Arts & Culture

Arts & Culture

Sun City Girls still shine

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PREVIEW When Sun City Girls drummer Charles Gocher died of cancer last year, it was a shock to fans of the long-running band. The group hadn’t publicized his illness, and they seemed to be as active as ever during the few years prior to this sad, surprising news. Following Gocher’s death, the remaining members — brothers Alan and Rick Bishop — immediately disbanded the group, which had the same three-piece lineup since 1981. Along with their current nationwide tour, Alan and Richard Bishop’s The Brothers Unconnected: A Tribute to Charles Gocher and Sun City Girls (Abduction) is meant to close the book on this influential, inspiring, and sometimes maddening ensemble.

No one will ever accuse the Sun City Girls of being predictable or easily accessible. They were probably best known for their various fusions of psych-rock with influences from the Middle East (the Bishops are half-Lebanese), India, and Southeast Asia. But part of their charm was their willingness to do anything they felt like: a movie soundtrack, a radio play, or an album of trashy 1970s rock covers. With all that in mind, the tour-only The Brothers Unconnected is the most concise, approachable summary of the vast SCG catalog you’re likely to find. It showcases the Bishops together on acoustic guitar and vocals, live in the studio, doing renditions of some of their "hits." There is plenty of black humor, with Rick doing his best Gocher impression on the ornery "Ballad of (D)anger," and Alan hilariously handling "Six Kids of Mine," a song about strangling a gaggle of crying children in order to get some sleep. There are also moments of unadorned beauty on par with anything they’ve done: the mysterious, gently flowing "Cruel and Thin" and a handful of tunes from 1990’s Torch of the Mystics (Majora), including dramatic spaghetti-western anthem, "The Shining Path," and the sunny, raga-like "Space Prophet Dogon." If this disc is any indication of what their upcoming show at Slim’s will sound like, then it’s a must-see for anyone interested in this legendary group.

ALAN BISHOP AND RICHARD BISHOP PRESENT "THE BROTHERS UNCONNECTED" With Neung Phak. Wed/21, 8 p.m., $16–$18. Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF. (415) 522-0333, www.slims-sf.com

“Reprise”

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REVIEW Norwegian helmer Joachim Trier may or may not be Lars von Trier’s distant relative. Let me back up a bit: according to several sources, the two directors are kin — but the former’s feature debut, Reprise, pleasantly reassures us that even if Joachim had the misfortune of sharing the same genes with Lars, at least he doesn’t share his bad sense of filmmaking. Nevertheless, the younger Dane did grow up in an environment where cinema was greatly appreciated (he first used an 8mm camera at age 4), which probably explains why his first attempt at full-length moviemaking is governed by such refreshing and refined ideas about the cinematic language. Trier is also a national skateboarding champion — something that might seem unrelated but may, on the other hand, account for Reprise‘s playful, edgy approach. Set in contemporary Oslo, the film follows friends Erik (Espen Klouman-Hoiner) and Phillip (Anders Danielsen Lie), who have dreams and aspirations about becoming great cult authors. Casting mainly nonactors and employing a slew of unannounced flashbacks and flash-forwards, Trier creates a fluid chronology where happiness and sadness coexist, and potentials are imagined, shattered, and rediscovered all at once. Like its 20-year-old protagonists, Reprise is disorderly, hazy, adventurous, and inquisitive, thus adequately reutf8g the agony of youth.

REPRISE opens Fri/23 in Bay Area theaters.

Power everywhere and nowhere

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REVIEW Arguably the strangest image in the news this year was an Associated Press-circulated pic of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wearing the type of 3-D glasses you’d find packaged with a comic book, examining a map at Tehran’s space center in a state of deep concentration. If you consumed solely mainstream news, you might think Iran consists only of a handful of gruff older men who have lost touch with reality.

"After the Revolution" — a remarkably energetic and intimate photography show at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery on City Hall’s ground floor — brings more subtle realities to light. The young artists — Californians Amir H. Fallah, Shadi Yousefian, Elhum Amjadi, Naciem Nikkhah, and Parisa Taghizadeh, and Tehranians Mahboube Karamli, Parham Taghioff, Morteza Khaki, Meysam Mahfouz, and Mehraneh Atashi — were all born around the time of the Iranian Revolution. They present narrative projects with an eye for individuality, whether in Yousefian’s collaged Self-Portraits (2003) or Khaki’s Purse Snatching (2006), an evocative collection of specimenlike images of people’s wallets.

The exhibit leaves you feeling that power is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. In Atashi’s Bodiless 1 (2004), which presents some of her remarkable photos from inside a Zourkaneh or "power house" — a sort of spiritual workout center for Iranian men — Atashi pops up in hijab, with her camera, in mirrors, while bare-chested men leap and flex their way into another world. Taghizadeh brings a mysterious cinematic quality to Iranian women in the act of applying makeup in Make-Up Iran (2001), while Fallah’s Fort Series (2007) constructs physical versions of his male friends’ inner lives. It’s disconcerting to have to pass through security at City Hall to see this show, but if anyone needs to see these pictures right now, it’s the inhuman bureaucrat in all of us.

AFTER THE REVOLUTION: CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY FROM TEHRAN AND CALIFORNIA Through June 27. Mon.–Fri., 8 a.m.–8 p.m. Brown-bag lunch discussion on Thurs/22, noon, at 401 Van Ness. San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, City Hall, 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett, SF. Free. (415) 554-6080, www.sfacgallery.org

Strange powers

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› johnny@sfbg.com

Witch! The accusation — or is it rallying cry? — that slices through Goblin’s pounding score for Dario Argento’s 1977 Suspiria is newly pertinent. Witchery reigns within strains of black metal and the long-awaited third chapter in Argento’s Three Mothers trilogy (which began three decades earlier with Suspiria), this summer’s invigoratingly zany naked bloodbath Mother of Tears. It’s tempting to credit film curator Joel Shepard with a sorcerer’s clairvoyance, because the "Witchcraft Weekend" he has programmed for the screening room at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is so damned prescient.

The centerpiece of "Witchcraft Weekend"<0x2009>‘s imaginatively and near-immaculately selected quartet of movies — the dark void or blinding light around which the other three orbit — is Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1943 Day of Wrath. I’ll be brazen enough to admit that my first encounter with this masterpiece occurred one evening while flipping channels, when its flaming dramatic core — a harsh counterpoint to the heroic final stakes of his peerless 1927 The Passion of Joan of Arc — flickered before my eyes and basically branded my psyche (and soul?) for eternity. There are few scenes in cinema as bluntly harrowing as the demise of accused witch Herlofs Marte (Anna Svierkier): her defiance and her fear of death — but not of God — rage as forcefully as the man-made inferno that consumes her.

Day of Wrath might be the most quietly terrifying or suspenseful art film ever made (though it shouldn’t be blamed for the form’s current crimes against patience or intelligence), because Dreyer seamlessly connects realism with a deeply ambiguous understanding of spirituality and fate. That is no small achievement, and one that’s been increasingly rare with the passage of time. The fate of Herlofs Marte is evident from the film’s first scene, where she hands herbs from a gallows garden to another woman, stating, "There is power in evil." Seconds later the bells begin to toll for her and — thinking of a past secret — she flees to seek refuge in the household of Absalon (Thorkild Rose); his bear of a mother, Marte (Sigrid Neiiendam); and his young wife, Anne (Lisbeth Movin), who seems to possess strange powers.

In the feline, fiery-eyed Movin, Dreyer finds this lonelier film’s answer to Falconetti from The Passion of Joan of Arc: in other words, an actor whose face becomes (to paraphrase André Bazin quoting Béla Balasz) a timeless and more ambivalently transcendent "document." Critics have pointed out Day of Wrath‘s abundant visual similarities with Italian Renaissance and Flemish painting, particularly the works of Rembrandt (James Agee went so far as to point out one sequence’s resemblance to Rembrandt’s 1632 Lesson in Anatomy), and Bazin is intuitively and perhaps more insightfully correct in invoking the film’s influence on Robert Bresson’s equally classic 1951 Diary of a Country Priest. But it takes Pauline Kael to sympathetically hone in on the feminine "erotic tensions" of what she deems "the most intensely powerful film ever made on the subject of witchcraft." As she puts it, "Dreyer dissolves our terror" as characters are "purified beyond even fear." But the sense of fear and terror he instills is purer than that engendered by the horror genre’s gleeful scare tactics.

"Witchcraft Weekend"<0x2009>‘s trio of other films steer clear of Blair Witch and Harry Potter terrain as well as the easy, if extremely enjoyable, kitsch of Teen Witch (1989) or The Craft (1996) to explore and connect less obvious instances of celluloid sorcery. In a manner that magnifies the resonance of Day of Wrath‘s austere use of black and white, Shepard brings in a pair of contrasting Technicolor sights: the Queen or Witch (spine-chillingly vocalized by Lucille La Verne) from 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and the scorpio-rising bikini sacrifices of William O. Brown’s 1969 cult obscurity The Witchmaker. The program’s series of spells begins with the wicked Witchcraft Through the Ages, a 1968 abbreviated revision of Benjamin Christensen’s energetically episodic 1922 silent work Häxan, featuring a frenetic and playful jazz score by Jean-Luc Ponty and mordantly misogynist narration by William S. Burroughs. *

WITCHCRAFT WEEKEND

Thurs/23–Sun/25

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Screening Room

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

No one likes to be defeated

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

Most folks who settle down to watch a Harmony Korine film know not to expect the familiar. Korine is, after all, the guy who wrote Larry Clark’s hot-button Kids (1995), and the writer-director of 1997’s Gummo, one of the head-scratchingest flicks ever to attain cult status. His latest — his first feature since the 1999 Dogme entry Julien Donkey-Boy — is perhaps his most unusual effort to date, but not for the reasons seasoned Korine watchers might expect.

Yeah, Mister Lonely is about a Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) who falls for a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton) while performing in Paris. Though she’s married (to a faux-Charlie Chaplin), he agrees when she asks him to come live with her in the Scottish highlands — on a commune populated by even more impersonators, including a Madonna wannabe and a pseudo-Pope. That said, the film is conventionally structured, with three acts shot in a straightforward manner. (Of course, there’s also a parallel tale involving flying nuns — but more on that later.)

"[Mister Lonely] is probably my most traditional story," agreed the 35-year-old Korine, speaking from his home in Nashville. "[My] other films were about deconstructing the narrative or breaking down the story and images — kind of an assault, or a collage, with images and sound coming from all directions. With this, I felt a little bit more peace about the story and these characters. So I decided early on that I should just go with the image itself."

Korine, who coscripted Mister Lonely with his younger brother, Avi, kept his own particular fascinations in mind while writing. "I’ve always been interested in marginalized or obsessive people in real life," he said. "I just thought it was a strange existence — there’s something odd about living as an icon. And visually I thought it was interesting. I spent time on a hippie commune as a kid, and I always wanted to make a movie that was set somewhere slightly communal. I started toying with this idea of impersonators and icons all being together — what it would be like to see Sammy Davis Jr. cleaning his socks, or Abe Lincoln riding a lawnmower. It just felt right."

The commune dwellers, whose farm-bound activities are indeed surreal, though not always played for comedic effect, were carefully cast. Some, like the Sammy Davis Jr. character, were impersonators by trade in real life; others, like French actor Denis Lavant, who plays Chaplin, were not.

"What was most important was that [the celebrities being impersonated] needed to have a certain kind of mythology about them, where the myth could actually bleed into the narrative of the story," Korine explained. "Plus, they were also just people that I liked — I loved all of those characters. And I knew I would never be able to work with the Three Stooges, or Buckwheat, so it was like my attempt at going back."

When it came to plotting out his Michael Jackson, Korine — who didn’t write with Luna in mind but did offer him the role first — had some specific ideas about how the character-within-a-character should look. He’s patterned after Jackson’s Dangerous era — face masks, military armbands, fedoras, and shoulder-grazing straight hair.

"I just thought he looked the best during that period," Korine noted. Earlier, he’d mentioned that while he finds Jackson interesting, he’s not a fan on the level of, say, buying his new albums. "He’s like the world’s greatest eccentric, and that was when he was on his way to becoming this incredible abstraction."

Interspersed between poignant sequences depicting Michael struggling to fit in, even among others of his kind, are a series of increasingly odd occurrences in the Panamanian jungle. A group of nuns — overseen by a bossy priest (Werner Herzog, who also starred in Julien Donkey-Boy) — are shocked to discover they can skydive without parachutes. It’s a bizarre conceit that allows Mister Lonely its most glorious images: nuns joyfully clasping hands in the air while plummeting safely to the ground. Yo, Harmony, what’s that got to do with Jacko?

"I always want to write a novel with pages missing in the right places," Korine said. "I think it’s best to leave some things undefined, to not complete the circle. To me, it was the same movie. They are the same story. The narratives were parallel to each other. They spoke to each other. They both had this idea of faith of and transcendence, wanting to be other than who you are, being outside the system and creating your own language. I knew there would be a certain kind of person who doesn’t want to try to make that connection, and that’s fine — but there are so many movies being made where you’re told what to think every step of the way. It’s not that important for me."

What is important to Korine is something that goes beyond the usual filmmaking process. Don’t look for him to pull a David Gordon Green, for example, and direct a mainstream stoner comedy.

"What I like is making things. I like to film things and put them together, whether they’re like movies or features or essays or clips. Movies are what I love, but in some ways there’s too much focus on everything being features. Sometimes it’s nice to see things that are just moments. Sometimes, in 30 seconds, I can feel more than I do in 30 hours," he explained. "I always felt like, in movies, they waste so much time getting to the good part, and resolving after the good part. I was just like, why can’t you make movies that consist only of good parts?" *

MISTER LONELY opens Fri/23 in Bay Area theaters.

Starry-eyed and stripped

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW More than one witness has reported that Mayor Gavin Newsom, fiancée in tow, dropped by the jam-packed opening reception for photographer Ryan McGinley’s show at Ratio 3. The civic-minded pair joined the fray of cool kids and art world cognoscenti — I heard John Waters and Todd Oldham were there — and in some ways the appearance was apropos: the artist and politician share a lineage of tall, charismatic Irish Catholics who inspire others to action. Noting celebrity, political, and religious connections is admittedly a little suspect in a review of a contemporary art show; still, the youthful but stately mayor’s presence at a gallery on a somewhat gritty Mission side street has meaning as an expression of the widespread appeal of McGinley’s pictures. Who could resist lush images of nubile white boys and girls cavorting naked amid what seem like national parks and roadside America?

McGinley is a particularly American artist. One of the photographs on view is even a dead ringer for an Andrew Wyeth painting. Rather than Christina crouched in the wheat field, McGinley’s Running Field (2007-08) offers a lithe young woman dashing through golden rolling hills wearing only white sneakers. His choreographed vision is a brand of hipster organic purity, a dream of back-to-the-land naturalism and free love.

McGinley also manages to straddle a number of positions and demographics. Among the 16 pictures in this satisfying exhibition, there’s full frontal male nudity, and a wonderful image of a shirtless blond guy embracing a black bear, both of which unabashedly read as queer. A centrally placed picture of a group of hikers in a rocky canyon plays like a still from an update of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970). McGinley’s photograph exudes cineaste hippie-spiritual vibes, as does the acid trippy image titled Blue Falling (2007-08), in which the silhouette of a male figure — the hair on his legs crisply visible in profile — is seemingly suspended in an intensely hued sky. Dakota’s Crack Up (2007-08), visualizing an ebullient male/female couple caught in an active moment of undressed while roller-skating, brims with both clothing-optional resort appeal and fashion photo bravado.

The youth and nakedness of this universe seems to be related to Larry Clark’s kid obsessions, except McGinley is still young himself — he had a solo show at the Whitney five years ago, when he was 24 — and his surprisingly wholesome pictures are more hooked on fresh air and community than the more troubled eroticism of the wizened though still dreamy-eyed elder artist. A cinematic influence also binds these two figures. Most of the photos in McGinley’s show blur the line between naturalism and studio artifice: the hikers on the rocks are positioned in light in such a way that they appear to have been inserted digitally, the woman in Fireworks Hysteric (2007-8) seems to be floating in a glittering, celestial space, as do other subjects who have been catapulted into thin air. And is that a naked dude embracing a stuffed animal or a real live bear?

According to the artist, the animal is a living thing, albeit a trained one. He also admits the colors in his works are achieved through an intense darkroom practice. That gray area between the real and the imagined works in the artist’s favor, lending his images a sense of the uncanny: the activities captured in his photos did happen, though they come across as otherworldly.

There’s also a performance art backbone to McGinley’s process. His photos depict a team of models, cast for their looks as well as their athletic abilities, who travel together for extended periods. The constant contact promotes intimacy and physical fearlessness, and while they are very believable as an actual pack of marauding, hopeful young people, they are in fact a constructed entity — a family of paid actors directed by an artist with a clear vision of a kind of communal lifestyle. McGinley assuredly realizes these images, but they don’t come off without some suspicion. Where can these photographs go from here? The likeability of the pictures — and models — is tinged with envy and perhaps a resentment of the cool high school kids who seem impervious to social or sexual obstacles. That McGinley’s models reportedly sustain their share of photo-shoot injuries only attests to his winning feats of fiction. It all appears so smooth and dreamy. I don’t know what the mayor thought, but in the end, McGinley’s work won me over, and I want the feeling to last. *

RYAN MCGINLEY: SPRING AND BY SUMMER FALL

Through June 21

Wed.–Sat., 11 a.m.–6 p.m.

Ratio 3

1447 Stevenson, SF

(415) 821-3371

www.ratio3.org

TWSS

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I’m confused. Are there any guys out there who aren’t at the extremes as far as sex goes? My ex-boyfriend was completely obsessed. Not only did he want it four or more times a day, he’d want to have phone sex at least twice a day when we were apart. I think of myself as a pretty sexual person, but even I have my limits. (Plus, I think phone sex is boring. Though I like to masturbate, it’s hard for me to orgasm when the person on the other end of the line is waiting for it.) My ex was so obsessed with sex that he saw everything as sexual. If I said it was raining, he’d say, "Oooh, sounds … wet." If I said something was hard (difficult), he’d say "Ooh, hard!" And he wasn’t some 20-year-old kid. He was 48! I’m 31, and since I felt more mature than him, we broke up. Then I fell in love with his polar opposite. I’ve been with the new guy for a couple of years and our sex life has gone downhill rapidly, from two or three times a week to maybe once every three months. I’ve tried to initiate, but I get nowhere. It only happens when he wants to. I really love this guy and I want to marry him. I just need to figure out how to find a happy medium between my sex-obsessed ex and my uninterested current beau.

Love,

Opposite Day

Dear Day:

A happy medium in your case would require something like the matter transporter machine from The Fly — you’d put Mr. "Ooh, Sounds … wet" in one pod and Mr. Every Three Months in the other and zap them back and forth in space until their DNA was well and truly mixed. Ideally, you’d end up with a guy who wanted to do it about as often as you do, with room for negotiation. Un-ideally, you’d make a boyfriend who never wants to have sex but does like to make a whole lot of immature, sniggery jokes about it. On second thought, maybe this isn’t the best plan.

The first guy sounds unbearable. I’m surprised you stuck it out with him as long (ooh, long) as you did. It must have been hard to … I mean, you had to have been open to … I mean on top of — oh, never mind. It must have been like living with Michael Scott with a few drinks in him: "That’s what she said!" Awful. You have my sympathy.

The new guy is a harder nut (oh, shut up) to crack. Are you really as mystified as you sound about where the sex has gone and why, or is there a chance that you do know what’s up (shut up) but don’t want to admit it? I don’t think it’s abnormal to experience a drop-off after a few years, but four times a year is slim pickings. As a mere stripling of 31, I would be very cautious, in your place, about signing any long-term contracts under those conditions. At the very least, you ought to know what’s going on with him (and with your relationship) before you marry someone who, frankly, isn’t going to satisfy you. It would be a different story if you were saying, "We only do it every three months and we’re both happy with that." Then I’d dance at your wedding. The way you’re talking, though, I’d feel more like I was dancing on your marriage’s grave. And while I’ve always liked Nick Cave, I’m just not that goth. Sorry. It ain’t going to work.

You’re going to have to have one of those sit-downs nobody wants but nearly everybody needs at some point. This is no time to ask him what’s wrong with him or to suggest that maybe he’s just not man enough for you — not if you actually like him. It is time to find out what’s going on in his head all those times you initiate and "get nowhere." Is it possible he’s missing your cues? Is there a better time or a better approach? A different act? If the answers are all "no" and this is just who he is — a guy who’s interested in sex four times a year and anything more seems unnecessary or unappealing — then you’re going to have to figure out if there’s a way you can get your itches scratched. Maybe he’d be happy just holding you while you take care of things for yourself. Maybe he’d be OK if you had a "friend." Maybe he needs a checkup and a meds adjustment and all will be well after that. In any case, you’re going to have to find out. I don’t care if it’s hard. And that’s not what she said, or so I hear.

Love,

Andrea


It’s not all about the sex! Andrea’s new blog, "Go Get Your Jacket: a blog about begetting and spending," debuts May 19 at gogetyourjacket.typepad.com. Pink or blue? Made in China or made in Vermont at three times the price? What are we buying for our kids, and why?

Andrea is also teaching two classes: "You’ve Really Got Your Hands Full" — a realistic look at having twins — at Birthways in Berkeley, and "Is There Sex After Motherhood?" at Day One Center in San Francisco and other venues.

Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question.

Driving reign

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Rockstar Games/Take-Two Interactive (XBOX360, PS3)

GAMER Since its April 29 release, more than 6 million copies of Grand Theft Auto IV have been purchased. While Take-Two Interactive is still taking contractor bids on Scrooge McDuck–style cash swimming pools, the gaming press has worked itself into a frenzy, bestowing five-star reviews and expostuutf8g on how GTA IV will revolutionize gaming, culture, and possibly the world.

This hyperbole exemplifies gaming’s innate pathologies. Since their inception, video games have been portrayed as the puerile inferior to other entertainment media, and game designers, players, and critics have long coveted a seat at the table alongside the realist novel and the feature film. When a game as ambitious as GTA IV is released, advocates are quick to frame it as the "future of the medium," a kind of messianic product that will show those old-media Luddites what they’re missing.

GTA IV is not video Jesus. Still, by any reasonable standard, it’s an incredible game, taking the hallowed legacy of the previous GTA games, striving to be bigger and better, and mostly succeeding. At this late date, weeks after its debut, describing it as "only" the next Grand Theft Auto game can seem like very faint praise. Then again, criticizing the game using the metric of its hype is like getting a Benz for your 16th birthday and complaining that you didn’t get a Batmobile.

The GTA series is credited with inventing the "sandbox" game, which drops the player into a vast interactive world with little or no agenda. Complete the missions that drive the story forward — or don’t. Murder passersby until the police have to call in the National Guard — or don’t. Furnished with the power of today’s consoles, Rockstar Games has created a staggering sandbox, recreating New York City’s five boroughs (and a miniaturized New Jersey) in such loving, exhaustive detail that it’s hard to list all the coolness concisely. There’s a working subway system, multiple hours of fake, satirical television — one could go on forever.

In addition to the huge strides the game makes in environmental design and artificial intelligence, it also delivers the latest in interactive storytelling. You play Niko Bellic, a veteran of Balkan strife who disembarks in Liberty City hoping to escape his past and embrace the American lifestyle his previously arrived cousin Roman has touted as luxuriant and easy. Of course, it is not, and Niko is inexorably drawn into the criminal underworld he tried to leave behind.

While it doesn’t quite deliver the reinvention of the immigrant narrative parsed by some reviewers, the game provides an engrossing tale, full of three-dimensional characters (in both senses of the phrase), magnificent action sequences, and deft plot twists. The voice acting is superb and extensive; many conversations have alternate versions, expecting you to get killed and end up listening to them twice. The character animations — in a sense the game’s other kind of acting — convincingly capture the most esoteric gestures, down to the shudder of a crime boss as a line of Colombia’s finest explodes into his sinus.

The save system is still frustrating, and the prospect of replaying a long, violent confrontation after failing right at its end is often almost too much to bear. Despite GTA IV‘s unfettered gameplay, the missions are still very conventional and leave little room for creative problem-solving. Sure, there are a number of red pill–blue pill dilemmas. But in a game that allows you as much freedom as GTA, having to stick to the plan in each attempt becomes annoying. The new multiplayer mode provides a panoply of game types, ranging from traditional death-match and racing modes to cops-and-robbers high jinks that exploit what’s best about the game. Unfortunately the interface is confusing and finicky, and the online player-base seems to still be enmeshed in the game’s vast single-player story.

Grand Theft Auto IV is not without its faults. It may not establish video games as a serious medium. But if you want to have 300-odd hours of fun, there’s no better way to spend $60.

Body eclectic

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When Miguel Gutierrez left the Joe Goode Company in 1996, he was a hot dancer. He returned to the Bay Area a mature artist. In Retrospective Exhibitionist and Difficult Bodies, part of ODC Theater’s recent "For the Record: Dancers Debate the Body Politic" at Project Artaud Theater, Gutierrez worked at breaking down the invisible divide between performer and audience. Granted, this idea has been tried before — but few have taken it as far, or developed it as consistently, as Gutierrez has done. The result was an evening of dance theater that at times pushed beyond what I can stomach but nevertheless left me full of admiration for the skill with which he works the material and the audience.

Gutierrez’s focus of attention was the body, his and ours, individually and collectively. He raised questions about performers as narcissists and exhibitionists, and about the audience as voyeurs. He subverted expectations on timing, eliminated divisions of physical space (with brilliant lighting design by Lenore Doxsee), and embraced the authentic with the sentimental. It was manipulation of the first order, and totally autocratic.

In the opening segment when he futzed around, naked between his ankles and neck, assembling props, we learned only that he is well-built and has added a few pounds since his San Francisco days. When he then invited (actually, commanded) the audience to repeat after him, "I am Miguel Gutierrez," my reaction was, "The hell I am." The tone of confrontation wove through the evening like a cry, perhaps indicative of a love-hate relationship with performance.

Retrospective was a rich tapestry of episodes that raised questions about perception. What is more real, an ad lib monologue on video, or its imitation read live from a script? Where does the screaming singer stop and become the man spilling his guts? Do we direct our eyes to Gutierrez as a teen heartthrob in an archival clip downstage, or to the live dancer way off in a corner? Have the women disappeared in the glittering sequins of their gowns in Difficult Bodies?

When a burning candle was moved ever closer to Guiterrez’s naked butt, the performance became voyeurism at its worst. My instinct was to get up and grab the candle, saying "I am Miguel Guiterrez." Unfortunately, I didn’t have the guts.

Kills thrill

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› Kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER "So … what kind of drugs inspired the record?"

"What kind of drugs?" Allison Mosshart of the Kills has to puzzle only briefly over that question. "Mmm … none. No, we didn’t take any drugs when we were writing the record. None. No, ate a lot of kale, drank a lot of coffee, made cocktails if we were getting bored, but no … "

Mosshart thinks I’m totally high. But I’m not: I’m just going ever so slightly deaf — thanks to all those Marshall stacks I’ve cozied up to over the years and those songs I can’t stop cranking to 13. And it doesn’t help that I’m feeling a wee bit hungover, and that the SF-UK phone connection this way-too-early Sunday morning is somewhat linty. So instead of hearing Mosshart sincerely explain that for the Kills’ latest album, Midnight Boom (Domino), she and bandmate Jamie Hince "didn’t listen to music, so we did things like read books, and watch documentaries, and cut out pictures from magazines, and type on typewriters, and take photographs, and do drawings," I semi-consciously absorb all of the above — as well as a tantalizing " … and do drugs." This is your brain on too many sidecars and Sazeracs.

That’s not Mosshart, though. "You know how when you’re trapped in a building and you don’t ever go outside for a long time?" she says of the CD’s recording. "It’s quite important that you don’t eat like shit so you don’t go mad."

Yet that inspired madness, the classic creative negativity of rock ‘n’ roll romanticism — the kind one might find in the nicotine rasps of Jennifer Herrema, hooked on the Stones as filtered through a jillion crappy boomboxes, or in the tattered valentines of Berlin-era Lou Reed, gloomed-out on jet-set trash — is just what the Kills seem to mainline. I witnessed as much at the sweaty, sizable hotbox of a Domino showcase at this year’s South by Southwest fest, where the pair entered silently and quickly, noisily conjured the outta-hand spirits that most definitely don’t virtuously devour kale or read good books. Hanging on to her mic stand like a lifeline in roiling waters, swaggering with a familiar rock pirate insouciance, and sporting big-cat spots like a lady who wanted less to drink from Keith Richards’ "Loving Cup" than to be the Glitter Twin himself, Mosshart sang, swayed, and spat. Her eyes were hidden behind midnight bangs, as if daring you to gaze at anything else.

So the vocalist-guitarist’s bare-faced honesty and earnest willingness to analyze the Kills’ work comes as a refreshing surprise. For instance, of the press literature that accompanied Midnight Boom, which pointed to Pizza Pizza Daddio, a 1967 documentary about inner-city kids and their playground songs, she complains good-naturedly: "I wish I could rip that press release up because every time I do an interview, every 15 minutes someone brings up that same thing." Mosshart and Hince merely identified with the "simplicity" of the subject matter, saw its similarity to what they were doing, and liked the juxtaposition of "these seven-year-old girls singing with these huge smiles on their faces, and the songs are really dark. They’re about murder and domestic violence and alcoholism."

More than anything, she says, they wanted a third album — which includes beats and additional production by Spank Rock producer Alex Epton — that "sounds like now. The other two records [2002’s Keep on Your Mean Side and 2005’s No Wow (both Domino)] are quite retro, y’know. The first one sounds a bit like a Velvet Underground record, and the second one sounds like a Suicide–Cabaret Voltaire kind of record."

So the Kills hunkered down at the Keyclub studio in Benton Harbor, Mich., far from the distractions of London where the twosome is based. After more than half a year and a getaway to Mexico, they came up with a clutch of songs they were satisfied with.

The scathing "Cheap and Cheerful" revolves around "just being honest with yourself and honest with other people despite hurting other people’s feelings and sometimes making a real big mess of things," Mosshart offers. "But not quite burying your emotions for the good of everybody all the time. Otherwise you’ll completely explode."

Most of the tunes were the pure product of collaboration. UK native Hince, whom the American-born Mosshart met in 2000, is "my best friend," she says. "He’s kind of like the most perfect creative partner I’ve ever had. There are no rules in this band. It’s not even a band — it’s this thing, whatever we do."

It’s something even tabloid attention — now that Hince has been linked to Kate Moss — can’t tear apart. "It’s a different world, isn’t it?" Mosshart says, sounding subdued. "It’s not my world, and it isn’t really Jamie’s world so … it’s nothing I, like, care too much about. I care about him being happy. That’s about it."

Supermodels or no, the Kills will continue to stoke the flames of that chemistry. How do they work themselves into that state? "We just get nervous, y’know," Mosshart says modestly. "There are so many ideas and so few of us. When I’m onstage, I’m, in a way, daydreaming and trying not to think about anything that’s really happening around me. Other than Jamie and not falling over."

THE KILLS

Sat/17, 9 p.m., $16

Slim’s

333 11th St., SF

www.slims-sf.com

BLOW BY BLOWFLY

BLOWFLY


OMG, the OG of dirty way before ODB. Anyone with the chutzpah to turn "What a Diff’rence a Day Makes" into "What a Difference a Lay Makes" can come play by me. Sat/17, 10 p.m., $12. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com

SKY SAXON AND THE SEEDS


Marin County garage-rock legend/lurker Sky (a.k.a. Sunlight, a.k.a. Dog) Saxon at the legendary punk palais? Don’t push too hard. With Powell St. John and the Aliens, Kreamy ‘Lectric Santa, and Saything. Sun/18, 5 p.m., $8. 924 Gilman Project, 924 Gilman, Berk. www.924gilman.org

CLINIC


Surgical scrubs on wry. The sly Liverpool quartet continue to keep "funk, celebration, and soft metal" alive with Do It! (Domino) — unbeknownst to Nike. Mon/19, 9 p.m., $17. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

Flowers for Kathleen Edwards

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Being of so-called American Indian and African descent, I have never believed in borders. These imperial lines have only wreaked havoc and sealed our fate. Still, I’m always amused by just how much Canadian roots rockers seem to out amber-wave many Americana acts in the Lower 48. From the Band’s part-Mohawk Robbie Robertson penning classic anthems about Southern history ("The Night They Drove Ole Dixie Down"), to Neil Young’s prurient praise-songs, to my much-removed kinswoman "Pocahontas" and beyond, there’s an outsider quality shared with my outlaw peoples, a sense of being on the margins that triggers keen lyrical and sonic focus. Add to this lineage Young’s aspiring heiress, Kathleen Edwards: on tracks such as the barroom gothic "Goodnight, California," she certainly makes that skill plain.

Edwards has bubbled under since her 2003 debut Failer (Socan/Factor), widely celebrated by music cognoscenti with reliable ears. But her world-weary folkie moves reminded me of Lucinda Williams and other sepia-tone, anachronist comers of the period. With Asking for Flowers (Zoe/Rounder), her finest album to date, she has finally distinguished herself from much of alt-country’s fringe-fetish ghetto . A cinematic sweep and fine Los Angeles sessioneering frame its road songs ("Buffalo") and polemical tales from the heartland ("Oil Man’s War"). "O Canada" revisits themes of drugs and mayhem from Tonight’s the Night (Reprise, 1975), by Young and his famed, unvarnished backing band Crazy Horse. I reckon we’ll be dancing round the ole maple this spring, crowing "B is for bullshit" from Edwards’ "The Cheapest Key" as it abounds on the ever more absurd campaign trail. Other Edwards lyrics should be reserved for rocker girlfriends and women saddled with tired-ass boyfriends. "I’ve been on the road too long to sympathize / With what you think you’re owed."

Nowhere is Edwards’ inherited Great North gift of odd insight more evident than on the disc’s best song: "I Make the Dough, You Get the Glory." One could almost see Ellen Burstyn’s Alice singing, "You’re cool and cred like Fogerty, I’m Elvis Presley in the ’70s" to Kris Kristofferson in some meta-American vérité — that is, if much current US indie cinema wasn’t vastly inferior to films like Sarah Polley’s Oscar-nominated Away from Her (2006). Just as Polley kicked creative ass and Feist has been anointed the "New Joni" by worshipful black Atlantic male musicians, Edwards looks poised to be this year’s sweetheart of the rodeo — although nowhere nearer to Music Row than before. Happy trails, gal.

KATHLEEN EDWARDS

With the Last Town Chorus

Tues/20, 8 p.m., $18

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1422

www.theindependentsf.com

To “Romance,” times two

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In 2006, Sally Shapiro’s album Disco Romance (Diskokaine) added a cooler shade of pale to the Nordic pop of Annie and a femme counterpoint to the boy’s own space disco zone charted by Lindstrøm and others. Shapiro — not her real name — used an understated, happy-sad vocal approach to navigate the vast, austere Europop soundscapes created by songwriter Johan Agebjörn. Tracks such as "Find My Soul" and "Hold Me So Tight" shimmered with an eerie grace. Agebjörn cited specific warm strains of Italo disco as his inspiration, but a Shapiro song sounds just as home in the Swedish snow.

Disco Romance deservedly received a deluxe North American release on the Paper Bag label last fall, with three additional songs. This year it’s getting the revision treatment through a pair of Remix Romance collections on the same label. The second one, which includes a mix by Europop touchstone Alexander Robotnick, is due next month. The first volume, out now, isn’t as solid as the original recording, but has its unique charms. Annie’s roommate Skatebard strips down one track, and the Cansecos’ version of "Hold Me So Tight" is the best Saint Etienne track that Saint Etienne never recorded. The Junior Boys, whose glacial crooner’s laments might be the masculine counterpart to the Shapiro sound, entreat the vocalist to speak instead of sing on "Jackie Junior." But the spoils go to Holy Fuck, whose take on "Find My Soul" magnifies the source material’s already potent sense of lost-in-space loneliness. Who is Sally Shapiro, and where is Sally Shapiro? I don’t know, but I like how she sounds on my stereo. (Huston)

www.johanagebjorn.info/sally.html, www.myspace.com/shapirosally

That girl

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› johnny@sfbg.com

The saga or psychodrama of Britney Spears mirrors the crash-and-burn George W. Bush era like a reflective toxic bio-dome. Robyn is that girl on the outside whose story is so vast and smart that it’s been invisible to everyone hypnotized into suffering blackouts.

Back when the Swedish star first kicked her way onto an MTV that played music videos in the summer of 1997 (around when Bill Clinton became a horny lame duck), the writer-producer partly behind the perfectly calibrated beats of her semi-hit "Do You Know (What It Takes)" was none other Max Martin, the man about to bring a little ditty called "(Hit Me Baby) One More Time" to the ears of the world. Spears soon took that abuse victim’s idea of first love to the top of the US pop charts, ushering out the Spice Girls’ version of girl power in the process. As for Robyn, she wound up resonating on a different level.

While reviewing 1997’s Robyn Is Here (RCA/Jive), I joked about a sub-coincidence: vocalists named Robyn and Robin S were both vying for success with tracks called "Show Me Love." Unlike me, the movie director Lukas Moodysson recognized dissent beneath the slick surfaces of Robyn’s music: how else to explain his use of her "Show Me Love" as the signature (and in English-speaking countries, title) theme of perhaps the best teen film of the ’90s, the 1998 girl’s coming-out tale Fucking ?mål? Though Moodysson has since veered toward anti-commercial visions of degradation, he still recognizes a talented woman stuck in conservative surroundings: he recently liberated Jena Malone from Hollywood and indieland for the unseen and just-about-unknown 2006 movie Container.

As for Robyn, a decade after her debut, she’s returning to America sharper than the Knife. The evidence is there on "Who’s That Girl," a standout track from her new — to the US — album, Robyn (Interscope). Coproduced by Karin Dreijer Andersson and Olof Dreijer, the song has greater vitality and wit than the duo’s own critic’s-darling recordings as the Knife. After a Jacuzzi-set intro that parodies rap and R&B boasts via claims that Robyn taught moves to Bruce Lee, "Who’s That Girl" kicks off the initial 2005 version of Robyn released on Robyn’s boutique label, Konichiwa, in Sweden. The marketing wizards at Interscope have messed with that sequencing: through some additional tracks and a revised order, their version of Robyn seems out to position her as a blond MIA.

No matter. Regardless of how you shuffle recent songs by Robin Miriam Carlsson, her unpretentious humor, melodicism, and neurotic toughness remain upfront. With its casually careful cataloguing and then rejection of all the things that good girls do, "Who’s That Girl" winds up containing more everyday wisdom than Spears’ entire output. (Ironically, Spears’ team turned to Robyn for a contribution to 2007’s Blackout on Jive.) If that doesn’t seem like much of an achievement, factor in that it’s also twice as good as that old Madonna song called "Who’s That Girl" and exactly the type of effervescent catchy tune that the Material Girl is no longer capable of writing, and you have a better idea of Robyn’s talent. It’s a talent that extends from string-laden stalker confessions ("Be Mine!") to statements of independence ("Handle Me," Chris Crocker’s MySpace anthem for a spell earlier this year), staying honest all the while.

A decade since Robyn Is Here, more people in the States are wise enough to know that Sweden’s honey-dripping groups and tough alliance of solo acts could fill an ark of the world’s best pop music. Robyn is here again to prove it.

ROBYN

Fri/16, 9 p.m., $20

Bimbo’s 365 Club

1025 Columbus, SF

(415) 474-0365

www.bimbos365club.com, www.robyn.com

Speed Reading

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THE TEN CENT PLAGUE: THE GREAT COMIC BOOK SCARE AND HOW IT CHANGED AMERICA

By David Hadju

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

448 pages

$26

David Hajdu is an antidote to ersatz historiographers. He’s unearthed and analyzed formative but forgotten figures (such as Billy Strayhorn) and moments of 20th-century Americana. In The Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America, the Columbia University journalism professor turns his attention to Brooklyn and the Lower East Side of the 1940s and early ’50s, when a cadre of young outsiders engendered a new and controversial artistic medium: the comic book.

Hajdu surveys Famous Funnies pioneer Harry Wildenberg, eccentric militant Major Nicholson-Wheeler, Crime Does Not Pay impresario Charles Biro, psychological activist Frederic Wertham, and Superman creator Jerry Siegel. But milquetoast EC Comics owner Bill Gaines, partly responsible for the horror and sci-fi craze that accompanied the atomic age, is at the center of the book’s narrative.

The Ten Cent Plague thoroughly documents the censorship struggles and creative flourishes of a subculture and revolutionary art form, but it lacks the freewheeling energy of earlier histories. For all of his rhapsodizing about the authentic juvenile experience within comics, there is a dearth of playful and existential perspective. Instead, the writing takes on an insipid encyclopedic tone, forcing cohesion on a subject matter renowned for random creativity. Large portions of text come across as just the kind of parental lesson comic book enthusiasts might shun. Nonetheless, Hajdu provides a necessary investigation into the moment when America stepped from a black-and-white past into a Technicolor future. (Erik Morse)

 

UNCREDITED: GRAPHIC DESIGN AND OPENING TITLES IN THE MOVIES

By Gemma Solana and Antonio Boneu

Index Books

313 pages

$55

Initially, Gemma Solana and Antonio Boneu’s survey of credit sequences in movies sported the title The Art of the Title Sequence. But now it is called Uncredited: Graphic Design and Opening Titles in the Movies, a gesture of solidarity toward the legion of graphic artists, particularly in Hollywood, who have designed credits for movies without being acknowledged for their efforts. Early sections of this hardcover slab of imagery and text — which weighs a good five pounds, in case you want to strengthen your biceps — explore the white-on-black and title-as-logo roots of studio movies from the first half of the 20th century. The creators of signature sequences such as the umbrella-twirling opening of Singin’ in the Rain (1952) are praised while remaining anonymous. Even when credits were credited, as with Pacific Title and Art Studio’s splendorous text for Gone with the Wind (1939), it was under a corporate blueprint.

Uncredited‘s latter chapters right those wrongs committed by the film industry by exploring the efforts of Otto Preminger’s and Alfred Hitchcock’s frequent partner-in-design Saul Bass (probably the only credit specialist to receive exhibition and monograph showcases) and his wife Elaine, as well as Jean Fouchet (an influence on Jacques Demy?), Pablo Nuñez (who created the credits for Victor Erice’s 1973 The Spirit of the Beehive), Dan Perri, and others. A climactic section about current trends displays work that uniformly pales in comparison to the work by Arcady, Fernand Léger, and especially Mary Ellen Bute and Jean-Luc Godard in a central chapter devoted to concepts. Uncredited is lavishly, gorgeously illustrated (complete with a DVD) and playfully designed. There are errors galore in the informative text though — a sharper editorial eye was needed. And who exactly is that mysterious “QT” who seems to have provided captions for a number of the illustrations? (Johnny Ray Huston)

 

She sang, he filmed

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Perhaps you’d like a dark date with Mary Wollstonecraft and Percy Bysshe Shelley. If not, you can always opt for a purple romp with Rimbaud and Verlaine, or Gertrude and Alice, or Paul and Jane Bowles. Maybe you have an ear for rock, in which case you can hit the bed or hit a vein with John and Yoko, or Sid and Nancy, or Kurt and Courtney. Really, what doesn’t fascinate us about legendary bohemian couples of various eras? They’re like Brangelina, but with a more thesis-friendly shelf life for anyone aspiring to a liberal arts degree.

We fetishize intersections between artists in any influential boho scene, from the Symbolists and the Dadaists to the Beats. Whether those bohos are hippies or punks, their brief encounters heighten each other’s retrospective glamour. Andy Warhol might be the all-time champ at making every minor contributor into a cult figure. One woman provided a bridge between the Warhol Factory and the fertile Euro boho scenes of the 1960s and ’70s. That woman was Nico (birth name: Christa Päffgen), the ethereally gorgeous model-actor turned avant-chanteuse who could transform anything — a sweet Jackson Browne ballad or one of her own inimitable compositions — into a postapocalyptic dirge.

The camera may have loved Nico, but that sentiment went unrequited. After she appeared in a few films, including 1966’s Chelsea Girls, and onstage as part of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable tour, Lou Reed dumped her, the Velvet Underground didn’t want her, and MGM Records realized the record-buying public enjoyed listening to this bleating beauty even less than they did the variably twee, glum, cacophonous, and not yet desert island–ready V.U.

Thus, this Germanic grievous angel slunk back to the continent from whence she came, leaving behind a list of ex-lovers that purportedly included Jim Morrison, John Cale, Brian Jones, Tim Buckley, and Iggy Pop. Once there, she fell in with a heady Parisian counterculture — in particular, with the filmmaker Philippe Garrel.

The film series "I’ll Be Your Mirror: Rare Films by Philippe Garrel" cuts a swath through Nico’s and Garrel’s enduring dual magnetism, a connection that endured long after her 1988 death from a cerebral hemorrhage. Ten years her junior, Garrel was barely out of his teens when he met Nico, yet he was already finishing his fourth feature, La Lit de la Vierge. She contributed the song "The Falconer" to that film’s ripe slice of 1969 Maintenant Génération angst, which was heavily dosed on post–May 1968 disillusionment and LSD.

A look at Morocco through a black-and-white CinemaScope viewfinder, La Lit de la Vierge is characteristic of Garrel’s hard-to-find (and hard to watch, some might say) early films. It’s visually striking, madly pretentious, and a perfect time capsule of a particular cultural moment’s entwined adventure and humorlessness. Scrawny and sporting a Prince Valiant ‘do, Pierre Clémenti is the film’s hippie Jesus, who rides into town on a burro only to be knocked off his humble ride by bullies. This Jesus has some real Oedipal issues, and no wonder — the actress Zouzou (Danièle Ciarlet) plays both Mary and Mary Magdalene. In case you can’t tell by now, there won’t be a Second Coming: when Christ makes an exit, it’s to get the hell away from people.

Nico appeared in virtually all of Garrel’s subsequent movies up until their decisive 1980 split. The fallout from their less-than-healthy relationship resonates through his more conventional later efforts, perhaps most blatantly within 1991’s I Don’t Hear the Guitar Anymore. In that film, Marianne (Johanna ter Steege; cute, but lacking Nico’s goddess quality) is a maddening object of desire who abandons lovers after dragging them into her heroin-addicted spiral. "I love you like a madman," declares Garrel’s stand-in Gerard (Benoît Régent). "That means the day you cease to be crazy, you won’t love me anymore," she snaps. Later, when talking to Gerard’s stable new squeeze, Marianna seems to speak for the director and his late muse when she ponders, "Maybe I didn’t make him happy, but it was a different era. Maybe we didn’t need to be happy. We were seeking something else."

Guitar‘s posthumous portrait is more repellent than alluring. But to help the unconverted fathom Nico’s peak mystique, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts film curator Joel Shepard has also programmed The Velvet Underground and Nico, an hour-long 1966 performance directed by Warhol. Static and chaotic, it features Nico on tambourine, with little Ari (her son by Alain Delon), a noise-jamming V.U., Mary Woronov and Gerard Malanga a-go-go, and a bout of performance interruptus courtesy of the NYPD. At the box office, up until 2005’s Regular Lovers, Philippe Garrel couldn’t get arrested. But outside of it, the types he hung with always could.

I’LL BE YOUR MIRROR: RARE FILMS BY PHILIPPE GARREL

Thurs/15–Sun/18, $6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Screening Room

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Yo, bangerz

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Also in this issue:

Rave it tecktonik: Hard electro’s dance du jour

Bang! The clubs, the music, the mixes

Super Ego Must the French rule everything? Is Justice revenge for "freedom fries"?

Anyone who’s recently squeezed themselves into a sliced-up silver Lycra T-shirt, pushed down a pair of Day-Glo Cazals, baby-oiled their coke-spoon anklet charms, and hit the city’s glitzier underground dance floors in the past year knows that the hardcore electro sound of Paris’s laptops — lahptoops? — is everywhere they wanna be. So yeah, this shout-out to the trenchant trend is late, and the French are already being usurped by English, Aussie, and American glam-tech innovators. But I’ve got hungry drag queens at home to feed. Mama can’t afford no glittery off-the-shoulder neon silk-screen slip dry-cleaning bills.

Also, it’s taken a while for the scene to coalesce into something tangible, nightlifewise. "Electro" has always been a catch-all — as long as it emanates from adorably entangled circuitry, the genre’s sound swings wildly from lowdown industrial grind to straight-up booty smack, vocoded howl to shuddering fwump to skittery blizzard of blips. It took French duo Justice, along with a slew of other big-name like-mindeds like MSTRKRFT and Simian Mobile Disco, to crystallize some of electro’s recent, disparate past — amped-up electroclash guitars, nu-rave airhorn screech, Philly and Baltimore cybernetic cartoon sexuality, bubbly London champagne rave, and triple-filtered Daft Punk euro strip-down — into the rock-candy party sound still blowing out woofers all over town, launching a genuine style. At first dismissed as mere Daft Punk knockoffs, these earnest Ableton addicts have transformed electro into this house generation’s gleaming hair metal, complete with fussy headbands, flashing tits, and on occasion, what my bf Hunky Beau terms "the most well-scrubbed mosh pits ever."

The scene is called banger — as in Ed Banger, Justice’s Paris-based label. The sound? Warped arena rock grandeur ripped asunder by fuzzy needles, taut bass arpeggios, pounding 808s with cymbal-crash breakdowns (they’re back!), dirty childlike vocals, and anarchic Prodigy posing to — cover your ears, discriminating queens — pop-rave 2 Unlimited keyboards. Banger kids arrive stripped of quotation marks (excessive goofy accessorizing and ironic retro bombast are out), fronting the tight sheen of perfect online shopping technique, 24-inch waists, Rockstar and rye on tap, wanton pantomimed sex, and a tang of American Apparel ennui. ("I’m on the club soda diet," a model confided matter-of-factly outside one bangin’ banger club. "I need to go to the bathroom and meditate for a minute before I pass out.") If all this sounds more like "da club" then the club, well, that’s the delicious line of tension bangers like to play against.

Banger style has even given rise, in Paris at least, to a dance craze (also back!) called tecktonik. Have you seen this shit? It’s electroclash break dancing — a splash of rave liquid by way of circuit fan–twirling, coupled with random Adderall withdrawal jerks. "Tecktonik" is now a brand-name T-shirt and a haircut, of course.

The above may look iffy on paper, but it works — there’s a blinding energy to the scene, and I’m held positively rapt by some local bangers. My next column will feature a few, as well as some young upstarts taking the bang into fidgety new directions. Let’s riot.

Mother’s Day don’t

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Readers:

I recently received a press release saying,

Although moms appreciate flowers and breakfast-in-bed on their special day, this year Dad should try to spice things up and not be so predictable! Booty Parlor offers items to add some fun to Mother’s Day that Mom and Dad can enjoy, together …

It went on, predictably, to hawk a number of chocolatelike items intended to be smeared on bodies (in bed, mind you) and removed in some fashion other than rigorous showering, heavily scented oils and bath bombs, and something which may or may not have been a vibrator but both image and text were too busy being coy to tell me. How do I loathe the idea of a "sexy" Mother’s Day? Let me count the ways.

It isn’t just the seXAY-fication of a faux-holiday properly celebrated by the delivery of adorably botched breakfasts made by pride-puffed seven-year-olds to mothers enjoying a morning off from domestic drudgery; it’s also that "should" sticking out there like a sore thumb that deserved everything it got: "Dad should …." Sez who? And who, we may ask, is "Dad," and what is he doing in that sentence? Either he’s your dad, who has no place in this scenario, or he’s your children’s dad, a role that only exists in relation to the people he is "Dad" to. This is not confusing. Imagine a bath that a male parent takes with his children; now think about a bath that a male partner takes with you. Who is your daddy?

While we’re counting, whose idea of sexy is this anyway? It’s not that it’s meant to appeal to a clumsily imagined male sense of what a clumsy male thinks women think is sexy (that really did make sense, I promise, go back and reread if you don’t believe me) — it’s that it’s nobody in particular’s idea of sexy. It is, as a friend put it, "the sex-related equivalent of the ‘festive hot chocolate assortment’ you give your coworkers at Christmas."

Do mothers even want sex or "sexiness" for Mother’s Day? Some would, sure. Many would welcome a reminder that Beloved Spouse still thinks she’s attractive. Fewer would welcome an additional duty ("being sexy") thrust upon them on what promised to be a day off. And yes, I do know how that sounds. As much as I may hate the popular idea of a mom doing pretty much anything to get out of having sex with her hubby, that’s exactly the sitcom-ish image this thing gives me. I picture an exhausted, vaguely shrewish, newish mom and a horny, sulky husband who’s resorting to ham-handed hinting. "Oh, God," she thinks, "chocolate sex paint and satin undies on a stick. Christ, maybe if I blow him he’ll go away and let me sleep late."

Although this ugly picture contains the usual stereotype’s tiny ring of truth, we don’t need to promulgate it. Parents in this culture hardly need any encouragement to see their roles thus, and I certainly don’t intend to promote this vision of connubial unbliss as either inevitable or permanent. I am all for sexy marriage. I had sympathy for author Ayelet Waldman when she got into that ridiculous brouhaha a few years ago when she meant to say that grown-up love and lust, not children, are the heart of a marriage, but she ended up sticking her foot down her throat and gacking up something about how she loves her husband so much she’d throw one of her children in front of a bullet for him. I didn’t say I agreed with her, mind, but I did think it was about time somebody spoke up for the hot bond that preexisted the children and, one hopes, will burn on long after the children are on their own. Just not on Mother’s Day. I think Mother’s Day is a bit silly, but if you’re going to celebrate it, it ought to have more to do with the family unit and less to do with dad’s. After the family stuff — a lovely evening out and copious oral sex, why not? — but no springing "sexy" surprises and no sticky body paint. Ever, really.

I asked a number of female friends how they’d like a bunch of sex toys (assuming nicer sex stuff than this) for Mother’s Day and only one thought she might. She retracted it, though, when I wrote, "It’s really just a come-on for a blow job by someone who feels he hasn’t been getting enough of those." "I pictured the body paint on the woman!" gasped my correspondent.

Was she right? Was I too cynical? Is it too much to ask that a man who wishes for more blow jobs say something or do something rather than buy something? Nobody loves a gift basket or a tap on the shoulder, and this is both at once.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question.

Follow that “Balloon”

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After years of Tarantino twists and shot-for-shot shams, homage has gotten a bad name. Let’s call Flight of the Red Balloon something else: a transportation device in which Paris, Albert Lamorisse’s beloved 1956 slice of magical realism The Red Balloon, and a patchwork family float in and out of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s inscriptive view. At 61, the former Taiwanese new wave pacesetter is on a travel kick. After moving to Tokyo to film 2003’s Café Lumière, his tribute to Yasujiro Ozu, the filmmaker next went to Paris, thanks to a commission by the Musée d’Orsay. Flight of the Red Balloon‘s reception at Cannes was lukewarm, but away from that hothouse it’s plainly a masterwork. Mysterious without being opaque, it is as delightful in its particulars as in its overall musical intelligence.

It starts simply, with a boy and a balloon. The red orb reappears periodically in Hou’s film, like a refrain, but this prologue provides the fullest convergence with Lamorisse’s original. A sleepy-eyed child calls out to the air before descending the Metro steps; the camera pans up, catches a first glimpse of the talisman as it lingers behind wind-brushed trees, and then follows it across the rooftops of an overcast Paris.

The balloon retreats, but Hou’s camera stays alight. We soon find the boy, Simon, living in a jumbled apartment with his mother Suzanne (Juliette Binoche), a blustery creative type who voices puppet shows. She has engaged a young Chinese filmmaker as Simon’s nanny: Song Fang (playing herself) is first seen entering Suzanne’s puppet theatre, her oval visage shrouded in the richly-toned shades of black typical of Hou’s collaborations with cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-Bin.

The conflicts within this autumnal story world pass at a remove. Hou wryly observes aspects of Parisian life (a downstairs neighbor unable to ask a simple kitchen favor without detailing his mutton stew, for example), but doesn’t tether his film to such observations. Instead he emphasizes resonant textures: the musical interplay between the relaxed camerawork and Binoche’s breathy, bleached-blond performance; the lyrical enfolding of a child’s half-comprehending, absorbed perspective with that of a foreigner’s; and too many paired scenes and visual echoes to count, including a couple of lovely pirouettes up and down a spiral staircase. Throughout, Hou’s inclusive model of filmmaking draws from painting, music, and puppetry. Whenever he ventures into the mother and child’s apartment, currents of light and color are pitched between minimalism and reverie.

Much like some of this season’s other film highlights (In the City of Sylvia, Alexandra, Paranoid Park), Hou’s latest foregoes plot restrictions for acute ambience and sustained portraiture. I didn’t respond to Flight of the Red Balloon as quickly as I did to the others, but it’s the one I most want to revisit. Diffuse yet deep, Hou’s vision erases the boundaries between his film and the worlds that surround it.

The red balloon of The Red Balloon beckons, but Hou’s film also bears a surprising resemblance to Olivier Assayas’ Irma Vep (1996) in its skipping ellipticism, its depiction of a detached Asian woman swimming amid unkempt Parisians, its utterly free way of withholding story information and averting linearity, and its double-exposed invocation of a past French film classic. Assayas is no stranger to Hou’s work, having made a documentary about the Taiwanese director in 1997 (HHH), but their unique sensibilities impart common materials with entirely different moods. Where Irma Vep radiates frenetic energy, Hou’s profoundly subdued film lingers in the drowsy quiet of afternoon. In this respect, Flight of the Red Balloon also reminds me of another French film about childhood, stasis, and puppet shows: François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959). One new wave shores up another, and an old man’s meditation reflects a precocious debut like so many carefully angled mirrors.

FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON

Opens Fri/16 at Bay Area theaters
www.ifcfilms.com

Sweet “Dreams”

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Words, words, words. You’ve probably noticed how Shakespeare’s plays are full of them. They skip or loll on the tongue; they tickle or bemuse the ear. Sometimes, and not just for the uninitiated or casually acquainted, they come across with more music than meaning. Well, that "Shakespeherian Rag" goes raga in the international production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, now taking its San Francisco bow at the Curran Theatre, where among a cast of exclusively Indian and Sri Lankan actors, Elizabethan English vies with seven languages of the subcontinent.

The words, for a change, are therefore not the most important feature of this production — unless you happen to speak one or more of the Indian and Sri Lankan languages on display, which judging by the pockets of laughter that arose at certain moments, some in the opening-night audience clearly did. This incredibly agile, imaginative, and widely praised 2005-6 production, led by UK director Tim Supple (and making its North American debut courtesy of Best of Broadway), foregrounds the play’s action, passion, physical humor, and erotic energy to such a striking degree that it reminds one persuasively of the full scope of Shakespeare’s potency as a dramatist. And the dialogue — if you don’t speak Hindi, for example — still reveals a surprising dramatic and melodic force all the same.

The words also give a thrilling sense of the vast treasure of cultural and linguistic tradition emanating from the subcontinent. At the same time, this is no museum piece; it is a vital blending of theatrical traditions and ideas. The amazingly athletic, even acrobatic cast effortlessly incorporates everything from traditional song and martial dance to Cirquelike aerial work into the enchanted forest–realm of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Shakespeare’s multilayered story of love’s fickle and darker aspects. As the production’s lone Brit, Supple’s staging is highly original. At the same time, it recalls the use of vertical space in Peter Brook’s legendary 1970 staging. The backdrop is a bamboo scaffold many meters high, initially covered over in a great wavy, ruffled sheet of thick paper that beautifully absorbs and deflects Zuleikha Chaudhari’s rich lighting. Performers come bursting, crawling, and tumbling through this membrane until it’s a mess of tatters.

The acting is physically and emotionally strong. Joy Fernandes, for instance, delivers a particularly memorable turn as the hilariously irrepressible Bottom. Meanwhile, the musicians to the sides of the stage left and right further refine the dazzlingly dynamic action with delicate metallic strains, sweet guitar melodies, or the crashing punctuation of a massive percussion kit.

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

Through June 1

Tues.–Sat., 8 p.m. (also Wed. and Sat., 2 p.m.); Sun., 2 p.m., $35–$80

Curran Theatre

445 Geary, SF

(415) 512-7770, www.shnsf.com

Focus on the future

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PREVIEW San Francisco Ballet just finished its 75th season with a buzz-creating festival of world premieres. But SFB hasn’t gone dormant. This week the focus shifts to the next generation of dancers: San Francisco Ballet School students who hope to take on the daunting task of defying gravity and having their bodies express the contents of their souls.

At the SFB School’s Student Showcase at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the audience can experience the stages of a dancer’s progress. From the smallest kids doing their precisely placed tendus and still-stiff port de bras to the graduates, seven years later, who are ready to compete with professionals, you can see dancers blossom and begin to be themselves. You’ll also notice that boys tend to develop later and that girls still dominate the field. The program features the American premiere of John Neumeier’s 1986 Yondering, danced to Stephen C. Foster songs. The advanced students perform Helgi Tomasson’s 1996 Simple Symphony, which he specifically choreographed for the SFB School.

But SFB isn’t the only school holding its end-of-the-year recital. The School of the Arts, a magnet school of the San Francisco Unified School District, presents its budding young dancers in Unfolding Light, which introduces dances by student and professional choreographers, including Brittany Brown Ceres, Juan Pazmino, Gregory Dawson, and Enrico Labayen. A few of these teenage artists wowed the audience when they performed during the Izzies dance awards at the end of April.

SAN FRANCISCO BALLET SCHOOL STUDENT SHOWCASE Wed/14, 8 p.m.; Thurs/15–Fri/16, 7:30 p.m. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SF. $32. (415) 865-2000, www.ybca.org

SCHOOL OF THE ARTS’ UNFOLDING LIGHT Fri/16–Sat/17, 8 p.m.; Sun/18, 2 p.m. Cowell Theater, Fort Mason Center, Marina and Buchanan, SF. $18–$20. (415) 345-7575

Funkonnection 5

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PREVIEW A few months ago, I came across the popular blog Stuff White People Like, and loved it. Finally, there was a piece of online real estate dedicated to dissecting the bizarre interests of white people. I grew up amid the city’s "we’re so liberal!" facade that included Mumia rallies downtown, peace festivals in Golden Gate Park, and rainbow flags in the Castro District. But every facet of this liberal oasis was laced with the irony of a skyrocketing housing market, a growing black exodus, and a media that spoke of poor folks only in terms of symptoms of neglect — drugs, violence, and hopelessness. To come across a blog that explicitly pokes fun at the ironies of white privilege was, like, hella tight. Then I found out it was authored by a white comedian based in Los Angeles who recently inked a book deal with Random House, purportedly for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now, I’m all for getting paid, but I’m also pretty sure that some version of Stuff Black People Like has been a part of the American fabric since day one. Yet the makers of cultural icons pre-fad status often don’t get recognized. Funk music and fried chicken also can be included in that category. So for better or worse, Mighty is hosting Funkonnection 5, a night of funk music, dress-up, and free fried chicken.

FUNKONNECTION 5 With Fort Knox 5, Thunderball, Mat the Alien, and Vinyl Ritchie. Fri/16, 10 p.m., $15. Mighty, 119 Utah, SF. (415) 626-7001, www.mighty119.com

Allen Oldies Band

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PREVIEW The Allen Oldies Band delivers a reckless tornado of classic hits, a retro dance party of Sham-tastic proportions. But don’t make the mistake of considering this Austin, Texas, ensemble a mere cover band. The Oldies have amassed a cult following built on the strength of a talented group of classic session players, sprinkled with a heavy dose of punk-pit sensibility. They have punctuated the beginning of South by Southwest in their hometown with an infamous 9:30 a.m. breakfast shindig replete with French maids serving jalapeño pancakes. They will play literally anywhere — but they will not play just anything. From "Wooly Bully" to "It’s Not Unusual," the Oldies are resolute in their mission to bring the dance tunes of yesteryear to your doorstep.

Allen Hill dreamed up this raucous, plaid-blazer-clad army of fun. Hill is a bit of a musical raconteur, a de facto spokesperson for the retro Austin scene who fronts his own combo with feverish enthusiasm and wisecracks. Wearing a tuxedo and tennis shoes, Hill rushes from one end of the stage to the other, employing a tongue-in-cheek goofiness with the group and the audience, recalling Louis Prima at his best. Always looking to spread the message of party rock, the Oldies are no strangers to either the wedding or corporate event circuit — please book three months in advance — and have played backing ensemble to the likes of Chuck Berry and Archie Bell. Lest their paying gigs sound too staid, the Oldies have the indie cred of a live WMFU album, Live and Delirious (Freedom, 2006). While their trips outside the Lone Star State are not as frequent as their fans would like, they are finally set to grace our fair city with a dose of hyperactive twistin’ tunes.

ALLEN OLDIES BAND With the Barbary Coasters. Fri/16, 9:30 p.m., $6.
Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. (415) 923-0923, www.hemlocktavern.com

Bad war, good film

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REVIEW Okay, here’s another Iraq War fictive feature people won’t go see, although this may be the first one where it would be a real shame (as opposed to the many very good documentaries everyone ought to have seen). It delivers sweeping, multicharacter, wide-canvas drama à la 2006’s Babel within a docudrama style that’s as convincing and effective as Brian DePalma’s thematically overlapping 2007 Redacted was — let’s put this delicately — phony, crass, and just plain shitty. A mix of professional and first-time actors (including actual Iraq vet and ex-Marine Elliot Ruiz as the platoon leader) play more disparate elements in post-Saddam society and the US military than we’re used to seeing. They converge on a reenactment of the November 2005 events in which an IED bombing of a Marine convoy triggered indiscriminate, retaliatory, home-invasion killings of two dozen local residents, including myriad women and children. (One point made is that many citizens get identified as insurgents simply because real ones have threatened families with death if they squeal.) There’s a long, ominous buildup in which we’re introduced to lives that will soon be traumatically shaken up — and then bleep hits the fan. Battle for Haditha is like a realpolitik version of a 1970s disaster movie, sans soap operatics, Charlton Heston, or idle pleasure in the spectacle of order collapsing. It’s tense, immediate, and vivid (if not quite so potently) in the way 2006’s United 93 was. A rare dramatic film from veteran documentarian Nick Broomfield, this film’s final outcry of grief, vengeance, and injustice is a terrifying illustration of how badly we’ve bungled — by creating new terrorists in attempting to eradicate established ones.

BATTLE FOR HADITHA opens Fri/16 at the Roxie. See Rep Clock for showtimes.

“Held Rectangles”

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REVIEW In Lawrence Weiner’s 1968 piece, A 36" X 36" REMOVAL TO THE LATHING OR SUPPORT WALL OF PLASTER OR WALL-BOARD FROM A WALL, the title functions as a set of instructions for a physical action that must be performed to complete the work. Like a number of Weiner’s other pieces in the same vein, the result varies based on where the piece is installed and/or executed, making for a work of art that is difficult to re-create identically. For these reasons, Weiner’s art seems to defy substantive definition. Since the artist does not seem to favor a specific environment in which to create the work, the piece becomes transient and ephemeral unless permanently installed — and even in this case, it co-exists simultaneously with other iterations elsewhere.

While the piece by Weiner currently on view in the small exhibit "Held Rectangles" at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum does not include a physically executed element, aside from the typographical installation of the words A RECTANGULAR REMOVAL FROM A XEROXED GRAPH SHEET IN PROPORTION TO THE OVERALL DIMENSIONS OF THE SHEET (1977), the construction of a geometric form is implied. Not only does the Weiner text allude to an act, it is based on a subjective set of parameters that, like A 36" x 36" REMOVAL, resist redundancy. In spite of his succinct instructions and regularized typeface, the phrase describes an abstract shape that is never defined but rather assumed.

By contrast, John C. Fernie’s Held Rectangles Series (c. 1970) begins with a physical object, recognized as a frame, examined through its 360-degree rotation and documented in a series of eight photographic screen prints. Unlike Weiner’s open instructions for a shape, Held Rectangles Series is defined, though the content it frames is not. In this case, the frame, like the shape in Weiner’s piece, becomes a study of a cultural signifier, its historical implications disturbed by its placement within the context of conceptual art.

HELD RECTANGLES Through Aug. 3. Wed.–Sun., 11 a.m.–5 p.m. Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft, Berk. $4–$8 (free first Thurs.). (510) 642-0808, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

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