Arts & Culture

Arts & Culture

Domestic disturbance

-
0

a&eletters@sfbg.com

Equal parts Antonio Gramsci and Monsieur Verdoux (1947), Dillinger is Dead (1969) is cultural critique masquerading as a one-man show. Michel Piccoli plays Glauco, with his forehead mostly: the fleeting pleasures of food and gadgetry are registered in satisfied wrinkles, though the slack glaze of boredom is never far off. The film opens with Glauco touring a factory using a gas mask of his design. In case we somehow miss this as a marker of alienation, the factory guide waxes Society of the Spectacle: "The introjections of these obsessive, hallucinatory needs do not produce an adaptation to reality, but mimesis, standardization: the cancellation of individuality."

Subtly may not be Italian auteur Marco Ferreri’s strong suit, but he achieves a weirdly frantic stasis once Dillinger settles in to Glauco’s chintzy bourgeois palace, a masterpiece of set design. Glauco tucks in his lolling girlfriend (Rolling Stones ingénue Anita Pallenberg, mostly naked here), snivels at the meal she’s left him and gets to cooking. Looking for something in the closet, he finds an old gun wrapped in a newspaper covering John Dillinger’s death. The film’s unforthcoming slowness reaches its apotheosis as he painstakingly cleans the revolver, keeping a close eye on the sauce.

Not satiated by his feast for one (Ferreri would later direct 1973’s La Grande Bouffe, a film about four men eating themselves to death), Glauco licks honey off the maid’s bare back, gives his firearm a Pop Art makeover, and finally endeavors to see if it still goes bang. Ferreri’s listless deadpan can’t help but pale after countless Coen brothers knockoffs, but Dillinger is saved from obsolescence by its prescient observations of technology’s ascendance in the domestic sphere. Glauco is ever fiddling with a machine, at one point documenting his sleeping wife with a tape recorder (this guy would be a nightmare with an iPhone).

All this mechanical action has a masturbatory quality to it, especially when Glauco watches his Super 8 home movies. He greedily reaches out for the breasts of a woman he’s filmed and tries to swim in a projection of the sea (a significant image given the film’s nautical conclusion). When a halved watermelon broaches sex, viewers may wonder if Tsai Ming-Liang knew of Dillinger before making The Wayward Cloud (2005). This fleshy interlude is the closest thing to life in Ferreri’s film; even murder, it seems, cannot bring these people back from the dead.

DILLINGER IS DEAD

Thurs/11–Sat/13, 7:30 p.m.; Sun/14, 2 p.m., $8–$10

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org

When in roam

-
0

Involving no catatonic housewives, no mortally botched abortions, and no luminous pools of blood in the kitchen either, Sam Mendes’ latest film presents a somewhat happier tale of domesticity than 1999’s American Beauty or last year’s Revolutionary Road, if "tale of domesticity" is a fair description for a road movie in which the stated goal is a home.

In Away We Go — from a screenplay by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida — 30-something couple Verona (Maya Rudolph) and Burt (John Krasinski) find themselves unexpectedly ditched during Verona’s second trimester by the only set of theoretically adoring grandparents available, Burt’s flakily self-absorbed parents (Catherine O’Hara and Jeff Daniels). Thus unsettled, the two set off in search of a place to provide their child with an "epic," "Huck Finn-y" childhood, as Burt wistfully envisions it. Some parents might quibble with this aim, given Huck’s epic stint as a runaway on a river, but some offspring, even grown ones, might find it pleasurable to imagine their parents dreaming for them a heroic, adventurous youth, rather than the anxious rigors preparatory to an Ivy education and a professional life.

In any case, away they go to visit friends in Phoenix, a sister in Tucson, a cousin in Madison, Wis., and so on — each stopover offering interludes with the film’s excellent ensemble cast and presenting Verona and Burt with various slices of parenting life to digest or spit out. We don’t see much of these places; Away We Go is, until the end, only vaguely concerned with geography, focusing its lens on private scenes even in public places. At a Phoenix dog track, Allison Janney provides hilariously, wildly inappropriate commentary on life with pre-postal husband (Jim Gaffigan) and silently resentful children. In Madison, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Josh Hamilton ooze sanctimony as a noxiously evolved couple raising their children via the Continuum school.

During calmer, more sober moments, you may find yourself idly pondering your investment in the drama and domestic arrangements of this financially solvent, utterly in love, ideally suited pair. But the dialogue is clever enough, the protagonists engaging enough to patchily override such cynical thoughts. If you can handle the twee whimsy of a shot in which the itinerant couple’s plane is transformed into a leaping dolphin in the reflection of skyscraper windows, you’re more than halfway home.

AWAY WE GO opens Fri/12 in San Francisco.

It’s Cougartown, Jake

-
0

andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I’m 19 and still a virgin. I’ve never been on a date, kissed a girl, held hands, hugged … you get the picture. I’ve never really had the time to take interest in girls, or the courage to ask one out. I’m now starting to feel pretty lonely, and tired of my lack of "experience." However, after talking with several different girls my age on different occasions, my question has come to this: are virgin guys really worthless for experienced women?

Most women I talk to say that’s the answer to the question. If this is true, I think I’m going to have serious nervous breakdown. Since this is apparently the case, and such a bad thing, I was wondering what I should do — if anything at all — to fix the problem?

Love,

Another Lonely Boy

Dear Boy:

In light of recent discussions of sexual opportunities found on craigslist, among the (barely) used fitness equipment and the remarkably ugly couches, I’m suddenly seeing your problem in a whole new light. In your usual fictional treatments of the "desperate male virgin seeks state-change" trope, you see the hapless hero attempt, unsuccessfully, to get age-mates interested, or to trick them with false-bottomed popcorn buckets or what-have-you. Then you have your prostitute scene, which never goes well. I have no compunctions about suggesting seeing a pro, actually — it may not be legal, but as far as I know I can recommend what I like as long as I don’t recommend whom I like, as in "See my friend Lavinia, she’ll fix you right up."*

In fact,I AM going to suggest you see a pro, since this has been going on way too long and I’m afraid you’re going to get what they used to call "a complex." But I do realize it’s not a solution that fits everyone’s tastes, morals, or pocketbook, and it isn’t much help if what you’re seeking is a boon companion and a chance to get your blank-blank-ed (I hate all those phrases and can’t even bring myself to type the one about cherries. Ick.

We’ll get back to craigslist, but first, no, I don’t think inexperienced men are "worthless" to women. I think very few people can truly be considered worthless (even the worst can be repurposed as mulch, for instance), and I’d hate for you to judge your own worth by what some chicks at a party said. Your "worth" is irreducible and inborn.

How useful you can be to other people may depend on things like skills and history, but probably not as much as you think. I think we’re having some confusion here about what question those girls thought they were answering. Would they really, at the advanced age of 19 or so, reject a serious and otherwise appealing suitor on the grounds of sexual inexperience? Or was it more a case of "I’d rather do it with guys who know what they’re doing"? The latter is understandable, the former a bit sad.

I really think young women of a slightly less hardened persuasion are your best bet, for many reasons, but there is that craigslist option (craigslist is in some senses sui generis, but it could also be considered to stand in here for any online meeting place where "casual encounters" ads are acceptable). I’m thinking that your chances of a cute 19-year-old picking up on your ad in a place like that and thinking, "Sweet! He doesn’t know a thing!" are virtually nil. But if there really is such a thing as a "cougar," then … mrowr.

I am personally still unconvinced that any such widespread social phenomenon of older, slightly stringy but glossily well-preserved ladies prowling for young man-meat yet exists, or ever will. You couldn’t prove it by the presence of the stereotype, though. Not only is there the SNL sketch and a number of ad campaigns featuring "cougars," there’s even an upcoming series staring the ancient and wizened Courteney Cox (I believe she’s 45) in something called Cougar Town. This is not good.

Reservations about the designation and the ugly light it casts on women over, say, 35 who still like sex aside, this could all be good news for you. Try running an ad that says "19-year-old virgin seeks cougar for important life lessons" and see how that works out for you. While it’s true that most female grown-ups are not seeking utterly inexperienced partners half their age, there are certainly some who would find you an interesting experiment.

All this nonsense about pros and ladies on the prowl aside, I do have two other suggestions, both of which seem to have escaped you. One, you can talk to girls and even ask them out without revealing a certain embarrassing biographical fact upfront and, two, you could date virgins.

Love,

Andrea

* No, I don’t know anyone named Lavinia.

Don’t forget to read Andrea at Carnal Nation.com.

Recession, renewal

-
0

johnny@sfbg.com

REVIEW When it comes to the negative impact that economic recession has upon the art world, there are as many problems as missing dollars. Yet among contemporary artists, such times tend to skew various views back toward those whose work isn’t epically expensive to begin with, a development that can be welcome. Moreover, careful budgeting can inspire reflection rather than a mad dash to acquire the newest, most expensive, and trendiest work.

At least two significant survey shows in 2009 follow this impulse in search of revelation. Next month, SFMOMA is opening "Not New Work," for which artist-curator Vincent Fecteau has selected art owned but rarely-to-never shown by the museum. Currently, Berkeley Art Museum executive director Lawrence Rinder taps into his curatorial insight with "Galaxy: A Hundred or So Stars Visible in the Night Sky," a multifloor epic exhibition that reveals the breadth of that institution’s art collection, and allows elements of it to ricochet off of each other in provocative ways.

Rinder is no stranger to such huge undertakings, having curated an installment of the Whitney Biennial and also co-conceived the landmark 1995 queer art survey "In a Different Light," one of the Berkeley Art Museum’s largest undertakings and banner shows of the previous decade. With "Galaxy," Rinder’s playful and subtly lively sensibility might even use a recent contemporary BAM exhibition as a trampoline of sorts. Last year, the site played host to Trevor Paglen’s "The Other Night Sky," a present-day photographic installation that provocatively muses on literal presences up above. With "Galaxy," Paglen’s literal stars and spy satellites are traded for the metaphorical celestial brilliance of artwork by Rembrandt, Rousseau, Dürer, Klee, and Rubens. One of the exhibition’s strongest facets is its tremendous array of remarkable etchings and engravings. Blake’s 1825 With Dreams upon My Bed and Behold Now Behemoth Which I Made with Thee are pettily awesome — worth an afternoon worth’s of scrutiny on their own.

While this excavation of canonical treasures tiny and large might be a new endeavor for Rinder, whose focus has primarily been on contemporary art, his selections and their arrangement are designed to trigger unpredictable associations and make a case for some comparatively-undiscovered contemporary local artists, such as Todd Bura. Thus a 2008 ink-on paper piece by Ajit Chauhan — who recently had a terrific show in a small side gallery at the de Young — holds its own and takes on added resonance next to works by Bruce Conner and Barry McGee, who might or might not count as Chauhan’s kin. In Chauhan’s A Mid Summer Night’s Cream … and McGee’s Untitled (2008), patterns of lettering and faces metamorphose into one another. Conner is one of a handful of recurrent artistic presences within "Galaxy" — his reappearance a testimony to his strong but varying presence and his influence upon Bay Area art.

Louise Bourgeois is another signature personality within "Galaxy," an impish creative force that darts in and out of different eras, styles and materials without ever seeming out of place. Rinder’s curatorial freedom allows for elliptical echoes that span centuries and floors of the museum. Bullfighting stampedes into the show in two different galleries, via an 1815-16 etching by Goya and a 1986 geutf8 silver print by Zoe Leonard. Etchings of village life congregate on one wall, landscapes and seascapes occupy a different area, experiments with color join up in groups of three and four. There are wave-like rhythmic patterns to the shifts between large-scale and miniature pieces.

A great sense of detail or flair has been given to the matter of framing many of these works, and Rinder’s use of framing extends to the show itself, which begins and ends with metallic or kinetic sculptural works that evoke Peter Selz’s 1966 Berkeley Art Museum exhibition "Directions in Kinetic Sculpture," while making a case for the tactile today. "Galaxy" begins with spinning metal discs and white button of Harry Kramer’s 1966 Jorg’s Chair, and closes with Edward Krasinski’s well-titled 1964 Perpindiculars in Space and Vassilakis Takis’ 1962-63 Tableau magnetique. In between these, there is a sense of queer flirtation and enjoyable perversity, thanks to the Caravaggio-esque crotch-pointing of Guiovanni Caracciolo’s 1610 oil-on-canvas The Young Saint John in the Wilderness, the eerie singed fringes of David Dashiell’s Dionysian 1992 Study for Queer Mysterties, the deathly delicacy of D-L Alvarez’s 1992 "In a Different Light" contribution Shawl (a net made of hair that likely degrades or is at least altered each time it is shown or moved), and a 1947 foam breast by Marcel Duchamp which asks to be touched.

Associations aside, "Galaxy" also is remarkable simply for exposing works so powerful that they stand alone. Such is the case with a 1955 untitled painting by Clyfford Still that takes the visceral and mortal concerns of the show into its deepest sense of experience. Gazing at this work is like passing through a threshold of elemental muck. In Still’s colors, beauty and horror entwine.

GALAXY: A HUNDRED OR SO STARS VISIBLE TO THE NAKED EYE

Through Aug. 30

Berkeley Art Museum

2625 Durant, Berk

(510) 642-0808

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Tears of a thug

-
0

a&eletters@sfbg.com

The first time I interviewed Shaheed Akbar, a.k.a. the Jacka — in December of 2007, during a midnight session for Tear Gas (Artist Records/SMC), due June 16 — he was rolling purple and green weeds plus two types of hash into a Sharpie-sized blunt. I felt like Paul Bowles interviewing Bob Marley. Having known him three years, I can assure you that even in the Bay’s smoky atmosphere, Jacka blazes like a forest fire.

I dwell on this because it’s one facet of the Tear Gas concept, beyond the title’s literal meaning. The perpetual cloud enveloping Jacka is as much a part of his persona as his mobbed out tales of street life, based on experience. Like many artists, the MC enlists his favorite plant in the service of music.

"Weed helps you concentrate on certain things," Jacka observes, during a follow-up interview last month. "Nothing that contains too much multitasking. But if you don’t rap, try writing one; it’s hard as fuck. Weed gets you outside your normal realm so you coming up with crazy shit."

ARE YOU EXPERIENCED?


Yet, considering his consumption, Jacka barely raps about weed, or at least no more than most rappers; he has other things on his mind. When I e-mail Paul Wall, one of several big-name features on Tear Gas, to ask why he wanted to work with Jacka, he emphasizes the authenticity of his collaborator’s verses.

"He speaks from experience when he rhymes," Wall writes. "Like he’s rapping from a hustler’s perspective for other hustlers."

The experience Wall cites consists of details which, in the aggregate, might make for improbable fiction. Jacka’s rise to local notoriety at age 18 as a member of C-Bo’s Mob Figaz — whose eponymous debut (Git Paid, 1999) moved something like 140,000 units — is fairly well documented. But the story begins much earlier. Born of 14-year-old parents, young Jacka saw his mother get addicted to crack, and his father go to prison for a decade only to be murdered shortly after release. The result was an impoverished childhood in various hoods in Oakland, Richmond, and finally Pittsburg, where the Mob Figaz began.

"As a kid, everywhere I lived was in the projects," he says. "A nigga’s whole thing is to get out of there." Such ambition led Jacka to start dealing crack as early as age 11.

"Say you’re in school," Jacka continues. "Moms ain’t working. Pops ain’t around. The other kids at school have everything you don’t, as far as clothes and packing they own lunch. All that matters when you’re a kid. You go to junior high and you eating free lunch, people are like, ‘What kind of nigga is you?’ So when you’re from the hood and can hustle, that’s definitely helping your self-esteem. You pulling out wads of cash and motherfuckers who used to laugh at you ain’t got shit. That made me feel hella good."

"Things I had to do to survive is one thing," he says. "But how I feel about it now is another."

BLUNT (OR DEEP) EMOTION


Jacka’s willingness to probe psychological wounds reveals another implication of Tear Gas. Paradoxically or not, in a genre where emotions are usually limited to elation and anger, a large part of Jacka’s appeal is his emphasis on the melancholy ambivalence of street life. It’s subtle, of course, sprinkled into stories of coke-dealing and cap-busting. But contrary to his assertion on the Traxamillion-produced "Girls," an infectious thug-pop remake of the 1986 Beastie Boys classic, Jacka doesn’t just "knock hoes and live it up."

"You can only shoot the breeze so much; you gotta drop a jewel on people," says Jacka, citing 2Pac, to whom he pays homage in "Hope Is for Real." "He had to be a sheep in wolf’s clothing because he had to reach me, the niggas in the hood, but look what you learn from him. So I have to study and get wiser to even make a song."

To be sure, Tear Gas isn’t a sociological treatise; like the blues, it voices the despair of a culture rather than proposing solutions. But such articulation is exactly what makes the music of both Pac and Jacka so powerful.

"Listen to Marvin Gaye," Jacka continues. "I guarantee he’s going to grab your soul. He knows something and could put it together with the music. And what he talked about was the struggle, the pain. I try to make shit that’ll stick to your soul. Like the music my parents used to listen to."

Besides his social consciousness, Jacka’s success rests squarely on quality. Last year, his single "All Over Me" — included on Tear Gas — hit No. 7 on KMEL’s playlist and No. 15 on Billboard’s "Bubbling Under" singles chart. Yet he refused to rush his album to capitalize on this exposure. Instead, he released 11 side projects. Two of them debuted on Billboard’s R&B/Hip-Hop chart: Drought Season (Bern One), a collaboration with rapper Berner, at No. 55, and The Street Album (Artist Records), a "mixtape album" with KMEL DJ Big Von, at No. 91.

"Motherfuckers like shit that make them think," Jacka says, when asked about his appeal. They also like real albums and, taken as whole, Tear Gas is among the best rap discs in recent history, major or indie. Despite its array of producers and perhaps a few too many guests, Jacka has fashioned a tight, coherent album where every track is vital — an extreme rarity in contemporary hip hop. With its minor-key, exotic flute and harp textures, the new single "Glamorous Lifestyle," also produced by Traxamillion and featuring André Nickatina, epitomizes the overall feel.

"It’s not an easy process unless you really listen to music, and follow all kinds of genres," says Jacka. "Some people just listen to rap, but other music helps you grow as an artist."

THE VOICE


Being a rapper, Jacka’s voice is ultimately his most important asset, an instantly recognizable, rounded, mellow drawl — even when he raps fast — that is never raspy, despite the steady diet of blunts. His melodic, half-sung delivery, moreover, perfectly fits his vocal texture and mournful themes.

"My style really comes from the struggle," he says. "I’m not trying to make you like what I’m saying — I’m trying to get into your soul." This spiritual goal reflects what he credits as his primary influence: chanting the Koran. Surprising or not, given his gangsta themes, smoking, and even drinking, Jacka is a devout Sunni Muslim. It’s the result of a spiritual quest he began at age 9, when he joined the Nation of Islam.

"They showed me how to be black, because I really didn’t know," he explains. "I just knew we were in America, we used to be slaves, but I didn’t know why it was so tough for us. They made me read books that taught me to be proud of who I am. They can be a little strict sometimes, but they have to be; there was so much taken away from us."

When Jacka began intensively reading the Koran, however, he began to question some of the Nation’s teachings. "I realized that what it said in the Koran is what I should do," he says. "Not that plus something else."

The development of Jacka’s faith toward more orthodox Islam accelerated circa 2000. The Mob Figaz’ momentum slowed when C-Bo went to prison and Jacka caught a robbery case that landed him in county jail for a year.

"In jail, I was reading the Koran and realized the Sunni Muslim way is for me," Jacka remembers. "It’s the way I can pray directly to God." Following his release, Jacka took his shahada, declaring his formal adherence to Islam. But as rap money dried up in the Bay during its leanest years (2000-04), he returned to crime at a whole new level, even while beginning his solo career with The Jacka (Akbr Records, 2001).

"When I started working on my album, things changed for me — I really got into the streets," Jacka says. Rap celebrity gave him connections he otherwise would have lacked. "Whatever rap niggas was talking about, we were living," he says with some pride, although he feels he’ll one day have to answer to Allah for his misdeeds. Details of his criminal past are necessarily vague, though if you consider that fellow Mob Figa Husalah was arrested for transporting "over five kilos" of cocaine, a case culminating in his 2006 sentence to 53 months in federal prison, you get the picture.

"The streets are dried up for me," says Jacka. "Once the feds knock your boy, you can’t fuck around for the rest of your life. I’m hot. So I stay with the music now."

"I didn’t take the business as seriously as I should have," he admits. "So I had to start from ground zero." Fortunately, by the time Jacka’s second "official" solo album The Jack Artist (Artist Records, 2005) was ready to drop, the Bay began to heat up again. Even in the heyday of hyphy, the conspicuously non-hyphy Jack Artist sold some 20,000 copies, or "more than all those niggas put together," in the words of the man behind it. Yet despite this success, Tear Gas sounds little like its predecessor. Instead, it reflects Jacka’s artistic growth now that he’s settled down to music full time.

"I wouldn’t trade this for those times again — never," Jacka says, when asked to weigh yesterday and today. "This is something legit we’re doing that’s real. My dream as a child was to do this."

www.myspace.com/thejackamobfigaz

Post-diva, darling

-
0

markeb@sfbg.com

SUPEREGO "Do you consider yourself a diva?" It’s one of those ridiculously rhetorical nightlife, especially gay nightlife, questions — like "Does this pair of angel wings and neon bob wig make me look dated?" or "Is that muscle queen by the speakers dancing or frantically signaling with both hands for me to call him on his cellular?"

And yet, here I am in the Castro, asking that very question of potential diva-in-training Caroline Lund (www.myspace.com/carolinelund). Lund certainly has all the particulars in place. Freshly released, circuit-friendly remix album of her debut single "Move Your Body"? Snap. A longtime dance presence on San Francisco’s shirtless gay afterhours scene, coordinating riser-writhers at Club Universe in the ’90s and now Wunderland? Snap, snap. Slick video featuring Lund in an array of revealing outfits, gyrating among backup pec-flexers? Of course. And heavy rotation play on Energy, 92.7 FM? Well, not until the Bay’s biggest progressive-pop dance station actually starts playing more local stuff. But soon.

Originally from Ghana, raised in Stockton, and now living in the Haight, the naturally gorgeous Lund even has a beauty pageant past, snagging a Miss San Joaquin sash when she was fresh out of high school ("I scored a few crowns and moved on," she laughs). But despite possessing all the slightly played-out signifiers of divadom, she offers a refreshing departure from the usual hyped-up circuit siren. First, she’s not a wailer. "Move Your Body" is an intensely catchy if unthreatening tune: Lund coos her way through the slinky "Ray of Light"-like slice of 2 a.m. loveliness with understated bravado.

Caroline Lund, “Move Your Body” (teaser)

She’s also disarmingly self-aware. "Look, I’m a track act," she tells me, "and I’ve seen a lot of track acts perform. It’s important not to interrupt the flow of the music with announcements, to flesh it out organically with dancing and costumes that don’t throw off the vibe." I’ll probably choke on an empty poppers bottle before I’ll ever again hear a track act describe herself as a track act. And underneath all the artifice, a real drama queen’s heart beats. The teenage Lund used to sneak out of her parent’s house to attend theater rehearsals, and has an impressive acting resume. "With the new release, I just always loved this type of music — it’s a time in my life to really go for something," she says, her eyes sparkling with resolve.

The bone of contention, of course, has always been divas. My cuticles are still raw from clawing my eyes out in the ’90s, trying to explain to my intransigent friends that house is more than just some lady yowling like a stuck pig to "be yourself" while a hurricane of gym clones twitches and disrobes on the dance floor around you. Not that there’s anything wrong with that scene, but it makes me kind of sneezy, kind of stabby. One could even hear much of the past decade’s underground dance music as a reaction to flagrant vocal house — from electro-clash’s snide, clipped raps, to electro’s Uffie "fuck me" mumbles and dubstep and future bass’s virtual obliteration of the feminine.

Maybe all that was necessary. But now that a diva can be "anyone with a midriff and an attitude" — in the words of DJ Bus Station John, who pretty much reintroduced the sound of women singing to SF’s dance underground with his bathhouse disco revival movement — and Lady Gaga has dominated global charts merely by raiding Grace Jones’ Goodwill bin, can we finally bury the overblown personality-machine and get back to the feeling?

"I’d be honored if anyone called me a diva," Lund says, demurely. "But really, I just want to be part of the energy, not to own it."

———–

STACEY PULLEN

In the early ’90s, along with seminal Detroit legends like Alton Miller, Kenny Larkin, and Carl Craig, ever-cool innovator Stacey Pullen explored and expanded a strain of the early techno sound, implicit in Derrick May’s first releases, that conjured up complex jazz-fusion-like chord shifts and African drum patterns. The results — oh, I’ll just say it — blew out some serious crania. They also helped establish techno as a distinctly black idiom at a time when its definition was being stretched so far it included sampling the Sesame Street theme song. In the late ’90s, when everyone was trying to make money, Stacey ventured into harder, more Euro-friendly mixes — with mixed results, at least to this Motor City queen’s ear. The man behind Silent Phase and Kosmik Messenger is back in his semi-abstract yet supremely danceable comfort zone, though, and should be worth braving the Temple weekend crowd for. Pack your anti-bachelorette spray and prepare to be seriously moved.

Fri/12, 10 p.m., $20. Temple, 540 Howard, SF. www.templesf.com

———-

THE MARTINEZ BROTHERS

Are Steve and Chris Martinez the great Bronx hope of house? The press hook about the dashing, actual brothers is that they’re incredibly tender: now 20 and 17 respectively, they’ve been tearing up global parties for the past couple years. (Don’t ask how they got past the door guys, nosy.) But the real news is that "house" in their case refers to deeply researched, deeply felt mixes that may be ravenous in scope — Kerri Chandler, Pat Methany, and Slum Village all find their way onto TMB’s decks — but are reviving that endangered species: dancefloor soul. This is not to say they’re fuddy-duddies in training, or that there’s cobwebs on the needles. The energetic duo may not yet be, as many have posited, the new Masters at Work (I’ll need to hear a few more releases from them before I’m willing to join that chorus), but when they give the electro-stutter treatment to Roland Clark’s political a capella "Resist" over DJ Spen’s string-driven throwdown "Gabryelle", the old-school spirits come down. House is alive and finding new children to speak through.

Sat/13, 10 p.m., $10 advance. Mighty, 119 Utah, www.mighty119.com

Munyurangabo

-
0

REVIEW Don’t be deceived by the serene, pastoral setting of Lee Isaac Chung’s Munyurangabo (2007), a neorealist drama that follows unlikely friends Sangwa (a Hutu) and Ngabo (a Tutsi) as they journey home nearly a decade after the Rwandan genocide. The film’s hauntingly peaceful veneer and desolate beauty speaks to the hundreds of thousands killed on Rwandan soil and belies Sangwa and Ngabo’s simmering resentment and shame. Refusing to fixate on the war’s carnage, Munyurangabo focuses on its psychological repercussions instead. As the pair arrives home to tend to the decimated farmland and to each other, Sangwa struggles with the prejudices that his estranged family still harbors while Ngabo wrestles with his duty to avenge his father’s murder. Delving into Rwanda’s tragic past, this provocative film that befittingly ends on National Liberation Day wonders if Rwandans can forge new identities unburdened by guilt or vengeance to ultimately find freedom.

MUNYURANGABO opens Fri/12 at the Sundance Kabuki.

“Leave the Capital”

-
0

PREVIEW What is it with Bay Area group art shows named after album and song titles by the Fall? Last month brought "I Am Kurious Orange," an exhibition and performance at David Cunningham Projects that slightly twisted the name of 1988 album by mush-mouth Mark E. Smith’s band. Now comes "Leave the Capital," a different multiartist endeavor that also slightly twists a Fall title, this time from a 1981 song, "Leave the Capitol." As the trade from o to a suggests, the 13 artists involved — including Zoe Crosher, Fang Lu, and Kamau Patton — address the economy and matters of rough trade in manners ranging from overt to oblique. Exit this Roman hell and enter the gallery.

LEAVE THE CAPITAL Sat/13, 7-10 p.m., continues through June 27; $2-$10. Root Division, 3175 17th St, SF. (415) 863-7668. www.rootdivision.org

im’ij-re

-
0

PREVIEW In 2007 choreographer Amy Seiwert set Morton Feldman’s hauntingly beautiful score "Rothko Chapel" on Robert Moses’ Kin dancers. Watching Memory was fresh, mysterious, and mesmerizing. Not the least of its appeal came from Marc Morozumi’s stunning lanterns, which enveloped the dancers in subtly changing luminosity. Earlier the same year, Seiwert’s first full evening of her own work packed Project Artaud Theater to the rafters, confirming that this petite woman, also the resident choreographer of Smuin Ballet, has one of the Bay Area’s most adventurous and intriguing voices. You always want to see her next work because you can sense the questioning spirit that leads her into unexpected terrain. Her own nine-year old company, im’ij-re — with its excellent dancers — is the place where she can experiment in the way the tight schedules of more traditional ballet companies (her latest commission was for Colorado Ballet this spring) don’t always have the means to support. From that first encounter with Morozumi, a relationship was born. For 2010 the two are planning a full-evening work that includes contributions by British sound designer Kaffe Matthews and German media artist Frieder Weiss. For the time being, they are premiering the sextet LIGHT essays as the centerpiece of a program of new works that showcases a trio choreographed by Morozumi (with sculptor Alex Uncapher), a solo by Andrea Basile (danced by Alex Ketley), and a structured improvisation for four dancers.

IM’IJ-RE Sat/13–Sun/14, 8 p.m., $20. ODC Dance Commons, 351 Shotwell, SF.

(415) 863-9834, www.odcdance.org

The Lemonheads

-
0

REVIEW For a brief time in the early 1990s, Evan Dando was an It boy. He wore great jeans and hid behind his hair — the shaggy pop songs didn’t hurt either. His band, the Lemonheads, coasted to success with an easy cover of "Mrs. Robinson," and then Atlantic took a bath on Come On Feel the Lemonheads (Atlantic, 1993), an album that’s likely still haunting remainder bins. These are the facts, but the melodies that snag your adolescence are destined to boggle any attempt at objectivity.

I still remember picking It’s a Shame About the Ray (Atlantic, 1992) off the rack after spotting it in an older friend’s collection — I must have been 11 or 12. Soon, I went the extra mile for a couple of bootleg cassettes I then listened to in ritualistic isolation. In Dando, I heard the sympathetic reticence of a dropout. I beached my shyness on his languid refrains; he was good company. I wouldn’t say I wanted to trade places (Ben Lee took up this mantle on "I Wish I Was Him"), but the Lemonheads furnished my imagination with yearning and ennui — sensing those things without knowing them was sublime. I loved the band for coming from Boston; their stoned melodies padded the lonely stretches of Memorial Drive and sandy dunes of Cape Cod where I moved into my feelings. Nearly all Lemonheads songs are letters, and I imagined I too would come to know a "you."

Trying to sort out how memory imprints my continued weakness for these melodies would require a novel rather than a capsule review, but I like to think the Lemonheads albums still hold up because I wouldn’t have had it any other way. I don’t put them on very often, but I can easily lose a whole afternoon when I do.

THE LEMONHEADS With Kim Vermillion. Wed/10, 8 p.m., $21. Slim’s, 333 11th St, SF (415) 255-0333. www.slims-sf.com

DJ Quik

-
0

PREVIEW Matthew Africa jumpstarts his new mixtape The Best of DJ Quik with a young Quik’s ambitious plans to be "America’s Most Complete Artist." What follows is an expertly mixed collage of rapid-fire blunted rhythms and gangsta blues that captures the zeitgeist of Los Angeles’ illustrious G-Funk era. Channeling the slap bass bounce of the Ohio Players and the dance grooves of Zapp & Roger, Quik conducts his singular, Compton-articulated swagger over percussion that still knocks.

Quik’s diverse catalog certainly provides fodder to grant him status as the best hybrid producer and lyricist in the game. No seasoned emcee touches his pimp strut flow graced with jazzy finesse. No daring beat conductor successfully ventures into his textured boogie-pop compositions and sounds just as cohesive, raw, and frenetic. But Quik’s ultimate edge is the charisma in his braggadocio style and the consistent humor in his street-refined vulgarity.

On this month’s BlaQKout (Mad Science), Quik teams up with Dogg Pound luminary Kurupt to reinvest some gutter spirit into today’s changing rapscape. A buzz is already building around "9 Times Outta 10," where Kurupt spits hypnotic, stop motion bars over a starkly dissonant drum clap and mushroom-induced atmospherics. My anonymous sources (Internet leaks) tell me we’ve got some ferocious beats and rhymes coming our way.

DJ QUIK AND KURUPT With Quik’s live band, Trackademicks, the Kev Choice Ensemble. Thurs/9, 8 p.m., $20. Ruby Skye, 420 Mason, SF. (415) 693-0777, www.rubyskye.com

If you’re nasty

-
0

U.K. HORROR Once outrage settles over the current Parliamentary expense-account scandals, our former colonialist landlords will no doubt return to their concerns about "broken Britain," as the perceived general decline of moral rectitude in the United Kingdom is termed these days. Call ’em hoodies, chavs, yobs, or Neds, U.K. youth are seen as waaay out of control — albeit in ways that would seldom elicit more than a perfunctory shrug of disgust here — and their loutish, negligent, unemployed, or dole-collecting parents merit equal time in the sense-slappin’ machine.

Real or exaggerated, this trend of antisocial behaviors has inevitably crept into the entertainment realm, horror movies included. While the two Brit features (Blood River and 2008’s The Dead Outside) in this year’s Another Hole in the Head Festival only marginally deal with the phenomenon, three recent stateside DVD releases by first-time feature writer-directors find "Whatever happened to family values?!" terror placed front and center.

Not long ago especially gory or sadistic genre flicks were branded "video nasties," heavily cut or banned outright from distribution in Britain. That those days are gone, however, is made vividly clear by Steven Sheil’s Mum and Dad (2008). When Polish immigrant Lena (Olga Fedori) misses the last bus to central London, aggressively friendly fellow Heathrow cleaning staffer Birdie (Ainsley Howard) and her shy brother Elbie (Toby Alexander) invite her to spend the night at their nearby home.

Unfortunately Lena soon discovers she’s a permanent guest, kept on a very tight leash by "Mum" (Dido Miles) and "Dad" (Perry Benson). Covering familiar terrain, with particular debt to 1991’s The People Under the Stairs, Mum sports its own distinctive musk of grotesquerie, with an all-time-sickest Yuletide celebration providing craftsy homemakers with one hell of a Christmas wall-ornament idea.

Meanwhile, in rural Ireland, the least united part of the "kingdom," Plague Town (2008) again proves you really don’t want to miss that last transit run. Here, a dysfunctional American tourist family discovers one extra-large brood of horribly functional kiddies during an overnight stranding they’re unlikely to survive. Director David Gregory cut his teeth making DVD-extra tributes to Tobe Hooper, Jess Franco, Jim Van Bebber, and the "video nasty" era itself. His mentors would be proud.

More realistic, upsetting, and directly addressing "broken Britain" fears is James Watkins’ Eden Lake (2008). Another vacation-gone-horribly-wrong tale, it played one unnoticed week at the Lumiere last year. Yuppie couple Kelly Reilly and Michael Fassbender’s weekend Buckinghamshire idyll runs afoul of some ill-mannered local tweens, who unfortunately are led by a full-blown junior psychopath. After its routine setup this develops into a genuinely grueling spin on Deliverance (1972), Lord of the Flies (1954), and whatnot, with an ending that can be nitpicked for plausibility but that nonetheless leaves a real chill.

First things Faust

-
0

a&eletters@sfbg.com

Bay Area writer-director Mark Jackson has been rightly hailed for his original scripts, especially since the rollicking ingenuity of 2003’s The Death of Meyerhold. But his dialogue with established or classic plays has been just as intriguing to follow. Here, strict fidelity to the text has not always proved a recipe for success. Indeed, it was by tossing out the text completely that Yes, Yes to Moscow — created with Tilla Kratochwil, Sommer Ulrickson, and Beth Wilmurt and one of the best things to happen on any Bay Area stage in 2008 — managed to capture the essence of Chekhov’s Three Sisters to a degree most big-budget, straight-ahead productions could only envy. Then again, without changing a word, Jackson brilliantly exploited the kinetic value of Sophie Treadwell’s expressionist drama, Machinal, for last year’s memorable production with alma mater San Francisco State University. But more recently, cleaving restlessly to August Strindberg’s text of Miss Julie in an otherwise skillful production for Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre, Jackson teetered near heavy-handedness, the injection of directorial personality often butting heads with Strindberg’s tightly wound material rather than entering a productive discourse with it.

That is happily not the case in Jackson’s current effort: a sure, compact, and invigorating free-adaptation of Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Faust, Part I produced, like Meyerhold, by Berkeley’s Shotgun Players. The "freely adapted" part is no doubt key to the success here, but that implies no reduction of the original. Although the text has been trimmed and jiggered greatly, Jackson’s version — alive and lively in rhyming verse — strikes a confident, highly effective balance between his own visually striking exegesis and a deep-seated fidelity to the poetical and dramatic spirit of Goethe’s glorious closet play.

Essaying the title role himself with considerable wit and panache, Jackson leads a winning cast in the kind of dynamic, precisely choreographed neoexpressionist production he has made a hallmark of his work. "In the beginning was the act!" is Faust’s eureka cry. But the director starts the action in a tense but humorous fit of inaction at the lip of the stage. There Faust, the arch but frustrated rationalist bent on bending nature to his will, vacillates in calling forth the spirit world, standing before a wall of thin metal-framed windows blacked out except for one square patch of moonlight, and bare but for a single glass of magic potion.

Frenetic, verbose, arrogant, and (nearly) fearless, Jackson’s Faust dances a tightrope line between jaded hero and willing fool with conjured devil and enabler Mephistopheles (played with a slippery sobriety and quiet menace by the solid Peter Ruocco) standing erect and a full head shorter by his side, all courteousness amid flashes of animal teeth.

The play centers on Faust’s tragic wooing (and ruining) of the beautiful maiden Gretchen (an exceptionally deft, completely mesmerizing Blythe Foster), whom Faust meets in that fair field after downing his magic potion. But Gretchen’s mother (in a suitably jagged but subtle portrait by Zehra Berkman) guards her daughter’s chastity with hawk-like concentration despite being wheelchair-bound, her sharpness accentuated by repeated appearance in profile.

Goethe’s Faust — so applicable to our historical moment-of-truth that in lesser hands any treatment is doomed to cliché — has the unparalleled Renaissance man embodying rational, post-Enlightenment humanity in a sobering confrontation with questions of good and evil. A forceful aspect of Jackson’s shrewd staging lies in never losing sight of this "embodied" tale. Certainly Faust is enchanted by his own words. After all, it’s through language — here, in particular, the paradigm of a masculine rationality subduing a feminized nature — that we not only define but bring into being the world we inhabit (notwithstanding Faust’s claim for "the act" as instigator). But amid the heightened speech, Jackson maintains a delightfully chilling carnality in the details. It echoes more remotely in the play’s eerie final lines as well, when Mephistopheles, calling creation one big wash, must concede that for all its nothingness, "something seems to circle around." It’s messy, and it bothers him. "I should prefer eternal emptiness," he says.

FAUST, PART 1

Through June 28

Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 5 p.m., $22–$30

Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk.

(510) 841-6500

www.shotgunplayers.org

Into the wild

-
0

› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER O, Commuter — wherefore art thou, Commuter? Grandaddy mastermind Jason Lytle is familiar enough with the concept of the long haul: he’s known plenty of people who’ve made the trek from his Modesto hometown to Silicon Valley and the Bay. But this time out, on Lytle’s first solo album, an exquisite clutch of songs titled Yours Truly, the Commuter (ANTI-), the typical definition of harried, driven, and road-raging working-stiff doesn’t quite apply. Or so he explains from his home on the edge of Montana backcountry, over a hot printer jetting out flight info concerning his imminent European tour.

"In this instance, I’m referring to the place I gotta go to make good art, get good results, be creative, and then making the trip back to reality, which is just taking care of business and taking care of my life and making sure that the car still works and, uh, there aren’t too many stains on the carpet," he rambles softly, as if speaking to himself, an old friend, or, as the Yours Truly song title goes, the "Ghost of My Old Dog." "It’s not always an easy transition, and I’ve found that the longer I do this, the harder it gets to push yourself to that level of making good art, and then having to come back and be responsible and sift through the wreckage."

Lytle turned 40 on March 26, while fulfilling his target of becoming the "healthiest" he’s ever been. ("Whew, it was a real chore!" he wisecracks wryly, recalling the performance and party gauntlet at South by Southwest a few days previous.) He has more goals where that one came from.

"There’s all this stuff I want to do before I get old," the ex-semi-pro skateboarder says, when I joke that the grandpa years are approaching despite the demise of his old band Grandaddy. "I want to start painting, and I wouldn’t mind playing golf, and I want to get a dog again. I still fucking skateboard on a regular basis! If your body allows you to do it, why quit?"

It’s just as hard to imagine Lytle turning his back on music, in spite of his seeming hiatus since the release of Grandaddy’s Just Like the Fambly Cat (V2, 2006) and his move to Montana three years ago. He busied himself setting up his studio, working on songs for M. Ward, Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse’s forthcoming project, and commercials, until a snowed-in winter spent at the grand piano and peering out the window triggered these tunes. Majestic space balladry ("I Am Lost [And the Moment Cannot Last]"), echo chamber rock ("It’s the Weekend"), Kraut meditations ("Fürget It"), bittersweet summons to the temple of Neil Young ("Here for Good"), and stately Brian Wilson-levitating-on-Air elegies ("Flying Thru Canyons") flowed forth. "I love the idea of putting together a little body of work," Lytle says, "whether it be a mix tape for my friends or just a collection of Christmas songs that I’ve recorded for relatives — or in this case, a group of songs that I thought were strong enough to call an album."

When Lytle comes through town with a group including ex-Grandaddy drummer Aaron Burtch and Rusty Miller of SF’s Jackpot, he’ll be fielding another question: When is the musical commuter coming home? "I would have loved to have stayed in California," drawls Lytle. "But the types of places that I want to live don’t really exist in California anymore. They’re too expensive — or they’re overrun with meth labs." *

JASON LYTLE

Mon/8, 9:30 p.m., $16

Café du Nord

2170 Market, SF

www.cafedunord.com

Also opening for Neko Case

Tues/9, 8 p.m., $30–<\d>$33

Warfield

982 Market, SF

www.goldenvoice.com

————

SNAP! OBSCURA NOT MISERABLE

Don’t you dare call Camera Obscura nostalgists. Vocalist Tracyanne Campbell, she of the heart-torching girlish brogue, fumes at the very thought, despite a "post-dinner slump" following her vegetarian Thai green curry. "No, I don’t think we’re a bunch of miserable, nostalgia-hungry losers," she protests from Glasgow. "We don’t long for the past. The past is very much a part of me, but I think it’s good to try and live in the moment. I think we’re misunderstood."

Still, the combo’s delicious new My Maudlin Career (4AD) is steeped in girl-group charm and Motown shimmy — though Camera Obscura had forged its sound eons before those genres’ current revival. There’s little contrivance to Camera Obscura’s lush music, Campbell explains, especially when it comes to recording: the group tends to track live with few overdubs. "I think a lot of times it’s the happy accident, to be honest," she says. "I don’t want to be too persnickety. I want to be brave enough to try and capture that moment on its own, without looking back with regret."

CAMERA OBSCURA

With Agent Ribbons

Mon/8, 9 p.m., $21.50

The Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

(415) 346-6000

www.livenation.com

A distant memory

-
0

a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW I was cautious when I got the galley for Attica Locke’s first novel Black Water Rising (Harper, 448 pages, $25.99). I’d been intrigued before by beguiling plots of intrigue and suspense, only to find myself in the middle of a tepid affair with no way out except for closing the damn thing and chalking it up to yet another life lesson. All the warning signs were there.

The book’s protagonist, Jay Porter, is an attorney operating out of a Houston strip mall in 1981. His only client is a shady prostitute, who may or may not pay him. His wife, Bernie, is pregnant and he’s barely making ends meet to feed them, much less the baby who’s on the way. Though not happy with his mediocre existence, he’s content enough with his lot to be strong-willed and determined to make it.

Jay has a terrible secret, of course, that threatens to tear the world he has meticulously built asunder. And one fateful night, something happens that sets the unraveling in motion. He saves a mysterious woman’s life and places himself in the middle of a plot rife with sex, backroom deals, and dirty cash that will determine his fate and that of Houston, Texas, and eventually, the world!

"Easy, big fella. Easy," I told myself. "You’ve been hurt before." I saw the signs, as much as any reader would. I saw a Grisham story. I saw a Leonard tale. I knew I was being seduced, but I couldn’t put the book down. The first chapters hooked me like classic mid-list pulp — a phenomenon I miss like pay phones — and it took a minute to realize what Attica Locke was doing.

It wouldn’t be a spoiler to tell Jay Porter’s secret. He did time for running guns during the Black Power movement. This was during the days of J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO program, when black dissidents’ phones were tapped, dossiers were amassed, and organizations were infiltrated. Jay Porter the strip mall lawyer has a legitimate cause to be paranoid. This kind of justified paranoia plagues many of the resisters who managed to survive the bloodbaths of the 1960s and 1970s social movements. Lensed through Porter’s claustrophobia, grandiosity, and self-deprecation, demons lurk in every dark corner. As the plot unfolds, the first thing that disappears from view is a tangible reality, one free from dark fantasy and delusion. Jay Porter may be nuts. Then again, maybe not.

Locke, a veteran screenwriter, has an almost supernatural understanding of pacing. This aids her well in storytelling, but even more so in figuring out where to work her magic. Her early 1980s Houston is a city on the verge of Texas-sized change. Porter is asked by his preacher father-in-law to work with the dockworkers union that meets in his church. The black dockworkers are being paid less than the white workers who do the same job. A split in the union along race lines is imminent. A battle between the warring workers breaks out after a young man is beaten. A greater impetus is revealed: the arrival of containers. These containers, it is threatened, will be used on barge, train, and truck, nearly rendering dockworkers obsolete. Jay Porter is asked to speak to the mayor — a "friend" from his revolutionary past — on behalf of the workers. Simultaneously he tries to uncover the identity of the mysterious woman he saved.

This is the one drawback in an otherwise stellar debut. Jay Porter has too much going on. So much that suspension of belief is pulled to the breaking point. So much that many characters who are vital to the plot get unbelievably overlooked. When the Porters’ home is burglarized, for example, Jay leaves his pregnant wife in the house to pursue a lead on one of his cases. When a tough offers Porter money to not pursue another lead, he does it anyway — out of, what, morbid curiosity? The mayor of Houston and many of the other characters are so full, rich, and singular that it is baffling and frustrating when someone as essential as Bernie becomes a bit player in Jay’s solipsistic pursuit. Is Jay Porter crazy, or just an asshole?

Black Water Rising reads like a hard-boiled thriller, but the real trick resides in Locke’s ability to personalize an overlooked part of American history and show how far-reaching, how entrenched, it is in today’s social, political, and cultural fabric. From running the voodoo down on the Weather Underground to using 1980s Houston as a backdrop, he wraps a People’s History of America in a digestible, entertaining package. There are whiffs of Chinatown and White Butterfly, sure, but Locke’s attention to the details between the action makes the novel, and turns every reader into an oracle.

As Jay solves this book’s mysteries, we see pre-Dubya America getting dubbed. We see the sprawl that is yet to be. We see the unions breaking, the factories shutting down, the diners, bars, and cafes closing. We see the Black Water Rising. I may not want to see too much more of Jay Porter, but I better see more of Attica Locke.

Return of the creatures

-
0

Zombies, werewolves, slashers, ghosts, and just plain fucked-up individuals: yep, the usual suspects are on hand for the Another Hole in the Head film festival, an offshoot of the San Francisco Independent Film Festival that’s back for a sixth unleashing of cinematic ghastliness.

David Gargani’s Monsters from the Id, named for the invisible menace in 1956’s Forbidden Planet, takes an earnest, somewhat unfocused look at how scientists were depicted in 1950s sci-fi films. Movie clips and talking heads delve into the ways in which the era’s "futuristic" flicks (Spaceships! Giant ants! Pod people!) were informed by both the era’s sense of wonder and paranoia. Monsters also notes how much less money is spent on space in these post-Cold War days; one scientist wistfully notes that the only way physicists would become heroes again would be in some kind of preventing-an-asteroid-from-hitting-the-earth type of scenario (but, duh, Doc: according to 1998’s Armageddon, oil drillers would actually save the day in that case).

Entries with local ties include James Isaac’s Pig Hunt (which screened a few weeks back as part of the Clay Theater’s midnight series). After kicking off their road trip with a meal at the Pork Store Café, a group of SF friends set out on an ill-advised hunting jaunt (their quarry: a 3,000-lb "Hogzilla," a creature that turns out to be just one of many backwoods adversaries). Even more bloody and bizarre is Oakland filmmaker Jonathan Lewis’s Black Devil Doll, an awesomely campy, proudly low-budget, X-rated cross between Child’s Play (1988) and Dolemite (1975) — the entire cast is basically comprised of strippers and a raunchy puppet that says things like "Holy shit! These white bitches is crazy!"

Also of interest for all you discerning sickos: HoleHead unleashes two films by prolific Japanese cult auteur Takashi Miike, including opening night film Crows: Episode Zero (a manga adaptation) and Detective Story, about a detective and his neighbor on the trail of an organ-stealing murderer.

ANOTHER HOLE IN THE HEAD

June 5–19, see film listings for schedule, $10

Roxie, 3117 16th St, S.F.

(415) 820-3907, www.sfindie.com

Shadowboxing

-
0

a&eletters@sfbg.com

"Explosive action" may be the stuff of soppy pullquotes, but the term takes on fresh life watching the 1950s noirs of Phil Karlson. All action movies give us men and violence, but Karlson’s pictures, to a rare degree, are about men living with violence. Punches aren’t redemptive, they just hurt — the one throwing them too. Take the clenched former prizefighter in 99 River Street (1953), Ernie Driscoll (played by Karlson’s preferred actor, the aggressively nondescript John Payne). "I’m so burned up, I take it out on everyone I see," Driscoll mutters to his loyal friend after tossing him against a car in the white heat of rage. When he finally does have reasonable cause, his maelstrom of punches exceeds the pleasure principle of vengeance by a wide margin.

If this sounds like Scorsese territory, it’s probably worth mentioning that Driscoll isn’t just a broken heavyweight — he also drives a taxi. Karlson’s movies are tightly-coiled enough to make the decades slip just like that: 99 River Street has enough weird transferences and reversals to make me wonder if it’s not a worm-hole to David Lynch’s films as well. The fabulous streaks of paranoia running through the PFA selections are Cold War to the core, but the films hurdle us so quickly and illogically towards the edge of abnegation that the reactionary myth of the vigilante isn’t given time to flourish.

Karlson recouped the debt owed by Dirty Harry and The French Connection (both 1971) with his 1973 hit, Walking Tall, but the ’50s films are more eloquent by far. In them, brutality is simply a fact, like cigarettes or hats. The most severe scenes are sometimes the quietest, as is the case when Eddie Rico (Richard Conte) has to wait out his brother’s death after unwittingly acting as a crime syndicate’s bloodhound in The Brothers Rico (1957, based on a story by Georges Simenon).

Other set-ups — nearly the entire second half of the remarkable semi-documentary The Phenix City Story (1955), cowritten by Daniel Mainwaring (1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers), with the same basic premise as Walking Tall — hardly give us room to breathe. The film’s corrupt Alabama police look the other way as local "vice peddlers" terrorize citizens, rig an election, and — remember this is 1955 — murder the children of a black man with reformist sympathies in broad daylight. The smug veneer of cordiality does nothing to disguise the constant threat of violence. To the contrary, it serves as an extra taunt, a superfluous flexing of power as enraging here as it is in Barbara Kopple’s documentary, Harlan County USA (1976). A trinity of resistance fighters (one of them a lawyer freshly returned from Nuremberg, an encounter with evil that still leaves him unprepared for Phenix City) can and do fight back, but resist administering the final coup de grace. They do so in deference to due process, but we’re long past a constitutional triumph, à la Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). The dark truth lurking just under The Phenix City Story‘s roiling surface is that the noble ideal these republicans embody may not actually exist.

TIGHT SPOT: PHIL KARLSON IN THE FIFTIES

June 5–26, $5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk

(510) 642-5249, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Objects in mirror

-
0

› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Readers:
Since I can’t write this week, I thought I could at least rerun a letter germane to recent discussions.

Dear Andrea:

I met a guy through his very explicit and fun Craigslist ad describing the weird-ass kinky sex he wanted. So we e-mailed, met, and had a great time. He’s handsome, intelligent, artsy … totally my type. We end up in bed, he gives me some quality oral sex, and then he ejaculates within two minutes. He makes no move to get me off either, just makes some remark about that being "my random Craigslist hookup." I’m too flabbergasted to ask for more oral sex. And then he wants to spend the night and cuddle. I’m frustrated and confused, but let him, and don’t comment on his premature ejaculation for fear of damaging his ego. Later we have sex again, and again he ejaculates within minutes. What do I do when he calls? What should I have said at the time?

Love,

UnListed

Dear List:

I once sat on a panel with Craig from Craiglist and I’m imagining him being mortified by this entire story. He’s a shy boy. I would also dearly love to link to the offending ad, but it seems faintly unethical, although it’s often said that once you post something on the Web, it’s public, period, and ripe for linkage. He’s probably taken it down by now, anyway. I can attest that the ad was lengthy, floridly descriptive, occasionally inept ("Bring your noble breasts"), and kinky in a cutely sophomoric, let-me-mash-grapes-in-you kind of way. It certainly did not read it as an offer of a two-minute, one-night stand complete with sexual frustration and dismissive jokes.

What to do if he calls? Doesn’t that depend on whether you wish to see him again? If you do, you will have to say, "But I want to do the stuff you said in the ad! Not five minutes of sex and then goodnight. OK?" If you don’t want to see him again, you say "no thanks."

There are ways to ask for more without bruising a boy’s ego — some boys, anyway. The ones to whom one is not allowed to say anything but "Wow! That was the best sex ever!" are not worth playing with. Yours doesn’t sound at all like the brutally macho type, more like your typical under-experienced urban dweeb-boy, so you would be quite safe in expressing an opinion, especially if you’re upbeat about it: "That was hot! I’m still hot! C’mon, let’s do some more." Not: "Well, that sucked. In fact, you suck." I can’t see the point of accusing him of premature ejaculation specifically, nor was that his greatest offense. What was, then? False advertising, of course. He proposed lengthy, goofy, sexy fun to ward off the looming, glowering gloom of autumn. Did he deliver any of that? No, he did not, and you would have been within your rights to point this out. On closer reading of his ad, though, I notice that he included an escape clause: "Not looking for mind-blowing, end-of-the-world sex."

I fear we shall all end up bringing our lawyers with us on first dates. End-of-the-world sex, indeed.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

I recently hooked up with an inexperienced 23-year-old man. Sex has not been great for him in the past. With his ex, he always initiated, she never seemed to enjoy anything he tried, she refused to offer suggestions, they both became resentful, and now he’s afraid of sex. He told me he’s nervous and insecure, and when we finally got to it, he lasted about 15 seconds.

I find this guy unbelievably hot. I wouldn’t have guessed he was so inexperienced, and I get turned on thinking about how some really great fucking could rock his world. So far I’ve tried to not judge him and to be patient. I’d like to show him how great sex makes life worth living. But I don’t want to coddle or condescend to him. I also have no experience dealing with quick ejaculators. (It only happened once, but I’d like to know some techniques for keeping it from happening again.)

Love,

Mama Teach

Dear Mama:

He is, for your purposes, a babe in the woods. Coddle all you want. I wouldn’t suggest actually condescending to him, if only because condescension, unlike, say, humiliation or scorn, lacks essential hotness. Assume that he is attracted to you at least in some part for your worldliness, and play it up. He is a tender, pink-eared schoolboy. You are Jeanne Moreau.

There is no instant technique applicable to premature ejaculation (and yes, 15 seconds is premature); it’s all longer-term stuff. If interested, he can apply himself to his studies and gradually train himself out of coming so quickly, especially since it is likely nothing but nerves. Far simpler, though, is the magical solution available mostly to very young men and their partners: do it again. And again. And again.

Love,

Andrea

Don’t forget to read Andrea at Carnal Nation.com.

Looking at ‘Looking In’

-
0

More on SFBG.com:
>>Johnny Ray Huston’s take on the epic SFMOMA Robert Frank retrospective

frank20609.jpg

"All original art looks ugly at first," Clement Greenberg wrote in defense of modern art. Implicit in Greenberg’s statement is the sense that time would eventually vindicate what was seen as anathema to prevailing tastes. Such has been the fate of The Americans, Robert Frank’s once reviled, now iconic photographic poem that traces the warped, smudged, and tattered fabric of our nation. Now 50, Frank’s odd little book (initially published in France in 1958 and brought to these shores the following year by Grove Press) of old glories, hardened faces, ghostly jukeboxes, in-between moments, and public rituals that captured the social inequalities and strangeness entrenched in the everyday of postwar America still cuts to the quick.

Frank, in collaboration with curators at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., has given his magnum opus something of the CSI treatment in "Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans." As its title suggests, "Looking In" offers an expanded view of the original volume’s 83 photographs (displayed in their original order, with each of the book’s four sections in its own gallery), incorporating contact sheets and other behind-the-scenes artifacts from the Guggenheim Fellowship-funded cross-country road trips Frank made with his wife and two kids in 1956 and ’57, as well as selections of Frank’s earlier and later photographic projects. But so much context and annotation to what was, even in the strictest sense, a self-contained work, often results in more noise than signal.

Frank pared his final choices from 20,000 frames, ordering the images in such a way to form daisy chains that relay visual puns, common themes, shared details (a decorative star motif or the position of a hand), and stark contrasts among them. A personal favorite occurs in a series of photographs that touch on driving, in which the tarpaulin covering a ride in Long Beach deflates in the next photo into the cloth draped over a car accident victim in rural Arizona. As with all art, the power and pleasure of viewing The Americans comes in discovering these subtle affinities and motifs by oneself. At times the interpretative cues offered by the explanatory texts all but erect a neon sign directing you toward significance. Some interpretive breathing room would’ve been nice.

Conversely, Frank’s conflicted relationship to his most famous work in the decades following its subsequent reappraisal and canonization by the art world — when he started to turn his attention to filmmaking — is shoehorned into a tantalizing but all too brief section, "Destroying The Americans," at the exhibit’s close. (Sarah Greenough’s excellent catalog essay of the same title goes into further detail.) It is curious to end a retrospective that largely adds to the hagiography already surrounding Frank’s work on such a sour, doubt-filled note. But perhaps it can be read as a warning to those who would be quick to call The Americans merely a reflection of its time. Frank’s "sad poem," as Jack Kerouac dubbed it in his introductory text to the American edition, may no longer look as ugly as it once did. But we are still a nation riddled by racism and poverty, worshipful of false prophets and political theater; a nation of gullible consumers, fervent believers, and drifters forever tethered to the horizon. As Frank himself said in response to initial criticism of the book, "It is important to see what is invisible to others — perhaps the look of hope or the look of sadness."

Bull feathers

-
0

superego@sfbg.com

SUPEREGO I recently found myself in Navajo Nation, munching on frybread at Kate’s diner in Tuba City with Hunky Beau after rocking out to, I shit you not, tech-navajo on the local FM station in the rental. I looked fantastic. We’d just witnessed a fierce two-spirit working the sandwich counter at the Bashas’ supermarket down the street. She/he looked fantastic. Back here in the city, on the nightlife scene, things weren’t so fantastic — another big underground party got busted, Pink Saturday ran into permit snafus, and neighborhood complaints mooted even more regular shindigs. And has anyone else noticed the skyrocketing price of a drink in this town? I’m not saying you need a buzz to bust out (alcohol sales are banned on the rez, so I’m grateful for the option), but dropping a Hamilton for a weak well screwdriver certainly has me rethinking my hollow leg. Still, as immortal shamans ABBA sang, "I can fly like an eagle, I can learn to spread my wings". Spread ’em, children, toss your hair, and let’s keep flying high.

ROLLER DISCO!

The only party in the city where I’m never alone falling on my luscious ass returns — skate rental provided, balance and expertise optional. I can’t lie, I have a total blast at this gig, even if the tunes are fun-yet-familiar and there’s always that one amazingly cute girl whose backspins and pirouettes make me bite my knuckles and wish I were a lot gayer. Like, Brian Boitano gayer.

Thu/4, 9 p.m., $5. Mighty, 119 Utah, SF. www.mighty119.com

"25 YEARS OF HOUSE MUSIC"

Dates and times, dates and times — why quibble? Most approaches to the evolution of house are more organic than any "x" on a calendar. But if a quarter-century celebration, complete with art exhibition, of the underground global movement that foretold the Internet’s interconnectivity is a big enough excuse to get Chicago genius Jesse Saunders behind the decks at Club Six, I’m way down.

Fri/5, 9 p.m.–3 a.m., $15. Club Six, 60 Sixth St., SF. www.clubsix1.com

ZOMBIE BEACH PARTY

"Guaranteed to put the laughter in slaughter" is a tagline that’ll get me every time. And so will any appearance by the Living Dead Girlz, those jaw-dropping undead dancer with a taste for semi-clothed flesh. They’ll be waving, not drowning, from the stage at this tongueless-in-cheek beach blanket bingo bacchanal, along with Sparkly Devil, Honey Lawless, and a mass grave of others. Plus: an undead beachwear costume contest. Paging Annette Funicello …

Fri/5, 9 p.m.– late, $10 street clothes/$7 surfer zombies. DNA Lounge, 375 11th St., SF. www.dnalounge.com

BIG IDEA: RITUAL AND REDEMPTION

Oh, crap. Is it really Pride month again? Time to haul that sequined rainbow thong from out the mothballs and try to get married or whatever. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is going homo-humongous for its latest, starlet-studded Big Idea party — rounding up the city’s fiercest alternaqueers with its golden lasso, including fab drag disasters Anna Conda and Monistat, DJ Dirty Knees, Pansy Division, Honey Soundsystem, Ex-Boyfriends, and the ever-present, never-sleeping Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. The Fellini-inspired spectacle also promises free tattoos, after-hours dancing, a taco truck, and "Project Nunway," heh. Best of all, the whole shebang is free — and not sponsored by Miller Lite, Altoids, 2Xist, Olivia Cruises, or Tylenol PM.

Sat/6, 9 p.m.–3 a.m., free. YBCA, 701 Mission, SF. www.ybca.org

WIGHNOMY BROTHERS

Monthly throwdown Kontrol at EndUp breeds absolutely bonkers dancefloor results that are far less fussy than its minimal techno focus, meticulous taste in talent, and somewhat daunting prevalence of miniscule eyewear would suggest. For the party’s fourth anniversary, it’s bringing in Germany’s superstar Wighnomy Brothers, two proudly unkempt vodka-swillers whose Seth Rogen-like public image belies a sizzling bromance with the more lovable, devil-may-care side of dance. The tipsy pair of teddy bears with a penchant for unpronounceable titles (recent release: Metawuffmischfelge) refused to visit the U.S. during that whole Bush thing. Laudable, but we could have used their balls-to-the-wall wig-outs to help us through such foulest ick. Good thing we’ve still got problems!

Sat/6, 10 p.m.–6 a.m., $20. EndUp, 401 Sixth St., SF. www.kontrolsf.com

That crazy feeling

-
0

>johnny@sfbg.com

369-frank3a.jpg
Robert Frank, “San Francisco, 1956”

The world writes a story far beyond — or deeper and more twist-riddled than — any author’s imagination. How else to explain the fact that Robert Frank’s peerless photographic book The Americans turned 50 the same year that Barack H. Obama was elected president of the United States? Looking in — again, and again — at The Americans, thanks to a handsome new edition (Steidl, 180 pages, $39.95), or at "The Americans," thanks to a traveling exhibition connected to Frank’s landmark work, one finds a vision of this country that is anything but dated.

Jack Kerouac raved about the way Frank captured "that crazy feeling in America," and to be sure, even if his prosaic descriptions of Frank’s photos come off a bit redundant now, there’s still some insightful gold to be gleaned from his observation that Frank was always taking pictures of jukeboxes and coffins. There’s been no shortage of writing about The Americans since Kerouac’s at-times stifled response. Is there anything left to say about The Americans? If there’s anything left to say about America, the answer is yes.

There are infinite views. One is Frank’s very particular sense of place. For a San Franciscan, that means an untitled image of a couple on Alamo Square, perhaps the most iconic of at least three Bay Area pictures. Frank has cited this photo as his favorite in The Americans, because the facial expressions of the couple he’s caught unaware bring across loud and clear what an intrusive presence the photographer is by nature. But this shot also is a document of the Western Addition when it was a thriving African-American neighborhood. It’s existence confronts the face of San Francisco today.

In a Charleston, S.C., image from The Americans, a pampered, already entitled-looking snow white baby looks out from the cradling arms of a black maid whose face — seen in profile — is more fascinating and harder to read. The picture is a blunt image of race in the South, and of race in America on the eve of civil rights uprisings. It also raises an interesting side question: why did it take European exiles to photographically render that subject with candor? This keepsake of Charleston by the Swiss Frank is the black-and-white counterpart to the Technicolor ironies that German expatriate Douglas Sirk brought to the 1959 version of Imitation of Life. (Racism was flagrantly institutionalized during the making of The Americans, and Frank has long had an critical eye for U.S. institutions — a Frank film series at SFMOMA doesn’t just showcase the Beat work Pull My Daisy, it also includes Me and My Brother (1969) a look at this country’s concepts of mental illness that’s more personal than, and just as direct as, Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies (1967).)

369-frank4a.jpg
Robert Frank, “US 90, En Route to Del Rio, Texas”

For any person who has lived with The Americans — spent time over the years looking through its pages, locking eyes on a particular picture and contemputf8g it — there’s a peculiar card-shuffle déjà vu-gone-slightly-askew-or-anew feeling to encountering the same photos in succession along the walls. This is the experience of looking at "Looking In: Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans,’" the Frank exhibition currently on view at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Alongside rather than on top of one another, an alphabet of American hats point in different directions, each one reflecting a viewpoint. An array of flags mask people’s faces, or point sorrowfully toward the ground.

One facet or extension of "Looking At" explores Frank’s influences, and in turn, his influences on, American photography. To be sure, Diane Arbus’s trannies and butches and Lee Friedlander’s broadcast TVs owe a debt to Frank’s visions of censored-or-taken-for-granted everyday 20th century life. The through line from the Depression-era photography of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans to Frank’s look at a family crammed into a car in Butte, Mont., is obvious. Absent, though, are some definite predecessors and peers. Weegee’s hard-boiled naked city is nowhere to be seen — except in Frank (and frank) images such as one of people in Miami Beach. William Klein’s pictorial rephrasing of urban adspeak is absent save for a look at a department store in Nebraska, an arrow on the wall of a building in Los Angeles, or a newsstand in New York City or a sidewalk in New Orleans.

With one photo in The Americans, Robert Frank maDE gas pumps look like a series of tombstones, all gathered by a sign that declares SAVE. There are legions of artists today making images less contemporary or relevant. Take a look at The Americans, and you’ll find cowboys, starlets, funeral parties, boys in arcades, queens on stoops, leather rebels, bored or contemplative waitresses, street preachers, a parade of pedestrians, wheelers and dealers — and workers. Take another look at The Americans today, 50-plus years after it made its first impression, and you’ll probably find yourself.


LOOKING IN: ROBERT FRANK’S "THE AMERICANS"

Through Aug. 23, free–$15

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third St, SF

(415) 357-4000

www.sfmoma.org

ROBERT FRANK RETROSPECTIVE

Through June 27

Phyllis Wattis Theater

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third St., SF

(415) 357-4000

www.sfmoma.org

Do the ‘bot

-
0

a&eletters@sfbg.com

It’s a flagship band on America’s taste-makingest dance music label, but the Juan Maclean’s second full-length of peerless pop disco, The Future Will Come (DFA) is a low-stakes affair. In contrast to the orbit of expectations around the Field’s recently released Yesterday and Today (ANTI-/Kompakt), there isn’t the sense that it should — or can — be read as a measure of the group’s artistic viability.

Which is not to say that Future hasn’t undergone intense scrutiny. Last year’s monster of a teaser single, the 12-minute "Happy House," weathered pages of heated message board discussion among sample spotters, who pointed out that the group lifted the track’s driving two-chord piano vamp from Dubtribe Sound System’s decade-old "Do It Now."

"It was pretty funny," John (a.k.a. Juan) MacLean says by phone, as he and his bandmates drive through Georgia. "Someone was accusing me of ripping someone off in a style of music that has been almost entirely sample-dependent."

Although it has taken on a massive life outside of Future, "Happy House" shows what TJM is capable of: namely, superb pop that uses dance music’s production techniques and structures. This elusive combination was hinted at on its debut, 2005’s Less Than Human (Astralwerks). Now vocals have a more prominent role. Songs such as "One Day" feature a back-and-forth between MacLean and LCD Soundsystem member Nancy Whang that recalls Dare-era Human League.

"We paid a lot more attention to how we were doing [vocals], stylistically," says MacLean, "On the first album it was more like we laid vocals on top of instrumental songs." With Future, the studio effects that masked MacLean’s voice are removed to reveal even colder circuitry. Like Brian Eno or Gary Numan, his tone is both affected and affectless. At times, it’s also goofy unto distraction. Then again, a line like "I’ll be here after midnight, wearing my beleaguered frown" isn’t angling for verisimilitude.

Future also pares down some of the trickier production flourishes that made Less Than Human feel a little insular, if satisfying in its complexity. MacLean describes the process as "nowhere near as difficult" as it was on Human. "This one has so much live playing on it that it’s been a pretty straightforward transition," he says.

The conciliatory quality at the base of Future‘s sound is cleanly framed and well-articulated in a manner that rebuts the tongue-in-cheek prohibition of TJM’s early single "You Can’t Have It Both Ways." The sequencing, for example, places the longer club tracks ("The Simple Life," "Tonight," and "Happy House") squarely at the beginning, middle, and end, spaced out by pop-length songs. MacLean has a history with structure and discipline as aesthetic strategies — from his earliest releases with Six Finger Satellite, he’s consistently taken cues from Kraftwerk over, say, Creedence.

The Juan MacLean makes music that’s uncomplicatedly likeable, even as the group emphasizes robot drama, traditionally not an easy sell with American audiences. "It’s easier to be crazy and out-there and experimental," MacLean says. "The pop music world is more difficult to navigate." Future puts that difficulty across to the listener with "Human Disaster," which sounds like a piano ballad with every other chord taken out. If I could get past just how bummed out MacLean sounds, I might hear it as a rebuke to listeners looking for recognizable emotion.

The album’s title track, on the other hand, plays as straight-up satire, and comes close to calling trust-funders out by name. It’s hard to tell brilliant and clumsy apart as Maclean pronounces "Your life in the city is a paid vacation /Your suicide note was a part of your thesis" over a hopped-up conga loop. "In New York, you find yourself surrounded by people who just talk a lot about doing things without ever getting them done — types that don’t have to live all that desperately," MacLean explains.

This is an assuringly human sentiment. On Future, class antagonism and Teutonic robots might be shunted aside by listeners in favor of values like emotional immediacy, personal agency, and dubiously coded ideals of authenticity and originality. Ultimately the Juan MacLean’s latest serves to emphasize that DFA is a label based on fandom committed to communicating the pleasure of listening. It gives us a glimpse of its maker’s canon, and a host of new thrills.

THE JUAN MACLEAN

With the Field

Sat/6, 9 p.m., $20

Mezzanine

444 Jessie, SF

(415) 625-8880

www.mezzaninesf.com

Musical, political, alchemical

-
0

a&eletters@sfbg.com

Quick, name a magus of the female persuasion, a black sorceress who wields sound like a talisman. The first image we have of Erykah Badu is her calmly walking on stage during the summer of 1997, lighting a series of candles to begin the ceremony. She would summon ghosts: Billie Holliday, the Nation of the Gods and the Earths, scruffy B-boys on a street corner. Her band — on her debut Baduizm (Kedar/Universal Motown, 1997), it is often neo-soul locus the Roots — played balletic grooves at a languid pace. She was a strangely beautiful apparition, a high priestess of soul.

Ever since, Badu has embraced and chafed at her mystical reputation. In 1998 she appeared in the mediocre coming-of-age flick The Cider House Rules as — guess what? — a voodun priestess. Meanwhile her romances with Andre 3000, Common, and, lately, Texas rap prospect Jay Electronica (with whom she recently had a child) have occasionally made her a target of the hip-hop paparazzi. She’s bragged in interviews of her prowess as a mackstress; other times, she’s refused to comment on her private life.

On last year’s Universal/Motown release New Amerykah Part One (4th World War), Badu finally seems at peace with her eccentricities. Past albums exhausted her former glories for fresh inspiration: 2003’s Worldwide Underground (Motown) included "Danger," which opens with a refrain from Baduizm‘s second single, "Otherside of the Game." Its intro track "World Keeps Turnin’" returns to the "on and on" lullaby of "On & On," Baduizm‘s Five Percenter-quoting breakout single ("And on and on and on, my cipher keeps moving like a rolling stone"). New Amerykah doesn’t look backward. Its starkly illustrated theme — a woman standing strong amid a world roiling in war and chaos — uneasily imagines the future present.

"This year I turn 36," Badu sings on the elegiac "Me." "Damn it seems it came so quick, my ass and legs have gotten thick. It’s all me." Thankfully Badu hasn’t settled into an adult contemporary middle-age, singing baby-making ballads for grown-ups. Few of her 1990s peers kept pace: last year, Spin magazine noted that D’Angelo, Maxwell, Lauryn Hill, and others from the neo-soul generation have mostly disappeared from view. But while Maxwell is drawing SRO audiences as he tours the country in preparation for BLACKsummers’night‘s July 7 release, and D’Angelo plans a similar comeback in the fall, it’s doubtful either will match Badu’s fiercely creative restlessness.

For New Amerykah, she turns to her artistic sons and daughters, musicians who used her blazing example to reinvigorate underground soul. The L.A. music collective Sa-Ra Creative Partners helm several tracks and 9th Wonder produces "Honey," a luscious love song that closes New Amerykah on an optimistic note. Wiggy soul-jazz aesthete Georgia Anne Muldrow appears on "Master Teacher," a heartbreaking yearning for positive influences in the black community. "A beautiful world is hard to find," sings Muldrow. "What if there was no niggas, only master teachers? I’d stay woke."

"Master Teacher" has been viewed as a tribute to Dr. Malachi Z. York, an esoteric philosopher whose mix of Egyptology, Islam and other pan-African ideas influenced Badu and other hip hop and R&B artists in the 1990s. (He was arrested and convicted for child molestation in 2004, and is currently serving a life sentence.) But without blunting the song’s original intent — many of "Master Teacher" York’s supporters believe he’s the target of a government conspiracy — it seems clear that Badu is the master teacher. Throughout her career, Badu has demonstrated a knack for communicating hardcore black ideologies in universal terms, educating and subverting her mainstream audience. She has always worked in alchemical ways. But with the arrival of New Amerykah, she finally turned the focus away from herself.

"Humdililah, Allah, Jehovah, Yaweh, Dios, Maat, Jah, Ras Tafari, fire, dance sex music, hip hop," Badu sings on "The Healer." "It’s bigger than religion, hip hop. This one is for Dilla."

ERYKAH BADU

Sat/6 9 p.m., $60

Warfield Theatre

982 Market, SF

(800) 745-3000

www.ticketmaster.com

Revanche

-
0

REVIEW In the sex industry of Vienna, small-time criminal Alex (Johannes Krisch) has dreams of escape for himself and his Ukrainian prostitute girlfriend, Tamara (Irina Potapenko). With a ski mask and an unloaded pistol, the miscreant schlemiel allows Tamara to accompany him during the commission of a robbery, and disastrous consequences ultimately transpire. After Alex and Tamara cross paths with young policeman Robert (Andreas Lust), his seemingly idyllic small-town life is also upended by the confrontation. Robert’s wife, Susanne (Ursula Strauss) fails to hearten her inconsolable husband. Instead, she finds her only comfort visiting a neighbor, Hausner (Johannes Thanheiser). But this tale of city-to-country anomie transforms into a gripping revenge play when Alex (who is, we learn, also Hausner’s grandson) suddenly appears in the town, seeking bloody satisfaction. Transforming from an urban neo-noir to a village morality play and a bedroom character study, Götz Spielmann’s Revanche (in French, the act of revenge) confronts the fundamental existential conundrum — fate’s random selection of its prey, or, as the film’s tag-line asks, "Whose Fault Is It When Life Doesn’t Go Your Way?"

REVANCHE opens Fri/5 in Bay Area theaters.

MORE AT SFBG.COM


Pixel Vision blog: An extended version of this review.

1...179180181...279Page 180 of 279

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