Arts & Culture

Arts & Culture

Ain’t I a werewolf?

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AFRO-SURREAL Stylistic rigor and as full an embrace of progressive technologies as budgets allow have made Underworld Trilogy (Sony Pictures DVD, $93.95) a pleasurable extension of epics from fang-face past. Yet perhaps the most significant aspect of Len Wiseman’s cycle about immortals warring for supremacy is an updated recognition of the post-1960s liberation strides of blacks and women in our society. It is reflected in the power and intellect of the first film’s heroine Selene (Kate Beckinsale) and her fellow vampiric rebels (like Robbie Gee’s tech-wizard Kahn) and lycan foes ("Razahir/Raze," played by Underworld concept engineer Kevin Grievoux). The last and best installment, Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, is a virtual remix of my generation’s seminal televisual event, Roots. If that ain’t Afro-Surreal, then what is?

It was 30 years ago — not long after the historic airing of the adaptation of Alex Haley’s Roots fundamentally changed public perceptions of America’s "peculiar institution" — that I moved to the Sahel and immediately became obsessed with Dogon lore about the Sirius star system and a family of deities including the trickster Pale Fox. Blood debates about antiquity and provenance continue to rage between disdainful classicists, denizens of the moribund field of Egyptology, and independent scholars of varying stripes devoted to Martin Bernal’s Black Athena (1987). My view supports linkages between the overlapping subcultures of the Dogon, Amazigh, "Egyptians," Zulu, and others, resulting in a kozmic fusion wherein the primordial werewolf (some would prefer jackal or werehyena) is a key deity from the dawn of civilization in the Motherland.

Underworld: Rise of the Lycans finds the great Irish actor Michael Sheen’s "lycan" leader character Lucian subbing for Kunta Kinte. In the stark, nightmarish Eastern European fiefdom of vampire lord Viktor (Bill Nighy), the decadent, pale vampires are pampered aristocrats guarded and served by their dark, subhuman lycan slaves (hybrids of humans and wolves). Lucian changes from pet house nigger fettered by shackles of the flesh and mind — condescendingly deemed "a credit to his race" by Viktor — into an enlightened, empowered rebel leader who brings deliverance to lycan-kind by forging an alliance with despised animal spawn of William Corvinus in the wooded wilds.

Yet all is not Molotovs and roses — there are sadistic spectacles of whipping at the hands of cruel overseer Kosta, Nubian ally Razahir is forced to submit to lycanthropy, and Lucian suffers the ultimate price for miscegenation with Viktor’s daughter Sonja (the underrated Rhona Mitra). Rise of the Lycans may not be Blacula, but it is often a winking mash-up of Roots and the even more hardcore, honest Mandingo (1975). In a time when America has just elected its first (official) black president but open dialogues on slavery — and reparations for same — remain muted at best, it’s heartening to witness product straight out of Hollyweird somehow serving as an optic Trojan horse for the oft-forgotten and misrepresented radicalism of antebellum culture heroes like Nat Turner, Cinque, and the O.G. Black Moses herself, Harriet Tubman.

Rise of the Lycans has been roundly panned by fanboys and critics alike, which is hardly shocking considering America’s unwillingness to face the major episodes of its bloody past — the enslavement of Africans via the Triangular Trade, and the genocide of the First Nations. Yet to these eyes and ears, the film’s a first sign in the Age of Obama that a willingness to finally address the West’s hateful legacies can emanate from "low" culture, despite the will to bliss out in the opiated mass of post-racial utopia.

Natural light

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REVIEW The abundant drama of natural light is reason enough to see Summer Hours, a family drama by Olivier Assayas aspiring to Proustian profundity and Chekhovian chambering. I prefer Les Destinées Sentimentales (2000) for Assayas’ novelistic mode, but the new film still has plenty to like. This will be especially true for Antiques Roadshow fans, who will have a field day with all the Musée D’Orsay-approved furnishings, even if the characters themselves don’t seem quite so sturdy. The film opens with an annual reunion at the beautiful country estate where matriarch Hélène (Edith Scob, the daughter in Georges Franju’s 1960 classic Eyes Without a Face) has tended the reputation and archive of a long-dead artist relation. When Hélène dies, the question of the house and all those beautiful objects falls to the three adult children. Being an Oliver Assayas film, this a globalization issue. Frédéric (Charles Berling) is the only one who remains in Paris (an economist who doesn’t believe in economics, he’s more susceptible to sentimentality than the other two). Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) has gone after the art market in New York, while brother Jérémie (Jérémie Renier) covers the financial sector in China. A clear opposition — perhaps too clear — is erected between the memory of provincial France and the dislocated pulse of the contemporary, but to Assayas’ credit, Summer Hours doesn’t feel like it has its mind made up between the two: the darting camera courts the promise of speed and movement, while the luxurious play of light nurses what’s been lost. The characters are never more than their scenes, but there are a few breathtaking ones, including two bookending portraits of footloose youth that recoup Summer Hours‘ air of inconsequence.

SUMMER HOURS opens Fri/22 in Bay Area theaters.

SFIAF’s dance events

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PREVIEW Perhaps the best part of this year’s San Francisco International Arts Festival is that it’s happening at all. After the dispiriting news of the demise of the Oakland Ballet, one is grateful for anybody who is surviving. SFIAF’s dance offerings are not as many as most of us would like, but they are excellent and splendidly varied. The hottest ticket in town, of course, is Sasha Waltz and Guests. The Goethe Institute also includes her work in its concurrent film series. Scott Wells and Dancers are bringing two weekends of sometimes unruly but ever-so-cheeky testosterone-laden work to CounterPULSE, while Jess Curtis/Gravity is leaving its home at CounterPULSE to take a version of its Symmetry Project to Union Square. Curtis and Maria F. Scaroni, in the company of local dancers, will perform their new Transmission. Gravity will appear as part of the free "Jewels in the Square" series, daily noontime performances by local and international dancers throughout the festival. Last, but by no means least, Gamelan Sekar Jaya celebrates its 30th anniversary during the fest. May they have many more and may we have many more SF International Arts Festivals.

SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL May 20-31, various venues. www.sfiaf.org

Uptown Thursday night

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AFRO-SURREAL PREVIEW Fuck all that. Camp Lo’s Uptown Saturday Night (Profile, 1997) is one of the most slept-on albums in the history of hip-hop. Period. Innovative well beyond its years, Uptown Saturday Night introduces the Camp Lo aesthetic — a combination of exquisite wordplay, foppish elegance, and Bronx-style bravado mixed in with a fearsome frivolity. They redefined "gangsta," using the oft-quoted Posdnous lyric "Fuck being hard /Posdnous is complicated" as a motto. Because Uptown Saturday Night IS complicated, which makes it hard. It’s also pornographic and violent to an extreme and probably bears the uncomfortable distinction of being the first, if not only, hip-hop album to portray coprophilia in nearly positive light.

The album is a complete immersion into a certain brand of street slang that bears a lineage with Iceberg Slim, De La Soul, Digable Planets, Raekwon and Ghostface Killah. Definitely otnay orfay ofeys, the Lo’s first outing is the most utterly inaccessible and damn-near indescribable crossover album of the era.

Camp Lo created such a lyrical Gordian knot that even the most versed connoisseur of microphone wizardry could be left looking baffled with a handful of either jewels or cubic zirconia — only an accurate hip-to-square conversion chart could tell which. "In another millenia /Blow the dust off these jewels," says Geechi Suede, and to this day, Googling the lyrics of their one and only "hit," "Luchini," brings page after page of misquoted and half-heard snippets exposing Herbs. An example: "Keep your ears out for our years"? How about keep your ears out for Roy Ayers? He’s a jazz musician. "Levitating in da’ shiggys"? How about dashikis? They’re a kind of shirt, from Africa.

All Afro-Surreal elements are present: a layered rococo style steeped in international travel; a dandy’s obsession with "vines" from Paris and Milan; a literary approach with references ranging from Donald Goines to Fragonard; and a frivolous manner that belies a serious intent. After Uptown Saturday Night, hip-hop changed, and not necessarily for the better. Go see Camp Lo. Give these men their due.

CAMP LO With DJ Apollo and Sake 1. Thurs/21, 10 p.m., $10. Mighty, 119 Utah, SF. (415) 762-0151. www.mighty119.com

Rock, B.C.

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PREVIEW I have yet to touch down upon the streets of Vancouver, B.C., but was advised recently by Jexxe Taylarr of Twin Crystals that if I ever do make the pilgrimage, I should stop by the Emergency Room — a hole-in-the-wall performance space where in addition to Taylarr’s band, the likes of Shearing Pinx, Sex Negatives, White Lung, and Gang Violence tear shit up on a regular basis.

"The music scene is unbelievable," Taylarr says via e-mail. "There was a lack of places to play, so a bunch of our friends opened this DIY warehouse space and it instantly seemed to take off," he continues. "Never have we seen shows with so many rad bands."

Count Twin Crystals as one such band. With synthist Jeremiah Heywood and drummer Jordan Alexander in tow, Taylarr and company wreak serious havoc. "Punk Heart" is a tried-and-true anthem that nods back to the blown-out alt of the Screamers and Wipers. Brimming with harsh, electric current and buzzsaw electronics, the song has a J. Mascis-like lead that’ll wrap around your face and scorch you. "Witness" is one helluva of an afterburner: as Taylarr unloads into the mic with unchecked rabidity, its raw primitive roots and sludgy demeanor rattle the speaker cones.

A few years after inception, Twin Crystals has stocked its vault with a collection of self-made vinyl, cassette, and CD-R releases on banners like Needs More Ram and SLU. The trio plans to issue more classics on the Gilgongo and Split Tapes imprints in the coming months. Taylarr credits the group’s bulky catalog in part to his trusty record lathe. "I have a bunch of black 10-inch acetates from 1940 that we release little jams and ideas on," he explains. "The digital format will die and all these great jams we have will be lost forever, so we just make these lathe-cut records to preserve the audio. It’s a great art project."

TWIN CRYSTALS With Long Legged Woman, Modern Creatures. Thurs/21, 9 p.m. $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. (415) 923-0923. www.hemlocktavern.com

Black man in the cosmos

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

AFRO-SURREAL "The Black Man in the Cosmos" wasn’t among the course offerings when I attended the University of California-Berkeley. The class was taught once, in 1971, by musician/composer Sun Ra (1914-93), whose lectures might include topics like the outer space origins of ancient Egypt, conceptualized as a black African culture. This cosmic tradition has a long history, particularly in Chicago, where Ra lived from the late 1940s through the early 1960s, and where Elijah Muhammad used it as the founding mythos of the Nation of Islam. Ra claimed to have influenced the NOI, though he rejected its conclusions, much as he would later criticize the Black Power movement he helped foster as too materialist.

Ra’s "Black Man" lectures — one of which recently surfaced on The Creator of the Universe (Transparency, 2007) — epitomize why he wasn’t taken seriously for so long. Critics who appreciated the severity of Ornette Coleman or the ferocity of Albert Ayler couldn’t accommodate the mischievous mysticism of a man who claimed to come from Saturn. Instead of playing the role of brooding artiste, Ra favored extravagant showmanship, cloaking ultimately stern spiritual messages in language as absurd as the science-fictional garb worn by his Arkestra. His strategies included Joycean deformations of words based on false etymologies and sound play. "Arkestra" itself characteristically mixes the spiritual (Ark of the Covenant) with the quotidian. According to John Szwed’s definitive 1998 biography, Space is the Place, this was how "orchestra" was pronounced in Ra’s native Birmingham, Ala.

Yet the strangeness of Ra’s music may have been the biggest stumbling block. His prodigious output is extremely diverse, continually vioutf8g unquestioned dichotomies. A product of the 1930s big band scene, when he led an orchestra under his terrestrial name Herman "Sonny" Blount, Ra was at the forefront of free jazz, yet he shocked fans and foes alike when, at its height, he began incorporating tight arrangements of swing classics by Fletcher Henderson, Ellington, and others into his sound.

Ra’s lifelong interest in synthesizers — there’s a photo of him with a primitive one in 1941(!) — developed into a command of pure sound. He adapted his style to the nuances of a particular keyboard. The 1970 recording Night of the Purple Moon (Atavistic, 2007), for instance, is a quartet disc on which he plays baroque runs on the Rocksichord, a 1960s electric harpsichord. The 1978 recording Disco 3000 (Art Yard, 2008), a live quartet performance, features Ra’s organ-like drones on the obscure, loop-enabled Crumar Mainman. Unlike some synth wizards, Ra was a virtuoso pianist, with a lightning-fast right hand and a left hand that seemingly bounced around of its own volition. While unafraid to mash the keys with his forearm, Ra’s ambidextrous precision and unorthodox chord voicings — he was unafraid to mash the keys with his forearm — place him among the top players of his time. If he’d worn a suit and stuck to piano, he’d be ranked with the likes of Art Tatum, as is evident from his previously-unreleased recital Solo Piano: Teatro la Fenice Venizia (Golden Years, 2003), possibly the best such recording.

Big bands remained Ra’s ideal, though they were giving way to smaller bop combos by the time he formed the Arkestra in the mid-’50s. Yet his insularity resulted in some of his most original works, discs that defy generic categories, like 1963’s reverb-drenched, proto-psychedelic Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy (Evidence, 1992), 1965’s percussive, minimalist Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, v. 1 (Esp, 2006), or 1967’s Strange Strings (Atavistic, 2007), on which the Arkestra, with no prior experience, plays various non-Western stringed instruments, accompanied by bells, tympani, sheet-metal lightning.

While the atonal Strings may be Ra’s least typical album, it embodies two of his main concerns. On the one hand, he was a tone colorist in the Romantic tradition, seeking unusual instrumentation to produce unique shades. But as that album’s untutored string section suggests, he was a highly conceptual composer — garnering attention from John Cage and others — known for arranging and conducting collective improvisation. Traditional/avant-garde, inside/outside: such oppositions didn’t exist for Ra, who even explored a "low" genre like disco on 1980’s tongue-in-cheek On Jupiter (Art Yard, 2008).

The bewildering amount of Sun Ra reissues stems from his habit of self-recording, which also dates from the 1940s. Had he not done so, albums like Strings and Cosmic Tones wouldn’t have been recorded. Nor would they have been released without his forming El Saturn Records, among the earliest artist-run labels. Given that his technological futurism seemed to stem from his preoccupation with outer space, Ra’s artistic achievements are perhaps inextricably bound to his cosmic consciousness. As with Prince, artistic activity was driven by extramusical concerns, which, if they result in an occasional lapse in "good taste," nonetheless are the ingredients that elevate Ra from artistic excellence to genius. This genius may not have given him more than a subsistence living, but it has made him immortal. Unless, of course, as an inhabitant of Saturn, he already was.

Ding dong, Wicked Witch is alive

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AFRO-SURREAL What was black music like before hip-hop took over? On Chaos: 1978-86 (EM), a compilation of private press recordings by the obscure machine funk guitarist Wicked Witch, it resembles squelching synthesizers riffed like rock guitars and deep, rumbling bass stomps. Unevenly tuned fretboard licks mash with splashing, polyphonic drum patterns as a mysterious leading man uncomfortably murmurs lyrics like "I just can’t hang out, too much time is lost."

As a young guitarist hooked on Cream, Sun Ra, and Weather Report who mostly played for family and friends in southeast Washington, D.C., Wicked Witch’s Richard Simms didn’t achieve local fame, much less a national audience. But his subterranean woodshedding reverberates with tremors from an industry in upheaval. Musicians adopted electronic equipment en masse, supplanting the flowery string arrangements of 1970s disco with keyboards and drum programming. It wasn’t just black musicians transitioning to the computer age: early-1980s rock offers contrasts between lush new romanticism (Human League, Duran Duran) and crass arena sounds (Foreigner, REO Speedwagon). While the latter is celebrated via redundant VH-1 retrospectives and football stadium soundtracks, early-1980s black music and its heroes (the System, Imagination) remain unexplored.

Nelson George describes the period in 1988’s authoritative history The Death of Rhythm & Blues. "Synthesizers of every description, drum machines, and plain old electric keyboards began making MFSB and other human rhythm sections nonessential to the recording process," he writes, somewhat overstating his case. "There were so many … with all the personality and warmth of a microwave."

George’s "microwave music" condemnation still resonates, and this crucial period of black music — just before the hip-hop, R&B and quiet storm era — has largely escaped serious critical attention, save for disco aficionados who cherry-pick proto-house music stars like D-Train and Larry Levan. Meanwhile, Wicked Witch’s unintended documentation of the black new wave — meshing machine gun funk with spacey keyboard ambience on "Fancy Dancer," giving a shambolic twist to Mahavishnu Orchestra-style jazz fusion on "Vera’s Back" — has reemerged on the collector’s market. Simms’ private press singles, which include two 7-inches and a 12-inch long player, have been bootlegged. Original copies trade for $100. This probably led EM, a Japanese specialty label, to contact Simms and assemble Chaos.

"It wasn’t commercial," Simms said during a recent phone conversation. Forced Exposure, the Boston distributor handling Chaos, had passed on his information, but it took more than two weeks to finally reach him. Though pleasantly surprised by the novelty of an interview, he’s somewhat suspicious of the affair. When asked how many copies he pressed up, he shoots back, "Why are you inquiring about that?" as if this writer, armed with a copy of Goldmine magazine, wants to corner the market on Wicked Witch collectibles. And how did Simms come up with the name Wicked Witch anyway? "I’m stumped on that one," he says. "I think I wanted something dramatic, like theater."

Simms remembers forming his first band, Paradiagm with teenage friends "on an original-type kick" from around the area. The group recorded the track "Vera’s Back" before going their separate ways. "We were trying to do an original act, but people didn’t really accept it," he says. Chuck Brown’s ingenious go-go style, an amalgamation of James Brown’s call-and-response breaks and N’awlins marching band jazz, reigned as D.C.’s unofficial soundtrack. And since Paradiagm wasn’t a go-go band and didn’t play covers of radio hits, they couldn’t get bookings: "It was too hard to break new material." Simms managed to reach the manager of Return to Forever, Chick Corea’s jazz fusion superstar collective. But he says, mysteriously, "We did vocals, and they weren’t doing no vocals."

After that came Wicked Witch, which Simms describes as a "studio thing" where he worked out his musical ideas and recorded them. Yet even that was relatively short-lived. "My background is jazz fusion," Simms says. For Wicked Witch, he tried to merge fusion and funk, resulting in tracks with cryptic time signatures and spaced-out melodies. "If it was more funky, I think it would have been it. But it wasn’t funky enough. But I still dig it."

By the mid-1980s, the leather-clad hero of "Fancy Dancer" disappeared in the Chocolate City, just as the hip-hop era had begun. "Kids, a job, other things you gotta do … all of the above got put on top of the music. And then the music became close to nothing," Simms says. Before that happened, however, he pressed up those now-collectible records for himself. "Nobody was doing it for me, so I might as well do something on my own, right?"

For your earholes

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johnny@sfbg.com

AFRO-SURREAL

Afro-Surreal is a crackling transmission from the tightest tunnels and recesses of inner space, and the furthest, darkest outposts of outer space. Afro-Surreal is androgynous — butch and femme on a whim. Afro-Surreal is a sonic realm that can morph any millisecond. It is a single body with many voices. Afro-Surreal might sound like gospel, but it ain’t, or if it is, it’s Goth gospel. Afro-Surreal is a Puya-like bloom from the root of a manifesto named "Black Sabrina." Afro-Surreal is a flawed masterstroke from the most unjustly under-known "popular music" recording artist of the 21st century. Afro-Surreal is the sound of Chelonis R. Jones.

Right now, the sound of Chelonis R. Jones is Chatterton (Systematic), his second solo album after the equally deep and fantastic Dislocated Genius (Get Physical, 2005). It’s named after a poet, and it’s a place where Giorgio Moroder-meets-Donna Summer to soundtrack an eight-minute minimalist epic sung from the perspective of the ungrateful sole survivor of a plane crash. It’s a place where rehab is a "recreant blur," and Fleetwood Mac’s "Dreams" are buried beneath threatening street wisdom from an ex-.

"’WELL SHUT MY MOUTH WIDE OPEN!’is an old surrealist term of expression that Afro-Americans created when they were emancipated, due to the fact that emancipation wasn’t a reality, but a much dreamed of condition that they hoped would become a reality." So writes Ted Joans — as tedjoans — in the liner notes for the recently-reissued 1974 album King of Kings (Pyramid/Ikef) by the Pyramids, Bay Area artist and musician Idris Ackamoor’s revelatory group. Joans was referring to the free jazz sounds of the time, but he could just as well have been referring to Death’s definition of rock ‘n’ roll, as demonstrated on …For All the World to See (Drag City), a previously unreleased true treasure of black Detroit rock that also dates from 1974. Brothers David and Bobby Hackney don’t just invent punk — "Freakin Out" is like the Buzzcocks if they were muscular — they create agit-punk on the epic "Politicians in My Eyes."

The arrival of Death couldn’t be better timed to match the black rock signs of life within the surreal electronic solar system of Jones’ Chatterton. Jones’ braiding of word and sound is subliminal, like when Pornography (as in a song that sounds like that particular era of the Cure) arrives in the wake of a track called "Tornogrpahy." In the audio "Che-ography" he has created with dozens of studio collaborators (charted on his MySpace), a cat-lady character from a 12" single (2007’s "Helen Cornell") can cameo in a song by another recording endeavor about a girl who suffers when "the pimps and crack dealers hit her…where the good lord split her."

All the lonely people, framed by "Pompadour," Chatterton‘s penultimate track that pays homage to an idol by stampeding to finality like "Speedway" on Morrissey’s Vauxhall and I (Sire, 1994). "’Twas said, ’twas said: Black singers are … well, so very very … uh … cliché," Jones, well, sings — and sings from a bottomless well. "And still, and still you know you’ll screw for them … you’ll screw in private anyway!"

MORE AT WWW.SFBG.COM

Afro-Surreal-List and writing by Chelonis R. Jones

The list in surrealist

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1. Putney Swope (Robert Downey Sr., 1969) The elder Downey’s brilliant, completely irreverent send-up of race, politics and the advertising industry. Smoke a big fat joint and watch this one. You will laugh your ass off. Take special note of the "commercials" for the products by Truth and Soul, Inc.

2. Bamboozled (Spike Lee, 2002) Spike Lee’s dark, squirm-in-your-seat masterpiece brings minstrelsy into the 21st century. Damon Wayans tries to get himself fired from a racist TV station by producing an extremely offensive prime time minstrel show. The show turns out to be a smash hit.

3. The Watermelon Man (Melvin Van Peebles, 1970) One of the great Afro-Surrealists casts Godfrey Cambridge as a white racist insurance salesman who wakes up as a black man after watching race riots on the late night news. Very, very OUT, especially the scene where Cambridge sits in a tub full of milk trying to reverse the color change.

4. Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (Melvin Van Peebles, 1971) Peebles casts himself as Sweetback, a black stud sex worker who kills a racist cop and has to go on the lam. More allegory than literal narrative, it reminds me of Jodorowsky’s El Topo (1970).

5. Black Like Me (Carl Lerner, 1964) Curious writer James Whitmore wants to experience being black so he takes a pill to darken his skin, tests his new identity on his favorite shoe shine man and heads down south. Bad idea. He runs into trouble instantly (near-lynching, bad vibes from every white person) and basically goes insane.

6. Which Way Is Up? (Michael Schultz, 1977) Richard Pryor plays three characters — a jackleg preacher, a dirty old man, and an orange picker who accidentally becomes union hero — in this very funny remake of The Seduction of Mimi (1972).

7. Richard Pryor: Live and Smokin’ (Michael Blum, 1971) Pryor’s first standup film. He’s coming off a coke binge, the film crew is pissing him off, and no one is laughing, but that doesn’t stop him. The highlight is the demented "a wino and a junkie" routine.

8. Space is the Place (John Coney, 1974) Sun Ra, black alien jazz musician for Saturn, lands his spaceship in early-1970s Oakland. His mission is to rescue black people, but strangely, no one wants to be saved. He battles the CIA, apathetic black youth (who think he’s a hippie from Telegraph Avenue) and a character called the Overseer while finding the time to put on a concert at Laney College. Anything by Sun Ra is Afro-Surrealism at its most potent.

9. Ghost Dog (Jim Jarmusch, 1999) Jim Jarmusch’s mystical meditation on the samurai, Brooklyn style. My man Isaach De Bankolé almost steals the movie.

10. Sankofa (Haile Gerima, 1993) Gerima’s off-the-charts take on slavery is disturbing, downright depressing, and utterly psychedelic. A black supermodel on a shoot on Goree Island, the infamous slave trader’s fort, steps into a basement and is transported back to a West Indies plantation. Afro-Surrealism at its best.

The cult of Fanaka

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cheryl@sfbg.com

AFRO-SURREAL Visitors to filmmaker Jamaa Fanaka’s MySpace page are greeted with a clip of Snoop Dogg clutching a pile of Fanaka DVDs — 1975’s Welcome Home Brother Charles, a.k.a. Soul Vengeance; 1976’s Emma Mae, a.k.a. Black Sister’s Revenge; 1979’s Penitentiary; and 1982’s Penitentiary II. He quotes some choice lines and enthusiastically sings the director’s praises: "These movies right here — this is black history."

When I mention Snoop Dogg to Fanaka, he’s delighted. "All the rappers love me," he says over the phone from Los Angeles. "Also actors, like Eddie Murphy. The first time I ran into him, he was with his brother, and they recited [a scene from Penitentiary] verbatim. That happens all the time."

The Fanaka library (which also includes 1987’s Penitentiary III and 1992’s Street Wars) has also earned a following among cult-movie fans. "I love that they’re cult films, because of what a ‘cult film’ means: the film lives because the people want it to live," he explains. He’s not a fan of the term "blaxploitation" — though it’s commonly applied to his films — due to its connotations.

"There were companies that were very profitable, and all they made were ‘exploitation’ films, which meant that they made low-budget films on subjects that Hollywood didn’t want to take on," he says. "It only became a negative term once they put that prefix ‘blax’ on it. No black filmmaker ever liked that term, though it was coined by a black publicist. ‘Blaxploitation’ has evolved into a genre, like a horror film, or an action film. But black filmmakers still resent the term because of its origins."

Born in Mississippi, raised in L.A., Fanaka says was distracted from committing a crime by a pair of UCLA recruiters who made him believe he could realize his childhood dream of becoming a filmmaker. ("They asked me, did I want to go to UCLA? I said, ‘Yeah. I’d like to go to the moon, too, but my chances of getting there are pretty minuscule.’") He was eventually accepted into the school’s prestigious film program, where he also earned a master’s degree; his peers included Charles Burnett, who directed 1977’s Killer of Sheep.

"It was an exciting time to be a black filmmaker," Fanaka says. "People like Charles Burnett were part of my film crew, I was part of his film crew. We helped each other, advised each other. Those were the halcyon days of filmmaking at UCLA."

Even more notably, "I’m the only person in the history of filmmaking to write, produce, direct, and get theatrical distribution for three feature films I made as part of my curriculum at the UCLA film school," Fanaka says. He shot his first feature, Welcome Home Brother Charles, on the weekends when he didn’t have class.

"I felt like, if I had access to all of this equipment, and the wherewithal to make a 10-minute film, why not make a whole feature?" he recalls. "I wanted to reach the widest audience possible, and no matter how good a short film is, the audience is going to be limited. Then I went on to graduate school and I made Emma Mae and Penitentiary."

This kind of determination also extended to Fanaka’s fundraising efforts. His parents invested their life savings into his work (good call — Penitentiary, Fanaka says, was the most successful indie film of 1980), but he wondered why he was rejected for a grant by the American Film Institute. He did some research and learned that only one African American had ever been a part of the grant-awarding committee. "I wanted to give minorities a shot," he says, so he wrote a letter to then-Sen. Alan Cranston suggesting that the committee should be more diverse. The next grant cycle, he got the money to help make Emma Mae; the following cycle, he served on the committee. "That goes to show you how the squeaking wheel gets the oil," he remembers, proudly.

In less-tenacious hands, there’d certainly be no Welcome Home Brother Charles. "White slave owners used to tell white women horror stories about the size of the black males’ sexual equipment," Fanaka explains. "But rather than frightening the white females, it intrigued them. I wanted to make a film that took that myth and exaggerated it to show how ridiculous it was, and I chose to do it in a very surreal, powerful scene."

(Note to readers who haven’t seen the film: uh, think 1997’s Anaconda. The entire Penitentiary series is also a gold mine of surreal moments, particularly part three, which features a prison-dwelling, crack-smoking, snarling killer dwarf. Fanaka sums up that film in one word: "feral.")

Now in his late 60s, Fanaka has been slowed in his efforts to make Penitentiary IV by complications from diabetes. He’s also been working for the last decade on a music documentary, Hip Hop Hope. It’s an apt title for a film by Fanaka, who calls himself "a very optimistic person." He’s enjoyed the resurgence of interest in his work, with screenings at places like San Francisco’s Dead Channels Film Festival and Austin’s Alamo Drafthouse, and frequent airings of the Penitentiary films on cable.

"My most artistic film, in my estimation, was Welcome Home Brother Charles, because I had no axes to grind but to try and use the medium of cinema to attack that myth, and attack it in a way that was quote-unquote artistic. Of course, very few people took that from it because that one scene kind of colors the whole film," he chuckles. "But I think as time goes by, people are gonna realize the value of these films I’ve made and begin to understand them."

Call it Afro-Surreal

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I’m not a surrealist. I just paint what I see. — Frida Kahlo

THE PAST AND THE PRELUDE


In his introduction to the classic novel Invisible Man (1952), ambiguous black and literary icon Ralph Ellison says the process of creation was "far more disjointed than [it] sounds … such was the inner-outer subjective-objective process, pied rind and surreal heart."

Ellison’s allusion is to his book’s most perplexing character, Rinehart the Runner, a dandy, pimp, numbers runner, drug dealer, prophet, and preacher. The protagonist of Invisible Man takes on the persona of Rinehart so that "I may not see myself as others see me not." Wearing a mask of dark shades and large-brimmed hat, he is warned by a man known as the fellow with the gun, "Listen Jack, don’t let nobody make you act like Rinehart. You got to have a smooth tongue, a heartless heart, and be ready to do anything."

And Ellison’s lead man enters a world of prostitutes, hopheads, cops on the take, and masochistic parishioners. He says of Rinehart, "He was years ahead of me, and I was a fool. The world in which we live is fluidity, and Rine the Rascal was at home." The marquee of Rinehart’s store-front church declares:

Behold the Invisible!

Thy will be done O Lord!

I See all, Know all, Tell all, Cure all.

You shall see the unknown wonders.

Ellison and Rinehart had seen it, but had no name for it.

In an introduction to prophet Henry Dumas’ 1974 book Ark Of Bones and Other Stories, Amiri Baraka puts forth a term for what he describes as Dumas’ "skill at creating an entirely different world organically connected to this one … the Black aesthetic in its actual contemporary and lived life." The term he puts forth is Afro-Surreal Expressionism.

Dumas had seen it. Baraka had named it.

This is Afro-Surreal!

THIS IS NOT AFRO-SURREAL


A) Surrealism:

Leopold Senghor, poet, first president of Senegal, and African Surrealist, made this distinction: "European Surrealism is empirical. African Surrealism is mystical and metaphorical." Jean-Paul Sartre said that the art of Senghor and the African Surrealist (or Negritude) movement "is revolutionary because it is surrealist, but itself is surrealist because it is black." Afro-Surrealism sees that all "others" who create from their actual, lived experience are surrealist, per Frida Kahlo. The root for "Afro-" can be found in "Afro-Asiatic", meaning a shared language between black, brown and Asian peoples of the world. What was once called the "third world," until the other two collapsed.

B) Afro-Futurism:

Afro-Futurism is a diaspora intellectual and artistic movement that turns to science, technology, and science fiction to speculate on black possibilities in the future. Afro-Surrealism is about the present. There is no need for tomorrow’s-tongue speculation about the future. Concentration camps, bombed-out cities, famines, and enforced sterilization have already happened. To the Afro-Surrealist, the Tasers are here. The Four Horsemen rode through too long ago to recall. What is the future? The future has been around so long it is now the past.

Afro-Surrealists expose this from a "future-past" called RIGHT NOW.

RIGHT NOW, Barack Hussein Obama is America’s first black president.

RIGHT NOW, Afro-Surreal is the best description to the reactions, the genuflections, the twists, and the unexpected turns this "browning" of White-Straight-Male-Western-Civilization has produced.

THE PRESENT, OR RIGHT NOW


San Francisco, the most liberal and artistic city in the nation, has one of the nation’s most rapidly declining black urban populations. This is a sign of a greater illness that is chasing out all artists, renegades, daredevils, and outcasts. No black people means no black artists, and all you yet-untouched freaks are next. Only freaky black art — Afro-Surreal art — in the museums, galleries, concert venues, and streets of this (slightly) fair city can save us!

San Francisco, the land of Afro-Surreal poet laureate Bob Kaufman, can be at the forefront in creating an emerging aesthetic. In this land of buzzwords and catch phrases, Afro-Surreal is necessary to transform how we see things now, how we look at what happened then, and what we can expect to see in the future.

It’s no more coincidence that Kool Keith (as Dr. Octagon) recorded the 1996 Afro-Surreal anthem "Blue Flowers" on Hyde Street, or that Samuel R. Delany based much of his 1974 Afro-Surreal urtext Dhalgren on experiences in San Francisco.

An Afro-Surreal aesthetic addresses these lost legacies and reclaims the souls of our cities, from Kehinde Wiley painting the invisible men (and their invisible motives) in NYC to Yinka Shonibare beheading 17th (and 21st) century sexual tourists of Europe. From Nick Cave’s soundsuits at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts to the words you are reading right now, the message is clear: San Francisco, the world is ready for an Afro-Surreal art movement.

Afro-Surrealism is drifting into contemporary culture on a rowboat with no oars, entering the city to hunt down clues for the cure to this ancient, incurable disease called "western civilization." Or, as Ishmael Reed states, "We are mystical detectives about to make an arrest."

A MANIFESTO OF AFRO-SURREAL


Behold the invisible! You shall see unknown wonders!

1. We have seen these unknown worlds emerging in the works of Wifredo Lam, whose Afro-Cuban origins inspire works that speak of old gods with new faces, and in the works of Jean-Michel Basquiat, who gives us new gods with old faces. We have heard this world in the ebo-horn of Roscoe Mitchell and the lyrics of DOOM. We’ve read it through the words of Henry Dumas, Victor Lavalle, and Darius James. This emerging mosaic of radical influence ranges from Frantz Fanon to Jean Genet. Supernatural undertones of Reed and Zora Neale Hurston mix with the hardscrabble stylings of Chester Himes and William S. Burroughs.

2. Afro-Surreal presupposes that beyond this visible world, there is an invisible world striving to manifest, and it is our job to uncover it. Like the African Surrealists, Afro-Surrealists recognize that nature (including human nature) generates more surreal experiences than any other process could hope to produce.

3. Afro-Surrealists restore the cult of the past. We revisit old ways with new eyes. We appropriate 19th century slavery symbols like Kara Walker, and 18th century colonial ones like Yinka Shonibare. We re-introduce "madness" as visitations from the gods, and acknowledge the possibility of magic. We take up the obsessions of the ancients and kindle the dis-ease, clearing the murk of the collective unconsciousness as it manifests in these dreams called culture.

4. Afro-Surrealists use excess as the only legitimate means of subversion, and hybridization as a form of disobedience. The collages of Romare Bearden and Wangechi Mutu, the prose of Reed, and the music of the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Antipop Consortium express this overflow.

Afro-Surrealists distort reality for emotional impact. 50 Cent and his cold monotone and Walter Benjamin and his chilly shock tactics can kiss our ass. Enough! We want to feel something! We want to weep on record.

5. Afro-Surrealists strive for rococo: the beautiful, the sensuous, and the whimsical. We turn to Sun Ra, Toni Morrison, and Ghostface Killa. We look to Kehinde Wiley, whose observation about the black male body applies to all art and culture: "There is no objective image. And there is no way to objectively view the image itself."

6. The Afro-Surrealist life is fluid, filled with aliases and census- defying classifications. It has no address or phone number, no single discipline or calling. Afro-Surrealists are highly-paid short-term commodities (as opposed to poorly-paid long term ones, a.k.a. slaves).

Afro-Surrealists are ambiguous. "Am I black or white? Am I straight, or gay? Controversy!"

Afro-Surrealism rejects the quiet servitude that characterizes existing roles for African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, women and queer folk. Only through the mixing, melding, and cross-conversion of these supposed classifications can there be hope for liberation. Afro-Surrealism is intersexed, Afro-Asiatic, Afro-Cuban, mystic, silly, and profound.

7. The Afro-Surrealist wears a mask while reading Leopold Senghor.

8. Ambiguous as Prince, black as Fanon, literary as Reed, dandy as André Leon Tally, the Afro-Surrealist seeks definition in the absurdity of a "post-racial" world.

9. In fashion (John Galliano; Yohji Yamamoto) and the theater (Suzan Lori-Parks), Afro-Surreal excavates the remnants of this post-apocalypse with dandified flair, a smooth tongue and a heartless heart.

10. Afro-Surrealists create sensuous gods to hunt down beautiful collapsed icons.

AFRO-SURREALISM IN ACTION


San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of the African Diaspora present the works of Mutu, William Pope L., Trenton Doyle Hancock, Glenn Ligon, Wiley, Shonibare, and Walker en masse, with Lam’s Jungle as a center piece. Lorraine Hansbury Theater stages Genet’s The Blacks and Baraka’s The Dutchman, while San Francisco Opera adapts Aimé Césaire’s Caliban and the Fillmore has an Afro-punk retrospective. Afro-Surreal adaptations of Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972), Hurston’s Tell My Horse (1937), and Marvel’s Black Panther will grace the silver-screen.

These are the first steps in an illustrious and fantastic journey. When we finally reach those unknown shores, we will say, with blood beneath our nails and mud on our boots:

This is Afro-Surreal!

Madcap laughs

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER "I told you so" are the sweetest, shortest words in the lexicon of raving visionaries and maligned prophets, but Sir Richard Bishop is far too gentlemanly to resort to such snack-sized snarkery. Still, I’m thinking the world’s attentions and the brothers Bishop and their many projects might finally be harmonically, magically converging as I park myself on a thrift-store coach beside the charming Bishop in the airy, uncannily tidy West Oakland flat he shares with Mark Gergis (Porest, Neung Phak, Mono Pause).

After the 2007 death of Sun City Girl Charles Gocher, attentive underground music fans — who’ve revered the band for its determinedly DIY, cassette-culture cussedness — collectively blinked, rubbed their eyes, and wondered why they hadn’t paid closer attention to the endlessly productive Girls (even now issuing rarities via the new Napoleon and Josephine: Singles Volume 2 [Abduction]). Attention from figures like Bonnie "Prince" Billy (who told me that the Bishop Brothers’ Brothers Unconnected show at Slim’s was the best he saw last year) and labels such as Sub Pop, which talked to the Bishops about doing a best-of, soon followed.

Likewise Sublime Frequencies — the label Richard and Alan Bishop toiled on for years amid accusations that they were ripping off artists, failing to follow academic protocol, and simply not applying enough polish to their rough aesthetic — began to get its due as a groundbreaking disseminator of obscure sonic gems from such far-flung, seldom documented sites as Burma, Laos, and Western Sahara. Richard, who is less involved with the imprint these days, says they’ve become adept at tracking down and paying the performers. Today, the label gets the kind of praise it richly deserves, including a hefty feature by onetime naysayer Clive Bell in Wire. Sublime Frequencies is also producing the first European, non-Mideast tour by breathtaking Syrian folk-pop legend Omar Souleyman, whose Highway to Hassake (Sublime Frequencies, 2006) positively shreds with phase-shifted Arabic keyboard lines and frenetic beats.

Meanwhile Sir Richard is concentrating on his new Oakland life, bathed in the soft light and BART train roar streaming in from the ‘hood. "It seems like it’s alive here — whereas in Seattle it’s kind of dying and not just musically," he says happily. "This is not the best neighborhood, but when I go out the door, I’m alive, and I’m totally aware of what’s going on, and there’s just some cool creative energy to grasp onto."

Guitars and instruments are neatly clustered in an alcove across from a massive TV rigged to catch Mideast channels — perfectly tuned into Bishop’s current obsession with and studies into the music the half-Lebanese musician first heard his grandfather play on old cassettes. Here in Oakland — aided and abetted by the half-Iraqi Gergis and his collection of Middle Eastern MP3s, cassettes, VCDs, and vinyl — he’s been digging deeply into the music of Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt, a homecoming of sorts since Bishop started out studying Egyptology around the time of Sun City Girls’ early ’80s inception.

When Bishop started tracking his fine, even sublime new The Freak of Araby (Drag City) in Seattle, the switch from making a poppy electric-guitar album to one centered on Middle Eastern-related originals and covers was a natural one — a tribute to his latest fave, Egyptian guitarist Omar Khorshid. Bishop scrambled to learn new songs in six days, but he’s pleased with the result, which he’ll fill out live with tour mate Oaxacan as his backing combo. The disc "was very rushed, and I didn’t have time to hash out a lot of the ideas," he says. "There are people who are not going to like it, but that’s okay, it never bothered me before!" And with that, the jolly Sir Richard laughs. *

SIR RICHARD BISHOP AND HIS FREAK OF ARABY ENSEMBLE

Fri/22, 9:30 p.m., $10

Stork Club

2330 Telegraph, Oakl.

www.storkcluboakland.com

FITS AND WIGGLES

OBITS


Drive Like Jehu and Hot Snakes are in the Brooklyn post-punkers’ past, now gathering steam with Sub Pop singles and SXSW blather lather. Wed/20, 9 p.m., $10–$12. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com.

BLK JKS


Don’t fear the guitar solo, all ye Johannesburg black-rockers. Fri/22, 9 p.m., $12. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

NOMO


Out now with Invisible Cities (Ubiquity), the polyrhythmic Midwestern mind-blowers destroyed all reservations at their last BOH show. Fri/22, 10 p.m., $10–$12. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com.

LADY SOVEREIGN


The pint-sized electro-grime poobabe finds a Cure with "So Human." Sun/24, 9 p.m., $18. Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell, SF. rickshawstop.com

Don’t change a Thing

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andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I found this on Craigslist. Please, please stop this poor girl before it’s too late! She should hear from a professional that she’d be sacrificing nerve endings to a bunch of dickweeds who are suckers for media standards. And they won’t even like her more. God help us.

advice please re labia — w4m

so im hearing mixed reviews from guys about a female’s labia. do guys prefer the labia minora to be big or small? because tons of my friends are seeking to have them made smaller (like by a lot) so they look like playboy types etc. is that what guys want? what turns men on? and why? any advice on what to do here for me??

‘Nuff said. Thank you.

Love,

A Concerned Citizen

(Seriously.)

Dear Concerned:

Oh, okay. Maybe she’ll see this and maybe she won’t, but obviously this is a thing, or a Thing, that affects a lot of young women, just as she says. "Tons" of her friends, though? I realize she’s posting from L.A., where you have to expect this sort of thing, but the image of busloads of girls she went to high school with or worked with at Hot Topic after school lining up for surgical "correction" is unsettling even me.

So, what is going on here? I’ve long assumed (this has been going on a while now) that women used to go a lifetime without seeing their own (it takes a mirror and the will to look) or anyone else’s labia in great detail unless they had chosen to be midwives or something, in which case they were busy.

Men used to see a few sets, all too different from each other to even form much of a preconceived notion of what they "ought" to look like. Hardly anybody used to view an endless parade of stunt labia, chosen or surgically altered to conform to a (sub)cultural standard. But since the 1990s or so, that is exactly what we are doing. The porn industry standard is tiny, close-to-the-body, and unusually symmetrical, and if that is what young men are seeing before they even get a peek at the real thing, I suppose it’s to be expected that some may be shocked or dismayed by reality’s asymmetry and wild diversity of form, and in some cases indignant that they did not get exactly what they were in the mood for. It works with YouTube and iPods!

At least with pubic hair (a similar issue with young men being shocked on first encounter), one can go with the fashion flow and change with it as it (inevitably) changes. The same cannot be said for surgical rearrangements.

Now, how do I feel about young women permanently altering themselves to suit male fancy? I think it might be a trick question, actually, since I’m not entirely sure that that many guys care that much. What if they do, though — ought a young woman scramble to put herself through a painful, expensive, dangerous (all surgery is dangerous) procedure to please guys who probably still won’t be that into her if they’re not already? Of course not. Nothing is ever that simple, though.

Most of the Web sites put up by surgeons who do these procedures talk a great deal about painful horseback-riding or bicycling or inability to wear pants, all very real if somewhat rare complications of very long or loose labia. Then they give a little nod to being displeased with the size, period, and that’s the population we’re worrying about here. A reputable surgeon is going to accept or reject patients based not only on physical factors but emotional ones as well, especially patient expectations ("this surgery will make my labia smaller" versus "this surgery will make me stop hating myself"). And I hate to say this, Concerned Dude, but there are plenty of women (and men too, of course) whose self-esteem problems really can be cleared right up with the proper application of surgical instruments. I hate to see people who undergo surgery, itself morally neutral and a personal choice, treated like brainwashed sheeple who could not possibly have had a good enough reason to go under the knife.

As for the nerve endings, while I was appalled to see this statement — There is no physiological association for sensory pleasure with the labia — that function is served by the clitoris. The only sensation elicited from labia is pain upon tearing or stretching. — on one of the surgeon’s sites, since it is obviously wrong and very condescending in that surgeon-y way as well, I think we have to concede that the labia are not the major, or even a major, route to sexual ecstasy for most women. A half-inch or so less here or there is not going to make much difference. Not that that’s any reason to go chopping them off, though, sheesh! L.A. Girl, don’t listen to your girlfriends. You’re fine. None of you knows enough yet about what men want, or, much more important, about what you want yourselves. Don’t change a thing!

Love,

Andrea

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

From the shadows

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

The cheapest special effect in the world is having one actor fire a cap gun as another cries, "Ow, ya got me!" Ergo crime did pay, in spades, for Hollywood’s "Poverty Row" studios in the disillusioned years between World War II and Eisenhower-era prosperity. Subsequently dubbed "film noir," this period’s myriad violent melodramas were cranked out fast, exhibited briefly, then forgotten.

Yet recent years have left very few stones unturned in the quest for buried gems. Back when he was programming at the Roxie Theater, Elliot Lavine did much to foster their cult with retrospectives showcasing both the genre’s acknowledged classics and dustiest obscurities. When he left in 2003, noir fans wore mourning black — though were consoled by the start of SF’s annual Noir City festival that same year.

Still, watching lurid old B-flicks at the funky Roxie had an extra frisson lacking amid the Castro Theater’s grandiose respectability. Very good news, then, that Lavine is bringing bad guys (and duplicitous dames) back to Valencia Street with "I Wake Up Dreaming: The Haunted World of the B Film Noir." Its two weeks emphasize noir’s lesser-sung efforts from the cinematic sweatshops of Monogram, PRC, Eagle Lion, and other economy-class companies where production values were low and the hard-boiled sleaze factor was often cranked high to compensate. Many of the 29 features haven’t been seen theatrically for decades, and few are available on DVD.

On Poverty Row, young talent proved itself; mainstream luminaries landed there once their box-office clout had expired. Thus velvet-voiced 1930s glamazon Kay Francis briefly descended to Monogram after Warner Bros. dumped her. In Allotment Wives (1946) she’s a socialite coolly fronting a polygamy racket targeting returned GI’s, while enduring Mildred Pierce-like torments from an ingrate daughter whose every action screams "Mother, slap sense into me." (Oh yes she will.)

Another WB castoff, ingénue Joan Leslie, starred in that year’s unique Repeat Performance. She’s an actress-turned-murderess who gets her wish to live the last fateful year over again — only to watch as the same deadly events unfold, only worse. Having outgrown a famous-juvenile heyday, Bonita Granville was ready to play twins — one good, one a "cheap little chiseler" — embroiled in a murder mystery in The Guilty (1947). (And to think just months earlier she’d been crushing on Andy Hardy at MGM.)

These programmer factories promoted personalities who only rated bit parts at the majors. Where else could sneering, square-faced Lawrence Tierney’s bullying malevolence float entire movies like The Devil Thumbs a Ride (1947) and The Hoodlum (1951)? Some noirs risked having no familiar faces at all. The docudrama-style Canon City (1948) uses real locations and (some) real inmates to recreate a Colorado prison break — one thwarted, in part, by a gutsy, home-invaded gramma-with-hammer.

While most titles here are known only to the most fanatical buffs, two come with minor cult status already attached. The craziest among fabled screenwriter Ben Hecht’s odd few directorial efforts, Specter of the Rose (1946) is an amour very-fou tale set in the ballet world, its prima ballerina imperiled by a dancing partner-spouse who experiences homicidal ideations when not husking heavy mush stuff: "Hug me with your eyes." "I am." "Harder!"

Likewise linguistically challenged in the best possible way is 1955’s Shack Out on 101, in which a young Lee Marvin unforgettably limns "Slob," bus boy extraordinaire forever pawing unaroused waitress Terry Moore. Meanwhile, lurking Commies plot to overthrow the American Way of Life, off-ramp greasy spoons included. With its hilariously pissed-off dialogue no obstacle to red-blooded patriotic display, Shack is a Cold War trash classic so plutonium-hot it smokes.

I WAKE UP DREAMING: THE HAUNTED WORLD OF THE B FILM NOIR

May 14–28, $10

Roxie Theater, 3117 16th St., SF

(415)-863-1087, www.roxie.com

Reels and (two) wheels

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What’s a "bike movie?" If you immediately thought of Breaking Away (1979), two upcoming events suggest that your definition is li’l old-fashioned. First up: the Disposable Film Festival is hosting a "Bike-In" outdoor screening. Pedal over and enjoy a selection of films (with an emphasis on bike themes) culled from DFFs past; an after-party celebrates the release of the Guardian‘s Bike to Work issue.

San Franciscans Eric Slatkin and Carlton Evans founded the fest in 2007 to highlight so-called disposable films — "any film made on these alternative devices we’ve seen cropping up in the past few years: cell phones, web cams, point-and-shoot cameras, one-time use video cameras, pocket cams," Slatkin said. "They really democratize the idea of not just filmmaking, but of a filmmaker."

The spirit of the festival lends itself to a bike-in screening. "The core of the DFF is a real DIY aesthetic," Evans said. "I think there’s a similar kind of aesthetic in the biking community in San Francisco. I bike all over the city, and I’m always navigating the city in a way where I’m having to overcome obstacles. You just sort of take on these challenges and come up with your own solutions."

Brendt Barbur, director of the New York City-based Bicycle Film Festival (now in its ninth year, it travels to San Francisco this summer), would likely agree with this comparison. The BFF showcases experimental films, music videos, documentaries, and more, with tie-in art exhibits and live music shows, but it’s powered by the creative energy of everyday cyclists.

"Technology has given the bike movement a tool to express themselves," he said from BFF headquarters in NYC. "That DIY spirit runs through the festival. A lot of people — maybe they’re graphic designers or bike messengers — have something to say, and cameras are now accessible to a lot of folks. Those little gems they produce are, a lot of times, the most popular movies at the festival."

DISPOSABLE FILM FESTIVAL: BIKE-IN

Wed/13, 8 p.m., free

Outside the Good Hotel, 112 Seventh St., SF

www.disposablefilmfest.com

BICYCLE FILM FESTIVAL

July 14-19

www.bicyclefilmfestival.com

Totally tubular

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TV OR NOT TO BE "All around is magic, just open your eyes and see it," declares either Siegfried or Roy at the beginning of A Rich Tradition of Magic, a previously VHS-only compendium of visual abuse compiled by the inimitable Pinky of TV Carnage. The man isn’t kidding. The menu of Rich Tradition is formatted to look like a remote control — with the push of a button, your screen melts like the hallucinogenic kick-off of a bad acid trip, bringing visions of spray-on hair, senior citizen aerobics, white teens moonwalking to Kenny Loggins’ "Footloose," and grunge figure skating set to "Smells Like Teen Spirit." (Is this what drove Kurt Cobain to suicide?)

Not yet prone to gutwrenchingly funny juxtapositions (Say Anything boombox scene meets child with extreme vibrato singing "Lady in Red"; John Ritter meets Rosie O’Donnell’s horrible idea of someone with Down syndrome), this early installment in the TV Carnage library veers toward the straightforwardly unsettling and outright disturbing. We get aerial performers accidentally slicing each other in half in mid-air, an elephant stomping on people in a circus tent and then rampaging through the streets, and a split-second skull-glimpse of Heaven’s Gate suicide guru Marshall Applewhite. We get Real TV footage of a methed-out man holding his baby as hostage, dangling the boy Blanket-style from a second-story window and demanding that police deliver him some beer.

Kids are people, too. A Rich Tradition of Magic‘s hapless master of ceremonies Gary Coleman ricochets between performative childhood and sad adulthood. A public service safety announcement by a Diff’rent Strokes-era Coleman is cross-cut with an Entertainment Tonight report about him assaulting an annoying fan. Later, Coleman warns us all of the dangers of "Showoff-itis."

John Travolta lipsync footage is perhaps the chief disturbing link between A Rich Tradition of Magic and The Dinah Shore Portal to Hell, another DVD whose beyond-Dante depths I’m just beginning to plumb. The opening installment is a series of lipysnc and live musical performances on Shore’s television show. A strange assortment of performers including Jeff Bridges and NFL star Terry Bradshaw try to be musical with varying degrees of success. William Shatner repeatedly attempts to be dramatic and poetic. All the while, unexpected lesbian golf icon Shore looks on admiringly, our friendly guide to the diabolical stretches of celebrity narcissism, her reliable appearance taking on an increasingly absurdist quality. Later, we are treated to Roger Ebert repeatedly tongue-lashing Gene Siskel between takes while recording promo spots. Rumor has it that it’s the later chapters devoted to alcohol, cocaine, and LSD that truly deliver the TV horror. I’ll report on those another time, if I survive them. (Johnny Ray Huston)

www.tvcarnage.com

House of Horrors

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Thrills and chills and disco ball spills — that’s what the Horrors are made of? After Shih Tzu-banged frontman Faris Badwan brattily ripped the mirror ball off the ceiling of 330 Ritch a scant two years ago, who knew the U.K. band would show its true, formative, and fundamentally curious colors? The hues and cries streaming off the Horrors’ second album, Primary Colours (XL) read as a limpid, moonlit pop-sonnet to true-school proto-goth-rockers and morbidly fixated post-punk upsetters like Siouxsie and the Banshees and Killing Joke.

Just don’t flash that dance-floor orb in front of Badwan again. "Mmm, Faris never really liked mirror balls," mumbles guitarist Joshua Third, né Hayward. It’s frozen in Boston, where the group is performing that night, and the chill that drops momentarily over the conversation is brief yet bracing. "Luckily we haven’t played anywhere with a mirror ball for ages."

Despite the menace — or maybe because of it — the goth-punk movement has always seemed fundamentally conservative. But the Horrors don’t peddle the shockabilly moves so common among goth-identified SoCalis. In contrast to the easy-sleazy comic-book corn of today’s prominent goth-punk purveyors — pass the Horrorpops and just keep walking — the group now draws from exploratory originators Joy Division and ornery rabble-rousers the Birthday Party. Primary Colours boasts driving tunes carved from silvery synth textures ("Three Decades") and Jesus and Mary Chain-like buzz-saw pop that thumps with creative negativity ("Who Can Say").

The group capers on the same frosty darkling plain as Interpol, judging from tunes like the Velvet-y, string-strewn "I Only Think of You," which may turn off those with a low tolerance for pop pomposity. Still, the opening track, "Mirror’s Image," sets the tone for pleasing surprise with its initial lush, plangent soundscape — more akin to Lindstrøm than Sisters of Mercy — before gently plunging into spiraling reverb, effects-gristled guitar, and a nodding keyboard fragment that will have some recalling Echo and the Bunnymen and others Kraftwerk.

Third says Primary Colours was "the first chance we had as a band to shut ourselves away and work on the record on our own. We’d retreat into a rehearsal space and get completely lost in it. Yeah, I think that really comes through."

The Horrors titled the first song they ever wrote "Sheena is a Parasite," so yes, this is throwback rock, It gazes directly into the eyes of the more serious Anglo art-rock makers of the ’80s with self-conscious affection, especially on haunted, haunting songs such as "Do You Remember." And what’s wrong with that?

"We actually made a record that’s a complete trip, from start to finish — it takes you through different moods," Third explains. "Also, you can listen to it on repeat, because the last track plays into the first track. I’ve always been quite into the idea because I like to sit down and listen to things over and over again." It’s a quality he misses in many new albums. "Yeah, partly the Internet’s to blame. Partly labels are to blame. Partly bands are to blame — because they don’t seem to care anymore," he says, capping the remark with a small grim chuckle.

In the Horrors’ hands — the ensemble coproduced along with longtime collaborator Craig Silvey, Portishead’s Geoff Barrow, and video artist Chris Cunningham — Primary Colours sounds astonishingly unmusty, stirring with tangible signs of life. The group has managed to find a pulse — while maturing into, yikes, artists. "We were all 19 when we wrote the first record — now we’re in our early twenties!" Third exclaims. "I think it’s the typical growing-up … malarkey." *

THE HORRORS

With the Kills

Tues/19, 8 p.m., $22.50

Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

www.livenation.com

————

MORE LIVE:

COMEDIANS OF ROCK II

Musical funny folk Tara Jepsen of Lesbians, Chris Portfolio of Hank IV, and Matt Hartman of Sic Alps pit wits and carve out snarfs at this comedy two-fer. Wed/13, 9 p.m., free. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

BLACK JOE LEWIS AND THE HONEYBEARS

And what a long, sweet name it is: the Austin, Texas, soul-stirrers cook up hot ones from Tell ‘Em What Your Name Is! (Lost Highway). Sat/16, 9 p.m. $17. Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF. www.slims-sf.com

JOHN VANDERSLICE

The Tiny Telephone operator’s new Romanian Names (Dead Oceans) rolls out Moog moods and Byzantine yarns. Mon/18, 6 p.m., free. Amoeba Music, 1855 Haight, SF. www.amoeba.com. Tues/19, 7:30 p.m., $16. Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell, SF. www.rickshawstop.com

The world stage

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

Recently I was lucky enough to land at an international theater festival in Wroclaw, Poland, jostling elbows with a transnational mix of theater folk on the occasion of the 13th annual European Theatre Prize, this year awarded to the great Polish director Krystian Lupa. It was an eye-opening glimpse at some awesome theatrical muscle rarely if ever seen in the Bay Area, or even the United States. Globally-renowned powerhouses like Italy’s Pippo Delbono and Belgium’s Guy Cassiers were there with some extraordinary work, not to mention that of Lupa, whose utterly brilliant and plotless eight-hour fantasia on Andy Warhol’s Factory, Factory 2, proved an absolute highlight of my theatergoing career thus far.

While dreaming of the day Factory 2 takes its local bow, I can only appreciate all the more what places like UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall or San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts do in bringing us news of the theatrical world — or news of the world, theatrically. Another local presenter of exceptional international work has been the San Francisco International Arts Festival, whose sixth season begins this week. SFIAF and executive director Andrew Wood have increasingly made world theater a vital part of the fest’s eclectic performance mix. This year is no exception, with three must-sees in the lineup.

First, South Korea’s Cho-In Theatre makes its U.S. debut with The Angel and the Woodcutter, an original physical theater piece reutf8g the Korean folk tale in a wordless, poetical drama as uncompromising as it is unexpected. Then, Russia’s famed, immensely creative performance ensemble, the Akhe Group — proponents of what they call "Russian Engineering Theatre" and favorites at SFIAF in 2005, where they presented White Cabin — return with the U.S. premiere of Gobo.Digital Glossary, a wild and captivating conglomeration of video projections, animation, ambient music, lasers, clowning, and trompe l’oeil.

Also receiving its Bay Area premiere is Beyond the Mirror, an unprecedented collaboration between New York’s Bond Street Theatre and Afghanistan’s Exile Theatre. The description of this first American-Afghani theatrical outing might ring a bell: Mirror had been slated to open Brava’s theatrical season in fall 2008, when the U.S. government’s inexplicable delays in processing visas for the Afghan performers forced its last-minute cancellation. That disappointment will happily be rectified by SFIAF when Mirror opens at Cowell Theater. (A second San Francisco appearance follows as part of foolsFURY’s Fury Factory festival in June.)

The two companies began crafting the play after meeting by chance in 2002 among the refugee camps outside Peshawar in northern Pakistan, where the activist, physical-theater–based Bond Street went after 9/11 to develop links to the Afghan people and work with a German NGO building schools in the devastated country. Exile, meanwhile, had formed as a group of refugee playwrights, actors, and other performance professionals committed to keeping Afghan arts alive and reflecting the concerns of the Afghani population living as second-class citizens in Pakistan.

Never more timely, the play ranges over the last three decades of Afghanistan’s history, using an expressive mélange of theatrical forms and techniques — including oral history, mythology, live music, traditional dance, drama, acrobatics, puppetry, and film — to tell a story of war and hope at the cusp of yet another turbulent chapter in the country’s unfolding story. Notably, the eight-member half-American, half-Afghani cast includes Afghanistan’s most famous actress, Anisa Wahab, who grew up in happier times on camera as a child star and has continued to act despite its still dangerous implications for women.

Communicating partly with some mutual English, and largely in terms of both distinct and shared physical vocabularies, the artists developed what became Mirror in a nonlinear, highly abstract way, according to Bond Street artistic director Joanna Sherman, who codirected it with Exile’s Mahmoud Shah Salimi. That in no way diminishes its rootedness or poignancy.

"We went around the countryside and interviewed different people, and videotaped them as they would allow," Sherman explained by phone from New York. "Our challenge was to portray these terrible stories in a way that was not gruesome or impossible to watch. We used our physical techniques in a way that it would be watchable and compelling but not exactly ‘realistic.’"

Since Mirror‘s premiere at the second Kabul Theatre Festival in 2005, much has happened in the U.S. and Afghanistan, prompting a small but significant revision, a new final scene, according to Sherman. "We do leave on a thought of hope," she stressed. "But [we’re] doing some interviewing again and getting some additional video. We’ll see what happens."

SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL

May 20-31, various venues

www.sfiaf.org

Beyond weird

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Tobacco doesn’t like the Beatles, or the Who. And Pink Floyd is "okay." This makes sense for the man whose prolific mind fuels Black Moth Super Rainbow. The Pittsburgh analog synth sorcerers specialize in prismatic albums that swing seamlessly between sunlit repose and hallucinatory freak-outs. They use an array of vintage beat makers, keyboards, and guitars. Those who pin BMSR’s mercurial sound with the "psychedelia" label aren’t peering deep enough into the looking glass.

"Maybe subconsciously all that garbage is in there and I don’t realize it," Tobacco consents. "I definitely don’t try to make it sound like Pink Floyd or the Beatles, but maybe that stuff’s just stuck in my head and I just can’t get it out."

He’s happier to cite the Beastie Boys’ 1992 mutative alt-rap disc Check Your Head (Capitol) as an influence, one that’s especially evident on his 2008 solo effort Fucked Up Friends (Anticon). He also credits one of the Beasties’ hip-hop cohorts: "I hated music when I was a kid. The first song I ever liked was "Just a Friend" by Biz Markie."

From Biz Markie to prog rock, nothing about BMSR’s sound is straightforward. The group cultivates a mystique that blends the anachronistic with the futuristic. Some surrealistic soundscapes are steeped in bongwater, while others teeter on the glittery edge of acid-trip oblivion. The resulting deconstructed melodies and beats elude most genre epithets. With Eating Us (Graveface) about to drop on May 26, Tobacco, né Tom Fec, is hoping that people will finally stop calling BMSR weird.

"I’ve never thought an album like [2007’s] Dandelion Gum (Graveface) was weird, but a lot of people did, even people who liked it," says Tobacco. Not so with Eating Us: "Everyone’s either understanding what I was going for or they’re just repeating what we’re telling them,"

Tobacco wrote and recorded Eating Us on his own, before enlisting the help of producer David Fridmann, who he says "just sort of pull(s) the gunk out of" BMSR’s sound. In the process, the wonderland of sonic bits and pieces found on albums such as 2003’s Falling Through A Field (Graveface) gives way to an expansive landscape of heady incantations for the electronic age.

If Dandelion Gum saw Black Moth spreading its wings for flight, Eating Us is the sound of the band going airborne. Drums replace beat machines. Layered dream-dipped hums and purrs play hand-in-hand the spooky minor-key trills that are one of the band’s signatures. The melodies are more cogent but no less rainbow-hued. Tobacco’s Vocoder-drenched voice is inhumanly-human on tracks such as the regal "Iron Lemonade."

For bands that continue to put out albums the traditional way, these are trying times. "When I was one of those young whippersnappers in high school, I used to read magazines and that’s how I found out about stuff," Tobacco says when asked about the shifting frameworks for music and music writing. "Now it’s all blogging, [and] no one would have heard of us without it.

"What sucks is that our album leaked a month ago and everyone started reviewing it," he continues. "I’ve been reading things by people who weren’t even done listening to it — they were reviewing as they were listening. That just changes perceptions. It’s not about the album anymore, it’s about the hype that leads up it. When I was a kid, it was all about finding the album when it came out — that’s when its life began. Now, once the album comes out, it’s dead. Who knows, May 26 may be the last time you hear about [Eating Us]."

That isn’t likely. BMSR’s albums are like musical toys, catering to nostalgists who still seek out music in its physical form. Their 2008 EP Drippers (Graveface) was packaged with five scratch-and-sniff scents, and Eating Us includes a 16-page booklet that can be refolded to create different images. Oh, and the cover art has hair.

The best bands constantly change, metamorphosing against sameness, labels, and the death of ideas. BMSR continues to evolve from the dimmest corners of the mind into transcendent swaths of weirdo-pop sensibility. It’s almost like the Beatles, if they got behind synthesizers, went underground, and never emerged from 1967. Almost.

Pagan fest

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Pre-Christian religion is all the rage in metal these days, and the second of two high-profile "Pagan" tours is rolling into town, along with Thor, Hecate, and various henges, stony or otherwise. Pagan Fest 2009 is headlined by the Finnish folk-metal outfit Korpiklaani, a group that puts the polka back into heavy music’s thrashing "polka beats," levying a relentless kick-snare attack with traditional Finnish melodies. Unlike many of their folk-metal brethren, the band was folk first and metal second, making the transition from obscure bar band to globe-trotting headbanger coalition by adding distorted guitars to its ancient hoedowns.

Irish black metal outfit Primordial is in direct support, mixing orthodox razor-wire riffing with jaunty, Emerald-isle rhythms and an epic feel. Finns Moonsorrow hew similar sounds, coupling frostbitten guitars to the thematic roots in Finnish folklore that give them their pagan bona fides.

Pirates are apparently honorary pagans these days: Alestorm played the Pagan Knights tour back in March, and New Jersey buccaneer-thrashers Swashbuckle round out the Fest bill with some plundering aplomb. Versed in all the freebooting lingo and boasting a number of mizzenmast-ready guitar licks, the trio is readying a new album that is sure to go triple-putf8um on the Spanish Main.

Montreal’s Blackguard is the odd band out — its tinkling keyboards occasionally flirt with folky scales, but they’ve also got a decidedly post-pagan symphonic thing going on. Thankfully, they like drinking stuff out of old-timey mugs, so they’ll fit right in with everyone else. So will anyone who likes rock-worship, of either kind. Praise Odin!

PAGAN FEST 2009

With Korpiklaani, Primordial, Moonsorrow, Swashbuckle and Blackguard

Sat/16, 6 p.m., $30

DNA Lounge

375 11th St., SF

(415) 626-1409

www.dnalounge.com

Aerosol melodies

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marke@sfbg.com

Ah, Le Poisson Rouge — how I yearn for you. The edgy New York City club and performance space has become a golden nexus for the current rich collision of the indie, electronic, and contemporary classical worlds. Zing go the avant-garde, filter-bent strings in the Bay often enough, of course, especially through the out-there provenance of sfSound (www.sfsound.org), the biannual Soundwave Series (www.projectsoundwave.com), and Berkeley’s Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (cnmat.berkeley.edu). But it took last August’s sold out Herbst Theater one-off by Wordless Music, the Poisson-based org that brings big indie names to the new music stage, to finally hold SF’s flannel-clad fixie pixie population enraptured by the freakier side of symphonica, with the white-noise-drenched West Coast premiere of “Popcorn Superhet Receiver” by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood and soul-loosening pieces by Bay boys Fred Frith (“Save As”) and Mason Bates (“Icarian Rhapsody”).

It’s been a massive year for 32-year-old Virginia native Bates, who told me over the phone that he moved from NYC to North Oakland four years ago because he “wanted a house and a short commute to a great city.” In March the Julliard grad debuted a six-movement work, Sirens, commissioned by local vocal greats Chanticleer, right after he wrapped up a three-season young-composer-in-residence program with the California Symphony. Perhaps his biggest break came last month, when the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, assembled via audition vids and led by San Francisco Symphony conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, made its debut at Carnegie Hall, playing a portion of Bates’ latest orchestral suite, The B-Sides. Like many other professional cynics, I had my nails sharpened and painted Jungle Red for this dreadful-seeming Internet marketing buzz-blast, but the inclusion of Bates’ forward-thinking work helped rescue the affair from maudlin crowd-pleasing.

Speaking of gimmicks, here’s what many perceive as Bates’: he plays a laptop onstage with the orchestra. Good heavens! Mere gimmickry’s a sad assumption — sure enough, his YouTube gig has reignited that tired technology vs. “true” classical debate that has periodically raged ever since the theremin took the Paris Opera stage in 1927. But Bates, who has toured clubs in his DJ Masonic guise for years, rises above all that with a deep knowledge of dance music history, which itself claims a long and fruitful entanglement with contemporary classical, and a mission of sonic integration.

“The laptop is a piece of the enterprise, a means of augmenting the texture of an orchestral arrangement and adding a richness that evokes new sonic landscapes,” says Bates, who considers his keyboard a “specialized extension of the percussion family.” As for snap judgments about technology, “it actually goes both ways,” he says. “Of course, some traditional symphony-goers can’t really go there. But it’s important for people from the club world to know that I’m not just orchestrating techno” — like the Balanescu Quartet’s version of Kraftwerk or the Williams Fairey Brass Band’s take on acid house. “I’m not Richie Hawtin for woodwinds and booming tubas. I’m coming from a more ambient, electronica place — I’m always aware that I’m playing off something while delving into unique textures and expanded sonari.”

The B-Sides, which will have its full debut for three nights with the San Francisco Symphony at Davies Symphony Hall, consists of five movements inspired by archetypal ambient moods — from the buzzing insects and tropical evocations of “Aerosol Melody Hanalei” to astronautical voice transmissions and blankets of static in “Gemini and the Solar Winds.” “Wharehouse Medicine,” which the YouTube Symphony debuted, is like a nifty bit of Leonard Bernstein pumped up with chattering clicks and back-ear bass that energetically summons up the chillout rooms of yore. If it seems odd that Bates references vinyl in his title, while combining laptop rumination and live orchestration, don’t sweat it. “I was thinking back to the experimental freedom that B-sides once afforded to groups like Pink Floyd — surgical strikes into trippy terrain.”

Bates will also be bringing his outstanding Mercury Soul project (www.mercurysoul.org), conceived with conductor Benjamin Shwartz and visual artist Anne Patterson, to Davies after the May 22 symphony performance and to Mezzanine (www.mezzaninesf.com) on May 28. Mercury Soul “is almost a negative image of what I do with an orchestra,” Bates says, “where I DJ and we create a club atmosphere interspersed with live performances of contemporary works by the likes of Steve Reich and John Luther Adams.”

“Look, I know a laptop is never going to be as expressive as a fiddle,” Bates says, a twang of his Virginian upbringing coming through. “And a CD installation pack may never rival the power of a written score. But if I can expand and screw around with orchestral space that way, then it definitely meets my intent.”

THE B-SIDES

With the San Francisco Symphony

Wed/20, Fri/22, and Sat/23

8 p.m., $35–$130

Davies Symphony Hall

201 Van Ness

(415) 552-8000

www.sfsymphony.org

Lizz Roman and Dancers

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PREVIEW The last time we saw Lizz Roman, her dancers were parading on Project Artaud Theater’s catwalk, climbing its scaffolding, and dangling from its imposing industrial crane (relics from the time the place buzzed as a canning factory). Now, three years later, she has taken over another popular performance venue, Dance Mission Theater. This time she doesn’t restrict herself to the interior; At Play starts outside at the corner of Mission and 24th streets, then moves upstairs into the various areas that most of us consider to be adjuncts to the main theater. It’s one of the peculiarities of Bay Area dance that so many choreographers are drawn to creating site-specific installations. Some work with an existing space, others add their own touches. Roman belongs to the former. I can’t help but think that — DMT’s architectural properties aside — Roman was attracted by its spirit as a home to so many artists and dance students. Roman is not the first to use DMT; Keith Hennessy has orated from its fire escape, and Jo Kreiter has dangled from its parapet. Joining longtime Roman dancers Sonya Smith and James Soria are Tara Fagan, Brian Fisher, and Kelly Kemp. Most encouragingly, Roman is again working with cellist Alex Kelly and DJ-percussionist Clyde Sheets. They worked magic at Artaud, and I’ll bet that they’ll do it again in the heart of the Mission.

LIZZ ROMAN AND DANCERS Through May 24. Fri-Sun, 8 and 9:30 p.m., $20. Dance Mission Theater, 3316 24th St, SF. (415) 273-4633. www.brownpapertickets.com

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