell an audience who understood and appreciated his vision. He was able to use that when he wrote and directed All About Evil, in which he also cameos — as Peaches, natch.

The film is Grannell’s ode to his idols, an homage to the schlocky gore of Herschell Gordon Lewis and the charming perversity of John Waters. It’s also an impressive achievement, the work of a filmmaker who is accomplished in his own right.

But he hasn’t let the success go to his head. As Peaches, Grannell remains a snarky fan, noting that part of her appeal is her unwavering silliness.

“Peaches is a bit of a goofball, and I certainly don’t take Peaches too seriously,” he notes. “The minute I do, go ahead and put a bullet in my head, because that would ruin everything.”

To Grannell, the fannish aspect is essential to the Peaches Christ brand. In a way, it mirrors his own passion — he’s just as excited to share the stage with his cult heroes as we are to see them.

“I’ve built a whole career centered around worshiping my idols,” Grannell says. “I’ve gotten to meet them and I’ve gotten to work with them. But even though I would say that I consider John Waters to be a friend, I don’t know that he’s a friend to me without my obsession still being there and being a fan.”

Grannell’s humility isn’t an affectation. Despite his considerable successes, he’s still driven by simple goals.

“I make crowd-pleasers,” he says. “I’m an entertainer. There’s a sort of art to what we do, certainly, and an aesthetic, but first and foremost, I get off on making people laugh or puke or scream. That’s always been the thing I’m most interested in.”

www.allaboutevilthemovie.com; www.peacheschrist.com

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GOLDIES 2010: Amanda Curreri

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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GOLDIES 2010: Amanda Curreri

Five minutes into talking with Amanda Curreri over a slice and coffee at Mission Pie, I’ve agreed to take part in a piece she’s working on as part of Shadowshop, the in-gallery artists’ marketplace Stephanie Syjuco is organizing for SFMOMA’s upcoming survey of work made in the past decade.

“It’s called Afghanistan Insert,” Curreri explains, speaking in the measured fashion of someone who carefully considers her words. “I’m trying to insert Afghanistan into SFMOMA and into San Francisco’s art community.”

Curreri’s commitment to getting the local arts scene to engage with what has become commonly dubbed by the mainstream news media as “the forgotten war” is not just politically motivated. It’s also personal. Her husband has been working in Afghanistan for the past five months as a security contractor, during which he has sent her snapshots of local graffiti. They are documents of his ground truth.

Curreri plans on physically inserting herself and her husband’s images into Shadowshop, much in the same way she holds one of his pictures in the portrait accompanying this feature. Indeed, the photo, this profile, Curreri’s new status within the local arts community as a Goldie winner, and the conversations this increased attention might encourage will all become part of the discourse surrounding Insert Afghanistan and contributing to its impact.

All this is consonant with Curreri’s view of herself as more of an instigator than an artist. “I’m trying to make art that crosses out of the art world,” she says, echoing Joseph Beuys’ notion of social sculpture. Her projects thrive on participation, using the exhibition space as a kind of social laboratory in which she arranges shared cultural touchstones and institutions — campfire songs, the judicial process, family recipes — as prompts for personal reflection and shared conversation on the “big subjects” that undergird them: history, politics, memory, and in the case of Afghanistan Insert, their intersection within a seemingly endless and fruitless foreign occupation thousands of miles away.

Engaging with Curreri’s art often entails an extended encounter with the artist herself (given how unexpectedly my interview at Mission Pie has turned out, the reverse seems true as well). The last conversation I had with Curreri was this past July, when she videotaped my extemporaneous responses to her off-camera questioning about the topic of last words. My interview was to be incorporated into her concurrent exhibit “Occupy the Empty,” for which she transformed Ping Pong Gallery via hand-sculpted “props” into a courtroom in which various associates, friends, and strangers, such as myself, volunteered their time and testimony.

As with Insert Afghanistan, the inspiration for “Occupy the Empty” was also personal: after participating in a court hearing concerning her late father, Curreri found out it had been held in the same Massachusetts courthouse in which Italian-American anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti were sentenced to death in the early 20th century. Curreri, also of Italian-American descent, saw the coincidence as a chance to connect to that history and, in the process, build a community around a larger discussion of remembrance. Curreri recalls one participant for whom the show served an almost therapeutic function.

“I want to create art that has an interpersonal function, in real-time,” she says. “I want my work to set a specific frame around our inherent connectivity.” 

www.amandacurreri.com

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GOLDIES 2010: DJ Bus Station John

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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GOLDIES 2010: DJ Bus Station John

“Listening to records is really the closest thing we have to a time machine,” says DJ Bus Station John. “Rest the needle in the groove, close your eyes, and the sensory experience can take you right back to 1979 — if you’re lucky enough to be that old, ha ha!”

Perhaps the most important DJ on the San Francisco gay scene in the past decade, Bus Station John has been the musical conduit for a huge cultural reawakening among younger homos. Called “the godfather of bathhouse disco,” he’s revered throughout the dance music world for his fastidious attention to party detail and his inimitable blend of extremely rare 1970s and early ’80s soul, boogie, garage, funk, Italo disco, Hi-NRG, and NYC no-wave.

But his influence goes far beyond helping to inspire the underground disco revival that has displaced techno as the music of choice on many of the world’s sophisticated dance floors. Believe it or not, disco and Hi-NRG used to be verboten in most gay clubs in the ’90s and early ’00s, sonic reminders of the early AIDS crisis that were trampled beneath pounding circuit music beats and generic diva screams. Imagine queers being ashamed of disco!

The arrival of life-extending protease inhibitors for HIV-positive men in the late ’90s opened the door for a not-so-painful appreciation of the recent gay past, and the time was ripe for a DJ to reprise the fantastic sounds of a generation tragically swallowed by disease — sounds that San Francisco had a huge hand in creating through the likes of producer Patrick Cowley, singer Sylvester, and dozens of other integral analog musicmakers.

Enter DJ Bus Station John in 2000, tastefully flaunting his dedication to the hot and heavy bathhouse and backroom days of yore. (The city, still gripped by AIDS panic, continues to outlaw these queer sexual venues.) Although the music is central to his mission, his parties are a complete package. From Xeroxed flyers of hand-made Gluesticked collages featuring Grace Jones or Joan Crawford in a spiky forest of exaggerated phalluses to his notorious “no cell phone” policy on the dance floor, he conjures the heady lust of gay history before social networking and the Internet replaced genuine human contact. “I work without a net, as it were,” he says. “There’s still a sense of discovery when you walk into my parties — no pretedermined list of ‘friends’ who are going. It’s a fresh and spontaneous mix.”

Bus Station John parties have also fostered the discovery of new spaces for homos to get down — past gigs have brought Deco Lounge, the Gangway, and the old Transfer to light as viable venues. His current regular parties include the disco-drenched Tubesteak Connection (Thursdays, 10 p.m., $4. Aunt Charlie’s Lounge, 133 Turk, SF. www.auntcharlieslounge.com) and the wonderfully named Le Perle Degli Squallor (first Saturdays of the month, 10 p.m., $5. The Hotspot, 1414 Market, SF.).

Musically, Bus Station John’s most meaty contribution to clubs, besides fostering the rediscovery of past genius, may be the renewal of classic disco song structure. His selections bring back the notion of dancing as erotic hold-release, an embarkment on a series of expertly crafted journeys. As a DJ, it’s OK (heroic, even) to let people’s attentions wander when a new track is abruptly introduced, then have them relax into an ultra-melodic verse-chorus-verse format as they freshen their drinks and eye a hottie or two. Because when the hypnotic extended outro hits and the red lights kick in, everything falls into place and it’s pure sexytime on the dance floor.

For more information, contact Bus Station John at djbusstationjohn@gmail.com.

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GOLDIES 2010: Ramón Ramos Alayo

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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GOLDIES 2010: Ramón Ramos Alayo

Whoever coined the phrase “jack of all trades, master of none” didn’t foresee an artist like Ramón Ramos Alayo, who is a stunning dancer, a socially committed choreographer, a passionate advocate of Afro-Caribbean culture, scholar of Yoruba spirituality, and an inspiring teacher of modern dance and salsa.

With his tall, powerfully built frame, Ramos Alayo is a mesmerizing presence whether he dances the West African Warrior God Ogun, the Tibetan Lord of Death, the son in La Madre — his tribute to family — or a prisoner trying to shed his shackles. Most recently he assumed Bob Hope’s mantle — unusual even for an open-minded artist like him — by spending a month entertaining American troupes stationed in Europe. “It was a good experience,” the Cuban-born dancer explains. “It was needed. These people have no entertainment. All they do is walk around with guns all day.”

Ramos Alayo regularly returns to Cuba. Next year he’ll go to choreograph and, even more important, to take classes. “The training in Cuba is very strict. There is no choice — you have to go to class,” he says. At 11, he began studying modern and folklórico. He still remembers that unless you met established standards, you couldn’t move to the next level. That kind of discipline paid off. Locally, he has danced with ensembles and choreographers as diverse as Robert Moses’ Kin, Zaccho Dance Theater, Sara Shelton Mann, and Krissy Keefer.

Ramos Alayo has two other passions: choreography and spreading the word about Caribbean culture.

For his Alayo Dance Company, he uses song, music, visuals, and narration to create theatrically potent works that include Afro-Cuban, modern, folkloric, and popular dance styles. Structurally these pieces can be rough, but they have an intoxicating quality — and often a no-holds-barred political perspective — that can prove irresistible. “Mixing things the way he does comes to him by nature and training,” Deborah Valoma, textile artist and costume designer for some of the choreography, explains. “The results are vibrantly alive pieces, approached from an unusually broad set of disciplines.”

After Rain looks at destruction and regeneration from an individual and social perspective. Blood and Sugar traces the passage of slavery through history and geography. A Piece of White Cloth metaphorically explores the movement of culture from Africa via Cuba to the Bay Area. These are big-themed endeavors, but Ramos Alayo also embraces athletic intimacy in works such as Wrong Way and last year’s Grace Notes. Still, Keefer, who first met Ramos Alayo when she took over Dance Mission Theater in 1999, appreciates him above all as a storyteller. “There are so few choreographers in modern dance who create narratives,” she explains.

The Cuba Caribe Festival, which Ramos Alayo founded in 2003, has become a mini ethnic dance festival, showcasing groups from the Cuban diaspora on the first weekend and Ramos Alayo’s ensemble on the second. The festival is always a rollicking, joyous affair. If sometimes there is a friendly rivalry between ensembles, it’s all in good spirit.

In the past, most of Cuba Caribe’s participating groups have been grounded in folklórico traditions. Lately, however, reflecting both the changes taking place within that community and Ramos Alayo’s personal interests, modern dance groups like Paco Gomes and Dancers and Liberation Dance Theater have made successful appearances. Master classes, workshops, and lectures augment the offerings.

Just how successfully Ramos Alayo will be in helping the Caribbean diaspora deepen its roots in the Bay Area remains to be seen. He has two daughters. “One of them is a dancer, the other a soccer player.”

www.alayodance.org; www.cubacaribe.org

>>MORE GOLDIES 2010

GOLDIES 2010: Said Adelekan

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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GOLDIES 2010: Said Adelekan

One of the joys of house music in this century is that it doesn’t exist. Or rather, its influence is so ubiquitous, its borders so gleamingly porous, that to call a dance track (or indie song, or laptop experiment, or even symphonic composition) “house” is to engage in the laughably vague. And while the expansion of the genre has produced its fair share of unlistenable clutter, it’s also given rise to exciting new standards of quality and adventurousness. Many of the new house standard bearers are located in the Bay Area, and among the most invigorating is Said Adelekan, known as DJ Said.

A Nigerian native who discovered his love for music through his family’s record collection, Said became a young disciple of Fela Kuti, the outspoken legend who shared his political message through Afrobeat, which combined a plethora of African styles into popping, hypnotic grooves featuring chiming guitars and swelling brass and organ chords. After promoting one of Kuti’s clubs in Lagos, Said moved to England to study and absorb the underground London club scene. Soon after, he found himself drawn to “the beautiful and very open” Bay Area in the 1990s, hosting parties like the wonderful, storied Atmosfere, which combined soulful house grooves with live instrumentation and Afrobeat spirit.

As his party reputation grew, Said felt the need to expand and launched the topnotch Fatsouls record label in 2007. “After a decade of successful event production, I realized that throwing parties isn’t all there is, and that creating music is equally important,” he says. “Dance music at the time had gotten so dark and aggressive, I wanted to counter that with something organic, refreshing. Something that celebrated the soul — the soul of the Bay Area, the soul of Africa, the soul of dance music — to bring that to the world.”

With his parties, Said had already attracted global attention to the Bay’s burgeoning Afrohouse scene, and his Fatsouls releases — featuring sparkling live instrumentation, heavy bass-driven grooves, and collaborations with soulful house giants like Alton Miller, Jerome Sydenham, Hideo Kobayashi, and Mr. Raoul K. — repped the Bay abroad as well. (The world dance music community also has been rediscovering house music’s black and African roots, celebrating complex rhythms and Chicago-style funkiness.) “The vast majority of people that download and buy Fatsouls vinyl are from Europe, Japan, South Africa, and Canada.” Said says. “I wanted to create and bring music to the very same people that had been attending my parties and keeping the spirit alive.”

Fatsouls’ first release, “Bad Belle (Remix),” a sublime, slow-burning slice of Afrohouse by Said overlaid with a ethno-ecological spoken word lament by Nigerian poet Ikwunga, was one of the best dance music releases of the past decade, and the seven Fatsouls releases since have shown an astonishing devotion to quality production and expanding scope. (Said plans to release a Fatsouls compilation soon.)

Said hasn’t stopped throwing parties either. “We & the Music” (first Fridays of the month, 9 p.m., $10. 222 Hyde, SF. www.222hyde.com ) is a fantastic and necessary monthly get-down in San Francisco that showcases the deep and lovely grooves being produced here — especially those coming from Oakland’s thriving soulful and Afro-influenced house scenes. East Bay players like Stephen Ringmaiden, Aybee and the Deepblak crew, and parties like The People, Top Ten Social, and Ra Rah are also contributing to the Bay’s liveliness, and Said is an invaluable supporter of their efforts.

“With the everchanging demographic of new partygoers here and so many promoters willing to cash in on faceless trends, I feel there’s a danger of the true San Francisco nightlife essence — diverse in its range but consistent in its dedication to soulfulness and intimacy — being compromised,” Said says. “With my parties and releases, I strongly wish to preserve that here and transmit it to the world.” 

www.fatsouls.com

>>MORE GOLDIES 2010

Epic Bush crawl, part 2

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Epic Bush crawl, part 2

ruggy@yelp.com

SUPER EGO Marke B. is off getting hitched to Hunky Beau (finally!) so we asked scruffy lad-about-town Ruggy Joesten, senior community manager at Yelp.com, to fill in as nightlife correspondent. This is the second part of his SF Bush Corridor bar blitz. You can read all about part one here.

Summer Place Cocktail Lounge (801 Bush): Once we adjusted to the optical shock of entering this dark bar, we were treated to red accents throughout, Festivus lights along the low ceiling, and a new-school jukebox flashing every color of the rainbow and begging for our hard-earned dollars. We were clearly no regulars, but if looks could kill, we’d have all been assassinated by the three locals bellied up to the bar. I get it, though. Here we were, a bunch of young knuckleheads on an ironic bar crawl, interrupting their usually quiet evening with jovial intrigue and obnoxious requests for shots that should only be consumed on 21st birthdays. Clearly we deserved the hesitated acceptance. The standoff between us and the barflies became so contentious that when I asked the bartender for a flyer to help spread the good word about the joint’s 12-year anniversary party, one of the seasoned veterans retorted, “How about this for a flyer: use your fucking mouth and tell people yourself.”

I actually appreciated his candor and offered him a shot. As expected, tequila helped bury the hatchet. Then I learned that every alcoholic beverage purchased comes complete with a free bowl of Doritos! I don’t know if that’s usual policy, since I also noticed a rice cooker and a bottle of mustard on the counter behind the bar. Meanwhile, with cheese-stained fingers and a solid buzz, my posse fixated on a young couple engaging in some serious heavy petting in the corner of the room. And by heavy petting, I mean, I’m almost certain we collectively became pregnant just by watching them. (I named my newly formed zygote Darius, since I’ve always wanted a boy.) Were we slugging moonshine in the Tenderloin, or watching a live sex show with Roman Polanski in Amsterdam? After bidding adieu to the two lovebirds, I thanked my lucky stars that I’d opted for denim instead of sweatpants, and we hightailed it to our next stop.

21 Club (98 Turk): Five warm PBRs for $12.50. Faint smell of Brylcreem, urine, and failure. Esquire magazine’s proclamation that this bar was one of the country’s finest in 2008, proudly framed on the far corner of the facade. Good times for all.

Yong San (895 Bush): Yet another Bush hole-in-the-wall with extremely good-looking Korean women at the helm, and yet another bar where smoking was not only tolerated, but also borderline encouraged. I’m not a smoker, but when in Rome and you find yourself with a lit match in your grill and wandering brown eyes anticipating a long, fiery drag, it almost makes you wish you had a Virginia Slim at the ready. Sadly in this instance, I didn’t have a fag within arm’s reach, but I’ll be better equipped the next time.

Minutes after indulging in complimentary Doritos at Summer Place, I was just as impressed with the honorary eats Yong San had to offer: Cheetos Puffs! I would have been just fine with an ashtray full of Snyder’s or some Beer Nuts. But it’s that kind of outside-the-box thinking that keeps me intrigued. From there, and with another round of shots consumed and more High Life entering my bloodstream than runoff after a winter storm, we sadly waved farewell to Bush Corridor … but I did hold onto a few bullet-pointed observations.

BUSH CRAWL BY THE NUMBERS

7: number of bars visited in one evening

13: number of drinks consumed (belch)

5: hours in which this was accomplished

6: number of sext messages sent with much regret the following morning

8: number of miles walked

16: number of hours needed to fight the herculean hangover.

(415) 674-1821: number for the San Francisco chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous

Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A: Konami Code. How this is relevant is beyond me, but somehow, it just seems appropriate.

alt.sex.column: Waiting for ….

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
alt.sex.column: Waiting for ….

andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Readers:

I was at the San Francisco Sex Information conference recently, where once again there wasn’t enough time to cover the intriguing (and frustratingly unavailable) new methods of male contraception lurking, not unlike unejaculated spermatozoa, in the great urethra of scientific research and development.

I’d run out of space myself with the “If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we … ?” argument, but in brief, yes, scientific understanding of male fertility in general lags its female counterpart. The other explanation for the paucity of male contraceptives is that men’s reproductive systems are just too, I dunno, male, to tame. It sounds reasonable enough to say it’s far easier to aim at one target — an ovum — than it is at 100 million new squirmy little targets a day. But the NIH’s repro-health branch, the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development, blames “social and economic/commercial restraints,” and I’m always up for blaming those too.

If we somehow cleared those pesky socials and economics out of our path (Big Pharma has to step up; there’s only so much university researchers can do), would we see an explosion of safe and acceptable male birth control options? Pretty soon, probably, yes. And study after study suggests that men are ready and even eager to take over some of the hassle and responsibility. Women might just be ready for that too.

Despite the many “Whither the male pill?” articles you see, the new products and procedures likely won’t come in pill form: shots, implants, and even nasal sprays are the front-runners so far. On the kind-of-freaky front, there’s a “dry orgasm” nostrum, a so-far-nonexistent combination of a well-known blood pressure med with a discontinued antipsychotic that has unexpected effects on smooth muscle tissue.

RISUG, for reversible inhibition of sperm under guidance, is far better studied and far more promising. It’s a long-lasting injection of a sludgy compound that both blocks the vasa deferentia and messes with the enzymes a sperm needs to penetrate the egg.

Other researchers are looking into chemically blocking necessary tubage. A couple new male versions currently under study, though, are at least somewhat reversible, if not as instantly (and cheaply!) so as the RESUG, with its bi-carb and tingly massage.

Possibly my favorite unorthodox method is so low-tech and un-patentable that it’s hard to see where any major research money is ever going to come from. It’s plain old heat, applied via very-tighty-whities (called suspensories, these undies mimic undescended testicles by nearly pushing your balls — painlessly! — back up the inquinal canal) or hot bath.

As for the tech-ier and more expensive methods, remember those “social and economic/commercial restraints? That means the big money isn’t getting thrown at male contraception because the big money people don’t believe there’s a huge and eager market. If you beg to differ, you can go to MaleContraceptives.org and fill out their survey, which goes out quarterly to policy makers and pharmaceutical bigwigs. Put your mouth where the money is!

Love,

Andrea

 

Psychic Dream

Andrew Lam
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0

Oct. 27-Nov. 11

 

ARIES

March 21-April 19

The natural flow of energy between you and someone or something you dearly love has grown stagnant and its time to deal. Step back to check your stuck emo patterns and make changes where needed.

TAURUS

April 20-May 20

Your ego will lead you down one-way streets going the wrong direction this week. Replace egoism with boundaries whenever you can. Be honest and direct about what you can and can’t handle without defensiveness.

GEMINI

May 21-June 21

Radiate the good vibes you have within you and share what you’ve got. You’ll get where you want by being a team member who supports the whole, not just the star player. Shine, but don’t overshadow.

CANCER

June 22-July 22

Display patience in all you do this week. You don’t have the necessary tools to build things where you want them to be. No worries, though! You’ll get what’s needed if you wait for it.

LEO

July 23-Aug. 22

Clarify your understanding of what works for you in the now, Leo, not what you think might work tomorrow. Get present every way you can this week, even if that means experiencing uncertainty.

VIRGO

Aug. 23-Sept. 22

Pour inspiration into every little thing you do, sweet Virgo, even if it’s the dishes. Look for opportunities to make the little things ritualistic as a strategy for easing your path with the big stuff.

LIBRA

Sept. 23-Oct. 22

Being out of control sucks. Accept that there are blocks in your life that require tending to. Stop fretting and try to slow down long enough so you can hear your instincts amid all that internal chatter.

SCORPIO

Oct. 23-Nov. 21

Fun and frivolity have their place, and that’s the spot you like to be. This week your more practical priorities need to take up the most of your time. Invest solidly in creating the outcomes you most desire.

SAGITTARIUS

Nov. 22-Dec. 21

Things are changing all around you of their own accord, and as wonderful as it is to think of what you would do if you were queen for a day, it’s not terribly helpful. Go with the flow, even if it’s not what you’d prefer.

CAPRICORN

Dec. 22-Jan. 19

The path to Authentic is paved with risk and open hearts. You are being called on to stay emotionally present and honest in ways you are inclined to avoid. Show bravery as you make your dreams come true.

AQUARIUS

Jan. 20-Feb. 18

Don’t distract yourself from the work at hand, Water Bearer! Feeling good because you are able to believe in the potential in your life is way better than feeling good because you distracted yourself successfully. Get it together.

PISCES

Feb. 19-March 20

Don’t fight your way out of dark places, Pisces. Make allies and win the favor of your adversaries because week you’ll catch more flies with honey than vinegar. If you can’t play nice, take a time out. 

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.

 

 

Falling for Fallout — again

Andrew Lam
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0
Falling for Fallout — again

Fallout: New Vegas

(PC, PS3, Xbox 360) Obsidian Entertainment/Bethesda Softworks

GAMER Despite the reverence it commands, the Fallout series has a tortured history. The first two games (both classics) were developed by Black Isle Studios and published by Interplay. Out of nowhere, Micro Forte and 14 Degrees East stepped in to produce a licensed spin-off in 2001. Interplay’s 2003 financial difficulties led to the demise of Black Isle, and the publisher produced a fourth game in-house before selling the Fallout name to Bethesda Softworks, which released the mega-hit Fallout 3 in 2008.

The creative core of Black Isle, meanwhile, went on to form Obsidian Entertainment, which cut its teeth on ambitious-but-flawed follow-ups to popular franchises like Knights of the Old Republic and Neverwinter Nights. After the success of Fallout 3, the company got permission from Bethesda to return to its roots, producing a new game in the post-apocalyptic Fallout universe, superintended by series vets Josh Sawyer and Chris Avellone.

The result was Fallout: New Vegas. Though its outward appearance is defined by the wooden character models and awkward animations of the Gamebryo engine (a holdover from Fallout 3 and Bethesda’s swords-and-sorcery smash Oblivion) New Vegas feels and plays more like one of Black Isle’s isometric 1990s classics.

This distinctive sensibility is most notable in the writing, which oozes dark comedy and pulpy, hard-boiled dialogue in a way that Fallout 3 never did. Questing and character creation have also been redesigned in accordance with the Black Isle games’ core principles, necessitating difficult choices whose outcomes are not always immediately clear. The score, by delightfully named Israeli composer Inon Zur, deftly echoes the series’ bizarre, dystopian musical tradition.

There is one element of the original Fallout titles that nobody missed: the bugs. Unfortunately, Black Isle’s questionable quality assurance survived the name change, and New Vegas is not without its many hiccups. Given the sheer scope of the game, however, it’s hard to complain too stridently.

When Interplay shuttered Black Isle in 2003, many of the company’s leading lights felt that the Fallout franchise, every bit their brainchild, had been unfairly taken from them by the vicissitudes of corporate law. Seven years later, they’ve gotten the opportunity to welcome the gaming public back to wasteland. And nothing, after all, says “we’ve missed you” like a dual-mohawked psychopath with a belly full of mutated cockroach steak and a rusty machete.

 

Different walls

Andrew Lam
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0
Different walls

arts@sfbg.com

Palestinian perspectives are in. You know it when a major filmmaker like Julian Schnabel makes a big-budget film like Miral, based on the book by Palestinian journalist Rula Jebreal (which recently screened at the Mill Valley Film Festival in advance of a general release next year).

In many ways, though, it’s the rest of the country that’s catching up to places like the Bay Area, where Palestinian voices have long been a part of the cultural landscape. The Arab Film Festival, for instance, which just closed its 14th season, once again featured several films from and about Palestine. And this year the San Francisco International Film Festival gave us a look at Port of Memory, the latest work from Kamal Aljafari, one of the most interesting and sophisticated filmmakers to come from Palestine since Elia Suleiman.

In theater, San Francisco’s Golden Thread Productions just gave a staged reading of biographical work from youth in embattled Gaza called The Gaza Monologues. For years, Golden Thread has produced works incorporating the Palestinian perspective amid a mass culture overwhelmingly slanted toward the more powerful side in a basically colonial project. And currently Campo Santo and Intersection for the Arts bring the diasporic repercussions of Palestinian dispossession center stage in Habibi, a new play from a new Palestinian American theatrical voice, Sharif Abu-Hambeh.

Habibi makes its debut as the second offering in a trio of world premieres at Intersection by first-time playwrights (the first having been Chinaka Hodge’sMirrors in Every Corner). Directed by Omar Matwally, Abu-Hambeh’s play weaves together two distinct storylines that attempt to capture the inter-generational confusion and displacement experienced by assimilating Palestinian immigrants in the Bay Area. That confusion can regrettably transfer to the play itself, whose intentional deployment of ambiguity ends up, at least to some extent, being merely fuzzy rather than thought-provoking. But the ideas here are at times intriguingly subtle and the effort a promising one. Moreover, Matwally and Campo Santo give the play a strong production with various charms along the way.

At the center of this double helix of a narrative is young Palestinian American Tariq (a coolly vital and engaging Aleph Ayin). Tariq shares a small Mission District apartment and even — talk about family overload — a single bed with his loving but paternalistic father, Mohammed (a stern, sympathetic Paul Santiago). The deliberate and routine-loving Mohammed — who unlike his Americanized son speaks in accented English — is a museum guard with a strong work ethic that he’s trying, unsuccessfully, to instill in his slacker offspring. Tariq, for his part, has just happily shed his menial job at a local café and is in no hurry to find a new one. His absent mother (Nora El Samahy) apparently left them some time before, though she reappears at one point in his imagination.

This father and son dynamic, familial and almost too familiar, comes intercut with a public talk by a high-class museum curator (a sharp and funny El Samahy, dressed by costume designer Courtney Flores in esteem-grabbing Manhattan chic and sporting a very respectable English accent), who leads us through a slide lecture on the great art heists of the last century. Her talk, avid but meandering, is interrupted by simultaneously exasperating and guilt-producing phone calls from her terminally ill father, and a consequent tendency to wander into ruminations farther afield — summoned for us in pictures of dispossession that float by on the screen behind her (in video projections designed by Aubrey Millen).

Maybe these wayward ruminations aren’t so far afield after all, we come to suspect, as her theme of cultural theft warms up to its own complexities and encourages us to consider the nature of cultural transmission, loss, and hybridization in the life-and-death circumstances of exiled populations. This idea deepens as Tariq’s raucous and rebellious spirit extends to breaking into the curator’s monologue, and even smashing the fourth wall to confront us, her audience. Tariq also has a unique tendency to narrate his own actions, a self-conscious conceit that can be productive at times, especially of humor, and works as an indirect aside to the audience.

By the end, the two narratives come even closer together through a rash act of Tariq’s father that trades disastrously on the concept of family heirlooms, or the physical symbols of patrimony and place. The climax arrives too hastily, and its potential impact is muted. At the same time, the play’s departure from the more universal, shopworn gestures of “melting pot” tales verges on something rare and coruscating.

HABIBI

Thurs.–Sun., 8 p.m.; through Nov. 7; $15–$25

Intersection for the Arts

446 Valencia, SF

(415) 626-2787 

www.theintersection.org

 

 

Rep Clock

Andrew Lam
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0

 

Schedules are for Wed/27-Tues/2 except where noted. Director and year are given when available. Double and triple features are marked with a •. All times are p.m. unless otherwise specified.

 ARTISTS’ TELEVISION ACCESS 992 Valencia, SF; www.atasite.org. $6. “Deep Leap Microcinema:” “Zaum/Beyonsense” and work by Jesse Malmed, Fri, 8. “Other Cinema:” War of the Gargantuas (Honda, 1966), Ishiro Honda tribute with Japanese monster movie clips, Sat, 8.

CASTRO 429 Castro, SF; (415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com. $7.50-10. “15th Berlin and Beyond Film Festival,” Wed-Thurs. Visitwww.berlinbeyond.com for complete schedule and tickets ($10-11.50). •Fahrenheit 451 (Truffaut, 1966), Fri, 3:10, 7, and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (Lourie, 1953), Fri, 5:20, 9:10. “Mark Huestis Presents:” Poltergeist (Hooper, 1982), noon, 7:30, 9. With star JoBeth Williams in person at first two shows; 7:30pm show also features a pre-show performance. “Matinees for Maniacs: Monsters Are Coming to Town!:” •Something Wicked This Way Comes (Clayton, 1983), Sun, 2:30, and Escape to Witch Mountain (Hough, 1975), Sun, 4:30.

CELLSPACE 2050 Bryant, SF; www.sfindie.com. Free (donations to benefit CellSpace appreciated). “Eli Roth’s Midnight Movie Marathon:” The Thing(Carpenter, 1982), Sat, noon; Zombie (Fulci, 1979), Sat, 2; The Vanishing (Sluizer, 1988), Sat, 3:45; Pieces (Simon, 1982), Sat, 6; The Wicker Man(Hardy, 1973), Sat, 7:45; Who Can Kill a Child? (Serrador, 1976), Sat, 9:30; Eraserhead (Lynch, 1977), Sat, 11:45; Suspiria (Argento, 1977), Sun, 1:30am; Cannibal Holocaust (Deodato, 1980), Sun, 3:15am; Evil Dead (Raimi, 1981), Sun, 5:15am; Audition (Miike, 1999), Sun, 7am; Torso (Martino, 1973), Sun, 9am.

CHRISTOPHER B. SMITH RAFAEL FILM CENTER 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; (415) 454-1222, www.cafilm.org. $6.50-10.25. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (Alfredson, 2009), Oct 29-Nov 2, call for times. “Global Lens 2010:” Becloud (Bicecci, 2010), Wed, 6:45; The Night of Truth(Nacro, 2004), Wed, 9; Masquerades (Salem, 2008), Thurs, 6:45; The Shaft (Zhang, 2008), Thurs, 8:45. Inside Job (Ferguson, 2010), call for dates and times. Leaving (Corsini, 2009), Oct 29-Nov 3, call for times. My Dog Tulip (Fierlinger and Fierlinger, 2009), Wed-Thurs, call for times. Straight to Hell Returns (Cox, 2010), Mon, 7:15. With Alex Cox in person.

EMBARCADERO One Embarcadero Center, Promenade Level, SF; www.sffs.org. $12.50. “French Cinema Now:” Copacabana (Fitoussi, 2010), Thurs, 6:45 and Fri, 9:30; Rapt (Belvaux, 2009), Thurs, 9:30 and Mon, 9:15; Irène (Cavalier, 2009), Fri, 5 and Sat, 1:45; Love Like Poison (Quillévéré, 2010), Fri, 7 and Sun, 9:15; Sisters (Faucher, 2009), Sat, 3:45 and Sun, 6:45; The Princess of Montpensier (Tavernier, 2010), Sat, 6:30 and Sun, 3:45; A Real Life (Leonor, 2009), Sat, 9:30 and Tues, 6:30; Two in the Wave (Laurent, 2009), Sun, 1:30; Hidden Diary (Lopes-Curval, 2009), Mon, 6:30 and Tues, 9:15; Certified Copy (Kiarostami, 2010), Nov 3, 7, 9:15.

HUMANIST HALL 390 27th St, Oakl; www.humanisthall.org. $5. The Cove (Psihoyos, 2009), Wed, 7:30.

JACK LONDON SQUARE East lawn, Oakl; www.jacklondonsquare.com. Free. “Waterfront Flicks:” Twilight (Hardwicke, 2008), Thurs, 7:30.

MECHANICS’ INSTITUTE 57 Post, SF; (415) 393-0100 (reservations required). $10. “CinemaLit: Apocalypse Noir:” Night of the Demon (Tourneur, 1958), Fri, 6.

PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE 2575 Bancroft, Berk; (510) 642-5249, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu. $5.50-9.50. “Alternative Visions:” “Photographic Memory: Bay Area Student Experimental Film Festival 2010,” Wed, 7:30. “Readings on Cinema:” Safety Last (Newmeyer and Taylor, 1923), Thurs, 7. “Days of Glory: Revisiting Italian Neorealism:” Chronicle of Poor Lovers (Lizzani, 1954), Fri, 7; La Terra Trema (Visconti, 1948), Sat, 7; Miracle in Milan (De Sica, 1951), Sun, 4. “Shakespeare on Screen:” Macbeth (Welles, 1948), Fri, 9:05. “Left in the Dark: Portraits of San Francisco Movie Theatres,” slide show presentation with photographer R.A. McBride and readings with contributors to Left in the Dark, Sat, 5. “Drawn From Life: Comic Books and Graphic Novels Adapted:” Swamp Thing (Craven, 1982), Sun, 7:30.

RED VIC 1727 Haight, SF; (415) 668-3994. $6-10. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Wright, 2010), Wed-Thurs, 7, 9:20 (also Wed, 2). Winnebago Man(Steinbauer, 2010), Fri-Sat, 7:15, 9:15 (also Sat, 2, 4). The Room (Wiseau, 2003), Sat, midnight. Planet Terror (Rodriguez, 2007), Sun-Mon, 7:15, 9:15 (also Sun, 2, 4). The Kids Are All Right (Cholodenko, 2010), Nov 2-3, 7:15, 9:30 (also Nov 3, 2).

“ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW” Clay, 2261 Fillmore, SF and Albany, 1115 Solano, Albany; www.landmarktheatres.com. $9.50-10. The 1975 Jim Sharman musical plays at both theaters Fri, midnight (also Sat, midnight at the Clay).

ROXIE 3117 and 3125 16th St, SF; (415) 863-1087, www.roxie.com. $5-9.75. “SF DocFest,” Wed-Thurs. Program information at www.sfindie.com.Larry Wessel’s Iconoclast: Boyd Rice (Wessel, 2010), Mon, 7. “Halloween Spooktacular:” •The Man From Planet X (Ulmer, 1951), Fri, 6:35, 9:30, and The Creature With the Atom Brain (Cahn, 1955), Fri, 8; •Corruption (Hartford-Davis, 1968), Sat, 2:30, 6:15, 9:45, and The Brood (Cronenberg, 1979), Sat, 4:15, 8; •Straight to Hell Returns (Cox, 2010), Sun, 3:15, 7, 9, and Searchers 2.0 (Cox, 2004), Sun, 5. Alex Cox in person at Sunday shows.

SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART 151 Third St, SF; www.sfmoma.org. $5. “Witches!”: •Season of the Witch (Romero, 1973) andSuspiria (Argento, 1977), Thurs, 7.

VARIETY SCREENING ROOM 582 Market, SF; (650) 724-5544, www.unaff.org. Free. “United Nations Association Film Festival:” Strange Birds in Paradise: A West Papuan Story (Hill-Smith), Wed, 4; Kites (Dzianowicz), Wed, 5:25; “Panel Discussion: Images That Provoke,” Wed, 6:45; Secrets of the Tribes (Padilha), Wed, 8; The Rage of Images (Scharf and Duregger), Wed, 9:40.

VIZ CINEMA New People, 1746 Post, SF; www.vizcinema.com. $10. “Mizoguchi and His Muse: Kinuyo Tanaka,” Wed-Tues, check website for schedule.

VORTEX ROOM 2961 16th Sf, SF; www.sfcinema.org. $10. “Remembering Dennis Hopper:” Night Tide (Harrington, 1961) with “The Wormwood Star” (Harrington, 1955), Wed, 7:30. YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS 701 Mission, SF; (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org. $6-8. “Muppet History 201: Rarities from the Henson Vault,” Thurs, 7:30 and Sat, 2.

 

 

Playlist

Andrew Lam
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0
Playlist

E.M.A.K.

A Synthetic History of E.M.A.K. 1982-88

(Universal Sound)

This banana-yellow retrospective comp devoted to a small collective-group of electronic musicians in Cologne, Germany offers a number of John Carpenter-like pleasures. E.M.A.K. member Kurt Mill provides two of the best. The vaguely sinister bass line, otherworldly organ, and synth stabs of “Bote des Herbstes” would fit in perfectly alongside tracks from Carpenter’s soundtrack for Christine (1983), and “Filmmusik” has a dancefloor as well as cinematic appeal. A fun document of a time when sampling was being invented and Commodore 64s were making music.


THE FRESH & ONLYS

Play It Strange

(In the Red)

A half-dozen or so listens in, this is shaping up to be the best album by SF’s Fresh & Onlys to date, thanks in part to its widescreen production (the album was recorded by Tim Green). With its Duane Eddy twang, ghost harmonies, propulsive rhythms, and dovetail lyric about bickering between dying forms of media, “Waterfall” is as terrific as it is catchy. I kinda wish the group would slow down the tempo from time to time for more variety, particularly because they seem more than capable of pulling off a big ballad. But not many groups can evoke both Morrissey and late-period Damned while sounding like themselves, and “I’m All Shook Up” offers exactly the kind of irresistible classic rock ‘n’ roll its title promises.


NICK GARRIE

The Nightmare of J B Stanislaus

(Cherry Red/Rev-Ola)

In 1970, when The Nightmare of J B Stanislas was released, Nick Garrie was young, blond, and beautiful. But one need only look to Scott Walker at the time to see that pop idol looks and ambitious melancholic talent didn’t necessarily equate to record sales. Garrie’s debut album isn’t as dramatically symphonic as Walker’s solo efforts of the time, but it features beautifully lush orchestration. His purple lyrical style — which bears some similarity to Donovan’s — and gentle choir-schooled voice meet up with strings to best effect on the plaintive “Can I Stay With You?,” a love song to a girl in his French lit class.


SMALL BLACK

New Chain

(Jagjaguwar)

Last summer I saw Small Black play after Pictureplane and before Washed Out on a chillwave triple bill of sorts that was disappointing in terms of how the sound translated to a live context. At the time, Small Black came off as the closest to an actual band, calling New Order to mind in terms of sound if not songwriting caliber. A year or so later, with a chillwave backlash in effect, Small Black’s debut album arrives amid a blogosphere’s worth of dodgy enthusiasm about the latest microgenre du jour: drag (or haunted house, or witch house). You can hear some trendy witch house elements in the production of New Chain, especially the album’s variety of woozy and wheezy speedball sounds, but Small Black is far more musical and melodic than the wretched hype-magnet Salem, and fond of vintage hi-NRG touches. A little pretty goes a long way, and at least “Search Party” and “Photojournalist” have incandescent moments.


T. REX

The Slider

(Fat Possum)

Kudos to Fat Possum for reissuing this hard-to-find 1972 T. Rex all-time great, which moves from high point to high point as quickly as Marc Bolan’s lyrics find new nicknamed characters to describe. Every once in a while — say, on “Baseball Ricochet” — Bolan’s playful language is a bit too nonsensical for its own good, but glam gems such as “Telegram Sam” and “Metal Guru” are matched by most of the album tracks. One peculiarity — how much the riff of “Chariot Choogle” resembles Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love,” recorded two year earlier.


VARIOUS ARTISTS

Califia: The Songs of Lee Hazlewood

(Ace)

There are all kinds of treats and discoveries to be made within this grab-bag of Lee Hazlewood obscurities. Who else could write a song called “The Girl On Death Row,” not to mention deliver it with the authority of a winking Johnny Cash? (Turns out the song was for an American International Picture that went and changed its title.) Califia also includes some squalling girl-pop by Hazelwood’s early flame Suzi Jane Hokom and his later muse Ann-Margret, and a number of guitar-themed gems penned for his buddy Duane Eddy. It all closes with a song in German by the formerly “Little” Peggy March.


WEEKEND

Sports

(Slumberland)

To hear how extraordinary Weekend can be, check out “Age Class,” a rock song of instant classic status because of its furious guitar, ghost rider breakdown, and Shaun Durkan’s vocal, which builds to a crescendo that grasps extremes of love and death from the repeated line “There’s something in our blood.” Sportsis an always-promising and sometimes powerful debut album, with a peculiar track sequence — its first half is erratic and largely opaque, but it hits stride with “Age Class” and the songs that follow. The Bay Area group’s antecedents range from Joy Division to Ride to the Wedding Present but they’re already on their own path. I’m excited to hear where they go next.

 

Onra’s future funk

Andrew Lam
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2
Onra’s future funk

arts@sfbg.com

I first stumbled upon Onra’s music three years ago when I picked up Chinoiseries (Label Rouge), a sprawlinlg beat-tape in the line of J Dilla’s blueprint for the future of hip-hop, Donuts (Stones Throw, 2006). But unlike the late Dilla’s many lackluster imitators, Onra proves a worthy disciple. 

Chinoiseries‘ crackling intro blends hip-hop quotables over boom bap percussion, closing out with Dilla’s signature rally call, “Let’s go!” But the transition into “The Anthem” is unexpected: a bass-heavy break anchors unfamiliar horn blasts and traditional Mandarin vocals, unsteady and fissured in odd rhythm. What follows are 30 head-nodding beats culled from late 1960s and early 1970s vinyl straight outta dusty Saigon crates — some Vietnamese, some Chinese in origin. The effort certainly takes cues from RZA’s eerie psychedelic architectonics for the Wu-Tang Clan, in which he transformed Staten Island street sagas into a Shaolin kung-fu epic, but Chinoiseries is more furtive and gargantuan, scattered and undigested.

Onra, or Arnaud Bernard according to his French government papers, isn’t your typical Parisian hip-hop producer (whatever that is). He was born in Germany to a Vietnamese father and French mother and moved to France at a young age. He spent summers in the Ivory Coast where his mother lived and listened to the Caribbean polyrhythms of Zouk. But what initially hooked Onra to the beat was early 1990s American hip-hop. “I never really liked music before hearing my first rap song,” Onra tells me over an extended e-mail correspondence. “I was like, ‘This is it, and anything else is garbage.’ I had this state of mind for a few years before opening to other genres.”

Travel permeated Onra’s early life, and hip-hop gave him a common language with other wayward teens searching for a sense of themselves. “Through hip-hop, it has always been easier to connect with people because we share the same passion. So we’re pretty much on the same wavelength — at least, we speak the same language,” he says.

What makes Onra stand out is a talent not only for exploring the semantics of hip-hop’s codified scriptures, but its heavily layered emotional fabric. The MPC sampler/sequencer is his weapon of choice for recontextualizing sonic histories and mythologies. I’d even go so far as to say that he usurps tools of hip-hop to ground a sense of place in today’s widespread diaspora, where traditional and modern, distant and far, the animate and artificial grind against each other in sometimes uncomfortable, and unsalvageable, ways.

Earlier this summer Onra dropped his strongest effort, Long Distance (All City), which he considers his full-length debut. The record, a thoroughly futuristic approach to early 1980s boogie funk, helped propel the wave of recent revivalism for the genre heralded by Los Angeles’ Dam-Funk. Locally, the Sweater Funk crew has steadily unearthed overlooked boogie jams, playing original vinyl of low rider grooves and synthesized soul in the basement of Chinatown’s Li-Po Lounge every Sunday night. Somehow the cheese factor of these sounds has retained its original funky odor, and even rampant irony has given way to wholehearted appreciation for lustful forays into buoyant bass and lush melodies.

But Onra’s approach to the funk gathers inspiration from Notorious B.I.G.’s Mtume-based “Juicy” and Foxy Brown’s “Gotta Get You Home” more than the analog-minded heritage channeled by Dam-Funk. “There were so many songs in the ’90s that sampled ’80s funk and modern soul,” Onra says. “That’s the feeling I wanted to have on my album. I had to find a way of recreating their feeling, but with a fresher touch.” Long Distance manages that tension well, navigating nostalgia for Roland chord progressions and vintage drum machines with a finger on the pulse for the spacey beat-futurism cultivated by the likes of Flying Lotus and Hudson Mohawke.

The rolling bass lines of “Comet” and “Rock On” pick up where Parliament’s mothership landed 30 years ago — but the rusty funk machine scrapped together during the days of the cold war gets a bit of a facelift on Long Distance. The swerving slap bounce is reconfigured into a fragmented narrative of sensual ideas and indulgent desire outlined in chalk. On “High Hopes” and the title track, R&B crooners Reggie B and Olivier Daysoul wax seductive over woozy beats that sound like Dilla flipped the Prelude vaults.

Voices are distorted and guzzled through technological mediation: “Oper8tor” receives the vocoder-inflected Zapp treatment and “Girl” traces a love interest’s absent-minded confession over a fuzzy telephone voice message. Onra also ventures into uncharted intergalactic territory. “Wonderland” cruises on ecstatic altitudes higher than the intoxication of house, while “WheeOut,” featuring Buddy Sativa wilding out on synth chords, discovers the sticky underbelly of electro.

A general theme of travel, and the insatiable desires that emerge from such trips through space and time, saturates the warm sonic textures of Long Distance. Onra doesn’t care to divulge too much on the topic: “I have been traveling a lot these past few years,” he says. “This album has been inspired by my own personal experiences, by a few long distance relationships I had … I think it’s a very inspiring subject.”

I would dare trace the notion of distance back even farther, to the very impulse of Onra’s stylized hip-hop production. Whether seeking out some sense of imaginative rootedness across disparate traditions and backgrounds in Chinoiseries and other beat-tapes, or the heart of expressionistic eros in Long Distance, a sense of absence drives Onra’s work. But he doesn’t get lost in mournful nostalgia for a lost past and places already visited; some sort of dreamy future — a strange horizon where the erotic and robotic merge — seems to rise from the rubble. Desire might just find what it’s been looking for. 

ONRA

With Buddy Sativa, Sweater Funk DJs

Fri/29, 10 p.m.; $10

SOM

2925 16th St., SF

(415) 558-8521

www.som-bar.com

 

Don’t stop this crazy thing

Andrew Lam
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0
Don’t stop this crazy thing

arts@sfbg.com 

Coldcut used to brag that it was “Ahead of Our Time.” In the late 1980s, they slapped the phrase onto a host of groundbreaking forays into cut-and-past sound mathematics like “Beats + Pieces,” “Doctorin’ the House,” and “Stop This Crazy Thing,” freewheeling tunes that treated the history of sound as an enormous candy shop, copyright laws be damned.

And now? Coldcut’s long-running company Ninja Tune reflects the musical times in all its heterogeneous subgenres and variations on familiar themes. When Matt Black and Jonathan More launched Ninja Tune in 1990, it was to create an outlet for the group’s abiding passion in instrumental beats (which the British press would soon garnish with colorful nicknames like “trip-hop” and “sampledelia”). It was built on Coldcut-related productions like DJ Food’s Jazz Brakes series and Bogus Order’s Zen Brakes. Over time, the label flowered into a major indie with two sublabels (Counter and Big Dada) and dozens of artists passing through its doors, from Amon Tobin and Roots Manuva to Antibalas and Mr. Scruff. Today, it releases iconoclastic statements from the L.A. beat scene (Daedelus), the Baltimore indie/electro scene (Spank Rock and the Death Set), and London’s grime and bass worlds (the Bug).

During a phone interview from London, Coldcut’s Black says, “All the artists on the label have their own character. It’s like a collection of audibles, really. There’s a consistency in the fact that we’re all quite out there.” He adds that Ninja Tune is more “advanced” than it was in its first decade, when most of the roster — including production units like the Herbaliser and Funki Porcini — fit under the “trip-hop” rubric. “I felt that some of the early releases interpreted the Coldcut blueprint too literally, just getting some funky loops and sounds and stringing it out for a bit.” Part of this is due to maturity. The Herbaliser, for example, began making beat “loops” for discerning headz but has since grown into a full-fledged band. Even DJ Food, which now solely consists of producer Strictly Kev, has become a purveyor of soundtrack music inspired as much by David Axelrod as Marley Marl.

The mutating Ninja Tune amoeba is being chronicled through a series of 20th anniversary promotions. The deluxe box set Ninja Tune XX includes a hardcover book, six CDs, and six 7-inch vinyl records. The book, Ninja Tune: 20 Years of Beats & Pieces (Black Dog Publishing, 1992 pages, $29.95), is also available separately as a paperback. “If you look at the arrangements and the musicality on the music on the XX set, it’s a lot more advanced than it was a few years ago,” says Black, pointing to San Francisco’s Brendan “Eskmo” Angelides as an example.

Eskmo isn’t the first Bay Area artist to record for Ninja Tune; that honor belongs to rap experimentalist cLOUDDEAD, which released the U.K. edition of its 2001 self-titled album through Big Dada. However, he gives Ninja Tune a foothold in the thriving bass and organic electronic music scene through the symphonic boom of tracks like “Hypercolor.” Eskmo says that signing with Ninja Tune, which just released his self-titled debut, has been “really inspirational,” adding, “It’s a unique thing in this day and age for an independent to be flourishing and still put out creative stuff.”

According to Stevie Chick’s book 20 Years of Beats & Pieces, Ninja Tune emerged in the wake of the music industry’s brief yet disillusioning courtship of Coldcut, who dazzled with a game-changing remix of Eric B. & Rakim’s “Paid In Full” (the classic “Seven Minutes of Madness” mix) and U.K. pop hits like Yazz’ “The Only Way Is Up” and Queen Latifah’s “Find a Way.” The label began as Coldcut’s middle finger to demands that they become another group of pop-dance hacks like Stock Aitken Waterman. “We really liked making instrumental hip-hop, fucking around, not having to make another ‘pop’ track,” Black tells author Chick. On albums such as 1997’s Let Us Play, Coldcut found an equilibrium between advocating the wonders of cutting-edge technology and vinyl consumption and promoting anticapitalist themes.

An inevitable byproduct of Ninja Tune’s success (as well as that of its great rival, Warp Records) is that its fashion-forward yet radical communal lifestyle seems more myth than reality. In 2005, the label released Amon Tobin’s soundtrack for the Ubisoft video game Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. Last year, Speech Debelle won the U.K. Mercury Prize for her Speech Therapy debut. A few months later, the British rapper announced that she wanted off the Big Dada label because it didn’t promote her work enough. Meanwhile, several roster artists have scored popular car commercials, from Mr. Scruff’s “Get a Move On” for the Lincoln Navigator to the Heavy’s “How You Like Me Now?” for KIA Sorento minivans.

“We’ve adapted our game,” Black explains. “We’ve got a company called Sync, Inc. and they specialize in getting sync licenses or getting our music placed in films, TV, video games, and adverts. That’s become an important part of our business.” When asked if that contradicts Coldcut’s earlier independent philosophy, he answers, “We give our artists a lot of freedom. If an artist wants to license a track to Coca-Cola, we wouldn’t necessarily block them. Coldcut has turned down a lot of syncs, particularly car ads, ever since we did one for Ford and realized that was a terrible idea.” Ironically, the song used was “Timber,” an instrumental decrying the eradication of rain forests. Even though Coldcut gave half of the licensing money to Greenpeace, says Black, “We didn’t feel comfortable with it.”

Two decades on, Ninja Tune continues to weather the rapid changes of the music industry while sustaining Coldcut’s dream of an independent haven for progressive artists. But the future ain’t free. “I believe the corporations are the Nazis of our age,” Black says. “But you sometimes have to talk to the Nazis because they’re a reality.”

NINJATUNE XX

With Amon Tobin, Kid Koala, DJ Food and DK, Toddla T and Serocee, Dj Kentaro, Eskmo, Ghostbeard, An-Ten-Nae, Motion Potion

Fri/29, 9 p.m.-4 a.m.; free with rsvp

1015 Folsom

103 Harriet, SF

www.ninjatunexx.xlr8r.com

 

 

Stage

Andrew Lam
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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.


OPENING

Equus Boxcar Theatre Playhouse, 505 Natoma; 776-1747, www.boxcartheatre.org. $10-25. Opens Wed/27, 8pm. Runs Wed-Sat, 8pm. Through Nov 20. Boxcar Theatre kicks off its fifth season with Peter Shaffer’s drama, directed by Erin Gilley.

Failure to Communicate The Garage, 975 Howard; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. Call for prices. Opens Fri/29, 8pm. Runs Fri-Sat 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through Nov 14. Perfomers Under Stress opens its sixth season with the world premiere of a physical theater piece by Valerie Fachman.

The Unexpected Man EXIT Theatre, 156 Eddy; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $18-25. Opens Fri/29. Runs Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Through Nov 14. Spare Stage revives Yasmina Reza’s ironic comedy, starring Ken Ruta.

BAY AREA

Becoming Britney Center REPortory Company, Knight Stage 3 Theatre, 1601 Civic Drive, Walnut Creek; (925) 943-SHOW, www.centerREP.org. $25. Previews Thurs/28-Fri/29, 8:15pm. Opens Sat/30, 8:15pm. Runs Thurs-Sat, 8:15pm; Sun, 2:15pm. Through Nov 14.Center REPortory Company presents an original musical about a naïve pop star, written by Molly Bell and Daya Curley.

Palomino Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk; (510) 843-4822, www.auroratheatre.org. $10-55. Previews Fri/29-Sat/30 and Nov 3, 8pm; Sun/31, 2pm; Tues/2, 7pm. Opens Nov 4, 8pm. Runs Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm; Tues, 7pm. Through Dec 5. David Cale brings his new solo play about a gigolo to Aurora Theatre for its Bay Area premiere.

Pirates of Penzance Novato Theatre Company Playhouse, 484 Ignacio, Novato; 883-4498, www.novatotheatercompany.org. $12-22. Opens Thurs/28, 8pm. Runs Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Through Nov 21. Novato Theatre Company revives the popular Gilbert and Sullivan swashbuckling tale.

ONGOING

Christian Cagigal’s Obscura: A Magic Show EXIT Cafe, 156 Eddy; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $15-25. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through Dec 18. Magician Christian Cagigal presents a mix of magic, fairy tales, and dark fables.

Dracula’s School for Vampires Young Performers Theatre, Fort Mason Center, Bldg C, Third Floor, Room 300; 346-5550, www.ypt.org. $7-10. Sat, 1 pm; Sun, 1 and 3:30pm. Through Nov 14. Young Performers Theatre presents a Dracula comedy by Dr. Leonard Wolf.

Equus Boxcar Theatre Playhouse, 505 Natoma; 776-1747, www.boxcartheatre.org. $10-25. Opens Wed/27, 8pm. Runs Wed-Sat, 8pm. Through Nov 20. Boxcar Theatre kicks off its fifth season with Peter Shaffer’s drama, directed by Erin Gilley.

Futurestyle ’79 Off-Market Theater, Studio 250, 965 Mission; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $15-20. Wed, 8pm. Through Wed/27. A fully improvised episodic comedy played against the backdrop of SF in 1979.

Glory Days Boxcar Studios, 125 Hyde; www.jericaproductions.com. $30. Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm (no performance Sun/31). Through Nov 7. Jerica Prodcutions and the Royal Underground Theatre company present Nick Blaemire’s and James Gardiner’s one-act musical.

Habibi Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia; 626-2787, www.theintersection.org. $15-25. Thurs-Sun, 8pm. Through Nov 7. Intersection for the Arts and Campo Santo present the world premiere of a play by Sharif Abu-Hamdeh.

*Hamlet Alcatraz Island; 547-0189, www.weplayers.org. By donation. Sat-Sun, times vary. Through Nov 21. Outside of an actual castle, it would hard to say what could serve as a more appropriate stand-in for Kronborg castle of Helsingør—also known as Elsinore—than the isolated fortress of Alcatraz Island, where WE Players are presenting Hamlet in all its tragic majesty. As audience members tramp along

stony paths and through prison corridors from one scene to the next, the brooding tension the site alone creates is palpable, and the very walls impart a sense of character, as opposed to window-dressing. Deftly leaping around rubble and rock, a hardy troupe of thespians and musicians execute the three-hour

production with neat precision, guiding the audience to parts of the island and prison edifice that aren’t usually part of the standard Alcatraz tour package. Incorporating movement, mime, live music, and carefully-engineered use of space, the Players turn Alcatraz into Denmark, as their physical bodies meld into Alcatraz. Casting actress Andrus Nichols as the discontent prince of Denmark is an incongruity that works, her passions’ sharp as her swordplay, the close-knit family unit of Laertes, Ophelia, and Polonius are emphatically human (Benjamin Stowe, Misti Boettiger, Jack Halton), and Scott D. Phillips plays the

appropriately militaristic and ego-driven Claudius with a cold steel edge. (Gluckstern)

Hedda Gabler Phoenix Theatre, suite 601, 414 Mason; (800) 838-3006, www.offbroadwaywest.org. $35.

The action unfolds in the parlor of the newly married Tesmans, young mediocre academic George (Adam Simpson) and town beauty Hedda, née Gabler (a crisp, tightly wound and nicely understated Cecilia Palmtag), a woman of exceptional intelligence, ambition and pride—to call her fiery wouldn’t be bad either, especially since she’s so fond of shooting off her late father’s pistols. Frustrated by her paltry new life, Hedda seeks news of an old flame, Eilert Lovborg (Paul Baird), via the admiring and vaguely lecherous Judge Brack (Peter Abraham) and a timid acquaintance from school days, Thea (Joceyln Stringer). The semi-wild but brilliant Lovborg has published a new book that imperils George’s chances for a professorship. Less interested in securing George’s career than controlling Lovborg’s destiny, Hedda soon manipulates events around her with bold determination and tragic consequences. Passionate, violent and psychologically complex, Henrik Ibsen’s titular heroine is at turns sympathetic and disturbing, an independent soul trapped in and warped by a society that allows her too little scope—a modern predicament that has inspired many modern and postmodern adaptations. Off Broadway West’s straight-ahead production of the late-19th-century drama, helmed by artistic director Richard Harder, remains faithful to the period setting. This includes Bert van Aalsburg’s respectable scenic design and Sylvia Kratins impressive costumes, as well as the old if fine translation by William Archer, who first introduced Ibsen to the English-speaking world. Unfortunately, the quaint diction is not handled with equal grace across an uneven cast. Palmtag’s solid, at times admirable performance in the lead, however, goes a good way toward grounding an otherwise patchy production. (Avila)

Last Days of Judas Iscariot Gough Street Playhouse, 1620 Gough; (510) 207-5774, www.CustomMade.org. $10-30. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through Sat/30. Custom Made Theatre Company presents the 2005 play by New York’s Stephen Adly Guirgis (Our Lady of 121st Street, Jesus Hopped the A Train), which places purgatorial Judas (Kristoffer Alberto Barrera) on trial to determine his deserved fate for dropping a dime on Jesus and all that jazz. Flamboyant, sycophantic and horny prosecutor El-Fayoumy (Ben Ortega) and defense attorney Loretta (Amelia Avila) call between them a series of brow-raising witnesses—including Mother Teresa (Brandy Leggett), Sigmund Freud (Catz Forsman), and Satan (Richard Wenzel)—as Judas (seated on the upper tier of Sarah Phykitt’s suitably imposing split-level set) stares stoically in relative silence or appears in a series of childhood flashbacks. Characteristically funny and streetwise, as well as versed in the Catholic rigmarole as filtered through a NYC-boroughs sensibility, Guirgis’s play is also unusually tedious in its jokey, poky unfolding since—offering not much more than a cipher in the largely mute Iscariot—the proceedings lack a strong sense of dramatic stakes. It feels more like a revue than a play, or like an unnecessarily long-winded excuse for the final, well-turned concluding monologue by a heretofore marginal character (a speech delivered with admirable understatement by director Brian Katz). (Avila)

Law and Order: San Francisco Unit: The Musical! EXIT Theater, 156 Eddy; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $10. Mon, 8pm. Through Nov 15. Funny But Mean comedy troupe extends its newest show at a new venue.

Mary Stuart The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; (510) 841-6500, www.shotgunplayers.org. $15-30. Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. (also Wed/27, Nov 3; 7pm). Through Nov 7. Shotgun Players presents Friedrich Schiller’s historical drama, directed by Mark Jackson.

*Pearls Over Shanghai Thrillpeddlers’ Hypnodrome, 575 10th St; (8008) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $30-69. Sat, 8pm. Through Dec 19. Thrillpeddlers’ acclaimed production of the Cockettes musical continues its successful run.

Proof Exit Stage Left Theatre, 156 Eddy; www.belljartheatre.com. $20. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through Sat/30. Bell Jar Theatre presents David Auburn’s award-winning play.

*The Real Americans The Marsh MainStage, 1062 Valencia; (800) 838-3006; www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Wed-Fri, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through Nov 6. The fifth extension of Dan Hoyle’s acclaimed show, directed by Charlie Varon.

*SHIToberfest Off-Market Theaters, 965 Mission; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $20. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through Sat/30. This special October run of PianoFight’s bowel-loosening comedy series, the S.H.I.T. Show (for acronym fans, that’s the Stop Hating Imagination Time Show), revolves dizzyingly around the subject of beer, Germans and, perhaps less explicably, flatulent dolphins, among much else in the wide open seas of poor taste. Is it hilarious? It is. And you don’t even need to smuggle in a forty to make it so, though it certainly doesn’t hurt. Fine comic acting throughout a charismatic cast (including writer-director-producers Alex Boyd, Zach Cahn, Jed Goldstein, Ray Hobbs, Devin McNulty, Evan Winchester and Duncan Wold, with help from Nicole Hammersla, Gabrielle Patacsil, Rob Ready, Derricka Smith, Andy Strong, Jacque Vavroch and Dan Williams) combines here with generally solid to exceptional sketch work, video and song. Add in a permeating spirit of revelry, debauchery and irreverence and the evening becomes a diversion of the first order, culminating in an utterly sacrilicious sketch about a bunch of toasted beer-brewing monks treated to a papal visit—one of the best venial sins for your buck. When it comes to Octoberfesting this year, “Bavaria” is just S.H.I.T.–faced for Bay Area. (Avila)

Shocktoberfest!! 2010: Kiss of Blood Hypnodrome Theatre, 575 10th; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $25-35. Thurs-Fri, 8pm (Thurs/28-Sun/31 include performances of The Forsaken Laboratory by the Brazilian Grand Guignol group Vigor Mortis). Through Nov 19. Thrillpeddlers’ seasonal slice of eyeball is comprised of three playlets variously splattered with platelets, all directed by Russell Blackwood and bridged by a rousing burst of bawdy song from the full cast. Rob Keefe’s Lips of the Damned (after La Veuve by Eugene Heros and Leon Abric) takes place in a rat-infested museum of atrocities just before the fumigating starts, as an adulterous couple—comprised of a kinky married lady (a vivacious Kara Emry) and a naïve hunk from the loading dock (Daniel Bakken)—get their kicks around the guillotine display, and their comeuppance from the jilted proprietor (Flynn DeMarco). Keefe’s delightfully off-the-wall if also somewhat off-kilter Empress of Colma posits three druggy queens in grandma’s basement, where they practice and primp for their chance at drag greatness, and where newly crowned Crystal (a gloriously beaming Blackwood) lords it over resentful and suspicious first-runner-up Patty Himst (Eric Tyson Wertz) and obliviously cheerful, non-sequiturial Sunny (Birdie-Bob Watt). When fag hag Marcie (Emry) arrives with a little sodium pentothal snatched from dental school, the truth will out every tiny closeted secret, and at least one big hairy one. Kiss of Blood, the 1929 Grand Guignol classic, wraps things up with botched brain surgery and a nicely mysterious tale of a haunted and agonized man (Wertz) desperate to have Paris’s preeminent surgeon (DeMarco) cut off the seemingly normal finger driving him into paroxysms of pain and panic. Well-acted in the preposterously melodramatic style of the gory genre, the play (among one or two other things) comes off in a most satisfying fashion. (Avila)

Sunset Limited SF Playhouse, 533 Sutter; 677-9596, www.sfplayhouse.org. $40-50. Tues-Wed, 7pm; Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 3 and 8pm. Through Nov 6. This 2006 play by Cormac McCarthy exhibits some of the best and worst of the celebrated author, but significantly more of the latter. It sets an aging white academic and failed suicide (Charles Dean) in a room with his rescuer and would-be savior, a poor black social worker (Carl Lumbly), who has just snatched him from a railway platform ahead of a tête-à-tête with a train called the Sunset Limited. Both characters remain nameless, emphasizing the abstract pseudo-Socratic dimensions attendant on the dialogue-driven realism here (staged with a knowing wink in director Bill English’s scenic design, a partially walled wood-framed shack with see-through slits between the thin horizontal planking). The black man is a born-again Christian and ex-con convinced Jesus has just given him a major assignment. His dogmatic certainty is matched by the white man’s nihilism and despair. “I believe in the primacy of the intellect,” the miserable prof tells his host, who’s locked the door on his self-destructive guest in an effort to buy time to change his mind. Leaving aside the historically clichéd, problematic and baggage-heavy dynamic of a poor black American devoted to the welfare of a rich white one, neither man moves from his respective position one inch (at least until perhaps and partially at the very end), which constrains the dramatic development. Moreover, both sides argue feebly, mainly by gainsaying whatever it is the other one says, making this not a great intellectual debate either. SF Playhouse’s production sets two fine actors at this heavy-handed twofer, but little can be done to redeem so static and arid an exercise. (Avila)

Susie Butler Sings the Sarah Vaughan Songbook Exit Theater Cafe, 156 Eddy; (510) 860-0997, www.brownpapertickets.com. $15-20. Sat, 8:30pm. Through Nov 20. Local actress and singer Susie Butler takes on the Sassy songbook.

Zombie Town Stage Werx Theatre, 533 Sutter; www.stagewerx.org. (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $24. Thurs-Sat, 8pm (also Sun/31, 5pm). Through Sun/31. Catharsis Theatre Collective presents a documentary play about zombie attacks in Texas.

BAY AREA

*Compulsion Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison; (510) 647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org. $29-85. Dates and times vary. Through Sun/31. Director Oscar Eustis of New York’s Public Theater marks a Bay Area return with an imaginatively layered staging of Rinne Groff’s stimulating new play. Compulsion locates the momentous yet dauntingly complex cultural-political outcomes of the Holocaust in the career of a provocative Jewish American character, Sid Silver, driven by real horror, sometimes-specious paranoia, and unbounded ego in his battle for control over the staging of Anne Frank’s Diary. A commandingly intense and fascinatingly nuanced Mandy Patinkin plays the brash, litigious Silver, based on real-life writer Meyer Levin, a best-selling author who obsessively pursued rights to stage his own version of Anne Frank’s story. The forces competing for ownership of, and identification with, Anne Frank and her hugely influential diary extend far beyond her father Otto, Silver, or the diary’s publishers at Doubleday (represented here by a smooth Matte Osian in a variety of parts; and a vital Hannah Cabell, who doubles as Silver’s increasingly alarmed and alienated French wife). But the power of Groff’s play lies in grounding the deeply convoluted and compromised history of that text and, by extension, the memory and meanings of the Holocaust itself, in a small set of forceful characters—augmented by astute use of marionettes (designed by Matt Acheson) and the words of Anne Frank herself (partially projected in Jeff Sugg’s impressive video design). The productive dramatic tension doesn’t let up, even after the seeming grace of the last-line, which relieves Silver of worldly burdens but leaves us brooding on their shifting meanings and ends. (Avila)

Dracula Center REPertory Company, 1601 Civic, Walnut Creek; (925) 943-SHOW, www.centerrep.org. $36-42. Wed, 7:30pm; Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2:30pm (also Nov 20, 8pm). Through Nov 20. Eugene Brancoveanu stars as the Count in a production directed by Michael Butler.

*East 14th: True Tales of a Reluctant Player Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Dates and times vary. Through Nov 21. Don Reed’s solo play, making its Oakland debut after an acclaimed New York run, is truly a welcome homecoming twice over. (Avila)

*The Great Game: Afghanistan Roda Theatre, 201 Addison, Berk; (510) 647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org. $17-73. Call for times. Through Nov 7. Berkeley Rep presents the West Coast premiere of a three-part show about Afghanistan.

*Loveland The Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston Way; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $20-50. Fri, 7pm; Sat, 5pm. Through Nov 13. Ann Randolph’s acclaimed one-woman comic show about grief returns for its sixth sold-out extension.

Superior Donuts TheatreWorks at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro; (650) 463-1960, www.theatreworks.org. $19-67. Tues-Wed, 7:30pm; Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 2 and 8pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through Sun/31. This latest from Tracy Letts (August: Osage County, Killer Joe) starts out as a delicious treat but a hollowness in the center of it all leaves one less than fully unsatisfied. Director Leslie Martinson’s cast shines, however, as the action unfolds in crisp, engaging scenes set in the titular run-down donut shop in Chicago’s slowly gentrifying Uptown neighborhood. Owner-operator Arthur Przybyszewski (Howard Swain) is an aging baby boomer and second-generation Polish immigrant who fled to Canada to avoid the Vietnam draft and returned years later to take over his parents shop, alienated and hesitant, though well liked by his regulars. At least most: As the play opens his shop has been vandalized. Two beat cops are on the scene, James (Michael J. Asberry) and Randy (Julia Brothers), the latter eventually displaying a visible crush on an oblivious, then discombobulated Arthur. When an impressive young African American man named Franco (Lance Gardner) comes in and charms his way into a job, Arthur gradually finds himself drawn out of his shell and faced with the challenge of valuing another human being more than his own hide—a challenge underscored by Arthur’s several monologues, in which his personal history comes to the fore. The play feels pat and a little lazy-sentimental in the end, but there’s no denying the entertainment afforded here, especially by the magnetic pairing of leads Swain and Gardner. (Avila)

Winter’s Tale Live Oak Theatre, 1301 Shattuck, Berk; (510) 649-5999, www.aeofberkeley.org. $12-15. Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Sun/31, Nov 7, and Nov 14, 2pm; Nov 18, 8pm). Through Nov 20. Actor’s Ensemble of Berkeley presents the rarely-performed Shakespeare play.

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

“Beloved: A Requiem for Our Dead” CELLspace, 2050 Bryant; (510) 207-6101. $10-20. Fri/29, 8pm. Mangos With Chili presents a night of conjuring, memory, mourning and celebration.

“The ChatRoulette Halloween Show” Makeout Room, 3225 22nd St; www.chatrouletteshow.com. $12-15. Sat/30, 7:30pm. The Illuminated Theater presents a special Halloween edition of its show.

Alicia Dattner Off-Market Theater, 965 Mission; (917) 363-9646, www.aliciadattner.com. $20. Fri/29, 8pm.

“Fright Nights at the Wharf” Castagnola’s, 286 Jefferson; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $10. Fri/29-Sat/30, 8pm. An evening of stand-up comedy by the water.

“Ghost Stories and other Horrors!” Jellyfish Gallery, 1286 Folsom; www.firesidestorytelling.com. $5. Wed/27, 8pm. Fireside Storytelling presents an evening of ghoulish tales.

“Kaleidoscope Cabaret” Brava Theater, 2781 24th St; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $20-25. Sat/30, 8pm. An evening of drag, burlesque, song, and aerial art by performers of color.

“Karaghiozis Saves the Economy” Hallidie Plaza, Market and 5th; 648-446, www.shadowlight.org. Free. Sun/31, 7pm. A Greek shadow theatre performance by Leonidas Kassapides.

“Make Drag, Not War!” Dance Mission Theater, 3316 24th St; www.dancemission.com. $15-20. Sun/31, 8pm. A drag show and dance party hosted by Artist Malcolm Drake.

“MUNI Diaries Live!” Makeout Room, 3225 22nd St; 647-2888, www.munidiaries.com. $5. Fri/29, 7:30pm. An evening of MUNI stories.

“Road trip to Pluto” 4 Star Theatre, 2200 Clement; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $9.99-12. Thurs/28, 8:30pm. Bitter Show reprises its contribution to the SF Fringe Fest.

“Romane Event Comedy Show: Super Special Election and Halloween Edition” Makeout Room, 3225 22nd St; 647-2888, www.pacoromane.com. Wed/27, 7:30pm. Paco Romane’s guests include Will Durst, Casey Ley, Grant Lyon, and Pamela Ames.

Devendra Sharma CounterPULSE, 1310 Mission; www.counterpulse.org. $14-24. Thurs/28-Sat/30, 8pm; Sun/31, 2pm. CounterPULSe’s “Performing Diaspora” program presents a contemporary take on Nautanki theater by Sharma.

“Stories From a Haunted Forest” Presidio’s Log Cabin, 1299 Story; www.bindlestiffstudio.org. Free. Sat/30, 7pm. Bindlestiff Studio presents a one-night-only phantasmic experience.

“Teatro Zinzombie!” Pier 29 at Battery; 438-2668, www.love.zinzanni.org. 117-167. Sun/31, 5:15pm. TeatroZinzanni is haunted for one night.

Trailer Park Boys Palace Fine Arts Theatre, 3601 Lyon; 567-6642, www.ticketmaster.com. $45-58. Thurs/28, 7:30pm. The fabled boys appear live in concert.

“Twilight Vixen Revue” SOMArts, 934 Brannan; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $12. A special Halloween edition.

“Upper Cut” The Dark Room, 2263 Mission; www.darkroomsf.com. $10. Thurs/28, 8pm. A weekly improve and sketch comedy open mic.

BAY AREA

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley campus, Berk; (510) 642-9988, www.calperformances.org. $31-68. Fri/29-Sat/30, 8pm. The acclaimed dance company performs some West Coast premieres.

“Persephone’s Boots” Codornices Park, Berk; www.raggedwing.org. Free. Wed/27-Sun/31, 5:30pm. Ragged Wing Ensemble presents the world premiere of a performance created by Anna Schneiderman and the ensemble.

 

 

Music

Andrew Lam
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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 27

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Boom Boom Satellites Independent. 8pm, $15.

Bring Me the Horizon, August Burns Red, Emarosa, Polar Bear Club, This is Hell Regency Ballroom. 6:30pm, $20.

Castles in Spain, Sea of Sorrow, Gun and Doll Show, Pollux, Ol’ Cheeky Bastards, Katie Garibaldi Bottom of the Hill. 8:30pm, $8.

Decry, Snake Mountain, Ruleta Rusa Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $7.

Fun., Steel Train, Jarrod Gorbel Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $16.

Future Night, Blackbird Blackbird Knockout. 9pm, $6.

Get Offs, Blowie! Hemlock Tavern. 6pm, $5-7.

Hawksley Workman, Ian Fays, Red Verse Hotel Utah. 8pm, $10.

Insomniacs Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $15.

Midnight Strangers, Red Yellow Blue, Nectarine Pie Red Devil Lounge. 8pm, $6.

Misisipi Mike’s Honky Tonk Night Time Band, Grand Nationals, Jeanie and Chuck’s Country Roundup El Rio, 8pm, $5.

Poor Bailey, Foxtails Brigade, Il Gato Café Du Nord. 8:30pm, $12.

Star Fucking Hipsters, Monster Squad, Static Thought Thee Parkside. 8pm, $8.

DANCE CLUBS

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

Club Shutter Elbo Room. 10pm, $5. Goth with DJs Nako, Omar, and Justin.

Hands Down! Bar on Church. 9pm, free. With DJs Claksaarb, Mykill, and guests spinning indie, electro, house, and bangers.

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.

RedWine Social Dalva. 9pm-2am, free. DJ TophOne and guests spin outernational funk and get drunk.

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 28

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Big Eagle, Caleb Coy, D. Lee Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $6.

“Blues at the Grammys” Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $15.

Isobel Campbell Ameoba, 1855 Haight, SF; www.amoeba.com. 7pm, free.

Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan, Willy Mason Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $19.

Dirty Filthy Mugs, Death Valley High, FlexXBronco, Box Squad, Rock Fight Thee Parkside. 9pm, $8.

Henry Clay People, Dig, Hundred Days Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

Jeffrey Jerusalem, Brainstorm, Safe Milk. 8pm, $5.

K’Naan, Paper Tongues Fillmore. 8pm, $25.

Liberation Institute, Annie Bacon and Her O-Shen, Terese Taylor, Seedy Naturalists El Rio. 9pm, $8.

UNKLE, Sleepy Sun Regency Ballroom. 8pm, $28.

VersaEmerge, Anarbor, Dangerous Summer, Conditions Café Du Nord. 7pm, $12.

Zinc Finger, Bigelows Treehouse, Emily Zisman Hotel Utah. 8pm, $7.

DANCE CLUBS

Afrolicious Elbo Room. 9:30pm, $10. 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.

Dirty Dishes 009 Lookout, 3600 16th St, SF; www.dirtydishesdjs.com. 9pm, $3. With Gordon Gartress, DJ Diagnosis, and Jive.

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

Gigantic Beauty Bar. 9pm, free. With DJs Eli Glad, Greg J, and White Mike spinning indie, rock, disco, and soul.

Good Foot Som., 2925 16th St, SF; (415) 558-8521. 10pm, free. With DJs spinning R&B, Hip hop, classics, and soul.

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

Koko Puffs Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 10pm, free. Dubby roots reggae and Jamaican funk from rotating DJs.

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

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

SFSU International Halloween Party DNA Lounge. 7:30pm, $20. With Fans of Jimmy Century, Glass Feather, and Nervous Factor.

FRIDAY 29

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Boy in the Bubble, Ready! Ricochet, Poor Sweet Creatures Hotel Utah. 9pm, $8.

Built to Spill, Revolt Revolt, Finn Riggins Fillmore. 8pm, $25.

Grady Champion Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $20.

Death Hymn #9, Midnite Snaxx Hemlock Tavern. 6pm, $5.

Deerhunter, Real Estate, Casino vs. Japan Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $17.

Elle Nino, Hold Me Luke Allen, Club Crashers El Rio, 9pm, $3-5.

Foreverland Yoshi’s San Francisco. 10:30pm, $35.

Free Energy, Foxy Shazam, Hollerado Slim’s. 9pm, $15.

Grass Widow, Bar Feeders, Lou Lou and the Guitarfish Thee Parkside. 9:30pm, $8. Book release party for Heart Transplant by Andrew Vachss.

Kindness and Lies, Leathers, Monbon, Mic Danja Rock-It Room. 9pm, $10. Also with Craft, DJ Madd Hatter with Rey Resurreccion, Paulie Rhyme, and Nero.

Lotus, Mux Mool Independent. 9pm, $20.

Of Montreal, Janelle Monae Warfield. 9pm, $32.

Joe Pug, Nik Freitas, Two Sheds Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10.

“SF Zombie Prom” Verdi Club, 2424 Mariposa, SF; www.zombiepromsf.com. 8pm, $15. With Stompy Jones and the Hi-Rhythm Hustlers.

Super Diamond, Pop Rocks Bimbo’s 365 Club. 9pm, $22.

*Thrones, Acid King, Christian Mistress Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $10.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Bitches Brew Revisited Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, 3301 Lyon, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 8pm, $25-65.

Dave Mihaly’s Shimmering Leaves Ensemble, Cylinder Community Music Center, 544 Capp, SF; www.davemihaly.com. 8pm, $10.

8 Legged Monster Coda. 10pm, $10.

Leo Kottke Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8pm, $32.

Kronos Quartet Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard, SF; www.ybca.org. 8pm, $30.

Savanna Jazz Trio Savanna Jazz. 7:30pm, $5.

DANCE CLUBS

All Hallow’s Eve DNA Lounge. 9pm, $13. Halloween party with Decay, BaconMonkey, Joe Radio, and more.

Club Dragon Club Eight, 1151 Folsom, SF; www.eightsf.com. 9pm, $8. A gay Asian paradise. Featuring two dance floors playing dance and hip hop, smoking patio, and 2 for 1 drinks before 10pm.

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.

Fake Blood, Huoratron Mezzanine. 9pm.

Fat Stack Fridays Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 10pm, free. With rotating DJs B-Cause, Vinnie Esparza, Mr. Robinson, Toph One, and Slopoke.

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.

Icee Hot featuring L-Vis 1990, Low Limit, Ghosts on Tape, Disco Shawn, Rollie Fingers Elbo Room. 10pm. Electro.

Live 105’s Subsonic Spookfest Cow Palace, 2600 Geneva, SF; www.livenation.com. 6pm, $50. With Underworld, Moby, MSTRKRFT, DJ Shadow, Booka Shade, and more.

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

Teenage Dance Craze Halloween Monster Party Knockout. 10pm, $4. Twist, surf, and garage with DJ Sergio Iglesias, Russell Quann, and dX the Funky Gran Paw, plus a live performance by Girlfriends.

SATURDAY 30

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Apples in Stereo, Fol Chen Independent. 9pm, $15.

*Cattle Decapitation, Devourment, Knights of the Abyss, Burning the Masses, Son of Aurelius, Slaughterbox Thee Parkside. 8:15pm, $12-15.

Dead Souls, Spellbound, Lisa Dewey and the Lotus Life Elbo Room. 10pm, $8-10.

Deerhunter, Real Estate, Casino vs. Japan Slim’s. 9pm, $17.

Fucking Buckaroos, Jesse Morris and the Man Cougars, Thee Heartbeats El Rio. 10pm, $7.

Love is Chemicals, HIJK, Donts, Jake Mann and the Upper Hand, ’86 Mets Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $8.

Nellie McKay Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 8pm, $30.

Kate Nash, Peggy Sue Warfield. 9pm, $25.

Super Diamond, Erasure-esque Bimbo’s 365 Club. 9pm, $22.

Earl Thomas and the Blues Ambassadors Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $22.

Tiny Television, Ferocious Few, Steve Pile Band Bottom of the Hill. 10pm, $12.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Justin Hellman Coda. 7pm, $7.

Omara Portuondo Herbst Theatre, 401 Van Ness, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 8pm, $30-75.

Primavera Latin Jazz Band Savanna Jazz. 7:30pm, $8.

Arturo Sandoval Herbst Theatre, 401 Van Ness, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 8pm, $30-75.

DANCE CLUBS

Bar on Church 9pm. Rotating DJs Foxxee, Joseph Lee, Zhaldee, Mark Andrus, and Nuxx.

Big Top Hallo-Weenie Party Club Eight, 1151 Folsom, SF; www.joshuajpresents.com. 9pm, $5-10. With Kidd Sysko and DJ Jinks.

Blow Up SF: Halloween Special Edition Kelly’s Mission Rock, 817 Terry Francois, SF; www.blowupsf.com. 9pm, $10-20. Jeffrey Paradise and Ava Berlin host a Haunted Mansion party.

Bootie DNA Lounge. 9pm, $10-20. Halloween mash-ups with Adrian and Mysterious D.

Cramps Night Knockout. 9pm, $3. Halloween jams with Djs Sergio Iglesias, Okie Oren, and Lisa.

Go Bang! Deco Lounge, 510 Larkin, SF; www.sanfrancisco.going.com/gobang. 9pm, $5. Atomic dancefloor disco costume party with Andre Lucero, Glenn Rivera, and more.

Hov-O-Ween Medici Lounge, 299 Ninth St, SF; www.medicisf.com. 10pm, $5. Gloom, doom, and boom with DJs Voodoo, Purgatory, and Unit77.

HYP Club Eight, 1151 Folsom, SF; www.eightsf.com. 10pm, free. Gay and lesbian hip hop party, featuring DJs spinning the newest in the top 40s hip hop and hyphy.

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

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

SUNDAY 31

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Burned Out Basements, Trainwreck Riders, Velveteen Habit, Dead Westerns, Beet the Meatles, Human Condition Bottom of the Hill. 6:30pm, $10.

Lucha VaVoom Fillmore. 8pm, $32.50.

Mig 21 with Jiri Machacek, DJ Che Café Du Nord. 8pm, $25.

Nobunny, Uzi Rash, Apache, Monster Maus, Tumor Boys Thee Parkside. 8pm, $12.

Parties, Lotus Moons Hemlock Tavern. 8pm, $6.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

“Ghosts and Jazz” Yoshi’s San Francisco. 7pm, $5-20. With Brenda Wong Aoki and Mark Izu.

Valeriana Quevado, Larry Vuckovich, Buca Necak, Sanna Craig Bliss Bar, 4026 24th St, SF; (415) 826-6200. 4:30pm, $10.

Trumpetsupergroup Koret Auditorium, de Young Museum, Golden Gate Park, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Dr, SF; www.theintersection.org. 2pm, free.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Albino!, Rito Reinoso y su Ritmo y Armonia, DJ Specific Independent. 8pm, $17.

Back 40, Carburetors Thee Parkside. 4pm, free.

Danilo El Rio. 4pm, $8.

La Mission Band Roccapulco, 3140 Mission, SF; www.roccapulco.com. 3pm, $20.

DANCE CLUBS

DiscoFunk Mashups Cat Club. 10pm, free. House and 70’s music.

Dub Mission Halloween Elbo Room. 9pm, $6. Dub, dubstep, roots, and dancehall with DJ Sep, Maneesh the Twister, and guests Spit Brothers with Bakir and Dubsworth.

45 Club Halloween Party Knockout. 10pm, free. Funky soul with dX the Funky Gran Paw, Dirty Dishes, and English Steve.

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?

Kick It Bar on Church. 9pm. Hip-hop with DJ Zax.

Pachanga Coda. 5pm, $10. Salsa with DJs Fab Fred and Antonio with Los Compas.

Religion Bar on Church. 3pm. With DJ Nikita.

Swing Out Sundays Rock-It Room. 7pm, free (dance lessons $15). DJ BeBop Burnie spins 20s through 50s swing, jive, and more.

Trannyshack: Halloween DNA Lounge. 9:30pm, $20. With special guest Julie Brown and hosts Peaches Christ and Heklina.

MONDAY 1

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Asteroid 4, Lovetones, Fauna Valetta, Spyrals Elbo Room. 9pm, $7.

Enter Shikari, Haste the Day, Sleeping With Sirens, Ms. White Slim’s. 7pm, $16.

Ingrid Michaelson, Guggenheim Grotto Fillmore. 8pm, $22.50.

Stone Temple Pilots Warfield. 8pm, $52.50-65.

White Denim, Zodiac Death Valley Independent. 8pm, $15.

DANCE CLUBS

Black Gold Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 10pm-2am, free. Senator Soul spins Detroit soul, Motown, New Orleans R&B, and more — all on 45!

Death Guild: Day of the Dead Guild DNA Lounge. 9:30pm, $3-5. Gothic, industrial, and synthpop with DJs Decay, Joe Radio, 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.

Manic Mondays Bar on Church. 9pm. Drink 80-cent cosmos with Djs Mark Andrus and Dangerous Dan.

Musik for Your Teeth Revolution Café, 3248 22nd St., SF; (415) 642-0474. 5pm, free. Soul cookin’ happy hour tunes with DJ Antonino Musco.

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.

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

TUESDAY 2

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Aural Logic Sound System/Back Beat Coda. 9pm, $5.

Bloody Beetroots DeathCrew 77 Mezzanine. 8pm, $25.

Robbie Fitzsimmons, Emily Greene Hotel Utah. 9pm, $10.

Ian Fays, Calorifer is Very Hot Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $6.

Gary Numan Fillmore. 8pm, $27.50.

Tokeson, Candelaria Elbo Room. 9pm, $7-10. Dia de los Muertos celebration.

Laura Veir and the Hall of Flames, Leslie Stevens and the Badgers Independent. 8pm, $15.

DANCE CLUBS

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

Rock Out Karaoke! Amnesia. 7:30pm. With Glenny Kravitz.

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

Womanizer Bar on Church. 9pm. With DJ Nuxx.

 

 

Dancing with the dark

Andrew Lam
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0
Dancing with the dark

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Kazuo Ohno, who died this past June at 103, probably received the broadest exposure of his long career when Antony and the Johnsons chose Naoya Ikegami’s black and white Ohno portrait as the cover art for their 2009 album The Crying Light. Shot in profile, wearing a black dress with a cluster of white flowers pinned in his hair, the visibly aged Ohno — his head tilted back, mouth slightly agape, and hands thrust forward like twisted branches — appears frozen somewhere between ecstasy and his last breath.

The image captures something of the powerful ambiguity of Ohno’s solo performances, in which he frequently embodied female characters. Beneath the What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? pancake makeup and vintage rags, Ohno — one of the founders of the postwar Japanese dance-theater form butoh — could still convey great tenderness as well as sorrow, and that it was possible to laugh in the dark while struggling through it. It is Ohno’s undeniable humanism that courses through Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ retrospective of films documenting his life and practice, with an accompanying performance run by acclaimed butoh troupe Sankai Juku.

Known for its evocations of darkness and decay, butoh came about as an artistic response to the horrors of the World War II, horrors Ohno had experienced first-hand when he was held for two years as a prisoner of war in China and New Guinea while serving as an intelligence officer in the Imperial Japanese Army. Ohno’s first solo performance, Jellyfish Dance, given in Tokyo in 1949, was a reflection on the burials at sea he witnessed on board a vessel bearing captives to be repatriated to Japan. Ohno was 43 years old.

In the audience that night was the much younger artist Tatsumi Hijikata, who was entranced by Ohno’s performance. The two spent the next several years developing what was to become known as Ankoku Butoh-ha, “the dance of darkness.” Although Hijikata choreographed many of Ohno’s performances from the 1960s on, he became known for his grotesque and boundary-pushing performance style, whereas Ohno developed a more introspective, sometimes even delicate approach.

Ohno was born on Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island. His life changed in 1926 when, while still a student at the prestigious Japan Athletic College in Tokyo, he attended a performance by the Argentinean flamenco dancer Antonia Mercé, who would become the subject of his 1977 magnum opus Admiring La Argentina. Soon after he began to study with the modern dance pioneers Baku Ishii and Takaya Eguchi, while teaching physical education at a private Christian school in Yokohama — a position he held until the 1970s when he momentarily retired from public performance.

Although his choice of characters and costuming frequently drew attention to his aging body, Ohno was an indomitable performer. Even when he was confined to a wheelchair, late in his life, Ohno was still determined to use his body as a means of expression. The documentary An Offering to Heaven focuses on a remarkable 2002 collaborative performance with ikebana master Yukio Nakegawa, in which Ohno brought to life a dream he had in which a million tulips were cast from a helicopter, by dancing under a shower of flower petals and rain using only his upper body.

When he could no longer use his hands, he would dance with his eyes. On his death bed, he claimed that he would continue to dance with his breath until he exhaled for the final time. 

“Remembering Kazuo Ohno”

Nov. 4-21, $6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-ARTS

www.ybca.org

 

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