Arts & Culture

Arts & Culture

Daughters

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PREVIEW "I’ve been called a sinner, wrong-doer, evildoer, worker of iniquity, transgressor, bad example, scoundrel, villian, knave, miscreant, viper, wretch, the devil incarnate" — make no mistake, it’s a warning from Daughters vocalist Alexis Marshall, delivered via the apparent thesaurus in his head and the intentions of bad behavior in his heart. Whether you call it noise, mathcore, grindcore, chaos-core, or noisegrind, the sound of Providence, R.I.’s Daughters resembles absolutely nothing that will put you gently to sleep at night (John Mayer fans, run away as fast as you can). Chuckle if you must at their me-so-clever song titles ("And Then the C.H.U.D.S. Came," "A Room Full of Hard-Ons and Nowhere to Sit Down," "The Fuck Whisperer"), but the Daughters are no joke. Loud, aggressive, caucophonous, spazzy (yet technically accomplished), and with interludes that occasionally resemble the sound of nails on a blackboard, this is the kind of band that makes people ask, "Uh, what are you listening to?" when what they really mean is, "Sweet Jebus, what is that godforsaken racket?" Not for nothing was Daughters’ last studio release dubbed Hell Songs (Hydra Head, 2006). If your ears can take it, you won’t want to miss their set opening for Chicago’s Russian Circles, whose epic instrumentals should provide a reasonable amount of balm for any lingering, teeth-rattling reverberations.

DAUGHTERS With Russian Circles and Young Widows. Thurs/12, 9 p.m. Slim’s, 333 11th St, SF. $13. (415) 255-0333. www.slims-sf.com

Valet

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PREVIEW I admit I was a little skeptical on first receiving Valet’s Naked Acid (Kranky) in the mail. I was burned out on Terry Riley–inspired meditation music even before seeing the garishly New Age "vibe painting" gracing the sleeve. It took a couple of weeks for me to get around to actually listening to the thing, and I’m glad I waited: the album begins with bell chimes, distant drums, and a what sounds like a thumb-piano loop, but what follows is hardly Tubular Bells, part two. Naked Acid is a drone album, but an incredibly brave one in which emotions are laid bare and a surprising range of musical textures flow from a minimalist sonic palette. Take three tracks in their chronological order: "Drum Movie"’s milky growl sounds fit for a David Lynch movie. "Keehar"’s reverb-licked guitar plays like celestial rock. "Fuck It"’s scraping drawl evokes Patti Smith played at half-speed or a duskier Mazzy Star.

Though Valet springs from the same Portland, Ore., DIY scene as White Rainbow, guiding light Honey Owens’ musical family tree includes Austin, Texas’ Jana Hunter, Finland’s Lau Nau, and fellow Portlander Grouper. All these women are pushing the female singer-songwriter format into new atmospheric, painterly territory, taking advantage of loop pedals and thick layers of reverb to collapse the distance between performance and production. Naked Acid‘s constant dissolve hovers uneasily between Karen Dalton remove and electronic opacity. After 40 minutes of enclosed drifting, Owens finally bobs to the surface on "Streets," turning a few pirouettes over a bustling programmed beat before clipping it off in noisy heat.

When Owens opened for Atlas Sound here last March, she was plagued by sound problems and seemed lost in the gestalt of her multiplanar drones. This time she plays at two smaller venues — Hemlock Tavern and a Mission District underground space — better suited to her diffuse blues, though it may take something else for her to shake something indelible from what, for now, remains ineffable.

VALET With Galactic Core, Kawabata Makoto, and Numinous Eye. June 18, 9 p.m., $7. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. (415) 923-0923, www.hemlocktavern.com

Daddy issues

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REVIEW Stuffy writer Blake Morrison (Colin Firth) struggles to come to terms with his father’s imminent death, hoping that, in their last days together, that they can finally make peace. A dying father? I know the premise is more than a little grim, but what When Did You Last See Your Father? lacks in levity it makes up for in heartfelt storytelling and powerful performances — trusty Jim Broadbent shines as Arthur, the overbearing, attention-seeking (possibly philandering) paterfamilias. We first encounter this force of nature as the film, set in the late 1950s, opens. Blake is eight, and his family is stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic. But not for long: Arthur breaks ranks and rides the shoulder, zooming past the long line of cars, waving a stethoscope in the air to justify the blatantly arrogant maneuver. This devil-may-care attitude inspires admiration in young Blake and animosity in slightly older Blake, when he grows into a surly, socially inept teenager. Adapted from an award-winning memoir and directed by Anand Tucker (Shopgirl, 2005), the film flows seamlessly in and out of flashbacks, fleshing out Blake and Arthur’s complex dynamic. Any film centered around a father-son relationship, especially when the father is terminally ill, pretty much lends itself to schmaltzy sentimentality. But When Did You Last See Your Father? avoids slipping down that syrupy slope. Instead, it is a poignant, sincere, occasionally funny — Arthur’s frank discussion of gonorrhea and masturbation during a camping trip had me chuckling — exploration of a man’s complicated history with his often uncouth but always larger-than-life father.

WHEN DID YOU LAST SEE YOUR FATHER? opens Fri/13 in Bay Area theaters.

“You Make Me Make You”

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REVIEW We photograph stuff and immediately pass it on to everyone who has Internet access. We ingest news events recorded only moments ago — and expect information on the next event even before it has completely unfolded. Artist Suzanne Husky is also driven to document what is happening right now: from social concerns to what she witnesses in her community. But she doesn’t give it to us flat, like so much documentation via electronic media. Instead, Husky renders her vision in 3-D and makes them potentially huggable.

In her current show at Triple Base Gallery, Husky has sewn, stuffed, and collaged a miniature wonderland that merges her social network with ecological and pop-cultural concerns. The initial effect of the installation is like seeing a grade-schooler’s attempt to recreate a Christmas window at FAO Schwartz. But these toy-size dioramas were designed for adults to contemplate. That desire to immediately disseminate information, the urge to make real what is only flat onscreen, and seeing the big picture are some of the ideas that come to mind when viewing her work — after you’re done chuckling over details like the composting toilet (Humanure). Husky wants her viewers to become social anthropologists and make their own connections. Using photographs for doll faces so there is no mistaking who is represented, the artist gives us Kobe Bryant dunking a basketball, her friends at a gallery opening, and that ever-present naked guy doing yoga in Berkeley Hot Tub. The herd from the Highway 5 stockyards, Chinese factory workers, and an activist aloft in the University of California, Berkeley oak trees also are reproduced with sad and funny results.

YOU MAKE ME MAKE YOU Through June 29. Artists Amy Franceschini and Michael Swaine discuss Husky’s work at a dinner lecture, June 27, 7 p.m.; e-mail triplebase@gmail.com for reservations. Thurs.–Sun., noon–5 p.m. Triple Base, 3041 24th St., SF. (303) 909-5481, www.basebasebase.com

Sealed with a fest

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER "Obviously I wanted to be part of this wealthy cause … whoops, I mean, worthy cause — a Freudian slip!" blurted Seal to amassed gowns and tuxes at a packed Davies Symphony Hall May 31. Well, it was pretty B&W at this, the Black and White Ball 2008. He went on to explain that he was more than glad to play the benefit bash for the San Francisco Symphony’s Adventures in Music education program, until he realized that night’s event was just a day before wife Heidi "And sometimes you’re out … in the doghouse" Klum’s birthday. "Even though it was written almost 20 years ago, I never knew what this song was about till four or five years ago," he drawled graciously, before easing into a swooningly romantic "Kiss from a Rose." The coiffed and painted debs swayed in the seats behind the stage like tropical palms, the gray-tressed oldsters in tuxes yawned as if their jaws would dislocate, and all the right — and leftie — blondes flitted to the front as if drawn to a gyrating, white-scarfed flame. The irony that Seal was putting in a high-energy set and working in an establishment-jabbing anthem titled "System" — "but you won’t get to hear it here because record companies aren’t what they used to be, but this isn’t that kind of show," according to the UK crooner — was not altogether lost on the assembled partygoers at this very establishment affair.

Still, the Grey Goose quaffing, shrimp chomping, and dance-it-up musical offerings lining the closed-off swath of Van Ness added up to a surprisingly solid good time — not to mention further confirmation of the latest urban SF curiosity: packs of underdressed, strapless-clad or micro-miniskirted, microclimate-besieged fashion victims who insist on braving hypothermia sans outerwear. Is it really that toasty over the bridge and through the tunnel?

Nonetheless I got a kick out of Extra Action Marching Band, its flag girls drooling faux-blood while chilling, kicking it iceberg-style beneath the polka-dot-lit, fireworks-bedecked City Hall. Pete Escovedo still had what it took to pull me to the dance floor and get the salsa out. Hot on the heels of Harriet Tubman (Noir), Marcus Shelby riled up Strictly Ballroom wannabes in the bowels of the War Memorial Opera House, and upstairs DJ Afrika Bambaataa turned in an unforgettable old-school hip-hop and rock-pop set, sweetly warbling, "I just want your extra time … " to Prince’s "Kiss," as a mob of gorgeous freaks mobbed the stage. Be it ever so old-fashioned and ever so obligatorily glammy, the B&WB was such a ball that I was inspired to use it as the barometer of sorts for a few other music-fest contenders.

B&W BALL BY THE NUMBERS Kilts: two. Turbans: three. Closeted waltz-heads eager to make the Metronome Ballroom lessons pay off: more than a dozen. Misguided ladies who looked like they tried to repurpose their wedding gowns as white formalwear: two. Gavin Newsom look-alikes: a toothy handful. Jennifer Siebel look-alikes: hundreds. Former hippies in formalwear: six. Men in all-white who looked like they stepped out of an alternate "Rapture" video: two. Burning Man references as City Hall was bookended by pillars of fire at midnight: two. Screeching highlights-victims upon seeing their girlfriends: more than two ears can handle. Sneaky types who looked like they’ve probably worn the same thing to B&WB every year since 1983: more than designers and luxury goods manufacturers would care to know.

HARMONY FESTIVAL (June 6–8, Santa Rosa, harmonyfestival.com, including Damian "Jr. Gong" Marley, George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic, Arrested Development, and Mickey Hart Band) Expected Gavin look-alikes: zip unless you count the Cali boys who look early Gavin — with dreadlocks. Rich hippies with perfect hair and lavishly embroidered coats: three.

BERKELEY WORLD MUSIC FESTIVAL (June 7, Berkeley, www.berkeleyworldmusic.org, with Dengue Fever, and Sila and the AfroFunk Experience) Expected turbans: the Sufi trance music guarantees at least a couple. Kilts: zero. Swirlie dancers: a dozen-plus.

OUTSIDE LANDS (Aug. 22–24, SF, www.sfoutsidelands.com, including Radiohead, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Jack Johnson, Wilco, Beck, and the Black Keys) Expected bikes piled in the racks: a thou. Concert-goers overcome by heat: C’mon, this is San Francisco.

TREASURE ISLAND MUSIC FESTIVAL (Sept. 20–21, Treasure Island, treasureislandfestival.com, with Justice, the Raconteurs, TV on the Radio, and Tegan and Sara) Projected number of great views of SF: innumerable. Gold-trimmed "ironic" sunglasses: a gazillion. Concertgoers who discover far too late that shorts are only ideal for an hour a day: 135.

LOVEFEST (Oct. 4, SF, www2.sflovefest.org) Ever-recyclable ’70s-style bells: a couple-dozen. Fabulous-faux hairpieces: Wigstock is forever. Swirlie dancers: you got ’em.

YOU BREAK IT — YOU BOUGHT IT

FROG EYES, LITTLE TEETH, AND CHET


Eke out a few tears of valedictorianism: it’s an Absolutely Kosher explosion of untrammeled, happily eccentric talent. Fri/6, 9:30 p.m., $10–<\d>$12 Café Du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. www.cafedunord.com

FOOT FOOT AND FOX PAUSE


Lo-fi dust-ups coupled with folkie meanders are a–Foot Foot, flanked by the solo musings of ex-Guardian-ite Sarah Han. With Casiotone for the Painfully Alone. Sat/7, 9:30 p.m., $8. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

RADIO SLAVE


Taking a break from the sweltering, disco-imbued exotica of Quiet Village and its Silent Movie (K7), producer Matt Edwards dons his dark techno persona, Radio Slave. Sat/7, call for time and price. Endup, 401 Sixth St., SF. (415) 646-0999, www.theendup.com *

Shock and aw

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

The White Stripes may be dormant and the Black Keys may be slowly incinerating their blues-rock genre confines, but elsewhere the minimalist, ’00s-styley, binary-busting power of two remains potent. Recent releases by No Age and Crystal Castles — Nouns (Sub Pop) and Crystal Castles (Lies/Last Gang) respectively — demonstrate as much. At first listen, the pair of twosomes seems spazzily coupled, sharing a short-attention-span feel and what-the-fuck adventurousness.

Yet it only takes a few listens to uncover major divergences. No Age’s two-part cluster bomb boasts forward-facing rock juxtaposed with moments of Sonic Youth–like distorto-delicacy. They may be a two-fer, but they’re also a clear segment of a community: witness the rainbow connection of faces in Nouns‘ booklet. Meanwhile Crystal Castles finds Ethan Fawn, né Kath, and Alice Glass looking determinedly toward the future, in us-against-the-world lonesomeness — armed with keys modified, as legend has it, with an Atari 5200 sound chip. Though their simultaneously noisy and dancey, agitated pop — searching, sample-heavy, and propelled by Glass’s effects-doused coos and cries — comes off as surprisingly accessible, theirs isn’t a trillion-bit future of audiophile perfection. And definitely don’t call the Toronto twosome nu rave, even though they remixed pals the Klaxons early in their four-year existence.

"There is nothing ‘rave’ about the way we sound," Kath writes in an e-mail from Moscow. "There is nothing ‘rave’ about the way we look." Instead, he adds, Crystal Castles’ earliest idea was "to try putting a New Order beat under noise-punk."

The duo met while reading to the blind as part of "community service punishment," as Kath puts it. "I was in a metal band, and we could not cross the US border because I had a criminal record. I did the community service work to clear my record. Instead I met Alice. We bonded over our shared love of noise-punk bands. She invited me to see her noise-punk band [Fetus Fatale], and I fell in love with her lyrics."

According to Kath, he left his group, Kill Cheerleader, on the verge of major record deal to make music with Glass under a name cribbed from She-Ra’s stronghold. "We are named after a line in a commercial for the toy version of She-Ra’s castles," writes Kath. "The line is ‘the fate of the world is safe in Crystal Castles.’"

The collaboration grew from a handful of Kath guitar-noise tracks supplemented with Glass’ vocals, to a second batch that, he offers, "were 100 percent based on samples (Madonna, Joy Division, Death from Above 1979, 8bitcommunity, Grand Master Flash). In 2005 we abandoned the idea of using samples and began looking for own our songs."

Meanwhile their experiment has been catching on: an early "Alice Practice" track put out as a 500-copy 7-inch by London’s Merok Records sold out within three days. More recently Crystal Castles — which compiles "Alice Practice" and other sold-out singles, unreleased tracks from the same era like "Courtship Dating" and "Vanished," and new tracks such as "Black Panther" and "Through the Hosiery" — has established a beachhead on CMJ charts.

The duo may never have thought their remixes of Bloc Party, among others, would be popular ("The [Klaxons] remix was so well-received that other bands began offering me money to remix them as well. It was at a time when we couldn’t afford a small bag of chips, so I was saying yes to everything," writes Kath). And they may have never imagined their so-called failures would find life online. For "Crime Wave [Crystal Castles vs. Health], Kath says, "I tried to cut up the vocal track from a Health song and place it over an unused CC rhythm track. I believed it was a failed experiment, but the track leaked and people were trading it on the Internet and finally in 2007 a label called Trouble Records decided to release it as a limited seven-inch single. It sold 2,000 copies in a week." But at least part of the world outside Crystal Castles listened closely.

All of which explains some of the controversy swirling around the band. In April the Torontoist and Pitchfork reported on the duo’s use of Trevor Brown’s black-eyed Madonna image for T-shirts, the "Alice Practice" single cover, and an early "banned" Crystal Castles cover. The band has stated that they initially found the art uncredited on an old flyer, and went on to form a handshake agreement with the artist. Brown, on the other hand, alleges he was never paid for the work’s use, while the group and its management allege that they tried to contact him without success.

Furthermore, the chiptune or 8-bit community appears to be up in arms regarding Crystal Castles’ sampling, leading BlogTo.com to report on Crystal Castles’ alleged use of Belgian producer Lo-bat’s "My Little Droid Needs a Hand" for their track "Insecticon," which some say is outside the provisions of Creative Commons licensing (the work was available free for noncommercial uses, though some chip-tuners claim "Insecticon" has been used promotionally in a way that violates Creative Commons’ spirit).

Meanwhile Crystal Castles, which has deferred comment on the allegations, continues to navigate a fine, fragile line. Though the fortress has clearly been breached, the duo emphasizes its hermetic remove ("We created the songs in isolation," Kath writes), which is colored by a somewhat understandable defensiveness. ("We think there is hostility in all the tracks"). "People seem to love or hate the music," Kath writes. "We never thought about our listeners. We put these songs together for ourselves, and it’s a shock that anyone is listening."

At the very least, the twosome have retained the kind of fatalistic humor that surely led them to create the Crystal Castles CD art: an image of the pair looking down, faces hidden, and bowing — or rising up. "In the universe of pop music," Kath opines, "we are the litter collecting at the sewer grate."

CRYSTAL CASTLES

Tues/10, 8 p.m., $16

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

www.theindependentsf.com

Spunk, funk, fusion

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Pianist Chick Corea’s band Return to Forever was the last of the fusion fruit to drop from the tree of Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew (Columbia, 1970). From its early-1970s start, RTF followed the Joe Zawinul/Wayne Shorter–led Weather Report and John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra into the critically thorny but audience-friendly avenues of rhythm-based electric jazz. Corea fronted several versions of the band, but from 1974 to ’76, a balanced muscular quartet variation — with the leader on keyboards, Stanley Clarke on bass, Al Di Meola on guitar, and Lenny White on drums — became a popular and resonant standard of the fusion genre. RTF confidently balanced jazz, funk, and rock on three studio albums before Corea reconfigured the ensemble as a more bloated lineup that included four horn players and his wife Gayle as a vocalist. Now, after more than three decades, the definitive RTF quartet has reunited for an international tour and a two-night, four-show stand in San Francisco. And on May 27, Concord Records released a newly remastered two-CD anthology of music by the foursome, including 1973’s "Hymn to the Seventh Galaxy" with Di Meola’s predecessor, guitarist Bill Connors.

Corea modeled the band on the power of McLaughlin’s group, but his spunky RTF had more personality onstage, more subtlety in its playing, and more diversity in its songwriting. Clarke, who figured in all the RTF variations, was just coming into his own as a writer and performer with the quartet. The bassist would go on to show his versatility by playing in a number of jazz styles with George Duke, Pharaoh Sanders, and McCoy Tyner, as well as taking a rock ‘n’ roll side-trip with Ronnie Woods’ New Barbarians and sharing the stage with Keith Richards during the New Barbarians’ tour in 1979. Di Meola was just 19 when he joined the combo in 1974 and became an international star through his collaborations with fellow guitarists McLaughlin and Paco DeLucia. White, a veteran of the Bitches Brew sessions along with Corea, was playing with the Escovedo brothers’ legendary Azteca when Corea asked him to join RTF. White has since balanced drumming with mainstreamers like Freddie Hubbard, Herbie Hancock, and Joe Henderson while producing Nancy Wilson and Chaka Khan, among others.

All RTF members wrote music for the outfit, and though Corea’s compositions were prominent, the others’ contributions were integral to the quartet’s accessibility. The quartet’s first album, and RTF’s fourth overall, Where Have I Known You Before (Polydor, 1974), sports a heavy, fuzzy sound: Corea plays Moog synthesizers on a recording for the first time, and the group searches for identity in its use of electronics and its blend of jazz and rock influences. The project’s next — and best — album, No Mystery (Polydor, 1975), includes more funk as well as tunes by each band member, all while mixing electric and acoustic instruments. Clarke’s groove-driven "Dayride" leads to a rock-based jam titled "Excerpt from the First Movement of Heavy Metal" — RTF had a generous sense of humor — and eventually Corea’s elegant title tune. The pianist’s complex "Celebration Suite" closes the disc. No Mystery‘s follow-up and the quartet’s last album, Romantic Warrior (Columbia, 1976), was the ensemble’s best-selling full-length, again mixing electric and acoustic textures in ways that most fusion bands wouldn’t dare.

Three years and three albums doesn’t necessarily add up to a legacy, but this foursome always was more than the sum of its parts.

RETURN TO FOREVER

Tue/10–June 11, 7 and 9:30 p.m., $79.50

Regency Center Grand Ballroom

Sutter and Van Ness, SF

(415) 421-TIXS

www.goldenvoice.com

No exit

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

LIT An interviewee in Grant Gee’s excellent 2007 documentary Joy Division posits that the gloomy Manchester band inverted punk’s initial "Fuck you!" to convey a more atmospheric and ultimately unsettling sentiment of "I’m fucked." If so, the contemporaneous No Wave bands from New York City melted down those two approaches to one primal howl. Spiritually indebted to punk but suspicious of the first wave’s rockist stance, the No Wavers pursued aggressive detachment and tongue-in-cheek dissonance with the all-in brio of performance artists.

With its loose aesthetic boundaries, abbreviated timeline, and incestuous collaborations, the No Wave years are ripe for the kind of anthropological studies offered by two recent illustrated histories, Marc Masters’ No Wave (Black Dog, 205 pages, $29.95) and Thurston Moore and Byron Coley’s No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York 1976-1980 (Abrams Image).

No Wave’s bylines make for an unwieldy taxonomy: Rhys Chatam studied with LaMonte Young and Tony Conrad; Lydia Lunch was a teenage runaway; Arto Lindsey of DNA and Mark Cunningham and China Burg of Mars all met at Eckard College in St. Petersburg, Fla. Moore and Coley have the most fun with the movement’s eclecticism. A No Wave coffee-table book may be a paradox, but they cram a fantastic level of detail into a handsome spread. If you want to learn that the artist Jeff Wall suggested the name of Glenn Branca’s group Theoretical Girls, theirs is the tome for you. But Masters gets several broader trends right, like when he makes the crucial point that No Wave filmmakers like Beth and Scott B. were upsetting an established avant-garde just as much as No Wave’s musicians were troubling their punk godparents.

Both No Wave overviews go to pains to limit their sphere of focus, though one does wish to read a little more about the movement’s literary influences (William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, William Gibson) and outliers (Lizzy Mercier Descloux, please). Likewise, it would help to learn how the same set of city blocks produced Lydia Lunch and Madonna, and what exactly Jean-Michel Basquiat was doing all those nights at the Mudd Club.

But what these books skimp on context, they make up for in their rich detailing of No Wave’s internal split between Lower East Side habitués and SoHo aesthetes. There’s no question that Glenn Branca has influenced as many Mogwais as James Chance has Liars, but at the time of the movement’s heyday, downtown NYC was contested terrain. Brian Eno’s 1978 folklorist survey No New York (Phantom) conspicuously ignored the more outwardly intellectual SoHo contingent, and one still senses the bruised egos in Branca’s stinging account: "We were doing music that was too similar to what [Eno] was thinking about," the composer explains, elsewhere fuming, "If those East Village bastards had ever come down to Barnabus [a Tribeca bar], they would have found … as much sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll going on in our scene as theirs."

Never mind the bollocks, there’s one clear constant refrain in all the No Wave testimonies: gimme cheap rent. Robert Christgau is right when he muses that No Wave’s bundling of nihilism and self-righteousness was "symptomatic of formal exhaustion"; but beneath, one finds an obvious irony. Where the movement’s progenitors were reacting to a perceived state of endless urban decay, their actions have, in retrospective, taken shape as an essential pre-gentrification story. As with Weimar Germany, No Wave is compelling for what was — and for what followed.

Ten City

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

For the last two years I have been trying to plant the term Afro-surreal into the collective unconscious. Unlike Afro-futurism, Afro-surrealism is about the present. In sound it conjures everything from Sun-Ra to Wu-Tang. In speech, it brings you Henry Dumas, Amie Cesaire, Samuel Delaney, and Darius James. In visual realms, the Afro-surreal ranges from Wifredo Lam to Kara Walker to Trenton Doyle Hancock. Afro-surreal stages are set for new productions of Jean Genet’s The Blacks (1959), George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum (1986) and Leroi Jones’ The Dutchman and The Slave (1964).

I’m always looking for an Afro-surreal movie. Maybe I’m the last of a dying breed.

The 10th San Francisco Black Film Festival (SFBFF), is billed as a bridge between worlds. But which worlds? Sirius and Earth? Black and other? Local and global? Oakland and San Francisco? San Francisco and itself? Dammit, they all apply.

Most of the SFBFF is taking place in the Fillmore District, and many sites are redevelopment showcases. Opening night at the Sundance Kabuki Cinema presents Nogozi Unwurah’s Shoot The Messenger (2006), a UK import about paranoia, self-loathing, love, and redemption. The after-party is at Rassales, so I might get a haircut and brush off the derby.

Yoshi’s Fillmore is hosting Donnie Betts’ Music Is My Life, Politics My Mistress: The Story of Oscar Brown Jr. (2005). Despite its connection to ongoing gentrification debates, the venue will be an apt and stylish location for a bio on Brown, an overlooked poet-singer-playwright-composer-social activist who penetrated the zeitgeist with his song "Forty Acres and a Mule." Certain other issues also spring to mind: The black derby again? The brown? Pin-striped wool pants and well-shined shoes, or suede boots?

The Melvin Van Peebles Awards Brunch (props to the festival for naming its short film award after the Afro-surreal mastermind behind 1971’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song) is taking place at 1300 Fillmore, which will also host a screening that includes the 2007 short film Lifted. Directed by Randall Dottin, it’s a magical realist piece about a dancer on the edge who finds herself on the wrong side of a subway platform, trapped by a spirit named "High John." The actors are great, which is just one reason why the supernatural story takes simplicity to the brink of facile schmaltziness without tottering over.

A housewife realizes she has superpowers in Chad Benton’s Women’s Work (2008), a warm, funny sitcom short with animation screening at the African American Art and Culture Complex. Around the same time, Yoshi’s is showing Nijla Mumin’s Fillmo (2008), a documentary about the gentrification currently taking place in the Fillmore. How’s that for mixed signals, homey?

Footsteps in Africa (2007), showing at the Museum of African Diaspora, is about the lives of the beautiful, mysterious, and enduring Taureg/Kai of Mali. These African nomads have survived thousands of years of drought, flood, and famine, and withstood acts of genocide. Director Kathi von Koeber’s portrait reveals the wisdom and strength of some of this planet’s greatest human survivors.

Considering the documented decline of black people in San Francisco, it’s a minor miracle that SFBFF continues to grow. Like MoAD, the festival is a testament to the artists and benefactors who’ve come to San Francisco, as well as to the aesthetes among SF’s native population. This year’s festival promises glimpses of vast black realities — the kind that appear to be diminishing locally, yet somehow still manage to thrive.

SAN FRANCISCO BLACK FILM FESTIVAL

Wed/4 through June 15

See Rep Clock for listings

(415) 771-9271

www.sfbff.org

Demy more

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› johnny@sfbg.com

Jacques Demy’s raindrops keep falling on the heads of French filmmakers. While Jean-Luc Godard has to be the French new wave’s historical and critical favorite, the legacy of Demy has arguably inspired more imitation or homage. In the past decade, François Ozon (2002’s 8 Women) and Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau (1998’s Jeanne and the Perfect Guy) have mined or mimed Demy’s distinct use of color and musicality, though even Ozon’s bright red is blue-blooded, and the charms of Ducastel and Martineau’s effort don’t include Demy’s graceful staging and assured storytelling. Now, with his third feature Love Songs, new wave lover Christophe Honoré has forged an uneasy marriage. He’s set out to connect and update the romantic wisdom and classical dramatic structures of Demy with the arch political wit of ’60s Godard.

Love Songs proves few movies are entirely terrible or terrific. Its crushworthy final half-hour is touching and sometimes magnificent. But much of its initial hour is maddening. It begins well, because Honoré is attuned to the mood-setting power of well-deployed credits. Handsome, last-name-only opening titles are the first of the film’s textual nods to Godard, which continue when various books play cameo roles much as they do in Godard’s 1961 musical A Woman Is a Woman. Tomes by Henri Michaux and Hervé Guibert become effective shorthand for characters’ desires. But novelist and playwright Honoré’s sole moment of spine-chilling — as opposed to groan-inducing — wordplay takes place when he simply makes his protagonist Ismaël (Louis Garrel, attempting to channel Jean-Pierre Léaud) read the nighttime signs of the 10th Arrondissement.

Garrel’s character is the focal point of Love Songs, but the film’s hidden star is Honoré’s longtime musical collaborator Alex Beaupain, who appears in a pivotal scene, performing the lovely piano ballad "Brooklyn Bridge." Beaupain is stuck with the job of bringing Michel Legrand’s jazz-inflected pop orchestrations for Godard and Demy into the 21st century. Melodically, he’s up to the task, especially when evoking the neo-Gainsbourg rock of Benjamin Biolay. But he isn’t helped by Honoré’s libretto contributions, because Honoré seems to misinterpret the pop opera of 1964’s Umbrellas of Cherbourg as a basic copying of old Hollywood musical traditions, when in fact it was a radical yet classical revision. Honoré assumes the casual multigenre musicality of Love Songs is more contemporary, but that’s arguable.

In their previous film together, 2006’s Dans Paris, Honoré and Beaupain discovered naturalistic, inventive intersections between drama and music sequences. Love Songs is more traditional in form, saving its radical aspect for a view and presentation of sexuality that’s far more fluid than one finds in contemporary cinema, straight or gay. Honoré is out to disavow exactly those kinds of divisions, and if he’s not helped greatly by Garrel, he’s aided immeasurably by Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet, whose arrival in the film’s second half takes the story out of a tritely fatalistic ménage-a-trois realm. He’s also saved by Chiara Mastroianni. Her presence is Honoré’s ultimate invocation of Demy, since she’s the daughter of signature Demy star Catherine Deneuve. (She also brings the off-camera baggage of a recent breakup from chanson specialist Biolay to her part.) Her role might appear secondary, but her solo number signals the return of the melody at the film’s heart. Her melancholic understatement testifies that Honoré hasn’t lost the attraction to eroticism that inspired his brash attempt to bring Georges Bataille to the screen with 2004’s Ma mère. He’s just made it as pop as he possibly can by setting it to music.

LOVE SONGS

Opens Fri/6 at Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at sfbg.com

www.ifcfilms.com

Slamdance elegance

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"Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?" Rock critic Simon Reynolds opens his recent survey Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 (Penguin, 432 pages, $16) with that famous piece of invective, courtesy of Johnny Rotten from the stage of San Francisco’s Winterland. Rotten sneered those words during a Sex Pistols show. Tellingly, they arrived at the end of an American tour that contained both a zeitgeist and its own annihilation — or so it seems from Lech Kowalski’s documentary D.O.A. (1980), one of four features comprising the Pacific Film Archive’s "Louder, Faster: Punk in Performance" series.

Even before the blowup, Rotten’s question had already been answered — first by the art school oddballs and city poets who pre-dated then capitalized on punk’s groundswell, and later by the younger acolytes who reclaimed the false prophets’ call for "louder, faster" with their authenticity-obsessed rebel yells. Punk was made to be photographed — Sex Pistols guru Malcolm McLaren ensured that much — but the spirit of the frame depended on who was doing the shooting. The same three-chord assaults could make for social documents (1978-’88’s Target Video) or hipster scrawls (1976’s Blank Generation). They might inspire science experiments (Bruce Conner’s 1978 Mongoloid; Graeme Whifler’s 1978 Hello Skinny), or lyrical love streams (1979’s Deaf/Punk).

Blank Generation is the earliest punk film essay, a given since its New York milieu was already codified and oozing latent celebrity before punk moved to the provinces. Directed by Patti Smith bassist Ivan Kral and future No Wave saint Amos Poe, the film’s chapbook portraiture is heightened via a Hollis Frampton-like use of non-synched sound. Grainy black-and-white 8mm footage floats over the skips and starts of the soundtrack’s mix, creating a jilted effect perfectly suited to the push-pull of Television and the Talking Heads, as well as the tense erotics of Smith and Blondie.

Crappy audio and video smears aside, Joe Rees’s Target Video compilation reveals Bay Area post-punk in full bloom as it moves between Black Flag’s pummeling hardcore and Flipper’s art-damaged sludge to Devo’s proto-Teletubbies weirdness. The austere, one-camera setups anticipate a billion YouTube transmissions. I’ve driven by San Quentin Prison dozens of times wondering how Johnny Cash scored his famous gig there, but that was before I saw Rees’ footage of Crime at the same site — thrashing away in mock police uniforms under the harsh glare of the afternoon sun.

Before it is art or communion, punk is permission. For a zenith-like picture of this freedom flight, one should look no further than John Gaikowski’s modest short Deaf/Punk. Gaikowski’s film uncorks a long-forgotten performance at San Francisco’s Deaf Club, using slow motion to revel in punk’s limitless potential energy. This music wasn’t designed to be elegant, but I can think of no better word for Gaikowski’s shocked vision of a singer standing in repose among a small crowd of daydreaming slamdancers.

"LOUDER, FASTER: PUNK IN PERFORMANCE"

Thurs/5 through June 26

Pacific Film Archive Theater

2575 Bancroft Way, Berk.

(510) 642-1124

Incredible hulks

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Competition is seemingly bred into Americans, along with an obsessive-compulsive desire to win that neighbors around the world find variably admirable, amusing, and bewildering. We aren’t team players — we’re capable of finding logic and necessity in the phrase "US out of UN." Not so coincidentally, recent US cultural attitudes toward sport and sportsmanship have caused even team athletics to become focused on arrogant and overpaid lone superstars. Why think about the collective good when the whole point, obviously, is to become an American idol?

In taking a trip down just such a road to self-betterment, the unexpectedly delightful and deep documentary Bigger, Stronger, Faster bumps up against cosmetic surgery, steroid usage, and wheatgrass juice. As it questions the points at which an investment in exterior or physical perfection might constitute cheating, it holds up a mirror to the American way of life.

Somewhat to the bewilderment of their nebbishy parents, Bigger, Stronger, Faster director Chris Bell and his older brothers, Mike and Mark, developed a childhood fascination with size and strength training that continues to this day. Disillusioned by the youthful realization that all his ’80s tough guy heroes — Hulk Hogan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Sylvester Stallone — injected steroids to get their bulked, cut physiques, Chris refused any chemical assistance in the pursuit of powerlifting titles. But his siblings felt no similar need to constrain themselves. As "Mad Dog" Mike strived for World Wrestling Federation stardom and "Smelly" Mark trained for powerlifting events, they lied to their loved ones about continued drug use. They were unable to break their habits, because their habits worked for them.

Frequently onscreen, Bell — whose mid-’30s waistline is now as expansive as his biceps — provides an ingratiating everyguy perspective on steroids and related complex issues. He’s not so quick to judge, either. Bigger, Stronger, Faster empathizes with the thirst for Superman and Superwoman excellence by any means. It also debunks many myths regarding "’roid rage" while spotlighting the still-unclear health consequences of long-term steroid use, via the cancer battle of NFL star and exploitation flick thespian Lyle Alzado.

Tiger Woods had LASIK eye surgery. Does that constitute dishonest tampering with nature? What about Gramps downing Viagra to reach for Olympic gold in the boudoir? The lines between unfair advantages and the simple good fortunes of technological and pharmaceutical progress can be blurry.

Bigger, Stronger, Faster is no apologia. Ultimately it’s less about steroids than about the never-ending American drive to grow über-masculine and dominant — a conviction applicable to select variations of women as well. Bell and his exceptional offscreen collaborators milk considerable parodic joy from deft archival montages and clever graphic elements. The narrow focus of this terrifically entertaining documentary winds up encompassing a much larger cultural truth.

BIGGER, STRONGER, FASTER

Opens Fri/6 at Bay Area theaters.

biggerstrongerfastermovie.com

So much “Useless” beauty

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Perhaps cinema is useless. Jia Zhangke entertains this idea — as a subtext — in his 2007 documentary Useless.

As the waves of raves for Jia have rolled in, I’ve felt a bit detached. In the case of Useless, however, I responded immediately to Jia’s vision. By focusing on clothing and to some extent fashion, he takes on subjects I find inherently filmic. (I’ll watch documentaries about Yves Saint-Laurent, Yohji Yamamoto, and yes, I’m a Project Runway devotee). More important, he appears to be outside his comfort zone. The friction that results, and the deep ambiguity and ambivalence at the heart of Jia’s movie, reward repeat viewings.

Useless takes its title partly from a clothing label of that name started by designer Ma Ke, who is profiled in the second of the film’s three sections. After she muses on the "shame" of China being associated with mass-produced cheap goods, Jia films the unveiling of her debut collection for Paris Fashion Week, where at least one older European model is nonplussed by the weight of the clothing, which has been dug up from the ground after a period of burial.

The potential meaning of such moments ricochets silently — yet far from painlessly — off the gorgeous gliding images of employees at work in a clothing factory in the beginning of the film, and a somewhat dramatized portrait of an obsolete tailor shop in Jia’s hometown of Fengyang at the close. Some reviews have faulted Useless for not relying on literal touches such as intertitles or voice-overs. But when Ma Ke’s deluxe car heedlessly speeds by a tailor on foot, Jia doesn’t need words to make a point. He isn’t out to damn Ma Ke — my guess is that the filmmaker in him identifies with her.

NEW WORKS BY JIA ZHANGKE

Thurs/5 and Sun/8, call for times

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2700

www.ybca.org

An everywoman at war

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Erykah Badu disappeared for a bit, taking her musical incantations and majestic head wraps on a retreat into motherhood. In 2006, she flitted back onto the mainstream radar in Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, a concert film that takes place in a Brooklyn neighborhood and includes the comedian’s closest muso pals. Badu’s appearance stops the hustle and bustle of the event cold with her tiny frame and a huge glorious Afro, which blows off during her duet with Jill Scott during the Roots number "You Got Me." The movie audience I was with that day gasped in admiration as Badu let her trademark locks sail away while she continued to sing, her head and soul apparent for all to see — a diva whose resplendence and power does not rest on borrowed plumage alone.

Back then searching out Badu’s whereabouts led to a stripped-down MySpace page with a selection of songs off her 2003 EP, Worldwide Underground (Motown/Island), and not much else. At one point an old press release showed up, but interjected between the normal publicist-speak were "additions" in block capital letters, which were gentle mockeries of her multiputf8um accomplishments and declarations about "paying bills" and other roadblocks appearing in her life. Her words had the feel of new life forcing its way up through the old. Two years on, that same page is a tricked-out site to behold: a dizzying pastiche of acid-rock tableaus and neo-propagandist political imagery that bears Badu’s likeness — many a result of an art contest held for her fans. It was here that she chose to debut many tracks from her new album, New Amerykah Part One: 4th World War (Universal/Motown).

The recording begins with an aural soup: the noise of a ghetto train ride and the booming voice of a marauder telling folks to drop off their valuables while backing vocals exhort the "Amerykahn Promise." Badu’s voice emerges from this cacophony asking for explanations, a metaphor for her own post-sabbatical rebirth. With a quick costume change and tinkling prayer bells, Badu becomes a prophet with "The Healer," a meditation on the restorative properties of hip-hop, which she describes as "bigger than religion / Bigger than my niggas / Bigger than government." Never one to shy away from her role as everywoman — cue those propaganda posters — Badu emerges amid the muted horns and mellow groove of "Me," underscoring an autobiographical letter to listeners explaining her hesitance to be in the spotlight, her life as a single mother of two, and her fears of martyrdom at the hands of the entertainment industry. Her resolve at the close of the song is evident as she proclaims, "They may try to erase my face / But millions spring up in my place."

Such resolve lies at the crux of Badu’s brilliance, her unerring ability to carry her vulnerability on a dais of steely resilience. Downtrodden tunes like "That Hump" offer funk-laced pipe dreams of a solo mom trying to break even: "We just need a little house / That comes with a spouse." But no matter how broken-down Badu’s New Amerykah gets, there is always an undercurrent fed by the missions for social justice that Badu feels she has been called upon to fight. "Soldier" is both an exhortation and rallying cry: "To my folks think they living sweet / They gonna fuck around and push delete," she warns. Expect the woman to bring this message and attitude to the stage with the help of longtime friends and collaborators the Roots during her "Vortex Tour 2008."

ERYKAH BADU

With the Roots

Sun/8–Mon/9, 7:30 p.m., $45.50–$83.50

Paramount Theatre

2025 Broadway, Oakl.

(510) 465-6400

www.paramounttheatre.com

Yuks galore

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FILM FESTIVAL Sometimes the best thing a movie has going for it is its title, especially if that title happens to be Mutant Vampire Zombies from the ‘Hood!. Far and away the most expressively named selection at this year’s Another Hole in the Head Film Festival, Zombies imagines what would happen if a couple of rival gangbangers, a weary cop, and assorted other ragtag types emerged as the only humans unaffected by a mysterious solar flare. Zombie-movie conventions are followed (the obligatory lesson about shooting ’em in the head, etc.), self-referential jokes are cracked (Shaun of the Dead gets a shout-out). The most distinctive features here — casting erstwhile soul man C. Thomas Howell as the cop, an eye-rollingly dated Snakes on a Plane joke, and a truly disturbing twist that renders the zombies brain eaters and sex freaks — aren’t quite enough to elevate Zombies to the realm of must-see undeadness. To be fair, though, even Troma would have a hard time fulfilling the promise of something called Mutant Vampire Zombies from the ‘Hood!.

A better bargain for your gross-out buck is 2007’s Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer, a film I seized on after noting the top billing of Robert "Freddy Krueger" Englund. With higher production values than Zombie and a clever script (cowritten by John Ainslie and director Jon Knautz), Monster follows the titular hero (Trevor Matthews), a slacker dude plumber who’s been toting around some serious anger issues since childhood — when he witnessed a monster gobble up his entire family. Jack’s princess-bitch girlfriend (Rachel Skarsten) convinces him to enroll in a night-school class taught by the bumbling Professor Crowley, who ropes Jack into taking a look at the rusty pipes beneath his creepy old house. Cue: the unearthing of an ancient evil, and Crowley’s transformation from science geek to chicken-wing-gobbling, Jabba the Hutt–like menace.

Naturally this turn of events unleashes the inner warrior in Jack; the film is bookended by flash-forwards that suggest he becomes something of a Buffy for the monster population. But the main reason to see Monster is Englund, who’s having something of a mini-comeback between this film and the recent Zombie Strippers. Always a limber, engaging performer, Englund further proves there’s more to him than vivisecting Elm Street teens — though that’d be enough for me, really.

But back to the zombies. One of HoleHead’s programming edicts is apparently "never enough zombies," to the extent of capitalizing the Zed-word in their programming notes. Along with those mutant hood-rats, the fest also includes Wasting Away (2007), Trailer Park of Terror (question: when did zombies and white trash become so synonymous?), and Brain Dead (2007), the latter containing nearly as many gratuitous female nudes (full-frontal, in most cases) as it does alien-parasite-spawned undead beasties. Whatever, dude — you want class, look elsewhere. These HoleHead selections embrace crass with pride.

Other notable picks in this year’s festival include the locally made Home World, an uneven if ambitious sci-fi tale that owes a debt to Battlestar Galactica; a revival of Roger Vadim’s 1968 Barbarella, Queen of the Galaxy (free entry for Jane Fonda look-alikes and other costumed attendees); The Machine Girl, about a one-handed Japanese schoolgirl who exacts tasty, gory revenge on the baddies who offed her family; and, just ’cause it’s Uwe Boll, ‘Nam drama The Tunnel Rats, potentially the first film he’ll direct that spawns a video game instead of vice versa. HoleHead kicks off with the Bai Ling-starring The Gene Generation (2007), followed by a party headlined by all-girl psychobilly quartet Thee Merry Widows.

ANOTHER HOLE IN THE HEAD

June 5–21, most shows $10.50

Roxie Film Center

3117 16th St, SF

www.sfindie.com

Opening night party with Thee Merry Widows, the Zooby Show, and the Undertaker and His Pals

Thurs/5, 9 p.m., $5 (free with HoleHead pass or ticket stub)

Annie’s Social Club

917 Folsom, SF

www.anniessocialclub.com

Faith-based initiative

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REVIEW The Contemporary Jewish Museum was founded in 1984 as the Jewish Museum San Francisco, and "starchitect" Daniel Libeskind’s building design, which seemingly bursts out of an 1881 vintage brick facade opposite Yerba Buena Gardens, began taking shape nearly a decade ago. But for all intents and purposes, the CJM’s opening this week marks the launch of a new art space that must affirm its brand identity on our cultural landscape. The folks behind this identity-based museum aim to instill a sense of belief in the place as a meaningful institution and to lure repeat visitors — Jews and non-Jews alike. With a prominent public location — and what could be a decent café — the odds are in its favor.

Other factors might continue that momentum. The building itself is a bold yet restrained move by an architect whose Jewish Museum in Berlin tends to overshadow its contents. The CJM, however, succeeds in feeling both formidable and intimate. The spaces balance form and function: they look good and seem like they can accommodate and contextualize the works within. Still, the programming itself should be the primary element in attracting viewers.

The opening offerings include a delightful survey of work by the New Yorker cartoonist William Steig, organized by the Jewish Museum, New York, and a sound series selected by John Zorn. But the centerpiece exhibition, "In the Beginning: Artists Respond to Genesis" — an ambitious, CJM-organized conglomeration of newly commissioned installations and historical and contemporary artworks and artifacts — is a clear sign the admin is taking the museum’s challenge seriously and thinking big.

The show is designed to offer entry points to a range of viewers, its biblical foundation rooted in the Old Testament volume of Genesis, which speaks to Christians and Jews and allows the concept of creation to relate to art, religion, and science. The curators — museum director Connie Wolf, deputy director Fred Wasserman, and assistant curator Dara Solomon — abide by an imperative not to restrict exhibited works to pieces by Jewish makers. "In the Beginning" unfolds in a hallway antechamber with a flat-screen monitor displaying a grainy video of images of the Earth and the moon as seen from Apollo 8, television footage widely seen on Christmas Eve 1968, with audio of the astronauts reading the opening verses of Genesis. The inclusion points to a curatorial openness to pop-cultural artifacts as part of a contemporary art dialogue.

The seven commissioned installations are the headliners in the expansive temporary exhibition space, and they’re by a deliberately diverse group of artists. There are pieces by Matthew Ritchie and Trenton Doyle Hancock, artists who set down complex personalized cosmologies that essentially are their own elaborate creation myths, and both manage to create works with visual appeal. For a piece titled Day One, Ritchie uses a couple of gently angled walls for a graphically ornate mural that accommodates orb-shaped projections of roiling, animated landscapes, sun flares, flocks of ambiguous black shapes, and a soundtrack of the artist pondering existence and creation. A more rambunctious spirit pervades Hancock’s In the Beginning There Was the End, in the End There Was the Beginning, which is set against dizzying cartoonlike wallpaper and depicts a mythological narrative involving characters called Mounds and lowly Vegans.

The exhibit’s inspiration is literary, and text appears frequently, as in the somewhat vertigo-inducing animated work by Shirley Shor, an ex-Bay Area resident who swirls projections, in English and Hebrew, of Web-gathered references to Genesis down a wishing-well structure. Ben Rubin contributes God’s Breath Hovering over the Waters (His Master’s Voice), a sound sculpture inspired by an antenna developed by Bell Labs physicists in the 1960s that, according to the artist, led to audible evidence of the Big Bang. A Kabbalistic-inspired work by Mierle Laderman Ukeles is the show’s most spiritual, and involves layered audience participation including forging a personal covenant with the artist, the public, and the self.

Filmmaker Alan Berliner adds a more crowd-pleasing form of participation with Playing God, a satisfying interactive, seven-channel video — one for each day of creation — installation that emulates a slot machine as it generates phrases with words from Genesis. Audio-visual jackpots can be had, and pushing the glowing buttons quickly becomes addictive.

The show’s inclusion of historical and archival material is a riskier gambit. While designed to enrich the exhibition themes, adding objects such as a 15th-century biblical manuscript page, a Tiepolo drawing, Tom Marioni’s shadowbox assemblages, and Barnett Newman’s 1948 painting Onement II starts to seem cluttered, or, as they say in Yiddish, ungehpotchkeyed. Still, the "something for everyone" approach clearly stems from a gracious perspective or brand, not an obfuscating one. And that’s a curatorial position worth a return visit.

CONTEMPORARY JEWISH MUSEUM

Opening exhibits include "In the Beginning: Artists Respond to Genesis," Sun/8–Jan. 4, 2009; opening events include "Dawn 2008," Sat/7, 8 p.m., $10-$15 with Dengue Fever and Jonathan Safran Foer; grand opening Sun/8, 10 a.m. ribbon-cutting, 11 a.m. doors, free.

Contemporary Jewish Museum

736 Mission, SF

(415) 655-7800

www.thecjm.org, www.dawn2008.org

Stephen Pelton Dance Theater

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PREVIEW Stephen Pelton’s full-bodied and thoughtfully structured choreography fits his dancers like second skins. It’s one of the most appealing aspects of the work from this longtime San Francisco artist who now spends half of his time in London. Another of his gifts is choosing music — whether it’s Radiohead, Schubert, or Edith Piaf — that supports his purposes ever so smoothly. Often drawing inspiration from literary sources, Pelton is a storyteller in the manner of poets who suggest, evoke, and analogize — but don’t spell out. The results are dances that resonate like a Zen bell. He may be best remembered for The Hurdy-Gurdy Man (1998), that strangely haunting solo drawn from documentation of Hitler’s body language. He also has created such epics as The American Song Book (1997), which uses popular American music to evoke three different periods in US history. But Pelton’s choreography is most at home in intimacy, full of contradictory impulses in which violence looks lyrical and tenderness totters at the edge of the abyss. A note of melancholy and resignation permeates much of it; perhaps this is not unexpected from an artist who came of age during the worst days of the AIDS crisis. Pelton describes and a white light in the back of my mind to guide me, this season’s premiere, as a meditation on aging. Performed solo and as an ensemble, the piece grew out of a World War II poem by Anglo-Irish poet Louis MacNeice. The work’s accompanying music is from the English composer Gavin Bryars. This program includes a preview of next year’s Citizen Hill, last season’s Tuesday, Not Here (created for the remarkable Nol Simonse in 2003), and Christy Funsch in her reworked 2007 Solo for Somebody.

STEPHEN PELTON DANCE THEATER Thurs/5–Sat/7, 8 p.m., Sun/8, 7 p.m. Dance Mission Theater, 3316 24th St., SF. $20–$25. (415) 273-4633, (415) 826-4441, www.dancemission.com

Live 105’s BFD

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PREVIEW Rock may be dead, but before it kicked it shot enough seed into the musical milieu that today its numberless bastard sons and daughters testify that Rock isn’t what you are, it’s what you do: namely, rock the fuck out. Hosting obvious punk and indie-rock progeny Anti-Flag and Alkaline Trio, as well as hip-hop and electronic-influenced distant relatives Lyrics Born and MSTRKRFT, Live 105’s BFD 2008 brings rock’s diverse diaspora together for a three-stage, all-day family affair.

Proof that Rock slept around? Listen to the accents of the vocalists — Cypress Hill, the chart-topping Latino hip-hop group, spits Spanish-spiced rhymes; punk rockers Pennywise, despite their hard-driving style, still speak the slow, stretched-out vowel sounds of SoCal; and Flogging Molly, when the lyrics don’t slur with Guinness, boast an Irish brogue.

Assorted accents aside, the bands themselves follow in their father’s footsteps, drawing from genres as varied as reggae and house. Take Moby: the face of techno for many, he fuses punk rhythms and distorted guitars with disco beats and the airbrushed production techniques of pop music. Or the Flobots, who note the Roots and Tool as influences, and feature multiple MCs as well as a full band — trumpet and viola included.

Despite siring more spawn than Genghis Khan, no one ever said Rock was easy — promiscuous, yes, but success in the industry evades all but a few. Enter the Soundcheck Local Music stage which works like rock nepotism: the notoriety of big brothers lends a hand to little brothers’ first steps toward aural apotheosis.

LIVE 105’S BFD Sat/7, noon–11 p.m. Shoreline Amphitheatre, 1 Amphitheatre Pkwy, Mountain View. $10.53. (415) 421-TIXS, www.live105.com

Comedy of the grotesque

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REVIEW Always looking like the potato famine’s desperately drunk survivor, Stephen Rea is that rare screen actor masochistically gifted at communicating physical as well as psychic pain. No one could possibly have struck more notes on the scale from pathos to giddy gallows humor than he does in Stuck, cult horror director Stuart Gordon’s brutally tart black comedy. He plays Tom, a down-on-his-luck, newly jobless and homeless guy whose already shitty day gets a whole lot worse when he’s accidentally plowed into by Brandi (Mena Suvari), a young rest home caregiver in the distracted aftermath of some major off-time partying. Lodged in her windshield — half in, half out of the car — Tom appears to be not long for this world. So Brandi (afraid that involving the police, to say nothing of jail time, might endanger her potential job promotion) does the logical thing: she drives home, parks the car in the garage, and goes to work, assuming that Tom will expire during her shift. Only he hangs on, finding ways despite his weakened, bloody, and, er, stuck condition to keep the not-exactly-evil but slightly trashy, supremely self-involved Brandi and her less-than-faithful boyfriend Rashid (Russell Hornsby) from disposing of him. Inspired (very loosely) by an actual incident, Stuck is a eminently satisfying comedy of the grotesque, sporting all of Gordon’s flair for balancing queasy horror and near-surreal hilarity. (When you look back on his track record of imaginative genre films and consider the dreck that routinely gets wide-released, it’s shameful that this is practically his first theatrically distributed feature since Re-Animator and From Beyond, both more than two decades old.) Suvari and Hornsby etch shallow yet oddly sympathetic characters in very funny and credible details, while Rea is ideal in one of his best roles ever — not that this is the kind of movie people give acting awards for. Maybe they ought to, though.

STUCK opens Fri/6 in Bay Area theaters.

“Written on Spiders”

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REVIEW From this side of the planet, as many in the American art world see it, Berlin is currently the art world’s utopia. Things are happening there: experimentation and funding can be had, as well as cheap studios, alternative-gallery spaces, and thriving collectives galore. But this scene didn’t just fall from the sky like a space virus and infect the German capital in the past few years. It’s been brewing for some time. One collective, known as a hub that links dozens of contemporary German artists, is Starship. In 1998 it began publishing a self-titled alternative-art magazine with conceptually-themed issues, including images and writing generated by its community. San Francisco gallerist Jessica Silverman befriended Starship founding members Ariane Müller, Martin Ebner, and Hans-Christian Dany five years ago, and Silverman Gallery’s inaugural exhibition in its former Dogpatch location showcased their work.

The collective’s current show at Silverman is a mixed-media gathering that includes drawings, text, sculpture, back issues of Starship’s magazine, and a selection from the group’s poster series titled The Like of it now happens, which focuses on the subjects of excess and sustainability. Judith Hopf’s Singing Frogs — a photo collage of frogs with frogs in their throats — and Klaus Weber’s Ultra Moth provide weirdly funny, surreal social commentary in the tradition of propaganda posters. Because the group chose to not plaster its work around San Francisco — a city not known to embrace guerilla art kindly — they created a faux "outside" for them to exist in. Visitors entering Silverman are confronted by a large, silver, barred cube, like an astral reproduction of the gallery space. Sit on the space’s floor and thumb through the relatively recent Starship issue, The year we went nowhere (2005), and it feels like browsing a travel guide: you might get a sense of these Berliners’ flourishing art boom.

WRITTEN ON SPIDERS Through June 14. Tues.–Sat., 11 a.m.–6 p.m. Silverman Gallery, 804 Sutter, SF. (415) 255-9508, www.silverman-gallery.com

I against I

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CULT FILM Nothing exerts quite the same simultaneous attraction-repulsion magnetism like a really world-class vanity project. You know, the kind in which the writer-director-star-editor-caterer-fluffer — usually playing a thinly disguised version of moi in a world that does not at all fully appreciate them — reveals more of their off-screen inner workings than one ever wanted to know.

Typically these things occur just once in a talent’s life, then are never allowed to happen again, like Babs’ 1996 The Mirror Has Two Faces or Los Angeles weirdo Tommy Wiseau’s so-bad-it’s-surreal cult microhit The Room (2003). Some inexplicably get to make several, like Vincent Gallo, Ed Burns, or such determined wrong-medium meddlers as Bob Dylan and Norman Mailer. It’s possible to strangle whole movies with manifest-destiny egotism even when one merely stars in them. It’s even possible to overexpose oneself without actually appearing onscreen: what are The Passion of the Christ (2004) and Apocalypto (2006) but coded maps of Mel Gibson’s soul?

For full effect, however, the more personal credits, the better. In 1969 Brit multitalent Anthony Newley conceived, cowrote, produced, directed, starred, and pretty much jacked off for the world to see in something called Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? This "erotic" autobiographical musical phantasmagoria cast Newley’s actual then-wife (none other than Joan Collins) and children as his endlessly cheated-on wife and neglected children — not to mention Milton Berle as Satan.

Though it was a major-studio release made for the then not-inconsiderable sum of $1 million, Merkin has since become more rumor than reality, with bootleg TV dupes sought by a few while most simply forgot it existed. Could it really have been that bizarre? Yup. That bad? Well, anything this out-there pretty much transcends ordinary quality measures. An extremely rare chance to taste its unique flavors — indeed, the only revival screening I’ve ever heard of — occurs June 4 at the Roxie when the Film on Film Foundation pairs it with another legendary cliff-jumper, Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie (1971).

Newley conquered the West End and Broadway with shows mixing Chaplinesque whimsical bathos and big-ballad bombast. They gave some critics hives — but not audiences. Covered by every mid-1960s crooner, his songs (like "What Kind of Fool Am I?") topped charts. A ubiquitous variety-show guest, he looked set to become a movie star too. Result: carte blanche for Merkin, the type of freedom that ought to have set off alarm bells from Hollywood to Hampstead.

The film tells the tender tale of an angst-ridden famous writer-singer-actor who, like Newley, was born a "bastard" (at a time when that really mattered), a former child star now on his second marriage — to Collins’ piquantly named Polyester Poontang — while incessantly screwing the likes of Filigree Fondle and Trampolina Whambang. Liberally partaking of Fellini’s 8 1/2 model, this "sum total of my life to date" (as the auteur then stated) operates on many levels, from flashbacks of Merkin’s professional rise to fantasy sequences to onscreen ersatz producers and critics critiquing the movie-in-progress. There’s a zodiac dance, a bestiality number, a mime alter ego, and an acid trip (not to be confused with the black mass) — plus the queasy running theme of Newley-Merkin’s jones for Lolita-esque girls, as personified by Playboy playmate Connie Kreski’s defiled innocent, Mercy. She’s his true love — or as close as it gets for a character who finally admits, "Not only do I have no respect for women, I may well hate them."

In her memoirs, Collins notes, "I had a sick, horrible feeling when I first read the script. Tony seemed to have spelled out the end of our marriage." (Indeed, that event promptly occurred.) The commingled massive egotism and masochism in this "totally revealing picture of his life" (her words) had a similar effect on most real-life critics, a typical notice saying Newley "so overextends and overexposes himself that the movie comes to look like an act of professional suicide … [it] is as self-indulgent as a burp."

Roger Ebert, however, thought it "strange, wonderful, original, and not quite successful," applauding its sheer nerve if nothing else. Indeed, Merkin remains such an oddity and perfect warts-and-all memorial to Newley (who died in 1999, his long, post-Merkin career slide actually highlighted by 1987’s The Garbage Pail Kids Movie) that, like most spectacular follies, it commands a certain awed respect.

CAN HIERONYMUS MERKIN EVER FORGET MERCY HUMPPE AND FIND TRUE HAPPINESS?

June 4, 9:15 p.m., $7

with The Last Movie, 7 p.m.

Roxie Film Center

3117 16th St., SF

www.filmonfilm.org

Mixed doubles

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A new work by Robert Lepage is always a major event. In theater, the Quebecois director, actor, and filmmaker stands with the likes of Robert Wilson or Peter Sellars at the pinnacle of theatrical invention and global acclaim. Little wonder that, like Wilson and Sellars, Lepage has found opera a logical outlet for his extraordinary capacities and grand, all-encompassing visions. (His last Bay Area bow was in November 2007 at the San Francisco Opera, where he staged Stravinsky’s 1951 opera The Rake’s Progress.) But while he is a truly international force wielding the largest of canvases, there’s an intimate and personal side running through much of his work, perhaps nowhere more poignantly than in his stunningly staged solo plays The Far Side of the Moon (2003) and The Andersen Project (2005). The latter, which slyly folds layers of personal and cultural doubt (as well as biting cultural satire) into a glancing exploration of Danish storyteller Hans Christian Andersen’s troubled psyche, makes its local debut courtesy of Cal Performances.

As with Far Side, Andersen was developed with Lepage playing dual roles that together define a kind of split personality and serve as starting point for a series of thematic dyads. In this case, the main characters are a corrupt French opera director and a French Canadian musician-songwriter named Frédéric Lapointe, who arrives in Paris on a commission to write an opera based on an Andersen story. Also as with Far Side, Lepage eventually handed off the roles to Yves Jacques. An extremely gifted theater and film actor in his own right (probably best known to Americans through several Denys Arcand films), Jacques shares a history and affinity with Lepage (they’ve known each other since their twenties) that make him the best, and perhaps the only, person capable of stepping into these demanding, idiosyncratic solo shows, with their half-hidden strands of autobiography and fraught national identity. I recently spoke with Jacques by phone from Montreal.

SFBG Before Andersen, you took over another Lepage solo play.

YVES JACQUES It started with Far Side because it was a story very close to him. So he wanted someone with the same sensibility. I was able to understand his feelings about [the subject matter]. So afterward he said, ‘Why not continue with The Andersen Project?’

SFBG Was it at all intimidating to take over these plays from their originator?

YJ Oh, yes. I felt a big responsibility to be at least equivalent to Robert — just to reach the level of the acting he puts into the show. But he liked [what I was doing] and was very happy because for once he could see his own work. When you play in a solo show you don’t always understand what you’re doing. Now he could see himself, or himself through me.

SFBG How did you approach the part?

YJ I never feel I’m doing a one-man show; I’m doing a play. I’m doing the yin and the yang of the same character, in a way. Far Side was the story of two brothers, and this is quite the same. You have the director of the Paris Opera and then you have Lapointe. They’re very different but they’re played by the same actor. In a way, it’s the yin and the yang of the same personality, which is Hans Christian Andersen. Lepage is using two different characters to describe [the complexity of] Andersen. It’s very clever. You see Andersen only twice in the show but he’s not talking; he’s just a silhouette. The only way to know him is to understand the other two.

SFBG The assertion of a Quebecois identity against the dominant Anglo culture of Canada is a theme in much of Lepage’s work.

YJ Lapointe comes to Paris because he wants to be approved of by Parisians — [but] he says at the end, I came here for the wrong reasons. I came here for approval, and we shouldn’t do that. We should be proud of what we are. And Andersen had the same problem in his own country. People in Denmark loved his fairy tales but they didn’t take him seriously as a writer because he was writing for children. So he needed to come to Paris as well, and be approved of by Balzac or George Sand or Victor Hugo — just as we need to be approved of by the old country. It’s like being in a colony sometimes [laughs]. That’s why I’m very proud of working with Lepage, because he [raises] Quebec to another standard. His work is totally amazing. *

THE ANDERSEN PROJECT

Wed/28–Sat/31, 8 p.m.; Sun/1, 3 p.m., $62

Zellerbach Playhouse

Bancroft at Dana, UC Berkeley, Berk

(510) 642-9988

www.calperfs.berkeley.edu

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