Arts & Culture

Arts & Culture

Zen and the art of extreme-metal maintenance

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Meshuggah’s obZen (Nuclear Blast) is not the first example of a quality album with dismal cover art. On the other hand, it’s not that easy to think of really, er, great examples. Mott the Hoople’s Brain Capers (Atlantic, 1971), Humble Pie’s Smokin’ (A&M, 1972), and the Rolling Stones’ Black and Blue (Rolling Stones/Virgin, 1976) come to mind, but I’m not sure if these are actually good albums or just guilty pleasures. There’s also Blue Öyster Cult’s Agents of Fortune (Columbia, 1976) and Steely Dan’s Can’t Buy a Thrill (MCA, 1972) — slightly more reputable records, but like the others above, they’re subject to the "Hey, it was the ’70s" defense.

Sweden’s Meshuggah occupy a whole ‘nother realm of music — modern extreme metal, generally speaking — which means I should be comparing them to their peers, not a bunch of musty classic rock acts. However, over my years of following this genre, I’ve become so desensitized to foul cover art that it seldom fazes me anymore. Skeletons being crucified on inverted crosses? Helpless, bloody victims with various orifices sewn shut? You try not to pay too much attention to it.

ObZen takes the good album–bad cover discrepancy to a new level, though. On their cover, a computer-generated image of a naked, three-armed, blood-covered mandroid sits in the lotus position, engaged in a solemn act of meditation. Apparently, it’s tied in with the title’s "obscene zen" pun. Whatever the case, it’s not good. Not good at all. The only reason I bother poking fun is because the music itself is pretty amazing.

Granted, the members of Meshuggah have been churning out this sort of sandblasting tech-metal for more than a decade, but obZen includes some of their most creative, demented riffing in years. They’re the rare extreme metal band whose sound is immediately recognizable: pick a song, any song, and you can tell it’s them within a few seconds — though it’s much harder to figure out exactly which song you’re hearing. This is partly because their music never changes all that much — externally, at least — but also because it’s so distinctive and idiosyncratic.

Meshuggah established their sound on 1995’s Destroy Erase Improve and 1998’s Chaosphere (both Nuclear Blast), and it’s essentially an industrial-tinged mutation of the tight, mechanical thrash metal of early ’90s Sepultura or pre-Black Album Metallica. While most of the far-out happenings in ’90s metal came from the seedier realms of black metal, death metal, and grindcore, Meshuggah continued as one of the few bands doing anything groundbreaking with this sort of weightlifter-metal template. In other words, they didn’t have any close peers when they emerged as a noteworthy group, and despite influencing a wide variety of metal, prog, and experimental acts in the years since, there’s no one who sounds quite like them.

They’re not without their metal-band trappings, although these don’t involve Satanism or bad horror-flick imagery. Instead, there is a sort of dystopian sci-fi thread running through much of their work, something they share with predecessors like Voivod and Fear Factory. I don’t know anyone who is specifically attracted to Meshuggah based on that aspect of their aesthetic, just as I don’t know anyone who listens to the band because of vocalist Jens Kidman, whose monochromatic bark is certainly an acquired taste.

Rather, Meshuggah’s appeal is all about "that thing" they do with their guitars and drums. It’s very specific: jackhammer drums and hiccuping guitar riffs wind around one another in an intricate fashion, with the drums and guitars usually playing in different time signatures and constantly turning around on one another. Their tracks are often more like études, which deal with complex polyrhythms, than a song with anything resembling a verse-chorus-verse form.

It would all be hopelessly nerdy if it wasn’t so darn heavy and impossibly well-executed. Perhaps, like the unfortunate dude on the cover, some of the members of Meshuggah have three arms. Listeners might find the band’s music tedious and one-dimensional, and indeed, sometimes it is. Then again, there’s often a fine line between hypnotic and monotonous. With obZen, Meshuggah are mostly on the right side of that line, even if their visual sensibilities leave much to be desired.

MESHUGGAH

With Ministry and Hemlock

Tue/1–April 2, 8 p.m., $38.50

Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

(415) 346-6000

www.ticketmaster.com

Go for baroque

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In the southern suburb of Portland, Ore., where dwell the two main men behind the ornate folk-pop of Musée Mécanique, there’s an old amusement park with a Ferris wheel, carousel, and, perhaps most strikingly, a roller-skating arena with a pneumatic-powered Wurlitzer organ that drops down from the ceiling.

"The park has all sorts of stuff that was inspiring in terms of the instrumentation we used for our record," says singer-guitarist Micah Rabwin — who also plays the keys and singing saw — over the phone from Portland in reference to their yet-unreleased debut, The Wayward Orchestrion. These various old-time amusements weren’t merely an abstract point of inspiration, however, as he excitedly explains: "We used some found sounds that we recorded at the amusement park itself. The park’s in the record!"

It’s these kinds of rusty, creaky pleasures that chiefly inspire both Rabwin and fellow multi-instrumentalist Sean Ogilvie (keys, guitar, accordion, vocals), who borrow their band’s name from the now Fisherman’s Wharf–based museum they used to visit when they lived down here a few years ago.

"We love to make a song that has its own soul, just like the machines they have over there at the museum," Ogilvie says of their tunesmithery, the products of which could be likened to a delicate Joseph Cornell assemblage. The orchestrion of the album’s title is, according to Ogilvie, "like a drum machine," except it runs on air power through paper rolls, which gives it an incidental quality that — combined with its "wayward" state — suggested to them a "wandering piece of equipment walking around, gathering little interesting tidbits into itself."

It’s an image reminiscent of freewheeling Japanese video game Katamari Damacy, yet it accurately reflects their songwriting and recording process: obviously Rabwin and Ogilvie aren’t robots or magical stuff-accumuutf8g orbs, but in the process of recording, the two would gradually incorporate new and odd bits of instrumentation — pianos, organs, et al. — to flesh out the basic tunes that they workshopped together. Once the basic tracks were laid down in their cobbled-together home studio, Rabwin and Ogilvie brought in strings and recorded drum tracks to unite the various instrumental adornments at play, pairing in serendipitous fashion the old with the new: for instance, vocal harmonies and a Mellotron choir, a singing saw with a thereminlike synth effect, and acoustic and electric guitar.

As old-timey as the frontmen’s tastes might be, The Wayward Orchestrion feels deeply contemporary throughout — sincere in its fragility, and lustrous even as it’s shielded from the brightness of the sun. One of its most affecting tracks is "Somehow Bound," on which strings and xylophone plinks buoy a lovely, sad, pink parade float of a song along. "Fits & Starts," meanwhile, is a wistful stroll through a pedal-steel sunset, exemplifying the kind of huddled, intimate feeling characterizing much of the disc. With the help of a backing band, the live rendering of their musical snow globe takes on a more rock ‘n’ roll quality, even as it often entails playing two instruments at once for a few of the musicians.

This spring tour marks the group’s first significant eastward trip, and they seem pretty darn excited at the prospect of taking their collection of keyed instruments and found sounds out on the road. Musée Mécanique sound like they’re soundtracking the eventual re-opening of the market for hot air balloons, top hats, and groomed mustaches. They shine quiet wonder through an eerie, nostalgic lens of quivering saws and keyboards, all the while providing Sufjan Stevens with formidable competition in the "Best Baroque Folksters" category. (Michael Harkin)

MUSÉE MÉCANIQUE

With Here Here and Winterbirds

Thurs/27, 8 p.m., $8

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com

Fresh flowers, warm waters

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

When you talk about performers with unusual career arcs, Charles Lloyd is up there with the Scott Walkers and Alex Chiltons of the world. Lloyd experienced almost unheard-of commercial success for a jazz saxophonist during the late ’60s, only to practically disappear for the next two decades. Then in 1989, he reemerged on Germany’s ECM label and entered the steadiest, most productive phase of his career, a phase that is still in progress as he celebrates his 70th birthday this year.

Lloyd’s best-known album remains 1966’s Forest Flower: Live at Monterey (Atlantic), which sold over 1 million copies in its day, a now-inconceivable feat for any saxophonist who doesn’t play soft-porno-soundtrack ballads. Lloyd and his quartet, which included soon-to-be-stars Keith Jarrett on piano and Jack DeJohnette on drums, managed this crossover success without dumbing down their music or resorting to fusion — which, after all, didn’t really exist yet in 1966. Their music was basically a kinder, gentler version of John Coltrane’s classic quartet sound: searching, occasionally Eastern-tinged modal jazz with spiritual overtones. Where Coltrane’s playing tended to be harsh and severe, Lloyd’s approach was relaxed and unhurried, with a softer-edged, gently babbling delivery. During their brief but successful run, Lloyd’s group released albums with swirly psychedelic cover art and hippie-ish titles like Journey Within and Love-In (both Atlantic, 1967), connecting with diverse, rock-friendly audiences in the days when jazz’s market share was rapidly eroding.

And then? It’s hard to say exactly. Jarrett and DeJohnette went on to play with Miles Davis’s early ’70s electric bands before pursuing successful solo careers, while Lloyd took up residence in the proverbial "Where are they now?" file. Musically, the ’70s was mostly a lost decade for Lloyd: his albums from this era — all long out of print — are written off as new age–leaning mood music or, in the case of 1971’s Warm Waters (Kapp), ill-fated forays into pop and rock. During this era, Lloyd retreated to Big Sur and got into transcendental meditation, which fittingly coincided with involvement with Beach Boys — and fellow TM advocates Mike Love and Al Jardine. (Lloyd even lent his horn playing to the band’s 15 Big Ones and M.I.U. Album [both Brother/Reprise, 1976 and 1978], and several Beach Boys appeared on Warm Waters.) Whatever else might have happened during those dark, confusing times would surely make for interesting reading, but details — sordid or not — are scarce.

Since coming out of retirement in the late ’80s, Lloyd has undergone an unlikely transition from mystic and ’60s relic to upstanding jazz citizen and elder statesman of the tenor saxophone — though he also plays flute and tarogato. His post-comeback recordings have included younger stars such as pianists Geri Allen and Brad Mehldau as well as august veterans like bassist Dave Holland and drummers Billy Hart and Billy Higgins. Meanwhile, his tenure with ECM has yielded 13 albums during this time, ranging from small group recordings in the vein of his late ’60s music to more far-flung efforts such as 2006’s Sangam, a live trio recording with Indian percussionist Zakir Hussain and drummer Eric Harland. The latter full-length includes some of Lloyd’s most fiery playing in recent years, and indeed, if there is one complaint about any of Lloyd’s post-comeback material, it’s that it’s sometimes been a bit too mellow and placid.

His newest album, Rabo de Nube, is a live disc highlighting his current band with Harland on drums, Jason Moran on piano, and Reuben Rogers on bass, all who are roughly half Lloyd’s age. It’s a good combination, because these younger musicians push Lloyd, while at the same time his playing brings a stateliness and an overall presence that is hard to find among more youthful players, however skilled they might be. Lloyd has never been known as a technical virtuoso, but there is a hard-won emotional depth to his work. You hesitate to call any living, breathing musician part of a so-called dying breed — it’s just not a nice thing to say — but Lloyd is at least representative of a different era, and opportunities to experience that era are getting harder to come across these days.

CHARLES LLOYD NEW QUARTET

Fri/28, 8 p.m., $25–$70

Herbst Theatre

401 Van Ness, SF

(866) 920-JAZZ

www.sfjazz.org

Magazinester

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Vanity Fair would like to know: "Who Says Women Aren’t Funny?" Magazinester would like to know: "Who Says Women of Color Aren’t Funny?" Granted, Wanda Sykes and Maya Rudolph represent. But why no Margaret Cho? Also, "Who Says a Story Like This Makes Up for Vanity Fair Saying Women Aren’t Funny in the First Place?," seeing as how the entire cover package is a response to Christopher Hitchens’s 2007 essay, "Why Women Aren’t Funny," for the same magazine.

Beefcake competing in this month’s sultry man-stare contest: George Clooney (Esquire) and Eric Bana (GQ). Does Daniel Craig on the cover of British rag Arena count?

Random quote from another British import, Mojo, on the subject of Harry Nilsson’s Nilsson Schmilsson: "Arrogant proof of Harry’s belief in his own genius."

ReadyMade offers tips on "How to Mount Heavy Stuff," but can’t resist snarking on velvet Elvis paintings. Another feature challenges three designers to redesign an Ikea bookshelf into something less grossly prefab-looking, including a pretty nifty credenza.

The American version of OK! promises a peek at Britney Spears’s home life — yikes! — but reveals little beyond quotes from anonymous "frequent visitors." Spears is apparently a neat freak who "loves rearranging her furniture and fluffing up her pillows." Shocking! Other features in this issue include the expected "Who Wore It Better?" and "What Were They Thinking?" fashion spreads, as well as mad doting on the lavish lives of celebrity offspring like Violet Affleck, Kingston Rossdale, and Brangelina’s assorted shorties. Clearly, the market demands a mag called Hollywood Tots. Coming soon, no doubt.

Karaoke revolution

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>a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW The radio at my neighborhood Laundromat is a source of pop music melancholy. That a-ha song "Take on Me" gets me misty while folding socks — damn it.

Something similar happened when I first saw British artist Phil Collins’s captivating Smiths karaoke video project, dünya dinlemiyor (Turkish for "the world won’t listen") at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2006. The piece documents Turkish Smiths fans performing versions of the band’s classics in front of high-keyed landscape photo backdrops — many depicting sites far more tropical than Istanbul. Throughout the run of the exhibition, the cozy projection room was packed with people who stayed far longer than they would for more blatantly arty video pieces. They laughed with empathy — and perhaps to deflect the mix of emotions roused by their own powerful memory triggers.

Dünya dinlemiyor was just one-third of a recently completed trilogy by Collins: to bracket his shoot in Istanbul, he also conducted karaoke sessions at Bogotá, Colombia, and two Indonesian cities. All three were recently united as a triptych at the Dallas Museum of Art. That Texas metropolis — site of the 1992 concert DVD Morrissey: Live in Dallas — is a long way from here. But the monograph produced for the exhibition, Phil Collins: the world won’t listen (Yale University Press, 132 pages, $45), serves as something akin to an edifying concert brochure. This is particularly true of a historical essay (regarding the Smiths oppositional relationship to Thatcherism and corporate label hegemony) by music critic Simon Reynolds.

In addition to Reynolds’s observations, Phil Collins: the world won’t listen includes still photos from videos, related imagery, two other illuminating essays, and a particularly engaging interview with Collins. "Karaoke is a form of joyful treason in which you quite materially supplant your idol," he tells the book’s editor, Dallas Museum curator Suzanne Weaver. Her conversation with the artist illuminates his interest in mediated subjects, and positions his Smiths project as an anti–American Idol. "Every single season [American Idol] is about complete conformity around the idea of the songbook," he observes. Collins’ Smiths project shatters that conformity, presenting an international range of people swayed by the idiosyncratic, outsider, emo aura of, say, "The Boy with the Thorn in His Side."

Critic Bruce Hainley links American Idol to the George W. Bush administration in a manner that — fittingly, considering that the Smiths are a touchstone of Collins’s project — combines longing with astute social observation. "What does it take to be a celebrity (not a star), circa 2007?" he asks, and then provides the American Idol–inspired answer: "Twelve weeks, and consumers voting with more gusto than they have voted in any recent American presidential election." Just as insistently, Hainley points to the crush-generating erotic lure of pop music collateral, citing a shirtless Joe Dallesandro on the cover of the first Smiths album, as well as the camera’s apparent lust for a Smiths fan in a red T-shirt in Collins’s Bogotá-set video. Next, Liz Kotz provides descriptive insight into Collins’s other works, which subvert standard practices of popular media in their depictions of Kosovo refugees, Iraqi citizens, and people emotionally scarred by their appearance on reality TV.

Because musical performance is so central to Collins’s work, it’s a shame that this slip-cased volume doesn’t include a DVD with a few song snippets and examples of the similarities and differences between each national version of the project. But there are compensations: the book does sport images of the Smiths’ set lists, an unauthenticated 1981 handwritten note from Morrissey, and Hainley’s comic acknowledgment of Collins’s pop music namesake: "Why not Genesis karaoke?"

Positive space

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> a&eletters@sfbg.com

In 2003, filmmaker and CalArts professor Thom Andersen completed Los Angeles Plays Itself, an ambitious and inventive undertaking that combines clips from a library’s worth of different movies set in Los Angeles into a long, discursive, highly opinionated film. Divided into three parts, this treatise presents an intriguing account of the numerous ways Los Angeles has been cinematically conceived, represented, and perceived. Through the cameras of thousands of filmmakers, Hollywood’s neighbor has been viewed either in accordance with or (more often) at odds with its particular geography and range of architectural styles.

The German artist-filmmaker Heinz Emigholz is attempting a similar spatial exploration — one that started long before Andersen’s, in 1993, and one that continues today. The five films in the Pacific Film Archive’s Heinz Emigholz: Architecture as Autobiography are part of a larger "Photography and Beyond" project Emigholz has been working on for the last 24 years. This handful of works captures constructions by important but somewhat neglected architects of the 20th century. One aim of Emigholz’s endeavor is to provide an alternative kind of biography: a biography in which knowledge about the architect is derived directly from his or her creations.

All five of the cinematic explorations of space in "Architecture as Autobiography" are presented starkly, so that, as Emigholz explained to Siegfried Zelinski in an interview, "The eye reverts back to what it always was: an extension and interface to the brain, and one that needs no codes. It thinks and feels at the same time."

In Emigholz’s movies, there is no voice-over narration to share background facts about architects, their aesthetics, and the reasons for their historical importance. Instead, intertitles on the screen inform the viewer about the names of the buildings, their locations, when they were built, and when they were photographed. This information is juxtaposed with long, medium, and close static shots of the buildings, accompanied by sound from the locations.

Described this plainly, Emigholz’s films might sound boring. But watching them proves to be a surprising and fascinating experience. In Sullivan’s Banks (1993-2000), the long succession of shots depicting banks that the American architect Louis H. Sullivan was commissioned to build from 1906 to 1920 slowly allows us, the viewers, to make certain connections. Through observing Sullivan’s banks in their surroundings (from various exterior angles) and in the context of their use, we come to understand his intention of harmoniously uniting function and form. Upon entering one of Sullivan’s imposing, cathedral-like buildings, you feel like you’re in a serious institution — one where your finances are absolutely secure.

Similarly, in Maillart’s Bridges (2001), the quiet repetition of photographs featuring bridges designed and built between 1910 and 1935 by the Swiss civil engineer Robert Maillart points to his obsessive experimentation with arches. In looking at Maillart’s curved constructions, one can’t help but marvel at their flowing shapes and forms, and also at the discrete ways in which they mingle with their natural environs.

This concern is even more evident in Goff in the Desert (2002-2003), where the filmmaker unobtrusively records — repeatedly — buildings that American architect Bruce Goff created from the 1920s through the 1970s. Goff’s attempts at simuutf8g the environments around his buildings yield imaginative constructions. Multilevel room divisions and novel uses of circle formations are two characteristics of his unique approach to spatial perception.

The residences in Schindler’s Houses (2007) — including one owned and occupied by none other than Los Angeles Plays Itself filmmaker Thom Andersen — are less preoccupied with fitting within a broader physical environment and more concerned with the harmony of their interiors. In the process of observing the ornament-free constructions that the Austrian American architect Rudolph Schindler built in Los Angeles from 1921 to 1952, Emigholz reveals the architect’s insistence on creating spacious, breezy, and minimal interiors for outwardly bulky houses.

The relative freedom Emigholz allows the viewer in terms of contemplation is one major reason among many that give his unusual films intrigue. Emigholz’s filmmaking technique moves several steps beyond — or in a different direction from — Los Angeles Plays Itself‘s concerns regarding spatial conception, representation, and perception. It does so while remaining true to one filmmaker’s particular perspective of how we experience and understand space.

"I believe that everyone perceives space differently, and that art and structure arise out of the perception of these nuances," Emigholz has said. In his films, this idea takes a number of different forms. Through his own understanding of space, Emigholz interacts with and presents other people’s conceptions and perceptions of it. In the process, he also creates his own artful cinematic structures — films that stimulate our understanding of space while in a sense simultaneously creating and navigating a visual maze. Mind boggling, isn’t it?

HEINZ EMIGHOLZ: ARCHITECTURE AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Through April 17

$5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive Theater

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Patty meltdown

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› superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO Clear the runway! Clear the runway! She’s got a Target elastic waistband and too many Walgreens L’Oreal home highlights in her shag — and she’s about to crash-land drunk off her Lucite Shoe Pavillion fuck-me pumps and into my $30 Blue Lotus powertini, with guarana extract, caffeine, taurine, and B vitamins 3, 5, 6, and 12. Somebody call Grey’s Anatomy on her jiggly, glitter-thonged ass, stat. Save me, Dr. McCreamy! Save my exorbitant cocktail!

Nightlife 911!!!

Hi. I’m writing to you from the bowels of underground club connoisseur hell, a.k.a. a gay bar in Las Vegas on St. Patrick’s Day during spring break. Try not to imagine it. On the giant video screen: a 2005 frat-boy rave remix of the Cranberries’ "Zombie." In the glass tanks lining the dance floor: live piranhas. Streaming through the door: distressed embroidered jeans and bleached-out cocka’dos. Kill me.

"What did you expect?" Hunky Beau reminds me not-so-gently. "This city has the freakin’ Liberace Museum. Drop the snob act." So I take some heart in the equality of it all. The Vegas homo-horror crowd out by the airport’s no different from the straight-when-sober one thronging the Strip, except the lesbians are real and the other women aren’t. Or rather, they’re 50 percent less real. Surgery is confusing! It’s like silicone algebra. And don’t let’s even glance at Vegas menswear, ‘k? When did Affliction team up with Hurley and Crocs to make Jams?

Other than the occasional squawk of stale reggaetón emanating from pastel Hummers on West Tropicana — not to mention a slew of rowdies screeching "The Star-Spangled Banner" throughout New York New York (never forget!) — the charge-card cocktails, Timba-hop tunes, and space-age bachelor ultralounge aesthetic of omnisexual fantasyland are bottle-serviced with a splash of Burner du Soleil myshtique. In Las Vegas, the apex of a corker evening is a Coyote Ugly boobarella with red contact lenses and vampire fangs writhing on a dry-iced bar to DJ Tiësto. The only thing missing, really, is a topless raver girl revue with dildo glowsticks and peekaboo JNCO jeans. I’m copyrighting this idea immediately.

Everything’s slathered in pimps-and-ho cheese and infernal strobing ultraviolet beams, grinding my delicate complexion into hamburger. Is this what you want, America? Awful-looking skin?

Like Manhattan and Miami — where three-quarters of San Francisco’s dance music movers-and-shakers are currently scratching their bikini waxes at the bubbly-drenched, forever-2001 Winter Music Conference — Vegas has now officially Disneyfied the salacious grit from my fond partial-memories of nightlife there, on and off the Strip. Bring on the recession, darlings! I’m all for having wild fun — this, after all, is how a majority of Midwesterners will be introduced to club culture — and I realize that a vibrant and shocking underground depends on a slick surface limelight to tunnel beneath. But please: what happens in Las Vegas, stay there.

Lady Go Boom Enough grumpy, let’s party! You may remember the excitably gorgeous Lady Tigra as one half of ’80s Miami Bass female electro-rap phenom L’Trimm, whose sub-woofin’ 1988 hymn to cracked windshields, "Cars That Go Boom" (Hot Productions), raised the fluorescent-suspendered rafters of club kids nationwide at the time. I was there, and Tigra was fierce. Now she’s back — grrrl! — with a slinky-nasty new album, Please Mr. Boombox (High Score), and a savvy plan to retake the alternative nightlife spotlight by teaming up with the cheekiest promoters on the West Coast. Fresh from her balls-out show at Los Angeles’s latest actually great party, Mustache Mondays, she’ll sink her claws into your dancey-pants with gender-bending vocalist and performance artiste extraordinaire Jer Ber Jones and the ever-beaky DJ Chicken at Cafe Du Nord on March 28. Her warped OMD-sampling jam "A Moon Song," especially, has been freaking the red zones in my headphones lately. And please note that I have not made a single tragic Tatiana the Tiger joke in this catty plug, mostly because I wish I’d mauled that hot dead Indian boy first and I’m still bitter. So there.

LADY TIGRA

Fri/28, 8:30 p.m., $15

Cafe Du Nord

2170 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

www.cafedunord.com, www.myspace.com/theladytigra

Teacher’s bet

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I have a bit of a moral dilemma. I am a submissive. Sometimes I correspond with, or even meet up with, people I find on the Internet for no-strings-attached fun. I always feel like I’m in control of my life, even when I’m chained up and blindfolded, and I think that it’s a healthy (enough) expression of my sexuality. However, I am also about to start training to be a teacher of kids under age 10.

Obviously, the two parts of my life have no relation to each other. But is it possible to pursue interests that could varyingly be described as "niche" or "perverted," and at the same time be a responsible caregiver to children? Do you think it is possible for my private life not to get in the way of my professional development?

Love,

Tied up in Knots

Dear Knots:

Of course I do. I’d better. I’m a retired pervert (I have no time!), and still writing this column and consorting with every stripe of (harmless) freak you can or can’t imagine. If I thought that knowing the people I know or admitting in public to having belonged to clubs which would now no longer have me as a member posed any sort of threat to my children — ever! — you better believe I’d be out of Pervertville and living in the suburbs wearing those weird sneaker-loafers (snoafers) that normal moms wear before you could say "I shop at Talbots." Happily, I don’t have to. There’s nothing about your hobby which should impede your ability to be the bestest teacher of little kids you can be. There’s nothing wrong with your hobby! Your question does set off some alarm bells, but I have no question that you can be not only a good person, but a self-directed one, fully in control — of your life, if not your limbs — while still enjoying being caught in any number of compromising positions.

What does worry me is the online hooking-up for activities that leave you helpless to defend yourself. I understand that some might find the very phrase "helpless to defend yourself" kind of hot (hell, I find the phrase kind of hot), and I’m also aware that real life is not an episode of Law and Order: Sleazy Exploitative Plotlines Unit. But seriously, I would not let strangers tie me up, and I wouldn’t mind if you didn’t, either. If you live in a major metropolitan area, you can join a club or take classes or otherwise meet people who would love to tie you up, and, even more important, meet other people who know those people. The chance that any of these Internet strangers might wish you harm is admittedly slight, but there are bad people in this world. Please try not to meet any.

The other thing about strangers, of course, is that you don’t know very much about them, including where they work and whom they know, which brings us to our next area of worry: how to keep your two worlds from ever, ever meeting. I’m imagining the principal at your new school arriving, toy bag in hand, to administer a good caning to that girl he met on the Internet (Or are you a guy? It doesn’t matter either way.) That scenario is far-fetched, granted, but you’ll be wanting — needing, actually — to keep your two lives rigorously separate from now on, if you aren’t already. I said your personal proclivities should not affect your ability to be a great teacher, and indeed they should not (if you find yourself so drawn to the alleged Dark Side that you can’t get it together to sleep or do lesson plans or get up for work in the morning, we’ll have another talk), but that depends utterly upon your ability to keep your secret self secret.

I am not a huge fan of the deep dark secret any more that I am big on urging people to blab to Aunt Babs at Sunday supper about their previous night’s exploration of scrotal inflation and anal electrodes: to everything its proper time and place, I say. You, though, are going to have to learn to be spectacularly discreet. Perverts are not a protected class, and people with little exposure to these things haven’t the faintest idea how to separate the lurid and usually deadly "whips and chains" depicted on Law and Order from the usual run of kink-sex reality, which is slightly less dangerous than golf thanks to fewer lightning strikes. Should they discover that one of those whips-and-chains people is — gasp — teaching the children, I can assure you that they will not be interested in becoming educated about it. They will be interested in having you drawn and quartered, and not in a fun way. Go ahead with your plans, but do shut up about it.

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.

Where’s Otto?

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>a&eletters@sfbg.com

ISBN REAL Graphic novels, obviously, aren’t just movies with a lot of missing frames. In the hands of artists like David B. or Craig Thompson, the elastic potential of their subjects, and of the panels that hold them, is realized in a manner entirely at odds with the medium of film.

From the perspective of screenwriters, however — particularly ones beaten repeatedly over the head with the knotty stick of the studio system — that’s nothing that can’t be worked out over a cup of coffee. More and more frustrated writers and directors are reviving their dead film and television projects in the form of comics and graphic novels, either as a last, affordable option or as a way of seeing an original vision make it through the production process intact. Joss Whedon could follow his and not the WB’s muse with the illustrated-only eighth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and certainly no one was knocking down Richard Kelly’s door to film the six-part prequel to Southland Tales.

Alex Cox, writer and director of the 1984 cult classic Repo Man, also has seen the light. His sequel to that film, Waldo’s Hawaiian Holiday (Gestalt Publishing, 164 pages, $19.95), is finally coming out, after more than a decade in the drawer, as a graphic novel. The script, written for the screen in the mid-1990s, was presented unsuccessfully to Universal and then later was the source material for an unfinished independent venture. So Cox posted the screenplay on his Web site, as well as dozens of others he has written or cowritten, with the open offer of a yearlong license to anyone interested in making a film.

Comics artist Chris Bones responded with a graphic novel proposal. The finished version, with artistic contributions by Justin Randall, is a richly drawn and smartly assembled festival of scuzz.

Waldo, as one might expect, answers the questions Repo Man raised with equivocation and deferment, and adds a couple of revelations that are quite cool if I understand them right.

You’ll recall that Repo Man left our hero, Otto, as he was shooting off into space in a glowing green 1964 Chevy Malibu. What we are kinda informed of right off the bat in the sequel is that Otto, now calling himself Waldo (presumably in a legal sidestep), has come back from a 10-year stint on Mars, maybe, though he thinks he’s only been gone for the night. Expecting to find his numskull parents where he left them on the couch, he shows up at their door only to discover he owes rent to a couple of bachelors (one "confirmed") now living there in meticulously rendered squalor.

Waldo more or less shrugs off his situation and proceeds to hop from one doomed job to the next, each of them overseen by the same mysterious man, though under different names. All the while, he abuses the trusting nature of the Russian Shopping Network and makes several attempts to use free tickets to Hawaii he earned by sitting through a real estate pitch. (I’m still not sure what was glowing in the Malibu’s trunk in Cox’s movie.)

Of course, there are more aliens and whatnot, but the strangest thing is Otto-now-Waldo’s change in temperament. The edgy, snotty Emilio Estevez of Repo Man is nowhere in sight. Waldo is a gentle, courteous kind of punk who says things like, "I’ll just redouble my efforts … buy a printer, get these job applications out, find another job ASAP." Waldo must have learned the word "redouble" in space, where he also picked up a considered cheeriness that could have been mistaken for maturity if it weren’t so apparent that Cox is up to something.

It helps to know that Cox is not one to shy away from the polemical, particularly at the expense of economic imperialism. The introduction to X-Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker (Soft Skull Press, 304 pages, $17.95), an upcoming book about his experiences as a filmmaker, is only a few angry pen strokes shy of a screed, and his 1987 film Walker lampooned — not very elegantly, really — the 19th-century American mercenary William Walker’s overthrow of the Nicaraguan government. Amongst Cox’s movies, Three Businessmen, a 1998 love child of the gospel according to Luke and Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), presents the closest echoes of Waldo. Its characters share Waldo’s aimless, profligate compliance with the dictates of modern capitalism.

And that’s really what Waldo’s Hawaiian Adventure is about, probably.

Would you finance that movie?

“Cariño: Economy of the Heart”

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PREVIEW There is something to be said for staying put. For one thing, you become part of a community. Anne Bluethenthal may have grown up in Greensboro, N.C. — not the easiest place when she was a kid if you were shy and Jewish — but she has been living and working in the Mission for more than 20 years. In one of her earliest pieces in San Francisco, Fish Can Sing, she paid tribute to Milly, the girl who walked away when the other kids threw stones at her. When Bluethenthal posits that the personal is political, she knows whereof she speaks. All the work she creates with Anne Bluethenthal & Dancers comes out of a deep womanly awareness of what it means to be a partner, a mother, a daughter, a friend, a female. Her collaborators, her dancers, the people who inspire her are (mostly) women — some gay, some not. Increasingly she has embraced and been embraced by women artists from non-Western cultures. Who has not embraced her are the foundations. She doesn’t fit their criteria. She is not edgy; she is not avant-garde; she is not political (in the most commonly understood way). She is outside the latest trend. Her voice is soft; her voice is quiet. But she won’t go away despite the reality that putting together shows is a constant uphill struggle. She manages because enough people believe in her work; people like Laura Elaine Ellis and Frances Sedayo, who have danced with her for years. Is Bluethenthal a "bleeding heart liberal"? You bet she is, and in Cariño: Economy of the Heart, you can count on an outpouring. "Cariño" is a term of endearment used between friends, family, and lovers. It fits.
Anne Bluethenthal & Dancers March 21-23 and March 27–29, 8 p.m. March 23, 6 p.m. Project Artaud Theatre, 450 Florida, SF. $25 (March 27, pay what you can). 1-800-838-3006, 706-9535, www.abdproductions.org, www.brownpapertickets.com.

Jewish Music Festival

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PREVIEW Few genre-themed music festivals enjoy as much freedom in programming as Berkeley’s Jewish Music Festival, now in its 23rd year. For who’s to say what the criteria are? Jewish music expresses joy and pathos, success and failure, the thrill of adventure and the solace of tradition, assimilation, ostracism, whimsy, and gravity, as much as music — and only music — can. And so goes the festival, staking out its territory with challenging and alluring forays all over the Jewish cultural map.

Klezmatics frontman Frank London opens the proceedings with "A Night in the Old Marketplace," a newly commissioned song cycle based on a Yiddish play penned in 1907 by I.L. Peretz. Of course, if Berkeley is the birthplace of slow food, you might call "The Ark: Cyclical Rituals," the most ambitious program of the festival, "fast music." In the space of a week, nine notable performers, including London and influential Bay Area composers John Schott and Jewlia Eisenberg, will board a creative Noah’s Ark, devising a collaborative debut on themes of ritual and tradition.

Two more sure bets: violinist Kaila Flexer and oud player Gari Hegedus of the acoustic ensemble Teslim play Middle Eastern and Sephardic traditional music with understated mastery of melody and ornamentation. And, straight out of the promised land of New York City, the punk-rock klezmer band Golem expands the limits of the shtetl songbook with show-stopping stage presence and a remarkable grasp of Yiddishkeit.

JEWISH MUSIC FESTIVAL Fri/22–Sun/30. (510) 848-0237, visit www.jewishmusicfestival.org for specific times and locations.

Simbad

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PREVIEW He’s originally from France, currently living in East London, and his debut is out on a Swedish label — and his productions are just as cosmopolitan. Simbad, né Stanislas Renouf, may just be coming up on the underground dance radar with productions ranging from majestic house with Robert Owens to heavy broken beats with Steelo, but he has been doing his best to ignore genres and focus on "quality booty music" for almost a decade.

The just-released Supersonic Revelation for Stockholm’s Raw Fusion Records does a solid job of capturing Simbad’s various moods. The multi-instrumentalist has almost as many styles as he does nom de tunes and imprints where they’ve found a home: Mowgly for Freerange, Loose Ensemble for Foundation, and, together with long-time partner Fred McQuinn, Twitch, Heal, and Marathon Men for Earth Project, Key Recordings, and Chillifunk, respectively. In addition to the nuanced electronica and deep house tendencies explored on the 2005 Marathon Men album, Blessings (Chillifunk), Simbad’s solo effort includes a heavy dose of soul, as on the title track with Abdul Shyllon, with its quavering, pitch-bent synth line, easygoing hand claps, and multitracked vocals verging on doowop. Woe to the music store clerk who has to chose a genre for shelving this wide-ranging collection: just like his favorite type of party, Simbad’s productions are truly many-hued. "I love it when the crowd is mixed actually. That’s where it’s the best!" the DJ explained via e-mail, just after praising Japan for its outstanding clubs with their somewhat homogenous crowds. "Our Je Ne Sais Quoi party in London, the legendary Raw Fusion party in Stockholm, Turntables on the Hudson in NYC," he raves. "All nations represented and all booties mixed together equals the best vibes. Just bring your smile down and be open — your ass will follow!"

SIMBAD

Fri/21, 10 p.m., $15. Pink, 2925 16th St., SF. (415) 431-8889, www.pinksf.com

The Duchess Of Langeais

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REVIEW Acclaimed director Jacques Rivette is still at the top of his game with his latest film, adapted from an Honoré de Balzac novella. The Duchess of Langeais is an opulent period drama that doesn’t feel like one — its story is fresh and alive, and has contemporary resonance. Guillaume Depardieu (Gerard’s son) gives a winning performance as the handsome general Armand de Montriveau. Humiliated when he’s refused by the Duchess (played flawlessly by Jeanne Balibar), it is only when seeking his revenge that he awakens her love. Photographed by William Lubtchansky, Duchess easily has to be one of the most beautiful pictures so far this year. With the richest art direction and wardrobe the genre has to offer, Rivette’s new wave sensibility shines through. Existential wit and love à la de Sade bring to life Paris of the 1820s, a juicy setting riddled with hypocrisy and vanity. Duchess evokes two films from 1975: Françoise Truffaut’s The Story of Adele H and Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. Bombarded as we are with blockbuster-style films that are about as personal as a box of cereal, the release of this film is notable. Told almost exclusively in cool blues, Rivette holds up the mirror to our Bonaparte-esque swollen faces, revealing decadence-gone-awry results that wouldn’t be out of place in the 21st century.

THE DUCHESS OF LANGEAIS Opens Fri/21 in Bay Area theaters.

Ace invader

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GUITAR HERO Here’s a star-spangled way to start a conversation: "Hi, Ace Frehley calling!" The 51-year-old Frehley, a.k.a. KISS’s guitar-slinging "Space Ace," telephoned me from his Westchester, N.Y. studio to discuss his current tour — which kicked off Feb. 20, the day after I spoke with him — and his still untitled new album, his first solo effort since 1989’s Trouble Walkin’ (Megaforce).

SFBG What’s the new album like?

ACE FREHLEY Everyone I talk to about my solo records almost unanimously cites the first [1978 Casablanca release Ace Frehley] as their favorite. I’ve been kind of studying all the different elements that are on that record, and trying to remember the mindset I was in. I’ve been pulling out old lyrics that I haven’t looked at in years. Some of the tracks on the record are gonna be from 10, 15 years ago, and some are as recent as two or three weeks ago. Sometimes when I get an idea, the lyrics come to me so quickly, it’s like someone’s beaming them into my head. Like there’s an alien ship up in the sky beaming me lyrics, and I can’t even write ’em as fast as I’m getting ’em. Other days, it’s like pulling hen’s teeth.

SFBG What can fans expect from your live show?

AF Some good rock and roll! My guitar will be blowing up, my light-up guitar will be on tour with me for "New York Groove," and maybe we’ll pull out some other surprises.

SFBG What are you most looking forward to with this tour?

AF Probably just getting out there and seeing my fans. It’s been way too long. And doing it clean and sober — it’s nice to wake up in the hotel and remember what I did the night before, or a week before.

SFBG What have you been listening to lately?

AF I don’t really have time. People ask me about television shows — I never watch TV. If I’m not in the studio, if it’s a nice day I’m on my Harley-Davidson. Usually when I’m in the car, to be honest, a lot of the time I don’t even listen to music. I like the quiet because it allows me to think. Sometimes I’ll just be driving and I’ll have to pull over, because I get a great idea and I have to write it down. Really the only other stuff I do, when I’m not in the studio — I like to paint, I like to do graphics on the computer. Maybe by the end of the year I can put together some type of art show, let the world in on some of my graphic art. I’d actually like to do an animation and put a score to it.

SFBG You’re known for being a huge science fiction fan. What are some of your favorite sci-fi films?

AF [Thoughtful pause.] Forbidden Planet [1956] is one. The Thing — I like both versions [1951 and 1982]. Kurt Russell is great in the newer version. Another great one is Invasion of the Body Snatchers [1956]. In black and white. I’ll never forget the look on Kevin McCarthy’s face when he realized his girlfriend had turned. That fear. The way the seed pods opened up and the bodies came out with the foam — I know it was just laundry detergent, but it looked great.

SFBG What draws you to science fiction as a genre?

AF Probably because I believe in extraterrestrials. The more we study the universe, the more we realize how minuscule our planet is in the scope of things. It’s completely absurd to believe that we’re the only intelligent life in the universe — our galaxy alone is immense. And there are millions of galaxies.

SFBG If you had the chance to travel in outer space, would you?

AF In a heartbeat! You wouldn’t have to ask me twice. (Cheryl Eddy)

ACE FREHLEY

Fri/21, 9 pm, $28.50

Grand Ballroom, Regency Center

1290 Sutter, SF

www.goldenvoice.com, www.ticketmaster.com

Hot fusion

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If you’ve done any traveling at all, you know about Peruvian dance and music. You will have seen the small groups of black-caped musicians (occasionally accompanied by dancers) playing pan pipes anywhere from Tokyo to New York City, Copenhagen to Atlanta. But there is another aspect of this country’s culture, one that originated halfway around the world. Early in their sixteenth century conquests, Peru’s Spanish colonial powers imported slaves from Africa to work the silver mines. But with the abolition of slavery in 1854, the thriving Afro-Peruvian culture gradually started melting away. By the mid-twentieth century it was composed of fading memories, dances half-remembered, and musical instruments in disrepair. One was the cajon, today known from flamenco dancing; a wooden box Afro-Peruvians used for percussion instead of the forbidden drum. One man, Ronaldo Campos, realized what a tragedy the loss of these cultural traditions would be. In 1969 he founded Perú Negro (now run by his son), and with the help of ethnologists they began to save and revitalize Peru’s African heritage. If you have seen the Bay Area’s El Tunante perform Peru’s national dance, the zamacueca (now often called the marinera), at the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival, you’ll have had a taste of how European, Indian, and African cultures have mixed in Peru. Perú Negro’s one-night-only concert presents a collection of dances, including the percussive zapateos; the popular zamacueca, which is danced with handkerchiefs; the landó, originally from Angola but entering Peru by way of Brazil; and the toro mato, which mocks the stiff-boned formality of the European minuet. Thematically, the dances both lament and celebrate the slaves’ daily working and living conditions. In addition to the guitar, you may also hear quijadas, or jaw bones, and cajitas, small box drums worn around the neck. (Rita Felciano)

PERÚ NEGRO

Thurs/20, 8 p.m., $22–$42

Zellerbach Hall

UC Berkeley, Lower Sproul Plaza (near Bancroft at Telegraph), Berk.

(510) 642-9988

www.calperfs.berkeley.edu

Taking flight

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Even for a company as committed to keeping on the move as ODC/Dance, debuting five world premieres in two programs is pushing the envelope of what is creatively possible — not only for in-house choreographers Brenda Way and KT Nelson, but also for the performers who have to learn the stuff.

ODC’s dancers are up to the challenge. They are fast; they are athletic; and they luxuriate in their own physicality. They are gorgeous as individuals and as an ensemble. Daniel Santos speeds up a turn as if he’s being unspooled. In one second, Anne Zivolich curls up on the floor, seemingly to take a nap; in the next, she pounces into a partner’s arms. Private Freeman’s barrel turn impresses, but he’s riveting even doing something as simple as leading a snaking line of walkers. ODC’s resident poet, however, is Andrea Flores, who has a lush physicality and impeccable lines. There’s a hidden reserve about her that keeps you wondering whether she knows something you don’t.

The March 13 gala opening of "ODC/Dance Downtown" presented two of Way’s three premieres: Origins of Flight and Unintended Consequences: A Meditation, as well as Nelson’s 1998 Walk before Talk. Since Nelson has become a major company voice, it would have been good to have one of her premieres included on opening night. "Downtown"’s other premieres include Nelson’s A Walk in the Woods and Hunting and Gathering, and Way’s Life Is a House.

Set to an oddly collaged selection of music by baroque composers Arcangelo Corelli, Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, and Schmelzer’s student Heinrich Biber, the high-energy Flight was an expansive, fairly inviting exploration of one of dance’s fundamental units, the duet. It reveled in the richness of the body’s expressive capability and, by implication, in the myriad ways we relate to each other. But Flight could have used some restraint. Some of the gestural decorations looked overdone, like too much lace on a frock coat.

Way started out with a basic man-woman duo (Flores and Santos) in side-by-side, front-facing unisons, adding decorative flourishes of pointing fingers and shaking shoulders. The dancing was often front-oriented with one couple downstage and three other pairs in the background. Despite Flight‘s cheerleader-ish optimism, the piece’s quiet moments were its most telling. Dancers leaned against each other back-to-back, undertook odd little walks to a plucked-string sound, and best of all, a hand caressed a calf just because it was there.

Unintended Consequences: A Meditation was dedicated to Laurie Anderson and co-commissioned by the Equal Justice Society. Of the work, Way has said, "it shines a critical light on the current state of political affairs and our inadvertent complicity in them." But she is not given to rants. Her political message, if there is one, insinuated itself into our awareness the way Zivolich, with her spiky little skirt (designed by Way), disrupted order by seduction. Anderson’s best-known piece, United States (1981), is tough competition for Way’s intermittently captivating choreography. Consequences‘ most interesting part was the nonchalance with which dancers switched from the dancerly to the pedestrian. Men engaged a partner intimately and then just dropped them without missing a beat. Once the "O Superman" section started, the dance became ever more dreamlike. People froze, their eyes covered; they danced with phantom partners. No wonder you choked for a moment when Corey Brady, who initially had silently emerged from between two futuristic pillars of light (design by Alexander V. Nichols), in the end simply dropped.

Walk before Talk is one of Nelson’s Diablo Ballet commissions. Now 10 years old, the work’s fleet-footed pairing and embrace of a skippy spaciousness, as well as the center section’s more languid lingering, have stood up well. ODC’s dancers did it proud. Yayoi Kambara, ODC’s newest "mom," flew through its musical strains with the exhilaration of a spirit ready to shoot into fresh territory.

ODC/DANCE DOWNTOWN

Through March 30, check Web site for schedule

$10-$40

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater

700 Howard, SF

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

South by Cynic

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By Kimberly Chun


› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Date night, March 15, the closing Saturday eve of the South by Southwest music conference, and I swear, the biggest thrill around is my offroadin’ pedicab ride on my way to the Diesel:U:Music bash atop Mount San Jacinto, through the remains of the Mess with Texas 2 music-comedy day-party in Waterloo Park. How sad is that?

"I do yoga, so that helps," explains my "driver" Liam (his name changed to protect the innocent). The spines of his spindly, highly waxed mohawk shiver like excited mushrooms beneath a forager’s greedy digits and his wire-rimmed spectacles gently mist as he steps up and pedals hard, climbing the park’s slopes as the Texas Capitol shines reprovingly above. "Hopefully it’s not all blocked off — this is my favorite shortcut."

Some shortcut: we career down too-tight paved paths, nearly get decked by a hat vendor stand, then head off onto the grass and through the woods, plunk down a curb — with minimal lady-passenger spillage — and then get back on a path and through a parking structure and finally, somehow, we’re on San Jac. Saint Jack ‘n’ Coke be praised. Liam glances back, mildly beatific: "Wanna smoke a bowl?"

Hey, I’ve only downed a few gratis cans of Lone Stars and a tall sweet tea ‘n’ vodka so far tonight — and with only a giveaway energy bar to absorb it all. Welcome to Austin, Texas, and SXSW, the now unfailingly polite, organizationally fine-tuned, and increasingly disappointing group-grope-n-grip for the increasingly somber, not-so-extravagantly partying music biz. Sure, the numbers are there — the fest appears to be doing well, with more than 123,000 attendees and 1,500 showcased acts, while pouring more than $77 million in expenditures into Austin coffers, according to 2007 stats — and the nontoiling gawkers and stalkers still filled the streets for what has become the nation’s fave musical spring break. But how to quantify the new wave of malaise? Roughly parse the leavings in the tea cup: where were the conference heavies when Dolly Parton bowed out due to health issues, as did, ahem, the Lemonheads? Was 60-ish ex-Oakland R&B elder Darondo’s much-talked-of Ubiquity appearance the best of the fest — or was it Yeasayer or Vampire Weekend? Does Ice Cube really wanna forsake Friday for the rap game? Can all the Euro and overseas showcases sub for the dampened-down US major label presence due to layoffs and cutbacks? At the troubled heart of 2008’s decentralized music biz, few could be heard whooping it up or mourning over at the fall of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, who as the state’s attorney general oversaw the uncovering of $50 million in unpaid royalties to musicians and served subpoenas against labels while investigating payola. Is it true, as so many I spoke to at SXSW have said, that "everything I’ve seen that I’ve liked, I’ve already seen before"? My, South By, how lame you were this year. (Can this trend bottom out? See Sonic Reducer’s 2007’s judgment: "But for a three-time SXSWhiner like myself … the fest generally underwhelmed this year," and 2006’s description of "the ground-level, vaguely dissatisfied vibe at this year’s fest — one studded with sentiments ranging from "there’s too many people here" to "everyone I’ve talked to is complaining about working too hard and not having any fun.")

Sure, there were plenty of free shows and oodles of guest-list jockeying, but when the most talked-about soirees were Perez Hilton’s hush-hush hoedown, Rachael Ray’s bid for day-party indie cred ("There better be good food!" one warily groaned), and natch, the Playboy after-hours warehouse rave — complete with more empties and Porta-Johns than you can shake a Hefty bag at — you can just toss the teacup and throw up your multi-wristbanded hands. The truth: do these brands, celebs, or marketing pipe dreams have anything to do with music? The sonic sustenance of SXSW has become secondary to product placement, relegated to background noise amid a recession-jittered hard sell. No surprise that my extremely random sampling of music lovers were uniformly disgruntled. They weren’t hearing the sounds that made it worth braving the yeehawing and puking hordes, risking podiatric agony for five whole nights.

Sure, there were revelatory moments: the grinning electro-diva Santogold, the crowd-entrancing the Whip, and teased blonde soulstress Duffy (dimpled Kate Bosworth-like everygirl to Amy Winehouse’s trouble-lady) were fab, as were Sightings and Evangelista. Lou Reed cracked mordantly wise even while hawking his new concert doc recreating Berlin (RCA, 1973), shades of Neil Young and Heart of Gold two years ago. SXSW organizers oughta take a cue from the packed "Vinyl Revival" panel, the teeming unofficial shows off the beaten Sixth Street path, where Monotonix raised the roof — and drum kit — at the Typewriter Museum, and where experi-punks screeched under sunny skies at Ms. Bea’s at shindigs hosted by Brooklyn party-starter Todd P, who was given his own official showcases this year. You can already make out signs of the next-gen underground filtering into Moby’s Girl Talk–like Playboy finale and folkie Liam Finn’s noise climax on DirectTV. Is the life-support-via-corporate-sponsorship worth the tourist buck, South By? Next time bring the focus back to the truly smokin’ sounds.

Also glad I saw: Black Moth Super Rainbow (spewing glitter and piñata), Joe Lean and the Jing Jang Jong (let the nouveau-mod boy-band revolution begin), Ra Ra Riot (kids love Arcade Fire!), High on Fire and Motorhead, Blitzen Trapper with Adam Stephens on harmonica, Justice and Moby’s DJ sets, Torche, High Places, Half Japanese (with a wiggly David Fair and Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan on sax), Deer Tick, Scary Mansions, Inca Ore and Grouper, a musically unimaginative but enthusiastic Carbon/Silicon, Goat the Head, Lightspeed Champion, Sons and Daughters, the Kills, "Body of War," Yacht, Does It Offend You, Yeah?, Smalltown Supersounders Lindstrom and Kim Hiorthoy, Naked Raygun, the Dicks, the Ting Tings, Paper Rad, Samara Lubelski, and Black Helicopter.

Regret I missed: the Rascals, the Wombats, Barbara Mason, Jaymay, Bun B, the Bo-Keys, Game Rebellion, These New Puritans, Robyn, Pete Rock, Ruby Suns, Napalm Death, the Touch Alliance, Snowglobe, Kayo Dot, Ola Podrida, Bowerbirds, Dark Meat, White Rabbits, White Rainbow, El-P, Herman Dune, Holy Ghost!, Digitalism, Arp, Juiceboxxx, Supagroup, Daryl Hall, Meneguar, Black Ghosts, the Mirrors, Van Morrison, 17 Hippies, Afrobots, Working for a Nuclear Free City, Boyz Noize, Peggy Sue and the Pirates, Death Sentence: Panda!, Christian Kiefer, Megafaun, Salvador Santana Band, Psychic Ills, Devin the Dude, Passenger, the Morning Benders, the Tennessee Three, the Switches, Sera Cahoone, Little Freddie King, A-Trak, Kid Sister, the Clipse, Headlights, Los Llamarada, Pissed Jeans, Rob G, Wale, Dax Riggs, Neon Neon, These Are Powers, WILDILDLIFE, Clockcleaner, Look See Proof, the Cynics, Dusty Rhodes and the River Band, Rahdunes, Stars Like Fleas, and Cheveu.

Pigeon vs. Fuck: Pidgeon, the Pigeon Detectives, Pigeon John, and Woodpigeon go up against Fuck Buttons, Holy Fuck, and Fucked Up, umpired by CunninLynguists.

BLACK MOTH SUPER RAINBOW

Wed/19, 9 p.m., $12

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF
www.bottomofthehill.com

Dark days, indeed

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It used to be that staying up late was a real form of rebellion. An easy test of parental authority for kids, the act takes on an almost anti-capitalist character for young adults. After all, so-called nightlife doesn’t even begin until the 9-to-5 business day has locked its doors. Yet Capital has caught on, and it’s hard not to see the slippery transition from Happy Hour to late-night diner as just another set of cogs on the gear. Still, New York City has held true to its insomniac reputation, issuing the challenge to antisocial misfits to stay up later than a city that never sleeps. Which is why we must thank Religious Knives for giving us a look at what may be the last hour for the lost, wild, and wicked: dawn. Their new album, It’s After Dark (Troubleman), seethes with the deep fear of bleary-eyed wanderers, psychotic with sleep dep’, staring straight into the morning sun.

Religious Knives might almost be considered a sobering up — or hanging over — of guitar player Mike Bernstein and key coaxer Maya Miller’s previous band, Double Leopards. While Religious Knives originally transmitted some of the sonic wall of murk that its earlier incarnation was renowned for, the addition of Mouthus drummer Nate Nelson plunges the band headlong into its current rock sound. Nelson’s drumming has always suggested an equatorial influence, but with the dense shit-storm haze of his other project removed, his brilliant, if grooveless, polyrhythms are finally allowed to cut through. Though the signature Big Apple, bad-vibes drone still rears its head on much of Religious Knives’ diverse discography, the outfit’s atonal crooning, their scrapes and bangs of questionable origin, and their flea-market-Casio runs have all the makings of a neoclassic punk band.

On It’s After Dark, Religious Knives hovers between two sonic paradigms: there’s a classic leather-jacket dirge-punk that culls from Joy Division, Suicide, and even the Cramps, in addition to a basement-apartment dub sound that suggests a production credit split between Lee Perry and some suburban teen hooked on Wolf Eyes. These divergent tendencies are most apparent on the full-length’s first two tracks, but by the time a Bad Seeds-esque "The Sun" rolls around, one senses a whole genre being invented. In many ways the merging of the dark dub of yore and noise music of today is no stranger than the similar convergence that brought us dubstep.

If vibe has much to do with why people listen to music today, then people may enjoy a band that sounds as New York City as Jean Michel Basquiat wandering the Lower East Side ruins. The dense creep of Religious Knives makes at least a few parts of Brooklyn seem satisfyingly seedy.

RELIGIOUS KNIVES

Wed/19, 9:30 p.m., $6

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

www.hemlocktavern.com

Just like Honeydrips

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› johnny@sfbg.com

Word on the streets and between the cuddlecore sheets has it that the best lovesick songs of this young year can be found on the Honeydrips’ Here Comes the Future (Sincerely Yours). As winter gives way to spring, I’ll admit I’m sometimes turning to Mikael Carlsson’s tender tunes for that special bruised but hopeful feeling. The 10 tracks of tears this Göteborg, Sweden, troubadour has assembled push all the right sentimental buttons. They also touch some meta-referential ones: from its anonymously pretty one-off girl vocal to its invocation of a rock standard from the past, the Honeydrips’ "(Lack of) Love Will Tear Us Apart" is an introductory single in the vein of Saint Etienne’s bright orange-red puzzle piece of a debut 45, which translated the rural folk whine of Neil Young’s "Only Love Will Break Your Heart" into synth pop.

The Honeydrips’ album might be titled Here Comes the Future, but Carlsson repeatedly laces his melodies with lyrics that nod to the past. "I Wouldn’t Know What To Do" not only invokes Morrissey’s romantic twist on Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes in order to stake a claim for the clumsy and shy, it pairs it with a jingle-jangle, strum-along guitar sound that ambles just a little bit faster than the one Johnny Marr created for Morrissey’s lyrical trip to the YWCA.

Since both men specialize in Smiths-flavored Swedish it makes sense that Carlsson’s virgin visit to United States’ stages is as an opening act for Jens Lekman. One of the peaks of Lekman’s most recent album Night Falls over Kortedala (Secretly Canadian) is "Shirin," in which Lekman turns a haircut from a girl who has fled Iraq for Sweden into four minutes of pop-symphonic poignance. For half a year now, I’ve wondered why — with only one or two blog exceptions — the heaps of rave reviews for Night Falls over Kortedala have failed to link Lekman’s first-person lyrical address to a person cutting his hair with the one in Morrissey’s "Hairdresser on Fire."

Lekman’s "Shirin" is a sequel that might improve on its inspiration, right down to the political complications that he adds to original scenarist Morrissey’s exploration of the strangely intimate bond between hairstylist and client. In "Hairdresser on Fire," Morrissey milks the lines "There was a client/He made you nervous/And when he said, "I’m going to sue you"/I really felt for you" for their full humor and pathos. Lekman’s corollary in "Shirin" is the concluding couplet "What if it reaches the government / That you have a beauty salon in your own apartment?," a genuine worry that a falsetto harmony somewhat futilely tries to kiss away with the promise, "I won’t tell anyone."

Lekman is peerless at marrying music-hall melody to lyrical melancholy. While Carlsson’s rock-inflected, ultravivid scenes have biff-bang-pow impact, they haven’t reached the same swoon-worthy level of storytelling mastery. To be sure, even Lekman traffics in heart-on-sleeve proclamations best indulged in through headphones, rather than shared blushingly in stereo with sure-to-mock strangers. Put your headphones on so I can whisper this to you: not only is Lekman’s "Rocky Dennis’ Farewell Song" perhaps better than the unique movie — Peter Bogandovich’s 1985 Mask — that inspired it, it’s the closest anyone has come to the Motown and Philadelphia International majesty of Holland-Dozier-Holland, and the first part of the best pop mini-suite since the underrated British group Prefab Sprout’s ditties for Jesse James.

The Morrissey, Saint Etienne, and Prefab Sprout songs I’m citing all date from 1988 or 1990, which shows that what comes around goes around in terms of nostalgia-drenched indie pop trends. Lekman and newer Swedish groups such as the Honeydrips and their fellow current critic’s faves and Sincerely Yours label mates the Tough Alliance owe varying degrees of overt debt to music from that particular era, when anorak-clad innocence cautiously rubbed up against bell-bottomed rave psychedelia to the oft-sampled beat of James Brown’s signature "Funky Drummer."

No matter which way they tip their B-boy hats, the Tough Alliance look more like a Cute Alliance. Still, their particular sonic revision of the cusp years of the twentieth century’s final decades is the one with a little swagger and some sneers. (It also has the least emotional variety.) In comparison, Carlsson begins Here Comes the Future with "The Strangest Dream (Pt 1 & 2)," where his paralysis upon running into a friend’s rapist is only the first instance of impotence countered by some golden guitar chords fit for a heroic leading man. When he hesitates and runs away at the end of the song, that same heroic guitar motif nips mockingly at his heels.

A harsher variant of that electric guitar motif flares forth on Here Comes the Future‘s next song, "Trying Something New," where the lyric nudges the listener that it knows about a secret place for love, much like Petula Clark once did, albeit less boisterously. It’s followed by yet another fresh expansion of the same guitar sound — an effect a bit like a new level of petals appearing on an unpruned flower — in "Fall from a Height," where Carlsson calls upon some well-placed snippets of sampled movie dialogue to add tinges of childhood existential crisis and teen angst (the latter element taken from Rebel Without a Cause, no less).

When Carlsson reaches Here Comes the Future‘s title track, it’s no surprise that it’s as much about resisting the lure of memory as it is about facing the unavoidable. A bell-clear melody similar to the kind that Amy Linton used to write and record for the Aisler’s Set answers him each time he claims that he wouldn’t turn back time if he could. The same push-pull between nostalgia and fantasy is taken to extremes two songs later in the album’s finale, as Carlsson’s closing sentiments are washed away by waves of synth pop. Ending the album as he began it, with a dream, he imagines a day centuries from now, but unsurprisingly, it’s a past-obsessed corner of that day, in which some archaeologist discovers the last remaining trace of his life. Even less surprisingly, that last remaining trace is a romantic one. What would love be, anyway, without the promise of eternity? *

JENS LEKMAN plus THE HONEYDRIPS

Sat/22, 9 pm; $18

Bimbo’s 365 Club

1025 Columbus, SF

(415) 474-0365

www.bimbos365club.com

JENS LEKMAN

Sun/23, 9 p.m.; $12–$14

Bottom of the Hill

1333 17th Street, SF

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

Alone again, or

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

In memoriam: Ike Turner, Buddy Miles, Teo Macero, and Arthur Lee

"Music won’t have no race, only space…." — an eternal lyric sung by that titanic philosopher Marvin Gaye, echoing many other dusky voices, from that of pioneer Afronaut Estevanico the Black, whose exploits across the sixteenth century, proto–American West supersede words, to the United Kingdom’s newest alt-country composer Lightspeed Champion. This sensibility is at the core of the Afro-Baroque aesthetic currently being revived as Arthurian legend — King Arthur Lee, that is. From punk-haired black girls in East New York City digging his hybrid soul on the subway through their iPods, to the foremost articulators of the genre’s lush, neoclassical Afropean clash — his Los Angelean heir Stew and the Houston-born boy-king Devonte Hynes, aka Lightspeed Champion — the Arthurly is wrecked no mo’. And it’s way past prime time for the original Love man to be honored on the black-hand side.

PASSING PHASES AND STAGES


The lure of fair Europa held sway over Arthur Lee’s next-gen singer-songwriter from Crenshaw-Adams in South Central Los Angeles: Stew. No more "California Dreamin’" or uneasy rock for this brer who eschewed his colored cloister for liberation abroad. Only Stew’s Negro Problem followed him to Western Europe and then to Gotham, where he’s brought it to the Great White Way in the format of Passing Strange (2007). What makes this choreo-poem Afro-Baroque is that at this play’s core it’s a conjure of sacrifice — lush and hybridized sonic bleeding for those Negro chillun who are nominally free but not weightless enough to swing a ride on ancient Kemet’s Ark of a Million Years.

Akin to Lightspeed Champion, Stew is the product of a God-fearing background and is prone to vanguard aesthetic allusions in parallel to his younger counterpart’s preoccupations with a blend of meditation, country, gospel, punk, Rocky Horror, French minimalist composer Alain Goraguer, and my friend Galt MacDermot’s Afro-fusionist musical score for Hair. The elder art-punk Stew can go head-to-head with the Afro-punk whippersnapper over Arthurly’s thorny crown, and nothing goes over so well during Passing Strange as the first act sequence when two costars, Daniel Breaker’s Youth and Eisa Davis’s Mother, enact their tense separation in homage to European avant-garde cinema.

Yass y’all, Passing Strange, which was incubated at the Berkeley Repertory Theater and Sundance Institute, is a bona fide masterpiece, yet not without flaw. On the structural tip, even with the move from downtown to midtown requiring a tightening up of the boho flow, the second "abroad" act still lacks a satisfying resolution and includes less of Stew’s meta-Pentecostal exhortations and fourth wall–smashing. And some aspects of the play are problematic, mostly on the score of gender politricks. On Broadway, Davis’s embodiment of her Mother role seems whittled down somehow — but I ain’t gon’ get into the thick of what goes on between black men and they mamas. Then there’s the grumbling from my historian sibling and others about the play’s valorizing of the second act’s European muses above the sacred black feminine. The title is derived from Shakespeare’s Othello, and after almost two decades of experience observing America’s black rock scene, it has struck me repeatedly the degree to which many black male rockers feel they can only truly rock by acquiring a baby mama who resembles Joni Mitchell circa 1970 or, nowadays, Feist. This, even when these black Atlantic boys believe Monika Danneman murdered their beloved Saint Jimi!

Still, Stew’s genius doesn’t make me want to put the hoodoo on him or Passing Strange. Rather, when he exhorts freedom from the podium with Arthur’s Little Red Book, Stew makes me wanna holler in Little Richard’s whoo-hoo! and reach back to my Baptist pastor granddaddy’s church in Georgia for my pious MLK Jr. hand fan with the wavy popsicle stick handle.

To wit: I have seen Passing Strange several times since being taken to see it for my birthday last spring at the Public Theatre (Mayday! Mayday!). While I applaud its leap to Broadway as a lifelong supporter of black difference and arts, my obsession with it is purely personal. Aside from Stevie Wonder at a distance, whose mother died a month before mine in 2006, no one feels my pain nor comes as close to articuutf8g the loss as Stew’s play. A mid-Atlantic chile from the opposite coast, I, like Stew, come from a restrictive Christian background — A.M.E. partisans on the maternal side and preaching as virtual family biniss on the paternal — that would condemn and cast me out for my atheism. Like me at an Allmans concert, Passing Strange is a spook in the Broadway buttermilk, probing the deep history of rock ‘n’ roll incubation and conservatism in the black church.

Although Stew’s a decade older than I, I also spent my youth in the ’70s plotting how to dance my way out of the constrictions of the black bourgeoisie horrorshow. And I loved punk and other subcultural provocations for the anarchic possibilities they presented in terms of society and style. Above all, I, too, long mistook songs for love — until now, when I’m in the grips of a hurt that music ultimately cannot heal. But while I appreciate my education abroad, I differ from Stew on the Europa-as-Utopia tip. Nothing breeds contempt like familiarity.

MR. MIDDLE PASSAGE


Stew’s alter-ego, Youth, comments that, "America can’t deal with freaky Negroes!" So there’s always been black in the Union Jack, leastways when it comes to rock ‘n’ roll — from Brian Jones’s ace boon Jimi Hendrix through to today’s new eccentric Lightspeed Champion. The UK has been perennially more hospitable to creative Africans who would be free, despite Ruth Owen of Mama Shamone’s faintly damning radio doc of last year, which took the pulse of the black rock orbit on both sides of the Atlantic.

Lightspeed Champion reminds me less of this ‘n’ that name-checked Britpopper than Modesto’s recently retired armchair critic of freeway flight and exurban strip-mall anomie: Granddaddy’s Jason Lytle. Perhaps this cracked Americana element stole into the proceedings since Hynes recorded his solo debut in Omaha amongst the cabal of Bright Eyes’ Saddle Creek-dippers, but it seems such wry "from inside the scene looking out" songs as "Everyone I Know Is Listening to Crunk" suggest the subjectivity of a disaffected young man looking for a room of his own far from the urban, madding crowd of druggies, chavs, and black authenticity dealers that surround its narrator. Like Lytle’s renovation of country and western — with an emphasis on restoring the western part of the early twentieth century modern genre from the perspective of what happens when America’s run out of room for expansion — Lightspeed Champion’s brand of high lonesome is borne out of England’s dreaming during the insular nation’s nightmarish era of being "overrun" by immigrants, urban blight, and various forms of terrorism.

It is rather fascinating that Texas-born Hynes should have escaped parochial black American life due to his itinerant parents’ lifestyle only to seek out Omaha-as-omphalos for requisite head space to craft his new opus, Falling Off the Lavender Bridge (Domino). Why? Precisely because it’s his attaining maturity in England that permitted Hynes to become the swooning, anxious, vulnerable almost to the point of fey version of black manhood that pervades his finely wrought songs. His brand of Afro iconoclasm — which got him signed as a Test Icicle at 19 and now gets him fêted for sepia twang in his early 20s — would have encountered far more roadblocks on American shores where young black males are required to be consistently hard and never punks (catch the final season of The Wire). Plus ça change, eh, Josephine et Jimmy? Of course, Hynes’s will-to-flight was telegraphed from childhood when he penned a comic about a superhero from Planet Voltarz whose power derived from wielding mathematical equations. The superhero’s moniker? Lightspeed Champion, whose power in maturity will likely rest on "touring until I die."

When he performed at that East Village hip cloister Mercury Lounge before a small fawning audience sporting about — a record — six Negroes, the fur-helmeted Champion in David Ruffin’s black glasses, a self-willed superhero and Urkel-in-Little Richard’s hairpiece, seemed to be signaling that the secret power propelling him out of the dystopic urban milieu he described was not merely blowing up in America but striving to refine a hyperliterate and well-enunciated language to get his Romantic apologias across. And don’t let the widescreen alt-country symphony "Galaxy of the Lost" fool you — our Devonte’s still black enough for ya, with his disc being inspired by a lot of hip-hop and by closing his debut with an ode to his Mama: "No Surprise (For Wendela)." If Falling Off the Lavender Bridge does the biniss projected, this postmodern Professor Longhair is on his way. Watch his space.

Despite the decades of separation, Stew and his fellow black Atlantic jumper Lightspeed Champion are both still seeking newer sonic horizons, even as that campaigning purveyor of "Them Changes," B-rack Obama, is traveling electric miles to paint the White House black.

Deja vu, times two

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TAKE ONE With his short film Night and Fog (1955), Alain Resnais introduced the world to his idiosyncratic and esoteric filmmaking, while offering an initial glance at his obsessions with memory, time, and space. He would further elaborate on this trio of fixations in his extraordinary debut feature, Hiroshima mon Amour (1959). But his second feature, Last Year in Marienbad (1961), is where Resnais truly allowed himself to grapple with these issues, as well as with cinematic form.

Because of its enigmatic plot, mysterious characters, and various peculiarities, Marienbad has inspired a wide variety of discussions about the nature of time and memory, and about the divisions and links between reality and fantasy. Although such explorations are totally valid, the most striking — and perhaps somewhat neglected — of Marienbad‘s many wonderfully bizarre features is its treatment of space.

Resnais’ choice and use of locations is very imposing. Marienbad‘s two protagonists — including Delphine Seyrig in only her second feature role — encounter each other at a hotel, and try to figure out whether they had met and fallen in love at that same place a year ago. The hotel is actually composed from the interiors and exteriors of various grandiose chateaux in Germany. Impressive scales, strictly geometric gardens, and an exhaustive array of rooms immediately give the impression of a sumptuous maze in which one can get trapped and become lost.

Employing repetitive long pans and dolly shots throughout most of the film, Resnais painstakingly observes the hotel’s interiors, emphasizing their excessive ornamentation. Endless corridors give way to doorways that yield yet more hallways and living rooms. All of them are decorated to perfection; all of them feel terribly empty, cold, still, and asphyxiating. These images are juxtaposed with shots that similarly observe the hotel’s occupants. Clad in their flamboyant Coco Chanel dresses, members of the bourgeoisie are shown aimlessly wondering around the hotel, engaging in commonplace activities and conversations.

By complimenting this visual pattern with eerie organ music, Resnais achieves a striking effect. As film professor and writer Laura Rascaroli puts it: “The [film recalls] one of the main features of baroque architecture, the use of a superabundance of details and decorative elements as a means of filling up the void and repressing the fear of nothingness, of oblivion, of death.”

Few filmmakers manage to treat space as more than mere background. Michelangelo Antonioni is one obvious example. In Marienbad, Resnais moves beyond an exploration of the creative possibilities that a film’s space has to offer. He goes so far as to use space to actually produce meaning. That idea, perhaps more than anything else, is what this ageless masterpiece is all about. (Maria Komodore)

TAKE TWO To begin, a word for Sylvette Baudrot, “script girl” for Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s arch postmodernist plaything, Last Year at Marienbad (1961). Film critics are often guilty of underplaying contributions by screenwriters and cinematographers, but script girls? You’d better believe it with a film as rigorously mathematical as Marienbad. Resnais and Robbe-Grillet’s creation defies continuity, but it rests heavily on bridges and echoes, its staging directions endowed with interlocking, psychic value — all impossible, one assumes, without Baudrot’s attentive supervision. Resnais goofily nods to his obsessive predecessor Alfred Hitchcock when he places a cardboard cutout of the master of suspense in an early shot. But Baudrot provides the direct link: she was the script supervisor on Hitchcock’s 1955 Riviera dalliance, To Catch a Thief.

Credentials aside, Last Year at Marienbad is an elegant whirlpool, all the more notable for being made amid the fuck-all bluster of the early French new wave. At a sodden grand hotel, “X” (Giorgio Albertazzi) implores “A” (Delphine Seyrig) that they met the previous year and agreed to reconvene away from the watchful eye of A’s husband “M” (Sacha Pitoëff). Some of the aspects surrounding these characters seem hopelessly musty, encrusted by decades of swollen undergraduate debate. There is the flattening score, and the famous strategy game that M always wins. Try not to giggle at those scenes in which a character’s bulging eyes conjure so many Universal B-movies — indeed, Pitoëff seems to have been cast for his gaunt shape, evocative as it is of Karloffs and Lugosis past.

And yet, Marienbad‘s distancing front-line of attack remains a radical proposition: erotic obsession defanged of the eros, and further soused in sounds and images that seem, if not deceitful, then at least unverifiable. At the center of this opaque sphere is Seyrig who, as A, has the unenviable task of making something of being more than a marionette. The film is most symphonic — and terrifying — in those moments when Resnais’ camera movements collude with Albertazzi’s direct address, simultaneously conjecturing and ensnaring the imagined A.

Marienbad‘s chilly core endures despite the extent to which its formalist shock tactics have been assimilated into mainstream productions. In stretching cinematic space-time like so much chewing gum, the film provides a direct link between Louis Feuillade’s shape-shifting serials (1913’s Fantômas, 1915’s Les Vampires), Stanley Kubrick’s gliding horror (1980’s The Shining, in particular) and latter-day brainteasers like Memento (2000), Being John Malkovich and The Matrix (both 1999). If this is Resnais’ unexpected lineage, Seyrig’s A keeps a different company. She’s still lost in Marienbad‘s hall-of-mirrors (the last line, like a curse: “Losing your way in the still night, alone with me”). But while there, she might catch a reflection of some kindred spirits: Kim Novak, of course, but also Rita Hayworth, Laura Dern, and least suspecting of them all, Rose in Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart (1936). (Max Goldberg)

LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD

Through March 27

Opens Fri/21; $7–$9.50

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

 

Edgeward

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

This is my third serious boyfriend. I think I’m his second. He’s into fairly hard-core masochism. Not like smack-me-around-a-little-Master masochism, which I’d cheerfully go along with, but shit like choking and knives and fire and no safewords. He’s also tried to convince me to fuck him without lube or preparation, which doesn’t sound like a good idea to me. He says that he’s played like this before, but never to the extent that he wants to. I’m wondering how rough can I get without actually hurting him? Any suggestions for good books or Web sites?

Love,

Gentle Ben

Dear Ben:

Your boyfriend is into "edgeplay," and/or possibly "RACK," (risk-aware consensual kink) the recently named alternative to the long-used and unnecessarily apologetic-sounding "safe, sane, and consensual" label for S-M activity. There’s a little essay which explains the distinction between SSC and RACK here: www.leathernroses.com/generalbdsm/medlinssc.htm. But for those who aren’t online right now, the idea behind risk-awareness is that you acknowledge that what you’re doing is potentially dangerous (rather than pretending that knowledge and precautions can render any activity completely "safe") and agree to accept that before continuing. It doesn’t mean that you have to do dangerous stuff, or that you do your dangerous stuff less safely — far from it. Truly "risk aware" kinksters, after all, are presumably also aware of things like proper technique, good gear, and common sense.

As for how far you can take it, well, that surely depends on which "it" you’re talking about. There are a lot of things on your list with a wide variety of potential risks. Knives and fire, for instance, can both be managed with little risk of real harm, assuming you know what you’re doing. You can take a class on knifeplay, for one thing; and for another, a very sharp, very clean knife applied lightly to a nice expanse of muscle like the upper arm, thigh, or the ever-popular buttock just isn’t that dangerous. Fire, in the form of dripped candle wax, singed arm hair, or flaming swathes of alcohol, can give a similar big-bang-for-small-danger buck, again provided you know what you’re doing. Of course, the most experienced, dedicated, total freakazoid sadist I know did kind of set his girlfriend on fire with flaming hand-sanitizer once, and in front of an audience at that — but even they emerged more embarrassed than crispy. For tips and tricks, it’s probably best to learn from an experienced player or take a class, but failing that, Greenery Press‘s Toybag series is probably your best resource.

The no-prep, no lube business is potentially problematic, but I can see how lots of people — really, really experienced people — could actually handle that. Find out if he’s one of them. Of course, you could always cheat and put the lube on you and never tell him. He can’t see back there, you know.

You may have noticed that I didn’t include choking in my "not as scary as it sounds" list, and for good reason. Personally, I think choking/breathplay is precisely as scary as it sounds, and I’m generally anti. Unlike practices which might cause a nasty infection or an unsightly scar, breathplay can make you dead in very short order, and completely unpredictably. Jay Wiseman, the emergency medical technician and kink educator who’s studied and written about this the most, comes down firmly against it in his well-known article, "The Medical Realities of Breath Control Play.&quot The other authority on such subjects, the much-published Charles Moser, MD, is somewhat more equivocal: when I talked to him about it, he basically said, "It can kill you. I won’t tell you not to do it, though. Oh, but it can absolutely kill you, and you’d never see it coming. People have a right to do it, though…." He might have kept on like this — "Kill you! Right to! Kill You! Right to!" — until I slapped him, Chinatown-style, but we don’t have that sort of relationship. If you and the b-friend are negotiating this stuff, and you’d better be or I’m coming over there and kicking your ass myself, I suggest you agree to oh, I dunno, carve "I LUV BRITNEY" on his chest and flog him through the streets with a flaming medieval flail, but you should refuse, categorically, to choke or black him out. Just say no.

As for playing without a safeword: fine, whatever. You know and he knows that if he were really in trouble he’d manage to communicate this to you, and you would stop what you were doing. No big deal. There’s one more thing we haven’t covered about consensuality though, and it’s a big one for you, the presumptive top: Do you even want to do this? You get to say no too, you know. Call out your own "safeword" if you have to.

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.

Unchain my art

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any nation in the world, with more than 1.8 million people currently behind bars. But perhaps more disturbing is the fact that the largest state on the so-called left coast is the most prison-happy: California spends the most money in the nation on corrections while ranking 43rd in funding education.

This according to "Golden Rules: A Guide to the California Prison System," a booklet designed by Kelly Beile and Emily Wright, which presents startling statistics on the industry and economics behind this state’s prison system as part of "The Prison Project," Intersection for the Arts’s continuing multidisciplinary exploration into California’s criminal justice system. The book was produced in conjunction with an exhibition of work by an array of artists directly affected by the correctional facilities in our state.

With so little money being put into education for California’s unoffending citizens, it’s not surprising that next to nothing is spent on rehabilitation programs for prisoners. Thankfully, through private funding and grants, programs such as San Quentin’s Arts in Corrections and the William James Foundation’s Prison Arts Project exist to offer a creative outlet to inmates.

Arts in Corrections student Ronnie Goodman uses acrylic on canvas board to record daily life as a prisoner at San Quentin. In Under the Bullet Holes Shat (2007), Goodman captures the undifferentiated backs of inmates exiting the prison yard as beams of light stream through bullet holes in the tented tarp roof. One figure — perhaps the artist — hangs back from the crowd, a solitary man without a face.

The solitary man is a recurring subject in the show. In the work of Robert Stansbury, who died on San Quentin’s death row in 1991, the male subject appears alone with nature, walking on a beach or cooking his meat over a campfire. Stansbury was entirely self-taught, since programs such as Arts-in-Corrections are only available to "mainline" prisoners, not those on death row.

Another self-taught artist, on San Quentin’s Death Row since 1983, William Noguera recreates images from his dreams and memories in painstaking detail with ink on paper. Photo-realistic renderings of a couple embracing, a billowing curtain, a cross, a shadow, and a cityscape are overlapped and collaged together, creating networks of narratives. Each piece takes Noguera approximately 100 hours to complete, and the artist mixes his own blood into the ink with the belief that he might free a bit of himself from his four-by-10-foot cell with every composition.

Artist Mabel Negrete is not incarcerated, but her brother is, and their collaborative installation You and Me describes the relationship between inmates and their loved ones on the outside. Negrete compares a day in her own life, as she lives in freedom, and a day in the life of her brother, as he lives inside prison walls. On the wall of the gallery, Negrete transcribes a letter from her brother — in distraught hatch marks — and, next to it, her own letter in carefree cursive. On the floor, Negrete renders with masking tape the actual space of her brother’s shared cell, with two beds, a desk, and a toilet/sink, next to the equivalent space of her apartment bathroom.

"The Prison Project" also includes works by at-risk boys and girls through preventive youth education programs such as the Imagine Bus Project and City Studio. Noticeably underrepresented in the exhibition is work by adult women prisoners, especially since "Golden Rules" tell us that the incarceration of women in California has gone up exponentially in the last two decades (mostly for nonviolent offenses) due to mandatory sentencing laws.

Amid the troubling information provided by "Golden Rules" and the haunting art on view, a lighter moment seems necessary — and it arrives in the form of Larry Machado’s motorcycle sculpture Bone Shaker (1981-82). Assembled from the bones of dead rodents found on the prison yard, Bone Shaker is a straightforward, unsentimental symbol of freedom.

THE PRISON PROJECT

Through March 29

Tues., by appt.; Wed.–Sat., noon–5 p.m.

Intersection for the Arts

446 Valencia, SF

(415) 626-2787

Desperately seeking cinema

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> a&eletters@sfbg.com

Jennifer Reeves’s movies are personal wishing wells, each a repository of dreams and worries. As we see ourselves reflected in the water’s surface after tossing in a coin, so too is Reeves’s presence apparent in the handmade, fussed-over quality of her moving pictures. I use that broad designation pointedly, as her films are as varied in material and form as they are prosaic in mood and temperament. Over 15 years of independent filmmaking, the New York–based artist has created hand-painted films in the style of her mentor Stan Brakhage, freewheeling shorts, fiction fantasias, 16mm double-projections, feature narratives, and experiments in high definition. San Francisco Cinematheque hosts the formally restless filmmaker for a three-program tour.

Reeves’s early shorts channel riot-grrrl spark with scratched-up film stock. Elations in Negative (1990) is a good sample of the celluloid-mad sexual politics of these 16mm beaters, though Taste It Nine Times (1992), with its vivid pickle-biting innuendos, will be missed from the Cinematheque run. In painted films like The Girl’s Nervy (1995) and Fear of Blushing (2001), Reeves’s appropriation of Brakhage’s technique conveys playful femininity in color, pattern, and music.

Though Reeves toyed with narrative early on, most notably in 1996’s psychodrama Chronic, 2004’s The Time We Killed represented a kind of breakthrough. An unhurried 94 minutes passes through the dark mirror of an agoraphobic poet keeping to her New York apartment during the buildup to the Iraq War. "Terrorism brought me out of the house, but the war on terror drove me back in," Robyn (Lisa Jarnot) says in her peripatetic voice-over, adding later, "I’m afraid of catching the amnesia of the American people." Reeves’s magnetically immersive filmmaking is such that the political situation neatly folds into an extended experiment in subjectivity — besides being an unstinting portrait of madness (it’s everywhere in this film: in a record’s spin and neighbors’ voices echoing through the walls, in dogs’ faces, bathwater, and masturbation), The Time We Killed also serves as an understated chronicle of the collateral psychic and moral damage of our country’s manufactured warmongering.

The Time We Killed is heavier than Reeves’s other work, though it’s not without humor; she finds the ridiculous, unwieldy side of depression in Robyn’s litany of death fantasies and a painfully misguided interaction with a curious neighbor. Robyn’s locked in, but Reeves is formally unfettered, mixing conventional 16mm footage with lyrical, associative streams of inner life shot in high-contrast black-and-white. The filmmaker raids her home-movie archive for the film, in addition to using her own apartment and acting as Jarnot’s body double during the extended shooting. This air of transference makes The Time We Killed weirdly transparent, so we feel as intimately connected to Reeves’s isolated work in the editing room as we do to Robyn’s experience in the apartment.

Since The Time We Killed, Reeves has returned to more typically experimental filmmaking. Her 2006–07 Light Work variations strike an ideal balance of abstract and representational visions, in the process cataloging the changing textures of cinema. In the affecting He Walked Away (2007), Reeves dissects, refracts, and abstracts footage from her older movies to create a tri-tipped memorial piece in which the intrinsically elegiac nature of cinema is connected to the dissolution of film technology, which is then tied to the disappearing loves and friendships that shadow personal lives.

As with Guy Maddin — another filmmaker who favors overheated evocations — one has the sense that Reeves could make a hundred interesting movies from the same scraps of footage. "I want to counter the turncoats who say film’s dead," Reeves announces on her excellent new blog. "Try telling a painter that she can only use digital paint on a Mac for the rest of her life. She’d be pissed." But if she were Jennifer Reeves, she certainly wouldn’t slow down.

IMMERSIVE CINEMA: JENNIFER REEVES

Artists’ Television Access, Sat/15, 8:30 p.m.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Sun/16, 7:30 p.m.;
Tues/18, 7:30 p.m.; $6–$8

See Rep Clock for venue information

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