Arts & Culture

Arts & Culture

Speed Reading

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THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF BEST HORROR COMICS

Edited by Peter Normanton

Running Press

448 pages

$17.95

It probably comes as no surprise that post–World War II Americans decided Hitler was a lot scarier than the Boogeyman. It’s a little more shocking to see that fear realized in their comic books. The Mammoth Book of Best Horror Comics contains its fair share of vampires, werewolves, and zombies, but those early years are dominated by ghostly stormtroopers, Nazi clones and — more often than not — the reanimated fuhrer himself. I’m particularly fond of "Terror of the Stolen Legs," which, I assure you, is creepier than the title suggests.

For this collection, editor Peter Normanton has culled prime examples from more than six decades of horror comics. The results are often fascinating: how else to see Nazi anxiety so aptly literalized? And, of course, they’re fun. Don’t forget these are comics, so for all of their time capsule–esque appeal, they retain that guilty pleasure quality. Imagine you’re a kid in the pre-"graphic novel" ’50s while reading the collection— it enhances the thrill.

For the most part, it’s these early offerings that prove the most delightful, if only for the camptastic writing. The best example comes from "The Game Keeper," which begins, "Run Avis Drood! Run as fast as your lovely legs can carry you, for the full moon burgeons beyond Drood Castle and the game is afoot!"

The only real downside to the collection is Normanton’s purple prose. He tends to ham it up in his introductions to each story, promising a life-changing experience on every page. But hey, feel free to skip those parts — they don’t have pictures, anyway.

All mod cons

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› johnny@sfbg.com

How can any of us forget 1835, and the heady discovery of spherical amphibians, blue goats, and petite three-foot zebras frolicking on the moon? In Fakers: Hoaxers, Con Artists, Counterfeiters, and Other Great Pretenders (New Press, 245 pages, $24.95), Paul Maliszewski relates that time, when the New York Sun brought news of lunar life to an increasingly large readership that craved delightful information during an economic drought. Maliszewski doesn’t have to work to make the story funny — he merely has to relate how the paper’s moon-discovery serial likened a typical blue goat to "a young lamb or kitten," and presented scientists pretending to tickle the creature’s beard as seen through a telescope, only to witness it "bound away into oblivion, as if conscious of earthly impertinence."

Within the context of Maliszewski’s sprawling look at fakery, the Sun saga is a light vacation, because of its relative datedness and good-natured imagination. Before and after, Fakers largely avoids such Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds–style nostalgia for more contemporary tales: the stories of Stephen Glass, James Frey, and JT Leroy, for example. It places Glass’s accounts under a microscope that highlights their pandering corniness. It relates the life and times of Leroy — and his feverish endorsement by the likes of Dave Eggers and Michael Chabon (more on him later), as well as his editorship of an installment in Da Capo’s Best Music Writing series — without losing sight of the fact that Leroy’s much-celebrated writing is mawkish.

Such targets and views might suggest that Maliszewski likes to wag his finger and tut-tut, but his viewpoint is much more variable — he isn’t out to condemn various literary liars, for example, so much as critique them. Early in the book, he relates one of his own adventures in the creation of phony identities, a Walter Mitty–scale satire somewhat akin to the letters that Joe Orton used to write to newspapers as "Edna Welthorpe," a make-believe housewife outraged by Orton’s plays. Here, and in other instances, such as a discussion of George W. Bush’s use of the word "confidence" when discussing economics, Fakers suggests that the Bush years have not just eroded but demolished the value of truth.

In a seeming act of first-person tit-for-tat, Maliszewski shares an example of an instance when he fell for a hoax, though the chosen subject — a tall tale that might qualify as an urban legend if it weren’t set in the wilderness — cops out in terms of allowing a truly personal and thus uncomfortable examination of the various aspects of being duped. The most curious of Maliszewski’s practices is the frequent weaving of e-mail interviews — a format that would seem to allow for flights of fancy — into his investigative text. A correspondence with former New York Times journalist Michael Finkel, for example, stays soft-focus when it could have questioned the presumptuous audacity of a middle-aged white man assuming the voice of a West African boy.

In a recent Bookforum review, Hua Hsu describes Fakers as vaguely paranoia-inducing, and indeed, at the very least, this reader — a journalist who has been duped — wonders if any of the facts or stories that the author relates might contain creative twists. In an extended conclusion about a fraudulent Michael Chabon essay, Maliszewski essentially asserts that to lie for the sake of lying is a cynical, selfish act. True. But Fakers is more interesting when it is ambivalent and discomfiting, or when Maliszewski’s examples and anecdotes prompt ideas about various permutations of truth and falsehood in the media landscape. (Take CNN’s Nancy Drew, I mean Nancy Grace, and the way she is currently using a compulsive liar — Caylee Anthony — to co-author cable news television’s version of a radio serial.) Blue goats are cute, but — as Fakers makes clear — white lies have many facets.

Dudes and don’ts

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All right, I’m not gonna try and pretend The Achievers: The Story of the Lebowski Fans and Deadgirl have all that much in common, other than they’re both playing the San Francisco Independent Film Festival. But they do both focus on folks with peculiar obsessions, healthy and otherwise.

Camera in hand, television commercial director Eddie Chung descended upon the 2004 Lebowski Fest — since 2002, an annual gathering of fans of the Coen brothers’ 1998 cult phenom The Big Lebowski — and discovered a bona fide subculture. Who are these people? Why are they addicted to Lebowski? What makes ordinary working stiffs fiendishly create movie-inspired costumes (severed toe, Sioux City Sasparilla bottle, walrus, "camel fucker") as detailed as they are obscure?

At 66 brisk minutes, The Achievers can’t help being fun, although I imagine it would be difficult to enjoy the doc without having seen Lebowski. (If you haven’t seen Lebowski, or you saw it when it came out and — like most audiences and critics at the time — didn’t get it, you’re long overdue for a viewing.) Still, that’s probably not gonna be a problem for IndieFest attendees, considering the fest hosts an annual bowling-infused salute to the Dude. Dilettantes will appreciate The Achievers’ many Lebowski clips, which pop up to contextualize lesser-known references; diehards will thrill to the interviews with bit-part actors like "Saddam," the Hussein look-alike who hands the Dude bowling shoes during his dream sequence. Also featured are the real-life inspirations for the Dude, Walter Sobchak, and Little Larry Sellers (you know, the kid who steals the Dude’s car and leaves his D-grade homework paper behind — incredibly, a true story, more or less.) The Coens are absent, but bemused star Jeff Bridges does make an appearance.

As Chung discovers, the most hardcore of the Lebowski fans found each other over the Internet, becoming acquainted via a message board dedicated to the film and the fest. Many have become real-world friends above and beyond the organized Lebowski gatherings, which now attract thousands of White Russian–drenched revelers. Really, they’re no different than heavy metal fans, or Rocky Horror junkies, or Civil War reenactors, tapping shared interests to build a tribe whose activities (Maude Lebowski tattoo, anyone?) might be viewed by the mainstream as crossing the line into low-level insanity.

Far more wackjobby are the protagonists of IndieFest’s closing-night film, Deadgirl, which is described in the fest program as resembling the early films of David Cronenberg. Body horror? Yes! Disturbing? Indeed! The work of filmmakers (Marcel Sarmiento, Gadi Harel) with innovative, artistically daring careers ahead of them? I’m not yet convinced. Deadgirl starts off promisingly enough, as a pair of ne’er-do-well high schoolers (pretty boys Shiloh Fernandez and Noah Segan) stave off boredom by exploring an abandoned mental hospital. But this ain’t slow-burn creepiness like Session 9 (2001); the film’s most original twist — the boys find a zombielike woman chained in the basement — comes early, and the shocks soon revert to tired torture-porn gross-outs. Naturally, the friends are torn apart by the discovery, even as they both become consumed by it. One’s horny enough to declare the woman/monster do-able, while the other’s a tad more sensitive; it’s not long before an unbelievable mix of emo and necrophilia, and a li’l dab of misogyny, oozes to the surface. Queasy does it.

SAN FRANCISCO INDEPENDENT FILM FESTIVAL

Feb. 5–22, most shows $11

Roxie, 3117 16th St., SF; Victoria, 2961 16th St., SF; and Shattuck, 2230 Shattuck, Berk.

www.sfindie.com

Hot pink

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Filmmakers like Jonathan Demme who worked for Roger Corman in the early 1970s were delighted by their freedom to include just about anything — radical political issues, wild tonal shifts, etc. — as long as the basic drive-in requirements of gratuitous T&A and violence were shoehorned in. That moment was brief. But something similar has lasted decades in Japan’s "pink film" milieu, where often youthful talent cut teeth on low-budget softcore features typically an hour in length.

With genital display and graphic sex illegal — we’ve all seen Japanese private parts obscured by a digital fogblot — "pink" makers must exercise a little more imagination than Western pornmeisters. No doubt there’s been much unwatchable dross among the diminished but still-active genre’s thousands of titles to date. But there’s also been inspired, sometimes just-plain-weird stuff, like Godardian Go, Go Second Time Virgin (1969), extreme nunsploitation School of the Holy Beast (1974) and 2003’s Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai (a.k.a. Horny Home Tutor: Teacher’s Love Juice), which played the San Francisco International Film Festival.

In a rare moment of retrospection, this year’s San Francisco Independent Film Festival sidebars "I am Curious (Pink): The Second Wave of Japanese Sex Cinema, 1986–Present." Offering two double bills at a sum length barely more than that of one bloated Hollywood prestige flick, this sampler ranges from the goofy to the gloomy. There are some constants — ironic use of Western classical music, variably consensual abuse of women, vigorously mimed sex acts — but these singular films aren’t much like each other, let alone most adult entertainment you’d see here. Even their misogyny often feels like an in-joke at men’s expense.

Not so in The Bedroom (also known, rather misleadingly, as Unfaithful Wife: Shameful Torture), a 1992 feature by Hisayasu Sato of gay "pink" Muscle — a dismemberment fantasia that set the gold standard for walkouts when bizarrely chosen as 1990’s San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival opening nighter. This cold, morbid, semi-abstract objet d’art queasily mixes identity blur, voyeurism, tranquilizer excess, marital ennui, homicide, and lewd consumption of chopped lettuce. It’s notorious for giving a small role to one Issei Sagawa, who’d committed real-life murder and cannibalism — only to be just briefly institutionalized before becoming a still-popular multimedia "celebrity" back home. Ick.

On a less appalling note, the other three IndieFest "pinks" take themselves less seriously. Osamu Sato’s New Tokyo Decadence: The Slave from 2007 is supposedly based on the experiences of star Rinako Hirasawa, who discovered early on that she was into masochism — though not averse to playing professional dominatrix. She finds fulfillment under the thumb of her eventual office boss, only to discover he’s a wuss in sadist’s clothing. Often funny, New Tokyo Decadence views its heroine not as victim but a sometimes ambivalent power bottom who actually pulls the strings.

For full-on silliness there’s Motosugu Watanabe’s 1986 Sexy Battle Girls, whose schoolgirl protagonist has an anatomical irregularity her father is hell-bent on using to avenge a long-ago wrong. "The Venus Crush is your secret weapon! Love is not an option!" he insists. Sent to a private school where "bad" students are sold to politicians as sex slaves and ballpoint pens are shot like deadly arrows, she combats perils including one highly exotic dildo you won’t find at Good Vibrations.

Shuji Kataoka’s same-year S+M Hunter features a titular character outfitted spaghetti western–style with cowboy boots, priest’s collar, a skull’s-head eyepatch, Morricone-type musical theme, and extraordinary erotic-lassoing abilities. But he and fellow "Pleasure Dungeon" habitués meet their match in the Bombers, a man-hating (and gay-man molesting) girl gang à la H.G. Lewis’ She-Devils on Wheels (1968). If you’ve yearned for a battle of the sexes encompassing gratuitous Nazi regalia and pervasive retro disco woo! woo! — well, prepare to be satiated.

SAN FRANCISCO INDEPENDENT FILM FESTIVAL

Feb. 5–22, most shows $11

Roxie, 3117 16th St., SF; Victoria, 2961 16th St., SF; and Shattuck, 2230 Shattuck, Berk.

www.sfindie.com

A pox

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I went for a test and the nurse found a genital wart. I have had more than 20 sexual partners and enjoy casual sex occasionally, but I always use condoms (plus the pill, just in case). I feel embarrassed, like I’ve been irresponsible, but I thought I was protecting myself thoroughly. How can I get over this and feel OK about sex again? And are there ways to keep from getting another wart?

Love,

Dirtied

Dear Andrea:

I just found out I have a genital wart. It’s a really small bump that could have been there awhile without me noticing. I’ve had it treated with freezing and have cream to apply to it; but I’ve been doing research and I keep getting conflicting information about how long it will last, whether any kind of sex is safe while it’s still there, how infectious it is, and what to do if it doesn’t go away.

I feel gross and dirty about it. I always use condoms and I don’t know where I could have gotten it. To make matters worse, I have a new boyfriend who doesn’t seem to have noticed anything wrong. Now that I’ve found out about this, I am dreading telling him. Help!

Love,

Sullied

Dear Andrea:

I found out I have HPV and I don’t even know how I …

Dear Warty Readers:

OK! We have found some warts. Until someone claims to have acquired them on purpose, or to have been accidentally exposed but really stoked about it, I will assume that everyone is feeling kind of miserable and a little soiled and having a hard time coming to terms with it. This is completely understandable. Indeed, it is expected. Having an infectious disease which may affect your ability to find happiness with other human beings would certainly be harsh enough; the whole STD thing adds insult to injury.

Personally, I think STDs need an image makeover. Syphilis never seemed to shock anyone in Elizabethan literature, but everyone was poxy then anyway, not to mention smelly. We’ve had centuries of crass jokes and shame campaigns since, though: a kind of cumulative shaming which no public health department’s "it could happen to anyone" message is going to be able to alleviate. Of course you feel bad.

I would hope — I would wish, anyway — that normalization would help. This shit is everywhere! I usually go to the CDC’s site for STD statistics. Here are their latest on HPV:

Approximately 20 million Americans are currently infected with HPV, and another 6.2 million people become newly infected each year. At least 50 percent of sexually active men and women acquire genital HPV infection at some point in their lives.

That’s a lot of people feeling shamed and dirty. Maybe it’s time to just accept that the disease is out there, it’s easy to get, and even the most cautious (well, the second-most cautious; the first-most cautious stay home and order their groceries over the Internet) can contract it. Having HPV doesn’t say a thing about your self-respect, your hygiene, or anything much beyond your native level of luckiness. For the record, the CDC’s "how not to get HPV" advice is not all that helpful:

… even people with only one lifetime sex partner can get HPV, if their partner was infected with HPV. For those who are not in long-term, mutually monogamous relationships, limiting the number of sex partners and choosing a partner less likely to be infected may lower the risk of HPV. Partners less likely to be infected include those who have had no or few prior sex partners.

While safety-by-partner-choice really does work, it sure does limit the choice of potential partners, from amazing abundance (in the big cities, assuming minimum levels of datability) to one of those measly little prix-fixe menus which never have any desserts except crème brûlée. What if you don’t want inexperienced partners?

Here’s the deal: none of you was being irresponsible. The virus got transmitted not through but around the condom, which did reduce the likelihood of transmission. Your immune system may clear it (rendering you disease-free) or it may not, in which case you may always be contagious from the area of the wart. Treating the warts won’t cure you, but may lower the chance of transmission, which may in turn help to make you feel less leper-like and more like your old self. Oh, and lest we forget, visible warts are the good kind of HPV! The ones that cause cervical cancer are invisible, the bastards.

Now for the bad part — you do have to tell people. You have to tell potential sex partners. You may lose some, but people who are really interested are likely to stick around. You have to tell the boyfriend. Since you just found out, you can’t be accused of withholding important information. Normalize for him, and bring up the CDC’s statistics (50 percent! How’s that for company?). Get treated. Take deep breaths.

Love,

Andrea

Contact Andrea at andrea@altsexcolumn.com for more info.

“Takako Yamaguchi”

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REVIEW For anyone who has attempted to stare down one of Bridget Riley’s hypnogogic vortices or contemplated the point at which two color blocks mesh in a Rothko, Takako Yamaguchi’s recent set of paintings at Jancar Jones Gallery should produce some pleasantly familiar sensations. Upon entering the shoebox-size space, one sees five three-by-four-foot canvases that form a seemingly continuous horizontal vista of graduated lines and patterned strips done in earth tones and blues, with the occasional wink of metallic shimmer. (This panorama effect is offset when one realizes that an outlier has been sneakily hung in the back office area.)

Viewed individually, Yamaguchi’s warm bands of color and geometric repetition start to take on the cast of Southern Californian geography — oceanic expanse, suburban sprawl, and stretches of desert. Interlocking white donuts and intestinal curlicues suggest clouds; hills and waves roll ad infinitum; distant mountains have the repetitive crenulations of a side-scrolling video game; the faintest line of gold leaf could demarcate city lights twinkling midground, or a sliver of sunset. And yet your eyes never fully adjust to the precise play of blurred and crisp elements, which is especially forceful in the two halves of Strangely Familiar. What looks fuzzy in your peripheral vision sometimes stays that way when studied head-on, just as Yamaguchi’s palette toggles between subtle abstraction and figurative hooks. In this sense, her canvases are Magic Eyes in reverse: if you stare long enough, the geographic reference points start to flicker into the background, like unstable mirages. So meticulous and subtle are the gradations of color — so light is Yamaguchi’s brushwork — that at times you forget you are looking at a painting. (This is underscored by the way in which each landscape continues around the sides of the canvas, as if the image were sprayed onto it and then stretched onto a slightly too-small frame.). Jancar Jones may be the smallest gallery in the city, but from the vantage point of Yamaguchi’s landscapes, you can see for miles and miles.

TAKAKO YAMAGUCHI Through Feb. 28. Jancar Jones Gallery, 965 Mission, suite 120, SF. Thurs–Sat, noon–6 p.m. (415) 281-3770, www.jancarjones.com

“Coraline”

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REVIEW Coraline is a great film to take your kids to, provided you’re willing to let them sleep in your bed for a night. Like the Neil Gaiman novel it’s based on, this is a fairy tale with a dark side, an Alice in Wonderland–style fable that doesn’t dumb things down for its target audience. But then, neither did Alice. Dakota Fanning voices Coraline, a lonely, blue-haired little girl in search of adventure. She finds it, and them some, when she travels into bizarro world by way of a tiny door in her house. There she finds her Other Mother (Teri Hatcher), who seems nice enough — except that she wants to sew buttons into Coraline’s eyes. Soon the precocious girl has embarked on a mission to save her kidnapped parents, some old school ghosts, and, of course, herself. The animation style is an updated version of that found in The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), also from director Henry Selick. There’s a richness and depth to Coraline‘s world, which is only emphasized by the nifty 3-D effects. Inevitably, this Coraline is softer than Gaiman’s source material, but it’s spooky enough to please both fans and newcomers. Despite the lack of big scares, it leaves you with a lingering unease. And possibly a fear of buttons.

CORALINE opens Fri/6 in Bay Area theaters.

Festival for Freedom

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PREVIEW It doesn’t take six degrees of separation to link the new breed of local bands performing at the University of San Francisco’s Festival for Freedom benefit show. They’re an interwoven clan of West Coast outfits with garage rock tendencies and psychedelic leanings. And they’re just about all in each other’s MySpace top eight. If I had to label, I’d consider the term "flower punks" for ’em. I mean, c’mon, San Francisco has a huge Haight-Ashbury legacy to live up to. So, in the spirit of hippiedom and smiling on your brother, the undergrads from the university’s Erasmus Community has decided to take on the cause of fighting modern-day slavery and is planning an immersion trip to Uganda and Rwanda, where they will focus their efforts on rehabilitating child soldiers.

This benefit show for that trip is a culmination of the group’s efforts in social justice awareness and activism, combined with a dose of peacenik-punk rock. Taking the stage on campus: Ty Segall, Man/Miracle, and a very Birthday Party-era Nick Cave sounding Depth Charge Revolt, among others. The bands will bring the noise, so you should bring your bucks to help support this worthwhile cause for the marginalized children of Uganda.

FESTIVAL FOR FREEDOM: USF BENEFIT FOR THE REHABILITATION OF UGANDAN CHILD SOLDIERS With A Quantum Visionary, Depth Charge Revolt, Travis Hayes, Ghosttown Refugees, the Vox Jaguars, James Rabbit, Ty Segall, and Man/Miracle. Fri/6, 6:30 p.m., $5–$8. McClaren 250, Phelan Building, University of San Francisco campus, SF. (831) 588-3537

“The Bird and the Bee”

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PREVIEW For a band that has leased tracks to Grey’s Anatomy, Sex and the City: the Movie (2008), and Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008), the Bird and the Bee curiously still bear the burden of being just one buzz band among the ravenous, clamoring multitudes. Nonetheless, the duo’s brand of frothy pop has gained traction among various species of photosphere hipsters.

According to their nonchalant MySpace bio, Inara George and Greg Kurstin met, hit it off over jazz standards, played a few, and then never looked back. An established producer, Kurstin has collaborated with artists running the gamut from Beck to Britney Spears. The Bird and the Bee’s self-titled, 2007 Blue Note debut garnered attention for the pair, thanks to songs like "I Hate Camera," a capering, catchy track with glinting synths offset by playful electronic noodlings, The music, which the band itself has described as sounding like a futuristic 1960s American film set in Brazil, fuses Kurstin’s retro inclinations and suave jazz accents with George’s sweet sing-song to darling, almost uniformly excellent results. With George’s bold Cleopatra chop and the twosome’s taste for playfully kitschy promo pics, you can’t say the kids lack style, either.

With the musical intelligentsia stroking their graying beards over the pass/fail results of the second album’s litmus test, the consensus is that new record, Ray Guns Are Not Just the Future (Blue Note), delivers its bubbly pop goods with minimal deviation from what’s already working. It’ll all be up for examination at the Independent.

THE BIRD AND THE BEE With Obi Best. Mon/2, 8 p.m., $15. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. (415) 771-1422, www.theindependentsf.com

Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes

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PREVIEW What lengths will you go to for your art? If you’re a castrato it’s probably a sore point. For Mexico’s internationally renowned experimental theater company, Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes (Certain Inhabitants Theatre), it’s the beginning of a lush and lively investigation into the complexities and contradictions of cultural power and refinement. Drawing from a variety of theatrical styles and incorporating multidisciplinary performers, director Claudio Valdés Kuri and writer Jorge Kuri have crafted a time-tripping escapade across three centuries of culture and cruelty.

Siamese twins — a surgeon and opera columnist in a single ungainly suit and two Louis XIV wigs — lead a journey that begins in the decadent 18th century court society of the Old World, in the throes of a circle that fed ravenously on the castrated children of the poor and elevated them to superstardom by the preservation and cultivation of their fine prepubescent sopranos. With Monsters and Prodigies: A History of the Castrati, Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes the company makes its long-overdue Bay Area premiere, courtesy of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, in what promises to be a resonant, dramatic outing whose operatic airs — in Spanish and Italian with English supertitles — hit an unfaltering high C for cutting, carnivalesque satire.

TEATRO DE CIERTOS HABITANTES Thurs/5–Sat/7, 8 p.m., $25–$30. Novellus Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard, SF. (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org

Seeing starzzz

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Pitchfork Media has sort of become synonymous with junk-food news in recent years, sensationalizing almost every aspect of the independent music world for the hungry masses through dirt-dishing bites on the latest breaking headlines and scale-tipping — or dipping — album reviews. While some may see the Chicago online music publication as a rock-snob tabloid, there’s no denying the influence it’s had upon some independent musicians: artists such as Animal Collective and No Age have collared a kind of A-list celebrity status almost overnight thanks, in part, to the site of music sites.

But when I met with San Francisco group Nodzzz at drummer Eric Butterworth’s Upper Haight apartment, the three seemed averse to any hype they may garner from Pitchfork. When I mentioned that the publication had just reviewed the band’s self-titled, 10-song long-player on What’s Your Rupture? that very morning, the three met my remark with silence. Then Butterworth opined: "Pitchfork is lame, and it doesn’t even matter because that shit is stupid. If you base your musical interests on Pitchfork — fuck yourself."

Fair enough. While Nodzzz managed to capture an above-average 7.6 rating for its efforts, the outfit agreed, as vocalist-guitarist Anthony Atlas put it, that "[Pitchfork] reviews are always kind of contradictory" and "a positive review would be just as problematic as a negative review."

"It’s pretty fucking crazy how many people that goes out to," guitarist and backup vocalist Sean Paul Presley added. "It makes you feel pretty nervous because you already hold your own material pretty close to yourself and you wonder what’s gonna happen when you get a review like that, because Pitchfork is single-handedly responsible for making bands, what bands do well, and what bands sell records. It’s been an auspicious day not knowing what it actually means. I’m on the fence about whether it means anything more than just another review."

This review does come at a point not long after Nodzzz’s "I Don’t Wanna (Smoke Marijuana)" single, issued on Butterworth’s Make a Mess imprint. That release ended up on quite a few best-of-2008 short lists. But while the group’s name has amassed a wave of chatter on the blogosphere, Nodzzz have obvious convictions concerning the objectification of its image and the commercialization of its sound — even going so far as to turn down an opportunity to play at this year’s South by Southwest festival.

"I like pop and punk music when they cater to an audience and to fun," said Atlas, who formed the band with Presley and original drummer Pete Hilton in the fall of 2006 after relocating from Olympia, Wash., to the Bay Area for school. "Something about SXSW seems too market driven — kind of like a rock ‘n’ roll tradeshow. There’s a ton of fantastic bands playing, and I’m sure it’s a fun time, but I don’t feel like asserting ourselves in this broader rock ‘n’ roll market is what we’re all about."

Released in November 2008, the album channels the slapdash garage-pop urgencies of ’80s groups like the Feelies and Great Plains. "Is She There" opens the recording with a burst of amp crackle and drum jolt that’s over before you know it. On songs such as "In the City (Contact High)" and "Controlled Karaoke," the bright-eyed harmonies of Atlas and Presley bait you with nagging, sing-along choruses that get lodged in your skull for days on end, while "Highway Memorial Shrine" and "Losing My Accent" smother you in fuzz and chaos with a scrappy, twin-guitar assault of chiming hooks and jangly lo-fi, as well as Hilton’s trash-can rumble.

As Atlas sees it, his band’s fortunes can be chalked up to simply "tunneling through the fog" as each of its "little goals" are accomplished.

"I have no agenda with this band, but I do have goals, and I just see them as they become possible," he explained. "I feel like we have to have a healthy relationship with it because it can just end quickly. It’s so rewarding, but yet it’s a rock ‘n’ roll band — it’s a project with three people. You can’t stake a life on it."

www.myspace.com/nodzzz

>>MORE GARAGE ROCK ’09

Gimme Gimme

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"I fucking hate normal garage rock," says Hunx. "It’s so boring. I love when it’s weirder."

If you’ve heard either of the two 7-inch singles the man born Seth Bogart put out last year under the name Hunx and His Punx — the debut "Good Kisser"/"Cruisin" EP on Austria’s Bachelor Records and "Gimme Gimme Back Your Love"/"You Don’t Like Rock ‘n’ Roll" on Rob’s House — you probably know where a comment like that comes from. Over the phone, Hunx and I agree that Jay Reatard doesn’t fall into the category: he’s too interesting with his combination of power-pop hooks and Public Image Ltd.-esque, spacious production techniques. Hunx, for his part, tweaks the formula by holding onto garage’s obsession with lo-fi recording and trash culture while injecting queercore gender-play into the mix.

In contrast to the genre-hopping hodgepodge of Gravy Train!!!! — the East Bay mainstays and hamburger advocates for which Hunx plays keyboards and sings — the Hunx and His Punx records sound like they’re drawing on fewer sources, but the songs are just as dense with jokes and sneaky melodies. But while the songs carry their own weight, half the story is Hunx’s charisma. Rather than coming off as buttoned-down in comparison to his other, famously raunchy band, the coyness and cuteness of "Gimme Gimme Back Your Love" shifts the focus to the strength of his nasally vocals and the wonderfully complete stories he sketches, running from heartbreak to new hook-up in seconds.

With Gravy Train!!!! scaling back its activities in the wake of vocalist Chunx’s relocation to Los Angeles and the difficult work of making a name for Down at Lulu’s — the Oakland salon-cum-vintage clothing store he runs with friend Tina Lucchesi — mostly behind him, it’s the right time for the quite literally hunky dude to release some new jams into the world.

Jay Reatard’s Shattered Records will be coming out of hibernation to release one of Hunx’s forthcoming records, and two others will be on their way via Bubbledumb and True Panther. The idea is to put out an album collecting the singles in the near future, and then, Hunx explains, "I want to come out with something super gay after that, like a disco record, so that all the people that got into [Hunx and His Punx] that are rockers are like, ‘Blah.’<0x2009>"

Hunx tells me that these records shouldn’t be seen as a Gravy Train!!!! side project, though. The seeds for the Punx were planted when Seth’s friend Nobunny, wrote a batch of songs with the intention of starting a Runaways-esque band made up of high school girls. "That’s why all those songs are about boys and stuff," Hunx says. "But then, he was, like, too creepy or something and couldn’t find any girls."

The two recorded some of the songs in Hunx’s hometown of Tucson and then sat on them for about a year before deciding to release them, along with other songs Hunx had written in the interim, as singles. The vocalist tells me that while he thinks the songs Nobunny wrote would be great sung by a girl, they’re better "sung in a gay way because there’s not that much going on like that."

He’s right, of course: the current crop of unorthodox garage rock revivalists like a dab of New Zealand pop ambition in their recession rock but don’t seem to have much use for gender ambiguity. Nor, for that matter, do they have lines as good as "We’ll go to Del Taco / and order something macho" from the boyf-stealing story "Good Kisser," or "What the hell is wrong with you / I think you sniffed too much glue" from the self-explanatory breakup rocker "You Don’t Like Rock ‘n’ Roll."

Although Hunx sometimes performs live with only a backing track and dancers — he likes the "talent show" feel — the upcoming Gilman show will include a full band of mostly "hot, straight dudes that I make dress up really slutty," the frontman promises. "Leather jackets with no shirt underneath and nylons and stuff. They always try to take home the outfits."

HUNX AND HIS PUNX

Sat/31, 7:30 p.m. doors, $8

924 Gilman Street Project, Berk.

www.924gilman.org


>>MORE GARAGE ROCK ’09

IV to the floor

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"We do rockcations," says Hank IV vocalist Bob McDonald, "which is trademarked, I believe, by Anthony." McDonald knows of what he speaks. The San Francisco underground dynasty of a band that he cultivates — alongside guitarist-vocalist Anthony Bedard, guitarist Andy Oglesby, bassist Chris Portfolio, and drummer Scott Jones — has been to Bologna, Italy, and back on the grand notion that, yes, you too can hold down steady, life-giving, lease-holding employment and still rock hard, hither and yon. Today’s revolutionary road, it seems, means playing outta town in, say, five-day spurts with a side of out-of-pocket relaxation, "because no one wants to go on an extended tour," McDonald continues over the phone from his day job. "Because we’re too old, or we have jobs we can’t leave."

The bonus is the word-of-mouth equivalent of an anniversary Rolex. During HIV’s sound check in Bologna, where the band was visiting friend and Fuck founder Kyle Statham, McDonald says, "this guy came up after we were done and said, ‘Everyone is so soft or so techno here. Finally, someone with some balls-ah!’"

Who knew this bastard offshoot of McDonald and Bedard’s Mr. and Mr. and Mr. and Mr. and Mr. Evil combo would take off like it has — HIV released its second long-player, Refuge in Genre, recorded in all its "high-fidelity bombastic rock" splendor by Tim Green (the Fucking Champs) and mastered by Bob Weston (Shellac), on the shitgaze-cool imprint Siltbreeze — and find its balls-ah in the process? This, after HIV’s furtive beginnings: its first show happened at the Dunes in Portland, Ore., a teensy bar owned by Valet’s Honey Owen. "We wanted to play somewhere where our friends weren’t going to see us," Bedard confesses by phone. Since then all the "good energy and crazy momentum" this proudly balls-ah-to-the-wall outfit has generated — inspiring comparisons to Country Teasers and the Saints, and garnering invites to perform live on WFMU — has surprised its music insider-y members. (McDonald is a veteran of Denver hardcore unit Bum Kon and a product manager at music distributor Revolver; Bedard, the Hemlock Tavern booker and ex-member of groups like the Resineators and Icky Boyfriends.)

HIV came about following the departure of Mr. Evil’s old drummer, amid a spate of drinking and brainstorming "dumb ideas," says McDonald. "We thought, ‘Hank IV — we’ll cut the lineage,’ and we wrote notes on a bar napkin. It was easy because we just told the guys [Portfolio and Oglesby] we were playing with that they were in this band. That’s the best way to do it, because if you ask them they might say no."

A few Hank fans, however, haven’t been able to take the tease. The group’s name is "definitely an idea that makes some people angry!" Bedard exclaims. "Like that Hank Williams III fan who called up Amoeba when we were doing an in-store: ‘They should change their name!’ It’s an absurd idea — thinking that our music has as much to do with Hank Williams as Hank III’s music has to do with Hank Williams, family lineage aside."

Rather, HIV takes its cues from the mind-blowing qualities of early Butthole Surfers, Volcano Suns, and other bands instrumental in forming the musical sensibilities of Bedard, McDonald, and Jones, who are in their late 30s and early 40s.

"We’re trying to make noisy, fun, abrasive, fucked-up rock ‘n’ roll," explains Bedard, clearly pumped to return to Portland for its Slabtown Bender festival on Feb. 7. "There’s so much medium rock out there. People settle for stuff that kind of rocks or maybe rocks. So they get taken aback a bit by the force of Bob’s vocals and how in-your-face and assaultive Hank IV’s music can be." Too bad for them, though not for HIV, because as Bedard puts it, "these are older guys who come from a generation of bands that want to see things get a lot more over-the-top."

www.hankiv.com

>>MORE GARAGE ROCK ’09

Bunny ballin’

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Nobunny loves you — that much is clear by the end of the first track on his debut, Love Visions. But where did the masked maven of caffeinated garage-punk come from? I met with the leather-jacketed, now Bay Area-based "half-rabbit, half-jackalope, half-human" at an Oakland bar, angling for two rabbit-earfuls of explanation. It’s hard not to be curious: the aforementioned Visions, released last year by 1-2-3-4 Go! and Bubbledumb, motorbiked outta left field to become 2008’s most delightful lo-fi slab of clambake party jams. Even heavy-hitter Jay Reatard recently designated it as his new favorite record "to jump around in [his] underwear and eat pizza in bed to!"

Eight years ago, Nobunny was conceived as "The No-Money Bunny" near the mountains west of Tucson, where, after having cleaned up a hard drug habit, the soon-to-be bunny-eared dude thought he ought to become "a rabbit Elvis impersonator … no joke!" He followed a peculiar familial precedent for masked musicianship — mom with the Moos Brothers and the Blues Chickens, dad donned punk garb in the Blues Burgers, and Nobunny himself prefers to remain anonymous — and busked on Tucson’s avenues before his first paid gig: an April 2001 show at Chicago’s Fireside Bowl on Easter Sunday. As it turned out, it was also the day Joey Ramone died — a strangely appropriate DOB for a project that would pick up the Ramones’ pink punk shoelaces and tie them to what Nobunny calls a "no boundaries, all id" ‘tude.

After early gigs opening for Blowfly and the Black Lips ("There was no competition for the cool slots in Tucson," Nobunny says), the live performance bug has since had him by his oft-visible balls. "Anything from a tape deck to a nine-piece band" backs him up as he cranks out tunes with a rousing, familiar-feeling bubblegum jubilance. He admittedly enjoys "Frankenstein-ing" together fragments of songs he loves, but make no mistake: such sugary album cuts as "I Am a Girlfriend" and "Church Mouse" are the keyboard-drum grind of Nobunny and nobody else!

Since the LP’s release, he has put out a 7-inch single, "Give It to Me"/"Motorhead With Me" (HoZac, 2008), and when we spoke he alluded to several new releases on the way, including an new album. "Not a single review of the other album could apply to the next one," which he said will be "all acoustic," powered by handclaps, beer bottles, and stomped-on phone books. For a good time, look up Nobunny’s line — it’s probably scrawled on a bathroom wall somewhere.

NOBUNNY

With Thee Makeout Party

Feb. 4, 8 p.m., $5

Knockout

3223 Mission, SF

www.theknockoutsf.com


>>MORE GARAGE ROCK ’09

Snap!

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Who says dumb can’t be a whole lotta fun? "One of our friends called us ‘bubblegum for skinheads,’" says Carlos Bermudez of his band Photobooth. "I don’t go for the Oi! thing myself. But I guess it is bonehead bubblegum."

Ah, but what boneheady pop bliss — bouncing along in its own happy three-minute/three-chord oblivion, whether live and thriving at last year’s Budget Rock fest or documented for garage posterity à la "Pretty Baby." Studded with "ba-ba-ba-bas" and propelled by an inexorable Troggs-y drone, the track will come out in a month or two as a 7-inch on Raw Deluxe.

Another tuneful case in point: "Da Me Tus Besos," recently released as a single by Daggerman — a number Bermudez, 25, describes as a "cheesy Spanish glitter rip-off."

"My Spanish is really, really bad," confesses the guitarist-vocalist. "I was trying to get my mom to work out the Spanish, which is embarrassing in itself, because I feel like I should know it by now." Yet simultaneous grammatical and lyrical perfection was not to be. "I had to make it grammatically atrocious to make the syllables fit," Bermudez adds.

No need to belabor it. Instead, how about a blurry B&W shot at Photobooth’s origins? Bermudez’s last group, the Mothballs — the de facto house band at West Oakland’s Cereal Factory, the site of many a fun summer barbecue show — had split, and his pal Jason Patrone, ex-vocalist for FM Knives, had just moved to the Bay Area from Sacramento. "We were bored because we didn’t have anything going on at the time," Bermudez recalls, and so one night in late 2007 the two drunkenly conceived a project named after a song by the Fevers.

Housemate Matthew Melton was pulled into the group before veering off to concentrate on his other combos, the Bare Wires and Snakeflower 2, which Bermudez also plays with. Now with Robbie Simon on drums and Tim Hellman on bass, songwriters Bermudez and Patrone figure an album is their next step — though god forbid Photobooth grows too solemn or careerist.

"It’s really boring when people take themselves so seriously," says Bermudez matter-of-factly. "The cool thing about garage rock is that it’s not really self-conscious about ripping off other people. It makes it more of a party thing than a cool thing."

PHOTOBOOTH

With Buzzer and Die RotzZz

Sat/31, 8 p.m., call for price

Knockout

3223 Mission, SF

www.theknockoutsf.com


>>MORE GARAGE ROCK ’09

Rage onstage

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kimberly@sfbg.com

Yep, you too are essential to the band, especially your super-sweet triangle solos. But roughly speaking, garage rock — be it in, out, or lurking merrily on the fringes — often comes down to one visionary or prime mover, though in the tight local music scene, one never rules out the cosmic convergence of several git-‘er-done leader types.

GREG ASHLEY — THE GRIS GRIS, THE MIRRORS, SIR LORD VON RAVEN


The Gris Gris may be dormant, but the life this producer, solo artist, and guy-with-seemingly-a-jillion-bands-up-his-sleeve pulls out of his organ and guitar with Oakland’s psychy-garage Sir Lord Von Raven makes us sit up, rub our eyes, and wiggle our bee-hinds a little harder as we fetch ourselves another PBR.

www.myspace.com/sirlordvonraven

DREW CRAMER — THE MANTLES, PERSONAL AND THE PIZZAS


"I Can Read" — an excellent reminder. Personal and the Pizzas is not only the funniest joke band — and Dictators jab/mash note — in town, but Mantles dude Drew Cramer can’t stop writing catchy songs, even in the service of a Bowser-riffic group that began as an idea for a TV show. "We were going to do a sitcom — The Young Ones–style," Cramer told me this fall. "It just turned into a band. The idea is we sit around all day eating pizzas, listening to the Stooges, and drinking beer." Makes you wonder about the next warp in the more ethereal weave of the Mantles.

ANDY JORDAN — THE CUTS, THE TIME FLYS, BUZZER


The Cuts appeared to go out with a bang following From Here on Out (Birdman, 2006) and the Time Flys seemed to have flown, but don’t lose hope for this manic son of a record-store man: Buzzer takes its cues from the wild-child kicks of ’70s glitter punk and messes with hole-in-the-head stranger dangers à la "Trepanation Blues."

Buzzer with Photobooth and Die RotzZz. Sat/31, 8 p.m., call for price. Knockout, 3223 Mission, SF. www.myspace.com/buzzeroakland

TINA LUCCHESI — THE BOBBYTEENS, THE BACI GALOOPIS, TOP 10


The lady keeps the up-dos swinging at Down at Lulu’s, but she also finds plenty of time to pour a lotta love into the rock scene. Top 10 makes us wanna mix cornrows in our pop charts.

MATTHEW MELTON — SNAKEFLOWER 2, PHOTOBOOTH, BARE WIRES


Photobooth is now in the mustachioed, Oakland-by-way-of-Memphis rock ‘n’ roll maven’s past, Snakeflower 2 is still simmering, and Bare Wires — the Jay Reatard photog’s old band with his River City Tanlines cohort Alicia Trout — has risen once more, peopled by Paul Keelan and ex–Time Flys member Erin Emslie. Looking forward to BW’s Artificial Clouds LP (Tic Tac Totally).

Bare Wires with Static Static and Fun Blood. Feb. 5, 9 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.myspace.com/thebarewires

RUSSELL QUAN — THE MUMMIES, THE DUKES OF HAMBURG, THE BOBBYTEENS, THE COUNT BACKWARDS, THE PHANTOM SURFERS, THE FLAKES, THE MERSEY WIFE BEATERS


He’s the OG of garage rock in the Bay, a madman on drums — and the dude can also whip out a mean rock ‘n’ roll DJ set. Does he get extra points because he’s a genuine garage rocker? Auto repair is his forte when he isn’t bashing out beats and generating positive vibes.

TY SEGALL — TRADITIONAL FOOLS, THE PERVERTS


The one-man rock-out machine fronts the Traditional Fools, temped in the Mothballs, and recently saw his super-energized self-titled solo debut come out on John Dwyer’s Castle Face label.

Feb. 6, 5 p.m., $5. University of San Francisco campus, SF. www.myspace.com/tysegall

SUPERCHARGED: MORE BANDS

MAYYORS


Everyone loves a mystery: the Sacto band has almost zero Web presence. Also no interviews and nada on promos. According to their kinda-sorta rep, Mark of the mount saint mountain (mt.st.mtn.) label, both of Mayyors’ mt.st.mtn. singles, Marines Dot Com and Megans LOLZ, were sold out in days and re-presses for show sales evaporated just as quickly. Tough, love. Yet somehow the chatter — the old-school mouth-to-mouth variety — is on, thanks to the blitzkrieg force of tunes like "Airplanes," bruising ultra-lo-fi Brainbombs allusions, and memorable performances like their set at 2008’s Budget Rock. About as garage rock as the Coachwhips or the Hospitals, Mayyors sports FM Knives’ Chris Woodhouse on guitar and Sexy Prison’s John Pritchard on the mic. Oh, and me likee the outfit’s soundtrack to Jay Howell’s The Forest City Rockers Motorcycle Club animation.

THE OKMONIKS


The Tucson, Ariz., terrors have a way of bending an organ to their will — and word has it they’re moving to the Bay Area. www.okmoniks.com

THE PETS


I’m in love — with the boy-gang vocals, delivered with the proper nasality and snot levels, on the Oakland band’s latest LP, Misdirection (Static Impulse). Midwestern proto-punk in the Dead Boys mode and bad-boy fast-loud-hard à la the Saints, with a dab of MC5 to do ya. With Buzzer and Bare Wires. Feb. 21, 9:30 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, SF. www.myspace.com/thepetsoakland

SIC ALPS


The SF duo always had the pop chops and ideas but somehow they just keep getting better. Garage rock gone noisy and classic rock-y at the same time. www.sicalps.com

>>MORE GARAGE ROCK ’09

‘Dance party

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PARK CITY REPORT A degree of relative tranquility settled on Sundance this year, as budget cutbacks among media outlets and distributors meant the customary frenzy was dialed down a notch or three. Of course most screenings were packed, but fewer people than usual got turned away; lodgings remained available during the festival, whereas normally they’d be booked months in advance. Still, what was onscreen remained as usual — a more or less even mix of good, bad, and indifferent. (Most likely in 2010 we’ll start to see a shrunken economy affect indie film production.)

The Bay Area was strangely underrepresented this year, particularly in the documentary realm where it often has a major presence. Instead, there were two dramatic features, each highly specific in local setting. Bratt Pack family project La Mission, directed by Peter Bratt, stars Benjamin Bratt as Che, an ex-con Muni driver and middle-aged lowrider whose macho veneer doesn’t get in the way of his love for a college-bound son (Jeremy Ray Valdez). When he discovers junior is gay, dad freaks out; the Castro District may be just a few blocks from their Mission District walkup, but it’s a world away from Che’s comprehension. This cable-ready exercise’s plot turns and social-issue pleadings can be predicted after 10 minutes. Yet it’s also got genuine warmth, easygoing humor, Benjamin B.’s charisma, and a fond grasp of the ‘hood.

Frazer Bradshaw’s starker Everything Strange and New focuses on young North Oakland couple Wayne (Jerry McDaniel) and Renee (sometime Guardian contributor Beth Lisick), neither of whom quite understand how they got to be saddled with a mortgage, two kids, her frazzled nerves, and his deadened ones. Meanwhile, Wayne’s work and drinking buddies (Luis Saguar, Rico Chacon Jr.) have domestic problems of their own. This is the kind of movie people walk out on at Sundance — too slow, uncommercial, etc. — but it’s a quietly original vision with nary a false emotional note.

Elsewhere, local luminary Robin Williams finally found an indie that suited his more restrained seriocomic abilities in The World’s Greatest Dad, an imperfect but clever black comedy about literary fraud and morbid personality cults from (no kidding) Bobcat Goldthwait.

I also particularly liked doc Prom Night in Mississippi, about a burg that finally held its first integrated high school prom last year; Israeli dysfunctional-slum-family drama Zion and His Brothers; amazingly detail-perfect recreation/spoof of 1970s blaxploitation flicks Black Lightning; and (at nearby Slamdance) Smile ‘Til It Hurts: The Up With People Story, about the Me Decade’s most alarmingly perky touring act. Imagine those song numbers in the satirical Brady Bunch movies performed by a couple hundred squeaky-clean young adults, sans irony. It’s enough to make a smiley face go postal.

Gloves on

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

PREVIEW Leslie Seiters entered college as a visual artist — and left it as a choreographer. Or at least that’s what her MFA diploma from Ohio State University says. Seiters prefers to call herself a director. "I am allergic to ‘choreography,’<0x2009>" she says from her home in San Diego. "When something looks ‘choreographed,’ it turns me off."

Seiters, who lived and worked in the Bay Area between 2002 and 2007, has nothing against the craft of choreography, of course. In fact, her own works are exquisitely crafted. But she doesn’t want to see the hand of the maker because she feels it keeps her from entering a piece and having it speak to her in an unmediated manner.

Seiters left Ohio right after graduation and relocated to San Francisco, where she worked and performed with Jo Kreiter, Kathleen Hermesdorf, Jess Curtis, and Sarah Shelton Mann. All the aforementioned artists have a strong commitment to contact improvisation, which is characterized by its immediacy and the performers’ ability to remain present in the moment — an approach that has influenced Seiters’ own work. The physicality of things — an object, a move — continually fascinates her. Seiters differs, however, from her colleagues — and just about any other dancer working in the Bay Area — in her acute and exceedingly refined interest in using objects beyond their function in dance as props.

In a Seiters’ piece — she calls them installations — the edge between the animate and inanimate material is often blurred. She might have dancers double each other’s movements so precisely — as they did in such tiny danger (2003) and an attic/an exit, which premiered at last year’s San Francisco International Arts Festival — that they begin to look as if they had been set in motion by an outside force. Or they might appear like a single image that, for some mysterious reason, split in two only to merge again. "I love repetition," she explains. "This may go back to my visual background, where I would sculpt by wrapping and wrapping or cutting and cutting over and over again."

At the same time, the objects — all quite ordinary — often acquire a life of their own. Sometimes this can be quite disconcerting. When two dancers slide their arms into suspended jackets, the garments begin to manipulate the women. Dozens of suspended teacups keep up their clinking chatter long after their users have left them behind. Huge shoes move people who step into them. Dancers in paper dresses recede into and are swallowed by identically patterned wallpaper. And what about the woman on a swing, seen through a hallway, who never alters her trajectory? At what point does she become the pendulum of some unseen time machine?

Seiters’ work is both immensely playful and physically sturdy in the way she treads that thin line — she confesses to an affinity with magical realism — between the everyday and the fantastic. The process allows the familiar to become more so, even as it grows strange. For her, dance must not be pinned down, but kept open-ended. "I like it when dancers can take a movement, and turn it into a question," she says.

For the Bay Area premiere of Incidental Fear of Numbers at CounterPULSE this weekend, Seiters and her Little Known Dance Theater is partnering with Lux Borealis, a modern dance company from Tijuana, Mexico, whose "intelligence and physicality in the way they use weight and motion" Seiters admired. It’s her first full-evening performance and her most ambitious work yet. Included as part of the performance will be lots of tops and at least one very tall stack of yellow pages with a turntable on top. She also loves the sound of gloves on a cardboard floor.

INCIDENTAL FEAR OF NUMBERS

Fri/30–Sat/31, 8 p.m., $10–$15

CounterPULSE

1310 Mission, SF

www.counterpulse.org

Revved up on garage rock

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Grease monkeys gotta scratch their coconuts and wonder: why have the words garage rock become so dirty? Especially when a garage-rock explosion of sorts seems to be going off all around us.

Few want to be tagged as such — though their affection for three chords; adoration of the square-one pleasures of guitar, bass, and drums; and love of a classic pop hook are out there for all to see. Does retro spell lame-o in a year beset with cultural, economic, and political change?

Not if you recall the last late-’90s/early-’00s garage rock resurgence, which arrived on the heels of a boom in tech-sector/dot-com creativity and coincided with a burgeoning home-recording underground — a rough, eerie corollary of the ’60s-era moment when British Invasion bands sparked a zillion garage-rock combos. No coincidence, I believe, that as digital home recording and online musical dissemination made it possible for every guy’s and girl’s band to reach a wide audience, so too did a world open up for vinyl and analog lovers of the most hidden and once-unheard-of musical niches, who were suddenly able to find newbie listeners.

So perhaps change, of the most DIY variety, is the very reason why so many bands in the Bay Area — and out past our waters where Wavves, Vivian Girls, and Jay Reatard ripple — are tapping into the garage-rock vein that oldsters like Legendary Stardust Cowboy (who bunks down in the South Bay) would recognize as similar to their own. Do you have an affinity for the early blues-based rock ‘n’ roll that can be traced from Chuck Berry and Carl Perkins to the Rolling Stones and the Kinks to their alternately upbeat and haunted progeny the Troggs, the Seeds, the 13th Floor Elevators, and San Jose’s Chocolate Watchband, then onto ’80s revivalists like the Lyres, the Scientists, the Cynics, and the Fuzztones, and further on to late-’90s wavers like the White Stripes, the Dirtbombs, the Detroit Cobras, and the Von Bondies?

Noisy, psychy, punky, gay, straight, sweet or grating — however you twist it, the current nu–garage rock explosion in the Bay is nowhere near as easy to tag, bag, and classify. How do you reconcile the ear-burning blast of Mayyors with the sweetly contrarian kicks of the Nodzzz’s "I Don’t Wanna (Smoke Marijuana)"? The latter’s parentheses are crucial here because theirs is a cry against easy conformity, really, rather than drugs ("I don’t wanna smoke marijuana… I just wanna get high / On another drug!"). Subverting the white-straight-boy paradigm also seems to be part of the plan for outfits like Hunx and His Punx, and the LaTeenOs.

Eric Friedl — owner of esteemed Memphis garage rock label-shop Goner Records and ex-member of the Oblivions — has noticed the rock ‘n’ roll energy surge coming off of SF: Sic Alps and the Oh Sees played 2008’s Gonerfest, and Goner releases by Ty Segall and Nobunny are on the horizon. "For whatever reason we like the bands coming out of there," Friedl says of the Bay. "In the ’90s there seemed like a lot was going on, and then it kind of died out, but yeah, I think it goes in cycles. People got tired of the garage-rock bands in the late ’90s, and it took ’em another five or six years to get back to straight-ahead rock ‘n’ roll."

Geoffrey Ellis, who puts out the zine Sadkids and documented Bay Area bands’ excursions out to Gonerfest, agrees. "It seems like in the last few years [garage rock] has hit its stride where it hadn’t existed for a while and was pretty relegated to undergroundish types of scenes," says the graphic designer whose garage rock images will be exhibited as part of "Rock Show," a group photo exhibit. "But now it’s just taken off everywhere."

Still, for all the new activity and faces, one of the pleasures of garage rock remains the breaking out of musty ole vinyl and listening to the San Jose–born Count Five’s "Psychotic Reaction," the Standell’s "Try It," and the Human Beinz’s "Nobody But Me" — and wondering where my Music Machine LP is. The last so-called garage-rock revival gave you the impression that the bands weren’t so much listening to the, er, originals as much as each other — many of those groups’ general raw sound seemed to be the main reason why they were dubbed garage rock, apart from some true believers and record collectors in Detroit. Garage rock was a somewhat commercial brand last time around. But this current surge seems content to ride tides far from marketable shores, melding garage rock’s ruff ‘n’ tough joys with surf riffs, hardcore aggression, proto-metal heavitude, or psychedelic exploration.

These bands seem closer to the scenario that Don Waller wittily sketched out in the liner notes to a Nuggets ’80s reissue: "The typical punkadelic band came from some suburban Anywheresville and consisted of one kid who’d grown up copying Chet Atkins licks on his uncle’s hollow-body, another who’d had 10 years of classical piano lessons, a hyperactive woodshop dropout on drums, a lead singer with a range of three and a half notes, and a bass player brought in for his ability to attract girls."

The garage may be gone, if altogether nonexistent, for many in the densely populated Bay Area. But considering that even the purportedly first garage-rock combo, Tacoma, Wash.’s fresh-faced Wailers (who made a big impression on the Kingsmen with their own "Louie Louie"), wryly made a big deal of recording in a "proper environment … namely a recording studio," in the liner notes of Out of Our Tree (Etiquette, 1966), the hands-on wherewithal of today’s bands isn’t so far from that of yesteryear’s ensembles.

"Pushin’ Too Hard"? For a while there "everyone was too self-conscious," opines Carlos Bermudez of Photobooth and Snakeflower 2, "but now there are a lot of bands that are doing well and playing sloppy again — all the garage stuff that people seemed to have grown out of. Schlocky fun party music is starting to happen again."

ROCK SHOW

Through April 7; reception Sun/1, 6 p.m.

Rite Spot Café

2099 Folsom, SF

www.ritespotcafe.net

NOISE ALLOYS

MAN/MIRACLE AND EAGLE AND TALON


The former plunges fists-first into ’00s-y sing-along fun and an ’80s synth-sensitivity vibe; the latter duo into grrrly lo-fi. With Railcars. Thurs/29, 9 p.m., $5. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

MATT AND KIM


Where’s the dance party? It’s wherever the pair’s primal pop is hopping. Their new Grand (Fader) sneaks up on you with its larger-than-life lowdown. With Hawnay Troof. Mon/2, 8 p.m., $10. Café du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. www.cafedunord.com


>>MORE GARAGE ROCK ’09

A scar is born

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› johnny@sfbg.com

What does Gary Indiana think of Obamamania? I have to ask, because Indiana is a peerless dissector of contemporary American political symptoms. The evidence includes his blistering appraisal of Jerry Brown’s blank gaze and sun-scorched face and other facets of the 1992 presidential campaign in Let it Bleed: Essays 1985-1995. Or more recently, the combination of laugh-out-loud descriptive power and pointed investigative fact (as opposed to typical journalistic trivia) in 2005’s The Schwarzenegger Syndrome: Politics and Celebrity in the Age of Contempt, a petite volume that somehow manages to depict the 2004 Republican National Convention, for the record, in words that do full justice to that historical event’s baleful hilarity and bottomless horror.

Indiana might be best known today as a novelist whose inspirations have ranged from pre-Disney Manhattan junkies and hustlers to jaundiced, post-In Cold Blood original fakes such as Andrew Cunanan and homicidal con artist and subconscious Liz Taylor impersonator Sante Kimes. Clearly this is a man who has something to say about American delusion, and the new Utopia’s Debris: Selected Essays (Basic Books, 320 pages, $28.95) includes a few brief but scathing riffs on the theme. "Kindergarten Governor" renders the 2003 California gubernatorial recall with great flair — the "aptly named" Gray Davis is likened to an "an especially depressive funeral director"; Arianna Huffington is tagged "inestimable" — while tracing the effort’s birth back to criminal business dealings in an office behind a Krispy Kreme in Sacramento. "The Excremental Republic" provides a sensible, revealing, and thus utterly unique reading of Bush vs. Gore and its impact.

Organized into five parts, beginning with the Nico-quoting "Desertshore" and ending with the title section, Utopia’s Debris collects Indiana’s journalistic writings, which are reliably several flights above almost all prose found in newspapers and magazines today, while never once stiff or pretentious. Quite the contrary: Indiana’s ever-active bullshit detector makes for the opposite of PR pablum, even when he flirts with the sin of log-rolling by sending a little textual love his to his frequent book jacket contributor Barbara Kruger (a better writer than artist, in my opinion), paying tribute to actress (and friend) Bulle Ogier, or eulogizing another close ally, Susan Sontag. To say Indiana is a writer who welcomes argument is an understatement. When he refers to one published eulogy as a "fulminating, hateful dismissal of Sontag’s entire lifework," his own hateful dismissal of the late Pauline Kael in Artforum — complete with a memory of himself and Sontag raiding a newsstand for a fresh opportunity to mock Kael’s writing does spring to mind.

As its name suggests, the pleasures and the value of Utopia’s Debris stem partly from the manner in which Indiana organizes these short examples of writing for a paycheck. In a one-two punch, an assessment of presidential election thievery ("The Excremental Republic") is followed by a look at the cultural relevance and role of Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls ("Uberdolls"). A posthumous look at Leni Riefenstahl and her last years (checkout this whiplash truth: "[She’s] relaxed, genial, reflective in an undefensive way, and genuinely likable. Rather like the giant toad who has, at last, eaten its fill of flies and can’t see any buzzing in her immediate vicinity") arrives shortly before his tribute to Sontag, who famously attacked Riefenstahl’s fascist aesthetics. The book’s final roll call of subjects — Robert Bresson, Georges Simenon, Brecht, and Weill as filtered through Harry Smith — is vital and dramatically potent.

A lifetime of sharpening sentences like so many knives means that Indiana knows how to write an intro: "You could infer from the production notes that Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain would be useful if it came in a spray can. Spritz a little on a fundamentalist and change him into a liberal, or neutralize a whole church of basement of rednecks with a full-strength tolerance bomb." When he detonates explosives by pious pop culture it makes for entertaining reading. But the peak stretches of Utopia’s Debris occur within assessments of a wide variety — Gavin Lambert, Mary Wornov, Caroline Blackwood, Rudolph Wurlitzer, Witold Gombrowicz, Thomas Bernhard, Curzio Malaparte, Jean Echenoz, Emmanul Carrère — of anti-canonical novelists. Through them, Indiana wrestles with his own ideas about life and chosen calling in a manner that is revelatory.

No joy

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

>>READ SFBG’S INTERVIEW WITH DIRECTOR KELLY REICHART HERE

If a road movie has car trouble and gets stuck in an unnamed town — say, somewhere deep in the Pacific Northwest — what we are mostly trained by our moviegoing résumé to see is a setup: for a lesson about small-town life, for a tangle with zombies, for an episode of boy meets girl. In Kelly Reichardt’s sparsely plotted film Wendy and Lucy — from a screenplay cowritten by Reichardt and Jon Raymond and adapted from a short story by Raymond — a stranger comes to town, but with no fanfare to speak of. And the events that follow are so quiet in tone and pace and, in a sense, so familiar that they’re almost unrecognizable as dramatic turns. After a while, something sinks in, and we adapt to the drifting rhythm of the film, in which the stranger, a transient young woman named Wendy (Michelle Williams), goes through hard times while barely anyone pays much attention.

Girl meets train hoppers. Girl meets Walgreens security guard. Girl meets bad luck and self-righteousness and various town-employed individuals, and the fact that these passing acquaintances exert meaningful influence over Wendy’s life and circumstances is mostly a reflection of how fragilely constructed that life is. Traveling north in a janky old car with her dog, Lucy (actually Reichardt’s dog, Lucy), in search of gainful employment in Alaska, Wendy gets stuck in a small Oregon city, and the film is a painstaking record of her attempts to stay on course, to keep it together for herself and her companion. The camera reflects these pains, patiently waiting with her while she exhausts her limited options.

Reichardt’s previous film, 2006’s Old Joy, also adapted from a story by Raymond, and a road movie minus the engine trouble, takes a similarly measured, muted, intimate approach, moving within delicately drawn boundaries describing a small narrative territory. Keeping company with a pair of young men during a two-day drive through rural Oregon, it depicts their reunion and a friendship that has thinned and shifted over the years, then takes them back home to their separate lives again.

The stories Reichardt and Raymond seem most interested in telling are these hushed, submerged ones that unfold unnoticed, barely recognized as stories. Signaling this in Wendy and Lucy are the high school boys who pass by Wendy’s car late one night idly talking some trash, one pausing mid-narrative to note, "Dude, fuck, there’s a lady in there." The dumb malice of the high school bruiser is a familiar enough cinematic element, and we brace ourselves for trouble as they approach, but these kids don’t even care enough to break stride, much less bring more problems into Wendy’s life. And that’s how it goes over the handful of days during which the film tracks her worsening circumstances, quietly asking us to notice her and remain attentive while the world proves largely incurious as to her fate.

But where Old Joy examined the intimacies and discomforts of a frayed relationship, the mood of Wendy and Lucy, two-name title aside, is set by Wendy’s solitude and lack of connection to those in her vicinity. She comes across as relatively incurious herself; fear or disinclination and, one imagines, some unreferenced web of relationships in her back story make her unwilling to engage here, and the few conversations she enters into are like financial transactions.

It’s absorbing to watch Williams vanish into this unapproachable character, but her near-wholesale disconnection makes it hard to be deeply moved by Wendy, even as we remain transfixed by a document of her quiet travails and maneuverings. The result is a sketchiness and a slightness, an impression that will fade. We witness and experience the film’s losses, disruptions, and sorrows, but from a rigorously maintained distance, in the life of someone who was, after all, just passing through.

WENDY AND LUCY opens Fri/30 in Bay Area theaters.

The mirror stage

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“13 Most Beautiful….” trailer

It’s become almost rote to tag Andy Warhol — that "most financially astute and commercially successful of all the members of the New American Cinema," to quote Winston Wheeler Dixon — as an exploiter of superior but less rich and famous artists, a claim often paired with the declaration that there is nothing left to say about him.

This past week I was thinking about Warhol’s Sleep (1963). The traditional doctrine about that five-hour study of John Giono in slumberland is that it introduced Warhol’s deployment of boredom, an effect that still lingers in feature-length "art" cinema today, where the worst directors are boors, while the best (Tsai; Apichatpong) lead people through trance or dream states. True. And yet — is there a gesture more romantic than watching your lover sleep?

The title of "13 Most Beautiful … Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests" nods to the baker’s dozen format Warhol used to organize and present the boys and girls who stepped in front of his Bolex for almost three minutes slo-mo projected to become four. (This type of tactic prompted plum-phrasing Parker Tyler to declare that Warhol’s films tend "to move at major physical retardation.") There are 300 or so such tests to choose from, and it’s hard not to wish that Dean and Britta’s live soundtrack accompanied some less obvious, more artistic portrait subjects. But I’m looking forward to seeing Mary Woronov vamp for Warhol, whom she felt the impulse to protect, according to her peerless — and scarifying — 1995 Factory account Swimming Underground. And I wonder if Freddy Herko’s beauty will leap off the screen.

"Black and white is easier," said Warhol, who likened watching a film to looking out a window. "In black and white, it’s just a picture." Acts of potent iconography accomplished by sidelit, inky close-up, the screen tests — not to be confused with 1965’s Ronald Tavel-scripted Screen Test #2 — demonstrate Warhol’s talent for simplifying where his peers might complicate. "13 Most Beautiful" also primes any interested audience for yet further adventures in pop this year — the Lou Reed screen test is included (along with screen tests of the other members of the Velvet Underground) in the upcoming "Warhol Live" exhibition at the De Young Museum.

13 MOST BEAUTIFUL … SONGS FOR ANDY WARHOL’S SCREEN TESTS

Tues/3, 8 p.m., $25

Palace of Fine Arts

3301 Lyon, SF

www.sffs.org

Punch drunkle

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› superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO Hola, age of change. My 2K9 nightlife motto: less musing, more cruising — just watch out for the bruising, child. A few blurry dawns ago, out of nowhere, I got bopped full-on in the kisser by some drunk fool outside the club. Tragedy struck.

Luckily, my impeccable cheekbones are fashioned from silky Teflon and my major Ukrainian modeling contract survived intact. But it was a good reminder, a "slap in the face," if you will — and you will: always be aware of your surroundings and don’t drink yourself too unfunctional. Hear me alike, dear macho bar queens, PBR fixie pixies, Bebe-clad bachelorettes, darling dragzillas, electro-spandex starlets, popped-collar wannabros, and pretend hip-hop producers. Let’s be careful out there. For more tips on surviving your midnights out, San Francisco’s guardian angels of the dark, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, are, as usual, eager to provide at their Web site under “features.” Now, let’s get it on.

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THE ID LIST

TINGEL TANGEL


This glorious cabaret monthly brings a touch of Weimar Berlin to San Francisco by way of NYC nightlife impresario Earl Dax. This time around, wacky Seattlean hostess Dina Martina wilkommens tunesmith Spencer Day, space-gother Kiddie, harpist Deirdre Egan, and more, ol’ chum. Wed/28, 9:30 p.m., $16. Café Du Nord, 2174 Market, SF. www.tingeltangelclub.com, www.cafedunord.com

SPECIAL DISCO VERSION


Part of LCD Soundsystem never dies? Not if the indie dance juggernaut’s members stay true to their retro-underground roots. LCD drummer Pat Mahoney keeps it fresh by pumping up the past as he DJs the West Coast debut of this roving club classic. Cheekbone bonus: a special Hercules and Love Affair DJ set. Thurs/29, 9 p.m., $10-$15. Mighty, 119 Utah, SF. www.mighty119.com

EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC SHOWCASE


Don’t let the serious name put you off — that UK queen of intel freak-uencies, BBC Radio’s Mary Ann Hobbs, is flying in to curate a dance explosion of razor-sharp local talent, including Ghosts on Tape, Lazer Sword, Kid Kameleon, Disco Shawn, Shane King, and more. Now, if only the BBC would archive her streaming weekly broadcasts for more than a month. Thurs/29, 9:30 p.m., $5. 103 Harriet, SF. www.1015.com

HOTTUB


The electro-rap trio of trouble destroyed the Guardian‘s Best of the Bay 2008 party and sent Jello Biafra to the hospital. Now they’re inaugurating a new monthly by two solid party producers, Popscene vs. Loaded, at the Rickshaw — and celebrating their latest record release. Watch out for blood puddles. Fri/30, 10 p.m., $10. Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell, SF. www.rickshawstop.com

AMON TOBIN


Proto-dubstepper? Future-glitch engineer? Global grooves genius? Let’s just say all three, then drool all over this singular Brazilian legend’s laptop. Stunned noggin-nodders at last year Treasure Island fest know he’s made a seamless live transition from vinyl to electronics — and teases serious dance breaks from the wizardly ambience. Fri/30 and Sat/31, 9 p.m., $23. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.independentsf.com, www.hacksawent.com

SUPPERVISION


Burning Man meets alternaqueer for a multimedia pajama party, with trippy visuals and outré drag performances. Wait! Don’t stop reading! Video artist III is truly talented, and his projections, combined with edgy queen antics, add up to more than the sum of my whole first sentence. Honey Soundsystem brings the noise. And, yes, wear pajamas. Sat/31, 9 p.m., $12 in pajamas, $20 without. Supperclub, 657 Harrison, SF. www.supperclub.com

HERR-A-CHICK


Too many puns to count in the name, too many too-hot queer rock bigwigs involved to miss this new live showcase and dragstravaganza monthly at DNA. Charlie Horse’s Anna Conda teams up with the Trans Am boys and Revolver’s Lucy Borden for alterna-excess, with the Ex-Boyfriends and Ethel Merman Experience all plugged in. Feb. 4, 10 p.m., $5. DNA Lounge, 375 11th St., SF. www.dnalounge.com

JUICY LUCY


Swank Brazilian resto Bossa Nova, in the old CoCo Club space, just opened its lusciously remodeled basement up for late-night affairs — and is going big from the get-go with this kaleidoscopic affair. Detroit techno slayer Mike "Agent X" Clark headlines, with soulful spinner David Harness, funky househed Greg Eversoul, and live jazziness from Lovelight Liberation. Feb. 6, 9 p.m., $10. Bossa Nova, 139 Eighth St., SF. (415) 558-8004.

2562 AND THE GASLAMP KILLER


Those ambassadors of dread bass, Surya Dub, are bashing for their monthly club’s second anniversary, with Dutch dubstep (Dutchstep?) heavyweight 2562, who couches his rumble in deep techno soundscapes. Also reverbin’: Los Angeles low-low lover the Gaslamp Killer, who can rip a slice of perilous psy-hop quite rightly. Local boy Lud Dub leads the congratulatory proceedings. Feb. 7, 9 p.m., $15. Club Six, 60 Sixth St., SF. www.clubsix1.com

The recipe

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Readers:

A few weeks ago, while I was writing about the sensation created by the release of the "bonding hormone" oxytocin at orgasm, I attracted the attention of a dear friend and major geek, whom we will call Bill. His wife is, um, Bachael. "Bachael and I have long been fans of the "warm gooey" feelings (as you so aptly described them) created by sex," wrote Bill. "Turns out: you can get these feelings from your partner cooking you a really, really good meal, too. Who knew?"

"Oh yeah?" I responded. "Is there research?"

So he sent this:

R___g, B., "The Way to a Man’s Heart: Field Trial of a New Stuffing Recipe," Journal of Warm Gooey Feelings, Vol. 12, No. 11, November 2008, p. 23.

Abstract:

Subject (n=1, a 43-year-old domesticated male) was conditioned with ethanol and fed an experimental diet consisting of stuffing and baked chicken to examine changes in behavior and neurochemistry. The chicken diet had been previously tested on the subject with good results but the stuffing was novel to this laboratory and was created as published in [1]. During the course of the experiment the subject was heard to make auditory noises commonly associated with sexual pleasure and exhibited "clingy" behavior toward his mate. Subject then exhibited postprandial narcolepsy and went to sleep at 8:15 p.m. while muttering endearments to his wife.

[1] "Italian Chard Stuffing", Sunset, November 2008, p. 79.

Hey. I thought it was funny. You don’t have to. Bill also sent along a New York Times article (www.nytimes.com/2008/11/24/us/24sex.html) which I had read and meant to get to. It was about a pastor in Texas who assigned his married parishioners seven days of warm gooeyness: the Rev. Young, an author, a television host and the pastor of the evangelical Fellowship Church, issued his call for a week of "congregational copulation" among married couples Nov. 16, while pacing in front of a large bed. Sometimes he reclined on the paisley coverlet while flipping through a Bible, emphasizing his point that it is time for the church to put God back in the bed.

Since I don’t believe in God, I ought to find the idea of tucking up under the covers with him no more discomfiting than cuddling up with the Easter Bunny or Harvey or any other invisible rabbit, and yet I do. Then again, if you’re comfortable with making room for invisible rabbits or comfortably capable of ignoring that part of the plan, the pastor is indubitably right. More sex does make for more intimacy, which does make for a better marriage or marriage-equivalent (you’ll notice that the latter is not included in the prescription).

"If you’ve said ‘I do,’ do it," Young said. As for single people, he said, "I don’t know, try eating chocolate cake." Lame, if you ask me. But, of course, it is not the job of a pastor in Texas to address the relationship-maintenance issues of the sin-living and the homo-sekshual. It’s mine, though, and at the risk of pointing out the tediously obvious, the same goes for all persons of coupledom.

The article cannot help but mention two books I’d been meaning to get to, 365 Nights and Just Do It, competing memoirs by members of married couples who agreed to have sex every night for a specified period (a solid year for the Mullers and 101 days for the Browns). Both couples claim that getting a book out of it never crossed their minds at first, and despite my generally jaundiced view of people who relate the super-intimate details of their lives on daytime TV, I do believe them. It’s tempting but probably unfair to lump the Browns and the Mullers in with stunt-memoirists like A.J. Jacobs, who first read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica and then followed every commandment in the Bible for a year, or Morgan Spurlock, who did the gross stunt with the McDonalds diet. Especially when considering that Jacobs shaved his beard and went back to wearing mixed fibers (and forgot most of what he learned from the encyclopedia), and Spurlock de-Supersized himself and shudders when he passes the Golden Arches, both the Browns and Mullers report greater intimacy and more (although, of course, also less) sex in the aftermath of their experiment. The Browns also reported being really, really tired.

Both books and all the participants may be eminently mockable (the couples are extremely perky and it’s easy to imagine them singing medleys of Christmas songs while wearing matching turtlenecks), but they are not stupid, and it’s not so easy to mock the results. And while I will never get a book contract for Twice a Week, OK?: The Warm-Gooeyness Method Will Save Your Relationship, I can at least try to sell it here. Hell, I may try it myself. But if I do, you won’t hear about it.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is teaching Sex After Parenthood at Day One Center (www.dayonecenter.com), Recess (info@recessurbanrecreation.com), and privately. Contact her at andrea@altsexcolumn.com for more info.

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