Arts & Culture

Arts & Culture

Tender is the ‘Loin

David Talbot
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0
Tender is the ‘Loin

arts@sfbg.com

STAGE The sexes — more or less all of them — were at the heart of much of my first 48 hours at the San Francisco Fringe Festival, Exit Theatre’s 19th annual uncurated gamut-gamble. There, too, were the power trips, the pity fests, the nonsense, the reverence, and the dark-carnival mayhem that trails in all of its wake. Men solo, women on women, persons of uncertain gender in ensemble dances, L.A. cabbies driving down mammary lane, men in lab coats burning women at the stake — all of them were sources of grim or delirious laughter, vividly etched characters, a legit existential truth or two, and the occasional horrible theatrical misstep. Just what we go to the Tenderloin for.

In VITCH Slapped, Starr Ahrens, Nancy Kissam, and Diana Yanez of Los Angeles–based troupe The Gay Mafia lob a volley of comic sketches on the subject of, for want of a better term, women’s issues. It’s about harmony (of voices, of visions, of menstrual cycles) and breakdown (of patriarchy, sexual orientation, nervous and social conditions). Hence songs to the goddess-moon-mother from three loving sisters in paganism — or two loving "life partners" and one disgruntled ex–life partner. Hence a jack-booted lesbian speaking impeccable German with an audible whip-crack to each (surprisingly) meaningful morsel. Hence a vlog by two determined liberators of the female bod on a nude road trip across America, always one step ahead of propriety and in stride with the best of bad taste. This and more, in a show that makes up for only fitfully inspired material with focused performances and contagious exuberance.

In the same venue — namely, the Exit’s brand new, nicely appointed Studio Theater — man gets his retort in L.A.-based writer-performer James Schneider’s Man on Sex. But this solo outing is not up to the task. The promise in its title of frank truth-telling from a male perspective leads instead to a disappointing meander down a rather passive-aggressive lane, taken by a man frustrated that his wife has stopped having sex with him. Shallowly assuming the air of an innocent victim of some unnatural disaster, Schneider presents a monologue that lacks honesty as well as cohesiveness. It’s punched up (if not quite elevated) by a pseudo-Elizabethan rap called the "PeniFesto" and about half-dozen original songs that the actor sings to his own keyboard accompaniment. These range from the maudlin ("If Only I Liked Strippers") to the boorishly jaunty ("Tranny in a Tree"). The music conveys some dexterity and imagination, but the schmaltzy pop style, like the show’s overarching theme, often feels strained and misplaced.

Meanwhile, just down the hall in the Exit’s cozy Stage Left, The Burnings smacks its female subjects and the audience around. Writer-director Lili Weckler’s macabre poetry spins a sinuous narrative about three exploited laborers (Rebecca Kanengiser, Carla Pauli, and Lauren Spencer, all wild-eyed and draped in sack cloth mended with duct tape). Their stories are coaxed from them on pain of death, then capitalized on by an opportunist doctor (Pete Frontiera), aided by his willful henchman, The Interpreter. There’s energy and attitude right out of the box, but the play takes a while to heat up and never quite scorches, despite committed performances and lively staging. Beginning like something staged in a neighbor’s haunted house, The Burnings gains depth in its mixing of medieval misogyny with the more subtly sadistic, flagrantly commercial gestures of the therapeutic age. The music along the way — each actor plucks or strikes or squeezes sound from some little something — is sparely composed but well done. This is especially true of the resonant vocal harmonies.

Accomplished actor Dominic Hoffman’s solo show Last Fare will likely rank among the best within the 12-day festival. Beginning at the funeral of a Hollywood man who was mysteriously murdered, the story follows a noir-like path through interviews with several people acquainted to one degree or another with the victim. Hoffman imbues the half-dozen or so characters in his beautifully written play with palpable life — life slightly larger-than, in fact, in keeping with one cab driver’s observation that in Hollywood everyone thinks he or she is a movie star. Suffused with alternately wry and raucous humor, affecting but understated emotion, and flashes of genuine insight and wisdom, Last Fare lures us to the fateful site of apartment 609, only to meet us with surfaces so crystalline in their appearance, and solid in their depth, that they become as much mirror as doorway.

One show not seen in time for review but worth flagging for consideration is San Francisco–based writer-actor David Jacobson’s Theme Park. A hysterically funny and sharp excerpt at the San Francisco Theater Festival had phrases like "powerhouse," "Best of Fringe," and "creatively disturbed" written all over it. Also promising is The Burroughs and Kookie Show: Late Night in the Interzone. The title alone appeals, but knowing this RIPE Theater coproduction is the brainchild of writer-performer Christopher Kuckenbaker (whose recent performance credits include Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage) seals the deal.

SAN FRANCISCO FRINGE FESTIVAL

Through Sept 19, $10–$12.99 ($45 for 5 shows; $75 for 10)

Various locations, SF

(800) 838-3006

Peruvian twist

David Talbot
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0
Peruvian twist

arts@sfbg.com

FILM At first glance Undertow doesn’t really seem a bona fide "great"
movie — time will tell. But it manages so many qualities seldom found together, or pulled off at all, that respect is due. It’s sensuous and erotic without becoming puerile fantasy; renders remote, beach-y locations alluring without pandering postcard exoticism or turning the people who live there peasant-quaint. More impressive still, it seamlessly folds magic realism — that very literary quality — into an already well-in-progress narrative
without losing any of the emotional groundedness already established.

Plus: it takes bisexuality for granted, sans salaciousness or melodrama, even if two gender-differentiated loves here provide primary conflict. But the issue isn’t "Choose your side, fence-sitter." It’s "How to handle being in love with two people at once?" Which is always difficult — particularly when one is a guy and the other your wife.

Even today in San Francisco’s gay community you can find plenty of folks whose imagination can’t quite encompass bisexuality as more than a PC camouflage term for those who resist taking one side or another. They’re self-justifying sluts, or outwardly homophilic but inwardly homophobic types who cling to socially comfortable straight relationships while stringing along gay or lesbian ones they’re actually passionate about. Such are the stereotypes.

A reverse scenario is offered up in The Kids Are All Right, which I love — yet Julianne Moore’s very physical affair with Mark Ruffalo ultimately proves only that her "real" relationship is with Annette Bening. He’s a diversion; she’s not really bisexual, just menopausal-restless.

Like most stereotypes, all of the above are occasionally echoed in real life. But movies seldom illustrate the not-uncommon mindset that might fall in love or lust with a person regardless of gender. Societal judgment being what it is, such sexual egalitarianism is seldom an easy path.

Here, Miguel (Cristian Mercado) and Mariela (Tatiana Astengo) are their humble coastal village’s starriest young married couple, leaders at church and in general the kind of people everyone else just knows will do right. He’s a fisherman (the major industry there), she’s pregnant for the first time. They’re both thrilled about that.

Yet Miguel has a very big secret: a passionate affair with upper-class inlander Santiago (Manolo Cardona), who rented a beach cottage to paint nature but now lingers on out of fervent love. Having his cake and eating it too, Miguel is in anxiety-tinged heaven. He truly loves Santiago. But he also loves his wife, their unborn child, their village status. Imagining a life for them together, Santiago is tormented by Miguel’s absolute unwillingness to compromise his status quo.

At a certain point something occurs offscreen, and the dynamic between the two men changes. Not drastically, though — even as Undertow turns into a ghost story of sorts, its characters’ passions remain stubbornly problematic, just as they were before.

Javier Fuentes-Leon is an exceptionally assured debuting feature writer-director. Undertow might easily have let commercial tides drift it toward routine soft-core fantasy, like so many features traveling the annual gay-fest circuit to eventual DVD-Netflix-download profitability. But its attractive, scruffy male leads aren’t buffed that way, and Mariela isn’t a nag or third wheel but an equally sympathetic, fully dimensionalized player in a painfully awkward triangle.

Undertow won the Sundance World Dramatic Audience Award last January. That was one testimony it can’t be pigeonholed as a gay movie, any more than The Kids Are All Right is a mere chick flick. It challenges strictly gay and straight-identified audiences alike, finessing that so smoothly few who pony up will ultimately realize they’ve been finessed. It’s lovely, lyrical, near-universally romantic, and ends on a quiet grace note that is bittersweet perfection.

UNDERTOW opens Fri/17 in Bay Area theaters.

The break-up artist

David Talbot
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0
The break-up artist

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Most countries crank out commercial features just as pandering as (if less expensively produced than) the majority of mainstream Hollywood product. Even sacrosanct art house supplier France manufactures plentiful dumb-and-dumber hits that attract little interest (unless it’s remake interest) beyond nations where Frog is spoken.

Still, their schlock is often better than our schlock. The new Heartbreaker is a star-driven romantic comedy that underlines how lame and formulaic Hollywood’s current endeavors in that genre almost invariably are. Not that it isn’t formulaic — but you don’t feel nose-led by a committee of script-coarsening hacks, and the usual escapist lifestyle pleasures (pretty people wearing really nice clothes in exotic or upscale locations) don’t come off as a product-placement parade.

The film immediately announces itself an escapist treat as six-packed Goran (Jean-Marie Paris) leers at a bikini’d fellow hard body across a Moroccan hotel pool. That reverie is interrupted by girlfriend Florence (Amandine Dewasmes), a plainer Jane who insists they actually see the country.

When he bails, she hitches a ride to nearby dunes with Doctors Without Borders type Pierre (Romain Duris). Several hours, some humanitarian aid and much mutual clickage later, Florence happily ditches her wandering-eye lout.

This is, actually, the last we see of Florence, Goran, or even Pierre. Because there is no "Pierre" — only Alex, star performer in a biz run with pragmatic sibling Mélanie (Julie Ferrier) and her genially vague husband Marc (François Damiens). They orchestrate breakups with maximum guile but also strict ethical rules ("We open their eyes, not their legs … We only step in if the woman is unhappy"), usually hired by families desperate to wean daughters from bad relationships with "jerks" like Goran.

An amusing montage of Alex essaying various roles — window washer, sushi chef, redeemable criminal — establishes this is an enterprise both elaborately thought-out and costly. Indeed, Alex and Co. are in debt, thanks to his theatrical perfectionism. Ergo they’ve no choice but to violate rules and accept a lucrative new assignment whose target seems far from unhappy.

For whatever reason, a "flower tycoon" (Jacques Frantz) whose fortunes may well have a shadier origin wants semi-estranged only child Juliette (Gallic pop star and Mrs. Johnny Depp Vanessa Paradis) courted from Brit Jonathan (Andrew Lincoln) whom she’s imminently scheduled to marry.

This is problematic. Juliette proves no pushover — defying Alex’s vain boast, "With preparation, no woman can resist me" — and is in mutual love with an utterly admirable fiancé. Posing as a bodyguard hired by dad to protect her, Alex’s flying-wedge act meets steep resistance.

There’s never any doubt where Heartbreaker is headed. Cocky Alex will fall hard, repent his professional Don Juan fakery, almost lose the game, then grovel sufficiently to pull a Graduate as scruffy charmer triumphs over dully respectable Mr. Right. What happens after the fade, when reality dawns? We probably don’t want to know.

Yet Heartbreaker earns that suspension of disbelief, arriving at a unabashedly melodramatic climax just as romantically intoxicating as it aims to be. Director Pascal Chaumeil’s first major feature (after a decade of TV work) is glamorous where appropriate — Monaco looks as high-end as Paradis in frocks evoking Hitchcock-era Princess Grace — and raffishly funny elsewhere. Duris (from several Cédric Klapish films and 2005’s The Beat That My Heart Skipped) seizes his star turn with perfectly judged panache. What can you say about a movie that exploits Wham!’s "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" as a recurrent in-joke without making the viewer’s stomach heave? Kudos, that’s what.

Heartbreaker isn’t great cinema. Yet it gives great escapist burger — In-N-Out, say, compared to the McDonald’s deep fry of gender-flipped similar Hollywood exercise Failure to Launch in 2006. Yeah it’s easy, but you won’t feel cheap the morning after.

HEARTBREAKER opens Fri/17 in Bay Area theaters.

Sunny Sunday smile

David Talbot
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1
Sunny Sunday smile

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC Michael Franti has definite ideas on the best manner in which to enjoy his music. "I wanna see you jumping!" the dreadlocked star of conscious pop music repeats numerous times throughout last weekend’s Power to the Peaceful concert in Golden Gate Park. But the crowd of 80,000 doesn’t mind — in fact, judging from the beaming faces in Speedway Meadow, Franti’s fervent messaging, mixed with liberal doses of dub sounds, reggae, hip-hop, and sunshine positivity, is the reason they came to the event in the first place.

Good thing, because Franti’s touch is everywhere. He started Power to the Peaceful in 1998 in Dolores Park to promote advocacy for death row prisoner-activist Mumia Abu Jamal. The concert’s date, Sept. 11, was chosen to highlight the urgency of Abu Jamal’s release, though now the event also honors victims of the World Trade Center attacks. Franti’s earnest odes to social justice attracted a crowd of 3,500 that first year, and twice that the next. Now Power to the Peaceful is a three-day event (Sept. 10-12) that includes mass yoga sessions, social justice organizations, and a weekend of benefit concerts at the Fillmore.

The vibe is feel-good to the point of theatrics. Throughout Saturday’s program, there was much turning to one’s neighbor and embracing. That many people wishing the world peace in synchronicity is heady, no doubt — but at one point during the yoga (while we are helping our partners, who are lying on their bellies, to "fly") I catch four face-painted Juggalos sniggering at the sheer compassion of it all.

"In order to sustain your activism, you have to have something inside you." Mid-interview, the six-foot, six-inch Franti is sitting cross-legged at my knee in a tapestried tent behind Saturday’s main stage. "It’s easy to get frustrated — you have to have something in your life to give you that fire." He smiles with the same easy grace he bestows throughout the weekend on everyone from toddlers to police officers. He likens PTTP to the battery recharging stations found in airport terminals.

This kind of spiritual activism and change through the shaking of hips hasn’t always been Franti’s modus operandi. At the start of his career, as an adopted kid in the Bay Area sick of hearing the n-word thrown at him (Franti’s birth father is Native American-black; his birth mother white), he called his first group the Beatnigs. Their hip-hop industrial punk songs railed against Ronald Reagan and the CIA.

But over the years, the anger behind Franti’s voice segued into something else. Sample lyric: "Even our worst enemies/ They deserve music." That music he slaps his guitar to, prances across the stage with, and compels us to jump in last weekend’s September sun is less "them" and more "us."

Which isn’t to say he’s given up on making a difference. Before his 2006 album Yell Fire (Anti) Franti, a staunch opponent of U.S. wars in the Middle East, took his show on the road to Iraq, Palestine, and Israel. He played for anyone who’d listen, from war zone families to American troops.

He’s still talking about the issues, just changing the approach. His most recent offering is The Sound of Sunshine (Capitol), whose album cover’s sweet scrawl of a boombox smiling bears the Franti signature. Live performances are ecstatic, infectious recitations of all things beautiful: multiculturalism, celebration, and the line "How ya feeeelin!" — a trademark he booms 11 times on Saturday.

By the family matinee concert Sunday at the Fillmore (a benefit for Hunter’s Point Family, a support center in the neighborhood that Franti has called home for 14 years), it’s clear that his appeal goes beyond the straightforward lyrics and infectious glee of his hits, which make a perfect fit for the little ones hoisted on their parents’ shoulders. He knows — as we do — the world’s got problems. But we do ourselves no favors if we don’t meet them with a smile.

At the Drive-In

David Talbot
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0
At the Drive-In

arts@sfbg.com

VISUAL ART Before it became the context-free darling of YouTubers and meta-bloggers, the 1980s was a real, living era. Movies and music videos copulated. An actor became president and decided to invade Grenada despite a warning from, yes, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that the action would be seen as "intervention by a Western country in the internal affairs of a small independent nation, however unattractive its regime." The pre-politics Governator appeared in 1984’s The Terminator as "something unstoppable … that felt no pain." And Martin Amis, in Einstein’s Monsters (1987), wrote that "the arms race is a race between nuclear weapons and ourselves." The future appeared bleaker than bleak, its robotic violence and darkness palatable if seen through neon-tinted pop culture glasses.

The 01SJ Biennial, a welcome if dizzying affair that opens this week in San Jose, is a plugged-in antidote to ’80s-era apocalyptic soothsaying. Although more recent cultural creations from 28 Days Later (2002) to The Road (2009) have done little to imagine a coherent future, they’ve at least begun asking what it means to be honestly human. Might we finally stop blaming technology?

Blogging about the biennial’s "Build Your Own Future" theme, Artistic Director Steve Dietz recently noted that the event offers a chance for "serious play." For an illustration of what he means, look no further than Todd Chandler and Jeff Stark’s Empire Drive-In, a fully functional theater featuring cars saved from a local auto wrecker and a screen built almost entirely from salvaged wood. A collaboration with artists including Brett James, Ian Page, and Robin Frohardt (who designed and fabricated a unique concession stand), Empire‘s cinema comes to life inside the San Jose Convention Center’s airplane hangar-sized South Hall.

Last week, Chandler took a break from cleaning broken glass out of one of the cars to chat about the project. He said he had first presented Dietz with the idea of a possible live performance by his band Dark Dark Dark, along with Flood Tide: Remixed. a sort of contemplative preview version of his forthcoming feature film of the same name. "Steve was interested," Chandler explained, "but he said that it wasn’t enough. I was like, not enough?!"

Though Chandler had been pouring himself into Flood Tide project, if the biennial wanted something even bigger, he knew what to do. He called Stark, the intrepid editor of Nonsense NYC (www.nonsensenyc.com ). "Jeff is amazing at pulling off really big, impossible projects," Chandler says. "And he’d had this idea in his head for a while about a junk car drive-in."

Chandler and Stark met while working on the Miss Rockaway Armada project (www.missrockaway.org ), the first iteration of a number of artistic ventures involving large rafts made of salvaged materials. That participatory trip down the Mississippi River — deemed an "anarchist county fair" and a "fools’ ark" — gave birth to the projects that became the subject of Flood Tide. In turn, Empire Drive-In includes not just the hypnotic Flood Tide: Remixed, but a number of "live cinema" presentations, including Zoe Keating and Robert Hodgin’s Into the Trees, and Laetitia Sonami and SUE-C’s Sheepwoman.

"The cars we’re using were on their way to Redwood City to get crushed," Chandler explained. "A lot of them had smashed windshields." He and Stark chose vehicles based on what was available rather than a predetermined vision: "We didn’t want to do a retro, ’50s-style drive-in."

As with any other theater, when a drive-in closes for good, we say that it has "gone dark." My childhood haunt, Skyview Drive-In in Santa Cruz, went dark a few years ago. When I drove by and saw the missing screens, I started to cry. Empire Drive-In presents the unbearable lightness of seeing in a world that might someday go dark.

01SJ BIENNIAL: EMPIRE DRIVE-IN

Thurs/16–Sun/19, various venues

(408) 916-1010

www.01sjart.org

Nobunny unmasked!

David Talbot
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2
Nobunny unmasked!

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC The morning of our scheduled interview, he sends me a text message, asking me to push things back a bit. Because he says he’s been up until 5:30 a.m., I figured he’s spent the previous night out being a bad bunny. But my assumptions are incorrect: the self-professed early bird known as Nobunny has stayed up late getting work done. The masked man, who now lives in Oakland, is out and about in San Francisco. I remain patient, knowing that he has plenty on his plate, including the release of his new album and an imminent European tour.

Nobunny’s First Blood (Goner Records) is more polished in production than previous efforts, including Love Visions (1-2-3-4 Go! Records), his breakthrough from 2008. He’s been at it for nearly 10 years now, but our hometown hero’s ascent to garage-rock stardom hasn’t come easy. Before getting off the phone with me, he speaks of darker days in Chicago, where he went from two-time Bozo Show visitor to “lying and stealing heroin addict,” only to be saved by a heartbroken sister and a pre-Hunx and His Punx member of the now-defunct Gravy Train. And by the time I finish interviewing him, he shares some information that I didn’t expect him to delve into, giving me glimpses of original obsessions, addictions, and future ambitions.

Still, at about the 30-minute mark, our first conversation comes to a sudden halt when Nobunny alerts me he has to put money in his parking meter. My time is up. After all, Blag Dahlia of Dwarves fame is expecting him for a radio interview. (Nobunny takes a page out of that fellow Chicago-to-Bay Area transplants’ book by shedding his threads on stage with the exception of the mask.)

I have the sense that Nobunny is holding back a little, like there is a wall. Is he guarded? Maybe a little nervous? He’d publicly admitted to shooting heroin before, but it isn’t until after our initial phone call that he begins to be genuine and upfront about his humbling experiences and the struggle that made him who he is today. All the while, I feel he is in complete control of our interactions, and imagine that’s probably what it’s like to work with someone so self-critical in the studio. The dichotomy of the man behind the mask begins to unravel.

We initially speak through a dodgy cell phone connection, interrupted by distracting wind and disruptive sirens. I’m in the TL, and he’s in the Mission. Both environments are worn down, sort of like the mangy Muppet-looking mask Nobunny wears during show time. He’s lived through misery before. He spent one winter in Chicago with a trash bag serving as his front door, and worked the graveyard shift at a highway gas station during his last year in the city. “I lived in a cage in a squatted grocery store that had become a shooting gallery-crack house,” Nobunny says. “Things were not all right.”

Just a week earlier, I’d seen Nobunny at the Total Trash Fest. He did what he does best: live rock ‘n’ roll, delivered sweaty and in briefs, with some crowd-surfing. The one new song worked into the set hinted at First Blood‘s tone. The album itself clocks in at a short but very sweet 26 minutes. Nobunny rips through the tracks, playing guitar, bass, and drums himself. He gets some assistance from his pal Jason “Elvis Christ” Testasecca, who’s aided him with home recordings in the past, and a couple of other musicians who get honorable mentions in the credits.

“Blow Dumb,” First Blood‘s first single, has been described as “Velvet-y” sounding. Perhaps because the Velvet Underground is associated with New York’s high-art scene by way of Warhol’s Factory, Nobunny points out that the track is a love song to California. It gives a special nod to the Bay Area and hyphy, but also shows some love for SoCal, with a possible Burger Records shout out. The end result is ideal for a groovy road trip with friends, riding down Highway 1 with nothing better to do than smile in the sun.

Content-wise, not everything on First Blood is so buoyant. Elsewhere, Nobunny’s lyrics confront sexual desire, unbalanced relationships, inner weakness, and the self improvements necessary to pull yourself out of the proverbial gutter and see the world. Plenty of lustful longings are laid out as he expresses exactly what he wants in the twangy-sounding “Pretty Please Me”: a noncommittal fling, no questions asked, just as long as it feels right.

The blatant “(Do the) Fuck Yourself” conjures up perverse images straight from Nobunny’s stage show, where his masked persona goes public, employing ball-gags while prancing around scantily-clad. When we finally meet in person, I ask him where these antics come from. His answer is quite simple, and makes sense coming from a rabbit, “I’m just horny,” he says. All the while, in order to maintain a “shred of anonymity,” he wears his favorite deranged-looking mask. It never seems to come off.

“I don’t think I’d like to deal with being in an un-masked band at, say, Hunx’s or Thee Oh Sees’ comparable level of popularity.” Nobunny says, when asked about the get-up. “Knowing eyes are on you when you are not on stage sounds maybe not always fun.” Nonetheless, a fruitful creative partnership with Hunx has been vital to Nobunny’s survival: “Seth [Bogart, a.k.a. Hunx] has been a very supportive friend, and, yes, in some ways I feel he saved me, or at the very least vastly improved my living situation.”

Though Nobunny often expresses the wish to record and play alone, he’s no stranger to collaboration, including a recent live session with Jack White at Nashville’s Third Man Records. Not all dream teams come true, though — since childhood he’d hoped to work with another master of disguises, the famously introverted King of Pop. “Michael Jackson was my first obsession, ” he says. “I wanted to be him. I still want to be him. According to Rocktober’s History of Masked Rock ‘n’ Roll, MJ was a masked musician with all his surgeries and what not. We all wear masks, some are just easier to spot than others.”

Speaking of costumed camouflage, First Blood‘s final track, “I Was On (The Bozo Show)” is a psyched-out, swirling down-tempo dirge with many levels of dedication. One could read it as homage to the late clown-god Larry Harmon (a.k.a. Bozo), as Nobunny hazily recalls his lost innocence and how he sat in the back row of a Chicago television with his little brother to meet the world-famous archetype on two separate occasions. Yes, Nobunny was on The Bozo Show — twice.

But behind its showbiz facade, “I Was On (The Bozo Show)” is also an agonizing confession from a former addict. “It’s for my blood brother and sister as well as my friends who struggle with drug addiction,” Nobunny says. “In another time, clowns made children happy and the circus was fun, but now they’ve become just another relic of past, tarnished by the more common association that their images are horrifying and that they are to be feared. I’m pretty sure no Juggalo ever went to clown school.”

A mythical creature from garage rock’s underbelly, Nobunny has earned his success, even securing a gig at the Playboy Mansion in L.A. as part of his 10-year anniversary celebration next Easter. But he’s no stranger to the addictions he sings about on First Blood final track. “My sister had been buggin’ me a bit to come visit her in Arizona, and I finally decided to take her up on it before I killed myself,” he says, still discussing “I Was On (The Bozo Show)”‘s origins. “I drove across the country shooting dope the whole way to the desert west of Tucson. She didn’t even know I was using. She nursed me back to health out there all alone in the desert. Our only neighbor was an 80-something yogi from India who was out there on a 30-day silent meditative prayer.”

If that sounds like material for a boulevard of broken dreams tell-all, in all seriousness, Nobunny has come out of the experience stronger, poised for new adventures, but most of all, grateful. “I am thankful to have enough fans to make touring worthwhile,” he said. “While I’d still be writing and recording and performing with no one looking, it’s really nice to see people at our shows dancing and singing along and smiling.”

On the Cheap listings

David Talbot
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0

On the Cheap listings are compiled by Paula Connelly. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com.

WEDNESDAY 15

Bad Movie Night Argus Lounge, 3197 Mission, SF; (415) 824-1447. 8pm, $2. If you’ve got a bad film you’ve been secretly wishing to screen, here’s your chance to share it. Bring any film on DVD, made by you, that is under 10 minutes and enter for a chance to win a best worst mystery prize. Proceeds benefit the Cut and Run Tour, a traveling film festival specializing in short, avant-garde, and experimental film. With DJ Squid spinning punk, core, and alt rock.

"Hot and Cold Extreme Environments" Randall Museum, 199 Museum Way, SF; (415) 554-9600. 7:30pm, free. Join planetary scientist Chris McKay, from the Space Science Division of the NASA Ames Research Center, for a presentation on life in extreme environments and how it is relevant to the search for life in the Solar System.

Ten Fingers Café Royale, 800 Post, SF; (415) 441-4099. 8pm, free. Everyone has a story to tell, so come share yours at this live storytelling event where performers have a chance to win $150 or be featured on NPR’s Snap Judgment. The only rules are: no reading, keep it under 10 minutes, and aim for nonfiction. To sign up in advance, email stephanie@snapjudgment.org.

BAY AREA

El Grito Bicentennial Jack London Square, Franklin at Water, Oakl.; www.jacklondonsquare.com. 4pm, free. Celebrate the 200 year anniversary of Mexican independence from Spanish rule at this outdoor festival featuring artists, craft vendors, live music, activities, and more.


THURSDAY 16

Inside Storytime Café Royale, 800 Post, SF; (415) 505-0869. 6:30pm, $3-$5. A fun, cozy event where you can booze and schmooze with the San Francisco literati featuring readings from Raj Patel, author of The Value of Nothing, Justine Sharrock, author of Tortured, Gordy Slack, author of The Battle Over the Meaning of Everything, Anna Mantzaris, Hank Pellissier, and James Warner.

Project Censored City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus, SF; (415) 362-8193. 7pm, free. Each year, Project Censored lists the top 25 major news stories that were ignored or underreported by the mainstream press and presents the details of these stories in depth. Join Mickey Huff and Peter Phillips in discussing this year’s most censored stories and celebrating the release of Censored 2011.

FRIDAY 17

Readings from Joyland Dog Eared Books, 900 Valencia, SF; www.joyland.ca. 8pm, free. Catch the second stop of the Joyland American tour celebrating the release of books from Joyland founders Emily Schultz and Brian Joseph Davis who will be reading along with San Francisco writers Peter Orner, Tamar Halpern, Helene Wecker, Ruth Galm, and host Kara Levy. All authors have been published on the joyland.ca site, which aims to make the international local by providing a platform for unique voices in short fiction.

SATURDAY 18

J-Pop Summit Festival Post between Webster and Buchanan, SF; www.j-pop.com.

11am-6pm, free-$20. Take in the Japanese pop-inspired attractions at this annual festival featuring musical performances by some of Japan’s hottest bands, fashion shows, film screenings, art and anime booths, live art performances, Japanese food vendors, and more.

Literary Tribute to Al Robles Intersection 5M, 925 Mission, SF; (415) 626-2787. 6pm, $5 suggested donation. Join members of the Bay Area literary community as they honor poet, educator, community activist, and advocate for the poor and senior citizens, Al Robles. The evening of storytelling hosted by D. Scott Miller to include poetry, prose, conversation, and recollections of Robles with Jessica Hagedorn, Jack Hirschman, Janice Mirikatani, Alejandro Murguia, Jaime Jacinto, Ishmael Reed, and more.

BAY AREA

Artspark San Pablo Park, 2800 Park between Russell and Ward, Berk.; www.artsparkfestival.org. 11am-4pm, free. Enjoy this free, community sponsored festival promoting community health by offering free health information from East Bay health organizations and free art lessons in drawing, painting, dancing, spoken word, and more. Also featuring nutritious, hot meals for under $5 and entertainment and performances including live music, spoken word, and more.

SUNDAY 19

Dancing in the Streets Noe at Market, SF; www.castrocbd.org. 1pm-4pm, free. Enjoy a live band and dancing in the streets with the Byran Keith Country Band and Queer Ballroom giving free country two step lessons.

Leland Avenue Fair Leland at Bayshore, SF; www.sfvvboom.blogspot.com. 10am-4pm, free. Celebrate the recently completed Visitacion Valley public art and streetscape at this community festival featuring local talents including Latin jazz percussionist Pete Escovedo and his six-piece orchestra, artists, chefs, entertainers, and vendors.

Roadworks Street Fair Rhode Island between 16th and 17th St., SF; www.sfcb.org. Noon-5pm, free. Using a three ton steamroller, a team of featured artists will be making large-scale prints right in the street from carved linoleum blocks. Watch the action and enjoy the bazaar featuring wares from over 80 artists, vendors, and organizations, live music, entertainment, street food, and activities.

Comedy Day Sharon Meadow, Golden Gate Park, SF; www.comedyday.com. Noon-5pm, free. Thirty comedians will be performing in a non-stop relay of jokes to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Comedy Day. Comics to include up-and-coming talent, national and Bay Area favorites, and a few who performed at the original Comedy Day. Food and beverage vendors available.

Music listings

David Talbot
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Music listings are compiled by Paula Connelly and 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.

WEDNESDAY 15

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Chapin Sisters, Rachel Efron Café Du Nord. 8pm, $12.

Honey, Gratitillium, Pow! Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $6.

Jaguares, Los Cenzontles Fillmore. 9pm, $49.50.

James Colley Show, Allen Stone, Jo Henley, Joe Gil Hotel Utah. 8pm, $8.

Jeff the Brotherhood, Ty Segall, Tropical Sleep Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $12.

*K.Flay Harlot, 46 Minna, SF; (415) 777-1077. 9pm, $5. Featuring special guests and DJs Kid Chris and Brother Bently spinning old school, hip hop, and soul.

Kim Lenz and the Jaguars, Quarter Mile Combo Verdi Club, 2424 Mariposa, SF; www.kimlenz.com. 9pm, $12.

Majesty, Parties, DJs Dirty Dishes and English Steve Knockout. 9pm, $5.

Marina and the Diamonds, Young the Giant Independent. 8pm, $15.

Menomena, Suckers, Tu Fawning Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $18.

Reaction, Crime Wave, Yes Go’s Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $8.

*Tamaryn, Weekend, oOoOO, Nako and Omar Elbo Room. 9pm, $8.

Zoo, Swanifant, Clouds El Rio. 8pm, $3-5.

DANCE CLUBS

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

Breezin Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 9:30pm, free. With DJs Amy A and Brynnie Mac spinning yacht rock od smooth 70s.

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 16

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Bobby Radcliff Trio Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $15.

Bonnie Doom, Real Nasty, Misisipi Rider Hotel Utah. 9pm, $6.

Jimmy Edgar, Loose Shus, Boys IV Men Rickshaw Stop. 9pm, $12.

Fucking Buckaroos, Baltic Cousins, Annie Bacon and Her Oshen Knockout. 10pm, $5.

Guella, Soda Pop Junkies, For the Kings Blue Macaw, 2565 Mission, SF; www.thebluemacawsf.com. 10pm, $10.

Hooray for the Riff Raff, Guilded Books Amnesia. 9pm, $5.

*Langhorne Slim, Or The Whale Independent. 8pm, $15.

Mission Players Coda. 9pm, $7.

Mike Posner Fillmore. 8pm, $30.

Release, Oola Rocksteady, Swoon, Amaya Slim’s. 9pm, $14.

Society of Rockets, Invisible Cities, Amores Vigilantes Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $8.

*Tyvek, Nodzzz, Art Museums Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $6.

White Barons, Space Vacation Thee Parkside. 9pm, $6. With Altercation Punk Comedy Tour’s JT Habersaat, Lisa Root, and Kleveland.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Mercury Falls, Dave Mihaly’s Shimmering Leaves Ensemble Make-Out Room. 9:30pm, $12.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Septeto Nacional de Cuba Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8 and 10pm, $18-26.

Somi, Sparlha Swa Café Du Nord. 8pm, $17.

DANCE CLUBS

Afrolicious Elbo Room. 9:30pm, $10. DJs Pleasuremaker and Señor Oz, plus guests Dunklebunt and Santero, spin Afrobeat, Tropicália, electro, samba, and funk.

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

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

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

Electric Feel Lookout, 3600 16th St, SF; (415) 431-0306. 9pm, $2. With DJs subOctave and Blondie K spinning indie music videos.

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.

Nightvision Harlot, 46 Minna, SF; (415) 777-1077. 9:30pm, $10. DJs Danny Daze, Franky Boissy, and more spinning house, electro, hip hop, funk, and more.

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

Popscene 330 Rich. 10pm, $10. Rotating DJs spinning indie, Britpop, electro, new wave, and post-punk.

Solid Thursdays Club Six. 9pm, free. With DJs Daddy Rolo and Tesfa spinning roots, reggae, dancehall, soca, and mashups.

FRIDAY 17

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Black Pacific, Static Thought, Stagger and Fall Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $14.

Blisses B, Tyler Matthew Smith, Bryn Loosley Hotel Utah. 9pm, $8.

Bonerama, Sol Driven Train Red Devil Lounge. 8pm, $15.

Quinn Deveaux and the Blue Beat Review, Jugtown Pirates Independent. 9pm, $14.

Hostility, Almost Dead, Hysteria, Kingdom Fail Slim’s. 9pm, $14.

James Lanman and the Good Hurt, Horde and the Harem, Dylan Cannon Café Du Nord. 9:30pm, $10.

KK Martin Union Room at Biscuits and Blues. 8:30pm, $10.

Mist and Mast, Sands, Yeltsin Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $7.

Pride and Joy Bimbo’s 365 Club. 9pm, $22.

Ratatat, Dom Warfield. 9pm, $32.

Lavay Smith and Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $20.

Venomous Concept, Kill the Client, Murder Construct, Population Reduction, DJ Rob Metal Thee Parkside. 9pm, $12-15.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Meredith Axelrod and Craig Ventresco Amnesia. 6pm.

Benise Palace of Fine Arts, 3301 Lyon, SF; (415) 567-6642. 8pm, $48-58.

Freddy Clarke’s Wobbly World Rrazz Room. 7pm, $25.

Los Rakas, 40 Love, Yung Mars Project Elbo Room. 10pm, $8-10.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Equinox Trio Rite Spot, 2099 Folsom, SF; www.ritespotcafe.net. 9pm, free.

Fazz Enrico’s, 504 Broadway, SF; (415) 982-6223. 8pm.

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

Sadao Watanabe Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8 and 10pm, $24-30.

DANCE CLUBS

Alcoholocaust Presents Riptide Tavern. 9pm, free. DJ What’s His Fuck spins old school punk rock and other gems.

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.

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

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

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.

Oldies Night Knockout. 9pm, $2-4. Doo-wop and one-hit wonders with DJs Primo, Daniel, and Lost Cat.

Radioactivity 222 Hyde, SF; (415) 440-0222. 6pm. Synth sounds of the cold war era.

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.

Singapore 60s Happy Hour Knockout. 5:30-9pm, free. DJ Sid Presley spins rare pop and garage from SE Asia, crica 1964-72.

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

Summer Climax 1015 Folsom. 10pm, $25. Featuring a live band performance by Lena Katina of t.A.T.u. and DJs Aykut, Frenchy le Freak, Trevor Simpson, and more.

Three Kings of Stupid Rickshaw Stop. 9pm, $10. DJs BAS and Brother Grimm spin an eclectic mix.

SATURDAY 18

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Tab Benoit Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $20.

Bonerama, Lubriphonic Red Devil Lounge. 8pm, $15.

John Lee Hooker Jr. Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $22.

Kele, Does It Offend You Yeah?, Innerpartysystem, Aaron Axelsen, Miles Mezzanine. 9pm, $20.

Mother Hips Fillmore. 9pm, $20.

LB Muzac Enrico’s, 504 Broadway, SF; (415) 982-6223. 8pm, free.

New Up, Hundred Days, Moanin’ Dove Café Du Nord. 9:30pm, $15.

*No Means No, Bar Feeders, Ezee Tiger Bottom of the Hill. 10pm, $15.

Pantha du Prince, Sight Below Independent. 9pm, $15.

Religious Girls, Clipd Beaks, Grand Lake, Casy and Brian, Dashing Suns, Siddhartha, Color Chasm Thee Parkside. 4pm, $10-20.

Robot Hustle, CLAWS, Global Warming, Mr. Saturday, DJs Chris Orr and Beaner Amnesia. 9pm, $5.

Savage Republic, Carta Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $8.

Swamees, Felsen, Jay Trainer Band El Rio. 3pm, $8.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Denise Perrier and the Swing Fever Band Rrazz Room. 7pm, $30.

Suzanna Smith Quintet Savanna Jazz. 7:30pm, $8.

Sadao Watanabe Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8 and 10pm, $30.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Benise Palace of Fine Arts, 3301 Lyon, SF; (415) 567-6642. 7pm, $48-58.

En Vivo, Tony Lindsay, Gladiators of Rock Slim’s. 8pm, $16.

Octomutt and friends Rite Spot, 2099 Folsom, SF; www.ritespotcafe.net. 9pm, free.

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

DANCE CLUBS

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

Booty Bassment Knockout. 10pm, $5. Hip-hop with DJs Ryan Poulsen and Dimitri Dickenson.

Cock Fight Underground SF. 9pm, $7. Gay locker room antics galore with electro-spinning DJ Earworm, MyKill, and Dcnstrct.

Fire Corner Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 9:30pm, free. Rare and outrageous ska, rocksteady, and reggae vinyl with Revival Sound System and guests.

Fringe Madrone Art Bar. 9pm, $5. With DJs Blondie K and subOctave spinning indie music videos.

Full House Gravity, 3505 Scott, SF; (415) 776-1928. 9pm, $10. With DJs Roost Uno and Pony P spinning dirty hip hop.

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.

Non Stop Bhangra Rickshaw Stop. 9pm, $15. Live dhol rhythms, DJs, and dance performances by Dholrythms Dance Troupe.

Prince vs. Michael Madrone Art Bar. 8pm, $5. With DJs Dave Paul and Jeff Harris battling it out on the turntables with album cuts, remixes, rare tracks, and classics.

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

Saturday Night Soul Party Elbo Room. 10pm-2am, $5. DJs Lucky, Paul Paul, and Phengren Oswald spin butt-shakin’ ’60s soul on 45.

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

SUNDAY 19

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Airborne Toxic Event, Calder Quartet Regency Ballroom. 8pm, $22-30.

"Bay for the Bayou Benefit" Bimbo’s 365 Club. 7pm, $75-150. With Anders Osborne, George Porter Jr., Ivan Neville, Zigaboo Modeliste, and more.

Karen Bein, Chris Cotton, John Henry and Dorothy Wood Hotel Utah. 8pm, $10.

Cult, Black Ryder Warfield. 8pm, $38.50-100.

Epidemia Rickshaw Stop. 7pm, free.

Grand Lake, Hosannas, Laura Stevenson and the Cans Hemlock Tavern. 8pm, $6.

*Hellbeard, Floating Goat, Gritter, Hashashin, DJ Rob Metal Thee Parkside. 8pm, $8.

Human Condition, Slow Motion Cowboys, Brothers Comatose Bottom of the Hill. 5pm, $8.

Lyfe Jennings Independent. 8pm, $27.

Jim Jones Revue, Bare Wires, Coasting Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $14.

*Melvins, Totimoshi Slim’s. 9pm, $21.

Peter Rowan, Elizabeth Cook Café Du Nord. 8pm, $20.

Tim Hockenberry Band Rrazz Room. 7:30pm, $25.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Hipwaders Park Chalet, 1000 Great Highway, SF; (415) 386-8439. 3pm, free.

Jesus Diaz Latin Ensemble Coda. 8pm, $10.

DANCE CLUBS

Call In Sick Skylark. 9pm, free. DJs Animal and I Will spin danceable hip-hop.

Culture Profetica Mezzanine. 7pm, $27.50. With Toy Selectah, Manicato, and DJ Walt Digz.

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

Dub Mission Elbo Room. 9pm, $6. DJ Sep, Ludichris, and J Boogie spin dub, roots, and classic dancehall.

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?

Jock! Lookout, 3600 16th St, SF; (415) 431-0306. 3pm, $2. This high-energy party raises money for LGBT sports teams.

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

Lowbrow Sunday Delirium. 1pm, free. DJ Roost Uno and guests spinning club hip hop, indie, and top 40s.

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

Stag AsiaSF. 6pm, $5. Gay bachelor parties are the target demo of this weekly erotic tea dance.

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

MONDAY 20

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Charlatans UK, Giant Drag, DJs Aaron and Omar Bimbo’s 365 Club. 8pm, $25.

Efterklang, Buke and Gass, Silian Rail Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $12.

Frankie and the Outs, Hunx and His Punx, Lilac, Wax Idols, DJ Primo Rickshaw Stop. 7:30pm, $12.

Hanson, A Rocket to the Moon, Red Light Circuit Great American Music Hall. 7:30pm, $35.

David Landon Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $15.

Peck the Town Crier, Roy G Biv Elbo Room. 9pm, $8.

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!

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 21

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Cloud Cult, Mimicking Birds Independent. 8pm, $15.

Do, El Olio Wolof, Please Do Not Fight Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $15.

Electric Sister, Mendozza, Hexe Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $7.

Hanson, A Rocket to the Moon, Motel Drive Great American Music Hall. 7:30pm, $35.

Lightning Swords of Death, Pathology, Deafheaven, Cyanic, DJ Rob Metal Thee Parkside. 8pm, $8-10.

Lion Riding Horses, Greenflash Rite Spot, 2099 Folsom, SF; www.ritespotcafe.net. 7pm, free.

Joanne Shaw Taylor Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $15.

DANCE CLUBS

Alcoholocaust Presents Argus Lounge. 9pm, free. With DJs Heiko and What’s His Fuck.

Brazilian Wax Elbo Room. 9pm, $7. Samba with DJs Carioca and Fausto Sousa and guests Mucho Axe and Borucoe.

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.

Rep Clock

David Talbot
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Schedules are for Wed/15–Tues/21 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. $5-10. "OpenScreening," Thurs, 8. For participation info, contact ataopenscreening@atasite.org. "Other Cinema:" "Blows Against BP!", works by Rick Prelinger and others, Sat, 8. "3rd I’s Green Eye: The Anatomy of a Carbon Footprint:" Climate of Change (Hill, 2007) Sun, 3:30; "Around the World Without Flying: A Year of Carbon Footprints, Cargo Ships, and Climate Uprisings," multimedia presentation, Sun, 5:30.

CASTRO 429 Castro, SF; (415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com. $7.50-10. The Bridge on the River Kwai (Lean, 1957), Wed-Thurs, 7:30 (also Wed, 1, 4:15). "Midnites for Maniacs: Reinventing Prom:" •Peggy Sue Got Married (Coppola, 1986), Fri, 7:30; Back to the Future (Zemeckis, 1985), Fri, 9:45; and Zapped! (Rosenthal, 1982), Fri, 11:59. "Janus Films Presents: Charlie Chaplin:" •The Circus (1931) and The Idle Class (1921) with "A Day’s Pleasure" (1919), Sat, 2, 4:30, 7, 9:20; •City Lights (1931), A Dog’s Life (1981), and Sunnyside (1919), Sun, 2, 5, 8; •Modern Times (1936) with "Payday" (1922), Mon, 2:30, 4:45, 7, 9:15; •The Great Dictator (1940), Tues, 3:30, 7, and The Kid (1921), Tues, 5:50, 9:20.

CHRISTOPHER B. SMITH RAFAEL FILM CENTER 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; (415) 454-1222, www.cafilm.org. $6.50-10.25. The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector (Jayanti, 2009), call for dates and times. Cairo Time (Nadda, 2009), call for dates and times. The Girl Who Played With Fire (Alfredson, 2009), call for dates and times. The Sicilian Girl (Amenta, 2008), Sept 17-23, call for times.

FORBIDDEN ISLAND TIKI LOUNGE 1304 Lincoln, Alameda; www.forbiddenislandalameda.com. Free. "Forbidden Thrills: Incredibly Strange and Strangely Incredible Films:" •The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies (Steckler, 1964), and Spider Baby (Hill, 1965), Mon, 7:30.

HUMANIST HALL 390 27th St, Oakl; www.humanisthall.org. $5. Crude Impact (Wood, 2006), Wed, 7:30.

MECHANICS’ INSTITUTE 57 Post, SF; (415) 393-0100 (reservations required). $10. "CinemaLit: Loves Labours: Leo McCarey Revisited:" Love Affair (McCarey, 1939), Fri, 6.

PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE 2575 Bancroft, Berk; (510) 642-5249, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu. $5.50-9.50. "Unseen Cinema:" "The Amateur as Auteur," Wed, 7:30. "Drawn From Life: Comic Books and Graphic Novels Adapted:" Popeye (Altman, 1980), Thurs, 7; Sin City (Miller and Rodriguez, 2005), Sat, 8:50. "Swoon: Great Leading Men in Gorgeous 35mm Prints:" Breathless (Godard, 1959), Fri, 7. "Shakespeare on Film:" A Midsummer Night’s Film (Dieterle and Reinhardt, 1935), Sun, 4; King Lear (Godard, 1987), Fri, 9. "Elegant Perversions: The Cinema of João César Monteiro:" Recollections of a Yellow House (1989), Sat, 6:30; Silvestre (1981), Sun, 4. "Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area:" "Landscape as Expression," Sun, 6:30.

RED VIC 1727 Haight, SF; (415) 668-3994. $6-10. Cyrus (Duplass and Duplass, 2010), Wed-Thurs, 7:15, 9:15 (also Wed, 2). The Room (Wiseau, 2003), Fri-Sat, 8 and midnight. Director and star Tommy Wiseau in person at all shows. The 400 Blows (Truffaut, 1959), Sun-Mon, 7:15, 9:25 (also Sun, 2). "Good Vibrations Fifth Annual Independent Erotic Film Festival: Hot Euro Porn Night," short films, Tues, 8. Visit www.events.goodvibes.com for complete schedule.

ROXIE 3117 and 3125 16th St, SF; (415) 863-1087, www.roxie.com. $5-9.75. The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector (Jayanti, 2008), Wed-Thurs, 7, 9:15. Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy, 2010), Wed, 7, 9:15. The Two Escobars (Zimbalist and Zimbalist, 2010), Wed, 7, 9:15. "San Francisco Latino Film Festival," Thurs-Sun. Check www.sflatinofilmfestival.com for program information. "Robert Altman vs…:" "Robert Altman vs. Teenagers!: •Brewster McCloud (1972), Mon, 7, and O.C. and Stiggs (1984), Mon, 9; "Robert Altman vs. Friendship!: •California Split (1974), Tues, 7, and 3 Women (1977), Tues, 9.

SAN FRANCISCO ART INSTITUTE 800 Chestnut, SF; www.iranianfilmfestival.org. $10. "Third Annual Iranian Film Festival," independent feature and short films made by or about Iranians, Sat-Sun, 11am.

SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC LIBRARY Koret Auditorium, 100 Larkin, SF; www.sfpl.org. Free. "Amandla! South Africa During and After Apartheid:" Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony (Hirsch, 2003), Thurs, noon.

VIZ CINEMA New People, 1746 Post, SF; www.vizcinema.com. $10-15. Detroit Metal City (Lee, 2008), Sept 18-30, check website for times.

YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS 701 Mission, SF; (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org. $6-8. A Brighter Summer Day (Yang, 1991), Thurs, 7; Sun, 2.

Stage listings

David Talbot
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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.

THEATER

OPENING

Anita Bryant Dies For Your Sins New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness; 861-8972, www.nctcsf.org. $24-40. Fri/17-Sat/18, 8pm; Sun/19, 2pm; Wed/22-Fri/26, 8pm. Opens Sept 25, 8pm. Runs Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. New Conservatory Theatre Center presents a show by Brian Christopher Williams.

KML Holds the Mayo Zeum Theater, 221 4th St; www.killingmylobster.com. $10-20. Opens Thurs/16, 8pm. Runs Thurs-Fri, 8pm. Through Oct 3. Killing My Lobster presents its fall comedy show, directed by co-founder Paul Charney.

The Secretaries Boxcar Playhouse, 505 Natoma; 255-7846, www.crowdedfire.org. $15-25 (pay what you can previews). Previews Sat/18, 8pm; Sun/19, 5pm. Opens Wed/22, 8pm. Runs Wed-Sat, 8pm. Through Oct 9. Crowded Fire Theatre brings the irreverent feminist satire by Five Lesbian Brothers to the stage.

BAY AREA

Angels in America, Part One Pear Avenue Theatre, 1220 Pear, Mtn View; (650) 254-1148, www.thepear.org. $15-30. Previews Thurs/16, 8pm. Opens Fri/17, 8pm. Runs Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 2 and 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through Oct 16. Pear Avenue Theatre kicks off its fall "Americana" program with the Tony Kushner play.

La Cage Aux Folles San Mateo Performing Arts Center, 600 N. Delaware; (650) 579-5565, www.broadwaybythebay.org. $20-48. Dates and times vary. Through Oct 3. Broadway By the Bay presents the gay musical based on the play of the same title.

ONGOING

Aida War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness, 864-1330, www.sfopera.com. $25-320. Thurs/16, 7:30pm; Sun/19, 2pm; Sept 24, 8pm; Sept 29, 7:30pm; Oct 2, 8pm; Oct 6, 7:30pm. San Francisco Opera presents Verdi’s classic, a co-production with English National Opera and Houston Grand Opera.

Bi-Poseur StageWerx Theatre, 533 Sutter; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $20. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through Sept 25. W. Kamau Bell directs a solo piece by Oakland native Paolo Sambrano.

The Brothers Size Magic Theatre, Bldg D, Fort Mason Center; 441-8822, www.magictheatre.org. $20-60. Dates and times vary. Through Oct 17. Magic Theatre presents the West Coast premiere of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play, directed by Octavio Solis.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Actors Theatre, 855 Bush; 345-1287, www.actorstheatresf.org. $26-38. Wed-Sat, 8pm. Through Oct 2. Actors Theatre presents Tennessee Williams’ sultry, sweltering tale of a Mississippi family, directed by Keith Phillips.

*Dieci Giorni Thick House Theater, 1695 18th; (800) 838-3006, 282-5616. $25. Fri-Sun, 8pm (through Sept 19). Premonitions of the end of the world in Plague-ravaged 14th-century Florence send a group of women and men into hiding in the countryside where lust, betrayal, high spirits and low comedy make for saucy times at the edge of the abyss. Based on the ribald tales of love and death in Boccaccio’s Decameron —with one contemporary riff about some rowdy bachelorettes in Las Vegas and a misplaced box of whip-its—this collaborative chamber opera directed by Jim Cave brings together new work by Bay Area–based composers Erling Wold ( Mordake ), Lisa Scola Prosek ( Belfagor ), Martha Stoddard and Davide Verotta. The wry, boisterous narration (by actor Robert Ernst, his gusto balanced by mute assistance from Roham Sheikhani’s placidly odd stagehand) has a jagged meta-theatrical quality of its own that charms us with self-conscious references to the production, while tacitly underscoring Boccaccio’s resonance for the present, but does not always aid in entering the individual stories, performed by impressive singers Sascha Joggerst, Maria Mikheyenko, Crystal Philippi, William Sauerland, and Wayne Dexter Wong. The musical aspects are generally more successful. Put fluidly into play under conductor Stoddard and five musicians sporting clarinet, cello, accordion, violin, and keyboard, the compositions offer up vivid, moody passages with contemporary flare yet something evocative too of its subject, a combination at times as contagious and fever-inducing as a touch of the Bubonic (without the swelling of the armpits).

Don’t Ask New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, 861-8972; www.nctcsf.org. $24-36. Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through Sun/19. New Conservatory Theatre Center presents the West Coast premiere of Bill Quigley’s play about the affair between a Private and his superior.

*Dreamgirls Curran Theatre, 445 Geary; (888) SHN-1749, www.shnsf.com. $30-99. Wed, 2 and 8pm; Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 2 and 8pm, Sun, 2pm; Tues, 8pm. Through Sept 26. The touring version of director-choreographer Robert Longbottom’s revamped revival of the 1981 Broadway sensation (with book and lyrics by Tom Eyen and music by Henry Krieger, under original direction by A Chorus Line‘s Michael Bennett) is a visually and aurally dazzling spectacle that is also a knowing (if now familiar) take on the history and business of latter-20th-century American pop music from the perspective of African American R&B. The cast, operating with ease against and within a remarkable videoscape projected onto large draped screens center stage, charms from the outset of this story about the rise of a female vocal group called the Dreams (a loose composite of the Supremes and the Shirelles). The first act enthralls with the plot’s gathering possibilities, the sparkling music and the irresistible performances—not least Moya Angela’s unstoppable Effie and Chester Gregory’s heroically soulful, funky Jimmy "Thunder" Early. But the second act stretches things unnecessarily with one too many power ballads (albeit lunged to perfection) and a slowpoke approach to the all but predictable plot resolution. Still, this is a masterful production on many counts and an infectious evening overall. (Avila)

Jerry Springer the Opera Victoria Theatre, 2961 16th; www.jerrysf.com. $20-36. Wed-Sat, 8pm. Through Oct 16. Ray of Light Theatre presents the West Coast premiere of the operatic farce by Stewart Lee and Richard Thomas.

Law and Order San Francisco Unit: The Musical! (sort of) Metreon Action Theater, Metreon Cineplex, second floor, 101 4th St; www.brownpapertickets.com. $10. Mon, 8pm. Through Sept 27. Funny But Mean comedy troupe presents an original production.

Olive Kitteridge Z Space at Theater Artaud, 450 Florida; (800) 838-3006, www.zspace.org. $20-40. Wed-Thurs, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through Sept 26. Word for Word presents a premiere production of stories from Elizabeth Strout’s award-winning novel.

*Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray Eureka Theatre, 215 Howard; 552-4100, www.TheRhino.org. $10-25. Wed-Sat, 8pm (also Sun/19, 3pm). Through Sept 19. John Fisher adapts the Oscar Wilde novel for the stage and directs the production.

A Picasso Royce Gallery, 2901 Mariposa; (866) 811-4111, www.apicassoonstage.com. $12-28. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through Oct 9. Expression Productions presents Jeffery Hatcher’s drama about the authenticity of three Picasso paintings.

*Posibilidad, or Death of the Worker Dolores Park and other sites; 285-1717, www.sfmt.org. Free. Fri/17, 8pm). Through Sept 17. It may have been just a coincidence, but it certainly seems auspicious that the San Francisco Mime Troupe, itself collectively run since the 1970’s, would preview their latest show Posibilidad on the United Nations International Day of Cooperatives. The show, which centers around the struggles of the last remaining workers in a hemp clothing factory ("Peaceweavers"), hones in on the ideological divide between business conducted as usual, and the impulse to create a different system. Taking a clip from the Ari Lewis/Naomi Klein documentary The Take, half of the play is set in Argentina, where textile-worker Sophia (Lisa Hori-Garcia) becomes involved in a factory takeover for the first time. Her past experiences help inform her new co-workers’ sitdown strike and takeover of their own factory after they are told it will close by their impossibly fey, new age boss Ernesto (Rotimi Agbabiaka). You don’t need professional co-op experience to find humor in the nascent collective’s endless rounds of meetings, wince at their struggles against capitalistic indoctrination, or cheer the rousing message of "Esta es Nuestra Lucha" passionately sung by Velina Brown, though in another welcome coincidence, the run of Posibilidad also coincides with the National Worker Cooperative conference being held in August, so if you get extra inspired, you can always try to join forces there. (Gluckstern)

*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.

*"San Francisco Fringe Festival" Various venues; www.sffringe.org. $6-10 ($40 for 5 shows; $75 for 10 shows). Dates and times vary. Through Sun/19. The marathon of indie theater returns, with a lineup that includes 43 companies.

BAY AREA

Anton in Show Business Marion E. Green Black Box Theater, 531 19th St; (510) 436-5085; www.theatrefirst.com. $10-30. Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through Sept 26. TheatreFIRST presents Jane Martin’s theater comedy, under the direction of Michael Storm.

Antony & Cleopatra Forest Meadows Ampitheatre, 1475 Grand, San Rafael; 499-4488, www.marinshakespeare.org. $20-35. Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 4pm. Through Sept 25. Marin Shakespeare Company’s summer season continues with the tale of the Egyptian queen.

Bleacher Bums Contra Costa Civic Theatre, 951 Pomona, El Cerrito; (510) 524-9132, www.ccct.org. $18. Runs Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through Oct 3. A sports comedy conceived by Joe Mantegna, directed by Joel Roster.

Compulsion Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison; (510) 647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org. $29-85. Dates and times vary. Through Oct 31. Mandy Patinkin stars in a world premiere of Rinne Groff’s play, directed by Oskar Eustis.

*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)

In the Red and Brown Water Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller, Mill Valley; 388-5208, www.marintheatre.org. $32-53. Tues, 8pm; Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Wed, 7:30pm, Sun, 7pm (also Sept 23, 1pm; Sat/18 and Oct 2, 2pm). Marin Theatre Company presents the West Coast premiere of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play.

In the Wound John Hinkel Park, Berk; (510) 841-6500, www.shotgunplayers.org. $10 (no one turned away). Sat-Sun, 3pm. Through Oct 3. Shotgun Players’ annual free performance in Berkeley’s John Hinkel Park is this year an impressively staged large-cast reworking of the Illiad from playwright-director Jon Tracy. In the Wound is actually the first of two new and related works from Tracy collectively known as the Salt Plays (the second of which, Of the Earth will open at Shotgun’s Ashby stage in December). Its distinctly contemporary slant on the Trojan War includes re-imagining the epic’s Greek commanders as figures we’ve come to know and loath here in the belly of a beast once know by the quaint-sounding phrase, "military-industrial complex." Hence, Odysseus (Daniel Bruno) as a devoted family man in a business suit with a briefcase full of bloody contradictions emanating from his 9-to-5 as a "social architect" for the empire; or Agamemnon (an irresistibly Patton-esque Michael Torres) as the ridiculously macho, creatively foul-mouthed redneck American four-star commander-clown ordering others into battle. While the alternately humorous and overly meaningful American inflections can feel too obvious and dramatically limiting, they’re delivered with panache, amid the not unmoving spectacle of the production’s energetic, drum-driven choreography and cleverly integrated mise-en-scène. (Avila)

The Light in the Piazza TheatreWorks at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro, Mtn View; (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/19. TheatreWorks presents Craig Lucas’s tale of love under the Tuscan sun.

MilkMilkLemonade La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid, Berk; www.impacttheatre.com. $10-20. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through Oct 2. Impact Theatre presents Joshua Conkel’s off off Broadway play about a lonely gay man trapped in a chicken farm.

She Loves Me Lesher Center for the Arts, 1601 Civic Drive, Walnut Creek; (825) 943-7469, www.CenterREP.org. $36-45. Wed, 7:30pm; Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 2:30 and 8pm; Sun, 2:30pm. Through Oct 10. Center REPertory company presents a musical choreographed and directed by Robert Barry fleming.

The Taming of the Shrew Forest Meadows Amphitheatre, 1475 Grand, San Rafael; (415) 499-4488, www.marinshakespeare.org. $20-25. Fri-Sun, 8pm; Sun, 4pm and 5pm. Through Sept 26. Marin Theatre Company presents a swashbuckling version of the classic.

Trouble in Mind Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk; (510) 843-4822, www.auroratheatre.org. $10-55. Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm; Tues, 7pm. Through Oct 3 Aurora Theatre presents Alice Childress’ look at racism through the lens of theater.

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

Alice NOHspace, 2840 Mariposa; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. Wed-Sun, 8pm (continues through Sun/19). $15. An original revision of Lewis Carroll, directed by Allison Combs.

The Book The garage, 975 Howard; 518-1517, www.975howard.com. Sat/18, 8pm, $10-20. RAW presents an audio-visual wotk by Erika Tsimbrovsky and Vadim Pyundaev.

"Previously Secret Information" StageWerx Theatre, 533 Sutter; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. Sun/17, 7pm. $15.The comedic storytelling series returns for a monthly installment.

"WestWave Dance" Cowell Theater, Fort Mason Center; 345-7575, www.westwavedancefestival.org. Mon/20, 8pm. The 19th annual season of contemporary choreography kicks off with Amy Seiwert, Kat Worthington, and three others.

Zhukov Dance Theater Cowell Theater, Fort Mason Center; 345-7575, Thurs-16-Sat/18, 8pm. $25. The company presents its third annual season.

Psychic Dream Astrology

David Talbot
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0

September 15-21

ARIES

March 21-April 19

Take responsibility for being the change you want to see in your life, Aries! Don’t wait for things to come to you. Let your bum-out feelings motivate you to find new ways to forge your path. Seek balance, not security this week.

TAURUS

April 20-May 20

Be bold, ballsy, and beautiful this week, Taurus! Assert yourself without hesitation to create the opportunities you want. Don’t sacrifice fun while you kick ass, though. Make sure it’s part of your plan and moves you forward.

GEMINI

May 21-June 21

You’re not a machine and the world is not a rational place, pal. You need to make sure you are taking good care of your beating, needy heart, and letting others love you up, too. Insert time and energy for care this week.

CANCER

June 22-July 22

Do you have enough adventure and playfulness in your life? It’s too hard to be an adult and do all the crap you have to do without a healthy dose of spontaneity! Plan an escapade this week, even if it’s only a tiny one.

LEO

July 23-Aug. 22

It’s on you to handle things, Leo. You can wallow in negative expectations or step up your game! Make the decisions that allow you to move towards what make you happy, not just move away from your fears.

VIRGO

Aug. 23-Sept. 22

Self-doubt is your public enemy No. 1 this week. Flush out your tweaky, freaky mind so you can focus on one true and all-important thing at a time! Take a break so you can blow off some steam and clear your overcrowded head.

LIBRA

Sept. 23-Oct. 22

Your roots need tending to, Libra. Put special loving care into your family of choice, and tend to the garden of your family of origin. Make sure weeds aren’t choking out new growth while your back is tuned on your foundational folks!

SCORPIO

Oct. 23-Nov. 21

You may have to make some hard choices this week, but it’ll be worth it in the long run! Favor getting your work done today so you can play tomorrow over the reverse. You’ll find freedom through dealing with what binds you.

SAGITTARIUS

Nov. 22-Dec. 21

Make necessary changes without getting caught up in shoulda-woulda-couldas. Look for blame and it’s easy to find, but it helps no one and nothing. Strive to improve things instead of bemoan what is or ain’t fair.

CAPRICORN

Dec. 22-Jan. 19

No matter where you’re at, it’s where you’re at, so there’s no use in being the Punisher about it. Focus on where you’re going, and ask yourself if you’re willing to do the inner work to get there.

AQUARIUS

Jan. 20-Feb. 18

Love is in the air, Aquarius! Pursue it with your autonomy intact and your head screwed on tightly. Maintain a healthy balance between being yourself and compromising for those you adore. Enjoy yourself this week!

PISCES

Feb. 19-March 20

Don’t avoid heartaches, deal with them, my Fishy Friend. Invest in your relationships, especially if they hit troubled waters. Your feelings are important, so communicate them constructively for best results.

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

Mr. In-Between

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Mr. In-Between

arts@sfbg.com

STAGE During a lively discussion of aesthetics, Lord Henry Wotton (John Fisher) and painter Basil Hallward (Jef Valentine) pry open a Pandora’s box of idolatry, narcissism, and moral quicksand called The Picture of Dorian Gray. Oscar Wilde, author of the novel, is of course the aesthete par excellence. But this genuinely creepy, darkly sexy, and thought-filled Gothic — now imaginatively brought to life on the stage by Theatre Rhinoceros artistic director and playwright-director Fisher (Medea, the Musical) — reminds us that Wilde was a man prone to paradoxes that were anything but facile.

If Wilde was uncompromising in his aestheticism (not to mention his admirable embrace of social frippery), these qualities came charged with a devastating, subversive wit and an unquiet, compassionate intellect prone to probing questions about so-called human nature, as well as the nature of the social world he had inherited (still familiar in its essentials today, a century later). In a way, Dorian Gray is the dark dramatic counterpart to Wilde’s “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” his still must-read essay on the cultivation of the individual as the basis of a just society and vice-versa.

But to the play. The preternaturally beautiful young man of the title (essayed here with the perfect balance of innocence and ruthlessness by a captivating Aaron Martinsen) is a privileged orphan who comes under the wing of a painter, but the hierarchy is immediately inverted: it is Basil who comes under the power of the initially oblivious Dorian. So possessed (as opposed to merely “inspired”) is Basil by his subject that he paints a portrait well beyond his usual powers and jealously guards it from public eyes. Reluctantly introducing the boy to his friend, the consummate aristo-hedonist Lord Henry (played with a slightly brooding manner and delicate raunch by Fisher), Basil loses Dorian to the pull of Watton’s morally unbounded worldview. Soon Dorian utters a fateful wish: his soul in exchange for the eternal youth represented by his portrait. Wish granted, the portrait bears all the scars of aging and debauchery and evil in his stead, as he spirals into a moral abyss that consumes more than one life along the way.

In the principle roles, Fisher, Valentine, and Martinsen are worthy vehicles for the play’s elevated language and heightened realism. Valentine’s smart and engaging performance as Basil carries real weight and is a fresh surprise coming from a talented actor seen more often in drag than “straight” clothes (though even here, his natty, late-19th-century threads and pointed mustachio suggest a refugee from a barber shop quartet). The principals get strong support from Maryssa Wanlass and Celia Maurice in a variety of parts, and inconsistent help from the hard-working but less versatile Stephen Chun and Adam Simpson.

Fisher’s staging is apt and frequently inspired in a manner that suits the idea-driven material. The Eureka’s ample stage remains empty but for the odd chair, with an occasional sheen of light and shadow (from lighting designer Anthony Powers) suggesting the outdoors. This stark approach emphasizes the actors, whose smart period costumes, courtesy of the able Christine U’Ren, do most of the visual work in setting a period mood. The play’s characters are serenely unmoored in a way that compliments the story’s moral drift, swift conflation of time, and ethereally — and sexually — in-between quality.

Balletic, operatic touches (including light but compelling movement from choreographer Lia Metz, amid occasional bursts of Wagner and other Romantics) enhance the more lurid moments lovingly, while filling out the action with the most economical yet graceful of gestures. When modest theater actress Sybil Vane (a sharp and appealing Wanlass), victim of Dorian’s caprice, jumps to her death, the moment shifts from sturm und drang to a tragic tranquility. The actress throws up her hands and recedes slowly backward upstage, already of another world, as the back wall stops her cold, her vertical pose perfectly in line with the audience’s sight line as it follows her down to the ground.

The production has minor flaws. Chun and Simpson speak into offstage microphones to substitute for onstage servants and other minor parts, and the disparities within sound quality and volume, along with the tossed-off line readings, prove jarring. But any missteps are small ones. Moreover, despite a nearly three-hour run time, the play’s length isn’t a problem. Every word of Wilde’s put to use here — and Fisher has elegantly managed to include a lot of them — feels relevant, enticing, and necessary. If anything, the subtlety and thematic density of the speech demands a certain period of adjustment, and the two sets amount to full immersion in the heart of Dorian Gray. *

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

Wed.–Sat, 8 p.m.; Sun, 3 p.m.;

(through Sept. 19); $15–$20

Eureka Theatre

215 Jackson, SF

(800) 838-3006

www.therhino.org

Strong Weekend

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Strong Weekend

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC: THE NEW SHOEGAZE Oh sure, I like to swoon and glide, and I stayed for all of “You Made Me Realize” when the reformed My Bloody Valentine played at the Concourse. But a million easy divers and slow Rides have stretched shoegaze out of shape, forgetting the loaming fury for déjà vu-ridden ecstasy. As with all pseudo-genres in the MySpace era, a premium is placed on affect: the shiny/skuzzy veneer that rewards your click. M83’s admittedly spectacular records (Before the Dawn Heals Us, Saturdays=Youth) were early harbingers of this tendency. Like big-budget fantasies of the early shoegaze sound, their effect is at once lush and deodorized.

That may be a circumspect way of introducing Weekend, but it helps me get a handle on my initial crush on the trio’s “All American”/”Youth Haunts” single (Mexican Summer). Both tracks hitch the familiar layers of ultraviolet feedback to a throbbing, post-punk core—the band approaches shoegaze as a means of attack. The songs are long, but only because they’re stalking another crescendo, like the blizzard of cymbals at the close of “Youth Haunts.”

The striving momentum of those two tracks made even more sense when I saw Weekend perform. Mission of Burma came to mind watching the band make Dionysian waves while remaining buttoned-up and steady. There was much unifying pounding, but at such a volume that the instruments seemed to be discordantly ripping at a beautiful cloud. When I ask bassist and singer Shaun Durkan why their forthcoming album is called Sports (Slumberland), he replies, “Because the record is about episodes of conflict and opposition.” That insight extends to the album’s minimalist cover art, designed by friend and fellow CCA grad Jeff Brush, and redolent of post-punk’s class of ’79.

Weekend plays loud enough to conjure little sonic hallucinations that compliment the band’s subtle, New Order-ish melodies. “We all come from punk and hardcore backgrounds where it’s really not a big deal to have a cranked half-stack,” guitarist Kevin Johnson explains when I meet up with him, Durkan, and drummer Abe Pedroza one sunny afternoon. And yet, the blown-out passages always channel back to the hook that was there all along. “I think that’s been an idea in our band for a long time,” Johnson adds, “having stuff that sounds really abrasive on the surface but that the listener can’t help but find the melody.”

This careful calibration surely owes something to Weekend’s long gestation. Durkan and Johnson first met as sixth graders in Novato, and though Johnson moved to Reno before a band could form, the two remained in close touch, scheming a band. They started Weekend in 2009 with drummer Taylor Valentino, who was replaced by Pedroza when he moved to Boston. Aside from the first single and a split 7-inch with Young Prisms, the band quietly logged weekend sessions toward Sports with local producer Monte Vallier, who played with Durkan’s father in Half Church, one of San Francisco’s early post-punk groups.

The finished album, set for a Nov. 9 release, recalls Sonic Youth’s mid-1980s records in its plateau-hopping sequencing and cohesive instrumental passages. Opener “Coma Summer”‘s wilting chord progression and slashes of noise suggest that while the band still probably sounds best in a basement (“We’ll play your Sweet 16,” Pedroza jokes), they grasp the dramatics required of a larger room. “Monongah, WV” would kill either — it’s one of those charmed post-punk tracks that simultaneously lilts and thrashes, overflowing a tightly wound three minutes. The more self-conscious stabs at transcendence, like slow-churning “Monday Morning” and epic “Veil,” can seem a little ponderous, though the kaleidoscopic fusillade climaxing the latter is worth the wait. Throughout Sports, the rhythm section works a full-court press, a nice counterpoint to the shambling side of the San Francisco sound.

Sports comes out the same day the band opens for the Pains of Being Pure at Heart at the Independent, and the guys are clearly basking in the company of the Slumberland revival. While several of the new additions to Mike Schulman’s label play at fey, Weekend steers back to the edgier sounds of groups like Whorl, the Lilys, the Ropers, and Schulman’s own Powderburns. “It’s a crazy legacy that we’re learning more and more about,” Johnson says. Like all the Slumberland acts, Weekend wears its ’80s and ’90s influences on its sleeves, but I’m struck by Durkan’s answer when I ask about the group’s touchstone albums.

“Most of the records that inspired us are pretty obvious: Loveless, Unknown Pleasures, Disintegration, Psychocandy,” he writes. These records were made painstakingly, and we were inspired by that thoughtful process of creation…. That process of discovering love for a record, having to work at it, always leaves me with more of an appreciation than when I’m instantly won over.” Rearticulating the slow victory of great records is a welcome gesture indeed from a still young Weekend.

WEEKEND

with Tamaryn; DJ sets by oOoOOO, and Nako and Omar

Sept. 15, 9pm, $8

Elbo Room

647 Valencia, SF

(415) 552-7788

www.elbo.com

Transfigurations

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Transfigurations

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC/THE NEW SHOEGAZE The Waves. The title of the first album by Tamaryn is big and elemental. It’s also dramatic and literary, invoking the writing and the death of Virginia Woolf and evoking the ocean’s fatal pull in a classic Romantic sense. Tamaryn’s music is all of these things.

The vast, vague, cacophonous yet harmonic sound that Melody Maker deemed shoegaze back in the late 1980s has made a strong return in recent years, but Tamaryn — comprised of Tamaryn and producer-instrumentalist Rex John Shelverton — distinguishes itself from the pack through epic scope and high fidelity of production, and most of all, through sheer force of presence. Shoegaze so often buried rock’s persona in noise’s capacity for jouissance that the sound became (and remains) a too-easy way to mask a lack of musicality and personality. Not so on The Waves. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more confidently unique rock album this year. On “Haze Interior” and “Dawning,” the result is literally awesome.

Tamaryn lives in the Bay Area, but I have to go through a publicity company to arrange an interview, and our conversation takes place over the phone, on a hot afternoon, after she’s found a place to park her car in the East Bay. This roundabout route to getting in touch with the lady herself is fitting, since much of The Waves‘ tension generates from the mysterious way in which Tamaryn moves through the huge and dense sounds that Shelverton generates. “To go into something that loud and overwhelming and do something completely restrained — that was the real challenge,” she says, after sizing up my own voice as that of a young person. “You play music like that in a practice space and you as a singer don’t hear a note coming from your voice. You have to go from muscle memory. It’s about finding your place in the sound.”

It’s easy to connect with Tamaryn on the subject of music, because her appreciation of it is as immense and intense as the album she’s made. When I mention that aspects of The Waves remind me in a flattering way of the ’90s group Curve, she’s appreciative. “The British [shoegaze] bands were all so specific and very restrained,” she says. “Bands like Curve were more in your face. Curve is what Garbage wanted to be — you can see the direct line.”

Tamaryn’s lyrics, guiding the listener through deep oceanic contours, ranging from choral winters to coral flowers, possess a strong sensory quality. She agrees. “Sensory is a perfect way to describe it,” she says. I wrote the lyrics in response to my experience of the music — my experience of being part of the song. There are performers that realize they are not playing an instrument — it’s almost like they are a participant, a part of the audience that is moved by the music to respond and perform. Ian Svenonius of the Make-Up had another band where he’d walk onstage and go, ‘I like this music,’ and start to be inspired. I always thought that was really cool.”

Without a doubt, The Waves is a San Francisco album, with lyrics written at Fort Funston, and music by a surfer — Shelverton — from Half Moon Bay. The album’s final track, “Mild Confusion,” draws from notes on a psychiatric patient that Tamaryn came across during a day job, and it brings the more classical doom-laden aspects of the opening title track to a specific, realistic modern realm. “It’s very extreme here, with water on three sides, and it can be totally inspiring,” Tamaryn says, amid talk of the Golden Gate Bridge’s beauty and tragic lure. “If you come to San Francisco with plans to destroy yourself, it will let you. But if you come self-contained, with a strong personal or creative identity, you can use the energy of the city to inspire you.”

At the moment, one of Tamaryn’s chief sources of inspiration is fellow singer and recent Guardian cover star Alexis Penney. The night of our interview, she assists Penney onstage during a Some Thing drag performance at the Stud that concludes with Penney being pelted with long-stemmed roses. Penney is also the nude star of the video for Tamaryn’s “Love Fade,” which uses Derek Jarman’s films for the Smiths as a touchstone. “Alexis is like everybody’s muse,” Tamaryn says. “He’s amazing.” The friendship makes perfect sense, because Tamaryn is no slouch when it comes to iconic and androgynous imagery: she looked to the rare monograph Trans-figurations, Holger Truzsch’s photo collaboration with Veruschka, when putting together band portraits for The Waves.

A few nights later at Honey Soundsystem’s BUTT Bias mixtape listening party, and then later by text, Penney is more than happy to repay the compliment. “I remember the first time I saw Tamaryn,” Penney writes. “She is so striking and startlingly beautiful, with a piercing gaze, and you can tell she knows exactly what she wants. She’s definitely lived a life and is full of stories, but also retains that same real-life mystery that pervades her music. Her music is so her in essence, almost as if she was even singing the guitars and drums. Composed, but very raw and real and spontaneous, with a voice that is so powerful. Which is funny, because when she’s speaking she’s so girlish, but when she sings she’s definitely channeling spirits — there’s primal earthy old magic in her voice, even when she’s whispering.”

The Waves is an album of staying power and growing rewards because of the subtle and understated way Tamaryn adds human emotion to the Slowdive-like dinosaur yawns and Loveless-era My Bloody Valentine blur of Shelverton’s guitar. Tamaryn makes no bones about the fact that she has set out to create an album that can stand alongside those bands’ best recordings, and the work of Talk Talk’s Mark Hollis, who she simply refers to as “my heart.”

“The kinds of things I write are always bittersweet,” Tamaryn says, as our conversation falls again into the subject of favorite music. “It’s my experience of life and that’s the music that makes me feel better. I feel that music is so liberating and it has the biggest impact on you because it captures how you feel about yourself. I’ve given up on my dream of having a fulfilling personal life — I’m more interested in making sacrifices in order to make the music I want to make. Being able to make a record I’m proud of is more fulfilling than some day-to-day activity.”

TAMARYN

with Weekend; DJ sets by oOoOOO, and Nako and Omar

Sept. 15, 9pm, $8

Elbo Room

647 Valencia, SF

(415) 552-7788

www.elbo.com

Stone age drop out

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Stone age drop out

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC Dopesmoker (Tee Pee Records, 2003) begins with a move characteristic of Al Cisneros’ style. Striking a series of low to mid-range notes, Sleep’s bassist and incantatory vocalist draws forth a series of monster bass tones that warp and disassociate as they decay.

As the listener focuses on the subtle permutations in the drone-overture — sometimes Cisneros’ bass notes vibrating into ever-smaller tonal subdivisions, at other moments, they radiate volume ever-outward — the DNA sequence for an unfolding doom metal magnum opus begins to take shape. The double kick bass follows in a steady trek to the foreground of the mix, followed by the guitar, which sounds almost grafted onto the bass, like a membrane of barbed amplifier fuzz circumscribing Cisneros’ hypnotic line. The riff snakes Geezer Butler-like into crevices and apertures, then rises to a Tony Iommian trill before pausing against a rain of cymbals — Black Sabbath as ancient, unstable organism.

With its relentless, uninterrupted hour-plus length, Dopesmoker unfolds like one of those naturally occurring geographical wonders that embodies thousands of years of passing time. Granite sheets, city-sized coral reefs, and Sleep’s culminating musical statement: all sprawling patterns dependent on vast expansions and mutations. This is what the undiluted version of Sleep’s masterpiece has over the abridged Jerusalem, released unofficially five years after Dopesmoker was completed. Where Jerusalem is divided and fragmented, seeking to place this freakish growth in track-length components and excising some of the weird arabesques of feedback that emerge at the margins, Dopesmoker, like Sleep’s music itself, evolves into ever more bizarre shapes via its own unintelligible logic.

Sleep broke up in 1995, after the band’s then-label, London Records, famously didn’t “get” Dopesmoker. The label felt (probably correctly), that a 60 minutes-plus quasi-Wagnerian “fuck you” to brevity would be career suicide for a band making its first foray on a major. In a sense, it was. It’s almost poetic that the album — a time-bending epic about traveling through sonic time and space — was released posthumously and out of chronology.

In the interim, Sleep has become the quintessential band for people who like their metal baked and ponderous. Following two discrete reunion shows at London’s All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in 2009 with Jason Roeder of Neurosis replacing Chris Hakius on drums, the group is set to reunite for a series of U.S. dates. As if this long dreamed-of tour wasn’t enough to make metal heads across the country flip the fuck out, the band’s set is to be comprised of Sleep’s Holy Mountain (Earache, 1993) played cover-to-cover, as well as excerpts from the now semi-mythical Dopesmoker. The returning sonic titans are set to once again engulf the Bay in a haze, one which smells mysteriously like the backroom of a T-shirt shop. But even if the band is notorious for its heroic weed consumption and all-around stoney pedigree, Sleep’s body of work — as challenging as it is impenetrably heavy — demands a staggering attention span on the listener’s part.

None of the San Jose trio’s albums reveal themselves on first listen; nor is Sleep’s catalogue by any means “feel good music.” Sleep purveys dark, unsettling grooves; its music ruins your buzz. Consider “Holy Mountain,” where Cisneros’ chant-vocal — like a Gregorian monk after a particularly harsh bong rip — approximates the desolate textures of his “earth drenched in black,” while Pike’s insistent riff (here anticipating High on Fire, perhaps) circles back in on itself like it’s spiraling toward the menacing “ohm” that distends across the mix of the titular track. This is heavy metal warped and skewed; an exercise in bad vibes that pulverizes thought in the same way that ultrasonic waves are used to crush kidney stones.

I can’t recall the specifics of picking up my copy of Sleep’s Holy Mountain, but what I do remember is hearing Matt Pike’s opening lick on “Dragonaut,” and the ensuing maelstrom of psychedelic electricity — maze-like and abstract, like the interlocking web of shapes on the album cover, only suffused with dripping, inexpressible colors. This is perhaps why Sleep’s sound has always been infinitely more compelling to me than feel-good psychedelia. Of all the bands to engage in the doom tradition, Sleep makes the increasingly relevant (sub)genre entirely its own. Familiar Sabbathisms — pentatonic bass grooves, monolithic power chords, a savvy manipulation of the lexicon of the blues — become building blocks within a phantasmal landscape of drones and echoes.

I also can’t help but feel that, as natives, Sleep has created a sound that forever superimposes itself over the Bay Area, so that cityscape surroundings, such as an ivy-choked chain-link fence or the cavernous opening of a BART tunnel (which doesn’t extend to their San Jose home) take on a weird, fantastical dimension, oscillating between solid matter and buzzing amplifier fuzz like the weird nebulas that seem to obsess Cisneros.

The way I hear music has been informed by Sleep since I first heard Sleep’s Holy Mountain in high school. Seventeen years after the album’s initial release, it still manages to yield stretches of unexplored musical terrain, as if it has been reproducing via osmosis while we were away. Like the elite cadre of spacey predecessors to the Great Drone, Sleep uses metal as a kind of vehicle for processing experience through rhythms and patterns, abstract tones and intricate layers of sound synching up with surroundings (like that Wizard of Oz/Pink Floyd thing you tried when you were 16, but in this case it actually works.)

The underlying genius of Sleep is the way the band manages to diffuse the atomic foundations of its monolithic riffs throughout entire albums and into a sprawling, seemingly endless landscape, a sonic cartography that — like a good Lovecraft yarn — perpetually expands past the next horizon point. The shape-shifting resonances of a decaying power-chord or bass fill flesh out the contours of an interminable sonic desert, a labyrinth of sound we find ourselves compelled to reexplore ad infinitum. “Drop out of life” are the first words we hear Cisneros chant on Dopesmoker. 

SLEEP

Sun/12–Mon/13, 8 p.m.; $23–$25

With Thrones (Sun/12) and Saviours (Mon/13)

Regency Ballroom

1290 Sutter, SF

www.theregencyballroom.com

Stimulating voltage

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Stimulating voltage

Don’t ask synthesizer inventor and electronic instrument designer Don Buchla (appearing Thu/9 as part of the 11th Annual San Francisco Electronic Music Festival) for a CD of his music. He’s more interested in following his curious muse — in this case, through the oft-uncharted territory of performance — than documenting his many experiments.

“It’s hard to have a CD that hasn’t been done yet,” the soft-spoken, even-keeled Buchla quips, deep within his Berkeley Victorian. He’s tucked behind a desk in a beige-carpeted, orderly studio-basement dotted with instruments — a hulking vibraphone dominates the space — and a few rainbow-colored 1960s- and ’70s-era lights. “None of my music can be recorded,” he adds. “It’s all theatrical in nature and involves a lot of visual simulations — stimulations.”

Buchla’s last performances were with saxophonist Peter Apfelbaum in Europe. His next appearance, a rare Bay Area one, will be in collaboration with Nine Inch Nails player Alessandro Cortini, for whom he made one of his Buchla Series 200e analog synthesizers. Using the 200e, a Thunder tactile surface MIDI controller, and various pieces of percussion, the two are making electronic and acoustic music with a distinct “element of chaos.” Buchla says they are striving for “unpredictability — allowing things to happen that we didn’t anticipate.”

In the meantime, forget about procuring a document of any of the practice sessions. Still, the inventor — who came out with his first modular synthesizer just months after Robert Moog in 1963 and created the first analog sequencer, among many other instruments — has made live CDs in the past. Indeed, his audiences would sometimes get a CD of the first half of a concert once the performance was completed and receive the second half in the mail. “If you want a record of the music,” he says, “the record should be the music you heard.”

If the live-recording-as-you-wait approach reminds you of the tape heads who devoted their energies to the Grateful Dead, you’re not far off: the Dead were onetime Buchla clients. He built their sound system — as well as the system on Ken Kesey’s bus — around the time he was doing sound and light at the Avalon Ballroom and the first Fillmore auditorium, as part of the North American Ibis Alchemical Company. Owsley Stanley, the Dead’s soundman and the onetime LSD cook, enlisted Buchla to make a Series 100 system for the band. “He wanted it to be very unique, so I painted all the panels candy-apple red,” Buchla remembers with a chuckle. “It was quite dazzling. It’s in their museum now, a collector’s item.”

Buchla’s instruments have all become collector’s items, from his Series 500, the first digitally controlled analog synth, to his all-in-one-paintbox Music Easel. “I usually can’t afford to keep them myself,” he says, laughing. “If I had, I’d be wealthy now.”

The first synthesizer that Buchla built in 1963 for composers Morton Subotnick and Ramon Sender at the San Francisco Tape Music Center was the fruit — the silver apple — of the UC Berkeley physics graduate drop-out and musique concrete composer’s roving curiosity. He’d learned that the Center had a three-track tape recorder, a marvel anywhere outside film studio contexts at the time. “I observed what they were using to compose electronic music,” Buchla remembers. “I proposed that instead of using the radar and gun sights and physics lab equipment and Hewlett-Packard oscillator, they build instruments intentionally geared toward electronic music. That was a revolutionary thought.”

In the 1984 book The Art of Electronic Music, Subotnick tells Jim Aikin that Buchla synthesizers are notable for “the way things are designed and laid out, so that a composer can impose his or her own personality on the mechanism. For example, Don always disassociated a voltage controlled amplifier from its control voltage source. That meant that the voltage source could be used for controlling anything. It wasn’t locked into a single use … That kind of sophistication has given him [a reputation] as the most interesting of all the people building this kind of equipment.”

The first Buchla Box, using touch-sensitive pads or ports rather than a standard keyboard, was funded with a $500 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. Today it’s permanently ensconced at Mills College. On a side note, Buchla estimates it would easily go for $30,000. Buchla still tackles new designs — he has a multichannel filter that can serve as a Vocoder coming out next month — and his instruments, it seems, “don’t depreciate at all, so they’re good investments.”

“But I prefer to build them for playing.” 

11TH SAN FRANCISCO ELECTRONIC MUSIC FESTIVAL

Wed/8–Sat/11, various times, $10–$40 (pass)

(Alessandro Corti and Don Buchla perform Thurs/9, 8 p.m., $10–$16)

Brava Theatre (except Fri/10 at de Young Museum)

2781 24th St, SF

(415) 861-3257

www.sfemf.org

Agony uncle

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Agony uncle

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Alternately slavish and critical, simultaneously buying into and subtly resisting the hype, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector is a bit like the renowned producer himself, who said this to biographer Mick Brown in 2007’s Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: the Rise and Fall of Phil Spector: “I have a bipolar personality … I have devils inside that fight me. And I’m my own worst enemy … I would say I’m probably relatively insane.”

Director Vikram Jayanti coproduced the Oscar-winning When We Were Kings (1996), yet seems to be more interested in American celebrity Babylons of late, à la The Golden Globes: Hollywood’s Dirty Little Secret (2003). You can see why he scored the interview with Spector at the center of Agony, since he gets on board the musicmaker’s bifurcated, multichannel tip. The doc is both fascinating and monotonous, respectful of Spector’s achievements as well as the sensation surrounding his blighted celebrity. The filmmaker stays away from the specifics of the night in 2003 when Lana Clarkson was found dead at Spector’s mansion, while recontextualizing the producer’s words and music with images culled from the murder trial and other footage. The end result is an innuendo-laden pastiche that resembles an echo chamber reverberating with all the doomed dramatics of “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss).”

Unavoidable, weirdly unblinking, and placed like a crazy diamond in front of John Lennon’s ivory “Imagine” grand piano is the wiggy wonder himself, rambling about such tidbits as his explosive courtroom ‘do (“It was a tribute to Albert Einstein and Beethoven. That day it got a little extreme”). In conversation, Jayanti dwells on the sunnier side of Spector’s checkered history: no mention is made of his alleged pistol-waving at the Ramones during the making of 1980’s End of the Century, or his reputed mistreatment of ex-wife and Ronettes star, Ronnie Spector — likely a condition of the interview. But the director manages to get in a scattershot series of thrusts and parries concerning the man and his guilt or innocence, pairing courtroom scenes — the image of a spent gun beside Clarkson’s twisted feet, a sphinx-like Spector in all his pop-Godfather pin-striped finery — with B&W TV clips of his now-classic, far-from-disposable songs.

The musical roll call is impressive, including the eerie, elegiac “To Know Him Is to Love Him” with Spector himself strumming guitar as part of the Teddy Bears and warbling to his dead father (who, eerily, committed suicide by “blowing his brains out,” as Spector puts it); the truly exquisite “Spanish Harlem”; and such rock ‘n’ roll Rosetta stones as “Then He Kissed Me” and “Be My Baby.” Subtitles by author Brown blow up the historical importance of the music, which could have easily stood on its own, and add to the po-mo swirl of information surrounding the man, the career, and the comedown. Yet we don’t hear from Spector’s crucial vocalists, who, like Darlene Love of the Crystals, struggled to find recognition beyond the producer’s Wall of Sound power, or the artists, who arguably tended to chafe against the producer’s overriding vision.

Still, to the Jayanti’s credit, Agony‘s strange parallels stay with you: Clarkson, in blackface, impersonates Little Richard (in a failed bid to resurrect her comedy career), around the time Lennon is heard on the soundtrack singing “Woman is the Nigger of the World”; Spector rattles on about how he wasn’t surprised when Lennon was shot (“People wanted to become famous by killing him, and if you were neurotic and crazy enough … “) before a prosecutor offers, “Lana Clarkson wasn’t an anonymous nobody who deserved a bullet to her head.” Over it all looms the so-called legend — a victim, yes, as he implies at the start, but one who has fallen prey to his own press, and to his own eternally flaming ego.

THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY OF PHIL SPECTOR opens Wed/10 at the Roxie.

Mellow noir

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Mellow noir

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Every nation’s cinema has its share of memorable contributions to the narrative category of amour fou. But since the French came up with that term in the first place, we might as well grant them a certain supremacy. They definitely tend to arrive at the madness of a self-destructive love with less high melodrama (let alone misogyny) than is the U.S. norm.

Consider such prior Gallic exercises as Duvivier’s 1937 Pépé le Moko, Malle’s 1958 The Lovers, Truffaut’s 1981 The Woman Next Door, or Resnais’ recent Wild Grass (2009) — all strong in incident yet restrained in execution and complex in psychology. Many of these movies might be classified as "noir," the label French critics applied to postwar American thrillers first.

But their country’s films seldom replicated the sharply-defined good vs. evil conflicts between character, circumstance, fate, and gorgeous black and white stylization in those Hollywood B movies that created an eventual transcontinental cult. Instead, they were essentially intimate dramas whose roiling domestic emotions hurtled toward fatalistic, often fatal yet low-key implosions.

Stéphane Brizé’s new Mademoiselle Chambon is like that, a movie whose protagonists lunge toward each other — even though they shouldn’t, for their own sakes and everyone else’s.

Grave-voiced, craggy-faced Jean (Vincent Lindon) is a construction-site laborer; Anne Marie (Aure Atika) his assembly-line worker wife; Jeremy (Arthur Le Hourerou) the eight-year-old offspring who’s already better educated than either of them. One day Anne Marie suffers a temporarily disabling factory accident, leaving Jean to pick up Jeremy from school.

There, Jean first encounters Jeremy’s teacher, Véronique Chambon (Sandrine Kiberlain). She has the willowy body of a veteran ballet dancer and a naturally refined air — at least by his limited experiential standards.

There’s an immediate if unadmitted spark between them, amplified when she asks him to address her fourth-grade class (there’s been a cancellation) on career day. He unexpectedly enthralls them describing how a house or school gets built — then she hires him to repair a drafty apartment window. As payment he asks her to play the violin, something she hasn’t done for anyone else in so long she plays with her back to him. You can imagine where this sequence’s heady repressed emotions are heading.

Yet Mademoiselle Chambon doesn’t get cheap about it. None of these people are more than ordinary, kinda-attractive. Forty-something Jean has working-class-hero brawn but also a beer gut. His wife is a French Talia Shire circa Rocky (1976), and slightly younger Véronique resembles a more starved Agnès Jaoui.

As temptations and related tensions unravel their stability, Brize allows his characters to slip grip gracefully. No one behaves well, but they do behave credibly. This isn’t the outsized universe of Hollywood noirs 60 years ago, where men were men and women were frequently duplicitous, bullet-bra’d Shivas of destruction. Nor does it echo the medium’s occasional role-reversals, in which intoxicated family man turns hapless stalker. Or even the stop-me-please-I’m-having-too-much-good-sex-to-maintain-sanity likes of Last Tango in Paris (1972) or Betty Blue (1986).

Instead, Mademoiselle Chambon sees rational folk with well-organized lives stubbornly resisting a mutual pull whose logical outcome will surely suck for all concerned. It’s a fine, measured drama presented with typical Gallic insouciance — tenderly discreet even when conventional art and commerce shout for something more crudely dramatic.

Indeed, Brizé ultimately aligns over-much with the Brief Encounter (1945) school of thwarted-passion pathos. His refusal to artificially underline such emotions, however, is what elevates this from so many good movies nobody in their right mind would confuse with reality.

MADEMOISELLE CHAMBON opens Fri/10 in Bay Area theaters.

Azztronaughty

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Azztronaughty

It’s impossible for me to think of Big Freedia without exploding into happy feathers. As the fierce national face of New Orleans’ bounce music movement (along with her drag daughter, Sissy Nobby), Freedia’s been shoehorned into several media narratives that don’t necessarily do her justice — popular performer who bridges a supposed gap between flamboyant gayness and macho rap, evidence that original regional roots music is still being generated in our monocultural-seeming musical world, post-Katrina beat-healer of ravished communities, anthropological curiosity. But she’s all that and more: a canny, hard-working force of nature who can really turn you out.

Bounce, with its quick-step, butt-thundering beats and hypersexual call-and-response template, has done a lot to push New Orleans back to the forefront of the American dance music scene. That a shoulder-shrugging attitude toward its superstar’s transgender appearance and cartoonish sexuality accompanies the sound should only surprise those who somehow missed Little Richard and Prince, not to mention Cameo and Cam’ron. Still, Freedia’s matter-of-fact, out-and-proud “Queen Diva” stance is all too rare in hip-hop. First-time listeners, after taking in Freedia’s feminine peacocking, still get floored when her gravelly voice orders straight crowds to “bend ovah like I told ya!” in her hit “Azz Everywhere.” (And then they do.)

Outsiders have called Freedia’s style “sissy bounce” — a niche label she rejects, and one that’s pretty inaccurate. Freedia’s first appearance in the Bay, last year at a San Francisco drag party, left the sissy audience completely befuddled. This time around, she’ll be in Oakland at a mixed affair put on by the fab Le Heat and Hella Gay parties. And now that she’s been featured everywhere from Diplo’s blog to The New York Times Magazine, Bay crowds may be ready to “jump back, shoot it up now, bitches get down” the Big Easy way.

Big Freedia Wed/9, 9 p.m., $10. The New Parrish, 579 18th St., Oakl. www.thenewparish.com

 

PEPE BRADOCK

The jazz-educated Frenchman could have been beamed up after he gifted the world with orchestral house classic “Deep Burnt” in 1999 and still been lionized. But he’s consistently delivered deep-streaming tracks that drop at just the right moments. He’ll be headlining the Staple boys’ ear-ticking Darkroom monthly with Fil Latorre and Javaight.

Thu/9, 9 p.m., $10. 222 Hyde, SF. www.222hyde.com

 

DRUMCODE: ADAM BEYER AND IDA ENGBERG

Attack of the Swedish techno giants! Drumcode label head Adam Beyer and “Disco Volante” hitmaker Ida Engberg bring news from the detail-oriented Stockholm scene to the perfectly curated weekly Base party at Vessel. My longtime local bass-maven crush Nikola Baytala warms up.

Thurs/9, 10 p.m., $15. Vessel, 85 Campton Place, SF. www.vesselsf.com

 

ARTIFICIAL

The debut of this dark wave, minimal synth, and rare post-punk party last month was fashionably bananas — don’t miss the follow up with DJ Justin of Nachtmusik, Banshee, Dreamweapon, Julian DeStrukt, and Nary Guman of Warm Leatherette.

Fri/10, 9:30 p.m., $7. Cat Club, 1190 Folsom, SF. www.sfcatclub.com

 

BACK TO SCHOOL

Aw, already? Meet and greet the new freshman class of clubgoers, probably wearing even more fantastically mismatched ensembles than previously imagined, at this electro blowout put on by the Blow Up kids. Tenderloins, Udachi, Sticky K, Lucky Date, Jeffrey Paradise, and more stoke your higher learning.

Sat/11, 9 p..m.–3 a.m., $15 for 18+, $10 for 21+. Kelly’s Mission Rock, 817 Terry Francois Blvd., SF. www.blowupsf.com

 

BLOOD, SWEAT, AND QUEERS

Bmore funk and booty jams from DJs Davo and Bunnystyle for two floors of hot queers in a Chinatown dive. ‘Nuff said!

Sat/11, 10:30 p.m., $5. Li Po Lounge, 916 Grant, SF.

 

MIXMASTER MIKE WITH DEL THE FUNKY HOMOSAPIEN

It’ll be a classic hip-hop throwdown when the Beastie Boys DJ and mind-warping rapper join forces at this Electronic Arts shindig. There’s something about a ” sexy exotic cars” showcase, too, but why burn the fossil fuels when you can inflame the brain cells? With DJs Sake One, Ren the Vinyl Archeologist, and more.

Sat/11, 9 p.m., free with RSVP at Mighty website. Mighty, 119 Utah, SF. www.mighty119.com

alt.sex.column: A good fit

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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alt.sex.column: A good fit

Dear Andrea:

I want to have anal sex with my boyfriend. I read that you can wear a butt plug beforehand to prepare. True?

Love,

Willing

Dear Will:

Good grief. What do you think people did before the advent of the novelty marital-aide industry? Sit on pinecones? You don’t need weeks of prep to achieve what may be in some senses an “unnatural act” (the rectum being far better at pushing things out than it is at taking things in) but is nevertheless performed regularly and pleasurably by normal people everywhere. I’d certainly suggest you try a smoothly manicured finger first to see if you even like this sort of thing. Use a bottle of lube. It may take time, but by time I mean minutes or hours, not weeks.

Honestly.

Love,

Andrea

 

Dear Andrea:

My boyfriend and I are planning to start having sex. I feel kind of silly saying this, but I am really scared! I’m afraid he won’t fit! Should I try stretching first with something? Or is that just ridiculous?

Love,

Tightly

Dear Tight:

First off, please stop using words like “silly” and “ridiculous” to describe yourself and/or your perfectly reasonable concerns. And second, yes, it would be pretty ridiculous to resort to something like vaginal sounds or graduated dildos to do what your very own vagina so cleverly evolved to do for itself. That said, it is far more likely to be successful when you are hot and bothered and ready to go. It will not, however, take weeks of preparatory homework and a specially-fitted case full of precision instruments.

Love,

Andrea

 

Dear Andrea:

I am just starting to date a new woman. I find her very attractive but frankly, she is BIG. Do I have to figure out some new positions or angles?

Love,

Skinny

Dear Skin:

You might, but I’m guessing she may know something about this herself. You may want to consult her when and if it comes to that. I enjoyed this summation of how not a problem your problem is likely to be, from the “Fat Sex” page of Dimensions Magazine’s website: “Those authorities who have taken the trouble to investigate the matter report that obesity is rarely, if ever, a barrier to intercourse.” … Or, as Marvin Grosswirth put it in “Fat Pride”: “To put it bluntly and squarely, no woman is so fat that her vagina is inaccessible.”

Love,

Andrea

Got a question? Email Andrea at andrea@mail.altsexcolumn.com

Rep Clock

David Talbot
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Schedules are for Wed/8–Tues/14 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. "ANSWER Coalition:" Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans (Logsdon, 2008), Thurs, 7:30. The Invisible Forest (Alli, 2008), Fri, 8.

CASTRO 429 Castro, SF; (415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com. $7.50-10. The Bridge on the River Kwai (Lean, 1957), Sept 10-16, 7:30 (also Sat-Sun, Wed, 1, 4:15).

CHRISTOPHER B. SMITH RAFAEL FILM CENTER 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; (415) 454-1222, www.cafilm.org. $6.50-10.25. Cairo Time (Nadda, 2009), call for dates and times. The Girl Who Played With Fire (Alfredson, 2009), call for dates and times. Lebanon (Maoz, 2009), call for dates and times. Soul Kitchen (Akin, 2009), call for dates and times. The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector (Jayanti, 2009), Sept 10-16, call for times. It Came From Kuchar (Kroot, 2009), Sun, 6:30.

"FILM NIGHT IN THE PARK" This week: Old Mill Park, 300 block of Throckmorton, Mill Valley; (415) 272- 2756, www.filmnight.org. Donations accepted. Alice in Wonderland (Burton, 2010), Fri, 8. Washington Square Park, Union and Columbus, SF; same contact and price info. Amélie (Jeunet, 2001), Sat, 8.

HERBST THEATER 401 Van Ness, SF; www.groundspark.org. $10-25. Choosing Children (Chasnoff and Klausner, 1985), Tues, 6:30. Twenty-fifth anniversary screening.

HUMANIST HALL 390 27th St, Oakl; www.humanisthall.org. $5. World in the Balance: The Population Paradox, Wed, 7:30.

JACK LONDON SQUARE East lawn, Oakl; www.jacklondonsquare.com. Free. "Waterfront Flicks:" Dreamgirls (Condon, 2006), Thurs, 7:30.

MECHANICS’ INSTITUTE 57 Post, SF; (415) 393-0100 (reservations required). $10. "CinemaLit: Loves Labours: Leo McCarey Revisited:" The Awful Truth (McCarey, 1937), Fri, 6.

"9/11 TRUTH FILM FESTIVAL" Various venues; www.sf911truth.org. Sponsored by the Northern California 9/11 Truth Alliance; go to website for complete schedule. Thurs-Sun.

PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE 2575 Bancroft, Berk; (510) 642-5249, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu. $5.50-9.50. "Unseen Cinema:" "Revolutions in Technique and Form," Wed, 7:30. "Shakespeare on Film:" Henry V (Olivier, 1945), Thurs, 7; A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Dieterle and Reinhardt, 1935), Sun, 4. "Swoon: Great Leading Men in Gorgeous 35mm Prints:" House of Bamboo (Fuller, 1952), Fri, 7; The Hustler (Rosen, 1961), Sun, 6:30. "Drawn From Life: Comic Books and Graphic Novels Adapted:" Flash Gordon (Hodges, 1980), Fri, 9; Hellboy (del Toro, 2004), Sat, 8:45. "Berkeley Old Time Music Convention:" •I Hear What You See: The Old-Time World of Kenny Hall (Simon, 2010), and Sprout Wings and Fly (Blank, Gerrard, and Conway, 1983), Sat, 4. "Dance and the State in East Asia Conference:" Yang Bang Xi: The Eight Model Works (Yan, 2006), Sat, 6:30.

RED VIC 1727 Haight, SF; (415) 668-3994. $6-9. "SF Shorts: The San Francisco International Festival of Short Films," Wed-Sat, 7:30, 9:30 (also Fri, 5:30; Sat, 3:30, 5:30). The Karate Kid (Zwart, 2010), Sun, 2, 5, 8; Mon, 7:30. Cyrus (Duplass and Duplass, 2010), Sept 14-16, 7:15, 9:15 (also Sept 15, 2).

ROXIE 3117 and 3125 16th St, SF; (415) 863-1087, www.roxie.com. $5-11.50. The Cockettes (Weissman and Weber, 2002), Wed-Thurs, 7, 9:15. With live performances from the Thrillpeddlers’ production of the Cockettes musical Pearls Over Shanghai. The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg (Aronson, 1984), Wed-Thurs, 7:15, 9. Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector (Jayanti, 2008), Sept 10-16, 7, 9:15 (also Sat-Sun, 2:30, 4:45). Pickup’s Tricks (Pickup, 1973), Sat, 6. Part of SFMOMA’s "Cinema City" film crawl.
SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART 151 Third St, SF; www.sfmoma.org. Prices vary. "Infinite City: Cinema City:" "Housing Shadows and Projecting Fog," work-in-progress screening, Thurs, 7. "Cinema City" continues with screenings at various SF venues. Check website for info.
SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC LIBRARY Koret Auditorium, 100 Larkin, SF; www.sfpl.org. Free. "Amandla! South Africa During and After Apartheid:" Tsotsi (Hood, 2005), Thurs, noon.

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