Arts & Culture

Arts & Culture

Lindstrom

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PREVIEW The epic dance track has had somewhat of a revival over the last few years, whether through the hipster strut of LCD Soundsystem’s "45:33" (DFA, 2007), or the obliquely historical morphing minimalism of Ricardo Villalobos’ "Fizheuer Zieheuer" (Playhouse, 2006). It isn’t all that surprising to find Hans-Peter Lindstrøm joining this mini-movement since he brings the same sort of transcendent musical facility to space jams of the non-Bugs Bunny kind that Villalobos brings to techno. In fact, it seems natural: prog-inflected electronic music is built upon monoliths such as Ash Ra Tempel’s epic "E2-E4." On Where You Go I Go Too (Smalltown Supersound, 2007) — his first proper solo full-length recording after a half decade of 12-inch singles, compilations, and collaborations — Lindstrøm presents a three-track, almost hour-long suite. The most audacious gesture is the 29-minute opening title track, which rides a midnight express on through the whirligig motif of Cerrone’s "Supernature" and the bicyclist-breaths of Kraftwerk’s "Tour de France" before reaching — and extending — a climax.

Elsewhere on Where You Go I Go Too, Lindstrøm flirts with gauche Euro trance sounds ("Grand Ideas") as much he does the seemingly chic-again disco touches (sublime closer "The Long Way Home") often associated with his recorded output. Redefining and fusing genres rather than obeying them, he’s a leader, not a follower, though this particular change in direction has been a divisive one. While the electronic music guru of one Bay Area music store listed Lindstrøm’s solo debut as his favorite recording of last year, another local shop trashed it. Rumor has it that Hans-Peter has been back in the studio with his sometime partner-in-crime, Prins Thomas. For now, he’s visiting the Paradise Lounge, which owes some of its current liveliness to the disco revival his music has helped spark in San Francisco.

LINDSTRØM With Beat Broker, Conor, and TK Disco, and visuals by AC. Sat/31, 9 p.m.–4 a.m., $15. Paradise Lounge, 1501 Folsom, SF. (415) 252-5017, www.paradisesf.com

Chris Hillman and Herb Pedersen and John McEuen

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PREVIEW Country-rock pioneer and original Byrds bassist Chris Hillman prepares to throw down some bluegrass with longtime friend, banjo player Herb Pedersen, at Yoshi’s SF this week.

As a founding member of the Byrds and later the Flying Burrito Brothers, Hillman was a staple of California’s fabled Laurel Canyon music scene during the late 1960s. Although the musician’s roots are steeped in bluegrass, it wasn’t until meeting his eventual Byrds bandmate Gram Parsons in 1968 that the group took on a significantly unique direction. The Byrds’ critically acclaimed Sweetheart of the Rodeo (Columbia, 1968) was a product of the outfit’s expansion into country even if it failed to chart. Hillman’s full-fledged emergence into the genre has inspired a spectrum of artists, including collaborators such as Emmylou Harris and fans like Beck. I don’t think the pedal steel sound heard on Beck’s "Rowboat" was even possible without the Burrito Brothers paving the way.

Throw into the mix multi-instrumentalist and Nitty Gritty Dirt Band veteran John McEuen, a.k.a. "America’s instrumental poet," and expect Pedersen, who played with Hillman in the Desert Rose Band and paid his dues picking five-string banjo with the likes of Jerry Garcia, to do just that: play some banjo. After all, this is bluegrass we’re talking about. Just remember, it’s all about the twang.

CHRIS HILLMAN AND HERB PEDERSEN AND JOHN MCEUEN Mon/2–Tues/3, 8 p.m., $30. Yoshi’s SF, 1330 Fillmore, SF. (415) 655-5600, www.yoshis.com

“Japan Dance Now”

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PREVIEW What does avant-garde Japanese dance look like? Butoh is 40 years old. Eiko and Koma have been working their version of slow dancing for three decades. What about dancers who have grown up in a high-tech, high-velocity, video-drenched urban environment? We at least get glimpses of the movies, comics, and pop music that are part of their lives. Once in a while, a company like the Condors will come through town on their way to somewhere else. But for the most part, our exposure to that type of edgy new dance — highly influenced by electronic media and sophisticated in its use of those elements — remains nil.

Now Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is making an attempt to open minds and ears to new moves from Japan. Next month they bring back Papa Taruhamara, and this weekend they present three companies in a performance titled "Japan Dance Now" on their first stop of a three-city tour of the states. Baby-Q, a multimedia company that includes a robotics specialist, is directed by choreographer Yoko Higashino. The group stages her solo E/G-Ego Geometria. Nibroll’s seven athlete-dancer-comedians are taking on the everyday in their excerpt of Coffee. Sennichimae Blue Sky Dance Club is an all-female ensemble with serious hair. The company describes The End of Water as an exploration of aspects of femininity from a pop butoh perspective.

JAPAN DANCE NOW Thurs/29–Sat/31, 8 p.m., $25–$30 (On Sat/31 audience members receive special entrance to the post-performance "Big Idea" party, 9 p.m.-midnight, in the Grand Lobby and Galleries). Novellus Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF. (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org

The Pope’s Toilet

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REVIEW In the Uruguayan hamlet Melo, poor residents like Beto (César Troncoso) squeak by smuggling consumer goods over the border from nearby Brazil — despite being frequently stopped, harassed, and robbed by corrupt, mean-spirited customs guard Meleyo (Nelson Lence). When Pope John Paul II’s 1988 visit encompasses a stop in Melo, the villagers enthusiastically prepare for an anticipated huge tourist influx, hoping their makeshift food stands and other services can reap life-changing profits from the visiting faithful. It’s Beto’s idea to build a flush-toilet bathroom outside his humble home that relief-needy procession-watchers can pay to use. Erecting it, however, involves getting in financial bed with the untrustworthy Meleyo, and some white lies told to Beto’s long-suffering wife (Virginia Méndez) and primly disapproving daughter (Virginia Ruiz). Enrique Fernández and César Charlone’s Uruguay-Spanish co-production deftly melds two quite different things: the sweetly comic village ensemble piece and the pitiless Bicycle Thief-style portrait of desperate measures that those without class, educational, or government resources must take to get ahead — or just survive. Charlone, a cinematographer turned director who previously shot Fernando Meirelles’ features City of God (2002), The Constant Gardener (2005), and this year’s Blindness), lends the countryside a poetic beauty to soften the co-directors’ sometimes harshly realistic script.

THE POPE’S TOILET opens Fri/30 in San Francisco.

“Who Got the Chickens” and “Love Can Build a Bridge”

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REVIEW/PREVIEW Although No. 43 has finally flown the coop back to Crawford, Texas, our country would do well to remember Faulkner’s famous words from 1951’s Requiem for a Nun: "The past is never dead. It’s not even past." The psychic damage from the Bush years runs deep, and will no doubt keep resurfacing. Maybe it’s the Texan atmospherics — the soundtrack of chirping crickets, the smell of sawdust, the strange manqués and photos of tumbleweeds — or the loose "one that got away" narrative that whistles through Stephan Pascher’s installation "Who Got the Chickens" that made me think of Bush.

The exhibit’s true empty center, though, is Donald Judd. Judd’s ghost is most present in Pascher’s sculptural centerpiece — an empty chicken coop, a few feathers the only trace left of its former occupant, that faces two gray wooden boxes in a Y-formation. The boxes nod to the concrete sculptures that dot Judd’s sprawling Marfa, Texas art ranch like unearthed giant sarcophagi, but Pascher’s mixed media assemblage is not as concerned with purity of form as Judd, the anti-minimalist minimalist who once opined that, "Art is free, but it is not a free-for-all." Pascher’s show practically calls Judd out on his prissiness — an accompanying short story finds Judd (here named James Dean) throwing hissy fits about bird shit on his sculptures — but it leaves the titular semi-question open and sidesteps anything as concrete as recrimination.

Kevin Killian and Karla Milosevich are perhaps less gracious toward Judd in their 2002 Poets’ Theater play Love Can Build a Bridge, which coincidentally is being restaged this weekend as part of BAM’s "Bending the Word/Matrix 226" exhibit. In Love, Judd (played brilliantly by the inimitable George Kuchar) is a Lear-like patriarch whose video will has left his extended clan — including country singers Naomi and Wynona, B-lister Ashley, and "illegitimate son" Judd Nelson — in disarray. I asked Killian over the phone if his characterization of Judd had any specific inspiration, and he recalled visiting curator David Whitney, whose Big Sur house had lots of furniture made by Judd. Looking at one such chair, Whitney said: "I can’t even stand to look at it or sit in it because he was the most hateful man I’d ever known." It looks like Bush isn’t the only wellspring of psychic damage deep in the heart of Texas.

WHO GOT THE CHICKENS Through Feb. 7. Tues.–Sat., 11:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m. Steven Wolf Fine Arts, 49 Geary, suite 411, SF. (415) 263-3677. www.stevenwolffinearts.com

LOVE CAN BUILD A BRIDGE Sat/31, 7 p.m., free. Pacific Film Archive Theater, 2575 Bancroft Way, Berk. (510) 642-1124. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Fill her up

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REVIEW In the late 1990s, Mary Alice Fry, artistic director of the now defunct Venue 9, found a hole. She has been filling them ever since.

The January performance calendars at her theater and many other local small venues, she noticed, were empty. At the same time her curatorial experience had shown that women artists still had a harder time getting noticed than their male counterparts. "So many of them," Fry said, "struggle with multiple responsibilities of mortgages, children, two or three jobs, keeping relationships going." So she started the Women on the Way Festival, now in its ninth year, to create "a stepping stone" for local women performers.

After Fry lost her lease on Venue 9, she moved the Festival to the Shotwell Studios and to Joe Landini’s Garage. For reasons of practicality and availability, WOW’s lineup changes every night. The performers seem to enjoy what, to an outsider, looks like a complicated format. "They like sharing the stage and seeing each other’s work," Fry explained. "For them it’s about standards and not competition. These women are pumped up and work and scramble and always want to do more."

While this year’s 17 performers working in theater, the circus, comedy, and dance are mostly up-and-coming, WOW also invited at least two highly experienced artists. Molissa Fenley and Nina Wise have each been working for more than three decades apiece. Each will present a world premiere.

On opening night, Jan. 15, the Garage hosted two soloists and a quartet. While none of the three pieces broke revolutionary ground, each had that spark of effervescence that makes one want to see where these artists are going. They deserve a bigger audience than they got.

Ara Glenn-Johanson’s based her earthstepper on a 10th-century English poem, "The Wanderer." As a choreographer for herself, she proved to be rather heavy-handed as soon as she moved beyond a rather basic gestural vocabulary. But she is a strong, expressive vocalist — both live and in duets with herself on tape — and her solo became an intermittently moving meditation on loneliness and perseverance.

Gretchen Garnett’s Edited for Time needs more editing for time, but impressed the audience with the ambition, if not quite the realization, of a rigorously conceived study in formal structure. With an extended duet for Garnett and the beautifully expressive Leah Samson, the piece started with simple swaying motions and quickly evolved into patterns of elastic tension that would snap, only to be picked up again. Edited looked full of contradictions, pre-ordained accidents, and surprising repetitions. The other committed dancers were Becca Rufer and Chad Dawson.

Despite having what must be one of dance’s more convoluted titles, Pfannenstiel Incision Marks the Spot, Lenora Lee’s solo was a stark, tightly choreographed portrait of one woman’s fear and anguish about her own body — Pfannenstiel was the surgeon who invented the so-called bikini cut. With her feet planted as if nailed to the ground and her hands veering between tendrils and claws, Lee pulled, yanked, spread, and hung her guts inside out. Performed in silence, Pfannenstiel was small in scale, but it resonated in a big way.

WOMEN ON THE WAY FESTIVAL

Through Feb. 1

Thurs-Sun., 8 p.m., at the Garage, 975 Howard, and Shotwell Studios, 3252-A 19th St., SF

$15-$25

(415) 289-2000, 1-800-838-3006

www.ftloose.org

Night at the museum

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REVIEW American Conservatory Theater leads off its new season with a revival of John Guare’s rollickingly self-referential 1974 comedy, a madcap musical so quirky and of the moment in conception and mood that it comes shrouded in a sometimes dazzling, more often distancing veil of nostalgia.

New York playwright Bing Ringling (Brooks Ashmanskas) has received his first commercial production — after only several hundred attempts — in a dreary downtown theater haunted by an insane producer (Mary Birdsong) with a failure wish and a strong resemblance to a tottering Kate Hepburn. Shadowed by the billboard superstardom of movie actor and old neighborhood pal Tybalt Dunleavy (Stephen Derosa), Bing recoils from the scathing reviews of Etruscan Conundrum, leading to a desperate search for meaning that winds through his past, his parents’ couch, the home of his maniacal death-devouring composer (played to the hilt by an irrepressible Derosa), and finally to the dizzy heights of celebrity, from which old pal Tybalt (Derosa again) is preparing to sail down in one big swan dive. The point is not that dreams do come true, you see, but that they exist at all — and get in the way of real life.

Although Guare reworked the material for ACT’s revival, adding even more autobiographical touches as well as some bright if unexceptional new songs, Rich and Famous remains a hit-and-miss affair, with some flat notes and fewer high ones shaking up its middle register. The often overly broad humor has dated — though it can still work well, as in the scene with Bing’s obsessive, half-senile parents, played by Derosa and Birdsong. Moreover, the main character, while sympathetic, never becomes more than mildly interesting, which contributes to the sense of the intermissionless performance dragging on. Overall, the feeling is not unlike walking around inside a museum piece — which is just what happens in one vignette. But the play’s whimsy is so rooted in a specific moment, despite a stab at more timeless themes, that maybe that’s inevitable.

Rich and Famous is, however, expertly performed by a versatile four-person cast — including ACT’s priceless Gregory Wallace in a couple of scene-stealing flights — and directed with appropriately zany energy by John Rando. It’s also lovingly gussied up by scenic designer Scott Bradley in jazzy, period-evoking slashes of color, including set pieces drenched in the garishly comic shades of nightmares. All of which ensures Guare and Ringling’s one-ring circus is nothing if not a frenetically romantic spree. (Robert Avila)

RICH AND FAMOUS Through Feb. 8. Tues.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sat.–Sun., Jan. 21, and Feb. 4, 2 p.m. American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary, SF. $17–$82. (415) 749-2228, www.act-sf.org

Fresh jam

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER The perfectly passive postmodern approach to pop nostalgia? Allow the milky waves of 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s retro navel-gazer rehash to simply wash over you — like so many warm, narcotic jets of synthetic baby formula. The opposite tact is the one that San Francisco trio Mi Ami takes: reject the rockist, retread trappings of the old and stale and make new and likely original sounds from a place of authenticity and openness. Breathe. Good. An excellent example might be Mi Ami’s recent spasm of songwriting after the completion of their debut, Watersports, out Feb. 17 on Quarterstick: the jams weren’t quite "up to snuff," as vocalist-guitarist Daniel Martin-McCormick puts it. But the essential flow was restored after drummer Damon Palermo spoke up in favor of letting the songs flow and allowing the changes to happen naturally rather than getting clogged with details.

"We started opening the songs up and started letting the changes happen naturally," explains the clear-eyed Martin-McCormick on this clear-skied, brilliant, balmy winter day in the Mission District. "I feel like when it works, it’s really great because it doesn’t seem like something locked in by something like repetitions of four. But at the same time, when it doesn’t work it can be kind of frustrating because it’s just like trying to have a conversation when you’re just not feeling it. It has to be like a lived experience. You can’t fake it."

You might not know it from glancing at the tall, lanky, check-shirted bandmates stalking down Alabama Street in search of coffee and nutrients at Atlas Cafe, but Martin-McCormick — a former member of Dischord punk outfit Black Eyes along with Mi Ami bassist Jacob Long — and the soft-spoken Palermo are pop philosophers of sorts: amiable, laid-back, yet ready to hold forth politely and passionately on their favorite disco singles and free jazz LPs, the multiple meanings one might glean from the title Watersports, or the role African funk guitar might play in, say, pulsing workouts like "The Man in Your House."

It’s easy to get lost in Martin-McCormick’s high-pitched, keening vocals, equal parts no wave nervousness and androgynous nerve; his bursts of scratched-out guitar skronk; Palermo’s primal-power beats; and Long’s reassuringly melodic bass lines. But Mi Ami never over-thinks its lengthy forays into that anxious and pleasure-strewn interzone between improv and noise, space-is-the-place dub and neverending party jams. Like groups such as !!! and the Rapture and locals à la Tussle and Jonas Reinhardt, which Palermo also drums for, Mi Ami sounds as if it was bred on hardcore’s aggression and reborn on a seething dance floor.

Martin-McCormick and Palermo met two years ago, after relocating from the East Coast and Vancouver respectively, while performing at an Adobe Book Shop art opening. The one thing they were sure of: they didn’t want to be a rock band. "Boring!" blurts Martin-McCormick.

"We are a rock band," says Palermo mildly in Atlas’ noisy back patio. "But you know what we’re talking about. There’s a lot of cool bands that are rock bands but a lot of it is a default setup, the structure of the songs and instrumentation."

"I think we came to be a guitar, bass, and drums trio very much on our terms," Martin-McCormick offers. "I didn’t want to play guitar when I started, but I realized that was what I’m best at and began to find ways to play it that suited what I was looking for." Their resistance to rock habit was helped by the fact that Palermo didn’t own a drum set: at first the duo had only two drums between them. They acquired bits as they progressed, while relying on a janky drum machine prone to crapping out at crucial moments — like their September 2007 opening date for No Age at Bottom of the Hill.

The turning point arrived when the twosome ditched the drum machine and put out a Craigslist ad for a bass player in ’07. "We got a few responses," says Martin-McCormick. "One was super confrontational. I wrote that we’re into disco, gamelan, and no wave — and no old people. We wanted someone who was kind of our age-ish. I just didn’t want an 48-year-old dude who was like, ‘I just need to jam!’ This guy wrote back and said, ‘How do you think gamelan musicians learn? They respect their elders, blah-blah-blah. You should go fuck off and die!’ Whoa!"

The second response: a hip-hop producer working with an "awful singer-songwriter." The third: Long, who happened to be roaming Craigslist during his day job.

"There was no going back after that," says Martin-McCormick. Listening to the forward-facing future-rock of Watersports, I’d say there’s little fear of that scenario. *

MI AMI

Fri/23, 10 p.m., $10

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

www.bottomofthehill.com

ROCK FOR LOVERS

THE ETTES


The primal beat band got theirs — where’s yours? Thurs/22, 8 p.m., $10. Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell, SF. www.rickshawstop.com

E-ZEE TIGER


One-man massive energy generator Anthony Petrovic rouses himself from dormancy. With Wooden Shjips and Hank IV. Thurs/22, 9 p.m., $7. Eagle Tavern, 398 12th St., SF. www.sfeagle.com

WAVVES


Going big with bristly, lo-fi garage rock. Fri/23, 9 p.m., $16–$18. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. www.gamh.com

AZTECA


The sprawling fusion combo including Pete Escovedo and Sheila E. rocks for autism awareness. With War, El Chicano, and Los Cenzontles. Sat/24, 7:20 p.m., $45–$75. Warfield, 982 Market, SF. www.goldenvoice.com

THE PHENOMENAUTS


The selfless Oakland space-rockers dish out For All Mankind (Springman). Sat/24, 9 p.m., $13. Slim’s, 33 11th St., SF. www.slims-sf.com

JAY REATARD


He’s watching you watching him. With Nobunny and Bare Wires. Sun/25, 9 p.m., $15. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

It’s a hit

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I’m glad I finally got my mitts on the self-issued CD-R from San Francisco titans High Castle: I feel like I’m back in ear-bleeding country with the trio’s Unwound-ishly, damaged style of noisy rock, nursing an insatiable appetite for more tinfoil-scorched guitar scuzz, blown-out low end, and full-tilt drum thwackage. As each song unloads, three howling voices punctuate the maelstrom. Try if you can to pass on this seven-song album after just one spin. If the punked-out oomph of "Soloman" and "No Mind" don’t bite you hard in the ass, then the annihiutf8g whomp of "Small Town Gay Bar" will certainly dish out the finishing touches.

As surprising as it may sound, this shower of pandemonium comes from three individuals who had their hearts set on becoming a pop group when they first convened in the summer of 2007. I yapped it up with the threesome over bowls of fideo and garlicky steak fries in drummer-vocalist Shaggy Denton’s SoMa apartment, while bassist-vocalist Wilson Drozdowski explained that High Castle aimed at becoming an actual band within the trio’s large circle of noise-making friends.

"We were like, ‘let’s start a rock band,’ because I felt I hadn’t seen a drum-bass-guitar band with songs in a long time," he disclosed. "It seemed like it was either improv or noise, so we wanted to do the opposite of that to see what would happen."

"We actually wanted it to be a pop band," said guitarist-vocalist Erin Allen with a laugh.

"None of us knew how to write pop music, so what ended up coming out was the closest we could get to doing that," Drozdowski continued. "Even when we try to write something that we think is poppy, it’s not poppy in the traditional sense. We always try and make the vocals very apparent by singing together."

"I guess that’s the one pop element that surfaces," Allen added. "But it’s not like the Mamas and the Papas."

Before HC, all three resided in Southern California, meeting through tours in bands such as Duchesses, Saviors, and Child Pornography. As Drozdowski, Denton, and Allen became jaded with the SoCal lifestyle, each separately trekked up to the Bay Area because, according to Denton, "the option was LA or here — and it was not going to be LA."

Reuniting in San Francisco with each member’s respective group in limbo, the three formed HC, but not before putting the collaboration on hold because of an unfortunate encounter between Allen and a car.

"We had to take a break because this one got hit by a car," Denton joked, pointing to Allen. "He was supposed to come over to my house and have some fideo and play PlayStation. I was worried because I kept getting the answering machine, and then somebody from General Hospital calls me and is like, ‘Um, do you know an Erin Allen? He told me to give you a message: he got hit by a car.’"

Aside from Allen’s slight dinger, the combo has been very active during the past year and a half, playing in just about every performance space dotting the Bay Area underground music scene with the likes of K.I.T., Stripmall Seizures, and Death Sentence: Panda! HC is currently in the mixing stages of its 12-inch debut for the Zum imprint, and after embarking on its first national tour last summer, the group hopes to hit the road once again this year. Whatever avenue this threesome decides to explore in the future — be it noisesome or poppy — I know I’ll be all ears.

HIGH CASTLE

With Stress Ape, Didimao, and the Dawns

Fri/23, 9 p.m., call for price

Kimo’s

1351 Polk, SF

(415) 885-4535

www.kimosbarsf.com

Wale watch

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If you went to the 2008 Rock the Bells festival at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, then you probably missed Wale Folarin. Barely an hour into the 12-hour-plus event, he was on the main stage, rocking back and forth in a half-crouch, spitting rhymes from his viral hit "W.A.L.E.D.A.N.C.E." to an arena that was one-quarter full.

Wale may be a padwan among hip-hop’s big dogs, but many of the genre’s tastemakers and fans call him a rising star. Though he has yet to release an official album, Wale has already graced the covers of several magazines. His most recent mixtape, The Mixtape About Nothing, landed on major 2008 year-end lists, including Pitchfork’s. Earlier in the year, the Roots, who have a history of recruiting hot prospects, gave him a guest spot on Rising Down (Def Jam, 2008).

Before dropping out to pursue a musical career in 2004, the DMV (District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia) native bounced through three colleges on football scholarships. He has subsequently attacked the rap game like an offensive coordinator, eschewing offers from majors like Epic to sign a production contract with Mark Ronson’s Allido Records. In turn, Ronson negotiated a joint deal with Interscope to distribute Wale’s debut, tentatively scheduled for this year.

Everyone loves raw, unformed talent, and hip-hop fans are no exception. They love MCs who can freestyle for days, never mind that their stanzas flow with rhyme but with neither reason nor hooks. They venerate rappers who compile mixtapes chock full of half-ideas. Great American Songbook traditions like harmonic structure and verse-chorus forms are nonexistent or merely subtext to the rapper’s unyielding voice.

Wale’s Mixtape About Nothing is nominally built around samples from Seinfeld, punctuated by Jerry Seinfeld’s standup bits and Jason Alexander’s antics. But Wale, with his twangy Southeast accent, takes center stage. He mostly wanders around, offering flickers of insight amid heaps of undistinguishable lines. Then he "goes in," to use a hip-hop phrase that describes a moment of clarity.

On "The Kramer," he opens with a snippet from Michael Richards’ infamous 2006 standup routine at the Laugh Factory, when Richards’ shouted to a heckler in the audience, "He’s a nigger!" Wale uses it to launch a sprawling discourse on race. He begins by confessing, "And P said that I should stop saying nigga / But what’s the difference / I’d still be a nigga." But at the end, he declares, "Make sure everything you say / Can’t be held against you in any kind of way / And any connotation is viewed many ways / ‘Cause under ev’ry nigga there’s a little bit of Kramer / Self-hatred / I hate you / And myself."

Two years ago, Lil Wayne rocketed to superstardom on the basis of these kinds of rambling tone poems. Hundreds of his tracks fueled a cottage industry of Weezy mixtapes. As a result, everyone is flooding the Internet with rangy bedroom studio cuts, proclaiming their status as "the truth" to anyone who’ll listen. In 2008, Brooklyn MC Sha Stimuli issued 12 mixtapes in 12 months, basing one around the 2007 Jennifer Aniston comedy The Break Up. Charles Hamilton dropped eight mixtapes in two months. In most cases, all this sound and fury signifies nothing; worse, it makes it difficult for a talented artist such as Wale to stand out.

"Everybody’s doing blogs. Everybody’s doing freestyles. Everybody’s doing, like, way too much stuff on the Internet," Wale complains by phone. "It’s like, c’mon, we get it. It’s way overdone now." It’s the most provocative statement the 24-year-old makes during a brief interview. Otherwise, Wale keeps his answers amiable but bland. When I ask him about the dreaded "hipster rapper" tag, he claims not to know what I’m talking about. Even when I point out that XXL magazine asked him the same question for a cover story, he responds: "I’m not familiar with that term. Nobody’s said that about me."

Yet Wale is keenly aware of his atypical tastes. "I think it goes over a lot of people’s heads," he says. "By no means am I comparing myself with Leonardo da Vinci or nothing, but by no means do I understand the significance of the Mona Lisa. But there are millions of people who do, and appreciate that piece of work. So eventually you have to do stuff for the people who appreciate what you do." For the moment, his esoteric creative decisions seem to work, including his widely mimicked freestyles over rock hits like Lily Allen’s "Smile." As he says on his 100 Miles and Running mixtape, "Y’all believe me when I do it. Don’t sass me for doing it."

WALE

Jan. 31, 9 p.m., $15

Mezzanine

444 Jessie, SF

www.mezzaninesf.com

Bringin’ on the heartache

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Twenty-year-old North London–born heartbreak crooner Adele Laurie Blue Adkins, or simply Adele to her fans, has had some big breaks amid her romantic woes. She appeared in 2007 on the BBC alongside Paul McCartney and Björk, and performed this past October on a Saturday Night Live episode that not only included Sarah Palin, Mark Wahlberg, Oliver Stone, and Tina Fey, but was seen by 17 million viewers.

Since then, her Burt Bacharach–styled symphonic pop hit "Chasing Pavements" has been ubiquitous, receiving constant airplay on local stations like Alice 97.3 FM. Her debut, 19 (XL/Columbia), is nominated for four Grammys, but Adele has had a tough time shaking comparisons to other British female neo-Motown vocalists such as Amy Winehouse, Duffy, and Lily Allen. "We’re a gender, not a genre," she quipped recently to London Guardian reporter Hannah Pool, revealing the same strong, honest qualities heard in her music. Adele’s songs revel in love’s bittersweet see-saw emotions ("Crazy for You," "Melt My Heart to Stone") while her equally elastic voice recalls Dusty Springfield and Jill Scott.

No telling if her luck will hold up, but with a new album for 2009, her formidable voice, and self-assured performances, Adele’s likely to outlast the trends.

ADELE

With James Morrison

Jan. 29, 8 p.m., $24

Warfield

982 Market, SF

www.goldenvoice.com

Just dandy

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Men dress up. Yes, we do. We dress like animals: peacocks, roosters, cats. We dress like weapons: blades, pistols, and straps. Men dress up. Always have. Always will.

Something has been happening in men’s fashion lately, an evolution that’s taken place underneath just about everyone’s noses. For the longest time it was assumed that men’s fashion was about function over style, resulting in an array of boring, drab clothing. Sexy, exotic, or provocative was taboo.

Hywel Davies’ Modern Menswear (Laurence King Publishers, 208 pages, $40) is a beautifully illustrated book that challenges this stereotype, introducing the new dandy or aesthete in the process. It also covers a lot of territory — geographically and intellectually — through interviews with the designers. "Menswear is no longer status-led or solely rooted in tradition," Davies writes in the book’s introduction. "It is driven by the personality of the consumer. Men will take elements from a range of designers and create a distinct personal style." And that is precisely what Modern Menswear inspires a reader to do.

I would like to take Aitor Throup’s military-inspired pants, please, along with his skull accessories and his tagline, "When Football Hooligans Become Hindu Gods." Let’s top the ensemble off with one of those baseball-cap masks.

Sadly, Alexander McQueen’s men’s collection hits at least one disappointing note. Apparently the bad boy can’t dress himself with as much verve as he does his models.

I will take the Blaak double-breasted suit. That label’s mix of western, eastern and African influences, its use of natural fabrics, and its fusion of hedonistic street style and subdued anarchy is new. Blaak believes in "The working class hero, The Poet, The Outsider, and Edwardian Pomp and Ceremony with a whispered subversive punch." The label’s ideal customer "is a person who understands the riot of anarchy, the need for the whimsical, and the hidden fine lines bound in society." Damn, these boys speak my Afro-surreal language.

So does John Galliano, whose eclectic mix of nearly every fashion innovation since the fig leaf makes him a patron of the new aesthete. A derby hat and a kimono can be fly, especially with a sturdy pair of boots. "It’s like giving men a bit of what they’ve seen on women without taking away their masculinity," he says, "allowing them to dream more." Savage refinery — ah, nothing like reconciliation!

The book draws to a close with the rich, opulent colors and decadent accessories of Vivienne Westwood’s MAN label, and Yohji Yamamoto’s sublime understanding of the silhouette. There are some outrageous pieces, but Davies’ book isn’t geared toward gawkers.

Fashion is an opportunity to expand possibilities — to dream, as Galliano puts it. Do I have $5000 to spend on a Yohji coat? No. But I may be inspired to modify a pea coat or mourning jacket from a secondhand store after seeing one. Will Vivienne Westwood ever see a dollar of my money? Probably not, but I can borrow her sense of adventure and create a little magic of my own. "If you dress up," says Westwood, "it helps your personality emerge — if you choose well." Modern Menswear makes that process a bit more exciting.

Get behind him

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› johnny@sfbg.com

Oscar season is upon us. Amid sniping text messages from best actor contenders, I’d like to advance the idea that cinema’s most compelling and perhaps revelatory male stars of cinema in recent years aren’t even thespians. They can be athletes, such as Zinedine Zidane, whose day’s work on the soccer field assumes mythic properties in Douglas Gordon’s 2006 Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait. More often, they are musicians. Think of Arthur Russell and Townes Van Zandt, tender ghosts who float through documentaries by Matt Wolf and Margaret Browne. Or the very-much-alive yet enigmatic subject of Stephen Kijak’s Scott Walker: 30 Century Man, a pop star, lyricist, and composer who was made to be a movie star — though one with, in the words of an observer, "Garboesque leanings toward seclusion."

Foreboding yet luminous in a manner that any film composer might envy, the first minutes of the songs "Big Louise" and "It’s Raining Today" are all it takes to prove that the chief glory of 30 Century Man is the lavish setting that it affords Walker’s recordings. Both the grand orchestration and vocal gestures of his late 1960s solo albums and the dark passages and shock tactics of his more recent ones — Tilt (Fontana, 1995) and The Drift (4AD, 2006) — are born again as they bloom and boom through a movie theater sound system. This music is truly majestic. The digital effects that Kijak sometimes uses to illustrate its sound can be cheesy, but another of his gambits hits paydirt. Instead of presenting David Bowie, Brian Eno, and a host of other figures as simple talking heads, he films their responses as they listen to Walker’s music. This listening party effect is intoxicating, and it triggers improvised, as opposed to rehearsed, insights.

Time stood still yesterday in the music Walker made with arranger Wally Stott (now Angela Morley, and one of the film’s most likable commentators), and it stands still today when 30 Century Man languishes in the songs from Walker’s quartet of self-titled Philips solo albums from 1967 through 1970. A welcome sense of ambiguity thrives throughout Kijak’s movie. Executive producer Bowie shares a back story about a competitive bond he felt he had with Walker, even if Walker wasn’t aware of it — namely, that one of Walker’s girlfriends never got over her love of Walker’s music, even as she was dating Bowie. The anecdote is a perfect illustration of the homo-social electricity that charges so much popular music, and Kijak is wise enough to let the inference speak for itself.

30 Century Man is unique simply for its on-camera interview and studio footage of Walker, who has spent more than a decade on a single album and gone 30 years between live performances. As a leading man, he’s conflicted. He may be a notorious film buff who is fond of Victor Erice and collaborated with Leos Carax, but the physical efforts on his part to cultivate an iconic mystique — hats and sunglasses, for example — come across as almost comic signifiers of a genuine unease about being on-camera. At the beginning of one of the film’s interviews, he jokingly refers to McCarthy-era forms of interrogation, and only truly loosens up past the point of obvious self-consciousness when he’s enmeshed in recording a song. Instead of a full-blown eccentric, Kijak’s movie puts forth a vision of a guy who’d simply rather make art than play the fame game. Of course, in Walker’s case, that art now involves using slabs of meat as rhythmic instruments — and instead of writing for the charts, he’s singing about Pasolini and Mussolini.

SCOTT WALKER: 30 CENTURY MAN opens Fri/23 in Bay Area theaters.

The stink of ink

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Film noir doesn’t fuck around. It gives you tough-taking characters, gunshots, stiff drinks, and outrage, all within 90 minutes (frequently less). The seventh Noir City, programmed by Anita Monga and Eddie Muller, is stacked with double-features focused on "Newspaper Noir," the inkiest of subgenres. The fest kicks off with Humphrey Bogart in Deadline — USA (1952), a crackling newsroom thriller from Richard Brooks (1955’s The Blackboard Jungle, 1967’s In Cold Blood). Rapid-fire pacing is the only way this film crams in so much exciting stuff: a storied newspaper, The Day, that’s on the verge of being sold; a mysterious blonde, found dead and wearing only a fur coat; a gangster-about-town who’s got his fingerprints on City Hall; a courtroom battle; and a murder that literally stops the presses. Bogart ("Newspaperman is the best profession in the world!") is aces as a soon-to-be-unemployed editor who makes a last stand by exposing the gangster’s crimes on his front page. He also has a nice subplot trying to woo back his ex-wife (future Planet of the Apes-er Kim Hunter) and barks plenty of wisdom about the state of the news biz, some of it oddly prophetic: "It’s not enough anymore to give ’em just news — they want comics, contests, puzzles …" Ethel Barrymore adds Old Hollywood class as the widow of Bogie’s boss, while Gilligan’s Island‘s Jim Backus pops up as a Day reporter.

But not all newspapermen are as heroic as Deadline — USA‘s scum-busting bunch; opening night concludes with 1952’s Scandal Sheet, based on a Sam Fuller novel. The film’s New York Express lives for a lurid mix of "thrills, escape, and news," with a special talent for manufacturing the latter. But editor Mark Chapman (Broderick Crawford) is as sleazy as his paper. When a secret from his past threatens his position, he commits a murder that becomes the obsession of the Express‘s top reporter (John Derek) — and the end result is dramatic irony at its juiciest.

NOIR CITY

Jan. 23-Feb. 1, double features $10

Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF

www.noircity.com

Emily Postfeminist

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Andrea is on vacation. Check out this column originally published Jan. 3, 2007.

Dear Andrea:

Recently, my boyfriend and I were at a strip club and bought a lap dance. My experience has been that, as a girl, the hands-off rule generally doesn’t apply to me. However, out of respect for the girl, I don’t touch until she invites me to. This one invited me to touch her. Caught up in the moment, my boyfriend asked, "Can she touch your pussy?" I was a bit shocked because I assumed that was off-limits — but she said, "She can, but you can’t." So I started touching her on the outside of her G-string. I got a little braver and went under her G-string but still stayed outside. She moved a certain way during her dance, and my thumb kind of slipped right in. A few seconds later, she stopped. She was nice and hugged me, and told us to come back any time. Did I go too far? I feel guilty that I may have made her feel like a hooker. Or is it really no big deal? I’m embarrassed to go back, and I’ve asked my boyfriend to not make that request in the future. How often does this sort of thing happen to a dancer?

Love,

Thumbelina

Dear Thumb:

Just what we needed, a new set of ethical dilemmas and moral failings to keep us awake and tossing on those long dark nights of the soul that tend to hit around this time of year.

I really don’t think this is the sort of thing that used to bother people before half the female grad students in the country started stripping and writing books and doing performance art (oh, so much performance art) about it. For that matter, I don’t think other girls used to feel as permitted or as obligated to go grope those girls for money at their places of work. I’m not entirely sure that what we’re seeing here is really an accurate demonstration of human sexual behavior in the wild — there are too many layers of politics and performance in there to tell what’s really happening — but I’m confident we’re at least seeing some genuinely new situations and their accompanying etiquette issues.

I’ve known any number of post-everything strippers, hookers, and dominatrices, but one in particular comes to mind. She’d been working at a womyn-owned, crunchy-organic peep show, but — surprise! — she could barely make her rent. So like so many before her, she’d given up her ideals and gone where the money is. Once she was hired by the grimy mainstream porn theater and Olde Lappe Dance Emporium, she was coming home with her pockets and God knows what else stuffed with fifties every night but complaining to me that some guy came while she was wiggling around on him and ew, ew, gross, yuck, how dare he? I commiserated at the time because I’m a wimp like that, but honestly, isn’t that an occupational hazard? If you’re going to be a sex worker, you deserve to be treated with respect and decency, of course, and what you say goes as far as who’s allowed to touch where with what and so forth, but come on. Into each stripper’s life a little semen must fall. If that’s absolutely not going to work for you, dance behind glass (for lower tips) or, hey, get your Realtor’s license or something.

Most of the female sex workers I’ve known have been at least passingly bisexual, but even those who really aren’t seem quite genuinely enthusiastic about female customers, both prospective and actual. There are elements of novelty to the appeal, I’m sure, just as there are elements of safety and sisterly enthusiasm. What there ought not to be, and what you ought not to worry about, is an expectation that female customers aren’t really customers — that is to say, that they’re not paying the sex worker for sex. While many women who go to strip clubs or book time with a dominatrix may be doing it to please a (male) partner, or as a learning experience or a lark, or just to make a statement of some sort, it would be pretty silly for a sex worker to be surprised when a customer, male or female, appears to be interested in having some sort of sex with her.

Your dancer granted you access. Maybe she liked you (or likes girls in general) or maybe she was milking you for tips, but whatever, she said yes. She has a sense of how sturdy or flimsy a barrier her G-string presents to curious fingers and was probably not surprised when you got where you got. The most telling thing was that she invited you back whenever, which she was certainly under no obligation to do. I think it would be fine to go back there and fine to whisper, "Sorry I got fresh last time" and fine not to. It would also be fine for her, in turn, to refuse you service, but I bet she doesn’t.

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.

Round and round

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› johnny@sfbg.com

David King and I are staring at a baseball, some screws, and some bolts. More specifically, King and I are looking at Satellite #2, a nine-inch pointy yet round sculpture he constructed from those ingredients for an upcoming show. "To me, this is one of the more successful pieces," King says, as we look around the warehouse art studio at SF Recycling and Disposal Inc. To our left, Christine Lee — who, like King, is an artist-in-residence at the Dump — is working with James Sellier on a wood-based project. To our right, there are many spheres, some suspended, others on pedestals.

A few of the spheres are made of green floral tubes, cassette tapes, lanyards, and balls. A couple brightly colored ones incorporate hair curler ends and board game pieces. "This piece made from curtain rod brackets is one of the first," King says, pointing to an 11-inch silver mass. "I thought I’d try to glue them to a ball, but then I began using string and fishing lines. It looks like a death star." He picks up a huge circular mass of Cliffords, teddy bears, and other stuffed animals that is akin to the work of Mike Kelley (or locally, Matt Furie). A Tickle Me Elmo laughs. "A guy drove up and dropped off two huge bags of stuffed animals. It’s so random. You wonder, ‘Did your daughter no longer want these? Or did someone die?’"

The sense of mortality and waste in those questions is present in King’s new work, particularly through titles that refer to allergens, viruses, and bacteria. But his latest pieces also possess a strong current of playfulness. It manifests via comic shapes and bright cartoon or sleekly attractive colors. King’s sculptures are a departure from his 2-D collages in a series such as last year’s "Beneath All We Know," but they’re also linked to such past projects through a recurrent use of circular shapes that have scientific or metaphysical connotations. With the cellular structures of "Beneath All We Know," King began to foreground floating energy masses that had previously taken the form of jeweled grapevines or crochet patterns. Now those patterns seem to have leapt off the paper of his collages into the three-dimensional world.

In fact, though, they’ve been gleaned from the Dump. "I wanted the challenge of doing something new, of finding a new way of being creative," King says, when asked what motivated him to seek out a residency at the site. "On a personal level, I wanted to put myself out there more and step outside my own studio. The first couple of weeks, it was pretty daunting to witness the sheer volume. I thought, ‘Oh, what have I gotten myself into?’ But over time, I realized you shouldn’t look for a particular thing. Whatever ideas you come in with, you have to let go of — the whole thing is about responding to the waste stream. It was very intuitive. I like to find a lot of one thing: plastic lemons or icicles, bits from chandeliers. When I saw a lot of one thing, I grabbed it."

The sheer volume of material at SF Recycling and Disposal is indeed daunting, if you’re looking for one very specific object. Micah Gibson from the site — who might have been referencing the trash compactor aesthetic of TV Carnage when he titled his 2008 Art at the Dump show "Casual Fridays" — leads me on a quick tour through a small portion of its 40 acres. We walk by enormous seagulls, around a hill covered with carousel horses and capped by a giant ice cream cone, through transfer and sorting stations, and past a pit as a big as football field and 15 feet deep, until we reach a sculpture garden designed by Susan Steinman.

We pause by Bench Curl, a recent piece made by Scott Oliver during his residency. The scent of trees is strong, yet Gibson says it isn’t from the surroundings, but rather a large number of trees in the IMRF (Integrated Materials Recovery Facility). Earlier in the day, when I first showed up, a different mega-pungent smell had been dominant. "It happens whenever food from cruise ships is boiled down," Gibson says, noting that kids on school trips enjoy coming up with descriptions for the occasional olfactory assault.

When Gibson and I return to SF Recycling & Disposal’s main building, I spot a sculpture by Henri Marie-Rose, who has exhibited at the de Young Museum, and who has a long-term artistic relationship with the site. Back at King’s show-in-progress, there are tetrahedrons- and icosahedrons-in-progress, made of cardboard, and a wreath comprised of Chinese food containers is mounted on a wall.

King has discovered a certain joy in multiplicity — he’s capable of cutting 1,000 diamonds out from a waist-high stack of Sotheby’s auction catalogs. Through dedication to repetition, he has used collage to transform the 1980s men’s exercise magazine pinup Scott Madsen into a Shiva figure. With its wide-open skies and mammoth hills — whether green or trash-strewn — his latest creative stomping ground makes for an interesting contrast from the gardens he tends when isn’t making art. It resembles a parody of the Arcadian vistas in his earliest collages. "Sometimes I feel like I want to be narrative, and sometimes I want to be looser," he says, discussing elders and contemporaries he admires, such as John O’Reilly and Fred Tomaselli. "I like the effect of a shift in perspective from a microscope to a telescope, between the tiny and the super large."

DAVID KING: ATOMS, SATELLITES AND OTHER ORBS

With "Christine Lee: Linear Elements"

Fri/23, 5-9 p.m.; and Sat/24, 1-5 p.m., free

SF Recycling & Disposal Art Studio

503 Tunnel, SF

(415) 330-1400

www.sfrecycling.com/AIR

Straight outta the garage

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Garage rock’s latest souped up wave hits the Bay. We’re supercharged on Nodzz, Hunx and His Punx, Hank IV, Nobunny, and more ….

>>Revved up on garage rock
Grease monkeys gotta scratch their coconuts and wonder: a trip through the new explosion
By Kimberly Chun

>>Seeing starzzz
Nodzzz ditch the Pitchfork and ride a wave of praise
By Chris Sabbath

>>Gimme gimme
We’re putty for the slutty rock ‘n’ roll of Hunx and his Punx
By Brandon Bussolini

>>IV to the floor
Bastard bonus combo Hank IV let it rock
By Kimberly Chun

>>Bunny ballin’
Loving that loopy, lupine, leather-bound Nobunny sound
By Michael Harkin

>>Snap!
Photobooth pictures perfectly sloppy pop — plus some really bad Spanish
By Kimberly Chun

>>Rage onstage
A highly selective map to the Bay’s gnarliest garage rock
By Kimberly Chun

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Soledad Barrio and Noche Flamenco

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PREVIEW Two years ago when Soledad Barrio and Noche Flamenco filled Zellerbach Hall to the rafters and awarded its performers with a standing ovation the likes of which Cal Performances probably had not experienced in a while, I felt very much like an outsider. I am crazy about flamenco, yet it was only when Barrio took to the stage that I got an inkling of why that southern Spanish form, which reaches deep in that country’s Arabic heritage and perhaps even further into its even more ancient gypsy roots, still manages to take my breath away in the 21st century.

Every pause, every rhythmic explosion, every serpentine turn spoke of something inside her that needed to come out. It was powerful, intimate, absolutely theatrical, and totally genuine. She was defiant, playful, and mysterious — frequently all at once. It was an unforgettable performance that probably would have been even better in a smaller venue — this tiny woman held 2,000 people in the raised palm of her hand.

The rest of the company is by no means simply backup for Barrio. These are superbly trained performers who manage to hang onto their individuality despite the constraints of this type of highly controlled, technically virtuosic performance. Company director Martin Santangelo, who got his start on the stage with El Teatro Campesino, knows how to put together sizzling shows. But the primary reason to welcome this company’s return is Barrio.

SOLEDAD BARRIO AND NOCHE FLAMENCO Fri/23–Sat/24, 8 p.m., $24–$48. Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley, Berk. (510) 642–9988, www.calperfs.berkeley.edu

Calvin Johnson

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PREVIEW It’s not hard to see Calvin Johnson as the obverse of Henry Rollins in the protean world of ’80s underground rock. Johnson’s teddy-bear huggability, and the straightforwardness and purity of sentiment of a track like his old band Beat Happening’s "Honey Pot," has nothing to do with Black Flag’s macho angst. Rather than burying his emotional life under muscle, Johnson’s appeal came from an embarrassing vulnerability. While he’s better known for his historic role and his work as K Records’ head honcho than for his current endeavors, Johnson remains au courant: his most recent release, Calvin Johnson and the Sons of the Soil (K, 2007), finds him backed by the likes of Adam Forkner, a.k.a. Portland, Ore., drone chief White Rainbow.

At press time, San Francisco opening act Grass Widow tentatively canceled its performance due to multiple family emergencies, so this Club Sandwich event will likely be rounded out by screenings of Heart of Nowhere, a stream-of-consciousness documentary about life in Alabama, and Crisis in the Credit System, a 2008 film by Melanie Gilligan. If you’re missing the cold, these hits of sunshine might not be for you.

CALVIN JOHNSON With screening of Heart of Nowhere and Crisis in the Credit System. Mon/26, 8 p.m., $6. Artists’ Television Access, 992 Valencia, SF. (415) 824-3890, www.atasite.org, clubsandwichbayarea.com

Department of Eagles

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PREVIEW Considering that the Brooklyn band Department of Eagles’ much-praised, tres delectable nugget of fast-forward/throwback rock, In Ear Park (4AD), resides so firmly in those lazy, hazy, haunted memories of youth, there’s something exquisitely fitting about the fact that 26-year-old East Bay native Fred Nicolaus is bringing his collaboration Grizzly Bear member and ex–New York University roommate Daniel Rossen back to the Bay for its first show at a venue frequented as a ska-loving Oakland kid. "I remember seeing a weird swing band there — Lee Press-On and the Nails?" he recalls from snowy Pennsylvania.

The Nails don’t crop up on the album — the follow-up to the group’s 2003 debut, The Cold Nose (The Whitey on the Moon UK LP) initially released by Oakland’s Isota Records and reissued by American Dust — nor do the years between NYU and today that Nicolaus spent toiling in the nine-to-five trenches of publishing ("The first magazine I worked for was Industrial Equipment News — the most doomed experience of all time!"). Instead DOE plunges into a many-pleasured, multitextured wonderland teeming with groaning cello, swooping samples, clattering toy pianos, and blissfully ethereal vocals — and tender backward glances to neglected classical LPs, childhood retreats, and the more ecstatic musical ruminations of Van Dyke Parks. "It was about taking that idea of using weird, amazing arrangements and applying them to music that’s more poppy," Nicolaus says of the band, once dubbed Whitey on the Moon UK after the protestations of the SF combo also named for the Gil-Scott Heron track.

The twosome worked on In Ear Park for years "in the margins of Grizzly Bear’s recording and touring schedule," with Nicolaus dreaming up with the raw ideas for the songs and Rossen molding them into shape. "When you work on something for five years," Nicolaus explains humbly, "you can afford to throw away stuff that isn’t up to par." Now the pair is tackling their studio creations live, assisted by a full band that includes Grizzly Bear’s Chris Bear, on an outing that Nicolaus believes "might be our only tour, really," since Grizzly Bear is committed to completing a 2009 full-length. Still, Nicolaus is delighted to find that DOE’s tunes can work without their aural finery: "It’s reassuring that with these songs, if you took their clothes off they’d still be able to stand up."

DEPARTMENT OF EAGLES With Cave Singers. Sun/25, 7 and 10 p.m., $15. Café Du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. (415) 861-5016, www.cafedunord.com

“Three on a Match”

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REVIEW This 1932 pre-Code gem is a fine example of the era’s snappy Warner Bros. style and economical storytelling. Three women are reunited by chance years after being Manhattan grade-school classmates: goodhearted "bad girl" Mary (Joan Blondell) became a Broadway baby via reform school. Smart but poor valedictorian Ruth (Bette Davis, whose screen prospects were considered pretty wan at this point) became a humble stenographer. Product of privilege Vivian (Ann Dvorak) married childhood sweetheart Robert (Warren William) and is now the consummate socialite wife and mother. But she is bored, dissatisfied, and frigid, manifesting behavior we might now read as clinical depression. Despite "having everything," her nasty downward spiral becomes the film’s melodramatic engine.

Unexpectedly sparking with a genial rake, Vivian impulsively drops out of sight, slumming with her new amour (Lyle Talbot, future contributor to 1959’s Plan 9 from Outer Space) and his increasingly disreputable friends. (They include a very young, kinda cute Humphrey Bogart as a tuxedoed thug who snarls lines like "The heat’s on enough to curl yer shoe leather.") She tows along a young son whose best interests are not served by separation from daddy, mom’s blackmailing/kidnapping new gangster pals, and rampant cocaine abuse. Directed by Mervyn LeRoy (a rather neglected figure nonetheless key to a remarkable number of Hollywood classics, from 1931’s Little Caesar and 1932’s I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang to 1956’s The Bad Seed and 1962’s Gypsy), Three on a Match is utterly packed with incident at 64 hurtling minutes. Yet it’s so astutely handled one never feels nuance is given the bum’s rush. Blondell is delightfully hard-boiled, while Davis seems tentative (no doubt waiting for bigger and better things) in a wallflower role. But it’s Dvorak who dominates in a "fallen woman" histrionic workout. Trivia note: she attempted to have her WB contract nullified after learning the five-year-old (Frankie Darrow) playing her son was paid equally.

THREE ON A MATCH plays Fri/23 at the Mechanics’ Institute. See Rep Clock.

“Brad Noble: Chaotic Resolve”

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The recent Washington Post obituary of Andrew Wyeth reveals that the figurative painter considered himself an abstract artist, because he didn’t depict but rather evoked a metaphysical vision. This idea is at least as old as 1907, when antimodernist Max Nordau hurled it as an accusation at French symbolist Puvis de Chavannes, and while few use the word abstract with this meaning, I find the conception sympathetic rather than pejorative. If we can call it a lineage, then Brad Noble is part of it. His Beach Girl (2007-08) could be a symbolist painting, evoking rather than dispelling mystery. Is the reclining nude partly buried in the sand, or is she becoming sand? Or is the sand becoming her? Up close, she seems to be eating it. This scene is abstract in that it takes representational elements and recombines them in nonrepresentational ways.

Most of the works in "Chaotic Resolve" lack recognizable landscapes, though Lucid Dream Lab features a woman seated on the ground with her back to us, forearms wrapped in ribbons, gazing into a receding horizon. The landscape’s vagueness is complicated by metallic paint that shows through, and many works have a metallic gleam impossible to capture in reproduction. Quagmire features a nude man in profile against a brown surface so shiny it looks lacquered. His back is stooped; thorny vines wind up his legs. His penis is obscured by one arm, but a lone tendril of hair curls out from between his legs at crotch-level: this, like many of Noble’s images, is fraught with uncertainty, lifting as if erect, then curving down impotent, then circling back on itself, suggesting infinity. Exacerbating the whole is the man’s cracking body, his missing brainpan, and the hatchet wounds dividing his neck. A couple pieces, such as Third Party, are less successful, but on the whole, this art is of productive opacity, subtly in tune with the host gallery’s orientation toward surrealist abstraction.

BRAD NOBLE: CHAOTIC RESOLVE Through Feb. 24. Mon.–Fri., 10 a.m.–6 p.m. Weinstein Gallery, 301 Geary, SF. (415) 362-8151. www.weinstein.com

Twice as nice?

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RANT As 2008 wound down, and filmgoers everywhere began to gag on For Your Consideration flicks, one exciting piece of news gurgled out for genre fans: a planned remake of 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby had been cancelled. According to a post on Collider.com, producer Andrew Form was stumped by trying to adapt Ira Levin’s 1967 novel for a contemporary audience. "We couldn’t come up with something where it felt like it was relevant and we could add something to it other than what it was," he told the site.

These pearls of wisdom from the guy who produced 2003’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 2005’s Amityville Horror, 2007’s The Hitcher, this February’s Friday the 13th, and the slated-for-2010 A Nightmare on Elm Street. Roman Polanski’s paranoia-will-destroy-ya tale of New York City witches is spooky enough on its own, thanks to suspenseful pacing, an overwhelming sense of dread, and its performances, particularly by a bug-eyed Mia Farrow and a grasping, Oscar-winning Ruth Gordon. For current viewers, subtext from the director (the movie predated Charles Manson’s murder party at Sharon Tate’s mansion by a year) and the setting (the Dakota, John Lennon’s last address) further ups the creep factor. The movie itself seems haunted. You think producers who favored lingering shots of Ryan Reynolds’s Amityville abs over any actual scares could replicate that?

But I’m rambling on a moot point. Most horror remakes do get made, and rake in the bucks. Many tend to be hampered by the worst invention in the past 25 years of cinema, the PG-13 rating. (The recent wave of PG-13 horror films really need their own genre distinction that doesn’t have "horror" in it, because there’s no horror in them.) For the most part, post-millennial horror remakes are either J-horror (2002’s The Ring remains the most lucrative) or slashers, like 2007’s Halloween. The selection process for what gets remade seems as arbitrary as the eventual results: Jamie Lee Curtis’s 1980 disco-dance nightmare Prom Night, a cult favorite, became a shitty 2008 release (PG-13!) seen by maybe 15 people. But some seemingly sacrilegious efforts, like the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake, were well liked. Even by me.

Up next: 1981’s My Bloody Valentine, a somewhat obscure early-period slasher comin’ at us in 3-D this Friday. (Yes, it’s rated R.) What good is gimmick du jour 3-D if not to enhance flailing limbs and splattering blood? Cynical though I am, I can’t resist. Besides, one of my favorite movies of all time is a horror remake: John Carpenter’s 1982 The Thing. (Cheryl Eddy)

MY BLOODY VALENTINE 3-D opens Fri/16 in Bay Area theaters

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