Arts & Culture

Arts & Culture

SFIFF: 52 pick-up

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cheryl@sfbg.com

In early April, a long-range rocket blasted off from deepest, darkest North Korea; according to a Reuters.com news report, the communist country claimed that its satellite was "launched into orbit and [is now] circling the Earth transmitting revolutionary songs." Um, yeah. Most folks say the rocket failed — and that its real purpose was to test North Korea’s dropping-warheads-on-our-enemies capabilities. Recent rumors of ill health aside, North Korea’s Kim Jong-il appeared shortly after the incident to mark his re-election as the chairman of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s National Defense Commission.

As scary as it is to imagine the pompadored, isolationist "Great Leader" with his mitts on nukes, to focus on North Korea’s threat to the outside world takes away from the atrocities committed within its borders, against its own citizens. As NC Heikin’s quietly terrifying Kimjongilia reveals, the dictator’s country is a cruel, brutal place. The doc features interviews with North Korean refugees whose tales of escape are as harrowing as their recollections of life back home — a place where simply listening to music from a capitalist country or dropping a newspaper with a photograph of Kim on the floor were infractions that could mean imprisonment for three generations of a single family. Starvation, torture, and constant fear factor into nearly every story; families are separated, and even those who escape struggle, such as a woman whose "freedom" in China translated into years of sex slavery. For these people, WMDs are the least of their concerns.

Peering beyond what’s obvious is a theme at the 52nd San Francisco International Film Festival, with a slate that’s particularly doc-heavy. For every gesture that’s a little debatable (you can spin that Francis Ford Coppola directing award however you want, but Apocalypse Now came out in 1979, and 2007’s Youth Without Youth sucked), there are many that deserves high praise: groundbreaking local documentarian Lourdes Portillo receiving the Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award, for example. Read on for the Guardian‘s coverage of this year’s fest, and keep watching the skies.

KIMJONGILIA

May 3, 3:30 p.m.; May 6, 3:15 p.m., Sundance Kabuki

May 4, 6:30 p.m., PFA


THE 52ND SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL runs April 23–May 7. Main venues are the Sundance Kabuki, 1881 Post, SF; Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk; and Clay, 2261 Fillmore, SF. Satellite venues are Premier Theater, Letterman Digital Arts Center, Bldg. B, One Letterman Drive, Presidio, SF; and Roxie, 3117 16th St, SF. Tickets (most shows $12.50; special programs vary) and additional information at www.sffs.org.

More: Reviews, interviews, and more SFIFF 52 coverage on the Pixel Vision blog as the festival unfolds.

First Person Magazine benefit party featuring Gudrun Gut

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PREVIEW Now two years old, I Put A Record On (Monika Enterprise, 2007) is a record worth lingering over. In addition to being the first solo release from Berlin-based musical gadabout Gudrun Gut, it’s remarkable for how unhurried Gut was in getting around to it: she’s been appearing on recordings and taking part in bands, including a very early incarnation of industrial pioneers Einstürzende Neubauten, for more than 25 years. Her intervening projects give her the aura of a post-punk Zelig: the all-female punk band Malaria! formed in 1981, toured with the Birthday Party, put out records on Belgian boutique label Les Disques du Crepuscule, and performed with Nina Hagen at Studio 54. That the group’s "Kaltes Klares Wasser" would later be covered by Chicks on Speed was a foregone conclusion.

The synthy Matador followed Malaria!’s collapse, but Gut’s ear eventually led her, like any good punk, to techno. With typical great timing too: Berlin had just undergone a techno surge, spearheaded by local duo and label Basic Channel. Abandoning the constraints of playing in a rock-derived idiom in favor of more uncharted territory, Gut also had the good fortune to run across Thomas Fehlmann, a producer with post-punk roots who had recently collaborated with Alex Paterson’s downtempo pace-setters the Orb. The two founded Ocean Club, producing a weekly genre-stomping radio show as well as parties that paired up the likes of experimental techno producer Thomas Brinkmann and splay-shirted southern gothic aficionado Nick Cave.

None of this is new information, yet all of it is useful in figuring out how something like I Put A Record On came to be. It’s beguiling, though free of big emotions — a left-field album that functions as an homage to the hypnotic state that arrives when you’re sucked into your favorite records. The best indication of its intentions is provided by the sole cover, of Smog’s "Rock Bottom Riser." Gut’s multitracked delivery, over a pistoning and downtrodden bass drum, is affectless enough to make Bill Callahan’s stoic delivery on the original seem fraught. But by the end, she’s wracked by giggles, as flecks of color appear like dried spittle around the monochrome production’s edges. Gut is not an innovator: both she and Callahan are committed to the old, inexhaustible pleasure of listening, regardless of genre. And this is exactly what allows them to give back to their respective genres, if we care to name them, some missing essence.

FIRST PERSON MAGAZINE BENEFIT PARTY FEATURING GUDRUN GUT with Thomas Fehlmann, Grecco Guggenheit, and Nate Boyce. Fri/24, 10 p.m., $10-$15. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. (415) 625-8880. www.firstpersonmag.com/events.htm

NorCal nuggets

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Now playing: Locals Only II (see part one here). You can’t stop it from happening, even if you crumble to the ground like Keanu, fire your pistol in the air, and scream, "Nooo!" NorCal bands gotta make some noise, Bay-bies.

Hey, what gives? The Fresh and Onlys promised to release their self-titled Castle Face debut in May, yet last week I spied the CD, prominently displayed, twinkling brightly on an Amoeba Music endcap. Could it be an inside job, being that Fresh and Onlys Tim Cohen and Shayde Sartin have passed through the store’s payroll? Whatev, Kev, be happy it’s there, polishing off rough gems like "Endless Love": "Why don’t we live forever /inside this little mirror /so that your eyes and my nose /and your ears and my mouth /and your chin and my beard /they all fit together? / Na-na-na-na-na-na-na!"

Just as you turn to dismiss "Endless Love" as another joke song — albeit one tuned to a staticky channel of surf and ’60s-style garage rock by way of Flying Nun novitiates and Jonathan Richman’s post-punk pop naifs — the group unleashes a mini-nugget of "A Man Needs a Maid" wisdom: "Don’t you know you gotta give yourself / to get somebody else." Happily tucked into an echo chamber of passion-first rock ‘n’ roll, and armed against the apocalypse with a here-to-help sincerity that could stand the test of time ("The Mind Is Happy." "Feelings in My Heart"), the Fresh and Onlys pull off the seemingly impossible: discovering a clunky sweetness and lo-fi grace in a very singular rock primitivo.

"Snap back like a bungee chord — Lord!" Watch yourself, Raw Deluxe. The Bay Area group’s flow is as satisfyingly smooth and substantive as classic Del tha Funkee Homosapien times three on "Can You Spend It," off its new Raw Communication (Reel Deal). MCs Lexxx Luthor and Mic Blake of Alphabet Soup and Soulati of Felonious are unstoppable and at the top of a mix that showcases the sheer delight of word-slingers riding the exact same wavelength. There’s nothing particularly uncooked about the smokily intoxicating old-school jazz-funk gumbo on Raw Deluxe’s third long-player: keyboardist Matt Fleming, saxophonist Tony Jurado, bassist Christ Arenas, and drummer Chris Spano are on point on "Something to Build Upon" — a celebration of the band’s actual music-making process — which would chart in a better world and provide the foundation for a more maximalist hip-hop.

On the post-rock-cum-math side of the spectrum is the far-too-scarce From Monuments to Masses, now SF-NYC bicoastal and back with a new mostly instrumental full-length, On Little Known Frequencies (Dim Mak), possibly the most powerful recording yet by Francis Choung, Matthew Solberg, and Sergio Robledo-Maderazo. Mars Volta and Minus the Bear — MTB keyboardist Matt Bayles coproduced, engineered, and mixed the disc — are obvious referents. though neither band finds its voice via fragments of sampled dialogue like FMTM does, as if tapping directly into the culture’s transmissions. Almost monochromatic in its clear-eyed devotion to alt-rock propulsion, FMTM’s music has the closed-circle urgency and internal fury of a sonic dialectic. Are these frequencies to be plumbed with increased frequency?

THE FRESH AND ONLYS

Thurs/23, 10 p.m., $5

Knockout

3223 Mission, SF

www.theknockoutsf.com

RAW DELUXE

Fri/24, 10 p.m., $10

Club Six

60 Sixth St., SF

www.clubsix1.com

————
UPCOMING:

FLIPPER

The punk legends are turning over a new leaf in honor of their new 4 Men With Beards vinyl reissues, including 1982’s Generic Flipper. The battle continues with Flipper’s new Love/Fight albums on May 19. Fri/24, 6 p.m., free. Amoeba, 2455 Telegraph, Berkeley. www.amoeba.com. Also Sat/25, 9 pm $10. El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF. www.elriosf.com

AUTOLUX

The L.A. combo veers toward the dark, detuned, and deliciously distorted, judging from the music released from its long-awaited, forthcoming second disc, Transit Transit. With Odawas and Mini Mansions. Sat/25, 9 p.m., $18. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. www.gamh.com

THE GROUCH AND ELIGH

Is three the magic number for the West Coast indie MCs? Check for lofty concepts on the new Say G&E (Legendary). With Exile and DJ Day and Afro Classics. Sat/25, 9 p.m., $18. Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF. www.slims-sf.com. Also Mon/27, 6 p.m., free. Amoeba, 1855 Haight, SF. www.amoeba.com

Grass Widow

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PREVIEW Grass Widow’s harmonious post-punk tension is fostered below SF street level, in a former meat locker containing, among other things, a very charming quilt with the band’s name patched into it. In anticipation of an impending record release, I met there with bass player Hannah Lew and drummer Lillian Maring (guitarist and trumpet player Raven Mahon was overseas), who, although living far apart — Maring is on the East Coast at present — were clearly very happy to be together.

"It’s not like there are any dispensable characters," explains Lew. After the dissolution of Shitstorm, Lew’s former band with Mahon, the two started playing together in 2007 with Maring, who was in the city for the summer from Washington state. Though Maring went back up north for a bit, she says she quickly returned and the trio "got really serious" — serious enough to tour the U.S. the following summer after cranking out a wonderful demo CD-R/ cassette that makes up most of their upcoming self-titled 12-inch on the local Make a Mess label.

Grass Widow artfully molds anxiety, love, and sturdy musicianship into a mesmerizing shape — a sound in which haunted beauty is tempered alternately by pain and, as Lew puts it, "the cathartic experience of playing the song itself." The group’s three-part harmonies are intricate, with an incidental, spoken quality. Imagine a darker shade of the Raincoats, with minimal, vocal harmony-centric arrangements — really terrific stuff.

A seven-inch EP is projected for summer release through Cape Shok, and Grass Widow has been making short films, some of which will be screened at the record release show. "So much of it is about survival and friendship that we’re not gonna quit," Maring said. "It’s a reason to live."

GRASS WIDOW With Ty Segall. Thurs/23, 8 p.m., $5. Artists’ Television Access, 992 Valencia, SF. (415) 864-3890. www.atasite.org>.

Film Festival 52

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Innovative docs, fractured fairy tales, Disney ditties, dinosaurs, and at least one scene-stealing camel highlight the Fest’s fifty-second year. Our critics take a peek at some of the more buzz-worthy entries below.

THE 52ND SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL runs April 23–May 7. Main venues are the Sundance Kabuki, 1881 Post, SF; Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk; and Clay, 2261 Fillmore, SF. Satellite venues are Premier Theater, Letterman Digital Arts Center, Bldg. B, One Letterman Drive, Presidio, SF; and Roxie, 3117 16th St, SF. Tickets (most shows $12.50; special programs vary) and additional information at www.sffs.org.

>>52 pick-up
SFIFF rides again, with a quietly terrifying North Korea doc
By Cheryl Eddy

>>In the realms of the real
Sacred Places and Z32 — SFIFF’s unconventional docs
By Max Goldberg

>>Unhappily ever after
The film fest’s fractured, freaky, and feminist fantasies
By Kimberly Chun

>>Oaktown fugue
Everything Strange and New: stillness interrupted
Lynn Rapoport

>>Tune Boom
SFIFF’s catchy ditties and dino-riffs
By Dennis Harvey

>>Shots in the dark
Our short, sharp takes on other SFIFF flicks

Metal militia

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Guitar Hero: Metallica

(Neversoft, Xbox 360, PS3; Budcat Creations, Wii, PS2)

GAMER Metallica were recently inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which they surely had in mind while writing their 1983 debut album Kill ‘Em All (Megaforce). Back in the spotlight and riding high on the release of 2008’s Death Magnetic (Warner Bros), which many have optimistically heralded as a return to form, the Bay Area’s most famous thrash band returned to store shelves this spring with Guitar Hero: Metallica. The latest in a burgeoning string of rock ‘n’ roll rhythm titles, the game is the second to focus on an individual artist, following on the heels of Guitar Hero: Aerosmith but predating the upcoming Beatles collaboration with Guitar Hero competitors Rock Band.

The game’s catalog spans 49 songs, incorporating 28 Metallica master recordings from all phases of their career, in addition to 21 hand-picked songs by band-approved rockers like King Diamond and Kyuss. Its now-familiar format enables four people to get together on drums, bass, guitar, and vocals, following candy-colored prompts onscreen to crank out high-voltage facsimiles of classics like "Hit the Lights" and "Master of Puppets."

The band appears in the game as motion-captured metal titans, and Neversoft’s animators render them right down to the mole on Kirk Hammett’s face. Songs are performed in the venues of Metallica lore, including their legendary 1991 concert at Moscow’s Tushino Airfield, where a free show drew a million-odd frenzied Muscovite headbangers. A profusion of pyro onscreen does make you worry a little bit for the health of pixelated James Hetfield.

The intricate, speedy compositions are not for the faint of heart. And while beginners are afforded introductory difficulties to hone their skills, Guitar Hero vets will be surprised by the challenges they face, including double kick pedal support for the drumset. Stumbling blocks aside, Metallica’s music is rife with satisfying riffs, and recreating Lars Ulrich’s heavy-handed drum fills or the bands rapid-fire thrash is laden with lots of ineffable plastic-instrument delight.

If you like metal, and Guitar Hero, the game is a must buy. If you’re into the former, but not the latter, you might be surprised at the way the deceptively simple transcription enables a deeper enjoyment of the music. Conversely, if your fingers are already toughened by those five magical buttons but you don’t care for Metallica, you might just change your tune once you’ve nailed the guitar solo in "Orion." If you don’t like either, why didn’t you just skip to the next page?

Fit to print?

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

Not long ago, before newspapers themselves were an endangered species, survival among journalists at the country’s leading papers was already a Darwinian proposition, especially for people of color. As playwright Tracey Scott Wilson limns the terrain in The Story, you need only add class, gender, and race to the equation to make things get very dicey—and very complicated—very fast.

Enter Yvonne Robinson (a sharp and charming Ryan Nicole Peters), an ambitious rookie reporter just hired to the local African American community section of a big Washington paper, a section hard-won by editor Pat (Holily Knox) and reporter Neil (Dwight Huntsman) as a corrective to the flagrantly racist coverage of the Metro section. But bright, highly educated Yvonne sees the position as stepping-stone to bigger things, beginning with the Metro section — plans she discusses with her secret lover, the white editor of the Metro department (Craig Marker), himself nervously aware of the minefield of racial politics around them. Frustrated by Pat’s dull assignments, Yvonne finally hits on a career-making feature when she discovers and interviews the culprit in an infamous ongoing case involving a murdered white schoolteacher in the black ghetto. Yvonne’s confessor: a bright, highly educated young girl gang member (Kathryn Tell). Yvonne’s refusal to betray her sources, however, and other details surfacing in the wake of her sensational story, soon throw her credibility in doubt, enraging colleagues and dividing the newsroom as the walls close in.

If the plot sounds far-fetched, it’s actually not far from real events. The Story draws on the Janet Cooke scandal of the early 1980s — Cooke, a young African American reporter at The Washington Post, won a Pulitzer Prize for a heart-rending 1980 feature on a heroin-addicted inner city child whom she later admitted was made up. Wilson makes recent history speak with dramatic and intellectual depth to a set of issues surrounding the everyday, real-world contexts of career, ambition, and racial perceptions and self-perceptions in American society.

Director Margo Hall’s smart and swift West Coast premiere, a coproduction between SF Playhouse and the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, channels well the play’s fleet dialogue and triple-latte energy — perhaps as much an homage to the representation of newspapers in popular culture as an accurate setting of the action at a big-city newspaper. Framed by Lisa Clark’s abstract set, a repeating series of banner headlines across the back of the stage, Hall’s cast proves sharp and engaging. At the same time, Wilson’s penchant for inter-cutting the rapid-fire dialogue between different but simultaneous scenes can seem strained at times, inadvertently pointing up the artificial nature of the set-up at least as much as the resonant ambiguity in the words and situations themselves. Nonetheless, that ambiguity and complexity make The Story well worth following through its various twists and turns — not only in terms of plot, but in the unfolding reactions and re-reactions of the audience, as our sympathies and judgments zigzag.

THE STORY

Through April 25

Tues, 7 p.m.; Wed-Sat, 8 p.m. (also Sat, 3 p.m.), $30-$40

SF Playhouse, 533 Sutter, SF

(415) 677-9596

Storytelling

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Last year choreographers Janice Garrett and Charles Moulton added a professional component to their 14-year personal relationship. They co-created StringWreck, a whimsical yet highly sophisticated collaboration between Janice Garrett and Dancers and the Del Sol String Quartet. Even though these two artists seem to come from different planets, the process clearly worked for them.

In the 1980s Moulton, a former Merce Cunningham dancer, became known for his beautifully pristine Precision Ball Passing dances that have been described as "a living Rubik’s cube." Over the years he has performed them with a few as three and as many as 120 dancers; he has also broadened his choreographic reach into the theater and the movies. As for Garrett, her musically astute and luscious, energy-driven choreography has been part of the Bay Area since 2001, when she returned from England where she spent a major part of her career.

During a recent phone conversation, the couple agreed that their creative differences has increased their respect for each other and has led, as Moulton said, "to many deep and fruitful conversations" so that their collaboration became part of an organic process. StringWreck was such an enriching experience that it whetted their appetite for more, particularly since they found willing collaborators.

The Illustrated Book of Invisible Stories was created for five of Garrett’s own dancers and a "movement choir" of 18. Integral to the Illustrated Book — which Moulton describes as drawing on visceral responses to the archetypal images we carry in our bodies — will be the music of vocalist Odessa Chen and composer-musician Jonathan Russell. (Rita Felciano)

THE ILLUSTRATED BOOK OF INVISIBLE STORIES

Thurs/16-Sat/18, 8 p.m.; Sun/19, 7 p.m., $25-$32

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-ARTS, www.janicegarrettanddancers.org

Locals only

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER April showers, worried world powers, CD towers — it’s tough to keep the kite-high ebullience, party vibes, and gotta-jet wings in flight during tough times. Bands come and go, move to Brooklyn (otherwise known as Break-Up-Land), and wither away in day jobs. So dole out a few propers to locals who brave the unofficial buy-nothing year of 2009 with new shiny plastic discs as they bid to become, erm, the next "secret show"-happy Green Day, revving up for Berkeley Rep, or Guitar Hero-hooked Metallica, currently gathering massive TV exposure via that goofy prime-time commercial.

Even the least likely to hunker down and deliver — namely the hard-smokin’ party hearties of Still Flyin’ — are casting aside the bakin’ dog lethargy and finally issuing a first album, Never Gonna Touch the Ground (Ernest Jenning). Love ’em or hate ’em, the brazenly silly 15-plus supergroup has finally found its footing amid the current wave of indie rock fun-seekers, a phenom (the Polyphonic Spree, Of Montreal, Tilly and the Wall, Broken Social Scene) characterized by collective-minded sprawl, theatricality, audience-friendliness, and dance jams (Still Flyin’ likes to call theirs HAMMJAMMS, but never mind that). Is "happy gang-bang Muzak" too raw a phrase to lay on it?

Headed by Athens, Ga., refugee Sean Rawls and boasting such members as ex-Aisler Set-ees Yoshi Nakamoto and Alicia Vanden Heuvel and former Architecture in Helsinki-ite Isobel Knowles, Still Flyin’ flies in the face of perceived indie elitism with a sound that fuses group-vocal pale-faced two-tone and lilting, ’80s-era Haircut 100 and Tom Tom Club lite tropi-pop. It’s present on the band’s title theme, on the anthemic ska workout "Forever Dudes," and on the bubbly vaca-rock of "Following the Itinerary." Yes, Still Flyin’ has an antidote to the economic woes that ail ya — the oughta-be-a-pop-hit "Good Thing It’s a Ghost Town Around Here" embraces the darkness that the Specials once dreaded. Ignore throwaways like the self-mocking "Act of Jamming," and you start to believe that the infectious Never Gonna just might achieve liftoff, especially if the group continues to get live crowds onto its party bus.

Never Gonna was partly recorded on weekends by Jason Quever at his Excelsior District home studio, Pan American, and it shows: the disc sounds just as toasty warm as the new You Can Have What You Want (Gnomonsong) by Quever’s Papercuts. Thanks to its Clientele-like mid-’60s folk pop, 2007’s Can’t Go Back promised to be Quever’s breakout recording, landing on Devendra Banhart and Andy Cabic’s Gnomonsong imprint with a hushed splash. You Can Have is a new mode of dreaming — one prone to bouts of levitation. Helped by Beach House’s Alex Scally, Lazarus’ Trevor Montgomery, Skygreen Leopards’ Glenn Donaldson, artist-filmmaker David Enos, and Helene Renaut, Quever conjures haunted carousels and the drift of spooked spaceships on tracks like "Once We Walked in the Sunlight," "A Peculiar Hallelujah," and "Jet Plane." Obsessively analog-centric and bewitched by dream pop, yé-yé, Floyd, and an earthbound breed of Krautrock, he makes it impossible to resist the surprisingly light-hearted charms of "A Dictator’s Lament" and You Can Have‘s overall stately high. Papercuts, we are floating in space …

The rock ‘n’ roll rave-ups and in-the-red rawness of the Sir Lord Raven’s new Please Throw Me Back in the Ocean (Happy Parts) tap into a whole ‘nother brand: screw-it-all naughty snotty. "Maybe I’ll jump in the river /Maybe I’ll cut out my liver … I’m tryin’ /I keep on tryin’," sneers frontman Eric Von Ravenson, once of the Time Flys, on — yeah, you got it — "I Keep on Tryin’." Recorded by indispensable organ and guitar pinch-hitter Greg Ashley, with producer Jay Bronzini on drums, Please Throw Me slices the cheesiness thickly, with a sense of cut-and-run fun. It’s throwback — hence a cover version of Fats Domino’s "I’m Ready" — but not necessarily throwaway. I like a band unafraid to pay tribute to its true, unlovely loves, but I prefer originals like "Take It or Leave It," "Spit on Your Grave," and "PC Action," the latter two of which intentionally subvert the garage rock, allowing glitter to seep in. How many times can these zombie riffs rouse themselves and return to life? A little spit, piss, and vinegar should do ya.

PAPERCUTS

April 24, 9:30 p.m., $10

Cafe du Nord

2170 Market, SF

www.cafedunord.com

STILL FLYIN’

May 9, 10 p.m., $10

Cafe du Nord

DAY ‘N’ NIGHT

TIPPY CANOE


Iron oar: check the rosy-cheeked, country-cabaret charm on Tippy Canoe and the Paddlemen’s Parasols and Pekingese (self-released, 2008). With Blue Rabbit and Chelsea Wolfe. Wed/15, 9 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern,1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

CROOKERS


Italians do it better — meaning, play their way to Coachella. With Bloody Beetroots and Congorock. Wed/15, 9 p.m., $18 advance. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. www.mezzaninesf.com

ZODIAC DEATH VALLEY


The vitality of the SF psych-rockers’ "cactus flower romanticism" (as Todd Lavoie once put it) is evident on their self-released, self-titled EP. With Golden Animals and Broads. Thurs/16, 9 p.m., $6. Thee Parkside, 1600 17th St., SF. www.theeparkside.com

CHAIRLIFT


Indie slow jams that include a dose of Morodor-esque synth seduction, anyone? With Sebastien Tellier. Fri/17, 9 p.m., $15. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

JAMIE STEWART


Expect mega intensity when the Xiu Xiu mastermind ventures out for his first solo tour in five years, drawing from 80-plus tunes including rarely-heard older numbers and new songs from 2010’s Dear God, I Hate Myself. And get ready to pose for Stewart and artist David Horvitz as they photograph every person at every show for their blog-book project. With Dark Holler and Lady Genius. Fri/17, 9:30 p.m., $12. Cafe du Nord.

Her direction

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

On the collection of platters Liz Harris has put out over the last four years as Grouper, the Portland, Ore., resident sounds like she’s exorcising many ghosts. A new self-released, 7-inch split single with City Center echoes with the sort of psych-drone incantations you’d expect to hear while lurking about a dark forest after midnight. On "False Horizon," accompanied by the murky strum of a guitar, Harris’ vocal loops seep through the cracks of a lost canyon, ricocheting from wall to wall of bedrock.

Big pictures. Yet over the course of her last couple of releases — particularly 2008’s acclaimed Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill (Type) — Harris has stripped away sonic elements. Gone are the amp currents, haunting drones, and tape hiss of earlier explorations like her full-length debut Way Their Crept (Free Porcupine Society, 2005) and 2007’s Cover The Windows and the Walls (Root Strata). In their place are more lulling compositions that have drawn comparisons to late-1980s and early-1990s recordings on the 4AD label. Chatting over the phone, Harris reveals that she doesn’t like to think of herself as "a drone artist," but can see why people categorize her songwriting in that light. She admits she was worried about Dead Deer at the time of its release because she thought it was "too poppy" and thus likely to be "fully rejected."

"I think what I’ve done hasn’t changed so much as the medium or packaging," she explains. "The stuff before was [also] very song-based, it’s just thicker at times and [the song structures] are underneath a lot. Initially I was trying to figure out how to use pedals and playing with sounds, and that’s just what came out."

Raised in the Marin County community of Bolinas, Harris describes a childhood spent "growing up in my own world," running around the woods, contemputf8g the idea of ghosts, and drawing or reading. Although she did take piano lessons for a short time in junior high, the 28-year-old didn’t think of putting her songs down on tape until she was in the late stages of college. "My piano teacher wasn’t really teaching me piano — he was just helping me learn how to write songs," she says. "That was the first time I can remember trying to write my own music. Outside of that, I’ve always been like everyone else, just had songs in my head and had to sing them and work them out."

Aside from a short U.S. tour with Animal Collective in May, Harris is spending the bulk of the coming months re-releasing old material on her own yet-unnamed label and focusing on songwriting. Fans can expect to see a re-pressing of Cover the Windows and a silkscreen edition of Dead Deer. A 3-inch CD-R originally put out by the Collective Jyrk imprint in 2006 titled He Knows, He Knows, He Knows is getting the re-release treatment, too. "I want to do [the releases] so there isn’t some kind of [outside] pressure going on," she says. "I’m still figuring out the logistics, but that is the direction I’m heading."

GROUPER

With Sic Alps, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, and Paul Clipson

Sat/25, 9:30 p.m., $7

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

Fiends, eyepatches, and femmes fatales

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The cause of showing neglected old films on 35 mm — that vanishing format — is one recently taken up by a number of local presenters, including the Film on Film Foundation and Midnites for Maniacs. We’re not alone in that pursuit, with one notable purveyor of vintage esoteria on celluloid being Austin, Texas’ Alamo Drafthouse. Its Cinemapocalypse programmers are currently on an "Invasion U.S.A." tour bringing disreputable shlock to big screens along the West Coast.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ double bill on Saturday spans the Atlantic with gratuitous violence and toplessness. Fernando Di Leo’s 1976 Mister Scarface is a lively example of the crime thrillers Italy churned out back then for the international grindhouse circuit. Italian-looking German and Fassbinder regular Harry Baer and German-looking Egyptian Fulci/Franco regular Al Cliver play cocky play dudes out to shake down Jack Palance’s titular mob boss. As their flamboyant older sidekick Vittorio Caprioli opines, "That’s a-Scarface. He’s-a bad news, I tell ya. Just-a looking at him and my asshole a-twitches."

Its marginally less obscure co-feature is Paul Nicholas’ incredibly tawdry 1983 Chained Heat, considered by many the greatest of all W.I.P. (Women in Prison) flicks. The cast alone clinches it: Linda Blair, Sybil Danning, Tamara (1973’s Cleopatra Jones) Dobson, Stella Stevens, Edy Williams — you get the idea.

Midnites for Maniacs gets into the Texas action with a "Fighting Back in the ’80s" quartet at the Castro Theatre on Sunday. Escape from New York (1981) you’ve seen, and 1983’s Vigilante, a.k.a. Street Gang (Fred Williamson and Robert Forster go Death Wish on the usual cackling punk-scum "animals"), is no rarity. But curious minds really want to know about 1982’s kitchen-sink exploitation blowout (cannibal monks! T&A! Kung fu! Cameron Mitchell!) Raw Force. And you haven’t lived till you’ve seen Lady Terminator, a 1988 Indonesian whatsit about an ancient nymphomaniac water goddess who towels off to wreak havoc on the police force and civilian penises of modern Jakarta. It’s vagina dentaterrific. (Dennis Harvey)

SAT/18, MISTER SCARFACE (7 P.M.) AND CHAINED HEAT (8:45 P.M.)

$8-$10

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

www.ybca.org

SUN/19, VIGILANTE (2 P.M.); RAW FORCE (4 P.M.); ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (6 P.M.); LADY TERMINATOR (8 P.M.)

$10

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

www.castrotheatre.com

Parts is parts

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andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Parts is parts

Dear Readers:

These are perennial body parts questions, and I feel I would be somewhat remiss if I didn’t re-answer them every few years. Here are some that have been hanging around waiting for me.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

I once tried for half an hour putting my index finger about two inches inside my girlfriend’s vagina, pressing with a "come hither motion" and simultaneously pressing the mound from outside. Unfortunately my partner did not experience any extra pleasure. Maybe I have to try again and again?
Love,

Willing

Dear Will:

Yes, yes, very funny. I’m not entirely sure what she was experiencing, but from your phrasing, which could have been cut and pasted from any one of a thousand how-to Web sites, I think you may have been proceeding a bit by rote there. Rather than printing out some stranger’s directions, how about following hers?

There are plenty of women who don’t have much of the spongy erectile tissue surrounding the urethra and the front of the vagina that we’ve come, for convenience’s sake, to call the G-spot. These women can lie there all day receiving simultaneous come-hither motions and external pressure and only manage to get kind of annoyed with you. If your girlfriend is one of them, I would not suggest "trying again and again" unless you want her to lean forward and swat the top of your head with the TV remote.

You can probably determine whether she is G-spot enabled by letting her guide you. Since the G-spot is, inconveniently, not actually a "hot button," but a collection of tissues sensitive to the touch under certain but not all circumstances, I cannot tell you exactly how to operate it. I’d start once she’s already well turned-on, though, and without impatience or, indeed, goal-orientation. Just kind of slip in there when things are already going well and keep your eyes on her face while you try a little deeper or a little closer in, a little harder and a little softer, a little … oh, you get the picture.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

My penis is curved a little. Is that normal, and if not what can I do to straighten it?

Love,

Upwards

Dear Up:

Nothing! Do not do anything! Some curvatures are caused by a previous injury that heals but puts a hitch in the sheath of sausage-casing-like material that encases the spongy, sausage-like corpora cavernosa, the working parts of your penis. I don’t think that’s what happened to you, but if you want to find out how a devastating penis fracture heals, try unbending it.

Yours probably was just made that way. If we were all made in God’s image, some of God’s avatars would have a dick just like yours. Worry not, and if you have a chance check out some G-spot toys, if the curve looks familiar, boy are you in luck.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

I am just a big chicken! How come I am afraid of sticking my finger inside of me? It just terrifies me for some reason, and I refuse to stick anything inside of me ’cause I am just so afraid!!

Love,

Chicken

Dear Chick:

I’m going to assume you are a teenager, in which case it’s pretty normal. Not only do we hear a ton about how it might hurt and bleed (and, indeed, it might), this is the inside of your body. That is, emotionally speaking, some heavy stuff. We spend our very early childhood learning the limits of our bodies — where we stop and other people begin, what goes in and what comes out. It is no small trick to relearn boundaries later and start letting new things in new places.

Take it easy, take it slow, and maybe try with something smaller, like a Q-Tip and see how that goes. Also, take a mirror and see where it’s going. Either you will learn that there is more room than you thought, or you won’t. If there’s a hymen there it will be more complicated, but it’s still meant to let things in. Just let them in on your own terms, at your own pace.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

My wife’s ex was a "big" guy, and she only mentioned this to me while trying to reassure me that she likes having sex with me more. I don’t believe her, though. Now all I can think about is how he was bigger than me and whether she misses that.
Love,

Average Joe

Dear Joe:

Just imagine telling her all the time how you can’t stop comparing yourself to her ex, who is out of the picture, and anyway she loves you and would rather have sex with you. How does that sound? See? Now cut it out. She was telling you the truth, as you perfectly well know.

Love,

Andrea

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

Carolina blues

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cheryl@sfbg.com

Ramin Bahrani is a young filmmaker who’s beloved by critics and whatever arthouse-type audiences have been lucky enough to catch his work, thus far 2005’s Man Push Cart and 2007’s Chop Shop. Born in America to Iranian parents, Bahrani was educated at Columbia University and set both of those films — minimalist marvels that racked up kudos galore at global fests — in New York City. His latest, Goodbye Solo, shifts from gritty NY to depressed Winston-Salem, N.C., where Bahrani was raised. Winston-Salem is home to Wake Forest University, Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, and RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company; it’s also where Bahrani met the real-life characters who inspired Solo‘s tale of an elderly Southerner, William (Red West) who reluctantly befriends the Senegalese cab driver, Solo (Souléymane Sy Savané), who regularly shuttles him around town.

In the film’s first scene — which really begins mid-scene, as if the camera just happened to be turned on at an unspecified moment — Solo has laughingly just agreed to take William to the mountain hamlet of Blowing Rock in two weeks’ time. As becomes increasingly clear, it’s a two-hour trip from which William does not plan to return. Solo, who dreams of being a flight attendant despite the disapproval of his hugely pregnant wife (mother to his feisty nine-year-old stepdaughter), reaches out to the lonely William for reasons he doesn’t quite understand. For his part, William would prefer to be left alone as he quietly ties up his affairs, though he does begrudgingly allow Solo to bunk down in his motel room when Solo’s career aspirations cause a marital rift.

West, a high school pal of Elvis Presley and a member of Presley’s Memphis Mafia (until Elvis: What Happened?, a 1977 tell-all co-written with other posse members), was a stunt player during the King’s Hollywood years. (As a big-screen presence, West is perhaps most recognizable as one of Patrick Swayze’s small-town allies in 1989’s immortal Road House.) His William is gruffly taciturn, with a mournful aura that suggests a past full of transgressions and a present choked with regrets.

By contrast, Solo is an ebullient force, working hard and hustling harder to get ahead. He takes to William immediately, dubbing the older man "Big Dog" and convincing him to ride around with him and even kick back with a beer at the local pool joint. It’s only when he interferes with William’s Blowing Rock plans that he understand the difficult choice he’ll have to make, should he want to become the friend William truly needs.

Hollywood films about aging are generally sappy, preachy, and stuffed with cringe-inducing scenes of distinguished actors skydiving (see: 2007’s The Bucket List). Not only does Goodbye Solo approach the subject with dignity, it balances out the grimmer William plot with Solo’s optimistic embrace of everything in his life. Realism, with naturalistic acting and locations, is Bahrani’s technical gift. Along with co-scriptwriter Baharez Azimi, he’s also able to hew giant, honest emotions from tiny moments and seemingly ordinary situations.


GOODBYE SOLO opens Fri/17 in Bay Area theaters.

Wiggletronics

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superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO “Many people confuse us with Spain,” MC Kalaf of worldwide dance sensations Buraka Som Sistema says — a back-end hint of fado-like melancholy mixing into his unfailingly chipper voice — when we talk over the phone about how the fab foursome has finally put their homeland, Portugal, on the club-must map. Buraka, two of whose members hail originally from Angola and two from that sunny strip along the Atlantic, represents a double bubbling up of the repressed: the crew has exploded onto the nightlife radar by melding the underground sounds of Luanda’s bumping kuduro dance movement with Lisbon’s buzzy, overlooked electronic music scene.

Last year Buraka’s sophomore release Black Diamond (Enchufada/Sony BMG) quickly shot up the hit lists of beats connoisseurs by jumping the current trend of streaming developing-world rhythms through the latest sonic technology. “We took the sound of the Lisbon suburbs where many Angolan immigrants live — our suburbs are not like your ‘Desperate Housewife’ suburbs — and used our years of dance music on it, and the crowds loved it,” says Kalaf.

Kuduro is often translated as “stiff bottom,” heh, or “hard ass,” referencing the form of lowdown, hips-wiggling motion that sometimes accompanies the deliciously uptempo sound, a hybrid of sensuous zouk, raucous soca, and free-flow hip-hop that shares an affinity for analog atmospherics with early dub. (Or rather, that dance is mostly reserved for women — men tend to go pop and lock crazy, as you can see in the video below.) Along with Kalaf, Buraka members Li’l John, DJ Riot, and Conductor apply their extensive hip-hop, house, and breakbeat production experience to blow the lid off kuduro’s possibilities. 

The superkinetic results reference everything from Ed Banger hardcore and hyperdub freakouts to Orb-esque kaleidoscopics and the late ’80s Sheffield bleep scene. Scoring MIA to guest on “Sound of Kuduro” helped kick that track up the club charts, and basing the excellent “Kalemba (Wegue-Wegue)” on a misheard lyric from the classic Afro Acid house remix of More Kante’s “Yeke Yeke” gave fanboys a theoretical boner. Live, Buraka’s a tornado, with toasting MCs, fierce singers, and, as Kalaf points out, “anything that makes you scream.” Last time the crew was here, a topless female fan stormed the stage. Kalaf half-joked that an upcoming tour of Japan is brief because “if they throw us out of the country, at least we won’t lose a lot of money.”

Some things get lost in the laptop filtration, however. Kuduro isn’t just a groove; like rap, it’s built on extended narratives of hood life. Buraka jettisons those for catchy calls to the dance floor and global unity “I’m from Angola,” Kalaf admitted, “and even I can’t follow most of what they say.” And, for all the talk on its records of the primacy of Africa, the group has yet to tour the continent. “We’re going in 2010,” Kalaf said, “and to be honest, I’m a little afraid. It may be mental.” But Buraka has helped bring the Angolan guests on its tracks an international audience, while waking up the Western world to yet another vital cultural expression on its edges. Let’s get suburban, y’all.

BURAKA SOM SISTEMA

Tue/21, 8 p.m., $14. Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell, SF. www.rickshawstop.com For more on Buraka’s kuduro connections, click here.

Astral peaks

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

If not for High on Fire, Mastodon might never have existed. The flame-bonging Oakland trio swung through Atlanta in 1999, playing what was presumably an eardrum-destroying gig in the basement of local musician Brent Hinds. At the show, Hinds and his friend, bassist Troy Sanders, met drummer Brann Dailor and guitarist Bill Kelliher, who had both recently arrived from Rochester, N.Y. The four were knit together by a love of the Melvins and Bay Area metal experimentalists Neurosis, and a decade later, they are a metal band of towering stature.

Mastodon’s Crack the Skye (Warner Bros./Reprise, 2009) is an appropriately mammoth undertaking, the final chapter in a four-album arc that ties each disc to an Aristotelian element. With fire (Remission, Relapse, 2002), water (Leviathan, Relapse, 2004), and earth (Blood Mountain, Warner Bros./Reprise, 2006) accounted for, Crack the Skye centers around ether, which (in the band’s typical fashion) serves as a jumping-off point for the story of a quadriplegic astral traveler who zooms through space and time only to arrive in tsarist Russia in time to warn Rasputin of his impending assassination.

Spanning only seven tracks but clocking in at roughly 50 minutes, the album is Mastodon’s most cohesive to date, its songs flowing into each other like the movements of a heavily distorted prog-rock symphony. With this in mind, the band will play the album in its entirety during its April 19 date at the Great American Music Hall, augmenting the performance with visual spectacle courtesy of an LED screen and Neurosis member Josh Graham.

Mastodon, “Iron Tusk”

Crack the Skye‘s title has a deeper meaning for drummer Dailor, whose contributions to the record are a tribute to his sister, Skye, who committed suicide at age 14. This multivalent phrase is an illuminating example of the band’s densely layered art, which combines the diverse songwriting of its members with a wealth of thematic and musical allusion.

It was Dailor who showed up in London after an exhausting plane trip clutching a copy of Moby Dick. Though the group had toyed with high- and pop-cultural references in the past, the drummer’s suggestion that their next album be centered around Herman Melville’s 1851 classic took a while to sink in. When I interviewed Kelliher recently by phone, he explained how it caught on: "We kind of saw ourselves in the same boat, literally, leaving our families and friends behind and jumping into this quest … going out in the world trying to make it, searching for our own white whale."

The album that resulted, Leviathan, was Mastodon’s defining work, mixing easy-to-grasp themes of harpooning and high-seas adventure with oceans of metaphorical extrapolation. The band has mined other allusive veins, modeling riffs from Blood Mountain’s "Crystal Skull" off tribal drum patterns in Peter Jackson’s 2005 take on King Kong and shooting a video for the Crack the Skye single "Divinations" that’s an uproarious tribute to John Carpenter’s 1982 version of The Thing.

Between the nods to other works, the narrative lyrical themes, and the complex, progressive songwriting, Mastodon’s music can be overwhelming. Kelliher cops to some early writing conflicts with guitarist Hinds that involved a refrain of "No, man, it doesn’t go like that, it goes like this" in response to his opposite number’s deconstructive playing style. Soon, though, they learned to fuse their disparate riffs.

After four albums, it is possible to point to this relentlessly inclusive artistic tendency as the key to the band’s success. Mastodon has a rare kind of talent that suggests a pseudo-aphorism: more is more. Saddling their listeners with the full weight of their wide-ranging inspiration, the band’s albums are cohesive against the odds, rewarding careful, long-form listening sessions and a lot of revisiting. Beneath each layer of discovery lies another, and this feeling of excitement and expectation is crucial to the enjoyment of their music. Who knows what abstruse surprises they will conjure up in the future? We can only wait and hear. *

MASTODON

April 19

With Kylesa, Intronaut

7:30pm, $25 (sold out)

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

www.gamh.com

“Julie Blackmon: Domestic Vacations”

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REVIEW One of my most uninteresting college professors used to insist that negatives only exist in language, but couldn’t explain what this meant. That’s funny, I thought, because I can physically feel a complete lack of interest in your class. In fact, I think you can feel it too; it’s contagious. Nonetheless, I was never bored as a child, and I’m still never bored. The boring and the uninteresting are different concepts. Julie Blackmon’s lucid, staged photographs of childhood fantasy worlds in the twilight of America are stunning for a ton of reasons, but first and foremost they get their signature bite and sting by recognizing that everyone in each scene is interested in different things. There is no sincere panorama. From the modern intrusions into Blackmon’s protoclassical, Dutch-inspired scenes — a miniature FedEx truck, Netflix mail — to trippy little things such as the almost lurid dog eyes and discarded gloves in Snow Day (2008), every person, place, and thing appears distracted by an otherworldly mission.

Adding to this sense of confused biography, Blackmon, the oldest of nine kids and now a mother of three, uses people and things from her life in her work like a novelist trussing out character relations pictorially. She reminds me of some essays by Orhan Pamuk about his daughter, Rüya. It’s not the stories themselves that are so thrilling, but the palpable feeling of love in their narrative arcs, plus the vectors they send out into Pamuk’s novels, where characters seem to have little aspects or shimmers of Rüya (even if she wasn’t born when the story was written): her young mind, her toys and delusions, the way she gazes out the window and finds it startlingly new every day.

JULIE BLACKMON: DOMESTIC VACATIONS Through May 23. Tues.-Sat., noon-5 p.m. SF Camerawork, 657 Mission, second floor, SF. (415) 512-2020. www.sfcamerawork.org

Liz Lerman Dance Exchange: “Small Dances About Big Ideas”

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PREVIEW Liz Lerman is one gutsy woman. Early in her career she decided that there is more to dance than working with highly trained performers for an audience that wants to be entertained. "There was a time when people danced and the crops grew," she told a conference of arts presenters 15 years ago. "They danced, and that’s how they healed their children." For Lerman, the primary function of dance is to heal and create communities. Not only has she taken her Dance Exchange company to parks, schools, and nursing homes, she has included so-called non-dancers in her performances. Today such efforts have become fairly commonplace, except they are usually considered ancillary outreach activities. For Lerman, making "dance of, by, and for the people" — as it has been called — is the foundation of her work. She often weaves spontaneous audience suggestions into her pieces. Older dancers (i.e., over 60) and dancers with disabilities are part of her company. And she doesn’t shrink away from big topics. In 2006 she brought Ferocious Beauty: Genome to Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. A hugely ambitious collaboration between artists, scholars, and scientists, this multimedia work explored the forces that had been unleashed with the mapping of the human genome. This weekend she is returning with an equally far-reaching project. Small Dances About Big Ideas was commissioned by Harvard Law School for the 60th anniversary of the Nuremberg trials. It looks at atrocities, the law’s ability to address genocide, and our capacity to be either "bystanders" or "up-standers."

LIZ LERMAN DANCE EXCHANGE Sat/18-Sun/19, 8 p.m., $28-$36. Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, 3200 California, SF. (415) 292-1233, www.jccsf.org/arts

In a Dream

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REVIEW Jeremiah Zagar’s feature has a subject that’s not just close to home, it’s in his home: father Isaiah is an eccentric artist who’s created extraordinary mosaics covering myriad walls, rooms, and several entire buildings in Philadelphia. Julia, his wife of 43 years, views herself as the necessary "reality base" to his "crazy, self-absorbed but amiable … rare flower." Isaiah is a bit of an exhibitionist, his art a "journal of my life" that might easily embarrass family members less accustomed to his idiosyncracies. His past encompasses childhood molestation and institutionalization, while the present is imperiled by "delusions of grandeur." During the several years Jeremiah shot this documentary — at first intended as a simple tribute to a very creative parent — Isaiah upset the family’s long-term yet still very delicate balance by springing a major crisis. On top of that, the filmmaker’s brother moves back in, his marriage collapsed and substance-abuse problems evident to all. The Zagars aren’t anybody’s idea of a standard-issue nuclear unit, but this quietly engaging portrait transcends train-wreck fascination because for all their quirks, they are functional — close, loving, and supportive. Also, because Isaiah’s epic mosaics of tile, paint, and embedded detritus are so remarkable, you’ll want to book the next flight to Philly to see them first-hand.

IN A DREAM opens Fri/17 at the Roxie. See Rep Clock.

Late of the Pier

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PREVIEW Late of the Pier is catchy while still retaining an essential core of flighty, fidgety weirdness. With its askew harmonics, squelchy synths, and wildly off-key vocals, Fantasy Black Channel (Parlophone, 2008) marks the big label debut of a band bent on peddling an oddball sound to the masses, to say nothing of a kitschy aesthetic. The album’s cover presents a haphazard assortment of drums, kits, cords, and keyboards scattered atop outcroppings of granite — an apt visual for the band’s chaotic approach. Some tracks suggest a recorder switched to on-mode at the site of a train wreck, while others rescue some order from the mayhem. Discerning musical adherents will peg the group as contemporaries of outfits like Metronomy, Hot Chip, and Klaxons. This quartet is inventive and almost extreme in how far they’re willing to take their sprawling multipart sagas, instrumental transitions and elaborate glam guitar breakdowns. Plain-jane indie rock outfits have nothing on them.

Late of the Pier hail from Castle Donington, London, where they formed in 2004. Frequent nightclub fixtures and the toast of a large teenage fanbase, the group was picked up by a few small record labels before landing a slot on one of French dance it-label Kitsune Maison’s annual compilations. Fantasy Black Channel is produced by electro DJ Erol Alkan, who brings his pedigree as a remixer (Mylo, Chemical Brothers, and Digitalism) to the recording’s sound. Now that its spunky electro-rock numbers have been rapturously received by the oft-smitten British music press, the band is setting its sights on the U.S. We should like what we hear: Late of the Pier’s fingerpainted audio tableaus add some slapdash vitality to the musical orthodoxies of today.

LATE OF THE PIER at Popscene. Thurs/16, 9 p.m.-2 a.m, $13 (advance). 330 Ritch, 330 Ritch, SF. (415) 541-9574, www.popscene-sf.com

Dan Deacon

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PREVIEW I first saw Dan Deacon perform at Oberlin College’s venue the ‘Sco, a den of nascent creativity that eventually brought me to a city sometimes referred to by the same three-letter abbreviation. Deacon was there, balding and bearded, his glasses taped to his head, his muffin-top iced by a bright pink T. He set up his mad scientist’s table of electronics in the audience’s usual domain. Different colored cords sprang out in every direction and there were multiple mics for his one-man show. Lit by a neon green skull, Deacon began stretching, then implored the audience to stretch. They did.

Not only did we all stretch with Deacon, we danced with Deacon. For a generation that has been taught that to move is to be judged — or whatever excuse keeps scenesters so static — such an act is similar to the miracle of the Virgin Mary getting pregos. Deacon’s inhibition-less philosophy was infectious: not only were the undergrads dancing, they were willing to participate in a high-five conga line and compete in a dance-off.

Although the complexities of Deacon’s music become clearer when heard on an iPod, the experience verges on seizure-inducing. Live, the same music becomes hypnotic. Like his earlier work, Deacon’s newest album Bromst (Carpark) is as much a singular composition as a collection of tracks, which should make it exhilarating to encounter. In concert, he has arranged for it to be played by a 15-piece ensemble. Now that he’s decidedly bigger — in band, popularity, and girth — it’s hard to predict how the intimacy and audience participation aspects of his performance will be affected. But it is sure to be a blast. And a bromst. (Deacon said he made up the word for his album title because it doesn’t have a meaning and he likes the way it sounds.)

DAN DEACON With Future Islands and Teeth Mountain. Thurs/23, 9 p.m., $13. Great American Music Hall. 859 O’Farrell, SF. (415) 885-0750, www.gamh.com

Trip at the ‘Brain’

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CULT HORROR "I am a genre terrorist," legendary Italian "B" filmmaker Lucio Fulci professes in an interview on the freshly released two-disc edition of his 1990 film Cat in the Brain (Grindhouse). "I perform my commercial deflagration, then I get bored and move on." Likely aware of his more successful compatriot Dario Argento’s moniker, the "Italian Hitchcock," perhaps the late Fulci fancied himself as a sort of Italian Howard Hawks with mild frontal lobe damage: whimsically genre-tripping (comedies in the ’50s, westerns in the ’60s, thrillers in the ’70s) while mastering and exploding conventions. But this would be something of a fanciful delusion. Fulci’s mid-career adoption of giallo, the "spaghetti horror" he helped pioneer and perfect, trapped him in an almost literal genre hell of his own making. With the success of the breakout Zombie (1979), blood-and-gore-thirsty fanboys cried out for more, and Fulci, eager for the commercial success that mostly had eluded him to that point, demurred.

It’s fitting then, that the hallucinatory Cat in the Brain would star Fulci as himself, a director tortured to the point of madness by brutal, graphic visions of his past and current productions: limbs hacked off with chainsaws, numerous decapitations, heads cooking in microwave ovens, and generally just a lot of gorings, stabbings, slicings, slittings, flayings, and disembowelings. When a psychiatrist suggests he is suffering from an identity crisis due to work stress, Fulci objects, "If I made films about love no one would buy a ticket."

But don’t assume Cat in the Brain is Fulci’s attempt to drive the final nail in giallo‘s coffin, much as Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (2007) tried (and failed) to do to its 21st-century offspring, torture porn. It’s certainly bad enough to do so: Fulci’s acting is painfully garish, the edit (featuring footage cobbled from his past films) is out to lunch, and the atypically pedestrian score is worthy of the worst MacGyver episode. But much of Cat‘s perverse charm, like much of giallo, comes from its chainsaw-rough edges. Fulci’s meta conceit may be more Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (a 1994 release he derided as a rip-off) than 8 1/2 (1963), but it’s still satisfying. In the end he has perpetrated a cinematic rope-a-dope, a "statement of innocence in the form of a joke," as his journalist daughter writes in the DVD’s liner notes. The maestro of splatter held an abiding affection for the genre after all, despite his alter ego’s haunted visions. Fulci’s messy violence and gore might not have always been in the best of taste, but for the man himself, they set the stage for an awful lot of good, clean fun.

El Paso passages

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

At the poetic heart of acclaimed playwright Octavio Solis’s aching, wild, and poignant new drama, Lydia — receiving a beautifully cast and memorable West Coast premiere at Marin Theatre Company under the direction of MTC’s Jasson Minadakis — is a mysterious connection between two very differently challenged and empowered young women: the severely brain-damaged Ceci Flores (Gloria Garayua) and her family’s new undocumented Mexican maid, Lydia (Adriana Gaviria). The house they live in, along with Ceci’s sharp and sensitive younger brother Misha (David Pintado) and her upbeat but overworked mother Rosa (Wilma Bonet), also comes stalked by some serious, restlessly conflicted, and grieving machismo — aloof yet violent patriarch Claudio (Luis Saguar); renegade big brother and guilt-ridden shit-kicker Rene (Lakin Valdez); and hunky first cousin Alvaro (Elias Escobedo), a newly discharged Vietnam vet turned border patrol agent. But leave it to Solis to put the real muscle in the most compromised of female bodies.

Ceci, played with a deft physical dynamism by Garayua, is the play’s vivacious narrator. When not addressing us in physically fluid gestures and urgently poetical language from some residual place inside her own battered head, she lies at the front of the stage in the center of her family’s living room, her quaking body a kind of Richter scale of emotional energy registering every molecule of feeling in the tumult around her. She was transformed into this state two years earlier, on the eve of a happier transformation, her quinceañera, after a mysterious car accident that still eats away at her family, especially her father, and older brother Rene, who was at the wheel.

The other motive force, Lydia, arrives with her own near-death experience behind her, something left purposely vague but giving her presence a sense of destiny, especially when it becomes clear that she alone can understand and speak for the seemingly vegetative Ceci. Lydia is also an unexpected balm to the suffering Claudio and a seminal inspiration to the burgeoning poet in Misha. Meanwhile the threat of deportation hangs over her in the person of the zealously authoritarian Alvaro. Before the end, Lydia will become the catalyst for still one more startling transformation, amid joyful memories and torturous longing associated with childhood play and flowering sexuality among the siblings and their cousin.

San Francisco’s Solis is one of the theater’s great poets of the border, in senses both banally specific and relentlessly far-reaching. Like many of his plays (including Bethlehem, Santos y Santos, and El Otro), Lydia is set just this side of the geopolitical divide between Mexico and the United States, where no lines physical, social, or otherwise actually divide people very neatly — but rather messily and haphazardly. The doubling and blurring of identities among his characters is one of Solis’s tried-and-true dramatic avenues into this reality, this border condition, a world forever straddling and negotiating two others to which it can never wholly belong. It’s the great paradoxical beauty of his work that in its concrete social and cultural details, hilariously accessible yet indigenous humor, and the sheer lyricism it inspires, this uniquely unsettled world gathers universal force and significance.

LYDIA

Through Sun/12, see stage listings for schedule, $20–$51

Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller, Mill Valley

(415) 388-5208

www.marintheater.org

Dance cocktail

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If you asked a member of the dozens of ethnic dance groups that make their home in the Bay Area (103 of them auditioned in January for the yearly San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival) why they are willing to rehearse many hours and perform for little or no money, they’ll tell you that they like the dances. But of almost equal importance is the sense of community these ensembles create. No doubt nostalgia for a better and simpler world may be factors as well. Even so, it’s the sense of being with people who share similar values that creates powerful bonds.

As in any other tight-knit community, however, in order to thrive you need to fit in. In ethnic, or as they are called these days, world dances, there is often not much room for individual expression. What little there is sprouts from within prescribed parameters. Yet some dancers reach beyond these boundaries. Perhaps, as does Wan-Chao Chang, they love Indonesian and modern dance. Ramon Ramos Alayo is the Bay Area’s best Afro-Cuban dancer, but he takes his choreography well beyond the traditional modes. What if you want to combine flamenco and tango? "There is no place for us — we don’t fit into established categories," says Holly Shaw, who is trained in flamenco as well as Middle Eastern, Romani, Balinese, and a slew of other styles. "So we perform in coffee houses and private homes."

To give space to these "homeless" artists, Shaw two years ago started "Eve’s Elixir," which highlights contemporary choreographers of world dance. They performed at the open-minded CounterPULSE in the Mission District. For its second incarnation, a grant from the Fort Mason Foundation’s In Performance series enables the young enterprise to move into the dance-friendly Cowell Theater.

"EVE’S ELIXIR: EYES OF EVE"

Fri/10-Sat/11, 7 p.m., $25

Cowell Theater, Fort Mason Center, Marina at Laguna, SF

(415) 345-7575, www.eveselixir.net

Victory lap

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

When Special One of the Conscious Daughters raps, "And I know all my folks been patient for this shit" on the Oakland female duo’s new track "A Moment In Rhyme," she ain’t kidding. It’s been 13 long years since she and partner-in-rhyme CMG released their last album, 1996’s Gamers (Priority). So long gone were the previously high profile pair that in 2007 Nas invited the Daughters, along with other forgotten Left Coast vets such as Kam, King Tee, and Threat, to appear on his homage track "Where Are They Now (West Coast Remix)."

The Nutcracker Suite, released in February on longtime associate Paris’ Guerrilla Funk label, is Conscious Daughters’ third album in 16 years. It’s a refreshing return to form for the female duo, who burst onto the national rap scene with 1993’s Ear To The Street (Priority), led by the Paris-produced, funk-fueled riding anthem "Somethin’ to Ride To (Fonky Expedition)." Striking a perfect balance between political hip-hop and street mobbin’ music, Special One and CMG have always won over discriminating rap fans.

"You can call it what you want — we just back," laughs an unfazed Special One, when asked if the new album and upcoming performances should be called a comeback. "It’s a comeback to everybody else, but we never went anywhere," adds CMG. "We been recording and making music the whole time."

The Conscious Daughters pick up right where they left off with The Nutcracker Suite, which includes production by Paris, Rick Ross, One Drop Scott, Fred White, and newcomer Steven King. The album opens with the head-nodding hard funk of "Not Bad But Good," an updated riding track about "the Town" (Oakland). But a few tracks later it veers into thought-provoking territory, with songs that tackle topics head-on from a female perspective. Domestic abuse and California’s spiraling incarceration rates are on the lyrical agenda. "And Arnold keeps building these correctional facilities for youth, women, and crooks and thieves with disabilities," Special One raps in the song "Issues."

Having spent a short stint behind bars herself ("for pot") Special One speaks from first-hand experience. "There’s women, their grandmothers, their aunties, mothers, nieces, and sisters in the penitentiary, just like there are men in the male penitentiary," she says.

One of the new album’s more poignant songs is "Dirty Little Secret," in which the duo urge domestic violence victims to "Get the hell up out that situation before you get killed."

"We have friends who have gone through this for many years, best friends who won’t even tell you [about their abuse]," CMG says when discussing the emotionally-charged song, told in the first-person voice of an angry victim who fights back. "Even though our song is pretty deep about getting this guy back, we are saying what a lot of women want to actually do, and helping them get their frustrations out by listening to our song."

In practice, as well as in their lyrics, Conscious Daughters demonstrate solidarity for their sisters: Nutcracker Suite features cameos from several Bay Area female hip-hop talents, including Mystic, Marvaless, and Goldee the Murderist, whose death last summer from a blood disease was sudden and tragic. Special One says that it’s important for females in hip-hop to look out for one another, since they already have the chips stacked against them. "It’s always harder for women," she notes, "Most female rappers have to balance a career and their family."

Another longtime fellow East Bay female hip-hop talent, DJ Pam the Funkstress of the Coup, is joining Conscious Daughters when they embark on a national tour later this year. (Official details — likely involving Paris, Talib Kweli, Pete Rock, and others — will be announced at guerrillafunk.com).

After so many years away, CMG and Special One heartily embrace the work ahead. "We love challenges, and we’re going to have to get out there and do everything all over again now," says CMG.

"It’s a blessing, and we’re confident in our talents," adds Special One.

www.myspace.com/consciousdaughters

www.guerrillafunk.com

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