Arts & Culture

Arts & Culture

Night on Earth

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Gus van Sant’s films are as thick as the Oregon sky. Swept with dreamy remove and elliptical narration, his work strikes me as being the cinematic equivalent of shoegaze music (sorry, Sofia). Now that the writer-director seems to have given up middlebrow commercial filmmaking (Good Will Hunting, Finding Forrester) to return to the art house (Elephant, Last Days), it feels like the right time for a revival of his shoestring 16mm debut, Mala Noche. Originally released in 1985, the understated story of a scraggly Portland liquor store clerk infatuated with a Mexican street youth is based on poet Walt Curtis’s novella of the same name, with the author’s beat-tinged style re-created in actor Tim Streeter’s affecting, wise voice-over.

Novellas may be easier to adapt than poems, but it’s still important that van Sant is working from a poet’s material, as he possesses a penchant for pure lyricism that puts him in league with Terrance Malick. Mala Noche has the woozy, restless rhythm of hanging around, playing hard to get. A couple of voice-overs on white privilege aside, van Sant’s rendering doesn’t feel like it’s about anything in particular — not inconsequential, considering its chronicling of a gay, biracial love triangle (Streeter’s Walt loves Johnny but ends up sleeping with his friend Roberto). Instead of identity politics, we get longing, laughter, working-class blues, weather. There are dramatic elements here, to be sure — disappearances, lockouts, even death — but they float by, washed out in wistfulness. The narration inevitably sags in places, though John J. Campbell’s low-key black-and-white cinematography is frequently stunning, imbuing van Sant’s handheld close-ups with surprising depth (reason enough for the new print from Janus Films). With a crooked smile and a purring voice, Streeter’s character is every bit the likable asshole, and the object of his desire (Doug Cooeyate) is magnetic. It’s easy enough to see Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho coming, though one doesn’t necessarily want to leave this Mala Noche.

No scrubs

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

Michael Moore is a divisive character, but he’s not the most controversial man in the United States. The first image in Sicko, the director’s first doc since 2004’s Fahrenheit 9/11, is of George W. Bush. But the liar in chief is only one of Moore’s targets this time around. In Sicko he goes after America’s entire health care system, examining how even folks who have health insurance are routinely screwed over by corporations that care more about profits than lives. Of course, he does it in typical Moore fashion, with big gestures, occasionally overwrought voice-overs, and a snarky humor that balance out what’s otherwise a gloomy tale.

There’s so much dejection here — babies dying because hospitals won’t treat them, Ground Zero volunteers being denied care, the exposure of corrupt insurance-company tactics, and worse — that comic relief is essential, Moore explained during a recent whirlwind visit to San Francisco. He’d just come from Sacramento, where the film was screened for enthusiastic members of the California Nurses Association.

"I’ll bet you that there are as many laughs in this film as some of my other films, but it doesn’t feel that way because there are so many sad moments," he said. "But you need that. The humor helps lead you from the despair to the justifiable anger."

Gimmicks like a Star Wars crawl to illustrate the hundreds of diseases insurance companies won’t cover lighten Sicko‘s tone, as do scenes in which Moore puts on his gee-whiz persona and travels to other countries (Canada, England, France) where emergency treatment comes quick and free and prescription drugs practically grow on trees. In France, he discovers, the government supplies nannies to do chores for new mothers — although I’m too cynical to totally accept that perk as the truth, especially since the mother interviewed is white and middle-class. Or is it my disgust with America’s shortcomings that clouds my judgment?

Disgust is what Moore is after, because it’s the kind of strong emotion that might actually motivate action. "I have to hold out some kind of hope that [change] is possible," he said. "[In Sicko, an American woman living in France] says, ‘The reason things work here is because the government is afraid of the people. In America the people are afraid of the government.’ So I’m hoping that people will stop being so afraid and apathetic and get involved."

One of Sicko‘s unlikely targets is former universal-health-care advocate Hillary Clinton — now among Washington’s top recipients of health-care-industry donations. In the film, the senator (and aspiring prez) is praised, then slammed, for her stance on the issue.

"I’ve always liked her. I had a chapter in my first book called ‘My Forbidden Love for Hillary.’ I always thought that she got a raw deal on the health thing that she tried to do. I could see instantly, as soon as she was in the White House, men were very threatened by her. There were whole Web sites devoted to her — hateful, hateful stuff," Moore said. "I have kind of a broken heart because of her votes on the war. And it was really sad, the discovery that she [later became] the second-largest recipient of health-care-industry money."

Moore, who said he’d lost 30 pounds in the past three months ("One way to fight the man!"), has high hopes for Sicko‘s long-range impact. "The whole system needs to be upended. If the American people actually listen to what I’m saying here, that we need to start rethinking everything in terms of how we treat each other and how we structure our society, a whole lot of other things are gonna get fixed, and we’re gonna be a better people. And I think the rest of the world is gonna feel a hell of a lot safer with a change of attitude."

Of course, Sicko wouldn’t be a Michael Moore movie without at least one moment that stays true to his prankster instincts. His controversial visit to Cuba has been well-documented elsewhere, so I won’t go into the details here. But I will say he was pretty delighted to ask, "Have you ever seen anyone sail into Guantánamo Bay?"*

SICKO

Opens Fri/29 in Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

I love Lucio

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› johnny@sfbg.com

"I was sad when he died and sad to have never been able to meet him and tell him how much he had done for me," Amedeo Pace of Blonde Redhead writes in the liner notes for Water’s reissue of Amore e Non Amore, a 1971 album by Lucio Battisti. Pace then closes his brief yet poignant tribute — one that describes growing up in a household unified by a love of Battisti’s music — with a simple but effective declaration: "Amore e Non Amore is one of the greatest albums."

The fact that one of Blonde Redhead’s twins acknowledges Battisti as a font of new and familiar ideas should intrigue English-speaking listeners who’ve never heard Battisti’s music. But there’s also an elliptical quality to Pace’s plaintive wish that he had met the man behind Amore, an album that shifts from propulsive beat rock to soundtrack-ready flamenco flourishes and sweeping string arrangements in its first two songs, setting the tone and rhythm for a richly seesawing display of vocal and instrumental tracks.

With Amore, Battisti established himself as an Italian corollary to Scott Walker, a singer with a brighter if just as seductively handsome tenor voice who, not content with mere stardom, was ready to chart the outer limits of popular music. Just as the late ’60s — the era of Scott through Scott 4 (all Fontana) — saw Walker move from the mainstream pleasures of Burt Bacharach to the ribald, poetic, and pun-laden chansons of Jacques Brel as well as his own imaginative landscapes, so Amore and 1972’s Umanamente Uomo: Il Sogno (also recently reissued by Water) saw Battisti use his position as a favorite voice of his nation to take its people to musical places they may not have expected to discover. In Battisti’s case, those were deeply emotional places; it was no accident that the album he’d completed before Amore was Emozioni (Ricordi), a 1970 collection that boasts a title track as gorgeous and reflective as the enigmatic, sunlit silhouette cover photo of the bushy-haired man behind its music.

As the years went on, Battisti, much like Walker, retired from public life, becoming even more of an enigma. He died in 1998, 14 years after the release of his final album, Hegel (Alex, 1994) — a title so blatantly philosophical, so nonpop, that the avant-leaning Walker of today, draped in references to Pier Paolo Pasolini, again comes to mind. It’s here that Pace’s sadness that he’d "never been able to meet" Battisti becomes something more than personal; many Italians wish they could have known the man whose recordings they found so moving on an elemental level.

"After E Già [BMG, 1982], Lucio disappeared from view," Stefano Isidoro Bianchi of the Italian magazine Blow Up wrote when I e-mailed him to ask about the Battisti enigma. "After the early ’70s, he didn’t appear on TV — the one exception was a German TV show in 1978 — and never gave interviews. And after 1982, he really became invisible: no interviews, no TV, no pictures. We knew he lived in London for some time, and then for the rest of his life in a county called Brianzia, in Lombardia (north of Italy). The further he vanished, the more he was loved because of his songs. He was a presence on the Italian music scene. We knew that when Lucio was back with another album, it was a strike. And it was."

In the wake of his heyday, Battisti truly struck, according to Bianchi, in 1974 with Anima Latina (BMG) — which, though it was unreleased in the US, he rates as highly as Amore — and with E Già and 1986’s Don Giovanni (BMG), which included lyrics by surrealist poet Pasquale Panella. But Water has chosen wisely in selecting Amore and Umanamente to rerelease. "These albums are unique in the way they combine string-heavy European crooner pop with prog rock grooves and psychedelic guitar," notes Michael Saltzman, who penned the liner notes for the label’s Umanamente reissue. When I ask Saltzman to name a favorite period in Battisti’s career, he chooses Amore and Umanamente as peak examples of the stylistic cross-pollination that was occurring on other continents — via Tropicália, perhaps most notably — during the late- and initial post-Beatles years. Indeed, they are "comunque bella," to quote the chorus of one of Umanamente‘s hymnlike highlights, only in the sense that Battisti adds dissonant elements to counterbalance the abundant beauty of his voice and compositions.

Perhaps at my suggestion, Bianchi isn’t averse to likening the deep artistic connection that Battisti had with his Amore and Umanamente lyricist, Mogol, to one that existed between a certain American troubadour and his wordsmith: "Mogol was the inner voice of Lucio like Larry Beckett was the inner voice of Tim Buckley," Bianchi observes. But in the end, he’s insistent — apologetically so — that "no one but the Italians can understand" the "magic" of Battisti in full bloom: "In the early ’70s, Battisti released his best albums, and the way he approached something we can call progressive was peculiarly Italian and peculiarly Battisti-like. If you know the other Italian progressive bands, you know that Battisti wasn’t part of the scene. He was a great musician because he changed the face of Italian pop music."

To which I say, "Pace, Pace," or "Pace, pace." The most musical of all languages might float through Battisti’s songs, but their space — shadowy, sacred, alternately melancholic and frenzied — is open to anyone who listens, Italian, American, Italian American, and otherwise.

After all, the glorious anthemic harmony at the close of Umanamente‘s "… E Penso a Te" speaks the universal language of pop, repeating variations of "la-la" until shivers shoot up the spine and tears form at the corners of one’s eyes.*

For an e-mail Q&A with Amedeo Pace about Lucio Battisti, see the Noise blog at www.sfbg.com/blogs/music.

Dream girl

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

"I used to joke sometimes that I’m Judee’s last boyfriend," concedes Patrick Roques, producer of Dreams Come True, Water’s two-disc 2005 compendium of Judee Sill’s unreleased 1974 third album and demos. "I don’t mean to sound egotistic or anything, but I loved this woman like I’d love a girlfriend or wife."

Sill has that effect on listeners. Over the past few years, the onetime hooker, junkie, armed robber, bisexual reform-school girl, and all-around archetypal bad apple has realized the revelation visited on her while incarcerated in the Sybil Brand women’s prison: her music has been etched into the consciousnesses of passionate followers around the world who know her as a singer-songwriter of uncommon musical and metaphysical power. Even 27 years after her death from a cocaine overdose, it seems like Sill still hasn’t quite passed. Water has done its part to keep her musical reveries alive with the landmark Dreams Come True, mixed by Jim O’Rourke and including Roques’s obsessively researched, invaluable 68-page booklet and a 12-minute QuickTime movie of rare performance footage; reissues of her two Asylum studio albums, Judee Sill (1971) and Heart Food (1973); and the newly released Live in London: The BBC Recordings 1972–1973, an impeccably recorded document of Sill performing solo on acoustic guitar and piano, chatting with the audience and an interviewer, and in the process revealing snatches of a nervy yet nervous urban cowgirl in her blue-collar SoCal drawl.

For too long, before her rediscovery in recent years by a generation falling back in love with the folk songs of their parents’ youth, Sill was simply the lost girl from an age of singer-songwriters, a victim of her lack of stateside commercial success — though she’s been covered by artists ranging from the Turtles to the Hollies, Warren Zevon to Bonnie "Prince" Billy — and her will to transcend the bounds of the earth and everyday troubles, growing up in her father’s rough Oakland bar and later sexually abused by her stepfather. Clues to map out her art — or potential escape routes, which included a brief stay in Mill Valley’s Strawberry Canyon — were found in the sacred texts and music of Rosicrucianism and other forms of Christian mysticism, her studies of Pythagoras’s music of the spheres and occult modes like numerology, or simply the moment’s drug of choice, whether it be a daily tab of acid or the $150-a-day heroin habit that led her into prostitution and eventually check forgery.

Her decision in prison to devote her creative efforts to songwriting led her to truly reach for the sublime, in the form of songs that still touch listeners’ cores. Always-immaculate intonation, a deft sense of harmony, and elegantly composed songs informed by AM radio, folk, R&B, blues, gospel, and classical music were framed by Sill’s own arrangements, leading competition like Joni Mitchell to stop by and check out the Heart Food sessions. "I defy anyone who’s a high school dropout ex-junkie reform-school person to do that," Roques declares. "This woman was brilliant and plugged in — she had the energy, and it flowed through her." If you want to know and love Sill, she is, remarkably, still available — her spirit can be found all over her music.

So why didn’t Sill become a household name like Asylum labelmate Jackson Browne? "Judee didn’t get along with [Asylum head] David Geffen, and David Geffen isn’t someone you give shit to," Roques says. After recording two moderately successful LPs, "she was in debt to him, and Jackson Browne came along, and he was just easier to deal with, I think, from a corporate perspective. Browne hung out in the close inner circle and had hits. She didn’t hang out with the Asylum record crowd too much. She hung out a little with Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles, and she had a lot of strange friends that she had had for a long time in LA."

One of Sill’s exes and old pals, musician Tommy Peltier witnessed the disconnect between the worlds Sill ran in and remembers accompanying her to a Warner Bros. Christmas party right after her debut came out. "We went in my beat-up old car to the Beverly Hills Hotel, and that was first time I saw her cringe," recalls Peltier, who first met Sill onstage at a 1968 jam session ("It was love at first song"). "Here she was the new starlet — there were all these Rollses and limos, and then this clunker drives up, and the new starlet comes out! That was the only time I saw her really uncomfortable, but she just went in there and took over the room."

But as difficult or out of her element as Sill could be, she was within her rights to complain about her handling when she went from opening for kindred souls like Crosby, Stills, and Nash to fronting rock bands. "If you listen to the BBC sessions, she talks about lower chakras and people who just want to boogie, and it’s true," Roques explains. "The rock crowd just wanted to drink wine and take mescaline and get fucked up and party, and there’s Judee singing ‘Jesus Was a Cross Maker’ and making references to esoteric literature. People who went out for a Friday night didn’t want to hear that, just like they didn’t want to hear Charles Mingus. Americans just want to partay — that’s cool — but that’s why she did better in England."

It’s no surprise, then, that Sill obsessives like O’Rourke and Roques still feel protective of her, careful about sharing their love for the dark lady of a sunlit Topanga Canyon whose revelations were forged on the grittily glamorous, sadly battered streets of Los Angeles and who, ironically, seems a perfect fit for yet another turn through Hollywood. "She was out there on the edge," Roques says, "and though I don’t think she ever talked about women’s lib, she was a very ballsy chick and knew what the fuck she wanted and just went and did it. And she evolved into a fantastic person — there’s no one like her" — although, apparently, listeners keep looking. "I search for tapes and talk to musicians endlessly," he continues. "And if you go on these sites, you’ll see everyone wants to find the next Judee Sill — and none of them can even touch Judee Sill." *

Something in the Water

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Franco Battiato’s 1972 album Fetus, reissued by Water, is the kind of recording that transcends a record-store genre category such as Italian prog rock. For starters, the keyboard freak-out at the close of the title number is something today’s army of Kraftwerk drones should covet.

Beginning with the sound of a heartbeat and moving through transmissions from Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin about purple rocks on the moon, Fetus repeatedly journeys from micro to macro and back again with ease. The spiraling keys of "Meccanica" could spook Goblin — or for that matter Alan Sorrienti, whose cronelike cackles and cries on another Water reissue, 1972’s Aria, presage Devendra Banhart’s running for the hobbit hills. And a ceaselessly splendid song such as "Energia" could teach Os Mutantes a lesson in mutation: it keeps moving from bambini babble to folk passages and gleaming synth vistas until it’s formed an exhilarating circular pattern — all in four and a half minutes.

Marvelous in form while Battiato’s lyrics marvel at the wonder and horror of life, Fetus has eight compositions. But they contain countless rich passages that flow into one another so seamlessly that the whole thing only seems to have one beginning and a single end that arrives too soon, after a truly epic half hour. One year later, with Pollution (also reissued by Water), Battiato brought the world the loveliest song ever recorded about plankton and a 20-second audio version of Y2K that proved to be more frightening and interesting than the real thing. But he still might have been at his best in Fetus form. (Huston)

The hot rock

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

It’s strange taking on a profile of a band so steeped in a musical language with which you were once not just fluent but even obsessed. I would have adored New York City rockers Battles when I was 19, their power-through-precision métier appealing to my penchant for all things prog and post, the words "ex-Helmet drummer" (that would be the band’s John Stanier) acting as foolproof elixir. But if I’m not so easily impressed by intensity and general hugeness these days, that only makes my response to the evident dynamism on Mirrored (Warp) seem all the more incontestable.

Not that anyone ever doubted Battles’ credentials: in the school of rock, these guys are definitely PhDs. Beyond Stanier’s heavy days with Helmet, Ian Williams’s guitar tapping was a cornerstone of Don Caballero’s pioneering math rock. Guitarist Dave Konopka put in time with Lynx. Multi-instrumentalist Tyondai Braxton still gets tied to his dad — avant-garde jazz colossus Anthony Braxton — though it’s worth noting he’s done lots of compelling work on his own, including 2002’s History That Has No Effect (JMZ).

There’s plenty of firepower here, though Mirrored doesn’t sound like the work of a typical, ego-fueled supergroup. Reflecting on the ensemble’s beginnings in 2003, Williams relates, "It was about starting from scratch rather than having it be the guy from Helmet doing what he’s supposed to do and the guy from Don Cab doing what he’s supposed to do and so on." Battles’ music is certainly cohesive, to the point of being migraine inducing. Williams is on the road between shows in Charlotte, NC, and Atlanta when we talk, and he sounds a bit mystified that some people still view Battles as a side project. "The reality is this band has taken up all of our time these past few years."

Part of this lingering getting-to-know-you talk clearly has to do with the group’s measured ascent: Battles took four years to release their first album, after all. While Williams says that part of why Mirrored took so long is simply a matter of the logistics of England’s Warp Records repackaging the band’s 2004 EPs — EP C (Monitor) and EP B (Dim Mak) — it’s clear that there were designs to build from the ground up. "One thing about the EPs was that they originally came out in the States on three separate small indie labels, and it took people a while to find out about it, and that was a conscious thing … just to have it be more word-of-mouth," Williams explains. "Another purpose of taking our time was in wanting to find our own sound, our own reason for being a band."

That sound — fractal, propulsive, profoundly stimulated — is mapped out in Mirrored‘s opening minutes. A tightly wound snare part rides the rails of muted guitar runs before "Race: In" blooms into a giant, Tortoise-size crescendo. The quartet then doubles back on the core rhythmic elements, which are projected through a half-dozen modes during the song’s five prismatic minutes. The video for the full-length’s glam-inflected single, "Atlas," offers a spot-on visual approximation: the band members play in a mirrored cube, their bobbing, duplicated forms angling in on one another as their respective parts interlock in so many different combinations.

"I guess it is a tension between enjoying far-out music that can sound inaccessible … but at the same time not thinking it should be unnecessarily difficult," Williams says of Battles’ strategy. "I think our approach is that there’s no reason it shouldn’t hit you on a primal level … even though you can take it in a thinking way too." I think it’s safe to say plenty of people are, none more than the 19-year-olds surely losing their minds to Battles and Mirrored this very minute.*

BATTLES

With Ponytail

Mon/2, 8 p.m., $15

Slim’s

333 11th St., SF

(415) 255-0333

www.slims-sf.com

The fundamentals of Fucked Up

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You needn’t be too wary of the dialogue surrounding Fucked Up, Toronto’s jewel of esoteric hardcore punk. The members’ beliefs and their names are hidden, but they’re not out to brainwash anybody. And they’re certainly not hiding anything in the songwriting department: the melodies are blistering and as uninhibited as the band, which has a knack for subverting punk conventions.

"For hardcore bands especially, politics are often made out to be black-and-white," rhythm guitarist 10,000 Marbles says on the phone from Toronto. Critics and listeners have puzzled aplenty over this pseudonyms-only band in their attempts to pin down Fucked Up’s political allegiances. Before releasing its debut, Hidden World, on Jade Tree last year, the band had spent the prior five years releasing 17 vinyl singles with artwork and lyrics that cited magick, anarchism, the Spanish Civil War, and André Gide. These may look to be the makings of a bizarre cult agenda, but Fucked Up’s "culture of confusion" and conflicting political ideas — the most bizarre instance coming in the form of a photo of a Hitler Youth rally on the cover of its 2004 split single with Haymaker on Deep Six Records — are more about kick-starting independent thought than advancing any specific, concrete ideas.

"We originally wore the anarchist tag pretty proudly," rhythm guitarist Gulag says, also calling from Toronto. "But now we’re more interested in leapfrogging cultures and ideas. It’s a more fulfilling way to live, if a little unprincipled." As amorphous as the members’ personal beliefs may be, Fucked Up doesn’t express any disdain for punk as a sound: Mustard Gas’s bass lines and vocalist Pink Eyes’s deep growl-howl are quite reverent toward the ghosts of hardcore past, and surprisingly enough, the band’s new 12-inch, Year of the Pig, marks its first waltz with rhetorical clarity and straight-ahead activism. The A-side title track examines the ongoing problem of violence toward women through the lens of prostitution, which is legal in Canada. It’s the culture of repression and guilt surrounding these subjects that has inspired the unusually pointed song, 10,000 Marbles says: "It’s taboo issues like sex work that people like us have a responsibility to talk about."

"Year of the Pig" is pretty daring stylistically and structurally, but to Fucked Up’s great credit, it’s also fantastic. Eighteen minutes long and starting as something of a twee shuffle before shifting into organ-backed operatic bellows from Pink Eyes, the song deftly delves into pummeling, psychedelic kraut rock riffage the likes of which might make Earthless or Major Stars jealous. Fucked Up’s sheer disregard of genre pigeonholes is especially evident in its recent doings. "We’re trying to bring in the electronic crowd now," Gulag says. "We just recorded a cover of [French dance duo] Justice’s ‘Stress.’ "

Venturing into Daft Punk–related territory: there’s a first for hardcore! It’s this staunch avoidance of cliché and political boundaries that very nearly makes Fucked Up punk for the Reading Is Fundamental set. More than anything else, the imperative is to ignore convention and get informed, which isn’t a fucked-up MO at all.

FUCKED UP

Sat/30, 8 p.m., $7

924 Gilman, Berk.

(510) 525-9926

www.924gilman.org

Also July 4, 9 p.m., $8

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

Ask Dr. Rock

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ASK DR. ROCK Say you’ve done a lot more practicing than primping. Your bandmates are starting to bore themselves with their uniform of New Balance kicks and give-away T-shirts with busted-dot-com logos. So how are you supposed to come up with a look or even, jeez, a show?

Dr. Rock feels your fashion-free pain and took up the issue with the party starters of Gravy Train!!!! Not for nothing did the Bay Area raunch peddlers title a tune off their new album, All the Sweet Stuff (Cochon), "The Hair Stare."

1. "Making the audience uncomfortable is a good place to start," vocalist Chunx says. "All the bands that were most memorable to me growing up were either awkward or androgynous or exuded something that made me so uncomfortable that it led me to become intrigued. Rock stars should always seem superhuman. Or alien. If you can imagine them eating breakfast, you’re probably not doing it right."

2. "I would start with fashion," says keyboardist Hunx, who also styles hair at Down at Lulu’s in Oakland. "You need to get a look down or matching outfits or at least have a theme." Absorb the high-camp retro swank of artists like the Bay City Rollers and Slade on DVD and study old dance shows to cop ideas and moves. "We don’t get inspiration from new bands," he adds. "People just dress like their neighbors. But even matching T-shirts is a start."

3. "I always like props," Chunx raves. "I think Alice Cooper beheading people on stage was genius!"

4. "This probably comes as no surprise, but I’d always advocate any overt sexuality," Chunx says. "It’s the cheapest way to go, but people like to see people get naked and overtly, crazily sexual onstage. No one’s going to want to look away — even if it’s the car-accident syndrome!"

GRAVY TRAIN!!!! July 7, 10 p.m., $10. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. (415) 621-4455, www.bottomofthehill.com

We got the answers to your burning music biz questions. E-mail Ask Dr. Rock at askdrrock@sfbg.com.

Rock ‘n’ read

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Anyone who’s thumbed through the oodles of zany organ, squealing chipmunk, and queasy-listening albums from the ’50s onwards knows this to be true: every generation has its version of Muzak, whether its members like it not — thanks to clueless parental units. And the class of 2025 will undoubtedly have vibe ‘n’ synth instrumental renditions of "About a Girl," "D’yer Mak’er," and "Cherub Rock" dancing in their heads — no thanks to the Rockabye Baby! series on Baby Rock Records that appears to be multiplying like bunnies monthly. What next — sleepy-time Mentors? But what would baby lend an ear to once he or she started dabbling in books, student-body politics, and witchcraft? In other words, WWHPLT — what would Harry Potter listen to?

Boston’s Harry and the Potters have been working off that premise for the past three years, touring the country’s finest libraries. After outgrowing San Francisco’s main library and drawing several hundred to their show at the Civic Center last year, they’ve decided to get booked, adult-style, at Slim’s, alongside Jurassic Park IV: The Musical, which dares to pick up where the last dino blockbuster left off.

So, I tease, you’re doing a real tour this time? "Why is playing libraries not a tour?" the older, seventh-year Harry, Paul DeGeorge, 28, retorts by phone as he hauls T-shirts into the cellar of the Tucson Public Library, the site of that night’s show. "It’s actually a lot more work, because we set up our sound system every day."

He may be playing in a basement, but DeGeorge and his brother Joe, who appears as fourth-year Harry, aren’t playing to our baser instincts. "I thought this would be a great way to play rock to a whole new audience that doesn’t experience that," he explains. "If Harry Potter had the cool effect of getting kids to read more, maybe we can get kids to rock more too!"

The proof is in his now-20-year-old sibling. DeGeorge started feeding his younger brother Pixies, Nirvana, They Might Be Giants, and Atom and His Package CDs when the latter was nine, and apparently the scientific experiment paid off. "I could see the effect immediately. By the time Joe was 12, DeGeorge says, "he was writing songs about sea monkeys that referenced the Pixies" — and popping up in the Guardian in a story about early MP3.com stars.

And what about the silly kid stuff on Baby Rock Records? "I’d rather hear the original songs," DeGeorge opines. "Instead of Nine Inch Nails for babies, I’d just make a good mixtape for my baby. You can do ‘Hurt’ and just lop off the ending. It’s supereasy — anyone can do it!" Read it and weep, Trent.

SERPENT SPIT "So the proctology jokes remain." Thus came the news from filmmaker Danny Plotnick that Nest of Vipers, his freewheeling podcast highlighting the wit and storytelling chops of such SF undergroundlings as Hank VI’s Tony Bedard, the Husbands’ Sadie Shaw, singer-songwriter Chuck Prophet, and Porchlight’s Beth Lisick, was now officially off the KQED site and fully independent (and available through iTunes). "I had a contract for six episodes to be distributed by KQED," Plotnick e-mailed. "Ultimately they released eight episodes. They didn’t renew the contract because the show was too edgy for them."

Unfortunately, that also means the customer-service episode that triggered those treasured proctology-convention yuks, which was supposed to go up on the public station’s Web site on June 15, has been delayed till July 1 as Plotnick figures out new hosting.

But at least the assembled vipers will continue to writhe unchecked. Inspired by Plotnick’s favorite sports talk shows, Nest of Vipers aims to issue a weekly breath of venomous, randomized air in an ever-constricting radio landscape. "So often on radio there’s a bunch of experts pontificating about whatever," he told me earlier. "This is more about real people talking about real experiences," or like hanging with the gritty raconteurs at your favorite dive bar. The next episode, for instance, sounds like a doozy: Bucky Sinister talks about working the phones at PlayStation on Christmas morning, and Bedard has a yarn about biting into a Ghirardelli chocolate bar and finding a maggot — thinking it’s his big payday, he returns it to the company. You have been served! *

HARRY AND THE POTTERS

With Jurassic Park IV: The Musical

Fri/29, 8 p.m., $12

Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF

(415) 522-0333

www.slims-sf.com

NEST OF VIPERS

www.nestofviperspodcast.typepad.com

www.myspace.com/nestofviperspodcast

GET INTO THE BAND

CAVE SINGERS


Seattle Matador starlets break out the rustic initial Invitation Songs. Wed/27, 9 p.m., $8–$10. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. (415) 621-4455, www.bottomofthehill.com

ORGANIZED GRIND


Jamin and J-Dubber combine protest gangsta with ye olde funk and minihyph on Grind Pays (Organized Grind). Thurs/28, 10 p.m., call for price. Fourth Street Tavern, 711 Fourth St., San Raphael. (415) 454-4044

BRIAN ENO’S 77 MILLION PAINTINGS


Partake in the Hot Jet’s imagescape of "visual music." Fri/29–Sun/1, 8 p.m.–2 a.m., $20–$25. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF. (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org

ALBUM LEAF AND ARTHUR AND YU


Incoming Korg attack! James LaValle’s gorg dream orchestrations cavort with Lee and Nancy–esque vocals. With Under Byen. Sat/30, Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF. (415) 522-0333, www.slims-sf.com

AUDRYE SESSIONS


The Oakland combo parties over its new CD — after vocalist Ryan Karazija spent a very unlucky Friday the 13th in April being brutally mugged and left in a pool of blood with a fractured skull after a Minipop show at Mezzanine. Sat/30, 10 p.m., $10. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. (415) 621-4455, www.bottomofthehill.com

RACCOO-OO-OON


On Behold Secret Kingdom (Release the Bats), the night critters generate a fine squall of free jazz, noise, drone, and jungle psychedelia. Knocking over trash cans never sounded so intentional. Tues/3, 9:30 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. (415) 923-0923, www.hemlocktavern.com

When cute animals attack

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(Nintendo; Nintendo DS)

GAMER Continuing my current tendency to gravitate toward games involving cute animals, I recently became addicted to the latest Pokémon installment, Pokémon Diamond. Pokémon Pearl is the same game with some different Pokémon.

My first Pokémon experience came during a long road trip in 2000, when I got hooked on Pokémon Gold. I made myself popular with every grade school kid on the block because I was an adult who knew that Pikachu evolves into Raichu.

In the Pokémon games, you grind to level-up your small army of cute creatures in turn-based battles against random Pokémon who hang out in grassy areas. You also capture new Pokémon. Pokémon are stored in small spheres and are released to fight, after which they get sucked back into their Pokéballs. And you thought non-free-range chickens have it bad.

There’s a plot, something about stopping a team of gangsters called Team Galactic from using the powers of Pokémon for evil, and you shame them into submission by using your small, cute animals to rough up their small, cute animals. You use the same technique to earn badges at the gyms scattered throughout the game’s world.

These titles are all about the exploring and the collection. You collect Pokémon, Pokémon battle techniques, and gym badges. So if you like to play collection games, Pokémon will take over your life.

What’s different between these installments and the one I played when I first got hooked on Pokémon in 2000? About 100 colors. I’m just eyeballing it. Also, a new online mode allows you to trade Pokémon with other users. To be honest, I haven’t gotten the chance to use this, but I’ve heard from one of my coworkers that it is "full of dumb kids who want to trade their level 100 Geodudes for my ultrarare Mewtwo!"

These two are the first non-spin-off Pokémon games on the Nintendo DS, and the series is well served by the platform. Being able to choose moves for my Pokémon by touching the screen is natural. That said, the game could have done a lot more with the hardware. I would like to see the Pokémon world or the battles in 3-D, like in Animal Crossing: Wild World, as opposed to the top-down view. The battles have surprisingly minimal effects and animation. This was OK on the Game Boy Color but seems a bit cheap on the DS. The series hasn’t changed much at all, and that’s good, because the game play is as fun and addicting as ever. But it’s bad in the sense that the latest installments in the series have almost nothing new to offer.

Flaming creators

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› johnny@sfbg.com

They’ve got passion to burn, whether there’s 100 percent pride or a potent dose or two of critical shame in their game. They’re the dozen-plus-one LGBT artists who constitute this year’s lineup of flaming creators — individuals and groups adding radical perversity, butch dyke glitter, b-boy funk, punkified monkey love, dandified bear flair, and more to the Bay Area. It seems apt to pun off the title of Jack Smith’s still-revelatory 1963 film Flaming Creatures in uniting this wildly varied group: all of them ignore or defy the conformist strains of mainstream gay culture to blaze new trails of truth and fantasy.

NAME Keith Aguiar

WHAT I DO Currently, I am photographing a community of queer artists who continue to resist assimilation and express themselves freely without compromise to both hetero and homo normative values that have imprisoned so many of our generation. I want the viewer to enter my world of rich color, texture, and chaos to find the intricate beauty that comes from reconnecting with more primitive forms of expression. More recently my work has been progressing to include portraits, erotic photography, and even a few landscapes. I’m currently seeking funds for my next show and have started to do commissioned work on the side.

MOTTO Create your own reality. Live your own myth. Be your own God.

MORE KeithAguiarPhotography@gmail.com; www.flickr.com/photos/untamedvessels

NAME Emerson Aquino

WHAT I DO I’m cofounder and executive artistic director of the nonprofit professional dance company Funkanometry San Francisco. In 2005, I helped establish the Funksters Youth Dance Company through summer camps and dance-intensive programs. I’ve trained and danced with groups such as 220, Anarchy, Culture Shock Oakland, and SWC and showcased my choreography with Funkanometry SF in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Diego, and Bogotá, Colombia. My most recent project is an all-male performing group called Project EM, featuring 12 principal dancers.

MOTTO Life’s not about how much money you make; it’s about the number of people you inspire.

MORE emerson@funkanometrysf.com; www.funkanometrysf.com; www.myspace.com/project_em

NAME Dreamboat, Where Are You? (Carrie Baum and Jessica Fudim)

WHAT WE DO We’re a punk pop duo with choreographed vaudevillian antics and a penchant for monkeys, monsters, and Yiddish innuendos. We’ve been described as "the Buzzcocks meet the Muppets." We’ll be leading a Dancers’ Group Rock Theater workshop July 21, and we also have our own projects: Carrie’s Exit Sign: A Rock Opera and Jessica’s dance show Please Feed My Animal will both be previewing at CounterPULSE’s "Rock 4 Art" benefit Aug. 4. (Carrie also runs Big Star Printing; Jessica is a certified Pilates trainer.)

MOTTO Be sure to share your cookies.

MORE www.myspace.com/dreamboatwhereareyou

NAME Edie Fake

WHAT I DO Food fetish zines (Foie Gras), dirty comics (Gaylord Phoenix, Anal Sex for Perverts, Rico McTaco), apprentice tattoos, perv-formance art, rare appearances, desert adventures, and general feminism.

WORDS OF WISDOM Someone was yelling on the bus the other day that anal sex produces no children.

But that is false!

Anal sex produces

ILLEGITIMATE GOLDEN CHILDREN

and they grow up to become

THE PERVERT SAINTS OF THE CATACOMBS.

MORE www.ediefake.com

NAME James Gobel

WHAT I DO Paint, serve as a member of the California College of the Arts faculty, chub 4 chub.

WORDS OF WISDOM I hope my paintings make people want to be big, bearded, and queer. I could be wrong, but I think it was fellow whiskered gay chubby chaser and one-time San Franciscan Alice B. Toklas who said, "I loves ’em tubby, and so should you!"

MORE www.heathermarxgallery.com; jamesgobel@hotmail.com

NAME David King

WHAT I DO I make collages, which often syncretize the camp and the spiritual. Some of my work can be seen at Ritual on Valencia during June.

WORDS OF WISDOM I don’t have words of wisdom. I have dissertations of wisdom, to which I subject only my most tolerant friends, who have other reasons to love me.

MORE www.davidkingcollage.com

NAME Torsten Kretchzmar

WHAT I DO Present good old electropop music with a German twist.

MOTTO My motto is "I know what girls like." I really do! With the hip music of the Men of Sport, I present this old Waitresses song in my three new video clips. The DVD release party will be Aug. 5 at Club Six, and I expect a lot of guys to show up to find out about my secret.

MORE www.kretchzmar.com

NAME Dolissa Medina

WHAT I DO Experimental films mostly, but I plan to move into more multimedia and installation work at UC San Diego, where I’ll be starting an MFA program this fall. I’m interested in San Francisco history, Latino and queer experiences, and mapping urban space through mythologized storytelling. Last year I produced Cartography of Ashes for the 100th anniversary of the 1906 earthquake; we projected the film onto the side of a fire station in the Mission District. My film 19: Victoria, Texas will also be on display at Galería de la Raza this August and September.

MOTTO Viva la caca colectiva!

MORE mercurious3@yahoo.com

NAME Lacey Jane Roberts

WHAT I DO I make large-scale, site-specific knitted installations that often involve guerrilla action. My work, which is knitted by hand and on children’s toy knitting machines, aims to traverse boundaries of art and craft, the handmade and the manufactured, as well as categories of gender and class, through fusing seemingly contradictory materials, methods, and contexts. Additionally, my work seeks to illuminate the connections between craft and queerness and shift this position into one of agency and empowerment.

MOTTO I don’t really have a motto, but I would like to thank my friends for always showing up and helping me install, especially in places where I am not supposed to.

MORE www.laceyjaneroberts.com

NAME Erik Scollon

WHAT I DO I try to queer up our ideas about what art can do by remaking and repurposing functional objects. At the same time, I’m trying to retell new histories in old languages. I want to make objects that exist in between the sculptural and the functional in an effort to insert art back into everyday life.

WORDS OF WISDOM Art objects are useless; craft objects are utilitarian.

MORE www.erikscollon.net

NAME Jonathan Solo

WHAT I DO Draw, eat, sleep, sex, draw, dance, laugh, cry, scream … not in that particular order. I roam the city and its late-night haunts with my beautiful, crazy, talented friends, protected by a black rose on my chest and my custom Jobmaster 14-hole oxbloods. I have a piece in a current group show at Catharine Clark Gallery and a solo show there next year. I also have contributed to the Besser collection at the de Young, opening this October.

WORDS OF WISDOM I observe the beauty and decay of humanity. Aren’t the strange the most interesting, powerful, and telling of who we are? I’m fascinated by the amount of energy we use to oppress our true selves. I say fuck ’em! Own who you are and walk forward boldly — it’s made me a more sensitive artist, lover, friend, son, and brother.

MORE www.cclarkgallery.com; (415) 531-3376

NAME Matt Sussman

WHAT I DO I am a freelance film writer, and I DJ under the moniker Missy Hot Pants. My friends and I run a party in Oakland called Dry Hump. Our sets include everything from Gui Boratto to Baltimore club remixes to Ethel Merman doing disco. We’re playing Juanita More’s Playboy party at the Stud on June 30, so come work off your post-Pride hangovers.

MOTTO "Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen." Robert Bresson.

MORE www.myspace.com/thedryhump

NAME Jamie Vasta

WHAT I DO Working with glitter and glue on stained wood panels, I create "paintings" of figures exploring dark, dazzling landscapes. I am interested in predatory beauty and the balance (or imbalance) between nature and culture. My work is currently on view in the group show "Stop Pause Forward" at the Patricia Sweetow Gallery. I’ll be having a solo show there in mid-October.

WORDS OF WISDOM Glitter connotes an image of cheapness made glamorous — the superficial, the frivolous. But to dazzle is to have power — this is something drag queens have known all along.

MORE www.jamievasta.com; www.patriciasweetowgallery.com *

Hot Secs

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Readers:

Since every third column I’ve run recently has harked back to one I wrote about the movie Secretary a couple of years back, I thought I’d bring it full circle, and then let’s all move on to something else. Here’s the original (published in fall 2005).

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

My manager is leaving at the end of the month. I’m pretty sure from hints that he’s dropped that he’s into S-M, particularly whipping. I’m attracted to him and I believe it’s mutual. I’m not interested in pursuing a dominant–submissive relationship with him but am definitely interested in having a one-off because a) he’s my boss, b) he’s kinky, and c) he’s my boss. I’d like to initiate an encounter between us, preferably on his last day at the office, but I am new to the scene and I’m not sure how to go about it.

Love,

Ms. Secretary

Dear Sec:

Two things come to mind when I think about Secretary and its stars, the unaccountably attractive Maggie Gyllenhaal, who has a face like a none-too-bright, six-month fetus, and creepy-sexy James Spader, who is at this point indistinguishable from the waxwork simulacrum of himself that undoubtedly exists in some museum somewhere, although I kind of dig him anyway: a) it was hot, and b) it was fiction.

I was listening to a colleague-friend give one of my favorite talks this weekend, the one about acceptable and unacceptable objects of desire and how they shift over time and space, and I thought about Secretary too. "Think about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky," my friend says. "Where we are right now [San Francisco in particular, but any blue-state bastion with a women’s studies department will do], the socially acceptable response was, ‘Oh! She’s just an intern! Think of the power imbalance! Uncool! Unclean! How could she give consent when he was so powerful and she was so lowly?’ But what do you think was really going on for 22-year-old Monica, on her knees in front of Superpower Man, the one and only leader of the free world? What do you want to bet that the power imbalance was exactly what was hot for both of them?"

More fantasy, of course. We have no idea what was really going through either of their heads (well, hers, maybe, but — hey! — that’s not what I meant!), and it doesn’t really matter, since we’re just using them as puppets called "Bill" and "Monica," not seriously examining the ethics of seducing interns or flashing your thong at the leader of the free world, depending. I liked your list (he’s my boss, he’s kinky, he’s my boss) and certainly trust you to know what’s hot for you and why, but let’s remember that this is neither a quirkily erotic indie movie nor a puppet show; it’s part of your actual life, and his, and it has consequences. Hot as a last-day quickie may sound to you, chances are he will be a little busy that day, plus, until all the paperwork is done, he is still your boss, and it could still go rather poorly for him to be found in the supply closet, whaling on the clerical staff with a … what? Unless he’s far kinkier than we ever suspected, he will not have his gear with him, so unless you want to get spanked with a three-hole punch while bound with extension cords and blindfolded with Post-its (wait — this is sounding kind of hot, isn’t it?), maybe you’ll want to wait.

Look, give him a break. Let him pack up his stuff and make his good-byes like a grown-up, and then corner him very late in the afternoon, just as he’s leaving, and tell him you’re sorry to see him go and you wonder if he’d like to get together sometime. Ask if he likes indie movies. Tell him you really dug Secretary. Really, really dug it, you know? That should work. To tell you the truth, I have some reservations about a boss who would drop hints about his kinky sex life around the office — that seems kind of, well, actionable to me, really, plus just kind of indiscreet in an icky way, but hey, he’s your fantasy, not mine.

One thing people who know nothing about S-M (I’m not necessarily talking about you here, Sec) might miss about Secretary is that the way Gyllenhaal’s character, Lee, is initiated into the joys of submission isn’t exactly the way it goes down most of the time. In real life, at least where there’s an organized "scene" with rules and regs and a public image to maintain, no mysterious and compellingly attractive Mr. Grey would, all unannounced and uninvited, order our heroine to bend over for a spanking, thus unleashing her deep longing to find freedom through submission and so on. Instead, he would have invited her to a "munch," where they could negotiate their scene, choose a safe word, and exhaustively disclose their physical limitations ("I have hypoglycemia — you’ll have to feed me." "I had tennis elbow but I think it’s better now"), emotional vulnerabilities, and time constraints. Then they would shake hands and agree to meet at his place on Friday evening to "play." Safer, more ethical, and much, much more boring.

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.

Cemetery gates

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Perhaps the only nonzombie movie in recent memory in which the dead outnumber the living, Colma: The Musical did not appear to be a hot prospect when it premiered at last year’s San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. A musical suburban-youth angstfest made locally on a shoestring, starring and produced by no one you’ve heard of? A movie originally intended to be an indie concept album and a stage show? It is the nature of such things to be cute in theory and adorable in execution — but only if one is friends with the cast and crew. If not, it might prompt the type of frozen smile reserved for requests such as "Will you go with me to see my old college roomie play Evita?"

The high energy at the packed Kabuki Cinema for Colma‘s first big screening didn’t necessarily raise my expectations. So the cast and crew have a lot of friends, I thought. Add a decent percentage of the burg of Colma’s approximately 2,000 current residents — hey, I’d go see anything named after my hometown too — and indulgence could be counted on, no matter how lame or amateurish the movie turned out to be.

It’s normal to go a little nuts when something you expected to be so-so at best emerges as totally ingratiating instead. The worthy underdog is usually a little overrated; one current case in point is another movie musical, Once. But in the case of Colma: The Musical, over the past 15 months a number of newspaper writers and people at subsequent festivals have been as surprised and delighted as I was at that first screening. Now Richard Wong’s movie is at a theater near you — at least in San Francisco, with New York City and Los Angeles showings soon to come — and it’s possible it could become a feel-good sleeper around the nation. Like, well, Once.

Almost everywhere anyone grows up seems like Deadsville at the time, boredom being the glue that holds adolescence together. But of course in Colma, the Bay Area’s ruling burial site (breathing-to-decomposing ratio: 1 to 1,500), that notion is redundant. The protagonists of Colma: The Musical are three best friends who’ve just finished high school and have no idea what they’ll do with the rest of the week, let alone the rest of their lives. Equal parts awkward and deadpan, they love and torture one another as if going through naturally spazzy growth spurts.

Jug-eared Billy (Jake Moreno) is a wannabe actor and serial monogamist with the attention span of a gnat, so his head-over-heels crushes come as fast as reprises of the ironically titled lovesick song "Mature." His parents are weird, but at least they’re trying hard to relate to him, unlike the militarily stern widower dad of Rodel (scenarist, composer, and lyricist H.P. Mendoza), who does not react well when his son’s crackhead secret ex-boyfriend reveals Junior is a ‘mo. Much like Rodel, Maribel (L.A. Renigen) is privately crushing on Billy. Even though she’s an aspiring slut, she’s probably the most grounded of the three.

Crises happen, feelings are hurt, and production numbers are born. Two particularly resourceful, near-spectacular highlights of this $15,000 production are the drunken barroom kiss-off "Goodbye Stupid" and "Deadwalking," a wistful lament sung by Maribel and Rodel while innumerable white-gowned ladies and black-tied men waltz through one of Colma’s oldest cemeteries. The sassy humor at play is perhaps best defined by Mendoza piping the tune "One Day" to a car-alarm accompaniment. But nothing is quite so exhilarating as the opener, "Colma Stays" ("like rigor mortis"), a snarky anthem that introduces the Bay Area, the movie’s lead characters, and Colma‘s droll tenor in a sugar rush of split-screen, lip-synching joy.

Colma: The Musical was shot on mini-DV in a widescreen format, and in his first directorial feature, cinematographer-editor Wong already knows how to fill the screen and cut images to music with a genius simplicity that shames most Hollywood (even MTV) veterans. The filmic energy ideally complements performances that are deadpanned to perfect al dente density.

Irresistible at first listen, Colma: The Musical‘s songs haven’t held up quite as well as I’d hoped over the last year’s repeat listens on CD. But as someone who still treasures the ’80s college rock likes of Game Theory, Let’s Active, They Might Be Giants, and subsequent torch carriers, I’ll happily note that a musical that sounds like those groups rather than the usual bad MOR (a description applicable even to the pseudosoulful Dreamgirls and the garish top 40 pastiche Moulin Rouge) is a step in the right direction.

On the other hand, the movie has improved. Clocking in at a generous 113 minutes during its festival travels, Colma: The Musical has since been tightened to a lean 95 without losing poignancy, hilarity, or nuance. "Listen, things got outta hand, things were said, basically everybody’s at fault here," Rodel quasi-apologizes at a late point after an instance of much interpersonal ado about basically nada. The makers of Colma, by contrast, have made something remarkable from almost nothing. Their film is as sweet, funny, and dweeb-pop catchy as anything you’re going to see this year.*

COLMA: THE MUSICAL

Opens Fri/22

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

www.colmafilm.com“>

Suburban stasis

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Colma is not Daly City. Apparently I’m the only San Franciscan who’s failed to comprehend the pronounced distinctions between these neighboring municipalities, outside the selection of merch at their respective Target stores. Daly City has Serramonte Center and the rows of houses made famous by Malvina Reynolds’s anthem to architectural sameness, "Little Boxes" (the song that opens Showtime’s fabulous stoned-in-suburbia sitcom, Weeds). Colma’s got car lots and a few square blocks of single-family dwellings, enough for the approximately 2,000 residents who live surrounded by a whopping 17 graveyards, most catering to specific ethnicities, if not deceased pets. According to the Colma civic Web site, the price of an average home here is a grounding $280,000. Necropolis is too harsh a word — there’s something truly adorable about a town whose official motto is "It’s great to be alive in Colma."

I learned this on a drive through the town with Richard Wong, the director of the wonderfully assured Colma: The Musical, a film that uses this unlikely and oddly ordinary community as a font of artistic inspiration. For Wong, who grew up in San Francisco, the burg recalls childhood trips to Toys "R" Us after visiting family tombstones at the Chinese cemetery. He brings me to the surprisingly expansive Colma Historical Association, a museum charting the town’s lore with binders on each of the memorial parks. Then we coast through the self-contained pocket of homes and the location where Rodel, one of the three restless, fresh high school grad protagonists of the film, fictionally resided. Wong notices a bit of improvement to the place — new brick-patterned siding spruces up the garage — and a couple of houses under construction at the end of the block. Other than that, nothing’s changed, he says.

"One of the inspirations for the film came from the idea of a small town — one that doesn’t really change much — next to one of the most progressive cities in the world," Wong remarks. "Colma is almost exactly the same as it was when the houses were first built."

Colma is a character in the movie — a collaboration with Wong’s college pal H.P. Mendoza, who wrote the script and songs and capably plays Rodel — whose opening musical number, "Colma Stays," is a peppy celebration of suburban stasis. It takes Wong’s expert use of split screen to enliven the carless boulevards and the encroaching sense of teenage ennui. (Befitting its location, Colma: The Musical does wonders with its garage-sale budget and rumpus-room laptop audio- and video-editing marathons.) Billy, another of the main characters, points to a rare new feature on the landscape: a just-built police station. It’s difficult to imagine the crimes the cops must contend with.

The film, however, vividly illustrates how three Colma youths occupy themselves: crashing generic college parties, working at the mall, and hitting the bars with fake IDs. (Wong had to excise a drug-use reference — another stereotypical suburban teen activity — in order to gain permission to shoot a moody musical number in the Italian cemetery.) The fog that envelopes Colma serves as an almost too-perfect metaphor for the insularity of dead-end streets, which engender the claustrophobia of neighborhood inertia in the characters. "There’s no conflict in their lives, and that’s the problem," Wong explains. "They just don’t have that much going on." With nothing to do, people can get bitter — or they get out. The two guys manage that — Rodel, shunned by his family because he’s queer, heads to New York to pursue his dream of being in the musical theater, while Billy, an aspiring actor, packs his car to move to San Francisco. Their female cohort Maribel, the tart character who holds them together, plans to stay — though her motivations are self-deprecatingly ambiguous.

There is a genre of suburban films that usually involves teen suicide, superdepressed moms, or scary skeletons in the linen closet. If this were a Larry Clark film, the kids would be shooting up or shooting themselves. If it were a John Hughes picture, there’d be prom-related antics in the McMansion. In Colma, they sing their suburban sorrows. Wong suggests his film might be a regional music-theater production of a suburban drama, and it’s a wacky idea that’s far more satisfying than you might expect.

Mendoza, in a phone conversation, admits that he prefers films that have some empathy for tract-house dwellers. He feels that Napoleon Dynamite sneers at its characters. "I did not want that for this. I find Colma endearing," he says. "This is not an indictment — it is a locale. We’re just portraying these kids saying it’s boring." Mendoza lived in Colma during his high school years, moving there after growing up in the Mission. "At that time, all the Filipino families moved to Daly City so their kids could go to Westmoor High."

While it finds comedy in the notion of living in a generically small locale, the film exudes an affably focused sense of place. Mendoza tells me that his best friend in high school cited a particular Colma cul-de-sac as his favorite place because it had a great view of the mall. He reveals his own beloved spot, an underpass at the intersection of an up-and-coming Filipino street and a dicey neighborhood. On the sloped, stagelike hill, Mendoza and his pals would have water-balloon fights and — "This is so gay," he warns — reenact scenes from Little Shop of Horrors. Given his movie, that makes wonderful sense.

The image also fits the satisfying, hometown-boys-make-good narrative of the film’s critical success. Since Colma: The Musical scored on the festival circuit, Wong has hooked up with the more seasoned director Wayne Wang, with whom he’s currently working. Future collaborations with Mendoza are imminent, including a Colma sequel: Serramonte: The Musical. That narrative will follow, in song, Maribel’s future in retail. As a career path, that may seem like a dead end, but for Wong and Mendoza, creating a movie about it affirms that their little town of graveyards is ripe with artistic joie de vivre.

The Muppets take San Francisco

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Be warned: the following is in no way a professional, measured critique of the career and oeuvre of one Jim Henson, master puppeteer, kiddie empire creator, and upcoming Yerba Buena Center for the Arts retrospective honoree. Oh, no. Below are the semicoherent ravings of a Muppet-philiac Henson fangirl. One whose first experience of the legitimate thea-tah was not The Pirates of Penzance but "Pigs in Space." One whose initial exposure to the ways of l’amour involved a pig and a frog getting it on after extensive rounds of bike riding and loaded sexual repartee. One who breaks into Muppet palsy — spastic flailings of staccato, head-wagging ecstasy — whenever she hears The Muppet Show siren song of "It’s time to play the music / It’s time to light the lights." One who, in her aggressively weird late teens, sported a sassy shag haircut dyed a deep shade of Grover blue because, perhaps, she secretly wished she were a Muppet.

And who could blame me, uh, her? After all, Muppets can do anything, and they usually have a good time doing it. These anarchic, orgiastic amalgams of felt, foam, and fun fur are investigative reporters, musicians, demolition experts, hack comics, boomerang-fish throwers, mad scientists, misunderstood performance artists, masters of the ancient art of ka-rah-tay, and so much more. Above all, they are vaudevillians with the incessant desire to entertain — just like their ingenious creator. Part Walt Disney (minus the Nazi sympathizing), part Groucho Marx — and looking like the cloned offspring of Lyle Lovett and Jesus Christ — the late Henson was nevertheless about as unassuming as they come. He is universally remembered as the nicest guy you’ve ever met (or, in my case, wish you had). But while his Muppets may have gained superstardom on Sesame Street, it may surprise some to know that cooperation didn’t always "make it happen" in Henson’s working relationships.

"We were very competitive with each other," director and longtime Henson collaborator Frank Oz (the voice of the inimitable Miss Piggy) admitted when I used a recent promotional tour for an Oz project as a chance to quiz him, quickly, about his Muppet past. "We put each other in lousy situations and tried to screw each other over." Of course, that’s not to say Henson was the Eve Harrington (as in All About Eve) of the puppet world. He valued collaboration with his fellow artists above all else; competition was a creative catalyst. "He appreciated everybody else’s work too," Oz, who calls Henson a "genius," clarifies. "There was a camaraderie, a great affection amongst all of us."

Henson’s creative fervor and Puritan work ethic helped make the Muppets a success, but so did his business acumen, something he leavened with that patented nice-guy attitude. "He really wanted everyone to be happy in a business deal," says Muppet performer (the Great Gonzo) and Marin resident Dave Goelz, who worked with Henson from the early ’70s until Henson’s sudden death from pneumonia in 1990. "The reason Jim was such a good businessman was very simple: people loved to work with him." Goelz, who will make appearances at the YBCA on June 21 and 22 to introduce "Muppets 101," fondly remembers the sense of community Henson fostered, having never experienced the tug-of-war that characterized Henson’s relationship with Oz.

The YBCA retrospective is thrillingly comprehensive, although it could be more cohesive. The three Muppet features being screened comprise what I like to call "the real original trilogy": 1979’s The Muppet Movie, 1981’s The Great Muppet Caper (viva Charles Grodin!), and 1984’s The Muppets Take Manhattan. Also included are assorted Muppet marginalia (Mike Douglas appearances, the infamous "Sex and Violence" Muppet Show pilot, some fantastic behind-the-scenes footage), forays into less kid-friendly puppetry (a betighted David Bowie in the Terry Jones–penned Labyrinth, the gloriously strange Dark Crystal), early commercial and experimental work, and later TV work like Fraggle Rock, the corny yet inspired (the Muppet modus operandi) ’30s gangster-movie send-up Dog City, and episodes of the gothic fairy-tale theater The Storyteller.

The Muppets aren’t lowering the stage curtain anytime soon. In addition to a planned Dark Crystal sequel, a Fraggle Rock movie is in the works. Disney bought the rights to the Muppets in 2004 (something, believe it or not, Henson was trying to make happen shortly before his death, recognizing that the juggernaut could give his franchise the protection it deserves). And the Jim Henson Co. continues to produce work in part inspired by Henson, like the film adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s MirrorMask. Still, no one has the gall to suggest it’s like it used to be. "Sammy Davis Jr. died on the same day," Oz notes. "There’s no other Sammy Davis Jr., and there’s no other Jim Henson."

Why exactly have the Muppets managed to endure? The answer, according to Goelz, is simple. "They are us," he says. "They describe a world that’s filled with conflict, but nonetheless they’re motivated by charity. It all came out of Jim’s philosophy. He believed that people are basically good, and he operated that way."

So it turns out I am a Muppet after all. The really good news, it seems, is that we all are. Corny? Maybe. But also pretty damn inspired.*

MUPPETS, MUSIC, AND MAGIC

June 21–July 1; $6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Screening Room

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Wayfaring stranger

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"I never imagined doing this." It’s a sentiment that Mariee Sioux, a singer-songwriter from Nevada City, returns to many times in our phone conversation: specifically, her genuine surprise that adapting her poetry to music has resulted in a life as a touring musician. "I was terrified playing at that show," she says mirthfully, describing her first big out-of-town gig at Brightblack Morning Light’s Quiet Quiet Ocean Spell Festival in Big Sur. "The whole tour that followed helped me get used to performing…. It sucks being scared all the time."

Sioux did seem a little shy — or quiet, anyhow — the first time I saw her play, but it only served to underline the concentrated energy of her music. Spiritual poems attuned to animals and ancestors, songs like "Wizard Flurry Home" and "Buried in Teeth" burrow deep inside you, with reams of words propelled by intuitive, circular guitar patterns. The circumstances of the show — organized by friends in a eucalyptus grove overlooking Berkeley — certainly helped, though I imagine Sioux’s diamond-in-the-rough talent would have been just as readily apparent in a club.

The compositions Sioux performed that night — most from her self-released EP, A Bundled Bundle of Bundles — seemed pointedly unhurried, more akin to the folk sprawl penned by Michael Hurley and Joni Mitchell than your typical verse-chorus-verse songwriting. Her guitar melodies are often a step behind her alliterative narrations, so it makes sense that the words came first. "I always wrote, since I was little … weird writing," she explains. "And I was just surrounded by music, so I guess this all started when me and a couple of friends wanted to start learning guitar. We formed this little girl band." She laughs. "And on my own time I started making these songs."

As is so often the case, the turning point came on a journey. "I left for Patagonia for three months, and I took my guitar with me because that was my new thing I had found. So I took it with me, and I had lots of solitary time in Patagonia," she recalls. "So I just wrote more songs and practiced and basically taught myself guitar." It was only through the prodding of friends that Sioux entertained the idea of recording these new songs: "I wouldn’t have even thought that people would want to hear it."

If word hadn’t gotten out of Grass Valley, it’s easy to imagine Sioux’s music being rediscovered some years down the line. Unshaped, personal to the point of being hermetic, this is the stuff record collectors live for. As it happened, though, Brightblack Morning Light has employed the singer-songwriter in a steady opening gig following that Quiet Quiet appearance, and now Nevada City’s Grassroots Records is readying her first full-length album, Faces in the Rocks, for a September release.

When talk turns to the album, Sioux gushes about collaborating with Gentle Thunder, an American Indian flute player who "felt this immediate connection to the project," and her bluegrass musician father (the two duetted at the Great American Music Hall a few months ago). And it sounds like she’s found a good partner in Grassroots, a homespun label with plenty of singer-songwriters on the roster. Label founder Marc Snegg writes, "Mariee’s songs, poetry, singing and performance dig deep in time, soar high in spirit, and possess a breadth of natural wisdom beyond her years or any years."

Still, while it might just be the jet lag following a European tour with Brightblack talking, Sioux sounds a little tentative about the musician’s life on the phone. She’s stoned on the album but wondering when things might settle down. "I’ve just been going for over a year. I haven’t really lived anywhere. I need a fixed point…. I want to decorate a room," she says. When focusing on the music, though, her view on itinerancy takes on a different, more redemptive cast. "It’s hard to pour your heart out so many times," she muses, "but it’s also refreshing, or even renewing in a way."*

MARIEE SIOUX

With Alela Diane, Aaron Ross, and Lee Bob Watson

Tues/26, 9 p.m., $7

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

Revenge of the nerds

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"Hey, everybody, we’re all gonna get laid!" Rodney Dangerfield’s character, Al Czervik, says in one of the classic lines from Caddyshack. Oakland’s Replicator sample the line as the tag end of "Delicious Fornicake," the opening track of their new album, Machines Will Always Let You Down (Radio Is Down). The inclusion is telling: Caddyshack celebrates the redemption — nay, triumph — of the little guy, the lowly, the nobody, the nerd, the caddy, for chrissakes, despite the oppression of greedy, classist boors. Machines is, in its way, a tight, terse, aggro, nerd-rock opera, with tweed cubicles replacing expansive set pieces, and hard, noisy post-punk reminiscent of geek-rock kingpins Big Black, in an alternate universe where Steve Albini doesn’t take himself so seriously. "It’s kind of, for lack of a better term, big rock," vocalist-guitarist Conan Neutron says over the phone from his apartment. In the opening track, the narrator, with the help of "a few beers, some Scotch, and a pack of cigarettes," builds "a robot with which to have sex." In "Payment www.yzzz.rd" (pronounced "wizard"), Neutron, an IT guy for a "major financial institution" when not living the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, sings, "I just got paid / So come get my cash / Come take my money / Come get it fast," the refrain of wage slaves everywhere.

The next track, "Assloads of Unrespect," is in the voice of a degenerate dot-com millionaire, the kind who crawled the Bay Area like a new species of roach in the mid- to late ’90s: "Let me begin / By saying I’m rich / I’m well-dressed / Good-looking / Hey — ain’t that a bitch? / Because I own you / That’s right, I own you." In an example of Neutron’s biting, often hilarious lyrics, the boss we love to hate goes on: "I heard it said the meek shall inherit the earth /Well, just make damn sure to shine my shoes first." The album goes on to tackle such subjects as time travel, the Enigma machine, and the spy-versus-spy uses of nanotechnology, before ending with the Office Space–like "Login with My Fist" — the battle cry of cubicle commandos everywhere — which winds down in a cacophony of screams and guitar squall, an implacable Commodore VIC-20–style voice repeating, "It does not compute," in the background.

It’s worth noting that the disc isn’t a celebration of all things techie, often a nerd stereotype. Rather, it’s a scathing denunciation of technology, or, more accurately, the devious and inhumane uses that technology has been put to in the hands of the powerful and ethically impaired. When the nerd class stops letting itself be pimped out for the glory of so-called pure science, then maybe it’ll inherit the earth. And when people stop being enamored of machines making life easier, maybe they’ll realize they’re being enslaved by technology — that, indeed, machines will always let you down.

"We make music for very pissed-off smart people," Neutron says. He goes on to acknowledge that this target demo is a small slice of the music-listening public: "Our music isn’t very popular." Formed in 1999, Replicator — Neutron, Ben Adrian on bass and keyboard, Chris Bolig on drums, and "junior partner" Todd Grant on guitar — have seen trends come and go. "First everyone was really into indie pop," Neutron says. "Then everyone was into sounding like Radiohead and then garage rock and then everyone wanted to, like, wear a mask and not really play music."

Through it all, Replicator have released three pissed-off, smart records, toured heavily, and brought to mind a time "when it was not an insult to be considered brilliant," as the lyric on "Login with My Fist" goes. I’m not saying they’re brilliant — nor am I saying they’re not — but what they’re attempting doesn’t accept mediocrity. This uncompromising approach often seems to have relegated them to the middle slot of shows while the underground flavor du jour headlines above them. Like Dangerfield, they get no respect.

One of the titles kicked around for the new album was Fuck You, Still Here. "I see bands that are more careerist," Neutron says. "They have this idea: ‘Oh, we’re going to get signed and then we’re going to make this video and go on tour with this band.’ That seems to be their end goal.

"Our end goal is to return the ass-kicking that music has given us."

REPLICATOR

With Moggs and Colony of Watts

June 30, 9:30 p.m., $6

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

The slow fade of Sly Stone

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FULL CIRCLE This spring Epic/Legacy finally started releasing Sly and the Family Stone: The Collection, the band’s seven albums complete with previously unreleased music, new liner notes, and great sound, with the final installment, Greatest Hits, to come July 24. The event had been on the horizon for some time, but like everything connected with Sly Stone, a fan was never sure when — or if, for that matter — the music would be available.

If you aren’t familiar with Stone’s music, get this collection and enjoy. These days it’s popular to credit the Beatles, Brian Wilson, Jimi Hendrix, and a few others as the essential pioneers from that era — with no mention of Stone, who was as important as any. If you’re wondering why that is, find the title track from his hugely popular 1971 album, There’s a Riot Goin’ On. It’s on the brief side — as in zero seconds, which was Stone’s idea of a joke or something. As San Francisco Chronicle writer Joel Selvin points out in the notes, the riot was going on in Stone’s life.

There was a moment in the late 1970s when music fans were asking, "What happened to Sly Stone?" Time passed, and the question evolved into "Whatever happened to Sly Stone?" The answer — "I don’t know" — didn’t change, until one day, sadly and inevitably, the question generated only another question — "Who?" — an answer all by itself.

In the early 1980s — somewhere between "what" and "whatever" — the band booked a show at the now-defunct Keystone Berkeley. Stone had gone phantom, which made the performance an event. Accordingly, the place was packed. The band was introduced and began to vamp, and after way too long — it was clear the Family didn’t know what to expect — Stone emerged and took his place behind a keyboard and, without acknowledging anyone, began to play. The band was thrown at first, but after a few halting bars and some nervous glances, they seemed to recognize the groove. Never mind the key or tempo, or where they should jump in. It didn’t matter, because suddenly Stone lurched into something else, with the same result. A moment later he did it again. And again. And again.

The set didn’t last more than a few minutes. That was the upside. The downside? Everything else.

Yet forgotten or not, Stone was once arguably the most important figure in pop. During the late 1960s and early ’70s, the Vallejo native wrote and recorded one hit after another: "Dance to the Music," "Everyday People," "Stand!" "I Want to Take You Higher," "Hot Fun in the Summertime," "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again)," "Family Affair." He brought black music to San Francisco’s tumultuous hippie scene and created rich, innovative, rock-flavored R&B, played by a deliberately integrated band. Rock fans — most of them white — welcomed the bridge to black music and, by inference, black people. If the door didn’t swing as wide or as often the other way, a glimpse of the band’s appearances on YouTube, which has great Family Stone material, shows a genuinely mixed audience responding to the group’s appeal for peace and understanding.

Stone was a founding father of modern funk, a wildly creative force who added innovations to the sound as it flourished. His music reshaped the tastes of black and white listeners, and one miserable Sunday morning in August 1969, his band took the Woodstock stage — it was 3:30 a.m. — and absolutely stole the show.

You can only hope The Collection will have a similar impact. The band’s four pre-Riot albums offer a treasure chest of rich, increasingly funky soul. No matter how cynical Stone became — the black superstar playing to a largely white audience, the musical genius forced to pander to the tastes of a pop audience, the master manipulator turning every scene to his own advantage — the music was charming and irresistible. As was the man who created it.

Although some of his most important work was still before him, Stone ushered in the 1970s in paranoia and retreat — a perfect fit with the moment. He flipped off superstardom with an arrogance only a superstar could muster. Once outgoing and engaging, Stone burned promoters, his band, and fans. The once-steady supply of new material slowed to a trickle, and Stone became a no-show at dozens of concerts. He slid into an increasingly opaque and eventually impenetrable world. Riot and 1973’s Fresh — forget 1974’s Small Talk — were as adventurous and self-involved as music could be. Most of the original Family was gone, and the losses of drummer Greg Errico and bassist Larry Graham — who reportedly slept with one eye open after falling out with Stone — were particularly felt. This music was dreamy and solipsistic. Stone’s huge smile and the Family vibe were gone, replaced by a menacing undercurrent. Credits on both albums are, apparently, haphazard, which means that the contributions of Miles Davis, George Clinton, and Bobby Womack, for instance, aren’t acknowledged.

That Stone could attract such talent was a testimony to his gifts, and to the legendary partying that went on at his Los Angeles mansion. Still, if James Brown invented funk, Stone got in where he fit in: the ground floor. Riot may clock a man losing his grip on reality, but it also captured a musical innovator exploring the possibilities of a crucial movement. *

Singin’ and shillin’ with the Muppets

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I had a revelation while watching Muppets Music Moments: Statler and Waldorf are the reasons I became a film critic. As a li’l Muppet-freaked kid in the late ’70s and early ’80s, I lived for their curmudgeonly peanut-gallery zingers. But there’s plenty of stuff I didn’t remember from The Muppet Show, or that I couldn’t pick out as examples of Jim Henson’s wonderfully offbeat sense of humor — like, say, a brigade of pigs in full leather-daddy garb singing "Macho Man." And surreal numbers, like that same brigade of pigs dressed as Eskimos, belting out "The Lullaby of Broadway," or a sequence in which Kermit’s hospital-room tableau morphs into a full-on jungle scene (complete with witch doctors) as the ensemble rips into Harry Nilsson’s "Coconut." Also, there’s plenty of just plain weirdness — like, did you ever notice that the Swedish Chef is the only Muppet with actual human hands? I don’t have to say any more, except that this program is essential viewing for anyone who worshipped The Muppet Show cast albums ("Menah Menah," anyone?) — or for folks with kids who are too young to have otherwise developed outrageous Muppet nostalgia.

More for grown-ups but no less entertaining is the foray into Henson’s Commercials and Experiments. An early Kermit prototype shills for pork sausage and bacon (wherefore art thou, Miss Piggy?); another spot highlights singing gas-pump nozzles; an RC Cola ad features a bird puppet muttering, "I hate folk singers with messages!"; and a spot for Muppet toys offers a group of mini-Kermits sweetly intoning, "If you don’t buy us, we’ll bite you in the leg!" There are also snippets of Henson appearing on talk shows and demonstrating his puppetry techniques, as well as short films that are entirely puppet free — including some psychedelia, such as a delightful sound-and-image collage starring the impish Henson himself. (Cheryl Eddy)

COMMERCIALS AND EXPERIMENTS Sun/24, 7:30 p.m.

MUPPETS MUSIC MOMENTS Sat/23, 2 p.m.; June 28, 7:30 p.m.; $6-$8. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Screening Room, 701 Mission, SF. (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org

Pay, pal

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER "Fuck Lars Ulrich — he can play drums on my balls with his teeth!" Them’s fighting words from the beefy bruiser in a tinsel page-boy wig, perhaps provoked only by four wannabe skids’ burning need to cover Metallica’s "For Whom the Bell Tolls" at last week’s first but — fortunately for your inner and outer sketched-out Priest hooligan with a nonironic mullet, prematurely weather-beaten mien, and herbally truncated short-term memory — not last "Hesher" night at the Parkside, where it’s now semiofficially installed after starting its smokin’ life at Annie’s Social Club. Still headbang or nod out to "Sweet Child o’ Mine"? All is forgiven and even drunkenly applauded at "Hesher," a metal karaoke and air guitar contest. Yet as delightful as it is to rock out with your crock out to such unrepentant cock-rock versions of "Eye of the Tiger" and "Round and Round," I couldn’t help but think that all of us ruddy walleyes were just cruising upstream against a current zeitgeist hell-bent on nailing culpables caught with their greasy paws in the cookie jar. How else to explain the crowds crowing to punish Paris or throw the book at I. Lewis "Lemme Scoot" Libby? Why else were latently Catholic viewers so outraged that Tony Soprano didn’t go down in a hail of bullets rather than simply cutting to black? After years of the Bush and Cheney show, the hordes have become less hesher than harsher.

Maybe we’re waiting for justice, answers, something to believe in — and perhaps the once-wronged and now recognized and fully redeemed Spoon’s Britt Daniel is ready to give it to us, just as he and other indie savants like Feist turn in their subtlest, slowest-growing recordings to date. In fact, the opening track of Spoon’s Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (Merge), "Don’t Make Me a Target," could serve as the theme song for a rockin’ version of Chicago starring the most hated Hilton in America: it soft-shoes the bristly snarl of "Waiting for the Kid to Come Out," off last year’s reissued Soft Effects EP. In spite or perhaps because of the troubles he saw when he was pushed off Elektra, griping loudly all the way, Daniel has always sounded like one of the angriest dogs on the lot, barely leashed to those leathery pop hooks.

With Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, Daniel ventures into other textures and tempos, moduutf8g his bark and bite with plangent pings and drastic pressure drops, floating in an echoey "The Ghost of You Lingers" and snapping suavely to the hand-clapping "Don’t You Evah." Though the infectious brass, Daniel’s streetwise taunts, and the band’s pugilistic punch conjure up memories of a certain cheesy piano man, as Sasha Frere-Jones of the New Yorker has pointed out, aligning "The Underdog" with Billy Joel’s "Only the Good Die Young," I’d venture that Daniel is less conjuring stereotypically cornball urban bluster pop straight out of some tourist fantasy of a Little Italy than continuing the same cranky conversation that began back around the hard-assed, grunge-era Soft Effects, now aged artfully into a modern-day Bobby Darrin–y hep cat. Much like the album’s cover girl, sculptor Lee Bontecou, Daniel’s finding new mettle — and much softer metals — with which to channel his rage.

FOLKLORE LURE Court and Spark and Hiss Golden Messenger honcho and teacher MC Taylor is answering the siren call of higher education and leaving the Mission digs he shares with his wife, Abby, to move to Chapel Hill, NC. "We both wanted a change of scenery, wanted to live in the country and have a garden. I got accepted to the grad program in folklore at UNC, so everything worked out perfectly," he e-mailed on the eve of a moving sale that promised "the craziest set of Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game books that you’ve probably ever seen — seriously." Taylor will continue the more improvisational HGM in his sweet home North Carolina, though sadly C&S will probably call it a day — but not before a finale July 6 at Cafe du Nord.

MICKI ON THE MEND? Many know Stork Club owner Micki Chittock as the Oaktown stalwart who moved the Stork from its cubby near the Tribune tower to its current Telegraph Avenue clubhouse. But how many, booker Joel Harmon wonders, have come through for Chittock since her serious van accident in April? Suffering from a broken femur, pelvis, back, and ribs, Chittock has three weeks left in intensive care before she’s transferred to a recovery room, Harmon e-mailed me, after doctors gave the club owner a 50 percent chance of recovery. Harmon has put together two benefit shows to ease the medical expenses, and he’s working on more because, he writes, "I’m thinking that in order for the Stork to survive, Micki has to survive." *

HEAR, YOU GO

SEX VID AND FUNEROT


Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll sweethearts sweat it out with kindred Northwestern miscreants. Wed/20, 9:30 p.m., $5. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. (415) 923-0923, www.hemlocktavern.com

SEAN HAYES


The SF singer-songwriter whoops it up in honor of Flowering Spade, which found him in a groove with Etienne de Rocher. Thurs/21, 9 p.m., $18. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. (415) 885-0750, www.musichallsf.com

THE JOINT


Crown City Rocker Headnodic breaks out hip-hop, soul, and dancehall alongside Raashan Ahmad. Thursdays, 10 p.m., $5. Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck, Berk. (510) 548-1159, www.shattuckdownlow.com

WHITE MICE


Load Records rodents bite headliner Skinny Puppy’s butt; don’t be surprised if they also gnaw their way onto a bill at the Bakery in Oakland. Thurs/21, 9 p.m., $27.50. Fillmore, 1805 Geary, SF. (415) 346-6000, www.thefillmore.com

SEA WOLF


Turn-of-the-century wolf moniker and contemplative songcraft. Fri/22, 9 p.m., $10–$12. Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. (415) 861-5016, www.cafedunord.com

DEAD SCIENCE AND IMPLIED VIOLENCE


A Wu-Tang dance party ensues after the twisted pop eccentrics couple with the experimental-theater ensemble fixated on dance, politics, and illness. Fri/22, 9 p.m., sliding scale. 21 Grand, 416 25th St., Oakl. (510) 444-7263, www.21grand.org

NOMO


Elliot Bergman’s free-funk, Afrobeat, and noise eight-piece fires up the mbira, gamelan, and glockenspiel. Tues/26, 9 p.m., $10. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. (415) 621-4455, www.bottomofthehill.com

FEIST


The ex-Peaches sidekick issues a subdued, ambitious, and multitextured Reminder (Cherrytree/Interscope). June 26–27, 8 p.m., $25. Fillmore, 1805 Geary, SF. (415) 346-6000, www.thefillmore.com

“Heart” attack

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FILM Angelina Jolie in blackface and a decent film? Both seem remarkable when one considers the cinematic caca generated by the Tomb Raider franchise star since her Oscar win for Girl, Interrupted (1999).

Decidedly weightier and more ambitious than the screwball Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005), A Mighty Heart finds Jolie coated with a deep tan and kitted out in a faux pregnant belly as Marianne Pearl in an adaptation of the journalist’s 2003 best-selling account of the kidnapping and demise of her husband, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

The part-French Jolie may be a more suitable choice than the last Marianne rumored to be slated for the project, coproducer Brad Pitt’s previous main squeeze, Jennifer Aniston, but surely there was a more apropos physical fit for the pixieish, caramel-skinned Pearl than the opulently Sophia Loren–like Jolie?

"I think that’s rubbish. It’s so superficial," A Mighty Heart director Michael Winterbottom says, talking a mile a minute in a blurry, nasal Lancashire accent and alternately basking in and ducking the uncharacteristically bright San Francisco summer sun in the Ritz-Carlton courtyard. "The first time I met Angelina was with Marianne, and in fact they knew each other already and they trusted each other already. They’re kind of similar in lots of ways and talked about the story in similar ways. And that’s what’s important, really — to have someone actually know the person they’re playing, especially with a story that’s as sensitive as this."

In many ways Winterbottom was perfectly cast as the director for A Mighty Heart. He’s an ex-documentarian noted for striking a balance between intimate love stories (2004’s 9 Songs, 2003’s Code 46); tales like his Manchester music scene snapshot, 24 Hour Party People (2002), that revolve around the pleasure principle; politicized narratives firmly embedded in a labyrinthine geopolitical landscape (2006’s The Road to Guantánamo, 2002’s In This World, 1997’s Welcome to Sarajevo); and literary adaptations (2006’s Tristam Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, 1996’s Jude).

"They’re also films about individuals as well," Winterbottom counters. And at times A Mighty Heart boils down uneasily as a Möbius strip of a meta–murder mystery — about the media, as documented by the media, intercut with shots of entangled Karachi phone and cable lines even as Brangelina paparazzi attempted to capture the couple’s every move and at least one scandal spun off the 2006 shoot (Mumbai residents charged the couple’s bodyguards with racism during filming at a school).

A Mighty Heart also reads somewhat like the flip side of Winterbottom’s previous release, The Road to Guantánamo, which blended dramatizations and documentarylike interviews with three British Muslims, a.k.a. the Tipton Three, who were held at Guantánamo Bay for two years before they were released without having been charged.

"In a way I think both stories are about people who are kind of victims of the extreme violence on both sides," the filmmaker says, describing both as post–Sept. 11 stories. "I think there are groups on both sides who want the violence to escalate."

Which gives Winterbottom impetus to carry on with his political-as-personal narratives, turning to the next in a series of Steve Coogan films, an adaptation of former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray’s memoir Murder in Samarkand. "We’re trying to do a comedy about the British ambassador in Uzbekistan being sacked because he didn’t agree about the use of information gained under torture."

A MIGHTY HEART

Opens Fri/22 in Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

Tastes like chicken

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FILM Always be suspicious of any documentary that starts off with this snippet of dialogue: "Is it real, is it not real?" In fact, for the first 10 minutes of American Cannibal, directed by Perry Grebin and Michael Nigro, I suspected I might be watching a mock doc. But nope, it’s real — more authentic than reality TV, anyway, which is the subject it chronicles via both insider insights (from showbiz types like Fox Reality Channel honcho David Lyle) and the tension-fraught journey of Gil S. Ripley and Dave Roberts, writing partners who turn to reality TV as their last make-a-buck resort. That chance comes in the form of skeezy Kevin Blatt, proud promoter of jailbird Paris Hilton’s sex tape, who bypasses their pitch Virgin Territory ("When you win it, you lose it!") in favor of American Cannibal, an extreme twist on Survivor that Ripley tosses out as more of a joke than anything else. Before he and Roberts can believe what’s happening, an American Cannibal pilot — presented to potential cast members as Ultimate, Ultimate Challenge, part of the show’s bait-and-switch tack — is in motion. Morals and friendships are soon tested, as is the idea that reality TV spells instant money and success for whoever can bring the last great idea to some new, more sensational level.

Seriously, though, would you actually eat someone’s finger for prize money, even if you were really, really hungry? Would anyone? American Cannibal the documentary proves far more fascinating than American Cannibal the failed reality show ever could have been. It does feel like America’s rabid urge to devour prepackaged reality has settled down a bit, but you and I both know it’s never going away. Representing the craze’s high end, American Idol vet Jennifer Hudson has an Oscar. At the low end, take your pick (wherefore art thou, The Littlest Groom?). But if Ripley and Robert’s American Cannibal — a show that was to strand constants on a desert island and starve them, then tell them they had to eat human flesh to survive — sounds so ridiculous that you feel kind of sorry it never made it to the airwaves so you could watch, you’re not alone. As doc interviewee and The Daily Show cocreator Lizz Winstead points out, "If the lowest common denominator was a muscle, it could kick the shit out of anything else."

AMERICAN CANNIBAL

June 22–28, $4-8

See Rep Clock for showtimes

Red Vic

1727 Haight, SF

(415) 668-3994

All-consuming consumption

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Copping to her fashion juju at curtain rise, amid a litany of designer labels rattled off at the audience, Fe, the heroine of the sordid story to follow, makes a pretense of having broken the solemn rules of drama by giving her big secret away at the outset. In fact, there’s plenty of mystery yet in this intriguingly mercurial, restless hedonist (played by a charismatic, unstoppable Margo Hall), who anyway reverses herself in the next line when she coyly concedes the covert nature of her splendid appearance. "Face? François Nars. You can never go wrong with the French. François’s motto? ‘Makeup is not a mask.’ A load of tired crap, but I forgive him."

We never get more than a glimpse behind Fe’s mask, but then, appearances are what count — for all and nothing — in Fe in the Desert, the latest world premiere collaboration between Philippine-born American playwright, novelist, poet, and performance artist Jessica Hagedorn and Campo Santo and Intersection for the Arts. After the outwardly fearless but inwardly insecure title character reveals her deceptive fabulousness, she seeks the psychological safety of her estranged husband’s brand-new Cadillac Escalade, with its aloof suspension and promise of indestructibility, as she drives to their desert home.

Narrowly avoiding a head-on with a meat truck, Fe nearly loses her life. This puts her in an existentially acute mood for the duration of her subsequent adventure-nightmare in a seemingly empty Mojave, where she and husband Bill (a coolly flamboyant, then persuasively unhinged Danny Wolohan) are interrupted in their shaky reconciliation by two armed intruders. But even that irony is no proof against the power of the all-American Caddy to ward off bad spirits. The juju of the mighty Escalade — and of the general wealth of Fe’s ultimately helpless epicurean husband, and of showbiz, whose allure also figures significantly, if somewhat obliquely, in the narrative — may falter, but never dies.

The prequel to 2005’s Tenderloin-set Stairway to Heaven, also launched with Campo Santo, Fe in the Desert cunningly puts the usual codes of identity in playful motion (with their hierarchy of class, gender, and ethnic markers) to explore the deeper social and cultural context of Fe’s existential crisis. Indeed, the play’s spacious and opulent setting (as well as its predominantly comic mode) offers a seemingly stark contrast to Stairway‘s grim inner-city tale but in fact provides no escape from the same world of contradictions, which dramatically swoop down on the reconciling couple in the form of ex-cons Tyrone (a sophisticated sociopath with a thing for good English, smoothly played by Robert Hampton) and his volatile ghetto-Pygmalion protégé, Mook (a credibly wild Jonsen Vitug). On their trail follows an unlikely rescue party made up of a producer (Michael Torres, in an amusingly sly turn) and his foreign-born secretary (a solid Sara Hernandez).

The American desert here is at once full and all-encompassing, being the desert of capitalism, consumerism, haute culture, pop culture, and the Hollywood dream factory. This soup of oneiric consumption tends to undermine any hard-and-fast identity, including those cast in multiethnic hyphenates and hoary stereotypes. Instead, various strands of the cultures still referred to as high and low flow into one another with abandon, sometimes comically, sometimes violently, but always ecstatically.

That slipperiness partly excuses the rather thin construction of some of the play’s characters, but only partly, in a production that provides little real punch despite high-octane performances and director Danny Scheie’s ever-inspired staging of a story that loops repeatedly back in time, confutf8g multiple perspectives on the same horrific and absurd encounter. Fe, on the other hand, memorably realized by the always formidable Hall, has a certain staying power. In the desert of American dreaming, she’s at least a consummate survivor, a Prada-clad pioneer who never stops moving. *

FE IN THE DESERT

Through June 25

Thurs.–Sun., 8 p.m. (also June 25, 8 p.m.), $9–$20, sliding scale

Intersection for the Arts

446 Valencia, SF

(415) 626-3311

www.theintersection.org

Eat on the beat

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Once upon a strange, overly prepared, possibly paranoid post-9/11-related time not so long ago, I’d bring my lunch to shows at Shoreline Amphitheatre, then–Concord Pavilion, and all those other mammoth Sleep Train–sponsored yet intrinsically antisnooze behemoths. I’d pack a heaving Dagwood of cold cuts and assorted cheeses and energy bars into a backpack for random spates of balls-out rockin’ in burbs and office parks. What was I thinking? Guess I felt goofy partaking in those pricey, once-no-frills concession stands o’ paltry choices. Will it be a $7 Bud or $12 Corona, milady?

My only point in this pointless universe of sunburn, service fees, and loud, loud music is that it looks incredibly silly to come too correctly sometimes, especially when one takes in all-day musical twofers like the Harmony Festival and BFD in one fell weekend, hoping to study the cultural disconnect.

Still, the disjunction started way earlier, while at Harmony, cruising the many-splendored superwheatgrass concoctions, nut ices, and organic brown-rice-and-veggie-bowl stands (here somewhat more affordable than making a meal at a movie theater) and sticking out like a black-garbed Trenchcoat Mafiosa amid the dreadlocked sk8ter bois and Marin wealth gypsies with perfectly crimped hair. So too at BFD, playing arcade basketball backstage, studying Interpol and the Faint as they attempted to summon dark magic in broad daylight, and feeling peckish and jaded for noting the all-male standard-issue modern-rock lineups dominating the main stage.

I just didn’t go far enough in packing num-nums for all-day summer music lovin’ — after all, when in Rome and paying Rome’s hefty ticket prices, why not dress, smell, and quaff like those kooky Romans do? (And why not get a brain transplant while you’re at it?) As author Kara Zuaro might say, "I like food, food tastes good," but I also like saving nonexistent moolah and embedding myself seamlessly clad in average fan camouflage.

Hence a modest proposal for blending in at and sneaking grub into this summer’s shed performances:

THE SHOW: The Police, the Fratellis, and Fiction Plane. Wed/13, 6:30 p.m., $50–$225. McAfee Coliseum, Oakl. www.ticketmaster.com.

THE LOOK: Blond wig, placenta facial, an afternoon in the spray-tanning salon, tantric sex charm bracelet.

THE FLASK: Guinness-laced nut milk shake to please the food police.

THE SHOW: Gwen Stefani, Akon, and Lady Sovereign. Tues/19, 7:30 p.m., $25–$79.50. Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View. (650) 967-3000.

THE LOOK: Blond wig, stunna shades, ab-baring lederhosen, and a pout.

THE LUNCH BOX: A single Ricola in sympathy with Stefani, who claims to have been dieting since she was 10.

THE SHOW: Vans Warped Tour, including Bad Religion, the Matches, Flogging Molly, Pennywise, and Tiger Army. July 1, noon, $29.99. Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View. (650) 967-3000.

THE LOOK: Black T-shirt, faux-hawk, and black low-top Converse or checkerboard Vans — why not one on each foot?

THE BROWN PAPER SACK: Not Dog, PBR, Ritalin.

THE SHOW: Ozzfest, including Ozzy Osbourne, Lamb of God, Static X, Lordi, Hatebreed, Behemoth, and Nick Oliveri and the Mondo Generator. July 19, noon, free. Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View. www.ozzfest.com

THE LOOK: Black T-shirt, stunna shades, floppy shorts.

THE FANNYPACK: Seitan, cheddar cheese Combos, a quart of Gorilla Fart No. 666.

THE SHOW: Bone Bash VIII, with Lynyrd Skynyrd, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Pat Traves, and Laidlaw. July 20, 5:45 p.m., $10.77–$59.50. Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View. (650) 967-3000.

THE LOOK: Uh, blond wig, floppy shorts, ab-bearing lederhosen.

THE TRUNK: Rice Chex and raisins, leftover tuna noodle casserole, Arkansas Buttermilk.

THE SHOW: Projekt Revolution Tour, including Linkin Park, My Chemical Romance, Taking Back Sunday, HIM, and Placebo. July 29, 12:45 p.m., $24.50–$70. Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View. (650) 967-3000.

THE LOOK: Floppy shorts and tantric sex charm bracelet.

THE PLASTIC SACK: Fried ramen with faux duck, Kit-Kat, Sparks, and Tylenol.*

HIGH THERE

Pills and purists might accuse Sean Rawls of appropriating Aislers Set for his reggae-scented SF party supergroup Still Flyin’ — or simply appropriating Jah lovers’ rock sans the spirituality — but that doesn’t bum out the ex–mover and shaker of Athens, Ga.’s Masters of the Hemisphere on the June 5 release of an EP, Za Cloud (Antenna Farm): "Some people hear Still Flyin’ described to them and automatically think that it’s such a horrible idea for a band, which I can understand. But what we’re trying to do is just have a good time. Most bands aren’t into that."

When Rawls moved to SF in 2003, he simply asked everyone he knew — including AS’s Yoshi Nakamoto, Alicia Vanden Heuvel, and Wyatt Cusick — to join his new band. He didn’t think 15 unlikely suspects from groups like Maserati would accept.

After an East Coast tour this fall, Rawls aims to record an album of even dancier material, provided more instruments don’t get stolen by fans, as they have been in Sweden. "They also steal our beer. Either way it sucks," Rawls says. "We’re partying hard, and beer is a vital ingredient."

STILL FLYIN’ WITH ARCHITECTURE IN HELSINKI Sat/16, 9 p.m., $16. Bimbo’s 365 Club, 1025 Columbus, SF. (415) 474-0365

GET THE BREAD OUT

BOTTOM AND TARRAKIAN


The Bay’s metal maidens meet the Totimoshi spinoff group, as the latter toast a new EP, The Swarm (No Options). Fri/15, 9 p.m., $7. Annie’s Social Club, 917 Folsom, SF. (415) 974-1585

LADYBUG TRANSISTOR


Following the sad passing of drummer San Fadyl, the Brooklyn nostalgia rockers carry on, twanging sweetly on Can’t Wait Another Day (Merge). Fri/15, 10 p.m., $10. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. (415) 621-4455

NO DOCTORS


The Docs are in with their third album, Origin and Tectonics. With Wooden Shjips, Fuckwolf, and Sic Alps. Fri/15, 10 p.m., $6. Elbo Room, 647 Valencia, SF. (415) 552-7788

SCISSORS FOR LEFTY


The SF combo skipped pants at BFD. Fri/15, 9 p.m., $13. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. (415) 771-1422

COOL KIDS


The Chicago duo kick out the streamlined boom-bap. Tues/19, 8:30 p.m., $8–$10. Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. (415) 861-5016

SCARY MANSION


No creeps — just poignant, eerie rock from the Thunderstick-wielding Brooklyn trio. Tues/19, 9 p.m., $7. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

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