Arts & Culture

Arts & Culture

in/divisible

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PREVIEW The fact that the state Supreme Court upheld Proposition 8 probably was no surprise to Dance Ceres choreographer-dancer Brittany Brown Ceres, since the aftershock of the proposition’s passage coincided with her residency at CounterPULSE. But it probably did strengthen her faith in dance’s ability to suggest and strengthen concepts of community, self, and instigating and supporting change. The upcoming in/divisible, presented as part of this year’s National Queer Arts Festival, may also serve as an affirmation for those engaged in the ongoing struggle for equality. Though there is nothing overtly political about Brown Ceres’ choreography, her dances are forceful and affirming of female identity. At their best, they draw you in because of the complexity of the impulses that generate and control them. Still, if you look closely, you can see how they undermine conventional mores and ingrained patterns of thought. But they mostly convince because they are so beautifully and emotionally logical in the way they communicate. For in/divisible, Brown Ceres is collaborating with two soul mates. Aerial artist Sonya Smith complements her own (physically) more gravity-bound choreography. Joining them from San Diego is Sadie Weinberg with American Torch Songs, a set of short dances that look back at one of the universal high school experiences: getting dumped.

IN/DIVISIBLE Thurs/4–Sat/6, 8 p.m., $15. CounterPULSE, 1310 Mission, SF. 1-800-838-3006. www.brownpapertickets.com

Garrett Pierce

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PREVIEW There’s a bald-faced beauty lurking at the dark heart of San Francisco singer-songwriter Garrett Pierce’s All Masks (Crossbill). The album, Pierce’s second, glimmers quietly, gorgeously from a luminous remove: the performer wrote many of its numbers after traveling for months in Italy and Greece, visiting the power centers and ritual spaces devoted to the gods that pull the strings in Pierce’s beloved myths. After passing through the hands of Pierce and his collaborators — Jake Mann, Jen Grady and Carey Lamprecht (Emily Jane White Band), and Tim Wright (Wilderness) — the tracks on All Masks ended up revolving around the what Pierce calls a "self-exploration" of his dark side. "Some are brutally honest about shortcomings," the 28-year-old explains by phone from Davis, where he’s visiting his girlfriend and partaking in kombucha and wine. "As a songwriter, I err on the therapeutic side. I love all kinds of music, and I’ve played music that has had nothing personal involved. But for me, songwriting kind of gets me through without having to pay for therapy. If there’s a thread between these songs, it’s the exploration of the more upsetting images in my head."

Of course, mythic creatures slither to the fore, as they do on "Adam" in the form of the Garden of Eden’s snake. "I had this idea that Adam and him were friends and kicking it for a while, then the snake got axed and had this spiritual awakening on his death bed," Pierce says. "Every song has its own little life that way — I give them happier endings or a spiritual conclusion of sorts." Why? "That’s what I’m hoping for in my own life and hoping for in my songs."

GARRETT PIERCE With Conspiracy of Venus and Devotionals. Wed/3, 8 p.m., $10. Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell, SF. (415) 861-2011, www.rickshawstop.com

Mayhem

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PREVIEW Since 1984, Oslo’s favorite sons Mayhem have had a reasonable claim to the title of most fucked-up band on the planet, the eagerly repeated stories of the lurid spectacle that is their live show representing only some of the milder aspects of their mythos. Colorful history aside, the men of Mayhem have established themselves as architects of the modern black metal sound, taking the nasty musicianship and overt occultism of Venom and early Bathory and using them as the foundation for a terrifying new kind of metal that mixes breakneck drums, guttural riffs, and croaking vocals with eerie, understated melody. Often imitated, the 25-year veterans’ unique style is seldom matched in terms of sheer, unhinged intensity.

Co-headliners Marduk, one of countless bands to follow in Mayhem’s footsteps, spent the better part of its career becoming even more gruesome and unpalatable to mainstream audiences with each successive album, until it was not inconceivable to mention the satanic Swedes in the same breath as their more established tour mates. By the late 1990s, Marduk began branching out instrumentally, refining its musicianship while remaining true to the genre it helped pioneer.

The two black metal greats are supported by a diverse collection of bands taken from all corners of the extreme metal scene. Progressive, black metal-inspired Withered makes a logical opener, and the presence of dizzying grindcore virtuosos Cephalic Carnage is strange but welcome. Rounding out the bill is the brutal Cattle Decapitation, a consistent favorite among fans of uncompromising, technical death metal. Fans of life-affirming music would do well to avoid this show.

MAYHEM Wed/3, 6 p.m., $25–$30, all ages. DNA Lounge 375 11th St., SF. (415) 626-1409. www.dnalounge.com

“Otl Aicher: Munchen 1972” and “Veronica De Jesus: Do the Waive”

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REVIEW The 1972 Munich Olympics is mostly associated with terrorism, with Marc Spitz running a distant second. But Otl Aicher’s graphic design for the event exemplifies the better possibilities of the fusion of humanism and capitalism that characterizes each incarnation of the international event. A member of the White Rose movement and friend of Hans and Sophie Scholl, who were arrested and executed by the Nazis, Aicher later made his name through graphic design concepts that possess a rare fusion of experience and imagination. Three years after his successful branding work for Lufthansa Airlines, Aicher created a friendly yet intricate pictorial language — or pictogram — system for the individual programs, posters, and even tickets of the Munich Games. While many exhibitions fail at presenting graphic design as a form with much soul or personality, "Otl Aicher: München 1972" has no shortage of either — or of refreshingly-deployed color, for that matter. A blue and green oasis within the SFMOMA behemoth, its pleasures spiral outward from the Op Art-like symbol Aicher used for the event’s main icon, into a number of engagingly basic and extremely influential renderings of the body in motion. Or in other words, iconic images of human striving.

The latest show by the contemporary Bay Area artist Veronica De Jesus presents an entirely different take on corporate branding and athleticism — one that nonetheless possesses a friendliness quite akin to Aicher’s work. Viewed alongside "München 1972," De Jesus’s "Do the Waive" comes off even more sharply as a satirical, at times hilarious, but also troubling take on the tyranny of symbols and supposed meanings wielded by the contemporary sports entertainment complex. Simply put, the logos for CNN and Shell don’t have the ingenuity of Aicher’s iconography. When De Jesus renders them — or the trademark colors of McDonald’s — via child-like scrawlings, the taken-for-granted commercialism woven into daily life to influence kids’ aspirant dreams seems questionable and dubious and absurd at its very core. Like Jenny Holzer with a far less dry sense of humor, De Jesus also has a talent for twisting received ideas or language, whether via creative misspelling or isolated bits of media chatter. (Three of her titles: Fry Anyone, Closed for the recession, and my favorite, People are going after the french fries.) "Do the Waive" is packed with treats. I enjoyed the life-size portraits and the connection between homo-affection and homo-aggression drawn — literally — by It’s a Battle and All Hugs. But the best works are smaller ones that layer media babble and athletic imagery into visions that are confusing, exhausting, and attractive all at once, like a day’s journey through an empire of signs.

OTL AICHER: MÜNCHEN 1972 Through July 7, free–$15. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., SF. (415) 357-4000. www.sfmoma.org

VERONICA DE JESUS: DO THE WAIVE Through June 16. Michael Rosenthal, 365 Valencia, SF. (415) 522-1010, www.rosenthalgallery.com

MORE AT SFBG.COM

This week’s museum and gallery listings.

Now you see him

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It takes a lot to get your head around William Kentridge. His nebulous existence in the world of modern art makes him a slippery figure, able to exist between things we can name. Though he is an internationally known South African artist who works in etches, collages, sculptures, and performance (SFMOMA recently presented his rendition of Monteverdi’s opera The Return of Ulysses), he is best known for his "cartoons."

As on view in the current exhibition "William Kentridge: Five Themes," Kentridge’s animated drawings are sublime, provocative, and mesmerizing. He films a charcoal drawing, and by making slight changes using erasures for light and depth and then repeating the process, he tells profound stories about oppression, deterioration, and social justice — in less than 10 minutes. He later shows the drawings with the films as finished pieces. His mastery of drawing is magical. It can cloud judgment. We see William Kentridge; we do to not see William Kentridge.

William Kentridge: Five Themes (Yale University Press, 264 pages, $50), the monograph accompanying the current SFMOMA exhibit, suggests the breadth of Kentridge’s contributions — from opera set design to printmaking — and the depth of his explorations. Versed in opera, Kentridge centers much of his work on the form’s classic themes but updates, twists, and transforms them to speak of his native South Africa and current social conditions. Editor Mark Rosenthal mixes Kentridge’s commentary, plates, sketches, and photos with writers’ explorations of his process and purpose. Not quite a microscope, the result is more like a pair of tweezers, bringing the reader-viewer closer to someone who loves the word erasure.
WILLIAM KENTRIDGE: FIVE THEMES

Through Sun/31, $7–$12.50

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third, SF

(415) 357-4000

www.sfmoma.org

Accidental, with purpose

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

What began as a frugal effort to make use of leftover paint, something all painters grapple with on occasion, has spawned a late career style that realigns everything previously thought about the artistic practice of Theophilus Brown, now 90 years old. Best known for his figurative paintings as a seminal member of a group of painters gathered around David Park and Richard Diebenkorn, Brown has also been associated with painters as diverse as Rothko and Picasso, both of whom he knew.

These new pieces, embarked on during the last decade, originated as abstract works composed on a peel-away palette. Brown then cuts and pastes his way to a new composition, adding acrylic paint when necessary. Part collage, part painting, the finished products have all the gravitas of the large canvases of the New York School. Although relatively small (they range from 8 1/2 by 6 1/2 inches to 17 by 21 inches), these works conceive a larger, formal enterprise reminiscent of the monumental experience projected by Conrad Marca-Relli’s smaller works.

On exhibit through mid-June at Elins Eagles-Smith Gallery, "Theophilus Brown at 90: Recent Abstract Collages" reveals little evidence of Brown’s earlier figurative style other than a general nod to formal elements of spatial configurations; the collages on view are rather more akin to the Abstract Expressionist gestural emphasis, and to the movement’s early work when the Surrealist influence was greatest (of note here is Brown’s 1950s friendship with Chilean Surrealist Roberto Matta).

Some undoubtedly will see this as an interesting turn in the well-known official account of Bay Area Figuration, which is commonly said to have diverged from the East Coast fixation with abstraction, in favor of emphasizing the figure, with the exhibition of Park’s canvases Rehearsal (1949-50) and Kids on Bikes (1951). Brown’s collages might evoke that narrative, with a new twist, or return, to abstraction.

But the official story belies a well-known truth among the painters themselves: many of these artists never fully abandoned abstraction. And many of the New York painters whom the Bay Area painters were said to oppose still rendered the figure at the height of Abstract Expressionism (for example, de Kooning’s "Woman" series began in 1950-52).

Theophilus Brown first came to prominence in 1956, when Life magazine published photographs of a series of his football paintings — cubist-influenced modernist compositions that somehow allowed figuration to coexist with the abstract. What may not be known is that these works were preceded by fully abstract experiments he started while living in post-World War II Paris on the GI Bill (Brown fought in the Battle of the Bulge when he was assigned to the U.S. Army Signal Corps), and in New York City among the burgeoning artist scene of the late 1940s and early 1950s.

These recent collages, then, are a re-engagement with the formal elements of abstraction that Brown experimented with when he was in the circle of Elaine and Willem de Kooning in the early 1950s. Less concerned with the hard edge and lines of those earlier years, Brown fully embraces greater ambiguity and freedom here, suggesting a surrender to the subconscious, which the Surrealists likewise sought to achieve.

These collages are non-objective color experiments and shape studies. Brown succeeds in presenting a finished canvas that evokes something accidental, yet with purpose — the natural expression of a skilled painter who has the courage to embark on a new path regardless of what those comfortable with his thought-to-be "settled style" might say. Ultimately, Brown’s figurative era will be seen as preparatory for this mature work. *

THEOPHILUS BROWN AT 90: RECENT ABSTRACT COLLAGES

Through June 15, free

Elins Eagles-Smith Gallery

49 Geary, suite 520, SF

(415) 981-1080

www.eesgallery.com

And justice for all

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TRUMPETING TRUMBO I read Dalton Trumbo’s 1939 masterpiece of antiwar literature Johnny Got His Gun in high school. I went for anything which said that patriotic duty to die for one’s country is bullshit — hence I loved it. Rereading it last year the book hit me harder. The writing is amazing, shot through with brilliance from start to finish — scathing, bitter, funny, righteous. Now lucky Trumbo fans can watch the former blacklistee’s 1971 film adaptation of his novel, just released on DVD.

Actor Timothy Bottoms was 18 when he played (via voiceover and flashbacks) Joe Bonham, who lies in an Army hospital bed pondering his fate. Hit by a mortar shell on the last day of World War I, Bonham is left a blind, deaf, and mute quadruple amputee, with only memories, fantasies, and, for a time, a sympathetic nurse. On a commentary track, Bottoms points to the film’s contemporary relevance given the staggering number of soldiers maimed in the Iraq war but kept alive by sophisticated medical technology.

Trumbo worked with Luis Buñuel on an adaptation of Johnny. Ultimately that project fell through, but by the time Trumbo directed his own script in 1971, the Spanish surrealist’s influence was palpable. At the time, Buñuel responded, "For me, the film has the same power as the novel. It has the same disturbing quality and moments of extremely powerful emotion. The film left an impression on me that is among the strongest I ever experienced."

Marsha Hunt, whose successful film career was cut short by the blacklist, played Bonham’s mother. In a phone interview, the now-91-year-old said, "I liked [Trumbo] enormously. I was so delighted that he wanted me in his film." Hunt emphasized Trumbo’s incredible discipline, which led him, during lean times of underpaid black market work, to write 12 screenplays in 16 months (a helpful doctor who prescribed amphetamines contributed to that productivity).

"It’s hard to believe that the same talent who gave us Spartacus also gave us Roman Holiday," she said. "Just as far from each other as possible in terms of style and period and everything else. He was an impressively versatile man, as well as brilliant."

The 2007 film Trumbo, featuring documentary footage and actors reading from the great man’s letters, should also be released on DVD. And some astute publisher should bring Additional Dialogue, Letters of Dalton Trumbo, 1942-1962 back into print. Among my favorite passages from that volume is in a 1951 letter to novelist Nelson Algren, who was prepared act as a "front" for Trumbo. Trumbo advised, "If you have any moral compunctions about such a procedure in relation to motion pictures, please forget them. Hollywood is a vast whorehouse, and any scheme by which tolerably honest men can abstract money from it for their own purposes is more than praiseworthy."

It takes two

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

Whether one thinks of them as a dreamy drone duo who happen to be married or a married couple who happens to make dreamy drone music, Windy & Carl endure. Their first release, the Instrumentals EP (Burnt Hair), dates back to 1994; while most American guitars were tuned down for grunge’s payday, Windy & Carl waxed celestial.

Spacey drones are now in fashion, but Windy & Carl’s influence remains relatively unsung, in spite of their being one of the Kranky label’s flagship acts. Perhaps it’s the duo’s Michigan roots, since ambient music fans are often swayed by Eurocentric cravings. Whatever the case, their prodigious oeuvre now swells with several earthily-titled monolithic albums (1995’s Portal on Ba Da Bing; 1997’s Antarctica on Darla; 1998’s Depths and 2001’s Consciousness on Kranky) and enough compilation appearances and singles to supply a triple-CD set (2002’s Introspection on Blue Flea).

I first plunged in with Depths, though it took me the better part of a year to make it through its viscous 70 minutes in one sitting. Windy & Carl’s music is like a mood ring: its timbre is responsive to emotional currents, some of them hidden. More often than not, dark thoughts surface after 30 or 40 minutes. This makes me suspect that many of those critics who fling adjectives like "blissful" and "glittering" at their records have only dipped their toes in the maelstrom. At the very least, these seem overly simplistic adjectives for music that tilts towards tumult as it limns stillness.

There is a common misconception that ambient music is intrinsically passive or inert: this, in fact, is only true of bad ambient music, of which there is plenty (unsurprisingly, it often accompanies tactless interior design). Windy & Carl, like the kosmische innovators before them, realign one’s sense of space rather than simply flattering it. This process occurs at the periphery of consciousness — trying to put it to words tests the limits of music writing. It’s clear, however, that much of the Michigan duo’s mastery comes down to a well-honed understanding of texture and scale. In a typical jam, the gigantic crest of a thousand distortion pedals curls around the intimate pluck of a lonely guitar in an arresting, Rothko-like frieze. Time is adjourned; foreground and background drift by one another in the fog.

The durational aspect of Windy & Carl’s music has two aspects: lost in the length of any one given piece, we also feel ourselves afloat on the broader body of work, a 16-year drone. This superimposed condition, with every conversation dissolving into all other conversations, should be familiar to anyone who has been inside a long-term relationship. Ambient music implies a porous self, and thus has interesting applications for a couple. Watching A Woman Under the Influence (1974) a few weeks ago, I was struck by the way John Cassavetes draws us into Nick (Peter Falk) and Mabel Longhetti’s (Gena Rowlands) nonverbal communication: the nonsense utterances, whispers, and cries. Something similar happens in Windy & Carl’s echo chamber of tone, feedback and voice.

For all the songs about love, how many actually document its dormant time and space? John and Yoko, Nelson Angelo and Joyce, and Mimi and Richard Fariña’s works spring to mind. Windy & Carl’s latest, Songs for the Broken Hearted (Kranky, 2008), belongs in any such pantheon. Their albums have always been "home recordings," but Dedications to Flea (Brainwashed Recordings, 2005), the duo’s disc-long contemplation of their dog’s death, marked a new degree of intimacy. Field recordings of Flea on a walk and Windy’s explanatory linear notes thickened the mise-en-scène of private loss, making for an album occupying the unknown zone between home movie and séance.

The last few years seem to have been a dark time for the couple (under her full name Windy Weber, Windy released a solo album for Blue Flea last year called, no joke, I Hate People). But one doesn’t require the details of estrangement to immerse into its recesses of fear and forgiveness. There’s more of Windy’s Nico-ish purr than before, and the lyrics are newly decipherable ("You already know so much of what I keep /From the rest of the world /But you did not shy away from me"). The album’s sequencing is distinct too, fluttering between vast passages of oblivion and brief statements of bare, shorn beauty. Whether the broken-hearted of the album’s title refers to Windy & Carl themselves or an imagined listener, Songs for finds fierce beauty in the hide-and-seek of cohabitation.

WINDY & CARL

With Jonas Reinhardt and Nudge

Wed/27, 8 p.m., $10

The Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF
(415)861-2011
www.rickshawstop.com

Glittering prize

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johnny@sfbg.com

One shorthand description of Ramona Gonzalez’s recording project Nite Jewel is that it’s disco on quaaludes. I don’t know if I like Nite Jewel quite as much as Glass Candy’s underrated B/E/A/T/B/O/X (Italians Do It Better, 2007) — c’mon, they’re funnier than they are given credit for, and they made "Computer Love" melancholic, what’s not to love? — or if I love it more.

Throughout Good Evening (Gloriette, 2008) and Nite Jewel (Human Ear, 2008) Gonzalez’s singing is both high-pitched and kinda dazed. On "Weak 4 Me," she reminds me of Mr. Bill, which can never be a bad thing. "What Did He Say" is the best Nite Jewel song so far. It sounds like a radio playing "I Can’t Wait" by Nu Shooz slowly sinking to the bottom of a pool. I recently caught up with Gonzalez on the phone.

SFBG I hadn’t realized you’re from the Bay Area. How was Berkeley High? What did you like about the Bay Area and not like about it?

Ramona Gonzalez Berkeley High when I went there was transitioning between being out of hand and horrible and pretty much a normal school. Now it’s nice. Back when I went, it was not like that. There were 23 arson attempts when I was a sophomore.

Certain teachers I had there were some of the best ones I’ve ever had. As for the school itself — fuck, it’s hard for a kid to get along in a 2300 person student body. Lots of aggro annoying kids, popularity contests and danger, everyday. But overall it was rewarding.

SFBG How were your experiences in the Oakland Interfaith Youth Choir and the Berkeley Jazz School Music Ensemble?

RG Oakland Interfaith Youth Choir was pretty awesome. My friend Emily introduced me to it, because her dad was singing in the adult choir. The songs are incredible and really difficult — the girls in that choir were unbelievably talented. I wasn’t as good as them. Singing soprano in a chest voice — that’s crazy.

I did that for 2 years and then joined the Berkeley Jazz school, just taking piano. I ran into one of the girls from the Youth Choir there.

SFBG You’ve said Kevin Shields would be a dream artists to work with.

RG I got into my shoegaze period in college and started listening to Lilys whenever possible. Me and my friend Shane tried to start a fan club.

One of my favorite bands is Woo. Their It’s Cozy Inside (Independent Record Publishing, 1989) and Whichever Way You’re Going, You’re Going Wrong (no info available) might be the two albums I’ve listened to the most in my entire life. They’re these two brothers who are Hare Krishna who live in the UK. I recently found out where they are, and they wrote me back and we’re totally going to hang out when I go to England.

SFBG We have to talk Bruce Haack. What do you love about him?

RG Bruce Haack to me is psychedelic electronic music. It also has a playfulness, because he’s making music for kids. His music has this relaxing quality and aggressive quality at the same time. There’s a simplicity I like. I like his fervor and bitterness towards the music industry, especially on Haackula (Omni Recording, 2008). But the one I listen to most is Electric Luficer (Omni Recording, 2007). His music doesn’t have a direct correlation with Nite Jewel in terms of textures and sounds, but more in terms of what it means to be a punk electronic musician.

NITE JEWEL

With Telepathe, Hawnay Troof

June 12, 10 p.m., $10

Bottom of the Hill

133 17th St, SF

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

Dystopian enterprise

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Best-selling author Richard North Patterson stays out of the local limelight, but he’s a San Francisco resident — and we caught up with him May 21st to talk about his new book, Eclipse, and the role that U.S. oil companies play in Nigeria.

Before Nigerian environmental activist (and Goldman Environmental Prize winner) Ken Saro-Wiwa was hanged in 1995, PEN, the international writers’ group, wrote letters and organized protests against the execution. "I was very impressed by Saro-Wiwa," says Patterson, who was on the board of PEN at the time. He notes that Saro-Wiwa was a nonviolence advocate who succeeded in building a grassroots movement among the Ogoni in the Nigerian delta — all in the face of a ruthless dictator, and at great risk to his wife.

As Patterson recalls, despite the protests, several Western governments voicing their concerns, and then-President Bill Clinton’s hour-long conversation with Nigeria’s military dictator Gen. Sani Abacha, "They unceremoniously hung Saro-Wiwa. It was a lesson in a number of things, beginning with the degree to which oil makes autocrats feel impervious."

Post- 9/11, oil "security" became a bigger concern. Patterson began to realize that amid the U.S. failures in the Middle East, the disaster in Iraq, and the growing fear of al Qaeda, everyone was looking at Nigeria as an even more important source of oil.

"Meanwhile Nigeria’s environment was that much more ruined, its political leadership hopelessly corrupt, a semi-official militia that claimed to be acting in Saro-Wiwa’s name was killing each other and stealing oil, and everyone had a fee," says Patterson. "It was a classic example of how a natural resource makes its extractors and the rulers rich, but only serves as a source of misery for people standing on the ground. I already felt that Saro-Wiwa was a remarkable man who should be remembered. But now he was becoming even more relevant."

Patterson began researching Saro-Wiwa’s life, a quest that involved one trip to Nigeria and many conversations with lots of related experts. "Nigeria is not a place to go back and forth to — you’d think I was trying to break into Las Vegas," he says, noting that he hired security during his trip. "I’m not unknown, so there was a concern I’d be a high-value target. But I loved the Nigerians I met. They were a bright enterprising bunch in a dystopian setting, and to the extent I couldn’t go places, I did all I could by talking to people, reading articles, and watching films."

The name of Eclipse‘s protagonist is Bobby Okari. Was Patterson making reference to President Barack Obama? "If I was, it was subliminal," he says.

So what can Americans do to improve the plight of everyday Nigerians? "Increasing our independence from oil and increasing our foreign aid to Nigeria would be helpful," Patterson says. "The real problem is the extent to which human rights are trumped by self-interest. When we fill up our tanks, half of us don’t know that there’s oil in Nigeria. So first we need to become aware of the impact of the commodities we need. But I’m not sanguine about how easy this is. Saro-Wiwa was hung and 14 years later, where are we? The same place, and that’s a disgrace."

While Patterson does not excuse what he calls "the callousness of the U.S. oil companies," he believes that first we must address the Nigerian government.

"The history of the oil industry in Nigeria is pretty ignoble, but [without the industry] they can’t maintain the schools, roads, hospitals, and clinics," he says. "If the government doesn’t give a damn, it’s hard to make a quasi-government out of an oil company. When we get angry at the oil companies, it begs the question, What is the government doing? If it isn’t encouraging economic development and environmental protection, how can the oil companies? Shell and Chevron didn’t invent corruption. This is in no way to defend them. [But] there is a disconnect between Nigeria’s miserable government and its citizens. One of my central aspirations is to tell an entertaining story — and also to convey an awareness of a real problem."

Total ‘Eclipse’

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Tredmond@sfbg.com

REVIEW Mass market novels of the mystery and thriller kind are not known for their progressive politics. The most popular authors of the political adventure set are the likes of Tom Clancy, who thinks we’re still at war with Japan and ought to be at war with China. The detective novelists tend to glorify law enforcement and disparage those weak-willed sorts who would rein in the mighty and righteous gun-wielding police. My favorite new character, Jack Reacher, who has made Lee Child a massive international best-selling writer, is a former military cop with a taste for violent vengeance.

But of course I read this stuff. It’s my guilty pleasure, what I do to relax over with my whiskey before bed, while my beloved partner is watching Super Nanny. As Pete Townshend used to say, each to his own sewage.

I’ve read almost everything San Francisco resident Richard North Patterson has written, and he’s a rarity. His stuff tends to go in a more liberal direction. (It also tends to have a subplot involving teenage sex.) He’s written about the death penalty and the criminal justice system and American politics, and his characters have more depth than John Grisham’s. I like him, but I’ve never raved.

But I do want to recommend Patterson’s latest book, Eclipse (Henry Holt and Co., 384 pages, $26). Not because it’s the most brilliant writing he’s ever written, but because it’s a real-life political novel that reveals, in graphic detail, the impact oil companies like Chevron Corp. have on the Niger River delta. Eclipse is a fictionalized account of the life of Ken Saro-Wiwa, an eloquent and charismatic environmentalist who tried desperately to tell the world how oil money had corrupted Nigeria and how the Western oil companies were conspiring with the brutal dictatorship of Gen. Sani Abacha to stifle dissent. He was hanged 15 years ago by Abacha; his legacy drives the protest movement that is still trying to force the petrolords to take responsibility for what they have done to the delta environment, its tribal residents, and the Nigerian people. Eclipse didn’t put me to sleep — it made me mad. It reminded me of what American companies are allowed to do to the rest of the world, with impunity. It’s a story, with Patterson’s typical devices (for example, I don’t have any reason to believe Saro-Wiwa’s wife had an affair with his lawyer). But there’s enough truth in it to make you think. And that makes Patterson’s novel, in a unique and surprising way, an important political book.

Senses and sensibility

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"Constant self-negation and transformation are necessary if one is to avoid debilitation and continue to confront circumstances as a filmmaker," filmmaker Nagisa Oshima wrote in a 1961 essay. Oshima’s declaration of restlessness presages what would become a four decades-long career defined by that continual struggle to "confront circumstances" — to challenge postwar Japan’s stagnant social order by pushing filmmaking into new areas of form and content. "In the Realm of Oshima," the first major U.S. retrospective of the director’s work in more than 20 years, is a staggering reaffirmation of the now 77-year old director’s persistence of vision. Frequently hailed as Japan’s answer to Jean-Luc Godard, Oshima’s reputation and stature among a certain generation of cinephiles has often dwarfed the unavailability of all but a handful of his films (Oshima would later counter, saucily, that Mr. Godard should be known as the Oshima of France).

Like his French counterpart, Oshima’s output grazed on familiar genres, such as youth-gone-wild and domestic dramas, while freely incorporating elements from avant-garde and documentary practices. As much as he sought to break from what he saw as the sentimentalism of the previous generation of Japanese filmmakers like Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi, Oshima also spent a great deal of time dissecting the struggles and failures of the radical left, as vertiginously condensed in the debates between disillusioned former comrades of Night and Fog in Japan (1960). But Oshima’s larger interest has been with, to borrow the title of Jim Jarmusch’s latest, the limits of control — and those who infract upon the social order. Fittingly, the series comes to a close with Oshima’s most extreme film, In the Realm of the Senses (1976), whose Sadean lovers, Sada and Kichi, are perhaps the most terrifyingly literal embodiment of Oshima’s quest for "constant self-negation."

IN THE REALM OF OSHIMA

May 29–July 18

Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk.

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

Higgamus hoggamus

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andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I wonder if you’ve been living in San Francisco too long? Most prostitutes are not happy grad students! Most have been abused, are addicts, or both, and it’s not a "career choice." I think the woman in your last column is a sex addict and needs therapy, not someone to be cheered on by people like you who think promiscuity is cool. I would worry that kind of behavior says something pretty bad about the emotional state of anyone who’s doing it. I usually like your column, but I do think you can get warped by living too long where being weird is cool.

Love,

I Used To Live There Too

Dear Used:

I worry about her, too! What do you think I am? The question for last week, though, was not "Is promiscuity healthy for women?" (a very complicated question indeed, and one we will get back to), but the far simpler and more specific, "Is meeting men online for sex likely to get you killed?" No matter how you feel about female promiscuity, the answer to the latter is going to have to be no. It is simply not likely, although we have seen, tragically, that it is possible.

Expensive, boutique-y prostitution practiced by sane, smart women who can afford to screen clients carefully is surprisingly unlikely to lead to ax-murder. Neither does either activity put its female practitioners at any great risk for STDs or accidental pregnancy, since these are women who own condoms and know how to use them. It’s young (and not so young) people in the fuzzy-headed throes of romantic love or lust (sure, there’s such a thing as "romantic lust") who fall prey to the "spontaneity" fallacy or simply cannot force themselves to hold back until someone has gone out and procured the necessary protective gear. Call girls don’t go "oops," and last week’s "friend" probably doesn’t either. Certainly my own friends who use the sexier personals sites (say, Nerve rather than Chemistry.com) don’t make amateur’s mistakes. They can’t afford to.

Now, "Female promiscuity — hobby or symptom?" Contemporary understanding points to neither, or both, or to questioning the entire category, since the word itself implies deviation from an assumed non-promiscuous norm. For the last 60 years or so, the basic sociobiological story has gone something like this: Men are naturally promiscuous (and interested in nubile young women) because sperm is cheap and the best route to reproductive success is to shoot (and shoot, and shoot) and run. Women, meanwhile, are naturally (if serially) monogamous because pregnancy and infancy are expensive and they will need the help of a well-to-do, physically strong male to help them achieve reproductive success. More recent research has served to completely bollux-up our tidy story, though.

"Chimpanzee males trade meat for sex!" announced pretty much every media outlet in April. No surprise there, really, but it also turned out that … female chimpanzees trade sex for meat. Lots of sex, although not on the first date, since they are not always in estrus at time of trade. Are they making bets on future help (and sperm donations) from males they are merely flirting with now? And are the males keeping a database of females who will later say yes? If they can carry on such complex sociosexual calculations, what else are they up to?

Meanwhile, our premier expert on the sociobiology of motherhood, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, posits a revolutionary difference between ape societies and early (and modern) human ones, so big that it renders ape models even more useless than they already were as revisitable reservoirs of human history. Looking at modern hunter-gatherer societies, she sees cooperative parenting, a human invention, still in operation. It takes a village, in other words, men and women both, to raise a helpless human baby. And, looking back, the more we helped each other, the better our social and communication skills grew. Group responsibility for the children, she says, made us human.

More immediately apropos, perhaps, is the research (www.scientificblogging.com/news_articles/human_sex_roles_male_promiscuity_debunked_and_women_arent_all_picky_either) by Gillian Brown and associates, widely reported this spring, which examined mating behavior and reproductive success in 18 human societies and found that what people do depends on what else is going on: population density, differing life expectancies between the sexes, sex ratios, and a bunch of other variables made a huge difference in who was doing more or less of what with whom. Why this demonstration that humans are complex and adaptable should have come as much of a surprise to anyone, I couldn’t tell you. I admit, though, that I likewise couldn’t tell you that sociobiological research supports the innate wholesomeness of picking up men on Craigslist, and I doubt it ever will. I tend to be a worrier too, and I have certainly seen people, especially women, do a fair amount of psychic damage to themselves with ill-considered sex. But it would be pretty presumptuous to assume that last weeks "friend" is broken on the basis of, well, not knowing anything.

Love,

Andrea

P.S. Readers, what about you? Care to share your adventures in promiscuity, soul-deadening, life-affirming, or just plain OK? They would make a great column.

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

O.G. sleaze

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

A full range of involuntary facial-muscle responses have already been triggered by the trailer to Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, which premieres at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. First 2008’s Valkyrie, now this: Brad Pitt’s Tennessee-hills-bred Lt. Aldo Raine twangily informing his Jewish-American Secret Service unit, "Each man under my command owes me ONE HUNNERD NAAATSEE SCALPS!" while Hostel auteur-turned-actor Eli Roth smirks in approval.

Will the whole turn out righteous, raucous, controversial, or just juvenile? We proles will have to wait until the film’s August theatrical release to decide for ourselves. Meanwhile, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is letting inquiring minds do their advance homework by reviving Enzo G. Castellari’s less orthographically challenged Inglorious Bastards, the 1978 Italian action movie Tarantino’s latest pays tribute to — though his isn’t a remake but a separate, newly crassed-up riff on The Dirty Dozen (1967).

That latter all-star World War II caper spawned umpteen "Europudding" imitations, including the QT-beloved Bastards, showing this week in a new 35mm print. A sort of Filthy Five to the original Dozen — budget reduced accordingly, with sharp eyes ID’ing the same extras experiencing different death throes in scene after scene — it centers on a quintet of U.S. Army grunts in 1944 France.

There’s Bo Svenson (who’d become a sorta-star by replacing the suspiciously car-crash-slain Buford Pusser in 1975’s Walking Tall Part II) as swaggering Lt. Yeager; Fred Williamson’s Pvt. Canfield, an incongruous 1940s fount of ’70s Black Power ‘tude; smirking wiseass, murderer, and racist Tony (Peter Hooten), who calls Canfield "Bongo;" Nick (Michael Pergolani), a long-haired hipster aping Donald Sutherland’s similar character in 1970’s hit Dirty rip Hell’s Heroes; and Jackie Basehart as fraidycat youth Berle.

After being sent to the brig for various misdeeds, they escape their captors, intending to flee to neutral Switzerland. En route they pick up a nice Nazi (Raimund Harmstorf, horny hero of 1971’s The Long Swift Sword of Siegfried) and bare collective musculature to some bathing Rhine maidens. But mostly they machine-gun everyone in sight, unfortunately including Yankee spies disguised in Third Reich uniforms.

Penitent, our protagonists vow to take over their late comrades’ dangerous mission. This culminates in an exploded train, and an SS commander foaming "All Americans are mongrels! Negro, Jew, Polish, Italian, Irish — every possible race! And your vimmen are whores! Coca-Cola! Hollyvood! Chewing gum! Stupid cowardly bastards!" just before his ass is whupped by Canfield. Musta been that soda remark.

Inglorious begins with psychedelic-silhouette images underlining two key things about Castellari: 1) he honed his energetic macho action style in spaghetti westerns; and 2) he isn’t considered "the poor man’s Peckinpah" for nothing, being absolutely addicted to balletic slow-mo violence. About a bazillion Germans here do the spastic dance of death, riddled by bullets or leaping from yet another explosion.

Yet the film’s tone is larky, at times even goofy. Hardly a neglected masterpiece, or a campy delight like some of Tarantino’s other retro faves, it’s a good example of another era’s disposable entertainment. Unlike the grim check-cashing air emitted by many similar Europudding exercises, here you can sense the fun that went into making it.

His big-screen career of Westerns, policiers, Mad Max and Escape from New York clones eventually tapped out, Castellari moved on to TV work. But at age 70, Castellari is still capable of rising to the exploitable moment. Currently being hawked at Cannes — alongside the considerably more hyped you-know-what — is his Caribbean Basterds, which appears to cobble together nods to Tarantino, contemporary sea piracy, Point Break (1991), and A Clockwork Orange (1971).

INGLORIOUS BASTARDS

Fri/29, 7:30 p.m.; Sun/31, 2 p.m., $8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF

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

Crack “Relapse”

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Symptoms: until last year there were few signs of life from Eminem, the hip-hop artist. Last sighted taking a bow on the cover of his last, toned-down, more PC, and ultimately underwhelming studio 2004 album, Encore, the rapper disappeared from the scene, as rumors festered about retirement and later, after he dropped out of the 2005 Anger Management Tour, substance abuse. Out of rehab and back to music-making — with hip-hop once again his favorite high, as he put it in a recent interview, Shady’s Relapse (Aftermath/Goliath/Interscope/Shady/Web) is now in our hands.

Diagnosis: listening to Em lead with his anger a decade after the release of The Slim Shady LP (Aftermath/Interscope), we’re back to the kind of music and lyrics the man was born to make and sling — impossible to ignore when blasting, and incapable of being reduced to wallpaper. Relapse isn’t perfect. The weakest track is the first single, "We Made You," with its easy, adolescent, cartoonish video and relatively violence-free lyrics. One too many numbers obsessively retreads similar women-hating, gore-mongering themes on this 22-tracker, which includes the hidden Dre collabos "Old Time’s Sake" and "Crack a Bottle" with 50 Cent. But even at its most repetitive (i.e., the skits devoted to nay-saying music biz types), Relapse writhes with life and smarts, conceptually of one piece from its narrative-like programming to its pill-mosaic cover portrait and medicine bottle top-like "Push, Down & Turn" packaging.

Em’s faux Jamaican/Scottish toaster patois may irk, much like his habit of subbing rap’s omnipresent "bitch" for "lesbian," but it’s tough to deny the vitality — and vitriol — rushing off Relapse‘s first three songs, as the rapper frontloads the disc with his strongest material. Tracks like the opener "3 a.m." and its serial-killer imagery (check the steal of Silence of the Lamb‘s imminently swipe-able "It puts the lotion in the basket" monologue and then the YouTube remixes) make it clear from the start that nasty alter ego Slim Shady has lapsed back into view. As he faces a 3 a.m. darkest hour of the soul stocked with a Fangoria-style rogue’s crew of references to Jason, Freddy, Dahmer, et al., rage continues to feed his rap.

Such gruesome reveries make Marshall Mathers’ acknowledged sleeping pill addiction totally understandable — whatever quiets the mind, dude. And though I usually suggest meditation and yoga as alternatives to self-medication, I’m loath to wreck such chaotic, thrill-kill fantasies as "Hello" and "Medicine Ball." "Bagpipes from Baghdad" and the more insinuating, handclap-riddled "Same Song and Dance" call out the perceived sins of rumored exes Lindsey Lohan, Britney Spears, and Mariah Carey — a trash-culture harem that makes one suspect that Shady’s rehab stays involved a lot of tabloid browsing for dates. Attraction is always linked to repulsion, hinted at in the openly weary title of the latter.

Blame the mother — Eminem does, while fully aware that the world is familiar with that corrosive, at times litigious relationship, judging from the beginning of second track, "My Mom": "My mom, my mom, I know you’re probably tired about hearing ’bout my mom." His still-heated fury at her legacy of bad parenting and Valium addiction streams through his flow, this time specifically linked to his own pill predilection. "Wait a minute this isn’t dinner this is paint thinner /’You ate it yesterday I ain’t hear no complaints did I? Now here’s a plate full of pain killers,’" he spits, before ending with, "Alright ma you win, I don’t feel like arguin’ /I’ll do it, pop it gobble it and start wobblin’ /stumble hobble tumble slip trip till I fall in bed with a bottle of meds and a Heath Ledger bobblehead." Ledger’s damaged Joker would appreciate those last, tongue-tying, onomatopoetic lines, pointing to Em’s revived brilliance even amid the Shadiest, sketched-out turmoil.

Or blame the stepfather. Was Eminem raped by his stepfather as a child? And if so, have pop listeners ever been informed of sexual abuse this graphically via song? "Insane" might be the most horrifically explicit, yet — a credit to Eminem’s powers as a bold entertainer — bleakly humorous and compulsively listenable tune about child molestation to date. Here, as with so many of his lyrics, the victim becomes conflated with the victimizer, as the rapper hints at the generational transfer of abuse: "I want you to feel me like my stepfather felt me /Fuck a little puppy kick the puppy while he’s yelping /Shady what the fuck you saying I don’t know help me," he rages, flipping between characters before settling on a primal scene too painful to be relegated to fiction, speaking as a boy to a step-Pater Monstrous. "I only get naked when the babysitter tells me /She showed me a movie like Nightmare on Elm Street / but it was X and they called it ‘Pubic Hair on Chelsea’/’Well this one’s called ‘Ass Rape’ and we’re shooting the jail scene.’" Don’t go there? Impossible. If rehab released fresh, brave streams of anger and pain in Eminem, no wonder Relapse 2 is hot on this horror flick of an album’s heels.

Revenge of the nerds

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

"Fukú Americanus" does not actually translate as "fucked-up American," but it might as well. Fukú refers to a curse, a bad piece of destiny that clings to your behind like a genetically transmitted boot up the ass, passing on through generations until it runs its course, which is who-knows-how-long. And if you want to get really specific about it, as does the narrator in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, fukú is an imprecation brought to the Americas in the mouths of kidnapped Africans, amounting to nothing less than "the Curse and Doom of the New World." Which means we all get a turn.

So maybe it’s appropriate that Díaz’s titular hero is a chubby nonentity, an hombre of no importance, and a fully fledged geek whom his mom (Maria Candelaria) can barely stand and no girl seems destined to come within a quarter mile of. Despite a passion for women unusual even among his fellow Dominicans — according to confessed player and reluctant sidekick Yunior (Carlos Aguirre) — Oscar (Brian Rivera) stands to be the first Dominican man to die a virgin. Ultimately, however, he’s more than a subtraction sign. As incarnated with zest and goofy likeability by Rivera, he’s an indefatigable survivor, maybe even the fifth member of the Fantastic Four, if only in his own mind. He’s also a mad scribbler, ever composing his magnum opus in an endless series of marbled notebooks. (The "Wao" comes from someone’s misapprehension of an Oscar Wilde reference that sticks to our Oscar ever after. A fervent sci-fi, anime, Dungeons-and-Dragons dweeb, he’s actually trying to look like Doctor Who at the time, so the confusion turning a "who" from the D.R. to a "wao" in the U.S. becomes all the more poetical, and culturally laden.)

Oscar’s terrible virginity is only one of several burdens propelling the action in the world premiere of Fukú Americanus, Campo Santo’s boisterous post–hip-hop stage adaptation of Díaz’s 2007 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, now up and pulsing — with lots of high-end but not enough in the bass — at Intersection for the Arts. The play cuts its largest swath through the New Jersey–based chapters of Diaz’s immigrant tale (which loosely aligns with the author’s own childhood passage from the D.R. to the U.S.), and features the travails of Oscar’s razor-sharp but wounded sister, Lola (Vanessa Cota), a goth-clad teen rebel against their cancer-ridden but nevertheless indomitably feisty mother. Meanwhile, Lola’s macho onetime-boyfriend Yunior gets cast in the role of Rutgers roomie and caretaker to Oscar.

Back of these plot points, and the transnational culture they limn, stands the inscrutable but ever-present designs of Fukú, in the lanky human form of our narrator (Biko Eisen-Martin), shirtless and shoeless in a black suit and silver bling. When not listening in on the action, he jumps in, usually literally, with a choice bit of information or opinion culled from the novel’s hefty footnotes and digressions. Intertwined with fukú is the burden of histories familial and colonial.

Given its subaltern subject matter, its slang-fueled homeboy/homegirl wisdom, curbside humor, and restive energy, Diaz’s novel would seem a natural fit for the kind of hip hop–inspired theatre Intersection for the Arts has championed with the Living Word Project as well as recent successes like Angry Black White Boy. On stage, however, it amounts to a high-energy but shallow distillation of the ample novel’s several decades of private history that are set meaningfully against a diasporic backdrop of colonial peonage, imperial intervention ("Santo Domingo was Iraq before Iraq was Iraq!"), hopeful and desperate migrations, New World ennui, oppression under a series of local and globetrotting top dogs — especially dictator Trujillo, here introduced only in the second act and a bit too inconsequentially — and disillusionment with that American Dream.

Codirectors Marc Bamuthi Joseph (of LWP) and Sean San José (who directed Angry) find their way into the material through a fluid physicality and driving beat (although actual beatboxing from Aguirre and singing by the cast are kept to a minimum). The effortless bounce and verve never gets close to the bone, though, since the relentlessly playful tone and broad if charming characterizations can’t sustain the full weight of the narrative. Straddling comedic melodrama and turned-out hip-hop performance, Fukú satisfies the requirements of neither too well, leaving its deeper themes marooned in the shallows of a fleetingly infectious celebration of outsider status.

FUKÚ AMERICANUS

Through June 21

Thurs-Sat, 8 p.m., $15–$25

Intersection for the Arts

446 Valencia, SF

(415) 626-3311, www.theintersection.org

Sila and the Afrofunk Experience

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PREVIEW First come the horns, then the bass, an emphatic high hat and a sparkle of percussion, a trill of electric guitar, more brass, and it’s on. Thanks to "Shelter," Sila and the Afrofunk Experience’s second album Black President (Visila Records, 2009) has a funky kickoff. With inspired grooves that recall the jazzy Afrobeat of standard-bearers both old (Fela Kuti) and new (Lagbaja) and layered with a tireless P-funk aesthetic, the group goes on to represent the best of all possible worlds in World Music terms: uptempo, polyrhythmic, socially conscious (but not pedantic), strikingly melodic, and eminently danceable.

While Sila and the Afrofunk Experience’s first album The Funkiest Man in Africa (Visila Records, 2006) explored the musical and social legacies of Fela Kuti, Black President brings it all back home — literally to our door step (or our turntable) — with a track cautiously celebrating the election of America’s first black president ("Mr. President … the people are hungry for change"). Africa never strays far from the rotation, though. "Shelter" is an examination of the ongoing AIDS epidemic, "I’m So Tired" speaks to the diaspora experience, and "Africa" is sheer Afrobeat magic. The official release party for Black President — which is already available online — kicks off a busy summer of touring for SF’s favorite adopted son Victor Sila and his tightly-knit ensemble. It’ll be a challenge to get enough of a Sila fix in a single night to last until the group returns from its travels, but I’m game to try.

SILA AND THE AFROFUNK EXPERIENCE With Fool’s Gold, Diego’s Umbrella. Sat/30, 9 p.m., $15. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF.(415) 625-8880. www.mezzaninesf.com

Big Business

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PREVIEW Here’s a page right out of any rabid metalhead’s book of wildest, mind-blowingest dreams: What if the Norse gods Thor, Odin, and Tyr descended from the stormy heavens and formed a power trio? What would it sound like? What earthly buildings would crumble to the ground? What souls would be raised from their shadowy graves? What chaos would ensue?

To answer that first question: what if? What’s more metal than thunder, lightning, magic, and Valhalla? Those dudes invented it. They started their band approximately 1,300 years ago, before you or guitars existed. Second, they would sound like Los Angeles bone-crushers Big Business, whose giant leaden riffs, primordial Cro-Magnon rhythms, and thunderous hollow vocals pretty much sound like a band Thor might have dreamt up after an all-nighter spent smiting Viking tribes with lightning bolts and joyriding in his goat-drawn chariot with a ravishing blonde goddess.

The guys in Big Business, cut from the same pitch-black cloth as any fearsome Nordic god, are fast approaching their own place in the pantheon of mortal metal royalty. Their sludgy, doom-soaked sound is forged by ex-Murder City Devils drummer Coady Willis and bassist Jared Warren, formerly of Karp. And if their musical resumes weren’t already steeped in metal street cred, Willis and Warren joined the Melvins to record (A) Senile Animal (Ipecac, 2006) and Nude with Boots (Ipecac, 2008). The Biz added guitarist Toshi Kasai to its lineup in 2007, just after its sophomore album Here Come the Waterworks (Hydra Head) won it a hailstorm of critical success and a spot touring with Tool.

Now Big Business’s third album has arrived. While retaining the group’s visceral low-end attack, Mind the Drift (Hydra Head) adds more of Kasai’s quick-fire guitar work to the murk — it gives the album an atmospheric discord that swings like a wrecking ball. The Biz gets almost prog-metal when it adds vocal harmonies (wait, now they sing, too?!) and an organ solo to the dirge of "Ayes Have It." Bottom of the Hill, look out. Will King Buzzo join them on stage? Whatever happens, Big Business won’t be taking prisoners.

BIG BUSINESS With Tweak Bird. Wed/27, 10 p.m., $12. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St, SF (415) 621-4455

CounterCorp Anti-Corporate Film Festival

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PREVIEW Moving in its fourth year from autumn to an early summer slot, San Francisco’s CounterCorp Anti-Corporate Film Festival now provides an apt alternative-entertainment prelude to Memorial Day — because what, after all, is more patriotic these days than asking the question, "What are we fighting for?" Fittingly, the opener is about Big Oil. Sandy Cioffi (who’ll be present) at one point spent five days in the custody of Nigerian security forces while making Sweet Crude, an investigation of Shell Oil Corp. and other companies’ violence and environmental ruination in Nigeria’s Niger Delta. Likewise, Robert Cornellier’s Black Wave documents the seemingly neverending efforts to exact justice from ExxonMobil over the catastrophic Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska 20 years ago. Other highlights in this year’s all-documentary edition of CounterCorp include Sam Bozzo’s Blue Gold: World Water Wars, about the escalation of conflict and privatization around that most precious (and vanishing) natural resource; Steven Greenstreet’s Killer at Large, which analyzes the industrial agribiz/food processing causes behind an obesity epidemic that has begun reversing Americans’ previously steady trend toward longer life expectancies; and Brett Gaylor’s RIP: A Remix Manifesto, a "mash-up movie" about the wars between copyright law and free expression. No doubting where Gaylor stands on that issue: his entire movie is already available to download and remix yourself at www.opensourcecinema.org.

COUNTERCORP ANTI-CORPORATE FILM FESTIVAL Thurs/28–Sat/30, $5–$10. Victoria Theater, 2961 16th St., SF. www.countercorp.org

Mark Morris Dance Group

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PREVIEW The year was 1988. Mark Morris and his intrepid dancers lived in Belgium. Not too happily. Morris and the good citizens of Brussels were not exactly a match made in heaven. Yet there they were: the Monnaie, the city’s gilded opera house; professionally-designed costumes and sets; a full orchestra and a chorus of 43-plus soloists. And, please let us not forget, there was also Milton, Handel, and Blake. No wonder Mark Morris and his 24 dancers threw themselves into a project that was bigger and more challenging than anything they had yet undertaken. Resources like that — including six rehearsals with the orchestra — Morris was never to have again after his return to the U.S. three years later. Yet the premiere of L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato was not a success. Critics and audiences couldn’t warm to Morris’ version of modern dance. It didn’t look like dance. In the intervening years, this exquisitely danced oratorio has traveled around the world (not too often, because it is expensive to produce) and remains one of Morris’ supreme achievements. Morris, who is a stickler for respecting a composer’s intentions, did take a few liberties with the original. The Milton-Handel work considers whether happiness or melancholy is the better state to strive for. Milton and Handel voted for melancholy, Morris for happiness. Blake provided visual inspiration. L’Allegro returns to Berkeley for the fourth time. It is perhaps as a thank-you to Robert Cole, departing director of Cal Performances, who started bringing Morris to the Bay Area in 1987, when most of us still wondered, "Who is Mark Morris?"

MARK MORRIS DANCE GROUP Fri/29-Sat/30, 8 p.m.; Sun/31, 3 p.m., $36–$82. Zellerbach Hall, Bancroft at Telegraph, UC Berkeley, Berk. (510) 642-9988. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu

Well-suited

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

AFRO-SURREAL Why would you commission a choreographer for a work featuring performers stuck into costumes that hide their bodies? This anomaly didn’t deter the 69 dancers who, in late April, auditioned at ODC Commons for a world premiere by Ronald K. Brown. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts wanted a site-specific piece to go with its current exhibition of Nick Cave’s wearable sculptures, "Meet Me at the Center of the Earth" — and Bay Area dancers jumped at the chance to work with one of today’s most thoughtfully intriguing choreographers.

Brown, who initially had wanted to become a journalist, found his way into dance almost serendipitously. Though he’d been fascinated with researching and writing articles on the way people lived their lives, dance allowed him to do that more indirectly, and also more deeply. He called his company Evidence because of his belief that we are products of the things that have shaped us — our culture, our roots, our families. The dry legal term "evidence" poorly suggests the physically and emotionally rich dances that have earned such a wide following for this modern dance artist, whose choreography is influenced by West African cultures. (Brown brings his company to YBCA Feb. 18-21, 2010)

Amara Tabor-Smith, a former 10-year member of Urban Bush Women, will perform in the Cave project. She doesn’t think of Brown as a fusion artist. "The way I see him is that he modernized West African dance," she explained a few days after the tryouts. But her depth of admiration comes from a recognition that Brown’s work is "infused with spirit." She made it as one of 13 dancers although she auditioned primarily to "soak up his energy and give energy in return."

Brown, who knew and admired Cave’s evocative sculptures from afar, became interested in this project partly because of an experience at the Seattle Art Museum, where he encountered a diorama of African costumes and masks displayed on life-size figures.

"I would talk to the person with me, then slightly turn my head, and there were [the figures]. After a while I almost couldn’t tell who was who," he explained. Being aware of a mask’s mysterious power to hide as well as to reveal, he nonetheless also told the dancers he wasn’t going to turn them into witch doctors or shamans because "we live in America, in a contemporary society."

Brown also insists he did not want to "collaborate" with Cave but wanted to have "his own dream." Since the suits in the actual exhibit are too delicate for performance, he chose a set made from raffia, the natural fiber prevalent in West African dance. Though visually different, they also allow one to sense rather than see the body. Being quite heavy, they may restrict a dancer’s movement. During the audition, the choreographer worked with shuffling steps and close-to-the-body arms. He also worked on phrases from Orisha dances and Sabar steps from Senegal ("a kind of social street dance," according to Tabor-Smith.) There may be little or no music, perhaps only the sound of the dancers’ feet and the whoosh-whoosh of raffia.

Speaking from Ireland last week, where he was setting work, Brown wouldn’t commit himself to the length of the piece but revealed that, though it was originally planned for the galleries only, it would encompass YBCA’s lobby area as well. "There will be a guide to take the dancers and the audience on a journey, so that whatever feelings we have, you also have — or it hasn’t happened."

RONALD K. BROWN/NICK CAVE

May 28, 7 p.m.; May 30–31, 3 p.m.,

free with gallery admission ($5–$7)

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Born to be wildly visionary

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AFRO-SURREAL Living in black America means you’re already living "science fiction" — already born to be wildly visionary and future- bent in form, function, context, and appearance. No choice, really.

History cast your ancestors in the real-world version of the genre’s defining, overarching anxiety-ridden trope — the Earthly-and-Earthy- Beings-Overcoming-Enslavement-and-Genocide-by-Evil-Aliens story.

Black America is clearly the result of Africans surviving an evil alien abduction to an evil alien slave planet where our ancestors, nearly transformed into automatons, came to develop sonically-induced counteracting powers of telekinesis, time travel, teleportation, telepathy, and "trickster-knowlogy" to combat invading alien armies who had us beat when it came to more bluntly ballistic technology. To those African spirit combatants we owe the advent of such dark avatars of symbolic, sonic, and psychic African weaponry as Scott Joplin, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Romare Bearden, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Nina Simone, Jimi Hendrix, De La Soul, Ramm El Zee, Jean Michel Basquiat, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, whose battle cry "Great Black Music Ancient and to the Future" is as succinct a manifesto for the black SF movement as has ever been written.

But now let’s get really real up in this piece: the terms black science fiction, Afro-Futurism, Afro-Punk, post-blackness, Black Surrealism, Black Dada Nihilismus, etc., are all born of attempts to accommodate and simulate the strange reality of being black (and "black being and nothingness") in the not-so New World in ways not seen on BET. Yet all these terms are actually redundant — black in America by itself already signifying the ultimate in Weird Tales.

They’re also just a tad elitist and academic — at times intended to suggest that some blacks, usually college miseducated, are more modern, avant-garde, and outside the black box than others. The world that most black working-class people live in here in these United States is already as freaking strange twisted and bizarre as any space opera. The self-taught artists that have come from African American working class communities — Ra, Thornton Dial, Bessie Smith, Thelonious Monk, Simone, Hendrix, David Hammons, George Clinton, Wu-Tang Clan to name a few — are all more "out of this world" than their merely grad school-sanctioned brethren and sistren. No surprise.

After all, who needs to dream bigger than folk trying to escape from America’s urban behavioral modification concentration camps? Furthermore, anybody who thinks the extraterrestrial African imagination needs anything but a daily reality check to get fired up needs to come spend a day in Harlem.

From my bedroom window nested high up on uptown’s Sugar Hill — blocks from the old cribs of Ellington, Robeson, Hughes, and Basie — I can see a shimmering forest of spring green trees being stalked and hovered over by a four-building complex of high-rise public housing projects known as the Polo Grounds towers. Each is 30 stories; the combined 1,616 units hold an estimated 4,200 residents of primarily African descent on a 15-acre property that defines Harlem’s eastern edge. At night these towers are illuminated by an artificial, man-made double moon: one brand new, one still to be demolished — the side-by-side circular monstrosities known to us natives as Yankee Stadiums I and II.

If that’s not odd enough, check this out: If you call up Harlem’s 155th Street corridor on Google maps, you will not find any evidence of these gargantuan buildings when you zoom in. What you will see instead is a huge empty white space marked "Polo Grounds." The online information readily available about the Polo Grounds says nothing about those four Tolkienesque towers, or the folk who live there.

Instead, it blathers on about the forgotten baseball stadiums, long demolished, that once stood there for the New York Giants, the Yankees, and the Mets. Think about it — 4,200 folk of color vertically stacked in their own Babel but erased from human consideration on the virtual map of the world and replaced by fanboy baseball lore. If that’s not black science fiction, I don’t know what qualifies.

Devil’s poetry

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AFRO-SURREAL Sadly, the mythology of poet Bob Kaufman almost rivals all we have left of his poetry. However, to place Kaufman within a mere "cult of personality" (along the lines of some of his contemporaries) undermines the innovation of his process and what it brings to the tapestry of American poetics and the complicated and surreal orality of his poems.

Called "the American Rimbaud" by the French, Kaufman lived as a poetic assassin. A frequently arrested union organizer, like Stagger Lee wielding a .44 of devil’s poetry, Kaufman assaulted the willing and unwilling (even white police officers) with verse. If you were cool, you knew his assault was meant as a cipher, a juxtaposition of rhythm, image, and sound meant to invite the listener into a dialectical examination of identity, even the identity obtained from syntax: "I went to a masquerade<0x2009>/ Disguised as myself<0x2009>/ Not one of my friends recognized."

Kaufman’s poetics were Kerouac’s spontaneous prose without the notebook, taken literally. Think an un-choreographed version of "Amethyst Rocks," the prison yard scene in Slam (1998) where Saul Williams stops a would-be beatdown with poetry. Except for Kaufman the beatdown was always real, inevitable, and though sometimes provoked, never for the camera.

Kaufman was the spirit of true North Beach bohemia: the street poet who stood "on yardbird corners of embryonic hopes drowned in a heroin tear," panhandling "with moist prophet eyes" free styles of surrealism, the blues and duende, meant to disturb, disrupt, and ultimately liberate.

Kaufman’s "crackling blueness" is distinctly Californian. In poems like "Carl Chaessman Interviews the PTA," Kaufman filters the "west of the west" through absurdist reflections that juxtapose outlaw figures such as Chessman (a 1960s serial killer on San Quentin’s Death Row) with figures from California’s mythology, all to the rhythms of a radio announcer calling a ballgame: Carl Chessman is in sickly California writing death threats to the Wizard of Oz, his trial is being held in the stomach of Junipero Serra, at last the game starts, Chessman steals all the bases & returns to his tomb to receive the last sacraments from Shirley Temple.

Ultimately, according to poet and scholar Nathaniel Mackey, what Kaufman creates is a cross-cultural poetics difficult to categorize. Though he lived in North Beach and is credited with coining the phrase "beatnik" — and infused his poetry with jazz and Eastern religious influence — Kaufman transcends the singular categorization of "Beat poet." By aligning himself with the pain of "all losers, brown, red, black, and white; the colors from the Master Palette," Kaufman creates a new American poetics — a hybrid poetics of projective California duende blues, an examination of the exhaustion that comes from the persistence of breath.

MORE AT SFBG.COM


PIXEL VISION: Bob Kaufman’s poem "Heavy Water Blues"

Afro-lunacy in bloom

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

LOST TELEVISION


"Ticket to Heaven," the last of the series of Our Gang comedies, was produced by Oscar Micheaux in 1944, with music provided by Babs Gonzales and his band, Three Bips and a Bop, on a makeshift sound stage constructed inside of a Harlem tenement building. The plot summary is as follows: With the help of Farina, Pineapple, and Stymie, Buckwee runs amok after reading an early Nation of Islam pamphlet that promises a place in heaven to any Black Muslim who killed a white person for Allah. The throats of the entire gang are slashed with unsheathed straight razors. Alfalfa is forced to sing "Ole Man Ribber" before his throat is slit by a young Robert Blake in blackface. Directed by Spencer Williams, the script was written by Flournoy Miller, who dedicated this final episode to the memory of his late partner, Aubrey Lyles. Miller then moved on to penning scripts for Gosden and Correl’s. Amos ‘n’ Andy television show. The controversial episode aired last Nov. 22, 1963, much to the glee of the N.A.A.C.P.

LOVE SPELL


You can’t eat with everybody. You got to have the right vibrations. —

Vera Grosvenor, dancer-vocalist, Sun Ra Arkestra

Menstrual blood, in both the Hoodoo folk traditions of the American South and the Straga traditions of southern Italy, is used to bind one’s affection to another. In Sicily, for example, a few drops of blood pricked from a woman’s finger is stirred into a man’s coffee. In the southern states, a man might get Hoodoo’d with a few drops of menstrual blood mixed into his red beans and rice. This spell is also quite effective when worked in the reverse by men substituting menstrual blood for the obvious. The following is an excellent recipe a lady might serve a gentleman caller for lunch.

Tomato with Basil Dressing

diced tomatoes

1 bunch basil

4 Tbs. balsamic vinegar

5 Tbs. olive oil

2 cloves garlic

3 tsp. of menstrual blood

Salt and pepper

Let stand for 30 minutes. Serve with Toscanini bread, Parma ham, salami, and a carafe of red wine. Bon appetit!

R.J. AT THE CROSSROADS


"What fool coon nonsense is this?" the Devil asked. "You call this a sacrificial offerin’? These ain’t nothin’ but some greasy, chewed-up chicken bones! What happened to my sammich?"

"Ah’ done et’ it" R.J. replied. "Ah gots hongry on de way ober ‘cheer!"

"Well how in the hell do you expect to play the greatest blues guitar in the history of the world if all you got to show for it is some splintered chicken bones all spit up with some nasty ol’ nigger slobber? What’s wrong with your head, boy? I’m the devil! You gots to give me somethin’ … !"

In the moonlight, R.J. turned his empty lint-lined pockets inside out. He gave the Devil a helplessly pathetic half-smile. "You is ’bout the most pitiful colored boy I done ever laid these infernal eyes on," the Devil said. "But I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do …. "

CRAB CORNER, MI, MAY 19


A report released late last night from the Crab Corner sheriff’s department confirmed recent rumors concerning retired physical education instructor, D.T. Ward, 68, who alleged over the weekend that a spectral, feral-eyed black man passed through the walls of his newly-paneled basement Saturday morning, and greeted him with a strange but cheery salutation.

"At first, I thought he was askin’ for a plate of ‘green eggs ‘n’ ham,’" D.T. told a disbelieving deputy. "Like in them Dr. Seuss books. But now that I think on it, what he said sounded somethin’ more like what them magician fellas say ‘fore they pull a rabbit outta their hats — Wham! Bam! Alley Ka Zam! — only this nigra fella was more dicty an’ foreign soundin’, like he was addressin’ royalty or somethin’, lookin’ at me with them flint-fire eyes. Gave me the Willies!"

According to Ward, whom long-time neighbors suspect is rapidly degenerating into senility, the red-haired apparition floated into the upstairs kitchen, where he took a box of Cap’n Crunch from a kitchen cupboard and prepared a large bowl of the sugar-coated cereal, using close to a full quart of milk. The sepia-tinted spectre then returned to the basement, sat on the sofa, nestling the bowl on his lap, and watched cartoons on the family’s new big-screen television with the Wards’ three visiting grandchildren — Ralph, Edwina, and Skip. The children chirped that he enjoyed early-vintage Popeye cartoons best.

"Right neighborly fella," D.T. said. "Real nice to the kids. Didn’t drink, smoke, or cuss. Helped around the yard. Wore a bowtie".

"MORE FRIGHTENING THAN A CLOWN AT MIDNIGHT" — LON CHANEY SR.


The wretched inherited the earth. And the Man spurt a glorious rain. His underwear was left sticky with seed.

Witches taught naming was power. To name was to know and exert influence over the world of things. The ability to name determined the fuction of a thing. To name was to tame. But we learned otherwise. Real power lay in un-naming.

We refused names, numbers, and codes. We refused stamps, marks. We acted anonymously and moved beyond the Man’s mechanisms of global economic and social control. If the Man could not name us, he could not know or tame us. Once he declared us one thing, we become another. We were an invisible and ever changing alphabet. The Man found our meaning more difficult to grasp than a bead of mercury.

He lamented. The cornerstone of the corporate nation-state, the family, had crumbled.

"Errant fathers! Sluttish mothers! Bastard births! Negro music! What is the world to do?" he mourned. "Return to the power of prayer!" So when the robots rolled into the cities, chirping "Automaton Christian Solidiers," we became the robots. The Man did not and could not know. We was them.

Even at the end, in the euphoria of his avarious wet dreams, he thought the tumors raging within were of his own making. But how could he know?

We shifted gender, race, and class. And hopped from one species to the next. We were flora and fauna. We were never what we seemed to be. We were never what he expected. We were random, illogical, varied. He could not predict us.

Then he turned on himself. "To restore order," he said, "we must restore the family. We must attempt to rebuild our moral foundation with the assistance of God."

In his megalomania, the Man resurrected the biblical Abraham from the dust. The ancient patriarch stood before the people and lifted his simple robes. He turned and bent over and exposed the halves of his pimpled ass. His asshole puckered and spoke in gaseous bleats. Throngs of people shuddered in awe. The Savior had come at long last in the mask of Abraham’s encrusted asshole.

"The father is the spirtual leader of the househould," it said, "the model of God’s love. And he must wash his wife in the waters of that love. He must also instruct his children on matters God’s word with diligence. It is his moral obligation, a duty bestowed on him by heaven. It is the responsiblity of men to teach and reaffirm God’s word."

A rancid pungency wafted through the crowd in fog-like densities. The people swooned and were overtaken by uncontrollable nausea and diarrhea. Soon, the streets were flooded with the waters of God’s love. And the waters clogged the circuitry of the robots under the Man’s control.

It was then the Man expired, jacking off in pools of his own shit.

Darius James is the author of the novel Negrophobia and the film survey That’s Blaxploitation!: Roots of the Baadasssss ‘Tude (Rated X by an All-Whyte Jury).

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